Sri Aurobindo came to Me

CHAPTER VI

"Bleeding Piece of Earth"*

One of the things that make Ashram life so hard to bear is that it first invites one to change, then exhorts, then coaxes and lastly presses one to realise that unless and until one agrees to change progressively, the divine life must remain a Utopian dream. Somebody said that human folly makes even angels weep because human idiocy is the only malady for which even the gods can find no medicine. Sri Aurobindo, however, was wont to put it in a different way. He said that it was not folly alone, but some kind of perversity (which something in us thrills to) that makes it so difficult even for angles to deliver fools from their cherished bondage. It is this insurmountable snag in the composition of nature that made Vivekananda cry out: "The scheme of the world is devilish." The sigh, alas, is as old as the sky. Somehow, things insist on going awry progressively no matter what we will or do. That is why the word 'fatality' has come to exercise an almost hypnotic influence on the minds of even the most robust among men. Sri Aurobindo has underlined the tragedy of this seeming fatality (I stress the word 'seeming' because he does not accept fatality, or its foster-child astrology, except in a very modified sense) in his epic Savitri in the mouth of the pessimist fatalist Queen-mother. She expounds it, indeed, as her own individual point of view but who will dare deny, when one

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*Antony (to the dead body of Caesar):

O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth.... Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 1

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looks at man and the world as they are, that it is almost completely convincing so far as it goes (Savitri VI.II):

An idiot hour destroys what centuries made,

His wanton rage or frenzied hate lays low

The beauty and greatness by his genius wrought

And the mighty output of a nation's toil.

A few weeks ago, a Korean lady wrote to Pundit Nehru a letter in which she deplored how even those who came as champions of the safety of Korea were responsible for unleashing further devastation on the poor country. To state just one single act and follow its concatenation of consequences: the south Korean capital Seoul was bombarded by the North Koreans who professed to come as its liberators. Result — devastation, followed by the retreat of the invaders in occupation: the North Koreans. Next, enter the Chinese Communists, they bombard again. Result — further devastation, followed by retreat once more of the liberators in occupation: the South Koreans and the Americans. Then the Americans bombard Seoul to liberate Korea once more from its old "liberators" to be followed by the counter-attack of the Chinese and so it goes on and on! But after such vicious bombardments of "liberation" how much of the unhappy town can possibly survive? The same thing happened with Poyangang, the capital of North Korea: first came the South Koreans who devastated it — this time as the liberators en revanche, next marched in the North Koreans followed by the Chinese communists, the latest liberators now in occupation, to be possibly supplanted once more by the South Koreans — almost like a perpetual-motion pendulum!

Now it must be remembered that only one act was responsible for all this: the crossing of the 38th parallel by the North Koreans as "liberators" (whatever the word may mean). Not even their worst enemies would assert that they could have anticipated the release of such an avalanche of calamities as the result of just one button pressed: their crossing of a geographical

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line. And it was not an accident: unforeseen catastrophes have been brought off again and again in history by just one misdemeanour, one outrage, one miscalculation. Was then Sri Aurobindo guilty of an over-statement when he wrote: "An idiot hour destroys what centuries made"?

I remember his reply, long ago in 1924, to my question on "the wide-spread misery, fear and suffering which afflict men":

"How can you help that so long as men choose as they do to hug ignorance which is at the root of all suffering? As long as they cherish the darkness of attachment rather than the light of liberation and knowledge, how can they expect to see?"* Years later, he expounded his outlook on pain, its rationale, in his Savitri, hinting that although Where Ignorance is, there suffering, too, must come, yet the very suffering, which is the offspring of ignorance serves one, in the enigmatic Divine economy, as a goad to the search for a panacea to the evil of suffering, pain or grief:

Pain is the hammer of the gods to break

A dead resistance in the mortal's heart,

His slow inertia as of living stone.

If the heart were not forced to want and weep,

His soul would have lain down content, at ease,

And never thought to exceed the human start.

Nietzsche caught something of the Divine Resolve, amounting to a predetermination, when he said: 'DerMensch ist Etwas das ueberwunden werden soll. '* But as Sri Aurobindo points out, this ultimate self-transcendence cannot be achieved if man unwarily sides with the power-addict Demon (Asura) in himself to the exclusion of the love-inebriate God — so sings Narad, the protagonist of Divine Aspiration:

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* Among the Great (American Edition), p. 221 where he also mentions, for the first time in public, what was the aim of his Yoga.

*Man is something that has to be transcended.

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0 mortal, bear this great world's law of pain,

In thy hard passage through a suffering world

Lean for thy soul's support on Heaven's strength,

Turn towards high Truth, aspire to love and peace!

But he warns him, withal, against admitting a wrong movement in his impatient exploration of a short cut:

Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,

Open not thy doorways to a nameless Power,

Climb not to Godhead by the Titan's road.

Because the deluded Titan is motivated not by the spirit of God-allegiance, but by God-defiance — and therefore,

Heavenward he clambers on a stair of storms ....

He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force

From life and Nature the immortals right,

because having grown blind in his lust for quick results,

He waits not for the outstretched hand of God

To raise him out of his mortality.

In the Gita we find a description of the salient features of the Asura's character. But Sri Aurobindo's description gives us a much fuller view (because the modem Asura, even as the modem human, has become a much more complex and sophisticated being):

A monopolist of the world-energy,

He dominates the life of common men,

His pain and others' pain he makes his means:

On death and suffering he builds his throne.

And therefore he grows and grows in stature till — by the inescapable law of Karma, as the Gita puts it — he identifies himself with the Colossus, Selfhood, the Image of his adoration, yo yachchhraddhah sa eva sah. * That this is not a fanciful nightmare must become obvious to anyone who will look at

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*A man grows into what he worships.

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what is happening in the world around us, in and through every power-addict Dictator who inflates himself into a colossal Demon of the vital, a veritable Titan of whom Sri Aurobindo says:

A mighty energy, a monster god,

Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak...

To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good,

It claimed the whole world for Evil's living room,

Its party's grim totalitarian reign

The cruel destiny of breathing things.

All on one plan was shaped and standardised

Under a dark dictatorship's breathless weight.

This is not an overdrawn picture; nor has one to be a mystic or a Yogi to be able to see that this has been one of the major causes of human misery. Any dispassionate observer will have to agree here with Sri Aurobindo. To give an instance, I shall quote a passage from the great realist-idealist Lowes Dickenson's Justice and Liberty:

"Nietzsche's strong man is not a mere ideal; he is a fact. . . For it is Power, not wealth or comfort, at which they aim; and in pursuit of that aim they trample under foot all law and all morality. . . . Power being their ideal, they are most conscious of having achieved it when the resistance over which they triumphed has been most vigorous, and what provokes resistance more determined than the prospect of spoliation, ruin and death? The more, therefore, the victims suffer, the more the 'Overman' rejoices, for the more conscious he is of being strong; and in that sense of strength lies his whole satisfaction in life."

Nietzsche's Overman is synonymous with Russell's Dictator, Sri Aurobindo's Titan and Sri Krishna's Asura. In other words, though each of these has a different outlook on the world, they all diagnose the same type of evil and its dreadful tendency. Studying this type, we realise that the time-old lust in humanity for dominating others is as difficult to eradicate from human nature as it is deleterious to the nature itself. When I

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first came to the Ashram, I well remember how I walked its grounds with jaunty steps with this complacent idea that I was, with all my faults and failings, a good man. I saw certain wrong movements in me — happily, more blemishes in others — but though I wanted sincerely to get rid of them, I never thought that their expulsion was a matter of any immediate urgency. In a word, I was far from surmising that I had such a tremendous leeway to make up or, to put it in the Yogic terminology, that I would have to strive so hard to "transform my nature" step by step resolutely, patiently, ruthlessly and lastly, alas, despondently because it was going to be such an uphill task. I was yet to be put wise to the difficulties of Yoga or, rather, to the hurdles the Yogis had to cross in the past. The actual difficulties which I had to encounter in my day to day sadhana of the Ashram life turned out to be very different, indeed, from those I had imagined and been forewarned against by the worldly-wise. When I came to the Ashram in my exalted mood I had thought that I would only have, in the first place, to undergo heroic austerities and, in the second, to meditate for hours and hours. The first prospect goaded the social climber in me to become even more alive if not kicking, while the second made me simply glow with pride as I said to myself with the great poet A.E.:

Pure at heart we wander now,

We have hopes beyond today

And our quest does not allow

Rest or dreams along the way.

The first fly that I discovered in the ointment of my self-esteem was when I found that I did not like it at all whenever any of those who used to obey my will declined to bow down to my wisdom in which I lived and moved and grew progressively: my growing wisdom made my egoism grow too. I had thought that it must work the other way: that my egoism should dwindle in proportion as my Yogic wisdom and insight deepened. This, naturally, disconcerted me, but that in itself would not have been

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so serious had I not noted, at the same time, that my discomfiture was often enough attended with a secret chafing at the Guru's will bearing mine down. This is not an autobiography, so I cannot possibly enlarge on such experiences. Suffice it to say, therefore, that I came to realise slowly but inescapably that the Asura of whom I had heard so much was not a mythical figure with a multitude of heads and hands but a real resident and cherished guest housed only too willingly by each one of us. Only some cherished him more, some less, that is all. I saw, for instance, that whenever any vital hunger in me was underfed, he got progressively restive till even the social trappings of decency became hard to retain to cover his naked ugliness. Years later, I read a citation from the great mystic William Law the purport of which is that none can turn towards God without turning his back upon his ego, because none can be fully alive to God till he completely dies to his lower nature.

But I must pause here a little to stress an experience of mine which grew from day to day till I could not deny its vivid, concrete reality. I refer to what Gurudev called the "hostile forces". I had, indeed, read about the Buddha's Mara, heard about the Christian Devil and speculated in my fanciful way about ghosts and spirits and monsters which figured in the Tantric writings of certain schools. But having always been exceedingly normal and strong with no "weird experiences" to boast (much though I longed to) I could never take such disembodied entities seriously. What I mean is that though I did not exactly pooh-pooh all such stories as old wives' tales, I never imagined that there could really be in action queer forces such as these wherewith a twentieth-century spiritual seeker might have to reckon in dull earnest on his way to the Divine.

I never saw any spirits not to mention the Devil, nor did I ever feel any eerie presences, (Paul Valerie called these "les choses absentes") which left me an aftermath of jittery fears. I did indeed hear from my friends about such macabre things which loomed and waylaid good Samaritans. Also I came to witness quite a few sudden unaccountable happenings which

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terrified the percipients, sometimes even disabling them temporarily. But, for all that, I could never persuade myself that these might ever be concrete impediments on my way, far less make my mind "go off its handle" as I put it flippantly.

Nevertheless (and here is my point) I had to take cognizance time and again — not indeed of their actual presences, but of the heritage of diffidence and depression they bequeathed, a legacy too heavy to be dismissed nonchalantly. And, to make confusion worse confounded, they bred their microbes so fast that before I could pronounce Jack Robinson they would have me "translated like Bottom" from a rational optimist into a ne'er do-well. I know, here I am unlikely to be convincing, the less so as I cannot hope to prove my point to those who have not experienced what I have. Notwithstanding, I must still testily to what I have felt again and again, namely, that we can never insulate ourselves completely from forces which encircle us except with the help of the powers which can as concretely shield us as others can attack. To give a typical instance:

I want something from Gurudev — some support in some matter. It so happens that he declines to come forward to oblige me. My self-love gets hurt and then lo! the magic button is pressed and where it was all a laughing garden a moment ago — with hopes dancing like flowers, certitudes glowing like sunbeams and aspirations soaring like birds, one sees only doubts blasting like poison-fumes, chafings irrational like thorns and a sentimental revolt that gesticulates like a demon deprived of his mask. Time and again did this happen to me and, often enough, just when on top of the weather, there, out of a clear sky, a wrong suggestion dropped into me and then bang came the show-down. I know full well how difficult it is to bring home to others the concrete vividness of such experiences, the more so because if and when they come to us in ordinary life, the depressions do not get us down as they do here — with the veritable downrush of a deluge or the cataclysm of an avalanche. The reason is that in ordinary life these hostile forces do not need to be as active or organised as they are in Yoga — their

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métier being to thwart all Godward endeavours, and in ordinary life people are seldom concentrated on such a task. But when the God-seeker wants to clamber or soar upwards, these phalanx themselves quickly in their rebel alarm to be able to act as a sort of earth-pull or wing-clipper, or, to give another simile, when you float with the tides, all the waves befriend you and carry you on their jubilant crests, but just turn back to swim against them and you will know swiftly what is what! This image seemed to me more apposite especially when I swam against the current and felt all but suffocated by the buffets of the waves. I was reminded of this when, years later, a nonplussed pupil of mine, Indira, said that so long as she had not wanted the Divine the world has been very kind and obliging, and appreciative, but that it all changed radically the moment she turned to Yoga for God. I told her what I had realised years ago, that it had to be always more or less like that.

"Had to be? Why?" she asked, still at sea.

"Because", I answered after I had recounted to her briefly what I myself had gone through, "Yoga means transcending Prakriti or the forces of Nature, which flow all around us like the waves. So long as you are in the swim, acquiescing in these, you will be automatically upheld and carried forward by them. But since the Yoga wants to wean you from them they, very naturally, resent your defection and outlaw you as a deserter. You can't expect the services of those you don't propose to oblige by offering concesions. And when, moreover, you want to expel them out of your very being which has been their habitat for years and years, won't they get furious and attack from sheer fear of becoming homeless refugees?"

This in itself would not have been so cataclysmic, if I may exploit such a purple word, had not these forces of Nature found the too-willing support of the hostile forces which are sworn to oppose God-seekers everywhere. That is why all spiritual guides have emphasised the urgent need of purifying our emotions so that we may, at every cross-road, side always with the right ones as against the wrong. To put it succinctly, we must not allow

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these adverse forces any loophole or handle by sympathising with what we are, alas, too apt to call natural. This may sound easy in theory but it is quite an uphill task in practice, as I found to my bitter cost, and the more I realised this the more grateful I felt towards Gurudev for his unfailing help and guidance showing me, indefatigably, where and how I had swerved from the right attitude as a result of which these forces, thanks to my lapses, could creep in imperceptibly through the breaches. It was primarily his insistence on the right attitude which helped me evict the wrong ones in spite of their masterly pleadings for what we call our human ways and natural reactions.

But this is known to all Yogis. I have no wish to write a manual of Yoga. I have referred to this only to underline, first, the redeeming lead of light Gurudev always gave us whenever we erred or slipped; secondly, the security of protection he extended to us whenever we felt depressed or diffident; and lastly, the invaluable guidance he gave us by acting as an eye-opener to us all, showing laboriously the cause of the minutest of our backslidings. None who has not been through such ordeals can ever fully appraise the concrete help that comes along with the guiding voice of the Pilot. Indeed, the feeling of reassurance, abhoy, cannot be described — it has to be experienced; but a sample of the nature of the guidance he gave on such occasions I may adduce here which will explain itself. After one such attack he wrote to me:

"The hostile forces exist and have been known to yogic experience ever since the days of the Vedas and Zoroaster in Asia (and the mysteries of Egypt and Cabbala) and in Europe also from old times. These things of course cannot be felt or known so long as one lives in the ordinary mind and its ideas and perceptions; for these there are only two categories of influences recognisable: the ideas and feelings and actions of oneself and others and the play of environment and physical forces; but once one begins to get the inner view of things, it is different. One begins to experience that all is an action of forces of Prakriti, Psychological as well as physical, which play upon our nature,

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forces which are either conscious or are supported by a consciousness or consciousnesses behind. One is in the midst of a big universal working and it is impossible any longer to explain everything as the result of one's own and sole personality. You yourself have at one time written that your crises of despair etc. came upon you as if thrown on you and worked themselves out without your being able to determine or put an end to them. That means an action of universal forces and not merely an independent action of your personality though it is something in your nature of which they make use. But you are not conscious, and others also, of this intervention and pressure at its source, for the reason I state. Those in the Ashram who have developed the inner view of things on the vital plane have plenty of experience of the hostile forces. However, you need not personally concern yourself with them so long as they remain incognito...

One may have the experiences on the mental plane without this knowledge coming — for there mind and idea predominate and one does not feel the play of Forces — it is only in the vital that this becomes clear. In the mind plane they manifest at most as mental suggestions and not as concrete powers. Also, if one looks at things with the mind only (even though it be the inner mind) one may see the subtle play of Nature-forces but without recognizing the conscious intention which we call hostile."

But Knowledge, too, has its disadvantages — as I was to discover soon enough — especially when it leads one to glimpse the world of occult forces, however fugitively. To give a typical instance, in my pre-yogic days, whenever I flirted with a wrong suggestion I never dreamt of its virus being cultured somewhere outside to be injected subsequently into my mind. But with the passage of time I did perceive a fissure in my own being: I could see, with progressive clarity, that what I had hitherto looked upon as an indivisible part of my personality was, in reality, a conglomerate of a variety of disparate influences. This generated in me a deep uneasiness: whither was I going? Why all this fuss in my own being about my own self— these rifts and interstices and what not? But the trouble was that nothing I could do

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at the time seemed capable of undoing what had been done. It was as though — to use a simile contrariwise — a drop of curd had been thrown into a bowl of milk where after the disintegration of the milk could not be reversed. A ray of light had come to stay in my consciousness and it had thereafter to work as a leaven. The result — I could not recapture my unflawed self-assurance of the pre-yogic days that I was indeed, what I took myself to be. This made me desolate as the new knowledge irretrievably had soured the sweet milk of self-complacency. I struggled in vain to have it restored. For do what I would, I simply could not revert to what I had been converted from. For instance, I could now see clearly that whenever I toyed with a wrong suggestion, some part of me was glad while another part was unhappy resenting it as an intrusion. What made me unhappier still was that I became more and more conscious, as days passed, of a wilful encouragement somewhere. But as this made me feel disloyal to my Guru, I tried in my clever(?) way to rationalise it into legitimacy. "Oh, keep an open mind, don't you know," a part of me said to myself coaxingly. "Don't you invite blindness, my boy! Why must you accept everything you are told as gospel truth? Watch, weigh and sift all the time: never surrender your native inviolable right to be a judge of your own reactions. If an idea is burgeoning within you, do not show it the door in this off-hand manner because somebody commands you to Remember that you have an inalienable right to your own ideas, you cannot possibly grow to your ultimate stature without their fortifying light. Everything that happens can push you forward, you know, provided you accept its aid in the right spirit. And, dash it all, isn't your individuality the most precious part of your integral self? How then can you — to whom freedom of judgment is like the breath of life — possibly will yourself into blind slavery instead of aspiring to be the architect of your destiny?"... and so on and on — endless variations on the one theme: do not surrender your self-will.

As the days went by, I became progressively conscious of the fallacy of such specious reasoning till, in the end, I saw, like

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St.Augustine of yore, that it was not freedom I ached for but license. I saw that my higher self was not only willing but eager to surrender to Guudev's will because it could well do without this so-called freedom to follow the ego's unruly cravings and subtle promptings. The trouble arose, as I came to realise, because my lower nature did not want to waive its native right to its unlovely enjoyments.

But my lower nature, like Goldsmith's famous schoolmaster, "though vanquished argued still", resisting transformation till, at last, matters were brought to a head, and thus decided for me, by a horrible experience of a friend and brother disciple, P. He used a be, in those days, a neighbour of mine and as he did not know English very well, I used to write for him to Sri Aurobindo about his experiences. And he had had wonderful experiences to his credit – seen marvellous vision, heard thrilling voices, savoured exquisite delights — in short, had already "drunk deep at the Pierian spring" of the Spirit. And yet his lower nature, which had survived, would still drag him back to his old pleasure-haunts, as he used to tell me in those days with bitter regrets.* "I do not want to come here and stay permanently", he would tell me off and on, "but alas, I cannot even stay here a couple of months at a stretch. I get restive and peaceless," and so on. His long tale of woes staggered me as, in those days, I was still a novitiate in Yoga and had only just begun to step across the border of ordinary consciousness. So, I could not account at all for his restlessness after the tremendous harvest he had reaped in the held of spiritual experiences till, on that unforgettable day, when he came running to me in the afternoon and told me, completely unnerved, what he had just seen with open eyes. He spoke in Hindi mixed with Bengali:

"I was praying to Gurudev, you know," he said, "for strength to be able to make a long stay here when I saw an ugly little brat of the colour of coal tar—a stinking, stunted mannikin — come

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* He gave up these Pleasures later on, a change which amounted, in his case, to a feat and so impressed all his friends including myself.

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out of my body and beg before me: 'Oh, give me something! You have enough to live on but I am starving!" And he fell at my feet crying, Dilip —just fancy that!! Oh, I shall never sleep again thinking of this nightmare!" And so he wailed on, in dire straits.

It was indeed hair-raising, as I wrote to Gurudev, who wrote back to P (I read out the letter to him) that the ugly little brat was an exteriorisation of his lower-vital being of lust and concupiscence and possessiveness. "Do you understand now," he wrote, "why you are not allowed to stay here? It is this formation of your life in the past. He wants food which is wholly denied here. That is why you have to depart again and again. Your lower vital being is still too much alive and kicking to let you stay on here and, till he changes radically, I fear this seesaw in your nature is likely to continue."

But, to my sorrow, I found, as soon as I reviewed it in retrospect, that my personality had not one but many gates and as many masked gate-keepers, so that even when Vigilance, the chief porter, was wide-awake at the main entrance, some other factotum could and often did open the back-door. So, it happened, again and again, that the hostile suggestion or impulse did get admitted in spite of my resolution to shut it out. To put it differently, the more I watched myself the more I was reminded of Pope's Essay on Man:

Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,

Aspiring to be angels, men rebel.

And, we do not merely rebel, but also refuse to learn from our past mistakes, insist On our right to plead for our folly with the wisest of reasonings and, lastly — to quote from Gurudev's letter to me — resist "the change from the human to the divine consciousness " in order to be able to defend our "right to sorrow and suffering". I was reminded again and again of Sri Ramakrishna's simile about the camel which even when its mouth bled from munching "prickly grass" would persist in bunching the same thorns and no others. In other words, I

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insisted, as Gurudev pointed out in a long letter, "on the Divine becoming human and remaining in the human consciousness" and withal protested "against any attempt to make the human divine".

And that is why this "bleeding piece of earth", human nature, has bled stanchlessly since the dawn of time and God on high has to wait on, in seeming helplessness till the blood shed may come to fertilise the life of the common man, because unless that happens, the flawless flowering cannot come about and the groping aspirant must remain what he is, a puppet of Destiny (SAVITRI VI: II):

A seeker in a dark and obscure place,

An ill-armed warrior facing dreadful odds,

An imperfect worker given a baffling task,

An ignorant judge of problems Ignorance made.

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