AT THE FEET OF THE MOTHER
Ask Alok da

How is this ok? How is what is happening ok? How can you call this place an Ashram and allow these things to happen? What am I not able to see? What is it, Mother? Help me, please. My limited mind is not able to comprehend. 🫨🙏🏻🪷

I am not sure what things you are referring to and what is the basis and source of information. Having lived for 40 years in the world, traveling to all the continents and every state of India, having seen number of Ashrams and spiritual and religious places, and then living here for nearly 23 years, I can safely say that it is the safest place in the world and, from the point of view of sadhana, it is the best. These may sound loaded statements, but they are based on decades of experience through number of travels all over.

However, if you are expecting that the Ashram is full of perfect people, then obviously it will be a wrong and illogical expectation. People come here not only from different walks of life but also represent different shades of humanity and in different stages of self-evolution. It cannot be otherwise. Sri Aurobindo explained this well in one of the letters.

‘It is necessary or rather inevitable that in an Asram which is a “laboratory”, as Adhar Das puts it,1 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

(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/35/representation-of-people-in-the-ashram#p12)

I suppose this explains everything. In fact, one of the interesting aspects of the Ashram life is that there are no rules except abstinence from smoking, drinking, politics and sexual Intercourse. Though here too, the Divine Mother, being who She is, always preferred putting a silent pressure on the sadhaks for an inner change rather than through a forcefully imposed outer rule, which changes nothing except outer behavior. There is no doubt a tremendous inner pressure for change, as all who live here begin to experience it. But outwardly a great degree of freedom is given and a lot of compassion and wisdom is shown towards the human defects and difficulties. This compassion and wisdom is the sign of strength. The weak persons feel easily threatened and are quick to punish. Of course this does not mean blind acceptance of anything and everything. There have been instances whence people have either left or sometimes (very rarely though) asked to leave. The key is whether the person is ready to go through the process of change or his very aim has shifted away from the yoga. 

In simple words, the Ashram is not a place of moral policing but of an authentic spiritual change. If you see it this way, you will understand the dynamics and the way of life here. It is not a temporary human creation but a divine manifestation, slow but progressive, with the certainty of the inevitable change. 

Affectionately,

Alok Da

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