The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Doubts and the Life Divine

A LETTER OF 1947

I myself have gone through many of your doubts and waverings. I have none of them any more. I may not be able to dispel all your difficulties, but some remarks may be of help to you.

You seem to be struggling against three kinds of obstructions. The first is a fundamental uncertainty about the Divine's presence. This uncertainty cannot be removed by reasoning only. I dare say I can intellectually make out some sort of a case for the Divine's presence, but I cannot wholly prove anything. Neither, for that matter, can you wholly prove to me the contrary by mere logic. This should make you see that we are in a region where more than the mind's argumentation is of genuine avail. The mystical path and the mystical illumination demand a certain deep instinct to start you off and sustain you. When this instinct is strong and takes a central place in your being, the mind's doubt about the Divine's presence becomes ineffective and you are aware of that presence even in the most dark and distressing situations. To make the most of this instinct you have to turn towards somebody who has followed it in himself firmly and far - a Guru. Then you are enabled to go beyond a living faith into a living radiance, for you contact the soul in you that is always filled with the Divine. I can't say that such a radiance is very intense in me, much less that I have illumined knowledge or the supreme realisation. I am only on the threshold of the mystical life, but Sri Aurobindo has helped me to stand there and not fall hopelessly back. And he has helped me mainly by giving something of his own being, by casting on me something of his own atmosphere. Of course his writings have greatly influenced me, but I could not have properly absorbed their influence without my approaching him primarily for spiritual rather than intellectual aid - a direct touch of his own Yogic state rather than an indirect touch through a mental exposition or arrangement of his experience.

The first thing, therefore, to do if you are mystically inclined and yet have misgivings about the Divine's presence is to open yourself to one you feel to be a Yogi. Nothing else will truly and

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basically help you. And the emergence of the soul's radiance will also go a long way towards curing you of the restlessness born of the second kind of obstruction - namely, the puzzlement vis-à-vis the problems of karma and rebirth, death and after-death, the why and whither of the universe, the raison d'être of pain and suffering, poverty and destitution. Even if no complete answer is forthcoming at the start, you will have a profound tranquillity. The mind may go on revolving its problems, but you will not be upset by them - and nothing will make you deviate from the conviction that there is surely an answer even to the most baffling riddle. What is more, you will feel that since the Divine is there, it is only by getting into full communion with Him that the complete and satisfying solution can be arrived at, for the mind has not made the world or woven its manifold texture and so cannot grasp in an "interior" way its warp and woof. The Divine's consciousness is not like the mind, it is not divided from the essence of things but is aware of it by an identity because that essence is ultimately the Divine Himself. If there is such a consciousness - and we cannot doubt its existence once the soul in us has put its radiant finger upon our normal being - then evidently our perplexities can end only by our rising into it. The soul by itself is able to give quite an amount of instinctive understanding, but it cannot provide total knowledge. To get that knowledge vaster and higher realisations have to be won through the soul: the Cosmic Consciousness has to be compassed and the Transcendental Truth attained.

Here, however, I must say that the Cosmic Consciousness and the Transcendental Truth have many shades and grades. Various Yogis have given out of their realisations various answers to the enigmas that are plaguing you. These answers they have couched in mental terms according to the type and quality of their minds. As far as India is concerned, there are for example, Buddha's answer and Shankara's and Ramanuja's and Madhwa's and Vivekananda's. I have mentioned answers more or less philosophically expressed. Some have the character of philosophical intuition rather than philosophical intellection: those of the Upanishads. Others are a blend of the two: the Gita's. Still others have a symbolic poetic character: the Rig Veda's. Some have an air of homely wisdom and a species of commonsense-coloured depth: Ramakrishna's. Sri Aurobindo

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has an affinity, in the basic message, with the Rig Veda, the early Upanishads, the Gita and the gospel of Ramakrishna, though he brings in addition to the manner of the seer or the poet or the pragmatist a fully formed philosophical expression which can compare quite well with any in the past. The affinity I speak of arises from the many-sidedness which is present in the Rig Veda, the early Upanishads, the Gita and Ramakrishna's gospel. Sri Aurobindo is not inclined to make trenchant divisions and to erect an extreme into the whole truth. He is disposed to be comprehensive and global and not confine himself to a limited and exclusive intensity of insight. He favours no sharp cutting asunder of the Gordian knot of the universe's mystery: his is the attempt to unravel all the devious strands and show how each of them has a part to play and does not deserve to be ripped off suddenly and summarily.

An Aurobindonian does not run down any Yogi; he refuses, however, to be single-tracked. Ramana Maharshi, for instance, has a wonderfully luminous realisation of the Silent Self and all that he says is charged with its truth. Just because a man follows Sri Aurobindo, he does not reject Ramana Maharshi as a false guide: the latter has caught hold of spiritual Reality - but in one aspect out of many, an aspect that cannot be overlooked or left unseized but is not the sole one. If it were the sole one, a devotee like Chaitanya who is all absorbed in a Personal Active Deity would be a hallucinated fool. Even Buddha would be reckoned as misguided since, though he too was the apostle of a Supreme Silence and Impersonality, he did not call it the Self but named it Non-Being or Nirvana. The large variety of spiritual experience creates the presumption not, as sceptics suppose, that here is a field of hopeless contradiction and therefore purely subjective individual illusion but that here is some Reality which has a thousand faces and that individuals usually see one face or another. A many-sidedness and comprehensiveness and globality seem to be eminently called for. Those who have tended towards them appear to have got nearest the ultimate Truth-Consciousness. Sri Aurobindo goes even beyond all past realisation and expression of them, so much so that he will not reject any part of our nature as lying for ever outside the possibility of divinisation: even our most material being has, for him, a supporting truth or archetype in the Divine Reality and can be

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transformed by a descent of that archetype. If many-sidedness and comprehensiveness and globality are pointers to the highest Truth, then Sri Aurobindo by his super-synthesis, his absolute integrality, can surely be regarded as "more advanced on the spiritual path, more perfect, more correct, more enlightened than others". And it is not unreasonable to suppose that one who is such is likely also to give us the last word on sundry problems literary and artistic and philosophical and political and sociological, provided there is ample development in him of the literary, artistic, philosophical, political and sociological consciousness. This, of course, does not debar a disciple of Sri Aurobindo's from discussing matters with him and making suggestions to him. Sri Aurobindo encourages discussion and invites suggestion, for often a lively give-and-take of the mind the best means of preparing the right mental state for a formulation of the truth of things.

I personally find Sri Aurobindo's answers very satisfying because of their integrality: he brings into his vision all the aspects of a case and presses towards such a solution as would draw out the truths of them and combine these truths into a final light. His light is not exclusively of this colour or that, but like the sun's, a sovereign lustre in which the hues of the entire rainbow are held in an ultimate fusion. And with that light playing, the tone and turn of the reply, which you imagine an Aurobindonian giving when the undesirable phenomena of life challenge him, are impossible. I do not maintain my "peace of mind" by a reply like the one you construct for me: "Oh, this is quite simple and clear; this is due to that and that is the result of this; God is in all and all are in God; the world is the manifestation of the One in its process of becoming the Many; there is in fact no sorrow, grief, suffering, and evil but all is an appearance and the Inner Being is indestructible and eternal." Mind you, I am not saying that the reply you imagine is quite off the mark. It has a certain truth, though a limited one: what in it is uncharacteristic of an Aurobindonian is as much the facile form of it as the limitation of its truth. It seems to hail from a rather queer creature - a robustly optimistic Browningesque Mayavadin!

An Aurobindonian is not a Mayavadin nor robustly optimistic; he is a Yogi radiantly realistic: he does not brush aside obnoxious things with an easy wave of the hand and a cheerful shutting of

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the eyes as if by ignoring them he could prove them to be not there: he does know that the Inner Being is indestructible and eternal and that behind all the discord and distress the divine felicity abides and the divine unity reigns, but he faces fully the terrible surface of things and regards it as very real indeed though a reality of the surface and he strives his utmost to change and transform and divinise it instead of fleeing from it as if it were Māyā, an illusory appearance. No Yoga has the shallow Browningesque attitude - it may be optimistic, yet without minimising sorrow, grief, suffering and evil. What does Sri Krishna in the Gita say? "Thou that hast come into this transitory and unhappy world, turn thy love to Me." Surely there is no cheap cheerfulness here. Deeply and poignantly the misery of time is felt; but together with it is felt also the possibility of a huge and happy escape by way of love of the Divine, the Inner Being, the indestructible and eternal Reality. Indeed, all Yoga is radiantly realistic - even Buddha with his notion that all cosmos is an illusion recognises intensely the duhkha, the suffering of life in it, while dwelling with great exultation on the exit he has found from this duhkha. Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga is all the more realistic by not subscribing to illusionism in the Buddhist sense or even to the Gita's doctrine that though action in the world is never to be disdained as a revolving in a field of Māyā our true and final abode is in some supra-cosmic status after death has brought the God-realised soul its liberation from bodily existence. Sri Aurobindo is not content with substituting Līlā, or God's play in the world, for Māyā or the universal illusion of activity. Līlā too looks beyond, it does not offer a complete fulfilment here and now of the whole self and nature of us, it does not provide for total divinisation. And inasmuch as it does not, it stresses the Beyond as the goal and puts earth life into a minor place and tends to see it as less real than the Beyond.

Sri Aurobindo never stresses the Beyond at the expense of earth-life: the call of earth is to him as insistent and as real as that of heaven, and a final liberation into the latter does not solve for him the acute problems around us. Unless sorrow, grief, suffering and evil are accepted as realities that will brook no forsaking of them, the Aurobindonian cannot reach the con- summation of his Yoga. He must tackle them until they are changed and replaced not by a Beyond but by a divinisation on

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earth itself of earth's constituents. Yes, he is most realistic. At the same time, he exceeds all other types of Yogis by being most radiantly so, for he has the largest hope - the hope of transforming what others accept either only for the time being or as only part brightenable by the Divine's presence. He does not merely realise the Consciousness in which everything is for ever and unchangeably divine - God is in all and all are in God. He adds to it another vision and experience - God not only in all but coming out in all, all not only in God but bringing out God. This simultaneously implies for him an unflinching realism and world-labour on the one hand and on the other an unqualified radiance and world-fulfilment. And an Aurobindonian's reply to the challenge of an imperfect world would be: "Life is no simple scheme of events and it has many chequered passages: its intricacy cannot be explained away or its difficulty met on the cheap; the process of the One becoming the Many is hardly the entire rationale of a world emerging from the brute blindness of matter into the hungerings of life and the dreamings of mind; God's presence is indeed everywhere and yet in terms evolution He has still to be everywhere present; the world's essence is divine but the world's appearance which is undivine is no phantasm and it has not to be left at last by the ascending soul but to be transformed by the descending Spirit; the Inner Being's indestructibility and eternity are insufficient for me, the most outer being also must become a stuff that neither perishes nor remains a miserable victim to fate and chance and powers of darkness."

Mention of the integral divinisation which is the aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga brings me to the third kind of obstruction in your way. Excuse my dubbing this kind shallow and flimsy. Is it not absurd to prevent Sri Aurobindo from using the words "I" and "me" and "my" just because he has destroyed his ego and surrendered his self to the Divine? Why should his use of them point to any egoistic motive? All Yogis use personal pronouns for themselves - from the Vedic Rishis down to Ramakrishna. Such using is at times absolutely necessary for intercourse in the world of men. Besides, why do you confine the "I" to the ego? The ego is a particular formation in ignorant Nature; but behind it is the real "I", the individual soul. To ignore the individual soul is to make nonsense of almost every spiritual attainment, for

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if the attainment is real and not just one more illusion in a world of illusions there must be someone who attains something, someone who gets liberated from mortal bondage, someone who evolves and reaches fulfilment. Surely the ego cannot perform these acts; it is the individual soul which does so. And the individual soul is not, like the ego, the opposite of the universal or a perversion of the transcendental, it can open into them and be united with them, for it is the complement of the former and the delegate of a divine archetype of itself existing in the latter. When Sri Aurobindo speaks in terms of "I" and "me" and "my", he means the individual soul of him that has become united with its own archetype in the transcendental and embraced its own complement, the universal. A divine triad, with one member of it - namely, the individual soul - as the frontal instrument: that is what Sri Aurobindo the Yogi is. There is nothing egoistic in his employing that frontal instrument. And since the new work he is doing, the work of integral transformation and supramentalisation which none of the past masters attempted with full consciousness of its possibility - since this work is carried on by that frontal instrument of his own highest being, it is quite appropriate that he should occasionally employ terms with a colour of individuality in them.

Furthermore, who told you that it is the impersonal consciousness of the Eternal that works the transformation of the earth-consciousness? If the impersonal consciousness were the only eternal factor, there would be no personal existence anywhere: personality implies a divine truth of itself which is trying to get manifested in the earth-consciousness: a supreme Personal Consciousness is also an eternal factor and it is this that carries on the transforming process of which Sri Aurobindo speaks and this, whenever a special call for direct utterance is felt, can best utter its messages and its purposes through the incarnate Figure of Sri Aurobindo by words like "I" and "me" and "my": there is no incongruity in his saying, "My Integral Yoga." Your notions of individuality and personality strike me as very superficial: individuality and personality are not opposed to self-surrender and self-dedication to the Divine Mother nor are they destroyed by those gestures and acts; nor, I may add, are they incompatible, in the manifold and harmonious truth of the Divine, with a realisation of the impersonal infinite, the impersonal

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eternal. What is opposed and destroyed is the desire-ridden feverish fragment that is the ego - and the ego also is what is incompatible with the impersonal realisation.

I have tried to clear your mind. I cannot, however, be sure that you will find peace and light by my efforts. Mental aid in spiritual matters can be effective only if you want it to be so or if you are really open to conversion. There is in our minds a perpetual doubter doubting for doubt's own sake. Don't let him take possession of you under the guise of the genuine spirit of inquiry and the genuine mood of perplexity.

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