Sri Aurobindo on Himself*
Sri Aurobindo
….I BELIEVE I have as many hours of hard external work
to do as almost anyone in the Ashram and I am not aware that I have any leisure
or spend even the very short time I have for concentration in a blissful
quietism communing with the silent Brahman.
Even my concentration is of the nature of action and it is not an easy
quietistic contemplation as your informants seem to imagine.
I may add
that I have not spent my life shouting down the quietistic ideal and sadhana
without knowing why they followed it.
All the experiences that the quietistic sadhana can give, I have had,
the realisation of the featureless Parabrahman, Maya, Sunya, the illusoriness
of the world, the Akshara Purusha. I
know also perfectly well why they turned away from the world and have gone
through all the million difficulties which they did not care to face. None of the difficulties of which you
enumerate one or two are strange to me – only I did not put the blame of them
on anybody or on the Yoga and I overcame them.
Anybody can
do the quietistic Yoga, who wants to do it.
But if any one imagines that they are easy and that these difficulties
do not occur there or that the sadhakas of these paths are all of them
perfected saints free from the human passions and defects which you see here
among the sahakas, he is labouring under a great delusion. No path of Yoga is so easy and to imagine
that by leaving the world and plunging inside oneself one automatically shuffles
off the vital and external nature is an illusion. If I ask you to develop equanimity and egolessness by work done
with opening to the Divine, it is because it is so that I did it and it is so
that it can best be done and not by retiring into oneself and shutting oneself
away from all that can disturb equanimity and excite the ego. As for concentration and perfection of the
being and the finding of the inner self, I did as much of it walking in the
streets of Calcutta to my work or in dealing with men during my work as alone
and is solitude….
* From a
Letter: Courtesy Sri Aurobindo’s Action, August, 2004.