Riddle of this World-AUROBINDO part 3

[Guest guest]

It is true that the problem still remains why all

this that yet is should have been necessary - these

crude beginnings, this long and stormy passage - why

should the heavy and tedious price be demanded, why

should evil and suffering ever have been there. For to

the how of the fall into the Ignorance as opposed to

the why, the effective cause, there is a substantial

agreement in all spiritual experience. It is the division,

the separation, the principle of isolation from the

Permanent and One that brought it about; it is because the

ego set up for itself in the world emphasising its

own desire and self-affirmation in preference to its

unity with the Divine and its oneness with all; it is

because instead of the one supreme Force, Wisdom, Light

determining the harmony of all forces each Idea, Force, Form

of things was allowed to work itself out as far as

it could in the mass of infinite possibilities by

its separate will and inevitably in the end by

conflict with others. Division, ego, the imperfect

consciousness and groping and struggle of a separate

self-affirmation are the efficient cause of the suffering and

ignorance of this world. Once consciousnesses separated

from the one consciousness, they fell inevitably into

Ignorance and the last result of Ignorance was

Inconscience; from a dark immense Inconscient this material

world arises and out of it a soul that by evolution is

struggling into consciousness, attracted towards the hidden

Light, ascending but still blindly towards the lost

Divinity from which it came. <br><br>But why should this

have happened at all? One common way of putting the

question and answering it ought to be eliminated from the

first, - the human way and its ethical revolt and

reprobation, its emotional outcry. For it is not, as some

religions suppose, a supracosmic, arbitrary, personal Deity

himself altogether uninvolved in the fall who has imposed

evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by

his fiat. The Divine we know is an Infinite Being in

whose infinite manifestation these things have come it

is the Divine itself that is here, behind us,

pervading the manifestation, supporting the world with its

oneness; it is the Divine that is in us upholding itself

the burden of the fall and its dark consequence. If

above It stands for ever in its perfect Light, Bliss

and Peace, it is also here; its Light, Bliss and

Peace are secretly here supporting all; in ourselves

there is a spirit, a central presence greater than the

series of surface personalities which, like the supreme

Divine itself, is not overborne by the fate they endure.

If we find out this Divine within us, if we know

ourselves as this spirit which is of one essence and being

with the Divine, that is our gate of deliverance and

in it we can remain ourselves even in the midst of

this world's disharmonies, luminous, blissful and

free. That much is the age-old testimony of spiritual

experience.