Sitting at Sri Aurobindo’s feet to hear him

All Life is Yoga

• by Aju Mukhopadhyay
  In an age when the purport of spirituality
  has been lightened, mixed with sensuousness and frivolity
  I feel like sitting at Sri Aurobindo’s feet to hear him:
  ‘The delight of spirit is ever new,
  the forms of beauty it takes innumerable,
  its godhead ever young and the taste of delight, rasa,
  of the infinite eternal and inexhaustible.’
  ‘Spirituality cannot be called upon
  to deal with life by non-spiritual method . . .
  always failed and will continue to fail . . .
  for ‘The spiritual evolution of Nature
  is still in process and incomplete, . . . only beginning . . . .
  ‘Any premature attempt at a large scale spiritual life
  is exposed to vitiation . . . .
  the individual must be preoccupied with . . . changing
  his mind and life into conformity
  with the truth of the spirit’-
  While all this are mined
  out of his golden treasure of The Life Divine,
  I venture to go into his more pungent
  but luscious words found in a letter-
  
  ‘The supramental can only make
  the best conditions for anybody
  who can open up to it . . . .
  But it could not dispense with the necessity of sadhana.
  If it did, the logical consequence would be that
  the whole earth, men, dogs and worms
  would suddenly wake up
  to find themselves supramental.
  There would be no need of an Ashram or of Yoga.’
  
  ‘An Asram means’, he wrote,
  ‘the house or houses of a teacher
  or the Master of spiritual philosophy
  in which he receives and lodges those
  who come to him for the teaching and practice . . . .
  it is only what has been indicated above
  and nothing more.’
  And, no Ashram without the Gurus, he wrote to clear the point.
  
  About the institutions he wrote in The Human Cycle-
  ‘The existence of institutions is sufficient
  to abrogate the need of insisting on the spirit
  that made the institutions.
  But spirituality is . . . nothing
  if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life
  does not flow out of this inward living.’
  
  ‘All life is yoga’- Yes he wrote.
  But without squandering its meaning,
  following Sri Aurobindo we may say
  All life of a Yogi is Yoga-
  not that of an ordinary man, dog or worm.
  © Aju Mukhopadhyay, 2008