Beyond Man

Chapter Three: A Backdoor to Spirituality

The India in which he arrived from Great Britain must have looked like a cultural desert to Aurobindo Ghose. The modern literature of the regional languages was still in its infancy (except in Bengal) and the literary production in English was of poor quality. Far away now were the lush cultural pastures of Cambridge and London, where Aurobindo’s eldest brother, the poet Manmohan, had befriended Laurence Binyon, Stephen Philips and Oscar Wide, the last calling him ‘an Indian panther in evening brown.’ Small wonder that Aurobindo spent a substantial part of his salary on crates of English books ordered from Bombay and which, wherever he settled down, occupied the main part of his living space.

He learned several Indian languages: Gujarati, the local language in Baroda; Marathi, spoken in the Bombay Presidency; Hindi, a direct offspring of Sanskrit and then, as now, the main language of India except for the deep Dravidian South. He also learned Bengali, which should have been his mother tongue, as he began needing it for his political activities; before long, he would be able to write articles and deliver speeches in Bengali. And he learned Sanskrit, the language that gave him access to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, to the plays of Kalidasa, to the Upanishads and the Bhagavat Gita — to the age-old wisdom of India and its sanatana dharma, ‘the eternal religion’.

Up until then Aurobindo had been an indifferent agnostic, and he had not followed up on the few rationally inexplicable inner experiences he had known. Sanskrit literature, however, opened up unexpected vistas for him — and did the yogis not claim they possessed extraordinary powers? If the wise were indeed wise, would it not be worthwhile to take a closer look at what they had found so interesting? On one occasion he himself had witnessed how a wandering sadhu (monk) had cured his brother Barin’s fever by muttering some words, drawing with a knife a crosswise figure in a glass of water, and making his brother drink it. He had met the great yogi Swami Brahmananda of the Ganga Math in Chandod and been impressed. In England he had already been familiar with the writings of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and Vivekananda. Maybe he would find in yoga some resource to help realize his political ideals? I wanted Yoga to help me in my political work, for inspiration and power and capacity. I didn’t want to give up my activities for the sake of Yoga.’¹

He dreamed the most daring dreams but was at the same time an arch-realist and a headstrong, undaunted perseverer — something one would not have expected from this apparently reticent, formally polite and almost timid man. While still in Baroda, he took up pranayama, a yogic breathing technique; daily he devoted six hours of his time to it, but the only effect was an abundant flow of poetic inspiration, resulting among others in his long poem Love and Death, all of which was written in a very short time. But pranayama without expert guidance is dangerous, and when he stopped practising it in Calcutta, he nearly paid with his life.

Shortly after the Surat conference, Aurobindo went to Baroda to meet some of his former friends and acquaintances and to reconnoitre the political lay of the land. There he met, through Barin, the tantric yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, and they withdrew to the attic of the house where Aurobindo was staying. There Lele was astounded to see that Aurobindo obtained in three days one of the mightiest realizations yoga can give, the realization of the passive Brahman. ‘[Lele] said: “Sit still and try to make your mind quiet and empty of thoughts. You will see that all your thoughts come from outside. As you perceive them, simply throw them away before they can enter in you.” I tried and did it. In three days my mind became entirely quiet and vacant, without any thoughts at all, and it was in that condition of Nirvanic Silence that I went first to Poona and then to Bombay. Everything seemed to me unreal, I was absorbed in the One Reality.’² This mental silence would never leave him anymore. In three days he had a realization attempted and not always obtained by advanced yogis in a lifetime. A certain predisposition must have lain dormant in him.

From then on, he only trusted the One Divine, present in the heart of all human beings; he surrendered himself to it unconditionally and in all things. This surrender would be the cornerstone of his yoga. The Upanishads, and in prison the Bhagavad Gita, became his guidance and source of inspiration. Who could have imagined that this radical politician, considered a very dangerous man and involved in that busy life of his, was continuously absorbed in inner concentration?

Sri Aurobindo at Alipore Jail, Calcutta, after his arrest in May 1908 in the Alipore Bomb Case (photograph from police records)

In Alipore jail he had his second important realization — this time of the omnipresent Brahman, the One within whom everything exists, and of the cosmic consciousness. ‘I looked at the jail that secluded me from man and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me his shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door, and again I saw Vasudeva.’ Vasudeva is one of the many names of Sri Krishna, and Sri Krishna, the former Avatar, is a personification of the One Divine. ‘I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva … I looked and it was not the Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench.’³

Everyday reality had become a spiritual reality for him wherever and whenever, whether he sat in concentration, ate, wrote, moved among the people, or gave a speech at a political meeting — something he had to do quite often as he had become the top leader of the extremists.

In Pondicherry, he was able to devote his full attention to his spiritual life. He had thought his withdrawal there — which he called his ‘cave of tapasya’ — would be of short duration, a couple of years at the most. But ‘the two years extended to four, then ten, then twenty. Never during this period did he abandon his intention of returning to the [public] field of action; but his idea of the relation between action and yoga underwent a fundamental change.’⁴ He had taken up yoga to find power and support for his political action. Gradually, by following with sincere surrender the unknown and the novel path that was being shown to him, step by step, he had acquired the cosmic consciousness. His quest would lead him to ‘the one thing needful,’ namely That, the One. Once That is found, all is found, the whole Cosmos and more — for That holds the cosmos in the palm of its hand, with all that the cosmos contains, also this Earth, also India and everything India stands for, including at that time her political liberation. The road of his exploration had widened steadfastly, ‘for the country, for the world, finally for the Divine.’⁵ Through the backdoor of politics he had arrived at the great Realization.

Who had been guiding him on his way? ‘Sri Aurobindo never took any formal initiation from anyone; he started his sadhana on his own account by the practice of pranayama and never asked for help except from Lele,’⁶ he wrote of himself. This does not mean that he did not receive help from other, most often non-material sources. One of these, as mentioned in Sri Aurobindo’s personal notes, was Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, who had died in 1886, and another was Vivekananda. ‘[Vivekananda] visited me for fifteen days in Alipore Jail and, until I could grasp the whole thing, he went on teaching me and impressed upon my mind the working of the Higher Consciousness … He would not leave me until he had put it all into my head,’⁷ Sri Aurobindo later confided to some of his disciples. Swami Vivekananda, that pillar of strength and the spiritual crown-prince of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, had died in 1902, six years earlier.

However, Aurobindo’s highest mentors, his true and abiding instructors, were Sri Krishna and, ultimately, the Great Mother. Once put upon the path with the help of Lele, his intense and unusually fast development led him from one surprising discovery to the other, and he soon realized that, after his unconditional surrender at the beginning, as a human being he hardly had any part in his own spiritual unfolding. Higher powers in him had taken up the reins of his destiny; out of Aurobindo A. Ghose was growing Sri Aurobindo.

After his arrival in Pondicherry, Sri Krishna sketched out for him the lines of his further growth, ‘the map of my spiritual progress’. Between 1912 and 1920 Sri Aurobindo kept a detailed diary of his sadhana (spiritual discipline). He noted everything down in a series of notebooks; after he left his body, it had always been known that those notebooks were there among the other documents of his estate, but they have only recently been deciphered and published by the researchers of the Sri Aurobindo Archives. It looks as if the significance of their contents still has not been fully fathomed, perhaps because these hundreds of pages with cryptic abbreviations in several languages are no easy reading matter. The Record of Yoga, as these writings have been named, ‘provides a first-hand account of the day-to-day growth of the spiritual faculties of an advanced yogi.’⁸ These experiences would lead him to his great spiritual discoveries, which afterwards he found confirmed in the Vedas and the Upanishads, and which would change the destiny of the world. What had started as a struggle for the liberation of India, became a struggle for the liberation of the human species from the shackles of its evolutionary nature.