World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 68

Being and its Becoming, the passive divine impersonality and active divine personality, the knowledge and the Ignorance, the Becoming and the Nonbecoming, life on earth and beyond and the supreme immortality. The images of the world either as a garment or as a dwelling place is for the informing governing spirit. The latter significance agrees better with the thought of the Upanishad." All this is for the habitation of the Lord, for the dwelling of the Lord, the Lord dwells in all this. That Infinite that has become each of these infinites -- the infinite Being dwells in each of these infinities.
V
The sense of this first phrase is further elaborated in the second half of the first line:
Yat kincha jagatyam jagat.
Simply put, one may translate this "Whatever moves in this world." But jagat put beside jagatyam is evidently an emphasis on the etymological origin of jagat, the word for "world." Sri Aurobindo's translation makes explicit this relation, achieving a sense of concreteness and profundity: "Whatsoever is individual universe of movement in the universal motion."
What was seen in terms of static being representing itself as universe and its parts, is now more properly seen as becoming. This again is one of the repeated concerns of the Upanishads - the relation between eternity and time, the real and the phenomenal. The mahavakya of the Upanishad that repeats in a number of places comes to mind - nityo'nityanam - that which is permanent in transient things, a being-in-becoming. Jagat, world, is that which changes. This is the basis of phenomenal experience. We find ourselves in a transient world; around us everything changes, nothing remains still. But, transience may have other properties when we study it more carefully.
In Sri Aurobindo's treatment of the line, he highlights first the instances of becoming. Here, each entity is its own universe. But not only is it the center of a static universe, it is a universe of movement, a mobile infinity, a whirl that takes itself to be the central reality, an individual universe of movement. Yet this reality which is an universe to itself is whirling in the language of the German philosopher Heidegger, we may say "worlding") in a cosmic reality (jagat/world) which is also whirling/worlding. This is the "individual universe of movement in the universal motion." In Sri Aurobindo's rendition, what becomes evident is that in each of these individual movements which take themselves to be their own universe, the entire moving universe is contained, is present - the Being of universal movement is present in every individual movement. And all this is "for the habitation of the lord" - that is, the integral Becoming made up of individual instances of becoming are inhabited by the Being-in-Becoming, which remains the integral Being
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