Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 24

The Yoga and The Ashram

I

It is characteristic of man's double nature that he wants both to cultivate the private garden of his personality and to lose himself in a larger collectivity. At one moment he dares to be all alone, but at other times he is eager to mingle and merge his individual identity in his family, his tribe, his caste, his guild, his nation; or he joins a club, or a professional society, or even a political party. And sometimes individual man is athirst for certainty in the realm of ends and means, he is drawn to the Infinite, he is teased by thoughts of Eternity. Everything - personal ambition, family fortunes, national welfare - pale into insignificance in the context of this passion for knowledge of the "first and last" things, and in his perplexity he may seek a Guru or a spiritual Guide. When many such seekers gather round a Guru, an Ashram - whether or not it is called by that name - comes into existence as the practical answer to this persistent human need. An Ashram, then, is a place - a house or group of houses - where the disciples of a Guru foregather to live the life of the Spirit. The soul of an Ashram is the Guru with a particular vision of Reality and his own tested pathway to the Goal. And since different disciples may come to the Guru from widely different background, he will deal with each in a manner appropriate to him alone. But of course there must be some wide base of shared faith among the disciples and a feeling of reverence for the Guru. The spiritual life implies an impulse towards the illimitable, the immaculate, the perfect. The pull is always from the narrow, the selfish, the egoistic, the temporal to the horizons of the higher knowledge, leading to unselfish action and stainless bliss.

Ashram have flourished in India since prehistoric times. The Rishis of the Vedic and Upanishadic ages had their own Ashrams where princes and commoners alike received training in the arts and sciences as well as spiritual instruction. Krishna and Balarama and Kuchela were fellow-pupils at Rishi Sandipani's Ashram on the banks of the Jamuna. It was only in later ages that Ashrams became excessively austere, a refuge for people who were fed up with the weary weight of this oppressive world. There was also the assumption that the phenomenal world was mere illusion, and the pursuit of the Self - or Nirvana - was the only wise course for the spiritual aspirant. But once again, there has been witnessed in our own time a return to the older type of Ashram that trained people for here and now, and not only for the hereafter. In their different ways Gurudev Tagore at Shantiniketan, Gandhiji at Sabarmati and Shevagram, and in many of the Ramakrishna Mission centres, the challenges of everyday life were not ignored, although the Divine Presence was always assumed and Divine Protection was always hoped for.

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The Ashram principle is also behind the age-old concept of guru-kula-vāsa, or learning by living with the Guru. Whether one desires initiation into spiritual philosophy or into the mystic folds of music or into the mystery of any of the arts and sciences, the best way of achieving mastery was to live with the Guru, to observe him, serve him and obey him, though not in fear but in love and complete trust. Caste, status, religion, even sex is irrelevant; the unique personal relationship is alone the essence of the matter, and the links between Guru and Disciple are forged in the fire and on the anvil of spirituality and not by means of sectarian imperatives or in terms of financial incentives. Even in the West, the greatest results in scientific research are obtained only by brilliant young men and women who expose themselves continually to the direct influence of savants in the respective fields. Nobel laureates breed other Nobel laureates, and there have been whole genealogies of Noble laureates. Himself a Nobel laureate, H.A. Krebs has illustrated this point by a reference to the von Baeyer family: tracing his own descent from Berthollet, Gay-Lussac, Liebig and Kekule, in the course of five or six generations von Baeyer and his scientific descendents seem to have accounted for nearly twenty Nobel laureates. There is thus a whole Guru-Sishya linked sequence which is as significant in the secular arts and sciences as it certainly is in the art and science of spiritual philosophy. The sense of the Divine Presence and the feeling of Divine Guidance and Divine Protection are, however, the indispensable élan in all Gurukulas and Ashrams.

When young men were first drawn to Sri Aurobindo - at Baroda, and later at Calcutta - it was because he was the apostle of Nationalism and the high-priest of the revolutionary movement. There was, of course from the first a visionary look in his eyes, which struck everyone; they could hardly help whispering, " Did you look at his eyes?" After the experience of the silent Brahman in January 1908, he seemed to move about like one almost in a trance of transcendence, and his political activities - writing, speeches, campaigning - seemed to take place on the surface consciousness, leaving the inner calm wholly unruffled. The year of incarceration at the Alipur jail, as we saw earlier, was really a session of sadhana and when, after his acquittal in May 1909, he launched the Karmayogin and the Dharma and made his astonishing speech at Uttarpara, it was clear to all that Sri Aurobindo was now a man of God and only incidentally a political leader. He had not forgotten the continuing fact of India's political subjection, but he felt he shouldn't act except from a ground of total competence; and, besides, he now began to see the Indian problem as a part of a larger problem - the human condition everywhere. Presently the unmistakable ādeś or divine command came to him in February 1910, and he went to Chandernagore, and from there, in April, to Pondicherry. He firmly decided to sever his connection with politics and to devote himself entirely to sadhana.

Notwithstanding the bleak outer circumstances in Pondicherry, the sadhana went on satisfactorily, and a little over a year after his arrival there, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the course of a letter dated 12 July 1911:

I need some place of refuge in which I can complete my Yoga unassailed and  

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build up other souls around me. It seems to me that Pondicherry is the place appointed....

I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane, and I am now able to put myself into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind. This I can do with great swiftness and completeness with those who are near me, but I have also succeeded with men hundreds of miles away. I have also been given the power to read men's characters and hearts, even their thoughts, but this power is not yet absolutely complete, nor can I use it always and in all cases....

.. .the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness, of error in order that the Truth I shall eventually show to men may be perfect, and of ineffectiveness in order that the work of changing the world, so far as I have to assist it, may be entirely victorious and irresistible.... I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work severe and painful. It is only now that the edifice is beginning to rise upon the sure and perfect foundation that has been laid.¹

Two months later, he wrote again:

My Yoga is proceeding with great rapidity, but I defer writing to you of the results until certain experiments in which I am now engaged, have yielded fruit sufficient to establish beyond dispute the theory and system of Yoga which I have formed and which is giving great results not only to me, but to the young men who are with me.... I expect these results within a month, if all goes well.²

From these two letters we may infer that (I) Sri Aurobindo looked upon Pondicherry as the divinely appointed place to do sadhana and build up other souls around him; (2) that, as early as 1911, he was developing the necessary powers to bring down the spiritual to the material plane (no reference here to the Supermind); (3) he had had some success in influencing by power of the spirit the men around him, and even some who were at some considerable distance; (4) he was experimenting in the spiritual field with a view to finalising his theory and system of Yoga; and (5) his aim in all this was to change the world (not merely to win India's independence).

During the early years at Pondicherry there was the group of young men - Nolini, Bejoy, Moni, Saurin, Va Ra - living with Sri Aurobindo, and friends like Bharati, Aiyar and Srinivasachari visited him frequently. There were language lessons, there were discussions on poetry and politics, and there were readings in the Veda. It was in all but name an Ashram already, and the soul of the Ashram was Sri Aurobindo. First the idea was that the sadhana might take only about six months; then a year passed, then four years. Then the Richards came, and the Arya was launched, for by now he had the clue to the entire Truth which he could now set forth in The Life Divine and other major treatises. When after the outbreak of the first world war Mirra returned to France, Sri Aurobindo wrote on 20 May 1915  

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that the aim of their Yoga should be to make "Heaven and Earth equal and one". In September 1916, Saurin opened the 'Aryan Stores' with capital advanced by the Mother, but the concern had to be sold in 1920 when he went away to Bengal. In the meantime the war continued, and the Arya continued; and when the war ended, the Mother came finally on 24 April 1920. Amrita and Barin were also of the group, and it became a more cohesive, a better organised group after 24 November after 1920. When the Arya was suspended in 1921, the group began to look more inward than ever. Not long after, Sri Aurobindo dissociated himself from Motilal Roy and his Prabartak Sangha at Chandernagore. By I January 1922, the Ashram - although not blazoned as such - was very much of a reality in its inner spiritual orientation and organised outer communal living. Between 1922 and 1926, some more joined the Ashram, there was regular group meditation, there were talks by Sri Aurobindo and evening discussions in which he took an active part, and the Mother gradually took an increasing measure of responsibility for the management of the Ashram household and the spiritual welfare of the sadhaks. First a few started meditating with her, and soon more joined, and the trend was clear in the early months of 1926, and especially after 15 August culminating at last in the "siddhi day" of 24 November and Sri Aurobindo's complete withdrawal. And yet it was not really a "withdrawal", and it was no setback for the Ashram either. As Barin wrote later in Khulnabasi:

The Yogic power of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo opened wide the doors of the unostentatious Ashram, so long in the grip of want and difficulty, to the steady inflow of sufficiency and prosperity. Spontaneous offerings came from disciples and admirers. The most ordinary men found in themselves an out flowering of the poetic power, a wonderful talent for painting, a capacity for meditation, occult vision and skillfulness of work. Day by day the Pondicherry Ashram grew into a Yogic place of pilgrimage for the entire world. An aspirant had a vision: the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were inside a golden tabernacle on the top of a luminous hill, and men from different climes from all directions thronged to the place in endless streams. Today his vision has materialised.³

It has, indeed.

II

From about 25 in 1926, the number of sadhaks went up to 36 by the end of the next year, and to 80 in 1928. Dhyuman, who had come earlier in 1924, joined the Ashram permanently in 1927. Dilip came, apparently for good, in November 1928. His intellectual admiration for Bertrand Russell infected him With philosophic doubt, while his adhesion to Sri Aurobindo opened up vistas 01 enchanting spiritual progress. The inner conflict was not easily solved, and once Krishnaprern had to give this friendly reprimand:

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Why do you keep harping on Russell?... why do you keep hoping that your Gurudev or someone else will answer his sceptical arguments? If you accept Russell's premisses you will be forced into his conclusions, but then why accept his premisses? He is no muddle-headed thinker whose conclusions are at fault with his premisses.... If you set foot on an escalator, you will be automatically carried to the top of it; so why set foot on it at all when you see it going in the wrong direction?⁴

Even before Dilip came in 1928, Datta (Miss Hodgson) was there and so was Pavitra, formerly P.B. St.-Hilaire, who had seen service as a Captain of the French Army during the world war. Another arrival was the young Englishman J. A. Chadwick, a brilliant Cambridge mathematical philosopher who had come to India, ostensibly to take up a professorship in a university, but really to seek the Truth beyond both mathematics and philosophy. In Sri Aurobindo he found the destined Guru, and in the Ashram his haven of peace. For about ten years he was in the Ashram breathing the free air of the Spirit and pursuing his sadhana unremittingly. Dilip records a revealing conversation between Arjava (the name on Aurobindo had given to Chadwick) and a visiting sceptic (nicknamed Mr. Pontif):

Mr. Pontiff: I will ask you a simple question: What on earth are you doing? - And, please don't stall....

Chadwick: Suppose I said: each of us here has to come to grips with his ego?

Mr. Pontiff: And when he wins?

Chadwick: The Kingdom of Heavens begins - for him, at all events.

Mr. Pontiff: But for the rest of us?

Chadwick: Why not "wait and see"...

Mr Pontiff: .. .I have not come all this way just to pick holes in your Master's way of doing things. I admire him because he professes to believe in our terrestrial evolution.... I would be the last person to say that the East has nothing to teach us. But then her prophets must become a little more dynamic and come out to give it instead of staying immured in their ivory towers of peace and meditation and self-conquest....

Chadwick: .. .You firmly believe (don't you) that the world can only be bettered if and when its best spirits work outside on a vocal platform and not, like the silent Orientals, in peaceful Ashrams?

Mr. Pontiff: That's right.

The best minds of the West had worked, at least since the rise of modern science and industrialism, on the noisy platform of activism, not committing the mistake of the orientals; and yet, asked Chadwick, wasn't Western civilisation already on the downward curve? Could the rose of Western civilisation bloom so long as mankind didn't know how to settle its score once and for all with the deadening canker that was eating into its core?

Mr. Pontiff: And suppose I asked you - what is that canker?

Chadwick: Suppose I told you it's made up of divers "isms" presided over by your fanatic itch to rush about doing something convincing when you

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are far from convinced yourselves about the rightness of your vision or the correctness of your method? Yes, I do claim one has to win the right vision first before one can find a clue to the right action.⁵

This sadhana of coming to grips with the ego and gaining the right vision into the innermost truth of things turned Arjava - as if by accident, or as though a spring had been released - into a poet of distinction and originality. The collected volume of his Poems includes over 3000 pieces written during 1931-8. Not only what Krishnaprem has called "the delicate dream-like beauty of these poems", but even more their panoramic interior landscape of the Spirit must set this body of poetry apart, a singular example of what Yoga could do to awaken the poetic Kundalini in the sadhak. Having early won his way to what he had sought -

This was the country that I did not know,

The joy that has no shadow-throw,

A lore which worldings worthless deem,

That love our thralled hearts fear to show,

That power no helmed hosts bestow

- Of freedomed soul the source and stream⁶ -

having basked in the Red Lotus of Sri Aurobindo's consciousness and having received the four-fold Grace of emerald, topaz, amethyst and ruby from the Shakti of God, Arjava reached his journey's end at the age of forty, a "burning blade" for ever.⁷

An intellectual like Chadwick, K.D. Sethna too was early drawn to Yoga. By the merest accident he heard about Sri Aurobindo and read about the Ashram, and now told himself: "I am going there!... I have found my goal - or at least the path to my goal."⁸ He was then twenty-three, and he made the trip to Pondicherry without much delay, arriving there in December 1927. His first darshan was on 21 February 1928:

I saw him sitting very grandly, with an aquiline nose and smallish eyes, and moustaches and a beard. I was examining him thoroughly. At length I made my pranam. He put both his hands on my head - that was his way - a most delightful way, with his very soft hands. I took my leave, looking at him again. I observed to myself: "Quite an impressive Guru... !"⁹

The "rebirth" in the Ashram was really the awakening to the "sweetness and light" of the psychic being within. It was actually an "open book" - once one was able to fix one's gaze on it:

...the sweetness in the experience is of a bliss which has no cause; a self-existent bliss is there. It is not dependent on persons, occasions, circumstances, objects. To be there, deep within, to feel oneself there is to be perennially, and I might even say unbearably, happy. The light also is present, because some kind of natural truth-feeling is experienced, which guides you all the time.... On the negative side... one is not depressed, one does not bewail one's lot

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any more; secondly, one does not rebel, either against the Divine or against human beings.¹⁰

He now acquired a new name too, 'Amal Kiran' (The Clear Ray) often shortened to 'Amal'; and he promptly started a correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. Innumerable letters passed to and fro covering a variety of subjects, and especially poetry - Sethna's, Sri Aurobindo's and other people's poetry. Ever since his first coming to Pondicherry over forty years ago, Sethna has been a committed and dedicated and evangelistic Aurobindonian, and he is also the best informed, the most perceptive and the most illuminating of the critics of Sri Aurobindo's poetry.

Another staunch Aurobindonian, Rishabhchand, joined the Ashram in February 1931. He had suspended his studies in college during Gandhiji's non-cooperation movement, and had then started the firm 'India Silk House' at Calcutta; but finding the lure of Yoga irresistible, he had shaken off the cares of family and business and boarded the "celestial omnibus" to Pondicherry. Once there, he never left it; a demure, scholarly, self-possessed person, he was utterly devoted to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, he used to give readings from Sri Aurobindo's poetry and The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, and he wrote authoritatively on the sadhana. The sense of consecration to the Divine blotted out all else from his memory, and for almost forty years he lived in the Ashram as the embodiment of surrender to the Divine.

From beyond the shores of India came Miss Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of the wartime American President. She had read Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita in the New York Public Library in the late nineteen twenties, and that effected the "decisive turn" in her life. She first acquired the habit of inward concentration, and learned to open herself to the psychic and the spiritual, and at last she was permitted to make the "passage to India" and join the Ashram. Sri Aurobindo gave her the name 'Nishta' ("one-pointed, fixed and steady concentration, devotion and faith in the single aim - the Divine and the Divine Realisation"), and it fitted her perfectly. Of Sri Aurobindo she said: "Here is one on earth whom one can love all one's life and in whom one can lose oneself." She willingly made typed copies of The Life Divine when the revised book was being got ready for the press. When she read The Ideal of Human Unity (she made a typed draft of this book as well), she wondered how it was that people like her father and herself hadn't seen things so clearly as Sri Aurobindo had from a comer of India.¹¹ Her sadhana was single-minded, and even when she fell ill, she declined to return to the States, remarking: "There they may take care of my body, but who will take care of my soul?"

And so they came, and most of them remained. Nirodbaran, for example, after a brilliant medical education in Edinburgh, returned to Bengal, and then made a bee-line to Pondicherry. Reminiscing about his discipleship to Sri Aurobindo, Nirod says:

A medical man, materialist by education, I cared very little for God and had no faith. I started the sadhana without having any idea about it, as Stendhal's

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Fabrice joined the army in utter ignorance of what war was like. And out of this raw and sceptical fellow Sri Aurobindo has made a fighter for the Divine.¹²

Like Arjava's, the bud of Nirod's psychic self too opened more and more as it warmed up in the sunshine of his Guru's Grace:

My intellectual preparation glided insensibly into creative activity. I wanted to be a poet. I had started writing in Bengali, then in English. ...Sri Aurobindo said that in the Ashram atmosphere a creative force was in action.... Every day he not only sent me inspiration but corrected my poems, gave concrete suggestions, explained the meaning of the poems which I composed without understanding what they meant. Strangely enough in both Bengali and English I wrote, medium-like, many such poems, some of which Sri Aurobindo called surrealist-mystic. ...Always his letters, persuasive like the wind, pushed me on till one day he cried out, "the poet is born. What about the Yogi?"¹³

Like his own "Lonely Tramp", he has since walked on, sustained by his dauntless faith:

My feet shall never rest nor tire

Until, my destined journey done,

I stand, led by the inscrutable fire,

Before the seat of the lonely One.¹⁴

Like Dilip and Amal, Nirod also corresponded with Sri Aurobindo a good deal from 1934 onwards, and as a physician he had privileges that others lacked, for even when correspondence had to be suspended during the daman rush-time, Nirod was permitted to make an exception of himself. " Correspondence suspended till after the 21st", Sri Aurobindo wrote once (February 1935), "and resumable only on notice. But under cover of your medical cloak, you can carry on. Only mum about it!"¹⁵ What human language can Nirod find for all that generous understanding and all that lavish downpour of Grace?

And Prithwi Singh came, he remained; notwithstanding his poor eyesight, he typed more than one draft of The Life Divine in the later nineteen thirties, and he also prepared the complete analytical index which later appeared in the American edition. And Nishikanto - a poet of distinction in Bengali - came and stayed on. And Bhishmadev the musician came. And Sisirkumar Mitra came from Shantiniketan, and has never looked back. Historian and educationist and Yogi, Sisir Mitra has been among the friendliest and most helpful of the Ashram community.

And thus as the years passed the Ashram has waxed in strength of numbers and widening influence. Men and women have come from all over India - and some from outside as well: from France, Germany, England, USA, Africa - and the sadhaks have had different religious backgrounds, and are drawn from a variety  

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of professions. Narayan Prasad, Premanand, Pujalal, Shankaragauda, Chandradip, Gangadharam - to name a few - were among the familiar figures in the Ashram in the early forties. The aeronautical engineer. Pinto, joined the Ashram and secured the name 'Udar', and has set up workshops and industries there. Madhav Pandit came in 1939 in the wake of his teacher, T.V. Kapali Sastry, and has been there since. A Sanskritist like Sastry, Madhav's consecration to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is as unflinching as it is unblemished. "Just as the Master Flutist of the Mahabharata attracted the choicest souls to his feet for his great work and master plan," says one writer, "so also Sri Aurobindo, the Master of the Supramental Age, has drawn this choicest instrument (Madhav Pandit) for his divine work and master plan."¹⁶ With his calm unhurried demeanour and taut strength tuned to the Divine, Madhav has been one of the principal, if unobtrusive, power-houses in the Ashram.

Not all the sadhaks, however, have been permanent inmates of the Ashram. Some like Sir Akbar Hydari usually came only for the darshans. Others stayed for periods short or long and went away. There was S. Doraiswami Aiyar, a Nationalist and leading Madras advocate, who gave up his lucrative practice to do sadhana in the Ashram, and he was there for several years. Distinguished in appearance, he wore the air of a man with a divine appointment to keep and was in readiness always. Another lawyer, Syed Mehdi Imam of Patna, educated almost wholly in England like Sri Aurobindo, was also drawn to him and the Mother, lived in the Ashram for years, and has written perceptively on Shakespeare's plays and on Savitri. And there was the ochre-robed Yogi Suddhananda Bharati, a prolific writer and poet in Tamil whose austere looks and leonine movements made an unforgettable impression on the visitor. Professor of philosophy like S.K. Maitra and Indra Sen, mathematicians like R. Vaidyanathaswami, seasoned politicians like Surendra Mohan Ghosh, Kannada poets like D.R. Bendre and V.K. Gokak, Sanskrit scholars like Acharya Abhayadev, and businessmen, industrialists, civil servants, diplomats - all were drawn to the Lighthouse from different points of the compass. Some felt they had reached their destined port, while others stayed for a while and put back to the sea hoping to return again, may be for a longer stay.

III

The Yoga-Ashram at Pondicherry that has been over sixty years a-growing is a hallowed area and a unique spiritual laboratory. It is easy to feel confused or to hug misapprehensions about it, but, actually, there is no need to be on the defensive about the Ashram. It is not a religious, social, educational or political organisation. It is not a "public body". It is not a corporation. It is not a caravanserai. In physical terms, an Ashram is the house or houses of a Guru or Master of spiritual philosophy in which he lives with the pupils who have come to him for instruction. The tradition of retirement from the world for study and meditation in an

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Ashram was already ancient at the time of Gautama Buddha, and Ashrams still exist in large numbers in India; "all depends on the Teacher and ends with his lifetime, unless there is another Teacher who can take his place".¹⁷ The part played by the Guru in the spiritual development of his disciples is most important, but it is not susceptible to cold categorisation or evaluation; a great deal must depend upon the variables Guru, disciple, vidyā, place, time and circumstance. It would, perhaps, be convenient to distinguish between the three main channels along which the Guru's influence can flow to the disciple and flood the tablelands of his aspiration, ardour and effort:

Firstly, transmission by written or oral teaching, instruction, or advice. Secondly, transmission by example: indeed the Master is a person who has already realised oneness with the Divine and whose life is a manifestation of this oneness. Thirdly, transmission by invisible influence and occult action. This last is the most important of the three; it is a tangible and constant reality for the advanced disciple.¹⁸

If the disciple is lucky, his lot will be cast in the hallowed company of a World-Teacher, but ordinarily it is enough for the disciple if in his eyes the Guru represents the divine wisdom, conveys to him something of the divine ideal or makes him sense the filiations between the human soul and the Eternal. The Guru's is a difficult and unique vocation, a "trust from above"; it is his destiny to be "a channel, a vessel or a representative"; and essentially "he is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a Light kindling other lights, an awakened Soul awakening souls, at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other powers of the Divine."¹⁹

While it is true that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram shares with all genuine Ashrams past and present a basically spiritual motivation, it is still not exactly the kind of Ashram people are commonly apt to visualise - an inaccessible nook in a jungle or on mountain fastnesses where a group of ochre-clad sadhus undergo austerities and do single-minded tapasya to be able to get for ever beyond the endless chain of birth and death and birth again! On the other hand, the Ashram at Pondicherry may be called - to use the word in no derogatory sense - a modem Ashram and a scientific one. It was located in 1926 in two houses in much the cleanest part of Pondicherry near the seashore. As the sadhaks increased in number, the Ashram has since had to take over several new buildings distributed over a fairly wide area; some buildings have had to be reconditioned, and some new structures too have come up. Describing the character and aims of the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo has remarked:

This Ashram has been created with another object than that ordinarily common to such institutions, not for the renunciation of the world but as a centre and a field of practice for the evolution of another kind and form of life which would in the final end be moved by a higher spiritual consciousness and embody a greater life of the spirit.²⁰

Vairāgya or meditative retirement or moksa is not the sole or even the primary  

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aim; the sādhaks are not sannyasis, not necessarily, and sannyasis are not excluded either. If the admission of women itself might have struck people as a dangerous novelty, at Pondicherry Sri Aurobindo not only admitted early two European ladies - Mirra Richard and Miss Dorothy Hodgson - as sadhaks, but installed the former in charge of the Ashram as the Mother and gave the latter the spiritual name of 'Vasavadutta' ('one who has given herself) or simply 'Datta'! Other ladies came presently, and sometimes the wife stayed in the Ashram while the husband followed his profession elsewhere, and sometimes the husband became a sadhak while the wife stayed back; and, of course, some couples joined the Ashram together. The problem of 'human relationships' is a ticklish one for the sadhak, but Sri Aurobindo's guidelines in the matter can give no room for ambiguity:

When one enters the spiritual life, the family ties which belong to the ordinary nature fall away - one becomes indifferent to the old things.... There need be no harshness in it at all. To remain tied to the old physical affections would mean to remain tied to the ordinary nature and that would prevent spiritual progress.²¹

The rule about personal relations in this Yoga is this: (1) all personal relations to disappear in the single relation between the sadhak and the Divine; (2) All personal (psychic-spiritual) relations to proceed from the Divine Mother, determined by her, and to be part of the single relation with the Divine Mother.²²

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.²³

Wife, comrade, son, brother, daughter, equally are they all fellow-sadhaks and they are near and dear because all are one with us in the Divine. Human relationships - brotherhood, love, friendship are sacred things and 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. Trust the true warmth of the pure flame of psychic love but beware of the flawed fuel of ego-desire!

The coming of the children was a development during the early years of the second world war. For personal and security reasons, some sadhaks desired permission to keep their families in the Ashram; and when this was given the children came too. It was presently felt that these children - who were growing in number - should receive suitable education, and so a School was started on 2 December 1943 with about twenty children on the roll. With the School came a Playground, and physical education - games, athletics, sports - came to occupy a visibly important place in Ashram life. It was after the communal riots of 1946 that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother felt that boys and girls - and even grown-up sadhaks - might with advantage give due attention to their physical fitness. When eyebrows  

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were raised within the Ashram and without regarding the wisdom of giving sports and athletics a place in Yoga, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a correspondent at some length and clarified the position. The sports were mainly for the children of the school, but they had to attend to their studies as well. The younger sadhaks were merely allowed - not enjoined or even advised - to join in these sports, and these sadhaks did other things also in the way of Karma-yoga. But it might be asked, "Why any sports at all in an Ashram?", which could only be answered by, "Why not?" And, besides the Ashram at Pondicherry was a different kind of Ashram altogether:

.. .this is not that orthodox kind of Ashram. It includes life in Yoga, and once we admit life we can include anything that we find useful for life's ultimate and immediate purpose and not inconsistent with the works of the Spirit. After all, the orthodox Ashram came into being only after Brahman began to shun all connection with the world and the shadow of Buddhism stalked over all the land and the Ashrams turned into monasteries. The old Ashrams were not entirely like that; the boys and young men who were brought up in them were trained in many things belonging to life: the son of Pururavas and Urvasie practised archery in the Ashram of a Rishi and became an expert bowman, and Kama became the disciple of a great sage in order to acquire from him the use of powerful weapons. So there is no a priori ground why sports should be excluded from life of an Ashram like ours where we are trying to equate life with the Spirit.²⁴

It was about this time too (the years immediately after the war and the coming of independence) that Sri Aurobindo set forth in ample detail his views on physical education and on the ideal of the perfect body. It was not simply a question of health, strength and fitness of the body, important as this was; of even greater consequence was the "development of discipline and morale and sound and strong character". And certain sports could also help "to form and even necessitate the qualities of courage, hardihood, energetic action and initiative or call for skill, steadiness of will or rapid decision and action, the perception of what is to be done in an emergency and dexterity in doing it".²⁵ The best education of the mind would be incomplete without the education of the body, and it was no more than the reaffirmation of the Hellenic ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body. But there was something else as well, rather more characteristic of the ancient Indian ideal:

If our seeking is for a total perfection of the being, the physical part of it cannot be left aside; for the body is the material basis, the body is the instrument which we have to use. Śarīram khalu dharmasādhanam, says the old Sanskrit adage, the body is the means of fulfilment of dharma.... A total perfection is the ultimate aim which we set before us, for our ideal is the Divine Life which we wish to create here, the life of the Spirit fulfilled on earth.... That cannot be unless the body too undergoes a transformation, un- less its action and functioning attain to a supreme capacity and the perfection  

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  The Mother

which is possible to it or which can be made possible.... It [the body] may even in the end be suffused with a light and beauty and bliss from the Beyond and the life divine assume a body divine.²⁶

In other words, if integral perfection is the ideal of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, the perfection of the body must form part of it and must therefore find a place in the Ashram scheme of education. And the purpose of this part of the Ashram discipline would be, in the Mother's words, "to build a body, beautiful in form, harmonious in posture, supple and agile in its movements, powerful in its activities and resistant in its health and organic functions".

In the life of the Ashram, the first decisive turn was taken on 24 November 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into the background asking the Mother to shape anew the outer and inner life of the community of sadhaks. Sri Aurobindo himself was now rather like the Witness Spirit behind the scenes, and, besides, his advice was always available to the Mother. As he wrote on 25 February 1945 to a disciple:

It has been an arduous and trying work for the Mother and myself to keep up this Ashram, with its ever-increasing numbers, to make both ends meet and at times to prevent deficit budgets and their results; specially in this war time, when the expenses have climbed to a dizzy and fantastic height.... Carrying on anything of this magnitude without any settled income could not have been done if there had not been the working of a divine Force.²⁷

In the pre-1926 period, as the Mother has acknowledged, the Ashram had been only "a collection of individuals... without a collective organisation... one could say it had a general value, but it was something very floating, without a collective reality".28 The aim, then, was to make collectivity as real as individuality, and besides to make the collective reality embrace even the individualities of those sadhaks who couldn't stay in the Ashram always. The whole point of Sri Aurobindo's teaching has been that there are overhead planes of consciousness above the mental, and it is possible to bring them down to inform and heighten our everyday life; and that, in the depth of things, there is a will much stronger than our surface human will, and this deeper force of action can be brought to the forefront to direct our actions. It is in the light of these profound truths that the Mother has given new life and form to the Ashram:

All our endeavour is to make this consciousness and this will govern our lives and action, and organise all our activities.... Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me full charge of it... all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and each service was created, not by any artificial planning, but by a living and dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress.²⁹

What was done in those early years - the thirties especially - was to prepare the individual consciousness to admit and recognise the necessity for a collective individuality, to help the sadhaks to shed their superficial angularities and egoistic separativities, and to tune themselves to the music of interdependence governed

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by the śruti of the Divine Will. Scores of houses have had to be secured or rented, and various services have had to be organised - partly because the growing numbers in the Ashram have to be enabled to live active, orderly, healthy and purposive lives, but even more because all life comes within the purview of this world-changing Yoga and every type of activity has to be used as a controlled experiment for the evolution of the higher life. But "work" in the Ashram has no status-symbol attached to it, nor is it remunerated as in the outside world; as Sri Aurobindo once explained the raison d'être behind the assignment and execution of work in the Ashram -

The work here is not intended for showing one's capacity or having a position. .. but as a field and an opportunity for the Karmayoga part of the integral Yoga, for learning to work in the true yogic way, dedication through service, practical selflessness, obedience, scrupulousness, discipline, setting the Divine and the Divine's work first and oneself last, harmony, patience, forbearance, etc.³⁰

There was, then, the question of "choice" or "acceptance": how were the sadhaks selected from among those who expressed the desire to join the Ashram? Quite obviously, there had to be restrictions; although many might hear the call, only a few could be chosen. Superficial or supercilious observers have wondered why So-and-so was selected and how Such-and-such were rejected. What were the criteria? Sometimes some of the sadhaks themselves have felt baffled, and have even taken their puzzlement to Sri Aurobindo; and on one such occasion, he answered:

It is necessary or rather inevitable that in an Ashram which is a "laboratory"... for a spiritual and supramental yoga, humanity should be variously represented. For the problem of transformation has to deal with all sorts of elements favourable and unfavourable. The same man indeed carries in him a mixture of these two things. If only sattwic and cultured men come for yoga, men without very much of the vital difficulty in them, then, because the difficulty of the vital element in terrestrial nature has not been faced and overcome, it might well be that the endeavour would fail.... Those in the Ashram come from all quarters and are of all kinds; it cannot be otherwise.³¹

More recently, Surendra Mohan Ghosh too has reported how Sri Aurobindo once told him: "The people outside think that the Mother selects very spiritually advanced people for the Ashram. Nothing of the kind. She selects different types.... She wants to observe how the Divine works in different types."³² The Ashram society was the microcosm of the macrocosmic global human race; and the integral Yoga was verily a pilot-project in the dynamics of individual and collectivist change, and the "instruments" were therefore chosen with that object in view.

As in the choice of the sadhaks, in the assignment of work to them also there was not always an immediately discoverable correlation between aptitude, attainments, qualifications and experience and the kind of work that was allotted. An intellectual might be first asked to work in the furniture section or to dust books in  

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the Ashram library or to read proofs: a prominent businessman might be asked to wash plates in the Dining Room; a member of a learned profession might be put in charge of nuts and bolts and screws; and so on. On the other hand, the work assigned may often seem to have an exact correspondence to the sadhak's visible capacities, at least, the sadhak will be seen - in due course - to grow from within the requisite power and personality for the job. There is no mystery in all this, however; as Sri Aurobindo wrote on one occasion to a disciple:

The work in the Ashram was not meant as a service to humanity or to a section of it called the sadhaks of the Ashram.... The work was meant as a service to the Divine and as a field for the inner opening to the Divine, surrender to the Divine alone, rejection of ego and all the ordinary vital movements and the training in a psychic elevation, selflessness, obedience, renunciation of all mental, vital or other self-assertion of the limited personality.³³

The Mother too has said more or less the same thing, though in a different language; the key word is 'sacerdocy':

That was my very first basis in forming the Ashram, that the work done must be an offering to the Divine.

Instead of letting oneself go in the current of one's nature, of one's mood, one must keep constantly in mind this kind of feeling that you are a representative of the Supreme Knowledge, the Supreme Truth, the Supreme Law, and you must apply it in the most honest way, in the most sincere way you are capable of; then you make great progress yourself....³⁴

In short, "work" in the Ashram is not for work's sake, not for the display of ability, but "a field of Sadhana, for getting rid of the lower personality and its reactions and acquiring a full surrender to the Divine".³⁵ The work assigned to a sadhak is meant to meet his true inner need rather than buoy up his own opinion of himself. On the one hand, the "work" is necessary for the complex and efficient functioning of the Ashram; on the other hand, the work will be the means for the psychic opening of the sadhak and his attunement to the divine purpose. Two attitudes of dissent are possible: the sadhak may feel that a low or inferior kind of work has been assigned to him, or he may grouse that he has been burdened with a too difficult task. As for the former, all work ranks the same with the Divine; and as for latter, the work being always an offering to the Divine, the necessary support will surely come from the Divine. It is the Divine's work, and the Divine force does the work through him and also helps him with his sadhana. In the ultimate analysis, aren't the work, the doer and the instrument one and the same, the Divine itself?

The sadhaks have no doubt come to the Ashram to live the higher spiritual life, but this life is still of the earth, and has to stand the tests of viability and effectivity. The Ashram doesn't treat "spiritual life" as something apart from - much less quite antagonistic to - everyday life. The "spiritual" problem is to open one's consciousness and charge it with the vibrations of the Truth, but while the sadhak is engaged in the task of beyonding the ego and harnessing the Divine, he  

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is also work-happy doing one of the hundreds of things that go to make the variegatedly rich life of the Ashram. Teaching, printing, proof-reading, binding, typewriting, painting, music, gate duty, sports, paper-manufacture, scent-making, doll-making, kitchen-service, dining-hall service, banking, accountancy, plumbing, bookselling, photography, poultry, dairy-management, farming, gardening, flower-arrangement, bakery, civil, mechanical, electrical and sanitary engineering, nursing, health service, town planning, architecture, tailoring, furniture service, footwear service, construction and maintenance service, flour-mill, oil-mill, fuel service, weaving service, cottage industries, transport service, postal service, etc. - indeed, there is no end to the bewildering network of activities in the Ashram that is nevertheless a seamless web of total harmony. Although some paid labour is employed, the main brunt of the responsibility for the work of the Ashram is born by the sadhaks themselves, for whom all work is worship or "sacerdocy". It is the psychic and spiritual relation between the sadhak and the Divine that holds the key to his progress in his vocation, in his sacerdocy. He steadily grows inwardly, his consciousness sprouts new wings of comprehension and perfect functioning, his karmayoga becomes one with his jñānayoga and bhaktiyoga. Sadhana issuing in efficient work, and work in its turn awakening the soul within and charging it with power and purpose: integral progress is the result of this zigzag reversible reaction between inner life and outer activity. The whole Ashram, then, has been a theatre of action with a push towards perfection; and the whole Ashram is also a laboratory of research in Yoga where the progressive gains of the sadhana are more and more reflected in the manifold works of the Ashram.

Yoga could be described as Nature intensified, concentrated, accelerated, for the invisible slow processes that may have taken ten thousand or a million years are pushed through a single life-span or a midnight vigil. Even as scientific and technological research through speculation, experimentation in a laboratory and pilot-projecting have often set in advance the clock of our material civilisation, Yogic endeavour through spiritual insights, realisations, and controlled experiments in an Ashram - or the world itself as an extended Ashram - might set the pace for humanity's evolutionary march. A thousand experiments may fail, yet the next one may be able to open the doors of resistance for a mass-march through the wide-open gates. The intended alchemic change of mentalised egoistic self-divided self-corrupting self-destroying man into spiritualised (or supramentalised) man in unison with all humanity and all Nature and enacting wholeness and harmony and the life divine, such a radical, such a revolutionary change cannot be effected except as the result of strivings, advances, setbacks, fresh advances and the final leap to the Goal. "There is a sort of locked struggle," Sri Aurobindo had written in 1915, "the spiritual force insisting against the resistance of the physical world... but the eye of knowledge looks beyond and sees that it is only a protracted episode."³⁶ The faith born of knowledge sustains the intestine struggle, for the victory must be won, and if possible in our life-time. This explains the faith of the growing number of sadhaks — growing steadily from 1926 to 1938, and at an

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even faster rate afterwards - who have volunteered to be mobilised to engage in the Yogic battle against the ignorance, the egoistic desires and the general human incapacity. Behind the infinite outer freedom from all rules and regulations, from all social and intellectual restraints, from all financial and hierarchic incentives, the inner link with the Divine - to the extent it has been established and is being maintained - enables the sadhaks in the Ashram and outside to accomplish the desired and destined inner change as well as the consequential collective change- To reach the Light, to manifest it in oneself and in the collectivity - that is the essence of the sadhana of this Yoga. But although it could be stated so simply, to practise it and register unqualified success - oh how difficult, how beset with peril and uncertainty! Yet beyond the quicksands of doubt and the fog of error, there surely looms yonder the unfading Light, the firm Victory, the divine Ananda.

IV

When 24 November 1926 had come and gone, the sadhaks knew that something very significant had happened. The Master went into a deeper retirement, and the Mother took full charge of the Ashram. It was popularly assumed that the world of the Overmind (or the world of the gods) had come down even to the physical plane. Sure enough, in the ensuing days, weeks and months, the sadhaks had striking experiences - "minute-to-minute miracles", as K.D. Sethna describes them. Some of these sadhaks had the feeling that they had received a mysterious accession of unpredictable power - it was as though anything might happen. The total effect, however, was hardly reassuring, and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had to resolve to stay the sudden descent of the Force. The sadhana had to go on, but less spectacularly though not less intensively; Sri Aurobindo and the Mother decided to concentrate - and advise others also to concentrate - on the physical, the subconscient and the inconscient.

The sudden opening up of the mental horizons - the quick unfreezing of the normally ego-ruled forms of vital energy - must inevitably produce startling visions and frightening experiences; and yet, should the physical base - the adhara - be unequal to the force of the descent, there might be terrible reactions. According to the ancient legend, Bhagiratha brought the Ganga down from Heaven, but the force of the impact on the earth would have been so great that Shiva himself had to be requested to contain the Force. In a condition of trance or samādhi, the body is laid asleep, individuality is painlessly transcended, and all separative consciousness is suspended; only the soul is awake in the oneness of omnipresent Reality. In a condition of sustained mental illumination, it is possible to infer the Truth, the Right, the Vast - the reality of Sachchidananda. One may accept intellectually the validity of Mach's Principle that not an atom can be really destroyed unless the entire universe also is destroyed, and not a thing can be newly created unless everything else also suffers some infinitesimal transmutation. But when

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one strays lower - to the heart which is the seat of the emotions, to the vital centre where the cauldron of desire keeps boiling constantly, to the physical plane where pain and pleasure fight their own unending battles, and to the still lower subconscient region of nightmarish fancies and the inconscient cellular mini-universes where a Walpurgis-night is perpetually being enacted - when consciousness makes the exploratory descent towards these lower planes of existence, when the world's regiments of confusions, contradictions and chaos batter through the private egoistic shell to fill it with the mud and filth and thorn and thistle and poison and perdition of all phenomenal existence, when such hell is let loose indeed, how shall the ādhāra bear the impact and the invasion and the insurrection?

To bring the higher consciousness to the lower planes is to be able to feel everybody's pain and pleasure, to bear everybody's kicks and caresses, to stomach everybody's nightmarish visions and fantasies, to survive everybody's cellular disturbances and tissue-deteriorations:

Accepting life, he [the Sadhaka of the integral Yoga] has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world's burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others'; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Their representative character gives them a much more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to recurrence. Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.³⁷ 

It is thus that the lower we go, the more difficult it becomes to maintain one's poise and calm and equality; and yet, unless these can be made to seep down to the lowest levels, the task of transformation must remain incomplete. Any moment there can be a Vesuvius eruption from below, and the sadhana of months or years can be destroyed by the spouting lava of a random moment. If salvation or mukti were to mean a non-physical non-terrestrial state of ineffable or transcendental bliss, as it meant to numberless people in the past, our everyday life here would be something to be merely suffered, its limitations and obscurations would have to be contained somehow - till physical death gave the necessary release. If, on the contrary, man were verily the advanced scout of the evolutionary adventure, if man were really destined to rise higher still and enact the Life Divine even here on this earth, it must then be possible for him to change his present nature totally into supernature. The higher consciousness must be lured to descend and inhabit and transform the lower planes (the lowest inconscient not excluded) -

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and this must be done regardless of the difficulties involved. For Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and their disciples, there was no escaping the rigorous logic or even the plain sense of the matter: either they had to give up the integral Yoga, or they had to dare the consequences of the sadhana being brought down to the lowest levels. The successive shocks and disturbances and exasperations had to be met squarely and transcended till the intervening regions of the resistance were all purified and spiritualised (or supramentalised), and from highest to lowest there was but one consciousness, one sensibility, one personality, but all moulded in the Divine substance.

As regards the outer growth of the Ashram after 1926, relevant "facts and figures" are not lacking to satisfy human curiosity: how the number of sadhaks increased year by year, when and which new buildings were secured and for what purpose, which new Services were organised and under whose departmental direction, how the different industries came into existence, how the sports and athletics are being organised so efficiently, how the Ashram runs a well-equipped surgery and dispensary, how a Centre of Education, a sugar refinery, and a perfumery are being run, how the magnificent modem guest-house, the Golconde, has come to be constructed, and so on. But all this is only the visible impressive facade, while the reality is still the transforming reactor within. It is the inner Agni - the Agni behind even the Saura Agni or the solar fire - that is the hub of the process. The stage is the inner world, the worlds within - the vital, the physical, the subconscient, the inconscient. But what do we know about this quintessential aspect of the Ashram's history - or of Sri Aurobindo's history - after 1926? We have only some broad clues, and we should try to piece them together in the best way possible.

Recalling the time when he first went to the Ashram (December 1927), K.D. Sethna has said recently:

Instead of bringing down he Great Gods, the effort now was to start from the bottom, not from the top - to dig, as it were, into the subconscient and gradually prepare the purification of the human consciousness and nature and bring out what Sri Aurobindo has called the psychic being.... Thus the evolutionary creature would develop slowly, gradually with a lot of hardships but still with a sure footing.

So that was the condition, the spiritual condition of the sadhana into which I happened to stumble.³⁸

Nirod's testimony is not different:

I came to the Ashram at a period when the sadhana was going on in the subconscient, as Sri Aurobindo said to me. The subconscient is like a dense virgin forest; we find a superb description of it in his A God's Labour.³⁹

And Sri Aurobindo himself wrote to Dilip that he was engaged in "dredging, dredging, dredging the mire of the subconscious".⁴⁰ And here are some more excerpts from Sri Aurobindo's letters belonging to the period 1934-6:

We had tried to do it [the sadhana] from above through the mind and higher  

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vital, but it could not be because the Sadhaks were not ready to follow - their lower vital and physical refused to share in what was coming down or else misused it and became full of exaggerated and violent reactions. Since then the Sadhana as a whole has come down along with us into the physical consciousness.... The total descent into the physical is a very troublesome affair - it means a long and trying pressure of difficulties, for the physical is normally obscure, inert, impervious to the Light. It is a thing of habits, very largely a slave of the subconscient and its mechanical reactions.... We would have preferred to do all the hard work ourselves there and called others down when an easier movement was established, but it did not prove possible.⁴¹

I am myself living in the physical consciousness and have been for several years. At first it was a plunge into the physical - into all its obscurity and inertia, afterwards it was a station in the physical open to the higher and higher consciousness and slowly having fought out in it the struggle of transformation of the physical consciousness with a view to prepare it for the supramental change.⁴²

But, of course, anyone who wants to change earth-nature must first accept it in order to change it. To quote from an unpublished poem of my own [A God's Labour]:

He who would bring the heavens here,

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way... ⁴³

No, it is not with the Empyrean that I am busy: I wish it were. It is rather with the opposite end of things; it is in the Abyss that I have to plunge to build a bridge between the two. But that too is necessary for my work and one has to face it.⁴⁴

What seems to have happened is something like this: the spiritual atmosphere in the Ashram was being gradually charged with increasing power and purpose during the years 1922-6, and this concentration rose to a high intensity in the weeks following Sri Aurobindo's birthday on 15 August 1926, culminating in the siddhi of 24 November signifying the descent of the overmental Force. In the months following - for nearly a year - the disciples had certain unusual experiences which were not capable of explanation in rational terms. The events or experiences had almost the look of 'miracles', but actually they were overmental superimpositions on our normal three-dimensional Euclidean material world. To be engrossed in such feats of supranormal occurrences would have meant leaving the lower life where it was, but structuring glittering edifices on a recalcitrant or inertia-ridden physical base: an open invitation to sudden eruptions with their disastrous consequences. Sri Aurobindo therefore ordained that the tenuous new connection between the overmental gods and the disciples should be cut, and that the sadhaks  

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should do the yoga of transformation at the material or physical base - the emphasis now being on Karmayoga in its many forms expressive of the Ashram's variegated communal life. To build except on a supramental base would have been to repeat the familiar "old fiasco" once again. The building of the Life Divine had to be - it could only be on strong physical foundations:-the consciousness that had been the monopoly of the mind and heart and the vital had to be transmitted to the body also and to the very seats of the inconscience. Just before November 1934, when there was the possibility of the Supramental Light coming down to the physical, all the subconscient mud arose to put it off - yet Sri Aurobindo also added consolingly: "But there are red crimson lights. One is Supramental Love, the other is Supramental Physical Force."45 The commandment of the integral Yoga is that, not the mind alone, not the heart alone, "even the body shall remember God" - but that could happen only when the body shed its inertia and inconscience and automatism, and the very cells learned to live consciously - learned to aspire for the Divine, to reject false movements, to act always as if fully tuned to the Divine Will. The sadhana in the physical thus means to strive to substitute an inert or false or sluggish consciousness by a true one. It is pertinent to recall here what the Mother has said in the course of a conversation:

...each time an illness is cured, each time an accident is avoided, each time a catastrophe, even a terrestrial catastrophe is avoided, all that is always the intervention of the Vibration of Harmony into the vibration of Disorder that causes the disorder to stop...

And this Vibration (that I feel and see) gives the impression of a fire; it is that which the vedic Rishis must have translated as the Flame - in the human consciousness, in man, in Matter...⁴⁶

The process of transformation would thus have to be carried out by the Flame, the ultimate Agni, "the warm golden dust", the supreme Ray of the Spirit - as the result of the descent of the Supramental Light. Just as mental and vital peace have to be secured by flinging out the disturbing, distorting or invading thoughts and cravings and obsessions, purposeful peace in the physical has to be won by beating back the hordes of false vibrations and opening the cells to the alchemic influence of the Vibration of Harmony, the Vibration of Peace and the Vibration of Bliss. Then the whole man - body, vital, mind - would become a perfectly stringed instrument, capable of the music of truest thought, love and action completely tuned to the śruti of the Will of God. The whole adventure may perhaps be summed up as in Narad's prophetic words:

Across the dust and mire of the earthly plain,

On many-guarded lines and dangerous fronts,

In dire assaults, in wounded slow retreats...

Awaiting the tardy trumpets of the dawn,...

Marches the army of the waylost god. ...

At length his front's indomitable line  

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Forces the last passes of the Ignorance:

Advancing beyond Nature's last known bounds,...

It mounts through a miraculous upper air

Till climbing the mute summit of the world

He stands upon the splendour-peaks of God.⁴⁷

V

In all Yoga, and more so in the integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the Guru's role is of supreme importance. No doubt the ultimate Guru, like the ultimate Shastra, is lodged within, but at least till that advanced stage of the Yoga is reached - no easy matter at all - the reliance on the Guru has to be absolute. The sadhak could profitably read The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Mother and the other works of the Master, and this anyone could do anywhere, and this is also the way in which many have had their first spiritual encounters with Sri Aurobindo. In the Ashram itself, the sadhaks were in a privileged position, since they could receive personal guidance from Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, - for even after his retirement he was willing to write detailed letters to the sadhaks on problems relating to their progress in the Yoga. But there could also be other means of control and guidance: pranām and darśan, for example, which are central to the practice of Yoga. Darśan, pranām - even the sense of the Guru's presence although not actually seen - have been a felt power of infinite potency. To see the Guru, to be seen by him - to bend one's head to touch the Guru's feet, to be blessed by the touch of the Guru's palm on one's head - these have been efficacious ways of receiving guidance and Grace, for the Guru could verily be the channel for the transmission of transforming vibrations from the Divine. Even if the Guru is not physically present before the sadhak, his invisible occult influence will not be hedged in by place and time and outer circumstances.

Sadhaks had pranām and darśan almost daily before 24 November 1926, but afterwards Sri Aurobindo gave darśan only on three days in the year, and after 1938 on four days. When the number of sadhaks and visitors increased, darśan did not include pranām as well. But pranām to the Mother continued all along, and special darśans too. 'Birthday' - whether Sri Aurobindo's, the Mother's or the individual sadhak's - have particular importance, and on such occasions Guru and disciple try to establish a personal link by means of the pranām or at least a message of Blessings from the Guru. About the significance of the birthday meeting, Sri Aurobindo once wrote to a disciple:

There is a rhythm (one among many) in the play of the world-forces which is connected with the sun and the planets. That makes the birthday a day of possible renewal when the being is likely to be more plastic.⁴⁸

About pranām itself - which might take the form of kneeling, the touch of the Guru's feet by head or hand, all done in a condition of inner surrender - it is easy

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to build foolish mental edifices. During the years of Sri Aurobindo's retirement, the disciples used to offer pranām to the Mother - some almost daily - and several of them used to write to Sri Aurobindo about their reactions to the pranām. And he invariably answered these letters with a divine patience! Thus, although in "retirement", his direct and constant participation in the sadhaks' spiritual progress was assured. Sri Aurobindo often used to say that his and the Mother's were a single consciousness, and thus the result of pranām and darśan was to establish or renew or reinforce the psychic link between the sadhak and the powers that represented the Divine to him. Sri Aurobindo has explained that the purpose of the momentary physical contact was only to facilitate the more important psychic opening or communion. Darśan at the time of collective meditation, whether with Sri Aurobindo or the Mother or both present, was an attempt "to bring down the right consciousness in the atmosphere of the Ashram"; and concentration and meditation are the means employed to effect the inner opening so that the descending Force may be received without obstruction or diversion. Regarding the right use of darśan and pranām, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

Physical means [like Darshan and touch in the Pranam]... are one means of approaching the Divine and receiving the Light and materialising the psychic contact, and so long as it is done in the right spirit and they are used for the true purpose they have their place.⁴⁹

An excessive cerebration or vital expectancy at the time of the darśan or pranām could do more harm than good. The physical contact - sight, touch - being only the means to the psychic contact, the essential thing is to still the vital movements, still the mind, and achieve a condition of perfect plasticity for the Divine Force to operate:

The inner connection can only be developed by an inner concentration and aspiration, not by a mere outward Pranam every day...

The greatest test of love and devotion is... when it bums as strongly in long absence as in the presence.⁵⁰

Again and again and yet again Sri Aurobindo warned the sadhaks that the relationship between them and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was a psychic, a spiritual, and not a purely mundane or physical or vital, bond - and it was not to be evaluated in material or mental categories:

The Ashram is not a schoolboys' class nor is the Yoga a competitive examination. ... At the Pranam the Mother puts her force to help the Sadhak what he ought to do is to receive quietly and simply, not to spoil the occasion by these foolish ideas and by watching who gets more of her hand and smile and who gets less....⁵¹

The heart of the secret is also the central principle of avatarhood: "The Divine has to put on humanity in order that the human being may rise to the Divine."⁵²

Those special occasions - the three or four annual darśans - were of course unique moments in the sadhaks' spiritual life. Different sadhaks have reacted differently - and the same sadhak on different occasions. Some have come from the

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darśan completely overwhelmed, with a sudden psychic efflorescence almost too powerful to bear. It is said that once an American visitor fell unconscious at the feet of Sri Aurobindo for about thirty minutes, and when he recovered consciousness declared that he had seen the whole map of America at the feet of the Master!⁵³ Others have returned in a condition of supernal calm that continued for days. As Nirod wrote after a darśan:

This time I had a great Ananda at Darshan. At the very sight of you I seem to have seen Shiva himself! And what a rapture it was!...

All these happy impressions and recollections were with me vividly for 2 or 3 days. Then I found that all that consciousness has evaporated....

Sri Aurobindo promptly replied: "It has not evaporated but drawn back from the surface."⁵⁴ The normal feeling used to be that, after darśan or darśan and pranām, one's inner being had been recharged (as batteries are) by the Divine, and with that spiritual renewal the sadhak felt that he would be able to stand the buffets of everyday life for many a long day. "If you get something by the darshan," Sri Aurobindo wrote to Nirod, "it is better to go home and absorb it.. ."⁵⁵ Of the darśan on 15 August 1936, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

The last Darshan was good on the whole. I am not now trying to bring anything sensational down on these days, but I am watching the progress in the action of the Force and Consciousness that are already there, the infiltration of a greater Light and Power from above, and there was a very satisfactory crossing of a difficult border which promises well for the near future. A thing has been done which had long failed to accomplish itself and which is of great importance.⁵⁶

It would thus appear that the collective aspiration of a flowing stream of sadhaks could itself create a concentration of spiritual atmosphere conducive to a collective advance in the Yoga although spearheaded by the Guru. The gains for the sadhak, of course, are beyond accountancy, and even beyond recordation. But the poets have made some attempts all the same. Thus Nirod:

A moment's touch - what founts of joy arise

Running through dull grains of my life's dead sands

Like a cool stream...

The finite for this one moment brief drinks

The Infinite.

One moment only, alas!

Time seizes and Space dungeons and the dream,

The deep spell breaks.⁵⁷

Thus Arjava (J.A. Chadwick):

Shining lance, far above rifted woe,

Reveal to earth the ending of thy quest;

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When thou to the Holy Logos shall be pressed,

The Hidden Love behind all universe

Sends ruby fire and ever-living flow, - 

And night is fading, dreams of self disperse.⁵⁸

And thus, thirteen years later (1948), Themis after her darśan:

The far voices of the earth die;

And in the vast lone hush of Being, Thou

Foldest Thy love around my cry....

O power-winged Love, Thou bearest me

O'er storm-black gulfs and endless mires of sleep,

To sunlit heavens of purity.⁵⁹

The darśan was always a seminal moment, an act of divine insurance, a moment in time out of time when something that is truly timeless was sought and won. In the first twelve years after his retirement (1926-38), the darśan was a leisurely procession, and each sadhak or visitor had some little time to himself when he could touch Sri Aurobindo's feet and offer pranam, and he would then place the palm of his hand on the disciple's head and "the Master's grace would rain over as like the Amitabha Buddha's". The people who had darśan were comparatively fewer, and the darśan went on from morning till past noon. But after 1938, the number of visitors wishing to have darśan increased greatly, and the sadhaks too had grown in number; and the darśan had therefore to be somewhat hurried through in the afternoon. Every darśan day was a festive occasion, not in any worldly sense - for there was no noise, no fanfare, no vitalistic display - but with the flag of aspiration and hope fluttering within, responding to the intimations of the Spirit with which the whole atmosphere of the Ashram and its environs came to be specially charged on those days. In fact, the visitors would start coming days before the darśan, and on that day the stream would grow into a flood. In their hundreds they would come - princes and paupers, financiers and politicians, merchants and landlords, saints and sinners, teachers and students, even hesitant scoffers and half-hearted believers - all desiring to have darśan of Sri Aurobindo. Did they know - did all of them know - what darśan meant? What precise experience was in store for them, how exactly it was going to grow into their being and shape their future - this they couldn't know as yet. Perhaps it was only an idle curiosity that had brought some to Pondicherry; and some might have caught the contagion of enthusiasm from their friends; and a few might have earlier chanced to read one of Sri Aurobindo's works and been temporarily swept off their feet. Perhaps, again, some might have learned by slow degrees to follow the career of Sri Aurobindo and admire the poet, the prophet of nationalism, and the philosopher, but failed to go further - might have nurtured a giant scepticism about the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

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- and come now at last to see for themselves whether the Yogi was really more than, or even the explanation of, the poet and prophet and philosopher. Men and women of all categories were they, and many children too, some carrying heaven in their hearts, others merely frolicsome and gay, and many suddenly charmed and chastened by the Ashram atmosphere.

On darśan days the Ashram would be filled with a suppressed excitement. There would be heard - more than on other days - the accents of many languages. Did it matter if one didn't know who one's neighbour was? Everyone was a copilgrim to the shrine of Fulfilment, and that alone mattered. One might whisper to one's neighbour if one cared to, but it was safer, on the whole, to sit or move about quietly. It was better to participate in the repast of silence; it was most becoming to seek refuge in the wisdom and strength of the uplifting reticence. Most of the sadhaks, and many even among the visitors, would have a noticeably abstracted air. They would sit, by themselves or in little clusters, on the pavements or on the steps of a flight of stairs, and would seem lost in thought. They were all on the threshold of a unique experience (if the regular sadhaks were to be believed), they felt projected into a strange new world - and they wondered what priceless revelation (or what dismal disappointment) was waiting for them round the corner.

The queue would be formed at last by about two in the afternoon - usually a bright day, and a great day for Pondicherry. The queue would start moving, although hardly seeming to move; coiling upwards towards the old library, coiling downwards, emerging into the garden, and soon turning sharply towards the meditation hall. It would move on like an impossibly long centipede, enveloping the pillars, scaling the stairs - now in one direction now in another - and at last reaching the very hall, the very spot... such a long long queue with its cusps and crests, its links and breaks, its ascents and descents, swaying and moving and stopping and moving again. How patiently the pilgrims awaited their chance, how self-absorbed many of them stood, how reverently they clutched the tulsi garlands or the fair white flower or the bright red rose. "I cannot believe... I want to believe... I must believe... I will believe": thus even the agnostic prayed, and hope and despair warred in his bosom, and he held the garland in a yet firmer grip.

The last turn taken, one's eyes grazed over the intervening forms and rested on the two figures seated together in unblenched majesty and aura serene: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother! The great moment had come... there was a flood of the Light of Truth... and the mere mind staggered, the mere human frame lurched forward mechanically, but the eyes were held irretrievably as if divinely spell-bound. The crowning moment of all, and one faced the Master, one faced the Mother; it was impossible to face the scrutiny of those piercing eyes, to meet the benediction of that dissolving smile. A second or two, perhaps, certainly not much more... but who could keep count of the fleeting fragments of time? One rather glimpsed then the splendorous truth. There shall be no more time\ Eternity was implicated in a grain of Time... one all but crossed the boundaries of Time and Space! And, alas, one was already out of the room.

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The pulses of life would then start beating again; the wires, the machinery of the mind would resume their work once more. The feet would mechanically know where to go and, back in one's room, one would be free to absorb the experience. The face of the Master had borne little resemblance to the published portraits and even less to one's deliberate imaginings, - yet it had worn a familiar look. Where had one seen the Master before? Was it the face of Zeus as it had appeared in an old book of mythology - or that of Aeschylus? Rishi Vasishtha had, perhaps, worn such radiance when he blessed King Dasharatha's son; perhaps Valmiki had sat even like that when the Ramayana in its entirety shaped itself before his wise and lustrous eyes. And hour later - and hours later - the vision remained, the experience persisted, the memory of the smile was like a balm to one who had often fallen on the thorns of life, the memory of the brahmatej, austere yet inconceivably beautiful, that was resplendent on Sri Aurobindo's face was like a renewal of strength and hope, and one dared to hope that even the frailest foulest clay could evolve - however long the journey and arduous the path - into the supermanhood of the Gnostic Being and the triune glory of Sachchidananda!

VI

Darśan and Pranām were special occasions - elected moments - when through physical contacts the physical is transcended and the whole being is wafted into the regions of the spiritual sublime- But Sri Aurobindo also adopted other means to maintain contacts with the disciples in the Ashram and even outside. The letters that passed between him and the sadhaks were one channel of communication and guidance; and the renewed talks - under different circumstances inner and outer - after 1938 were another channel.

It was customary for the disciples to leave their queries and recordations of personal experience in a tray before 11 p.m. every day - the letters might pile up to a hundred or more - and Sri Aurobindo would sit up half the night answering them, and these replies would be distributed to the respective sadhaks by Nolini the next morning. The sadhaks could write about anything - almost anything - and some wrote twice a day and there was at least one sadhak who, on occasions, wrote thrice a day: and they wrote about their trials, their hopes, their dark nights, their dreary days, their sudden exultations and exhilarations, their strange fears and their leaden-eyed despairs - or they wrote about problems of philosophy, or Yoga theory and practice, or poetic inspiration and technique - or even on contemporary Indian and world politics. And the reply came giving the true balm of spiritual succour in the shape of a kindly-worded, conversationally-spoken, message - an epistle long or short, gay or serious, but always springing from the heart and from the home of Truth, and appropriate in every way to the nature of the query and the character and mood of the correspondent. And an important letter sent to a particular disciple soon became the common property of the inmates of

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the Ashram - sometimes typed copies were made available, although Sri Aurobindo himself usually wrote in his minute artistic hand using slips of paper of divers sizes - and every sadhak derived what benefit he could, each according to his or her individual need and capacity.

There must now be in existence several thousands of these letters, and from time to time selections from (or collections of) these letters have been published to reach an audience wider than the Ashram, and as wide as the world. The Riddle of This World appeared in 1933, Lights on Yoga in 1935, Bases of Yoga in 1936;77ie Mother (1928) too had in the main a similar origin. Introducing the first series of Letters of Sri Aurobindo (1947), Kishor Gandhi wrote:

The letters of Sri Aurobindo are a vast literature of very great value... intended for direct and intimate help to disciples, they are written in a somewhat less lofty and difficult style than his other more metaphysical works and yet they bear that stamp of luminous authenticity and are charged with that High Wisdom that comes from the constant living in the Spirit's complete Truth.

More collections appeared, and then most of the letters pertaining to Yoga were brought out in two omnibus volumes, Tomes One and Two of On Yoga - Book Two (1958). Tome One comprises letters on 'The Supramental Evolution', Integral Yoga and the Other Paths', 'The Purpose of Avatarhood', 'The Foundations of the Sadhana', Sadhana through Work, Meditation, Love and Devotion, and similar topics; and Tome Two comprises letters on the Transformation of the Mind, the Vital, the Physical, the Subconscient and the Inconscient, and on the Triple Transformation, Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental. The letters have been graded and arranged with infinite care, and in their totality the two Tomes constitute a many-limbed but unforbidding treatise complementary to The Synthesis of Yoga.

While appreciating the freedom and informality of the epistolary form, it is equally necessary to remember the implied limitations. Sri Aurobindo warned more than once against readers indiscriminately applying to themselves what had been written in a particular context:

It is not always safe to apply practically to oneself what has been written for another. Each sadhak is a case by himself and one cannot always or often take a mental rule and apply it rigidly to all who are practising the yoga.... Each sadhak has a nature or turn of nature of his own and the movement of the yoga of two sadhaks, even where there are some resemblances between them, is seldom exactly the same.⁶⁰

People often catch hold of something written by me or said by the Mother, give it an interpretation quite other than or far beyond its true meaning and deduce from it a suddenly extreme and logical conclusion which is quite contrary to our knowledge and experience. It is natural, I suppose, and part of the game of the hostile forces; it is so much easier to come to vehement logical conclusions than to look at the Truth which is many-sided and whole.⁶¹

I thought it was understood that what I wrote to you about persons was

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private. Experiences one's own or others' if one comes to know of them, should not be talked about or made a matter of gossip. It is only if there can be some spiritual profit to others and even then if they are experiences of the past that one can speak of them. Otherwise it becomes like news of Abyssinia or Spain, something common and trivial for the vital mass-mind to chew or gobble.⁶²

But of course these cautions apply only to advice or comments or instructions regarding the sadhana of individual disciples. The broad general statements, the enunciations of principle, the elaborations of theory, the differentiations between states of mind, the precise definitions of terms (like 'peace', 'calm', 'quiet', 'silence' ; or Sadhana, Tapasya, Aradhana, Dhyana),63 the exact location of planes and parts of the being, the interpretations of particular visions, dreams and symbols, the fascinating excursions into philosophy, aesthetics, history or politics, these have a value for all. When the letters are torn from the relevant questions which provoked them, when portions of letters are separated and arranged along with portions of other letters so as to form reasonably coherent expositions or at least to make an ordered sequence of comments on the same or collateral topics - and this has been done with singular editorial patience and tact and skill in the two tomes of On Yoga - Part Two and in some of the earlier collections like Lights on Yoga and Bases of Yoga - the personal human touch, the contextual piquancy, even the sheer brilliance and gusto of the writing are inevitably lost. But in volumes like Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, the collection of letters entitled Life Literature - Yoga, and Dilip's Among the Great, Sri Aurobindo came to Me and Yogi Sri Krishnaprem - all of which include several of Sri Aurobindo's letters - it is easier to appreciate the personal touch with its humour and humanity as well as the universal application; the letters then become a voice near one's ear and a voice from above, verbal curtains that shut us in and are woven out of the delicate turns of common speech. A letter like the one Sri Aurobindo wrote to Dilip on the 'logic of his doubts" .M being impeccably phrased in rhythms akin to those of subdued but nervous conversational speech, plays upon one's tongue; with disarming ease and friendliness and force. But it is in exchanges like the following that the true Guru-Sishya relationship is brought out, mingling the bantering and the sublime with a delightful freedom:

Nirodbaran: No joy, no energy, no cheerfulness. Don't like to read or write - as if a dead man were walking about. Do you understand the position? Any personal experience?

Sri Aurobindo: I quite understand; often had it myself devastatingly. That's why I always advise people who have it to cheer up and buck up.... To cheer up, buck up and the rest if you can, saying "Rome was not built in a day" - if you can't, gloom it through till the sun rises and the little birds chirp and all is well.

Looks however as if you were going through a training in vairāgya. Don't much care for vairāgya myself, always avoided the beastly thing, but had to go through it partly, till I hit on samatā as a better trick. But samatā

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is difficult, vairāgya, vairāgya is easy, only damnably gloomy and uncomfortable.⁶⁵

Nirodbaran: My hard labour and effort deprive me of the joy of creation and discourage me with a dread of the work. You say this is because I am an "efforter" and a "hower". All very well. Sir, but have you shown me the Grand Trunk Road of non-effort - not to speak of leading the way?

Sri Aurobindo: There are two ways of arriving at the Grand Trunk Road. One is to climb and struggle and effortise, (like the pilgrim who traverses India prostrating and measuring the way with his body, - that's the way of effort). One day you suddenly find yourself on the G.T.R. when you least expect it. The other is to quiet the mind to such a point that a greater Mind of mind can speak through it. (I am not here talking of the supramental.) You will do neither. Your mind refuses to be quiet - your vital kicks at the necessity of effort. One too active, the other too lazy. How can I show you the G.T.R. when you refuse either way of reaching it?⁶⁶

The innumerable letters that deal mainly with Yoga - either the underlying principles of the Yoga or intimate personal problems like those relating to food, desire, sex, illness, etc. have their practical value to sadhakas, for whom they are intended. An exercise in differentiation like the following must certainly prove helpful to a practising sadhak:

The difference between a vacant mind and a calm mind is this: that when the mind is vacant, there is no thought, no conception, no mental action of any kind, except an essential perception of things without the formed idea; but in the calm mind, it is the substance of the mental being that is still, so still that nothing disturbs it.... A mind that has achieved this calmness can begin to. act, even intensely and powerfully, but it will keep its fundamental stillness - originating nothing-from itself but receiving from Above...⁶⁷

Even more pertinent and pointed are the following remarks on the entire futility of suicide:

Suicide is an absurd solution....

Sadhana has to be done in the body, it cannot be done by the soul without the body. When the body drops, the soul goes wandering in other worlds - and finally it comes back to another life and another body. Then all the difficulties it had not solved meet it again in the new life. So what is the use of leaving the body?...

The only sensible thing is to face the difficulties in this life and this body and conquer them.⁶⁸

This life, then, is not to be wantonly thrown away, and this body is not to be thoughtlessly allowed to decay before its time. The outer physical is not to be divorced from the inner vital, mental or psychic, and without orderly harmony and organisation the physical cannot be made an efficient and perfect instrument for whatever work one has to do. Changes in outer or physical life, if not dictated

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by the needs of the inner development but only by the call of external novelty, can hardly lead to any lasting good. As Sri Aurobindo explained in one of his letters:

There can be no physical life without an order and-rhythm. When this order is changed, it must be in obedience to an inner growth and not for the sake of external novelty. It is only a certain part of the surface lower vital nature which seeks always external change and novelty for its own sake.

It is by a constant inner growth that one can find a constant newness and unfailing interest in life.⁶⁹

The concern one brings to the well-being and efficiency of one's physical body has further to be extended in respect of one's dealings with other physical or material things as well. In handling houses, furniture, machines, cars, and other physical things ever so apparently insignificant, it would be wise to remember that each entity - a chair, a pen, a mirror, a vase, a paper-weight - has its own veiled consciousness, and the avoidance of violence for the sake of violence, of waste as a kind of spendthrift energy, and of carelessness as a sign of dispersion (instead of concentration) of consciousness, should be part of one's sadhana in the physical:

Wanton waste, careless spoiling of physical things in an incredibly short time, loose disorder, misuse of service and materials due either to vital grasping or to tamasic inertia are baneful to prosperity and tend to drive away or discourage the Wealth-Power.... Asceticism for its own sake is not the ideal of this yoga, but self-control in the vital and right order in the material are a very important part of it - and even an ascetic discipline is better... than a loose absence of true control.⁷⁰

One has to learn to use things with the right consciousness - to learn to use, not misuse things; and one has to learn to observe the right measure when going in for even needed essentials like food and sleep if one wants to keep the material base or sheath in efficient trim. "...no yoga can be done without sufficient food and sleep," says Sri Aurobindo and adds: "Fasting or sleeplessness make the nerves morbid and excited.... It is the same with everything else";⁷¹ matra or measure is most important. The long hours of sleep are not all a period of 'rest' but make a nightly Odyssey for a brief return to Ithaca where Penelope is waiting, waiting, and in one letter Sri Aurobindo shows how modern medical theory corroborates occult-spiritual experiences:

A long unbroken sleep is necessary because there are just ten minutes of the whole into which one enters into a true rest - a sort of Sachchidananda immobility of consciousness - and that it is which really restores the system. The rest of the time is spent first in travelling through various states of consciousness towards that and then coming out of it back towards the waking state. This fact of the ten minutes true rest as been noted by medical men, but of course they know nothing about Sachchidananda!⁷²

From the waking state to the Sachchidananda state of complete rest, light and silence is a necessary nightly journey, which is however usually disturbed or arrested or reversed before the restorative ten minutes' period. With most people,

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the consciousness in the night descends below the level of the waking consciousness. The aim in the yoga is not to rely on sleep alone to give the sadhak the needed ten minutes' susupti state of Brahman consciousness, but rather to tune the waking state itself to intensities of seeing and being, and thereby to push consciousness to higher and higher planes and the highest possible. But although one might talk of planes and grades, yet all is one whole arc of consciousness:

In all the series of the planes or grades of consciousness there is nowhere any real gulf, always there are connecting gradations and one can ascend from step to step. Between the overmind and the human mind there are a number of more and more luminous gradations; but, as these are superconscient to human mind... it is apt to regard them as a superior Inconscience. So one of the Upanishads speaks of the Ishwara consciousness as susupti, deep Sleep, because it is only in Samadhi that man usually enters into it, so long as he does not try to turn his waking consciousness into a higher state.⁷³

The central aim therefore should be to achieve a condition of heightened Brahman consciousness, not in the sushupti stage of sleep alone (which is all too brief and all too unpredictable and uncontrollable.) nor in the engineered samādhi state (which is the total, if temporary, suspension of normal consciousness), but rather in the waking state itself:

...it is in the waking state that this realisation must come and endure in order to be a reality of the life. If experienced in trance it would be a superconscient state true for some part of the inner being, but not real to the whole consciousness. Experiences in trance have their utility for opening the being and preparing it, but it is only when the realisation is constant in the waking state that it is truly possessed. Therefore in this yoga most value is given to the waking realisation and experience.

To work in the calm ever-widening consciousness is at once a sadhana and a siddhi.⁷⁴

Again, just as there are the processes and forces of Yoga to hasten Nature's slow evolutionary endeavour towards the ultimate goal of perfection, there are also the devious movements and undivine forces that conspire to resist and throw back the sadhak during his accelerated march made possible by his Yoga. In everyday life we deal with the normal forces of average human nature - the ordinary vital movements, or the waves from the general Nature, Prakriti. We are exposed to 'desires' and temptations that come with a thousand suggestions from the outside, penetrate to the subconscious vital, and then surge upwards in all their malignancy. While the average man has to deal day by day with this horde of desire-suggestions, the sadhak has to face in addition a set of hostile undivine forces as well. To strive of set purpose to move from the lower egoistic to the higher spiritual life is to provoke these hostile forces, and unless one has the strength to defeat them, the progress in the sadhana must be retarded or rendered impossible. With reference to these 'hostile' forces, Sri Aurobindo writes in the course of some of his letters:

Normal human defects are one thing - they are the working of the lower

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nature of the Ignorance. The action of the hostile forces is a special intervention creating violent inner conflicts, abnormal depressions, thoughts and impulses of a kind which can be easily recognised as suggestion e.g. leaving the Ashram, abandoning the yoga, revolt against the Divine....

The lower nature is ignorant and undivine, not in itself hostile but shut to the Light and Truth. The hostile forces are anti-divine, not merely undivine; they make use of the lower nature, pervert it, fill it with distorted movements and by that means influence man and even try to enter and possess or at least entirely control him.⁷⁵

But even the so-called 'hostile' forces have a function in the larger scheme of things: "It is to test the condition of the individual, of the work, of the earth itself and their readiness for the spiritual descent and fulfilment". The force necessary to enable one to walk on level ground is much less than the force needed to go uphill, for now the formidable force of gravity also has to be overcome. Ascent in the spiritual life involves overcoming the pull of the 'hostile' forces (which are analogous to gravitation, the pull towards the earth), and this could be done by seeking "a greater strength, a more perfect self-knowledge, an intenser purity and force of aspiration, a faith that nothing can crush, a more powerful descent of the Divine Grace".⁷⁶ This is evidently the inner meaning of the stories of demons and other anti-divine forces trying always to prevent the completion of holy yajñas or yāgas (sacrifices). In the Ramayana, for example, Rishi Vishvamitra complains to King Dashratha that Mareecha, Subahu and their Rakshasa hordes were continually defiling a forest sacrifice in progress by showering unclean flesh and blood on the sacred fire; and Vishvamitra seeks the assistance of Prince Rama to checkmate and destroy those hostile forces. It then becomes a part of Rama's avatar-function to respond to the Rishi's appeal, fight and destroy the Rakshasas, and felicitate the completion of the sacrifice. Always when the conscious upward drive is countered by the play and pull of the riot of adverse forces, the call to Divine Grace is alone the sovereign remedy.

One more question: To what extent is predestination an adamantine law? If we are to accept the doctrine of Karma - of fate, of destiny, of kismet - of what use is personal effort, and how is one eves going to get out of the endless chain of birth and death and birth again? As always, Sri Aurobindo's answer is pointed as well as reassuring:

Destiny in the rigid sense applies only to the outer being so long as it lives in the Ignorance. What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and determining the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One's spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future.⁷⁷

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And more pointed still, and verily ambrosial, is the promise conveyed - albeit mixed with some Aurobindonian banter - to his disciple, Nirod:

Who ever was fit, for that matter - fitness and unfitness are only a way of speaking; man is unfit and a misfit (so far as things spiritual are concerned) - in his outward nature. But within there is a soul and above there is Grace. "This is all you know or need to know" and, if you don't, well, even then you have at least somehow stumbled into the path and have got to remain there till you get haled along it far enough to wake up to the knowledge. Amen.⁷⁸

VII

While it was natural that most of his disciples should have ordinarily written to Sri Aurobindo only on the practical difficulties encountered by them or about their perplexities while pursuing the sadhana of the integral Yoga, since nothing human was outside its purview and since it embraced all life, some disciples - notably Dilip, Arjava, Sethna (Amal), Nirod - often raised other questions too. Likewise, in the talks before 24 November 1926 and the resumed talks after 1938, among the subjects that figured were literature, poetry, art, politics, Vedic exegesis, education, psychology, philosophy, religion, war, and even nudity and birth-control, besides of course problems relating to the sadhana. Many of the letters (and the conversations too) have been collected, but many letters also lie scattered in the pages of old journals, and there must also be several letters untraceable or unpublished. A disciple would send some question or other for answer, some poem or prose extract for elucidation or comment, and Sri Aurobindo would be "provoked" as it were to giving a beautifully phrased reply redolent of wisdom and learning and wit and humour. What a diversity of themes, and what a variety of approaches! The twelve great masters of style: Aeschylus and Dante: Dante and Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Blake: the poetry of the school of Dryden and Pope: Shelley's Skylark: Baudelaire's "vulgarity": Anatole France's "ironising": Walter de la Mare's Listeners: five kinds of poetic style: austerity in poetry: architectonics in poetic composition: "great" poetry and merely beautiful poetry: limits of personal vagaries in criticism: relation between length of poems and purity of poetic expression: the unescapable subjective element in all criticism of poetry: the quantitative metre in English: on translating poetry: the place of Bernard Shaw in English literature: the Overmind inspiration in poetry: the poetry of Shahid Suhrawardy, of Amal, of Dilip, of Armando, Menezes, of Auden, of Spender, of Hopkins, of Bharati Sarabhai, of Harindranath, of Arjava, of D.H. Lawrence: Planck and the Quantum Theory: Ouspensky: automatic writing: spiritism, ghosts, popular superstitions: Cheiro and Astrology:... indeed, there is no end to the subjects that figure in the letters.

There is not space here to bring out fully through illustrative excerpts from Sri Aurobindo's letters their great range in subject-matter and their variegated richness

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in tone and style. The scintillating wit, the unobtrusive humour, the unexpected turns of phrase, the sudden Americanisms and colloquialisms, the memorable lightning flashes, the tone of gentle familiarity, all cumulatively reveal a unique power and personality with a capacity for global understanding and multiple concentration enabling him to write so often, to so many correspondents, on such a variety of themes, and always with sureness, lightness, pellucid clarity and seeming finality. Here are a few lines, as it were carelessly dashed off, and yet they succeed in weighing Goethe against Shakespeare with an admirable percipience:

Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly not a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare's equal. He wrote out of a high poetic intelligence, but his style and movement nowhere came near the poetic power, the magic, the sovereign expression and profound or subtle rhythms of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice, his mind's choice among its many high and effulgent possibilities, rather than by the very necessity of his being. He wrote his poetry as he did everything else with a great skill and an inspired subtlety of language, and effective genius but it was only part of his genius and not the whole. There is too a touch mostly wanting - the touch of an absolute, an intensely inspired or revealing inevitability; few quite supreme poets have that in abundance, in others it comes by occasional jets or flashes.⁷⁹

Equally illuminating is the distinction Sri Aurobindo draws, in the course of the same letter, between Vyasa and Valmiki on the one hand and Homer and Shakespeare on the other. In another letter, Sri Aurobindo elaborates the point that, although in the Yogin's vision of universal beauty, all is indeed beautiful, yet all cannot be reduced to a uniform level:

There are gradations, there is a hierarchy in this All-Beauty.... In the artist's vision too there are or can be gradations, a hierarchy of values. Shakespeare can get dramatic and therefore aesthetic values out of Dogberry and Malvolio and he is as thorough a creative artist in his treatment of them as in his handling of Macbeth or Lear. But if we had only Dogberry or Malvolio to testify to Shakespeare's genius, no Macbeth, no Lear, would he be so great a dramatic artist and creator as he now is? It is in the varying possibilities of one subject or another that there lies an immense difference. Apelles' grapes deceived the birds that came to peck at them, but there was more aesthetic content in the Zeus of Pheidias... .⁸⁰

Or he can, in the course of a few lines, balance the merits of Albert Samain's poem Pannyre aux talons d'or as against those of Flecker's English translation of the same poem:

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Samain's poem is a fine piece of work, inspired and perfect; Flecker's is good only in substance, an adequate picture, one may say.... The difference is that the French has vision and the inspired movement that comes with vision - all on the vital plane, of course, - but the English version has only physical sight, sometimes with a little glow in it, and the precision that comes with that sight.... But both these poems have the distinction of being perfectly satisfying in their own kind.⁸¹

And here, in a few lines, Sri Aurobindo sums up the quality of Donne's poetry and the reason why it appeals to the modem mind:

Donne's ingenuities remain intellectual and do not get alive except at times, the vital fire or force is not there to justify them.... Energy and force of a kind he has, but it is twisted, laboured, something that has not found itself. That is why he is not so great a poet as he might have been. He is admired today because the modern mind has become like his - it too is straining for energy and force without having the life-impulse necessary for a true vividness and verve nor that higher vision which would supply another kind of energy - its intellect too is twisted, laboured, not in possession of itself.⁸²

And when a correspondent tried to put a highly philosophical and mystical interpretation on Shakespeare's "We are such stuff as dreams are made on...." Sri Aurobindo's comment was: "One can read anything into anything... Shakespeare's idea here as everywhere is the expression of a mood of the vital mind, it is not a reasoned philosophical conclusion."⁸³*

Psycho-analysis figures in the talks as well as in the correspondence. Once in 1925 Sri Aurobindo seems to have referred to the theory of one Major Hill ("fit to be an inmate of a lunatic asylum") that the entire Hindu-Muslim problem was due to the "cow-complex"⁸⁴; on another occasion, Sri Aurobindo remarked how surprising it was that even some of the best intellectuals accepted psycho-analysis.⁸⁵ And here in one of his letters he admirably twits the psycho-analyst's complacent pretentions:

I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysis at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights, - yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t, cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower , obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari

*For a full discussion the reader is referred to Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare (1965), in which K. D. Sethna has brought together, with a commentary of his own, the numerous insights and critical observations of Sri Aurobindo scattered mainly in his letters.

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budhna esām. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above.⁸⁶

The case against a too ready acceptance of psycho-analysis cannot be put more concisely or incisively.

Sri Aurobindo had certainly little in common with the popular conception of a Yogi - a self-absorbed ecstatic far removed from the madding crowd and its interests and illusions and involvements. He was in his own way in the very thick of the world's happenings, trying a spiritual action to influence men and affairs; and when his disciples ventured to prod him as it were, they were invariably surprised by his uncanny knowledge of the minutiae as also of the broad outlines of the developing world situation. When somebody pointed out that a particular nation had been seized with lunacy, Sri Aurobindo promptly wrote back:

Seized with lunacy? But this implies that the nation is ordinarily led by reason. Is it so? Or even by common sense? Masses of men act upon their vital push, not according to reason: individuals too do the same. If they call in their reason, it is as a lawyer to plead the vital's cause.⁸⁷

In another letter, he stressed the importance of humour:

Sense of humour? It is the salt of existence. Without it the world would have got utterly out of balance - it is unbalanced enough already - and rushed to blazes long ago.⁸⁸

And sometimes Sri Aurobindo's humour sprouts and sparkles like a fountain in the sunshine, and there is no resisting its infectious gaiety, its sheer fascination. In these letters wisdom mingles with lightness and sanity with humour and all blend in the right measure and hue:

Don't aspire for two days and then go into the dumps, evolving a gospel of earthquake and Schopenhauer plus the ass and all the rest of it. Give the Divine a full sporting chance. When he lights something in you or is preparing a light, don't come in with a wet blanket of despondency and throw it on the poor flame.⁸⁹

Welt, Chesterton, Shaw and others joust at each other like the kabiwalas of old Calcutta, though with more refined weapons, and you cannot take their humorous sparrings as considered appreciations; if you do, you turn exquisite jests into solemn nonsense.⁹⁰

Well, well, this is the bare, rocky, direct poetry? God help us! This is the sort of thing to which theories lead even a man of genius.⁹¹

On one occasion, somebody who signed himself 'Aurobindo, Bombay' wired for permission to attend a darśan and gave Dilip's name for reference. Dilip promptly wrote a Bengali poem describing four possible identities, and this at once elicited a marvellous reply from the Master:

Dilip, your epic of four Aurobindos is luminous, informing and hair-raising. But there can be no doubt about who this Aurobindo is - it is, I presume,

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Aurobindo the fourth, "a doer of dreadful deeds"... what I am doing is to shove my responsibility on your shoulders.... To sum the matter up in two far-flowing Alexandrine couplets:

Tell him, by wire: 'Come on' with a benignant nod,

Or leave him journeying to the devil or to God,

Decide for the other Aurobindo what you please,

This namesake-flooded Aurobindo leave at ease.⁹²

Again, when Dilip hit his head against a door, he received as compensation this priceless piece of epistolary art:

You struck your head against the upper sill of the door our engineer Chandulal fixed in your room? A pity, no doubt. But remember that Chandulal's dealings with the door qua door were scientifically impeccable: the only thing he forgot was that people - of various sizes - should pass through it.. .our Lilliputian engineer perhaps measured things by his own head, forgetting that there were in the Ashram higher heads and broader shoulders.... As for the Divine rapture, a knock on the head or foot or elsewhere can be received with the physical ānanda of pain or pain and ānanda or pure physical ānanda - for I have often, quite involuntarily, made the experiment myself and passed with honours. It began, by the way, as far back as in Alipur Jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious-looking warrior ants, and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are conventions of our senses.⁹³

Now and then, Sri Aurobindo could enter even more fully into the spirit of the disciple's ruling sensibility and make almost a duet of the question-and-answer in the best tradition of the comic theatre:

Nirod: .. .I can't rush up again till August [15th - the next darśan]. Will you kindly come down and help the poor amateur Yogi out of these inexplicable meshes?

Sri Aurobindo: Come down? into Erebus? No, thank you.... But why hug despair without a cause - Dilipian or other? Come to your senses and develop a Nirodian jollity instead.... Laugh and be fat - then dance to keep the fat down - that is a sounder programme.⁹⁴

This was in February 1935; then, some ten months later:

Nirod: I am thrown out of joint at two miracles... though Madam Doubt still peeps from behind. Anyhow, no chance for me! Kapāl* Sir? What to do?

Sri Aurobindo: Why out of joint? It ought to strengthen your joints for the journey of Yoga.

Not at all Kapāl, sir. Mind, sir, mind. Madam Doubt, sir. Madam

* Bengali for fate.

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Doubt! Miss Material Intellectualism, sir! Aunt Despondency, sir! Uncle Self-distrust, sir! Cousin self-depreciation, sir! The whole confounded family, sir?⁹⁵

And for a final example, when a disciple wrote to Sri Aurobindo in 1936 that the Master had struck Paul Brunton as a Chinese sage, and given the disciple the impression as of a King of the Hungarian gypsies, swiftly came the answer:

Confucius? Lao-Tse? Mencius? Hang-whang-pu? (Don't know who the last was, but his name sounds nice.) Can't remember anything about it. As for the Hungarian gypsy, I suppose we must have been everything at one time or another, on this earth in some other cycle. But I am not aware of any particularly Magyar or Chinese element in me. However, when I came here, I was told I looked just like a Tamil sannyasi and some Christians said I was just like Christ. So it may be.

More seriously, Brunton seems to have thought I was Lao-Tse. Maybe, I can't say it is impossible.⁹⁶*

* For further instances of Sri Aurobindo's humour, the reader is referred to Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo in two volumes (1983).

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