The Practice of the Integral Yoga

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Personal Effort and the divine Grace

While walking on the thorny path of spiritual Sadhana the sadhaka should never forget even for a moment that he is not alone in his arduous journey. But if not alone, who gives him companions hip on the Path? Is it any human comrade who is referred to here? No, certainly not. From that point of view the sadhaka has to mercilessly dispense with all his inner dependence upon other human beings and be austerely alone in his 'Pilgrim's Progress' to the divine Goal. Is it not asserted by the mystics of all ages that it has to be sternly "a flight of the alone to the Alone"? Did not the dying Buddha admonish his beloved disciple Ananda who was complaining of his future helplessness in the impending physical absence of his Master: "Ānanda, ātmadīpo bhava" - "Be a light unto thyself, Ananda" ?

But this is only one side of the coin. The other side is that we are really never alone on the Path. And this is the deeper side of the spiritual truth. For me Divine's Eye is always fixed upon the sadhaka; the Mother Consciousness is always accompanying him at every step of his advancement. Not only that; in reality the Divine Mother is everything. She is, of coarse, the Goal but she is also the Way; and she is again the Mahasadhika, carrying on that Sadhana herself. So how can the sadhaka say that he is alone on' the upward march of his spiritual itinerary?

But the fact is that this deeper truth is not revealed to the sadhaka's consciousness in the early part of his sadhana. And in spiritual matters it is not the mental speculative knowledge which can be of much help. What is essential is to have the direct subjective experience of the Truth. Otherwise, without having this intimate experience to support him, if a sadhaka tries to shape his daily conduct in his dealings with life and its various possible situations, solely on the basis of intellectual suppositions, he is liable to commit many serious follies and land himself into great troubles.

It is almost a truism that till a sadhaka reaches the concrete

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realisation that there is none else in the universe than the Divine, and so long as he labours in his active consciousness under the delusion of separativity, he has to necessarily start in his sadhana and continue for a long time with the clear idea of three distinctive elements:

Firstly, the Goal: What is the destination of my sadhana? Who is the object of all my spiritual effort? And with whom am I seeking union? The obvious answer is: The Divine.

Secondly, the Agent: Who is doing the sadhana? Who is seeking the divine union? The answer is, of course, myself, the sadhaka.

Thirdly, the World or the Nature: that is to say, all the rest, whatever I, in my ignorance, have been feeling as different and distinct from my personal self, all that can be labelled as "not-I" to toy ignorant perception.

God, the individual sadhaka, and the Nature are thus the three diverging streams issuing forth from a unique source of confluence, the Supreme. Of course, such is the case in the experience of the novice sadhaka. Later on, when the sadhana will become mature and the sadhaka's mental ideas give place to direct spiritual realisation, he will come to feel concretely that there is indeed one unique Reality functioning in the world, and that the three separate elements of our anal is above are not different and separate at all: the y represent the Three- in-One and the One-in-Three. The Mother ' s Mantric words are worth recalling in this connection: "Then you feel - everywhere, everywhere, everywhere: inside, outside, everywhere, everywhere - Him, nothing but Him - Him,His vibration." (On Thoughts and Aphorisms, MCW, Vol. 10, p. 156)

And this is what Sri Aurobindo explains in the second chapter of his seminal work, The Mother. "In all that is done in the universe, the Divine through his Shakti is behind all action... In Yoga also it is the Divine who is the Sadhaka and the Sadhana; it is his Shakti with her light, power, knowledge, consciousness, Ananda, acting upon the Adhara... that makes the Sadhana possible." (Cent. Ed.,p.6)

But this truth is at present veiled from the ego-consciousness of the sadhaka, and his lower nature is quite active with the sense

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of a separately functioning personal will. And so long as this state of affairs continues, the sadhaka cannot shirk his responsibility and pretend to leave everything, including his sadhana, to the care of the Divine Shakti; for, he should not fallaciously argue, "is not this Shakti the sole Agent in the world?"

No, this will not do. For this will be the case of a serious dharma-sankaratā, a tragic confusion of standards. For, let us affirm once again with insistence that the law of functioning of the siddha-cetanā, the consciousness of the realised Yogi, is quite different from the law of conduct of the ego-bound consciousness of an ordinary ignorant individual. And we should not forget that it is the quality and the level of consciousness of the sadhaka 'Which alone matters in the spiritual field.

Hence the sadhaka of the Integral Yoga should always keep in mind that he has to conduct his life and mould the ways of his action in accordance with the actual stage of his consciousness: he Should not seek to copy the mode of action of a siddha-yogī, a realised soul. In practical terms this means that he should not mistakenly abdicate his personal effort too soon but rather put it consistently at the service of the Divine. And as his consciousness grows and develops in spiritual awareness, his way of action also will correspondingly change and this change will be effected quite naturally and with a smooth transition. Such is the established rule of the game in the world of spirituality.

One has to traverse all the steps of the ascent and cannot allow oneself the risky luxury of a triple or a quadruple leap. "On ne peut pas brûler tes étapes" — "One cannot skip the steps", says the Mother. Sri Aurobindo's words also are in the same vein:

"... all evolution must move by stages; even the greatest rapidity and concentration of the movement cannot swallow up all the stages or reverse natural process and bring the end near to the beginning. A hasty and ignorant mind, a too eager force easily forget this necessity;... This is not only an absurd expectation but full of danger." (The Synthesis of Yoga, Cent. Ed., p. 268)

By applying this universal truth of progressive change to the

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specific case of whether personal effort is necessary in the life of a sadhaka it may be bluntly stated that so long as the sense of a separative ego with a separate will of its own is present in the sadhaka, he has to apply his personal effort quite seriously and not leave everything to the action of the divine Shakti. Hence is the admonition of Sri Aurobindo:

"Reject the false notion that the divine Power will do and is .bound to do everything for you at your demand and even though you do not satisfy the conditions laid down by the Supreme. Make your surrender true and complete, then only will all else be done for you.

"Reject too the false and indolent expectation that the divine Power will do even the surrender for you. The Supreme demands your surrender to her, but does not impose it:... Your surrender must be self-made and free; it must be the surrender of a living being, not of an inert automaton or mechanical tool." (The Mother, Cent. Ed., p. 4)

The sadhaka's personal effort should be engaged in making this surrender to the Divine genuine and thorough. And in the measure he is capable of doing so, he will find to his happy surprise that the Divine Mother has started acting quite overtly in his life and no longer secretly as before. And this with the purpose of building up his spiritual life and bringing him to the fruition of his divine goal.

Thus is solved the puzzling riddle of personal effort in sadhana vis-à-vis the action of the Divine Shakti, through a harmonious reconciliation of the two factors in the light of the Mother's dictum: "Everything has its own place and everything should be at its place" — "Chaque chose a une place et chaque chose doit être á 'sa place."

Let us close our discussion with an excerpt from Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga which brings into focus the essential points pf the problem and its solution:

"... there are two movements with a transitional stage between

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them, two periods of this Yoga... In the first 'the individual pre-pares himself for the reception of the Divine into his members. For all this first period he has to work by means of the instruments of the lower Nature, but aided more and more from above. But in the later transitional stage of this movement our personal and necessarily ignorant effort more and more dwindles and a higher Nature acts;... In the second period the greater movement wholly replaces the lesser formerly indispensable first action.... But the entire substitution of the divine for the human personal action is not at once entirely possible.... A continual and always repeated refusal of the impulsions and falsehoods of the lower nature is asked from us... In the last period there is no effort at all, no set method, no fixed Sadhana; the place of endeavour and Tapasya will be taken by a natural, simple, powerful and happy disclosing of the flower of the Divine... These are the natural successions of the action of the Yoga." (The Synthesis of Yoga, Cent. Ed., pp. 79-81)

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