Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

A MASTERPIECE OF DISTORTION

AN ANSWER TO A READER'S REQUEST FOR LIGHT ON A

CRITICISM OF SRI AUROBINDO AND HIS YOGA

The Reader's Letter

I am enclosing extracts, translated by me into English, from a Hindi book by an author of some repute in circles appearing to be of spiritual seekers — Rajneesh. I came across it recently and found serious misconceptions about Sri Aurobindo and his work. Would you care to set right such blatant misrepresentations of what the Master was and worked at?

The Answer

You have sent me a veritable masterpiece of distortion. I wonder how Rajneesh, who claims to have an insight into spirituality, can pen such a criticism.

Rajneesh seems to have dipped into Sri Aurobindo's "logical" and "philosophical" books but missed completely the great sweep of the spiritual experience that is behind the grand progression of his argument. The direct vision and the concrete realisation that have used a master-intellect to build the thought-system have not been felt at all. One who feels them would know that the "logical" and "philosophical" books were written, first, to employ fully the mental instrument which is a powerful means of manifestation and which for a world-accepting Yoga is a valuable help in establishing that Yoga's hold on the world. Secondly, the usual jibe that mysticism and spirituality are only for emotional and non-intellectual beings is met right royally by these books. Thirdly, there is the need of the present age to satisfy itself on the mind-plane. The books answer to this need in a magnificent manner.

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The Integral Yoga is for man in his integrality: it brings its spiritual revelations to him on all levels and in whatever various modes are possible on them. If Sri Aurobindo is a logician and a philosopher par excellence, it is not because logic and philosophy are a substitute for genuine spirituality but because they are an additional expression of it — just as poetry is. And the diverse additional expressions are there because Sri Aurobindo is an integral person, a full being, accomplished on all sides. And his happening to be many-sided is in tune with not only the Integral Yoga which he propounds and communicates but also with the character of his own time. The Integral Yoga has to cope with man in his wholeness, which includes the reasoning intellect. Also, contemporary homo sapiens is exceedingly complex in his demands and particularly requires a structure of rationality to convince him and assure him of the suprarational. Ours is the age of analytic science.

Not understanding all this, Rajneesh launches on his anti-Aurobindo campaign. But he lands himself pretty soon in confusion and self-contradiction. He says about Sri Aurobindo: "He is an extremely logical system-maker, and system-makers are never suprarational, for systems are made only by reason. How can there be any system in non-argumentation and the non-thinkable? That is why anyone who has gone even a little beyond reason puts forward fragmentary not systematic views." A little later, Rajneesh tells us: "After Shankara, no greater system-maker has been born in India than Aurobindo. But this is also his greatest limitation." If Rajneesh, who has been setting forth a case, knew even the elementary logic needed for doing so, he would realise the implication of his statement. The unes-capable implication is: "Shankara, who is the greatest system-maker before Sri Aurobindo, was subject to the same 'greatest limitation' as Sri Aurobindo and cannot have gone even a little beyond reason. In other words, Shankara had no spiritual experience at all of the suprarational." Will any Indian agree to this conclusion? Does even Rajneesh suggest

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it? Not at all. He has no censure to pass on Shankara the outstanding system-maker. Nowhere does he dub him a spiritual ignoramus, as he consistently should. But what can we expect when self-satisfied mush instead of inquiring grey matter talks? One should say "ultra-mush", for even ordinary mush would try not to pull in two utterly opposite directions.

Elsewhere also Rajneesh fails to keep a hold on his own initial premise that one who argues as much as Sri Aurobindo and who says so much cannot be experienced in spirituality, cannot have true spiritual knowledge. He contrasts Sri Aurobindo with Ramana Maharshi about whom he informs us: "Aurobindo remained knowledgeable but Ramana really knew. Ramana does not know the language of reason; he has no system; his statements are all atomic and he has little language to say what he knows." Then, surprisingly, Rajneesh goes on to assert that merely because a man has a lot to say we cannot affirm that he lacks spiritual knowledge; "for Buddha too had much to say" and yet "experience-wise Buddha is like Ramana". Surely here Rajneesh refutes himself out of his own mouth? If Buddha, who said a great deal, could be equal to Ramana in knowledge, Sri Aurobindo with his abundant speech need not be devoid of knowledge and could be at least equal in it to Buddha and Ramana!

In the matter of "descent of the Divine" our self-appointed "Daniel-come-to-judgment" is ridiculous. He says that Sri Aurobindo talked only of the Divine descending and completely ignored the question of the human ascending. Actually what Sri Aurobindo said is that ascending is not enough: there must be the descent of what is ascended to: then alone can our nature-parts and life and the world be transformed. Even without the ascent, certainly the Divine can be invoked to descend — and certainly the descent can take place if the invoker prepares himself. Sometimes the descent can occur because the Divine wills it. There is no laying down the law for the Supreme or dictating the

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operation of the Grace. Has Rajneesh never heard of the overwhelming appearance of Christ to the anti-Christian Paul on the road to Damascus? Has he never read "The Hound of Heaven"? Again, what does he mean by saying that the Divine will descend only if man ascends? What is the need of the descent if the ascent is accomplished and the Divine reached? Rajneesh writes: "Mankind's history till now shows that man must strive upwards and lose himself in the divine consciousness." What sense then is there in speaking of a descent at all? Rajneesh does not know what he is talking about.

He pours ridicule on the idea of Sri Aurobindo bringing down the Divine for the world. He reminds us that all spiritual development is "individual-centred", and asks: "If I am determined to stay ignorant, can the Divine descend in me?" What he suggests is that Sri Aurobindo tried to ram the Divine down people's throats, whether they wanted the Divine or not. Obviously, such an absurdity could never have been perpetrated by Sri Aurobindo or, for that matter, by any spiritual guru. Again and again Sri Aurobindo has insisted on each individual's co-operation and preparation: even if the Supreme Grace makes the first move, the beneficiary has to follow up and carry out a course of sadhana, launch on a definite via mystica for receiving the higher consciousness in a continuous stream and for ultimately settling it in himself. The descent which Sri Aurobindo laboured to effect was of a new power which he distinguished as Supermind or Truth-Consciousness. From his own experience of the entire range of spiritual realisation in the world's past, he said that it was his special mission to reach beyond that range and invoke and embody the Supermind so as to serve as the radiating centre of it for whoever had the aspiration to share in the new age of earth-life which such a realisation would inaugurate. He also strove for a general descent charging the earth's atmosphere, as it were, with a supramental consciousness ready to enter all who would be prepared for it, so that in the long run this

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consciousness might be accessible to the race just as the mental, in various degrees, is now part and parcel of the human condition. Rajneesh has gone quite off the track. He has no insight into Sri Aurobindo's personal role, nor has he the ghost of a notion of the Aurobindonian Supermind in its distinction from the diverse other aspects of the Divine that have so far been embodied and manifested.

This is the reason for his next fatuity in the utterance he puts into Sri Aurobindo's mouth. He makes Sri Aurobindo brag: "I am physically immortal." Then he gives us his own adverse reflections on the possibility of physical immortality. Nowhere in the voluminous writings of the Master can we find the statement attributed to him or even any approximation to it. The actual Yogic situation related to the question of physical immortality is entirely missed by Rajneesh.

According to Sri Aurobindo, what he termed Supermind or Truth-Consciousness can alone transform or divinise the human entity totally, down to the very body. And it is clear why Sri Aurobindo considered the divinisation of the body not only possible but in the long stretch of earthly evolution inevitable. The Supermind is the complete dynamic Divine, a creative Unity-in-Multiplicity from whom our universe has derived and by whom secretly it is being worked out with its starting-point in apparently the opposite end of perfection — an immense Inconscience, the Rigveda's original "darkness wrapped within darkness". The working out spells the expression of the supreme Divine in all the evolutionary terms — mind, life-force, even matter. The Supermind holds in itself the ultimate truth, the archetypal model of these terms: a divine mentality of which our seeking mind is a half-lit image, a divine vitality whose semi-effective reflex is our struggling life-force, a divine materiality which our embodied existence shadows forth with its fumbling stress towards health and beauty and secure duration. Within mind, life-force and matter the Supermind itself is concealed: it is their inmost substance, with its absoluteness their implicit dharma: the concealed or involved Supermind is the urge

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behind the emergence or evolution of our nature-powers. But the urge cannot be fully successful — labouring as it does under conditions antithetical to the Divine — unless the free and un-involved and eternally expressed Supermind from beyond the mental-vital-physical complex comes down in response to the call of that complex, a call centrally spurred by what Sri Aurobindo names the psychic being, the true soul which is the immortal spark in us of the Eternal, a delegate of the individual aspect which subsists in the Supermind's flawless unity-in-multiplicity. That is why immortality, which is the nature of the Divine and represented inwardly here by the developing and reincarnating soul, is the goal of all evolutionary terms, including the physical. There is nothing illogical in the Aurobindonian Yoga's vision of the body becoming, as a result of its supramentalisation, immune to disease, free from the ageing process and safe from final disintegration.

Without grasping the rationale of Sri Aurobindo's vision, Rajneesh throws out the dictum: "He who is born will have to die: this is nature's law. Yes, the yogi can be physically immortal who does not take birth but appears all at once, not through the union of parents. It is strange that Aurobindo, born of parents, should dream of physical immortality."

No doubt, Sri Aurobindo did not fulfil the ideal he had set up — and occult reasons have been offered for what we believe to be his choice of non-fulfilment. But the fact of it is neither here nor there to the logic of the ideal. The "laws" we have observed until now relate to the state of nature reached thus far. If nature is as Sri Aurobindo envisaged and experienced it, birth from a union of parents cannot rule out what would be natural to a new dimension of spiritual realisation in the body. Towards that dimension the whole effort of the Ashram established by Sri Aurobindo tends, with a host of wonderful inner experiences on the way and with the helping presence of the Master subtly behind his Ashram always. Certainly, it is the height of gratuitous impudence for Rajneesh to proclaim: "The work at Pondi-

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cherry is the most useless in the world and in the sphere of spirituality."

Even in discussing Sri Aurobindo vis-a-vis Lele, the Maharashtrian Yogi whom he had consulted in the early part of his spiritual search, Rajneesh is utterly at sea. He has read nothing of Sri Aurobindo's notes on his relationship with Lele and on what he experienced as a consequence of Lele's instruction. Sri Aurobindo has repeatedly and in some detail recounted his Nirvana-realisation in the wake of Lele's initiating guidance. Rajneesh dismisses the experience as "the petty technique of becoming a witness". He adds: "Aurobindo made the great mistake of thinking that this was the ultimate thing while it is really the first step." Rajneesh is unaware that here he is practically quoting Sri Aurobindo himself. Does he not have any inkling of Sri Aurobindo's express declaration that the Integral Yoga begins where the other Yogas end? And has he not gauged the immensity of what happened when Sri Aurobindo implicitly followed Lele's advice but realised something which Lele had never anticipated: the infinite, eternal, featureless, world-transcendent, silent Brahman who is the grand terminus of traditional Vedanta and, in a negative version, the culmination of the Buddhist enlightenment?

Until Rajneesh studies Sri Aurobindo's life and reads his books carefully, making an honest and humble endeavour to understand the spirituality Sri Aurobindo wanted to establish on earth and progressively work out in his Ashram, we must totally regret his putting pen to paper in this field. The smallest of small minds, the most distorting eye, the most ignorant babbler of spiritual themes — such is Rajneesh as he emerges from these several pages of pretentious gibberish.

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