PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The book has been thoroughly revised and considerably enlarged by the addition of The Divine Collaborators, which appeared separately in its first edition. A few essays, written later, have also been incorporated.
RISHABHCHAND
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Most of these essays were originally published in the Mother India of Bombay, one in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, and one in the Advent, all organs devoted to the exposition of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the future. Here they are reproduced with slight revisions by the courtesy of the editors of these journals, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude.
The Aspiration and the Work
"When I was a child—about the age of thirteen and for about a year—every night as soon as I was in bed, it seemed to me that ,I came out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the town, very high. I saw myself then clad in a magnificent golden robe, longer than myself; and as I rose, that robe lengthened, spreading in a circle around me, to form, as it were, an immense roof over the town. Then I would see coming out from all sides men, women, children, old men, sick men, unhappy men; they 'fathered under the outspread robe, imploring help, recounting their miseries, their sufferings, their pains. In reply, the robe, supple and living, stretched out to them individually, and as soon as they touched it, they were consoled or healed, and entered back into their body happier and stronger than they had ever been before coming out of it. Nothing appeared to me more beautiful, nothing made me more happy; and all the activities of the day seemed to me dull and colourless, without real life, in comparison with this activity of the night which was for me the true life. Often as I thus rose, I would see on my left an old man, silent and immobile, who looked at me with a benevolent affection and encouraged me by his presence. This old man, dressed in a long robe of sombre violet, was the personification—I knew him later—of him who is called the Man of Sorrows.
Now the profound experience, the almost ineffable reality is translated in my brain by other notions which I can define thus:
Many a time during the day and in the night it seems to me that I,—that is to say, my consciousness is wholly concentrated in my heart, which is no longer an organ, not even a feeling, but the divine Love, impersonal, eternal; being this Love, I feel myself living in the centre of everything upon the whole earth, and at the same time it seems to me that I am stretching out immense, infinite arms and enveloping with a limitless tenderness all beings clasped, grouped, nestled upon my breast, vaster than the universe...
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Words are poor and clumsy, O divine Master, and mental translations are always childish... But my aspiration for Thee is constant, and, to tell the truth, it is very often Thyself and Thou alone who livest in this body, an imperfect means of Thy manifestation
May all beings be happy in the peace of Thy illumination.
THIS is one of the earliest—it does not seem to be the very first—spiritual experiences of the Mother. It signalizes the beginning of a great mission and is eloquently prophetic of the Mother's future. Four things stand out in it arresting out attention and compelling our wonder :
(1) the Mother's ascent high up into the sky,
(2) her putting on of a golden robe,
(3) the lengthening and stretching out of the golden robe to all those who had gathered under it, imploring help and consolation, and
(4) the Mother's delight in this experience.
We have here, in this experience of the Mother when she was a mere child of thirteen, practically all the basic elements that constitute her life and work in the world—a sort of epitome of the greatness and grandeur of her future creative self-expression. The vision is remarkable—I should have said, unique - in the history of spiritual lives. For about one whole year, day in and day out, the Mother used to have it at the same hour and in the same invariable way. This persistence of the vision with its details unchanged and its full realization in the Mother's subsequent life, challenges the complacent theories of psycho- analysis and proves that the vision was not a conditioned reflex of the individual Unconscious, but a prophetic revelation of that which was preparing in the Superconscious. Looking at the Mother's present activities, one would say that this childhood experience was the blue print of her later work on earth. The experience is remarkable for another reason : the sequence of its details is flawlessly perfect, it corresponds exactly to that of the spiritual experiences on the path of Sri Aurobindo's integral Yoga, as promulgated years afterwards.
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother — February 22, 1914.
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The first movement in the Mother's experience is one of ascent. "I came out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the town, very high.” It signifies, I suppose, first, transcendence of the body-consciousness, then of the habitual environmental consciousness and, last, of the universal human consciousness. This transcendence of all human formulæ and ascent "very high" gives the Mother a secure station in the superconscience. But by transcendence we do not mean exclusion, nor do we imply a suspension of the physical consciousness, an act of abstraction and a rocket-flight into the empyrean of the Spirit. The Spirit's skies are, of course, attained; the Mother does stand in their serene, shoreless infinity; but not as a naked soul or an unvestured mind. Her experience is much too concrete, much too physically real and definite to permit of such an interpretation. The truth and tenor of her whole spiritual life have been consistently characterized by an unfailing, downright practicality. Her ascent is an ascent of her whole integrated being, including the subtle physical— it is only the outer physical body that remains below; and the lengthening of her robe and the touching of it by those who implored her help and consolation—as we shall see presently - are as real, as vivid, as distinctive and decisive an experience as any we get by means of our physical senses. The Mother does not regard any realization as complete so long as it is not rendered into the terms of the physical consciousness and possessed by it as a hard, solid, indubitable fact.
The second movement is the assumption of the Supernature or the supramental nature as represented by the putting on of "a magnificent golden robe". "I saw myself then", says the Mother, "clad in a magnificent golden robe." The word "then" in the sentence is very important, as it emphasises the true order of the movements—first, ascent and then the assumption of the golden robe. It is a commonplace of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga that there can be no assumption of the Supernature or Para Prakriti without ascent.
The third movement is the lengthening and stretching out if the golden robe, "supple and living", to each individual
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of the crowd that had gathered under it. The lengthening and stretching are the movement of descent consequent upon the ascent. An important thing to be noted here is that it is not the Mother descending, but only her golden robe which symbolizes the Supernature. The central consciousness of man, once it has travelled beyond the borders of even the spiritual mind, finds a stable base above in the Transcendent, and a tranquil, luminous poise in it, and never spirals back — na punarāvartate — into the whirl of the lower energies. It is the divine nature assumed after the ascent that descends as a vehicle of the divine Grace to help and heal humanity. This movement illustrates the Mother's rôle, so well indicated in many of her later Prayers, of the Mediatrix between the supreme Transcendent above and the material world below. The stretching out of the golden robe is a significant gesture of the divine Grace leaniing down to succour suffering humanity. It is interesting to note again that the "men, women, children, old men, sick men, unhappy men" gathered under the robe after it had lengthened, spreading in a circle around the Mother "to form, as it were, an immense roof over the town." It is always, indeed, the Grace that acts first, the divine Love that leans down first and exerts a secret, silent pressure from above, and the human aspiration and appeal are but a reflex action from below.
The fourth movement — it is not really the fourth in succession, but a constant accompaniment of the others—is the Mother's delight in the experience. "Nothing appeared to me more beautiful, nothing made me more happy; and all the activities of the day seemed to me dull and colourless, without real life, in comparison with the activity of the night which was for me the true life." The later "Prayers" of the Mother—they are prayers in a special sense—are literally soaked in an ineffable delight.
"Thou hast heaped Thy favours upon me, Thou hast unveiled to me many secrets, Thou hast made me taste many unexpected and unhoped-for joys, but no grace of Thine can be equal to this Thou grantest to me when a heart leaps at the touch of Thy divine
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breath."¹
To be a plastic and powerful instrument of the Divine for the progressive elimination of ignorance and suffering from the life of humanity has been the acme of the Mother's delight. She has even foregone, for a period, the absorbed bliss of the transcendent union for the sake of descending into the darkness of Matter and calling upon the Divine from below as the representative of the earth to illumine and transform her. The joy of selfless service, the unutterable rapture of God-willed and God-impelled impersonal work is regarded by the Mother as the very highest happiness of her life.
"Let me be like an immense mantle of love enveloping the whole earth, penetrating all hearts, murmuring to every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace.”
This experience is the prophetic dawn of the Mother's life whose blazing noontide is revealed in the Prayers and Meditations of the Mother. Here it is only a foreshadowing, but what a marvellously precise foreshadowing !
We now propose to proceed very humbly to understand—it is foolhardy to presume to interpret such high spiritual experiences— (1) the constant seeking of the Mother's soul, (2) the means of fulfilling that seeking, and (3) the nature and significance of her work on earth.
The constant seeking of the Mother's being has been the Divine. With a consuming passion and unblemished sincerity each fibre of her being has sought Him and nothing but Him. This intensity of aspiration has found a most moving expression in many of her Prayers.
"Beyond all human conceptions, even the most marvellous, beyond all human feelings, even the most sublime, beyond the most magnificent aspiration and the purest élans, beyond Love, Knowledge and the Unity of the Being, I would enter into a constant
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—March 31,1917.
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communion with Thee, O Lord. Free from all trammels, I shall be Thyself; it will be Thou seeing the world through this body; it will be Thou acting in the world through this instrument.
In me is the calm serenity of perfect certitude.”
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RADHA'S PRAYER
"O Thou whom at first sight I knew for the Lord of my being, and my God, receive my offering.
Thine are all my thoughts, all my emotions, all the sentiments of my heart, all my sensations, all the movements of my life, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood. I am absolutely and altogether Thine, Thine without reserve. What Thou wilt of me, that I shall be. Whether Thou choosest for me life or death, happiness or sorrow, pleasure or suffering, all that comes to me from Thee will be welcome. Each one of Thy gifts will be always for me a gift divine bringing with it the supreme felicity.”
The Mother's body has participated as much as her soul in this constant aspiration for and surrender to the Divine. It would even seem, reading some characteristic Prayers, that the immediate aspiration of her body and, in fact, of her whole physical consciousness has been even greater than that of her soul. And this is not surprising, for, on the basis of the Prayers it can very well be asserted that she had already realized a complete and constant inner union with the Divine very early in life and that her subsequent aspiration and endeavour have been to realize an equally complete and constant union in her physical consciousness and outer life. In the Prayer of Nov 19,1912—this is the year with which the "Prayers and Meditations" begins—she says : "I said yesterday to that English man who is seeking for Thee with so sincere a desire, that I had definitively found Thee, that the Union was constant.” But this is not the union to satisfy the Mother's whole being. She starts with this union as the base, but for the immense spiritual structure she has to rear upon it, much greater conquests have to be made, a more integral union has to be attained. So, not
content with this union, she says, "Yet I know that this state of union is poor and precarious compared with that which it will become possible for me to realize tomorrow.” Again, in the Prayer of May 16, 1914, the Mother says, "Now I clearly understand that union with Thee is not an end to be pursued, so far as this present individuality is concerned; it is a fact accomplished long since. And that is why Thou seemest to tell me always: 'Do not revel in the ecstatic contemplation of this union, fulfil the mission I have confided to thee on the earth’ "
This is a point of capital importance inasmuch as it affords the right perspective to the tremendous significance of the Mother's life-work. Not union only in the depths of her being, which is the common objective of all mystics, but union even in the outermost nature, and a complete possession and government of the whole being by the divine Love, so that the divine Will, realized by the Mother in her union with the Eternal, may fulfil itself in her terrestrial existence. But what is this divine Will in regard to the Mother ? "To be the Life in all material forms, the Thought organizing and using this Life in all .forms, the Love enlarging, enlightening, intensifying, uniting all the divers elements of this Thought, and thus by a total identification with the manifested world, to be able to intervene with all power in its transformation. On the other hand, by a perfect surrender to the Supreme Principle, to become conscious of the Truth and the eternal Will which manifests it. By this identification, becoming the faithful servant and sure intermediary of the divine Will, and uniting this conscious identification of the Principle with the conscious identification of the becoming, to mould and model consciously the love, mind and life of the becoming according to the Law of Truth of the Principle. It is thus that the individual being can be the conscious intermediary between the absolute Truth and the manifested universe, and intervene in the slow and uncertain advance of the Yoga of Nature in order to give it the swift, intense and sure character of the divine Yoga.”¹
A colossal work, well-nigh staggering to our timid and tethered intelligence ! Our imagination faints before the vastness
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother — May 24, 1915.
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and complexity of its conception, and yet something in us, awed and attracted, pledges to it its eternal adhesion and loyalty.
This, then, has been the sole aspiration of the Mother's whole being : to realize an integral union with the Integral Divine and become the conscious intermediary between Him and the material world, so that His unflawed manifestation may be possible in transformed human nature. Divine manifestation can, therefore, be said to be the core of her mission in this life.
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We turn now to the means the Mother adopts and advocates for the fulfilment of this matchless aspiration. The first means —in fact, the means par excellence,— is Love. But this Love is the dynamic and creative divine Love which is instinct with the supreme Knowledge and the supreme Power.
"O Lord, Thou of whom I would be constantly conscious and whom I would realize in the smallest cells of my being, Thou whom I would know as myself and see manifested in all things, Thou who art the sole reality, the sole reason and the sole aim of existence, grant that my love for Thee may go on increasing incessantly, so that I may become all love, Thy very love, and that being Thy love, I may unite integrally with Thee. May this love become more and more intense, complex, luminous, powerful may this love be an irresistible élan towards Thee, an invincible means to manifest Thee. May all in this being become pure love profound, disinterested, divine, from the unfathomable depths to the outermost substance. May the God in form who is manifesting this aggregate be wholly moulded of Thy complete and sublime love, that love which is at once the source and the realization of all knowledge; may the thought be clarified, classified, enlightened, transformed by Thy love; may all the forces of my life, solely penetrated and moulded by Thy love, become irresistible purity and constant energy, power and rectitude...and may this body, becoming a burning brazier, radiate Thy divine, impersonal,
sublime and calm love through all its pores...may the brain be reconstituted by Thy love. Finally, may Thy love overflow, inundate, transfigure, regenerate, animate everything with the power, splendour, sweetness and force which are its very nature. In Thy love is peace, in Thy love is joy, in Thy love is the sovereign lever of work for Thy servitor.
Thy love is vaster than the universe and more enduring than the ages; it is infinite and eternal, it is Thyself. And it is Thyself that I would be and that I am, since such is Thy law and such Thy Will.”¹
This love, as I have already said, is not a static but a supremely dynamic love, and the union it leads to is not a union. in trance, but a perfect union in action...Action, then, has to be performed, action of every kind and at every instant. A life of ascetic inaction and flight from the world is a life of spiritual defeat and frustration, whatever may be its other-worldly value. If God is evolving in man, then the world is the field of His evolution and eventual self-revelation, and action is one of the indispensable means by which alone both the evolution and the revelation can be fully effected.
The second means, therefore, that the Mother advocates is an ungrudging, unreserved and loving surrender to the Divine through action. A long and arduous discipline of selfless and surrendered action alone—and this is Yogic action—can purify and impersonalize the numberless elements of our dynamic personality and prepare them for participation in the integral union. I quote below a Prayer² which is a brilliant exposition of Yogic action as understood by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo:
"The outer life, the activity of each day and each instant, is it not the indispensable complement of our hours of meditation and contemplation ? And is not the proportion of time given to each the exact image of the proportion which exists between the amount
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—March 23, 1914.
² ibid.,—November 28, 1912.
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of effort to be made for the preparation and the realization ? For, meditation, contemplation, Union is the result obtained—the flower that blooms; the daily activity is the anvil on which all the elements must pass and repass in order to be purified., refined, made supple and ripe for the illumination which contemplation gives to them. All these elements must be thus passed one after the other through the crucible before outer activity becomes needless for the integral development. Then is this activity turned into the means to manifest Thee so as to awaken the other centres of consciousness to the same dual work of the forge and the illumination. Therefore are pride and satisfaction with oneself the worst of all obstacles. Very modestly we must take advantage of all the minute opportunities offered to knead and purify some of the innumerable elements, to make them supple, to make them impersonal, to teach them forgetfulness of self and abnegation and devotion and kindness and gentleness, and when all these modes of being have become habitual to them, then are they ready to participate in the Contemplation, and to identify themselves with Thee in the supreme Concentration..."
The Mother, therefore, rightly insists in many of her Prayers on the unwearied performance of Yogic action, so that the whole of our life, which has been up till now under the sway of the forces of Ignorance and Falsehood, may be conquered for the Divine and rendered a radiant scene of His rapturous self-manifestation.
The Manifestation of God in Matter
We have seen what the constant seeking of the Mother's soul is and the means of its fulfilment in the material world. Let us now try to understand the nature and significance of her work upon earth. If we take a synoptic view of all her experiences and teachings, we cannot resist the conclusion that it is not her personal salvation that she has ever sought, not even, as we have already seen, an ecstatic union with the Divine in the depths or on the heights of her being, for, she seems to have
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been in constant possession and enjoyment of it as her birthright; but what she has steadfastly yearned for and willed is the manifestation of God in Matter through the liberated and transformed nature of man. It was the reconciliation of Spirit and Matter, the long-dreamed-of marriage of Earth and Heaven that was the problem the Mother set before herself early in life, and her work has been a progressive solution of it.
"Do not revel in the ecstatic contemplation of this union, fulfil the mission I have confided to thee on the earth.”¹
"One day thou wilt be my head, but for the moment turn thy look towards the earth.”²
Such has been the invariable and insistent command of the Divine to the Mother. The earth, the tortured, convulsed, agonized earth, has to be redeemed, illumined and rendered "the home of the Wonderful." Darkness and death, sorrow and suffering have to be blotted out from her face, and a superior race of men must people her, revealing the divine Presence in her transfigured heart.
"It is a veritable work of creation we have to do : to create new activities and new modes of being, so that this Force, unknown to the earth till now, may manifest in its plenitude. It is to this work of a bringing to birth that I have consecrated myself, O Lord, because it is this that Thou demandest from me.”³
"All that has been conceived and realized up to now is mediocre, commonplace, insufficient compared with what has to be. The perfections of the past have no longer any force at present. A new puissance is needed to transform the new powers and make them submit to Thy divine Will.—'Ask and it shall be’, such is Thy constant reply...Let all these elements perish, so that from their
¹ prayer and Meditations of the Mother—May 16, 1914.
² ibid,- May 27, 1914.
³ ibid, - June 14, 1914.
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ashes may emerge new elements adapted to the new manifestation”¹
This new manifestation is the Will of the Divine and the mission of the Mother upon earth, and because it is the Will of the Divine, it will be accomplished by His Force alone, and not by any thought and plan of man. But for His Force to act freely—it never acts arbitrarily—man has to have an infinite faith in it.
"Thou art the sovereign power of transformation, why shouldst Thou not act upon all those who are put in relation with Thee through us as intermediaries ? We lack faith in Thy power. We always think that for this integral transformation to take place, men must will in their conscious thought; we forget that it is Thou who willest in them and that Thou canst will in such a way that all their being may be illumined....”²
But the mind of man is beset by doubts which impede the working of the divine Will. Man judges by his very limited and often misleading experiences of life and Nature and by the puny standards he has erected in his half-lit mind. By a fraction of the past and the present which is all that he has at his command, he presumes to judge the infinite and incalculable potentialities of the future. But, the Mother says, "It is always wrong to try to judge of the future or even to foresee it in the light of the idea that we have of it, for this idea is the present, it is, in the very measure of its impersonality, a translation of the present inter-relations which inevitably are not the future inter-relations of all the elements of the terrestrial problem. To deduce the future from the present circumstances is a mental activity of the order of reasoning, even if the deduction takes place in the subconscient and is translated in the being under the form of intuition; and reason is a human, that is to say, an individual faculty; the inspirations of the reason do not come from the infinite, the unlimited, the Divine.
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—June 17, 1914.
² ibid.,—June 23, 1914.
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It is only in the All-Knowledge, it is only when we are at once That which knows, that which is to be known and the power of knowing that we can become conscious of all relations past, present and future; but in this state there is no longer any past, present and future, all eternally is.” ¹ To the tranquil eye of faith "the formidable omnipotence of Thy Force is there; ready for manifestation waiting, it is building the propitious hour, the favourable opportunity ; it is there; the incomparable splendour of Thy victorious sovereignty.
The Force is there. Rejoice, you who wait and hope; the new manifestation is sure; the new manifestation is near.” ²
We have already had a glimpse of the Mother's rôle in this new manifestation. But in order to have a clear and indubitable idea of what it implies, let us listen to what the Divine Himself says to her—"/ have chosen thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the earth, not in an invisible way, but in a way apparent to the eyes of all men. And what thou wert created to be, thou shalt be.”³ Again, "By renouncing everything, even wisdom and, consciousness, thou wert able to prepare thy heart for the rôle which was assigned to it : apparently the most thankless rôle, that of the fountain which always lets its waters flow abundantly for all, but towards which no stream can ever remount; it draws its inexhaustible force from the depths and has nothing to expect from outside. But thou feelest already beforehand what sublime felicity accompanies this inexhaustible expansion of love; for, love is sufficient unto itself and has no need of any reciprocity. This is true even of individual love, how much more true, then, of divine love which so nobly reflects the infinite.
"Be this love in everything and everywhere, ever more widely, ever more intensely, and the whole world will become at once thy work and thy estate, thy field of action and thy conquest. Strive with persistence to throw down the last limits which are but frail barriers before the expansion of the being, to conquer the last obscurities which the illumining power is already lighting up.
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—June 24, 1914.
² ibid,—July 6, 1914.
³ ibid.,—December 8, 1916.
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Fight that thou mayst conquer and triumph; struggle to surmount all that has been up to this day, to make the new light emerge, the new example which the world needs. Fight stubbornly against all, obstacles, outer or inner. This is the pearl without price which is proposed for thee to realized "¹
"Thou wilt lead them all towards their supreme destiny.”²
We have been able to contemplate from a respectable and respectful distance and through the unavoidable haze of our mental preferences and preconceptions only a few aspects of the Mother's multi-dimensional spiritual career. As we follow the course of her spiritual achievements, a point of profound interest and significance to the future of humanity strikes us with an increasing force and clarity : it is the representative character of her Yoga. Not only has she aspired for the elimination of ignorance and suffering from the earth and the revelation of the Spirit in her transfigured substance, but, identified with the earth, she has constituted herself her sole representative, and practised the Yoga for the earth's liberation and transformation. Her Yoga has, therefore, been a collective rather than an individual Yoga; and many of the Prayers are not so much prayers of her soul or her heart for any personal boon or gain, as prayers for the earth and of the earth herself and of humanity through the Mother for a descent of the Light and Force, Peace and Harmony of the Divine. The Mother gave all herself to the Divine, so that, through her as an intermediary, He might act directly upon the earth and her children. She gave all herself in a supreme holocaust, so that the Divine might "reign over all the earth" with His "sovereign Love", and the consciousness of men might be full of the "Light of His serenity". This representative character of her Yoga is luminously brought out in her following utterances:—
"O Thou whom I cannot name but whose will I perceive in the
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—Dec, 25, 1916.
² ibid.,—March 27, 1917.
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supreme silence and in a total surrender, let me be the representative of the whole earth, so that, united with my consciousness, she may give herself to Thee without reserve.” ¹
"It was their pain and suffering that my physical being was feeling, O Lord.”²
The Mother's role of an intermediary presupposes, on the one hand, a complete identification of her whole being with the integral Divine, who is at once transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic, and, on the other hand, an equally complete identification with the whole earth for which she invokes and canalizes the Love and Light of the Divine. And this double identification has been either graphically expressed or cryptically indicated in many a Prayer of surpassing beauty and sublimity.
"In a silent and inward quietude, in a mute adoration, uniting myself with all this dark and sorrowful substance, I salute Thee, O Lord, as the divine saviour, I bless Thy love as the supreme liberator, I thank it for its innumerable boons, and I surrender myself to Thee, so that Thou mayst complete Thy work of perfectionment. Then I identify myself with Thy love and I am nothing but Thy inexhaustible love; I penetrate everything, living in the heart of each atom I kindle in it the fire that purifies and transfigures, the fire that is never extinguished, the messenger flame of Thy beatitude which realizes all perfections.
Then this love itself silently draws inwards, and turning towards Thee, unknowable splendour, awaits with ecstasy Thy New Manifestation” ³
Within the limited scope of this essay it has not been possible to attempt a fuller treatment of the subject. We have, therefore, had to omit any consideration of the Mother's more deeply mystic experience : her descent into the frozen darkness of
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.
² ibid.,—October 12, 1914.
³ ibid.,—June 2 , 1914.
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Matter, her contact with "the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience,” inconscience," "the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity"; her intimate colloquies with the Eternal and the Divine Mother, and the help rendered to her in her terrestrial work by the supreme Gods. Perhaps they are a little too mystic and mysterious for the blear and blinkered human reason to understand and value. We have had also to omit pondering over some of her characteristic teachings, vibrant words of light, sprung from a plenary Wisdom, which prove that her thoughts are not confined to a narrow spirituality, but embrace all the manifoldness of life and the multiplicity of its vital issues; for, to her unhorizoned consciousness there is no division between the Light of the Supreme and the Life of the universe—they are different aspects of the same indivisible Reality,
But we cannot close this cursory survey without citing in extenso two of the Mother's outstanding experiences which seem to us to serve as a permanent background of her thoughts and her great terrestrial work. We wonder whether there is any thing in the whole range of mystical literature to compare with these two gems of spiritual realization.
"The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity.
Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made little by little, even in the most material sensation, all personal limits fall away. The being, progressively, methodically, grew in greatness, breaking down every barrier, shattering every obstacle, that it might contain and manifest a force and a power which increased ceaselessly in immensity and intensity. It was as if a progressive dilatation of the cells until there was a complete identification withthe earth; the body of the awakened consciousness was the terrestrial globe moving harmoniously in ethereal space. And the consciousness knew that its global body was thus moving in the arms of the universal Personality, and it gave itself, it abandoned itself to Her in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss. Then it felt that its body was absorbed in the body of the universe and one with it; the conscious
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ness became the consciousness of the universe, in its totality immobile, in its internal complexity moving infinitely. The consciousness of the universe sprang towards the Divine in an ardent aspiration, a perfect surrender, and it saw in the splendour of the immaculate Light the radiant Being standing on a many-headed serpent whose body coiled infinitely around the universe. The Being in an eternal gesture of triumph mastered and created at one and the same time the serpent and the universe that issued from it; erect on the serpent. He dominated it with all His victorious might, and the same gesture that crushed the hydra, enveloping the universe, gave it eternal birth. Then the consciousness became this Being and perceived that its form was changing once more; it was absorbed into something which was no longer a form and yet contained all forms, something which, immutable, sees—the Eye, the Witness, and what It sees, is. Then this last vestige of form disappeared and the consciousness itself was absorbed into the Unutterable, the Ineffable.
The return towards the consciousness of the individual body took place very slowly in a constant and invariable splendour of Light and power and Felicity and Adoration, by successive gradations, but directly, without passing again through the universal and terrestrial forms. And it was as if the modest corporeal form had become the direct and immediate vesture, without any intermediary, of the supreme and eternal Witness”¹
"My heart has fallen asleep, down to the very depths of my being.
The whole earth is in a stir and agitation of perpetual change; all life enjoys and suffers, endeavours, struggles, conquers, is destroyed and formed again.
My heart has fallen asleep, down to the very depths of my being.
In al1 these innumerable and manifold elements, I am the Will that moves, the Thought that acts, the Force that realizes, the matter that is put in motion.
¹Prayers a" Meditations of the Mother—November 26, 1915 .
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No more any personal limits, no more any individual action, no more any separatist concentration creating conflict; nothing, but a single and infinite Oneness.
My heart has fallen asleep, down to the very depths of my being."¹
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother - April 10, 1917
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PEACE is the basis and pedestal of the cosmic movement. If the immutable peace of the Spirit were not there as the Infinite and eternal support, the whole universe would fly to atoms. In spite of the discords and disorders, clashes and collisions, the world holds together with its multitudinous elements and progresses forward through whatever zigzags and detours, because an unshakable peace upholds it from below. This truth was sought to be conveyed by the symbolic image of Shiva supporting upon his prostrate, moveless body the unceasing dance of Kali, the supreme creative Force. Peace is the last of he three principles of jyoti, Tejas and Shama or Shanti, which .are the supernal spiritual equivalents of Sattwa,¹Rajas,² and Tamas,³the three primal qualities of the lower Nature. In Matter Shanti or the luminous Peace of the Divine becomes the dark and dense Tamas, the congealed inertia of Inconscience.
This peace is the recurring refrain of many of the hymns and incantations of the world's scriptures, because without it here can be no steady purification of human nature, and no creative play of any beneficent power in life. It is the principle of preservation and conservation, stability and security, repose and equilibrium. It is the infallible healer of all ills, the rectifier of all errors, and the sustainer and restorer of all energies. If peace is once established in one's nature, all defects can be easily repaired, all impurities washed clean, and a solid, sure progress made towards self-transcendence. It is the mirror in which the soul sees itself and the only condition and atmosphere in which it can commune with its eternal Master.
But it is not easy to have a settled peace in one's entire being. If quiet and detachment are practised for a long time through an unremitting renunciation of all desires, and a conscious opening is made inwards and upwards, peace comes and begins to fill
¹ The qualitative mode of inner light, happiness, and harmony.
² The qualitative mode of action and passion.
³ The qualitative mode of darkness and inertia.
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our being. In the beginning, we feel a growing peace only in the centre of our consciousness, and whenever there is unrest or disquiet in any of the members of our nature, we can at oncerecede from it and take refuge in that tranquil centre. But after- wards peace expands from the centre and gradually steeps and encompasses the whole nature. It establishes itself not only in the mind, the heart and the life parts, but even in the very cellsof the body. That is to say, it becomes integral and sovereign But this integrality is the most difficult to achieve. It can be said that an integral peace has been only an ideal never yet perfectly realised by man. It includes a complete elimination of all rajasic restlessness from the very cells of the body and a saturation of the entire being with the serenity of an imperturbable calm. There have been many Yogis who lived in an absolute peace in the depths of their being, but the outer partsof their nature were still subject to the onslaughts of the lower passions and impulsions. It is true that they did not mind these onslaughts, which felt like pin-pricks to them, but still a pin-pricks is a pin-prick and a hindrance to an absolute immunity and mastery. This besetting duality has been an ungainly incongruous feature of most spiritual lives, and enforced a frequent resort to trance. A complete invulnerability, a perfect and permanent immunity of the whole consciousness to the forces of disturbance or unrest, is a conquest hardly yet achieved by man.
In the Prayers and Meditations the Mother speaks of this integral peace. Her conception of it is not only deeper and fuller, but immeasurably more comprehensive than that most spiritual teachers. It overwhelms us by its uncompromising absoluteness. She would have us establish a peace which is all-pervasive and perfectly impervious to all causes of trouble or worry. In her Prayer of the 5th December, 1912, she gives us a revealing picture of this kind of peace, which is remarkable not only for its arresting originality, but also for the momentous bearings it has upon the question of divine realisation.
"In Peace and Silence the Eternal manifests; allow nothing to
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disturb you and the Eternal will manifest; have perfect equality in face of all and the Eternal will be there...Yes, we should not intensity, too much effort into our seeking for Thee; the effort and the intensity become a veil in front of Thee; we must not desire to see Thee, for that is still a mental agitation which obscures Thy Eternal Presence. It is in the most complete Peace, Serenity and Equality that all is Thou even as Thou art all, and the least vibration in this perfectly pure and calm atmosphere is an obstacle to Thy manifestation. No haste, no inquietude, no tension; Thou, nothing but Thou without any analysis or any objectivising , and Thou art there without any possible doubt, for all becomes a Holy Peace and a Sacred Silence”¹¹
"Have perfect equality in face of all and the Eternal will be there.”
This is the same supreme equality as elaborated and insistently inculcated by the Gita,—an equality which is the very essence of eternity. This alone can be the widest foundation powerful, dynamic spirituality, and not the traditional straining and struggle of the spiritual seekers, or the heat and effervescence of their undisciplined emotions, so ruthlessly denounced by Vivekananda and branded as hysteria and neurosis. So long as aspiration and devotion for the Infinite are mental or vital-emotional, there is usually, perhaps unavoidably, a great, unequal tension in the being, an overdoing and excess, and in consequence, a want of balance and poise, but when the aspiration becomes purely psychic, a movement of the central soul, the fever and strain subside, and there is, instead, a calm, placid, ever-growing intensity, a naming but unwavering love, broad-based on equality. Pure Bhakti—and by it is meant psychic Bhakti—blossoms only when the mind and the heart have been lulled into a reposeful, trustful peace.
"We must not desire to see Thee, for that is still a mental agitation which obscures Thy eternal Presence.” An astounding this—not to desire to see the Divine ! But is not
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—December 5, 1912.
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desire a movement of ignorance, however laudable and salutary it may be in the conditions of that ignorance ? It has, no doubt, its evolutionary purpose; but it is not an authentic movement the soul, which does not desire to see, but sees, and revels in its natural sight. To a man who has wilfully kept his eyes closed you will not say, "Grope for the light, it is there," but, "Open your eyes and see the light." Our ignorance is, indeed, wilful.We have not only chosen it, but we cling to it, and that is why knowledge does not dawn and the darkness does not pass. If we want the freedom and bliss of the spirit, we have only to rejectthis ignorance and its trail of blind cravings and attachments, and turn globally to God.
We have not to desire to see Him, but actually to open our eyes and see Him. A flaming faith passes into vision and culminates in knowledge. One remembers in this connection a very apt teaching of Shankaracharya : "Steep your sight in knowledge and contemplate the world as full of Brahman." The desire to see the Divine is, as the Mother says, "a mental agitation which obscures Thy eternal Presence." In this agitation a veil falls between us and the Divine, and instead of seeing Him,we see only a surging mist or a confused blur of our mind's imaginings. But, if from the beginning, instead of following the lead of the mind, we follow the lead of our soul, and have a firm faith in its guidance, the fiery intensity of the psychic aspiration will gradually infuse itself into our whole nature and force open the "third eye" which will see the Divine as naturally as the physical eyes see the material objects.
"The least vibration in this perfectly pure and calm atmosphere is an obstacle to Thy manifestation. No haste, no inquietude, no tension; Thou, nothing but Thou...” Here the Mother speaks of the very perfection of peace, something transcending even psychic peace. It is a peace in which there is not even the slightest disturbing vibration anywhere, in any part of the being. It is the peace of the immutable Self, universal in consciousness and eternally equal to all impacts of the world. It is one of the prerequisites of the manifestation of the Divine in and through the liberated soul of man. It is only in this boundless, nameless
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peace that the liberated individual develops what the Gita calls Para Bhakti, and by this transcendent love and adoration knows and unites with the Supreme and becomes a vehicle of His Light and Love and Force upon the earth.
"When one has become the Brahman, when one, serene in the Self, neither grieves nor desires, when one is equal to all beings, then one gets the supreme love and devotion to me." (The Gita: Chapter 18).
We know that Sri Aurobindo lays the same kind of insistent stress upon this peace and calm as the very foundation of his Yoga. In the Bases of Yoga he says,
"The first thing to do in the sadhana is to get a settled peace and silence in the mind.” "Whatever else is aspired for and gained, this (calm) must be kept. Even Knowledge, Power, Ananda, if they come and do not find this foundation, are unable to remain and have to withdraw until the divine purity and peace of the Sat-Purusha are permanently there”....
"It is in the peace behind that you must learn to live and feel it to be yourself.”
"To feel the peace above and about your head is a first step; you have to get connected with it and it must descend into you and fill your mind, life and body and surround you, so that you live in it—for this peace is the one sign of the Divine's presence with you.”
It is interesting to note the same idea here as in the Mother's Prayer quoted above, and expressed in almost identical terms.
This was also the ideal of the ancient spiritual culture in India. But later Yogic and religious disciplines seem to have loosened their hold upon peace. Especially, in some forms of the Bhakti cult, there is a tacit—in many cases even an explicit—sanction given to frenzy, impatience and over-eagerness. Intensity is, of course, indispensable; it is the marshalling of the concentrated energies of the being towards a single definite object; but an unquiet intensity shakes the poise and disturbs the balance of the central consciousness and opens the door to many a force of darkness and disorder. It produces a lop-sidedness,
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flaccidness, sometimes even a morbidity, and clouds and confuses the intellect, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, for the higher light to descend and settle in our nature. The vast, untrembling background and foundation of the ancient Vedic and Vedantic discipline having been lost, Indian spiritual endeavours floundered for centuries in morasses or tossed in swirls and eddies, only achieving a sheer, giddy ascent into the Light of the Spirit or a brilliant burst of power or ecstasy in a few giants of exceptional calibre. It is high time they reverted to theancient background and recovered its deep peace and calm upon which alone the massive edifice of the future can be securely reared.
It is obvious that it is not a mental peace that the Motherspeaks of in her Prayers. A strong moral will may succeed in coercing the nature and imposing a sort of peace upon it, but it is usually found to be a precarious peace and very superficial, behind which one can often hear the uneasy rumble of the rebellious forces. The Socratic confession of suppressed passions is a universal experience which sometimes damps the ardours of youthful idealism and leads to cynicism or pessimism. A peace or calm held at the point of the sword against the unflagging opposition of its enemies, cannot be called a conquest, far less a secure possession. What the Mother means by peace is not the sepulchral stillness of a devasted nature either. She means by peace something profound, permanent, radical, absolute, something that is sovereign in action as well as inaction, in life as well as in death—the infinite and fathomless peace of the Eternal.
"May the peace of Thy divine Love be on all things.” It is this peace of the Divine which she passionately invokes in her Prayer of March 10, 1914 :—
"In the silence of the night Thy Peace reigned over all things, in the silence of my heart Thy Peace reigns always; and when these two silences were united, Thy Peace was so powerful that no trouble of any kind could resist it. I then thought of all those who were watching over the ship to safeguard and protect our route, and, in
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gratitude I willed that Thy Peace should be born and live in their hearts; then I thought of all those who, confident and care-free, slept the sleep of inconscience, and, with solicitude for their miseries, pity for their latent suffering which would awake in them in their own waking , I willed that a little of Thy Peace might dwell in their hearts and bring to birth in them the life of the Spirit, the light which dispels ignorance. I then thought of all the dwellers of this vast sea, visible and invisible, and I willed that over them might be extended Thy Peace. I thought next of those whom we had left far away and whose affection is with us, and with a great tenderness, I willed for them Thy conscious and lasting Peace, the plenitude of Thy Peace proportioned to their capacity to receive it. Then I thought of all those to whom we are going, who are restless with childish preoccupations and fight for mean competitions of interest in ignorance and egoism; and ardently, in a great aspiration of all those whom we know, of all those whom we do not know, of all the life that is working itself out, of all that has changed its form, and all that is not yet inform, and for all that, and also for all of which I cannot think, for all that is present to my memory, and for all that I forget, in a great ingathering and mute adoration, I implored Thy Peace.”
And in the Prayer of Dec. 7,1916, she gives us a vivid picture of the divine Peace realised by her :—
"In appearance my life is the most ordinary and commonplace possible; and inwardly what is it ? Nothing but a calm tranquillity without any variation or anything unexpected; the calm of something which is realised and is not sought for any longer, which no longer expects anything from life and things, which acts without anticipating any profit, knowing perfectly that its action does not in any way belong to it, either in its impulsion or in its result; which wills, conscious that it is the supreme Will alone that wills in it; a calm wholly made of an incontestable certitude, of an objectless knowledge, of a causeless joy and of a self-existent state of consciousness which no longer belongs to time. It is an immobility which moves in the domain of external life, without however, be-
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longing to it or seeking to escape from it. I hope for nothing, expect nothing, desire nothing, aspire for nothing and, above all, I am nothing; and yet happiness, a happiness calm and unmixed, a happiness that does not know itself and has no need to look at its existence, has come to inhabit the tabernacle of this body. This happiness is Thou, O Lord, and this calm too is Thou, O Lord, for these are not at all human faculties and the senses of men can neither appreciate nor enjoy them...”
This peace is one constantly felt even in action, and not only in the silent depths of the soul. It is victorious over all causes of anxiety or agitation, and a stable support of even the most stupendous activities of life.
We have seen that its first perfection is the psychic peace— peace in its pervading and unassailable purity, possessing and occupying the whole nature. Its final perfection is the peace of the Spirit, infinite, eternal, all-embracing and all-transcending. It is through this peace alone that the Divine can sovereignly act in the liberated human instrument.
Man, torn and tossed by the universal unrest, pants today for peace : his soul is in deep agony. War and strife have become the order of the day, war and strife in every walk of life; and everywhere there is a conflict of values, a crumbling of traditions, a vague longing for something new, a desperate tug of the old and a growing discontent and disquiet. How will peace emerge out of this heaving chaos ? And unless peace comes, how will this chaos dissolve ?
In this dilemma, the soul of man, unknown to his outer consciousness, appeals to God, its sole refuge. It is this appeal that rings in many of the Mother's "Prayers and Meditations" with the haunting pathos of psychic sadness. Her Prayer of the 29th Nov. 1913 runs :
"Why all this noise, all this movement, this vain and hollow agitation; why this whirlwind sweeping men away like a swarm of flies caught in a storm ? How sad is the spectacle of all this energy wasted, all these efforts lost ! When will they cease from dancing
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like puppets at the end of threads held they know not by whom or by what ? When will they take the time to sit and draw inwards, to collect themselves and open that inner door which hides from them Thy priceless treasures. Thy infinite boons ?...
"How painful and miserable seems to me their life of ignorance and obscurity, their life of foolish agitation and profitless dissipation, when a single spark of Thy sublime light, a single drop of Thy divine love can transform this suffering into an ocean of joy !
"O Lord, my prayer rises towards Thee: May they know at last Thy peace and that calm and irresistible power which springs from an immutable serenity—appanage of those whose eyes have been opened and who can contemplate Thee in the enkindled core of their being.
"But the hour of Thy manifestation has come.
"And canticles of joy will soon break out from every side.
"I bow down religiously before the solemnity of that how.”
The foregoing consideration will have made it abundantly clear that by peace the Mother does not mean non-violence. Peace comes with purity, with the elimination of desires and the progressive abdication of the ego, and is not the result of the imposition of an ethical principle upon one's nature. It is an inner state that evolves out of the awakened soul within, or descends from the Self above, and is not generated, or induced by the ethical discipline of non-violence. It is not, therefore, an outcome of moral but of spiritual growth. On the basis of peace both violence and non-violence can have their respective play in accordance with the Will of the Divine. Ancient dynamic spirituality had the wisdom to recognise the indispensability of divine violence as a preliminary to every new creation. Effete formations and outworn structures of the past, whether they are physical, vital or mental, have often to be ruthlessly broken up and cast away, so that new forms and principles may emerge and initiate a new era of human progress. Destruction clears the way for new creation, and it is a folly to fight shy of it and zealously try to keep one's hands clean. Ancient spirituality imaged Shiva, the beneficent God of kindness and
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compassion, as also Rudra, the terrible Godhead of destructive violence and scourging wrath. It is this truth that Sri Krishna taught Arjuna while exhorting him to fight—"Fight, but with the fever of thy soul gone",—"Fight but without anger of hatred."
The pacifists who think that a mere physical abstention from violence will save the modern world from ruin and bring about the cherished millennium are either ignorant of human nature, or infatuated with an impossible Utopian dream. Violence will continue to disturb or disrupt human society and shatter the naive hopes of the pacifists so long as any of the lower lusts of man sways his nature. If it is repressed on the physical level it will migrate to the vital and chafe and seethe there till it bursts on the physical again; or, repressed even on the vital level, it will rise to the mental and assume the concentrated intensity of a mental violence. The remedy lies not in the imposition of a moral principle or the adoption of a mental rule, but in the spiritualisation of human nature including even the subconscient; for it is often seen that when violence is completely expelled from the normal waking consciousness, it sinks into the sub-conscient and re-emerges from there in sudden, fretful spurts, playing havoc with the order and security of individual and collective life.
Besides, violence cannot be regarded with indifference, but has to be met and combated, not certainly out of any love of revenge or retribution, but for the protection and preservation of the higher values of existence. Evil has to be smitten and smitten hard, and falsehood pulled down from its high throne, in order that Love and Truth may be reinstated in the hearts of men. And this work of destruction need not in the least ruffle the inner peace; rather the inner peace is sure to impart a clearer vision and an unfailing strength to those who engage in such a dharma yuddha—a battle for the safeguarding or salvaging of the spiritual and cultural heritage of humanity. The Kshatriya element, the aspect of Rudra and Mahakali, has its undeniable truth and function, at least in the present economy of the world, and a willful ignoring of it can only lead to chaos and confusion
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and untold miseries. The use of soul-force is an ideal for which man is not yet prepared individually, let alone its employment in the life of the community. And even granting that soul-force succeeds, it is open to question whether it destroys less than physical force would do in the same circumstances, and whether it is not attended with consequences too radical and dangerously explosive to control. Whenever it has been tried,—it should not be confounded with moral force which is much feebler, because mental, and limited in its scope—it has violently disturbed the ordered march of humanity and upset its psycho- logical balance.
But the peace that the Mother speaks of is the abysmal peace of the Eternal which supports equally the dual work of creation and destruction, and is the foundation of all authentic Yogic action. It is a state of perfect equality to all the movements and impacts of life, and of harmony and co-ordinated action of all the parts of one's nature. Even a little of this peace ensures happiness and clear perception and a comprehensive and catholic outlook on life and its complex problems. This peace transcends all mental and moral states and is "not the peace of an inconscient sleep or of a self-satisfied inertia, nor the peace of a self-forgetful ignorance and an obscure and heavy indifference; but the peace of the omnipotent force, the peace of a perfect communion, the peace of an integral awakening, of the disappearance of all limitation and all darkness.”¹
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother—July 7, 1914.
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THERE is nothing in the art and literature of the world so moving, so inspiring and so exalting as the expression of man's love for the Divine. The soul's beauty and sweetness are, as it were, distilled into the love-lyrics of the mystics, and no human relation has ever reached the depth, the amplitude, the consuming intensity of passion which characterise the relation between the human soul and its eternal Beloved. Life becomes a Paradise, and even its crosses are transmuted into crowns by the magic of this love. Poverty, starvation, suffering slander, persecution, all tend but to feed the soul's sacred fire of love which burns brighter and brighter as it leaps up towards its sempiternal source. The incredible sacrifices that love makes with a beaming smile of unstinted joy, the unfailing and clearsighted faith and trust that it exhibits in the midst of defeat and desolation, should be evidence enough, even to a sceptic and a materialist, of the reality of its passion and the truth of its spiritual vision. Even a half-awakening of this love elicits the divine qualities of tenderness, compassion, forgiveness and forbearance, patience and endurance, equality and selflessness which nothing else in life can inspire and induce to an equal extent No materialist creed can ever hope to make out of common clay a St. Paul or a St. Francis, a Tulsidas, a Mirabai, or a Suso. The power that produces this miracle is no illusion or fiction; rather it is a pitiable self-delusion in modern man, enclosed in the dim cell of his reason, to deny the eternal Fount above and swear by the temporal waters on which he is so helplessly tossed.
Psychic Love
The most sincere and poignant expression of love for the Divine is essentially psychic. It is the soul in man that alone can pierce through the veil of appearances and deliver itself to the Divine with the unreserved self-abandon of an absolute
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love. Neither the mind nor the surface heart of fugitive emotions can have that passionate seeking and aspiration, that self-effacing surrender, which we find in a Chaitanya or a St. Catherine of Genoa. The hungering physical, the craving vital, the straining and clinging emotional, and the groping mental parts of man are constitutionally incapable of concentrating on the Divine and making Him the sole object of their pursuit, unless the soul has awakened and infused its fire-passion into them. The soul is made of love and joy, and it is not by any effort or outer influence, but by an innate, spontaneous urge that it turns to the Divine and offers itself to Him. It is the central being in man, embodying the central truth and purpose of his existence : the union with and the manifestation of the Divine in Matter. But this truth and purpose are realised by love and by nothing else—love which is, in Dante's words,
The increate perpetual thirst that draws
Towards the realms of God's own form...¹
In some of the Prayers and Meditations of the Mother this psychic love finds an exquisitely sweet and melting expression :
"Like a flame that burns in silence, like a perfume that rises straight upward without wavering, my love goes to Thee, and like the child who does not reason and has no care, I trust myself to Thee that Thy Will may be done, that Thy Light may manifest, Thy Peace radiate. Thy Love cover the world. When Thou wiliest I shall be in Thee, Thyself, and there shall be no more any distinction; I await that blessed hour without impatience of any kind, letting myself flow irresistibly toward it as a peaceful stream flows toward the boundless ocean.” ²
"O my divine Master, my love aspires after Thee more intensely than ever; let me be Thy living love in the world and nothing but that! May all egoism, all limitations, all obscurity disappear;
¹Paradiso, Canto I.
² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, Dec. 7, 1912.
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may my consciousness be identified with Thy Consciousness, so that Thou alone mayst be the will acting through this fragile and transient instrument.
"O my sweet Master, with what an ardour my love aspires for Thee!
"Grant that I may be only Thy divine Love, and that in everything this Love may awake powerful and victorious.
"Let me be like an immense mantle of love enveloping the whole earth, penetrating all hearts, murmuring to every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace...”¹
Though we have cited these two Prayers as an illustration of the psychic love, we can already discern in them something transcending it, some wider, mightier, sovereign Love, occupying the Mother's consciousness, shaping, stimulating and transmuting her psychic love into its own image and pouring out upon the world to redeem and illumine it. Let us quote another Prayer in which this process of dynamic union between the psychic love and the Divine's Love is more elaborately depicted:
"O Lord, Thou of whom I would be constantly conscious and whom I would realise in the smallest cells of my being. Thou whom I would know as myself and see manifested in all things. Thou who art the sole reality, the sole reason and the sole aim of existence, grant that my love for Thee may go on increasing incessantly, so that I may become all love. Thy very Love, and that being Thy Love, I may unite integrally with Thee. May this love become more and more intense, complete, luminous, powerful; may this love be an irresistible élan towards Thee, an invincible means to manifest Thee. May all in this being become pure love, profound, disinterested, divine, from the unfathomable depths to the outermost substance. May the God in form, who is manifesting in this aggregate, be wholly moulded of Thy complete and sublime Love, that Love which is at once the source and the realisation of all knowledge; may the thought be clarified., classified, enlightened, transformed by Thy Love; may all the forces of my life, solely
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, May 9, 1914.
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penetrated and moulded by Thy Love, become irresistible purity and constant energy, power and rectitude...and may this body, becoming a burning brazier, radiate Thy divine, impersonal, sublime and calm Love through all its pores... May the brain be reconstituted by Thy Love. Finally, may Thy Love overflow, inundate, penetrate, transfigure, regenerate, animate everything with the power, splendour, sweetness and force which are its very nature. In Thy Love is peace, in Thy Love is joy, in Thy Love is the sovereign lever of work for Thy servitor.
"Thy Love is vaster than the universe and more enduring than the ages; it is infinite and eternal, it is Thyself. And it is Thyself that I would be and that I am, since such is Thy Law and such Thy Will.”¹
This important Prayer foreshadows in some detail the working of the Divine Love in the Mother's being for enlightening and transforming her thought, reconstituting her brain, moulding her life-forces and making her body radiate "Thy divine, impersonal, sublime and calm Love through all its pores." The working continues, the transition is effected, and the Sun of the divine Love blazes forth at last against throbbing, incandescent background of a pure psychic consciousness. This rapturous union of the two loves, the psychic and the Divine, is beautifully brought out in the Prayer of 3ist May, 1914 :—
"If it is a sweetness to be Thy divine Love at work in the world, it is as great a sweetness to be the aspiration which rises towards that infinite Love. And to be able to change thus, to be successively, almost simultaneously, that which receives and that which gives, that which transfigures and that which is transfigured, to be identified with the sorrowful darkness as with the all-powerful splendour, and, in this double identification, to discover the secret of Thy sovereign oneness, is it not a way of expressing, of fulfilling Thy supreme Will?”
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, May 23, 1914
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Divine Love
What is Divine Love ? What is it in its essence and in manifestation? Can a human Being incarnate it in its purity and radiate it in the world ? Does it consist only of delight and sweetness, or is it also a Force ? What is its proper function in the material world ?
Describing Divine Love, the Mother says,
"Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The material world in its darkness and ignorance had forgotten the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep, it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, 'There is something that is worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love !' And with the awakening to love there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace. Love cannot exist in its pure beauty, love cannot put on its native power and intense joy of fullness until there is this interchange, this fusion between the earth and the Supreme, this movement of Love from the Divine to the creation and from the creation to the Divine. This world was a world of dead Matter, till Divine Love descended into it and awakened it to life. Ever since it has gone in search of this divine source of life, but it has taken in its search every kind of wrong turn and mistaken way, it has wandered hither and thither in the dark. The mass of this creation has moved on its road like the blind seeking for the unknown, seeking but ignorant of what it sought. The maximum it has reached is what seems to human beings love in its highest form, its purest and most disinterested kind, like the love of the mother for the child. This human movement of love is secretly seeking for something else than what it has yet found; but it does not know where to find it, it does not even know what it is. The moment man's consciousness awakens to the divine Love, pure, independent of all manifestation in human
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forms, he knows for what his heart has all the time been truly longing. That is the beginning of the soul's aspiration, that brings the awakening of the consciousness and its yearning for union with the Divine. All the forms that are of the ignorance, all the deformations it has imposed, must from that moment fade and disappear and give place to one single movement of the creation answering to the Divine Love by its love for the Divine. Once the creation is conscious, awakened, opened to love for the Divine, the Divine Love pours itself without limit back into the creation. The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.”¹
This long paragraph—is it not rather short, considering the great delivering knowledge it imparts in its pregnant words ? —answers almost all the questions we have put to ourselves. Love is not only joy and sweetness, but a supreme, probably the supreme Force of the eternal Consciousness. Its function is to release the submerged Spirit in Matter and carry it back to its infinity, not for extinction or immersion, but for a revelation of divine splendours in creation. We shall understand this better if we go a little deeper to glimpse the origin and essence of love. The primal principle of creation is delight, Ananda, from which everything in the universe is derived. Ananda is the first sheath, koṣa, in which the Spirit clothes itself for individual manifestation. It is at once the womb of the universe and its eternal sap and sustenance. Out of this essential delight of the eternal Existent, Love emerges, the first-born of the delight. It is the delight itself, but with a significant qualification : it is a seeking and uniting delight. It seeks, discovers and unites God's multiple self-representations; it is the one principle that makes for the infinite interrelations of the universe. A beatific blossom of essential identity, it is the one all-pervading cohesive principle in the midst of the teeming diversities and discords of the universal forms. But for Love the world would have gone to pieces, its relativities clashing and colliding, and its magnificent
¹ Words of the Mother, pp. 111-113.
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planetary systems, marvels of harmony and rhythm, disintegrating in a dance macabre. Speaking on this cohesive aspect of Love, the Mother says :
"Love is nothing else than the tie which unites and holds together all the flowers of Thy divine bouquet. It is a rôle unobtrusive modest, not recognised; a rôle essentially unselfish, which, only in this impersonality, can find all its utility.
"It is because I become more and more this tie, this link, assembling the scattered, fragments of Thy Consciousness and enable those fragments, by grouping them, to reconstitute better and better Thy consciousness, at once single and multiple, that it has been possible for me to see clearly what love is in the play of the universal forces, what is its place and its mission. It is not an end in itself but a supreme means. Active everywhere and between everything, everywhere it is veiled by that very thing which it unites, and which, while undergoing its effects, sometimes does not even know of its presence.” ¹
If we can step aside in consciousness, be it even for a moment, from the stupendous whirl of the cosmic forces, we shall be able all the better to study the rôle Love plays in the world of multiplicity. A conscious, eternal, universal Force, it moves amongst the divisions, differences and disparities of life, combining, co-ordinating , harmonising the conflicting elements, seeking for the beings who are ready to receive it into themselves, up-holding the world from disintegration and destruction, and leading the march of Time to the Timeless. "Love does not manifest in human beings alone; it is everywhere. Its movement is there in plants, perhaps in the very stones; in the animals it is easy to detect its presence. All the deformations of this great and divine Power come from the obscurity and ignorance and selfishness of the limited instruments. Love, the eternal Force, has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession, no self-regarding attachment, it is, in its pure movement, the seeking for union of the self with the Divine, a seeking absolute and regardless of all other things. Love
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, January 5, 1917.
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divine gives itself and asks for nothing.”¹
Divine Love can be incarnated in a human being if psychic love has cleared the whole consciousness and nature of all selfish distortions and the individual has opened wide—receptively wide—to its mighty influx. Often it is seen partially and temporarily occupying the being of an individual and working through it; it retires as soon as egoism or the unredeemed obscurities of the nature re-assert themselves. Except in a few extremely rare cases, it has not been possible to house this "guest of the marvellous hour" permanently in a human body. Even a most developed psychic love, leading a purified heart and mind, may not be able to incarnate divine Love so long as the body and the general physical consciousness have not been radically converted by the conquest and illumination of the subconscient which exerts such a fundamental, darkening sway over them. It is only a completely psychicised human nature upon which divine Love can take its stand and base its operations in the material world.
Human Love
A derivative of divine Love, human love is dwarfed and distorted in the ignorance of man's nature. It is infected with desire, clouded by mental ideas, and darkened and weighed down by the dross of the physical being. It has become an inconstant, hectic hunger, clamouring for possession and exclusive enjoyment; giving, but only to receive; insisting on its demands and receding, if there is no requital. It has degenerated into a barter, an unabashed bargaining, and bears little trace of its universal origin. Even at its best, it has a short-lived or intermittent intensity; it is crossed or thwarted by the contrary elements of nature and nipped by the frosts of life. But whenever it survives these assaults and grows into its full stature, it betrays something of its divine birth, and shines like a star over the grey fields of earthly existence. However brief it may be, it is one of the most beautiful movements of life.
¹ Words of the Mother, 4th Edition, p. 105.
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But
"If the movement does not last, it is because it is not conscious of its own aim and seeking, it has not the knowledge that it is not the union of one being with another that it is seeking after, but the union of all beings with the Divine.”
The Mother thus indicates the issue out of the cramping intensity of human love, the point of release. Love has not to be killed : a loveless life is a dreary desert, arid and infertile. Love has to cure itself of desire and soar above attachment; it should be a bond of union between the individual and the Divine, and through the Divine between the individual and all beings. It has to transcend all personal limits and widen itself into infinity and impersonality. What it has really been seeking after is not any particular finite form of a fugitive duration, a sparkling bubble on the moving ocean of Time, but the Timeless in time, the Archetype of all forms, the eternal and transcendent One who beams and beckons in and through all forms. He is everywhere, embodied in all things and all beings, and to be united with Him in them all, not abolishing the awareness of, but embracing and enjoying Him in all phenomenal distinctions, is the inmost urge of love. The discontent and the persistent sense of insecurity, disappointment, and disillusion only point to the intrinsic infinity of its seeking which no finite, perishable form can ever fulfil. It is only the Infinite that can fulfil it, and it is the Infinite, the infinite Being or Purusha, whom love has been seeking in the ignorance of the terrestrial nature. The awakening of man's consciousness to this truth of love is the end of the night of his ignorant quest and the dawn of a new life of growing light, happiness and harmony.
Love the Victor
The sole business of human life is to strive to rise superior the witchery of the senses and the importunities of desires, a evolve the psychic love to such an extent that it pervades ;
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possesses the whole being and makes it a single consecration and appeal to the Love of the Divine. This appeal is echoed in the Mother's Prayer of 27th August, 1914 :
"To be the divine Love, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being—it is for this I cry to Thee, O Lord. Let me be consumed with this Love divine, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being ! Transmute me into that burning brazier, so that all the atmosphere of the earth may be purified with its flame.
"O, to be Thy Love infinitely!”
When the entire being has become one psychic flame, pure and intense, the divine Love descends and unites with it, and carries on with a victorious might its work of transfiguration of the earth-consciousness. It is a long and extremely difficult work, involving a dive into the subterranean bases of life and a deadly fight with the ageless forces of ignorance and inconscience. But the Force that has released the Spirit from the cavern of "supreme obscurity" can and will transform that cavern into an illuminated temple and install the Spirit there as the undisputed sovereign of the material world. Love, the initiator of evolution, will consummate its mission of divine manifestation in Matter as Love the Victor.
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THE Upanishadic dictum of enjoyment by renunciation-- tyaktena bhuñjīthā—is the basic motor principle of all evolutionary existence. Every step forward in evolution, from the primal outburst of life from the blind darkness of Matter to the luminous infinity and immortality of the superconscient Spirit, is taken, consciously or unconsciously, by renunciation or surrender. Take, for instance, the first emergence of life. How does it happen ? Something in the dumb bosom of Matter wearies of the unrelieved inertia and obscurity in which it lies buried, and pants for light and a free flow of life. The dull sleep in darkness is renounced, so that there may be a leap into some kind of light, movement, change, growth and progress. As a result of this aspiration and surrender, life breaks out of "the mire and the stone", lusty and impetuous, and weaves the marvels of living Nature. But the light in which it acts is a dim, dusky light, and the source of its action is not in itself, but in some veiled Intelligence, occult to its nascent consciousness. There is flux, but a fettered and conditioned flux, mutation, but a limited and mechanical, though marvellous, mutation; and there is no witness or enjoyer of the wonder-working élan vital. Again, in the mysterious depths something wearies of this ceaseless, subconscious flux and yearns to know and to be, in the full light of self-consciousness. A drugged obsession with the perpetual flicker-dance of the senses is renounced in favour of a clearer and more steadfast light, a knowledge of one's self and a knowledge of the world. This surrender initiates the development of the Mind. In this way, by continual surrender, the normal and the habitual are exceeded and the consciousness of the embodied being transcends itself.
Up to the emergence of the Mind, the renunciation or surrender is either unconscious or subconscious, taking place behind the veil; but with the emergence of the Mind, it gets a chance of being conscious and voluntary. But at this stage of transition between the automatic surrender and spontaneous
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self-adaptation of subhuman existence and the conscious, deliberate and joyous self-giving of the fully evolved human being, the ego comes to the front, centralising and consolidating the evolving consciousness and grabbing at everything to enrich and fortify itself. A more or less long spell of egoistic development ensues. All individual initiative pivots upon an entrenched egocentricism till the individuality is well organised, as far as that is possible in the conditions of the Ignorance, and the being is ripe for a further advance and expansion. It is then that a new tendency manifests itself in the individual: an incipient but insistent tendency towards self-giving and self-surrender. The old, prevailing tendency to self-aggrandisement and self-satisfaction persists, but along with that, in a firm and steady opposition to it, grows the new one, big with immense possibilities for the future. Even if the old tendency dominates the nature and dictates and directs most of its movements for a long time, the new one cannot be altogether stifled—it keeps up a protest, however feeble in the beginning, and a struggle and discontent. In the end, the ego awakes to its own distressing limitations and, feeling itself a prisoner in its own narrow formations, stresses the second tendency and begins to take a genuine delight in self-surrender. In self-expansion by self- giving it seeks its highest satisfaction and fulfilment. This self- expansion is really the self-extinction of the ego. With the gradual disappearance of the ego, the central being of man, the immortal soul or psyche, whose shadow-figure was the ego, comes forward to lead the nature, replacing desire by love.
With the emergence of love, love of the Universal, the Infinite and the Eternal, love of God or the Supreme Person, begins what Sri Aurobindo calls the third status of the ascent of life. The consciousness of the individual breaks beyond its normal bounds, surrenders all it had clung to in its constricting ignorance, and hungers for self-fulfilment in an illimitable self- expansion. Progress in this third status and the attainment of the fourth are characterised by an increasing, self-offering of the being and a glad renunciation of all its sense of separativity.
Self-surrender to the Infinite Reality or the Eternal Being, is,
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then, the most powerful lever of self-transcendence. It is a renunciation of our smug complacency with the finite and the fleeting, a breaking of all bonds, a sure means of the widening and heightening of our consciousness and a recovery of our own free and immortal existence. Self-surrender cuts asunder the knots of the ego and the toils of desire and, neutralising the seductions of the senses, liberates us into the ineffable Love and Light of the Supreme. It removes the impediments of nature, sweeps away the accretions of ignorance and creates an opening towards the higher values, and an orientation towards the great goal of life. Self-surrender brings strength to the weak, light to to the blind, and faith and certitude to those who despair. It is said of Rulman Merswin that, one evening, when he was walking in his garden, he suddenly saw a Cross before him and was so intensely moved to his depths by the sight that "lifting his eyes to heaven, he solemnly swore that he would utterly surrender his own will, person and goods to the service of God." As soon as the surrender was made, there was, as it were a sudden release of mighty spiritual springs within him and an electric awakening of faculties which bridged the gulf between the sensory and the supra-sensory world. "The reply (td the surrender) from on high came quickly. A brilliant light shone about him; he heard in his ears a divine voice of adorable sweetness."
Similar instances are recorded in the lives of St. Teresa an St. Catherine of Sienna, which go to prove the stupendous power of conversion and transformation inherent in the act of self-surrender. It is only by self-surrender, that is to say, by surrender of the limited, ignorant and egoistic self, that the infinite and eternal Self can be realised. "Attainment," says Dionysius the Areopagite, "comes only by means of this sincere, spontaneous and entire surrender of yourself and all things."
But how to surrender ? What is its actual process ? Is there such a thing as partial surrender, and also temporary surrender —a surrender which is revoked after a certain spell of experience ? What is the difference between active surrender and passive surrender ? What is detailed surrender ? What is integral
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surrender ? For a conclusive elucidation of all these very important issues—what can be more important than self- surrender, at least in the beginning of one's spiritual career ? —we cannot do better than turn to the illuminating words of the Mother; for, in these words alone do we find a most complete and comprehensive exposition of the different aspects and results of self-surrender and an inspiring illustration of its integral perfection.
Regarding the process—or rather the spirit or attitude— of surrender, the Mother says :
" once you have turned to the Divine, saying, 'I want to be yours,' and the Divine has said, 'Yes,' the whole world cannot keep you from it. When the central being has made its surrender., the chief difficulty has disappeared. The outer being is like a crust. In ordinary people the crust is so hard and thick that they are not conscious of the Divine within them. If once, even for a moment only, the inner being has said, 'I am here and I am yours,’ then it is as though a bridge has been built and little by little the crust becomes thinner and thinner until the two parts are wholly joined and the inner and the outer become one.” ¹
Speaking of the paths of tapasya (discipline) and surrender, the Mother observes:
"The path of Tapasya is arduous. Here you rely solely upon yourself, you proceed by your own strength, you ascend and achieve according to the measure of your force. There is always the danger of falling down. And once you fall, you lie broken in the abyss and there is hardly a remedy. The other path, the path of surrender, is safe and sure. It is here, however, that the western People find their difficulty. They have been taught to fear and avoid all that threatens their personal independence. They have imbibed with their mother's milk the sense of individuality. And surrender means giving up all that.... If you take up this path of surrender fully and sincerely, there is no more any danger or
¹ Words of the Mother, 4th Edition, p. 14.
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serious difficulty. The question is to be sincere.” ¹
Surrender, as the Mother teaches us, is safety itself; it is, as it were, taking refuge in the loving arms of the Almighty. But in order to be completely immune to all attacks, one has to surrender all one's being, which is hardly possible at the initial stages of the sadhana; for man is a multi-personality and a jumble of divergent aims and appetites, and to forge all his disparate parts and chaotic instincts into a unity and a harmony, he has, first, to be conscious of them all and of their tufted working, and then, by a progressive purification of this disorderly mass, achieve an order and concordance which will facilitate his mastery and his subsequent surrender of it to its Creator and Lord. An illustration of the triple movement of self- mastery, self-integration and self-surrender is found in the Mother's Prayer of November 9, 1914 :
"O Lord, we aspire to perfect consciousness. The whole being is gathered like a closely tied wreath made of flowers, different but all perfectly harmonised together. The will was the hand that gathered the flowers and the string that tied the wreath, and now too it is the will that lifts the wreath towards Thee as a scented offering. It is held up towards Thee unweariedly, unfalteringly.”
But it is a long way to this state of integrated and consecrated harmony, and it has to be trodden with a resolute will and an endless patience through a scrupulously detailed surrender. The Mother explains how a general offering can be carried out in detail:
"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, such as eating; when you eat, you must feel that it is the Divine who is eating through you. When you can thus gather all
¹Words of the Mother, pp. 9 and 10
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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.” ¹
But surrender may be partial and not integral, which means that only one part of our being may be willing to give itself and the other parts may either reserve themselves or oppose the movement of self-offering. But even this partial surrender is not unavailing, it may, if carried out with sincerity, create an opening in the nature for the higher light and initiate a salutary, expansive change in it. But for the divine Grace to descend and do its work fully and freely in the human being, it is essential that the surrender should be unreserved and integral.
There are many pitfalls on the path of surrender. We may start with a sincere surrender, but when the divine Power descends into us and achieves something extraordinary—as it not unoften does—we take all the credit to ourselves and forget the Source from which the Power came. The surrender, though genuine in the beginning, proves transient: the highly gratifying result of the working of the divine power is at once misappropriated by the ego, neutralising the previous self-consecration. A vigilant constancy and a total sincerity in self-surrender alone can save the spiritual seekers from these pitfalls.
A point of capital importance in regard to surrender is that, in a dynamic yoga, it should be active and not merely passive. The Mother distinguishes between the two in the following words :
"What is required of you is not a passive surrender in which you become like a block, but to put your will at the disposal of the Divine Will...Take the example of becoming conscious of your nights. If you take the attitude of passive surrender, you would say, 'When it is the divine Will that I should become conscious,
¹ Words of the Mother, p. 39.
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then I shall become conscious.’ On the other hand, if you offer your mil to the Divine, you begin to will; you say, 'I will become conscious of my nights.’ You have the will that it should be done; you do not sit down idle and wait. The surrender comes in when you take the attitude that says, 'I will give my will to the Divine. I intensely want to become conscious of my nights. I have not the knowledge, let the divine Will work it out for me. Your will must continue to act steadily, not in the way of choosing a particular action or demanding a particular object, but as an ardent aspiration concentrated upon the end to be achieved. This is the first step. If you are vigilant, if your attention is alert, you will certainly receive something in the form of an inspiration of what is to be done, and that you must forthwith proceed to do. Only you must remember that to surrender is to accept whatever is the result of your action, though the result may be quite different from what you expect. On the other hand, if your surrender is passive, you will do nothing and try nothing; you will simply go to sleep and wait for a miracle.
Now, to know whether your will or desire is in agreement with the Divine Will or not, you must look and see whether you have aw answer or have no answer, whether you feel supported or contradicted, not by the mind or the vital or the body, but by then something which is always there deep in the inner being, in your heart.”¹
In short, the Mother says that our will must always endeavour' to attune itself to and put itself at the disposal of the divine Will and help its realisation. The combined working of the two wills is the best condition and the most speedily effective means of spiritual progress and divine manifestation.
We shall now try to understand what the Mother means by integral surrender. Its key-note is struck in the very first Prayer of her book, The Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, and it rises in pitch and power as the Prayers advance. In the Prayer of Aug. 15, 1913, the Mother says to the Divine,
¹ Words of the Mother, pp. 32-33.
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" O Divine Master, for Thee is our life, our thought, our love, all our being. Take possession of Thy own; for, Thou art ourselves in our real being.”
A great experience is followed by a fuller outburst of self- surrender :
"Thou hast passed over my life, O Lord, like a great wave of love, and when I was immersed in it, I knew in a way, integral and intense, that I had offered to Thee—when ? I do not know, at no precise moment and, doubtless, always—my thoughts, my heart and my flesh in a living holocaust,”¹
Outdistancing all previous records comes a most generous gesture of self-surrender:
"It seems to me that I am being born into a new life and that all the methods and habits of the past can no longer be of any use. It seems to me that what was once a result is now only a preparation. I feel as if I had done nothing yet, as if I had not lived the spiritual life, as if I was only entering upon the way which leads to it; it seems to me that I know nothing, that I am incapable of formulating anything, that all experience is yet to commence. It is as if I was stripped of all my past, of my errors as well as my conquests, as if all that had disappeared to give place to one new- born whose existence has yet to take shape, who has no Karma, no experience it can profit by, but no error either which it must repair. My head is empty of all knowledge and all certitude, but also of all vain thought. I feel that if I can surrender without any resistance to this state, if I do not strive to know or understand, if I consent to be completely like a child, ignorant and candid, some new possibility will open before me. I know that I must now definitively give myself up and be like a page absolutely blank on which Thy thought. Thy will, O Lord, will be able to inscribe themselves freely, secure against any deformation.
"An immense gratitude rises from my heart; I seem to have at
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, January 13, 1914.
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last arrived at the threshold which I have so long sought.
"Grant, O Lord, that I may be pure enough, impersonal enough, animated enough with Thy divine Love, to be able to cross it definitively.
"O to belong to Thee, without any darkness or restriction /"
But even this does not seem to satisfy the exacting Lover. He insists on more, for, he has ordained more—an unprecedented perfection by an exhaustive and exemplary self-surrender. In the rapt silence of the Mother's heart, His voice rings out:
"Never hast thou been able to die integrally. Always something in thee has wished to know, to see, to understand. Surrender completely, learn to disappear, break the last dam which separates thee from me; accomplish without reserve thy act of surrender.”¹
This last surrender is at last accomplished : "Suddenly the veil was rent, the horizon was disclosed. Before the clear vision my whole being threw itself at Thy feet in a great outburst of gratitude. Yet in spite of this deep and integral joy, all was calm, all was peaceful with the peace of eternity.
"I seemed to have no more any limits; there is no longer the perception of the body, no sensations, no feelings, no thoughts.... A clear, pure, tranquil immensity, penetrated with love and light, filled with an unspeakable beatitude, is all that is there, and that. alone seems now to be myself, and this 'myself is so little the’ former ' I’, selfish and limited, that I cannot tell if it is I or Thou, O Lord, sublime Master of our destinies.
"It is as though all were energy, courage, force, will, infinite sweetness, incomparable compassion.
"Even more forcibly than during these last days the past is dead and as though buried under the rays of a new life. The last glance that I have just thrown backward, as I read a few pages of this book, definitively convinced me of this death, and lighten of a great weight, I present myself before Thee, O my divine Master,
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, April 7, 1914.
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with all the simplicity, all the nudity of a child...And still the only thing I perceive is that calm and pure immensity....Lord, Thou hast answered my prayer. Thou hast granted me what I have asked from Thee; the I has disappeared, there is only a docile instrument put at Thy service, a centre of concentration and manifestation of Thy infinite and eternal rays; Thou hast taken my life and made it Thine; Thou hast taken my love and identified it with Thine; Thou hast taken my thought and replaced it by Thy absolute consciousness.
"The body, marveling, bows its forehead in the dust in mute and submissive adoration. And nothing else exists but Thou alone in the splendour of Thy immutable peace.”
Indicating the various efficacy of surrender, the Mother says that surrender at once relieves the strain and tension of the struggling will and brings peace and a calm confidence to the individual being. It is a safeguard against all anxiety and fear, and a guarantee of all fulfilment.
Surrender heals all physical ailments and restores health and harmony to our life-energies :
"As soon as physical conditions are a little difficult and there results from them some unease, if we know how to surrender completely before Thy Will, holding cheap life or death or illness, our integral being enters immediately into harmony with Thy law of love and life, and all physical indisposition ceases to give place to a well-being calm, deep and peaceful.”
Surrender removes all obstacles and difficulties, changes the environments and circumstances and makes for a thorough purification and perfection of the seeker of the Divine.
"He who, in all sincerity of his being, has given himself to Thee With all his conscious will, he who has resolved to make every effort to help in the manifestation and triumph of Thy divine law of Love in him and in the whole zone of his influence, sees everything change in his life and all circumstances begin to express Thy law
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and facilitate his consecration; for him it is always the best that happens; and if there is still in his intelligence some obscurity, some ignorant desire which sometimes prevents him from perceiving it immediately, he recognises sooner or later that a beneficent power seemed to protect him even against himself, so as to secure for him the conditions most favourable to his blossoming and transfiguration, his integral conversion and utilisation.”
Such is the result of self-surrender. Human reason cannot understand the mysterious action of the dynamic of a higher dimension of consciousness, and what it does not understand it readily dubs superstition or hallucination. Self-surrender, by bridging the gulf between the finite and the infinite, immeasurably widens the range of human possibilities and effects miraculous changes in human life. But it presupposes an implicit faith in the existence of a living, omnipresent Reality, nay, a Supreme Being or Person, of whom the essential human individuality is an abiding manifesting centre in the material world, and the mutable human personality a phenomenal front and figure of self-representation. It is His Will that is splintered into the myriad wills and desires of the swarming mass of living forms, and His purpose that is being inevitably, but through mysterious, incalculable ways, fulfilled. Each individual is That in his eternal essence, but alienated in consciousness by his manifold ignorance. Surrender is the means to the rediscovery of That—a dispelling of ignorance, a transcendence of the ego, and an attainment and fulfilment of the highest truth of our being.
One word more before we conclude. The self-surrender that the Mother has illustrated by her aspiration and realisations has two aspects—one, which is the general and universal aspect of it and needs to be fully grasped and integrally accomplished by every follower of the synthetic Yoga of the dynamic divine realisation, the other, which is special to the Mother's life and mission on earth. Over and above the general and detailed surrender of her integral being to the Divine, the Mother; identified with the entire earth, made a representative and symbolic
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surrender of her whole being, so that through it the Divine might accept the self-offering of the earth and humanity and work upon them to bring about the much-needed transformation. She speaks of this representative self-surrender in the following words :—
"Lord, eternal Master!
"Men, pushed by the conflict of forces, are making a sublime sacrifice, they are offering their lives in a sanguinary holocaust.
"Lord, eternal Master, grant that it may not be in vain; that the inexhaustible torrents of Thy divine force may spread over the earth, penetrating into the troubled atmosphere, the struggling energies, all the violent chaos of the battling elements; and that the pure Light of Thy Knowledge and the inexhaustible love of Thy Benediction may fill the hearts of men, penetrate into their souls, illumine their consciousness and make to pour forth out of this obscurity, this sombre, terrible and powerful darkness, the splendour of Thy majestic Presence !
"My being is before Thee in an integral holocaust so that it may make their unconscious holocaust effective.
"Accept this offering, reply to our call: Come!”¹
Again : "Grant that we may be Thy vivifying breath. Thy sweet peace. Thy luminous love upon the earth amongst our ignorant and sorrowful human brothers.
"O divine Master, accept the offering of my integral holocaust, so that Thy work may be done and the time may not pass in vain...
"The whole being is transformed into the ardent flame of a sacrifice of pure love.
"Become again the king of Thy kingdom, deliver the earth from the heavy weight which crushes her, the weight of her inert, ignorant and obscure ill-will.”²
The holocaust was accepted by the Divine and we have a most ecstatic expression of the Mother's gratitude as well as another most revealing picture of an absolute surrender:
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, August 4, 1914,
² 'bid., August 5, 1914.
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"O my beloved Lord, what a sweetness to think that it is for Thee and Thee alone that I act! At Thy service I am; it is Thou who decidest, ordainest and puttest in motion, directest and accomplishest the action. What peace, what tranquillity, what supreme felicity are given me when I sense and perceive it! For, it is enough to be docile, plastic, surrendered and attentive, so as to let Thee act freely; then there can be no longer errors or faults or any lack or insufficiency, since it is what Thou hast willed that Thou doest and it is so done as Thou hast willed it.
"Accept the ardent flame of my gratitude and of my joyous and fully confident adherence.
"My father has smiled at me and taken me in His powerful arms. What is there that I could fear ? I have melted into Him and it is He who acts and lives in this body which He has Himself formed for His manifestation.”¹
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, October 10, I9t8.
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"The material world in its darkness and ignorance had forgotten the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep; it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, 'There is something that is worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love !' And with the awakening to love, there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace. Love cannot exist in its pure beauty, love cannot put on its native power and intense joy of fullness until there is this interchange, this fusion between the earth and the Supreme, this movement of love from the Divine to the creation and from the creation to the Divine. This world was a world of dead matter till Divine Love descended into it and awakened it to life. Ever since it has gone in search of this divine source of life, but it has taken in its search every kind of wrong turn and mistaken way; it has wandered hither and thither in the dark. The mass of this creation has moved on its road like the blind seeking for the unknown, seeking but ignorant of what it sought. Once the creation is conscious, awakened, open to love for the Divine, the Divine Love pours itself without limit back into the creation. The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.”¹
WITH the pregnant limpidity of these revelatory words, the Mother outlines the whole evolution of the Earth from her state of being "dead Matter" to her union with the supreme Spirit and transformation into its manifesting channel. The primary state is that of inconscience, inertia and the utter obscurity of absolute ignorance. It is a total involution of Sat, the infinite, eternal Existence, an apparent negation of the Light and Bliss of the supreme Reality. Out of this state of involution evolution
¹ words of the Mother, Revised edition, pp. 111-113
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starts. Love comes down from the Divine above,—love, the most victoriously powerful of all divine forces, and releases into self-expressive play, first. Life with its prolific energies, multiform desires and dim, dawning consciousness, and then Mind with its developing consciousness and variegated volitions. But the process of evolution does not—because it cannot—stop short at Mind : Love has to liberate the involved principle and power of the Supermind which is the infinite dynamic Consciousness-Force of the Divine Creator of the universe. The consummation of this evolutionary process is the uncurbed self-revelation of Sachchidananda on earth.
Ancient wisdom saw the potential greatness of the earth. In the Vedas the earth is called the foothold of God and the mother of all creatures whose father is Heaven. In the Atharva Veda we have : "I am a son of Earth, the soil is my mother...May she lavish on me her manifold treasure, her secret riches.... May we speak the beauty of thee, O Earth, that is in thy villages and forests and assemblies and wars and battles."
The secret riches prayed for are the infinite, involved riches of the Spirit which the Earth yields to the aspiring soul of man under the pressure of the descending Light from above. Again in the same Veda the Rishi prays, "May Earth, sovereign over the past and the future, make for us a wide world.. .Earth that was the water in the ocean and whose course the thinkers follow by the magic of their knowledge, she who has her heart of immortality covered up by the Truth in the supreme ether, may she establish for us light and power in that most high kingdom.
It is held by most of the religions in India that this Earth is the Karmabhumi,¹ the only place where man can change his consciousness, his nature and his whole life by his thought and action, and rise from the animal-human to the divine-human level of existence. The other worlds are the Bhogabhumi² where he can only enjoy the fruits, good and evil, of his actions. It is only here that the soul can liberate itself from the meshes of
¹ The world of creative action.
² The worlds of enjoyment.
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ignorance and recover its infinity and immortality. It is only here that the individual can regain his universality and transcendence and unite with the supreme Divine. It is only here, on this earth and nowhere else, that the highest Truth can be realised and expressed. It is said—and it is a fact—that even the gods, if they desire liberation and union with the Supreme, have to be born here, on this earth, and assume the human form. They may be in possession of high knowledge and power in their own realms, but the highest knowledge and the utmost perfection are possible only to man upon this earth. Chinese spiritual tradition regards Chien (Heaven) as the Father and Khun (Earth) as the Mother of all terrestrial existence. The union of Earth and Heaven has been the ideal not only of esoteric Christianity but also of many of the more ancient forms of spiritual mysticism.
Seen in this perspective, the Earth appears as the only field in the whole universe for the highest divine realisation and revelation. Human life here is a rare privilege and opportunity which, whatever the aim and objective—if it has any—of modem scientific culture, can bear resplendent fruits, only if it turns integrally to its supernal source—Light. Man ascending to the Divine and the Divine descending into man and revealing Himself in Matter : this is the whole play and purpose of earthly life, and, in spite of the lapses and relapses of our frail humanity, this purpose is being progressively but inevitably fulfilled.
This ancient view of the Earth and her destiny invests terrestrial existence with an abiding sacredness and significance and elevates human life from the drab and dusty inanity of material pursuits into the blissful freedom and perfection of the life divine.
Ascetic spirituality, which has been invariably characterised by a narrow and intolerant orthodoxy, both in India and elsewhere, has chosen to malign the mother Earth and look down upon her with an undisguised contempt. The bigotry of the exclusive spiritual aim blinds it to the secret and sublime end of human birth, and it mistakes the
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field of dynamic, integral perfection for a delusion and a snare. It glorifies a retreat into a high renunciation and is proud of its purblindness. Happily the spell of ascetic spirituality has almost faded away, and mankind is slowly but steadily reverting to the comprehensive aspiration for an integral perfection and harmonious fulfilment in life. Matter, the Annam Brahman of the Upanishads, is receiving again the respectful attention and devout consideration it deserves, not only of the doped worldings, but of the serious seekers of the Spirit. A glorious future looms before mankind, and the Earth has a most magnificent rôle to play in it. The prophecies of many seers and saints—Ramakrishna, Ramalingam, Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, to name only a representative few—about the birth of powerful Yogins in India and a general spiritual renaissance in humanity only confirm and substantiate the persistent anticipations of an approaching millennium upon earth.
But what has been a cryptic or vague prognostic and a dubious expectation is fixed in its proper setting, given a coherent significance and revealed as the definite and inevitable destiny of the Earth by the Mother in her Prayers and Meditation. These Prayers are no glistening gossamer of imaginative idealism, nor an imposing fabric of theological speculation, but undeniable facts of spiritual realisation,—truths seen, words heard, forms touched, at least as concretely as the objects of the outer senses, but all in a world or worlds of light, sealed to the sense-bound consciousness of men. It is in these worlds, as in the green-room of the theatre, that the earth-scenes are determined, arranged, rehearsed and released into material expression. If human reason has the humility to listen to the words of wisdom, and human life the self-control and flexibility to alter and adapt itself to their dynamic demands, the truth of the Mother's experiences will not take very long to translate itself into a shining reality of our earthly existence.
But what is it that imparts a compelling force and the unmistakable ring of prophecy to the expressions of the Mother's experience ? What is it that makes her affirm in clear and definite terms the secret aim of the long, travailing evolution of
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the earth-consciousness and the glory of its final perfection ? It is, on the one hand, her identification with the Earth and her intimate knowledge of the aspiration of the Earth-soul and, on the other, the indications and injunctions received by her from the Divine regarding her own rôle on Earth.
Let us first have a glimpse of the identification—a full view is impossible on the mental plane of consciousness—and then we shall be all the better able to apprehend the dumb but unquenchable yearning of the Earth-soul, its sublime possibilities and their inevitable fruition :
"When the sun had set in the indrawn quietude of the calm twilight, all my being prostrated itself before Thee, O Lord, in a mute adoration and complete surrender. Then I was the whole Earth and the whole Earth prostrated herself before Thee, imploring the benediction of Thy illumination and the beatitude of Thy Love. O that kneeling of the Earth in supplication towards Thee, then collected in itself in the silence of the night, awaiting, at once with patience and anxiety, the so-longed-for illumination.”¹
"...And when I ask this of Thee, the "I” which speaks to Thee is the whole Earth, aspiring to be this pure diamond, perfect reflector of Thy supreme light. The hearts of all men beat in my heart, all their thoughts vibrate in my thoughts, the least aspiration of the docile animal or of the modest plant joins in my formidable aspiration, and all this lifts itself towards Thee, to the conquest of Thy love and light, scaling the peaks of the being to attain to Thee, to ravish Thee from Thy immobile beatitude and make Thee penetrate into the shadow of suffering so as to transform it into divine Joy, into sovereign Peace. And this violence is of an infinite love which gives itself and of a confident serenity which smiles in the certitude of Thy perfect Unity /"²
The above two passages bear eloquent testimony to the identification of the Mother's being with the Earth, but this identification by itself cannot deliver the Earth from darkness
¹ Prayers and Meditations Of the Mother, May 31,1914.
² ibid., May 25, 1914.
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and suffering and make her the field of divine revelation, unless there is an equally complete identification of the Mother's being with the being and consciousness of the Supreme and a sovereign working of His Will through the Mother upon the Earth. Of the latter there is no dearth of evidence in the Prayers and Meditations. We cite here only one or two of those that bear directly and definitely upon the Earth and her destiny:
" Mother Divine, Thou art with us, every day Thou givest me the assurance, and, closely united in an identity that grows more and more total, more and more constant, ' we'’ turn to the Lord of the universe and to That which is beyond in a great aspiration towards the new Light. All the Earth is in our arms like a sick child who must be cured and for whom one has a special affection because of its very weakness. Cradled on the immensity of the eternal becomings, ourselves those becomings, we contemplate, hushed and glad, the eternity of the immobile Silence where all is realised in the perfect Consciousness and immutable Existence, miraculous gate of all the unknown that is beyond.
"Then is the veil torn, the inexpressible Glory uncovered, and, suffused with the ineffable Splendour, 'we' turn back towards the world to bring it the glad tidings.”¹
"O Thou wonderful Unknown, Thou who hast not yet manifested Thyself, Thou who awaitest the auspicious hour and who hast sent us on earth to prepare Thy ways, all the elements of this being cry to Thee, 'May Thy Will be done', and give themselves to Thee in a supreme and unconquerable élan.
"Enfold this sorrowful Earth with Thy puissant arms of mercy, impregnate her with the beneficent outflowings of Thy infinite love.
"I am Thy puissant arms of mercy. I am the vast bosom of Thy limitless love....The arms have enfolded the sorrowful Earth and tenderly press it to the generous heart, and slowly a kiss of supreme benediction settles on this atom in conflict: the kiss of the Mother that consoles and heals.” ²
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, October 14, 1914.
² ibid., August 11, 1914.
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But even this double identification, which is the secret of the Mother's mission on earth and her supreme power to act as an intermediary between the Spirit and Matter, does not ensure an easy accomplishment of her work. The stark resistance of Matter, the stubborn refusal of darkness to admit Light, the inertia of the long-established habits of Nature oppose the double movement of liberation and transformation, and in spite of the divine pledge and the prophetic experiences of the Mother, the work seems well-nigh impossible.
"O my sweet Master, why hast Thou asked me to leave my blessed place in Thy heart and return to the earth to attempt a realisation which everything seems to prove impossible ?...What dost Thou expect from me that Thou hast torn me away from my divine and marvellous contemplation and plunged me again into this dark world in conflict?”¹
The anarchy and anguish of the present world find a, poignant. expression in the following words of the Mother :
"Darkness has descended upon Earth, dense, violent, victorious ...All is sorrow, panic and destruction in the physical world, and the splendour of the light of Thy Love seems darkened by a veil of mourning.” ²
"O Lord, Lord, the whole Earth is convulsed; she groans and suffers, she is in anguish.. It must not be that all this suffering has fallen upon her in vain, grant that all this blood which has been poured out may produce a more rapid germination of all the seeds of beauty, light and love which have to flower and cover the Earth with their rich harvest. From the depth of this abyss of darkness, the integral terrestrial being cries to Thee that Thou mayst give it air and light; it stifles, wilt Thou not come to its aid ?” ³
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, August l6,1914.
² ibid., September 4, 1914.
³ ibid., August 21, 1914.
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But the work, the tremendous, transfiguring work has to be accomplished : Matter has to be churned and delivered of the Spirit it holds imprisoned in itself, and darkness has to be lashed into Light, for, the aspiration of the Earth for the "benediction of Thy illumination and the beatitude of Thy Love" must be realised. And such, too, is the decree of the Divine: "Thou hast said that the Earth would die; and she will die to its old ignorance. Thou hast said that the Earth would live, and she will live in the renewal of Thy Power.” Such, too, again, are the signs betokening the longed-for Advent:
"This sorrowful world kneels before Thee, O Lord, in mute supplication; this tortured Matter nestles at Thy feet, its last, its sole refuge; and so imploring Thee, it adores Thee, Thee whom it neither knows nor understands. Its prayer rises like the cry of one in a last agony; that which is disappearing feels confusedly the possibility of living again in Thee; the Earth awaits Thy decree in a grandiose prostration. Listen, listen; its voice implores and supplicates Thee...What will be Thy decree, what is Thy sentence ?' O Lord of Truth, the individual world blesses Thy Truth which it knows not yet, but which it calls, and to which it adheres with all the joyful energy of its living forces.
"Death has passed, vast and solemn, and all fell into a religious silence during its passage. A superhuman beauty has appeared on the earth.
"Something more marvellous- than the most marvellous bliss has made felt the impress of its Presence.”¹
According to the Mother, the Earth is the epitome of the universe. All the cosmic principles, powers, and potentialities are concentrated here, those of light as well as those of darkness and evil, and a long-drawn, eventful battle has been raging between these contrary forces for the conquest and possession of this evolutionary planet, which is destined to be the scene of the most perfect manifestation of the Divine. It is, therefore, incumbent on us, as children of the mother Earth, to help her
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 7, 1915.
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realise her inmost truth and fulfil her destiny by a complete and definitive victory over the opposing forces. Stricken and sorrowful, enveloped in the darkness of inconscience, but fraught with glorious possibilities, the Earth waits in mute and patient aspiration for the birth of a new Force, "unknown to her till now," the Force that will unseal her heart and set flowing the streams of divine glories. The ageless sorrow of the Earth is not a curse, but a blessing in disguise—it is the greatest spur to evolution, to the transcendence of the inert and murky origin. It is, to quote Sri Aurobindo, "the red and bitter seed of the raptures seven."¹The obscure, dumb, anguished Earth is not a hopeless derelict doomed to perdition; she has a might and a light which, once enkindled, can overcome all obstacles and justify the poet's assertion :
I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven...
By me the last finite, yearning, strives
To reach the last infinity's unknown. ²
The self-manifestation of the Divine in transformed Matter, the outflowing of His splendours in terrestrial life, the unimpeded fulfilment of His Will and purpose in a New Creation, the evolution of the supramental race of men and the establishment of the Life Divine, the life of inalienable unity and harmony and dynamic peace—this, then, is the destiny of the mother Earth. Neither wars nor cataclysms can baulk her of it, neither disasters nor surging darkness. Whatever the chaos and catastrophic conflicts of the present, if one steps behind the heaving surface, one is sure to discover an urge for Unity, an urge for Peace, and an insistent urge for spiritual fulfilment. This triple urge is the fermenting seed of the future efflorescence. The hectic heat and heave will subside, the greed and hate and insatiable power-lust will be transformed into love and harmony, and mankind will live as a single family of the children of Light, doing God's work and serving God's ends on earth.
¹ Collected Poems and Plays, Vol. II.
² ibid.
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In many a Prayer the Divine asks the Mother to "turn towards the earth”, and warns her that "the time of a small, tranquil, uniform and peaceful life will be over. There will be effort, danger, the unforeseen, insecurity, but also intensity.” "Thou wert made for this role. After having agreed for long years to forget it completely, because the time had not come and also because thou wert not ready, awake now to the consciousness that it is very truly thy role and that it was for this that thou wert created.” In obedience to the divine Will and in order to accomplish her mission, the Mother had to descend into the very matrix of the Earth, the frozen core of tenebrous Matter, and invoke from there a descent of God's delivering Grace. Her Prayer rushed up towards the Divine and, as she describes it, "from the depths of the abyss I beheld Thee in Thy radiant splendour; Thou didst appear and Thou saidst to me ; 'Lose not courage, be firm, be confident,—1 COME’.”
Here is the pledge and prophecy of the divine fulfilment., of the destiny of the Earth who "seems to be passing through a decisive crisis."
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MANKIND can be divided into four categories from the standpoint of a goal of life. The first category comprises the preponderant bulk of men who never think of any goal of life, but are content to live from moment to moment with an un- questioning submission to the blind drive of fickle desires and the urgent demands of conventions and contingencies. They are born, they grow, they develop and imbibe traits and tendencies, they labour and succeed, and fail and suffer, and are whisked away unawares under an imperious summons, they know not why and where. Their crowns and crosses roll together in the dust while they, the travellers, depart for a while to return to this earth again—and again to seek fresh laurels and suffer fresh martyrdoms. Every time a new stage is set and a new role assigned to each of them; something is worked out once more, they know not what, through the tangled knots of combining and conflicting elements. A groping and a gamble in the hinterlands, and an aimless drift and a restless vagrancy on the surface—this is their life.
It is not that this category is made up of the waifs and off-scourings of humanity, — many strong and sensible men are also found in it; and not that they are all easy-going, unambitious men either, shirking the responsibilities and shrinking from the hazards of life. Some of them may be intrepid men, avid of adventure and courageous in confronting difficulties; but what distinguishes the men of this category is the lack of a vision of a goal of life and the absence of a steady endeavour for its realization. Their life is a vicious circle, and they do not know and never pause to think that it can have a definite issue or a divine purpose. Petty and provisional objectives are fixed upon by some, such as excellence or eminence in a particular field of action, fame and power and wealth; but there is no perception of an ultimate goal bound up with the harmonious perfection of all or most human parts, and the most complete fulfilment of life's deepest yearnings.
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The second category is constituted by those who are seeking for a goal, but have not yet found it. Even though they live apparently like the men of the first category, swayed by desires and moulded by the opinions of others, they are vaguely or acutely aware of a want, a deficiency or a lacuna which gnaws at the centre of their being and turns the wine of life into gall and wormwood. Inwardly they fret and fumble for an issue out of the clamours and constraints of their ambiguous days and long for something which will give them an unalloyed freedom and felicity. Their discontent ruffles the tenor of their lives and discovers a thorn in every rose of pleasure, and yet, as they will realise later, it is the herald of a wholesome change and the only spur to self-transcendence and the conquest of the hidden secret of existence.
To the third category belong those who have glimpsed or envisaged some goal and advance, slowly or swiftly, according to their capacity, towards it. This category breaks off into diverse units proceeding in diverse directions. Some canter to a near and comparatively easy goal; some, drawn by a higher and wider idealism, strive for a greater and more difficult consummation. A selfless service of one's society or country or of humanity, the spreading of the gospel of peace and harmony, the dissemination of lofty truths, and the imparting of true cultural education are some of the ethical goals they endeavour to pursue They renounce most of their personal desires and try to rise superior to the formations of their lower nature, so that their life may get out of the rut of vital-physical preoccupations and emerge into some kind of transparent purity, freedom and noble beneficence. Some go even beyond these shining ideals, finding them rather lacking in any fullness and finality, and sacrifice their all to discover and realize the soul or the Spirit, the Brahman or the Divine. This is a goal which alone seems to them worth attaining, the rest appearing as unsubstantial or illusory. The fathomless peace of the Eternal or the unutterable ecstasy of the Godhead gives a profound satisfaction to the deeper parts of their being and carries with it a limpid freedom and finality which preclude any further quest or seeking. Most of the
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sacred writings of the world enjoin upon men to seek only the immortality and infinity of the Spirit and give up all other thought. An exclusive pursuit of the ineffable Reality or the supreme Knowledge or Truth has, therefore, been the dominant spiritual note for many a century, and claimed the absolute loyalty of some of the rarest men in the world. But even the liberation of the individual soul or the realization of the immutable Eternal, or the bliss of the divine embrace in the depths of the being may seem to some to be a falling short, and not the supreme fulfilment. Something more is wanted, something more comprehensive and complete, something that is real not only to the inner or ingathered consciousness, but also to the outermost active personality of man, and patent and palpable even to his physical senses.
The fourth category consists of those exceptional souls who hunger for the highest possible perfection and fulfilment in life. They are born with a sense of the indivisible unity of existence and cannot rest satisfied with any experience that cuts up this unity into pairs of opposites: Spirit and Matter, Light and Life, One and Many, Reality and Appearance, etc. And the unity they aspire after is not only the eternal and essential unity of all existence, but also the unity that breathes and blooms in opulent rainbow splendour even in all that is fleeting and phenomenal. The essential and the expressional aspects of the one Reality are felt by them as eternal correlates and seizable by an englobing realization. Besides, they feel that the expressional aspect is not a confused blur of teeming elements, but a real cosmos, an ordered evolution, a mounting harmony, self- conscious, self-fulfilling and invincibly purposive. But what has been up to now only a feeling and a vague, if insistent, aspiration in this direction, is luminously revealed by the Mother as the very goal of human life and the central secret of the soul's descent into human birth.
Of what use would be man if he was not made to throw a bridge between that which eternally is, but is not manifested, and that which is manifested, between all the transcendences, all the splendors
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of the divine life and all the obscure and sorrowful ignorance of the material world? Man is the intermediary between That which has to be and that which is; he is a bridge thrown over the abyss, he is the great X as the cross, the quaternary link. His true abode., the effective seat of his consciousness, should be in the intermediate world at the joining point of the four arms of the cross, where all the infinity of the Unknowable comes to take precise form for being projected into the multitudinous manifestation,
This centre is the seat of supreme love and perfect consciousness, of pure and total knowledge. Establish there, O Lord, those who can, who must and who will serve Thee truly, so that Thy work may be done, the bridge may be definitively established and Thy forces may spread untiringly in the world.”¹
In this Prayer the Mother sets up a goal, outlines a destiny before mankind, which surpasses its highest imagination, and is destined to fulfil its widest and deepest aspiration. Man has to be a bridge between That which eternally is, but is not manifested, and that which is manifested. High above, beyond the frontiers of Time and Space, are the ineffable and unthinkable transcendences and infinitudes of the Unmanifest, and below, at the polar end, are the obscure, travailing expanses of the material existence, ignorant and sorrowful. Man must raise himself out of the lower yoke of desires and passions, ascend to the peak of his being, now veiled from his mental consciousness, and take his effective seat in the intermediate world from where he can canalize and conduct the golden stream of God's descending Light for the illumination and transfiguration of the whole of his earthly nature. He is "the great X as the cross, the quaternary link". Body, life, the psychic being (soul), and the mind constitute his quaternity. The first two link him to the manifested world and make him its representative and medium of self-expression, and the last two raise him beyond himself and beyond the universe and unite him with the eternal Unmanifest. He is thus created to bridge the yawning gulf between Matter and Spirit and be the great reconciler and unifier of
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, August 29, 1914.
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what appears as eternal opposites in creation. His birth here is not a chance caprice of Nature or a vain error. If he has come down into the material world, it is certainly not to run away from it for good and all, leaving it in its distressing darkness, but to illumine and transform it and render it an abode of the Divine. The overstress on the individual salvation was a passing phase of human aspiration when the spiritual vision was contracting and the spiritual force receding before the advancing tide of materialism. The great primeval prayer of the human heart is, in the words of the Rig Veda, "Become high-uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in us the things of the Godhead.”¹¹
Manifestation of the Godhead, implicit in the soul of every man, is then the goal of human life. Man has to exceed his present ignorant humanity and establish himself in the intermediate world "at the joining point of the four arms of the cross where all the infinity of the Unknowable comes to take precise form for being projected into the multitudinous manifestation". This intermediate world is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind, the immense manufactory of definite forms and the source of all life's distinctions and diversities. Securely seated in that effulgent world of infinite creativity he, the jivanmukta, will act and live :
"Only to bring God's forces to waiting Nature,
To help with wide-winged peace her tormented labour
And heal with joy her ancient sorrow,
Casting down light on the inconscient darkness”² ²
Man has to combine in himself, because it is the Divine in him who combines in Himself, the transcendent, the universal, and the individual. His individuality is meant to be a focal Point and expressive facet of the universal and the transcendent. He is destined to be at once the golden crown of the evolutionary Nature, who began her ascensive spiral from the inert Inconscient,
Vamadeva—Rig Veda IV.
Sri Aurobindo : Collected Poems and Plays.
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and the most complete and creative embodiment of the descending Love, Light and beatific Force of Sachchidananda upon earth.
It is a commonplace of spiritual philosophy that God is the ultimate goal of life, and it has also been an experience of countless men, purchased at the cost of many a cruel pang and bitter remorse and cheerless roving in the wilderness of the world. Even the politicians of today, who have perforce to ply a trade in blustering falsehood and burnished hypocrisy, take the name of God and implore His protection at the crises and junctures of their lives. All the hackneyed cant of rationalism is hushed, and the pride of bolstered-up personality falls to the ground when, at a crucial moment, the soul of man turns to its eternal 'Master. Even rank atheism sometimes betrays a tremor or a glimmer of faith, a pin-point of hope and trust upon which, as upon a rock of safety, it can rest its tired head in the midst of an unspeakable agony of doubt. God is not only the friend and refuge of the poor and the weak, but also the secret guide and deliverer of the high and mighty.
But all has not been said even when God is affirmed as the goal of life. God—yes, of course, but what do we mean by God ? Is God only a static, transcendent, nameless Reality to which the soul has to climb and cease ? Is the upward ascent the sole legitimate movement of the aspiring human consciousness, and can it affirm a retreat to its Source as its only goal ? Has the soul of man taken upon itself the burden of terrestrial birth only to fling it on the wayside and run back to the Incommunicable ? Is not there any glorious denouement of this long toil and travail upon earth ? The naked soul beating a precipitate retreat to its Maker may rejoice, but:
"O Soul, it is too early to rejoice!
Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,
Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;
But where hast thou thrown self's mission and self's power?
On what dead bank on the eternal's road?
One was within thee who was all the world,
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What hast thou done for His purpose in the stars ?
Escape is not the victory and the crown!
Something thou earnest to do from the Unknown,
But nothing is finished and the world goes on,
Because only half God's cosmic work is done.
Only the everlasting No has neared
And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:
But where is the Lover's everlasting Yes,
And immortality in the secret heart?...
A black veil has been lifted, we have seen
The mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord;
But who has lifted up the veil of light
And who has seen the body of the King?...
To free the self is but a radiant pace;
Here to fulfil Himself was God's desire.”¹
The goal towards which the Mother would have us advance is just this fulfilling of God in the world. So, when she speaks of the integral union with the Divine, she means a union out of which will pour, as from an inexhaustible fountain. His Love and Light and blissful Force upon this obscure material world.
"O divine Mother, Thy march is triumphal and uninterrupted, He who unites with Thee in an integral love journeys unceasingly towards vaster and vaster horizons, towards a completer and completer realization, leaping from peak to peak in the splendour of Thy light to the conquest of the marvellous secrets of the Un- known and their integral manifestation.” ²
The Mother never tires of insisting on manifestation, the manifestation or revelation of the Divine in Matter, the shaping of His perfect Form in the clay. This is, according to her, the Work of all works, the Goal of all goals.
"My sole aspiration is to know Thee better and serve Thee
¹ Sri Aurobindo : Savitri, Book III, Canto II.
² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother,
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better every day.”¹ Knowledge, Power, Love, Union—all are harnessed to bring about the manifestation which is the purpose of God in creation.
"Let the pure perfume of sanctification bum always, rising higher and higher, and straighter and straighter, like the ceaseless prayer of the integral being, desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee.”²
So long as one is in the material world, living the material life in a physical body, one cannot lead the life of an absorbed contemplative—the ineluctable necessities of this life will constantly pluck at his elbow and remind him again and again of the work he has to accomplish and the debt he has to discharge. He may elect to be stone-deaf and content himself with s clumsy compromise—a radiant serenity and silence within, and a lurid hush without; but he can never arrive in this way at a conquest of the evils of life and a victorious vindication of the omnipotence of the Spirit.
"Even he who might have arrived at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude, could only have done so by extracting himself from his body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have abandoned it to itself; by a misguided mysticism, by the attraction of supraphysical splendours, by the egoistic desire of being united with Thee for his personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the reason of his earthly existence, he would have refused cowardly to accomplish his mission to redeem and purify Matter. To know that a part of our being is perfectly pure, to commune with that purity, to be identified with it, can be useful only if we subsequently utilize this knowledge for hastening the earthly transfiguration, far accomplishing Thy sublime work.”³
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.
² ibid., March 13, 1913.
³ ibid., June 15, 1913,
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What fire-flakes of words to kindle the consciousness of man into the right perception of his goal and the right aspiration for its attainment !
Dwelling on the right attitude man should take for the progressive attainment of his goal, the Mother says, "To be constantly in search of Thee in everything, to will to manifest Thee better in every circumstance—in this attitude is to be found supreme peace, perfect serenity, true contentment. In it life blooms, widens, spreads out so magnificently, in such majestic surges that no storm can any more trouble it.”¹
The main cause of the human misery, ideological confusion and colossal dissipation of energy in the present world is the lack of a definite goal of life. Men have chosen to be flotsam and jetsam upon the tempestuous ocean of life. Theirs is a wandering without an aim, a hopeless, rudderless drift. Depolarized, deflected from the true course, deluded by appearances and seduced by contrary attractions, they dance "like puppets at the end of threads held they know not by whom or by what. When will they take the time to sit and draw inwards, to collect themselves and open that inner door which hides from them Thy priceless treasures. Thy infinite boons?—How painful and miserable seems to me their life of ignorance and obscurity, their life of foolish agitation and profitless dissipation, when a single spark of Thy sublime light, a single drop of Thy divine love can transform this suffering into an ocean of joy /"²
"Give peace and light to them all, O Lord; open their blinded eyes and their obscured understanding; calm their useless torments and futile cares. Turn their regard away from themselves and give them the joy of consecration to Thy work without calculation or mental reserve. Let Thy beauty blossom in everything, awaken Thy love in all hearts, so that Thy eternally progressive order may be realized upon earth and Thy harmony spread till the day when all will be Thyself in perfect purity and peace.
"Oh! may all tears be dried, all sufferings relieved, all anguish
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother,
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disappear, and may a calm serenity dwell in the hearts of men and a potent certitude strengthen their minds. May Thy life circulate in all as a regenerating flood and may all turn towards Thee to draw in this contemplation energy for every victory.”¹
Will not man in his present predicament and perplexity hearken to the Mother's call of love and turn to the Divine to make Him the Pole-star and His Will the single pilot of his life ? Will he not awake to the reason of his earthly existence, to the glory of his mission here, and grow into "the great X, the quaternary link," joining God and Nature, Spirit and Matter, Light and Life, Heaven and Earth ? Will he not become the gold-and-blue bridge, the intermediary between "That which has to be and that which is", the flame-channel at once of the highest aspiration of the sorrowful earth and the redeeming and transforming Grace of the Divine ? The great goal to which the Mother beckons him is a double fulfilment by a double identification—a dynamic identification not only with the transcendent Fount of all existence, but also with its perennial, rapturous cosmic Flood; and a fulfilment of his integral being in the Divine and the fulfilment of the Divine in his integral being upon earth.
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THE SOUL OR THE PSYCHIC (I)
IF we probe deep into our nature, we cannot fail to discover that behind the unceasing flux of its constituent elements there is a constant thirst for infinity and eternity. This thirst can be detected even in the very grain of the elements themselves. It is this secret thirst or yearning that is the source of hope which sustains us even in the midst of our worst trials. Our instinctive fear of death is an inverted hope of immortality. Our desires strain after an infinity of satisfaction. We covet a particular thing or a particular enjoyment, and when that is obtained, our desires, instead of ceasing, fully satisfied, increase in intensity and run after further satisfactions. Our emotions like love and hate seem to be limitless and unfathomable. Our sensations, likewise, betray no end or term of their lust for pleasure. Our thoughts, above all, wing and soar beyond the confines of our sense-mind, exploring immeasurable spaces and surprising truths after truths which widen and enlighten our life and culture. All this proves—and even the most confirmed materialist cannot but perceive it— that there is something in us which has a divination of its infinity and immortality, and a conscious or subconscious urge towards it in life—a being, an entity or a principle, call it what you like, that does not perish with the perishing elements of our nature, an immortal inhabitant of this mortal tenement, a child of infinity in this fleeting, finite form. How shall we otherwise account for this thirst implanted in the depth of our consciousness for infinity and immortality, the ever-expanding horizons of our vision and aspiration, our ineradicable faith in an illimitable progression towards perfection ? How could a finite being, made wholly of finite elements and a fixed quantum of finite energies, dream of the infinite and reach after it ? The very perception of our finiteness, our mortality, our state of captivity in a world which imposes its iron laws upon us, and our anguished helplessness against the blind forces of nature that toss and torture our lives into any shapes they like—in
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the spiritual seekers this perception becomes acute and poignant —this very perception presupposes a consciousness somewhere within us, however dim and inchoate it may be, of a potential existence of infinite freedom and immortal bliss. We chafe against our finiteness only because we have an occult apprehension of infinity. Our struggle against death and disintegration is induced by a subconscious feeling that we are heirs to an undying life. Science advances forward to conquer more and more of knowledge and power, but what sustains and inspires its intrepid endeavours is nothing but a faith in the infinite potentialities of man. In fact, if life is evolving, if human culture is progressing in various directions, and the knowledge and power of man are extending their frontiers and their sway over the forces that oppose them, it is only due to the fundamental faith in the heart of man that he can achieve everything, and that nothing can ultimately prevail against his will, which is indomitable in its infinite force. It is at once an evidence and affirmation of the principle of infinity which man contains deep within him.
But what is that in man which exhales this sense of infinity and immortality ? The materialist does not know it. Too exclusively preoccupied with the fugitive elements of his life and nature and the outer aspects and processes of things, he does not care to inquire if there is anything within him which, defying defeat, death and destruction, leads him from behind a veil—an invisible pilot, a living fount of perennial hope and strength and inspiration. If ever a beam of light penetrates into his outer consciousness from behind the veil, or a still small voice breathes into his heart a message of ethereal import, he muffles it lest it disturb his complacent scepticism, the pride of his culture and civilisation. But the salvation of materialistic science lies in being scientific enough to recognise that besides the surface of man and things and Nature it has so successfully explored, there are far-flung uplands and hinterlands and netherlands which it has yet to explore; depths upon depths of human consciousness and nature, and even of material nature, beckon to its adventurous spirit. It must march forward to the
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conquest of the unknown with the same unflagging will and energy by which it has already conquered many a recondite secret of the known. For, indeed, the unknown is not unknowable, and even the known cannot be perfectly known except in reference to the vast unknown that enfolds, informs, sustains and directs it. The latest trend in scientific thought, wobbling between physics and metaphysics, suggests the beginning of the great venture.
In the immortal words of Maitreyi in the Upanishad we find a pointed reference to that which is imperishable in us : "What shall I do with that which will not make me immortal ?” She refused her husband's offer of wealth and property, and ex- pressed her firm resolve to follow him on his quest of the eternal Reality. For she knew that life is lived in vain if death is not conquered in it. She was athirst for the Infinite and Eternal, the one, imperishable Reality of all existence. Christ's teaching, though often quoted, is hardly understood by the majority of those who call themselves Christians. "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ?" These are no mere words of visionary idealism, but an impassioned exhortation to man, to every man in the world, to know his real self,¹ his real, eternal "I", and get beyond death and dissolution. What man knows and cherishes as his "I", that for which he sweats and bleeds, outrages his conscience and blackens his life and nature, is but a flux, a changing fabric appearing and disappearing in the tides of Time, as science can very well convince him. Neither his body nor his life, his thoughts nor his feelings, his sensations nor his actions are really his—they are waves and eddies of universal energies passing through him as they pass and repass through all created beings. As the Mother vividly puts it : "Before the true self is known, you are a public place, not a being. There are so many clashing forces
¹"There is a root or depth in thee from whence all these faculties come forth as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of a tree. This depth is called the centre, the fund or bottom of the soul. This depth is the Unity, the Eternity.. .of thy soul." —William Law
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working in you...”¹ "Your present individuality is a very mixed thing, a series of changes which yet preserves a certain continuity, a certain sameness or identity of vibration in the midst of all flux. It is almost like a river which is never the same and yet has a certain definiteness and persistence of its own. Your normal self is merely a shadow of your true individuality which you will realise only when this normal individual which is differently poised at different times, now in the mental, then in the vital, at other times in the physical, gets into contact with the psychic and feels it as its real being.”² The psychic is the real, abiding core of man's shifting outer structure. That is his real "I". To discover and realise the psychic or the soul must be his first business in life, as Socrates always insisted, and as every religion or spiritual discipline invariably teaches. Science, as Bertrand Russell admits, is incapable of furthering man's genuine progress, simply because it cannot remove his pitiful ignorance of himself and enlighten him on the true ends of life. "I mean by wisdom ! right conception of the ends of life. This is something which science in itself does not provide. Increase of science by itself therefore, is not enough to guarantee any genuine progress.' Genuine progress can come only by finding the soul, the in extinguishable divine spark we carry within us. "The psychic being is also a great discovery to be made requiring as mud fortitude and endurance as the discovery of new continents."³
The Psychic Presence and the Psychic Being
The Divine Consciousness which is involved here in Matter is immanent as a Presence in all that exists. In every living being on earth this consciousness becomes a psychic presence, a nucleus of the psychic being. "With regard to the evolution upwards, it is more correct to speak of the psychic presence than the psychic being. For it is the psychic presence which little by little becomes the psychic being. In each evolving form there is this presence, but it is not individualised. It is something
¹ & ² Words of the Mother, 3rd Series.
³ The Mother on Education,
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which is capable of growth and follows the movement of the evolution."¹ The psychic presence, a spark of the Divine Consciousness, is the only thing that is permanent in the impermanent forms we assume from life to life. It gathers round itself all sorts of elements for the formation of an individuality, the psychic being, for individualisation is the first decisive step evolution takes in its creation of diversity. But that diversity may not lead to disorder, it proceeds on the basis of the unity of the Divine Consciousness, and uses the psychic being as an immortal, living individual unrolling infinite variation on the bosom of a conscious unity. The psychic being is the living temple of the Divine on earth, and if we aspire to realise the Divine, it can be only through a realisation of the psychic in us. "Below the human level there is, ordinarily, hardly any individual formation—there is only this (psychic) presence more or less.”²
The Origin and Nature of the Psychic Being
We have already seen that it is the one, immanent, indivisible Divine Consciousness that, dwelling in each living form on earth as a psychic presence, develops a psychic personality and becomes the psychic being, an individualised entity representing an aspect of the Divine and meant to manifest that aspect in its earthly life. There is a general belief that the soul comes down from the Divine and gets entangled in the meshes of karma in the material world, and that its salvation lies in its realisation of its innate freedom from karma and its return to from where it came. The Mother does not subscribe to this age-old view. According to her, the soul or the psychic is "a child of the earth.”³ It is here, out of the inconscience of Matter that the involved Divine Consciousness emerges and, remaining immanent in all, becomes a soul or psychic in every living form, and it is this soul that is the indestructible centre of our evolving individuality; in fact, the only real individual in us. Essentially
³ It is, at the same time, a child of the Infinite.
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the psychic being is the Divine Consciousness individualised, immaculate in its purity and conscious of the Divine in itself; but it is shrouded in the obscurity of Matter in the beginning —a thin, quivering spark of fire, a pulsing ray of consciousness in the Cimmerian darkness of the material world. Then it evolves little by little till the spark becomes a flame, a tongue of fire rising straight to the Divine. As it evolves and awakens, it begins to radiate its influence to all the parts of our nature, and it is only because of its growing influence that our heart or mind feels an aspiration for something higher and purer than what ordinary life can give us—an unconditioned peace or bliss, an infinite existence of freedom and harmony, the Divine Reality. All that contributes to sweetness and beauty, to purity and perfection derives from the psychic. The very principle of perfection or the urge to self-transcendence that we feel within us comes from the psychic or the soul. Even those who deny the soul cannot escape its purifying and ennobling influence. But the influence remains indirect, and is impeded in its action so long as the soul has not awakened enough to stamp itself upon the outer parts of our nature. The awakened soul can turn even the rankest scepticism into faith and convert a determined materialist into an ardent seeker of Spirit. "Once we are securely conscious of the true soul in us which is always surrendered to the Divine, all bondage ceases. Then incessantly life begins afresh, the past no longer cleaves to us.”¹ This contact with the psychic being in us, and the change of consciousness that results from it are called new birth. "To be reborn means to enter, first of all into our psychic consciousness where we are one with the Divine and eternally free from the reactions of karma.”²
Till the psychic is awake and in front, it is the ego in us that is the leader of our life. The desires and impulses of our vital (prana) and the ideas, opinions and preferences of our mental being are all egoistic in their nature and drive. If left to them- selves, they would never turn to the Divine, but perpetually spin round the ego. Born of the obscurity of Matter and nursed by subconscient energies, they multiply division and discord)
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and mechanically repeat the movements of the world forces. And the ego itself with which we are so completely identified and which we regard as our real "I", is but a creation and tool of ignorant Nature and subject to constant mutation. It is only when the psychic awakes that we can be said to be on the way to discovering our real individuality. It is only a contact with the soul and with the Divine in the soul that can make our life worth living, for, the soul gives not only meaning and significance to our life, but the right direction, and, finally, the right fulfilment. "All things are insignificant in ordinary life. The thoughts you think, the actions you do, the feelings you experience, all your movements have no significance at all, they possess no value. They belong to the superficial parts of your being, they come and pass away, like ripples on the sea, leaving no trace or effect in the depths. Only at a rare moment, if ever you come in contact with a corner of your soul, if something of that inmost consciousness touches or gazes at any limb of yours, that flash of a moment is the only significant thing that happens in the midst of all the useless mass that is your life. This is the only precious point and the rest a world of rubbish. To make your life significant, to give it its true meaning and value, you must then draw back from the surface trivialities and look for something else behind. You must go very deep indeed if things are to cease being insignificant.”¹
In the dust and heat of life's struggles, we hardly ever pause to reflect and ask ourselves whether there is any ulterior purpose and goal of our life, whether or not, indeed, there is something deep within us that whirls not in the vortex of Nature, that craves not in our cravings, suffers not in our sufferings, dies not in our death, but abides, calm and smiling, watching our Joys and griefs, watching our victories and defeats, and raying. out its influence, little by little, to turn our consciousness from the futile turmoil of the surface to the limpid peace and harmony of the depths, from the ignorance and discord and ugliness of the external world to the beauty and truth and happiness of the veiled domains of our being, from the passing show of
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Sri Nolini Kanta Gupta.
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appearances to the ever-lasting, all-enfolding Reality, the Divine. We, who brag of our knowledge and culture, are so blissfully ignorant of the very essence of our being, the reason of our existence, the infinite source of light and love and life we carry within us ! The soul, our inmost being, "is a centre of light and truth and knowledge and beauty and harmony which the Divine Self in each of you creates by His Presence, little by little; it is influenced, formed and moved by the Divine Consciousness of which it is a part and parcel. It is in each of you the deep inner being which you have to find in order that you may come in contact with the Divine in you. It is the intermediary between the Divine Consciousness and your external consciousness; it is the builder of the inner life; it is that which manifests in the outer nature the order and rule of the Divine Will. If you become aware in your outer consciousness of the psychic being within you and unite with it, you can find the pure Eternal Consciousness and live in it; instead of being moved by the ignorance as the human being constantly is, you grow aware of the presence of an eternal light and knowledge within you, and to it you surrender and are integrally consecrated to it and moved by it in all things.
"For your psychic being is that part of you which is already given to the Divine. It is its influence gradually spreading from within towards the most outward and material boundaries of yow consciousness that will bring about the transformation of your entire nature. There can be no obscurity here; it is the luminous part in you.”¹
"The psychic being is that which persists after death, because it is your eternal self; it is this that carries the consciousness forward from life to life.”²
Though the psychic being represents and manifests one particular aspect of the Divine, yet it is one with the Divine. It does not feel its own existence as separate from the universal existence. It lives in conscious unity with all. "You are conscious
¹ & ² Words of the Mother.
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there (in the psychic being) that your individuality is your own line of expression, but at the same time you know too that it is an expression objectifying the one universal consciousness.”¹ It is only the ego in us that, in its pitiful ignorance, denies the soul, denies God, denies everything that would deliver it from death and suffering. It is proud of its atheism, its agnosticism, its scepticism, and regards them as the hall-mark of a rationalistic culture. It continues in its willful blindness till the breath of the psychic passes over it, quickening it to a new aspiration and orienting its consciousness towards the Infinite and Eternal. For, sooner or later, the psychic must awake and the troubled night of our ignorance must pass for ever. The Divine in us wills to manifest.
The Mission of the Psychic Being
That the soul or psychic being has any mission to fulfil on earth is overlooked by almost all religions and philosophies. The general notion is that the soul has somehow got ensnared in Prakriti (Nature) or karma, and has, in consequence, to pass through numberless births and deaths, suffering the agonies incidental to them, and that its only business in life is to break out of the snare and retire to its unconditioned existence of perfect purity and freedom. This notion bypasses all question of the mission of the soul. It does not care to inquire why the soul, intrinsically pure and free and blissful, should have got enmeshed in Prakriti, karma or samskaras. The fact of the bondage is taken for granted, and escape or flight is proclaimed as the summum bonum of human life. It is hardly realised that this notion is a tacit repudiation of most forms of theism, particularly those in which elements of monistic teleology predominate. The Mother gives us an original exposition of the mission of the psychic.
We have already learnt from the Mother how the psychic being is formed, how, essentially one with the Divine Consciousness and partaking of its infinity and immortality, it
¹ Words of the Mother.
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yet develops by the process of evolution an individuality of its own which becomes a particular radiating centre of the Divine Consciousness. It manifests an individual aspect of the universal and transcendent Divine. The object of its passing through births is not only awakening and liberation from the thraldom of Nature and recovery of its essential consciousness, but also a progressive preparation of its nature parts of mind, life and body for an eventual manifestation of the Divine and the fulfilment of His purpose on earth.
"The Psychic is like the wire between the generator and the lamp. What is the generator and what is the lamp, or rather, who is the generator and who the lamp ? The Divine is the generator and the body, the visible being, the lamp. The function, then, of the Psychic is to connect the two. In other words, if there were no Psychic in Matter, Matter would not come in direct contact with the Divine.”¹
Is it not a flood of new light thrown upon the role the psychic being is meant to play upon earth ? The psychic being is, we are told, a living link, a bridge, between the Divine and brute Matter. "It is a specialty of the earth alone." Though the Divine immanence is there in all beings and objects in all the worlds of the universe, the psychic being is only in the beings of the earth, and in no other. And among the beings of the earth, it is man alone who has the rare, glorious privilege of achieving a full efflorescence of the psychic being in himself and thereby becoming a perfect channel of divine manifestation. Integral divine transformation, integral divine union and manifestation of which even the gods are not capable, are the inevitable destiny of man on earth, thanks to the presence of the psychic in him.² The psychic is "the direct infusion of a purifying and redeeming agent into the most obscure and unconscious Matter
² "...Beings from other worlds, worlds of what are known as demi-gods or even gods, beings from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, are anxious to take a physical body upon earth so that they may experience the Psychic, as they do not possess it".
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to waken it by degrees towards the Divine Consciousness, the Divine Presence, to the Divine Himself. It is the psychic presence that makes of man an exceptional being...But to tell the truth, tie does not seem to have profited much by it. He does not look like considering his virtue as something very desirable. He prefers to it his mental ideas, he prefers to it his vital demands and he prefers to it his physical habits. I do not know how many of you have read the Bible. But there is a story that I used to like always. There were two brothers, Esau and Jacob. Esau had gone out hunting and felt tired and hungry. He came back home and found his brother preparing a dish. He asked Jacob to feed him. Jacob said he would give him food if he, Esau, sold his birthright to him. Esau said, of what use is the birth-right to me now, and sold it to his brother. You understand the significance ? You can take it quite in the superficial way. But I took it differently. The birth-right is the right to be son of God. And Esau was quite ready to give up his divine right for a mess of pottage. It is an old story, but it is eternally true.”¹ It is the worst tragedy that can happen to mankind—and it happens perpetually—that he sells away his soul, his divine birth-right to be a son of God, for a mere mess of earthly pottage ! If he only turned to the psychic within him, believing that it is his own true, essential and immortal divine self, and that the external parts of his being are all a flux of ephemeral elements, that would be the end of his ignorant struggles and miseries. The psychic would, then, gradually become the overt leader of his life, linking his external consciousness to the Divine Consciousness and manifesting in his outer nature "the order and rule of the Divine Will.” It is the psychic being that infuses its influence into all the parts of our nature and transforms them. It is the psychic from which we receive intimations of freedom, purity, infinity and immortality. It is the psychic that enlivens us with a sense of beauty and makes us participate in the termless ecstasy of the Divine Existence. It is the psychic that inflames us with love and devotion for the Divine, and compels the discords of our life to dissolve into order and harmony.
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta.
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The unity, equality, happy concord and cooperation which the progressive modern mind is groping after, the coordinated progress of mankind towards a nobler existence, a higher perfection to which it is dimly aspiring, can be realised only by a direct flow of the Divine Force into us through a full-fledged psychic being. No moral precept, no emotional or humanitarian appeal, but the psychic alchemy alone can change the animal in man into a god. It is impossible to regard others as others after a perfect realisation of the psychic being—others become our own self. Conscious unity with all is of the very stuff of the psychic life. A dynamic union with the psychic unites us with the Divine, and with the whole universe in the Divine. This union is the well-spring of universal love. "Live in the consciousness of the psychic centre, thus your will shall express the Divine’s Will alone and your transformed being will then be able to receive and manifest the Divine Love.”¹
What we know as faith in the Divine Presence everywhere and the Divine's power to heal and redeem all, is a gift of the psychic. It is nothing irrational or superstitious, as the callow rationalist would glibly assert, but a reflection upon our consciousness of the spontaneous knowledge of the psychic; for, the psychic knows and is one with the Divine by identity. It is small wonder, then, that faith moves mountains. For, behind the strong faith of a man, sustaining and fortifying it, stands the infinite omnipotence of the Divine to which nothing is impossible. To kindle faith and establish a conscious contact with the psychic within us is the first, indispensable preliminary to manifesting God in Matter, which is the mission of the psychic on earth.
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THE SOUL OR THE PSYCHIC (II)
How to Realise the Psychic?
IF it is true that the psychic is our true self, and that it is only when we identify ourselves with it that we can become real individuals, then it is obvious that nothing should be regarded as more pressingly important in life than the discovery and realisation of the psychic. Of what avail our humanitarian strivings, our struggles to reform others, to help others, to enlighten others, so long as we are ourselves unregenerate, helplessly tossed between the dualities of good and evil, success and failure, gain and loss, honour and dishonour, and pain and pleasure; so long as we are floundering in ignorance and torn between the conflicting tendencies of our heterogeneous being ? Self-realisation, which is the most pressing problem of our life, can be shelved for some time, for even a long time, if you will; but you cannot shelve it for ever. Your soul insists on being recognised and given an effective voice in your life. It is a subtle device of the ego— and it has its utility in the evolution of our being—to shift its focus of interest from its grossly selfish desires to the service of others; but whether it seeks petty personal satisfactions or the satisfaction of the collectivity, it remains essentially what it is—all that it does as a step to self-improvement is to rise from the restricted field of restless rajasic cravings to the comparative poise and wide, lucid outlook of the rajaso-sattwic nature. But the sattwic ego is even stronger than the rajasic ego, and, being justified in its own eyes and in the eyes of society, it is more difficult to get rid of. Many an honest philanthrope comes out of his benevolent obsessions, a disillusioned man, stung by the discovery of the corroding canker of the ego, the base self, in what he had fondly believed to be his selfless work. How can an action be selfless so long as our ego, the false self, has not faded in the eternal radiance of our true self, the psychic ? Deluded by the ego, we hug the illusion of disinterested work and drown
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the inner urges to self-discovery in the fervour of social and humanitarian activities; but however beneficial the activities may be, however much they may help the world and the development of our being, they are not an outcome of knowledge, and cannot, therefore, be a substitute for the action which wells out of the depths of the psychic. For, the activities of the psychic are directed by the Will of the Divine, and carry in them not only the fiat and force of the Divine, but also the light of His Knowledge, which knows what is best for the world and for each of its beings and things. To live in the psychic is to be in tune with the Divine Will and work in the unfaltering steps of Truth.
But how to discover and realise the psychic ? "How, you ask me, are we to know our true being ? Ask for it, aspire after it, want it as you want nothing else...All urge for perfection comes from it, but you are unaware of the source, you are not collaborating with it knowingly, you are not in identification with its light. Do not think that I refer to the emotional part of you when I speak of the psychic. Emotions belong to the higher vital, not to the pure psychic. The psychic is a steady flame that bums in you, soaring towards the Divine and carrying with it a sense of strength which breaks down all oppositions. When you are identified with it you have the feeling of the divine Truth—then you cannot help feeling also that the whole world is ignorantly walking on its head with its feet in the air.”¹
A constant and intense aspiration for the psychic, an ardent seeking for it at all times and in all that we do, and a simultaneous rejection of all desires and attachments and self-centred interests, is the best way to realise the psychic. Aspiration for the psychic is essentially an aspiration for the Divine, for the Divine dwells in the psychic, and our realisation of the psychic is the solitary gate of entry into the Presence of the Divine within us. "Concentrate in the heart. Enter into it; go within and deep and far, as far as you can. Gather all the strings of your consciousness that are spread abroad, roll them up and take a plunge and sink down. A fire is burning there, in the deep quietude of
¹ Words of the Mother, 3rd Series,
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your heart. It is the divinity in you—your true being. Hear its voice, follow its dictates.”¹ "In the depths of your consciousness is the psychic being, the temple of the Divine within you. This is the centre round which should come about the unification of all these divergent parts, all the contradictory movements of your being.”²
It is to be noted here that one may concentrate above the crown of the head or between the eyebrows; or, one may directly concentrate on the idea of the divine immanence in the world. There are as many ways and objects of concentration as there are aspects and poises of the Divine. But for the full realisation of the psychic, there is but one way—concentration in the deepest depths of the being, a plunge into the fathomless cave of the heart. And it is also to be noted that the total psychic realisation is indispensable for a dynamic union with the Divine and the transformation of nature.... "The central being lies in the heart and from the heart proceed all central movements—all dynamism and urge for transformation and power of realisation.” ³
Describing the most concrete and effective way in which the psychic can be discovered, the Mother says : "Very often at the beginning of sādhanā one has the impression as if the psychic being is shut up in a kind of shell or prison and it is that which prevents it from manifesting itself outside and coming into conscious and constant contact with the external consciousness, the surface being. In endeavouring to join with the psychic one feels exactly as if there was a wall in front which one must break through or there is a door which must be forced if one were to enter. If you can break through the wall, open the door, then the psychic being is freed and it can manifest itself externally.
"You sit in meditation before a closed door, as it were, heavy as a door of bronze. You sit still with a will that the door must open so that you may cross over to the other side. The entire concentration, the entire aspiration is gathered together and made to push and push against the door, push more and more with increasing
³ ibid,
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energy until all on a sudden the door gives way and you enter thrown as it were into the light. It is a powerful, unforgettable experience : you go through a sudden and radical change of consciousness, with an illumination that completely seizes hold of you, giving you the sensation that you have become another person. This is a very concrete and effective way of entering in contact with one's psychic being.”¹
One remembers in this connection the teaching of the Christ: "Knock, and it shall be opened unto thee.” It is the intense, unwavering sincerity of the will, the inflexible determination, the stubborn, indefatigable perseverance, vyavasāyātmikā buddhi, the indomitable courage and tireless patience with which the Buddha clove through the meshes of samskāras into the heart of Truth that are needed for the discovery and realisation of the psychic. One has to knock, and knock hard, and harder, till the door flies open, and the long-cherished treasure of our seeking stands gleaming before our eyes.
The Mother says that there is not one person in a million who has a conscious relation with his psychic being, even for a moment. "The psychic being can work from within, but, for the external being, in such an invisible and unconscious way as if it did not exist. In most cases, in almost all cases, in fact, the psychic being is asleep, as it were, not active at all, but in a kind of torpor.”² "A very sustained effort is needed to become conscious of one's psychic being. You would be considered very fortunate if you succeeded in doing so after having put in thirty years of assiduous labour.”³
The Mother says that when the intensity of loving aspiration reaches a flaming point, all of a sudden there takes place a reversal of consciousness, and one is no more what one was the moment before. "Everything changes in a second: you know, you are, you live, you see the unreality of what seemed so real.” One may have to wait for this moment "through days and
¹ Bulletin of Physical Education.
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months and centuries.” "But if you intensify your aspiration, the pressure becomes so great...that something veers round in your consciousness. Instead of being outside and trying to look inside, you are inside; and as soon as you are inside, all changes absolutely, completely. All that seemed to you true, natural, normal, real, tangible, all, all immediately appears to you as very grotesque, extremely funny, quite unreal, quite absurd. ”¹ You find yourself in the luminous depths of your being, reborn, as it were, into the unbanked light and peace and bliss of your eternal soul. "Yes, you have touched something that is supremely true and eternally beautiful, and that you never lose anymore.”² It may be that you cannot always remain stably and securely poised in that experience. There may be occasional lapses into the old consciousness of ignorance, division and discord, but something of the experience will always abide with you, and pull you out of the lapses and aberrations. "Once this reversal has happened, you can slip into the outer consciousness, you may, in dealing with others, fall back some- what into their ignorance and blindness, but always there will be something living, erect, that moves no more, until that thing enters everywhere, and the blindness disappears for ever.” ³ The experience of the psychic is something crucial and decisive, unforgettable and indubitable. It changes the orientation of the being and gives it a new vision, a new outlook, and a new aim to pursue in life. ”
In no yoga the complete psychic realisation is so much insisted upon as in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; for, the secret of divine fulfilment lies in the psychic, and also the key to the transformation of nature. It is true that the supreme transforming power comes from the Supermind, but for the descent of the supramental power, it is essential that the psychic should purify and unify the whole nature and remould it in its own image. Psychic transformation, as Sri Aurobindo says, must precede the other two transformations,
³ ibid.
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spiritual and supramental. Those schools of yoga which have as their aim an escape of the human soul from the material world into some state of Brahmic peace and silence, or into the rapt bliss of inner union and communion with the Divine, do not, as a rule, lay so much stress on a full and dynamic realisation of the psychic. According to them, the soul or the psychic has no mission here to fulfil, nor has it any necessity to transform the physical consciousness and nature of man. Such transformation is deemed rather Utopian and impracticable. But for the Integral Yoga, which has as its sole object a dynamic union with the Divine and a divine transformation of the entire human consciousness and nature, a complete and dynamic realisation of the psychic and a resultant psychicisation of the whole being is an indispensable prerequisite. It may be argued that the realisation of the soul or the psychic is common to most forms of the spiritual sadhana, and that it is no special feature of the Integral Yoga. But what is actually realised in the other yogas does not necessarily lead to the discovery of the mission of the psychic or the transformation of the physical nature. One usually stops short at one phase of the psychic realisation, the phase of passive peace and silence, as do Sankhya and Jainism; or, one may proceed through it, by a deepening and widening of the consciousness of peace and silence, to the realisation of the universal and transcendent Brahman. There is another phase at which one also stops short—the phase of love and devotion for the Divine in the heart. One may intensify this phase and enjoy a blissful union and communion with the Divine. The truth of the matter is that usually one realises only the static aspect of the psychic, and not the dynamic, or, eve before having a definite experience of the psychic, one may widen out into an experience of the Self, the silent, witness Purusha, detached from the working of nature and indifferent to it, udāsīnavadāsīnaḥ. There are different realisations possible, and unless we have a clear perception of their distinctive characteristics, we are likely to confound one with the other in our estimate of them, or lump them all together under the blanket term of self-realisation. Whatever that may be, we must not
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forget that the psychic has a specific mission to fulfil in the material world—it is the transformation of Matter, and the Epiphany of God in material life. It cannot, therefore, stop short at its own liberation, but securely established in it, must work for the fulfilment of its mission. It progress lies along a road which is interminable, indeed, infinite. It has to prepare its nature in such a way that it may express better and better the Divine's Will and the splendour of its purpose on earth. "It is not merely a matter of ameliorating the world. There are people who clomour for change of government, social reform and philanthropic work, believing that they can thereby make the world better. We want a new world, a true world, an expression of the Truth-Consciousness. And it will be, it must be—and the sooner the better. It should not, however, be just a subjective change. The whole physical life must be transformed. The material world does not want a mere change of consciousness in us. It says in effect: 'You retire into bliss, become luminous, have the divine knowledge; but that does not alter me. I still remain the hell I practically am!’ The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and make it an entirely new creation.”¹ And who will do it, if not the psychic ? For, the psychic is the only channel through which the Truth-Consciousness and the Truth-Force can flow down into Matter and transform it. This work of the psychic must necessarily be long and chequered. We can call it the psychic's post-liberation progress in the material world. And this, indeed, is its raison d'être. Its mission is bound up with the earth. Its presence in the world is a pledge of the earth's deliverance and transformation, of the establishment of Light in the kingdom of darkness, of unity and harmony in the hurtling arena of divisions and discord, of blissful immortality in this undisputed empire of death and suffering.
When the psychic is realised, it is our second birth, we attain to dwijattwa, we step into Brahminhood. A new sense of universality, of illimitable expansion, of termless continuity develops in us. We find our existence infinitely enlarged, our
¹Words of the Mother.
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consciousness illumined and extended beyond all horizons, our thoughts and feelings, delivered from their narrow moulds, embracing the whole world. "Then you decentralise, spread out, enlarge yourself; you begin to live in everything and in all beings; the barriers separating individuals from each other break down. You think in their thoughts, vibrate in their sensations, you feel in their feelings, you live in the life of all. What seemed inert suddenly becomes full of life, stones quicken, plants feel and mil and suffer, animals speak in a language more or less inarticulate, but clear and expressive; everything is animated with a marvellous consciousness without time and limit. And this is only one aspect of the psychic realisation. There are many others. All combine in pulling you out of the barriers of your egoism, the walls of your external personality, the impotence of your reactions and the incapacity of your will.”¹
The psychic experience is, as I have said above, indubitable —it carries with it a sense of absolute certainty, of unchallengeable authenticity. One knows without doubt that one is immortal; that one has always existed and will never cease to exist; that one assumes different names and forms in different lives, passes through various experiences, and grows and profits by them all, but remains essentially the same—the same luminous being of love and bliss, infinite and immortal. And he who has realised his psychic means every letter of what he says when he asserts that no price is too heavy to pay for this sublime experience, no sacrifice, no renunciation, no tapasya too difficult to make. The experience is revolutionary. It unseals a new vision, initiates a new life of glorious possibilities, cuts at the roots of sorrow and suffering, and excises death out of one's existence for ever. It is the bridge to immortality, as the Upanishad puts it.
Will not man, in his present crisis, turn his gaze inwards and discover his psychic, his real self, the eternal fount of love and light, the living ocean of peace and power, the potential architect of the kingdom of God upon earth ?
¹Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Education,
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THE Mother has many interesting and unconventional things to say about rebirth. She dispels the obscurity which surrounds this important subject, exposes the fraud or self-deception of those who retail entertaining stories of past lives, and gives a clear account of what happens to the soul after it has departed this life—through what worlds it passes, how it assimilates its past experiences and what is the process of its reincarnation. The careful reader will find the cloud of his misconceptions on this subject melting away under the glare of her categoric utterances; for her words spring from her own experiences and not from her speculative thought. As the problem of rebirth is of universal interest, the Mother's visions and experiences will be found to be very illuminating.
The original and ultimate rationale of reincarnation, according to the Mother, is not that the soul is entangled in the meshes of karma and has, in consequence, to pass through a series of births till it is liberated. Maya or karma or samskaras may be the apparent and ancillary cause of the soul's rebirth, but the real reason, the compelling cause and drive is the irrepressible urge in the soul for evolution. Originally a spark of the sempiternal Fire, the soul develops here in Matter into an individual being through the chequered process of rebirth, even as a new-born child grows into a man, .or a seed grows into a tree. The cycle of births and deaths is, therefore, an indispensable means of evolution, freely and voluntarily adopted by it. The pain and suffering incidental to this cycle is the inevitable price it has to pay for dispelling the darkness of inconscience and snapping the bonds of ignorance in which it is held. Pain is, indeed, nothing but a natural reaction of ignorance, of the little ego- bound personality of man, to those impacts of life which it fails to bear and assimilate. Suffering breaks asunder the moulds of thought and feeling, the hard shells of habits in which our being is so complacently imprisoned. It widens our consciousness and calls forth our latent strength. But if we go behind pain
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and suffering, behind the confederacy of untoward impacts and circumstances, we shall discover the organising and directing will of the soul, its will to grow, to develop by experience, to harmonise and unify the discordant elements of its instrumental nature, so that it can use it freely and masterfully for the work of the Divine in the material world. The developed soul does not hesitate to choose a life of pain and suffering, if it thinks that in that way it can accelerate its evolution.
Viewed in this light, birth ceases to be a mournful and meaningless episode, and death loses all its paralysing horror. Every incident of life, every pang of birth and death, all that we call chance (because we cannot probe beyond appearance and fate), everything is accepted by the soul, everything is grist to its evolutionary mill. It profits by every event in the long chain of its rebirths, whether the event is happy or unhappy, fortunate or unfortunate, according to the superficial standards of human ignorance. And since progress is possible only on earth, as all schools of Indian philosophy unanimously hold, birth and a long life of dedicated action are always welcome, for they are always conducive to the soul's evolution and a means of its self- expression...kurvanneveha karmāṇi jijīviṣet śatam samāh. Birth should not be accepted on sufferance, as a means of exhausting the prāravdha, but as a field, and the only field, of evolutionary progress, as an opportunity for the soul's awakening and ascent to the higher levels of consciousness, and, when the ascent is achieved, for the manifestation of the Divine on earth through its liberated and transformed nature.
"Rebirth is a necessity, it is compulsory; for it is through reincarnation...taking up a new body...that he (the psychic being) progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being.”¹
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII by Nolini Kanta Gupta.
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After-death Journey and the Process of Rebirth
As I have already said, the Mother does not subscribe to the current notions about rebirth. According to her, it is not a fact, except only in some cases, that a soul takes birth immediately after leaving its old body. If it did so, its next incarnation would perforce be a mere duplication or repetition of its previous personality. This popular notion does not square with the fact of the soul's post-mortem journeying in the different worlds described in the religious books of India. What actually happens is that after death the soul continues to live in the subtle-physical body for some time—the time varies in each case—till the latter is dissolved. The soul then continues to live in the vital sheath, prāṇamaya koṣa, having experiences in the vital world. The vital sheath, then, dissolves in its turn, and the soul lives on in the mental sheath, manomaya koṣa, till that too is dissolved. When all the three sheaths are dissolved, the soul goes to its own plane, the psychic plane, for rest, for assimilation of its past experiences—the quintessence of which it carries with it—and for preparation for the next incarnation. "In the psychic world there is a kind of blissful repose." This is the normal process, but there are certain exceptional cases in which birth may follow immediately after death; but such cases are, as I have already said, rare. For instance, if a person is inordinately attached to somebody or something on earth, he will be irresistibly pulled by his attachment to return to the earth almost immediately after his death, or, if a soul has just emerged from animal life and assumed the human form for the first time, it may not feel at home in the new environment and atmosphere, and has to depart only to return again and again till it gets acclimatised and accustomed to the ways of human life. There are other cases also, but it would be going beyond our present scope to deal with them here.
It would be interesting to note in this connection that the Mother totally discounts the traditional belief that the human soul has to be born as a animal or a tree, if its karma in human life has been very dark and gross. In her view, if a soul, in
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course of its evolution, has once reached the level of human consciousness and lived a human life, it can never sink back to the obscure levels of animal or vegetable consciousness, whatever may be the nature of its karma. This kind of total devolution is not observed in the normal working of Nature. What actually happens sometimes is that, if a man is very vicious or extremely avid of the gross pleasures of the lower prana, a part of his pranic being or the lower vital may project itself into the animal birth for the desired enjoyment. It may enter the body of a pig or a dog or any other animal. But his soul or central being can never take an animal body. Such projection of a part being into non-human birth can be but a temporary episode in the life of the man for the exhaustion of his abnormal animal appetites.
Another thing that happens sometimes is that a certain formation, mental, vital or subtle-physical, of a dead man may remain in the earth atmosphere and enter into a suitable living person for its own satisfaction. "... When I speak of a formation entering into a living person, the formation does not mean the man himself who is dead, that is to say, his soul or psychic being. I say that it is only a special/acuity which continues to remain in the earth atmosphere even after the death of the man to whom the faculty belonged: it was so well developed, well formed that it continues to retain its independent identity.”¹ The Mother gives an example of the above phenomenon : "I shall tell you the very interesting case of a musician, a pianist, a pianist of a very high order; he had hands that had become something marvellous, full of skill, accuracy, precision, force, swiftness; it was truly remark- able. The man dies comparatively young, and with the feeling that had he lived he would have continued to advance in his musical self-expression. Such was the intensity of his aspiration that his subtle hands retained their form without getting dissolved, and wherever there was someone passive and receptive and at the same time a good musician, the hands of the dead man would enter into the living hands that played. In the case that I saw the man used to play well enough normally, but quite in the ordinary way;
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he became, however, as he continued to play, all on a sudden not only a virtuoso, but a marvellous artist; it was the hands of the other person which made use of him.”¹
To take up our thread. When the time is ripe for another incarnation, the psychic comes out of the psychic plane and begins again the downward journey. The Mother gives a very interesting description of how the soul chooses in advance the form it will take, the place where it will be born, and the line of progress it will follow. "As I have told you...there are psychic beings that are just on the way of formation and growth, they usually cannot choose at the beginning, they cannot choose very much. But when they have come to a certain degree of development and consciousness, they make a choice; generally when they are still in the body, when they have gathered a certain amount of experience, they decide what is to be their next field of experience. I shall give you an illustration, although somewhat external. A psychic being, for example, needed the experience of power, authority, command, and wanted to know the reactions of these movements and also how to turn them towards the Divine, to learn, in a word, what these things can teach. So the soul took the body of a king (or a queen). When it had the necessary experience, learnt what it had to learn, it gave up the body, no longer useful. It is at that moment when it decides to leave the body but is still in the body that the soul makes the choice of the next experience. The choice very often takes a course of action and reaction. If the soul has experienced and studied a particular field, its choice falls upon a contrary field on the following occasion. Thus if the soul has had the experience of a kingly position and worked through that to enter into a conscious relation with the Divine, then at the moment of leaving the body that served with power and authority and command, it perhaps would say : 'This time I shall take a middle position, neither high nor low, where there will be no need to lead mostly an external life, where one is neither in great luxury nor in great misery.’ With that resolution it returns to the psychic World for the necessary rest, for the assimilation of past experiences and preparation/or the future. When the time comes for
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta,
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return upon earth, for the descent into a physical body, it remembers naturally the choice it made.. ,”¹ From above it surveys the earth atmosphere and can discern things, not, indeed, in their detail, but in their general contours. But the degree of the discernment depends upon its development. A developed psychic can even choose a particular country and a particular milieu in which it intends to be born. It has in view the kind of life it will lead here on earth, the culture in which it will be brought up, and the education it will avail itself of. As it descends more and more and comes closer to the earth, its perception becomes clearer, and it advances towards the region which appears to it likely to answer to its evolutionary purpose. Here a new factor intervenes. The choice of the psychic is not enough, there must be an aspiration and a receptivity in the atmosphere of its choice. It is said of Sri Ramakrishna's mother that she had an aspiration for having a godlike being as her child. This aspiration from below is a sort of invocation or call, the peculiar vibration of which is easily felt by the developed psychic. It perceives a pin-point of light there, and precipitates headlong into that atmosphere. But this headlong plunge lands it directly into the darkness and inconscience of the material world, and for a more or less long time, even after its birth, it remains, as it were, dazed, lost to itself and lost to its preconceived purpose in life. "Generally it takes time for the soul to come to its own. It wakes up but slowly from its numbness, it is only gradually that it begins to understand that it is there for some reason and by choice. This oblivion is occasioned by the presence of the mind and mental education which completely shuts off the psychic consciousness. All kinds of circumstances, happenings, experiences—external and emotional—are then needed to strike open the doors within, to bring the memory that one comes from elsewhere and for a very special reason.”² In this way all knowledge comes to the psychic as memory, as reminiscence, to use Plato's expression; for all knowledge is already in the psychic; what is needed is the shocks and impacts of the world to break open the seals and let the latent consciousness, the veiled knowledge, shine out in their
¹ & ² The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta.
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unbarred wideness. If we look at rebirth from this standpoint, we can easily understand why the psychic sometimes chooses difficulties, struggles and hardships as a very drastic means to the evolution of its consciousness and the purification of its instrumental nature. "Many people come to me and complain: 'What have I done in my past life that I have to be under such difficult conditions now, to suffer so much /' I always reply : 'But don't you see it is a blessing for you, the divine grace upon you ? In your past life perhaps you yourself asked for such conditions so that you may make greater progress through them.”¹
Our ordinary, ignorant notions of good fortune and ill fortune, of justice and reward and punishment have only an ethical value, not spiritual. What we regard as the good fortune of a man—good looks, wealth, fame, etc.—may be the cause of his downfall and degradation, while adversity, obstacles, hard- ships, poverty, etc. may and do sometimes act as the most powerful lever of the soul's ascent. The soul knows infinitely better than our cocksure mind what is good for its evolution and growth. It uses rebirth as the only means of the evolution of its consciousness, and the evolution of consciousness is the primary end of human life. The other things must be considered as secondary or subservient to it, and as instruments of its self-expression.
For the evolution of its consciousness and the development of its being with all its faculties, the soul freely chooses the most congenial atmosphere and situation in its earthly life. It changes its role, its line of self-development, the pattern of its life and action from birth to birth. "Suppose the psychic being has had the experience of the life of a writer. The function of the writer is to express himself, his perceptions and observations and judgements in words : he has a certain field, a certain range of associations and circumstances in which to live and move. But there are other fields and ranges beyond and outside of which he has no experience. So he may say to himself : 'I have lived with my head, I know something of the intellectual reactions to life; now let me live with my heart and experience the reactions of feeling and
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passion'....So the psychic being, in order to have this new kind of experience, abandons his intellectual heights, so to say, and comes down to the vital plane. He is no longer a creative genius, but an ordinary man but with a heart enriched or enriching itself with its intense or generous movements. ...It is not rare to see psychic beings that have reached the maximum of their growth in certain directions, take up a very modest and ordinary life in some other new direction or for some other purpose....Can you say it is a decline and a fall ? It is only facing life, meeting its problems from another angle, another point of view.”¹ The psychic makes no distinction between glory and obscurity, success and failure, as we understand them. What it is most concerned with is the growth of its consciousness, the development of its possibilities, the variety and richness of its experiences, and the flowering of its innate swabhava and swadharma in its outer nature and life. The total urge in it is not for self-extinction, but for self-fulfilment.
Groups of Souls
The souls are not, as is maintained by Sankhya and Jainism, and, more or less, by the concensus of philosophical opinion in India, absolutely separate entities, like Leibnitz's monads, coming down to earth and departing in perfect isolation, having nothing to do with one another. According to the Mother, there are groups or families of souls, bound together by an inner. affinity, that come down more or less at the same time or epoch for a particular type of work in their earthly life. They follow each a certain basic line of development and are intimately connected with certain aspects and phases of the evolution of the earth-consciousness. Each soul, being a spark or ray of the divine Consciousness, plays its individual part, as a constituent of its group, in the work of the illumination of the material inconscience. The coming together of many kindred souls under the prophet's banner, or round the revolutionary presence of the Avatara or Vibhuti testifies to the fact of the existence
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of groups or families of souls. One such group, it is said, gathered round the personality of Sri Chaitanya, and another round Sri Ramakrishna, who had seen it in vision before it came to him physically. Sri Ramakrishna would often say in regard to a sadhaka or yogi that he belonged to this house or that, meaning, evidently, this line or that of the manifesting divine Consciousness. All this proves that there is a universal Will and a universal plan behind the apparent phenomenon of the soul's coming and going, a community and solidarity of purpose, and a complex interplay of evolutionary interests, which are ignored by the simplist theory of the individual soul's transmigration in perfect insularity. The theory of karma, as it is expounded from different standpoints, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina, errs on the side of oversimplification, and bypasses the important truth that karma is not only individual, but collective; that there is a constant intermingling of all karmas, and that no individual karma can pursue its solitary course completely uninvaded and unaffected by the environmental and collective karma.
A new, revealing light is thrown upon the problem of rebirth and the grouping of souls by the following words of the Mother :
"To understand rightly the problem of what is called reincarnation, you must perceive that there are two factors in it which require consideration. First, there is the line of divine consciousness which seeks to manifest from above and upholds a certain series of formations, peculiar to itself, in the universe which is its field of manifestation. Secondly, there is the psychic consciousness which climbs up from below, the seed of the Divine developing through tine till h meets the Force from above and takes the impress of the supramental Truth. ”¹
We have already seen how the psychic, a tiny, pulsing spark, develops through many births into a full-fledged psychic being in man. When it is fully formed, it often feels an aspiration for a
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greater realisation, a higher ascent, in order to manifest the Divine more perfectly on earth. "As a result of this pullet generally draws towards itself a being of a higher order, from a higher plane, from the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, a being of involution who incarnates in the psychic being. These overmental entities are termed gods or divinities by men. Now when the fusion takes place of a god into a psychic being, the latter naturally increases in stature and partakes of the nature of the god and acquires also the capacity to produce emanations; that is to say, it throws out of itself a pan which possesses an independent existence and can incarnate in others. In this way there may be not only two but several emanations or projections of the same original being. In other words, there may be a single psycho-divine origin but many personalities coming out of it.... If you emanate a being out of you, you remain whole and entire without losing anything of yourself and the emanation too is a being whole and entire living its independent life.”¹
The subject is somewhat difficult, because occult to our ordinary ideas, and rather unfamiliar. But the fact of the higher gods or a ray of the divine Consciousness entering into exceptional men and investing them with a superhuman greatness, majesty or valour, is not quite unknown to readers of the ancient myths. But what is original and very illuminating from the standpoint of the soul's evolutionary purpose is the Mother's Statement that there are different lines of divine Consciousness seeking to manifest from above and upholding various series of formations here below for their diverse self-expression. The statement establishes the teleological significance of the soul's evolution. It makes it clear that the end of the soul's evolution is not flight from the material world, or nirvana, but letting the divine Consciousness descend into and flow out of its liberated and perfected individuality and manifest its infinite glory upon earth. The soul's aspiration from below and the divine Grace from above combine to fulfil what the soul seeks through many births and the earth is made for.
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Memory of Past Lives
Considerable romance and an extravagant play of fancy and imagination have entered into the fascinating subject of the memory of past lives. It is not unoften that we hear fantastic stories about one's recovering a knowledge of one's past life or lives. It is sometimes reported that somebody has recounted in staggering detail the incidents and scenes of his previous birth, and described the persons and places he was then familiar with. Such reports have to be taken with a grain of salt. "What commonly goes by the name of such recollection is, mostly, either deliberate imposture or a fabrication out of a few spasmodic hints received from within." The fact of the matter is that it is only the psychic, when it has evolved sufficiently to come to the front of the nature, that holds and carries clear memories of its past births. Till the psychic is fully awake and in control of its terrestrial nature, the human being is an ephemeral individual made up of diverse, heterogeneous elements, a composite flux with only the semblance of a constant personality. Death breaks up all this shifting formation. With the dissolution of the different parts, the memory is also dissolved. The psychic then goes to the psychic plane, carrying with it the essence of its experiences. When it returns to human birth again, it puts on a new mind, a new vital or prana, and a new body in accordance with its past experiences and the fresh line of evolution it is going to pursue. Where then does the memory of past lives reside ? For, nothing, except the psychic, survives the dissolution of the constructed personality. If the psychic is not much developed and the life and mind it assumes are not purified and organised enough to receive its direct influence and communication, there is no possibility of the external personality knowing anything of the soul's past births. It is only when the nature parts are organised round the psychic and open to its communications, that the external personality can have a flash of some of the incidents of the previous birth. And it is usually the Foments of the psychic awakening or the psychic touch that are preserved in the memory rather than the outer details of life.
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"At a given point in our life, there comes a special circumstance, there is a call within, an absolute inner necessity that brings forward the psychic and a contact is made perhaps for an instant. That experience is preserved in the psychic memory. More than the outer circumstances and the physical events, however, what is cherished in the consciousness is the intimate emotion, the vibration that accompanied the perception at the time....These psychic flashes, more in some cases, less in others, are the only genuine and authentic records of the story of a person's lives.”¹
"It is a being who is completely identified with his psychic, who has organised his whole person, in all its parts, around this centre; in fact, a being of one piece, entirely and solely turned to the Divine that can alone remember or hold in his consciousness something like a totality of his personal history. For in his case even when the body drops, the other parts being integrated and taken up into the soul substance maintain their individual existence; the personality formed around the psychic continues with its memory intact; even it can pass from one life to another without losing its consciousness. ”²
The psychic memory has an extraordinary intensity. It retains with a wonderful clarity the most precious moments of its life, moments of the widening and illumination of its consciousness, moments when it experienced its freedom and bliss, or felt the rapture of the Divine's embrace. Till the psychic has organised and integrated our being, the perishable parts of our nature are all dissolved after our death, and the memories and impressions stored in the physical brain or floating amorphous in the subconscient, are also dissolved.
The problem of karma and rebirth is a knotty problem comprising countless possibilities of variation and departure, and the supraphysical worlds teem with mysteries and marvels for our human mind. It is only a developed occult vision and a penetrating spiritual perception that can command a clear and comprehensive view of those worlds and the elements and energies,
² The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, by Nolini Kanta Gupta,
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beings and forces abounding in them. And it is only the souls shepherded by divine Grace that can pass through them unscarred and safe.
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A SPECIAL sense attaches to the word "service" in the Mother's philosophy of Yogic action. She has given the word such a heightened connotation that it has become the key- word of human evolution and spiritual fulfilment. According to her, human birth has only one objective : the service of the Divine; and all human activities and endeavours, pursued from birth to birth, are but a long preparation for it. This view gives a definite teleological significance to the otherwise unaccountable phenomena of life and death and the continued participation even of many liberated souls in the travail of the world.
The soul comes down into the material world not to lose itself in the labyrinths of fleeting interests, not to become a sport of freakish desires and blind passions, not to toss among the conflicting lures of sense-objects, not even to awake, at last, to the futility of of its peregrinations and beat a glorified retreat from this terrestrial existence, but to prepare its triple nature of mind, life, and body till it is fit to fulfil its mission: the manifestation of the Spirit in Matter.
Man is not, therefore, a biological creature of a passing moment, but an immortal spark-soul, clad in mind, life, and body and charged with the mission of revealing in redeemed and purified Matter the supernal glories of the Divine he houses in himself. This divine revelation or manifestation is the service he owes to his Master, this is the sole reason of his earthly existence. Some mystics postulate delight as the end of existence; some a deployment of Power; some, again, the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth; but so far as the individual is concerned and his destiny, the Mother says, service is the great end, the End of all ends, the rapturous tryst of the Spirit with Matter, the sublimest expression of the eternal and ineffable relation between man and his Maker and Lover.
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What is True Service ?
Though the service done in the spirit of sacrifice and with love and devotion and psychological and practical disinterestedness is the most powerful means of purification and liberation, it is not exactly this the Mother means when she speaks in it in its most sublimated sense. She gives, no doubt, the preliminary and purificatory service a considerable importance and declares it to be indispensable to our progress towards a dynamic union with the Divine, but, according to her, the crowning fulfilment comes only from the true service, which is not so much a means to as an expression of divine union.
By true service the Mother means the service of the Divine with the will of the servant in perfect tune with the Will of the Master, and the whole being of the servant, surrendered and integrated, moved by the omniscient divine Force. It is, really speaking, a direct action of the Divine in and through the instrumental being of the liberated, egoless individual. It is, if we can so put it, a service of the Divine by the Divine Himself with the individual serving only as a fire-point of concentration and diffusion. The Mother calls it service, because it is an unerring accomplishment of the work of the Divine and a perfect fulfillment of His purpose in terrestrial existence through man. And in the last analysis, is not this the pivotal truth of all creation —the Divine is the sole Doer of all universal action, the Vishwakarma ? In no other way could this work of a manifold manifestation be accomplished.
Describing the inner state of the individual from which this service proceeds, the Mother says, "Each activity in its own sphere accomplishing its special mission, without any disorder or confusion, one enveloping another, and all hierarchically arranged around a single centre : Thy Will”¹. No discord between the different parts of the being, no contrary pulls or distracting drives of chameleon tendencies, no sting of desires or pang of frustration, but all nature, harmonized and integrated, quickened and illumined, ecstatically responding to the touch of
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, June 30, 1914.
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divine Love and impeccably moved by the divine Force. The Will of the eternal Doer functions through the co-operating will of the apparent human doer, using the means and achieving the ends decreed by itself. The individual being is at once the receiver and the giver—it receives from the Transcendent above and it gives what it receives to the Immanent within and around it. It lives in a double identification—an identification with the supreme Light and an identification with the darkness of this sorrowful earth upon which the Light acts, and in this double identification discovers the "secret of Thy sovereign oneness.” This divine commerce between the Transcendent and the Immanent, between the ordaining and initiating Spirit and the actualising Matter through the medium of the surrendered and emancipated human individual, is what the Mother means by true service.
Aspiration for Service
Once we are convinced that our birth here is not a fall, an aberration, or an exile, or a chance happening of mechanical Nature, but a purposive evolution and a divinely ordained mission, our whole outlook on life and its values undergoes a radical change. No longer do we struggle to escape from the earthly life, nor try to squeeze it to the last drop of its scanty sap, but we aspire and endeavour, as best we can, to discover its source and sustenance, its pulse and purpose, and live it as worthily, usefully and beautifully as the dignity and strength of our divine manhood seem to demand. Individual liberation ceases to be an ideal in so far as it implies a renunciation of life and its salutary activities, an atrophy of the motor springs of our being, and a willful or neglectful sterilization of our creative faculties, and service becomes the watch-word of our spiritual progression. Delight, power, peace, purity, all grow in service, for it is the most spontaneous, concrete expression of our love and devotion for the Divine. And when this initial, preparatory service culminates in what the Mother calls the true service, there is only a beatific interchange of love between
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the individual and the Divine, and a triumphant outpouring of redemptive Force upon the material world.
The Mother seeks knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the service of the Divine, even the bliss of divine union she seeks not for itself, but for the sake of service. In how many Prayers does she not pray to the Divine to let her be only a servant, an instrument, a docile manifesting channel of His Love and Grace ! And in many a Prayer the Divine too asks the Mother not to revel in the ecstasy of the absorbed union, but to turn her look towards the earth and "work as an ordinary man in the midst of ordinary beings; learn to be nothing more than they are in all that is manifesting". He asks her to "associate with the integral way of their being; for, beyond all that they know, all that they are, thou earnest in thyself the torch of the eternal splendour which does not waver, and by associating with them, it is this thou wilt carry into their midst”. And in words which give the right clue to the secret of service and the significance of the Mother's role in the world, the Divine says, "Hast thou any need to enjoy this light so long as it spreads from thee ? Is it necessary that thou shouldst feel my love vibrating in thee, so long as thou givest it ? Must thou enjoy integrally the bliss of my presence, so long as thou serves! as its intermediary among men ?”¹
Absolutely consecrated to service, the Mother prays :
"O Lord, my sole aspiration is to know Thee better and serve Thee better every day. What do the outer circumstances matter ? They appear to me every day more vain and more illusory, and I take less and less interest in what will outwardly happen to us; but I am more and more intensely interested in the only thing which appears to me important: to know Thee better in order to serve Thee better. All outer events must converge towards this goal, and towards this alone; and for that, all depends upon the attitude we have towards them. To be constantly in search of Thee in everything, to will to manifest Thee better in every circumstance; in this attitude is to be found supreme Peace, perfect serenity,
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, January 11, 1915.
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true contentment. In it life blooms, widens, spreads out so magnificently, in such majestic surges that no storm can any more trouble it.”¹
"Life blooms, widens, spreads out so magnificently”, says the Mother, if we are constantly in search of the Divine in everything, bhūteṣu bhūteṣu vicitya, as the Upanishad phrases it, if we "will to manifest" Him better in every circumstance. This attitude is essentially and fully psychic, that is to say, it comes from the central soul and does not originate either in the mind or the heart of man. When the soul awakes, a seeking for the Absolute or the Infinite or the Eternal awakes in us; our being instinctively feels a want, an inadequacy, an imperfection, sometimes even an illusoriness in the passing phenomena of life. Something above it, something to which it begins to respond with a growing thrill, draws it towards its own inconceivable splendours. At this stage there are two possibilities open to man : if it is only the static side of his soul that yearns for the Eternal, he will feel an exclusive aspiration for its peace and silence and gravitate towards it, emphasizing the illusoriness of the world of appearances and turning away from it; but if it is a full opening of the soul, not only of the witnessing Purusha, but also of the Prakriti in it—for, it comprises both— not only of its status, but also of its purposive dynamism, then the natural aspiration will be for the realization and revelation of the Divine, the supreme Person of the Upanishad, the Purushottama of the Gita, in the very texture of terrestrial life. This integral awakening of the psychic accounts for the intense and comprehensive aspiration for service which has found such an exquisite and inspiring expression in many of the Mother's Prayers and Meditations.
"May every morning our thought rise with fervour towards Thee, asking Thee what is the best we can do to manifest and serve Thee.”²
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March 12, 1914.
² ibid., January 31, 1914.
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"O Love divine. Knowledge supreme, perfect Unity, at each moment of the day I call to Thee so that I may be nothing else but Thou!
"May the instrument serve Thee, conscious that it is an instrument, and may my whole consciousness be immersed in Thine and contemplate all things with Thy divine sight.
"O Lord, Lord, grant that Thy sovereign Power may manifest; grant that Thy work may be done and Thy servitor solely consecrated to Thy service.
"May the T disappear for ever and the instrument alone live.”¹
A perfect picture of the ideal attitude of true service is found in the following Prayer :
"To be immersed at once in Thee and in Thy work....To be no longer a limited individual...to become the infinity of Thy forces manifesting through a point...to be delivered from all trammels and all limitations...to rise above all restricting thought...to act and be beyond the act...to act through and for individuals and see only the oneness, the oneness of Thy love. Thy knowledge and Thy Being....O my divine Master, eternal Teacher, Sole Reality, dissolve all the darkness of this aggregate which Thou hast formed for Thy service, Thy manifestation in the world. Realise in it that supreme Consciousness which will generate an identical consciousness everywhere.” ²
All the essential strands of divine service have been woven together in this marvellous Prayer. The right spirit, the right attitude, the right way of service, the right definition of service as "Thy manifestation" have been given with an unsurpassable point and precision. At first, union with the Divine, but a dynamic and not a static union, achieved through an integral surrender and an intensive and inclusive concentration; then transcendence of one's mutable individuality and assumption of
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, May 3, 1914.
² ibid.. May 4, 1914.
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the infinitude of the divine forces manifesting through a point, that is to say, through the body, then the simultaneity of unrestricted action and freedom from action; and, last, dealing with and acting for individuals, but seeing, contacting and communing with the One everywhere, in all individuals and units. This last experience of service establishes its sovereignty in a life of spiritual perfection—it is the only means by which the Divine can be loved and adored and served, embraced and communed with in every individual and thing and circumstance at every step and moment of one's earthly existence. It is service alone that can turn the whole field of human existence in the material world—a field so much spurned and condemned by short-sighted religions—into a heaven of constant and active God-union.
In a Prayer of flaming aspiration and melting sweetness, the Mother prays to the Divine to let her only be His servant and nothing else. She puts service above everything else, above every other experience possible on earth, but she gives to it a , depth and an amplitude of sense, unmatched in the history of dynamic mysticism.
"Let me lie down at Thy feet”, she prays, "merge into Thy heart, disappear in Thee, be blotted out in Thy beatitude; or rather” ,—mark the climax of her "self-naughting", the absolute perfection of her self-surrender—"be solely Thy servitor, without pretending to be anything else. I do not desire or aspire to anything more, I wish only to be Thy servitor.”
Hindrances to true Service
But such a consummation of divine service cannot be achieved at a bound or by a jolly trot over a bed of roses. There are many obstacles to be met and overcome, many a pathless desert to be crossed under the dire menace of storms and thunders. We shall touch upon only the cardinal hindrances here and leave out the tremendous question of physical transformation without which no service can be perfect.
The greatest hindrance to the true service is the ego, the
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ignorant sense of one's being a separate individual. This self- insulation of the individual from the universal is the cause of all his besetting limitations—limitations of consciousness, knowledge and power. The ego, the circumscribing sense of I-ness and my-ness, mamatwa, must, therefore, completely disappear, if the individual has to recover his innate infinity and immortality; and without this recovery it is impossible for him to serve the Divine. It is for a complete elimination of the ego, its elimination even from the physical consciousness, that the Mother prays to the Divine : "O Lord, O my sweet Master, dispel this feeling of the 'I'...tear out from my heart this illusion that Thy servant may become pure and faithful.”¹
Another hindrance is attachment. Attachment keeps us chained to persons or things or ideas, and prevents our taking wings towards the Infinite. "One who would serve Thee worthily", says the Mother, "should not be attached to any- thing, not even to the activities which enable him to commune more consciously with Thee...
O, to do everything seeing Thee alone everywhere, and thus to soar above the accomplished act, without any claim which holds us prisoners to the earth, coming to burden the flight.”²
Attachment to opinions, theories, creeds, and principles, so much justified, perhaps even glorified, by the mind of man, has to go the way of all other attachments, if the consciousness has to open and be plastic to the higher light.
Another hindrance, a formidable one, is world-weariness. It comes usually from Tamas, the principle of inertia, incapacity and delusion, in the being. Long tradition and narrowness of outlook have sanctified it into a spiritual tendency, and its blighting effect upon life is completely overlooked or ignored. So long as world-weariness or world-disgust is allowed to obscure the consciousness of the individual and paralyse his creative powers, he cannot be an aspirant for divine service which demands, not a rejection, but an enthusiastic, wholesale acceptance
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, April 17, 1914.
² ibid., February 25-26, 1914.
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of life as the field of the highest divine realization and revelation. Renunciation of life is a renunciation of the progressive play of God's Light in the material world.
Integral Self-Surrender—the Sole Means
A loving and unreserved self-surrender of the whole being to the supreme Consciousness-Force is the sole means of becoming a servant of the Divine. So long as the ego persists, surrender has to be effected by a constant and detailed self-offering, and it has to be renewed from day to day, so that it may not flag or falter. But when the surrender has been integral and complete, Grace descends and takes up the charge of the being, and begins its victorious work of purification and transformation. Personal effort then ceases, and the divine Shakti expresses and fulfils her Will in the world through the liberated and universalised individual. According to Sri Aurobindo there are three stages of this long discipline. At the first "you have to regard yourself as a soul and body created for her (the Divine Shakti’s) service, one who does all for her sake. Even if the idea of the separate worker is strong in you and you feel that it is you who do the act, yet it must be done for her. All stress of egoistic choice, all hankering after personal profit, all stipulation of self- regarding desire must be extirpated from the nature. There must be no demand for fruit and no seeking for reward; the only fruit for you is the pleasure of the Divine Mother and the fulfilment of her work, your only reward a constant progression in divine consciousness and calm and strength and bliss. The joy of service and the joy of inner growth through works is the sufficient recompense of the selfless worker.”¹
At the second stage, when surrender has progressed far and the ego is fading out of existence, "you will feel more and more that you are the instrument and not the worker... .You will realise that the divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and carries out your works; all your movements are originated by her, all your powers are hers; mind, life and body are conscious
¹ The Mother—Sri Aurobindo.
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and joyful instruments of her action, means for her play, moulds for her manifestation in the physical universe...
"The last stage of this perfection will come when you are completely identified with the Divine Mother and feel yourself to be no longer another and separate being, instrument, servant or worker, but truly a child and eternal portion of her consciousness and force....You will know and see and feel that you are a person and power formed by her out of herself, put out from her for the play, and yet always safe in her, being of her Being, consciousness of her Consciousness, force of her Force, ananda of her Ananda. When this condition is entire and her supramental energies can freely move you, then you will be perfect in divine works; knowledge, will, action will become sure, simple, luminous, spontaneous, flawless, an outflow from the Supreme, a divine movement of the Eternal.”¹ It is this unobstructed, luminous working of the Divine through the child-state of the individual that the Mother calls true service.
Service—A Life-Transforming Ideal
This conception of service is not only original, but revolutionary for life. Its initial, purificatory stage, so elaborately delineated in the Gita, is a radical preparation for infinity and impersonality; its final stage, so vividly mirrored in many of the Mother's Prayers, is a supreme triumph of the Divine in man. The former is an ascent of man's love for the Divine, the latter is a descent of the Divine's Love for all creatures. The first is a God-ward service, the second is a God-possessed earthward service. The ideal of true service is the only ideal that can regenerate earthly life, redeem humanity and make it a vehicle of God-manifestation. True service is at once a victory of Love and a vindication of Grace.
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IF a perfect manifestation of the Divine in material life is the end of evolution, transformation of human nature is the principal means of achieving it. Man in his unregenerate state manifests not the Divine but the animal from which he has emerged and upon which he stands in his endeavour to transcend himself. His inherent divinity lies asleep or half-awake within him, unable to come to the fore and express itself because of the crudeness and opacity of his natural instruments. Even when it is fully awake and strong enough to reveal something of its love and light and peace and purity, it finds only one or two parts of the nature purified and prepared to be the channels of that revelation, while the rest lie lapped in unredeemed obscurity. For a full and unobstructed self-manifestation of the Divine in man, it is essential that human nature should undergo a radical and integral transformation by a complete elimination of its basic animality and a conversion of all its members, faculties, and functions into their divine counterparts. Nothing short of a fully divinised nature can manifest the integral Divine.
What is Transformation ?
In the philosophy of the Mother's Yoga as well as in Sri Aurobindo's, the word "transformation" bears a special and very comprehensively profound sense. It is the keyword of the long and arduous process of total self-perfection which is the indispensable prerequisite of divine manifestation. Transformation means a radical change and conversion of human nature, its thorough transmutation and transfiguration. Let us try to understand what it really amounts to. Human nature in its unperfected state is composed of a mind of ignorance seeking for knowledge, a life of desires and passions and dogging discontent, and a fragile body, conservative in its inertia and insensible to the higher values of existence. This triple
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mechanism has always opposed the soul's transcendence of the human formula and assumption and expression of the divine, and yet, paradoxical as it may seem, it has been created to be the very means of that expression. Derived from the inconscience of Matter and conditioned by it, the mechanism is found to be much too dense and inapt to meet the demands of the evolving soul, the disabling weight of ignorance and the downward pull of material inertia greatly impeding its necessary self- modification and self-adaptation. The soul, exerting a steady ethicspiritual will, effects a certain amount of purification, sometimes even a great amount—it rays out something of its light into the mind, transmits something of its peace and calm and detachment into the vital, and controls some of the movements of the body, but it finds that there is a limit to this purification, which cannot be easily overpassed. This has been the invariable experience of most of the spiritual disciplines of the world. A certain inherent imperfection of human nature has been taken for granted and put up with. It is only a few dynamic Yogas, such as the Vedic and the Tantric in India, and the most illumined of the ancient mystery cults in the West, that sought to cross the Rubicon and achieve something like a thorough purification and mastery of human nature. But mastery is not transformation. And, besides, never has the result been commensurate with the endeavour—the stuff of human nature proving a little too intractable to the will of the ethical or spiritualised mind of man, which was the only means the Spirit could employ to prepare its vehicle of expression on earth. Some Yogas did register a comparative success, but it was either unilateral or partial, never the sovereign victory which was their ideal.
Perhaps there was something lacking in their ideal itself. Perhaps they did not bestow on the nether bases of life the same amount of attention as they bestowed on its radiant peaks, or, as in the case of the Tantra, in their exploration of the submerged regions of human consciousness, they let go their hold on the light of the peaks and floundered in the reeking swamps. Perhaps many of them failed to command the integral
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vision of the omnipresent Reality—the Superconscient, the Subliminal, the mentally Conscient, the Subconscient and the Inconscient—and discover the supreme divine Principle whose all-achieving dynamic could effect a total transformation of human nature. So, in spite of high transcendental realisations, they could not compel life to be the manifesting instrument of the Divine.
As we have said above, by transformation the Mother means not a mere purification and enlightenment of nature, an ethical sublimation, but a fundamental change and conversion of the the very poise and constituents of the whole nature. What are the poise and the constituents ? The normal poise of human nature is an ego-centric triplicity of mind, life, and body, separated in its individualised formation from the world, and yet carrying on perforce a commerce of mutuality and interchange with it, which is the condition of its development and growth. This poise, though inevitable and indispensable in the lower stages of evolution when the individuality is being formed around the nuclear ego, is a wrong poise, opposed to the essential truth of unity which is the bed-rock principle of all existence. A conversion of this normal poise by the process of transformation will mean a reversal to the unitarian as opposed to the separative consciousness. The whole being will then live in and act from a permanent consciousness of unity, seeing itself in all and all in itself, and dealing with the world of diversity as if it was—as, indeed, it is—a multiple self-deploying of the One.
The constituents of the nature of man are the physical body, the vital, that is to say, the principle and active formation of life, and the mind. Behind this triple formation is the psyche or the soul evolving in this nature for a divinely perfect self-expression and self-fulfilment on earth. But the body, life, and mind, being derived from material inconscience, are normally turbid and impure, and cannot mirror the immaculate purity of the soul. The soul, however, goes on purifying them by infusing into them its aspiration, devotion, peace, and freedom. In this way, a considerable purity, plasticity and transparency may be
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established in the nature, but the basic defects and disabilities persist, in however diminished a form, and prevent a full divine out flowering. Now, conversion is calculated to rid the nature of these very basic defects and limitations. Matter, life, and mind have their spiritual counterparts in Existence, Consciousness- Force and Supermind respectively. If Matter is converted into the immortal substance of the eternal Existence, life into the luminous Consciousness-Force, and mind into the Supermind, they shed for ever their obscuring deficiencies and become perfect instruments of the Divine. This is conversion and transformation—a radical sublimation of the lower nature of man into the higher nature, parā prakṛti. But this sublimation does not imply suppression or annihilation, the triple formation of mind, life and body persists and acts, but with a new consciousness, a new dynamism, and a new triumphant effectivity. The Upanishads say that there is nothing here that is not there above, and nothing there that is not here. This formula not only links the earth to Heaven, but discovers Heaven even in the murk and slime of the earth; and the inescapable corollary to this formula is that Heaven is in the earth in order that earth may live in Heaven. All the divine principles and powers that make up the splendour of Heaven are involved or partly evolved in the material world, and can be fully evolved. Earth can become Heaven and man divine. This is the logic of transformation. This is real Resurrection or New Birth of man, far more radical and integral than the current conception of it.
Process of Transformation
The most essential condition of transformation is a total and active surrender of the whole being of man to the divine Presence within and above him. The first stage of this long process is marked by an increasing emergence of the psychic being or the soul and its self-infusion into the mind, life and body. This is called psychicisation. The innate aspiration, devotion, love and joy of the psyche are transmitted into the Mind, life and body which, progressively cleansed of the taint
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of the inconscience in Matter, begin to radiate the soul. This psychic transformation is in itself a great achievement. It makes a global opening in the entire nature and initiates a wealth of uplifting spiritual experiences which flood the being with light and bliss and raise its consciousness above mortality. "As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, turned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and stubbornness of the tāmasic inertia, the turbidities and turbulences and impurities of the rājasic passion and restless unharmonised kinetism, the enlightened rigidities and sāttwic limitations or poised balancements of constructed equilibrium which are the character of the Ignorance”.¹
The second stage is characterised by an ascent of the liberated, psychicised consciousness into the teeming vastness of the universal Self. An unprecedented wideness, a realisation of the Cosmic Divine, a direct perception of and participation in the cosmic movement, and an influx from the spiritual planes of Light and Power and Peace and Bliss into the human vessel, are some of the outstanding experiences of this middle stage of transformation, which is called spiritual transformation.
At the third stage there is a victorious ascent beyond the spiritual ranges of the mind, beyond even the universal formula, into the Supermind, which is the Truth-Consciousness, the almighty Creator-Consciousness. This is the entry into the very home of Light and Unity and Harmony, which is regarded as the highest achievement of man, or more truly, the highest gift of Grace. This ascent is followed by a succession of descents, which give the final, finishing, decisive touches to the work of transformation, and consummate the divine perfectioning of the human being. The supramental Light penetrates into the subconscient and the inconscient and illumines them and liberates the supramental principle latent in them. The supramental Force is the supreme, authentic Force of the Divine, capable of grappling with all the obscure resistance of Matter and conquering and compelling it to be an outlet of the divine
¹ The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo, Vol. II, Chap. 25.
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splendour. A radical, integral conversion and transfiguration of human nature is the result of the supramental transformation.
It can be said that the psychic transformation liberates the inner and considerably refines and enlightens the outer being of man; the spiritual transformation universalises it, illumines it, within and without, and brings into it the native rhythm of the Infinite; and the supramental transformation integrates and sublimates the whole being from the inconscient to the superconscient, forging all its parts into a luminous unity and harmony, and makes of it a perfect manifesting instrument of the Divine. The infinite Knowledge, the infinite Power, the infinite Freedom and Bliss of the Divine, which the human soul secretly aspires after, can be not only possessed but sovereignly expressed in life, a natural outcome of this supramental transformation.
Evidently, this triple transformation is not an easy work. Nothing like it on such a vast collective scale has ever been conceived and attempted in the history of spiritual culture. It is not, as we have already affirmed, a moral purification and enlightenment of the human nature by self-discipline, prayer and contemplation. It is much too radical, much too comprehensive and conclusive to be effected by any of the agencies and powers normally available to man. It is only the Supermind and its omnipotence that can achieve it. The whole colossal enterprise, therefore, depends upon the discovery of the Supermind and its descent into the earth-consciousness.
The Mother's Mission and Experiences
of Transformation
The Mother has made this transformation—transformation of human nature as an inevitable condition of divine manifestation—the whole work and mission of her life. The Prayers and Meditations of the Mother is a living record of how she, after having attained a "constant and definitive" union with the Divine, had to forgo its rapt ecstasy, often for long spans of
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time, in order to plunge into the dark depths of Matter and labour to reproduce there, even in those obscure regions of inconscience, the Light and Bliss of the Union enjoyed above. Her life has been a ceaseless sacrifice, a holocaust, an ungrudging renunciation of all that constitutes the happiness and solace of an exclusive spiritual existence in the material world. She has voluntarily travelled down far afield from the absorbed unitive life, which is held to be the apex of spiritual fulfilment, so that the uncharted subconscient and inconscient bases of human life may also be included in the union, and the integral being of man, blissfully and creatively active, may live for evermore in the Light and Love and Harmony of the Divine.
Giving a mystically metaphysical outline of the essential work of transformation, the Mother says :
"In each of the domains of the being, we must awaken the consciousness to the perfect existence, knowledge and beatitude. These three worlds or modes of the Divine are found in the physical reality as well as in the regions of Force and Light and those of impersonality, infinitude and eternity. When we enter fully conscious into the higher regions, it is easy, almost inevitable, to live this existence, this light and this beatitude. But what is very important, as also very difficult, is to awaken the being to this triple divine consciousness on the most material levels. This is the first point. Then we must find out the centre of all the divine worlds (probably in the intermediate world), from where we can unite the consciousness of these divine worlds, synthesise them and act simultaneously and in full knowledge in all the domains”¹.
What the Mother means here is that the vital-physical and the gross physical consciousness of man must also awake to the constant perception of Sat-Chit-Ananda, as his inner and subtler consciousness does on the spiritual planes, where the perception is more or less native and abiding. A full and revealing emergence of "the perfect Existence, Knowledge and Beatitude,'' on all the levels of the individual being—each being comprises
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, May 27, 1914.
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in itself all the levels or planes of consciousness—depend for its perfection, on the transformation of the obscure physic levels which, up till now, have opposed the greatest, resistance to it. A constant and dynamic consciousness of Sat-Chit-Ananda on the most material levels will be the final triumph of the transforming descent of the Supermind. The second point that the Mother speaks of is that the individual consciousness must station itself in the intermediate world (called by Sri Aurobindo the Supermind) from where it can, effecting a synthesis of a the planes of consciousness, act simultaneously, freely and in full knowledge in all of them. This will be possible only when the entire consciousness of the individual has been transformed into the divine consciousness.
The physical transformation is an extremely long and laborious process, of which we get glimpses in many of the Prayers, particularly the later ones, of the Mother's book.
"Thou hast taken entire possession of this miserable instrument and if it is not yet perfected enough for Thee to complete its transformation, its transmutation. Thou art at work in each one of its cells to knead it, and make it supple and illumine it, and to class, organise and harmonise it in the ensemble of the being. All is in motion all is changing; Thy divine action makes itself felt as the inexhaustible source of a purifying fire that circulates through all the atoms...”¹
"Break, break the last resistances, consume the impurities, strike with Thy thunder this being, if need be, but let it be transfigured.”²
"The working in the constitution of the physical cells is perceptible; penetrated by a considerable amount of force, they seem to expand and become lighter. But the brain is still heavy and asleep..... I unite myself with this body, O divine Master, and I cry to Thee : 'Do not spare me, act with Thy sovereign omnipotence; into me Thou hast put the will for a total transfiguration.”³
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, January 22, 1916.
² ibid., January 23, 1916.
³ ibid., July 10, 1914.
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The prayer addressed to the Divine, as one can very well see, is of the body of the Mother with which she has united herself in order to give an expression to its intense and resolute aspiration. This truth of the body's having a distinct individual consciousness of its own is a definite fact of spiritual experience and provides the rationale of the physical transformation. There is an involved yearning in Matter for a permanent union with the Divine; for essentially Matter is the death- less substance of the divine Existence, and its conversion into that substance even here, in Time and Space, will be its supreme fulfilment, and assure the immortality of the human body. This too can only be achieved by the Supermind and by no other agency.
We can have some idea of the nature of the material exploration, the extreme difficulty of the work in the abyss and the superhuman sacrifice the Mother has joyfully made for its achievement, from the following Prayer :
"O My Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down into the unfathomable depths of Matter, I have touched with my finger the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience, I have reached the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity ! But in my heart was the Remembrance, from my heart there leaped the call which could arrive to Thee : 'Lord, Lord, everywhere Thy enemies are triumphant; falsehood is the monarch of the world; life without Thee is death, a perpetual hell; doubt has usurped the place of Hope and revolt has pushed out submission; Faith is spent. Gratitude is not born; blind passions and murderous instincts and a guilty weakness have covered and stifled Thy sweet law of love. Lord, wilt Thou permit Thy enemies to prevail, false- hood and ugliness and suffering to triumph?”¹
With the unflinching heart of a divine warrior the Mother mounted the calvary of physical transformation, so that the resistance of Matter might be broken once and for all, its imprisoned aspiration released into a flaming will to transfiguration,
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 24, 1931.
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and mankind advance with sure steps towards the onl goal of its life—the realisation and manifestation of Sachchidananda upon earth.
The following Prayer breathes the fire of the Mother's heart and the absolute certainty of the ultimate victory of the Divine
" 'Turn and face the danger!’, Thou hast said to me, 'Why dost thou wish to turn thy look away or fly far from action, away from the fight, into a profound contemplation of Truth ? It is its integral manifestation that has to be realised, it is its victor over all the obstacles of blind ignorance and obscure hostility. Look straight at the danger and it will vanish before the Power.’
"O Lord, I have understood the weakness of this most external nature which is always ready to surrender to Matter and to escape, as a compensation, into a supreme intellectual and spiritual independence. But Thou expectest from us action, and action does no allow of such an attitude. It is not enough to triumph in the inner worlds, we must triumph even in the most material worlds. We must not run away from the difficulty or the obstacle, because we have the power to do so by taking shelter in the consciousness where there are no longer any obstacles.... We must look the danger straight in the face, with a faith in Thy Omnipotence and Thy Omnipotence will triumph.
"Give me integrally the heart of a fighter, O Lord, and Thy victory is sure.
" 'To conquer at any cost' must be the present motto. No, because we are attached to the work and its results, not because we are in need of such an action, not because we are incapable of escaping from all contingencies.
"But because such is Thy command to us. But because the time has come for Thy triumph upon earth. But because Thou willest an integral victory.
"And in an infinite love for the world...let us fight”.¹
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, September 5,1914.
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Contemplation and Action
THE combination of Mary and Martha, of contemplation and devoted action, has been held to be the most progressive and catholic ideal of spiritual life. Contemplation by the exclusion of action is a creed narrow in its outlook, and, more often than not, results in a disastrous neglect of the very basis and meaning of life, because it generally leads to an illusionist interpretation of existence. On the other hand, action to the exclusion of contemplation is a senseless splashing and paddling in the shallows of life, such as modern humanity displays. It is a race without a goal, a frantic scramble for power or fame or position or the mere fleshpots which life furnishes for a brief moment. Sensible spirituality, therefore, steers clear of the two extremes, and endeavors to effect a reconciliation between contemplation and action. It resorts to contemplation for inspiration, a serene vision and a patient, tranquil strength, and it engages in action for purification and self-expression. It takes care to preserve and, if possible, to fortify the base of life, for, it knows that without this base all its achievements will be like castles in the air, lacking in the concreteness of the brute facts of the material world. They may have a reality and a value—perhaps a great value—in some other world or on some other plane of consciousness, but little here, in this world, unless they stamp themselves upon the expressive material medium. Those schools of spiritual discipline that accepted life and action have stood the test of time and endured through the ages, but those that took their stand upon an uncompromising rejection and negation of the works of life have either had to compromise with the world or died out, leaving an effete name and a fading memory of having built without a base.
So long as man is upon earth and in a human body, he has to satisfy the inherent claims of life and keep it in health and vigour; for, life is the sole vehicle of the Light of his quest, and
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if the vehicle is weak or weary, the Light will find either no expression at all, or only a mutilated and warped one. Many brilliant spiritual adventures have been shipwrecked on the shoals of material life and paid the penalty of its disdainful neglect. Let us take a concrete example to illustrate the point : There was a lady of admirable spiritual perception and capacity. She was steadily advancing in Yoga when, all of a sudden, she had an attack of brain-fag, as a result of which she partially lost her reason. Her spiritual life suffered a tragic set-back, and none of her previous spiritual gains could stay the decay that had set in. Life, gone out of gear, became a purveyor not of light, but of darkness.
The fact quoted above demonstrates the importance of the material mould, the indispensability of action, a proper care of the body, a regulated exercise of the life-energies, and a vigilant and sacrificial harnessing of the whole vital-physical nature to the Light that contemplation bestows upon us. Any want of balance between contemplation and action, between the inspiring and directing Light and the expressive and actualising Life will result in a lop-sided growth and be detrimental to the harmonious development of the being.
The Ultimate Rationale of Action
The acceptance of life entails an acceptance and a flexible gospel of action. A partial and provisional acceptance may and does hedge itself in by a rigid cult or sacrament, and concentrate exclusively on the purification and liberation of the individual soul. Action has then only a personal and preparatory utility. On the other hand, a full and ungrudging acceptance eventually culminates in a perennial outflow from the depths, God's "expiring" us without "for the practice of love and good works", as Ruysbroeck picturesquely puts it. Action has then a general and expressional utility. In the first case, action is more or less an education in selflessness and detachment, and conduces to contemplation. It dissolves some of the hard knots of the ego and helps a widening of consciousness. In proportion
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as contemplation begins to be tranquil and profound, action diminishes in volume and is often reduced to the bare minimum. This is the path usually followed by those who strive for personal salvation and are impatient of anything that threatens to deter or delay their nostalgic retreat. But modern culture with its pronounced bias towards universality tends, however, to discredit this selfish eagerness for personal liberation. Its insistence on life and its manifold unity undermines the very foundation of this life-shunning tendency and neutralises its unmanning influence on society.
In the second case, action is done, first, as a means of self- purification and, next, as a means of expressing the universal love and peace and purity which grow in the inner being as a result of spiritual progress. This is the ideal most widely accepted in all progressive forms of spiritual culture—God within and His service without, or the freedom of the soul within and its healing and delivering touch without.
This ideal of spiritual service (as it is called,) of the cult of consecrated and compassionate action has such an undeniable sanctity and sublimity about it that we feel loth to analyse it in order to arrive at its rationale and an estimate of the range of its possibilities. Even the most advanced spiritual seekers and acute thinkers seem to find in it—Buddhism appears to them as an exemplary embodiment of it—a promise of the highest spiritual perfection possible to man on earth. Our deepest reverence and gratitude go to the man who communes with the Spirit in silence and moves among his brother men as an angel of love and tenderness, bringing hope and solace to mortal suffering. But if we go far, very far, indeed, behind the bright surface of this spiritual beneficence, we shall find that such a man is usually spiritual within and ethical without; his actions proceed not from the authentic will of his soul or from the Will of the Divine within his soul, but from the purified parts of his nature. There is always, in however small a degree, an un- detected, because unanalysed, mixture of the various elements of the human personality, an intercrossing of light and shade, and hardly ever a fully satisfying finality and a free and sovereign
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functioning of the spiritual energies in his acts of disinterested beneficence. There is often a slight wobble of hesitancy or an evanescent ripple of regret, as if the ethical mind, though basking in the sun of the Spirit, had yet some grey, woolly clouds flitting over it and obscuring its sight. The inner movement may be perfect, but its transmission to the outer nature is partially blocked and diminished, even distorted, by the meagreness and mental accretions of the passage. Not to him does the Upanishadic saying apply that a knower of the Brahman neither regrets an omission nor repents a commission of action, he does what has to be done, led by the light within. Not for him the clear vision, the set drive of the Force, the unerring choice of the means and the right hitting of the target, whatever it may be, which characterise a divine worker. He discovers, if he is very scrupulous and searching, that even the most self-denying actions of philanthropy leave the sense of a want, a defect, an inadequacy somewhere—a falling short, and to that extent, a failure. Why so ? Cannot the most soul-satisfying action, action that is a spontaneous out-welling of energy and intrinsically free from any uneasy reaction, spring from an unimpeachable benevolence ? Is not ethical perfection a guarantee of the purity and potency of an action ? Is not philanthropy the highest form of human action ? To resolve these doubts let us go to the root of action and its ultimate rationale.
In essence an action is a movement of the universal Force individualised in a human being and directed towards a particular object. Now, the ultimate truth of Existence being the Supreme Being, the all-containing and all-constituting One, the direct and authentic movement of His Force is the real action, and the fulfilment of His Will the real rationale and objective of action; and man being essentially one with the Supreme Being; it is only the movement of the Supreme's Force and the fulfilment of His Cosmic Will in him that can satisfy his whole being and appear as the only rationale of all action. It is for this reason that even his best ethical actions fail to give him full satisfaction, but trail a dull discontent. But this discontent is his deliverance. It points to something infinitely
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higher than humanitarianism, altruism, even religious service, to the ultimate rationale of all universal and individual action—the fulfilment of the Will of the Supreme.
What is that Will ? What is the object of creation, the final aim of this long evolutionary labour? It is the revelation of the One in the Many in the conditions of material life, or, as it is put in philosophical terms, the manifestation of the Divine in Matter. Each individual, being an essential and eternal part of the Divine, is driving, without being aware of it, towards the same consummation—the manifestation.
What is Manifestation
As we have said above, manifestation is the self-revelation of the One in the Many in the conditions of material life. Matter, though in essence a mode of the Spirit, is yet its negation and denial in evolutionary earth life, which arises out of the Inconscience—a level of Existence created by the descent of the Spirit into its own nether abysses. The Spirit is indivisibly one, luminous, all-knowing, all-achieving and free; and Matter is infinitely self-dividing, dark, inert, and bound to the blind drive of the force of Inconscience. In this contrary substance of Matter the Spirit gets involved, self-lost, having willed the temporal adventure of rapturous self-recovery and self-expression in a myriad individual forms. Therefore all creation can be called manifestation, but we use the word in the special sense of the perfect deployment of the divine qualities of Light and Peace and Purity and Freedom in terrestrial life, which is now engulfed in gloom and suffering. Manifestation is the meaning and purpose of creation. It gives a direction, a definite significance and a final consummation to all the diverse strivings of man. Without this ideal and underlying evolutionary impulsion, life would be a futile buffet against the tide of Time and the blockade of material circumstances. A hedonistic life, made up of desires and sensations, may satisfy the animal in man, but not the God who longs to recover and reveal His radiant infinity and immortality. It is the ideal and truth
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of manifestation alone that can polarise man's whole consciousness and engage all his energies, purifying, illumining, and transfiguring them, and fulfilling them in the unveiled plenitude of the Spirit.
Having prepared the background, let us now turn to the Prayers and Meditations of the Mother for the light it sheds on the ideal and truth of manifestation. In the Prayer of June 13, 1914, the Mother gives the whole philosophy, principle, and a synopsis of the process of manifestation :
"We must first conquer knowledge, that is to say, learn how to know Thee, to be united with Thee; and all means are good and can be employed to attain this end. But it would be a great mistake to think that all is done when this end is attained. All is done in principle, the victory is won theoretically, and those who have for their motive only the egoistic aspiration for their own salvation can be satisfied and can then live only in and for this communion, without any care for Thy manifestation.
"But those whom Thou hast chosen as Thy representatives upon the earth cannot be satisfied with the result so obtained. To know Thee, first and before everything else, yes; but once the knowledge of Thee is acquired, there remains all the work of Thy manifestation; and then intervene the quality, force, complexity and perfection of that manifestation. Very often those who have known Thee, dazzled and transported with ecstasy by their knowledge^ are content to see Thee for themselves and to express Thee as best or as worst they can in their outermost being. He who would be perfect in Thy manifestation cannot be satisfied with that; he must manifest Thee on all the planes, in all the states of the being and thus draw from the knowledge he has acquired the greatest possible profit for the whole world.
"Before the immensity of the programme, the whole being exults and sings to Thee a hymn of gladness.
"All nature in full conscious activity, vibrating all over with Thy sovereign forces, responds to their inspiration and wills to be illumined and transfigured by them.
"Thou art the Master of the world, the sole Reality.”
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Let us pick out the key-ideas of this Prayer and concentrate on them in order to understand what the Mother means by manifestation.
(1) "We must first learn how to know Thee, to be united with Thee. ” This is the very first objective of any human life worth the name, and it is the one common aim of all theistic religions. But is that the end ? Why did the soul come down into birth, assume the perishable human form, consent to pass through death, mount the calvary of suffering, and endure the yoke of the world's labour ? Why did it leave the eternal bliss of the divine embrace and descend into mortality ? Was it only to discover its blunder and return to the Ineffable ? The Mother says that the great object of its descent into the inertia and inconscience of Matter is the reproduction of the bliss of the eternal union here, in the infinite divisions and discords of the phenomenal flux, and the preparation of the terrestrial nature in order to make it a fit tabernacle of Sachchidananda.
(2) "Those who have for their motive only the egoistic aspiration for their own salvation can be satisfied and can then live only in and for this communion, without any care for Thy manifestation.” The exclusive striving for personal salvation and the secret communion in the remote depths of the being is egoistic, it is a denial of the universality of the soul, its essential oneness with the whole existence.
(3) "Once the knowledge of Thee is acquired, there remains all the work of Thy manifestation; and then intervene the quality, force, complexity and perfection of that manifestation.” First knowledge and union, and then manifestation. But even after inner union and communion, the work of manifestation is found to be extremely difficult and has to be carried on, stage by stage, in the teeth of the lower nature's basic inertia and dominant animality. The nature that has sprung and developed out of the dark inconscience of Matter lends itself with an ill grace to the work of transmutation. It perpetuates its dull obsession with all that is grossly material and its dread and doubt of all that is subtle and wide and radiant. The history of spirituality is the history of the progressive purification and preparation of
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this nature from its centre to its dense peripheries. But though much has been achieved, an immense more has still to be achieved. The ideal of the Yogi being, in his outer nature, like an inert stone or a mad man or a demon or a child, is an out- worn creed reflecting the failure of the Spirit to conquer and convert the medium of its self-expression. Much of the doubt in the mind of the modern man about the truth and power of spirituality derives from this failure on the part of the spiritual seekers to express in the concrete terms of life what is realised in the depths of the being. This disability has to be overcome. Life can have no sense, no justification for continuing, if it can- not be a manifesting channel of Light. But the purification, preparation, and perfection of nature is a long and laborious process, ranging from the physical being to its subtler and subtest parts and planes; and it is only when this process is complete, that is to say, when one can "manifest Thee on all the planes, in all the states of the being," that the human nature can be said to be transformed and ripe for the fulfilment of the Will and the manifestation of the Divine. And this manifestation, as the Mother indicates, is not the triumph of the individual in the Divine, but rather the triumph of the Divine in the egoless individual, and "the greatest possible profit for the whole world."
If man is dehumanised today, if he manifests, not the Deity within, but the demon and the brute reigning in the lower parts of his being, it is because he has no sublimating ideal before him; no centre of gravity above him. Because he cannot rise, he sinks: for, life abhors stagnation. All that his developed intellect acquires and accumulates is used, not for the perfection of his soul and the elevation and enlightenment of his life, but as fuel for the hell-fire of his nether personality. The greater the accumulation of the fuel, the greater the intensity and range of the burning, and, involved in this raging conflagration, he does not see that it is spreading also to his higher parts to enfold and consume them.
Is there, then, no hope for man ? Will the hell-fire consume his whole being till it is reduced to ashes ? The Mother holds
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out high hopes of his regeneration and eventual divinisation. She takes her stand upon the assurance of the Divine :
"Of that ,O Lord, Thou hast given us assurance, an assurance which has been accompanied by the most powerful promise which Nature, the universal Consciousness, can ever make...We have, therefore, the certitude that what has to be done will be done, and that our present individual being is really called upon to collaborate in this glorious victory, in this new manifestation”.¹
But are not the forces of darkness rampant in the world ? Do we not see greed and violence, hate and ill-will, lust and cruelty, falsehood and hypocrisy swaying human nature ? The Mother does not deny it, but her inspiring message comes as a breath of the mountain breeze : "On the surface is the storm, the sea is in turmoil, waves clash and leap one on another and break with a mighty uproar, but all the time, under this water in fury, are vast smiling expanses, peaceful and motionless. They look upon the surface agitation as an indispensable act; for. Matter has to be vigorously churned if it is to become capable of manifesting entirely the divine Light.”² The thickening of the gloom is a proof, not of a return of the night, but of the advent of the dawn —beyond the tunnel gleams, indeed, the invading light.
"By the sum of the resistance one can measure the scope Thou wouldst give to the action of so much of Thy pure forces as are coming to be manifested upon the earth. What opposes is precisely that on which it is the mission of those forces to act; it is the darkest hatred which must be touched and transformed into luminous peace.”³ The forces of resistance are, therefore, the very forces which, by divine Providence, have been designed to assist the manifestation. The darkest hour in the annals of the human race is pregnant with the brightest possibilities of its redemption.The highest Force, "unknown to the earth up till now," is at
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 15, 1914.
² ibid., May 26, 1914.
³ ibid., November 15, 1914,
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work upon the rebellious stuff of Matter, and under the highest Light the divine centre is being organised—the centre that will be the pioneer creation of the New Manifestation.
"Like a sun Thy splendour descends upon the earth and Thy rays will illumine the world. All the elements which are pure enough, plastic enough, receptive enough to manifest the very splendour of the central fire group themselves....Thy splendour would radiate, that which is capable of manifesting it, manifests it; and these elements gather to reconstitute, as perfectly as possible in this world of division, the divine Centre which is to manifest.”¹
Emanating from her spiritual vision and experience, the Mother's message blends with the divine assurance in two revealing Prayers which breathe infinite hope for mankind.
"How present Thou art amongst us, O beloved Mother ! It seems as if Thou wouldst assure us of Thy complete support and show us that the Will which would manifest itself through us has found instruments capable of realising its Law by putting it into a complete accord with Thy present possibilities. And the things which appeared most difficult, most improbable, and perhaps even most impossible, become wholly realisable, since Thy Presence assures us that the material world itself is prepared to manifest the new form of the Will and the Law ”? ²
"What a plenitude in the perception!...Thy Force is there;
ready for manifestation, waiting, it is building the propitious how, the favourable opportunity: it is there, the incomparable splendour of thy victorious sovereignty.
"The Force is there. Rejoice, you who wait and hope: The new manifestation is sure, the new manifestation is near. ”³
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, June 16, 1914.
² ibid., September 24, 1914.
³ ibid., July 6, 1914.
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THERE are as many kinds of divine union as there have been mystics to realise it. Any supra-sensible and decisive experience in the inner consciousness is called divine union. Some Yogins, descending into the deeps of their being, realise an ineffable peace and call it divine union, some find themselves engulfed in an illimitable ocean of bliss or receive the torrential influx of a mighty power and call it divine union. Some realise the immutable Self and think that they have identified themselves with the Absolute. Some, again, unite themselves with the Divine in their hearts, hṛddeśe, and cherish the belief that this is the highest possible union with the Master and Lover of all creatures. Instances like these could be multiplied ad infinitum, but that would hardly throw much light on the nature of the union we propose to deal with here. It is, of course, true that all these experiences and many more of the kind are genuine —not that there cannot be any faked ones—and that they are undoubtedly divine in so far as they are spiritual, but what is of capital importance is, first, whether all of them can be at all called union, and, second, whether they are union with the Divine.
We are, therefore, naturally led to a consideration of what we mean by the Divine and union with Him. Most philosophies and theologies agree to disagree on this point. We are not, of course, concerned here with those philosophies which are avowedly atheistic or materialistic; but even among the theistic ones, there are various conceptions of the Divine. Some postulate Him as the extra-cosmic Lord and Master of the universe; some regard Him as immanent in and coextensive with the universe; some envisage Him only as an all-pervading static Existence; and yet some as the inexpressible, incommunicable, transcendent Absolute; and so on and so forth. The connotation of the words "divine union", therefore, varies according to the conception one has of the Divine. And then various things are meant by union, as we have already said
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above. Even in cases of authentic divine union, there are differences, not only of degree but also of kind, entailing considerable differences in their effects upon the consciousness of those who realise it. It is a vast and extremely interesting subject, but as it does not lie within the scope of our present object, we shall just touch upon it and pass on to the Mother's experiences of the divine union as transcribed in the "Prayers and Meditations". And in order to obviate a possible misunderstanding, we shall make it perfectly clear at the very outset that the union the Mother aspired for and realised, is not the traditional union experienced and held in the depths of the being and strenuously guarded against the disturbing elements of the surface-self and the surrounding world. That is a comparatively easy achievement—the outer personality hushed, the deeper layers of the consciousness are released into activity, and the soul either plunges headlong into the eternal immobility of the silent Brahman or enters, thrilled and transported, into the beatific embrace of the Beloved. Or, it passes, swiftly or by slow stages, through various realms of the Spirit, bathing in their light and feeding on their delight, into the ineffable Absolute. Whatever consciousness persists in the outer personality —unless it is a complete trance, in which case there is a temporary suspension of all movements of the external nature-is left to itself and its helpless automatism. Or sometimes, in some Yogins of exceptional calibre, the rapturous state of inner union is reflected to a certain extent on the outer nature; there is a reproduction or radiation of the inner peace and purity and joyous freedom and, subject to certain conditions, a more or less conscious and direct play of the divine Force in the natural personality which undergoes, in consequence, a remarkable heightening and acquires a new and infinitely more perfect an potent dynamism. But great as these states are and equally glorious to the undiscriminating eye of mental intelligence, they are far from what the Mother has experienced and expressed in so many of her "Prayers and Meditations."
We shall now proceed to see what the Mother means by the Divine and the divine union. By the Divine she means—and that is
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exactly the view of Sri Aurobindo, as we shall see presently —the one infinite and eternal Person, Purusha, who is at once the transcendent Author and Lord of the universe of His own creation, which is but His own multiple self-extension and self- representation in Himself, and immanent in it as a sustaining, guiding and consummating static and dynamic Presence. The Upanishad describes Him with a comprehensive sweep and a penetrating vividness :—
"But the divine and unborn and formless Spirit that containeth the inward and the outward is beyond mind and life and is luminously pure, and He is higher than the highest Immutable.
"And of Him is born life and the mind and all the organs of sense and of Him are Ether and Air and Light and Water and Earth that holdeth all.
"Fire is the head of Him and His eyes are the sun and the moon and the quarters are His organs of hearing and the revealed scripture is His speech; Air is His life-breath and the universe is His heart and earth is at His feet. He is the inner Self within all creatures.
"And from Him is fire, of which the sun is the fuel, rain that arises from the wine of the gods, and herbs that grow upon the earth; as when a man pours his seed into a woman, many creatures are born from the Spirit.
"And from Him are many kinds of gods produced and the demi-gods and men and the beasts and the birds, and the breath and the nether breath, and grain of rice and grain of barley, and faith and truth and holiness and rule.
"And the seven breaths are born of Him, and the seven tongues ’ of the flame, and the seven kinds of fuel and the seven kinds of offering, and the seven worlds in which the breaths, whose chamber is in the secret heart, move and are placed within, seven and seven.
"And from Him are the seas and all the mountains and from Him flow all forms of rivers, and all herbs are from Him, and sensible delight which maketh the soul to abide with the material elements.
"The Spirit is all this that is here in the universe; He is works
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and self-discipline and Brahman and the supreme immortality.”¹
He is the eternal Ground of all things that were, are and will be. In Him there is no division, though He seems to be divided; no dualities and anomalies, though he creates them freely for the play of Ignorance with which evolution starts from Inconscience. He is the reconciliation of all differences and discords. He is the One, and He has become many; and this becoming is not an illusion, but a timeless fact of the divine Reality. And yet He is the ineffable, indefinable Absolute unconditioned, unqualified and featureless.
It is clear that this comprehensive conception of the Divine is the fusion of all the current conceptions of religions philosophies, and embraces and unifies the diverse experience of the mystics of all ages and climes. It does not negate or invalidate any truth of spiritual realization, or give the lie to sane and substantial finding of metaphysical speculation. I luminous amplitude Vedanta joins hands with Sankhya, Tantra with Vaishnavism, Paganism with Christianity, and even Materialism finds its essential quest justified, rightly interpreted and enlightened, and itself united with spirituality in a happy wedlock. It is a synthesis, not achieved by an intellectual or emotional eclecticism, but by an integral spiritual experience — a synthesis which reflects the manifold unity of all existence. It is an epitome of all the conceptions of the Divine, past and present, and bids fare to be the sovereign, dynamic spiritual conception of the future.
"An omnipresent Reality”, says Sri Aurobindo in "The Life Divine" (Vol. I, p. 51) "is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed expressions, from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those remote antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the ineffable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse. From that
¹ Mundaka, II, Chap. I,
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all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation of the same Reality. All antinomies confront each other in order to recognise one Truth in their opposed aspects and embrace by the way of conflict their mutual Unity. Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.”
Now, union with this Divine or omnipresent Reality will, of course, mean union with Him at once in all the states of His consciousness and all the modes of His Being and becoming. Anything short of it may be a partial, but can never be a complete or integral union. A seeker of integral union has to be identified with the Chatushpada Brahman of the Upanishad—the Brahman of the waking consciousness, the Brahman of the dream or subliminal consciousness, the Brahman of the sleep consciousness, and That of the transcendent, absolute consciousness. When one is fully identified with the Divine in all these states of consciousness, one can be said to have realised the most complete union. Thus identified, one becomes, so to say, like the Divine Himself, at once transcendent and immanent, universal and individual, static and dynamic, one and many, and yet—this point has to be carefully noted—it is not a self-annihilation of the individual in the Divine, for that would mean an extinction of the very centre of manifestation in the world. The individual persists as an eternal portion and aspect of the Transcendent in the universe, but liberated from all limitations and participating in the infinity and immortality of the Supreme. In a perfect union, one holds in a divine grip and balance all the four states described above. One is beyond all universe, inaccessibly poised in the inconceivable supracosmic silence, and yet moves in all the multiple movements of the world, guiding it to its ultimate destiny. No alternation of the states, but an unbroken and spontaneous simultaneity, a firm possession and a termless ecstasy of multitudinous enjoyment are the experience of the integral divine union.
It goes without saying that we hardly ever come across any
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record in the ancient and modern scriptures and mystical hagiography of the world of such a comprehensive realisation, such a fourfold perfection of divine union. There have been many cases of transcendent union, necessitating a deliberate or automatic diminution of the activities of the surface nature, or, more usually, a temporary abrogation or suspension of the active physical self. Light has often been wooed and won, but at the expense of Life, which has gone either pale or grey with neglect. But a fusion of Light and Life, of the One and the Many, of the Transcendent, the Universal and the individual, of utter silence and the stupendous stir and hum of the cosmic movement, of the Spirit and Matter in an integrated and divinised human consciousness, is an achievement yet unrecorded in the history of spiritual culture.¹
Let us now try to follow in the footsteps of the Mother as she proceeds from one realization of union to another till the integral union is attained. Almost in the beginning of her "Prayers and Meditations" the Mother declares that she has realized divine union : "I said yesterday to that Englishman who is seeking for Thee with so sincere a desire that I had definitively found Thee, that the union was constant. Such is indeed the state of which I am conscious. All my thoughts go towards Thee, all my acts are consecrated to Thee; Thy Presence is for me an absolute, immutable, invariable fact, and Thy Peace dwells constantly in my heart... how many times already when I pronounce, it (the word "I”) it is Thou who speakest in me, for I have lost the sense of separativity.”²
The reader will find in this description a beautiful and living example of divine union. "I have definitively found Thee", "All my thoughts go towards Thee, all my acts are consecrated to Thee", "I have lost the sense of separativity." All these words signify a state in which the Divine is not only discovered but embraced and served even in the minute details of the
¹ There is, it is true, the legend of Yajnavalkya who wished to possess both the worlds, ubhayameva, and also the Rajarshis (king-sages) and those "liberated in life" (Jivanmuktas); but the exact nature of their integral realisation has not been recorded.
² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 19, 1912.
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Mother's life.. .And yet, she continues, "I know that this state of union is poor and precarious compared with that which it will become possible for me to realise tomorrow". She is not content with what would have been readily regarded by most mystics as the final attainment; she finds it "poor and precarious", for her aspiration is for something much higher and wider, something that is indissolubly bound up with the very mission of her life. And she gives expression to this aspiration in some of her Prayers:—
"I aspire for the day when I can no longer say "I", for I shall be Thou”.¹
"Let the pure perfume of sanctification burn always, rising higher and higher and straighter and straighter, like the ceaseless prayer of the integral being, desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee”. ²
In the second quotation we have the key-note of her sublime aspiration : "desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee." Not union in itself and for itself, for that has been already realised, but union for the sake of manifestation, that is to say, a permanent and active union in the whole consciousness and the whole nature. It is a union in which the Mother does not so much revel as reveal; it is a union for bridging "earth-hood and heavenhood" and making deathless "the Children of Time".
This, then, is the central truth of the Mother's aspiration, and unless we have a clear grasp of it, it would be difficult to follow in her footsteps through the Prayers which are a mounting symphony of dynamic union. There are many Prayers which may appear to us to be self-contradictory and self-repetitive, but that is a common experience of our human mind when it tries to follow the movements of an infinite consciousness and force whose incalculable flexibility and subtle self-modification
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 2, 1912.
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baffles its comprehension. Most of the Prayers, especially the later ones, are a kaleidoscope of a difficult perfectioning of the physical being of the Mother, without which the union of her longing could not be realised. This physical transformation is a revolutionary conception, extremely intricate and arduous in its process, involving systematic exploration of the subconscient and the inconscient parts of the human being, and their eventual illumination and transfiguration. A complete union includes a union even of these parts with the superconscience and omniconscience of the supreme Reality.
It is true that transcendental union, which means union with the Reality in its timeless and spaceless self-existence, is the first necessity. Unless we attain to the Transcendent, we remain tied to Time, cooped up in the cosmic formula. Complete liberation implies transcendence of the universe and a secure superiority to the waves of Nature. But a naked, irrevocable retreat to the relationless Absolute cannot be the aim of the soul's incarnation in the world of relativities, it can only be an important episode in its spiritual evolution. If the soul has descended into Matter, it is only to transfigure it and manifest the Divine in its transmuted substance. If it has descended into the relativities, it is to realise and fulfil the Absolute in the very play of the relativities. If it has come down into Time it is only to reveal the Eternal in the very flux of Time. Therefore, after the transcendental union, the integral union, or, in other words, the perfect and permanent union of the whole being and consciousness of man with the Divine. In this integral union one does not lose the transcendental union, but only annexes to it the universal, dynamic union, and makes the integrality, thus attained, the base of an unfettered action in the world. The Mother expresses this idea in the following words : "Now I clearly understand that union with Thee is not an end to be pursued, so far as the present individuality is concerned; it is a fact accomplished long since. And that is why Thou seemest to tell me always. Do not revel in the ecstatic contemplation of the union, fulfil the mission I have confide to thee on the earth.’ ”
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"And the individual work to be pursued simultaneously with the collective work is the awareness and possession of all the activities and all the regions of the being and the definitive establishment of the consciousness in that highest point which will allow at once the prescribed action and a constant communion with Thee. The joy of perfect union can come only when what has to be done has been done.”
"We must preach to all, first, union, then work; but for those who have realised the union, each moment of their life must be an integral expression of Thy Will through them.”
Describing this union with a greater elaboration, the Mother says, "In all the states of being, in all the modes of activity, in all things, in all worlds, one can meet Thee and be united with Thee, for Thou art everywhere and ever present. He who has met Thee in one activity of his being or in one world in the universe, says: 'I have found Him’, and seeks no more for anything else; he thinks he has arrived at the summit of human possibility. What a mistake ! It is in all states, in all modes, in all things, in all worlds, in all elements that we have to discover Thee and be united with Thee; and if we leave out one element, however small it may be, the communion cannot be perfect, the realisation cannot be accomplished.
"And that is why to find Thee is only the first step in an ascent that is infinite”.¹
The Mother leaves no doubt in our minds as to the nature of the divine union she calls integral. Obviously, it is not a union only on the heights of the being, nor is it realised only in the distant depths. It enfolds each and every element in the infinite existence and remains the same, whatever the field and role of action assigned to the individual. The prevalent idea that "consciousness of the Many and consciousness of the One are mutually exclusive states” is so strongly fixed in men's minds that it does not occur to them that the state they describe as union or complete self-absorption or self-annulment of the
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, July 12, 1914.
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individual soul in the Reality "in which all outward things are forgot", is but a partial, a truncated union. If Reality is everywhere, at once in all worlds, in all states, in all beings and in all elements as well as beyond all states, all worlds and all elements; then a complete union with It will surely never exclude the "outward things"; for, in fact, there is nothing that is outward, nothing that is not essentially divine and contained in the Divine. A union that causes a forgetfulness of the outward things is a kind of trance, a limited and localised intensive union, not an integral one. Tuned to an ampler key runs this other Prayer :—
"O Lord, Lord, a boundless joy fills my heart, songs of gladness surge through my head in marvellous waves and in the full confidence of Thy certain triumph, I find a sovereign peace and an invincible Power. Thou fillest my being. Thou animatest it, Thou settest in motion its hidden springs, Thou illuminest its understanding, Thou intensifiest its life, Thou increasest tenfold its love; and I no longer know whether the universe is I or I am the universe, whether Thou art in me or I am in Thee; Thou alone art and all is Thou; and the streams of Thy infinite Grace fill and overflow the world.”¹
Experience succeeding to richer and wider experience tends towards the final, dynamic identification. The path stretches interminable through the fields of inconscience. Often the gallop slows down to a trot and the trot to an amble; after the unspeakable rapture of a rapt union, a spell of "harsh solitude", "a desert, arid and bare", but a new Light emerges from the heart of the solitude, a fresh gust of Force sweeps the being again to the summits and plunges it into a union incomparably deeper and more comprehensive than ever before. Here a word of caution is necessary. Those who have studied Western mysticism may run away with the idea that it is the "dark night of the soul" that the Mother describes by the phrases, "harsh solitude" and "a desert, arid and bare", a state of inevitable
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, May II, 1913.
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transition, of spiritual fatigue or of a desperate upsurge of the lower impurities before their final elimination. But even a cursory glance through the Prayers will belie this assumption. There is a transition, of course, but a transition in the long and difficult process of transforming the physical consciousness by a descent into the Subconscient and the Inconscient and their conquest and illumination. These obscure regions of the human consciousness, of which we know precious little, are still dominated by the twin principle of Ignorance and False-hood, and unless their universal base and dynamic are mastered and metamorphosed, unless Ignorance is turned into Knowledge, darkness into Light, Falsehood into Truth, and suffering into Ananda, there is no possibility of any individual, however spiritually great he may be, achieving a complete conversion and transformation of his physical being. It is this universal work that has engaged the whole of the Mother's attention and labour, because it is the work which the Divine has entrusted to her. It is, in fact, the mission, of her life.
"Thy will is that from the heart of this heavy and obscure Matter I must let loose the volcano of Thy Love and Light. It is Thy will that, breaking all old conventions of language, there must arise the right Word to express Thee, the Word that never was heard before, it is Thy will that the integral union should be made between the smallest things below and the sublimest and most vast above; and that is why, O Lord, cutting me off from all religious joy and spiritual ecstasy, depriving me of all freedom to concentrate exclusively on Thee, Thou hast said to me, 'Work as an ordinary man in the midst of ordinary beings; learn to be nothing more than they are in all that is manifesting; associate with the integral way of their being; for, beyond all that they know, all that they are, thou earnest in thyself the torch of the eternal splendour which does not waver, and by associating with them, it is this thou wilt carry into their midst.’ ” ¹
Sweeping through unimaginable experiences of ineffable
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, January n, 1915.
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ecstasy and utter desolation, the Divine lands her at long last on the threshold of the "Marvellous Way", where the Mother feels that "in the perfect union I am this plan and this Will, and I taste the supreme bliss of the infinite, even while I play with ardour, precision and energy, in the world of division, the special play Thou hast entrusted to me."
"Thy power in me is like a fountain, strong and fertilizing, which clamours behind the rocks, accumulating its energies to break down the obstacle and gush forth freely to the exterior, pouring over the plain to fertilize it.”¹
A further progress through the "sombre night" and the Mother emerges into the sunlight of a deeper union which finds expression in the following : "Thou hast taken entire possession of this miserable instrument, and if it is not yet perfected enough for Thee to complete its transformation. Thou art at work in each one of its cells to knead it, and make it supple and illumine it, and to class, organise and harmonise it in the ensemble of the being.”²
Describing the detailed action of transformation leading to the integral union, the Mother says at one place :—
"Little by little, the vital being was habituated to find harmony in the most intense action, as it had found it in passive surrender. And once this harmony was sufficiently established, there was light again in all parts of the being, and the consciousness of what had happened became complete.
"Now the vital being has recovered in the midst of action the perception of Infinity and Eternity. It can, through all sensations and all forms, perceive Thy supreme Beauty and can live it. Even in its sensation, extended, active and fully developed, it can feel the contrary sensations at the same time and always it perceives Thee.”³
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, July 31, 1915.
² ibid., January 22,1916.
³ ibid., June 7, 1916.
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"Thou hast willed, O Lord, that the being should become larger and greater. It could not do so without entering again, at least partially and temporarily, into ignorance and obscurity. It is this ignorance and this obscurity that it has come now to place at Thy feet as the most modest of ordeals.”¹
When the spire of the temple of perfection gleams in the distance, the Mother hears in the silence of her being :—
"By renouncing everything, even wisdom and consciousness, thou wert able to prepare thy heart for the role which was assigned to it: apparently the most thankless role, that of the fountain which always lets its waters flow abundantly for all, but towards which no stream can ever remount; it draws its inexhaustible force from the depths and has nothing to expect from outside. But thou feelst already beforehand what sublime felicity accompanies this inexhaustible expansion of love...
"Be this love in everything and everywhere, ever more widely, ever more intensely and the whole world will become at once thy work and thy estate, thy field of action and thy conquest.. Fight that thou mayst conquer and triumph; struggle to surmount all that has been up to this day, to make the new Light emerge, the new example which the world needs.”²
Another heroic advance through the darkness of Matter culminates in an experience of union of a unique depth and comprehensiveness :—
"The whole earth is in a stir and agitation of perpetual change;
all life enjoys and suffers endeavours, struggles, conquers, is destroyed and formed again.
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, December 4, 1916.
² ibid., December 25, 1916.
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"In all these innumerable and manifold elements, I am the Will that moves, the Thought that acts, the Force that realises, the Matter that is put in motion.
"My heart has fallen asleep down to the very depths of my being.
No more any personal limits, no more any individual action, no more any separative concentration creating conflict; nothing but a single and infinite Oneness.
"My heart has fallen asleep down to the very depths of my being”¹
We have called this experience unique, for, we believe there is nothing in the whole range of mystical literature to compare with it in depth and amplitude. Here there is a perfect, a divine combination of the abysmal silence of the Eternal and the stupendous movement of the Universal, There is sleep "down to the depths" of the being, a state of suṣupti, the third state of the fourfold consciousness of the all-comprehending Brahman, the state of the Consciousness of the supreme Lord of the world, Sarveshwara. And in the very midst of that sleep there is a perception of the stir and agitation of perpetual change. Is it only a perception ? Then it cannot be a total identification with the Lord of the universe. A total identification implies a participation, not only in the infinite Peace and Silence of the Lord, but also in the thrilled delight of the movement of His creative Force. And we have an illustration of the participation, a full and integral participation, in what follows :—
This is a complete dynamic identification. The Mother is identified with the Lord's Will, the Lord's creative Thought and the Lord's realising Force and, at the same time, with this inert and inconscient substance, this dark Matter which is being
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, April 10, 1917.
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churned and redeemed, and in which the integral union is to be attained. And yet, implicit in the very grain of this identification, its inalienable base and sustenance, is the perfect identification of the Mother's consciousness with the Consciousness of the Absolute in its eternal Silence and Immutability. This combination constitutes what the Mother calls integral divine Union. And still there may be many more conquests to be made and consolidated in the rolling fields of inconscience—who knows ? Matter is not only obscure but obdurate. Life is complex and convulsed with desire, and the Light invincibly insistent. What will be the issue ? Who knows? Who cares to know ? Man is enamoured of the tinsel and preoccupied with it, and has little time and less inclination to follow the labours of one whose sole object in life has been to dig "a bed for the golden river's song" and bring "the fires of the splendour of God into the human abyss.” ¹
Not union with the Divine in the soul alone, not in the soul, mind and heart alone, but a union, a constant, dynamic, honey- dripping, life-transforming union even in the physical being, even in the cells of the body—a complete and creative union between the Summit and the Base—has been the labour of the Mother, not for herself alone, but for mankind.
Man will one day awake from the nightmarish reality he calls his life, and garner the golden harvest of a divine humanity upon earth, but he may know not who ploughed the fields and who sowed the seeds. God's Grace, even when it takes a human form, remains invisible to the fleshly eyes of material men.
¹ Poems Past and Present; Sri Aurobindo,
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IN almost all theistic religions, Eastern and Western, the intervention and action of Grace has been acknowledged to be the supreme force of effectuation in spiritual life. But this intervention is held to be mysterious and unpredictable. Grace blows like the wind, "where it listeth". No virtues can claim it, and no sin, however black, need despair of it. It visits the broken hearts of the fallen and the deluded, and heals them with its balm of love; while it passes by the arrogant great, and lets the unrepentant stew in their own juice. It comes like gentle dew a soft breath of zephyr on a sultry day, or a gleam of light in the midst of a forlorn darkness. It comes also sometimes like a cyclone or an earthquake, sweeping or upheaving the soul of man. Its frowns are as much a blessing as its irradiating smiles; and if it smites hard sometimes, it is only to rouse the slothful and the slumbering. But for the action of Grace, life would run in its normal grooves, and the souls of creatures rust in their obscure inertia.
The Upanishads suggest the action of Grace when they say "This understanding is not to be gained by reasoning nor by tapasya nor by much learning, but whom this Self chooses, to him it reveals its own body." The teaching of the Gita is soaked in the spirit and gospel of Grace. In the Vaishnavic tradition of Hinduism, Grace or bhagavatkṛpā is regarded as the sole agent of redemption and divine realisation. It is said to be ahaitukī actuated by no ostensible reason; and its action is irresistible and infallible. Ramanuja, Vallabhacharya, Chaitanya and Ramakrishna lay a preponderant stress on the divine Grace. Christianity can be called a religion of Grace, so much in its essence, it hinges upon it. "No man can come to Me unless the Father draw him" is remarkably identical in spirit with the Upanishadic saying quoted above. "Contemplation" says Ruysbroeck, "places us in a purity and a radiance which is far above our understanding... and none can attain to it b knowledge, by subtlety, or by any exercise whatsoever, but
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he whom God chooses to unite to Himself, and to illuminate by Himself, he and no other can contemplate God." Here again we find almost a paraphrase of the Upanishadic saying. The same mystic says again elsewhere: "...the union takes place in God through grace and our homeward turning love..." Richard Rolle, another great Western mystic, confirms Ruysbroeck's words when he says : "Contemplative sweetness not without full great labour is gotten, and with joy untold it is possessed. Forsooth, it is not man's merit but God's gift..." Hilton, another mystic rings the same note : "...first He chooseth him, and that is when He draweth a man to Him by comfort of devotion..." In his "Scale Of Perfection", Hilton dwells again and again on the subject of Grace and waxes inspiringly eloquent over it. "The soul of a man, whilst it is not touched with special grace, is blunt and boisterous to ghostly¹ work, and can nought therein. It may not thereof for weakness of itself; it is both cold and dry, undevout and unsavoury in itself. But then cometh the light of grace, and through touching maketh it sharp and subtle, ready and able to ghostly work, and giveth it a great freedom and whole readiness in will for to be buxom to all the stirrings of grace, ready for to work after that grace stirreth..." Baron Von Hugel calls Grace "the noblest root and flower of the Jewish-Christian religion and of European civilisation, the sense of givenness...." S. L. Frank, a famous Russian philosopher-mystic, clearly brings out the essential Christian attitude to Grace when he writes in his book, "God with us" : "All ethical religions except Christianity, are religions of Law... religions, that is, whose moral content is limited to definite moral rules and ways of living. In principle, i.e. leaving aside the question of human sinfulness, it is possible to realise consistently and to the end the conditions of life prescribed by the Jewish, the Mahomedan, the Confucian, and partly even by the Buddhist religion, for it is possible to carry out the rules of conduct enjoined by them. But it is impossible by human efforts alone to realise through definite forms of conduct and of social order the main Christian commandment to
¹ Ghostly—Spiritual.
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'be perfect, even as the Father in heaven is perfect' or, in other words, to become wholly like God. Christianity is the religion of grace and not of law. Man can and must by the moral effort of will and the spiritual intensity of prayer draw the gracious forces to himself, but it does not depend upon him in what measure they will flow to him, nor what their effect may be... .In revealing to man the ideal of absolute perfection for which he must strive, Christianity calls forth the whole of his spiritual energy. But it teaches him clearly to distinguish between two ways towards perfection. The first is the main Christian path of perfecting one's inner spiritual condition, of giving one's heart to God and striving for the divine likeness. In following that path man knows that his own powers are insufficient for attaining the end, and that the amount of grace bestowed upon him, being a free gift, depends upon God's will alone; it is inevitably a case of 'many being called, but few chosen'; there is however, no set limit either to man's spiritual energy, or to the flow of grace." According to Origen, freedom and grace are the two wings on which the human soul ascends to God.
We have assured ourselves of the traditional background of an almost universal faith in Grace among spiritual seekers. Let us now turn to the teachings of the Mother and try to understand what she says on the subject.
What is Grace ?
Going to the very root of the matter, the Mother explains the genesis of Grace and its essential nature, and then she throws light upon the nature of its action, the conditions to be fulfilled for receiving it, its place in the Integral Yoga, etc. According to her. Grace is the Divine's Love which has descended here into the world of inconscience and ignorance to raise it towards the supreme Truth and its infinite Light of Consciousness. "The Supreme has sent His Grace into the world to save it.”¹ Before its advent, everything here was dark and dense and inert, in the death-grip of inanimate Matter. Love came down
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as Grace, and gave the first, perennial impetus to evolution. It awoke the Spirit that slept in Matter, and, little by little, leads it back to its own infinite and eternal superconscience. Grace is all-permeating, all-sustaining and all-transfiguring. It is everywhere, and supremely dynamic behind the tangled play of the apparent and occult world-forces.
"What you have to do is to give yourself up to the Grace of the Divine; for, it is under the form of Grace, of Love, that it has consented to uplift the universe after the first involution was established... . With the Divine Love is the supreme power of Transformation. It has this power because it is for the sake of Transformation that it has given itself to the world and manifested everywhere. Not only has it infused itself into man, but also into all the atoms of the most obscure Matter in order to bring the world back to the original Truth. It is this descent that is called the supreme sacrifice in the Indian scriptures.”¹
Grace, then, is Love pervading the whole universe and acting from behind a thick veil as the most potent force of redemption and transformation. The popular idea that Grace is something that comes all of a sudden one knows not from where, achieves a miraculous result, and retires to where it came from, is based on a partial truth; for it takes account of the sporadic outward result of the working of Grace, but not of its constant, active Presence in all that exists in the universe. Grace is present in all beings, things and happenings as an all-knowing and all- directing Love; and it is enough to open to it with faith and trust in order to benefit by its mighty action. "The Grace is equally for all. But each one receives it according to his sincerity. It does not depend on outward circumstances but on a sincere aspiration and openness.”²
Those who walk through life with their eyes unblinded by any materialist bias, their inner perception not quite blurred by personal preferences, and their hearts meekly receptive to
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spiritual influences, may perceive something of the mysterious working of Grace. But those who follow the spiritual life, particularly the life of Yoga, can never fail to testify to the fact that from "behind the appearances...this infinite, wonderful, all- powerful Grace...knows everything, organises everything, arranges everything, and leads us, whether we want it or not, whether we know it or not, towards the supreme goal, the union with the Divine, the awareness of the Divine Consciousness and becoming one with it.”¹ How it makes us keep to the line of advance in spite of ourselves ! And how, when we stray and wander, when our inner vision is dimmed and the heart's fire flags, it keeps pointing us to the distant Light and whispering in our ears : "Aham twām sarvapāpebhyaḥ mokṣayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ” (I will deliver thee from all sin, do not grieve). When harried by some impetuous desire, or blinded by some passion or delusion, we revolt against the Will of the Divine, Grace smites us with disgrace and calamity, and makes us smart with sharp pain, so that the desire or delusion may be burnt out in the fire of suffering, and we may turn again towards the out- stretched arms of the Divine. If the pressure of Grace upon the crooked and the cowering parts of our being is sometimes heavy and painful, it is only to straighten them out and make them strong enough to bear the Divine's yoke ² for the yoke of the Divine upon the parts of our instrumental nature is the release of our soul into His unconditioned freedom.
Our valuation of things is superficial and ignorant. What we regard as good or bad, auspicious or inauspicious, happy or unhappy, helpful or harmful, is all grist to the mill of benign Providence, which uses them indifferently for the ultimate good of every evolutionary soul. It uses misfortune with as much clairvoyant grace as good fortune. It makes no bones of employing even disaster and death, if need be, to wrest a soul from the toils of ignorance. Once our eyes are fully opened to the truth of the constant presence and intervention of divine Grace, we learn not to complain of the circumstances of our lives, but see
¹ Advent, April, 1957.
² "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me."—Christ,
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in them all the hand of the All-Lover who is leading us infallibly to Himself, to His eternal harmony and happiness, which is the ultimate fulfilment of our destiny.
"If you are truly in a state of intense aspiration”, says the Mother, "there is no circumstance that will not serve to help you in the realisation of your aspiration. All will come to help you, as if it were the perfect and absolute Consciousness that organised all things around you. And you in your external ignorance may not recognise it, may at first protest against the circumstances as they come to you, may complain and try even to change them. But after a time you will have become wiser, with a little distance put in between you and the event, you will find out that that was just the thing necessary for you to make the required progress. It is a Will, a supreme Good Will that arranges everything around you.”¹ It is an all-seeing universal Love that orders and directs our life, and not a blind chance or an inscrutable conspiracy of accidents.
In our spiritual life it is not unoften that we observe with a growing wonder and gratitude how experiences come into us, how veil after veil is lifted from our consciousness, truth after truth is revealed to our vision, and frozen masses of darkness are dispelled in a trice, as if by a miracle ! What we could not achieve by intense personal efforts, by discipline and prayer, : comes suddenly sailing into us as a mere gift. We know not how a certain luminous hint is thrown in, a certain necessary poise is established, a new solution is suggested to an obstinate problem, a besetting obstacle is cast out of our way, and the bewitching, beckoning glory of a new horizon is disclosed to our view! When we feel lost and forlorn, and do not know how to proceed, a ray of light is shot into our being and a nameless force carries us out of the wood. There can be no moment, no circumstance, no happening in which we need feel depressed or despair. Thanks to Grace, "each beat of the wing of sorrow can be a soar towards glory.”² There is an eye that is sleepless in its loving vigil, and a hand that is tireless in rendering help
¹ Advent, February 1957.
² The Supreme Discovery by the Mother,
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and healing. To feel lost is to deny God and repel His Grace.
"Who is worthy or unworthy in front of the Divine Grace ?
All are children of the same Mother.
Her love is equally spread over all of them.
But to each one She gives according to his nature and receptivity”¹
Conditions of Grace
"But there are conditions to fulfil: a great purity must be there and a great intensity in the self-giving, and that absolute trust in the supreme Wisdom of the Divine Grace which knows better than us what is truly good for ourselves. If the aspiration is offered to That and the offering is made truly and with enough intensity, the result will be marvellous.”²
Purity, unstinted self-giving and implicit faith and trust are the three main conditions for an unimpeded working of the divine Grace. Not to have faith is to keep the doors of one's being shut against Grace. "The Grace is always there ready to act but you must let it work and not resist its action. The one condition required is faith.”³ Not to give oneself is to remain helplessly imprisoned in egoistic and separative ignorance. Faith and self-giving make for purity, and purity ensures a smooth working of Grace. "Let us give ourselves without reserve to the Divine so best shall we receive the Divine Grace.”4
Grace and Universal Justice
"Justice is the strict logical determinism of the movements of universal Nature.”5 An inexorable law of causality, an inflexible system of cause and consequence governs the operations of all
² Advent, February, 1957.
³ Words of the Mother, 4th Series.
.4 Words of the Mother.
5 ibid.
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universal forces. There is in it no exceptions, no loop-holes, as the Buddha declared. As one sows so one has to reap. There is no escape from the natural and inevitable consequences of one's karma. But "the divine Force alone”, as the Mother assures us, "has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice.”¹ Grace possesses this freedom to override the determinism of universal nature, because it is from beyond the circle of nature that it acts—its sovereignty lies in its all-comprehending transcendence. Its freedom is not the licence of an arbitrary caprice, but the sovereign liberty of the all-knowing Wisdom of Love of which universal Justice itself is a derivative, mechanical action in temporal manifestation. The following example, once given by the Mother, may illustrate the action of Grace : Suppose that a man is going down a staircase, a loose dislodged tile of whose roof is on the point of falling right upon his head. According to the law of gravitation, the tile would fall and break his head, but lo, suddenly a hand stretches forth from behind and catches the tile. The man is saved. This interception by a person from behind him is an intervention of Grace, which nullifies the rigid determinism of Nature. "It is the great work of the Avatāras”, says the Mother, "to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatāra is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrix—through identity—of the absolute mechanism of Universal Justice. And through her mediation each movement of sincere and confident aspiration towards the Divine calls down in response the intervention of the Grace.”²
"Without the ceaseless intervention of Thy Grace, who would not oftentimes have come under the merciless blade of the Law of Universal Justice ?”³
"It is the Divine Grace that must be prayed for—if justice were
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to manifest, very few would be those who could stand in front of It.”¹
The Right Attitude
Once we have given ourselves over to Grace, we must abide by whatever it decides, and try to perceive its will in all that happens to us, good or bad, favourable or unfavourable, whatever it is, according to our mental standards. "The same thing, the same circumstance, identically the same, if taken as a gift from God, as a Divine Grace, as the effect of a total harmony, helps us to become more conscious, more strong and more true.”² This is the right attitude. If we keep it, we profit by all that befalls us, because our faith and trust in Grace makes it easy for it to act freely in and upon us, and by its mysterious alchemy turn defeat into victory and misfortune into a supreme good fortune. This is a universal experience of spiritual seekers all the world over.³ But, on the other hand, if the same thing, the same circumstance is taken as "a blow given by Fate, as a bad force that seeks to hurt us", it will serve only "to diminish us, make us dull and heavy, it will take away our consciousness, our force and the harmony.”4 The classical example of Prahlad is an apt case in point. Because his dependence on Grace was absolute. Grace carried him unscathed through all ordeals. Doubt or misgiving is an obstacle put in the way of the action of Grace. A simple, unquestioning faith and confidence is the best safeguard against all difficulties. "The Grace and help are always there for all who aspire for them, and their power is limitless when received with faith and confidence.”5 If the response of Grace does not come immediately, one should wait with confident patience
¹ Words of the Mother, 4th Series.
² Advent, February 1957.
³ "If the ordeal and fault have flung you down, if you have sunk into an abyss of suffering, do not at all be grieved, for it is there that the Divine affection, the supreme benediction will reach you !"—The Supreme Discovery by the Mother.
4 Advent, February, 1957.
5 Words of the Mother.
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—infinite patience, if need be—without allowing the mind to entertain the least doubt or the vital to lose its quiet. "With patience and perseverance all prayers are fulfilled.”¹ "Continue to have full faith in the Divine's Grace, Will and Action and all will be all right.”² Even a moment's slip from this right attitude may deflect or retard the action of Grace.
Grace and Illness
The Mother says that "90 p.c. of illnesses are the result of the subconscient fear in the body. In the ordinary consciousness of the body there is a more or less hidden anxiety about the consequences of the slightest physical disturbance. It can be translated by these words of doubt about the future : 'And what will happen ?’ It is this anxiety that must be checked. Indeed, this anxiety is a lack of confidence in the Divine Grace, the unmistakable sign that the consecration is not complete and perfect.”
As a remedial measure against this kind of pernicious anxiety, the Mother suggests the following method : "As a practical means of overcoming this subconscient fear, each time that something of it comes as the surface, the more enlightened part of the being must impress on the body the necessity of an entire trust in the Divine's Grace, the certitude that the Grace is always working for the best in ourself as well as in all, and the determination to submit entirely and unreservedly to the Divine’s Will.”³ A complete and unwavering trust in Grace is the most effective antidote against all fear.
Grace and the Integral Yoga
It can be said that as the Mother regards Grace to be the sole motive power behind the evolutionary ascent of man in general, so too she considers it to be the only means of progress in the Integral Yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, "the principal thing
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in the Yoga is to trust in the Divine Grace at every step, to direct the thought continually to the Divine and to offer oneself till the being opens and the Mother's force can be felt working in the ādhāra.”¹ Nobody, however powerful ² he may be, can do the Integral Yoga and reach its great goal of supramental trans- formation by his own strength and effort. It is a complete reliance on the divine Grace from the very beginning of the Yoga to the end that is indispensable—in the beginning for kindling the flame of aspiration and directing and fortifying our intense endeavour for self-offering, and in the end for the conquest of the supreme Truth and its manifestation in material life. "Let us offer our will to the Divine Grace, it is the Grace that accomplishes all.”³ The Integral Yoga, as it proceeds, cleaves through many a rocky tract and virgin forest. There are temptations below and temptations above—temptations in the domains of darkness to which we are so very prone, and temptations, almost irresistible temptations, in the regions of light. No human soul can overcome them by its unaided strength. "We must learn to rely only on the Divine Grace and to call for its help in all circumstances, then it will work out miracles.”4
The bedrock truth secretly sustaining and fortifying our faith in Grace is that the Divine is infinitely more solicitous about our liberation and perfection than we can ever be, for it is He who is evolving in us here—our soul is His soul, our mind is His mind, our life is His life, and our body nothing but His material vesture. There is an inscrutable but unfailing Wisdom with its own impeccable rhythm behind His progressive self- revelation in every creature and thing. That Wisdom is the all-achieving Force of Love, and that is Grace. When once we realise this truth, 5 we cannot but fling ourselves headlong
¹The Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.
²"However long the journey may be and however great the traveler, at the end is always found exclusive reliance on the Divine Grace."—The Words of the Mother.
³ Words of the Mother.
4 ibid.
5 It is a spontaneous Knowledge in our soul.
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into the arms of Grace and let it carry us wherever and howsoever it chooses. Grace, then, becomes at once the sole pilot and refuge of our entire existence. Cradled on illimitable bosom, we journey through storm and sunshine towards God's everlasting day of Love and Bliss, an ineffable joy and gratitude overflowing our hearts. A serene and joyous gratitude is the most helpful response our hearts can give to the action of Grace. "If one can be full of gratefulness and gratitude for the Divine Grace, then that is the last thing; you begin to see that at every step things are exactly what they should be and the very best that can be. It is then that Saccidānanda begins to gather Himself and refashion His Unity.”¹
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WE have seen what the Mother means by aspiration. Another basic element of the spiritual way taught by her is sincerity, which she regards not only as a basic element, but as the leaven of all basic and essential elements of spiritual life. If there is one thing that can open all closed doors and lead straight to the highest spiritual achievements, it is sincerity and if there is one thing without which no substantial progress can ever be made and nothing abiding achieved, it is sincerity. A sincere aspiration, a sincere faith, a sincere prayer, a sincere endeavour, can never go in vain. Whatever the difficulties of the path, however long and arduous the journey, however feeble and faltering the steps of the traveller, if there is sincerity in him. God's Grace will surely lead him on, firing his being, fortifying his will, and replenishing his failing strength and courage.
What is sincerity ? It is certainly not one of those simple copy-book maxims taught by ethical and religious teachers. The Mother gives it an infinitely extended and profound connotation. Viewed in her light, sincerity appears to be one of the signal conquests to be made in sadhana. It takes the sadhaka long years of unrelaxed labour to establish a complete or integral sincerity in his being. It is not enough for him to be sincere in his mind or in his heart in a general way, he has to be sincere in every fibre and movement of his mind, in every feeling and emotion of his heart. But even this is not enough. He has to be sincere in all the parts of his being that are conscious, and also in all those that are not yet conscious. All that is subconscious or unconscious in him has to be raised into the light of consciousness and rendered consciously sincere, fully and joyously open to the object of the soul's seeking. Nothing in him, not even a cell of his body, must remain complacently entrenched in darkness and inertly indifferent or averse to the central aspiration of his being. It is only when all the Parts of his nature with all their numberless elements have
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become united with the soul in its aspiration for the Divine that he can be said to be sincere, integrally sincere. This integral sincerity is the sine qua non of the supramental transformation, which is the object of the Integral Yoga.
Speaking on sincerity, the Mother says :
"Sincerity is a most difficult thing to have, but it is also the most effective of things. If you have sincerity, you are sure of victory. But it must be true sincerity. Sincerity means that all the elements of your being, all-its movements, each and every one, from the most spiritual to the most physical, from the inmost to the outermost, from the topmost to the bottommost, all parts, severally and wholly and equally, are turned to the Divine, they ask for nothing else than the Divine, they live for and by the Divine.”¹
"And it is not an easy thing. To be sincere in a part, to be sincere on the whole, to be sincere at moments is easy enough; everybody can have or achieve that much. It is within the capacity of any human being with normal goodwill to be sincere in his psychic movements, even if these are rare. But to be sincere in the very cells of your physical body is a still rarer achievement. To make the body cells so one-pointed that they too feel they cannot live but for the Divine and in and through the Divine. That is true sincerity and that you must have.”²
We can see at once that not only all common ideas or notions of sincerity have been overpassed, but that a new, unprecedented depth and comprehensiveness have been given to the concept of sincerity. "To make the body cells so one-pointed that they too feel they cannot live but for the Divine and in and through the Divine” is a conception almost staggering to the mind of the sadhaka who has just started on the path of the Integral Yoga. How to make the cells of the body sincere, the cells we are not conscious of ? But those who have advanced a little know full well that, however difficult it may be, the conversion
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of the cells and their global turning to the Divine is a crucial stage in the process of the integral self-surrender demanded by this Yoga. Sincerity can become complete and perfect only when there is nothing left in the being, nothing in any part or movement of the nature that is averse to the Divine or inertly irresponsive to His Love and Light.
But how to achieve this sincerity ? It is a matter not of theory or intellectual understanding, but of a single-minded and persistent practice. It is a matter of constant self-observation, constant self-correction and constant and trustful reliance on the divine Grace. For, as we advance in sadhana, we find that there are moments when, in spite of our best efforts, we feel we cannot take the next step forward—somewhere in the being a shadow hides a twist or a snag, and our consciousness fails to perceive it. It is at such crucial moments that our sincerity is put to the test. If we are sincere, the divine Grace removes the shadow and exposes to our view whatever has to be cast out of our nature or converted to its spiritual equivalent. What is indispensable is an unsleeping vigilance and a tireless practice.
"First you must observe that there is not a day in your life, not an hour, not even a minute when you have not got to rectify or intensify your sincerity...You will always find moments in your everyday life when you try to deceive yourself. Almost automatically you bring forward reasons in favour of whatever you do...The real test of sincerity, the very minimum of true sincerity lies here, in your reaction to a given situation, whether you can take automatically the right attitude and do exactly the thing to be done.”¹
This is only the rudimentary stage of sincerity. "...If you look into you with keener eyes, you will discover thousands of insincerities, more subtle, none the less seizable. Try to be sincere, occasions will multiply when you catch yourself insincere :
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini K,anta Gupta.
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you will know how difficult a thing it is.”¹ What one has to do is to persist in one's efforts to make all the parts of one's being . sincere, not by coercion—sincerity cannot come by coercion— but by casting more and more light upon the parts that are obscure and turned away from the Divine. "Even when you think you are sincere, there may be movements which are not quite straight, behind which, if you probe unflinchingly, you will find lurking something undesirable. Look to the little movements, thoughts, sensations and impulses that crowd the margin of your daily life; how many of them are fired with an aspiration towards something higher ?”² These little movements—the little thoughts that flit across your mind, the little feelings and emotions that ripple in and out of your heart, the little sensations, the little, fitful impulses that flicker and fade out in a twinkling—betray the elements of your nature that are still insincere, still attached to the old ways of life and nature. A clear perception, a firm and detached observation and analysis of all yourself, and a silent but intent aspiration for more and more light in the consciousness are the best means of removing the obstacles to the establishment of sincerity in the whole being. The difficulty of the task need not be discouraging, for, the Mother says, none can be wholly sincere all at once, the process must needs be progressive. All that is asked for is that there must be a resolute and perspicacious central sincerity steadily spreading to all the parts of the being, and uncompromising in its rejection of all insincerities.
It often happens that when there is some persistent insincerity in the being, suffering comes in some form or other to make us painfully aware of it, and compel us to grub it out. "If you discover anything clutching sticking somewhere in the depths, you must be ready to pluck it out, wholly erase it and see that no mark of it is left behind. Yes, sometimes you repeat your mistakes. You repeat them till your suffering becomes too acute to bear and compels you to be sincere in spite of yourself as it were." But this is "an arduous and tortuous way”, as the Mother says, this way of suffering. The sun-lit
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path of the psychic direction, the steady infiltration and permeation of the central sincerity is the better way, and much more speedily effective.
Sincerity makes it possible for the divine Grace to act directly and sovereignly. And when the Grace intervenes, it stimulates and accelerates the growth and infusion of sincerity in the whole being. Mountains of difficulties can be swept away in a trice by the Grace, which demands only one condition for its action—a sincere call and opening. "The Grace is equally for all. But each one receives it according to his sincerity. It does not depend on outward circumstances but on a sincere aspiration and openness.”¹
What are the enemies of perfect sincerity ? "The greatest enemies of a perfect sincerity,” says the Mother," are preferences (either mental, vital or physical) and preconceived ideas. It is these obstacles that must be overcome.”² Our preferences may be mental, vital or physical. They are nothing but selective likings, derived from habitual fancies, desires, automatic attractions, etc. They are basically irrational and arbitrary. Even our highest intellectual preferences are born of mental narrowness and conservatism. They preclude an unfettered approach to truth, a wide and equal reception of the touches of the world, and an impersonal, universal outlook. Our pre-conceived ideas are the constructions of our mental ignorance. They are no less arbitrary and irrational than our preferences, and stand stubbornly in the way of our being sincere to the Divine. They do not allow us to look at life in its entirety and indivisible unity, and accept the working of the divine Will within us and without in a tranquil spirit of faith and confidence. On the contrary, they induce us to challenge the divine working and doubt its wisdom. Cocksure of the correctness of our ideas and convictions, imprisoned in our preferences and prejudices, perpetually swaying between attractions and repulsions, we grope about in darkness for fragments of truth and catch only broken and distorted reflections of them. We
¹ Words of the Mother, yd. Series.
² Words of the Mother, 4th Series,
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are proud of our moral ideas and ideals. We want philosophy, religion, spirituality, all to conform to them. We never suspect that they are some of the worst barriers to our perception and reception of truth. How is sincerity possible in such a state of blinkered vision ? So long as we expect the working of the infinite Force to conform to our puny, mental standards and respect our callow, pretentious principles, we cannot be sincere to the Divine. It is, therefore, essential that we pull down all our mental constructions, make a clean sweep of all preferences and prejudices, break away from all attachments, expel all desires, oppose an unshakable equality to the insidious forces of attraction and repulsion, and learn to regard the world and all beings with the imperturbable calm of a wide, detached and impersonal consciousness, if we aspire to rise into the infinite freedom and all-comprehending knowledge of the divine existence. It is only in such serene, impersonal wideness that we can cultivate sincerity and call upon the Divine to liberate and transform our nature. Sincerity can develop only in the inner freedom and wideness of our being, and nothing can be so prejudicial to its growth as preferences and preconceived ideas—they cramp and stifle it.
It is our preferences and preconceived ideas again that make us complain of the conditions and circumstances of our life, if they do not happen to be quite to our liking or convenience. To complain of the difficulties of life is a kind of insincerity. It implies want of faith and confidence in the Divine. It is a common experience in spiritual life that our greatest conquests and achievements are almost always wrung out of the worst difficulties and obstacles. To complain and grumble is to lapse into doubt and darkness, and become unsteady. But, instead, if we quietly offer our difficulties to the divine Force, which is the dynamic aspect of divine Love, it will turn them into blessings, and help us derive from them the knowledge and strength needed for the next step forward. Sincerity requires a constant inner reference of all our experiences, happy or painful, to the divine Mother, so that she may turn them to good account for our transformation. Sincerity imparts
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to us the inner perception that, whatever the appearances may be, it is the divine Love that arranges from behind all the events and circumstances of our life in such a ,way that each of them is meant to conduce to our progress, if only we know how to face them with faith and confidence. To complain, to grumble, to be impatient is always a sign of insincerity.
The Mother associates transparency with sincerity. She says that one who is sincere cannot but be transparent. "When some one comes to me and I look at him, I look into his eyes, straight into his eyes. If the person is sincere, that is to say, transparent, I enter into him through his eyes and I see his soul clearly. But when I look and see in his eyes a cloud, and then a screen or continuing farther I meet a wall or something very black and when I find I have to pass through all that and drill holes at places to go through, even so at the last minute I am not sure if I do not stand against a bronze wall that refuses all entry, then in such cases I do not find the soul, and the person I can declare to be not sincere. Literally, such a person is not transparent.”¹ Sincerity abhors all camouflage and smoke-screen, and repels all tendency to dissimulation. It insists upon a perfect transparency of the whole being, and is the most powerful force for its harmonisation and integration. It calls forth the latent powers of our being and at the same time ensures the intervention of the divine Grace. "Sincere calls surely reach and receive an answer", says the Mother. "Those who are sincere, I can help and turn easily towards the Divine. But where there is insincerity I can do very little.”²
I have dwelt at some length on sincerity, for it is essential to understand what the Mother means by it and why she attaches to it the greatest importance. The Integral self- surrender that is demanded of the sadhaka of the Integral Yoga is impossible of achievement without an integral sincerity. And perfection in sincerity is victory itself, for, then, in the condition of perfect sincerity, it is the divine omnipotence that acts and achieves, and when the infinite divine Force
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VIII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta,
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acts freely and sovereignly in a nature rendered transparent and receptive, what is there that is impossible to it ?
"When I say that if you are sincere you are sure of victory, I mean that kind of sincerity, whole and undivided: the pure flame that bums like an offering, the intense joy of existing for the Divine alone where nothing else exists, nothing has any meaning or reason for existence but in the Divine. Nothing has value or interest if it is not this call, this aspiration, this opening to the supreme Truth; all this that we call the Divine. You must serve the only reason for which the universe exists : take it away, all disappears.”¹
¹The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta.
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IN its simple and moderate form, asceticism is a self- imposed mortification or privation for the discipline and control of the lower nature. When the animal in man refuses to be tamed or quieted, but opposes his inner quest and living by an obstinate insistence on the satisfaction of its base appetites, a curb or brake is put upon it by his will. The objects of desire are renounced, so that the outer obsession may cease and the being may be free to discover its inmost truth and live in it. Asceticism in this sober form can be, in many individual cases, an unimpeachable, perhaps indispensable, preliminary to spiritual discipline, and those who decry or deride it are either innocent of spiritual life or addicted to an unthinking self-indulgence. However much it may be buttressed with dialectical subtlety and ingenious sophistry, indulgence of one's lower cravings is absolutely incompatible with spirituality. Those who dream of attaining to a harmony and happiness in their psycho-physical being by "following Nature" and making light of self-restraint and discipline, are only deceiving themselves and wandering away from the true path of purity and freedom.
An initial self-control preceding a direct, higher control is, therefore, a prerequisite of spiritual life. A resolute and persevering will, fired by a high-soaring aspiration, rejects the turbulence and waywardness of the lower nature, its disquieting desires and impulses that seek only egoistic gratification, and imposes a rhythm, a balance and a poise on it, so that a certain amount of self-mastery may be achieved by the individual soul, and its consciousness, released from the trammels of ignorance, may advance, unimpeded, towards spiritual realisation. This practice of self-discipline, unless it goes to extreme forms of renunciation and mortification, is common to all religions and Yogas.
But asceticism usually defeats its own purpose by three wrong movements ;—
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(1) it easily runs to extremes, turning rejection into a systematic repression;
(2) it often betrays a tendency to gravitate towards tamas, inertia, and becomes formal and mechanical, a matter of habitual routine;
(3) it induces an anti-pragmatic mentality and encourages a progressive withdrawal from the world and life.
(1) The history of religions is replete with instances of ascetic excesses. It is not only in India, but even in the West, that asceticism has gone to rabid extremes and delighted in the mortification of the flesh for its own sake. Most often the ethical mind exerts its will upon the erring vital-physical nature and represses those of its movements which it disapproves or deems detrimental to its self-improvement. Sometimes it is the vital will that turns a red eye upon some of its own movements and takes a perverse pleasure in a ruthless 'self-repression. Sometimes—and this is very common among people of poor mental development—the mind or the vital tramples upon the body, crushing even its healthy instincts and natural capacities, and reducing it to a limp bundle of battered nerves, as if the poor "brother ass" were solely responsible for all the ills and infirmities of human nature. Countless spiritual seekers have lost themselves in the labyrinth of ascetic practices and never emerged from them to reach the goal of their pursuit; and among the few who have been fortunate enough to emerge, the majority have had to pass the rest of their days as physical wrecks. Very few, indeed like Suso and St.Catharine of Genoa, escaped unhurt and continued to live as vigorous champions of practical spirituality. The modern mind reads with horror Madame Guyon's description other own ascetic practices: "Although I had a very delicate body, the instruments of penitence tore my flesh without, as it seemed to me, causing pain. I wore girdles of hair and of sharp iron, I often held wormwood in my mouth. If I walked, I put stones in my shoes."
In the serene, full-blooded spirituality of the Vedas and the Upanishads there is hardly any trace of self-torture as a means
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of self-purification. The spiritual vision of the God-lovers was clear enough to perceive that the causes of deviation and fall are within and not without, and that an inner conquest by detachment and equality and not an outer abstention and renunciation is the surest means of spiritual perfection. The Gita, a great synthesis of the living spiritual traditions of the past, denounces in no uncertain terms the extreme forms of asceticism and brands them as a violence on the indwelling Divine. But the mind of man is not, except in extraordinary individual cases, capable of so strengthening its will and raising its consciousness as to remain equal and impassive to the seductions of the senses, even while giving the senses full play and moving freely in the midst of their objects of desire. In fact, in all forms of ascetic extremism we find, if we probe into their roots, a lack of the right knowledge of human nature, an ignorance of the source and character of the frailties and impurities which hamper our spiritual progress, and an impatient haste born of ignorance and weakness. It can be said that ascetic excesses are an outcome of a mental or vital fear in the face of assailing impurities, an exaggerated stress and overmeasure, and a perversity of vindictive violence on oneself. From the standpoint of Yogic knowledge they are a dangerous preoccupation.
(2) Ascetic excesses, if practised for a long time, tend to produce a sort of anaesthesia in the being and end in a mechanical, routine observance. The initial spiritual ardour is soon lost, and the unchallenged pressure of tradition and the dull drive of habit continue to supply the momentum. Asceticism then becomes tamasic, clouding the consciousness and deadening the springs of life.
(3) Ascetic extremism takes its stand upon the trenchant duality of the Spirit and the flesh. Light and Life, sin and virtue. It negates or spurns the world in order to gain Heaven or realise the freedom of the naked soul. It acts as a constant blight upon life and its activities. Renunciation is carried to the length of utter destitution and poverty on the one hand, and fierce and fantastic self-torture on the other, over which
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the ego of the individual secretly gloats as a remarkable achievement. Renunciation of the world is a natural corollary to extreme asceticism, which, even if it engages in works of philanthropy or social service, as it has done in some outstanding Eastern and Western mystics, holds on to its base of physical renunciation and regards it as the sole condition of all selfless service. But the basic problem remains unsolved, for asceticism does not seem to touch it at the right point—the ego and its separative self-assertion.
The Mother's approach to the problem is altogether on a different footing. She agrees with the Gita that a relentless repression of nature, nigraha, is a perilously barren method of self-purification. Solitude, vows of silence and inaction, abstinence from even the necessary and healthy pursuits of life are, even at their very best, but temporary makeshifts, and cannot yield any substantial and abiding results. The question is essentially one of consciousness. If the being is enslaved to sense-pleasures, it means that the consciousness has not risen beyond the sense-mind. Not a rigorous renunciation of all sense-objects—if that were at all possible—but a raising of the consciousness will bring the desired freedom. A totally different vista opens before our eyes as we look at the problem from this new angle of vision.
Man is essentially a consciousness, a certain individual formation of consciousness with major and minor vibrations in it, and his complex nature is only an instrumental mechanism, a realising and revealing medium, of that consciousness. The greater the limpidity and lightness and wideness in the consciousness, the greater its freedom from the yoke of the sense-objects. The positive and spiritually fruitful method of self-purification is, therefore, detachment, equality, and sublimation of consciousness, and not self-repression. Asceticism may be helpful in some cases of stubborn attachments and impurities, but, then, it must be a sane and seeing asceticism, mild and patient in its dealing with the peccable parts of nature, which have to be educated and enlightened and not coerced and crushed? for, the end of self-purification is not self-mutilation or self-
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annihilation, but a harmonious self-perfection, a divine self-fulfilment. "Certainly, it is easier to suppress than to organise, but a harmonious order is a realisation or superior to suppression.”¹The Mother, therefore, advocates the positive way of spiritual progress, the way of psychic aspiration and surrender, the "sun-lit path", as Sri Aurobindo calls it, and not the negative way of painful and precarious ascetic repression. If you are attached to certain persons or things, it is almost futile to think of running away from them, you will remain attached to them even in their physical absence, or you will develop new attachments to other persons and other things. Even when you think you have got rid of all attachments, you have done nothing better than drive them underground and expose yourself to their surprise assaults. Besides, as the Mother says, "The attitude of the ascetic who says, 'I want nothing’ and the attitude of the man of the world who says, 'I want this thing’ , are the same. The one may be as much attached to his renunciation as the other to his possession” The solution of the problem with which the ascetic vainly struggles, is an ascent of consciousness by aspiration, rejection, and surrender. If the impurities of your nature seem to be obstinate, detach yourself from them, feel that they do not belong to your essential being, which is ever pure, but are an excrescence, a discharge from the surrounding universal nature, and reject them quietly and sincerely. A quiet, sincere, and uncompromising rejection is infinitely more powerful than a desperate wrestle and a perturbed preoccupation with them. The Mother counsels detachment, rejection of all wrong movements, and sublimation of consciousness, and not repression. Turn to the Divine and advance towards Him with a consuming love and resolute will, and most of your bonds will snap and drop of themselves, the few that will remain the Divine will cut asunder.
There is "the very universal superstition, prevalent all over the world, that asceticism and spirituality are one and the same
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother
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thing. If you describe someone as a spiritual man or a spiritual woman, people at once think of one who does not eat or sits all day without moving, one who lives in a hut in great poverty, one who has given away all he had and keeps nothing for himself. This is the picture that immediately rises in the minds of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, when you speak of a spiritual man, the one proof of spirituality for them is poverty and abstinence from everything that is pleasant or comfortable. This is a mental construction which must be thrown down if you are to be free to see and follow the spiritual truth. This false conception has to be broken down and disappear. Once it is gone, you find something that is much higher than your narrow ascetic rule, a complete openness that leaves the being free. If you are to get something, you accept it, and if you are to give up the very same thing, you, with an equal willingness, leave it. Things come and you take them up; things go and you let them pass, with the same smile of equanimity in the taking or the leaving....The only true attitude for a Yogi is to be plastic and ready to obey the divine command, whatever it may be; nothing must be indispensable to him, nothing a burden. Often the first impulse of those who want to live the spiritual life is to throw away all they have; but they do it because they want to be rid of a burden, not because they want to surrender to the Divine. Men who possess wealth and are surrounded by the things that give them luxury and enjoyment turn to the Divine, and immediately their movement is to run away from these things, —or, as they say, to 'escape from their bondage.’ But it is a wrong movement; you must not think that the things you have belong to you,—they belong to the Divine. If the Divine wants you to enjoy anything, enjoy it; but be ready too to give it up the very next moment with a smile”¹
These words transport us from the stale and stuffy atmosphere of traditional asceticism into the serene freedom and amplitude of the true spiritual consciousness. No longer do we take our stand upon the vital or mental will injuring and impairing the manifoldness and elasticity of our nature, but upon the
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innate and inalienable sovereignty of our divine Self and the Grace of the Self of our Self for the purification and perfection of our natural instruments. We realise that each part of our nature, each fibre of its composition has its proper function and individual utility in the economy of the corporate organism, and has to be cleansed, fostered, illumined and transfigured to serve the divine ends of our life, and not to be starved and suppressed or mangled by the cruel excesses of a life-shunning asceticism. We remember that Rama, one of the most harmonious spiritual personalities ever born, was no ascetic; nor was Krishna, the embodiment of the most versatile perfection realised in the past. Yajnavalkya had such a wealth of cows as might make an American master dairyman giddy. Janaka, Ajatashatru, Kartavirya—to name only a few—led a robust spiritual life in the midst of material opulence. Buddha had to pay heavily for his initial, immoderate austerities, and was forced to relinquish them in favour of a sane method of moderation : the golden mean; Sri Ramakrishna, after a pretty long spell of physical neglect and ascetic practices, had to pray to the Mother (Kali) to let him live a life of easeful sweetness, and not to turn him into a desiccated ascetic. The Christ, we all know, was no ascetic, nor did he preach the mortification of the flesh, so common in his day among the followers of John the Baptist. In reply to the charge that his disciples were not fasting, but feasting and enjoying themselves, he said, "Can ye make the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them ?" St. Paul, regarded as second only to the Christ in spiritual stature and transparent purity, exerted his powerful influence to check the spread of extreme asceticism, and exhorted men to revert to the inner Christ and live from within outwards. All this proves that the greatest stalwarts of the Spirit have always been led by the calm light of knowledge in their dealings with their nature, and not stampeded into panicky devices which constitute asceticism in its immoderate forms. Harsh asceticism is a symptom of spiritual anaemia and decadence, and, even at its best, a negative way, which has to be complemented or replaced by the positive way of spiritual progress—
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a loving and active surrender of the whole being to the Will of the Divine.
The Mother's gospel of an unfettered life of consecrated service, a life in God, equal in plenty and poverty, sounds the death-knell of rigorous asceticism and initiates a new era of the radical purification and transmutation of the flesh for the manifestation of the Spirit.
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THE SUBCONSCIENT AND THE INCONSCIENT
THE Inconscient is the origin of the evolutionary creation. It is an apparent negation of the superconscient, an infinite abyss of absolute darkness in which the transcendent omnipresent Reality gets involved for playing at self-loss and self-finding, for the delight of a plunge and a subsequent emergence, a progressive evolution into multiple forms and a manifold self-expression. The engulfing darkness of the Inconscient turns the eternal effulgent substance of Reality into Matter, the dense and obscure primal substrate. In this fathomless night of existence or apparent non-existence, there is no stirring of life or mind, only a blind mighty Energy weaving stupendous systems of worlds and suns and moons and star-clusters and planets, as if in a dumb, creative sleep. Out of this tranced involution of the Spirit in Matter evolves Life, making the earth smile with a splendour of verdant beauty and shudder with a secret, unknown delight. With Life emerges consciousness, first, as faint shadowy sense-tremors, then as sensations, then as instincts, impulsions, volitions, feelings, and later as a sort of rudimentary reason, which constitute the variegated marvels of animal creation. Last emerges man out of the animal, with a far more evolved set of organs and faculties, a more extended and sensitive gamut of psychological functioning, and a fully conscious mind equipped with a developed reason and a self- directing will. But however free and self-directing man's will may be, however wide and limpid his waking consciousness, the roots of his life and nature lie still embedded in the swamps of the Inconscient. The inertia, the insensibility, the ignorance, the dual tendency of atomic aggregation and disaggregation, attraction and repulsion, play such a dominant role in his life and nature that he can be called only a super-animal or a sub-man, rather than a full-fledged man. His conservatism, his un- willingness and inability to change, his forgetfulness of his divine origin and essence, his easy subjection to doubts and dull fatigue, to disease and death are all a trailing heritage from inconscient
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Matter. Besides, there are in Matter the seed-impressions of all the past cycles of creation, the brute instincts and hungers, the falsehood, the ugliness, the ingratitude, and the perversity, which surge up to eclipse the soul of man and prolong the reign of Ignorance in his nature.
The Subconscient is above the Inconscient and just below our surface physical consciousness, below the threshold, as it is called. It is, to quote Sri Aurobindo, "the extreme border of our inner existence where it meets the Inconscient; it is a degree of our being in which the Inconscient struggles into a half-consciousness; the surface physical consciousness also, when it sinks back from the working level and retrogresses towards the Inconscient, retires into the intermediate Subconscience. Or, from another viewpoint, this nether part of us may be described as the antechamber of the Inconscient through which its formations rise into our waking or our subliminal being. When we sleep and the surface physical part of us, which is in its first origin here an output from the Inconscient, relapses towards the originating inconscience, it enters into this subconscious element, antechamber or sub-stratum, and there it finds the impressions of its past or persistent habits of mind and experiences,—for all have left their mark on our sub-conscious part and have there a power of recurrence. In its effect on our waking self this recurrence often takes the form of a reassertion of old habits, impulses dormant or suppressed, rejected elements of the nature, or it comes up as some other not so easily recognisable, some peculiar disguised or subtle result of these suppressed or rejected but not erased impulses or elements.”
The Subconscient is the builder of most of our dreams, the source of our mechanical, repetitive habits and idiosyncrasies, and the seed-bed of most of the obstinate ailments, physical or mental, to which we are all too prone. It is the repository of all our life-impressions which it throws up pell-mell from time to time, either in dreams or in the waking state, to cloud or confuse our consciousness and disturb our poise and balance. The animal propensities, the passions and cravings of the lower nature, when renounced or repressed by the waking self, sink into the Subconscient and bide their time for a vindictive eruption.
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That is why, in spite of our best efforts, the old Adam often takes us by surprise and knocks down many a Vishwamitra from a hard-won eminence of poise and purity. Only what is raised, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, expunged and utterly expelled from the nature, disappears for ever.
It is clear from the above description that the roots of our being, especially of the vital-physical being, lie deep in the Subconscient and the Inconscient out of which we have emerged by evolution, and unless we illumine and transform them, our nature cannot become free and pure, as our soul is free and pure. We may attain to the freedom of the soul or the Self, but we shall remain more or less bound to nature and her three modes, so long as we live on earth, our peace and purity, knowledge and bliss will be always menaced or darkened by the waves from the Subconscient and the Inconscient. An integral purification and transformation of the whole being is the only means of realising an integral union with the Divine in life, and for this a radical purification and conversion of the Subconscient and the Inconscient is an indispensable condition. If we have understood it, we shall be able to understand why the Mother speaks again and again of these nether regions, their exploration and conquest; why she has dived into their murky depths, touched with her fingers "the horror of the inconscience”, invoked from there a descent of the Divine, and come out to announce to humanity: "A new light shall break upon the earth, a new world shall be born.”
It is said that one day a young man came to Vivekananda and took his seat in the room where he was discoursing on spiritual matters to a spell-bound audience. When the discourse was over and the crowd thinned, the young man approached the Swami and asked him with evident earnestness, "What should I do to progress in spirituality ?" The Swami turned his large penetrating eyes upon him, took his measure at a glance and queried, "Can you tell lies ?" "No, Sir", was the bewildered reply, "Go and try to tell lies," counselled the intrepid preacher of Vedanta, and, when the young man was gone, turned towards his friends and disciples saying, "Can
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you teach virtue to a wall ? That young man is like a wall, a mass of inertia, tamas, and he has perforce to pass through a stormy period of desires and passions, get many a staggering jolt and knock before he is fit for a sattwic or religious life."
This tamas, of which the young man was a living embodiment, is a legacy of the Inconscient. It is more or less in all men, confined not only to their physical parts, but attacking also their minds and hearts and paralysing the springs of their life. Referring to this immobilising and disintegrating tamas, the Mother says, "The only thing which must be feared and shunned is the inertia of inconscience, of blind and heavy ignorance. That state is quite at the nethermost of the infinite ladder which leads to Thee. And all Thy effort consists in drawing the substance from this first obscurity, so as to make it he born into consciousness. Passion itself is preferable to inconscience. We must, therefore, constantly march to the conquest of this universal bedrock of inconscience, and making our organism the instrument, transform it little by little into luminous consciousness.,”¹
The transformation of inconscience into luminous consciousness is, therefore, the main business of a dynamic spirituality in the present world. And how is it to be effected ? The Mother's experience discovers the secret presence of the divine Force in the inconscient depths of Matter as the "Irresistible Healer ”, setting in motion, stirring and churning the innumerable elements, so that "from their primal darkness, their primitive chaos, they may be awakened to consciousness and to the full light of knowledge.” It is the supreme Love of the Divine, His redeeming and transfiguring Grace that informs the Force which heals. But man has to collaborate with this Force, enter into these obscure stretches of his being with a conscious will, and establish there the Light and Law of the Divine. It is perhaps the most difficult work and discipline ever undertaken by spiritual seekers, the most perilous exploration and bitter combat; but it is also the most glorious endeavour pregnant with the possibilities of a divine perfection of man upon earth.
The conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient will
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother; February 9, 1914,
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mean the conquest of material life and nature, and the conversion of human nature into divine nature. The Mother says that the majority of beings, even of human beings, live constantly in the Subconscient, "few, emerge from it,” and she affirms that "this is the conquest that has to be made; for, to be conscious in the true sense of the word is to be Thou integrally; and is not that the very definition of the work to be accomplished, the mission to be fulfilled upon the earth ?”¹
One of the most harassing and hampering actions of the Subconscient is the upsurge of its chaotic vibrations in the forms of random thoughts, unpleasant or painful memories, fickle fancies or swarming impressions, incoherent and senseless, which oppose our silent ingathering and contemplation. Every beginner in the practice of meditation knows how troublesome and tiresome this opposition is, how we are sometimes swept away along the stream of these surging vibrations and find it extremely difficult to silence the mind and concentrate. These vibrations are the outcome of the "constant subconscient registering of the multitude of phenomena with which we are put into contact.” "Quite a portion of our sensibility, and not perhaps the smallest, plays the role of a cinematographic apparatus without our knowledge and, indeed, to our detriment.” Throughout the day, in our waking state, all our sense-perceptions, thoughts, imaginations, day-dreams, feelings, emotions, sensations, all the actions and reactions that take place in us, are recorded by the Subconscient in a sort of cryptic notations which are jumbled up to form fantastic patterns and thrown up in our dreams and even in the waking state. Modern psychotherapy tries to trace many of the mental and physical illnesses to this obscure action of the Subconscient. Most of the strange and stubborn symptoms of psychoneurosis can be safely attributed to it and successfully grappled with by one who has a spiritual knowledge —not the empirical, conjectural, hypothetical knowledge of the psychotherapist—of the subconscient working. But it must be remembered—psycho-analysis ignores this truth—that though the Inconscient is the origin of our evolutionary birth and the
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March. 13, 1914. :
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Subconscient the nursery where our animal-human traits and proclivities are developed. Heaven is our eternal father and the divine qualities are the stuff and composition of our essential self and nature. It is not the Inconscient and the Subconscient that are the ultimate determinants of our destiny, but the Superconscient, the Divine.
Fear is one of the gifts of the Subconscient to the body. The Mother says, "In fact, 90 per cent of illnesses are the result of the Subconscient fear in the body. In the ordinary consciousness of the body there is a more or less hidden anxiety about the consequences of the slightest physical disturbance. It can be translated by these words of doubt about the future : 'And what will happen ?' It is this anxiety that must be checked.”¹ Fear, by inoculating our being with its suggestion, actually produces the symptoms of an illness for which there may be no traceable cause. To get rid of this fear we have to root it out from the Subconscient.
In the integral Yoga which means to effect a radical conversion and transformation of human nature into the divine, a complete conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, as we have insisted above, is indispensable; otherwise half of our being will gleam in the light of the Spirit and the other half lie sunk in obscurity and be moved by the forces of Ignorance and False- hood. Inertia, weakness, dullness, an easy proneness to physical and psychological disturbances, inability to change and progress, a supine subjection to material conditions and circumstances, a general predisposition to suffering, fears, passions and restless desires are the normal constituents of the surface human nature, and all this is derived from the Subconscient and the Inconscient. The Mother's main work is a complete transformation of this subterranean base of human nature, so that a divine race of supermen may reveal God's glory and fulfil His Will in the material world.
The present state of humanity, torn and distracted, and convulsed with passions and fears, is the result of the volcanic eruption of the Subconscient and the Inconscient into human
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nature. The more the divine Light descends into Matter, the more desperate is the resistance of the material darkness, which rules the earth-nature today. But the very desperateness of the resistance forebodes its eventual end. And that is exactly what is heralded by the following heartening words of the Mother from her message of the i5th August 1950 :
"Our sadhana has reached a stage in which we are mostly dealing with the Subconscient and even the Inconscient. As a consequence, the physical determinism has taken a predominant position, bringing an increase of difficulties on the way which have to be faced with an increase of courage and determination.
"In any case, whatever happens and whatever you do, do not allow Fear to invade you. At the slightest touch of it, react and call for help”
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DREAMS are an index to the mystery of life. "Movies" from the unknown caves and hinterlands of our being, they flit past us in our sleep, announcing, if we have ears to hear, that there are more things in life than meet the human eye, and realms and realities that elude the grasp of the rational mind. Though many of their patterns appear to us rather chaotic or fantastic, there are some which are manifest marvels of symmetry and beauty. They have inspired many an exquisite artistic creation and exercised the thought and speculation of many a poet and philosopher and psychologist. There are again some dreams which, whether simple or symbolical, possess a prophetic character and reveal something of the future.
Modern psychology has been labouring with astonishing energy and perseverance to unravel this mystery of dreams in its own fragmentary, empirical way. Freud's analysis of dreams, though warped by certain unfortunate obsessions and prejudices, has yet uncovered some of the sinks and sewers of human nature and exposed to the light of day the festering seed-beds of many of the neuroses and abnormalities which afflict man-kind. But it has not advanced in the direction of the gleaming founts and crystal streams which feed and foster the Godhead in man and inspire the talents and the sterling qualities of his nature. Freud preoccupied himself with diseased and deranged human systems and built the imposing structure of his theories on the basis of the results his investigation of these systems yielded him; but the majority of mankind being neither hysteric nor neurotic, Freud's generalisations fail to apply to them, and stand convicted of a dogmatic narrowness and falsifying over- emphasis. Jung's researches on the same line have gone farther ahead, and his happy discovery of what he calls "Mandala" dreams is a remarkable contribution to modern dream-analysis. According to him, it is the very centre of the human personality that reveals itself in "Mandala" dreams-—the centre of light and poise and harmony, which is as far removed from the "Id" of
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Freudian psychology as the stars are from the slime of the earth.
But still it is only the fringe of the subject that has been touched; immense, immeasurable fields of the dreamland lie yet unexplored. Considering the fact, as the Mother points out, that "a third of our existence is passed in sleep" and that "whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always dreaming," it is essential and imperative that we should acquire a more or less accurate and active knowledge of dreams. "A coherent knowledge of sleep life, though difficult to achieve or to keep established, is possible.”¹
What are dreams ? Can they be classified ? Can bad dreams be avoided, combated or changed ? Are there dreams which we should cultivate as "precious auxiliaries for our work on our- selves and around us” ? Can we be conscious in sleep, and study and control our dreams ? How to achieve this consciousness ? These are the points we shall endeavour to touch upon here.
Dreams are a transcript of the activities of the suprasensible parts of our being in the state of sleep. "What happens in sleep is that our consciousness withdraws from the field of its waking experiences; it is supposed to be resting, suspended or in abeyance; but that is a superficial view of the matter. What is in abeyance is the waking activities, what is at rest is the surface mind and the normal conscious action of the bodily part of us; but the inner consciousness is not suspended, it enters into new inner activities, only a part of which, a part happening or recorded in something of us that is near to the surface, we remember. There is maintained in sleep, thus near the surface, an obscure subconscious element which is a receptacle or passage for our dream experiences and itself also a dream builder.”²
When we sleep, our surface mind, which is mostly busy with the sense objects and the reactions produced by their impacts on us, falls into abeyance and our consciousness recedes into the recondite ranges of our or universal being and acts there or is acted upon or comes into contact with the activities of those regions. These covert happenings are recorded or transcribed, in its own diminishing or distorting way, plainly or in strange figures, images or symbols, by a part of our subconscious nature, which is close to the waking surface.
¹ & ² The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo,
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In some dreams, which are of a totally different order, the transcriber is not the proximate subconscious layer, but the subliminal, a much more faithful and efficient agent.
Dreams can be roughly classified under two heads :—(l) sub-conscious dreams and (2) subliminal dreams. Subconscious dreams can again be sub-divided into two categories. The first category is made up of the random impressions, fancies, impulses which sink down from the most superficial parts of our nature and have neither any coherence nor significance. They are a strange motley, a baffling triumph of inconsequential incongruity. "These dreams are almost always determined by purely physical circumstances, the state of health, digestion, position on the bed, etc.,” and occur like a fugitive phantasmagoria in states of drowsiness or half-sleep. "With a bit of self-observation and some precaution, one can easily avoid this class of dreams, as useless as they are fatiguing, by removing their physical causes.,”¹
The second category comprises dreams taking place on the deeper levels of the subconscient. They are of many kinds. Some reflect the confusion of our thoughts and ideas or the splash and sway of our surface emotions. Some reveal our raging or repressed desires, our passions, tendencies, tastes and dominant or dormant impulses, our complexes and tangled associations. Because the controlling and coercive will of the waking mind is suspended in sleep, these seething or suppressed elements rush up, as if in revenge, and try to possess our nature. The common experience of a quiet and peaceful day followed by a dismal night of disquieting dreams, foul or ugly, can be safely attributed to the upsurge of the simmering scum from the nether lands. Saints being surprised by ravenous desires self-satisfied honesty outrage by heinous acts of fraud and perfidy, long records of love and friendship blackened by incredible betrayals, are occurrences in sleep, not at all infrequent, which substantiate some of the discoveries of modern psychology. No man can call himself pure until he has swept and scoured and lighted up these obscure caves of his subconscient being. His ethical or pietistic purity is but a veneered or pretentious
¹ Words of Long Ago by The Mother,
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impurity. It is only in such subconscious dreams that he can discover his real nature,—not certainly the essential, spiritual nature into which he has to grow, but the actual,, dynamic nature which dominates and dictates most of his characteristic life-movements. "You will easily understand", says the Mother, "that, rather than let them {the dark hidden elements of your nature) thus remain unknown, it is better to draw them out boldly and courageously into the light of day and oblige them definitively to leave us.” Most of such dreams are, therefore, indicators of our real psychological state, and it is only when all our dreams mirror a pure and peaceful nature, untroubled by desires and unperverted by passions and mean self-interests, that we can be sure of having achieved some substantial purity, and not before that.
The subliminal dreams are a class apart. But before we try to observe something of their nature and function, let us turn to the subliminal itself and have a cursory view of its vast terrain. "Our subliminal self is not, like our surface physical being, an outcome of the energy of the Inconscient, it is a meeting place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction of the first inconscient world-energy or a natural developed functioning of our surface consciousness or a reaction of it to impacts from the outside universal Nature,—and even in this construction, these functions, these reactions the subliminal takes part and exercises on them a considerable influence. There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct contact with the universal, unlike the mostly indirect contacts which our surface being maintains with the universe through the sense-mind and the senses. There are here inner senses, a subliminal sight, touch, hearing; but these subtle senses are rather channels of the inner being’s direct consciousness of things than its informants; the subliminal is not dependent on its senses for its knowledge, they only give a form to
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its direct experience of objects...The subliminal has the right of entry into the mental and vital and subtle-physical planes of the universal consciousness, it is not confined to the material plane and the physical world, it possesses means of communication with the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in its passage and with all corresponding planes or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re- ascent from Inconscience to Super conscience...Our waking state is unaware of its connection with the subliminal being, although it receives from it—but without any knowledge of the place of origin —the inspirations, intuitions, ideas, will-suggestions, sense-suggestions, urges to action that rise from below or from behind our limited surface existence...The subliminal ...is the seer of inner things and of supraphysical experiences, the surface subconscience is only a transcriber. ”¹
When the subliminal becomes active in our dream consciousness, "there is sometimes an activity of our subliminal intelligence,—dream becomes a series of thoughts often strangely or vividly figured, problems are solved which our waking consciousness could not solve, warnings, premonitions, indications of the future, veridical dreams replace the normal subconscious incoherence. There can come also a structure of symbol images, some of a mental character, some of a vital nature : the former are precise in their figures, clear in their significance; the later are often complex and baffling to our waking consciousness, but, if we can seize the clue, they reveal their own sense and peculiar system of coherence. Finally, there can come to us the records of happenings seen or — experienced by us on other planes of our own being or of universal being into which we enter: these have sometimes, like the symbolic dreams, a strong bearing on our own inner and outer life or the life of others, reveal elements of our or their mental being and life-being or disclose influences on them of which our waking self is totally , ignorant; but sometimes they have no such bearing and are purely records of other organised systems of consciousness independent of our physical existence.”²
¹ The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.
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In sleep sometimes we reach a state which seems to be dreamless. The fact of the matter is that our consciousness sinks so deep into the subconscient or travels so far afield in the subliminal that the recording apparatus loses all touch with it and in our surface consciousness there is the impression of a dreamless sleep, an unfilled void. But the dreams take place all the same, and the deeper layers of our consciousness participate in them. But it is possible, as the Mother says, "to have complete sleep, without dreams; but to plunge our mind into a repose analogous to that of our physical body, it is necessary to attain a per feet mastery over the mental being, which is not an easy matter.”¹ This state of repose can hardly be called sleep, "for it is extremely conscious. In that condition you may remain for a few minutes, but these few minutes give you more rest and refreshment than hours of ordinary sleep.”² It is also possible that in what we call a dreamless sleep, we fall into the torpid depths of inconscience. It is an experience which is "almost death—a taste of death ”, and we return from it weighed down with a heavy dullness and fatigue.
The interpretation of dreams is a rather difficult matter. There are numerous possibilities of error involved in it. First of all, the transcription of a dream may leave much to be desired—it may be vague or blurred or inadequate or even distorted; it may be in peculiar images or symbols. These symbols and images do not obtain universal currency, but convey different things in different cases; they have an uncanny individuality which baffles all rules and systems and belies all sweeping generalisations. In fact, "generalisations made from certain interpretations which might have been quite correct for the one who applied them to his own case, give rise only to vulgar and foolish superstition.”³"The cerebral rendering of the activities of the night is at times so much distorted that a form is given to phenomena which is the exact opposite of the reality.”4 We are, therefore,
³Words of Long Ago by the Mother.
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counselled to take "great intellectual precautions in the interpretation of dreams”, and above all to exhaust all possible subjective explanations before attributing to them the value of an objective reality. ”¹
What should we do with our sleep and dreams ? Should welet them have their own way ? That will certainly preclude all possibility of self-mastery. "None knows himself well who does not know his free activities of the night, and no man can call himself his own master if he is not perfectly conscious and master of the multifarious actions which he performs during his physical sleep.”² The vast fields of sleep have, therefore, to be carefully cultivated, for they are capable of yielding a golden harvest as well as the fields of our waking activities. What we have to do, first of all, is to be conscious in sleep. This consciousness is not to be brought down from somewhere or transferred from the waking state—our normal consciousness has only to be extended into the depths. The surface active consciousness, which is all we command in our normal state, is a petty, limited portion of our total consciousness. Below it and behind and above are infinite ranges with incalculable possibilities and powers which have to be annexed to our waking consciousness, if we want to be integrally conscious. This extension of our consciousness and its free functioning in our sleep can be effected by a steady exercise of concentration, which is the one universal key to all conquests and achievments. "The practice of concentration should bear at the same time on the special faculty of memory as well as on participation of the consciousness in the activities during the sleeping state.”³ An unrelaxed practice, continued from night to night, will help us extend the frontiers of our consciousness and make us conscious of our nights and their activities as much as we are conscious of our days. This consciousness will not only make it possible for us to watch and study all our dreams, but also control them and change their course and character, if they seem to oppose or retard
² Words of Long Ago by the Mother,
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our spiritual progress. It will even enable us to participate in the activities of the remote levels of our own or of the universal being and retain an unclouded memory of them in the waking state, independently of the cerebral transcription. Elimination or conversion of unhelpful and undesirable dreams and a conscious fostering of those which help our progress will be a natural corollary to this conquest of the fields of sleep.
But before one is conscious of one's nights, what should one do to recover the dreams that have almost faded from one's memory ? And unless they are recovered, how can they be analysed and studied ? The discipline of concentration which opens to us the realms of sleep will help this recovery. We have to concentrate on the indistinct scraps and fading vestiges of the dreams and follow them up unremittingly till the whole dreams come sailing back into our memory. What the psycho-analysts attempt by free association is something—though not quite—like this. A regular and intelligent practice of concentration in this direction will facilitate the recovery of dreams, and even enable us to track them to their "obscure retreat" in the subconscient "where the forgotten phenomena of sleep take refuge".
It may be feared that if we begin to concentrate on the activities of the night, our sleep will be disturbed and we shall lose the rest and relaxation our physical system so much needs. But the fear is unfounded. What disturbs our sleep and saps our rest is the subconscient. It is the chaotic, squalid and un- shapely subconscious dreams that disturb and depress and fatigue us. An intensive purification of the lower nature in the light of our experiences in sleep as well as in the waking hours of the day will culminate in a thorough catharsis of the subconscient—sustained personal effort led and progressively replaced by the Force of the Divine alone can accomplish this difficult work—and the subconscient dreams will then give place to subliminal dreams, which are restful, helpful, and revealing. "If our night granted us the acquisition of new knowledge, the solution of an absorbing problem, the establishment of contact in our inner being with some centre of life or of light, or even the
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accomplishment of some useful work, we should always get up with a feeling of vigour and well-being.”¹
If we desire a complete purification of our nature and a freedom from the thrall of our primitive appetites and ungodly instincts, let us analyse and study our dreams, and expose their roots to the transforming light and force of the Mother. Every man, if he is keen and steady, "can study his own dreams, unravel them and find out their meaning. The daily habit of going with interest over the various dreams of the night, thus trans- forming their vestiges little by little into precise memories, as well as that of noting them down on waking, are very helpful from this point of view.”² We have to remain conscious all through the night even as we are conscious during the day—a full, unabrogated state of consciousness is the sole condition of perfect self-mastery. It is unconsciousness that harbours beings and forces which imperil our spiritual progress and keep us chained to ignorance and suffering.
But the most effective means of cultivating the fields of sleep, as, indeed, of achieving any abiding perfection in life, is a complete, confident and dynamic surrender to the Grace of the Divine. Here, as everywhere, it is always the Grace that finally conquers and triumphs, our personal effort, sincerely and persistently made, only prepares our being for its right reception and unimpeded action in us.
¹ Words of Long Ago by the Mother.
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WHAT is the proper place and function of the mind in spiritual life ? Is it a help or a hindrance ? Can spiritual illumination come by mere intellectual development ? How should one deal with the mind in order to make it aid and subserve one's spiritual end?
The mind is the pride, power and highest possession of man until he rises into the skies of the Spirit. It is by his developed mind that he can achieve a certain amount of control over his unruly desires and passions, train his body to be a docile beast of burden and, perceiving a higher goal than mere sense-gratification, create a centre of gravity above to counteract the constant pull of that which is below him. It is his mind that can give him a sense of inner freedom, purity and peace, absolutely independent of outer conditions and circumstances and, though his life and its normal working run counter to this new sense and perception, he can enlighten and modify them by his mind and, sooner or later, succeed in persuading them to seek and surrender to the Light. The mind can purify itself by renouncing its obsession with material objects, detaching itself from selfish vital interests and restraining its own discursive and desultory habits of thought and random vagrancy. Though not a possessor of knowledge, the mind is a seeker of it, and can greatly help man's progress towards the Truth by the sustained intensity of its spiritual seeking. "This intellectual faculty which makes man vain and leads him into error, is the very faculty which can also, once enlightened and purified, lead him farther, higher than the universal Nature, to the direct and conscious communion with the Lord of us all. He who is beyond all manifestation. This dividing intelligence, which enables him to separate himself from me (the Divine), enables him also to scale the heights to be climbed, without his advance being enchained and retarded by the totality of the universe, which in its immensity and complexity can- w achieve so prompt an ascent.”¹ A clear light in the intelligence
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is a great asset in spiritual life. A wide sweep of perception, a penetrating discernment, a calm and balanced judgment and a constant uplook are the best mental safeguard against the insidious attacks of the lower nature.
But the mind does not always act for the harmonious development of the individual and his progress towards freedom and mastery. A creation and tool of the lower nature, it panders to the gratification of the ego and becomes a bar to the individual's spiritual advancement. If it seeks knowledge, it is only because the ego takes a delight in intellectual knowledge, even as the vital ego takes a delight in vital power and the physical ego in material possession and comfort. But the knowledge it usually seeks is intellectually informative and not spiritually illuminative —flashy scraps and snippets, culled from various sources, which it can proudly store and trot out at will. The egoistic drive is always for self-gratification, whether it is on the physical level or the vital or the mental, and so long as this drive is not detected and stopped, the soul cannot come forward and assume the reins of the nature. "Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar.”¹
Let us first pass in brief and rapid review the characteristic traits of the human mind before we proceed to consider how we ought to deal with it in spiritual life. The mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis. It cuts up things from the whole and deals with them as if they were separate integers. It takes an obvious parcel of a whole and dissects it in order to study its structure and function, and then puts together the constituents to arrive at an aggregate or what it believes to be an independent whole. All its operations move on the basis of division, differentiation and distinction. It can deal successfully with finite objects or a conglomeration of finite objects, but it can never conceive or perceive the infinite. If it tries to do that, it finds itself at sea, and has to content itself with mere symbols and images and figures of speech.
It is then evident that the mind is constitutionally incapable of apprehending the infinite, and has, therefore, to be transcended,
¹ Thoughts and Glimpses by. Sri Aurobindo.
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if a flight to the infinite is the primary object of our spiritual life. But a flight may be an irrevocable one, entailing, as it has done up to now, an increasing renunciation of life in the world and culminating in the final disappearance of the soul in the immobile Infinite. That is an eventuality which the Mother does not envisage in her teachings, for it arbitrarily cuts up the unity of existence into two. Light and Life, and ignoring God's purpose in the world, lures the soul away from the field of its divine perfection and creative self-expression in Nature. "Even he who might have arrived, at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude, could only have done so by extracting himself from the body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have abandoned it to itself; by a misguided mysticism, by the attraction of supraphysical splendours, by the egoistic desire of being united with Thee for his personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the reason of his earthly existence, he would have refused cowardlike to accomplish his mission to redeem and purify Matter. To know that a part of our being is perfectly pure, to commune with that purity, to be identified with it, can be useful only if we subsequently utilise this knowledge for hastening the earthly transfiguration, for accomplishing Thy sublime work.”¹ If we take a flight to the Infinite, it is not to merge in but to be united with It, and to return to the world with Its force and benediction in order to conquer and transform our material life for Its self- revelation. We cannot, therefore, afford to coerce the mind into a complete inaction and impose upon it a progressive atrophy in order to transcend it. The mind has its essential, indispensable function in the economy of our triple nature and must be developed to its highest perfection, so that with all its faculties quickened, widened and illumined, it may serve the soul in its work of divine manifestation.
What is the essential and indispensable function of the mind in the hierarchy of the instrumental nature of man ? The mind is "an instrument of formation, organisation and action. And. it
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is in these functions that it attains its full value and real utility.”¹ "It is not an instrument of knowledge—it is incapable of finding knowledge—but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a region much higher than that of the human mind, even beyond the region of pure ideas.”² The mind forms thoughts, that is to say, partial and, in most cases, dwarfed and distorted representations of Truth, and transmits them to the vital (prāṇa) which infuses them with its own energy and passes them on to the physical being for materialisation in life. If we follow the ascetic way, we shall reduce the mind to a blank and let its faculties starve and languish or be paralysed by a long disuse; but in a dynamic spirituality they have to be fully awakened, trained and developed to their utmost perfection. Instead of forming thoughts from its dim perception of the remote shadowy aspects of Truth, the mind can receive, in silence and in in a growing light, the messages, intimations and revelations of Truth and employ its organised faculties to give them the right forms for life-effectuation.
But in spiritual life, though we instinctively feel the necessity of imposing a purificatory discipline on the vital (prāṇa) and the body, we usually neglect the mind and, except during meditation or short spells of concentration, let it roam and browse just as it pleases, and do not think that it too needs a scrupulous discipline of restraint and renunciation, if it is to be transformed, and if our consciousness is to transcend it. No transcendence is possible without renunciation. If we cling to the normal delights of the mind and its habitual interests, we shall never feel the necessity of climbing to the higher realms of Light an discovering the Truth and its native delight. It is by the renunciation of our absorption in the gross pleasures and preoccupations of the body that we have risen into the tumult and thrill of life's stimulating adventure, and, again, by a renunciation'' of the exclusive goad of desires and the blinding storm of passions, into the partial poise and quiet of the thinking mind. But since we find even this poise precarious and this quiet
¹ The Science of Living by the Mother,
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besieged and obscured by the waves of the vital and the disintegrating inertia of the body, we have to renounce the mind's customary, mechanical movements and its separative tendency, and aspire to ascend to the higher reaches of our consciousness, where alone, away from the dividing and limiting operation of the mind, we shall realise the unity of universal existence and the truth of both our essential and phenomenal being. But the pleasures of reasoning and speculation have so enthralled us that we think we can know everything by means of them, and even if, as in spiritual life, we feel the need of silencing or at least quieting the mind, we cannot easily arrive at a total renunciation of its habitual, hampering activities. Especially, in this age of exaggerated intellectuality, we are apt to confuse spirituality with mental accomplishments and let the power of our pen or the eloquence of our tongue to duty for spiritual experience. It is not unoften that the initial fervour of our heart for spiritual progress is overlaid with a plethora of intellectual activity which revels in the analysis, synthesis, criticism and exposition of spiritual truths of which our mind knows little or nothing by realisation, but everything by imagination, inference and reasoning, or, at second-hand, from books; and many a promising spiritual career is wrecked by this overmastering passion to know and understand and expound, rather than to be and become, which should be the prime objective of spiritual life.
There is a story told of St. Jerome which finely illustrates our point. It is said that, having renounced all other pleasures, he found that he could not renounce the pleasure of reading, and so had to carry his library to the desert, where he repaired for the purpose of penance and purification. "One day, during a fever, he dreamed that, at the Last Judgment, Christ asked him who he was, and he replied that he was a Christian. The answer came : 'Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ’ Thereupon he was ordered to be scourged. At length Jerome in his dream cried out: 'Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied Thee.’ This, he adds, ' was no sleep or idle dream’.”¹ Here is obviously an extreme case
¹ History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell,
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of ascetic self-denial, but it has, all the same, an unmistakable lesson for those who engross themselves in unremitting mental activities either in the deluded hope of being thereby able to follow the spiritual path better or simply because they cannot overcome the force of habit. One of the reasons why we have so few original and creative thinkers in modern times is this inveterate habit of constant and promiscuous reading and thinking, which keep the surface layers of the mind in a chronic fever of activity and prevent the deeper layers, the deeper faculties from opening and developing. It is not without justice that Whitman characterises the modern mind as "dazed and darkened by reading". A sort of mental indigestion is a prevailing malady of the modern intelligentsia and accounts not only for the catalepsy of its intuitive powers—intuitive thought, intuitive imagination, intuitive perception—but also for its inaptitude and disinclination for the spiritual life, and the fungus growth of doubt and disbelief choking its mind. Every part of human nature has, unquestionably, a right to autonomy, but it must be an autonomy respecting and conforming to the organic unity of the whole, and not exclusive and subversive of it. Besides, as we have already said, in the scale of life's values, the higher must always be given a greater emphasis of attention and an ampler scope of development than the lower; for, it is on the perfection of the higher that depend the perfection and secure fulfilment of the lower; it is, indeed, the higher and the highest that explain and justify the lower and the lowest in the scale of life's values. No part of our nature has to be neglected or re-pressed, but each must be developed to its highest perfection and integrated with all around the central truth and substance of our composite being. If the autonomy of a part, even of a dominant part, degenerates into autocracy, oppressing and obstructing the growth and legitimate self-expression of the others, then it is a serious menace to the harmony of the whole. It is from such a tyranny of excessive intellectuality that humanity is suffering today. All its science, politics, economics, sociology—in fact, all its intellectual labour is threatening it more and more with a complete disruption of the balance of
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its life and the harmony of its being. An exclusive emphasis on the material values of existence and their glorification in philosophy, arts and science seems to be the sole pre-occupation of the mind of modem humanity. If it turns, as in a few exceptional individuals, to the ethical values, it gives them a utilitarian bent; if it turns, as in a still fewer exceptional individuals, to spirituality, it reduces it to a code of ethics, trimmed and tabulated by the mechanising intellect, and exults in its summary negation of all that exists beyond its very limited ken. Its vaunted rationalism is a willful exclusion of true knowledge, and it is no wonder that it is paying rather heavily for it. Its brilliant, un- spiritual, egoistic, sense-enmeshed, matter-enslaved intellect is leading its life from problems to predicaments and from predicaments to perils. It is a blind chase—after what ?
What should we do with the mind in order to make it help our spiritual evolution and become a supple and docile instrument of the Divine, which it is meant to be ? The Mother says, "The mind has got to be made silent and attentive in order to receive knowledge from above and manifest it.”¹ For developing the capacity to receive, it has to purify itself of all its preferences, . preconceptions and prejudices, its fixed ideas and rigid principles, its narrow outlook and arrogant dogmatism, its categoric affirmations and negations, and turn in intent and aspiring silence to the Light which broods over it with an infinite motherly solicitude to illumine it. For developing the capacity to manifest knowledge, it has to widen itself by renouncing its attachment to its habitual thoughts and ideas and develop all its faculties to their utmost potentialities of perfection. When the Light descends, the mind, surrendered to it, will be not only lit up with knowledge, but transformed in all its operations, —its thought, reason, imagination, perception, memory,— all changed in their basic stuff and substance. It will become an inspired instrument of a developing concord and harmony, instead of being, as it is now, a confused creator of division and discord. A quiet and aspiring mind is the nursery of intuition.
Let us conclude by quoting at some length from Words of
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the Mother in which the Mother points out some of the normal defects and limitations of the human mind. "The whole mental world in which you live is limited, even though you may not know or feel its limitations, and something must come and break down this building in which your mind has shut itself and liberate it. For instance, you have some fixed rules, ideas or principles to which you attribute an absolute importance; most often it is an adherence to certain moral principles or precepts, such as the commandment : 'Honour thy father and mother...’ or 'Thou shaft not kill’, and the rest. Each man has some fad or one preferred shibboleth or another, each thinks that he is free from this or that prejudice from which others suffer, and is willing to regard such notions as quite false; but he imagines that his is not like them, it is for him the truth, the real truth. An attachment to a rule of the mind is an indication of a blindness still hiding somewhere. Take, for example, the very universal superstition, prevalent all over the world, that asceticism and spirituality are one and the same thing. If you describe someone as a spiritual man or a spiritual woman, people at once think of one who does not eat or sits all day without moving, one who lives in a hut in great poverty, one who has given away all he had and keeps nothing for himself. This is the picture that immediately arises in the minds of ninety-nine people out of a hundred when you speak of a spiritual man; the one proof of spirituality for them is poverty and abstinence from everything that is pleasant or comfortable. This is a mental construction which must be thrown down if you are to he free to see and follow the spiritual truth. For you come to the spiritual life with a sincere aspiration and you want to meet the Divine and realise the Divine in your consciousness and in your life; and then what happens is that you arrive in a place which is not at all a hut and meet a Divine One who is living a comfortable life, eating freely, surrounded by beautiful and luxurious things, not distributing what he has to the poor, but accepting and enjoying all that people give him. At once with your fixed mental rule you are bewildered and cry, 'Why, what is this ? I thought I was to meet a spiritual man.’ This false conception has to be broken down and disappear. Once it is gone, you find something that is much higher than your narrow ascetic rule,
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a complete openness that leaves the being free. If you are to get something, you accept it, and if you are to give up the very same thing, you, with an equal willingness, leave it. Things come and you take them up; things go and you let them pass, with the same smile of equanimity in the taking or the leaving.
"Or, again, you have adopted as your golden rule, 'Thou shah not kill’ and have a horror for cruelty and slaughter. Do not be surprised if you are immediately put in the presence of killing, not only once but repeatedly, until you understand that your ideal is no more than a mental principle and that a seeker of the spiritual truth should not be bound and attached to a mental rule. And when once you are free from it, you will find perhaps that all these scenes which troubled you—and were indeed sent in order to trouble you and shake you out of your mental building —have, singularly enough, ceased altogether to happen in your presence.”¹
It will have been clear from the above consideration that, in spiritual life, the best discipline for the mind is its rejection of all egoistic interests and habits of thought and reasoning, and a growing surrender, in serenity and silence, to the divine Light. None of its essential functions have to be suppressed, but all have to be offered and polarised to the Infinite. "When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have knowledge.”² "Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light. This is thy goal ”³. A regular practice of a constant and loving concentration on the Divine and an unfailing reference of all mental movements to His Light is the surest means of making the mind "receive and manifest knowledge."
² Thoughts and Glimpses by Sri Aurobindo,
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REASON—ITS UTILITY AND LIMITATION
The Utility of Reason
REASON is our best guide and mentor so long as we live in the mind. It is the one faculty in us that distinguishes our mind from the mind of the animal. In the lower forms of animal life, it is the instinct that leads, instinct which has more of drive in it than light. Whatever light is in it is buried in the turbid waters of life. Instinct works within a very restricted field and under certain fixed conditions; but it has a sort of automatic sureness, a precision and resourcefulness in its movements which are really amazing. Scientific studies of the bees and the white ants have revealed with what marvellous ingenuity and exactitude their instinct works within its narrow orbit. In higher animals there is a development of the sense-mind which at once supplements and somewhat impairs the automatic action of the instinct. Cosmic intelligence appears to be working in the animals from behind a thick veil of unconsciousness and semi-consciousness. But in man, a part of his mind detaches itself more and more from the surges of life and the impulsions of desire. It learns to watch, distinguish between the good and the bad, the beneficial and the harmful elements and energies of human nature, and strives to acquire a deciding and determining voice in the complex play of the forces. This part of his consciousness tries to know and understand, to rescue his being from the helpless goad of automatic instincts and appetites, and exercise a sort of control, very partial and precarious in the beginning, over the disorderly elements of his nature. In the language of Yoga we can say, it is the first, initial, tentative release of the mental Purusha from the hypnotic spell, the inexorable thralldom of Prakrit ! or Nature. The mental being or Purusha can now say "No", at least to some of tin impulses of the lower nature, though his refusal of consent is more often than not, overridden by the impetuous urges of the prāna or vital nature.
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Reason is a function of this detached part of the mind. Its chief office is to arrange the concepts of the mind, reduce them to order, survey the field of thought and, clearing it of weeds and outgrowths, arrive at conclusions and judgements by a process of induction or deduction from the concepts arranged. It imparts to the mind a certain clearness, lucidity and subtlety, and to our thoughts and ideas some coherence and compactness; and corrects the errors of our perceptions. It helps us to seek the truth for itself, and guards us against the intrusion of our habitual preferences and prejudices, our emotional partialities and entanglements, and our proneness to take appearances for facts. Reason, at its best, is a sentinel warning us against the pitfalls of life and the ambushes of desires, and showing us the right road to follow. Sattwic reason, enlightened and poised reason, is a safeguard against many of the delusions to which our fancies, passions and emotions so often betray us.
"Sri Aurobindo places reason at the top of the human mind, In fact, reason is, during the whole period of the growth of the mind, the arbiter of its activity, the safest guide, the master, one might say, who controls, and so long as you resort to mental activities, even those that are most speculative, it is reason that must guide you, prevent you from going astray, taking the wrong road or being beguiled by more or less erratic and unhealthy imaginations.”¹
It is generally thought that in spiritual life one should discourage the development of reason and not allow it to interfere with the free play of the heart's emotions and intuitions. Though there is some truth in this view, it must not blind us to the fact that uncontrolled emotions and pseudo-intuitions spell a greater danger to spiritual life than the intervention and domination of reason. We all know to what depths of demoralisation they usually descend who spurn the admonitions of reason, disregard its counsels, and elect to follow the obscure lead of their unchastened emotions. Vivekananda had once to
¹ Bulletin of Physical Education, Feb. 1957.
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lash out against some of his brother disciples who had given themselves up to extravagant emotional paroxysms in the mistaken belief that such swoons and wailings were a sign of intense love and devotion for God. Vivekananda branded them as hysterics and neurotics, and charged them to put an immediate end to all that imbecile, unmanly blubber.
The Mother is very emphatic in regard to the utility of reason up to a certain stage of mental evolution. She considers it dangerous to give up the help of reason so long as one lives in the mind and acts from the mind. "It is possible”, she says, "to give up reason only when you have passed beyond the mental activity. It is possible only when you have given yourself totally to the Divine. It is possible only when you have no more desires. Reason must be the ruler until you have gone beyond the state where it is indispensable or merely useful.”¹ It would be well to remember how categorically she commends reason and warns against its abandonment: "So long as there is an ego, so long as there are desires, so long as there is a personal will, so long as there are impulses and passions, preferences and attractions and repulsions, you cannot give up reason without falling into an unbalance.”²
There is another point to consider in this connection. Those who have gone far in the study of human nature and acquired an insight into the working of the subtle forces of the supra- physical worlds surrounding our material existence, know that influences and suggestions are always streaming into us from them. We do not see where these influences come from, and we take their suggestions as being our own, springing from some part of our own being. Desires, cravings, all sorts of impulses pour into us pell-mell from these environing regions. Some of the suggestions are good and helpful, while others are evil and harmful; and it is this medley of heterogeneous elements that renders our life so confused and miserable. Reason is our only safeguard against the inroads of the unfriendly or unhelpful forces. Its discrimination protects us from many a dangerous snare. It is true that our reason itself is often deluded,
¹ & ² Bulletin of Physical Education, Feb. 1957.
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bribed or blackmailed, but whatever its faults and shortcomings, it is still the best guide we possess so long as we are not in the hands of the Divine.
"There is another condition altogether indispensable for you to be able to do without reason. And that is, not to be open at any point to the suggestions of the hostile world. As a matter of fact, if you are not completely freed from the habit of answering to adverse suggestions, then by giving up your reason, you give up reason itself, that is to say, common sense, and you begin to behave here also in such an incoherent manner as may lead you to a dangerous lack of balance. And if the adverse suggestions are not to touch you any more, you must be exclusively under the influence of the Divine”¹
"You see now that the problem is not so easy. It means that unless you are completely illumined and transformed, it is always much safer to act by your reason. It may be a limitation, indeed it is a great limitation, but it is also a check which prevents you from becoming one of those half-crazy people who are too many in the world.”²
It is evident that the Mother is not one of those who regard reason as the highest possible faculty of man and the only leader of his life. It is only a guide so long as he lives in the mind—it bridges the gulf between instinct and intuitive knowledge. It leads and enlightens human consciousness during a particular period of transition in its evolution. But for it, man would have remained a bond slave of his desires and passions, and a sport of his lower impulses. He could not have advanced a step beyond his aboriginal animality.
"Reason is a very respectable person, and like all respectable persons, it has its limitations and partialities; but none the less it is of great utility. There are many things you would have done, if you had no reason, and which would have led you straight to
¹& ² Bulletin of Physical Education Feb. 1957.
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your ruin, because so long as you have not reached the highest regions, your best means for discrimination is reason.
Naturally it is neither the ideal nor the peak, it is only a guide to lead you through life, a check that protects you from extravagances, excesses and disordered passions, and above all from such impulsive acts as may lead you to the abyss.
One must be quite sure of oneself, quite free from ego and perfectly surrendered to the Divine Will if one is to dispense with reason safely.”¹
The Mother's words are very clear and incisively definite in regard to the role reason plays in our life. So long as the ego and the desires are there in us, so long as we are swayed by passions and attachments, preferences and prejudices, the guidance of reason is indispensable. To surrender reason is to surrender to darkness and invite disaster.
Reason as a Bar
But man arrives at a stage in his evolution when reason becomes the greatest bar to his further advance. What would have happened if our being had refused to outgrow the rule of instincts and impulses and develop the mind of reason ? It would have condemned itself to the vicious circle of desires and suffering, and there would have been no escape from it. But fortunately it was made to forego the easy guidance of instincts and impulses and press forward towards a more developed mind of reason and discrimination and reflection, and evolve the higher potentialities of its consciousness and nature. Now that it has developed reason, it must be its constant aspiration and effort to purify it of all alloy, foster its growth towards perfection, and then proceed beyond it in search of higher instruments of knowledge. It would be as irrational for it to cling on to reason in spite of its intrinsic deficiencies and limitations and refuse to advance in evolution," as it would have been if it had clung on to the sense-mind of
¹ Bulletin of Physical Education, Feb. 1937.
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the animal and refused to rise towards the life of reason. And, strange to say, it is this very thing, this irrational refusal to transcend reason, that is one of the basic causes of the present crisis in civilisation. One notices with wonder a certain un- canny dread, even in the most enlightened elite of humanity, of trying to rise beyond reason and seek for a better instrument of knowledge than this blinkered arbiter of our life. Kant's mind sought to reach after intuition, but could not cut its moorings in reason. The same dread is discernible in Jung, the leading psychologist, who, at times, appears to be almost touching the fringes of the psychic and the spiritual, and then recoiling in sudden alarm lest he should lose the safe anchorage of reason and find himself floundering in the uncharted unknown. It must be borne in mind that an endeavour of our consciousness to transcend reason does not mean surrendering our reason to the sub-rational forces of our nature. Transcendence is the law of all earthly beings. Not to aspire and strive for self-transcendence is to obstruct the onward march of evolution. The present impasse is partly due to this evolutionary bottleneck. But more of this later on. For the moment let us see what are the inherent limitations of our reason.
The Limitations of Reason
Reason is, as the Mother says, only a guide in the ignorance. It has no sure knowledge of anything. It is characterised by two incurable propensities—the propensity to doubt and the propensity to divide. Doubt always dogs its conclusions, and it cannot know anything without first dividing and analysing it. It works on the basis of the data furnished by the physical senses and are, therefore, more or less fettered to them in all "s operations. It can grow in purity and develop towards freedom and perfection only if and as it detaches itself from the insistence of the desires, passions and attachments of the lower prānic or vital nature. It has also to liberate itself from the meshes of the sense-mind and its preferences and predilections, its habitual, mechanical thoughts and ideas. Reason can thus
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purify itself to some extent and acquire a certain balance and detachment, a certain impartiality and disinterestedness. But there is always a fatal limit to its development. Mental reason cannot get completely beyond the fundamental limitations of f the physical brain out of which it has grown and to which it is tied. Its purity is always a qualified purity, exposed to surprise assaults from the passions and emotions of the unregenerate vital nature; behind its professed disinterestedness there lurk swarms of subtle, selfish interests, which cloud its perception and distort its judgement. It takes a regular training in self-culture or spiritual discipline to render reason even tolerably pure and free from the crippling and obscuring influences of the lower nature. Those who swear by reason and extol it as the highest possible faculty of man, capable of guiding him to his ultimate destiny, betray an ignorance of the complexity of human nature and the constitutional incompetence of reason to deal with the problems of the heart and life. Reason usually imposes stringent rules, represses and desiccates our feelings and emotions, and coerces many of the movements of the nature which it fails to understand or reduce to order; and, since it is never in possession of any assured knowledge, it cannot promote a harmonious development of our whole being. Either it is itself swayed by desires and passions, or it represses them so long as it can. But there is always the risk of the repressed energies erupting and swamping it with their burning lava.
Greek culture attained a great development of the mental reason, but in spite of its signal achievements, it was poor in the riches of Spirit. It neglected and discouraged its old tradition of mysticism, and tended more and more towards rationalism and humanism, with the result that, from Aristotle downwards, it began to describe a curve of steady decline and increasingly react to empiricism and scientific materialism till it ceased to exist except in its considerable but diluted contribution to Christian thought and Western life in general.
Reason may continue to help the growth of our being and consciousness, if it surrenders to intuition and opens to the higher light. The more it emancipates itself from the yoke of
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the physical mind, the more it can expand and brighten up with an unwonted light. But it finds it very difficult to do so —the knot of the ego is strongest in the intellectual mind. An exaggerated development of the mental reason without a concomitant refinement and deepening of the feelings and an openness and surrender to the higher light is harmful to our harmonious growth. Agnosticism, scepticism, utilitarian humanism, pragmatism, dialectical materialism, and last but not least, logical positivism are the natural brood of the hypertrophied mental reason. When reason refuses to widen beyond its normal sphere of work and rise to higher regions of consciousness, it begins to look down and occupy itself with the passing objects and interests of life, and forgets its higher idealism. It becomes a self-deluded tool of the desires and preferences of the lower nature. It loses whatever light it had, its discrimination is eclipsed, and it is so much engulfed in the obscurity of the lower nature that it turns into its very opposite, unreason, supporting its specious judgements and erring decisions by unabashed quibbles and sophistry. It becomes then an agility gymnast, as the Mother characterises it.
"Reason is an agility gymnast. It can move in all varieties of ways, make infinite twists, the most impossible contortions with equal ease and skill... What Reason does and can do is to justify, find arguments for whatever position it is put in or called upon to support. Its business is to supply "proofs" : it can do so as the spider brings out of itself the whole warp and woof of the cobweb. There is no truth, that is to say, no conclusion which it cannot demonstrate with equal cogency...”¹
What is indispensable for our reason to function in the right way and in the best interest of our integral development is rectitude, mental integrity. But that is not an easy thing to achieve. It presupposes a considerable purification of the lower nature. Unless reason rises above the surges of desires and attachments, unless it becomes more or less impersonal, it
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo by Nolini Kanta Gupca, Part 7.
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cannot lead us far on our evolutionary march. That is why it is said in the Upanishad that the soul cannot be realised by reason. A deliverer of our being from the obscure instincts of life, reason must grow mature enough to learn how to seek its own fulfilment in a spontaneous surrender to the higher light.
There is another disabling limitation under which reason labours. It proceeds by division and analysis, as we have already seen, for it inherits the basic function of the mind, Which is to divide, to separate, to analyse into parts. It cannot deal with an undivided whole. When it synthesises, it does nothing better than putting the discrete parts together, agglomerating or assembling the diverse elements into a whole. But it often finds to its surprise that its syntheses abound with discrepant elements and anomalies.¹ Then it eliminates what it cannot harmonise and retains only those elements that agree with its preconceptions and cherished conclusions. When it deals with the ideas and views of other minds, its personal .preferences and incapacity to reconcile apparently conflicting elements vitiates all its judgments. In philosophy its defects show conspicuously. It erects admirable fabrics of thought, trim, logical, and symmetrical, but founded on uncertain postulates derived from the sense data and expanded and buttressed by inference and speculation. That is about the high waters mark of its achievement. It can catch some broken reflections .of truth, but not truth itself. Its theories are feats of intellectual speculation, but they do not lead human consciousness beyond the confines of the mind, they do not open doors upon infinity and eternity, they do not make us experience and live Reality. The basal differences between the speculative structures of the philosophers are the measure of the incapacity of mental reason to envisage truth in all its aspects and reconcile its apparent incompatibles and contradictions. If it accepts the impersonal aspect of Reality, it rejects the personal; if it regards Reality as static and inactive, it dubs all creation and action as illusion; or if, like Heraclitus and Bergson, it perceives
¹"It is not in the mental consciousness that things can be harmonised and synthesised". The Mother
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the exclusive reality of the universal flux, it considers the status and immutability of Reality as myth and moonshine. If Brahman is Nirguna or devoid of all qualities and attributes, it cannot be at the same time Saguna or possessor of qualities. These are the usual trenchant oppositions created by human reason, even at its best, in the all-harmonising unity and integrality of Reality. It is baffled by the paradoxical nature of Reality, by its simultaneous possession of radical contraries. "It is a malady of the ordinary human intelligence which comes necessarily from separation, from division, that things must be either this or that. If you choose this, you turn your back on that."¹
Reason and Intuition
It is only intuition that sees things in the whole. It commands an immediacy of knowledge which views the whole and the parts at the same time, and embraces their apparent contradictions in a vast sweep of unifying- and harmonising vision. It is only intuition that can very well affirm, like the Upanishad :
"That moves and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That is outside all this.”...—Isha
The action of intuition is diametrically opposed to that of reason—it sees the One, the Indivisible, and the multiplicity as the manifold aspect or self-representation of the same One. It has not to analyse or divide in order to know. It knows by identity, by becoming what it wants to know. Reason, on the other hand, tries to know, now one aspect of truth and now another, now in one way, and now in another; but it never succeeds in knowing except in a very partial and fragmentary manner, for it creates an artificial gulf between itself and the object of its knowledge. All its action proceeds upon the basis °f division, differentiation and separation. By dividing the
¹ Bulletin of Physical Education, Aug. 1957.
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indivisible, it renders the object of its knowledge unknowable. That is why agnosticism is the last word of reason's quest of knowledge. What it thinks it knows, is only the prismatic spectrum of appearances, the perpetual flux of changing forms, not Reality. And not knowing Reality, it does not know the truth of appearances either.
Reason and Faith
"Faith,” says the Mother, "is the movement of the soul whose knowledge is spontaneous and direct. Even if the whole world denies and brings forward a thousand proofs to the contrary, still it knows by an inner knowledge, a direct perception that can stand against everything, a perception by identity”.¹ It knows, but it cannot give reasons for what it knows. "It does not believe after proofs are given.”² Faith originates from the very centre of our being. True faith is as deep and strong as life itself. But reason cannot understand it. It scouts and chills it. It insists on proofs, on factual and objective evidences; and it peremptorily rejects all that eludes its objective tests. Thus it shuts out an infinite range of knowledge from itself. The action of reason is mostly negative. It surveys and sifts, detects and rejects, watches and warns, checks and corrects. It is only rarely that it acts in a positive and constructive way. But faith is always positive and creative in its action. It possesses a confidence and a certitude which sharply contrast with the habitual doubt and scepticism of reason. Faith is a reflection of the knowledge of the soul, and has all the power of the soul behind it to fortify and support it in its self-fulfilment. Loss of faith is the greatest loss modern man has suffered on account of his exclusive reliance on reason.
Reason and Revelation
The greatest scriptures of the world, those that have given spiritual strength and sustenance, light and joy to humanity
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through the ages, are words of revelation, and not of reason. The Veda, the Upanishad, the Bible, the Avesta, for example, are so powerfully revealing, because they embody direct revelation. They are perennially fresh and creative, inspiring and ennobling and exalting, because they were not manufactured in the mind of reason, in the shadow of human ignorance, but flashed as revelation in the deeper or higher consciousness of man, which can be attained only by silencing and over- passing reason. Denouncing all mental judgements as ignorant and erroneous, and describing the way to receive the higher light, the flash of revelation, the Mother says :
"If you wish to be a little wiser, observe things attentively record them without pronouncing any judgment. When you will have contemplated them quietly within yourself, place them before the highest part of your consciousness, trying to keep yourself silently attentive and wait.
Then perhaps, slowly, as if coming from very far and from very high, something like a light will manifest itself. And you will know a little more of the truth.”
That is the ancient, traditional way of attaining knowledge—by vision, by inspiration, by revelation, when thought has ceased, the mind of reason has been lulled to sleep, and an inner or higher level of consciousness has awakened in a spirit of intent receptivity. "There are higher regions of conscious- ness beyond the intellect; and you have to stop all intellectual activity, make your mind a total blank before you can reach there. And indulgence in even so-called higher or philosophical speculations can only block the way to the true consciousness and knowledge”.¹
The Fetish of Reason
Modem man has made a fetish of his intellect and reason, and that is why the evolutionary progress of his consciousness
¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo by Nolini Kanta Gupta—Part VI.
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has been arrested. According to the Mother "the intellect that believes too much in its own importance and wants satisfaction for its own sake, is an obstacle to the higher realisation... People do not regard an all-engrossing satisfaction of the vital desires or the animal appetites as a virtue; the moral sense is accepted as a mentor to tell one the bounds that one may not transgress. It is only in his intellectual activities that man thinks that he can do without any such mentor or censor!”¹ Man's moral and spiritual sensibilities have been starved and atrophied by the arrogant autocracy of his intellectual reason. He cannot get away even for a moment from its frowning and withering look, though, it must be admitted, its frowns have sometimes a sobering and salutary effect upon our lower nature. His imagination ² cannot soar as far and as freely as it could before, for reason damps its ardour and clips its wings. Even his intelligence has lost its ancient sweep and depth, its keenness, suppleness and creative vigour for want of moral and spiritual sustenance. Its activities have become hectic and desultory, flurried and shallow. It has ceased to delight in the ideal, the glory that can be, the inspired thought and far- reaching reflection, but revels in petty details and niggling technicalities; and even wallows in the ugly and the repulsive, the coarse, the squalid, and the sordid. Alexis Carrel paints a true, though somewhat lurid, picture of the decay of reason and intelligence in modern man.
"In modern civilisation the individual is characterised chiefly by a fairly great activity, entirely directed towards the practical side of life, by much ignorance, by a certain shrewdness, and by a kind of mental weakness which leaves him under the influence of the environment wherein he happens to be placed. It appears that intelligence itself gives way when character weakens. For this reason, perhaps, this quality, characteristic of France in former times, has so markedly failed in that country. In the United States the intellectual standard remains low, in spite of
² Blake rejects reason as an enemy of imagination.
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the increasing number of schools and universities... Modern civilisation seems to be incapable of producing people endowed with imagination, intelligence and courage. In practically every country there is a decrease in the intellectual and moral calibre of those who carry the responsibility of public affairs... It is chiefly the intellectual and moral deficiencies of political leaders, and their ignorance, which endanger modem nations.”¹
Degeneration of Reason
It is evident that human reason has darkened and degraded itself by refusing to evolve, to extend its horizons, and open to the higher light; and that it is unreason and its cohort, irrational desires, passions and mean selfishness, that have the whip hand of human nature today. This unreason is reason inverted and perverted and fallen from its high office. Like a fallen angel turned into a malignant devil, it is dragging mankind down into a kind of civilised barbarism, which is the greatest menace to human culture, and even human existence. This civilised barbarism is capable of brutalities from which even the hardened conscience of the Chenghiz Khans and Timurs of the past would have sunk in spontaneous horror—brutalities perpetrated from day to day, not in sudden fits of uncontrollable violence or vindictive passion, but in cold blood, with calm, calculated cruelty and self-justifying callousness; scientific tortures and massacres, devised and carried out with unblushing atrocity and sovereign nonchalance, and without any qualms of conscience, but rather with an imposing array of ostensible reasons disguising their revolting inhumanity. In the previous ages of human culture, passion and perfidy, cruelty and rapacity did not know how to hide their contorted features—they were self-exposed in all their unrelieved hideousness but today human intellect and ingenuity have woven such deceptive masks over them that they play the butcher and the vandal in the name of civilisation and culture, in the best interests of world peace and security. They maul and mutilate, ravage
¹ Man the Unknown by Alexis Carrel,
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and destroy all higher values and the priceless legacies of the past; they lay waste vast areas of productive earth and poison the health and happiness of millions of men; they pollute the very air we breathe and the very water we drink, with strident professions on their lips of the welfare of mankind and the advance of civilisation.
A Crucial Choice
It is a crucial choice that confronts man today : whether he should elevate and exceed reason and explore the vaster and luminous reaches of his consciousness, or let his reason pander to the base interests and brutish hungers of his animal nature. On the one hand, there is the hope of an infinite expansion of human consciousness in light and peace and creative harmony, and unimpeded flowering of man's immortal Spirit, and a radical transformation of his human into divine nature; and, on the other, the rampant chaos and anarchy of his animal appetites and blind impulses, rendered immensely more powerful and destructive by the subtlety of his intellect and reason. The very existence of man on earth is at stake. To be or not to be is the sole question of the hour. Mind is at the end of its tether. Shall man cling on to his collapsing reason and find himself broken in the bottomless pit, or ascend to the supramental heights and renew his life and nature in its transforming light ?
Sublimation of Reason
Man is a pilgrim of eternity, and must not settle down at any wayside inn, however snug and secure it may seem to be. As he has been endeavouring to transcend the subrational stage of impulse and instinct, so too he must strive to ascend beyond reason to whatever higher powers and faculties await the exploration of his evolving consciousness. But reason can be transcended only when it is fully developed. It is dangerous to attempt a premature leap.
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The Mother says that knowledge is above and beyond the mind of thought, but the mind of thought and reason has to be fully developed before one can hope to transcend it in order to attain knowledge. She enjoins on everybody the duty of developing his reason, for it is only after he has risen to his full stature as a mental being that he can aspire to scale the spiritual heights.
"The first thing that is to be taught to every human being as soon as he is capable of thinking is that he must obey reason which is a kind of super-instinct of the species. And I repeat that it is not a question of spiritual life, but the very elementary wisdom of human, purely human, life. Every child must know that he is created to become a mental being, and if he is to manifest his human nature, reason must govern his life and not vital impulses. That is the elementary education that should be given everywhere.
The reign of reason should not end until the coming of the psychic law which manifests the Divine Will.”¹
Reason must not be thrown overboard, but purified and raised to its full stature and held up to the higher light. Instead of remaining a henchman of our desire-soul, it must achieve a control over it and help our being to offer all itself to the Divine.
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THE CONQUEST OF DESIRE
PART I
IT is said that when the light of knowledge (bodhi) descended on Buddha at the close of his long meditation, the very first words he uttered were: "I have caught thee at last, thy name is thirst (desire). No more shalt thou make me wheel from birth to birth, from suffering to suffering.”
With an unerring intuition, Buddha thus laid his finger on the prime cause of terrestrial suffering and the greatest enemy of man's spiritual evolution. Renunciation of desire, he taught, was the elimination of all evil and suffering and the surest means to the extinction of the egoistic human personality, which is a not-self, a mere ephemeral construction of Karma. The Gita affirms the same truth of desire with a repeated and hammering insistence : desire is the arch-enemy of man, the eternal foe of the wise, and the origin of obscuration and suffering. Therefore, slay desire, root it out of your nature once for all and desirelessly act in God and for God in the world. In the Upanishad, though the intellectual method of the Gita and the Buddhist scriptures had not yet so much developed,¹ the renunciation of desire is woven into the very grain of their teaching, as the following references amply testify :
(1) In the Brihadaranyak Upanishad, in the course of his elaborate reply to Janaka's questions, Yajnavalkya says that when the desires that are lodged in the heart are eliminated, then the mortal becomes immortal, and even here realises the Brahman.
(2) In the Chhandogya Upanishad (IV—10) Upakoshala says to his preceptor's wife who was importuning him to break his fast, "In this Purusha (i.e. in me) there are many desires running in various directions. I am full of many diseases (maladies of the mind). I shall not eat.”
¹ In the Isha Upanishad we have, however; "Lust not after anyone's possession,"
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(3) In the Kathopanishad Yama says to Nachiketa, "Hardly a wise man here and there desiring immortality turneth his eyes inward and seeth the self within him. The rest childishly follow after desire and pleasure and walk into the snare of Death who gapeth wide for them. But calm souls, having learned of immortality, seek not for permanence in the things of this world that pass and are not.”
In the words of Christ, "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on” , there is an implicit denunciation of desire and an ardent advocacy of a complete dependence on God.
We find, therefore, that, whatever its spell on deluded minds, under the spotlight of spiritual knowledge desire stands thoroughly unmasked as the prolific parent of most of life's evils. The progressive rationalistic mind of today, if it is searchingly honest, will readily admit this truth, but it will ask in amazement, as Bossuet asked Madame Guyon, "If the desires are renounced, how will the springs of life function ? Will not life come to a dead stop?” The astounded interrogation is not so naive as it may appear to a hide-bound religious mind; it is perfectly legitimate and merits a straight and serious consideration. Life, as it is normally lived, is apparently geared to desire, and if the desires are relinquished, it may be reasonably contended, how can life get on ? Is there not a desire or the drive of a purpose (as the Purposivists in modern psychology maintain) behind every human action, as its initiating and impelling force? Will not the stifling of desires mean the stifling of life itself and its motor forces ? The Buddhist gospel or the Gita's may be a counsel of perfection, but how in this work-a-day world, in practical life, in this grim struggle for existence, can one renounce all desires and not sink into inertia and stagnation and eventual disintegration? Will it not spell a total defeat and frustration of life's purpose ?
The answer, usually advanced by the spiritual man, is that this very defeat of life's purpose is the crowning victory of the soul. You lose the kingdom of the earth in order to gain the
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kingdom of Heaven. You cannot surely have the best of both worlds, serve two masters at the same time. But the answer falls flat on the modern mind, for, first of all, it cannot believe that life, which has brought it to its present state of evolution, will stop short at a half-result and betray a sudden bankruptcy of all its resources to carry evolution to any higher perfection. And, besides, it is fired with a synthetic idealism, a supreme gift of the Time-Spirit, which insists on the discovery and realisation of unity and harmony in life and is loth to reject it out of hand as an ever-circling futility. A victorious unity of Spirit and Matter, Life and Light, Silence and Movement, One and Many, seems to be its master passion, which it cannot forswear simply because life confronts it with the lash of desire and the trail of tragic suffering. It seems to have the courage to look desire in the face, stultify its goad, and probe into its heart to discover something of which it is a dark distortion. A complete conquest and conversion of the energy which desire embodies is not only possible, but inevitable, if life is not to languish and the human society not to turn into an unprogressive structure of quietistic ascetics. The modern approach to life is, at its best, an intellectual, scientific approach, and it augurs well for the rediscovery of truths which have long lain buried under the wreckage of the past and willfully neglected by a narrow spirituality impatiently avid of the beyond. A rehabilitation of the ancient truths will transform life from a clamorous hunger into a divinely creative force led by the supernal Light to a , greater and greater fulfilment.
What is Desire ?
When inorganic Matter evolves out of the indeterminate flux of the primal energy of the Inconscient, there begins, in the dance of the released atoms, a rhythmic swing, characterised by the dual movement of attraction and repulsion. The atoms combine and separate, aggregate and disaggregate, in response to an inscrutable force operating in them. That force is a blind hunger, immeasurable, unquenchable. It is an urge implanted
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in the centre of every atom, towards individual growth, development, expansion and expression. It is a mysterious, irrepressible urge which makes each atom draw towards itself only those atoms which can help its growth, and repel or draw away from those which are likely to be harmful or hampering. It is a marvellous, automatic action making for the rhythm which regulates the stupendous movements of the material universe. In organic Matter this urge assumes a more distinct and definite form. Life, in its first manifestation, appears to be a heaving sea of hunger and richly deserves the vivid Upanishadic epithet; "Life is hunger, which is death.” Individual life feeding on other lives in order to maintain and aggrandize itself, feeding and eventually being fed upon by the contending lives—this is the spectacle that presents itself to our view behind the apparent birth and death of living Matter.
When Life evolves Mind, this hunger becomes desire, a conscious craving, an insistent longing to seize and possess and enjoy what one feels one lacks. No individual life at this stage of evolution can progress without this propelling force of desire. It is the sole motive force that neutralizes to a considerable extent the constant gravitational pull towards inertia and disintegration, on the one hand, and creates the conditions and designs the contours of the future out of an indeterminate mass of possibilities, on the other. Desire dominates and directs the movements of life. Springing from hidden sources which man does not care to explore, but stinging him into incessant action, physical, vital and mental, desire leads him through whatever defeats and detours, struggles and sufferings, to an increasing development of his individuality and an efficient functioning of his awakened faculties. A desire is an energy, a creative and formative energy, which does not lie idle in us, but, either on our conscious or subconscious level, is always busy trying to bring about its own fulfilment. Even when we repress it, it does not disappear out of existence, but only sinks under- ground and ferments and works there, biding its time for a fresh outburst and self-satisfaction. It can wait there long, very long, indeed, if our will is strong and alert enough to prevent
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its recurrence, and we may lay the unction to our hearts that we have got rid of it for good and all; but that would be a sheer self-delusion, liable to be shattered some day in this life or the next.
The ego in the individual thrives on desires. Its finite, individualised consciousness cuts itself off from others and makes it concentrate on its own growth and gratification. Thus divided and limited, the individual in his ignorance desires the objects which attract it and, impelled by desire, struggles to possess them. Human life on the surface is this struggle, this ceaseless seeking and striving after the objects which, being finite and fugitive, are unable to give anything like a full and abiding satisfaction to the soul. But though desire acts in the beginning and for a long while as a lever by which life lifts itself out of the lower bog and advances towards fresh gains and conquests, yet a stage arrives in this evolutionary advance when the compelling tyranny of desire and the struggle and suffering it entails become too acutely disquieting to be borne. Desire then reveals itself in its true colours, as the greatest obstacle to a further progress. That which worked as a lever appears now as an insufferable fever, a futile fret and a mounting frustration. It is more and more clearly perceived by the individual that desires are endless, and endless the uneasiness they cause—uneasiness and anxiety in the pursuit of them, uneasiness and anxiety in the insecure enjoyment of their fleeting satisfaction, and uneasiness, exasperation or corroding grief in their frustration. They allow no repose or peace or a calm, dispassionate view of the meaning and goal of life. They lash and drive man on in a vicious circle. They bar his passage into the eternity and infinity of the Spirit.
What should man do at this juncture ? If he gives up all his desires, he fears that he may lapse into an inert passivity and quiescence, the springs of life may cease to function, its wheels come to a standstill. A further perfection in terms of life may be barred out for ever. He may slip out of life, if be is so inclined, and merge in some infinite Void or indefinable immutable Existence; but that would be a flight and not a conquest.
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How to conquer desire and lead a divine, desireless life . of joyous freedom, richly and resplendently creative, is the problem man must solve, if he is to achieve this highest perfection on earth.
We have seen that desire is an evolved, mentalised form of the hunger which characterises both organic and inorganic Matter, but we have not traced hunger to its ultimate source and watched its primal genesis. If we do that, we shall know what hunger or desire represents in the material world and what it is in its eternal essence. A clear perception of this essence will tend to liberate us from the tormented yoke of desire and make us revert to the source which is a perennial fount of force for a manifold fulfilment in life. Once this source is seen in the light of knowledge, renunciation of desire will cease to be an arduous and painful endeavour, but become, instead, a glad and natural sacrifice offered to the Supreme.
Desire—a Distorted Splinter of the Divine Will
It is said in the Upanishads that in the beginning there was the One without a second. That One desired to be many. This, then, is the first birth of desire; but it is better to call it Will than desire, for, desire, in its ordinary acceptation, means a longing for something which we lack. The Divine lacked no- thing; He willed to reproduce Himself in numberless forms, to deploy the infinite possibilities of self-formation inherent in Him, to enjoy variously, manifoldly, even in the contrary terms of pain and suffering, the eternal, invariable delight of His unconditioned self-existence. This flaming out of the divine Will to self-creation or rather multiple self-realisation and self-expression is an eternal fact of the omnipresent Reality, as much as its immobility and silence. The Will to create argues no want or deficiency in the One who is Absolute, but is a spontaneous play of His Consciousness-Force (cit-tapas). Its Purpose in our evolutionary world is a progressive self-manifestation of the Divine in terms of unity in diversity. But in the material formula diversity or division seems to be its primary
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objective. It creates a myriad centres of the one indivisible Consciousness; a myriad units of the one, unitary Existence; countless waves and ripples of the one infinite ocean of Power and Delight; and, breaking itself into splinters, emerges as the dark, blind hunger which we have envisaged as the motive-force behind every little movement of organic and inorganic Matter. This hunger is a fragmentary impulse of the one universal Will, but a fragment darkened and deformed in the conditions of the inconscience out of which it springs. Its business is to organise and consolidate the individuality of each unit, to mark it off from others, so that the original intention of the One to be many may become a concrete fact of terrestrial existence. Passing through a long process of evolution, this hunger turns into conscious desire in man. Based on division, it signalises a pronounced development of the ego and its sharp separation and clear-cut distinction from other egos. This ego is the desire-soul, a dark reflection of our delight-soul, which is a spark of the sempiternal Fire. When the separative development of the ego is complete and its individuality well formed, its consciousness tends towards universality, impersonality and infinity. Evolution registers now a new turn. The ego-centric stress gives place to a growing tendency towards theo-centric self-giving—desire melts into love.
Two Stages of Life
Terrestrial life can then be divided into two stages : the first is that at which the chief preoccupation of Nature is to form and consolidate the ego, the dynamic centre of every constructed individuality. Her stress is on multiplicity, on the creation of inexhaustible genuses and species with distinctive traits and characteristics, on sharply differentiated individualities. From the formation of the atom to that of the full-fledged ego in man, the whole stage is marked by a subconscient hunger or a conscious desire, impelling the growth of the individual unit. The universal Will is stationed behind, controlling and co-ordinating the giant interaction of the multifarious hungers
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and desires of the evolving units, but not obtruding on the surface. It acts through the unconscious drive or the subconscious urge or, as in man, through desire and a delusive free will, in each individual unit. Hunger or desire is the distinctive stamp of this first stage.
At the second stage the stress shifts on to unity. The full- fledged ego in man, smarting under the slavery of desires, yearns to transcend itself and attain to freedom and mastery. This new yearning does not originate in the ego, though the ego seems to be its immediate medium of expression, but in the soul—it heralds the replacement of the desire-soul by the delight-soul in man. An increasing unity, harmony, order, loving and joyful mutuality mark this stage at which, in proportion as the individual being is purified of desire, and enlightened and widened in consciousness, the divine Will, the sovereign creator and ruler of the universe, unveils itself and takes up the charge of the nature. Life does not stop because desire is dying, but is, on the contrary, immeasurably heightened, widened, quickened and superbly accentuated in its manifold self-expression under the luminous direction of the omnipotent Will. The egoistic division having disappeared, the individual identifies himself with the Universal and the Transcendent and partakes of the life of all and embraces all in his unwalled consciousness. What will he now crave or covet ? What gain will elate and what loss depress him ? Perceiving the underlying unity of all beings, himself in all beings, he "neither mourns nor desires", but works out God's Will in the world, poised in the absolute equality of his liberated soul and nature.
It is evident from the foregoing consideration that desire is not the real and ultimate motive-force behind the movements of individual and universal nature, but is only an overt incentive to action, a concomitant of ignorance, entailing conflict and struggle and suffering, which are inevitable, even necessary, in the egoistic phase of evolution. The real motive-force is the Will of the supreme Being, which emerges from behind the confusion and anarchy of individual desires and cravings,
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as man surpasses his ego and recovers his unity and solidarity with all—with the All and the One in all and beyond all.
Two Attitudes towards Desire
In spiritual life there can be only two attitudes towards desire : one is that of the ascetic, which is an attitude of relentless hostility and rigid repression, and the other the plastic and supple attitude of the lover of God in life as well as in Light. The ascetic, whose single aim is to wake up from what he calls the delirium of life.; strives to strangle desire by sheer will-force and rigorous self-denial, and in strangling desire, strangles or sterilises life itself. He bruises the motor springs of life and inhibits all expansive faculties, cripples all will and initiative till he finds himself sitting upon his own corpse. It is true that the Gita advises the slaying of desire, but of desire only as the immediate and overt cause of delusion and suffering, and not of the Will behind it, not, certainly, of life itself. The ascetic's dealing with desire, and for the matter of that, with his whole nature, is relentlessly repressive, drastic and destructive. If he succeeds in it, he returns, when his body drops, to the Inane or the Beyond; but if he fails—and the majority do fail—there usually results a violent upheaval in his nature, or an obscure mixture and disorder, a quasi-spiritual state of unresolved anomalies, or a steep fall from the poise and purity so laboriously attained. The Gita deprecates this strenuous, short-sighted, cavalier attitude of the ascetic and gives preference to the second attitude, which is one of equality, detachment, and a quiet and persistent rejection of desire. This attitude is of those who believe that God is not only transcendent of life, but also immanent in it; and that it is His unblemished manifestation in terrestrial life that is the object of the soul's descent into birth. A calm and integral rejection of desire for the discovery of the divine Will and its creative play in life, constitutes the cardinal principle of the second attitude, which we shall now consider at some length.
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PART II
We have seen that (I) desire is a darkened and deformed splinter of the divine Will and that its elimination means a free and unhampered working of the unveiled Will in and through the liberated individual, and not a cessation of life and its activities; that (2) though an indispensable agent in the development and aggrandisement of the individual, so long as he is bound to the ego and its dualities, it is the greatest obstacle to his transcendence of the ego and entry into the infinite freedom and self-existent bliss of his spiritual self and his identity with God and the universe, and that (3) suppression of desire never leads to its conquest.
If we wish to live in an everlasting peace and happiness, not, certainly, in ascetic seclusion, but in the full flood of life's salutary activities, and in the full light of knowledge, and not, as now, in the stumbling ignorance of our mind, we have to conquer desire and replace it by the divine Will as the leader of our nature. "Desire and the passions that arise from desire are the principal sign and knot of ego. It is desire that makes you go on saying I and mine, and subjects you through a persistent egoism to satisfaction and dissatisfaction, liking and disliking, hope and despair, joy and grief, to your petty loves and hatreds, to wrath and passion, to your attachment to success and things pleasant and to the sorrow and suffering of failure and of things unpleasant. Desire brings always confusion of mind and limitation of the will, an egoistic and distorted view of things, a failure and clouding of knowledge. Desire and its preferences and violences are the first strong root of sin and error. There can be, while you cherish desire, no assured stainless tranquillity, no settled light, no calm, pure knowledge. There can be no right being—for desire is a perversion of the Spirit—and no firm foundation for right thought, action and feeling. Desire, if permitted to remain under whatever colour, is a perpetual menace even to the wisest, and can at any moment subtly or violently cast down the mind from even its firmest and most surely acquired foundation. Desire is the chief enemy
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of spiritual perfection.”¹
In this essay we shall try to understand how desire is to be conquered and replaced by the divine Will by progressive stages of purification, and what difference there is between repression and rejection, suppression and indulgence, desire and necessity, and desire and delight.
It goes without saying that those who have known life to be only an inextricable skein of desires and demands, hopes and disappointments, struggles and successes and failures, unsteady 'pleasures and pains, all marked by a dull or raging fever in their active, conscious being, will find it extremely difficult to believe that there can be a state of untroubled peace and un- ebbing delight securely maintained in the midst of life's distracting maelstrom, just as those who have lived in perpetual slavery from their birth cannot easily bring themselves to believe in the dignity and blessings of freedom. Habit dulls or deadens our finer sensibilities and fetters our imagination. A life of un-alloyed bliss and desireless action may appear to many as something colourless and vapid, if at all possible. It is only those who have seen through the colossal cheat of the life of desires, its continual goad, its frequent frustration or fleeting satisfaction, 'the train of evils it brings and the fruitless round in which it moves without any definite issue, that can make up their minds to end this agnonised slavery and rise into the freedom and peace of their desireless, egoless, boundless spiritual existence.
In the second chapter of the Gita there is a very graphically graduated description of how desire attacks a man and leads him to perdition. As soon as he thinks intently of an object, he becomes attached to it; of attachment is born desire; desire gives rise to wrath and passion; wrath generates infatuation; infatuation leads to a loss of the memory of one's eternal Self; loss of the memory of the real self culminates in a ruin of intelligence, and when intelligence is obscured and ruined, he is done for. The whole steep process by which a man, who has subjected himself to desire, comes to grief, is beautifully delineated. First, an intent settling of the consciousness on an object of the
¹ Essays on the Gita, Vol , II by Sri Aurobindo,
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sense, then attachment, then desire, then disquieting wrath, then infatuation, then forgetfulness of one's true self, then a complete eclipse of intelligence and then—when the light of the intelligence is clouded—a collapse of the whole being. This is the invariable story of every man madly pursuing the phantoms of desire—they prove to be his doom. If the very first movement could be checked; if desire could be killed in the seed; if the mind, as soon as it settled on an object of sense with a longing for possession, could be quietly removed and concentrated on the Infinite and Eternal;—it is indeed the Infinite alone that can give us infinite satisfaction, which our hungering soul vainly seeks in finite objects—the whole precipitate process of fall could be avoided. But the desire-soul acts with an almost irresistible impetuosity, it sweeps us as a storm sweeps a frail boat, and before we have time to control its course, we find our-selves rolling in the dust.
How to Conquer Desire
The analogy of the boat should not be carried too far, for, behind man's apparent fragility, there is a firmness which is absolutely unshakable, a fire which nothing can quench. He is not born to be a toy of desire, tossed about in alternating sensations of pleasure and pain, or broken and flung away after a brief moment's play; but an instrument of God, commissioned here to fulfil His Will to self-manifestation in humanity. He has, therefore, to learn how best to deal with his soul's sworn enemy, desire. The traditional way of dealing with desire is a drastic or gradual suppression. This is the ascetic way, which does not care to take proper account of the origin and nature of desire and the best and safest means of disposing of it, but is bent upon getting rid of it by a sheer violence of the will and physical austerities. The basic attitude of this way is one of fear, impatience and aversion, which dictate, in most cases, panicky, precipitate measures, and proceeds on a fundamental assumption that desires dwell in our own being and, being a source of untold miseries, have to be smothered there to death; and in
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order to smother or slay them, one begins to smother or slay the vital (prāṇa) itself, where, it is held, the desires have their source and stronghold. This identification of the individual with his desire is an ignorant identification which turns self- discipline into self-torture, and renders it immensely difficult and arduous, as if he was hammering or hacking away a part of himself. It is certainly the wrong way to deal with desires. There may be a relentless and tireless wrestling, much struggle and repression, but the result, except in a very few cases in which there are other factors entering into play, is always un- satisfactory and depressing. It is not unoften that even after one has made a desert of one's life, one is painfully surprised by new shoots of desire cropping up in it.
The Mother teaches us a most simple and effective way of conquering desire. It is lit up with knowledge, and that makes all the difference between it and the ignorant, coercive methods of impatient asceticism. She says that the best means of self- mastery is a dual movement of transcendence and surrender. It is sheer folly to wrestle with desire in its own field, where it is almost invincible by any human effort, and constantly fed and fortified by its own universal energy. What we have to do is to step back from the lower vital which is a part of the un-universal Nature, abounding with all sorts of desires, cravings, lusts, hungers, etc., and take our stand on our true being. Once we learn how to stand there, we are free, free from the compulsion of the forces of nature. Tranquil witnesses, we can watch the desires invading us like waves from the surrounding sea of universal Nature. It becomes then increasingly clear that they do not belong to us, they are not at all native to our true self. "When an attack comes the wisest attitude is to consider that it comes from outside, and to say, 'This is not myself and I will have nothing to do with it.’ You have to deal in the same way with all lower impulses and desires and all doubts and questionings in the mind. If you identify yourself with them, the difficulty in fighting them becomes all the greater; for then you have the feeling that you are facing the never easy task of overcoming your own nature. But once you are able to say, 'No, this is not myself, I will have nothing
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to do with it’, it becomes much easier to disperse them.”¹ In fact, all desires come from outside, from the universal Nature, and take shelter in our subconscient vital. It is only when they rise from there into our conscious mind that we become aware of them. It is our ignorance that makes us think that they are ours and that we must exert ourselves either to satisfy or suppress them. They belong to a world of their own, the beings of which seek to make us their tools for perpetuating the reign of evil and suffering upon earth. Here a word of caution seems to be necessary. In the beginning, when we practise the rejection of desire, we have to be very careful that we do not indiscriminately reject all movements of the will and discourage all volition. It is essential that we should be able to distinguish between a will and a desire. A desire is always accompanied by an overeagerness or an impatient precipitancy, a straining or a tension and a certain uneasiness in the being,² whereas a will is a self-possessed impulsion, quiet even in its intensity, and more or less assured of the sanction of the Divine or that of the most luminous part of our being. It may be that in some cases this discrimination will be somewhat difficult, but as we progress in inner purity by a persistent rejection of desires and an aspiration for the reception and realisation of the divine Will in us, the difficulty will diminish and finally disappear, and it will be not only possible, but quite easy to detect and reject all desires and accept all impulsions that come from the Divine or from our inmost self. During the stage of transition when there takes place a transference of initiation from desire to will, there may be passing moments of misjudgment or indecision,—inevitable in every transition—but our sincerity and aspiration for release from the bondage of egoistic desires will be a sure safe- guard against any major error or serious setback, and the divine help will always be there to light our path and lead us to the Truth.
² There can be, in some cases, a quietly persistent or a quietly recurring desire, but even then one can always detect in it a hectic heat or heave, enough to tell it from a will,
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Transcendence, then, is the first condition of mastery. This transcendence, the Mother says, has to be achieved by a quiet detachment and equality. By detachment she means a self- withdrawal of the central consciousness from the vortex of vital desires, and its untrembling poise in the soul or the psychic. Rajayoga calls it draṣtuḥ swarūpe’vasthānam—the acquisition of a vantage ground, from where one can watch and work upon the desire-ridden vital. This detachment need not be too difficult a job for the spiritual seeker who has endeavoured to be "conscious" of himself, to realise that he is not a composite of mind, life and body, but an infinite and immortal self, ever free and ever pure, who has assumed the triple nature for the manifestation of the Divine in Matter. The Mother's very first instruction to a spiritual aspirant is : "Be conscious.” "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... .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 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 to the undivine against the divine.”¹ This consciousness of oneself being a child of the Light or a ray of the divine Sun will considerably help our detachment from the lower nature of desires and cravings and give us the power to reject them. But there are two points which we must bear in mind in regard to this detachment: (1) it must be quiet and masterful, (2) it must be dynamic. A disgusted or cowardly recoil is not detachment, it is rather an inverse attachment. "The more you think of a thing and say, 'I don’t want it, I don’t want it’, the more you are bound to it. What you should do is o keep the thing away from
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you, to dissociate from it, take as little notice of it as possible, and,. even if you happen to think of it, to remain indifferent and un- concerned.”¹ Detachment must be dynamic, and not, like that of Sankhya and Rajayoga, merely passive, for, a passive detachment can lead to the liberation of the soul, but is ineffectual to change or transform nature to any considerable extent. A quiet and dynamic detachment is stabilised and fortified by equality. A perfect, unperturbed equality in the face of all happenings of the nature makes the detachment invulnerable and itself becomes the base of the most powerful action of a dynamic Yoga of self-perfection. Detachment and equality are, there- fore, the indispensable primary means of the conquest of desire.
The other means is surrender. Detachment and equality by themselves can purify the nature to some extent, but cannot effect a radical transformation of it. For that, the direct intervention of the Grace of the Divine is the sole requisite, and surrender ensures it. The detached soul watches the desires as they rise in the being, and rejects them, at the same time offering them to the divine Force for the destruction of their dark forms and the conversion of their energies into the fire of the Will. An unreserved surrender makes for an unveiled action of the divine Omnipotence in man and lifts his life from the whirlpool of desires into the creative glory of a God-possessed and God-guided existence. Here, again, we must remember that surrender, like detachment and equality, should be dynamic and not only passive. If we want a rich and radiant life, a life of manifold creation and divine self-expression, of high adventures and noble achievements, all the means we adopt for self- perfection must be supremely dynamic.
How simple, how straightforward and sure seems now the method prescribed by the Mother for the conquest of desire ! If knowledge is power, here is infinite power in this method, for it is founded on a perfect knowledge of human nature and its ultimate destiny. Transcendence and surrender are a royal movement of man from the afflicted domination of blind desires to the recovery of the divine Will and its victorious fulfilment
¹ Words of the Mother,
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in life. Desire goes, but the will remains and reigns. Life no more wallows or spins in unredeemed ignorance and unavailing agony, but marches with unfettered steps to the epiphany of the uncreated Light.
Repression and Rejection
The Gita says that creatures follow their own nature, and, therefore, repression is not of much avail. Repression is a movement of ignorant impatience and fear, and usually generates explosive reactions. A repressed desire, as the modern psychologist tells us, does not die, but chafing and seething, causes serious derangements and morbidities in the nature. One can repress one's desires for a time, even for a long time, if one has a strong will, but not for all time. They are bound to explode. Rejection, on the contrary, is a movement of confident strength and calm self-dissociation. It is an irrevocable withdrawal of the sanction of the Purusha from the cravings and appetites of the unregenerate Prakriti. It is based on the spiritual truth that the Purusha is the master, adhyakṣa, of his nature, Prakriti, whose sole business is to please him. The play of egoistic desires goes on so long as the Purusha, unawakened to his divinity, takes a delight in them and evolves through that delight; but when he awakes, it is up to him either to bring the whole play of Prakriti to a standstill by a progressive withdrawal of all sanction, or, as in dynamic spirituality, to combine the withdrawal of sanction with a transference of the entire Prakriti into the hands of the Divine for a radical and integral conversion into her spiritual counterpart. In the former case it is an eventual cessation, in the latter a total transformation. Rejection changes the ego-centric nature of desires, while repression can only maim and mangle it.
Suppression and Indulgence
"The difference between suppression and an inward essential rejection is the difference between mental or moral control
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and a spiritual purification.”¹
Both suppression and indulgence are movements of ignorance and signify attachment. In suppression there is a tacit violence of protest and coercion, even an obsession of ruthless retribution, which keep the consciousness tied to the very desire one is struggling to get rid of, while in indulgence one surrenders oneself to one's desires and remains helplessly attached and yoked to them. Neither is the right way of knowledge. Neither suppression nor indulgence can ever eliminate desire. But, it must be noted, if it ever came to a choice between suppression and indulgence, one should not hesitate to adopt the former, though we repeat, both stand on the same level, from the spiritual standpoint. To indulge desires is to condemn oneself to frequent disappointment and distress.
Desire and Necessity
As one has to distinguish between desire and will in the be- ginning of self-discipline, so has one to draw a line between desire and necessity. An ascetic austerity may trample even upon necessity and exult in privation and squalor, but dynamic spirituality, which is chiefly concerned with the preservation and divine outflowering of life takes care to respect its necessities and even provide it with some amenities, so that no harsh material hardships may interfere with its natural growth and expansion. A necessity is not a desire, it is the need of something which is indispensable; and the need arises naturally from the circumstances of one's life. But desires may or may not have any reference to circumstances,—they are, as the Mother says, waves from the sea of the subconscient vital entering into us—if there is something in us responding to them—and driving us to struggle and suffering. We must, therefore, be always on the alert, so that no desire may come disguised as necessity and delude us into striving to satisfy it. Let us take an example. A man needs something to wrap up at night in winter. He is
¹ Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.
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given a rug which is thick enough to keep the cold out. This is a legitimate satisfaction of a genuine necessity. But if the man refuses the rug and wants to have a special kind of quilt, which he has seen at one of his friends', then it is undeniably a desire, and to indulge or even nurse it would be to imperil his own spiritual progress. "There are few things that are real necessities in life", the rest are but objects of desire. One of the ways of distinguishing between desire and necessity is, first, to ask one- self in regard to the object of desire, "If I get it?". At once there will be a bounding and agitating reaction of pleasure and the vital being will be simply beside itself. This sudden excitement is an unmistakable sign of desire. Next, to ask oneself, "If I don't get it ?". The immediate reaction of this thought will be a depression or a sense of uneasiness or disquiet, or even revolt in the vital being, which is another sign of desire. But if the vital being remains calm in either case, then one may be more or less sure that one is dealing with a necessity and not a desire.
Desire and Delight
What desire really seeks for is delight. Delight is, indeed, the seeking of each element of our being, but desire seeks it in things that are finite and perishable, and exclusively for the ego. It is a wrong and perverted seeking, which creates conflict and entails suffering. A complete renunciation of desire—all desires, j -good and bad, for they are all born of separative ignorance—is the only condition of the enjoyment of the infinite delight which is the sap and sustenance of all things and beings in the universe. "To conquer a desire brings more joy than to satisfy it.”¹
Disguises of Desire
Desire assumes many disguises to beguile the unwary soul. .If we reject a gross physical desire, it appears in the form of a
¹ Words of the Mother.,
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Vital ambition tempting us to a great adventure and promising a brilliant success. If we have developed the purity and perspicacity to unmask and reject it even in that form, it comes back as an admirably righteous desire, a desire for social service or the service of humanity, which the highest standards of secular life seem fully to justify. We drive desire from one part of the being, it takes shelter in another, we unmask it in one form, it assumes another. Innumerable are its disguises, and intricate and subtle its ruses to entrap the human soul evolving into its godhead. It is only when we can say a categoric "No" to all its solicitations, and turn integrally to the Divine to know and realise His Will and nothing but His Will, at every step and moment of our life, that desire is finally conquered and the divine Will installed as the undisputed sovereign of our nature. It is then only that we can be said to have free will, for it is the divine Will alone that is free and sovereign.
Detachment, equality and surrender, as the Mother teaches us, will achieve the conquest of desire, which has been the despair of all ethical disciplines and ascetic austerities. It is only a question of the right attitude and the action of the divine Grace. "Each wave of desire as it comes must be observed, as quietly and with as much unmoved detachment as you would observe something going on outside you, and must be allowed to pass, rejected from the consciousness, and the true movement steadily put in its place.”¹ "You should not rely on anything else, however helpful it may seem, but chiefly primarily, fundamentally on the Mother’s Force.”²
The dignity of our divine manhood demands a complete conquest of desire, a lax or helpless subjection to which is our normal lot in ignorance and the source of most of the ills that afflict us. "There is a sovereign royalty in taking no thought for oneself. To have needs is to assert a weakness; to claim something proves that we lack what we claim. To desire is to be impotent; it is to recognise our limitations and confess our incapacity to overcome them. If only from the point of view of a legitimate pride, man should be noble enough to renounce desire. How humiliating
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to ask something/or oneself from Life or from the Supreme Consciousness which animates it! How humiliating for us, how ignorant an offence against Her !
"For, all is within our reach; only the egoistic limits of our being prevent us from enjoying the whole universe as completely and concretely as we possess our own body and its surroundings.”¹
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A GREAT confusion seems to prevail today, not only in the popular mind, but also in the minds of thoughtful men, in regard to the distinctive nature and function of morality, religion and spirituality. They are either lumped together and flung into the limbo of past relics, or only morality is singled out for conventional lip homage and use partly as a cloak and an expedient, and religion and spirituality dismissed with a superior disdain as incompatible with the culture and civilisation of a scientific and rationalistic age. Even those, who seriously ponder over the problems of life and death and endeavour to envisage the destiny of man and the means of its fulfilment, extract a code of ethics, a set of lofty moral rules and principles from the great religions and make them do duty for spirituality. The Sermon on the Mount, the Dhammapada or the Nitisutras are considered the very essence of the religions from which they have sprung, and it is believed that a devout following of their injunctions in the growing light of one's intelligence is the sanest and safest method of spiritual progress. An ethical eclecticism has thus come to be regarded by some as the high water-mark of spiritual culture, because it is rational, practical and attractively catholic, and there is an instinctive dread and distrust of all that is mystic or esoteric. The overweening ignorance of the human mind refuses to believe that there can be any higher planes of consciousness or subtler formulations of energy beyond what it perceives and conceives. The boundaries of man's little consciousness are held to be the boundaries of Reality, of which man, in his present state, is the sole witness, assessor and possessor. This conceit of the human mind pens it in the narrow province of Matter and precludes any excursion into the immeasurable reaches beyond. It deadens man's finer perceptions, atrophies his subtler faculties, and reduces his proud mastery over Nature to a crippling psychological serfdom.
And yet, in spite of the satisfied subjection to Matter, or
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probably as an inevitable reaction to it, the consciousness of man is awaking, very slowly, tentatively, and under a cloud of misgivings, to the truth of the supraphysical realities, and an infinite vista is opening before it of an integral freedom and self-fulfilment. It has already begun to knock at the doors of the subliminal, peer into the caves of the subconscient, and in a few exceptional individuals, here and there, gaze up into the superconscient. It will not, therefore, be without some help to the seekers of Truth and a harmonious perfection in life, if we try to study, in the light of the Mother's teachings, the distinctive features and functions of morality, religion and spirituality and their respective contribution to the growth of human consciousness and culture.
Anthropologists tell us that the consciousness of the primitive man was essentially religious. Whether it was animism, fetishism or totemism, there was a natural, instinctive feeling in him of a Presence or Presences hovering all about him and open to his call for help and healing, if he could only propitiate them. Based on this feeling, there developed a half-mysterious, half- superstitious cult of sacraments and sacrifices out of which later on branched off magic, thaumaturgy, etc. At this stage of evolution, there was no distinct conception of morality; individual and social life automatically adjusted themselves to the varying demands of circumstances and environment. There was not much sense of sin or guilt chilling or curbing the natural expression of the aboriginal passions and impulses, and it was only the herd-instinct, the inborn gregarious habits that held the social units together and prevented a violent disruption or disintegration. Gradually, as reason developed, the individual ego also developed with it, asserting, on the one hand, its personal ideas and tastes and rights and, on the other, the imperative need of making life conform to the rhythm of the light of an expanding consciousness brought to it. This was the beginning of morality—a growing sense of sin or guilt corresponding to
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an increasing perception of the possibility of a pure rhythmic and harmonious living.
It is not true, as some sociologists maintain, that morality is an outcome of the multiplying social factors that demanded a discipline or regulation of life to counter the menace of its disruptive tendencies. Morality, according to them, is a mate- rial growth, a covenant and convenience agreed upon for the sake of a smooth running of the wheels of life. But the origin of ethics lies not in the outer mechanism of the individual and collective existence, but in the evolutionary development of reason and the balancing and enlightening principle of sattwa in man. It can be said that morality is a gift of religion, if by religion is meant a contact, however rudimentary, of the human consciousness with the light and harmony of the higher. Like every evolutionary growth in man, the principle of sattwa, in which there is a pronounced emergence and lead of the buddhi or reason, is quickened and fostered by a higher pressure and is not a child of material contingencies. But in its active self- formulation in society, ethics has to make terms with the outer factors of existence, which cloud its original perception and diminish its co-ordinating and controlling capacity. It becomes then a mere construction of the human mind. And this explains the incompetence of ethics to deal successfully with the obstinate, ancestral elements of human nature—either it represses and strangles them or, which is more frequent, makes a com- promise with them and rests content with a mere veneer and a make-believe. If it wants to be strictly logical and consistent, it ends in an unpractical, self-stultifying extremism which plays havoc with the normal poise of life and impresses the mass mind by its relentless self-mortification.
There is another intrinsic defect of morality : it is that it proceeds on a fixed basis of a division into "the good and the bad". Because it is a creation of the human mind, it goes by analysis and division and fails to arrive at any complete harmony and unity. It "sets up an ideal type into which all must force themselves. This moral ideal differs in its constituents and its ensemble in different times and different places. And yet it proclaims
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itself as a unique type, a categoric absolute; it admits of none other outside itself, it does not even admit a variation within itself. All are to be moulded according to its single ideal pattern, everybody is to be made uniformly and faultlessly the same. It is because morality is of this rigid unreal nature that it is in its principle and its working the contrary of the spiritual life. The spiritual life reveals the one essence in all, but reveals too its infinite diversity; it works for diversity in oneness and for perfection in that diversity. Morality lifts up one artificial standard contrary to the variety of life and the freedom of the spirit. Creating some- thing mental, fixed and limited, it asks all to conform to it. All must labour to acquire the same qualities and the same ideal nature.”¹
Turning to the practical side of morality, we find that in most cases a whole life is spent in a strenuous endeavour to put into practice some of the most appealing (this appeal varies according to individual culture and temperament) of the precepts or maxims of ethics. The control of anger or greed- or lust proves an exhausting enough affair, and yet the result is hardly ever complete and conclusive. The reason of man which takes the leading part in the practice of morality, finds itself often floored before the inconvenient facts of the world, the stubbornness of the habitual trends of life and nature, and the embarrassing recurrence of the very passions and propensities it tries to get rid of. This happens because the reason of man has little knowledge of the working of the complex elements of human nature and less power to cope with them. Its characteristic way of dealing with them is to fix upon one or two or a few of them at a time, give them an exclusive and exaggerated importance and strive to coerce them into a preconceived pattern. A single principle is sometimes deified as the central truth of life and hammered into a mutilated nature. This narrow rigidity of ethics stands in the way of the flexible? many-sided movement of human nature, and results in a sort of hot-house growth and a lop-sided development. It is, moreover, usually, attended with a settled gloom or sombreness of
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spirit which recalls the monastery or the convent.
A frequent untoward consequence of an unbending practice of morality is a magnification of the ego. This may sound a bit paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, as a clear-eyed introspection is sure to reveal. Even the very humility which is practised by the moralist subtly tends to feed the ego and fill it with a secret sense of gratification. This sattwic ahankāra, the egoism of virtue, is more difficult to overcome than its cruder rajasic and tamasic forms, for it is conscious of some light and poise in itself and, drunk with the sense of its unrelaxed tapasyā or self-discipline, feels no need of seeking or surrendering to a higher light. Its chain of gold is an ornament in its eyes and it wears it with an implicit pride. In some extreme forms of self- justifying rigour, morality goes to the extent of becoming not only unspiritual, but even anti-spiritual.
The way out for the moralist from the hold of his mind-made ethics is to realise that he is a pilgrim of eternity and should not, therefore, rest in any half-way house, however clean and con- genial it may be. Ethics is only a stage in the evolution of human consciousness, and to cling to a stage is to forfeit the power and privilege of the final fulfilment. Deliverance for him lies in a sincere seeking for and an unconditional surrender to a higher light and a plastic following of its guidance.
Religion
Unlike morality, religion has its roots in the deeper parts of human nature. It is as old as man himself, and has been passing through various stages to help him on his way to the Spirit. In its evolved form "it belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man’s higher mind to approach, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name of God or Spirit or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the Infinite, some kind of Absolute, which the human mind cannot reach and yet tries to reach.”¹ If religion retains the original vision and spiritual inspiration which gave it birth, it can be a
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capable guide of man to the kingdom of the Spirit. But very often its golden kernel is overlaid with mental accretions and its freedom and suppleness of movement are replaced by a rigid fixity of forms. Instead of leading the human consciousness towards the Spirit or the eternal Truth, it imprisons it in its dogmas and doctrines, cults and ceremonies, and comes to constitute a positive hindrance to the spiritual life. In its desire to make its appeal wide, it lends itself to many distortions and ends in a flat compromise with the forces of Ignorance. "All religions have each the same story to tell. The occasion for its birth is the coming of a great Teacher of the world. He comes and reveals and is the incarnation of a Divine Truth. But men seize upon it, trade upon it, make an almost political organization out of it. The religion is equipped by them with a government and policy and laws, with its creeds and dogmas, its rules and regulations, its rites and ceremonies, all binding upon its adherents, all absolute and inviolable. Like the State, it too administers rewards to the loyal and assigns punishments for those that revolt or go astray, for the heretic and the renegade.”¹
This is true of all organised credal religions, and accounts for their inability to stand the searchlight of the scientific reason. They have ceased to set the human soul afire and stimulate and canalise its aspiration for the Infinite. They have failed to provide a field for it to grow and expand and advance towards its divine self-fulfilment. They have hemmed it in and entangled it in their elaborate formalism. Instead of becoming a jumping-board to the Eternal, they have become a drag and a snare.
But their utility in the evolution of human consciousness, so long as they steer clear of dilution, mixture and perversion, cannot be questioned. "In all religions we find invariably a certain number of people who possess a great emotional capacity and are full of a real and ardent aspiration, but have a very simple mind and do not feel the need of approaching the Divine through knowledge. For such natures religion has a use, and it is even necessary to them; for, through external forms like the ceremonies
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of the Church, it offers a kind of support and help to their inner spiritual aspiration...Religion has been an impulse to the worst things and the best; if the fiercest wars have been waged, and the most hideous persecutions carried on in its name, it has stimulated too supreme heroism and self-sacrifice in its cause. Along with philosophy it marks the limit the human mind has reached in its highest activities.”¹
The main work of religion is to awaken the inner being of man and give it an ample scope for self-development and self-perfection. It is like a bridge for the human consciousness to pass from Nature to the Spirit. It should be primarily concerned with the preparation of "man’s mind, life and bodily existence for the spiritual consciousness to take it up; it has to lead him to that point where the inner spiritual light begins fully to emerge.”²
If religion is to accomplish its real mission, it must start with a double movement of revival and reform. It must re- vive its spiritual core and purify its forms of all dross and distortion. Forms are indispensable in life, for without them life would be robbed of its very raison d’etre, which is diversity, but they must be plastic and transparent enough to reveal the Spirit and not bury it under their dense and cumbrous externalities. Forms should be like symbols, at once pointing to and expressing the Formless. But the forms of religion are often darkened and disfigured by the very material with which they have to deal—the abounding impurities of the lower nature of man. A constant renovation and quickening of the central truth and the informing spirit, a constant adaptation and change of forms, and a progressive approximation to the Spirit are the condition of keeping a religion undefiled, undecaying and effective in the social economy of mankind.
Spirituality is the native light and force of the Spirit. It is
² The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.
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at once the sole means and the end of man's self-transcendence. It does not proceed, like religion, with a set of dogmas and doctrines and a round of rituals and try to reach the consciousness of man through them, it touches, on the contrary, his consciousness first, and through it effects a change, sometimes a revolutionary change, in his nature. But because it is the authentic power of the Spirit, it is beyond the grasp of the human reason, and is, therefore, readily branded as mystic, occult or esoteric. But, in fact, spirituality would not be what it is, if it were not mystic, not a power and principle transcendent of the human mind and capable of illumining and transforming it by virtue of its very transcendence. Spirituality effects a living contact between the limited human consciousness and the infinite consciousness of the Spirit, and this contact cannot but be overwhelming and stunning to the mind. A genuine spiritual experience is not like a mental thought, idea or imagination, it comes from the unexplored depths or heights of the being and leaves an indelible impress upon the consciousness, if it does not at once give it a new and decisive orientation. It is the only power that can lift man out of the morass of his ordinary existence and restore him to his infinity and immortality. It is the only power that can awaken his soul and make it the master of his nature, which is now in the hands of the lower forces of life. Neither morality nor religion can change man and his society; it is the very lightning of the Spirit that has to be infused into them to quicken a new birth. If we admit that the Spirit is the essential and universal truth of existence, the one, immortal Self of all beings, and that body, life and mind are its instruments of self-expression in the material world, then we cannot escape the conclusion that the power of the Spirit is the highest power we can avail ourselves of for the cure of the complex malaise which afflicts humanity today. The ideas of the mind or the ardours of the heart, however powerful they may be, can never reach the root of the malaise, and have no compelling hold over the impetous energies of life.
But the reason of man fights shy of spirituality, which seems
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to it so immense, impalpable and uncertain. Besides, the element of mystery which is usually associated with spirituality is a positive bugbear to the human reason, and it is ever on the watch for the failings and impostures of pseudo-spiritual spiritism in order to condemn spirituality. But even the highest achievements of reason have not helped man to attain to any abiding harmony and happiness in life, it has only made him more ego-centric, as Aldous Huxley rightly insists, and restless and unhappy. Speaking of those in whom the mental life is awakened, the Mother says that they are "restless, tormented,, agitated, arbitrary, despotic. Caught altogether in the whirl of the renewals and transformations of which they dream, they are ready to destroy everything without the knowledge of any foundation on which to construct, and so with their light made only of blinding flashes, they increase yet more the confusion rather than help it to cease.”¹ This does not mean that there is any inherent, insuperable difficulty and defect in the intellect of man which condemns him for ever to a life of stumbling half-knowledge and disquieting disharmony. The difficulty is not in the intellect itself, but in its egoism and its inveterate tendency to divide and analyse, and concentrate on parts to the exclusion of the rest. But, says the Divine Mother to the Mother, "This intellectual faculty which makes man vain and leads him into error., is the very faculty which can also, once enlightened and purified, lead him further, higher than the universal Nature, to the direct and conscious communion with the Lord of us all. He who is beyond all manifestation. This dividing intelligence which enables him to separate himself from me, enables him also to scale the heights to be climbed, without his advance being enchained and retarded by the totality of the universe which in its immensity and complexity cannot achieve so prompt an ascent.”²
Spirituality, as we have said above, is the dynamic of a higher, luminous, and infinite consciousness, and is not, like morality and religion, a working of the human mind. It is the breaking of a lid, the tearing of a covering, or the opening of a door; it
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is a leap into the unknown or an invasion of the unknown into our consciousness. Whatever its beginning or the trend and tempo of its working, it is bound to appear mysterious and incalculable to the weak and limited human mind. But the bold leap or the head-long plunge has to be taken, for that is the next evolutionary step, if mankind is to transcend itself, not only in rare individuals, but as a race, and justify its existence upon earth by a divine self-perfection.
Spirituality is a free choice of our being and not, like religion, an imposition of society upon it. Being a free choice, it engages and permeates our whole consciousness, and illumines and widens it with a rapidity and radicality absolutely unknown to either morality or religion. It can not only liberate our soul, but also liberate and transform our whole nature, rendering it a fit instrument of the Divine. Spirituality is the end of which morality is the beginning and religion the middle term. All the previous preparation of man discovers its secret sense in this final saltus and consummation—the recovery of the light and bliss and purity and power of the Spirit.
But spirituality demands a sacrifice and surrender of the entire being and consciousness of man, not for their self-extinction, but for their self-fulfilment. An ungrudging self-giving alone can bring about his ultimate release and transfiguration. It will not do to keep bits of himself tied to the various objects and pursuits of the world, all has to be gathered and given, so that all may be united with the Eternal. "When you come to the Yoga [spiritual self-discipline leading to Union], you must be ready to have all your mental buildings and all your vital scaffoldings shattered to pieces. You must be prepared to be suspended in 'the air with nothing to support you except your faith. You will have to forget your past self and its clingings altogether, to pluck it out of your consciousness and be born anew, free from every kind of bondage. Think not of what you were, but of what you aspire to be; be all in what you want to realise. Turn from your dead past and look straight towards the future. Your religion, country, family lie there; it is the DIVINE.”¹
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THE place and importance of money in the creative economy of life cannot be overestimated. Without it nothing can be achieved in the material field. Whether it is the formation and growth of a society, or the promotion of its culture and civilisation and commerce and industry, or the stimulation and progress of scientific research and discovery, in the great undertakings, in the works of destruction as much as in those of creation and construction, the one indispensable means (but only a means) is money. Even the ascetic, who studiously avoids all contact with money, has perforce to depend upon the money of others for the sustenance of his body and the dissemination of his teachings, if he has any. If we turn to history, we shall see that all great nations, in the heyday of their culture, were sufficiently rich to expand and organise the creations of thei0.0.r individual genius, and any period of decline in the life of a nation has been invariably associated with either a growing poverty or a reckless waste of wealth. Let us take the example of India. When she was great in the realms of the Spirit, when the higher Light moulded and guided the manifold expression of her expanding life, she was great also in material opulence —her plenty was the envy of the world. Poverty, famine and pestilence were regarded as exceptional visitations, and reflected upon the integrity and purity of the ruling head. But when the decline set in, corruption too set in, a multiform corruption, which drained the fabulous wealth by a steady process, and paved the way for the predatory incursions and ruthless exploitation of foreigners. And yet the opulence India possessed even in the sunset glow of her ancient greatness struck the foreigners dumb with amazement, and fired the cupidity of unscrupulous adventurers. When the decline was complete and India lay prostrate in the dust, her destitution too was complete—she had been bled white. The land that had flowed with milk and honey and sparkled with diamonds and rubies, became a land of half-starved and half-clad men groaning under the
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heels of marauders and vampires.
It may be argued that money is the source of much evil, but so are all forces in the world. One never thinks of eschewing fire because it burns, or water because it drowns. It is the use to which a force is put that determines its character. A world- shunning spirituality instinctively shrinks from the forces of life and has not the courage to look them in the face. Its achievement is in a cowering retreat and not in conquest. But a complete retreat is not possible, so long as the body is there, therefore the ascetic is compelled to resort to a compromise, a clumsy enough compromise, with the forces he detests and dreads, and yet cannot altogether avoid. A dynamic spirituality, which aims at a divine conquest of the world and all its forces and movements, cannot permit itself the relief and comfort of a retreat, but has to grapple with the very elements which oppose its progress but which, once conquered and converted, would substantially contribute to its creative fullness. If the whole of human life has to be organised anew on the basis of divine Consciousness, fall its energies are to be marshalled and mobilised for the revelation of the splendours of the Divine on earth, the money-power has to be utilised with a disinterested control and a perfect knowledge of its potentialities. If spirituality fights shy of the money-power, its material self-expression is bound to be what it has almost always been, poor and halting, or squalid. Much of the aversion of the modern mind to spirituality is due to the latter's uncouth expression in life, its lack of control over material things, and an uncertain, hesitant and slovenly attitude towards them. This weakness—for, it is nothing short of that—has to be cured and replaced by a masterful dealing with the money-power for the organisation of a rich and powerfully creative material life in the world.
What is Money ?
According to Sri Aurobindo, "Money is the visible sign of a universal force, and this force in its manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical planes and is indispensable to the fullness
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of the outer life. In its origin and its true action it belongs to the Divine. But like other powers of the Divine, it is delegated here., and in the ignorance of the lower nature can be usurped for the uses of the ego or held by Asuric influences and perverted to their purpose. This is, indeed, one of the three forces—power, wealth, sex —that have the strongest attraction for the human ego and the Asura and are most generally missed and misused by those who retain them. The seekers or keepers of wealth are more often possessed rather than its possessors; few escape entirely a certain distorting influence stamped on it by its long seizure and perversion by the Asura.”¹
We learn from the above quotation that money is a universal force and is derived, like every other force, from the Divine; but, equally, like every other force, it is appropriated and perverted by the beings of darkness and is used, more often than not, to serve and satisfy their own ends. It is indispensable to the fullness of the outer life, and if the Life Divine is our objective on earth, a divine use of money is an imperative desideratum. Be- sides, the aversion to and fear of money are usually the result of an illusionistic philosophy or a timid, anaemic spirituality, neither of which is in consonance with the comprehensiveness and robust vitality of the ancient ideal. In Hinduism the very conception of the Divine, Bhagavan, is a global conception of qualities or attributes which include omni-opulence, samagram aiśwaryyam. The Divine is not only the naked Spirit of the ascetics, without features and contents and qualities, but the sole Sovereign of the worlds and the sole Master and Ruler of all creatures. If there is wealth in the worlds, if there is splendour and magnificence, where have they come from, if not from the Divine ? If Matter is from the Divine, then material wealth is also from Him; only, as says Sri Aurobindo, it is usurped here, in the material world, for the uses of the ego or "held by Asuric influences and perverted to their purpose.” It has to be wrested from the hands of the Asuras and used for the service of the Divine in the world. The ancient ideal of plenty and plenitude, the divine splendour and magnificence,
¹The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.
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has to be lived again, if spirituality has to shed its timidity and narrowness and rise to its full stature of an all-conquering might and revealing majesty. For its creations in the material world and the organisation of a harmonious and progressive life of luminous knowledge, power, love and joy, the material means indispensable to it is money.
The Present Possessors of Money
Most of the present possessors of money are not, really speaking, possessors at all, but possessed. They are slaves of their money and are directly controlled and used by the forces of the vital world, which abounds with all sorts of desires and cravings. What do men mostly spend for ? Evidently, for the satisfaction of their desires. Usually their desires are "connected with the sex impulses,” but very often too they yield to "the desire for fame and consideration, the desire for food or any other that is on the same vital level.”¹ Money is allowed to flow like water when these lower appetites clamour for their base satisfactions, and this lavishness is not only justified, but admired as larger hearted munificence. Society praises this selfish use of money and transmits an effective tradition of it to future generations. If a super-idealistic nature impungs this use, it does so on altruistic or humanistic grounds, and advocates the spending of money for the service of humanity or all sentient creatures.
Now, let us try to understand the rightness or wrongness of such uses of money by an analysis of the motives that he behind them. It is a commonplace of psychology that man is a multi-personality,—there are many parts and personalities in him, having different, often divergent, desires and propensities, and moved by diverse forces. There are the physical personality, the vital personality, the mental personality and the psychic; and there are besides, many sub-personalities within these main categories. These personalities hardly agree with one another. If the mental personality, for instance, seeks the Divine and hankers for a life of spiritual freedom and bliss, the vital opposes
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it with its insistent desires and blind attachments. In the vital personality itself there may be a part touched by the light and responsive to a higher call, and another, obscure and perverse, wallowing in turbid sense-pleasures. The physical personality may often find itself oppressed by the mental or the vital, and suffering in consequence of a constant, unavailing revolt. It is these different personalities that are responsible at different times for the motives of our actions and the actions themselves. And if we go a little behind these surface personalities—we leave out the soul or the psychic for the moment, for in most men it is not on the surface, but veiled deep within—we discover that most of them have an affinity with or a habitual open- ing to the beings and forces of the subtler worlds; and it is these forces and beings that influence or impel their movements to their own advantage. Men are thus used as puppets by the subtle forces of the invisible worlds. Because they are ignorant of their true Self, the secret, eternal reality of their existence, because their beings are divided against themselves and their nature is a cockpit of contending and chaotic elements, they fall an easy prey to the forces of Ignorance.
Here an example will make my point clearer. Let us suppose that a rich man conceives the idea of spending a lakh of rupees for the celebration of his son's marriage. He may have imbibed the idea from the society to which he belongs, or conceived it independently of all social customs and traditions, as the result of an impulse arising in or invading him. "The Power of money”, says the Mother, "is at present under the influence or in the hands of the forces and beings of the vital world.”¹ Therefore, the rich man submits automatically to the organised influence of the vital forces operating in his society, or succumbs unawares to their fresh assault upon him. In any case, it is not the decision of his true self that he follows, but the imperative direction of the enemies of his true self; and it is not really he, but those forces that profit by and enjoy the result of the enormous expenditure. The pleasure derived from the spending of the huge amount is an exclusively vital pleasure, which obscures
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his consciousness, inflates his pride and egotism, and retards, if it does not, indeed, impede, his spiritual evolution. "It is not that those rich men who are more or less toys and instruments in the hands of the vital forces are averse to spend; their avarice is awake only when the vital desires and impulses are not touched. For, when it is to gratify some desire that they call their own, they spend readily; but when they are called to share their ease and the benefits of their wealth with others, then they find it hard to part with their money. The vital power controlling money is like a guardian who keeps his wealth in a big safe always tightly closed. Each time the people who are in its grasp are asked to part with their money, they put all sorts of careful questions before they will consent to open their purses even a very little way; but if a vital impulse arises in them with its demands, the guardian is happy to open wide the coffer and money flows out freely.”¹ It is only when we consider this tight hold of the vital forces on the money-power, in the light of the Mother's words, that we appreciate the justice of the severe stricture of the Christ upon the rich that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. The Christ saw the grip of the vital forces on the money-power, and it was not any ascetic loathing of money, but a divine solicitude for the deliverance of men from the dark influence of the hostile powers that inspired the stricture. It can be safely asserted that in nine cases out often the use we make of money is an illegitimate and unspiritual use, which degrades us and justifies the ascetic's ban on money. Not only do we lose much of the money we use, but we lose into the bargain the precious opportunities offered to us for using it for the service of the Divine to whom it really belongs. "All wealth belongs to the Divine, and those who hold it are trustees, not possessors. It is with them today; tomorrow it may be elsewhere. All depends on the way they discharge their trust while it is with them; in what spirit, with what consciousness in their use of it, to what purpose.”²
² The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.
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The Conquest of the Money-Power
No dynamic spirituality which aims- at the regeneration of man and the re-organisation of human society, can afford to nut a ban on money, for, that will mean leaving the money- power in the hands of the vital forces, on the one hand, and, on the other, allowing its action in the material world to be paralysed by poverty. Like other powers, it has to be reconquered for the Divine and used divinely for the divine purpose in human life. How to achieve this conquest ? Individually, he who is inwardly dedicated to the Divine must not fly away from the money-power in a spirit of ascetic aversion or fear, but endeavour with a perfect scrupulousness and vigilance to use all his money in the service of the Divine. In the beginning, it is true, it will be difficult for him to know for certain what the service of the Divine is. His ego may wear various disguises and delude him into wrong decisions. If he forswears all expenditure on vital pleasures, customary, conventional or contingent, the ego may dictate more commendable uses of money, for the service of the society or the country or humanity, for instance, a service which appears so indubitably disinterested and noble. Very few people have the perspicacity to detect the ego even in these acts of obvious selflessness; most of them do not know that the ego's hold is sometimes strongest when it is bent on altruistic or philanthropic activities. It is immensely more difficult to unmask the sattwic ego than the rajasic or the tamasic. Our mental principles and moral notions come usually to justify and support the sattwic ego, and the unqualified appreciation of the world always confirms it in its inclinations and actions. But if a man clearly feels that he belongs to the Divine, all he has and is, and that to surrender all himself and his pos- sessions and possibilities to the Divine from whom they are derived is the sole work of his life, then the ego's dominance begins to diminish and an unsuspected centre of reference opens in the deeps of his consciousness, which gives him the right lead in his use of money, as in everything else. The doubts and hesitations, the uncertainties and indecisions of his mind
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give place, little by little, to a clear perception and a definite direction of the will, as a result of the growing purity and transparency of his being. What seemed impossible in the beginning becomes not only possible, but even easy and natural. We deny, because we cannot foresee, the new faculties of perception and discrimination which develop in us in proportion as we repel our desires and release ourselves from the yoke of the ego. But once the inmost centre opens—and a sincere aspiration and self-giving cannot fail to open it—we cease to take counsel with our mind, even with our ethical conscience, but look deep within for the support and sanction of each of our actions. This is the initial progress. Later, by a further purification and transformation of our consciousness and nature, another centre opens high above, beyond the ranges of the spiritual mind, which gives an immediate and infallible lead to all the movements of our being. It is here, in the supreme creative Consciousness, called by the Upanishads the Truth-Consciousness, that the conquest of the money-power is fully consummated and its divine use permanently assured. This is the way to deal with money, so far as we are individually concerned with it. But its sway over the collectivity has also to go, if man- kind in general is to organise its existence on earth in perfect obedience to the will of its Creator. "The hold of the hostile forces upon money-power is powerfully, completely and thoroughly organised, and to extract anything out of this compact organisation is a most difficult task. Each time that you try to draw a little of this money away from its present custodians, you have to undertake a fierce battle. And yet one single victory somewhere over the adverse forces that have the hold upon money would make victory possible simultaneously and automatically at all other points also. If in one place they yielded, all who now feel that they cannot give money to the cause of Truth would suddenly experience a great and intense desire to give,”¹
Only those who are utterly surrendered to the Divine in their active nature and securely superior to the lures of money and the comforts and advantages it confers, but without the least ".
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ascetic shrinking and aversion, can conquer the money-power for the Divine and use it freely for the accomplishment of His work in the world.
The Proper Use of Money
Once money has been won from the hands of the vital forces whom it serves, it has to be diverted into the developing channels of the divine work. Not to the animal or the Asura in man, but to the Divine Shakti, the supreme Creative Force alone has it to be offered; for, it belongs to Her and has been created by Her for the purpose of Her work in the material world. "In your personal use of money look on all you have or get or bring as the Mother’s. Make no demand but accept what you receive from her and use it for the purposes for which it is given to you. Be entirely selfless, entirely scrupulous, exact, careful in detail, a good trustee; always consider that it is her possessions and not your own that you are handling. On the other hand, what you receive for her, lay religiously before her; turn nothing to your own or anybody else’s purpose.”¹
It will not be an unnecessary repetition to state here that the acts of altruism or philanthropy are not, as they are commonly supposed to be, selfless and disinterested. We do them, because the ego in us takes a positive delight in them—a self-regarding delight, full of pride and complacency. The perception that we have been given the material life and its powers and resources not for the egoistic satisfaction of our desires and cravings, not even for our mental ideas and predilections and moral principles, but for the realisation of the divine Will and its perfect fulfilment in every movement of our composite being, will loosen and eventually abolish the ego's hold upon us in our use of money, as in every other thing, and lead to an integral consecration of all our consciousness and nature to the dynamic Master of the universe. Money, which is regarded as a source of evil, will thus be turned into a means of self-perfection and divine work. In the New Creation or the supramental new- .
¹ The Mother by Sri Aurobindo.
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moulding of life, money will be restored to the Divine Power and "used for a true and beautiful and harmonious equipment and ordering of anew divinised vital and physical existence in whatever way the Divine Mother herself decides in her creative vision.”¹ The degrading bondage of money has to be annulled, not by a flight or withdrawal from it, but by a complete conquest and mastery. It is not enough to be unegoistic and disinterested in our use of money, we have to be docile and po
werful instruments of the supramental Force, the Mother's Creative Shakti, which alone knows how best to use the money-power for the establishment and fulfilment of the Life Divine on earth. The God-directed supramental use is the only proper use of money.
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No part of the psycho-physical organism of man has been more misunderstood and mishandled than the body. Either it has been unduly coddled and cossetted, and its coarse demands and pleasures inordinately indulged, or a severe asceticism has ridden rough-shod over it, denying even its elementary need and depressing or damaging its motor powers. Man's dealing with his body has usually swung between these two ignorant extremes, and it is only in rare individual cases that it has been able to strike a balance and steer a middle course. And even this balance has been a rather poor and precarious makeshift, there being always an unsuspected disproportion or a wrong stress on the part of the mind or the life forces illegitimately interfering with the natural working of the body. Never has man awakened to the spiritual potentialities of his body and the role it is meant to play in his terrestrial perfection. Never has he faced its defects and difficulties with a searching empathy and a patient, dispassionate courage, and directed the powers of his soul or the supreme Force of the Spirit to effect its radical conversion and transfiguration. Even Plato who gave so great an importance to physical culture, speaks with an undisguised disparagement of the body which, in his view, is "the source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food, and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being; it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us all power of thinking at all.... It has proved to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge of anything, we must be quit of the body." The Stoics gave an added impetus to the mortification of the flesh, and the Neo-Pythagorians carried on the tradition with an un- abated zeal. Nor did Christianity improve upon this pagan attitude, rather its later development tended to put a premium on the contempt and chastisement of the body, culminating Sometimes in a positive self-torture, In India the whole post-
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Upanishadic period of philosophical thought and spiritual practice has been marked by a growing and glorified aversion to the body, and even Hathayoga, which concerns itself with the body and its health and longevity, does so with the ulterior motive of the soul's release from the material bondage into the freedom and peace of the pure spiritual existence, and not for any spiritual conquest and perfection of the body itself. Even the great eight siddhis or supernatural powers are regarded as incidental to a certain line of spiritual advance, and not as an achievement in themselves, so far as the body is concerned.
Thanks to the prevailing pragmatism of the modern age, the body has come to claim its rightful place in the hierarchy of our natural instruments and assume, in spite of the materialists, a teleological importance and significance. An expansion, enrichment and enlightenment of life is one of the two most insistent demands of the modern mind—the other being the unity of human life—and for the fulfilment of this demand, what is essential is a physical frame capable of holding the heightened powers of life and responding to its varied urges towards self-development and creative self-expression. The studied neglect and high disdain of the traditional religious outlook are being replaced by an earnest plumbing of the physical possibilities of the human body, and though science is leading in this endeavour, resurgent spirituality is trying to catch up with it and investing the endeavour with a deeper significance, and lifting it from the domain of the merely physical to that of the boundless supraphysical.
And yet the inmost secret of the body has not been discovered and its hidden springs have not been touched. Beyond all the accumulated knowledge of physiology and anatomy, beyond the momentous discoveries of biology, anthropology and psychology, beyond even the horizons of neo-spiritual aspiration and vision, there waits a great mystery to be revealed, the crux of the physical birth of man to be resolved. What is the body? What is its proper function and destiny ? What is the right way of dealing with it ? What is the secret of its mastery and transformation ? These are some of the questions we shall
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briefly consider here in the light of the Mother's teachings.
The body is the material form of the self-manifesting Spirit. In its fundamental essence, it is the substance of the Spirit itself, luminous and immortal, but in its phenomenal formation in the inconscience of Matter, it undergoes such a modification as to belie its eternal essence and become dense and mutable and perishable. Density, insensibility and inertia are the gift of its inconscient origin, and mutability and mortality the condition of its evolution in the Ignorance. When the soul evolves, its triple nature of mind, life and body also evolves with it. This evolution is a progressive refinement, purification, widening and deepening of the emergent consciousness and the realisation of its potential capacities for instrumental action. The mind, because it is the subtlest and most elastic and plastic of the three instruments, evolves with a greater celerity and ease than the other two; the body takes the longest time and offers the most obstinate resistance. But it, too, is an instrument, a very important instrument at that, in our earthly existence; in fact, it is the base and pedestal upon which we stand for our spiritual growth and fulfilment. Therefore it has neither to be repressed nor pampered, but patiently and properly trained and perfected. That it is capable of an infinite perfection is attested by two facts : first, the ascending scale of its development in evolution and, second, the existence of its sustaining, subtle counterpart behind, which is wider, ampler, lighter, plastic and transparent. When we study the ascending scale, we find that the most dense, inert and rigid material form (body) is the stone, in which the indwelling consciousness is imprisoned and shrouded in its corporeal tenement. A creeper or a plant is a less dense body of the evolving soul,—the delicacy, suppleness, grace and adaptability of the form betray the awaking Inhabitant. The body of an animal is more free and flexible, mobile and mutable, and capable of expressing something of its inner movements. The human body is a distinct improvement upon the body of the animal, and its architectonic harmony and beauty are fully approved by the gods, says one of the Upanishads. It can reflect and reproduce, to a remarkable extent, the stuff, colour
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and psychological vibrations of the human consciousness, work Out, as far as it lies in its power, the behests of the will and support the manifold action of an expanding mind and life. It is more conscious than the body of an animal—though its consciousness is mostly a subconsciousness,—and able to adapt itself to all sorts of conditions and contingencies. This ascending scale of perfection lends support to the belief that if man's consciousness undergoes a further change and breaks out of its present sense-moulds into the limpid infinity of the Spirit, his body may also register a considerable change, provided he wills it. The body is a material reflex of the soul, a crystallisation of its formative energy, its clay configuration. There is no gulf between it and the soul, but an ascending series of substance, linking up the crust to the core, and a correlation of creative energies. Every advance made by the soul and the mind is, therefore, sure to produce its results upon the body in some form or other, and no limit can possibly be set to this progressional parallelism. But what has weighed in favour of repression or rejection of the body is its density and inertia, its slowness to change, its instinctive recoil from the light and force of a higher poise. This dull conservatism—it is essentially a principle of conservation—can be overcome, as the evidence of morphology proves, and a radical transformation effected, not only in its instincts and impulses and desires, but even in its structure, texture, and organic functions.
The second fact¹which supports our theory of physical transformation, is the existence of the subtle or etheric body, just behind the gross body. Through the medium of this subtle body, the soul or the mind can, if it knows how to do it, influence and change the gross body to an unimaginable extent. It can purify or enlighten it, fill its nerves and tissues and veins with a subtler energy and verve, and supplement the normal limping and limited action of the outer senses by the superior working of the subtle ones. It can eliminate the causes of the body's weakness and its susceptibility to illness, and infuse into it something
¹ I take it for granted that modern advanced thought does not deny its existence,
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of its own fire, freedom and flexibility. Most of the physical attacks in the form of diseases come through the subtle physical and can be stopped there before they get at the gross, body, if one has the knowledge and perception of the operations of that sheath. Faith cure, cure by hypnotic suggestion, etc., even after due allowance has been made for the elements of chance and superstition involved in them, point to the occult presence of potent curative agencies which, once set in motion, may per- form miracles on the material plane. Indeed, except to a willful obscurantist and unseeing sceptic, miracles are not after all so miraculous as they seem at the first blush.
There are other facts as undeniable as the two referred to above, but they are far removed from the normal experience of man and the orbit of his immediate perception. It is only when his consciousness, which is now almost wholly identified with material things, rises beyond them into the large air of the Spirit-skies that a new limitless vista will open before him and he will know that he is infinitely greater than he ever imagined, and that he has the power to reveal and radiate this transcendent greatness by every part of his being, even by every pore of his body. "There is , so to say, no limit to its (the body’) growth in capacities and to its progress”, says the Mother, "provided one discovers the true method and the proper conditions. This is one of the numerous experiments which we wish to attempt in order to break the collective suggestion and show to the world that human possibilities surpass all expectations.”¹
If such are the possibilities of the human body, how is it that it suffers so much and proves such a stumbling-block to our mental and spiritual progress ? The Mother says that the mind and the life are the two "brigands' that sack and ravage the body. "The body is a marvellous instrument, it is our mind that does not know how to use it, and, instead of promoting its suppleness, its plasticity, puts into it a certain fixity arising from preconceived ideas and unfavourable suggestions.”² The mind imposes its own ideas, which are nothing but ignorant constructions,
² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.
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upon the body, and, in its effort to compel it to subserve its own ends, disrupts the natural harmony of the physical-organism and throws it out of gear. The vital forces, in the blind fury of their desires, prey upon the body and suck up its life-blood. This combined tyranny breaks the body, deadens or destroys its springs and renders it vulnerable to all sorts of suffering.
The body has its own consciousness—though much of it is still submerged and can be evolved—its own mode and rhythm of action and its characteristic way of expressing the self-nature of the being. If patiently and intelligently trained, it can respond to most of the psychological movements of our composite personality and reproduce them in a growing beauty of poise and form. But the training must respect its autonomy and basic qualities, and not play havoc with them in order to force it into a preconceived mould. But the best results can only be obtained if the body and its evolving consciousness are steadily opened to the infinite consciousness and force of the Divine. Once united to its universal source and sustenance, it will receive a perennial flow and know no defeat or depletion.
Among several means of replenishing the bodily energies, the Mother mentions two : "The first is to put oneself in relation with the energies accumulated in the material and earthly world and to draw freely from this inexhaustible source. These material energies are obscure and half inconscient; they encourage animality in man, but at the same time establish a kind of harmonious relation between the human body and material Nature. Those who know how to receive and use these energies generally meet with success in life and achieve whatever they undertake. But still they depend largely upon the conditions of their life and the state of their bodily health. The harmony created in them is not safe from all attack, it generally vanishes when circumstances become ad- verse. The child spontaneously receives this energy from material Nature when it throws out all its forces without measuring, gladly and freely. But in most human beings, as they grow up, this faculty is deadened because of the cares of life and the predominant place mental activities come to occupy in the consciousness,
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"Yet there is a source of energy which, once discovered, never dries up, whatever the circumstances and the physical conditions in life. It is the energy that can be described as spiritual, that which is received not from below, from the depths of inconscience, but from above, from the supreme origin of men and the universe, from the all-powerful and eternal splendours of the superconscious. It is there, everywhere around us, penetrating everything and to enter into contact with it and to receive it, it is sufficient to sincerely aspire for it, to open oneself to it in faith and confidence, so as to enlarge one's consciousness for identifying it with the universal Consciousness, ”¹
"We can easily imagine what would be the consequences of this power to draw at will and in all circumstances from the limitless source of an omnipotent energy in its luminous purity. Fatigue, exhaustion, illness, age and even death become mere obstacles on the way which a steady will is sure to surmount.”²
Speaking on the same subject of opening to the Divine Consciousness and Will, the Mother says, "As soon as physical conditions are a little difficult and there results from them some unease, if we know how to surrender completely before Thy Will, holding cheap life or death, health or illness, our integral being enters immediately into harmony with Thy law of love and life and all physical indisposition ceases, to give place to a well-being calm, deep and peaceful.³
Regarding the protection the human body affords against the attack of the vital beings, the Mother says, "The physical body acts as a protection by its grossness, by the very thing we charge against it. It is dull and insensitive, thick, rigid and hard; it is like a fortress with strong dense walls. The vital world is fluidic, there things move and mix and interpenetrate freely; it is like the waves of the sea that ceaselessly flow into each other and change and mingle. Against this fluidity of the vital world you are
¹ Bulletin of Physical Education, Vol. I. No. 3.
³Prayers and Meditations of the Mother,
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defenceless unless you can oppose to it a very powerful light and force from inside; otherwise it penetrates you and there is nothing to hamper its invading influence. But the body intervenes., cuts you off from the vital world and is a dam against the flood of its forces.”¹
"The human being is at home and safe in the material body; the body is his protection. There are some who are full of contempt for their bodies and think that things will be much better and easier after death without them. But in fact the body is your fortress and your shelter. While you are lodged in it the forces of the hostile world find a difficulty in getting any direct hold upon you. What are nightmares ? These are your sorties into the vital world. And what is the first thing you try to do when you are in the grip of a nightmare ? You rush back into your body and shake yourself into your normal physical consciousness. But in the world of the vital forces you are a stranger; it is an uncharted sea in which you have neither compass nor rudder.. .Directly you enter any realm of this world, its beings gather round you and want to encompass and get out of you all you have, to draw what they can and make it a food and a prey. If you have no strong light and force radiating from within you, you move there without your body as if you had no coat to protect you against a chill and bleak atmosphere, no house to shield you, even no skin covering you, your nerves exposed and bare. There are men who say, 'How unhappy I am in this body’, and think of death as an escape ! But after death you have the same vital surroundings and life. The dissolution of the body forces you out into the open spaces of the vital world. And you have no longer a defence; there is not the physical body any longer to rush back into far safety.”²
The greatest spiritual achievement has to be made here, in this material world, in this physical body. Is the body dense and inert and reluctant ? The reason is that much of it is yet sub- merged in the obscurity of the Subconscient and the Inconscient,
² ibid,
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and so it is incapable of moving forward as quickly as the rest of the being. Is it always prone to illness and suffering ? This too is due partly to its roots being in the Subconscient and the Inconscient and partly to the tyranny of the mind and the vital. An illumination and transformation of these neither regions will make the body not only fully conscious, but impervious to fatigue and illness and suffering. An immortality of the body too is not a Utopian dream, but the inevitable culmination of its progressive evolution. "The body must know and be convinced that its essence is divine,” and that "if no obstacle is put in the way of the Divine’s working”, it can be converted into its divine essence and become a radiant, potent and undecaying instrument of divine manifestation.
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Man's Eternal Quest—the Absolute
WHAT do men seek in life ? In their desires and dreams, in their hopes and ambitions, as well as in their eagle flights of spiritual aspiration, what is it they have all been seeking since Time began ? Is it not an Absolute ? The scientist in his laboratory, the philosopher in his ivory tower of thought, the artist and the poet in their moments of creative inspiration, the mystic in his ecstatic contemplation, the politician on his plat- form, the farmer in his field, the soldier in the fury of battle, the grocer in his shop, the beggar in the street, do they not all —all, without exception,—seek an Absolute of Bliss or an Absolute of Power or an Absolute of Peace or an Absolute of Knowledge or an Absolute of Energy or an Absolute of life- satisfaction ? One might go farther and say that even lust and greed and cruelty seek in their own perverse way an Absolute of self-gratification. In fact, all creation, consciously or unconsciously, seeks an—or, more truly, the—Absolute. No success ever succeeds in giving us permanent satisfaction, no fulfilment ever quenches our heart's desire. In spite of all the power we acquire, all the conquest we achieve, all the glory we attain, all the wealth we amass, all the love and esteem we win and enjoy, a discontent pursues our steps, a feeling as if all these were not enough, as if there was something more, something else,—we know not what—that had to be discovered and possessed. This discontent is so universal, so patent and persistent, that even the most confirmed hedonist can hardly deny it. All life stirs, struggles, creates and destroys, falls and rises, crawls or rushes in quest of something which will give it eternal satisfaction and perfect fulfilment. Everywhere there is the thirst, the search for the Absolute in life, the Absolute of all life's values. Give it whatever name you like, it is for the Absolute that all life lives and labours, and to realise that Absolute and express it in its own terms is the ineradicable impulse of all
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life. Life would have long ceased if its quest had not been the Absolute, and its quest could not have been the Absolute if its origin and source were not the Absolute, releasing a perennial flow of force for a ceaseless advance and adventure. Whether we peer into the past, into the estuary of the temporal stream, or into the future, we descry the same silhouette of the Absolute shadowed forth against the dim background of an impalpable infinity.
The Absolute—the Life of Life
This Absolute is the Life of all life. It is life's ultimate Truth, its unity and harmony, its force, its beauty and its bliss. We call it God or the Divine, whom we seem to have lost in the wilderness of the sense-objects—the Divine whom we seek in all our obscure and groping endeavours, and aspire to realise and reveal here in our material life. Even the atheist seeks an absolute of atheism, the rationalist an absolute of reason, the hedonist an absolute of life-enjoyment. They too are, therefore, seekers of the Divine, whom they profess to deny. The divisions and conflicts in our being—parts warring with parts, desires with opposing desires—are evidence of the eventual harmony, which is the goal as well as the origin of all existence. They point to the Absolute in whom alone all the jarring discords will be harmonised; for, there can never be an ordered play of relativities, a law of Nature, a system of values, a rule of conduct or a rhythm of evolution in life without an Absolute embracing and leading them together in the steps of its own shadowless light. If the relativities are real—with an apology to Shankar and Berkeley—if the constituents of life are real and living, then the Absolute in whom they subsist and grow is also real and living. This real living Absolute is God, the Life of all life.
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The Absolute—the Transcendent Transfigurer
The Absolute is not only the immanent substratum and link of all relativities, but also the Transcendent, as Pan-entheism rightly holds. An Absolute confined to and exhausted in the relativities cannot be the ultimate Unity and the inspirer and leader of the evolution of its own multiplicity. The Creator is superior to His creation, the Fount is anterior to its flow, the One is transcendent of the Many. Beyond life and in life, the Life of life is the sole reality, the sole object of human knowledge, and the solitary goal and abode of all creatures. If we exclude the aspect of God's transcendence, we condemn life to a horizontal circling, and shut out from its vision the golden altitudes from which Truth has often beamed down upon us and benign influences have sought to mould us. The Upanishadic image represents in the truest and most vivid light the eternal relation of the world with its Source. "This is the eternal Ashwattha tree whose roots are aloft, but its branches are downward. It is He that is called the Bright One and Brahman and Immortality, and in Him are all the worlds established; none goeth beyond Him. This is the thing thou seekest.” The roots are above and the branches are downwards, the roots nourish and sustain the branches, which grow and thrive and bear fruits and flowers. This is the true relation, and to forget it is to forget the basic truth of our existence. Besides, transcendence transfigures. The Hegelian Absolute can weave on endless webs of relativities out of the elements of the universe and within the limits of Time and Space, but it cannot bring down—from where will it ?—a new principle, introduce a revolutionary rhythm, initiate a radical departure. Its creations will be but permutations and combinations of the same existing elements, varying patterns, protean repetitions of the time-worn space-soiled principles and powers. It cannot transfigure or transform. It is only God and the Son of God, in whom lies the secret of the transfiguration of the son of man, it is only ii the Word that one has to seek the mystery of the transubstantiation of the flesh.
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Faith, the Leader
This transcendent-immanent Absolute is the Divine, the Life of our life whom we have to seek continuously and discover and embrace in love and joy. Does our sense-bound reason doubt His existence, or deny it ? Does culture mean unbelief, and enlightenment the lurid glow of agnosticism ? But our doubts and denials are not really categoric negatives, they are only a temporary revolt and resistance of a dominant and pampered part of our being, indirectly serving to stimulate and strengthen the faith in the other parts. Faith is the inalienable base of life's evolutionary progression, and without it nothing could move or advance. Our reason may cover it up in contempt, or spurn it as a relic of our primitive barbarism, but cannot kill it altogether, for to kill it would be to kill the soul itself. Much to the disgust and disappointment of the reason, the relic lives on and even threatens to consume the very doubts and misgivings of reason in its white flame. Faith is at once the prevision of the Truth and its foreshadowing—it always points to the sun, even though clouds may be gathering in the sky.
The Absolute, the Supreme Person
If we proceed with this faith, we discover that the Transcendent-Immanent Absolute, the Divine, is not only a living,' omnipresent Reality, but a Person, the supreme Person, self- figured in all the forms of the universe. We can love Him as He loves us, adore Him as He moulds us, and serve Him as He perfects and fulfils us. Merely to turn to Him is to banish the bleakness and sordidness of our desire-driven life and stand in the liberating light and animating warmth of the living Sun. As the Mother says, "To turn towards Thee, live in Thee and for Thee, is supreme happiness, unmixed joy, immutable peace; it is to breathe infinity, to soar in eternity, no longer feel one’s limits, escape from Time and Space.”¹ And she wonders : "Why do men flee from these boons, as though they feared them ? What a,
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strange thing is ignorance, that source of all suffering ! How miserable that obscurity which keeps men away from the very thing which would bring them happiness, and subjects them to this painful school of ordinary existence fashioned entirely from struggle and suffering ”¹ Not one among those countless men who have turned to the Divine has ever had to complain that his life has been robbed of its joy and freedom. Can it be said of those who make material pursuits and the satisfaction of their desires the end of their life ? What a contrast the God-filled life presents to the harsh discords and gnawing cares of the ordinary human life ! What a poignant and illuminating contrast the life of a Buddha or a Christ or a Ramakrishna presents to the life of a Napoleon or a Bacon, a Voltaire or a Schopenhauer ? An untroubled peace and tranquillity, a calm and comprehensive vision of the Truth and its manifold working, and a steady, silent, impersonal will fulfilling itself in the movements of life, is an ideal deemed impracticable, if not inconceivable, by those who follow either the lure of desire or the rushlight of their reason; but it has been more or less realised through the ages by those who have sought the Life of their life and the Self of their self, and followed His guidance in simple faith and confidence. A deep personal relation of love with the super-personal Person, and an unreserved surrender to His Light is the secret of transmuting our life into something vast, luminous, blissful and inexhaustibly creative.
The Approach of Love
The supreme Person is the eternal essence and archetype of our terrestrial personality, each fibre of which is not only created by Him, but also constituted by His own substance and energy. Our true self is made in His image and for His cosmic work of multiple self-expression. If we awake to this truth, if we learn to live in our essential identity and union with Him, the sombre nightmare of our separative existence vanishes for ever. This is the identity and fundamental oneness
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that our love fumbles for in the obscurity of ignorance and amidst the finite and fugitive objects of the senses. An illumined love discovers Him at a bound and carries us beyond the misery and mortality of our egoistic life into the rapturous heart of the Life of all life, where we enjoy "peace in strength, serenity in action and an unchanging happiness in the midst of all circumstances.” Because the supreme Person is our own highest Self, the approach of love is the best and most rapidly fruitful approach, for, love is at once the seed and the flower of identity.
The Supreme Person—the Pivot of
Individual Synthesis
The first business of human life, the Work of all work, is to find and realise the supreme Person in oneself and make Him the effective centre of one's whole life. Ordinarily, human nature is a shifting mishmash of diverse elements and unco-ordinated energies. Its parts do not agree with each other, but follow their exclusive individual likes and desires to the detriment of the whole. Reason may try—provided it is itself sufficiently developed and detached—to impose an order and synthesis on the other parts, but so long as it is not itself freed of its own likes and dislikes, its way cannot but be unsteady and partial. Even the most rational synthesis is found to be tainted with imperfection, and at least some amount of arbitrary constraint and coercion. It is only when the soul or the psychic being awakes and comes forward, that a centre is found round which a stable synthesis can be built. But even the discovery of the soul is not enough to form a complete and dynamic synthesis in the entire being; the synthesis achieved may well turn out to be partial or static. What is essential for a dynamic synthesis is the discovery and establishment of the Divine, the Absolute Being, the supreme Person at the very centre of human life and consciousness, assuring a perfect condition for the self-accomplishment of His Will. The Life of life has to be installed as the Guide of life, if man is to attain his highest
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destiny. The glib prating of the rule of reason and free will cannot carry him anywhere, so long as the ego is the effective centre of his nature and desire the motive of his actions. Unless a higher light dawns and begins to lead his nature, his reason can never be perfectly rational, nor his will a free will. It is the will of the ego that he mistakes for the will of his real self and the blinkered, interested reason of the ego for pure reason. That is why the Mother says, "The most useful work to be done is, for each individually, to be conscious. ¹
"The final aim is to be in constant union with the Divine, not only in meditation, but in all circumstances and in all the active life. ”² This constant dynamic union is the sole basis of a perfect individual synthesis.
The Supreme Person—the Centre of Human Unity
"The realisation of human unity through the awakening in all and the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity which is One.”³ The unity and harmony of mankind is one of the goals modern man has been steadily pursuing in his conscious thought and subconscious aspiration. The disruptive differences and discords, the aggressive cupidity and power-lust, the savage self-seeking and brutal conflicts which disfigure the present dealings between man and man and between nation and nation, however hideous and inhuman they may be, prove that they are only a last, desperate resistance of the beast in man to the advent of Love for uniting, harmonising, perfecting and completing humanity in the being of the Supreme. However dark the modern world may be, however dismal the present state of civilisation, mankind is undeniably proceeding towards a life of harmony, unity, peace and creative freedom. But the real unity can never come by political, economical, cultural or ethical means, for these have their origin in the mind and the life-parts of man, where there is no dynamic principle of unity
³ibid.
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and solidarity, but only egoistic exclusions and restrictions, or at best, a self-regarding self-sacrifice vainly seeking a reconciliation of contrary elements. Unity inheres, not in ,the mutable, phenomenal parts of man which make for multiplicity and diversity, but in that which is eternal in him and common to all mankind. "When you are one with the Divinity within, you are one with all things in their depths.”¹ The Divine dwells in the heart of every being and everything, and it is through Him and by Him that we must enter into relation with them. There is no other way to a real and abiding unity. The modern man, led by his reason or vital instincts, will no doubt try, as he has indeed been trying, all avenues of human unity, but a day will surely arrive when, wearied and foiled, he will turn to the Life of his life and receive his first initiation into the mystery of universal unity and harmony, which is the bed-rock truth of all existence. His illuminated consciousness will then perceive that the surface dissonances of life prelude and not preclude the victorious emergence of the final harmony, even as the jarring notes of a musical instrument, which is being tuned, herald and prepare the coming music, and not preclude it. In the Life of life is the secret of the conquest and transformation of life and the evolution of the divine unity and harmony in the midst of multitudinous diversity.
The Liberating Knowledge
"Without the Divine, life is a painful illusion, with the Divine, all is bliss.”² Because modern humanity, in its pride of intellectual advancement, has exiled the Divine from its life, it is labouring under a painful illusion and tottering on the verge of a complete collapse, its culture sinking into savagery and its hypertrophied mental powers dragging it into a blind destruction. If human life embodied no divinity, the present crisis might well end in a total ruin, but the indwelling Divinity is indestructible, and its Will to self-evolution invincibly powerful,
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When the cup of a godless life of exclusive material pursuits has been drained to its bitter dregs, man, defeated and disillusioned, with grim death gaping wide to devour him, and chill darkness closing in upon him, will hear the rousing admonition : "All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.” That will be his salvation, that will save him from death and damnation. "All difficulties are solved by taking rest in the Divine’ s arms, for, these arms are always opened with love to shelter us.”¹ "Turn towards the Divine, all your sufferings will disappear.”²
But the safety from death and damnation is not enough; man has to offer all himself to the Master of his life, so that the Master may offer all Himself to him, and the drop and the sea meet in an ineffable embrace of unending ecstasy. "The whole of our life should be a prayer offered to the Divine.”³ Therefore, after the decisive turning, the self-offering, the self-consecration to the Life of life, leading to the integral, dynamic union. "One who has given himself to the Divine has no longer any other duty than to make that consecration more and more perfect. The world and those who live in it have always wanted to put human—social and domestic—duty before duty to the Divine, which they have stigmatised as egoism. How indeed could they judge otherwise, they who have no experience of the reality of the Divine ? But for the divine regard their opinion has no value, their will has no force. These are movements of ignorance, nothing more...Besides, has not mankind proved its utter incompetence in the organisation of its own existence? Governments succeed governments, regimes follow regimes, centuries pass after centuries, but human misery remains lamentably d same. It will always be so, as long as man remains what he is blind and ignorant, closed to all spiritual reality. A transformation ,an illumination of the human consciousness alone can bring about real amelioration in the condition of humanity. Thus even from the standpoint of human life, it follows logically that the first duty of man is to seek and possess the divine consciousness.”4
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This aspiration, this faith, this loving surrender to the Life of life will not mean a renunciation or denial of reason, but its sublimation into a higher intelligence, which does not gloat over the surface of things, but looks deep into their truth and essence, and visions the one Reality everywhere and its self-fulfilling creative Will. The next step on the ladder of evolution will carry man from reason to suprarational Light. "Turn from the dead past and look straight towards the future. Your religion, country, family lie there: it is the Divine.”¹
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YOGIC ACTION*
THERE are four attitudes possible towards action in spiritual life, and all of them have important bearings on life. The first is an attitude of rejection; the second, of qualified rejection; the third of ethical acceptance, and the fourth, of divine utilization. These are the fundamental attitudes, which not only colour spiritual life in their distinctive ways, but also condition its course and consummation.
The first attitude is of sheer rejection of all action, so far as that is practicable in life. It pertains to the exclusive way of abstractive knowledge or love, which proceeds by a categoric renunciation of all secular relations, obligations and values. It looks down upon action as distracting and impeding, and tolerates only that much of it as is indispensable to the maintenance of the body. This is the way of extreme asceticism advocated and preached by some of the schools of Vedanta, Buddhism and Jainism. It exerts a positively discouraging and withering effect on life in the world.
The second attitude of qualified rejection is of a much wider applicability. The Vedanta as interpreted by Shankara, the catholic forms of Mahayana Buddhism, Jainism and Christianity accept action as a preliminary means of purification. Certain prescribed actions, calculated to calm the mind of the neophyte and help the growth of disinterestedness and concentration, are enjoined in the beginning and continued, as a social utility or as an example to others, even through the later stages of progress. But the final aim is a release from all action into an extra-cosmic, immobile peace or silence.
The third attitude is that of ethical acceptance, in which action is not rejected, but accepted, in the beginning as a means of purification and preparation, and later as a medium of ethico-spiritual self-expression. Through it one pours out into the;
* Based on Prayers and Meditations of the Mother,
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world something of the moral purity, freedom, power, love and compassion which grow in the being as a result of accumulating spiritual realizations. This is a derivative growth or a reflex of the spiritual progress, and not a direct dynamization of the powers of the Spirit. Most spiritual seekers seem to be quite satisfied with it. An authentic and abiding experience of the Absolute within and a constant outflowing of love and light and peace and bliss from the instrumental being seems to be considered a summit attainment, even by most of the greatest of mystics. There may be, in this state, an intermittent or steady perception of a universal or transcendental Will behind the shifting waves of one's individual nature, but usually it is not accompanied by any clear knowledge of the why and the how of its working. A veil still remains, however thinned, between the shining harvest reaped within and its diminished transmission without : the higher values are rendered into cleansed lower terms. The supreme knowledge lacks which could dissipate the veil and integrate the inner and the outer, and the supreme power which could transform the instrumental being into a flawless vehicle of the Vast.
A seeker of the transcendent Light does not bother whether or not Life has an inherent right to possess and be possessed by that Light and express it in its own, but divinely transmuted, terms. He does not recognize any claim of life upon himself, but is content if it makes itself transparent enough to reflect something of the glow and sublimity of the Spirit.
This attitude has a great humanitarian value, and is productive of immense cultural progress—religious, ethical, aesthetic, literary, etc. The Maurya and Gupta periods of Indian culture were a material flowering of this attitude. Their abounding vitality and creative gusto were directly derived from the pre- ceding burst of spiritual achievements which gave them a religio-ethical stamp. But however great and splendid the action welling out of this attitude, however beneficial and elevating to human society, it is not the direct action of God in man, nor the authentic, immediate, unhindered fulfilment of His Will upon earth.
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The fourth attitude is one of divine utilization of all action. Here action is not accepted on sufferance, nor are its natural defects and drawbacks looked on with a high indifference, but all action is welcomed and embraced, provided it is not prejudicial to one's spiritual progress, first as a potent, indispensable means of self-surrender and liberation, and next as a transformed medium for the manifestation of the Divine and the fulfilment of His Will. This attitude is hardly met with among spiritual seekers of the traditional paths, because it is based upon a comprehensiveness of vision and an integrality of aspiration which have been almost lost to the post-Upanishadic spiritual culture of India. The Nihilism of the Buddhists and the Illusionism of the school of Shankara split the ancient amplitude and harmony and narrowed down the spiritual urge to a few trenchant simplicities. The Vedic and the Upanishadic mystics did not divide life into the spiritual and the secular, but viewed it whole, and endeavoured to render it, in its entirety, a manifesting instrument of the supreme Light. Nothing was repressed or renounced, but all was illumined and transmute to serve the Cosmic Will.
This Cosmic Will or the self-fulfilling Will of the Eternal operating in Time and Space, is the teleological secret and source of all action, collective and individual. To know this Will by inner identity and fulfil it through our integral being, perfectly attuned to its working, is the aim of Yogic action; and we shall presently see how the Mother throws a flood of light upon the complexity of its nature, process and utility.
I make no apology to reproduce in full the Mother's Prayer of the 28th November, 1912 :
"The outer life, the activity of each day and each moment, is it not the indispensable complement of our hours of meditation and contemplation ? And is not the proportion of time given to each the exact image of the proportion which exists between the amount of effort to be made for the preparation and the realisation ? For, meditation, contemplation. Union is the result obtained—the flower that blooms; the daily activity is the anvil on which all
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the elements must pass and re-pass in order to be purified, refined, made supple and ripe/or the illumination which contemplation gives to them. All these elements must be thus passed one after the other through the crucible before outer activity becomes needless for the integral development. Then is this activity turned into the means to manifest Thee so as to awaken the other centres of consciousness to the same dual work of the forge and the illumination. Therefore are pride and satisfaction with oneself the worst of all obstacles. Very modestly we must take advantage of all the minute opportunities offered to knead and purify some of the innumerable elements, to make them supple, to make them impersonal, to teach them forgetfulness of self and abnegation and devotion and kindness and gentleness; and when all these modes of being have become habitual to them, then are they ready to participate in the Contemplation, and to identify themselves with Thee in the supreme Concentration. That is why it seems to me that the work must be long and slow even for the best, and that striking conversions cannot be integral. They change the orientation of the being, they put it definitely on the straight path; but truly to attain the goal, none can escape the need of innumerable experiences of every kind and every instant.
O Supreme Master, who shinest in my being and each thing, let Thy Light be manifest and the reign of Thy Peace come for all.”
Three momentous truths of far-reaching consequence emerge from this Prayer which contains the whole gospel of Yogic action, (1) Contemplation, supreme Concentration or Union —the Mother uses these terms almost as synonyms—is not only the meeting of the liberated part of our being, our soul, but of our whole being—soul and nature—with the supreme Reality. (2) Action of every day and of every instant is indispensable for the integral development of our being and the realization of the integral union, which is not possible without the long, chequered discipline of consecrated action. (3) Action continues even after the integral development, but only to manifest the Divine and to awaken other centres of consciousness, i,e. other individuals, to the same "dual work of the forge and
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the illumination.”
Let us elaborate and try to elucidate these truths, one after another, in order to make them definite and clear to our aspiring intelligence.
1) Union is commonly understood to be an ecstatic identification of the most spiritually developed part of our conscious- ness with the Divine. It is usually effected by an act of abstractive thought, the most spiritualized part of our consciousness withdrawing from the movements of Nature (trance) and plunging in the infinity of the Spirit. But this means the sundering of a part from the whole. The Mother does not regard it as an integral union. According to her, union is a fusion and identification of the whole consciousness of man—physical, vital, mental and spiritual—with the Supreme, who is at once the All and the Beyond-All. In this union, trance is not indispensable; in fact, it is ultimately dispensed with, the whole consciousness enjoying an abysmal silence in the midst of the most stupendous action. Acting, thinking, feeling, sleeping—in all states of being and all modes of its operation—one abides in a perfect union and identification with the Divine. As the Divine has not to abrogate or annul his waking self to realize His transcendent immobility, or forfeit His luminous silence and stillness to engage in world-action, so the individual who has realized an integral union with Him, has not to labour under any such disabling dichotomy and oscillate between peaceful passivity and agitated activity. An integral union denotes a union in all the four states of our being at one and the same time— Jagrat (waking state), Swapna (dream state), Sushupti (massed sleep-state) and Turiya (transcendent state). It is to become absolutely one with the Absolute, but not by self-annihilation or tranced merger. If we refer to the state of the detached Purusha, witnessing the works of Nature but not participating in them, as described in the Gita, we shall more easily under- stand how the individual consciousness, widened beyond all ego-moulds and revelling in the infinity of the Eternal, who is at once in Time and beyond Time, can see all the movements of its nature initiated, guided and consummated by the Divine,
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in whom it now permanently lives, moves and has its being.
2) But, paradoxical though it may seem, the integral union cannot be realized without Yogic action. We must take special note of this truth, lest in the impatient fervour of our devotion, or the vertiginous flight of our Godward thought, we let our- selves drift away from action and seal for ever the highest and widest fulfilment of our terrestrial destiny. Action is indispensable in this Yoga of integral union. The Mother calls it preparation or the work of the forge. It is only through action that each part of our being, each fibre of our subjective and objective personality, can be purified, refined, made supple, unegoistic, self-abnegating and impersonal. There is a nuclear formation of the ego in each element of our being, which has to be broken up, and the elements have to be released into a dynamic impersonality. But if we eschew action, we shall find ourselves eschewing the essential preparation; and the myriad elements of our nature, deprived of their natural play and process of purification and development, will either lie supinely dormant or chafe in resentful repression—they can never be transformed and divinely dynamic.
It was the renunciation of action under the fateful spell of Buddhism and illusionistic Vedantism that atrophied the veins and arteries of the Indian society and caused its eventual decay and subjection to foreign domination. A religion or spirituality that disdains life and discourages its natural growth and colourful self-expression, discounts, in effect, the Will of God in creation and is doomed to wither out of existence. It may have its fulfilment in some timeless Otherwhere, but none here, in the eternal march of Time.
The great gift of the West to the culture of modern humanity is the insistent sense of the significance of Life and its irresistible purpose in the material world. But this purpose cannot be read on the surface of its ceaseless flux; it is hidden in its depths and can be known only by the light of the Spirit and fulfilled only by its all-achieving Power. Science skims the surface of life and fails to fathom its depths and discover its goal, How human life can be explored, expanded, purified and
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transfigured by Yoga and, married to the supreme Light, become its blissful manifesting medium upon earth, is what the Mother teaches in the present Prayer. The union with the supreme Reality, which will illumine and transform life and make it divinely creative, cannot be achieved, the Mother insists, without "action of every kind and of every instant”. This teaching coincides with the Gita's gospel of work except for the enthralling glimpse it affords of the glory of the final achievement—the divinization of the whole human nature and the revelation of Sachchidananda through it. By action is it to be freed. The actions performed for the sake of oneself, for the satisfaction of one's egoistic desires and for personal profit, hem in and heave the consciousness with their reactions and results, and emphasize the separateness of the individual from the universal. It is only when actions are stripped of desires and turned Godwards, that they become a powerful liberating force and a sure means of progressive self-transcendence. Each action, offered to the Infinite and the Eternal, is a step forward towards It and the unravelling of one of the million knots that attach man to ignorance and death. Rejection of action, therefore, is a willful postponement of the solution of the central problem of life, and cannot effect the release of the embodied being of man from Nature's yoke, however high his detached soul may soar in its unclamped freedom. That which binds must unbind, that which veils must be the agent of the supreme unveiling. "Action cleaves not to man", says one of the Upanishads, but it must be an action scrupulously performed in the spirit of sacrifice, as the Gita definitely lays down. "The daily activity is the anvil on which all the elements must pass and re-pass in order to be purified refined, made supple and ripe for the illumination which contemplation gives to them. All these elements must be thus passed one after the other through the crucible (of action)." These words imply not only a consecration and Godward orientation of all actions, but their utilization in the transformation of the numberless elements of our nature which have a right, as much as the naked soul, to the bliss of the divine union. It is only in the
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course of action that one meets with opposition, unmerited calumny, deceit and dishonesty on the part of those with. whom. one deals, or praise and flattery and generous rewards, and one can watch one's various reactions to these outer touches —anger and lust and greed and vanity and resentment and envy and egoistic elation and gratification—and offer them to the divine Force for the transformation of their perverted energies and their conversion into their spiritual counter- parts. How else can the weak and obscure life of homo sapiens change into an epiphany of Light and Force, once the possibility of such a radical change is admitted ? Renunciation of work spells a betrayal of God's intention in the world and a turning of one's back upon the highest perfection of one's terrestrial existence.
3) The third truth the Mother brings out in the Prayer is the dual nature of Yogic action—its nature as a means of purification and preparation for divine union, and as a means of manifestation of the divine splendours. When all the elements of one's nature have been radically cured and converted by a long discipline of consecrated action, then one stands independent of all action, it ceases to be indispensable; but still it goes on, even as life goes on, as the world goes on, as a vehicle of divine revelation and a means of awakening other human beings to the great "dual work of the forge and the illumination.” The liberated soul in a liberated, luminous nature—this is exactly what Sri Aurobindo means by the term "Jivanmukta"—works on in the world in an immortalized divine body or in several divine bodies in succession, if that be God's Will, securely stationed in the Divine and moved by His Force alone.
It is a long, a very long and laborious discipline, this of Yogic action, demanding constant vigilance and an integral, ungrudging surrender to the divine Force, and a sudden, "striking conversion cannot be integral.” In order to reach the goal which is nothing short of a divinization of the whole being in all its states of consciousness and modes of operation, "none can escape the need of innumerable experiences of every kind
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and every instant.” But the goal, the great glorious goal has magnetized the soul of humanity, and whatever the difficulties of the path, whatever the resistance in the nature and the buffet and drag of tradition, humanity cannot rest till it has been attained.
II
The formula of Yogic action is twofold : action for Yoga and action in Yoga. The essential object of Yogic action is, therefore. Yoga or union. Most of the schools of dynamic Yoga in the world—and they are not many—occupy themselves only with the first formula and its realization—action for Yoga. They explore some of the possibilities of disinterested and consecrated action for a speedy attainment of union with the object of their seeking, whoever and whatever that may be. Once that is done, once the central consciousness has discovered and learned to live in the infinite Reality or the Eternal Being, the object of Yoga is thought to have been achieved, and action is then relegated to a very subordinate position. It reflects, indifferently, sometimes the ethical being, sometimes the liberated soul, sometimes even the simmering or settled turbidity of the subconscient, and seldom, if at all, the undeflected Will of the Supreme. Even if clarity and rhythm are achieved in the outer nature, they are maintained at a great cost of unflagging vigilance and circumspection, and one is never as free and self-possessed in action as in inaction. To overcome this drawback, the second formula has to be lived to the utmost possible perfection—action in Yoga. The Union attained at the centre has to be extended to the most physical peripheries of the being and plunged into the unlit profundities of the subconscient, so that the will of God may make itself easily felt and powerfully and perfectly expressed in life.
The Will of God, the direct, unimpeded, undiminished, undistorted will of God is the fount and fulcrum of all authentic Yogic action. It may reveal itself in various ways :—
1) as an intermittent drive strongly or faintly felt and
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Working itself out in the nature of the Yogi with the why and the how of its action rather obscure,
2) as a phosphorescent impulsion with a modicum of knowledge of the why and the how, but little of the result;
3) as a luminous, fully conscious direction lighting up the whole process and result of the action.
These ways sometimes alternate and sometimes combine and make up the complex working of the divine Will in the Yogin till the channel has been completely cleared and tempered for its direct, uninterrupted self-fulfilment.
The self-expression of the supreme Will, which is the sole end of Yogic action, depends upon a variety of factors which a Karmayogi has to tackle with an intent, receptive flexibility and a subtle, discerning tact. It depends not only upon the completeness and constancy of his identification with the supreme Consciousness, but also—and probably more—upon the state of his normal active consciousness and the fitness or unfit- ness of the dynamic parts of his nature. If there are twists and hurdles in his nature and his normal consciousness is not immune to the inroads of the forces of Ignorance, the Will cannot act in its purity and undiluted potency. An immixture takes place, and though the action may be felt as inspired or impelled from within or above, it does not carry on it the hall- mark of the divine Will.
How to incarnate the divine Will and let it express itself freely and effectively in life ? This is the central problem of a dynamic Yoga, and the Mother gives us an inestimable guidance in it.
"In my view the ideal state is that in which, constantly conscious with Thy Consciousness, we know at every moment, spontaneously, without any necessity of reflection, exactly what we should do to express in the best way Thy law. I know this state because I have been in it at certain moments, but very often the knowledge of the "how” is veiled by a mist of ignorance and we have to appeal to reflection which is not always a good councellor, not to speak of all that we do every moment, without having time
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for reflection, being at the mercy of the inspiration of the moment. In what measure is it in conformity with or contrary to Thy law? All depends on the state of the subconscient, on what is active in it at the moment. Once the act is accomplished, if it has any importance, if we can look at it, analyse it, understand it, it serves as a lesson, enables us to be aware of the motive force which has made us act, and so of something of that subconscient which still governs us and has to be mastered.
"It is impossible that in every terrestrial action there should not be a good and a bad side. Even the actions which best express the most divine law of Love contain in them something of the disorder and darkness inherent in the world as it is at present.
"Some men, those who are called pessimists, perceive almost solely the dark side of everything. The optimists, on the contrary, see only the side of beauty and harmony. And if it is ridiculous and ignorant to be an involuntary optimist, is it not a happy conquest to be made to become a voluntary optimist? In the eyes of the pessimists, whatever one does will be always bad, ignorant or egoistic; how could one satisfy them? It is an impossible enterprise.
"There is only one resource-—it is to unite ourselves as perfectly as we can with the highest and purest light we can conceive of., to identify our consciousness as completely as possible with the absolute Consciousness, to strive to receive all inspiration from it alone, in order to facilitate as best we can its manifestation upon the earth, and, confident of its power, consider the events with serenity. Since everything is necessarily mixed in the present manifestation, it is wisest to do our best, striving towards a higher and higher light, and to resign ourselves to the fact that absolute perfection is for the moment unrealizable.
"Still with what an ardour should we not always aspire towards this inaccessible perfection.”¹
The implications of the Mother's teaching in this Prayer favour our initial postulate of the twofold nature of Yogic action. The dual formula corresponds, we can say with more
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March 23, 1914.
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or less precision, to the double movement of the integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo—the movement of ascent and the movement of descent. The first movement is a movement of spontaneous self-offering through action, as well as through love and knowledge. Yoga or union with the supreme Consciousness is the goal towards which the most developed and aspiring part of our consciousness shoots with a greater and greater intensity. Each action is undertaken and accomplished in the spirit of an offering, a sacrifice, which brings about a releasing reversal of the desire-ridden, egoistic poise of the being and its entry into a super-personal wideness. Nothing is done for the satisfaction and aggrandizement of the ego, but all for the love and worship of the One with whom a conscious and constant union is consumingly sought for. This sincere and unremitting self- giving through action works as a great purifying force, and with the increase of purity and elimination of desires and attachments, there is felt more and more a natural, irresistible tendency towards a liberating self-transcendence and approximation to the Eternal and the Infinite. This experience of a progressive self-transcendence is usually accompanied, in the dynamic Yoga which the Mother has in view, by an increasing perception of a serene, subtly impelling Will, and the tormenting goad of egoistic desires is replaced, by slow or swift stages, as the case may be, by its developing direction.
The movement of ascent—the inner plunge and the subsequent climb—admits of many possibilities of descent. Some- times the two movements alternate and enrich each other— a downpour from above bathes the climber and refreshes and invigorates him on his upward way, just as an ascent induces a delivering descent. But this is not, according to the Mother, a very high, let alone the ideal state. In it the divine Will can manifest itself but intermittently and-with a modified force.
For a glimpse of the ideal state, as the Mother envisages it here, and as many of her later experiences fully illustrate, and the other two inferior states from which a God-seeker may also act sometimes, let us draw a little closer to the Prayer.
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The ideal state is that in which the consciousness of the Yogi is united with the absolute consciousness of the Divine. It is a state in which "we know at every moment, spontaneously, without any necessity of rejection, exactly what we should do to express in the best way Thy law. The divine Will is known luminously, integrally and unerringly, and no necessity is felt for resorting to reflection. "At the moment when the being becomes aware of Thy Presence and identifies itself with Thy Consciousness, it is conscious in everything and everywhere.” But the duration of this supreme consciousness is fugitive. Why ? It can be explained by the "complexity of the elements of the being, by their inequality in the illumination and by the fact that they enter successively into activity.” Before we attempt any elaboration, it would be advisable, because helpful, to make ourselves clear as to what the Mother means by "Thy Consciousness". The absolute divine Consciousness of which the Mother speaks is not the supracosmic, incommunicable Consciousness which is the ultimate goal of some traditional Yogas, but the supreme, integral divine Consciousness, which is everywhere and everything in the universe as well as beyond it. No dynamic Yoga can proceed on the conception of the incommunicable, relationless Transcendent as the only goal; for, in the relationless Absolute there is no stirring of the Will to self-creation and self-expression. What the Mother means by the Absolute Consciousness is the all-comprehending Consciousness of the Supreme Being, the One without a second, the supreme Purusha who is beyond even the Unmanifest, as the Upanishad describes Him with a disarming definiteness. In Him is the omnipotent Will to eternal self-multiplication and self-manifestation as well as the timeless silence of the absolute immutability. To be identified with Him, integrally, that is to say, physically, vitally, mentally and spiritually, is the sole condition of ex- pressing His Will or rather letting it express itself in the material world. It is to become "a pure crystal without stain which allows Thy divine ray to pass without obscuring, colouring or deforming it.”
How to realize this identification with the Supreme Purusha ?
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The Mother gives a very concentrated idea of it in the Prayer of the 27th May, 1914 :-
"In each of the domains of the being, we must awaken the consciousness to the perfect Existence, Knowledge and Beatitude. These three worlds or modes of the Divine are found in the physical reality as well as in the regions of Force and Light and those of impersonality, infinitude and eternity. When we enter fully conscious into the higher regions, it is easy, almost inevitable, to live this Existence, this Light and this Beatitude. But what is very important, as also very difficult, is to awaken the being to this triple divine consciousness on the most material levels. This is the first point. Then we must find out the centre of all the divine worlds (probably in the intermediate world), from where we can unite the consciousness of these divine worlds, synthesize them and act simultaneously and in full knowledge in all the domains”
Was it the unimaginable difficulty of this integral union and divine manifestation that led the spiritual seekers to discover a short cut and turn vertiginously to the static Impersonal ? Or was it that this comprehensive ideal had been lost to the contracting consciousness of humanity and that an intensive churning of the material levels had become an imperative need of the evolutionary Nature ? But the Mother would have us shun the easy paths and "aspire towards this inaccessible perfection” , short of which nothing can satisfy our deepest aspiration.
This integral union in the waking, active consciousness of man is usually and unavoidably fugitive, in as much as "everything is necessarily mixed in the present manifestation” and disorder and darkness are "inherent in the world as it is at present.” The absolute perfection of the individual depends upon the perfection of the collectivity of which he is an inseparable part, and the perfection of the collectivity is the great end which the divine Force has been working out through the evolutionary process of Nature and revolutionary Yoga.
The first cause of the fugitiveness of this union is, as the Mother explains it, the complexity of the elements of our multi-
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dimensional being. There are elements within elements, world within world, jagatyām jagat, interwoven and interacting, each of which has to be sedulously and patiently weaned from the disorder and darkness of Ignorance and brought into perfect accord with the supreme Consciousness and its Will, for, each, in its essence, is derived from that Consciousness and is a note indispensable to the final diapason in creation.
"So long as one element of the being, one movement of thought is still subjected to outside influences, that is to say, not solely under Thine, it cannot be said that the true union is realized; there is still the horrible mixture without order and light; for that element, that movement is a world, a world of disorder and darkness, as is the entire earth in the material world, as is the material world in the entire universe.”¹
The second cause is their inequality in the illumination, as the Mother puts it. Some elements may have been purified and transmuted enough to enter into the Unitive Life, but others may be still lingering in the twilight, slackers and stragglers of the rear-guard, fighting shy of the total conversion. This in- equality in the very constituents of the being retard the fullness and permanence of the Union.
The third cause is that these elements enter successively and not simultaneously into the integrating and sublimating action of the Yoga. In the wise dispensation of Providence the spiritual life, as indeed all life, is so arranged that no element of it is hustled into a premature conversion, but each is given its proper time and opportunity to grow and evolve into the supreme identification. Today it is one part of the being or one group of elements seeking illumination and submitting to its transforming rhythm, and tomorrow it is another, which entails a long preparation for the final resolution of all their discords and disparities into the conquering harmony of the progressive Union. A simultaneous utilization of all the elements in perfect concordance is possible only when the whole human
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, December 2, 1912,
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consciousness rests in the supreme Consciousness and the whole human nature is possessed and moved by it.
We have seen what is the ideal state of integral Union in which the divine Will expresses itself in its native purity and omnipotence. There are two other states from which the Yogin has to act at the immature stages of his sadhana. The first state, as the Mother indicates it, is that in which the knowledge of the how is veiled by a mist of ignorance, and one has perforce to appeal to reflection. But reflection is not always a good counsellor, for, it bases its operations on the crystallized experiences of the mind and the prima facie evidences of the senses, on the one hand, and, on the other, on inference and imagination. The data of the senses being, more often than not, misleading and confusing, and imagination not always a very reliable truth-finder, reflection labours under certain inherent disabilities and cannot be a safe guide of man on the path of Yoga. Its judgment at a given moment depends upon the being's psychological poise and orientation and the stress of the forces at work in it. Even at its best, reflection can give but a poor and halting lead and can never be a substitute for intuition, born of the divine identification.
The second state is that in which action is impelled by the inspiration of the moment, and the being has neither any steady light of intuition to lead it nor time to take the help of reflection. This action may be flawless and authentically Yogic, but also it may not be—it all depends upon the then state of the being's subconscient. If the subconscient is pure and calm, the divine inspiration may be received undeformed, but if it is full of impurities and obscure movements, the inspiration received may be a false one, and the action can only betray the the riot and reek of the sub-soil. Besides, reflection is smothered in the rush and tumult of the nether energies, and the dynamic parts of the being lie helpless at the mercy of the moment's impulsion. This is a movement of the unregenerate personality of man which is a creation and tool of the lower nature and trails evil and falsehood as the dark heritage of Matter, But from the Yogic standpoint, even this retrograde
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movement has a utility : it affords the Yogin a glimpse of the hidden working of his nature and of the elements and energies which have to be exposed to the light, purified and transformed. The Yogin cannot rest content with a surface polish and refinement of his nature; he is not concerned to put up a presentable appearance in society, but to weed out the obstinate remnants of his inconscient origin and build up a nature invulnerably pure and divinely dynamic. He has, therefore, to face and conquer and convert the obscure forces that lie below the threshold and surprise him by their sporadic incursions. He takes advantage even of all his stumbles and detours to effect a solid and secure progress. Not the eye outside but the eye within is his guide, and woe unto him who slurs or glosses over the nether upsurges of his nature.
In the light of the Mother's teaching we learn, then, that the prime object of Yogic action is the constant realization and fulfilment of the divine Will in all the multifarious details of life. An unceasing self-surrender through action as well as through love and knowledge inevitably culminates in an integral union and identification of our whole being with the supreme Consciousness, and it is out of this blissful union that the all- achieving Will blazes forth and fulfils itself in the material world. One of the Mother's experiences, recorded on September 17, 1914, gives an illustration of such a union :—
"No longer can any impulse to action come from outside or from any particular world. It is Thou, O Lord, who settest all in motion from the depths of the being; it is Thy Will that directs, Thy Force that acts; and no longer on the limited field of a small individual consciousness, but on the universal field of a conscious- ness which, in each state of being, is united to all. And the being has at once the conscious perception of all the universal movements in their complexity, and even in their confusion, and the silent and perfect peace of Thy sovereign immutability.”
Human life will turn into an epic of creative ecstasy when, cradled on the bosom of the Divine and rocked by His Love
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YOGIC ACTION
alone, it becomes a luminous channel for the outpouring of His Grace and glory upon earth.
III
"What action should I do and what should I refrain from doing ?" "What work will best help my self-offering and deliver me from my desires and attachments ?" "What kind of service will be acceptable to the Divine ?" These are some of the problems which often besiege and perplex the Karmayogin at the outset of his spiritual career. There is an aspiration in him, a sincerity, a faith, a fervid, if somewhat flurried, will to self- surrender, what is lacking is knowledge,—knowledge not only of the precise nature and implications of his goal, but also of the path, its ups and downs, its mazes and meanderings, its pitfalls and blind alleys. Mere goodwill cannot be, in the be- ginning at least, a guarantee of perfect immunity. Experience has to be purchased, knowledge to be acquired, at the price of many an error and stumble. But most of these errors can well be avoided if the Yogin can avail himself, from the start, of the guidance of a Guru, a knower of the path and the goal. Because he has trodden the path and arrived at the goal, the Guru can be trusted to lead him, pointing out the pitfalls and protecting him from the visible and invisible attacks.
Still a certain amount of knowledge is essential, for, without a little light in the consciousness, the spiritual adventure may end in a dismal shipwreck. The long passage between the human mind and infinite Consciousness is full of dangers and difficulties, and it is inadvisable to dare to traverse it by the sheer strength of one's will or the ardours of one's heart. The Gayatri, the famous hymn of the Hindus, is a prayer for light in the consciousness, and many verses of the Upanishads too invoke and evoke the same light—"dhi". It is this initial light that makes for the right reception and proper assimilation of the teachings of the Guru and a confident surrender to his guidance. It is from this standpoint of the fostering of the light that Swaddhyaya, the concentrated musing on the sacred teachings, is so
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much enjoined upon the followers of the spiritual path. It is, therefore, with an aspiration for this light—the light that leads, the light that watches and warns, and lifts and consoles us when we "fall upon the thorns of life and bleed"—that we turn to the gracious words of the Mother. These words, or rather sparks shot from the brazier of universal Love, at once kindle the fire of our soul and set aglow our normal consciousness, so that it may cut off its moorings and launch upon the Infinite.
In this essay we shall dwell upon some of the teachings of the Mother regarding the proper accomplishment of Yogic action, especially the avoidance of some of the snares of its path and the renunciation of the ideas, habits and tendencies to which our ignorant nature is all too prone.
"See, how small is the importance of external circumstances. Why strain and stiffen in the effort to realise thy conception of the Truth ? Be more supple, more confident. The only thing thou hast to do is not to let thyself be troubled by anything. To torment oneself about doing good brings about as bad results as bad will. It is in the calm of deep waters that lies the sole possibility of true Service.”¹
In this short paragraph, packed with suggestions, the Mother has embodied three invaluable instructions which every spiritual seeker would do well to lay to heart and practise. The first is that the external circumstances have not much intrinsic importance. Their value lies in the idea we form and the use we make of them. In spiritual life it is always the inner condition, the trend and drift of the psychological elements, the attitude and the spirit that count, and not so much the outer circumstances, whose favour and menace are equally utilised by the soul for its evolution. Sometimes congenial circumstances minister to our spiritual growth and sometimes they prove a positive
¹ Prayers and Meditations, of the Mother, August 2, 19I3. These words spoken by the Divine have a special significance and special bearing on the life and experiences of the Mother. Here we are concerned only with their general import and universal applicability.
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hindrance. Very often the buffet of adverse circumstances fires the being into a more intensive effort and induces an integration of its parts which would have otherwise remained either dully apathetic or feebly responsive to the call of the Spirit. The Yogin comes to discover, as he proceeds on his way, that the circumstances and conditions of his life are not chance happenings, but the impeccable dispensation of a Providence that is working out, in its inscrutable way, the liberation and perfection of his complex nature. He ceases to take the circumstances at their face value, for, in fact, they have none in spiritual life, but goes behind them to glimpse the hand of the Guide. Proceeding still farther, he learns to look upon all circumstances, good and bad, scowling and smiling, with the calm gaze of eternity—they shed all their secular values and distinctions and become but the steps of the self-fulfiling Will of the Divine in him.
The second counsel the Mother gives is that we should not "strain and stiffen” in our effort to realise our conception of the Truth. What we usually do is to form a mental idea of the Truth we want to attain. The idea, no doubt, has its utility; it becomes for the time being the focal point of the progressive energies of our nature. But as soon as our mind opens into a higher consciousness and new truths begin to dawn upon it, it must know how to give up its preconceived ideas, its rigid constructions, and hail the new truths. Without this readiness to renounce the old, limited conceptions and the suppleness to receive the new, expanding aspects of the Truth, we shall remain tethered to the ambitious ignorance of our mind and continue to hug our complacent consistency in a vain pride. What we should never lose sight of is the fact that Truth is one and infinite, though its formulation are many and mutable, and however brilliant a formulation may appear to our mental consciousness, however much it may claim our homage and fealty, to make it the only ideal to be realised is to elect to live in a half-way house and refuse to go forward. Surely, nothing can be more preposterous than to make the mind our guide in the boundless realms of the Spirit. All that it can possibly do
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is to lead us on to some comparatively serene uplands of our normal consciousness and make us believe that we have arrived at the summit of our soul's aspiration. This is nothing short of a camouflaged spiritual catastrophe.
There is another danger in depending entirely upon the guidance of the mind. It is a common experience of those who have studied their own nature that the ego thrives best on the strict principles and stringent rules it imposes upon itself, and feels not only secure but glorified if it can entrench itself in a lofty code of inflexible ethics. Cock-sure of the validity of its prepossessions, it presumes to dictate its spiritual course, and, in spite of the Guru's leading and the soul's experiences, it strives to force its consciousness and nature into a preconceived mould and pattern. This stress and domination of the mental ego spells an arrest of the spiritual evolution, though it may rig out an ethical Joseph and make him masquerade as a spiritual Paul.
What is most needed in spiritual life is an infinite plasticity and an ungrudging capacity for renouncing the lower for the sake of the higher, and ascending from the plains to the plateaus and from the plateaus to the radiant peaks. A springy tread, a supple grasp, and a soaring aspiration characterise a genuine seeker of the Truth. The last renunciation of the mind is the renunciation of its knowledge and its pretentious purity, which done, it can easily surmount itself and steadily progress towards the infinite Truth.
The third teaching of the Mother is : "The only thing thou hast to do is not to let thyself be troubled by anything.” Fret and worry are a great hindrance to Yogic action in as much as they ruffle the poise of the being and disturb the equality of consciousness which is the basis of all spiritual progress. To be troubled is to betray one's weakness and relapse into a mental confusion. Usually it is the vital-emotional being that, hurried by some desires and predilections, creates a ferment in the consciousness and a feverish impatience to realise the ideal; but the very ferment and fever cloud the ideal and deflect the will. "To torment oneself about doing good brings about as
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bad results as bad will.” We may be pursuing an altruistic object, but an agitated consciousness with an unsteady will often produces results contrary to our expectations, results which appear to have been brought about by a bad will. There are many instances, recorded in the lives of Yogins, of a disastrous fall from the path caused by a restless desire for "doing good." Under this desire, so innocent in our eyes and so laudable in those of others, we forget for a while the goal we have set out to attain and give rise to many complications in our own psychology. Not only do our preferences and attachments enter into our choice of the work, but the atmosphere and vibrations of those we want to help and serve introduce into the work elements which often militate against or throw out of gear the developing trends of our being. Our consciousness is obscured as a result of this unhappy decision and choice, and we have perforce to submit to the "determinism of the order of the realities in which we are conscious” at the moment; "whence all the consequences, often unforeseen and unfortunate, contradictory to the general orientation of life and forming obstacles, sometimes terrible, which have afterwards to be surmounted.”¹ Altruism, philanthropy, humanism are all good in their place and conducive to the growth of the moral being and the development of disinterestedness;—some subtle, self-regarding interest, however, remains even in this mental disinterestedness—but the Yogic life is a revolutionary departure from the common standards and traditional courses of human existence, and it is dangerous to be in two minds about its pursuit. If I seek the Divine and a dynamic union with Him in my entire being and at the same time open myself to the suggestions and solicitations of my ethical mind, which is even at its best a mind of twilit ignorance, I allow the brightest part of my consciousness to be eclipsed, my will deflected, and my nature yoked to a category of determinism which may seriously imperil my spiritual progress. It is only our ignorance of the diverse determinisms of the different planes of consciousness and different orders of realities that makes
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, January 31, 1914.
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us rush into any action that appeals to our surface being. An indiscriminate undertaking of the actions preferred by the mind usually leads to a confusion of values and a chaos of consequences. What than should a Yogin do when many ideals appeal to his mind and many actions demand his decision and choice ? What is the most important criterion of Yogic action ? The Mother's words depict two successive states of the Yogin: —first, that in which he is seeking union and identification with the Divine through Yogic action as well as through love and knowledge, and, second, that in which he acts in the Divine, by the direct dynamisation of the divine Will. The whole attitude of the Yogin in the first state is summed up in the the following words, "Grant that more and more I may be perfectly awakened to the awareness of Thy constant Presence. Let all my acts conform to Thy Law; let there be no difference between my will and Thine. Extricate me from the illusory consciousness of my mind, from its world of phantasies; let me identify my consciousness with the absolute Consciousness, for that art Thou.”¹ The attunement of the will of the Yogin to the will of the Divine through a progressive elimination of the desires and attachments of the old Adam is the first objective. Each action, before it is undertaken, has to be referred to the Guru, or in the absence of the Guru, to the indwelling Divine, for approval and sanction, so that none of the desires of the being, physical, vital or mental, may go to determine our decision and choice. Not what we think best and essential, ; but what the Divine, the Author and Master of our being, demands of us, should be undertaken and accomplished in the spirit of a joyous sacrifice. So long as we have not attained to some kind of union with the Divine, so long as we live in the ordinary consciousness, "nothing should...be treated lightly, with indifference; the smallest circumstances, the smallest acts have a great importance and should be seriously considered; for we should at every moment strive to do that which will facilitate the identification of our consciousness with the eternal Consciousness, and carefully avoid all that can be an obstacle to this identification.
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, February 15, 1914.
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It is then that the rules of conduct having at their base a perfect personal disinterestedness should assume all their value.”¹ In this state of aspiring but unsealed human consciousness, it would be not only fatuous but spiritually fatal to believe or claim that we are instruments of the divine Will and have no personal responsibility for the actions we do. Such a belief is always attended with the most ruinous consequences—an abnormal magnification of the ego, a precipitation of the crude vital forces, and a straying away from the right path. And yet the consciousness of being a divine instrument has to be attained, the sense of ourselves being the doers of our actions has to go. This paradox is resolved by the double movement of rejection and surrender,—rejection or repulsion of all egoistic desires and a progressive surrender and opening of the whole consciousness and nature to the developing action of the divine Force. Desirelessness, so much insisted upon in the Gita, is the best insurance against delusions and errors. A desireless heart is a pure heart and a fit temple for the installation of the divine Presence. It is only in a desireless consciousness that the divine Will can manifest itself.
We learn, then, from the above words of the Mother, that the touchstone of a true Yogic action, done from the ordinary consciousness, is that it should not be impelled by any self- regarding desire, however humane and noble it may be, but by an unflagging aspiration for union with the Divine through an increasing conformity to His self-manifesting Will. At each step of our journey, "the duality will present itself"—whether to do this or to do that—and at each step we have to make a choice, surrenderingly and irrevocably. It is only the sincerity —absolute and integral sincerity—of our aspiration and the answering action of the divine Grace that can take us through the tangled forest of Yogic action—gahana karmano gatiḥ.
But when we live in the Divine, identified with Him, our will attuned to His Will, our springs of action moved by Him alone, we perceive the relativity of all terrestrial circumstances and we say, "Doing this or that has after all no great importance,
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, February 12, 1914.
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yet such and such a way of action will be the best utilisation of such and such a faculty or temperament. All actions, whatever they may be, even the most contradictory in appearance, can be the expression of Thy Law in the measure in which they are imbued with the consciousness of that Law, which is not a law of practical application capable of being translated into principles or rules in the ordinary human consciousness, but which is a law of attitude, of a constant and general consciousness, something which is not at all expressed by formulas, but which is lived.”¹
In that unbanked consciousness "all problems regarding we should or should not do or concerning all the resolutions to be taken, appear easy, a little childish.” For "the best use to be made of our physical organism. Thy mode of manifestation upon earth, it is enough, when Thou alone art conscious in us, to turn regard towards this body to know indisputably (for, there is room for any doubt there) what is the thing it can do b what is the activity which will employ most completely all energies.”² The right intuition springing out of that union, or to put it more graphically, the Will of the Divine, flashing i of the union, impels the action of the Yogi, his mind stilled into a receiving and transmitting channel, and his body, a plastic and thrilled dynamo of divine energies.
But whatever the nature and magnitude of the action, w ever the range and depth of its results, "without attaching any great importance to this activity, to this quite relative utilisation, we can take, without any difficulty, without any inner discussion, the decisions which, to the outer consciousness, appear most daring and hazardous.”³
For, after all, what is an action, even a most stupendous and far-reaching action, but a relative and transitory utilisation of human faculties, an ephemeral ripple of the universal Force, before the moveless infinity and eternity of the Absolute! To be attached to an action, however great it may be, is to forfeit one's union with the Absolute. A Yogi must "rise above
¹ prayers and Meditations of the Mother, February 12, 1914.
² ibid., February n, 1914.
³ ibid,, February n, 1914.
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the perception of contingencies” and see "things from the heights of Thy eternity.”
The Mother's words ring in our ears as we close this brief exposition :—"It is in the calm of deep waters that lies the sole possibility of true service.” No precipitancy, no inquietude, no tension, no anxiety or worry about doing this important duty or that, serving the society or helping humanity, but taking an inner plunge through love and knowledge and dedicated action, and, in the unassailable peace and serenity of the depths, discovering the Will of the Divine, surrendering our own to it and letting it fulfil itself in every movement of our life—this is true service. Whom else should man serve if not the eternal Maker and Master of his being ? And how else can he best serve Him except by the direct instrumentation of His Will and Force ?
IV
"Who is the real doer of a perfect Yogic action ? Is it the purified and surrendered ego of the individual under the direct influence of the soul ? Is it the soul itself ? Or, is it Divine ?” This is one of the most momentous questions in the philosophy of Yogic action, and we propose to consider it here in the light of the Mother's teachings.
It goes without saying that the ego cannot be the doer of a pure Yogic action. The ego acts from desire, however subtly disguised it may be, or refined and noble in its character; but the one indispensable pre-condition of a pure Yogic action is that it must be absolutely disinterested and desireless. If the ego is ruled out, is the soul then the doer ? Some schools of dynamic Yoga will reply in the affirmative. They will say that the liberated soul, detached from and superior to Nature, does the Yogic action. Others may go a step further and assert that the liberated individual, the Jivanmukta, living in the Divine, can be said to be the doer, in the sense that he is the channel of the divine Will, but, really speaking, it is the Divine Himself who is the sole and sovereign doer of all action. Both these
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views are true, because they are based on experiences which cannot be impugned; but what they skip over is the dynamic nucleus or the active centralising agency in the frontal part of the nature and its contribution or non-contribution to the Yogic action. In other words, does the ego completely fade out of the individual nature, or does it persist even when the soul is in command ? With the blunt, disarming candour, characteristic of him, Sri Ramakrishna says, "If the obstinate ego would not go, well, let it then remain as a servant of God." The implication is unmistakable that the ego does not altogether disappear out of the nature of the liberated individual, but persists, subdued and surrendered, it may be, enlightened and widened in consciousness, but essentially separative and self-assertive, This view lends colour to the wide-spread belief that so long as the body is there, some kind of "I" ness or the ego is bound to persist in the nature parts of even a liberated man. The physical knot of egoism, it is held, can be dissolved only when the body drops and the soul departs from the earthly life. The Vedantic ideal of the Jivanmukta (liberated in life) is not quite explicit; about the actual state of the active physical consciousness of the liberated man. That his soul remains detached, impersonal unaffected by the mutations of Nature, which it observes but with which it does not identify itself, admits of no possible doubt; but what about his outer personality, that part of his surface nature which is rivetted to the sense-bound separative "I" ? There is nothing definite and conclusive in the Upanishads to prove that Janaka's outer nature too was as much liberated as his soul, and that his physical consciousness was! much universalised and impersonalised as his spiritual., purified, quieted and controlled physical consciousness may reflect to a certain extent the light and bliss of the soul, but, as the experience of many of the greatest Yogis testifies, inherent egoism of the body-consciousness remains or recurs, and the subconscient welter is always there to surprise the a by its sporadic surges. In Sri Chaitanya's case we find a victorious humility beating the veils of the ego to a frazzle, but still the frazzle remained and betrayed itself in his occasional
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Over-eagerness to abase himself to the dust and his not infrequent spurts of ascetic severity towards himself and his disciples. Only in the state of the Mahabhava did his ego completely vanish, leaving the whole being in the possession of the Divine. Totapuri's sudden flare-up at a stranger's asking for a brand from his fire to light his tobacco was not so much an outburst of anger as of the subconscient ego, which had managed to survive his soul's liberation and which now revolted at the impudent audacity of the boorish stranger in asking for a brand from his—Totapuri's !—fire. In Vishwamitra's case, we have the classical example of the leech-like tenacity of the ego asserting itself in the wake of every spiritual achievement.
It is perhaps the Gita alone that holds out the great hope of a full and harmonious divine living, sarvathā yogī mayi vartate, wholly free from the taint of the ego, nirahankāra. It promises to its follower an abiding God-union in and through life's manifold activities. But how that is to be accomplished, by what supreme transmutation of the basic stuff of human nature, it does not explain. It confines itself to the synthetic teaching that by the elimination of all desires and an integral self-giving to the Divine alone through knowledge, works and love, one can come to do the works of the liberated, muktasya karma, or the divine action, divyam karma, unhindered and unharassed by the ego. Here we must pause to clarify two points : first, whether the ego which is rooted in the sub-soil of our being, can be grubbed out and cast away by the discipline of the Gita and, second, whether a desireless, impersonal action is all that a perfect Yogic action means.
The spiritual discipline of the Gita is, indeed, a very powerfully synthetic discipline for a divine life-effectuation and life- fulfilment, but the most radically effective steps of it, the steps of the crucial transition from the human to the Divine, have been left in obscurity, as a mystery to be resolved in personal experience. But the modern mind insists on elaboration and elucidation. It wants to know what this supreme path is, before it resolves to venture upon it. It wants to have a clear idea of what constitutes a Yogic action—who is the real doer of the
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divine works and what is the place and function of the individual soul and its nature in them. It has understood that the ego has to go, lock, stock and barrel; but, how, it asks, so long as the gross physical body is there and the ego's roots thrive in the fertile fields of the subconscient ? Has it ever been achieved except in trance or a deeply indrawn state of human consciousness? Is there any spiritual discipline by which not only the conscious parts of the nature, but also the subconscient and the inconscient can be thoroughly cleansed of even the last, lingering vestiges of the ego and transferred to the sole charge of the Divine ? Can the lower human nature of the three shackling qualitative modes, guṇas, be raised and converted into the divine Nature, parā prakṛti ? Can man become wholly divine, not only in his inner, but also in his outermost consciousness and being, even in his secular, active personality ?
The second point which has to be clarified before we proceed to a detailed consideration of all the above issues, is whether a desireless, impersonal action is all that a consummate Yogic action means. The end of Yogic action is the perfect fulfilment of the Will of the Divine, which is a will to self-manifestation. The attunement of the will of the individual to the Will of the Divine is, therefore, the indispensable condition of this fulfilment, and this attunement must be integral, that is to say, it must be an attunement of the will of each part of the individual to the Will of the Divine. Now, a desireless, impersonal, passive consciousness can let the divine Will work itself out, but this passivity, however luminous and blissful it may be, reduces the soul to a will-less channel and its instrumental nature to an automaton. There is no active participation or collaboration of the individual in the work of the Divine, no rapture of the dynamic union. That cannot surely be the intention of the Divine in the individual. In a pure and perfect Yogic action the individual soul with its integrated and transformed nature must be an active agent and participant in the divine action, each part of its being, in tune with the others and in tune with the Divine, developed to its utmost perfection and responding to every touch of the divine Force. In the midst of its passivity it
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must be a vibrating dynamo of divine activity; in the midst of its impersonality it must preserve a unified and powerful personality, and its desirelessness must be, not a blank of luminous repose, but a vast, thrilled channel of the supreme creative Will and its lightning energies.
In the Prayer of the 17th April, 1914, the Mother makes it abundantly clear that no part of the human nature has to be coerced or repressed or weakened, each has its distinct place and function proper to it and indispensable to the harmonious working of the organic whole. What is to be totally expunged is the ego, the separative ‛I-ness' and 'my-ness' which insulates the individual from the universal and condemns him to ignorance and incapacity.
"O Lord, O almighty Master, sole Reality, grant that no error, no obscurity, no fatal ignorance may creep into my heart and my thought.
"In action, the personality is the inevitable and indispensable intermediary of Thy will and Thy force.
"The stronger, the more complex, powerful, individualised and conscious is the personality, the more powerfully and usefully can the instrument serve. But, by reason of the very character of personality, it easily tends to be drawn into the fatal illusion of its separate existence and become little by little a screen between Thee and that on which Thou wiliest to act. Not at the beginning, in the manifestation, but in the transmission of the return; that is to say, instead of being, as a faithful servant, an intermediary who brings back to Thee exactly what is Thy due—the forces sent forth in reply to Thy action—there is a tendency in the personality to want to keep for itself a part of the forces, with this idea : 'It is I who have done this or that, I who am thanked.’ Pernicious illusion, obscure falsehood, now are you discovered and unmasked. This is the maleficent canker corroding the fruit of the action, falsifying all its results.
"O Lord, O my sweet Master, sole Reality, dispel this feeling of the 'I’. I have now understood that so long as there will be a manifested universe, the 'I’ will remain necessary for Thy manifestation;
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to dissolve, or even to diminish or weaken the T, is to deprive Thee of the means of manifestation, in whole or part. But what must be radically and definitively suppressed, is the illusory thought, the illusory feeling, the illusory sensation of the separate 'I’. At no moment, in no circumstances must we forget that our 'I’ has no reality outside Thee.
"O my sweet Master, my divine Lord, tear out from my heart this illusion that Thy servant may become pure and faithful, and faithfully and integrally bring back to Thee all That is Thy due, In silence let me contemplate and understand this supreme ignorance and dispel it for ever. Chase the shadow from my heart and let Thy light reign in it, its uncontested sovereign”
This Prayer focuses our attention on five cardinal principles of Yogic action :—
1) "In action the personality is the inevitable and indispensable intermediary of Thy Will and Thy forces.”
2) "The stronger, the more complex, powerful, individualised and conscious is the personality, the more powerfully and usefully can the instrument serve.”
3) "So long as there will be a manifested universe, the T will remain necessary for Thy manifestation...”
4) "To dissolve or even to diminish or weaken the T is to deprive Thee of the means of manifestation, in whole or part.”
5) "What must be radically and definitively suppressed, is the illusory thought, the illusory feeling, the illusory sensation of the separate 'I’. At no moment, in no circumstances must we forget that our 'I’ has no reality outside Thee”
These revolutionary ideas give a remarkable definiteness and precision to the ideal of the Yogic action as set forth by the Mother. The human personality has not to be abolished in the Impersonal, but carefully preserved, organised, reinforced and harmoniously developed; only it has to be purified of all taint and perversion of the ego. A supremely conscious, complex and firmly individualised personality is the best "intermediary of the divine Will”, if the "I” in it is not the little, limited, separative "I", but the transcendent and universal
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"I" who is without a second. Through such impersonal personalities alone can the Divine affirm His inalienable unity in diversity and yet make each diversity, each finite form a facet and an aspect, a manifesting mould and a mirror of His formless Infinity. To weaken the "I" is to deprive the Divine of the means of His manifestation, for, how, then, will the Divine declare Himself and reveal His glory in myriad forms, saying in each of them, "Here am I, my initial intention of becoming many and yet remaining the indivisible One has been fulfilled" ?
The "I" will then remain,—without it there can be no reception and transmission of the divine Will and the divine forces—but it will become the transcendent and universal "I", the one "I" conscious of itself in all forms and powerful to achieve everything. The blind, sense-embedded, separate "I" will disappear for ever, even from the physical consciousness, even from the subconscient. This supreme consummation, unrealised by man up to the present day, but inevitable as the crown of his evolutionary endeavour, will be possible by a descent of the transforming Light of the Divine into the very cells of the body, even into the submerged parts of the being, as some of the Mother's experiences in the "Prayers and Meditations" illustrate. We do not propose to deal with the long and steep work of transformation here;¹ for our present purpose it is enough to maintain that the ego can be completely excised from the entire being and consciousness of man and the Divine installed there as the unveiled doer of all Yogic action. What was left cryptic in the Gita's conception of the Yogic action and missed by some dynamic Yogas that miscarried, has been clearly expounded by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and reduced to a comprehensive, synthetic and flexible system—the steps of the Spirit override all rigour and routine—which, whoever feels called, can follow to its glorious end.
Describing the state of the liberated individual being, living in the Divine and exclusively devoted to His work, the Mother
¹ It has been dealt with in our article "THE MOTHER ON TRANSFORMATION” in the Mother India of August 19, 1950,
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says, "To be immersed at once in Thee and in Thy work....To be no longer a limited individual...to become the infinitude of Thy forces manifesting through a point...to be delivered from all trammels and limitations... to rise above all restricting though ...to act and be beyond the act...to act through and for individuals but see only the oneness, the oneness of Thy Love, Thy Knowledge and Thy Being...”¹ An egoless, impersonal, individual consciousness, basing and supporting God-impelled action through the transfigured natural personality and its sublimated faculties, each in its place and at its proper task, none depressed or repressed or neglected, but all harmoniously organised and divinely used—this is the perfection of Yogic action as experienced by the Mother and held up before man as the highest spiritual ideal to be realised in life. This dynamic divine union is not only a "simple and perceived contact of the substance of the soul with that of the Divine", as Coventry Patmore describes "the most perfect form of contemplation", but it is also a constant union and communion between the transmuted substance of the individual body with the infinite luminous substance of the divine Existence. It was perhaps some such integral dynamic ideal that was in the background of the Upanishadic verses :—
"Know the body for a chariot and the soul for the master of the driving, the lower mind for the reins and the higher mind for the charioteer who driveth.
"The senses are the steeds of the soul and the objects of their action are the paths in which they gallop; for there is one who is yoked with soul and mind and senses, and he is that which enjoyeth, say the thinkers.”²
"There is one who is yoked with soul and mind and senses" evidently refers to the One without a second, the only Existent, the sole Reality, the Divine, who becomes on earth the overt doer of all Yogic action, and this interpretation is confirmed
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, May 4, 1914.
² Kathopanishad, Part I, Chap. 3.
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by the first verse of the same part of the Upanishad :—
"There are two that drink deep of the truth of works well done- in the world: they are lodged in the heart of the creatures and in the highest half of the most high is their dwelling.” "As of light and shade God-knowers speak of them...”
An ascent of the integrated consciousness of the individual to the supreme Truth-Consciousness, ṛta-cit, of the Divine by an absolute and integral aspiration and self-surrender induces a delivering and transforming descent of the ṛta-cit into the whole being of man, and it is this ṛta-cit that becomes the doer of all actions, kṛtsna karmakṛt, in the liberated individual who enjoys immortality "by birth" and works in this terrestrial existence. The end of human life is not flight or extinction, but immortality in creative delight.
V
Immensely more than the ordinary worldly life, the spiritual life is a battlefield, where each inch of ground has to be won by hard fight, and it is always—except at a very advanced stage—a fight against tremendously heavy odds. Besides, what immeasurably increases the difficulty of the struggle, is that the forces we fight are not outside, but within us, within our psychological constitution, though foreign to our true self. It is a fight in oneself, a remorseless, tireless fight for the excision of the exotic and the excrescent and the expulsion of the malignant intruders and the purveyors of poison and pestilence. There is no force outside that can really harm us, so long as there is none within us to respond to it.
But, it may be asked, are there not forces hostile to us and to our spiritual progress, which attack us from outside? It must be admitted at once that there are, no doubt, many such forces in the world, and that they do strive to delude or thwart us; but if we oppose them with a calm and resolute rejection, fortified by divine protection which a sincere call can never
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fail to secure, and if nothing in us responds or gives the slightest opening to them, they may invade, but can never injure us. But are there not forces and elements in the world, it may be asked again, which are vowed to prevent a collective advance of man towards the Divine and His descent and emergence for self-manifestation in human life ? Will an exclusively subjective self-discipline be effective enough against them ? And granting that it is effective, will it be effective to the extent of conquering and converting them altogether ?
The last question raises an important issue. Spiritual victory has two aspects, the inner and the outer; and a complete victory must comprise both. Self-mastery and world-mastery, swarājya-siddhi and sāmrājya-siddhi have been the highest ideal of the most dynamic spiritual cultures of the remote past. But self-mastery or swarājya-siddhi is the first indispensable achievement, and without it the second is impossible. It is only when one is master of oneself that one can hope and endeavour to be master of the world. It is a wrong strategy to launch upon aggression before consolidating the defence. But when one realises one's true self, one finds it widening into infinity. It is realised not only as an individual entity, but also as universal and transcendent; and then nothing remains outside-all is seen and felt and tackled in oneself. It is only when we have this comprehensive realisation of ourself containing the whole universe, that we understand that there is no outside and inside; and not before that. It is only then that we appreciate the truth of what the Mother means when she says:—
"It is in oneself that there are all the obstacles, it is in a that there are all the difficulties, it is in oneself that there is all the darkness and ignorance. Even if we were to travel across the whole earth, bury ourselves in some solitary place, break with all our habits, lead the most ascetic life, still if some bond of illusion held back the consciousness far from Thy absolute Consciousness, if some egoistic attachment deprived us of the integral communion with Thy divine Love, we should be no nearer to Thee, whatever might be the outer circumstances. Are there even
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circumstances more or less favourable ? I doubt it; it is the idea we form of them which enables us to profit better or worse by the lessons they give us.”¹
First, then, a thorough cleansing of our inner being, an uncompromising elimination of all that stands in the way of our total self-consecration to the Divine. At this stage of the Yoga, it will be more and more evident that the real causes of our difficulties lie within us and that the outer resistance is only a provoking action and a reminder of them. It would be futile to struggle with the outer circumstances without conquering the inner impurities and weaknesses which render our being vulnerable to their attacks. All the obstacles we meet with, all the difficulties we knock against, all the darkness and ignorance which cause stumbles and suffering are, as the Mother says, within us; and it is the most primary and principal part of Yogic discipline to look within with an honest, dispassionate and searching eye, and spot even each little offender that hides in darkness. A considerable amount of time and labour which we expend on the outer factors in the mistaken belief that it is they that are responsible for our falls and failures, can thus be saved, and many an unpleasant consequence avoided or obviated.
When we look at the difficulties of life from this standpoint, we realise the extreme importance and utility of action in spiritual life. Action rouses all the elements and energies of our nature and confronts them with those of others. In this interlocking of diverse forces, colliding and coalescing with each other, we get an opportunity, otherwise unavailable, of studying not only the main trends and tendencies of our own nature, its major movements and vibrations, its dominant desires and attachments and preferences, but even the little turns and twists, the hidden sores or passing quivers which, though they elude a superficial observation, are yet prolific sources of disharmony and disruption. It is thanks to Yogic action that all these forces and elements of our nature are
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exposed to our view and made amenable to change and correction.
But usually we twist away from the truth and blame others or our circumstances and surroundings for the defeats and chagrins we experience in life. We do not have the courage to trace their sources in us, to realise that they are pointers to some defects and drawbacks lurking or latent in our being, which have to be discovered and removed, in order that we may advance towards our goal of an integral union and communion with the Divine. It is spiritually harmful to quarrel with persons or worry over circumstances. On the contrary, it is not unoften the unfavourable circumstances that stimulate the divine qualities in us and promote our spiritual progress; and we can also say that what we know as favourable or congenial circumstances prove often positively detrimental by their anaesthetic effect upon our creative energies and evolving faculties.
The truth of the matter is that the outer conditions and circumstances play a very insignificant, almost a negligible role in the spiritual advancement of our being. What is important is the inner purification—the freedom from desire and attachment, from cares and unrest and falsehood and egoism. And what is still more important than this, is the single-minded aspiration for the Divine and a perfect self-dedication to His Will. This is the positive aspect of Yoga which has always to be stressed and not lost sight of in the rush and tumult of the lower forces. A sincere aspiration and surrender usually bring in their wake a light which is not of the mind, and a subtle guidance which is not of our moral conscience; and then it becomes much easier to detect in us the difficulties and obstacles which hamper and hinder our progress. And once we detect and reject them, we find that the subjective self-discipline amply justifies itself by a definite change in the objective self-expression of our nature. The difficulties and obstacles which had cast a menacing gloom over our life disappear, as if by a miracle, confirming our trust in the Mother's words, "If you keep your faith unshaken and your heart always open
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to me, then all difficulties, however great, will contribute to the greater perfection of the being.”¹ In regard to the difficulties we encounter in work, the Mother says, "The difficulties in work come not from circumstances or outer petty occurrences, they come from something in the inner attitude (especially in the vital attitude) which is wrong,—egoism, ambition, fixity of the mental conceptions regarding work, etc., etc. And it is always better to look for the cause of the disharmony, in order to correct it, in oneself rather than in the other or others.”² If we learn to step back and look within, instead of fretting and worrying, each time there is an opposition or confusion in the outer circumstances of our life, we gain not only in endurance and equality, which are the very basis and condition of self-mastery, but in the inner power to straighten and solve the outer problems; and the greatest gain is first the awareness and then the elimination of whatever in us has occasioned or reacted to the circumstances. "Always circumstances come to reveal the hidden weaknesses that have to be overcome.”³
But when we identify ourselves with the universal and the transcendent Spirit, nothing is perceived as outside of us; the forces of light and the forces of darkness, the factors that help and the factors that hinder, the goodwill and sympathy of friends and the rancour and resistance of enemies, our own blemishes and the blemishes of others—all are seen within us, and not without; all have to be dealt with, in the way the inner light indicates, within us, and not without. It is this that the Mother means when she says to the Divine, "(1) await from Thee the inspiration and strength needed to set right the error in me and around me,—two things that are one, for I have now a constant and precise perception of the universal unity determining an absolute interdependence of all action.”4 A comprehensive consciousness embraces all, feels itself in all, grapples with the forces and problems of life, individual and collective,
² Words of the Mother, Second Series.
³ Words of the Mother. . .
4 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 2, 1913.
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with the clairvoyant intimacy of identity. This is the typical spiritual seeing of which the Upanishads speak—the seeing from the inside out, from the core to the crust, from reality to phenomena, from the absolute to the relative, from Truth to its manifold, evolving self-expression. In this seeing in dynamic identity inheres the power of not only purifying, but trans- figuring life and achieving divine mastery.
But whatever the nature of the mastery we aim at, self- mastery or world-mastery, the problem of the spiritual life is the problem of inner exploration and inner conquest. The truth of things floats not on the surface, but rays out from the depths, and a complete union and communion with the Divine can only be the result of a perfect perfection in self-mastery achieved by a scrupulous self-analysis and a relentless elimination of the difficulties and obstacles that our ignorant desires and attachments invite and harbour in us. And for this victorious self-mastery or all-mastery, Yogic action is the indispensable means. A passive, ascetic spirituality leaves the world and life much as they have always been—it seeks its crown elsewhere than on earth.
VI
Our survey of the Mother's teaching on Yogic action draws to a close. We have seen that the primary and principal aim of Yogic action is union with the Divine. A disinterested doing of all action as an offering to the Divine, without allowing any desire or preference to enter into it, is the first step. In proportion as desirelessness, and self-offering progress, one advances in an increasing purity and freedom, towards union and communion with the Divine. It is at this stage, when a certain amount of silence has been established in the mind and the central consciousness has become transparent and limpid, that the Divine Will manifests itself, intermittently, as if in a sudden flash, in the beginning, and afterwards more clearly, definitely and constantly, and the will of the divine worker unites with it in a rapture of ardent self-giving. If the primary and principal
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object of Yogic action is union, the ultimate object is the flawless expression of the divine Will in the liberated and transformed individual. The fullness of the self-giving is the most important condition of this double fulfilment—divine union and divine self-expression.
But what usually happens in many spiritual seekers is that the most developed and enlightened part of their being surrenders itself to the Divine, but the other parts comprising even those of which they are not themselves quite aware, remain entrenched in customary habits and let themselves be moved by the forces of Ignorance; and it is often these unsurrendered and unregenerate parts that cash in upon the progress of the enlightened part and feel a glow of vicarious self-exaltation. This state can continue long; for, the sense of surrender gives a sort of justification to all one's actions and general ways of life, and one hardly feels any imperative call for the change of the whole being. If the enlightened part is under the direct influence of the psychic or the soul, there is the possibility of a total change. The cosy sense of self-exaltation fades away sooner or later, giving place to a haunting sense or want, some- times a positive, poignant feeling of inner destitution and forlornness. This augurs well, for it shows that the psychic influence is spreading to all the parts of the being, preluding and compelling an earnest seeking and effort. The discontent may be vague in the beginning, and one may not even know what it is for; but it grows, becomes more and more insistent and articulate and definite till the dominant will gathers up all the threads of the consciousness and constrains the unaspiring, apathetic and recalcitrant parts of the being to pay homage to the central ideal of life. But if the mind has taken the lead in the sadhana and the psychic influence is but faintly felt in moments of idealistic exaltation or emotional ardours, the total change may be long in coming, or may not come at all in the present life. And this is a common enough eventuality, which illustrates the biblical dictum that many are called, but only a few are chosen; for it is only those who have given all of themselves that are chosen.
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This completeness of the turning is the most decisive and determining factor in spiritual life. Especially, in the integral Yoga of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, nothing abiding can be achieved without an integral surrender. Experiences in the mind and the heart, or even in the higher and deeper reaches of consciousness are, in themselves, ineffectual to change the whole man,—his outer dynamic parts, which are slaves of mechanical habits and susceptible to the suggestions and impressions of the subconscient or the streaming influences of the surroundings, refuse to submit to any new orientation and discipline. The utility or rather the indispensability of Yogic action comes in just here, for, it is impossible to change the outer active nature without imposing upon it the attitude of self-offering in detail. An active, detailed self-offering, an offering of all one's external movements and of the will itself to the Divine, is the most effective way of purifying and transforming the whole nature.
But here too there is a difficulty. The hold of the ego is nowhere so fixed, so inertly, rigidly automatic as in our physical personality. Though it is stronger and more dominant and perverse in the vital, more subtly pervasive and masterful in the mind, the ego has an uncanny density in the physical being, which is almost impervious to the influence of any higher light, short of the highest, the Supramental. In a global Overmental experience, there does take place a complete universalisation of consciousness, but in normal moments of active physical consciousness, the ego in the body is found to persist as an unrelenting menace and veto against the universalisation achieved. That is why the seekers of the Spirit have always cherished an undisguised contempt for the body and its consciousness and tried to live as far as possible in the depths of their being or on its heights. This inert, mechanical persistence of the ego in the physical consciousness is considerably due to its roots being in the obscure regions of the subconscient, where the light of the higher consciousness does not reach and act. The way to eliminate this ego is not, therefore, an aversion to action and a retreat into the depths, but a constant and conscious
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offering of all action to the Divine with a persistence as dogged, as uncompromising and as relentless as that of the physical ego itself. The attitude of surrender and offering has to be rubbed into the physical being till it oozes down into the subconscient and becomes permanently fixed there. In the inertia of Matter lies the hidden power of tenacious retention; and if the attitude of offering is once stamped upon it, it will hold on to it, as it holds on to the ego today, Yogic action, therefore, is indispensable if the ego is to be wiped out of the physical consciousness and the Divine made the sole master of it. But the final victory and the absolute divine possession of the whole physical being will come, as we have already indicated, by the descent of the supramental Force which will unloose all the knots of the ego and steep the whole being in a living sense of the Infinite. In the luminous amplitude of the supramental consciousness, the ego, including the physical ego, will attain a painless Nirvana.
Let us illustrate what the Mother means by the offering of all actions.
She says, "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, such as eating; when you eat you must feel that it is the Divine who is eating through you. 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.”¹ Sri Krishna's injunction to Arjuna in the Gita to offer all that he does, eats, renounces, gives and strives for in the way of askesis, is in line with this teaching of the Mother. But this detailed surrender is very difficult to achieve. An unflagging will and a sleepless vigilance, harnessed to a constant and comprehensive aspiration, can alone discipline and integrate all parts of the being and offer
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all their movements from moment to moment to the Divine. And Yogic action is the only means by which this detailed self- offering can be effected.
In the Prayer of November 28, 1912, which we have studied in the first essay of this series, the Mother speaks of the daily activity being the "anvil on which all the elements of our being must pass and repass in order to be purified, refined, made supple and ripe for the illumination which contemplation gives to them.” The Prayer, as we have seen in that essay, is remarkable as an outline of the Yogic action and demonstrates its indispensability for the integral realisation of the Divine. The Prayer we quote below—it is the last Prayer in the Mother's Prayers and Meditations—sums up the fundamental qualities necessary for Yogic action; it covers the whole field of life, its pith and pulse and purpose, and brings out in bold relief the ideal attitude of a servant of God :—
(A Prayer for those who wish to serve the Divine)
October 23, 1937.
"Glory to Thee, O Lord, who triumphest over every obstacle.
Grant that nothing in us shall be an obstacle in Thy work.
Grant that nothing may retard Thy manifestation.
Grant that Thy Will may be done in all things and at every moment.
We stand here before Thee that Thy Will may be fulfilled in us, in every element, in every activity of our being, from our supreme heights to the smallest cells of the body.
Grant that we may be faithful to Thee utterly and for ever.
We would be completely under Thy influence to the exclusion of every other.
Grant that we may never forget to own towards Thee a deep, an intense gratitude.
Grant that we may never squander any of the marvellous things that are Thy gifts to us at every instant.
Grant that everything in us may collaborate in Thy work and all be ready for Thy realisation.
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Glory to Thee, O Lord, Supreme Master of all realisation.
Give us a faith active and ardent, absolute and unshakable, in Thy Victory”
In the integral Yoga self-surrender can be said to be the very first step, which means that for the overcoming of difficulties as well as for the purification of our nature, we depend not upon our e own strength and power, but upon the Grace and Force of the Divine. That is why in the first line of the Prayer quoted above, the Mother addresses the Divine as the Lord "who triumphest, over every obstacle.” In fact and in actual experience, it is the Divine who does the sadhana (Yoga) in him who has surrendered to Him in all sincerity; and it is He who removes all obstacles, lurking within us or assailing us from without. In the a second line, therefore, the Divine is prayed for "that nothing in us shall be an obstacle in Thy work.” But what is that work ? Manifestation—manifestation of the Divine in Matter. And what is the best means of bringing about the fullness of this manifestation ? It is the fulfilment of the Divine Will "in all things and at every moment.” When our will, purified of all desire and egoism, unites and co-operates with the divine Will, then the latter can fulfil itself freely in our life and nature, "in every activity of our being, from our supreme heights to the smallest cells of the body.” This is a state of surpassing joy and freedom, a joy and freedom which no desire-ridden human being can ever us, know. But in order to attain this state and maintain it, we have to develop, along with surrender, faithfulness and gratitude, the capacity for cherishing, conserving and making the right use of the "marvellous things that are Thy (God's) gifts to us at every instant,” an integral and dynamic aspiration for collaborating in the divine work, and most important of all, faith, a faith "active and ardent, absolute and unshakable”, not only in the Divine, but in His Victory. Faithfulness means to be completely under the influence of the Divine, to the exclusion of every other influence. Gratitude, the rarest of virtues, has to be deep and and intense and constant for the marvellous things,—the inspiring flashes of light, the spurts of force and the thrills of delight
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among other things,—that are God's "gifts to us at every instant.” It would be suicidal for a seeker of the integral union and perfection to squander or to be negligent or indifferent to the gifts of the Divine, whether they are material or spiritual, Even the material things that come to him for his use are not only from the Divine, but afire with the Divine, and have, there- fore, to be handled in the right spirit and with a loving and scrupulous care. His life is a sacrament and his possessions are a trust from the Divine, and his progress and perfection depend upon the spirit in which he makes use of them. Lastly, what is most fruitful in the self-surrendering attitude of the servant of the Divine, is a resolute will to collaborate in the divine work with an absolute, unshakable faith in the ultimate Victory. This collaboration implies an active, and not a passive, surrender; the perception of the divine Will and the nature and purpose of its work, and a conscious and constant cooperation in that work with an unwavering faith in its final accomplishment—the full and perfect manifestation of God in the material world.
The only objective we have to set before ourselves, in this age at least, is the Victory of the Divine over the forces of darkness —over Ignorance, Falsehood and Death. This is the great work we are called upon to undertake and achieve. What is the means, the sovereign means by which this Victory will be won ? It is Love, the highest and mightiest Force of the Supreme. In her Prayer of the 23rd July, 1914, the Mother invokes the Divine to achieve this Victory :—
"O Lord, Thou art all-powerful; become the fighter and aim the victory. May Thy Love dwell as the sovereign Master of our hearts and Thy knowledge never leave our thoughts.....Do not abandon us in impotence and darkness; shatter all limits, break all chains, dispel all illusions...”
And in the Prayer of the 17th October, 1914, she communicates to us the promise of the Divine Mother with whom she is identified :—
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"O Divine Mother, the obstacles will he surmounted and the enemy appeased. Thou wilt reign over all the earth with Thy sovereign love, and the consciousness of men will be full of the light of Thy serenity. This is the promise.”
To conclude. The Mother teaches a dynamic and integral surrender to the Divine through Yogic action, which is the most effective means of purifying and transforming the active surface nature of man, especially the vital-physical. Since the aim of her Yoga is no mere purification but a radical transfiguration of the integral being of man, she insists on detailed surrender, surrender of each thought and feeling and action, to the Divine. Transformation of the whole being will naturally culminate in a constant and complete union with the Divine and an unimpeded expression of His Will in the life of the human instrument. This Will is, for the present period of human evolution at least, as we learn from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo a Will to Victory over the forces of darkness and death, and a manifestation of God's supramental sovereignty and splendour in the material world.
Those who have felt or perceived the transcendental great- ness of this work of the establishment of the supramental life or the Life Divine upon earth, and dedicated themselves to it, can have no hankering for personal salvation, though liberation from ignorance and egoism is a pre-condition of the perfection of this work, nor can they cherish an exclusive desire for peace or power. For them "There is a Power which no government can command, a Happiness which no earthly success can give, a Light which no wisdom can possess, a Knowledge which no philosophy, no science can acquire, a Beatitude of which no satisfaction of desire can give the enjoyment, a thirst for Love which no human relation can quench, a Peace which can be found nowhere, not even in death.
"It is the Power, the Happiness, the Light, the Knowledge, the Beatitude, the Love and the Peace which come...from the Divine Grace.”¹
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, October 28, 1928.
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WHAT is the central truth and essence of the Mother's life and the secret of her spiritual achievement ? What is the key to the synthesis of her vast and complex personality, her irresistible magnetism and the unlimited sway she holds over the hearts of thousands of God-seekers ? What has created the divine beauty of her form, imparted the divine rhythm to her movements and the divine fire to her will ?
Those who know her or have only read her Prayers and Meditations will at once reply in a chorus : Love is the truth and essence of the Mother's life and love the nuclear force of her personality. In the Chandi (a portion of the Markendya Purana), the Divine Mother has been hymned under her diverse aspects of Consciousness, Intelligence, Power, Peace, Beauty, Forgive- ness, Kindness, etc., but the most primal and puissant, the most graceful and rapturous aspect of love—one wonders why —has been left unmentioned. Love is the first, highest and completest expression of the divine Truth in the world, and the supreme Force that can lead the world back to the Divine. It includes all the other aspects and principles and is the eternal fount of the most ineffable ecstasy and sweetness that flow out of the union of the human with the Divine. And it is this love that is literally incarnate in the Mother—in her presence, in her carriage, in her words, in her gestures, and in all her ways and dealings with men; so much so that the word Mother has come to mean Love, and to be near her is to feel that we are in the physical presence of the divine Love itself, which is instinct with infinite Wisdom and vibrant with omni- potent Force. Human faculties are much too limited to fathom the mystery of this Love; they can only stand overpowered, thrilled, illuminated and influenced by it. It floods our being with its light and joy, and, healing us of all our ills and ailments and breaking asunder all our bonds, liberates us into our essential purity and perfection.
As we contemplate this living Love, this blazing Force
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of dynamic divine Grace and Beatitude, She reveals herself to us under three arresting aspects : first, the aspect of her love for the Divine,—a white psychic flame burning in unabated intensity, second, the aspect of the Divine's Love in her,—the dazzling sun-fire, clothed in flesh, and, third, the two fires combined, the psychic love and the divine, pouring out upon the world, upon all mankind, in an unceasing flood of regenerating and transforming force. The three aspects, like the three strands of a string, are intertwined; and though our intellectual mind, in its penchant for analysis, may feel tempted to analyse them, they are really unanalysable and indistinguishable —they are one essence and movement.
In this essay I shall try to contemplate the third aspect of this Love which we call the Mother, its aspect of delivering and transforming beneficence, its aspect of Grace. But to obviate a possible misunderstanding, I must make it clear at the very outset that this Grace or beneficence is not the act of a transcendent divine being stretching out its hands, like the Amitabha Buddha, across the ocean of life, to those afflicted souls who pant and thirst for the Beyond. It is the Grace that has assumed a human form, come down to our shores, the shores of Time, from its unthinkable eternity, consented to bear the cross of human life and labour in the darkness of the material world, so that even here, on these very shores, in the very midst of the darkness, the divine Light may be lit and shine undimmed, and a divine humanity manifest the glory of God. It is the Grace that has invaded Gethsemane, so that Gethsemane itself may be transformed into Heaven. It is the Grace that has come down not only to liberate, but to rehabilitate man, to reinstate him in his divine heritage of luminous freedom and immortal, creative bliss, even here, even in this world of ignorance and suffering. If we overlook or forget this unique aspect of the divine Love as embodied in the Mother, we shall miss all the significance of her sacrifice, the secret of her transforming power and the surpassing beauty and sweetness of her radiant presence in our midst. We shall then either concentrate exclusively on her transcendent divinity and ignore or misjudge her humanity, or
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dote only upon her sweet humanity and ignore her trans- figuring divinity—the divine mystery of the union of the two, the unspeakable embrace of God and man in a single being, will elude us.
The constant aspiration of the Mother's early life was to be transformed into divine Love. This aspiration finds a vibrant expression in the Prayer of the 27th August, 1914:
"To be the divine love, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being—it is for this I cry to Thee, O Lord. Let me be consumed with this love divine, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being ! Transmute me into that burning brazier so that all the atmosphere of the earth may be purified with its game.
"O, to be Thy Love infinitely.”
It is apparent from the above Prayer that it was not for the passive bliss of the divine Love or even for its transporting thrills that she wanted to be transmuted into it; she aspired to be the divine love, "in every activity, in all the worlds of being”, so that she might achieve what the supreme Love alone can achieve in the material world—the integral transformation of human nature. It is not possible for us to gauge this Love, nor conceive the exact nature and extent of the work it has been doing for humanity. One day when the Mother indicated to us, in passing, how she and Sri Aurobindo have been labouring in the Subconscient and the Inconscient to change the very elements and atoms that go to constitute the human body, how they have been conducting the supramental light into those dark bases of human existence, so that a new race of man may be born on the earth, it took our breath away. We wondered in what ignorance we live—in what woeful, colossal ignorance not only of our own true self and its incalculable possibilities, but also of the selfless labour of the greatest of our benefactors who, identified with the Divine, work out His Will in the silent majesty of their spiritual
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strength. The aim of their labour lies beyond our ken and the methods they employ are inscrutable to our mind. We, who go by material performance and surface results, acclaim a scientist or a social reformer, a statesman or a political thinker, a religious preacher or an ethical teacher, whose achievements we can more or less assess and appreciate, but for those who work in union with the Master of our existence and change the very texture of our nature and prepare a divine destiny for the human race, we have nothing better than a lofty indifference or a cynical disdain.
The Prayer quoted above proves that the Mother aspired to be nothing short of the burning brazier of Love. She had nothing to ask for herself, nothing to acquire or achieve in the interest of her individual being; but she had to do—because it was the divine Will in her to do—all that was possible to root out for ever the ignorance and suffering of human life and make it a potent channel of the Light divine. Her love for the human soul, her solicitude for its release and harmonious perfection in the material world, and her compassion for its besetting miseries, are very movingly expressed in one of the sweetest of her Prayers :
"Each time that a heart leaps at the touch of Thy divine breath, a little more beauty seems to be born upon the earth, the air is embalmed with a sweet perfume, all becomes more friendly.
"How great is Thy power, O Lord of all existence, that an atom of Thy joy is sufficient to efface so much darkness, so many sorrows, and a single ray of Thy glory can light up thus the dullest pebble, illumine the blackest consciousness!
"Thou hast heaped Thy favours upon me. Thou hast unveiled to me many secrets. Thou hast made me taste many unexpected and unhoped-for joys, but no grace of Thine can be equal to this Thou grantest to me when a heart leaps at the touch of Thy divine breath.
"At these blessed hours all earth sings a hymn of gladness, the grasses shudder with pleasure, the air is vibrant with light, the trees lift towards heaven their most ardent prayer, the chant
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of the birds becomes a canticle, the waves of the sea billow with love, the smile of children tells of the Infinite and the souls of men appear in their eyes.
"Tell me, wilt Thou grant me the marvellous power to give birth to this dawn in expectant hearts, to awaken the consciousness of men to Thy sublime Presence, and in this base and sorrowful world awaken a little of Thy true Paradise ? What happiness, what riches, what terrestrial power can equal this wonderful gift ?
"O Lord, never have I implored Thee in vain, for that which speaks to Thee is Thyself in me...”¹
The Mother knew early in life that the divine Vibhutis, the divine Powers and Personalities of the spiritual-mental planes, even of the Overmind, would not be capable of conquering the resistance of Matter and dispelling the darkness of Inconscience. That was why she prayed: "...O Sweet Master, it is a Love more wonderful and formidable than any that has manifested up till this day, of which the earth has need; it is for this Love that she (the earth) implored...” And she felt and knew, though the knowledge was sometimes revealed to her and sometimes hidden, that she was that Love, the supreme Love, incarnate in human form. But the knowledge, rather than gratifying her heart, intensified a hundredfold its single, selfless aspiration.
"O my divine Master, my love aspires after Thee more intensely than ever; let me be Thy living Love in the world and nothing but that! ...May my consciousness be identified with Thy Conscious- ness so that Thou alone mayest be the will acting through this fragile and transient instrument.
"O my sweet Master, with what an ardour my love aspires for Thee.
"Grant that I may be only Thy divine Love, and that in every- thing this Love may awake powerful and victorious.
"Let me be like an immense mantle of love enveloping the whole
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March 31, 1917,
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earth, penetrating all hearts, murmuring to every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace.”
The Mother's aspiration was fulfilled beyond measure : the divine Love prepared her whole being, part by part, hour by hour, till it became a pure flame of psychic love quivering in the embrace of the sempiternal fire of the Love Divine.
"My love for Thee, O Lord, it is Thyself, and yet my love bows down religiously before Thee ”
Once she became the divine Love, the real work of her life began. Love revealed itself as a victorious power of illumination and transformation, and it carried her into the obscure foundations of terrestrial life, the dark matrix of Matter, which it is the divine Will to chum, illumine and transfigure. Human mind is incapable of imagining the horrors and perils to which the Mother was exposed, the ordeals she had to pass through, and the battle she had to wage against the grim forces of Inconscience and Ignorance, Falsehood and Death. It was the greatest test of her love for the Divine, this "Calvary of the terrestrial consciousness,” this descent into "the unfathomable depths of matter,” this touching with her fingers "the horror of the false-hood and the inconscience,” "the seat of oblivion and a supreme obscurity.” Had not the Divine said to her, "If thou wouldst learn how to love truly, it is in this way that thou must love...in the darkness and the inconscience” ? Had He not created her, as He once confided to her, to be His exceptional representative on the earth ? She had nothing to complain of, for, she knew she was made for the most difficult work of material transformation, and she let herself be moved by the divine Will, which is one with divine Love. And yet something in her outer personality, something sweetly human—this plastic and receptive human element is indispensable to her work—had the modesty to find itself "poorly equipped" for such a tremendous task, and she asked the Divine with the utter candour and simplicity of a child, "Thou plungest me, O Lord, into the most opaque
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darkness; it must be then because Thou hast so firmly established Thy light in me that Thou knowest it will stand the perilous test. Hast Thou chosen me for descending into the vortex of this hell as Thy torch-bearer ? Hast Thou deemed my heart strong enough not to fail, my hand firm enough not to tremble ?” The heart was, indeed, strong with the strength of divine Love, and the hand was firm with the unshakable firmness of the divine Force, and she has been labouring since, in serene silence and endless patience, for the spiritual freedom and perfection of mankind.
Among the historical mystics of India Mirabai stands apart as an exceptional example of the most passionate, the most consuming love for the Divine. With a matchless lyrical intensity she gave all herself to her beloved Master and turned her life into a constant hymn and a devoted worship. But it was a life of absorbed contemplation and rapturous exaltation, of rapt union and longing for re-union, of radiating purity and contagious sweetness; and not a life of dynamic union and divine action. The Mother's life affords a new vision of the Will of God in the material world and a new perspective to the goal of human existence. Union with the Divine, she holds, is the first objective in spiritual life, but the ultimate aim and the glorious consummation of human existence, the very meaning and purpose of human birth, is the manifestation of the Divine in man and the fulfilment of His Will in the world.
The legendary Radha is the very personification of an absolute and integral love for the Divine. From the physical to the spiritual, the whole gamut of her consciousness was completely at the disposal of the transcendent Flute Player. Indian tradition records no more unreserved and joyous self-giving, nor is there any parallel to it to be found in the spiritual traditions of the world. But it was a love that bore no cross except that of the Lover's playful self-hiding; it had not to burn, bright and steady, in the congealed darkness and bleak blasts of the Inconscient. It did not, besides, incarnate any specific Will of the Divine to a New Manifestation or a New Creation. It was not charged with a world-mission, or called upon to a supreme holocaust,
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The Mother's Radha’s Prayer reveals the same psychic texture, an identical integrality of self-offering, but with a remarkable difference. Her love is the supernal self-Force of the Divine, redemptive and creative, it bears in itself the world- transforming fiat of the Absolute.
The four aspects of the Mother¹ of which Sri Aurobindo speaks in his book. The Mother, "have stood in front in her guidance of this universe and in her dealings with the terrestrial play,” but they do not exhaust her;—her divinity, because it is the divinity of the Divine Himself, transcends them all. "There are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother, but they were more difficult to bring down and have not stood out in front with so much prominence in the evolution of the earth-spirit. There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental realisation,—most of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental Spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divinest Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of all the other Powers of the universe.”
"Her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love” is, as we have already stated above, the highest aspect of the Mother, which we have to adore and approach with the utter love and self-giving of our whole being, if we aspire after the supramental realisation on earth. The highest power of transformation is with the supreme divine Love, which the Mother embodies in this life for the accomplishment of her great mission in the material world.
But the Mother transcends even this highest aspect of Love and Ananda. "Outside all manifestation, in the immutable silence of Eternity, I am in Thee, O Lord, an unmoving Beatitude.” She is one with the Unthinkable Absolute, the ineffable Unnamed. All the powers and splendours of creation are her powers and splendours, derived from her, constituted by her, directed by
¹ Maheshwari , Mahakali , Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati.
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her and offered to her own unmanifest, undifferentiated Eternity. What words will describe the mystery and marvel of that silent Unknowable ?
After all we have seen and known, felt and imagined of the Mother, she remains to us what she has always been, the same Divine-human Mother, closest to us even if she is transcendent, enfolding us in her liberating Love, protecting us with her Grace, transporting and transforming us with her irradiating smile, and infinitely forbearing and forgiving to our countless recurrent frailties. She remains our sole, sweet deliverer from the inflexible rigours of the Cosmic Law and the bestower of her own spiritual freedom and bliss. She remains for us the crystal fountain "which always lets its waters flow abundantly for all, but towards which no stream can ever remount”; the giver of all boons and the receiver of all our burdens. Has not the Divine said of her, "...art thou not myself crystallised for my work ?” And do we not love and adore the Divine Himself when we love and adore her, not in distant awe and amazement, but as her frail ignorant children, physically approaching her in freedom and confidence, and aspiring to be united with her to become deathless instruments of her great work upon earth ? What is that great work ? It is, as we have already noted, a "veritable work of creation...to create new activities and new modes of being, so that this Force, unknown to the earth till now, may manifest in its plenitude.”¹ And what is this Force that is going to manifest ? It is the authentic, invincible Force of the supreme divine Love; and the Mother is this Force, she who has descended into our darkness and mortality and constituted all herself the burning brazier of Love, so that the atmosphere of the earth may be purified with its flames and our animal humanity transfigured into the glory of a divine humanity.
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EVEN those who have only a smattering of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy know that they aim at these three signal achievements : (1) ascent of the consciousness of man from mind to Supermind, which is the Truth-consciousness, the Rita-chit, of the Veda, (2) descent of the Supermind into Matter and the conversion and transformation of the integral nature of man—physical, vital and mental,—by the Light- Force of the Supermind, and (3) the perfect manifestation of Sachchidananda on earth through the transformed and divinised human nature. Sri Aurobindo does not subscribe to the world-shunning asceticism of the old schools of spiritual discipline, nor does he advocate the hedonistic enjoyment of life lived in the Ignorance and in the trailing turmoil of the dualities. His message is of the essential divinity of man and the inevitable fullness and perfection of its self-expression in life, on this earth, and in the human body. He does not regard a union with God or Brahman only in the depths or on the heights of the being as a complete union. Man's birth-right, he affirms, is a constant, dynamic, integral union—a union in the nature as well as in the soul, in every little movement of life as well as in the stirless silence of ecstatic contemplation. Life must become a sparkling flood of Light and its jarring discords pass into the inalienable harmony of the supramental conscious- ness reigning over earth.
It goes without saying that this triple aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy is a revolutionary departure and is absolutely original to his spiritual genius. There is no precedent or parallel to it in the annals of spirituality, oriental or occidental, ancient or modern. It is true that in the Veda we meet with some references to the Rita-Chit or the supermind. It is described there as the Truth, the Right, the Vast; as the supreme step of Vishnu; and some Vedic Rishis endeavoured to rise into its solar glory. But there is no trace of a collective ascent into it or of any attempt on their part to bring it down into
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the material life for a conversion of the earth-consciousness. It was even held by some Rishis that it was not possible to pass through the gates of the Sun, i.e. the Supermind, and yet retain the human body. The Upanishadic Rishis knew of the existence of this supreme Truth-consciousness, which they called the Vijnana, but the Vedic urge towards it was no longer there in its ancient intensity and amplitude. However that may be, it was Sri Aurobindo who first fixed upon the creative Supermind as the goal of human evolution and laboured to call down and canalise its all-achieving Force for the birth of a new race of humanity, the race of gnostic supermen. This new birth will be an emergence of man, as the culmination of his evolutionary progression, into the supreme Truth-Consciousness, which will admit of a simultaneous realisation of and union with the transcendent Sachchidananda and His universal Immanence—a consummation not yet achieved by man. But in order that this emergence may be complete and securely established on earth, it is essential, as a pre-condition, that Matter should be transmuted into the luminous substance of the divine existence from which it is derived, and that the physical nature of man should, in consequence, be definitively freed from the dark density, inertia and insensibility which are its heritage from its inconscient origin. Physical transformation by means of the authentic supramental Force is, therefore, the crux of the mission of Sri Aurobindo's life, and it presages a future for humanity which is too glorious even for the widest and keenest mind of the modern man to conceive.
This sublime ideal and a definite spiritual guidance to realise it and make it a concrete experience and an abiding base of all life's activities and achievements, are the special gift of Sri Aurobindo to man. But it is very interesting that the same ideal had been the shaping truth and realising force in the Mother's life even when she was in France and knew absolutely nothing of Sri Aurobindo and his thoughts. Conscious of the great mission of her life from her very childhood and confirmed in her foreknowledge by certain remarkable visions and mystical experiences, she had been pursuing her spiritual
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life and steadily rising to her destined stature. Her Prayers and Meditations, in which she has transcribed some of her experiences, bear surprising testimony to the essential identity which had existed between her ideal and that of Sri Aurobindo's even before she met him in person on the 29th March, 1914. We cannot account for this identity by deriving it from the mystical traditions of the West, which do not seem to be aware of the Supermind or any such plane of creative Truth- consciousness, where man can have a perfect union, both in silence and in action, and a simultaneous self-identification with the Transcendent and the Immanent. The general trend of mystical thought in the West, in spite of the towering achievements of Ruysbroeck and St.Teresa, inclines towards a denial of the possibility of a complete and constant union with God in human life. "Man shall not see my face and live” has been accepted more or less literally by almost all the leading Western mystics. St. Gregory the Great believes that "no one is able to fix the mind’s eye on unencompassed ray itself of Light One can only "attain to somewhat of the unencompassed Light by stealth and scantily.” St. Bernard agrees with St. Gregory that "those who by transport of contemplation are at times rapt in spirit, are able to taste some little fragment of the sweetness of supernal felicity,” though rarely and momentarily. Couched in the same key, but weightier in authority, is St. Augustine's verdict, "Contemplation is only begun in this life, to be perfected in the next” (Tract, in Ioan. cxxiv. 5).
This, then, is the prevailing conception in the West of divine union or contemplation, though it is somewhat contradicted by the experiences of a few mystics here and there. Regarding the descent of the supernal Light and the consequent transformation of human nature, it has always been a doubtful and mystified issue. True it is that the Orphic Mysteries aimed at some kind of transformation or deification, but what they meant by transformation and how they proposed actually to achieve it has been a lost science, having had little bearing on the life of the subsequent Western mystics. Besides, the question of the manifestation of God in Matter has hardly ever seriously exercised the
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thought of Western mysticism. That the physical nature of man, which has its roots in the murky depths of the Inconscient and most of its motive forces in the obscure welter of the Subconscient, can be, not only purified, but completely converted and transmuted into the divine Nature, is a possibility unexplored even by the greatest mystics of the West.
In the absence of any such tradition in the West from which the Mother might have imbibed the main strands of her manifestational and life-transfiguring mysticism, and in view of her later domicile in India and self-identification with Sri Aurobindo's life-work, we think we are justified in regarding her spiritual development in the West as a prelude to and a preparation for her work in India, which is a work for the whole of humanity, and seeing in the identity between her ideal and that of Sri Aurobindo an evidence of the decree of God that East and West must meet as Shiva and Shakti, self-manifesting Light and realising and transforming Force, to raise man from mind to supermind and convert his life of division and discord into the creative unity and blissful harmony of the Life Divine.
The Prayers and Meditations of the Mother begins from November 2, 1912 and ends on October 23, 1937. Out of a total of over 350 there are only six Prayers from 1919 to 1937, the rest all ranging from 1912 to 1918. Here we shall confine ourselves only to the Prayers written between 1912 and March 28,1914¹—about 97 Prayers, which bear eloquent testimony to the great ideal which was defining itself more and more clearly and pressing forward towards self-realisation in the Mother. We shall also draw upon some of her youthful writings in the form of discourses, delivered before select audiences in France, to substantiate our thesis that the identity between the ideal of the Mother's life and that of Sri Aurobindo's, even when they did not know each other on the physical plane, was not a chance coincidence, but a decree and dispensation of Providence for the great work of the future. To say that their souls are complementary to each other, that is, each filling up what lacks in the other, as some people have suggested, is not true, for, a
¹ The Mother met Sri Aurobindo on the 29th March 1914, as said above
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searching perusal of their respective thoughts before their meeting on the physical plane does not bear it out. The Mother's mission is so definitely outlined in the Prayers of between 1912 and 1914 that it betrays no trace of an incomplete- ness or a wide gap anywhere to be filled up in the future; and Sri Aurobindo's thoughts and ideals are blazoned even in his earliest utterances and writings,—in his voluminous prose writings and, particularly in his poems,—so that there is no room for any doubt as to what he regarded as his life's work. To say that Sri Aurobindo represents the static aspect of the Divine and the Mother the dynamic, is again not true; for the pulsing heart of their teachings is the divine dynamism, which they have both been labouring to instill into the earth-life. To call Sri Aurobindo static is to miss the very significance and the central, distinctive truth of his life and ideal. And that there is not only dynamism, but an untrembling status of eternal peace and repose in the Mother, will be amply proved by the Prayers we shall quote in the course of this essay. The truth of the matter is that the identity of their ideal was a natural flowering of the identity of their beings, and that their meeting from the two hemispheres was neither a chance nor a conjunction of complementaries, but a providential reunion of identities, separated for a time for the exigencies of the evolutionary terrestrial existence.
It is true that there are certain Prayers in the Prayers and Meditations, particularly those written immediately after the Mother's meeting with Sri Aurobindo, in which she speaks of all her inner constructions having vanished like a vain dream and herself left before the immensity of the divine "without any frame or system, like a being not yet individualised.” That a great change did take place in her, a marvellous new birth, as a result of her very first contact with Sri Aurobindo, is clearly recorded in the Prayers and Meditations; but it was a change in the methods and processes of of her spiritual self-discipline and a new birth of her instrumental being, or more accurately perhaps, a re-affirmation, a re-foundation, abinitio of what was already achieved. "All
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the past, in its external form, appears to me ridiculous and arbitrary, and yet I know that it was useful in its time.” Describing this state in another Prayer (dated April 3, 1914), the Mother says, "It is as if I was stripped of all my past, of my errors as well as my conquests, as if all that had disappeared to give place to one new-born whose whole existence has yet to take shape, who has no Karma, no experience it can profit by, but no error either which it must repair... I know that I must now definitively give myself up and be like a page absolutely blank on which Thy thought. Thy Will, O Lord, will be able to inscribe themselves freely, secure against any deformation.” It was, indeed, a monumental revolution, a massive whirlwind preparation that took place in her, and as a result of it, a flood of new experiences came, tending to complete the divine union she had been longing for and clinching the role she was to play in the work of the creation of a supramental race of men initiated by Sri Aurobindo.
"The "I” has disappeared, there is only a docile instrument put at Thy service, a centre of concentration and manifestation of Thy infinite and eternal rays. Thou hast taken my life and made it Thine; Thou hast taken my will and united it to Thine; Thou hast taken my love and identified with Thins; Thou hast taken my thought and replaced it by Thy absolute Consciousness”.¹
But whatever the nature and magnitude of the change, the ideal and mission of her life, as outlined in the enlarging prescience of her early years, remained essentially the same. That these modifications and even radical reversals in the methods of her self-culture did not occur only once is attested by the Mother's Prayer of October 7, 1913, about six months before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo :
"A new door has opened in my being and an immensity has appeared before me...
"All is changed, all is new; the old garbs have dropped and
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, April 10, 1914.
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the new-born child half-opens its eyes to the light of the dawn.”
And there are not a few subsequent Prayers depicting remarkable transitions and new conquests. The Mother's sadhana has followed strange curves of ascent and descent, for it has not been so much an individual as a collective sadhana for the conversion of the earth-consciousness and the supramental self-expression of God in man. It would, therefore, be a great mistake to try to assess and understand it by the usual criteria of the mystical life. Many of her experiences are a prism or a reflex of the experiences of the earth-soul, and by far the majority a mighty prelude and preparation and prognosis. Hers has been a consecrated life of collective conquests, and it is only when the curves of her work come full circle that the veil will be lifted from the true nature of her experiences and an illumined elite of humanity or super- humanity will be able to comprehend something of the significance of her ideal and mission. For the moment it remains an impenetrable mystery pregnant with incalculable possibilities for the future of humanity—a mystery, which repels the advances of the prying analytical reason, but welcomes faith into its sacred heart and vouchsafes to it a revealing glimpse of its hidden secret.
Let us now proceed to a dose and devoted study of the words written or spoken by the Mother before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo, and try to see how they are essentially identical with those of Sri Aurobindo. We shall study them under four heads : (1) The Divine Union, (2) Physical transformation through service in an integral surrender, (3) Conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, (4) The Divine Manifestation and the Divine Life. It ill be our humble endeavour in this study to follow the developing contours of the Mother's ideal and mission and relate them to those of Sri Aurobindo in order to substantiate our thesis that the meeting of the two identities from the two hemispheres of the world betokens the advent of the unity of mankind in the integral realisation and manifestation of the Divine in life.
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WE have proposed to ourselves, first, a consideration of the essential identity between the Mother's conception of the divine Union as enunciated by her before tier meeting with Sri Aurobindo and that of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo's conception, evolved out of the all-embracing integrality of his realisation, is a global synthesis of all the concepts of the past crowned with his distinctive gospel of the constant, dynamic union and communion with the Divine in the physical being of man. This original contribution of his to the ideal of the divine Union opens up an infinite vista of spiritual perfection and explains and justifies the soul's descent into human birth.
"These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being.”¹
The three highest forms of union aimed at respectively by the three great schools of Indian Yoga, Jnanayoga, Bhaktiyoga and Tantra,—Sayujya, Samipya and Sarupya—are fused into one all-comprehending union which combines the rapt ecstasy of the embrace of the Eternal with the thrilled dynamism of His self-expression in Time. All nature and all life are included in the sweep of this integral union and every fibre of our complex being is meant to find in it its perfect fulfilment. This union is the sovereign means of reproduction, in the triple term of mind, life and body, of the triple supreme principle of the transcendent Existence, Sat, Chit and Ananda, through the conscious and co-operating agency of the full-fledged psychic, the soul of man; of an unblemished transcription of the infinite glories of the Spirit in finite, living and
¹ Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. IV.
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thinking Matter. That which most impedes the attainment of this integral union is the dense physical being of man, en- trenched in its obscurity and inert conservatism, and reluctant to open or respond to the higher light. Most initiates of Eternity have, therefore, sought to enjoy the transporting bliss of the divine union in the remote depths or on the lonely peaks of their being, leaving the physical part to vegetate in its habitual obscurity. It is only the rare heroic souls, the intrepid warriors of the Spirit, who have struggled to redeem the physical and render it capable of reflecting something of the light and power and ecstasy welling out of the union. But all that has been really achieved up to the present, by way of redemption, is a modicum of purification and illumination, but not a radical conversion and transfiguration; and without a total conversion and transfiguration of the physical being, the outer personality, it is impossible to have an integral and uninterrupted union with the Divine in active life—the surface self will either lie quiescent and sterile while the soul is entranced in the beatitude of the inner union, or dilute and distort and spill what is transmitted to it for expression. A perfect physical expression of the fruits of divine union has hardly been possible as yet in human life.
Sri Aurobindo's spiritual power has been bent on the achievement of the integral divine union and its undiminished and undistorted expression in the normal work-a-day life of humanity; but for this supreme consummation of the evolutionary effort of the human soul, two things are indispensable : a pioneer individual perfection and a progressive reproduction of the individual perfection in the general nature of the collectivity. But the individual, being a part of the collectivity, and not an isolated unit, cannot completely identify himself with the Divine until the rampant impurities of the collective nature have been to a certain extent eliminated. It is this dual work of individual and collective transformation that has been the mission and labour of Sri Aurobindo, and we shall miss all the significance, all the superlative greatness of it, if we lose sight of these two aspects of his ideal. No individual, however great be may be, can attain to the integral divine perfection through
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the integral divine union until the earth-consciousness itself has undergone a revolutionary transformation and the earth-conditions have definitely changed in its favour. The integral union with the Divine, as understood by Sri Aurobindo, is the ultimate and inevitable destiny of mankind, but it is an ideal that is to be striven for and attained, and not one that has ever been achieved in the spiritual history of humanity. It will come as the ultimate victory in a double war waged within man and without, individually and collectively.
If we bear the above salient points well in mind, we shall be able to follow the general trend of the Mother's aspiration and achievements and discover in them the same essential elements that constitute the ideal and the realisation of Sri Aurobindo, so far as the divine union is concerned.
In the very first Prayer of the Prayers and Meditations, the Mother gives us a glimpse of the central aspiration of her being and the height of vision and experience to which she has already attained.
"I aspire/or the day when I can no longer say 'I’, for I shall be Thou.”¹
* *
"I have now a constant and precise perception of the universal unity determining an absolute interdependence of all actions.”²
The first quotation embodies the Mother's aspiration, but the second, which is very significant, shows that the perfection of individual action depends to a great measure upon the conditions which make for the perfection of the universal action. This perception of the Mother of the interdependence of all actions is an index to the line her spiritual career has consistently taken—it is the dual line of individual and collective aspiration and conquest. It must have been a basic realisation other consciousness,
² Ibid.
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early in her life, that existence is one and indivisible, and that our individual perfection and fulfilment must include the perfection and fulfilment of all. The same idea is expressed by Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga, (Book I: Part one, Ch. 2)
"Accepting life, [the sadhaka of the integral Yoga] has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world's burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others’; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Their representative character gives them a much more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to recurrence. Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to vain it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.
It is evident, then, that the union the Mother aspires for in these Prayers is a progressive integral union, which, even when perfect at the centre, necessarily takes long to be perfect at the peripheries. But nothing short of it can satisfy the Mother's being any more than Sri Aurobindo's. In her Prayer of the 19th November, 1912, the Mother says to the Divine :
"I said yesterday to that Englishman who is seeking for Thee with so sincere a desire, that I had definitively found Thee, that the Union was constant. Such is indeed the state of which I am conscious.
A little farther on in the same Prayer, she says,
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"How many times already when I pronounce it (the word 'I’), it is Thou who speakest in me, for I have lost the sense of separativity.
She has found the Divine "definitively", the Union is "constant", she has lost "the sense of separativity"; and yet she calls this union "poor and precarious" in comparison with what it will be possible for her to "realise tomorrow". The inner union has been attained and stabilised : "...It is Thou who breathest, thinkest and lovest in this substance...” , but the Mother would not rest till she has become "Thou", completely and irrevocably, from the highest summits of her being to its lowest plains. What is this becoming "Thou" ? It is not a mere identification with the Divine in the soul and the mind,—it is a spiritual rebirth of the whole being, a remoulding of the entire apparatus of the surface and the subconscient human personality, and, above all, a radical transfiguration of the body, its consciousness and its mode of working, leading to an untrembling dynamic poise in the Divine and a constant union and communion with Him in active life.
"So long as one element of the being, one movement of the thought is still subjected to outside influences, not solely under Thine, it cannot be said that the true Union is realised; there is still the horrible mixture without order and light,—for that element, that movement is a world, a world of disorder and darkness, as is the entire earth in the material world, as is the material world in the entire universe.”¹
That is why there is an intense, unceasing aspiration in the Mother's body—it is not a mental or vital aspiration imposed upon the body, but the body's own separate, individual, unquenchable aspiration—for a dynamic union with the Supreme through service... "This body whose will is to become Thy docile instrument and Thy faithful servant.”² "...This substance
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, December 2, 1912.
² ibid., November 3, 1912.
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which, being Thyself, desires to be Thy willing servant.”¹ This service, as the Mother understands it, is not a mere Karmayoga, a discipline of desireless and disinterested action, for the purification and liberation of the being; it has a double purpose and significance : 1) the canalising of the supreme Love and Light into the material world and 2) the preparation and trans- formation of the physical being of man for the perfect Union and the eventual Manifestation. The Mother so much insists on service, because : 1) Union with the Divine cannot be integral if the body is excluded from it; for, the body, as much as the heart or the mind, has a birthright to a constant and complete union with the Divine and a perfection in the expression of that union; and it is only when all the parts of the being of man are converted and transformed enough to enter into the union, abide in it and radiate its ineffable glory, that the Union can be called integral, and the entire being of man can have its completest fulfilment. 2) It is only through service that the Will of the Divine in the world can be victoriously fulfilled. In fact, in its advanced stages, service becomes another name for an unobstructed divine self-expression.
Attuned to the same key, ring Sri Aurobindo's words :
"Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental, it is Nature’s aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities.”²
The Mother does not regard an exclusive, unilateral tension of the mind or the heart or the will towards the Divine as capable of leading anywhere near the integral union; it is a narrow intensity within a restricted field of consciousness and barren of any enduring and transforming effect upon life in the world. It can initiate the Godward turn, but cannot by itself consummate
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 19, 1912.
² The Synthesis of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo, 'Book, I,
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and fulfil it in an integral union.
"Even he who might have arrived at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude, could only have done so by extracting himself from his body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have abandoned it to itself; by a misguided mysticism, by the attraction of supraphysical splendours, by the egoistic desire of being united with Thee for his personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the reason of his earthly existence, he would have refused cowardlike to accomplish Ms mission to redeem and purify Matter.”¹
The same idea informs the following words of Sri Aurobindo;
"Brahman expresses Itself in many successive forms of conscious- ness, successive in their relation even if coexistent in being or coeval m Time, and life in its self-unfolding must also rise to ever-new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions of His manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude, However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained: is true divinity of nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many states of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integral and all- embracing.”²
There must be an integration and harmonisation of all the
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, June 15, 1913.
² The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo, Chapter V.
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parts of our being and a global turning of it to the Divine, if the integral union be the supreme objective. Very often a partial union is so overwhelming that it is easily taken for an integral one—the soul and mind and heart are immersed in bliss and peace, or the life parts vibrate with a mighty power; even the body reflects something of its glow and thrill. But that is not what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo mean by Union. They mean, as we have already seen, something more luminously and comprehensively complete, and more sovereignly effective, something in which the whole being of man, from his Self to the very cells of his body, permanently lives and moves and acts in the Divine. But this union cannot come about merely by an inner plunge and identification, or by any number of plunges and identifications. It includes also the union of our subconscient and inconscient parts with the Divine, which is possible only by the illumination and transformation of those nether regions by the direct action of the Supramental Force. It is a tremendous work, entailing a descent into the Subconscient and the Inconscient and a raising up of the dark elements which seethe or sleep there, so that they may be either destroyed or transformed into radiant spiritual energies and lend themselves to the total transformation of the physical personality of man. And, besides, according to them, union is not an end in itself,— that the soul never forfeits in its depths—it is the sole and supreme means to the ulterior end and reason of our existence, the object of the soul's descent into birth and its evolution, the purpose of the immanence of the Divine in the world, the aim of creation itself—the perfect Manifestation, the intended Epiphany of the Spirit in Matter. According to Sri Aurobindo, the aim of his Integral Yoga is not only to seek and realise the Divine but to call upon Him to manifest Himself in and through us in the material world. That is not only Union, but Union multiplied, universalised and dynamically self-revealed in its native glory in humanity. And in a sweet little Prayer, written on March 13, 1913, when the Mother had not even heard of Sri Aurobindo, she too says,
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"Let the pure perfume of sanctification burn always, rising higher and higher, and straighter and straighter, like the ceaseless prayer of the integral being, desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee.”
We shall now consider the essential identity¹ existing between Sri Aurobindo's idea of physical transformation through service in an integral surrender and that of the Mother as expressed by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo.
¹ Really speaking, the identity is not only essential, it is also practical, and even literal, as the Mother's frequent use of the expressions, "integral union", "perfect manifestation", "transformation", "earthly transfiguration", etc. which are the key-expressions of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and Philosophy, testifies.
SRI Aurobindo insists so much on physical transformation, because without it the spiritual achievements of the human soul cannot be manifested in earthly life, individual and collective. It has been possible up to now to purify the mind and the heart to a certain extent and even to discipline and regulate (more by suppression or repression than otherwise) the life-parts of man, but the physical nature has been left almost unreclaimed. Its customary habits and tendencies, its crude appetites and impulses, its mechanical reactions and responses to outward impacts have always been the disgust and despair of even the greatest of spiritual men. Hathayoga, rightly practised, gives considerable control over the physical body, but not over the whole physical nature; and even the best control acquired by Rajayoga is neither conquest nor conversion.
The bitter truth has to be admitted that no amount of spiritual realisation has ever been able to overcome the inherent darkness and disabilities of the physical part of our human nature. Inertia, obscurity, disease, decrepitude and death, doubt, obstinacy in error, unwillingness to change, a helpless subjection to past associations, proneness, to suffering and a sharp sense of egoistic separation have been the invariable stamp of it and a constant goad to a resort to absorbed contemplation or trance. Truth is not known in the physical being, because it is gross and dense; peace cannot dwell securely in it, because it is turbid and restless; the soul's limpid joy cannot flow out of it, because it is choked with the fungus of pleasures and pains. Even when universal love floods within, little slimy swirls of hatred or anger or grief or jealousy may be detected on its outer fringes, perhaps more as lingering remnants of past habits than as any fresh movements; but they linger long and seem never to leave definitively. And to crown all this, one is often surprised by sudden blinding and convulsive raids from the subconscient. Movements and elements of nature which one would have thought dead,
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suddenly recur and recur again and seek to recover their lost empire. There are many such awkward and disturbing factors which hide behind the calm and imposing fa9ade of a Yogi's life, and betray themselves only to the eye that can probe below the surface.
Sri Aurobindo will have none of these ungainly sun-spots in the perfection of the Integral Yoga; for, the basic aim of his Yoga is a dynamic union with the Divine in life, in every movement of life, in the whole being, in the entire nature and in all its thoughts and feelings and actions; and a persistence of the obscure habits of the physical nature and the subconscient scum is absolutely incompatible with it. So long as a man is on earth, the terrestrial life is his field of achievement, and all that he gains by personal effort or by divine Grace must have a full and perfect expression in his life, whether the gain is physical, vital, mental or spiritual; and if any acquisition, however highly spiritual it may be, fails to manifest itself in his life, it means that it is still a potentiality and has to be realised in terms of the material existence. If the Upanishadic dictum is true that all that is here is there in the Beyond, and all that is there is also here, the only logical deduction can be that all that is there is latent here or only partly patent, and can manifest in its fullness; and that so to manifest is the sole reason of its being here.
Sri Aurobindo wrote in one of his letters to Barindra,
"What God wants from man is to manifest Him here, in the individual and the collectivity — to realise God in life. The ancient systems of Yoga failed to synthesise or mite spirituality and life; they have explained the world away as Maya (illusion) or a transient Lila (play). The result has been a dwindling of the life-force and the decline of India.”
In one of his letters to his disciples, he says, "Unless the external nature is transformed, one may go as high as possible and have the largest experiences,. .but the external mind remains an instrument of Ignorance.” In More Lights on Yoga,
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he remarks, "The whole physical life must be transformed. This material world does not want a mere change of consciousness in us. It says in effect, 'You retire into bliss, become luminous, have the divine knowledge, but that does not alter me. I still remain the hell I practically am ! The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and make it an entirely new creation.”
By transformation Sri Aurobindo does not mean mere purification, as we have already indicated. By physical trans- formation he means a reversal of the whole physical consciousness and a radical conversion of the very grain and gamut of its working—"...a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body.”¹ It is a long and difficult work, depending for its success on two indispensable factors : self-offering of the individual through every action of life done as an oblation to the Divine, and the bringing down of the Light-Force of the Vijnanamaya Purusha into the physical being. The Vijnanashakti or supramental Force descends and suffuses the physical being and awakens and activates the divine consciousness that is submerged in it. Purification can be done by the enlightened human intelligence, but it is only a partial and precarious purification that can be thus effected; for the reaches of our being where lie the roots of our earthly nature are sealed to our mental vision, and in our impatient ardour for purification, we often end by doing nothing better than maiming and crippling much of our nature and even hacking away some recalcitrant elements which, once conquered and converted, might have contributed to a substantial enrichment and perfection of our being. The human mind cannot evidently be a wise and efficient agent of purification. Itself a creation and sport of the lower nature of the three gunas, and incurably conditioned in all its ideas and principles and judgements by those gunas working in shifting combinations, it cannot, by itself, achieve the dynamic freedom necessary for purifying the nature. Besides, even its highest ideas and principles are nothing but an evolution out of a complex
¹ The Synthesis of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.
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of sense-data, inference, imagination, reasoning and the prevailing bent and bias of the whole being—they are not facets and formations of Truth received undiminished and undeformed from their authentic origin. To meet Truth face to face, we have to go beyond our mind of dividing ignorance; and it is only when, transcending the mind, we have climbed to the Truth in its own domain, that we can bring down its authentic omnipotent Force to purify and transform our nature, mental, vital and physical. This Force is not only omnipotent, it is also omniscient, being the luminous Force of the Supreme, and it knows best how to grapple with the tangled skein of our nature and weave out of it a flawless divine Supernature, a miracle of transfiguration.
But action is the indispensable means, and without it the transformation of the physical nature is out of the question. It is not only a state of passive peace and purity that is sought for in the Integral Yoga, but a free and unhampered expression of the divine Will and a fulfilment of the divine purpose in a life of God-guided action.
"Even for those whose first natural movement is a consecration, a surrender and a resultant entire transformation of the thinking mind and its knowledge, or a total consecration, surrender and transformation of the heart and its emotions, the consecration of works is a needed element in that change.... It is possible, indeed, to begin with knowledge or Godward emotion solely or with both together and to leave works for the final movement of the Yoga. But there is then this disadvantage that we may tend to live too exclusively within, subtilised in subjective experience, shut off in our isolated inner parts; there we may get incrusted in our spiritual seclusion and find it difficult later on to pour ourselves triumphantly outwards and apply to life our gains in the higher Nature. When we turn to add this external kingdom also to our inner conquests, "we shall find ourselves too much accustomed to an activity purely subjective and ineffective on the material plane. There will be an immense difficulty in transforming the outer life and the body. Or we shall find that our, action does not correspond with the
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inner light: it still follows the old accustomed mistaken paths, still obeys the old normal imperfect influences; the Truth within us continues to be separated by a painful gulf from the ignorant mechanism of our external nature.”¹
Having dwelt at some length on the question of the transformation of the physical consciousness and being of man, as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo, we turn now to the Mother's conception of it, as expressed by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo. It is here, on the question of the transformation of the physical being, that the identity of their views seems to be all the more striking; for, the subject with all its far-reaching implications is almost a new one, hardly ever treated in a complete and comprehensive way by any of the Yogis and mystics of the past, and yet all-important to the future of humanity. The divine fulfilment aimed at by the Integral Yoga pivots upon the perfection of the physical transformation. If homo sapiens cannot be transformed out of his normal animality into a dynamic divinity, there can be no divine life upon earth. And yet, Sri Aurobindo affirms, the establishment of the divine life is inevitable, as it is the logical culmination of the process of evolution which brings out from the indeterminate inconscience the fundamental principles of existence involved there. As Matter has evolved, and life and mind, so the other principles must also evolve. Therefore the divine life on earth is a destiny which cannot be reversed, and of which the achievement of the physical transformation is an inescapable pre-condition.
In 1912 the Mother wrote : "The terrestrial transformation and harmonisation can be brought about by two processes which, though opposite in appearance, must combine,—must act upon each other and complete each other :
(1) Individual transformation, an inner development leading to the union with the Divine Presence.
(2) Social transformation, the establishment of an environment favourable to the flowering and growth of the individual.”
This terrestrial transformation of which the Mother speaks
¹ The Synthesis of Yoga, Book I., Part I, Ch. 3
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can be nothing else than the physical transformation of man, individual and collective, leading to the establishment of the divine life on earth. On more or less the same subject, the Mother says in The Supreme Discovery: "Let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love and give up to Him, without reservation, this marvellous instrument, our material organism. He will make it produce its maximum on every plane of activity.” The stress is, as always, on the physical being of man and its radical change, so that the spiritual wealth may be poured out in terms of material facts.
Those who have read the Mother's Prayers and Meditations know how, practically through the whole book of over 350 Prayers, the recurring theme is the same : the transformation of Matter, the transmutation of the physical being of man. But this is not a theme that originated with the Prayers and Meditations, but had its birth in the Mother's consciousness very early in her life, and has been ever since the one out-standing mission of her life. She too felt like Sri Aurobindo that divine perfection could only be attained in earthly life by conquering and converting Matter, and not before that. In a speech delivered in 1912 in France, she said, "Built as we are out of an imperfect substance, we cannot but share in this imperfection.” "Whatever therefore may be the possible degree of perfection, consciousness and knowledge that our deeper being possesses, the simple fact that it incarnates in a physical body gives rise to obstacles to the purity of its manifestation. And yet, the incarnation has for its goal precisely the victory over these obstacles, the transformation of Matter.”¹ The perception of the inherent imperfection of Matter, which could very well have, as it almost always has in other cases, led to a world-shunning spirituality, sublime in its islanded grandeur, turned the Mother's whole being towards the conquest of that very imperfection and a definitive victory over Matter. And she has expressed in unmistakable terms the object of our birth or incarnation here, the ultimate goal of our earthly life, as "the transformation of Matter" which is, as is well known, the
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central aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy.
In her Prayer of the 26th November, 1912, the Mother, addressing the Divine, says, "...Thou who everywhere raisest up Matter in this ardent and wonderful aspiration, in this sublime thirst for Eternity.” These ideas of "raising up Matter," the "aspiration of Matter" and its "thirst for Eternity" are so very new to the philosophico-spiritual concepts of the West and so very fundamental to the teaching of Sri Aurobindo that the identity we have been studying becomes apparent even to a cursory glance, and has not to be laboured into recognition.
Dwelling on the same subject in her Prayer of the 15th June, 1913, the Mother says that to know that a part of our being is perfectly pure and to commune and identify ourselves with that part is very helpful, but this knowledge and communion must be utilised for "hastening the earthly transfiguration," for that is, indeed, "the sublime work" of the Divine in the material world. To be identified only with the immaculate soul and commune with it in the silence of the depths is not the ultimate object of human birth. This identification must be extended and reproduced in every part of our composite being, and utilised as a unifying and integrating force working at the same time as a potent leverage of our ascent to the Divine. It must be translated into the terms of the physical being for the "earthly transfiguration."
This work of physical transformation is no morbid obsession with the body. It is, in fact, only when one rises far above the body-consciousness that one gains the power to transform the body. Deploring the engrossing care for the preservation of the body, which is almost universal in men, the Mother says, "Nothing can be more humiliating, nothing more depressing than these thoughts turned always towards the preservation of the body, this preoccupation with health, with our subsistence, with the frame-work of our life. How trivial are these things, a thin smoke dissolved by a simple breath, vanishing like mirage before a single thought turned towards Thee (the Divine).”¹ And yet it is not a
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, August 17, 1913.
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neglect of the body that the Mother teaches, for she knows that "the body is a marvellous instrument” and that "there is... no limit to its growth in capacities and to its progress.” We are reminded of what Sri Aurobindo says in this connection in his Bases of Yoga : "There should be no attachment to it (the body), but no contempt or neglect either of the material part of our nature.” In his Letters, Vol. IV, he says, "Matter itself is secretly a form of Spirit and has to reveal itself as that, can be made to wake to consciousness and evolve and realise the Spirit, the Divine within it...That does not mean that the body has to be valued for its own sake or that the creation of a divine body in a future evolution of the whole being has to be contemplated as an end and not as a means...”
Regarding the indispensability of the active service of the Divine in an integral surrender, the Mother is as definite as Sri Aurobindo, and as uncompromising. This service is not a routine round of rituals which the religions prescribe, nor is it philanthropy, humanitarianism or altruism which pass by that name and usually constitute the active life of spiritual men. By service of the Divine the Mother means the constant and conscious offering of each movement of one's nature- physical, vital, psychic, mental and spiritual—to the Divine and to none and nothing but the Divine. All actions of life are accepted and turned towards the Divine except those which are tainted with desire or clearly detrimental to spiritual growth. This wholesale offering of all work is the only means of dedicating all our faculties and their functions, all our energies and their hidden or apparent motives to the Mother, the supreme Force of the Divine, so that they may all be purified, illumined and transfigured for the very purpose for which they have been created—the perfect manifestation of the Divine. Service has, therefore, two stages: one, in which, casting away all our de- sires and self-interest, we offer all our actions to the Divine, and through this integral self-consecration attain to release from the ego and its separative ignorance; and the other, in I which, liberated and transfigured in all our parts, we become luminous instruments of the unveiled Divine,
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Sri Aurobindo's views on this point are much too well- known to need recapitulation here. We shall only quote a few lines from the Mother's writings to show how her thought and practice have moved on identical lines since the beginning of her spiritual life.
The Mother regards the daily activity of life as the anvil on which all the elements of our being must pass and repass in order to be "purified, refined, made supple and ripe for the illumination which contemplation gives to them.”¹ If one gives up the daily activity, one gives up the very process by which, and by which alone, the elements and energies of one's being can be purified and transformed. But, it must be carefully noted, the work of the transformation of the physical being is neither an easy nor a short work; for, each element of our physical personality has to be, not only purified and illumined, but impersonalised and taught "forgetfulness of self and self-abnegation." It is not enough to dislodge the ego from the centre of one's being,—that might be deemed enough by those who seek their spiritual fulfilment elsewhere than on earth—it must be dislodged from every element of one's being, every fibre of one's nature. That is why even for the best of sadhakas sudden and "striking conversions cannot be integral." "Truly to attain the goal, none can escape the need of innumerable experiences of every kind and every instant.”²
The secret of success in this uphill work of physical transformation is, according to the Mother, "Living Thee (the Divine) alone in the act whatever it may be, ever and always Thee.” Divine union through integral self-offering, and transformation and divine fulfilment through integral dynamic union, is the formula of the life of service as conceived and taught by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
In Matter itself, and not elsewhere, lies "the seed of its own salvation." Therefore, not by renouncing the material life and its activities—a renunciation which the Mother calls "a struggle useless and pernicious"—but by recognising in
¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 28, 1912.
².ibid
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each atom of Matter "the Will of God who inhabits it" and identifying oneself with it, that "the promised day, the day of great transformation will be near.”¹
¹ The Supreme Discovery by the Mother.
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CONQUEST OF THE SUBCONSCIENT
AND THE INCONSCIENT
NOWHERE is the identity between the Mother's views (as held by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo) and those of Sri Aurobindo so strikingly significant as on the subject of the Subconscient and the Inconscient. Even if all other subjects were passed over, this alone would be enough to prove that the identity was not accidental, but rooted in the uniqueness of a mission which is fraught with the highest possibilities for human culture, and which could not be fulfilled except by their collaboration. The identity of their views was an outer expression of the identity of their beings, and a precondition for the accomplishment of their work. These two pioneer personalities, belonging to two opposite ends of the earth, met on the soil of resurgent India to sow the seeds of a new, a divine humanity and weave a luminous pattern of life for it. They did not meet to swell the traditional cry of world-renunciation and create a parked-up spiritual atmosphere for preparing a few souls to cross over the dark waters of life and reach the haven of Light beyond. They did not meet to widen the gulf between the secular and the spiritual, or preach a shallow, spiritual culture which would combine the two in a clumsy practical compromise, such as is fondly advocated by the modern idealists. They met to help man live in God and God in man; to convert human life into a vehicle of the divine Light, and human nature into divine nature. They met to declare that Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, the One and the many are essentially one, and that their oneness can be dynamically expressed in every movement of human life. It was for the complete transformation of homo sapiens and his ascent into the Divine Life that they have laboured for long years of unrelaxed collaboration. But the transformation is impossible without a radical dealing with the very base of human life and nature. This base, as both of them realised early in their lives, is subconscient and, deeper down, inconscient, and the source and store-house of most
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of the invisible forces which move mankind and prolong in it the residual life of the plant and the animal; and they bent their energies to the conquest and conversion of this nether base as much as to the bringing down of the Supermind, by whose omnipotence alone can this conquest and conversion be effected.
Obviously, it was a new work entailing infinite difficulties. Even the conversion of the individual subconscient has hardly ever been tackled with any conclusive thoroughness since the short-lived heyday of the great but tragic Tantric experiment, let alone the conversion of the collective subconscient. The dominant trend of most of the spiritual disciplines being otherworldly and escapist, the impurities of human nature were not traced to their ultimate roots, but lashed or lulled, and left to seethe or slumber in their unlit depths. It was, indeed, deemed an achievement if the inner consciousness could be separated from the turmoil of the outer and launched upon the Infinite,— the outer, thus abandoned and discouraged, usually lapsed into a chafing quiescence or, in some cases, consented to undergo just a modicum of purification. But there was no question of a radical transmutation of the very substance of the base and a definitive triumph over the ignorance and inertia of the material part of human nature.
Significantly enough, both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo started their spiritual careers with a clear perception of the Subconscient and the Inconscient and their immense hold on the motor springs of human nature; and they resolved to make them the targets of their most determined and sustained assaults. Without knowing each other, they yet continued their efforts on identical lines; and when they met, their efforts were fused into one mighty churning of the dragon foundation of human life. They strove not only for the triumph of the soul in the kingdom of Light, but also—and more—for the triumph of God in the kingdom of the material life. They strove, both of them, with an astonishing equipollence of intuitive knowledge, for the complete illumination of the material life and an unflawed manifestation of the Divine on earth—an Epiphany in transfigured humanity.
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Human reason understands moral self-discipline, which is, to quote William James's apt words, "but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure". It understands too something of religious fervour in which the fire of Godward emotions burns up some of the dross of human nature. But it has no idea of the elemental forces that go to constitute human nature, and does not know from what murky depths they emerge into overt play. When it sees falsehood, corruption, dishonesty and cruelty running rampant in civilised human society,—the animal completely unleashed—it wonders how these brute passions could subsist along with so much of intellectual and cultural advancement. When an unsophisticated man of ethical culture hears of great scientists (science is the parent of culture, it is claimed) betraying the political or military secrets of their own motherland; eminent university professors (the universities, it is asserted, are the radiating centres of knowledge) found guilty of flagrant moral depravity, and university students in one of the most civilised countries in the world manhandling their teachers or making raids into the hostels of the opposite sex in broad day light and in brazen defiance of all restraints of morality and decorum; when he sees most of the modern educationists, politicians, sociologists—all men of light and leading —competing with each other in the fruitful arts of lying and hypocrisy, and pursuing a career of unbridled power-lust and vile self-seeking; and above all, when he thinks of the inhuman brutalities that are being perpetrated by responsible men from day to day in cold blood and even in the very name of peace and patriotism, he cannot but reel under their shock. Is it civilisation, he asks in amazement, that turns men into beasts of prey ? Is it culture that nourishes on their aboriginal passions ? Is it education that educes all that is dark and barbarous in them and yokes their intellectual powers—God's precious gift to them—to the service of their animal self ?
Human reason can only marvel, but find no solution of this distressing, problem; for the solution lies beyond it. It lies in a double discovery; the discovery of that which is beyond the level of our mental consciousness and of that which is below it,
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Our present active self is but an outer fringe and surface of our far-ranging being which plunges into remote depths below and spreads high above in the infinitudes of the Spirit. The motive forces of our thoughts and actions, the impulses that drive us and the desires that dictate and direct our movements, all come from sources hidden from our view; and unless we plumb the depths and scale the heights, we live in a woeful ignorance of our self, of our nature, and of the world in which we are set to evolve. Most of these motive forces surge up from the subconscient and the inconscient layers of our being, and if we want to transform our nature, it cannot be done by any surface adjustments and reforms, but by a thorough exploration of those submerged regions as well as of the superconscient, and the conversion of all blind and brute energies into their divine counterparts. But if the being of man refuses to exceed its present mental limitations and ascend into the Infinite and Eternal, it will go on pandering to the base passions of its animal self with all the formidable powers of its developing intellectuality, as we see it doing today, and a universal resurgence of the animal in man with an almost limitless potentiality for evil and destruction will be the unavoidable dire result.
But that is not to be. Man's evolution cannot thus be wrecked on the shoals of his animal self. His inherent divinity must awake and assert itself. He must one day come to realise that this mind, however developed, is a tool of the obscure forces of the material life which emerge from the nether reaches of his being and express themselves in his character, temperament and action. This realisation will arouse in him an aspiration for freedom and mastery by his soul's union with the Infinite and Eternal. It was precisely to help this spiritual freedom and mastery of man by his union and communion with the Divine that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo undertook the tremendous labour of illumining and transforming the Subconscient and the Inconscient.
The subconscient is the main support of all habitual movements,
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especially the physical and lower vital movements. When something is thrown out of the vital or physical, it very usually goes down into the subconscient and remains there as if in seed and comes up again when it can. That is the reason why it is so difficult to get rid of habitual vital movements or to change the character, for, supported or refreshed from this source, preserved in this matrix, your vital movements, even when suppressed or repressed, surge up again and recur. The action of the subconscient is irrational, mechanical, repetitive. It does not listen to reason or the mental will. It is only by bringing the higher light and force into it that it can change.”¹
If we read these words of Sri Aurobindo along with those written by the Mother in her Prayer of Nov.25, 1913, we cannot help being struck by the identity of their views and experiences :
"The greatest enemy of a silent contemplation turned towards Thee is certainly this constant subconscient registering of the multitude of phenomena with which we are put into contact. So long as we are occupied with cerebral activity, our conscious thought veils for us this excessive activity of our subconscient reception of things... It is only when we silence our active thought ...that we find surging from all sides the multitude of little subconscient notations which often drown us in their overflowing stream. This is why it happens, as soon as we try to enter into the silence of deep contemplation, that we are assailed by innumerable thoughts—if thoughts they can be called—which do not in the least interest us, do not represent for us any action of desire, any conscious attachment, but which only prove to us our inability to control the receptivity, we might say, mechanical, of our subconscient.”
It is clear from these quotations that no attempt at a radical reform of human nature or a reconstruction of human society that fails to explore, illumine and conquer the Subconscient
¹Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.
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and the Inconscient can ever succeed. The dark depths hold the secret of our evolutionary growth as well as dangerous explosives that may disrupt our being. We are moved by their obscure forces, even in spite of ourselves; even when we think we are guided by our own will and intelligence. "We are governed ”, says Sri Aurobindo, "by the subconscient and the subliminal even in our conscious existence and in our very self-mastery and self-direction we are only instruments of what seems to us the Inconscient within us.” And yet, "the principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient, but wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Maya.”¹ Voicing the same truth, the Mother says, "...from many points of view our subconscient has greater knowledge than our habitual consciousness.”²
Locating and describing the subconscient, the Mother says in her Prayer of March 13, 1914, just a fortnight before her fateful meeting with Sri Aurobindo :
"The subconscient is the intermediate zone between precise perception and the total darkness of the ignorance; it is probable that the majority of beings, even of human beings, live constantly . in this subconscience; few emerge from it.”
It is interesting to compare with these words what Sri Aurobindo says on the same point:
"The Subconscient lies between this Inconscient and the conscious mind, life and body. It contains the potentiality of all the primitive reactions to life which struggle out to the surface from the dull and inert strands of Matter and form by a constant development a slowly evolving and self-formulating consciousness; it contains them not as ideas, perceptions or conscious reactions but as fluid substance of these things. But also all that is consciously experienced sinks down into the subconscient, not as precise though submerged memories but as obscure yet obstinate impressions of experience,
¹The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.
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and these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feelings, action, etc., as complexes exploding into action and event, etc., etc. The subconscient is the main cause why all things repeat themselves and nothing ever gets changed except in appearance. It is the cause why people say character cannot be changed, the cause also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got rid of for ever. All seeds are there and all samskāras of the mind, vital and body,—it is the main support of death and disease and the last fortress (seemingly impregnable) of the Ignorance. All too that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and remains as seed ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment.”¹
The goal of evolution, as conceived by Sri Aurobindo, is the complete conversion of the Subconscient and the Inconscient into luminous consciousness, and the principal means to attain it is a descent of the supreme divine Light into them. "Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscious in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of the Spirit.”² This is the conquest that the Mother speaks of in many of her Prayers,—the conquest of the divine Light over the sombre night of the subconscience and the inconscience.
".. .And all Thy (God's) effort consists in drawing the substance from this first obscurity so as to make it be born into consciousness. Passion itself is preferable to inconscience. We must therefore constantly march to the conquest of this universal bedrock of inconscience, and making our organism the instrument, transform it little by little into luminous consciousness.”³
She speaks elsewhere of the subconscient passivity "which we have to conquer and awaken to the consciousness of Thy divine
² The Life Divine, Vol. II, Chap. XXVI.
³ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.
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Presence,”¹ and calls this conquest "the work to be accomplished, the mission to be fulfilled upon the earth. ”
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are both agreed that so long as we live under the dismal sway of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, we are almost amorphous in our psychological being, repeating indefinitely, helplessly, mechanically, the desires and cravings, the impulses and instincts, the passions and propensities which enter into us from the universal nature of Ignorance.
"To feel Thee and aspire for Thee, we must have emerged from the immense sea of the subconscient, we must have begun to crystallise, to define and so to know and then to give ourselves as that alone can give itself which belongs to itself. And how many efforts and struggles are needed to attain to this crystallisation, to come out of the amorphous middle state...”²
We do not remember having come across any instance of an organised spiritual campaign against the bedrock of the Subconscient and the Inconscient that can be cited along with that of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. And yet it is the most momentous humanitarian work ever undertaken, for, without a complete transmutation of the basic stuff of human nature, it would be idle to dream of a happy and harmonious human life on earth. Man can be redeemed and released into his inherent divinity only by the double discovery we have spoken of above : the discovery of the golden summits of his being and the dark base from which he has started on his evolutionary pilgrimage. A simultaneous conquest of the summits and the base has to be attempted, if the integral being of man has to have an integral divine fulfilment in life. This is the fundamental perception upon which the work of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo has been progressing, and its consummation will be the manifestation of God in life, the Life Divine. If we lose sight of this fundamental perception, we shall find ourselves
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lost in the many-sided vastness of the aim and the incalculable swing and sweep of the process of the Integral Yoga propounded by them. This perception was the well-spring of all the efforts of the Mother even when she knew nothing of Sri Aurobindo, and it has ever been the same in their unwearied collaboration.
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THE DIVINE MANIFESTATION
AND THE DIVINE LIFE
BEFORE we proceed to note the identity existing between Sri Aurobindo's views on the Divine Manifestation and the Divine Life and those of the Mother before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo, we had better be clear about what Sri Aurobindo understands by Manifestation and the Divine Life.
There are two important elements which give a distinctive character to the above terms and mark them out as the most creative concepts in spiritual philosophy. The first is the evolutionary and the second the collective element. Manifestation is, according to Sri Aurobindo, the very purpose and goal of evolution. All creation is, in a sense the manifestation of that which lay latent and unmanifest in the Absolute. It is an expression, a self-expression, of the creative delight of existence; a self-revelation in name and form of the nameless and formless Infinite. But what Sri Aurobindo means by manifestation is not a flawed and imperfect self-revelation under the conditions of mental ignorance and material limitations, as we have today in the mental man, but a perfect self-expression of the Divine Sachchidananda in the triple term of mind, life and body, as the crown of Nature's evolutionary endeavour. He says that emerging from inconscience, the soul of man is mounting, through whatever stumbles and zigzags, towards its own infinite consciousness and bliss in the Divine; and the more it climbs the more it can reveal here, if it will, the light and power and harmony of the higher reaches of its being. The culmination of this evolutionary ascent will be the supreme creative Truth-Consciousness, the transcendent Supermind or Vijnana, in which man will live, even as the Divine lives, in the unfading glory of infinite knowledge and power and creative delight of an immortal existence.
The ascent to the Supermind will be followed by a descent of the supramental Consciousness-Force into the nature of man and the latter's transformation into the divine nature or
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Para Prakriti. When the transformation is complete—it is only the supramental Force that can radically transform human nature—the whole being of man will be ready for a perfect manifestation of the Divine in life, which is the ultimate end of evolution. This evolutionary aspect of Manifestation has to be taken fully into account in any correct appreciation of Sri Aurobindo's gospel of the Divine Life, for it argues the inevitability of such a consummation.
The second element is, that Manifestation, according to Sri Aurobindo, will not be a spiritual victory of an individual or a few exceptional individuals, but a signal triumph of the collective man over the forces of ignorance. For, the crux of the problem of Manifestation is the transfiguration of the physical being of man which is half embedded in the Subconscient and the Inconscient—a thing of obscure appetites and mechanical habits, stubborn in its refusal to admit light and order and any higher conscious force into itself, and no individual, however great he may be, is capable of completely transforming his physical being without there being a considerable change and modification in the general physical being of humanity itself. Matter, like Mind and Life, is an indivisible substance, and if the manifestation of the spirit in it is the final destiny of terrestrial evolution, it has to undergo the supramental transfiguration, just as any other part of the human being; and whatever transformation takes place in it will be the heritage of humanity at large, and not the enclosed monopoly of only a few gifted individuals. It is true, of course, that a few individuals will be the pioneers in this spiritual work of transformation and manifestation, but what they will achieve will be the pledge and prophecy of what humanity in general is called upon to accomplish. This collective aspect of the message of Manifestation foreshadows the splendour of a more or less universal perfection in humanity.
This Manifestation of Spirit in Matter, of God in man, will be an unhampered expression of man's integral living in the Divine. His body, life, soul and mind, in possession of the Divine and possessed by Him, will reveal nothing but Him in
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thought and feeling and action, and fulfil Him and His Will in the world. This is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Divine Life. Defining the process and the condition of the Divine Life Sri Aurobindo says,
"The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of Supermind towards the divine Being. The knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemisphere, is where mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them. The rending of the veil is the condition of the divine life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending Supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all- blissful Ananda, life possess its divine power in the play of omnipotent Conscious-Force and Matter open to its divine liberty as a form of the divine Existence. And if there be any goal to the evolution which finds here its present crown and head in the human being, other than an aimless circling and an individual escape from the circling, if the infinite potentiality of this creature, who alone here stands between Spirit and Matter with the power to mediate between them, has any meaning other than an ultimate awakening from the delusion of life by despair and disgust of the cosmic effort and its complete rejection, then even such a luminous and puissant transfiguration and emergence of the Divine in the creature must be that high-uplifted goal and that supreme significance.”
That the ideal of such a Manifestation with its implicits of divine perfection and fulfilment in general humanity, as an inevitable evolutionary consummation, is a new one cannot be gainsaid. There is no evidence of its existence either in the traditions of Indian spirituality or in Western religious and philosophic literature. The Christian ideal of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth is at best an ethical ideal of righteousness and
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piety, carrying no implications of a collective ascent of mankind to a higher than the present mental level of consciousness and a corresponding descent of any higher Truth-Consciousness into humanity. The idea of Satya Yuga, as it prevails in India, is also a rather vague anticipation of a cyclic reign of Truth and Justice ending the sway of ignorance and falsehood. The idealistic thought of mankind has, indeed, dreamed of a millennium upon earth, but the dream, except being a remote inspiration to the higher endeavours of a very small section of humanity, has never been able to base itself on any definite truth of spiritual experience or any comprehensive vision of the purpose and possibilities of evolution. Sri Aurobindo's ideal of the divine Manifestation and the Divine Life on earth claims originality, in as much as it is "a thing to be achieved that has not yet been achieved, not yet clearly visualised, even though it is one natural but still secret outcome of all the past spiritual endeavour.” What Sri Aurobindo envisages as the aim of his Integral Yoga—for he holds up not only the sublime ideal, but gives a definite guidance on the way to its realisation—is "not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth- consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing in of a Power of consciousness (the Supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth-nature, even in the spiritual life but yet to be organised and made directly active.”
The divine Manifestation in the Divine Life has been the constant preoccupation of the Mother also all through her life, the single aim of all her spiritual strivings. As we read her Prayers and Meditations, we find it to be the recurring refrain of all her heart's songs mounting towards the Divine. Not content with the bliss of an absorbed union with the Supreme in the immobile depths of her being, she has laboured for long years and through unimaginable difficulties to extend the orbit of the union and its creative bliss down to her most outer physical being, so that from her soul to her body and its activities, all may be an uninterrupted expression of the Divine
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Presence and an integrated means of the fulfilment of His Will. This colossal work of revealing the divine glory and dispensing the divine Grace in a life of ceaseless activity, she has undertaken, as the Prayers and Meditations proclaims from page to page, in response to the express Will of the Divine, so that the fruits of her labours may be reproduced in humanity and there may be a perfect Manifestation of Spirit in transformed Matter.
In her Prayer of the nth December, 1912, the Mother says to the Divine, "Thou alone art the doer and I am the instrument; and when the instrument is ready for a completer manifestation., the manifestation will quite naturally take place.” Even so far back as 1912, she knew that the Manifestation of the Divine on earth was inevitable and that she was the pioneer instrument chosen for that purpose. The knowledge of her supreme role was clear and definite, and she expresses it with a selfless candour and joy in her Prayer of the 10th February, 1913 : "My being goes up to Thee in thanksgiving, not because Thou usest this weak and imperfect body to manifest Thyself, but because Thou dost manifest Thyself, and that is the Splendour of splendour, the Joy of joys, the Marvel of marvels.” Again, in her Prayer of the i3th March, 1913, she speaks of the ceaseless prayer of her integral being which desires "to unite with Thee (the Divine) so as to manifest Thee.” Union has for her at once a static and a dynamic aspect, for, without a dynamic union in the full flood of life's activities, there cannot be any Manifestation in Matter. The path of discipline which leads to the dynamic union, she has chalked out in her Prayer of the 28th November, 1912, and in many a subsequent Prayer, which proves, if any proof were at all needed, that she knew what she meant by Manifestation; and what she meant was exactly what Sri Aurobindo has always held up before humanity as the ideal of his Integral Yoga and the goal of the evolutionary march of Nature. In her Prayer of August 8, 1913, she calls upon the essential divine harmony which is immanent in all things to manifest itself "in the most outward forms of life, in every feeling, in every thought, in every act.” Her insistence has always been on the perfection of the most outer, the most physical part
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of human nature. And we have the same ideal stressed time and again in the writings of Sri Aurobindo : "...Its (of his Yoga) aim is not only to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world- consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter.”¹
With regard to the "Advent" of the Divine, that is to say. His unveiled manifestation in collective humanity, the Mother has been as positive as Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo says,
"If I believe in the probability and not only possibility, if I feel practically certain of the Supramental Descent (I do not fix a date), it is because I have my grounds for the belief, not a faith in the air. I know that the Supramental Descent is inevitable—I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later age... I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane. That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse forces who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer to the field of earth and Matter.” "I know with absolute certitude that the Supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable.”¹
Let us now listen to what the Mother says in her Prayers to the Divine so far back as 1913-1914. In her Prayer of the 17th August, 1913, she speaks of flying up into "Thy divine atmosphere with the power to return as messengers to the earth and announce the glorious tidings of Thy Advent which is near.” Again, on November 29, 1913, she says to the Divine :
"But the hour of Thy manifestation has come. And canticles of joy will soon break out from every side.”
¹ Lights on Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.
² Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. II.
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Knowing, as she does, her pioneer part in the Manifestation, she prays to God, on February 8, 1914 :
"I implore that more and more perfectly identified with Thee, I may become nothing else than Thou manifested in word and act...”
Another Prayer (dated February 23, 1914) breathes the self-same aspiration :
"Grant that I may be a useful and clairvoyant collaboratrix and that all in me may promote the plenitude of Thy manifestation.”
And what is the best way of promoting the plenitude of the divine manifestation ?
"To live in Love, by Love, for Love, indissolubly united to Thy highest manifestation..”¹
"But the supreme science, O Lord, is to be united with Thee, to confide in Thee, to live in Thee, to be Thou; and then there is nothing that is impossible to the man manifesting Thy omnipotence.”²
"There is only one resource, it is to unite ourselves as perfectly as we can with the highest and purest light we can conceive of, to identify our consciousness as completely as possible with the absolute Consciousness, to strive to receive all inspiration from it alone, in order to facilitate as best we can its manifestation upon the earth, and, confident of its power, consider the events with serenity.”³
In the first and third quotations, the Mother speaks of
¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March r, 1914.
² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March 17, 1914.
³” Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March 23, 1914.
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"the highest manifestation" and "the highest and purest light," which evidently means what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental manifestation or the supramental light, which is the goal of earthly evolution. She knows that the manifestation she is heralding, initiating and incarnating will be something surpassing all that has taken place up to now. It will be a new Creation, as Sri Aurobindo terms it, or a new race of humanity. The unprecedented perfection of such an eventuality can be glimpsed through one of her old writings of 1912 where, outlining the path of "the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity which is One,” and indicating "the most useful work to be done,” she says :
"To individualise the states of being that were never till now conscious in man and, by that, to put the earth in connection with one or more of the fountains of universal force that are still sealed to it.”¹
This unsealing of the sealed fountains of Force and linking the earth to them—is it not the central secret of Sri Aurobindo's work of the supramental manifestation ?
In fact, the more we reflect upon the ideal the Mother had been endeavouring to realise in her life before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo, the more we are struck by the identity of their life's mission and the unwavering certitude of victory with which they have engaged in a grim combat with the forces of terrestrial ignorance. This certitude of victory the Mother had from her early years, not as an outcome of faith, but of a series of profound experiences, and her knowledge about herself and her life's work was luminously confirmed much later by Sri Aurobindo when he wrote,
"Her (the Mother’s) embodiment is a chance for the earth-consciousness to receive the Supramental into it and to undergo first the transformation necessary for that to be possible.”²
² Letters of Sri Aurobindo on the Mother.
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"The Mother comes in order to bring down the Supramental and it is the descent which makes full manifestation here possible.”¹
Born to collaborate with Sri Aurobindo in the work of the supramental manifestation and the establishment of the Divine Life on earth, the Mother had the most decisive physical confirmation of her inner certitude when she first met Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry on the 29th March, 1914. The whole teeming mass of her past experiences melted and lit up into one thrilled revelation. The earth shuddered with joy and the heavens showered their benediction when the Mother's soul went up in prayer to the Supreme :
"It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth: His presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, when Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.”²
And thus commenced the marvel of a fateful collaboration for the achievement of the divine Manifestation and the Divine Life upon earth.
¹ Letters of Sri Aurobindo on the Mother.
² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March 30, 1914.
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THE MOTHER'S WORK*
WHEN Sri Aurobindo left his body in the year 1950, most of his disciples and devotees, living in the world outside, made anxious enquiries as to what would now be the fate of the Ashram and the great work of the supramental transformation which he had laboured for during the forty long years of his strenuous seclusion at Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo had asserted time and again that the descent of the Supermind and its establishment in the earth-consciousness as a principle and power of the infinite Knowledge-Will, superseding and completing the mind of man, was inevitable, and that a divine life on earth was the crowning glory of human destiny. How was that great work going to be accomplished ? Who would now be the leader of the supramental evolution ? Was it not merely a lofty dream of a spiritual visionary—one of those dreams and ideals that flash for a moment across our mental skies and fade away into the light of common day, leaving but a memory of a splendour and a sublimity never to be achieved on this petty planet of our brief habitation ?
What reply did the inmates of the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo give to these eager queries ? What proof, what certitude did they advance against the turbid surge of facile doubts and misgivings ? Stunned by the first shock of separation from One they had so profoundly loved and adored, so faithfully followed and served, they did not know what reply to give, how to convince the doubting, unbelieving minds. Their sole proof, their whole certitude, their absolute faith stood personified before them—the Mother, she who had been to them at once the path, the guide and the goal; and the solemn words of Sri Aurobindo rang in their hearts :
"A day may come when she must stand unhelped
* "Mother has taken the body because a work of a physical nature (i.e. including a change in the physical world) has to be done.."—Sri Aurobindo.
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On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,
Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.
Alone with death and close to extinction’ s edge,
Her single greatness in that last dire scene,
She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man.
In that tremendous silence lone and lost
Of a deciding hour in the world’ s fate,
In her soul’s climbing beyond mortal time
When she stands sole with Death or sole with God
Apart upon a silent desperate brink,
Alone with her self and death and destiny
As on some verge between Time and Timelessness
When being must end or life rebuild its base,
Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.
No human aid can reach her in that hour,
No armoured God stand shining at her side.
Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.
For this the silent Force came missioned down;
In her the conscious Will took human shape :
She only can save herself and save the world.”¹
With the flaming ardour of a renewed loyalty and the spontaneous self-abandon of an overflowing love, they clung to the Mother in that grim hour of their life. She was there, to whom they had already surrendered all of themselves and on whose guidance they had learned to depend exclusively in all the details of their lives. She was there, who had been leading their spiritual unfoldment from stage to stage, across many a path and by-path, over many a gulf and chasm, many a quagmire and precipice, toward the perfection that had attracted them to the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Their contact with Sri Aurobindo had always been through her, and they had
¹ Savitri,, Book VI, Canto II.
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come to realise the truth of Sri Ramakrishna's dictum that the key to the abode of Brahman is with the Mother, and that none can enter there unless She, in her Grace, opens the door. Wearied out by the inner struggle, they had reposed and revived on her lap; battered by the blasts of life, they had taken refuge at her feet, menaced by the forces of darkness, they had clung to her bosom of boundless love and compassion. Her love had been their mainstay, their never-failing friend and protector, their healer and comforter, and the solitary leader of their spiritual journey. Her love had been, indeed, the very sap and sustenance of their lives. If they stumbled on the rugged path of Yoga, she was there to lift them up; if they were confused and clouded in their vision, her light was always there to brighten up their consciousness and show them the right way. If the path appeared long and steep and laborious, and their heart's fire seemed to sink, her beaming eyes pointed to the distant horizons, golden with the glory of the eternal Sun. With her, they knew they were invincible; without her, they could hardly conceive of existence except as a painful illusion. To be united with her, to be her pliant and docile instruments, to fulfil her work in the world, have been the only aspiration of their hearts. So, when Sri Aurobindo left his body, they naturally looked up to her, yearning to find him in her. She assured them that he had cast off his material vesture only for a definite purpose, and not compelled by any ineluctable law of Nature; and that he was here still, in the earth atmosphere, toiling, as ever, for the fulfilment of the great work of his life— the descent of the Truth-Consciousness and the supramental transformation of man. She assured them that he was present in their midst, not in a figurative sense or as a universal, impersonal consciousness, but as the very divine being he had been in his physical body, as the very dynamic Master they had loved and adored. Sri Aurobindo had often told them that his consciousness and the Mother's were one; and now they realised that truth more and more, in a sense more living, quickening and intimate.
A meditative silence reigned in the Ashram for twelve days
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after the passing of the beloved Master. Then the normal activities began, but with a striking difference. One felt a pervading Presence in the Ashram atmosphere and the Mother's Force as more sovereignly in command of the life blossoming there. There was an imperative call, a kindling inspiration, almost an irresistible pull to transcend the normal levels of human consciousness and ascend to the radiant heights of the Spirit. Concentration came easier and the need for total self- consecration became more imperious than ever. Many felt an urge, never felt in the same way before, to ferret out all that was unholy and unlovely in them, all that opposed their self- transcendence, and fling them away for ever, so that the influence of the Mother alone could enter into them and mould them in the image of their innate divinity. Besides, each successive day brought a greater contact with the world outside, resulting in a rapid expansion of the Ashram and, which is remarkable, greater and more enthusiastic acceptance by the world of the ideal for which the Ashram stood. The expansion appeared, indeed, to exceed all expectation. The departments of the Ashram work multiplied and the energies of the sadhakas found new channels of self-expression. It is a singular, though usual, feature of the Ashram activities that they develop of themselves, as if impelled by some invisible force, without any previous plan or blue-print. A person comes and starts a new line in which he appears to be an expert, or one of the sadhakas suddenly develops a capacity of which he never suspected any . trace in himself before, and it becomes the occasion for a new department. Those who live in the Ashram and have observed how the departments come into being and thrive, know well enough that their single source of inspiration is the Mother, whose supramental Will manifests itself in its inscrutable way in the various life of her children. The working of that Will now made itself felt more powerfully than ever and sought manifold ways of self-fulfilment. Streams of visitors poured in, day after day, month after month, to pay their homage to the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo, catch a glimpse of the ideal of the Life Divine, and imbibe something of the Light and Force
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emanating from the Mother. It seemed as if the flood-gates of a dynamic spirituality had been flung wide open to the whole world without any distinction of creed and colour. It seemed that the Mother's will and aspiration breathed by her Prayer of January 9, 1914 when she knew nothing of Sri Aurobindo and his teachings, had begun to be realised:
"O Lord, unseizable Reality, Thou who constantly escapest before our conquering advance even though it is effective, and who wilt always be the Unknown in spite of all that we shall learn to know of Thee, in spite of all that we shall have ravished from Thy eternal mystery, we would, with a complete and constant effort, combining the multiple paths which lead towards Thee, advance like a rising and indomitable flood, breaking all obstacles, crossing all barriers, lifting all veils, dispersing all clouds, piercing all darknesses, advance towards Thee, always towards Thee, with a movement so powerful, so irresistible, that a whole multitude will be swept on behind us, and the earth conscious of Thy new and eternal Presence will understand at last what are her true ends, and live in the harmony and peace of Thy sovereign realisation...”
It seemed that the mission of her life of which she had spoken in so many of her Prayers was going at last to be fulfilled :
"Grant that I may accomplish my mission, that I may help in Thy integral manifestation.”
"Grant, O Divine Teacher, that we may more and more, better and better, know and accomplish our mission upon the earth, that we may fully utilise all the energies that are in us, and that Thy sovereign Presence may become more and more perfectly manifested in the silent depths of our soul, in all our thoughts, all our feelings, all our actions...”¹She, who had always kept
¹ Both these Prayers were written by the Mother in 1914, just a few days before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo. What is particularly remarkable in
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herself in the background and shunned the lime-light, became now the cynosure of countless eyes and the hope and refuge of many wandering souls. Many who came to see the Ashram came again, and again, to see more, and more; for they felt that here there were more things below than on the surface; and some even came, decided to stay and enroll themselves as warriors in the great spiritual battle. Parents left their children, husbands left their wives, brothers left their sisters, whole families came and settled—all drawn by some irresistible, mysterious magnetism. Even little children, once they came and felt a touch of the Mother's love, refused to go back with their parents and were happy to live and grow under the Mother's outspread wings. The Mother dislikes advertisement and propaganda, particularly in the cause of spiritual institutions. She says that, if her work is the work of the Divine, workers will flock to her from all parts of the globe. An so, indeed, they have been flocking—from America and England and France, from Germany and Holland and Spain, from Sweden and Australia and China and Japan, and from almost every part of India. The stream expands as it pours in and rushes forward to bathe the Mother's feet. Fired with the new spirit, the standard- bearers of the new Light gather round her to help fulfil her mission. Each day brings, as if by miracle, a more admiring appreciation of the Ashram and its expanding activities. Is it any wonder that men feel spontaneously drawn to one who can awaken their souls, unveil their innate harmony and happiness, and lead them to the perfect fulfilment of their divine destiny ?
In 1951 the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education came into existence. On the occasion of its convention the Mother said : "Sri Aurobindo is present in our midst, and with all the power of his creative genius he presides over the formation
----------------------------------------------------
them is not only the word 'manifestation', but the expression 'integral manifestation', which has always been the keyword of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy. This insistence on the integrality of the realisation, un-heard of before Sri Aurobindo, is the most conclusive evidence of the identity of their souls and their mission upon earth.
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of the university centre which for years he considered as one of the best means of preparing the future humanity to receive the supramental light that will transform the elite of today into a new race manifesting upon earth the new light and force and life. In his name I open today this Convention meeting here with the purpose of realising one of his most cherished ideals.” It is a centre where irrespective of race and clime, men can receive a harmonious education designed to develop and enlighten not only their mind but their whole being—soul, mind, life and body—and give them a definite lead towards a dynamic spiritual life lived in God and devoted to the fulfilment of the divine Will in the world. It is a centre where men can learn how to achieve their perfection and fulfilment, not only on one but on all planes of their existence, and express their inherent divinity which is now masked by their half-animal humanity. It is a centre where they can learn to rise beyond all artificial divisions of race and country, sex and age, caste and creed, and find themselves one with all, in peace and harmony with all—in God. It is a place where they can serve humanity best by learning to serve the Divine in humanity.
The Centre of Education is growing, slowly but steadily, in the silent way things grow and flower under the benignant eye of God, when the bustling mind of man, in its arrogant incompetence, ceases to interfere. The number of children has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and, but for the extreme difficulty of accommodation, would have swollen to unmanageable proportions. It is in the flower-like faces of these children, more than anywhere else, that one can perceive the gleam of the heavenly Light the Mother has been striving to establish in the earth-consciousness, the Light about which she wrote decades ago in her Prayers and Meditations:
"A new Light shall break upon the earth, a new world shall be born : the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.”
Addressing the children of the Centre of Education, she said in 1951 :
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"There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, the last rung at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In that he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material habits and instincts. Undoubtedly, nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she endeavours to bring out a being who will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance.
"Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it.
"You have the immense privilege of having come quite young to the Ashram, that is to say, still plastic and capable of being moulded according to this new ideal and thus becoming the representatives of the new race. Here, in the Ashram, you are in the most favourable conditions with regard to the environment, the influence, the teaching and the example, to awaken in you this supramental consciousness and to grow according to its law.
"Now all depends on your will and your sincerity. If you have the will no more to belong to ordinary humanity, no more to be merely evolved animals; if your will is to become men of the new race realising Sri Aurobindo's supramental ideal living a new and higher life upon a new earth, you will find here all the necessary help to achieve your purpose; you will profit fully by your stay in the Ashram and eventually become living examples for the world.”
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This, then, is the Mother's work—to awaken in man the supramental Truth-Consciousness and help him grow according to its law. Evidently it is a signal departure from the aims and objects of traditional spirituality, which points to the Beyond as the only kingdom of perfection and fulfilment. The Mother's Force is directed to the radical transformation of the whole active nature of man, so that the gulf between his outer consciousness and the divine Consciousness may be bridged and he may manifest the Divine in every movement of his individual and collective life on earth.
The Ashram of Sri Aurobindo is the Mother's creation, and she has built it up, brick by brick, arch by arch, so that one day it may become a temple and a radiating centre of the new Light, a prism of the splendour of the Supermind. With her will united with the Will of the Divine, her unbarred vision contemplating the future more clearly than we can contemplate the immediate present, and her supramental Force creating the principles and conditions of the Truth-life upon earth, the Mother has been silently proceeding with her work, unmindful of the praise or blame of the world. What has been achieved is little by the side of what she has to achieve for God and humanity—a refounding of human life on the peace and bliss and creative harmony of the Spirit, a perfect revelation of God in Matter.¹
¹ "All here shall be one day her sweetness's home,
All contraries prepare her harmony..."
—Savitri, Book III, Canto II.
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