Summary
Aurobindo: The Divine Life
Volume I
Ubiquitous Reality and the Universe
Man's earliest preoccupation in his waking thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and basic preoccupation - since he manages to survive even the longest periods of skepticism and return after every exile - is at the same time the most sublime that thought can assume and consider. They are manifested in the foreboding of Divinity, in the drive for perfection, in the search for universal Truth and pure Bliss, in the feeling of mysterious immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge allowed us to witness this continuous aspiration; today we see that humanity, saturated but not satisfied with the victorious examination of the objectification of Nature, is preparing to return to its primal desires. The oldest basic position of Wisdom assures us that it will also be final - God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.
These enduring ideals of the human race are at the same time the opposite of its usual experience and the confirmation of higher and deeper experiences that are unusual for humanity and have yet to be reached, in their orderly wholeness, through revolutionary individual or general evolutionary effort. To know, have and be a divine being in an animalistic and egoistic consciousness, to convert our darkened or cloudy physical mentality into complete supramental enlightenment, to establish peace and self-existent bliss where only the tension of short-term pleasures interspersed with physical pain and emotional suffering reigns, to achieve infinite freedom in a world that presents itself to us as a set of mechanical necessities, to discover and realize immortal life in a body subject to dying and constant change - that is what appears to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the purpose of Nature in its earthly evolution.
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