India - the Mother

September 7, 1955

[A child asks:] Mother, why is it the doctrine of all spiritual schools in India to flee from action?⁶

Because it's all based on the teaching that life is an illusion. It began with the teaching of the Buddha, who said that existence is the fruit of desire, and that the only way out of misery and suffering and desire is to get out of existence. Then it went on with Shankara who added that not only is the world the fruit of desire, but it's a complete illusion, and as long as you live in that illusion, you can't realize the Divine....

But once you have reached that inner freedom and conscious contact with what is eternal and infinite, then without losing that consciousness, you must return to action and let it influence the whole consciousness turned to action.

That's what Sri Aurobindo calls bringing down the higher Force. That is how there is a chance of changing the world, because you have sought a new Force, a new region, a new consciousness, and you bring it into contact with the outside world....

If we go back to the teaching of the [Vedic] Rishis, for instance, there was no idea of flight from the world: for them, realization had to be on the earth. They clearly conceived of a Golden Age, in which the realization would be on the earth. But perhaps after a certain decline in the vitality of the country's spiritual life, a different orientation came—it's certainly after Buddha's teaching that the idea of flight came, and that sapped the country's vitality, because you had to strive to cut yourself off from life. Outer reality became an illusory falsehood with which you should have nothing to do anymore. So naturally, you would cut yourself off from universal energy, and the vitality kept decreasing; and along with it, all possibilities of realization decrease too.

Questions and Answers (1955): 7 September 1955