Q: It has been said that in order to
progress in Yoga one must offer up everything to the Divine, even every little
thing that one has or does in life. What is precisely the meaning of that?
A: The Mother: Yoga means union with the Divine,
and the union is effected through offering - it is founded on the offering of
yourself to the Divine. In the beginning you start by making this offering in a
general way, as though once for all; you say, “I am the servant of the Divine;
my life is given absolutely to the Divine; all my efforts are for the
realisation of the Divine Life.” But that is only the first step; for this is
not sufficient. When the resolution has been taken, when you have decided that
the whole of your life shall be given to the Divine, you have still at every
moment to remember it and carry it out in all the details of your existence.
You must feel at every step that you belong to the Divine; you must have the
constant experience that, in whatever you think or do, it is always the Divine
Consciousness that is acting through you. You have no longer anything that you
can call your own; you feel everything as coming from the Divine, and you have
to offer it back to its source. When you can realise that, then even the
smallest thing to which you do not usually pay much attention or care, ceases
to be trivial and insignificant; it becomes full of meaning and it opens up a
vast horizon beyond.
This is
what you have to do to carry out your general offering in detailed offerings. Live
constantly in the presence of the Divine; live in the feeling that it is this
presence which moves you and is doing everything you do. Offer all your
movements to it, not only every mental action, every thought and feeling but even
the most ordinary and external actions such as eating; when you eat, you must
feel that it is the Divine who is eating through you. When you can thus gather
all your movements into the One Life, then you have in you unity instead of
division. No longer is one part of your nature given to the Divine, while the
rest remains in its ordinary ways, engrossed in ordinary things; your entire
life is taken up, an integral transformation is gradually realized in you.
In the
integral Yoga, the integral life down even to the smallest detail has to be
transformed, to be divinised. There is nothing here that is insignificant,
nothing that is indifferent. You cannot say,
“When I
am meditating, reading philosophy or listening to these conversations I will be
in this condition of an opening towards the Light and call for it, but when I
go out to walk or see friends I can allow myself to forget all about it.” To
persist in this attitude means that you will remain untransformed and never
have the true union; always you will be divided; you will have at best only
glimpses of this greater life. For although certain experiences and
realisations may come to you in meditation or in your inner consciousness, your
body and your outer life will remain unchanged. An inner illumination that does
not take any note of the body and the outer life, is of no great use, for it
leaves the world as it is. This is what has continually happened till now. Even
those who had a very great and powerful realisation withdrew from the world to
live undisturbed in inner quiet and peace; the world was left to its ways, and
misery and stupidity, Death and Ignorance continued, unaffected, their reign on
this material plane of existence.
For those
who thus withdraw, it may be pleasant to escape from this turmoil, to run away
from the difficulty and to find for themselves a happy condition elsewhere; but
they leave the world and life uncorrected and untransformed; and their own
outer consciousness too they leave unchanged and their bodies as unregenerate as
ever. Coming back to the physical world, they are likely to be worse there than
even ordinary people; for they have lost the mastery over material things, and
their dealing with physical life is likely to be slovenly and helpless in its
movements and at the mercy of every passing force. An ideal of this kind may be
good for those who want it, but it is not our Yoga. For we want the divine
conquest of this world, the conquest of all its movements and the realisation
of the Divine here. But if we want the Divine to reign here we must give all we
have and are and do here to the Divine. It will not do to think that anything
is unimportant or that the external life and its necessities are no part of the
Divine Life. If we do, we shall remain where we have always been and there will
be no conquest of the external world; nothing abiding there will have been
done.
(CWM, Volume 3, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)