In the Mother's Light

THE CONQUEST OF DESIRE

PART I

IT is said that when the light of knowledge (bodhi) descended on Buddha at the close of his long meditation, the very first words he uttered were: "I have caught thee at last, thy name is thirst (desire). No more shalt thou make me wheel from birth to birth, from suffering to suffering.”

With an unerring intuition, Buddha thus laid his finger on the prime cause of terrestrial suffering and the greatest enemy of man's spiritual evolution. Renunciation of desire, he taught, was the elimination of all evil and suffering and the surest means to the extinction of the egoistic human personality, which is a not-self, a mere ephemeral construction of Karma. The Gita affirms the same truth of desire with a repeated and hammering insistence : desire is the arch-enemy of man, the eternal foe of the wise, and the origin of obscuration and suffering. Therefore, slay desire, root it out of your nature once for all and desirelessly act in God and for God in the world. In the Upanishad, though the intellectual method of the Gita and the Buddhist scriptures had not yet so much developed,¹ the renunciation of desire is woven into the very grain of their teaching, as the following references amply testify :

(1) In the Brihadaranyak Upanishad, in the course of his elaborate reply to Janaka's questions, Yajnavalkya says that when the desires that are lodged in the heart are eliminated, then the mortal becomes immortal, and even here realises the Brahman.

(2) In the Chhandogya Upanishad (IV—10) Upakoshala says to his preceptor's wife who was importuning him to break his fast, "In this Purusha (i.e. in me) there are many desires running in various directions. I am full of many diseases (maladies of the mind). I shall not eat.”

¹ In the Isha Upanishad we have, however; "Lust not after anyone's possession,"

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(3) In the Kathopanishad Yama says to Nachiketa, "Hardly a wise man here and there desiring immortality turneth his eyes inward and seeth the self within him. The rest childishly follow after desire and pleasure and walk into the snare of Death who gapeth wide for them. But calm souls, having learned of immortality, seek not for permanence in the things of this world that pass and are not.”

In the words of Christ, "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on” , there is an implicit denunciation of desire and an ardent advocacy of a complete dependence on God.

We find, therefore, that, whatever its spell on deluded minds, under the spotlight of spiritual knowledge desire stands thoroughly unmasked as the prolific parent of most of life's evils. The progressive rationalistic mind of today, if it is searchingly honest, will readily admit this truth, but it will ask in amazement, as Bossuet asked Madame Guyon, "If the desires are renounced, how will the springs of life function ? Will not life come to a dead stop?” The astounded interrogation is not so naive as it may appear to a hide-bound religious mind; it is perfectly legitimate and merits a straight and serious consideration. Life, as it is normally lived, is apparently geared to desire, and if the desires are relinquished, it may be reasonably contended, how can life get on ? Is there not a desire or the drive of a purpose (as the Purposivists in modern psychology maintain) behind every human action, as its initiating and impelling force? Will not the stifling of desires mean the stifling of life itself and its motor forces ? The Buddhist gospel or the Gita's may be a counsel of perfection, but how in this work-a-day world, in practical life, in this grim struggle for existence, can one renounce all desires and not sink into inertia and stagnation and eventual disintegration? Will it not spell a total defeat and frustration of life's purpose ?

The answer, usually advanced by the spiritual man, is that this very defeat of life's purpose is the crowning victory of the soul. You lose the kingdom of the earth in order to gain the

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kingdom of Heaven. You cannot surely have the best of both worlds, serve two masters at the same time. But the answer falls flat on the modern mind, for, first of all, it cannot believe that life, which has brought it to its present state of evolution, will stop short at a half-result and betray a sudden bankruptcy of all its resources to carry evolution to any higher perfection. And, besides, it is fired with a synthetic idealism, a supreme gift of the Time-Spirit, which insists on the discovery and realisation of unity and harmony in life and is loth to reject it out of hand as an ever-circling futility. A victorious unity of Spirit and Matter, Life and Light, Silence and Movement, One and Many, seems to be its master passion, which it cannot forswear simply because life confronts it with the lash of desire and the trail of tragic suffering. It seems to have the courage to look desire in the face, stultify its goad, and probe into its heart to discover something of which it is a dark distortion. A complete conquest and conversion of the energy which desire embodies is not only possible, but inevitable, if life is not to languish and the human society not to turn into an unprogressive structure of quietistic ascetics. The modern approach to life is, at its best, an intellectual, scientific approach, and it augurs well for the rediscovery of truths which have long lain buried under the wreckage of the past and willfully neglected by a narrow spirituality impatiently avid of the beyond. A rehabilitation of the ancient truths will transform life from a clamorous hunger into a divinely creative force led by the supernal Light to a , greater and greater fulfilment.

What is Desire ?

When inorganic Matter evolves out of the indeterminate flux of the primal energy of the Inconscient, there begins, in the dance of the released atoms, a rhythmic swing, characterised by the dual movement of attraction and repulsion. The atoms combine and separate, aggregate and disaggregate, in response to an inscrutable force operating in them. That force is a blind hunger, immeasurable, unquenchable. It is an urge implanted

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in the centre of every atom, towards individual growth, development, expansion and expression. It is a mysterious, irrepressible urge which makes each atom draw towards itself only those atoms which can help its growth, and repel or draw away from those which are likely to be harmful or hampering. It is a marvellous, automatic action making for the rhythm which regulates the stupendous movements of the material universe. In organic Matter this urge assumes a more distinct and definite form. Life, in its first manifestation, appears to be a heaving sea of hunger and richly deserves the vivid Upanishadic epithet; "Life is hunger, which is death.” Individual life feeding on other lives in order to maintain and aggrandize itself, feeding and eventually being fed upon by the contending lives—this is the spectacle that presents itself to our view behind the apparent birth and death of living Matter.

When Life evolves Mind, this hunger becomes desire, a conscious craving, an insistent longing to seize and possess and enjoy what one feels one lacks. No individual life at this stage of evolution can progress without this propelling force of desire. It is the sole motive force that neutralizes to a considerable extent the constant gravitational pull towards inertia and disintegration, on the one hand, and creates the conditions and designs the contours of the future out of an indeterminate mass of possibilities, on the other. Desire dominates and directs the movements of life. Springing from hidden sources which man does not care to explore, but stinging him into incessant action, physical, vital and mental, desire leads him through whatever defeats and detours, struggles and sufferings, to an increasing development of his individuality and an efficient functioning of his awakened faculties. A desire is an energy, a creative and formative energy, which does not lie idle in us, but, either on our conscious or subconscious level, is always busy trying to bring about its own fulfilment. Even when we repress it, it does not disappear out of existence, but only sinks under- ground and ferments and works there, biding its time for a fresh outburst and self-satisfaction. It can wait there long, very long, indeed, if our will is strong and alert enough to prevent

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its recurrence, and we may lay the unction to our hearts that we have got rid of it for good and all; but that would be a sheer self-delusion, liable to be shattered some day in this life or the next.

The ego in the individual thrives on desires. Its finite, individualised consciousness cuts itself off from others and makes it concentrate on its own growth and gratification. Thus divided and limited, the individual in his ignorance desires the objects which attract it and, impelled by desire, struggles to possess them. Human life on the surface is this struggle, this ceaseless seeking and striving after the objects which, being finite and fugitive, are unable to give anything like a full and abiding satisfaction to the soul. But though desire acts in the beginning and for a long while as a lever by which life lifts itself out of the lower bog and advances towards fresh gains and conquests, yet a stage arrives in this evolutionary advance when the compelling tyranny of desire and the struggle and suffering it entails become too acutely disquieting to be borne. Desire then reveals itself in its true colours, as the greatest obstacle to a further progress. That which worked as a lever appears now as an insufferable fever, a futile fret and a mounting frustration. It is more and more clearly perceived by the individual that desires are endless, and endless the uneasiness they cause—uneasiness and anxiety in the pursuit of them, uneasiness and anxiety in the insecure enjoyment of their fleeting satisfaction, and uneasiness, exasperation or corroding grief in their frustration. They allow no repose or peace or a calm, dispassionate view of the meaning and goal of life. They lash and drive man on in a vicious circle. They bar his passage into the eternity and infinity of the Spirit.

What should man do at this juncture ? If he gives up all his desires, he fears that he may lapse into an inert passivity and quiescence, the springs of life may cease to function, its wheels come to a standstill. A further perfection in terms of life may be barred out for ever. He may slip out of life, if be is so inclined, and merge in some infinite Void or indefinable immutable Existence; but that would be a flight and not a conquest.

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How to conquer desire and lead a divine, desireless life . of joyous freedom, richly and resplendently creative, is the problem man must solve, if he is to achieve this highest perfection on earth.

We have seen that desire is an evolved, mentalised form of the hunger which characterises both organic and inorganic Matter, but we have not traced hunger to its ultimate source and watched its primal genesis. If we do that, we shall know what hunger or desire represents in the material world and what it is in its eternal essence. A clear perception of this essence will tend to liberate us from the tormented yoke of desire and make us revert to the source which is a perennial fount of force for a manifold fulfilment in life. Once this source is seen in the light of knowledge, renunciation of desire will cease to be an arduous and painful endeavour, but become, instead, a glad and natural sacrifice offered to the Supreme.

Desire—a Distorted Splinter of the Divine Will

It is said in the Upanishads that in the beginning there was the One without a second. That One desired to be many. This, then, is the first birth of desire; but it is better to call it Will than desire, for, desire, in its ordinary acceptation, means a longing for something which we lack. The Divine lacked no- thing; He willed to reproduce Himself in numberless forms, to deploy the infinite possibilities of self-formation inherent in Him, to enjoy variously, manifoldly, even in the contrary terms of pain and suffering, the eternal, invariable delight of His unconditioned self-existence. This flaming out of the divine Will to self-creation or rather multiple self-realisation and self-expression is an eternal fact of the omnipresent Reality, as much as its immobility and silence. The Will to create argues no want or deficiency in the One who is Absolute, but is a spontaneous play of His Consciousness-Force (cit-tapas). Its Purpose in our evolutionary world is a progressive self-manifestation of the Divine in terms of unity in diversity. But in the material formula diversity or division seems to be its primary

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objective. It creates a myriad centres of the one indivisible Consciousness; a myriad units of the one, unitary Existence; countless waves and ripples of the one infinite ocean of Power and Delight; and, breaking itself into splinters, emerges as the dark, blind hunger which we have envisaged as the motive-force behind every little movement of organic and inorganic Matter. This hunger is a fragmentary impulse of the one universal Will, but a fragment darkened and deformed in the conditions of the inconscience out of which it springs. Its business is to organise and consolidate the individuality of each unit, to mark it off from others, so that the original intention of the One to be many may become a concrete fact of terrestrial existence. Passing through a long process of evolution, this hunger turns into conscious desire in man. Based on division, it signalises a pronounced development of the ego and its sharp separation and clear-cut distinction from other egos. This ego is the desire-soul, a dark reflection of our delight-soul, which is a spark of the sempiternal Fire. When the separative development of the ego is complete and its individuality well formed, its consciousness tends towards universality, impersonality and infinity. Evolution registers now a new turn. The ego-centric stress gives place to a growing tendency towards theo-centric self-giving—desire melts into love.

Two Stages of Life

Terrestrial life can then be divided into two stages : the first is that at which the chief preoccupation of Nature is to form and consolidate the ego, the dynamic centre of every constructed individuality. Her stress is on multiplicity, on the creation of inexhaustible genuses and species with distinctive traits and characteristics, on sharply differentiated individualities. From the formation of the atom to that of the full-fledged ego in man, the whole stage is marked by a subconscient hunger or a conscious desire, impelling the growth of the individual unit. The universal Will is stationed behind, controlling and co-ordinating the giant interaction of the multifarious hungers

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and desires of the evolving units, but not obtruding on the surface. It acts through the unconscious drive or the subconscious urge or, as in man, through desire and a delusive free will, in each individual unit. Hunger or desire is the distinctive stamp of this first stage.

At the second stage the stress shifts on to unity. The full- fledged ego in man, smarting under the slavery of desires, yearns to transcend itself and attain to freedom and mastery. This new yearning does not originate in the ego, though the ego seems to be its immediate medium of expression, but in the soul—it heralds the replacement of the desire-soul by the delight-soul in man. An increasing unity, harmony, order, loving and joyful mutuality mark this stage at which, in proportion as the individual being is purified of desire, and enlightened and widened in consciousness, the divine Will, the sovereign creator and ruler of the universe, unveils itself and takes up the charge of the nature. Life does not stop because desire is dying, but is, on the contrary, immeasurably heightened, widened, quickened and superbly accentuated in its manifold self-expression under the luminous direction of the omnipotent Will. The egoistic division having disappeared, the individual identifies himself with the Universal and the Transcendent and partakes of the life of all and embraces all in his unwalled consciousness. What will he now crave or covet ? What gain will elate and what loss depress him ? Perceiving the underlying unity of all beings, himself in all beings, he "neither mourns nor desires", but works out God's Will in the world, poised in the absolute equality of his liberated soul and nature.

It is evident from the foregoing consideration that desire is not the real and ultimate motive-force behind the movements of individual and universal nature, but is only an overt incentive to action, a concomitant of ignorance, entailing conflict and struggle and suffering, which are inevitable, even necessary, in the egoistic phase of evolution. The real motive-force is the Will of the supreme Being, which emerges from behind the confusion and anarchy of individual desires and cravings,

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as man surpasses his ego and recovers his unity and solidarity with all—with the All and the One in all and beyond all.

Two Attitudes towards Desire

In spiritual life there can be only two attitudes towards desire : one is that of the ascetic, which is an attitude of relentless hostility and rigid repression, and the other the plastic and supple attitude of the lover of God in life as well as in Light. The ascetic, whose single aim is to wake up from what he calls the delirium of life.; strives to strangle desire by sheer will-force and rigorous self-denial, and in strangling desire, strangles or sterilises life itself. He bruises the motor springs of life and inhibits all expansive faculties, cripples all will and initiative till he finds himself sitting upon his own corpse. It is true that the Gita advises the slaying of desire, but of desire only as the immediate and overt cause of delusion and suffering, and not of the Will behind it, not, certainly, of life itself. The ascetic's dealing with desire, and for the matter of that, with his whole nature, is relentlessly repressive, drastic and destructive. If he succeeds in it, he returns, when his body drops, to the Inane or the Beyond; but if he fails—and the majority do fail—there usually results a violent upheaval in his nature, or an obscure mixture and disorder, a quasi-spiritual state of unresolved anomalies, or a steep fall from the poise and purity so laboriously attained. The Gita deprecates this strenuous, short-sighted, cavalier attitude of the ascetic and gives preference to the second attitude, which is one of equality, detachment, and a quiet and persistent rejection of desire. This attitude is of those who believe that God is not only transcendent of life, but also immanent in it; and that it is His unblemished manifestation in terrestrial life that is the object of the soul's descent into birth. A calm and integral rejection of desire for the discovery of the divine Will and its creative play in life, constitutes the cardinal principle of the second attitude, which we shall now consider at some length.

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THE CONQUEST OF DESIRE

PART II

We have seen that (I) desire is a darkened and deformed splinter of the divine Will and that its elimination means a free and unhampered working of the unveiled Will in and through the liberated individual, and not a cessation of life and its activities; that (2) though an indispensable agent in the development and aggrandisement of the individual, so long as he is bound to the ego and its dualities, it is the greatest obstacle to his transcendence of the ego and entry into the infinite freedom and self-existent bliss of his spiritual self and his identity with God and the universe, and that (3) suppression of desire never leads to its conquest.

If we wish to live in an everlasting peace and happiness, not, certainly, in ascetic seclusion, but in the full flood of life's salutary activities, and in the full light of knowledge, and not, as now, in the stumbling ignorance of our mind, we have to conquer desire and replace it by the divine Will as the leader of our nature. "Desire and the passions that arise from desire are the principal sign and knot of ego. It is desire that makes you go on saying I and mine, and subjects you through a persistent egoism to satisfaction and dissatisfaction, liking and disliking, hope and despair, joy and grief, to your petty loves and hatreds, to wrath and passion, to your attachment to success and things pleasant and to the sorrow and suffering of failure and of things unpleasant. Desire brings always confusion of mind and limitation of the will, an egoistic and distorted view of things, a failure and clouding of knowledge. Desire and its preferences and violences are the first strong root of sin and error. There can be, while you cherish desire, no assured stainless tranquillity, no settled light, no calm, pure knowledge. There can be no right being—for desire is a perversion of the Spirit—and no firm foundation for right thought, action and feeling. Desire, if permitted to remain under whatever colour, is a perpetual menace even to the wisest, and can at any moment subtly or violently cast down the mind from even its firmest and most surely acquired foundation. Desire is the chief enemy

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of spiritual perfection.”¹

In this essay we shall try to understand how desire is to be conquered and replaced by the divine Will by progressive stages of purification, and what difference there is between repression and rejection, suppression and indulgence, desire and necessity, and desire and delight.

It goes without saying that those who have known life to be only an inextricable skein of desires and demands, hopes and disappointments, struggles and successes and failures, unsteady 'pleasures and pains, all marked by a dull or raging fever in their active, conscious being, will find it extremely difficult to believe that there can be a state of untroubled peace and un- ebbing delight securely maintained in the midst of life's distracting maelstrom, just as those who have lived in perpetual slavery from their birth cannot easily bring themselves to believe in the dignity and blessings of freedom. Habit dulls or deadens our finer sensibilities and fetters our imagination. A life of un-alloyed bliss and desireless action may appear to many as something colourless and vapid, if at all possible. It is only those who have seen through the colossal cheat of the life of desires, its continual goad, its frequent frustration or fleeting satisfaction, 'the train of evils it brings and the fruitless round in which it moves without any definite issue, that can make up their minds to end this agnonised slavery and rise into the freedom and peace of their desireless, egoless, boundless spiritual existence.

In the second chapter of the Gita there is a very graphically graduated description of how desire attacks a man and leads him to perdition. As soon as he thinks intently of an object, he becomes attached to it; of attachment is born desire; desire gives rise to wrath and passion; wrath generates infatuation; infatuation leads to a loss of the memory of one's eternal Self; loss of the memory of the real self culminates in a ruin of intelligence, and when intelligence is obscured and ruined, he is done for. The whole steep process by which a man, who has subjected himself to desire, comes to grief, is beautifully delineated. First, an intent settling of the consciousness on an object of the

¹ Essays on the Gita, Vol , II by Sri Aurobindo,

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sense, then attachment, then desire, then disquieting wrath, then infatuation, then forgetfulness of one's true self, then a complete eclipse of intelligence and then—when the light of the intelligence is clouded—a collapse of the whole being. This is the invariable story of every man madly pursuing the phantoms of desire—they prove to be his doom. If the very first movement could be checked; if desire could be killed in the seed; if the mind, as soon as it settled on an object of sense with a longing for possession, could be quietly removed and concentrated on the Infinite and Eternal;—it is indeed the Infinite alone that can give us infinite satisfaction, which our hungering soul vainly seeks in finite objects—the whole precipitate process of fall could be avoided. But the desire-soul acts with an almost irresistible impetuosity, it sweeps us as a storm sweeps a frail boat, and before we have time to control its course, we find our-selves rolling in the dust.

How to Conquer Desire

The analogy of the boat should not be carried too far, for, behind man's apparent fragility, there is a firmness which is absolutely unshakable, a fire which nothing can quench. He is not born to be a toy of desire, tossed about in alternating sensations of pleasure and pain, or broken and flung away after a brief moment's play; but an instrument of God, commissioned here to fulfil His Will to self-manifestation in humanity. He has, therefore, to learn how best to deal with his soul's sworn enemy, desire. The traditional way of dealing with desire is a drastic or gradual suppression. This is the ascetic way, which does not care to take proper account of the origin and nature of desire and the best and safest means of disposing of it, but is bent upon getting rid of it by a sheer violence of the will and physical austerities. The basic attitude of this way is one of fear, impatience and aversion, which dictate, in most cases, panicky, precipitate measures, and proceeds on a fundamental assumption that desires dwell in our own being and, being a source of untold miseries, have to be smothered there to death; and in

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order to smother or slay them, one begins to smother or slay the vital (prāṇa) itself, where, it is held, the desires have their source and stronghold. This identification of the individual with his desire is an ignorant identification which turns self- discipline into self-torture, and renders it immensely difficult and arduous, as if he was hammering or hacking away a part of himself. It is certainly the wrong way to deal with desires. There may be a relentless and tireless wrestling, much struggle and repression, but the result, except in a very few cases in which there are other factors entering into play, is always un- satisfactory and depressing. It is not unoften that even after one has made a desert of one's life, one is painfully surprised by new shoots of desire cropping up in it.

The Mother teaches us a most simple and effective way of conquering desire. It is lit up with knowledge, and that makes all the difference between it and the ignorant, coercive methods of impatient asceticism. She says that the best means of self- mastery is a dual movement of transcendence and surrender. It is sheer folly to wrestle with desire in its own field, where it is almost invincible by any human effort, and constantly fed and fortified by its own universal energy. What we have to do is to step back from the lower vital which is a part of the un-universal Nature, abounding with all sorts of desires, cravings, lusts, hungers, etc., and take our stand on our true being. Once we learn how to stand there, we are free, free from the compulsion of the forces of nature. Tranquil witnesses, we can watch the desires invading us like waves from the surrounding sea of universal Nature. It becomes then increasingly clear that they do not belong to us, they are not at all native to our true self. "When an attack comes the wisest attitude is to consider that it comes from outside, and to say, 'This is not myself and I will have nothing to do with it.’ You have to deal in the same way with all lower impulses and desires and all doubts and questionings in the mind. If you identify yourself with them, the difficulty in fighting them becomes all the greater; for then you have the feeling that you are facing the never easy task of overcoming your own nature. But once you are able to say, 'No, this is not myself, I will have nothing

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to do with it’, it becomes much easier to disperse them.”¹ In fact, all desires come from outside, from the universal Nature, and take shelter in our subconscient vital. It is only when they rise from there into our conscious mind that we become aware of them. It is our ignorance that makes us think that they are ours and that we must exert ourselves either to satisfy or suppress them. They belong to a world of their own, the beings of which seek to make us their tools for perpetuating the reign of evil and suffering upon earth. Here a word of caution seems to be necessary. In the beginning, when we practise the rejection of desire, we have to be very careful that we do not indiscriminately reject all movements of the will and discourage all volition. It is essential that we should be able to distinguish between a will and a desire. A desire is always accompanied by an overeagerness or an impatient precipitancy, a straining or a tension and a certain uneasiness in the being,² whereas a will is a self-possessed impulsion, quiet even in its intensity, and more or less assured of the sanction of the Divine or that of the most luminous part of our being. It may be that in some cases this discrimination will be somewhat difficult, but as we progress in inner purity by a persistent rejection of desires and an aspiration for the reception and realisation of the divine Will in us, the difficulty will diminish and finally disappear, and it will be not only possible, but quite easy to detect and reject all desires and accept all impulsions that come from the Divine or from our inmost self. During the stage of transition when there takes place a transference of initiation from desire to will, there may be passing moments of misjudgment or indecision,—inevitable in every transition—but our sincerity and aspiration for release from the bondage of egoistic desires will be a sure safe- guard against any major error or serious setback, and the divine help will always be there to light our path and lead us to the Truth.

¹ Words of the Mother.

² There can be, in some cases, a quietly persistent or a quietly recurring desire, but even then one can always detect in it a hectic heat or heave, enough to tell it from a will,

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Transcendence, then, is the first condition of mastery. This transcendence, the Mother says, has to be achieved by a quiet detachment and equality. By detachment she means a self- withdrawal of the central consciousness from the vortex of vital desires, and its untrembling poise in the soul or the psychic. Rajayoga calls it draṣtuḥ swarūpe’vasthānam—the acquisition of a vantage ground, from where one can watch and work upon the desire-ridden vital. This detachment need not be too difficult a job for the spiritual seeker who has endeavoured to be "conscious" of himself, to realise that he is not a composite of mind, life and body, but an infinite and immortal self, ever free and ever pure, who has assumed the triple nature for the manifestation of the Divine in Matter. The Mother's very first instruction to a spiritual aspirant is : "Be conscious.” "We are conscious of only an insignificant portion of our being; for the most part we are unconscious. It is this unconsciousness that keeps us down to our unregenerate nature and prevents change and transformation in it... .Once you are conscious, it means that you can distinguish and sift things., you can see which are the forces that pull you down and which help you on. And when you know the right from the wrong, the true from the false, the divine from the undivine, you are to act strictly up to your knowledge; that is to say, resolutely reject one and accept the other. The duality will present itself at every step and at every step you will have to make your choice. You will have to be patient and persistent and vigilant,—'sleepless’, as the adepts say; you must always refuse to give any chance to the undivine against the divine.”¹ This consciousness of oneself being a child of the Light or a ray of the divine Sun will considerably help our detachment from the lower nature of desires and cravings and give us the power to reject them. But there are two points which we must bear in mind in regard to this detachment: (1) it must be quiet and masterful, (2) it must be dynamic. A disgusted or cowardly recoil is not detachment, it is rather an inverse attachment. "The more you think of a thing and say, 'I don’t want it, I don’t want it’, the more you are bound to it. What you should do is o keep the thing away from

¹ Words of the Mother.

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you, to dissociate from it, take as little notice of it as possible, and,. even if you happen to think of it, to remain indifferent and un- concerned.”¹ Detachment must be dynamic, and not, like that of Sankhya and Rajayoga, merely passive, for, a passive detachment can lead to the liberation of the soul, but is ineffectual to change or transform nature to any considerable extent. A quiet and dynamic detachment is stabilised and fortified by equality. A perfect, unperturbed equality in the face of all happenings of the nature makes the detachment invulnerable and itself becomes the base of the most powerful action of a dynamic Yoga of self-perfection. Detachment and equality are, there- fore, the indispensable primary means of the conquest of desire.

The other means is surrender. Detachment and equality by themselves can purify the nature to some extent, but cannot effect a radical transformation of it. For that, the direct intervention of the Grace of the Divine is the sole requisite, and surrender ensures it. The detached soul watches the desires as they rise in the being, and rejects them, at the same time offering them to the divine Force for the destruction of their dark forms and the conversion of their energies into the fire of the Will. An unreserved surrender makes for an unveiled action of the divine Omnipotence in man and lifts his life from the whirlpool of desires into the creative glory of a God-possessed and God-guided existence. Here, again, we must remember that surrender, like detachment and equality, should be dynamic and not only passive. If we want a rich and radiant life, a life of manifold creation and divine self-expression, of high adventures and noble achievements, all the means we adopt for self- perfection must be supremely dynamic.

How simple, how straightforward and sure seems now the method prescribed by the Mother for the conquest of desire ! If knowledge is power, here is infinite power in this method, for it is founded on a perfect knowledge of human nature and its ultimate destiny. Transcendence and surrender are a royal movement of man from the afflicted domination of blind desires to the recovery of the divine Will and its victorious fulfilment

¹ Words of the Mother,

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in life. Desire goes, but the will remains and reigns. Life no more wallows or spins in unredeemed ignorance and unavailing agony, but marches with unfettered steps to the epiphany of the uncreated Light.

Repression and Rejection

The Gita says that creatures follow their own nature, and, therefore, repression is not of much avail. Repression is a movement of ignorant impatience and fear, and usually generates explosive reactions. A repressed desire, as the modern psychologist tells us, does not die, but chafing and seething, causes serious derangements and morbidities in the nature. One can repress one's desires for a time, even for a long time, if one has a strong will, but not for all time. They are bound to explode. Rejection, on the contrary, is a movement of confident strength and calm self-dissociation. It is an irrevocable withdrawal of the sanction of the Purusha from the cravings and appetites of the unregenerate Prakriti. It is based on the spiritual truth that the Purusha is the master, adhyakṣa, of his nature, Prakriti, whose sole business is to please him. The play of egoistic desires goes on so long as the Purusha, unawakened to his divinity, takes a delight in them and evolves through that delight; but when he awakes, it is up to him either to bring the whole play of Prakriti to a standstill by a progressive withdrawal of all sanction, or, as in dynamic spirituality, to combine the withdrawal of sanction with a transference of the entire Prakriti into the hands of the Divine for a radical and integral conversion into her spiritual counterpart. In the former case it is an eventual cessation, in the latter a total transformation. Rejection changes the ego-centric nature of desires, while repression can only maim and mangle it.

Suppression and Indulgence

"The difference between suppression and an inward essential rejection is the difference between mental or moral control

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and a spiritual purification.”¹

Both suppression and indulgence are movements of ignorance and signify attachment. In suppression there is a tacit violence of protest and coercion, even an obsession of ruthless retribution, which keep the consciousness tied to the very desire one is struggling to get rid of, while in indulgence one surrenders oneself to one's desires and remains helplessly attached and yoked to them. Neither is the right way of knowledge. Neither suppression nor indulgence can ever eliminate desire. But, it must be noted, if it ever came to a choice between suppression and indulgence, one should not hesitate to adopt the former, though we repeat, both stand on the same level, from the spiritual standpoint. To indulge desires is to condemn oneself to frequent disappointment and distress.

Desire and Necessity

As one has to distinguish between desire and will in the be- ginning of self-discipline, so has one to draw a line between desire and necessity. An ascetic austerity may trample even upon necessity and exult in privation and squalor, but dynamic spirituality, which is chiefly concerned with the preservation and divine outflowering of life takes care to respect its necessities and even provide it with some amenities, so that no harsh material hardships may interfere with its natural growth and expansion. A necessity is not a desire, it is the need of something which is indispensable; and the need arises naturally from the circumstances of one's life. But desires may or may not have any reference to circumstances,—they are, as the Mother says, waves from the sea of the subconscient vital entering into us—if there is something in us responding to them—and driving us to struggle and suffering. We must, therefore, be always on the alert, so that no desire may come disguised as necessity and delude us into striving to satisfy it. Let us take an example. A man needs something to wrap up at night in winter. He is

¹ Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.

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given a rug which is thick enough to keep the cold out. This is a legitimate satisfaction of a genuine necessity. But if the man refuses the rug and wants to have a special kind of quilt, which he has seen at one of his friends', then it is undeniably a desire, and to indulge or even nurse it would be to imperil his own spiritual progress. "There are few things that are real necessities in life", the rest are but objects of desire. One of the ways of distinguishing between desire and necessity is, first, to ask one- self in regard to the object of desire, "If I get it?". At once there will be a bounding and agitating reaction of pleasure and the vital being will be simply beside itself. This sudden excitement is an unmistakable sign of desire. Next, to ask oneself, "If I don't get it ?". The immediate reaction of this thought will be a depression or a sense of uneasiness or disquiet, or even revolt in the vital being, which is another sign of desire. But if the vital being remains calm in either case, then one may be more or less sure that one is dealing with a necessity and not a desire.

Desire and Delight

What desire really seeks for is delight. Delight is, indeed, the seeking of each element of our being, but desire seeks it in things that are finite and perishable, and exclusively for the ego. It is a wrong and perverted seeking, which creates conflict and entails suffering. A complete renunciation of desire—all desires, j -good and bad, for they are all born of separative ignorance—is the only condition of the enjoyment of the infinite delight which is the sap and sustenance of all things and beings in the universe. "To conquer a desire brings more joy than to satisfy it.”¹

Disguises of Desire

Desire assumes many disguises to beguile the unwary soul. .If we reject a gross physical desire, it appears in the form of a

¹ Words of the Mother.,

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Vital ambition tempting us to a great adventure and promising a brilliant success. If we have developed the purity and perspicacity to unmask and reject it even in that form, it comes back as an admirably righteous desire, a desire for social service or the service of humanity, which the highest standards of secular life seem fully to justify. We drive desire from one part of the being, it takes shelter in another, we unmask it in one form, it assumes another. Innumerable are its disguises, and intricate and subtle its ruses to entrap the human soul evolving into its godhead. It is only when we can say a categoric "No" to all its solicitations, and turn integrally to the Divine to know and realise His Will and nothing but His Will, at every step and moment of our life, that desire is finally conquered and the divine Will installed as the undisputed sovereign of our nature. It is then only that we can be said to have free will, for it is the divine Will alone that is free and sovereign.

Detachment, equality and surrender, as the Mother teaches us, will achieve the conquest of desire, which has been the despair of all ethical disciplines and ascetic austerities. It is only a question of the right attitude and the action of the divine Grace. "Each wave of desire as it comes must be observed, as quietly and with as much unmoved detachment as you would observe something going on outside you, and must be allowed to pass, rejected from the consciousness, and the true movement steadily put in its place.”¹ "You should not rely on anything else, however helpful it may seem, but chiefly primarily, fundamentally on the Mother’s Force.”²

The dignity of our divine manhood demands a complete conquest of desire, a lax or helpless subjection to which is our normal lot in ignorance and the source of most of the ills that afflict us. "There is a sovereign royalty in taking no thought for oneself. To have needs is to assert a weakness; to claim something proves that we lack what we claim. To desire is to be impotent; it is to recognise our limitations and confess our incapacity to overcome them. If only from the point of view of a legitimate pride, man should be noble enough to renounce desire. How humiliating

¹ Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.

² ibid.

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to ask something/or oneself from Life or from the Supreme Consciousness which animates it! How humiliating for us, how ignorant an offence against Her !

"For, all is within our reach; only the egoistic limits of our being prevent us from enjoying the whole universe as completely and concretely as we possess our own body and its surroundings.”¹

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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