It is a little human way of putting it but there is a profound truth in it that has been corroborated by all the bhaktas. Sri Aurobindo himself has described this in quite a detail in chapters on the Mystery of Divine Love in the Synthesis of Yoga.
What it means is firstly that the original urge of creation is to multiply the delight of oneness into the delight of multiplicity. The One becomes the Many so for the delight to be multiplied. It is due to this One becoming the Many that the power of Love manifests so that all the countless elements of creation can be linked and drawn together in the dance of delight that the creation is meant to express. Love then becomes the supreme Power of attraction that draws the human soul towards the Divine like a magnet.
Quite naturally, this power that draws us towards the Divine even when we know nothing about Him originates from the Divine Himself. It is He who draws us first and hence one may say that He seeks us first. The human soul touched by Love is drawn helplessly towards God and though it might seem that the bhakta is loving God but in reality it is because the bhakta has reached a point where he is now able to feel the pressure and pull of the Divine Love. In truth this Love is everywhere and in everything. In our ignorance it is felt as the power that binds and draws things towards each other. It is due to the presence of the Divine Love in creation that beauty and delight begin to emerge in stars and stones and rivers and mountains attracting the human beings even in ignorance towards some touch of beauty and delight. But as we develop we begin to see the limitations of these lower and lesser forms and seek it in its purest, truest, highest, deepest form which is in the Divine. Thus seen, from this side, it would appear that man loves God first. But in reality it is God who has sent forth His Love into creation to awaken in it the seeking and the resultant union with the Divine. In truth it is Love that binds the stars and draws the human soul upwards towards God.
To put it apparently paradoxically, it is God who seeks us first and when something in us awakens to His touch we too begin to seek Him. Naturally, this delight of seeking and finding, the original game of hide and seek is possible only with creation. God then enters and apparently loses Himself in myriad forms and then rediscovers Himself in the multiplicity as the Many who are secretly the One by the power of Love.
Yes, the Divine wants nothing is true of the Divine in the transcendent status but the Divine is not only far and aloof but also near and intimate in each and every object of creation including ourselves. The Gita speaks of the Divine Purushottama in the heart of every creature who takes delight in the smallest of things offered to Him, – patram, pushpam, phalam, toyam, leaf, flower, fruits, even a drop of water offered to Him. The Gita closes too with this call for an absolute self giving to the Divine, manmana bhava, madbhakta, madhyaji, manamaskuru, become My minded, My devotee and lover, turn to Me and surrender yourself completely to Me, sarvadharmanparityajya. The Gita itself calls this complete turning and self giving to the Divine as the Highest secret and its supreme Word, guhyat guhyataram, paramam vacah. Sri Aurobindo and The Mother confirm it. Sri Aurobindo reveals to us in The Synthesis of Yoga.
‘We may seek after him passionately and pursue the unseen beloved; but also the lover whom we think not of, may pursue us, may come upon us in the midst of the world and seize on us for his own whether at first we will or no. Even, he may come to us at first as an enemy, with the wrath of love, and our earliest relations with him may be those of battle and struggle. Where first there is love and attraction, the relations between the Divine and the soul may still for long be chequered with misunderstanding and offence, jealousy and wrath, strife and the quarrels of love, hope and despair and the pain of absence and separation. We throw up all the passions of the heart against him, till they are purified into a sole ecstasy of bliss and oneness. But that too is no monotony; it is not possible for the tongue of human speech to tell all the utter unity and all the eternal variety of the ananda of divine love. Our higher and our lower members are both flooded with it, the mind and life no less than the soul: even the physical body takes its share of the joy, feels the touch, is filled in all its limbs, veins, nerves with the flowing of the wine of the ecstasy, amαΉta. Love and Ananda are the last word of being, the secret of secrets, the mystery of mysteries.
Thus universalised, personalised, raised to its intensities, made all-occupying, all-embracing, all-fulfilling, the way of love and delight gives the supreme liberation. Its highest crest is a supracosmic union. But for love complete union is mukti; liberation has to it no other sense; and it includes all kinds of mukti together, nor are they in the end, as some would have it, merely successive to each other and therefore mutually exclusive. We have the absolute union of the divine with the human spirit, sΔyujya; in that reveals itself a content of all that depends here upon difference,βbut there the difference is only a form of oneness,βananda too of nearness and contact and mutual presence, sΔmΔ«pya, sΔlokya, ananda of mutual reflection, the thing that we call likeness, sΔdαΉΕya, and other wonderful things too for which language has as yet no name. There is nothing which is beyond the reach of the God-lover or denied to him; for he is the favourite of the divine Lover and the self of the Beloved.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
