Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

A Foreword to philosophy

Unity in Diversity — from Kapila down to Carnap, that is the most comprehensive concept possible to man when he turns a searching eye upon the gigantic enigma presented by the cosmos in which he plays so striking a part.

There have been uncompromising monists of stark, immutable, homogeneous Being who have looked upon all diversity as an inscrutable phantasmagoria, and on the other hand implacable pluralists have refused to see any essential unity in the teeming multitude of heterogeneous events which seems to constitute the spatiotemporal process. But in the end these extremes fail to satisfy the integral philosophic sense of the human mind: all life and thought are based on a fundamental recognition of identity and difference, the universal and the particular, the one and the many.

All things tend to indicate a ground of unity just as much as each thing tends to express a unique shade of it: cosmos is at once a universe and a pluriverse. The most satisfying as well as finally inevitable act of both reason and intuition is to affirm and believe in the bedrock reality of a single yet multiply-realised Fact.

However, once we have admitted that if Philosophy seeks to evade this Fact it is always likely to be so much the worse for Philosophy, we must, in order to have a clear insight into the ultimate nature of the bedrock reality, take into account the two poles of evolutionary history — the material existence from which man is apparently sprung and his look upward from it towards spiritual truth. He is, somehow, always subject to the dual attraction of Matter and Spirit. Living and thinking in a physical body, he cannot neglect the demands and necessities of his material nature, its comfort, gratification and development, its insatiable push towards a perfect secular fulfilment. But at the same time there is in him a conviction of something else than his first insistent experience of terrestrial being. Set like flint against the invasion

Page 1

of doubt from a certain part of his nervous psychology which harps on the paramount importance of secular growth is the feeling that life on earth is not the sole reality and that its vicissitudes do not exhaust his entire duration. Soul, After-life, God — these intuitions shine out through whatever thick veils he chooses to put upon them: he cannot for long hold them at bay, they persist in returning, in moulding his action as a step towards meriting celestial enjoyment, in suggesting a chain of rebirth as developing his spiritual potentialities in order to deserve an ever more ample heaven and, if too unwisely thwarted, they acquire a morbid hold on him, casting over his whole terrestrial existence a hue of futile disorder and incorrigible sinfulness.

Thus, no age of scepticism which denies the Spirit and refuses to investigate sympathetically the data of religious experience can last long; it is condemned to transience by the unconquerable aspiration in man towards the immortal, the infinite, the divine. Neither does any feverish emphasis on other-worldliness give him permanent satisfaction: the moment religion, no matter with what conciliatory compromises, regards in the main a supra-terrestrial sphere as the scene of his final fulfilment it becomes suspect to the equally unconquerable impulse in him towards material self-consummation, individual and communal. What Philosophy has to find is the sovereign equation which perfectly harmonises these two master-passions. The very fact that they are equally inevitable, creating by their perpetual conflict the whole course of man's advance and destiny, seems to imply that there is such a comprehensive equation possible and that the very instinct of Nature is somehow to arrive at it.

Hence we must take the human aspiration towards the immortal, the infinite, the divine as not just the fallen soul's home-sickness for a post-mortem paradise but rather as the evolutionary urge by which Nature is striving to produce the superman in whom mind, life and body have received the law and light of a higher Consciousness and Power which have purified, subtilised, intensified and transformed them

Page 2

into perfect images on earth of their own ideality. In that case, Nature is at bottom a supreme Spirit conceptively self-extended as the basis and substance of all cosmic existence, a Spirit of which the implicit diversity is necessarily of living soul-truths enjoying a play of divine consciousness, force and bliss, and which guides overtly or covertly a phenomenal mould of itself which starts with a complete involution of all its powers in order that they may be progressively manifested in the terms and figures of their own seeming opposites — apparently inanimate Matter and unconscious Force.

What we call evolution is a process by which the multiplicity of the soul-truths inherent in the Spirit shape various series of formulations on earth for the gradual revelation of their own shades of divine diversity at play in the divine unity. This, again, means that each soul-truth gathers and assimilates through these formulations or rebirths a certain growing experience which helps it to express its diversity on evolutionary lines, and which it holds together in an evolving intermediate psychological form of itself between its pure spiritual status and its expression here. That is to say, midway between the material existence in which life and mind develop because of a hidden Spirit in it and the spiritual existence which contains the ideal realities of all that is gradually worked out here, there is a subtle psychological existence which reveals itself with its derivative light and power in the form and scope afforded them by nature-force on the material plane.

For, matter contains, on this hypothesis, everything in potentiality; it is the action of what is hidden in it that aids to compel the emergence of the higher values, the action of the Spirit's single yet multiply-realised splendour through intervening terms of itself which are mind and life-force. This explains the rise of living and thinking forms, half-obscure and half-enlightened, in the material universe as a preparatory step to the emergence of a spiritual consciousness which will display and fulfil all that life and mind hint at in matter.

Page 3

The first objection to such a promising vision of our possibilities is that there is no evidence even of a consciousness, much less a supreme Spirit, in crude inanimate matter. But this argument derives its seeming strength from the fact that we have assumed our mental awareness or whatever else appears to approximate to it as the sole criterion of consciousness, forgetting that there may quite easily be in what is to us the sleep or insensibility of matter and unconscious inanimate force a consciousness differing from ours in its action, its pitch, its organisation and hence incommunicative to us, so that apparent matter may be merely the most involved manifestation of the conceptively self-extended substance of Spirit.

The second objection is that the huge amount of waste in Nature, the plethora of blind and useless expenditure of energy we notice all around, gives the lie to the presence of a secret spiritual Consciousness. But the impartial philosopher must reply that what we consider waste may be precisely a necessary feature in Nature's plan, an unavoidable element in the logic of the aim to manifest her innermost truth through various symbols of involution or superficial contradiction of that truth.

We might indeed resort to a sort of tertium quid between Spirit and unconscious Force, a rudimentary consciousness fundamental to matter and attaining higher intensities according to the growing complexities of physical structure. But we can rest in such a theory only at the risk of leaving it unintelligible why neither a religionism which lays up its treasure in a future heaven nor a materialism which ignores the mystic in man ever seems to afford lasting and integral satisfaction. Whereas, if we accept the hypothesis that a sovereign Consciousness has in one of its interminable self-deployments used its power of variable realisation in order to find itself through a process beginning with an increasing concealment of itself in what it formulates, we explain not only this fact but also all the anomalies of evolution.

For, such a hypothesis makes us understand better than

Page 4

any other view how, out of the terrible phenomenon of an apparent non-mind and non-life, living and conscious creatures emerge, how at last human beings come to be, yearning for truth and bliss and freedom and God, rising towards the contemplation of absolute values and thrilling with the emotion of supernal ideals. That these beings should be callous, ferocious and stupid is explicable on account of the vast superficial insentience of matter out of which their natures are compounded, but whence spring beauty, harmony and unbounded compassion, how out of a heartless and inexorable unconscious energy are born the heart of a Chaitanya, the intellect of a Plato and the exquisite sensibility of a Da Vinci? If we accept a Spirit as well as its secondary powers as concealed in the material shell, we can comprehend both sides of human nature no less than all those intermediate impulses between the brute and the superman which constitute average humanity.

The one last question which intrudes itself hails from the moralist quarter: the moralist tries to arraign Omnipotence for choosing this particular possibility of involution and evolution. He becomes melodramatic in gathering up all the details of sorrow, pain and futility and asks the Supreme how it could stoop to the baseness of manifesting so laborious a cosmos, how it could ever mix with loveliness, harmony and delight the bitter drop of ugly discord and suffering.

Thus one of the most idealistic minds of our day has uttered the crashing blasphemy that he would spit in the "empty face" of a God who did not utilise His almightiness to lend a fiat to the "Open Conspiracy" by which an ignorance-besotted, capitalist-ridden world is to be saved. The same humanitarian type of conscience anxious to spare an almighty Maker the responsibility of an imperfect world has compelled another reactionary against Materialism to conceive a universal Life-Force originally blind and undeveloped, stumbling experimentally towards perfection.

No doubt, there is a certain truth in this theory of trial and

Page 5

error, but the main dilemma is purely intellectual, and solved the moment we are humble enough to acknowledge that our human standards of benevolence cannot be wholly applied to the ultimate Being. Our intuitive aspiration towards an absolute Good, a final Law of Righteousness, is indicative, like all feeling-out towards absolute values, of something in the constitution of this Being, yet we have to realise that this Being is not good in our sentimental human way: His is a benevolence which in its wisdom and far-sightedness must surpass our notions just as considerably as our notions would exceed those, say, of the most altruistic gorilla possible. For, while the essence of rationality is the sublime feeling that there is Intelligence at the back of the universe, it is the very essence of irrationality to suppose that this Intelligence is only of a much magnified man.

All we can ask is that somehow our nature's highest desires and noblest longings must get fulfilled, and this much is amply provided for in the view we have sponsored. The grim involution is accomplished only so that the self-finding by the Spirit may be through a varied battle and not that the end of the cosmic manifestation may mark the frustration of all the terms through which the Spirit expresses itself.

Indeed, to bring the battle of the ages, the slow travail of phenomenal Nature to a rapid victory by not merely extending the limits of our vital and mental faculties but by predominantly seizing on the true psyche, the inmost soul, hidden behind life and mind, the spontaneously spiritual part of our nature which possesses the dynamic to develop the vision, the faith and the will required for the discovery of our supra-mental Self with its masterful ability to perfect by its highest law our entire earth-life — this indeed is the practical outcome of all spiritual philosophy. It is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Integral Yoga.

The Integral Yoga is the methodised effort towards perfection by a constant urge towards the Divine as a Presence and Power capable of all relations of identity-in-difference

Page 6

with us — by an incessant surrender to it and consecrated invocation of it in the midst of work no less than in restful meditation — by a steady awareness of it within and without and an appeal to it to fill the whole system and take charge of all our nature, substituting for our activities its own supramental Light which will give us the uttermost freedom of our own highest soul-truth without sacrificing anything essential in us because it will reject only those inferior operations which will become superfluous because superior faculties will do their work with greater certitude, efficiency and synthesising prescience.

No easy task is this for man, says Sri Aurobindo, "but in the end the difficulty resolves itself into two adverse tendencies, one of his lower nature, a downward attraction to what he has been and still partially is, one of his higher nature, too much attachment to what he has become and satisfaction with partial achievements. It is the joys of the way, useful in themselves as a support to his strength on the journey, that hold him, when clung to with too much attachment, back from the splendour of his goal. To know himself for a pilgrim of the heights called on to press ever upwards, to know the principle of his life as a constant self-becoming and self-exceeding of which each step is a present form out of which something higher is to be delivered, is the sign of his election. This constant upward will is his true heroism, his true greatness, his sane and sound asceticism. To discover more and more highly and widely the goal and the way his complex and ascending powers of knowledge were given, to follow it more and more strenuously and indomitably his forces of will and infinite aspiration. The Spirit within him supports him by its universal delight, by its growing largeness in his consciousness, by its inexhaustible treasuries of will and capacity, by all the vastness of its infinite being. When he tears away the veils of the Spirit, when he sees God and delivers his outward nature into the hands of the divinity within, what is now impossible will be revealed as his one possibility and his eternal certainty; his obscure and

Page 7

difficult journey will become a rapid and luminous ascension. Then will he climb to that fulfilment of the apparent and discovery and possession of the real Man which is the meaning of supermanhood."

Page 8