The Practice of the Integral Yoga

XV

On Human Relationships in Sadhana

In all spirituality with an ascetic orientation it is asserted that a sadhakas love for the Divine should be exclusive; that is to say, it should admit of no sharing with others . Do we not read in the Bible? - "1the Lord thy God am a jealous God." The Mother also has said: 'To love truly the Divine we must rise above all attachments. To become conscious of the Divine Love, all other love must be abandoned."

But , we wonder, why is thi s harsh injunction imposed ? Two different reasons are advanced in its support. The first one is: "There is a thirst for Love which no human relation can quench . It is only the Divine' s Love that can satisfy that thirst." (The Mot her, M C W, Vol. 14, p. 127

The second reason is intimately connected with the first one, because it seeks to answer the very natural question: "How to ac-l quire this Divine's Love so necessary for the soul's satisfactions The first hint of the answer comes from the Mother's words:! "...whatever the sincerity, simplicity and purity of the relation between two human beings, it shuts them off more or less from the 1 direct divine force and help..." (Ibid., p. 126)

The Mother becomes more explicit when she explains: "These rare souls must reject all forms of love between human beings, for however beautiful and pure they may be, they cause a kind of short-circuit and cut off the direct connection with the Divine.... Moreo- ve , 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." (M C W, Vol. 12, pp. 68-69)

"Love Him alone?" — What a disconcerting demand is this if How disturbing for the ego-bound attached heart of man! The sadhaka may at this point raise some questions of perplexity as j regards the real nature and goal of the Integral Yoga. He may ask:

"Have I to renounce all other loves, all without exception, far I the sake of the love for the Divine? How can I stay then in the world? Is it really suggested that in order to receive the love of the

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Divine, one has perforce to give up all forms of human love such as love between brothers and sisters, parents' love for their children and vice versa, love between the lover and the beloved, and the helpful love between faithful friends? Will not our heart completely dry up in that case? On what foundation should we then build up our relationship with other human beings? Is it mooted that a stern indifference is the only right attitude for a sincere sadhaka?"

To answer these uneasy questions satisfactorily we have first to ply our boat of inquiry somewhat upstream and mount to the source of love itself. We have to understand the deeper mystery behind love as an emotion and its veritable nature. We have to know why love arises in somebody' s heart and is directed to some particular objects and persons and not to others, and that too at some specific point of time. Is there any inevitability in this appearance of human love? And any psychological-metaphysical necessity behind its genesis? Finally, we have to comprehend the real implication of the Mother's statement: "... human love is not a need of the soul, but rather a concession it makes for a time to the ego." (M C W, Vol. 14, p. 126)

We have always to bear in mind one fundamental truth concerning what is called love. This truth is that whoever be the lover and whoever or whatever may be the object of one's love, the fascination and the attraction involved is always coming from one common source, the soul, the Spirit, the Divine who is there in everyone and everything, sarvabhūtāntarātmā. Viewed from the deepest point of view, this attraction is the attraction of the soul directed to itself in others. Let us explain.

World-manifestation is in its essence the One becoming many but not for that matter separating itself from the many. "I shall be Many", "aham bahu syām": that was the first Will of the Divine, the One without a second, ekam evādvitīyam. But because of the intervention of Cosmic Ignorance this 'many' thought itself to be different from the One, but the One continues to view the many as the One-in-many. As a result this One, the fundamental Reality, is always seeking to annul the veil of Ignorance and bring the many back to the consciousness of One-4h-many. This divine seeking is

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expressed in the world as the Attraction of the One exercised on the One-in-many. And as a consequence the 'many', which ignorantly experiences itself to be different and cut off from the One, is unknowingly but constantly feeling a reflex urge, albeit obscure and distorted, to move towards the One. But as the essential truth is hidden from the 'many' which is shrouded in ignorance and dominated by the sense of a separative egoism, this ineluctable urge towards the unique Source cannot retain its pure form but becomes caricatured and perverted in the egoistic human heart. There, love's apparent arousal and continuation becomes entirely based on a sense of need and deficiency felt by the ego. The satisfaction of this need is then sought through a peculiar human sentiment otherwise called 'love'. Thus love loses its absolute character and becomes something altogether relative and conditional.

Also, depending on the particular part of the being in which this need is acutely felt, this 'love' takes different forms such as a physical lust, a vital desire, a mental fascination, etc. But, in reality, it is always the same pure love of the One for the One. Hence are the words of the Mother:

'There is only one Love - the Divine ' s Love; and without that Love there would be no creation. All exists because of that Love, and it is when we try to find our own love which does not exist that we do not feel the Love, the only Love, the Divine 's Love which permeate s all existence." (M C W, Vol. 14, p. 130)

The same truth, the truth of all love in its multifarious manifestation being in essence love directed to the Divine alone, has been beautifully brought out in Rishi Yajnavalkya's famous dialogue with his aspirant wife Maitreyi as recounted in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. There, the Rishi explains to his wife that"not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear to the wife but for the sake of the Self that is in the husband" - "Na vā are patyu kāmāya patih priyah bhavati ātmanastu kāmāya patili priyali bhavati," And the same principle holds good in the case of all other objects of love whether they be wealth or fame, parents or children, brothers or sisters, friends or lovers, etc. In every case it is

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ātmanastu kāmāya", for the sake of the Self or the Divine present in the object of love.

Such is the fundamental truth but this is not the way the ordinary ignorant consciousness of man interprets it. Man interprets it in a way that pampers to the interests of the separative ego. And this confusion becomes possible because of the double meaning of the term "atman" as used in Yajnavalkya's expression "ātmanastu kāmāya" — "for the sake of the Self."

The first meaning of 'Atman' is, of course, the Self, the Di-vine and that is the higher sense. But the same term means also the ego, the lower self. And man in his ignorance takes this lower sense to be the purport of Rishi Yajnavalkya's teaching and claims on its basis that all objects of human love should be just the means for satisfying the obscure hungers and appetites of the ego-self, "ātmanastu kāmāya", "for the sake of the self.

It is because of this false interpretation that all human love, in spite of its "coloured and passionate professions" of self-giving is at its basis nothing more than a sheer self-centredness which grabs and pulls its object of love only to satisfy Its¹ ravenous hunger operative on different levels of consciousness. Here are some pertinent verses from Sri Aurobindo' s Savitri:

"This angel in thy body thou callst love,

Who shapes his wings from thy emotion's hues,

In a ferment of thy body has been born

And with the body that housed it it must die.

It is a passion of thy yearning cells,

It is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust;

It is thy mind that seeks an answering mind

And dreams awhile that it has found its mate;

It is thy life that asks a human prop

To uphold its weakness lonely in the world

Or feeds its hunger on another's life."

(Book X Canto 2, p. 608)

Yet, the fact remains that, whatever may be its present deformation or even perversionn, the basic truth is that "all the forms that

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love has taken in the human consciousness on earth are but awkward attempts, deformed and incomplete, to find once again true Love." (The Mother, M C W, Vol. 14, p. 129)

Such is the mystery behind the phenomenon of human love; and, if this is the truth, how can a sadhaka remain for ever satisfied with the giving and receiving of this frail and obscure human love? Sooner or later his heart must cry out and thirst for the real Love and seek union with the Divine, the Atman, who is always the real Lover behind the grotesque masks of various names and forms. As Sri Aurobindo reminds us:

"... our aim is to go beyond emotion to the height and depth and intensity of the Divine Love and mere feel through the inner psychic heart an inexhaustible oneness with the Divine which the spasmodic leapings of the vital emotions cannot reach or experience." (Letters on Yoga, p. 754)

After all, why should a genuine sadhaka feel any pain or any sense of deprivation if he is asked to renounce the lures of ordinary human love for the sake of the love for the Divine? Is human love so precious and so noble a thing? A close observation will

reveal the sombre fact that

"The snake is there and the worm in the heart of the rose.

A word, a moment's act can slay the god [love];

Precarious is his immortality,

He has a thousand ways to suffer and die;...

Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes..."

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, p. 611)

No reflecting sadhaka, desirous of discovering the truth behind the glittering guises of the appearances, can deny the veracity of what Sri Aurobindo once wrote to his beloved disciple Dilip Kumar Roy as regards the real nature of all human love. This is what he wrote:

"... the human feeling is always either based on or strongly

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mixed with ego.... There is usually a hope of return, of benefit or advantage of some kind, or of certain pleasures and gratifications, mental, vital or physical that the person loved can give. Remove these things and the love very soon sinks, diminishes or disappears or turns into anger, reproach, indifference or even hatred." [Letters on Yoga, p. 759)

Therefore, all profession of ordinary human: love and its inevitable attendant, attachment, are absolute taboos to the sadhaka of the Integral Yoga. Indeed, any attachment whatsoever to anyone or anything in the world acts as a stumbling block to the building up of a veritable spiritual consciousness. And when we say "any attachment" this 'any' is very much rigorous in its comprehensiveness. There is no scope for any self-deception in this regard. For there is no such thing as a permissible attachment. All attachments have to be burnt up in the brazier of the sadhaka' s utter self-consecration to the Divine. Sri Aurobindo has made this point absolutely unambiguous in a magnificent passage of his The Synthesis of Yoga:

"... attachment... must be utterly cast out; there is nothing in the world to which we must be attached, not wealth nor poverty, nor joy nor suffering, nor life nor death, nor greatness nor littleness, nor vice nor virtue, nor friend, nor wife, nor children, nor country, nor our work and mission, nor heaven nor earth, nor all that is within them or beyond them." (p. 314)

But does it mean that the sadhaka of the Integral Yoga should be "heartless" and not love anything or anyone at all? Not so surely; for, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "attachment is egoism in love and not love itself." And when this egoism is renounced, attachment will surely fall off like a dead leaf from the tree but true love will shine forth in its utter purity and unimaginable splendour and delight.

Not only so; love will escape at the same time the artificial confines arbitrarily imposed upon it by the petty and short-sighted egoism of the individual. Being freed from all limitations, love

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will become universal in its scope: the sadhaka will come to love everyone and everything, for his only object of love will then be the Divine and what is there in the world which does not have this Divine as its essential Reality? To quote the Mother's luminous words:

"Then you feel — everywhere, everywhere, everywhere: inside, outside, everywhere, everywhere — Him, nothing but Him — Him, His vibration." (On Thoughts and Aphorisms, MOW, Vol. 10, p. 156)

Let us close this chapter-with some practical guidelines from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother which will help the Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga to steer clear of all dangers and pitfalls on the Way and build up his human relationships upon a right foundation in the early transitional period of sadhana when he has not yet attained to the union with the Divine:

(i)A Sadhaka should have universal goodwill for all irrespective of sex

(ii)The love of the Sadhaka should be for the Divine. It is only when he has that fully, that he can love others in the right way.

(iii)A Sadhaka 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)Relationship between a man and a woman should be as between two human beings and not as between a man and a woman.

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

(vii)A relationship should not be formed with a craving for the gratification of unchastened emotional desires or physical passions.

(viii)"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

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for supremacy and domination, and even among the best they are full of misunderstanding and irritability, of friction and incomprehension." (M C W, Vol. 12, p. 69)

(ix)"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)

(x)"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 against the misunderstanding and bad will of others." (M C W, Vol. 12, p. 70)

At last will dawn a day when the ascent of love will be completed on the world stage and the cosmic manifestation will be fulfilled in its true purpose. Then

^: "... is our being rescued from separateness; All is itself, all is new-felt in God: A Lover leaning from his cloister's door Gathers the whole world into his single breast."

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X Canto 3, pp. 632-33)

And so far as individual human love is concerned, this too will undergo a divine apotheosis. For

"All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,

And Love that was once an animal's desire,

Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,

An ardent comradeship in the happy mind,

Becomes a wide spiritual yearning's space."

(Ibid., Book X Canto 3, p. 632)

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