{"id":2188,"date":"2013-07-13T01:40:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2188"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:40:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:40:00","slug":"48-chapter-ii-the-motives-of-devotion-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga\/48-chapter-ii-the-motives-of-devotion-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","title":{"rendered":"-48_Chapter II The Motives of Devotion.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\n\n
\n<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter II <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Motives of Devotion
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA<\/font>LL RELIGION<\/b> begins with the conception of some
\nPower or existence greater and higher than our limited and mortal selves, a thought and act of worship done to
\nthat Power, and an obedience offered to its will, its laws or its demands. But Religion, in its beginnings, sets an immeasurable
\ngulf between the Power thus conceived, worshipped and obeyed and the worshipper. Yoga in its culmination abolishes the gulf;
\nfor Yoga is union. We arrive at union with it through knowledge; for as our first obscure conceptions of it clarify, enlarge, deepen,
\nwe come to recognise it as our own highest self, the origin and sustainer of our being and that towards which it tends. We arrive
\nat union with it through works; for from simply obeying we come to identify our will with its Will, since only in proportion
\nas it is identified with this Power that is its source and ideal, can our will become perfect and divine. We arrive at union with it
\nalso by worship; for the thought and act of a distant worship develops into the necessity of close adoration and this into the
\nintimacy of love, and the consummation of love is union with the Beloved. It is from this development of worship that the
\nYoga of devotion starts and it is by this union with the Beloved that it finds its highest point and consummation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll our instincts and the movements of our being begin by supporting themselves on the ordinary motives of our lower
\nhuman nature, \u2014 mixed and egoistic motives at first, but afterwards they purify and elevate themselves, they become an intense
\nand special need of our higher nature quite apart from the results our actions bring with them; finally they exalt themselves into
\na sort of categorical imperative of our being, and it is through our obedience to this that we arrive at that supreme something
\nself-existent in us which was all the time drawing us towards it, first by the lures of our egoistic nature, then by something much
\n  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t higher, larger, more universal, until we are able to feel its own
\ndirect attraction which is the strongest and most imperative of all. In the transformation of ordinary religious worship into the
\nYoga of pure Bhakti we see this development from the motived and interested worship of popular religion into a principle of
\nmotiveless and self-existent love. This last is in fact the touchstone of the real Bhakti and shows whether we are really in the
\ncentral way or are only upon one of the bypaths leading to it. We have to throw away the props of our weakness, the motives
\nof the ego, the lures of our lower nature before we can deserve the divine union. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFaced with the sense of a Power or perhaps a number of Powers greater and higher than himself by whom his life in
\nNature is overshadowed, influenced, governed, man naturally applies to it or to them the first primitive feelings of the natural
\n\t\t\tbeing among the difficulties, desires and dangers of that life, \u2014 fear and interest. The enormous part played by these motives
\nin the evolution of the religious instinct, is undeniable, and in fact, man being what he is, it could hardly have been less; and
\neven when religion has advanced fairly far on its road, we see these motives still surviving, active, playing a sufficiently large
\npart, justified and appealed to by Religion herself in support of her claims on man. The fear of God, it is said,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 or, it may be
\n\t\t\tadded for the sake of historical truth, the fear of the Gods, \u2014 is the beginning of religion, a half-truth upon which scientific
\nresearch, trying to trace the evolution of religion, ordinarily in a critical and often a hostile rather than in a sympathetic spirit, has
\nlaid undue emphasis. But not the fear of God only, for man does not act, even most primitively, from fear alone, but from twin
\nmotives, fear and desire, fear of things unpleasant and maleficent and desire of things pleasant and beneficent,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 therefore from
\n\t\t\tfear and interest. Life to him is primarily and engrossingly, \u2014 until he learns to live more in his soul and only secondarily in
\nthe action and reaction of outward things, \u2014 a series of actions and results, things to be desired, pursued and gained by action
\nand things to be dreaded and shunned, yet which may come upon him as a result of action. And it is not only by his own <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t action but by that also of others and of Nature around him
\nthat these things come to him. As soon, then, as he comes to sense a Power behind all this which can influence or determine
\naction and result, he conceives of it as a dispenser of boons and sufferings, able and under certain conditions willing to help him
\nor hurt, save and destroy. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn the most primitive parts of his being he conceives of it as
\na thing of natural egoistic impulses like himself, beneficent when pleased, maleficent when offended; worship is then a means of
\npropitiation by gifts and a supplication by prayer. He gets God on his side by praying to him and flattering him. With a more
\nadvanced mentality, he conceives of the action of life as reposing on a certain principle of divine justice, which he reads always
\naccording to his own ideas and character, as a sort of enlarged copy of his human justice; he conceives the idea of moral good
\nand evil and looks upon suffering and calamity and all things unpleasant as a punishment for his sins and upon happiness
\nand good fortune and all things pleasant as a reward of his virtue. God appears to him as a king, judge, legislator, executor
\nof justice. But still regarding him as a sort of magnified Man, he imagines that as his own justice can be deflected by prayers
\nand propitiation, so the divine justice can also be deflected by the same means. Justice is to him reward and punishment, and
\nthe justice of punishment can be modified by mercy to the suppliant, while rewards can be supplemented by special favours
\nand kindness such as Power when pleased can always bestow on its adherents and worshippers. Moreover God like ourselves
\nis capable of wrath and revenge, and wrath and revenge can be turned by gifts and supplication and atonement; he is capable
\ntoo of partiality, and his partiality can be attracted by gifts, by prayer and by praise. Therefore instead of relying solely on the
\nobservation of the moral law, worship as prayer and propitiation is still continued. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAlong with these motives there arises another development of personal feeling, first of the awe which one naturally feels for
\nsomething vast, powerful and incalculable beyond our nature by a certain inscrutability in the springs and extent of its action,<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t and of the veneration and adoration which one feels for that
\nwhich is higher in its nature or its perfection than ourselves. For, even while preserving largely the idea of a God endowed
\nwith the qualities of human nature, there still grows up along with it, mixed up with it or superadded, the conception of an
\nomniscience, an omnipotence and a mysterious perfection quite other than our nature. A confused mixture of all these motives,
\nvariously developed, often modified, subtilised or glossed over, is what constitutes nine tenths of popular religion; the other tenth
\nis a suffusion of the rest by the percolation into it of nobler, more beautiful and profounder ideas of the Divine which minds
\nof a greater spirituality have been able to bring into the more primitive religious concepts of mankind. The result is usually
\ncrude enough and a ready target for the shafts of scepticism and unbelief, \u2014 powers of the human mind which have their utility
\neven for faith and religion, since they compel a religion to purify gradually what is crude or false in its conceptions. But what we
\nhave to see is how far in purifying and elevating the religious instinct of worship any of these earlier motives need to survive
\nand enter into the Yoga of devotion which itself starts from worship. That depends on how far they correspond to any truth
\nof the divine Being and its relations with the human soul; for we seek by Bhakti union with the Divine and true relation with it,
\nwith its truth and not with any mirage of our lower nature and of its egoistic impulses and ignorant conceptions. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe ground on which sceptical unbelief assails Religion, namely, that there is in fact no conscient Power or Being in
\nthe universe greater and higher than ourselves or in any way influencing or controlling our existence, is one which Yoga cannot accept, as that would contradict all spiritual experience and make Yoga itself impossible. Yoga is not a matter of theory
\nor dogma, like philosophy or popular religion, but a matter of experience. Its experience is that of a conscient universal and
\nsupracosmic Being with whom it brings us into union, and this conscious experience of union with the Invisible, always renewable and verifiable, is as valid as our conscious experience of a physical world and of visible bodies with whose invisible minds <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\twe daily communicate. Yoga proceeds by conscious union, the
\nconscious being is its instrument, and a conscious union with the Inconscient cannot be. It is true that it goes beyond the
\nhuman consciousness and in Samadhi becomes superconscient, but this is not an annullation of our conscious being, it is only
\nits self-exceeding, the going beyond its present level and normal limits. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSo far, then, all Yogic experience is agreed. But Religion and the Yoga of Bhakti go farther; they attribute to this Being
\na Personality and human relations with the human being. In both the human being approaches the Divine by means of his
\nhumanity, with human emotions, as he would approach a fellow-being, but with more intense and exalted feelings; and not only
\nso, but the Divine also responds in a manner answering to these emotions. In that possibility of response lies the whole question;
\nfor if the Divine is impersonal, featureless and relationless, no such response is possible and all human approach to it becomes
\nan absurdity; we must rather dehumanise, depersonalise, annul ourselves in so far as we are human beings or any kind of beings;
\non no other conditions and by no other means can we approach it. Love, fear, prayer, praise, worship of an Impersonality which
\nhas no relation with us or with anything in the universe and no feature that our minds can lay hold of, are obviously an irrational foolishness. On such terms religion and devotion become out of the question. The Adwaitin in order to find a religious basis for his bare and sterile philosophy, has to admit the practical existence of God and the gods and to delude his mind with the
\nlanguage of Maya. Buddhism only became a popular religion when Buddha had taken the place of the supreme Deity as an
\nobject of worship. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEven if the Supreme be capable of relations with us but only
\nof impersonal relations, religion is robbed of its human vitality and the Path of Devotion ceases to be effective or even possible.
\nWe may indeed apply our human emotions to it, but in a vague and imprecise fashion, with no hope of a human response: the
\nonly way in which it can respond to us, is by stilling our emotions and throwing upon us its own impersonal calm and immutable<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t equality; and this is what in fact happens when we approach
\nthe pure impersonality of the Godhead. We can obey it as a Law, lift our souls to it in aspiration towards its tranquil being,
\ngrow into it by shedding from us our emotional nature; the human being in us is not satisfied, but it is quieted, balanced,
\nstilled. But the Yoga of devotion, agreeing in this with Religion, insists on a closer and warmer worship than this impersonal
\naspiration. It aims at a divine fulfilment of the humanity in us as well as of the impersonal part of our being; it aims at a
\ndivine satisfaction of the emotional being of man. It demands of the Supreme acceptance of our love and a response in kind;
\nas we delight in Him and seek Him, so it believes that He too delights in us and seeks us. Nor can this demand be condemned
\nas irrational, for if the supreme and universal Being did not take any delight in us, it is not easy to see how we could have come
\ninto being or could remain in being, and if He does not at all draw us towards him,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 a divine seeking of us, \u2014 there would
\nseem to be no reason in Nature why we should turn from the round of our normal existence to seek Him. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTherefore that there may be at all any possibility of a Yoga of devotion, we must assume first that the supreme Existence is
\nnot an abstraction or a state of existence, but a conscious Being; secondly, that he meets us in the universe and is in some way
\nimmanent in it as well as its source, \u2014 otherwise, we should have to go out of cosmic life to meet him; thirdly, that he is
\ncapable of personal relations with us and must therefore be not incapable of personality; finally, that when we approach him by
\nour human emotions, we receive a response in kind. This does not mean that the nature of the Divine is precisely the same
\nas our human nature though upon a larger scale, or that it is that nature pure of certain perversions and God a magnified or
\nelse an ideal Man. God is not and cannot be an ego limited by his qualities as we are in our normal consciousness. But on the
\nother hand our human consciousness must certainly originate and have been derived from the Divine; though the forms which
\nit takes in us may and must be other than the divine because we are limited by ego, not universal, not superior to our nature, not
\n  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\tgreater than our qualities and their workings, as he is, still our
\nhuman emotions and impulses must have behind them a Truth in him of which they are the limited and very often, therefore,
\nthe perverse or even the degraded forms. By approaching him through our emotional being we approach that Truth, it comes
\ndown to us to meet our emotions and lift them towards it; through it our emotional being is united with him. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSecondly, this supreme Being is also the universal Being and our relations with the universe are all means by which we are prepared for entering into relation with him. All the emotions with which we confront the action of the universal existence upon us,
\nare really directed towards him, in ignorance at first, but it is by directing them in growing knowledge towards him that we enter
\ninto more intimate relations with him, and all that is false and ignorant in them will fall away as we draw nearer towards unity.
\nTo all of them he answers, taking us in the stage of progress in which we are; for if we met no kind of response or help to our
\nimperfect approach, the more perfect relations could never be established. Even as men approach him, so he accepts them and
\nresponds too by the divine Love to their bhakti, tathaiva bhajate<\/i>. Whatever form of being, whatever qualities they lend to him,
\nthrough that form and those qualities he helps them to develop, encourages or governs their advance and in their straight way
\nor their crooked draws them towards him. What they see of him is a truth, but a truth represented to them in the terms of
\ntheir own being and consciousness, partially, distortedly, not in the terms of its own higher reality, not in the aspect which it
\nassumes when we become aware of the complete Divinity. This is the justification of the cruder and more primitive elements of
\nreligion and also their sentence of transience and passing. They are justified because there is a truth of the Divine behind them
\nand only so could that truth of the Divine be approached in that stage of the developing human consciousness and be helped
\nforward; they are condemned, because to persist always in these crude conceptions and relations with the Divine is to miss that
\ncloser union towards which these crude beginnings are the first steps, however faltering.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n  
\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tAll life, we have said, is a Yoga of Nature; here in this
\nmaterial world life is her reaching out from her first inconscience towards a return to union with the conscient Divine
\nfrom whom she proceeded. In religion the mind of man, her accomplished instrument, becomes aware of her goal in him,
\nresponds to her aspiration. Even popular religion is a sort of ignorant Yoga of devotion. But it does not become what we
\nspecifically call Yoga until the motive becomes in a certain degree clairvoyant, until it sees that union is its object and that love is
\nthe principle of union, and until therefore it tries to realise love and lose its separative character in love. When that has been
\naccomplished, then the Yoga has taken its decisive step and is sure of its fruition. Thus the motives of devotion have first to
\ndirect themselves engrossingly and predominantly towards the Divine, then to transform themselves so that they are rid of their
\nmore earthy elements and finally to take their stand in pure and perfect love. All those that cannot coexist with the perfect
\nunion of love, must eventually fall away, while only those that can form themselves into expressions of divine love and into
\nmeans of enjoying divine love, can remain. For love is the one emotion in us which can be entirely motiveless and self-existent;
\nlove need have no other motive than love. For all our emotions arise either from the seeking after delight and the possession of
\nit, or from the baffling of the search, or from the failure of the delight we have possessed or had thought to grasp; but love is
\nthat by which we can enter directly into possession of the self-existent delight of the divine Being. Divine love is indeed itself
\nthat possession and, as it were, the body of the Ananda. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThese are the truths which condition our approach to this
\nYoga and our journey on this path. There are subsidiary questions which arise and trouble the intellect of man, but, though
\nwe may have yet to deal with them they are not essential. Yoga of Bhakti is a matter of the heart and not of the intellect. For even
\nfor the knowledge which comes on this way, we set out from the heart and not from the intelligence. The truth of the motives of
\nthe heart’s devotion and their final arrival and in some sort their disappearance into the supreme and unique self-existent motive<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t of love, is therefore all that initially and essentially concerns us.
\nSuch difficult questions there are as whether the Divine has an original supraphysical form or power of form from which all
\nforms proceed or is eternally formless; all we need at present say is that the Divine does at least accept the various forms
\nwhich the devotee gives to him and through them meets him in love, while the mixing of our spirits with his spirit is essential
\nto the fruition of Bhakti. So too, certain religions and religious philosophies seek to bind down devotion by a conception of
\nan eternal difference between the human soul and the Divine, without which they say love and devotion cannot exist, while
\nthat philosophy which considers that One alone exists, consigns love and devotion to a movement in the ignorance, necessary
\nperhaps or at the least useful as a preparatory movement while yet the ignorance lasts, but impossible when all difference is
\nabolished and therefore to be transcended and discarded. We may hold, however, the truth of the one existence in this sense
\nthat all in Nature is the Divine even though God be more than all in Nature, and love becomes then a movement by which the
\nDivine in Nature and man takes possession of and enjoys the delight of the universal and the supreme Divine. In any case, love
\nhas necessarily a twofold fulfilment by its very nature, that by which the lover and the beloved enjoy their union in difference
\nand all too that enhances the joy of various union, and that by which they throw themselves into each other and become
\none Self. That truth is quite sufficient to start with, for it is the very nature of love, and since love is the essential motive of this
\nYoga, as is the whole nature of love, so will be too the crown and fulfilment of the movement of the Yoga.
\n   <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\n <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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