“India is a protected land, the land of Sri Aurobindo.”
***
“Spiritual aspiration develops very strongly and spontaneously as soon as one comes to India. Those are graces. Graces, because it is the destiny of the country, it has been so through out her history, and because she has always been turned much more upward and inward than outward. She is now losing all that and wallowing in the mud, but anyway…it was like that and still is like that.”
1. India’s Soul and Mission
“India is not the earth, rivers and mountains of this land, neither is it a collective name for the inhabitants of this country. India is a living being, as much living as, say, Shiva. India is a goddess as Shiva is a god. If she likes, she can manifest in human form.”
***
“The Soul of India is one and indivisible. India is conscious of her mission in the world. She is waiting for the exterior means of manifestation.”
***
“O our Mother, O Soul of India, Mother who hast never forsaken thy children even in the days of darkest depression, even when they turned away from thy voice, served other masters and denied thee …. Guide us so that we may be always on the side of great ideals and show to men thy true visage, as a leader in the ways of the spirit and a friend and helper of all the peoples.”
***
“It is only India’s soul who can unify the country.
Externally the provinces of India are very different in character, tendencies, culture, as well as in language, and any attempt to unify them artificially could only have disastrous results.
But her soul is one, intense in her aspiration towards the spiritual truth, the essential unity of the creation and the divine origin of life, and by uniting with this aspiration the whole country can recover a unity that has never ceased to exist for the superior mentality.”
***
“United India has a special mission to fulfill in the world. Sri Aurobindo laid down his life for it and we are prepared to do the same.”
***
“It is the flag of India’s spiritual mission. And in the accomplishment of this mission will India’s unity be accomplished.”
***
“O India, land of light and spiritual knowledge! Wake up to your true mission in the world, show the way to union and harmony.”
***
“True spirituality is not to renounce life, but to make life perfect with the Divine Perfection.
This is what India must show to the world now.”
2. Indian Spiritual Culture, Art and Literature
“From time immemorial India has been the land of spiritual knowledge and practice, of the discovery of the Supreme Reality and union with it. It is the country that has practised concentration most and best. The methods, called Yoga in sanskrit, that are taught and used in this country are countless. Some are merely material, others purely intellectual, others religious and devotional; lastly, some of them combine these various processes in order to achieve a more integral result.”
***
“All this is based on the old idea that whatever the image – which we disdainfully call an ‘idol’ – whatever the external form of the deity, the presence of the thing represented is always there. And there is always someone – whether a priest or an initiate, a sadhu or a sannyasi – someone who has the power and (usually this is the priest’s work) who draws the Force and the Presence down into it. And it’s true, it’s quite real: the Force and the Presence are THERE; and that (not the form of wood or stone or metal) is what you worship, it’s that Presence.
Europeans don’t have the inner sense at all. To them, everything is like this (gesture), a surface – not even that, a thin layer on the surface. There’s nothing behind, so they can’t feel. But it’s an absolutely real fact that the Presence is there, I can vouch for it. People have given me little things in metal, wood or ivory, representing various gods; all I have to do is to take one in my hand for the god to be there. I have a few of Ganesh (I have been given several), and when I take one in my hand and look at it for a minute, he is there …Then there is a Narayana which comes from the Himalayas, from Badrinath.
….I have always felt what’s behind, the presences behind.
But I rarely had an experience in churches. Rather the opposite: I very often had the very painful experience of the human effort to find higher solace, a divine compassion…falling into very bad hands – very often…
I don’t know why, but I have had this kind of experience so very often: either a hostile force lurking behind and swallowing up everything, or else man – ruthless man abusing the Power.
In fact, I have seen this all over the world. I have never been on very good terms with religions, neither in Europe, nor Africa, nor Japan, nor even here….
When I was told that the Divine was within – the teaching of the Gita, but in words understandable to a Westerner – that there was an inner Presence and one carried the Divine within oneself, oh!… What a revelation! In a few minutes, I suddenly understood all, all. Understood everything. It brought the contact instantly.”
***
“If you want art to be the true and highest art, it must be the expression of a divine world brought into this material world. All true artists have some feeling of this kind, some sense that they are intermediaries between a higher world and the physical existence…
This was the avowed function of Art in the Middle Ages. The ‘primitive’ painters, the builders of cathedrals in mediaeval Europe had no other conception of art. In India all her architecture, her sculpture, her painting have proceeded from this source and were inspired by this ideal. The songs of Mirabai and the music of Thyagaraja, the poetic literature built by her devotees, saints and Rishis rank among the world’s greatest possessions.”
***
“Here in India, there is an art tradition that has subsisted, the whole country is full of creations that were made at the height of the art history of the country. People live in it. The repercussion of what has taken place in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, has not been felt much. Only those parts of India that have been a little too anglicized have lost the sense of beauty – some schools of Bombay, schools of artists, are dreadful. Then there was that attempt of the Calcutta School to revive Indian art, but that is only on a very small scale. From the artistic point of view, what you find within easiest reach is the old creations, the old temples and old paintings. All that was very fine. And it was done to express a faith. It was done with the sense of a whole, not of disorder….Most of the works here, almost all beautiful works, I think, are unsigned. All those cave paintings and cave sculptures are unsigned. We have no idea who made them. And they didn’t make them with idea of making a name for themselves, as they do now.”
***
“A Japanese house is a wonderful artistic whole; always the right thing is there in the right place, nothing wrongly set, nothing too much, nothing too little. Everything is just as it needed to be, and the house itself blends marvelously with the surrounding nature. In India too, painting and sculpture and architecture were one integral beauty, one single movement of adoration of the Divine.”
***
“The Mahabharata and Ramayana are certainly not inferior to anything created by Shakespeare or any other poet, and they are said to have been the work of men who were Rishis and had done Yogic tapasya. The Gita which, like the Upanishads, ranks at once among the greatest literary and the greatest spiritual works, was not written by one who had no experience of Yoga…
The best paintings in India and much of the best statuary and architecture were done by Buddhist monks who passed their lives in spiritual contemplation and practice; they did supreme artistic work, but did not care to leave their names to posterity.”
***
“I have the deepest respect for Indian languages and continue to study Sanskrit when I have time.
The Sanskrit ought to be the national language of India.
Hindi is good only for those who belong to a Hindi-speaking province. Sanskrit is good for all Indians.”
***
“If only one language is taught, it should be international. But for the general development of students, several languages are needed.
Sanskrit should be the real national language. It is only Sanskrit which will be ultimately acceptable to the people of India. Sanskrit is the only language which creates an equal handicap for all the parts of the country, so that nobody has a natural advantage over others in learning it. When I speak of Sanskrit, it should be simple Sanskrit, but not ‘simplified.’
When India goes back to her soul, Sanskrit will naturally become India’s national language.”
***
“It would be better to learn Sanskrit and try to make it a truly living language.”
3. India and the West
“In the whole creation the earth has a place of distinction, because unlike any other planet it is evolutionary with a psychic entity at its centre. In it, India, in particular, is a divinely chosen country.”
***
“…India is the only place in the world which is still aware that something else than matter exists. The other countries have quite forgotten it: Europe, America and elsewhere….That is why she still has a message to preserve and deliver to the world. But at present she is splashing and floundering in the muddle.
Sri Aurobindo has shown that the truth does not lie in running away from earthly life but in remaining in it, to transform it, divinize it, so that the Divine can manifest HERE, in this PHYSICAL world.”
***
“India has or rather had the knowledge of the Spirit, but she neglected matter and suffered for it.
The West has the knowledge of matter but rejected the Spirit and suffers badly for it.
An integral education which could, with some variations, be adapted to all the nations of the world, must bring back the legitimate authority of the Spirit over a matter fully developed and utilised.”
***
“Europeans attach the greatest importance to the words uttered.
Indians are much more sensitive to the feeling, which more often than not those words veil.”
***
“The West expresses more than it really knows.
India knows more than it really can express.”
***
“From the spiritual standpoint, India is the leading country in the world. Her mission is to give the example of spirituality. Sri Aurobindo came on earth to teach this to the world.
This fact is so obvious that a simple, ignorant farmer here is closer to the Divine in his heart than the intellectuals of Europe.”
“India shall take her true place in the world only when she will become integrally the messenger of the Divine Life.”
***
“It is only to those who can conquer the mind’s preferences and prejudices of race and education that India reveals the mystery of her treasures. Others depart disappointed, failing to find what they seek; for they have sought it in the wrong way and would not agree to pay the price of the Divine Discovery.”
4. Some Problems and Their solution
“Mother Durga! Extend wide the power of Yoga. We are thy Aryan children, develop in us again the lost teaching, character, strength of intelligence, faith and devotion, force of austerity, power of chastity and true knowledge, bestow all that upon the world. To help mankind, appear, O Mother of the world, dispel all ills.”
***
“Sri Aurobindo always loved deeply his Motherland. But he wished her to be great, noble, pure and worthy of her big mission in the world. He refused to let her sink to the sordid and vulgar level of blind self-interests and ignorant prejudices. This is why, in full conformity to his will, we lift high the standard of truth, progress and transformation of mankind, without caring for those who, through ignorance, stupidity, envy or bad will, seek to soil it and drag it down into the mud. We carry it very high so that all who have a soul may see it and gather round it.”
***
“India is the country where the psychic law can and must rule and the time has come for that here. Besides, it is the only possible salvation for this country whose consciousness has unfortunately been distorted by the influence and domination of a foreign nation, but which, in spite of everything, possesses a unique spiritual heritage.
Blessings.”
***
“What has ruined India is this idea that the higher consciousness has to do with ‘higher’ things, while it’s not interested in lower things and knows nothing about them! That’s what has caused the ruin of India. Well, this error must be completely abolished. It’s the highest consciousness that sees the most clearly – the most clearly and the most truly – what the needs of the most material thing should be.
With this, we could try out a new kind of government.”
***
“It is one of the greatest weapons of the Asura at work when you are taught to shun beauty. It has been the ruin of India. The Divine manifests in the psychic as love, in the mind as knowledge, in the vital as power and in the physical as beauty. If you discard beauty it means that you are depriving the Divine of this manifestation in the material and you hand over that part to the Asura.”
***
“The country seems to be falling apart, so there [in Delhi]they asked me what should be done. I told them…that the ONLY salvation for the country, the ONLY thing that can unify it, is to adopt Sri Aurobindo’s ideal for the country – he had a plan, he very clearly saw how the country should be organized, he said it to me. It’s there, if one reads his books seriously, one can see it.”
***
“One thing is obvious, it’s that if everything had gone very well, with good results, the need for a higher Help would never have occurred to them; they would have become puffed up with statistics and with satisfaction with their capacities.”
***
“The first thing that you ought to do is to change the Constitution in such a way that those people who combine honesty and capability should come to power. Normally, people who are honest are not capable, and those who are capable are not honest. Therefore it is very important that people who combine these two qualities should be able to come to power.”
***
“Already at the age of ten, I found democracy to be idiotic (there, in France), but anyway…It’s idiotic there, in France (but that doesn’t matter), but at any rate I don’t think democracy is AT ALL, at all an organization in accord with India’s spirit – not in the least. And the proof is that it’s not at all the collectivity of people that controls things, it’s a few scoundrels who push themselves forward, saying, ‘I represent this, I represent that….’”
***
“Socialism, like all political parties, belongs to the past and must be surpassed if we want to serve the Truth.”
***
“There must be a group forming a strong body of cohesive will with the spiritual knowledge to save India and the world. It is India that can bring Truth in the world. By manifestation of the Divine Will and Power alone, India can preach her message to the world and not by imitating the materialism of the West. By following the Divine Will India shall shine at the top of the spiritual mountain and show the way of Truth and organise world unity.”
***
5. The Future of India and its Importance for Humanity
“The map was made after the partition.
It is the map of the true India in spite of all passing appearances, and it will always remain the map of the true India, whatever people may think about it.”
***
“India must be saved for the good of the world since India alone can lead the world to peace and a new world order.”
***
“The future of India is very clear. India is the Guru of the world. The future structure of the world depends on India. India is the living soul. India is incarnating the spiritual knowledge in the world. The Government of India ought to recognise the significance of India in this sphere and plan their action accordingly.”
***
“The future of India is luminous in spite of its present gloom.”
***
“Let us all work for the greatness of India.”
***
“India has become the symbolic representation of all the difficulties of modern mankind.
India will be the land of its resurrection – the resurrection to a higher and truer life.”
***
“India shall take her true place in the world only when she will become integrally the messenger of the Divine Life.”
***
“…There is only one country in the world that knows that there is only one Truth to which everything should be turned, and that is India. Other countries have forgotten this, but in India it is ingrained in the people, and one day it will come out….I know the conditions of the country. Even if one person could put himself faithfully at the disposal of the Truth, he could change the country and the world.”
***
“For…for years, even from the time Sri Aurobindo was here, there had been the vision – an inner vision – that India is the place where the fate of the earth will be decided. So the two opposite possibilities are there. As if it were said that if there were war, it would be over India; that the world conflict. ..(how can I put it ?), the ISSUE would be played out over India. But will the Force of Peace be sufficient to prevent war? There’s the whole question. But the whirl of forces is here, over India.”
