The account which seems to have been given to Lizelle Reymond and recorded by her on pages 318–319 of her book* is, I am compelled to say, fiction and romance with no foundation in actual facts. I spent the first part of my imprisonment in Alipore jail in a solitary cell and again after the assassination of Noren…Read the whole passage · 622 wordsClose the passage
The account which seems to have been given to Lizelle Reymond and recorded by her on pages 318–319 of her book* is, I am compelled to say, fiction and romance with no foundation in actual facts. I spent the first part of my imprisonment in Alipore jail in a solitary cell and again after the assassination of Noren Gosain to the last days of the trial when all the Alipore case prisoners were similarly lodged each in his own cell. In between for a short period we were all put together. There is no truth behind the statement that while I was meditating they gathered around me, that I recited the Gita to them and they sang the verses, or that they put questions to me on spiritual matters and received instructions from me; the whole description is quite fanciful. Only a few of the prisoners had been known to me before I met them in prison; only a few who had been with Barin had practised sadhana and these were connected with Barin and would have turned to him for any help, not to me. I was carrying on my yoga during these days learning to do so in the midst of much noise and clamour but apart and in silence and without any participation of the others in it. My yoga begun in 1904 had always been personal and apart; those around me knew I was a sadhak but they knew little more as I kept all that went on in me to myself. It was only after my release that for the first time I spoke at Uttarpara publicly about my spiritual experiences. Until I went to Pondicherry I took no disciples; with those who accompanied me or joined me in Pondicherry I had at first the relation of friends and companions rather than of a guru and disciples; it was on the ground of politics that I had come to know them and not on the spiritual ground. Afterwards only there was a gradual development of spiritual relations until the Mother came back from Japan and the Ashram was founded or rather founded itself in 1926. I began my yoga in 1904 without a guru; in 1908 I received important help from a Mahratta yogi and discovered the foundations of my sadhana; but from that time till the Mother came to India I received no spiritual help from anyone else. My sadhana before and afterwards was not founded upon books but upon personal experiences that crowded on me from within. But in the jail I had the Gita and the Upanishads with me, practised the yoga of the Gita and meditated with the help of the Upanishads; these were the only books from which I found guidance; the Veda which I first began to read long afterwards in Pondicherry rather confirmed what experiences I already had than was any guide to my sadhana. I sometimes turned to the Gita for light when there was a question or a difficulty and usually received help or an answer from it, but there were no such happenings in connection with the Gita as are narrated in the book. It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence, but this had nothing to do with the alleged circumstances narrated in the book, circumstances that never took place, nor had it anything to do with the Gita. The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject.
Sri Aurobindo now [in Alipore jail] started reading the Gita and learning to live its sadhana; he fully apprehended the true inwardness and glory of Sanatana Dharma.
My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level; they [the ideas from the Higher Mind] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience. This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.
Essays on the Gita
Devoir is hardly the meaning of the [word]* Dharma. Performing disinterested[ly] one’s duty is a European misreading of the teaching of the Gita. Dharma in the Gita means the law of one’s own essential nature or is described sometimes as action governed by that nature, swabhava.
This is not in the teaching of the Gita according to which the two natures are opposed to each other and the Asuric nature has to be rejected or to fall away by the power and process of the yoga. Sri Aurobindo’s yoga also insists on the rejection of the darker and lower elements of the nature.
It is true that in 1894 considerable agitation was created in the State against its land policy, but this was due in His Highness’ opinion entirely to the policy itself and not to his absence and the agitation would have soon subsided if the Resident had not unfortunately taken a position of active hostility to that policy which eventually turned out to be an unjustifiable attitude.
Be very careful to follow my instructions in avoiding the old kind of politics. Spirituality is India’s only politics, the fulfilment of the Sanatan Dharma its only Swaraj. I have no doubt we shall have to go through our Parliamentary period in order to get rid of the notion of Western democracy by seeing in practice how helpless it is to make nations blessed. India is passing really through the first stages of a sort of national Yoga. It was mastered in the inception by the inrush of divine force which came in 1905 and aroused it from its state of complete tamasic ajnanam. But, as happens also with individuals, all that was evil, all the wrong sanskaras and wrong emotions and mental and moral habits rose with it and misused the divine force. Hence all that orgy of political oratory, democratic fervour, meetings, processions, passive resistance, all ending in bombs, revolvers and Coercion laws. It was a period of asuddha rajasic activity and had to be followed by the inevitable period of tamasic reaction from disappointed rajas. God has struck it all down,—Moderatism, the bastard child of English Liberalism; Nationalism, the mixed progeny of Europe and Asia; Terrorism, the abortive offspring of Bakunin and Mazzini. The latter still lives, but it is being slowly ground to pieces. At present, it is our only enemy, for I do not regard the British coercion as an enemy, but as a helper. If it can only rid us of this wild pamphleteering, these theatrical assassinations, these frenzied appeals to national hatred with their watchword of Feringhi-ko-maro, these childish conspiracies, these idiotic schemes for facing a modern army with half a dozen guns and some hundred lathis,—the opium visions of rajogun run mad, then I say, “More power to its elbow.” For it is only when this foolishness is done with that truth will have a chance, the sattwic mind in India emerge and a really strong spiritual movement begin as a prelude to India’s regeneration. No doubt, there will be plenty of trouble and error still to face, but we shall have a chance of putting our feet on the right path. In all I believe God to be guiding us, giving the necessary experiences, preparing the necessary conditions.
What you say about the Ramakrishna Mission is, I dare say, true to a certain extent. Do not oppose that movement or enter into any conflict with it; whatever has to be done, I shall do spiritually, for God in these matters especially uses the spiritual means & the material are only very subordinate. Of course, you can get into that stream, as you suggest, and deflect as much as you can into a more powerful channel, but not so as to seem to be conflicting with it. Use spiritual means chiefly, will & vyapti. They are more powerful than speech & discussion. Remember also that we derive from Ramakrishna. For myself it was Ramakrishna who personally came & first turned me to this Yoga. Vivekananda in the Alipore jail gave me the foundations of that knowledge which is the basis of our sadhana. The error of the Mission is to keep too much to the forms of Ramakrishna & Vivekananda & not keep themselves open for new outpourings of their spirit,—the error of all “Churches” and organised religious bodies. I do not think they will escape from it, so long as their “Holy Mother” is with them. She represents now the Shakti of Ramakrishna so far as it was manifested in his life. When I say do not enter into conflict with them, I really mean “do not enter conflict with her.” Let her fulfil her mission, keeping always ours intact and ever-increasing.
The root of the whole evil is that we have been attempting an extension of Tantric Kriya without any sufficient Vedantic basis. You especially were going on the basis that if a man had faith, enthusiasm, intellectual & emotional sincerity & proffered self-surrender, all that was necessary was there & he could go on straight to difficult Tantric anusthana. This basis is condemned. A much stronger & greater foundation is necessary. It was the basis of the sattwic ahankara; which said to itself, “I am the chosen of Kali, I am her bhakta, I have every claim on her, I can afford to be negligent about other things, she is bound to help & guard me”. It is this sattwic ahankara which I have long felt to be the great obstacle in our Yoga; some have it in the sattwa-rajasic form, others in the sattwo-tamasic, but it is there in you all, blinding your vision, limiting your strength, frustrating your progress. And its worst quality is that it is unwilling to admit its own defects, or if it admits one, it takes refuge in another. Open your eyes to this enemy within you and expel it. Without that purification you can have no success. To “do rajasic kriya in a sattwic spirit” is merely to go on in the old way while pretending to oneself that there is a change. Going on in the old way is out of the question. That path can only lead to the pit. I speak strongly because I see clearly; if not yet with absolute vision yet without that misleading false light which marred all my seeing till now & allowed me to be swept in the flood of confused sattwo-rajasic impure Shakti which came with you from Bengal.
There is another point. You sent a message about an “Aurobindo Math” which seemed to show you had caught the contagion which rages in Bengal. You must understand that my mission is not to create maths, ascetics and Sannyasis; but to call back the souls of the strong to the Lila of Krishna & Kali. That is my teaching, as you can see from the Review, and my name must never be connected with monastic forms or the monastic ideal. Every ascetic movement since the time of Buddha has left India weaker and for a very obvious reason. Renunciation of life is one thing, to make life itself, national, individual, world-life greater & more divine is another. You cannot enforce one ideal on the country without weakening the other. You cannot take away the best souls from life & yet leave life stronger & greater. Renunciation of ego, acceptance of God in life is the Yoga I teach,—no other renunciation.
This once understood, the really important thing becomes at once our own work and the relation between different workers, and here, as I have said, what we need is the growth of spiritual unity and a readiness to take the work of others as supplementing one’s own and, wherever it is called for and possible, to cooperate. There is a danger here from the subtler forms of egoism. It is not enough to realise unity among those who are already working with one mind as one soul in many bodies; there must be unity of spirit with others who are following different ways or working separately for the present and complete samata with regard to their action, even if it seems to one wrong or imperfect, and patience with regard to mental and moral divergences. This should be easy for you, as it means only getting rid of the remnants of your sattwic ahankara; it may not be so easy for others who have still a rajasic ahankara to trouble them. But if people like you and Barin give the example, that difficulty can eventually be got over; if on the contrary you also allow misunderstandings among yourselves, the work is likely to be very unnecessarily hampered. I may give as an instance, the matter about the Prabartak. Certain casual utterances of Saurin’s, made in answer to queries and not volunteered, have come to you quite misreported as a sort of intentional campaign to belittle the paper and the other half of what he said, namely, that the Prabartak was inspired, though not actually written by me and the spirit and substance were that of my ideal, never reached your ears. I may add also that the alleged incident to which you took exception, as to his method of raising money, never actually happened. Again the advertisement or rather paragraph about Narayana in the Amrita [Bazar]* was not inserted by Barin, but by someone else according to that other person’s idea after a conversation with him: Barin was not responsible for the form nor had he any intention of claiming the Narayana as the sole and direct mouthpiece of my ideas. It is these misunderstandings which I want to see all of you avoid and it can be easily done if those who are among the principal channels of the Shakti preserve the spiritual unity which ought to prevail among those who derive their inspiration from the same source and follow the same ideal. Others less developed may give cause for offence owing to their inability to control the rajasic ego still working in them, but calm, patience, prema and samata are the spirit in which we should meet such causes of offence; otherwise where is the perfection we seek by our Yoga? Let me add, while I am on this subject, that Haradhan seems to have been misinformed about Nalini. As a matter of fact he has mixed with no দল, nor engaged in any kind of associated activity while in Bengal. And if he had, it would have been with no other purpose than to draw others to our Yoga and our way of thinking; but as a matter of fact he remained inactive.
At this juncture it is not for me to prejudge the issue; each must meet it according to his light and conscience. This at least can be demanded of every man who would be worthy of India and of her great departed son that he shall put away from him in the decision of the things to be done in the future, all weakness of will, all defect of courage, all unwillingness for sacrifice. Let each strive to see with that selfless impersonality taught by one of our greatest scriptures, which can alone enable us to identify ourselves both with the Divine Will and with the soul of our Mother. Two things India demands for her future, the freedom of soul, life and action needed for the work she has to do for mankind; and the understanding by her children of that work and of her own true spirit that the future India may be indeed India. The first seems still the main sense and need of the present moment, but the second is also involved in [it]*—a yet greater issue. On the spirit of our decisions now and in the next few years depends the truth, vitality and greatness of our future national existence. It is the beginning of a great Self-Determination not only in the external but in the spiritual. These two thoughts should govern our action. Only so can the work done by Lokamanya Tilak find its true continuation and issue.
When the Unity has been well founded, the static half of our work is done, but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power,—Krishna and Kali as I name them using the terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Master using, directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which I call myself only as a centre of his universal existence and responding to its workings as a soul to the Soul, taking upon itself his image until there is nothing left but Krishna and Kali. This is the stage I have reached in spite of all setbacks and recoils, imperfectly indeed in the secureness and intensity of the state, but well enough in the general type. When that has been done, then we may hope to found securely the play in us of his divine Knowledge governing the action of his divine Power. The rest is the full opening up of the different planes of his world-play and the subjection of Matter and the body and the material world to the law of the higher heavens of the Truth. To these things towards which in my earlier ignorance I used to press forward impatiently before satisfying the first conditions—the effort, however, was necessary and made the necessary preparation of the material instruments—I can now only look forward as a subsequent eventuality in a yet distant vista of things.
This form leads to another, the emptying of all thought out of the mind so as to leave it a sort of pure vigilant blank on which the divine knowledge may come and imprint itself, undisturbed by the inferior thoughts of the ordinary human mind and with the clearness of a writing in white chalk on a blackboard. You will find that the Gita speaks of this rejection of all mental thought as one of the methods of Yoga and even the method it seems to prefer. This may be called the dhyana of liberation, as it frees the mind from slavery to the mechanical process of thinking and allows it to think or not think as it pleases and when it pleases, or to choose its own thoughts or else to go beyond thought to the pure perception of Truth called in our philosophy Vijnana.
The mental attitude you are taking with regard to “the Lord is the Yogeswara” can be made a first step towards this quietude.
Apart from external things there are two possible inner ideals which a man can follow. The first is the highest ideal of ordinary human life and the other the divine ideal of Yoga. I must say in view of something you seem to have said to your father that it is not the object of the one to be a great man or the object of the other to be a great Yogin. The ideal of human life is to establish over the whole being the control of a clear, strong and rational mind and a right and rational will, to master the emotional, vital and physical being, create a harmony of the whole and develop the capacities whatever they are and fulfil them in life. In the terms of Hindu thought, it is to enthrone the rule of the purified and sattwic buddhi, follow the dharma, fulfilling one’s own svadharma and doing the work proper to one’s capacities, and satisfy kāma and artha under the control of the buddhi and the dharma. The object of the divine life, on the other hand, is to realise one’s highest self or to realise God and to put the whole being into harmony with the truth of the highest self or the law of the divine nature, to find one’s own divine capacities great or small and fulfil them in life as a sacrifice to the highest or as a true instrument of the divine Sakti. About the latter ideal I may write at some later time. At present I shall only say something about the difficulty you feel in fulfilling the ordinary ideal.
Yes, it will be very good for you to read and translate the Arya. We have not until now been able to get the numbers you wanted from Calcutta, and at present we have not a set of the Arya available. I will send you a copy of the Essays on the Gita, first series; it will be best for you to begin with this and translate it. Accustom yourself to translate only a little every day and do it very carefully. Do not write in haste; go several times through what you have written and see whether it accurately represents the spirit of the original, and whether the language cannot be improved. In all things, in the mental and physical plane, it should be your aim, at present, not to go fast and finish quickly, but to do everything carefully, perfectly, and in the right manner.
I shall await your report about Mohini. I gather from his letter that he wanted to remain some time with you for sadhana. My own idea is that already written by Manmohan to Chittagong, that it is better for most to practise first in its elements at least the synthetic Yoga of jnana, bhakti and karma and establish a basis of mental peace and samata before taking up the Yoga of complete and direct self-surrender. There will always be exceptions, but this is for most the safest course.
In regard to the order of issue I think you are right in selecting “War and Self-Determination” as a preliminary publication. The “Essays on the Gita” seems to me preeminently fitted to take the lead in a standardised series, but it would be necessary to await the publication of the “Second Series” by the A.P.H. The “First Series” covering the first six chapters of the Gita is being reprinted with only one necessary correction and should be out in a few days. But I have had to make extensive additions, alterations and corrections and to remould to some extent the language of the Second Series now to be published in book form for the first time. I have sent the M.S. to the A.P.H and I hope that it will be out in two or three months at the outside, when it will be sent to you. At present I am preparing a revised edition of the “Ideal of Human Unity”, already published in Madras but now out of print, and the “Psychology of Social Development”, not yet published in book form, which I propose to bring out under another title, “The Human Cycle”. The “Synthesis of Yoga” is too large a work to be included in a single book; I propose to publish it in India in four parts, each devoted to one of the four Yogas,—Works, Knowledge, Devotion and Self-Perfection,—but this would involve a slight recasting here and there so as to make each volume in itself sufficiently complete. There remain, apart from some uncompleted works, the “Life Divine” and “The Future Poetry” which could be published, subject to the writing of a Preface, almost as they are and the smaller books or booklets already published some of which might be put together as you suggest so as to form part of the standardised volumes. That is the situation as regards the “Arya” writings. I gather that, having view to the conditions in America you propose to print “War and Self-Determination” first as a booklet, to start the standardised series with “Essays on the Gita” and to follow with the “Life Divine”. I would have no objection to such an order of issue.
Two things especially are needed for the life-realisation to take form, an entire faith and equality of mind—not disturbed by anything that may happen, knowing that all happens for the best by the inscrutable Will—and the instrumentation of the Divine Force in the adhara. These must be established in the inner being, but also as much as possible in the outer nature. Men and circumstances may not come up to your expectation or to your demand on them—they seldom or never do, but it is not on them but on the Divine and on the Divine Force acting in you that must be your dependence.
II. Offering of all the actions, all that is done in your life as a sacrifice to the Lord.
MORARJI DESAI: Since 1930 I have been making an effort to put the Yoga preached by the Gita in practice as I understand it…. I cannot however say that I am on the right path and every day I realise how immensely difficult it is to give up attachment in every form & still live the ordinary life.
There is no need for you to change the line of life and work you have chosen so long as you feel that to be the way of your nature (svabhava) or dictated to you by your inner being, or, for some reason, it is seen to be your proper dharma. These are the three tests and apart from that I do not think there is any fixed line of conduct or way of work or life that can be laid down for the Yoga of the Gita. It is the spirit or consciousness in which the work is done that matters most; the outer form can vary greatly for different natures. Thus, so long as one does not get the settled experience of the Divine Power taking up one’s work and doing it, one acts according to one’s nature; afterwards it is that Power which determines what is to be done or not done.
