Are we so dear to Mother than all of them that she has accepted us and either consciously or unconsciously we are breathing in her Love.
So true and so beautiful. We can never be grateful enough.
As to the saints and sages, they belong to the old world order where the highest spiritual aspiration of mankind was laya or nirvana or moksha, the annulment of the individual existence. The world was seen as an illusion that forever binds the self in a never ending play of pleasure and pain. This idea built an unbridgable gulf between world and God and has governed the higher mind of humanity and directed its spiritual seeking.
The new idea and the new aspiration along with the new possibility of the transformation of earthly life has been planted in the human soul by Sri Aurobindo and its seed is being nourished by The Mother’s Love. The spiritual men and women of the old world order would need to give up their old idea of personal mukti or individual salvation as the ultimate goal and take up this new goal starting from scratch. It is somewhat like switching our petrol driven vehicles to solar powered ones. It will be viewed first with suspicion (as when the first possibility of flying was discovered), then with fear, then with acceptance but also the difficulties of the change over, then the demonstration of its success in a few and then finally, with a larger acceptance and generalisation in mankind.
Yes it is a special Grace over those souls that have been called. Perhaps the old spirituality in certain ways and unwittingly nurtured the spiritual ego. It prevents the seeker to go further once he is hailed as a yogi, saint, sage and starts living a life that is generally regarded as the life of a renunciate who has cut himself off from the world. Of course not all fall prey to this but many do thereby blocking the further advance. Here, on the other hand, one has to accept the ordinary and become a child new born to the Divine Mother.
There is of course a deeper occult reason why this yoga has drawn different sections of humanity due to the very nature of the collective work.
Here are two letters of Sri Aurobindo touching upon this issue.
‘I wish you had chosen or called some better stuff—perhaps somebody like Krishnaprem.
Yes, but would the better stuff, supposing it to exist, be typical of humanity? To deal with a few exceptional types would hardly solve the problem. And would they consent to follow my path—that is another question. And if they were put to the test, would not the common humanity suddenly reveal itself—that is still another question.’
3 August 1935
‘It is necessary or rather inevitable that in an Asram which is a “laboratory”, as Adhar Das puts it, for a spiritual and supramental Yoga, humanity should be variously represented. For the problem of transformation has to deal with all sorts of elements favourable and unfavourable. The same man indeed carries in him a mixture of these two things. If only sattwic and cultured men came for the Yoga, men without very much of the vital difficulty in them, then because the difficulty of the vital element in terrestrial nature has not been faced and overcome, it might well be that the endeavour would fail. There might conceivably be under certain circumstances an overmental layer superimposed on the mental, vital and physical and influencing them, but hardly anything supramental or a sovereign transmutation of the human being. Those in the Asram come from all quarters and are of all kinds; it cannot be otherwise.
In the course of the Yoga, collectively—though not for each one necessarily—as each plane is dealt with, all its difficulties arise. That will explain much in the Asram that people do not expect there. When the preliminary work is over in the “laboratory”, things must change.
Also much stress has not been laid on human fellowship of the ordinary kind between the inmates, (though good feeling, consideration and courtesy should always be there), because that is not the aim; it is a unity in a new consciousness that is the aim and the first thing is for each to do his sadhana, to arrive at that new consciousness and realise oneness there.
Whatever faults are there in the sadhaks must be removed by the Light from above—a sattwic rule can only change natures predisposed to a sattwic rule.’
31 October 1935
Affectionately,
Alok Da
