SRI AUROBINDO MANDIR ANNUAL

real or unreal, temporary or permanent. The One-many
problem is thus the rock on which absolutisms and pheno-
menalisms are wrecked.

The second way is to derive the social mass or homogeneity
from the collections of individuals or the many through devices
of absorption, subordination or subsumption, annihilation of uni-
quenesses in eacfi individual or reduction to uniformity through
impositions of conformity to routine law, and logically to evolve
a general idea (jdti) which is hypostatized into a real thing. The
social unity or unification is achieved as the inner necessity of
the individual plurality. All pluralists are forced to accord to
plurality a unity or God or harmony of co-existence or order of
service so that they could be together in harmony without rift
or divergent pulls. They too have to accept Unity or Oneness
of the plurality whether they are prepared to call this real or
unreal, temporary or permanent.

In both these ways there is inevitable the affirmation of
evolution of the individual or the evolution of the social unity
or Universe, the former involving the abolition of the society or
mass uniformity or Nature in the raw, and the latter involving
the abolition of the individual uniquenesses.

Sri Aurobindo finds that the truth of the Oneness is its
eternal manyness, expressed or unexpressed in the texture of
experience, whilst the truth of the manyness lies in their oneness,
an eternal and compelling oneness that substands the divergent
currents of life. Thus the individuals are not mere fragmenta-
tions or portions, sundered apart, of the Divine, but are charged
intrinsically with the nisus to unity, even whilst the social homo-
geneity or Nature is impelled inconscicntly to realise the infinite
potentialities of manyness enfolded in it.

"For the initiation of the evolutionary emergence from the
Inconscient works out by two forces, a secret cosmic consciousness
and an individual consciousness manifest on the surface. The
secret cosmic consciousness remains secret and subliminal to the
surface individual, it organises itself on the surface by the crea-
tion of separate objects and beings. But while it organises the
separate object and the body and mind of the individual being,
it creates also collective powers of consciousness which are large
subjective formations of cosmic Nature ; but it does not provide
for them an organised mind and body, it bases them on the group
ot individuals, develops for them a group mind, a changing yet
continuous group body." {ibid., pp. 606-7).

These two movements are in the supramental Divine worked

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