Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

20

God Contracts a Bad Habit

We have gone far ahead in time. Sri Aurobindo's Yogic activities were still hidden in the mists of the future, while his political activities were still concealed from the public eye. Let us take a journey back into time.

A. Ghose was known to all ranks of people at Baroda from the Maharaja to the street sweeper —and esteemed by all. The educated community of Baroda had a great respect for the young man's uncommon gifts.

From February 1898, when he was first appointed Extra Professor of English, Sri Aurobindo was associated with the Baroda College until he left the State Service in 1906; at the time he was the Acting Principal of the College.

By the time Dinendra Kumar Roy came to Baroda in late 1898, A. Ghose, then twenty-six years old, was already a well-known figure at the College. D. K. Roy found that "Aurobindo was revered and adored as a god by Baroda's student community. The students were charmed by his manner of teaching.... They honoured and trusted this Bengali professor more than the British Principal of their college."

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R.N. Patkar, a former student of Sri Aurobindo's, who later became an advocate at Baroda, called up the past in 1956, independently confirming in the process many observations made by D. K. Roy. "In these days he did not take any cooked food in the evening but used to take fruit —mostly plantains — and a cup of milk. This kind of austere life continued to the day he left Baroda." For active politics.

"When I came to Baroda," ran Patkar's statement, "I was a mere lad hardly sixteen in age and so was not in a position to judge things properly. However, I note down a few points that struck me and made a vivid impression on me.

"Sri Aurobindo was very simple in his mode of living. He was not at all fastidious in his tastes. He did not care much for food or dress because he never attached any importance to either. Any dish served at his meal time was welcome to him. Similarly about his dress —he never visited the market for his dress. At home he was clad in plain white sadara and dhoti and outside invariably in white drill suits. He never slept on a soft cotton bed —as most of us do —but on a bed of coir [coconut fiber], on which was spread a Malabar grass mat which served as a bedsheet.

"Once I asked him why he used such a coarse and hard bed to which he replied with his characteristic smile: 'Don't you know, my boy, that I am a Brahmachari? Our Shastras enjoin that a Brahmachari should not use a soft bed.'"

On another point also Patkar's and D. K. Roy's observations converged: it was Sri Aurobindo's non-attachment to money. Sri Aurobindo disclosed how it happened. "When I

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joined the Baroda State Service," he said, "as I was not accustomed to getting money I got the tendency to gather and save money. I saved some money, and then suddenly spent away the whole sum at a time." That is what D. K. Roy and R. N. Patkar had noted. "Another important thing I observed about him," said the advocate, "was his total absence of love for money. He used to get the lump sum of three months' pay in a bag which he emptied in a tray lying on his table. He never bothered to keep money in a safe box under lock and key. He never cared to keep account of what he spent. This struck me and one day I casually asked him why he was keeping his money like that. He simply laughed and then replied : 'Well, it is a proof that we are living in the midst of honest and good people.' 'But you never keep an account which may testify to the honesty of people around you ?' I asked him.

"Then with a serene face he said: 'It is God who keeps account for me. He gives me as much as I want and keeps the rest to Himself. At any rate He does not keep me in want, then why should I worry?"

A smile must have curved God's lips when He heard that! Because, in his early days at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo would begin to keep a detailed account of all the expenditures. With the responsibility of half a dozen young men he had worries, and then some! He who at one time "never asked anything from anyone" had to send letters to various friends asking for monetary help, so desperate was the financial situation. "At present," wrote Sri Aurobindo to one, "I am at the height of my difficulties, in debt, with no money for the morrow, besieged

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in Pondicherry...." To another he wrote sometime later, "The situation just now is that we have Rs. 1^1/2 or so in hand." That was 3 July 1912. Then wryly, "No doubt, God will provide, but He has contracted a bad habit of waiting till the last moment."

Although poverty held no terrors for him, as his study of the universal forces deepened, his position on money and wealth ultimately stabilized. "But we look upon money," Sri Aurobindo said in 1926, "as a power of the Divine, and, as with everything else, we want to conquer it for the Divine in life. As the money-power today is in the hands of the hostile forces, naturally, we have to fight them." He explained its working. "You have really to follow a certain rhythm of the money-power, the rhythm that brings in and the one that throws out money. Money is given to you in the beginning; then, you have to deserve it. You have to prove that you do not waste it. If you waste it, then you lose your right to it.... It is not that you have to hoard money. It is there for being spent. But we must spend it in the right way —in a certain order and with an arrangement."

He dispelled plainly some wrong notions. "I may say, however, that I do not regard business as something evil or tainted," he wrote in a letter, "any more than it is so regarded in ancient spiritual India.... Even if I myself had had the command to do business as I had the command to do politics I would have done it without the least spiritual or moral compunction." Elaborating, he said, "This idea of poverty was never the Hindu ideal, not even for the Brahmin.... It is a Christian ideal to be poor.... There never was any preaching of poverty

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[in India]. Of course, there was Sannyasa having the ideal of 'no-property.' But that is quite a different thing from remaining poor. What the Indian ideal is you read in the Ramayana where the civic life is described. There was no man who was poor in Dasharatha's kingdom, none who had no garden. That is the Indian ideal and even in the Upanishads we see that the Brahmins had got wealth." In conclusion he said, "Not to be attached to property was the idea, but it is quite a different thing from remaining poor."

Sri Aurobindo knew perfectly well that money, as it circulates, accumulates and increases life wherever it flows. So he never discouraged his disciples from acquiring wealth. His only condition was the disciples' attitude. "All depends on the spirit in which a thing is done, the principles on which it is built and the use to which it is turned."

This principle applies to every field of human activity. "I have done politics," Sri Aurobindo wrote, "and the most violent kind of revolutionary politics, ghoram karma [dreadful works], and I have supported war and sent men to it, even though politics is not always or often a very clean occupation nor can war be called a spiritual line of action. But Krishna calls upon Arjuna to carry on war of the most terrible kind and by his example encourage men to do every kind of human work, sarvakarmdni. Do you contend that Krishna was an unspiritual man and that his advice to Arjuna was mistaken or wrong in principle? Krishna goes further and declares that a man by doing in the right way and in the right spirit the work dictated to him by his fundamental nature, temperament and capacity

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and according to his and its Dharma can move towards the Divine. He validates the function and Dharma of the Vaishya as well as of the Brahmin and Kshatriya. It is in his view quite possible for a man to do business and make money and earn profits and yet be a spiritual man, practise Yoga, have an inner life." There, put succinctly, is the traditional Indian attitude towards money and wealth and property.

Let us end this chapter with some quotations from Sri Aurobindo's The Mother.

"Money is the visible sign of a universal force," he wrote in a letter in 1927, "and this force in its manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical planes and is indispensable to the fullness of the outer life. In its origin and its true action it belongs to the Divine.... This is indeed one of the three forces — power, wealth, sex —that have the strongest attraction for the human ego and the Asura and are most generally misheld and misused by those who retain them. The seekers or keepers of wealth are more often possessed rather than its possessors; few escape entirely a certain distorting influence stamped on it by its long seizure and perversion by the Asura." It is for this reason that some spiritual disciplines put a ban on money and riches and proclaim poverty and bareness of life as the only spiritual condition. "But this is an error; it leaves the power in the hands of the hostile forces. To reconquer it for the Divine to whom it belongs and use it divinely for the divine life is the supramental way for the Sadhaka.

"All wealth belongs to the Divine and those who hold it are trustees, not possessors. It is with them to-day, tomorrow it

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may be elsewhere. All depends on the way they discharge their trust while it is with them, in what spirit, with what consciousness in their use of it, to what purpose."

Lakshmi, in the Indian tradition, is the presiding deity here.

"In the supramental creation the money-force has to be restored to the Divine Power and used for a true and beautiful and harmonious equipment and ordering of a new divinised vital and physical existence in whatever way the Divine Mother herself decides in her creative vision."

There are four great aspects of the Mother —Maheswari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. The "third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace." That is Mahalakshmi. "All turn with joy and longing to Mahalakshmi. For she throws the spell of the intoxicating sweetness of the Divine: to be close to her is a profound happiness and to feel her within the heart is to make existence a rapture and a marvel; grace and charm and tenderness flow out from her like light from the sun and wherever she fixes her wonderful gaze or lets fall the loveliness of her smile, the soul is seized and made captive and plunged into the depths of an unfathomable bliss." Oh, Mother! "Magnetic is the touch of her hands and their occult and delicate influence refines mind and life and body and where she presses her feet course miraculous streams of an entrancing Ananda.... For it is through love and beauty that she lays on men the yoke of the Divine. Life is turned in

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her supreme creations into a rich work of celestial art and all existence into a poem of sacred delight; the world's riches are brought together and concerted for a supreme order and even the simplest and commonest things are made wonderful by her intuition of unity and the breath of her spirit."

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