The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7

The Divine Family

When people, far separated from one another, belonging to different parts of the world or pursuing most diverse professions, meet and gather and work for a common purpose, it means that they are kindred souls and have met together and worked together before in other lives. They felt they belonged to the same family and resolved to act together and collaborate in a common endeavour for a common ideal. Indeed, the souls, in their psychic reality, are grouped in big families, as it were; they come down in groups again and again to take up and continue the work they are engaged in till it is complete.

At a given moment, when the time is ripe, they are called up. The souls are like children asleep, in the peace and repose of the psychic world, awaiting the urge or order for another birth. As soon as the order is given, they wake up and rush down towards the earth. When they drop thus into the earth's atmosphere, they are no longer together, they are scattered about all over the earth. One does not know even where one drops. Also once under the material conditions and circumstances here below, things take a very different aspect. For, the inner impulse, the original purpose gets veiled; the psychic forgets itself and is now surrounded and hedged in by forces, things and persons perhaps quite foreign and contradictory to its nature. Now comes the

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labour of the soul, to find itself, to look about for the lost end of the thread. The inner urge must be strong enough, the original will categorical enough for the being to surmount all obstacles, pass through all vicissitudes, work through all the windings of a labyrinthine journey and finally arrive. Some perhaps do not arrive at all in a particular life or arrive only to stop at a distance: others arrive not in a straight line, but, as I have said, after a tortuous and round-about wandering. In other words, in their external mind and impulsion, they look for other things, they are interested in objects that are far other than the soul's interest—like the person who enquired of Yoga, as she thought a Yogi could give her back her spoilt beauty. And yet the soul makes use of such trivial or absurd means to turn the man towards itself, guide him gradually to the place or the family to which he really belongs.

The material world is full of things that draw you away from your soul's quest, from approaching your home. Normally you are tossed about by the forces of ignorant Nature and you are driven even to do the utmost stupidities. There is but one solution, to find your psychic being; and once you have found it, cling to it desperately and not to allow yourself to be drawn out by any temptation, any other impulsion whatsoever.

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