The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo and Human Evolution

"I have no intention of giving any sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco."¹ These ringing challenging words come from the greatest spiritual figure of modern India: Sri Aurobindo. They were meant to refuse acceptance of what he called "a partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the law of the external nature."² Although originally applied to a particular crisis in a disciple's career, the surmounting of the habitual outer personality with its petty and egoistic ways of thought, feeling, character and action, they can be taken in general to suggest Sri Aurobindo's keen sense of the need for a new principle and power of spiritual life to solve the many- sided problem of man's imperfect nature.

To grasp what Sri Aurobindo stands for, we must first seize the significance of the phrase "spiritual life". Historical India has had no uncertainty about it. "Spiritual" does not mean merely "cultural" or, as is mostly the case today, merely "moral". Of course, spirituality has in its essence a supreme refinement and liberality as also an extreme honesty, purity, unselfishness and benevolence. Yet its essence goes beyond the values of the intellectual, the aesthetic and the ethical being. Even religious values - concerned primarily as they are with a set of dogmas, pietistic practices, modes of external worship to support and satisfy one's faith in and fervour for the supernatural - cannot be quite equated with it. It does not deny all these values, but it goes to the concrete experience of a more-than-human Reality hidden from us, a Reality eternal and infinite whose partial and divided reflections are caught in all that we ordinarily consider the highest humanity. Spirituality is oneness with or at least effective participation in that secret existence: it is for evolutionary man the act or state of what India has called Yoga. The word "Yoga" has the same root as the English "yoke" - it connotes the being yoked or joined or united with the more-than-human, the divine, the perfect, through a disciplined process of inner development.

This process is sometimes preluded by the practice of certain

¹. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 24, p. 1306.

². Ibid.

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extraordinary physical postures and breathing exercises. But they have never been considered necessary to the central object of Yoga. The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo starts straight with the consciousness and puts a double aim before it: transcendence and transformation. That double aim is in general all Yoga's, but much depends on the precise content read in it. In the past, the whole meaning of transcendence lay in getting beyond the ordinary human self into some aloof Absolute or some Cosmic Consciousness or some Oversoul that is this self's Lord and Lover. Transformation meant sagehood and saintliness, a calmly compassionate, wisely energetic and helpful living from within outwards, which brings others not only happiness but also touch of the transcendence achieved by the sage and the saint. The philosophy behind this spirituality has been either that the world is a huge illusion from which its victims have to be drawn away into an illimitable peace, or that here is a mysterious play of God with the soul around a theme of love's hide and seek, or else that a creative divine Force is sweeping the soul upward through various phases of effective self-expression to an ultimate identity with the Supreme Spirit above Nature. Ascetic quietism, ecstatic devotionalism, enlightened dynamism have been the three main strands of the Indian spiritual life. But the first has acquired prominence because of a tremendous trenchancy in it, its impatience with any kind of "make-do" with a world which, whatever the transformative influence brought to it, seems compounded of some stuff of radical and irremediable imperfection. After all, even the other ways of spirituality end up with a passing out of the world-scene, an attainment of a Beyond where alone is fulfilment found. A clean cut, therefore, between matter and Spirit has often struck the baffled aspiring mind of man as the most satisfying solution.

Sri Aurobindo holds that by such a clean cut nothing is really solved: the problem is shirked and shelved and, though the Nirvana of Buddha and the Absolute Brahman of Shankara are grand experiences that no aspirant to all-round spirituality can afford to ignore or miss the original Indian drive towards a many-sided harmony, towards an accord of the Here and the Beyond, is left uncompleted. At the same time he recognises that the means adopted so far for changing the earth from a mêlée of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, beauty and ugliness,

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strength and weakness, into a mould for the Divine's manifestation have been inadequate. The Yoga of God's enrapturing love and the Yoga of God's uplifting power have indeed a splendour which cannot be depreciated, they have unsealed great springs of idea and action; and yet they have failed to break the ultimate rock, so to speak, from which the full fountain of the Life Divine may leap. Philosophically, though they did not deny like the Illusionists the world's value, they overlooked three basic points.

First, the world is a field of evolution in which through a succession of births the growing inmost soul in us prepares three instruments - the physical, the vital, the mental - and unless these instruments find a perfection of their own, there can be no fulfilment of the evolutionary scheme. Merely for a sojourning soul to develop itself and utilise them exaltedly for a while and then, discarding them as incapable of entire divinisation, pass on beyond is surely to bypass the purpose of evolution. Together with the inmost being's growth into the Divine we must have the instrumental nature's completion if we are to appease the urge that has always found voice in human history - the mind's search for flawless knowledge of the world's dynamics, the life-force's cry for happiness and co-operative abundance and triumphant activity, the body's passion for health, stability, continuance. Transformation must signify the perfecting of our nature-parts to the full, a total conquest of the difficulties with which evolution is beset, the establishment of a divinised mind, a divinised life-force, a divinised body - a spiritual victory in the very field that is the concern of science. The Yogi must prove to be the super-scientist. Then alone can spirituality have integral and utterly incontrovertible justification for earth-beings. That is the first point to be emphasised.

The second point is the rationale of the spirituality which is super-science. Is the required divinisation possible by the way things are constituted? "Yes," answers Sri Aurobindo. Evolution starts with a seeming opposite of all that we can imagine of Godhead: a vast welter of blind brute energy - insensitive, unconscious, amoral matter. Out of this arises the élan of life and out of life arises the activity of mind. Sri Aurobindo says that evolution occurs because the emergent powers are already in a state of involution within the physical cosmos. And the involution is the last stage in a series of grades downward - a

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devolution - from the supreme Spirit, a series in which plane of mind and life occultly exist between Spirit and matter. Forces of these planes press upon matter and enter into it to assist the push within it to evolve life and mind in material terms. The supreme Spirit also has an involved figure of itself in matter and that is why there can be no ultimate satisfaction in earth existence without a straining towards the spiritual. Once the mental level has emerged, the inmost soul is able to function with some of its light in the forefront and, through the pursuit of ideals and values, through the ache for the infinite, the eternal, the deific, it helps its instruments, our nature-parts, in that onward and upward straining. But since the Spirit is not only beyond but even here - and here not only as a Cosmic Consciousness containing and enveloping all but also as an entity hidden in the very atoms of the physical universe and progressively active in the stuff of life and mind - its outflowering in our nature-parts must be possible and the liberating touch and penetration from the Spirit's uninvolved status above can be no alien intrusion but God's coming into His own through an evolutionary process. Divinisation of mind and life and body can be accomplished only if there is a fundamental identity of substance between the higher and the lower: that is, if the lower is a particular phenomenal organisation put forth for working out some potentiality of the masterful infinite that is the higher.

Having seen what the spiritual goal of the evolutionary process is and how its attainment is grounded in the nature of things, we must get into conceptual focus the exact principle and power of the Spirit which provides the ground and goal. In Sri Aurobindo's view, the Spirit is the Truth of existence not in the sense of the Real as opposed to the unreal that is the universe of mind and life and matter, or in the sense of the Perfect that can never be found in the world's formations. Sri Aurobindo avers that if all things have come from the Spirit, there must be in the Spirit a supporting original of them. No doubt, the Spirit is an ineffable freedom from all that is here, it is not limited by anything, it exceeds all that we can conceive; but, while exceeding all, it does not negate all: of its reality they are phases and init must be the archetypes, the perfect patterns, of which all the formations of the world are evolving terms. Divine counterparts of mind and life and matter must reside in it, fully manifested in

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a flawless harmony in the Beyond and concealed in their fullness within the laboriously evolving terms here, the twofold presence of them constituting by descent and ascent a manifestation upon earth. Such presence alone, with its descending and ascending movement, can provide the exact goal and ground of evolutionary fulfilment, it alone can be the genuine significant Truth of the cosmos and of the individual centres through which the involved cosmic possibilities blossom forth. Sri Aurobindo calls it Supermind, Gnosis, Creative Truth-Consciousness.

The Aurobindonian Supermind is not an entirely new discovery. As early as the Vedas, there was the vision of it as Satyam Ritam Brihat - the True, the Right, the Vast - and it was symbolised as the Sun of Knowledge in the highest heaven. But either it was experienced in deep trance from which its whole import could not be transmitted or what was seized was its reflection in the several grades between it and the mental level - grades distinguished by Sri Aurobindo from that level upwards as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. On each of these levels the Spirit has an organised existence in which it is self-revealed, each carries something of which our universe seems a half-lit image-echo; but the Spirit's self-revelation differs in intensity from grade to grade. In the Overmind it is so intense that most yogis and mystics have hardly looked further, they have believed the ultimate omniscience and omnipotence to be here, and yet this greatness has not the secret of the total transformation. No more than grand hints and glimmerings of the Supermind have been caught up to now. If there had been a clear and concrete seizure of it, its precise potentialities in reference to the evolutionary process would have been gauged. The realisation of the Supermind's significance and intention, by a wide-awake union with its Truth-Consciousness, is Sri Aurobindo's contribution to spiritual experience. The systematic detailed exposition of them is his contribution to philosophy. And the direct application of them to the problems of individual and collective living in his Ashram at Pondicherry is his contribution to practical world-work.

These three contributions render Sri Aurobindo the most important influence for humanity's future, the spiritual India of history reaching its climax and giving modern times a stimulus of the profoundest creativity. Behind the stimulus was a versatile

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personality who could claim to be representative of both East and West and who seemed to hold in himself, like a greater Leonardo da Vinci, the seeds of a new age. A Bengali by birth, he was yet educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England, first at St. Paul's School, London, and then at King's College, Cambridge. Over and above using the English language as if it were his mother-tongue, he was a brilliant classical scholar who made his mark not only at Cambridge but also in the open competition for the I.C.S. by his record scoring in Greek and Latin. Fluent knowledge of French, Italian and German was another of his accomplishments. Together with his linguistic proficiency, close study of European history and institutions gave him insight into the whole heart of Western culture. On return to India, after deliberately absenting himself from the riding tests in the I.C.S. examination and thus getting disqualified for official co-operation with the British Government, the years that he spent in state service with the then Gaekwad of Baroda were used by him for literary self-development, mastery of Sanskrit as well as several modern Indian languages, and intense absorption of the culture of the Orient. A period of educationist activity followed. Soon he launched into politics and became an all-India figure as the leader of Bengal in the struggle against foreign rule. In eight years he changed the face of the Indian political scene: working with Tilak he fixed the idea of complete independence in his country's mind. Here it is interesting to note that India's Day of Independence, August 15, is not symbolically connected with any event in the life of Gandhi or Nehru but happens to be the birthday of Sri Aurobindo.

Three times in those momentous eight years he was accused of sedition, yet never convicted: on the most famous occasion of the three, when he went through a year's undertrial detention in jail and C.R. Das, the future leader of Bengal, appeared as his counsel and, by a curious stroke of fate, the judge at his trial was one Mr. Beachcroft whom he had beaten to second place in Greek and Latin in the I.C.S. competition, Rabindranath Tagore addressed to him a long stirring poem opening, "Aurobindo, Rabindranath bows to you." During his political career he began the practice of Yoga and rapidly went through the traditional spiritual experiences which had been considered the crown of mystic realisation. He pressed on farther in order to cure the

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defect which had rendered spirituality in the past, for all its gigantic achievements, incapable of altering radically the life of the race. In response to an inner call he left the field of politics and withdrew in 1910 to Pondicherry in French India for concentrated attainment and manifestation of the Supermind. There he was joined after a few years by one who in far Europe had been fired by the same integral aspiration and had proceeded on similar lines of spiritual experience. She settled in Pondicherry and became, at his express wish, the head and guide of his Ashram and the chief radiating centre of the new Light which he sought to establish in earth-terms.

In 1950 Sri Aurobindo, at 78, departed from his body-which was laid in a specially prepared vault in the Ashram courtyard after lying in state for five days during which it was testified by French as well as Indian doctors to be showing in spite of the tropical climate no sign of decomposition or even discolouration.¹ Sri Aurobindo's samadhi (resting-place) has grown a venue of pilgrimage. The Ashram instead of suffering a setback by his departure developed on the contrary a new intensity of spiritual life, as if the passing of the Master whom innumerable people had known by experience to possess supernormal power over even physical circumstances were a sort of strategic sacrifice in the interests of his own work. His co-worker whom the disciples have called the Mother was determined to carry on until the goal set by him would be reached: the beginning of a divine humanity, a new step in evolution as definite as the one from animal to man and not just an enrichment or enlargement on the same level.

The Ashram today is an organisation in which hundreds of souls - men, women and children from several countries - are being shaped to be the nucleus of the new humanity. It is a scene of varied enterprise, with engineers, doctors, craftsmen, physical culturists, sportsmen and manual workers no less than artists, poets, musicians and thinkers, trying to be the instruments of a novel inspiration. Sri Aurobindo's call is not to the wilderness: modern times in all their subtlety and complexity are accepted by him, for the spiritual life can be most fruitful only when it is organic to the age, takes stock of whatever is current, keeps in touch with contemporary problems and needs. Typical of the

¹. The author was himself one of the thousands of eye-witnesses to this phenomenon.

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modernity of the Aurobindonian Yoga is the insistence that the production of a few extraordinary individuals is not the object. A collective, a social transformation is wanted. And that is why the spiritual work, though unimplicated in politics, is never indifferent to the crises brought about in any part of the world by tyrannies that seek to arrest into a single-typed thought-fettered uniformity the many-sided evolutionary nature of man which can be fulfilled only by a diversity in unity, a freedom within co-operation. But Sri Aurobindo has always reminded the world that its dreams of liberty and democracy and international harmony cannot really come true unless there is a progressive inward dedication to the service of the divine Supermind which is the whole sense of his Yoga.

Here a few words would be in place about Sri Aurobindo's attitude to the scientific temper of modern times. We have already said that the Aurobindonian Yoga does not dissociate itself from the current and the contemporary. This should imply that there is nothing obscurantist about it. In fact it welcomes many of the mental qualities science has helped to cultivate. Sri Aurobindo's stay in England coincided with the heyday of scientific materialism. And, though he prophesied quite early that its negation of the extra-sensory and the supra-physical would break down by the very force of its own narrowness, he always appreciated the austere discipline, fostered by science, of emotion-free intellect which insists on putting everything to rigorous test, and he set an immense value on science's demand for tangible results of all endeavour and for building by evolution upon terra firma whatever heaven the idealist visions among the clouds. By what he criticised and what he approved he went to the core of the scientific adventure, cleansing it of all adventitious dogmatism and making its essential integrity and clarity and progressive this-worldliness one with his insatiable hunger for not only the surfaces but also the depths of Reality. It is this rare union of the scientific and the spiritual, each intensifying and completing the other, that finds expression in a letter he wrote apropos of an inveterately sceptical intellectuality like Bertrand Russel's as contrasted with the temperament which easily and eagerly believes or rests happy with lofty speculations. The letter begins:

"I must remind you that I have been an intellectual myself and

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no stranger to doubts, - 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 contented with the shining ideas and phrases which a Rolland or another takes for 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 it 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."?²

"The Field of earth and Matter" - that is the final objective of the scientist of the Spirit that is Sri Aurobindo. And to prepare in this field the requisite inner receptivity to the Supermind's Light in a comprehensively cultured and efficient consciousness, he had conceived an International Centre of Education in Pondicherry, with residential quarters for students and teachers from all over the globe. After his passing away, the Mother started to materialise the gigantic scheme. It was her aim to offer free studies in every accepted branch of learning. A unique feature is the intention to teach the different nationals in their own languages. But this Centre would not be just one more educational institution added to the hundreds of others in India and elsewhere. It would always have the Aurobindonian world-vision as its background. And this vision would be conveyed not only by study, in the higher classes, of the Master's own books like The Life Divine (the metaphysical structure of that vision). The Synthesis of Yoga (the exposé of an integral technique of spiritual progression), The Human Cycle (studies in the psychology of social development and the search for values). The Ideal of Human Unity (an analysis of man's political aspirations and of present-day social, political and economic history), The Future

². SABCL vol. 26, pp. 468-69.

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Poetry (essays on poetry in general and English poetry in particular, on the various grades and powers of consciousness finding poetic expression and on a new direction of poetic development under the stress of spiritual experience). Savitri (a blank-verse epic of nearly twenty-four thousand lines turning legend of the past into a symbol of the supramental transformation and variously exemplifying "the future poetry"). Over and above Sri Aurobindo's books which are part of India's most living and significant literature, as well as the illuminating publications of the Mother, what would convey his vision would be the constant presence of its very source - the new spiritual consciousness made dynamic for earth-use by him and the Mother and in process of establishment in their disciples. Thus the Centre of Education in its full development would be at the same time a great meeting-ground of the East and the West and a rich soil for the first shoots of a harmonised world in which the spiritual would not be cut off from the material, the outermost would be illumined with the innermost and there would not be in any form "a new edition of the old fiasco".³

³. The latest project for the birth of a harmonised world has been the construction of a new township, about 8 miles north of Pondicherry, covering about 15 square miles - AUROVILLE, "the City of Dawn", named with the suggestion of "Dawn" by the French "aurore" combined with "ville", the French for "city". There is the added indirect hint of Sri Aurobindo by the first component of the name.

Sponsored by the Sri Aurobindo Society, unanimously recommended by UNESCO, and directed by a voluntary team of architects and engineers from various countries, under M. Roger Anger of Paris, the town was originally developed for 50,000 inhabitants on a circular or concentric plan, with equal place given to the four fundamental aspects of man's activity: Dwelling (Residential Zone), Culture (Cultural Zone), Social Relations (International Zone), Work (Industrial Zone). Each zone must be in relation to the spiritual centre of the town which would dominate the architectural ensemble and serve as a constant reminder of the very reason of Auroville's existence. This "Sanctuary of Truth" and "Shrine of the Mother", amidst gardens surrounded by a lake, would be the point of Unity upon which the four fundamental aspects of activity would converge.

Auroville, in the words of the Mother, would be "a place where all human beings of good will, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world." To quote her again: "Auroville is the shelter built for all those who want to hasten towards a future of knowledge, peace and unity." - "Auroville must be at the service of the Truth, beyond all convictions, social, political and religious." It is a call to whoever desires to participate in the advent of a new race beyond the human level.

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