Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

We have already brought out four research publications coming from the pen of Jugal Kishore Mukherjee, one of the seniormost members of our teaching staff. They are as follows:

(1) The Destiny of the Body (The Vision and the Realisation in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga); (2) From Man Human to Man Divine (Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Evolutionary Destiny of Man); (3) Sri Aurobindo: The Smiling Master (Humour in Sri Aurobindo's Writings); (4) Sri Aurobindo's Poetry and Sanskrit Rhetoric (Ideational Figures of Speech in Sri Aurobindo's Poetry).

In this 125th year of Sri Aurobindo's birth we feel happy to bring to the readers' notice another publication from the same author. The book has rather an unusual title, Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny.

Sri Aurobindo's 125th birth anniversary is being celebrated all over the world in this calendar year 1997. Everywhere in India and abroad people in large numbers are evincing a keen interest in the Mahayogi of Pondicherry and in all that he stands for. Now, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry symbolises one of his great creations having momentous evolutionary bearing. As a result, it is quite natural that people are becoming eager to know more about this unique institution where almost two thousand men and women of varying ages, belonging to different nationalities and coming from diverse social backgrounds, are consciously striving to build up a new type of collective life which, far from being a monastic life of a few isolated spiritual seekers, gives full scope to life-manifestation in all its vigour and variety. Sri Aurobindo Ashram aspires to create a "new common life superior to the present individual and common existence" (- Sri Aurobindo) wherein the genuine and unfettered freedom of individual creativity will be harmoniously blended with the flowering of collective perfection of a higher order.

The Ashram community in its self-building draws inspiration and guidance from the following words of Sri Aurobindo:

"Man's true way out is to discover his soul and its self-force and instrumentation and replace by it both the mechanisation of mind and the ignorance and disorder of life-nature. But there would be little room and freedom for such a movement of self-discovery and self-effectuation in a closely regulated and

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mechanised social existence." (The Life Divine, p. 1058)

"As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature." (Ibid., p. 1051. Italics added.)

'In all the elements of our nature' - that is the demand made upon us. But this is not so easy to accomplish. Our nature is complex and we have to find a key to some perfect unity and har-monisation of this complexity. As Sri Aurobindo has warned us:

"The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of us - intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire-self, the heart, the body - has each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralising self on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 69)

Such being the case there are bound to arise occasionally some problems in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram which consists of almost two thousand souls at different stages of self-development, all put together in the crucible of a new creation. And this is especially so because we have accepted life in its entirety in our Yoga "in order utterly to transmute it." But the problems are only problems of transition. These should not unduly baffle and discourage us. In Sri Aurobindo's words:

"We are forbidden to shrink from the difficulties that this acceptance [of life] may add to our struggle. Our compensation is that even if the path is more rugged, the effort more complex and bafflingly arduous, yet after a point we gain an immense advantage. ... Victorious in the struggle, we can compel Earth herself to be an aid towards our perfection and can enrich our realisation with the booty torn from the powers that oppose us." (Ibid., p. 68)

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Those who would like to follow closely how this onerous task is being realized in actual practice both in the life of the individuals and in the life of the community in spite of all the vicissitudes involved in the process may read with interest this book by Mukherjee which makes a frank and forthright assessment of the past, present and possible future of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Now a few words addressed to the Ashramites, residents of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, who have been actually participating in the task of translating the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's dream into realized Truth. The author, being himself a resident of the Ashram for the last five decades, takes the liberty of making a humble and sincere appeal to all other fellow-Ashramites:

Let this auspicious year 1997, the 125th Birth Anniversary of Sri Aurobindo, be for all of us a year of heart-searching and a year of re-dedication with a full sincerity of purpose to the noble task the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have assigned to us. It is hoped that this book, Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny, will contribute in some measure to the process of re-awakening on our part.

August 15,1997

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(Jugal's book brings us an easy insight into the heart of Sri Aurobindo's "Integral Yoga" and into the manifold play of his creative vision. A fine piece of work!)

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FOREWORD

Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, has attracted the attention of innumerable minds - saints', philosophers', thinkers', leaders', pilgrims', visitors', tourists', commoners' - in varied ways. Quite a good deal has also been written on it and about it in meaningful perspectives.

And yet there arises now and then the necessity of turning to an intrinsic study of this Ashram which has a world-wide reputation for its uniqueness, particularly since it is clearly pronounced to be not simply a peace resort, though of course peace dwells here natively, but a place of concentrated endeavour for spiritual perfection in life, aiming not at liberation from phenomenal existence but at constant progression towards realisation and manifestation of the Spirit in the world, a New Vision, a New Future.

This necessity is not so much for projecting an image of the Ashram as for a proper reorientation of those who belong to the Ashram and those others who are closely associated with its multiple activities in pursuit of its objectives. It is the need of consciously reiterating to ourselves what is always important and yet what by easy familiarity we somehow miss to recognise the value of.

Here comes in response to this need and necessity a long sustained essay from Prof. Jugal Kishore Mukherjee, a sizeable monograph bearing the caption Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny, having in its development as many as twenty-one sections with sub-headings, commencing from "The Pioneers" and culminating in "The Ashram Marches Towards Its Glorious Destiny". There are details in it of the initial stages of the Ashram which has grown steadily and also phenomenally. But it is not meant to be only a narrative. It is much more a thematic presentation of the development of the Ashram, with its sustained purpose of preparing the human stuff for a new, a spiritual future. With every thought in the developing sections there are appropriate quotations from the writings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo which enlighten and guide and inspire. Thus, the monograph has a double character: it is a document and an agenda, both in one.

Prof. Mukherjee speaks of the Ashram not only in terms of its great aim and the extraordinary privilege we have of the

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guidance received from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, he also refers to the problems of human frailties due to man's ordinary nature, particularly the problems of the corporate life of the sadhaks in freedom from customary codes, venturing to enter into self-vigilance and inner discipline, the problems of transition from the socio-moral standards of conduct to spiritual self-rule. Consistently the author views such problems in the light of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and offers certain meaningful suggestions including the possible criteria for admission of individuals to the Ashram in the future. In all this one reads his firm commitment to the ideals set by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, his sober assessment of the present position of the Ashram, and his unshaking faith in the spiritual destiny of the Ashram.

While considering all things that present themselves in the proposed study of the Ashram, its raison d'être, its Yogic grounding, its past phases and present status and future prospects, its problems and its promises etc., etc., Prof Mukherjee draws frequently and abundantly from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. These excerpts, - often from The Life Divine, - carry their great value, variedly as enunciation, exhortation, guidance, instruction, help, caution, promise, and assurance. Sometimes a single quotation presents a whole thesis. For instance one reads on pages 51-52:

"An entirely new consciousness in many individuals transforming their whole being, transforming their mental, vital and physical nature-self, is needed for the new life to appear; only such a transformation of the general mind, life, body-nature can bring into being a new worthwhile collective existence." (The Life Divine, p. 1061)

All such quotations suitably knit by Prof. Mukherjee for bringing out the import of every idea related to the total study of the Ashram, impress on the mind the great truth that this Ashram is not merely an object or an institution of a common category of which the present monograph is supposed to be a brochure; nay, it is rather an extraordinary event to initiate a decisive movement in the future history of a new life on this earth, and the said monograph is an invitation to the study thereof.

After a brief retrospect of the Ashram's past in which the initial

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work of the Master and the Mother had the most powerful influence on the stalwarts of the Ashram whose memorable names have been recorded by Prof. Mukherjee, quite a large portion of the monograph deals with the present of the Ashram, commencing from section four, "Sri Aurobindo Ashram Today", running upto section nineteen, "The Task Ahead". This naturally is the study of the "Role" and "Responsibility" of the Ashram, preparing its "Destiny". Prof. Mukherjee has presented this study quite thoroughly, speaking to us about facts, principles, governing ideals, psycho-spiritual scrutiny, and bringing everything to the light of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

The section "The Task Ahead" is indeed very important. It offers a sincere invitation to the serious attention of all inmates of the Ashram, older ones, recent ones and even the would-be ones, and also equally the attention of its associates and admirers to become conscious of the importance of their willing collaboration in the Great Work with faithful adherence to the divine guidance given for all times by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Appropriate quotations from their writings given in the monograph are particularly helpful in focussing our attention on the task ahead.

The sustained study represented by the monograph culminates in an all-assuring optimism, "The Ashram Marches Towards Its Glorious Destiny". With full faith and confidence, Prof. Mukherjee convinces and assures us that the Ashram is destined to accomplish its great work of realising the Goal for which it was started. The most important truth in this connection is the one declared by Sri Aurobindo that the Divine Destiny of the Supramental Future is so decreed that nothing can withhold it, not even a complete failure of the present humanity. At the same time, there is no sure sign to show that the great venture that is the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is likely to fail in realising its cherished aim. This optimism, this implicit faith and confidence and the positive notes struck by the author in spite of some caution against what he calls "Danger Signals", remind one of the declaration divinely made by the Mother that this Ashram is the "Ashram of the Lord."

In the light of this single declaration, which is essentially all-potent, all-inspiring and all-assuring, this essay of Prof. Mukherjee, by the very "composition" of which he has himself "benefited a lot", entering into contemplative study of the

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"luminous writings of the Master and the Mother", may very well become a call to kindred souls, not only to their sacred commitment to the great Cause but, more significantly, to their unique privilege to collaborate in the "Work of works", and be blessed by the Grace.

Sri Aurobindo Ashram

29 June, 1997

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BEHIND THE GENESIS OF THE BOOK

A couple of months back, on July 17, 1995 to be precise, P-da of our Ashram Press wrote to me a two-page long letter in a most unexpected way. I say 'unexpected' because we have not met each other even for once during the last so many months if not years. In his letter, among other things, P-da has expressed his anguish over the supposed absence of harmony and brotherly feeling among many Ashramites. He somehow feels that our collective life here is not as he thinks it should be. He wanted to meet some senior member of the Ashram who could possibly clear his sense of uneasiness.

I immediately took the letter to respected Nirod-da (Sri Aurobindo's literary secretary and the celebrated author of Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo) and read it out to him. I asked Nirod-da whether he would like to see P-da and explain the true situation to him. Nirod-da replied that he had already met P-da and asked me to write something to him.

Days passed after that. Somehow I did not feel like writing anything in haste nor did I want to indulge in any cheap theorising or writing for the mere pleasure of writing. I prayed to the Mother for her guidance so that my own ideas about the issue might be made clear. And then, after seven long weeks I started typing out something on my machine. The end-result has been quite different from my contemplated reply to P-da. P-da is now out of the picture. My long essay has been composed on a bigger canvas and with a wider perspective. The whole essay is an integrated one with its ideas and arguments developing in a continuous way.

After the essay was completed I decided to show my manuscript to Kishorbhai (Dr. Kishor Gandhi, the renowned exponent of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga-Philosophy and the

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compiler and editor of the six-volume letters of the Master), for I greatly value his perspicacious wisdom and critical acumen. Kishorbhai has been kind enough to go through my long essay very carefully and then write to me a valuable note wherein he has penned his considered comment. This note has brought out in full measure Kishorbhai's unbounded faith in the future glory of our Ashram. This is what he has written to me concerning my manuscript Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny:

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(5.10.95 Jugal,

Your marathon writing is really very well done; it is not only very instructive but also very inspiring, especially in its last section.

I have thought over the problems you have raised a great deal, and it has raised a number of points in my mind. Instead of mentioning them in detail, I will sum them up in one sentence of Sri Aurobindo which seems to provide the real answer to all these problems:

"My opinion is that Allah is great and great is the mystery of the universe and things are not what they seem, etc."

The Ashram is an epitome of this mystery; so any attempt to unravel it by the human mind is bound to be unfruitful. The only thing to hold on is this faith:

"The Ashram is the cradle of the new world."

Many thanks for showing me your note -

Kishor)

So, such is the genesis of this manuscript and I fervently pray from the depths of my heart:

"O Mother, O Sri Aurobindo, let Your Will be done always and in every way!"

J.K.M.

Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Pondicherry

12 September, 1995

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A FEW WORDS OF INTRODUCTION

Sri Aurobindo Ashram: the wonder-creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Who can write about it in all its bearings, especially on a theme like its "Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny"? Yet, I have ventured to do so with a trepidant heart. I have felt like taking up this ticklish task and that for the following reason.

In course of their close contact with me many of the senior students of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education have often asked me some interesting - at times embarrassing - questions concerning our Ashram, its functioning and its possible future. Some of their representative questions are as follows:

In the physical absence of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is there any specific Goal towards which the Ashram is moving? Are the majority of the Ashramites aware of it? Do they seriously try to realise it? After the "departure" of the Master and the Mother, does spirituality, as Sri Aurobindo understood it, count for much in the Ashram life of today? Are we not slowly veering round to the status of a religio-cultural community? Do many Ashramites still aspire after and make an effort for the acquisition of spiritual consciousness? And if yes, who guide and illumine the sadhaks in their spiritual endeavour? Can one contact the Presence of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo as a really living Reality here? Why are there at times serious conflicts in the Ashram? Has the Ashram outlived its value as a spiritual institution? Is there any fear of its transforming itself with the passage of time into a thriving cultural community, forgetting the pristine character given it by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo? etc., etc.

Not only the students of the "Centre of Education" but even some Ashramites have expressed some vague misgivings as regards the actual orientation and the future

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destiny of our Ashram. For a mood of laisser-aller seems to have gripped quite a few among the disciples here. I may be utterly mistaken in my assessment but that is the feeling gaining currency in the minds and hearts of many of the young people here.

Faced with such a situation and with a view to answering satisfactorily the questions put by my students, I prayed fervently to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo to give me some light so that I can see things in the proper perspective and not be confused by the deceptive appearances. I assiduously delved into their luminous writings, meditated on their deeper implication and finally felt everything falling into its proper place. Then I took up my pen and jotted down whatever came to my mind. And the following essay is a humble result of that effort.

The writing of this piece of composition has benefited me a lot. Now I leave it with a humble heart to careful perusal by other children of the Mother. Victory to the Mother Divine!

9 September 1995

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The Pioneers

Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry, the great Institution known the world over, which draws its appelation from the name of Mahayogi Sri Aurobindo, was formally established on or around 24 November 1926. But even before that date some young seekers had already started flocking to the then capital town of French India in order to live near Sri Aurobindo and shape their lives under the spiritual guidance of the Seer.

The first to arrive was Suresh Chandra Chakravarty (Moni) who reached Pondicherry on 31 March 1910 and made arrangements for Sri Aurobindo's stay there. A few days later Sri Aurobindo arrived at Pondicherry, accompanied by Bejoy Nag: the date was 4 April 1910. Thus Bejoy became the second young pilgrim of the Dawn. After a few months in the same year, two other young souls came to live with Sri Aurobindo: they were Saurin Bose in October and Nolini Kanta Gupta in November. The fifth person to join Sri Aurobindo's household was a Tamil youth Va Ra. After a few years, in 1919 to be precise, another local youth, K. Amrita by name, came to join the group. The next year 1920 brought two more additions, Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Kodandaraman. Rajangam, a young doctor fresh from the college campus, heard the call and reached the haven of Sri Aurobindo's feet on 7 April 1921. A couple of years passed and, in different months of the year 1923, five more young aspirants, four from Gujarat and one from Bengal, came to live with Sri Aurobindo: they were A.B. Purani, Champaklal, Punamchand and his wife Champaben, and Kanailal Gangulee. The year 1924 saw the arrival of Punjalal, again from Gujarat. A French army engineer Phillipe Barbier Saint-Hillaire (Pavitra) came and settled down in 1925. And the following year 1926 saw the arrival of Anil Baran Roy.

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Let us salute the memory of these sixteen ardent seekers of Light who, between the years 1910 and 1926, left behind them everything worldly men yearn after and came from different parts of India and abroad to reside near Sri Aurobindo, the fountain of eternal wisdom. Interestingly there is an extant photograph dating from the early months of 1923; this is reproduced in Champaklalji's book Champaklal's Treasures and is entitled "1923: Inmates" showing the pictures of seventeen people who were staying with Sri Aurobindo at that time. Saurin Bose had already left for Bengal; instead, four new persons figure in the group photo. The list of the inmates of Sri Aurobindo's household as given by this particular photograph is as follows:

(1) Suresh (Moni), (2) Bejoy, (3) Nolini, (4) Amrita, (5) Rajangam, (6) Purani, (7) Kanai, (8) Kodandaraman, (9) Mrs. Kodandaraman, (10) Champaklal, (11) Punamchand, (12) Champaben, (13) Saiyen, (14) Kshitish, (15) Tirupati, and (16) Manmohan.

In the meantime the Mother had come back from Japan and joined Sri Aurobindo in his Tapasya aimed at the divine transformation of human nature and life. One Miss Dorothy Hodgson, for many years a companion of the Mother, came with her and joined Sri Aurobindo's entourage. She was known by the Indian name Datta.

A few more years rolled by and then came the momentous day, 24 November 1926. This day, known in the Ashram as the 'Siddhi Day' or 'Victory Day', marked a decisive stage in Sri Aurobindo's Sadhana, since it meant -as explained by him later - the descent of the overmental Godhead into the physical. There was a collective evening meditation on this 24th of November 1926. All the inmates - permanent residents and temporary visitors alike -attended that special meditation. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo blessed all those who were present. Here is the

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list of the twenty-four souls who were with Sri Aurobindo on that special occasion of twenty-fourth November charged with a tremendous significance for the earth's destiny.

(1) Suresh (Moni), (2) Bejoy, (3) Nolini, (4) Amrita, (5) Datta, (6) Barindra, (7) Rajangam, (8) Purani, (9) Kanai, (10) Punamchand, (11) Champaben, (12) Champaklal, (13) Punjalal, (14) Pavitra, (15) Satyen, (16) Lilavati (Purani's wife), (17) Dr. Upendra Nath Banerjee, (18) Nonibala (Upendra Nath's sister), (19) Rajanikanta Palit, (20) Kshitish Chandra Dutt, (21) V. Chandrasekhar, (22) Puru-shottam Patel, (23) Rambhai Patel and (24) Rati Palit. (All these 24 pioneers have since "left" us.)

November 24, 1926 marked a watershed in the history of the world-redeeming Sadhana undertaken by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and on this particular day Sri Aurobindo Ashram was formally founded as an integrated community of spiritual seekers.

The Ashram Comes into Being

In the earlier years of Sri Aurobindo's stay at Pondicherry, all those who dwelt with Sri Aurobindo formed a rather loosely bound informal grouping. It was only after the Mother finally settled in Pondicherry in 1920 that a serious attempt was made at some sort of a collective organisation. By January 1922, the Ashram - although not yet known as an 'Ashram' - was very much of a reality in its inner spiritual orientation. Yet, in this pre-1926 period, the community of sadhaks had been - in the words of the Mother - no more than "a collection of individuals ... without a collective organisation... One could say it had a general value but it was something very floating, without a

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collective reality." (Bulletin, April 1963, p. 23)

Then came the 'Siddhi Day' of 24 November 1926 and along with it the founding of what has come to be known as 'Sri Aurobindo Ashram'. Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion for the realisation of the further stages of his Sadhana and the whole material and spiritual charge of the Ashram devolved on the Mother. Then she started working along two complementary lines with a dual purpose - individual and collective - in view. In order to understand what this dual purpose meant in actual practice, we have to remember that one of the cardinal points of Sri Aurobindo's teaching is that there are more than one overhead planes of spiritual consciousness above the ordinarily functioning mental, and it is possible through yogic sadhana to bring these superconscient planes down to illumine and heighten our everyday life; and that, in the depths of our being, there is a will much stronger and purer than our surface human will, and this deeper force of action can be brought to the forefront to direct our daily activities. It is in the light of these truths of occult psychology that the Mother sought to give a new orientation to the life and form of the fledgling Ashram. To quote her own words: "All our endeavour is to make this consciousness and this will govern our lives and action, and organise all our activities." (Bulletin, August 1964, p. 96)

This was the individual aspect of Sadhana, what every inmate of the Ashram was expected to put into progressive practice for his own march towards spiritual perfection. But there was at the same time a collective aspect to it. Thus the second line along which the Mother worked was to make the collectivity as real and living as the individual aspect and besides make this collective reality of the Ashram embrace even those sadhaks who for whatever reason could not permanently stay at Pondicherry. Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar has expressed well the significance of

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what was being done by the Mother immediately after the formal establishment of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Here are his words:

"What was done in those early years - the thirties especially - was to prepare the individual consciousness to admit and recognise the necessity for a collective individuality, to help the sadhaks to shed their superficial angularities and egoistic separativities, and to tune themselves to the music of interdependence governed by the śruti of the Divine Will." (Sri Aurobindo, 1972 edition, p. 562)

But the question may be asked: What was the necessity for the fostering of this sense of 'collective individuality' in the consciousness of the sadhaks of the Ashram? To answer it we have to refer, although in brief, to the basic elements of Sri Aurobindo's Vision of Integral Reality.

Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and Group-life

To introduce in a succinct as well as authentic way the fundamentals of the Yoga-Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, we cannot do better than quote in extenso from an article entitled "The Teaching of Sri Aurobindo" written by Sri Aurobindo himself in 1934. Here are some excerpts from that article germane to the question we have been discussing:

"Behind the appearances of the universe there is the Reality of a Being and Consciousness, a Self of all things, one and eternal.

"All beings are united in that One Self and Spirit but divided by a certain separativity of consciousness, an ignorance of their true Self and Reality in the mind, life and body.

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"It is possible by a certain psychological discipline to remove this veil of separative consciousness and become aware of the true Self, the Divinity within us and all....

"This One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the process by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection.

"Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental.

"The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection. ...

"A conversion has to be made, a turning of the consciousness by which mind has to change into the higher principle.... In the past, it has been attempted by a drawing away from the world and a disappearance into the height of the Self or Spirit. ... [But] a descent of the higher principle is possible which will not merely release the spiritual Self out of the world, but release it in the world, replace the mind's ignorance or its very limited knowledge by a supramental Truth-Consciousness which will be a sufficient instrument of the inner Self and make it possible for the human being to find himself dynamically as well as inwardly and grow out of his still animal humanity into a diviner race." (Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, pp. 95-96, paragraphing added)

From the short account of Sri Aurobindo's teaching as given above it becomes evident that in the Mother's and

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Sri Aurobindo's decision to found an Ashram in Pondicherry it was not their "object to develop any one religion or to amalgamate the older religions or to found any new religion - for any of these things would lead away from his [Sri Aurobindo's] central purpose." (Sri Aurobindo in Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram, 1983 edition, p. 34) Sri Aurobindo makes explicit what his Integral Yoga has for its aim:

"The one aim of his [Sri Aurobindo's] Yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinise human nature." (Ibid.)

Referring specifically to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry we can thus say in words adapted from Sri Aurobindo that this is a community of spiritual seekers and all those who join the organisation and live there have for their basic and primary goal in life (i) to seek liberation from Ignorance, self-fulfilment and perfection; (ii) to ascend from the present purely mental and material being to the spiritual-supramental being and life; (iii) to outgrow the state of ignorance and half-knowledge and acquire instead a nature of self-knowledge and world-knowledge.

Sri Aurobindo assures us that this greater nature which may be termed as Supernature - because it is beyond man's actual level of consciousness and capacity - is in fact his own true nature, the height and completeness of it, and to this nature "he must arrive if he is to find his real self and whole possibility of being." (The Life Divine, p. 1034)

But all this, one may contend, represents the possible realisation and perfection of individual sadhaks and sadhikas. Is that then all that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has been created for? The answer is an emphatic NO. For our ideal is not that some isolated individuals engage

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themselves in spiritual sadhana and reach in time the sought-after realisation. Nor even that a group is formed with these aspiring individuals but the sole purpose and utility of this collectivity remains confined to the task of providing all help and opportunity to the constitutive individuals in their effort at attaining to their separate individual realisation and perfection. No, we aim at something more; in our Yoga we seek to bring about a radical change in earthly manifestation which will make possible, nay inevitable, the emergence of spiritually perfect collectivities whose constituents will be spiritually perfect individuals.

For, Sri Aurobindo tells us, the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single form and in the group-existence; the individual and the universal are equally important terms of the higher and vaster Being, and their total and complete fulfilment must have some real place in the supreme Existence. In Sri Aurobindo's own words, "...the development of the individual [is not] the sole object of the Divine in the world..." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 182); "the Divine manifests himself always in the double form of the separative and collective being, vyaṣṭi, samaṣṭi." (Ibid.)

To fulfil with equal importance this double requirement of a truly divine manifestation the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has been created, "not for the renunciation of the world but as a centre and field of practice for the evolution of another kind and form of life which would in the final end be moved by a higher spiritual consciousness and embody a greater life of the spirit." (Letters on Yoga, p. 847)

In other words, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is not in its nature an association of other-worldly seekers, "men whose sole attempt is to find and realise in themselves the spiritual reality and who form their common existence by rules of living which help them in that endeavour." (The Life Divine, p. 1060) Sri Aurobindo Ashram is, on the

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contrary, "an effort to create a new life-formation which will exceed the ordinary human society and create a new world-order." (Ibid.)

The Ashram is not an agglomeration of a certain number of psychologically isolated individual sadhaks and sadhikas; for the command of the Spirit is unity. The genuine spiritual life should be, according to Sri Aurobindo, "the flower of a ... conscious and diversified oneness." (The Human Cycle, p. 243) Each individual has, no doubt, to grow into the Divine within himself; but also, the Divine whom he thus discovers in himself, he has to see equally in all others and as the same Spirit in all. "Not only to see and find the Divine in oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek one's own individual liberation and perfection, but to seek the liberation and perfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being. [And]... he who [thus] sees God in all, will serve freely God in all with the service of love. He will, that is to say, seek not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all, not only his own perfection, but the perfection of all. He will not feel his individuality perfect except in the largest universality, nor his own life to be a full life except as it is one with the universal life." (The Human Cycle, p. 24)

Thus, for the sadhaks of Sri Aurobindo's Path, although individual spiritual realisation remains always the first necessity, it cannot be deemed complete unless and until it is accompanied by an outer realisation also in life; "spiritual consciousness within but also spiritual life without." (Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, Cent, ed., p. 229) And herein lay the justification, nay the necessity for the founding of a spiritual community of a different genre and thus was born the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. And it continued to grow over the years like a living organism till it has assumed its present dimension. In the Mother's words:

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"Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me full charge of it... all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and each service was created, not by any artificial planning, but by a living and dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress." (Bulletin, August 1964, p. 96)

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram Today

Following the formal establishment of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926, a steady stream of seekers heard the inner call and came to form an integral part of the organisation. From among those who joined the Ashram in the first twelve years after the year of founding, we mention here the names of some of the notables who became well-known in later years. The respective years of their joining the Ashram are indicated within brackets:

1. Chunibhai Patel alias Dyuman (1927); 2. K.D. Sethna alias Amal Kiran along with his wife Daulat alias Lalita (1927); 3. Dilip Kumar Roy (1928); 4. Sahana Devi (1928); 5. John Chadwick alias Arjava (1930); 6. Rishabhchand (1931); 7. Margaret Woodrow Wilson alias Nishtha (c.1938); 8. Nirodbaran (1933); 9. Nishikanto (1934); 10. Kapali Shastry (1930).

From about 24 in 1926, the number of sadhaks residing in the Ashram went up to 36 by the end of the next year, and to 80 in 1928. As the years passed Sri Aurobindo Ashram waxed in strength of numbers and widening activities. Men and women started coming from all over India and many from abroad - from France, Germany, U.K., U.S.A., Africa, China, Italy, Russia, and several other countries. The various regions of India were represented in the Ashram.

In the last seventy years since its founding the Ashram

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at Pondicherry has grown from an informal grouping of a couple of dozen members into a diversified spiritual community with 1200 regular inmates. There is, besides, a significant number of non-members living in Pondicherry in the Ashram surroundings: they fully participate in Ashram life. Members are of both sexes and of all ages, from tiny tots of three or four years to people in their nineties. No distinction of creed, caste, religion or national origin is observed in this Ashram.

Disciples joining it have come from widely different backgrounds social, cultural and religious - and are drawn from a variety of professions. Philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, poets, artists, Sanskrit scholars, businessmen, engineers, industrialists, civil servants, diplomats, sophisticated urban people and simple village folks, are all represented in the variegatedly rich life of the Ashram.

The Yoga-Ashram of Sri Aurobindo is not a religious, social, educational or political organisation. It is basically and above everything else a spiritual institution but spiritual with a difference. Sri Aurobindo Ashram has nothing to do with asceticism or retreat from the world. "It includes life in Yoga, and once we admit life we can include anything that we find useful for life's ultimate and immediate purpose and not inconsistent with the works of the Spirit.... [In] an Ashram like ours we are trying to equate life with the Spirit." (Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, pp. 502, 503)

As all life comes within the purview of the Yoga of Transformation as propounded by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram presents the spectacle of a bewildering network of activities in which individual sadhaks may participate as an effective means of consecrated self-offering to the Divine, leading to a progressive growth of their consciousness. Some of the activities in the Ashram are as follows:

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"Teaching, printing, proof-reading, binding, typewriting, painting, music, gate-duty, paper-manufacture, perfume-making, doll-making, kitchen service, dining-hall service, banking, accountancy, plumbing, book-selling, photography, poultry- and dairy-management, farming, gardening, flower-arrangement, bakery service, civil, mechanical, electrical and sanitary engineering, nursing, health service, town planning, architecture, tailoring, furniture service, footwear service, construction and maintenance service, fuel service, weaving service, cottage industries, transport service, postal service, woodworking, stainless steel fabrication, hand-marbling of mill-fabrics, pottery, batik work, embroidery, etc." (Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram, p. 43 and Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, p. 567)

Surely the sumptuous account given above makes an imposing picture of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as it is today. But a question is pertinently asked in some quarters: In the medley of these variegated activities and in the inordinate expansion of the Ashram, do the Ashramites still keep in view the original and primary goal that inspired the founding of the Ashram in 1926? Do the inmates still seriously engage themselves in their spiritual pursuit? Do they sincerely make an effort to build up in the Ashram a spiritual collectivity harmonised on the basis of the unity of the Spirit in all? Or, who knows, perhaps many of the new Ashramites have for all practical purposes banished from the field of their consciousness any active awareness of the Goal set by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother!

Where Do We Stand Now?

Time has come for us for a sincere soul-searching and an honest appraisal to see how far we in the Ashram have advanced towards the realisation of the double goal of

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establishing spiritual consciousness in the constituent individuals and building up a collective spiritual life. Where does our Ashram stand in its present form and disposition with respect to that dual achievement?

Surely, as it is, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram cannot be considered to conform to what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wanted it to grow into. Sri Aurobindo himself said a long time ago: "The Ashram as it is now is not that ideal." (The Mother, p. 229)

But why not? Where is the lacuna? Sri Aurobindo answers: "For that all its members have to live in a spiritual consciousness and not [as it is now] in the ordinary egoistic mind and mainly rajasic vital nature." (Ibid., p. 229) In one of his important letters Sri Aurobindo made the position clear:

"What is being done here [in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram] is a preparation for a work - a work which will be founded on yogic consciousness and Yoga-Shakti, and can have no other foundation." (Letters on Yoga, p. 847, italics ours)

In another letter dated 25-2-45, just five years before his passing, Sri Aurobindo wrote "The Ashram is a first form which our effort has taken, a field in which the preparatory work has to be done." (The Mother, p. 229, italics ours)

Now the crucial question is: What do these expressions "preparation", "first form" and "preparatory work" signify? Have Mother and Sri Aurobindo an occult plan to build the "ideal group-life" of their dream elsewhere than at Pondicherry and at some other time than at present? Has our Ashram to remain content with its arrested flowering and the not too glorious a role of being a mere pilot project? Can it not hope and aspire to embody in time the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's goal of spiritually perfect individuals dwelling in a spiritually consummate community?

It is no use denying the fact that garbled and exaggerated

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reports of some isolated unpleasant happenings in our Ashram have started reaching people outside, confusing in the process the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's devotees residing elsewhere. Hostile elements outside, elements not well-disposed towards our Ashram or for that matter to the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, are eagerly lapping up this 'news', spreading calumny against the Ashram and gleefully prophesying the impending decay and downfall of the creation of the Master and the Mother.

But we, the inmates of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, need not feel unduly perturbed by the uncharitable reactions of others. For, as Sri Aurobindo has affirmed:

"What X or others think or say does not matter very much after all as we do not depend on them for our work but on the Divine Will only. So many (people outside) have said and thought all sorts of things about and against us, that has never affected either us or our work in the least; it is of a very minor importance." (Letters on Yoga, p. 856)

So, leaving the prophets of doom to their biased and inimical assessment of our work, let us, the Ashramites -one and all - turn our gaze within and see for ourselves how far we have been faithful to the ideal of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in our own individual life and practice. And if on soul-searching it is found that lapses and failings have appeared at some point, let us take remedial measures to arrest in time any possible erosion of spiritual values here.

The Misgivings

It is not that some danger signals are not there at all. Some unhealthy trends have lately set in in the Ashram in a

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rather generalised way. Are they in the nature of a passing catharsis? Or pathological symptoms of the forthcoming decay and decline of our group as a spiritual institution? Only the Mother and Sri Aurobindo know the answer. But on our part we have to be on our guard so that the apparent lowering of values may not lead to an irreversible degeneration of the Ashram.

We know there have already been sounded in some very responsible and respectable quarters some honest misgivings about the future destiny of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. It has been suggested by implication that the Ashram may have by now outlived its raison d'être and passed into the phase of dismantlement and disintegration so far as its spiritual character is concerned.

It has been hinted at by some that the Ashram may have acted as a scaffolding for the accomplishment of the real mission of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the descent and establishment of the supramental Truth-Consciousness into the earth atmosphere, and once that mission was adequately fulfilled, the Ashram lost its functional utility for their purpose and may now be passing into the phase of being pulled down. And that the real mission of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo has been accomplished can be gathered from the following statement of the Mother herself:

"What has happened [after the manifestation of Super-mind in 1956], the really new thing is that a new world is born, born, born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is a new world which is born. And we are right in the midst of this period of transition where the two are entangled -where the other still persists all-powerful and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but where the new one is quietly slipping in, still very modest, unnoticed -unnoticed to the extent that outwardly it doesn't disturb

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anything very much, for the time being, and that in the consciousness of most people it is even altogether imperceptible. And yet it is working, growing - until it is strong enough to assert itself visibly, ...

"Meanwhile we are in a very special situation, extremely special, without precedent. We are now witnessing the birth of a new world; it is very young, very weak - not in its essence but in its outer manifestation - not yet recognised, not even felt, denied by the majority. But it is here, making an effort to grow, absolutely sure of the result." (Questions and Answers 1957-58, pp. 149-150)

In the light of the above declaration of the Mother, can it not be contended, ask some, that the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's Work will now be all the world over and they will not have any special interest in the institution which went by the name of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram? In that case can we not say that 'scaffolding' is the most apt description of the role the Ashram played during the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's physical existence upon earth?

Such is the view of some. But some others are worried about the possible implication of a significant sentence that occurs in a piece of writing Sri Aurobindo penned in 1936. In the English version of the booklet L'Enseignement et I'Ashram de Sri Aurobindo issued on 16-2-36 Sri Aurobindo wrote inter alia:

"An Ashram means the house or houses of a Teacher or Master of spiritual philosophy in which he receives and lodges those who come to him for the teaching and practice. ... An Ashram is not an association or a religious body or a monastery - it is only what has been indicated above, nothing more.... All depends on the Teacher and ends with his lifetime, unless there is another Teacher who can take his place." (See Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram, 1948 ed., p. 53)

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The last sentence of the passage quoted above has given rise in some minds to serious misgiving about the future of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry. For it is well known that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother jointly founded the Ashram on 24 November 1926. After Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body in 1950, the Mother continued to preside over the destiny of the Ashram. So there was nothing to worry about. But when she too left her body in 1973, there was none left in Sri Aurobindo Ashram who could possibly take her place. Twenty-two years have rolled by since then and the void of spiritual leadership still continues in the Ashram. Of course there is the Ashram Trustee Board but that is only for the external administration of Ashram affairs. Surely there is none who can even in his wildest imagination claim to fill up the void left by the physical withdrawal of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. There is, then, some would say, only one conclusion which is inferrable: it is the ultimate demise of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. For, so would they contend, has not Sri Aurobindo himself declared: "All depends on the Teacher and ends with his life-time"?

Of course, be it noted, it is not suggested by the doubting hearts that the Ashram as a physical organisation will disappear from the scene; far from it. It is quite on the cards that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry will over the years develop into a thriving cultural institution; or, perhaps, into a vibrant religious community whose members will be bound by "a credal adherence, a formal acceptance of its ethical standards and a conformity to institution, ceremony and ritual." (The Life Divine, p. 1058). But what is feared is that the Ashram may lose its essential character and be moribund or even dead as a spiritual organisation.

But surely that type of fiasco the Mother and Sri Aurobindo did not visualise for the destiny of their

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Ashram. Here are Sri Aurobindo's own words:

"I have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco, a partial or transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the law of the external nature. If, then, any sadhak refuses in practice to admit this change or if he refuses even to admit the necessity for any change of his lower vital being and his habitual external personality, I am entitled to conclude that, whatever his professions, he has not accepted either myself or my yoga." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1306)

We should not forget even for a moment that the real worth and importance of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is not in its opulent eye-catching faÇade but in its inner spiritual character and we the Mother's children, the inmates of the Ashram, should see to it that it does not forfeit its spiritual life-force and turn into something stale and of alien character.

But is there really any possibility that our Ashram may meet with some such adverse fate? We do not think so. We foresee for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram a glorious role in the drama of the accomplishment of the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's transformatory Work upon earth. And we have valid reasons for entertaining such faith and hope. We shall come to the discussion of this topic somewhat later on in course of this essay. But even now we may refer to something special to this Ashram and its functioning, and this will, we hope, help us to see things in a different and deeper perspective. With reference to the working of a Conscious-Force in the Ashram Sri Aurobindo made the following observation:

"What seems to me of more importance is to try to explain how things are worked out here. Indeed very few

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are the people who understand it and still fewer are those who realise it.

"There has never been, at any time, a mental plan, a fixed programme or an organisation decided beforehand. The whole thing has taken birth, grown and developed as a living being by a movement of consciousness (Chit-Tapas) constantly maintained, increased and fortified. As the Conscious-Force descends in matter and radiates, it seeks for fit instruments to express and manifest it." (The Mother, p. 226)

A conscious divine Force presiding over the formation, maintenance and development of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram - such, then, is the secret of its constant growth and progress in spite of occasional vicissitudes. But that does not release us from our own responsibilities. For the working of the higher conscious Force is very much dependent on the availability of proper instruments. Sri Aurobindo reminds us: "It goes without saying that the more the instrument is open, receptive and plastic, the better are the results." (Ibid.)

The Mother too has reminded us, in the same vein, of the unique importance of the Ashram atmosphere and the necessity of constant vigilance on our part:

"If you are here, it is for a special reason!. It is because here there is a possibility of absorbing consciousness and progress which is not found elsewhere. And if you don't prepare yourselves to receive this, well, you will lose the chance that's given to you." (Questions and Answers 1954, CWM Vol. 6, p. 269)

But the sceptic may rejoin that all this might have been true when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were there physically present in the Ashram; but what about now when both of them have withdrawn from their bodies? What guarantee is there to believe that we the Ashramites

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are still in the same privileged position?

Yes, the guarantee is there in Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's own words. For when Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body in 1950, he gave a solemn assurance to the Mother about his continued presence and action. Here is how the Mother expressed this assurance on 7 December 1950:

"Lord, this morning Thou hast given me the assurance that Thou wouldst stay with us until Thy work is achieved, not only as a consciousness which guides and illumines but also as a dynamic Presence in action. In unmistakable terms Thou hast promised that all of Thyself would remain here and not leave the earth atmosphere until earth is transformed. Grant that we may be worthy of this marvellous Presence and that henceforth everything in us be concentrated on the one will to be more and more perfectly consecrated to the fulfilment of Thy sublime Work." (Words of the Mother, CWM Vol. 13, p. 4)

And when in her turn the Mother too left her body in 1973 she made it a point to assure her children in advance through respected Nolini-da (Nolini Kanta Gupta) that if ever she would withdraw from her physical body, she would continue to remain with us.

With this double assurance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as regards their continued presence and active guidance in our midst, we in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram need not at all feel like forlorn children and despair about the future of the Ashram as a destined centre of their world-wide action.

But it is at the same time true that from our side we have to make special and sincere efforts to deserve their unsolicited Grace and earnestly collaborate in the work of our spiritual transformation. For Sri Aurobindo has warned us,

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their work in the Ashram may be hampered by the instrumental difficulties offered by the disciples who dwell there. Let us listen to his words:

"The two obstacles that stand in the way of a smooth and harmonious working [of the Conscious Force] in and through the Sadhaks are:

(1)the preconceived ideas and mental constructions which block the way to the influence and the working of the Conscious Force;

(2)the preferences and impulses of the vital which distort and falsify the expression. Both these things are the natural output of the ego." (The Mother, p. 227)

We should have no hesitation in admitting that many of us, the sadhaks and sadhikas of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, are still very much subject to the play of ego and to its concomitant ills like preferences and antipathies, blind impulses and urges, self-centred behaviour, erratic and erroneous actions and reactions, etc. And because of these we have not yet succeeded in building up an ideal collective life in accordance with the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's dream. And it is good to be reminded that we shall never be able to realise our goal if we fail to remedy the basic malady assailing and corrupting all ordinary group-formation. We propose to treat this question in the following section.

Basic Frailties of Any Group-life

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry is, as is well known, an elaborate and complex structure of group-life sufficiently large in its dimension. But on what fundamental principle of solidarity has it been based or should it

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be based? Before discussing this question let us first see how, in general, any group is formed.

Man has in him two distinct master impulses, the individualistic and the communal, a personal life and a social life, a personal motive of conduct and a group motive of conduct. The possibility of their opposition and the attempt to find their equation lie at the very roots of human civilisation and persist throughout man's history of cultural development, even up to the stage when he has grown into a highly individualised mental being or even entered the path of spiritual progress.

And how are collectivities formed? Men seek to be grouped, linked, united around a common ideal, a common action, a common realisation, but in a completely artificial way. The individual, to satisfy his communal urge, partially identifies his life with the life of a certain number of other individuals and this association is determined either by birth or by circumstance or even by deliberate choice. While describing the nature of collectivities formed by mental man solely basing himself on the resources of his unregenerate ego-bound mental-vital consciousness, Sri Aurobindo writes:

"In our present human existence there is a physical collectivity held together by the common physical life-fact and all that arises from it, community of interests, a common civilisation and culture, a common social law, an aggregate mentality, an economic association, the ideals, emotions, endeavours of the collective ego with the strand of individualities and connections running through the whole and helping to keep it together. Or, where there is a difference in these things, opposition, conflict, a practical accommodation or an organised compromise is enforced by the necessity of living together." (The Life Divine, p. 1031)

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And what is created in this way is a natural or artificially managed constructed order. But all such man-made attempts at the building up of a perfect collective life are bound to fail in practice and cannot but be exposed to an inevitable process of decay and disruption. For, the constituent individuals of any human order remain rooted in their egoistic nature and it is an axiom of truth that man can construct nothing that goes beyond his nature. As Sri Aurobindo has trenchantly put it:

"Imperfect, we cannot construct perfection, however wonderful may seem to us the machinery our mental ingenuity invents, however externally effective. Ignorant, we cannot construct a system of entirely true and fruitful self-knowledge or world-knowledge: our science itself is a construction, a mass of formulas and devices; masterful in knowledge of processes and in the creation of apt machinery, but ignorant of the foundations of our being and of world-being, it cannot perfect our nature and therefore cannot perfect our life." (The Life Divine, p. 1034, italics added)

Without the perfection of our nature, no perfection of life is possible, and this is the root of the matter. All group-life including our Ashram life cannot be perfect so long as the constituent individuals remain fixed in what they are now. And what is the actuality of the state of our consciousness and nature, whatever may be our professions and pretensions? In Sri Aurobindo's words:

"Our nature, our consciousness is that of beings ignorant of each other, separated from each other, rooted in a divided ego, who must strive to establish some kind of relation between their embodied ignorances; ...but in the mass the relations formed are constantly marred by imperfeet

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sympathy, imperfect understanding, gross misunderstandings, strife, discord, unhappiness. ... All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction..." (The Life Divine, pp. 1034,1035,1054)

And is this not what we meet with at times in our Ashram? And it cannot but be so. For most of us, the inmates of the Ashram, are in our surface consciousness, bound to separation of consciousness from others and wear the fetters of the ego. Our very pose of selflessness hides behind it more often than not a subtle form of selfishness. To build up an ideal collective life harmonious and spiritually perfect is a task far transcending the capability of such ego-governed individuals. What Sri Aurobindo has described in a significant passage of The Life Divine is almost an exact picture of what has been happening in our Ashram community today or might be happening in the near future with the invasion of new entrants, unless we take precautions to arrest the downward trend. Sri Aurobindo writes:

"There is in the mass of constituting individuals an imperfect understanding and knowledge of the ideas, life-aims, life-motives which they have accepted, an imperfect power in their execution, an imperfect will to maintain them always unimpaired, to carry them out fully or to bring the life to a greater perfection." (The Life Divine, p. 1044)

How exactly does it correspond to the actual psychological state of many of those who have lately joined the Ashram! Sri Aurobindo continues his description:

"There is an element of struggle and discord, a mass of

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repressed or unfulfilled desires and frustrated wills, a simmering suppressed unsatisfaction or an awakened or eruptive discontent or unequally satisfied interests." (Ibid.)

Again, how true is the diagnosis! We do not fail to see ourselves clearly reflected in the mirror of these words. Sri Aurobindo continues:

"There are new ideas, life-motives that break in and cannot be correlated without upheaval and disturbance; there are life-forces at work in human beings and their environment that are at variance with the harmony that has been constructed, and there is not the full power to overcome the discords and dislocations created by a clashing diversity of mind and life and by the attack of disrupting forces in universal Nature." (Ibid.)

This has been the root-cause behind the ultimate decay and degeneration of most, nay all, of the collectivities men have erected in the past. And the same fate may overtake our Ashram if we do not wake up in time. And surely that cannot be the destiny the Mother and Sri Aurobindo envisaged for their Ashram when they founded it in 1926. They wanted to build the Sri Aurobindo Ashram on an altogether new foundation so that it might fulfil its mission of unending progression.

But what is the nature of that new foundation? In which way should our Ashram be distinct and distinguished from all other group-formations past or present?

The Ideal Group-life: Its Character

All the past attempts of man to build an ideal collective life have invariably foundered on the rocks of ego-consciousness

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of the constitutive individuals. Egos in different persons in a group are bound to differ in their separate ideas, urges, perceptions, interests and purposes. And sooner or later these differences will emerge into the open, be accentuated and then come into conflict bringing in its trail the attendant discords. There are only two ways of overcoming this disharmony. Either the egoistic individuals, continuing to retain their egos, seek to enlarge and universalise themselves; or the individuals make an effort to transcend their egos and attain a state of consciousness where the conscious experience of the essential unity of all becomes the basis of group-life.

Now, the first course cannot but lead to disastrous consequences. For, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "any external attempt at universality can only result either in an aggrandisement of the ego or an effacement of the personality by its extinction in the mass or subjugation to the mass." (The Life Divine, p. 1027)

What is then the solution? The solution is that the individuals constituting any collectivity should move away from their surface existence which is at present the field of unbridled play of ego and try to dwell more and more in their inner consciousness. In Sri Aurobindo's words:

"It is only by an inner growth, movement, action that the individual can freely and effectively universalise and trans-cendentalise his being. There must be for the divine living a transference of the centre and immediate source of dynamic effectuation of the being from out inward; for there the soul is seated, but it is veiled or half-veiled and our immediate being and source of action is for the present on the surface." (Ibid.)

A veritable community of spiritual seekers, as our

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Ashram yearns to grow into, must reverse the ordinary principle of group-building and base its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being. An inner sense of oneness should be the binding element in the group-existence. To quote Sri Aurobindo again:

"The spiritual individual acts out of [a] sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the demand of self on other self, the need of the life, the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly be done. A realisation of spiritual unity, a dynamisation of the intimate consciousness of one-being, of one self in all beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action of the divine life." (The Life Divine, p. 1030)

And it is such a divine life that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother want to establish upon earth, and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram should consciously and deliberately aspire to be the nucleus of such a noble type of collective life. In such a group-life what would bind and hold together different individuals forming the group would be, not the physical fact of life creating a sufficiently workable united social consciousness, but "a common consciousness consolidating a common life. All will be united by the evolution of the Truth-Consciousness in them; in the changed way of being which this consciousness would bring about in them, they will feel themselves to be embodiments of a single self, souls of a single Reality; illumined and motived by a fundamental unity of knowledge, actuated by a fundamental unified will and feeling, a life expressing the spiritual Truth would find through them its own natural forms of becoming." (The Life Divine, pp. 1031-32)

Thus, unity will be the basis of such a spiritual consciousness,

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mutuality the natural result of its direct awareness of oneness in diversity, and harmony the inevitable manifestation of the working of its force: "Unity, mutuality and harmony must therefore be the inescapable law of a common or collective gnostic life." (Ibid., p. 1033)

The Mother too has spoken about the essential character of a genuine community ("une communauté vraie"). She says:

"... a true community can exist only on the basis of the inner realisation of each of its members, each one realising his real, concrete unity and identity with all the other members of the community, that is, each one should feel not like just one member united in some way with all the others, but all as one, within himself. For each one the others must be himself as much as his own body, and not mentally and artificially, but by a fact of consciousness, by an inner realisation." (Questions and Answers 1957-58 , pp. 140-41)

In such a community, perfect co-existence of freedom and harmony, unity and universality and not, as at present, separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the group. Love would be there absolute, equality consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference, and order would be maintained not by the observation of artificial standards and rules and regulations but by the free automatic perception, by each, of the right relations and their inevitable application in the act.

Now, in the light of what has gone before as regards the traits of an ideal group-life envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, let us cast a look at the actual state of our Ashram life and dispassionately judge how far or near are we to this ideal.

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The Deficiencies

If we in the Ashram would like to fulfil the God-given task of building a collective life in which spiritually perfect individuals would dwell in a spiritually perfect community, many of the Ashramites, or even the majority of them, would have to sincerely try to grow into a more complete spiritual nature, live in the light of a higher and larger and more integral consciousness, and move and act under the guidance of a Truth which sees intuitively and spontaneously the thing to be done at any given moment and intuitively and spontaneously fulfil that in the act. The question is, Have we reached that happy position? The obvious answer is an emphatic NO.

Already on 3 July 1957 - and almost forty years have passed since then - the Mother spoke in one of her evening classes about the then state of affairs in "our collectivity" meaning, it goes without saying, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry. She began her discourse with these words:

"I have been asked if we are doing a collective yoga and what the conditions for the collective yoga are.

"I might tell you first of all that to do a collective yoga we must be a collectivity, and then speak to you about the different conditions required for being a collectivity. But last night (smiling) I had a symbolic vision of our collectivity." (Questions and Answers 1957-58, p. 137)

The Mother mentioned that she had this vision in the early part of the night, and then remarked: "it made me wake up with a rather unpleasant impression." All Ashramites are requested to go through the whole discourse of the Mother made on that memorable evening a careful perusal of the piece will help us be aware of our individual roles and responsibilities in the matter.

(The Mother's discourse is printed on pages 137 to 142 of

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her Questions and Answers 1957-58, CWM Vol. 9.)

The Mother had a symbolic vision of our Ashram and she saw that "all the possibilities are there, all activities are there, but in disorder and confusion. They are neither coordinated nor centralised nor unified around the single central truth and consciousness and will." (Ibid., p. 140)

This was about the state of our group-life. But what about the individuals constituting this special collectivity whose name is Sri Aurobindo Ashram? Sri Aurobindo remarks:

"The highly sattwic are few; the abnormally rajasic are few; of the middle sort there are many. According to my observation, this is true not only of this Ashram but of others." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, Volume One, p. 348)

Sri Aurobindo elsewhere opines that many of the members of the Ashram are not living in a spiritual consciousness but "in the ordinary egoistic mind and mainly rajasic vital nature". (The Mother, p. 229) Here are two pieces of written dialogue worth noting in this connection; the excerpts are from Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo:

NB: "The physical condition of many sadhaks and sadhikas is

not cheering in the least."

Sri Aurobindo: "Far from it."

NB: "You know best about the condition of their sadhana." Sri Aurobindo: "Very shaky, many of them." NB: "D finds the world outside much better, to which I would reply that here [in this Ashram] we don't believe in appearances. And life is precisely inner here."

Sri Aurobindo: "Is it? If people here were leading the inner life, these things [hyper-sensitivity, jealousy, hatred, meanness, caddishness, etc.] would soon disappear." (p. 1048).

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And Sri Aurobindo made these observations in 1938, twelve years after the founding of the Ashram. Sixteen more years rolled by and we come to the year 1954. What was the psychological preparation of the sadhaks then, the state of their sadhana at that time? Let us listen to the Mother's admonition addressed to the inmates of the Ashram:

"... to tell the truth, I think you have such an easy life that you don't take much trouble!... Are there many among you who really feel an intense need to find your psychic being? to know what you really are, what you have to do, why you are here? One just goes on living or even complains when things are not too easy. And then one takes like that things as they come, and sometimes, if some aspiration arises and one meets a difficulty in oneself, one says, 'Oh, Mother is there, she will manage this for me', and then thinks of something else!" (Questions and Answers 1954, p. 296)

The Mother continues with her scolding: "I am even astonished that you don't feel an intense need for it: 'How can one know?' For you know - you have been told, told repeatedly, it has been dinned into your ears - you know that you have a divine consciousness within you, and you can sleep night after night and play day after day and learn day after day, and not have the enthusiasm and intense will to enter into contact with yourself, yes, with yourself, here within!...(Mother points to the centre of her chest) This, this indeed, is beyond me!

"And how many years you have been here, half asleep! You think about it, of course, from time to time, especially when I speak to you about it; at times when you read. But that ardour, that will which conquers all obstacles, that concentration which overcomes everything!...." (Ibid., pp. 299, 300)

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This was in 1954 when the Mother was very much in our midst in her physical embodiment, guiding and enlightening us all the time. And now? When it is more than two decades since she has withdrawn from her body and more than twelve hundred people drawn from widely different backgrounds have clustered in the Ashram, what is the quality and the intensity of the aspiration in most of the inmates here? We should not be surprised if we find that these have gone down to a great extent. No doubt, formal devotion is there in the majority of the people here, but an intense awareness of the Goal set before us by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and an ardent and one-pointed practice to reach that Goal are conspicuous by their overall absence in many. And as a natural consequence of this dampening of spiritual zeal, we in our group-life have been encountering many sorts of unpleasant and undesirable incidents and happenings. Some sadhaks and sadhikas are behaving erratically; some others are manifesting unhealthy trends. But we should not be unduly worried about that nor should we give up hope about the spiritual destiny of our community. For, whatever the individual aberrations, the core of the Ashram is still very sound. And individual aberrations and wayward behaviour are not peculiar to the present-day Ashram life alone nor do these necessarily indicate the onset of the period of its inevitable decline. For it is worth recalling that such aberrant idiosyncracies were not infrequent even in the so-called 'golden' past of the Ashram. And there was a deeper reason behind their manifestation. We shall have chance to discuss this point in the latter part of this essay but for the moment let us see how the state of affairs in the Ashram was in the far past as far as the behaviour of some sadhaks and sadhikas was concerned.

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Difficulties of the Past

We have ventured to state that even in the "golden" past when the number of inmates was very much restricted and the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were physically present to look after everything, the Ashram's collective life was beset with certain difficulties arising out of the capricious nature and behaviour of some disciples. And this phenomenon was neither fortuitous nor unessential to the fulfilment of the central purpose of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Once we understand the occult rationale of this apparently disconcerting phenomenon, we shall be in a position to form a new perspective of vision and not be disheartened by whatever unedifying event occasionally occurs in the Ashram today. But first things first: let us hear from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother themselves about some glaringly negative aspects of the Ashram life prevailing in that early period. The extracts below will speak for themselves; we need not annotate them in any way:

(1)NB: "Now I hear that Y is leaving you to go to R.M. What next?"

Sri Aurobindo: "You are astonished? Really, you seem to be living like a cherub chubby and innocent with his head in the clouds ignorant of the wickedness of men. I thought by this time the revolts of Y were common knowledge." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence, with Sri Aurobindo, p. 297)

(2)NB: "I can't imagine such an incident taking place" in the Ashram - I mean, of course, N's gripping M's throat. It makes me rather aghast. Coupled with that the incident of R rushing to shoe-beat P. Good Lord! but I suppose they are all in the game!"

Sri Aurobindo: "You seem to be the most candid and ignorant baby going. We shall have to publish an Ashram News and Titbits' for your benefit. Have you never heard

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of N's going for K's head with a powerfully-brandished hammer? Or of his howling challenges to C to come out and face him, till Mother herself had to interfere and stop him? Or of his yelling and hammering in a rage at C's door till Dyuman came and dragged him away? These things happened within a short distance of your poetic ears and yet you know nothing??? N is subject to these fits and has always been so. And he is not the only howler. What about M herself? and half a dozen others? Hunger strikes? Threats of suicide? Not to mention rushes to leave the Ashram etc., etc. All from the same source, sir, and apparently part of the game." (Ibid., p. 502)

(3)Sri Aurobindo: "I am all the time occupied with dramas, hysterics, tragic-comic correspondence (quarrels, chronicles, lamentations) ... It is not one or two, but twenty dramas that are going on." (Ibid., p. 212)

(4)NB: "Nowadays we don't see many vital outbursts in the atmosphere."

Sri Aurobindo: "O happy blindness!" (Ibid.)

(5)Sri Aurobindo: "The human vital everywhere, in the Ashram also, is full of unruly and violent forces - anger, pride, jealousy, desire to dominate, selfishness, insistence on one's own will, ideas, preferences, indiscipline - and it is these things that are the cause of the disorder and difficulty in the Ashram work." (The Mother, p. 242)

(6)Sri Aurobindo: "This is one of the main difficulties throughout the Ashram, as each worker wants to do according to his own ideas, on his own lines according to what he thinks to be the right or convenient thing and expects that to be sanctioned. It is one of the principal reasons of difficulty, clash or disorder in the work, creating conflict between the workers themselves, conflict between the workers and the heads of departments, conflict between the idea of the Sadhaks and the will of the Mother." (Ibid., p. 245)

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(7)NB: "Y is hurling abuses, threats, most offensive words at you!"

Sri Aurobindo: "In his 'periods' he was doing that all the time privately among his friends. Now it is publicly, that is all. Afterwards he puts on the airs of a saint and howls reproachfully at us for having believed lying reports. Another specimen of humanity." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 297)

(8)Sri Aurobindo: "I do not find that the Mother is a rigid disciplinarian. On the contrary, I have seen with what a constant leniency, tolerant patience and kindness she has met the huge mass of indiscipline, disobedience, self-assertion, revolt that has surrounded her, even revolt to her very face and violent letters overwhelming her with the worst kind of vituperation." (The Mother, p. 229)

All this makes strange reading to us and we wonder if human nature has always been the same whether today or in the past. And such was the case even when the Mother herself selected the new entrants to the Ashram and that too on the basis of their inner possibility and preparedness. The Mother herself has raised a pertinent question and answered it. Here is what she says:

"But one cannot even say that there was a mistake in the selection - one would be tempted to believe it, but it is not true; because the selection was made according to a very precise and clear inner indication." (On Thoughts and Aphorisms, CWM Vol. 10, p. 200)

If it was so, if the selection of entrants was made on the basis of their inner aspiration, why is it then that the sadhaks could not maintain their original state and fell down to a lower level of functioning? Mother clarifies:

"It is probably the difficulty of keeping the inner attitude unmixed. ... Many came, attracted by the True Thing, but... one lets oneself go. That is, it is impossible to hold

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firm in one's true position." (Ibid., p. 200)

Also, there might have been another causative factor behind the qualitative decline in the Ashram life. Sri Aurobindo has hinted at that in a letter dated October 9, 1938. He says: "Increase of numbers brought in all sorts of influences that were not there in the smaller circle before." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 705)

The Mother has made the point more explicit. She said on 16 September 1964: "This is exactly what Sri Aurobindo wanted, what he was trying for. He said: 'If I could find one hundred people, that would be enough.' But it was not one hundred for a long time and I must say that when it was a hundred, it was already mixed." (On Thoughts and Aphorisms, p. 200)

Thus, when the number of inmates in the Ashram reached the figure 100, it was found to have been contaminated with undesirable elements and influences. What is, then, the situation now, when the Ashramites number more than twelve hundred? And how many more are joining the Ashram every year? And why? - impelled by what urges? How can we expect in these changed circumstances that all the new entrants will be able to maintain the true spirit that operated behind the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's creation? Is it permissible to expect from them that they will consciously collaborate in the task of building up of an ideal spiritual group life after the Mother's dream?

If not, where do we go from here? Should we adopt some remedial measures in order to tone up the quality of the new entrants?

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Criteria of Admission: A Suggestion

If we would like to maintain the spiritual character of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, care should be taken to see that there is no lowering of the standard of admissibility for the new entrants. The issue is: If someone comes and says that he is ready - or pretends that he is ready - to work in an Ashram Department for a stipulated number of hours every day, should that be deemed to be a sufficient qualification for him to be admitted into a spiritual group-life like our Ashram? Will that not introduce many an unprepared ādhāra into the community and thus lead to a progressive derailment from its basic orientation?

It is true we can't be too choosy about the new entrants. It is not that only sattwic people with a spiritual inclination will seek admission to our Ashram; along with them there may be many more, representing all strands of humanity, who will opt to join the institution. And that is necessary too in a way. For, Sri Aurobindo has clarified:

"It is necessary or rather inevitable that in an Ashram which is a 'laboratory' ... for a spiritual and supramental yoga, humanity should be variously represented. For the problem of transformation has to deal with all sorts of elements favourable and unfavourable. The same man indeed carries in him a mixture of these two things. If only sattwic and cultured men come for yoga, men without very much of the vital difficulty in them, then, because the difficulty of the vital element in terrestrial nature has not been faced and overcome, it might well be that the endeavour would fail. ... Those in the Ashram come from all quarters and are of all kinds; it cannot be otherwise." (Letters on Yoga, p. 856)

This is one side of the picture but there is another side

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too. Sri Aurobindo has warned about the possible invasion by non-spiritual elements bringing about in the long run miscarriage of the whole attempt at transforming human nature. Therefore, one has to be vigilant that the core light does not get extinguished by the submerging darkness settling in.

Especially now, when the Mother is not there physically to select the new entrants on the basis of their inner preparation, also when senior Ashramites - who had been in contact with the Mother, had worked with her and had been conversant with her way of working - are all "departing" from us one by one, leaving a tremendous vacuum of transition, one has to be, in order to prevent the qualitative deterioration of the collective life of the Ashram, very strict in the matter of admitting new entrants. Otherwise, there is fear that our Ashram too will meet the same fate as befell many other spiritual communities attempted in the past history of the human race. There may be, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "an intrusion of the lower forces into it, an acceptance by the world more dangerous than its opposition, and in the end an extinction, a lowering or a contamination of the new principle of life". (The Life Divine, p. 1063) And Sri Aurobindo warns that this has been "a frequent phenomenon of the past." (Ibid.)

In order to avert this adverse eventuality, may we humbly suggest that, whatever be their other deficiencies and frailties, the intending entrants should fulfil one basic minimum psychological requirement? What is, then, this precondition? Let us explain.

In the earlier stages of the Ashram Sri Aurobindo was very particular about this point. He used to term it as "receiving the call." Whenever someone approached him and expressed a wish to join the Ashram and follow his Yoga, Sri Aurobindo would enquire: "Have you received the Call?" In one of his letters written to a disciple Sri

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Aurobindo has made clear why he laid so much stress on "receiving the call". This is what he writes:

"The sadhak who comes to this yoga must have a real call, and even with the real call the way is often difficult enough.... When one has the real thing in oneself, one goes through and finally takes the full way of sadhana, but it is only a minority that does so. It is better to receive only people who come of themselves and of these only those in whom the call is genuinely their own and persistent." (Letters on Yoga, pp. 1615-16)

So, the call should be persistent and genuinely their own and not something imposed upon them from outside. But how does one know that one has recived the basic call? What are its psychological signs? For the right answer, let us listen to the Mother; she has lucidly explained the whole thing and pointed out how the call arises in one and what is its character. We quote below in extenso from what she said on 13 August 1958.

"You are going to wake up all of a sudden to something you never noticed but which is deep within you and thirsts for the truth, thirsts for transformation and is ready to make the effort required to realise it. ... You will suddenly feel an irresistible need not to live in unconsciousness, in ignorance, in that state in which you do things without knowing why, feel things without understanding why, have constradictory wills, understand nothing about anything, live only by habit, routine, reactions - you take life easy. And one day you are no longer satisfied with that.

"It depends, for each one it is different. Most often it is the need to know, to understand; for some it is the need to do what must be done as it should be done; for others it is a vague feeling that behind this life, so unconscious, so

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futile, so empty of meaning, there is something to find which is worth being lived - that there is a reality, a truth behind these falsehoods and illusions.

"One suddenly feels that everything one does, everything one sees, has no meaning, no purpose, but that there is something which has a meaning; that essentially one is here on earth for something, that all this - all these movements, all this agitation, all this wastage of force and energy - all that must have a purpose, an aim, and this uneasiness one feels within oneself, this lack of satisfaction, this need, this thirst for something must lead us somewhere else....

"You no longer live like a little machine, hardly half-conscious. You want to feel truly, to act truly, to know truly. ... The starting-point: to want it, truly want it, to need it. The next step: to think, above all, of that. A day comes, very quickly, when one is unable to think of anything else." (Questions and Answers 1957-58, pp. 373-75)

So, this is what we mean by "receiving a call" and an intending entrant into our Ashram life should feel in some measure the "need" for the higher spiritual existence and life the Mother is referring to. If he has got this, his other deficiencies may be remedied in time; but if he has not this, he will move here like a rudderless boat tossed about hither and thither by the passing waves. This "call" will act as the stable point d'appui, the solid foundation, of the sadhak's consciousness. Without this point d'appui, without an unshakable commitment to the ideal given us by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, how can anyone hope to stand firm in moments of his personal crises and difficulties, or how can he successfully contend against the upsurge of the lower tendencies of his as-yet-unregenerate nature? Hence the necessity of satisfying this basic psychological criterion before any one is considered for admission to the Ashram.

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Otherwise he will prove himself to be a nuisance to the Ashram's collective life and himself be harassed by unruly drives and impulses. For, every sadhak staying in the Ashram has perforce to confront a host of personal difficulties. There is an occult reason for this upsurge. Let us see what it is.

The Ashram Life and the Upsurge of Difficulties

Sri Aurobindo has analysed on more than one occasion this phenomenon of the upsurge of difficulties of personal character in many sadhaks after they have settled down in the Ashram and dwelt there for some months or some years. The reason behind the sadhaks' troubles and the troubles they create for other individuals living in the same community is threefold: (1) close concentration of many people within the confines of a small space; (2) sadhana extending to the submerged obscure layers of consciousness and forcing the concealed dark elements there to come out into the open and be exposed to Light; and (3) the very nature of the Yoga of Transformation which will not allow any unregenerate movement in the sadhak to evade the transforming action of the Consciousness-Force constantly operative in our Ashram atmosphere. The following three excerpts from Sri Aurobindo's writings will explain the rationale behind the manifestation of many kinds of psychological difficulties encountered amongst the inmates here:

(1) "The Ashram is an epitome of the human nature that has to be changed ... outside people put as much as possible a mask of social manners and other pretences over

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the rottenness - what Christ called in the case of the Pharisees the 'whited sepulchre'. Moreover there one can pick and choose the people one will associate with while in the narrow limits of the Ashram it is not so possible -contacts are inevitable. Wherever humans are obliged to associate closely, what I saw described the other day as 'the astonishing meannesses and caddishnesses inherent in human nature' come quickly out. I have seen that in Ashrams, in political work, in social attempts at united living, everywhere in fact where it gets a chance." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 1047)

(2)"The power that works in this yoga is of a thoroughgoing character and tolerates in the end nothing great or small that is an obstacle to the Truth and its realisation." (Letters on Yoga, p. 803)

(3)"The exacerbation of certain vital movements is a perfectly well-known phenomenon in Yoga and does not mean that one has degenerated, but only that one has come to close grips instead of a pleasant nodding acquaintance with the basic instincts of the earthly vital nature. I have had myself the experience of this rising to a height, during a certain stage of the spiritual development, of things that before hardly existed and seemed quite absent in the pure Yogic life. These things rise up like that because they are fighting for their existence - they are not really personal to you and the vehemence of their attack is not due to any 'badness' in the personal nature. I dare say seven Sadhaks out of ten have a similar experience. Afterwards when they cannot effect their object, which is to drive the Sadhak out of his Sadhana, the whole thing sinks and there is no longer any vehement trouble." (On Himself, p. 157)

We can now understand the occult reason behind the genesis and recrudescence of many sorts of weaknesses in the consciousness of many sadhaks in the Ashram. But the

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matter does not or, rather, should not end there. Sadhaks should on no account be complacent about their weaknesses or give a free indulgence to them taking them as a natural phenomenon. If they do so, how can they call themselves 'Sadhaks' or 'Sadhikas'? These weaknesses arise, not for being nurtured and pampered, but for being ruthlessly fought against and thrown out. And herein comes the absolute necessity, on the sadhaks' part, of the 'inner Call' we have referred to in the previous Section of our essay. If any inmate of the Ashram fails to have the basic commitment to what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo expect of us as their loving and loyal children, he will not only lose his own peace and happiness but, what is worse, he will disturb the collective life here into the bargain. A sadhak of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, if he would really like to deserve the appellation, must show his zeal to fight out his weaknesses again and again; for, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "no victory can be won without a fixed fidelity to the aim and a long effort." (Letters on Yoga, p. 819)

It is a pity many of us, the sadhaks of the Ashram, take a very lenient attitude towards our weaknesses. We adopt any one of three facile attitudes which are all equally inimical to the building up of a healthy spiritual life. The attitudes may be formulated in this way:

1."I don't care to eradicate my weaknesses. If at all, I shall attend to this task much later in my life, surely not so soon."

2."Oh, what can I do? I am too weak to fight these weaknesses."

3."Why do I bother about these things? The Mother's Grace and Consciousness are there to work out everything. She will free me from my weaknesses in her own time. Meanwhile..."

This sort of escapist attitude has to be scrupulously

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avoided. Difficulties are bound to arise in course of the sadhak's sadhana but he has to make a sincere effort to overcome them - of course, aided and sustained by the Mother's Grace. If he does not do so, what spiritual progress can he expect to register? Let us listen to what Sri Aurobindo has to say in this connection. This will, let us hope, help us shake off our attitude of lethargy and laisseraller.

"When one tries to do Yoga, one cannot fail to see [weaknesses coming out] in oneself and not only, as most people do, see it in others, and once seen, then? Is it to be got rid of or to be kept? Most people here seem to want to keep it. Or they say it is too strong for them, they can't help it!" (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 1047)

"If things become prominent, it is that people may see and reject them. If instead they cling to them as their most cherished possessions, what is the use? How is the purging to be done with such an attitude?" (Ibid., p. 1048)

(2) "If I said things that human nature finds easy and natural, that would certainly be very comfortable for the disciples, but there would be no room for spiritual aim and endeavour. Spiritual aims and methods are not easy or natural (e.g. as quarreling, sex indulgence, greed, indolence, acquiescence in all imperfections are easy and natural) and if people become disciples, they are supposed to follow spiritual aims and endeavours however hard and above ordinary nature and not the things that are easy and natural. (Letters on Yoga, p. 864)

Yet, we should note at the same time that to overcome in a short span of time all possible difficulties of ordinary human nature is never an easy proposition for a sadhak in the Ashram; and this is so not because he is always negligent about his weaknesses but in spite of his repeated

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efforts to conquer them. The reason is not far to seek. Our normal human nature has been mostly moulded by the forces of the Inconscience and to go against their downward gravitational pull appears at times an impossible task.

So if at times we happen to witness in the Ashram some undesirable manifestation of human weaknesses not behoving those who profess to be spiritual seekers, we should not be too harsh and precipitate in our criticism: we should cultivate an attitude of patience, tolerance and benevolent sympathy and help the errant colleagues to win the battle and come out of their dark pit. For, knowing human nature as it is in its actuality we should not expect an easy definitive victory over it.

Problems Peculiar to Our Collectivity

Problems are sometimes accentuated in our Ashram community because our aim is to practise a 'collective yoga'; and this implies that individual sadhaks will not only have to contend against the difficulties of their own personal nature but fight many problems as representatives of the whole group. Because of the fact of inner solidarity with all, each member of the collectivity is at all times exposed to the influences coming from all others and if he is not vigilant and strong enough to detect and nullify any adverse influence trying to overpower him, he will surely be lowered down in his consciousness, and willy-nilly he will start copying others in their unspiritual tendencies, forgetting in the process his own original aspiration. And this has been the tragic fate of many promising sadhaks. Here we may recall some memorable lines from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:

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"Heaven's call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;

The doors of light are sealed to common mind,

And earth's needs nail to earth the human mass,

Only in an uplifting hour of stress

Men answer to the touch of greater things:

Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven-air,

They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;

In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know

They joy in safe return to a friendly base,

And, though something in them weeps for the glory lost

And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.

To be the common man they think the best,

To live as others live is their delight."

(Savitri, Book XI Canto 1, p. 689)

This risk of progressive fall in consciousness over the years and the readiness to lead a routine existence confronts many a sadhak in the Ashram. And this is not the morbid imagination of a pessimist mind; it is very much true to fact and cannot escape the notice of any one who would keep his eyes open. And this risk arises because of the situation of many heterogeneous elements coming close together in the short space of our Ashram collectivity. Sri Aurobindo has alluded to this difficulty in a significant passage of The Life Divine:

"It might be that, in such a concentration of effort, all the difficulties of the change would present themselves with a concentrated force; for each seeker, carrying in himself the possibilities but also the imperfections of a world that has to be transformed, would bring in not only his capacities but his difficulties and the opposition of the old nature

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and, mixed together in the restricted circle of a small and close communal life, these might assume a considerably enhanced force of obstruction which would tend to counter-balance the enhanced power and concentration of the forces making for the evolution. This is a difficulty that has broken in the past all the efforts of mental man to evolve something better and more true and harmonious than the ordinary mental and vital life." (The Life Divine, p. 1062)

But whatever may have happened in the past, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have undertaken this difficult task. For that they have brought down the Supramental Truth-Consciousness with its absolute potency into the earth nature and this will surely overcome the apparently insuperable difficulty of transformation and help to establish a perfect spiritual society here.

Yes, surely it will do so but it may not be in a few years' time, not even in a few decades'. For human nature will not admit of such a radical transformation so easily. Has not Sri Aurobindo reminded us? -

"It is the nature of the human being - whoever told you it was an easy job?" (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 272)

"If you want to change things, you will have to change humanity first and I can assure you you will find it a job. Yes, even to change 150 people in an Ashram and get them to surmount their instincts." (Ibid., pp. 564-65)

Sri Aurobindo found it difficult "to change 150 people" in the Ashram in 1936. And now we are more than 1200, almost approaching the number 1500 including the devotees permanently settled here. So, if we occasionally see some difficulty flaring up these days, should we get unduly disheartened and lose faith in the validity of our ideal? We should rather redouble our effort to become

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more sincere in our aspiration and more steadfast in our practice.

The Problem of Harmony in Our Ashram Life

Complaint is at times murmured in some quarters, even among many sadhaks of the Ashram, that there is not much of harmony in our group life; what is there, they say, is that the individual inmates have some sort of vital attachment to some and an attitude of indifference towards the rest. Many recall the Upanishadic utterance - saṁ-gacchadhvaṁ saṁvadadhvaṁ saṁ vo manāṅsi jānatām: "Let us move in harmony, speak in harmony, be united in our heart to know together" - and feel aggrieved to find the supposed absence of this united feeling and thought amongst the Ashram inmates.

But we must know that this lacuna, even if it is factually true, is not something peculiar to the Ashram of today. The complaint is as old as the hills. For even in 1938 Dr. Mahendra Sircar, a distinguished philosopher on a visit to the Ashram, commented after a "stove incident" that Sri Aurobindo's Ashram lacked "fraternity", while the Ramakrishna Mission was ideal in that way. When Nirod-baran reported this complaint to his Guru, Sri Aurobindo replied:

"I am afraid not. When I was in Calcutta it was already a battle-field and even in the post-civil-war period one hears distressing things about it. It is the same with other Asrams..." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p.1048)

Be that as it may, we, the disciples of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, should be clear about one point. What we

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should strive after in our collective sadhana is not a fanatically disposed herd-instinct nor an emotional-vital egoistic solidarity. We seek in our mutual relationships something deeper and truer, based on the inner oneness of the spirit. It is worth quoting in this connection parts of three letters of Sri Aurobindo:

(1)"The personal relation is not a part of the yoga. When one has the union with the Divine, then only can there be a true spiritual relation with others." (Letters on Yoga, p. 803)

(2)"The Mother has not laid stress on human fellowship of the ordinary kind between the inmates (though good feeling, consideration and courtesy should always be there), because that is not the aim; it is a unity in a new consciousness that is the aim, and the first thing is for each to do his Sadhana to arrive at that new consciousness and realise oneness there." (The Mother, p. 264)

(3)"Our view is that the normal thing is in yoga for the entire flame of the nature to turn towards the divine and the rest must wait for the true basis: to build higher things on the sand and mire of the ordinary consciousness is not safe. That does not necessarily exclude friendships or comradeships, but these must be subordinate altogether to the central fire." (Letters on Yoga, p. 818)

(4)"Friendship or affection is not excluded from the yoga. Friendship with the Divine is a recognised relation in the sadhana. Friendships between the sadhaks exist and are encouraged by the Mother. Only, we seek to found them on a surer basis than that on which the bulk of human friendships are insecurely founded. It is precisely because we hold friendship, brotherhood, love to be sacred things that we want this change - because we do not want to see them broken at every moment by the movements of the ego, soiled and spoiled and destroyed by the passions,

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jealousies, treacheries to which the vital is prone - it is to make them truly sacred and secure that we want them rooted in the soul, founded on the rock of the Divine." (Letters on Yoga, p. 818)

So we see that although it is our aim to have harmony and mutuality of relationships prevailing in our Ashram, we must be careful to see that these spring up from some inner source. Human relationships are worthy of being cherished because all flow from a convergent relationship to the Divine, but they will prove deceptive and destructive when they are centred in the ego. As Prof. Iyengar has so aptly put it in his biography of Sri Aurobindo, "Trust the true warmth of the pure flame of psychic love but beware of the flawed fuel of ego-desire." (Sri Aurobindo, p. 563)

Nature of Human Relationships: Cherished Goal

We should not forget that, being spurred by some misplaced zeal to establish a semblance of all-round 'harmony' in our Ashram collectivity, if we attempt to adopt some arbitrary short-cut measures and try to build our group-life on the insecure foundation of ego-prompted sympathy and solidarity, what we will at best achieve will be a deceptive and brittle 'constructed harmony', not the harmony the Mother and Sri Aurobindo would like us to cultivate. And these attempts are bound to fail in the end; for all that springs from ego has the roots of its ultimate decay and dissolution in-built into its soil. Sri Aurobindo has analysed the problem and offered its right solution at many places of his writings, especially in The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Human Cycle. Here are two relevant excerpts from his writings:

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(1)"These attempts have always been overcome by the persistent inconscience and ignorance of our human vital nature; for that nature is an obstacle which no mere idealism or incomplete spiritual aspiration can change in its recalcitrant mass or permanently dominate." (The Life Divine, p. 1061)

(2)"Either the endeavour fails by its own imperfection or it is invaded by the imperfection of the outside world and sinks from the shining height of its aspiration to something mixed and inferior on the ordinary human level." (Ibid.)

A collective spiritual life - the goal of our Ashram - is meant to express the spiritual and not merely the physical, vital, or even the mental being of man; it has, therefore, to found and maintain itself on greater values than the mental, vital, physical values of the ordinary human groupings. If it is not so founded, our Ashram will be merely the normal human collectivity with a cosmetic difference.

If we would like to avoid such an eventuality for our Ashram life, we have to reject the temptation of taking recourse to some easy procedures and, instead, follow the only veritable way to our goal, the way of inner regeneration. However arduous and time-consuming the journey may prove to be, we should not give up our effort but move on, upbuoyed by an unshakable faith in the ultimate victory, for such is the Will of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. In our attempt to establish an ideal group life in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram we should never lose sight of the following words of Sri Aurobindo:

"An entirely new consciousness in many individuals transforming their whole being, transforming their mental, vital and physical nature-self, is needed for the new life to

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appear; only such a transformation of the general mind, life, body nature can bring into being a new worthwhile collective existence." (The Life Divine, p. 1061)

In our absorption into and preoccupation with variegated activities of our burgeoning Ashram life we should not be oblivious of the basic fact that, according to the ideal set before us by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, our Ashram should fulfil a double purpose at the same time: (i) to provide a secure atmosphere, a space and life apart, in which the individual sadhaks might concentrate on their inner self-discovery and progressive growth of consciousness in surroundings provided by the community in which all is turned and centred towards this one all-important endeavour; and (ii) as and when things get ready, to formulate and develop a new kind of collective spiritual life in the prepared spiritual atmosphere of the Ashram. All other achievements are secondary and incidental: this alone is the real raison d'être of the Ashram founded by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. And to fulfil it the main concern of the inmates should be the development of a spiritual consciousness in themselves. With it will automatically develop in the Ashram mutuality of consciousness, spontaneous reign of harmony and the growth of a spiritually conscious community. To quote Sri Aurobindo:

"Beyond the mental and moral being in us is a greater divine being that is spiritual and supramental... There alone the unification of the transformed vital and physical and the illumined mental man becomes possible in that supramental spirit which is at once the secret source and goal of our mind and life and body. There alone is there any possibility of an absolute justice, love and right - far other than that which we imagine - at one with each other in the light of a supreme divine knowledge. There alone

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can there be a reconciliation of the conflict between our members. ... This supreme truth of ourselves must have a double character. It must be a law and truth that discovers the perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of a great spiritualised collective life and determines perfectly our relations with each being and all beings in Nature's varied oneness. It must be at the same time a law and truth that discovers to us at each moment the rhythm and exact steps of the direct expression of the Divine in the soul, mind, life, body of the individual creature." (The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 190, 191, italics added)

But the detractors may contend: Is it not too Utopian a task we are placing before the Ashramites? Is it not a sheer chimera we have been chasing in vain?

A Utopian Dream?

We have put forward in the preceding Section the idea that in order to fulfil its destiny, the destiny of erecting an ideal collective life wherein will live perfect spiritual individuals, a significant number of Ashramites should seriously endeavour to grow within and live from within, know their real selves and build up their relationships with their comrades on the basis of the inner unity of consciousness.

But this is a solution to which it may be objected that it puts off the consummation of an ideal human grouping to a remote future; for it presupposes that no machinery invented by man's reason can perfect either the individual or the collective man. And who will deny that the inner change needed in human nature to achieve this goal of dual perfection is something too difficult to be ever achieved except by a microscopic minority?

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But, whether we agree with this misgiving or not, the indubitable fact remains that "if this is not the solution, then there is no solution; if this is not the way, then there is no way for the human kind. Then the terrestrial evolution must pass beyond man as it has passed beyond the animal and a greater race must come that will be capable of the spiritual change..." (The Human Cycle, p. 207)

Sri Aurobindo has elaborated this point in The Life Divine. A portion of what he has said there is worth quoting here:

"At first sight this insistence on a radical change of nature might seem to put off all the hope of humanity to a distant evolutionary future; for the transcendence of our normal human nature, a transcendence of our mental, vital and physical being, has the appearance of an endeavour too high and difficult and at present, for man as he is, impossible. Even if it were so, it would still remain the sole possibility for the transmutation of life; for to hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle." (The Life Divine, p. 1059)

But to grow within and live from within, is it really too difficult a task for the awakened section of humanity, for those who have deliberately chosen to form a part of this Ashram in order to realise the Goal given them by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother? Are earth-conditions not yet propitious for the fulfilment of that task? Sri Aurobindo assures us that these doubts are ill-founded. The time has come to disprove all these forebodings and realise the goal in actual practice. Let us recall in this connection a passage from The Life Divine which makes the issue in all its aspects absolutely and unambiguously clear:

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"What is demanded by this change [of human nature] is not something altogether distant, alien to our existence and radically impossible; for what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of the self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation. It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human destiny when the mental and vital evolution of the being touches a point where intellect and vital force reach some acme of tension and there is a need either for them to collapse, to sink back into a torpor of defeat or a repose of unprogressive quiescence or to rend their way through the veil against which they are straining." (The Life Divine, pp. 1055-60)

Sri Aurobindo assures us further that the evolutionary movement of man has indeed reached a critical point when a serious attempt can be made to effectuate a radical change of present human nature and with it to usher in unity, mutuality and harmony in man's collective living. Let us listen to him:

"...if an evolution of being is the law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that Supernature, - for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened to a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness

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of a fulfilled nature." (The Life Divine, p. 1036)

And we venture to hope that this glorious destiny of man is not something belonging to an indeterminately far future of humanity: it can be realised in the foreseeable future. For, Sri Aurobindo has assured us, Nature is ready and has taken the evolutionary decision and along with it, according to the Mother's declaration, the supramental Truth-Consciousness - the complete power of the Spirit -has descended into the earth-atmosphere and is very much active there. As a result all the difficulties encountered on the Path will be progressively overcome and a first evolutionary formation of an ideal group life will be a reality.

And can we not expect that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the joint creation of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, will have the unique privilege of enshrining such a formation? Are we too timid to hope for that? Have we become too cynical to enthusiastically participate in that effort?

But mere idealism or a pious wish will not deliver the goods. For that what is necessary is that there should be a turn in the Ashramites felt by some or many towards "the vision of this [inner] change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way." (The Life Divine, p. 1060)

And if these psychological factors are found in the Ashramites, our dream of building a perfect collective life made up of spiritually active individuals will prove neither Utopian nor chimerical.

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Relationships in the Transitional Period

What we have portrayed above is the ultimate goal to realise, a goal sure to be realised one day but - it is realistic to admit - not in the immediate future. In the meantime, what sort of relationships should the Ashramites seek to establish in their collective life? Now, what the sadhaks are expected to avoid and what to cultivate have been made abundantly clear by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in their various writings. If we become sincere in our effort to put into active practice all that they have prescribed, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram would be much nearer to its true destiny than what it is today. Here are three passages relevant to the topic we have been discussing:

(1)"The ideal of the yoga is that all should be centred in and around the Divine and the life of the sadhaks must be founded on that firm foundation, their personal relations also should have the Divine for their centre. Moreover, all relations should pass from the vital to the spiritual basis with the vital only as a form and instrument of the spiritual - this means that, from whatever relations they have with each other, all jealousy, strife, hatred, aversion, rancour and other evil vital feelings should be abandoned, for they can be no part of the spiritual life. So, also, all egoistic love and attachment will have to disappear - the love that loves only for the ego's sake and, as soon as the ego is hurt and dissatisfied, ceases to love or even cherishes rancour and hate. There must be a real living and lasting unity behind the love. It is understood of course that such things as sexual impurity must disappear also." (Letters On Yoga, p. 804)

(2)"Quarrels, cuttings are not a part of sadhana: the clashes and frictions ... are, just as in the outside world, rubbings of the vital ego. Antagonisms, antipathies,

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dislikes, quarrelings can no more be proclaimed as part of sadhana than sex-impulses or acts can be part of sadhana. Harmony, goodwill, forbearance, equanimity are necessary ideals in the relation of sadhak with sadhak." (Ibid., p. 824) (3) "... a sense of closeness and oneness with others is a part of the divine consciousness into which the sadhak enters by nearness to the Divine and the feeling of oneness with the Divine. ... In this Yoga the feeling of unity with others, love, universal joy and Ananda are an essential part of the liberation and perfection which are the aim of the sadhana." (Ibid., p. 805)

Another important point: in our Ashram life there should be on no one's part the uncharitable tendency to sit in harsh judgement over others, judgement at times quite unnecessary, often without sufficient foundation. It is not that we are asked to develop blindness of vision or deliberately turn our eyes away. We can observe, but in a calm, quiet and unbiased way and without giving rise to any carping criticism. In this matter we should scrupulously follow Sri Aurobindo's advice:

"There is no harm in seeing and observing if it is done with sympathy and impartiality - it is the tendency unnecessarily to criticise, find fault, condemn others (often quite wrongly) which creates a bad atmosphere both for oneself and others. And why this harshness and cocksure condemnation? Has not each man his own faults - why should he be so eager to find fault with others and condemn them? Sometimes one has to judge but it should not be done harshly or in a censorious spirit." (Letters on Yoga, p. 826)

Here becomes entirely relevant Mother's prescription to the inmates of the Ashram:

"A good advice to all the Ashramites in their dealings

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with visitors and foreigners (and even among themselves): "'When you have nothing pleasant to say about something or somebody in the Ashram, keep silent.

"'You must know that this silence is faithfulness to the Divine's work.' " (Words of the Mother, CWM Vol. 13, p. 150)

Finally, for the proper functioning and the progressive evolution of our Ashram life towards its destined goal, all the sadhaks should always try to put into sincere and effective practice what Sri Aurobindo has indicated in the following passage:

"There is one thing everybody should remember that everything should be done from the point of view of Yoga, of Sadhana, of growing into a divine life in the Mother's consciousness. To insist upon one's own mind and its ideas, to allow oneself to be governed by one's own vital feelings and reactions should not be the rule of life here. One has to stand back from these, to be detached, to get in their place the true knowledge from above, the true feelings from the psychic within. This cannot be done if the mind and vital do not surrender, if they do not renounce their attachment to their own ignorance which they call truth, right, justice. All the trouble rises from that; if that were overcome, the true basis of life, of work, of harmony of all in the union with the Divine would more and more replace the trouble and difficulty of the present." (The Mother, p. 239)

And we should not forget even for a moment what our Sweet Mother has told us. She has analysed our problem, offered the true solution and reminded us about what we are expected to do here in the Ashram. Here is what she says:

"In human life the cause of all difficulties, all discords,

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all psychological sufferings, is the presence in everyone of the ego with its desires, its likes and dislikes. ... The ego reacts to everything that displeases it, starts an inner storm that rises to the surface and spoils all the work.

"This work of overcoming the ego is long, slow and difficult: it demands constant alertness and sustained effort. This effort is easier for some and more difficult for others.

"We are here in the Ashram to do this work together with the help of Sri Aurobindo's knowledge and force, in an attempt to realise a community that is more harmonious, more united, and consequently much more effective in life." (On Education, CWM Vol. 12, p. 357)

To free oneself altogether from all insistence of the ego and not to govern one's life and action by the promptings of egoistic ideas, urges and feelings, is not an easy task for everybody, even for many in our Ashram. It may take years to achieve this. Hence it is quite natural that some Ashramites will continue for some time, may be for a long time, to be governed by their unillumined impulses and desires. Their behaviour in the Ashram may not be consistent with the ideal of a spiritual institution. What should the authorities do in such cases? To discipline them with a firm hand? to allow them to indulge in their waywardness? This is a ticklish question and we devote the following Section to the consideration of this issue.

Freedom and Discipline in the Ashram

The establishment of overall harmony and concord in our Ashram community and the building up of an ideal group life here is surely a realisation that would require sustained

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effort of long duration. This cannot be expected in a few years' time or even in a few decades'. So let us not be overhasty in trying to "achieve" this concord by any means proper or improper, for that is bound to lead to failure and frustration. In our ignorant enthusiasm we may be tempted to adopt some mental and external measures to establish conformity in our Ashram life by unduly curtailing the freedom of the constituent individuals. But this attempt cannot succeed by the very nature of things. It will lead sooner or later to some moribund uniformity and stagnation or to some authoritarian steam-rollering whose end-result will be a lifeless mechanisation. And surely that is not what we have set out to achieve. If we hope to build here an ideal group-life in conformity with the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's Vision, we have to be very clear in our mind about the respective places freedom and discipline should occupy in the ordering of our Ashram community.

It is necessary to remember at the very outset that any attempt at a large-scale collective spiritual life is always liable to be vitiated by the imperfections of the individual seekers, also by the intrusion of the unregenerate mental, vital and physical consciousness into the higher truth that is seeking to manifest in the community. The question is, how to neutralise this danger? An increasing standardisation, a fixing of all into a common mould in order to ensure harmony and concord is the mental method of solving the problem. But does it adequately and satisfactorily solve the problem? Let us listen to what Sri Aurobindo has to say on this point:

"... the method that is being employed is... a forced compression and imposed unanimity of mind and life and a mechanical organisation of the communal existence. A unanimity of this kind can only be maintained by a compression of all freedom of thought and life, and that

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must bring about either the efficient stability of a termite civilisation or a drying up of the springs of life and a swift or slow decadence. It is through the growth of consciousness that the collective soul and its life can become aware of itself and develop; the free play of mind and life is essential for the growth of consciousness: for mind and life are the soul's only instrumentation until a higher instrumentation develops; they must not be inhibited in their action or rendered rigid, unplastic and unprogressive. The difficulties or disorders engendered by the growth of the individual mind and life cannot be healthily removed by the suppression of the individual; the true cure can only be achieved by his progression to a greater consciousness in which he is fulfilled and perfected." (The Life Divine, p. 1057)

Luckily for our Ashram as it is constituted and as it functions, there is not much fear of any standardisation or mechanisation of its life, or of any undue restriction being placed on the spontaneous growth of its members. And this should be its mode of functioning even in the future. Adapting some words of Sri Aurobindo as occuring in The Synthesis of Yoga (p. 184), we may say that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, representing as far as possible the individual Ashramites' best self and helping them to realise it, would respect the freedom of each of its members and maintain itself not by rules and coercion but by the free and spontaneous consent of its constituent members.

And this is perfectly all right so far as the majority of its members are concerned. But what about the others, however few they be in number, who have not developed any capacity for self-discipline and hence become a destabilising factor for the whole collectivity? There should no doubt be in the Ashram for all its members total freedom to grow in consciousness and realise their spiritual destiny in their own way. But that does not mean that there should

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be licence for any member to injure the interests of the group, to disturb others in their effort at self-perfection or to corrupt, pollute and lower the Ashram atmosphere by his or her unspirirual example. And there may be some in whom the lower part of their being is "random, wayward, self-assertive" and unwilling to accept any discipline other than its own idea or impulse. Speaking of this part, Sri Aurobindo writes:

"Its defects even from the beginning stand in the way of the efforts of the higher vital to impose on the nature a truly regenerating tapasya. This habit of disobedience and disregard of discipline is so strong that it does not always need to be deliberate; the response to it seems to be immediate, irresistible and instinctive." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1308)

Sri Aurobindo remarks that this constant indiscipline is a radical obstacle to sadhana and "the worst possible example to others." (Ibid.) Sri Aurobindo has reminded us that "perfection does not consist in everybody being a law to himself" (Ibid., p. 863); and discipline is absolutely essential in "the exceedingly difficult work" the Ashram represents. (The Mother, p. 228)

Sri Aurobindo has explained in detail in one of his most significant letters entitled "The Mother and the Ashram's Discipline" why order and discipline should form an integral element in the Ashram group-life which aspires to embody his life-work in one of its important applied aspects. Here are some excerpts from that letter:

"You seem to say that people should be allowed complete freedom with only such discipline as they choose to impose upon themselves; that might do if the only thing to be done were for each individual to get some inner realisation and life did not matter or if there were no collective life or work or none that had any importance.

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But this is not the case here. We have undertaken a work which includes life and action and the physical world. In what I am trying to do, the spiritual realisation is the first necessity, but it cannot be complete without an outer realisation also in life, in men, in this world. Spiritual consciousness within but also spiritual life without. ... Discipline is necessary for the overcoming of the ego and the mental preferences and the rajasic vital nature, as a help to it at any rate. ... While the present state of things exists, by the abandonment or the leaving out of discipline except such as people choose or not choose to impose upon themselves, the result would be failure and disaster." (The Mother, p. 229)

Sri Aurobindo remarked in 1945: "I do not agree myself with him in the idea that there is perfect discipline in the Ashram; on the contrary, there is a great lack of it, much indiscipline, quarreling and self-assertion. ... it is only the Mother's authority, the frame of work she has given and her skill in getting incompatibilities to act together that has kept things going." (The Mother, pp. 228, 229)

This was in 1945. And what is the state of affairs now in the year 1995, especially when both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have withdrawn from the physical plane and when new unprepared people who have had no acquaintance with the Mother's way of working are joining the Ashram in large numbers?

The Mother herself has said: "As long as I was physically present among you all, my presence was helping you to achieve this mastery over the ego and so it was not necessary for me to speak to you about it individually. But now this effort must become the basis of each individual's existence, more especially for those of you who have a responsible position and have to take care of others. The leaders must always set the example, the leaders must

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always practise the virtues they demand from those who are in their care..." (On Education, CWM Vol. 12, pp. 357-58)

There is no harm admitting that lately there has grown in the Ashram a tendency to confuse freedom with permissiveness. Some inmates, old and new, do not feel any compunction in breaking the healthy discipline of the collective life or even in introducing injurious innovations. How to check this trend? If allowed a free course, this tendency is bound to grow more and more with the passage of time and infect more and more people here. Compromise and dilution will then set in and the Ashram may end up by losing its essential spiritual character.

A great responsibility devolves upon the Ashram authorities and various Departmental Heads in the matter of striking a happy synthesis of freedom and discipline. There should be in our Ashram no attempt at standardisation and establishing comformity all around. But at the same time any attempt by some wayward persons to injure the central spirit of this unique spiritual institution will have to be discouraged.

We Ashramites should never forget that enlightened self-discipline is the precondition for asserting one's right to enjoy and exercise freedom. Let us be guided at all times by the following words of Sri Aurobindo if we would aspire to be deserving members of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram:

"We must feel and obey the compulsion of the Spirit if we would establish our inner right to escape other compulsion; we must make our lower nature the willing slave, the conscious and illumined instrument or the ennobled but still self-subjected portion, consort or partner of the divine Being within us, for it is that subjection which is the condition of our freedom, since spiritual freedom is not the egoistic assertion of our separate mind and life but obedience

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to the Divine truth in ourself and our members and in all around us." (The Human Cycle, p. 242)

The Task Ahead

But all this, the ideal of achieving a perfect and harmonious blending of the principles of freedom and discipline, cannot be realised in a day in all the members of the Ashram. So if at times we happen to see some imperfections troubling the atmosphere of our collective life here, we should not turn unduly pessimistic. Knowing that there cannot but be some natural difficulties on the arduous path of the achievement of our difficult goal, we should redouble our efforts at self-amelioration and invoke the Mother's Grace and help to crown our efforts with victory.

But one thing we have to avoid: we must not be complacent in our attitude and allow things to drift on. On one side we have to remember that "the Ashram is an epitome of the human nature that has to be changed." (Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 1047) On the other hand, we should not lapse into the indolent attitude, "We need not bother; the Mother will do everything for us." There are some who would like to rationalise this attitude of laisser-aller by reminding us of the following dialogue of the Mother with our Kishorbhai (Gandhi):

Q.: What is the right thing that we should expect from you ?

A.:Mother answers: Everything.

Q.: What have you been expecting from us and from humanity in general for the accomplishment of Your Work upon earth?

A.: Nothing.

Q.: From your long experience over sixty years, have You found that Your expectation from us and from humanity has been sufftciently fulfilled ?

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A.: As I am expecting nothing I cannot answer this question.

Q.: Does the success of Your Work for us and for Humanity depend in any way upon the fulfilment of Your expectation from us and from humanity?

Mother answers: Happily not.

(On Education, CWM Vol. 12, p. 308)

While citing the above assertion of the Mother in defence of our attitude of lethargy and inaction vis-a-vis our weaknesses and imperfections, we conveniently forget that the Mother has said something else too which goes apparently counter to what she has stated in the course of the above piece of dialogue. She has referred to the Law of Collectivity and pointed out that even a supreme Avatar cannot accomplish the Goal set before us unless and until there is a conscious collaboration of others in the task. Here is the relevant portion of her observation:

"I do not think that a single individual on the earth as it is now, a single individual, however great, however eternal his consciousness and origin, can on his own change and realise - change the world, change the creation as it is and realise this higher Truth which will be a new world more true, if not absolutely true. It would seem that a certain number of individuals - until now it seems to have been more in time, as a succession, but it could also be in space, a collectivity - are indispensable so that this truth can become concrete and realise itself.

"Practically, I am sure of it.

"That is to say, however conscious, however powerful he may be, one Avatar cannot by himself realise the supramental life on earth. It is either a group in time, extending over a period of time, or a group spread out in space -perhaps both - that are indispensable for this Realisation. I

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am convinced of it." (On Thoughts and Aphorisms, CWM Vol. 10, p. 138)

Before we quote anything from the Mother in order to justify our tamasic attitude, we should be aware of all else that she has said. A global synthetic comprehension of all that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have pronounced on any issue or question can alone protect us from taking recourse to a one-sided facile course of action. The Mother herself has warned us against the danger of such a onesided interpretation and advised us about how we should proceed while reading Sri Aurobindo's and her own writings. This is what she says:

"If you want to know what Sri Aurobindo has said on a given subject, you must at least read all that he has written on that subject. You will then see that he has apparently said the most contradictory things. But when one has read everything, and understood a little, one perceives that all the contradictions complement each other and are organised and unified into an integral synthesis." (On Education, p. 399)

If we rightly apply the above maxim to the solution of the problem of mutual relation between personal effort and the action of the divine Grace, we can come to understand what we should do whenever we confront a situation like that. This has been clearly indicated in one of Sri Aurobindo's letters:

"All this cannot be done in a day. So you are once more right in not being anxious or uneasy. One must be vigilant, but not anxious or uneasy. The Mother's Force will act and bring the result in its own time, provided one offers all to her and aspires and is vigilant, calling and remembering

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her at all times, rejecting quietly all that stands in the way of the action of her transforming Force." (The Mother, p. 202)

So what is expected of every inmate of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is that he be constantly faithful to the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's teachings and that he try to put into effective practice the following instruction of the master:

"Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present."

The danger to our Ashram community is not so much ' from direct and open opposition from outside. The danger is from those who profess to accept the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's teachings, join the organisation, and, then, sabotage and subvert it from within as its accepted members.

We have to be vigilant so that, with the arrival of such entrants not yet spiritually surrendered to the Mother, the Ashram does not degenerate into some sort of a huge boarding and lodging house where the inmates can legitimately expect the fulfilment of their desires and fancies in return for a modicum of service in some Department for a number of hours every day. Sri Aurobindo has denounced this bargaining give-and-take attitude on the part of some inmates. It is worth quoting here what he has said in this connection:

"What your vital being seems to have kept all along is the 'bargaining' or the 'mess' attitude in these matters. One gives some kind of commodity which he calls devotion or surrender and in return the Mother is under obligation to supply satisfaction for all demands and desires spiritual, mental, vital and physical, and, if she falls short in her task, she has broken her contract. The Ashram is a sort of communal hotel or mess, the Mother is the hotel-keeper or

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mess-manager. One gives what one can or chooses to give, or it may be nothing at all except the aforesaid commodity; in return the palate, the stomach and all the physical demands have to be satisfied to the full; if not, one has every right to keep one's money and to abuse the defaulting hotel-keeper or mess-manager." (The Mother, p. 232)

Let us substitute "the Ashram Trustees" for the "Mother" in the above passage from Sri Aurobindo and we get an exact description of the attitude entertained by many an Ashramite of our times. But Sri Aurobindo has come down heavily on this sort of wrong attitude of mind and heart. He has asserted:

"This attitude has nothing whatever to do with Sadhana or Yoga and I absolutely repudiate the right of anyone to impose it as a basis for my work or for the life of the Ashram." (Ibid.)

All the sadhaks, especially the new entrants, should clearly understand the basic character of this Ashram and the reason for their stay here. Things cannot move smoothly in our community unless and until most if not all the Sadhaks here come to realise that "they are not here for their ego and self-indulgence of their vital and physical demands but for a high and exacting Yoga of which the first aim is the destruction of desire and the substitution for it of the Divine Truth and the Divine Will." (Ibid., p. 244)

For over-all harmony to reign in the Ashram, another important point we have to attend to with all the sincerity of execution: it is as regards the mutual relationship of Departmental Heads and the sadhaks and sadhikas who work under their supervision. Let the following words of Sri Aurobindo act as a constant guide to our behaviour:

"None should regard or treat another member of the Ashram as his subordinate. If he is in charge, he should

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regard the others as his associates and helpers in the work, and he should not try to dominate or impose on them his own ideas and personal fancies, but only see to the execution of the will of the Mother. None should regard himself as a subordinate, even if he has to carry out instructions given through another or to execute under supervision the work he has to do.

"All should try to work in harmony, thinking only of how best to make the work a success; personal feelings should not be allowed to interfere, for this is a most frequent cause of disturbance in the work, failure or disorder." (The Mother, p. 239)

We feel happy to conclude this Section of our essay, entitled "The Task Ahead", by quoting the introductory passage of the booklet Sri Aurobindo Ashram issued by the Board of Trustees on the 1st of January 1995. The inspiring passage is as follows:

"The beautiful words of our Beloved Mother... come to us as a reminder to tell us why we all are here and to make us aware once more of the work we have to do, 'together', as a united harmonious community. Each one of us, at heart, wants to realise Mother's Work and Will, for we all deeply feel that Mother continues to preside over the Ashram and to guide our destiny.

"The changing times have brought us many challenges which we need to face. With the message of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother gaining ever wider attention and acceptance, more and more people are attracted towards the Ashram. This is natural and obviously augurs well for the world. But such a situation also demands greater cohesion, understanding and efficiency on the part of the Ashram. This is why those of us who are members of the Ashram and feel we are Mother's children need always to keep in

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mind our spiritual aim and express it in dedicated action. How important it becomes for us to live constantly in accordance with the high dignity of this institution created by our Master and Mother. If only we would remember the purpose of our living here in the Ashram and unite in love, surely most of our difficulties, the irritations and annoyances we experience and cause others to experience will disappear." (p.4)

Some Danger Signals

The Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's Work is bound to succeed; there is no shadow of doubt about it. The question is whether our Ashram at Pondicherry will have the privilege of being the vehicle of that Work. If we Ashramites remain sincere in our effort and do not deviate from the Goal that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have set before us, there is no reason why our Ashram cannot realise its God-given destiny. But if we fail to fulfil the conditions for our spiritual awakening, we may be left behind and the Mother and Sri Aurobindo may initiate their work of integral transformation elsewhere at another time in some other collectivity more open to their Light and action. Sri Aurobindo himself has uttered a similar note of warning in another context with respect to the evolutionary preparedness or willingness of humanity. Thus we find in The Life Divine:

"If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind

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and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature." (The Life Divine, p. 847)

Sri Aurobindo has referred to the same ominous possibility in his epic, Savitri:

"Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;

What hides within her breast she must reveal.

I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.

If man lives bound by his humanity,

If he is tied for ever to his pain,

Let a greater being then arise from man,

The superhuman with the Eternal mate

And the Immortal shine through earthly forms."

(Savitri, Book XI Canto 1, p. 693)

As an integral part of their Yoga of earthly transformation The Mother and Sri Aurobindo wanted to build up an ideal spiritual community consisting of spiritual individuals. And they have said that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry is the first form their work has taken. The question is: Has our utility been over? Were we meant to play the role of a 'pilot project' alone? Cannot our Ashram prove itself worthy of embodying Sri Aurobindo's ideal of a new kind of spiritual consciousness and life? We say, why not? But a mere declaration or a pious wish will not bring us nearer to our goal. For that the Ashramites have to wake up in time and seek honestly to arrest a few negative trends which have lately, rather prominently, manifested among quite a few inmates of the Ashram. We refer below to five of these trends and append along with them some select passages from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, which have bearing on them.

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A. Frequent Absence from Ashram Life

Many ashramites have taken to the habit of leaving their field of work in the Ashram and going away elsewhere in and out of season for a short or a long period of time and for reasons not at all connected with their avowed intention of building up a dedicated spiritual life. Their consciousness has become so insensitive that they feel no difference in them whether they are physically staying in the Ashram or dwelling elsewhere in an alien atmosphere. It is not a day too early that the Board of Trustees of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has sounded a note of warning in this regard in the brochure they have brought out on 1.1.95. We take the liberty of quoting here the relevant passage from their publication:

"The inmates will not go out of the Ashram at any time for any reason. In case of an emergency or absolute necessity they will consult the Trust Board and follow their advice.

"Though all of us know that it was the Mother's wish that one should not go out from the Ashram, lately it has been found that the inmates go out for days and weeks together for reasons which are hardly important - say, for some celebration or problem in the family or even in a relative's or friend's family or for participating in cultural programmes or pleasure trips. Apart from being detrimental to our own well-being, this causes great hardship to the various services in the Ashram, for we forget that we have to work here as a community. When a brief absence from the Ashram is thought unavoidable, this can always be considered by the Trust."

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Sri Aurobindo on Sadhaks Absenting from the Ashram:

(1)"No one in fact is kept here when his will or decision is to go - although the principle of the spiritual life is against any return to the old one even for a time especially if the deeper urge is there and striving towards a firm foundation of the new consciousness - for the return to the ordinary atmosphere and surroundings and motives disturbs the work and throws back the progress." (Letters on Yoga, p. 865)

(2)"Most people after the atmosphere here cannot tolerate the ordinary atmosphere. If they go outside, they are restless until they return. Even X's aunt who was here only for a few months writes in the same way. But probably when people get into the control of a falsehood as Y and Z did, they are projected into the unregenerated vital nature and no longer feel the difference of the atmosphere." (Ibid., p. 866)

(3)"The feeling of difficulty or uneasiness in going is... a sign that the soul has taken root here and finds it painful to uproot itself." (Ibid., p. 867)

(4)"The inability to go [from the Ashram] can come from the psychic which refuses, when it comes to the point, to allow the other parts to budge, or it can come from the vital which has no longer any pull towards the ordinary life and knows that it will never be satisfied there. It is usually the higher parts of the vital that act like that. What still is capable of turning outwards is probably the physical vital in which the old tendencies have not been extinguished." (Ibid., pp. 867-68)

B. Urge to Procure Personal Money

Another timely reminder the Board of Trustees of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has recently issued. It deals with some

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sadhaks' urge to procure money by various means. This is what the Trust Board has said:

"The inmates will employ all their time for Ashram Work. They will not take up any outside work or business.

"Ashramites should not involve themselves in private or personal business transactions or taking up part-time jobs outside the Ashram. How can this be reconciled if one is living totally, entirely for Mother's work here? Naturally, also, one cannot use the Ashram's name and address for any other work than the Ashram's, nor can one contact or write personally to Government offices. This has to stop."

(Brochure issued by the Trust Board)

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram provides the Ashramites with everything they need for a decent and healthy living. Even then, why is it that some Ashramites are in pursuit of personal money in abundant measure? The reason is not far to seek. It is because some of us have forgotten what an ideal spiritual seeker's life should be like. We have forgotten too that indulgence in ever-multiplying desires is totally inconsistent with leading the life of Sadhana. And as a result our vital is hungering for many a thing and to satisfy it adequately we need money as a purchasing commodity. But this course can only lead to our spiritual downfall. In order to bring us back to our senses let us listen to what Sri Aurobindo has to say to the sadhaks:

Sri Aurobindo on Desires and a Sadhak's Needs:

(1)"It is not yoga to give free play to the natural instincts and desires. Yoga demands mastery over the nature, not subjection to the nature." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1396)

(2)"Kāmanā bāsanā have no part in yoga, they cannot be

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its help, they can only be hindrances. So long as desire and ego remain, there can be no surrender to the Divine, no fulfilment in the Yoga. They are movements of the vital and cannot be anything else." (Ibid.)

(3)"It would certainly be very easy if all that one had to do were to follow one's desires; but to be governed by one's desires is not yoga." (Ibid., p. 1400)

(4)"The necessities of a sadhak should be as few as possible; for there are only a very few things that are real necessities in life. The rest are either utilities or things decorative to life or luxuries. These a yogin has a right to possess or enjoy only on one of two conditions -

(i)If he uses them during his sadhana solely to train himself in possessing things without attachment or desire and learn to use them rightly, in harmony with the Divine Will, with a proper handling, a just organisation, arrangement and measure - or,

(ii)if he has already attained a true freedom from desire and attachment and is not in the least moved or affected in any way by loss or withholding or deprival. If he has any greed, desire, demand, claim for possession and enjoyment, any anxiety, grief, anger or vexation when denied or deprived, he is not free in spirit and his use of the things he possesses is contrary to the spirit of sadhana." (Ibid., pp. 1399-1400)

C. Spirit of Karmayoga Vanishing

As it has been pointed out in the booklet Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram, a community the size of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram naturally requires a considerable amount of work to keep it going. Most of this is done by the members. But it should never be forgotten that the primary purpose of the work in the Ashram is not to satisfy any practical or economic need, nor to be a means for the self-expression of

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the members, but to provide a field for their spiritual growth. Work is done by all, and it is done without remuneration. Sadhaks and sadhikas here strive for perfection in their work not in hopes of material advancement, but in order to make their labour a more worthy offering to the Divine.

But as years have rolled by, especially after the physical withdrawal of the Mother, and with the arrival of a new generation of entrants, the real purpose of work in the Ashram has been lost sight of by many. Work has been reduced to the status of office or factory work prevailing elsewhere. If one has to live in a community, one is expected to give some service to the group which provides him with the amenities and necessities of life: such is the attitude developed in quite a few Ashramites. And this detracts much from the spiritual quality of the Ashram atmosphere. In order to recover the proper spirit in their work, the sadhaks and sadhikas would do well if they comprehend the full meaning of the following words of Sri Aurobindo:

"The work in the Ashram was not meant as a service to humanity or to a section of it called the sadhaks of the Ashram. It was not meant either as an opportunity for a joyful social life and a flow of sentiments and attachments between the sadhaks and an expression of the vital movements, a free vital interchange whether with some or with all.

"The work was meant as a service to the Divine and as a field for the inner opening to the Divine, surrender to the Divine alone, rejection of ego and all the ordinary vital movements and the training in a psychic elevation, selflessness, obedience, renunciation of all mental, vital or other self-assertion of the limited personality.

"Self-affirmation is not the aim, the formation of a

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collective vital ego is also not the aim. The merging of the little ego in union with the Divine, purification, surrender, the substitution of the Divine guidance for one's own ignorant self-guidance based on one's personal ideas and personal feelings is the aim of Karmayoga, the surrender of one's own will to the Divine Will.

"If one feels human beings to be near and the Divine to be far and seeks the Divine through service of and love of human beings and not the direct service and love of the Divine, then one is following a wrong principle - for that is the principle of the mental, vital and moral not the spiritual life." (Letters on Yoga, pp. 850-51)

D. Formal Adherence Replacing the Spirit of Sadhana

The life of an Ashramite here should be a life of sadhana and that too for the whole of the daily life comprising all its activities. As the Mother has reminded us:

"In the integral Yoga, the integral life down even to the smallest detail has to be transformed. There is nothing here that is insignificant, nothing that is indifferent. You cannot say, 'When I am meditating, reading philosophy or listening to these conversations, I will be in this condition of an opening towards the Light and call for it, but when I go out to walk or see friends I can allow myself to forget all about it.' To persist in this attitude means that you will remain un-transformed and never have the true union; always you will be divided..." (Questions and Answers, CWM Vol. 3, p. 24)

It is regrettable to note that in recent years, with the passing away of the senior Ashramites of the Mother's time, this sort of all-time sadhana has been progressively missing in many of the new inmates. They attend the

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periodic ceremonies, go through the "rituals", manifest some formal "devotion" and fervour but where is the burning zeal for developing spiritual consciousness and for the transformation of their nature? Rejection, aspiration and surrender are the three basic movements characterising our sadhana and, according to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, these have to be for a sadhak entire and uninterrupted. But do we put this principle into active and ardent practice? The absolutely minimum sadhana that an Ashramite should do if he would like to consider himself a practitioner of the Integral Yoga has been expressed in brief both by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. We give below four passages from their writings and these luminous words, let us hope, will set us again on the path of integral sadhana:

(1)"Yoga means union with the Divine, and the union is effected through offering - it is founded on the offering of yourself to the Divine. ... This is what you have to do to carry out your general offering in detailed offerings. Live constantly in the presence of the Divine; live in the feeling that it is this presence which moves you and is doing everything you do. Offer all your movements to it, not only every mental action, every thought and feeling but even the most ordinary and external actions ... 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 your nature 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." (The Mother, Questions and Answers, CWM Vol. 3, pp. 23, 24)

(2)"Vigilance means to be awake, to be on one's guard, to be sincere - never to be taken by surprise. When you want to do sadhana, at each moment of your life, there is a

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choice between taking a step that leads to the goal and falling asleep or sometimes even going backwards, telling yourself, 'Oh, later on, not immediately' - sitting down on the way.

"To be vigilant is not merely to resist what pulls you downward, but above all to be alert in order not to lose any opportunity to progress, any opportunity to overcome a weakness, to resist a temptation, any opportunity to learn something, to correct something, to master something. If you are vigilant, you can do in a few days what would otherwise take years. If you are vigilant, you change each circumstance of your life, each action, each movement into an occasion for coming nearer the goal." (Ibid., p. 202)

(3) Question: "What is one to do to prepare oneself for the Yoga?"

The Mother answers: "To be conscious, first of all. We are conscious of only an insignificant portion of our being; for the most part we are unconscious. It is this unconsciousness that keeps us down to our unregenerate nature and prevents change and transformation in it. It is through unconsciousness that the undivine forces enter into us and make us their slaves.

"You are to be conscious of yourself, you must awake to your nature and movements, you must know why and how you do things or feel or think them; you must understand your motives and impulses, the forces, hidden" and apparent, that move you; in fact, you must, as it were, take to pieces the entire machinery of your being. Once you are conscious, it means that you can distinguish and sift things, you can see which are the forces that pull you down and which help you on. And when you know the right from the wrong, the true from the false, the divine from the undivine, you are to act strictly up to your knowledge; that is to say, resolutely reject one and accept the other. The duality will present itself at every step and at every step

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you will have to make your choice. You will have to be patient and persistent and vigilant - 'sleepless', as the adepts say; you must always refuse to give any chance whatever to the undivine against the divine." (Ibid., p. 2)

(4) "The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in the old externalised order of things. It is imperative to exchange this surface orientation for the deeper faith and vision which see only the Divine and seek only after the Divine. The next need is to compel all our lower being to pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. ... This is no easy task; for everything in the world follows the fixed habit which is to it a law and resists a radical change. And no change can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga. Everything in us has constantly to be called back to the central faith and will and vision. Every thought and impulse has to be reminded in the language of the Upanishad that 'That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore.' " (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 66)

E. Wrong Relationship Between Sadhaks and Sadhikas

The admission of women in an Ashram of spiritual seekers might strike many people as a dangerous novelty. In the history of past attempts to build a spiritual community, many an organisation has been wrecked because of wrong relationships developing between men and women dwelling together. But Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, as in many other fields of life, does not want to run away from difficulties; instead, it wants to meet them squarely and gain mastery over them. And hence Sri Aurobindo and the Mother admitted equally men and women disciples into

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the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from the very first day of its founding.

To meet successfully the ticklish and potentially subversive problem of human relationship between a sadhak and a sadhika, Sri Aurobindo has given us some guidelines which, if scrupulously followed, will protect us from any possible unhealthy deviation. These principles may be summed up as follows:

(i)An Ashramite should have universal goodwill for all irrespective of sex.

(ii)The love of the sadhak should be for the Divine. It is only when he has that fully that he can love others in the right way. (iii) A sadhak should not establish personal relationship with any other person in the sense of what Sri Aurobindo calls "exclusive mutual looking to each other."

(iv)There should be no relationship based on sex differentiation: no friendship with someone simply because that someone happens to be a man or a woman.

(v)All friendship should be totally free from any sex-colouring however subtle that may be.

(vi)Relationship between a sadhak and a sadhika should be as between two human beings and not as between a man and a woman.

(vii)One should not seek to establish relationships in order to satisfy the sentimental, sensational and physical wants of the lower vital nature.

(viii)No relationship should be formed with a craving for the gratification of unchastened emotional desires or physical passions.

Here are Sri Aurobindo's guidelines for safe human relationships to prevail in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and these were mostly followed in the early years of the Ashram. But over the years, especially in recent times, an

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unhealthy trend has set in. Many young people in their twenties or thirties, men and women alike, have started joining the Ashram in large numbers. Many of these youthful sadhaks and sadhikas have taken to the habit of having a girlfriend or a boyfriend of their own, depending on the case. Friendship is a good thing but when tainted with the sex feeling it becomes baneful to the development of sadhana. Sex-governed friendship between two members of the community cannot but lower the spiritual atmosphere of the Ashram. For the benefit of these novices we quote below some of the words of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo concerning this vital issue:

(1) "For one who has known love for the Divine, all other forms of love are obscure and too mixed with pettiness and egoism and darkness; they are like a perpetual haggling or a struggle for supremacy and domination, and even among the best they are full of misunderstanding and irritability, of friction and incomprehension." (The Mother, On Education, CWM Vol. 12, p. 69)

(2)"It is a well-known fact that one grows into the likeness of what one loves. Therefore if you want to be like the Divine, love him alone. Only one who has known the ecstasy of the exchange of love with the Divine can know how insipid and dull and feeble any other exchange is in comparison." (Ibid.)

(3)"Since we have decided to reserve love in all its splendour for our personal relationship with the Divine, we shall replace it in our relations with others by a total, unvarying, constant and egoless kindness and goodwill that will not expect any reward or gratitude or even any recognition. However others may treat you, you will never allow yourself to be carried away by any resentment; and in your unmixed love for the Divine, you will leave him sole judge as to how he is to protect you and defend you

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against the misunderstanding and bad will of others." (Ibid., p. 70)

(4)"A human vital interchange cannot be a true support for the sadhana and is, on the contrary, sure to impair and distort it, leading to self-deception in the consciousness and a wrong turn of the emotional being and vital nature." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, pp. 811-12)

(5)"The only relation permissible between a sadhak and sadhika here is the same as between a sadhak and sadhak or between a sadhika and sadhika - a friendly relation as between followers of the same path of yoga and children of the Mother." (Ibid., p. 816)

(6)"It is certainly easier to have friendship between man and man or between woman and woman than between man and woman, because the sexual intrusion is normally absent. In a friendship between man and woman the sexual turn can at any moment come in a subtle or in a direct way and produce perturbations. But there is no impossibility of friendship between man and woman pure of this element; such friendships can exist and have always existed. All that is needed is that the lower vital should not look in at the back door or be permitted to enter." (Ibid., p. 817)

(7)"In a general way the only method for succeeding in having between a man and a woman the free and natural yogic relations that should exist between a sadhak and a sadhika in this yoga is to be able to meet each other without thinking at all that one is a man and another a woman - both are simply human beings, both sadhaks, both striving to serve the Divine and seeking the Divine alone and none else. Have that fully in yourself and no difficulty is likely to come." (Ibid., p. 816)

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The Ashram Marches towards Its Glorious Destiny

In spite of some temporary twists and turns visiting the history of its life, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has been steadily marching towards its glorious destiny. There may be some Ashramites who hold the opinion that the Ashram is at present "passing through a very bad time" and the inmates "are passing through a great darkness." But we, on our part, do not subscribe to this alarmist view. This may possibly be the case with a few isolated individuals. But there are many more Ashramites who can easily testify on the basis of their daily personal experience that the Presence of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is, as it has ever been before, active and living in the Ashram atmosphere and our Master and the Mother have been constantly helping and sustaining all sincere souls in their life of sadhana.

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo have assigned a sublime task to the members of the Ashram: we must fulfil it as their loyal and devoted children. And why should there be any misgiving that we Ashramites may fail to achieve it and the Ashram may be possibly overtaken by some inglorious degeneration? If we in this Ashram, we who have been and still are constant recipients of the Grace of the Master and the Mother, do not measure up to their expectation, who else can possibly do so? And where else upon earth will their dream be realised if not here, in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry, which has been their own creation, over whose shaping they have presided for almost fifty years, where their divine bodies remain interred in permanence, ceaselessly emanating their regenerating influence, and where the supramental Truth-Consciousness is inalienably active to bring about the desired earthly transformation?

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Against all deceptive appearances to the contrary, we the disciples residing in the Ashram must maintain our faith unshakable and our hope undimmed that the Ashram will surely be able to fulfil its glorious destiny, if not in the immediate future, at least in the march of Time, and that too not because of our petty efforts but through the omnipotent action of the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's Force. And why should there be any scope for doubt as regards their active Presence in the Ashram? Look at our community dispassionately and without any bias. Almost two thousand people of all age-groups and of both the sexes, drawn from different strata of society and with widely differing backgrounds, and living and working together in the compact space of a collectivity and yet how smoothly and satisfactorily the Ashram life is going on with how few troubles and turmoils erupting there! And this is so when the Mother and Sri Aurobindo are both not there physically to control the affairs of the Ashram nor is there any despotic authority imposing its will with an iron hand. Imagine for a moment any other community springing up anywhere else upon earth, of a size and composition comparable to that of our Ashram and with the constituent individuals enjoying the same amount of unbridled freedom as is available in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Imagine what would be the state of affairs in that community. A quasi-total anarchy and a plethora of clashes, to say the least. And now look how our Ashram group life has been functioning - so smoothly with so many heterogeneous elements working together. This simple fact cannot but convince anyone with unblemished vision that this smooth functioning of our Ashram collectivity is a tangible proof that a higher spiritual Force and not any mere human control has been at work here despite the individual sadhaks foibles and deficiencies.

Sri Aurobindo has not left us. The Mother has not left us.

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After Sri Aurobindo left his body the Mother gave us this assuring message:

"Lord, this morning Thou hast given me the assurance that Thou wouldst stay with us until Thy work is achieved, not only as a consciousness which guides and illumines but also as a dynamic Presence in action. In unmistakable terms Thou hast promised that all of Thyself would remain here and not leave the earth atmosphere until earth is transformed." (Words of the Mother, CWM Vol. 13, p. 6)

Yes, Sri Aurobindo will stay with us until his work is achieved. Those among us who are afflicted with a vacillating will and a doubting heart should remember the following words of the Mother:

"Never for an instant vacillate in the belief that the mighty work of change taken up by Sri Aurobindo is going to culminate in success. For that indeed is a fact: there is not a shadow of doubt as to the issue of the work we have in hand.... The transformation is going to be: nothing will ever stop it, nothing will frustrate the decree of the Omnipotent. Cast away all diffidence and weakness and resolve to endure bravely awhile before the great day arrives when the long battle turns into an everlasting victory." (Ibid., p. 21)

Sri Aurobindo has placed before us a sublime Vision and assured us with solemn certitude that this Vision is going to be realised sooner or later against all possible recalcitrance and inveterate opposition. For, he declares:

"Even should a hostile force cling to its reign

And claim its right's perpetual sovereignty

And man refuse his spiritual fate,

Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail.

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For in the march of all-fulfilling Time

The hour must come of the Transcendent's will:

All turns and winds towards his predestined ends..." (Savitri, Book XI Canto 1, p. 708)

"Even the multitude shall hear the Voice

And turn to commune with the Spirit within

And strive to obey the high spiritual law..." (Ibid., p. 709)

"Even the many shall some answer make

And bear the splendour of the Divine's rush

And his impetuous knock at unseen doors." (Ibid.)

"Mortality's bond-slaves shall unloose their bonds,

Mere men into spiritual beings grow

And see awake the dumb divinity." (Ibid., p. 710)

"Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine." (Ibid., p. 711)

Such is the prophetic declaration of Sri Aurobindo. And this is not the imaginative utterance of a mere epic poet. It is the utterance of one who could write in one of his private letters dated 19.10.46:

"I have never had a strong and persistent will for anything to happen in the world - I am not speaking of personal things - which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster." (On Himself, p. 169)

Such is the potency of the Will of our Master and such the noble future towards which his Tapasya is directed. Now, we the Ashramites of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, where do we stand in this 'Hour of God'? Does it behove us to be forgetful of our spiritual commitment and of the purpose of our stay here - here in an Ashram which has been nurtured jointly by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother -

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and thus be left behind by the road-side while the Chariot of the lord moves inexorably on?

We cannot plead in support of our timid tepidity that as the Mother too has withdrawn from her body, we are now left like helpless orphans who cannot dare fulfil the task before us. For have we not the Mother's great promise and assurance:

"You know that I love you and that I am always with you to sustain you, help you and show you the way." (On Education, CWM Vol. 12, p. 358)

So, shaking off from our consciousness any mood of laisser-aller, lethargy and complacency, let us constantly pray to Sri Aurobindo in the words of the Mother:

"Lord, we are upon earth to accomplish Thy work of transformation. It is our sole will, our sole preoccupation. Grant that it may be also our sole occupation and that all our actions may help us towards this single goal." (New Year Prayer of 1951)

Let this prayer formulated by the Mother truly express our genuine feeling and firm resolution, and for the rest let us leave everything to the fostering care of our Master and the Mother and in the meantime do our personal bit of sincere sadhana and live in peace without getting unduly bothered by what others are on their part doing or not doing.

Sri Aurobindo has envisioned a day when a collectivity or group would be formed of those who would have reached the supramental perfection. Then indeed some divine creation could take shape here upon earth: "A new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the

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receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 196)

But that is an achievement still hiding in the bosom of a distant future. Meanwhile, those of us who are at present inmates of this great and unique Ashram created by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, let us try by all means to keep the hearth clean and the flame of aspiration burning bright and the Mother's Flag flying high, and, when the need will arise with the passage of time, let us pass on the baton of spiritual endeavour to those sun-eyed children of the Mother who are destined to appear "in the march of all-fulfilling Time", join this Ashram and turn it by their Tapasya into the divine Dream-Home of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother upon earth.

Victoire à la Douce Mère: Victory to the Mother Divine!

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