classes ::: George_Van_Vrekhem, Integral_Yoga, chapter,
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object:1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force
book classPreparing for the Miraculous
author class:George Van Vrekhem
subject class:Integral Yoga
class:chapter

What Arjuna saw:
the Dark Side of the Force
1. Kurukshetra: the field of the Kurus
The Bhagavad Gita, a part of the ancient Indian epos Ma-
habharata, is one of the great creations of the human spirit,
if not the greatest. Indeed, when compared with the most
brilliant passages of the Gilgamesh epic, Homers Iliad and
Odyssey, the works of the Greek tragedians, Dantes Divina
Commedia or the best of Shakespeare, the Gita soars above
them all because of its philosophical and spiritual depth,
its representative significance for the human condition, and
the tragic though glorious setting of its action.72
e l e v e n tal k s
Arjuna, one of the five Pandavas, is the foremost kshatri-
ya or knight of his time. His charioteer is his friend and
mentor Krishna, king of the Vrishnis and in fact the avatar
Sri Krishna. In the internecine quarrel within the Kuru clan,
to which the Pandavas as well as the Kauravas belong, most
kingdoms of the subcontinent have chosen sides and the
day of the great confrontation, the battle in Kurukshetra, the
field of the Kurus, has dawned. Of this great slaughter Ar-
juna is to be the chief instrument. Among the principal en-
emies are close relatives, former friends and even his former
gurus. Many of them he will have to kill. Arjuna finds sud-
denly that he has been led to become the protagonist of a
terrific and unparalleled slaughter, a monstrous civil war
involving all the cultured Aryan nations which must lead
to the complete destruction of the flower of their manhood
and threatens their ordered civilization with chaos and col-
lapse. 1
Overwhelmed by the tragic purport of the moment,
Arjuna asks Sri Krishna to drive his chariot into the space
between the two battle-ready armies, for he wishes to
look upon all these kings of men who have come here to
champion against him the cause of unrighteousness and
establish as a rule of life the disregard of law, justice and
truth which they would replace by the rule of a selfish and
arrogant egoism. 2 Being well aware of the importance
and the righteousness of his cause, he is yet suddenly over-
whelmed by dejection. O Krishna, I behold these kinsmen
and friends arrayed in hostile armies, and my limbs sink
beneath me and my face grows dry, and there are shudder-
ings in my body, and my hair stands on end. Gandiva [his
bow] falls from my hand and my very skin is on fire. Yea, I
cannot stand and my brain whirls ... (Gita I, 28-32) Arjuna
1 Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, p. 23.
2 Id., p. 54.w h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
73
thus lapsed into unheroic weakness, a weakness which
might cause him to fail in his dharma, his inherent duty
as a warrior. And this is where Sri Krishna at first rebukes
him, and then, making him see the essential, divine justi-
fication of it all, instructs him in the yoga. Arjuna receives
his initiation on the battlefield.
That the Mahabharata, the great war of the Bharatas, has
been a historic event is not in doubt, but the date of the war
is still under discussion. In the introduction to his Search
for the Historical Krishna, Navaratna S. Rajaram writes: It
is beginning to be seen that even the chronology of ancient
India based on the so-called Kali Date (3102 BC) for the
Mahabharata period is not lacking in scientific support, fall-
ing as it does at the beginning of what we now call the
Harappan Civilization. The Kali Age especially its har-
binger, the Mahabharata War may be seen as marking the
end of the spiritual age of the Vedas to be replaced by the
materialistic age in which we live. Its origins go back some
5 000 years. The Mahabharata War stands at the threshold
of this transition.
The historic significance of this war was therefore con-
siderable. No less is its significance in the spiritual progress
of humanity, as it constitutes the background of the avatar-
ic Work of Sri Krishna. And the lasting significance of Sri
Krishnas teaching to the present day witness the role it
played in Sri Aurobindos Yoga and his marvellous Essays
on the Gita is that it remains an inexhaustible guide for
spiritual practice, especially useful on the daily battlefield
of us, present-day humans.
2. Dharmakshetra: the field of dharma
The Gita, together with the Upanishads, was the text
which Sri Aurobindo constantly studied and worked out74
e l e v e n tal k s
in the practice of his Yoga during the year of his imprison-
ment in Alipore Jail (starting in May 1908). His realizations
resulted in a completely new understanding of the ration-
ale and destiny of the world and humanity. Considering the
Vedantic premise that All is That, he drew the ineluctable
conclusion that the Earth and life on it also were That, that
their essence and their meaning must be spiritual, and that
therefore the aim of life and yoga could not be an egoistic
escape into a Hereafter or a Nirvana, but that the aim of
earthly existence had to be the evolutionary recovery of the
Divine.
As the Mother once said, Sri Aurobindos avataric ac-
tion was an immense spiritual revolution rehabilitating
Matter and the creation. Sri Aurobindo himself wrote in
a letter: I am concerned with the earth, not with worlds
beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realization that
I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other yogas
regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the su-
pramental yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the
Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfil-
ment of the life and the body for its object. 3
Although the evolutionary and supramental vision of
Sri Aurobindo is well known, his radical attitude towards
Reality, including material reality, is sometimes forgotten
or diluted in ways more in line with traditional views. The
following passages from Essays on the Gita may remind us
of the true contents of his teaching.
From a clash of material or other forces everything
in this world, if not the world itself, seems to be born; by a
struggle of forces, tendencies, principles, beings it seems to
proceed, ever creating new things, ever destroying the old,
marching one knows not very well whither. However that
3
Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 91.w h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
75
may be, this is certain that there is not only no construction
here without destruction, no harmony except by a poise of
contending forces won out of many actual and potential
discords, but also no continued existence of life except by a
constant self-feeding and devouring of other life. The com-
mand seems to have gone out from the beginning, Thou
shalt not conquer except by battle with thy fellows and thy
surroundings; thou shalt not even live except by battle and
struggle and by absorbing into thyself other life. The first
law of this world that I have made is creation and preserva-
tion by destruction.
Ancient thought accepted this starting-point so far as
it could see it by scrutiny of the universe. The old Upan-
ishads saw it very clearly and phrased it with an uncompro-
mising thoroughness which will have nothing to do with
any honeyed glosses or optimistic scuttlings of the truth.
Hunger that is Death, they said, is the creator and master of
this world, and they figured vital existence in the image of
the Horse of the sacrifice. Matter they described by a name
which means ordinarily food and they said, we call it food
because it is devoured and devours creatures. The eater eat-
ing is eaten, this is the formula of the material world. 4
War, said Heraclitus, is the father of all things, war is
the king of all; and the saying, like most of the apophthegms
of the Greek thinker, suggests a profound truth. From a clash
of material or other forces everything in this world, if not the
world itself, seems to be born; by a struggle of forces, ten-
dencies, principles, beings it seems to proceed, ever creating
new things, ever destroying the old ... 5 Words like these
are rarely found in books on spirituality and yoga. Still the
truth is that the world can only be changed by confronting it
without excluding any of its problems, not by sidestepping
4 Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, pp. 40-41.
5 Id., p. 40.76
e l e v e n tal k s
them or trying to escape from them in what is fundamen-
tally an act of egoism.
It is only a few religions which have had the courage
to say without any reserve, like the Indian, that this enig-
matic World-Power is one Deity, one Trinity, to lift up the
image of the Force that acts in the world in the figure not
only of the beneficent Durga, but of the terrible Kali in her
blood-stained dance of destruction and to say, This too is
the Mother; this also know to be God; this too, if thou hast
the strength, adore. 6 Therefore: We must acknowledge
Kurukshetra; we must submit to the law of life by Death
before we can find our way to the life immortal; we must
open our eyes, with a less appalled gaze than Arjunas, to
the vision of our Lord of Time and Death and cease to deny,
hate or recoil from the universal Destroyer. 7
Which brings us to what Arjuna was given to see on
the battlefield, between two armies lined up to attack each
other.
3. What Arjuna saw
After having been told by Sri Krishna that his dejec-
tion is unworthy of his dharma as a fighter, Arjuna, the
representative man of a great world-struggle and divinely
guided movement of men and nations, is initiated in yoga
on the battlefield. Now he learns what is the sense of the
birth and passing away of existences. He knows that the
imperishable greatness of the divine conscious Soul is the
secret of all these appearances. 8
As a confirmation of the revelation he has received
from the Avatar, the Master of the Yoga himself, he would
6 Id., p. 45.
7 Id., p. 46.
8 Id., p. 377.w h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
77
see too the very form and body of this Godhead, of the
Absolute Existence about whom he has been told and who
has done the telling.
Thou shalt see, replies the Avatar, my hundreds and
thousands of divine forms, various in kind, various in shape
and hue ... Thou shalt see wonders that none has beheld.
Thou shalt see today the whole world related and unified
in my body and whatever else thou willest to behold. Yet
what Arjuna has to see, the human eye cannot grasp. But
there is a divine eye, an inmost seeing, by which the su-
preme Godhead in his Yoga can be beheld, and that eye I
now give to thee, says Sri Krishna. 9
The glory of the Supreme is disclosed to the warrior.
The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the
infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom
are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies all the many
marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide Divinity
seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking through innumer-
able mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine up-
lifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty,
robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of
divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the
light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at
once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided
and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods.
Arjuna, in ecstasy, cries out: Thou art the supreme Immu-
table whom we have to know, thou art the high founda-
tion and abode of the universe, thou art the imperishable
guardian of the eternal laws, thou art the sempiternal soul
of existence!
However, in the absoluteness of the God of Gods there
is also the opposite side, the terrible dark side completing
9 These quotations and the following in this section are from Essays
on the Gita, pp. 377 ff.78
e l e v e n tal k s
the glorious bright side. This aspect of his being too Sri
Krishna reveals to Arjuna, this Godhead who embraces
the worlds with his numberless arms and destroys with his
million hands, whose eyes are suns and moons, has a face of
blazing fire and is ever burning up the whole universe with
the flame of his energy ... The companies of the gods enter
[that Being] ... It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths
that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction;
it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings and
the captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battle
are hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws, and some
are seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between
its teeth of power; the nations are rushing to destruction
with helpless speed into its mouths of flame ... With those
burning mouths the Form of Dread is licking all the regions
around; the whole world is full of his burning energies and
baked in the fierceness of his lustres ...
Arjuna, the protagonist in the world-battle at that time
in human history, receives the full initiation. This is the
figure of the supreme and universal Being, writes Sri Au-
robindo, the Ancient of Days who is for ever, sanatanam
purusham puranam, this is he who for ever creates ... he who
keeps the world always in existence, for he is the guard-
ian of the eternal laws, but who is always too destroying in
order that he may new-create, who is Time, who is Death,
who is Rudra the Dancer of the calm and awful dance, who
is Kali with her garland of skulls trampling naked in battle
and flecked with the blood of the slaughtered Titans, who
is the cyclone and the fire and the earthquake and pain and
famine and revolution and ruin and the swallowing ocean.
This aspect of the Divine is an aspect from which the mind
in men willingly turns away and ostrich-like hides its head
so that perchance, not seeing, it may not be seen by the Ter-
rible. The weakness of the human heart wants only fair and com-
forting truths or in their absence pleasant fables; it will not havew h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
79
the truth in its entirety because there there is much that is not
clear and pleasant and comfortable but hard to understand and
harder to bear. 10
4. The battle that is our battle
In the words of Sri Aurobindo, Arjuna is the represent-
ative man of his age. In the Gita he typifies the human
soul of action brought face to face through that action in its
highest and most violent crisis with the problem of human
life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state
or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection. 11 When
putting the teachings of the Gita into practice, Sri Auro
bindo himself was constantly guided by Sri Krishna whom
afterwards he declared to have been the Master of his Yoga
(and who later incarnated into him 12 ). The Gita formed an
integral part of the foundation of his avataric realization
which is one reason why his Essays on the Gita remain an
essential source of inspiration for all who want to follow
in his footsteps. The battle on the field of the Kurus is the
battle of striving humanity; it is our battle.
The world of our battle and labour is a fierce dan-
gerous destructive devouring world in which life exists
precariously and the soul and body of man move among
enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward,
whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken,
in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put
away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terri-
ble on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put
it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposi-
tion between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature
10 Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, p. 381 (emphasis added).
11 Id., p. 21.
12 See talk 2, The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought.80
e l e v e n tal k s
were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on
man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the
making of this world or could create anything against the
will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices.
We have to look courageously in the face of the real-
ity and see that it is God and none else who has made this
world in his being and that so he has made it. We have to
see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the
lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the
violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the
supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to
see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the
helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the de-
vourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and
evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as hap-
piness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only when we see
with the eye of the complete union and feel his truth in the
depths of our being that we can entirely discover behind
that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful
Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the
touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The
discords of the world are Gods discords and it is only by
accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive
at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the sum-
mits and thrilled vastnesses of his transcendent and his
cosmic Ananda. 13
Sri Aurobindo touches here upon the question that has
been on the mind of all humans since their appearance on
the Earth, and to which all religions have to provide an an-
swer: the justification of a benevolent, omnipotent and om-
niscient God in view of the existence of evil and suffering. 14
13 Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, pp. 381-382.
14 See talk 10: Theodicy: Nature Makes no Mistakes.w h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
81
In The Life Divine he formulates the problem as follows:
God being All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we say
that pain is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moral
problem, we arrive at an immoral or non-moral God an
excellent world-mechanist perhaps, a cunning psycholo-
gist, but not a God of Good and Love whom we can wor-
ship, only a God of might to whose law we must submit
or whose caprice we may hope to propitiate. For one who
invents torture as a means of test and ordeal, stands con-
victed either of deliberate cruelty or of moral insensibility
and, if a moral being at all, is inferior to the highest instinct
of his own creatures. 15
As Sri Aurobindo writes in the letters of which The Rid-
dle of This World is composed: no answer has ever been giv-
en to satisfy the human mind because the answer requires
a consciousness vaster than ours, a cosmic consciousness,
only obtainable in an advanced state of yoga. The path to-
wards such understanding is the path of faith and surren-
der, warranted by the Vedantic affirmation that all is the
Brahman and that our souls have chosen to incarnate in
this evolutionary universe. If it be true that the Self alone
exists, it must also be true that all is the Self.
The gospel of universal peace and goodwill among
men for without a universal and entire mutual goodwill
there can be no real and abiding peace has never succeeded
for a moment in possessing itself of human life during the
historic cycle of our progress, because morally, socially, spir-
itually the race was not prepared and the poise of Nature
in its evolution would not admit of its being immediately
prepared for any such transcendence. ... A day may come,
must surely come, we will say, when humanity will be ready
spiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace;
15 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 101.82
e l e v e n tal k s
meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and function
of man as a fighter have to be accepted and accounted for
by any practical philosophy and religion. (Essays on the
Gita, p. 49)
5. The Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
In September 1943, when the Second World War was at
its height and undecided, Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter:
Ours is a Sadhana which involves not only devotion or
union with the Divine or a perception of Him in all things,
but also action as workers and instruments and a work to
be done in the world or a force to be brought in the world
under difficult conditions ... It does not seem to me that X is
wrong in seeing in it [i.e. the Second World War] the same
problem as in Kurukshetra. In this yoga, he wrote on
another occasion, all sides of the Truth are taken up, not
in the systematic forms given them formerly but in their es-
sence, and carried to the fullest and highest significance. 16
It cannot be overstressed that the Integral Yoga of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother is a radical, revolutionary ef-
fort to change human nature. As it is integral, it takes up
the essence and many processes of the old yogas, but it is
new in its aim (the transformation and divinization of hu-
man nature); its standpoint (if all is the Brahman, the world
and the body in which we are incarnated is also the Brah-
man; instead of the search for escape, the appreciation of
their Work must lead to an understanding and realization
of their purposes); and the totality of its method (including
the yogas of devotion, knowledge and works).
The Integral Yoga is also new because the object sought
after is not an individual achievement of divine realization
for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for
16 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 73.w h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
83
the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-
cosmic achievement. And it is new because a method has
been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total
and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and inte-
gral change of consciousness and nature ... I have not found
this method (as a whole) or anything like it professed or
realized in the old yogas, writes Sri Aurobindo. If I had, I
should not have wasted my time in hewing out a road and
in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could
have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over
paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped,
macadamized, made secure and public. Our yoga is not a
retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure. 17
Hewing out a new road, broadening and deepening the
destiny of humankind, is the task of the Avatar. In Sri Au-
robindos words: The Avatar is one who comes to open the
Way for humanity to a higher consciousness. ... The Divine
being all-powerful can lift people up without bothering to
come down on earth. It is only if it is a part of the world-
arrangement that he should take upon himself the burden
of humanity and open the Way that Avatarhood has any
meaning... The Avatar is not bound to do extraordinary ac-
tions, but he is bound to give his acts or his work or what
he is any of these or all a significance and an effective
power that are part of something essential to be done in the
history of the earth and its races. ... The Avatar is necessary
when a special work is to be done and in crises of the evo-
lution, as Sri Krishna himself gives Arjuna to understand,
saying that he incarnates as an Avatar yuge yuge, from age
to age. 18
Extraordinary actions abounded in the lives of Sri Au-
robindo and the Mother, the most extraordinary being of
17 Id., p. 101.
18 Id., pp. 408, 409, 414, 401.84
e l e v e n tal k s
course that they hewed out the road by preparing the Earth
for the descent and action of the Supermind. To this end
they had to fight the good fight as no incarnated beings be-
fore them had done, for and this is essential the Avatar,
to achieve the change he has come down for, has to take
upon him the entire burden of the past, the burden of the
evolution. In Savitri we find the lines:
But when Gods messenger comes to heal the world
And lead the soul of earth to higher things,
He too must carry the yoke he came to unloose ...
But though to the outward eye no sign appears
And peace is given to our torn human hearts,
The struggle is there and paid the unseen price;
The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within.
He carries the suffering world in his own breast ... 19
[He]
Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,
Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes
And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal. 20
And in that marvellous poem A Gods Labour, which
could also be called The Avatars Song, we read:
My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
And the Titan kings assail,
But I dare not rest till my task is done
And wrought the eternal will. 21
Although in a case like this comparisons are otiose, we
might say that the Mothers burden has been no less, as
witnessed for instance by some of her conversations in The
Mothers Agenda. At that time her transformational work in
19 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, p. 446.
20 Id., p. 230.
21 Sri Aurobindo: Collected Poems, p. 535.w h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
85
the depths of the subconscient had its repercussions in her
physical body, while she had to perform what she called
la besogne obscure, the obscure chore, and to confront toutes
les horreurs de la cration, all the horrors of creation. Now
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are accepted and adored as
Gods by many; few realize that they were also the Great
Warriors Kalki with the sword, Kali doing battle who
had, unknown, to fight the crusade for the future of human-
ity. The reality of their Work, even of the little we know of
it, is much more epochal than any of the religious myths.
Krishna calls upon Arjuna to carry on war of the most
terrible kind and by his example encourage men to do eve-
ry kind of human work, sarvakrmani. Do you contend that
Krishna was an unspiritual man and that his advice to Arju-
na was mistaken or wrong in principle? asked Sri Aurob-
indo in a letter to a disciple. Each spiritual effort attracts au-
tomatically the adverse forces, who do not want that change
and progress should occur in their dominion on Earth. It
was so at the time of the Vedic Rishis; it was so at the time of
the Mahabharata; it is so today in the experience of anybody
who sincerely steps upon the path of yoga. This yoga is a
spiritual battle, wrote Sri Aurobindo to a disciple, its very
attempt raises all sorts of adverse forces. 22
Fighting, war, courage and heroism are not among the
favourite social occurences and virtues of the civilized mind
at present, and, as mentioned above, the practice of yoga
is usually associated with the search for tranquillity, peace
and feeling well. Such, however, is not the path of the Inte-
gral Yoga, although some of its professed practitioners seek
to level the path in imitation of more familiar traditional
ways. Referring to the quotations from Sri Aurobindo, such
an attitude cannot agree with the Integral Yoga because Sri
Aurobindos and the Mothers Yoga is about changing the
22 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 1639.86
e l e v e n tal k s
human nature, which is such a difficult undertaking that
formerly no spiritual path, and certainly no religious one,
has even tried to attempt it.
As every aspirant is soon to find out: This yoga is a
spiritual battle; its very attempt raises all sorts of adverse
forces. The battlefield, however, is we ourselves, we com-
posite, complex human beings. It is a war of our members
in which every member, like every creature, has the right of
its highest possible development. It is a battle, a long war
with ourselves and with opposing forces around us.
Without heroism, avers Sri Aurobindo, no human can
grow into the Godhead. Courage, energy and strength are
among the very first principles of the divine nature in ac-
tion. And the Mother had the following prayer printed
in the Ashram School notebooks: Make of us the hero-
warriors we aspire to become. May we fight successfully
the great battle of the future that is to be born, against the
past that seeks to endure, so that the new things may mani-
fest and we be ready to receive them.
O soul, intruder in Natures ignorance,
Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights,
Thy spirits fate is a battle and ceaseless march
Against invisible opponent Powers ...
All who would raise the fallen world must come
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell. 23
6. Kurukshetra in the twentieth century
The Second World War is long past and is by most peo-
ple today but vaguely remembered. Countless books have
23 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, pp. 458, 227.w h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
87
been written about it, but its true significance is to be found
in the sparse comments and statements by Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother, providing us with a glimpse of the crucial
importance of that war for humanity, and of their part in it.
It may therefore be apposite here to quote once again the
following lines from a letter by Sri Aurobindo to a disciple,
written in September 1943, when the situation was criti-
cal not only for the world, but also for Sri Aurobindo, the
Mother and the Ashram: Ours is a Sadhana which involves
not only devotion or union with the Divine or a perception
of Him in all things, but also action as workers and instru-
ments and a work to be done in the world or a force to be
brought in the world under difficult conditions ... It does
not seem to me that X is wrong in seeing in it [i.e. the ongo-
ing war] the same problem as in Kurukshetra.
When more than half of the Ashram inmates were
sympathetic towards Hitler, most of them out of hatred to-
wards the British colonial regime, Sri Aurobindo made his
and the Mothers standpoint clear: I affirm again to you
most strongly that this is the Mothers war ... It is a struggle
for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of
humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realize itself fully and
against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to over-
whelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It
is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not
this or that superficial circumstance ...
It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for
conditions in which men have freedom and room to think
and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth,
grow in the Spirit. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if
one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and
hope of light and truth and the work that has to be done will
be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly
impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness,88
e l e v e n tal k s
a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human
race such as people in this country do not dream of and can-
not yet at all realize. (29.7.1942)
The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the
path open for the evolutionary forces; the victory of the
other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly
and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as
a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.
(3.9.1943)
This was the Avatar speaking in defence of the Work he
had come to do, to keep the path open for the evolution-
ary forces. It is at the vital, decisive evolutionary moments
that the Avatar incarnates, yuge yuge, to create the possibil-
ity of an evolutionary step forwards and to do battle with
the Forces who oppose his action with all their terrific, ego-
istic powers. Sri Rama had to fight Ravana at the time of the
mentalization of humanity; Sri Krishna led the fight of the
Mahabharata war, supporting with his physical presence
and his spiritual Power the Pandavas against the ill-inten-
tioned Kauravas. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were for
the first time in human history the complete, bi-poled male-
female Avatar. May it at last be realized that their crucial
avataric effort of transforming humanity, to make a better
world possible, impelled the Hostile Forces to retaliate and
caused the twentieth-century wars. Actually the First and
Second World War, together with the third Cold War, are
closely interrelated and should be seen as one.
A direct result of the Second World War was that it
brought the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to a
halt, and this at the moment that they expected the supra-
mental Descent to take place. Sri Aurobindo wrote later
on about these times of world-crisis when I have to be on
guard and concentrated all the time to prevent irremediablew h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
89
catastrophes. 24 The Mother reminisced more explicitly:
There was such a constant tension for Sri Aurobindo and
me that it interrupted the yoga completely during the whole
war. And it was for that reason that the war had come: to
stop the Work. For there was an extraordinary descent of the
Supermind at that time, it came like this [massive gesture]!
That was exactly in 1939. Then the war came and brought
everything to a standstill, completely. For if we had gone
on with the Work personally, we would not have been sure
that there was enough time to finish it before the other one
[the Asura of Falsehood, Hitlers God] had made a mess
of the world, and the whole affair would have been post-
poned for centuries. This had to be stopped first of all: the
action of the Lord of Nations the Lord of Falsehood. 25
Hitler, his Nazis and the supporting Fascists of several
countries lost the war. Yet the Lord of the Nations is not
bound to any country or personality, and while the Allied
nations were at their victory jig, he intensified his action in
the knowledge that, if he did not win one way or another,
there would come an end to his reign over the peoples. The
situation was as clear as a pike-staff to Sri Aurobindos
yogic knowledge and insight. There was a time when Hit-
ler was victorious everywhere and it seemed certain that a
black yoke of the Asura would be imposed on the whole
world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule?
However: Other blacknesses threaten to overshadow or
even engulf mankind ... 26
May Aurobindians bear these words of Sri Aurobindo
in mind: It is not enough that our own hands should re-
main clean and our souls unstained for the law of strife
24 Sri Aurobindo: On Himself, p. 188.
25 LAgenda de Mre 1961, pp. 410-411.
26 Sri Aurobindo: On Himself, p. 169.90
e l e v e n tal k s
and destruction to die out in the world; that which is its
root must first disappear out of humanity. Not till the
Time-Spirit in man is ready, can the inner and ultimate pre-
vail over the outer and immediate reality. Christ and Bud-
dha have come and gone. But it is Rudra who still holds the
world in the hollow of his hand. And meanwhile the fierce
forward labour of mankind tormented and oppressed by
the Powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their
servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle and
the word of the prophet. 27
The gospel of universal peace and goodwill among
men for without a universal and entire mutual goodwill
there can be no real and abiding peace has never succeed-
ed for a moment in possessing itself of human life during
the historic cycle of our progress, because morally, socially,
spiritually the race was not prepared and the poise of Na-
ture in its evolution would not admit of its being immedi-
ately prepared for any such transcendence. ... A day may
come, must surely come, we will say, when humanity will
be ready spiritually, morally, socially for the reign of uni-
versal peace; meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature
and function of man as a fighter have to be accepted and
accounted for by any practical philosophy and religion. 28
The Yoga having come down against the bed-rock of
Inconscience which is the fundamental basis of all resist-
ance in the individual and in the world, 29 the situation of
the world worsened because the resistance against the ava-
taric Work intensified. Things are bad, are growing worse
and may at any time grow worst or worse than worst if
that is possible and anything however paradoxical seems
27 Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, p. 386.
28 Id., pp. 48-49.
29 Sri Aurobindo: On Himself, p. 169.w h at ar j una saw: t he dar k si de of the force
91
possible in the present perturbed world, wrote Sri Aurob-
indo in July 1948. 30 And, after a life of avataric effort, he
wrote the fateful words: I have no intention of giving my
sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco, a partial and
transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical
change in the external nature 31 as had happened when
Christ and the Buddha had come and were gone.
It is not enough that our own hands should remain
clean and our souls unstained for the law of strife and de-
struction to die out of the world; that which is its root must
first disappear out of humanity. 32 And Sri Aurobindo, the
Avatar and Warrior of the Supermind, prepared to descend
into death to extirpate, at the root of the human condition,
that which on all previous occasions had barred the way
of Progress. This act was the ultimate condition of the de-
scent of a greater, a divine Consciousness on Earth. Only
six years after his voluntary descent into death (1950) the
Supramental Consciousness manifested in the earth at-
mosphere (1956). 33
Coda
Years before he performed the yogic Master Act of con-
sciously descending into death to purify and change the
occult foundations of the world, Sri Aurobindo had writ-
ten:
And yet I know my footprints track shall be
A pathway towards Immortality. 34
30 Id., p. 171.
31 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 130.
32 Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, p. 43.
33 See talk 8: Sri Aurobindos Descent into Death.
34 Sri Aurobindo: Collected Poems, p. 603.92
e l e v e n tal k s
It is good for those who follow in his footprints to re-
member that they continue the arduous pilgrimage of so
many predecessors, all of them belonging to the Fellow-
ship of the Aspiration:
n the sadhu conquering himself on the dusty or mud-
dy roads of the world;
n the gnostic in his quest for the knowledge of his
soul and its redemption;
n the hermetist pondering the teachings of his secret
divinity;
n the spiritual alchemist experimenting in his labora-
tory to realize his own transformation;
n the Zen-monk battering his mind against the glass
walls of insanity while trying to become truly sane, en-
lightened;
n the nun and monk kneeling in their solitary cell till
their prayer is answered by a touch of God;
n and so many others, whenever and wherever, who
were or are carried by the aspiration that animates our
lives.



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