Part 5: All Shall Be Done

All Shall Be Done

Although Fate lingers in the high Beyond
And the work seems vain on which our heart’s force was spent,
All shall be done for which our pain was borne.
Even as of old man came behind the beast
This high divine successor surely shall come
Behind man’s inefficient mortal pace,
Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears:
He shall know what mortal mind barely durst think,
He shall do what the heart of the mortal could not dare.
[Savitri: 344]

Thus began the next phase of the Divine experiment in the Divine laboratory. Its purpose was not to turn ‘little sprouts’ into budding yogis. Even the Ashram was not meant for that. Difficult to understand though from a human angle that sees only the surfaces and has certain fixed notions of life, the Ashram had only a few, a very small percentage so to say, who came impelled by the aspiration for the Yoga. In the beginning, yes, but soon it was evident that this yoga of world transformation is difficult, if not impossible even for the strongest and the best. The aspiration and tapasya required are too constant and intense, the sincerity needed near impossible for human nature as it stands today with its many sided complexity where each part seeks its own satisfaction and moves at its own pace, even the faith and surrender which are the indispensable elements needed for the yoga was not so easy for the human ego that always wants things to happen in its own way and its own time. That is why the endeavor of transforming human nature into a divine nature was undertaken only when the Divine Mother decided to take charge of the yoga. This meant a massive shift in the process itself. It meant a progressive opening and receptive surrender to the Mother who would then ‘do the yoga’ in others. Of course even in earlier writings of Sri Aurobindo, notably the Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo emphasizes the need for surrender to the Divine Shakti. But it is quite a different thing when the Divine Shakti, still a matter of faith for many, was here, right in front in an embodied human form. With Her coming, Sri Aurobindo stepped into the background so that he could work upon the world forces from behind, act upon the cosmic agencies that were raging to spoil the work for it meant taking away their long-established reign and, as far as possible hasten the hour of supramental manifestation through an intense yoga that needed some kind of an outer seclusion. The stage was now set to launch the extreme experiment. The Ashram had taken birth.

Even as the experiment was underway and progressing reasonably well that there arose, as if from the darkest gulfs of nature, the forces of falsehood and darkness and death engulfing the world in its flames. To counteract their effects there came into the world play Rudra and Kali, portions of Shiva and the consort of Krishna to throw back the attack. The Ashram became the spiritual epicenter of the inner battle even as the world went through the purifying fires of hell. Finally the flames of destruction began to recede but the smoke that had arisen was a poison that needed to be absorbed. It is then that Sri Aurobindo offered his own body as a sacrifice, drinking the poison fumes of jealousy and hate and rage and fear and the blatant dance of evil upon earth. Both knew this and hence the Mother had already started working upon a new strategy for the Divine Victory. The coming of children during the war provided this opportunity and though the Ashram School took roots unofficially somewhere around 1943, it was officially made known to the world in 1952.