Page 4 - All India Magazine Jul-2025

Band of the Spirit's inner enemies
The vulgar conception of sacrifice is an act of painful self-immolation,
austere self-mortification, difficult self-effacement; this kind of sacrifice may
go even as far as self-mutilation and self-torture. These things may be tem-
porarily necessary in man's hard endeavour to exceed his natural self; if the
egoism in his nature is violent and obstinate, it has to be met sometimes by
an answering strong internal repression and counterbalancing violence. But
the Gita discourages any excess of violence done to oneself; for the self within
is really the Godhead evolving, it is Krishna, it is the Divine; it has not to
be troubled and tortured as the Titans of the world trouble and torture it,
but to be increased, fostered, cherished, luminously opened to a divine light
and strength and joy and wideness. It is not one's self, but the band of the
spirit's inner enemies that we have to discourage, expel, slay upon the altar
of the growth of the spirit; these can be ruthlessly excised, whose names are
desire, wrath, inequality, greed, attachment to outward pleasures and pains,
the cohort of usurping demons that are the cause of the soul's errors and suf-
ferings. These should be regarded not as part of oneself but as intruders and
perverters of our self's real and diviner nature; these have to be sacrificed
in the harsher sense of the word, whatever pain in going they may throw by
reflection on the consciousness of the seeker.
CWSA 23: 108-09 Sri Aurobindo

4 All India Magazine, July 2025