Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

The Deficiencies

If we in the Ashram would like to fulfil the God-given task of building a collective life in which spiritually perfect individuals would dwell in a spiritually perfect community, many of the Ashramites, or even the majority of them, would have to sincerely try to grow into a more complete spiritual nature, live in the light of a higher and larger and more integral consciousness, and move and act under the guidance of a Truth which sees intuitively and spontaneously the thing to be done at any given moment and intuitively and spontaneously fulfil that in the act. The question is, Have we reached that happy position? The obvious answer is an emphatic NO.

Already on 3 July 1957 - and almost forty years have passed since then - the Mother spoke in one of her evening classes about the then state of affairs in "our collectivity" meaning, it goes without saying, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry. She began her discourse with these words:

"I have been asked if we are doing a collective yoga and what the conditions for the collective yoga are.

"I might tell you first of all that to do a collective yoga we must be a collectivity, and then speak to you about the different conditions required for being a collectivity. But last night (smiling) I had a symbolic vision of our collectivity." (Questions and Answers 1957-58, p. 137)

The Mother mentioned that she had this vision in the early part of the night, and then remarked: "it made me wake up with a rather unpleasant impression." All Ashramites are requested to go through the whole discourse of the Mother made on that memorable evening a careful perusal of the piece will help us be aware of our individual roles and responsibilities in the matter.

(The Mother's discourse is printed on pages 137 to 142 of

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her Questions and Answers 1957-58, CWM Vol. 9.)

The Mother had a symbolic vision of our Ashram and she saw that "all the possibilities are there, all activities are there, but in disorder and confusion. They are neither coordinated nor centralised nor unified around the single central truth and consciousness and will." (Ibid., p. 140)

This was about the state of our group-life. But what about the individuals constituting this special collectivity whose name is Sri Aurobindo Ashram? Sri Aurobindo remarks:

"The highly sattwic are few; the abnormally rajasic are few; of the middle sort there are many. According to my observation, this is true not only of this Ashram but of others." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, Volume One, p. 348)

Sri Aurobindo elsewhere opines that many of the members of the Ashram are not living in a spiritual consciousness but "in the ordinary egoistic mind and mainly rajasic vital nature". (The Mother, p. 229) Here are two pieces of written dialogue worth noting in this connection; the excerpts are from Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo:

NB: "The physical condition of many sadhaks and sadhikas is

not cheering in the least."

Sri Aurobindo: "Far from it."

NB: "You know best about the condition of their sadhana." Sri Aurobindo: "Very shaky, many of them." NB: "D finds the world outside much better, to which I would reply that here [in this Ashram] we don't believe in appearances. And life is precisely inner here."

Sri Aurobindo: "Is it? If people here were leading the inner life, these things [hyper-sensitivity, jealousy, hatred, meanness, caddishness, etc.] would soon disappear." (p. 1048).

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And Sri Aurobindo made these observations in 1938, twelve years after the founding of the Ashram. Sixteen more years rolled by and we come to the year 1954. What was the psychological preparation of the sadhaks then, the state of their sadhana at that time? Let us listen to the Mother's admonition addressed to the inmates of the Ashram:

"... to tell the truth, I think you have such an easy life that you don't take much trouble!... Are there many among you who really feel an intense need to find your psychic being? to know what you really are, what you have to do, why you are here? One just goes on living or even complains when things are not too easy. And then one takes like that things as they come, and sometimes, if some aspiration arises and one meets a difficulty in oneself, one says, 'Oh, Mother is there, she will manage this for me', and then thinks of something else!" (Questions and Answers 1954, p. 296)

The Mother continues with her scolding: "I am even astonished that you don't feel an intense need for it: 'How can one know?' For you know - you have been told, told repeatedly, it has been dinned into your ears - you know that you have a divine consciousness within you, and you can sleep night after night and play day after day and learn day after day, and not have the enthusiasm and intense will to enter into contact with yourself, yes, with yourself, here within!...(Mother points to the centre of her chest) This, this indeed, is beyond me!

"And how many years you have been here, half asleep! You think about it, of course, from time to time, especially when I speak to you about it; at times when you read. But that ardour, that will which conquers all obstacles, that concentration which overcomes everything!...." (Ibid., pp. 299, 300)

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This was in 1954 when the Mother was very much in our midst in her physical embodiment, guiding and enlightening us all the time. And now? When it is more than two decades since she has withdrawn from her body and more than twelve hundred people drawn from widely different backgrounds have clustered in the Ashram, what is the quality and the intensity of the aspiration in most of the inmates here? We should not be surprised if we find that these have gone down to a great extent. No doubt, formal devotion is there in the majority of the people here, but an intense awareness of the Goal set before us by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and an ardent and one-pointed practice to reach that Goal are conspicuous by their overall absence in many. And as a natural consequence of this dampening of spiritual zeal, we in our group-life have been encountering many sorts of unpleasant and undesirable incidents and happenings. Some sadhaks and sadhikas are behaving erratically; some others are manifesting unhealthy trends. But we should not be unduly worried about that nor should we give up hope about the spiritual destiny of our community. For, whatever the individual aberrations, the core of the Ashram is still very sound. And individual aberrations and wayward behaviour are not peculiar to the present-day Ashram life alone nor do these necessarily indicate the onset of the period of its inevitable decline. For it is worth recalling that such aberrant idiosyncracies were not infrequent even in the so-called 'golden' past of the Ashram. And there was a deeper reason behind their manifestation. We shall have chance to discuss this point in the latter part of this essay but for the moment let us see how the state of affairs in the Ashram was in the far past as far as the behaviour of some sadhaks and sadhikas was concerned.

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