Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects

THE SECRET OF THE ALLIES' SUCCESS IN WORLD WAR II

(Few realise that the age-old adage, "Man proposes and God disposes", is the quintessence of wisdom distilled by the sages. The truth of the adage can never be questioned because it bears the testimony of countless generations of men. Human will is always impotent before the Will of the Divine who has always the final decision in all matters terrestrial and supra-terrestrial.

If in spite of the glaring impotency of human" will, men still believe that they are all-mighty and all-knowing, it only betrays their folly, ignorance and arrogance. Instances of such movements of the human ego are not rare. They are common to men placed at the helm of the governance of their countries whether chosen democratically or come to power dictatorially. To overlook the existence of a Power which is infinitely greater than any human power, single or combined, is to invite danger and disaster. This we have seen in the case of Napoleon, Hitler and Tojo.

We do not really know the source of their defeat but attribute it to adverse circumstances and a combination of forces against them. This is only a superficial and therefore misleading knowledge of the true causes of their downfall. Men in pride of power, authority and governance will always claim that it is they and their superior intelligence and strategy that have brought their victories but the real and unquestionable source of their victory is certainly not their superiority but the intervention of some higher Power, sometimes

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the highest, that we can conceive of in our sober and detached assessment of the Truth. Or, who could have conceived of the disastrous defeat of the victorious Nazis after their resounding success at Narvik and Dunkirk ?

It is said that whom God wants to destroy, He first makes mad. Is it not true in the case of the ill-fated invasion of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler and of the bombing of Pearl Harbour by Tojo's air-arm, a bombing, which was but a brilliant passage to a terrible doom ? To deny this is to evince lack of the most elementary knowledge of human affairs.

So long as human beings, even the most mentally developed ones, are involved in the life of the ego which is a deformation of our true Being which is the self, soul or the divine reality in us, this higher knowledge is denied to us. Yet, a foreknowledge might be ours if we could always take the Spirit's stand. As Sri Aurobindo says :

"An inspired Knowledge sits enthroned within

Whose seconds illumine more than reason's years"

(Savitri)

Sri Aurobindo has envisaged the possibility of human beings, the elites, transcending the mental ignorance and rising to the truth of the spirit which is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. If by spiritual self-discipline and self-surrender to the divine Power, we eliminate the ego and identify ourselves with the Divine, then we also become omniscient and omnipotent. This is not an impossible ideal ; this identification has been achieved by all spiritual Masters who have appeared on the human scene from time to

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time in order to lift the veil of ignorance and darkness from men's eyes. Sri Aurobindo has himself affirmed his role in defeating the Japanese and the Nazis. When they were victoriously progressing in their march to world-domination, he used his spiritual powers to stop their victories and turn them into defeat and disaster. This is the inner history of how the world was saved from domination by the Asuras. Likewise the Mother used her spiritual powers in making the Chinese withdraw from the Indian plains in the 1962 war.

To the ordinary unenlightened human mind entrenched in ego, ignorance and self-assertion, all these events may seem to be chimerical. Till we have raised ourselves above the limited horizon of our half-enlightened mental intelligence, the truth of spiritual living with its unity, peace and harmony, its knowledge, power, love and bliss will look like an impossible ideal, or, if possible, meant only for a few and not for humanity in general. But spiritual truth like all other truths is a fact of life and has been more or less generalised in human lives in the past. All we can do now is to surrender to the Divine, the Omnipotent Power which guides our destinies and be identified with Her in our knowledge, will and action. Then only the miracle will have been achieved and human life become life 'divine.

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