Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo's Enlargement of Spiritual Metaphysics

A LETTER

Your little disquisition on Plotinus vis-a-vis Abbe Moncha-nin's article on Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is delightful.¹ Especially appealing to me is your statement that according to Plotinus "the original emanation of Nous from the One is not a temporal distinction (Ennead, V. I, 6th section), for they are as intimately conjoined as the Sun and its rays to which these hypostases are compared (Ennead, V. I 6th and 7th sections)." Here we have two points: (1) the One is not only a self-locked stasis but, in spite of its absolute supremacy and without abrogating its unity, its "aloneness", it is also and always a self-expressive dynamis; (2) the archetypal Ideas are inherent in and intrinsic to the supreme Reality and not either a secondary realm of manifestation or else themselves an abstract primal pattern which a secondary being, a demiurge, has to imitate or work by: they are both an original self-expression of the One and, in their own right, a primary creative power.

I don't know whether Plotinus elaborates these points, but the image of the Sun and its rays must, in my view, imply them. Perhaps a more accurate image would be to compare Nous itself to the Sun. It is a mass of gathered knowledge-light — gathered by the One from its own illimitable self-luminous essence, which we may compare to an immense nebula, for an organized play of its own infinite verities, a play still within its unmodified being and not projected into space and time as phenomenally known. The rays, then, would be the power-efflux of Nous towards phenomenal creation, but still in a kind of planning potentiality, a controlled corona of world-initiatives.

A vision similar to Plotinus's is, I believe, behind Platonism, though Plato seems to reduce it more than Plotinus to

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intellectual terms, except perhaps in the Symposium. Plotinus too perhaps loses the wholeness of the vision while putting it into a philosophical system. For the problem of the One and the Many appears to be worrying that system in some way or other: else the emphasis on the flight of the alone to the Alone would not be so great and the concept of the absorption of the soul into the One would not be so extreme — at least in appearance.

The same problem has lain heavy on the mind of Indian spiritual philosophy and has led to uncompromising Monism at the end, to utter a-cosmism, with whatever head-ache and heart-ache accompanying it. The whole work of Sri Aurobindo, on the conceptual level, is occupied with resolving the problem from the yonder side rather than from the hither side as done so far. That is to say, he explicates it not by tackling it from the viewpoint of the mind that looks at it from below but by dealing with it from above and, as Coleridge would put it, "defecating it to a transparency" through the use of "That which thinks not with the mind but by which the mind is thought". (Kena Upanishad)

The oldest Indian seers also used this "That": what they did not succeed in keeping alive was the fine distinction between — to use Sri Aurobindo's terminology — Supermind and Overmind. In the Supermind there is a perfect balance among the three modes of divine dynamism: Brahman is all, all is in Brahman, Brahman is in all. The Over-mind, while never losing the first two, stresses the last and lets each member of the all, each God-name and God-form of the multiple One, act to the fullest stretch of its individuality though without actually reaching a breaking-point with the rest. The failure of the seers — to differentiate the Super-mind's "integral" harmony, where every detail is in perfect balance, from the Overmind's "global" accord where there is a perfect balance only on the whole — was, I believe, due to their living at their highest not quite in the Supermind but midway the Supermind and the Overmind, with a pull towards the latter all the time because the latter is more in

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tune with the spiritualised mentality as well as with the phenomenal world where the Many stand out and the One is far in the background if not even submerged.

The One, however, always remained the magnet par excellence and the spiritualised mentality could not give a satisfying reconciliation of it with the Many. All spirituality worth the name has this passionate attraction towards unity —The one entire and perfect chrysolite — and if it cannot be fully reconciled with multiplicity, then hang the multiplicity! That is what the post-Rigvedic sages tended to do and finally the very secret of the Supermind was lost or at any rate hazed off. The lack of a concrete complete grasp of the Supramental is clear to me from the fact that the last formula of Indian spiritual thought was Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) — surely a magnificent summing up of Reality and yet containing the seed of a static realization in which no vision of a universe sprouting from that Reality was inevitable.

As you know, Sri Aurobindo has introduced a basic change in the formula. He speaks of Chit-Tapas, not Chit. Tapas means "energetic heat". To Sri Aurobindo Consciousness is always Force, and to leave this truth inexplicit is to open the door to misunderstanding of the original summing-up. This key-statement came really from the Supermind where Consciousness is inherently Force and so there was no need to make a special point of the identity of the two, but it has been seized by the Overmind and interpreted by the spiritualized mentality, with the result that cosmic creativity is not taken necessarily as involved in it. If the transmission of the triple synthesis had been done by a seerhood stationed in the Supermind instead of in a middle vastness between what is Super and what is Over, a clear expression would have been given and we would have had Chit-Tapas rather than Chit. The compound is most vital to spiritual meta-

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physics, for without it the cosmic movement is left shorn of an indubitable ground in the Supreme.

Nor is the introduction of the compound the sole change Sri Aurobindo has brought about in Indian philosophy. There is also the concept of Vijnana added. Creative Con-scious Force at blissful self-deployment is only the first step towards giving a foundation to the cosmic movement. The second step is the ordering out, by this Conscious Force, of the truths implicit in the Supreme, the organization of these truths in a perfect interrelation and interaction by a faculty of harmonizing unity and multiplicity in a universal self-deployment. This faculty is Vijnana, the maker of a detailed design, at once a mass of particulars and a gestalt, on a divine scale. Vijnana is the Aurobindonian Supermind, the "Truth-Consciousness", which is part and parcel of the Ultimate. The term exists in the Taittiriya Upanishad with at least an Overmind-suggestion but later was misunderstood as merely the highest or intuitive intelligence. Vijnana is the reality behind Plotinus's notion of the intimate conjoinment of the Sun and its rays. It is involved in Chit-Tapas, just as Tapas is involved in Chit, but unless one is poised in the Supermind itself the involvement is likely in the long run to be overlooked. But, whereas Tapas and Chit stand together, Vijnana is a special mode of them and is best conceived as an extra term. Hence it is not enough to speak of a Divine Trinity: we have to speak of a Divine Quaternary in order fully to formulate the Transcendent which is yet the Arche-typally Cosmic, as it were. With Vijnana there, we have also the Personal or Super-personal Godhead, the omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent Creator in whom the ideal blueprint of all phenomena is held forever and with whom the phenomenal can be in a kinetic love-relation.

Yet here too we must pass beyond the implications of a merely Aurobindonianised Platonism and Plotinism. The latter's Nous and the former's World of Ideas come out in their true colours in the concept of the Supermind. The Christian God also finds his grandest form there. But the

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Supermind or Vijnana is more than just creative. It is also transformative. And because the post-Rigvedic sages and even the oldest Indian seers did not have their poise in the sheer Supermind they missed altogether the transformative aspect. God was indeed taken as omnipotent but it was never thought that he could totally divinise mind, life and matter. Indeed the thought of doing so was never taken as having entered God's consciousness! Just as even God cannot make a square circle or effect 2+2=5, so also He cannot be ascribed the power to do such an impossible, such a logically self-contradictory thing, as a divinised mentality, vitality, physi-cality. And once the omnipotent is considered impotent in this concern, we cut away the phenomenal world from the Ultimate. If, behind whatever veil in this world, Brahman is all and yet this world cannot be divinised, it cannot truly be Brahman, however incognito, but only a Brahman-semblance and therefore real-unreal, a magic of Maya, an illusionist trick. In Platonic, Plotinian and Christian terms, the world is temporal and must finally pass away; the Divine Plenitude cannot be totally materialised, and the soul's fulfilment is in the Beyond.

The instinct of transformation has always been there because the Supermind is always behind everything: the ideal of a perfect knowledge here and now, the ideal of an all-effecting life-force, the ideal of a radiantly perpetuated body have never stopped haunting man but they have come to be regarded as magnificent will-o'-the-wisps even while felt to be compulsive. They are both unavoidable and futile unless the Supermind is possessed, and without a revelation like Sri Aurobindo's from the Supermind they will never have a rationale.

5-8-1975

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Notes and References

1. "From my reading of Plotinus, it would seem that Monchanin errs (Mother India, December 1974, p. 924) when drawing a distinction between the systems of Plotinus and Spinoza as to the coincidence of the points of departure and arrival in the Eternal, the One. In Plotinus, the original emanation of Nous from the One is not a temporal distinction (Enneads, V. I, 6th section) for they are intimately conjoined as the Sun and its rays, to which these hypostases are compared (Enneads, V. I, 6th and 7th sections). The soul's laborious return to the All-Transcending culminates in an ecstatic reunion beyond all distinction of space and time, a reabsorption into the Eternal. Plotinus rarely includes both 'fall' and resurgence in one passage, as he does at VI. 9, 11th section: 'It is not in the soul's nature to touch utter nothingness; the lowest descent is into evil and, so far, into non-being: but to utter nothing, never. When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is in nothing but itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the Supreme.' (From Stephen Mackenna's translation of The Enneads, VI. 9, 11th section, p. 625.)" — Rand Hicks

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