Page 30 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

edge and satisfaction, rajas, the mode of passion, action and strug-
gling emotion, tamas, the mode of ignorance and inertia. Dominat-
ed by tamas, man does not so much meet the rush and shock of the
world-energies whirling about him and converging upon him as he
succumbs to them, is overborne by them, afflicted, subjected; or at
the most, helped by the other qualities, the tamasic man seeks only
somehow to survive, to subsist so long as he may, to shelter himself
in the fortress of an established routine of thought and action in
which he feels himself to a certain extent protected from the battle,
able to reject the demand which his higher nature makes upon him,
excused from accepting the necessity of farther struggle and the
ideal of an increasing effort and mastery. Dominated by rajas, man
flings himself into the battle and attempts to use the struggle of
forces for his own egoistic benefit, to slay, conquer, dominate, en-
joy; or, helped by a certain measure of the sattwic quality, the raja-
sic man makes the struggle itself a means of increasing inner mas-
tery, joy, power, possession. The battle of life becomes his delight
and passion partly for its own sake, for the pleasure of activity and
the sense of power, partly as a means of his increase and natural
self-development. Dominated by sattva, man seeks in the midst of
the strife for a principle of law, right, poise, harmony, peace, satis-
faction. The purely sattwic man tends to seek this within, whether
for himself alone or with an impulse to communicate it, when won,
to other human minds, but usually by a sort of inner detachment
from or else an outer rejection of the strife and turmoil of the ac-
tive world-energy; but if the sattwic mind accepts partly the rajasic
impulse, it seeks rather to impose this poise and harmony upon the
struggle and apparent chaos, to vindicate a victory for peace, love
and harmony over the principle of war, discord and struggle. All the
attitudes adopted by the human mind towards the problem of life
either derive from the domination of one or other of these qualities
or else from an attempt at balance and harmony between them.
CWSA 19: 53-54 Sri Aurobindo

30 All India Magazine, October 2025