Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

E. Wrong Relationship Between Sadhaks and Sadhikas

The admission of women in an Ashram of spiritual seekers might strike many people as a dangerous novelty. In the history of past attempts to build a spiritual community, many an organisation has been wrecked because of wrong relationships developing between men and women dwelling together. But Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, as in many other fields of life, does not want to run away from difficulties; instead, it wants to meet them squarely and gain mastery over them. And hence Sri Aurobindo and the Mother admitted equally men and women disciples into

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the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from the very first day of its founding.

To meet successfully the ticklish and potentially subversive problem of human relationship between a sadhak and a sadhika, Sri Aurobindo has given us some guidelines which, if scrupulously followed, will protect us from any possible unhealthy deviation. These principles may be summed up as follows:

(i)An Ashramite should have universal goodwill for all irrespective of sex.

(ii)The love of the sadhak should be for the Divine. It is only when he has that fully that he can love others in the right way. (iii) A sadhak should not establish personal relationship with any other person in the sense of what Sri Aurobindo calls "exclusive mutual looking to each other."

(iv)There should be no relationship based on sex differentiation: no friendship with someone simply because that someone happens to be a man or a woman.

(v)All friendship should be totally free from any sex-colouring however subtle that may be.

(vi)Relationship between a sadhak and a sadhika should be as between two human beings and not as between a man and a woman.

(vii)One should not seek to establish relationships in order to satisfy the sentimental, sensational and physical wants of the lower vital nature.

(viii)No relationship should be formed with a craving for the gratification of unchastened emotional desires or physical passions.

Here are Sri Aurobindo's guidelines for safe human relationships to prevail in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and these were mostly followed in the early years of the Ashram. But over the years, especially in recent times, an

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unhealthy trend has set in. Many young people in their twenties or thirties, men and women alike, have started joining the Ashram in large numbers. Many of these youthful sadhaks and sadhikas have taken to the habit of having a girlfriend or a boyfriend of their own, depending on the case. Friendship is a good thing but when tainted with the sex feeling it becomes baneful to the development of sadhana. Sex-governed friendship between two members of the community cannot but lower the spiritual atmosphere of the Ashram. For the benefit of these novices we quote below some of the words of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo concerning this vital issue:

(1) "For one who has known love for the Divine, all other forms of love are obscure and too mixed with pettiness and egoism and darkness; they are like a perpetual haggling or a struggle for supremacy and domination, and even among the best they are full of misunderstanding and irritability, of friction and incomprehension." (The Mother, On Education, CWM Vol. 12, p. 69)

(2)"It is a well-known fact that one grows into the likeness of what one loves. Therefore if you want to be like the Divine, love him alone. Only one who has known the ecstasy of the exchange of love with the Divine can know how insipid and dull and feeble any other exchange is in comparison." (Ibid.)

(3)"Since we have decided to reserve love in all its splendour for our personal relationship with the Divine, we shall replace it in our relations with others by a total, unvarying, constant and egoless kindness and goodwill that will not expect any reward or gratitude or even any recognition. However others may treat you, you will never allow yourself to be carried away by any resentment; and in your unmixed love for the Divine, you will leave him sole judge as to how he is to protect you and defend you

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against the misunderstanding and bad will of others." (Ibid., p. 70)

(4)"A human vital interchange cannot be a true support for the sadhana and is, on the contrary, sure to impair and distort it, leading to self-deception in the consciousness and a wrong turn of the emotional being and vital nature." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, pp. 811-12)

(5)"The only relation permissible between a sadhak and sadhika here is the same as between a sadhak and sadhak or between a sadhika and sadhika - a friendly relation as between followers of the same path of yoga and children of the Mother." (Ibid., p. 816)

(6)"It is certainly easier to have friendship between man and man or between woman and woman than between man and woman, because the sexual intrusion is normally absent. In a friendship between man and woman the sexual turn can at any moment come in a subtle or in a direct way and produce perturbations. But there is no impossibility of friendship between man and woman pure of this element; such friendships can exist and have always existed. All that is needed is that the lower vital should not look in at the back door or be permitted to enter." (Ibid., p. 817)

(7)"In a general way the only method for succeeding in having between a man and a woman the free and natural yogic relations that should exist between a sadhak and a sadhika in this yoga is to be able to meet each other without thinking at all that one is a man and another a woman - both are simply human beings, both sadhaks, both striving to serve the Divine and seeking the Divine alone and none else. Have that fully in yourself and no difficulty is likely to come." (Ibid., p. 816)

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