THE three parts of the perfection
of our instrumental nature of which we have till now
been reviewing the general features, the perfection
of the intelligence, heart, vital consciousness and
body, the perfection of the fundamental soul powers,
the perfection of the surrender of our instruments and
action to the divine Shakti, depend at every moment
of their progression on a fourth power that is covertly
and overtly the pivot of all endeavour and action, faith,
sraddhä. The perfect faith is an assent
of the whole being to the truth seen by it or offered
to its acceptance, and its central working is a faith
of the soul in its own will to be and attain and become
and its idea of self and things and its knowledge, of
which the belief of the intellect, the heart's consent
and the desire of the life mind to possess and realise
are the outward figures. This soul faith, in some form
of itself, is indispensable to the action of the being
and without it man cannot move a single pace in life,
much less take any step forward to a yet unrealised
perfection. It is so central and essential a thing that
the Gita can justly say of it that whatever is a man's
sraddhä, that he is, yo yacchraddhah
sa eva sah, and, it may be added, whatever he has
the faith to see as possible in himself and strive for,
that he can create and become. There is one kind of
faith demanded as indispensable by the integral Yoga
and that may be described as faith in God and the Shakti,
faith in the presence and power of the Divine in us
and the world, a faith that all in the world is the
working of one divine Shakti, that all the steps of
the Yoga, its strivings and sufferings and failures
as well as its successes and satisfactions and victories
are utilities and necessities of her workings and that
by a firm and strong dependence on and a total self-surrender
to the Divine and to his Shakti in us we can attain
to oneness and freedom and victory and perfection.
The
enemy of faith is doubt, and yet doubt too is a utility
and necessity, because man in his ignorance and in his
progressive labour towards knowledge needs to be visited
by doubt, otherwise he would remain obstinate in an
ignorant belief and limited knowledge and unable to
escape from his errors. This utility and necessity of
doubt does not altogether disappear when we enter on
the path of Yoga. The integral Yoga aims at a knowledge
not merely of some fundamental principle, but a knowing,
a gnosis which will apply itself to and cover all life
and the world action, and in this search for knowledge
we enter on the way and are accompanied for many miles
upon it by the mind's unregenerated activities before
these are purified and transformed by a greater light:
we carry with us a number of intellectual beliefs and
ideas which are by no means all of them correct and
perfect and a host of new ideas and suggestions meet
us afterwards demanding our credence which it would
be fatal to seize on and always cling to in the shape
in which they come without regard to their possible
error, limitation or imperfection. And indeed at one
stage in the Yoga it becomes necessary to refuse to
accept as definite and final any kind of intellectual
idea or opinion whatever in its intellectual form and
to hold it in a questioning suspension until it is given
its right place and luminous shape of truth in a spiritual
experience enlightened by supramental knowledge. And
much more must this be the case with the desires or
impulsions of the life mind, which have often to be
provisionally accepted as immediate indices of a temporarily
necessary action before we have the full guidance, but
not always clung to with the soul's complete assent,
for eventually all these desires and impulsions have
to be rejected or else transformed into and replaced
by impulsions of the divine will taking up the life
movements. The heart's faith, emotional beliefs, assents
are also needed upon the way, but cannot be always sure
guides until they too are taken up, purified, transformed
and are eventually replaced by the luminous assents
of a divine Ananda which is at one with the divine will
and knowledge. In nothing in the lower nature from the
reason to the vital will can the seeker of the Yoga
put a complete and permanent faith, but only at last
in the spiritual truth, power, Ananda which become in
the spiritual reason his sole guides and luminaries
and masters of action.
And
yet faith is necessary throughout and at every step
because it is a needed assent of the soul and without
this assent there can be no progress. Our faith must
first be abiding in the essential truth and principles
of the Yoga, and even if this is clouded in the intellect,
despondent in the heart, outwearied and exhausted by
constant denial and failure in the desire of the vital
mind, there must be something in the innermost soul
which clings and returns to it, otherwise we may fall
on the path or abandon it from weakness and inability
to bear temporary defeat, disappointment, difficulty
and peril. In the Yoga as in life it is the man who
persists unwearied to the last in the face of every
defeat and disillusionment and of all confronting, hostile
and contradicting events and powers who conquers in
the end and finds his faith justified because to the
soul and Shakti in man nothing is impossible. And even
a blind and ignorant faith is a better possession than
the sceptical doubt which turns its back on our spiritual
possibilities or the constant carping of the narrow
pettily critical uncreative intellect, asüyä,
which pursues our endeavour with a paralysing incertitude.
The seeker of the integral Yoga must however conquer
both these imperfections. The thing to which he has
given his assent and set his mind and heart and will
to achieve, the divine perfection of the whole human
being, is apparently an impossibility to the normal
intelligence, since it is opposed to the actual facts
of life and will for long be contradicted by immediate
experience, as happens with all far-off and difficult
ends, and it is denied too by many who have spiritual
experience but believe that our present nature is the
sole possible nature of man in the body and that it
is only by throwing off the earthly life or even all
individual existence that we can arrive at either a
heavenly perfection or the release of extinction. In
the pursuit of such an aim there will for long be plenty
of ground for the objections, the carpings, asüyä,
of that ignorant but persistent criticising reason which
founds itself plausibly on the appearances of the moment,
the stock of ascertained fact and experience, refuses
to go beyond and questions the validity of all indices
and illuminations that point forward; and if he yields
to these narrow suggestions, he will either not arrive
or be seriously hampered and long delayed in his journey.
On the other hand, ignorance and blindness in the faith
are obstacles to a large success, invite much disappointment
and disillusionment, fasten on false finalities and
prevent advance to greater formulations of truth and
perfection. The Shakti in her workings will strike ruthlessly
at all forms of ignorance and blindness and all even
that trusts wrongly and superstitiously in her, and
we must be prepared to abandon a too persistent attachment
to forms of faith and cling to the saving reality alone.
A great and wide spiritual and intelligent faith, intelligent
with the intelligence of that larger reason which assents
to high possibilities, is the character of the sraddhä
needed for the integral Yoga.
This
sraddhä—the English word faith is
inadequate to express it—is in reality an influence
from the supreme Spirit and its light a message from
our supramental being which is calling the lower nature
to rise out of its petty present to a great self-becoming
and self-exceeding. And that which receives the influence
and answers to the call is not so much the intellect,
the heart or the life mind, but the inner soul which
better knows the truth of its own destiny and mission.
The circumstances that provoke our first entry into
the path are not the real index of the thing that is
at work in us. There the intellect, the heart, or the
desires of the life mind may take a prominent place,
or even more fortuitous accidents and outward incentives;
but if these are all, then there can be no surety of
our fidelity to the call and our enduring perseverance
in the Yoga. The intellect may abandon the idea that
attracted it, the heart weary or fail us, the desire
of the life mind turn to other objectives. But outward
circumstances are only a cover for the real workings
of the spirit, and if it is the spirit that has been
touched, the inward soul that has received the call,
the sraddhä will remain firm and resist
all attempts to defeat or slay it. It is not that the
doubts of the intellect may not assail, the heart waver,
the disappointed desire of the life mind sink down exhausted
on the wayside. That is almost inevitable at times,
perhaps often, especially with us, sons of an age of
intellectuality and scepticism and a materialistic denial
of spiritual truth which has not yet lifted its painted
clouds from the face of the sun of a greater reality
and is still opposed to the light of spiritual intuition
and inmost experience. There will very possibly be many
of those trying obscurations of which even the Vedic
Rishis so often complained, "long exiles from the
light", and these may be so thick, the night on
the soul may be so black that faith may seem utterly
to have left us. But through it all the spirit within
will be keeping its unseen hold and the soul will return
with a new strength to its assurance which was only
eclipsed and not extinguished, because extinguished
it cannot be when once the inner self has known and
made its resolution. The Divine holds our hand through
all and if he seems to let us fall, it is only to raise
us higher. This saving return we shall experience so
often that the denials of doubt will become eventually
impossible and, when once the foundation of equality
is firmly established and still more when the sun of
the gnosis has risen, doubt itself will pass away because
its cause and utility have ended.
Moreover,
not only a faith in the fundamental principle, ideas,
way of the Yoga is needed, but a day to day working
faith in the power in us to achieve, in the steps we
have taken on the way, in the spiritual experiences
that come to us, in the intuitions, the guiding movements
of will and impulsion, the moved intensities of the
heart and aspirations and fulfilments of the life that
are the aids, the circumstances and the stages of the
enlarging of the nature and the stimuli or the steps
of the soul's evolution. At the same time it has always
to be remembered that we are moving from imperfections
and ignorance towards light and perfection, and the
faith in us must be free from attachment to the forms
of our endeavour and the successive stages of our realisation.
There is not only much that will be strongly raised
in us in order to be cast out and rejected, a battle
between the powers of ignorance and the lower nature
and the higher powers that have to replace them, but
experiences, states of thought and feeling, forms of
realisation that are helpful and have to be accepted
on the way and may seem to us for the time to be spiritual
finalities, are found afterwards to be steps of transition,
have to be exceeded and the working faith that supported
them withdrawn in favour of other and greater things
or of more full and comprehensive realisations and experiences,
which replace them or into which they are taken up in
a completing transformation. There can be for the seeker
of the integral Yoga no clinging to resting-places on
the road or to half-way houses; he cannot be satisfied
till he has laid down all the great enduring bases of
his perfection and broken out into its large and free
infinities, and even there he has to be constantly filling
himself with more experiences of the Infinite. His progress
is an ascent from level to level and each new height
brings in other vistas and revelations of the much that
has still to be done, bhüri kartvam, till
the divine Shakti has at last taken up all his endeavour
and he has only to assent and participate gladly by
a consenting oneness in her luminous workings. That
which will support him through these changes, struggles,
transformations which might otherwise dishearten and
baffle,—for the intellect and life and emotion
always grasp too much at things, fasten on premature
certitudes and are apt to be afflicted and unwilling
when forced to abandon that on which they rested,—is
a firm faith in the Shakti that is at work and reliance
on the guidance of the Master of the Yoga whose wisdom
is not in haste and whose steps through all the perplexities
of the mind are assured and just and sound, because
they are founded on a perfectly comprehending transaction
with the necessities of our nature.
The
progress of the Yoga is a procession from the mental
ignorance through imperfect formations to a perfect
foundation and increasing of knowledge and in its more
satisfyingly positive parts a movement from light to
greater light, and it cannot cease till we have the
greatest light of the supramental knowledge. The motions
of the mind in its progress must necessarily be mixed
with a greater or lesser proportion of error, and we
should not allow our faith to be disconcerted by the
discovery of its errors or imagine that because the
beliefs of the intellect which aided us were too hasty
and positive, therefore the fundamental faith in the
soul was invalid. The human intellect is too much afraid
of error precisely because it is too much attached to
a premature sense of certitude and a too hasty eagerness
for positive finality in what it seems to seize of knowledge.
As our self-experience increases, we shall find that
our errors even were necessary movements, brought with
them and left their element or suggestion of truth and
helped towards discovery or supported a necessary effort
and that the certitudes we have now to abandon had yet
their temporary validity in the progress of our knowledge.
The intellect cannot be a sufficient guide in the search
for spiritual truth and realisation and yet it has to
be utilised in the integral movement of our nature.
And while, therefore, we have to reject paralysing doubt
or mere intellectual scepticism, the seeking intelligence
has to be trained to admit a certain large questioning,
an intellectual rectitude not satisfied with half-truths,
mixtures of error or approximations and, most positive
and helpful, a perfect readiness always to move forward
from truths already held and accepted to the greater
corrective, completing or transcending truths which
at first it was unable or, it may be, disinclined to
envisage. A working faith of the intellect is indispensable,
not a superstitious, dogmatic or limiting credence attached
to every temporary support or formula, but a large assent
to the successive suggestions and steps of the Shakti,
a faith fixed on realities, moving from the lesser to
the completer realities and ready to throw down all
scaffolding and keep only the large and growing structure.
A
constant sraddhä, faith, assent of the
heart and the life too are indispensable. But while
we are in the lower nature the heart's assent is coloured
by mental emotion and the life movements are accompanied
by their trail of perturbing or straining desires, and
mental emotion and desire tend to trouble, alter more
or less grossly or subtly or distort the truth, and
they always bring some limitation and imperfection into
its realisation by the heart and life. The heart too
when it is troubled in its attachments and its certitudes,
perplexed by throw-backs and failures and convictions
of error or involved in the wrestlings which attend
a call to move forward from its assured positions, has
its draggings, wearinesses, sorrowings, revolts, reluctances
which hamper the progress. It must learn a larger and
surer faith giving in the place of the mental reactions
a calm or a moved spiritual acceptance to the ways and
the steps of the Shakti which is in its nature the assent
of a deepening Ananda to all necessary movements and
a readiness to leave old moorings and move always forwards
towards the delight of a greater perfection. The life
mind must give its assent to the successive motives,
impulsions, activities of the life imposed on it by
the guiding power as aids or fields of the development
of the nature and to the successions also of the inner
Yoga, but it must not be attached or call a halt anywhere,
but must always be prepared to abandon old urgency and
accept with the same completeness of assent new higher
movements and activities, and it must learn to replace
desire by a wide and bright Ananda in all experience
and action. The faith of the heart and the life mind,
like that of the intelligence, must be capable of a
constant correction, enlarging and transformation.
This
faith is essentially the secret sraddhä
of the soul, and it is brought more and more to the
surface and there satisfied, sustained and increased
by an increasing assurance and certainty of spiritual
experience. Here too the faith in us must be unattached,
a faith that waits upon Truths and is prepared to change
and enlarge its understanding of spiritual experiences,
to correct mistaken or half true ideas about them and
receive more enlightening interpretations, to replace
insufficient by more sufficient intuitions, and to merge
experiences that seemed at the time to be final and
satisfying in more satisfying combinations with new
experience and greater largenesses and transcendences.
And especially in the psychical and other middle domains
there is a very large room for the possibility of misleading
and often captivating error, and here even a certain
amount of positive scepticism has its use and at all
events a great caution and scrupulous intellectual rectitude,
but not the scepticism of the ordinary mind which amounts
to a disabling denial. In the integral Yoga psychical
experience, especially of the kind associated with what
is often called occultism and savours of the miraculous,
should be altogether subordinated to spiritual truth
and wait upon that for its own interpretation, illumination
and sanction. But even in the purely spiritual domain,
there are experiences which are partial and, however
attractive, only receive their full validity, significance
or right application when we can advance to a fuller
experience. And there are others which are in themselves
quite valid and full and absolute, but if we confine
our selves to them, will prevent other sides of the
spiritual truth from manifestation and mutilate the
integrality of the Yoga. Thus the profound and absorbing
quietude of impersonal peace which comes by the stilling
of the mind is a thing in itself complete and absolute,
but if we rest in that alone, it will exclude the companion
absolute, not less great and needed and true, of the
bliss of the divine action. Here too our faith must
be an assent that receives all spiritual experience,
but with a wide openness and readiness for always more
light and truth, an absence of limiting attachment and
no such clinging to forms as would interfere with the
forward movement of the Shakti towards the integrality
of the spiritual being, consciousness, knowledge, power,
action and the wholeness of the one and the multiple
Ananda.
The
faith demanded of us both in its general principle and
its constant particular application amounts to a large
and ever increasing and a constantly purer, fuller and
stronger assent of the whole being and all its parts
to the presence and guidance of God and the Shakti.
The faith in the Shakti, as long as we are not aware
of and filled with her presence, must necessarily be
preceded or at least accompanied by a firm and virile
faith in our own spiritual will and energy and our power
to move successfully towards unity and freedom and perfection.
Man is given faith in himself, his ideas and his powers
that he may work and create and rise to greater things
and in the end bring his strength as a worthy offering
to the altar of the Spirit. This spirit, says the Scripture,
is not to be won by the weak, näyam ätmä
balahïnena labhyah. All paralysing self-distrust
has to be discouraged, all doubt of our strength to
accomplish, for that is a false assent to impotence,
an imagination of weakness and a denial of the omnipotence
of the spirit. A present incapacity, however heavy may
seem its pressure, is only a trial of faith and a temporary
difficulty and to yield to the sense of inability is
for the seeker of the integral Yoga a non-sense, for
his object is a development of a perfection that is
there already, latent in the being, because man carries
the seed of the divine life in himself, in his own spirit,
the possibility of success is involved and implied in
the effort and victory is assured because behind is
the call and guidance of an omnipotent power. At the
same time this faith in oneself must be purified from
all touch of rajasic egoism and spiritual pride. The
Sadhaka should keep as much as possible in his mind
the idea that his strength is not his own in the egoistic
sense but that of the divine universal Shakti and whatever
is egoistic in his use of it must be a cause of limitation
and in the end an obstacle. The power of the divine
universal Shakti which is behind our aspiration is illimitable,
and when it is rightly called upon it cannot fail to
pour itself into us and to remove whatever incapacity
and obstacle, now or later; for the times and durations
of our struggle while they depend at first, instrumentally
and in part, on the strength of our faith and our endeavour,
are yet eventually in the hands of the wisely determining
secret Spirit, alone the Master of the Yoga, the Ishwara.
The
faith in the divine Shakti must be always at the back
of our strength and when she becomes manifest, it must
be or grow implicit and complete. There is nothing that
is impossible to her who is the conscious Power and
universal Goddess all-creative from eternity and armed
with the Spirit's omnipotence. All knowledge, all strengths,
all triumph and victory, all skill and works are in
her hands and they are full of the treasures of the
Spirit and of all perfections and siddhis. She is Maheshwari,
goddess of the supreme knowledge, and brings to us her
vision for all kinds and widenesses of truth, her rectitude
of the spiritual will, the calm and passion of her supramental
largeness, her felicity of illumination; she is Mahakali,
goddess of the supreme strength, and with her are all
mights and spiritual force and severest austerity of
Tapas and swiftness to the battle and the victory and
the laughter, the attahäsya, that makes
light of defeat and death and the powers of the ignorance:
she is Mahalakshmi, the goddess of the supreme love
and delight, and her gifts are the spirit's grace and
the charm and beauty of the Ananda and protection and
every divine and human blessing: she is Mahasaraswati,
the goddess of divine skill and of the works of the
Spirit, and hers is the Yoga that is skill in works,
yogah karmasu kausalam, and the utilities of
divine knowledge and the self-application of the spirit
to life and the happiness of its harmonies. And in all
her powers and forms she carries with her the supreme
sense of the masteries of the eternal Ishwari, a rapid
and divine capacity for all kinds of action that may
be demanded from the instrument, oneness, a participating
sympathy, a free identity, with all energies in all
beings and therefore a spontaneous and fruitful harmony
with all the divine will in the universe. The intimate
feeling of her presence and her powers and the satisfied
assent of all our being to her workings in and around
it is the last perfection of faith in the Shakti.
And
behind her is the Ishwara and faith in him is the most
central thing in the sraddhä of the integral
Yoga. This faith we must have and develop to perfection
that all things are the workings under the universal
conditions of a supreme self-knowledge and wisdom, that
nothing done in us or around us is in vain or without
its appointed place and just significance, that all
things are possible when the Ishwara as our supreme
Self and Spirit takes up the action and that all that
has been done before and all that he will do hereafter
was and will be part of his infallible and foreseeing
guidance and intended towards the fruition of our Yoga
and our perfection and our life work. This faith will
be more and more justified as the higher knowledge opens,
we shall begin to see the great and small significances
that escaped our limited mentality and faith will pass
into knowledge. Then we shall see beyond the possibility
of doubt that all happens within the working of the
one Will and that that will was also wisdom because
it develops always the true workings in life of the
self and nature. The highest state of the assent, the
sraddhä of the being will be when we feel
the presence of the Ishwara and feel all our existence
and consciousness and thought and will and action in
his hand and consent in all things and with every part
of our self and nature to the direct and immanent and
occupying will of the Spirit. And that highest perfection
of the sraddhä will also be the opportunity
and perfect foundation of a divine strength: it will
base, when complete, the development and manifestation
and the works of the luminous supramental Shakti.
-Sri
Aurobindo
