Page 49 - NAMAH-Jul-2022

Namah The Art of Suffering Well

“This craving life-force or desire-soul in us has “By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins,
to be accepted at first, but only in order that it The inanimate world perceived its sentient soul,
may be transformed (1).” Else had the Inconscient never suffered change.
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
“Division, ego, the imperfect consciousness A dead resistance in the mortal’s heart,
and groping and struggle of a separate self- His slow inertia as of living stone.
affirmation are the effective cause of the suffering If the heart were not forced to want and weep,
and ignorance of this world. Once consciousnesses His soul would have lain down content, at ease,
separated from the One Consciousness, they fell And never thought to exceed the human start
inevitably into ignorance and the last result And never learned to climb towards the Sun.
of ignorance was Inconscience; from a dark This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;
immense Inconscient this material world
arises and out of it a soul that by evolution is Throes of an endless birth coerce her still;
struggling into consciousness, attracted towards The centuries end, the ages vainly pass
the hidden Light, ascending but still blindly And yet the Godhead in her is not born (5).”
towards the lost Divinity from which it came
(2).” “He walks by his own choice into Hell’s trap;
This mortal creature is his own worst foe (6).”
“So too we have a double psychic entity in us,
the surface desire-soul which works in our vital Wanting to make a stable ground in the
cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and fleeting
mental seeking for power, knowledge and
happiness, and a subliminal psychic entity, As I am unconsciously identified with a limited
a pure power of light, love, joy and refined sense of self, the ego-self, I am always full of
essence of being which is our true soul behind a sense of lack, an incompletion within, like
the outer form of psychic existence we so often something is missing, and I need something
dignify by the name. It is when some reflection else to make me full, stable, solid. So, in
of this larger and purer psychic entity comes to this unconsciousness and in this ignorant
the surface that we say of a man, he has a soul, identification with the sense of limited
and when it is absent in his outward psychic life self, I desperately look for stable ground.
that we say of him, he has no soul (3).” How can I make a stable ground? A person? A
relationship? A workplace? A sense of identity?
In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo elaborates deeply A particular ideology? Something, something
and profoundly on the problem of pain: which gives me grounding that I am. Something
that gives me a sense of self. And for that I
“Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god, mostly look outward, through the doors of
The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain. my sense perceptions.
Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must
come; Things may go well for some time, and as
Thy grief is a cry of darkness to the Light; long as they are going well according to me,
Pain was the first-born of the Inconscience I don’t bother to care much about suffering
Which was thy body’s dumb original base… (4)” or the art of suffering well, or finding who I

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