It is an unfortunate habit that we have using our mental framework, to try to divide things into separate categories and treat them as if they are separate and distinct; when in fact, they are actually standpoints or parts of a larger integrated whole. When we do this in terms of the spiritual context of existence, we posit a “passive Brahman” and an “active Brahman” and then we focus on one or the other aspect as if it is the sole and unique Truth, and consider the other side to be a falsehood, or at best a “lesser truth”.
Sri Aurobindo however does not accept this separative view of things: “…though we make the distinction for the convenience of our minds, there is not a passive Brahman and an active Brahman, but one Brahman, an Existence which reserves Its Tapas in what we call passivity and gives Itself in what we call Its activity.”
And in terms of the mechanism of this action: “The passivity of Brahman is Tapas or concentration of Its being dwelling upon Itself in a self-absorbed concentration of Its immobile energy; the activity is Tapas of Its being releasing what It held out of that incubation into mobility and travelling in a million waves of action, dwelling still upon each as It travels and liberating in it the being’s truths and potentialities. There too is a concentration of force, but a multiple concentration, which seems to us a diffusion. But it is not really a diffusion, but a deploying; Brahman does not cast Its energy out of Itself to be lost in some unreal exterior void, but keeps it at work within Its being, conserving it unabridged and undiminished in all its continual process of conversion and transmutation. The passivity is a great conservation of Shakti, of Tapas supporting a manifold initiation of movement and transmutation into forms and happenings; the activity is a conservation of Shakti, of Tapas in the movement and transmutation. As in ourselves, so in Brahman, both are relative to each other, both simultaneously co-exist, pole and pole in the action of one Existence.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part I, Chapter 12, The Origin of the Ignorance, pp. 574-575
Sri Aurobindo Studies 