Patterns of the Present

3: East and West

(Note: In this chapter the concepts “East” and “West” are used as they are in the works of Sri Aurobindo: in their symbolical, spiritual sense, which remains valid underneath the developments in the last decades.)

To this mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by the fusion of the old Eastern and the new Western knowledge the thought of the world is already turning.²

– Sri Aurobindo

The safety of Europe has to be sought in the recognition of the spiritual aim of human existence, otherwise she will be crushed by the weight of her own unillumined knowledge and soulless organisation.³

– Sri Aurobindo

The significance of the time we are living in has been examined in the two previous chapters viewing the present “turning point” from the perspective of the cycles humanity has traversed, and by interpreting the present as the third phase in the mission and action of the Avatar of the Supermind. In this chapter another approach with the same end will be suggested by considering the intrinsic value of the Eastern and Western civilisations, and their eventual reciprocality.

The Western Way – Greece

The difference between East and West is essentially a difference of culture. Seen in this way, the “West” means the various aspects and developments of the European culture, generally thought to have originated in the city-states of ancient Greece. Although this view is still the common one, set forth in all philosophical and historical manuals and works of reference, it becomes more and more open to doubt as the Middle-Eastern and Egyptian roots of ancient Greece are uncovered or rediscovered.⁴

A few elementary facts will prove that this new assessment of the origins of Greek culture is indeed convincing. The people of the eastern Mediterranean were able seafarers even in prehistoric times; it must have been as easy for them to hop from island to island southwards, in the direction of the Egyptian delta, as it manifestly was eastwards, in the direction of what is now Turkey and the islands along its coast, which would become the first important centre of Greek culture and philosophy. Secondly, there must have been compelling reasons for a number of prominent Greeks to journey to the Land of the Two Kingdoms (Upper and Lower Egypt) – Solon, Pythagoras, Herodotus and Plato among them – and to stay there for long periods. The Egyptian influence is quite evident in their teachings and writings. For example, Egypt is where Plato got his story about Atlantis. Still more important: according to Herodotus, “the father of history”, most of the Greek gods were the counterparts of the Egyptian gods. “In the Egyptian language”, he writes, “Apollo is called Horus, Demeter Isis, Artemis Bubastis”. Neith is identified with Athena, Osiris with Dionysus, Hathor with Aphrodite, Ammon with Zeus, and so on.⁵

In the present context more need not be said about this fascinating topic. Its importance will be clear because it erodes another foundation of the bulwark of “Eurocentrism” that has limited for centuries the Western outlook on the other civilisations of the world. The revelation of the true roots of ancient Greece diminishes in no way its special distinction; on the contrary, it makes it more profoundly understandable and thereby enriches it. Few have been greater admirers of Greece than Sri Aurobindo, who was intimately familiar with its culture and civilisation, read and wrote classical Greek fluently, and produced brilliant pages of poetry and prose dedicated to it.⁶ He wrote, for instance, in The Ideal of Human Unity: “The cultural and civic life of the Greek city, of which Athens was the supreme achievement, a life in which living itself was an education, where the poorest as well as the richest sat together in the theatre to see and judge the dramas of Sophocles and Euripides, and the Athenian trader and shopkeeper took part in the subtle philosophical conversations of Socrates, created for Europe not only its fundamental political types and ideals but practically all its basic forms of intellectual, philosophical, literary and artistic culture.”⁷

The fact that concerns us here is the emergence of the rational mind in classical Greece. It was there that Western man fully became “the mental being”, a term defined by Aristotle as follows: “What is naturally proper to every creature is the highest and pleasantest for him. And so, to man, this will be the life of Reason, since Reason is, in the highest sense, a man’s self.”⁸ According to Sri Aurobindo, though, the rational mind is not the highest level of existence man has access to: it is his specific, characteristic level, the “typal” level of the universal manifestation which he incarnates in the evolution. The fact that from Aristotle onwards Western philosophy considered it to be the highest level limits its outlook even in the present times.

The transition from the mythological to the rational age in ancient Greece took place at the time of Pericles, in Greece’s Golden Age. The instruments of this transition were the sophists – Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicos, Hippias, Critias, and others – who were much more influential than is generally supposed. “Truly speaking, one does not understand anything of the century of Pericles and ‘the Greek miracle’ if one does not have a clear idea of the nature and the portent of their influence”, writes Jacqueline de Romilly.⁹ The sophists, according to this expert on ancient Greece, were the ones who questioned all current norms and opinions. They not only taught oratory, the necessary art for prominence in the public life of the city: they were philosophers “in the true sense of the term”, whose innovating views freed the spirit. They initiated “a veritable intellectual and moral revolution”. Though Socrates did not take money for his teachings, he, the Vibhuti of the rational mind for the West, was after all a sophist and regarded as such by the Athenians.

Referring to the role of the sophists, Sri Aurobindo writes: “The mind and the intellect must develop to their fullness so that the spirituality of the race may rise securely upward upon a broad basis of the developed lower nature in man, the intelligent mental being. Therefore we see that the reason in its growth either does away with the distinct spiritual tendency for a time, as in ancient Greece …”¹⁰ The sophists were feared and loathed by the traditional, reactionary factions in Athens because they openly expressed their rational doubts about the irrationalities of the religion, the myths and the Gods. They were attacked in the public gatherings, and for his free thinking Socrates will finally pay with his life. Another point of importance is that the tabula rasa advocated by the sophists “allowed to construct, on new grounds, a new morality centred on man alone” (de Romilly). In other words, the humanism and individualism for which the culture of ancient Greece is so highly praised and which would run as a golden thread through the subsequent stages of the West originated with the sophists. It should however be stressed that all this concerns the Western civilisation. The irreversible acquisition of the rational mind by humanity in Greece was of primary consequence for the West and for everything the West stood and still stands for. William Barrett, in his standard study of existentialism, Irrational Man, writes: “The momentousness of this emergence of reason can be gauged by setting Greece over against the comparably high civilisations of India and China. These latter had a great flowering of sages at a time close to that of the pre-Socratics in Greece; but neither in India nor in China was reason fully isolated and distinguished – that is, differentiated – from the rest of man’s psychic being, from his feeling and intuition. Oriental man remains intuitive, not rational.”¹¹ This statement gives voice to a common Western misconception and shows Barrett’s ignorance in the matter of the philosophical schools of ancient India and China, where the outflowering of rational thought preceded the classical period in Greece and was much more varied in its expressions.

The focus on the human being and the urge towards an individual evaluation of life are indisputably two of the great gifts the Greek civilisation bequeathed to the West. It seems justified to consider humanism (plus political democracy) and individualism as the foundations of “Europe”, of the common culture which developed on the most western peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, spread to the Americas, and is now so influential worldwide. In a series of interviews Alison Browning had in 1989 with prominent European intellectuals these fundamentals were referred to time and again: “Europe equals humanism” (Eugene Ionesco); Europe stands for “a more human being” (Peter Härtling); Europe is “the land of the human … the country of origin of the individual” (Denis de Rougemont).¹²

Christianity

Another essential element that contributed to the building of European culture was Christianity. “Greece with its rational bent and its insufficient religious sense was unable to save its religion; it tended towards that sharp division between philosophy and science on one side and religion on the other which has been so peculiar a characteristic of the European mind”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in his essay on Heraclitus.¹³ “… Heraclitus prepares the way for the destruction of the old religion [by the sophists], the reign of pure philosophy and reason and the void which was filled up by Christianity; for man cannot live by reason alone … Europe had killed its old creeds beyond revival and had to turn for its religion to Asia.”¹⁴ Jesus Christ was an Asian.

This may be the place to quote a revealing, seminal text of Sri Aurobindo’s, which was published in the Arya in 1915 and covers the whole range of the relations between East and West. It goes as follows: “The fundamental difference [between East and West] has been that Asia has served predominantly (not exclusively) as a field for man’s spiritual experience and progression, Europe has been rather a workshop for his mental and vital activities. As the cycle progressed, the Eastern continent has more and more converted itself into a storehouse of spiritual energy sometimes active and reaching forward to new development, sometimes conservative and quiescent. Three or four times in history a stream of this energy has poured out upon Europe, but each time Europe has rejected wholly or partially the spiritual substance of the afflatus and used it rather as an impulse to fresh intellectual and material activity and progress.

“The first attempt was the filtering of Egyptian, Chaldean and Indian wisdom through the thought of the Greek philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato and the Neo-Platonists; the result was the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism filtered through the Semitic temperament entered Europe in the form of Christianity. Christianity came within an ace of spiritualising and even asceticising the mind of Europe; it was baffled by its own theological deformation in the minds of the Greek fathers of the Church and by the sudden flooding of Europe with a German barbarism whose temperament in its merits no less than in its defects was the very anti-type of the Christian spirit and the Graeco-Roman intellect.

“The Islamic invasion of Spain and the southern coast of the Mediterranean – curious as the sole noteworthy example of Asiatic culture using the European method of material and political irruption as opposed to a peaceful invasion by ideas – may be regarded as a third attempt. The result of its meeting with Graecised Christianity was the reawakening of the European mind in feudal and Catholic Europe and the obscure beginnings of modern thought and science.

“The fourth and last attempt, which is as yet only in its slow initial stage is the quiet entry of Eastern and chiefly of Indian thought into Europe, first through the veil of German metaphysics, more latterly by its subtle influence in reawakening the Celtic, Scandinavian and Slavonic idealism, mysticism, religionism, and the direct and open penetration of Buddhism, Theosophy, Vedantism, Bahaism and other Oriental influences in both Europe and America.”¹⁵

Christ, who according to Sri Aurobindo was influenced by Buddhism and Vaishnavism, brought the experience of the soul and therefore of individual spirituality to the Hebrews, the People of the Law. His legacy would be an important contribution to the development of individualism in the West. The soul is a part of the Divine – the Son of Man is also the Son of God. As each human being has a soul, Christ declared that he had come to show a new way to the whole of humanity, low as well as high. This doubly offended the Hebraic authorities; he was a blasphemer for asserting that he and all human beings had God within them and could communicate directly with Him, and he upset the social order by mixing with people who were no better than outcasts in Hebraic society. (The first Christian converts in the Empire were for the most part women and slaves.)

Nowadays it is generally known that Christ and the religions which claim descendence from him are two different things. Christianity was much more the creation of St. Paul and the Church Fathers than of Christ himself, although the shining core of Christ’s mission has remained present on the Earth for a long time to contact with the soul and follow its true spiritual path, called bhakti by the Indians, devotional love. “To humanise Europe”, as Sri Aurobindo put it, Christianity and the then still living force of its founder used the apparatus of the Roman Empire, which itself had absorbed the civilisation of the Greeks. Thus Greece, Rome, Judaism and Christianity became the pillars upon which Europe was built. All four elements have remained active through the ages and are still directly influential in what is now called Western civilisation.

The Teutonic Lapse

History tells us how the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries gradually disintegrated under pressure from the barbarian tribes on its northern frontiers. “The old Hellenic or Graeco-Roman civilisation perished, among other reasons, because it only imperfectly generalised culture in its own society and was surrounded by huge masses of humanity who were still possessed by the barbarian habit of mind”, writes Sri Aurobindo. “Civilisation can never be safe so long as, confining the cultured mentality to a small minority, it nourishes in its bosom a tremendous mass of ignorance, a multitude, a proletariat. Either knowledge must enlarge itself from above or be always in danger of submergence by the ignorant night from below. Still more must it be unsafe if it allows enormous numbers of men to exist outside its pale uninformed by its light, full of the natural vigour of the barbarian, who may at any moment seize upon the physical weapons of the civilised without undergoing an intellectual transformation by their culture. The Graeco-Roman culture perished from within and from without, from without by the floods of Teutonic barbarism, from within by the loss of its vitality.”¹⁶

The effects of this invasion Sri Aurobindo called “the Teutonic lapse”. It happened much more gradually than is usually supposed, and many structures of the Roman Empire survived or were revived in due course. Most of these structures or institutions actually belonged to the Catholic Church which before long felt impelled to convert the heathen Teutons. The methods of conversion were far from refined¹⁷, and will have their consequences in the centuries to come, for they resulted in the cruder sides of the Catholic religion and will ultimately lead to the Protestant Reformation. As Sri Aurobindo put it: “The European, ever since the Teutonic mind and temperament took possession of western Europe, has been fundamentally the practical, dynamic and kinetic man, vitalistic in the very marrow of his thought and being. All else has been the fine flower of this culture, this has been its root and stalk, and in modern times this truth of temperament, always there, has come aggressively to the surface and triumphed over the traditions of Christian piety and Latinistic culture.”¹⁸

“The exceptional nation touched on its higher levels by a developed reason or spirituality or both, as were Greece and later Rome in ancient Europe, India, China and Persia in ancient Asia, is surrounded or neighboured by enormous masses of the old infrarational humanity and endangered by this menacing proximity; for until a developed science comes in to redress the balance, the barbarian has always a greater physical force and unexhausted native power of aggression than the cultured peoples. At this stage the light and power of civilisation always collapses in the end before the attack of the outer darkness. Then ascending Nature has to train the conquerors more or less slowly, with long difficulty and much loss and delay to develop among themselves what their incursion has temporarily destroyed or impaired. In the end humanity gains by the process; a greater mass of the nations is brought in, a larger and more living force of progress is applied, a starting-point is reached from which it can move to richer and more varied gains. But a certain loss is always the price of this advance.”¹⁹ Readers knowledgeable about the Hegelian view of history will discern in these words of Sri Aurobindo a familiar echo, although Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation is much less dogmatic. Hegel sees history as one great curve, one progressively dialectial act of the Spirit; Sri Aurobindo, in his wider view (as we have seen in the first chapter), allows for brilliant progressions as well as dramatic regressions, this being the way in which Nature, the universal Creatrix, encompasses whole peoples and civilisations, thus including them in the upward spiral of the evolution of mankind.

This is how the European Middle Ages came into existence. Their closed universe was geographically based on the western half of the former Roman Empire, which they tried to revive in one form or another; their world view was a grandiose though rather heterogeneous architecture of a Christianity hardly recognisable from the Gospels, parts of the Roman law and institutions, and fragments of ancient Greek culture; and its basic temper was vitalistic and materialistic, the direct inheritance of the Teutonic tribes. The Catholic Roman Church dominated all forms of life and, passing itself off as the exclusive intermediary, demanded that everybody use its hierarchy to address God. Real spirituality and spiritual experience were mostly foreign to it – and have remained foreign to the West ever since, so much so that Western philosophy and psychology hardly have an inkling of them. But, by reason of the fact that every human being has a soul, spirituality is potentially innate in the human being and in some cases the soul cannot be prevented from coming to the fore, for instance in some saints and mystics. In these cases too a strict conformity with the prescriptions of the Church was a stern demand; nonconformity and a direct approach to the Godhead were branded as heresy, punishable by excommunication and death.

Humanism and Individualism

The European Middle Ages, with their feudalism, Catholic institutions, crusades, cathedrals, monasteries, universities and scholasticism, was a civilisation that lasted for centuries. Gradually and inevitably, however, the institutions became conventions and the process described by Sri Aurobindo in The Human Cycle²⁰ set in: the conventions were more and more felt as restrictions by sensitive and intelligent people, and a need for individualisation began to be felt. This need formed the basis of the Renaissance and its direct offspring, the Reformation.

“The individualistic age of Europe was in its beginning a revolt of reason, in its culmination a triumphal progress of physical Science. Such an evolution was historically inevitable. The dawn of individualism is always a questioning, a denial. The individual finds a religion imposed upon him which does not base its dogma and practice upon a living sense of ever verifiable spiritual Truth, but on the letter of an ancient book, the infallible dictum of a Pope, the tradition of a Church, the learned casuistry of schoolmen [the “scholastics”] and Pundits, conclaves of ecclesiastics, heads of monastic orders, doctors of all sorts, all of them unquestionable tribunals whose sole function is to judge and pronounce, but none of whom seems to think it necessary or even allowable to search, test, prove, inquire, discover.

“He [the individual] finds that, as is inevitable under such a regime, true science and knowledge are either banned, punished and persecuted or else rendered obsolete by the habit of blind reliance on fixed authorities; even what is true in old authorities is no longer of any value, because its words are learnedly or ignorantly repeated but its real sense is no longer lived except at most by a few. In politics he finds everywhere divine rights, established privileges, sanctified tyrannies which are evidently armed with an oppressive power and justify themselves by long prescription, but seem to have no real claim or title to exist. In the social order he finds an equally stereotyped reign of convention, fixed disabilities, fixed privileges, the self-regarding arrogance of the high, the blind prostration of the low, while the old functions which might have justified at one time such a distribution of status are either not performed at all or badly performed without any sense of obligation and merely as a part of caste pride.

“He has to rise in revolt; on every claim of authority he has to turn the eye of a resolute inquisition; when he is told that this is the sacred truth of things or the command of God or the immemorial order of human life, he has to reply: ‘But is it really so? … And of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts of the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of truth, with my experiences of reality?’ And if it does not the revolting individual flings off the yoke, declares the truth as he sees it and in doing so strikes inevitably at the root of the religious, the social, the political, momentarily perhaps even the moral order of the community as it stands, because it stands upon the authority he discredits and the convention he destroys and not upon a living truth which can be successfully opposed to his own. The champions of the old order may be right when they seek to suppress him as a destructive agency perilous to social security, political order or religious tradition; but he stands there and can no other,²¹ because to destroy is his mission, to destroy falsehood and lay bare a new foundation of truth.”²²

In these sentences Sri Aurobindo gives the gist of what caused the profound turn in the history of the West (with far-reaching consequences in the global history) that were the Renaissance and the Reformation. Everything the decrepit Catholic Church represented was put into question. But the tenets and the dogmas of the Catholic Church were so ingrained in the Western psyche that even today they keep cropping up in the thinking of writers who deem themselves positivists, materialists, reductionists, atheists. The Reformation was the direct offspring of the Renaissance (its leaders, Luther included, were learned Renaissance men); it was followed by the Enlightenment, the high tide of Reason in the West; the Enlightenment resulted in the American and French Revolutions, followed by the positivist Nineteenth Century, a period of industrialisation, science and progress; and then ensued the “existentialist” Twentieth Century in which the rational systems would lose their bearings and Reason itself, the main tool of disassembly and destruction of the medieval inheritance, would be questioned and even ridiculed.

Why is there this persistent obsession with the Middle Ages? Because they are supposed to have been an Age of Faith in which life had an established and universally accepted meaning, up to a degree justified by rational systems borrowed from the ancient Greeks and from the Arabs. The psychologically defective thought systems of the West never realised – until recently, that is – that Reason is of primary importance but can never be of absolute importance; that the Mind is not a source of knowledge because it cannot really apprehend reality; that the Mind is an essential part of the human being, in the present human condition even its most determinative or characteristic part, but that the human being is far more complex than Cartesian dualism and reductionist materialism have chosen to accept. Since the Middle Ages the West has been desperately in search of a new Faith, mainly through science and (so-called Scientific) Marxism, but both these modern Churches are failing their believers badly. And what to turn to now? This simple question contains in a nutshell the present crisis, which far exceeds the West and has global dimensions.

Europe is taking shape again in the still expanding European Union. One of its numerous problems is a search for identity by its member nations and peoples. What does France represent as such? And Germany? And Great Britain? And Italy? And Poland? And Spain? … What makes each nation different from the others?²³ And what makes Europe special in the concert of the continents? No doubt the golden thread running through the various phases of Europe’s development: humanism and individuality. Recently some philosophers found pleasure in denying the individuality of the human being. (We will touch upon this later.) It may therefore be of importance simply to give a few quotes from Sri Aurobindo on this subject, for his insight is always crystal clear and exactly to the point.

• “The individual is not merely the ephemeral physical creature, a form of mind and body that aggregates and dissolves, but a being, a living power of the eternal Truth, a self-manifesting spirit.”²⁴

• “The individual is indeed the key of the evolutionary movement; for it is the individual who finds himself, who becomes conscious of the Reality.”²⁵

• “The immense importance of the individual being, which increases as he rises in the scale, is the most remarkable and significant fact of a universe which started without consciousness and without individuality in an undifferentiated Nescience.”²⁶

• “The growth of the individual is the indispensable means for the inner growth as distinguished from the outer force and expansion of the collective being. This indeed is the dual importance of the individual that it is through him that the cosmic spirit organises its collective units and makes them self-expressive and progressive and through him that it raises Nature from the Inconscience to the Superconscience and exalts it to meet the Transcendent.”²⁷

• “It is always the individual who receives the intuitions of Nature and takes the step forward dragging or drawing the rest of humanity behind him … For a mass experience or discovery or expression is not the first method of Nature; it is at some one point or a few points that the fire is lit and spreads from hearth to hearth, from altar to altar.”²⁸

• **“The principle of individualism is the liberty of the human being regarded as a separate existence to develop himself and fulfil his life, satisfy his mental tendencies, emotional and vital needs and physical being according to his own desire governed by his reason; it admits no other limit to this right and this liberty except the obligation to respect the same individual liberty and right in others.”²⁹

• “The great evolutionary periods of humanity have taken place in communities where the individual became active, mentally, vitally or spiritually alive. For this reason Nature invented the ego that the individual might disengage himself from the inconscience or subconscience of the mass and become an independent living mind, life-power, soul, spirit, co-ordinating himself with the world around him but not drowned in it and separately inexistent and ineffective. For the individual is indeed part of the cosmic being, but he is also something more, he is a soul that has descended from the Transcendence. This he cannot manifest at once, because he is too near to the cosmic Inconscience, not near enough to the original Superconscience; he has to find himself as the mental and vital ego before he can find himself as the soul or spirit.”³⁰

• “Whatever perfection of the collectivity is to be sought after, can come only by the perfection of the individuals who constitute it.”³¹

• “But within this general nature and general destiny of mankind each individual human being has to follow the common aim on the lines of his own nature and to arrive at his possible perfection by a growth from within … He is not merely the noble, merchant, warrior, priest, scholar, artist, cultivator or artisan, not merely the religionist or the worldling or the politician. Nor can he be limited by his nationality; he is not merely the Englishman or the Frenchman, the Japanese or the Indian; if by a part of himself he belongs to the nation, by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity. And even there is a part of him, the greatest, which is not limited by humanity; he belongs by it to God and to the world of all beings and to the godheads of the future.”³²

• “But in addition there is this deeper truth which individualism has discovered, that the individual is not merely a social unit; his existence, his right and claim to live and grow are not founded solely on his social work and function. He is not merely a member of a human pack, hive or ant-hill; he is something in himself, a soul, a being, who has to fulfil his own individual truth and law as well as his natural or his assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence. He demands freedom, space, initiative for his soul, for his nature, for that puissant and tremendous thing which society so much distrusts and has laboured in the past either to suppress altogether or to relegate to the purely spiritual field, an individual thought, will and conscience. If he is to merge these eventually, it cannot be into the dominating thought, will and conscience of others, but into something beyond into which he and all must be both allowed and helped freely to grow. That is an idea, a truth which, intellectually recognised and given its full exterior and superficial significance by Europe, agrees at its root with the profoundest and highest spiritual conceptions of Asia and has a large part to play in the moulding of the future.”³³

• “It is in Europe that the age of individualism has taken birth and exercised its full sway; the East has entered it only by contact and influence, not from an original impulse. And it is to its passion for the discovery of the actual truth of things and for the governing of human life by whatever law of the truth it has found that the West owes its centuries of strength, vigour, light, progress, irresistible expansion.”³⁴

The individualisation of the human being, rooted in the Earth that is its Mother and yet availing of the possibility to be completely in possession of itself, is without any doubt the great realisation of Europe. The men and women of the present day are hardly aware of the debt they owe to so many daring and tireless thinkers, dreamers and seers of the past for the freedom to be themselves in ways unprecedented in history. Countless are the individuals in Greece, among the first Christians, during the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and the two great revolutions to which it led, who dedicated and even sacrificed their lives to this freedom of self-mastery. Never has individualism been more widespread than now – more used and, what still is inevitable among humans, abused.

Today in most parts of the world man and woman can be themselves. Ultimately they are accountable only to themselves. Many are frightened by this responsibility. It is, however, the only way to see oneself whole, to experience oneself fully, and, in the last instance, to discover one’s real self within. There awaits the Light; there is the unshakeable foundation; there is hidden the secret that is the key – the only one – to ourselves, the universe, and the meaning of it all. Deep inside is present the true Individual who supports the surface individual before its birth, during its life, after its death.

The work and suffering of centuries, the true treasure gathered by Europe, will prove its value; it will lead the descendants of the Teutons and the descendants of all the tribes they have mixed with to something that until now remained outside their ken: the spiritual experience – the direct, personal, individual encounter with God.

The Eastern Way – India

To find what the West is lacking, the spiritual experience, we have to turn to the East, more especially to India, “the heart of Asia”, whose spiritual attainments have spread across the whole of Eastern Asia in the form of Buddhism, in South-East Asia in the form of Brahmanism, and in West Asia through its influence on Christianity.

Few have had such a high, and well-founded, opinion of India as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Here are some of their statements by way of illustration. “In the whole of creation the earth has a place of distinction, because unlike any other planet it is evolutionary with a psychic entity at its centre”, wrote the Mother. “In it, India, in particular, is a divinely chosen country.” – “India is not the earth, rivers and mountains of this land, neither is it a collective name for the inhabitants of this country. India is a living being, as much living as, say, Shiva. India is a goddess as Shiva is a god. If she likes, she can manifest in human form.” – “India has become the symbolic representation of all the difficulties of modern mankind. India will be the land of its resurrection – the resurrection to a higher and true life.” – “It is only India’s soul who can unify the country.” – “India is the country where the psychic law can and must rule and the time has come for that here.” – “It is only to those who can conquer the mind’s preferences and prejudices of race and education that India reveals the mystery of her treasure.”³⁵

“We have a flag which Sri Aurobindo called the Spiritual Flag of United India”, wrote the Mother, who designed it. “Its square form, its colour and every detail of its design have a symbolic meaning. It was hoisted on the 15th August 1947 when India became free. It will now be hoisted on the 1st November 1954 when these settlements [the French enclaves on the subcontinent] get united with India and it will be hoisted in the future whenever India recovers other parts of herself. United India has a special mission to fulfil in the world. Sri Aurobindo laid down his life for it and we are prepared to do the same.”³⁶ The Mother also drew a map of the real India, the still divided physical embodiment of India’s soul. “The map was made after the partition [in 1947]: It is the map of the true India, in spite of all passing appearances, and it will always remain the map of the true India, whatever people may think of it.”³⁷ It includes the present India, Pakistan, Sikkim, Bhutan, Bangladesh, part of Burma and Sri Lanka.³⁸

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s extreme stand on India was not the result of irrational patriotic fervour and certainly not a pose. Several selections of their positive statements about India have been published, but usually without mentioning their comments on the past and present negative aspects of India’s development. “Certainly we must repel with vigour every disintegrating or injurious attack [on India and its culture]”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, “but it is much more important to form our own true and independent view of our own past achievement, present position and future possibilities, – what we were, what we are and what we may be. In our past we must distinguish all that was great, essential, elevating, vitalising, illuminating, victorious, effective. And in that again we must distinguish what was close to the permanent, essential spirit and the persistent law of our cultural being and separate from it what was temporary and transiently formulative. For all that was great in the past cannot be preserved as it was or repeated forever; there are new needs, there are other vistas before us. But we have to distinguish too what was deficient, ill-grasped, imperfectly formulated or only suited to the limiting needs of the age or unfavourable circumstances.

“For it is quite idle to pretend that all in the past, even at its greatest, was entirely admirable and in its kind the highest consummate achievement of the human mind and spirit. Afterwards we have to make a comparison of this past with our present and to understand the causes of our decline and seek the remedy of our shortcomings and ailments. Our sense of the greatness of our past must not be made a fatally hypnotising lure to inertia; it should be rather an inspiration to renewed and greater achievement. But in our criticism of the present we must not be one-sided or condemn with a foolish impartiality all that we are or have done. Neither flattering or glossing over our downfall nor fouling our nest to win the applause of the stranger, we have to note our actual weakness and its roots, but to fix too our eyes with a still firmer attention on our elements of strength, our abiding potentialities, our dynamic impulses of self-renewal.”³⁹ The importance of these masterfully formulated words is perhaps greater at present than at the time they were written.

It is now generally forgotten that India once was an opulent civilisation and the wonder of the world. The cause of its impoverishment and deterioration was, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the otherworldly mentality propagated by Buddhism and illusionism. “In India the philosophy of world-negation has been given formulations of supreme power and value by two of the greatest of her thinkers, Buddha and Shankara … The spirit of these two remarkable spiritual philosophies, – for Shankara in the historical process of India’s philosophical mind takes up, completes and replaces Buddha, – has weighed with a tremendous power on the thought, religion and general mentality: everywhere broods its mighty shadow, everywhere is the impress of the three great formulas, the chain of Karma, escape from the wheel of rebirth, Maya.”⁴⁰ – “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 [Truth], the world is Ananda [Bliss]; 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 misery. There is no other falsity and no other cause of sorrow.”⁴¹

“We have then to return to the pursuit of an ancient secret which man, as a race, has seen only obscurely and followed after lamely, has indeed understood only with his surface mind and not in its heart of meaning, – and yet in following it lies his social no less than his individual salvation, – the ideal of the Kingdom of God, the secret of the reign of the Spirit over mind and life and body. It is because they have never quite lost hold of this secret, never disowned it in impatience for a lesser victory, that the older Asiatic nations have survived so persistently and can now, as if immortal, raise their faces towards a new dawn; for they have fallen asleep [this was written during the First World War], but they have not perished. It is true that they have for a time failed in life, where the European nations who trusted to the flesh and the intellect have succeeded; but that success, speciously complete but only for a time, has always turned into a catastrophe. Still Asia had failed in life, she had fallen in the dust, and even if the dust in which she was lying was sacred, as the modern poet of Asia [Rabindranath Tagore] has declared, – though the sacredness may be doubted, – still the dust is not the proper place for man, nor is to lie prostrate in it his right human attitude.”⁴²

“The need of a developing humanity is not to return always to its old ideas. Its need is to progress to a larger fulfilment in which, if the old is at all taken up, it must be transformed and exceeded. For the underlying truth of things is constant and eternal, but its mental figures, its life forms, its physical embodiment call constantly for growth and change.

“In India, since the great Buddhistic upheaval of the national thought and life, there has been a series of recurrent attempts to rediscover the truth of the soul and life and get behind the veil of stifling conventions; but these have been conducted by a wide and tolerant spiritual reason, a plastic soul-intuition and deep subjective seeking, insufficiently militant and destructive. Although productive of great internal and considerable external changes, they have never succeeded in getting rid of the predominant conventional order …

“It is only with the period of European influence and impact that circumstances and tendencies powerful enough to enforce the beginnings of a new age of radical and effective revaluation of ideas and things have come into existence. The characteristic power of these influences has been throughout – or at any rate till quite recently – rationalistic, utilitarian and individualistic. It has compelled the national mind to view everything from a new, searching and critical standpoint, and even those who seek to preserve the present or restore the past are obliged unconsciously or half-consciously to justify their endeavour from the novel point of view and by its appropriate standards of reasoning. Throughout the East, the subjective Asiatic mind is being driven to adapt itself to the need for changed values of life and thought. It has been forced to turn upon itself both by the pressure of western knowledge and by the compulsion of a quite changed life-need and life-environment. What it did not do from within, has come on it as a necessity from without and this externality has carried with it an immense advantage as well as great dangers.”⁴³

In these paragraphs Sri Aurobindo has summarised clearly the ancient secret, guarded in “the heart of an Asia” that fell asleep with it and that was awakened by European colonialism in search of material riches and dominion. It may, however, turn out that the ultimate boon of the colonialists’ efforts will be something they could have no idea of: that India will share its spiritual treasure with the West. What kind of treasure is this?

“The East is on the whole, in spite of certain questionings and scruples, willing and, where not wholly willing, forced by circumstances and the general tendency of mankind to accept the really valuable parts of modern European culture, its science, its curiosity, its ideal of universal education and uplift, its abolition of privilege, its instinct of freedom and equality, its call for the breaking down of narrow and oppressive forms, for air, space, light. But at a certain point the East refuses to proceed farther and that is precisely in the things which are deepest, most essential to the future of mankind. The things of the soul, the profound things of the mind and temperament. Here, again, all points not to substitution and conquest, but to mutual understanding and interchange, mutual adaptation and new formation.”⁴⁴

The Spiritual Experience

Then what is that essential element, spirituality, which is unknown to the West? “Spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism, not an ethical turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiosity or an ardent and exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all these excellent things”, writes Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine; “a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution, – the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening of the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature.”⁴⁵ All Christians will assert that they have a soul, but few will be able to say what it is, except that it is in some way immortal. The soul, the real individual and, according to Sri Aurobindo in the aforementioned paragraph, the key to all things spiritual, is the essence and ground of our being; it is the divine spark in us which grows as the psychic being in whatever may be our spiritual destiny. It is the presence of the Divine in his manifestation. Because of our soul we are not only the Sons and Daughters of Man but also the Sons and Daughters of God. Read the Western philosophers, worldly or religious, and you will find the soul confounded or identified with the vital being, with the mind, or with both, so widespread is the confusion concerning what we should understand with utter clarity because it is the mainspring of our life, the lever of our becoming, and that what we were, are and will be in eternity – the golden Light within, our glory and ecstasy of being.

The second means of acquiring spiritual knowledge and experience is by gaining access to the spiritual levels above the mind: higher mind, illumined mind, intuition and overmind.⁴⁶ “In the East, especially in India, the metaphysical thinkers have tried, as in the West, to determine the nature of the highest Truth by the intellect. They have, however, not given mental thinking the supreme rank as an instrument in the discovery of Truth, but only a secondary status. The first rank has always been given to spiritual intuition and illumination and spiritual experience; an intellectual conclusion that contradicts this supreme authority is held invalid … Each philosophical founder (as also those who continued his work or school) has been a metaphysical thinker doubled with a yogi. Those who were only philosophic intellectuals were respected for their learning but never took rank as truth-discoverers.”⁴⁷

“The sages of the Veda and Vedanta relied entirely upon intuition and spiritual experience. It is by an error that scholars sometimes speak of great debates or discussions in the Upanishad. Wherever there is the appearance of a controversy, it is not by discussion, by dialectics or the use of logical reasoning that it proceeds, but by a comparison of intuitions and experiences in which the less luminous gives place to the more luminous, the narrower, faultier or less essential to the more comprehensive, more perfect, more essential. The question asked by one sage of another is ‘What dost thou know?’, not ‘What dost thou think?’ nor ‘To what conclusion has thy reasoning arrived?’ Nowhere in the Upanishads do we find any trace of logical reasoning urged in support of the truths of Vedanta. Intuition, the sages seem to have held, must be corrected by a more perfect intuition; logical reasoning cannot be its judge.”⁴⁸

By way of comment. Firstly, “intuition” here is not what is meant by this word in the common parlance: a hint, a feeling, a presentiment, a suspicion, or whatever to the same effect. By “intuition” Sri Aurobindo and the Mother mean a “knowledge by identity”, which is the only real knowledge; it is proper to the spiritual level of the same name; it is “a messenger from the superconscient and therefore our highest faculty”. – “Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest. Intuition gives us that idea of something behind and beyond all that we know and seem to be which pursues man always in contradiction of his lower reason and all his normal experience and impels him to formulate that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God, Immortality, Heaven and the rest by which we strive to express it to the mind … Ancient Vedanta seized this message of the Intuition and formulated it in the three great declarations of the Upanishads, ‘I am He’, ‘Thou art That, O Swetaketu’, ‘All this is the Brahman, this Self is the Brahman.’”⁴⁹

Secondly, ancient India had a broader gamut of philosophical schools, including even purely materialist ones, than the West has had since Descartes. The true foundation of rational thinking, however, remained always the spiritual levels beyond the rational mind. The image of the human being in the West is still distressingly limited and defective; its limitation perforce afflicts its philosophical reasoning and causes its inability to solve any fundamental problem. As we will see in the next chapter, this has led in the present time to a fallow ground of philosophical absurdity where anything goes and nothing is real or true anymore. “One must transgress limits and penetrate to the knowledge behind, which must be experienced before it can be known; for the ear hears it, the intellect observes it, but the spirit alone can possess it. Realisation in the self of things is the only knowledge; all else is mere idea or opinion,”⁵⁰ wrote Sri Aurobindo. And, ever the radical: “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.”⁵¹

“I seek a text and a Shastra”, Sri Aurobindo 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 [i.e. Knowledge] to be the foundation of the Sanatana Dharma; 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.”⁵² – “You will find disputants questioning your system on the ground that it is not consistent with this or that Shastra [Scripture] or this or that great authority, whether philosopher, saint or Avatar. Remember then that realisation and 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 but not as fetters. What matters to you is what you have seen or what God in his universal personality or impersonality or again personally in some teacher, guru or pathfinder undertakes to show you in the path of Yoga.”⁵³

Conclusion

The West is reawakening to the truth of the spirit and the spiritual possibilities of life, the East is reawakening to the truth of Life and tends towards a new application to it of its spiritual knowledge.⁵⁴

– Sri Aurobindo

It is evident, at this decisive turn in the history of humanity, that the West desperately seeks to fill up the emptiness of its inner life since the erosion of the certainties of the medieval faith, and that therefore it is more and more turning towards the treasures of spirituality preserved in the East, more particularly in India. The West has worked hard to make the existence of the individual human being, man and woman, possible; this is a necessary and essential achievement in the development of humanity. Man and woman are now, for the first time in history on a general scale, at last directly responsible for themselves but also confronted with themselves, with what they really are in their essence, with their selves. The nature of the self is a knowledge kept alive in the East, and so are the techniques for its discovery and the ways of living in it.

The mental climate of the West is still very distrustful of Eastern wisdom. For centuries the West has been convinced of its superiority, intellectually and religiously. The founder of its faith was the only Avatar, Jesus Christ, the one and only incarnation of God as man, of the Son of God who was also the Son of Man; the Christian institutions based on this faith were the only ones to possess the means of the salvation and the keys of heaven. Everything outside these institutions was condemned as primitivism and idolatry, as darkness peopled by demons. And when the Western faith became anaemic, when its image of God faded, science replaced it with a worldview no less dogmatic than the creed of the Churches. These factors created an almost instinctive suspicion, not to say aversion, of anything Eastern – except in the soul of more and more individuals who instinctively, if not rationally, felt that the Eastern spiritual paths were worth exploring, that following them one could breathe and be oneself in freedom, that they provided the possibility to meet directly with God and at last justify life on Earth.

To a Western world still imprisoned within its prejudices, Sri Aurobindo addressed the following words: “To refuse to enquire upon any general ground preconceived and a priori is an obscurantism as prejudicial to the extension of knowledge as the religious obscurantism which opposed in Europe the extension of scientific discovery. The greatest inner discoveries, the experience of self-being, the cosmic consciousness, the inner calm of the liberated spirit, the direct effect of mind upon mind, the knowledge of things by consciousness in direct contact with other consciousness or with its objects, most spiritual experiences of any value, cannot be brought before the tribunal of the common mentality which has no experience of these things and takes its own absence or incapacity of experience as a proof of their incapacity or their non-existence. Physical truth of formulas, generalisations, discoveries founded upon physical observation can be so referred, but even there a training of capacity is needed before one can truly understand and judge; it is not every untrained mind that can follow the mathematics of relativity or other difficult scientific truths or judge of the validity either of their result or their process.

“All reality, all experience must indeed, to be held as true, be capable of verification by a same or similar experience; so, in fact, all men can have a spiritual experience and can follow it out and verify it in themselves, but only when they have acquired the capacity or can follow the inner methods by which that experience and verification are made possible. It is necessary to dwell for a moment on these obvious and elementary truths because the opposite ideas have been sovereign in a recent period of human mentality, – they are now only receding, – and have stood in the way of the development of a vast domain of possible knowledge. It is of supreme importance for the human spirit to be free to sound the depths of inner or subliminal reality, of spiritual and of what is still superconscient reality, and not to immure itself in the physical mind and its narrow domain of objective external solidities; for in that way alone can there come liberation from the Ignorance in which our mentality dwells and a release into a complete consciousness, a true and integral self-realisation and self-knowledge.”⁵⁵

The following is an extract from Sri Aurobindo’s “Message to America”, given on 15 August 1949. “It has been customary to dwell on the division and difference between these two sections of the human family [East and West] and even to oppose them to each other; but for myself I would rather be disposed to dwell on oneness and unity than on division and difference. East and West have the same human nature, a common human destiny, the same aspiration after a greater perfection, the same seeking after something higher than itself, something towards which inwardly and even outwardly we move. There has been a tendency in some minds to dwell on the spirituality or mysticism of the East and the materialism of the West; but the West has had no less than the East its spiritual seekings and, though not in such profusion, its saints and sages and mystics, the East has had its materialistic tendencies, its material splendours, its similar or identical dealings with life and Matter and the world in which we live. East and West have always met and mixed more or less closely, they have powerfully influenced each other and at the present day are under an increasing compulsion of Nature and Fate to do so more than ever before.

“There is a common hope, a common destiny, both spiritual and material, for which both are needed as coworkers. It is no longer towards division and difference that we should turn our minds but on unity, union, even oneness necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginning obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere.”⁵⁶

Sri Aurobindo was asked for a message to be broadcast by the Trichinopoly station of All India Radio on 15 August 1947, the day of India’s independence. In this message he enumerated the world movements which once had “looked like impossible dream” of his, but which were “on this day either approaching fruition” or “on the way to their achievement”. The fourth of these dreams – we will encounter them in a subsequent chapter – was “the gift by India of her spiritual knowledge and her means for the spiritualisation of life to the whole race”: “The spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun. India’s spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever-increasing measure. That movement will grow; amid the disasters of the time more and more eyes are turning towards her with hope and there is even an increasing resort not only to her teachings, but to her psychic and spiritual practice.”⁵⁷

The materialisation of Sri Aurobindo’s prediction on the threshold of the new millennium is there for all to see. As Roger-Pol Droit writes in his remarkable book L’Oubli de l’Inde (Forgetting India): by the joining of the most precious values of East and West, it will at last be possible for “the complete man” to be born. “From Herodotus to Montaigne, [man, according to the Western view] only inhabited the shores of the Mediterranean … [His destiny] took shape between the delta of the Nile, the land of Judea and the coasts of Greece. Or between Byzantium, Rome and the Rhine. Never beyond the Elbrus or in the plains of the Ganges. Now the discovery of Asia will make possible the unification of the two halves of the world. It will allow to foresee the espousal of humanity with itself and the advent of a new humanist thinking, richer and at the same time much more supple.”⁵⁸ If Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are correct, it may well be that what is awaiting humanity is far beyond a new, more complete form of humanist thinking: from humanity will first emerge an overhuman, and afterwards a supramental, divine species.