Much is often made, possibly with due justification also, about the views changing in the course of time, as if one becoming wiser with the unfolding actions, measures and results. Should not this be applied to Sri Aurobindo also? Would he not have changed his earlier opinions and statements, becoming wiser with the rolling of events? That appears to be an important question, and let us have a look at it. It is to be well understood that Sri Aurobindo's view of India and the world might have changed with world circumstances, with changing time, but never his fundamentals behind them. In fact such a possibility of his views changing with time fits in quite well with the awareness, the comprehension he had of the working of the occult forces that are at play behind the scene. His grasp of these cosmic goings-on and activities has always been there at the back his appraisals and assessments, if we have to use these descriptions. It is therefore not necessary, as someone is hectically trying, to hunt out quotations from his letters written to Nirodbaran in the 1930s, without realizing that there is a contradiction in itself. The point is, Sri Aurobindo was always alive to the dynamics of the situation. There is another aspect also that, these occult forces have to get tired and exhausted before they disappear altogether. When it was absolutely necessary he did intervene with his full concentrated yogic force, with a decisive yogic will in it,—as he did in the course of the War against Hitler when the stakes were very high, stakes concerned with the fate of this creation itself. In general he was aware of the working of the occult forces, and his statements could be contextual with regard to this complex game. Very often this is missed, and wrong conclusions drawn to justify one’s own pet ideas and theories. Smart commentators say that there is no reason we should not believe that the passing of some six decades would not have altered his view of 1950 regards the pre-nuclear subcontinent. But nobody is going to deny this fact, yet would Sri Aurobindo change what he had said, say, in his Independence Day message that the India-Pakistan Partition is an artificial creation and should go? would he ever revise that statement? One wonders, if one has some perception of such matters. The sorry thing is, these smart commentators and their cohorts confuse modus operandi with the basic realities that are there behind the yogic vision.
... more »