-16_A Canadian Question

 

Question:

    IT is written in A Practical Guide to Integral Yoga¹:

 

The physical nearness to the Mother is indispensable for the fullness of the sadhana on the physical plane. Transformation of the physical and external being is not possible otherwise.

 

My question is: How are we to interpret these words in the light of the Mother's recent passing? Does this mean that a full transformation is no longer possible to the aspirant? Or has discipleship on the material level in the path of the Integral Yoga come to an end?

 

Answer:

    Obviously, the immediate programme of a physical transformation is postponed – not cancelled.

But what we have been given is not less of a miracle. Mother has prepared for us her new body in the inner world, in the subtle physical which is as living and tangible as her physical body even though not as concrete. In one of her last Notes2 she refers to this new transformed body and she describes it as presented to her vision. That body she has built up in her long arduous labours, built up in a complete form and left with us and with humanity.

    This new body of hers, prepared behind the material curtain, she sought to infuse into the material form, even press into it or

   

¹ Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1970, p. 179.

² Notes on the Way: Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education – August 1972 (Notes on 25-3-72). 

Page – 88

force into it this new element; but Matter and man's physical nature were not yet ready: Earth still considered it as an intrusion, as something foreign. The material casing broke down in consequence – perhaps not broke down, rather broke through: but that must be another story.

But it is there living and glorious in its beauty and power and is still at work within us, and around us in the world, incessantly, towards the final consummation of its material embodiment.

What is expected of us is to see this golden Mother within us and try to become, as she always wanted, her golden children, within and without.

Sri Aurobindo speaks of an inner mind, an inner vital, an inner physical. Only the other day the passage was read out at the playground-meditation.³ The golden body, the new body, is formed out of an inner mind, an inner vital and an inner physical, renewed and reshaped. We can show our love for her, requite the debt that we owe to her Grace by admitting her Presence into our physical being and allowing her to do the work she has undertaken to do.

 

(2)

 

For us now it is time to make amends for the lapses of the past – there were lapses, indeed, grievous lapses. So long her physical body was our protection; we did not suffer the full consequences of our Karma because her body acted as buffer: it broke the force of the impact of the karma and reduced its evil effects to a minimum. Her body bore our burden and relieved us of the misery otherwise due to us. Mankind, the the world even, does not know the saving Grace that her material frame brought to them They would have gone down to destruction and dissolution but for the presence of the Divine Body.

The world has survived, mankind has an assured future, that is the work done by her body. It aimed at a little more, to show us something of the concrete form of the future, but evidently that was not to be, because something from us also,

 

³ Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Toga, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 22, pp. 307-8. 

Page – 89

from the world and mankind, some helping hand in the labour was needed – we remember her ringing words: Si l’humanité consentait à être spiritualisée – well, that is the minimum, that minimum was also not granted to her body. Her body was made so easily available to all without any trouble and effort on our part that we lost all sense of the precious things brought to us, brought to our very door. We did not know how to make use of it and have the true benefit out of it. Many a time she did say something to us to that effect regretfully, we wasted a treasure like the pampered prodigal son.

It is regrettable but she has left no cause for our regret She has left with us the true source of her protective power, her living Consciousness concretised in the earth's atmosphere, in the personal atmosphere of each one of us. We have only to open our grateful eyes and see it. The ladder has been taken away, but she has come nearer to us and a little uplift will replace us within her arms.

Since we have no longer the support of her body on which we depended almost exclusively, we are compelled to seek the true support, the support of her, consciousness, the inner reality – her inner presence, her living Person within – which her body represented, whose acquaintance we were not careful enough to cultivate. Now we are thrown upon the only alternative available. The way will be arduous; we could have much more easily mounted up the ladder of consciousness with the aid of her body, almost playfully like children. Now a little bit of austerity will be needed to go on our own, the austerity will be needed to bring our external life and physical consciousness in line with her own consciousness, to prepare them, to make them ready. Her material body offered an unconditional help and protection, now all that will be conditional – conditional upon our willing co-operation, our happy and conscious collaboration – of course the Grace will be always there. Once she asked us point-blank, for the crisis was upon us – Are you ready? Almost unthinkingly, in a gesture of bravado and gallantry, many answered "yes, we are." But we were not in fact.

    The task then for us and for the world is to make ourselves ready, that is to say, make our physical being and consciousness

 

 "If only mankind consented to be spiritualised." 

Page – 90