The object of integral Yoga

The object of the yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine for the Divine’s sake alone, to be tuned in our nature into the nature of the Divine, and in our will and works and life to be the instructrument of the Divine. Its object is not to be a great yogi or a Superman (although that may come) or to grab at the Divine for the sake of the ego’s power, pride or pleasure. It is not for Moksha though liberation comes by it and all else may come, but these must not be our objects. The Divine alone is our object.

To come to tis yoga merely with the idea of being a superman would be an act of vital egoism which would defeat its own object. Those who put this object in the front of their preoccupations invariably come to grief, spiritually and otherwise. The aim of this yoga is, first, to enter into the divine consciousness by merging into it the separative ego (incidentally, in doing so one finds one’s true individual self which in not the limited, vain and selfish human ego but a portion of the Divine) and, secondly, to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth to transform mind, life and body. All else can be only a result of those two aims, not the primary object of the yoga.

You must get out of certain wrong ideas that you seem to have about yoga, for these are dangerous and ought to be thrown away by every sadhak:

The object of yoga is not to become “like” Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. Those who cherish this idea easily come to the further idea that they can become their equals and even greater. This is only to feed the ego.
The object of yoga is not to get power or to be more powerful than others or to have great siddhis or to do great or wonderful or miraculous things.
The object of yoga is not to be a great yogi or a superman. This is an egoistic way of taking the yoga and can lead to no good; avoid it altogether.
To talk about the supramental and think of bringing it down in yourself is the most dangerous of all. It may bring an entire megalomania and loss of balance. What the sadhak has to seek is the full opening to the Divine, the psychic change of consciousness, selflessness, humility, bhakti, surrender, calm, equality, peace, quite sincerity are necessary consistuents. Unitil he has the psychic and spiritual change, to think of being supramental is an absurdity and an arrogant absurdity.

All these agoistic ideas, if indulged, can only aggrandize the ego, spoil the shadhana and lead to serious spiritual dangers. They should be rejected altogether.

The object of the shadhana is opening of the consciousness to the Divine and the change of the nature. Meditation or contemplation is one means to this but only one means; bhakti is another; work is another. Chitta-shuddhi was preached by the yogins as a first means towards realization and they got by it the saintliness of the saint and the quietude of the sage but the transformation of the nature of which we speak is something more than that, and this transformation does not come by comtempation alone; works are necessary, yoga in action is indispensable.

The growth out of the ordinary mind into the spiritual consciousness can be effected either by meditaion, dedicated work or bhakti for the Divine. In our yoga, which seeks not only a static peace or absorption but a dynamic spiritual action, work is insdispensable . As for the supramental Truth, that is a different matter; it depends only on the descent of the Divine and the action of the Supreme Froce and is not bound by any method or rule.

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