The Message of India

SRI AUROBINDO
KARMAYOGIN : Vol.I. No.2 SATURDAY 26th JUNE 1909

The ground gained by the Vedantic propaganda in the West, may be measured by the growing insight in the occasional utterances of well-informed and intellectual Europeans on the subject. A certain Mrs. Leighton Cleather speaking to the Oriental circle of the Lyceum Club in London on the message of India has indicated the mission of India with great justness and insight. We need not follow Mrs. Cleather into her dissertation on the Kshatriyas, whom for some mysterious reason she insists on calling the Red Rajputs, but it is true that the first knowledge of Vedantic truth and the Rajayoga was the possession of the Kshatriyas till Janaka, Ajatashatru and others gave it to the Brahmins. But the real issues of this historical fact are inevitably missed by the lecturer.

She is on a surer ground when she continues, "India's message to the world today she considered to be the realisation of the life beyond material forms. The East has taken for granted the reality of the invisible and has no fear. The recognition of the soul in ourselves and others leads to the recognition of the universal soul and the great word of the Upanishads: This soul which is the self of all that is, this is the real, this the self, that thou art.' Modern civilisation has lost sight of the fundamental law of self-sacrifice as conditioning man's evolution."

We have here, very briefly put, the triple message of India, psychical, spiritual and moral. India believes in and has the key to a psychical world within man and without him which is the source and basis of the material. This it is which Europe is beginning dimly to discover. She has caught glimpses of the world beyond the gates, her hands are fumbling for the key but she has not yet found it. Immortality proved and admitted, it becomes easier to believe in God. The spiritual message is that the universal self is one and that our souls are not only brothers, not only of one substance and nature, but live in and move towards an essential oneness. It follows that Love is the highest law and that to which evolution must move. Ananda, joy and delight, are the object of the lila and the fulfilment of love is the height of joy and delight. Self-sacrifice is therefore the fundamental law.

Sacrifice, says the Gita, is the law by which the Father of all in the beginning conditioned the world, and all ethics, all conduct, all life is a sacrifice willed or unconscious. The beginning of ethical knowledge is to realise this and make the conscious sacrifice of one's own individual desires. It is an inferior and semi-savage morality which gives up only to gain and makes selfishness the basis of ethics. To give up one's small individual self and find the larger self in others, in the nation, in humanity, in God, that is the law of Vedanta. That is India's message. Only she must not be content with sending it, she must rise up and live it before all the world so that it may be proved a possible law of conduct both for men and nations.