The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

202 The Yoga of Divine Works
man’s moral law and beyond them, though feebly and ignorantly
aimed at by something within them, a larger truth of a vast
unbound consciousness, a law divine towards which both these
blind and gross formulations are progressive faltering steps that
try to escape from the natural law of the animal to a more exalted
light or universal rule. That divine standard, since the godhead
in us is our spirit moving towards its own concealed perfection,
must be a supreme spiritual law and truth of our nature. Again,
as we are embodied beings in the world with a common existence
and nature and yet individual souls capable of direct touch with
the Transcendent, this supreme truth of ourselves must have
a double character. It must be a law and truth that discovers
the perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of a great spiritualised
collective life and determines perfectly our relations with each
being and all beings in Nature’s varied oneness. It must be at the
same time a law and truth that discovers to us at each moment
the rhythm and exact steps of the direct expression of the Divine
in the soul, mind, life, body of the individual creature. 1 And we
find in experience that this supreme light and force of action
in its highest expression is at once an imperative law and an
absolute freedom. It is an imperative law because it governs by
immutable Truth our every inner and outer movement. And yet
at each moment and in each movement the absolute freedom of
the Supreme handles the perfect plasticity of our conscious and
liberated nature.
The ethical idealist tries to discover this supreme law in his
own moral data, in the inferior powers and factors that belong
to the mental and ethical formula. And to sustain and organise
them he selects a fundamental principle of conduct essentially
unsound and constructed by the intellect — utility, hedonism,
reason, intuitive conscience or any other generalised standard.
All such efforts are foredoomed to failure. Our inner nature is
the progressive expression of the eternal Spirit and too complex
a power to be tied down by a single dominant mental or
1 Therefore the Gita defines “dharma”, an expression which means more than either
religion or morality, as action controlled by our essential manner of self-being.