The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 8

III

SADHANA

Asceticism

You have seen Sannyasins lying upon nails. Why do they do that? Perhaps to prove their saintliness. But when they do so in public, well, the suspicion is legitimate that it is something like a pose. There are some perhaps who do the thing sincerely and seriously, that is to say, they do not do merely to make a show. In their case we might ask why they do so. They say it is to prove to themselves their detachment from the body. There are others: they go a little further and say that one must make the body suffer in order to free the soul. But I tell you that the vital has a taste for suffering and imposes suffering on the body because of this perverse taste for suffering. I have seen children who, when they got hurt, would press the part hurt in order to get more pain and it was a pleasure to them. I have seen bigger persons also doing the same thing—morally I mean. It is a very well-known fact. I always tell people 'If you are unhappy, it is because you want to be unhappy. If you suffer, it is because you like suffering, otherwise you would not have the thing.' I call it an unhealthy state; for it is contrary to harmony and beauty; it is a land of unhealthy need for strong sensations. Do you know, China is a country where they have invented the

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most atrocious kinds of torture, unthinkable ways? When I was in Japan I asked a Japanese who liked the Chinese very much, why it was so. He told me: 'It is because the people of the Far East, including the Japanese, possess very dull sensibility. They feel very little; unless the suffering is very strong they feel nothing." They were obliged to use their intelligence for the discovery of extremely strong sufferings. Well, all people who are inconscient or tamasic, the more inconsicnet they are the greater the tamas,have their sensibility blunted; they need strong sensations if they have to feel them. This is what usually makes them cruel, because cruelty gives very strong sensations. The nerve tension produced in you when you impose suffering on some one, well, it does bring a sensation: they need that in order to feel, otherwise they would not feel. It is for that reason that whole races are particularly cruel. They are inconscient, inconscient vitally. They may not be unconscious mentally or otherwise. But they are unconscious vitally and physically, physically above all.

If one has a sense of beauty can he be cruel ?

It is a psychological problem. It depends upon the region where there is the sense of beauty. There may be a physical sense of beauty, a vital sense of beauty and a mental sense of beauty. If you have the moral sense of beauty, that is to say, a sense of decency and nobility, you can never be cruel. You will be always generous;

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your movements will consist of fine gestures. But, as I say often, man is composed of many different bits pieced together. For example, I frequented very much the artists. I knew all the great artists of the end of the last century and the beginning of the present. I lived among them. They had really a great sense of beauty. But morally some were very cruel. It is because when you see an artist in his study at work you find him living in an atmosphere of great beauty, but when you see the gentleman at home, he is a different person, having very little contact with the artist he was. Here he becomes vulgar and commonplace. Many of them are indeed like that. But there are always exceptions. Some have a unified personality, that is to say, they live their art and are truly generous, fine.

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