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Awakening the consciousness of matter*

“Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life and her reminder to it that it has not yet found
itself. If there were no siege of death, the creature would be bound forever in the form of an imperfect
living. Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility.” 1

There seems to be matter enough here for us not to need to go any further. This is a question
which every person whose consciousness is awakened a little has asked himself at least
once in his life. There is in the depths of the being such a need to perpetuate, to prolong, to
develop life, that the moment one has a first contact with death, which, although it may be
quite an accidental contact, is yet inevitable, there is a sort of recoil in the being.

In persons who are sensitive, it produces horror; in others, indignation. There is a tendency
to ask oneself: “What is this monstrous farce in which one takes part without wanting to, without
understanding it? Why are we born, if it is only to die? Why all this effort for development,
progress, the flowering of the faculties, if it is to come to a diminution ending in decline and
disintegration?...” Some feel a revolt in them, others less strong feel despair and always this
question arises: “If there is a conscious Will behind all that, this Will seems to be monstrous.”

But here Sri Aurobindo tells us that this was an indispensable means of awakening in the
consciousness of matter the need for perfection, the necessity of progress, that without
this catastrophe, all beings would have been satisfied with the condition they were in —
perhaps.... This is not certain.

But then, we have to take things as they are and tell ourselves that we must find the way
out of it all.

The fact is that everything is in a state of perpetual progressive development, that is, the
whole creation, the whole universe is advancing towards a perfection which seems to
recede as one goes forward towards it, for what seemed a perfection at a certain moment is
no longer perfect after a time. The most subtle states of being in the consciousness follow
this progression even as it is going on, and the higher up the scale one goes, the more
closely does the rhythm of the advance resemble the rhythm of the universal development,
and approach the rhythm of the divine development; but the material world is rigid by
nature, transformation is slow, very slow, there, almost imperceptible for the measurement
of time as human consciousness perceives it... and so there is a constant disequilibrium

*Heading provided by the Editor

1 Sri Aurobindo. Birth Centenary Library, Volume 16. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust;
1971, p. 386.

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