Savitri

  VIII

      THE BASIS OF SAVITRI:

        SRI AUROBINDO'S YOGA

What was it that Sri Aurobindo experienced, what was it that he saw, what was the nature of the realisations that he later tried to record in prose and in verse? It is usual to call these yogic experiences. The word 'yoga' evidently comes from the same root as jungo in Latin, to unite; and the aim of yoga is to effect the union between the one (the individual) and the many (the All). This sense of union can come in many ways. It may come as an experience of intimate partnership, father-son or lover-beloved relationship; it may come as the experience of a personal God, of an aspect of God (Peace, Power, Silence), of identity with Brahman (I am He), or of utter dissolution in nirvana. The Scripture says: "Know ye not that ye are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" ⁹³ God is within:

      The heavens are still—no sound.

      Where then shall God be found?

      Seek not in the distant skies:

      In man's own heart He lies.⁹⁴

It is always a question of exceeding the limited human nature and growing into the Truth, the Right, the Vast. Man is at the meeting point of the physical and the metaphysical, and sums up in himself all physical nature and all the possibilities of angelic or divine nature.

Page 322

The spiritual problem is to realise these possibilities. The mystic Jan Van Ruysbroeck says:

He who seeks that gift to light him

Must rise beyond his nature,

To the highest height of being...

Through his soul will flow

The light of heavenly truth

And he in it shall vanish...⁹⁵

Another mystic, Plotinus, describes as follows his own experience:

Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and I have

entered into myself, going out from all other things. I have seen

a beauty wonderfully great...I have lived to the full the best life

and come to identity with the Divine. Set firm in It I have come

to That Supreme Actuality, setting myself above all else in the

realm of Nous...⁹⁶

The battle is joined, and the- aim is to transcend the tyranny of the material world, to go out "from all other things", to race beyond the bars of mere empirical knowledge. The Rig Veda declares: Pādosya viśvā bhūtāni tripādasyāmrtam divi; in other words, but a quarter of man the Purusha is in the apparent world, the remaining three quarters subsist above as Immortality. This assurance, like "the lark's morning thrill of humanity" (in Brunnhofer's words), has been at the root of man's strivings to invade the invisible, to defy his mortality, and to see in himself, "the conscious vice-gerent of God or responsible cooperator with a divine plan and purpose."⁹⁷ It is a trite saying that man partly is and wholly hopes to be; what he is, the appearance, is the one-quarter referred to by the Rig Veda. In so far as "we are at all", writes C.S. Lewis, "we have, so to speak, a root in the Absolute, which is the utter reality.. .we yearn, rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal being called 'we.'"⁹⁸ These random witnessings and asseverations show clearly enough how, through all the ages of human history, there has

Page 323

manifested in mat the desire for transcendence, the thirst for God, Light, Freedom and Immortality.

      Sri Aurobindo's own yogic experiences and realisations may, for the sake of convenience, be said to have occurred roughly at four points in his life. No doubt what he experienced suffused his whole life, the Becoming flowed from the Being and returned to It; but these four shining land-marks in his spiritual life have also their particular significances. First came the experience of utter silence and calm and void when, under Yogi Lele's guidance, Sri Aurobindo, early in January 1908, learned in a room on the top floor of Sardar Mazumdar's house in Baroda to fling his thoughts back and create the desert of silence in his mind." Writing about this, Sri Aurobindo says: "In three days —really in one—my mind became full of an eternal silence—it is still there."¹⁰⁰The experiences of this point of time enabled Sri Aurobindo to, "see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman."¹⁰¹ This basic condition of silence seems to have continued for the rest of his life; that is to say, his subsequent activities—politics, journalism, authorship, etc.—proceeded as it were from the surface, without in any way affecting the deeper inward peace.¹⁰²

      Second came, not many months afterwards in his solitary cell in the Alipore Jail, his experience of the omnipresent Deity in the form of Narayana, Vasudeva. As he described his experience later in the course of the celebrated Uttarpara Speech delivered on 30 May 1909:

I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no

longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva

who surrounded me...I looked at the bars of my cell, the very

grating that did duty for a door, and again I saw Vasudeva. It was

Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I

lay on the coarse blankets that were given to me for a couch and

felt the arm of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and

Lover. This was the first use of the deeper vision He gave me. I

looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the

Page 324

swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana

whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies.¹⁰³

Although the ground is the absolute silence, there is structured above the many-chambered mansion of the divine manifestation Sarvam khalvidam Brahma: all is Brahman.

      Third came, during the first four or five years of 'silent yoga' in Pondicherry, the experience of the glimpse of the possibility of the descent of Supermind into the earth-consciousness to create the conditions for the manifestation of the Life Divine here on the terrestrial base:

I know that the Supermind is a truth...I believe the descent of

this Truth opening the way to a development of divine

consciousness here to be the final sense of the earth evolution.¹⁰⁴

No, the Supramental has not descended into the body or into

Matter—it is only at the point where such a descent has become

not only possible but inevitable; I am speaking, of course, of my

experience.¹⁰⁵

      During the seven years (1914-21) when he edited Arya, Sri Aurobindo tried to project his vision of the supramental transformation in terms of philosophy, psychology, Vedic exegesis, etc. Presently he glimpsed the Overmind as a great intermediate power between Mind and Supermind and on 24 November 1926, known as the 'Day of siddhi (Realisation), Sri Aurobindo had the experience of the descent of the Overmind, "in the physical, rendering possible the descent of the Supermind in Matter."¹⁰⁶

      As we have seen earlier, Overmind is a global consciousness and power, permitting variety and multiplicity but without denying the underlying unity; overmental activity can have multiple directions, but there will be no wasteful diffusion of effort, for the essential purpose, which is the divinisation of man and earth-nature, will not be ignored. Such was the power that Sri Aurobindo 'realised' through his yoga on 24 November 1926.

Page 325