Riddle of this World-AUROBINDO part 1

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It is not to be denied, no spiritual experience

will deny that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory

world, strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy,

suffering, evil. Indeed this perception is in a way the

starting-point of the spiritual urge - except for the few to

whom the greater experience comes spontaneously

without being forced to it by the strong or overwhelming,

the afflicting and detaching sense of the Shadow

overhanging the whole range of this manifested existence. But

still the question remains whether this is indeed, as

is contended, the essential character of all

manifestation or so long at least as there is a physical world

it must be of this nature, so that the desire of

birth, the will to manifest or create has to be regarded

as the original sin and withdrawal from birth or

manifestation as the sole possible way of salvation. For those

who perceive it so or with some kindred look - and

these have been the majority - there are well-known

ways of issue, a straight-cut to spiritual

deliverance. But equally it may not be so but only seem so to

our ignorance or to a partial knowledge - the

imperfection, the evil, the suffering may be a besetting

circumstance or a dolorous passage, but not the very condition

of manifestation, not the very essence of birth in

Nature. And if so, the highest wisdom will lie not in

escape, but in the urge towards a victory here, in a

consenting association with the Will behind the world, in a

discovery of the spiritual gate to perfection which will be

at the same time an opening for the entire descent

of the Divine Light, Knowledge, Power, Beatitude.

<br><br>All spiritual experience affirms that there is a

Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we

live in and this limited consciousness in whose narrow

borders we grope and struggle and that its characters are

infinity, self-existence, freedom, absolute Light, absolute

Beatitude. Is there then an unbridgeable gulf between that

which is beyond and that which is here or are they two

perpetual opposites and only by leaving this adventure in

Time behind, by overleaping the gulf can men reach the

Eternal? That is what seems to be at the end of one line

of experience which has been followed to its

rigorous conclusion by Buddhism and a little less

rigorously by a certain type of Monistic spirituality which

admits some connection of the world with the Divine, but

still opposes them in the last resort to each other as

truth and illusion. But there is also this other and

indubitable experience that the Divine is here in everything

as well as above and behind everything, that all is

in That and is That when we go back from its

appearance to its Reality. It is a significant and

illumining fact that the Knower of Brahman even moving and

acting in this world, even bearing all its shocks, can

live in some absolute peace, light and beatitude of

the Divine. There is then here something other than

that mere trenchant opposition - there is a mystery, a

problem which one would think must admit of some less

desperate solution. This spiritual possibility points

beyond itself and brings a ray of hope into the darkness

of our fallen existence.