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delight, it is not a bondage imposed by His own ignorance on the free and absolute
Brahman.

If the world were Brahman’s self-imposed nightmare, to awake from it would be the
natural and only goal of our supreme endeavour; or if life in the world were irrevocably
bound to misery, a means of escape from this bondage would be the sole secret worth
discovering. But perfect truth in world-existence is possible, for God here sees all things
with the eye of truth; and perfect bliss in the world is possible, for God enjoys all things
with the sense of unalloyed freedom. We also can enjoy this truth and bliss, called by the
Veda amritam, Immortality, if by casting away our egoistic existence into perfect unity
with His being we consent to receive the divine perception and the divine freedom.

The world is a movement of God in His own being; we are the centres and knots of
divine consciousness which sum up and support the processes of His movement. The
world is His play with His own self-conscious delight, He who alone exists, infinite,
free and perfect; we are the self-multiplications of that conscious delight, thrown out
into being to be His playmates. The world is a formula, a rhythm, a symbol-system
expressing God to Himself in His own consciousness, — it has no material existence but
exists only in His consciousness and self-expression; we, like God, are in our inward
being That which is expressed, but in our outward being terms of that formula, notes of
that rhythm, symbols of that system. Let us lead forward God’s movement, play out His
play, work out His formula, execute His harmony, express Him through ourselves in His
system. This is our joy and our self-fulfilment; to this end we who transcend & exceed the
universe, have entered into universe-existence.

Perfection has to be worked out, harmony has to be accomplished. Imperfection,
limitation, death, grief, ignorance, matter, are only the first terms of the formula —
unintelligible till we have worked out the wider terms and reinterpreted the formulary;
they are the initial discords of the musician’s tuning. Out of imperfection we have
to construct perfection, out of limitation to discover infinity, out of death to find
immortality, out of grief to recover divine bliss, out of ignorance to rescue divine self-
knowledge, out of matter to reveal Spirit. To work out this end for ourselves and for
humanity is the object of our Yogic practice.

— Sri Aurobindo*

* Sri Aurobindo. The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Volume 12. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo
Ashram Trust; 1997, pp. 96-97.

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