Overman

3: Turning Towards the Earth

Our father Heaven must remain bright with the hope of deliverance, but also our mother Earth must not feel herself for ever accursed.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

The contents of the previous chapter may seem unusual, bizarre, esoteric, or simply outlandish to a mind conditioned by the present-day Western “consensus reality”. But once the premises of an omnipresent Reality and an evolutionary development of the successive degrees of existence are accepted, the conclusions as drawn by Sri Aurobindo and Mirra are perfectly logical. This is why Sri Aurobindo himself characterised their view of things as “a rational and philosophic truth which is in accordance with all the rest we have hitherto known, experienced, or been able to think out about the overt truth of our existence.”² If evolution is true, then it is only the time it takes before a radical change in the existing situation happens – i.e. before a new species appears on the scene – that has accustomed us to the idea that we humans are on the top rung of the ladder of life on earth, and will remain there for as long as there will be life on this planet.

When might such a radical change in the existing situation happen? If it happens in a million or several million years from now, then we, living under the threat of a nuclear holocaust, will be hardly interested – especially now, when the exploding human population on the planet seems to have lost its bearings and nothing makes sense to us anymore, except the instant gratification of our desires. Sri Aurobindo and Mirra, however, were convinced that the evolutionary experiment on this planet would run its full course, and that the mutation into a new species was to be initiated now. Indeed, they believed themselves missioned to set the process going, to take the first basic, transformative steps and secure the transition into a new world.

They were not naïve, for their life experience, their insight into human nature and their spiritual explorations had been too thorough for that. And although they may have underestimated the difficulty of some aspects of the enormously complex process of transformation, they were nevertheless aware of the huge scale of the task they were taking upon their shoulders. We must remember that this task consisted in opening the lower hemisphere of existence to the higher, in bringing Light and Knowledge where now there is darkness and ignorance, in changing the human life into “the life divine”. If ever there was a change or crisis in humanity, then the present one certainly must be greater than any other in the past. And if a profound crisis in the development of humanity requires a direct embodiment of the Divine in its manifestation, in other words an Avatar, then this very profound crisis certainly required the descent of an Avatar, the Avatar of the Supermind. But this time the Avatar came not in a single, male body as on all previous occasions: he came as a complete incarnation of the male and female poles of existence in Sri Aurobindo and Mirra.

Once again, does this sound too unusual, bizarre, esoteric or outlandish? The established religions tell us that everything worthwhile in religion has happened in the past, and nothing of fundamental religious importance can happen in times like ours. “The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past,” wrote Sri Aurobindo trenchantly, “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 great future.”³ This does not sound unreasonable. And is the century that just ended not suggestive of a change never before witnessed in the history of humanity? If the signs are there, the facts and their cause may be there too. But seldom have humans been aware of a vital change in their way of being, at the moment the change came to pass, even the ones who were instrumental in their own revolutions.

“Matter also is Brahman”

If everything is Brahman, then, of course, matter too is Brahman, even the gross kind of matter held by scientific materialism to be the only one existent, while in fact it is but one of the many gradations of substance which lend concreteness to the tiers of being. For vital beings exist in vital substance, mental beings in mental substance, supramental beings in supramental substance. “[Matter] is a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.”⁴ The Upanishads describe the physical universe of gross matter “as the external body of the Divine Being”.⁵ Therefore matter, arisen from the Inconscient – Sri Aurobindo described our body as “a flower of the material Inconscience” – is “a form of the Spirit, a habitation of the Spirit, and here in Matter itself there can be a realisation of the Spirit”.⁶

If a higher, more refined species of being is to appear in a world of gross matter, then the grossness has to be refined. It is because this alchemic work of transformation has to take place in earthly matter that Sri Aurobindo gave so much importance to the essential divinity and transformability of this kind of substance. The earth seems after all to be a much more special cosmic body than is postulated in the current cosmological model. “Our attention must be fixed on the earth because our work is here. Besides, the earth is a concentration of all the other worlds and one can touch them by touching something corresponding in the earth-atmosphere”,⁷ wrote Sri Aurobindo. And the Mother said: “The earth is a kind of symbolic crystallisation of universal life, a reduction, a concentration, so that the work of evolution may be easier to do and follow. And if we see the history of the earth, we can understand why the universe has been created. It is the Supreme growing aware of himself in an eternal Becoming; and the goal is the union of the created with the Creator, a union that is conscious, willing and free, in the Manifestation.”⁸ The earth, in their view, was once more elevated, not physically but symbolically, to a central place in the universe and its evolution. The earth was again considered a living being, the Earth Mother, whose children we literally are.

“However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base”,⁹ wrote Sri Aurobindo in the Arya. Even a casual survey of the world’s chief religions will show how innovative a standpoint this was at the beginning of the twentieth century. As noted, all major religions condemn the world as a place of suffering, and no religion has a rationally adequate explanation for our being here and having to undergo the ordeal. There are stories, there are myths telling in most cases about a coincidence or accident that caused us to get lost here, but none of those tales offers a convincing rationale. The reasons for escape from life as systematised by Buddhism, for instance, or by Advaitic Illusionism are much more convincing. In fact these religions, with India as their centre of propagation, have convinced and converted whole peoples.

Sri Aurobindo and Mirra took an outspoken stance against what the latter called a “supreme act of egoism” that escapism from the world and from life in all its aspects is. “Buddha and Shankara supposed the world to be radically false and miserable; therefore escape from the world was to them the only wisdom. But this world is Brahman, the world is God, the world is Satyam, the world is Ananda; it is our misreading of the world through mental egoism that is a falsehood and our wrong relation with God in the world that is a misery. There is no other falsity and no other cause of sorrow.”¹⁰

This is the reason why an important part of The Life Divine is actually an argumentation against Buddhism and Advaitic Illusionism. They are, according to Sri Aurobindo, responsible for India’s deterioration because of their exclusive concentration on “the other world”. He esteemed Gautama the Buddha (563-483 BC) as gifted with a “penetrating rational intellect supported by an intuitive vision”,¹¹ and called Adi Shankara (788-820 AD) “easily the first of metaphysical thinkers, the greatest genius in the history of philosophy”. All the same, “it remains true that Shankara’s commentary is interesting not so much for the light it sheds on the Upanishad as for its digressions into his own philosophy … The time is fast coming when the human intellect, aware of the mighty complexity of the universe, will be more ready to learn and less prone to dispute and dictate; we shall be willing then to read ancient documents of knowledge for what they contain instead of attempting to force into them our own truth or get them to serve our philosophic or scholastic purposes.”¹²

Sri Aurobindo was “concerned with the earth” and so, of course, was Mirra. Already before meeting Sri Aurobindo she had written in her diary: “Even he who might have attained a perfect contemplation in silence and solitude would have arrived at it only by withdrawing from his body, by disregarding it, and so the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have left it to itself; and by a misguided mysticism, through the lure of supraphysical splendours, the egoistic desire to unite with Thee for his own personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the very reason of his earthly existence, he would have cowardly refused to accomplish his mission of redemption, of purification of Matter. To know that a part of our being is perfectly pure, to commune with this purity, to be identified with it, can be useful only if this knowledge is later used to hasten the earthly transfiguration, to accomplish Thy sublime work.”¹³ (This is strong evidence that Mirra and Sri Aurobindo’s paths were the same from the beginning.)

The Radical Spirit

Nowadays it is often forgotten how novel and daring, how uncompromising was Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s enterprise when they took it up. When reading them, one may become satiated with reading about superman, Supermind, a divine body and paradise upon earth. But if concrete results are not forthcoming and life keeps passing by without any experience of the things promised, then what was at first a revelation becomes little by little no more than an inspiring fiction, and the great literature in which the revelation is packed covers the contents. The results, however, are there – this is what this book is all about – and it is therefore important to recall, at least in passing, the radical spirit in which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother took up their heavy task and worked it out every minute of their existence. And they always expressed themselves very clearly and, at times, forcefully.

The quiet, gentlemanly Aurobindo Ghose had always been a radical. His series of political articles “New Lamps for Old”, written in 1893 when he was twenty-one, was terminated by the editor of the Indu Prakash because the articles where so scathing that the editor feared the colonial rulers might take offence. We know already that Aurobindo staked his life on achieving the freedom of his Motherland. What is not well known is that he was the very first to demand unconditional freedom for India. Later he would write about himself in the third person: “He always stood for India’s complete independence which he was the first to advocate publicly without compromise as the only ideal worthy of a self-respecting nation”; and on another occasion: “Sri Aurobindo’s first preoccupation was to declare openly for complete and absolute independence as the aim of political action in India and to insist on this persistently in the pages of the journal [^Bande Mataram]; he was the first politician in India who had the courage to do this in public …”¹⁴ He withdrew from politics only when he was sure that the idea of unconditional freedom was firmly imprinted on the political mind of India and that its eventual realisation was assured.

Mirra’s life was not less radical. She had to break with her bourgeois background to enter the “bohemian” life of the artists’ world in Paris. The risks she took in her occult explorations were considerable, and once she actually died for a short time because her own teacher, in a fit of anger, cut the silver cord connecting the subtle sheaths with the material body. (The combined knowledge of herself and of her teacher succeeded in bringing her painfully back to life.) The battle with the hostile being incarnated in her second husband must have been frightful, but we get only scarce glimpses of it. What are most extensively documented are her risky adventures later in life, after 1958, when she took up the transformation of her physical body.

“My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in a letter meant to put the record straight, “from hardships, starvation in England and constant dangers and fierce difficulties to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, external and internal. My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle: the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character.”¹⁵

Two remarks may put the above into the correct perspective. Firstly, the “hostile beings” were very real to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. They belong mainly to the vital worlds, but also partially to mental worlds, and are dominating the earth in its present state. This dominion they want to keep, and as their nature is sheer ego, their methods and actions are ruthless. Compared with the great hostiles, Asuras for instance, the popular idea of the devil in Christianity is but a grotesque caricature. Hostile beings influence our lives constantly, unseen and unawares, and are the cause of all evil, corruption and perversion, for that is what they revel in. They resist every effort to change the world or oneself for the better as that goes against their interests. This means that they are the arch-enemies of any kind of spiritual discipline and of the transformation of the world.

Secondly, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother rarely talked about themselves in public. The intimate details known about them are mainly found in personal writings, letters and conversations published after their passing away. When they could not avoid mentioning themselves, they did so with great discretion, though the truth sometimes compelled them to say who they were and what they stood for.

What they stood for, we know now. We know Mirra realised that a new chapter in the evolution of the planet was going to be written – and so did Sri Aurobindo, of course. But what seems to be little remembered about the latter is that he represents a totally new chapter in Indian philosophy and spirituality. We have already seen how he distanced himself from the Buddha and from Shankara. “I seek a text and a Shastra [scripture]”, he wrote, “that is not subject to interpolation, modification and replacement, that moth and white ant cannot destroy, that the earth cannot bury nor Time mutilate … I believe that Veda to be the foundation of the Sanatan Dharma [the eternal law]; I believe it to be the concealed divinity within Hinduism, – but a veil has to be drawn aside, a curtain has to be lifted. I believe it to be knowable and discoverable. I believe the future of India and the world to depend on its discovery and on its application, not to the renunciation of life, but to life in the world and among men.”¹⁶ – “It is irrelevant to me what Max Müller thinks of the Veda or what Sayana thinks of the Veda. I should prefer to know what the Veda has to say for itself and, if there is any light there on the unknown or on the infinite, to follow the ray till I come face to face with that which it illumines.”¹⁷

Reflecting upon himself in an early note, he wrote: “You will find disputants questioning your system on the ground that it is not consistent with this or that Shastra or this or that great authority, whether philosopher, saint or Avatar. Remember then that realisation and¹⁸ experience are alone of essential importance. What Shankara argued or Vivekananda conceived intellectually about existence or even what Ramakrishna stated from his multitudinous and varied realisation, is only of value to you so far as you [are] moved by God to accept and renew it in your own experience. The opinions of thinkers and saints and Avatars should be accepted as hints, not as fetters. What matters to you is what you have seen or what God in his universal personality or impersonally or again personally in some teacher, guru or pathfinder undertakes to show you in the path of Yoga.”¹⁹

Sri Aurobindo wrote in the same vein to a disciple: “I have never disputed the truth of the old Yogas … I recognise their truth in their own field and for their own purpose – the truth of the experience so far as it goes – though I am in no way bound to accept the truth of the mental philosophies founded on the experience. I similarly find that my Yoga is true in its own field – a larger field, as I think – and for its own purpose … Only you say that the thing is impossible; but that is what is said about everything before it is done.”²⁰

In agreement with their principle of “a complete and catholic affirmation”, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would always be respectful and appreciative of other views, ancient as well as contemporary, and point to their essence. For, after all, everything in the world, being Brahman, must be a bearer of some truth, of some essential significance. But this did not mean that they were relativists pure and simple; on the contrary, they had a task to do, and the mental formulation of this task was only part of it. It is important, especially for Westerners, to keep in mind that “mental formulation” (philosophy) is secondary to praxis, to the practical, living realisation of knowledge. For the West, as we shall see further on, has been one-sided and therefore fundamentally flawed in its attitude towards Existence. Its approach to things has been mental through and through, it has been an exercise of the mind; the living, the praxis, the spiritual realisation of the knowledge it gained was for many centuries limited to prescriptions by a Church and to not much more than religious ethics. “Truth of philosophy”, noted Sri Aurobindo, “is of a merely theoretical value unless it can be lived.”²¹

The freedom Sri Aurobindo and Mirra exacted for themselves has its manifesto on the very first page of the Essays on the Gita, in which Sri Aurobindo in his turn, after the great Indian philosophers of earlier times, interprets what is probably the most revered and undoubtedly the most commented upon text of the Shastra. He writes, not mincing his words: “The world abounds with Scriptures sacred and profane, with revelations and half-revelations, with religions and philosophies, sects and schools and systems. To these the many minds of a half-ripe knowledge or no knowledge at all attach themselves with exclusiveness and passion and will have it that this or the other book is alone the eternal Word of God and all others are either impostures or at best imperfectly inspired, that this or that philosophy is the last word of the reasoning intellect and other systems are either errors or saved only by such partial truth in them as links them to the one true philosophical cult. Even the discoveries of physical Science have been elevated into a creed and in its name religion and spirituality banned as ignorance and superstition, philosophy as frippery and moonshine …

“Mankind seems now indeed inclined to grow a little modester and wiser; we no longer slay our fellows in the name of God’s truth or because they have minds differently trained or differently constituted from ours; we are less ready to curse and revile our neighbour because he is wicked or presumptuous enough to differ from us in opinion; we are ready even to admit that Truth is everywhere and cannot be our sole monopoly; we are beginning to look at other religions and philosophies for the truth and help they contain and no longer merely in order to damn them as false or criticise what we conceive to be their errors. But we are still apt to declare that our truth gives us the supreme knowledge which other religions or philosophies have missed or only imperfectly grasped so that they deal with subsidiary and inferior aspects of the truth of things or can merely prepare less evolved minds for the heights to which we have arrived. And we are still prone to force upon ourselves or others the whole sacred mass of the book or gospel we admire, insisting that all shall be accepted as eternally valid truth and no iota or underline or diaeresis denied its part of the plenary inspiration.”²²

This paragraph alone should prevent Aurobindonians from being sectarians or fanatics. But once again, this is not an incentive to complete relativism. As (re)discovered by some mainstream schools of present-day philosophy, Mind has no grasp on essentials; therefore it can never know Truth and is always dependent on the prevalent ways of thinking peculiar to the culture and time it is active in. Yet to discover the truth behind a given view one has to follow a discipline, especially if the view is spiritual, which every world-view ultimately is. Following a spiritual discipline demands the commitment of the whole person for a considerable period of time, if not for the remainder of his or her life. The conclusion is that to follow a teaching intended to change things – in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s case to change the world – one has to be as broad-minded as the problem one intends to tackle (the world) is large, while inwardly remaining concentrated on the task of complete transformation (integral yoga) in a total dedication. We will briefly touch upon this later.

“Avatars Still Come”

The following quotations are from Sri Aurobindo’s letters to disciples:

• “I had my past and the world’s past to assimilate and overpass before I could find and found the future.”²³

• “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.”²⁴

• “No difficulty that can come on the Sadhak²⁵ but has faced us on the path … It is in fact to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden.”²⁶

• “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 pretence. 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.”²⁷

• “It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine.”²⁸

• “As for faith, you write as if I never had a doubt or any difficulty. I have had worse than any human mind can think of. It is not because I have ignored difficulties, but because I have seen them more clearly, experienced them on a larger scale than anyone living now or before me that, having faced and measured them, I am sure of the results of my work. But even if I still saw the chance that it might come to nothing (which is impossible), I would go on unperturbed, because I would still have done to the best of my power the work that I have to do, and what is so done always counts in the economy of the universe.”²⁹

These words, in all their dramatic directness, disclose the essence of avatarhood better than any comment or paraphrase could do. Here the Avatar is giving us in his own words an idea of what it means for him to take on a human body in order to bring the evolution a step further. Sri Aurobindo is speaking not only in his own name but also in the name of the Mother. Their path was identical, their task was the same, their sufferings were equally gruesome. The Mother rarely spoke about the torment until later, in the conversations that constitute the Agenda.

In the previous chapter we have defined an Avatar as the direct incarnation of the Divine in his manifestation to make the next higher step in evolution possible. “The Divine”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, “puts on an appearance of humanity, assumes the outward human nature in order to tread the path and show it to human beings, but does not cease to be the Divine. It is a manifestation that takes place, a manifestation of a growing divine consciousness, not human turning into divine.”³⁰

The concept of the Avatar is actually very well known in the West, for it defines the being and mission of Christ.³¹ The difference with the Hindu concept lies in the fact that Christianity acknowledges only one Avatar, while in the Hindu view there is a succession of Avatars which furthers the earthly evolution. So extraordinary, so “unhuman” is the divine embodiment to the human understanding that the interpretation of the person and role of Christ has been the cause of numerous Christian heresies. Some interpretations saw Christ as purely human, others as exclusively divine, with every possible combination of both views in between. This groping for the truth about the Avatar seems to be a common phenomenon, for one finds the same kind of “theological” interpretations in the Hindu assessments of Rama and Krishna – and in the assessments of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother by their disciples, as reflected in the aforementioned quotations. Some disciples obviously had doubts about the accomplishment of Sri Aurobindo’s avataric mission, in some cases reducing him to a fallible human being; others supposed that he, being divine, could not really suffer or doubt, but was only putting on a show, a lila. And then there were the vacillations between those two extreme viewpoints, often in one and the same disciple. The spectrum of attitudes towards the Mother was exactly the same: some considered her wholly divine and expected her to fulfil all their demands in the blink of an eye, others would not accept or could not discern the divinity in her human personality.

We may summarise Sri Aurobindo’s statements about himself as Avatar in the following way. The Avatar has to assimilate the world’s past in order to make the new evolutionary quantum jump possible. He, “the Leader of the Way”, has to take up the human condition as it is, carry out the Yoga of the world and bring it into unexplored evolutionary territory. This superhuman task is more difficult, more vast and more painful than any ordinary human being would be able to stand and accomplish. It has to be performed “in grim earnest”, for the Avatar’s difficulties and suffering are real. The difficulties must be conquered to make them conquerable by the ones who will follow on the newly paved path. “Only divine Love” can bear such a burden. His greater knowledge gives him also a deeper insight into the “impossibility” of the task, for if it were not impossible for ordinary human beings, he would not have to come to do it.

A child once asked the Mother: “Mother, are you God?” The Mother, ever smiling, answered: “Yes, my child, and so are you.” The human being too has the divine in itself. The difference between the Avatar and the ordinary human being consists in the fact that the Avatar is a direct embodiment of the Divine – “he has something behind him which emerges always out of the [human] coverings” – while the Divine portion in the human being has chosen to participate in the adventure of the evolution and therefore has become “temporarily” ignorant of its essence. As the Avatar is born of human parents in a human adhara, he may not be immediately aware of his avatarhood. In his youth Sri Aurobindo was, according to his own statement, an agnostic; he probably united with his true Being during the first years of his stay in Pondicherry, between 1910 and 1914. The Mother was aware of her uniqueness even in early childhood. She was told by Madame Théon during her occultist days in Tlemcen that she was an incarnation of the Universal Mother, and this was confirmed by Sri Aurobindo after their first meeting. Several diary entries in October 1914 bear witness to her conscious unification with the Great Mother. Essentially, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were the double-poled supramental Avatar, descended to create a divine world. “The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same”, asserted Sri Aurobindo; “the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play.”³²

Those who feel that the suffering Sri Aurobindo mentions is perhaps exaggerated might contemplate for a moment what it must have meant to be nailed to a cross knowing beforehand that such an experience is awaiting you. Yet, the crucifixion of Christ was only the climax of his Avatarhood,³³ for the whole life of an Avatar is dedicated to the effort of transforming humanity.

Sri Aurobindo gave one of the most striking accounts of his avataric toil in an autobiographic poem written in 1935 and called “A God’s Labour”.

He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way …

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 …

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 … ³⁴

If ever there was an “avataric” poem, it is this one, regrettably too long to be quoted in full. Not that one saw much of the suffering. Sri Aurobindo had trained his body to such a degree that all the few people who had access to him saw was him sitting there in that big armchair, staring at the wall in front of him. But when in the years after 1958 the Mother worked on the transformation of her body, which had become the body of the world, then at times her suffering became quite evident.

Still, nothing could prevent the Avatar from doing the job he/she had come to do and the spirit remained unflaggingly radical. “Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption [to change the world], – 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.”³⁵ Sri Aurobindo is mostly seen as a sage, a calm, self-mastered, sattwic mahayogi (great yogi), a visionary, a philosopher, a poet, but he is seldom seen as the Warrior he was. It is, however, his warriorhood that made the rest possible. The last Avatar of the Hindus, Kalki, is represented as riding a white, winged horse and brandishing the flaming sword of Truth. But “too much importance need not be attached to the details about Kalki”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in a letter, “they are rather symbolic than an attempt to prophesy details of future history. What is expressed is something that has to come, but it is symbolically indicated, no more.”³⁶ Kalki, of course, was Sri Aurobindo – but people in the present time do not realise that Kalki had already come to wage his battle. For he had not come as expected in one male body, but in the bodies of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who was herself no less a warrior. For are two of the personalities of the Great Mother not Durga and Kali?

Out, out with the mind and its candle flares,

Light, light the suns that never die.

For me the cry of the seraph stars

And the forms of the gods for my naked eye!³⁷

This too was the voice of the soft-spoken Sri Aurobindo – who had risen far beyond human dimensions, as he relates in the autobiographical parts of his epic poem Savitri. Nevertheless, this should not lead us to the conclusion that the path he was hewing through the virgin forest of the future – a simile often used by him and by the Mother – was all daring and improvisation. On the contrary, he “cast his deeds like bronze to front the years”,³⁸ patient, undaunted, with the sturdy perseverance of the great builders.

“I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane”, he wrote. “That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse Forces [note the capital letter] who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer to the field of earth and Matter.”³⁹ This letter was written somewhere around 1935, but such had been his attitude from the beginning. “Adhering still to the essential rigorous method of science, though not to its purely physical instrumentation, scrutinising, experimenting, holding nothing for established which cannot be scrupulously and universally verified, we shall still arrive at supraphysical certitudes. There are other means, there are greater approaches, but this line of access too can lead to the one universal truth.”⁴⁰

“To form no conclusions which are not justified by observation and reasoning, to doubt everything until it is proved but to deny nothing until it is disproved, to be always ready to reconsider old conclusions in the light of new facts, to give a candid consideration to every new idea or old idea revived if it deserves a hearing, no matter how contradictory it may be of previously ascertained experience or previously formed conclusion, is the sceptical temper, the temper of the inquirer, the true scientist, the untrammelled thinker.”⁴¹ This was Sri Aurobindo.

Few have evaluated science and materialism with as much clarity and intuitive insight as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. They perceived the force lines of history and had a clear appreciation of their substance and role. To give but one example, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the opening pages of The Life Divine: “The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness – to its heights we can always reach – when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. ‘Earth is his footing’, says the Upanishad whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe. And it is certainly the fact that the wider we extend and the surer we make our knowledge of the physical world, the wider and surer becomes our foundation for the higher knowledge, even the highest, even the Brahmavidya [knowledge of Brahman]:”⁴²

Evidently, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could not agree with the turn taken by science into scientism⁴³ which flattened, “collapsed” the dimensions of being into a single one. A substantial volume could be written about their insights into this subject. Here the following prediction will have to suffice: “If modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, it will be unable to cry a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense-knowledge and of the reasoning from sense-knowledge, its very rush will carry it beyond and the rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe is only an earnest of the energy and success which we may hope to see repeated in the conquest of what lies beyond, once the stride is taken that crosses the barrier. We see already that advance in its obscure beginnings.”⁴⁴ Science is moving more and more into the realm of the invisible which by definition is the occult – a mathematical formula does not make a neutron or a quark visible. And does the crisis of science – perhaps leading to a new and surprising scientific “paradigm” as predicted by Sri Aurobindo – not become apparent in works like John Horgan’s widely commented upon The End of Science (1996)?

From 1950 till 1958, the Mother gave twice a week French evening classes to the youth of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram School, which had been founded by her during the Second World War. There the children could ask her any question that popped up in their head, and the Mother answered, drawing on her erudition, experience and vast occult and spiritual knowledge. She talked several times about high civilisations that had disappeared long ago. The progress of humanity moved in a kind of a spiral, she said, at times progressing, at times apparently regressing. Brilliant civilisations, “Golden Ages”, some of which still live in humanity’s memory, suddenly disappeared and were followed by long eras of darkness and primitivism. (We find this repeatedly confirmed in Sri Aurobindo.⁴⁵) The high tides of civilisation were always accompanied by the variously formulated promise to mankind of a New Earth, of a Divine World, of a New Creation. But up to now, alas, “one has always fallen back.”⁴⁶

“Teachers of the law and love and oneness there must be, for by that way must come the ultimate salvation. But not till the time-spirit in man is ready can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone, but it is Rudra⁴⁷ who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand. And meanwhile the fierce forward labour of mankind tormented and oppressed by the Powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle and the word of its prophet.”⁴⁸ – “Every time a god has taken a body, it has always been with the intention of transforming the earth and creating a new world. But till today, he has always had to give up his body without completing his work. And it has always been said that the earth was not ready and that men had not fulfilled the conditions necessary for the work to be achieved.”⁴⁹

It was Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s warrior will that there would be no falling back this time. “I have no intention”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, “of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco, a partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the external nature.”⁵⁰ He also wrote: “A partial realisation, something mixed and inconclusive, does not meet the demand I make on life and Yoga.”⁵¹ And: “Neither antiquity nor modernity can be the test of truth or the test of usefulness. All the Rishis do not belong to the past; the Avatars still come; revelation still continues.”⁵²

The Integral Yoga

The path through the virgin forest had to be cleared, the method had to be found, the “yoga” had to be built up. We know that Mirra as well as Sri Aurobindo were powerfully aided by extramaterial beings who watched over their perilous road, which they followed with total dedication. But it was ultimately the embodied double Avatar who had to do the job for which he/she had come, consisting in developing a new spiritual modus operandi in order to work out a new spiritual realisation: the supramental transformation of the body, of the material substance of the earth.

One may get an idea of their struggle’s countless unforeseen challenges and of the heroism required of “the finders of the Way”⁵³ in Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo for the period 1933-38, in Sri Aurobindo’s autobiographical poems and parts of Savitri (especially the first three Books), and in Mother’s Agenda, conversations with the Mother in the last twelve years of her life.⁵⁴ Their establishing of the path of the “Integral Yoga”, as Sri Aurobindo named it – in the beginning he also sometimes called it Purna Yoga (complete yoga) or “Synthetic Yoga” – would allow others to follow in their footsteps; for creating a divine life necessitated collaboration from the flower of humanity. Sri Aurobindo would call the Integral Yoga “the path I had opened, as Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Chaitanya, etc. opened theirs.”⁵⁵

A systematic yoga is only possible when the path as well as the goal are known and determined. The goal of the Integral Yoga is known but not determined. The goal is the realisation of a supramental body on the Earth; what a supramental body will be like is (more or less) known; but its realisation is not fixed, not determined, as up to now nobody has concretely existed in a supramental body. And didn’t Sri Aurobindo time and again refuse to define Supermind so as not to limit it by mental formations? Besides, the Integral Yoga is as complex as its object, which is the whole world, and as every practitioner of the Yoga is different, his or her approach has to be different. We may therefore conclude that the path of the Integral Yoga has been cleared up to a certain point, i.e. as far as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went on it, that its method has been established in principle, but that it will be fully determined only when the first supramental beings appear on this planet and the whole path will be perceptible and describable.

Sri Aurobindo’s words in The Life Divine leave no doubt in this matter: “… Evolutionary [and evolving] Nature is not a logical series of separate segments; it is a totality of ascending powers of being which interpenetrate and dovetail and exercise in their action on each other a power of mutual modification … This interaction creates an abundant number of different intermediate and interlocked degrees of the force and consciousness of being, but it also makes it difficult to bring about a complete integration of all the powers under the full control of any one power. For this reason there is not actually a series of simple clear-cut and successive stages in the individual’s evolution; there is instead a complexity and a partly determinate, partly confused comprehensiveness of the [yogic] movement.”⁵⁶ And he goes on to compare the yogic development to “a tide or a mounting flux, the leading fringe of which touches the higher degrees of a cliff or hill while the rest is still below”, and to “an army advancing in columns which annexes new ground, while the main body is still behind in a territory overrun but too large to be effectively occupied, so that there has to be a frequent halt and partial return to the traversed areas for consolidation and assurance of the hold on the occupied country and assimilation of its people.”⁵⁷

“All Yoga is in its very nature a means of passing out of our surface consciousness of limitation and ignorance into a larger and deeper Reality of ourselves and the world and some supreme or total Existence now veiled to us by this surface. There is a Reality which underlies everything, permeates perhaps everything, is perhaps everything but in quite another way than the world now seen by us; to it we are obscurely moving by our thought, life and actions; we attempt to understand and approach it by our religion and philosophy, at last we touch it directly in some partial or, it may be, some complete spiritual experience. It is that spiritual experience, it is the method, it is the attainment of this realisation that we call Yoga.”⁵⁸ This being the general principle, what specifically is Integral Yoga?

“What is Integral Yoga? It is the way of complete God-realisation, a complete Self-realisation, a complete fulfilment of our being and consciousness, a complete transformation of our nature – and this implies a complete perfection of life here and not only a return to an eternal perfection elsewhere. This is the object, but in the method also there is the same integrality, for the entirety of the object cannot be accomplished without an entirety in the method, a complete turning, opening, self-giving of our being and nature in all its parts, ways, movements to that which we realise. Our mind, will, heart, life, body, our outer and inner and inmost existence, our superconscious and subconscious as well as our conscious parts, must all be thus given, must all become a means, a field of this realisation and transformation and participate in the illumination and the change from a human into a divine consciousness and nature.”⁵⁹

For the general reader a text like this may not be easy to fathom at one go. Each sentence, each phrase has its subtle resonances, and Sri Aurobindo’s sonorous language evokes a globality that has to be intuited to be properly apprehended. On the other hand, quoting Sri Aurobindo’s own words is the safest way not to distort or dilute his meaning. The historian Arthur Lovejoy wrote in his book on the Great Chain of Being: “… [The citation of illustrative passages from the original authors] will, I dare say, seem to some readers too abundant. But in my own reading of works of this character [i.e. historic] I have often been exasperated by finding précis or paraphrases where I desiderated the actual language of the authors whose ideas were under consideration; and my rule has therefore been to give the words of relevant texts as fully as was consistent with reasonable brevity.”⁶⁰

So, how better to outline the newness of the Integral Yoga than in Sri Aurobindo’s own words? “[The Integral Yoga] is new as compared with the old Yogas:

“1. Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into Heaven and 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 [Supermind] attained by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the Sadhana. Even the Tantra and Vaishnavism 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 recognised 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.”⁶¹

The radical newness of this stance has been noted by many commentators. In connection with the second point above, for instance, we quote Chitta Ranjan Goswami in Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of the Superman: “… In a very important respect Sri Aurobindo’s conception of the superman differs from anything conceived in the past. Sri Aurobindo thinks not only of individual superman but also of a race of supermen. The collectivity is conceived to evolve gradually to a higher stage of life and being. When the Bodhisattva resolves not to get into Nirvana (final fulfilment) until all others are made ready for the same, the stress is purely on individual liberation, one by one. The idea of a society of the liberated is altogether absent in the Indian tradition.”⁶²

The goal of the Integral Yoga, according to Sri Aurobindo, was “to become one in our absolute being with the ineffable Divine and in the manifestation a free movement of his being, power, consciousness and self-realising joy, to grow into a divine Truth-consciousness beyond mind, into a Light beyond all human or earthly lights, into a Power to which the greatest strengths of men are a weakness, into the wisdom of an infallible gnosis and the mastery of an unerring and unfailing divinity of Will, into a Bliss beside which all human pleasure is as the broken reflection of a candle-flame to the all-pervading splendour of an imperishable sun, but all this not for our own sake [but] for the pleasure of the Divine Beloved, this is the goal and the crown of the supramental path of Yoga.”⁶³

“Our Yoga is a Yoga of transformation”, he wrote, “but a transformation of the whole consciousness and the whole nature from the top to the bottom.”⁶⁴ This is explicit. A spiritual effort of this kind cannot bear fruit unless every part of the human being is fully open to the divine influence and direction. It is the Great Mother, the Divine Creatrix, who is the origin fons et origo, of the whole manifestation – who is the whole manifestation, including this very special Earth. The evolution of the Earth is the Yoga of the Earth; the supramental or Integral Yoga is actually a revolutionary acceleration of the evolution. This throws some light on the reason why the Supramental Avatar was not only male but also female in embodiment though one in Consciousness: the Great Mother had to be directly present, in person, at the perilous juncture of the transition and transformation of the lower into the higher hemisphere. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had tried out many ways to construct the new path; in the end Sri Aurobindo confided the Integral Yoga entirely to the Mother, who was doing it herself, literally, in every person turned towards her. For every soul on earth “is a portion of the Divine Mother”⁶⁵; and: “It is only those who are capable by aspiration and meditation on the Mother to open and receive her action and working within that can succeed in this Yoga.”⁶⁶

A “Yoga with these dimensions and this degree of difficulty is not meant for everybody, one has to be called to it. “First be sure of the call and of thy soul’s answer … Imagine not the way is easy; the way is long, arduous, dangerous, difficult. At every step is an ambush, at every turn a pitfall. A thousand seen and unseen enemies will start up against thee, terrible in subtlety against thy ignorance, formidable in power against thy weakness. And when with pain thou hast destroyed them, thousands will surge up to take their place. Hell will vomit its hordes to oppose thee and enring and wound and menace; Heaven will meet thee with its pitiless tests and its cold luminous denials. Thou shalt find thyself alone in thy anguish, the demons furious in thy path, the Gods unwilling above thee. Ancient and powerful, cruel, unvanquished and close and innumerable are the dark and dreadful Powers that profit by the reign of Night and Ignorance and would have no change and are hostile. Aloof, slow to arrive, far-off and few and brief in their visits are the Bright Ones who are willing or permitted to succour. Each step forward is a battle …”⁶⁷ All this was reported from Sri Aurobindo’s personal experience and reminds us in prose of what he sang elsewhere in that sweet and terrible poem, A God’s Labour.

The expected result should be, we may suppose, at least equivalent to the magnitude of the effort. “The boon that we have asked from the Supreme is the greatest that the earth can ask from the Highest, the change that is most difficult to realise, the most exacting in its conditions. It is nothing less than the descent of the supreme Truth and Power into Matter, the supramental established in the material plane and consciousness in the material world and an integral transformation down to the very principle of Matter. Only a supreme Grace can effect this miracle”⁶⁸ – as only a supreme Grace can bring this Yoga of physical transformation to fruition.

“This Thing of Capital Importance …”

“If Supermind descends upon the earth, it will bring necessarily the divine life with it and establish it here … The manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness is therefore the capital reality that will make the divine life possible,”⁶⁹ wrote Sri Aurobindo. “If Supermind descends …”, “if the supramental comes down …” It was the condition, the conditio sine qua non, the aim of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s whole effort from the beginning of their destined collaboration. The human being had appeared in evolution because of the descent of Mind, the rational level of the mental consciousness, into the earth-atmosphere. Now the condition for the appearance of the supramental being, the species beyond the human being, was the descent of Supermind. “The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration …”⁷⁰

“I am not trying to change the world all at once but only to bring down centrally something into it, it has not yet, a new consciousness and power,”⁷¹ wrote Sri Aurobindo in a letter. And in another one, of October 1935: “The present business is to bring down and establish the Supermind, not to explain it.”⁷² – “I know that the supramental Descent is inevitable – I have faith in view of my experience that the time can and should be now and not in a later age … But even if I knew it to be for a later time, I would not swerve from my path or be discouraged or flag in my labour. Formerly I might have been, but not now – after all the path I have traversed. When one is sure of the Truth, or even when one believes the thing one pursues to be the only possible solution, one does not stipulate for an immediate success, one travels towards the Light taking as well worthwhile and facing every risk of the adventure. Still, like you, it is now, in this life that I insist on it and not in another or in the hereafter.”⁷³ (30.8.1932)

“I know with absolute certitude that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how. That also is decided and predestined from somewhere above; but it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces. For in the terrestrial world the predetermined result is hidden and what we see is a whirl of possibilities and forces attempting to achieve something with the destiny of it all concealed from human eyes. This is, however, certain that a number of souls have been sent to see that it shall be now. That is the situation. My faith and will are for the now.”⁷⁴ (25.12.1934)

“The hour of the realisations is near”, noted Mirra in her diary as early as September 1914.

“A new light shall break upon the earth.

“A new world shall be born.

“And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.”⁷⁵ However, the previous pages should have made clear that the realisation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s endeavour would be difficult and complex – and unforeseeable. Yes, the Supramental Consciousness would descend, but later than expected and after some daunting obstacles and dramatic developments.