A Call to
Young India
Sri Aurobindo:
...There are times in
a nation's history when Providence places before it one work, one aim,
to which everything else, however high and noble in itself, has to be
sacrificed. Such a time has now arrived for our Motherland when nothing
is dearer than her service, when everything else is to be directed to
that end. If you will study, study for her sake; train yourselves body
and mind and soul for her service. You will earn your living that you
may live for her sake. You will go abroad to foreign lands that you may
bring back knowledge with which you may do service to her. Work that
she may prosper. Suffer that she may rejoice. All is contained in that
one single advice.
*
...Our endeavour
shall be to prepare the paths and to accomplish the beginning of a
great and high change which we believe to be and aim at making the
future of the race and the future of India. Our ideal is a new birth of
humanity into the spirit; our life must be a spiritually inspired
effort to create a body of action for that great new birth and
creation.
A
spiritual ideal has
always been the characteristic idea and aspiration of India. But the
progress of Time and the need of humanity demand a new orientation and
another form of
that ideal. The old forms and methods are no longer sufficient for the purpose of the
Time-Spirit. India can no longer fulfil herself on lines that are too
narrow for the great steps she has to take in the future. Nor is ours
the spirituality of a life that is aged and world-weary and burdened
with the sense of the illusion and miserable inutility of all God's
mighty creation. Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from
life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit. It is to
accept the world as an effort of manifestation of the Divine, but also
to transform humanity by a greater effort of manifestation than has yet
been accomplished, one in which the veil between man and God shall be
removed, the divine man hood of which we are capable shall come to
birth and our life shall be remoulded in the truth and light and power
of the spirit. It is to make of all our action a sacrifice to the
master of our action and an expression of the greater self in man and
of all life a Yoga....
This secret too has
been possessed but not sufficiently practised by India. It is
summarised in the rule of the Gita,
yogasthah kuru
karmaani.
Its principle
is to do all actions in Yoga, in union with God, on the
foundation of the highest self and through the rule of all our members
by the power of the spirit. And this we believe to be not only possible
for man but the true solution of all his problems and difficulties.
This then is the message we shall constantly utter and this the ideal
that we shall put before the young and rising India, a spiritual life
that shall take up all human activities and avail to transfigure the
world for the great age that is coming. India, she that has carried in
herself from of old the secret, can alone lead the way in this great
transformation of which the present
sandhya
of the old
yuga
is the
forerunner. This must be her mission and service to humanity,
—
as she discovered the
inner spiritual life for the individual, so now to discover for the
race its integral collective expression and found for mankind its new
spiritual and communal order.
Our first object
shall be to declare this ideal: insist on the spiritual change as the
first necessity and group together all who accept it and are ready to
strive sincerely to fulfil it: our second shall be to build up not only
an individual but a communal life on this principle. An outer activity
as well as an inner change is needed and it must be at once a
spiritual, cultural, educational, social and economical action. Its
scope, too, will be at once individual and communal, regional and
national, and eventually a work not only for the nation but for the
whole human people. The immediate (?) of this action will be a new
creation, a spiritual education and culture, and enlarged social spirit
founded not on division but on unity, on the perfect growth and freedom
of the individual, but also on his unity with others and his dedication
to a larger self in the people and in humanity, and the beginning of an
endeavour towards the solution of the economic problem founded not on
any western model but on the communal principle native to India.
Our call is to young
India. It is the young who must be the builders of the new world,
—
not those who accept
the competitive individualism, the capitalism or the materialistic
communism of the West as India's future ideal, not those who are
enslaved to old religious formulas and cannot believe in the acceptance
and transformation of life by the spirit, but all who are free in mind
and heart to accept a completer truth and labour for a greater ideal.
They must be men who will dedicate themselves not to the past or the
present but to the future. They will need to consecrate their lives to
an exceeding of their lower self, to the realisation of God in them
selves and in all human beings and to a whole-minded and indefatigable
labour for the nation and for humanity. This ideal can be as yet only a
little seed and the life that embodies it a small nucleus, but it is
our fixed hope that the seed will grow into a great tree and the
nucleus be the heart of an ever-extending formation. It is with a
confident trust in the spirit that inspires us that we take our place
among the standard-bearers of the new humanity that is struggling to be
born amidst the chaos of a world in dissolution, and of the future
India, the greater India of the rebirth that is to rejuvenate the
mighty outworn body of the ancient Mother.
*
We say to the
individual and especially to the young who are now arising to do
India's work, the world's work, God's work: "You cannot cherish these
ideals, still less can you fulfil them if you subject your minds to
European ideas or look at life from the material standpoint. Materially
you are nothing, spiritually you are everything. It is only the Indian
who can believe everything, dare everything, sacrifice everything.
First, therefore, become Indians. Recover the patrimony of your
forefathers. Recover the Aryan thought, the Aryan discipline, the Aryan
character, the Aryan life. Re cover the Vedanta, the Gita, the Yoga.
Recover them not only in intellect or sentiment but in your lives. Live
them and you will be great and strong, mighty, invincible and fearless.
Neither life nor death will have any terrors for you. Difficulty and
impossibility will vanish from your vocabularies. For it is in the
spirit that strength is eternal and you must win back the kingdom of
yourselves, the inner Swaraj, before you can win back your outer
empire. There the Mother dwells and She waits for worship that She may
give strength. Believe in Her, serve Her, lose your wills in Hers, your
egoism in the greater ego of the country, your separate selfishness in
the service of humanity. Recover the source of all strength in
yourselves and all else will be added to you, social soundness,
intellectual pre-eminence, political freedom, the mastery of human
thought, the hegemony of the world."
*
The Mother:
Let India work for
the future and set the example. Thus she will recover her true place in
the world.
Since long it was the
habit to govern through division and opposition.
The time has come to
govern through union, mutual understanding and collaboration.
To choose a
collaborator, the value of the man is more important than the party to
which he belongs.
The greatness of a
country does not depend on the victory of a party but on the union of
all the parties.
*
Youth does not depend on
the small number of years one has lived, but
on the capacity to grow and to progress. To grow is to increase one's
potentialities, one's capacities; to progress is to make constantly
more perfect the capacities that one already possesses. Old age does
not come from a great number of years but from the incapacity or the
refusal to continue to grow and progress. I have known old people of
twenty and young people of seventy. As soon as one wants to settle down
in life and reap the benefits of one's past efforts, as soon as one
thinks that one has done what one had to do and accomplished what one
had to accomplish, in short, as soon as one ceases to progress, to
advance along the road of perfection, one is sure to fall back and
become old.
*
As soon as you stop advancing, as soon as you stop progressing, as soon
as you cease to better yourself, cease to gain and grow, cease to
transform yourself, you truly become old, that is to say, you go
downhill towards disintegration.
There are young
people who are old and there are old people who are young. If you carry
in you this flame for progress and transformation, if you are ready to
leave every thing behind so that you may advance with an alert step, if
you are always open to a new progress, a new improvement, a new
transformation, then you are eternally young. But if you sit back
satisfied with what has been accomplished, if you have the feeling that
you have reached your goal and you have nothing left to do but enjoy
the fruit of your efforts, then already more than half your body is in
the tomb: it is decrepitude and the true death.
Everything that has
been done is always nothing compared with what remains to be done.
Do not look behind.
Look ahead, always ahead and go forward always.