The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

The Way of Equality 717
other, and this gradation depends on the power of the individualised
consciousness to meet, sense, assimilate, equate, master
all that comes in on it from all of the greater self which it has by
separative individualisation put outside of it and made as if notself
to its experience. But all the time, because of the greater Self
within us, there is a secret soul which takes delight in all these
things and draws strength from and grows by all that touches
it, profits as much by adverse as by favourable experience. This
can make itself felt by the outer desire soul, and that in fact is
why we have a delight in existing and can even take a certain
kind of pleasure in struggle, suffering and the harsher colours of
existence. But to get the universal Ananda all our instruments
must learn to take not any partial or perverse, but the essential
joy of all things. In all things there is a principle of Ananda,
which the understanding can seize on and the aesthesis feel as
the taste of delight in them, their rasa; but ordinarily they put
upon them instead arbitrary, unequal and contrary values: they
have to be led to perceive things in the light of the spirit and
to transform these provisional values into the real, the equal
and essential, the spiritual rasa. The life-principle is there to
give this seizing of the principle of delight, rasa-grahan. a, the
form of a strong possessing enjoyment, bhoga, which makes
the whole life-being vibrate with it and accept and rejoice in
it; but ordinarily it is not, owing to desire, equal to its task,
but turns it into the three lower forms, — pain and pleasure,
sukha-bhoga duh. kha-bhoga, and that rejection of both which
we call insensibility or indifference. The prana or vital being
has to be liberated from desire and its inequalities and to accept
and turn into pure enjoyment the rasa which the understanding
and aesthesis perceive. Then there is no farther obstacle in the
instruments to the third step by which all is changed into the
full and pure ecstasy of the spiritual Ananda.
In the matter of knowledge, there are again three reactions
of the mind to things, ignorance, error and true knowledge.
The positive equality will accept all three of them to start with
as movements of a self-manifestation which evolves out of
ignorance through the partial or distorted knowledge which