Book II – Chapter III – The Eternal and the Individual

SYNOPSIS THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL There is Divine living within each individual and our individual consciousness is a vehicle of progressive evolutionary manifestation. Yet we have difficulty in admitting

Study Notes He am I.                                                  

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 2 Contd.., We must have a clear, pure, subtle and flexible mind in order that we may fall as little as possible into that ordinary mental habit

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 4      But in the end we have to see that our individualisation is only a superficial formation, a practical selection and limited conscious synthesis for

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 6      Our unity with the world-being is the consciousness of a Self which at one and the same time cosmicises in the world and individualises

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 8      Now we may get rid of this differentiation by plunging into the absorption of an exclusive unity, but to what end? For perfect union?

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 9      But we see farther that it is not solely and ultimately the cosmic being into which our individual being enters but something in which

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 10 Contd…, If we go beyond these three terms of mind, life and body, and speak of the soul or individual self, we still think of an

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 12 Contd…, Unity was perhaps and will be perhaps, but it is not now and cannot be so long as cosmos and the individual endure. The cosmic

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 14 Contd…, But the Absolute, obviously, finds no difficulty in world-manifestation and no difficulty either in a simultaneous transcendence of world-manifestation; the difficulty exists only for our

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 16      The positives of the Absolute are its various statements of itself to our consciousness; its negatives bring in the rest of its absolute positivity

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 18      The isolation is certainly necessary for first knowledge. A diamond is a diamond and a pearl a pearl, each thing of its own class,

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 19      This truth which we can see, though with difficulty and under considerable restrictions, even in the material world where the subtler and higher powers

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 20      In our practical dealings with life we have to arrive at the same truth. For certain practical ends we have to say that a

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 21      We cannot, either, effect a reconciliation or explanation of the original contradictions of existence by taking refuge in our concept of Time. Time, as

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 22      There we see that all meets and all principles, all persistent realities of existence,—for the finite as a principle of being is as persistent

Study Notes PARAGRAPH 23      We see then that there are three terms of the one existence transcendent, universal and individual, and that each of these always contains secretly