{"id":2215,"date":"2013-07-13T01:40:10","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2215"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:40:10","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:40:10","slug":"49-chapter-iii-the-godward-emotions-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\/49-chapter-iii-the-godward-emotions-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","title":{"rendered":"-49_Chapter III The Godward Emotions.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

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

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Godward Emotions
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE PRINCIPLE<\/b> of Yoga is to turn God-ward all or any of
\nthe powers of the human consciousness so that through that activity of the being there may be contact, relation,
\nunion. In the Yoga of Bhakti it is the emotional nature that is made the instrument. Its main principle is to adopt some human
\nrelation between man and the Divine Being by which through the ever intenser flowing of the heart’s emotions towards him
\nthe human soul may at last be wedded to and grow one with him in a passion of divine Love. It is not ultimately the pure
\npeace of oneness or the power and desireless will of oneness, but the ecstatic joy of union which the devotee seeks by his Yoga.
\nEvery feeling that can make the heart ready for this ecstasy the Yoga admits; everything that detracts from it must increasingly
\ndrop away as the strong union of love becomes closer and more perfect. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll the feelings with which religion approaches the worship, service and love of God, the Yoga admits, if not as its final accompaniments, yet as preparatory movements of the emotional nature. But there is one feeling with which the Yoga, at least as
\npractised in India, has very little dealing. In certain religions, in most perhaps, the idea of the fear of God plays a very large part,
\nsometimes the largest, and the God-fearing man is the typical worshipper of these religions. The sentiment of fear is indeed
\nperfectly consistent with devotion of a certain kind and up to a certain point; at its highest it rises into a worship of the divine
\nPower, the divine Justice, divine Law, divine Righteousness, and ethical obedience, an awed reverence for the almighty Creator
\nand Judge. Its motive is therefore ethico-religious and it belongs not so strictly to the devotee, but to the man of works moved
\nby a devotion to the divine ordainer and judge of his works. It regards God as the King and does not approach too near the<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tglory of his throne unless justified by righteousness or led there
\nby a mediator who will turn away the divine wrath for sin. Even when it draws nearest, it keeps an awed distance between itself
\nand the high object of its worship. It cannot embrace the Divine with all the fearless confidence of the child in his mother or of
\nthe lover in his beloved or with that intimate sense of oneness which perfect love brings with it. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe origin of this divine fear was crude enough in some of the primitive popular religions. It was the perception of powers in the world greater than man, obscure in their nature and workings, which seemed always ready to strike him down in his
\nprosperity and to smite him for any actions which displeased them. Fear of the gods arose from man’s ignorance of God and
\nhis ignorance of the laws that govern the world. It attributed to the higher powers caprice and human passion; it made them
\nin the image of the great ones of the earth, capable of whim, tyranny, personal enmity, jealous of any greatness in man which
\nmight raise him above the littleness of terrestrial nature and bring him too near to the divine nature. With such notions no
\nreal devotion could arise, except that doubtful kind which the weaker may feel for the stronger whose protection he can buy by
\nworship and gifts and propitiation and obedience to such laws as he may have laid upon those beneath him and may enforce by
\nrewards and punishments, or else the submissive and prostrate reverence and adoration which one may feel for a greatness,
\nglory, wisdom, sovereign power which is above the world and is the source or at any rate the regulator of all its laws and
\nhappenings. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA nearer approach to the beginnings of the way of devotion
\nbecomes possible when this element of divine Power disengages itself from these crudities and fixes on the idea of a divine ruler,
\ncreator of the world and master of the Law who governs the earth and heavens and is the guide and helper and saviour of
\nhis creatures. This larger and higher idea of the divine Being long kept many elements and still keeps some elements of the
\nold crudity. The Jews who brought it forward most prominently and from whom it overspread a great part of the world, could
\n  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\t believe in a God of righteousness who was exclusive, arbitrary,
\nwrathful, jealous, often cruel and even wantonly sanguinary. Even now it is possible for some to believe in a Creator who
\nhas made heaven and hell, an eternal hell, the two poles of his creation, and has even according to some religions predestined
\nthe souls he has created not only to sin and punishment, but to an eternal damnation. But even apart from these extravagances
\nof a childish religious belief, the idea of the almighty Judge, Legislator, King, is a crude and imperfect idea of the Divine,
\nwhen taken by itself, because it takes an inferior and an external truth for the main truth and it tends to prevent a higher approach
\nto a more intimate reality. It exaggerates the importance of the sense of sin and thereby prolongs and increases the soul’s fear
\nand self-distrust and weakness. It attaches the pursuit of virtue and the shunning of sin to the idea of rewards and punishment,
\nthough given in an after life, and makes them dependent on the lower motives of fear and interest instead of the higher spirit
\nwhich should govern the ethical being. It makes hell and heaven and not the Divine himself the object of the human soul in its
\nreligious living. These crudities have served their turn in the slow education of the human mind, but they are of no utility to
\nthe Yogin who knows that whatever truth they may represent belongs rather to the external relations of the developing human
\nsoul with the external law of the universe than any intimate truth of the inner relations of the human soul with the Divine; but it
\nis these which are the proper field of Yoga. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tStill out of this conception there arise certain developments
\nwhich bring us nearer to the threshold of the Yoga of devotion. First, there can emerge the idea of the Divine as the source and
\nlaw and aim of our ethical being and from this there can come the knowledge of him as the highest Self to which our active nature
\naspires, the Will to which we have to assimilate our will, the eternal Right and Purity and Truth and Wisdom into harmony
\nwith which our nature has to grow and towards whose being our being is attracted. By this way we arrive at the Yoga of
\nworks, and this Yoga has a place for personal devotion to the Divine, for the divine Will appears as the Master of our works<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t to whose voice we must listen, whose divine impulsion we must
\nobey and whose work it is the sole business of our active life and will to do. Secondly, there emerges the idea of the divine Spirit,
\nthe father of all who extends his wings of benignant protection and love over all his creatures, and from that grows between the
\nsoul and the Divine the relation of father and child, a relation of love, and as a result the relation of brotherhood with our
\nfellow-beings. These relations of the Divine into the calm pure light of whose nature we have to grow and the Master whom we
\napproach through works and service, the Father who responds to the love of the soul that approaches him as the child, are
\nadmitted elements of the Yoga of devotion. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe moment we come well into these developments and
\ntheir deeper spiritual meaning, the motive of the fear of God becomes otiose, superfluous and even impossible. It is of
\nimportance chiefly in the ethical field when the soul has not yet grown sufficiently to follow good for its own sake and needs
\nan authority above it whose wrath or whose stern passionless judgment it can fear and found upon that fear its fidelity to
\nvirtue. When we grow into spirituality, this motive can no longer remain except by the lingering on of some confusion in
\nthe mind, some persistence of the old mentality. Moreover, the ethical aim in Yoga is different from that of the external idea of
\nvirtue. Ordinarily, ethics is regarded as a sort of machinery of right action, the act is everything and how to do the right act
\nis the whole question and the whole trouble. But to the Yogin action is chiefly important not for its own sake, but rather
\nas a means for the growth of the soul God-ward. Therefore what Indian spiritual writings lay stress upon is not so much
\nthe quality of the action to be done as the quality of the soul from which the action flows, upon its truth, fearlessness, purity,
\nlove, compassion, benevolence, absence of the will to hurt, and upon the actions as their out-flowings. The old western idea
\nthat human nature is intrinsically bad and virtue is a thing to be followed out in despite of our fallen nature to which it is
\ncontrary, is foreign to the Indian mentality trained from ancient times in the ideas of the Yogins. Our nature contains, as well as<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\t its passionate rajasic and its downward-tending tamasic quality,
\na purer sattwic element and it is the encouragement of this, its highest part, which is the business of ethics. By it we increase the divine nature, daivī<\/font> prakr<\/font>ti<\/i>, which is present in us and get
\n.<\/i> rid of the Titanic and demoniac elements. Not therefore the
\nHebraic righteousness of the God-fearing man, but the purity, love, beneficence, truth, fearlessness, harmlessness of the saint
\nand the God-lover are the goal of the ethical growth according to this notion. And, speaking more largely, to grow into the
\ndivine nature is the consummation of the ethical being. This can be done best by realising God as the higher Self, the guiding
\nand uplifting Will or the Master whom we love and serve. Not fear of him, but love of him and aspiration to the freedom and
\neternal purity of his being must be the motive. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCertainly, fear enters into the relations of the master and
\nthe servant and even of the father and the child, but only when they are on the human level, when control and subjection and
\npunishment figure predominantly in them and love is obliged to efface itself more or less behind the mask of authority. The
\nDivine even as the Master does not punish anybody, does not threaten, does not force obedience. It is the human soul that has
\nfreely to come to the Divine and offer itself to his overpowering force that he may seize and uplift it towards his own divine levels,
\nand give it that joy of mastery of the finite nature by the Infinite and of service to the Highest by which there comes freedom from
\nthe ego and the lower nature. Love is the key of this relation, and 
\nthis service, dā<\/font>syam<\/i>, is in Indian Yoga the happy service of the divine Friend or the passionate service to the divine Beloved. The
\nMaster of the worlds who in the Gita demands of his servant, the bhakta, to be nothing more in life than his instrument, makes
\nthis claim as the friend, the guide, the higher Self, and describes himself as the Lord of all the worlds who is the friend of all 
\ncreatures, sarvalokamaheś<\/font>varam suhr<\/font>dam sarvabhū<\/font>tānā<\/font>m<\/i>; the two relations in fact must go together and neither can be perfect
\nwithout the other. So too it is not the fatherhood of God as the Creator who demands obedience because he is the maker of
\nour being, but the fatherhood of love which leads us towards<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t <\/i>the closer soul-union of Yoga. Love is the real key in both, and
\nperfect love is inconsistent with the admission of the motive of fear. Closeness of the human soul to the Divine is the object, and
\nfear sets always a barrier and a distance; even awe and reverence for the divine Power are a sign of distance and division and they
\ndisappear in the intimacy of the union of love. Moreover, fear belongs to the lower nature, to the lower self, and in approaching
\nthe higher Self must be put aside before we can enter into its presence. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis relation of the divine fatherhood and the closer relation with the Divine as the Mother-Soul of the universe have
\ntheir springs in another early religious motive. One type of the Bhakta, says the Gita, is the devotee who comes to the Divine as
\nthe giver of his wants, the giver of his good, the satisfier of the needs of his inner and his outer being. “I bring to my bhakta”
\n˙<\/i> says the Lord “his getting and his having of good, yogaks<\/font>emam<\/i> 
\nvahā<\/font>myaham<\/i>.” The life of man is a life of wants and needs and therefore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in
\nhis mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through
\nprayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough journey, for protection and aid in his struggle. Whatever crudities there may be in the ordinary religious approach to God by prayer, and there are many, especially that attitude which
\nimagines the Divine as if capable of being propitiated, bribed, flattered into acquiescence or indulgence by praise, entreaty and
\ngifts and has often little regard to the spirit in which he is approached, still this way of turning to the Divine is an essential
\nmovement of our religious being and reposes on a universal truth. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous
\nand ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty, it is true of the Transcendent who expresses himself in the universal order that being omniscient his larger knowledge must
\nforesee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\t stimulation by human thought and that the individual’s desires
\nare not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal
\nwill altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and forces of which for human life at least human will, aspiration
\nand faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. Its forms
\nare very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance.
\nIts power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being
\nwith whom we can enter into conscious and living relations. For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength
\nand endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and effective whether for lower or higher purposes,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 and there are
\nplenty of disciplines which put it forward as the one force to be used, \u2014 or it can act in dependence upon and with subordination to the divine or the universal Will. And this latter way again may either look upon that Will as responsive indeed to our
\naspiration, but almost mechanically, by a sort of law of energy, or at any rate quite impersonally, or else it may look upon it
\nas responding consciously to the divine aspiration and faith of the human soul and consciously bringing to it the help, the
\n˙<\/i> guidance, the protection and fruition demanded, yogaks<\/font>emam<\/i> 
\nvahā<\/font>myaham<\/i>. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPrayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the
\nlower plane even while it is there consistent with much that is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw
\ntowards the spiritual truth which is behind it. It is not then the giving of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself,
\nthe contact of man’s life with God, the conscious interchange. In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this
\nconscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings
\na fuller spiritual growth and experience. Necessarily in the end prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t as the faith, the will, the aspiration are there,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 or remains only
\nfor the joy of the relation. Also its objects, the artha <\/i>or interest it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the
\nhighest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure and simple without any other demand or longing. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe relations which arise out of this attitude towards the Divine, are that of the divine Father and the Mother with the
\nchild and that of the divine Friend. To the Divine as these things the human soul comes for help, for protection, for guidance, for
\nfruition, \u2014 or if knowledge be the aim, to the Guide, Teacher, Giver of light, for the Divine is the Sun of knowledge,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 or it
\ncomes in pain and suffering for relief and solace and deliverance, it may be deliverance either from the suffering itself or from the
\nworld-existence which is the habitat of the suffering or from all its inner and real causes.\u00b9<\/font> In these things we find there is
\na certain gradation. For the relation of fatherhood is always less close, intense, passionate, intimate, and therefore it is less
\nresorted to in the Yoga which seeks for the closest union. That of the divine Friend is a thing sweeter and more intimate, admits of
\nan equality and intimacy even in inequality and the beginning of mutual self-giving; at its closest when all idea of other giving and
\ntaking disappears, when this relation becomes motiveless except for the one sole all-sufficing motive of love, it turns into the free
\nand happy relation of the playmate in the Lila of existence. But closer and more intimate still is the relation of the Mother and
\nthe child, and that therefore plays a very large part wherever the religious impulse is most richly fervent and springs most warmly
\nfrom the heart of man. The soul goes to the Mother-Soul in all its desires and troubles and the divine Mother wishes that it
\nshould be so, so that she may pour out her heart of love. It turns to her too because of the self-existent nature of this love and
\nbecause that points us to the home towards which we turn from our wanderings in the world and to the bosom in which we find
\nour rest. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\u00b9<\/font> These are three of the four classes of devotee which are recognised by the Gita,
\n\t\t\tā<\/font>rta<\/i>, arthā<\/font>rthī<\/font><\/i>, jijnā<\/font>su<\/i>, the distressed, the seeker of personal objects and the seeker of God-knowledge<\/font>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\t\t\t  
\n  But the highest and the greatest relation is that which starts
\nfrom none of the ordinary religious motives, but is rather of the very essence of Yoga, springs from the very nature of love
\nitself; it is the passion of the Lover and the Beloved. Wherever there is the desire of the soul for its utter union with God, this
\nform of the divine yearning makes its way even into religions which seem to do without it and give it no place in their ordinary
\nsystem. Here the one thing asked for is love, the one thing feared is the loss of love, the one sorrow is the sorrow of separation
\nof love; for all other things either do not exist for the lover or come in only as incidents or as results and not as objects or
\nconditions of love. All love is indeed in its nature self-existent because it springs from a secret oneness in being and a sense of
\nthat oneness or desire of oneness in the heart between souls that are yet able to conceive of themselves as different from each
\nother and divided. Therefore all these other relations too can arrive at their self-existent motiveless joy of being for the sake
\nof love alone. But still they start from and to the end they to some extent find a satisfaction of their play in other motives.
\nBut here the beginning is love and the end is love and the whole aim is love. There is indeed the desire of possession, but even
\nthis is overcome in the fullness of the self-existent love and the final demand of the Bhakta is simply that his bhakti may never
\ncease nor diminish. He does not ask for heaven or for liberation from birth or for any other object, but only that his love may be
\neternal and absolute. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tLove is a passion and it seeks for two things, eternity and
\nintensity, and in the relation of the Lover and Beloved the seeking for eternity and for intensity is instinctive and self-born. Love is a
\nseeking for mutual possession, and it is here that the demand for mutual possession becomes absolute. Passing beyond desire of
\npossession which means a difference, it is a seeking for oneness, and it is here that the idea of oneness, of two souls merging
\ninto each other and becoming one finds the acme of its longing and the utterness of its satisfaction. Love, too, is a yearning for
\nbeauty, and it is here that the yearning is eternally satisfied in the vision and the touch and the joy of the All-beautiful. Love<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 <\/font>569<\/font>  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t is a child and a seeker of Delight, and it is here that it finds the
\nhighest possible ecstasy both of the heart-consciousness and of every fibre of the being. Moreover, this relation is that which
\nas between human being and human being demands the most and, even while reaching the greatest intensities, is still the least
\nsatisfied, because only in the Divine can it find its real and its utter satisfaction. Therefore it is here most that the turning of
\nhuman emotion God-wards finds its full meaning and discovers all the truth of which love is the human symbol, all its essential
\ninstincts divinised, raised, satisfied in the bliss from which our life was born and towards which by oneness it returns in the
\nAnanda of the divine existence where love is absolute, eternal and unalloyed.
\n   <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>570<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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