न च मत्स्थानि भूतानि पश्य मे योगमैश्वरम् ।भूतभृन्न च भूतस्थो ममात्मा भूतभावनः ॥
na ca matsthāni bhūtāni paśya me yogamaiśvarambhūtabhṛnna ca bhūtastho mamātmā bhūtabhāvanaḥ
And yet all existences are not situated in Me, behold my divine Yoga; my self is that which supports all beings and constitutes their existence but does not dwell in them.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
Mottoes of The Life Divine
My self is that which supports all beings and constitutes their existence. . . . I am the self which abides within all beings.
Essays on the Gita
And even to say of him that all exists in him is not the whole truth of the matter, not the entirely real relation: for it is to speak of him with the idea of space, and the Divine is spaceless and timeless. Space and time, immanence and pervasion and exceeding are all of them terms and images of his consciousness. There is a Yoga of divine Power, me yoga aiśvaraḥ, by which the Supreme creates phenomena of himself in a spiritual, not a material, self-formulation of his own extended infinity, an extension of which the material is only an image. He sees himself as one with that, is identified with that and all it harbours. In that infinite self-seeing, which is not his whole seeing,—the pantheist’s identity of God9·5 and universe is a still more limited view,—he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it; but he is other also than this self or extended infinity of spiritual being which contains and exceeds the universe. All exists here in his world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a self-conception by the supracosmic reality of the Godhead which exceeds all our terms of world and being and consciousness. This is the mystery of his being that he is supracosmic, yet not in any exclusive sense extracosmic. For he pervades it all as its self; there is a luminous uninvolved presence of the self-being of God, mama ātmā, which is in constant relation with the becoming and brings all its existences into manifestation by his simple presence.* Therefore it is that we have these terms of Being and becoming, existence in itself, ātman, and existences dependent upon it, bhūtāni, mutable beings and immutable being. But the highest truth of these two relations and the resolution of their antinomy must be found in that which exceeds it; it is the supreme Godhead who manifests both containing self and its contained phenomena by the power of his spiritual consciousness, yogamāyā. And it is only through union with him in our spiritual consciousness that we can arrive at our real relations with his being.
- bhūtabhṛn na ca bhūtastho mamātmā bhūtabhāvanaḥ.
Thus the Gita begins by affirming that the Supreme contains all things in himself, but is not in any, matsthāni sarva-bhūtāni9·4–5, “all are situated in Me, not I in them,” and yet it proceeds immediately to say, “and yet all existences are not situated in Me, my self is the bearer of all existences and it is not situated in existences.” And yet again it insists with an apparent self-contradiction that the Divine has lodged himself, has taken up his abode in the human body, mānuṣīṁ tanum āśritam, and that the9·11 recognition of this truth is necessary for the soul’s release by the integral way of works and love and knowledge. These statements are only in appearance inconsistent with each other. It is as the supracosmic Godhead that he is not in existences, nor even they in him; for the distinction we make between Being and becoming applies only to the manifestation in the phenomenal universe. In the supracosmic existence all is eternal Being and all, if there too there is any multiplicity, are eternal beings; nor can the spatial idea of indwelling come in, since a supracosmic absolute being is not affected by the concepts of time and space which are created here by the Lord’s Yogamaya. There a spiritual, not a spatial or temporal coexistence, a spiritual identity and coincidence must be the foundation. But on the other hand in the cosmic manifestation there is an extension of universe in space and time by the supreme unmanifest supracosmic Being, and in that extension he appears first as a self who supports all these existences; bhūta-bhṛt, he bears them in his all-pervading self-existence. And, even, through this omnipresent self the supreme Self too, the Paramatman, can be said to bear the universe; he is its invisible spiritual foundation and the hidden spiritual cause of the becoming of all existences. He bears the universe as the secret spirit in us bears our thoughts, works, movements. He seems to pervade and to contain mind, life and body, to support them by his presence: but this pervasion is itself an act of consciousness, not material; the body itself is only a constant act of consciousness of the spirit.
Mottoes of The Life Divine
My self is that which supports all beings and constitutes their existence. . . . I am the self which abides within all beings.
Gita.*
Other writings
We must not for a moment imagine that Brahman of the Upanishads is either an extracosmic God entering into a cosmos external to Him or that last refuge of the dualising intellect, an immanent God. When Brahman the conceiving Spirit is said to be in life & mind and matter, it is only as the poet is said to be in his…Read the whole passage · 610 wordsClose the passage
We must not for a moment imagine that Brahman of the Upanishads is either an extracosmic God entering into a cosmos external to Him or that last refuge of the dualising intellect, an immanent God. When Brahman the conceiving Spirit is said to be in life & mind and matter, it is only as the poet is said to be in his own thought and creations; as a man muses in his mind, as the river pours forward in swirls & currents. It would be easy, by quoting isolated texts from the Upanishads, to establish on them any system whatever; for the sages of the Upanishads have made it their business to see Brahman in many aspects, from many standpoints, to record all the most important fundamental experiences which the soul has when it comes into contact with the All, the Eternal. This they did with the greater freedom because they knew that in the fundamental truth of this All & Eternal, the most varied & even contradictory experiences found their harmony & their relative truth and necessity to each other. The Upanishads are Pantheistic, because they consider the whole universe to be Brahman, yet not Pantheistic because they regard Brahman as transcendental, exceeding the universe & in his final truth other than phenomena. They are Theistic because they consider Brahman as God & Lord of His universe, immanent in it, containing it, governing & arranging it; yet not Theistic because they regard the world also as God, containing Himself & dwelling in Himself. They are polytheistic because they acknowledge the existence, power & adorability of Surya-Agni, Indra and a host of other deities; yet not polytheistic, because they regard them as only powers and names & personalities of the one Brahman. Thus it is possible for the Isha Upanishad to open with the idea of the indwelling God, Isha vasyam jagat, to continue with the idea of the containing Brahman, Tasminn apo Matariswa dadhati, and at the same time to assert the world, the jagat, also as Brahman, Tad ejati, sa paryagat. That this catholicity was not born of incoherence of thinking is evident from the deliberate & precise nicety [of] statement both in the Gita & the Upanishad. The Gita continually dwells on God in all things, yet it says Naham teshu te mayi, “I am not in them, they are in me”; and again it says God is Bhutabhrit not bhutastha, and yet na cha matsthani bhutani pashya me yogam aishwaram. “I bear up creatures in myself, I do not dwell in them; they exist in me, & yet they do not exist in me; behold my divine Yoga.” The Upanishads similarly dwell on the coexistence of contradictory attributes in Brahman, nirguno guni, anejad ekam manaso javiyo, tadejati tannaijati. All this is perfectly intelligible & reconcilable, provided we never lose sight of the key word, the master thought of the Upanishads, that Brahman is not a Being with fixed attributes, but absolute Being beyond attributes yet, being absolute, capable of all, and the world a phenomenal arrangement of attributes in Intelligent Being, arranged not logically & on a principle of mutual exclusion, but harmoniously on a principle of mutual balancing & reconciliation. God’s immanence & God’s extramanence, God’s identity with things & God’s transcendence of things, God’s personality & God’s impersonality, God’s mercy & God’s cruelty & so on through all possible pairs of opposites, all possible multiplicity of aspects, are but the two sides of the same coin, are but different views of the same scene & incompatible or inharmonious to our ideas only so long as we do not see the entire entity, whole vision.
Writings in Bengali
Similarly, here the World-Brahman is the true light of the Divine, not a dream, nor illusory, nor a false shining. It is the real light of the Reality, not the Divine in himself but still He himself only. This is the supreme Maya, this is the greatness of the Yoga of the mysterious Lord of Yoga, Sri Krishna. This is His blissful Lila with His Consciousness-Force, this is the inconceivable working of the Supreme.
The Arya — text not in the CWSA
† Bhūtabhrin na cha bhūtastho mamātmā bhūtabhāvanah.
Evening talks
Sri Aurobindo laughing: _ Yes – the Gita also makes the Divine appear variously: the Divine says, “I am in everybody”, and then, “Everybody is in me”, and finally, “Everybody is in me but I am not in them.”
