…My
own life and my Yoga have always been, since my coming
to India, both this- worldly and other-worldly without
any exclusiveness on either side. All human interests
are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered
into my mental field and some, like politics, into my
life, but at the same time, since I set foot on the Indian
soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual
experiences, but these were not divorced from this world
but had an inner and infinite bearing on it, such as a
feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the
Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the
same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds
and planes with influences and an effect from them upon
the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or
irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the
two ends of existence and all that lies between them.
For me all is Brahman and I find the Divine everywhere.
Everyone has the right to throw away this-worldliness
and choose other-worldliness only, and if he finds peace
by that choice he is greatly blessed. I, personally, have
not found it necessary to do this in order to have peace.
In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds
in my purview - the spiritual and the material - and to
try to establish the Divine Consciousness and the Divine
Power in men's hearts and earthly life, not for a personal
salvation only but for a life divine here. This seems
to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this
life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into
its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish its spirituality
or alter its Indian character. This at least has always
been my view and experience of the reality and nature
of the world and things and the Divine: it seemed to me
as nearly as possible the integral truth about them and
I have therefore spoken of the pursuit of it as the integral
Yoga. Everyone is, of course, free to reject and disbelieve
in this kind of integrality or to believe in the spiritual
necessity of an entire other-worldliness altogether, but
that would make the exercise of my Yoga impossible. My
Yoga can include a full experience of the other worlds,
the plane of the Supreme Spirit and the other planes in
between and their possible effects upon our life and the
realization of the Supreme Being or Ishwara even in one
aspect, Shiva, Krishna as Lord of the world and Master
of ourselves and our works or else the Universal Sachchidananda,
and attain to the essential results of this Yoga and afterwards
to proceed from them to the integral results it one accepted
the ideal of the divine life and this material world conquered
by the Spirit. It is this view and experience of things
and of the truth of existence that enabled me to write
The Life Divine and Savitri. The realization of the Supreme,
the Ishwara, is certainly the essential thing; but to
approach Him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve
Him with one's works and to know Him, not necessarily
by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience,
is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga.
28-4-1949
- Sri Aurobindo
