Here are two essays by Sri Aurobindo which appeared first in his philosophical monthly Arya [Vol. 2] and were somewhat revised later by him: The Delight of Works [August 1915] and Yoga and Skill in Works [July 1916]. The text we have used is from the Birth Centenary Editon of his works, Vol. 16 entitled The Supramental Manifestation. What is attempted is a free rendering or excerption of the two essays essentially to get an idea of the eternal theme they present.

The Delight of Works

There are always these three things in the works, the Master, the Worker, and the Instrument. To define them in oneself rightly and rightly to possess them is the secret of works and of the delight of works.

First we must learn to be the instrument of God and to accept our Master. The instrument is this mould of mind, a driving force of power, a machinery of form, a thing full of springs and cogs and clamps and devices. It is wrong to call this the Worker or the Master; it can never be the Worker or the Master. To be humbly, yet proudly, devotedly, submissively and joyfully a divine instrument is the condition.

There is no greater pride and glory than to be a perfect instrument of the Master.

We must simply learn absolutely to obey. As instruments things are settled by the intention and working of Nature and the more the conscious instrument learns to feel and obey the pure and essential law of its nature the sooner shall the work turned out become perfect and flawless. Self-choice by the nervous motive-power, revolt of the physical and mental tool can only mar the working.

Let it drive us in the breath of God that we be as a leaf in the tempest; we should put ourselves in His hand and be as the sword that strikes and the arrow that leaps to its target. In whatever way, we should do as an instrument the work that is natural.

Because we have mistaken the instrument for the worker and the master, therefore we have suffering and anguish and have many times to be reborn and reshaped and retempered until we shall have learned our human lesson.

And all these things are, because they are in our unfinished nature. For Nature is the worker and what is it that she works at? She shapes out of her crude mind and life and matter a fully conscious being.

We should know ourselves next as the Worker, we should understand our nature to be the worker and our own nature and All-Nature to be ourselves.

This nature-self is not proper to us, nor limited. Beyond all these things of nature it is an original self-knowledge and an infinite force and innumerable quality. In us there is a special movement, a proper nature and an individual energy. We should follow that like a widening river till it leads us to its infinite source and origin.

When that is done, we shall take our free delight in the truth of our individual being, and in our strength, and in our glory, and in our beauty, and in our knowledge; and in the denial of these things we shall take delight also.

There are those who know themselves as a workshop or an instrument or the thing worked, but they mistake the Worker for the Master; this too is an error. Those who fall into it can hardly arrive at the high, pure and perfect workings. The instrument is finite in a personal image, the worker is universal with a personal trend, but neither of these is the Master, for neither are the true Person.

Know we should last the Master to be ourselves; but to this self we should put no form and seek for it no definition of quality. We should be one with That in our being, commune with That in our consciousness, obey That in our force, be subject to That and clasped by it in our delight, fulfil That in our life and body and mentality. Then before an opening eye within us, there shall emerge that true and only Person, the Director and Enjoyer of our works, the Master of the worker and the instrument, the Reveller and Trampler in the dance of the universe and yet hushed and alone with us in our soul’s silent and inner chamber.

The joy of the Master possessed, there is nothing else for us to conquer. He shall give us Himself and all things and all creatures’ gettings and havings and doings and enjoyings for our own proper portion, and He shall give us that also which cannot be portioned. We shall contain in our being ourselves and all others and be that which is neither ourselves nor all others. Of works this is the consummation and the summit.

Yoga and Skill in Works

Yoga, says the Gita, is skill in works, and by this phrase the ancient Scripture meant that the transformation of mind and being to which it gave the name of Yoga brought with it a perfect inner state and faculty out of which the right principle of action and the right spiritual and divine result of works emerged naturally like a tree out of its seed. Certainly, it did not mean that the clever general or politician or lawyer or shoemaker deserves the name of Yogin; it did not mean that any kind of skill in works was Yoga, but by Yoga it signified a spiritual condition of universal equality and God-union and by the skill of the Yogic worker it intended a perfect adaptation of the soul and its instruments to the rhythm of the divine and universal Prakriti liberated from the shackles of egoism and the limitations of the sense-mind.

Yoga is the exchange of an egoistic for a universal or cosmic consciousness lifted towards or informed by the supra-cosmic, transcendent Unnameable who is the source and support of all things. Yoga is the passage of the human thinking animal towards the God-consciousness from which he has descended. In that ascent we find many levels and stages, plateau after plateau of the hill whose summit touches the Truth of things; but at every stage the saying of the Gita applies in an ever higher degree. Even a little of this new law and inner order delivers the soul out of the great peril by which it had been overtaken in its worldward descent, the peril of the ignorance. It is the utility of Yoga that it opens to us a gate of escape out of the vicious circle of our ordinary human existence.

The idea of works, in the thought of the Gita, is the widest possible. All action of Nature in man is included. The seeking of the Self by thought, the adoration of the Highest by the emotions of the heart, the gathering of means and material and capacity and the use of them for the service of God and man stand here on an equal footing. While the outward action may be the same, there is a great internal difference between the working of the ordinary man and the working of the Yogin,—a difference in the state of the being, a difference in the power and the faculty, a difference in the will and temperament.

What we do, arises out of what we are. The existent is conscious of what he is; that consciousness formulates itself as knowledge and power; works are the result of this twofold force of being in action. Mind, life and body can only operate out of that which is contained in the being of which they are forces. This is what we mean when we say that all things act according to their nature. God is not limited or bound by any particular working or any moment of time or any field of space or any law of relation, because He is universal and infinite. Nor is He limited by the universe; for His infinity is not cosmic, but supracosmic.

But the individualised being is or acts as if he were so bound and limited, because he treats the particular working of existence as the binding truth of things. Then from his egoistic error arises an all-vitiating falsehood. Therefore the salvation of the individual lies in his universalising himself; and this is the lesson which life tries always to teach him, but the obstinate ego is always unwilling to learn.

Nor is the universalising of himself sufficient for liberation, although certainly it will make him practically more free and in his being nearer to the true freedom. To put himself in tune with the universal is a step, but beyond the universal and directing and determining it is the supracosmic infinity. Therefore the universalised mind must look up from its cosmic consciousness to the Supernal and derive from that all its sense of being and movement of works. This is the fundamental truth from which the Yogic consciousness starts; it helps the individual to universalise himself and then to transcend the cosmic formula. And this transformation acts not only on his status of being but on his active consciousness in works.

The Gita tells us that equality of soul and mind is Yoga and that this equality is the foundation of the Brahman-state, that high infinite consciousness to which the Yogin aspires. Now equality of mind means universality. The equality spoken of is not indifference or impartiality or equability, but a fundamental oneness of attitude to all persons and all things and happenings because of the perception of all as the One. Such equality, it is erroneously thought, is incompatible with action. By no means; this is the error of the animal and the intellectual man who thinks that action is solely possible when dictated by his hopes, fears and passions or by the self-willed preferences of the emotion and the intellect justifying themselves by the illusions of the reason. The universal is equal in all and therefore its determinations are not self-willed preferences but are guided by the truth of the divine will and knowledge which is unlimited and not subject to incapacity or error.

Therefore the state of his being by which the Yogin differs from the ordinary man, is that by which he rises from the foundation of a perfect equality to the consciousness of the one existence in all and embracing all and lives in that existence and not in the walls of his body or personal temperament or limited mind. All action in the universe he sees as arising in this being, out of the divine Existence and under the stress of the divine Truth, Knowledge, Will and Power. He begins to participate consciously in its working and to see all things in the light of that divine truth and governance; and even when his own actions move on certain lines rather than others, he is not bound by them or shut to the truth of all the rest by his own passions and preferences, gropings and seekings and revolts. It is evident that such an increasing wideness of vision must mean an increasing knowledge. And if it be true that knowledge is power, it must mean also an increasing force for works. The Yogin ceases, progressively, to act by the choice of his intellectual or emotional nature. Another light dawns, another power and presence intervenes, other faculties awake.

As the state of being changes, the will and temperament must necessarily be modified. Even from an early stage the Yogin begins to subordinate his personal will or it becomes naturally subordinate to the sense of the supreme Will which is attracting him upward. There is the increase to an immense forcefulness while giving it an infinite calm and an eternal patience. The temperament also is delivered from all leash of straining and desire, from all urge of passion and pain of wilful self-delusion.

Not only must the will and fundamental knowledge-view of things change, but a new combination of faculties take the place of the old. For if the intellect is not to do all our mental work for us or to work at all in its unillumined state and if the will in the form of desires, wishes, intellectual preferences is not to determine and enforce our action, then it is clear that other powers of knowledge and will must awaken and either replace the intellect and the mental preference or illumine and guide the one and transform and dominate the other. Such faculties and new combinations of faculties can and do emerge and they are illuminations and powers that are in direct touch and harmony with the light and power of the Truth; therefore in proportion as they manifest and take hold of their functions, they must increase the force, subtlety and perfection of the Yogin’s skill in works.

But the greatest skill in works of Yoga is that which to the animal man seems its greatest ineptitude. The object of all skill in works must be evidently to secure the best welfare either of ourselves or of others or of all. The ordinary man calls it welfare. The greatest cunning of Yoga is to have detected this cheat of the mind and its desires and dualities and to have found the way to an abiding peace, a universal delight and an all-embracing satisfaction, which can not only be enjoyed for oneself but communicated to others. That too arises out of the change of our being; for the pure truth of existence carries also in it the unalloyed delight of existence, they are inseparable in the status of the infinite. To use the figures of the Vedic seers, by Yoga Varuna is born in us, a vast sky of spiritual living, the Divine in his wide existence and infinite truth; into that wideness Mitra rises up, Lord of Light and Love who takes all our activities of thought and feeling and will, links them into a Divine harmony, charioteers our movement and dictates our works; called by this wideness and this harmony Aryaman appears in us, the Divine in its illumined power, uplifted force of being and all- judging effective will; and by the three comes the indwelling Bhaga, the Divine in its pure bliss and all-seizing joy who dispels the evil dream of our jarring and divided existence and possesses all things in the light and glory of Aryaman’s power, Mitra’s love and light, Varuna’s unity. This divine Birth shall be the son of our works; and than creating this what greater skill can there be or what more practical and sovereign cunning?

Sri Aurobindo: The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 287-97