-03_The Advent April 1975

I WILL tell you a story today, but of another kind. I will tell you of a dream, or a vision that I had some time ago. It was an ashram, I say an ashram for it was not quite like our ashram although there was a great similarity between the two. In some respects it was like our ashram and in other respects somewhat unlike. First of all, the whole ashram was in one place, a consolidated organisation, not houses here and there scattered about: there were no buildings or houses belonging to other people or other organisations, also the buildings were beautiful to look at and the general lay-out artistic; but all the activities we have were there. The school was there, the playground was there, the library also, but all in an orderly arrangement. The Mother was also there, she. was going from place

to place, observing all and speaking to people. Among the people, curiously some I seemed to recognise, some of those even who are here now, there were many strangers from other countries, a good many of them. Regarding those who are here now and whom I seemed to recognise there also, the impression is rather vague and I cannot name them. But some of those who were here and passed away I recognised very well, they had almost the same face and features — but in a new, fresh and younger form. They were active and handsome young men, young women — I remember Sri Aurobindo quoting from the Rig Veda: the Vedic Rishi speaks of a happy herd of cows grazing in green fields; the Rishi adds: even those among them that were old have become young now. The cow represented for the Rishi the light, the sun's ray, the purity of consciousness. Perhaps the image came from the actual life of the Rishis of that time, the cattle they reared, the domestic animals about them, the natural scenery around them, and all that was an important part of their ordinary daily life. A whole herd of cattle all-white is a beautiful picture. Even so there was something in the atmosphere of the ashram which gave it a special quality, it was clear and pure, limpid and transparent, there was a strange luminosity in it, and it was a very happy atmosphere. While you are there, you feel free and at ease and there were no petty feelings that we have here in the normal life of the world, no anger, no jealousy, no selfishness, no ugliness : there was a happy coordination of all persons and things.

My feeling is that this ashram that I saw was in fact the inner reality of our ashram here, that inner ashram which is within us all; what we see at present is the outer form, the material form which is a good deal deformed and even falsified in many ways. Indeed that inner ashram has an other-worldly atmosphere of its own, an atmosphere of rarified heights. I have told you very often that those who are here are fortunate, they breathe this atmosphere and in spite of their faults and foibles, and no matter what they do, they are in contact with something of the inner beauty and fragrance. I do not know whether you have heard what Mother said more than once, that all the children here, when they live here for some time, imbibe and carry a new atmosphere. And she could recognise a person from a distance, even from a great distance, not by his face or physical features but by the

atmosphere he carried that he belonged to the ashram, very different from the atmosphere an outsider normally carries. It is an atmosphere or aura made of happiness and purity and luminosity. All the ashram children are surrounded by it because it is Mother's own atmosphere. Therefore in those days, she used to say, these children should not go out into the outside world even in their holidays because, when they go out, she said, she had seen it, they lose this ashram atmosphere and when they come back, they are coated with a thick layer of the mud of the ordinary world, and it took her a lot of time and trouble to rub and scrub and clean the dirt upon the body, to make it shine as before. You may remember here in this connection a Ramakrishna story about the sinners who went to the Ganges for a bath to purify themselves: they leave their sins on the shore or the sins leave them as they get into the Ganges water, but the sins wait for them there on the bank and as soon as they come back purified of their sins, the sins lying in wait jump on them again and the sinners remain always sinners. Here naturally you are not destined to remain sinners always.

However, that atmosphere, the inner atmosphere still exists here. With the Mother's withdrawal of physical body that too might have withdrawn a little perhaps, a little only, just a few inches perhaps! But it is still there, for the Mother is there as concrete as before although not as material. As I said, there are some who have passed away from here and some new faces also I found in this other inner Ashram. These are already there wholly in that ashram. But we who are here, we lead a double life as it were: part of us is here, and part in that other inner ashram, as though one leg this side and the other on that side over the fence. In your better moments when you feel nice and free, when you are happy, when you are noble in spirit, you come in contact with that inner ashram, you breathe that atmosphere. In dreams also, while asleep, apparently asleep, many of you must have seen the Mother, must have had Sri Aurobindo's darshan. That is because you come in contact with that inner atmosphere and enter into it. Now our task is to come more and more in contact with that reality even in our waking moments, to be conscious of that which is nothing but the Mother's Presence. Half of you, your inner life, is already there, bathing there in that luminous happy air. Only try to

be conscious of that: if you are conscious of it, even a little, you will feel immensely happy, feel that you are beautiful, that you are wise — when you feel the touch of that inner ashram life. And instead of living entirely or mainly the outer life of the ashram as at present you can turn this life into that inner life; and gradually reshape the present life in the mould of the inner life. That is your duty,, your task, particularly you who are students, boys and girls, that is your central work — study and learning and all that is secondary. What you should do and what you can is to breathe a new air, live in a better, more beautiful way. You can have this inner life, that is already there, this inner life, not with much difficulty for it is already there, a collective inner life, which is so beautiful as I say, filled with the fragrance of the Mother's Presence. It is a collective life in which you all are not only brothers and sisters but one body and soul unified in the Mother's loving and living substance. That inner life you have to bring out into your body and all the external activities. It is however the very nature of that inner organisation to express itself outwardly, its spontaneous drive is towards expression and embodiment, even if you do not know or perceive it, it is slowly coming forward. Only if you are conscious, if you help, collaborate, you will be benefitted, you will grow in consciousness, attain a new stature, you will enjoy the supreme happiness of a miraculous achievement.

At present, as I say, there is a separation between the two ashrams, these two worlds or fives. They run parallel to each other, or oftener intertwined, intermixed, dovetailed. They are to be made one single existence; the inner must take up, assimilate into itself the outer, the outer must allow itself to be cleansed and emptied of its dross and be possessed altogether by the inner. They are to form one, as it is said, streamlined entity: one being, one life, one body.

I said your work is to try to be conscious and take part more and more in the inner life. Naturally you ask how to do it. Actually there is no precise process, no hard and fast rule for learning or acquiring it. It is not like learning a mathematical problem or even a particular physical exercise which you learn by habit and culture. It is nothing mechanical. It is a natural growth. It comes automatically and spontaneously, shows itself to you and in you. You have simply to ask for it sincerely, go on asking for it as intensely as possible, repeat as a

mantra: "I want to be there, I want to be there, I want to be there." That is quite sufficient. That will evoke in you the new light, the new impulse that will lead you on. That is the child's call to the Mother and the Mother always responds — with her Light and Love.

You have been told, and I have also often told you, that although the Mother's physical body is not there, she has left her consciousness with us: the consciousness is still living, it is still working. She herself said even while she was in her body that if ever she left her body, her consciousness would be always with us. But I will add something more here. Apart from the consciousness, what she has left with us, what remains with us, is her Love, the love of her children is still there undiminished as before in its fullness. I spoke of the inner ashram life: that life is built out of her love for her children, and it must be easy for you to enter and enjoy that life through your love for the Mother, your answering love for the Mother's love for you. And through the glow of that love you will gradually develop into what she wanted you to become.

A REBIRTH of the soul of India into a new body of energy, a new form of its innate and ancient spirit.¹

Even as men come to Me, so I accept them. It is my path that men follow from all sides.... Whatever form the worshipper chooses to worship with faith, I set in him firm faith in it, and with that faith he puts his yearning into his adoration and gets his desire dispensed by me. But limited is that fruit. Those whose sacrifice is to the gods, to elemental spirits, reach the gods, reach the elemental spirits, but those whose sacrifice is to Me, to Me they come.⁷

Even as men approach him, so he accepts them and responds too by the divine Love to their bhakti.²

This is a sin we do and a great destruction of men and brothers.⁶I will forbear.

The Asat, the Non-Existent of the Taittiriya Upanishad, which alone was in the beginning and out of which the existent was born.⁸

His progress is an ascent from level to level and each new height brings in other vistas and revelations of the much that has still to be done.¹⁰

There is a self that is of the essence of Matter; there is another inner self of Life that fills the other; there is another inner, self of Mind; there is another inner self of Truth-Knowledge; there is another inner self of Bliss.²

They climb Indra like a ladder. As one mounts peak after peak, there becomes clear the much that has still to be done. Indra brings consciousness of That as the goal.⁴

Like a hawk, a kite He settles on the Vessel and up bears it; in His stream of movement He discovers the Rays, for He goes bearing his weapons; He cleaves to the ocean surge of the waters; a great King, He declares the fourth status. Like a mortal purifying his body, like a war-horse galloping to the conquest of riches He, pours calling through all the sheaths and enters these vessels.⁶

SRI Aurobindo thought that it was India's destiny to be the Guru of the Nations. The Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram said the same thing in a different way: "India today represents all the ills of modern humanity. India will become the land of its resurrection — resurrection to a higher, truer life". India has first to battle with the festering ills, and defeat, change and transform them into engines of possibility or instruments of national rehabilitation and reconstruction. Only when India thus saves herself by her own exertions would she be in a position to save the world by her example.

Where are we? Over twenty-seven years after independence, India presents today a pretty dismal picture. The Five Year Plans haven't been able to give effective fight to poverty. The mass of the people are poorer than even ten years ago. It is pointed out by statisticians that the average availability of pulses per day per capita is now less than 50 grams, as against 60 grams a decade ago. And so on, with many other essential items of food, raiment and shelter. The chasm between -the few rich and the many poor hasn't been bridged; if anything, it has only become wider and deeper. There is a visible breakdown in our political and economic life, in our social and cultural life. And a cold desperation seems to have possessed the teeming millions who inhabit our country.

Who will be bold enough to visualise for this India, this sick India, the role of Guru of the Nations? For a time in the early 1950's, India's voice was heard with respect in international forums. The situation changed when India found herself caught in economic narrows after Suez, and India's stock slumped very much indeed after the Chinese invasion, followed by their unilateral withdrawal. Even the victory over Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh haven't radically changed India's international standing. Heavily indebted to other nations, still grovelling in our own economic grooves of stagnation, torn by political, communal, factional rivalries, enfeebled by indiscipline, corruption and defeatism, caught in the whirling wages-prices spiral, India strikes many as the very paradigm

of national sickness. How are we to reconcile Sri Aurobindo's Vision of India and the starkness of current actuality?

Nay more: realistic futurological projections to 2000 A.D. or after would reinforce the truth that, not only with reference to the affluent West or Japan, but also as compared with the new petro-rich Arab countries, or Brazil, Venezuela or Indonesia, India must continue to be a poor country. Which means that we should learn first and foremost to accept the fact of comparative poverty in the context of our present and still growing population, but also take quick steps to make this poverty bearable and honourable by eliminating the grosser inequalities of the present time, and charging our communal and national life with economic and social justice. Instead of unending economic growth (personal and national), what we need is a healthy feeling of "enough ness", the concept of simplicity if not austerity, the ideal of plain living and honest thinking, and the sense of commonalty and commonwealth.

Even in the affluent Western world, intelligent people are anxiously questioning the wisdom of exhausting the non-replenish able material resources of the earth and the parallel exploitation in divers devious ways of the people of the developing or underdeveloped countries. The revolt of Western youth is no passing phenomenon. The flight of more and more Western youth to India to discover and experiment with new patterns of living is an interesting pointer to the future. Affluence more often induces satiety rather than satisfaction. By returning to the ways of simple and honest living, by refusing to ape the criminally expensive habits — conspicuous spending and conspicuous waste — of the affluent West (or the affluent pockets elsewhere), India would once again be able to set her own house in order.

On the other hand, this distrust of wasteful surplus age, this acceptance of comparative national poverty but coupled with the elimination of hunger, want, squalor and ignorance in their present soul-searing forms, might be the means of a great enrichment of the inner countries of the mind, heart and soul. We will make use of all the creative science and technology of our time, but not for exploitation, or luxurious living, or the satisfaction of the individual, communal or national ego. Given a new orientation to life, the emphasis being on inner richness and outer enough ness, inner peace and outer

harmony, inner poise and outer collaboration, India might once more live in self-respect and self-sufficiency, and even acquire the right to be the Guru of the Nations.

The time is past when professional politicians, administrators, economists, industrialists and educationists could be trusted all by themselves to order satisfactorily the affairs of the nation, and of the world. These men wielding divers forms of power have nevertheless made rather a serious mess of things, and they are apparently caught helplessly in the coils of their own contriving. Representative leaders of the world religions met at Leuven in Belgium in August-September last to approach from a religious stance problems like Disarmament and Security, Economic Development and Human Liberation, Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Environment and Human Survival, Education for Peace, Religion and Population, and Violence and Non-Violence, and through the 'Leuven Declaration' appealed as follows to the peoples of the world:

"We are resolved henceforth to serve humanity together each in the way most in keeping with the convictions of his spiritual family and local circumstances ...

.We press religious people to condemn profiteering by the affluent world from the weakness of the developing countries ...

We plead with our religious communities to evoke among their peoples a fresh sense of awe before the mystery of existence and a recovery of the value of humble self-restraint in the conduct of personal and social life ...

We appeal to the religious communities of the world to inculcate the attitude of planetary citizenship, the sense of our human solidarity in the just sharing of the food, the energy, and all the material necessities which our generous habitat, unlike any other yet perceived in universal space, will continue faithfully to produce if only it is well loved and respected by mankind".

More recently, a Seminar was convened at Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, by Sri Aurobindo Society, World Union, Sri Aurobindo's Action and Navajyoti to take stock of the present situation in India and to consider the means of national reconstruction

as the necessary prelude to a reshaping of the world. Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy and integral Yoga may be viewed as the culmination and fulfilment of the main Indian tradition, and the quintessential aim of the Yoga is life-affirmation and world-transformation. Among the participants in the Seminar, which extended from 18th to 20th February, were members of the Ashram and its several affiliated institutions as also select invitees from outside. After the inauguration highlighted by a keynote address from Mr. M. P. Pandit, the Seminar divided itself into four commissions devoted respectively to the Social, Spiritual, Educational and Economic aspects of the national malady. The discussions were wide-ranging, and covered both the theoretical and practical aspects of the various problems of national reconstruction. In the end, the Seminar adopted a Statement which begins with this significant affirmation:

Purify the source within, transform the individual; from this base, the outer changes, the reconstruction of society, would follow. The far aim of the whole endeavour should be "the spiritual Vision of India as the soul of the world". And this aim is to "rise out of the various imperfections, deformations and deviations that characterise the present society, towards increasing enlightenment, progression and perfection".

Groups of awakened, enlightened and dedicated individuals — with wings for Women and Youth — should function at various centres as foci of purposive motivation and change. Study of spiritual literature, elevating association (satsanga), and the practice of psychological disciplines like meditation, concentration and prayer, should help to deepen and heighten the level of consciousness. From self-study (svādhyāya) to service would be a natural step, the motive-force being spiritual. All religions are roads to service and realisation, but it is first necessary to recover the spiritual bases of the various religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Christianity,

Zoroastrianism, Hebraism — and systems of ethics, because these bases are often hidden by encrustations of dogma, ritual and superstitious custom which sometimes tend to pervert the purity of the source. The seminal teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother can lead to "the integration of personality, the resolution of conflicts between the individual and the collectivity, and the integration of the values of the different civilisations of the East and the West". A beginning has been made already at Auroville, but such experiments in integral living should be multiplied as pilot-projects for ushering in the new India, the new World, of the future.

A revaluation of the ends and means of Education will be central to any scheme of reconstruction. "The ideal education is that which is imperceptibly woven into every detail of the day-to-day life of the student". The experiments in "free progress" or integral education at Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and at Auroville may with advantage be repeated with local adjustments elsewhere also.

All discussions on National Reconstruction are apt to hinge on the economic problem. The Seminar described the economic situation in India as "a state of self-perpetuating drift", and hence what is needed is a decisive breakthrough to new horizons of possibility. It was rightly urged that "problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that has given rise to them; one has to rise to a higher level and seek their solution". On the practical side, the following four-fold programme was recommended:

If wealth is one of the aspects of the Divine Power, joyous work is verily a form of worship of that Power. If something new is to be built, it should be on firm new foundations. Everywhere one hears the rumblings of disorder and the urgent call for new life, new times, and a new dispensation. This is the hour to be heroic, to start with a new spiritual faith, adventure bravely and install Mother India on her sacred pedestal again.

''THE world is preparing for a big change." This is what the Mother saw and said in one of her recent messages, and aroused in Her children a spirit of participation in the 'big change' by her subtle call "Will you help?". (1970)

A new age must come and there must emerge a new society, a new humanity. Our privilege can be to make our conscious preparation for it. Mental as we are at the moment, this preparation has to be primarily a psychological self-opening, an intellectual and emotional readiness for the reception of the influence of the new power of Consciousness. The terms of this psychological preparation will be those of educating the present mentality into true perspectives, inspiring ideals, refined emotions and judicious will-power. With these man could not only seek but also welcome the New Consciousness; in the absence of them the New Consciousness might have to work, who knows, through catastrophes. Mental we are, spiritual we have to be; our preparation has to be psycho-spiritual. An effective programme of this preparation could be taken up by both individuals and organisational groups who receive their inspiration from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and who wish to work for a better Future.

Such a programme naturally deserves to be global. But it must avoid all extravagant regard for uniformity, and give necessary importance to the essentials of development uniquely specific to each society, each country, each culture. In that context India deserves to have a comprehensive programme of spiritual regeneration so that she could resume her true spirit, reorient herself and reorganise her

life according to her true nature, her true being, her svabhāva. Then alone could India rise to her stature, play her proper role and contribute her best to the community of nations; then alone could she fulfil her true mission of guiding and helping the entire world towards man's divine destiny. The revealing words of Sri Aurobindo are:

And confirms the Mother: "India's true destiny is to be the Guru of the world."

Let us turn to Sri Aurobindo's guidance for the development of India and her spiritual regeneration. He says:

It is quite often mistaken that spirituality is an exclusive concern for the life of the spirit in its isolation from the rest of life and that spiritual pursuits are necessarily un secular or other-worldly pursuits. But in the words of Sri Aurobindo "Spirituality is not necessarily exclusive; it can and in its fullness must be all-inclusive." He enlightens us further, particularly revealing to us the spiritual genius of India:

Thus revealed, spirituality is to be regarded as an all-inspiring, all embracing self-culture in which we have first to discover the truth of our inmost being and then enlighten all the parts of our being by its splendour and enliven all our activities with its power. That would imply a central approach to all life, personal as well as public, individual as well as collective, and not any confined concentration on some little part of our living.

The key to true spirituality may be termed as 'psychic transformation', and all the items of a psycho-spiritual programme in India have to be oriented to it. It may be generally stated that the necessary steps to the psychic and spiritual preparation would be the deepening and raising of our consciousness more and more from its present levels to profounder and higher levels; the marks of development would be spontaneous affinity with truth and good and beauty: widening of thought, serenity, faith and confidence, self-reliance, sincerity, truthfulness, strength of will, love and harmony would be the manifest terms of that development.

This preparation in the context of Indian renaissance which is coming up is not only resuming what once naturally belonged to the Indian genius, but a further and recreative prospect and venture into a diviner future of the entire world as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo:

Addressing ourselves thus to the great mission of India's spiritual regeneration for the good of the whole world, we could now see the possibility of a two-fold programme: (i) a general campaign for spiritual recovery, a regeneration and a resumption of the hitherto ideals of spirituality by reorienting ourselves to the Indian spirit, — a reconstruct ional movement of a community of sadhakas; (ii) a concentrated effort of intensive preparation for adventurous exploration into the possibilities of future spirituality, — a movement of daring sadhakas with personal fervour for spiritual research and pledged to new experiments. Needless to say that the second type of programme could be taken up by our Ashram; it would perhaps be more accurate to say that our Ashram already is engaged in it.

A psycho-spiritual programme has to be both individual and collective. The characteristic feature of the one has to be personal self-improvement and of the other a mutual fostering and promotion in the spirit of 'parasparam hhāvayantah. Without being both it would not be complete and effective, for, although spirituality is not reducible to social terms yet there are both the aspects of spiritual development, a unique individuality and a harmonious communion with all.

Some of the effective items of personal spirituality and self-discipline which have always been recognised as almost indispensable for self improvement could be listed as under:

A list of self-improving virtues cannot be completely exhaustive. What is proposed here can be enhanced further, the suggestion being that such items of self-culture could be suitably adopted by individuals according to their nature and need and circumstances. What would always matter is that self-improvement is indispensable and that the inner sincerity of attitude rather than an outer form of our practice will be the important thing. It deserves to be understood that the success of all our collective programmes will depend entirely on the quality of our individual self-improvement. In that sense all sadhana has to be basically a sadhana of self-improvement.

As for the collective programme we could suitably develop items of mutual and cooperative nature, items for example like physical education, congregational meditation, regular weekly svādhyāya, study camps, cooperative projects of dedicated work, mutual arousal and promotion of yogic attitudes towards life-situations, etc., etc. There will naturally arise the need of opening svadhyaya and sadhana centres at different places with proper atmosphere and promotional equipments. Devoted individuals who could organise the activities of such centres will be a consistent requirement.

As far as feasible, educational activities could be closely assodated with such centres, for in fact sadhana and education are essentially one.

While the programme of an all round self-improvement has to be initiated with a fresh vigour, we could ill afford to miss or neglect the popular ways of ethic religious life in India, for indeed religion as well as ethics has always been spiritually oriented here. It would be expected, on the contrary, that such a movement would focus on the spiritual significances of religious practices and traditional norms, stripping off the true content from routine rituals or customary observances, so that the conventional people might experience a sense of recovery of their own faith and in turn become more and more catholic to others' faiths.

On the bases of recovered spirituality it would be proper to bring out the unifying principles of all religions and thus harmonise all faiths. A spiritual movement, though transcending in its true essence all religiosity, would, while having a liberating effect on religion, not cancel, — much less condemn, — the religious life: it would rather provide the nourishing kernel to the religious people, supporting them in their own faiths, inspiring thus a christian to be a better christian, a muslim to be a truer muslim, and the followers of the various other cults better adherents of their established ideals. The Gita, for example, enjoins on the man of wisdom (jnanin) to support and strengthen the people of ordinary faiths by his superior knowledge.

So too regarding the traditional ways of living. A spiritual movement would liberate rather than disparage social conventions, catholicise individuals into mutual appreciation rather than tear them away into antagonistic attitudes towards traditional ways of living. The characteristic motive of spirituality would be to help in finding the deeper significance of customs and make people more conscious of the implied values of their traditional culture and thus encourage them to develop further and ever more in their own line of growth.

This, however, would never imply that it is demanded or expected of a spiritual movement to be either passively indifferent or clumsily tolerant of all that is nonsense or superstitious or petrified either in the name of religion or in the garb of custom. On the contrary, it has to be very sensitive and drastic, making absolutely no allowance to all that tends to persist in ignorance. In principle it may

have to be even revolutionary, since all spirituality is in a sense a reversal, that is, living radically from within, from the soul-truth instead of Jiving from without, from external considerations, antar-mukhī as against bahirmukhī. But this revolution is not an externalised operation, a turmoil or a disruptive commotion: it is rather a serious and self-resolute orientation in which' all that is extraneous becomes insignificant and the call of the soul within out-weighs every other consideration. Primarily therefore it is getting oneself revolutionised rather than revolutionising others. And since the spiritually revolutionised would live by spiritual consciousness, truth and good and beauty would be his characteristic features.

The collective aspect of spiritual life would thus be almost an outcome of the spiritual orientation in social living. Conventional life of the community could well be the field for the spiritual man for penetrating deep into the spiritual content implied in traditional values, and his association with others an occasion for arousing others' consciousness towards the profundity of that content.

One of the very helpful and valuable things that such a movement could and should do is to work out a thorough value-scheme in which such an integral hierarchy of values could be brought home that nothing worthwhile in life is left out and no stress on any one particular value could render it out of proportions. Physical, economic, social, emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, moral and religious values must find their due place corresponding to the different pursuits of man and the developing levels of his consciousness. Such a value-system will not only sustain all the value seeking of man but will also guide him in matters of value-grades so that he could always live by a correct perspective and never lose sight of the supreme value. Sri Aurobindo's categorical advice is: "...the lower in us must learn to exist for the higher, in order that the higher also may in us consciously exist for the lower, to draw it nearer to its own altitudes."¹

Another very important work could be usefully taken up by a psycho-spiritual movement: that is the work of 'personality integration', not in the popular manner of psycho-therapy but in the deeper sense of psycho-synthesis. In this age of stress and strain the

human individual is suffering from all sorts of disintegrational imbalances. His personality is almost torn between unhealthy pulls and pushes and the problem of maladjustment is reaching its heights. Psychiatry is fast coming to the view that a proper rehabilitation of personality is possible by the recovery of one's deeper faith and his devotion to that inspiring ideal to which one would feel pledged. Spirituality in its core has all the inspiration for loving and living the highest ideals. The work of personality integration can best be done by spiritual orientation and spiritual regeneration can best be accomplished by truly integrated personalities.

These suggestive notes could be summed up into a seven-fold programme consisting of (i) Self-improving discipline coupled with group activities including dedicated work for mutual promotion of higher and superior considerations;

(ii) Recovery of spiritual content of religious traditions for a harmonious appreciation of different faiths;

(iii) Bringing home an integral view of life for promoting wholesome attitudes towards life-situations;

(iv) Proper value-orientation with clear consciousness as to the supreme Goal of life;

(vii) Sustained and resourceful adventure into future possibilities of a divine life.

The passages from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Committee felt, open the entire perspective and strike the keynote and provide the guide-lines for all the task to which this Committee could address itself:

The Committee realised that spirituality being the core of Indian life as viewed by Sri Aurobindo, it could not be treated as a mere aspect among other aspects of an Indian Reconstruction Programme: it rather deserved to be the central theme of all the aspects, economic, social, educational and the rest. It further realised that

spirituality being all-inclusive on the one hand, and on the other, sadhana being unique to each individual without much uniformity, the task of formulating any programme for the whole nation was rather delicate. All the same the urgency of spiritual regeneration being so acutely felt, some suggestions, howsoever tentative, deserved to be imperatively worked out. The Committee therefore considered it very important that in a spiritual regeneration programme primary emphasis should be laid on the principles of spirituality, and the mention of specific practices should be regarded as simply useful suggestions to be suitably adapted.

Since it is quite often misconceived that spirituality is an isolated pursuit of some unworldly or other-worldly aim, it deserved to be brought home and very clearly emphasised that true "spirituality is to be regarded as an all-inspiring all-embracing self-culture in which we have first to discover the truth of our inmost being and then enlighten all the parts of our being by its splendour and enliven all our activities with its power. That would imply a central approach to all life, personal as well as public, individual as well as collective".

Considering the various suggestions of the working paper as valuable the Committee very strongly felt that the programme of svādhyāya was of capital importance since it was through svādhyāya, that individuals as well as groups could bring their consciousness into direct contact with the enlightening Consciousness revealing itself through the Word-Power. A separate Note on svadhyaya is given here. Svādhyāya, it is sincerely believed, would effectively initiate us into other parts of the total programme.

In the field of work the programme of spiritual regeneration should be brought to active participation in the ideal and project of Auroville.

The Youth of the country deserve to be particularly inspired into the Auroville ideal of Tomorrow while the traditional people need to be made deeply conscious of the agelong ideals of spirituality.

'Svādhyāya' is a very significant word. We in India are more or less conversant with its meaning and import, even though in the

course of long tradition its practice in life has mostly lapsed into mere routine of scriptural readings, mechanical while regular in its mode.

In the famous eight-fold Yoga of Patanjali 'svādhyāya' is one of the essential five self-regulatives, niyama, absolutely necessary for the inner self-preparation for and in the life of Yoga. The Gita in its scheme of all-life-yajna speaks of svādhyāya as coupled with spiritual knowledge, svādhyāya-jñāna-yajña. (Chapter IV-28) It also mentions of it as one amongst the foremost divine qualities. (XVI-I6) Almost all other spiritual traditions have recognised the great value of svādhyāya, and have considered it necessary and helpful in the life of sādhanā that is spiritual discipline.

Literally speaking svādhyāya would mean self-study. But it is not merely a study by oneself: it is at once a study of one's self, the truth of one's spiritual reality. Consequently it has a specific reference and bearing on scriptural study which is basically contemplative. It could thus be meaningfully said that suādhyāya is a contemplative or meditative study of soul-truths in the light of revealing scriptures. Such a study would, from the very nature of the case, be a profound study very much different from common and ordinary informational readings, superior even to intellectual learning's. It would at the least be that wisdom-giving study for which T. S. Eliot happened to express his great and serious concern when he exclaimed "Where is that knowledge which is lost in information, and where is that wisdom which is lost in knowledge?"

Our usual studies are loaded and stuffed with information for the most part, and at their best they serve as the material out of which we might weave out what we call intellectual understanding termed loosely as 'knowledge'. But nothing more than that. Informational survey and intellectual approach have, no doubt, their value. But by themselves they fall miserably short of wisdom, and, given to their presumptuous claims, they stick to their limitations, may even fall a prey to falsehood and ignorance, from which nothing short of spiritual wisdom can save.

Now in a programme oriented to Wisdom, study in the spirit of svādhyāya is a must, since it is a meditative study, and to meditate is at once to open our inner consciousness in receptivity to the light

of the truth that radiates through the Word. A programme of svā-dhyāya can have both the modes, individual as well as collective. Those who have a proper disposition for such contemplative studies with others can have the joy and satisfaction of mutual enlightenment when they join as Wisdom-seekers, parasparam bodhayantah as the .Gita puts it. (X-9)

To study the revealing writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in a spirit of svādhyāya is not only meaningful in this context, but the most pertinent and essential thing, for, to say the least, svādhyāya is the basic and most effective condition for receiving the profound meanings of their words. Without that spirit we are likely to fail in getting the full import: with that spirit we are assured of their illuminating influence.

Man being mental at the moment, he lives his conscious life according to his thoughts, under the influence of his emotions and directions of his will. Until a superior light and power possess him and mould his normal nature and transform his whole being he has to progress through his mental preparation which may be termed as his mental sādhanā. Even in the sādhanā of his body and life his mental understanding and attitude and resolutions are his leaders. "Man is. a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and body;" For an inward turn of his psychic sādhānā his mind has to learn to open itself to faith and to become quiet to receive the psychic influence. The mind's preparation and sādhānā has thus to proceed with svādhyāya which is meditative study of the truths of life and existence revealed in the scriptures and the writings of the seers and sages and auatārs.

In this context, what a privilege for mankind that Sri Aurobindo has written so abundantly, so revealingly, so convincingly, and has made a whole treasure of valuable truths available for our svādhyāya; what a great fortune again, that the Mother has so richly explained the secrets of existence and the goal of life: To study Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is to be with them, at least mentally, and thus to be exposed in mind to the influence of their Light. To engage ourselves in the study of their writings in the spirit of soādhyāya is at once to enlighten our thoughts, inspire our feelings, ennoble our attitudes and enhance our will. Their words are at once a light and a power, and to

receive them is to breathe in the truths they contain. They not only communicate, they charge our consciousness. Svādhyāya is attuning ourselves to their Muse; the least it gives is an inviting acquaintance with the heights and depths of life and reality, in its true spirit It kindles the fire of 'spiritual thought' in us.

Sri Aurobindo reveals to us the ways in which Nature has conducted man's inward preparation towards spiritual evolution. He says, "There are four main lines which Nature has followed in her attempt to open up the inner being, — religion, occultism, spiritual thought and an inner spiritual realisation and experience: the three first are approaches, the last is the decisive avenue of entry." ¹ He calls them "powers" since each is effective in its own way and also in combination with one another. Making a specific exposition of each he tells us about spiritual thought that "it has been the outcome of realisation and experience or built its structures as an approach to it". Svādhyāya here appears in its true significance working both ways - basing itself on revealed Truth and approaching towards experience and realisation.

Such, being the significance of Svādhyāya, and so much being the importance of spiritual thought and its intellectual study, it may be very useful to launch a comprehensive programme of svādhyāya. For the, sake of efficiency this programme could be organised by an informal and free Association of the seekers of Truth which might be called: 'SRI AUROBINDO SVADHYAYA MANDALA'.

The Svādhyāya Mandala should aim to develop into a vast sphere of svādhyāya with svādhyāya centres and circles everywhere but confining circumference nowhere.

Its primary feature has to be an inspiring activity of elevating and enlightening study of spiritual literature, and not a form of mere constitutional body.

Its purpose and programme will be to promote and enhance the mind's seeking for the spiritual truth and thereby release the mental energy into psycho-spiritual explorations.

The foremost field of svādhyāya will be the revealing writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, integral and integrative as they are. Scriptural studies like those of the Upanisads, the Gita, the Dhammapada etc. could be suitably included without any sectarian bias.

Svādhyāya will have its personal as well as mutual aspects: a contemplative self-study would be the personal way, and a dialogue over meditative readings would be the mutual way of collective svādhyāya.

The programme of svādhyāya could be regular - daily or weekly - and also on particular occasions in Study Camps specially organised for intensive study etc.

The activities of svādhyāya Centres could be extended in terms of expository talks, seminars, conferences, and such other regular study provisions as may be felt useful according to the local needs.

Certain educational activities could, as far as feasible, be associated with these centres.

It would be important to consider the requirements of svādhyāya Centres. They would need suitable places with necessary books and a scope for library facilities to develop in due course. Basic books may be available to deserving readers at cheaper rates.

Easy expository booklets may be published for preliminary studies of the common readers. A monthly journal entitled ' SVADHYAYA in regional languages may regularly supply useful selections. from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for contemplative study of the members of the svādhyāya Centres.

Working sincerely and regularly, these svādhyāya .Centres could prepare their own compilations of inspiring and enlightening selections from source books on different topics for use and service to those workers who propose taking up certain projects of practical work in any sphere of life with spiritual outlook. This would be a very practical help of the centres to the society.

FOR any social programme to be meaningful and effective the individual must be accepted as the key. Secondly the orientation of life must be changed: it should proceed from within outward.

Individuals who accept this discipline of inner change should organise groups of like minded individuals for the preparation of the needed climate and the means for the execution of the programmes. These groups or Centres are to be autonomous bodies deriving guidance direct from their source of Inspiration — The Mother.

The background of this work is the spiritual vision of India as the soul of the World. The aim is to rise out of the various imperfections, deformations and deviations that characterise the present society towards increasing enlightenment, progression and perfection. The endeavour at Sri Aurobindo Ashram is the working model for this purpose.

These Centres, as they develop, should have distinct wings for the development of the Youth and of Women. Facilities should be provided for a sound programme of physical education as a strong physical base is indispensable for a total growth. Apart from studies, exercises in self-discipline etc. there should be a dedication to social service for the Divine.

Naturally the main motive force for this movement is spiritual. But this spirituality is not anything that touches only the soul or only a part of oneself; it is the central truth around which everything is to be organised. Each individual must exert himself to awaken in himself his soul or psychic centre utilising all means that are available; study of spiritual literature, especially those of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, elevating association — Satsang — practice of psychological discipline like prayer, meditation etc. to deepen and heighten the level of one's consciousness. It is equally important to normalise these elevations of consciousness by expressing them in day to day life.

Studies must be undertaken in order to recover the spiritual bases of religions and ethics as they have come down to us; side by side

explorations into the future expressions of spirituality must be promoted. This endeavour — both individual and collective — is best carried on under the guidance of the Ashram.

Application of the Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for the integration of personality, resolution of the conflict between individual and the collectivity, integration of values of the different civilisations of the East and the West, on the lines attempted at Auroville, must be given priority.

The importance of the right type of education that alone can help in an organised realisation of these Ideals cannot be gainsaid. A total change in the attitude to the child who is to be educated, a radical change in the role of the teacher and in the relation between the teacher and the taught, are called for. The ideal education is that which is imperceptibly woven into every detail of day to day life of the student. Taking advantage of the breakdown in the current systems of education in the country, the encouraging results of the modes of integral education developed in Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education must be propagated. Teachers from outside who are open to new ideas and feel the need to revise their methods must be encouraged and helped to imbibe the spirit and learn the techniques of the New Education. Orientation camps in the Ashram may be provided under expert guidance. A cell may be created at the Centre of Education to keep contact with teachers and groups who are interested in New Education and guide them. A periodical bulletin on the subject may also be considered for a larger propagation. A small committee is recommended to be set up to maintain the link between teachers in the Ashram and teachers outside who are trying to work out this programme in their respective institutions to the extent that is possible.

Lastly the state of economy in the country is in a state of self-perpetuating drift. A breakthrough has got to be effected and that can be done if:

2. A professional collective management system is allowed to replace the existing, outmoded system of proprietory management:

4. There is a change of attitude to wealth and money is recognised to be a Power of the Divine to be used for the manifestation of the Highest in all walks of life.

The individual should change — in his attitude and living. He must create an area of influence around himself and generate action. Existing models of such enterprise should be publicised.

It should be recognised that problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that has given rise to them. One has to rise to a higher level and seek their solution.

There is much in the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that could help in revolutionising the attitude and creating new dimensions in the field of economy. Committees must be set up to collect apposite passages on these themes and present them in an effective manner. There should also be a kind of clearing house Committee to receive queries from those interested and feed them with the right answers from the Teachings of the Masters.

It is strongly recommended that to guide and direct such a many-sided movement of regeneration as this, a Central Coordinating Committee be set up in Pondicherry with a representative each from the participating organisations and a convener from the Ashram. This Committee may co-opt members for specific assignments as and when necessary. The Committee must meet periodically and review the developments.

Joint Seminars of the type now held must be organised at least once a year to take stock and prepare programmes for the next years.

SWAPATHY sees before him a vivid picture of the little life; it struggles into existence on the fringe of the Truth idea; has a protective covering of Ignorance; he directs his searching glance into the mists of obscurity to disentangle its origins; even as the searchlight reveals all that is covered up in darkness, so too his penetrating eye discloses the restless uncouth populace teeming in their thousands in the dusk; they are moved into activity by the subtle deities; men in their ignorance believe that they are doing everything on their own, little knowing the control exercised over them by the unseen supra-physical forces; these magic artisans, the forces working behind the veils, mould out of the plastic clay a motley multitude of ignominious creeping life such as the reptiles; there are seen at work not only the evil but the good spirits; there are fairer genii who due to their fall, have lost their soul while retaining their beautiful exterior; they are interested in playing with good and evil; they lure into failure all attempts by resorting to the sorceries of deceit and corruption; they spill poison into knowledge, making man an enlightened brute and making virtue disgusting, dull and drab.

'However large a part of this pressure may be traced to our own subliminal self or to the siege of the universal mind forces or life-forces belonging to our own world, there is an element which bears the stamp of another origin, an insistent supra-terrestrial character.'¹These supra-terrestrial forces take advantage of men with half-awakened souls following an uncertain line of drift; the twilight state of their vacillation is their lurking place for their wily scheming; the primitive heart comes under the dominance of their misleading suggestions; they influence with their dark counsels; misguide their darkened lives into greater darkness; it is not the powers of the earth

alone but those belonging to the other worlds also that vie with one another to exercise their influence on the earth life; when reaching the earth these powers which function as absolutes in their own realms, have to adjust and acclimatise themselves to the conditions obtaining on the earth; for the purpose of gaining a hold on earth, even the opposites have to unite; the* human mind which is a prey to all these subtle forces, is naturally thrown into a state of unquiet; it hungers for light which when traced to its origin is discovered to lie within; but the light for which the conscious life is athirst is beyond its reach since the human mind is subject to the laws of the inconscience and the pulls of the blind desires; the mind is under the yoke of forces beyond its control; even the conquests achieved so far by the mind are of doubtful value; with all their travail they get a battered crown, a success mangled out of shape; but gradually a higher consciousness steps in; the horizon widens and the finite grows into the infinite.

'This organisation includes as on our earth, the existence of beings who have or take forms, manifest themselves or are naturally manifested in an embodying substance tangible only to subtle sense, a supraphysical form-matter. It is possible to receive help or guidance or harm or misguidance from these beings; it is possible even to become subject to their influence, to be possessed by their invasion, or domination, to be instrumentalised by them for their good or evil purpose. At times the progress of earthly life seems to be a vast field of battle between supraphysical forces of either character, those that strive to uplift, encourage and illumine and those that strive to deflect, depress or prevent or even shatter our upward evolution or the soul's self-expression in the material universe. Some of these Beings, Powers or Forces are such that we think of them as divine; they are luminous or benignant or powerfully helpful; there are others that are Titanic, gigantic or demoniac, inordinate influences, instigators or creators often of vast and formidable inner upheavals or of action that overpass the normal human measure.'¹

At the outset the world gives the impression of a brute machine in spite of the fact that the Supreme sits in the inconscient secrecy directing the whole movement; the Spirit first takes birth as matter;

lies in a tranced condition, asleep and dumb; the subtle vibrations of life in matter are neither heard nor perceived; the subtle wizard, the creative Force of the Supreme, is at work producing numerous material forms; behind the veil of inconscience, the immanent supreme intelligence is directing the whole movement.

Though the world has sprung out into existence out of Ananda, in the initial stages of creation, there is an all-pervasive insensibility; first there is the space characterised by sound vibrations; this is followed by the element of the air which has the quality of touch, clash and clasp; the creative force looks like a spendthrift throwing away its energy; but it is also a force of conservation drawing back all that has been scattered or diffused.

The next arrival on the stage is the element of fire which modifies itself into the luminous order of the stars; space becomes a vast field of electric energy releasing strange wave-particles; thus is formed Matter where consciousness is heavily massed; The matter Chit or Consciousness-force masses itself more and more to resist and stand out against other masses of the same consciousness-force; in substance of spirit pure consciousness images itself freely in its sense of itself with an essential indivisibility and a constant unifying interchange as the first basic formula even of the most diversifying play of its own force.'¹ The world which seems an impossibility comes out of the void; but because it is a reality, it is a miracle; this is the explanation from the limited human perception; the riddle, the mystery of life is sought to be solved by error leading to a groping of truth.

It may to another view appear an illusion, a deception imposed by Maya; or all may be an appearance of a change, a flux while the spirit is immutable; the objects which appear stationary are in a constant whirl; they await fife and consciousness; this leads to the dreamer in the pose of stone changing slightly from inconscience to mobility; this sets the scene for nature's conscious play; the pent up force in matter trickles out in an inarticulate fashion; there is a thin spray of life along the prevailing dead order of existence; the ocean of lifeless space is dotted by islands of the living; a conscious power of life twins the insensible matter; they ever after function as companions; but the life that is born obeys the laws of matter; except for certain move merits,

and the basic responses to sensations of pain and pleasure, life and matter are indistinguishable; life awake or asleep looks like matter; however these involuntary movements in life reveal the directive heaving of an imprisoned will of the Supreme.

Life in its nascent stage has not taken the shape to vocalise its feelings there is yet an inarticulate sensibility, an experience of a throb of delight, a vague unexpressed thrill of pleasure at its own beauty; in course of time there is the birth of feeling, an awareness; but this consciousness is turned without and is not directed within since the doors of the house are sealed; as a sequel the eye catches the surface and misses the spirit concealed within; though life is laden with infinite potentialities, it does not venture into the depths but confines itself to the shallow waters of safety; it is merely content with trotting out its desires, its yearnings for fulfillment at a later stage; it does not experience that by which it lives or breathes; then slowly as a result of long hungering, mind and thought are born lending an awareness to the encasement of the body; the reflex actions or the instinctive responses are now transformed into well thought-out conscious reactions; with the birth of consciousness, the realisation dawns that matter and spirit are not different but aspects of the same reality; this brings about a new attitude to life; heart overflows with love and life takes an uplifting turn since its activities in the new awareness, are under the soul's witness gaze.

Due to the impulsion of an unseen will, there break out fragments of some vast impulse to become; from the inconscient swoon of things, wake up numerous forms and shapes; an animal creation creeps and runs; though hunted by death, it strangely clings to life; then man is moulded from the original brute; he is endowed with a thinking mind, but his intelligence has a double characteristic; it is part involved in the operations of nature and part detached and observant; he is intended to be and gives the impression of being the driver of Nature's wheel of works, but instead of being the director, he becomes the directed; instead of being the master, he becomes the servant; but eventually he may rise up to the mission of motivating and recording nature's drift; then he may become the master-spring of the delicate enginery of the evolutionary nature; man unlike other animals, looks heavenwards; he catches the face of the emergent being

in the Heaven's light; Nature herself pauses aghast; is amazed at the works wrought in her mystic sleep; when she has arrived at the stage of man in the course of her works, she holds a self-enquiry; finds she is no longer driven by instinct; but governed by thought and will; therefore she creates a specious image of a self, the living idol of the disfigured spirit, the narrow ego; she makes it the centre of r>er mass of impulses; she creates a thinking body from chemic cells; she directs her activities thus towards some high Unknown; the bracing fresh air from the Supreme above, is felt below on the earth.

The earth may sometimes receive flashes from the celestial spheres; it is in their fight that some of the human ideals are conceived and are sought to be carried through; but unfortunately the divine qualities which are absolute in their own spheres, undergo a mutilation when they reach the earth; the ever-lasting pure love that is the quality of an awakened soul, becomes here the tarnished sordid love; the wings that it develops are not those of the seraph that could lift the soul but those of the petty moth that perishes in no time; joy is a rare visitor no doubt on the earth, but for the duration of the visit, man feels a sense of beauty and forgets all sense of misery and mortality; it is under these not very encouraging circumstances, that man struggles hard to make the best of life; but without his knowledge, there is the in-dwelling presence of the spirit, a projection of the un-manifest Reality; the time is not yet ripe for its earthly embodiment or for its overt interference in Nature's doings; the spirit mutely allows itself to be bound by nature; watches the works of his own ignorance; though the spirit is silent and non-interfering, everything takes place according to the immanent wisdom within the thing itself.

The huge world has most unintelligibly its origin in Inconscience; it seems to be the base for its movement; the key that can unlock the mystery is buried in the folds of Inconscience; there is an inner voice within us which is also blocked from reaching our ears; but what becomes obvious is that there is the mighty labour of the spirit which has brought the world into existence; the exact machine that the world reveals itself to be, gives evidence of an art and ingenuity that are beyond human comprehension and therefore appear without sense; man is in the unfortunate position of not understanding a tiling in its whole; he can destroy, analyse, and piece together

again; he cannot have any understanding, unless the thing is fragmented; therefore he does not see the purpose behind all this play of nature; he misses the wood for the trees; he is lost in the minutiae, the jungle and the intricacy of fine detail of nature and runs away with the notion that the fragments picked up are truths; we, who are hardly in a position to see the intimate part we have in the cosmic, evolutionary scheme, may mistake harmonies in nature for discords; with the limited instrumentation of his faculties, he cannot fathom the purpose, the part, and the significance in the divine scheme of what may appear to him as useless.

'We see only part of nature's purpose and all that does not sub serve that part we call waste.'¹

Bedeviled by a pettifogging reason, man is unable to feel the pulse and core of things; he cannot plumb the depths, the mystery of life's mighty sea by embarking on the fragile vessel of logic; perhaps he can count the waves and scan the foam and do nothing beyond; true perception is possible only when mind and reason are transcended, only when a spirit of humility and surrender are developed; without knowing the origin and purpose of the vast energies locked up in nature, he seeks to canalise them for human ends; but this is a futile attempt since the instrumentation either human or mechanical is vitiated at source in that it is the Inconscience that is the base and instead of promoting it may retard the human weal; it is only a few driblets of the unseen cosmic energies circulating in the vast universe that come to man's share; the human mind is far off and remote from the source of authentic light; its vision and knowledge are confined to an infinitesimal sector of the vast universe; human life is part of the universal life force; he may separate himself from the ocean by an individuation, by raising around himself by way of protection from invasions of larger life and the cosmos, the walls of the divisive ego; it is in higher awareness that the walls of the ego collapse and a true identity is reached.

Even our conscious movements have sealed origins; they come off not because of our will or volition, as we believe, but because of the promptings of the subliminal, a vast sea of which we have no knowledge and of which the surface consciousness forms the minutest

fraction; man lives in absolute ignorance of this vast ocean within; every impulse like a wave is born there; the roots of human action like the roots of a tree are concealed under the earth; ,they are below the surface in the Inconscience or the subliminal; there are planes and planes and the powers belonging to them exercise their influence which reaches us through the subliminal springs concealed within; the spirit's puissance is such that it can act direct without any elaborate instrumentation such as mentalisation preceding actuation; the subliminal receives all the impressions in the wakeful and the sleep condition; they are reduced to a Morse code and a particular mystic message being transmitted by the subtle being, sometimes the animal counterpart, a Troglodyte, the necessary impulse and actuation follow; thus man is swayed as much by the overt as by the covert and occult.

'The subconscient is the Inconscient in the process of becoming conscious; it is a support and even a root of our inferior parts of being and their movements. It sustains and reinforces all in us that clings most and refuses to change, our mechanical recurrence of unintelligent thought, our persistent obstinacies of feeling, sensation, impulse, propensity, our uncontrolled fixities of character. The animal in us — the infernal also — has its lair of retreat in the dense jungle of the sub conscience. To penetrate there, to bring in light and establish a control, is indispensable for the completeness of any higher life for any integral transformation of the nature.'¹

Man, though he thinks he is the author and the architect of his fate, is in fact a puppet in the hands of the unseen elemental strengths; these forces in their turn are unaware of the source of their strength and the cause they serve; a man for all his thinking is unable to take decisions in critical moments, unless he is pushed into taking one by invisible hands; the large troupe behind the veils, operates the strings, plays with the fortune of the mortals; makes of them the marionettes for their entertainment; but even these dark powers that take hold of man, also play their part in promoting the objective of the creative spirit; the agents who use us as tools, are themselves tools of the Unknown; their interference sometimes is the cause of the unforeseen and the unexpected; this is accounted for and explained away as the incoherence of fate; the mortals in their turn are improvident and

throw away the precious opportunity of life on trivial pursuits; the higher Truth has no attraction to them; they lie prone before the demoniac force; these asuric forces have an inordinate hold on their hearts; they are the architects of the low-built lives, trade on their worldly desires, and by their gratification make man more and more worldly minded; man thus becomes attached to the earth, its coarseness and muddy thrills; the divine ecstasy is not for him; Ananda is alien to him; the temple of the soul which should be filled with the symbols of beauty, he clutters with the stuff of ego's mart; meanwhile the subtle powers which play with human lives, design the comedy or the tragedy, arrange the plot, the deed, the circumstance and the decor of the dull-hued stage; they are the prompters, the tutors of our stumbling speech; we are the mere actors who play the role, strut about for a while and disappear as soon as the piece assigned is finished; unable to build our own fate by an indomitable will of our own, we play into the hands of these unfriendly powers which are interested in stifling the human development.

The life of the mortal continues unvaried and remains the same drab routine as long as the human animal retains the sway and the soul is shoved behind; as long as man remains extrovert and is interested merely in intellectual pursuits and creature comforts, man is doomed to an irredeemable littleness and pettiness; this explains why, ever since the dawn of consciousness, life has been essentially the same in the insect, the ape and the man except for its brightened appearance in the general level in the course of evolution; man derives a gross contentment in the small success achieved at the material level though it turns him away from the call of the spirit; he earns a precarious right to live at great cost of toil and hardship and ultimately pays the wages of death; in spite of all these curbs, he achieves something; himself being a part of the creative spirit and experiencing its momentary clasp sometimes, he is able to reproduce a puny splendour in his art and music; he strives and leaves behind something which survives him; he sometimes has the gleams of the revels of the gods; with his fragile and failing limbs, it is not possible for him to reproduce those raptures; any such attempt brings about his collapse for it is a 'leonine greatness that would tear his soul'; the boon of the little hour of life is thoughtlessly squandered on trifles; his companionships have not the enduring

bond of love but of convenience; hence the brief moment of his life is filled with disharmony, jealousy and hatred; he takes to art in the spirit of a pastime and never with the intention of making it a bridge to the infinite; even when the heavenly glimpses visit him, he cannot eternise his momentary exaltation; his nights in art must have a low pitch; the sustained high soaring nights by the very nature of the human instrumentation, are not possible; he takes to music in the spirit of giving a thrill to his nerves, getting a sensation from it, and he has not the least intention of stepping into the rhythm of the universe, of putting himself in tune with the harmony of the universe.

Harassed by toil and exposed to a welter of cares, man approaches nature for its healing balm and derives comfort from its tranquillity; he puts himself in unison with nature and its spirit; makes an opening in his heart which closes the next moment since it is too weak to hold the puissant guest and since he is presently caught up under a new excitement; his days are tinged with the red hue of strife and the little glow of a finer nature is swamped by a re-assertion of the tribal nature; he exiles himself from his real self; there are very few that have the persistence to scale the heights; most of them are content to lead a life set in a low key; the small joy of life that breaks out of the Bliss supreme, the Ananda underlying all existence is enough to make him reconciled with the acerbities of life and he plods on; he immures himself in the citadel of his ego; erects a formidable hedge against self-expansion; further he finds in his worldly preoccupations a means to shut-off God and forget his kingship to infinity since 'time has he none to turn his eyes within'.

But can Man, the crown of all that has been done so far, be the last word in evolution?; this cannot be; only a definite stage has been reached in the long ascent from nescience, a terminal point where there may be a branching off from sentience to super-sentience; if man were all, then we have to accept existence as an accident in Time, an illusion, or phenomenon or freak; the world must be a fiction; a monstrous lie created by the fertile mind; man may be a somnambulist, an automaton moving without volition from scene to scene 'whither it knows not'; granting it is all a dream, the questions arise: 'who is the dreamer? and whence the dream? the world therefore is real but it is too colossal for the puny man to understand with his limited faculties;

what is unlimited can be understood only by rising above all limits; the human apparatus which functions marvellously when applied, to the physical world of man, fails miserably when turned to the transcendental use; this misuse lands us in the trouble of doubt and disbelief; however there is an inner perception to which is revealed a poi tillage minute of little self; it must be the primal source of all; but the giantess Science takes the infinitude of Matter as its base; we are between the scientist who is lost in his ever-growing data and the intellectual who is lost in his abstractions; we are tossed between the quantitative and qualitative analysis, induction and deduction and in this situation, Religion brings in the hope, speaks of a Reality and promises riches compensatory of all the rigours and austerities undergone here.

According to mind's superficial reading, the disbelievers go to hell, the black unknown and those having faith, to heaven; but this is only a provisional scheme devised by the mind; true knowledge rests not on these surface powers; it comes from a deeper seeking from within; the greater vision meets us when we leave these small purlieus of mind; then shall we be aware of a witness soul within, concealed from us; in the new light of consciousness with which we are charged, everything assumes a fresh significance; we see the luminous presence at the core and everything quivers with a God-light; the artificial hedges dividing the finite from the infinite, crumble down, leading to a spirit of identity, universality; in this context we can read back and discover that the magnificent though confused pattern of the universe is a game in which the sempiternal concealed in the Inconscience is striving to peer at himself or attempting a self-discovery or gradual unfoldment through the apparent form; we are guided in every one of our actions by the immanent self towards the goal of the unknown self; in the apparent mechanical working of nature, is revealed on a deeper reading, a direction, a guidance, a sanction of the unseen presence, an eye 'that drives the stars and the suns'; everything is thus governed by a logic of its own which may defy human reasoning.

A higher destiny awaits man; he is not a mere creature of flesh and blood; he will grow in course of time to a consciousness that he is more a spirit than a body; he will act more as the delegate of the Supreme, a pioneer for paving the ground for the appearance of a super

race that can manifest in a fuller measure the glory of God; the One has made the supreme sacrifice, passed through the crucible of suffering in the shape of man; in the guise of a beggar, he stretches out his hands for alms; he does all this for the redemption of man; even in the theatre of our small lives, man is visited, in spite of his best attempts to steel his heart against any appeals, by urges and promptings divine to help the ailing and the suffering; in this vale of misery that this world is, we hear yet the murmur of occult happiness; the broad general feature of pain has an undertone, an undercurrent of bliss manifest in laughter, in sleep because the characteristic of the Divine is Ananda and everything floats in and is supported by it; the Lord is like Krishna, inviting all by the dulcet notes of his flute to participate in the banquet provided by nature.

Though mostly subject to sordid material pulls, man becomes conscious of a Presence within which is indestructible and part of the divine; 'this kindles a fire that is half divine'; there is a rift, an opening in the ego wall; with bowed heads, so as to avoid a collision with the lowly threshold, angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass into our heart; the heart melts; is filled with flashes of sympathy and tenderness making for a self-enlargement; behind in the subliminal, unknown to us, a work is done tending to transform the human to divine nature; the eternal Entity within plans not for the time under the shadow of death, but unmoved by the limitations to which man is subject, it prepares its matter of divine felicity and makes the human respond to its shaping hands; instead of a direct there is the devious manifestation of the Reality, his beauty, power and knowledge express themselves by extreme division and fragmentation; our strength derives from omnipotence, thought from omniscience, but they are deformed and limited by the base of Inconscience on which they have to manifest; however his attraction to these qualities of knowledge, beauty and power in the absolute, brings an awareness of their origin and makes him athirst for realisation.

The awareness of the greater Self comes suddenly in a sea-like downpour; it is a descent of massive lightnings; 'if we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an out-pouring of massive lightnings

of naming sun-stuff'¹; it works a sea-change in the man subject to such a welcome descent; every part of his tissue and cell are thrilled with ,an apotheosis; the ego which is a perverse distorted image of the real self carrying on hitherto its petty traffic, rises from its dwarf ignoble condition to its full radiant stature; the travesty, the clay troll kneaded into a God and worshipped in ignorance by man is replaced by the effulgent soul, flaming with a paradise touch; but this ascent of the spirit has to be preceded by a preparation; consciousness must be released from its long incarceration in Inconscience; the heart must grow to its native heavenly strength; the mind must expand beyond its rim into greater knowledge and will; there must be a spirit of dedication, of sacrifice of the small ego self; he must hew an opening, make a road in the abysm for heaven's descent, for the Godly light to refashion him.

Aswapathy adventures through the astral chaos, undaunted and supported by his spirit's flame which dimly lights up the gloomy region disturbing the demon gods who protest against the intrusion; he journeys on without an aim or end in view; he trusts only the sunlight of his spirit.

WHERE something has been made, surely there must be a Maker. This is the view that is fundamental to my own thought about life, its nature and its purpose.

When that something is permeated by an unbelievably high degree of complexity, then I can presume only that the intelligence responsible for the complexity derives from this Maker.

But — running from one extreme to the other — we now live in an age when God is Dead and anything goes. Sir Julian Huxley, addressing the Darwin Centennial Convocation of the University of Chicago, in November 1959, talked of two-and-a-half billion years of biological improvement being due to 'the blind opportunistic workings of natural selection.' But to be opportunistic is to seize your opportunity and to do that you must first recognise it as such and this cannot be done by blindness. Surely it is much more elegant, simple, and rational to think that a process which began as Stardust and went on to produce first stars, then planets, then fish, then apes, then man possibly knows what it is up to.

The concept of universal immanence explains how this could be done — this Creator dwells within all created and directs it as an Artist directs his work of Art, being also objective scientist and mathematician. It dwelt within Shakespeare and Beethoven giving us tangible evidence of much higher forms of thought and feeling than those common to us. It experiences every thought and emotion not only here but throughout the Universe, every raised eyebrow, every act of love and hate. It times the insemination of every seed and navigates the birds across the oceans. It is in the fledgling robin and the bee and in the whale and the astronaut, in blades of grass and in erupting volcanoes. It never ceases; it never sleeps. Time is as nothing to it. In the evolution of plant and animal life, e.g. in the development of camouflage and colour adaptation among moths, butterflies, and insects, it gives further evidence, as Thoreau felt by Walden Pond, of much much higher levels of life than those so far available to man in beauty, complexity, and sheer subtlety of form and content, complexity and subtlety echoed only by the finest art, poetry and music, when they achieve the sublime. As Wordsworth intimated, it paints and appreciates

the multihued glories of the morning and evening sunspace; it can be as cruel as rape and genocide and cannibalism and is in every holocaust and orgy. Its ultimate object we can only conjecture, perhaps the conversion of its own energy into additional spiritual reserves through Child's Play, or giving birth to Gods and Goddesses, but the higher the intelligence the higher the purpose Quantum physics reveals Matter as patterned energy. If Matter is patterned energy then the Creator could be also Projectionist, Time only a building brick.

This view is neither Belief nor Disbelief but an hypothesis aimed at Understanding.

Sir Julian Huxley notes in his Religion without Revelation, 'Once we have rid ourselves of this doctrine of a Divine Power external to ourselves, we can get busy with the real task of dealing with our inner forces.'

The beauty of the concept of Immanence is that it gets rid of an arbitrary external or intrusive anthropomorphic deity without asking us to consider the experiment of life in a vacuum. And Immanence allows for the whole range of human feelings from the sacred and sublime to that mysticism which is rooted in but goes beyond the verifiable truth of objective science and the artificial if valid truth of imaginative art. By mysticism I do not mean strong and possibly misleading intuitions but, e.g., being caught in the grip of meaningful coincidences — Carl Jung's synchronicity — which are valid to the observing and reasoning intelligence or intellect seeming to give objectively direct glimpses, even "revelations" of the Puppeteer at work.

All thought is ultimately subjective even the most objective; it is the accuracy and impartiality of the observation that is important and introspection is as valid as the external as a source of experimental observation. If life is merely one's own reflection, then some "reflections" are clearer and more comprehensive than others ...

It is as if this Maker periodically reveals secrets to humanity concerning the point and purpose of existence in a vital cumulative process of culture and civilisation: the secret that the world is round not flat; the law of gravity and the theories of relativity; the theory of evolution.

Maker toys with its material but, sooner or later, a mutation occurs, or, now, an idea catches on and a movement forward is made in a process of refinement by fire.

But let us not fall into the 19th century trap of believing Evolution necessarily guarantees the continuous perfection of man, as Darwin himself thought. We would not be the first animal to become extinct through overdeveloping its armaments, whether it be top-heavy antlers or over-costly bombs. Like the dinosaurs, we may cease to amuse....

In the overall ebb and flow of history, it is not necessarily the fittest who survive during periods of decline or disintegration: it is Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Laertes and Claudius who survive, establishing indeed a vicious circle, whose inevitable frustration must always intensify to further violence.

Arthur Koestler in his book, The Ghost in the Machine (Hutchinson, 1967) thinks that evolution has botched the union of the new and old brains leading to a paranoic streak in man leading, in turn, to his persistent will to DESTRUCTION. But this may be like blaming the television set because the programme is bad. It may not be the equipment which is faulty but the fact that those in charge of the channels of communication in totalitarian societies block that truth which is life. This enables them, with their power politics, to maintain their unjust distribution of wealth and resources, and this leads to the reaction of frustration and violence, the collective unconscious being deprived of the catharsis of healthy art and communication.

If and when the scientific method is applied to population control and the distribution of wealth and resources, we shall awake from this nightmare without the need for Arthur Koestler's drugs to achieve mental harmony. In the course of evolution, the second man killed the first, the third the second. Surely the fourth will be more enlightened?

Let us now review briefly the nature of Evolution and see what it appears to require of us for continued development and, indeed, survival.

What the patient and exhaustive Charles Darwin and the brilliant and incisive Alfred Russell Wallace said in the 1860's is briefly that there is in Nature a struggle for existence in which the weakest and

least perfect succumb. The environment produces changes and those which facilitate survival are maintained, leading to ever better adaptation, aided not only by natural selection but also by genetic mutation which can improve the stock. All this is reviewed with great authority by Sir Alistair Hardy in his books, The Living Stream (1965), and The Divine Flame (1966), published by Collins. In The Living Stream, on p.124, he writes that there can be no doubt the selection acts on small random changes in the inherited nuclear material and that this is the chief physical mechanism of evolution. But why random? Why not through immanence should these changes not be precisely calculated? Direction is implicit in the whole process and chance or randomness directly militate against direction. Randomness betokens absence of control but the unbelievable complexity and fineness with which the whole of Matter and Nature are balanced betoken the presence of control - of infinite control.

On p.94 of The Living Stream, Sir Alistair notes of the gene complex: "The appearance of any organism is the product of this internal gene complex interacting with the external environment...." What room does this leave for free will? But it fits in exactly with the concept of universal immanence, individual consciousness a product of fusing directing forces, the feeling of free-will being entirely subjective. The feeling of being free reaches its peak when desire welds with action and fulfilment, but in actual fact all are cogs in a vast machine; this is the vehicle of libidinous psychic energy making the Collective Unconscious, as it strives for collective fulfilment, to reach the Promised Land bodied forth in that Art which taps our deepest desires expressing the fundamental driving Dream of the species, the world-wide demi-urge, lost sight of only in periods of increasing functional complexity when Realism ousts Romance and Art merely represents instead of curing disease.

Writing of the superlative creative powers of selection as seen in the camouflage of animals, Sir Alistair refers to the 'subtleties of the artist's craft' and the tricks of 'the cunning creative artist' all produced by selection and modifying the actual behaviour of the animal; eventually, he sees behaviour as a selective force, as a dominant selective force (P.163) in higher forms. According to myth - as immanently communicated for us by the coded signposts of the Collective

Unconscious — the behaviour of Jesus leads to immortality. Thus, the primitive "fairy story" acquires additional verisimilitude or fresh life as the old values are resurrected in the new empirical frame of reference.

Mention of Jesus brings .us to Arnold Toynbee and the social sciences. What does this evolutionary force want of us at this time? Socially? It may not be too gross a simplification to say that all the two dozen or so civilisations which have so far appeared here have been motivated by the union of Greed and Necessity. This was the union which pushed the American frontier from New York across mountains and deserts to San Francisco and the acquisitive instinct rooted in insecurity may be said to have been endemic in the growth of all other empires and cultures.

But in the history of every civilisation, there always comes a moment when this union ceases to be constructive, when it becomes chiefly destructive. Things can look well on the surface, as with Sparta or Rome, but the inner quality of life can be rotten and deteriorating further. When the union turns abortive, the society is faced with the challenge of evolving a totally new social structure based on the best teachings of its culture — in the case of the West today, this is the teachings of Christianity. Arnold Toynbee seems to have made it quite clear in his A Study of History (abridgement by D. C. Somervell, O. U. P. 1957) that if this challenge is not met the civilisation dies or fossilises in living death

I suppose if the teachings of Jesus were summed up in one word, that word would be "Co-operation". What political philosophy today is based on co-operation? As we look around the world it seems to be Tyranny from the right or Terror from the left. Yet when we do co-operate, we can put men on the moon. The grinning challenge now placed by evolution is to apply this same co-operation to the distribution of wealth and resources. Along with population control, this would purge the frustration and stop the violence. The bombs would then be dismantled instead of stock-piled. The continual application of science to religion would help further to fill the spiritual vacuum and give man back his soul again, i.e. a sense of dedicated purpose without which he must run out of fuel and expire in the desert or wasteland of chaotic anarchy.

In the ebb and flow of history, we must hope the water is about to flow again after a long black spell of anxious analysis.

If an-Age of Synthesis dawns, bathing us once again in the warm radiance of understanding, humanity will awake from its troubled slumber to full conscious maturity. This will achieve a higher more satisfying life for all, based not on endless soul-destroying labour but on creative leisure as we cease fighting like rats in an overcrowded trap. We will then evolve together to realise our deepest dream as betokened by Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy involving the compulsive apprehension of Intelligence through mystic insight as man realises his true inner Self containing the immanent Creator as His Story or history makes up the evolving tidal river of life in the cosmos as a whole.

At the moment, amidst our birth pangs, there are few signs of our adapting to the new challenge and its requirements. The statistical curves for industrial disputes, crime, vandalism, violence, mental and psychosomatic illness, alcoholism, venereal disease, suicide, drug-addiction and divorce are all rising.

The downfall of the dinosaurs may have been facilitated by the explosion of a supernova as powerful as hundreds of millions of suns. It could be our turn now. So far, man has never yet refrained from using, sooner or later, any weapon that has been devised for him and explosions seem very much part of the creative process.

On the other hand, what in some cases we laughingly call sentient, man has only just arrived here. The growth and application everywhere of the scientific method is relatively very, very rapid indeed.

FIFTY-FOUR years ago today the Mother came to Pondicherry, to Sri Aurobindo and finally settled here. On the 24th of April 1920, six years after she had first visited this then comparatively unknown French settlement on the south-east coast of India, theMother adopted Pondicherry as her home and, until 17 November 1973, when she willingly gave up her physical body, she had not left it even for a night. This may be a good time to contemplate, within our capacity, the object of the Integral Yoga, for she was, as she still is, the guiding spirit and force of this most comprehensive spiritual discipline. As I go round India and sometimes other countries of the world, I find increasing interest in and enthusiasm for the philosophy and the yoga of Sri Aurobindo. This certainly is a most encouraging sign. We have arrived at the cross-roads; humanity is bewildered, does not know in which direction it should go, what should be its goal. The gospel of progress, of material prosperity, of advance in education and technology and mastery over the forces of Nature, possession and enjoyment, seems to have lost its charm. More and more there is a turning towards what Sri Aurobindo calls the subjective aspect of man's being and nature. Having forgotten the spiritual aspect of life's significance, the West concentrated entirely on living well. It was good living rather than good life that became the be all and end all of the Western man. We in the East have been deeply affected by this new ideal of life and while today the West is seeking some new path, we in the East and in India are trying to catch up with the West in its mad race for good living. But in the process man has created a number of problems for himself which cannot be solved by the normal resources that he has at his disposal. It seems to me that we must have a new orientation, a new view of man, that we must find other areas of his consciousness where we may be able to find the solutions to the problems he has created for himself. How are these remarks relevant to the subject which we may entitle generally "The Object of the Integral Yoga"? Sri Aurobindo has said in his great work "The Synthesis of Yoga"

the future life of humanity. It seems to me that apart from the desirability of pursuing a path of yoga towards self-discovery, it is also a potent means of remaking man in such a manner that he can face the problems of life today. But I could urge upon you the more legitimate view of the yoga and speak to you briefly on the true object of the Integral Yoga.

This is a topic which has been expounded, explained, explicated a thousand and one times by people competent to speak on the philosophy and yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Why treat of the same theme again, you may ask? The reason for choosing the subject is this: I find in the course of lecturing in different parts of India and sometimes in other countries of the world, that there is a good deal of confusion in people's minds in regard to the goal of the Integral Yoga. The idea of a new race of beings, a new world, a new life, the Life Divine, is so fascinating that many people have come to look upon this as the first object of the Integral Yoga. This however is a mistake and thrice a mistake. Sri Aurobindo is quite clear on the point that seeking the Divine, uniting oneself with one's own highest Self, experiencing and realising the Divine and living in God and living from the God-Consciousness, these are the main objects of the Integral Yoga. We may say that this is not a new aim, that all yogas in some way or other have spoken of the need for the knowledge of the Self, God, the Divine or the Absolute. We would add that the realization in the context of Sri Aurobindo and the Integral Yoga does not mean quite, indeed not at all, the same thing as it does in that of the other yogas. Its conception of the realization of the Self is extremely comprehensive. He has said over and over again that -Reality cannot be bound to any particular status of its existence. The different yogas approach, experience, realise the Divine in a partial and limited way. A brief glance at the history of Yoga not only in India but in other countries of the world, - yes, there is yoga in the other great religions too, a brief glance at the history of spiritual thought and practice and achievement would convince us that there is a great deal of difference between different mystic disciplines. This is as it should be. For one thing, man is extremely varied in his nature, no two human beings are alike; for another, the Truth has got infinite aspects and man, being a mental being and limited in his consciousness, must necessarily follow

one path and following one path means arriving at one aspect of the goal. I am not saying the same goal. Here again there may be some room for confusion which I would like to clear up. All Yogas promise experience and realisation of the same Reality but they do not all yield the same experience of that Reality. Be that as it may, the object certainly is to find the Divine and live in the Divine and carry out the Divine's directions in life if we are chosen to do so. Is it not true then that a transformation of Nature, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, is an object of the Integral Yoga? There is no gainsaying the fact that this is the most distinguishing feature of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and Yoga. To usher in a new world, to help in the evolution of a new race of beings, to bring about a new quality of life, spiri tual, supramental, divine life, certainly, this is the ultimate aim of the Yoga. But what I am trying to impress upon you is this that before this particular aim can even be thought about by those who have taken up the Integral Yoga, a great deal has to be done and achieved. To manifest the Divine in life is an impossible ideal unless the Divine who is to be manifested has been realised, realised not only in one aspect but in all the aspects in which we can know it. And here lies the distinction of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. Its character of synthesis, comprehensiveness and harmony is first evidenced in its idea that the Divine has got many aspects and there is a particular kind of knowledge by which all of them can be known simultaneously and equally importantly. If this is not done in our consciousness, it cannot be done in our nature outwardly.

It is emphatically true that for Sri Aurobindo the Divine has got many statuses and we must arrive at and experience — realise, make real to us the integral Brahman in which all these different aspects of the Divine can be known together and held in perfect balance in one single spiritual perception. I say spiritual but I will have to qualify this a little because though it is spiritual, it is spiritual in a very special sense. We have been told over and over again that Mind cannot know the Reality. This is only partly true. The kind of mind that cannot know the Reality is the analytic, dialectic, argumentative mind, a mind impure, impelled by desire, urged on by ambition, dominated by the separative ego-sense. But mind can become free of all these defects, faults and lacks. Mind is a consciousness that can proceed only

on the basis of division and separation but it is also a fact at the same time that mind is always questing after unity. This is because the mind is » derivative power of another consciousness which possesses a knowledge of unity inherently. And because mind is a power fallen from that higher level of Consciousness, the quest of unity is inbuilt in the mental consciousness also. Because of this fact, because of this essential nature of mind, it can be made pure, quiescent, capable of receiving and reflecting knowledge, power, peace, bliss descending from the Spirit on the mind. This reception, this reflection is what we call spiritual knowledge, spiritual experience, spiritual intuition, spiritual realisation. It is spiritual because it is experience of the Spirit. But the medium by which this experience is obtained is not capable of realising all the aspects of the Truth integrally. The word integral is very important in Sri Aurobindo's yoga. It could even be described as a mantram. What Sri Aurobindo is proposing is that man must evolve in him another level of consciousness which possesses the integral knowledge, which indeed is the integral knowledge. This is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind.

The Supermind is already an accomplished level of consciousness. If we go back to the basic concept of the Reality as Sat-Chit-Ananda, the Chit "is Consciousness but the Chit is also Chit-Shakti, Consciousness-Force. It is the Force aspect of Consciousness which moves towards itself, discovers itself, knows itself. This knowledge of Sat-Chit-Ananda that is had by Sat-Chit-Ananda himself; the result of the primary movement of its Chit or Consciousness, this knowledge that God has of himself is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind. This alone knows all the aspects of the Divine. Sat-Chit-Ananda as utter transcendence, Sat-Chit-Ananda as cosmic, Sat-Chit-Ananda as individual, as Soul, Mind, Life, Matter, to know all this together, simultaneously, integrally, this is therefore the first object of the Integral Yoga. The manifestation of the Divine in Matter, the transformation of Nature, the evolution of a new race of beings, and as a result of that, the ushering in of a new world, of a new life, all of these are included in the aims of the Integral Yoga. But there are many preconditions which must be met, fully met, before we could talk about the manifestation of the Divine in Nature, in Matter, fully in man, and this is what I would like to impress upon you very strongly. I will try to prove my

contention by Sri Aurobindo's own words. Here is a letter of Sri Aurobindo which is extremely important in this connection:

"To find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life; it is the one thing indispensable and all the rest is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him, — that is, first of all to transform one's own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the infinite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss, to become that in one's essential nature and, as a consequence, to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one's active nature. To bring into activity the principle of oneness on the material plane or to work for humanity is a mental mistranslation of the Truth — these things cannot be the first true object of spiritual seeking. 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 help or means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. As we grow in the inner consciousness, or as the spiritual Truth of the Divine grows in us, our life and action must indeed more and more flow from that, be one with that. But to decide beforehand by our limited mental conceptions what they must be is to hamper the growth of the spiritual Truth within. As that grows we shall feel the Divine Light and Truth, the Divine Power and Force, the Divine Purity and Peace working within us, dealing with our actions as well as our consciousness, making use of them to reshape us into the Divine Image, removing the dross, substituting the pure gold of the Spirit. Only when the Divine Presence is there in us always and the consciousness transformed, can we have the right to say that we are ready to manifest the Divine on the material plane. To hold up a mental ideal or principle and impose that on the inner working brings the danger of limiting ourselves to a mental realisation or of impeding or even falsifying by a half-way formation the true growth into the full communion and union with the Divine and the free and intimate out flowing of His will in our life. This is a mistake of orientation to which the mind of today is especially prone. It is far better to approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the

Divine Plan, but it can only be fulfilled by an out flowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outwards, not by the working-out of a mental principle."¹

Now four things stand out in this letter. First, to find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life, not only that, all the rest is nothing without it. Secondly, the Divine once realised, we have to make ourselves ready for its manifestation, but this would mean first transforming our inner consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the Peace, Knowledge, Power and Bliss of the Divine fully. It is only then that we can become vessels, channels, instruments of the Divine's Will working out in our nature, but we must give ourselves first, become divinised in our consciousness, so that through the divinised consciousness Nature can be brought within the scope of divinisation. Thirdly, to bring the principle of oneness on the material plane and to work for humanity is described by Sri Aurobindo as a mental mistranslation of the Truth, that is to say, before the Divine has been realised and before we have started to live in the Divine Consciousness, to fix upon an ideal, even the ideal of bringing the sense of oneness on the material plane, is a mistranslation of the Truth and certainly working for humanity is that mistranslation also. They are a misinterpretation of the Truth by the mind because they are not the first goals of the Yoga. We must not decide ourselves what we are going to do, we must leave it to the Self, the Divine in us, to decide for us what work he demands from us. It is his command that we will carry out, his order that we will execute, his direction that we will always obey. Fourthly, as Sri Aurobindo says at the end, the manifestation must be a process of out flowing of that which we have realised within us, and this cannot be done by fixing mentally what our work is going to be. We must grow into the Truth as completely as we possibly can, give our nature up to the Truth and the Force of the Truth will bring about the change. And this means not deciding upon what is going to be our task, spiritually speaking, by the standards of the mind. Sri Aurobindo says this will be a falsifying and that this will hamper our growth. I will read the last sentence again and it will make clear what the essence of the letter is. "The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine plan but it can only be fulfilled by an out flowing

of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outwards, not by the working out of a mental principle."

"The object of the 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. Its object is not to be a great yogi or a Superman (although that may come) or to grab at the Divine for the sake of the ego's power, pride or pleasure. It is not for Moksha though liberation comes by it and all else may come, but these must not be our objects. The Divine alone is our object."²

It may seem paradoxical to say that the object of the Integral Yoga is not to become a great yogi, not to become a superman, not even to seek liberation. But the meaning is that all these things may be given us by the Divine but that our seeking should be for the Divine himself and nothing else at all. For if we have a limited aim, our achievement will also be partial, but if we want the Divine for the sake of the Divine, not because of what he can give us, then we would be in quest of the true aim of the yoga. Here is a part of another letter:

"The object of yoga is not to get power or to be more powerful than others or to have great siddhis or to do great or wonderful or miraculous things.

"The object of yoga is not to be a great yogi or a superman. This is an egoistic way of taking the yoga and can lead to no good; avoid it altogether.

"To talk about the supramental and think of bringing it down in yourself is the most dangerous of all. It may bring an entire megalomania and loss of balance. What the sadhak has to seek is the full opening to the Divine, the psychic change of his consciousness, the spiritual change. Of that change of consciousness, selflessness, desire-less ness, humility, bhakti, surrender, calm, equality, peace, quiet sincerity

are necessary constituents. Until he has the psychic and spiritual change, to think of being supramental is an absurdity and an arrogant absurdity."³

Now what is the Divine, what is the nature of the Absolute that we are called upon to experience and realise and live in? First I will read a small poem of Sri Aurobindo where he sketches a picture of the Absolute in very bold, strong strokes:

The Divine is neither sound nor silence. It has been said that there is an aspect of the Divine which can only be described as Silence. It is beyond all self-expression and hence beyond all description, even silence is a description which really is not adequate. But Sri Aurobindo says it is not only that. Why not? Because sound proceeds from silence. Word is an expression of that which is beyond the Word. Nevertheless, the Reality manifests itself and the medium of its self-expression is the supreme Word, the parāvāk of which all words are limited manifestations. The Divine is neither world nor void. It is not peopled with creatures, qualities, attributes, features, and yet it is not void, not a content less emptiness. The unthinkable, absolute, unalloyed One, not confined to relativities, pure, not a mixture of different types of elements, is indivisible yet multitudinous. If it is One and also multitudinous, the implication is that the One has become the Many, all is a self-variation of the Self. Nameless, yet it is a Name. Name is the inner power of things, it is nomen, the essence of a thing expressed as a power sustaining its existence and in the last analysis the Divine is that inherent power. All names proceed from the Name which is the Name of the Divine who is in himself and in essence nameless. Innumerably other, Brahman is always whatever it has become, yet it ever remains identically the same. Nothing can

affect Brahman's self-existence, nothing can make it forfeit its being. To whom shall it forfeit its own being? There is no other reality, so it is the same, yet by its inherent power it becomes innumerably other. It is immeasurable ecstasy, bliss of existence; it is, it knows that it is and it enjoys its own existence, not only its own existence, but also the manifestation of its own existence in the multitudinous world as Self and Soul and mind and life and matter. It has become everything, it is spread out, extended in everything, it is the galaxy as much as the particle of dust. There in the Absolute Divine, Time and Space have fainted in a swoon sublime, they are in abeyance. Sri Aurobindo does not say that Time and Space do not exist there, but they are in a sublime trance, that is to say, this immeasurable ecstasy is beyond Space and Time but is manifesting itself also in Space and Time, for Space and Time though they are there in the being of the Absolute are not experienced, not realised, because the Omnipresent Reality is beyond Space and Time.

But beyond does not mean "minus". It is not that the Divine is not in Space and Time, in fact they are means of his self-extension, but we in our search must first go to the essential Reality and that is beyond Space, Time and Causality which constitute our world. So when our poet says it is not world nor void, it is not the world that we know, in which we live, move and have our being; the world lives by That, That does not live by the world, and being in the world, we must go beyond it and find its source, its sustenance, its reality. Here is another passage from "Savitri" in which Sri Aurobindo speaks eloquently of the Absolute :

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone, there is no other reality, ekamevādvitīyam. But this One without a second has become all, saruabhūtāni cābhūt; all is Brahman, sarvam khalvidam brahma. How does the One, the Alone, the Perfect, the Absolute become All and all? It has called out of the silence, from the featureless and formless hush the mute Force. The Force though it manifests the world in the being of the Absolute yet guards its absoluteness from Time and the works of Time. She is the intermediate link between the world and the Divine, She is the Mother. So the Mother hides the Absolute from the onslaught of the world of relativities and yet draws out this world of multiplicity from its unsullied being. Without being limited by Space and Time, the Absolute as Sachchidananda has entered with his silence into Space and Time, has fashioned these countless persons of his Self; each self, each soul is a person of the one Self who becomes many selves,-selves who become many souls. He lives in all who lives in his vast Alone; in his essential nature he is the vast Alone but by the expansion of his inherent Force, he has become all, he lives in all, he is the inmost reality, the Self of all, "Space is himself and Time is only he". In the previous poem quoted by me, Sri Aurobindo says,

"immeasurable ecstasy where Time and Space have fainted in a swoon sublime", they were not non-existent, but they were in abeyance, but now God has entered into Space and Time. It has assumed our mask of imperfection, it has cast its image in the human mould. But why, with what purpose? The purpose simply is this, the Divine having become human, the human has to become Divine. We must become as we are originally in the Truth of our being, namely God, the Divine, the Absolute. We are mortals, but we have derived our existence from immortality and having known that immortality has assumed mortality, mortality must also put on immortality. This is the debt that man has to discharge towards God. God has a debt to man too, he must make himself available to him, he must confer the divinity on man who is his own creature. But man from his side must accept this mission, fulfil this charge, complete this task and in the cosmic travail of Nature, he must attain Divine perfection. What is our life? It is a paradox. And how should we solve the paradox, where is the key to its solution? God is the key, since God is the beginning, the source, the sustenance, the substance of life. Any problem of life can be solved only if man can go back to the source and from there look at life and its problems and its difficulties and also find the solution there in the essential nature of things which is God himself.

Now when we say problems of life, the first problem of course is' self-knowledge. We must know the Truth of our being, discover the Ground of our existence. I think it can be said without any fear of contradiction that all men are really seeking self-knowledge because they are all seeking bliss. It is true that it comes to us as pleasure because of our divided consciousness. This divided consciousness which distorts the essential truth of things turns Bliss of Existence into pleasure, pain, and indifference. We cannot get the purity of Bliss unless we discover our Self because the very nature of the Self is Bliss, — nobody can live without the Bliss of Existence, says the Upanishad, nobody could breathe except in the Ether of Bliss. And therefore we are always questing after self-knowledge which will give us the self-bliss. The bliss however can be realised in the inner parts of our consciousness and nature. But Sri Aurobindo says that it is to be realised and enjoyed integrally in everything, that we must be able

to find the Self and its Bliss everywhere, even in matter. Not only must we find it in matter, we must also enable matter itself to find it. It is possible for the consciousness in me to know that matter is a form of consciousness seizable by the senses, but Sri Aurobindo says that it is also possible to make matter itself conscious of the truth of its being, \o find its soul. As he says in "Savitri":

The world was created with this purpose. In matter which is to all intents and purposes absolutely opposed to the nature of the Divine lurks dormant the soul. Arouse matter, awake the consciousness in it and matter will become capable of knowing God, to discover its soul, to say: "I am a form of Consciousness". How is this possible? Can matter really do it? It can because "...Matter's breasts suckled the divine Idea." (Savitri) What is the Idea? It means the supermind, the Divine's integral self-awareness and all-awareness. It is the prevision of the whole course of manifestation, substance of everything that is in the world, the power that sustains and maintains them in existence and the urge of evolution in them. Evolution is bringing out what is potentially already present in existence. Nature is in travail to deliver the potentialities and make them actualities here in the world. Now the Idea is present in the very heart of the atom. "And Matter's breasts suckled the divine Idea". Sri Aurobindo says this about the Idea in Savitri. Aswapathy is making journeys in the upper worlds and he has come to worlds where everything is so utterly unlike objects in this world; there everything is beautiful, harmonious, marvellous, and yet in these higher worlds something is missing:

The Idea is the timeless Word and the Word is the creative Knowledge-Will of the un create Consciousness-Force of the Divine. It is the self-luminous key to all ideas. All our ideas are pale reflections of this supreme Idea, our ideas are mental, this is supra-mental. "It is the integer of the Spirit's perfect sum" that equates the unequal All to the equal One, The One has become All which is all existences and in the All there are inequalities, but the inequalities are nothing but That, they house in themselves the equal One. The Idea is the single sign interpreting every sign. Everything in the world is a sign, a symbol of the Divine, but their significance, their meaning, their interpretation lies in the Supreme's integral self-symbol which is the supermind, that is the absolute index to the Absolute. If we want to know the Absolute absolutely, we must have the absolute knowledge which is the supramental awareness.

But in order to do these things we must first find the essential Spirit. Unless we do that it will not be possible at all to find the Spirit in anything and everywhere. We must know the Truth of things before we can discover the Truth in things. Sri Aurobindo says this in so many words in a passage in "Savitri":

Eternity sleeps in us who seem to be creatures of Time. We must realise that eternal Reality and make it completely manifest in us.

The eternal Entity that is within us prepares for its overt manifestation a matter of divine felicity. It is in the process of evolving a new body the very stuff of which is the divine Truth. I said everything is questing-after self-knowledge, not only the soul in us but everything else in nature is seeking perfection. Our thoughts seek for light, our strength aspires for an omnipotent force from which it is derived. Indeed the world is nothing but a manifestation of a veiled God-joy, ānandādhyeva khalvimāni bhutāni jāyante, from Bliss all creatures are born.

The ancient Ignorance will be rescued by Knowledge, the saviour Light come into the inconscient Darkness, the evolving god-man have a divine body alive and breathing and with limbs that one can touch and clasp. But how and when can it happen ?

We are transient beings but there is something of the Eternal in us and that must come to the forefront unmistakably manifest. Then the body itself will know the self and enjoy its immeasurable ecstasy.

We indulge in petty dreams, in little ambitions, in small aspirations, but we must grow out of this littleness, this pettiness, this transience. We must seek the bhūmā, the Vast, the Immeasurable, the Illimitable, for that is the highest Bliss, bhūmaiva sukham; not in the petty lies happiness, because the little is mortal, yat alpam tat martyam. The petty ego of the Time-bound creature will be new-made in the image of God and become a god

This we must do first, refuse all truck with Ignorance, and this we cannot do unless we have achieved the Spirit's ascent out of the void from which our nature sprang. The heights of the Self must be scaled, the heavenly Force must move our hearts and let the secret God in us supplant the animal in our being. When we have scaled the heights of the Spirit then we can plumb the depths of the subconscious, the unconscious and the material inconscience. There we must bring the heavenly Light and cut asunder the darkness with a mystic splendour.

For however enigmatic the world may seem to be, however meaningless our life may appear to be, God and his Nature, nay, God as Conscious Nature, is leading the world to a high and integral consummation.

THIS is a collection of short essays on subjects of philosophical import: Choice and Value, Freedom and Necessity, Moral Freedom, Dialectic of the Individual, Logic of Moksha etc. The common theme is the place accorded to man the individual vis à vis the collectivity and the Transcendent, from the point of the Existentialists in the West and the Sage-philosophers in India. The writer stresses on the positive content of moksha and points out that the true spiritual experience connoted by the term is realisation, not attainment.

Discussing the question whether 'a state of reclusive peace and aloofness can be regarded as the zenith of human spiritual realisation', the author quotes from Sri Aurobindo: "Certainly, we may prefer the absorption in a pure exclusive unity or a departure into a supra-cosmic transcendence, but there is in the spiritual truth of the Divine Existence no compelling reason why we should not participate in this large possession and bliss of His Universal Being which is the fulfilment of our individuality."

More than two decades ago when Mystic Approach to the Veda and the Upanishad first appeared, Ravindra Khanna in a review for "Mother India" began:

The Renaissance of spiritual India is an event of profound importance for modern times and the world's future. For centuries

This perception, acknowledged then by a relative few, has come of age. So too an essence of that renaissance, the theme of this volume: reaffirmation of the spiritual content of the Veda and Upanishad.

That at that time it be suggested these scriptures are pre-eminently revelations of spiritual knowledge bordered on academic, Ideological heresy. Of course it was Sri Aurobindo even thirty-five years earlier who originated, or reinstated, the esoteric interpretation through the pages of the "Arya". It had been received by certain scholars — particularly in relation to the Veda — as it was by even Dr. S. Radhakrishnan as "opposed not only to the modern views of European scholars but also to the traditional interpretation of Sayana and the systems of Purva-Mimamsa, the authority on Vedic interpretation; we must hesitate to follow the lead of Mr. Aurobindo Ghosh, however ingenious his point of view may be."¹ That now the recognition of these scriptures' spiritual content has become commonplace, is a sign of the immensely greater receptivity of the advanced mind and heart of man. The third printing of Mystic Approach is thus most apposite.

The dominant traditional and modern European theories have regarded the Vedas as the primitive hymnal of a people not yet capable of sophisticated psychological or spiritual comprehension. They are thought to contain ritual propitiatory offerings to personified powers of Nature, to the gods of a vast pantheon. Sri Aurobindo's view affirms that these scriptures are actually what their name suggests, Veda, abook of divine knowledge. The sacrifice then reveals itself as a "making sacred", a conscious self-giving of all one has and is to the Divine that all may become what it truly is. The Gods to whom the oblations

are made are seen to be the powers, attributes and personalities of the sole and supreme Divine Being — the Reality above transcendentally, around universally and within individually. It is, thus, for self-culture and spiritual enlightenment that the Veda is centrally intended. This being so, Sri Aurobindo concludes, "it becomes of supreme importance to know and to hear its message".

Mystic Approach is a step towards the restoration in this light. Its opening section surveys concisely the fields of Vedic enquiry and presents the fundamentals of Sri Aurobindo's symbolic interpretation. It provides a direct and uncluttered introduction to and entry into the Veda as well as a foundation for the examples of the esoteric view's application which follow. These illustrations, of the true nature of the soma and of the legend of Shunah shepa, are compelling by their clarity, justness and spiritual inevitability.

The concluding chapter similarly re-establishes the authentic import of the high and pure utterances that are the Upanishads. Modern scholarship is inclined to see in the Upanishad relatively developed intellectual reflections on the nature of existence in revolt against the obscurant traditional worship and ritualism they saw in the Veda. Closely following Sri Aurobindo's line of approach, Pandit makes evident the Upanishads' continuation and summation of the spiritual essences held in the Veda. These sacred writings are shown to be repositories and living guides for the seeker of the Spirit.

In his Mystic Approach to the Veda and the Upanishad, Pandit has lent his hands to a work initiated by Sri Aurobindo, the burnishing of the pure gold of the Vedic and Upanishadic receptacles and the pouring again of the clarified truths therein assembled.

Srimati Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister, paid a special visit to the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education on the 19th of April. She first visited the Sports Ground where she witnessed a March Past oj the members and heard them sing the Bande Mataram. A recorded message of the Mother given to the captains {on 24.4.61) was played.

Nous sommes unis dans un meme but, pour un meme accomplishment, une oeuvre unique et nouvelle que la Grâce divine nous a donnée à accomplir. J'espère que de plus en plus vous comprendrez importance exceptionnelle de cette oeuvre et que vous sentirez en vous une joie sublime qu'il vous ait été donné de raccomplir.

La force divine est avec vous, sentez de plus en plus sa presence et soyez bien soigneux de ne jamais la trahir.

Sentez, voulez, faites que vous soyez des etres nouveaux pour la realisation d'un monde nouveau.

We are united towards the same goal and for the same accomplishment — for a work unique and new, that the divine Grace has given us to accomplish. I hope that more and more you will understand the exceptional importance of this work and that you will sense in yourselves the sublime joy that the accomplishment will give you.

The divine force is with you — feel its presence more and more and be very careful never to betray it.

Feel, wish, act, that you may be new beings for the realisation of a new world and for this my blessings shall be always with you.

I am happy to have this opportunity of seeing the young and the old or perhaps all the young in heart who are here, who have marched and sung so beautifully in front of us. It was inspiring for me to hear the Mother's words and I can well imagine what it must mean to you to be living here, and to feel her presence.

I know what great importance she gave to physical education, in fact the very first time I visited Pondicherry, I think we saw a physical demonstration and she herself was with us then.

We in India, as perhaps people all over the world, have a very great responsibility in trying to make this a better world in trying to create a new type of human being. There are many paths and many truths, and perhaps each one of us has to find the path and the truth for ourselves and to seek for strength not from outside but from within ourselves.

Many times when we see what is happening in the world we are discouraged, but there is no cause for discouragement and specially here, in India the people have always risen to the occasion, they have always been able to face hardship and danger with courage, with faith and determination. So I give you all my good wishes for the future. I know that you have a role to play and that you will rise to the occasion magnificently.

1. Place of Publication:	Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry
2. Periodicity of its Publication:	Quarterly
3. Printer's Name: Nationality Address	Amiyo Ranjan Ganguli Indian
4. Publisher's Name: Nationality Address	P. Counouma Indian Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry-605002
5. Editor's Name: Nationality Address	Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry-605002
6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital.	Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry-605002
I, P. Counouma, hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Date: 24th April 1975	(Sd/) P. Counouma
	Signature of Publishe

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