Beyond Man

Chapter Six: The Arya

At the end of 1911 Alexandra David-Néel was travelling in India. She seized the opportunity to take the train to Pondicherry and visit Aurobindo Ghose ‘of whom friends of mine have had such a good opinion’. These friends obviously were Mirra and Paul Richard. About her visit she wrote the next day to her husband: ‘I spent two wonderful hours reviewing the ancient philosophical ideas of India with a man of rare intelligence. He belongs to that uncommon category that I so much admire, the reasonable mystic. I am truly grateful to the friends who advised me to visit this man. He thinks with such clarity, there is such lucidness in his reasoning, such lustre in his eyes, that he leaves one with the impression of having contemplated the genius of India such as one dreams it to be after reading the noblest pages of Hindu philosophy.’¹ But her visit had not gone unnoticed. When her train pulled into the station of Madras, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department was waiting for her in person. ‘He asked me — very civilly and politely, I must say — what I had been doing in Pondicherry in the house of that suspicious character.’ Madame David-Néel had a whole collection of letters of recommendation by the British government in her handbag, and the suspicions of the chief of police were soon put to rest. ‘[Aurobindo] certainly is a very remarkable scholar,’ he then said, ‘but he is a dangerous man. We hold him responsible for the recent assassination of Mr. Ashe, a British official.’ Madam David-Néel replied that she thought it improbable that a learned man, who had spoken to her so penetratingly on philosophical topics, was an assassin. ‘He certainly did not kill Mr. Ashe himself,’ replied the chief of police, ‘he had him killed.’

So the British colonial authorities had not forgotten Aurobindo Ghose. On the contrary, he still was a thorn in their side. Lord Minto, the Viceroy of India, said that he would not rest till he had crushed Aurobindo Ghose.² Aurobindo’s house was under surveillance night and day, and the young Bengalis who were living with him were shadowed wherever they went, as were his friends and acquaintances. To this end quite a substantial contingent of British police were engaged, and permission obtained of the French government in Pondicherry to keep an eye on Aurobindo Ghose and other revolutionaries on the run. Nolini Kanta Gupta, one of Aurobindo’s first four companions, writes in his Reminiscences: The British Indian police set up a regular station there, in a rented house with several permanent men. They were of course plainclothes men, for they had no right to wear uniform within French territory. They kept watch both on our visitors and guests. Soon they got into the habit of sitting on the pavement round the corner next to our house in groups of three or four. They chatted away the whole day and only now and again took down something in their notebooks … The police gave reports all based on pure fancy, they made up all sorts of stories at their sweet will. As they found it difficult to gather correct and precise information, they would just fabricate the news.’³

The British tried their best to make the French extradite Aurobindo Ghose. Incriminating false documents were hidden in a well in the house of V.V.S. Aiyar, but they were found by a maidservant. A police spy was smuggled into Aurobindo’s house as attendant of an invalid guest. Rumors were afloat that Aurobindo would be kidnapped, and his young associates kept watch night and day armed with bottles of acid. Paid informers had accused Aurobindo in court of all kinds of subversive activities, but when a French examining magistrate (juge d’instruction) on a domiciliary visit saw his Greek and Latin books, he annulled the prosecution on the spot. An Indian who read Homer and Virgil in the original language! No, this could not be the sinister conspirator depicted to him.

Pondicherry was — and is — a small port on the Coromandel Coast, one hundred and sixty kilometers south of Madras. Visiting ships had to weigh anchor. With its carefully kept sea front and park it is one of the most attractive smaller towns in India, but at that time it seemed a place out of the Three Penny Opera. It was divided into the ‘white town’ near to the sea, with the spacious houses of the French colonists, and the ‘black town’ more inland, with the small houses in local style and the hutments of the Tamil population. The two parts of the town were separated by a straight ‘canal’, actually the smelly main drain of the town. Out of reach of the British, Pondicherry was a French free port and a den of smugglers of weapons, liquor and all kinds of Western produce greatly in demand, of gangs employed by totally unscrupulous politicians, of police spies and professional informers, and of numerous fugitives, idealistic freedom fighters as well as common criminals. After a visit in 1921 A.B. Purani wrote: ‘Pondicherry as a city was lethargic, with a colonial atmosphere — an exhibition of the worst elements of European and Indian culture. The market was dirty and stinking and the people had no idea of sanitation. The sea-beach was made filthy by them. Smuggling was the main business.’⁴

After the beginning of the First World War the British exerted strong pressure on the French governor to expel all fugitive revolutionaries from the Pondicherrian enclave to Africa, more specifically to Algeria or Djibouti. Strange to say, most of the freedom fighters, including the poet Subramania Bharati, found that a good idea, maybe under the delusion that in Africa they would have total freedom of movement, but without realizing that the aim of their life would lose its meaning in a place so far away from their motherland. At a meeting called to decide about the voluntary exile, Aurobindo Ghose refused categorically ‘to budge one inch’. Madame Richard exerted her influence on the French governor of Pondicherry, and her brother Mattéo managed to hush up the affair at the Ministry of the Colonies in Paris. The British authorities would continue keeping an eye on Sri Aurobindo till 1936.

In June 1914, Sri Aurobindo and Paul and Mirra Richard decided to publish a periodical to spread Sri Aurobindo’s ideas. It is difficult to find out who convinced whom of doing so. Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter at the time: ‘So far as my share is concerned, it will be the intellectual side of my work for the world.’⁵ In the four years of his stay in Pondicherry, he had filled many notebooks with brief annotations and essays on the Vedas and Upanishads, comparative linguistics and a lot of other subjects — all the while involved in the intensive yoga which he was practising constantly. In a couple of months he managed to compose a prospectus for enlisting subscribers and to write a series of articles which would become his major works. He also translated Richard’s contributions, a collection of apothegms about The Wherefore of the Worlds and quotations of sages from all parts of the world, entitled The Eternal Wisdom. Mirra, as she had done for the Revue cosmique, took on the administration of the review and helped Richard translating Sri Aurobindo’s texts, for the periodical would be published in English and in French. The first English issue of Arya, as the monthly was called, came out on 15 August 1914, Sri Aurobindo’s forty-second birthday.

An Aryan is ‘whoever cultivates the field that the Supreme Spirit has made for him, his earth of plenty within and without’, and who ‘does not leave it barren or allows it to run to seed, but labours to exact from it its full yield’. The word Aryan in the original Sanskrit is not tainted with the racist connotations it later developed in Germany and Austria, and of which Sri Aurobindo was of course aware. Basing himself on his extensive linguistic studies, he gave in the second issue of the review the following definition: ‘The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stand opposed to human advance … Self-perfection is the aim of his self-conquest. Therefore what he conquers, he does not destroy, but ennobles and fulfils. He knows that the body, life and mind are given him in order to attain something higher than they; therefore they must be transcended and overcome, their limitations denied, the absorption of their gratifications rejected … The Aryan is a worker and warrior. He spares himself no labour of mind or body whether to seek the Highest or to serve it. He avoids no difficulty, he accepts no cessation from fatigue. Always he fights for the coming of that kingdom within himself and in the world.’⁶

The periodical, with the title in Devanagari characters on the front-page, was ‘a philosophical review’ and intended to contribute to the presence on earth of the noble, perfect man, who in fact would be a new species beyond the existing imperfect, transitory human race. Sri Aurobindo’s very first contribution, which would later be chapter one of his magnum opus The Life Divine, opens with the following splendid paragraph, once called a ‘living entity’ by Nolini Kanta Gupta: ‘The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation — for it survives the longest periods of skepticism and returns after every banishment — is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of the Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last — God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.’ (Arya, first volume, first issue, page 1.)

That is how it resounded, this new voice, but to the world it was at first drowned by the thunder of the guns. The monthly, though no easy reading matter, never was in the red during the seven years of its publication, but the French edition, under the name Arya — Revue de grande synthèse philosophique, had to be discontinued because Paul Richard was called up for military service.

All of Sri Aurobindo’s important works, with the exception of his poetry, Savitri, and The Supramental Manifestation, have been serialised in the Arya. At the present time, eighty years after their first appearance, they still have not been accorded a generally recognized place in the cultural heritage of humanity. This may have its advantages, for they were not destined for the general public but for the few for whom the world, as it is, is no longer livable and who, from the bottom of their heart, long for something else, something really worthwhile.

The Life Divine has been found by some to be the philosophical masterpiece of the century. In The Synthesis of Yoga Sri Aurobindo describes in detail the synthetic yogic method, worked out by him in the course of the previous years to reach the threshold of a supramental manifestation. The Secret of the Veda gives a reinterpretation of the Vedas, which no longer seems to be a kind of very old folkloristic sayings but are the most meaningful revelations ever received by mankind. Month after month Sri Aurobindo published in the Arya his translations from the Vedas, later to be collected under the title Hymns to the Mystic Fire, as well as articles about a future mantric poetry which were published as The Future Poetry. In Essays on the Gita he wrote down his interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita which, at one time, was one of the principal sources of his inspiration. And there are perhaps the least understood or appreciated political and social writings, The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, which contain the key to the destiny of man as a social being and the conditions which may lead to a world of general development, harmony and unity.

All this was composed in the organ mode of Sri Aurobindo’s English. And in spite of such an impressive contribution he said he was no philosopher! ‘And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher,’⁷ he wrote in a letter. And he explained: ‘My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Vedas came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realize what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level. They [the ideas of the Higher Mind] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from an experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience. This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.’⁸

This is typical of Sri Aurobindo: a ‘crystal-clear vision’ (said the Mother) which integrates everything, even the smallest details, in a large synthetic whole. That is why he could say: ‘There is very little argument in my philosophy — the elaborate metaphysical reasoning full of abstract words with which the metaphysician tries to establish his conclusions is not there. What is there is a harmonizing of the different parts of a many-sided knowledge so that all unites logically together. But it is not by force of logical argument that it is done, but by a clear vision of the relations and sequences of the Knowledge.’⁹

Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, ca. 1918-1920

This enormous ‘mental’ activity, which we can witness for almost seven full years thanks to the Arya, used as its instruments a completely inactive brain (since the realization with Lele in Baroda) and fingers that typed directly on a prehistoric Remington what was inspired into them, including the corrections. In summer it is dreadfully warm in Pondicherry, but Sri Aurobindo, in yogic detachment, was totally oblivious to the effect on his health and remained concentrated on his work, though according to eye-witnesses he was perspiring so much that his sweat dripped on the floor.

Looking back on the first year of the Arya’s publication, he opened the second as follows: ‘Our Review has been conceived neither as a mirror of the fleeting interests and surface thoughts of the period we live in, nor as the mouthpiece of a sect, school or already organized way of thinking. Its object is to feel out for the thought of the future, to help in shaping its foundations and to link it to the best and most vital thought of the past.’¹⁰

In the July issue of 1918 he concluded the fourth year with the words: ‘We start from the idea that humanity is moving to a great change in its life which will even lead to a new life of the race — in all countries where men think, there is now in various forms that idea and that hope — and our aim has been to search for the spiritual, religious and other truth which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour. The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based, were already present in us, otherwise we should have had no right to make the endeavour at all; but the complete intellectual statement of them and their results and issues had to be found. This meant a continuous thinking, a high and subtle and difficult thinking on several lines, and this strain, which we had to impose on ourselves, we were obliged to impose also on our readers. This too is the reason why we have adopted the serial form which in a subject like philosophy has its very obvious disadvantages, but was the only one possible.’¹¹ Sri Aurobindo wrote simultaneously eight books of his profoundest experiences in monthly installments, an example of mental power seldom equalled. But it is true that this was not exactly what we know as ‘mental power’.

A synthetic, non-linear way of thinking or seeing is very complex and difficult to formulate in human language, especially when, like Sri Aurobindo, one wants to express oneself adequately and completely throughout. This is one of the reasons why some people find that Sri Aurobindo’s works are difficult reading, as is the fact that to follow him in his philosophical texts a certain degree of intellectual perception is necessary. But Sri Aurobindo’s books are inspired works and, like all inspired works, when reading them for the first time one is confronted, as it were, with a closed, forbidding gate; one pushes against the gate with the full intensity of one’s aspiration and all at once, unexpectedly, one finds it ajar; one goes on pushing, perhaps reading a certain book of his once again after several years, and suddenly the gate swings open and for the first time one puts a step into the garden beyond the printed characters — a garden extending far, far ahead, as it is a whole new world.

Satprem phrased it thus: ‘I tell you that every sentence of Sri Aurobindo’s is the expression or the translation of an exact experience, and that it not only contains as it were a whole world in a few words, but that it contains the vibration of the experience, almost the quality of light of the particular world it touches, and that through the words one can come without much difficulty into contact with the experience … Sri Aurobindo has never written one word too many.’¹²

Paul Richard, a lamb among the wolves of Pondicherrian politics, miserably failed in his political ambitions; of the four candidates for the French House of Representatives he had got the lowest number of votes. More important for posterity however was the role he played in founding the Arya, on the cover of which his name remains printed forever next to the names of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa. Sri Aurobindo would continue mentioning him as an editor even when he could not contribute to the review any longer.

Richard was not in the good books of the British because of ‘his intimate contacts with the extremists,’ and they used all possible means to have him expelled from Pondicherry. He was called up for military duty in the beginning of August 1914, but life in the trenches had but little attraction for him. Eventually the British pressure became too strong and he was unable, even with the best legal advice, to fight the expulsion order of January 1915. The Richards left Pondicherry on 22 February, the day following Mirra’s birthday, which she probably had wanted to spend near Sri Aurobindo. From now on the burden of writing, printing, publishing and administering the Arya rested solely on Sri Aurobindo’s shoulders. He would carry it on dutifully till January 1921.

For Mirra the separation was especially painful. She knew that her place was with Sri Aurobindo, but she had promised herself that she would convert Paul Richard who, like Max Théon, was the incarnation of a great Asura; this was particularly important in these times of transition and it was the true reason for her marriage with Richard. The moment of her full collaboration with Sri Aurobindo had not yet arrived. ‘I had left my psychic being with [Sri Aurobindo]. How much he was present all the time that I was not with him, and how much he has guided my sojourn in Japan!’

Separating your body from your psychic being is a risky enterprise, even for an experienced occultist, and in the south of France, where the Richards were staying for some time, Mirra fell seriously ill — an illness which attacked all the nerves of the body and was extremely painful.

Aboard the Kama Maru, the Japanese ship on which she and Richard had sailed from Colombo to Europe, she had noted in her diary: ‘Solitude, a harsh, intense solitude, and always this strong impression of having been flung headlong into a hell of darkness! Never, at any moment of my life, have I felt myself living in surroundings so entirely opposite to all that I am conscious of as true, so contrary to all that is the essence of my life.’¹³ Having recovered, she went to Lunel to help and take care of the wounded soldiers transported by the trainload to the south of France. The frenetic dance of the dark powers on earth seemed unstoppable and Mirra received her share of the suffering. In the meantime the spiritual experience and the invisible work kept going on in her. She may not have known that the dark night and the suffering in Lunel were only a foretaste of what was to await her in the years to come.

Paul Richard got exempted from military service. In March 1916 the Richards managed to sail from London and arrived in Japan in June. They would stay in that country for four years, mainly in Tokyo and Kyoto. The Mother would often talk about Japan — about the splendour of the gardens, the landscapes and the buildings, about the cleanliness and politeness but also the mental rigidity of the people, about her encounters with persons of all kinds, Rabindranath Tagore and the son of Leo Tolstoy among them. But she was silent about her intimate but fierce struggle with the Asura who was her companion, except that at the end of those four years she had not won the battle and therefore had been unable to fulfil her promise. When one day she had to face the fact, the Supreme appeared to her in a vision ‘more beautiful than in the Gita’. He took her in his arms like a newborn child and turned with her towards the West, towards India, where Sri Aurobindo was awaiting her.

The Mother in Tokyo, 1916

The Richards travelled back to India via China. The definitive meeting of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo took place on 24 April 1920. ‘An hour began, the matrix of new time.’¹⁴ Richard finally gave up his resistance and disappeared from the scene. The Mother never left Pondicherry again.

Many years later two of her Indian devotees met with Dr. O. Okawa in Japan. He had lodged the Richards in his house for some time. ‘You would like to know, my young friends, what struck me about your Mother?’ he asked. ‘She had a will that moved mountains and an intellect sharp as the edge of a sword. Her thought was clarity itself and her resolve stronger than the roots of a giant oak. Her mystic depths were deeper than the ocean. But her intellect was a plummet that could sound her deepest depths. An artist, she could paint pictures of an unearthly loveliness. A musician, she enchanted my soul when she played on an organ or guitar. A scientist, she could formulate a new heaven and earth, a new cosmogony. I do not know what Mirra had not become or was not capable of becoming. But to me she was a sister and a comrade in the spirit. That is how I know her.’¹⁵