Sri Aurobindo

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Shorter Works. 1910 – 1950

Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921
Arguments to The Life Divine

Appendix II. Chapter XXIV. Matter

Life then is not an inexplicable dream or impossible evil; it is a force of being, a pulsation of the divine All-existence capable of divine outflowering. But there still remains the problem of Matter.

This problem is of a fundamental importance. For all here, mind, life, body, depend on Matter, evolve out of it; Matter is their support, conditions their emergence and action. Man rose out of the animal by developing a body capable of a progressive mental illumination; to rise beyond himself to a divine manhood or supermanhood he must develop a physical instrumentation or body capable of a still greater supramental illumination.

But the body seems to be from the beginning the soul’s great obstacle. Its opposition is a compelling cause of asceticism and of the condemnation put by most religions upon Matter.

The conflict begins with Life and increases as higher principles evolve. There is a discord between Life and Matter ending in death, the defeat of Life; but really there is a constant compromise, Life using Matter and even death for its own continuance: Mind struggles with the limitations of life and matter, and there is a half victory, a constant compromise. When spirit wakens to itself it finds itself hampered by mind, life and body, oppressed by its instruments. The solution proposed is to carry this discord to its logical conclusion. Life rejects body, mind rejects life, the spirit abandons its instruments and departs from world into its own infinity.

This solution is not a solution, it is only the individual’s escape from the problem; the labour of the world and its discord continues. But if Sachchidananda is the world’s indwelling reality, discord cannot be the fundamental principle. The real solution must be a true and complete conquest and taking up of body by life, of life by mind, of all three by the spirit.

This can seem possible only when we have found the real truth of Matter as of Soul, Mind and Life. As Life is found to be force of Spirit, and Mind to be consciousness of Spirit, so Matter is found to be body and substance of Spirit.

Matter as a thing in itself is non-existent. What we see of it is a form or forms created by a particular relation between our sense-experience and the all-existence in which we move. Science discovers that Matter resolves into forms of Energy; Philosophy discovers that Matter is only a substantial appearance and the one reality is Spirit. But what brings about this phenomenon of forms of Energy or this appearance of Spirit?

There should be only states of spirit or currents of Energy; whence these phenomena of forms? It can be attributed to an action of consciousness, an intervention of Mind,– sense-mind creates the forms it seems to perceive; Thought works upon them and gives them their values. But the embodied individual thought or sense which thus conceives or perceives is itself a creation and cannot be the creator. There must be a universal Mind not known to us because subconscious to us in the form of the universe, superconscious to us in the spirit. Such a universal Mind may have determined and constructed the relations of form with form and the rhythms of the universe.[[The embodied individual mind is a surface fragmentation of the universal consciousness repeating by its perceptions this creation and so by a sort of reflection creating for its own thought and sense its own perceptual and conceptual universe.]]

But how is this done?

Existence in its activity is a Consciousness-Force which presents the workings of its Force to its consciousness as forms of being. The Force of Existence of the one sole conscious being can by its workings produce no results that are not forms of that Being. Matter as substance of forms must then be itself a form or substance of spirit; it can be nothing else.

The appearances it assumes, the phenomena of Matter are the result of the dividing action of Mind. Consciousness descending from Supermind appears as Mind, an inferior power of Supermind, Force appears as Life, an energy instrumental to Mind; Mind descending into Life becomes by involution in it subconscient and gives to the material workings of Life the appearance of inconscience. The inconscience, inertia, atomic disaggregation of Matter is due to this involved action of Mind. The creative life-energy of Mind involved in Matter and there turned into what appears to us as an inconscient material Energy gives to form or substance of being on which it works the aspect of inconscience. Mind here is a first action of Supermind in the involutionary descent working in these conditions, separated from the Supermind, Life is a similar action of Force of Being, Matter the form taken by Being itself as a result of this working.

The fragmentation of Matter is due to the dividing action of Mind which does not abrogate the essential unity of Existence. The object is to push the principle of Multiplicity in the One to its extreme which can only be done by division and separativeness of consciousness and of form. For an awareness of things from separate centres of consciousness is meant to be the basic experience of existence here. The movement of Mind the dividing principle makes the knower regard the forms of his own universal being as other than he, but it has also a movement of union which heals this phenomenal division. In divine Mind the two actions are simultaneous and prevent the division from being real. In ignorant or involved Mind the division seems real; the movement towards union becomes a contact of consciousness and primarily a contact of sense. Material substance is the form in which Mind acting through sense contacts being as object,– as a general object, a mass of objective existence and a multitude of objects in that mass of being.