Page 31 - All India Magazine Aug-2026

Ashram as a labratory
It is necessary or rather inevitable that in an Asram which is
1
a "laboratory", as Adhar Das puts it, for a spiritual and supra-
mental Yoga, humanity should be variously represented. For the
problem of transformation has to deal with all sorts of elements
favourable and unfavourable. The same man indeed carries in
him a mixture of these two things. If only sattwic and cultured
men came for the Yoga, men without very much of the vital dif-
ficulty in them, then because the difficulty of the vital element in
terrestrial nature has not been faced and overcome, it might well
be that the endeavour would fail. There might conceivably be un-
der certain circumstances an overmental layer superimposed on
the mental, vital and physical and influencing them, but hardly
anything supramental or a sovereign transmutation of the hu-
man being. Those in the Asram come from all quarters and are of
all kinds; it cannot be otherwise.
In the course of the Yoga, collectively — though not for each
one necessarily — as each plane is dealt with, all its difficulties
arise. That will explain much in the Asram that people do not ex-
pect there. When the preliminary work is over in the "laboratory",
things must change.
CWSA 35: 600-01

Inmates of all kinds
Also much stress has not been laid on human fellowship of
the ordinary kind between the inmates, (though good feeling,
consideration and courtesy should always be there), because
that is not the aim; it is a unity in a new consciousness that is
the aim and the first thing is for each to do his sadhana, to ar-
rive at that new consciousness and realise oneness there.

1. A. C. Das, review of Lights on Yoga. The Calcutta Review 47 (October 1935),
pp.101 – 2.

All India Magazine, August 2026 31