The Sunlit Path in the Yogic Endeavour

When we see deeply religious or spiritual people, we expect to see people who are serious, reserved and who carry an air of distance from the things of the world. This expectation has been so deeply embedded in the human psyche that we almost unconsciously take up this attitude when we tread the spiritual path. Consider the austerity and silence of monasteries and cloisters, or even the churches, temples, mosques or synagogues that abound throughout the world. It almost feels like heresy to relax, enjoy a laugh or just to be generally cheerful. The austere monk is the image that many hold for what true spirituality looks like. The path of austerity, struggle, suffering for one’s spiritual practice, becoming a martyr for God, is the way we think about spiritual practice. This increases the perceived gap between the spiritual or religious life and the exte
al life in the world. it also tends to lead to a severe, strict view of things and can lead to judgmental practices that want to limit, constrict, punish and stamp out anything that varies from this model.

There was a famous film in the 1960’s which centered around the story of a novice in a cloister in Austria who did not quite fit in. She was boisterous, smiling, laughing, singing and otherwise finding full expression of the joy of living and the developmental needs of her vital being. The nuns discussed (in song) the trouble she was, but the Mother Superior supported her with the statement that “she makes me laugh”. The happiness she brought to the environment she lived in was recognised as something valuable and worthwhile. Eventually the nuns found a solution to the ‘problem’ by sending her out to become a caretaker for a number of children of a widower who was raising the children in a quasi-military style. She succeeded in bringing out the natural joyfulness of the children, and eventually won over their father, and they were married and faced the troubles of the Third Reich in Austria, together with joy in their hearts and a song on their lips. The film, The Sound of Music was based on a real underlying story and captivated hearts everywhere for its musical delights. But the deeper message is one that bears consideration — perhaps the austere, strict, judgmental view of many traditional religious or spiritual traditions (or let us not leave out the materialst versions based on economic models or political systems and ideologies) is not the only way, or even the best possible way.

The ‘law of attraction’ holds that whatever we focus upon we bring toward us. If we focus on difficulties and struggles, that is what we get! If we shift our focus to the Divine, to the beauty, the harmony, the oneness of the creation, the uniqueness and the bliss that is the secret ‘air’ that we all breathe in..

In the Brahmanandavalli of the Taittiriya Upanishad, the Rishi states, as translated by Sri Aurobindo: “When he hath gotten him this delight, then it is that this creature becomes a thing of bliss; for who could labour to draw in the breath or who could have strength to breathe it out, if there were not that Bliss in the heaven of his heart, the ether within his being? It is He that is the fountain of bliss…”

In Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol, Sri Aurobindo calls forth this power of bliss: “O radiant fountain of the world’s delight World-free and unattainable above, O Bliss who ever dwellst deep-hid withi
While men seek thee outside and never find”

If the seeker focuses his attention on the Oneness, on the higher ranges of consciousness, on the Bliss that lives in the secret heart, rather than on all of the petty conce
s and struggles of the exte
al being, he can tread a different path, which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother call the ‘sunlit path’.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “There is nothing spiritually wrong in being glad and cheerful, on the contrary it is the right thing. As for struggles and aspiration, struggles are really not indispensable to progress and there are many people who get so habituated to the struggling attitude that they have all the time struggles and very little else. That is not desirable. There is a sunlit path as well as a gloomy one and it is the better of the two.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pg. 140