The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

The Ascent of the Sacrifice – 2 173
do only the works of Love and Knowledge and leave aside the
works of will and power, possession and acquisition, production
and fruitful expense of capacity, battle and victory and mastery,
striking away from us the larger part of life because it seems to
be made of the very stuff of desire and ego and therefore doomed
to be a field of disharmony and mere conflict and disorder. For
the division cannot really be made; or, if attempted, it must
fail in its essential purpose, since it would isolate us from the
total energies of the World-Power and sterilise an important
part of integral Nature, just the one force in it that is a necessary
instrument in any world-creative purpose. The Life-Force is an
indispensable intermediary, the effectuating element in Nature
here; mind needs its alliance if the works of mind are not to
remain shining inner formations without a body; the spirit needs
it to give an outer force and form to its manifested possibilities
and arrive at a complete self-expression incarnated in Matter. If
Life refuses the aid of its intermediary energy to the spirit’s other
workings or is itself refused, they are likely to be reduced for
all the effect they can have here to a static seclusion or a golden
impotence; or if anything is done, it will be a partial irradiation
of our action more subjective than objective, modifying existence
perhaps, but without force to change it. Yet if Life brings
its forces to the spirit but unregenerate, a worse result may
follow since it is likely to reduce the spiritual action of Love or
Knowledge to diminished and corrupted motions or make them
accomplices of its own inferior or perverse workings. Life is
indispensable to the completeness of the creative spiritual realisation,
but life released, transformed, uplifted, not the ordinary
mentalised human-animal life, nor the demoniac or Titanic, nor
even the divine and the undivine mixed together. Whatever may
be done by other world-shunning or heaven-seeking disciplines,
this is the difficult but unavoidable task of the integral Yoga;
it cannot afford to leave unsolved the problem of the outward
works of Life, it must find in them their native Divinity and ally
it firmly and for ever to the divinities of Love and Knowledge.
It is no solution either to postpone dealing with the works
of Life till Love and Knowledge have been evolved to a point