The Destiny of the Body

Chapter V

The Critique of the Trance-Solution

The Voice replied: "Is this enough, O Spirit ?

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows

The work was left undone for which it came ?

Or is this all for thy being born on earth

Charged with a mandate from eternity,

........

To pass and leave unchanged the old dusty laws ?

Shall there be no new tables, no new Word,

No greater light come down upon the earth

Delivering her from her unconsciousness,

Man's spirit from unalterable fate?

..........

Is this then the report that I must make,

My head bowed with shame before the Eternal's seat, —

His power he kindled in thy body has failed,

His labourer returns, her task undone?"

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book VII, Canto II, pp. 475-76)

"I am concerned with the earth, not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits."

(Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 124)

Trance-experiences are undoubtedly of great value in the pursuit of the spiritual goal as ordinarily understood, and the Nirvikalpa Samadhi taken in the specific sense in which the term is used, no doubt represents a supreme height of realisation that a seeker may aspire after. Naturally enough, this most elevated trance-state proves to be adequate if the goal is to pass away into the Superconscient and not to bring down the Power and Glory of the Superconscient into our normal waking consciousness. But Samadhi experiences cannot suffice in the least for the object of our Yoga of Transformation; for, our goal is no less than the dynamic divinisation of our total existence including the outermost parts of Prakriti. To be more specific, viewed from the

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perspective of our spiritual goal — the goal of embodying and manifesting the highest spiritual consciousness here upon earth itself — the trance-solution for the actual imperfections of our world-existence suffers, among others, from the following deficiencies:

(i)The supreme trance-state represents a state of consciousness or rather superconsciousness to which only a rare few can ordinarily attain. Thus, it has got no general validity so far as the goal of a wide-based terrestrial realisation is concerned.

(ii)Even when attained, there is no return for the majority of seekers from this supreme height of spiritual consciousness. It is only the exceptionally gifted Iswarakotis or "divine souls" who succeed in coming back to the waking state.

Cf. Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, Vol. VI, p. 499: "When once they [ordinary Sadhakas] somehow attain to the direct realisation of Brahman, they cannot again come back to the lower plane of material perception. They melt away in Brahman — ksīre nīravat — like water in milk."

So the question of the divinisation of the waking existence becomes otiose and irrelevant.

(iii)Traditionally, it is averred that even those rare few who happen to return from the supreme state can do so only through the intermediary of a trace of ego and desires. Hence a certain "lowering of the key" becomes unavoidable which places it at a remove from the perfect divine realisation we aspire after.

Cf. Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, Vol. VII, p. 140: "The conclusion of the Vedanta is that when there is absoluteSamadhi and cessation of all modifications, there is no return from that state; as the Vedanta aphorism says: anāvṛtti śavdāt....

But the Avatars cherish a few desires for the good of the world. By taking hold of that thread they come down from the superconscious to the conscious state." (Italics ours)

Narrating his own personal experience the Swami says in the same context:

"I had just a trace of the feeling of Ego, so I could again return to the world of relativity from the Samadhi." (Ibid., p. 139). (Italics ours)

(iv)In a more general way we may state that if the entry into the higher reaches of our being is effected only in the absorbed super-conscient state of trance, the experience cannot become real to the whole existence, being valid only for a remote part of it. Thus it

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militates against our goal of the complete spiritualisation of the totality of our existence.

(v)The Yogic trance helps us to fix the spiritual experiences in our inner consciousness alone; it cannot automatically lead to the spiritualisation of the outer waking consciousness. So for us who aim at a total spiritual And supramental change, even, and in particular, of the outer parts of our Nature, Samadhi as an instrumentation proves to be altogether inadequate and futile.

(vi)Because of the aforesaid inability to exercise anything but a relative and moderate elevating influence on the outer consciousness, it so happens that when the Samadhi ceases, the thread is broken and the soul returns once again to the "distractions and imperfections of the outward life."

As a matter of fact, since one cannot continually remain in the trance-state,¹ while leading an embodied existence, vyutthāna or the "return" from the superconscious state becomes unavoidable, and with this vyutthāna "the lower consciousness from which the ascent took place falls back to what it was, with only the addition of an unkept or a remembered but no longer dynamic experience."²

It is because of this persistence of the disabilities of the waking mentality even after attainment of Samadhi that it is sometimes asserted that an absolute eradication of Ignorance or a complete ascension of consciousness from the "mortal mentality" become feasible only when the body and the bodily life cease to function at death. (Cf. Yoga-Shikhopanishad, I.163: piṇdapātena yā muktiḥ sā muktirna tu hanyate.)

The foregoing discussion makes it clear that trance-experiences may be all right so far as the traditional Yogas are concerned; for, after all, according to them the true bondage is the very process of birth and the liability of the individual to rebirth in this "unhappy transient world" (anityamasukhaṁ lokam). Liberation achieved through the attainment of the knowledge of Reality should therefore have for its practical consequence the definitive stoppage of this cyclic process of birth-death-rebirth.

And if this is so, if the cessation from embodied existence is

¹ Cf. "Yes, this Samadhi...is a state not at all easy to attain. When very rarely it appears in somebody, it does not last for long."

(Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, Vol. VII, p. 112)

² The Life Divine, p. 912.

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considered to be the summum bonum, one need concentrate only on an inner realisation of the inner Divine and not bother oneself with the possibility or otherwise of an integral terrestrial realisation. Also the body, although initially a necessary instrument for the realisation of our spiritual destiny (śarīramādyaṁ khalu dhar-masādhanam), may be allowed to disintegrate once that goal is achieved. (Cf. Sri Ramakrishna: "Take out the thorn with the help of a thorn"; and Yoga-Vasishtha: "Renounce that with which you renounce" (yena tyajasi taṁ tyaja).

But this can by no means be our attitude to the body and bodily life. For the Integral Yoga has for its objective:

(i)to make spiritual experiences real to the whole consciousness including that of the outer being;

(ii)to establish the highest possible realisation in the waking state and make it endure there;

(iii)not only to experience the Truth subjectively and in one's inner consciousness alone, but to manifest it even in full activity;

(iv)an integral possession of the integrality of the Divine in the life of this world and not only beyond it.

In short, in the words of Sri Aurobindo: "It is the object of my yoga to transform life by bringing down into it the Light, Power and Bliss of the Divine Truth and its dynamic certitudes. This Yoga is not a yoga of world-shunning asceticism, but of divine life ....It aims at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object."¹

Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo points out that "not only must the mind be able to rise in abnormal states out of itself into a higher consciousness, but its waking mentality also must be entirely spiritualised." ²

This then is our goal, and hence trance-experiences alone cannot help us much in achieving our objective. Moreover the Samadhi state as ordinarily realised suffers from another great disability which may not be considered as such when viewed from the standpoint of the goal of the traditional world-shunning Yogas but certainly so from our point of view. This is as regards the absence of any conscious memory of the trance-experience when one returns to the waking mentality again.

As a matter of fact the aim of the old Yoga is to pass away into

¹ Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, pp. 99, 109.

² The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 453. (Italics ours)

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the Superconscient and not to bring back its dynamic riches to the waking outer existence with a view to effectuate a spiritual transformation there. Hence, as soon as the Yogin goes above the level of the spiritual mind, he does not seek to retain any continuity of awareness there; instead, he passes into the "mystic sleep" of Samadhi, a state of superconsciousness in which the human mind in its actually evolved condition cannot remain awake even with what has been termed the "inner waking" and hence passes into "the blank incomprehension and non-reception of slumber."¹ And as a result, because of the gulf of oblivion, the spiritual experiences of the superconscient trance-state lose all their dynamic value for the waking consciousness.

But this disability has to be remedied. Since we seek to bring down the Superconscient into our normal waking consciousness, we must somehow bridge the gulf, heighten and intensify our spiritual awakening even in the normally superconscient reaches of being and train our consciousness to bring back in full the dynamic memory "from the inner to the outer waking."

In this connection we feel tempted to reproduce in extenso what the Mother said in reply to the question "Is the state of trance or Samadhi a sign of progress?"²

"To enter into Samadhi is to pass into a state of which no conscious memory remains on awakening.

"In ancient times this was considered as a very high condition. It was even thought that it was the sign of a great realisation.... 1 have read in all kinds of so-called spiritual literature marvellous things about this state of trance or Samadhi; and it happened that I had never had it. I did not know if it was a sign of inferiority. And when I arrived here [at Pondicherry], one of my first questions to Sri Aurobindo was, 'What do you think of Samadhi, this state of trance which one does not remember? One enters into a condition which seems to be blissfull but when one comes out of it one never knows what happened.' He looked at me, he saw what I meant and told me, 'It is unconsciousness.....Yes, one enters into what is called Samadhi, when one comes out of one's conscious being and enters into a part of one's being which is completely

¹ The Synthesis of Yoga p. 453. (Italics ours)

² Vide Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Vol. XIV, No. 3, pp. 43-45. (Italics ours)

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unconscious or rather into a domain where one has no corresponding consciousness — one goes beyond the field of one's consciousness and enters into a region where one has no more consciousness. One is in the impersonal state. That is to say, a state in which one is unconscious; that is why naturally one remembers nothing, because one has not been conscious of anything'...

"So you have the reply. The sign of progress is when there is no more unconsciousness, when you can rise to the same regions without entering into a trance."

At the time of the publication of this Talk, the Mother added the following remark:

"There are people who enter into domains where they have a consciousness, but between this conscious state and their normal wakeful consciousness there is a gap: their individuality does not exist between the waking state and the deeper state; then in the passage they forget. They cannot carry the consciousness they had there into the consciousness here because there is a gap between the two. There is even an occult discipline which consists in building the intermediary fields, so that one may be able to remember things."¹

But even this does not suffice for our goal. For what we aim at is not the conscious bringing back of the impressions, the reporting back to the waking consciousness, in transcriptions more or less perfect, what one experiences in states at present superconscient to it: we want instead an integral supramental transformation of the waking existence itself. In the luminous words of Sri Aurobindo:

"If the control of [the] highest spiritual being is to be brought into our waking life, there must be a conscious heightening and widening into immense ranges of new being, new consciousness, new potentialities of action, a taking up — as integral as possible — of our present being, consciousness, activities and a transmutation of them into divine values which would effect a transfiguration of our human existence. For wherever a radical transition has to be made, there is always this triple movement, — ascent, widening of field and base, integration..."²

¹ Vide Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Vol. XIV, No. 3, p. 43. (Italics ours)

² The Life Divine, p. 737. (Italics ours)

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So we see that in order to have a divinely transformed waking existence, an ascension to the trance-state or even the building up of a conscious bridge between that and the waking state is not enough. Something much more revolutionary is needed: let us see what.

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