Beyond Man

Chapter Eleven: All Life is Yoga

In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

In our story we have now arrived at 1926, the year Sri Aurobindo withdrew in seclusion for the rest of his life and put the Mother in charge of the corporeally present guidance of the disciples; by this fact the small group around them became an ashram, a spiritual community. To fully understand the importance of this milestone in the life of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, it is necessary to take a closer look at the effort at transformation they had made up to then.

A.B. Purani tells us how the consequences of that effort had become visible: ‘The greatest surprise of my visit in 1921 was the “darshan” of Sri Aurobindo. During the interval of two years his body had undergone a transformation which could only be described as miraculous. In 1918 the colour of the body was like that of an ordinary Bengali — rather dark — though there was a lustre on the face and the gaze was penetrating. On going upstairs to see him … I found his cheeks wore an apple-pink colour and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light. So great and unexpected was the change that I could not help exclaiming, “What has happened to you?” Instead of giving a direct reply he parried the question, as I had grown a beard: “And what has happened to you?” But afterwards in the course of the talk he explained to me that when the Higher Consciousness, after descending to the mental level, comes down to the vital and even below the vital, then a transformation takes place in the nervous system and even in the physical being. He asked me to join the meditation in the afternoon and also the evening sittings. This time I saw the Mother for the first time. She was standing near the staircase when Sri Aurobindo was going up after lunch. Such unearthly beauty I had never seen — she appeared to be about 20 whereas she was more than 37 years old.’² In fact, she was then fourty-three years old.

The parallels between the ways followed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are striking. The parents of both wanted their children to be the best of the best. Their parents were atheists, and in their youth Sri Aurobindo and the Mother themselves had been atheists (the Mother: ‘I was a convinced atheist’). The yoga of Aurobindo Ghose began with an intensive practice of pranayama in Baroda, in 1905; about the same time Mirra Alfassa stumbled upon the Revue cosmique which put her into contact with Théon’s teachings and the Divine within. After a period of spiritual stagnation and ‘inner dryness’, Aurobindo met with the yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele at the end of 1907; Mirra’s yoga, properly speaking, began immediately afterwards (‘I began my true yoga in 1908’). The Bhagavad Gita played an important role in the initial development of both. Both were guided by incorporeal instructors for some time. Sri Aurobindo started his annotations in his Record of Yoga when the Mother began writing her Prières et Méditations, her spiritual diary, which in its present form comprises only a fraction of the original entries. As young Aurobindo had journeyed from East to West to receive a thorough Western education, so Mirra later travelled from West to East; their union and collaboration resulted in an intimate global synthesis. And the path both followed led them to the discovery of the Supermind.

And so the Mother could say, when commenting on an early text of hers: ‘This was the complete programme of what Sri Aurobindo has done and the way to perform the work on earth, and I had foreseen all that in 1912. I have met Sri Aurobindo for the first time in 1914, two years later, and I had already worked out the complete programme,’³ a programme that was the outcome of an inner realization. ‘And I have arrived here in that state, with a world of experiences and already the conscious union with the Divine above and within — everything consciously realized, noted down, and so on — when I came to Sri Aurobindo.’⁴ We are reminded of Sri Aurobindo’s words: ‘There is no difference between the Mother’s path and mine; we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they were the same.’ In 1938 he said, as noted down by Nirodbaran: ‘All my realisations — Nirvana and others — would have remained theoretical, as it were, as far as the outward world is concerned. It is the Mother who showed the way to a practical form. Without her, no organised manifestation would have been possible. She has been doing this kind of sadhana and work from her very childhood.’⁵

The Traditional Yogas

The process of Yoga is a turning of the human soul from the egoistic state of consciousness absorbed in the outward appearances and attractions of things to a higher state … ⁶

— Sri Aurobindo

The word ‘yoga’, now familiar to most people, remains associated for many in the West with bizarre, exotic Indian practices, with fakirs besmeared with ashes, with leprous beggars and holy cows, and trying to see God by standing on the head. It is true that various yogic disciplines have been developed in India and practised on a scale and with a naturalness as has never been the case in the West; but yoga — the seeking for God and the union with God — is, just like the concept of the Avatar, much more widespread in the West than most people would suspect. As Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘These things have been experienced, it is true, by a small minority of the human race, but still there has been a host of independent witnesses to them in all times, climes and conditions, and numbered among them are some of the greatest intelligences of the past, some of the world’s most remarkable figures.’⁷ The Mother said: ‘The experience of all of them is the same. When they have touched the Thing, it is for all of them the same thing. The proof that they have touched That is precisely the fact that it is the same for everybody … And to That you can give the names you like, it does not matter.’⁸

By way of illustration: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,’ said Christ, ‘and all these things shall be added unto you.’ So is to know God ‘the one thing needful’ of Sri Aurobindo, from which ensues all else. Without knowledge and the unification with God, all else is nothing but ‘vanity of vanities’ while mankind keeps plodding around in its mental circles. ‘Yoga is not a thing of ideas but of inner spiritual experience. Merely to be attracted to any set of religious or spiritual ideas does not bring with it any realization. Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change of consciousness, it can only bring a change of mind,’⁹ Sri Aurobindo wrote tersely. And also, ‘Yoga is not a field for intellectual argument or dissertation. It is not by the exercise of the logical or debating mind that one can arrive at a true understanding of yoga and follow it.’¹⁰

Above the entrance of the Apollo temple in Delphi was written: ‘Know yourself’. Nowadays, this adage is generally understood in the humanistic, psychological sense, but it was the key word from the core of the secret Greek mysteries: know your Self and you will know the world and God, because your Self is the world and God. That concise Greek formula contains also, for instance, the whole message of the realized soul that was Ramana Maharshi, a contemporary of Sri Aurobindo. And Christ said: ‘The Kingdom of God is within you.’ Does not The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis provide the soul with a method, a discipline to experience the revelation of its Beloved and to enjoy the resplendence of his Presence? Is not the Jesus prayer of the Orthodox Church a japa, a repetition of words charged with power and condensed in a mantra (formula) so that the soul, by the power of the word, may transcend everyday reality and emerge in a higher reality? Have not the repetition of the Lord’s prayer or the Ave Maria, or some phrases from the Psalms, the same function and effect, even unconsciously? Is not the Rule of St Benedict, for instance, essentially a discipline of God-realization contained in the practical regulation of a monastic community? And there are the spiritual paths of so many saints and mystics who have been the fine flower of their age and culture.

This is why Anne Bancroft could write in The Luminous Vision, her book about six medieval mystics: ‘The three essential beliefs of mysticism, that the beingness of oneself is also that of the God-ground, or timeless Reality; that to find this unconditioned beingness we have to let go our dependence on conditioned things; and that actually to do this reveals to us the nature of our true life as a human being — these three beliefs are not only those of Dionysius and the Christian mystics who followed him but also the basic beliefs of all religions, particularly Buddhism — indeed the Four Noble Truths are echoed time and again in medieval words.’ (p. 6) Those ‘essential beliefs’ are also the main pillars of Sufism and of the traditional Yogas.⁹¹

All this allows us to conclude that yoga has indeed been very well known in the West, albeit in another garb or under other names, long before various schools of Eastern spirituality induced its conscious revival in the course of the present century. The need for a direct individual contact with the Godhead, or with the true Self, has in the course of the past centuries grown ever more urgent because of the authoritarianism of the Christian Churches, for they have put themselves between the soul and its God who is its Self, and they have appropriated the exclusive right of mediation and intercession with God on the basis of dubious religious claims. No formal grouping of men has up to now succeeded in keeping alive the teachings of an authentic, missioned or realized Founder. What in the beginning was intended as a religious apostolate has time and again been formalized into an Earth-bound community of interests, motivated by the urge for power, social esteem and material possession. The Churches have played an irreplaceable role historically and culturally, but their main victim has been the living soul of the faithful. The Eastern ‘sects’ which are now attracting so many people in the West can only fulfil their true mission if they know how to escape the snares of human nature in group formation, and if they keep pointing, beyond themselves, to ‘the one thing needful’ of which every soul is a part and grows into the living image, and that eventually must lead to the foundation of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

‘Yoga is nothing but practical psychology,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga, the literary formulation of his experiments, experiences and realizations from 1912 till 1921, cryptically noted down in his Record of Yoga. ‘Essentially, Yoga is a generic name for the processes and the results of processes by which we transcend or shred off our present modes of being and rise to a new, a higher, a wider mode of consciousness which is not that of the ordinary animal and intellectual man.’¹¹ These processes are based on the general psychological characteristics of the human being, and have been found to be realizable and repeatable by others as tried out by generations of practitioners in India.

For man the active being there is the yoga of the will or of works, karmayoga; for man the emotional being there is the yoga of devotion or love, bhaktiyoga; for man the thinking, reflective being there is the yoga of knowledge, jnanayoga. These are the three main procedures by which the human being can use its fundamental qualities to rise above its ordinary state and to find access to the Above. But it is also embodied in several ‘sheaths’: the visible material sheath and the invisible vital and mental sheaths. The totality of this complex embodiment — called the adhara in India and much more complex than the commonly supposed single material body — also has its possibility of perfection through hathayoga, which in the West is practically synonymous with yoga in general. Hathayoga, however, is the most limited and least spiritual form of yoga because it exclusively aims at the perfection of the adhara; to touch higher realities, it has to borrow elements from other yogic disciplines. There is also rajayoga, probably the most practised method of yoga in India, which has organically integrated elements of the other yogas into an effective whole and is accessible to the greatest diversity of spiritual aspirants. A wide range of literature is now available about all these yogic systems.

Like all existing forms of spirituality and all religions, the methods of yoga too have only one goal: to escape from this nightmarish world, this valley of tears, this prison, this place of banishment, into higher, more agreeable worlds or states of being, or into a state of non-being. On the one hand there is this impossible world in which the soul for some reason or other has been plunged or has plunged of its own volition; on the other hand there is the hereafter, mostly the positive projection of our negative experience of the world — and in between there is nothing. It is therefore a matter of some urgency to get away from here as soon as possible and never come back, if possible, for instance by disappearing forever into the Godhead or into Nirvana. But in Nirvana there is nobody left to congratulate oneself on the liberation. ‘Sri Aurobindo often said: the people who choose to get out of [the manifestation] forget that, at the same time, they will lose the consciousness with which they might congratulate themselves on their choice.’¹² (the Mother) Moreover, if God is the perfect being he is supposed to be, why has he made this hellish world and us in it?

One school of yoga has tackled this problem courageously, the tantrayoga. Although its final aim too is to attain mukti, liberation, it does not turn its back on the creation; on the contrary, it utilizes the difficulties in the creation as possibilities. While all Vedantic yogas (the ones mentioned earlier) turn towards the hidden Supreme Being that is the Purusha, the tantrayoga worships the creative Power, the Shakti, the World-Mother, and it worships her works because of her. One who has read the previous chapter will find here something of Sri Aurobindo’s relation with the Great Mother, accentuated by his confirmation in principle that the Creation too is the Godhead — because the Godhead is everything and nothing can exist outside it. (Because of these two reasons — the recognition of the role of the Great Mother and the positive evaluation of her creation — Sri Aurobindo’s yoga could in fact be considered as a kind of super-tantra.)

Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga

‘Sri Aurobindo has always told that his yoga begins where the others’ end,’ said the Mother, ‘and that to be able to realize his yoga, one first has to attain the extreme limit of what the other yogas have realized.’¹³ This is no small prerequisite. But the Work the doublepoled Avatar had come to do was no small work either.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have mastered, if not all the details, all the essence of the traditional yogas. ‘Will, knowledge and love are the three divine powers in human nature and the life of man, and they point to the three paths by which the human soul rises to the Divine. Their integrality, the union of man with God in all the three, must therefore … be the foundation of an integral Yoga.’¹⁴ ‘In this yoga all sides of the Truth are taken up, not in the systematic forms given them formerly but in their essence, and carried to the fullest and highest significance.’¹⁵ ‘As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure, ways to cleave through impenetrable morass and desert and forest, hostile masses to conquer — a work such as, I am certain, none else had to do before us. For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience, not in a mere play or Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path.’¹⁶ Their discovery of the New World was the consequence of an integral knowledge and experience of the old one. They could only build on an integral synthesis of what existed to work out the profound significance of the evolution in themselves and in others.

Their attitude towards the traditional paths of yoga and spirituality has, of course, never been denigrating. Isn’t it yoga and spirituality which, ‘in all times, climes and circumstances,’ have gifted mankind with its greatest exponents? Wouldn’t humanity be a sorry mess if it had not produced those beacons of light? Sri Aurobindo once put one of his disciples in his place: ‘One can and ought to believe and follow one’s own path without condemning or looking down on others for having beliefs different from those one thinks or sees to be the best or the largest in truth. The spiritual field is many-sided and full of complexities and there is room for an immense variety of experiences. Besides, all mental egoism — and spiritual egoism — has to be surmounted and this sense of superiority should therefore not be cherished.’¹⁷

In the course of their personal evolution it had become clear to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that they, as Avatars, had been sent to build the foundations of the material realization of a new species on Earth. This time the issue was not the embodiment of a higher being within the mental range, but of a divine being in the literal sense of the word. Their own yoga, work or development — whatever one wants to call it — therefore consisted of the following: (i) the complete identification with their divine nature; (ii) the realization in themselves of their divine consciousness in a dynamic way (a yoga beyond the existing yogas), to render that consciousness active in the world; and (iii) to progressively embody that divine consciousness themselves, first on the mental, then on the vital and finally on the material level. The result of all that should be that a divine species, as the successor of the present human being, would inhabit the Earth and that the Kingdom of God would no longer be a promise or a dream, but a reality beyond our highest expectations. ‘Then all the long labour of Nature will end in a crowning justification.’¹⁸

Evidently, a yoga to turn such a fantastic ambition into reality — the coming of the Golden Age — required other means than those available in the traditional yogas, however much tested and practised — for the practitioners of those yogas do not intend a divine creation here on Earth but try, without exception, to escape as soon as possible from the hell on Earth.

Sri Aurobindo’s new method was unbelievably simple and at the same time very daring. If that new something was so new, if it was the intention of the Supreme and his manifesting power to embody in evolution something superhuman, a divine species succeeding the existing human species, then the only way to collaborate was to open inadequate human nature totally and unconditionally to the new Divine Action, to surrender to it. ‘Surrender’, the total giving of oneself, is the keyword in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s yoga — also called the Integral Yoga, the Purna [complete] Yoga or the Supramental Yoga. If the comprehension as well as the power and the effects of the totally new Event on Earth surpass the human being, and if the human being wants to collaborate in the coming of a New World, then it can only try and open itself to the Divine Action in the hope that this Action will permeate and transform its physical, vital and mental limitations.

‘The first word of the supramental Yoga is surrender; its last word also is surrender,’¹⁹ wrote Sri Aurobindo in a recently discovered note of his. Surrender had been the beginning and the foundation of his own journey of discovery. About his meeting with Lele, he narrates: ‘In my own case I owe the first decisive turn of my inner life to one who was infinitely inferior to me in intellect, education and capacity and by no means spiritually perfect or supreme; but, having seen a Power behind him and decided to turn there for help, I gave myself entirely into his hands and followed with an automatic passivity the guidance. He himself was astonished and said to others that he had never met anyone before who could surrender himself so absolutely and without reserve or question to the guidance of the helper [i.e., Lele].’²⁰ This reminds one, of course, of Sri Aurobindo’s own pronouncement about the surrender of the Mother.

‘Before parting I told Lele: “Now that we shall not be together I should like you to give me instructions about the sadhana [his spiritual discipline].” In the meantime I told him of a Mantra that had arisen in my heart. He was giving me instructions when he suddenly stopped and asked me if I could rely absolutely on Him who had given me the Mantra. I said I could always do it. Then Lele said there was no need for instructions … Some months later, he came to Calcutta. He asked me if I meditated in the morning and in the evening. I said, no. Then he thought that some devil had taken possession of me.’²¹

This extract is from a conversation noted down by A.B. Purani in 1923. Fifteen years later Sri Aurobindo, answering a question on this subject, said: ‘I [then] said to myself: “You have handed me over to the Divine and if as a result of that the Devil catches hold of me, I will say that the Divine has sent the Devil and I will follow him.”’²² Sri Aurobindo was still more radical in the spiritual revolution he had brought about than he was as the ideologist of the political extremists.

This radicality, this unconditionality we find also in the first lines of the first chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga, the greatest book about yoga ever written, where as a kind of programmatic declaration one reads: ‘The supreme Shastra [scripture] of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda [knowledge] in the heart of every thinking and living being.’²³ Further on in the same book, he writes: ‘If we are to be free in the Spirit, if we are to be subject only to the supreme Truth, we must discard the idea that our mental or moral laws are binding on the Infinite or that there can be anything sacrosanct, absolute or eternal even in the highest of our existing standards of conduct.’²⁴ ‘For the Sadhaka [practitioner] of the integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture … He must live in his own soul beyond the written Truth … He is a Sadhaka of the infinite.’²⁵ ‘Either the Shastra grows obsolete and has to be progressively changed or finally cast away or else it stands as a rigid barrier to the self-development of the individual and the race. The Shastra erects a collective and external standard; it ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable elements of a secret spiritual force within him. But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable.’²⁶ ‘The decision lies between God and our self … It is altogether from within that must come the knowledge of the work that has to be done.’²⁷

This does not mean that Sri Aurobindo wanted to wipe the past off the map. As we have already seen, he and the Mother had completely assimilated the existing yogic disciplines, and we know that they, as Avatars, had to take into them the whole pre-existence of humanity to work out the inner meaning of the evolution and to manifest a higher gradation of it. ‘I had my past and the world’s past to assimilate and overpass before I could find and found the future.’²⁸ (Sri Aurobindo) But the transformation of the human into a divine species demanded a radically new approach. They were the pioneers of a new creation on the Earth who at first were the only ones to know about it and who had to build the foundations of it in themselves before they could involve other, selected representatives of the existing human species. This was a task which by far surpassed the potentialities of the human nature in which they had incarnated and which therefore required the unconditional surrender to the Divine and his Executrix, the Great Mother. ‘This surrender is the indispensable means of the supramental change,’²⁹ wrote Sri Aurobindo, and more personally in Savitri: ‘A vast surrender was his only strength.’³⁰

Of that supramental change they were the forerunners, the founders, the avantgardists. As with all Avatars, it was also their job to clear a path in the unknown, this time to make real the utopia of all utopias. Sri Aurobindo called himself ‘a path-finder hewing his way through a virgin forest.’³¹ This is a metaphor the Mother, when alone, burdened with the task after Sri Aurobindo’s passing, would use time and again, for instance in 1961: ‘I am really hewing a road in a virgin forest … What is the road? Is there a road? Is there a procedure? Probably not.’ The old yogas, roads on the established map of spirituality, were already far behind them. They had ventured into the unknown, into the impossible. ‘Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption — I go on till I conquer or perish. This is the spirit in which I seek the Supermind, no hunting for greatness for myself or others,’³² asserted Sri Aurobindo emphatically. The Mother said with as much emphasis to the youth of the Ashram, among whom were present some of the elect: ‘It looks like foolishness, but everything new has always seemed foolish before it became reality … And as we are all here for reasons probably unknown to most of you, but which are very conscious reasons, we can choose the fulfilment of that foolishness as our aim. It will at least be worthwhile to participate in the experience.’³³

‘The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past, but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther, in the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future.’³⁴ There is no gainsaying this. However, human nature is distrustful and conservative. ‘They admit and jealously defend the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it in the present,’³⁵ Sri Aurobindo wrote ironically. And then in his inimitable humorous vein to a more ignorant than sceptical Nirodbaran: ‘What a wonderful argument! Since it has not been done, it cannot be done! At that rate the whole history of the earth must have stopped long before the protoplasm. When it was a mass of gases, no life had been born, ergo, life could not be born — when only life was there, mind was not born, so mind could not be born. Since mind is there but nothing beyond, as there is no supermind manifested in anybody, so supermind can never be born. Sobhanallah! [Glory to God!] Glory, glory, glory to the human reason!! Luckily the Divine or the Cosmic Spirit or Nature or whoever is there cares a damn for the human reason. He or she or it does what he or she or it has to do, whether it can or cannot be done.’³⁶

In what way does Sri Aurobindo’s yoga differ from the traditional yogas? He has clearly explained this in one of his letters:

‘It is new as compared with the old yogas:

‘1. Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into Heaven or Nirvana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object. If there is a descent in other yogas, yet it is only an incident on the way or resulting from the ascent — the ascent is the real thing. Here the ascent is the first step, but it is a means for the descent. It is the descent of the new consciousness attained by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the sadhana. Even the Tantra and Vaishavism end in the release from life; here the object is the divine fulfilment of life.

‘2. Because 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 here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing in of a Power of Consciousness (the supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth-nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active.

‘3. Because a method has been recognized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive. I have not found this method (as a whole) or anything like it professed or realised in the old yogas. If I had, I should not have wasted my time in hewing out a road and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public. Our yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.’³⁷

It was an incredible load Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had taken on their shoulders, a load all but invisible to others. They had to take evolution a gigantic leap forward; they had to take everything into them in order to transform it; to be able to activate the divine supramental power in the earth-substance, they not only had to have it at their own command, but they also had to be able to manifest it on every level of their personality in accordance with the particular conditions of that level; and nothing of the existing reality could remain outside the scope of their work, for the Supramental is a Truth-Consciousness that is a Unity-Consciousness, and anything not taken up into the transforming movement, however small or apparently unimportant, would frustrate it. ‘Nothing is actually done as long as everything is not done.’ ‘If everything does not change, nothing will change.’ (the Mother)

‘In this Yoga nothing is too small not to be utilised and nothing too big not to be tried out,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo. He and the Mother were, like all Avatars, accelerators of the evolution. Yoga is always a condensation, a densification, a telescoping of the evolution, which under normal circumstances is the work of Mother Nature as she amuses herself with her magic of producing new forms and takes her time of it. Yoga is a rapid and concentrated conscious evolution of the being … It may effect in a single life what in an instrumental Nature might take centuries and millenniums or many hundreds of lives.’³⁸ The Avatar turns evolution into revolution. This is the reason why so few can understand him or even believe in the certainty of his vision of Light.

Sri Aurobindo wanted to fix the base of a manifested supramental world for all future time. ‘[He] cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.’³⁹ Ever the revolutionary and radical extremist, he wrote that it was his wish that the supramental victory, manifestation and transformation should be for now. His followers, like all human beings eager for the miraculous, interpreted such words in their naive way: they forgot that the work of the Avatar, however quick and powerful — and in itself a miracle — had to take into account the evolutionary mechanisms built into her creation by the Creatrix. ‘The whole samskara [the established habits] of the whole universe’ is against his efforts. Nirodbaran too was of the opinion that the work of his gurus — ‘the most difficult imaginable’ (Sri Aurobindo) — went rather slowly; therefore Sri Aurobindo asked him: ‘What would have satisfied your rational mind — 3 years? 3 months? 3 weeks? Considering that by ordinary evolution it could not have been done even at Nature’s express speed in less than 3000 years, and would ordinarily have taken anything from 30,000 to 300,000, the transit of 30 years is perhaps not too slow.’⁴⁰ Sri Aurobindo wrote this in 1936, when after about thirty years of sadhana he thought the manifestation of the supramental was imminent. (The manifestation, however, would take place twenty years later and after a whole series of dramatic events. So many expectations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have time and again been postponed by the opposition of the hostile forces who tenaciously resisted every inch of progress. This uncertainty in the battle of cosmic dimensions they had to fight and the unimaginable suffering that went with it is, as it were, the seal of authenticity on their work.)

To execute the total, global Work in which nothing was too small or too big, they had to include the whole world in their embrace. ‘The thing to be done is as large as human life, and therefore the individuals who lead the way will take all human life for their province. These pioneers will consider nothing as alien to them, nothing as outside their scope. For every part of human life has to be taken up by the spiritual — not only the intellectual, the aesthetic, the ethical, but the dynamic, the vital, the physical; therefore for none of these things or the activities that spring from them will they have contempt or aversion, however they may insist on a change of the spirit and a transmutation of the form.’⁴¹

What Sri Aurobindo describes here as the indispensable attitude of those who want to collaborate in the great work, was the attitude he and the Mother themselves had found necessary for their Work. ‘All life is Yoga’ is the motto of Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis. ‘Sri Aurobindo took the difficulties like this,’ said the Mother, opening her arms to embrace all, ‘and then he worked on it so that there were no difficulties anymore.’⁴² And that was what she did too, she pressed the whole world upon her bosom.

At his first meeting with Lele, Sri Aurobindo, to his own and Lele’s surprise, had had the realization of the passive Brahman. (A spiritual experience is, generally speaking, an unexpected but relatively brief event; a realization causes a permanent change or acquisition in the personality.) After the following intensive practice of the yoga and guided by the Master of the yoga in his heart, Sri Aurobindo had had the realization of the Omnipresent Divine and of the Cosmic Consciousness in the prison at Alipore. One of those two realizations is for the greatest yogis, in most cases, the fruit of a lifelong sadhana.

The date of Sri Aurobindo’s third realization cannot be fixed accurately. The letter in which he mentions it has been printed in the Supplement to his Collected Works and is dated 1913 with a question mark. He writes: ‘15th August [his birthday] is usually a turning point or a notable day for me personally either in sadhana or life, — indirectly only for others. This time it has been very important for me. My subjective sadhana may be said to have received its final seal and something like its consummation by a prolonged realisation and dwelling in the Parabrahman [at once the passive and the active Brahman, the Supreme Godhead] for many hours. Since then, egoism is dead for all in me except the Annamaya Atma, — the physical self which awaits one farther realisation before it is entirely liberated from occasional visitings or external touches of the old separated existence.’⁴³ Sri Aurobindo was at that moment a fully realized Yogi, completely at one with the Divine, except for certain states in which the material body was still experienced as something personal. The meaning of this we, ordinary mortals, cannot even attempt to understand.

Peter Heehs writes in connection with this third great realization: ‘Sri Aurobindo’s resumption of action after having entered the silence of the Brahman was, in our opinion, the principal turning-point in his life. A yogin who realizes Brahman has no need to proceed further.’⁴⁴ K.D. Sethna probably supposes that Sri Aurobindo’s realization of the Parabrahman must have happened some time earlier, for he writes: ‘This means that by 1910 — the year in which he [Sri Aurobindo] came to Pondicherry, he could have rested on his laurels, for, in matters of God-realisation as traditionally envisaged he had nothing more to achieve.’⁴⁵ Whatever the correct date may be, the opinion of both writers converges on the same fact: that Sri Aurobindo after having reached the supreme individual siddhi (yogic realization) turned back towards the Earth and mankind to continue the work for which he had incarnated: ‘My mission in life is to bring down the Supermind into Mind, Life and Body.’⁴⁶ ‘I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only — I am not doing anything for myself, as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others … My sadhana was not done for myself but for the earth-consciousness.’⁴⁷

As always, he has been working at his proposed aim without respite, even during the years he wrote the Arya, as witnessed in his Record of Yoga. This is why the Mother could say: ‘When I returned in 1920, he was bringing the Supramental in the mental consciousness’, i.e. in the highest of the three elements humans consist of. In Purani’s report about his meeting with Sri Aurobindo in 1921, we read that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were already bringing down the Supramental into the vital, which is the domain of the life-forces — the very reason why they were looking so different and, as it were, rejuvenated. (We know that spiritual force is more concrete and mightier than material force, and that consciousness literally is a concrete entity; otherwise spirituality and yoga would only be a fiction and the transformation of the body a chimera.) ‘Something strange happened; when we were in the vital all at once my body became young again just like I was eighteen!’ told the Mother. ‘There was a young man named Pearson, a disciple of Tagore, who had been in Japan [at the same time as the Richards] and who had come back to India, and he came to visit me. When he saw me, he was stupefied. He said: “But what has happened to you?” He did not recognize me. It has not lasted very long, only a few months. At that time I received some old photographs from France and Sri Aurobindo saw a photo of mine from the time I was eighteen. He said: “See here! This is how you are now!” My hair was dressed differently, but I had become eighteen again!’⁴⁸

Since then five, six more years had gone by — years of intensive, now combined sadhana for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Their dedication was total, their effort an act of every moment, night and day, and their capabilities the highest which embodied beings on Earth had ever acquired. And this is how we arrive at a new milestone in their work which we will relate in the next chapter.

The Concept of the ‘Superman’

The higher, divine being that will succeed man has as yet no name. Sri Aurobindo called it the gnostic or supramental being, or more often the superman. However, the word ‘superman’⁹² can easily be misunderstood because it actually means a human being with greater quantitative and/or qualitative human capacities than at present. This is one of the reasons why it immediately brings to mind Nietzsche’s Übermensch, while Sri Aurobindo meant by it a ‘supra-man’, i.e. a being spiritually and physically of a totally different and higher order than the humans, just like the supramental is a higher and totally different consciousness compared with the mental.

It is practically impossible to find a reference book which gives an undistorted outline of Sri Aurobindo’s ideas, and he is often represented as an epigone of Friedrich Nietzsche. At the time he gave in the Arya a philosophical shape to his inner experiences and coined the terminology for them, he was of course aware of the possible association with Nietzsche, if only because of the word ‘superman’ and its connotations. This is why in one of the first issues of the review he published an article to define unequivocally Nietzsche’s conception of the superman and his own. The difference is not a matter of nuances, it is poles apart. But later experience has shown that few writers have been so badly, or so partially, or so superficially read and understood as Sri Aurobindo; this is the reason why time and again he has been wrongly labelled as a philosopher and as a spiritual innovator.

Sri Aurobindo held Nietzsche in high esteem. He called him ‘the most vivid, concrete and suggestive of modern thinkers,’⁴⁹ and he regretted ‘the misapplication by Treitschke of the teachings of Nietzsche to national and international uses which would have profoundly disgusted the philosopher himself.’⁵⁰ One should keep in mind that the Arya was written for the most part during the first World War, when Nietzsche’s sister too was turning his (sometimes even falsified) writings into propaganda material for the Herrenvolk, the master race. ‘Two books belonged to the standard equipment of the German soldier in the first World War: Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Gospel of St John. It is difficult to say which of both authors thereby was most misused.’ (Bernal Maguus)

Sri Aurobindo writes in The Human Cycle: ‘Nietzsche’s idea that to develop the superman out of our present very unsatisfactory manhood is our real business, is in itself an absolutely sound teaching. His formulation of our aim, “to become ourselves,” “to exceed ourselves,” implying, as it does, that man has not yet found his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully and spontaneously live, could not be bettered. But then the question of questions is there, what is our self, and what is our real nature? What is that which is growing in us, but into which we have not yet grown?’⁵¹

We are now familiar with Sri Aurobindo’s answer. The human being is a transitional being that is the embodiment of an eternal, divine soul. It is the evolution of this divine soul which causes and supports the material evolution from the deepest Inertia back to its divine Origin. As before man there has been a whole gradation of evolutionary steps, so after him there will be still more steps, for at present he does not come close to incarnating the divine potential contained in his soul. The most important means of transition to the following species, the species of the Aurobindonian supramental being, is a complete surrender to the Evolving Power by which, after the example of the double-poled, complete Avatar, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the present human qualities and way of being will be supramentalized. We have heard Sri Aurobindo say that only the Divine Shakti can accomplish the integral yoga of this transformation. He consequently also said: ‘It is a great mistake to suppose that one can “do” the Purna Yoga [the complete or integral Yoga] … No human being can do that.’⁵² No species can break through its own ceiling all by itself. The Unity-Consciousness, which will be the essence of the supramental being, surpasses man as much ‘as a lizard differs from a man.’ ‘As man is removed from the animal, so will be the Superman from man.’⁵³ (Evening Talks)

The differences with Nietzsche’s philosophy are evident. For instance, Nietzsche believed in an endless succession of cycles, not in an evolution with a beginning and an end (which does not exclude a cyclical development, but then as it were in a spiral, the cycles being repeated on an ever higher level and directed towards a goal). His superman was the product of a Wille-zur-Macht, an attitude of superiority and hunger for power and the will by which he had to rise above all moral norms to become the master, driven by an inspiration of which the source is difficult to define. The higher characteristics of this superman are not the (by us still unrealized) spiritual qualities of Light, Love, Harmony and Unity-Consciousness, but the aggrandized, ‘colossalized’ (Sri Aurobindo’s word) human capacities as known to us in our present state. When Nietzsche talks about the soul, he means something quite different — usually a concentration of life-forces — from the presence of the Supreme in us. In short, Friedrich Nietzsche was a strongly inspired seer and poet, much more than a philosopher, whose brain almost literally burst because of the pressure of the awareness that the time of the incarnation of a higher species on Earth was imminent. Imprisoned by mental limitations, he suffered like few others; born too early and too much to the West, he was unable to escape from the mental prison and dashed himself to insanity against its glass walls.

As an evaluation of Friedrich Nietzsche, we may conclude with the following words by Sri Aurobindo: ‘Nietzsche first cast it, the mystic of Will-worship, the troubled, profound, half-luminous Hellenising Slav with his strange clarities, his violent half-ideas, his rare gleaming intuitions that came marked with the stamp of an absolute truth and sovereignty of light. But Nietzsche was an apostle who never entirely understood his own message. His prophetic style was like that of the Delphic oracles, which spoke constantly the word of the Truth but turned it into untruth in the mind of the hearer. Not always indeed; for sometimes he rose beyond his personal temperament and individual mind, his European inheritance and environment, his revolt against the Christ-idea, his war against current moral values, and spoke out the Word as he had heard it, the Truth as he had seen it, bare, luminous, impersonal and therefore flawless and imperishable. But for the most part this message that had come to his inner hearing, vibrating out of a distant Infinite like a strain caught from the lyre of far-off Gods, did get, in his effort to appropriate and make it near to him, mixed up with a somewhat turbulent surge of collateral ideas that drowned much of the pure original note.’ (Arya, first volume, p. 571)

Friedrich Nietzsche too, who like few others sensed that a New Age was at hand, was a veritable precursor.