Sri Aurobindo & Mira Alfassa

Difference between Religion and Yoga, Words of the Mother (Mira Alfassa, Sri Aurobindo)

 Im Ashram von Aurobindo haben wir einen kurzen Text gefunden, geschrieben von Mira Alfassa, die den Ashram sowie Auroville, nach dem Tod von Sri Aurobindo während dreissig Jahren, geleitet hat. In dieser Zeit wurde Auroville zu einem weltberühmten Zentrum für Spiritualität, Biolandbau, Bildung, Kunst und solidarischem Zusammenleben, und war  in allen Belangen sehr erfolgreich. Nach ihrem Tod kam es zu Konflikten und noch heute ist die Zukunft des gross angelegten Experimentes ungewiss.

Hier der Text in gekürzter Form:

 The time of religions is over. We have entered the age of universal spirituality.

Priests say things to encourage people to do good. You may ask, why should I take the trouble of being good? Is it better to be wicked and have an easy life? When you die you will be sent to heaven, or purgatory or hell. If you believe in the dogmas, you go to Paradise. There are heavens where you are in constantly blissful meditation, but for people that are not keen on meditation this must be rather tiresome. The religions and traditions have been imposed on you by others, there is something compulsory about it.

When you come to the Yoga you must be prepared to have all your mental buildings and vital scaffoldings shattered to pieces.

What do you want the Yoga for? More power, peace, to serve humanity? Yoga is for the sake of Divine. This is precisely the aim of Yoga, to get out of the cycle of Karma into a divine movement. First of all, we must be conscious.

The real achievement, of Yoga, the final perfection is a consciousness in which all is impossible to do anything without the Divine.

There is a great difference between spirituality and morality, two things that are constantly confused with each other. Morality takes for its basic element a fixed division into the good and the bad. It takes things that are relative and tries to impose them as absolutes. And yet it is good to realize this. It is a stage through which one has to pass, one begins to be the master of one’s ego and nature.

Sri Aurobindo says: Spiritual life can exist in all its purity only when it is free from all mental dogma.

Before Aurobindo, religions and spiritualities were always centered on past figures, and they were showing as the goal, the negation of life upon earth. You had to choice between a life in this word (with all its pleasures and pains, threatened by hell if you were not behaving well), or escape into another world (heaven). Sri Aurobindo has told us that this was a fundamental mistake which accounts for the weakness and degradation of India. Buddhism, Jainism, Illusionism were sufficient to sap all energy out of the country. The truth does not lie in running away from earthly life but in remaining in it, to transform it, so that the Devine can manifest here, in this physical world.