Preparing for the Miraculous

2: The Development of Sri Aurobindo’s Thought

Now that most of the writings and recorded sayings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have been published, and with the hindsight we have of their lives, it is sometimes thought that their Work on Earth was completely preordained. After all, they were “special,” being divine incarnations, and, in the life of such beings, is not all settled beforehand, from beginning to end and with everything in between? Supposing this to be a given, some disciples even wrote to Sri Aurobindo that for him the yoga must be easy, little more than “a sham.” To contradict such suppositions, Sri Aurobindo repeatedly affirmed the constant efforts he had to make, the battles he had to fight, and the wounds he had to endure.

My wounds are a thousand and one,

And the Titan kings assail…

“Our yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure,” he wrote. “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, 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.” ¹ And the Mother said in 1958: “It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, risks and hazards it entails – a real adventure of which the goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be traced step by step in the unexplored.”

From A.A. Ghose to Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo’s outward life is now fairly well known and can be found in every standard biography. The time he wrote jokingly that he would have to write a book about what he did not do in his life, to contradict the many false rumours, is long past. We know of his fame as a classical Cambridge scholar and a master of the English language; we know of his years in Baroda and his study of the Indian culture and its classical literature; and we know of his crucial role as an Indian politician and freedom fighter. In all these years Aravinda Akroyd Ghose, who would revolutionize the spiritual destiny of the world, was an “agnostic,” to use his own term.

1908 was an axis year in his life. In the beginning of this year he met the yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele and had with him his first great spiritual experience, the realization of the silent Brahman. Later he was imprisoned in Alipore Jail under accusation of revolt against the Crown, which could cost him his life. But the jail, where his cell is now a shrine, turned into his “cave of tapasya,” and when, after one year, he came out of it he was no longer the agnostic. His political work for Bharat Mata had turned into a spiritual Work for humanity. As he said in his Uttarpara speech soon after his release: “There is a word to speak and a work to do,” but nobody understood him at the time.

From the time of his imprisonment in Alipore Jail, Sri Aurobindo was constantly in the company of Sri Krishna and guided by him, and it was in obedience to Sri Krishna’s adesh (command) that he left Calcutta for Chandernagore, and soon afterwards for Pondicherry. In this French enclave in South India he took up his study of the Vedas and discovered the secret of their esoteric contents. He now lived exclusively for his spiritual mission, as we know from his notebooks, published under the title Record of Yoga. (There are some striking correspondences or resonances in the lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. For instance, both began their yoga in the same year; as the Mother said: “I began my conscious yoga in 1908.” And both began to note down their practice of yoga in 1912, Sri Aurobindo in his Record of Yoga, the Mother in her Prières et Méditations.)

Soon, in 1912-13, Sri Aurobindo started formulating his Thoughts and Aphorisms in a students’ notebook that was deciphered and published almost half a century afterwards. The relevance of these concise formulations, and of the Thoughts and Glimpses, is that they provide an insight into the gigantic metamorphosis that was taking place in him. They illustrate the confrontation between his overwhelming spiritual experiences and the worldview which had been his background before 1908. The dominant values and tenets of science, politics, history, sociology, psychology, religion and traditional spirituality were checked against his day-by-day exploration into the new realms of experience opening up before him. This thin booklet contains 572 thoughts and aphorisms which are glimpses of the greatest spiritual revolution in history ongoing in a single being.

As a politician, Aravinda Ghose had been a revolutionary extremist. It was at his instigation that the Congress Party had broken up into a moderate and an extremist wing. And from the very moment of his entrance on the political scene – when writing the series of articles New Lamps for Old in 1893 – he had stood for the unconditional independence of his motherland, at that time still a “chimaera.” Compromise had never been his way, and neither was it in the spiritual adventure of discovery to which he had now irrevocably and totally dedicated himself.

“We must look existence in the face in whatever aspect it confronts us and be strong to find within as well as behind it the Divine. … To grow into the fullness of the divine is the true law of human life and to shape his earthly existence into its image is the meaning of his evolution. This is the fundamental tenet of the philosophy of the Arya.” These statements were found in his notes, now published as Essays on Philosophy and Yoga² and other volumes of his complete works. During the year of his imprisonment he had taken the Upanishads and the Gita as practical guidance in his yoga. “The supreme and final word of the Gita for the Yogin is that he should leave all conventional formulas of belief and action, all fixed and external rules of conduct, all constructions of the outward surface Nature, Dharmas, and take refuge in the Divine alone,” he will write in The Synthesis of Yoga.³ “A partial realization, something mixed and inconclusive, does not meet the demand I make on life and yoga,” he declared, but also: “It is true that I want the supramental not for myself but for the earth and souls born on the earth.” ⁴

When in 1914 Paul Richard proposed the publication of a monthly review to make their new worldview known, Sri Aurobindo had his material ready. The main concepts in which his vision was formulated filled the notebooks whose contents are only now becoming accessible to the general public. This is why, in the first issue of the Arya, he was able to start several of his major works without further ado. Although one should also consider that his writings were inspired “directly into the pen.”

“Men are becoming more psychic…”

In 1925 the First World War – “the war to end all wars” – belonged to the past, the Arya had been written and successfully published, and the Mother had been residing with Sri Aurobindo already for a few years. At that time he still met regularly with some privileged disciples and answered their questions. On the 15th of August of that year – his birthday – the following question was put to him: “How are the universal conditions more ready for the coming down of the Supermind than they were before?”

Sri Aurobindo answered: “Firstly, the knowledge of the physical world has increased so much that it is on the verge of breaking its own bounds. Also, the world is becoming more united on account of the discoveries of modern science – the aeroplane, the railways, the wireless telegraph, etc. Such a union is the condition for the highest Truth coming down and it is also our difficulty.

“Secondly, there is an attempt all over the world towards breaking the veil between the outer and the inner mental, the outer and the inner vital and even the outer and the inner physical. Men are becoming more ‘psychic’.

“Thirdly, the vital is trying to lay its hold on the physical as it did never before. This is always the sign that whenever the higher Truth is coming down, it throws up the hostile vital world on the surface, and you see all sorts of abnormal vital manifestations, such as an increase in the number of persons who go mad, earth-quakes, etc.

“[Fourthly,] the rise of persons who wield a tremendous vital influence over large numbers of men.

“These are some of the signs to show that the universal condition may be more ready now.” ⁵

Science and technology were not only integrating humanity into one world, they were also changing the living conditions to a degree which has created our post-modern surroundings, but which was hardly predictable a century ago. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have said that the First World War caused a massive descent of the vital forces on our planet, an observation supported by the phenomena of a decade named “the roaring Twenties.” As to “the rise of persons who wield a tremendous vital influence over large numbers of men”: Benito Mussolini had marched on Rome in 1922 and Adolf Hitler had become the hero of a sedition trial in 1924; fascism raised its pompous head everywhere, also in Great Britain and the United States, and violence was seen as becoming of manhood, as the expression of the reality of life.

Had the knowledge of the physical world increased so much that, in 1925, it was on the verge of breaking its own bounds? In the century to come, scientific materialism would dominate as never before. In fact scientism, “the belief that science is or can be the complete and only explanation,” has occupied all the grounds which religion had to vacate, and is now a worldwide pseudo-religion to be accepted by every student in any academic institution. Religion and spirituality have not (yet) found the arguments to counter the physical arguments of science, and scientists like Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg launch their pronouncements from the peaks of their popular fame. “A few years ago, Stephen Hawking summed up the scientists’ prevailing attitude to the status of life in the universe. ‘The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet,’ is how he put it. Most physicists and cosmologists would echo Hawking, and regard life as a trivial, accidental embellishment to the physical world, of no particular significance in the overall cosmic scheme of things.” (Paul Davies)

Were men becoming more psychic, and have they actually become so? Sri Aurobindo’s reasons for saying this are now very little remembered, and some statements of his are therefore skipped over out of respect or convenience. It is not possible to understand his and the Mother’s sayings and writings without putting them in their historical or biographical context. Although their Beings belonged to Eternity, they had chosen, once again, a particular time and place in history to incarnate. Moreover, it may be said that, because of their love for humanity and because of their avataric Work, they took all facets of humanity more intimately into themselves than ordinary human beings would be capable of or even could imagine.

Some of the facts determining their historical background are the following. Spiritism, the belief that the soul survives death and can enter into contact with the living, was still at its height. In France, for instance, Allan Kardec and his Livre des esprits (1857) had created a real spiritist mass movement. Theosophy had been founded in 1875 and spread almost instantaneously around the globe. Its influence, teaching the belief in the soul and reincarnation, and drawing attention to the oriental spiritualities, cannot be overestimated.

Friedrich Nietzsche, with his philosophy of the Umwertung aller Werte (revaluation of all values) and the Übermensch (literally “overman”) was the philosopher en vogue, together with Henri Bergson and his vitalism, and Sigmund Freud and his theory of the subconscious. Impressionism and the post-impressionist schools in painting destroyed the classical norms in the arts, as did the symbolist poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé in literature. All this, and much more, really looked like “an attempt all over the world towards breaking the veil” between the outer and the inner realities, necessary for a rediscovery of the psychic – here understood as the “psychic being” or soul.

Science itself seemed to advance in the same direction. The sensational discoveries around 1900 are now integrated into the standard theories in physics, but at the time they were mysterious and spell-binding. “The detection of the interactions between matter and radiation – Crookes’ discovery of the cathode rays, radioactivity, X-rays and the electron – unveils a world of possibilities which expanded the domain of physics to the limits of what matter was deemed to be and, still further, to the frontiers of reality.” The magic, the transgression of supposedly unsurpassable limits, happened in the laboratories. Besides, “because one is accustomed to all this, it is difficult to evaluate today the effect on the imagination of the transmission at a distance of power, light or music by telephone, or of messages by telegraphy.” ⁶

This is why Sri Aurobindo could write in The Human Cycle: “The Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end; novel ideas are sweeping over the world and are being accepted with significant rapidity;” and he could point to the “dynamic ideas such as Nietzsche’s Will-to-live, Bergson’s exaltation of intuition above intellect, or the latest German philosophical tendency [German Idealism] to acknowledge a supramental faculty and a suprarational order of truths.” ⁷ In The Life Divine he wrote: “Now that we are outgrowing the superstition of the sole truth of Matter … the outposts of the scientific knowledge come more and more to be set on the borders that divide the material from the immaterial … In the present time itself, after an age of triumphant intellectuality and materialism, we can see evidence of this natural process – a return towards inner self-discovery, an inner seeking and thinking, a new attempt at mystic experience, a groping after the inner self, a reawakening to some sense of the truth and power of the spirit …” ⁸

All the signs were there, but the resistance – the vicious swoop of the Black Dragon’s tail – was more resilient than apparently presumed. Ahead lay the continuation of the twentieth century with a series of cataclysms and wars on a global scale, and with an acceleration of change, scientific and social, in which humanity would integrate towards oneness in spite of all innate resistances caused by its evolutionary formation. This was the terrain of the battle to be fought out in the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

The Word of Creation

In the later months of 1926, Sri Aurobindo spoke several times to the evening circle of disciples about the gods, their world, and the way in which human beings potentially incarnate a portion (amsha) of a particular god. On the 6th of November he warned that his words should be understood without inflating their ego. And he continued: “I spoke about the world of the gods because not to speak of it would [now] be dangerous. I spoke of it so that the mind may understand the thing if it comes down. I am trying to bring it down into the physical, as it can no longer be delayed, and then [unusual] things may happen. Formerly, to speak of it would have been undesirable, but now not to speak might be dangerous.” ⁹

All this sounds quite intriguing. What was going on? Why was Sri Aurobindo trying to bring down the overmental world of the gods into the physical? In the reminiscences of disciples present around Sri Aurobindo in those days, we read about an increasing spiritual pressure, almost unbearable, and in some of them causing bizarre behaviour. “In 1926,” said the Mother many years later, “I had begun a sort of overmental creation [the overmind is the world of the gods], that is, I had brought the overmind down into matter, here on earth. Miracles and all kinds of things were beginning to happen. I asked all those gods to incarnate, to identify themselves with a body [on earth]. Some of them absolutely refused. But with my very own eyes I saw Krishna, who had always been in rapport with Sri Aurobindo, consent to come down into his body. It was on the 24th November…” ¹⁰

In the Sri Aurobindo Ashram 24 November 1926 is known as “Siddhi Day” and as the foundation date of the Ashram. It was the day that Sri Aurobindo put the Mother in charge, to withdraw soon afterwards into seclusion for the rest of his life. On this extraordinary day Sri Krishna took on an earthly body, consenting to descend into the adhara of Sri Aurobindo, making his withdrawal “indispensable”. We have already mentioned the close connection between Sri Krishna and Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. Some hints by the Mother even suggested that Sri Aurobindo had been Sri Krishna in “a formation of the past.” The fact that the aura of both of them is the same, whitish blue, seems to confirm this. It may come as a surprise to many that Sri Krishna was bodily on the earth from 24 November 1926 till 5 December 1950.

The extraordinary situation went still much further. The Mother continued her overmental creation “for some months” after 24 November. Put in the simplest of terms, this creation would have brought down upon earth a set of circumstances enabling a direct reciprocal action between the humans and the incarnated gods, leading up to a world perhaps resembling Sri Krishna’s goloka, in other words a heaven on earth. Later the Mother said to K.D. Sethna that at that time she had got “the Word of Creation.” “When I looked a little puzzled,” remembered Sethna, “she added: ‘You know that Brahma is said to create by his Word. In the same way whatever I would express could take place. I had willed to express a whole new world of superhuman reality. Everything was prepared in the subtle dimension and was waiting to be precipitated upon earth.” ¹¹

In 1958, the last year of her talks at the Ashram Playground, the Mother narrated that immediately after Sri Aurobindo’s withdrawal “things took a certain shape: a very brilliant creation was worked out in extraordinary detail, with marvellous experiences, contacts with divine beings, and all kinds of manifestations which are considered miraculous. Experiences followed upon experiences, and, well, things were unfolding altogether brilliantly and, I must say, in an extremely interesting way.” When she went to report to Sri Aurobindo, “he looked at me and said: ‘Yes, this is a creation of the overmind. It is very interesting, very well done. You will cause miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to turn the course of events on earth upside down. In brief …’ and then he smiled and said: ‘It will be a great success. But it is a creation of the overmind. And it is not the success that we want: we want to establish the Supermind upon earth. One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.’ With my inner consciousness I understood at once,” said the Mother. “A few hours later the creation did not exist any more, and from that moment we started upon another foundation.” ¹²

Had the Mother continued this new creation with the direct participation of the gods, some of them incarnated in terrestrial bodies, a new religion would have been founded with a force and a lustre beyond our imagination. Now nobody knows about it. As K.D. Sethna reflects: “This was surely the mightiest act of renunciation in spiritual history.”

No New Edition of the Old Fiasco

Of Sri Aurobindo’s battle in the following years to establish the new Consciousness of the Supermind on Earth, we have some ideas from his letters, his poetry, and Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. At times his reports were very positive, to be followed by renewed obstacles and “tremendous resistance” soon after. But in spite of everything the supramental manifestation was expected in 1938, when in a direct attack by the hostile forces Sri Aurobindo fell and broke his right thigh. 1938 was also the year of the infamous conference at Munich, where Hitler bluffed the representatives of the rival powers into submission, ready to pounce on Czechoslovakia and conquer Europe and the world.

Then the war broke out. “There was such a constant tension for Sri Aurobindo and me,” said the Mother afterwards, “that it interrupted the yoga completely during the whole war. And it was for that reason that the war had come: to stop the Work. For there was an extraordinary descent of the Supermind at that time, it came like this [massive gesture]! That was exactly in 1939. Then the war came and stopped everything, completely. For if we personally had gone on with the Work, we would not have been sure that we had the time to finish it before ‘the other one’ [the Asura of Falsehood behind Hitler] had made a mess of the world, and the whole affair would have been postponed for centuries. That had to be stopped first of all: that action of the Lord of Nations – the Lord of Falsehood.” ¹³ We find this confirmed in one of Sri Aurobindo’s letters written in those days: “Now in these times of world-crisis when I have to be on guard and concentrated all the time to prevent irremediable catastrophes …” ¹⁴

At stake was more than was (and is) generally realized. “It is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realize itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. … It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country do not dream of and cannot yet at all realize.” Thus wrote Sri Aurobindo in July 1942 when, according to his estimation, Hitler still had a fifty-fifty chance of being victorious. If he was, “the work that has to be done” would be postponed by centuries if not millennia, warned Sri Aurobindo.

He was not. Nirodbaran Talukdar and A.B. Purani have published their notes of Sri Aurobindo’s conversations in the first months of the war. (After his accident in November 1938, Sri Aurobindo had allowed some disciples, most of them visiting his rooms for medical reasons, to stay a while and enter into conversation with him.) From these publications, and still more of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother later told and wrote, we have some inkling of their constant occupation with the affairs of the war and their direct interventions in them.¹⁵

When the war was over, life could start anew again, as could the effort to bring down the Supermind and found the future. Or could it? In June 1946, less than a year after the unconditional surrender of Japan, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed certain that a black yoke of the Asura would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule? Berlin and Nuremberg [where the trial of the top Nazi criminals was taking place] have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human history. Other blacknesses threaten to overshadow or even engulf mankind, but they too will end as that nightmare has ended.” The threat, however, seemed to increase, for in April of the following year Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Things are bad, are growing worse and may at any time grow worst or worse than worst if that is possible.” ¹⁶

Something at the root of things was blocking the Work. And Sri Aurobindo had stated irrevocably: “I have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco.” ¹⁷ Once more he stood up for the future against all the past and the whole of the manifestation on Earth. What was the old fiasco, repeated time after time? “A partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the external nature.”

A new spiritual approach with no lasting material effect, leaving the Earth and humanity as they were. Years ago, in his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo had already written: “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 Rudra 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 the prophet.”

Now here he stood – after a life of sacrifice and battle “to bring the fire to man,” the burning sun of the Supermind – on the verge of another failure of which history shows us so many examples?

What the blockage at the root of things was, we cannot know. But its removal required a yogic master-act: to go and work behind the veil of Matter, in other words to descend consciously into death. True, many spiritual masters have had the knowledge to go voluntarily into death, but not for reprogramming the course of the terrestrial evolution.

Before leaving his body Sri Aurobindo wrote, at the Mother’s request, the important series of articles titled The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth. In these articles he expounded the situation at that time of his Work, of the Integral Yoga, explaining the role of the “Mind of Light,” and the necessity of a range of intermediary beings between the human and the future supramental species. These transitional species or subspecies in the making he gave no name, calling them in general “a new humanity,” but the Mother did give them a name in French, “surhommes,” literally meaning “overmen.” “This was certainly what he expected of us: what he conceived of as the overman, who must be the intermediate being between humanity as it is and the supramental being created in the supramental way … It is quite obvious that intermediary beings are necessary, and that it is these intermediary beings who must find the means to create beings of the Supermind. And there is no doubt that, when Sri Aurobindo wrote this, he was convinced that this is what we have to do.” (Questions and Answers 1957-58)

And then he finished Savitri, his last bequest to those who would follow the path he had hewn in the virgin forest, going where none had gone. Gradually he prepared everything for his departure, especially taking into account its effect on the Mother, who had to remain behind for the continuation of the transformative effort because “your body is better than mine.” The significance of these words will become clear in the last years of the Mother’s yoga, the years covered by the Agenda.

The dramatic but dignified happenings at the time of Sri Aurobindo’s passing have been witnessed by many and narrated elsewhere.¹⁸ His “death” was interpreted by most as the result of illness and/or advanced age. Who realized at the time – and even now – that there, in those days and in that place on Earth, a sacred mystery without precedence was enacted on which humanity’s future depended? In his poems we may find some predictive or relevant passages. In the 1930s he had already written in “A God’s Labour:”

A voice cried, “Go where none have gone.

Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate.”

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

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

Perhaps we find the work that was to be done on pages 232-233 of Savitri, which have the lines:

Into the abysmal secrecy he came …
And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor
Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts
And built the world not knowing what it built …
He saw the secret key of Nature’s change …

Then …

Torn were the formats of the primal Night
And shattered the stereotypes of the Ignorance …
He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
The diamond script of the Imperishable …

Sri Aurobindo’s supreme intervention at the root of things must have been successful, for only six years later, on 29 February 1956, the Supermind manifested in the atmosphere of planet Earth. A new world was born. Its infant growth is causing the evolutionary acceleration expressed in the confusing phenomena of the present, perceptible for those who, as recommended by the Mother, have developed the necessary capacity of attention. In the years to come, and up to 1973 when she laid down what she had called “the residue” of her material body, the Mother will take up the Yoga of corporeal transformation, watched by all, understood by hardly anyone.

But our story ends here.

We have briefly followed three episodes in the avataric Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. All three illustrate to what extent their superhuman effort was an adventure into the unknown. Evolution is always a work in progress, and so is the evolutionary Yoga. Those whose souls have been made attentive to the true force currents in the world, and who have been called to consciously participate in their course, will be gifted with the eye that sees the meaning of yesterday, today and tomorrow.