Alok Pandey replies: The stepping over the mole o...

2009-11-30T22:39:52.633+05:30

Alok Pandey replies:

The stepping over the mole of some returnees from the mountain is not done in a cruel way. It happens, with a careless step and the passer by looks back and feels sympathetic and cautions himself to be more careful next time.

Quoted below is the context:

Unknown to the mole, while he slept and dreamt of his future glory and fame, a group of climbers returned from the summit. One of them took a careless step and crushed the mole under his foot, burying it in the sand. When he realised what he had done, he cast a sympathetic glance at the dead mole and cautioned himself to be more careful with his steps.'

As to the conversion of the demon in the beautiful lines from Savitri, that is an inner process, not the survival on the physical plane with all our egoistic propensities. If you like, one may say that allegorically, the ego-self, that is to say the littleness depicted in the persona of the mole, must die to itself for the effective conversion to take place, the weeping of the demons with this joy typifies this change, ...the end of their long dreadful task.

Yes, in this story the smallness does not change in the lifetime of the mole. He is not new born in his lifetime but of course he can always be reborn anew and have a fresh chance to change. To show that it changed one may have to write a part two of the mole-story, the mole being reborn as a mountaneer perhaps. But that is to stretch the allegory too far. The story has a limited scope. It is about the stupidity of the little human intellect that thinks itself the judge of all things high and beautiful and takes this position that whatever escapes it does not exist. Such an attitude leads to its ruin eventually since with all its might it is far too small before the forces that govern life and destiny.

The story is not about the demons but about the little mind and its blindness described thus in Savitri:

Mind keeps the soul prisoner.....
...And perish from the earth where he was king
Bk I C IV p.53

It is the perishing of the little mind under its weight of stupidity and not the conversion of an asura that is depicted here.

The story is clearly an allegory. Just as the mole is not a mole but the tendency of the physical mind so also the human beings are not human beings but representatives of an ascending consciousness or, if we like, beings of a cosmic order with vaster movements.

bhavana said:

I read this the day it was posted, i think, and at the time didn't reply. But the reply keeps on singing in my head, so here it is. I was startled to find the returnees descending from the heights of the mountain trampling the ignorant mole to death. Unless the storyteller goes on to deconstruct Death in the story, this is rather a harsh and unhopeful sentence. I think the storyteller (who has the option, after all) should write in the possibility of redemption... despite our Teacher's teachings, i guess we're still far from the time when
"... the demons wept with joy
Foreseeing the end of their long dreadful task
And the defeat for which they hoped in vain
And glad release from their self-chosen doom
And return into the One from whom they came."
---Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

Comments on A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs: The Mole and the Mountain

Alok Pandey replies: The stepping over the mole o...