The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

144 The Yoga of Divine Works
or of weariness and inertia. “For I too,” says the Lord in the
Gita, “have no need to do works, since there is nothing I have
not or must yet gain for myself; yet I do works in the world:
for if I did not do works, all laws would fall into confusion, the
worlds would sink towards chaos and I would be the destroyer
of these peoples.” The spiritual life does not need, for its purity,
to destroy interest in all things except the Inexpressible or to cut
at the roots of the Sciences, the Arts and Life. It may well be
one of the effects of an integral spiritual knowledge and activity
to lift them out of their limitations, substitute for our mind’s
ignorant, limited, tepid or trepidant pleasure in them a free,
intense and uplifting urge of delight and supply a new source
of creative spiritual power and illumination by which they can
be carried more swiftly and profoundly towards their absolute
light in knowledge and their yet undreamed possibilities and
most dynamic energy of content and form and practice. The one
thing needful must be pursued first and always; but all things
else come with it as its outcome and have not so much to be
added to us as recovered and reshaped in its self-light and as
portions of its self-expressive force.
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This then is the true relation between divine and human knowledge;
it is not a separation into disparate fields, sacred and
profane, that is the heart of the difference, but the character of
the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge
that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested
in the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena
for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or
mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the Intelligence. But
the same activity of knowledge can become part of the Yoga if it
proceeds from the spiritual or spiritualising consciousness which
seeks and finds in all that it surveys or penetrates the presence
of the timeless Eternal and the ways of manifestation of the
Eternal in Time. It is evident that the need of a concentration
indispensable for the transition out of the Ignorance may make