EWS #25: On what is Yoga and what is not Yoga (1)
Feb 23, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:00):
Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste. A question totally unrelated to our subject. Some people say that Namaskar is Sanskrit and others say Namaste, could you enlighten us?
Sraddhalu (0:01:15):
In the correct grammar, the exclamation is Namaste. Namaskar is the act of doing the Namaste. But if you go in northern India the Namaskar becomes the popular form in the Hindi belt in particular. So there are spaces in India where people will say Namaskar or even in Bengal, it becomes Namoskar, but exclamation when you greet in Sanskrit technically will be Namaste. I bow to thee.
Narad (00:01:58):
In the last session, Sraddhalu discussed power and money. And at the end of that session, Anmol had a question regarding tainted money, or black money, whatever we want to call it in India. Could you address that?
Sraddhalu (00:02:21):
The Mother had a detailed discussion on money which is considered tainted, where somebody asks this question, what if someone has made money by means which are not considered acceptable and should we receive money from them if they give it. Sri Aurobindo is clear on this that money itself is not tainted, money itself is a neutral power and at best you may give to its acquisition a moral dimension or not, but the power itself is independent of it. So Mother's response is in this direction and she says that if somebody is giving money and there are no strings attached, you are not particularly concerned with how it is earned. And someone again specifically asks, what if the person has earned it the wrong way, by illegal means or even by criminal acts? Can one accept? And she gives this example. She says, often it happens that a person has earned money by means which may or may not fit the conventional sense of morality but he may undergo an internal change, he may say, 'oh I have done this, but now I regret and now this money I would like to put to proper use', and in such a case it is completely acceptable to receive. Even if the person has not got that sense of regret but is willing to give for a good cause and that's acceptable. The problem she said is when you go and ask a person who has earned it by wrong means and then use the factor of his guilt and say now you give here to feel somehow ashamed or guilt and those of course she said is pointless but still it does not taint in itself the money.
Narad (0:04:29):
But if the money is being given for the Divine work.
Sraddhalu (0:04:33):
Exactly, and her point was simply this, that you accept what comes. Sri Aurobindo comments on the taint or the influence that is there on the money itself and on the power because of the long rule of the Asuric hold on it and that is not in the manner in which the money comes to you, it is in what happens to you when you hold that money. When you receive a lot of money or when you gain a lot of power, with it there is the strong influence that enters that tends to seize you, it possesses you and gives you a certain kind of a high and exaggerates your sense of importance or the ego and that's not what came with the money from the person. It came with your ability to handle or not handle the money in the right way. So keeping this distinction in mind, the specific question there was, does not the money coming in corrupt you because the person who earned it was corrupt? If you keep this clarity, then it need not have any influence. Of course, if your mind engages with the idea that the person has corrupted, was corrupt, and you connect with that person's energy in receiving the money, you may of course inherit some element of confusion. But it's not because of the money, it's because of the way you relate it to the source of the person giving it.
Narad (0:05:58):
Well, today's subjects are very, very interesting. For example, what is Karma Yoga and what is not Karma Yoga? Meditation, what is proper meditation and improper meditation? Many of these things Mother has guided us on. Where would you like to start?
Sraddhalu (0:06:23):
I found this to be an important theme to dwell upon what makes something yoga or not yoga. And in particular in the context of the ashram and of the integral yoga and those who follow Sri Aurobindo. There is a lot of confusion in popular talk largely because of either a wrong understanding or mis application or what you have read or understood from Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. A lot of confusion surrounds the place of work and the fact of work itself being yoga or not. When you look at people who have lived in the ashram for literally decades, some of them have been here and there has been no real practice of yoga of any kind, much less the integral yoga. But they have satisfied themselves or they have convinced themselves that the fact that they are doing the work every day in their routine is in itself yoga. Often it happens that some new people who come to the ashram either for a while or even to settle permanently are told by these people, 'Oh you do your work, unless you do your work you are not doing yoga'. On the other hand, if the person is doing some meditation, they will discourage the person, say, 'don't meditate, all this is not here, here you do work and Mother will do the yoga for you' and these are of course wrong understandings of the circumstances. And I have to put it in the historical context first. Until about the middle of the Second World War, when the refugees first came to the ashram, the Mother notes that she was doing the yoga in everybody, for everybody and the condition for her to be able to do the yoga in you was that you had to remain open to her. Before 1926, it was the same arrangement with Sri Aurobindo at the centre. You were there as a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. The only condition was that you remained open to him in your consciousness and you were celibate. And you did pretty much whatever you needed to do otherwise in your activities and work. These were the only two conditions. So many of the people who came with Sri Aurobindo from the freedom fighters days had no particular interest in yoga. They were devoted to Sri Aurobindo, that was it. They would go and play football for hours in the field, come back and they were young boys having their usual fun. But in the evening they would sit with Sri Aurobindo, either he would speak to them or they would meditate together and the experiences described by them are so overwhelming. They would find the energy pouring into them, their whole consciousness changing and so on and every day that they went, it was as if something new was built and something new was built until many of them began to have extraordinary spiritual experiences, an extraordinary change of consciousness. Some of them did struggle with what they described as their old nature returning and the conflict of elements of the ego or strong desire or strong distortions in some of the old habits, most of which Sri Aurobindo also dealt with. As long as they stayed within that framework, it was fine. But the struggle, the conflict between different parts was still strong. It was for this reason that Sri Aurobindo shifted the initial focus of the yoga to bring in the psychic principle that until the basic psychic emergence is in place, any rapid growth of consciousness into such states tended to exaggerate the ego or was seized upon by the ego and created some issues of confusion.
As of 1926, when Sri Aurobindo formally handed over the responsibility of the yoga to the Mother, everybody was given that, everybody was put in her charge directly and he withdrew from the active contact with people, staying in contact through writings, the Mother took up that responsibility and she would do the yoga in everybody. There is one particularly beautiful incident I want to share of this transition of the handover. I don't know if I have shared it before here but this was narrated to me by a lady called Swarna di. She was one of the very old sadhikas who had come in the early days of the ashram and she was living in Bengal, I believe it was in Calcutta, I don't remember now, but she was in Bengal and she was a housewife with a child and she was devoted to Sri Aurobindo writing to him by correspondence and he had taken her responsibility in the yoga, accepted her as disciple and she narrated to me this. I had it on tape somewhere it might still be around, but she said how she would, the child would be on the swing with a little rope to keep the swing moving. So she would be gently rocking the child in the swing and then her eyes would close and she would drift into meditation. And she had extraordinary experiences. She would remember Sri Aurobindo and be immersed in his consciousness. And at some point she had the experience of the awakening of the Kundalini, the rising of the energy, the opening of the chakras and she saw these three passages, the Sushumna, the Ida and Pingala which are described in classical yogic texts. She knew nothing of what was happening. So she would write to Sri Aurobindo, I had this strange experience, what does it mean? And he would send a reply and, it just shows you what was happening and the rapidity of her progress and at some point she said in one of these meditations, she found herself pulled out of her body, Sri Aurobindo had held her hand, he took her out, they flew a great distance and then landed at the terrace of a building and Sri Aurobindo took her inside and there was a woman there and Sri Aurobindo said to her, from this point on she will be in charge of your yoga. And then the handover was complete, he brought her back into her body and some years later, she came to the ashram, visited, she was going through some of the buildings and she entered the archives building, where the present ashram archives are there and she went up the stairs and she said, 'Oh, this room looks familiar. This is the room where Sri Aurobindo had brought me'. And it's the room where Mother used to stay. And so this was before the handover took place publicly in the Ashram. He had already done the handover on the subtle level to many of the disciples around the world. Some knew it in this way, obviously others may not have been fully conscious and of that particular building there is a passage in the prayers and meditations, which Mother wrote while she was living in that room in that building where she says something to this effect, I don't have the exact lines, she says every brick of this house is suffused with the Presence. And that's where she had stayed and that's where the handover was made and so you see how important this incident is, the Mother was not only physically present there but while doing her physical activities she was conscious of this subtle form in which Sri Aurobindo brought that woman and did a handover, the Mother received her, greeted her in that subtle form, so a lot of things were happening for her which were simultaneously in the physical world as well as in the subtle worlds and she was working already on those levels at that time. So post 1926 formal handover was made. The same process continued. The Mother says, she did the yoga in people and then she says naturally everybody made a lot of progress.
Narad (0:14:59):
Recall Alberta? I interviewed him, and he says, he said, Mother I don't want to do yoga, I just want to serve you. And she said, I'll do your yoga, you serve me.
Sraddhalu (0:15:02):
Yes.
Narad (0:15:03):
And I think it was Kunima also, she said the same thing.
Sraddhalu (0:15:07):
To several, even to Udhar. He said, Mother, I don't know how to meditate, and Mother said to him, well when did I ask you to meditate? But all of these we have to see in that context, where she said that she was doing the yoga in them. But then she explains it is up to the point where the refugees came. And at that stage she said it was not practical to do this for so many people. And so she withdrew that process and she said a general pressure was placed that anybody who chooses to open to her can receive her action in them, but you have to make that effort to open and make that connection and to the extent that you open, there is that continued support and help. But it's possible equally to be right there in that, in the space and not be consciously open and there is a pressure in the environment to grow which compels you to grow but again only up to the extent that you choose to accept or to participate. Otherwise the pressure makes you somehow uncomfortable and even it can be crushing if you do not grow or if you resist the growth. After that transition which we can say is in the early 1940s, it's not the same thing. It's not that you can sit idle and do your work and the yoga is done for you automatically. Only to the extent that there is a pressure here which compels you to grow to a certain degree but it need not lead to anything more, if you do not make the necessary effort. And so what happens is so many people have stayed here for decades doing work only, chasing after work. There are people who were given work by the Mother. So, I just as an example, somebody who was given work, who is an extraordinary doctor, but he was given the work of working in the press. And at some point when he was physically unable to go to the press on his bicycle to do his work, he still forced it. Because Mother gave me this work, I cannot let go of it and I said to myself what if you had gone to the Mother in this condition and said Mother this is what I'm struggling with, do you think she would say, 'no I gave you work 20 years ago, now you must keep doing it even if your body is not well', would she say that or would she say, 'no stop it now, and change your work', and you have fixated on the assignment she gave to you 20 years ago, not listening to what she is saying to you now. You see, the reality of your relationship with the Mother is an external form. It is not the living presence of the living contact in which you receive what she is giving you as guidance. Unfortunately, this has happened to very large numbers of people. They hold a memory or a particular fixed external relation that she had, not living in the presence and in the living contact of the present.
Narad (0:18:08):
But still some teachers, lecturers say that everything can be done by the Grace.
Sraddhalu (0:18:19):
Always, that is always true. But to the extent that you consent. Grace cannot force you to change. Grace will not force you to change against your own will or against your own acceptance. The difference may be your soul may call the help of the grace for an intervention, whereas you might be resistant to it. That's possible. In that case the soul calls because it's suffocating in this personality, the action of the grace is in response to the soul's call and often may be felt as a blow from outside because internally you are closed. If inwardly you were open to your own inner presence, then the action would be from inside out. You would know what you need to do and you would act already in the right way. Because you are blocked up, the soul's call is for the help to be freed from this false and suffocating personality. The action is from outside to break. And often it comes as a blow, as a shock, which helps to break and allows the soul now to extend its influence through the cracks in the surface personality.
Narad (0:19:32):
I remember a man who used a pendulum and many people went to him to have guidance and one man died actually. He wrote a book, 'A House for the Third Millennium: Essays on Matrimandir'. And someone went to Nolini and said, what about this pendulum? And Nolini said, the psychic being is our pendulum.
Sraddhalu (0:19:57):
That's a beautiful way of saying it. Mother had warned, and she knew all the ways in which the anti-divine forces play their tricks. She was after all, she is after all the mother of the Asuras as much as of the Devas. So she knows their ways and their weaknesses equally. And she had warned explicitly saying that she will never communicate through mediumship, through automatic writing and so on. And the rationale is very simple. When you approach a medium or a medium that is supposedly transmitting from any higher power including the Mother, how are you to know if it is true or not? What mechanism do you have to validate what comes through? through. It's only the medium's claim to be accessing either Napoleon or Julius Caesar or whatever Divine being that you are supposedly accessing or your own grandmother if that's your interest. It's only their word. In fact, in the theosophical literature, they have a lot of material on this phenomenon and they explain often it is one single being that is pretending to take on the form of any of these that you call. So let's say you have a hundred people approaching the medium the first person says I want to talk to Napoleon, another person says I want to talk to my grandma, I want to talk, third person says any figure, it's the same being who now takes on that aspect and puts out the information you want to hear because on that level they have access to your own subconscious so they can read what you expect to hear and feed it back to you and you would not be the wiser. In fact, they will pick out things which you have forgotten but which are in your subconscious because they can read your mind easily. And so they can easily validate what you think would be your verification. So Mother said, I will never communicate through these means precisely because anybody can imitate that communication. She even went so far as to say they will even try to imitate my voice - voice, handwriting, anything easy to imitate. She said I will only communicate through the psychic being because that is one thing which nothing can compromise. Because innate in the psychic being is the discrimination of what is true, and what is not true, what is mixed. It's the only part of our personality in which you have the innate discrimination, even your intellect doesn't have that, because it is substance of truth and so it knows what is true and it senses when it's mixed. It may not be able to tell you what the thing is but it can tell you this is not it or this is mixed, it's not a replacement for the intuition that still has to develop but it is the first level of discrimination, the compass, which shows you what is right and what is mixed. That's why the insistence Sri Aurobindo had on the psychic influence becoming strong enough early on, then it avoids a lot of these confusing things.
Sraddhalu (0:23:07):
But coming back to the question of work, just doing work is not yoga, nor just having devotion. There are lots of people who come to the ashram or living in the ashram who have devotion, they offer their flowers, they circulate their incense so many number of times, place their head on the samadhi, whatever else they think. But at the end of the day, after all the rituals you have gone through, after all the devotion you have shown, in itself it need not lead to any change of consciousness and in itself it is not yoga, much less the integral yoga. So the highlight which I want to make is on the wrong idea that these things in themselves will do it.
What makes it yoga? And this is the question which we need to recognize. Most people even in the ashram have not bothered to read what Sri Aurobindo had to say or I have seen people who will say, oh yes, 20 years ago, I read the Life Divine or I read Synthesis of Yoga and what did you understand from it and they have no idea, not only they don't remember but they actually didn't understand. They went through the words but what did they get in terms of practice? There are people in the ashram who have written books on Sri Aurobindo, who claim that Sri Aurobindo did not teach any practical methods or techniques. Now this is utterly false, it is deeply shocking and disturbing, but these are actually being projected in the public on the authority of the ashram's name, that Sri Aurobindo did not teach methods or techniques. And they will conveniently quote from Sri Aurobindo's own statement in the Arya, where in the beginning of the Arya when he started writing most of the major works, he says that we will be also teaching many techniques in this and then after the first one year of Arya, he has another article where he says, although we had promised to teach techniques, we have focused much more on the principles behind the techniques, which make the techniques effective and not gone so much into the techniques themselves and so this is used by them as a justification. It is a mischief, it is a mischievous thing to claim that Sri Aurobindo did not teach. He in fact taught you what makes the technique effective and he goes much deeper. Going to the basic principles of the practice now, you are open to all possible techniques and all possible methods. You know how to energise a particular method or what makes the method effective or ineffective. And you can even disengage from a particular form of method and use what Sri Aurobindo himself teaches you as what he calls the direct method, in which you are not bound to specific techniques. And so if you have not bothered to read or to understand these things, practically most people in the ashram even don't know what the integral yoga is about. I had a very strange conversation with one of the teachers in the ashram school. She's been here now almost 50 years I think, came at a pretty young age and when I was discussing this out of concern for the situation and I said to her, you realise that most people in the ashram don't know what is the integral yoga, you can ask them and they'll say I don't know. She said, no that's not true. Then I asked her, can you tell me what is the integral yoga? And she looked vacantly in the air and she said, no but, I said, well there is the answer. After being here for so many decades, you still don't know what is the integral yoga. You go to any other system, practices of Hatha Yoga, any other school, any other lineage of any religion or any yogic system, ask them what is your basic framework of practice. They will all be able to tell you straight away. And here most people cannot even tell you and they claim to be practicing the yoga. How is it even possible? So when I challenged her like this, she said, 'no, but in the last 30 years I have changed so much, I have grown so much in my consciousness'. I said, fine. So in 30 years you've grown so much and I said if you compare with somebody outside the ashram in 30 years, how much have you grown in relation to them? She said pretty much the same. So if you've grown the same then you have not done yoga because in the very definition of the yoga it is accelerated evolution. It is work to which you may do in a hundred years which is now reduced to a single year, otherwise it's not yoga or you are in the what Sri Aurobindo calls the slow yoga, the unconscious yoga of nature which is what everybody in the world is already practising unconsciously but then we don't call it yoga especially and so she said yes. She was a little upset about the whole discussion but she said when I walk towards the ashram, I can feel the presence growing. I said yes, you have the sensitivity to the Presence, but is that in itself enough? Does it qualify to be a practitioner of the yoga?
And if you look at the experiences of people in the early days of the ashram, the rapidity of the growth that they had, that should be our reference at the very least. And have we grown with that kind of rapidity in whatever aspect or quality of our consciousness. If nothing else, has there been a greater intuitivisation of your consciousness? Has there been a psychic-isation of your consciousness? Has your contact with the Divine Mother grown, deepened, widened, become more permeated in all your thoughts, emotions, actions, something, some measure, which is not the slow evolution which you find anywhere else in the world. And if your growth is only as you would from the time passed on earth because of the work you have done, it is no different from anybody else doing their job in a normal company or in the government or living their normal life. And unfortunately large numbers are still within that category because the pressure of Mother's consciousness which was on them to a great extent has been reduced by the dilution of the environment. So even what you have experienced in those days, you had to do pretty much nothing and the pressure was there to keep you growing. The degree of dilution today is such that you don't feel that anymore. You can easily wallow in pretty much the same state without the pressure hitting you. One of the reasons for this dilution is the cutting off of the community from the center. The physical centre, physical focus of the power of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother being largely around the Samadhi and the Ashram building, sometime about 25 years ago there was a change in the arrangement made and the whole front of the ashram portion was cleared. We used to have our bicycles parked in front of the ashram gate. So you could go from your workspace straight to the ashram footpath, walk in and it was pretty much open, you had hardly a few dozen people wandering inside, you could go to the Samadhi, concentrate, come back, take your bicycle, go back to your work, all within five minutes. They asked to clear all the bicycles so that there is a place for cars to come, of tourists. And you will see today all the cycles in front of the ashram have been cleared out, even the student cycles. And then suddenly these hordes of tourists came blocking the passage, most of them uninterested, some of them even wandering inside looking around as if they are supposed to be looking at walls and flowers. And they walk around, they are herded around the Samadhi and gawking. Sometimes you hear them ask, 'Whose Samadhi is that? What is that?'. All of this has diluted the immediate contact of the community with the spiritual centre to a degree that people don't feel anymore that intensity of the pressure. And I want you to comment on this, if from your earlier days when you had that, you could feel the power literally radiating from the ashram. This difference has made a huge, has been a huge loss for the community, where earlier you could have that impact even without doing much. Still, the point still remains valid that just doing work is not going to get you anywhere, unless you make that effort to enter in relation with the Divine Presence within you, with the Mother's consciousness. So the question is what makes work part of the sadhana, yoga. Karma is not karma yoga. Sri Aurobindo has a dozen chapters on the yoga of works and if you go through it you will see how meticulously he describes what are the not only the criteria, the nature of the effort and the variations of the effort, the difficulties and so on. The first requirement will be that you do the work in the spirit of consecration to the Mother right now, not sometime 10 years ago. So as an offering, I have had people say things like 10 years ago I surrendered myself to the Mother, but now nothing is happening. What's wrong? I tell them, surrender is not an event, it is a state. So you surrendered ten years ago, well, you benefited ten years ago, but if you want to benefit now, then you have to be in an active state of surrender.
Narad (0:33:18):
Before you continue with this, I want to go back to this problem today of the ashram. What do you see as a possible change, from these crowds, etc.?
Sraddhalu (0:33:28):
I believe we can divert the crowds away from having to suffocate the environment around the ashram. If you look at Pondicherry today, because of the government policy of promoting tourism, we are heading in a dangerous direction. We are where Goa was 20 years ago before it was destroyed by tourism. We are pretty much in that direction. There has to be a shift in policy ideally at the level of the state itself. Ideally, Pondicherry should have been an educational township and not a tourist township. First, because it brings all the wrong people. They come for alcohol, they come for various other things. But second, if you see Pondicherry carefully today, the part which is most clear from encroachment and tourist space is the French Consulate. For security reasons you will find the entire area around it completely clear and if it can be done around them it can be done around the ashram equally. You do not need security reasons but you will have to find a mechanism to turn the crowds elsewhere and there are several ways to do that give them something else to occupy them. They want to know about the ashram, fine. Here's an exhibition. Go and watch that but if you want to meditate you can go there. But nobody is interested in meditation if you are a tourist. So there are ways to manage that it is not such a big deal.
Narad (0:34:58):
In Auroville with the Matrimandir, they have done it very well. They have done a viewing centre for all the buses and people can go and look at the Matrimandir, but its not the main entrance where you can go into the Matrimandir, it's a viewing point.
Sraddhalu (0:35:18):
Yes, so there are ways to manage. I am sure it can be done. It will be difficult increasingly unless there is a policy decision to reverse the promotion of Pondicherry as a tourist destination. But coming back to this point, because it is relevant for people living everywhere in the world, not just in the ashram and the erroneous teaching that, 'do the work and the yoga will happen automatically', that needs to be corrected. There is an effort to be made in terms of conscious consecration and to the extent you are able to do that it will be effective, as one part of the integral yoga and in itself not integral. You can't be a karma yogi and claim you are practising integral yoga. There is an interesting story I want to share here. This was narrated to me by a guru of a bhakti sect in Gujarat. I had gone for some lectures and my hosts took me to visit him. He was a very highly respected teacher in his particular lineage and it's a lineage of gurus in the Bhakti tradition, one of the Bhakti traditions and they lived in a building in which all the disciples lived in the same building with him. They were all celibate, all were devotees of him, all were working in life and one of the persons was vice-chancellor of one of the universities. So that was the link through which I was invited to meet him. And what was their way of living? The disciples would be working in their day time in whatever job they had, including the vice-chancellor. Whatever money they earned was given to the Guru, they had no personal possessions. It's very interesting, it's possible to do this in a city. They were living as our ashramites did within the ashram community but in a framework which was fully engaged with life. And then having done that, they lived as effectively as monks with no personal possession and ownership, but wearing normal clothes, nothing of the trappings of the ochre robes and all that. You wouldn't know them if you didn't know that they belonged to this sect. They just lived their life with full dedication to the divine. And one of the particular characteristics of their tradition was, they had to physically serve the Guru. So all of them would vie for the opportunity to sweep the floor, wash his feet or wash his clothes and things like that. And that was the mechanism in their tradition by which they received the blessings of the Guru and grew in their spiritual growth. Now this man, when I met him, very jolly, jovial person, he said, Oh, I have been to Sri Aurobindo Ashram and I learnt one of the greatest lessons of my life. And then he narrated his lesson. He said, ‘I went there, I saw your ashram, wonderful place. I saw people working everywhere. And I said, but your Guru is sitting in a room up there in the ashram building, you are working here, how are you doing seva, service to your guru? How do you grow spiritually if you don't serve your Guru?’. And he was there with Sundaram-ji, who was a Gujarati literary poet. And Sundaram told him, you know, have you experienced what it's like to fall in love? And the man said, yes, yes. So Sundaram said, you know, when you have fallen in love you only think of the beloved and so all of us here in the ashram we have fallen in love with the Divine Mother and so whatever work we do we are only thinking about her and so the work we do is given to her and this man said when I heard that it made so much sense and I learned a great lesson and so he narrated that to me. I took it as an important guidance. But this works, this works as long as you do it with that consciousness. In some of the old days you have, we still have the samples of those sarees, some people working in the embroidery department. And imagine in an ashram we have an embroidery department, where people are making sarees with fine embroidery that is so detailed that it takes an entire year to finish a single saree. Now it's not commercially viable, it's not a commercial objective obviously, it's a complete artistic expression and the person is doing it thinking that when it is complete the Mother is going to wear it and so every thread of the needle she's thinking of this is going to go on the Mother and this is being going to be appreciated by the Mother, this is for the mother and your whole consciousness is seeped in the Mother and that becomes Karma Yoga.
Narad (0:40:11):
I heard a story about a woman who took her name with every stitch and Mother just valued that so much. Marbling group, they were losing money regularly, losing money each month and the money man went to Mother and said, Mother we should give it up. Mother said, ‘No, I have occult reasons. Keep it open’.
Sraddhalu: (0:40:38):
Yes and the reason was, you look at it this way, the Mother practically organised every different kind of life activity within the ashram and even when financially it was not viable, often because of incompetence of people. They didn't know how to market themselves, they didn't know how to meet market expectations or demands and you have experienced that with the handmade paper factory. But she kept it because through that she was infusing her consciousness into that activity, into that work, even into the business. So in the early stages, the first few businesses which opened in the ashram, all of them she named Honesty. So we have Honesty electrical, engineering and electricals. We had Honesty departmental stores, we had Honesty various things, each were called Honesty. Because that was a time in the world where business was associated with dishonesty and part of Mother's work was now to change completely the consciousness of that activity for the world. How do you do that? Well you create the miniature world and make the shift here to ripple it out and all the people she chose to take those works were people who had that commitment to her who tried to live up to whatever extent they could and that's how she was working on all these. But you see how a simple exercise which is completely unconnected with spirituality of any kind was turned into a means of sadhana when done in that spirit. You will find today sometimes people doing labour, hard labour, lifting big vessels in the dining room, shuttling them, throwing them here, pushing like this, violently, utterly unconscious of the action they are doing. It's labour. Nowhere is the conscious effort made to feel the Mother's presence or do it consciously in service to her, and it's labour. And Mother would feel the difference in consciousness. So, Panditji narrated to us this example, where Mother wanted something typed out from Sri Aurobindo's writings and there was this lady who was very proud of her typing skills and the assignment was given to her, she took the book and went very efficiently, ta ta ta ta ta ta, finished all the letters, all the typing, sent the paper and when Panditji brought the paper into the Mother's hands, she held the paper and she shook her head in dissatisfaction and said, mere labour, and she put it aside. And it was her way of teaching them, her attendants, her secretaries, that what she was looking for was something else, the consciousness with which you do it. And there is another example which Panditji gave which was the very opposite of this, where somebody from Karnataka had sent a little pot in which every day he had put a single coin, in those days a single paisa or one anna which is six paisa, it's like one cent or six cents in today's terms. Nobody even thinks about it today, you throw ten rupee notes without thinking of its value, but in those days that had value. Every day he would remember the Mother and put one of his coins in his pot. The smallest denomination of currency. And when the pot was full, he had it sent to the mother. Very poor man. But when it came into her hands, she held the pot and she could feel his consciousness and the meticulous love with which he had given. And she showed it to everybody who came to meet her that day saying, you know he remembered every day and put the coin, he remembered every day, that was the important thing for her.
Narad (0:44:34)
You share the story about the postman?
Sraddhalu (0:44:36)
Which one?
Narad (0:44:38)
Who would send her one rupee each month? oh, there was a postman and he was very very poor, in those days postmen didn't make much. And he would take one rupee from his salary every month and send it to mother and after about a year, year and a half, one month it didn't come. Mother said where is the rupee? And she sent her secretary out to find the man to see if he was alright.
Sraddhalu (0:45:15)
And during particularly the Second World War when there was a major financial crisis, every money order that came, the Mother asked for the forms to be brought to her and she personally signed each money order form. Now there are so many, numbers may have been small and they said, but why do you take so much trouble, Mother will do it for you and she said no there was a reason for her to receive personally the money that came obviously for that reason, occult spiritual reason. So all of these are examples of how the dedicated meticulous remembered work, consecrated work is very much what she wanted, but also is the base on which Karma Yoga really builds the consciousness. In itself though, it would not be enough to qualify as the Integral Yoga or Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. What may happen is, for a person that is the starting point, the link point, through which their hearts and minds open to the Mother, but even if that much is there, her consciousness pouring in you can begin the larger process of the integral yoga without your active knowledge of all the details of it. Certainly if you are conscious of the other aspects of the integral yoga, you can participate or grow into that awareness. But this would be the first base of start. Doing karma, doing mechanical work, even doing skillful and meticulous detailed work is not enough to qualify for the yoga. That's the point.
Narad (0:46:52):
And Mother says work is the body's best prayer to the Divine.
Sraddhalu (0:46:57):
When done in that spirit. This is the problem. You see that quotation is also misused.
Narad (0:47:04)
It's also the body's best prayer which we have to remember.
Sraddhalu (0:47:08):
So, taking this quotation someone might say, fine I am working 24 hours, I am doing such excellent work, look at all that I have done, was the body doing prayer to the Divine? Unless it is done in that spirit of consecration. So we might qualify that with consecrated work, but work done in that spirit where you do this for the Mother, is the body engaging in relation with the Divine and so the body's best prayer to the Divine. And therefore in the integral yoga, the work has an important place, even an extremely important place because it is the space in which your inner realisation is now put in active engagement of life. It's the reason why Mother gave so much importance to the work, and Sri Aurobindo equally. There was one person who had a lot of physical illnesses who wrote to Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo's response was, what have you done in service to the Mother? You see the idea was if you have physically served the Mother, your physical consciousness has opened to her, then the action of her force in your body would have even healed that problem or would have largely mitigated it. But it should be done in that spirit and this is extremely important to recognize, the same principle now can be extended to devotion. People come and wave their agarbathis[1] but in itself it's not bhakti yoga, you are exercising bhakti but you may not get the benefit of that into yoga with a rapid growth of consciousness, unless it is done in that spirit and made an entry point. The same principle will extend to reading. There used to be a person in the ashram, he was the head of our college, he would read all of Sri Aurobindo's writings. In those days it was 27 volumes, now it's more, it's 34 or something. He would read all of his 27 volumes, every afternoon for two or three hours and I believe it took him five years to complete the whole thing and then he would start all over again and read and all over again and read. So he had become effectively an encyclopaedia, he could pull out references from X Y Z place, but as students we could see how his quantum of practice, he was not at all for any of us, as students an example of anything that we would want to be. And that is the strange part. So just reading, studying is not going to make it Jnana Yoga. So the whole principle of the Jnana Yoga is through the mind's awareness you begin to perceive the Divine, separate the sense of the permanent from the transitory and through the mind dwell on the Divine in whatever way, with many variations possible. Unless that is there, mere reading and study is scholarship and does not qualify for Jnana Yoga. These three things, if done together as Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Jnana Yoga, making them yogas, not merely activities, would qualify as a broad base, upon which the proper practice of the Integral Yoga can be built. And for the practice of the Integral Yoga, the first level, the first grade is the general purification of the consciousness, which means to make your thoughts, emotions and even your actions respond only to the Divine, well more and more only to the Divine. And that itself separating the thoughts from the emotions, separating the emotions from the instincts is part of the purification and then turning them towards the Divine, could be done through a mix of these three practices of Karma, Bhakti and Jnana Yoga but that would be the first base upon which the sixfold path of the integral yoga would begin.
Narad (0:51:27):
Wonderful! Thank you so much. Namaste.
Sraddhalu (0:51:30):
Namaste.
[1] Incense used during prayers in India.