Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

Apropos of the passing of Sri Aurobindo

AN OLD CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN

DR. IMMANUEL OLSVANGER AND K. D. SETHNA

1

3, Gaza Road, Jerusalem, Israel, 7-2-52

Dear Mr. Sethna,

I acknowledge with many thanks the receipt by airmail of your article "The Mystical and the Misty" in Mother India of January 19, 1952.

I have read and reread it several times and was frequently carried away by the exquisite beauty of the language and by the poetry of the thoughts. It is in such poetry that my soul finds temporary repose and rest. But the appeal of this poetry does not depend upon the correctness of the thoughts.

My questions, to which your article was a reply, were, however, concerned not with poetry but with the correctness or otherwise of thoughts and facts.

In this respect, they remained, as far as my judgment goes, without reply. You repeat the well-known Upanishadic "psychotomy" of the soul, with its Sthula, Sukshma and Karana Shariras. An arbitrary assumption, transmitted from ancient times, poetic, but based on nothing but fancy. "A permanent leaving of the physical sheath so that, unconnected with the subtle sheaths, the physical loses its support and vitality", is, when translated into common language, a euphemistic expression for death. But you say about the yogi that "the terms 'death' aijd 'suicide' cannot have for him the meaning ordinarily attached to them", and yet some thirty lines later you say that "Sri Aurobindo decided upon death in the fullest meaning" of that word. He decided, consequently, and he died in the fullest meaning of that word, like

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all men from Adam down to our days. "He decided", i.e. he did consciously commit suicide, whether by means of poison or by an act of will (if this is possible) makes no difference.

I do believe that a man, not a-superman or a Yogi, can, unfortunately for him, succumb to a disease, if his will to fight it is not strong enough, or if he consciously refuses to use his will-power. This is true for some diseases, not for all. It is most decidedly not true in the case of uraemia, which was the cause of Sri Aurobindo's death.

If, as you maintain, Sri Aurobindo consciously decided to die (or, in your euphemistic language, to leave his body), why were there Indian and French doctors about him (who, as you write, testified to the miracle of his body remaining intact for several days, in spite of the tropical climate and in spite of uraemia!)? Did he need their help to die? Some doctors do render such help, indeed!

These doctors testified to what, if true, was an obvious miracle. If they were to publish an article about it in some serious medical magazine, such as The Lancet, it would create a tremendous sensation!

The Mother's announcement (only 41 hours after death, which word you preface with an apologetic "clinical"), giving an explanation for that miracle, "that his body is charged with such a concentration of supramental light", makes no sense. A body can be charged with anything but light. Evidently, the Mother wanted to say something else. But how can one guess what she wanted to say?

If, however, that "concentration of supramental light" (whatever it may mean) was the reason of the miracle, how is this reconcilable with your statement that it was due to Sri Aurobindo's "last act of Grace"? Was it his act of Grace that before death he still managed to charge his body with a concentration of supramental light? If not, how could he, after his death, have exercised any influence upon his body? Did his soul remain hovering in the room, still clad in the Sukshma Sharira, and keep watch over the body?

Lastly, regarding the same consciousness divided in two!

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Your reply does not satisfy me. I believe in God, in His Consciousness, in His Power. But He, His Consciousness, His Power, and any other attribute which we may try to ascribe to Him, is One and the same That, Ekamevadvitiyam!3I do believe that my consciousness is a reflection of that One. The degree of perfection of my consciousness is, I believe, dependent on how well the lens of my soul is polished. But the reflexion focussed in my soul cannot be 'same' divided into two, the second twin-reflexion being focussed in someone else's soul, — I still maintain, that such a statement has no meaning and no sense, unless taken as a figurative expression, as when we speak of two "kindred" souls.

Any attempt to hypostatise the Consciousness of God, as apart from Him, or some special reflexion of that Consciousness, leads to idolatry in the very worst sense. Bad service is done to Sri Aurobindo's memory by referring to him as to one endowed with "superhuman" power. That is deification. It must lead to a final degeneration of the circle of his readers and students to a new religious sect with new arbitrary dogmas and a new form of worship. A repetition of the fate of Sri Ramakrishna and "the Holy Mother"!

Good service to his memory would be a shortened edition of his books, freed from unnecessary repetitions, provided with annotations for the benefit of readers not familiar with Sanskrit words and Vedantic ideas.

Of special importance would be, in my opinion, such an edition of Savitri and of his letters dealing with questions of literature.

I shall be grateful if you let me know where I could order a copy of Savitri.

I hope, dear Mr. Sethna, that you will not take amiss my frank words, and I must thank you for the trouble you took in replying to my previous letter with such an elaborate dissertation.

With cordial greetings

Sincerely yours,

Dr. I. OLSVANGER

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Hamilton Villa, Nepean Sea Road, Bombay, 16-5-52

Dear Dr. Olsvanger,

I am glad you liked my article — but I am deeply disappointed with the reason for which you liked it. I don't at all mind your writing to me frankly. What depresses me is that you proceed from a certain purely intellectual bias and seem to have made no effort to come into contact, in a direct and concrete manner, with spiritual or occult realities. You don't even appear to understand that the major Upanishads are not mere poetry but factual statements of spiritual and occult realisations and experiences — they are poetic in form because the measured intensity of poetry is the natural medium for the mantra, the word-body of the highest truths of the mystical life. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, too, is not intellectual ideas decked out in imaginative colour: it is, as Sri Aurobindo has clearly said, an expression of spiritual vision and realisation: beauty and truth are one single power in it. What may be called fictitious in it is only the story which is used as a symbol of the spiritual reality known by Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo, by the way, is not just a philosopher with a mystical bent. I was amazed at the conclusion to your fine tribute to him published in India and Israel. You spoke of Radhakrishnan taking up the baton dropped by Sri Aurobindo. Without minimising Radhakrishnan's gifts, one may state categorically that he and Sri Aurobindo belong to two entirely different classes. Radhakrishnan himself would never claim to be a God-realised man. Sri Aurobindo is a master of Yoga who employs the form of philosophy or of poetry to pattern out for the intellect or the aesthetic sense the actual experiences he has had. Unless you grasp this, you will never be in a state of mind to appreciate any truly spiritual figure — spiritual as ancient India conceived that term and not as a part of modern India and most of the West

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wash it down to the level of high metaphysics or disciplined ethics. Neither Radhakrishnan nor Gandhi can be called, in the real sense, spiritual.

Now to your criticisms of my reply. Apart from what seems to me a quibble about the word "death" and your insistence on "suicide" as a general term which, in spite of all subtle shades of difference, should cover the phenomenon of voluntary departure from the physical body, I think your statements rest on lack of proper information or of relevant experience. The sthula, suksma and karana sariras are not an arbitrary assumption. The Upanishads speak of them because the Seers of the Upanishads experienced them and their experience can be repeated and verified. Of course, the real karana Sarira is a rare experience, but some approach can be made to it. The suksma sarira is one of the commonest experiences in Yoga. I myself have moved in it out of my sthula sarira scores of times, in as concretely conscious a manner as getting up from my bed and moving in my physical body! So, when you say that the well-known Upanishadic "psychotomy" is based on nothing but fancy, I can only smile and ask you to do a bit of Yoga.

When you make sweeping assertions about what is true and what is "most decidedly not true" about uraemia, you are only talking of ordinary cases. Of course I am not asking you to believe all that I say, but the capital defect is that you have not made an attempt to understand Sri Aurobindo's Yoga or even the philosophical structure of his system of thought and of his spiritual work. Without such an attempt it is difficult to get certain things in the right perspective or focus.

The presence of the doctors was part of the same process which included Sri Aurobindo's "accepting" many other ordinary-looking physical arrangements. But I may tell you that the doctors were allowed to do a few things at their own request and as a concession to their solicitude. And their chief ministrations were permitted after the withdrawal from the body had decisively begun. Sri Aurobindo never took

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any medicines or injections in any of the physical crises through which he passed in the course of his Yoga.

I have in my hands, as I write this, the actual notes of Dr. P. C. Sanyal, an eminent Calcutta physician and surgeon. He writes: "The Mother said that Sri Aurobindo's body would be kept till it began to show signs of decomposition. I told her that 48 hours was the maximum time for which a body could be kept. After 48 hours there were no signs of decomposition. But the French law does not permit a period longer than that, unless the French Civil Surgeon certifies. The Civil Surgeon came and we both examined the body: there was not a trace of decomposition. For more than 100 hours the body was intact. People wondered whether Sri Aurobindo was in samadhi or dead."

I was myself an eye-witness, together with hundreds of others. Whether the case will be reported to The Lancet in order to create a tremendous sensation — this lies with the doctors. But there is no getting past the fact that the "miracle" was "obvious" to even scientific eyes and was genuine according to scientific tests.

However, we don't basically build on this miracle. Sri Aurobindo's mission is independent of it and even if this miracle had not happened, the truth of his teachings could stand.

When you comment on the Mother's announcement I again can't help being amused. "Light" is a very common experience in the Yogic life. One sees and feels light breaking out from several occult centres in one's body or descending from above the head and touching or pervading or settling in one part of the body or another or in even the whole body. Light is also of various kinds and colours. This is testified by thousands of practitioners of Yoga, past and present. Light in the spiritual sense is not a mere metaphor, any more than spiritual consciousness or bliss is metaphorical. And if a human body is completely transformed, as wanted in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, one of the constant attributes of the transformed body will be a subtle luminousness visible even

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to the sceptic, the agnostic and the atheist. Spiritual phenomena are concrete things and compared to their concreteness the phenomena of material reality are insubstantial. It is because of this comparative insubstantiality that the theory of Maya or World-illusion acquires its real strength — until a wider experience than that of the silent and featureless infinite Brahman, or Atman, restores the balance and makes the world a spiritually real manifestation of the Divine.

On the point about the same Consciousness divided into two or into many, I cannot do anything further than ask you to read The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo's philosophical statement of his Yogic realisations. It is evident that you have not studied this book at all: even your turn of argument against what I have said would be different and more subtle and more cognisant of crucial issues.

I won't at present enter into any discussion as to whether one should fight shy of a word like "idolatry" or "superhuman" power or what constitutes the best service to Sri Aurobindo. The one whom we call the Mother is with us and she knows best what we should do.

You can order your Savitri (both volumes) from the Sri Aurobindo Books Distribution Agency, Limited, 32 Rampart Row, Fort, Bombay.* You may order also the book called Sri Aurobindo's Letters on "Savitri", a compilation made by me from my private correspondence with Sri Aurobindo: it is designed to serve as a substitute for the long Introduction Sri Aurobindo wanted to write.

May I in my turn ask you not to take amiss anything I have spoken out in the course of this letter?

With kind thoughts, dear Dr. Olsvanger,

Yours sincerely,

K. D. Sethna

* Editor's Note: SABDA at present is based in Pondicherry.

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