Integral Yoga is no uniform potion

When it comes to The Mother & Sri Aurobindo and Integral Yoga, one feels like Condoleezza Rice remarking “The fact of the matter is I've been black all my life. Nobody needs to tell me how to be black.^[125]” Like Socrates’ "examined life,” The Mother’s stress on avoiding the misery of an “aimless life” is perhaps the most basic rule for an aspirant. For a major stretch in life, however, many mistake earning livelihood for the aim although the profession provides the opportunity for flowering of talent, nurturing creativity, and moulding of subjectivity. The resultant individuality, identity, and social mobility, however, do exert a mesmerizing effect whereby the chance of coming face to face with choosing an aim or confronting one’s own real self head on is always deferred. Drawing satisfaction from some substitute as compensation is, of course, forced by subsistence compulsions.

Traditional canons of conduct conveniently contain predominantly direct correspondence between ethical life and action and liberation. But non-linear Integral Yoga Ontology and its spiral evolution paradigm is more prone to post-modernist rapprochement with tentativeness, contingency, and uncertainty of interpretation. This is no logic to condone misconduct (for, the elephant is Brahman and so is the mahut) but the paramountcy of context is never emphasized more elsewhere. The tenet, All life is Yoga, therefore, assumes unprecedented significance against this backdrop. Like the Shatadala or a Sahasra-bahu (called Saas-bahu erroneously in colloquial fashion) temple, the interdependence, interconnection, and economy within a collectivity is thrown into sharp relief. Integral Yoga, thus, is no uniform potion; but rather an arena for experimenting with life along the known tracks and with notions yet unpracticed. [TNM55]