The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Is Philanthropy Enough?

A LETTER OF 1947

I have no doubt you are sincere in your desire to bring sunshine into other people's lives. This desire arises from something deep in our nature, but the form it usually takes is not true to the arch-image within. To outgrow our narrow personality and our self-absorbed consciousness is indeed a great aim; but we have to do this with the purpose of expressing no longer the mere human ego but the supreme Divine: we have to manifest in the world the ultimate Being instead of the lower limited "I". Now, the ordinary form this high intention dwelling in the recesses of our soul assumes is philanthropy - the extension of the consciousness not upward and then outward but only outward - a going beyond the ego yet not above it. Philanthropy is not a bad discipline provided love of fame does not motivate it; it can, however, stand in the way of a light that is larger still. I am sure you are not fame-hungry and so it is bound to broaden your range of consciousness; you must, nevertheless, fight clear of the fallacy that it is itself the largest light.

For one thing, where is the certainty that what we conceive to be good for the world is really so? The Grand Inquisitors roasted Jews and Protestants in the sincere belief that they were benefiting not only the world but even the souls of their poor victims! As Bernard Shaw has been at pains to explain, even Joan of Arc was burned with the most pious and society-preserving motives! Perhaps you will say I am choosing extreme instances. I have taken them to emphasise the fact that mere belief constitutes no guarantee of real good. Oscar Wilde has somewhere a prose-poem in which he describes how a man on being cured of blindness by a philanthropist ran immediately after a woman of the streets! One may act according to one's conscience or one's principles, but is there a definite proof, an incontrovertible assurance, that one is conferring true benefit on mankind?

How to define benefit? According to several modern sociologists, easy access to divorce and spread of birth-control are mighty boons; the Roman Catholics deem these boons the devil's own stepping-stones to an earthly hell. For an English-minded

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Indian, charity on Poppy-day was always a beautiful act; for a nationalist it used to be, for many years after the First World War, treachery to the motherland, since till a little before the second Armageddon the collection was made to help only English soldiers - that is, members of the dominating race - and not one pice went to the poor Indians who had fought to save both India and England. We are in such a welter of conflicting consciences and principles that to apotheosise one's personal idea of philanthropy is sheer illogic, whatever be the comfortable sensation one may get of doing one's duty.

What, then, is the way out of the welter? Only a divine consciousness can know what is truly good for the world: it possesses the inalienable truth of things, it keeps the secret certainties of the universe. So the sole endeavour of all true philanthropy should be to rise into that divine consciousness and become, by a perfect self-consecration and self-transformation, a clear channel for its work in the world. Then you begin to be a centre of real light, radiating an influence around you which is filled with the divine initiative, the truth-conscious impulsion. Then your actions are bent automatically towards the certain good which God alone can know: whether the results of your actions be beneficial in any conventional sense or not, you have the firm assurance that in being a pure instrument of the super-human knowledge you are carrying out the highest ideal, the truest conception of Good. There can be no room for error, no room for doubt, because you are manifesting an infallible Benevolence.

You will be tempted to retort that a yogi may be mistaking his own notions of Good for the supreme command. Yes, there is a palpable danger in being a half-baked yogi: many are deluded - but that is precisely why it is necessary not to plunge into the world-mêlée in a half-baked condition: one must keep a little apart until the full illumination has possessed one and there is no risk of spoiling the authentic Spirit-force. So if you feel, as you do, that you have received an imperative call to a Higher Life which you interpret as a call to serve mankind genuinely, I should advise you to be Indian enough to do yoga first - and what better place for such practice of perfection than the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo?

We are all sick souls, and even as sick bodies require a partial

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aloofness under medical care to get cured, so also our inner selves need a partial detachment under a guru to be able to recover their true health. This is just what is supplied by the Ashram-life. A curb is put on indiscriminate contacts, but that is no escapism. The Ashramites are not hiding in a jungle or in caves; they live in the midst of the world as really as the people in Pondicherry who do not embrace yoga. They move about in the same streets, eat sufficient and well-cooked though not sumptuous food, wear normal clothes and have decent lodgings: there is no external flying from the world in any extreme sense. They undergo no strenuous austerities, shoot up in no prolonged trances: while entering, with the Master's and the Mother's help, more and more into a vast inner light and joy beyond the human and the mortal, they live serious busy lives, do their daily work in the Ashram as if they were earning their own livelihood or else educating themselves, and have sufficient commerce with their fellowmen to keep aware of earth-realities. In what way are they "suspended," as you put it in your reference to them, "out of the world"? Well, they do not throw cocktail parties, they do not attend the Stock Exchange, they take no part in deceptive politics - and they do not indulge their sexual appetites. Nor do they intend to do so even when they feel that the sickness in the soul is cured; for, though more extended world-activity must come, to fall back upon the old unhealthy habits would mean courting disease once more.

Is that an irrational precaution? Are the things they avoid so valuable that for abandoning them they should be accused of flying from the world? If living in the world means liking its slush and slime, they are world-forsakers; but who does not strive to keep as much as possible out of such contaminations? If they have no taste for sense-excitements, are they to be regarded as "selfish"? If they control their passions instead of letting them be gratified, are they practising "artificiality"? You have expressed your doubt whether they live as God meant human beings to live, you think they are tending to be unnatural. But what is "natural" and what is God's ordinance for us? If the Creator whom you imagine to be arranging out things with finality put a man in a filthy slum, is that man not to try his best to get into a less hoggish way of existence? Would you call him "artificial" because he goes against "his Creator's will" that he

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should be born and bred in dirt and squalor and misery? If the Creator made a man a physical wreck because his father happened to have a foul disease, would you call him artificial if he endeavours to get rid, medically, of his Creator's gift to him of the rot in his bones and the canker in his brain? Why on earth should we do anything to improve ourselves or our fellow-creatures when the Creator has made us what we are?

Or perhaps it is your conviction that the manner in which most people have lived down the ages is the manner their Creator intended for them for ever and ever. But you must not confuse what has been with what ought to be. Every act of progress, every step of evolution is a going against the routine of the has-been: it is an outgrowing of old habits, a changing of Nature. New organs are developed, new faculties are formed by a refusal to accept the status reached and to acquiesce in what has seemed "natural". Truly speaking, the most unnatural thing is to remain what we are instead of falling into line with Nature's universal movement of changing from a lower level to a higher, giving up accustomed responses and reflexes, modifying both the physical and psychological organisation of life from time to time. Indeed, Nature is not to be wholly rejected, but we need not complacently keep to the path we have been treading: we must blaze other trails and attempt to contact the original hidden starting-point in the Divine for discovering what route is the right one and where lies our goal.

The fact is - we know very little of the Creator's wish and will; and that is what I have been hammering at in the first part of my letter. It is, however, extremely important that we should know His mind, for how otherwise can we act rightly and be His genuine instruments in the world? And do you think that remaining in the crude rut of normal desire tends to a deeper union with the Spirit's light? It is only in their striking out of this rut that the Aurobindonians may be said to live "out of the world". In every other respect they are radically in the world and what they are trying to do - with unselfish labours undreamable by the mere philanthropist - is to bring down some ray of truth which would really solve the terrible problem of life.

Of course, if you feel very strongly that you will brim the void in your present mode of being by doing social service, you may give social service a trial. I am positive the soul in you will not be

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placated by it. Whatever my own faltering in the practice of the Higher Life, I have never lost the vision of the ideal and I have always subscribed to St. Augustine's declaration: "Thou has made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." Only, I should like you to understand properly the resting spoken of and not carry away the idea that God is mere repose. He is immense illumined activity but that activity is, as Sri Aurobindo puts it,

Force one with unimaginable rest.

The Augustinian release from restlessness is in such force. And the force-aspect of the Divine is at its finest and intensest in the Ashram towards which I have pointed you, for the work of the Master there is to make the human race take the next step forward in evolution of consciousness and to divinise the ways of earth and not fly for good to remote summits beyond. The divinisation of all our parts through an integral yoga is a stupendous job, and maybe as a final shot you will fling at me the argument that to be fully illumined and to channel a deific dynamism are impracticable - but I must reply that the effort is worth making and even if the whole journey be not accomplished there will be gained enough in the passage to justify the endeavour. And unless one endeavours how is one to get anything? And if this is the completest ideal and the most logical path towards truth, surely it is worth following through years and years. Something transcendental is bound to get manifested - and is not that more precious, more authentic, more reliable than all things weakly and gropingly human put together?

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