Preparing for the Miraculous

208 eleven talksdetail, slowly and with labour. It is this great secular movementin cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing,which is imaged and set forth in the symbols ofthe Puranas.” 26Multiple universes and typal worldsIn “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds” in Savitri,Sri Aurobindo has given an unprecedented descriptionof “the world-stair,” the tremendous hierarchic scale ofworlds that form the divine manifestation. All consist oftheir specific substance – vital, mental, spiritual; all arepeopled with countless beings; all are perpetual and existin complete contentment according to their nature. SriAurobindo has called them “typal” worlds, because theyare not subject to change. In these countless gradations ofexistence, however, there is one world where change is thelaw: our material, evolutionary world. Matter is an evolutionaryproduct of the Inconscient into which the Absolutehas plunged to experience the Lila of rediscovering himself.Matter may be considered the lowest form of substance, althoughit too is the Divine.“The material universe is only the façade of an immensebuilding which has other structures behind it, andit is only if one knows the whole that one can have someknowledge of the truth of the material universe. There arevital, mental and spiritual ranges behind which give thematerial its significance.” (Letters on Yoga) 27 “The immensematerial world in which we live is not the sole reality butonly one of innumerable potential and existent universes;all of them need not have either Matter as we know it orthe Inconscient for their base. Indeed this world of matter26 Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, 1979, vol. I, p. 9 (emphasis added).27 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 212.