The Practice of the Integral Yoga

XIV

The Conquest of Self-love

A total and unreserved self-giving to the Divine on the part of a sadhaka is the key secret of living a truly spiritual life. And Sri Aurobindo has reminded us that, in practice, this "self-giving... means a change from ego-centricity to God-centricity". (Letters on Yoga, p. 1374) But this 'God-centricity' is not so easy to obtain: it can come only if we truly and integrally love the Divine.

Now the question arises whether, as sadhakas of the spiritual Path, we fulfil the above condition. Of course, if someone asks us point-blank: "Do you love the Divine?", our prompt answer will be: "Surely we do." If now a second question is addressed to us seeking some clarification: "How do you know that you really love the Divine?", our reply will perhaps be: "Well, we intensely like any discussion about the Divine and spiritual life; we sit in meditation at regular intervals; praying to the Divine is a normal feature of our life; we do not forget to offer flowers before the Images; and, of course, an attentive reading of books on spirituality forms a significant part of our daily life; etc."

But these are not sure signs of one's loving, the Divine. Most often these apparently sacred operations hide behind themselves a pronounced form of self-love. This statement may seem to be rather startling and unbelievable but yet it is true. A sincere and clairvoyant search will reveal to us that this pernicious enemy of self-love can assume a legion of deceptive camouflages and openly parade before the eyes of the self-oblivious sadhaka.

In fact, most of us most of the time have turned ourselves into bond-slaves of "I" and "Mine" and the major portion of our activities during our daily life is devoted to the satisfying of the voracious hunger of this twin demon "I" and "Mine". But this sort of self-love is totally incompatible with true love for the Divine. This acts as a stumbling-block to our effort at offering ourselves to the Divine. As a result our life of sadhana cannot develop up to our expectation and the progress made by us remains stunted.

And why should it not be so? If one cuts the roots of a tree and

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then pours water on the top of its branches with a hope to nourish it, will the tree grow in its stature or even survive? To allow self-love to sneak in is tantamount to the cutting of the roots of our spiritual life. Sri Aurobindo pin-points the real malady afflicting many sadhakas when he writes:

"Even in their sadhana the I is always there, — my sadhana, my progress, my everything.... it is always one's own sadhana, one's own endeavour, one's own development ,perfection, siddhi." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1372)

So long as this unholy "I" occupies the central position in the field of our spiritual effort, it will be difficult for us to receive the bounty of divine Grace in a free and uninterrupted flow nor can we in that case expect to grow in genuine love for the Divine. A Christian mystic of Europe of the Middle Ages has succinctly stated the same truth: "As soon as one begins to seek oneself in one's spiritual life, he ceases to love the Divine at that very moment."

Indeed the co-existence of self-love and love for the Divine is an impossible proposition. The growth of one of these two loves leads to the diminution of the other. Thus, in the measure in which a pure, unadulterated love for the Divine occupies the sadhaka' s heart, his penchant for feeding his self-love is bound to diminish and disappear. Equally, any (form or measure of self-pampering, whether knowingly or unknowingly done, cannot but proportionately dislodge from his heart the already existent love for the Divine. It is because of this fundamental truth of spiritual life that Sri Aurobindo has warned us in his book The Mother:

"Do not imagine that truth and falsehood, light and darkness , surrender and selfishness can be allowed to dwell together in the house consecrated to the Divine. The transformation must be integral, and integral therefore the rejection of all that withstands it."(pp. 3-4)

Sri Aurobindo further says: "If behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for your desires, egoistic demands and

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vital insistences, if you put these things in place of the true aspiration or mix them with it and try to impose them on the Divine Shakti, then it is idle to invoke the divine Grace to transform you." (lbid., pp.2-3)

We recall here the words uttered by Bellecius in his Solid Vir-tue: "Self-love is the rival, adversary and sworn enemy of the love of the Divine. Divine love cannot enter our heart unless self-love is banished thence."

But the question of questions is: "How to do it". Here is Sri Aurobindo' s prescription:

"The remedy is to think constantly of the Divine, not of oneself, to work, to act, do sadhana for the Divine; not to consider how this or that affects me personally, not to claim anything, but to refer all to the Divine." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1372)

We as sadhakas should never forget that the main purpose of our human existence upon earth in a physical body is to give our-selves totally to the Divine and be the perfect instruments of his manifestation. If we can successfully do this and completely forget ourselves we will be granted an ineffable Ananda beyond all human imagination.

While referring to this state of self-forgetting God-centric consciousness acquired by a sadhaka the Mother speaks:

"In the mere fact of not thinking of oneself, not existing for Oneself, referring nothing to oneself, thinking only of what is supremely beautiful, luminous, delightful, powerful, compassionate and infinite, there is such a profound delight that nothing can be "compared to it.

"This is the only thing that deserves... that is worthy of being attempted. All the rest is only marking time." (Questions and Answers, M C W, Vol. 3, p. 269)

Alas, this 'marking time on the same spot' many of us have been doing most of the time. We pretend to do the necessary sadhana by displaying the inessential trappings of a spiritual life

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but the flaw remains at the very base: we do not pay sufficient attention to the eradication of our ego-centricity and its attendant evil, self-love. This self-love prospers in the sadhaka' s consciousness in many different ways unimaginable to the unwary sadhaka. In a significant passage of his treatise on the acquisition of what he calls 'Solid Virtue', Bellecius writes:

"Self-love is a crafty, skilful, obstinate enemy. There is no prevarication of which it is not the principle. It frequently assumes the mask of virtue to conceal its deformity. Self-love possesses an inconceivable dexterity in seeking itself in all things—even thingy divine, and in constituting itself the last end of all its actions. It has but itself in view, seeks only its own glory and advantage every where. It has a thousnd ways of justifying itself, a thousand intensities through which to insinuate itself. Its deceits are extremely concealed as they are continual. It has defensive weapons as well as offensive ones. Very often it even causes us to abandon one passion only in order to satisfy another. Everything, even nothingness itself, serves it as a nutrient. If it is vanquished and we flatter ourselves upon it, then, lo, self-love survives its ruin!... Self-love deceives all our actions with the twin motivations of hope and/or fear."

The passage from Bellecius is long but it was worth quoting here. For it leaves us really speechless when we discover in how many different ways we indulge in our self-love in our daily life of sadhana and how subtle and deep-rooted is our self-deception in this regard. And it is not that this sort of self-deception is a rarity in the sadhaka' s life: it is often a habitual feature of his daily, life. Did not the Mother say in surprise —

"It is amazing, amazing — this power of self-deception, the mind's skill in finding an admirable justification for any ignorance, any stupidity whatsoever. This is not an experience that comes only now and then. It is something which you can observe from minute to minute." (On Thoughts and Aphorisms, M C W, Vol. 10, p. 82)

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This fourteenth chapter of ours is entirely devoted to the elucidation of the necessity of eradication of self-love from the consciousness of the sadhaka, for so long as this bane is allowed to remain, it proves itself highly detrimental to any progress in sadhana. Many, many are the harmful effects produced by this nuisance of self-love. It completely disrupts the right functioning tiff all the inner faculties of the sadhaka' s consciousness. Thus it invades his mind and heart and will and corrupts them. Self-love enthrones itself in the sadhaka' s heart, knows how to confuse his mind by its illusions, and to deceive his will by its threatenings or flatteries as the case may be. For it has the capacity of derailing all our actions from the straight path through the twin motivations of hope and/or fear as we indicated above.

Because of the intrusion of self-will our faculty of understanding gets confused and obscured, and we fail to see a thing as it really is but always in a distorted way: and we think ourselves to be what we are not. Self-love constantly creates in the sadhaka a sense of illusion and delusion and he is led to commit many a mistake and take many false steps on the path of sadhana.

Our emotional nature too falls often under the corrupting influence of self-will and self-love. A black veil is then interposed before the eyes of our perception and judgment and we become prone to commit any evil act however dangerous or heinous it may be in its nature.

After deluding our mind and heart, self-love moves to attack our faculty of will which then loses sight of the right goal before us and rushes impetuously towards a dark pit of perdition sidetracking the path of light.

At a further stage of downfall the sadhaka' s personal will goes at every moment counter to the will of the Divine but he cannot realise his folly because of the blindness brought about by self-love.

Another deleterious effect produced by inordinate self-love is to create a false scare in the mind and heart of the sadhaka in order to dissuade him from following the path of spirituality. It goes on suggesting to the credulous sadhaka many sorts of 'imaginary fears such as:

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"Beware, danger is looming large before you. Never forget that too much effort at sadhana may make you lose the sanity of your mind. Rather slow down your progress; otherwise, who knows, you may stumble on the path and break your limbs. In the name of the Divine do not give up everything else. For the result may be that you will lose both the ends: a spiritual realisation worth the name will elude you while you will completely lose your life in the world. After all, you should know that to fulfil all the hard conditions of an Integral Yoga may perhaps be possible only for some great and gifted souls but surely not for ordinary mortals like yourself. Any rash attempt at trying to copy their examples] can only lead to some serious disaster. So the sane advice that should guide you in your sadhana-life is that you should follow the path of the Divine in a rather moderate way with permissible compromises to soften the impact. Otherwise, an undue suppression may undermine all your future. Etc., etc."

Readers should not think that the imaginary fears we have detailed above are mere creations of our poetic fancy. They are not. The failures of many sadhakas to advance on the path of self-consecration and self-surrender have behind them such and allied misgivings whispered into their consciousness by their inordinate self-love.

In her commentary on The Dhammapada the Mother has alluded to this noxious whispering of self-love in another context. The purpose of this whispering is of course to dissuade the sadhaka from following the path of the Spirit in preference to the worldly material life of the senses. Here is what she says:

"... this horrible notion that only material realities are real.... the whole of modern civilisation is based on this conception: 'Ah, what you can touch, you are sure that is true; what you can see, you are sure that is true; what you have eaten, you are sure of having eaten; but all the rest — pooh! We are not sure whether they are not vain dreams and whether we are not giving up the real for the unreal, the substance for the shadow. After all, what are you going to gain? A few dreams! But when you have some coins in your pocket, you are sure that they are there!'

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The Conquest of Self-love

"And that is everywhere, underneath everything. Scratch the appearances just a little, it is there, within your consciousness; and from time to time you hear this thing whispering within you, 'Take care , don't be taken in .' Indeed, it is lamentable....

"Now, in those beautiful cities that are so comfortable, when one wants to condemn anything, what does one say? — 'It's a dream, it is imagination.' " (Questions and Answers, M C W, Vol. 3, p. 204)

Now, both these whisperings referred to above which militate so much against the sadhaka' s spiritual zeal come from the same source, the source of self-love, one from the love of one's assumed security and the other from the love of one's comfortable worldly existence.

And as long as this self-love is not hunted out, the imaginary I shadow-demons of fear and shrinking will always act as scarecrows and prevent the forward movement of the aspirant, pulling him always backwards.

We have already indicated in one of our preceding chapters that fearlessness and an entire and uncalculating faith and confidence in the Divine's working are the very sine qua non of a genuine spiritual consciousness. But these virtues cannot be acquired if self-love is not banished from the sadhaka' s heart. On the other and, when one achieves a total conquest over this disabling element of self-love, the sadhaka' s psychology undergoes a radical transformation and he spontaneously grows into the right attitude befitting a sincere sadhaka of the Path.

Now this right attitude is principally characterised by fearlessness under all circumstances and an unwavering faith in the wisdom of divine Providence. The Mother has graphically described this ideal attitude through the words' she has put in the mouth of two aspirants in her play let, The Ascent to the Truth. This is how these aspirants express their feelings and resolve when confronted with an apparently impossible situation on a mountaintop:

"Everything else has disappeared. The steps by which we so laboriously climbed to the summit have vanished.... Emptiness

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behind, in front, everywhere; there is only room for our feet , nothing more .... Where do we go now? What shall we do? .. The Truth is here, Truth alone, all around, everywhere.... And yet to realise it we must go further. And for that another secret must be found .... Obviously, all possibility of personal effort ends here. Another power must intervene .... Grace, Grace alone can act. Grace alone can open the way for us, Grace alone can perform the miracle .... Yes, we must have faith, an absolute trust in the Grace, a total surrender to the Divine.... Yes, an absolute self-giving to the Divine Will. And since all visible path s have disappeared , we must leap forward without fear or hesitation, in complete trust.... And we shall be carried to the place where we must go.... (They leap forward) ... Here we are, borne upon invisible wings, by a miraculous power!" (On Education , M C W, Vol. 12, pp. 516 , 517 and518)

Such is the attitude we have to grow into and that not merely on one or two occasions but always, in every situation of our life, if we would like to complete our journey on the arduous Path of the Integral Yoga.

But this is not possible if the sadhaka has not the faith and courage to trust himself into the hands of the Lord of all things and the Friend of all creatures and plunge into the ocean of divine Providence without hesitation, reserve, fear or scruple.

Yes, 'without hesitation, reserve, fear or scruple'; but it is impossible to fulfil this condition if the sadhaka allows even the slightest remnant of his self-love to linger in his heart and mind. He must empty himself totally of all self-seeking and unite himself in everything with the Will of the Divine. He must not vacillate in this task even for a moment — whatever may be the vicissitudes of life. He must deny his lower self absolutely, nor seek to gratify his self-love in any way and in any circumstance.

The following message of Sri Aurobindo should be the central I Mantra of a sadhaka' s life:

"The sadhaka must be free from ego; he should do nothing with reference to himself or for his own sake but only for the

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Divine; all his thoughts and feelings will be for the Divine. Not any ego-centricity but God-centricity should govern all his life." (Adapted from pages 1369-71 of Letters on Yoga)

Here ends our chapter on the conquest of self-love.

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