February 21, 2008

©Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Puducherry

Am I fast coming to a scheduled end? Or am I faltering to find a beginning after being disgusted of all conceivable completeness of life given to me without caring for an understood concept of mine as to what course it would take to evolve me? At this point of my age when I am supposed to have an experience of a performed life in a portion of time, I find myself left in an undefined existence. It is an existence restlessly needing a pivot to know, to feel what is all about. It is suffering to live in this amorphous meaninglessness.

I have never lived a life. I have always been driven to myriad ways by thousands of impulses of moments that have spilled over from a fullness of single time. This life has no tale as it is an aggregation of assorted moments.

But I am not for, as I feel, to be couched in some solidity either for a grasping or for a restraining contour. Solidity is always preferable to amorphousness. But solidity is something as already performed; and however complete, it is tagged with a sense of past. It is a product in the past, may even be a symbol of the existing present, but it is never in any way a help to a future. Here in my restlessness, I am affranchised from this fragmentation as well as from a built concreteness. I have been languishing being in this amorphousness and amidst this is the travails of a face to surface to find which has been covered since the beginning.

"Alone who stares at future's covered face…"

Don't exaggerate yourself

Can you remember youself in your very early childhood? A little child, as little as you had just learnt to walk a measured length and been managing to utter some words with indistinctive syllables; you were then an uncertain being. You could not think as your mind was still in its shape and its grasp was as insignificant as the measure of your walking strides. Most of the time you remained satisfied (I do not use the word 'happy') or content with you except at times of physical discomfort. You had your little world, better say, a sense-world. Can you remember what it was exactly like? It was unlike what it is now to you characteristically. Now, to you, the world and you are two different entities. But at that period of your childhood, we are discussing, you could not as yet been able to detach your surroundings off from your sense of existence. So you were comfortable with everything known, as stuck to your senses-the faces, places, sounds, and touches. Anything unknown was an adverse intrusion and it upset your balance. The centre of this tiny sense-being was your mom.

So, if for reasons, whenever you found yourself none around you in the middle of the corridor of the house –you had never been kept in before, you cried out, not out of fear but because you could not be of what you were accustomed to in your sense world. Yes, you were an ensemble of senses.

It was a justified suffering more justified than when you were afraid of a ghost in a haunted house-much later when you were enough grown-up as a boy. Unlike the child's it was a mentally constructed fear. There can be no raison d'être of such suffering. The child suffered as a part of his being was cut off, he was unshaped, reduced as less. Have you ever noticed how the tail of a domestic lizard when cut off from the body moving and fidgeting with life impulse even after the lizard has gone into hiding? It is in desperation for the body it is a part of.

You still continue to suffer. And you know it has no end. You suffer in myriad ways the types and nature of which were not known to the early Homo sapiens. It is all because you are not consciously living in unity with the real existence you are a part of. All our suffering is rooted in our ignorance in feeling us as separated from the whole. You exaggerate you when you feel alone or separated. What we require is to expand ourselves without limit.

In the last phase of her life The Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram –while doing her sadhana with the cells of her body she told once to one of her disciples that there was only one physical body in this world!

The burden of the Light

A few persons even today, fifty seven years after he left his body, are aware of what Sri Aurobindo did in his life in Pondicherry. For people of India it is not unusual. For thousands of years the sanyasins in India lived in seclusion for purpose of their sadhana. But Sri Aurobindo was not a sanyasin as he accepted life and world as real and his yoga is not for shunning this world as Maya and accepting Nirvana as the only goal. He attained Nirvana in 1908 before he left for Pondicherry in 1910. So what required him to live within the boundaries of his room for long forty years?

SRI AUROBINDO'S ROOM

His was a life of battling against ignorance of life we live in. But it is impossible to get an idea by oneself unless one believes in the possibility of a change of human nature and for that matter in oneself following the path sincerely as shown by Sri Aurobindo. His disciples wrote to him about their sadhana and sought his guidance and opinion. Sri Aurobindo, in reply, wrote hundreds of letters to them regularly. These letters are now sources of light for all who follow his path of Yoga of transformation.

The following letter is one among them and which shows partly the extent of his battle and about himself.

"I can not say that I follow very well the logic of your doubt. How does the suffering of a noble and selfless friend invalidate the hope of yoga? There are many dismal spectacles in the world, but that is after all the very reason why yoga has to be done. If the world were all happy and beautiful and ideal, who would want to change it or find it necessary to bring down a higher consciousness into this earthly Mind and Matter? Your other argument is that the work of the yoga itself is difficult, not easy, not a happy canter to the goal. Of course it is, because the world and human nature are what they are. I never said it was easy or that there are not obstinate difficulties in the way of the endeavour. Again, I do not understand your point about raising up a new race by my going on writing "trivial" letters ten hours a day. Of course not-nor by writing important letters either; even if I were to spend my time writing fine poems it would not build up a new race. Each activity is important in its own place-an electron or a molecule or a grain may be small things in themselves, but in their place they are indispensible to the building up of a world; it can not be made up only of mountains and sunsets and streaming of aurora borealis-though these have their place there. All depends on the force behind these things and the purpose in their action-and that is known to the Cosmic Spirit which is at work; and it works, I may add, not by the mind or according to human standards but by a greater consciousness which, starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using a tangle of ganglia, can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Sprit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare. Is the life of a great poet either made up only of magnificent and important things? How many trivial things had to be dealt with and done before there could be produced a "King Lear" or a "Hamlet"? Again according to your own reasoning, would not people be justified in mocking at your pother-so they would call it; I do not-about metre and scansion and how many ways a syllable can be read? Why, they might say, is he wasting his time in trivial prosaic things like this when he might have been spending it in producing a beautiful lyric or fine music? But the worker knows and respects the material with which he must work and he knows why he is busy with "trifles" and small details and what is their place in the fullness of his labour.

As for faith, you write as if I never had a doubt or any difficulty. I have had worse than any human mind can think of. It is not because I have ignored difficulties, but because I have seen them more clearly, experienced them on a larger scale than anyone living now or before me that, having faced and measured them, I am sure of the results of my work. But even if I still saw the chance that it might come to nothing (which is impossible), I would go on unperturbed, because I would still have done to the best of my power the work that I had to do and what is so done always counts in the economy of the universe. But why should I feel that all this may come to nothing when I see each step and where it is leading and every week, every day-once it was every year and month and hereafter it will be every day and hour-brings me so much nearer to my goal? In the way that one treads with the greater Light above, even every difficulty gives its help and has its value and Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be."

©Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust-1970

When China smiles...

The Chinese are the queer people. The Spaniards are almost what they appear externally. You can half-read their mind after ten minutes of first acquaintance. Perhaps it is almost the same with all the common people of the world. But you have to dig deep to discover the real person in a Chinese. They talk little and their smile means many things including the diametrically opposites. They are secretive and pose just the opposite of what they actually think or plan. One can understand Stalin or Hitler but it was difficult to understand Mao Zedong. Nehru was a victim of this specious political face of Mao. There was a popular slogan in India –hindi chini bhai bhai( Indians and Chinese are like brothers) mainly at the behest of Nehru after Zhou Enlai’s visit to India. So Nehru did not ever dream of making a strong and secure border with China. That was exactly what the Chinese wanted Nehru to believe before making a sudden aggression of their force deep into the northern territory of India. India is still licking her wound having lost a considerable land to China. Vietnam has lost some land to the Chinese. The crookedness of China is best exemplified in the old stories about China’s business with Vietnam. Once China offered a lucrative offer that she would pay handsomely for the tails of cats. Enamored by such offer the Vietnamese people cut thousands of tails of their cats and sold them to China. This led to alarming increase of rodent population in Vietnam as the maimed cats were not able enough to catch them. These vermin ravaged crops all over the country. Now China came to their help by selling them cheap pesticides. The pesticide worked well and within a very short time the villages were filled the dead rodents and also with the dead chickens that fed on the carcasses of the rodents. But still the number of rodents was alarming and threat to the crops continued. But the villagers were now cautious and refused to buy any pesticide from China. But China was an indomitable friend. So now they sold plastic sheets for fencing the crop fields. These sheets were too high and slippery for the rodents to climb over. In another occasion China tempted the Vietnamese people by offering to buy cinnamon roots at abnormally high prices. The poor Vietnamese in order to make fortune sold the roots to them. Soon the cinnamon trees withered. So one should be very thoughtful on occasions when China comes forward to help with a smiling face. Has India learnt a lesson from her friendship?