The Synthesis of Yoga - Super school Auroville - The Synthesis of Yoga 1402

“It is he who destroys our darkness by the resplendent light of his knowledge…” God to us is in darkness. We don’t see him anywhere. We see so many objects but we don’t see God; the Divine Teacher is not seen. He is in darkness we might say. It is a great surprise that one who is all luminous is unseen by us. Actually speaking the only thing that we can know is the Divine because he is all luminous but somehow there is a phenomenon of darkness which has covered that all luminousness which is itself a surprise. How can the All luminous be covered? This is a very important question and one day you will ask me and we should spend two, three days on it. But at present we only start with this statement: it is a fact that we do not see the All luminous. The Divine is All luminous and yet covered to our eyes. Something has happened. What has happened, how it has happened, why it has happened? These questions are extremely important. And one of the specialities of The Life Divine is that this book answers these questions in detail, which no book in the world answers as much in detail as The Life Divine has answered. It is the only book in the world which has answered these questions in detail. How has the all luminous become covered? What is the process by which this has happened? What is the nature of light that it can be covered? Can the self-luminous be covered? But this is what has happened. At present to our psychology, it is a fact that we don’t see God. The Self-luminous and All-luminous, the Divine we don’t see him.

In other words, there is a darkness, that darkness by which we are not able to see the All-luminous. We see so many other things but not He. Sri Aurobindo says, it is he who himself destroys our darkness. By what mean: by the resplendent light of his knowledge. The one who is covered as it were suddenly reveals himself as self-luminous. It is as if there is an object which at present you don’t see and suddenly it becomes luminous. Then you see it. It is he himself who switches on the light as it were, his own light, so that light falls upon him and he is seen. This is the mark of a teacher, the Divine Teacher. When you have the experience of this kind then you can say: “I have now found my teacher.” When the teacher reveals himself by his own knowledge which is thrown upon himself -- it is the resplendent light of his knowledge. Dazzling light, light which you cannot refuse at all. Having seen that light you have no doubt -- can you ask the sun to prove that it is luminous? Having seen the sunlight you cannot doubt that there is sunlight. Similarly, here too, there is a self-luminous light of the Supreme. That is why those who have seen God have no doubt at all that God exists. We know the story of Swami Vivekananda. As a young man studying in the college, reading books on philosophy and logic and he listened to a number of people who claimed that they knew God, they described God and he was not convinced. He used to ask the question to everybody who claimed knowledge: “Have you seen God?” And nobody could satisfy his query until one day he met Sri Ramakrishna to whom he asked his very question, “Have you seen God?” And Sri Ramakrishna said: “Yes! Only I see him more vividly than I see you.” It is as if somebody asks: “Have you seen the sun?” Our answer would be the same: “Yes! I have seen the sun”. That was his answer. That is the mark of the Teacher. The one who has seen it is he who destroys our darkness by the resplendent light of his knowledge.

“… that light becomes within us the increasing glory of his own self-revelation.” The light of the Divine is a glow within ourselves. Once you see that light that light does not get extinguished. It is the glow that is born in us and in that glow we have the revelation both of ourselves and of the Divine.

“He discloses progressively in us his own nature of freedom, bliss, love, power, immortal being.” When you say you have seen the Divine, you have not seen the Divine unless you have experienced the Divine Freedom, the Divine Bliss. The Divine Love, the Divine Power, the Divine Immortal Being. “He sets above us his divine example as our ideal and transforms the lower existence into a reflection of that which it contemplates.” All the qualities that you have spoken of: freedom, bliss, etc, cannot be understood unless we have an example, a human being or a divine being. Merely by looking at the outside you do not understand his real nature. It is when you come into contact by experience and learn by example in what way he is free. By freedom is meant capacity of manifesting infinite possibilities, at the same time any one of these infinite possibilities -- that is the freedom. Normally human beings have got only one or two possibilities. I can go here or I don’t go there. Even if some people have two or three possibilities, or hundred possibilities but all that is limitation. The real freedom comes when there is infinite possibility and also the possibility of selecting any one of them without any compulsion. That is the freedom. And it is by his example that you can see…