The Ego and the Dualities: Selections from “The Life Divine” by Sri Aurobindo (vegetarian), Part 2 of 2

“Equally, an enlargement of our mental consciousness out of the experience of the egoistic dualities into an unregulated unity with some form of total consciousness, might easily bring about a confusion and incapacity for the active life of humanity in the established order of the world’s relativities.”

“Such a disorder and incapacity may be accepted personally and are accepted by many great souls as a temporary passage or as the price to be paid for the entry into a wider existence. But the right goal of human progress must be always an effective and synthetic reinterpretation by which the law of that wider existence may be represented in a new order of truths and in a more just and powerful working of the faculties on the life material of the universe.”

“So also, for the mental consciousness, God moves round the personal ego and all His works and ways are brought to the judgment of our egoistic sensations, emotions and conceptions and are there given values and interpretations which, though a perversion and inversion of the truth of things, are yet useful and practically sufficient in a certain development of human life and progress.”

“‘Truth is the path and not the falsehood.’ The truth is not that God moves round the ego as the center of existence and can be judged by the ego and its view of the dualities, but that the Divine is itself the center and that the experience of the individual only finds its own true truth when it is known in the terms of the universal and the transcendent.”

“That new life and power of the human integer must necessarily repose on a realization of the great verities which translate into our mode of conceiving things – the nature of the Divine existence. It must proceed through a renunciation by the ego, of its false standpoint and false certainties, through its entry into a right relation and harmony with the totalities of which it forms a part and with the transcendences from which it is a descent, and through its perfect self-opening to a truth and a law that exceed its own conventions, – a truth that shall be its fulfilment and a law that shall be its deliverance. Its goal must be the abolition of those values which are the creations of the egoistic view of things; its crown must be the transcendence of limitation, ignorance, death, suffering and evil.”