Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

We have already brought out four research publications coming from the pen of Jugal Kishore Mukherjee, one of the seniormost members of our teaching staff. They are as follows:

(1) The Destiny of the Body (The Vision and the Realisation in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga); (2) From Man Human to Man Divine (Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Evolutionary Destiny of Man); (3) Sri Aurobindo: The Smiling Master (Humour in Sri Aurobindo's Writings); (4) Sri Aurobindo's Poetry and Sanskrit Rhetoric (Ideational Figures of Speech in Sri Aurobindo's Poetry).

In this 125th year of Sri Aurobindo's birth we feel happy to bring to the readers' notice another publication from the same author. The book has rather an unusual title, Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny.

Sri Aurobindo's 125th birth anniversary is being celebrated all over the world in this calendar year 1997. Everywhere in India and abroad people in large numbers are evincing a keen interest in the Mahayogi of Pondicherry and in all that he stands for. Now, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry symbolises one of his great creations having momentous evolutionary bearing. As a result, it is quite natural that people are becoming eager to know more about this unique institution where almost two thousand men and women of varying ages, belonging to different nationalities and coming from diverse social backgrounds, are consciously striving to build up a new type of collective life which, far from being a monastic life of a few isolated spiritual seekers, gives full scope to life-manifestation in all its vigour and variety. Sri Aurobindo Ashram aspires to create a "new common life superior to the present individual and common existence" (- Sri Aurobindo) wherein the genuine and unfettered freedom of individual creativity will be harmoniously blended with the flowering of collective perfection of a higher order.

The Ashram community in its self-building draws inspiration and guidance from the following words of Sri Aurobindo:

"Man's true way out is to discover his soul and its self-force and instrumentation and replace by it both the mechanisation of mind and the ignorance and disorder of life-nature. But there would be little room and freedom for such a movement of self-discovery and self-effectuation in a closely regulated and

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mechanised social existence." (The Life Divine, p. 1058)

"As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature." (Ibid., p. 1051. Italics added.)

'In all the elements of our nature' - that is the demand made upon us. But this is not so easy to accomplish. Our nature is complex and we have to find a key to some perfect unity and har-monisation of this complexity. As Sri Aurobindo has warned us:

"The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of us - intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire-self, the heart, the body - has each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralising self on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 69)

Such being the case there are bound to arise occasionally some problems in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram which consists of almost two thousand souls at different stages of self-development, all put together in the crucible of a new creation. And this is especially so because we have accepted life in its entirety in our Yoga "in order utterly to transmute it." But the problems are only problems of transition. These should not unduly baffle and discourage us. In Sri Aurobindo's words:

"We are forbidden to shrink from the difficulties that this acceptance [of life] may add to our struggle. Our compensation is that even if the path is more rugged, the effort more complex and bafflingly arduous, yet after a point we gain an immense advantage. ... Victorious in the struggle, we can compel Earth herself to be an aid towards our perfection and can enrich our realisation with the booty torn from the powers that oppose us." (Ibid., p. 68)

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Those who would like to follow closely how this onerous task is being realized in actual practice both in the life of the individuals and in the life of the community in spite of all the vicissitudes involved in the process may read with interest this book by Mukherjee which makes a frank and forthright assessment of the past, present and possible future of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Now a few words addressed to the Ashramites, residents of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, who have been actually participating in the task of translating the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's dream into realized Truth. The author, being himself a resident of the Ashram for the last five decades, takes the liberty of making a humble and sincere appeal to all other fellow-Ashramites:

Let this auspicious year 1997, the 125th Birth Anniversary of Sri Aurobindo, be for all of us a year of heart-searching and a year of re-dedication with a full sincerity of purpose to the noble task the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have assigned to us. It is hoped that this book, Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny, will contribute in some measure to the process of re-awakening on our part.

August 15,1997

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