The Pure Existent: Selections from “The Life Divine” by Sri Aurobindo (vegetarian), Part 1 of 2

Originally written by Sri Aurobindo between 1914 and 1919, “The Life Divine” describes the spiritual journey that unfolds as a person sincerely seeks the highest Truth. Such a journey leads to the soul’s awakening and the direct experience of Divinity.

“When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of boundless energy, infinite existence, infinite movement, infinite activity pouring itself out in limitless Space, in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum numberless myriads count only as a petty swarm.”

“Therefore, the first reckoning we have to mend is that between this infinite movement, this energy of existence which is the world, and ourselves. At present, we keep a false account. We are infinitely important to the All, but to us, the All is negligible; we alone are important to ourselves. This is the sign of the original ignorance, which is the root of the ego that it can only think with itself as center as if it were the All, and of that which is not itself accepts only so much as it is mentally disposed to acknowledge or as it is forced to recognize by the shocks of its environment.”

“This mental self-sufficiency of man creates a system of false accountantship that prevents us from drawing the right and full value from life. There is a sense in which these pretensions of the human mind and ego repose on a truth, but this truth only emerges when the mind has learned its ignorance and the ego has submitted to the All and lost in it its separate self-assertion. To recognize that we, or rather the results and appearances we call ourselves, are only a partial movement of this infinite movement and that it is that infinite which we have to know, to be consciously and to fulfil faithfully, is the commencement of true living.”