The mental or vital demigod, the Asura, Rakshasa and Pishacha, — Titan, vital giant and demon, — are superhuman in the pitch and force and movement and in the make of their characteristic nature, but these are not divine and those not supremely divine, for they live in a greater mind power or life power only, but they do not live in the supreme Truth, and only the supreme Truth is divine.1
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In Nature, since it started from division and egoism, the Titan had to come first; he is here in us as the elder god, the first ruler of man’s heaven and earth. Then arrives the God and delivers and harmonises. Thus the old legend tells us that the Deva and the Asura laboured together to churn the ocean of life for the supreme draught of immortality, but, once it had been won, Vishnu kept it for the God and defrauded the fiercer and more violent worker. And this seems unjust; for the Asura has the heavier and less grateful portion of the burden. He begins and leads; he goes his way hewing, shaping, planting: the God follows, amends, concludes, reaps. He prepares fiercely and with anguish against a thousand obstacles the force that we shall use: the other enjoys the victory and the delight. And therefore to the great God Shiva the stained and stormy Titan is very dear, — Shiva who took for himself the fierce, dark and bitter poison first churned up from the sea of life and left to others the nectar. But the choice that Shiva made with knowledge and from love, the Titans made from darkness and passion, — desirous really of something very different and deceived by their stormy egoism. Therefore the award of Vishnu stands; to the God shall fall the crown and the immortality and not, unless he divinise himself, to the proud and strenuous Asura.2
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The world of the Asuras is prior to the evolution, so are the worlds of
the mental, vital or subtle physical Devas.3
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[The] Deva [god] is capable of a high self-transforming sattwic action, the Asura incapable.4
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There is and can be no psychic being in a non-evolutionary creature like the Asura.5
~ Sri Aurobindo
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The Asura is the force of falsehood, antidivine, which reigns as sovereign over the physical world; his influence is felt everywhere, it is in everything in Matter. But the time has now come when the separation, the purification, can be made, the falsehood, the Asuric influence, rejected and there can be an exclusive living in the Divine Truth.6
~ The Mother
References:
- CWSA Vol. 12, Essays Divine and Human, P: 365
2. CWSA Vol. 13, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, P: 154
3. CWSA Vol. 19, Essays on the Gita, P: 469
4. CWSA Vol. 28, Letters on Yoga, P: 450
5. CWSA Vol. 28, Letters on Yoga, P: 449
6. CWM Vol. 15, P: 176
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