Intellectual Paradigms of our Age
IN HIS centenary tribute to Sri Aurobindo, K.D. Sethna (Mother India, 1972) observed: "This age, seen in its many-sided whole, will show itself secretly Aurobindonian. Sri Aurobindo will stand out as its truth-source and truth-focus, its natural gatherer-up and destined fulfiller." I present in this paper some evidence that will substantiate Sethna's claim about Sri Aurobindo. I shall show briefly what light Sri Aurobindo throws on some of the most influential intellectual paradigms of our age, such as, the liberal conception of man enshrined in the Western democracies, the Marxist conception of an ideal society, and the religious ideal of a transcendental fulfilment of life. Such an exploration will inevitably lead us to an examination of Marx, Freud and Darwin, the dominant intellectual influences of our age. In my opinion, although each one of these thinkers has brought to humanity a great truth, the illumination Sri Aurobindo's writings throw on them reveals their exaggerations and incompleteness and also offers to each of them the corrective needed.
1
Remain Holland described Sri Aurobindo as "the completest synthesis that has been realised to this day of the genius of Asia and the genius of Europe". The English novelist Dorothy M. Richardson once wrote to K. R. Srinivasa lyengar:1 "Has there ever existed a more synthetic consciousness than that of Sri Aurobindo ? Unifying he is to the limit of the term." S.K. Maitra2 has demonstrated in some detail how Indian and Western thought have met in Sri Aurobindo. He says: "...[that] this meeting is not a mere handshake, but [that] there is a real
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synthesis of these two types of thought in him. There is even something more, a fulfilment of what each aims at but has not been able to realise." Thus one of the most striking features of Sri Aurobindo's intellectual temper is his capacity for finding the core of truth each intellectual perspective contains and to harmonise it with the truths contained in other perspectives which are equally valid but to a superficial view not mutually congruous.
Professor Gabriel Monod-Herzen,3 the well-known French physicist, once explained in what sense Sri Aurobindo embodied for him the quintessence of the scientific spirit. "There are two attitudes in him which I most admire: The first is that he does not reject anything or anyone; there is a place for all opinions, even those which he does not accept, in his work. He has come to find that particle of truth that exists in everything because without it that opinion itself could nor exist. One never feels a prisoner of ideas when one reads him. One never save, 'This is falsehood', or else 'That person is wrong'; one says, 'Here is an incomplete idea.' Being a physicist, I was deeply struck because I had always been greatly impressed by the fact that the long succession of scientists did not contradict one another, as say those who have not studied science themselves. In fact they complement one another."
This is a most remarkable feature of Sri Aurobindo's intellectual temper. The human intellect by nature is incapable of seeing the truth of anything in its integrality. It has to break reality into parts and if it seizes upon one or more parts, it has automatically to reject some other. But Sri Aurobindo is the one thinker I know of who overcomes this inherent limitation of human reason. To cite a couple of examples of this: Although Sri Aurobindo does not accept in its entirety either the philosophy of Buddhism or of the Vedanta as interpreted by Shankara, he is second to none in acknowledging the truth of the spiritual experiences on which these philosophies were based and the great contributions made to spirituality by Buddha and Shankara. Similarly, although he does not favour asceticism, he pays high tribute to asceticism and recognise the value of the spiritual experience supporting it.4
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Among numerous such instances in his writings, I would like to refer here particularly to one which occurs in his brief essay on Materialism.5 In this article he goes on to say that the godheads of Materialism, namely, reason, science, progress and freedom in fact are preparing humanity for a greater religion than it has had in the past.
This brings me to the main point I wish to make here. In the intellectual domain what Sri Aurobindo offers us is not just one more corpus of a logically established theory about some aspect or domain of human life or of Nature but an integral theory of Man, Nature and God which is explanatorily more adequate than any other theory available to us now. In fact it made him far too comprehensive and global for the limited interests and mental horizon of most intellectuals. If anybody offers such a comprehensive theory we are either not interested or too sceptical about the whole enterprise and tend to dismiss it out of hand.
Is his theory verifiable? Sri Aurobindo has explained several times how spiritual truths require verification of a kind other than what is feasible in physical sciences. In A Defence of Indian Culture, he refers to experience, experimental analysis and synthesis, reason and intuition as the tests which are valid for spiritual truths as they are for scientific truths. This is also explained in several of his letters.
Another feature of Sri Aurobindo's writings is that whether it is the exegesis of ancient scriptural texts like the Gita, or the Vedas, or the future of evolution, or of something as specific as English poetry, he always speaks with the supreme assurance of one who knows what he is talking about, of somebody who is merely describing what he has seen. Often the details which he gives of them are so precise that only one who has seen what he is describing could have given them. He is a seer in the real sense of the term. In his writings there is not the tension of a purely speculative philosopher who builds an elaborate logical structure to convince himself that what he is saving is after all plausible but is never sure he has in fact guarded all his flanks. Sri Aurobindo affirms this when he says: "Experience and formulation of experience I consider as the true aim of philosophy. The rest is
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merely intellectual work and may be interesting but nothing more." Monod-Herzen also refers to this quality of Sri Aurobindo's writings when he says: "The impression I had in reading The Life Divine was not at all that of receiving what is ordinarily called a lesson in philosophy, but of listening to a traveller who had discovered a new land."
The sheer brilliance and grandeur of Sri Aurobindo as a seminal and creative thinker is an aspect of him which we often tend to overlook because of his achievements as a yogi and mystic. To give only two examples, it can be said without being guilty of exaggeration or partisanship that nobody has built a metaphysical thought-structure as grand as the one in Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, or sounded the depths of the soul-culture of India as he has in his The Secret of the Veda and The Foundations of Indian Culture. His comprehensive writings on yoga, on the evolution of social and political institutions, on the desirability and possibility of a World Union, on literary criticism, his exegeses of Indian scriptural literature, his scintillating letters on a variety of life-problems, and his literary output which finds its crowning achievement in the cosmic epic Savitri - every one of these is stamped with the force of his intellectual genius.
And yet, none of these seems to have persuaded the academics in Indian universities to take more than a peripheral interest in Sri Aurobindo. Some years ago C.D. Narasimhaiah,6 the well-known literary scholar and critic, observed that in his The Future Poetry Sri Aurobindo had given certain clear guidelines which if followed would have led to the inauguration of an Indian school of literary criticism- Narasimhaiah notes with anguish that this lead was not followed by our academics and even today, nearly seventy years after The Future Poetry, we continue to produce literary criticism which is derivative and imitative of the West.
What Narasimhaiah has pointed out about Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism is true in my view of Sri Aurobindo's writings in general. For most of the intelligentsia in our country, particularly for those in our universities, Sri Aurobindo is no more than a vague and misty figure. At best they have heard of him as a mystic and a Vedantin, and therefore they feel fully justified in dismis-
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sing him as someone whose concern was other-wordly and therefore of no consequence to their scholarly interests. His epochal role in shaping the political consciousness of this country in the early years of this century is probably known only to specialist students of Indian history. His contribution to political and social thought, to psychology, to the discovery of the real meaning of the Vedas, to the philological studies of Indian languages, his luminous interpretations of India's past, his epoch- making contributions to Yoga, and to philosophy which offer the best framework for reconciling most of the antinomies of the East and the West, - none of these has created any enthusiasm among our professional intellectuals in the universities. His work as a literary figure, as the creator of a new kind of poetry, is the one small part of the corpus of his writings that has received some attention, for the most part hostile, from poets, poetasters, and sundry critics most of whom, I dare say, did not have the decency of reading him before pronouncing on him.
This is a sad situation because it has made our country deny to itself the benefit of reviving itself at the fountain of one of the most creative intellectuals of this century. Did the French savant Remain Rolland not describe him as the last of the great Rishis who held in his hand, in firm unrelaxed grip, the bow of creative energy ? The creative energy of Sri Aurobindo's writings, if only we had tapped it, would have by now freed the minds of our countrymen from the stranglehold of Western domination, and shown us the way of building up a country strong, prosperous, confident, united and abundantly creative in all fields of art, science, culture and human endeavour.
The Indian intellectual today is in a most unenviable position. He hesitates to turn for inspiration to his own indigenous tradition or anything based on this tradition because of his superstition that it is obscurantist, anti-intellectual, emasculating, other-worldly and life-negating. His normal mood is one of cynicism, and his role in the life of the country has in effect been more destructive than constructive. Such a stance is hardly conducive to willed action in the diverse fields of national endeavour. If only our countrymen had followed the lead given
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by Sri Aurobindo, India would have by now been well on its way to realise its destiny.
With this we now return to the main objective of this paper, which is to review the intellectual contours of this age in the light of Sri Aurobindo, most aptly described by C.R. Reddy as "the sole sufficing genius of our age".
2
We begin with Marxism. The recent happenings in the Soviet Union and other East European countries clearly suggest that Marxist communism has swiftly collapsed. It is true that Sri Aurobindo rejected Marxism as an erroneous and fallacious doctrine, but he gave it credit for the role it has played in shaping the progressive movement of humanity, particularly during the fifty years after the end of the first World War. It has dealt a crushing blow to the monster of European capitalist industrialism and humanised it. Capitalism may have survived but it is no more the cruel thing that Marx found it to be in his time, and we have to be grateful to Marxism for this human face it has forced on capitalism.
On the theoretical level, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the characteristic doctrines of Marxism because there are at least three main versions of it. The oldest of these is the social-democratic version; the second is the communist version which acquired widespread influence after the October 1917 Russian Revolution, and the third version is what emerged after the Second World War and which deals primarily with the problem of human alienation and how to overcome it.7 The last of these is the Existentialist theory of Marxism and is based on Marx's Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts which remained unpublished until 1932. It has been pointed out by students of Marxism that accepting any one of these versions entails rejecting in large parts the two other versions. The Existentialist view of Marxism is based on the manuscripts of Marx written before he had become a Marxist.
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Marx's theory of alienation arises out of his theory of the nature of man. In the West there is the liberal conception of man competing with the Marxist conception. The liberal conception of man was developed by such classical writers as Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill and is enshrined in the liberal democracies of the West and is incorporated in the thinking of influential philosophers like Karl Popper. The defenders of Western democracies such as Karl Popper do not deny that, as in all social orders, in Western democratic societies too, there has been injustice and repression, poverty and destitution. But these evils are constantly combated in western societies, and as a result there is less injustice and repression there, less poverty and destitution, than in any other social order we know of. Popper advocates rational argument and democratic process as the best way of bringing about gradually the changes required in these democracies.8 Critics of Western democracies find this assumption of Popper's quite naive, because there is an important difference between the development of scientific theories and the relations between individuals and classes in society, namely the presence of power-dimension in the latter.
Sri Aurobindo of course would have no sympathy with the basically hedonistic concept of man in this ideology, because it regards man as no more than an animal with a mind. He recognises that reason is a powerful tool in the analysis and eradication of the ills in the social, political and economic life of human societies but that does not make reason a sufficient basis for democracy. In practice it is often a dominant class which rules over the ignorant masses. Sri Aurobindo has pointed out that the expectation that universal education will strengthen human rationality has also proved to be unfounded.9
Sri Aurobindo is as much a firm believer in the Open Society and democracy as Karl Popper is, except that in his view the true democratic ideal cannot be achieved except on the foundation of spiritual comradeship or brotherhood; human rationality alone is too frail for this task.
For Marx alienation is man's losing himself in the things he makes, man's inability to experience himself as the acting agent in
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his grasp of the world. It is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object. It is the lack of a sense of meaning, as if one's life has become a pawn that is being manipulated. Lack of self-realization is one of the main forms of alienation. The worst feature of capitalism is that people do not even realise that they are alienated. Capitalism drives people to be mere consumers and curbs their aspiration for self-realization. He defines self-realization as the full and true actualization and externalization of the powers and abilities of the individual. Marx believes that alienation can be overcome only in a society whose end is man, not the production of objects.
This Marx sounds almost like a resident of Auroville or of some such spiritually oriented community because his primary concern for self-realization is, what I would call, basically spiritual. In some places in the Manuscripts he seems to suggest that some primordial act of alienation has taken place in human development which is not to be traced to the economic process, but which in fact generates private property and its attendant evils. What was this act of alienation ? Unfortunately, the Manuscripts breaks off before we have the answer. The answer that Marx was seeking but could not formulate is that alienation in the generalized sense is primarily psychic, not sociological. It is not a proprietary distinction that exists between men of different classes but rather a disease that is rooted inside all men.
But unfortunately Marx himself did not seem to appreciate the implications of his insight, because he goes on to maintain the thesis that it was "not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness".10
There can be no doubt that Marx was wrong in coming to this conclusion. For one thing the typical alienation phenomena are observable in socialist economic systems as well. Secondly, as pointed out by Erich Fromm,11 alienation is not a distinctive characteristic that can be assigned to any social or economic structure, and that change in these structures alone will not eradicate alienation. There must be spiritual liberation as well. Socialisation of the
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means of production, Fromm recognises, is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for overcoming alienation.
One of the most balanced appraisals of communism and socialism can be found in Sri Aurobindo's The Human Cycle. The following two quotes from his Thoughts and Aphorisms very neatly summarise his critique of Marxist socialism.
1. "The communistic principle of society is intrinsically as superior to the individualistic as is brotherhood to jealousy and mutual slaughter; but all the practical schemes of Socialism invented in Europe are a yoke, a tyranny and a prison."
2. "If communism ever re-establishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a foundation of soul's brotherhood and the death of egoism. A forced association and a mechanical comradeship would end in a world-wide fiasco."
We need not dwell on this aspect of Marxism here because we are now dealing with the Existentialist, the almost-spiritual Marx. With respect to Marx's struggle to understand the phenomenon of alienation, I have often felt about Marx what Sri Aurobindo once said about D,H. Lawrence12 - that he was a Yogi who had missed his way. If only he had the benefit of an understanding of the spiritual complexities of the being of man, he would not have floundered on the question whether alienation is brought about by the exploitative reality of the social system or by deeper psychic reasons. It is such an understanding of the spiritual complexities of the being of man that is one of the great contributions of Sri Aurobindo. He was emphatic that man must turn inwards and seek a deeper source of guidance than the fallible intellect and that he must live in his soul and make it the leader of the march. If this is not the solution, then, he said, there is no other.
Marx shows some intuitive awareness of the need for such a spiritual foundation to social institutions when he describes his conception of a classless society as one in which the freedom of each person will find in the freedom of every other person "not its limitation but its fulfilment". This is almost reminiscent of the lofty sentiments expressed in the Upanishads and the Gita: "All in the Self, the Self in all, and all as the Self."
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Like Marx, Freud too held that man is the victim of false consciousness from which he must be freed if he is to achieve fulfilment; but their diagnoses are built around entirely different principles, Marx blamed the exploitative reality of the social system for this falsification while Freud blamed it on the hidden content of the subconscious. In his civilization and its Discontent,13 Freud made explicit his assumption that human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and this can lead to a edge. But for him self-knowledge meant "the knowledge of personal causes, not transcendent needs, of organic appetites, not spiritual purpose. Freud's conviction was that the quest for the self must take us down and back - into the juice and tissue of our physical nature, into its infantile fantasies and passions. The way to sanity lay through history of the body and its many thwarted gratifications.”14
Sri Aurobindo in one of his letters refers to the new psychologists and psychiatrists in the West and gives his evaluation of them as follows: "This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground superego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esām. The superconscient is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its mystery is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can know the part and they highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings
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will disappear and come to nothing."15
Indra Sen16 and Charles Maloney17 have written most insightfully about the evolutionary or Integral psychology of Sri Aurobindo, and shown how the movement which Freud began finds its proper direction and fulfilment in Sri Aurobindo. Here it is only necessary to compare briefly the salient features of the psychology of Freud with those of Sri Aurobindo's Integral psychology.
As Maloney has pointed out, Freud gave to the West a whole new concept of mental health and of the therapies needed to combat such cultural ailments as loneliness, boredom, anxiety, alienation from self, others and nature. The basis of these therapies is the analysis of the subconscious and the raising of the suppressed cause of the ailment to the plane of consciousness. In recent years there has been an increase in the range of therapies practised and we have today transactional analysis, Rolfing, primal therapy, psychodrama, Gestalt, hypnotherapy, existential analysis, drug therapy and behavioural therapies. These therapies emphasise as the principle of integration and healing either the truth of our being be sufficiently explained in terms of the mind, the vital and the physical ? Sri Aurobindo has shown that the consciousness and force necessary for the integration of the being resides not in the mental, vital or physical components but in a higher consciousness which both transcends and is immanent in the three aspects of our being, - in the spiritual dimension of our being. The spiritual, according to Sri Aurobindo, is "the true foundation of things ... the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour..."The concept of Yoga developed in India can be an excellent and surer foundation for psychotherapies than anything that Freud or his disciples have come up with. Sri Aurobindo describes Yoga as "nothing but practical psychology" but with a much greater range and depth than the goals and techniques of most Western psychology. Yoga demands as a preparatory requirement that we become conscious fully of ourselves, of our nature, of how and why we do things or feel or think them, of our motives and impulses, of the forces apparent
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and hidden that move us. In this attempt to be conscious of all the parts of our being, we discover our spiritual being as well. This higher consciousness of the spirit is knowledge as well as power and holds the key to a total healing and integration of the being.
He views the problem also from the evolutionary perspective. He looks upon the present organisation of the human consciousness which is an amalgam of mind-formations, life-movements and physical functioning's as transitional. The aim of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga is nor only to bring about the integration of the human being which is the aim of psychotherapy but also to hasten immeasurably the realisation of the supramental consciousness. Sri Aurobindo's challenge to psychologists is that they recognise this fourth or the spiritual dimension in man, because one must know the whole before one can know the part and the highest before one can truly understand die lowest.
Not too long ago when Indra Sen drew the attention of some of our academics in Indian universities to the rich psychological systems implicit in the traditional Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga, Tantric Yoga and also in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the responses he got from some of the academics were interesting. "They showed a clear recognition and appreciation of the tradition of psychological knowledge in India and yet do not know how to recover that tradition in the present situation and bring it into an adjustment with the Western approach which is now the established fact with us.”18 Some of these scholars pleaded ignorance of the psychological facts involved in the yogic and religious experience. We still seem to be awaiting a Carlos Castenada to teach us how to go about making a study of the psychology of yoga academically respectable!
4
Lewis Mumbord tells us that every historical era has its dominant themes and emergent themes. While science, secular humanism,
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social revolution, and global industrialism have been the dominant themes of this age, its emergent theme has been developed by those who see man as an unfinished animal, or in Sri Aurobindo's terms, man as a "transitional being" summoned to rise to his unrealised evolutionary possibilities. It is a sure indication of Sri Aurobindo's centrality to our age that this happens to be a cornerstone of his theory of Man, Nature and God.
It is said that The Bible, Newton's Principia Mathematica, Marx's Das Kapital, and Darwin's Origin of the Species rank among the most influential (if least read!) books of all time. The full title of Darwin's book spells out its message unambiguously: The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection; it has also a subtitle which further clarifies its message: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. When the idea of evolution was presented in the middle of the 19th century it is said to have broken like a hurricane on the entire intellectual life of the day. [The Origin of the Species was published on 24 November 1859 and all the copies were sold out the same day.] But Darwin's theory of evolution now looks vulnerable, even from a scientific point of view, and the time seems to be ripe for a concept more profound to come on the stage.
During the last 150 years many theories of evolution have been propounded. In the West, the problem of evolution has been tackled from two points of view - biological and metaphysical. Among the former there are mechanistic theories of Darwin, Spencer, Weisman, and De Vries. According to these theories there is no goal in evolution, and evolution is purely the outcome of chance variation in structure and function. The Lamarckian theory introduces the element of purpose in evolution. Bergson's creative evolution opposes both the mechanistic theory of Darwin and also the ideological theory of Lamarck. Bergson posits a life-force which goes on creating ever new forms. Loyd Morgan and Alexander developed the theory of emergent evolution, which provides for the emergence of a new quality in the process of evolution. Hegel developed the metaphysical theory of evolution and used the dialectic method to show how evolution of thought proceeded.
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It is the uniqueness of Sri Aurobindo that not only does his theory of evolution bring together the best in the Eastern and Western systems, but it also opens up new vistas. He has explained the difference between the scientific theory of form-evolution and his theory of the evolution of consciousness in these words: "A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form evolution and physical-life evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: It may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the detail of Nature's execution, with the physical development of things in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul's manifestation in material existence.''19
It is through his theory of evolution that Sri Aurobindo so triumphantly brings together the fundamental truths of materialism and spirituality. According to him what is evolving is consciousness, and evolution is basically spiritual. Evolution is preceded by involution. First, there is the descent of the absolute Reality into the density of the Inconscient from where it again climbs back to the plenary splendour of the Divine consciousness. Mind evolved out of Life because Mind was involved in Life, and Life evolved out of Matter because it was involved in Matter. Evolution is not mechanical; it has a goal and it is upward bound. The higher level of consciousness is always the emergent principle, and it is the Divine who is both the alpha and the omega of evolution. For Sri Aurobindo the Absolute is both being and becoming. He emphasises how with the emergence of a higher principle the lower principle are transformed under its power. And finally for him evolution is individual as well as cosmic.
In the final analysis evolution, for Sri Aurobindo, is "nothing but the progressive unfolding of Spirit out of the density of
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material consciousness and the gradual self-revelation of God out of this apparent animal being". Sri Aurobindo has given to the world his Integral Yoga which is a methodised effort at individual as well as cosmic fulfilment. All life is in fact Nature's yoga undertaken to manifest the Divine involved in Nature. This is in fact the true aim of all religion. However, religions including Hinduism are facing a crisis because they have lost sight of this true aim.
What then is the ideal that humanity or the Time Spirit cherishes today, no matter what religion one belongs to? A divine and terrestrial perfection of the human being, not just the perfection of the soul but the harmonious perfection of the whole being of man. Such an integral perfection is the deepest, ineradicable urge of the human consciousness. We must develop a new yoga which aims not at a departure out of the world and life into Heaven or Nirvana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central objective. It is not enough to have yogas which enable us to rise to the higher levels of consciousness; it is necessary also to have a yoga which enables us to bring down the power of these higher supramental levels of consciousness to transform the lower nature so that there can be a divine fulfilment of life. The objective here is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth consciousness as a whole. No Plato and no Marx ever thought of such a Republic based on a communism of the spirit. The Divine Materialism and Spiritual Communism advocated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is such a revolutionary concept that it is no wonder that the world has yet to grasp its full implications.
I am conscious of the fact that I have not been able to give more than a hurried and very sketchy account of in what sense Sri Aurobindo is, in Sethna's words, "the truth-focus and natural gatherer-up and destined fulfiller of our age". An indication of what he has given us can only be given in his own words from Savitri:
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He sang the Inconscient and its secret self,
Its power omni potent knowing not what it does,
All shaping without will or thought or sense,
Its blind unerring occult mystery,
And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light,
And Love that broods within the dim abyss
And waits the answer of the human heart,
And death that climbs to immortality.
He sang of the Truth that cries from Night's blind deeps,
And the Mother Wisdom hid in Nature's breast
And the Idea that through her dumbness works
And the miracle other transforming hands,
Of life that slumbers in the stone and sun
And mind subliminal in mindless life,
And the consciousness that wakes in beasts and men.
He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,
Of the Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,
Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,
Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,
And the delight when every barrier falls,
And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.20
MANGESH V. NADKARNI
References
1. Sri Aurobindo: a biography and a history(1985)
2. The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy(1968)
3. Reminiscences of Sri Aurobindo in Mother India(1972)
4. The Life Divine, Centenary Edition , p. 24.
5. Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, Centenary Edition, p.245.
6. Aurobindo: Inaugurator of Modern Indian Criticism in the Literary Criterion; Vol. 15. No. 2, 1980.
7. Sydney Hook, Marxism and Beyond, Rowman and Littlefield, 1983.
8. A.T. Ferguson, Revolution or reform, (ed.), New University Press(1956).
9. The Human Cycle.
10. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts(1932).
11. Marx's concept of Man(1961).
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12. The Future Poetry, Centenary edition, p.536.
13. Translated by J.Riviere(1953).
14. Theodore Roszak, The making of Counter Culture(1969).
15. Letters on Yoga, Centenary Edition, pp. 608-1609
16. Integral psychology(1986).
17. Evolutionary psychology: Mother India (1975).
18. Indra Sen, Integral psychology (1986).
19. The Life Divine, Cent. Ed., pp. 835-36
20. Savitri, Cent. Ed., pp. 416-17.
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