What numbers do you need? Who is saying that sincere people are not welcome? They anyways come and become part of the work. Who is shutting the doors to them? The letter is so vague and based on presumptions. Here are two quotes from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that explain this issue of increasing numbers, pulling people, spreading and propaganda.
‘I don’t believe in advertisement except for books etc., and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom—and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere—or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the “religions” and is the reason of their failure. If I tolerate a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient counterweight in that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would defeat that object. I am perfectly “rational”, I assure you, in my methods and I do not proceed merely on any personal dislike of fame. If and so far as publicity serves the Truth, I am quite ready to tolerate it; but I do not find publicity for its own sake desirable.’
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/35/writing-philosophy#p10)
Then again, about the overzealous attitude to spread the teaching, the Mother points out in Her conversation with Satprem.
‘It was like a vision of a great universal Rhythm in which each thing takes its own place and… everything is just fine. And the effort of transformation limited to a small number becomes something FAR MORE precious and FAR MORE powerful for the realization. It’s as if a choice had been made of those who will be the pioneers of the new creation. And all those ideas of “spreading” [the ideal], of “preparing” or churning Matter—childishness. It’s human agitation.
….
In other words, you’re concentrating the work instead of diffusing it everywhere?
No, it may be materially diffused because the individuals aren’t necessarily gathered together. But there aren’t many of them.
That idea of an urgent need to “prepare” humanity for the new creation, that impatience has disappeared.
The realization must first take place in a few.
Exactly.
Take for instance a book like yours (but I’ve known this from the beginning), a book of that sort will have fulfilled its full purpose if it touches just a dozen people. It doesn’t need to sell by the thousands. If it touches a dozen people, it will have fulfilled its purpose to the full. That’s how it is.
I saw that, I have seen that so concretely.3 Besides those who are capable of preparing for the supramental transformation and the realization, whose number is necessarily very limited, there should be increasingly developed, in the midst of the ordinary human mass, a higher humanity that had towards the future or promised supramental being the same attitude as animality, for instance, has towards man. What is needed, besides those who work for the transformation and are ready for it, is a higher or intermediate humanity that would have found in itself or in life this harmony with life—this HUMAN harmony—and that would have the same sense of worship, of devotion, of faithful dedication to “something” that seems to it so superior that it doesn’t even attempt to realize it, but which it worships and whose influence and protection it feels the need of—and the need to live in that influence and to have the joy of being under that protection…. It was so clear. But not that anguish and agony of wanting something that eludes you because—because it isn’t yet your destiny to have it, and because the amount of necessary transformation is premature for your existence, and so it creates a disorder and a suffering.’
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/agenda/06/november-27-1965#p8)
This is the conversation being quoted. See what She is saying…..’a book of that sort will have fulfilled its full purpose if it touches just a dozen people. It doesn’t need to sell by the thousands. If it touches a dozen people, it will have fulfilled its purpose to the full. That’s how it is.’….is there any doubt about the number game! Basic knowledge of the English language is enough to understand that the work has to spread to a few first and that is enough (just a DOZEN people touched by the book and not THOUSANDS). Is there any ambiguity still?
Of course, people are free to have their views and opinions. But to think other views are all adverse forces at play is indicative of something. And let us be clear about sincerity. It is a most difficult quality to practice. Mere wanting to do the yoga or reading and cogitating or professing or even meditating and claiming to be a disciple and devotee are not even a beginning of sincerity. Sincerity begins when we try to live the Teaching, in whatever measure. It is to have only one occupation and preoccupation, – the Divine and thereby to turn and lift all we think and feel and do towards the very highest.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
