Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

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Recently two Russian scholars from Moscow were brought by Balkrishna of SABDA to have a talk with me. They said the Russians had replaced tradidonal religion by a much worse one - the worship of Stalin - from which they were now free. I gave them an example of the absurd length to which this substitute had once gone. They were amused by it. I recounted how the poet Lermontov came to be celebrated for his work. A huge statue was built of Stalin holding in one hand the book of Lermontov's poems!

When the subject of Gorbachev came up I tried to explain the Indian vision of the Avatar and the Vibhuti. The Avatar is the Divine Himself incarnate with full knowledge of His being. The Vibhuti is an instrument driven by the Divine to do His work but not necessarily aware of what is driving him. And I said Gorbachev struck me as a Vibhuti by his masterly attempt to break the rigours of a system that had come short in his country as well as the deadlock between Soviet Rusia and the U.S.A. so as to avert the nuclear threat to the world by the antagonism of these two superpowers.

My visitors were talking now and again in Russian. The topic of linguistics came up. We discussed the difference between agglutinative languages and inflected ones, the former proceeding by the addition of word to word without changing their forms, the latter by changes in their terminations according as the words relate to different genders and cases. Thus in English the word door or doors remains unchanged with any preposition or verb, whereas in Latin we have various forms: porta, portae, portam, portarum, vortis, portas. The lady remarked that Russian also had inflections.

Then we spoke of the way certain studies have been carried on in countries with a materialistic turn of mind. The study of religion is subsumed under 'Anthropology" which undertakes, among other things, a comparative research in culture - culture being defined as the manner in which social

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groups live, both physically and mentally. Thus the mode of cooking in India would be put on a par with the Indian mode of conceiving God and both the modes would be examined without the slightest notion that there might be a reality answering to the God-concept.

Now to your problem, which very much relates to God's reality. Your lament about sadhana issues from an inadequate idea of what we are supposed to do as practitioners of the Integral Yoga.(It is idle to imagine that such a Yoga of complete transformation by a power beyond all that has worked so far on earth - namely, "Supermind" - can be done fully on his own by any johnny who has a spiritual aim From the beginning Sri Aurobindo has said that this Yoga can only be done by the Mother for and in each of us. The Mother too has declared that the best thing in this Yoga is for the sadhak not to stand in her way but allow her to work towards making him a true Aurobindonian. One of the basic things in our spiritual path is, as you know, samata, "equality of consciousness", which empties us of personal reactions and produces a huge vacuum in which the impersonal Self of selves can slowly emerge and draw into that serene wideness the light and love of the Mother. I may add that another central need in our Yoga is that this samata should be self-giving. The presence of the Mother has always to be kept in the heart's view. Then the samata is not only a superb passivity but a fount of illumined activity by something infinitely more than our tiny being - something at once calm and dynamic:

Force one with unimaginable rest —

as a line of Sri Aurobindo's puts it, creating a Mantra born of what he has characterised as the ideal state of a poet for such messages - namely, "a hushed intense receptivity turned upwards" - and invested with the potency to re-create us in the very image of our Master.

(31.12.1988)

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I have read a little about Stephen Hawking and I know of at least one revolutionary development of scientific theory by him. The "black holes" in space, which had been believed to be so gravitationally powerful that nothing could come out of them, not even light, were theoretically proved by him to emit gamma rays! This may be poetically compared with his own situation - how, from a physically stricken condition which would seem to prohibit any fruitful manifestation of the mind, Hawking has proved himself capable of making fundamental contributions to physics, so much so that some people have dared to speak of him in the same breath as Einstein.

It is news for me to hear from you that he favours the Einsteinian re-entrant universe - "a cosmos," as you say, "which is both finite and boundless, comparable to the surface of the earth which begins and ends nowhere." According to Einstein, gravitational masses so affect the "field" round them that objects move in it as if space were not flat, as in Euclidean geometry, but curved as in the geometry of Riemann. It is the curvature of space which renders the universe re-entrant. Thus, a ray of light starting anywhere would travel in a huge curve and ultimately reach back to its starting point. What further development Hawking has made of the Einsteinian concept I don't know yet. The book you mention hasn't come into my hands.

You may be interested to know that Sri Aurobindo adopted Einstein's expression: "boundless finite". In Savitri, after describing in brief all the "overhead" planes - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition - up to Overmind he begins the description of the Overmind:

Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse,

The cosmic empire of the Overmind,

Time's buffer state bordering Eternity...

(Centenary Ed., 660: 23-25)

The overhead planes, including Overmind, are boundless

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because there is an infinite in them but each infinite is of a particular aspect of the Supreme and not the totality of the Supreme's aspects. That totality would be the true infinite: everything else would be a finite even though boundless in a particular aspect. Similarly we can speak of the Supermind's boundlessness as the true one, charged as it is with an infinity of infinites, being the Supreme itself fronting from the Transcendent Sat-chit-ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) its own creation. The planes that are not overhead can also be designated each "a boundless finite" in terms of the Cosmic Ignorance as contrasted with each member of the overhead series which is so in terms of the Cosmic Knowledge - "Knowledge" being defined as the inherent experience, the natural pervading realisation, of the One Self everywhere. The extended meaning of the Einsteinian phrase in Sri Aurobindo's hands is suggested when he lists the hierarchy of levels -

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law -

and ends with the lines about the Supermind:

A last high world was seen where all worlds meet;

In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,

The light began of the Trinity supreme.

All there discovered what it seeks for here.

It freed the finite into boundlessness

And rose into its own eternities.

{Cent. Ed., 89: 24-29)

I gather from the report you have sent that for Hawking the processes of physics can explain the universe and therefore God even if He exists is not necessary. An Aurobindonian can understand such an outlook whereas the conventional religious or spiritual world-visions would think it absurd and shocking. For, Sri Aurobindo's vision of evolution has two sides. On the one hand he posits a Supermind,

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a Divine Truth-Consciousness, both creative and transformative, which holds a super-cosmos of perfect originals of all that is gradually evolving in our space-time. These originals are not like the Platonic archetypes aloof from the flux of time which can only give vague broken reflections of them. They are dynamic and work towards their own incarnation, as it were, in the forms of that flux. The forms are themselves aspiring to incarnate them, aspiring deep down in their being although the outer self may not always be aware or cooperative. And these arise across millennia of slow development from a beginning which is apparently the very opposite of the Perfect, the Divine. Sri Aurobindo calls this opposite the Inconscient. But the Inconscient, the apparently lifeless, mindless, soulless process known to physics, still carries hidden and locked within it the whole Superconscient. Because of the utter secrecy of the Superconscient, the process is bound to create the impression of a blind brute existence, a Godless universe, such as scientists like Hawking begin with but contemplating which they are likely to be amazed at life and mind appearing in the course of the ages in it and even an open or indirect soul-search for a God. Thus Sri Aurobindo grants a ground for the possibility of materialism and atheism without really legitimising them as being anywhere near a final reading of the cosmic riddle.

As for Hawking's concessive formula - "God is the embodiment of physical laws" - it seems to be a variation of Einstein's "religious" outlook: God is the intelligence embodied in the cosmic order. Here too God is impersonal, but this intelligence which renders the universe comprehensible to our minds evoked in Einstein what he termed "the cosmic religious emotion" which he put as the fount of all true scientific quest for some all-synthesising, all-harmonising, all-explaining "unified theory". Here he is nearer than Hawking to the philosopher Spinoza. There seems to be something cold-blooded about Hawking. Spinoza is even more suffused than Einstein with the cosmic religious emotion. In fact he has a mystic in him and that is why he was

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called "God-intoxicated" although from the orthodox Jewish or Christian viewpoint he was dubbed an atheist. Actually he was a pantheist to whom the universe was an infinite reality manifesting to us two of its innumerable modes: thought and extension. The thought-mode he named natura naturans, the active energy responsible for the world-order, while the extension-mode he labelled as natura naturata, the passive matter undergoing the order. One may see the two as the mind and body of the universe and to him they are not only inseparable but also constitute the whole of reality. There is nothing beyond the cosmos for Spinoza but the cosmos is God, and Spinoza compares his feeling of it to St, Paul's spiritual sense when he told the Athenians: "In Him we live and move and have our being." Even if no recognisable Transcendent is granted by Spinozism, the pantheist in Spinoza takes at the same time the universe as God and God as the universe without realising that the latter formula is open-ended, as we mark in Indian pantheism where the Divine is perceived beyond the physical world as well as in it. The Mundaka Upanishad, in Sri Aurobindo's translation, says with a super-Spinozistic enthusiasm;

The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the north and to the south of us and above and below and extended everywhere. This magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal.

The same Upanishad goes on to declare with a seer's exaltation what exceeds the cosmos:

There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth.

In the light of such knowledge one would like to reverse Hawking's "God is the embodiment of physical laws" into

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"Physical laws are an embodiment of God." This, of course, does not mean that science should give up its ardent search for the how and the why of things on the assumption that no supernatural agency is at work. A pragmatic materialism and atheism is the very source of scientific inquiry for immediate causes - an inquiry which has to be pressed as far as it can go without taking soul or God as necessary. But I believe with Sri Aurobindo that if science pushes more and more into the depth of things with an unabated honesty and an unprejudiced mind it is bound to touch upon a background of vital and mental and psychic forces and a basis of spiritual dynamisms. And these subtle realities will help the scientific consciousness to discover finer and wider complexes of physical laws, for in their true functioning such realities are not meant to distract our intelligence from the realm of matter and energy but to make it explore and utilise and enrich this realm in various ways, one important way of which is that of science with its working method of not invoking supraphysical causes. Man spiritualising himself will in addition bring to bear upon the natural world a keener insight, a larger grasp, a light of intuitive comprehension out-Hawking Hawking.

(17.11.88)

To try to follow the ideal and example of a Schweitzer without sharing his faith is, no doubt, possible: the ethical nature is not dependent on the religious motive for its instinctive impulsion and emotional exaltation. Even intellectually it can justify itself without that motive: to do unto others as we would others to do unto us may seem capital sense to the thinking mind. But there are two levels of thought - the provisional-pragmatic and the fundamental-philosophic. Although the first level can provide the ethicist with "sensible" supports, the second will give him no standing ground except religion - of course the truly felt and

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not just the conventional kind. For this level lays bare the full implication of the ethical consciousness. Ethics is essentially normative: its key-terms are: "right", "duty", "obligation", "good", "ought". These terms cannot be derived from natural factors with any finality.

The study of natural factors is science - a study which is purely descriptive and not in the least normative. The universe of the scientist is impotent to yield those terms. Not even a human natural factor like "society" can be their source, for it can only impose on the individual what many individuals consider to be advantageous to collective existence: its will is not from any plane higher than that of the individual and hence cannot have a definitively binding character. Mere numbers cannot make a thing right. Nor can any punishment visited on the recalcitrant individual prove the duty of not being dishonest, cruel and selfish: it can impress him only with the inexpediency of certain types of behaviour, convince him merely of the need to be clever enough to get away with dishonesty, cruelty and selfishness instead of being foolishly found out.

The real logic of ethical conduct can lie in nothing else than a Law eternal behind the codes and statutes of men, a Law which men strive to embody according to their best lights. Our ideals and morals may not always image the divine depths of the eternal Law, but logically there can be no idealism and morality without an effort or aspiration to image the depths that are divine of a Law that is eternal. The sense of unconditioned imperativeness and inherent validity, without which no "ought" can have justification, must argue that we are ethical inasmuch as we strain to express a supreme Reality faultlessly guided by its own Truth-light. Ethics can be neither valid nor imperative without a religious sanction.

Of course, merely to be religious does not guarantee that one is ethical: religiousness often has a self-righteous fanaticism as its bedfellow. What is needed is a genuine religious

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life - or, rather, a life of inward-plunging and outward-radiating spirituality. But, philosophically, we may aver that if religion means a feeling of divine operation, it is the sole reliable basis of ethics. Good-will has its strongest logical support in a sense of God-will.

(1976)

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