Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

37

All Life is Yoga

It was going to turn out to be an incredible 'spiritual adventure.' Because it was the 'Yoga for the Earth.' Not an atom was to be neglected. Sri Aurobindo's motto was 'All Life is Yoga,' and he lived up to it. His was the Upanishadic view, which did not assert the unreality of our present existence but only its incompleteness and inferiority. So what Sri Aurobindo had to do was to get to the bottom of things: where did things go wrong? Why did they go wrong? He began by observing life. Not only of man, to be sure. No creature great or small was beyond the pale of observation of this Scientist of Yoga. He observed, studied, analyzed. He observed at close quarters butterflies, spiders, ants, cats, dogs, and men. Nothing and nobody escaped his keen study. He had heaps of anecdotes on all sorts of creatures. He never lost a chance to put his disciples in their places when they talked superciliously about animals.¹ He always repudiated man's general misconception that animals cannot think or reason. "They have," he said, "an intelligence which acts

¹ Let us remember that all this took place in the 1920s. Today there is some improvement in our ideas.

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within narrow limits of the needs of their life."

Sri Aurobindo taught his disciples to make a distinction between the instinct and intelligence of animals. He explained that "the animal instinct is limited to a particular purpose. It is something ingrained in the being, something that is handed down to a particular species." He held that the ordinary idea about animals is absurd. "They are much nearer to man than is generally supposed."

When he told the tale of a spider—he had scores of spidery tales!—and one of the disciples present still thought that animals have 'no intelligence,' Sri Aurobindo promptly put the man in his place. "What do you mean?" he shot back. "They have as much intelligence as men have." As an illustration he told another tale of a spider. "I told you, perhaps," he said in 1925, "how the other day I saw a spider. He wanted to balance his cobweb against some weight in order to support it. He put a blade first, but found it was not heavy enough. So he went down and brought a small piece of gravel and with it balanced the web. Now, you can't call this instinct. It is intelligence."

Commenting on the resourcefulness of spiders which he had witnessed any number of times, he said, "they know what they have to do and then they learn by experience and experiment." Better than humans ...

Do the animals, despite having no articulate speech, have a language to communicate with each other? The question was put to Sri Aurobindo in 1926.' "It is not true that they have no

¹ In the intervening decades science has brought a wealth of information on the subject. Today it is common knowledge that dolphins, for instance, communicate with each other through sound impulses—or is it song?

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language," he replied. "They have some sort of intoned sounds, and also they have a power of wonderful telepathic communication of impulse." He cited the case of cats. "The cats have a language of their own; they utter different kinds of mews for different purposes." Then added characteristically, "It is the Europeans who make a big difference between man and animals. The only difference is the animals can't form a concept, can't read or write or philosophies."

A decade later, in a letter to Dilip, he was more explicit. "The power to discuss and debate is, as I say, a common human faculty—and habit," he wrote on 23 June 1935. "Perhaps it is here that man begins to diverge from the animal; for animals have much intelligence—many animals and even insects, even some rudimentary power of practical reasoning, but, so far as we know, they don't meet and put their ideas about things side by side or sling them at each other in a debate as even the most ignorant human can do and very animatedly does____" In a footnote he corrected himself: "Perhaps the crows do in the Crow Parliament sometimes?"

All this was the result not only of his keen observation of physical movements of creatures, but also of a deep study of their psychology. He deduced that not only have we inherited much from the animal nature, but we have brought it almost intact into our human life.

It was the day before his fifty-fourth birthday, 14 August 1926. During the evening talk with his disciples on the subject of beauty, Sri Aurobindo said, "Well, some flowers have got psychic beauty in them: for instance, the jasmine is a very psychic flower."

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An astonished disciple remarked, "The flowers have beauty but it is something new to learn that they have psychic beauty."

Sri Aurobindo nodded. 'Yes, it is the beauty of the soul of the flower."

"Soul of the flower!"

"I knew it would astound you," came the rejoinder. 'You think the flowers have no soul? It is again man's ignorance that makes him think that he is the greatest being in creation. Many dogs have got a much finer psychic being than many men."

The conversation was held in August 1926, as I said. By then Mother had been there already for several years. So it need not surprise us to learn that there were several cats around. Mother used to prepare pudding, and put aside a portion in a small dish, then add a little milk and stir it herself. "She showed me how to do it," said Champaklal, who was Mother's odd job man, "and was particular that no grains should be left unmeshed.... And do you know for whom this part of the pudding was meant?" He answered his own question. "For cats. Later on I learnt that they were not really cats but something more. You would be interested to know that at times Sri Aurobindo also kept fish ready for these 'cats,' removing the bones etc." Sri Aurobindo had ample opportunity to study cats at close quarters.

"Would you believe if I were to tell you," Sri Aurobindo asked his sceptical disciple, "that there is a psychic element in the love-making of animals? Take our cat, Big-boy. When he makes love to Bite-bite, he is physical; when he makes love to Baby, he is vital; when he makes love to Mimi, he is emotional and sentimental; and when he makes love to Girly, he is psychic!"

A perplexed disciple asked, "Then how is it that man is

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regarded as the highest being in creation?"

"It is the egoistic ignorance of man that makes him think so." Sri Aurobindo replied patiently. "He is high because there is in him the possibility of evolving a divine life. You can say also, that he is high because he has developed a mind and the mind gives him a chance of conscious evolution. But it does not necessarily follow that because man is a mental being he has used his mind for his evolution. Exactly because he has a mind, man has an infinite capacity to be devilish. He brings to the help of his devil a mind, and the devil himself can't be so bad as man with his mind when he puts it at the service of his

vital being It is the egoistic ignorance of man which makes

him think he is the highest in creation," he reiterated.

It was difficult for the disciple to accept that downgrading. He could not conceive that in this world of slow evolution man has emerged out of the beast and is still not out of it. So he came out with another argument. "But, then, there is the great difference between man's body and the animal's."

"That is all," Sri Aurobindo refused to buy the argument, "and even that is not so much as you try to make it out to be." He asked, "After all, what is the difference between the animal body and the human ? If you see carefully, you will see you have discarded the tail, and instead of walking on four legs you have been using two, and the other two you have changed into hands." He conceded, "There have been slight but very important changes in the brain and some details here and there. You have cast off your fur and horns."

"Not all men!" interjected another listener. "Khitish has a lot of fur yet."

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Amidst the roar of laughter that followed, Sri Aurobindo said with a smile, 'You see, after all it is not so great a change in the physical as would create a gulf between animal and man! No, all that is human nonsense!" Then more seriously, "Man is great because he can open to something higher and can consciously go beyond the mind and live a divine life upon earth."

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