Savitri

 III

Yoga

There have been great fighters in modern India like Tilak, philosophers like Vivekananda, poets like Tagore, and 'mahatmas' like Gandhi. But Sri Aurobindo was all these, and a yogi as well. To the question, what is yoga, it is not possible to return an easy or facile answer, and unfortunately the word 'yoga' is being bandied about too often and used too indiscriminately.

      "Indian Yoga", writes Sri Aurobindo, "in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity."³⁵

      Yoga, then, is the technique of bringing out the fullest possibilities of powers already inherent in Nature. It is really a multiform technique, because one or another of the many powers of Nature

could be isolated and its fullest potentialities brought out. Man has a body, a mind, a heart—he has a physical, mental and emotional life—he can work, he can think, he can love. He can exercise his will, he can channel his passions. Any one of his faculties or functions could be isolated and perfected, and we would then have the Yoga of Works (Karma Yoga), the Yoga of Knowledge (Jnana Yoga) and the Yoga of Love or Devotion (Bhakti Yoga). There are other yogas too like Raja, Hatha, and Tantra, etc. These are really so many 'paths' leading to God or the Life Divine.

      Aurobindo took these and other ideas from the older yogas and evolved a dynamic and truly multiform yoga of his own, which he called Integral or Purna Yoga. It was not necessary, he thought, to isolate this or that faculty or instrument; all could be simultaneously used to bring about the desired union with God or the desired transformation of man. He developed his ideas, principally in the 1,000-page treatise, The Synthesis of Yoga, but also in his other works, and especially in the thousands of letters to his disciples in which he discussed their particular problems in the larger context of the yoga. Many of these letters have been lately arranged and published in two massive volumes, On Yoga (Tomes One and Two), which form an indispensable guide to the yoga of Sri Aurobindo. There is also the more succinct The Mother, one of the classics on the subject; and there are the records kept by disciples like Purani, Nirod and Dilip of conversations with the Master; and, finally, there are authoritative expositions by the Mother herself, and disciples like Nolini, Rishabhchand and Pandit. Altogether, it is a vast, and still growing, literature.

      Writing on the mystic, Jacob Boehme, J.J. Stoudt says that, "he was a prophet in more than a metaphorical sense because he created a philosophy of history more profound than the dated apocalypses of his contemporaries, he saw a new world emerging from a new man, a new level of religious living begetting a new social order, and, so intense had his sunrise to eternity been for him, he gave himself

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a place in creating this new world."³⁶ Sri Aurobindo is that kind and order of prophet, in a sense even more absolute perhaps than that intended by Stoudt. In one of his letters, Sri Aurobindo has briefly explained the total aim of his yoga:

The object of the Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the

Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the

Divine's sake alone, to be tuned in our nature into the nature of

the Divine, and in our will and works and life to be the instrument

of the Divine. Its object is not to be a great Yogi or a Superman

(although that may come) or to grab at the Divine for the sake

of the ego's power, pride or pleasure. It is not for Moksha though

liberation comes by it and all else may come, but these must not

be our object. The Divine alone is our object.³⁷

               Seize the million, the thousands, hundreds, and tens will be incidentally included in the catch. Possess the Divine and be possessed by the Divine; all else come as a matter of course, and no seeming hardship will really matter. "It is only divine Love", Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1934, "which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine."³⁸ Such Love could be a Cross, a pain that is also a joy. One who is capable of such Love—a Buddha, a Christ, or a Sri Aurobindo—is honoured as a Messiah by us who are of the earth because we know that only such a superman can hold the key to the future; but, "whether this means that the human race in general will at some future epoch evolve, reach upward, to his level, who can say?"³⁹

              In the past there had been great yogis in India. The Bhagavad Gita itself, which is as old as the Mahabharata, is a great manual of yoga; and many would say that the Raja Yoga of Patanjali, which tries to mobilise psycho-vital, psycho-mental and physico-mental processes on the issue of a rise to a higher consciousness, is the yoga. The Jnana, Karma and Bhakti yogas too have masses of adherents. What, then, is the speciality about Sri Aurobindo's yoga? Not a mere adding up or jumbling together of all these older methods. It is an integral yoga.

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The others come in, of course, wherever necessary or possible, but there is some other element also.

      Sri Aurobindo's yoga is new because its aims are new and it has to employ means that are new. It aims not at, "a departure out of the world and life into Heaven or Nirvana, but at a change of life and existence." The object sought after, "is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness"; and in order that this transformation of earth-consciousness may take place, "a method has been pre-conised"⁴⁰ which uses the old techniques with a new urgency and motive power. A new principle of instrumentation, namely the Supermind, is to be brought down and made to inhabit and energise the earth consciousness. The physical, vital, mental, all would then come under the supramental influence, just as now the mental consciousness is able—thanks to our arts and sciences— to influence our physical and vital life. Even now the human mind, while it has some influence on our body and passions, is unable to influence the life of the mere animal, except to a very limited extent. The descent of the Supermind, when it takes place, will naturally mean the possibility of a great extension in the power of the human consciousness, far beyond the present power that men have, and the higher mental power a few have. At first only a handful of people will embody this supramental consciousness, but there will be radiating influences which will gradually encompass all earthly life.

      While this was the possibility that Sri Aurobindo saw—a possibility that seemed to him an inevitability, while he doubtless experienced in the course of his forty-five years' yoga a power of consciousness denied to average humanity, yet it was not the supramental that he was able to realise but a middle power between the Mind and the Supermind, which he called the Overmind. This was his realisation or siddhi on 24 November 1926. "It is only the supramental Force that works absolutely", he wrote in 1935, "because it creates its own conditions. But the Force I am using is a Force that

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has to work under the present world conditions. It is not the less a Force for that."⁴¹

      Twelve years later, he wrote again that his yoga had enabled him to put only an Overmind force on human affairs, with the result that when it acted in the material world it was, "inextricably mixed up in the tangle of the lower world force that its results, however strong or however adequate to the immediate object, must necessarily be partial."⁴² But he had no doubt that, since the Overmind was a realised fact, the Supermind too would be—sooner or later. He refused therefore to be daunted by defeat or by the doom that seemed to hover over man in the atomic age. A few months before he passed away, when conditions were pretty bleak because of the Cold War and the warm Korean War, because of the Indo-Pakistani imbroglio, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple: "I am not disposed even now, in these dark conditions, to consider my will to help the world as condemned to failure."⁴³ The fact was that, although himself realising the Highest consciousness (including the Supermind), Sri Aurobindo nevertheless found it convenient to bring down only the Overmind into the physical being and consciousness, but even so the Supermind was always behind it. The limitations were apparently self-chosen, the aim being to keep the link with the physical consciousness and use the higher powers from that stand. In this the Overmind helped Sri Aurobindo as a medial force, a bridge, and for the time being he was content to operate from that bridge, to use that force, with the Supermind always poised in the inner being, ready for deployment in an emergency.

      It would be clear from the foregoing that Sri Aurobindo's 'retreat' was no running away from the demands of life but rather a different way of confronting life's challenges with a view to mastering them and laying the foundations of a new life here on earth. "My own life and my Yoga", he said once, "have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side."⁴⁴ He has, again, compared his yoga to a battle; and, "its very attempt raises all sorts of adverse forces and one must be ready to

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face difficulties, sufferings, reverses of all sorts in a calm and unflinching spirit."⁴⁵ When one dares into the occult or hidden regions of Nature, the forces of the subtle physical and supraphysical planes are seen to be active—sometimes to help, sometimes to hinder; and hence the need for faith, calm, patience and fearlessness. Yoga, after all, is the razor's edge. Its first taste could be "bitter like poison" on account of the difficulties to be faced and surpassed, but the end would be "sweet as nectar" because of "the joy of realisation, the peace of liberation or the divine Ananda."⁴⁶

      In the first three parts of The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo outlines the dynamics of the three classical paths—the Yoga of Divine Work, the Yoga of Integral Knowledge, and the Yoga of Divine Love, and in the final part describes the Yoga of Self-Perfection which uses all three disciplines in a bold way:

To arrive by the shortest way at the largest development of

spiritual power and being and divinise by it a liberated nature in

the whole range of human living is our inspiring motive.

The principle in view is a self-surrender, a giving up of the human

being into the being, consciousness, power, delight of the Divine,

a union or communion at all the points of meeting in the soul

of man, the mental being, by which the Divine himself.. .shall by

the light of his presence and guidance perfect the human being

in all the force of the Nature for a divine living.. .The liberated

individual being, united with the Divine in self and spirit,

becomes in his natural being a self-perfecting instrument for the

perfect outflowering of the Divine in humanity.⁴⁷

The individual should perfect himself first, then seek to perfect the race. The spiritual aspirant who desires self-perfection has to put forth a certain personal effort:

...the triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender—an

aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing—the mind's will, the

heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being...rejection of

the movements of the lower nature, rejection of the mind's

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ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the

true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind, rejection

of the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations,

passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy,

envy, hostility to the truth, so that the true power and joy may

pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated

vital being, rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt,

disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to

change, tamas, so that the true stability of light, power, ananda may

establish itself in a body growing always more divine; surrender

of oneself and all one is has and every plane of the consciousness

and every movement to the Divine and the Shakti.⁴⁸

            To aspire for the Divine and only the Divine, to reject from one's life all that is in any way undivine and so make oneself a plastic instrument in the hands of the Divine—this, in a nutshell, is the way of this yoga. Once self-perfection is achieved, one will be able to strive for the perfection of others and the world. It is therefore very truly a self-transforming and world-transforming yoga.

          Besides systematically expounding his own yoga in The Synthesis of Yoga and some of his other writings, Sri Aurobindo has also given us brilliant commentaries on the Isha Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita. Elucidating the last (the eighteenth) stanza of the former, Sri Aurobindo says that, "the sign of right action is the increasing and finally the complete submission of the individual to the divine Will", and in a footnote adds: "Here the offering is that of completest submission and the self-surrender of all the faculties of the lower egoistic human nature to the Divine Will-force."⁴⁹

          The Gita, of course, is a pocket spiritual encyclopaedia, for all spiritual problems are "briefly but deeply dealt with" in it, and in his Essays on the Gita Sri Aurobindo has "tried to bring out all that fully".⁵⁰ Almost every great philosopher and thinker in India has commented on the Gita, and in our own century Tilak, Gandhi, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalachari and Vinoba Bhave—

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among others—have made the Gita a text (or pretext) to present their own philosophies.

      Sri Aurobindo has likewise given an Aurobindonian version of the Gita. His writing often rises to heights of poetry, and the last chapter is magnificent. The key stanza in the whole Gita is, without question, the sixty-sixth in the last chapter: "Cast away all your dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; there is no need to grieve, for I shall liberate you from all sins." Sri Aurobindo says that these words, "express the most complete, intimate and living relation possible between God and man."⁵¹ Rejection of all dharmas and total surrender to the Divine, such should be the decisive action. The rest would follow, for now the Divine would take up the responsibility. Krishna tells Arjuna in effect:

This then is the supreme movement, this complete surrender of

your whole self and nature, this abandonment of all dharmas to

the Divine who is your highest Self, this absolute aspiration of

all your members to the supreme spiritual nature...This is the

supreme way because it is the highest secret and mystery and yet

an inner movement progressively realisable by all.⁵²

The three movements of the Aurobindonian yoga, as given in The Mother, are Aspiration, Rejection, Surrender. The Isha Upanishad, as interpreted by Sri Aurobindo, lays stress on the right Knowledge of the Lord and total submission (or surrender) to Him. In the Gita, too, the stress is on aspiration, abandonment (or rejection) and complete surrender. Sri Aurobindo thus traces the seeds of his yoga to the Gita, the Isha Upanishad, and the Veda generally. Sri Aurobindo's yoga is new in its practical urgency and dynamism, but its strength is that it has its roots in India's spiritual past.

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