Beyond Man

Chapter Thirteen: Sri Aurobindo and the ‘Laboratory’

The Divine does not need to suffer or struggle for himself; if he takes on these things it is in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men; and if the sufferings and struggles are to be of any help, they must be real … They must be as real as the struggles and sufferings of men themselves — the Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

‘Therefore we had to descend into the physical,’ said Sri Aurobindo looking back. They had to descend into the mine shafts of Matter — no, they had to dig those shafts themselves, in a physical substance ‘dead as stone’. But Matter is an already highly organized and conscious mode of existence compared to its base: the Subconscient and, all the way down, the Inconscient.

The Inconscient is the state of absolute Inertia, the endless, starless Night — ‘darkness wrapped in darkness’ (Rig Veda) — the primeval stuff out of which evolution would successively create its forms, ever more complex and conscious, to mould from the substance of the Black Dragon the radiant body of the Godhead. ‘The black dragon of the Inconscience sustains with its vast wings and its back of darkness the whole structure of the material universe.’² (The Life Divine) Nevertheless, the Supreme is also present in that utter Inconscience and in the Subconscient, for nothing can exist outside of him. ‘The Inconscient is the sleep of the Superconscient,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in Savitri, and he named the Inconscient also ‘a masked Gnosis’, as such infinite.

‘We had tried to do it [the descent of the Supramental] from above through the mind and the higher vital,’ as we have seen in the previous chapter, ‘but it could not be because the Sadhaks were not ready to follow — their lower vital and physical refused to share in what was coming down or else misused it and became full of exaggerated and violent reactions. Since then the sadhana as a whole has come down along with us into the physical consciousness. Many have followed … The total descent into the physical is a very troublesome affair — it means a long and trying pressure of difficulties, for the physical is normally obscure, inert, impervious to the Light. It is a thing of habits, very largely a slave of the subconscient and its mechanical reactions … We would have preferred to do all the hard work ourselves there and called others down when an easier movement was established, but it did not prove possible.’³ (Sri Aurobindo)

One should fully realize the significance of these words. Here it is clearly said that the decisive evolutionary step, deemed impossible in the whole of the previous history of mankind by all the Great-of-soul, has been consciously and willingly taken by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother sometime in 1927. Matter is the first-born of the Inconscient and Subconscient and completely impregnated by them, also in the human body. As a result of which the transformation of this body, in other words the heightening of its consciousness and its eventual divinization, were held by one and all to be unachievable. For to transform and immortalize the material body — an indispensable condition for a truly divine life on Earth — its material substance and hence the basis of that substance has to be transformed too. This is to say that the Subconscient and ultimately the universal Inconscient had to be transformed, an enterprise nobody had dared to undertake up to then. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother took this gigantic step because they had come to take it. A new phase of evolution began in which the Unity-Consciousness would be established in their body, therefore in the body of humanity, therefore in the mother-body of the Earth, and therefore in the evolutionary cosmos of which the Earth is the symbolical condensation and representation.

A point of increasing importance seems to be the role of the ‘others’ in the process of transformation. As later told by the Mother: ‘This exactly is the problem which confronted Sri Aurobindo here and myself in France: does one have to delimit one’s way, first reach the goal and then take up the rest to begin the work of the integral transformation, or does one have to advance progressively, leaving nothing aside and eliminating nothing from the way, taking up all possibilities at the same time and progressing on all points at the same time? In other words, does one have to withdraw from life and action till one has reached one’s goal, becoming conscious of the Supramental and realising it oneself, or does one have to embrace all creation and progressively advance together with all creation towards the Supramental?’⁴

The question was of vital importance. The answer would decide on the choice of one out of two totally opposite ways to go about their work, on the inner as well as on the outer level. In the one case they would personally work out the supramental transformation for themselves and take up the burden of the mass of humanity only after their own body had been transformed, in the other theirs would be an action on all fronts simultaneously. They themselves did not know beforehand which was the right solution to the problem, for up to then nobody had tried to solve it, nobody had preceded them on that road. ‘This was the first question that arose when I met Sri Aurobindo,’ remembers the Mother. ‘Should we do an intensive sadhana withdrawing from the world, that is to say having no contact with others any more, arrive at the goal and thereafter deal with the others? Or should we allow all those others to come who had the same aspiration, let the group form itself naturally and spontaneously, and march all together towards the goal? The two possibilities were there. The decision was not a mental choice, not at all. Quite naturally, spontaneously the group formed and asserted itself as an imperative necessity. No choice had to be made.’⁵ We have seen how some of the very first ‘others’ had come to Sri Aurobindo, how since November 1926 the already existing group was formally called Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and how Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were doing their yoga of divine transformation in this more and more expanding and representative body they called the ‘laboratory’.

This draws our attention to that highly intimate collaboration between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, which was often not sufficiently realized or forgotten because of what we might call their ‘division of tasks’ and because their physical presence in the Ashram differed. But their work was complementary and their division of tasks rooted in the One, in the inner core of those Great Beings behind their visible personality. Sri Aurobindo as the ‘masculine’ Purusha or Ishwara [Lord] kept himself in the background and worked from there, while the Mother as the ‘feminine’ Prakriti, Shakti or Creatrix converted his spiritual acquisitions into practical facts of change and growth. But they always were one divine Consciousness and therefore acted on a plane far above, behind and within the physically perceptible.

‘I already had all my experiences,’ said the Mother in 1962, ‘but in the thirty years I have lived with Sri Aurobindo (a little more than thirty years) I lived in an absoluteness, and this absoluteness was an absoluteness of security, a feeling of total security, even physical security, even the most material — a feeling of total security because Sri Aurobindo was there. And that supported me, you know, like this [Mother makes a gesture as if she was carried]. In those thirty years that did not leave me for one minute … I did my work on that basis, you know — a basis of absoluteness, of eternity.’⁶

In their division of tasks, Sri Aurobindo had taken up the ‘inner’ labour, and the Mother left that completely to him even with regard to the transformation of her own body ‘because I knew he was looking after it.’ For ‘all realizations he had, I had too, automatically.’ And everything she received in this way, she transferred as much as possible to the group she had accepted as the laboratory and in her consciousness ‘as in an egg.’ She guided and organized all that. The Mother converted Sri Aurobindo’s realizations into a concrete, material form for the Earth.

‘All upon earth is based on the Inconscient as it is called, though it is not really inconscient at all, but rather a complete subconscience in which there is everything but nothing formulated or expressed. The subconscient of which I speak lies in between the Inconscient and conscious mind, life and body. It contains all the reactions to life which struggle out as a slowly evolving and self-formulating consciousness, but it contains them not as ideas or perceptions or conscious reactions but as the blind substance of these things. Also all that is consciously experienced sinks down into the subconscient not as experience but as obscure but obstinate impressions of experience and can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feeling, action, etc., as ‘’complexes’’ exploding into action and event, etc. The subconscient is the main cause why all things repeat themselves and nothing ever gets changed except in appearance. It is the cause why, people say, character cannot be changed, also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got rid of. All seeds are there and all the sanskaras of the mind and vital and body — it is the main support of death and disease and the last fortress (seemingly impregnable) of Ignorance. All that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and remains in seed ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment.’⁷ This is how Sri Aurobindo described the action of the Subconscient at the time he was labouring in it.

It is an endless, repugnant labour of which one gets an idea only later on in the conversations of the Mother with Satprem. As the latter noticed, the Mother got tears in her eyes when from the hell she was living in she could deduce what Sri Aurobindo must have suffered. But he never showed anything of that suffering, not even to her. All the same, he writes about it in one or two biographical poems and in Savitri. It is no exaggeration to maintain that practically all poetry of Sri Aurobindo’s written after his first great experiences was autobiographical. In it he conveyed his experiences on the higher planes, among them those from where the poets in general, often without actually realizing it, draw their inspiration — and he formulated those experiences in the highest poetic expression of the irreplaceable word.

Two months after the above quoted passage about the subconscious, Sri Aurobindo wrote the deeply moving poem A God’s Labour. There we read:

My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
And the titan kings assail,
But I cannot rest till my task is done
And wrought the eternal will …

A voice cried, “Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate.”

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
At the very root of things
Where the gray Sphinx guards God’s riddle sleep
On the Dragon’s outspread wings.

I left the surface gods of mind
And life’s unsatisfied seas
And plunged through the body’s alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.

I have delved through the dumb Earth’s dreadful heart
And heard her black mass’ bell.
I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell.⁸

Expressed in an almost freely floating, singing rhythm, the words ring through with the ominous, conjuring force of the experiences undergone by Sri Aurobindo. To those who are not familiar with the work Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have performed for the Earth, these lines will probably be not much more than bizarre fiction, but when one has got some insight in their pioneering work, they provide a profound understanding of their action. Here no word is fictitious, superfluous or poetically overstated. The poem gives a condensed impression of their descent into matter and into the Subconscient and the Inconscient, which influence and even determine most of our human condition. That was the place where the battle had to be fought and the victory won — at the root of things — if Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wanted to lay bare the mystery of our evolutionary world and transform existence. The source of evil, falsehood, suffering and death had to be drained or transformed into the Divine Realities which that source essentially had always contained, even in spite of their distortion.

The Hostile Forces

This may be an occasion to bring the ‘hostile forces’ on the scene, including the ‘Titan kings’ and a numerous brood of lesser rank, so active in the wings of the visible world and of our inner theatre, and so powerful outside the fluctuating limitations of our tridimensional world that they can play with human beings as with marionettes.

‘As there are Powers of Knowledge and Forces of the Light [e.g. the Gods], so there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience,’⁹ wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. In his correspondence we find: ‘Behind visible events in the world there is always a mass of invisible forces at work unknown to the outward minds of men.’¹⁰ He cautioned an anonymous disciple: ‘The hostile forces exist and have been known to yogic experience ever since the days of the Veda and Zoroaster in Asia (and the mysteries of Egypt and the Cabbala) and in Europe also from old times.’¹¹ And he warned Nirodbaran: ‘Man, don’t talk lightly like that of the devil. He is too active to be trifled with in that way.’¹²

The origin of the hostile forces is known to us. The four primordial Powers of Light, Truth, Life and Bliss (Lucifer and his three companions) started imagining that they were, each by himself, the Supreme. This is how they separated from the One in their consciousness and thereby became, as it were, its counter forces as the Lords of Darkness, Falsehood, Suffering and Death. It was the great ‘Fall’ in the beginning, from which originated our universe fundamentally based on the principles of Freedom and Ananda (Bliss) — precisely the freedom and enjoyment by which the four great Lords had been able to fancy that they were the Divine. In India, these four Lords are called Asuras. Further on we will hear more of them. Like all higher beings, they had the power to produce lesser entities of themselves, emanations existing by themselves and able to act independently, but essentially remaining the being who put them forth. The big Four have brought forth cascades of lesser beings, so to speak, who are intensely active on the lower levels of creation. ‘There are only a few big ones and then countless emanations.’ (the Mother)

The four great Asuras were les premiers émanés, the very first four emanated by the Divine out of Himself. The Gods, then, are les seconds émanés, emanated by the Divine at the request of the Great Mother after the fall of the first four. The Gods work for the fulfilment of the divine Plan in the evolutionary creation; the Asuras work obstinately and mercilessly for the obstruction or the abolition of the Plan. One can read about this never-ending battle between the Gods and the anti-Gods in the traditional texts of all great civilizations.

However, the four big Asuras are not the only progenitors of hostile forces. We know that the One ceaselessly manifests ‘typal’ worlds out of himself which are the concretizations of his inherent qualities, from the highest — Existence, Consciousness, Bliss — down to the lowest, i.e. the lower vital worlds. All those worlds exist in their own gradation of substance, but the (gross) substance we know of and are made of, and which we call ‘matter’, is a product of the Inconscient and therefore exists exclusively in our evolutionary world. (It is as if our world originated in a shadow cast by the Supreme and is, provisionally, the dark spot in the limitless garden of worlds which is his ecstatic, prolific manifestation.) We have also seen that by the process of evolution time after time a higher gradation, or world, of the hierarchy of typal worlds is inserted in our evolving universe. The beings of the typal worlds are immortal and on their level fully satisfied with their existence, this according to the basic principle of the omnipresent divine Ananda or Bliss. So too are the beings of the lower vital worlds, who for the most part are vicious little mischief-makers; their nasty games and tricks are a source of inexhaustible fun for themselves, but they are very bothersome to us, humans, when we are the butt of their fun. They have no motive to collaborate in any way whatsoever and only pursue the satisfaction of their petty desires.

In India, the hostile forces are broadly divided in three categories. At the top are the Asuras, (a word usually written with a capital letter by Sri Aurobindo) already known to us, and their nearest emanations still big enough also to be called ‘Asura’. They belong to the mental and the higher vital levels. All Asuras are radically against the work of the divine evolution and do everything possible to thwart it, on the one hand out of pure self-complacency which has no urge or aspiration for anything more elevated, and on the other hand because the material embodiment on the earth of divine beings, like the future supramental beings, would bring the dominance they are now exerting here to an end. (We will meet with a example of this in one of the following chapters.)

Far below the Asuras are the rakshasas, beings of the lower vital and often a kind of ogres, especially in the occult way. To satisfy their insatiable hunger and greed, they prey on all possible kinds of embodied and unembodied forces and feed on them. They are ugly folk but can take on the most seductive shapes and even appear as divinities, and they mainly roam about in the dark. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the pishachas, the little gruesome people, finding their vicious pleasure in the annoying little tricks they can pester themselves and the humans with, making our lives into an uninterrupted affair of unease, dissatisfaction and restlessness. (Those who are familiar with Tolkien’s ‘Middle World’ will have been reminded of many of these kinds of beings in it.)

To all half-conscious worlds they extend their reign.

Here too these godlings drive our human hearts,
Our nature’s twilight is their lurking place.¹³

— Savitri

All those beings, like all beings not embodied in (gross) matter, are immortal — like the Titan from Greek mythology (a rakshasa) who, when slain, became alive again through each contact with the life-force of the Earth and continued fighting. The only medium that can bring to an end their manifested existence is the divine White Light, by which they are dissolved into their Origin. This White Light is the light of the Mother. ‘There is only one Force in the world that can destroy them categorically, without any hope of return, and this is a force belonging to the supreme creative Power. It is a force from beyond the supramental world and therefore not at everybody’s disposal. It is a luminous force, of a dazzling whiteness, so brilliant that ordinary eyes would be blinded if they looked into it. It suffices that a being of the vital world be touched by this light to make it dissolve instantly — it liquefies, like the snails that turn into water when you put some salt on them,’¹⁴ said the Mother herself.

Nevertheless, the hostile forces too have their significance and their role in the great Plan. The Mother wrote: ‘In the occult world, or rather if you look at the world from the occult point of view, those adverse forces are very real, their action is very real, completely concrete, and their attitude towards the divine realisation is positively hostile. But as soon as you pass beyond this domain and enter in the spiritual world where there is nothing other than the Divine, who is everything, and where there is nothing that is not divine, these “adverse forces” become a part of the total play and they can no longer be called adverse forces. It is only a posture that they have taken; to speak more exactly, it is only a posture that the Divine has taken in his play.’¹⁵ (We always return to our first premise: there is nothing but That.) All the same, it may be a play from the viewpoint of the Divine, but to the beings incarnated on the Earth, including the humans, that play is in dire earnest, even when having been promised a more enjoyable future.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the centre of the accelerated evolution on Earth, were also the focus of the resistance and attacks of hostile forces of every breed. As early as 1924 Sri Aurobindo had already told some disciples in passing: ‘You do not know how strong they are. I alone know it, you have only a glimpse of it.’¹⁶ The figure of speech, becoming of a gentleman, is as a rule rather the understatement than the exaggeration. He also wrote: ‘Wherever Yoga or Yajna [offering] is done, there the hostile forces gather together to stop it by any means.’¹⁷ (This should be a warning for anyone who feels attracted to seriously taking up yoga.) To the hostile forces this was no inoffensive yoga, for it was clearly the intention of the Two-in-One to terminate their dominance on the Earth by bringing the divine Light into the twilight of the Subconscient and into the darkness of the Inconscient, in order to make the transformation of matter and the formation of the supramental body possible.

At the end of 1926 Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn into seclusion ‘to work things out’ and devote himself totally to ‘a dynamic meditation’. ‘Dynamic’ is another of his keywords; he always uses it in the sense of an active spiritual practice aimed at the improvement of the Earth, in contrast with the usual static aspiration to escape from the Earth and to leave it unaltered under the pretext that it is unalterable anyway — which, to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, is ‘a supreme act of egoism.’

After his withdrawal Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter: ‘All has been for long slow, difficult, almost sterile in appearance, and now it is again becoming possibly to go forward. But for the advance to be anything like general or swift in its process, the attitude of the Sadhaks, not of a few only, must change.’¹⁸ All those years, Sri Aurobindo had laboured, struggled and suffered in a material ‘dead like stone’ and with his unique capabilities; only now, was he able to report a shift of the front-line. Personally, he and the Mother would have shot forwards like tracer bullets in the night, but the sadhaks, representing humanity and the Earth as a whole, had to be dragged along. This had been preordained, and to act otherwise had not been possible, as we have seen.

The Tail of the Whale

He drew the energies that transmute an age.¹⁹

— Savitri

In Sri Aurobindo’s correspondence with Nirodbaran we can follow his Herculean effort better than anywhere else. On 26 March 1935 Sri Aurobindo writes: ‘I am too busy trying to get things done to spend time in getting them written.’ A few days later: ‘Just now I am fighting all day and night — can’t stop fighting to write.’ Again some days later: ‘Never has there been such an uprush of mud and brimstone as during the past few months … It was not inevitable — if the sadhaks had been a less neurotic company, it could have been done quietly. As it is there is the Revolt of the Subconscient.’ And we get a look back: ‘[The Supermind] was coming down before Nov. 34, but afterwards all the damned mud arose and it stopped.’²⁰ It was a dirty, nauseating job Sri Aurobindo had to do day and night, an uninterrupted nightmare of the kind horror films are made of, but experienced as stark reality and without the anticipation that the lights would be switched on after one and a half hours.

And suddenly came the breakthrough! On 16 August 1935 (the day following his birthday) we read: ‘I am travelling forward like a flash of lightning, that is to say zigzag but fairly fast … Like a very Einstein I have got the mathematical formula of the whole affair (unintelligible as in his case to anybody but myself) and I am working it out figure by figure.’ A mysterious but apparently very important announcement. One week later: ‘There is always an adverse movement after the darshan, the revanche of the lower forces. I had a stoppage myself, but I am off again, riding on the back of my Einsteinian formula.’ Shortly afterwards he declared having got hold of the tail of the supramental whale (!) and in November of the same year he reported: ‘My formula is working out rapidly … The tail of the supermind is descending, descending, descending.’

In their correspondence, Sri Aurobindo and Nirodbaran went on using the comparison of the Supermind with a gigantic whale and the first indications of the descent of the Supermind into matter with the hanging-down or descending tail of that whale. On 17 May 1936 Nirodbaran asks: ‘Is the Tail in view?’ Sri Aurobindo answers: ‘Of course. Coming down as fast as you fellows will allow.’ And he states a year later: ‘Tail is there — but no use without the head,’ and once again: ‘Too busy trying to get the supramental Light down to waste time on that [i.e. correspondence on a certain subject].’

From all this information phrased in a most simple and even playful way, we can deduce without any doubt that Sri Aurobindo had covered an enormous distance on the path despite all possible resistance of the hostile forces, and that a decisive achievement could be expected. But then came November 1938. The adversary was never to be underestimated.

The Correspondence

Nirodbaran’s 1,200 printed pages of correspondence are only a small part of the letters Sri Aurobindo was penning in those years, ten hours a day. In his biography of Sri Aurobindo, K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar calls the years from 1933 to 38 ‘the golden years of his yogic correspondence.’ We are indebted to those years for the 4,000 letters to Dilip Kumar Roy, the three volumes of correspondence with Nagin Doshi and the ample exchange of letters with K.D. Sethna, as well as for the numerous letters to so many others. The Letters on Yoga in Sri Aurobindo’s Collected Works comprise 1,774 pages.

This extensive written exchange between Master and disciples naturally had its reason. This was a Master the disciples could see only three times a year, on the darshan days, the ‘see-days’, of his birthday (15 August), the birthday of the Mother (21 February) and the anniversary of the founding of the Ashram (24 November). Moreover, these briefest of meetings, however spiritually important and intense according to the testimony of so many, took place in silence. The correspondence was a means of contact, explanation, illumination, teaching, and especially of self-discovery of the disciples.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother giving Darshan on 24 April 1950

One of them asked: ‘You and the Mother are supposed to know what is going on in us, how and what we are aspiring for, how our nature is reacting to help and guidance. What is then the necessity of writing all that to you?’ Sri Aurobindo answered: ‘It is necessary for you to be conscious and to put your self-observation before us; it is on that that we can act. A mere action on our observation without any corresponding consciousness in that part of the Sadhak would lead to nothing.’²¹ And to another disciple he wrote: ‘It is an undoubted fact proved by hundreds of instances that for many the exact statement of their difficulties to us is the best and often, though not always, an immediate, even an instantaneous means of release.’²²

But the daily correspondence was an occupation the proportions of which grew too time-consuming in the whole of Sri Aurobindo’s work. In the correspondence with Nirodbaran, in which he expressed himself more freely than with others, we read time and again, especially from the beginning of 1936 onwards: ‘A too damned thick stack of letters to write …’ ‘My dear sir, if you saw me nowadays with my nose to paper from afternoon to morning, deciphering, deciphering, writing, writing, writing, even the rocky heart of a disciple would be touched and you would not talk about typescripts and hibernation. [Nirodbaran had asked if his typed poems, sent to Sri Aurobindo for correction and commentary, were perhaps hibernating.] I have given up (for the present at least) the attempt to minimise the cataract of correspondence; I accept my fate … but at least don’t add anguish to annihilation by talking about typescripts.’²³ ‘Light went off, in my rooms only, mark — tried candle power, no go. The Age of Candles is evidently over. So “requests, beseeches, entreats” [Nirodbaran’s Words] were all in vain. Not my fault. Blame Fate! However, I had a delightful time, 3 hours of undisturbed concentration on my real work — a luxury denied to me for ages.’²⁴

Sri Aurobindo also gives his daily time schedule. ‘From 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. afternoon correspondence, meal, newspapers. Evening correspondence from 7 or 7.30 to 9. From 9 to 10 concentration, 10 to 12 correspondence, 12 to 12.30 bath, meal, rest, 2.30 to 5 or 6 a.m. correspondence unless I am lucky. Where is the sufficient time for concentration?’²⁵ Indeed, where? ‘When people write four letters a day in small hand closely running to some 10 pages without a gap anywhere and one gets 20 letters in the afternoon and forty at night (of course not all like that, but still!) it becomes a little too too.’²⁶

His finely etched handwriting became more and more unreadable. Nirodbaran protested: ‘Good Lord, your writing is exceeding all limits, Sir!’ Sri Aurobindo: ‘Transformation of handwriting. The self exceeds all limits, the handwriting should do so also.’²⁷ Sometimes this had comical consequences, for example when Nirodbaran deciphered ‘neurasthenics’ as ‘nervous thieves’. Sri Aurobindo: ‘It is altogether irrational to expect me to read my own handwriting — I write for others to read, not for myself.’

The truth was that he very often wrote in a state of trance. No matter how incredible it may sound, while he was penning those letters about all kinds of subjects imaginable, he was inwardly occupied with other things elsewhere in this world or in other worlds, and probably often in the person or situation to whom or about whom he was writing. His handwriting is in many cases clearly a trance-handwriting, at the time decipherable by only a very few and best of all by Nolini, who had the privilege of distributing the ‘heavenly mail’ in the morning. Sri Aurobindo has written himself: ‘It does not mean that I lose the higher consciousness while doing the work of correspondence. If I did that, I would not only not be supramental, but would be very far even from the full Yogic consciousness.’²⁸

As mentioned earlier, many of Sri Aurobindo’s letters have been gathered in three volumes of the Centenary Edition of his Collected Works under the title Letters on Yoga. This is ‘a three-volume work that constitutes the most complete presentation of his yoga as given to others. It is remarkable, however, that nowhere in the two thousand pages of his published correspondence did he put forward a set method of practice. The “perfect technique” for a yoga that aimed not only at personal liberation, but also at a transformation of the nature of the individual and eventually of the world, was not, he wrote, “one that takes a man by a little bit of him somewhere, attaches a hook, and pulls him up by a pulley into Nirvana or Paradise. The technique of a world-changing yoga has to be as multiform, sinuous, patient, all-including as the world itself.”’²⁹

It is logical that he who would lead others must have a better insight into their problems than the guided themselves. As Sri Aurobindo and the Mother intended a world-transformation, they themselves, as leaders and builders of men and women who represented the full spectrum of human psychological complexity, had to have the broadest possible experience. Disciples always put their master(s) on a pedestal of unapproachable reverence, and as few sadhaks in the Ashram had an idea of the details of the life of Sri Aurobindo and still less of the life of the Mother before Pondicherry, they deemed them so highly superior to the small problems of human existence that they were thought to have but a vague notion of them.

Sri Aurobindo found it necessary to clarify these matters more than once. ‘No difficulty that can come on the Sadhak but has faced us on the path; against many we have had to struggle hundreds of times (in fact, that is an understatement) before we could overcome; many still remain protesting that they have a right until the perfect perfection is there. But we have never consented to admit their inevitable necessity for others. It is, in fact, to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden.’³⁰ ‘I have borne every attack which human beings have borne, otherwise I would be unable to assure anybody “This too can be conquered”. At least I would have no right to say so … The Divine, when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely and without any conjuring tricks or pretense. If he has something behind him which emerges always out of the coverings, it is the same thing in essence, even if greater in degree, that there is behind others — and it is to awaken that that he is there.’³¹ Thus spoke the Avatar.

‘I think I know as much about the dualities, weaknesses, ignorance of human nature as you do and a great deal more,’ he wrote to a disciple. ‘The idea that the Mother or I are spiritually great but ignorant of everything practical seems to be common in the Ashram. It is an error to suppose that to be on a high spiritual plane makes one ignorant or unobservant of the world or of human nature. If I know nothing of human nature or do not consider it, I am obviously unfit to be anybody’s guide in the work of transformation, for nobody can transform human nature if he does not know what human nature is, does not see its workings or even if he sees, does not take them into consideration at all. If I think that the human plane is like the plane or planes of infinite Light, Power, Ananda, infallible Will Force, then I must be either a stark lunatic or a gibbering imbecile or a fool so abysmally idiotic as to be worth keeping in a museum as an exhibit.’³²

A Breeding Ground of Poets

It is remarkable that Sri Aurobindo, besides all the work he was doing, still found the time and the interest to make the Ashram into a breeding ground of poets. To him, however, culture was not a superficial layer of varnish; it was the product of a dimension, or of dimensions, without which the human being is not fully human. And poetry, to him, was not an irrational fancy of characters who cannot manage reality: it was a direct contact with the ‘overhead’ regions between our ordinary mental consciousness and the Supramental. To Sri Aurobindo, writing poetry was not a fanciful flight of the imagination, but a means of access to higher worlds, and therefore a form of spirituality if practised with the right inner attitude. The great poets have never doubted the reality of their inspiration or the concreteness of what they saw and where they saw. Here now was somebody with a knowledgeable, practical, everyday involvement with those worlds, for whom poetry was a higher form of experience of great importance, and who helped his disciples with sufficient capacities or interest in their efforts to express those overhead worlds in words, to become aware by means of the word, as part of their sadhana.

‘To us poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no dancing courtesan, but a priestess in God’s house commissioned not to spin fictions but to imagine difficult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the Vedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to suggest a pleasing artifice or thought. The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought or to express the physical and superficial, could not at all hope to manifest.’³³

The best known Ashram poets were: Dilip Kumar Roy, as a poet characterized by Rabindranath Tagore as ‘the cripple who threw away his crutches and started running’ since he wrote under Sri Aurobindo’s guidance and inspiration; Arjava, the Sanskrit name of the British mathematician John Chadwick; Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), according to Sri Aurobindo a poet of international stature, whose collected poems have been published in 1993 under the title The Secret Splendour; Jyotirmoyee, Harindranath Chattopadyaya and Nishikanto Roychaudhuri, who gained fame as poets in Bengali; Pujalal, who wrote in Gujarati, etc. And there was the phenomenal Nirodbaran, worth some special consideration.

Nirodbaran had obtained his medical certificate in Great Britain from the University of Edinburgh. He heard for the first time of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in a meeting with Dilip Kumar Roy in Paris. He visited Pondicherry in 1930 and had an interview with the Mother. After two or three disappointing years as a physician in Burma, he was accepted as a member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He became the Ashram doctor, as abundantly illustrated in his Correspondence With Sri Aurobindo; in this correspondence, Sri Aurobindo, generally considered grave and unapproachable, showed a scintillating sense of humour and suddenly started writing in an unusual confidential tone to the amazement of his correspondent.

Nirodbaran, probably awed by D.K. Roy, K.D. Sethna and others, developed literary and more specifically poetical ambitions. But he was, in Sri Aurobindo’s words, ‘not a born poet’, and his literary English was old-fashioned and stilted. Under Sri Aurobindo’s influence, however, he began writing, after a couple of years, exceptionally good poems in a surrealistic vein of which he himself did not understand a thing, as little as he did of the contents of his poems and of their poetic qualities. His poem Bright Mystery of Earth was evaluated by Sri Aurobindo as: ‘Quite awfully fine. Gaudeamus igitur.’ When Sleep of Light was sent to Sri Aurobindo, Nirodbaran himself found it only a little sprat, but Sri Aurobindo said it was a goldfish! And so on. Only in the period from March to August 1938 Nirodbaran wrote not less than 136 poems, 15 of which Sri Aurobindo judged to be ‘exceptionally fine’. Later on, he published the volumes Sunblossoms and 50 Poems of Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo’s corrections and comments. He remained as nonplussed as ever about the way it all had come about. (Nirodbaran: ‘Last night I tried to compose a poem. It was a failure, I fell asleep over its first two lines.’ Sri Aurobindo: ‘You call it a failure — when you have discovered a new soporific.’)

And then to think that the Gaekwad of Baroda, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and so many others were of the opinion that Aurobindo Ghose had withdrawn in a mystical cloud-world. A mystic he was, Sri Aurobindo, and one of the highest order, but not of the nebulous, unearthly type. ‘My gaping wounds are a thousand and one …’ His yoga was a battle in which no quarter was given against the allied hostile forces and for the growth of humanity. His correspondence was a means of direct contact with and a transmission of forces to the human elements who had felt the call to participate in that battle; without the spiritual force accompanying the letters, the written word would have been but of little use. In the meantime Sri Aurobindo worked with his yogic powers on the events and personalities on the Earth, on everything that fulfilled a key-role on this momentous turning point of the evolution.

To Sri Aurobindo power was not a forbidden fruit of yoga; power was its legitimate and desirable result if it was used for the divine Cause and not for selfish aims. In his Record of Yoga we read on so many pages how he practised influencing humans and even other kinds of living beings invisibly. The yogic force is a real, concrete force. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could not possibly do their work without acquiring that force and without the ability to use or apply it. For they had come to transform the Earth — a labour which would be successful only if they had at their disposal a greater force than that of the invisible masters of the ruling order and so end their sovereignty.

I look across the world and no horizon walls my gaze;

I see Paris and Tokyo and New York,

I see the bombs bursting in Barcelona and on Canton streets …³⁴

Sri Aurobindo wrote these lines in September 1938. The unifying world suffered the labour pains of the birth of a new era — from the beginning of the century, actually. A.B. Purani has noted down Sri Aurobindo’s words spoken to a few confidants: ‘It would look ridiculous and also arrogant if I were to say that I worked for the success of the Russian revolution for three years. Yet I was one of the influences that worked to make it a success. I also worked for Turkey.’³⁵ In December 1938 Sri Aurobindo once more talked about his work in the world to the handful of disciples gathering every evening in his room. His assessment, as somewhat roughly noted down by Purani: ‘[When] I have tried to work in the world, results have been varied. In Spain I was splendidly successful [at that time]. General Miaca [i.e., Miaja, the defender of Madrid] was an admirable instrument to work on. The working of the Force depends on the instrument. [The] Basque [Provinces were] an utter failure. The Negus was a good instrument but the people around him, though good warriors, were too ill organised and ill occupied. Egypt was not successful. Ireland and Turkey were a tremendous success. In Ireland, I have done exactly what I wanted to do in Bengal.’³⁶

‘I have never had a strong and persistent will for anything to happen in the world — I am not speaking of personal things — which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster,’³⁷ wrote Sri Aurobindo. The Mother once gave the following message: ‘What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world’s history is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme,’³⁸ and she signed her words with that winged signature of hers. Much later, she said confidentially about herself to Satprem: ‘I don’t know if I ever told you, but there has always been an identification of the consciousness of this [her] body with all revolutionary movements. I have always known and guided them even before I heard of them: in Russia, in Italy, in Spain and elsewhere — always, everywhere. And it was always essentially that same Force which wants to hasten the coming of the future — always — but which has to adapt its means of action to the state in which is the mass.’³⁹

About their work in history we will soon hear more. In the meantime, Sri Aurobindo’s constant effort to make the Supermind descend into matter had reached a critical phase. We have already seen how he complained sometimes about the fact that the daily torrent of correspondence prevented him from doing his ‘real work’. In November 1937, Nirodbaran wrote to him: ‘Guru, I dare to disturb you, as daring has become a necessity. I feel utterly blank and am in need of some support, I can’t write poetry by myself, without your help. Have you stopped the correspondence because of your eye-trouble or for concentration? In either case, then, I don’t insist on your seeing my poems. You will understand that I don’t write for the sake of writing, but for a support from you. Please give me a line in reply, after which I won’t bother you any more.’ Sri Aurobindo replied: ‘Apart from the eye question, I have stopped because there are certain things I have positively to get done before I can take up any regular correspondence work again. If I start again now, I shall probably have to stop again soon for a long, long time. Better get things finished now — that’s the idea. You must hold on somehow for the present.’⁴⁰ Yet a couple of months later he started writing again, probably out of Aurobindonian compassion (as the Mother has named a little flower). But ‘the golden years of correspondence’ neared their sudden end, and nobody saw it coming.