from Volume 12 On Education, p.116 (24 July 1951)
Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it. I found this piece from “Synthesis of Yoga” to be truly amazing and wish to share it with readers….
The Synthesis of Yoga
“The full recognition of this inner Guide, Master of the Yoga, lord,
light, enjoyer and goal of all sacrifice and effort, is of the utmost
importance in the path of integral perfection. It is immaterial
whether he is first seen as an impersonal Wisdom, Love and Power
behind all things, as an Absolute manifesting in. the relative and
attracting it, as one’s highest Self and the highest Self of all, as a
Divine Person within us and in the world, in one of his — or her —
numerous forms and names or as the ideal which the mind conceives. In
the end we perceive that he is all and more than all these things
together- The mind’s door of entry to the conception of him must
necessarily vary according to the past evolution and the present
nature.
This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our
personal effort and by the ego’s preoccupation with itself and its
aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives
place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the
growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise
how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined
towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our
entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been
designedly led towards its turning point.
For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts,
successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of
our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given
us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and
stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not
retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a
transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power,
of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss
and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from
the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal
presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher.
We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into
likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we
perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own
efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One
who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the
conscious being (caitya guru or antaryamin), the Absolute of the
thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the
materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme shakti, the One who is
differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our
Yoga.
To see, know, become and fulfil this One in our inner selves and in
all our outer nature, was always the secret goal and becomes now the
conscious purpose of our embodied existence.
To be conscious of him in all parts of our being and equally in all
that the dividing mind sees as outside our being, is the consummation
of the individual consciousness. To be possessed by him and possess
him in ourselves and in all things is the term of all empire and
mastery. To enjoy him in all experience of passivity and activity, of
peace and of power, of unity and of difference is the happiness which
the jЖva, the individual soul manifested in the world, is obscurely
seeking. This is the entire definition of the aim of integral Yoga; it
is the rendering in personal experience of the truth which universal
Nature has hidden in herself and which she travails to discover. It is
the conversion of the human soul into the divine soul and of natural
life into divine living.”
Children Of Light 