A Practical Guide To Integral Yoga

Section One

PREFACE

To start with, it is important to know what we as human beings are and what our life is.

Under the Divine Wisdom, the earth has evolved from matter to plant life and then to animal life. Evolution from animal to man is not the final stage. Humanity is under the sway of dark and ignorant forces and that is the reason for human sufferings, disease and death—all the signs of imperfection. It is clear that man has to progress towards a Light which brings knowledge, power, happiness, love, beauty and even physical immortality. The Divine is the essence of the whole universe and to realise and possess Him should be the supreme aim of human life. To acquire all the qualities of the Divine is the final purpose of Nature's evolution.

Mere ideas and ideals, mere talk about God and the Good cannot help. Nor can performance of religious rites really help. A firm resolution should spring from one's heart to realise the Divine, and nothing else should matter. Emotional enthusiasm does not by itself go very far. One must be ready to pass through the hard ordeals of the spiritual path. One cannot persist to the end unless one keeps the will firm and draws on the support of an inner strength.

The soul progresses by gathering experiences in the ordinary life but it is a very long, slow and devious process from birth to birth. Yoga hastens the soul's development. The

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progress that can be made in many lives is made in a few years by the help of Yoga.

Just as modern science has advanced greatly over past researches and brought new truths and powers, the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has also made a momentous advancement over all past Yogas. It is called the "Integral Yoga" or the "Supramental Yoga".

Where the past Yogas end, this new Integral Yoga starts. The Yogas of the past were only of ascent to the Spirit, Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is both of ascent and descent. One can realise the Divine in consciousness by the old Yogas but cannot establish the Divine on earth in a collective no less than in an individual physical life. In the old Yogas the world was considered either an illusion or a transitional phase : it had no prospect of having all the terms of its existence fulfilled. Sri Aurobindo says that the world is a real creation of the Divine and life in it can be completely divinised, down to the very cells of the body. A Kingdom of God on earth can be brought about in the most literal sense by a total transformation of collective men.

To put it in Sri Aurobindo's words : "Here and not elsewhere the highest Godhead has to be found, the soul's divine nature developed out of the imperfect physical human nature and through unity with God and man and universe the whole large truth of being discovered and lived and made visibly wonderful. That completes the long cycle of our becoming and admits us to a supreme result; that is the opportunity given to the soul by the human birth and, until that is accomplished, it cannot cease."

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For this transformation a new power called the "Super-mind" which was sealed to this earth till now is needed. By its manifestation in earth-nature a supreme evolution is made possible.

The Mother has declared recently that at last the Super-mind has manifested. It is now only a question of time to have its increasing effect in world-life. This new Light will work everywhere in general but it will be more effective in those who come into direct contact with the Masters of this Yoga and take up the Yogic life in earnest.

More and more people, in India as well as abroad, are drawn towards Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and are anxious to know their teachings. A need is felt to collect these teachings in a single book which would combine brevity with many-sidedness and serve as an introduction to the new path. We hope the present collection will prove helpful to all sincere aspirants.

MANIBHAI

Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Pondicherry

5-5-1957

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It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He [Sri Aurobindo] 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.

The Mother

30-3-1914

*

Since the beginning of the earth, wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of the Consciousness, I was there.

The Mother

Without him, I exist not;

Without me, he is unmanifest.

6-5-57

The Mother

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INTRODUCTORY

LIFE'S GOAL

(i)

The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.

*

(ii)

Whoever clings to desires and weaknesses of the flesh, the cravings and passions of the vital in its turbulent ignorance, the dictates of his personal mind un silenced and unillumined by a greater knowledge, cannot find the true inner law and is heaping obstacles in the way of the divine fulfilment. Whoever is able to detect and renounce those obscuring agencies and to discern

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and follow the true Guide within and without will discover the spiritual law and reach the goal of the yoga.

*

(iii)

The Divine Life and the transformation of the lower human into a higher divine nature must be made the sole aim of all the life. No attachment, desire or habit of the mind, heart, vital-being or body should be clung to which come in the way of this one aspiration and one object of life. One must be ready to renounce all these completely as soon as the demand comes from above and the Divine Shakti.

*

(iv)

First, the consciousness must be transformed, then life, then the forms. It is in this order that the new creation will happen. All Nature's activity is, in fact, a progressive return towards the Supreme Reality which is at once the origin and the goal of the universe, in its totality as well as in its smallest element; we have to become concretely what we are essentially. We must live integrally the truth, the beauty, the power and the

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perfection hidden in the depth of our being. It is then that all life will become the expression of the sublime, eternal, divine Joy.

*

(v)

Some give their soul to the Divine, some their life, some offer their work, some their money. A few consecrate all of themselves and all they have—soul, life, work, wealth; these are the true children of God. Others give nothing—these, whatever their position, power and riches, are for the Divine purpose valueless cyphers.

*

(vi)

The Adverse Powers are the forces and beings that are interested in maintaining the falsehoods they have created in the world of the Ignorance and in putting them forward as the Truth which men must follow. In India they are termed Asuras, Rakshasas, Pishachas who are in opposition to the Gods, the Powers of Light. These too are Powers, for they too have their cosmic field in which they exercise their function and authority and some of them were once divine Powers who have fallen towards the darkness by revolt against the divine Will behind the cosmos.

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As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all the ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure, ways to cleave through impenetrable morass and desert and forest, hostile masses to conquer—a work such as, I am certain, none else had to do before us. For the leader of the way in a work like ours has not only to bring down or represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience, not in a mere play or Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled, hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the path It is because we have the complete experience that we can show a straighter and easier road to others—if they will only consent to take it. It is because of our experience won at a tremendous price that we can urge it upon you and others.

SRI AUROBINDO

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THE LAST DECISIVE BATTLE

(Between the Asuric and the Divine Forces in 1955)

I foresee that the coming year will be a difficult year. There will be much inner struggle and much outer struggle too. So I shall tell you of the attitude you should take in such circumstances.

Indeed the more things become difficult, the quieter you should remain, the more unshakable the faith you should have.

When difficulties come, human beings usually get agitated, excited, nervous and so make the difficulties hundredfold more difficult.

The difficulties may last perhaps more than the twelve months of the year, may extend to fourteen months. It is in the nature of things. The nature of the struggle determines the measure of its duration. The forces must come up to a certain pitch of activity to produce a certain result.

We make use of time in the measure of our small human duration. But naturally Divine Forces have not the same measure as we have and that may appear to us too long or too uncertain. For the Divine, however, that is the shortest way, in spite of everything, to the goal aimed at. The goal is the fulfilment of the Divine Will, whatever it is. Given the circumstances, the Divine always

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takes the shortest way, although that may seem-to us the longest, or tortuous and uncertain. Because we do not see the whole, we see just a little fragment which is according to our proportions. Our vision is narrow, narrow with regard to what is behind, narrow with regard to what is ahead. Man's vision is limited ; he cannot see very much beyond his nose. Human vision is linear, that is to say, things present themselves to it one after another in a line. Divine vision is different; it is total, it is global : it looks at the problem integrally, that is to say, from all sides, in the round, not from one side or at one point; the supreme vision takes in all sides and aspects at a glance, not only on the surface, but in the depth too. It embraces all the elements of the question and resolves the question without neglecting any of the points involved in it. Man, on the contrary, follows a straight line; anything that is not on the straight line escapes his notice, and if it were left to his choice, these other things would not get done. The Divine's way is circular and yet it is the most direct.

The adverse forces have always tried to push back the divine Realisation as much as possible, to maintain their hold upon the world as long as possible. That struggle seems now to have come to a head at last. It is their final chance. These

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forces are not blind or ignorant forces merely, there are conscious beings behind them and they know that it is their last chance; therefore they are putting forth all their will and strength as much as they can and what they can is very great. They are not at all like human beings with, their small consciousness and smaller power to which they appear formidable and even as divine forces, not only in the measure of their power, but in their consciousness too. They are engaged in a tremendous battle upon this earth ; for it is upon this earth that the victory has to be won, the victory that will decide the course of earth's future.

Those whose heart leaps up, who hold their head high just when things become specially dangerous, will have their full satisfaction. It is now the occasion to surmount oneself.

31-12-1954

The Mother

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THE VICTORY

The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute :

A new light shall break upon the earth,

A new world shall be born,

And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.

25th September, 1914 The Mother

Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute :

A new light breaks upon the earth, A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.

29th February, 1956 The Mother

The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality.

It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.

24th April, 1956 The Mother

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Open yourself to the new Light that has dawned upon earth and a luminous path will spread in front of you.

28th May, 1956 The Mother

THREE CONCEPTIONS OF THE WORLD

1.Buddhist and Shankara :

The world is an illusion, a field of ignorance and suffering due to ignorance. The one thing to do is to get out of it as soon as possible and to disappear into the original Non-Existence or Non-Manifestation.

2.The Vedantic as very commonly understood :

The world is essentially divine, for the divine is omnipresent there. But its exterior expression is distorted, obscure, ignorant, perverted. The one thing to do is to become conscious of the inner divine and remain fixed in that consciousness

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without troubling about the world; for this external world cannot change and will always be in its natural state of unconsciousness and ignorance.

3. Sri Aurobindo's View :

The world, as it is, is not the divine creation it is meant to be, but an obscure and perverted expression of it. It is not the expression of the divine consciousness and will, but this is what it is meant to become; it has been created to develop into a perfect manifestation of the Divine under all His forms and aspects—Light and Knowledge, Power, Love and Beauty.

This is our conception of it and the aim we follow.

24-2-1936 The Mother

TO THE CHILDREN OF THE ASHRAM

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,

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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

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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 yourselves 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.

24-7-1951

The Mother

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HUMANITY

Its Present Condition and Need

The whole aim of the material man is to live, to pass from birth to death with as much comfort or enjoyment as may be on the way, but anyhow to live____ The customary routine, the customary institutions, the inherited or habitual forms of thought,—these things are the life-breath of their nostrils____ To the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman.

The surfaces of life are easy to understand; their Jaws, characteristic movements, practical utilities are ready to our hand and we can seize on them and turn them to account with a sufficient facility and rapidity. But they do not carry us very far. They suffice for an active superficial life from day to day, but they do not solve the great problems of existence.

The word civilisation so used comes to have a merely relative significance or hardly any fixed sense at all.

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We must therefore get rid in it of all that is temporary or accidental and fix it upon this distinction that barbarism is the state of society in which man is almost entirely preoccupied with his life and body, his economic and physical existence____ It is obvious that in a state of barbarism the rude beginnings of civilisation may exist; it is obvious too that in a civilised society a great mass of barbarism or numerous relics of it may exist. In that sense all societies are semi-civilised.

Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality,—he may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal in his own kind, but that normality is only a sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding.

The Divine is infinite and immortal being; the human is fife limited in time and scope and form, life that is death attempting to become life that is immortality.

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In subhuman life of animal there is a vital and physical struggle, but no mental conflict. Man is subject to this mental conflict and is therefore at war not only with others but with himself; and because he is capable of this war with himself, he is also capable of that which is denied to the animal, of an inner evolution, a progression from higher to higher type, a constant self-transcending.

The true business of man upon earth is to express in the type of humanity a growing image of the Divine ; whether knowingly or unknowingly, it is to this end that Nature is working in him under the thick veil of her inner and outer processes. But the material or animal man is ignorant of the inner aim of life; he knows only its needs and its desires and he has necessarily no other guide to what is required of him than his own perception of need and his own stirrings and pointings of desire.

The Self of man is a thing hidden and occult; it is not his body, it is not his life, it is not—even though he is in the scale of evolution the mental being, the Manu,—his mind. Therefore neither the fullness of his physical, nor of his vital, nor of his mental nature

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can be either the last term or the true standard of his self-realisation.

We miss the divine reality in man and the secret of the human birth if we do not see that each individual man is that Self and sums up all human potentiality in his own being. That potentiality he has to find, develop, work out from within.

The knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence ; it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experience. Nor does that experience proceed by anything like rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking.

Man's road to spiritual superman hood will be open when he declares boldly that all he has yet developed, including the intellect of which he is so rightly and yet so vainly proud, are now no longer sufficient for him, and that to uncase, discover, set free this greater Light within shall be henceforward his pervading preoccupation.

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DIVINE LILA (Play)

We play at being bound, we are not really bound. We can be free when God wills; for He, our Supreme Self, is the master of the game, and without His Grace and permission no soul can leave the game.

The command is now. God always keeps for himself a chosen country in which the higher knowledge is through all chances and dangers, by the few or the many, continually preserved, and for the present, in this chaturyuga at least, that country is India. Whenever He chooses to take the full pleasure of ignorance, of the dualities, of strife and wrath and tears and weakness and selfishness, the tamasic and rajasic pleasures, of the play of the Kali in short, He dims the knowledge in India and puts her down into weakness and degradation so that she may retire into herself and not interfere with this movement of His Ma. When he wants to rise up from the mud and Narayana in man to become once again mighty and wise and blissful, then He once more pours out the knowledge on India and raises her up so that she may give the knowledge with its necessary consequences of might, wisdom and bliss to the whole world. When there is the contracted movement of knowledge, the Yogins in India withdraw from the world and practise Yoga for their own liberation and delight or for the liberation of a few

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disciples ; but when the movement of knowledge again expands and the soul of India expands with it, they come forth once more and work in the world and for the world. Yogins like Janaka, Ajatshatru and Karta-virya once more sit on the thrones of the world and govern the nations.

God's lila in man moves always in a circle, from Satyayuga to Kaliyuga and through Kaliyuga to the Satyayuga, from the age of gold to the age of iron and back again through the iron to the gold......But the Kaliyuga is not merely evil; in it the necessary conditions are progressively built up for a new Satyayuga, another harmony, a more advanced perfection.-

It is only India that can discover the harmony, because it is only by a change—not a mere readjustment—of man's present nature that it can be developed, and such a change is not possible except by Yoga. The nature of man and of things is at present a discord, a harmony that has gone out of tune. The whole heart and action and mind of man must be changed, but from within, not from without, not by political and social institutions, not even by creeds and philosophies, but by realisation of God in ourselves and the world and a remoulding of life by that realisation. This can only be effected by Purna-Yoga, a Yoga devoted to the fulfilment of the divine humanity in ourselves and others.

For this Purna-Yoga, the surrender must be complete. Nothing must be reserved, no desire, no demand, no opinion, no idea that this must be, that cannot be, that

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this should be and that should not be;—all must be given.

To those who demand from Him, God gives what they demand, but to those who give themselves and demand nothing, He gives everything that they might otherwise have asked or needed and in addition He gives Himself and the spontaneous boons of His love.

You must put aside what you want and wish to know what God wants; distrust what your heart, your passions or your habitual opinions prefer to hold as right and necessary.....The power that governs the world is at least as wise as you and it is not absolutely necessary that you should be consulted or indulged in its management; God is seeing to it.

An almighty love and wisdom are at work for your uplifting. Therefore never be troubled by the time that is being taken, even if it seems very long, but when imperfections and obstructions arise, be apramatta, dhira, have the utsaha, and leave God to do the rest. Time is necessary. It is a tremendous work that is being done in you, the alteration of your whole human nature into a divine nature, the crowding of centuries of evolution into a few years. You ought not to grudge the time.

The goal marked out for us and the call upon us is to grow into the image of God, to dwell in Him and with Him and be a channel of His joy and might and an instrument of His works. Purified from all that is ashubha, transfigured in soul by His touch we have to act in the world as dynamos of that divine electricity and send it

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thrilling and radiating through mankind, so that wherever one of us stands, hundreds around may become full of His light and force, full of God and full of ananda.

Churches, orders, theologies, philosophies have failed to save mankind because they have busied themselves with intellectual creeds, dogmas, rights and institutions, with achara, shuddhi and darshana, as if these could save mankind, and have neglected the one thing needful, the power and purification of the soul.

The reason for which the Avatars descend is to raise up man again and again, developing in him a higher and ever higher humanity, a greater and yet greater development of divine being, bringing more and more of heaven again and again upon the earth until our toil is done, our work accomplished and Sachchidananda fulfilled in all even here, even in this material universe.

AIM AND OBJECT OF YOGA

The aim of our Yoga is to open the consciousness to the Divine and to five in the inner consciousness more and more while acting from it on the external life, to bring the inmost psychic into the front and by the power of the psychic to purify and change the being so that it may become ready for transformation and in union with the Divine Knowledge, Will and Love. Secondly, to develop the Yogic consciousness, i.e., to universalise the being in

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all the planes, become aware of the cosmic being and cosmic forces and be in union with the Divine on all the planes up to the Overmind. Thirdly, to come into contact with the transcendent Divine beyond the Overmind through the supramental consciousness, supramentalised the consciousness and the nature and make oneself an instrument for the realisation of the dynamic Divine Truth and its transforming descent into the earth-nature.

The object of our Yoga is to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth, to fix it there, to create a new race with the principle of the supramental consciousness governing the inner and outer individual and collective life.

This Yoga does not mean the rejection of the powers of life, but an inner transformation and a change of the spirit in the life and the use of the powers. These powers are now used in an egoistic spirit and for undivine ends; they have to be used in a spirit of surrender to the Divine and for the purpose of the divine Work.

The whole principle of this Yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody and nothing else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother all the transcendent fight, power, wideness,

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peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ananda of the Supramental Divine.

The Divine gives itself to those who give themselves without reserve and in all their parts to the Divine. For them the calm, the light, the power, the bliss, the freedom, the wideness, the heights of knowledge, the seas of Ananda.

Man is shut up at present in his surface individual consciousness and knows the world only through his outward mind and senses and by interpreting their contacts with the world. By Yoga there can open in him a consciousness which becomes one with that of of the world; he becomes directly aware of a universal Being, universal states, universal Force and Power, universal Mind, Life, Matter and lives in conscious relations with these things. He is then said to have cosmic consciousness.

It is the aim of the sadhana that the consciousness should rise out of the body and take its station above,— spreading in wideness everywhere, not limited to the body.

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To be a Yogi, a Sannyasi, a Tapaswi is not the object here. The object is transformation, and the transformation can only be done by a force infinitely greater than your own; it can only be done by being truly like a child in the hands of the Divine Mother.

The object of our Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine's sake alone, to be tuned in our nature into the nature of the Divine, and in our will and works and life to be the instrument of the Divine. The Divine alone is our object.

Spirit is the crown of universal existence; Matter is its basis; Mind is the link between the two. Spirit is that which is eternal; Mind and Matter are its workings. Spirit is that which is concealed and has to be revealed; mind and body are the means by which it seeks to reveal itself. Spirit is the image of the Lord of the Yoga; mind and body are the means He has provided for reproducing that image in phenomenal existence. All Nature is an attempt at a progressive revelation of the concealed Truth, a more and more successful reproduction of the divine image.

But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution, Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her faculties.....Nature seeks the divine in her

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own symbols: Yoga goes beyond Nature to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent and can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat of the Omnipotent.

Here the soul lives in a material universe; of that alone it is immediately conscious; the realisation of its potentialities in that are the problem with which it is concerned. But matter means the involution of the conscious delight of existence in self-oblivious force and in a self-dividing, infinitesimally disaggregated form of substance. Therefore the whole principle and effort of a material world must be the evolution of what is involved and the development of what is undeveloped. Here everything is shut up from the first in the violently working inconscient sleep of material force; therefore the whole aim of any material becoming must be the waking of consciousness out of the inconscient; the whole consummation of a material becoming must be the removal of the veil of matter and the luminous revelation of the entirely self-conscient Being to its own imprisoned soul in the becoming. Since Man is such an imprisoned soul, this luminous liberation and coming to self-knowledge must be his highest object and the condition of his perfection.

The gnostic perfection, spiritual in its nature, is to be accomplished here in the body and takes life in

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the physical world as one of its fields, even though the gnosis opens to us possession of planes and worlds beyond the material universe. The physical body is therefore a basis of action, pratistha, which cannot be despised, neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution: a perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine living on earth will be necessarily a part of the gnostic conversion.

The Mother:

The general aim to be attained is the advent of a progressing universal harmony, and individualised 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.

The only way to become a conscious being, to be oneself, is to unite with the divine Self that is in all. For that, we must , by the aid of concentration, isolate ourselves from external influences. When you are one with the Divinity within, you are one with all things in their depths.

Living among others you should always be a divine example, an occasion offered to them to understand and to enter on the path of the life divine. Nothing more. You should not even have the desire to make them progress; for that too would be something arbitrary.

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It is an invaluable possession for every living being to have learnt to know himself and to master himself To know oneself means to know the motives of one's actions and reactions, the why and the how of all that happens in oneself. To master oneself means to do what one has decided to do, to do nothing but that, not to listen to or follow impulses, desires or fancies.

The whole world is in a process of progressive transformation; if you take up the discipline of Yoga, you speed up in yourself this process. The work that would require years in the ordinary course, can be done by Yoga in a few days and even in a few hours.

Our goal is not to lose oneself in the Divine Consciousness. The goal is to let the Divine Consciousness penetrate into Matter and transform it.

Ours is neither a political nor a social but a spiritual goal. What we want is a transformation of the individual consciousness, not a change of regime or government. For reaching that goal we put no confidence in any human means, however powerful, our trust is in the Divine Grace alone.

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The eternal Veda is the Truth that dwells within the heart of every being; it can express itself spontaneously either in words or as a luminous will.

If one is to prepare for Yoga by the study of books, this preparation would take rather long. But it goes much quicker when one receives directly a teaching which is at one's disposal in all circumstances......

Indeed they who are predestined receive the help of the inner Guide. At the right moment they come across the book they should read or the person who can give them the right indication......

It goes without saying that it is easier for those who are here in India. India maintains her living tradition. An aspirant for Yoga will always find someone who can give him the teaching. Even the most ignorant and the most uncultured possess in them a vague feeling of what is to be done or what can help. But if you transplant yourself to the West, you will see how difficult it is.......Now the situation is somewhat better, there has been some progress^ the light has spread a little everywhere............

Note this particularly, you are given a full freedom of choice; if you decide within yourself that you will reach the goal in this life, you will do so—in that case you can succeed even in twelve months..........

It is no reason, however, to lose your time on the way; it is no reason why you should follow all the meanderings of the labyrinth and arrive at the goal, decreased by all that you have lost, spent, wasted on the way. But

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in any case it is a reason why you should never despair whatever the obstacles and difficulties.

When you have something to do, it is better to do it as quickly as possible, that is my opinion. But there are people who like to lose their time. Perhaps they need turning round and round, falling back, going about in circuitous ways before they arrive where they should arrive. Unfortunately it is exactly people who have this habit of loitering, wandering away from the straight line, that most complain of the way being long; they lament, but they themselves are the artisans of their own misery. But to each his choice.

What cannot be acquired or conquered during life can certainly not be done after death. The physical life is the true field for progress and realisation.

PAST YOGAS AND THE INTEGRAL YOGA

The way of Yoga followed here has a different purpose from others,—for its 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

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Divine here and create a divine life in Matter. This is an exceedingly difficult aim and difficult Yoga; to many or most it will seem impossible. All the established forces of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness are opposed to it and deny it and try to prevent it, and the Sadhak will find his own mind, life and body full of the most obstinate impediments to its realisation. If you can accept the ideal whole-heartedly, face all difficulties, leave the past and its ties behind you and are ready to give up everything and risk everything for this divine possibility, then only can you hope to discover by experience the Truth behind it.

Asceticism for its own sake is not the ideal of this Yoga, but self-control in the vita] and right order in the material are a very important part of it—and even an ascetic discipline is better for our purpose than a loose absence of true control. Mastery of the material implies in it the right and careful utilisation of things and also a self-control in their use.

Forceful suppression (fasting also comes under the head) stands on the same level as free indulgence; in both cases, the desire remains: in the one it is fed by indulgence, in the other it lies latent and exasperated by suppression.

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Those who seek the Self by the old Yogas separate themselves from mind, life and body and realise the self and then they proceed from realisation of Self to Nirvana or some Heaven and abandon life. The Supramental Yoga is necessary for the transformation of terrestrial life and being, not for reaching the Self. One must realise Self first, only afterwards can one realise the Supermind. This Yoga is "new" because it aims at the integrality of the Divine in this world.

The Sadhaka of integral Yoga who stops short at the Impersonal is no longer a sadhaka of integral Yoga. Without the action of the integral Divine there is no change of the whole nature. If it were not so, the Mother would not be here and I would not be here if a realisation of the Impersonal were sufficient......It is only the Supramental that is all-knowledge. All below that from Overmind to Matter is Ignorance.

Each man who enters the realms of Yogic experience is free to follow his own way; but this Yoga is not a path for anyone to follow, but only for those who accept to seek the aim, pursue the way pointed out upon which a sure guidance is indispensable. It is idle for anyone to expect that he can follow this road far,—much less go to the end by his own inner strength and knowledge without the true -aid or influence. Even the ordinary long-practised Yogas are hard to follow without the aid of the Guru; in this which as it advances goes through

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untrodden countries and unknown entangled regions, it is quite impossible. As for the work to be done, it also is not a work for any sadhak of any path; it is not, either, the work of the "Impersonal" Divine—who, for that matter, is not an active Power but supports impartially all work in the universe. It is a training ground for those who have to pass through the difficult and complex way of this Yoga and none other. All work here must be done in a spirit of acceptance, discipline and surrender, not with personal demands and conditions, but with a vigilant conscious submission to control and guidance.......

The fundamental difference is in the teaching that there is a dynamic divine Truth and that into the present world of Ignorance that Truth can descend, create a new Truth-consciousness and divinise Life. The old Yogas go straight from mind to the absolute Divine, regard all dynamic existence as Ignorance, Illusion or Lila; when you enter the static and immutable Divine Truth, they say, you pass out of cosmic existence....

My aim is to realise and also to manifest the Divine in the world, bringing down for the purpose a yet unmanifested Power,—such as the Supermind.

I have to bring it into the cosmic formula and, if so, I must realise the cosmic Divine and become conscious of the cosmic self and the cosmic forces. But I have to embody it here,—otherwise it is left as an influence only and not a thing fixed in the physical world, and it is through the Divine in the individual alone that this can be done.

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It is no part of my Yoga to have nothing to do with the world or with life or to kill the senses or entirely inhibit their action. It is the object of my Yoga to transform life by bringing down into it the Light, Power and Bliss of the Divine Truth and its dynamic certitude. This Yoga is not a Yoga of world-shunning asceticism, but of divine life.

This Yoga accepts the value of cosmic existence and holds it to be a reality; its object is to enter into a higher Truth-Consciousness in which action and creation are the expression not of ignorance and imperfection, but of the Truth, the Light, the Divine Ananda. But for that, surrender of the mortal mind, life and body to that Higher Consciousness is indispensable, since it is too difficult for the mortal human being to pass by its own effort beyond mind to a Supramental Consciousness in which the dynamism is no longer mental but of quite another power. Only those who can accept the call to such a change should enter into this Yoga.

My Yoga is new as compared with the old Yogas:— (i) Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into Heaven or Nirvana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object. If there is a descent in other Yogas, yet it is only an incident on the way or resulting from the ascent—the ascent is the real thing. Here the ascent is the first step, but it is a means for the descent. It is the descent of the new consciousness attained by the ascent that is the stamp and seal

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of the sadhana. Even the Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life; here the object is the divine fulfilment of life.

(2)Because the object sought after 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.

(3)Because a method has been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive. I have not found this method (as a whole) or anything like it professed or realised in the old Yogas. If I had, I should not have wasted my time in hewing out paths and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public. Our Yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.

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The purely monistic Vedantist says, all is Brahman, life is a dream, an unreality, only Brahman exists. One has Nirvana or Mukti, then one lives only till the body falls—after that there is no such thing as life.

What has to be overcome is the opposition of the Ignorance that does not want the transformation of the nature. If that can be overcome, then old spiritual ideas will not form an obstacle.

It is not intended to supramentalised humanity at large, but to establish the principle of the Supramental consciousness in the earth-evolution. If that is done, all that is needed will be evolved by the Supramental Power itself. It is not therefore important that the mission should be wide-spread. What is important is that the thing should be done at all in however small a number; that is the only difficulty.

It is in the waking state that this realisation must come and endure in order to be a reality of the life. If experienced in trance it will be a superconscient state only for some part of the inner being but not real to the whole consciousness. Experience and trance have their utility for opening the being and preparing it but it is only when the realisation is constant in the waking state that it is truly possessed. Therefore in this Yoga much value is given to the waking realisation and experience.

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This is not a Yoga of Bhakti alone; it is or at least it claims to be an integral Yoga, that is, a turning of all the being in all its parts to the Divine, so that the nature also may become one with the nature of the Divine.

The object of the sadhana is opening of the consciousness to the Divine and the change of the nature. Meditation or contemplation is one means to this but only one means; bhakti is another; work is another. Chitta-shuddhi was preached by the Yogins as a first means towards realisation and they got by it the saintliness of the saint and the quietude of the sage but the transformation of the nature of which we speak is something more than that, and this transformation does not come by contemplation alone; works are necessary, Yoga in action is indispensable.

The purpose of the old Yogas is to get away from life to the Divine—so obviously, let us drop Karma. The purpose of this new Yoga is to reach the Divine and bring the fullness of what is gained into life—for that, Yoga by works is indispensable.

Veda and Vedanta are one side of the One Truth; Tantra with its emphasis on Shakti is another; in this Yoga all sides of the Truth are taken up, not in the systematic forms given them formerly but in their essence, and carried to the fullest and highest significance. The

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integral Yoga needs to develop its own forms and processes, but the ascent of the consciousness through the centres and other Tantric knowledge are there behind the process of transformation to which so much importance is given by me—also the truth that nothing can be done except through the force of the Mother.

In our Yoga the Nirvana is the beginning of the higher Truth, as it is the passage from the Ignorance to the higher Truth. The Ignorance has to be extinguished in order that the Truth may manifest.

The Jain philosophy is concerned with individual perfection. Our effort is quite different. We want to bring down the Supermind as a new faculty. Just as the mind is now a permanent state of consciousness in humanity, so also we want to create a race in which the Supermind will be a permanent state of consciousness.

You seem not to have understood the principle of this Yoga. The old Yoga demanded a complete renunciation extending to the giving up of the worldly life itself. This Yoga aims instead at a new and transformed life. But it insists as inexorably on a complete throwing away of desire and attachment in the mind, life and body. Its aim is to re found life in the truth of the spirit and for that purpose to transfer the roots of all we are and do from the mind, life and body to a greater consciousness

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above the mind. All must be given up to the Supreme Master of the Yoga.

The power that works in this Yoga is of a thoroughgoing character and tolerates in the end nothing great or small, that is an obstacle to the Truth and its realisation.

The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past, but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future.

All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object.

I have objected in the past to vairagya of the ascetic kind and the tamasic kind. I object to it for those who come to this Yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life.

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By Yoga we can rise out of falsehood into truth, out of weakness into force, out of pain and grief into bliss, out of bondage into freedom, out of death into immortality, out of darkness into light, out of confusion into purity, out of imperfection into perfection, out of self-division into unity, out of Maya into God. All other utilisation of Yoga is for special and fragmentary advantages not always worth pursuing. Only that which aims at possessing the fullness of God is Purna Yoga or Integral Yoga.

All Yoga which takes us entirely away from the world, is a high but narrow specialisation of divine tapasya. God in His perfection embraces everything, we also must become all-embracing.

In brief, by Yoga, we have to replace dualities by unity, egoism by divine consciousness, ignorance by divine wisdom, thought by divine knowledge, weakness, struggle and effort by self-contented divine force, pain and false pleasure by divine bliss. This is called in the language of Christ bringing down the kingdom of heaven on earth, or in modern language, realising and effectuating God in the world.

The principle of this Yoga is not a perfection of human nature as it is, but a psychic and spiritual transformation of all the parts of the being through the action of an inner consciousness and then of a higher consciousness which works on them, throws out the old movements or changes them into an image of its own and so transmutes the lower

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into higher nature. It is not so much the perfection of the intellect as a transformation of it, a transformation of the mind, the substitution of a larger greater principle of knowledge—and so with all the rest of the being.

This is a slow and difficult process; the road is long and it is hard to establish even the necessary basis. The old existing nature resists and obstructs and difficulties rise one after another, till they are overcome.

Yoga of the Gita

Our Yoga is not identical with the Yoga of the Gita although it contains all that is essential in the Gita's Yoga. In our Yoga we begin with the idea, the will, the aspiration of the complete surrender; but at the same time we have to reject the lower nature, deliver our consciousness from it, deliver the self involved in the lower nature by the self rising to freedom in the higher nature. The full truth is in the supramental consciousness and the power to work from there on life and Matter.

The Gita does not speak expressly of the Divine Mother ; it speaks always of surrender to the Purushot-tama—it mentions her only as the Para Prakriti who becomes the Jiva, that is, who manifests the Divine in the multiplicity and through whom all these worlds are created by the Supreme and he himself descends

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as the Avatar. The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishwara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it; the Tantric tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishwari aspect and-makes all depend on the Divine Mother because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation through it. This Yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential for without it there is no fulfilment of the object of the Yoga.

The Gita at its cryptic close may seem by its silence to stop short of that solution for which we are seeking; it pauses at the borders of the highest spiritual mind and does not cross them into the splendours of the supramental Light.

I suggested the Gita method for you because the opening which is necessary for the Yoga here seems to be too difficult for you. I may say that the way of the Gita is itself a part of the Yoga here and those who have followed it, to begin with or as a first stage, have a stronger basis than others for this Yoga.

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The ordinary life consists in work for personal aim and satisfaction of desire under some mental or moral control, touched sometimes by a mental ideal. The Gita's Yoga consists in the offering of one's work as a sacrifice to the Divine, the conquest of desire, egoless and desireless action, bhakti for the Divine, an entering into the cosmic consciousness, the sense of unity with all creatures, oneness with the Divine. This Yoga adds the bringing down of the supramental Light and Force and the transformation of the nature.

AVATARHOOD (Manifestation)

An Avatar, roughly speaking, is one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action; he feels identified inwardly with this divine power and presence. But a Vibhuti is supposed to embody some power of the Divine and is enabled by it to act with great force in the world, but that is all that is necessary to make him a Vibhuti : the power may be very great, but the consciousness is not that of an inborn or indwelling Divinity.

The Avatar takes upon himself the nature of humanity in his instrumental parts, though the consciousness acting behind is divine. That does not prevent the Avatar from acting as men act and using the movements of Nature

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for his life and work. Surely for the earth consciousness the very fact that the Divine manifests himself is the greatest of all splendours.

The Divine puts on an appearance of humanity, assumes the outward human nature in order to tread the path and show it to human beings, but does not cease to be the Divine. It is a manifestation that takes place, a manifestation of a growing Divine consciousness, not human turning into divine. The Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood.

When the Divine descends, he takes upon himself the burden of humanity in order to exceed it—he becomes human in order to show humanity how to become Divine. But that cannot be if there is only a weakling without any divine Presence within or divine Force behind him —he has to be strong in order to put his strength into all who are willing to receive it. There is therefore in him a double element—human in front, Divine behind. The Divinity acts according to another consciousness, the consciousness of the Truth above and the Lila below and It acts according to the need of the Lila, not according to men's ideas of what It should or should not do.

The Divine Manifestation, even when it manifests in mental and human ways, has behind it a consciousness greater than the mind and not bound by the petty mental

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and moral conventions of this very ignorant human race—so that to impose these standards on the Divine is to try to do what is irrational and impossible.

The Divine does the sadhana first for the world and then gives what is brought down to others. Naturally, the Mother does the sadhana in each sadhak—only it is conditioned by their zeal and their receptivity.

It is much easier for the sadhak by faith in the Mother to keep free—because the Mother by the very nature of her work had to identify herself with the sadhaks, to support all their difficulties, to receive into herself all the poison in their nature, to take up besides all the difficulties of the universal earth-nature, including the possibility of death and disease in order to fight them out. If she had not done that, not a single sadhak would have been able to practise this Yoga. The Divine has to put on humanity in order that the human being may rise to the Divine.—It is a simple truth, but nobody seems to be able to understand that the Divine can do that and yet remain different from them—can still remain the Divine.

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The Avatar is not supposed to act in a non-human way —he takes up human action and uses human methods with the human consciousness in front and the Divine behind. If he did not, his taking a human body would have no meaning and would be of no use to anybody. He could just as well have stayed above and done things from there.

The manifestation of the Divine in the Avatar is of help to man because it helps him to discover his own divinity, find the way to realise it.

There are two sides of the phenomenon of Avatar-hood, the Divine Consciousness and the instrumental personality. The Divine Consciousness is omnipotent but it has put forth the instrumental personality in Nature under the conditions of Nature and it uses it according to the rules of the game—though also sometime to change the rules of the game.

The Divine does not need to suffer or struggle for himself; if he takes on these things it is in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men. The Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them; otherwise his assumption of human nature has no meaning and no utility and no value. I have said that the Avatar is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness.

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The Mother :

The Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice. The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrix—through identity—of the Divine Grace, with a perfect knowledge—through identity—of the absolute mechanism of Universal Justice.

The chief purpose of avatarhood is to give to men a concrete proof that the Divine can live upon earth.

To believe or not to believe in the possibility of avatarhood can make no difference to the bare fact. If God chooses to manifest in a human body I do not see how any human thought, approval or disapproval can affect in the least His decision; and if He takes birth in a body, the denial of men cannot prevent the fact from being a fact, and if He decides not to incarnate in a human body, the faith, certitude and belief of all humanity cannot in the least alter the fact that He is not incarnate. It is only in perfect quietness and silence, free from all prejudices and preferences, that the consciousness can perceive the truth.

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SRI AUROBINDO ON HIMSELF

For myself, the dark conditions do not discourage me of the vanity of my will to "help the world", for I knew they had to come ; they were there in the world-nature and had to rise up so that they might be exhausted or expelled and a better world freed from them might be there. After all, something has been done in the outer field and that may help or prepare for getting something done in the inner field also. For instance, India is free and her freedom was necessary if the divine work was to be done. The difficulties that surround her now and may increase for a time, especially with regard to the Pakistan imbroglio, were also things that had to come and to be cleared out.....Here too there is sure to be a full clearance, though unfortunately, a considerable amount of human suffering in the process is inevitable. Afterwards the work for the Divine will become more possible and it may well be that the dream, if it is a dream, of leading the world towards the spiritual light, may even become a reality. So I am not disposed even now, in these dark conditions to consider my will to help the world as condemned to failure.

I believe the descent of this Truth opening the way to a development of divine consciousness here to be the final sense of the earth evolution. If greater men than

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myself have not had this vision and this ideal before them, that is no reason why I should not follow my Truth-sense and Truth-vision. There is no question of X or Y or anybody else in that. It is a question between the Divine and myself—whether it is the Divine Will or not, whether I am sent to bring that down or open the way for its descent or at least make it more possible or not.

I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only—I am not doing anything for myself, as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others. My supramentalisation is only a key for opening the gates of the Supramental to the earth-consciousness; done for its own sake, it would be perfectly futile____

Of course, anyone who wants to change earth-nature must first accept it in order to change it. To quote from a poem of my own, A God's Labour :—

He who would bring the heavens here,

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.........

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As for faith, you write as if I never had a doubt or any difficulty. I have had worse than any human mind can think of. It is not because I have ignored difficulties, but because I have seen them more clearly, experienced them on a larger scale than anyone living now or before me that, having faced and measured them, I am sure of the results of my work. In the way that one treads with the greater Light above, even every difficulty gives its help and has its value and Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be.

I know with absolute certitude that the Supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how. That also is decided and predestined from somewhere above ; but it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces. That is, however, certain that a number of souls have been sent to see that it shall be now. My faith and will are for the now.

If we had lived physically in the Supermind from the beginning nobody could have been able to approach us nor could any sadhana have been done. There could have been no hope of contact between ourselves and the earth and men. Even as it is, Mother has to come down towards the lower consciousness of the sadhaks instead of keeping always in her own. The Divine has to veil himself in order to meet the human.

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There is no difference between the Mother's path and mine; we have and always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same.

The attempt to set up a division and opposition putting the Mother on one side and myself on another and opposite or quite different side, has always been a trick of the forces of Falsehood when they want to prevent a sadhak from reaching the Truth. Dismiss all such falsehoods from your mind. The Mother and myself stand for the same Power in two forms.

You consider that the Mother can be of no help to you. If you cannot profit by her help, you would find still less profit in mine. But, in any case, I have no intention of altering the arrangement I have made for all the disciples without exception that they should receive the light and force from her and not directly from me and be guided by her in their spiritual progress. I have made the arrangement not for any temporary purpose but because it is the one way, provided always the disciple is open and receives.

The Mother and myself deal with all according to the law of the Divine. We receive alike rich and poor, those who are high-born or low-born according to human standards, and extend to them an equal love and protection.

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Their progress in sadhana is our main concern —for they have come here for that, not to satisfy their palates or their bellies, not to make ordinary vital demands or to quarrel about position or place or comforts. That progress depends on how they answer to the Mother's love or protection—whether they receive the forces she pours on all alike, whether they use or misuse what she gives them. But the Mother has no intention or obligation to deal with all outwardly in the same way—the demand that she should do so is absurd and imbecille—and if she did it, she would prove false to the truth of things and the law of the Divine. Each sadhak has to be dealt with according to his nature, his capacities, his real needs (not his claims or desires) and according to what is best for his spiritual welfare. As to how it is to be done, we refuse to be dictated to by the ignorance of those of the sadhaks who consider that the Mother must act according to their standards or their ideas of equality or justice or the demands of their vital or the notions they have brought with them from the outside world. We act according to the Light within us and for the Truth that we are striving to establish in this earthly Nature.

In Mother's childhood's visions she saw myself whom she knew as "Krishna".

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The detail of method of the later stages of the Yoga, which go into little known or untrodden regions, I have not made public and I do not at present intend to do so.

What we are doing, if and when we succeed, will be a beginning, not a completion. It is the foundation of a new consciousness on earth—a consciousness with infinite possibilities of manifestation. The eternal progression is in the manifestation and beyond it there is no progression.

It is only Divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine.......

The Mother's difficulties are not her own; she bears the difficulties of others and those that are inherent in the general action and working for the transformation....

We have to do it through ourselves first and, through the circle of sadhaks gathered around us, in the terrestrial consciousness as typified here. If a few open, that is sufficient for the process to be possible. On the other hand, if there is a general misunderstanding and resistance, that makes it difficult and the process more laborious, but it does not make it impossible.

Progress might be slow at first, but progress would come; it would quicken afterwards and with the

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supramental force here, there would be for you a for others the full speed and certitude.

We are not working for a race or a people or a continent or for a realisation of which only Indians or only Orientals are capable. Our aim is not, either, to found a religion or a school of philosophy or a school of Yoga, but to create a ground of spiritual growth and experience and a way which will bring down a greater Truth beyond the mind but not inaccessible to the human soul and consciousness. All can pass who are drawn to that Truth, whether they are from India or elsewhere, from the East or from the West.

It would be only myself who could speak of things in my past giving them their true form and significance.

Neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life ; it has not been on the surface for men to see.

I may say also that I did not leave politics because I felt I could do nothing more there; such an idea was very far from me. I came away because I got a distinct "Adesh" in the matter....

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For the rest, I have never known any will of mine for one major event in the conduct of the world affairs to fail in the end, although it may take a long time for the world-forces to fulfil it.

August 15th is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance (of free India). I take this coincidence, not as a fortuitous accident, but as the sanction and seal of the Divine Force that guides my steps on the work with which I began life, the beginning of its full fruition. ...In all these movements free India may well play a large part and take a leading position........

Indeed, on this day I can watch almost all the world-movements which I hoped to see fulfilled in my lifetime, though then they looked like impracticable dreams, arriving at fruition or on their way to achievement.

The first of these dreams was a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India. India today is free but she has not achieved unity........The old communal division into Hindus and Muslims seems now to have hardened into a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that this settled fact will not be accepted as settled for ever or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled........This must not be; the partition must go......By whatever

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means, in whatever way, the division must go ; unity must and will be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India's future.

Another dream was for the resurgence and liberation of the peoples of Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilisation.

The third dream was a world-union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind. That unification of the human world is under way; there is an imperfect initiation organised but struggling against tremendous difficulties.

Another dream, the spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India's spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever increasing measure.............

The final dream was a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness and begin the solution of the problems which have perplexed and vexed him since he-first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society.

From Early Letters of 1911-1915

I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane, and I am now able to put myself into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind. This I can do with great swiftness

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and completeness with those who are near me, but I have also succeeded with men hundreds of miles away. I have also been given the power to read men's characters and hearts, even their thoughts, but this power is not yet absolutely complete, nor can I use it always and in all cases. My communication with the other world is yet of a troubled character, though I am certainly in communication with some very great powers. But of all these things I will write more when the final obstacles in my way are cleared from the path.

What I perceive more clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness, of error in order that the Truth I shall eventually show to men may be perfect, and of ineffectiveness in order that the work of changing the world, so far as I have to assist it, may be entirely victorious and irresistible. It is for this reason that I have been going through so long a discipline and that the more brilliant and mighty results of Yoga have been so long withheld. I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work severe and painful. It is only now that the edifice is beginning to rise upon the sure and perfect foundation that has been laid.

My Yoga is proceeding with great rapidity, but I defer writing to you of the results until certain experiments in which I am now engaged, have yielded fruit sufficient to establish beyond dispute the theory and system of Yoga which I have formed and which is giving great results not only to me, but to the young men who are with

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me. ...I expect these results within a month, if all goes well.

The whole earth is now under one law and answers to the same vibrations and I am sceptical of finding any place where the clash of the struggle will not pursue us. In any case, an effective retirement does not seem to be my destiny. I must remain in touch with the world until I have either mastered adverse circumstances or succumbed or carried on the struggle between the spiritual and physical so far as I am destined to carry it on. This is how I have always seen things and still see them.

One needs to have a calm heart, a settled will, entire self-abnegation and the eyes constantly fixed on the beyond to live undiscouraged in times like these which are truly a period "of universal decomposition. For myself, I follow the Voice and look neither to right nor to left of me. The result is not mine and hardly at all now even the labour.

Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth; but the fullness of the Yoga is to make, in the formula of the Veda, "Heaven and Earth equal and one."

Everything internal is ripe or ripening, but there is a sort of locked struggle in which neither side can make

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a very appreciable advance, the spiritual force insisting against the resistance disputing every inch and making more or less effective counter-attacks And if there were not the strength and Ananda within, it would be harassing and disgusting work ; but the eye of knowledge looks beyond and sees that it is only a protracted episode.

SRI AUROBINDO ON THE MOTHER

The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence. The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates.

But personally too the Mother has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of

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the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life.

The Mother's consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. Nothing can be done without her knowledge and force, without her consciousness—if anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers.

The Mother's consciousness is the divine consciousness and the Light that comes from it is the light of the Divine Truth. One who receives and accepts and lives in the Mother's light, will begin to see the truth on all the planes, the mental, the vital, the physical.

It is not necessary for us always to be physically conscious of the action, for it is often carried out when the mind is occupied with outward things or when we sleep. The Mother's sleep is not sleep but an inner consciousness in which she is in connection with people or working everywhere. At the time she is aware, but she does not carry all that always into her waking consciousness or in her memory. A call would come in the occupied waking mind as the thought of the person coming—in a more

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free or in a concentrated state as a communication from the person in question; in a deeper concentration or in sleep or trance she would see the person coming and speaking to her or she herself going there. Besides that, wherever the Force is working, the Presence is there.

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. Afterwards there will be a further transformation by the Supramental.

There is one divine Force which acts in the universe and in the individual and is also beyond the individual and the universe. The Mother stands for all these, but she is working here in the body to bring down something not yet expressed in this material world so as to transform life here—it is so that you should regard her as the Divine Shakti working here for that purpose. She is that in the body, but in her whole consciousness she is also identified with all the other aspects of the Divine.

The Divine Mother is the Consciousness and Force of the Divine—which is the Mother of all things.

It is the Divine who is the Master—the Self is inactive, it is always a silent witness supporting all things—that is the static aspect. There is also the dynamic aspect through

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which the Divine works—behind that is the Mother. You must not lose sight of that, that it is through the Mother that all things are attained.

The relation which exists between the Mother and all who accept her is a psychic and spiritual motherhood. It is a far greater relation than that of the physical mother to her child; it gives all that human motherhood can give, but in a much higher way, and it contains in itself infinitely more.

If the sadhak becomes unfaithful to the Mother, it means that he did not want the sadhana or the Mother but the satisfaction of his desires and his ego. That is not Yoga.

Mother has taken the body because a work of a physical nature, including a change in the physical world, had to be done. Some have come with her to share in the work, others she had called, others have come seeking for the fight. With each she has a personal relation or a possibility of the personal relation, but each is of its own kind. To apply the silly mathematical rules of the physical mind here is absurd. Your physical mind cannot understand what the Mother does, its values and standards and ideas are not hers. It is still worse to make your personal vital demand or desire the measure of what she ought to do. She acts in each case for different reasons suitable to that case.

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Whether in work or in Yoga the Mother acts not from the mind or from the level of consciousness from which these criticisms arise, but from quite another vision and consciousness. If people want to understand why the Mother does things, let them get into the same inner consciousness from which she sees and acts. As to what she is, that also can only be seen either with the eye of faith or of a deeper vision.

It is the Purusha and Prakriti sides of the nature—one leading to pure conscious existence, static, the other to pure conscious force, dynamic—the Mother.

If I give, the Mother's force goes with it, or else the sadhak would get nothing, and if the Mother gives, my support goes with it and gives it my light as well as the Mother's. It is two sides of one indivisible action one carrying with it the other. It is the Mother's Force that gives the push.

The Mother proposition is true. If one is open to Sri Aurobindo and not to the Mother it means that one is not really open to Sri Aurobindo. There is one force only, the Mother's force—or, if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo's Force.

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This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the Supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her—the Supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.

As for the Mantra—, usually the Mother's name has the full power in it; but in certain states of consciousness the double Name [The Mother & Sri Aurobindo] may have a special effect.

A free and united India will be there and the Mother will gather around her her sons and weld them into a single national strength in the life of a great and united people.

PROCESS OF SADHANA

There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.

But the supreme Grace will act only in the conditions of the Light and the Truth; it will not act in conditions

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laid upon it by the Falsehood and the Ignorance. For if it were to yield to the demands of the Falsehood, it would defeat its own purpose.

These are the conditions of the Light and Truth:— There must be a total and sincere surrender; there must be an exclusive self-opening to the divine Power; there must be a constant and integral choice of the Truth that is descending, a constant and integral rejection of the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature. The surrender must be total and seize all the parts of the being. There must be no part of the being, even the most external, anything that makes a reserve, anything that hides behind doubts, confusion and subterfuges, anything that revolts or refuses.

If behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for your desires, egoistic demands and vital insistences, if you put these things in place of the true aspiration or mix them with it and try to impose them on the Divine Shakti, then it is idle to invoke the divine Grace to transform you. You must keep the temple clean if you wish to instal there the living Presence.

Reject the false notion that the divine Power will do and is bound to do everything for you at your demand and even though you do not satisfy the conditions laid down by the Supreme. Make your surrender true and complete, then only will all else be done for you. Reject too the false and indolent expectation that the divine

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Power will do even the surrender for you. The Supreme demands your surrender to her, but does not impose it; you are free at every moment, till the irrevocable transformation comes, to deny and to reject the Divine or to recall your self-giving, if you are willing to suffer the spiritual consequences. Your surrender must be self-made and free; it must be the surrender of a living being, not of an inert automaton or mechanical tool. A glad and strong and helpful submission is demanded to the working of the Divine Force, the obedience of the illumined disciple of the Truth, of the inner Warrior who fights against obscurity and falsehood, of the faithful servant of the Divine.

So long as the lower nature is active the personal effort of the sadhaka remains necessary. The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender:—

(i)An aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing.

(ii)Rejection of the movements of the lower nature.

(iii)Surrender of oneself and all one is and has.

In proportion as the surrender and self-consecration progress, the Sadhaka becomes conscious of the Divine Shakti doing the sadhana. The more this conscious process replaces his own effort, the more rapid and true becomes his progress. But it cannot completely replace the necessity of personal effort until the surrender and consecration are pure and complete from top to bottom. Note that a tamasic surrender refusing to fulfil the conditions and calling on God to do everything and

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save one all the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection____

To walk through life armoured against all fear, peril and disaster, only two things are needed, two that go always together—the Grace of the Divine Mother and on your side an inner state made up of faith, sincerity and surrender. Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect. An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards to heaven. Regard your life as given you only for the divine work and to help in the divine manifestation. Desire nothing but the purity, force, light, wideness, calm, ananda of the divine consciousness and its insistence to transform and perfect your mind, life and body. Ask for nothing but the divine, spiritual and supramental Truth, its realisation on earth and in you and in all who are called and chosen and the conditions needed for its creation and its victory over all opposing forces.

Let your sincerity and surrender be genuine and entire. When you give yourself, give completely, without demand, without condition, without reservation so that all in you shall belong to the Divine Mother and nothing be left to the ego or given to any other power.

The more complete your faith, sincerity and surrender, the more will grace and protection be with you. And when the grace and protection of the Divine Mother are

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with you, what is there that can touch you or whom need you fear? A little of it even will carry you through all difficulties, obstacles and dangers; surrounded by its full presence you can go securely on your way because it is hers, careless of all menace, unaffected by any hostility however powerful, whether from this world or from worlds invisible. Its touch can turn difficulties into opportunities, failure into success and weakness into unfaltering strength.

While this transformation is being done it is more than ever necessary to keep yourself free from all taint of the perversions of the ego. Let no demand or insistence creep in to stain the purity of the self-giving and the sacrifice. There must be no attachment to the work or the result, no laying down of conditions, no claim to possess the Power that should possess you, no pride of the instrument, no vanity or arrogance. Nothing in the mind or in the vital or physical parts should be suffered to distort to its own use or seize for its own personal and separate satisfaction the greatness of the forces that are acting through you. Let your faith, your sincerity, your purity of aspiration be absolute and pervasive of all the planes and layers of the being; then every disturbing element and distorting influence will progressively fall away from your nature.

The sadhana of this Yoga does not proceed through any set mental teaching or prescribed forms of meditation,

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mantras or others, but by aspiration, by a self-concentration inwards or upwards, by self-opening to an Influence, to the Divine Power above us and its workings, to the Divine Presence in the heart and by the rejection of all that is foreign to these things. It is only by faith, aspiration and surrender that this self-opening can come.

It is not by taking a mere mental attitude that this can be done or even by any number of inner experiences which leave the outer man as he was. It is this outer man who has to open, to surrender and to change. His every least movement, habit, action has to be surrendered, seen, held up and exposed to the divine Light, offered to the divine Force for its old forms and motives to be destroyed and the divine Truth and the action of the transforming consciousness of the Divine Mother to take their place.

The constant presence of the Mother comes by practice; the Divine Grace is essential for success in the sadhana, but it is the practice that prepares the descent of the Grace.

You have to learn to go inward, ceasing to live in external things only, quiet the mind and aspire to become aware of the Mother's working in you.

Faith, reliance upon God, surrender and self-giving to the Divine Power are necessary and indispensable. But

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reliance upon God must not be made an excuse for indolence, weakness and surrender to the .impulses of the lower Nature.

There is no method in this Yoga except to concentrate, preferably in the heart, and call the presence and power of the Mother to take up the being and by the workings of her force transform the consciousness. When the mind falls quiet and the concentration becomes strong and the aspiration intense, then there is a beginning of experience. The more the faith, the more rapid the result is likely to be. The bhakta does not rely on his own effort alone, but on the grace and power of the Divine whom he adores.

There are always difficulties and a hampered progress in the early stages and a delay in the opening of the inner doors until the being is ready. The road of Yoga is long, every inch of ground has to be won against much resistance and no quality is more needed by the sadhak than patience and single-minded perseverance with a faith that remains firm through all difficulties, delays and apparent failures.

Each part of the nature wants to go on with its old movements and refuses, so far as it can, to admit a radical change and progress, because that would subject it to something higher than itself and deprive it of its sovereignty in its own field, its separate empire. It is this that makes transformation so long and difficult a process.

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The lower nature is ignorant and undivine, not in itself hostile but shut to the Light and Truth. The hostile forces are anti-divine, not merely undivine; they make use of the lower nature, pervert it, rill it with distorted movements and by that means influence man and even try to enter and possess or at least entirely control him.

The rule in Yoga is not to let the depression depress you, to stand back from it, observe its cause and remove the cause. The Yogi should look on all the defects of the nature as movements of the lower prakriti common to all and reject them calmly, firmly and persistently with full confidence in the Divine Power. However hard the fight, the only thing is to fight it out now and here to the end.

The goal of Yoga is always hard to reach, but this one is more difficult than any other, and it is only for those who have the call, the capacity, the willingness to face everything and every risk, even the risk of failure, and the will to progress towards an entire selflessness, desirelessness and surrender.

All the ordinary vital movements are foreign to the true being and come from outside; they do not belong to the soul nor do they originate in it but are waves from the general Nature.

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When one lives in the true consciousness one feels the desires outside oneself, entering from outside, from the universal lower Prakriti, into the mind and the vital parts.

Demand and desire are only two different aspects of the same thing. Demand or desire comes from the mental or the vital, but a psychic or spiritual need is a different thing. The psychic does not demand or desire —it aspires; it does not make conditions for its surrender or withdraw if its aspiration is not immediately satisfied —for the psychic has the complete trust in the Divine or in the Guru and can wait for the right time or the hour of the Divine Grace.

The supramental realisation is much more difficult and exacting in its conditions and the most difficult of all is to bring it down to the physical level.

You should not rely on anything else alone, however helpful it may seem, but chiefly, primarily, fundamentally on the Mother's Force. The sun and the Light may be a help but cannot take the place of the Mother's Force.

Our object is the supramental realisation and we have to do whatever is necessary for that or towards that under the conditions of each stage. At present the necessity is to prepare the physical consciousness; for that a complete equality and peace and a complete dedication free from personal demand or desire in the physical and the lower vital parts are the thing to be

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established. Other things can come in their proper time. What is needed now is the psychic opening in the physical consciousness and the constant presence and guidance there. It is this material consciousness into which we are seeking to bring first the higher Light and Power and Ananda, and then the Supramental Truth which is the object of our Yoga.

By remaining physically open to the Mother, all that is necessary for work or sadhana develops progressively, that is one of the chief secrets, the central secret of the sadhana.

To practise Yoga implies the will to overcome all attachments and turn to the Divine alone. The principal thing 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 Adhara.

To remain open to the Mother is to remain always quiet and happy and confident—not restless, not grieving or despondent, to let her force work in you, guide you, give you knowledge, give you peace and Ananda.

It is by the constant remembrance that the being is prepared for the full opening. By the opening of the heart the Mother's presence begins to be felt and, by the opening to her Power above, the Force of the higher consciousness comes down into the body and works there to change the whole nature.

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The direct opening of the psychic centre is easy only when the ego-centricity is greatly diminished and also if there is a strong bhakti for the Mother. A spiritual humility and sense of submission and dependence is necessary.

To be a Yogi, a Sannyasi, a Tapaswi is not the object here. The object is transformation, and the transformation can only be done by a force infinitely greater than your own; it can only be done by being truly like a child in the hands of the Divine Mother.

The effort demanded of the sadhak is that of aspiration, rejection and surrender. If these three are done the rest is to come of itself by the Grace of the Mother and the working of her force in you. But of the three the most important is surrender of which the first necessary form is trust and confidence and patience in difficulty.

Nothing can be done except through the force of the Mother. All has to be done by the working of the Mother's force aided by your aspiration, devotion and surrender.

'X' is probably making two mistakes—first, expecting outward expressions of love from the Mother; second, looking for progress instead of concentrating on openness and surrender without demand of a return. These are two mistakes which sadhaks are constantly making. If

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one opens, if one surrenders, then as soon as the nature is ready, progress will come of itself; but the personal concentration for progress brings difficulties and resistance and disappointment because the mind is not looking at things from the right angle.

The sadhaks who enter the Yoga are human beings and if they were not allowed a human approach at the beginning and long after, they would not be able to start the Yoga or would not be able to continue it. But the human approach to the Divine should not be constantly turned into a human revolt and reproach against it.

The power needed in Yoga is the power to go through effort, difficulty or trouble without getting fatigued, depressed, discouraged or impatient and without breaking off the effort or giving up one's aim or resolution. A quiet vigilant but un distressed persistence is the best way to get the sadhana done.

It is because the vital is restless and full of desires that it is like that. Also the physical mind is by no means at rest. If the desires were thrown out and the ego less active and the physical mind at rest, knowledge would come from above in place of the physical mind's stupidities, the vital mind could be calm and quiet and the Mother's Force

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take up the action and the higher consciousness begin to come down.

The tendency to inquire and know is in itself good, but it must be kept under control. What is needed for progress in sadhana is gained best by increase of consciousness and experience and of intuitive knowledge.

The pressure and help of the Mother's Force is always there. Your rapidity of progress depends upon your keeping yourself open to it and rejecting calmly, quietly and steadily all suggestions and invasions of other forces. Especially the nervous excitement of the vital has to be rejected; a calm and quiet strength in the nervous being and the body is the only sound basis.

These are the main conditions of preparation for the supramental change, but none of them is easy, and they must be complete before the Adhara can be said to be ready. If the true attitude (psychic, unegoistic, open only to the Divine Force) can be established, then the process can go on much more quickly:—

I. Get the psychic being in the front and keep it there, putting its power on the mind, vital and physical, so that it shall communicate to them its force of single minded aspiration, trust, faith, surrender, direct and immediate

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detection of whatever is wrong in them and turned towards ego and error, away from Light and Truth.

2.Eliminate egoism in all its forms and from every movement of the consciousness.

3.Develop the cosmic consciousness—let the egocentric outlook disappear in wideness, impersonality, the sense of the cosmic divine, the perception of the universal force, the realisation and understanding of the cosmic manifestation, the play.

4.Find in place of ego the true being—a portion of the Divine, issued from the World-Mother and an instrument of the manifestation. This sense of being a portion of the Divine and an instrument should be free from all pride, sense of claim of ego or assertion of superiority, demand or desire. For if these elements are there, then it is not the true thing.

5.Most in doing Yoga live in the mind, vital, physical, lit up occasionally or to some extent by the higher mind and by the illumined mind; but to prepare for the supramental change, it is necessary to open up to the intuition and the over mind, so that these may make the Adhara ready for the supramental change. Allow the consciousness quietly to develop and widen and the knowledge of these things will progressively come.

6.Calm, discrimination, detachment (but not indifference) are all very important, for their opposites impede very much the transforming action. Intensity of aspiration should be there, but along with these, no hurry, no inertia—neither rajasic over-eagerness nor tamasic

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discouragement—a steady and persistent but quiet call and working. No snatching or clutching at realisation, but allowing realisation to come from within and above, and observing accurately its field, its nature, its limits.

7. Let the power of the Mother work in you, but be careful to avoid mixture or substitution in its place of either a magnified ego-working or a force of ignorance presenting itself as Truth. Aspire especially for the elimination of all obscurity and unconsciousness in the nature.

The Mother :

The question you are to answer is this : Do you want the Yoga for the sake of the Divine ? Is the Divine the supreme fact of your life, so much so that it is simply impossible for you to do without it ? Do you feel that your very raison d'etre is the Divine and without it there is no meaning in your existence ? If so, then only can it be said that you have a call for the path.

Aspiration for the Divine is the first thing necessary. The next thing you have to do is to tend it, to keep it always alert and awake and living. And for that what is required is concentration—concentration upon the Divine with a view to an integral and absolute consecration to its Will and Purpose.

Concentrate in the heart. Enter into it; go within and deep and far, as far as you can. Gather all the strings of

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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 the heart. It is the divinity in you—your true being. Hear its voice, follow its dictates.

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

Yoga does become dangerous if you want it for your own sake, to serve a personal end. Dangers and difficulties come in when people take up Yoga, not for the sake of the Divine, but because they want to acquire power and under the guise of Yoga seek to satisfy some ambition. If you cannot get rid of ambition, do not touch the thing. It is fire that burns.

There are two paths of Yoga, one of tapasya (discipline) and the other of surrender. The path of tapasya is arduous, the path of surrender is safe and sure.

If you take up this path of surrender fully and sincerely, there is no more danger or serious difficulty. The question is to be sincere. If you are not sincere, do not begin

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Yoga. The first effect of Yoga, however, is to take away the mental control, and the hungers that lie dormant are suddenly set free, they rush up and invade the being. So long as this mental control has not been replaced by the Divine control, there is a period of transition when your sincerity and surrender will be put to test.

The impulses and desires that come up by the pressure of Yoga should be faced in a spirit of detachment and serenity, as something foreign to yourself or belonging to the outside world. They should be offered to the Divine, so that the Divine may take them up and transmute them.

If you have once opened yourself to the Divine, if the power of the Divine has once come down into you and yet you try to keep to the old forces, you prepare troubles and difficulties and dangers for yourself. You must be vigilant and see that you do not use the Divine as a cloak for the satisfaction of your desires.

So long as you belong to humanity and so long as you lead the ordinary life, it does not matter much if you mix with the people of the world ; but if you want the divine life, you will have to be exceedingly careful about your company and your environment. The whole world is full of the poison. You take it in with every breath. You can lose in a few minutes what it has taken you months to gain.

It is always wrong to display powers. This does not mean that there is no use for them. But they have to be used in the same way as they came. They come

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by union with the Divine. They must be used by the will of the Divine and not for display.

To enter the spiritual life means to take a plunge into the Divine, as you would jump into the sea. And that is not the end but the very beginning ; for after you have taken the plunge, you must learn to live in the Divine. That is the plunge you have to take, and unless you do it, you may do Yoga for years and yet know nothing of a true spiritual living.

Yoga means union with the Divine, and the union is effected through offering—it is founded on the offering of yourself to the Divine. When the resolution has been taken, when you have decided that the whole of your life shall be given to the Divine, you have still at every moment to remember it and carry it out in all the details of your existence.

In the beginning of the Yoga you are apt to forget the Divine very often. But by constant aspiration you increase your remembrance and you diminish the forget-fullness. But this should not be done as a severe discipline or a duty ; it must be a movement of love and joy.

SADHAK'S ATTITUDE

This Yoga demands a total dedication of the life to the aspiration for the discovery and embodiment of

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the Divine Truth and to nothing else whatsoever.

You must go inside yourself and enter into a complete dedication to the spiritual life. All clinging to mental preferences must fall away from you, all insistence on vital aims and interests and attachments must be put away, all egoistic clinging to family, friends, country must disappear if you want to succeed in Yoga.

The ways of the Divine are not like those of the human mind or according to our patterns and it is impossible to judge them or to lay down for Him what He shall or shall not do, for the Divine knows better than we can know. Not to impose one's mind and vital will on the Divine but to receive the Divine's will and follow it, is the true attitude of sadhana.

Fix upon your mind and heart the resolution to live for the Divine Truth and for that alone ; reject all that is contrary and incompatible with it and turn away from the lower desires ; aspire to open yourself to the Divine Power and to no other. Do this in all sincerity and the present and living help you need will not fail you.

The necessities of a sadhaka should be as few as possible; for there are only a very few things that are real necessities in life. The rest are either utilities or things decorative to life or luxuries.

These, a Yogin has a right to possess or enjoy only on one of two conditions :—

(a) if he uses them during his sadhana solely to train

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himself in possessing things without attachment or desire and learn to use them rightly, in harmony with the Divine Will, with a proper handling, a just organisation, arrangement and measure,—

(b) if he has already attained a true freedom from desire and attachment and is not in the least moved or affected in any way by loss or withholding or deprival. If he has any greed, desire, demand, claim for possession or enjoyment, any anxiety, grief, anger or vexation when denied or deprived, he is not free in spirit and his use of the things he possesses is contrary to the spirit of sadhana. Even if he is free in spirit, he will not be fit for possession if he has not learned to use things not for himself, but for the Divine Will, as an instrument, with the right knowledge and action in the use, for the proper equipment of a life lived not for oneself but for and in the Divine.

To remain within, above and untouched, full of the inner consciousness and the inner experience,—listening when need be to one or another with the surface consciousness, but with even that undisturbed, not either pulled outwards or invaded—that is the perfect condition for the sadhana.

Care should be taken that there should be no ambitious or selfish misuse, no pride or vanity, no sense of superiority, no claim or egoism of the instrument, only a

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simple and pure psychic instrumentation of the nature in any way in which it is fit for the service of the Divine.

Take with you the peace and quietude and joy and keep it by remembering always the Divine.

A mere restless dissatisfaction with the ordinary life is not a sufficient preparation for this Yoga. A positive inner call, a strong will and a great steadiness are necessary for success in the spiritual life.

Live always as if you were under the very eye of the Supreme and of the Divine Mother. Do nothing, try to think and feel nothing that would be unworthy of the Divine Presence.

It is not Yoga to give free play to the natural instincts and desires. Yoga demands mastery over the nature, not subjection to the nature.

It is the past habit of the vital that makes you repeatedly go out into the external part; you must persist and establish the opposite habit of living in your inner being which is your true being and of looking at everything from there. This Yoga is not of world-shunning asceticism, but of divine life.

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Follow always the one rule, to open yourself directly to the Divine Force and not to others; if you keep in touch with it, all else will progressively arrange itself.

But in order that it may go on developing, you must become more and more quiet, more and more able to hold whatever comes without getting too eager and excited. Peace and calmness are the first thing—in the peace you can bear whatever love, Ananda, strength or knowledge comes.

Truth in speech and truth in thought are very important.

A spiritual atmosphere is more important than outer conditions; if one can get that and also create one's own spiritual air to breathe in and live in it, that is the true condition of progress.

The Mother is always near and within, it is only the obscurity of mind and vital that does not see or feel it. That is a knowledge which the mind of a sadhaka ought to hold firmly.

If a sadhaka does anything wrong inwardly or outwardly, it creates a wrong influence in the atmosphere of the Ashram and opens the gates to the hostile Powers.

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The feeling that all one does is from the Divine, that all action is the Mother's is a necessary step in experience, but one cannot remain in it—one has to go farther. Those can remain in it who do not want to change the nature but only to have experience of the Truth behind it.

One can be a conscious and perfect instrument only when one is no longer acting in obedience to the ignorant push of the lower nature but in surrender to the Mother and aware of her higher Force acting within oneself.

One must be vigilant, but not anxious and uneasy. The Mother's Force will act and bring the result in its own time, provided one offers all to her and aspires and is vigilant, calling and remembering her at all times, rejecting quietly all that stands in the way of the action of her transforming Force.

There should be not only a general attitude, but each work should be offered to the Mother so as to keep the attitude a living one all the time. There should be at the time of work no meditation, for that would withdraw the attention from the work, but there should be the constant memory of the One to whom you offer it. This is only a first process. When you begin to feel always that it is the Mother's force that is doing the work and you are only a channel or an instrument, then in place of memory there will have begun the automatic constant realisation of Yoga, divine union, in works.

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Not only in your inward concentration, but in your outward acts and movements you must take the right attitude. If you do that and put everything under the Mother's guidance, you will find the difficulties begin to diminish or are much more easily got over and things become steadily smoother.

Demands should not be made; what you receive freely from the Mother helps you; what you demand or try to impose on her is bound to be empty of her force.

If vanity, ambition and self-conceit stand in your way, cast them from you. You will not get rid of these things by merely waiting for them to disappear. If you merely wait for things to happen, there is no reason why they should happen at all.

Once one has entered the path of Yoga, there is only one thing to do, to fix oneself in the resolution to go to the end whatever happens, whatever difficulties arise. None really gets the fulfilment in Yoga by his own capacity—it is by the greater Force that stands over you that it will come—and it is the call, persistent through all vicissitudes, to the Force, by which the fulfilment will come. Even when you cannot aspire actively, keep yourself turned to the Mother for the help to come—that is the one thing to do always.

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Everyone who is turned to the Mother is doing my Yoga. It is a great mistake to suppose that one can "do" the Purna Yoga i.e. carry out and fulfil all the sides of the Yoga by one's own effort. No human being can do that. What one has to do is to put oneself in the Mother's hands and open oneself to her by service, by bhakti, by aspiration; then the Mother by her light and force works in him so that the sadhana is done. It is a mistake also to have the ambition to be a big Purna Yogi or a supramental being and ask oneself how far have I got towards that. The right attitude is to be devoted and given to the Mother and to wish to be whatever she wants you to be. The rest is for the Mother to decide and do in you.

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

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union with the Divine would more and more replace die trouble and difficulty of the present.

Our incapacity does not matter—there is no human being who is not in his parts of nature incapable—but the Divine Force is also there. If one puts one's trust in that, incapacity will be changed into capacity. Difficulties and struggles themselves then become a means towards the achievement.

It is when there is no attachment to outward things for their own sake and all is only for the Mother and the life through the inner psychic being is centred in her that the best condition is created for the spiritual realisation.

Those who are not straightforward cannot profit by the Mother's help, for they themselves turn it away. Unless they change, they cannot hope for the descent of the supramental Light and Truth into the lower vital and physical nature; they remain stuck in their own self-created mud and cannot progress.

One rule for you I can lay down, "Do not do, say or think anything which you would want to conceal from the Mother".

We must find the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine demands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a

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help or means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. But to decide beforehand by our limited mental conceptions what they must be is to hamper the growth of the spiritual Truth within.

The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has an activity on the surface which veils the real Self. But there is another, a hidden consciousness within behind the surface one in which we can become aware of the real Self and of a larger, deeper truth of nature, can realise the Self and liberate and transform the nature. To quiet the surface mind and begin to live within is the object of this concentration. To concentrate in the heart centre with the offering of oneself to the Divine and the aspiration for this inward opening and for the Presence in the heart is the first way and, if it can be done, the natural beginning; for its result once obtained makes the spiritual path far more easy and safe than if one begins the other way —but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the more desirable.

One must say "Since I want only the Divine, my success is sure, I have only to walk forward in all confidence and His own Hand will be there secretly leading me to Him by His own way and at His own time". That is what you must keep as your constant mantra.

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As for the way out of the impasse you speak of, I know only of the quieting of the mind which makes meditation effective, purification of the heart which brings the Divine touch and in time the Divine Presence, humility before the Divine which liberates from egoism and pride of the mind and of the vital. What I have said is that you should not expect the Divine or insist on it at once or within an early time. It can come early or it can come late, but come it will if one is faithful in one's call.

Harmony and not strife is the law of yogic living. The aim here is fulfilment of the Divine in Life and for that, union and solidarity are indispensable. All jealousy, strife, hatred, aversion, rancour and other evil vital feelings should be abandoned as they can be no part of the spiritual life. So, also, all egoistic love and attachment will have to disappear—the love that loves only for the ego's sake and, as soon as the ego is hurt and dissatisfied, ceases to love or even cherishes rancour and hate. It is understood of course that such things as sexual impurity must disappear also.

The things that have to be established are:— Brahmacharya, complete sex-purity; Shamah, quiet and harmony in the being, its forces maintained but controlled, harmonised, disciplined; Satyam, truth and' sincerity in the whole nature; Prashantih, a general state

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of peace and calm; Atmasamyama, the power and habit to control whatever needs control in the movements of the nature. When these are fairly established, one has laid the foundation on which one can develop the Yoga consciousness and with the Yoga consciousness there comes an easy opening to realisation and experience. A Yoga like this needs patience, because it means a change both of the radical motives and of each part and detail of the nature.

Meditation is only a means or device, the true movement is when even walking, working and speaking, one is still in sadhana.

You must remain and grow always more and more deeply quiet and still both in yourself and in your attitude to the world around you. If you can do this, the sadhana is likely to go on progressing and enlarging itself with a minimum of trouble and disturbance.

You must gather yourself within more firmly. If you disperse yourself constantly, go out of the inner circle, you will constantly move about in the pettiness of the ordinary outer nature and under the influences to which it is open. Learn to live within, to act always from within, from a constant communion with the Mother. You must persist and establish the habit of living in your inner being which is your true being and of looking at everything from there.

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The Mother's presence is always there; but if you decide to act on your own—your own idea, your own notion of things, your own will and demand upon things, then it is quite likely that her presence will get veiled; it is not she who withdraws from you, but you who draw back from her. But your mind and vital don't want to admit that, because it is always their preoccupation to justify their own movements. If the psychic were allowed its full predominance, this would not happen.

It is not advisable to cut oneself off from mixing with people altogether. You must remain in the higher consciousness even when with people.

Keep your aspiration strong and sincere and call in the Divine in each thing and at each moment for support and in all that you feel keep yourself open to us. That is the easiest way to the Divine.

Do not dwell much on the defects of others. It is not helpful. Keep always quiet and peace in the attitude.

Quarrels and clashes are a proof of the absence of the Yogic poise and those who seriously wish to do Yoga must learn to grow out of these things. It is easy enough not

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to clash when there is no cause for strife or dispute or quarrel; it is when there is cause and the other side is impossible and unreasonable that one gets the opportunity of rising above one's vital nature.

Efface the stamp of ego from the heart and let the love of the Mother take its place. Cast from the mind all insistence on your personal ideas and judgment, then you will have the wisdom to understand her. Let there be no-obsession of self-will, ego-drive in the action, love of personal authority, attachment to personal preference, then the Mother's force will be able to act clearly in you and you will get the inexhaustible energy for which you ask and your service will be perfect.

All should be done quietly from within—working,, speaking, reading, writing as part of the real consciousness—not with the dispersed and unquiet movement of the ordinary consciousness. If you are troubled by failure or excited by success, that also you should overcome.

If one has the close inner relation, one feels the Mother always near and within and around and there is no insistence on the closer physical relation for its own sake If they get the outer closeness, they will find that it means nothing without the inner oneness and closeness. One

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may be physically near the Mother and yet as far from her as the Sahara desert.

If any sadhaka refuses in practice to admit this change or if he refuses even to admit the necessity for any change of his lower vital being and his habitual external personality, I am entitled to conclude that whatever his professions he has not accepted either myself or my Yoga.

Whatever the difficulties of the nature, however long and painful the process of dealing with them, they cannot stand to the end against the Truth, if there is or if there comes in these parts the true spirit, attitude and endeavour. But if a sadhaka continues out of self-esteem and self-will or out of tamasic inertia to shut his eyes or harden his heart against the Light, so long as he does that, no one can help him. The consent of all the being is necessary for the divine change, and it is the completeness and fullness of the consent that constitutes the integral surrender. But the consent of the lower vital must not be only a mental profession or a passing emotional adhesion; it must translate itself into an abiding attitude and a persistent and constant action.

There is a general protection around all the disciples, but most go out of it by their attitude, thoughts and actions or open the way to other forces.

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The Mother:

When you come to the Divine, you must abandon all mental conceptions; but, instead of doing that, you throw your conceptions upon the Divine and want the Divine to obey them. 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 and 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.

If we allow a falsehood, however small, to express itself through our mouth or our pen, how can we hope to become perfect messengers of Truth? A perfect servant of Truth should abstain even from the slightest inexactitude, exaggeration or deformation.

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Do not worry about the reactions of people however unpleasant they may be—the vital is everywhere and in everybody full of impurities and the physical full of unconsciousness. These two imperfections have to be cured, however long it may take, and we have only to work at it patiently and courageously.

The force was acting chiefly in the mind, the vital and, through it, in the physical. It has come further down in its action and now it is at work not only in the material but also in the subconscient and even in the inconscient. Unless you follow this descending movement and allow the force to act in your body and the material regions of the consciousness, you will find yourself stranded on the road without being able to advance any further. And now to allow this working of the force, it is detailed surrender of all movements, habits, tastes, preferences, sense of necessities etc., that is urgently required.

He who wants to advance on the path of perfection must never complain of the difficulties on the way; for each one is an opportunity for a new progress. To complain is a sign of weakness and of insincerity.

The secret of this attainment of perfection lies in the sincere urge for it. In one's action one must be free from all social conventions, all moral prejudices. All

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physical activities should be organised entirely in such a way as to make the body grow in balance and force and beauty. With this end in view one must abstain from all pleasure-seeking including the sexual pleasure. For each sexual act is a step towards death.

Indeed one who wants to prepare for the supramental life should never allow his consciousness to slip down to dissipation and inconscience under the pretext of enjoyment or even rest and relaxation. The relaxation should be into force and light and not into darkness and weakness.

The two cannot go together; at every minute you have to decide whether you wish to remain within the manhood of yesterday or belong to the superman hood of tomorrow. You must refuse to be moulded according to the life as it is and be successful in it, if you want to prepare for the life as it shall be and become its active and efficient member. You must deny yourself pleasures, if you wish to be open to the joy of living in integral beauty and harmony.

The senses should be able to bear everything without disgust or displeasure; at the same time they must acquire and develop more and more the power of discrimination with regard to the quality, origin and result of various vital vibrations and so know whether these are helpful to

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the poise and progress of the physical and vital being. Moreover, the senses should be utilised as instruments to approach and study the physical and vital worlds in all their complexities. Sensations are an excellent instrument for knowledge and education. To make them serve this purpose, they should not be used with an egoistic purpose, as a means of enjoyment, in a blind and ignorant seeking for pleasure and self-satisfaction.

It is by enhghtening, strengthening and purifying the vital and not by weakening it that one can help towards the true progress of the being. To deprive oneself of sensations is as harmful as depriving oneself of food. But in the same way as the choice of food must be made with wisdom and only with a view to the growth and proper functioning of the body, the choice of sensations also should be made and control over them gained with a view only to the growth and perfection of this great dynamic instrument which is essential for the progress of all other parts of the being.

Yoga is not a joke; when you choose it you must know what you do. Once you have chosen it, you must stick to it. You have no right to waver, you must go through......

To do this Yoga, the Yoga of transformation which is the most arduous of all things, is possible only if you feel that you have come here for that—I mean here upon earth —that for you nothing else is worth doing, that this is the very reason of your existence. Even if you have to labour,

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suffer, struggle, it is of no importance; for you want that realisation and nothing else.

Once you have set your foot on the path of Yoga, you must have an iron resolution and walk straight to the goal at any cost....

If you abandon the path, it is difficult even to find it again. What is strange is that if you leave it you lose it. There are legends to that effect in all countries, of people who abandoned the path and then have been seeking it again and have never regained it. It is as if it has vanished.

When you are on the path, do not leave it. Before you take it, hesitate, you may hesitate as long as you like. But as soon as you have taken it, it is finished, do not leave it any more; for that has consequences that may extend even to several fives. And that is extremely grave.

AIDS IN SADHANA

ASPIRATION

THE aspiration must be intense, calm and strong but not restless and impatient,—then alone it can be stable.

You should aspire calmly—eat, sleep, do your work. Peace is the one thing you have to ask for now—it is only on the basis of peace and calm that the true progress and realisation can come. There must be no vital excitement

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