The Richness of the Evolution in the Knowledge

Most of us are wedded to the sense that enjoyment of life and richness of experience are inseparably linked to the play of the dualities. We believe and find our satisfaction in the mixture of darkness and light, joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, and the challenges attendant on meeting and overcoming the difficulties that arise. We frequently express the sentiment that life in “heaven” may be “dull” because it does not have any of these challenges or the play of the dualities. This viewpoint however is based solely on an extrapolation of our mental and vital experience of the ego, and does not necessarily stand up when we approach life from the position of the gnostic being, expressing Oneness that nevertheless has an infinite Multiplicity that it manifests.

Sri Aurobindo describes a different experience: “The evolution in the Knowledge would be a more beautiful and glorious manifestation with more vistas ever unfolding themselves and more intensive in all ways than any evolution could be in the Ignorance. The delight of the Spirit is ever new, the forms of beauty it takes innumerable, its godhead ever young and the taste of delight, rasa, of the Infinite ete
al and inexhaustible. The gnostic manifestation of life would be more full and fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the Ignorance; it would be a greater and happier constant miracle.”

“Our evolution in the Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half-fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supe
ature.”

And that represents the manifestation of the ultimate destiny, the creation of a divine life on earth. The dream of a “kingdom of heaven on earth” is only possible through the evolution of consciousness beyond the level of the mind. Sri Aurobindo has provided us the solution to the riddle of our lives. He has gone beyond the contradictions and the dualities to a place where they are united as aspects of One Reality, unified, harmonious, complete.

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 28, “The Divine Life”, pp. 1068-1070