Integral Yoga & Human Defects (V): the Divine in the Other & in Everything

When I arrived in Auroville in 1972, the new book of writings from Sri Aurobindo I discovered then was a thin one, but it just blew my mind once again, just as his ‘Life Divine’ had done before. It was his ‘Thoughts & Aphorisms’, many of them mentioned and quoted already over the years on this blog, and in my recent articles too, but their value is so deep and universal, I’ll have to use some of them in the present article again. The following few, in the ‘Jnana’ part of the booklet, when I read them long ago, took my breath away by the hugeness of what they actually meant. It went way beyond the very beautiful but still limited beliefs of those who adore Jesus-Christ, or those who adore Vishnu, the Preserver (in contrast to Brahma the Creator and Shiva the Destroyer, in Hinduism). Here is what Sri Aurobindo says:

22. Forgiveness is praised by the Christian and the Vaishnava, but for me, I ask, “What have I to forgive and whom?”

23. God struck me with a human hand; shall I say then, “I pardon Thee thy insolence, O God”?

24. God gave me good in a blow. Shall I say, “I forgive thee, O Almighty One, the harm and the cruelty, but do it not again”?

25. When I pine at misfortune and call it evil, or am jealous and disappointed, then I know that there is awake in me again the eternal fool.

And Sri Aurobindo adds: ‘… but the wisdom that is not mine, sees the good that is coming and approves.’

28. God is a great and cruel Torturer because He loves. You do not understand this, because you have not seen and played with Krishna.

30. I have forgotten what vice is and what virtue; I can only see God, His play in the world and His will in humanity.

Mocking our human reason, which tries to judge from superficial appearances what is good or evil, it is only with irony that Sri Aurobindo describes its usual way of reasoning:

32. What I wished or thought to be the right thing, does not come about; therefore it is clear that there is no All Wise one who guides the world but only blind Chance or a brute Causality.

It is from his own experience that Sri Aurobindo knew better than human reason, by the time he was writing those Aphorisms: when in 1908 he had been all of a sudden arrested and thrown into the Alipore jail of Calcutta, under such a serious accusation that it could mean death for him, in his surprise he anxiously complained to the Divine: where was the Protection he thought was assured to him as long as his life was dedicated to his mission of freeing his country from the British rule?

Well, the Divine responded that there was no other choice but this drastic solution for stopping Aurobindo in his political tracks, after he had ignored the milder promptings given previously to him to quit – as he would have to, for the Divine had an even more important mission for him! He had done enough for India, by the way: others would now rise up to continue that task, and India would anyway become free during the major world-changes to come…

And the Divine did promise to also protect him personally now against any real danger from the incarceration and court-case, assuring him he would actually come out free. Well, a year to the day later, at the time of the decisive judgement, his lawyer in his speech suddenly uttered divinely inspired and inspiring, prophetic words about the worldwide renown and gratitude that would one day be there for the accused man, as the great benefactor of Humanity that he would become. In the stunned total silence everyone had fallen into, the miracle happened: to everyone’s amazement Aurobindo was purely and simply acquitted.

But there was even more to this incredible story: during that one year in prison, he had been given by the Divine, day after day, all the diverse spiritual experiences he would need as a basis for the real, immense Mission the Divine had in store for him: to go further than all that and find the new, Integral Yoga that would enable Humanity as a whole to break out from the Mental Consciousness imprisoning it and preventing it from further evolution towards a higher and truer Consciousness. For this intense, year-long, spiritual training, the Divine had invaded Aurobindo’s own prison life in the form of Sri Krishna, the Divine as the Eternal Lover of our Souls, revealing Himself in everything and everyone around him, including the lawyers and judges!… As Aurobindo explained later in his famous speech at Uttarpara, the first one after his liberation:

‘It was Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled. “Now do you fear?” He said, “I am in all men and I overrule their actions and their words. My protection is still with you and you shall not fear. This case which is brought against you, leave it in my hand. It is not for you. It was not for the trial that I brought you here but for something else. The case itself is only a means for my work and nothing more.”

Any wonder then that in 1913 Sri Aurobindo was writing this sublime words of gratitude:

35. O Misfortune, blessed be thou; for through thee I have seen the face of my Lover.

So after all this,  you, my readers, have better stop considering automatically ‘the others’ to be the obvious source and cause of all your miseries, and start seeing in all that is happening the Hand of the Divine through various outer circumstances and human instruments, – most of them, given our present human unconsciousness, totally unaware that they are actually participating in an exquisitely complex and minutely arranged Divine Plan gradually unfolding in this Terrestrial Evolution. Through all those occurrences each of us is led as best as possible to the correct understanding of how it all works, with the Divine Grace being there for all, even when the outer event seems to be ‘bad’, or unjust, or…

The faster we will learn to have more and more constantly this new perception and understanding of each situation, of whatever is happening, the faster we will become peaceful and happy…. just as Sri Aurobindo himself showed us the way to be through those so precious Aphorisms of his, now from the ‘Bhakti’ part of them:

444. There are two things in God which men call evil, that which they cannot understand at all and that which they misunderstand and, possessing, misuse; it is only what they grope after half-vainly and dimly understand that they call good and holy. But to me all things in Him are lovable.

445. They say, O my God, that I am mad because I see no fault in Thee; but if I am indeed mad with Thy love, I do not wish to recover my sanity.

446. “Errors, falsehoods, stumblings!” they cry. How bright and beautiful are Thy errors, O Lord! Thy falsehoods save Truth alive; by Thy stumblings the world is perfected.

447. Life, Life, Life, I hear the passions cry; God, God, God, is the soul’s answer. Unless thou seest and lovest Life as God only, then is Life itself a sealed joy to thee.

448. “He loves her”, the senses say; but the soul says “God God God”. That is the all-embracing formula of existence.

449. If thou canst not love the vilest worm and the foulest of criminals, how canst thou believe that thou hast accepted God in thy spirit?

450. To love God, excluding the world, is to give Him an intense but imperfect adoration.

488. I should love my neighbour not because he is neighbourhood, — for what is there in neighbourhood and distance? nor because the religions tell me he is my brother, — for where is the root of that brotherhood? but because he is myself. Neighbourhood and distance affect the body, the heart goes beyond them. Brotherhood is of blood or country or religion or humanity, but when self-interest clamours what becomes of this brotherhood? It is only by living in God and turning mind and heart and body into the image of his universal unity that that deep, disinterested and unassailable love becomes possible.

It doesn’t even stop there: with that Love comes also the Honey of this Delight of Being and Becoming that is part of the very Essence of the Divine, for it is the Ananda part of SatChitAnanda. In this New Consciousness now dawning on us and transforming more and more the way we live each moment of our life, the human defects due to our human ego gradually fade away with it, just naturally, as we simply outgrow them. It is this wonderful Divine Honey which we start tasting more and more permanently, and this is the straight way to this ‘Life Divine’ promised to us, right here on Earth. It’s up to each of us to use the ultimate secret given to us by Sri Aurobindo in yet another one of  his ‘Thoughts & Glimpses’: