WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Nature's Laws and Human Aspiration

125--Every law, however embracing or tyrannous, meets somewhere a contrary law by which its operation can be checked, modified, annulled or eluded.

126--The most binding Law of Nature is only a fixed process which the Lord of Nature has framed and uses constantly; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but we must first open the doors of our prison-house and learn to live less in Nature than in the Spirit.

There is no law of Nature that cannot be overcome and changed, if we have the faith that all is ruled by the Lord and that it is possible for us to come into direct contact with Him, if we know how to escape from the prison-house of age-old habits and give ourselves unreservedly to His will.

In truth, nothing is fixed, everything is in perpetual change; and this ascending transformation will lead this inconscient and mortal creation back step by step to the eternal and all-powerful consciousness of the Lord.

3 August 1969

127--Law is a process or a formula; but the soul is the user of processes and exceeds formulas.

The laws of Nature are imperative for the physical nature only so long as this nature is not under the influence of the psychic being (the soul); for the psychic being is in possession of the divine power which can, for its own ends, use all processes and formulas and transform them at will.

5 August 1969

128--Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body? This first we ought to determine.

129--O son of Immortality, live not thou according to Nature, but according to God; and compel her also to live according to the deity within thee.

What does Sri Aurobindo mean here by "the nature which exceeds the body"?

The nature which exceeds the body is the nature which goes on living even after the disappearance of the body; it is the psychic nature which is immortal and divine in essence. The psychic can and must become conscious of the Divine at its centre and consciously unite with Him.

7 August 1969

130--Fate is God's foreknowledge outside Space and Time of all that in Space and Time shall yet happen; what He has foreseen, Power and Necessity work out by the conflict of forces.

If everything is foreseen, what is the role of human aspiration and effort?

In each domain (physical, vital and mental) everything is foreseen; but the intrusion of a higher domain (overmental and beyond) introduces another determinism into events and can change the course of things. This is what aspiration can achieve.

As for human effort, it is one of the things that are determined and its role is foreseen in the overall play of forces.

9 August 1969