Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
07. Sadhana through Love and Devotion
Peace was the very first thing that the yogis and seekers of old asked for and it was a quiet and silent mind – and that always brings peace – that they declared to be the best condition for realising the Divine. A cheerful and sunlit heart is the fit vessel for the Ananda and who shall say that Ananda, or what prepares it, is an obstacle to the Divine union? As for despondency, it is surely a terrible burden to carry on the way. One has to pass through it sometimes, like Christian of The Pilgrim’s Progress through the Slough of Despond but its constant reiteration cannot be anything but an obstacle. The Gita specially says, “Practise the yoga with an undespondent heart – anirviṇṇacetasā“. I know perfectly well that pain and suffering and struggle and accesses of despair are natural – though not inevitable on the way – not because they are helps but because they are imposed on us by the darkness of this human nature out of which we have to struggle into the Light. I do not suppose Ramakrishna or Vivekananda would have recommended the incidents you allude to as an example for others to follow – they would surely have said that faith, fortitude, perseverance were the better way. That after all was what they stuck to in the end in spite of these bad moments.... At any rate Ramakrishna told the story of Narada and the ascetic yogi and Vaishnava Bhakta with approval of its moral. I put it in my own language but keep the substance: Narada on his way to Vaikuntha met a yogi practising hard tapasya on the hills. “O Narada,” cried the yogi, “you are going to Vaikuntha and will see Vishnu. I have been practising terrific austerities all my life and yet I have not even now attained to him. Ask him at least for me when I shall reach him.” Then Narada met a Vaishnava, a bhakta who was singing songs 
to Hari and dancing to his own singing, and he cried also: “O Narada, you will see my Lord Hari. Ask him when I shall reach him and see his face.” On his way back Narada came first to the yogi. “I have asked Vishnu,” said the sage, “you will realise him after six more lives.” The yogi raised a cry of loud lamentation: “What! So many austerities! Such gigantic endeavours! And how hard to me is the Lord Vishnu!” Next Narada met again the bhakta and said to him: “I have no good news for you. You will see the Lord but only after a lakh of lives.” But the bhakta leapt up with a great cry of rapture: “Oh, I shall see my Lord Hari! After a lakh of lives I shall see my Lord Hari! How great is the grace of the Lord!” And he began dancing and singing in a renewed ecstasy. Then Narada said, “Thou hast attained. Today thou shalt see the Lord.” Well, you may say: “What an extravagant story and how contrary to human nature!” Not so contrary as all that and in any case hardly more extravagant than the stories of Harishchandra and Shivi. Still, I do not hold up the bhakta as an example, for I myself insist on the realisation in this life and not after six or a lakh of births more. But the point of these stories is in the moral and surely when Ramakrishna told it, he was not ignorant that there was a sunlit path of yoga. He even seems to say that it is the quicker way as well as the better. So the possibility of the sunlit path is not a discovery or original invention of mine. The very first books on yoga I read more than thirty years ago spoke of the dark and sunlit way and emphasised the superiority of the latter over the former.