Vol: 16, No: 51
August-2015
The Descent
Edited by S.A. Maa Krishna,
Sri Matriniketan Ashram Sri Aurobindo Centre,
Managed by The Mother’s International Centre Trust,
Regd.No-146/24.11.97. Vill: Ramachandrapur, PO: Kukudakhandi-761100,
Via: Brahmapur, Dist: Ganjam, State: Odisha, India
www.srimatriniketanashram.org
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(This August Darshan issue is offered at the Lotus Feet of The Mother and Sri
Aurobindo on occasion of His 143rd birth anniversary, 15.08.2015. In this paper
The Post Thesis of the forth coming book ‘Sri K. Anurakta and Evolution of
Sri Matriniketan Ashram’ is released in order to express our deep gratitude
and love towards him. It reflects the hierarchies of Ashram living and
awareness of our limitation and endless Spiritual possibilities. A free selfadoptability and acceptance of Universal and Transcendent Divine into
ourselves are the right condition to attain full Spiritual life.)
Sri K. Anurakta
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The Post Thesis
Sri Aurobindo considered His creation the Ashram, Devotees,
Ashramites and Sadhakas as made up of the stuff of Brahman, pure gold in
their essence without any trace of alloy and ‘pours out rather in them the
delight of His being and glories of His godhead.’2 These gold vessels aspire
together towards the revelation of inviolate Spirit, discovery of ‘golden occult
link’ that connects mutable Matter with immutable Spirit, increase the capacity
of existing container to hold Divine nectar and strive to become one with the
dual Divine Consciousness that has made the significance of this Ashram more
than earthly Heaven or more than Vaicountha, Golaka, Brahma Loka of our
ancient writings. If we experience here anything other than this indivisible
Brahman-Consciousness of Sri Aurobindo and its dynamic Divine Shakti of
The Mother then that is the distortion and error of our divided surface
constructed personality and not the imperfection and defect of the faultless
Eternal. If our apparent personality is purified, transformed and perfected then
this seemingly lost self-bliss on the surface will lose its raison d’être and the
above ecstatic Ashram living will be extended to realise this world as field of
equal and impartial Brahma-ananda.
In Their effort to enlarge the experience of Integral Divine Union of
three Powers that of the Will, Ichha Shakti, Knowledge, Jnana Shakti and
Love, Prema Shakti in harmonizing and transforming the earth nature, the Law
of the Divine, cosmos, collectivity and individual Soul was evolved which gave
birth to the ideals, norms, right standards of conduct and self-disciplines of
integral Yoga. Most of the rules and laws formulated by the Mother in the
Ashram are intended to control falsehood and maintain harmony and change of
collective living and to be utterly obedient and exceedingly faithful to these
descended Truth expressions lead one towards joy of multiplicity and intimacy
of the One. These Spiritual injunctions for Ashramites are complemented by
still more difficult norms for Sadhakas and the most difficult subtle norms of
sadhana for consecrated Children indicated directly and symbolically by Sri
Aurobindo in His high concentration writings. He further pointed out that these
self-disciplines may not be sufficient10 for a seeker of the Infinite because he
may feel the need of obedience to more and more subtle laws; for beyond the
Law there is Liberty, after the personal, general and universal standard there is
impersonal plasticity, transcendent force and supernal impulse. All outward
laws of Truth are temporary5 higher and higher standards as long as they are
needed to serve the Divine in the world march and in the Supramental plane
these temporary constructions become free automatic obedience to Truth of
things and inevitable right execution in the action and all is determined by the
integral Law of truth awareness, truth feeling, truth will and truth movement.
Any imposition of rigidly fixed set of strict principles, precise mental rules,
constructed laws of conduct, ideals and artificial limiting standards are
abrogated because they are too narrow for the Spirit’s vastness and stand as
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barrier to the eternal on flow of Divine opulence. Its self-discipline begins with
the method of evolutionary unconscious Yoga of Nature with many-sided
wideness, catholicity, plasticity, universality, integration of being followed by
the outcome of largest, deepest, widest and highest form of every possible line
of Spiritual realisation and Spiritual experience and complete dynamism of that
return to truth of our Nature.
There is a hierarchy of Ashram living based on the expansion of our
Consciousness and this makes us equally aware of our evolutionary constraint,
endless Spiritual possibilities and our higher aspiration. In the Ashram, the
beginners of integral Yoga are known as Ashramites who limit their action by
the pressure of three modes of Nature, gunas.21 They have received the Divine
call, ‘Like a far-heard unseen entrancing flute’13 to pursue a Divine life. They
have experienced Divine’s touch but not His constant embrace represented in
the symbolic language of Satyavan’s early sadhana, ‘I have lived in the ray but
faced not the sun.’14 These sattwic, rajasic and tamasic Ashram personalities
represent modus operandi of transformation of the world imperfection and this
Yoga asks patient and persistent personal effort through force of intellect,
known as zeal for the Lord, Utsaha, personal effort through heart’s eagerness
to find Divine, known as Vyakulata and austerity and effort through will power
and askesis of the body, known as Tapasya, which are necessary at every step
and moment of our life. If we reject persistently what is false and obscure in us
then we will be automatically become instruments of Light of higher conscious
planes and not toys and puppets of countless dark universal entities. If we
practice consecration then we can no longer remain selfish, egoistic and narrow
but will experience Divine union, His wideness, depth and height. If we
increase our faith towards the Divine then we conquer samsaya and asuya
which are indispensable for healthy collective Ashram living and prolongation
of static and dynamic Divine union. If we increase the sincerity then we will
constantly feel the need to change and overcome the old and obsolete
existence. Thus a subtle link of Divine union captures our seeking mind,
battling emotion and imprisoned bodily action.
With the above partial Divine realisation, some of them show eagerness
to guide12 the world without having capacity to guide themselves; they develop
the capacity to save their Soul without having capacity to save their life and the
world. These deficiencies are partly fulfilled by the emergence of Sadhakas
whose aim are settled in the static Divine union, free from three gunas,
nistraigunya.21 They possess the Being and live in the wide range Equality,
passive Silence, deep Quietude, self-absorbed exclusive Ananda, liberated
Action, freedom from bondage to attachment and ignorance and life becomes
happy laughter of Soul and their Spiritual possibility can be expressed in the
symbolic language of King Aswapati’s early sadhana, ‘Climbed through white
rays to meet an unseen Sun.’15 In integral Yoga, the benefit and advantage of
this increase of intensity of static Divine union culminates in bearing earth’s
burden in the form of sufferings, miseries and sorrows and compels all
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divisible things towards accomplishment of an unrealised Oneness. The
limitation and disadvantage of an apprentice Sadhaka of above kind is that his
personal isolated achievement does not resolve any world problem and hence
he does not descend down to the need of the common down to earth men. He
seems to be satisfied in his limited range of higher consciousness which does
not protect saints from suppressing many of their ‘unsaintly movements’3 or
‘even the saint and the Yogin cannot be sure of their liberated purity’6 and he
may be habituated to make himself light and comfortable for the race by
throwing away its barriers or an indifference may grow towards the cry and
suffering that rises up from a labouring helpless humanity or selfishness may
breed that cares not what happens of those who are left behind in
consciousness. Thus he suffers ‘golden impotence’4 of modifying the
surrounding existence without the real power to transform it.
Few of them rise above this perfection of later Vedantic Saints of
enabling self-transcendence and direct contact with the Divine and arrive at the
perfection of ancient Vedantic Seers or realise the dynamic Divine union of
Shakti; they could descend to the level of common earth bound man in
resolving their gross earthly and subtle Spiritual problems. They believe
strongly that the Divine attributes of Love, Delight, Beauty, Wisdom, Silence
and Peace become incomplete, relative and imperfect if it is not equally shared
by all. For a Sadhaka with dynamic Divine union, parambhava22 and
universalised Consciousness, sarvabhutatmabhutatma17 and the capability of
his transformed Nature to become centre of world liberation and
transformation; his Ashram living is still difficult as more he ascends in
Consciousness more he faces world opposition and revolt of
Subconscient/Inconscient sheath. Purified, liberated, transformed, plastic and
illumined he adores the Feet of embodied Mother as the universal Mother and
serves as instrumental child of Her wider Yoga of humanity and participates in
the infinite variation of phenomenon and action of the universe without any
attachment. The gathering together of large helpless blind humanity around
him for their material benefit in resolving their earthly problems like getting a
good job, settlement of marriage, giving birth to a child, prosperity in business,
social miseries and curing of disease are no doubt universal motiveless
consecrated Divine action and this necessity of ‘contemplation and service of
God in man’1 or well being of all creature, sarvabhutahiteratah,20 can be
considered indispensable in order to ‘complete the realization of God in all
things.’1 The disadvantage of this action of self-expansion is that an
apprehension of emergence of a new sect, new power centre and shifting of
centre of worship cannot be ruled out within Ashram premises. Thus if selfexpansion is not made the subordinate of self-concentration then this deviation
from the norms9 of integral Yoga either draws one towards defection from the
Ashram living oblivious of the original Divine call to which he must be always
faithful or this vibration creates an atmosphere of disbelief limiting his capacity
of self-expansion.
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There is still a fourth most difficult endeavour in which dynamic Divine
realisation is followed by the Divine Call to explore exclusively the
intermediate hierarchies of Consciousness leading to Supermind and the
inception of this action goes back to a period when one steps into Spiritual life
and experiences Divine union. Through systematic, purposeful and intensified
ascent and descent of Consciousness one will experience purification,
transformation and perfection of his multiple selves and sheaths and will search
permanent solution of problem of existence and complete integration through
reversal and universalisation of his all-inclusive Consciousness and doing good
of all creature need not necessitate direct contact with helpless humanity. He
will also seek that Mother Consciousness before which the Supramental Light
‘grows as a shadow’7 and pours it on the world, ‘so that the whole race may
approach nearer to the attainment of its supreme personalities.’19 The
disadvantage of this quest is that firstly, it creates a great difference of
Consciousness between individual developed Soul and the surrounding
developing Souls; secondly, such practice of special highest integral Yoga in
isolation cannot be generalised in the collective Ashram living whose base is
strongly established on the principle of Karma Yoga and contact with the
world; thirdly, in integral Yoga the necessity of complete seclusion is felt to
pursue Yoga of Self-perfection after one is thoroughly established in Karma,
Jnana and Bhakti Yoga whereas in traditional path, Jnana Yogis prefer to live
in complete seclusion; fourthly, even The Mother got the opportunity to begin
and continue the Yoga of Self-perfection and subsequently Yoga of cellular
transformation for a period of twenty three years after Sri Aurobindo’s forty
years of concentrated Sadhana which left incomplete of His continuation of
Yoga of Self-perfection; fifthly, after Sri Aurobindo, the most of those Jnana
Yogis lived in complete seclusion did not succeed much because it was not
possible for them to integrate Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga successfully
through a fourth self-discipline of Yoga of Self-perfection; sixthly, an integral
Yogi must not be disheartened by enormity of Their large incarnated Divine
unfinished Action but must mould world Nature and world Soul before the
transforming hands of the Mother and must venture to expand Consciousness
persistently within the boundary of his own instrumental and emanative swift
Spiritual evolution and lastly movement of Consciousness They had initiated
must not be arrested but continue through slow customary evolutionary activity
of noble Ashramites who have offered their whole external life to the Divine
and through tardy crab movement born out of the mental self-satisfaction of
religious worship of its faithful Devotees.
From the above study, we conclude that for full realisation of selfexpansion through integral Karmayoga complemented by full realisation of
self-concentration through integral Jnanayoga and Bhaktiyoga in fulfilling the
total realisation of the vision of integral Yoga, this one brief life span seems to
be small fragment of vast all Life extending over all Time. So in order to be a
part and indispensable portion of integral Yoga extending over many
successive births and bodies one must develop three basic requisites of entire
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Faith, constant Courage and unending Patience and accept many fold effort in
Ignorance and spontaneous invasion of Shakti in Knowledge. He must keep this
faith that his small beginning and persistent personal effort of Sadhana will
necessarily lead towards entire awareness of all the nook and corner of
traditional and integral Yoga.
The next decisive action of ascension in the Consciousness is possible, if
one has fixed his aim at the total possession of the supreme Mother and the
supreme Lord through identity or to be totally possessed by Them through
movement of Consciousness in all Life. Then he must be from the very
beginning get the Divine Call to become the liberated Soul centre of multiple
liberating Souls gathered together in a Divine Centre where the collective
living ‘would create its own body of the life of the spirit.’18 His static
realisation of the Divine Oneness must be further pushed towards the difficult
task of becoming an Impersonal centre or centre of universality to include
whole of humanity as ultimate collectivity, Deva Sangha and his universalised
impersonal Consciousness will fill the emptiness and miseries of human heart
with Divine Love, transforms worst difficulties into best opportunities, heals all
the bitter cruelties, crudities and aberrations of earth through Subconscient
transformation, guards the world with its all seeing gaze, masters the
catastrophes of Nature with a glance, channels the total energy of Universal
and Transcendent forces which would flow unobstructed and unrestricted,
effective inclusion and penetration of dynamised intimate vision and does good
of all creatures, ‘sarvabhutahite ratah.’20 His most difficult task is the extreme
accumulation of the Spirit’s bare and absolute potencies to become mightier
than all the forces of the material and vital world and wrestles with Matter to
meet and confront victoriously dark forces of naked Hell, compel active
dynamic unification of cosmic Nature and total transformation of mundane
Nature, apara Prakriti. Then he emerges as Universalised individual Soul
Centre with liberated immobile Soul and transformed mobile Nature.
Sri K. Anurakta claims lovingly and firmly that Sri Matriniketan
Ashram is the Divine manifestation and continuation of his active Sadhana. He
has always reminded us, “The Mother has given you a special work to
accomplish and be careful and don’t allow this action to be broken, mutilated
and distorted.” Its mission is to unite and become one with its parent
institution, one with Self, God and Humanity and pursue the total vision of The
Mother and Sri Aurobindo in an atmosphere of instrumental endeavour,
knowledge based action, freedom from three modes of Nature, greater
plasticity, simplicity born out of Divine union, wider range of exploration of
Consciousness and all embracing Divine Love that can link between the
Nescient unconscious state and Supreme state of Consciousness. Its vision rests
on the concentration of the Divine Will as Creator of universe followed by
Divine Wisdom and Love that have preserved, nourished and sustained the
creation. The latter has also the greatest power for physical transformation and
those very few, who will be able to receive, hold and canalise the fragments of
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Divine Love of this universal proportion, for the highest evolutionary leap of
the race, must satisfy following conditions; firstly, they must have strong and
balanced body and spontaneous and integral purity in order to bear the intensity
of the descending Supreme Ananda; secondly, they must totally give up all
external pleasure by renouncing all participation in the active life by plunging
into a rigorous asceticism or the askesis of above order can be avoided if the
inner illumination and sublimation of the being is sufficient enough to reject
automatically all gross and obscure enjoyments; thirdly, in order to arrive at the
full possession of subtle and causal body, the physical organs must be sealed
against the disturbance of human sight and sound; or as an alternative the mind
has to be drawn inward to the depths by the force of the concentration so that
the call of surface physical things can no longer easily draw its attention;
fourthly a growth of receptive and collaborative surrounding which include
more flowers and plants, less animals, birds and children and least faithful
human aspirants; for plants and animals collaborate more in Supramental action
and the small collectivity will be the representative of strong Spiritual
concentration. Without pursuance of this purified concentration, the existence
in a small Ashram and the Soul’s preparation may end as a temporary sojourn.
The above discipline and tapasya must accompany true humility and gratitude,
complete surrender, absolute sincerity and total dependency on the Divine
Mother or dynamic Divine Shakti so as to counter the growth of the ego,
separative individuality and pride and lastly consciousness must undulate in
between two extreme ends of Self-concentration and Self-expansion in carrying
the existence towards great, wide and stupendous pulsation of Divine Love.
As in this Yoga each Sadhaka must be ‘able to follow his own path of
Yoga’ or own way of uniting with the Divine, so it further insists that he
would under no circumstance ‘set the power and knowledge in him against the
power and knowledge’18 of other Devotees, Ashramites and Sadhakas or
‘affirm himself as an ego striving against other egos.’18 A seeker would be
considered fit for collective Ashram living when he conquers ‘sceptical doubt
(samsaya) which turns its back on (total knowledge of) our spiritual
possibilities’16 and triumphs over ‘the constant carping of the narrow pettily
critical uncreative intellect, asuya, which pursues our endeavour with a
paralysing incertitude.’16 A successful Ashram living emerges when one lives
only for the Divine, thinks only for the Divine and acts only for the Divine and
becomes the instrument of truth in the long Divine Play. A healthy and
Spiritual Ashram living emerges as opposed to religious Ashram living when
adoration of Divine’s impersonal form gets precedence11 over His personal
form and personal manifestation and equal effort is maintained to go beyond
the complementary, not seemingly antagonist attributes of nirguna and saguna
Brahman.
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Thus we are genuinely linked with Sri K. Anurakta while searching
ardently and impersonally the limitless Mother and infinite Sri Aurobindo and
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shall strive to live alone in Their total Consciousness and fit ourselves in Their
Transcendent action.
OM TAT SAT
References:
1: “Contemplation of God in Nature, contemplation and service of God in
man and in the life of man and of the world in its past, present and future, are
equally elements of which the Yoga of knowledge can make use to complete
the realization of God in all things.” CWSA/The Synthesis of Yoga-517,
2: “The Divine Being is not incapable of taking innumerable forms because He
is beyond all form in His essence, nor by assuming them does He lose His
divinity, but pours out rather in them the delight of His being and the glories of
His godhead; this gold does not cease to be gold because it shapes itself into all
kinds of ornaments and coins itself into many currencies and values, nor does
the Earth-Power, principle of all this figured material existence, lose her
immutable divinity because she forms herself into habitable worlds, throws
herself out in the hills and hollows and allows herself to be shaped into utensils
of the hearth and household or as hard metal into the weapon and the engine.
Matter, — substance itself, subtle or dense, mental or material, — is form and
body of Spirit and would never have been created if it could not be made a
basis for the self-expression of the Spirit.” CWSA/22/The Life Divine-668,
3: “The wise are not always or wholly wise, the intelligent are intelligent only
in patches; the saint suppresses in himself many unsaintly movements and the
evil are not entirely evil: the dullest has his unexpressed or unused and
undeveloped capacities, the most timorous his moments or his way of courage,
the helpless and the weakling a latent part of strength in his nature.”
CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-235,
4: “If Life refuses the aid of its intermediary energy to the spirit’s other
workings or is itself refused, they are likely to be reduced for all the effect they
can have here to a static seclusion or a golden impotence; or if anything is
done, it will be a partial irradiation of our action more subjective than
objective, modifying existence perhaps, but without force to change it.”
CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-173,
5: “This, then, stands fixed for us that all standards by which we may seek to
govern our conduct are only our temporary, imperfect and evolutive attempts
to represent to ourselves our stumbling mental progress in the universal selfrealisation towards which Nature moves. But the divine manifestation cannot
be bound by our little rules and fragile sanctities; for the consciousness behind
it is too vast for these things. Once we have grasped this fact, disconcerting
enough to the absolutism of our reason, we shall better be able to put in their
right place in regard to each other the successive standards that govern the
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different stages in the growth of the individual and the collective march of
mankind. For we have to see how they stand in relation to that other
standardless spiritual and Supramental mode of working for which Yoga seeks
and to which it moves by the surrender of the individual to the divine Will and,
more effectively, through his ascent by this surrender to the greater
consciousness in which a certain identity with the dynamic Eternal becomes
possible.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-192,
6: “The difficulty is great; for their hold is so strong, so apparently invincible
that it justifies the disdainful dictum which compares human nature to a dog’s
tail,--for, straighten it never so much by force of ethics, religion, reason of any
other redemptive effort, it returns in the end always to the crooked curl of
Nature. And so great is the vim, the clutch of that more agitated Life-Will, so
immense the peril of its passions and errors, so subtly insistent or persistently
invasive, so obstinate up to the very gates of Heaven the fury of its attack or the
tedious obstruction of its obstacles that even the saint and the Yogin cannot
be sure of their liberated purity or their trained self-mastery against its
intrigue or its violence. All labour to straighten out this native crookedness
strikes the struggling will as a futility; a flight, a withdrawal to happy Heaven
or peaceful dissolution easily finds credit as the only wisdom and to find a way
not to be born again gets established as the only remedy for the dull bondage or
the poor shoddy delirium or the blinded and precarious happiness and
achievement of earthly existence.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-172,
7: “And sunlight grows a shadow of thy hue” Savitri-408,
8: “So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come
when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the
development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends
the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation.” CWSA/23/
The Synthesis of Yoga-57,
9: “It is at this point that religion (representing self-expansion) must learn to
subordinate itself (to self-concentration), not to insist on its outer characters,
but give full scope to the inner spirit to develop its own truth and reality.”
CWSA/22/The Life Divine-897,
10: His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one Scripture or by several
successively,--if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for
example, the Upanishads, the Vedas. Or it may be a good part of his
development to include in its material a richly varied experience of the truths of
many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past.
But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and
from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the limitations of the
word that he uses. The Gita itself thus declares that the Yogin in his progress
must pass beyond the written Truth,-- sabdabrahmativartate—beyond all that
he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, --srotavyasya srutasya ca. For he is
not the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the Infinite.”
CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/55-56,
11: “But the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has to know the eternal and
ultimate truth and not to persist to the end in the delight of a Shadow. If the
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impersonal is the sole enduring truth, then a firm synthesis is impossible. He
can at most take the divine personality as a symbol, a powerful and effective
fiction, but he will have in the end to overpass it and to abandon devotion for
the sole pursuit of the ultimate knowledge. He will have to empty being of
all its symbols, values, contents in order to arrive at the featureless Reality.”
CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/578,
12: “He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide;
He would save his soul, his life he cannot save.” Savitri-337,
13: Savitri-614,
14: Savitri-407,
15: Savitri-23,
16: CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-773,
17: The Gita-5.7,
18: CWSA/22/The Life Divine-1068-69,
19: CWSA/23/ The Synthesis of Yoga-22,
20: The Gita-5.25, 12.4,
21: The Gita-2.45,
22: The Gita-9.11.
THE DESCENT
Edited and Published by S. A. Maa Krishna, Sri Matriniketan Ashram, for
The Mother’s International Centre Trust, Regd. No.-146/24.11.97, AtRamachandrapur, PO-Kukudakhandi-761100, Via-Brahmapur, Dist.Ganjam, Odisha, India. E-mail: samaakrishna@gmail.com,
www.srimatriniketanashram.org
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