January 01, 2009

Sitting at Sri Aurobindo’s feet to hear him

All Life is Yoga

  • by Aju Mukhopadhyay
    In an age when the purport of spirituality
    has been lightened, mixed with sensuousness and frivolity
    I feel like sitting at Sri Aurobindo’s feet to hear him:
    ‘The delight of spirit is ever new,
    the forms of beauty it takes innumerable,
    its godhead ever young and the taste of delight, rasa,
    of the infinite eternal and inexhaustible.’
    ‘Spirituality cannot be called upon
    to deal with life by non-spiritual method . . .
    always failed and will continue to fail . . .
    for ‘The spiritual evolution of Nature
    is still in process and incomplete, . . . only beginning . . . .
    ‘Any premature attempt at a large scale spiritual life
    is exposed to vitiation . . . .
    the individual must be preoccupied with . . . changing
    his mind and life into conformity
    with the truth of the spirit’-
    While all this are mined
    out of his golden treasure of The Life Divine,
    I venture to go into his more pungent
    but luscious words found in a letter-

    ‘The supramental can only make
    the best conditions for anybody
    who can open up to it . . . .
    But it could not dispense with the necessity of sadhana.
    If it did, the logical consequence would be that
    the whole earth, men, dogs and worms
    would suddenly wake up
    to find themselves supramental.
    There would be no need of an Ashram or of Yoga.’

    ‘An Asram means’, he wrote,
    ‘the house or houses of a teacher
    or the Master of spiritual philosophy
    in which he receives and lodges those
    who come to him for the teaching and practice . . . .
    it is only what has been indicated above
    and nothing more.’
    And, no Ashram without the Gurus, he wrote to clear the point.

    About the institutions he wrote in The Human Cycle-
    ‘The existence of institutions is sufficient
    to abrogate the need of insisting on the spirit
    that made the institutions.
    But spirituality is . . . nothing
    if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life
    does not flow out of this inward living.’

    ‘All life is yoga’- Yes he wrote.
    But without squandering its meaning,
    following Sri Aurobindo we may say
    All life of a Yogi is Yoga-
    not that of an ordinary man, dog or worm.
    © Aju Mukhopadhyay, 2008

1 comment:

  1. Thanks Mr.Tushar Mahapatra, nice posting.
    Aju Mukhopadhyay

    ReplyDelete