Daily Offerings from Alokda

We must have a synthetic understanding with as total a vision as possible of their complete vision and yet be plastic enough to admit that all that we understand today is nothing compared to what we will understand tomorrow and the day after. This wideness and plasticity is most needed when we deal with their writings that cover every aspect of life from every angle of vision without losing, even for a moment, the total picture. It is as if a Master-artist was filling a vast canvas with a meticulous eye on each detail but all the time keeping the full picture and every other detail in it constantly in his universal mind. Everything is there but in its just place and right proportion. If we take the word or the sentence out of this totality and put it as an exclusive truth then it turns into a falsehood by such misplacement. A certain understanding and formulation may have been needed for us at a certain point of time and a certain stage of development but if we do not constantly enlarge our vision and scope then this understanding begins to get petrified and turns the high spiritual truths contained within a body of words into a fixed and narrow formula or a dogmatic religion. Or worse still by repeating it too often, especially without an effort to live it, we turn the living body of Truth into a dead and sterile corpse whose carcass we carry as Shiva carrying Sati on his shoulders until Vishnu breaks the dead body into pieces so that Sati may be reborn as Parvati, Sati must pass through the flames of sacrifice to be thus reborn. So too, the word must pass through the flames of our inner aspiration to reveal its inmost truth.

When we thus make an effort we shall ourselves see how Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Works are arranged in a hierarchical manner. There is a context to everything, a context at once inner and outer; and a purpose, a purpose that goes beyond mere understanding and living. It is to lead us to the heart of Love that the Divine Incarnate embodies. Each of Sri Aurobindo’s Works is a step of the Infinite Shakti that leads us closer and closer to Her and it is only when we have found Her that the real truth behind the luminous words is revealed to us by Her Grace. It is Her Grace that leads us to the vast and luminous heart of the Lord where the word stands self-revealed. This, after all, is the real, if not the only, purpose of his words, – to take us closer to the Divine and His workings in creation and all these countless revelations to lead us to Her Feet where knowledge rests in a blissful Silence. This is the grand revelation towards which the all-powerful Word of the Avatar leads us.

Indeed it is only to the degree that we grow close to Her that we can truly understand. Words of Sri Aurobindo are like illuminated stairs that lead us towards Her. Of course the world experiences are also a staircase that takes us to Her but it is a dark and dangerous staircase. The ascension through the Word is swifter and safer provided we read it with the fire of aspiration to grow closer to the Divine. But if we get lost in mere outer meanings and pedagogy and analysis of the structure and the sentence then we shall be like the man who kept staring and appreciating a mountain from the foothills but never really tasted the bliss of rising into the skies which is where the mountains were meant to lead him. The more we ascend, the better we understand the mountain, in its totality and its specific details. The same is true of Sri Aurobindo’s books. The more we read about a given subject from different works of his, the better we understand the many-sided and all-encompassing vision contained within them. The more we put into practice what we read, the more we grow closer to the intrinsic sense of the Word rather than its outer meaning. The more we let the power within the Words penetrate deeper into the different layers of our consciousness, the more they do the work of illumining and awakening different parts of our being to the greater Truth-Light. Sound and sense is our mind’s contact with the Word. The soul however opens out to the state of consciousness contained within it and grows by this strengthening wine ‘born from the presses of Light’.

The Mother reminds us:
“There is a world of ideas without form and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the other without any necessity of words. But if there is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the word means to you. This is true not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in the mind’s silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its surface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression.” [CWM 3:64–65]

Herein comes the third and most important major difficulty when we turn to the word of any scripture. It is this that very often we bind ourselves to the letter and not the spirit, the outer sense rather than the deeper inner meaning, the mental understanding rather than the truth being revealed to us. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo repeatedly caution us not to turn their luminous writings meant to awaken and inspire rather than instruct and systematize, into fixed systems of thought or rigid dogmas of life. Worse still to use them as means to justify our own weaknesses (given the vastness of their writings) while pointing figures at others. Such a misuse of their words would be the proverbial ‘devil quoting the scriptures’. The word is a means of ascension but not the final culmination of yoga. If born out of the yog agni  of tapasya as indeed all words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are, it can purify us, uplift us, refine us but the final act of entering the sanctum sanctorum of the Lord is effected by the free surrender of all that we are and do and understand. The powerful Word can carry us to the abode of the Lord on wings of fire like the Garuda, but to enter the shrine of Truth where sleeps the Great Being in the heart of Time and its infinite unfolding afloat the great ocean of infinite Knowledge, we must step out of the vehicle and step inside the house of the Lord bare feet and humble with faith as the only lamp of Light. There the Word ceases and understanding fails, a holy darkness wraps us in its sacred shroud and passing through the mystical gates of the Unknown we step into Light and Freedom and Bliss and Truth. What is of greater importance than mere reading and intellectualizing is to meditate on the living truths contained in the words with a will to live it.

“A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophic reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable: it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind.” [CWSA 23: 55 – 56]

It means that we should be careful of limiting the Divine by our own understanding of His too luminous Words! Both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have often cautioned us about this tendency to quote their words and worse still think that our own understanding is the one true understanding of it. The Mother clearly reminds us:       

“Men find a book or a teaching very wonderful and often you hear them say, “That is exactly what I myself feel and know, but I could not bring it out or express it as well as it is expressed here.” When men come across a book of true knowledge, each finds himself there, and at every new reading he discovers things that he did not see in it at first; it opens to him each time a new field of knowledge that had till then escaped him in it. But that is because it reaches layers of knowledge that were waiting for expression in the subconscious in him; the expression has now been given by somebody else and much better than he could himself have done it. But, once expressed, he immediately recognises it and feels that it is the truth. The knowledge that seems to come to you from outside is only an occasion for bringing out the knowledge that is within you. The experience of misrepresentation of something we have said is a very common one and it has a similar source. We say something that is quite clear, but the way in which it is understood is stupefying! Each sees in it something else than what was intended or even puts into it something that is quite the contrary of its sense. If you want to understand truly and avoid this kind of error, you must go behind the sound and movement of the words and learn to listen in silence. If you listen in silence, you will hear rightly and understand rightly; but so long as there is something moving about and making a noise in your head, you will understand only what is moving in your head and not what is told you.” [CWM 3: 51 – 52]

Our limited receptivity is one issue when we turn towards Sri Aurobindo’s words. There is another issue that arises from the vast and complex nature of the Truth he brings to earth and man. The Supramental Truth is the truth of the Infinite. It cannot be bound or limited by any one-sided formula or understanding of things. Nor even can it be bound by any process or technique for which we may be eagerly looking for. Sri Aurobindo would rather give us the fundamental understanding of how things are and work. He leaves the rest to be adapted by each individual given his or her evolutionary stage. As he points out in the Synthesis itself about the workings of the Divine Shakti:

“In the first place it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic Yoga….

What is his method and his system? He has no method and every method. His system is a natural organisation of the highest processes and movements of which the nature is capable. Applying themselves even to the pettiest details and to the actions the most insignificant in their appearance with as much care and thoroughness as to the greatest, they in the end lift all into the Light and transform all. For in his Yoga there is nothing too small to be used and nothing too great to be attempted. As the servant and disciple of the Master has no business with pride or egoism because all is done for him from above, so also he has no right to despond because of his personal deficiencies or the stumblings of his nature. For the Force that works in him is impersonal—or superpersonal—and infinite.” [CWSA 23: Pp. 46 – 47, 61 – 62]

Or else he would give us some luminous and helpful hints, some uplifting strains of divine music that carries us deep and high into hitherto unknown realms of the Spirit. Then mere reading with a quiet concentration and receptivity to the power contained in the words itself becomes a yoga. The word here becomes not just a messenger bringing to us divine tidings from high and luminous worlds but also a vehicle to carry us back to the Source from where the Word has emerged. Ordinarily, we dissociate understanding from doing. Therefore men have a tendency to first read, then reflect, then act in accordance with what is written. This is of course needed since mere reading a Teaching without a sincere will to live it is at best a stage of development prior to the beginning of the yogic journey. Here we read with our active mind and the outer consciousness receives the impacts of the word-meanings as our mind understands. Slowly these multiple impacts begin to create a dent and an opening for the inner being to open up and receive the Light. But once the opening has come then the reading itself becomes a yoga since now it is no more the active external mind but the inner being and the inmost soul that hears and receives the Word. The Word then becomes a representative of the Divine Master, a power and force of the author who created it like the Rishis of yore, or brought it down from a higher Source embodying the higher states and the vibrations of Truth into a rhythmic expression wearing the body of sound and letter and word. Sri Aurobindo reveals this power of the Representative Word in The Synthesis:

“Ordinarily, the Word from without, representative of the Divine, is needed as an aid in the work of self-unfolding; and it may be either a word from the past or the more powerful word of the living Guru. In some cases this representative word is only taken as a sort of excuse for the inner power to awaken and manifest; it is, as it were, a concession of the omnipotent and omniscient Divine to the generality of a law that governs Nature….

But usually the representative influence occupies a much larger place in the life of the sadhaka. If the Yoga is guided by a received written Shastra,—some Word from the past which embodies the experience of former Yogins,—it may be practiced either by personal effort alone or with the aid of a Guru. The spiritual knowledge is then gained through meditation on the truths that are taught and it is made living and conscious by their realisation in the personal experience; the Yoga proceeds by the results of prescribed methods taught in a Scripture or a tradition and reinforced and illumined by the instructions of the Master. This is a narrower practice, but safe and effective within its limits, because it follows a well-beaten track to a long familiar goal.”  [CWSA 23: 23: 54 – 55]

However he also cautions us not to bind ourselves rigidly in a dogmatic manner to the written or spoken word, however great and helpful it may be. The sadhaka is, in his words, ‘not the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the Infinite.‘

Alok Pandey