by RY Deshpande on Mon 01 Dec 2008 08:58 PM IST  |  Permanent Link  |  Cosmos

The mystery of manifestation is “[more] terrible and unfathomable than the Eternal Cause”; it indeed looks strange, the problem of death and ignorance arising out of the immortal spirit full of knowledge and wisdom, prajnānam brahma giving rise to its weird extreme opposites. However, it is precisely to remove that mystery, to bestow reality’s sense and purpose, to discover the law that governs it that the divine Soul takes birth here. What is true of the Chit-Shakti’s incarnations passing through the portals of the life that is a death, is also true for the supreme Purusha’s incarnations, the Avatars and also the great Vibhutis. But why does this transcendental Divine come at all as incarnations, and do they really undergo the thousand sufferings our flesh is prone to? When the Divine comes, asserts Sri Aurobindo in a letter to Dilip Roy, he suffers or struggles not for himself, “but in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men; and if the sufferings and struggles are to be of any help, they must be real… the Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them.”

And then: “The manifestation of the Divine in the Avatar is of help to man because it helps him to discover his own divinity and find the way to realise it… The psychic being does the same for all who are intended for the spiritual way—men need not be extraordinary beings to follow it. That is the mistake you are making—to harp on greatness as if only the great can be spiritual.” This was in the mid-1930s. But even during the earlier period Sri Aurobindo, speaking about himself, said in letter written in 1911: “I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work severe and painful.” A work severe and painful—and it stands to perfect reason that anyone wishing to change the earth-nature must work hard against all odds, against every kind of antagonism, first bear its law, the law of anguish and suffering, must come in contact with the harsh physical reality of this life, this existence on earth. In a letter, again written to Dilip Roy, Sri Aurobindo quotes a stanza from his own poem A God’s Labour, unpublished at that time, in 1935: