Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

Dr. Mahadevan And Sri Aurobindo

A NOTE ON AN "AIR" NATIONAL BROADCAST

ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1972

An appreciation from a mind like Dr. T. M. P. Mahadevan, Director, Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy, Univer-sity, of Madras, cannot but have value. Similarly any philosophical difficulty felt by such a mind has to be considered. A discussion in philosophy is usually a lengthy affair, for one issue arises out of another. But, within a limited universe of discourse, a few pointed remarks may not be inutile.

Dr. Mahadevan has, in passing, mentioned two difficulties for him in Sri Aurobindo's philosophical system. The first is: How can the supreme Spirit be viewed as really changing?

I believe it is fundamentally a question of whether any change at all can be thought of as real. If change is not an illusion, it must be, in whatever manner, a reality. But if it is real, then it must be some aspect of the supreme Spirit which is the sole Existent. In other words, the supreme Spirit must be capable of putting forth a changing expression of itself. The reality of such an expression does not imply that the supreme Spirit has no changeless being. It only implies that changeless being has the power to manifest changeful being, to bring about what is commonly called "becoming". We may remember that Sri Aurobindo posits not merely Consciousness (chit) along with Existence (sat) and Bliss (ananda) as the ultimate. He posits Consciousness-Force (chit-tapas). His Absolute is not impotent to act: it is omnipotent and, where there is the power to do things, there is bound to be a change as a result. Changelessness is not the sole character of the supreme Spirit. To make it so is to deny power to the Absolute. The difficulty felt in conceiving power and peace, being and becoming, changelessness and change as simultaneous characters of the supreme Spirit arises out of our

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customary dichotomies of seeming opposites. According to Sri Aurobindo's experience the Absolute suffers from no self-contradiction in having a twofold reality. In Sri Aurobindo's philosophy the so-called opposites are even more than mere complementaries in the supreme Spirit. They are an identity. What are opposites to the mind are harmonious complementaries to the Overmind and a total identity to the Supermind. As a line from a poem of Sri Aurobindo's has it, there is in the supreme Spirit

Force one with unimaginable rest.

Dr. Mahadevan's second difficulty is: How can the Infinite and the finite be equally real? The solution should stem essentially from the answer to the first difficulty. The formation of the finite is an act of the supreme Spirit's power: it is the Infinite's self-expression or self-becoming in a certain mode. In that sense the finite is the Infinite itself and therefore equally real, though logically the latter is the primary reality and the former the secondary. In another sense, however, there is a difference. The Infinite may be self-figured as the finite with a certain veil between the figurer and the figured. This is what we find in the universe that is ours. But the cosmos we live in does not exhaust the full manifesting activity of the Absolute. So the partly veiled self-figuration we have in it is not necessarily the character of all finite existence. Even here it is not the basic stuff of being that can be considered less real: only the play of consciousness and bliss is restricted, creating a psychological diminution, as it were, of the existence-status. Sri Aurobindo never denies the unequal realness in this connotation. The condition of Cosmic Ignorance has to be psychologically less real than the supreme Spirit's, direct consciousness and delight of itself — less real even than the condition of Cosmic Knowledge which obtains on "planes" where the supreme Spirit is luminously self-deployed in organised interplay of permanence and change, infinity and finitude. The sense in which

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Sri Aurobindo puts the Infinite and the finite on a par as realities is the one that cuts down to the question whether the supreme Spirit has the power of manifestation or there is just an incomprehensible and indescribable Maya which can be regarded as neither real nor unreal and which ultimately gets reduced to an appearance negligible, inconsequential, empty, null. The Infinite and the finite are equally real only as against the shadow of unreality cast on the latter by the illusionist school of thinkers basing themselves on Shankara.

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