The Mutual Debt (2) The Hiatus and the Greater Possibility

So far traditions agree. They agree that there is the soil of nature that is subject to change and erosion and everything else. They agree that there is something buried within the depths of nature that partakes of the same essence as God. But where they disagreed was about why did the soul get buried in the soil of earth nature full of dirt and slush and mud? An even greater question would be as to what really is the soil or Nature so to say. If the soul comes from God and carries within it all the potential of Godliness then what about the soil. Ordinarily, this question is either brushed aside as an illusion or else something that has somehow come to be. We are told to instead focus on the soul’s growth until it can emerge out of the ambiguous soil and head off straight to the Non Being through the doors of Nirvana. It suddenly gives a lie to the creation and hence by default to the Creator Himself.  It is as if the Creator played an absurd bad joke upon us and now, as a recompense of a sort, helps us get out of the mess that He created in the first place,  through a series of Saints and sages! No thinking mind can accept this version of things.  Another big hiatus it leaves is the relation between the Creator and the Creation. Man is not just the mind that can be satisfied with the Impersonal. He is also a heart that throbs and sings and hopes and loves. Nay, he is also a life force that instinctively seeks and searches and labours and wins and loses.  He is also a body, a form that has its own needs, the need for beauty and strength and endurance and youthfulness.

It is here that Sri Aurobindo comes in to answer this unsolved riddle of creation. He reminds us that the soil too is He. After all just as the seed grows by drawing nutrition from the slush and the mud, our soul too grows through the feeder experiences it receives through this very ambiguous bed of nature where good and evil, light and darkness,  truth and falsehood mix together to help the soul grow.  The upward pull of the sun and the downward resistance of earth nature both seem to be strangely needed for the growth.  The soul draws from all these countless experiences provided by the soil and turns them all into growth, into soul powers,  soul qualities,  soul values, soul truths, soul strength, soul possibilities.  It acts like an alchemist or the gold washer who extracts what is true out of the falsehood,  light trapped within the darkness, good out of evil. In the process, it grows and brings out its divine possibilities.