Hitler and his God

“The Titan Kings Attack …”

Sri Aurobindo never considered his seclusion at the end of 1926 to be definitive. It was a necessity of his yoga, imposed upon him by the inner Voice which he obeyed unconditionally. His seclusion was misunderstood by many, and the temporary seal of secrecy on his yoga, as on all inner explorations, did not allow him to set things straight at once. “Those concerned with day-to-day politics deplored his retirement and thought that he was lost to India and the world, being interested only in his own spiritual salvation. So he was called a truant and escapist. Even now there is insufficient understanding of what led to his decision,” Nirodbaran writes in Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo.

In spiritual as in political matters Sri Aurobindo was a radical. The unconditional independence of India was thought to be a chimera when he was the first to demand it from the colonial occupant; now the integral transformation of Matter in its divine essence, with the formation of a new evolutionary species, was supposed to be equally chimerical. Sri Aurobindo had not started with this idea, or with any other idea. He had been gradually led to its revelation by his ever expanding realizations, and was at times daunted by them and by the effort they demanded from him. But he was stubborn and his surrender to the inner Guidance could be shaken but not eradicated. “Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption – I go on till I conquer or perish. This is the spirit in which I seek the Supermind, no hunting for greatness for myself or others”, he wrote in a letter. 957

“The thing to be done is as large as human life, and therefore the individuals who lead the way will take all human life for their province. These pioneers will consider nothing as alien to them, nothing as outside their scope. For every part of human life has to be taken up by the spiritual – not only the intellectual, the aesthetic, the ethical, but the dynamic, the vital, the physical; therefore for none of these things or the activities that spring from them will they have contempt or aversion, however they may insist on a change of the spirit and a transmutation of the form.” (The Human Cycle 958) “Sri Aurobindo once wrote to a disciple: ‘I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years’ his spiritual knowledge and experience ‘more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane’. The Record of Yoga bears this out in detail. It may be looked on as the laboratory notebook of an extended series of experiments of yoga.” (Peter Heehs 959) For he had no intention “of giving his sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco” by bringing a new yoga “with no true and radical change in the law of the outer nature”. 960

If Sri Aurobindo’s withdrawal from public life was not a retirement, it was still less a retreat in the sense of a separation from worldly matters. He read the newspapers and followed attentively what was going on in the world. There were also the yogic means of perception which he had developed: “I look across the world and no horizon walls my gaze …” 961 And there was the daily chore of answering the letters from his disciples who could correspond freely with him and sometimes availed themselves rather indiscriminatingly of the privilege. “My dear sir”, Sri Aurobindo wrote to Nirodbaran, “if you saw me nowadays with my nose to paper from afternoon to morning, deciphering, deciphering, writing, writing, writing, even the rocky heart of a disciple would be touched …” 962 In these letters, published in the still increasing volumes of Letters on Yoga, all problems of the human condition are discussed, from the trivial to the sublime, and they reflect faithfully the political developments within and outside India.

Then there were the unceasing yogic battles he had to fight, for no yogic exploration or new effort at progress remains unchallenged, as the invisible powers-that-be want first and foremost to keep their grip on a world which is still under their rule. About this aspect of his work, at the time unknown to anybody, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1935 one of the most wonderful poems in any language, A God’s Labour. It is a kind of ballad in a light, almost nonchalant rhythm narrating the ordeal of the pioneers of evolution. “He who would bring the heavens here / Must descend himself into clay / And the burden of earthly nature bear / And tread the dolorous way … My gaping wounds are a thousand and one / And the Titan kings assail, / But I cannot rest till my task is done / And wrought the eternal will … I have delved through the dumb Earth’s dreadful heart / And heard her black mass’ bell. / I have seen the source whence her agonies part / And the inner reason of hell …” 963

The “Titan kings” attacked Sri Aurobindo in the very early hours of 24 November 1938, one of the four yearly darshan days on which disciples and visitors could come in his presence, with the Mother at his side, and receive their blessings. Sri Aurobindo fell heavily in his apartment and broke his right thigh. This happened at a time that, after years of continuous effort, the descent into matter of the higher, supramental Consciousness was expected. Now the circumstances of Sri Aurobindo’s life changed drastically. Where before only the Mother and the faithful Champaklal had been regular visitors to his rooms, now doctors, medical assistants and one or two other helpers had to be admitted, for the fracture of the thigh had been nasty and took a long time to heal. The people present with Sri Aurobindo profited of the occasion to talk with him and ask questions. These conversations have been noted down by A.B. Purani in his Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo and by Nirodbaran Talukdar in his Talks with Sri Aurobindo. Their notes remain a direct source of the involvement of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the Second World War.

To a disciple Sri Aurobindo will write in July 1942, when the outcome of the war was still in the balance: “You should not think of [the war] as a fight of certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance … It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit.

“There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country [i.e. India] do not dream of and cannot yet at all realize. If the other side that has declared itself for the free future of humanity triumphs, this terrible danger will have been averted and conditions will have been created in which there will be a chance for the Ideal to grow, for the Divine Work to be done, for the spiritual Truth for which we stand to establish itself on the earth. Those who fight for this cause are fighting for the Divine and against the threatened reign of the Asura.” 964