The Sun and The Rainbow

Sri Aurobindo, Other Teachings,

THE BUILDING OF AUROVILLE

A LETTER

Your circular is full of goodwill and a sincere desire to bring about harmony. You seem to have come across Aurobindo-nians who tend to be more religious than spiritual in their attitudes. It is the usual religious mind that sets up one alleged revelation in opposition to the approaches of other religions towards God. But one who claims to do an Integral Yoga cannot be exclusive in this fashion or come out with cudgels against people who are not yet aware of what Sri Aurobindo stands for. No true Aurobindonian tries to bully or browbeat anyone into becoming an Aurobindonian.

However, one must realise what is meant by saying, as you do, that a newcomer from an old Teaching has to be brought to a point where Sri Aurobindo can take over and that the old Teaching should be given its due as the newcomer's starting-point. If the old Teaching is a "starting-point" and if Sri Aurobindo has to "take over", surely it is admitted that there is something in Sri Aurobindo which exceeds the old Teaching and effects a consummation not possible with the old Teaching. When this is admitted, one cannot just say: "It has all been said before two thousand years ago and in other ages too." One cannot remain simply a Christian, a Buddhist, a Judaean, a Zoroastrian, a Mohammedan, a Bahai or even an adherent to the Vedantic Hinduism which served as the base and background to Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga — one cannot just be any of these things and still be an Aurobindonian. One

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does not "exclude" the old Teachings, for exclusion would run counter to integrality, but one certainly cannot keep them as they were. You have yourself understood Sri Aurobindo to imply that his Yoga "goes beyond Buddha, Christ, Krishna and other Teachings". If Sri Aurobindo "includes" all the Teachings of the past and yet goes beyond them, why does one have to keep them at all in their old recognisable forms instead of plunging wholeheartedly into Sri Aurobindo?

If we keep harking back to the great figures from whom the old Teachings emanated and to the terms in which they have chiefly gone home to humanity, we shall merely be using Sri Aurobindo to give a new look to the religious forces of the past. No doubt, we must not disdain these forces, but there must be what I may paradoxically call a sympathetic goodbye to them, a friendly break-away. Those forces have their own counterparts in Sri Aurobindo: so there will be no real loss, but they will now work in a wider context and be infused with new meanings. If that context and those meanings are to yield their full life-value and bring us a pull from the future in addition to a push from the past, the old associations need to disappear, however gently and gradually. Otherwise we shall never get the total benefit of the light which Sri Aurobindo embodied for us. I may specifically make it clear that I do not mean only an adapting of the old Teachings to changed modern conditions. I mean something more than old wine in new bottles or even new wine in old bottles. In a certain important sense there have to be both new wine and new bottles. Two basic instances in point are the Aurobindonian concepts of "Supermind" and "Transformation".

Sri Aurobindo says that he brought the term "Supermind" into general use and now it is employed in various ways quite far from his intention. Similarly he remarks that people talk of "Transformation" in senses that are very different from what he wants. Sri Aurobindo's "Supermind" makes a fundamental difference in our vision of God's activity and purpose in the world, and Sri Aurobindo's "Transformation" carries us far

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beyond all previous ideals of sagehood, seerhood, sainthood. Time and again he has explained the precise content of these two key-terms of his Integral Yoga and how they make this Yoga very new on the whole in spite of old aims, methods, disciplines and experiences forming part of it, especially in the early stages.

Now I come to what you write on love of one's fellows as a builder of Auroville. There is a fundamental truth in what I may call the essence of your message. For, the love you speak of is a mighty idealism and a forgetfulness of oneself. Your vision answers in its own way to Sri Aurobindo's in those glorious lines of Savitri:

Love must not cease to live upon the earth;

For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,

Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;

Love is man's lien on the Absolute.

But you will observe that Sri Aurobindo's definition of love is openly charged with a sense of "heaven", the "Transcendent", the "Absolute". Unless these high realities are made an active force in the lover's consciousness, the unity towards which love drives will never be set on its way to consummation. Unquestionably if one is not capable of loving the human, one will not have the capacity to love the Divine, just as one's love of the Divine will not be complete if cut off from love of the human. But the converse is even truer and more basic: one cannot fully and freely love the human without rooting oneself in love of the Divine.

What we name love of one another is as much coloured — whether grossly or subtly — by egoism as any other movement of our nature, however high-pitched it may be. The gospel of love of one's fellows has been preached repeatedly but it has never brought about the hoped-for results. As long as no attempt is made towards an inner wideness and tranquillity which would lead us to an already existent Universal Being,

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the single infinite Self in all — as long as no turn is there towards the deep hidden "psyche" in us to whom God the beatific Super-Person is ever real as its Lord and its Origin, as the Master and Source of the whole world —- we shall always have in our love a seeking for the satisfaction of our desires, a feeling of disgruntlement at things not going as we might wish, and even a resentment if the sort of response we want
is not forthcoming. Our fine dreams and grand hopes will invariably founder on the blind rock of our divided egos.

A conscious Yoga must accompany the movement of love for our fellows, an intense turn both to the Cosmic Presence and to the Personal Divinity beyond all beings as well as within them. Then alone will love bring heaven to earth. Then alone shall Auroville be the City of Dawn built from the Light of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

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