Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

D. Formal Adherence Replacing the Spirit of Sadhana

The life of an Ashramite here should be a life of sadhana and that too for the whole of the daily life comprising all its activities. As the Mother has reminded us:

"In the integral Yoga, the integral life down even to the smallest detail has to be transformed. There is nothing here that is insignificant, nothing that is indifferent. You cannot say, 'When I am meditating, reading philosophy or listening to these conversations, I will be in this condition of an opening towards the Light and call for it, but when I go out to walk or see friends I can allow myself to forget all about it.' To persist in this attitude means that you will remain un-transformed and never have the true union; always you will be divided..." (Questions and Answers, CWM Vol. 3, p. 24)

It is regrettable to note that in recent years, with the passing away of the senior Ashramites of the Mother's time, this sort of all-time sadhana has been progressively missing in many of the new inmates. They attend the

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periodic ceremonies, go through the "rituals", manifest some formal "devotion" and fervour but where is the burning zeal for developing spiritual consciousness and for the transformation of their nature? Rejection, aspiration and surrender are the three basic movements characterising our sadhana and, according to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, these have to be for a sadhak entire and uninterrupted. But do we put this principle into active and ardent practice? The absolutely minimum sadhana that an Ashramite should do if he would like to consider himself a practitioner of the Integral Yoga has been expressed in brief both by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. We give below four passages from their writings and these luminous words, let us hope, will set us again on the path of integral sadhana:

(1)"Yoga means union with the Divine, and the union is effected through offering - it is founded on the offering of yourself to the Divine. ... This is what you have to do to carry out your general offering in detailed offerings. Live constantly in the presence of the Divine; live in the feeling that it is this presence which moves you and is doing everything you do. Offer all your movements to it, not only every mental action, every thought and feeling but even the most ordinary and external actions ... When you can thus gather all your movements into the One Life, then you have in you unity instead of division. No longer is one part of your nature given to the Divine, while the rest remains in its ordinary ways, engrossed in ordinary things; your entire life is taken up, an integral transformation is gradually realised in you." (The Mother, Questions and Answers, CWM Vol. 3, pp. 23, 24)

(2)"Vigilance means to be awake, to be on one's guard, to be sincere - never to be taken by surprise. When you want to do sadhana, at each moment of your life, there is a

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choice between taking a step that leads to the goal and falling asleep or sometimes even going backwards, telling yourself, 'Oh, later on, not immediately' - sitting down on the way.

"To be vigilant is not merely to resist what pulls you downward, but above all to be alert in order not to lose any opportunity to progress, any opportunity to overcome a weakness, to resist a temptation, any opportunity to learn something, to correct something, to master something. If you are vigilant, you can do in a few days what would otherwise take years. If you are vigilant, you change each circumstance of your life, each action, each movement into an occasion for coming nearer the goal." (Ibid., p. 202)

(3) Question: "What is one to do to prepare oneself for the Yoga?"

The Mother answers: "To be conscious, first of all. We are conscious of only an insignificant portion of our being; for the most part we are unconscious. It is this unconsciousness that keeps us down to our unregenerate nature and prevents change and transformation in it. It is through unconsciousness that the undivine forces enter into us and make us their slaves.

"You are to be conscious of yourself, you must awake to your nature and movements, you must know why and how you do things or feel or think them; you must understand your motives and impulses, the forces, hidden" and apparent, that move you; in fact, you must, as it were, take to pieces the entire machinery of your being. Once you are conscious, it means that you can distinguish and sift things, you can see which are the forces that pull you down and which help you on. And when you know the right from the wrong, the true from the false, the divine from the undivine, you are to act strictly up to your knowledge; that is to say, resolutely reject one and accept the other. The duality will present itself at every step and at every step

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you will have to make your choice. You will have to be patient and persistent and vigilant - 'sleepless', as the adepts say; you must always refuse to give any chance whatever to the undivine against the divine." (Ibid., p. 2)

(4) "The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in the old externalised order of things. It is imperative to exchange this surface orientation for the deeper faith and vision which see only the Divine and seek only after the Divine. The next need is to compel all our lower being to pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. ... This is no easy task; for everything in the world follows the fixed habit which is to it a law and resists a radical change. And no change can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga. Everything in us has constantly to be called back to the central faith and will and vision. Every thought and impulse has to be reminded in the language of the Upanishad that 'That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore.' " (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 66)