How to Recognise the Manifestation of the Divine Presence in the Human Individual

How do we recognise the Divine manifesting through an individual human being? Arjuna poses a similar question in the Bhagavad Gita, when he asks how to recognise the enlightened man. How does he walk, how does he dress, what does he eat, how does he act? Sri Krishna reminds Arjuna that the realised soul cannot be recognised by outer forms, but only by the inner spiritual consciousness at work in the individual. The needs of the outer world change and the individual must act according to those needs. The Divine does not operate, normally, outside the framework of the operation of Nature, which indeed is the form that the Divine manifestation has set up to build the creation.

We expect God to do something that defies or alters the laws of nature. We expect God to part the waters of the sea, to turn water into wine, to walk on water, to fly through the air, to have extraordinary powers of wisdom and action. We only accept divinity, generally, when it is packaged within a cloak of supernatural events. We expect some kind of miracles to show the Divine Presence at work; otherwise we do not accept the divine source. The miracle surrounds us every day, all the time, in every aspect of our existence in this created universe!

There are transitions to be accomplished to move the evolutionary process forward, and it is during these transitions that certain individuals appear to provide guidance, work out the details and disseminate them for general progress. In some cases, they may be fully conscious of the divine source and power that is moving them, and thus, become what in India is known as an ‘avatar’. In others, they carry some genius, or power of action, some special skill set, without necessarily recognising the source and process, and in those instances they are known as a ‘vibhuti’, or emanation of the Divine. There may be what men call ‘miracles’ at any point in these transitional stages, as they are, by definition, bringing forward evolutionary powers that were not fully activated previously, and this, for most human beings, will seem to be miraculous.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “Men’s way of doing things well is through a clear mental connection; they see things and do things with the mind and what they want is a mental and human perfection. When they think of a manifestation of Divinity, they think it must be an extraordinary perfection in doing ordinary human things — an extraordinary business faculty, political, poetic or artistic faculty, an accurate memory, not making mistakes, not undergoing any defeat or failure. Or else they think of things which they call superhuman like not eating food or telling cotton-futures or sleeping on nails or eating them. All that has nothing to do with manifesting the Divine. … These human ideas are false.”

“The Divinity acts according to another consciousness, the consciousness of the Truth above and the Lila below and It acts according to the need of the Lila, not according to man’s ideas of what It should or should not do. This is the first thing one must grasp, otherwise one can understand nothing about the manifestation of the Divine.”

Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice, Chapter 12, Other Aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice, The Avatar and the Vibhuti, pp. 347-349