The Sun and The Rainbow

Spiritual India and Sri Aurobindo

The old picture of spiritual India with the dreamy unpractical look has been stripped off the wall. Not that the picture was false in every detail; but unhappily it overlaid the true with the fictitious. India does "dream" a great deal of what is behind the veil of earth's appearances and she definitely is not concerned with only the dust and heat of an outward-going life. Even in the tumultuous twentieth century, she is tremendously "inward": political slogans and economic formulas do not wholly absorb her, but her "inwardness" is not unpractical, her otherworldly dreaming does not end in an emotional haze, a mental mist.

CONCRETE REALISATION

Ever since the hymns of the oldest scripture in history, the Rigveda, began to be sung, it has been dinned into Indian ears that the way of the inner life is not blind belief or vague speculation. We have to pierce the veil of earth's appearances and seize the hidden Beauty as no less real than the universe to which we are accustomed. To rest content with faith in God and in the Hereafter is far from enough from the Indian standpoint; it is equally insufficient to chop logic about the Absolute and the soul's immortality.

The Gospel of Mark has the famous query: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" The Indian mystic, from the Rigveda down to our day may be taken to have asked more pungently: "What does it profit a man if he possesses a soul but never realises it?"

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Realisation: that is the keyword in India. A man realises what love is by actually falling in love with a woman and taking her to himself — not by emotionally reading Shelley or intellectually studying Havelock Ellis. So too by a psychological process within him, which brings him into actual touch with a divine reality, and not by mere religious belief or philosophical speculation does he grow aware of his true soul and become a mystic.

SEEING GOD

When the young Narendra, who later made a name on three continents as Swami Vivekananda, met the God-intoxicated Ramakrishna, the first question he shot at him was: "Sir, have you seen God?" A crude question for the awed religionist and a naive one for the abstract thinker, but typically Indian in its approach to the Unknown. And typically Indian was the answer it evoked: "I see God more concretely than I see you." Indian mysticism begins to be understood as we start grasping its concreteness.

When the sacred books of this land spoke, for instance, of God's light, they did not use a poetic figure. They meant light just as concretely as Raman meant it when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. In India the concrete was not synonymous with the material, even as consciousness did not stop with the level of the elan vital and the mind. Beyond apparently unconscious Matter and the grades of organic evolution there was for the Indian a Power which was the Spirit

And this basic stuff of being, this divine substance of consciousness, could be perceived by the subtle senses lying latent behind our imperfect physical instruments. A faint and faltering image of it entered our perception in the cosmos around us. Listen to a stanza from those chants of mystical seerhood, the Upanishads, describing the supreme spiritual Existence: "There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind; there these lightnings flash

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anot nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth." Super-Science is here, a statement of some concrete fact. Even while denying the ultimate reality of the things we know, it denied by means of a greater affirmation of the Real. Our lustres faded in the high trance of the mystic because a mightier one which was more substantial took their place.

PRACTICE OF YOGA, STATIC OR DYNAMIC

A wishy-washy play with the Unknown is not Indian mysticism. India has established a sustained systematic process leading to it from many starting-points, and that is what is meant by Yoga. Yoga is "yoking", a union of the human with the Divine: its results are concrete and verifiable. Long and arduous is the path, but there can be no mistake about its practicality: thousands in India even today take it up and pursue it to one end or another.

Various ends have been put before the Yogi, all realisable by a steady endeavour, but they fall mainly into two classes of realisation: the static and the dynamic.

The masters of the static path regard the world as a thing to be thrown aside, a temporary bagatelle. They aim at an absorption in the vast Divine. Their experience of a mysterious Eternal, compared to which the world is like an empty hallucination, is overwhelmingly concrete, but it diverts the consciousness from the earth's normal activities and gives no final raison d'etre to them.

Why did the Eternal bring about or permit the pageant of Time and Space if its aim was merely to renounce it? Such a renunciation is indeed not unpractical escapism towards a sort of day-dream — it is escapism without being unpractical, for what its escape leads, to is felt as a greater reality behind Nature rather than as an imaginary or theoretical "thin air". All the same, there is a certain one-sidedness which is not in tune with the modern trend of life no less than with the

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secret Instinct of mankind that the earth too has importance and is no flimsy foil to heaven. India today is awake to that deep instinct and its penchant is for synthesis, for many-sided unity. And the Dynamic Yoga which is the other side of spiritual realisation in India's past falls in with such a penchant.

THE DOUBLE PRACTICALITY OF THE GITA

This dynamic Yoga regards the world as a field of God's manifestation, not as a trap from which the soul must break out. The finest expression of it in our history is the "Song Celestial", the Bhagawad Gita. The Gita is not an ascetic cry; it does not seek to pluck one away from the throbbing heart of things. It is a gospel delivered on a battlefield with warriors brandishing their spears and holding drawn bows of destruction. In fact the scene is remarkably like the modern world with the holocaust of a terrible conflict not long past and the heart-numbing threat of the Cold War all about us. And the word of Sri Krishna is not a pious advice to stand aside from the grim actuality but "Go forth and fight: conquer a mighty kingdom" because on the one side stood in burning indignation the defenders of civilised values and on the other a titanic tyranny. Sri Krishna, however, did not look forward to just an outward triumph. The warrior was asked to rise above the ordinary human consciousness and live in the light of the Eternal and be by Yoga the instrument of a Will wider than his own.

The Gita is not a gospel of action in the common meaning of the term: it teaches a new way of action which absorbs human push and power into an inspired and illumined initiative that is divine. It combines two species of practicality — the practicality of Yoga and the practicality of life. The . former is present even in the static realisation and its presence everywhere gives the lie to those who think that mystics live in a "glorified gas". But the static path lays an overstress on the Beyond: Sri Krishna makes the Beyond dynamic here and

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now, he links up with it the concrete human.

THE GREATEST YOGI OF OUR AGE

An attitude similar to the Gita's is to be found in the greatest Yogi of our age, Sri Aurobindo. That is why in these times of tense body and alert mind, with upheavals in our midst and upheavals around us, he stands as a modern among the modems. The eyes of renascent India turn to Pondicherry, the little town on our east coast, capital of the one-time French India, where a school of spirituality, an Ashram with hundreds of disciples, sprang up with him as its centre.

A magnificent leonine personality — a writer educated from boyhood in England and using the English language like a mother-tongue in splendid poetry as well as prose - a scholar in Greek and Latin — at home in French, German and Italian, not to mention Sanskrit and other Indian languages — once a politician of profound constructive power — a gigantic philosophical intellect whose chief work. The Life Divine, has been hailed as epoch-making — a still more towering Master of Yoga, whom Tagore in the East and Rolland in the West called the custodian of the future — Sri Aurobindo was a figure to dominate the world's gaze.

For six years he led his country's fight for political freedom. Then suddenly he left politics to concentrate more completely on the Yoga he had already been practising for some years. He felt his withdrawal into the background a most necessary step, because the true genius of India was itself a background — the deep Spirit waiting secretly behind the clamour and conflict raging in the outer being of man. India's greatness in the past arose, according to Sri Aurobindo, from her possession of the hidden Spirit by Yogic experience.

The Spiritual Background, however, was not his whole objective. In India's finest hours the contact with the outer being was never lost. Sri Aurobindo sought for something more than a contact which, after a brief flash of illumination,

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lets the outer being remain the half-lit and stumbling creature it normally is. As in the background, so too in the forefront there must always be the Spirit. His Yoga is integral, an all-round fulfilment of the Divine on this very earth and not in a remote paradise or a transcendental Nirvana. That is why Pondicherry, with its Ashram, can be regarded as the gateway to a wonderful future.

DIVINISATION OF LIFE

Sri Aurobindo holds that man's hopes and dreams can be crowned only if, with the help of the highest consciousness developed up to now, we rise beyond ourselves to a new level of being, a level above mind as mind is above animal life and animal life above mere matter in which everything lay latent and unevolved.

This new level has to be a step forward in evolution and not just Science, Philosophy Art, Ethics or Religion achieving combinations and permutations of the various aspects of man at his cleverest and noblest. Sri Aurobindo takes up the whole beautiful heritage of past progress but does not rest with giving it a novel shape: he seeks to divinise the entire self by a special experience and ultimately permeate with a spiritual power of consciousness every means of manifestation and the entire outer form so that even the poor body which lives a victim to disease and decay and the sudden stroke of death may become king of Nature.

Our mind boggles at the colossal scheme. But surely one for whose constructive insight men of practical force like Tilak and Das bore the deepest esteem cannot be dismissed as the chaser of a magnificent mirage. The fact that his Ashram is not an abode of complacent "navel-gazers" but a scene of varied enterprise, astir with architects, engineers, scientists and manual workers as well as artists, poets, musicians and thinkers — this fact is enough to testify that the source from which such a complex fountain sprang must have still been a manifold creative vitality. The

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Ashram is an experiment to form by a profound psychophysical transformation the nucleus of a super-mankind to be.

THE INTEGRAL YOGA

Patiently and without lust for fame the Master kept mould-ing his vision of super-mankind. The method of his Integral Yoga is a very plastic one. There are no mechanical breath-exercises or painful physical postures; it is our consciousness that the Yoga starts with, a constant remembrance of the Divine and an offering of all our movements, inward and outward, to Him by a consecrated attitude, a self-surrender that brings about a series of extraordinary yet concrete and convincing experiences affecting every side of us, down to our physical substance.

"A quixotic hope!" cries the man in the street in the face of a Yoga so far-reaching and revolutionary. The claims of the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Bhagawad Gita are difficult enough to accept, but here in our midst we have something that exceeds them all. Can that intractable old stumbling-block of every spiritual effort in the past, the physical body, be illumined and transformed together with the mind and heart? The signs of such a change would not be the ability merely to stay in a sealed trance, insensitive to outward attacks of pain, or a vague and intermittent exaltation in the nerves, or a few spectacular capacities as developed by "naked fakirs".

An immense wakeful consciousness that is unfettered by human limitations and uses a body that has taken on itself the divine immunity of the Spirit — this is the Aurobindo-nian ideal. There is nothing fantastic here, once it is admitted that the Spirit is the supreme underlying reality. For, if everything has come from the Spirit, Matter too must be a diminished aspect of some divine truth and can by awakening to that truth get divinised. The trouble is that life does not always bear out logic. Doubt, disbelief, denial are bound to dog the path of Sri Aurobindo's experiment, but we must

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not forget that we are living in a country where the Spirit has trafficked with the earth for ages and the Divine and Superhuman are no strangers. Above all we must remember what Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter to a disciple apropos of an inveterately sceptical intellectuality like Bertrand Russell's as contrasted with the temperament which easily and eagerly believes or rests happy with lofty notions. Referring to himself and to his associate and co-worker in the Integral Yoga, the Mother, he begins the letter:

"I must remind you that I have been an intellectual myself and no stranger to doubt — both the Mother and myself have had one side of the mind as positive and as insistent on practical results and more so than any Russell can be. We could never have been contended with the shining ideas and phrases which a Rolland or another takes for the gold coin of Truth. We know well what is the difference between a subjective experience and a dynamic outward-going and realising Force. So although we have faith, (and who ever did anything great in the world without having faith in his mission or the Truth at work behind him?) we do not found ourselves on faith alone, but on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives. I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane. That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse Forces who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer to the field of earth and Matter."

THE BACKGROUND OF AUROVILLE

It is, on the one hand, the process of an unheard-of spiritual transformation and, on the other, the presence of a super-scientific this-worldly genius, that are the background of the larger field of work into which the Aurobindonian inspiration

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has broken forth in the project of Auroville, a growing city on the borders of Pondicherry. "Auroville" is a name derived from the French word " Aurore" meaning "dawn". So it stands for "City of Dawn", with an appropriate undertone of the Master's name because of the common component "Auro". Extending to a greater range of human material than the intensive life of the Ashram could allow, this project has sent out a call to the four corners of our disillusioned earth. The call is to find at last a centre of manifold yet unified existence, marking the first flush of a new era of peace and harmony in the secure working of the new principle of divine dynamism which Sri Aurobindo terms "Supermind" or "Truth-Consciousness". Not that all who give their services to Auroville have to be full-fledged Yogis; but all must be aware that the City of Dawn is a dream meant to come true under the shaping hand of the guide and guru of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram: the Mother.

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