Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

"SEVEN DOUBTS"

Here is my attempt to answer your "seven doubts".

1.It is according to Sri Aurobindo that Sri Krishna is known to have revealed what you designate "the plane of Purushottama" in the Gita. I venture to suggest that he could disclose Sri Krishna's ultimate status because he was himself Sri Krishna in a past birth: the status of an Uttama (supreme) Purusha beyond either the Kshara (mutable) or the Akshara (immutable) Purusha. The existence of Purushottama was part not only of Sri Aurobindo's philosophical knowledge but also of his own experience. Both he and Sri Krishna were Purushottama incarnate, the latter using, in consonance with the need of the time, what Sri Aurobindo has called the Overmind, the highest Cosmic Consciousness, as his instrument of manifestation while the former used the Supermind, the transcendent creative Truth-Consciousness whose hour in spiritual history has struck now. The Supermind is directly an aspect of Purushottama, the Overmind is indirectly so. To divide Purushottama from the Supermind as something higher is a mistake.

2.Every Avatar has a special divine aspect to incarnate and a special plane to employ as his instrument of manifestation. It was Sri Krishna's purpose, according to Sri Aurobindo, to manifest the Bliss-Self, the Anandamaya, through the Overmind. Other Avatars had other purposes. An intense expression of the Bliss-Self through their particular planes of manifestation was not a part of the purpose of any of them who came before Sri Krishna.

This is not in disagreement with Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision that there is a progressive incarnation, each Avatar descending from a higher plane than his predecessor, even though all the Avatars may be regarded as coming ultimately from the Bliss-Self.

3.Chaitanya was, as you say, a case of possession, but in the highest sense of that word: he was possessed at intervals

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by Sri Krishna. Perhaps the more correct way of putting the matter would be to say: "Chaitanya was an emanation of Sri Krishna and manifested not only the Lord himself but also an extreme relationship of the psychic-emotional being in the human consciousness with the Lord."

4.After the incarnation of the Supermind, the Bliss-Self has to be incarnated — but not necessarily in a new Avatar. The Supramental Avatar can serve in the future as the vehicle and tabernacle for the Bliss-Self because Supermind and Ananda are front and rear of the same Transcendence.

The Bliss-Self may be considered the final phase in the sense that it carries in itself the Self of Chit-Tapas and the Self of Sat, but these two Selves would not be in the fore from the beginning. They would emerge later in human history, but, again, not necessarily in another Avatar. If we like, we may count them to be further phases of the Bliss-Self.

5.The soul — Chaitya Purusha or Antaratman — in the body which is destined to hold the Avatar's descent would feel itself essentially one with its own supreme Jivatman counterpart but would not fuse with it in the sense of disappearing in it. Its existence as an entity is needed for the Divine's manifestation upon earth through the human individuality.

6.I don't follow your phraseology here. What is meant by "the involutionary being" and by its "embodied state" or "disembodied state"? The Avataric being has a subtle form of its own and this form may be thought of as achieving its presence within the physical body in which the soul destined to receive the Avatar is itself housed.

7. I do not know Valmiki's Ramayana sufficiently to pronounce whether he pictures Rama as conscious of the Divine born in him from the beginning of his life. This phenomenon is not essential. The Avatar-being is, of course, present from birth, but there is no fixed rule as to when it would manifest in the outer personality. The Mother appears to have been more aware of her Avatarhood, or rather the essence of it, in her outer personality from childhood than

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was Sri Aurobindo in his. Still, even she went through the stages of a progressive awareness. And such stages were indispensable — along with certain human experiences — in order that there might be a manifestation of what we may term "evolutionary Avatarhood" — a type of incarnation peculiar to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother because they came to start a new race, the next step in earthly evolution, a job none of the other Avatars had come to carry out. The very idea of "evolution" as understood and expressed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in our present post-Darwinian age could not be there in the times of Rama or Krishna or any other Avataric descent.

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