The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Part One

Prolegomenon

Section I: Introduction

While studying with attention Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri we come across two highly striking verses occurring at two different places almost a hundred pages apart. The first one is: "Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight" (276)' while the second one is: "A progress leap from sight to greater sight." (177)

We said "striking" because in the consideration of the intellectuals thought is a far greater power than mere sight. Our sight is often erroneous in its reporting and misleading in its transcription. Not only that: the visual sense can only give us the superficial image of things and it needs the aid of thought to "fill and inform" the image. As Sri Aurobindo himself has pointed out:

"The intellect does not consider that it knows a thing until it has reduced its awareness of it to the terms of thought, not, that is to say, until it has put it into a system of representative mental concepts... It is true that the mind gets its knowledge primarily by various kinds of impressions... but these are taken by the developed intelligence only as data and seem to it uncertain and vague in themselves until they have been forced to yield up all their content to the thought and have taken their place in some intellectual

1. A single number placed after any quotation from Savitri refers to the page of the Centenary Edition of the Epic.

relation or in an ordered thought sequence." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 801)²

If so, the question arises, why are we asked by Sri Aurobindo to give up the human privilege of thought and take recourse to the inferior and uncertain faculty of sight?

Now about his second prescription of "A progress leap from sight to greater sight." We may conveniently couple it with the other explanatory statement of Sri Aurobindo: "If a further extension of knowledge is required, [one] can come at it by new seeing without the slower thought processes that are the staff of support of the mental search..." (Ibid., p. 803) (italics author's)

We wonder whether there can be sights and sights, any sight more authentic than the well-known physical sight which is, as we know, directly or indirectly dependent on the employment of physical sense organs.

Of course, it may be readily granted that apart from the well-known physical sight there may be other occasions or situations in which another sort of visualisation is quite possible and feasible. Leaving aside the dream phenomenon, three of these other enabling circumstances are:

1.the act of imagination;

2.the ingestion of psychedelic drugs; and

3.hallucinations induced during hypnotic 'sleep'.

Let us discuss in the barest outline these three alternative causative factors giving rise to non-physical visualisation outside the field of the evidence furnished by the physical sense organs

2. Unless otherwise indicated, all the editions of Sri Aurobindo's books referred to are those included in the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL).

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1.Imagination: Every human being is endowed with the remarkable faculty of imagination more or less developed depending on the particular individual. We can easily enough imagine a tall green tree with thick foliage or a gurgling river with boats sailing on it or a high-rise building with shiningly white walls and so on and so forth. But it is obvious that these visualisations, however vivid and detailed in content, are nothing but subjective constructions terminable at will: in no way do they measure up to any objective reality existent in some objective space. It goes without saying that these imaginative exercises in visualisation do not fall in the category of Sri Aurobindo's "greater sight".

Now, let us go to the consideration of the second source of non-physical vision, the ingestion of a potent psychedelic drug possessing the capacity of temporarily altering the state of the consciousness of the viewer.

2.Psychedelic Drugs: The well-known novelist and writer Aldous Huxley did some personal experiments on the effect of the drug mescalin, and claimed in his book The Doors of Perception that in suitable doses this drug 'changes the quality of consciousness very profoundly'. Huxley took his pill of mescalin sitting in his study and facing a vase of flowers. After half an hour, he claimed, these flowers became transfigured and gave him mystical vision. Huxley's attention was then drawn to a wooden chair in the room, which also shone with inner light. Here are some pertinent words of Huxley:

"The Beatific Vision, Sat-Chit-Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss: for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely

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and completely what these prodigious syllables referred to."

Was this then a new kind of vision conforming to the specification of Sri Aurobindo's "greater sight"? Alas, the answer is NO. For R.C. Zaehner, after having gone through Aldous Huxley's book, took mescalin himself and wanted to verify whether in his case too Huxley's supraphysical mystical visions would be reproduced, thus validating their subjective-objectivity. But the results were almost opposite to those in Huxley's case. Zaehner's damaging conclusion was that the experiences produced by mescalin were simply trivial, though they seemed hilariously funny.

Thus the visions appearing in the altered state of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are all hallucinations and subjective fancies and formations not corresponding to anything objectively real. (Vide Geoffrey Parrinder, Mysticism in the World's Religions, 1976, p. 179) Let us now probe the case of hypnotic visions.

3. Hypnosis and Hallucinations: Investigators over the centuries have discovered one great truth about the functioning of human mind. This may be formulated in the words of Leslie D. Weatherhead as follows: "If the mind really accepts an idea as true, and if the idea is reasonable, it [the idea] tends, by means of unconscious processes, to actualise itself or come true." (Psychology, Religion and Healing, 1952, p. 117)

Well, the whole phenomenon of hypnosis is based on this. Dr. Liebault has described seven stages of hypnosis: in the fifth stage illusions can be successfully suggested to the patient. Dr. Weatherhead conducted extensive investigation on a young woman called Ethel and here is a passage from his writing relevant to the topic under discussion:

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"Ethel could also be induced to have hallucinations. When told by me that a lovely black cat was asleep in the couch near her knees, she sat up, described if (!) and went through the movements of stroking it. On another occasion, on being given a blank postcard and told it was a photograph of the Prince of Wales, she admired it and described it, going into details about his uniform and staring all the time at a blank card." (Ibid., p. 123)

Dr. Weatherhead's experiments convincingly demonstrated that although the visions appeared to the subject to be absolutely real and concrete, they did not correspond to anything really 'real' and existent in any objective space.

Our short discussion of the three possible situations of imagination, ingestion of consciousness-altering drugs and hypnosis may lead us to doubt the objective validity of any and every kind of supraphysical vision. And in fact most of the skeptical thinkers hastily conclude that all the cases of so-claimed inner sights and visions are nothing but subjective fancies and formations: there can be but one true sight and that is the objective physical sight occasioned by physical sense-organ.

Does then Sri Aurobindo's affirmation of "from sight to greater sight" lose all meaning? Surely not. We shall come to the discussion of this very important point with precision and thoroughness a little later in the course of our essay. For the present let us bear in mind a very significant characteristic of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.

Sri Aurobindo has not only affirmed the necessity of "A Progress leap from sight to greater sight", but a close study of his epochal epic Savitri reveals to our delightful surprise that the entire composition is shot through and through with

a panoramic depiction of the 'progression of sight' from plane to plane of the evolving consciousness of an individual being, also from world to world of the hierarchically arranged fields of cosmic manifestation, starting from the blind sight of the "sightless Inconscient" up to the "all-seeing closed eyes" of the supreme Superconscient. But an uninformed reader may perhaps unwarily think that all this magnificent depiction of sights and visions in Savitri is the imaginative product of the creative genius of a supremely gifted poet.

But we should never forget that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have categorically affirmed on many occasions that the whole of Savitri is a very precise and authentic transcription of their spiritual-visional experiences: not a single line has been introduced in the body of this epic simply to satisfy the exigencies of a sublime and superb poetical creation. There is everywhere in the Poem "a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho-physical concreteness." (Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Cent:'Ed., p. 750)

As the point is of crucial importance and as all doubts and misgivings in this regard should better be dispelled at the very outset, we crave the indulgence of our readers to quote in extenso a few passages from Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's writings where they speak unambiguously about the nature of the composition of Savitri. The whole of Section II below is entirely devoted to the reproduction of their observations vis-à-vis the issue under discussion.

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