Second Stage of Self-Surrender and Self-Mastery Through Active Nature : Sri Aurobindo

06/02/2018

In the transition from perceiving the ego-personality as the doer of works, the first stage was characterized by an awareness of the Divine Shakti carrying out the work, albeit through the individual ego-consciousness. Thus, there remains a sense of the individual as the doer of works, even if not the original cause or initiator of the work. The second stage sees a relaxation of the ego-centric focus, as the individual more and more recognizes that the universal divine Shakti is in fact doing all and the individual is simply a nexus or occasion for differentiated action to take place in the divine manifestation.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “The Sadhaka does not think, will, act, feel, but thought, will, feeling, action happen in his system. The individual on the side of action has disappeared into oneness with universal Prakriti, has become an individualised form and action of the divine Shakti. He is still aware of his personal existence, but it is as the Purusha supporting and observing the whole action, conscious of it in his self-knowledge and enabling by his participation the divine Shakti to do in him the works and the will of the Ishwara.”

The conscious awareness of the seeker encompasses three terms at this stage: “Here too there are three things present to the consciousness, the Shakti carrying on all the knowledge, thought, will, feeling, action for the Ishwara in an instrumental human form, the Ishwara, the Master of existence governing and compelling all her action, and ourself as the soul, the Purusha of her individual action enjoying all the relations with him which are created by her workings. There is another form of this realisation in which the Jiva disappears into and becomes one with the Shakti and there is then only the play of the Shakti with the Ishwara, Mahadeva and Kali, Krishna and Radha, the Deva and the Devi. This is the intensest possible form of the Jiva’s realisation of himself as a manifestation of Nature, a power of the being of the Divine….”

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