Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

SOME QUESTIONS ON TRANSFORMATION

AND SRI AUROBINDO

A REPLY TO A LETTER

I am glad you liked the way our correspondence has figured in Mother India under the caption "Sri Aurobindo's Views vis-a-vis.the Mother's". The new points you have raised on some other matters are welcome.

The issue of 300 years for total transformation has several bearings. In the first place, it is a mistake on your part to set in opposition the later letter dated 6 December 1949 in which Sri Aurobindo speaks of full physical transformation — "the divine body"¹ — as a matter of the remote future and the earlier letter where he writes "My faith and will are for the now." You believe that this earlier communication belongs to 1923-24 and that around 1933-1934 some spiritual events occurred to alter Sri Aurobindo's perspective. Actually the letter in question dates to 28 December 1934, your very period.² Besides, I was present in the Ashram at the time and can vouch that nothing happened of the sort you suppose. Furthermore, the statements of the two letters do not fall within the same universe of discourse. The one of 28 December 1934 relates to the "advent" of the "Supramental". This should properly connote the first decisive descent into the physical, as a result of which the final supramentalisation of the body could take shape if the descent increased and expanded and became integrally detailed in the course of a long time. We cannot imagine Sri Aurobindo holding that the body's supramentalisation could be achieved pretty soon. What he wanted pretty soon was only the first descent. There is no contradiction between the two letters.

In respect of the 300 years, what your visitor friends have told you makes little sense to me. All who joined the Ashram in the 1930s with a grasp of what Sri Aurobindo was doing believed — and, according to me, on Sri Aurobindo's own

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authority — that the total transformation was certain, but nobody with his wits about him would fancy that it was round the corner. So no room was really left for disappointment on learning of the 300 years. Again, not to decide to. take up the Aurobindonian Yoga if one knew that the body could be supramentalised only after three centuries strikes me as utter incomprehension of what Sri Aurobindo was attempting. Was one ever told that one would surely die before becoming 300 years old? If one were so informed, one might feel some justification in fighting shy of the whole venture. But in fact the understanding was that this Yoga would keep on sustaining one, lengthen one's life and give one a long-enough span of years to complete the Aurobindonian programme.

Even otherwise — even if one were not persuaded of life-prolongation — I should imagine that one would not back out of a Yoga whose guides were such grand beings as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and which could achieve under them wonderful inner results beyond all previous spiritual dreams. The entire picture presented to you of the early period of Yogic initiation seems to me distorted and irrational.

Furthermore, you write of people telling you of having kept pace with Sri Aurobindo's sadhana and, in this connection, you mention the Overmind. I can't help laughing. On 24 March 1934 Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Even the Overmind is for all but the Mother and myself either unrealised or only an influence, mostly subjective."³ If anybody makes the claim you record, then he or she must be a paragon of spiritual conceit and was bound to go wrong and deserve the epitaph we framed for one who in the same context suffered a spiritual fall in the 'thirties: "Undermined by Overmind." There is also the suggestion to you by your friends that some people left the Ashram because they failed to keep pace. But if everybody acted on such failure, who could ever remain in the Ashram? The Ashram would become a howling wilderness. All are bound to fail in this respect — though the

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inability to move with ease constantly from a Nanga Parvat through a Kanchenjanga to an Everest need not spell doom: it is the natural characteristic of the plodding sadhaks of so exalted and exacting a Yoga. The other pretension, that this Yoga had nothing more to give and further progress — beyond the Supermind, I suppose! — was possible only outside the Ashram, bespeaks abysmal ignorance. No Yoga outside has even heard of the Supermind. Besides, even much below the Supermind there is quite a lot in this Yoga to be received and it makes no sense to say that one has reached a "finis" to what the light and power and grace of our two gurus had to pour into the receptive vessel. Sadhaks quitted the Ashram simply because they either had strayed too much from the path or could no longer control their common egoistic urges and wanted a free field for them. Several of the names you cite are well known to me. We were all fellow-strugglers and from my own deficiencies as well as acquaintance with their difficulties I am aware of what went on in their beings and I refuse to accept the explanations now offered.

About the Master's departure, there was a purpose in it. Whoever asks about it may be advised to con carefully my long article: "The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence", which the Mother fully approved and endorsed on three separate occasions.

As for the accident to Sri Aurobindo on the night of 23 November 1938, he has himself said, as reported by Nirod-baran: "The hostile forces have tried many times to prevent things like the Darshan but I have succeeded in warding off all their attacks. At the time the accident to my leg happened, I was occupied with guarding the Mother and I forgot about myself. I didn't think the hostiles would attack me. That was my mistake."⁴ Perhaps the tiger-skin on which he slipped is symbolic of the fierce forces of the physical-vital world. I don't think it was deliberately used — as you suspect — by any black magician to topple Sri Aurobindo during his pacings.

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Your speculation about the supramental change in dust and rocks as a result of the transformation of human cells is rather a bit of science-fiction. True, the appearance of the Supermind in the gross-physical world will have a universal action — the Supermind is just the Power whose action is bound to be universal — but the action will be very subtle at first and the Supramental will be expressed according to the stage reached by material objects. Merely because the ultimate constituents — proton, electron, neutron, etc. — of a human body are the same as those of dust and rocks, the supramental transformation of the latter can be almost as little expected in the immediate future as the mental transformation of them might have been expected when the Mind appeared in evolution and mentalised the physico-vital organisation. The human body's ultimate constituents have been built up into cells — and this structure makes a lot of difference to the domains where the descended or manifested Supermind can be effective.

9 December 1979

Notes and References

1.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 1953), pp. 423-4.

2.Ibid., pp. 233-4.

3.Ibid., p. 397.

4.Talks with Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Pathmandir, Calcutta, 1966), p. 44.

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