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<b><font face="Times New Roman">IV</font></b>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">MORE OF YAJNAVALKYA</font></p>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Last time I told you the story of the great Rishi Yajnavalkya. But that was about the later Yajnavalkya when he
had become a full-fledged rishi, a guru with an Ashram
and disciples. Today I will tell you something of the
earlier Yajnavalkya, the beginning of his rishihood, the
start of his spiritual life. You know the structure of the
old Indian society, it consisted of four castes, <i>varnas,
</i>and four stages, <i>asramas.</i> I shall speak of the <i>asramas
</i>now. Each individual person had to follow a definite
course of life through developing stages. First of all,
naturally, when you are a baby, in your early childhood,
you belong to the family and remain with your parents.
As soon as you grow up and the time for your education
arrives, you are initiated into a stage called <i>brahmacarya;</i></font>&nbsp;
<font face="Times New Roman">you may generally call it as the stage of self-discipline,
you go to a guru and pursue your studies through a disciplined life, something like the life of the children who are
here like you. In those days a student's life did not mean
merely studies, that is to say, reading and writing, book-knowledge, but as here a very active life. The physical
education in the old time <i>asramas</i> in certain ways was even
more complete than what is given here, for it included the
art of warfare also, combatives like serious archery and</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size=2>Page- 27</font><hr align="justify">

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<font face="Times New Roman">many other items of physical training. When you have
terminated this discipline or <i>brahmacarya,</i> when you have
become an accomplished young man you are allowed to
return to the world, and take to the worldly life, enrich
yourself with all experiences of that life, that is to say,
you marry and become a family man. It is the second
stage called <i>garhasthya.</i> Next when you have fully enjoyed
or fulfilled the duty of the worldly life, you pass on to the
next stage that is called the <i>va&#61464;naprastha.</i> That is the
hermit life, the beginning of the true spiritual life. Finally
at the end of the <i>va&#61464;naprastha,</i> you pass still beyond and
adopt the life of the sannyasi, abandoning everything,
concentrating wholly on the Supreme Truth and merging
into it.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">Now our Yajnavalkya in the normal course of things
has passed through the stage of <i>brahmacarya,</i> he has also
pursued the stage of domestic life and is now at the end&nbsp;
of it. He thinks the time has now come to him to take to
spiritual life and enter into <i>va&#61464;naprastha.</i> He had married
and had two wives. So one day he called the first wife,
Katyayani, and said to her: &quot;Katyayani, I am now leaving
this life and entering the spiritual life. You have given
me comfort and happiness. I am thankful to you for that.
Whatever I have, my possessions, movable and immovable, I have divided into two. This is your portion.&quot;
Katyayani accepted the decision without a murmur. She
answered: &quot;Since you are my lord and husband, as you
ask me so I shall do.&quot; Then Yajnavalkya went to his</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman" size=2>Page- 28</font><hr align="justify">

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<font face="Times New Roman">second wife, Maitreyee; to Maitreyee too he said the same
thing as he had said to Katyayani: &quot;Maitreyee, I am leaving this life, I am taking to the spiritual life. I have given
to Katyayani her share of my possessions. This is your
share.&quot; But Maitreyee answered: &quot;Wherever you go, I
will follow you, I will also give up the world and its life.&quot;
Yajnavalkya said: &quot;No, Maitreyee, it is a very hard, very
difficult life, particularly for a woman. Follow the life to
which you have been accustomed. Enjoy freely the possessions I leave you.&quot; Then Maitreyee uttered those famous
words which you must have heard and which have been
ringing through the centuries down to us also, even today:</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&quot;All these possessions, will they give me immortality?&quot;
Yajnavalkya answered: &quot;No, Maitreyee, that they will
not give you, it is quite another matter.&quot; Maitreyee
answered — uttering a <i>mantra</i> as it were — &quot;What am
I to do with that which does not give me immortality?&quot; So
Yajnavalkya had to accept her and allow her to accompany
him. Now Yajnavalkya gives his first lesson of spiritual
life to Maitreyee: &quot;Maitreyee, you love me, so you are
coming with me. But do you know the real truth of the
matter? The real truth is that you do not love me, but
you love the soul that is in you, which is also in me: you
love your own self in me. Therefore you love me. And I
love you, I love you not for your sake but for the sake of
the self in you which is the self in me. All love is like that.
A husband loves his wife, the wife loves her husband, the
brother loves his brother or sister, a sister loves her sister</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman" size=2>Page- 29</font><hr align="justify">

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<font face="Times New Roman">or brother, it is not for the sake of the person or the relation but for the sake of the self— one's own self which is
in everybody. That is the first lesson which you have to
learn. Forget the outer person, your own person or
another's person, find the self that is in you and everybody
else. That is the basis of the spiritual life.&quot;</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">I told you there were four stages of life for an individual
in the ancient Indian society. You complete one stage and
then proceed to the next, and then to the next and so on.
But they also say that you need not go through the stages
gradually, step by step in this way, you can skip one or
two stages in your stride if you have the capacity to do so;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">if you want the spiritual life when you are young, even
when you have not gone through the worldly life, even
then you can jump over, take a leap into the life of the
<i>sannya&#61464;sin.</i> It is said the day you feel detached from your
worldly home, then forthwith you may take to the life of
the ascetic. It depends upon the urge in you, the insistence of the truth in you. A large freedom was given to all
who really wanted a spiritual life.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">I have said that Yajnavalkya had two wives. You did 
not ask me why: for to us moderns such a thing is not only immoral but 
inconvenient; it is however another story, a long story. In those days, those 
far-off early days of mankind, thousands and thousands, millions 
perhaps, of years ago, it was the law, the social custom and it became a duty, 
to have more than one wife and the relation too between man and woman was much 
freer and more</font><p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0" align="center">
<font face="Times New Roman" size=2>Page- 30</font><hr align="justify">

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<font face="Times New Roman">loose. That was because, as you know, man started his
earthly life at a certain stage of creation; before that stage
there was no man, there were only animals. The earth was
filled with animals, only animals, wild animals, ferocious
animals, insects, worms, all kinds of ugly and dangerous
creatures. Man came long, long after; he is almost a
recent appearance. It was a mysterious, indeed a miraculous happening, how all of a sudden, out of or in the midst
of animals there appeared a new creature, quite a different
type of animal. Still in whatever way it happened, they
were not many in number. The first creation of man must
have been a very limited operation, limited in space, limited
in number. Perhaps they sprouted up like mushrooms
here and there, a hundred here, another hundred there, or
perhaps a few thousands — few and far between. So man
led a dangerous and precarious life. All around him these
animals, some too big, some too small to be tackled withstood against him, and Nature also was as wild and as
much against him. So for self-preservation and survival
they needed to be numerous, to increase in number as
much as possible. It is exactly what is needed in war; the
larger the number of troops, the greater the chance of
winning the war. So the impulse in man, in the social
aggregate was to have more men, increase the number, to
strengthen the extent and volume of the force to be able
to fight successfully against the enemy. So a necessity
became a religious duty to multiply, to procreate and redouble the race. In later days, even when the necessity</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman" size=2>Page- 31</font><hr align="justify">

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<font face="Times New Roman">was not so imperative, even then the habit and custom
continued. To beget children was a praise-worthy thing,
the more the number the greater the merit. Women who
had numerous children were considered favourites of the
gods. King Dasharatha had, it appears, a thousand wives,
King Dhritarashtra had more than a hundred, Vashishtha
had a hundred sons and King Sagar a thousand. Draupadi</font>&nbsp;
<font face="Times New Roman">had five husbands and she was considered the ideal chaste
woman.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">In the modern age we have gone to the other extreme,
we have tided over the danger of under-population. At the
present day it is over-population that threatens the existence of mankind. Now we are anxious, we are racking our
brains, trying to find out all kinds of means and ways to
restrict and control any increase in population.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">I said, in the early days the need to marry in any way
— a very free choice was given in the matter of the way of
marriage — and to procreate was a social duty: but note
it is not for individual pleasure. Today we have discarded
all notion of that kind of action as superstition, a form of
tyranny. We are for freedom of the individual. Whatever
we do we must do for our personal gain, our personal
pleasure. But in those days that was not the ideal nor the
custom. Even when you marry, you marry not for the sake
of personal enjoyment but for the sake of the society, to
give birth to healthy and useful children, to increase
the number of able-bodied members of your society.
Service for society, not personal pleasure was the aim.</font><p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0" align="center">
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<font face="Times New Roman">Yajnavalkya lifted that ideal on to a still higher level — you
exist not for your own sake of course — own means the
personal ego individual — but for the sake of your soul,
the greater self.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">In this connection I am reminded of what Sri Aurobindo
said when he was taking leave of his students at Calcutta
in his farewell address before starting his public political
activity: he said, &quot;When I come back to you again, I hope
to see some of you become great, great not for your own
sake but for your country, to make your country great. I
hope to see some of you become rich, rich not for yourself
but to make your country rich&quot;: that is the ideal ideal, not
individual satisfaction, exclusively personal accomplishment or achievement, one must work in view of the
welfare of all, a global well-being. The goal is not one's
own little self, but the Great Self in all. This is of course,
in the secular way in the secular field. But here also the
appeal, it must be observed, is not to the social life as a
mere machine of which individuals are dead helpless
parts and units meant to serve as obedient instruments in
the production of useful goods. The appeal on the contrary is to the soul, the free inner individual, choosing its
destiny but with a view to collaborating and uniting with
others in the realisation of a global truth.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">In the spiritual sphere also Sri Aurobindo gives us the
same ideal and outlook. In the early days spiritual realisation was sought for personal salvation, a complete renunciation of the world, absolute freedom from this transient</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman" size=2>Page- 33</font><hr align="justify">

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<font face="Times New Roman">unhappy world—<i>anityam asukham lokam imam.</i> The
individual person leaves his individual existence upon
earth and retires and merges into the Infinite Brahman.
But here in Sri Aurobindo's Revelation we are taught that
the individual realisation and spiritual attainment is not
to dissolve oneself into the nameless formless Beyond but
to maintain it, preserve it in a pure divine form, for the
sake of the sorrowful ignorant world. The knowledge, the
power, the delight that the individual gains — not as
something merely individual but as the result of one's
identity with the universal — are at the service of earth and
humanity so that these may be transformed and share in
the same realisation. One becomes spiritually free and
Complete and enters into all so that all may be transformed
into a new divine reality.</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman" size=2>Page- 3</font><hr align="justify">

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