sense that the first stage is more associated with the will, the second with the intelligence, and the third with the emotions and psychic being, and each of these latter are associated more closely with one of the branches of the yoga.
Equality would support the yoga of knowledge by helping in the purification of the intelligence, which is generally clouded by desire and emotional reactions, by reducing and eliminating the latter. Beyond desire and emotion, there is also a natural intellectual preference for one's own personal points of view, opinions, and these also distort the higher knowledge descending from above. Equality should help in reducing or eliminating these mental preferences. In general, equality to outside contacts should assist in a centering of the consciousness within and above, away from the surface consciousness, and thus contribute towards the realization of the Purusha which stands behind as a silent witness to the changing activity of Prakriti.
Equality would also support the yoga of devotion in that one becomes less attached to outside matters and more able to focus inward on one's love and devotion and self-giving to the Divine. The surface emotions which tend to occur as a reaction to outside things should grow calmer, and one can begin to feel the deeper emotions of the psychic being. Also, equality should aid in the perception of the Divine in all things, the good and bad, attractive and repellant, and following on the perception, the delight of the Divine these things.
Comment by MD to LS
Dear LS, I understand now what you point out. I am usually so enamoured and in awe of what Sri Aurobindo writes in these pages and so completely and deeply touched and moved that maybe I am not able to draw the obvious and more practical conclusions that you expect us to see. Also often the personal yoga or effort coincides so well with what I read that I get lost in that joy and ecstasy... In any case it is a lovely journey and every stage is more joyful than the last... every week more enriching than the previous... thank you Larry for your guidance.
“The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness,—the great command to Arjuna given after the foundation and main structure of the teaching have been laid and built, “Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,” has not the ring of an uncompromising altruism or of a white, dispassionate abnegation; it is a state of inner poise and wideness which is the foundation of spiritual freedom. With that poise, in that freedom we have to do the “work that is to be done,” a phrase which the Gita uses with the greatest wideness including in it all works, sarvakarmani, and which far exceeds, though it may include, social duties or ethical obligations. What is the work to be done is not to be determined by the individual choice; nor is the right to the action and the rejection of claim to the fruit the great word of the Gita, but only a preliminary word governing the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of Yoga. It is practically superseded at a subsequent stage. For the Gita goes on to affirm emphatically that the man is not the doer of the action; it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Force with its three modes of action that works through him, and he must learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore the “right to action” is an idea which is only valid so long as we are still under the illusion of being the doer; it must necessarily disappear from the mind like the claim to the fruit, as soon as we cease to be to our own consciousness the doer of our works. All pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of the right to action, is then at an end.”
Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, CWSA, vol 19, p. 36
