The Thinking Corner

Sri Aurobindo's 72nd Birthday

On the fifteenth of this month, August, Sri Aurobindo reaches the age of seventy-two. But immediately we state that fact our minds are filled with a sense of contradiction. We used to speak of Tagore advancing in years and we speak now of Gandhi growing old: nothing strange is felt by us in our utterances. Sri Aurobindo, however, makes any calculation in terms of age a falsity.

Fundamentallly such a calculation errs because of Sri Aurobindo's mysticism. Both Tagore and Gandhi can be called great, but their greatness is of the human and not the divine type. The essence of Tagore is the poet, of Gandhi the moralist, of Sri Aurobindo the mystic. Though Tagore and Gandhi cannot be considered devoid of mysticism, the mystical Reality is in them an indirect power. The indirectness is shown by their predominant aims. The mystic in quest of the divine Spirit does not hold it as his predominant aim to write a Gitanjali or to practise satyagraha. Sri Aurobindo is a poet of the highest order and the moralist's effort at detachment from gross animal desires and egoistic motives finds fulfilment in him, but poetry and morality are not his ends: they are only the means of his master-passion. His master-passion is not brilliant poetic achievement for its own sake or the triumph of a human virtue: it is the sheer surpassing of the human level, the continuous union with the Supreme Being and the direct expression of that Being in all the ways of our nature.

Now, the Supreme Being is, first and foremost, a mighty transcendence of time and life, and infinite Consciousness and Bliss immutably seated above the waxing and waning of the world's years. A grand stanza of the ancient Upanishads, translated with revelatory force by Sri Aurobindo, catches in words that sovereign status: "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

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bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth." What the rishis in the past attained is present in Sri Aurobindo, and he stands, among things that vary and fade, a smiling Eternity unbarred by appearances, unmarred by phenomena. To such a realisation how shall we apply our measure of moments and confine it within an age of seventy-two? Is it not incongruous to think of the Spirit's timeless plenitude that is Sri Aurobindo's deepest self as growing old as men grow old who live in the clutch of the temporal and the mortal?

But the Eternity that is above time and life is not the sole cause of the contradiction we feel. The divine Spirit is not utterly the opposite of time and life. When the Upanishads chant, "by His shining all this shineth", they do more than trace the source of our cosmos in the beyond. While opening our world-beglamoured eyes to the Truth whose infinity no light of earth equals, they do not cut off earth's light from that Truth. It is God who has emanated the world, the world is at bottom His own stuff of divinity: omnipresent, He pervades occultly all phenomena. The many-sided vision of the Upanishads no sooner found tongue in the grand stanza about the supra-cosmic "There" than it followed up with another as grand about the cosmic "Here" of the Divine. In Sri Aurobindo's vivid, vibrant and wide-sweeping English this Sanskrit mantra runs: "The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the south and to the north of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal." A mystic par excellence, Sri Aurobindo is inwardly one with a Cosmic Consciousness supporting with a limitless peace a limitless activity, with an indivisible singleness a myriad variety of forms. Not this one body alone which we know as Sri Aurobindo is his reality. It cannot circumscribe the far-stretched continuity of his being and his becoming. In all quarters he feels his own self at work. He overflows the span of an individual life. The march of the centuries is not alien to him, the rising and falling and rising again of the endless

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energy around us is part of him in the union he has realised with the Beauty of ancient days that is ever new. Can seventy-two years in one particular physical form sum up such an existence?

When we have seen mysticism in its cosmic aspect as well as in its transcendental, we have still not said the last word about Sri Aurobindo. There is yet another aspect - the individual - rendering the concept of old age inapplicable to his seventy-two years. And here he brings a mystical achievement that goes further than any spirituality known in the past. Our universe is not merely the occult omnipresence of the Divine: it is also meant to be His manifestation. The immense unity and the immense multiplicity are pressing forward to express in the cosmic formula a divine life taking its start in the individual soul-spark which is enshrined in creatures and which one of the Upanishads englished by Sri Aurobindo sums up with intuitive intensity: "The Purusha that is within is no larger than the finger of a man; he is like a blazing fire that is without smoke; he is lord of his past and his future; he alone is today and he alone shall be tomorrow." An intricate evolution focussing itself in individuals and proceeding through rebirths of the individual soul is worked out from a beginning and a base that appear to be the opposite of everything divine. All mystics talk of evolving and manifesting the perfect Light: the perfect Light, according to them, can throw an aureole round life's hours and express sublimities and sweetnesses of a superhuman kind in the human mould. Yet a bound has been felt by all mystics, an irreducible imperfection in our members that compels us ultimately to drop them and look for the end of our soul's journey in a plane that is not terrestrial - a Vedantic Brahmaloka, a Buddhist Nirvana, a Vaishnavite Gokula or Heaven. Sri Aurobindo says that if the universe is meant to be the Divine's manifestation, there must lie in the bosom of the Spirit the secret of the universe's fulfilment. In some hidden Consciousness must be waiting the archetype, the perfect ideality of our whole embodied nature. He calls

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that Consciousness Supermind or Gnosis. The gnostic plane has created the evolutionary process. Our evolving nature is upheld by a truth of its terms, a truth of its varied individuality in the gnostic plane and it has been created for expressing fully on earth itself this prime perfection. To incarnate again and again in order finally to escape beyond for good does not justify the Soul's incarnating travail. And our terrestrial nature can have no divine rationale unless it be capable of being completely divinised. Have not our mind, our vital force and our physical form derived from God's self and substance? Surely then they are here for a Godlike existence and not simply to be used awhile and thrown aside: past yogis used them thus and threw them aside because the dynamics of the supramental Gnosis were not adequately possessed. A Godlike existence can signify nothing save living no longer on any level a victim to ignorance, incapacity, failure. From top to toe God must make us His habitation. From the highest peak of the mind down to the lowest chasm of the body we must live in the Immortal's consciousness.

The implications of such a living are almost incredible: they posit as a last rapturous result a physical transformation, a change of our very stuff of matter, so that the mortal in us puts on immortality in the most palpable sense! Ever since man awoke to his own incompleteness and to a perfect Presence concealed behind phenomena the dream of a divine earth has haunted him. He has sought the elixir vitae along a multitude of paths. Disappointment has met him wherever he has searched, for the right mode of searching has never been found by him. Even his spiritual masters have told him that though the terrestrial scene can display the paradisal lustre he cannot hope for an integral manifestation. Now comes Sri Aurobindo and proclaims that the earth-scene would never have been set by the Divine except for an integral display and manifestation of Himself, and that, however strange it may seem to the disease-suffering, decay-enduring, death-accepting experience that has been ours so

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far, a divinised body immune to "crass casualty" and harmonious with the undying Spirit that descends into it is a miracle inevitable in the long and arduous but all-consummating Yoga he is doing today and offering to all who follow in his footsteps.

It must be made clear that the Aurobindonian Yoga is not for selfish seekers of health and longevity. The physical transformation is the fifth act to a drama in which egoistic desire dies at every turn of the plot and only a vast aspiration for God goes from strength to strength. It is God and not the ego who, in answer to the aspiration, flowers in the mind, the elan vital and the body. No attachment to things gross is at the back of the body's change: the thirst for divine integrality alone is the alchemist. The body's change is insisted on as a grand finale because Sri Aurobindo deems it a slur on God's creative vision and a blindness to our raison d'etre in a God-emanated cosmos to leave any part of our complex being as radically impotent to be perfect. And not just the philosopher of the Integral Yoga does Sri Aurobindo act: mystical realisation is his work and his philosophy is born from his experience. By mystical realisation he moves ahead of mysticism's glorious past to the most golden lustre our time-process can enjoy - a future in which his so-called old age will prove a prelude to a radiant renovation of the physical cells in a manner we can scarcely imagine.

Sri Aurobindo, therefore, is not only unlike a non-mystic advanced in years; he is also unlike any other mystic bearing grey hair. To look at August 15 as bringing him to the dangerous ripeness of seventy-two is to forget this unique difference. His birthday is the symbol of a step forward in the complete birth of the Divine in the human.

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