The Ego and the Dualities: Selections from “The Life Divine” by Sri Aurobindo (vegetarian), Part 1 of 2

India is the home of many great spiritual Masters who have brought wisdom and truth to Earth, Their lives and compassionate teachings inspire us to seek a higher purposes in life, thus uplifting humanity to a more Divine state of being. One such great figure is the spiritual Master, yogi, philosopher, poet, and politician Sri Aurobindo, who graced our planet from 1872 to 1950. 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. Today, we present to you excerpts from Chapter 7 “The Ego and the Dualities” from the book, “The Life Divine.”

“This is the fall of man typified in the poetic parable of the Hebrew Genesis. That fall is his deviation from the full and pure acceptance of God and himself, or rather of God in himself, into a dividing consciousness which brings with it all the train of the dualities, life and death, good and evil, joy and pain, completeness and want, the fruit of a divided being. This is the fruit which Adam and Eve, Purusha and Prakriti, the soul tempted by Nature, have eaten. The redemption comes by the recovery of the universal in the individual and of the spiritual term in the physical consciousness. Then alone the soul in Nature can be allowed to partake of the fruit of the tree of life and be as the Divine and live forever.”

“At first, however, we must strive to relate the individual again to the harmony of the totality. There it is necessary for us — otherwise there is no issue from the problem — to realize that the terms in which our present consciousness renders the values of the universe, though practically justified for the purposes of human experience and progress, are not the sole terms in which it is possible to render them and may not be the complete, the right, the ultimate formulas. Just as there may be sense-organs or formations of sense-capacity which see the physical world differently and it may well be better, because more completely, than our sense-organs and sense-capacity, so there may be other mental and supramental envisagings of the universe which surpass our own.”