On Yoga
THEME/S
its lower members and raise to divinity in itself and others—this human existence.
HUMAN SERVICE
All work done in an egoistic spirit, however good for people in the world of the Ignorance, is of no avail to the seeker of the Yoga.
The idea of usefulness to humanity is the old confusion due to secondhand ideas imported from the West. Obviously, to be 'useful' to humanity there is no need of Yoga; everyone who leads the human life is useful to humanity in one way or another.
Yoga is directed towards God, not towards man. If a divine supramental consciousness and power can be brought down and established in the material world, that obviously would mean an immense change for the earth including humanity and its life. But the effect on humanity would only be one result of the change; it cannot be the object of the sadhana. The object of the sadhana can only be to live in the divine consciousness and to manifest it in life.
To concentrate most on one's own spiritual growth and experience is the first necessity of the sadhak—to be eager to help others draws away from the inner work.
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To grow in the spirit is the greatest help one can give to others, for then something flows out naturally to those around that helps them.
Working for family, society, country is a larger ego— it is not the Divine. One can work for them and say that one is working for the Divine only if one is conscious of the Divine Adesh to act for that purpose or of the Divine Force working within him. Otherwise it is only an idea of the mind identifying country etc. with the Divine.
The attainment of God is the true object of all human effort for which all the other efforts political, social, literary, intellectual, are only a necessary condition and preparation of the race; but there are both differences in the state of the attainment, differences in its range and effectivity.
Selfishness kills the soul; destroy it. But take care that your altruism does not kill the souls of others. Very usually, altruism is only the sublimest form of selfishness.
Do not be caught by the desire to "help" others—do and speak yourself the right thing from the inner poise and leave the help to come to them from the Divine. Nobody can really help—only the Divine Grace.
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Altruism, philanthropy, the service of mankind are in themselves mental or moral ideals, not laws of the spiritual life....The greatest service to humanity, the surest foundation for its true progress, happiness and perfection is to prepare or find the way by which the individual and the collective man can transcend the ego and live in its true self, no longer bound to ignorance, incapacity, disharmony and sorrow foundation for its true progress, happiness and perfection is to prepare or find the way by which the individual and the collective man can transcend the ego and live in its true self, no longer bound to ignorance, incapacity, disharmony and sorrow.
The Mother :
Yoga is not for the sake of humanity but for the sake of Divinity. It is not the welfare of humanity that we seek but the manifestation of the Divine. We are here to work out the Divine Will so that we may be its instruments for the progressive incorporation of the Supreme and the establishment of His reign upon earth. Only that portion of humanity which will respond to the Divine Call shall receive its Grace.
One of the commonest forms of ambition is the idea of service to humanity. All attachment to such service or work is a sign of personal ambition. There should be no attachment to any object or any mode of life. You must be absolutely free.
It is an illusion to think that all these so-called movements change things. It is merely taking a cup and beating
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the water in it. This illusion of action is one of the greatest illusions of human nature. Men have a feeling that if they are not all the time running about and bursting into fits of feverish activity, they are doing nothing. Whatever has been done in the world has been done by the very few who can stand outside the action in silence; for it is they who are the instruments of the Divine Power. They are dynamic agents, conscious instruments; they bring down the forces that change the world. Things can be done in that way, not by a restless activity. In peace, in silence and in quietness the world was built; and each time that something is to be truly built, it is in peace and silence and quietness that it must be done. I am not speaking of the ordinary day-to-day acts that are needed for the common external life, but of those who have or believe that they have something to do for the world. Enter into the consciousness of Eternity, then only you will know what true action is.
Change yourself if you wish to change the world. Let your inner transformation be the proof that a truth-consciousness can take possession of the material world and that the Divine's Unity can be manifested upon earth.
Organisations, however vast and complex they may be, can achieve nothing permanent, unless a new force, more
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divine and all-powerful, expresses itself through a perfected human instrument.
The conditions under which men live upon earth are the result of their state of consciousness. To seek to change the conditions without changing the consciousness is a vain chimera; for no human organisation can change radically unless human consciousness itself changes.
In this effort, however, to improve human conditions there have always been two tendencies, which although apparently contrary to each other should rather be complementary and together work out the progress. One seeks a collective reorganisation, something that would lead towards an effective unity of mankind : the other declares that all progress is made first by the individual and insists that it is the individual who should be given conditions in which he can progress freely. Both are equally true and necessary, and our effort should be directed along both the lines.
All urge of rivalry, all struggle for precedence and domination, should disappear giving place to a will for harmonious organisation, for clear-sighted and effective collaboration.
For all world organisation, to be real and to be able to live, must be based upon mutual respect and understanding between nation and nation as well as between individual and individual. It is only in the collective
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order and organisation, in a collaboration based upon mutual goodwill that lies the possibility of man being lifted out of the painful chaos where he is now.
This must not be understood, however, to mean that each nation would choose its place arbitrarily, through its ambition and its greed. A country's mission is not a thing to be settled mentally, with all the egoistic and ignorant preferences of the external consciousness; that would serve only to shift the field of the conflict between nations, but the conflict would continue, perhaps more accentuated.
For those who practise the integral Yoga, the welfare of humanity can be only a consequence and a result, it cannot be the aim.....So we can say that on the one hand a change in the human consciousness is absolutely indispensable ; on the other hand, without an integral transformation of the terrestrial atmosphere, the conditions of human life cannot be effectively changed. The appearance of a new force and light and power, accompanying the descent of the supramental consciousness into this world can alone lift man out of the agony and pain and misery under which he is submerged. The integral Yoga is not an escape from the physical world leaving it irrevocably to its fate. Nor is it an acceptance of the material life as it is with no hope for any decisive change, an acceptance of the world as the final expression of the Divine Will. It is only the possession of the
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consciousness of the divine nature in its essence that enables one to have the conception of what the divine nature will be in its manifestation. Yet they who have realised in themselves this consciousness are generally more anxious to become the superman than to give a description of it.
No material organisation, whatever its degree of preparation, is capable of bringing a solution to the miseries of man.
Man must rise to a higher level of consciousness and get rid of his ignorance, limitation and selfishness in order to get rid also of his sufferings.
HUMAN UNITY
It is not by social and political devices, or at any rate not by these, chiefly or only, that the unity of the human race can be enduringly or fruitfully accomplished......
Nature moves forward always in the midst of all stumblings and secures her aims in the end more often in spite of man's imperfect mentality than by its means......
Man must learn not to suppress and mutilate, but to fulfil himself in the fulfilment of mankind, even as he must learn not to mutilate or destroy, but to complete his ego by expanding it out of its limitations and losing it in something greater.......
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A national culture, a national religion, a national education may be useful things provided they do not interfere with the growth of human solidarity on the one side and individual freedom of thought and conscience and development on the other; for they give form to the communal soul and help it to add its quota to the sum of human advancement; but a State education, a State religion, a State culture are unnatural violences......
Human society progresses really and vitally in proportion as law becomes the child of freedom; it will reach its perfection when, man having learned to know and become spiritually one with his fellow-men, the spontaneous law of his society exists only as the outward mould of his self-governed inner liberty......
The first principle of human unity, groupings being necessary, should be a system of free and natural groupings which would leave no room for internal discords, incompatibilities and repression and revolt as between race and race or people and people......
The union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of human brotherhood and it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else. For this brotherhood is not a matter either of physical kinship or of vital association or of intellectual agreement. When the soul claims freedom, it is the freedom of its self-development of the divine in man in all his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming is
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that freedom equally for all and the recognition of the same soul, the same godhead in all human beings. When it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon the recognition of this inner spiritual unity. These three things are in fact the nature of the soul; for freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of the Spirit. It is the practical recognition of this truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the race......
This is the cause why all human systems have failed in the end ; for they have never been anything but a partial and confused application of reason to life......For the limited imperfect human reason has no self-sufficient light of its own ; it is obliged to proceed by observation, by experiment, by action, through errors and stumblings to a larger experience.
There has been almost continuous war in the world, Man is a quarrelling and fighting animal and so long as he is so how can there be peace ?
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It is only by the growth and establishment of the consciousness of human unity, that a true and lasting peace can be achieved upon earth. All means leading towards this goal are welcome, although the external ones have a very limited effect; however, the most important, urgent and indispensable of all is a transformation of the human consciousness itself, an enlightenment of and conversion in its working........
If diplomacy could become the instrument of the Truth and the Divine Grace, instead of being based on duplicity and falsehood, a big step would be taken towards human unity and harmony.
IGNORANCE (MAYA)
Ignorance means Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic intelligence separated itself from the light of the Supermind and lost the Truth. It is this that some of the ancient thinkers like Shankara, not perceiving the greater Truth-Force behind, stigmatised as Maya and thought to be the highest creative power of the Divine.
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Falsehood, on the other hand, is not this Avidya, but an extreme result of it. It is created by an Asuric power which intervenes in this creation and is not only separated from the Truth and therefore limited in knowledge and open to error, but in revolt against the Truth, or in the habit of seizing the Truth only to pervert it.
I have started writing about doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the 'doubt' whether any amount of writing or of anything else can ever persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. For doubt exists for its own sake ; its very function is to doubt always and, even when convinced, to go on doubting still; it is only to persuade its entertainer to give it board and lodging that it pretends to be an honest truth-seeker.
Nothing can arise from Nothing. Asat, Maya, nothingness, is a creation of our mind. Out of its own incapacity it has created the conception of a zero ; but it is an incalculable Infinite. Our sense by its incapacity has invented darkness. In truth there is nothing but Light. God is everywhere and wherever God is, there is Light.
There is no way to get free from ignorance and ego except to open to the higher consciousness so that it may descend and open to the Mother.
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The difficulty of the difficulties is self-created, a knot of the Ignorance; when a certain inner perception loosens the knot, the worst of the difficulty is over.
The more a mind is ignorant the more easily it judges everything it does not know or is incapable of understanding.
ILLNESS
Illness marks some imperfection or weakness or else opening to adverse touches in the physical nature and is often connected also with some obscurity or disharmony in the lower vital or the physical mind or elsewhere.
It is very good if one can get rid of illness entirely by faith and Yoga-power or the influx of the Divine Force. But very often this is not altogether possible, because the whole nature is not open or able to respond to the Force.
Attacks of illness are attacks of the lower nature or of adverse forces taking advantage of some weakness, opening or response in the nature—like all other things that come and they have got to be thrown away, they come from outside.
Certainly, one can act from within on an illness and cure it. Only it is not always easy as there is much resistance
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in Matter, a resistance of inertia. An untiring persistence is necessary.
If you can succeed by the inner action in preventing increase, even that is something; you have then by practice to strengthen the power till it becomes able to cure. Note that so long as the power is not entirely there, some aid of physical means need not be altogether rejected.
All illnesses pass through the nervous or vital-physical sheath of the subtle consciousness and subtle body before they enter the physical. If one is conscious of the subtle body or with the subtle consciousness, one can stop an illness on its way and prevent it from entering the physical body.
It is only by the conquest of the material nature that illness can cease altogether to come.
In illness physical means can be used wherever necessary; but behind the physical means there must be the Divine Force. The physical means are to be used with discrimination and in case of necessity.
The human body has always been in the habit of answering to whatever forces chose to lay hands on it and illness is the price it pays for its inertia and ignorance. It has to learn to answer to the one Force alone, but that is not easy for it to learn.
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All these ideas are wrong suggestions to which you must refuse access. You have the Mother's Grace and presence with you and it is only when you allow such suggestions of restlessness and despair that this kind of condition is created. Otherwise when you receive the Force it works. However serious an attack may be or however severe the illness, it can be got rid of by receptivity to the true working. If that is not enough, the Force aided by treatment can deal with them. The worst possible diseases have been cured recently by the Mother's force aided by treatment and this in people who know nothing of sadhana. In a sadhak the action can be still more effective. But the first thing is to get rid of these dark and disabling suggestions and open yourself once more to the Mother's working.
All the time he is busy with that idea and he has made a strong formation of illness around him. He is unable to receive my help because of this formation. Let him discard the idea of illness and more than half the trouble will be over and it will be easy to cure him.
If you want to get cured from illness there are two conditions. First you must be without fear, absolutely fearless and secondly you must have a complete faith in the Divine Protection. These two things are essential.
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Modern medicine lays a great stress on microbic infection and the dictum is to kill the microbes and the disease will be cured and it is so in many cases, but for us, illness has other deeper causes. It is an expression of a disorder of an inner subtler kind. If you cannot reach and touch that you cannot be free from illness or prevent it from recurring.......
Illness always, without exception, means a disturbance of equilibrium.....Now with regard to the causes, they are innumerable : there are inner or personal causes and there are external causes......
To resist the attack of illness, you must become fighters of the vital, spiritual fighters in your vital. All who do Yoga sincerely must become so, and when they can become they are quite safe. But one of the conditions enabling you to become such a fighter is that you must never have an evil will or an evil thought against anyone. For if you have a bad feeling, a bad will or a bad thought against people, you at once bring yourself down to their level and then you receive their blows.
The first thing to do then is to quiet oneself, to bring the peace and calm, the repose and a full confidence not necessarily into the entire body, but into the affected part. And then you can see the cause of the disorder. Even if you cannot in the beginning spot the central cause, you can try to get something near to it, approximating to it. And then you throw the light of consciousness, the spiritual force, exerting a kind of pressure upon the source of the disturbance and you try to re-establish
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balance and normal functioning of the affected part.
Now, there are, much nearer, in the physical, in the terrestrial atmosphere a large number of small beings whom you do not see, because your sight is too limited, but who move about in your atmosphere. There are some who are very good and nice, others who are wicked. Mostly these entities are the offshoots of the disintegration of vital beings, of persons who have died and are on the way of gradual dissolution. Often they are seized by Asuric forces and used by them as their instruments for all kinds of mis chief.... Very often they are behind accidents that happen to people. They get immense pleasure in the disorder and confusion following an accident. It not only amuses them but gives them their food. They draw sustenance from the human vitality thrown out of the body by emotion and excitement and all that. And further, these beings are not harmonious among themselves. They quarrel, they fight, they dash against each other, want to hit and destroy one another. And this is the origin of microbes. Microbes are forces of disintegration, the living remnants, scattered bits of the vital passions and desires and hungers of dead people, taken possession of by the vital beings, asuric beings. Most of the microbes have behind them a bad will and this is what makes them so dangerous. Unless one knows the quality and the kind of the bad will behind and can act upon it, in 99 cases out of 100, one is unable to find the true and the total remedy. The microbe is
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only the most material expression of some entity which is living, the embodiment in the most physical of a vital force....
Now when it is a case of attack from adverse forces, the thing becomes still more and specially complex,... There is a force outside you that wants to do you harm. You must have opened the door by a spiritual error of yours: a movement of vanity, anger, spite, violence; it may be even a momentary lapse and that is sufficient to give an opportunity to the beings that are always there on the watch for it.....Then the first method I spoke of is not sufficient. You have to add to it another aid, you must add the force of spiritual purification. It is such an absolutely and perfectly constructive force that no destructive force can stand before it......The adverse force usually disappears forthwith, for if it falls within the range of the force of light it gets dissolved. No force of disintegration can face this force of purifying fire and light. Either it is reduced to nothing or it has to change into a force of construction. In either case you are not only freed of your illness, but all possibility of its return is eliminated.
That does not necessarily mean that one is safe from all possible attack. To say the truth,—it is only when one has permanently established his consciousness in the supramental that the body is protected from all adverse attacks and inner disharmony.
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ADVICE TO A SICK DISCIPLE
You must not fear. Most of your troubles come from fear. In fact, 90 per cent of illnesses are the result of the subconscient fear in the body. In the ordinary consciousness of the body there is a more or less hidden anxiety about the consequences of the slightest physical disturbance. It can be translated by these words of doubt about the future : "And what will happen ?" it is this anxiety that must be checked. Indeed this anxiety is a lack of confidence in the Divine's Grace, the unmistakable sign that the consecration is not complete and perfect.
As a practical means of overcoming this subconscient fear each time that something of it comes at the surface, the more enlightened part of the being must impress on the body the necessity of an entire trust in the Divine's Grace, the certitude that this Grace is always working for the best in our self as well as in all, and the determination to submit entirely and unreservedly to the Divine's Will.
The body must know and be convinced that its essence is divine and that if no obstacle is put in the way of the Divine's working nothing can harm us. This process must be steadily repeated until all recurrence of fear is stopped. And then even if the illness succeeds in making its appearance, its strength and duration will be considerably diminished until it is definitively conquered.
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IMMORTALITY
Immortality is one of the possible results of supra-mentalisation, but it is not an obligatory result and it does not mean that there will be an eternal or indefinite prolongation of life as it is. To live in the Divine and have the Divine Consciousness is itself immortality and to be able to divinise the body also and make it a fit instrument for divine works and divine life would be its material expression only.
There can be no immortality of the body without supramentalisation; the potentiality is there in the Yogic force and Yogis can five for 200 or 300 years or more, but there can be no real principle of it without the Supramental.
INTELLECT
It is not by the intellect that one can progress in the Yoga but by psychic and spiritual receptivity—as for knowledge and true understanding, it grows in sadhana by the growth of the intuition, not of the physical intellect.
That is why one has to object to the intellect thrusting itself in as the all-knowing judge ; if it kept to its own limits, there would be no objection to it. But it makes constructions of words and ideas which have no application to the Truth, babbles foolish things in its ignorance and makes its constructions a wall which refuses
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to let in the Truth that surpasses its own capacities and scope.
The psychic being will not need the support of intellectual ideas or outer signs and helps. It is that alone that can give you the direct feeling of the Divine, the constant nearness, the inner support and aid. You will not then feel the Mother remote or have any further doubt about the realisation ; for the mind thinks and the vital craves, but the soul feels and knows the Divine.
To see the Truth does not depend on a big intellect or a small intellect. It depends on being in contact with the Truth and the mind silent and quiet to receive it. The biggest intellects can make errors of the worst kind and confuse Truth and Falsehood, if they have not the contact with the Truth or the direct experience.
The point is that people take no trouble to see whether their intellect is giving them right thoughts, right conclusions, right views on things and persons, right indications about their conduct or course of action. They have their idea and accept it as truth or follow it simply because it is their idea. Even when they recognise that they have made mistakes of the mind, they do not consider it of any importance nor do they try to be more careful mentally than before. The intellect, it is said,
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is man's highest instrument and he must think and act according to its ideas. But this is not true; the intellect needs an inner light to guide, check and control it quite as much as the vital. There is something above the intellect which one has to discover and the intellect should be only an intermediary for the action of that source of true Knowledge.
But for many intellectuals, so-called, their intellectuahty may be a stumbling block as they bind themselves with mental conceptions or stifle their psychic fire under the heavy weight of rational thought.
Yoga is not a field for intellectual argument or dissertation. It is not by the exercise of the logical or the •debating mind that one can arrive at a true understanding of Yoga or follow it. Unless and until the mind is stilled, including the intellectual or logical mind, and opens itself in quietude or silence to a higher and deeper consciousness, vision and knowledge, sadhana cannot reach its goal.For the same reason an unquestioning openness to the Guru is demanded in the Indian spiritual tradition.
Out of one thousand mental questions and answers there are only one or two here and there that are really of any dynamic assistance—while a single inner response
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or a little growth of consciousness will do what those thousand questions and answers could not do.
What I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little, for people do not really understand what I write—they put their own constructions on it. People do not understand what I write because the mind by itself cannot understand things that are beyond it.
For one who wants to practise sadhana, sadhana must come first—reading and mental development can only be subordinate things. Mental development may or may not help sadhana—if the mind is too intellectually developed in certain rationalistic lines, it may hinder.
It is impossible for the limited human reason to judge the way or purpose of the Divine,—which is the way of the Infinite dealing with the finite.
So long as we confine ourselves to sense-evidence and the physical consciousness, we can conceive nothing and know nothing except the material world and its phenomena.
For training the intellect you should look at things without egoism or prejudice or haste, to try to know
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fully and accurately before judging, to try to see the truth behind other opinions than your own etc., etc.
The intellect can be as great an obstacle as the vital when it chooses to prefer its own constructions to the Truth.
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.
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.
Whether the intellect is a help or a hindrance depends upon the person and upon the way in which it is used. There is a true movement of the intellect and there is a wrong movement; one helps, the other hinders. The intellect that believes too much in its importance and wants
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satisfaction for its own sake, is an obstacle to the higher realisation. A power has the right movement when it is set into activity for the Divine purpose; it has the wrong movement when it is set into activity for its own satisfaction.
INTERMEDIATE ZONE
Any one passing the border of ordinary consciousness can enter into this intermediate zone of vital world, if he does not take care to enter into the psychic. In itself there is no harm in passing through, provided one does not stop there. But ego, sex, ambition, etc. if they get exaggerated, can easily lead to a dangerous downfall ...or there is the opposite danger that he may become the instrument of some apparently brilliant but ignorant formation; for these intermediate planes are full of little Gods or strong Daityas or smaller beings who want to create, to materialise something or to enforce a mental and vital formation in the earth life and are eager to use or influence or even possess the thought and will of the sadhak and make him their instrument for the purpose. This is quite apart from the well-known danger of actually hostile beings whose sole purpose is to create confusion, falsehood, corruption of the sadhana and disastrous unspiritual error.
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The main strength of the hostile forces is in the vital —but there are some in the lower ranges of mind and smaller beings and forces in the subtle physical also.
KARMA
Karma is only a machinery, it is not the fundamental cause of terrestrial existence—it cannot be, for when the soul first entered this existence, it had no Karma.
If we believe that the soul is repeatedly reborn in the body, we must believe also that there is some link between the fives that preceded and the lives that follow and that the past of the soul has an effect on its future; and that is the spiritual essence of the law of Karma.
The idea of reward or retribution is a crude and vulgar conception which is a mere popular error.
On the highest height is the Supreme and in the lowest depth is matter; and there is an infinite gradation of levels of consciousness between this lowest depth and the highest height. In the plane of matter and on the level of the ordinary consciousness you are bound hand and foot. A slave to the mechanism of Nature, you are
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tied to the chain of Karma. There is an illusion of independent movement, but in fact you repeat what all others do. But it need not be so. You can shift your place if you will. You can rise and look from above and by changing your consciousness you can even change the consequences. This precisely is the aim of Yoga,—to get out of the cycle of Karma into a divine movement.
KARMA YOGA
I do not know why you drag in humanitarianism, activism, philanthropical seva etc. None of these are part of my Yoga or in harmony with my works, so they don't touch me. I never thought that politics or feeding the poor or writing beautiful poems would lead straight to Vaikuntha or the Absolute. It is not the form of the work itself or mere activity but the consciousness and God ward will behind it that are the essence of Karmayoga.
To do work in a close union and deep communion with the Divine in us, the Universal around us and the Transcendent above us, not to be shut up any longer in the imprisoned and separative human mind, the slave of its ignorant dictates and narrow suggestions, this is Karmayoga.
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To work in obedience to a divine command, an eternal will, a universal impulse initiated by a transcendent compulsion, not to run under the whips of ego and need and passion and desire, and not to be guided by the pricks of mental and vital and physical preferences, but to be moved by God only, by the highest Truth only, this is Karmayoga.
LIFE (Ordinary and Spiritual)
One who has not the courage to face patiently and firmly life and its difficulties will never be able to go through the still greater inner difficulties of the sadhana. The very first lesson in this Yoga is to face life and its trials with a quiet mind, a firm courage and an entire reliance on the Divine Shakti.
The life of samsāra is in its nature a field of unrest-to go through it in the right way one has to offer one's life and actions to the Divine and pray for the peace of the Divine within. When the mind becomes quiet, one can feel the Divine Mother supporting the life and put everything into her hands.
All the insistence upon action is absurd if one has not the light by which to act. "Yoga must include life and not exclude it" does not mean that we are bound to
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accept -life as it is with all its stumbling ignorance and misery and the obscure confusion of human will and reason and impulse and instinct which it expresses.
One must go deep and find the soul, the self, the Divine Reality within us and only then can life become a true expression of what we can be.
Divinisation itself does not mean the destruction of the human elements; it means taking them up, showing them the way to their own perfection, raising them by purification and perfection to their full power and Ananda and that means the raising of the whole of earthly life to its full power and Ananda.
It is a lesson of life that always in this world everything fails a man—only the Divine does not fail him, if he turns entirely to the Divine.
Everything depends upon the aim you put before you. If, for the realisation of one's spiritual aim, it is necessary to give up the ordinary life of the Ignorance, it must be done; the claim of the ordinary life cannot stand against that of the spirit.
In the Yoga practised here the aim is to rise to a higher consciousness and to live out of the higher consciousness
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alone, not with the ordinary motives. This means a change of life as well as a change of consciousness. But all are not so circumstanced that they can cut loose from the ordinary life; they accept it therefore as a field of experience and self-training in the earlier stages of the sadhana. But they must take care to look at it as a field of experience only and to get free from the ordinary desires, attachments and ideas which usually go with it; otherwise, it becomes a drag and hindrance on their sadhana. When one is not compelled by circumstances there is no necessity to continue the ordinary life.
It is quite possible for you to do sadhana at home and in the midst of your work. What is necessary at the beginning is to remember the Mother as much, as possible, to concentrate on her in the heart for a time every day, if possible thinking of her as the Divine Mother, to aspire to feel her there with you, offer her your works and pray that from within she may guide and sustain you. This is a preliminary stage which often takes long, but if one goes through it with sincerity and steadfastness, the mentality begins little by little to change and a new consciousness opens in the sadhak which begins to be aware more and more of the Mother's presence within, of her working in the nature and in the' life.
Peace is never easy to get in the life of the world and
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never constant, unless one lives deep within and bears the external activities as only a surface front of being.
Cases are seen in which the predictions of the horoscope fulfil themselves with great accuracy up to a certain age, then apply no more. This often happens when the subject turns away from the ordinary life to the spiritual life. If the turn is very radical, the cessation of predictability may be immediate.
The question about the family duties can be answered in this way—the family duties exist so long as one is in the ordinary consciousness of the grihastha; if the call to .a spiritual life comes, whether one keeps to them or not -depends partly upon the way of Yoga one follows, partly -on one's own spiritual necessity.
When one has to escape from the lower dharma, one has often to renounce it so as to arrive at a larger one, i.e., social duties, paying debts, looking after family, help to serve your country, etc., etc. The man who turns to the spiritual life, has to leave all that behind him often and he is reproached by lots of people for his adharma. But if he does not do this adharma, he is bound for ever to the lower life—for there is always some duty there to be done—and cannot take up the spiritual dharma ever.
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In the worldly life, the one thing by which one can enter into the sadhana is to remember the Divine always, taking one's difficulties as ordeals to be passed through, to pray constantly and seek the Divine help and protection and ask for the opening of the heart and consciousness to the supporting Divine Presence.
A divine life upon earth, the ideal we have placed before us, can only come about by a spiritual change of our being and a radical and fundamental change, an evolution or revolution of our nature. The embodied being upon earth would have to rise out of the domination over it of its veils of mind, life and body into the full consciousness and possession of its spiritual reality and its nature also would have to be lifted out of the consciousness and power of consciousness proper to mental, vital and physical being into the greater consciousness and greater power of being and the larger and freer life of the spirit.
The aim of ordinary life is to carry out one's duty, the aim of spiritual life is to realise the Divine.
It is the Spirit, the spiritual consciousness and the divine Presence that give life all its value; without this
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spiritual consciousness and this divine Presence life has no value......
This means that from the point of view of the truth of things, a man who has no material possessions, no remarkable capacity or possibility but is conscious of his psychic being and united with the Divine in him is infinitely greater than a ruler of the earth or a millionaire possessing considerable material power but unconscious of his psychic being.
From the point of view of truth, things apparent and external have no true value. The only thing that has a value is the divine Consciousness and the union with the Spirit......
The true spiritual life begins when one is in communion with the Divine, in the psychic.....
When one is united with one's psychic being and conscious of the divine Presence, when one gets the impulse for action from this divine presence, when one's will has become a conscious collaborator with the divine will, then that is the starting-point.
Before this, one can be an aspirant for the spiritual life, but has not got the true spiritual life.
LOVE (Human and Divine)
As for love, the love must be turned singly towards the Divine. What men call by that name is a vital interchange
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for mutual satisfaction of desire, vital impulse or physical pleasure.
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-Power all the transcendent light, force, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ananda of the supramental Divine. In this Yoga, therefore, there can be no place for vital relations or interchanges with others; any such relation or interchange immediately ties down the soul to the lower consciousness and its lower nature, prevents the true and full union with the Divine and hampers both the ascent to the supramental Truth-consciousness and the descent of the supramental Ishwari Shakti. Still worse would it be if this interchange took the form of a sexual relation or a sexual enjoyment, even if kept free from any outward act; therefore these things are absolutely forbidden in the sadhana.
Human love is mostly vital and physical with a mental support—it can take an unselfish, noble and pure form and expression only if it is touched by the psychic. One who wishes to reach the Divine must not burden himself with human loves and attachments, for they form so many fetters and hamper his steps, turning him away
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besides from the concentration of his emotions on the one supreme object of love. One must also be on one's guard against the profession of psychic love when one is doing sadhana,—for that is most often a cloak and justification for yielding to a vital attraction or attachment.
To run about expressing love for one's personal satisfaction or the satisfaction of others is only to spoil and lose it. One can love divinely only by becoming divine in nature; there is no other way.
The true love for the Divine is a self-giving, free of demands, full of submission and surrender, it makes no claim, imposes no condition, strikes no bargain, indulges in no violences of jealousy or pride or anger—for these things are not in its composition. Keep your love pure of all selfish claim and desire; you will find that you are getting all the love that you can bear and absorb in answer.
The Divine Love, unlike the human, is deep and vast and silent; one must become quiet and wide to be aware of it and reply to it. To give oneself is the secret of sadhana, not to demand and acquire. The more one gives oneself, the more the power to receive will grow. But for that all impatience and revolt must go; all suggestions of not getting, not being helped, not being
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loved, going away, of abandoning life or the spiritual endeavour must be rejected.
But whether love or goodwill the human feeling is always either based on or strongly mixed with ego,—that is why it cannot be pure. It is said in the Upanishad, "One does not love the wife for the sake of the wife", or the child or friend etc. as the case may be "but for one's sake one loves the wife". There is usually a hope of return, of benefit or advantage of some kind, or of certain pleasures and gratifications, mental, vital or physical that the person loved can give. Remove these things and the love very soon sinks, diminishes or disappears or turns into anger, reproach, indifference or even hatred.
To bring the Divine Love and Beauty and Ananda into the world is, indeed, the whole crown and essence of our Yoga. But it has always seemed to me impossible unless there comes as its support and foundation and guard the Divine Truth—what I call the Supramental— and its Divine Power. Otherwise Love itself blinded by the confusions of this present consciousness may stumble in its human receptacles and, even otherwise, may find itself unrecognised, rejected or rapidly degenerating and lost in the frailty of man's inferior nature.
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Universal love is the spiritual, founded on the sense of the One and the Divine everywhere and the change of the personal into a wide universal consciousness, free from attachment and ignorance.
The supramental love means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire flooding of the body consciousness with the physical experience of oneness, the presence of "the Beloved in every part, in every cell of the body.
The Divine Love of which I speak is a Love that manifests here upon this physical earth, in matter, but it must be pure of its human distortions, if it is to incarnate. But the adverse forces have distorted it; they have turned it into a field of violence and selfishness and desire and every kind of ugliness and prevented it from taking part in the divine work.
Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine. This human movement of love is secretly seeking for something else than what it has yet
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found; but it does not know where to find it, it does not even know what it is. Once the creation is conscious, awakened, opened to love for the Divine, the Divine love pours itself without limit back into the creation; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.
The Divine's Love is the power of Transformation. It has this power because it is for the sake of Transformation that it has given itself to the world and manifested everywhere. Not only into man but into all the atoms of Matter has it infused itself in order to bring the world back to the original Truth. The moment you open to it, you receive also its power of Transformation. What is essential is the true contact; for you will find that the true contact with it is sufficient to fill at once the whole of your being.
To love truly the Divine we must rise above attachments. To become conscious of the Divine Love, all other love must be abandoned.
There is always a bitter taste behind the human love —it is only the Divine Love which never disappoints. It is to the sincerity of your aspiration that the Love answers spontaneously.
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Only he who loves can recognise love. Those who are incapable of giving themselves in a sincere love, will never recognise love anywhere, and the more the love is divine, that is to say unselfish, the less they can recognise it.
Devotion is love and respect plus consecration. Without self-giving there is no love. But self-giving is very very rare in human love which is full of selfishness. Even a baby's love is quite selfish, because it asks for something in exchange, but the so-called human love is much worse; it only wants to possess its object. Devotion is much superior to human love, it is the first step towards self-giving.
If it is divine Love you are speaking of, you can have it only by giving up human love which is its disguise and caricature.
Of all austerities, the most difficult is the austerity of feeling and emotion, the Tapasya of love.
In the name of love the worst crimes have been perpetrated, the wildest follies committed. And yet, man has invented all kinds of moral and social rules hoping to control this force of love, to make it sober and docile. For it if- not by rules that the movements of love can be
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governed. Only a greater, higher and truer power of love can master the uncontrollable impulses of love. Love can alone rule over love by illumining transforming and enlarging it.
Consciousness is indeed the creator of the universe, but love its saviour. The love, the thing to which human beings give that name, has suffered all the degradations and thus it has been lowered to the level of the beast.
In the human beings love is immediately mixed with the egoistic lower movements that tarnish it and take away all the power of its purity. The exceptional souls, who seek the spiritual progress towards the creation of a new race, the race that will express the supramental truth upon earth, have to reject all love that is between human beings; for, however beautiful and pure it is, it creates a kind of short circuit and cuts the direct connection with the Divine.
One who has known Divine Love, finds all other love obscure, mixed with smallness and egoism and darkness. It looks like a bargain or a struggle for superiority and authority : and even in the best, it is full of misunderstanding and sensitiveness, frictions and misgivings. Moreover, it is a well-known fact that you grow into the likeness of him whom you love. If you want to be like
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the Divine, love Him alone. It is this wonderful state that we wish to realise upon earth; it is this which will transform the world and make it a habitation worthy of the Divine Presence. He will be able to manifest himself in the plenitude of his perfection only when human beings have made some indispensable progress in their consciousness and in their body.
No effort, therefore, is too arduous, no austerity too rigorous, if it can illumine, purify, perfect and transform the physical substance so that it may no longer conceal the Divine, when the Divine takes in it an outward form. For that marvel of love will then freely express itself in the world, the love divine which has the power of changing life into a paradise of sweet joy.
Your joys and your pleasures you will await from the Divine alone. In Him alone you will seek and find help and support. He will comfort you in all your pain, lead you on the path, lift you up if you stumble, and if there are moments of faintness and exhaustion, he will take you in his strong arms of love and wrap you in his soothing sweetness.
MADNESS IN SADHANA
Those who fall into insanity have lost the true touch and got into the wrong contact. It is due either to some impurity and unspiritual desire with which the seeker enters into the way or some insincerity, egoism and false
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attitude or to some weakness in the brain or nervous system which cannot bear the Power it has called down into it.
If the being is small, the nature weak and incapable, there is not this large-scale disaster; but a loss of balance, a mental unhinging and fall into unreason or a vital unhinging and consequent moral aberration or a deviation into some kind of morbid abnormality of the nature may be the untoward consequence.
When people begin Yoga out of ambition or vanity, it very frequently happens that they put themselves under the influence of certain hostile forces.
MATERIALISM—SPIRITUALISM
Materialism can hardly be spiritual in its basis because its basic method is just the opposite of the spiritual way of doing things. The spiritual works from within outward, the way of materialism is to work from out inwards.
Materialism seeks to "perfect" humanity by outward means and one of the main efforts is to construct a perfect social machine which will train and oblige men to be what they ought to be. But spirituality can only
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come by opening of the mind, vital and physical to the inmost soul, to the higher Self, to the Divine, and their subordination to the spiritual forces and instrumentation as channels of the inner Light, the higher Knowledge and Power.
It is quite true that the word "superstition" has been habitually used as a convenient club to beat down any belief that does not agree with the ideas of the materialistic reason, that is to say, the physical mind dealing with the apparent law of physical process and seeing no further. It has also been used to dismiss ideas and beliefs not in agreement with one's own idea of what is the rational norm of supraphysical truths as well. Even in the field of supraphysical experience only so much was admitted as could give a mentally rational explanation of itself according to a certain range of idea—all the rest, everything that seemed to demand an occult, mystic or below-the-surface origin to explain it was put aside as so much superstition.
Why I call the materialist's denial an a priori denial is because he refuses even to consider or examine what he denies but starts by denying it like Leonard Woolf with his "quack, quack" on the ground that it contradicts his own theories, so it can't be true
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If one is blind, it is quite natural to deny daylight : if one's highest natural vision is that of glimmering mists, it is equally natural to believe that all high vision is but a mist or a glimmer. But Light exists for all that—and Spiritual Truth is more than a mist and a glimmer.
The so-called sciences which deal with the mind and men are so much dependent on physical science that they cannot go beyond their narrow limits. If science is to turn her face towards the Divine, it must be a new science not yet developed which deals directly with the forces of the life-world and of Mind and so arrives at what is beyond Mind; but present-day science cannot do that.
The soul is not divided from God by these barriers of material dimensions. What is true of matter is not true of Spirit, nor do the standards of form apply to the formless. For Matter is conscious being confined in form, the spirit is conscious being using form but not confined in it; and it is the privilege of spirit that though indivisible in its pure being, it is freely self-divisible in its conscious experience and can concentrate itself in many states at a time.
Even the truth of physical things cannot be entirely known, nor can the right use of our material existence
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be discovered by physical Science and an outward knowledge alone or made possible by the mastery of physical and mechanical processes alone : to know, to use rightly we must go beyond the truth of physical phenomenon and process, we must know what is within and behind it.
MATERIAL OBJECTS
It is very true that physical things have a consciousness within them which feels and responds to care and is sensitive to careless touch and rough handling. To know or feel that and learn to be careful of them is a great progress of consciousness. It is always so that the Mother has felt and dealt with physical things.
The rough handling and careless breaking or waste and misuse of physical things is a denial of the Yogic Consciousness and a great hindrance to the bringing down of the Divine Truth to the material plane.
There is a consciousness in physical things, a life which is not the life and consciousness of man and animal which we know, but still secret and real. That is why we must have a respect for physical things and use them rightly, not misuse and waste, ill-treat or handle with a careless roughness. This feeling of all being
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conscious or alive comes when our own physical consciousness—and not the mind only—awakes out of its obscurity and becomes aware of the One in all things, the Divine everywhere.
Yes, I am in things also and that is why they must be treated with care.
Not to take care of material things which one uses is a sign of inconscience and ignorance.
You have no right to use any material object whatsoever if you do not take care of it.
You must take care of it not because you are attached to it, but because it manifests something of the Divine Consciousness.
MONEY
Money is the visible sign of a universal force, and this force in its manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical planes and is indispensable to the fullness of the outer life. In its origin and its true action it belongs to the Divine. But like other powers of the Divine it is delegated here and in the ignorance of the lower Nature can be usurped for the uses of the ego or held
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by Asuric influences and perverted to their purpose. To reconquer it for the Divine to whom it belongs and use it divinely for the divine life is the supramental way for the Sadhaka. All wealth belongs to the Divine and those who hold it are trustees, not possessors.
A day shall come when all the wealth of this world, freed at last from the enslavement to the anti-divine forces, offers itself spontaneously and fully to the service of the Divine's Work upon earth.
Money is not a thing that can be acquired honestly and quickly at the same time.
Those who try to earn quick, generally lose their honesty and straightforwardness—this is a great evil, for honour and honesty are much more valuable than money.
MORALITY, ETHICS
The spiritual life (adhyatma jivan), the religious life (dharmic jivan) and the ordinary human life of which morality is a part are three quite different things and one must know which one desires and not confuse the three together.
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The ordinary life is that of the average human consciousness separated from its own true self and from the Divine and led by the common habits of the mind, life and body which are the laws of the Ignorance. The religious life is a movement of the same ignorant human consciousness, turning or trying to turn away from the earth towards the Divine but as yet without knowledge and led by the dogmatic tenets and rules of some sect or creed which claims to have found the way out of the bonds of the earth-consciousness into some beatific Beyond. The religious life may be the first approach to the spiritual, but very often it is only a turning about in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices of set ideas and forms without any issue. The spiritual life, on the contrary, proceeds directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a greater consciousness in which one finds one's true being and comes first into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine. For the spiritual seeker this change of consciousness is the one thing he seeks and nothing else matters.
Morality is a part of the ordinary life; it is an attempt to govern the outward conduct by certain mental rules or to form the character by these rules in the image of a certain mental ideal. The spiritual life goes beyond the mind; it enters into the deeper consciousness of the Spirit and acts out of the truth of the Spirit.
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Yoga is not a thing of ideas but of inner spiritual experience. Merely to be attracted to any set of religious or spiritual ideas does not bring with it any realisation. Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change of consciousness, it can only bring a change of mind.
The popular account of reincarnation and Karma is based on the mere mental assumption that the workings of Nature ought to be moral and proceed according to an exact morality of equal justice—a scrupulous, even mathematical law of reward and punishment or, at any rate, of results according to a human idea of right correspondence. But Nature is non-moral—she uses forces and processes moral, immoral and amoral pell-mell for working out her business. Nature in her outward aspect seems to care for nothing except to get things done—or else to make conditions for an ingenious variety of the play of life. Nature in her deeper aspect as a conscious spiritual Power is concerned with the growth, by experience, the spiritual development of the souls she has in her charge.
It is the same with the problem of the taking of animal life. In fact the right decision might vary in each case and depend on a knowledge which the human mind has not—and it might very well be said that until it has
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it, it has not the right to take life. It was some dim perception of this truth that made religion and ethics develop the law of Ahimsa—and yet that too becomes a mental rule which it is found impossible to apply in practice. And perhaps the moral of it all is that we must act from the best according to our lights in each case, as things are, but that the solution of these problems can only come by pressing forward towards a greater light, a greater consciousness in which the problems themselves, as now stated by the human mind, will not arise because we shall have a vision which will see the world in a different way and a guidance which at present is not ours. The mental or moral rule is a stop-gap which men are obliged to use, very uncertainly and stumblingly, until they can see things whole in the light of the spirit.
The principle of life which I seek to establish is spiritual. Morality is a question of man's mind and vital, it belongs to a lower plane of consciousness. A spiritual life therefore cannot be founded on a moral basis, it must be founded on a spiritual basis. This does not mean that the spiritual man must be immoral—as if there were no other law of conduct than the moral. The law of action of the spiritual consciousness is higher, not lower than the moral—it is founded on union with the Divine and living in the Divine Consciousness and its action is founded on obedience to the Divine Will.
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A moral man may be chock-full of ego, an ego increased by his own goodness and rectitude. Freedom from ego is spiritually valuable because then one can be centred, no longer in one's personal self, but in the Divine.
All that belongs to the intellectual-ethical virtue-and-sin dodge which is only a mental construction of practical value for the outward life but not a truth of real inner values.
The greatest difficulty of the sattwic man is the snare of virtue and self-righteousness, the ties of philanthropy, mental idealisation, family affections, etc.
Suffering is simply a natural consequence of past errors, not a punishment, just as a burn is the natural consequence of playing with fire. It is part of the experience by which the soul through its instruments learns and grows until it is ready to turn to the Divine.
No one has a right to sit in judgment over moral and social laws, - unless he has taken his seat above them;, one cannot abandon them, unless one replaces them by something superior, which is not so easy. The majority
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of those who reject human laws and proclaim their liberty and their decision to "live their own life" do so only in obedience to the most ordinary vital movements which they disguise and try to justify, if not to their own eyes, at least, to the eyes of others. They give a kick to morality, simply because it is a hindrance to the satisfaction of their instincts. The moral consciousness acts in the same way in the social body as tapasya in the spiritual domain.
There is a great difference between spirituality and morality, two things that are constantly confused with each other. The spiritual life has for its object to grow into the divine consciousness. Morality proceeds by mental constructions with the idea of good or bad and sets up an ideal type into which all must force themselves. This moral ideal differs in its constituents and its ensemble in different times and different places. And it proclaims itself as a unique type and it admits of none other outside itself.
Morality lifts up one artificial standard contrary to the variety of life and the freedom of the spirit. Morality is not divine or of the Divine; it is of man and human. But the spiritual life demands that you should reject desire altogether. Its law is that you must cast aside all movements that draw you away from the Divine. All desires, whether good or bad, come within this description;
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