In the Mother's Light

The Goal of Human life

MANKIND can be divided into four categories from the standpoint of a goal of life. The first category comprises the preponderant bulk of men who never think of any goal of life, but are content to live from moment to moment with an un- questioning submission to the blind drive of fickle desires and the urgent demands of conventions and contingencies. They are born, they grow, they develop and imbibe traits and tendencies, they labour and succeed, and fail and suffer, and are whisked away unawares under an imperious summons, they know not why and where. Their crowns and crosses roll together in the dust while they, the travellers, depart for a while to return to this earth again—and again to seek fresh laurels and suffer fresh martyrdoms. Every time a new stage is set and a new role assigned to each of them; something is worked out once more, they know not what, through the tangled knots of combining and conflicting elements. A groping and a gamble in the hinterlands, and an aimless drift and a restless vagrancy on the surface—this is their life.

It is not that this category is made up of the waifs and off-scourings of humanity, — many strong and sensible men are also found in it; and not that they are all easy-going, unambitious men either, shirking the responsibilities and shrinking from the hazards of life. Some of them may be intrepid men, avid of adventure and courageous in confronting difficulties; but what distinguishes the men of this category is the lack of a vision of a goal of life and the absence of a steady endeavour for its realization. Their life is a vicious circle, and they do not know and never pause to think that it can have a definite issue or a divine purpose. Petty and provisional objectives are fixed upon by some, such as excellence or eminence in a particular field of action, fame and power and wealth; but there is no perception of an ultimate goal bound up with the harmonious perfection of all or most human parts, and the most complete fulfilment of life's deepest yearnings.

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The second category is constituted by those who are seeking for a goal, but have not yet found it. Even though they live apparently like the men of the first category, swayed by desires and moulded by the opinions of others, they are vaguely or acutely aware of a want, a deficiency or a lacuna which gnaws at the centre of their being and turns the wine of life into gall and wormwood. Inwardly they fret and fumble for an issue out of the clamours and constraints of their ambiguous days and long for something which will give them an unalloyed freedom and felicity. Their discontent ruffles the tenor of their lives and discovers a thorn in every rose of pleasure, and yet, as they will realise later, it is the herald of a wholesome change and the only spur to self-transcendence and the conquest of the hidden secret of existence.

To the third category belong those who have glimpsed or envisaged some goal and advance, slowly or swiftly, according to their capacity, towards it. This category breaks off into diverse units proceeding in diverse directions. Some canter to a near and comparatively easy goal; some, drawn by a higher and wider idealism, strive for a greater and more difficult consummation. A selfless service of one's society or country or of humanity, the spreading of the gospel of peace and harmony, the dissemination of lofty truths, and the imparting of true cultural education are some of the ethical goals they endeavour to pursue They renounce most of their personal desires and try to rise superior to the formations of their lower nature, so that their life may get out of the rut of vital-physical preoccupations and emerge into some kind of transparent purity, freedom and noble beneficence. Some go even beyond these shining ideals, finding them rather lacking in any fullness and finality, and sacrifice their all to discover and realize the soul or the Spirit, the Brahman or the Divine. This is a goal which alone seems to them worth attaining, the rest appearing as unsubstantial or illusory. The fathomless peace of the Eternal or the unutterable ecstasy of the Godhead gives a profound satisfaction to the deeper parts of their being and carries with it a limpid freedom and finality which preclude any further quest or seeking. Most of the

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sacred writings of the world enjoin upon men to seek only the immortality and infinity of the Spirit and give up all other thought. An exclusive pursuit of the ineffable Reality or the supreme Knowledge or Truth has, therefore, been the dominant spiritual note for many a century, and claimed the absolute loyalty of some of the rarest men in the world. But even the liberation of the individual soul or the realization of the immutable Eternal, or the bliss of the divine embrace in the depths of the being may seem to some to be a falling short, and not the supreme fulfilment. Something more is wanted, something more comprehensive and complete, something that is real not only to the inner or ingathered consciousness, but also to the outermost active personality of man, and patent and palpable even to his physical senses.

The fourth category consists of those exceptional souls who hunger for the highest possible perfection and fulfilment in life. They are born with a sense of the indivisible unity of existence and cannot rest satisfied with any experience that cuts up this unity into pairs of opposites: Spirit and Matter, Light and Life, One and Many, Reality and Appearance, etc. And the unity they aspire after is not only the eternal and essential unity of all existence, but also the unity that breathes and blooms in opulent rainbow splendour even in all that is fleeting and phenomenal. The essential and the expressional aspects of the one Reality are felt by them as eternal correlates and seizable by an englobing realization. Besides, they feel that the expressional aspect is not a confused blur of teeming elements, but a real cosmos, an ordered evolution, a mounting harmony, self- conscious, self-fulfilling and invincibly purposive. But what has been up to now only a feeling and a vague, if insistent, aspiration in this direction, is luminously revealed by the Mother as the very goal of human life and the central secret of the soul's descent into human birth.

Of what use would be man if he was not made to throw a bridge between that which eternally is, but is not manifested, and that which is manifested, between all the transcendences, all the splendors

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of the divine life and all the obscure and sorrowful ignorance of the material world? Man is the intermediary between That which has to be and that which is; he is a bridge thrown over the abyss, he is the great X as the cross, the quaternary link. His true abode., the effective seat of his consciousness, should be in the intermediate world at the joining point of the four arms of the cross, where all the infinity of the Unknowable comes to take precise form for being projected into the multitudinous manifestation,

This centre is the seat of supreme love and perfect consciousness, of pure and total knowledge. Establish there, O Lord, those who can, who must and who will serve Thee truly, so that Thy work may be done, the bridge may be definitively established and Thy forces may spread untiringly in the world.”¹

In this Prayer the Mother sets up a goal, outlines a destiny before mankind, which surpasses its highest imagination, and is destined to fulfil its widest and deepest aspiration. Man has to be a bridge between That which eternally is, but is not manifested, and that which is manifested. High above, beyond the frontiers of Time and Space, are the ineffable and unthinkable transcendences and infinitudes of the Unmanifest, and below, at the polar end, are the obscure, travailing expanses of the material existence, ignorant and sorrowful. Man must raise himself out of the lower yoke of desires and passions, ascend to the peak of his being, now veiled from his mental consciousness, and take his effective seat in the intermediate world from where he can canalize and conduct the golden stream of God's descending Light for the illumination and transfiguration of the whole of his earthly nature. He is "the great X as the cross, the quaternary link". Body, life, the psychic being (soul), and the mind constitute his quaternity. The first two link him to the manifested world and make him its representative and medium of self-expression, and the last two raise him beyond himself and beyond the universe and unite him with the eternal Unmanifest. He is thus created to bridge the yawning gulf between Matter and Spirit and be the great reconciler and unifier of

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, August 29, 1914.

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what appears as eternal opposites in creation. His birth here is not a chance caprice of Nature or a vain error. If he has come down into the material world, it is certainly not to run away from it for good and all, leaving it in its distressing darkness, but to illumine and transform it and render it an abode of the Divine. The overstress on the individual salvation was a passing phase of human aspiration when the spiritual vision was contracting and the spiritual force receding before the advancing tide of materialism. The great primeval prayer of the human heart is, in the words of the Rig Veda, "Become high-uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in us the things of the Godhead.”¹¹

Manifestation of the Godhead, implicit in the soul of every man, is then the goal of human life. Man has to exceed his present ignorant humanity and establish himself in the intermediate world "at the joining point of the four arms of the cross where all the infinity of the Unknowable comes to take precise form for being projected into the multitudinous manifestation". This intermediate world is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind, the immense manufactory of definite forms and the source of all life's distinctions and diversities. Securely seated in that effulgent world of infinite creativity he, the jivanmukta, will act and live :

"Only to bring God's forces to waiting Nature,

To help with wide-winged peace her tormented labour

And heal with joy her ancient sorrow,

Casting down light on the inconscient darkness”² ²

Man has to combine in himself, because it is the Divine in him who combines in Himself, the transcendent, the universal, and the individual. His individuality is meant to be a focal Point and expressive facet of the universal and the transcendent. He is destined to be at once the golden crown of the evolutionary Nature, who began her ascensive spiral from the inert Inconscient,

Vamadeva—Rig Veda IV.

Sri Aurobindo : Collected Poems and Plays.

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and the most complete and creative embodiment of the descending Love, Light and beatific Force of Sachchidananda upon earth.

It is a commonplace of spiritual philosophy that God is the ultimate goal of life, and it has also been an experience of countless men, purchased at the cost of many a cruel pang and bitter remorse and cheerless roving in the wilderness of the world. Even the politicians of today, who have perforce to ply a trade in blustering falsehood and burnished hypocrisy, take the name of God and implore His protection at the crises and junctures of their lives. All the hackneyed cant of rationalism is hushed, and the pride of bolstered-up personality falls to the ground when, at a crucial moment, the soul of man turns to its eternal 'Master. Even rank atheism sometimes betrays a tremor or a glimmer of faith, a pin-point of hope and trust upon which, as upon a rock of safety, it can rest its tired head in the midst of an unspeakable agony of doubt. God is not only the friend and refuge of the poor and the weak, but also the secret guide and deliverer of the high and mighty.

But all has not been said even when God is affirmed as the goal of life. God—yes, of course, but what do we mean by God ? Is God only a static, transcendent, nameless Reality to which the soul has to climb and cease ? Is the upward ascent the sole legitimate movement of the aspiring human consciousness, and can it affirm a retreat to its Source as its only goal ? Has the soul of man taken upon itself the burden of terrestrial birth only to fling it on the wayside and run back to the Incommunicable ? Is not there any glorious denouement of this long toil and travail upon earth ? The naked soul beating a precipitate retreat to its Maker may rejoice, but:

"O Soul, it is too early to rejoice!

Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,

Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;

But where hast thou thrown self's mission and self's power?

On what dead bank on the eternal's road?

One was within thee who was all the world,

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What hast thou done for His purpose in the stars ?

Escape is not the victory and the crown!

Something thou earnest to do from the Unknown,

But nothing is finished and the world goes on,

Because only half God's cosmic work is done.

Only the everlasting No has neared

And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:

But where is the Lover's everlasting Yes,

And immortality in the secret heart?...

A black veil has been lifted, we have seen

The mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord;

But who has lifted up the veil of light

And who has seen the body of the King?...

To free the self is but a radiant pace;

Here to fulfil Himself was God's desire.”¹

The goal towards which the Mother would have us advance is just this fulfilling of God in the world. So, when she speaks of the integral union with the Divine, she means a union out of which will pour, as from an inexhaustible fountain. His Love and Light and blissful Force upon this obscure material world.

"O divine Mother, Thy march is triumphal and uninterrupted, He who unites with Thee in an integral love journeys unceasingly towards vaster and vaster horizons, towards a completer and completer realization, leaping from peak to peak in the splendour of Thy light to the conquest of the marvellous secrets of the Un- known and their integral manifestation.” ²

The Mother never tires of insisting on manifestation, the manifestation or revelation of the Divine in Matter, the shaping of His perfect Form in the clay. This is, according to her, the Work of all works, the Goal of all goals.

"My sole aspiration is to know Thee better and serve Thee

¹ Sri Aurobindo : Savitri, Book III, Canto II.

² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother,

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better every day.”¹ Knowledge, Power, Love, Union—all are harnessed to bring about the manifestation which is the purpose of God in creation.

"Let the pure perfume of sanctification bum always, rising higher and higher, and straighter and straighter, like the ceaseless prayer of the integral being, desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee.”²

So long as one is in the material world, living the material life in a physical body, one cannot lead the life of an absorbed contemplative—the ineluctable necessities of this life will constantly pluck at his elbow and remind him again and again of the work he has to accomplish and the debt he has to discharge. He may elect to be stone-deaf and content himself with s clumsy compromise—a radiant serenity and silence within, and a lurid hush without; but he can never arrive in this way at a conquest of the evils of life and a victorious vindication of the omnipotence of the Spirit.

"Even he who might have arrived at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude, could only have done so by extracting himself from his body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have abandoned it to itself; by a misguided mysticism, by the attraction of supraphysical splendours, by the egoistic desire of being united with Thee for his personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the reason of his earthly existence, he would have refused cowardly to accomplish his mission to redeem and purify Matter. To know that a part of our being is perfectly pure, to commune with that purity, to be identified with it, can be useful only if we subsequently utilize this knowledge for hastening the earthly transfiguration, far accomplishing Thy sublime work.”³

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

² ibid., March 13, 1913.

³ ibid., June 15, 1913,

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What fire-flakes of words to kindle the consciousness of man into the right perception of his goal and the right aspiration for its attainment !

Dwelling on the right attitude man should take for the progressive attainment of his goal, the Mother says, "To be constantly in search of Thee in everything, to will to manifest Thee better in every circumstance—in this attitude is to be found supreme peace, perfect serenity, true contentment. In it life blooms, widens, spreads out so magnificently, in such majestic surges that no storm can any more trouble it.”¹

The main cause of the human misery, ideological confusion and colossal dissipation of energy in the present world is the lack of a definite goal of life. Men have chosen to be flotsam and jetsam upon the tempestuous ocean of life. Theirs is a wandering without an aim, a hopeless, rudderless drift. Depolarized, deflected from the true course, deluded by appearances and seduced by contrary attractions, they dance "like puppets at the end of threads held they know not by whom or by what. When will they take the time to sit and draw inwards, to collect themselves and open that inner door which hides from them Thy priceless treasures. Thy infinite boons?—How painful and miserable seems to me their life of ignorance and obscurity, their life of foolish agitation and profitless dissipation, when a single spark of Thy sublime light, a single drop of Thy divine love can transform this suffering into an ocean of joy /"²

"Give peace and light to them all, O Lord; open their blinded eyes and their obscured understanding; calm their useless torments and futile cares. Turn their regard away from themselves and give them the joy of consecration to Thy work without calculation or mental reserve. Let Thy beauty blossom in everything, awaken Thy love in all hearts, so that Thy eternally progressive order may be realized upon earth and Thy harmony spread till the day when all will be Thyself in perfect purity and peace.

"Oh! may all tears be dried, all sufferings relieved, all anguish

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother,

² ibid.

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disappear, and may a calm serenity dwell in the hearts of men and a potent certitude strengthen their minds. May Thy life circulate in all as a regenerating flood and may all turn towards Thee to draw in this contemplation energy for every victory.”¹

Will not man in his present predicament and perplexity hearken to the Mother's call of love and turn to the Divine to make Him the Pole-star and His Will the single pilot of his life ? Will he not awake to the reason of his earthly existence, to the glory of his mission here, and grow into "the great X, the quaternary link," joining God and Nature, Spirit and Matter, Light and Life, Heaven and Earth ? Will he not become the gold-and-blue bridge, the intermediary between "That which has to be and that which is", the flame-channel at once of the highest aspiration of the sorrowful earth and the redeeming and transforming Grace of the Divine ? The great goal to which the Mother beckons him is a double fulfilment by a double identification—a dynamic identification not only with the transcendent Fount of all existence, but also with its perennial, rapturous cosmic Flood; and a fulfilment of his integral being in the Divine and the fulfilment of the Divine in his integral being upon earth.

¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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