Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

The Problem of Harmony in Our Ashram Life

Complaint is at times murmured in some quarters, even among many sadhaks of the Ashram, that there is not much of harmony in our group life; what is there, they say, is that the individual inmates have some sort of vital attachment to some and an attitude of indifference towards the rest. Many recall the Upanishadic utterance - saṁ-gacchadhvaṁ saṁvadadhvaṁ saṁ vo manāṅsi jānatām: "Let us move in harmony, speak in harmony, be united in our heart to know together" - and feel aggrieved to find the supposed absence of this united feeling and thought amongst the Ashram inmates.

But we must know that this lacuna, even if it is factually true, is not something peculiar to the Ashram of today. The complaint is as old as the hills. For even in 1938 Dr. Mahendra Sircar, a distinguished philosopher on a visit to the Ashram, commented after a "stove incident" that Sri Aurobindo's Ashram lacked "fraternity", while the Ramakrishna Mission was ideal in that way. When Nirod-baran reported this complaint to his Guru, Sri Aurobindo replied:

"I am afraid not. When I was in Calcutta it was already a battle-field and even in the post-civil-war period one hears distressing things about it. It is the same with other Asrams..." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p.1048)

Be that as it may, we, the disciples of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, should be clear about one point. What we

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should strive after in our collective sadhana is not a fanatically disposed herd-instinct nor an emotional-vital egoistic solidarity. We seek in our mutual relationships something deeper and truer, based on the inner oneness of the spirit. It is worth quoting in this connection parts of three letters of Sri Aurobindo:

(1)"The personal relation is not a part of the yoga. When one has the union with the Divine, then only can there be a true spiritual relation with others." (Letters on Yoga, p. 803)

(2)"The Mother has not laid stress on human fellowship of the ordinary kind between the inmates (though good feeling, consideration and courtesy should always be there), because that is not the aim; it is a unity in a new consciousness that is the aim, and the first thing is for each to do his Sadhana to arrive at that new consciousness and realise oneness there." (The Mother, p. 264)

(3)"Our view is that the normal thing is in yoga for the entire flame of the nature to turn towards the divine and the rest must wait for the true basis: to build higher things on the sand and mire of the ordinary consciousness is not safe. That does not necessarily exclude friendships or comradeships, but these must be subordinate altogether to the central fire." (Letters on Yoga, p. 818)

(4)"Friendship or affection is not excluded from the yoga. Friendship with the Divine is a recognised relation in the sadhana. Friendships between the sadhaks exist and are encouraged by the Mother. Only, we seek to found them on a surer basis than that on which the bulk of human friendships are insecurely founded. It is precisely because we hold friendship, brotherhood, love to be sacred things that we want this change - because we do not want to see them broken at every moment by the movements of the ego, soiled and spoiled and destroyed by the passions,

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jealousies, treacheries to which the vital is prone - it is to make them truly sacred and secure that we want them rooted in the soul, founded on the rock of the Divine." (Letters on Yoga, p. 818)

So we see that although it is our aim to have harmony and mutuality of relationships prevailing in our Ashram, we must be careful to see that these spring up from some inner source. Human relationships are worthy of being cherished because all flow from a convergent relationship to the Divine, but they will prove deceptive and destructive when they are centred in the ego. As Prof. Iyengar has so aptly put it in his biography of Sri Aurobindo, "Trust the true warmth of the pure flame of psychic love but beware of the flawed fuel of ego-desire." (Sri Aurobindo, p. 563)