When Sri Aurobindo said:
I am neither an impotent moralist nor a weak pacifist, these words were full of meaning.
He had deepened in depth the history of Europe and that of the great revolutions of Europe and America, to know that armed rebellion may be just; neither Joan of Arc nor Mazzini nor Washington were apostles of "nonviolence."
When Ghandi's son visited him in Pondichery in 1920 and told him about non-violence, Sri Aurobindo answered him with this simple question, by the way very current: "What would you do if tomorrow the northern borders were invaded?"
Twenty years later, in 1940, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother declared themselves in favor of the allies in the Second World War, while Ghandi, moved by an impulse without a doubt "worthy of virtuosity, " wrote an open letter to the people English, urging him not to take up arms against Hitler and to appeal only to the "spiritual force" in case of German invasion.
The position adopted by Sri Aurobindo of total support for England in this war could not be understood in India in 1940, still dominated by the colonial power; they could not understand how the revolutionary leader who had led the rebellion against the occupying power, now stood on his side.
We must, therefore, specify the spiritual vision of the revolutionary yogi Sri Aurobindo regarding his knowledge about the Consciousness-Truth of violent action, as expressed in a letter-response to Ghandi's initiative of non-intervention of the English people:
War and destruction, he says, constitute a universal principle that governs not only our purely material life below, but even our mental and moral existence.
It is of all evidence, practically, that in his intellectual, social, political and moral life, man cannot advance, without any struggle, a single step; a struggle between what exists and lives and what it tries to become and live, and between everything that lies behind one and the other.
It is impossible, at least in the current state of humanity and of things, to move forward, grow and fulfill and, at the same time, to observe, really and absolutely, the principle of innocence that is proposed to us as the best and highest standard of conduct.
Will we use only the force of the soul and never destroy anything by war or even by physical violence to defend ourselves? So far we agree.
But while the forces of the soul reach the necessary effectiveness, the demonic forces in men and nations crush, demolish, kill, burn and rape, as we see it today; they can then do it comfortably and without hindrance, and you may have caused, with your abstention, the loss of as many lives as the others with their violence ...
It is not enough to have clean hands and an immaculate soul so that the law of battle and destruction disappears from the world; it is necessary that whatever forms its base disappears first from humanity. The immobility and inertia that refuse to use the means of resistance to evil or that are incapable of using them, will not repeal the law, much less. In reality, inertia does much greater damage than the dynamic principle of struggle, which creates at least more than it destroys. Consequently, disregarding the point of view of individual action, refraining from fighting in its most visible physical form and the destruction that inevitably accompanies it, perhaps gives us moral satisfaction, but leaves the Destroyer of creatures intact. .
And if our abstention leaves the Destroyer of creatures harmless, neither do our wars suppress it, although it is practically necessary to stain their hands on them.
In the middle of the First World War, Sri Aurobindo observed with prophetic force:
The defeat of Germany ... is not enough to remove the spirit that incarnates in Germany; there will probably be a new incarnation of the same spirit elsewhere, in another race or in another empire and it will then be necessary to fight the battle once more.
All the old forces are alive and it does not do much to break or depress the body they animate, because they very well know how to transmigrate. Germany struck down the Napoleonic spirit in 1813 and demolished the remains of French hegemony in Europe in 1870; This Germany itself has become the embodiment of what she had dejected. The phenomenon can easily be repeated on a much larger scale.
Today we have been able to see how the old forces know how to transmigrate.
Gandhi himself, seeing that all the years of non-violence came to a halt in the terrible violence that characterized the partition of India in 1947, he watched sadly shortly before his death:
"The feeling of violence that we have secretly fed, comes back to us and we hit each other when it comes to sharing power ... Now that the yoke of servitude has been shaken, all the forces of evil come to the surface." Because neither non-violence nor violence reach the source of Evil.
In the middle of the 1940 war, for the same days that he embraced the Allied party because, "practically", that was how it was necessary to proceed, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple:
You believe that what happens in Europe is a war between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, but this is no more true now than during the First World War. It is a war between two species of Ignorance….
The eye of the yogi sees not only the external events and the characters and the external causes, but also the powerful forces that precipitate them into action.
If the men who fight are instruments that are in the hands of the heads of state and the financiers, these, in turn, are simple puppets that are in the grip of hidden forces.
When the habit of contemplating things to the bottom has been acquired, one is no longer inclined to be moved by appearances or even to expect that political or social changes, or changes of an institutional nature, can remedy the situation.
Sri Aurobindo had become aware of these hidden "enormous forces" and the constant infiltration of the superphysical into the physical; their energies were no longer unfolding around a moral problem, very short after all - violence or nonviolence - but around a problem of effectiveness; and I saw clearly, also from experience, that in order to cure the evil of the world it is necessary to cure first “what in man is at the base” and that nothing can be cured outside if the inside is not cured first, because it is the same thing; the external cannot be mastered if the internal is not dominated, because it is the same thing; external matter cannot be transformed without transforming our inner matter, because it is also and always will be the same thing; there is only one Nature, one world, one matter, and as long as we want to proceed backwards, we will nowhere arrive.
And if it seems to us that the remedy is difficult, then there is no hope for man or for the world, because all our outer panaceas and our rosewater morals are doomed to nothingness and destruction at the hands of those hidden powers:
The only solution, says Sri Aurobindo, is found in the advent of another consciousness that will no longer be a toy of these forces, but more powerful than them, and that may force them to change or disappear ...
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