The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

The Spiritual Life and World-Renunciation: A Letter to One Attracted by the Cloister

I READ your letter with great interest and my mind went back to my own early days of groping and struggling. When the hunger for the Divine first awoke in me, it was something devastating no less than uplifting. The devastating part of it was to a considerable extent unavoidable, because so much of my ordinary movement of consciousness was contrary to the God-ward urge of the inmost soul. I turned with disgust from my .way of life, and I yearned to sit alone on some Himalayan height and lose myself in samadhi. Not only was common living a matter of repugnance, but even the common mental self-awareness that is ours was a continual pain. I wanted annihilation of my normal being, a submergence of my small self in the Infinite, a forget-fulness of the world and an oblivion of my own existence.

Somehow, things of beauty which to a man of my temperament had a special appeal were to me a special pang. They brought an excruciating exquisiteness or a shattering splendour, and in my intense response to them and enjoyment of them I felt that they at the same time opened a window upon eternity and held me back from that sweetness and glory by their own limited alluring perfection. Always there was the cry in me to transcend everything and be lost in some sort of formless and nameless, spaceless and timeless tranquillity.

I was very young - not even twenty-three. The conflict, therefore, between what is called the flesh and what is termed the Spirit was acute. That is often how the mystical turn starts. But that is not the essence of mysticism. The conflict is due to the difficulty our true soul finds in coming to the surface through the thick crust of our ignorance and our attachments. As I have said before, the devastating conflict cannot altogether be avoided; but, when the soul succeeds in coming up, the terrible tension goes. The soul is spontaneous communion with the Divine. It does not talk of renunciation, because to renounce implies that one is

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attached to ordinary things and the soul has no attachment to them. The soul does not think in terms of sacrifice, because to give up hankering after superficial objects it has to make no effort at all - it is most naturally free from the hankering. And when we grow aware of its blissful inherent freedom, we too lose the fear we have of the flesh, the recoil we have from the world. To the soul the earth is not a devil's trap. No doubt, a lot of ugliness is about us, but that is because the earth has not been made the soul's luminously built abode. The earth too is God's own creation and all the power and diversity, colour and complexity that are Nature are secretly God's and are in existence not in order to be hated and dreaded and shunned and escaped from but in order to be converted into channels and instruments and moulds of God. As the Upanishad puts it: "The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the south and to the north of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal." To seek the transcendent Godhead and forget the cosmic divinity - to suppose that the cosmos is a fruitless nullity and has no purpose - is to fly against God's own being and God's own will. There are those superb words of Allah in the Koran: "Dost thou think I have made this whole world in a jest?" Surely the long march of time has some aim and if the soul has come into the world and passes from birth to birth, it is not for kicking off everything and leaving unfulfilled the poor dust out of which we are made.

An utter inner detachment from all objects of desire must be there - progressively, of course, and not attained at one shot. But when we are in love with God alone we have to take heed of God calling out to us from every corner and every particle of His creation. This, mind you, is not just a gospel of doing one's duty and being good to people. Duty and goodness are not negligible, but the spiritual life does not stop with them or even basically consist of them. It consists essentially in increasing union with the Divine and increasing expression of the Divine as a result of that union. In whatever we do we must seek to serve God. If you give a dying man some water and save his life, you do a fine thing, but it is not in itself a spiritual act unless you remember intensely that

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you are offering the saving cup to the Divine within the man. A conscious self-consecration, a conscious self-offering are requisite, for then alone all activity becomes a means of uniting with God, participating in God's sinless nature and doing God's perfect will. Of course, until we get the full illumination, we have to go by our own lights, but while doing the best we can we have to keep asking for the higher guidance and we have to think not of duty towards anyone or service to a human being but only of serving the Supreme Lord and Lover, the Supreme Shakti and Mother of the worlds, seated in all things and beings and exceeding them and drawing them to an ever greater perfection. "Remember and offer" - this is the essence of spiritual work.

To come back to my point: spirituality does not imply a spurning of the earth and its calls. To flee from them is the exact opposite pole of the error of remaining enmeshed in them, and has the same partiality, the same incompleteness, the same lopsided extremism. If a choice has to be made between only these extremes, the flight is definitely preferable - it is an absorption in light and not an engrossment in darkness. But this does not change the fact that God's manifestation has been refused by us and that we have spat on God just because He has taken the form of common clay. The monastic or cloistered life, the hermit's ascetic seclusion, are far greater than rotting in the sty of Epicurus, but they do not solve the problem posed by God. They intensely bypass the entire riddle of the universe.

And once we accept the principle of bypassing it, the most logical thing is not to retire merely into the cloister where at least we have the company of other human beings and a roof above our heads and some common comforts, however meagre. The most logical thing is to cut ourselves off from everyone, deny ourselves everything - live in a dismal cave, wear next to nothing, face the inclemencies of the weather, create hardships where there is the least creeping in of creature comfort, sleep on stones and sharp ones at that, practise terrible austerities, mortify the flesh till it bleeds and faints, reduce life to bare subsistence, grow old as quickly as possible in order to avoid the slightest chance of self-love or vanity, invite diseases in order to make the flesh loath-

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some, pray for early death in order that the world may be no more. Perhaps even suicide would not be out of place. If life is to be renounced, why not go the whole hog?

Besides, all these methods of being spiritual are artificial and they are signs that somehow the inner detachment is not complete. If one is not attached to earthly things, the feverish urge to throw them away cannot come. They trouble us no longer and do not seem to us hell's own handiwork. Of course, a certain discipline is necessary, but its use is made only for acquiring an inner detachment and not as an end in itself. Merely the reduction of our life to the hard and bare minimum does not lead to spiritual freedom from the grip of things. Do you know the story of King Janaka? He was the lord of a huge empire, he had possessions in plenty and wore beautiful clothes and had hundreds who did his bidding. But he had been initiated by a rishi into God-knowledge and he sought ever to do God's will. The wealth he had, the power he commanded, the people who served him - all these became the tremendous means of an activity in tune with the highest consciousness. If what he possessed had been given up into the hands of somebody who was not an initiate, it would have been utilised for purposes dark and devious. In King Janaka's hands it became not a denial but an affirmation of God's presence. And mark now what happened when a sannyasi who had left home and belongings and kept only a loin-cloth came to Janaka. The King invited him to his bathing pool and they were both splashing about in the water when a cry arose from the house that a fire had broken out. In a few seconds the King's great palace was all in flames and his finest tapestries and treasures were being licked up by the fire's relentless tongue. Down to the very edge of the bathing pool the conflagration spread. Janaka swam on, undisturbed. But the sannyasi gave a heart-rending shout and rushed from the water, with the words: "Oh my loin-cloth! It will get burnt!"

Inner freedom has nothing essentially to do with poverty or hardship. Self-indulgence is certainly an obstacle and a certain amount of tapasya and self-control is necessary, but to go to God by the way of extreme austerity is to maim oneself and to miss

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that paramount liberty of the Spirit which is attached to neither plenty nor poverty, neither ease nor hardship, but remains the same through all conditions and circumstances and gladly accepts life's abundance as it accepts life's rigours. When this sort of inner freedom is there, the spiritual life grows at the end a conquest of the world's powers for the sake of the Divine. Art is encouraged and transfigured. Beauty plays in every heart-beat and every movement. And if beauty demands a certain fine organisation of externals, that organisation is accepted. This does not put a premium on what the Mother, of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, calls in her talks the physical consciousness. One must get out of this narrow superficial mode of being and as long as one has not got out of it one cannot give up a degree of outer discipline, but even here the important thing is, as the Mother says, not to keep oneself attached to one's physical needs and enjoyments. One must get rid of attachment to good clothes, good food, comfort and happy social relationships, and to an extent the riddance is helped by discipline, by doing away with many matters which one cherishes. But an impoverishment is not asked for and in any case the inner attachment is what is to be broken. The sign of this breaking is not so much the outer living without conveniences as the inner independence of them which feels no loss at all if they are lacking. To live a particularly hard life, as if any virtue resided in such a life itself, is not necessary to spiritual growth. The error of many a religion is to make too much of austerity and sorrow. This casts a shadow upon the forces of nature in oneself and makes one miss the goal of God in the world. God does not come on the cheap: that is true, and yet it is also true that God is infinite bliss and endless creativity and life abounding. The goal of evolution is not the martyr's crown of thorns but the wreath of the conqueror. However, I may add that the wreath is never deserved unless one is not afraid of martyrdom and it has to be put on one's brows by only the Guru's hands.

Yes, the Guru is an important part of the higher life. Without the Guru one is likely to go astray in the sense that one may ultimately feed one's ego by subtle means and end up in spiritual pride. One may also come to grief, for when one strives to rise

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beyond the routine of human existence one gets into touch with strange beings and forces and unless one has a deep purity and sincerity they may make use of one in ways that are far from spiritual and they may even derange one's mind. That is why, I may remark, a matter of prime moment is the development of some kind of peace. The Guru can give this peace as well as a protection by his own power. Unless one is a spiritual genius, one cannot do without the Guru.

Here I may dwell a little on the life of the cloister which you seem to regard as very desirable. Apart from the unnatural tax it lays on one by its rigid rules and its grinding tasks, there is the very great possibility of its not spiritualising one at all. Who is usually in charge of a nunnery? Not a St. Teresa or a St. Catherine, but an ordinary Mother Superior who has an ability to govern and organise, but no special spiritual radiancy. How is she to help one's soul? Of course one may turn to the occult Christ and worship him and call down his help. But how much is one's own capacity for doing this? Most of us are very ordinary people even when we turn Godward, we are not spiritual geniuses. We cannot for long keep up worship or mystical communion or even the inner strength that laughs at the outer hardships one has often to go through. Deep disappointment is bound to invade us and a bitter resentment against life. One's sister nuns may, and usually do, have many petty traits, for they too are not supernormal folk. A religious bent of mind or an impetuous turn towards the cloister does not transmute people into superhuman beings. And unless a St. Teresa or a St. Catherine is there to guide a nun and help her and uplift her by their very presence and make all her travails and tribulations as worth while as they can be made, the aspirant will not attain her genuine goal - God-union and God-expression. The point is that we must find the Guru who is God-realised; and in a merely moral and pious life which is all that there is in organised religion at its best, whether Christian or Hindu or any other, we have not much hope of being truly illuminated. To sit at the feet of a living Saint or Yogi who embodies the Divine and is with us as a constant spiritual presence in very flesh and blood is the only right and reliable and fruitful way of mysticism.

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Lastly, in regard to a person who has passed beyond our own level of consciousness and whose life has not lacked in trials and heroisms, we must remember the opening para of the Mother's talks to which I have already referred, where she says that we must never sit in crude judgment on what we imagine to be shortcomings. The Divine, when It manifests for earthwork, seems often to act very ordinarily, but we do not know what is the magnificent meaning of Its action. To take an instance from another sphere, suppose an average matric student reads a poem and says, "It's beautiful." What would be the meaning of this statement? Will it put the stamp of merit on the poem? Now suppose a man like Coleridge or Matthew Arnold makes the same remark, "It's beautiful." The words will have come from an entirely different source: they will have sprung from a mind quick to the revelatory impact of poetic inspiration and the significance they will carry for whoever is able to recognise their source will be momentous. The two utterances were identical and yet worlds apart. In a like manner, a spiritual person may act in several respects like a non-spiritual one, but the whole fount of consciousness, the whole aim and objective are altogether different.

People used to question why Sri Aurobindo was staying in one room and not coming out and lecturing or guiding political conferences at Delhi or doing social service. They passed judgment on him for not acting as they imagined a spiritual person should have. The conclusion they drew was that Sri Aurobindo was wasting his time and that his spirituality was dubious. But how could we dictate to a person who had been for years at the job of spirituality, how could we tell what spirituality consists in? Can you dictate to a poet what he should do in poetry? He may not be good at cooking or at mending clothes, but he knows something about poetry and he should not be compelled to act according to the wishes of those who are not so experienced in the art of writing poems. Similarly, how could we know what Sri Aurobindo, with the aim he had in view, should have done or not done? He knew his job best. We could, of course, have offered suggestions to him, but if he persisted in his own line of living, we should have to concede to him that he knew better than we the art

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and science of being spiritual and doing the Divine's work. The Mother too knows her work best and is better aware than we of the right way to embody and express the spiritual realisation and to lead others to it. Of course, doubts and questions are not unnatural, but in our search for the Spirit we must not erect our ordinary conceptions into absolute canons. Especially when a new path of spirituality is trod, which, for all its discipline and detachment, tries to take into its sweep the whole essential life-movement of the world and bring about its transformation by the power of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have called the Supermind, a power that has never before been completely compassed or directly manifested, such criticisms from a standpoint based on old identifications of spirituality with a stress on poverty and bareness and external abstentions are all the more invalid.

I quite understand that even if you grasp with your mind my contention, some sub-mental impulse may still trouble you. But if the mind grasps a truth, the chances are that this impulse may weaken gradually. The final blow to it, however, can come only by actual living contact with the Mother and with the truth, the radiancy, the beauty, the bliss, the love, the compassion that she embodies. In front of her, if the soul in you is open even a little bit, your whole being will be flooded with light and everything she does will strike you as the rightest possible and even the things one may most criticise from an outsider's conventional standpoint will become part and parcel of the divinity that is in her smile - for here is

The Light whose smile kindles the universe.

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