Why Sri Aurobindo?
This is a great opportunity today, on the birthday anniversary of Sri Aurobindo, on the august day of the fifteenth August, for all of us to remember Him and His Purpose and to renew our Aspiration and our Hope for the New Way, for the New Consciousness and Force and Being, for the Progress and Transformation towards the New Man, the New Race.
Sri Aurobindo is the Person, who has given the most hopeful meaning of the human existence, of the Creation. He has shown us the greatest Hope, the greatest Dream, of Joy and Bliss and the Widest Consciousness and of an eternal, immortal existence. He was not satisfied with Moksha or Nirvana, nor did He ask us to be so satisfied. We shall have to be transformed into an immortal Race, a new Race, who will not live in Darkness or in Ignorance or in Transience and Death.
Sri Aurobindo showed us the Way, the New Way , transcending and surpassing Moksha and Nirvaana. You need not leave the World, the Manifestation — for everything is He, the All-Existence. The Creation, the Manifestation, is His Will — can anyone go beyond His Will? For, in everyone, He is manifest and He is hidden.
Sri Aurobindo and The Mother [Mira Alfassa] have assured us of Their help on the Way. Has not He told us so in the following words?
And yet I know my footprints' track shall be
A pathway towards Immortality.
[The Pilgrim of the Night]
OOOOO
When one refers to Sri Aurobindo or His Collaborator, The Mother, Mirra Alfassa, one may directly or indirectly face the questions: Why Sri Aurobindo? What does Sri Aurobindo stand for? What is His message for us?
At times, the questions may not come to us directly in that manner, but during discussions or conversations, one finds that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother are referred to, but often with a lot of misunderstandings, as in the case of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs or in the case of The Failed Prophet, another derogatory book written by N. Nandhivarman on Sri Aurobindo. Throughout the world now, such cases are rare, but these two books have shown the depth of darkness possible in the human mind in understanding and knowing Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Time and the community, more or less open and devoted to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, will definitely give the due and proper answer to these attempts of the Dark Forces! About Peter Heehs, I have commented in ASPIRATION [http://newreflexions.ning.com] as follows:
Having come to read and know all that is written by Heehs on Sri Aurobindo, I feel and understand that an anti-Divine force is active in and through him, and in course of time, he will be swept away by the current and force of Time into oblivion!
About The Failed prophet, my comments will be the same!
However, besides these rare people who like to live in Darkness, there are some others who have respect and reverence for Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, but their appreciation and understanding are insufficient and incomplete and sometimes incorrect and without much of depth. One such person is Rajneesh or Osho, who stated that Sri Aurobindo was a very great and rare scholar, but there was lack of Realization. Definitely, that was an expression of a sheer ignorance!
Often, persons who had earlier direct or indirect links or contacts with Sri Aurobindo failed to appreciate Him. I had a teacher in my college life — he had also had a deep and versatile knowledge in music and in order to learn instrumental music, I came in good contact with him. He was unmarried till the last. He was Satyen Chakravarty, son of someone, who was very close to Sri Aurobindo. He often spoke of Sri Aurobindo, whatever he came to know of Him. In 1959, I had the last meeting with him, as he questioned me, "If He is really a Divine Avatar, saying that through Supermind, Man will conquer Death, then why did He die? He really failed." Obviously, that was the last meeting. I tried to refute him, but he would not listen to me. So, I had to leave him, and never did I have any more of opportunity to meet him again.
So, some people are always there who has failed understand Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and they tried to describe Them through the language of their own darkness and Ignorance.
However, it is necessary for as many persons as possible to learn and know and ascertain what is the Purpose and the Way of which Sri Aurobindo spoken to us. And it is also equally necessary for us to know What Sri Aurobindo IS.
OOOOO
He has asked us to go within and find the Inner Being, the Inner Divine, the Psychic Being. He has told us to find also the deep-routed falsehood hiding in us and solve the riddle of existence.
I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
At the very root of things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep
On the Dragon's outspread wings.
[God's Labour: Sri Aurobindo]
In order to conquer all Darkness for the progress and evolution of a New Race, Sri Aurobindo, in His unique Sadhana, had entered the worlds of Darkness and unconsciousness to bring the required Transformation.
I MADE an assignation with the Night;
In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous :
In my breast carrying God's deathless light
I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.
[The Pilgrim of the Night]
He has asked us to find the secrets within and proceed towards the New Becoming. To show us the Way, Sri Aurobindo had to find out the Way himself, for it was an untrodden way, a New Way . He had to work hard, undertaking an untried spiritual research.
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
[God's Labour: Sri Aurobindo]
And what did He tell us to do?
A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate."
[God's Labour: Sri Aurobindo]
Sri Aurobindo was Himself an Adventure of Consciousness, as Satprem called Him. In the language of His own epic poem Savitri, He was a 'Voyager upon uncharted routes, fronting the danger of the Unknown and adventuring across enormous realms.'
A big change will come on earth — it has already started coming, since the 29th February 1956, when the Supramental Consciousness descended on earth, as declared by The Mother.
Sri Aurobindo has said :
Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come
Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;
A sudden bliss shall run through every limb
And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray
And meet the deity in common things.
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.
Of the Mission for which Sri Aurobindo and The Mother descended on earth, one can have a clear Idea from what Savitri has stated :
My soul and his indissolubly linked
In the one task for which our lives were born
To raise the world to God in deathless Light.
To bring God down to the world on earth
We came to change the earthly life to life divine.
Thus, They came to change the earthly life.
And with the Divine words that came from Sri Aurobindo, an attempt has been made for remembering and adoring Him on His birthday, the birthday of the Hope of Mankind, also for remembering and adoring The Mother.
OOOOO
Sri Aurobindo, as the world knows, was a philosopher par excellence, a poet par excellence, a rare and superb visionary of evolution. But that is not the complete truth about Him. Further, He has been described as the Hope of Man. And Satprem, a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Mira Alfassa, has described Sri Aurobindo as the Adventure of Consciousness. He was not only an Adventurer of Consciousness, but Himself the Adventure.
Yes, He was an Explorer of Consciousness, and further, He was also the builder of the New World , basing on the New and a Higher Consciousness, the Supramental Consciousness, a much higher level of Consciousness, which was hitherto unmanifest, and which is discovered by Him. And He has shown us the Way, the Integral Way to the New Realisation, not of realising the Divine Consciousness and merging into It, transcending and leaving the Manifestation, the World and the Universe, forgetting the mankind and its past and present and future. He did not teach us to have Nirvana, or Moksha, or of reaching the Heaven and staying there forever hereafter. He did not ask us to return to the Source, to the Origin. He has given us a Way to discover and manifest and realise our own possibilities, our human and also our superhuman and divine possibilities, step by step. He tells us about transforming our individual existence and also the world, breaking all our personal and egoistic limits, becoming one with our earth, as vast as our earth. To divinise and supramentalise the world was ans is the Task he performed and asked us to perform.
As a philosopher, we find Him to be at the topmost level of Consciousness, denying none of the philosophical truths reached by the earlier philosophers, but by accepting and transcending and integrating them all in a new synthesis into one whole Truth.
As a poet, he shows us the Way to the Future Poetry, and His Poems were expressions of the Truth, which He saw and realised and lived, and which creations of highers planes of mind and Consciousness.
The Mother has said :
What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world's history is not a teaching, not even a revelation ; it is a decisive action, direct from the Supreme.
[Continued]
Barindranath Chaki
15-08-2010
[Published in AUROSPACE on the occasion of Sri Aurobindo's Birthday on 15-08-2010]
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