Here is a personal e-mail from Paulette which is significant in more than one respect. I therefore thought it gainful to post it for the benefit of the perceptive readers of the Mirror of Tomorrow, particularly the aspiring souls of the Aurobindonian or what is called the Integral Yoga Community. I thus approached the writer whether it would be all right if I should make the letter public. I’m glad she readily consented to it and my sincere thanks to her for the splendid gesture. There’s no doubt that it will bring a fresh look at the controversy that is raging on the latest biography of Sri Aurobindo which is rather unfortunate on several counts. Paulette adds: “I hope this will help to disentangle some of the mess, so that we can at last move forward and look where the real problems are—using this controversy to remind all of us that there is something deeply missing, to be found again! Everything, truly everything is a chance to progress.” How wonderful! But will we avail the chance? go into the depth of our soul and our heart, in the true spirit of the Aurobindoinan ethos, of progressive spirituality? The problem is, essentially, we are looking at things with our idée fixe, with our entrenched formulations and formations, the ancient samskāras,—also as much as with our idée reçue—without realizing the fundamental fact that we are approaching a Yogi par excellence, a spiritual giant, a Master, one from whom we are seeking spiritual guidance. We go to him for that spiritual guidance because there is something in us which tells us that our deepest soul’s aspirations and urges would find fulfilment in it. Should that ‘something’ be lacking, and then it would be immaterial with what else we might be occupied in our life. Those who have a call for that spiritual life, a kind of an imperative for it, they only will find it rewarding; any attempt in our zeal to take him to the spiritually raw or uneducated or illiterate, that is, those who have not received the ‘call’, whatever might otherwise be their great academic or professional standing, is likely to prove much frustrating. In fact spirituality is not a commodity which can in the manner of a Capitalist be freely promoted or exported to others. Such notions of promoting spirituality are a falsification, a gross unpleasant falsification, and therefore it becomes shocking when we see that they are held by those who claim themselves to be members of a spiritual group or an Ashram. That is unfortunately the kind of thing which one sees in the latest biography, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. What have academia to do with spirituality at all, if they have no compulsion of any sort, of them being drawn towards it? Nothing, really nothing. When we say that we belong to the IY Community, then let us not forget its principal element, its foundational aspect, the ‘Yoga’-aspect of it, never—the rest being of little importance or consequence. “Self-realisation is the one thing needful,” says Sri Aurobindo; “to open to the inner spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after and discover the Eternal, to be in union with God”—that is the essential sense of spirituality. The “dynamic following after the highest spiritual truth” has to be the only consideration if we are to hold that we belong to the IY Community. The rest is gross and unpleasant falsification which must be eschewed. I’m glad that Paulette brings out some of these aspects in her e-mail in a very forceful manner, and that is why I thought of making it public.

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