The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo and the Philosophers

A LETTER

[This letter was addressed to the well-known English author, Paul Brunton, two of whose early books were at one time bestsellers bridging the worlds of popular interest in the occult and of profound thought aspiring to the Unknown. He twice visited the Ashram at Pondicherry and was deeply impressed by Sri Aurobindo and, for all his doctrinal differences, remained a great admirer. He and the writer of this letter struck up a friendship which carried on a correspondence for a number of years. The letter marks a middle stage in the happy exchange of ideas.]

The difficulties you have mentioned in the way of your seeing eye-to-eye with Sri Aurobindo in the realm of philosophy can very well be insuperable. All difficulties in that realm can be insuperable: if this were not so, there would be a universal consensus of philosophers instead of Aristotle at loggerheads with Plato, Kant going hammer-and-tongs at the Schoolmen as well as the Empiricists, Bertrand Russell spitting fire at Bergson. The spectacle, though extremely fascinating, is a trifle ludicrous too. Seeing that all these men possessing first-class minds cannot agree, one is inclined to think that the heat of utter self-certainty with which they fight is rather a defect. The history of thought shows that there is endless argumentation possible: the mind can take up any standpoint and plead plausibly for it. To philosophise is one of our instincts, but no philosophising can arrive at indisputable truth. Certain aspects of the ultimate reality appeal to certain types of mind or chime with certain types of experience — and these we erect into a system by means of logical reasoning which seems cogent to us but which others with equal cogency for themselves put aside as erroneous. The only system which is likely to be accepted in the long run is one which satisfies all the sides of our nature. The acceptance will not be merely by intellectual argument: it will be by a deep instinct which wants harmony and integration rather than the apotheosis of one side at the expense of the others.

You declare with Berkeley that we can know only our own

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minds and that what we call matter is really a form of mind. I shall not for the present try to argue against Berkeley. Any history of philosophy will provide you with the traditional counter-attack and the work of the neo-realists in our own day will show the modern technique. I shall not try, because it is pretty futile until your penchant for Berkeley is weakened: you will be able to argue back and the neo-idealists of our own day will help you to return the blitz of neo-realism. What I want to say is simply this: there is no sense of rest in the Berkeleyan philosophy for that in us which strives for harmony. It leaves something in us unconvinced, for, opposed to Berkeley, we have the very strong feeling that, instead of matter being a form of mind, mind seems often to be a form of matter. Most of our practical life is based on what appears to be the independent existence of matter. And when we ask ourselves: wouldn't matter be more amenable to mind if it were just an idea? - the answer makes us seriously doubt Berkeley's position. Matter does impress us as a power in itself which we contact by means of mind. Mind does not bring us perfect harmony and fulfilment: it struggles and gropes, it is not the master-magician of life. Nor does matter as known in practical experience hold the secret we are vaguely aware of. There must be something else. Matter and mind seem to be two forms of some other reality which contains the archetypes of them both, archetypes from which they have derived and deflected.

Only when the mind is stilled, there dawns a deeper and higher consciousness which bears golden within it the harmony we are hungering for. Yes, it bears it within itself, but for us to get that harmony we need profound progress in the supramental domain. The limitation of the whole superb school of ātman-knowers is that they stop with the pure infinite Self beyond our narrow human selves and make no attempt to realise a divine dynamic to replace the dynamic that is human and discordant. At most there is some light reflected in the ordinary workings of the mind - a degree of intuition comes into play - but where is the divinisation of which we dream? The mind must be completely divinised after being stilled and a new faultless activity initiated and substituted for the old stumbling one. Mind must begin to function according to the archetype of it which must exist in the ultimate reality and without which we would

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never feel in ourselves that urge for perfection which is the mainspring of all our mental life. But. can mind realise wholly its archetype without the other parts of our being doing the same? No: if, as experience teaches us, we cannot rest finally in mind and, for the sake of a harmonious sense of life, grant matter a separate status, we must strive after an archetype of matter too. Here also the perfection we are seeking cannot be got out of matter itself. Not by material progress - though that is useful in its own way just as mental progress is - can we attain the perfection our bodily being desires. Again we must tax the Beyond, the supramental which is at the same time the supramaterial. In that Beyond are powers that transcend Nature. Many Yogis catch snippets, so to speak, of these powers, but the real and final miracle to work on Nature is what Sri Aurobindo calls transformation - the utter divinisation of the physical body so that it becomes a form of the Consciousness that is luminous and immortal.

Remember that Sri Aurobindo's teaching is Integral Yoga. The word "integral" denotes the Aurobindonian search. Sri Aurobindo says it is no use denying that man is in quest of an all-round harmony of perfection. If that quest is a fact, there must be in the unknown depths of the Divine the secret of an all-round fulfilment. Once you feel this, you will not stress intellectually your differences with his teaching. He is not primarily arguing out a system. With his instinct towards harmony he has pressed on in spiritual experience. His is not an integral philosophy for the sake of philosophy, his is an integral Yoga, and all his philosophising is a statement in mental terms of what he has realised. The Life Divine expresses nothing except his experience, his realisation. Having attained in constant waking life and not merely in a sealed samadhi the reality which he terms Gnosis, he has but laid out in intellectual exposition what the gnostic consciousness is and what yogic possibilities it holds and what the results of its full descent into our earth-existence will be. Sri Aurobindo does not proclaim to the world: "Read my book and I shall argue you into my beliefs." His call is: "Read this book in which I have clothed in philosophical language my actual experience and if you feel in your heart the urge towards the integral realisation I have pictured and propounded, come to me and I will give you every living and glowing bit of it."

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The best way in which I can dissipate your difficulties is to ask you to feel in your heart that the essence of all our human endeavour is the thirst for perfection and that there can be no true perfection unless it is integral, all-round, top-to-toe. It is not very easy to have this feeling. In a weak form it can never be escaped. What I am asking for is not such a form; Iwant you to have it like a fire - keen and clear. In the path of it there is the whole debris of failure cumbering human history. "Man is finite, man is mortal" - this has been the cry through the ages. "Something indeed is infinite and immortal," the religions say, "but there is a residue of finitude and mortality which is irreducible" - and this contention is not based only on argument: it has behind it a lack of realisation. The great prophets have all striven to their utmost and come short. It is the concrete coming short in actual spiritual experience that has created the tremendous obstacle to a keen and clear recognition of the élan towards harmony. Yet the élan is there. "Thou art That", "Brahmaloka is here and now", "The Kingdom of God is within you", "I and my Father are one" - all these words are trying to let that élan find voice. The Vedic search for the Sun lost in the cave of Earth, the Vaishnava worship of the Incarnate Divine, the Word become Flesh of neo-platonic Christianity, the belief in the resurrection of the body - these too are the same élan seeking an outlet. And an outlet is sought in all our straining towards perfect beauty in art, perfect truth in philosophy, perfect law in science, perfect conduct in ethics, perfect health in day-to-day living. The mind yearns to immortalise its products and find means to transcend the limits of space and time, the body longs for blissful perpetuation, seeks it vicariously through the process of child-birth, ransacks the entire realm of Nature and of chemistry for the conquest of disease and for the elixir vitae. We are labouring to deliver some perfect all-embracing Godhead. Alas, we have laboured and failed, even Sri Krishna came and went without delivering the hidden Divine in a complete invulnerable form. Is it any wonder that we do not see keenly and clearly the hunger for perfection? It is natural that we should envisage it vaguely: veil on veil of disappointment and defeat has covered it. These veils have to be pierced and struck aside, so that the true secret may shine out.

If you hold naked before you this secret and contemplate Sri

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Aurobindo's teaching in its light, you will perceive how sublimely, how exquisitely, how accurately that teaching answers to every little nuance of the world's aspiration. If like a flame you enshrine it in your mind you will put yourself in the right receptive mood to follow Sri Aurobindo's philosophy to its ultimates. The Berkeleyan penchant, the scepticism about avatarhood, the shying away from the doctrine of absolute union will slowly dissolve and the intellect, inclined to move along new tracks, will fall into line with the Aurobindonian teaching. Does not perfection imply the human ascending to absolute union with its own concealed origin, the Divine? Can there be perfection unless the Divine descends into the human mould - and what in general is the Avatar except the most centrally creative of the descending splendours? Is perfection possible if the mind's idea and experience be the last word on matter and no evaluation be made of the material in terms of a supreme spiritual Consciousness? My impression of you is of a man of great mental plasticity and breadth, a man capable of meeting the challenge of many unknown directions: there is no blind rigidity in you to check any movement towards new horizons. I am afraid, however, that you have slipped into an overstress on philosophical pursuit and not kept the living relation advised by all Indian wisdom between philosophy and Yoga. You have thus not seen, for what it is, the philosophical process of The Life Divine and other writings of Sri Aurobindo. There is a mighty intellect in The Life Divine which we at once feel to be no whit less than Plato's or Spinoza's or Hegel's, but none of these giants was a full-fledged Yogi. Sri Aurobindo's intellect is an instrument used by a spiritual realisation: not one sentence anywhere is inspired by the intellect alone.

If the philosopher's realisation is poor and fragmentary, the philosophy will seem narrow in spite of the intellect being gigantic. In some respects Plato, Spinoza and Hegel seem very narrow, they do not cover our full sense of things: the cause is that each of them elaborated in terms of the intellect a one-sided intuition of a limited set of intuitions. The elaboration was stupendous, the root-sense of the real did not feed on wide intuitive experience. Even where, added to intuition, there is in philosophy actual spiritual contact with the unknown, we often get the impression of a narrow emphasis. Buddha and Shankara

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and Plotinus are powerful spiritualised intellects, yet their single-track extremism is apparent. Nirvana, the featureless Brahman, the absolute Alone are indeed grand and no Yoga can be complete without them, but as known and presented by the three arch-transcendentalists they cast on much of our life a blank of unfulfilment. Though they are grander than anything in ordinary human life, something in Nature weeps and weeps, the clinging clay of us feels torn, Mother Earth stands defeated and baulked. The hidden instinct of integral harmony is not satisfied, even as it is not satisfied by the mere vicissitudes of Time, however colourful and varied. Does Sri Aurobindo's philosophy strike us as narrow in any such sense? The trouble here is quite the opposite: Sri Aurobindo is too broad for most minds, he is too comprehensive, he posits things which seem too good to be true, too far-reaching to be believable, too gloriously integral to be realised by human capacity. We are led to say, "Yes, yes, all this is exactly as it should be, it is precisely what the age-old hunger for perfection and harmony wants, but can we really have the moon?" Sri Aurobindo's reply is: "That hunger in you exists because the moon is just what you are made for: in fact, you have the moon, you are the moon - only you don't know it. Do the Yoga which I have done and you shall know."

So, there is a twofold solution I offer to your difficulties. First, bring forward into the utmost brightness and with all its facets before you the fiery gem of our secret élan towards perfect harmony, so that you may move with ease along thoughts put forth by one who plunged into the Unknown with that occult diamond for his guide. Then across those thoughts reach out for the concrete spiritual experience, the actual harmonious realisation which the Integral Yoga of that master-explorer is bringing to the world's view.

Perhaps you will be disappointed by my letter, since I have not argued out in explicit detail Sri Aurobindo's position vis-à-vis the points you have raised. I am hoping that what I have written will attune you to the Aurobindonian note and automatically suggest the arguments. Even if the arguments do not arise of themselves and only some attuning is achieved, I shall be rewarded, for then my future arguing will go home more swiftly.

1941

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