Editorial

Late Professor Amitava Chattopadhyay

(Ritam, Vol.5, No.1, pp.3-8)
The Message Divine

It would certaintly not be a figure of rhetoric to say that Sri

Aurobindo was an original thinker and like all great philosophers he
always referred to the germinal philosophical ideas of The Vedas and
The Upanishads. He writes, “I began my yoga in 1904 without a Guru;
In 1908 I received important help from a Marathi Yogi and discovered
the foundations of my Sadhana; but from that time till the Mother
came to India I received no spiritual help from anyone else. My
Sadhana, before and afterwards was not founded upon books but upon
personal experiences that crowded on me from within. But in the jail I
had the Gita and the Upanishads with me, practised the Yoga of the
Gita and meditated with the help of the Upanishads...”1

The self-experience might help in to move forward to self-

knowledge.

chetasā sarvakarmāni mayi samngasya matparah

buddhiyogamupāśritya machchittah satatam bhava.
(Gita - 18.57)

Surrender, by your mind, all the works that you have done or will
be doing and after this surrender by pure and universal yoga and with
complete devotion try to concentrate all your thinkings only to me and
for nothing else, only to me. “The realisaton of the psychic being, its
awakening and the bringing of it depend mainly on the extent to which
one can develop a personal relation with the Divine, a relation of
Bhakti, love, reliance, self-giving, rejection of the insistences of the
separating and self-asserting mental, vital and physical ego.”2

Īśvarah sarvabhutanām hridddśe'rjuna tisthati

bhrāmayan sarvabhutāni yantrārudham mayayā.
(Gita - 18.61)
 Oh Arjuna! The Lord is in the heart of all beings and he directs
their movements like machine-driven captive dolls.

“To become divine in the nature would and in the symbol of

humanity is the perfection for which we were created.”3

It is believed that human beings can develop their own Self-

conscience and they have to put all efforts with deep concentration for
it.

Sri Aurobindo says, he received the Adesh to accomplish the

three missions - the three strides of Narayana -the family, the nation,
and the humanity. Since his return from England and even before that
he had been accomplishing the first two and yet had to fulfill the third
one.

In communion with God (Yoga) Sri Aurobindo strode long with the
prayer, “If thou art, then thou knowest my heart. ....1 ask only to be
allowed to live and work for this people whom I love and to whom I
pray that I may devote my life”.4 He was a Karma yogin. His aim of
Sadhana was not for some imeffable goal, by self-annulment. “Let ours
be the path of perfection, not of abandonment, let our aim be victory in
the battle, not the escape from all conflict.”5

Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary gradualism is evident in his view on

spiritual philosophy for possibilities of human progress in life. One lives
constantly in ignorance and unless the mind of ignorance is replaced
by mind of light one cannot follow the true path and this was the
indispensable preparation before any integral transformation can take
place. The search for truth is ultimate goal or the evolutionary voyage
of life. For true progress and acquiring the capacity of knowing the
truth of our being, or in other words, what we are truly created for,
what we call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular
and constant manner reject from us and eliminate ·whatever
contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this
way, slowly but steadily all the elements of our existence will be
organised in a homogenious whole around our psychic being, waiting
for The hour of God.
 A relentless critic of rationalism Sri Aurobindo does not fail to
indicate, the narrowly limited, though undeniable influence in the
integral scheme of life in reality and divine spirituality. The more man
deepens his in-look into himself and broadens his outlook in the world
the more he realises and integralises supreme consciousness and
spiritual sense of reality. The first necessity is the practice of
concentration of one's consciousness within oneself. The realisation is
a progressive process. It has to be remembered that man's inward
journey knows no end; in other words he cannot discover his own
spiritual identity without ceasing to be what he is. He is indeed faced
with endless possibilities. “What is this that has happened to me? I
believed that I had a mission to work for the people of my country and
until that work was done, I should have thy protection. Why then am I
here and on such a charge? A day passed and a second day and a
third, when a voice came to me from within, 'wait and see'.”6

The psychic mind is in the process of evolution for growth and

development of spiritual knowledge. There are three steps of self-
achievement of soul, which are three parts of one knowledge, the
three steps for self-realisation.7 The first is discovery of the soul, not
the outer soul of thought and emotion and desire, but the inner soul,
the psychic entity, the divine element within us. One has to enthrone
the soul, the divine psychic entity in place of the ego. This first step in
self-realisation persuades the individual to a self-identity separated
from the world and at the same time takes him to the world, one alone
in a crowd, yet not an alienated one. The inner soul, then, becomes the
dominant nature and mind, life and body that is to say the total vital
life becomes its instrument. The individual, from time to time, gets the
true adesh from within as the direction of action and behaviour of vital
being. However one must be sure of the call and of his answer to that.
The ego may stand on the way to true response to the voice and “only
a transient emotion leaps like an unsteady flame moved by the
intensity of the Voice or its sweetness or grandeour...”8 Then there can
be little surety for realisation. “I remembered then that a month or
more before my arrest, a call had
come to me to put aside all activity to go into seclusion and to look.
into myself, so that I might enter into closer communion with Him. I
was weak and could not accept the call. My work was very clear to me
and in the pride of my heart I thought that unless I was there, it would
suffer or even fail and cease; therefore I would not leave it.”9

The second step of realisation is “to become aware of the eternal

self in us, unborn, and the one” self, “above the body, life, mind.” That
Divine Self is “above and free and unattached as the static. Self in all
and dynamic too as the active Divine Being and Power ..... containing
the world and pervading it as well as transcending it, manifesting all
cosmic aspects.”10

“It seemed to me that He spoke to me again and said, ”The

bonds you had not strength to break, I have broken for you, because it
is not my will nor was it ever my intention that that sould continue. I
have had an other thing for you to do and it is for that I have brought
you here, to teach you what you could not learn for yourself and to
train you for my work.”11

The aim of the psychic being is to form an individual being

individualised, personalised around the divine centre. The psychic
being organises all the experiences of external life to realise a
particular attitude towards the Divine. This attitude “liberates and
universalises; even if our action still proceeds in the dynamics of vital”
nature, “it no longer binds or misleads once the psychic being is
awakened in the light of self-knowledge.”12

At this stage of realisation, one feels the presence of the self-soul

in the waking daily consciousness, its influence fills, dominates,
transforms the mind and vital and their movements, even the
physical.13 “Then he placed the Gita in my hands. His strength entered
into me and I was able to do the sadhana of the Gita. I was able not
only to understand intellectually but to realise what Sri Krishna
demanded of Arjuna and what he demands of those who aspire to do
his work....”14 Hereafter Sri Aurobindo expresses his experiences about
the various aspects of the jail and
its surroundings. The Magistrate, the jailor and others. And in what
forms he visualized them. It was Vasudeva whom he visualised in
everybody and in every material aspect of the jail.15 To him Sanatan
Hindu Dharma has not so much ‘to be believed as lived’. “That which
the Gita teaches is nor a human but a divine action; nor the
performance of social duties but the abandonment of all other
standards of duty or conduct for a selfless performance of divine will
and working through our nature. In other words, “the Gita is not a book
of practical ethic but of spiritual life.”16

In his Uttarpara Speech, we get a glimpse of Sri Aurobindo's

spiritual life. However he was the Sadhaka of the Divine Perfection -
the Puma Yogin. The entire purpose of Yoga to Sri Aurobindo was to
have the truth that the adesh he received in jail, “....it is for the
Sanatan Dharma that they arise, it is for the world and not for
themselves that they arise.”17 Released from Alipore jail his sadhana
progressed to attain Siddhi in the Puma Yoga, to bring all mankind in
the same divine perfection : this is the third step of self-realisation.
“.....to know the Divine Being who is once our supreme transcendent
Self, the Cosmic Being, foundation of our universality, and the Divinity
within, of which our psychic being, the true evolving individual in our
nature, is a portion, a spark, a flame growing into the enternal Fire
from which it was lit....”18 However for the Victory Day which was to
come at Pondicherry we had to wait till November 24, 1926.

Coming out of jail he was at a cross road looking at the road-map

to know which way to move. It appeared to him that a hush, a silence
had fallen on the total environment. “But one thing I knew, that it was
the Almighty Power of God which has raised that cry, the hope, so it
was the same Power which had sent down that silence.”19 He realised
that he was to walk alone with goal:

I walked on the high-wayed Seat of Solomon

Where Shankaracharya's tiny temple stands
Facing Infinity from Time's edge, alone
 On the bare ridge ending earth’s vain romance.
Around me was a formless solitude :
All had become one strange Unnamable,
An unborn sole Reality world-nude.
Topless and fathomless, for ever still20

Man is here, in the world to fulfil himself. His body, life and mind,
his history, and his present environment provide him with all that he
needs to fulfil himself by exceeding himself.

Amitava Chattopadhyay

Reference:

1. Sri Aurobindo. On Himself. Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram 1995.

p. 68 2. Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. The Psychic Being. Selections.
Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1997. p. 119.
3. Sri Aurobindo. The Hour of God. Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
1997, p. 40.
4. Sri Aurobindo. "Uttarpara Speech." Rtam, Vol. I, No.1, May 2002.
p. 18.
5. The Hour of God. p. 20.
6. Uttarpara Speech. p. 13.
7. The Psychic Being. pp. 101-102.
8. The Hour of God. p. 5.
9. Uttarpara Speech. p. 13.
10. The Psychic Being. p. 102.
11. Uttarpara Speech. pp. 13-14.
12. The Psychic Being. p. 101.
13. Ibid. pp. 102-103.
14. Uttarpara Speech. p. 14.
15. Ibid. pp. 14-15.
16. Sri Aurobindo. Essays on the Gita. 9th ed. Pondicherry : Sri
Aurobindo Ashram. 1996. p. 31.
17. Uttarpara Speech. p. 19.
18. The Psychic Being. pp. 101-102.
19. Uttarpara Speech. p. 12.
20. Sri Aurobindo. Collected Poems. Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo
Ashram. 1994. p. 163.