The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

All or Nothing

The Integral Yoga is a matter of all or nothing. Not that the Guru rejects partial offerings: whatever movement is towards the Divine is welcome and can be made the starting-point for a larger gesture. The Grace answers to even the smallest sincere gift. But its call is towards more and more, a new starting-point each moment. And if to this insatiable call a deaf ear is turned, then in terms of the Integral Yoga it is as if nothing was done.

The call is insatiable not only because the Grace wants the whole human to be surrendered to the Divine but also because it wants the whole Divine to be lavished on the human. Surely, since the very nature of Grace is to exceed mere tally and equation, its self-lavishing is always greater than the aspirant's self-surrender. Yet the aspirant cannot receive and retain it unless he holds up to it a being that increasingly widens and deepens and grows a less and less partial offering.

In the integral offering that has to be made in the Integral Yoga, one understands fairly well the need of entire detachment from the non-divine and of absolute love for the Supreme and of perfect service to the Master. What is not often understood is the way of action in the midst of the world where the Supreme's manifestation has to take place, the way of dealing with the humans amongst whom the Divine has put us. There are two extremes into which we are likely to fall. One is the position that the mere practice of goodness is spiritual. No doubt, every movement that loosens one's self-centredness is a help to spirituality. But it is not till the ego which is one's common centre is replaced by the true soul and the universal Self that spirituality is established. Otherwise all that happens is a subtilisation of the ego, a diffusion of it in place of a concentration - a state in which it is at times more difficult to detect and therefore more difficult to outgrow, more liable to induce a self-haloing complacency and prevent the release into true Light. A constant remembrance of the Divine, a direct life-offering to the Supreme, a conscious motive and élan beyond mere goodness, an unremitting cry to the Master Light to manifest its own will in all human relations: this is spirituality in action.

The other extreme cares little for how we act among men. We feel that all our capacity of sweetness is to be exercised only with

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the Guru and that it does not matter how we behave with others. We tell ourselves: "The incarnate Divine is our concern: nobody else is of any importance and what helps us in Yoga is simply the way we love and serve the Master. It is of no moment whether we are just and generous and calm and helpful to others." Here a great truth is shaded off into a great falsehood. Even apart from the fact that the Divine who is incarnate is also hidden in all beings and requires from the secret station there a fineness and largeness of attitude and action, we have here an oblivion of two ingredients of the Integral Yoga.

First, this is a Yoga of manifestation no less than realisation. Not only is the Supreme to be centrally reached: the Supreme is also to be radiated to the farthest peripheries of the world. The innermost soul has to look forth and touch the outermost: all crudity of attitude, all meanness of action in our dealings with earth's creatures would cut across the ultimate aim of this Yoga.

Secondly, it is a delusion that one can divide oneself into parts and be always fine and wide with the Guru without practising fineness and wideness twenty-four hours of the day. Of course, the Divine is our concern, but can we ever hope to love and serve the Divine wholly if in some part of our being, in some field of our activity we tolerate the crude and the mean? As long as the soul remains somehow in force during the hours in the sanctuary we may be able to exclude the unregenerate movements from our relations with the Master. But it is not only the soul that has to be offered: the soul must lead the rest of the being to the sanctuary. And when the rest is touched by the Divine and called upon to co-operate, then if it has not trained itself to be fine and large outside the sanctuary it will tend to be resentful, angry, jealous, self-seeking with the Divine as it has been with the human. The soul's sweetness and light may fail to curb and convert it if that sweetness and that light have not been accustomed to do so everywhere and at all times. Resentment, anger, jealousy, self-seeking on any occasion can be a secret seed of the same ego-expression against the Supreme. In the Integral Yoga, with its stroke on each part for response to the Supreme, the total self-offering is not possible unless one takes to heart Sri Aurobindo's command: "Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present."¹

¹ . SABCL Vol. 25, p. 105.

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Difficulties in Yoga*

I

The nature of your difficulty indicates the nature of the victory you will gain, the victory you will exemplify in Yoga. Thus, if there is persistent selfishness, it points to a realisation of universality as your most prominent achievement in the future. And, when selfishness is there, you have also the power to reverse this very difficulty into its opposite, a victory of utter wideness.

When you have something to realise, you will have in you just the characteristic which is the contradiction of that something. Face to face with the defect, the difficulty, you say, "Oh, I am like that! How awful it is!" But you ought to see the truth of the situation. Say to yourself, "My difficulty shows me clearly what I have ultimately to represent. To reach the absolute negation of it, the quality at the other pole - this is my mission."

Even in ordinary life, we have sometimes the experience of contraries. He who is very timid and has no courage in front of circumstances proves capable of bearing the most!

To one who has the aspiration for the Divine, the difficulty which is always before him is the door by which he will attain God in his own individual manner: it is his particular path towards the Divine Realisation.

There is also the fact that if somebody has a hundred difficulties it means he will have a tremendous realisation - provided, of course, there are in him patience and endurance and he keeps the aspiring flame of Agni burning against those defects.

And remember: the Grace of the Divine is generally proportioned to your difficulties.

2

The most difficult thing in our difficulties is the sense they give us that they stand in stark opposition to the workings of the

* Section 1 is based on an unrecorded talk of the Mother.

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Divine. They seem to come from outside the Divine's intention and plan and make us feel that they are there wholly by some devilish power within or without us, bent on dragging us away from the Light. The Light appears to pull one way, the Darkness the other, and between the two we are torn.

But, if the Divine is the one ultimate reality, can anything be utterly independent of His Will? No doubt, a Darkness keeps opposing the Light and it must be rejected as an enemy. To forget this is to overlook the entire meaning of the process of evolution, the constant urge to rise from the animal to the godlike and to make Nature an instrument, an expressive form, of the soul. But, on the other hand, if we forget that the very process of evolution, the struggle itself towards godhead, is set by the Divine, we let the Darkness seem more dense than it really is. For we then see it as it shows itself to our frailty rather than as it can be revealed to us by the power of the Light.

What the Light reveals within, behind, above each difficulty is the figure of Sri Aurobindo. And this is what one may hear Sri Aurobindo say:

"Difficulties are part of the cosmic plan. I would wish to lift you beyond all need of them, so that yours may be a spontaneous flowering into divinity. But there are a thousand checks put by you and by the world to my Grace. Even so, it can reach you - through the very difficulties where you see the opposite of my face. Since only by their stroke can you be awakened to all that has to be changed in yourself, I choose to come to you in their stroke. Invite not the Darkness; but, when it is there, let not your mind be troubled or your heart burdened. Everything I weave into my pattern of perfection. Do not feel as if some incomprehensible devilry were dooming you: feel as if I with one hand were giving the difficulty and with the other the will and the power to overcome it. Safely you may take even the Darkness as part of my own workings, provided you recognise that I send it not to be accepted but to help your growth by being mastered at once with my love's ever-pouring Light. Keep this double vision clear, and you will not be torn as between two enemies, nor sink into the despair of human weakness."

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The Series of Avatars

A COMMENT ON THE MOTHER'S MESSAGE OF

APRIL 24, 1957

This Message of the Mother¹ -

"In the eternity of becoming, each Avatar is only the announcer, the forerunner of a more perfect realisation" -

has prompted in some minds the question: Is the work of establishing the Supermind on earth not the work of the culminating Avatar, not the fulfilment of earth-existence but only a step further, like so many earlier steps, on an endless path where every realisation proves to be imperfect in comparison to what comes after it?

Behind this question there are a number of misconceptions. It is indeed true that no end can be set to the Divine's manifestation on earth. If the Divine is the Infinite, then His manifestation can never be exhausted: depth after depth must keep disclosing itself. When the Supermind, the Vijnana-plane, has established its splendour amongst us, it will serve as the beginning of a movement towards establishing the wonder that is the Transcendent Bliss, the Ananda-plane. After that, other secrets of the Supreme will work out their revelation. But we must not overlook a great difference between the Supermind's manifestation and the manifestation of divine powers that have preceded it. And we must not omit to note that the Mother's Message, in its complete form, has a second sentence running:

"And yet men have always the tendency to deify the Avatar of the past in opposition to the Avatar of the future."

This sentence makes us throw a glance backward at man's spiritual history and it suggests in relation to the Supermind the error of sticking to past realisations as if they were ultimate instead of preparatory of the Supermind's epiphany. The opposing tendency spoken of can take two forms. One is to deny the supramental revelation and make a jealous cult of what Rishi and Saint and Prophet have taught in ages gone. The other is to consider this revelation of today nothing save the old truth

¹. Bulletin, April 1957, MCW Vol. 13, p. 22.

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retold in novel terms and therefore fit for acceptance by those who like novelty but not imperative for acceptance by all.

Of course, as we have said, the supramental realisation also is not final. And the Mother's second sentence does not imply its finality. But by the word "past" contraposed to the word "future" it brings the generality of the first sentence to a certain particularisation which, without making a fresh fetish of today against tomorrow, flashes out the need of opening the eyes to the new Day of God that has dawned.

The new Day can be seen in proper focus by divesting the epithet "supramental" of all looseness of significance. Every Yoga has sought for what is "supra", or superior, to the mental. But Sri Aurobindo attaches a special meaning to the epithet he has brought into use. People not intimate with his thought understand by it one of two things. Either they apply it to an infinite and eternal Silence exceeding all cosmic activity and making the whole cosmos seem an inexplicably created enigma that has no basic reality - or else they apply it to a spiritual Force beyond the mind, standing against the background of that Silence and governing its own creation, this universe in which the souls of creatures rise from birth to birth but in which, despite all spirituality, a certain imperfection is inherent and irreducible. The first conception culminates in a sense of māyā, World-Illusion; the second in a sense of līlā, World-Play. But both point in the end to a fulfilment above the earth - the one to a merger in the sheer Absolute, the other to a heavenly abiding within the Godhead.

According to Sri Aurobindo, the Supreme is totally defined by neither of these conceptions. Each has certainly a validity in experience. The sense of World-Illusion comes by experience of the utter freedom of the Divine from the universe of forms, an entire independence that can be asserted by turning away from the phenomena of body, life and mind as if they were trifles and even phantoms adding nothing to the essential self-existence of the Spirit. The sense of World-Play comes by experience of a constant sustainment of phenomena by that self-existence as if they emerged from its own being and lived by its conscious force and expressed, overtly or covertly, its boundless delight. But the Supreme, for Sri Aurobindo, is not only the utter freedom above cosmic existence, not only the inalienable divine presence within

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the cosmos and the Lord and Lover of it: He also renders possible a fulfilment of the terrestrial adventure in its own terms of mind, life and body. The Supreme holds a divine mentality, a divine vitality, a divine physicality awaiting to manifest by a descent from above where they stand in open glory and by an emergence from below where they lie hidden in the profundities of all that appears the very opposite of the Divine. The Supreme, as unfolding from His absolute freedom this threefold Truth of Nature and dynamising this Truth in an evolutionary self-expression, is the Supermind. By the Supermind a godlike evolution in the most literal sense can result: the formation of an earthly being who by his very nature shall be free from ignorance, incapacity and the deathward movement that is all embodied life at even its most powerful.

Once the Supermind is realised on the earth we have no longer a disparity between Spirit and World. Nothing of Here and Now will fall short of the Divine who is infinite and eternal. The division of basic reality from phenomenon, of the Creator from the creation, will be abolished without putting away form and becoming. Thus a radical change will take place which will distinguish the supramental realisation from all others. Hence to say that this realisation is not final is never the same thing as to say that the realisations before the Supermind's advent are not final but part of an endless process of world-perfection. As Sri Aurobindo puts it, there is conversion before the Supermind and progression after it. Until the supramental change has occurred, something of the phenomenal and the created remains imperfect and needs to be converted. With the occurrence of that change, what remains is only the inexhaustible exploration of the perfect: what remains is the "more perfect" in the sense of more quantity, as it were, of the perfection hidden in the Divine and not the "more perfect" in the sense of a superior quality. After the supramental realisation the Divine cannot be diviner but He can still be various and show design on miraculous design of ordered flawlessness in an eternity of becoming.

This fact should also clarify the problem of Avatarhood. Avatarhood, essentially manifesting the supreme Godhead, takes place from various planes of being by an incarnation of the central Divine Personality poised on a plane. It can take place from the Mind plane to establish the rule of an ideal and Spirit-

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touched Dharma answering to the finest mental aspiration; or from the Overmind plane to bring a many-sided direct impulsion from a spiritual state that is vaster than the mental and beyond all merely ethico-religious rule. Again, it can take place straight from the supreme Truth-Consciousness, the Supermind, where the ultimate marvel of the Transcendent is organised for time-creation and the all-transformative archetype of earth-existence is dynamic. The Avatarhood from the Supermind carries not only in the inward but also in the outward the utter Godhead and all potentialities of future Avatarhood are continuous with those which it manifests and come out not so much from a higher plane as from a plane in its own background. A new form or incarnation for a new manifestation is no longer a necessity. It is the intuitive inkling of this absence of further embodiment, rather than the anomalous idea of putting a term to the Infinite's manifestation on earth, that has led Hinduism to speak of Kalki as the last Avatar.

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The "I" who wants to do Yoga

A LETTER

I did not reply to your first letter because I thought you would soon be in Pondicherry to exemplify concretely the good news you had conveyed to me that the Mother had approved of your resuming your stay in the Ashram. Your second letter puts off that exemplification for a time. So I am hurrying to reply, particularly as you say you are pestered by a metaphysical question without having the capacity to give a metaphysical answer!

The way you have stated the question carries in itself an answer, though in negative terms. You have said in effect: "If it is the ego who wants to become conscious of the soul and ultimately becomes conscious of it, he must be a very fine fellow. So his existence should not be grudged and his disappearance and destruction would be a misfortune. In addition, there would be the problem why he should be interested in following a course resulting in suicide." Well, it should be pretty clear from the contradictions inherent in this statement that the ego cannot be the "I" who wants to do Yoga and grow conscious of the "real I", the soul, who loves the Mother.

Evidently, if there is going to be a continuity between you who are an aspirant and you who will be aware of yourself as the soul, there must be something in common between the two, something that makes the transition and will know that it has done so. If "knowledge", if "awareness", is implied in the whole process, it is logical to say that what makes the transition is fundamentally "consciousness". Consciousness gets identified with this or that state of being - with the ego at the beginning and with the soul later. Whatever the consciousness identifies itself with, that is the state realised. Here we have the first step of the solution.

The second step will be clear when you consider that you are trying to do Yoga and to realise your soul. Such an aspiration can come only if something in affinity with the Yogic condition and with the soul is already there in the consciousness which is you, along with its identification with the ego. Mental man has always, within his ego-consciousness, a projection made by his soul, a

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projection which mingles with his sensational, emotional and conceptional being and creates in that being all that we call idealism, the sense of values, the courage to live up to them, the aspiration to become better and better, "the desire of the moth for the star" and the longing to realise more and more the truth of the world and of oneself. It is this psychic projection into the ego-consciousness, that is the part of you which could not be happy outside the Ashram and which the Mother has allowed to come back and start exulting and agonising once more in the heavenly hell that is the Yogic passage from the hell of ordinary life to the heaven of God-realisation.

I hope all this is simple enough to pull you out of what you term "the fog" and save you from being "an old foggy" if not "an old fogey"!

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A Physical "Confrontation" and some

Spiritual Issues

A LETTER

Of course I am sorry to read the story of your physical "confrontation" but I don't think it is so very serious an affair as you feel. Your appearance is hardly that of an easily thrashable pigmy or of a habitual shiverer-in-his-shoes. The fellow who threatened you must have seen this and that is why he added the further threat to call his friends to help him deal with you. The calm and inoffensive behaviour you put up was just the right thing - both to impress the bully and to receive the Mother's help and grace. The bully was impressed and the Mother did come to your protection. Wasn't it a signal favour to you that the man summoned to assist in pulping you happened to be of a gentle sort and a distant relative of yours to boot?

No need to blame yourself as a coward just because you did not start fisticuffs at once. One should not confuse fear with discretion or give up discretion merely to show that a lion is hidden in the Yogi. I don't remember - for that matter - that Krishna anywhere in the Gita calls Arjuna a lion: as far as I can recollect, his highest apostrophic compliment is: "O Bull among the Bharatas!" If I may interpret Krishna à la Chesterton, I should say: "A bull is one who is never cowed, yet never bullies." In the same vein I may define: "A lion is one who leaps to lie on another." A lion is a beast of prey, seeking to be on the offensive. A bull is a beast of burden, brave but preferring to be on the defensive. A lion is always independent, a bull usually looks up to a master. To play Chesterton again: "A lion in his might ever roars, 'Let me prey!' " A bull with all his strength still bellows, 'Let me pray!' " You acted the Gita's Bull, stood unafraid without being violent, appealed to the Divine and awaited the Divine's Word for fighting. Even the dejected mood in which you have written to me is not quite un-Gita-like: only, your dejection differs from that of Krishna's friend in coming after the event instead of before; but the heart-searching is typical.

As to your future line of action, it would be wrong to run away from the field of potential danger. I would not assert that one

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should never leave such a field. But your circumstances don't strike me as justifying any packing up. The sudden discovery of a relative, however distant, in the most unexpected place is a sign that the turn of events will be favourable. Carry on your work as this chap has advised you. Possibly your initial mistake was to interfere in somebody else's wrangle so soon after arrival for service in a strange town. Get settled, get known, get your true character familiarised: then people won't misunderstand you when you speak out on one side or the other. Maybe there is - in my sense of the term - a bit of a lion lurking within the bull in you and it relishes picking little quarrels. Instead of talking in a quiet tone, expressive of impartial sobriety and common sense, to the woman who was abusing the School's Headmaster, you may have indignantly raised your voice and sounded aggressive. Rather than appearing somewhat of a hothead on behalf of your boss you should have been your own head-master. Then she might have respected you if not him and stopped abusing him in your presence. Perhaps you don't live consciously enough all the time. Be more self-watchful - and I think you won't get into scrapes.

Now to your question about the Mother's help. No doubt, those who are in what you call "conscious contact" with her can draw her help better in a continuous way. But that does not mean others can't have it effectively. To appeal to her with sincerity and intensity even at an isolated moment ensures response. Even people who do not directly know her can have her aid. You who know her directly and have her as at least the background, if not the foreground, of your life should be more assured of her intervention. You further ask me: "When we call on her, should we completely rely on her and do nothing ourselves but only keep calling her name?" Surely we should completely rely on her but we should also make certain, when we do nothing, that it is she who makes us do nothing: ourselves to decide to do nothing is actually to do something rather than relying on her! Mere passivity is no sign of openness or obedience. A quick sensitive feel within oneself of her impulsions is the right thing. Doing something or doing nothing should come out of that feel. No rule can be laid down.

The word "sensitive" which I have used brings me to your own statement: "Life has no charm if I have to live under such

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humiliations. It is the most sensitive part of me that is being hit often and hit hard." Your sensitiveness is of the wrong type: it is one form of the ego, amour propre, self-regard. Self-respect is not wrong, born of a just appraisal of one's positive qualities, the powers particular to one. But there is no reason in the world why one should not be subjected at times to what you call "humiliations". We are not so extraordinary that everybody should show respect for us always. Of course, to humiliate a man hardly argues for a fineness of nature: we should try not to insult anybody, not to make him look cheap. But if somebody is unrefined enough to pull us down, we should not be upset. We should take all circumstances humbly as well as calmly. In fact, we cannot be truly calm without giving up exaggerated notions about ourselves.

However, I must add that true calmness implies our giving up exaggerated notions about others, too. We should not only ask: "Am I so important that nobody should insult me?" We should also ask: "Are others so important that I should attach value to their insults?" You will see that the second question, counter-balancing the first, should take away the sting from the latter. Being upset at "humiliations" is due no less to putting others at a premium than to setting a premium on oneself. There should be a quiet discounting on either hand. Often one's sensitiveness on being "humiliated" comes of the imagination that one's lowered condition means the elevated condition of others. But can others be felt as elevated unless you consider them so important that their attitude towards you should matter all the world in your eyes? They are men like yourself: if you are not exceptional, neither are they. It is the common element in them that seeks to humiliate you: recognise that stock of poor stuff and refuse to be humiliated by what is akin to the poor stuff in yourself.

Of course, true calmness goes, for its ultimate basis, beyond the equal depreciation of yourself and others. It results from two spiritual realisations. One is the experience of That which is infinite and eternal and identical within all beings and things, what the Upanishads term ātman, the Self in all. This Self is, first, a supreme stability amidst and above the fluctuations of the phenomenal world. As such, it cannot but be calm. Secondly, as it is undifferentiated, it takes away the ground of feeling that somebody other than oneself interacts with one. Who then

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humiliates whom? There is only the One without a second in the universe. Thirdly, ātman stands as the mere Witness. It is for ever detached not only from the world outside but also from the world inside, our thoughts, emotions, sensations. It gives no reaction. How will it suffer humiliation or, for that matter, any psychological phase whatever?

The other spiritual realisation on which true calm is based is the experience of the Psychic Being, the Soul in us, the Upanishad's antarātman and caitya purusa. The Psyche is not an undifferentiated and detached stability: it is an evolving consciousness, individualised with a thinking, feeling, sensing personality. But it is a spark, as it were, of the Dynamic Divine and all the values of its response are divine, intrinsically free from the ego and the disequilibriums that accompany the ego-consciousness. It has also an inherent happiness and, although it is intense in its being, its intensity is - to quote a figure from the Gita - a flame burning upward in a windless place. A pure steady dynamism is its nature - pure by being devoted only to the Lord of the universe, the Supreme Person whose Will is behind the whole play of phenomena - steady by being dedicated to the same Supreme Person as enshrined within each being, the Lover of lovers who is at play in every life. How does one figure in the eyes not of oneself or of others but of this Inmost Beloved Presence, that Utmost Adored Master? That is the decisive question here and it liberates us from all perturbation.

Some reflex of the Spirit as the single Self and of the Spirit as the Psychic Being we have to catch in our ordinary nature in order to escape at all times from the sense of humiliation - before we have compassed actually the two spiritual realisations that bring true calm in its very essentiality.

You have said at the end of your letter: "Please give practical ways to solve my problem." I don't know whether what I have written will strike you as practical. But it is practical in the sense that it refers to the practice of Yoga in a general way at each step.

1967

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