Understanding the Respective Roles of Personal Effort and Divine Grace in the Transformation of Human Nature

It is one thing to adopt, in one’s mind, the idea that since the Divine is doing the work, we need simply accept the idea and let things take their course. It is an entirely different thing if we actually want to accomplish the transformation needed to bring about a change in human nature based on evolutionary growth and development. There is a long debate about whether we have ‘free will’ or whether everything is determined by fate, or destiny, dependent origination or karmic consequence. The mind wants to have a simple solution that tends to be either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘black’ or ‘white’. Thus, the idea of having the Divine do everything and the individual not having to make any personal effort, or the opposite idea that says that personal effort is the sole solution and there is no need, or even a reality to Divine Grace in action, is an expression of the mind’s limitations. There is certainly a role for personal effort, just as there is a deeper understanding of the working of the Divine Force, or Divine Grace.

Sri Aurobindo, in his book The Mother, clarifies this point: “but so long as the lower nature is active the personal effort of the Sadhaka remains necessary. The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender…. Note that a tamasic surrender refusing to fulfil the conditions and calling on God to do everything and save one all the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection.”

In the same text he states: “Reject the false notion that the divine Power will do and is bound to do everything for you at your demand and even though you do not satisfy the conditions laid down by the Supreme. … Reject too the false and indolent expectation that the divine Power will do even the surrender for you. The Supreme demands your surrender to her, but does not impose it: you are free at every moment, till the irrevocable transformation comes, to deny and to reject the Divine or to recall your self-giving, if you are willing to suffer the spiritual consequence. Your surrender must be self-made and free; it must be the surrender of a living being, not of an inert atuomaton or mechanical tool.” … “An inert passivity is constantly confused with the real surrender, but out of an inert passivity nothing true and powerful can come.”

Sri Aurobindo further observes: “It [the idea that the sadhana is done by the Divine rather than by oneself] is a truth but a truth that does not become effective for the consciousness until or in proportion as it is realised. The people who stagnate because of it are those who accept the idea but do not realise — so they have neither the force of tapasya nor that of the Divine Grace. On the other hand those who can realise it feel even behind their tapasya and in it the action of the Divine Force.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pg. 125