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The true Delight of being *

“The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the Divine into the
human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity.

“But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all
this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were
to be its ending.

“Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.

“What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for
sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself
innumerably.

“And what is the middle? Division that strives towards a multiple unity, ignorance that labours
towards a flood of varied light, pain that travails towards the touch of an unimaginable ecstasy. For
all these things are dark figures and perverse vibrations.

“And what is the end of the whole matter? As if honey could taste itself and all its drops together
and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be
with God and the soul of man and the universe.

“Love is the key-note, Joy is the music, Power is the strain, Knowledge is the performer, the infinite All
is the composer and audience. We know only the preliminary discords which are as fierce as the harmony
shall be great; but we shall arrive surely at the fugue of the divine Beatitudes.” 1

How can one “learn of pure delight”?

First of all, to begin with, one must through an attentive observation grow aware that
desires and the satisfaction of desires give only a vague, uncertain pleasure, mixed, fugitive
and altogether unsatisfactory. That is usually the starting-point.

Then, if one is a reasonable being, one must learn to discern what is desire and refrain
from doing anything that may satisfy one’s desires. One must reject them without trying
to satisfy them. And so the first result is exactly one of the first observations stated by the

*Heading provided by the Editor
1 Sri Aurobindo. Birth Centenary Library, Volume 16. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust;
1971, p. 384.

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