Early Work

Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1911: "I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane… What I perceive most clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness… It is for this reason that I have been going through so long a discipline and that the more brilliant and mighty results of Yoga have been so long withheld. I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work severe and painful. It is only now that the edifice is beginning to rise upon the sure and perfect foundation that has been laid."

Sri Aurobindo in a letter, dated 12 July 1911 to Barin, his younger brother and revolutionary, written a little after one year of his coming to Pondicherry, reveals as what he was busy with:

I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane… What I perceive most clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness… It is for this reason that I have been going through so long a discipline and that the more brilliant and mighty results of Yoga have been so long withheld. I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work severe and painful. It is only now that the edifice is beginning to rise upon the sure and perfect foundation that has been laid.

In another letter he tells us about his earliest connection with the Mother, that they were in material and spiritual contact with each other since his coming to Pondicherry.

But the identity was in fact at a much deeper level. Even before the actual meeting took place for the first time on 29 March 1914, the Mother was significantly speaking of “us” in a few contexts. Thus we have the Mother’s revealing prayer of 11 January 1914.

I know that a day will come when Thou wilt transform all those who come to us; Thou wilt transform them so radically that, liberated completely from the bonds of the past, they will begin to live in Thee an entirely new life, a life made solely of Thee, with Thee as its sovereign Lord.

Again, on 11 August 1914, after the meeting, the Mother speaks of their being sent upon earth to prepare the Unknown’s ways. The Unknown One, she says, is waiting for the propitious hour of manifestation in which His Will will be done. Indeed, behind their coming together there was the Divine Will itself. It was in that Will, in that high samkalpa that everything was going to be worked out. That Will became dynamic in their wonderful undertaking.

It is unfortunate that we do not have anything of the sort in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo.

RY Deshpande