The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Gnosis and Ananda 503
action and makes true and radiant and authentic and inevitable
every movement and impulse.
The gnosis does not reject the realisations of the lower
planes; for it is not an annihilation or extinction, not a Nirvana
but a sublime fulfilment of our manifested Nature. It possesses
the first realisations under its own conditions after it has transformed
them and made them elements of a divine order. The
gnostic soul is the child, but the king-child; 2 here is the royal and
eternal childhood whose toys are the worlds and all universal
Nature is the miraculous garden of the play that tires never. The
gnosis takes up the condition of divine inertia; but this is no
longer the inertia of the subject soul driven by Nature like a
fallen leaf in the breath of the Lord. It is the happy passivity
bearing an unimaginable intensity of action and Ananda of the
Nature-Soul at once driven by the bliss of the mastering Purusha
and aware of herself as the supreme Shakti above and around
him and mastering and carrying him blissfully on her bosom
for ever. This biune being of Purusha-Prakriti is as if a flaming
Sun and body of divine Light self-carried in its orbit by its own
inner consciousness and power at one with the universal, at one
with a supreme Transcendence. Its madness is a wise madness
of Ananda, the incalculable ecstasy of a supreme consciousness
and power vibrating with an infinite sense of freedom and intensity
in its divine life-movements. Its action is supra-rational
and therefore to the rational mind which has not the key it
seems a colossal madness. And yet this that seems madness is
a wisdom in action that only baffles the mind by the liberty
and richness of its contents and the infinite complexity in fundamental
simplicity of its motions, it is the very method of the
Lord of the worlds, a thing no intellectual interpretation can
fathom, — a dance this also, a whirl of mighty energies, but the
Master of the dance holds the hands of His energies and keeps
them to the rhythmic order, the self-traced harmonic circles of
his Rasa-lila. The gnostic soul is not bound any more than the
divine demoniac by the petty conventions and proprieties of the
2 So Heraclitus, “The kingdom is of the child.”