Thoughts
and Aphorisms 34
34. O Misfortune,
blessed be thou; for through thee I have seen the face of my Lover.
[Sri Aurobindo:
Thoughts and Aphorisms]
When something happens which is unexpected,
unwanted, undesired and un-hoped for, and which does not add to our material benefit
or vital pleasure or to our egoistic satisfaction and advantage, in our common
human ignorance, it is called misfortune.
The Mother has said:
“When things happen which are not what we expect,
what we hope for, what we want, which are contrary to our desires, in our
ignorance we call them misfortunes and lament.”
However, we may observe the deeper and further
consequences of the unwanted events and we find that they have led us more towards
the Divine Realization. And we may also see that when Man continues to be in
what he called a fortunate life, he is then not on the Way towards the Divine,
but he is passing away and wasting his time in easy and pleasant activities and
enjoyments and circumstances, often leading him towards a life having no
progress to our real Goal : the Divine Realization and the Supramental
Manifestation. We may be materially and vitally engrossed in a so-called
fortunate life, and we continue to be in Ignorance without any Progress to the
Higher Realization.
When Man has the Realization of the Divine, he goes
above the dualities like ‘fortune’ and ‘misfortune’ etc — as he surpasses the
then the mental limits. Sri Aurobindo has discussed about this in The Synthesis
of Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo says:
“When this liberation of the nature comes, there is a
liberation also of all the spiritual sense of the dualities of Nature. In the
lower nature the dualities are the inevitable effect of the play of the gunas
on the soul affected by the formations of the sattwic, rajasic and tamasic ego.
The knot of this duality is an ignorance which is unable to seize on the
spiritual truth of things and concentrates on the imperfect appearances, but
meets them not with a mastery of their inner truth, but with a strife and a
shifting balance of attraction and repulsion, capacity and incapacity, liking
and disliking, pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, acceptance and repugnance;
all life is represented to us as a tangle of these things, of the pleasant and
the unpleasant, the beautiful and the unbeautiful, truth and falsehood, fortune
and misfortune, success and failure, good and evil, the inextricable double web
of Nature. Attachment to its likings and repugnances keeps the
soul bound in this web of good and evil, joys and sorrows. The seeker of
liberation gets rid of attachment, throws away from his soul the dualities, but
as the dualities appear to be the whole act, stuff and frame of life, this
release would seem to be most easily compassed by a withdrawal from life,
whether a physical withdrawal, so far as that is possible while in the body, or
an inner retirement, a refusal of sanction, a liberating distaste, vairāgya,
for the whole action of Nature. There is a separation of the soul from Nature.
Then the soul watches seated above and unmoved, udāsīna, the
strife of the gunas in the natural being and regards as an impassive witness
the pleasure and pain of the mind and body. Or it is able to impose its
indifference even on the outer mind and watches with the impartial calm or the
impartial joy of the detached spectator the universal action in which it has no
longer an active inner participation.”
[Sri
Aurobindo: Synthesis of Yoga]
Barindranath Chaki
Written on 7-9-2012,
Posted on 13-9-2012.
Posted on 13-9-2012.
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