Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 35

Fragment ID: 9220

Representation of People in the Ashram [4]

It is necessary or rather inevitable that in an Asram which is a “laboratory”, as Adhar Das puts it,¹ for a spiritual and supramental Yoga, humanity should be variously represented. For the problem of transformation has to deal with all sorts of elements favourable and unfavourable. The same man indeed carries in him a mixture of these two things. If only sattwic and cultured men came for the Yoga, men without very much of the vital difficulty in them, then because the difficulty of the vital element in terrestrial nature has not been faced and overcome, it might well be that the endeavour would fail. There might conceivably be under certain circumstances an overmental layer superimposed on the mental, vital and physical and influencing them, but hardly anything supramental or a sovereign transmutation of the human being. Those in the Asram come from all quarters and are of all kinds; it cannot be otherwise.

In the course of the Yoga, collectively – though not for each one necessarily – as each plane is dealt with, all its difficulties arise. That will explain much in the Asram that people do not expect there. When the preliminary work is over in the “laboratory”, things must change.

Also much stress has not been laid on human fellowship of the ordinary kind between the inmates, (though good feeling, consideration and courtesy should always be there), because that is not the aim; it is a unity in a new consciousness that is the aim and the first thing is for each to do his sadhana, to arrive at that new consciousness and realise oneness there.

Whatever faults are there in the sadhaks must be removed by the Light from above – a sattwic rule can only change natures predisposed to a sattwic rule.

31 October 1935

¹ A. C. Das, review of Lights on Yoga. The Calcutta Review 47 (October 1935), pp. 101–2.

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