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FULLER PORTRAITS
29 its worst. It is because the ass does not do what man wants him to do under blows, that he is taxed with stupidity.
“But really, the ass behaves like that first beacuse he has a sense of humour and likes to provoke the two-legged beast into irrational antics; and secondly because he finds that what man wants of him is quite a ridiculous and bothersome nuisance which ought not to be demanded of any self-respecting donkey. Also note that the ass is a philosopher. When he hee-haws, it is out of a supreme contempt for the world in general and for the human imbecile in particular. I have no doubt that in the asinine language man has the same significance as ass in ours. These deep and original considerations are, however, by the waymerely meant to hint to you that your balancing between a wise
man and the wise ass is not so alarming a symptom after all."30
Lastly, Dilip Roy considers that Sri Aurobindo possessed a unique synthesising genius. He feels that Sri Aurobindo's education in the Western culture has enabled him to grow into a spiritual personality of global importance. He unites in his vision the best of the East and the West, recognizes the beauty of temporal existence and recommends the quest of a spirituality which may include and transform it.
According to Sri Aurobindo the true message of the East to the West is that:
"Only by finding himself can man be saved... The West has heard the message and is seeking out the law and truth of the soul and the evidence of an inner reality greater than the material. The danger is that with her passion for mechanism and her exaggerated intellectuality she may fog herself in an external and false psychism such as we see arising in England and
America, the homes of the mechanical genius."31
Similarly, the Message of the West to the East is that man also is God and it is through his developing manhood that he approaches the godhead. He writes:
“The danger is that Asia may accept it in the European form, forget for a time her own law and nature and either copy blindly the West or make a disastrous amalgam of that which she has in its most inferior forms and the crudeness which are invading her.""32
Again, in the Life Divine, he said: “All problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony." In Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo observed that the Tantra philosophy of life was similar to his own outlook on life because in the Tantra they weld together alien elements of the human personality in the roles of
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