The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

The Mystical and the Misty: An Answer to Some Queries about Sri Aurobindo

A READER from abroad has asked for a clarification of certain points apropos of an article in Mother India of July 14, 1951. He writes:

"I read in Prithwi Singh's Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: 'Sri Aurobindo's decision to leave his own body does not invalidate the truth of his teachings.' I would like to hear, in clear and understandable words, what is meant by 'Aurobindo's decision to leave his own body'. Death does not depend on our decision unless we commit suicide. Was this the case with Aurobindo? If so, how did he do it, and how would it be re-concilable with his words (quoted on page 2 of Mother India): 'Death must not be feared, but neither should death or permanent ill-health be invited.'

"Further Prithwi Singh writes, 'His last act of Grace was to keep his body intact for several days.' What is the sense of these words? After death the body immediately begins to decay and cannot be kept intact by any act of grace. Was something applied to the body so as to keep it intact for several days?

"Equally un-understandable are Prithwi Singh's words concerning Aurobindo and the Mother: 'It is the same consciousness divided into two for purposes of the play.' The 'same' consciousness cannot be divided into two. This sentence simply makes no sense and no amount of play or Lila will add any sense to it.

"I should like to have a lucid reply from you, not one couched in words of mist and clouds."

This reader from abroad is no scoffer and he belongs to the rank of Sri Aurobindo's admirers. His inquiry is of one who is interested in spiritual things and it represents the difficulty and perplexity of many sincere minds in both the West and the East. We may, therefore, take some trouble over the clarification he desires of what he considers puzzling obscurities and we consider to be nothing more than non-expository declarations.

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But clarification here must not be supposed to have in view a perfect intellectual lucidity such as is possible in matters with which the human mind has been familiar for centuries. Spiritual things do not belong to the surface of life as lived at present. God is not evident to the ordinary senses with which we function: even our own souls are not to us a certain knowledge. We have instinctive beliefs about them, which to some people are automatically convincing, but as soon as we start thinking and reasoning we find ourselves in what our reader would call "mist and clouds". Of course, the words we use can be either precise or vague, our manner of argument can be pointed or rambling and involved: "mist and clouds" can come from the kind of words we employ as well as from the kind of thoughts that are behind words, and we should do our best to be clear in these respects, but when the very subject is of a range of being beyond the common we cannot hope for statements absolutely disinfected or the mysterious or even the miraculous.

Even in the realm of modern science we have passed far beyond ordinary lucidity. Not that the ideas of what is called classical or Newtonian physics were in themselves axiomatic: absolute space, for instance - an utter omnipresent void which is yet a substantial stationary entity determining and affecting measurements of physical processes - is hardly a very clear idea. Neither is the force of gravitation which acts instantaneously, requires no medium for its passage and cannot be interfered with by any intervening object. But they seemed to agree roughly with our experience of the man-sized world and with the familiar deliverance of our senses: they thus acquired a spurious lucidity. With the advent of Einstein this lucidity disappeared: a "curved" non-euclidian four-dimensional continuum of fused space and time is "mist and clouds" with quite a vengeance. So too is the world or quanta in which we are asked by Bohr to choose between non-causality in space and time or causality without them! Even the fact that no mechanical model can represent now the ultimate processes of physical Nature strains the understanding immensely.

All this is really as it should be, for when we get down to the

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infinitesimal or stretch our minds towards the infinite "we break out of the world to which we are generally accustomed. The pure mathematician may cope in his own way with the basic problems of the physical universe, but his way is most abstract and seems to our day-to-day intelligence utterly removed from reality. The pure mathematician himself knows that the extremity of abstraction to which he is driven is due to a tremendous mystery baffling the senses and yielding only a series of provisional algebraical equations of a most complicated kind.

If the physical universe, the more we probe it, becomes so mysterious and challenges both imagination and conception, surely supra-physical or spiritual phenomena cannot be brought before the tribunal of the ordinary outward-going mind. Their nature, processes and laws, their possibilities, actualities and necessities are different from what is familiar to normal human experience. Either there is no spiritual reality and then we need not bother about Sri Aurobindo at all, or else there is such a reality and then we must expect it to exceed our usual imagination and conception even more than do the fields of relativity theory and quantum theory. This does not mean that we can make no intelligible statements about it or that a systematic presentation of aspects of it is impossible. But lucidity or clarity here cannot be of the same type as when we deal with familiar physical or psychological things. It can only apply a logic proper to the subject-matter in hand and show certain ideas as following consistently from certain basic concepts.

Our reader says: "Death does not depend on our decision unless we commit suicide." First of all, the terms "death" and "suicide" are relevant only to one who knows no state of existence apart from the material body. A Yogi in the full sense is precisely one who has, to say the least, transcended the physical body-formula. Mystical experience brings to light several "sheaths" other than the physical. The Yogi is awake in them at the same time he lives in the latter, and he can at any moment put his body in a state of trance and move out in them. Death, in the common connotation, is to him merely a permanent leaving of the physical sheath so that, unconnected with the subtle sheaths, the

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physical loses its support and vitality. Inasmuch as this support is lost, there is a death unlike the temporary departures the Yogi usually makes from his body. But inasmuch as the Yogi, even when not making these temporary departures, lives beyond the body and knows an inner independence of it, the terms "death" and "suicide" cannot have for him the meaning ordinarily attached to them. And he certainly has the power to die whenever he wishes: death does depend on his decision. He may not be able to prolong his life indefinitely, but he can indubitably cut it short at any time - either by withdrawing into his subtle sheaths or else by withdrawing beyond all sheaths into the formless Atman and Brahman, the essential and infinite spiritual Self-hood or Being-hood.

As for Sri Aurobindo, he was not only a Yogi in the highest sense known to the past: a Mukta, a liberated soul. He was also a Yogi in a new sense by virtue of wide-awake possession of what is called the Supermind. The Supermind is the creative Truth-Consciousness, the divine harmony of unity in diversity in which the perfect truth of all manifestation resides, both singly and innumerably, as Lord of the universe as well as the universe's m-dwelling Godhead. By the Supermind's integral realisation the mind, the life-force and even the body would become divinised, fulfilling Nature's evolutionary labour and establishing on earth a perfect individual and collective existence manifesting in Time ever-new riches of the inexhaustible Infinite. When Sri Aurobindo passed away, the Supermind was in process of being established in his body. This means an extraordinary power over normal physical nature's activity - a power to keep off disease and ward off death. The absolutely automatic immunity would come only with the total establishment of the Supermind in the body, the absolute transformation or supramentalisation of all bodily functions, but a capacity to sustain and prolong the body indefinitely could be there even before. Whatever signs of age and whatever physical ailments might appear would be because of a sanction of the conscious will in order to meet every difficulty facing human nature and to cope with it by actual acceptance of it: unless this is done there can be no complete evolutionary

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conquest significant for the race. Whether the final physical difficulty - the death of the form - is met by coming to the verge of death or by going through the whole experience of dying - this is decided according to the need of the hour. Sri Aurobindo decided upon death in the fullest meaning. And when for the purposes of the supramental manifestation death is accepted it would not be a mere withdrawal, but an acceptance of natural factors of disease so that a real fight with them may take place and by the sacrifice of one body, in which the Supermind is supremely manifesting, a decisive absorption, as it were, occur of the force of death and the way be cleared for the removal of that force's effectivity from the partner body, the Mother, working with Sri Aurobindo. Then with that partner body as the centre a new life would radiate to all earth.

It is because of these facts that we are told: "Sri Aurobindo's decision to leave his own body does not invalidate the truth of his teachings. "And the truth of his teachings is not only the words our reader quotes from him: "Death must not be feared, but neither should death or permanent ill-health be invited." The truth of his teachings is also that for a divine manifestation the Supramental Yoga aims at conquest of bodily deterioration, disease and death just as it aims at conquest of the life-force's incapacity and perversity and the mind's ignorance and egoism. What Sri Aurobindo did to his own body was not the result of a failure on his part nor of an invitation to ill-health and death for their own sakes. It was a momentous act in the drama of the Supramental Yoga and various incidents before it and during it show positively its true nature. To realise this, our reader has only to study - among other things - my own article The Passing of Sri Aurobindo, Nirodbaran's Sri Aurobindo: "I am Here! I am Here!" and "Synergist's" The Debt to Rudra. A passage from Nirodbaran may be quoted: "As the disease was taking a bad turn we repeatedly asked him to use his spiritual Force to cure it... But each time we questioned him, we met with an enigmatic silence... It was the memorable 4th December... Sri Aurobindo had totally emerged from the depths and expressed a desire to sit up. In spite of our objections, he insisted. We noticed after a while that all the distressing

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symptoms had magically vanished and he was once more a healthy person. Then he sat in the chair. The change was so sudden and unexpected that we looked at each other in sheer joy and amazement... Now we ventured to repeat our question: 'Are you not using your Force to get rid of the disease?' 'No!' came the shocking reply. We could not believe our ears and to get a confirmation of our disbelief we asked again. What we heard was as clear and sharp as a sabre-edge. Then we put forth the bold query: 'Why not?..' To this he simply gave the cryptic reply: 'Can't explain; you won't understand.' "

Once the meaning of the Supramental Yoga is grasped and Sri Aurobindo's passing seen in the proper light, there is nothing mystifying in Prithwi Singh's sentence: "His last act of Grace was to keep his body intact for several days." The body's remaining absolutely intact for several days under even tropical conditions -and this was certified by several doctors Indian and French - had a manifold purpose, one side of which is Prithwi Singh's statement that Sri Aurobindo wanted all his disciples and followers to have time to come and have the last darshan. We need not enter here into all the sides: the point we are concerned with is simply that such a phenomenon is completely in tune with the superhuman Aurobindonian power. The basis of this power was declared by the Mother when she announced forty-one hours after the "clinical" death: "The funeral of Sri Aurobindo has not taken place today. His body is charged with such a concentration of supramental light that there is no sign of decomposition and the body will be kept lying on his bed so long as it remains intact." It is no use saying, as our reader does, that after death the physical body immediately begins to decay and cannot be kept intact by any act of grace and that if it did not decay something must have been applied to it. Nothing was applied or needed to be applied: what happened happened naturally according to Sri Aurobindo's attainment and will and was no miracle at all from the viewpoint of the Supermind's capacity. But from the viewpoint of the ordinary mind it cannot help looking like a miracle - and that, again, is precisely what we should expect at certain phases of the Supermind's manifestation in a world of limited mind.

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We come now to our reader's last puzzle. He feels that it is nonsensical or at least incomprehensible to assert that for the sake of the lila or world-play the same consciousness was divided into two - Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But we are afraid that he is thinking in terms of the Ahankar or ego. The ego is the separative individual, a formation of Nature whose very essence is its limitation, its exclusion of others. There cannot be the same ego in two beings, for that would be a self-contradiction. But the true individual, whose distorted figure in evolving Nature is the ego and which can be realised only by overpassing the ego-cadre, is an inherent aspect of the multi-moded Spirit and is not debarred from a genuine oneness with other individuals and with the universal consciousness. Beyond the universe it has its reality in the Transcendence whose complementary manifested formulations are the universe and the individual. In a general sense we may say that the original Consciousness is a unity-in-multiplicity and that for the purposes of the world-play the same Consciousness is divided into an infinite number of focal points. There is nothing impossible here: in fact it is the only possibility. It is also possible to have a special manifestation of a certain level or cast of divine Consciousness in two forms. We may suggest that the biological division or a species into two sexes is some kind of representation of a twofold basic reality of being. Within each of us, spiritual experience reveals a twofoldness - Purusha and Prakriti, being and becoming, self and nature. In spiritual knowledge the creative world-principle is seen to be biune - Ishwara-Shakti - a two-in-one put forth from the Oneness in which manyness lies implicit. When the Ishwara-Shakti manifests in a special way which constitutes what we call the Avatar manifestation we can have two embodied beings serving as radiating centres of a new creative spiritual force. Intrinsically, therefore, there is no lack of sense in speaking of the same consciousness divided into two for purposes of the play. Whether Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are such a consciousness must be left to spiritual experience or intuitivised intellectual insight. One thing is clear: their joint endeavour is to bring about a radical spiritual change of the world's consciousness, an evolution of

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mental man into supramental man, a transformation of the human into the divine: they are the luminous parents of a new creation on earth. As such they have all the marks of an Avatar manifestation, a play of the biune Ishwara-Shakti in two physical bodies.

If all that we have said seems still to be merely "words of mist and clouds", then indeed mist and clouds are the very constitution of reality and all words about ultimates are bound to be misty and cloudy! Of course, our statements have been brief, they are not fully elaborated philosophical expositions, yet the leading philosophical ideas necessary are there and to find them lucid the mind must throw itself into a spiritual mood and feel the presence of a Wonder beyond the common actualities and surface concretenesses of physical and psychological life. It is not called upon to renounce reason but to reason about That which is greater and subtler than the categories dictated by sense-experience and by the intellect based on it. Ceasing to make a fetish of a too apparent clarity, we must proceed by the truth of the paradox:

They see not the clearliest,

Who see all things clear.

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