Sri Aurobindo

The Hour of God

and other writings

III. On Yoga

Initial Definitions and Descriptions

Yoga has four powers and objects, purity, liberty, beatitude and perfection. Whosoever has consummated these four mightinesses in the being of the transcendental, universal, līlāmaya and individual God is the complete and absolute Yogin.

All manifestations of God are manifestations of the absolute Parabrahman.

The Absolute Parabrahman is unknowable to us, not because It is the nothingness of all that we are, for rather whatever we are in truth or in seeming is nothing but Parabrahman, but because It is pre-existent and supra-existent to even the highest and purest methods and the most potent and illimitable instruments of which soul in the body is capable.

In Parabrahman knowledge ceases to be knowledge and becomes an inexpressible identity. Become Parabrahman, if thou wilt and if That will suffer thee, but strive not to know It; for thou shalt not succeed with these instruments and in this body.

In reality thou art Parabrahman already and ever wast and ever wilt be. To become Parabrahman in any other sense, thou must depart utterly out of world-manifestation and out even of world-transcendence.

Why shouldst thou hunger after departure from manifestation as if the world were an evil? Has not That manifested itself in thee and in the world and art thou wiser and purer and better than the Absolute, 0 mind-deceived soul in the mortal? When That withdraws thee, then thy going hence is inevitable; until Its force is laid in thee, thy going is impossible, cry thy mind never so fiercely and wailingly for departure. Therefore neither desire nor shun thy world, but seek the bliss and purity and freedom and greatness of God in whatsoever state or experience or environment.

So long as thou hast any desire, be it the desire of non-birth or the desire of liberation, thou canst not attain to Parabrahman. For That has no desires, neither of birth nor of non-birth, nor of world, nor of departure from world. The Absolute is unlimited by thy desire as It is inaccessible to thy knowledge.

If thou wouldst know Paratpara Brahman, then know It as It chooses to manifest Itself in world and transcending it, — for transcendence also is a relation to world and not the sheer Absolute, — since otherwise It is unknowable. This is the simultaneous knowing and not knowing spoken of in the Vedanta.

Of Parabrahman we should not say that “It” is world¬ transcendent or world-immanent or related or non-related to the world; for all these ideas of world and not-world, of transcendence and immanence and relation are expressions of thought by which mind puts its own values on the self-manifestation of Parabrahman to its own principle of knowledge and we cannot assert any, even the highest of them to be the real reality of that which is at once all and beyond all, nothing and beyond nothing. A profound and unthinking silence is the only attitude which the soul manifested in world should adopt towards the Absolute.

We know of Parabrahman that It Is, in a way in which no object is and shall be in the world, because whenever and in whatever direction we go to the farthest limits of soul-experience or thought-experience or body-experience or any essential expe¬rience whatsoever, we come to the brink of That and perceive It to be unknowable, without any capacity of experiencing about it any further truth whatsoever.

When thy soul retiring within from depth to depth and widening without from vastness to vastness stands in the silence of its being before an unknown and unknowable from which and towards which world is seen to exist as a thing neither materially real nor mentally real and yet not to be described as a dream or a falseehood, then know that thou art standing in the Holy of Holies, before the Veil that shall not be rent. In this mortal body thou canst not rend it, nor in any other body, nor in the state of self in body nor in the state of pure self, nor in waking nor in sleep nor in trance, nor in any state or circumstances whatsoever; for thou must be beyond state before thou canst enter into the Paratpara Brahman.

That is the unknown God to whom no altar can be raised and no worship offered; universe is His only altar, Existence is His only worship. That we are, feel, think, act or are but do not feel, do not think, do not act is for That enough. To That, the saint is equal with the sinner, activity with inactivity, man with the mollusc, since All are equally Its manifestations. These things at least are here of the Parabrahman and Para Purusha, which is the Highest that we know and the nearest to the Absolute. But what That is behind the veil or how behind the veil It regards Itself and its manifestation is a thing no mind can assume to tell or know; and he is equally ignorant and presumptuous who raises and inscribes to It an altar or who pretends to declare the Unknown to those who know that they can know It not. Confuse not thought, bewilder not the soul of man in its forward march, but turn to the universe and know That in this, tadeva etat, for so only and in these terms It has set itself out to be known to those who are in the universe. Be not deceived by Ignorance, be not deceived by Knowledge; there is none bound and none free and none seeking freedom but only God playing at these things in the extended might of His self-conscious being, parā māyā, mahimānam asya, which we call the universe.