Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and Group-life

To introduce in a succinct as well as authentic way the fundamentals of the Yoga-Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, we cannot do better than quote in extenso from an article entitled "The Teaching of Sri Aurobindo" written by Sri Aurobindo himself in 1934. Here are some excerpts from that article germane to the question we have been discussing:

"Behind the appearances of the universe there is the Reality of a Being and Consciousness, a Self of all things, one and eternal.

"All beings are united in that One Self and Spirit but divided by a certain separativity of consciousness, an ignorance of their true Self and Reality in the mind, life and body.

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"It is possible by a certain psychological discipline to remove this veil of separative consciousness and become aware of the true Self, the Divinity within us and all....

"This One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the process by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection.

"Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental.

"The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection. ...

"A conversion has to be made, a turning of the consciousness by which mind has to change into the higher principle.... In the past, it has been attempted by a drawing away from the world and a disappearance into the height of the Self or Spirit. ... [But] a descent of the higher principle is possible which will not merely release the spiritual Self out of the world, but release it in the world, replace the mind's ignorance or its very limited knowledge by a supramental Truth-Consciousness which will be a sufficient instrument of the inner Self and make it possible for the human being to find himself dynamically as well as inwardly and grow out of his still animal humanity into a diviner race." (Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, pp. 95-96, paragraphing added)

From the short account of Sri Aurobindo's teaching as given above it becomes evident that in the Mother's and

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Sri Aurobindo's decision to found an Ashram in Pondicherry it was not their "object to develop any one religion or to amalgamate the older religions or to found any new religion - for any of these things would lead away from his [Sri Aurobindo's] central purpose." (Sri Aurobindo in Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram, 1983 edition, p. 34) Sri Aurobindo makes explicit what his Integral Yoga has for its aim:

"The one aim of his [Sri Aurobindo's] Yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinise human nature." (Ibid.)

Referring specifically to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry we can thus say in words adapted from Sri Aurobindo that this is a community of spiritual seekers and all those who join the organisation and live there have for their basic and primary goal in life (i) to seek liberation from Ignorance, self-fulfilment and perfection; (ii) to ascend from the present purely mental and material being to the spiritual-supramental being and life; (iii) to outgrow the state of ignorance and half-knowledge and acquire instead a nature of self-knowledge and world-knowledge.

Sri Aurobindo assures us that this greater nature which may be termed as Supernature - because it is beyond man's actual level of consciousness and capacity - is in fact his own true nature, the height and completeness of it, and to this nature "he must arrive if he is to find his real self and whole possibility of being." (The Life Divine, p. 1034)

But all this, one may contend, represents the possible realisation and perfection of individual sadhaks and sadhikas. Is that then all that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has been created for? The answer is an emphatic NO. For our ideal is not that some isolated individuals engage

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themselves in spiritual sadhana and reach in time the sought-after realisation. Nor even that a group is formed with these aspiring individuals but the sole purpose and utility of this collectivity remains confined to the task of providing all help and opportunity to the constitutive individuals in their effort at attaining to their separate individual realisation and perfection. No, we aim at something more; in our Yoga we seek to bring about a radical change in earthly manifestation which will make possible, nay inevitable, the emergence of spiritually perfect collectivities whose constituents will be spiritually perfect individuals.

For, Sri Aurobindo tells us, the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single form and in the group-existence; the individual and the universal are equally important terms of the higher and vaster Being, and their total and complete fulfilment must have some real place in the supreme Existence. In Sri Aurobindo's own words, "...the development of the individual [is not] the sole object of the Divine in the world..." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 182); "the Divine manifests himself always in the double form of the separative and collective being, vyaṣṭi, samaṣṭi." (Ibid.)

To fulfil with equal importance this double requirement of a truly divine manifestation the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has been created, "not for the renunciation of the world but as a centre and field of practice for the evolution of another kind and form of life which would in the final end be moved by a higher spiritual consciousness and embody a greater life of the spirit." (Letters on Yoga, p. 847)

In other words, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is not in its nature an association of other-worldly seekers, "men whose sole attempt is to find and realise in themselves the spiritual reality and who form their common existence by rules of living which help them in that endeavour." (The Life Divine, p. 1060) Sri Aurobindo Ashram is, on the

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contrary, "an effort to create a new life-formation which will exceed the ordinary human society and create a new world-order." (Ibid.)

The Ashram is not an agglomeration of a certain number of psychologically isolated individual sadhaks and sadhikas; for the command of the Spirit is unity. The genuine spiritual life should be, according to Sri Aurobindo, "the flower of a ... conscious and diversified oneness." (The Human Cycle, p. 243) Each individual has, no doubt, to grow into the Divine within himself; but also, the Divine whom he thus discovers in himself, he has to see equally in all others and as the same Spirit in all. "Not only to see and find the Divine in oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek one's own individual liberation and perfection, but to seek the liberation and perfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being. [And]... he who [thus] sees God in all, will serve freely God in all with the service of love. He will, that is to say, seek not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all, not only his own perfection, but the perfection of all. He will not feel his individuality perfect except in the largest universality, nor his own life to be a full life except as it is one with the universal life." (The Human Cycle, p. 24)

Thus, for the sadhaks of Sri Aurobindo's Path, although individual spiritual realisation remains always the first necessity, it cannot be deemed complete unless and until it is accompanied by an outer realisation also in life; "spiritual consciousness within but also spiritual life without." (Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, Cent, ed., p. 229) And herein lay the justification, nay the necessity for the founding of a spiritual community of a different genre and thus was born the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. And it continued to grow over the years like a living organism till it has assumed its present dimension. In the Mother's words:

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"Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me full charge of it... all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and each service was created, not by any artificial planning, but by a living and dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress." (Bulletin, August 1964, p. 96)