The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Is Sri Aurobindo New?

A LETTER

[This letter was first published in 1947, after being seen by Sri Aurobindo. The essential thesis of it still holds and needs to be underlined. It does not suffer because Sri Aurobindo himself has left his body. Apropos of this act of his on December 5, 1950, the author's booklet, The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence, which was fully approved by the Mother, may be read. For immediate concentrated light we may refer the reader to the Messages of the Mother soon after December 5 and to the following two given some time later. One is dated 1951: "The lack of receptivity of the earth and men is mostly responsible for the decision Sri Aurobindo has taken regarding his body. But one thing is certain: what has happened on the physical plane affects in no way the truth of his teaching. All that he said is perfectly true and remains so. Time and the course of events will prove it abundantly.” The other Message came in 1953: "Sri Aurobindo has given up his body in an act of supreme unselfishness, renouncing the realisation in his body to hasten the hour of the collective realisation. Surely if the earth were more responsive, this would not have been necessary.” The present letter is concerned to set forth the essence of "the realisation” whose pursuit constitutes the ultimate form in which Sri Aurobindo's teaching is "new”.]

The western world is often declared to be so engrossed in its new materialism that it cannot listen to any of the old spiritual messages. In a similar way the eastern world seems at times so engrossed in its old spirituality that no spiritual message that is new reaches its mind.

There are some good reasons for this unprogressive tendency. First, the spirituality of the past is really immense and its hold, therefore, cannot help being great. Second, civilisations that are, like India's, very old and have still a living continuity with their past develop an intent look backwards. Third, the accustomed meanings of spiritual terms have got impressed on our minds with such prolonged force that new complexions given them are liable to be overlooked. I was hoping, however, that there would be more than a handful who might keep on the qui vive for the

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genuinely new in spirituality and be subtle enough to understand it when it got explained in various ways and with a marvellously illuminating style as has happened in a book like The Life Divine. But if you declare that you have given days and nights to the consideration of Sri Aurobindo's vision and yoga and yet found nothing new, I am brought to the verge of despair. How shall I strike upon your eyes the novel shades of his thought, the original turns of his experience? Perhaps it is best to concentrate on presenting his newness under one aspect that would be the most spectacular, the most sensational.

To say that Sri Aurobindo is new is, of course, not to deny the many common factors between him and the Indian rishis and yogis that are gone. He stands grounded in India's colossal experience of God, and from the God-experience of no other country could he lead on to what is his own individual contribution to spirituality. In fact, the starting-point of his contribution is not anything unknown to the ancient scriptures: the Creative Consciousness of the eternal and infinite Divine putting forth the world-play and taking part in it for a various expression of Himself by purifying and illuminating our mind and life-force and body. In Vaishnavism and Tantricism the ideal of God's self-expression in our nature was the most openly held. But everywhere a definite irreducible quantity was recognised in which no self-expression of the Divine could take place. And that is why, on the most external plane, the fact of death was accepted as inherent in earth-existence. The triple formation of mind, life and body that makes up earth-existence was regarded as never capable of perfection and so always to be dropped after a time. Perfection abided somewhere beyond, whither the soul was bidden to rise, either to stay there for ever or to return after a while for the sake of suffering humanity. Birth was either to be escaped from or accepted in an endless series: in both cases no birth could be such as to allow absolute perfection of the mind-life-body formation. Disease and decay and deathwards-progressing old age were always inevitable: even the hathayogis who commanded extra-ordinary powers of reinforcing the ageing physical system by subtle vita) energy never claimed even as a possibility a complete partaking by the body in a divine physicality which by the presence of the immortal consciousness and substance would not ever die by age or disease or stroke of accident.

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You must admit that since the body is our characteristic vehicle of earth-existence there can be no entire self-manifestation of the Divine here without this vehicle being thoroughly divinised and changed into stuff of the immortal divine being with its incorruptible illumination and imperishable bliss and power. No so-called natural law or necessity should compel this body to suffer disease and grow aged and finally die or remain open to accident and be a victim to "crass casualty". Disease and old age and the death consequent upon them or due to sudden violent circumstance are a stamp of undivinity - they are in the body what ignorance and falsehood and obscuration are in our mental and vital consciousness. A divinised being on earth is one in whom not merely the mental and vital consciousness but also the physical instrument has been changed into divine and therefore fully illumined and immortal and immune substance. Indeed, no such change can be wholly effected in the former without a corresponding change in the latter - unless they stand aloof from it and do not associate themselves with it for God's manifestation on earth. As there is the association indispensable for manifesting God on earth, the imperfection of the body would interfere with the perfect working of the mental and vital elements for terrestrial purposes. Hence it follows that, so long as the body's imperfection is accepted as in the last resort irremediable, there can be no vision by any yogi of integral transformation.

And if you give close thought to the matter you will observe that, so long as an irreducible quantity of imperfection is acknowledged, a tremendous hiatus is caused between the Divine and earth-existence. All, says the ancient wisdom, is the Divine. But if all is the Divine, then all can manifest divine values perfectly in an evolutionary scheme like our earth's: there cannot be an irreducible quantity of the imperfect in man's career through time. Once the quantity is granted in spite of the process of evolution, we automatically make a division in ultimate being: there is the Divine and there is the undivine which cannot wholly express and be transformed into divine values. To fight clear of this dualism arises the theory of māyā, Illusion. Whatever holds the irreducible quantity of the imperfect cannot really exist - it must be a hallucination, a strange non-being that yet seems to have existence. The only thing to do

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for the seeker of "the one entire and perfect chrysolite", the innate idealist in man wanting the Absolute, the Flawless, the hundred per cent Divine, is to get rid of this illusion and pass into the formless and nameless samadhi, Nirvana, Nirguna Brahman. If we are told that something undivinisable is present in the world-elements, we may yet choose to work for the world and look upon the world as valuable because there are also so many God-expressive parts in it, but the deepest self in us will always feel discontented, unappeased, impatient and know that not here is the Grand Terminus of the soul's evolution, the scene of its integral fulfilment. And in the long run the countries where this deepest self is most active will yield, in spite of all theories of the world as līlā or God's play, to the theory of the world as māyā.

India is overshadowed by the māyā theory not just because India has lost her ancient vigour: it is also because India is irrepressibly influenced by the deepest self and that perfection-haunted dweller within cannot accept as real whatever fails to admit of total divinisation. Nothing save extreme Shankarite sannyāsa, nothing save extreme Buddhistic tyāga can be the logical result for a spiritual aspirant who accepts an undivinisable factor in our nature's constituents. The pull towards the Beyond, towards utter rejection of the world for a supra-cosmic status cannot be helped - and really should not be opposed if the Divine, the wholly Perfect, is our goal. And yet even Shankara and Buddha with their illusionist attitude were drawn to world-work, to some effort at manifestation of the Spirit, at irradiation of our nature by the Secret Splendour. Here also is an instinct that is innate. But it can have justification only if our nature is really capable of divine irradiation. Between the instinct to withdraw to the Beyond because of our nature's ultimate residue of the undivinisable with its consequent Mayic emptiness and the instinct to illumine our nature as much as possible as though it were something real and not Mayic - between these two instincts the fight must go on, with a trend more and more towards the former because the allure of the aloof Perfection to the dreamer in us of spiritual plenitude is greater than that of the world-intimate imperfect shedding of manifesting light. This fight is the history of Indian spirituality in the past. It can end only if a NEW vision is both entertained and practised - the vision of

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complete illumination down to the very cells of the body - the vision of the body's utter divinisation!

Can you aver that such a vision has been in the past? Can you quote to me any yogi who has said as the Mother has said: "Physical death is no part of our programme"?¹ Where in any scripture is the assertion that the completely God-realised man has a body which is no longer subject to disease, decay and death and that this body need not be given up because of the operation of any so-called Nature's law or necessity? Great yogis are declared to leave the body and depart from life, at will; but this they do in anticipation of the stroke of death and the body they leave is no intrinsically incorruptible substance but generally the seat of some disease or other - cancer of the throat in Ramakrishna, asthma and diabetes in Vivekananda, blood-poisoning in Dayananda. Even that champion hathayogi, Pavhari Baba, whom Vivekananda was at times sorely tempted by his own ailments to consult and take as master, gave up his corporeal frame because of some affliction that had overtaken it. Never in the past has there been any vision of the thoroughly divinised body, immune even from accidents, as the external support for an integrally divine manifestation. If that vision put forth by Sri Aurobindo is not NEW, and revolutionarily NEW at that, tell me what significance the word NEW has!

You may be sceptical about the probability of so radical a transformation or even argue that it is not desirable. But how can you say that what Sri Aurobindo is asking for is old? Most certainly the transformation he has in mind is not "a statement in another language of the age-old cry of the mystic". It does not stand for merely a purified saintly life - not even for the magnificent selflessness of a Gautama. It is something no mystic has ever wholly dreamed of in a practical positive manner, though some intuition of it has always been vaguely at work behind all our efforts at manifesting the Divine. Despite that faint intuition, no mystic has dared to place in the forefront a transformation such as Sri Aurobindo wants. They may employ the same term but his meaning cannot be theirs. This is so

¹. It must be understood that life's perpetuation for the sake of an unending activity of the unregenerate human ego is not the immortality aimed at. In fact, any perpetuation as such is not desired: what is desired is the Divine in the body and the Divine's inherent deathlessness as part of the body's realisation of Him.

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because no mystic had the full organised wide-awake knowledge of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind or Truth-Consciousness, nor the active effective experience of its mighty alchemic process. There is a tendency to think that Supermind means only "above the mind" and coincides with what other seers have discovered to be divine levels of being, higher than the mind yet lower than the "Ultimate Transcendent Reality". The Latin word "super", as used by Sri Aurobindo, has a particular significance which emerges with unique force once we look at his table of what is above the mind. He speaks of the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuitive Mind, the Overmind, and then the Supermind. The word "super" does not indiscriminately cover all these levels. It acquires, as distinguished from the word "over", a shade of utter supremacy, and in his expositions the Supermind does not do service for merely the highest level of being below the "Ultimate Transcendent Reality" but is part and parcel of that Reality: only it is the part that is turned towards creation, towards the bringing forth and harmonisation of the truths implicit in the Transcendent for world-play.

There are many terms both in western and eastern mysticism which appear on the surface to contain the essence of the Aurobindonian Supermind, but they basically do not. Take the "Nous" of the Neo-Platonists. The Supermind is not this Nous: it is the consciousness of which the Neo-Platonic Nous is a weak, vague and diffuse description. All the planes above the mind are spiritual ones and are the play of a luminous unity in a diversity of delight: there is natural to them what I have called in a poem of mine "the shining smile of the one Self everywhere", they form a pattern and harmony whose wavering reflex and echo we find in our universe. All of them, therefore, are Nous - the consciousness whose multiple singlehood is the formative arche-type of things here. The apex of this consciousness is the Overmind. I cannot tell whether Plotinus had a glimpse of the Overmind: perhaps it was his glimpse of it that he put into the poetic account in his Enneads of the ecstatic interfusion of glorious God-forms in the spiritual world. But all this does not identify Nous with the Supermind. Just as the Overmind, the world of the greatest Gods, seems to be the archetype of our universe, so also the Supermind is the archetype of the "over-

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mental" plane. In other words, as compared to "life here the Overmind is perfection; but, as compared to what is still beyond, the Overmind is imperfect Nature rounded off in general without a flawless balance and harmony between the One and the Many. The Overmind is not Ignorance: it is Knowledge, yet it is Knowledge on the way to being Ignorance. So the Neo-Platonic Nous is very distant from being "supramental" - and the proof is simply this: complete conscious awareness of the Supermind must mean the awareness and revelation of the chief secret of the Supermind, namely, that man's entire nature, down to his material substance, can be divinised in an immortal perfect existence on earth. Nor would such awareness and revelation stop short of a spontaneous effort to divinise and immortalise the earth-sheath. The Supermind's essence is the power it possesses to effect a total and integral divinisation. That power could never have been plumbed before, nobody ever thought it possible to produce so fundamental a change. Not merely is Plotinus's Nous ruled out: even the Vedas and the Upanishads and the Gita were not acquainted with any direct dynamic realisation of the Supermind in relation to terrestrial Nature. They have grand hints and glimmerings of it: the Vedas' Satyam Ritam Brihat, The True, the Right, the Vast - the Upanishads' Vijnāna, the all-comprehensive Knowledge - the Gita's Purushottama with Parā-prakriti, the Supreme Being with His Super-Nature. But no radically transforming intimacy with it was present. To be uplifted into it in a trance or to be lost in it and pass through its golden gate into the supracosmic Unknown or else to work under its glowing guidance from afar and above is not the same thing as to ascend to it and live in it with one's physical eyes open and bring about its progressive descent - as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do.

The constant day-to-day living in the light of the Supermind and the supramental descent into our whole constitution in order to shape a divine mind, a divine life-force, a divine body: this is the aim and the decisive condition of Sri Aurobindo's yoga. But there is a long and difficult way to go, a hard task of self-consecration, self-purification, self-discipline, a development on many lines and an opening to the Divine Shakti and Her working on all the planes to be carried through before this

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decisive condition can he reached. That an opportunity may be given to others for this long training and process and a nucleus formed of seekers after this great transformation, Sri Aurobindo has let an Ashram grow around him. In this nucleus the seekers have to grow out of the habits and tendencies created by the past opposite trends of human existence, the clinging to the egoistic life and its ignorance and the revolt against life and finally the satisfaction with a half and half spiritual effort and realisation, and so make themselves fit for the final movement of an integral and supramental Yoga. A successful formation of such a nucleus is evidently a necessary preliminary condition for the work Sri Aurobindo has undertaken for the world since he aims not only at an individual realisation but at a great collective descent of the highest truth into life and a new power on the earth for the liberation and perfection of mankind.

I may point out further that it is this yoga's newness that is responsible for the length of Sri Aurobindo's labour. Though forty years have passed since he set forth on the via mystica and though all the achievements of Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Karma Yoga seem compassed and though on the one hand the Nirvana of Buddha and on the other the Tantric awakening of all the occult chakras in the body appear to be realised, Sri Aurobindo still declares that his labour has not come to its end. Do you imagine that a spiritual genius like him has to continue for forty years to nearly attain what others have got within half a dozen years or so? Surely it is clear that he is at a mighty unparalleled job: there is an obvious case for considering his goal momentously new. The period of time taken depends, where spiritual geniuses are concerned, on what their goals are and the goal of Sri Aurobindo is not reached yet because that stupendous thing - the integral descent of the Supermind - has not shown itself utterly in the most outer physical. What has already happened, however, is more significant than anything in the history of Indian spirituality, for only the last steps in the top-to-toe descent remain and not even the first extraordinary steps that lead to these last have been taken by anyone hitherto. Even before the last hundredth step there must be the sovereign entry into the Supermind with its clear vision of total transformation: can you point to any yogi or rishi who gives

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signs of that clear vision, leave aside indications of the practice of the full dynamics of the supramental descent? Is there any wonder the disciples of Sri Aurobindo say that this path is new and different?

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