The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

CHAPTER VII

The Integral Surrender

PART I

THE BACKGROUND

THE essential truth which informs the concept of the Integral surrender is a triple postulate: That the Divine is the omnipresent Reality, the sole all-constituting and all-transcending Being, whose progressive self-manifestation in Matter is the goal of evolutionary terrestrial Nature; that it is the supreme Consciousness- Force of this Being, or rather the Being Himself as Consciousness-Force or Shakti, the Magna Mater, or the Megale Dunamis of the Gnostics, that has woven out of Himself this immense and intricate web of the worlds; and that it is the omniscient Will of the Shakti, and not any Chance or caprice of an inconscient Force or Energy, that moves the entire universe of its own creation and acts in and through all creatures and things and happenings. Once we admit this triple truth, we are on the way to appreciating the significance of the integral surrender in the Integral Yoga. For, if there is one conscious Shakti, the transcendent and universal Mother, everywhere, in all Her self-formations, organic and inorganic, and if it is Her Will that; covertly or overtly, initiates,

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inspires and influences all action, and works itself through the tangled combinations and oppositions of t myriad elements; if it is She who, invisible to our mortal sight and unacknowledged by our mental ignorance the Soul of our soul (parāprakṛtirjīvabhūutā) and the Life of our life (prāṇasyedam vaśe sarvam or prāṇaḥ prajānām), then a glad and loving self-surrender to He Power is the best way to realise our unity with the Divine and fulfil our destiny in the world. It is not merely the faith and emotion of our heart that induce this surrender but our reason too, when it overcomes the witchery of the senses and the enslaving lure of the material objects and interests, dictates it as the sole means of the utmost fulfilment of our whole being.

An enlightened intelligence cannot remain tethered to the brute facts of the material world, and impervious to the call of Spirit. With his vision unbarred, his imagination unclamped, and his sensibilities sharpened and subtilised, man, following the secret law of his evolution, which is a law of continuous self-transcendence, must look up beyond the boundaries of his mind and extend his exploration into the domains of Spirit with as much faith and courage as he commands in his intrepid and untiring exploration of the fields of Matter. He must realise that his scientific scepticism is another name for the fanaticism of the materialist, a perverse refusal to see the subtler truths of existence and know the abiding law and essence of his being. A spiritual awakening will widen his consciousness, develop many

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faculties which lie dormant in him, and advance him a step beyond Bergson, where he will perceive the one Elan, not only vital, but also physical, mental and spiritual,— the one, indivisible, conscious Force, deploying its manifoldness and diversity on the basis of its inalienable unity; and, realising that all-creating and all- constituting Force as the universal Mother, surrender himself to Her, so that undeflected by the fickle desires and unhampered by the preferences and hesitancies of his ego, his being may blossom, with the same spontaneity as the flower blossoms, under the fostering love and care of Her all-pervading Presence. His surrender to the Mother would then be as natural a movement as the surrender of the wave to the sea,—the microcosm will participate in the freedom and sovereignty of the macrocosm. A further step will lead him from the universal to the transcendent Mother, in whose arms of unebbing Love he will find his eternal rest, even while, united with Her universal aspect, he lives an immortal's life on earth, fulfilling Her Will and manifesting the Divine. What appears Utopian and impossible to his imprisoned mental ego will one day appear natural and in- evitable to his liberated consciousness. To know that his atomic being is generated, sustained and led to its evolutionary perfection by the omnipresent plenum of the Mother's living Presence, and to surrender all himself with an unstinted joy and generosity to Her Force, which is at once Light and Love, is man's deliverance, and his first decisive step towards knowledge.

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THE TRIPLE SURRENDER

Man is composed of body, life, soul and mind. Of these four components, the soul, which is made of the Love and Delight of the Supreme, is eternally surrendered to Him. Nothing can wean it from Him, nothing can seduce it into the devious ways of ignorance. It has no desire and no ego; and it does not react with pleasure or pain to the dualities of the world. It is only the triple nature of mind, life and body that, grouped round and manipulated by the ego, is attached to the shifting surfaces of existence and self-insulated from Spirit, its infinite source and sustenance. Unaware of his soul and the Divine dwelling within it, and identified with the mobile mechanism of his triple nature, man feels himself a separate being, set in the midst of other separate beings and forces, to carve out his own career as best he can by a series of clashes and compromises. He does not suspect that his egoistic individuality, asserting its separate existence and pluming itself upon its free will, is an ignorant tool of Nature, and that all its vaunted endowments of intelligence and independence of judgment, conscience and ethical instincts, are but instrumental gifts controlled and directed from behind and above by the one universal Shakti of whom it is only an expressive medium. This triple nature of mind, life and body has to be surrendered to the Mother to whom it really belongs; for it is only by surrender to the infinite, all-knowing Force of the Mother that it can be cured of its egoistic

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distortions and led to its highest possible perfection and fulfilment. Surrender will not diminish or impoverish it, rather it will enlarge and enrich it beyond any conceivable measure.

THE SURRENDER OF THE MIND

The secret sense of evolution being the full and perfect emergence of the Divine in the human individual, the motor means of achieving it is a progressive self- transcendence by the double power of aspiration and renunciation. The consciousness of the individual must aspire for the highest it can conceive and imagine, and, at the same time, always renounce its attachment to what it has already acquired. No self-transcendence is possible without a combined working of these two powers. If we do not stretch to infinity, we remain cribbed in the finite; and if we do not leave the plains, we cannot rise to the peaks. Aspiration without renunciation is an idle imagining, and renunciation without aspiration is a joyless self-denial. Therefore the two powers must be harnessed together to effect the utmost self-transcendence of our being.

Philosophers, scientists and thinkers in general attain to an intellectual eminence by the same double process of aspiration and renunciation. If they remained pre-occupied with physical interests, like the unenlightened portion of humanity, or fully lent themselves to the drive of vital desires and the ambition for vital success and satisfaction,

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their ascent to the intellectual heights would have been impossible. An increasing renunciation of the lower pleasures and pursuits and a steady uplook have crowned them with intellectual glory. But even the highest mental eminence is a dim plateau which commands no direct view of Truth. What we have arrived at by strenuous mental strivings is not knowledge, but, at best, some shadowy figures and fragments of knowledge some aspects of Truth torn from their harmonious unity and fringed with the nimbus of our minds. There is no knowledge in the mind but is harassed by doubt and challenged by fresh discoveries—we seem to be moving from hypothesis to hypothesis, speculating, imagining, conjecturing, experimenting, but never getting at any assured, incontrovertible truth, any final solution of the problems of life.

What is the remedy? The same as we employed, though subconsciously, at the past crucial stages of our evolution —the renunciation of our attachment to what we possess and cherish, and an aspiration for something higher and wider. If we are sincerely convinced of the inherent limitations of the human mind and its inability to lead us to Truth, we must cease to glorify it, and, renouncing our exclusive reliance on it and obsession with its pursuits, aspire for an ascent to the next higher plane of consciousness. A keenly felt discontent with mental limitations will open new doors upon the infinite and advance us a step further on our journey to Truth; for, surely it is incredible that after so much evolutionary

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progress and promise of perfection, we should have to- ' short at a half-result and continue rumbling for ever in the twilight of the mind. But there is always a. limit to the mind's own power of self-transcendence, which necessitates a surrender to the infinite divine Force of the Mother.

In the Integral Yoga, the mind is not sought to be forcibly silenced or suppressed, as is done in some of the other Yogas, notably in Raja Yoga. The aim of the Integral Yoga being a dynamic union, not only of the soul but of every part of its terrestrial nature, with the Divine, and a resultant perfection and fulfilment of the whole being of man, neither mind, nor life, nor body is coerced or atrophied, or left out in the cold shade of a righteous neglect. Each part, each fibre of our complex nature has a divine origin, and a divine right to exist and grow, and an indispensable, legitimate use in the service of God in the world. The surrender of the mind, therefore, means, in the Integral Yoga, a surrender of all its faculties. and functions into the hands of the divine Mother, so that She may, in Her inscrutable but infallible way, purify and transform them, and render them potent instruments. for the reception and transmission of Knowledge.

The mind is derived from the Supermind, the dynamic Truth-Consciousness of the Infinite, but in the evolutionary ignorance of the human consciousness, it seems to be cut off from its source—though, in reality, it is not,—and works as a dividing and differentiating instrument. It commands no vision of the Infinite, no-

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perception of the indivisible unity and totality. It deals with each object as if it were a separate unit having relations, but no identity, with the rest. Its characteristic action is to divide and depiece, to segregate and aggregate, to analyse and synthesise, but always on the basis of a separative ignorance; and if is, therefore, constitutionally incapable of arriving at the truth of existence "which is a truth of unity and totality. In life it is an agent of organisation and action, but a lame and limited Agent, organising and acting in the shadow of its seeking ignorance, and not in the self-existent light of knowledge. I propose to go into greater details of the nature of the .human mind and the transformation it has to undergo in the Integral Yoga in a subsequent part of this exposition. Suffice it to say here that, unless the mind surrenders and the human consciousness transcends it, there can be no attainment of knowledge and no satisfactory solution of the problems of life. Aspiration and renunciation must proceed hand in hand on the firm basis of a total surrender.

What is actually meant by the surrender of the mind? With an intense and constant aspiration, the mind must turn all its thoughts to the divine Mother, so that the loving intensity of the turning may bring about an automatic concentration of its energies and a consequent freedom from its wonted distraction and confusion. Concentration on the Divine will bring into it peace and .serenity, silence and harmony—a state of intent and tranquil receptivity to the descending Light of the Mother.

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'This aspiring concentration should be accompanied and fortified by a renunciation of the mind's attachments, and a complete rejection of its "ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind"¹ Our thoughts, ideas, judgements, all depend upon the perspective and. angle of vision we take in our regard of ourselves and others; and the angle of vision depends, in its turn, upon. the poise of our consciousness. If the poise changes, as. it not unoften does, our whole mental outlook and inlook change; our thoughts, ideas and opinions begin to assume a different complexion and run on different lines. This is a common enough experience, illustrated in the lives of many great men, such as St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, Luther, and Kant (among the Westerners); and Valmiki, Tulsidas, Vivekananda, to name only a few, among the Indians. This proves that there is nothing permanent and sacrosanct about our mental structures, which are but ephemeral things, constructed out of a medley of passing physical and psychological elements. In the Integral Yoga, all such vamped up structures have to be pulled down, the accumulated cobwebs to be swept away, and the emptied mind, like an empty vessel, has to be held up for the Mother's Light to fill it. It is an extremely difficult work for the modern intellectual man to do: to cast away his cherished thoughts and ideas, his views and convictions, his predilections

¹ The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

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and prepossessions, his mental principles and rules, and become, as Sri Ramakrishna became, a simple child of the Mother, open only to Her inspiration and intuition

But if one could do that, the result would be what » has always been in the case of all sincere spiritual seekers a marvellous shower of intuitive knowledge, untainted by personal bias, and sparkingly spontaneous in its revelation and action. Knowledge sits enthroned beyond the leapings and circlings of the human intellect, and manifests itself only to the mind that has surrendered to it with aspiration and renunciation. The knowledge that speaks in the Vedas and the Upanishads, in the Avesta and the Bible, and in the utterances of the mystics, is a supra-intellectual knowledge, not born of reason and reflection, but self-revealed to the silent and surrendered mind, and it is this knowledge that is instinct with Truth, and not what we call knowledge in the pretentious ignorance of our struggling mind. In the Integral Yoga, the surrender of the mind as, indeed, of every other part of our nature, has to be dynamic, and not merely passive. It must be a surrender for sublimation, integration and a radical and total transformation, and not only for a stillness and passivity through which the consciousness may pass out of the mind into some kind of trance or absorbed union with the Eternal. Each faculty of the mind—imagination, perception, reasoning; discrimination, penetration, judgement, must be directly intuivised, and finally linked to and worked by the Supramental Light. Mind, the alienated, and diminished

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delegate of the Supermind, must be transformed into a luminous and powerful vehicle of the supramental Truth-Consciousness, and an efficient organiser and active agent for the establishment and consolidation of the Life Divine on earth.

THE SURRENDER OF THE VITAL (PRANA)

The surrender of the vital or prāṇa means, first and foremost, the surrender of all desires. At the very heart of life, the egoistic, separative life as is lived by man, there is a hard knot of desire, formed of many strands that are connected with each part of our being. Each motive, each impulse, each action of our life, if it is dispassionately scrutinised, will be found to be shot through with the threads of desire, whether it assumes physical forms, vital forms or mental. In the body it manifests as hunger and thirst, which engross and enslave our physical consciousness; and in the vital it manifests as turbulent lusts and passions, clamorous cravings and insatiate ambitions, that toss and torment our being and goad us into all sorts of actions, most of which entail considerable struggle and suffering. This heady rajasic wine is not only useful, but indispensable, at a particular stage of evolution, when the being is enveloped in the tamas (inertia) of Matter and needs to be shaken up and vitalised; but once that stage is passed, and a decisive step forward is taken towards the relative equipoise

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of Sattwa,¹ and, especially, when the being is awaking to its spiritual possibilities, the bondage of desire is the most hampering bondage possible. Because of it, life, which should be a tidal flow towards the deathless Light, drifts and dissipates itself, or meanders in fruitless mazes' ; Because of it, the universal Will, which is behind and of which desire is a dark and distorted reflection remains veiled, and man runs hungering after transient pleasures and finds himself overtaken by recurrent suffering. This vital being has to be completely surrendered and irrevocably consecrated, and its desires persistently discouraged and repelled, so that they may ultimately fade away from the nature, leaving the one universal Will to fulfil itself in human life.

Here, too,, we must remember, the object is not the repression and killing of the vital (prāṇa), but its purification and transformation. The vital being is the centre of force, and an indispensable instrument for life-effectuation; without it nothing can be achieved in life, whatever may be the power and potentialities of the ideas and visions of the mind. It is the warrior, the executive agent, the intrepid adventurer; and it is also the enjoyer in man. It is made for possession and enjoyment. Its repression, mutilation or neglect—so common in ascetic spirituality —is a fatal folly, for it is nothing short of depriving God of the means of conquest and enjoyment in the material world. Purified of desire, the prāṇa becomes a potent

¹Nature's qualitative mode of enlightened poise and happiness

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instrument in the hands of the Mother, and capable of universal enjoyment. But, let us repeat, it must be totally surrendered to the Mother, and the rejection of its ignorant movements must be uncompromising and unreserved. "Rejection of the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large strong and consecrated vital being."¹ If this constant harasser of man's God-ward endeavour is once conquered and converted, life becomes a triumphal march towards Light and Bliss and immortality, a march ringing with paeans to the self- fulfilling Will of the Divine.

THE SURRENDER OF THE BODY

The surrender of the body means a surrender of all its movements to the divine Mother. It will not do, in the Integral Yoga, to reduce the action of the body to a minimum and limit it only to the bare maintenance of the physical frame, or to social or humanitarian beneficence, or to the performance of some prescribed religious duties. Since the integral Yoga accepts the whole of life, it accepts all its multitudinous action and play of energy, not for the personal profit or egoistic satisfaction of the individual, but for the fulfilment of the divine Will,

¹The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

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which is a Will to endless creation for self-expression To do action for the satisfaction of one's own desires physical, vital or mental, is to remain attached and fettered to action, and perpetuate the life of ignorance and suffering To renounce action is to non-co-operate with God in His self-manifestation. To do all action, first as an offering to the Mother without any hankering after its results. selflessly and dispassionately—and then to renounce the egoism of the doer, even of the selfless doer, and let the Force of the Mother initiate and carry on all action, is the sovereign Yogic way. Each movement of the body,—walking, speaking, reading, eating, working, playing,—has to be severally offered, so that no energy of the physical being may remain entangled in the desires and preferences of the ego, but all are surrendered to and controlled by the Mother. "When you can thus gather all your movements into the One Life, then you have in you unity instead of division. No longer is one part of you given to the Divine, while the rest remains in its ordinary ways, engrossed in ordinary things; your entire life is taken up, an integral transformation is gradually realised in you."¹

But along with this aspiring surrender of the body and its actions, there must go a thorough rejection of the "physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, t mas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda

¹.The Words of the Mother.

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may establish itself in a body growing always more divine...."¹ We shall see, when we come to consider the supramental transformation of the body, how, through surrender to the Mother's Power, it is changed from a dense and impeding clod into a transparent temple of the manifest Divine. Work which, in the beginning of the Yoga, is a prayer of the body to the Divine, becomes in the end the prism of His Victorious Power.

What the Integral Yoga aims to achieve, is not only the surrender of the being of man, but also of his entire temporal becoming; and that makes all the difference between this Yoga and all the others. In it, it is not enough that man's actions should be altruistic and selfless— though, till the final transformation, there is always a subtle, undetected self (ego) even in what is deemed as selfless,—it must be definitely and authentically God- willed and God-directed. The soul of man belongs neither to any society, nor to any nation, nor to any country, nor even to humanity,—it belongs solely and eternally to God; and to be dynamically united with God in life and be to Him "what his own hand is to man", is the purpose of its descent into mortal birth. And it is by an integral surrender of its whole terrestrial being to the Mother that it attains to the blissful and creative union, which is the fount and cradle of its divine becoming.

¹The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

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PART II

THE THREE STAGES OF SURRENDER

THE FIRST STAGE

ALL our turning towards God is caused by the soul or psychic being from behind. It is the soul that infuses its influence, little by little, into the most developed part of our being, whether it is the mind or the heart or the will in the vital, and then diffuses it into the other parts by a general penetration and expansion. When our mind begins to think of God or the Infinite, or of something transcending our ignorance and mortality; when, more or less released from the thralldom of the body and the vital desires, it seeks an Absolute of Light or an Absolute of Peace or an Absolute Bliss, it is invariably the soul that has inspired the seeking. But our egoistic personality is not aware of this occult influence and inspiration. It feels that it is itself thinking of the Eternal or the Absolute, or that there is naturally developing a love of God and devotion and an attitude of self-offering in its heart. K takes the credit for this spiritual orientation to itself a"" derives a secret, proud satisfaction from the change. An'1 certainly there is nothing unnatural or undesirable in it.

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So long as the soul does not come to the front of our consciousness, it is always the ego that is the organiser and ruler of our nature. It may be a tamasic ego, wallowing in inertia and indolence and sheer physical amenities; or it be rajasic, drunk with desires and revelling in strife d struggle for power and possession; or it may be sattwic, stationing itself in the growing light of the intelligence (buddhi) and progressing in comparative peace and purity; hut none the less it is the ego all through, living in a constant sense of its separateness from others and emphasising its personal inclinations and preferences. But a stage arrives in the evolution of the human individual, when he comes to perceive that his separateness is an illusion, a hollow and uneasy illusion, and that behind it there is something infinite and eternal, of which it is a finite and fugitive figure. This Infinite and Eternal appears to be more than a mere immutable, impersonal immanence—it looms as a Being, as the supreme Master of our existence, as God. This perception kindles in the individual a new faith and aspiration, and reverses his poise from self-seeking to self-surrender. The more he evolves, the more he realises his cabined littleness and his undeniable dependence on God, who enfolds and exceeds him. Not only does he feel that he is sustained and supported by the infinite Being, but that his very will is a tool of His will, and that all his decisions and determinations are but disfigured and diminished reflections of His inscrutable decrees. This perception is the right- step Awards knowledge taken by the individual, and it initiates

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the first stage of surrender. It is his voluntary surrender to That which at once contains and transcends him.

As I have said above, this change in man is really engineered from behind by the soul which is evolving in him; for, left to itself, his egoistic personality would never have come by this liberating knowledge of its essential dependence on God. But in the beginning the soul works from behind the veil, and it is the ego that is the overt leader of the nature. It is, therefore, the ego that makes the surrender. Enlightened and fired with aspiration, it says, in effect, to God, "Take me, take my all, and make me Thine; for, in truth, I belong to Thee. Deliver me from myself, and let me be Thy servant." Not "I" and "mine", but "Thou" and "Thine" becomes then the burden of its heart's song. This stage of surrender is Characterised by personal effort. Instead of seeking to arrogate every desirable object to itself, it yearns with a greater and greater sincerity to offer all it is and all it has to the All and Beyond-All. In the Integral Yoga this surrender tends to be integral, that is to say, it becomes the surrender of the mind with its thoughts and ideas, of life with its will and emotions and desires, and of the body with its movements and activities,—a synthetic progress in Jnanayoga, Bhaktiyoga and Karmayoga, though the start may be only with one of these, or, as in some cases, with two or all the three together. Constantly and conscientiously, the individual offers all his mind's thoughts, all his heart's love and devotion and all his works to the Divine Mother, and transforms his whole existence into a

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happy and loving sacrifice, into an unremitting yajña, as the Gitâ calls it. At this stage of surrender, the seeker and lover of God becomes His servant; therefore, we call it the stage of the servant,—the long and arduous stage of self-consecration by personal effort. It is a stage of the progressive transference of the centre of gravity from the ego to the Divine. It is a stage of relentless self-observation, constant self-purification, unsleeping vigilance and persistent, unreserved surrender. "A tamasic surrender refusing to fulfil the conditions and calling on God to do everything and save one all the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection."¹

THE SECOND STAGE

In proportion as the self-offering through personal effort becomes more or less integral, the sâdhaka (spiritual aspirant) begins to feel that the hold of the ego on him is slackening, and that the Mother's Power is entering into him, replacing his personal effort. The sense of his being a servant tends then to disappear gradually into the growing experience of becoming an instrument of the Mother's Will. This transition takes long to be complete, for the ego dies hard, and the integral surrender is not an easy achievement. However, a sincere call of the whole being and its self-opening to the Mother wears down the residual resistance in the nature and clears the way for a more and

¹ The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

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more manifest working of the Mother's Force. At times one feels the Force streaming in and impelling certain actions and then going out; at other times, it enters and occupies the being, lighting up some tracts of the mind intensifying the Godward emotions, and firing up the will. It initiates some or many actions in the nature, the sâdhaka remaining peacefully passive and receptive. He becomes an instrument, having learnt not only the surrender of his will to the Mother, but also of his outer actions; and detached from the urges of ignorant desires, contemplates the world and the play of its dualities with the calm gaze of a dispassionate witness. The more his surrender is sincere and pervasive in the nature, the greater is the tangibility and effectiveness of the Mother's Force; and, feeling the Force working in him, initiating his actions and carrying them out, he is strongly confirmed in his experience and attitude of the instrument, and ceases to be the worker or the servant. This second stage is called the stage of the instrument. The illusory sense of oneself being the doer of one's actions is dispelled now for ever. One comes in concrete contact with the Mother's Force, universal, all-seeing and all-achieving, and, passive in its hands, like the machine in the hands of the mechanic, sees one's life and nature being remoulded and transformed in the image of the Divine, and giving out an unwonted music of unearthly harmonies. Thought, feeling, emotion, volition, action,—nothing is repressed or restricted, but all are originated, guided and consummated by the Mother's Will and Force.

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But, at this stage, there is the possibility of two dangers, which have to be carefully guarded against, 1 ) When the sâdhaka has learnt to be passive in the hands of the divine Mother, the forces of darkness, which may still be lurking in some neglected nooks of his nature or around him in the environment, may try to take advantage of this passivity and manoeuvre him into a deflection from the path. He has to be alert and vigilant, and plastic and passive only to the Mother's Force, and to no other. The transparent sincerity and genuineness of his surrender will, however, be his safeguard against the machinations of the hostile agencies; for, sincerity can never fail to assure the Grace and protection of the Divine; but it must be an integral and unflawed sincerity, which seeks the Divine and nothing but the Divine. 2) The second danger is a great magnification of the ego at this stage, when the sâdhaka is feeling the influx and operation of the Mother's Force in him. His experience of being a divine instrument may stimulate and inflate the ego, and the discouraged or repressed ambitions, if he has any, hiding anywhere in his nature, may rear their unholy heads and strive to lure him away from the path of the Divine. Power always corrupts, unless it is held by a consecrated and divinised consciousness; and the sâdhaka cannot do better at this stage of his spiritual carreer than resolutely continue in the attitude 6f the servant, till the take-over by the Mother's Force is complete and conclusive. He must always be on his guard against the delusion that he has "arrived"; for, as Sri Aurobindo says, in this

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Yoga nothing is accomplished till all is accomplished

At this stage, the sâdhaka may find in the beginning. that though the egoism of the worker or the servant has disappeared, the subtler egoism of the instrument has taken its place. His consciousness has receded into the depths from where he knows and regards his triple nature of mind, life and body as not himself and separate from his real self, and yet there is a subtle relation, faintly felt and growing fainter, which seems to keep up the illusion of his being an instrument. This egoism of the instrument too, has to be stamped out of the consciousness and the entire being given over to the Mother to whom it really belongs.

THE THIRD STAGE

The third stage comes when the consciousness of the sâdhaka has completely identified itself with the consciousness of the Mother, and regards itself neither as a worker nor as an instrument. The soul, the central being in him, liberated from the bondage of Nature, though possessing it and enjoying its play, rests in the arms of the divine Mother, and its terrestrial being is sovereignly used by Her for the manifestation of the Divine. All egoism has faded out of his nature, all drive of desire has ceased for ever. He has become a child of the Mother, an eternal portion of Herself. Referring to this stage, Sri Aurobindo says, "Always she (the Mother) will be in you and you in her, it will be your constant, simple and natural experience

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that all your thought and seeing and action, your very breathing or moving come from her and are hers. You will know and see and feel that you are a person and power formed by her out of herself, put out from her for the play and yet always safe in her, being of her being, consciousness of her consciousness, force of her force, ananda of her Ananda. When this condition is entire and her supramental energies can freely move you, then you will be perfect in divine works; knowledge, will, action will become sure, simple, luminous, spontaneous, flawless, an outflow from the Supreme, a divine movement of the Eternal."¹This is the stage of the child.

These are the three stages of the triple or integral surrender, of which the last is the crowning result. The ego, the desire-soul, having been renounced, what marvels of knowledge and power and bliss pour upon our delightsoul, the antarātman ! Transported from the blind struggle and suffering of the life of ignorance, we live in the unity and harmony of the Life Divine. Free in the soul and free in the transformed nature, clasped by the Transcendent, and moved by His Immanence, we live, even as the Divine lives, in the triune glory of His self- existence— Sat-Chit-Ananda. And that is the destiny to which the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo leads us. .

¹ The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.

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