Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Yoga as Pragmatic Power

PEOPLE ask about the practical value of Yoga, but do not always wait for an answer. For, according to some, Yoga means "introversion", escapism – illusion, delusion, hallucination. And yet the truth of the matter is that Yoga is nothing but a downright practical affair, that its proof is in the very eating of it. To judge a Yogin you are to ask, as did Arjuna, a very prince of pragmatic men, how he sits, how he walks about – kim āsīta vrajeta kim. Indeed the very definition of Yoga is that it is skill in works. To do works and not to run away from them has always been the true and natural ideal even (and particularly, as we shall see), for the spiritual man: the ideal is as old as the Upanishadic injunction, "Doing verily works in this world one should wish to live a hundred years." The Yogi as a world-shunner was not always the only ideal or the highest ideal. To do works, yes; but, with skill, it is pointed out, that is to say, in the way in which they can be most effectively done. Sri Krishna teaches Arjuna the skill and shows how to apply it in the crudest and the most terrible action, viz ., a bloody battle. But the skill that he demands, that is demanded of a Yogi, is not mere cleverness, craftiness or business policy including deceit, duplicity, sharpness; it means quite another spirit and faculty.

The ordinary man does works, achieves the object he aims at, through processes and means which, however powerful and effective, can be only moderately and approximately so. The amount of time and energy wasted is not proportionate to the result obtained. Man knows to utilise only a fraction of the energy collected in a system: the best of dispositions and organisation can harness just a modicum of the total stock, the rest is frittered away or locked up, whether it is vital energy or

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mental energy or even physical energy. That is because the central power that drives, the consciousness that controls the whole mechanism is of an inferior quality, of a lower potential. The Yogi views all energy as various forms and gradations of consciousness. So what he proposes, as a good scientist, is to lift up the consciousness and thus raise its potential and effectivity and minimise the waste. The higher the consciousness, the greater the effectivity, that is to say, the pragmatic value. As we rise in the scale there is less and less waste and greater and greater utilisation until we reach a climax, a critical degree, where there is absolutely no waste and where there is the utmost, the total utilisation of the whole energy. This supreme peak of consciousness that is absolute energy Sri Aurobindo names the Supermind. But on lesser levels too the spiritual consciousness is dynamic and effective – pragmatic in a way that the ordinary, limited, externally pragmatic consciousness cannot hope to be.

Sometimes it is urged that in the worldly affairs we should move according to the worldly procedure, otherwise to import into mundane things spiritual values would merely confuse issues and end in failure in both the fields – “fallen from hence, lost from thence". Of course there are spiritual points of view that go ill with the mundane, as indeed there are mundane considerations that do not match with the spiritual. The two categories of view-point have been succinctly and luminously named by Sri Aurobindo as the Materialist Denial and the Ascetic Refusal.* But there are other points of view, .other lines of approach which seek a harmony and union between Spirit and Matter, that envisage the marriage of Heaven and Earth.

The fundamental truth to be noted is that the Spirit is power, not merely consciousness: indeed the very definition of the spirit is that it is consciousness-energy. And it is this consciousness-energy that is at the source of all cosmic activities. Man's action too springs from this original source, although apparently it seems to be caused by other secondary and derivative energies. As a matter of fact what these energies that seem to be actually in play do is not the origination but rather

the deviation and diversion, a diminution and adulteration of the supreme energy, a lowering of the quality, the tone and .

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* The Life Divine, by Sri Aurobindo

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temper of the dynamism. In other words, as we have already said, a thought force, a vital force, a nervous or physical force, all these are only lower, even minima values, more or less distant and deformed echoes of a true and absolute Power behind and above them all. These forces become powerful in proportion as they are instruments and functions of that one mother energy. The truth is most beautifully illustrated in the story of Brahma a and the gods in the Kena Upanishad. The gods conquered and were proud of their conquest; each thought that it was due to his own personal prowess that he conquered. But they were utterly discomfited and shamed when the Divine Powter appeared and proved to them that but for this Power they would not be able even to tackle a blade of grass-Fire would not burn it, Water would not drench it, Wind would not move it.

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