By the Mother.. With the permission of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry
Our world today abounds in the creation of new sciences, disciplines and processes... We explore the sky and the stars, we seek to further unravel the secrets of Nature, to evolve the structures of life. But, even as we do so, the complexity of problems we face becomes increasingly more intractable. A 'core' process seems to be missing... it still eludes us! Though our awareness of it grows... as our need for discovering it and making it an essential part of our life. Our life... as conscious beings... in the full richness of our potentialities... is not revealed to us. We develop the 'external' field in which our lives unfold – but know not the treasures that lie within us, which give meaning to all the rest. • This 'key science' awaits its hour of discovery and practice. But its 'presence' is palpable in the lives of men the world over. There is the need to re-create our being itself – to sound its greatest depths and farthest heights and to move with ease in the realms of the Spirit., and the domains of Matter. And... to discover that the two make one 'Whole' of Existence. To live this plenitude of being... in the physical universe itself... is our irresistible pole of attraction. • This we share... and it binds us. Sharing the journey... helps us move ahead with an assured step. We present here a few key texts that mark the steps of this journey... and guide us on the way. In the days we are together, we hope to deepen our understanding and enrich our practice, along the myriad paths that life offers us...
As we await the hour...
"The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things arc being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence. Indian Yoga, in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialized, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the secret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and utilities. • In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature attempting to realise her perfection in an ever increasing expression of her potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises self- conscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained. • All methods grouped under the common name of Yoga are special psychological processes founded on a fixed truth of Nature and developing, out of normal functions, powers and results which were always latent but which her ordinary movements do not easily or do not often manifest. • Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental, it is Nature's aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilization of the bodily, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities. Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in humanity, the whole method and aim of our existence must work by the interaction of these three elements in the being. • 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. But their aim is one in the end. The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. • We see, then, what from the psychological point of view, - and Yoga is nothing but practical psychology, - is the conception of Nature from which we have to start. It is the self-fulfilment of the Purusha through his Energy. The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the Sadhaka of the Sadhana as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but always inevitable workings. • There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place, it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialized methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enables us to construct not indeed a routine system, but yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic Yoga. Secondly, the process, being integral, accepts our nature such as it stands organized by our past evolution and without rejecting anything essential compels all to undergo a divine change. Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. • Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection embraces the realization of ourselves in being, in life and in love through others as well as through ourselves, the extension of our liberty and of its results in others would be the inevitable outcome as well as the broadest utility of our liberation and perfection. And the constant and inherent attempt of such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately complete generalization in mankind. The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike of our individual and of our common effort." -Sri Aurobindo Texts are from With the permission of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry
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