The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice 107
always again it receives something from its environment gratis or
in return for its voluntary or involuntary tribute. For it is only by
this giving and receiving that it can effect its own growth while at
the same time it helps the sum of things. At length, though at first
slowly and partially, we learn to make the conscious sacrifice;
even, in the end, we take joy to give ourselves and what we
envisage as belonging to us in a spirit of love and devotion to
That which appears for the moment other than ourselves and is
certainly other than our limited personalities. The sacrifice and
the divine return for our sacrifice then become a gladly accepted
means towards our last perfection; for it is recognised now as
the road to the fulfilment in us of the eternal purpose.
But, most often, the sacrifice is done unconsciously, egoistically
and without knowledge or acceptance of the true meaning
of the great world-rite. It is so that the vast majority of earthcreatures
do it; and, when it is so done, the individual derives
only a mechanical minimum of natural inevitable profit, achieves
by it only a slow painful progress limited and tortured by the
smallness and suffering of the ego. Only when the heart, the will
and the mind of knowledge associate themselves with the law
and gladly follow it, can there come the deep joy and the happy
fruitfulness of divine sacrifice. The mind’s knowledge of the law
and the heart’s gladness in it culminate in the perception that it
is to our own Self and Spirit and the one Self and Spirit of all that
we give. And this is true even when our self-offering is still to our
fellow-creatures or to lesser Powers and Principles and not yet to
the Supreme. “Not for the sake of the wife,” says Yajnavalkya
in the Upanishad, “but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear to
us.” This in the lower sense of the individual self is the hard fact
behind the coloured and passionate professions of egoistic love;
but in a higher sense it is the inner significance of that love too
which is not egoistic but divine. All true love and all sacrifice are
in their essence Nature’s contradiction of the primary egoism and
its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first
fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between
creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from
which we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others.