CWTVKS Volume 2

1) The Fifteenth of August

The 15th of August—once more this great day arrives. It is indeed a greater day than many among the present generation may imagine. The advent of Independence after many a century to a country of continental dimensions is easily a world-event and naturally cherished by her people in spite of the fissure in the unity of India paid for the price of freedom. Whether the cleavage in the geographical unit involving wounds on the cultural, social and economic integer of India can be only patched up or thoroughly healed in course of time naturally or miraculously even as the foreign yoke dropped recently, is a matter that need not concern us here. Nevertheless, the independence won so far is precious and indispensable for the realisation of India's possibilities from now on and in the future that is coming upon us. And the 15th of August is a greater day in a larger sense because it is the day of the advent to this earth of one who foresaw and foretold the advent of the Nation's freedom years ago, and worked for it all along in his own godly way and whose life's mission includes the uplift of Indian Nationalism to a higher level in which the light of its fuller significance can shine and have its full play and sway for the benefit of the world's peoples.

Yes, it was Sri Aurobindo who received God's message with the gradual unfoldment of its meaning for the Indian nation and spoke it out openly under inspiration. For it was a command and an inspiration that moved him to speak from the Silence, the Supreme Silence in which he was stationed afresh, and this speech which is a Voice of the Silence he made even before the Alipore trial, and therefore before the famous Uttarpara speech. “...God is there, and it is his Mission, and he has something for us to do. He has a work for his great and ancient nation. Therefore, he has been born again to do it, therefore he is revealing himself in you not that you may be like other nations, not that you may rise merely by human strength to trample underfoot the weaker peoples, but because something must come out from you which is to save the whole world.”

Some people think whatever he may have done for Nationalism and India's awakening to her strength in the past, he has cut off from public life and taken to Yoga and whatever he may be doing in his seclusion, however precious may be the ideals he formulates, all that has little practical value for the millions, classes as well as masses, except to the chosen few—be it many hundreds, and that is a drop in the ocean of humanity peopling this continent. But this is a superficial thought and is bound to fade once the nature of his mission on earth is understood and the results or something of the results of the great work he is engaged in is recognised, seen or felt and realised even though by a limited few in the initial stages of the success.

When we look at Sri Aurobindo's life as a whole—leaving aside for the present the mystical inexpressible divine secret of his inner and larger life—in the actual and outer life on the earth, and begin with the date of his birth, it is not difficult to find that the 15th of August is not a mere coincidence on which the two advents have occurred—the Indian independence and the birth of Sri Aurobindo. The truth is that the latter precedes and embraces or is closely linked with the former.

When we consider his speeches and messages, not only during the Swadeshi days, but even on other occasions, and his references to his early life in England as a boy of 14 and his war messages in recent years, two things strike us: one is that there has been a continuous thread of the idea of national independence for India, and the other is a deep and assured consistency, a harmony which may not be quite apparent to the outward looking superficial mind but quite intelligible to the thoughtful and straightforward intelligence.

True, he did cut off from public life for a definite work, for a larger and higher mission. But that never meant that the Indian Nationalism of which he was the great teacher and its true significance for the world were banished from his purview. It is not necessary here to draw the reader's attention to his manysided activities on a colossal scale in the field of thought, literature and poetry. And even though his outward political action had to continue for a few years only, yet it changed the face of Indian politics and was a powerful factor contributing to the successive movements of fight for the nation's freedom.

How then can we explain his abandoning of the patriot's role for the life of the Yoga and where is the connection between the two, if it is a fact that there has been all along a consistency and harmony in the various aspects of his life? We can very well understand that such a question arises when people think of Yoga as something extraneous, otherworldly and a means for the liberation of the soul. But with Sri Aurobindo the problem is the problem of man, and the solution is the special Yoga for which he has found the way and prepared the road, a Yoga which embraces all life and elevates and changes it, in order to restore it to its rightful place in a higher order, in a God-ordained scheme of human existence. It is childish to think that the problem of man can be postponed to a future when nationalism grows strong and firm and well-protected, and the country's independence finds itself assured to be far out of peril. It is something like waiting for the waves of the rough seas to be stilled and remain calm for the sea-bathers. Under modern conditions, no human group in any part of the globe can be immune from the impacts of other groups from the rest of the world.

Whether man is a political animal of Aristotle or the economic animal of Karl Marx, or a combination of both, the problem of man will ever remain unsolved until it is realised that man is not a mere material body composed of calcium and magnesium minerals and salts. Man is that also, of course; but he is something else and essentially different and more. Political freedom and freedom from economic serfdom for the people of any country are certainly favourable external conditions for a real solution of the problem of man, but they are not the solution itself and cannot resolve the tangle of many knots with which human existence is riddled.

To understand the character of the solution a close knowledge of the intricacies of the problem is a pre-requisite. Everywhere the crux of the problem is either missed, evaded or misunderstood. The struggle for existence is there everywhere; it is agrarian here, industrial there; it is for political power and military superiority or for a combination of any or many of these, all under the guise of an aim for the betterment of the people's living in the various parts of the world. It is the story everywhere that has been repeated across the ages with suitable variations according to the circumstances of the times. The situation is bound to continue as long as men have to live by an unhealthy competition everywhere, whether as individuals or as a nation. If living by real co-operation in the place of an unholy rivalry and competitive fighting is to be achieved at all, it can be done only by the establishment of a true harmony among the diverse and discordant interests within man and the extension of such a harmony to social life in the environment. How can this be achieved? It can be done by a change in the human consciousness which sees that man is a spirit in his depths and heights, superior to nature, to life and mind and body. This is the initial change that is aimed at and the rest follows or accompanies the first results.

This conversion of the human consciousness with the concomitant changes that affect and influence the environments and the society has had to confront the cynical doubts or agnostic remnants—though almost negligible now, still alive to some extent—of scientific materialism of the 19th century Europe; and these have, indeed, adverse effect upon the out-flowering of the soul of man in the individual and collective life.

Sri Aurobindo is handling this problem of man. His solution aims at a direct change in the core of the human consciousness. This is no Utopia. Before 1945, men would not have believed in the tremendous and world-devastating potentialities of the atom. But the scientists who were working at the laboratory for well-nigh three decades knew something of the atomic secret and anticipated results, though not exactly as they saw later, but something akin to them. Similarly, the Yogin knows what lies behind the material existence, he knows the Life-force as it is in its native country of the vital world, he knows the Powers and intelligences of the mind-world, and the lines of manifestation of forces that work against human well-being; he knows also the forces that are favourable and help the human mind to find its source in the cosmic mind and cosmic consciousness; also, he knows the forces that are helpful for man's progress on earth towards the realm of the Supreme Spirit. And all this intimate knowledge he uses for the achievement of the object he has in view.

Sri Aurobindo assures us that the change in the human consciousness, to begin with, is not only possible, it is actual and inevitable. He proclaims this is what he has done for many years now, after forty years of arduous tapasya. God's ways are inscrutable. Whoever could have dreamt the full significance of God's message he delivered on January 19, 1908, at Bombay?

The work has started and proceeds first here in this hoary land; God has chosen this country to receive his message and put it into practice so that it may in a spontaneous action spread and expand and get into work first in the receptacles that are ready and eventually cover a wider area of the globe. Change, radical change in the consciousness of man is the real solution in the face of which other problems begin to dissolve. This is the true significance and distinguishing feature of Indian Nationalism and Indian culture that God has ordained to be of lasting benefit to mankind.