Such tremendous spiritual power, even excluding Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who each were greater in power to Krishna and Buddha, still had 3 people(Sri Ramkrishna, Maa Sarada devi and Swami Vivekananda) who were greater or equivalent to the founders of the biggest religions of the world namely christianity (Christ) and islam(Muhammad) and this should have theoretically created an unbelievably powerful and unstoppable movement or Religion and made India an unstoppable Force.
And yet we see for at least a century an unusual mediocrity and no sight of the transcendental beauty or that mighty force and glory even till now.What kind of tremendous Tamas it must be that was clouding India.
The image of the lotus comes to mind. These beings are the lotus and the tamas is the mud. So greater the presence of such beings, the more foul must be the mud. The mud must also include all the nefarious empires and ideologies that roamed the world back then and even now.
P.s.- We know that it is sure that India will be the chosen victorious champion of this World because the Supreme writer of this play has written it as such but still it is funny to see this weird calm before the upcoming Divine storm that is sure to blow our minds literally.
This must be the arrow being pulled back to the bow’s limits and when it is shot it sure to go farther than anyone can imagine. I wanted your opinion on this.
First about the facts. Sri Aurobindo did not speak of Sri Ramkrishna as an Avatar in the sense of the Gita. In fact Sri Ramakrishna himself spoke something similar when he spoke about it. But both Sri Aurobindo and Sri Ramakrishna as well as other mystics did regard Christ as an Avatar. Having said that we can now take up the issue of numbers first. Sri Aurobindo himself was asked about it.
‘I find it difficult to emerge from the peace I found in meditation. How difficult it must be to come out of the peace of Nirvana or Samadhi! I think that is why Yoga could not be made dynamic up till now.
It is only because they make the peace an end, not, as we aim at doing, a basis for the divine consciousness and all its dynamisms.
25 May 1933
It seems to me that there would hardly be any difference between the consciousness of peace, light, bliss and wideness in Nirvana and in the transformed supramental status, except perhaps in detail.
There is a great difference in consciousness, because Nirvana means absorption into a static Brahman on the level of spiritual mind—the other would mean identification with the integral Divine in the much higher Truth of Supermind.
It seems to me that the number of people in the world accepting our Yoga of transformation would not be as large as those who accepted Buddhism, Vedanta or Christianity.
Nothing depends on the numbers. The numbers of Buddhism and Christianity were so great because the majority professed it as a creed without its making the least difference to their external life. If the new consciousness were satisfied with that, it could also and much more easily command homage and acceptance by the whole earth. It is because it is a greater consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, that it will insist on a real change.
Since the spread of the Yoga throughout the world will proceed slowly, its creations in art, literature, architecture, etc., may be inferior to those of Buddhist, Christian and Muslim creators.
Your argument assumes that the greater consciousness will be in its creations inferior to the inferior consciousness.
Ordinary people may obtain more immediate results from the traditional systems than from our Yoga. Many may feel they have benefited from the “miracles” these systems offer. In our Yoga they would find the way closed for that. Naturally they would shrink from it.
It would on the contrary be impossible for them not to feel that a greater Light and Power had come on the earth.
Thus on the whole there would seem to be scope for very few people in our Yoga, and the world would hardly interest itself in it.
How do you know that it will have no effect on the ordinary people? It will inevitably increase their possibilities and even though all cannot rise to the highest, that will mean a great change for the earth.
29 April 1934′
Numbers in fact are very deceptive. Democracy is the classic example how numbers can deceive. More often than not trying to increase the number of adherents decreases the quality. Look at what happened in all the three religions you mention. Islam was murdered when it mixed Religion with politics. Once its followers killed its founder then they went around with the sword fighting with each other to claim the blood stained throne. Islam is not a Religion at all. It is a socio-political ideology governed by fear as in medieval times. It is very easy to have many adherents to such an ideology because it banishes freedom of thought and insists on blind conformity. Hence it appeals to the lazy unthinking humanity that is happy getting into comfort zones of a postmartem heaven. Christianity is no different. Christ was crucified by his prospective followers and then a socio-political ideology built around his tomb guarded by pompuous institutional trappings and farcical conversions. There are very few if any followers of Mohammad and Christ though papers and name tell a different misleading story. It is not the number of their adherents that is the problem, it is the unthinking mass of men moved by the rajshasic instinct to devour and the Asuric ambition to dominate and kill all that does not accept its way of thinking that is the problem.
Vedanta recognised this long back. Hence instead of creating another Religion they insisted on unleashing the power of thought and use it to climb to the Highest where thought is stilled in a consciousness beyond thought and mind. It requires effort, real effort, hence the few adherents. But those who are in it are generally genuine, not all but many.
In Hinduism also there is a lazy mind at play. It is quick to believe anything and everything but not ready to inquire, examine, seek. Sri Aurobindo pointed it out long back. In a letter to his brother Barin he writes.
‘This was the defect of the old yoga—the mind and the Spirit it knew, and it was satisfied with the experience of the Spirit in the mind. But the mind can grasp only the divided and partial; it cannot wholly seize the infinite and indivisible. The mind’s means to reach the infinite are Sannyasa [Renunciation], Moksha [Liberation] and Nirvana, and it has no others. One man or another may indeed attain this featureless Moksha, but what is the gain? The Brahman, the Self, God are ever present. What God wants in man is to embody Himself here in the individual and in the community, to realize God in life.
The old way of yoga failed to bring about the harmony or unity of Spirit and life: it instead dismissed the world as Maya [Illusion] or a transient Play. The result has been loss of life-power and the degeneration of India. As was said in the Gita, “These peoples would perish if I did not do works”—these peoples of India have truly gone down to ruin. A few sannyasins and bairagis [renunciants] to be saintly and perfect and liberated, a few bhaktas [lovers of God] to dance in a mad ecstasy of love and sweet emotion and Ananda [Bliss], and a whole race to become lifeless, void of intelligence, sunk in deep tamas [inertia]—is this the effect of true spirituality? No, we must first attain all the partial experiences possible on the mental level and flood the mind with spiritual delight and illumine it with spiritual light, but afterwards we must rise above. If we cannot rise above, to the supramental level, that is, it is hardly possible to know the world’s final secret and the problem it raises remains unsolved. There, the ignorance which creates a duality of opposition between the Spirit and Matter, between truth of spirit and truth of life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes possible to fully know and fully realize God—to do what is said in the Gita, “To know Me integrally.” The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda—these are the spirit’s five levels. The higher man rises on this ascent the nearer he comes to the state of that highest perfection open to his spiritual evolution. Rising to the Supermind, it becomes easy to rise to the Ananda. One attains a firm foundation in the condition of the indivisible and infinite Ananda, not only in the timeless Parabrahman [Absolute] but in the body, in life, in the world. The integral being, the integral consciousness, the integral Ananda blossoms out and takes form in life. This is the central clue of my yoga, its fundamental principle……
My idea is that the chief cause of the weakness of India is not subjection nor poverty, nor the lack of spirituality or dharma [ethics] but the decline of thought-power, the growth of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see inability or unwillingness to think—thought-incapacity or thought-phobia. Whatever may have been in the middle ages, this state of things is now the sign of a terrible degeneration. The middle age was the night, the time of the victory of ignorance. The modern world is the age of the victory of Knowledge. Whoever thinks most, seeks most, labors most, can fathom and learn the truth of the world, and gets so much more Shakti. If you look at Europe, you will see two things: a vast sea of thought and the play of a huge and fast-moving and yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe is in that. And in the strength of that Shakti it has been swallowing up the world, like the tapaswins [ascetics] of our ancient times, by whose power even the gods of the world were terrified, held in suspense and subjection. People say Europe is running into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions and upsettings are the preconditions of a new creation.
Then look at India. Except for some solitary giants, everywhere there is your “simple man,” that is, the average man who does not want to think and cannot think, who has not the least Shakti but only a temporary excitement. In India, you want the simple thought, the easy “word.” …..’
He concludes prophetically about Bengal.
‘In Bengal this weakness has gone to the extreme. The Bengali has a quick intelligence, emotional capacity and intuition. He is foremost in India in all these qualities. All of them are necessary but they do not suffice. If to these there were added depth of thought, calm strength, heroic courage and a capacity for and pleasure in prolonged labor, the Bengali might be a leader not only of India, but of mankind. But he does not want that, he wants to get things done easily, to get knowledge without thinking, the fruits without labor, siddhi by an easy sadhana [discipline]. His stock is the excitement of the emotional mind. But excess of emotion, empty of knowledge, is the very symptom of the malady. In the end it brings about fatigue and inertia. The country has been constantly and gradually going down. The life-power has ebbed away. What has the Bengali come to in his own country? He cannot get enough food to eat or clothes to wear, there is lamentation on all sides, his wealth, his trade and commerce, his lands, his very agriculture have begun to pass into the hands of others. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and Shakti has abandoned us. We do the sadhana of Love, but where Knowledge and Shakti are not, there Love does not remain, there narrowness and littleness come, and in a little and narrow mind there is no place for Love. Where is Love in Bengal? There is more quarreling, jealousy, mutual dislike, misunderstanding and faction there than anywhere else even in India which is so much afflicted by division.
In the noble heroic age of the Aryan there was not so much shouting and gesticulating, but the endeavor they undertook remained steadfast through many centuries. The Bengali’s endeavor lasts only for a day or two.
You say that what is needed is maddening enthusiasm, to fill the country with emotional excitement. In the time of the Swadeshi [fight for independence, boycott of English goods] we did all that in the field of politics, but what we did is all now in the dust. Will there be a more favorable result in the spiritual field? I do not say there has been no result. There has been. Any movement will produce some result, but for the most part in terms of an increase of possibility. This is not the right method, however, to steadily actualize the thing. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement or any intoxication of the mind the base. I wish to make a large and strong equanimity the foundation of the yoga. I want established on that equality a full, firm and undisturbed Shakti in the system and in all its movements. I want the wide display of the light of Knowledge in the ocean of Shakti. And I want in that luminous vastness the tranquil ecstasy of infinite Love, Delight and Oneness. I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if I can get a hundred complete men, purified of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God. I have no faith in the customary trade of the guru. I do not wish to be a guru. If anybody wakes and manifests from within his slumbering godhead and gets the divine life—be it at my touch or at another’s—this is what I want. It is such men that will raise the country.’
I could go on. But suffice it to say that the Age of Religions is over. What we are witnessing are its last dying spasms, the convulsions of a deathbound society. Islam and Christianity were the gifts of the dark Ages. But with the dawn of a New Age, these Religions are now dated and destined to pass away with the advancement of human consciousness and the growth of an intuitive spiritual intelligence. The work of the ‘Avatar of Dakhineswar’ was sowing the seeds of unity amidst the jarring religions. The work of the ‘poorna Avatar’ is to take humanity beyond religions into the Consciousness of Unity in diversity possible only through the full emergence of the Divine Mother’s Glory. That work is only in its early faint beginnings. We should be careful not to compare it with religions or turn it into one. It is only in proportion as we live it that we will serve it best. Sri Aurobindo cautions us.
‘If a subjective age, the last sector of a social cycle, is to find its outlet and fruition in a spiritualised society and the emergence of mankind on a higher evolutionary level, it is not enough that certain ideas favourable to that turn of human life should take hold of the general mind of the race, permeate the ordinary motives of its thought, art, ethics, political ideals, social effort, or even get well into its inner way of thinking and feeling. It is not enough even that the idea of the kingdom of God on earth, a reign of spirituality, freedom and unity, a real and inner equality and harmony—and not merely an outward and mechanical equalisation and association—should become definitely an ideal of life; it is not enough that this ideal should be actively held as possible, desirable, to be sought and striven after, it is not enough even that it should come forward as a governing preoccupation of the human mind. That would evidently be a very great step forward,—considering what the ideals of mankind now are, an enormous step. It would be the necessary beginning, the indispensable mental environment for a living renovation of human society in a higher type. But by itself it might only bring about a half-hearted or else a strong but only partially and temporarily successful attempt to bring something of the manifest spirit into human life and its institutions. That is all that mankind has ever attempted on this line in the past. It has never attempted to work out thoroughly even that little, except in the limits of a religious order or a peculiar community, and even there with such serious defects and under such drastic limitations as to make the experiment nugatory and without any bearing on human life. If we do not get beyond the mere holding of the ideal and its general influence in human life, this little is all that mankind will attempt in the future. More is needed; a general spiritual awakening and aspiration in mankind is indeed the large necessary motive-power, but the effective power must be something greater. There must be a dynamic re-creating of individual manhood in the spiritual type.
For the way that humanity deals with an ideal is to be satisfied with it as an aspiration which is for the most part left only as an aspiration, accepted only as a partial influence. The ideal is not allowed to mould the whole life, but only more or less to colour it; it is often used even as a cover and a plea for things that are diametrically opposed to its real spirit. Institutions are created which are supposed, but too lightly supposed to embody that spirit and the fact that the ideal is held, the fact that men live under its institutions is treated as sufficient. The holding of an ideal becomes almost an excuse for not living according to the ideal; the existence of its institutions is sufficient to abrogate the need of insisting on the spirit that made the institutions. But spirituality is in its very nature a thing subjective and not mechanical; it is nothing if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life does not flow out of this inward living. Symbols, types, conventions, ideas are not sufficient. A spiritual symbol is only a meaningless ticket, unless the thing symbolised is realised in the spirit. A spiritual convention may lose or expel its spirit and become a falsehood. A spiritual type may be a temporary mould into which spiritual living may flow, but it is also a limitation and may become a prison in which it fossilises and perishes. A spiritual idea is a power, but only when it is both inwardly and outwardly creative. Here we have to enlarge and to deepen the pragmatic principle that truth is what we create, and in this sense first, that it is what we create within us, in other words, what we become. Undoubtedly, spiritual truth exists eternally beyond independent of us in the heavens of the spirit; but it is of no avail for humanity here, it does not become truth of earth, truth of life until it is lived. The divine perfection is always there above us; but for man to become divine in consciousness and act and to live inwardly and outwardly the divine life is what is meant by spirituality; all lesser meanings given to the word are inadequate fumblings or impostures.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
