On Savitri
THEME/S
V
In 1934 Sri Aurobindo wrote: "I am supposed to be a philosopher, but I never studied philosophy—everything I wrote came from yogic experience, knowledge and inspiration."56 Again, declining an invitation to contribute to a volume on 'Contemporary Indian Philosophy', he said that it was "quite impossible for me to write philosophy to order."57 On a later occasion also, with regard to a statement in an article that he had derived his philosophical technique from Shankara, Sri Aurobindo said:
That is not true. I have not read much of philosophy. It is like
those who say that I am influenced by Hegel. Some even say that I
am influenced by Nietzsche.. .The only two books that have influ-
enced me are the Gita and the Upanishads. What I wrote was
the work of intuition and inspiration working on the basis of my
spiritual experience...Experience and formulation of experience
I consider as the true aim of philosophy. The rest is merely
intellectual work and may be interesting but nothing more.58
Sri Aurobindo's philosophical magnum opus is the luminous and voluminous treatise, The Life Divine, a jewel of a title, yet wonderfully apt to describe its total content. It grew out of his experience of the higher planes of consciousness which indicated to him the ultimate possibility of the descent of the Supermind. He sought corroborative
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evidence in India's ancient scriptures—the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita—and found it in ample measure. For the rest he had to think out the whole argument and present it in a style that was worthy of the subject. In the first instance it appeared as a sequence of articles in the Arya, but subsequently it received careful revision at his hands and appeared in two volumes, each of twenty-eight chapters:
Vol I: 'Omnipresent Reality and the Universe'
Vol II: 'The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual
Evolution'
Part I: "The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance'
Part II: 'The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution.
The argument, reduced to fundamentals, is simplicity itself. In the first volume, Sri Aurobindo describes the nature or constituents of 'omnipresent Reality', which is made up of two quartets:
A. Sat (Existence)
B. Chit (Consciousness-Force)
C. Ananda (Bliss)
D. Supermind (Real-Idea: Vijnana)
D'. Mind
C. Psyche
B'. Life
A. Matter
The upper hemisphere or quartet of Satchidananda has, in the course of involution—or the descent of consciousness—the phenomenal lapse from undivided to divided existence—become the lower hemisphere of our terrestrial travail made up of Matter, Life, Psyche and Mind. There is a 'veil' now that separates Mind (D') from Supermind, its opposite number in the upper quartet; the creative principle and power of the upper hemisphere, Truth-Consciousness, self-knowledge that is also self-force (D), is both in possession of the essential unity of things and is able out of it to manifest its multiplicity. If humanity and earth-nature are to
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change decisively, a 'rending' of the 'veil' is necessary, for then the Supermind or the supramental consciousness would operate here, even as Mind of the mental consciousness is already operating. Neither the denial of matter through asceticism nor the denial of the Spirit through materialism or hedonism, neither escaping into the upper hemisphere nor absorption in the lower, can solve the age-long problems of mankind. Matter and spirit should be brought into an intimate and integral partnership. Only the Supermind can bring about such a partnership and transformation.
In the first part of the second volume, Sri Aurobindo explains how the Knowledge of the upper quartet became the Ignorance of the lower quartet. Evil and its manifestations are neither eternal undivine powers nor beginningless maya but a field of force with a limited validity at the middle mental rung in the stair of consciousness. The dualities are also relativities. Evil will cease when the Ignorance is replaced by spiritual Knowledge. In the second part of the second volume, Sri Aurobindo discusses how this could be achieved. The ascent from Ignorance to Knowledge will be long and slow, and there must be many gradations on the way. In order to reach the Supermind, many levels above the Mind—Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind—will have to be passed. But it can be done, and will be done, leading, "inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature."59
The style of The Life Divine—if it can be dissociated from the thought—is at once the attraction of the book and also the reason why it exasperates so many readers. J.A. Chadwick (who became Sri Aurobindo's disciple and assumed the name 'Arjava') described the language as global', because it tried to express a "global thinking".60 But once one can surrender to its rhythms, the book really seems to have the "power of creating round us wide circles of peace".61 Faced by so formidable a revelation, people have been obliged to
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seek suitable comparisons. D.S. Sarma calls it "a vast philosophical prose epic...on the spiritual evolution of the universe" and describes Sri Aurobindo as "a self-exiled and self-imprisoned Dante" and The Life Divine as, "a philosophical Divina Commedia having its Inferno in the Spirit's descent into the ignorance of mind, life and matter, its Purgatorio in the ascent to the true knowledge of the so-called Supermind and its Paradiso in the ineffable mysteries of Satchidananda. His spiritual guides, his Virgil and Beatrice, are the Rig Veda and the Bhagavad Gita 62
An English critic, G. Wilson Knight, likewise writes: "In reading Sri Aurobindo's colossal work of mystical philosophy, The Life Divine, I was continually struck to find how much of his visionary structure was covered by the lucid couplets and fourfold plan of Pope's Essay."63 Besides the Commedia and the Essay on Man, various other works too, the Summa Theologica, for example, have been pointedly compared with The Life Divine.
It is thus natural that philosophers should try to see points of resemblance between The Life Divine and the thought of other philosophers of the East and of the West. Khalifa A. Hakim finds the great truths of the higher Sufism embodied in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. S.K. Maitra finds in Sri Aurobindo's thought the "meeting of the East and the West", and he also makes interesting comparisons between Sri Aurobindo and Western thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, Hegel, Hartmann, Bergson, Whitehead and others.64
Plato, like Sri Aurobindo, was a seer and a poet, but as a philosopher he was rather less consistent than the Indian thinker. Plotinus' double trinity is paralleled by Sri Aurobindo's double quartets—the upper and the lower hemispheres of omnipresent Reality separated by a veil of obscuration. Whereas the Hegelian dialectic creates the impression that we can reach the Absolute more or less automatically, by sheer power of gravity as it were, in the Aurobindonian view the ascent is not altogether inevitable and is really conditioned by the auspicious descent of Divine Grace at every
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step of the evolutionary advance. Hartmann's dualism of value and reality is apparently in sharp contrast to Sri Aurobindo's affirmation that value is also Reality.
As for Bergson, although he was a 'volcanic thinker' like Sri Aurobindo, his theory of 'creative evolution lacks both the comprehensiveness and the logical clarity of the theory of Divine Evolution outlined in The Life Divine. Again, while Whitehead was a great system-maker (like Sri Aurobindo) and took (like him all knowledge for his province), his philosophy of organism is but a bloodless and loveless abstraction compared to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of the Life Divine evolving from the life mundane as we know it. Gathering the threads of his argument, Maitra concludes by saying that Sri Aurobindo has really given us "an outline of future philosophy", touching the whole arc of our being and combining the functions of religion, philosophy, art, poetry, and even dedicated work.
Sri Aurobindo's thought is also likely to provoke comparison with the thought of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Berdyaev. The Gurdjieff-Ouspensky system is a Gnostic system, like Sri Aurobindo's. There is thus a superficial similarity between the two systems which is no doubt striking.65 The Ray of Creation and the Aurobindonian stair of Involution-Evolution seem distantly to resemble each other. In the Absolute, according to Gurdjieff, the three basic forces (active, passive, neutralising) are in perfect harmony; but down the scale of creation (or 'involution', as Sri Aurobindo would prefer to call it), the forces separate, mingle, clash, and the divers worlds—the suns, the planets, etc.—come into being.
But even as evolution is possible and is actually proceeding, it is also possible to go up the Ray of Creation and reach the highest state. But the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky system is but a tour de force of the speculative intellect, and does not draw (as Sri Aurobindo's system does) from a fount of personal spiritual experience. There is, says D.S. Savage, a deadness, a lack of a living intuition at the root of
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Gurdjieff's Gnosis, whereas Sri Aurobindo's vision of the Supermind is an integral unity of apprehension, "a primary spiritual intuition which is only afterwards elaborated by the reasoning mind."66 As for Berdyaev, his postulation of Nature's 'transfiguration' is rather suggestive in the context of the Aurobindonian postulation of a supramental transformation of man and Nature. Dorothy M. Richardson the novelist once wrote after reading about Sri Aurobindo's life and thought:
Has there ever existed a more synthetic consciousness than
that of Sri Aurobindo? Unifying he is to the limit of the term.
How I wish that the now so widely read Berdyaev could have
entered it and found therein the answer to his central problem: that
of the seemingly impossible transfiguration of the universe.67
Similarly, the theory of the 'Mental Ambience' put forward as a speculative possibility by Viscount Samuel in his modern Utopia, An Unknown Island, has a remote resemblance to the Aurobindonian supramental consciousness. But the British philosopher had no personal spiritual experience of anything like the Ambience, though he conceded, in the course of a letter, that while he had no doubt merely put it forward "as a speculation, and not even as a hypothesis, still less as a fact. ..None the less it may be a fact!" 68
Again, the recently (and posthumously) published book, The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin provokes comparison with The Life Divine at many points. Father de Chardin, a Jesuit was also a hard-headed biologist and palaeontologist, and he saw in man the spearhead of the evolutionary adventure. But his thesis, although sought to be scientifically sustained, is also basically the expression of an intuition.69 He is not unaware of India's contribution to philosophy:
India—the region par excellence of high philosophic and religious
pressures: we can never make too much of our indebtedness to
the mystic influences which have come down to each and all of
us in the past from this 'anticyclone'. But however efficacious
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these currents for ventilating and illuminating the atmosphere of
mankind, we have to recognise that, with their excessive passivity
and detachment, they were incapable of building the world. The
primitive soul of India arose in its hour like a great wind but, like
a great wind also, again in its hour, it passed away. How indeed
could it have been otherwise? Phenomena regarded as an illusion
(Maya) and their connections as a chain (Karma), what was left
in these doctrines to animate and direct human evolution?70
This is, of course, a misreading of ancient Hindu thought and an equating of Indian philosophy with a caricature of Mayavada and Advaita-Vedanta. Besides, de Chardin could not have written like this, and indeed would have greatly benefited, had he been acquainted with The Life Divine. For example, Gerald Bullett is particularly attracted to Sri Aurobindo because he tries to transcend the two 'negations', namely the materialist 'denial' and the ascetic 'refusal'.71
Nor was Sri Aurobindo a mere mystic or dreamer. "I think I can say", he writes, "that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane."72 It is de Chardin's merit as a thinker that he has seen evolution, not as a one-way traffic, but in relation to involution:
First let it be noted that, by the very fact of the individualisation
of our planet, a certain mass of elementary consciousness was
originally emprisoned in the matter of earth, ...By its initial
chemical composition, the early earth is itself, and in its totality,
the incredible complex germ we are seeking.73
Again, later in the book:
...if the universe, regarded sidereally, is in process of spatial
expansion (from the infinitesimal to the immense), in the
same way and still more clearly it presents itself to us, physico-
chemically, as in process of organic involution upon itself (from
the extremely simple to the extremely complex)...74
Although Sri Aurobindo and de Chardin do not give an identical
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meaning to 'involution', the resemblance in their systems is striking enough. Further, corresponding to the Aurobindonian concept of the Supermind, de Chardin posits the concept of the Omega point:
Only one reality seems to survive and be capable of succeeding
and spanning the infinitesimal and the immense: energy—that
floating, universal entity from which all emerges and into
which all falls back as into an ocean; energy, the new spirit;
the new god. So, as the world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the
Impersonal.75
There is also in de Chardin's thought the same apparent ignoration of the problem of pain and evil that we find in Sri Aurobindo's thought.76 "We mankind", writes Julian Huxley in his 'Foreword' to de Chardin's book, "contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them...That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man."77 The Life Divine is a more complete and convincing revelation than de Chardin's very thoughtful book, but of both it may be said that they are philosophies of affirmation and philosophies of hope.78
These parallels (near or distant, close or vague) between aspects of Sri Aurobindo's thought and the thought of some of the Western thinkers of yesterday or today are interesting mainly because they serve to show that there is nothing purely 'Oriental' or 'escapist' in the Aurobindonian philosophy. Sri Aurobindo felt that "man can never get out of the futile circle the race is always treading, until he has raised himself to a new foundation."79 Such a foundation would be the supramental—when it can be realised. Sri Aurobindo thus fused in his philosophy his answer to the existential problem and the problem of value, and both in terms of logic. And Sri Aurobindo lived his thought and made it dynamic through his yoga. As the Protestant theologian, Otto Wolff, says: "it is Aurobindo, representing mankind, who takes that next step into evolution...by realising it in his own person...Sri Aurobindo's yogic accomplishment practically and existentially fulfilled is a magnificent contribution to various sciences
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which, in their way and in the frame of their possibilities, confirm Sri Aurobindo throughout."80
Not satisfied with so comprehensive a statement of his philosophy, Sri Aurobindo turned to some of its applications in the fields of social and political organisation, and of art and poetry. The Human Cycle is thus a notable little treatise on the psychology of social development. Man's primary urge should be to open to the higher light of the overhead planes of consciousness: to turn to the Divine, to achieve a progressive divinisation of his nature. As he once wrote to his brother Barin: "No one is God but in each man there is a God and to make him manifest is the aim of divine life. That we can all do."81
When man so manifests the divine, then his philosophy, art, science, ethics, social existence, and vital pursuits will be, "no longer an exercise of mind and life, carried in a circle, but a means for the discovery of a greater Truth behind mind and life and for the bringing of its power into our human existence."82 When small collectivities thus organise themselves, it should not be difficult for the ideal of human unity also to be realised on truly spiritual foundations, instead of being sought to be realised (as they now are) through mechanical or semi-legalistic organisations like the old League of Nations or the present United Nations. "Human society", Sri Aurobindo writes, "progresses really and vitally in proportion as law becomes the child of freedom; it will reach its perfection when, man having learned to know and become spiritually one with his fellow-man, the spontaneous law of his society exists only as the outward mould of his self-governed inner liberty."84 Sri Aurobindo therefore concludes his treatise on The Ideal of Human Unity with the affirmation that, while the mechanical means now being adopted to forge world unity will have to be pursued for the time being, a lasting solution can come only when the supramental transformation takes place:
A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness
not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and
compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means
of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a
free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this
would be the basis for a higher type of human existence.84
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