It is an occult fact that for success in devout pursuit, human effort and the divine assent have to go together. The gleaming power of tapasya, tapahaprabhāva, and the grace of God, devaprasāda, alone can lead the aspiring soul towards the cherished spiritual realisation. That is how Rishi Shwetashwatara came to know the Eternal. The equivalent of this classical tapahaprabhāva, the arduous personal effort, the “constant expansion and self-perfecting” in Sri Aurobindo’s transformative Yoga is indeed the “call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes.” The acceptance of this concentrated and fiery endeavour of the exceptional tapasvin as an invocation to the Supreme can then in response open out the doors for him to walk in and bequeath his riches upon him. That will be the sanction, the luminous bestowal of benediction, the Upanishadic devaprasāda. Which means that, the intense and ardent call and will, tapahaprabhāva, as well as the heavenly sanction, devaprasāda, in the transformative Yoga of Sri Aurobindo are actually in the context of a most decisive change, the supramental change which is “a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness.”

...   more »