Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 23

The Ten Limbs of The Yoga

1

The 'Siddhi' of 24 November 1926 was a decisive stage in Sri Aurobindo's mission, since it meant - as he explained later - "the descent of Krishna into the physical". On 11 November he had said that he was trying to bring down the "world of the Gods", and had almost hinted that the descent was imminent. In the Aurobindonian Weltanschauung, the "world of the Gods" was the Overmind world just below the Supermind:

If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being....¹

When the "descent of Krishna" thus actually took place on 24 November, it only signified the fullness of the Overmental realisation. And the event was not only important in itself, but could very well be the preparation for - and the promise of- the Supramental descent itself and the consequent transfiguration of the whole arc of human existence down to the physical and the inconscient. On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo had warned his disciples that egoism and divine manifestation couldn't abide together; and hence "all noise should be only incidental".²

This was how 24 November 1926 passed without any fanfare, without speeches, and without even the customary evening conversation. Only Datta's words "The Lord has descended into the physical today" had for a brief second broken that supernal silence; and what was it but a simple announcement wrung in a moment of sudden divination?

However, it was actually some days later that the disciples grasped the full implications of the event, for Sri Aurobindo, if he had shown them for a brief immaculate hour the rūpa of Delight of Existence, had also afterwards withdrawn into effective retirement. No more discourses, no more evening talks! The Mother was there, of course, and now more than ever solicitous of their general - and especially spiritual - welfare, but it was not easy to get reconciled to Sri Aurobindo's total withdrawal into this self-forged seclusion. When somebody ventured to complain, Sri Aurobindo wrote to say that he had decided - as much in their interest as for his own convenience - that they should henceforth receive the light and the force from the Mother, and be guided by her in their sadhana. Even on 24 November - as the disciples now remembered - he had blessed them, as it were, through

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the Mother as the intermediary. And they realised soon enough that all was indeed for the best, and complete seclusion was necessary for Sri Aurobindo if he was to bring his own sadhana to its preordained fulfilment.

This, then, was the significance of the "siddhi" day. The Lord of the Yoga went into the background, the Mother assumed full responsibility for the sadhana of the disciples, and the 'Sri Aurobindo Ashram' formally came into existence. Nor was Sri Aurobindo's seclusion really total. He gave darśan to the disciples and select visitors on three days in the year - 21 February (the Mother's birthday), 15 August (Sri Aurobindo's birthday) and 24 November (the Siddhi day) - and, from 1939, a fourth day, 24 April (the day of the Mother's second coming), was added. Also, he occasionally broke the rule of retirement in favour of visitors like Rabindranath Tagore and Sylvain Levi. Further, since the Mother and one or two disciples kept in constant touch with Sri Aurobindo and since he answered in detail the letters from his disciples posing their problems, his involvement in the Ashram community was as intimate as ever though the form had changed. The Lord of the Yoga was no symbol figure-head, but the invisible yet subliminal reality behind the Ashram's functioning.

II

Before describing the Ashram - its attempt to realise the ideal of a "typic society" as visualised by the Mother or a "Deva Sangha" of Sri Aurobindo's conception - it would be appropriate to take a look at the Yoga itself. We saw in the previous chapter how, in the course of his letter to Barindra in 1920, Sri Aurobindo remarked that the "Guru of the world" had given him "the ten limbs of the body of this Yoga". This was presented as a spiritual philosophy in The Life Divine and, more particularly, as a practical treatise in The Synthesis of Yoga. The latter was begun as a serial in the first (August 1914) issue of the Arya - and although seventy-three chapters appeared in all - it had not quite concluded when the journal ceased publication in 1921. At the time The Life Divine or The Synthesis of Yoga was written, Sri Aurobindo had not found the name "overmind" to describe the state of consciousness just below Supermind, and hence it didn't figure in the Arya. When The Life Divine was revised in the late nineteen thirties, Sri Aurobindo added the last chapter in the first volume to explain the role of the "Overmind", and it figures too in the final chapters of the second volume. Sri Aurobindo had likewise hoped to make good the omission in the contemplated additional chapters to The Synthesis, "but these latter chapters were not written".³

The Synthesis of Yoga, published in 1955, in a single omnibus volume, contained a new Introduction ('The Conditions of the Synthesis'), the fully revised Part I ('The Yoga of Divine Works'), the slightly revised Part II ('The Yoga of Integral Knowledge'), and the unrevised Parts III and IV ('The Yoga of Divine Love' and 'The Yoga of Self-Perfection'). An additional, incomplete chapter entitled

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'The Supermind and the Yoga of Works' had been appended to Part II, opening up some more vistas of possibility. Although the rounded and shining finish of The Life Divine is lacking in The Synthesis of Yoga, this too is a mighty testament running to over one thousand pages, only a little less in bulk than the complementary Supramental Manifesto. Part of this work has been translated into French by the Mother as La Synthèse des Yoga, and the English, French and Hindi versions have been appearing side by side since 1958 in the trilingual edition of the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. Wide-ranging in its scope, the emphasis still is on synthesis, integration, unity of aim and coordination of means. However, the little trodden paths of Sri Aurobindo's Supramental Yoga - newly cleared by him but not yet macadamised for others' use - have not been brought into the scheme of The Synthesis of Yoga. Hints are thrown out here and there, but a full statement has been deferred. There is a tendency to repetition because Yoga after Yoga in separately described and assessed, and because the circumstance of periodical publication required recapitulation from time to time; but these are repetitions with a difference and integral to the scheme of the work. The total effect is of the epic churning of the ocean, each revolving motion bringing forth its own characteristic products, and the whole action geared to the final coming of the nectar itself.

All life is Yoga: such is the challenging epigraph with which Sri Aurobindo launches his work. The new Introduction is a masterly statement of the "conditions" of the proposed "synthesis" and is meant to prepare the reader for the encircling and spiralling argument of the following pages. There are "two necessities of Nature's workings" which are apt to assume the dual movement of convergence towards unity and divergence towards multiplicity. Forms that were once alive are now dead; and as life changes, there is need also to renovate old forms by charging them with new life or to create altogether new forms. What a world we are living in -

We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are being subjected to a supreme test and given their opportunity of rebirth. The world to-day presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence.⁴

In this situation, Indian Yoga could be "potentially one of these dynamic elements for the future life of humanity". Yoga is quite simply the movement or effort towards self-perfection reuniting "God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life". There is of course the primordial process of natural evolution which is unconscious, slow and subject to uncertainties and serious set-backs, while it is man's prerogative to make the conscious and organised effort of Yoga forging "the harmony of our inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consummation  

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of both", thereby compressing into a single life - or a few years or a few months - what Nature might have taken centuries or aeons to accomplish. Yoga thus makes an intense and exceptional use of powers that are already there. While science exploits steam, electricity or nuclear power. Yoga harnesses man's psychological or other powers. Both science and Yoga are based on knowledge developed and confirmed by regular experiment, practical analysis and constant assessment of results. But there is a need for caution too: just as "science in the service of man" should not mean mere gadgetry and the tyranny of cybernetics, Yoga too should not become a matter of technique and process, for that would mean an impoverishment - not an enrichment - of life. "The true and full object and utility of Yoga," says Sri Aurobindo, "can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself..."⁵

There are three rungs in the ladder of life - bodily life, mental life, divine life - which God and Nature have provided for man's ascent towards self-perfection culminating in a "trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight (Sachchidananda). To find this Transcendent, to link it with the life in Nature, and to possess the power freely to ascend or descend the great stair of existence would be the prospective programme of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. Of all living forms, man alone is "perfectly made" - so the gods of the Aitareya Upanishad thought! - and man could therefore be the mould for the further divine perfection to come. The distinctive feature of bodily life is not so much progress as persistence through the perpetuation of the species. In mental life, the keynote is continual enlargement, improvement and the pull towards endless change and variability. In spiritual life or divine existence, the mind longs for a self-existent perfection and immutable infinity and can find peace only when these are realised. If the mind starts regulating the bodily life, the externals alone are rapidly changed and we may be caught up in a materialism that can only bring "great wearinesses, swift exhaustions, startling recoils".⁶ On the contrary, if spirituality should come to mean mere asceticism, that will merely impoverish life and weaken its base.

In the different systems of Yoga, the consenting parties are three: God or Purusha, Nature or Prakriti, and the individual human soul. Man being a thinker and a doer, he has the freedom to aspire nobly and engage in appropriate action, thereby giving himself the push towards perfection or union with the Divine. Since Yoga has been defined as the organised effort towards self-perfection, India's Yogic systems have found it convenient to seize and maximise the use of one or another of the several instruments or faculties lodged in man as the means of promoting such progressive self-improvement:

The principle of Yoga is the turning of one or of alt powers of our human existence into a means of reaching the divine Being. In an ordinary Yoga one main power of being or one group of its powers is made the means, vehicle, path. In a synthetic Yoga all powers will be combined and included in the transmuting instrumentation.⁷  

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In the language of modem military strategy, it is an all-out attack, involving the deployment of the army, the navy and the air force,- and paratroops and propaganda as well, that storms the citadel and establishes dominion. Likewise, in an integral Yoga, the storm-troops of the muscle, the swift-squadrons of the brain, and the high-powered flotillas of the heart, all are to be energised and directed to march up and seize the invisible citadel of Reality. In Sri Aurobindo's words:

Each Yoga in its process has the character of the instrument it uses; thus the Hathyogic process is psycho-physical, the Rajayogic mental and psychic, the way of knowledge is spiritual and cognitive, the way of devotion spiritual, emotional and aesthetic, the way of works spiritual and dynamic by action. Each is guided in the ways of its own characteristic power. But all power is in the end one, all power is really soul-power.⁸

Since all power is verily soul-power, it is this that has to be mobilised and canalised. All the powers lodged in man that are really emanations of the Spirit have thus to be purified and disciplined into a body of troops filled with the zeal and imbued with the determination to invade Reality, to possess it, to bring it down so that the desired change and transformation could be accomplished.

The body, the mind, the ratiocinative and discriminating intellect, the will, the heart, anyone of these by itself could be made the means of steady self-improvement or self-purification. In Hatha Yoga, the body is the principal agent of transformation, and the principle of action is based on the close connection between the body and the soul. For the Hathayogin, the body is indeed "a mystic bridge between the spiritual and the physical being", and his whole aim is to awaken (he soul in the physical body and make it realise the purity, power, light, and freedom that are native to it. Through the disciplines of āsana and prānāyāma - in other words, through the systematic and complete control of the limbs and of breathing - the Hathayogin achieves control of his body's vital energy and links it with the universal energy. The three principles of practice common to all Yoga - purification of the instrument, concentration or intensity of effort towards a desired end, and liberation or "release of our being from the narrow and painful knots of the individualised energy in a false and limited play" - are the steps leading to the consummation or union with the Supreme.⁹ In Hathayoga, the āsanas which are perhaps over eighty in number help to make the body healthy, strong; supple and free from fatigue and rapid decay, while prānāyāma aims at purifying the nervous system and circulating the life-energy through all the nerves. By thus perfecting the body and the breathing - the annamaya and prānāyāma sheaths mentioned in the Taittiriya Upanishad - the Hathayogin reaches his desired goal.

In Rajayoga, the mind - the manomaya kosa — is the theatre of action and the field of victory. Through the discipline of the movements of the mind, Rajayoga achieves the total mastery of consciousness. The Hathayoga techniques of āsana and prānāyāma are used within reason, and to these is added the incantation of the mantra, and the large aim is to accomplish the body's purification and self-mastery 

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and also to awaken the reserves of power in the inconscient depths of the physical nature:

The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and slumbering like a snake, - therefore it is called the kundalinī śakti, — in the lowest of the Chakras, in the mūlādhāra. When by Pranayama the division between the upper and lower Prana currents in the body is dissolved, this Kundalini is struck and awakened, it uncoils itself and begins to rise upward like a fiery serpent breaking open each lotus as it ascends until the Shakti meets the Purusha in the brahma-randhra in a deep Samadhi of union.¹⁰

The aim in Rajayoga is invariably the trance of samadhi when the pure still mind is possessed by (and possesses for the nonce) the highest supra-cosmic knowledge. To withdraw the mind first from the multiplicity of outward phenomena - to fix the concentrated attention on one object (a rūpa or a mantra) alone - and finally to transcend all outer consciousness in the infinite immobility of the cessation of normal consciousness: this is the Rajayogin's way and goal. In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, while physical techniques are not taboo and are, in fact, found "useful at times in certain stages of the progress", they are not deemed essential. Besides, it is not the transcendence of the physical base of life in samādhi, but rather its transfiguration through the descent of the Spirit that is the aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. "Our object is," says Sri Aurobindo, "to make the spiritual life and its experiences fully active and fully utilisable in the waking state and even in the normal use of the functions."¹¹

There are, then, the three classical paths - Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, and Bhakti Yoga. In Karma Yoga, the will, the will to action - the resolve to activise the right creative urge - is the protagonist. Through purification or the renunciation of egoistic self-indulgence and total indifference to the "fruits" of action and through concentration or complete absorption in the action itself, the Karmayogin makes himself the vehicle of the universal energy, and achieves release and fulfilment in the completion of the work; in the result, he has become a willing tool in whom the Lord of that energy has manifested himself:

Not desire, not attachment must drive him, but a Will that stirs in a divine peace, a Knowledge that moves from the transcendent Light, a glad Impulse that is a force from the supreme Ananda.¹²

In Jnanayoga, the ratiocinative and discriminating intellect is the actor: through the discipline of self-inquiry, ātmavicāra, through the dialectic of negating layer after layer of illusive 'appearance', Jnanayoga perseveres towards the Truth by means of viveka or right discrimination, and achieves knowledge of the self with the triumphant affirmation of identity with the Brahman:

This pure Jnanayoga comes by the intellect, although it ends in the transcendence of the intellect and its workings. The thinker in us separates himself

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from all the rest of what we phenomenally are, rejects the heart, draws back from the life and the senses, separates from the body that he may arrive at his own exclusive fulfilment in that which is beyond even himself and his function.¹³

The sheaths of body, sense, mind, all aspects of our phenomenal being, all are seen to be mere vestiges of Nature or Prakriti, or as the tantalising play of māyā. The One alone — the Illimitable Permanent - remains; all else is nothing, less than nothing.

In Bhakti Yoga, or the Way of Love and Devotion, the sovereign actor is the heart: through the purification of human emotions and human relationships and their elevation to a one-pointed and blissful condition of participation in divine love, the Bhaktiyogin emancipates himself from the turbulent vicissitudes of everyday existence and becomes a sharer in the divine līlā of the Lord who is the all-beautiful, the all-loving, the all-blissful:

The God-lover is the universal lover and he embraces the All-blissful and All-beautiful. When universal love has seized on his heart, it is the decisive sign that the Divine has taken possession of him; and when he has the vision of the All-beautiful everywhere and can feel at all times the bliss of his embrace, that is the decisive sign that he has taken possession of the Divine.¹⁴

The God-lover is also the beloved of the Lord, and in their mutual possession is the proof of the blissful oneness of Reality. But who can describe the ecstasy of such spiritual union? In Sri Aurobindo's words -

...it is not possible for the tongue of human speech to tell all the utter unity and all the eternal variety of the Ananda of divine love. Our higher and our lower members are both flooded with it, the mind and life no less than the soul: even the physical body takes its share of the joy, feels the touch, is filled in all its limbs, veins, nerves with the flowing of the wine of the ecstasy, amrta. Love and Ananda are the last word of being, the secret of secrets, the mystery of mysteries.¹⁵

God is the invoked charioteer guiding the Karmayogin through the embattled field of Kurukshetra: God is the transcendent experience of Sachchidananda: and God is the beloved Lord and Lover who responds utterly to the heart's longing for delight. And it is the same God too!

III

Numberless are the men and women who have followed one of these pathways to felicity, and they have found no reason to turn back. The great overwhelming mass of humanity has, however, remained behind. And there has not been effected any total change in the human situation. The several Yogas therefore seem to suffer from two drawbacks. In the first place, this excessive emphasis on one element or faculty alone - body, mind, intellect, will, heart - in the human complex  

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cannot but lead to a one-sided (or lop-sided) development, causing thereby an attenuation or alienation or impoverishment of life. The ascetic's rejection of even good and auspicious things is to that extent a negation of life. If the mind has its realisations, the heart too has its own goals of fulfilment. The contemplation of Truth or the Higher Knowledge need not exclude good works, and these again need not deny the claims of the heart. The man of knowledge could be doubled with the man of action, and both could achieve co-existence with the man of devotion. The body athletic, electric, aesthetic, the mind in a trance of self-lost supernal stillness, the ratiocinative intellect forging the supreme identity "I am Brahman", the determined will to action enacting the truth of yogah karmasu kauśalam ("Yoga is skill in works"), and the heart leaping out to an embrace of (or by) God, each of these movements - when that alone is pursued to the total ignoration of all others - tends by its very success to derogate the importance of other realisations. Reality is not cosmic energy alone, nor universal stillness, nor knowledge, nor good works, nor love - none of these alone. The attempt to maximise the function of any one alone of the divers human faculties can succeed only through the ignoration or suppression of the other faculties which have their rights too to survive and thrive. It is the whole man that needs to make the leap in evolution, and not merely a part of him.

Another possible objection to these Yogas is that they create something analogous to a "brain-drain" in the affairs of humanity. The Hathayogin and the Rajayogin, while they may be solving their problems in their own way, leave the rest of humanity just where they are and always have been. The Jnanayogin who has found the Absolute hardly affects the fortunes of the multitude who still go their rounds of petty desires and corroding incapacity. An aim higher than personal salvation would be service of humanity or service of the Divine:

The desire of personal salvation, however high its form, is an outcome of ego... If we seek the Divine, it should be for the sake of the Divine and for nothing else... all other motives are excrescences....

Often we see this desire of personal salvation overcome by another attraction which also belongs to the higher turn of our nature.... It is that which is implied in the great legend of the Amitabha Buddha who turned away when his spirit was on the threshold of Nirvana and took the vow never to cross it while a single being remained in the sorrow and the Ignorance. It is that which underlies the sublime verse of the Bhagavata Purana, "I desire not the supreme state with all its eight siddhis nor the cessation of rebirth; may I assume the sorrow of all creatures who suffer and enter into them so that they may be made free from grief."¹⁶

The Buddhas, the Jivanmuktas, the Prahladas, and the Ramanujas who are eager to share the burden of everyday human care, these are the type that the mass of men need as helpers, guides, friends, consolers, redeemers. The Karmayogin could be an active helper of his fellow-men, healing their hurts and fighting their battles. The Bhakti-yogin, although he is generally lost in the ecstasy of divine love, has

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often been able to infect others too - sometimes tens of thousands - with his own sense of intoxication and fervour of love's realisation. All the same, the general run of Yogins have been more interested in effecting an escape from the obstreperous problems of humanity than in facing and mastering them. This flight of the elect, the emancipated, the inheritors of the power and glory of Realisation cannot but deprive the rest of mankind of their counsel and leadership. But not even for humanity, only for the Divine Sri Aurobindo would have us do Yoga; after all, isn't humanity too comprehended in the Divine's play of manifestation? What is necessary, what is crucial, is the annulment of the ego through union with the Divine, and once this has been achieved, action would arise "spontaneously, freely, infallibly from the light and force of our spiritual self in union with the Divine".¹⁷

It is not as though the five Yogas mentioned above are to be viewed as being necessarily independent of one another. Hathayoga and Rajayoga have their obvious affiliations, and āsana and prānāyāma could be practised with advantage by almost all, yogins and non-yogins alike. And the paths of Knowledge, Works and Love could easily converge into a single highway:

Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which is known; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His being. It is in this triple path that we come most readily to the absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings and in Its entire manifestation.¹⁸

While such a happy convergence of the triple paths is no doubt a possibility, it is nevertheless seldom realised except with persons uniquely endowed, while it has been far easier to pursue one line alone to its logical conclusion.

The problem therefore is to devise a Yoga that aims at realisation here and not in a world to come, and makes personal realisation the starting-point or the means for effecting a radical transformation of individual and collective man or the establishment of a new heaven and a new earth in our midst. The aim should be to effect a total change in body, life, mind, will, emotion, thereby outgrowing man's current limitations and imperfections and reaching a superman's puissance, tranquillity, knowledge, power, love. Is such a Yoga well within the bounds of practical formulation? Sri Aurobindo is, however, certain that it will not do merely to make a jumble of the different Yogas in the name of "synthesis", hoping that somehow sensational results will follow. Neither can the trying out of one Yoga after another - Hatha first, then Raja, and so on - engineer the great result we have in mind. Even an example like that of the Paramahamsa isn't meant to be imitated by everybody as a recipe of Yogic versatility:

In the life of Ramakrishna Paramahansa, we see a colossal spiritual capacity, first driving straight to the divine realisation, taking, as it were, the kingdom of heaven by violence, and then seizing upon one Yogic method after another  

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and extracting the substance out of it with an incredible rapidity, always to return to the heart of the whole matter, the realisation and possession of God by the power of love, by the extension of inborn spirituality into various experience and by the spontaneous play of an intuitive knowledge.¹⁹

If the disciplines of the various Yogas are not simply to be fortuitously thrown together and if we are not to make an example of the unpredictably unique phenomenon of the Paramahamsa, we have to discover and bring into operation a principle that perhaps holds the key to the mastery of all the disciplines. It should be something akin to the discovery of nuclear power which has lately revolutionised our knowledge of the older sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, geology and medicine. What was once thought to be the atom, a minute speck of lifeless, motionless, unbreakable matter, is now seen to be a universe in itself, with its own incredible inhabitants whirling at terrific speeds, repeating in miniature the mysteries of the outer universe. And the nucleus and its constituents seem to hold the clue to many things, and they flaunt a capability both to effect total ruin and to usher in an era of comfort, health and happiness to mankind. The challenge is to tap this dangerous prepotent source of energy and mobilise it for peaceful, instead of destructive, uses and purposes. Might it not be that, deep within the world of man there is - akin to this nuclear power - a reserve of incommensurable spiritual energy which, rightly tapped and mobilised in due measure, can take up the faculties of body, mind, intellect, will and emotion, and fuse them into a new engine of illimitable power for bringing about the transformation of our earth-life?

Sri Aurobindo finds such a principle, such a key, in the old system of Tantra which, even like the Vedanta, has had its own hoary traditions and historic vicissitudes. Contrasting the Vedantic and Tantric approaches to Yoga, Sri Aurobindo writes:

In a sense, all the schools we have hitherto examined are Vedantic in their principle; their force is in knowledge, their method is knowledge.... In all the lord of the Yoga is the Purusha, the Conscious Soul that knows, observes, attracts, governs. But in Tantra it is rather Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Energy, the Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method, its Tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his discipline, - mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and conquered....

We have in this central Tantric conception one side of the truth, the worship of the Energy, the Shakti, as the sole effective force for all attainment. We get the other extreme in the Vedantic conception of the Shakti as a power of Illusion and in the search after the silent inactive Purusha as the means of liberation from the deceptions created by the active Energy. But in the integral conception the Conscious Soul is the Lord, the Nature-Soul is his executive Energy.²⁰

If the two poles of reality are Brahman and Shakti - Spirit and Nature - Being and  

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Becoming - then the method of the Tantra is not the ascetic's denial, nor an attempt to flee from life and nature into the Bliss of Brahman, but rather is it a bold confrontation and mastery of the forces and processes of life and nature so as to "raise nature in man into manifest power of spirit". The Hathayogic way of the opening up of the nervous centres for facilitating the movement through them of the awakened Shakti on her way to union with Brahman, the Rajayogic way of purification, meditation and concentration, the triple leverage of will-force, knowledge and devotion derived from the 'paths' of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti, all are taken into the synthetic system of the Tantra. But all this is no haphazard assembly of the powers and methods of the different Yogas but a psychologically satisfying integration, constituting a decisive advance on the earlier Yogas:

In two directions it enlarges by its synthetic turn the province of the Yogic method. First, it lays its hand firmly on many of the main springs of human quality, desire, action and it subjects them to an intensive discipline with the soul's mastery of its motives as a first aim and their elevation to a diviner spiritual level as its final utility. Again, it includes in its objects of Yoga not only liberation (mukti), which is the one all-mastering preoccupation of the specific systems, but a cosmic enjoyment (bhūkti) of the Power of the Spirit, which the others may take incidentally on the way, in part, casually, but avoid making a motive or object. It is a bolder and larger system.²¹

For a moment we may return to the nuclear analogy. During the last twenty-five years, mankind has regretted from time to time that the atom was ever split at all and the nucleus was ever penetrated; but we also know that vain are all these regrets. Today knowledgeable people are speculating about the peaceful uses of atomic energy - and we have passed beyond mere speculation as regards radioisotopes for medicine, nuclear power for fuel and nuclear-powered ships, and so on. There was, doubtless, incalculable danger in meddling with the atom; and we know that the world today is poised on the precipice Perilous reared up by the nuclear super-powers. On the other hand, we cannot fail to glimpse the vistas of wondrous possibility open to mankind, and our hope is that the false propensities and pulls of the present will be effectively neutralised by our reviving sanity and will to survive. Nature in her great fecundity and infinite variety throws up lava upon lava of energy, and torrid heat, torrents of rain, rivers in spate, all have their destructive and creative potentialities. The adventure of civilisation consists in meeting and mastering the challenge of Nature's virility and violence, and turning them to beneficial uses. In like manner, within man too are lodged whole dynamos of energy with explosive possibilities, although they are also capable of being controlled and chastened, and directed to noble ends. The body's native vigour and vitality, the rivers of energy ready to burst their confines and overrun the inner countries, the insurrections in the heart, these and other human faculties and powers may not easily be ignored, or not for long; for they have a way of taking their revenge upon us.

Nuclear energy simply is; it is neither evil nor good in itself, it is the use to  

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which man puts it that makes it one or the other. Nature likewise simply is; all thoughts that seethe in the human brain, all passions that rage, all loves and hates that bring us together or tear us apart, all the body's bottled-up energies, all assertions and movements of the will, and also all the obscure currents and eddies in the dark hinterland of the subconscious - all have their origin in Nature or Prakriti. We cannot long ignore them, we cannot for ever run away from them, and we must not allow them to master or enslave us. The proper way would be to face them, understand them, purify them and tame and turn their terrific potentialities into purposive use:

Yoga is nothing but practical psychology... [Nature] is the self-fulfilment of the Purusha through his Energy. But the movement of Nature is twofold, higher and lower... divine and undivine. The distinction exists indeed for practical purposes only.... All things are in Nature and all things are in God.... The lower Nature, that which we know and are and must remain so long as the faith in us is not changed, acts through limitation and division, is of the nature of Ignorance and culminates in the life of the ego; but the higher Nature, that to which we aspire, acts by unification and transcendence of limitation, is of the nature of Knowledge and culminates in the life divine. The passage from the lower to the higher is the aim of Yoga... the whole difference between the Yogin and the natural man will be this, that the Yogin seeks to substitute in himself for the integral action of the lower Nature working in and by ego and division the integral action of the higher Nature working in and by God and unity....

The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the Sadhaka of the Sadhana as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and instrument of its own perfection.²²

The reference to nuclear energy above may gain added significance when we recall Sri Aurobindo's amazing anticipation just before he went into retirement in 1926. Even fifty years ago, science had gone beyond the old view that atoms were the ultimate particles of matter; actually atoms were microscopic solar systems, the nucleus taking the place of the Sun. Secondly, atoms of different elements were seen to differ, not on account of the constituents which were the same, but in their number and arrangement. Commenting on these, Sri Aurobindo said:

According to the experience of ancient Yogis... Agni is threefold:

1) ordinary fire, jada agni,

2) electric fire, vaidyuta agni,

3) solar fire, saura agni.

Science has only entered upon the first and second of these fires. The fact that the atom is like the solar system could lead it to the knowledge of the third.²³

Nuclear power is evidently solar fire or saura agni, but, beyond the physical universe, 

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there is, of course, Agni the 'mystic Fire', the source even of saura agni. It is the first of the Powers, "at once the flame on the altar and the priest of the oblation", the force behind everything everywhere in the phenomenal universe. If the scientist could smash the atom and release nuclear power, why shouldn't the Yogi be able to smash the ego which is the ultimate resistant to individual and collective liberation, and thereby release the spiritual Agni that holds the key to all other sources of energy and all the so-called "laws of Nature"? Modern science knows that Matter and Energy are convertible in terms of the equation E=mc², but Yoga might be able, by wresting the secret of the fundamental Agni itself, to effect a radical change and transformation of our life. In Satprem's words,

To transform Matter into Energy it [science] knows only of physical processes producing great temperatures, but if one knows the fundamental Agni which is the substance of Energy or of Consciousness-Force, one can, in principle, manipulate Matter and come to the same transmutation without reducing one's own body to the state of a living torch.²⁴

Hence the constant stress in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga on the need to crack the shell of the ego and release the sovereign power of the Spirit, the native creative force of the fundamental Agni.

We thus come back to the central issue between ego and division on the one hand and God and unity on the other. The aim of the Yoga is to substitute the urges and movements of the ego by the involvement and participation of God so that all thoughts, all actions, all laws may be directed towards unity, harmony and ananda rather than division, strife and misery. Of the three terms in the Yoga - the sādhaka or the practitioner, the sādhanā or the process, and the siddhi or the consummation of the Yoga - the sādhaka is the individual Yogin who is also to a greater or lesser extent the representative and vanguard of the race, the siddhi is the effective identification and union with the Purusha and the resulting accession of power for the laying of the foundations of a New Life on earth, and the mediating sādhanā is the dynamic process, as in an atomic reactor, by which the innate faculties and potentialities of our life (all the latent material, vital, mental and psychic energies) are integrally transformed from the 'lower' Nature to the 'higher' Nature or Supernature. In the final reckoning, of course. God alone is the sādhaka because he who chooses the Divine has already been chosen by the Divine, God alone is the sādhanā because without His Grace the process of integral transformation can neither commence nor continue to the ultimate point of fruition, and the siddhi too is God because all the process of becoming moves only towards the power and the glory of His Being and His Purpose in the phenomenal world. And śuddhi, siddhi, mukti, bhūkti - the ascending series of terms in the Tantra; in other words, purification, puissance, liberation, enjoyment - these too would seem to have divine origin, divine sustenance, divine sanction and divine participation.

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IV

In his own spiritual life, Sri Aurobindo had moved, as we saw in some of the earlier chapters, from one or two unexpected experiences to the tentative period of prānāyāma and then on to the all-annihilating experience of the silent Brahman at Baroda, under Yogi Lele's guidance. At the Alipur jail, the blissful experience of Narayana Omnipresent had suddenly overwhelmed Sri Aurobindo, and he had won his way to the heart of the Gita's integral Yoga; and he had been given a glimpse of the overhead planes of consciousness from Mind towards Supermind. At Chandernagore he had further explored the Unknown, and at Pondicherry he had discovered the fundamental insights of the Veda and with their help formulated the "ten limbs" of his Supramental Yoga. When Sri Aurobindo started writing The Synthesis of Yoga, he was thus in a position to build on the ground of personal experience and take his readers through the unconscious Yoga of Nature, and the various conscious Yogas: Hatha, Raja, Jnana, Karma, Bhakti, the Yoga of the Gita, his own integral Yoga and the revolutionary world-transforming Supramental Yoga. With this unique wealth of variegated spiritual experience, it was not unnatural that Sri Aurobindo should weave into the fabric of his Yoga - described with ascending connotation as Integral Yoga, Puma Yoga or Supramental Yoga - the more essential threads of all the earlier Yogas. The twin streams of Vedanta and Tantra have flowed into Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, but what has made the meeting creative and new is the electric charge of his own sadhana. While the earlier systems of Yogic discipline placed before themselves only the aim of achieving man's salvation as an individual, of reaching the goal of the Spirit and once and for all getting rid of the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, escaping for all eternity from the fatuity and misery of terrestrial life and the interminably involved and meaningless labyrinth of samsāra, the aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is not only to reach the highest possible levels of the Spirit but also to bring down their Light and Force to our earth-life and make them alone the impulse and the law, the motion and the act, the idea and the actuality, of every segment of our terrestrial life.

Broadly speaking, life on the earth could be lived at three distinct levels of consciousness, the life in the ignorance, the life taught to Arjuna by the Lord of the Gita, and the Life Divine visualised by Sri Aurobindo. In ordinary life, humanity is driven by egoistic desire, and the controls are exercised - freely and fitfully - by an agreed religious ethic or a mental ideal (social, economic or political). The Gita's Yoga involves the conquest of egoistic desire and the offering of all work to the Divine, the cultivation of a sense of unity with all creatures flowing from the feeling of oneness with the Divine, the flowering of love and devotion or bhakti for the Divine, and the climactic act of ātmasamarpana or prapatti or total self-surrender to the Lord. In the following passage, Sri Aurobindo differentiates between the three well-trodden paths of jñāna, bhakti and karma, and shows how they converge in the integral Yoga and rise to a new height of liberation and consummation:

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In the Way of Knowledge we may arrive at a point where we can leap out of personality and universe, escape from all thought and will and works and all way of Nature and, absorbed and taken up into Eternity, plunge into the Transcendence; that, though not obligatory on the God-knower, may be the soul's decision.... In the Way of Devotion we may reach through an intensity of adoration and joy union with the supreme All-Beloved and remain eternally in the ecstasy of his presence, absorbed in him alone, intimately in one world of bliss with him; that then may be our being's impulsion, its spiritual choice. But in the Way of Works another prospect opens; for travelling on that path, we can enter into liberation and perfection by becoming of one law and power of nature with the Eternal; we are identified with him in our will and dynamic self as much as in our spiritual status; a divine way of works is the natural outcome of this union.... In the Integral Yoga these three lines of approach give up their exclusions, meet and coalesce or spring out of each other; liberated from the mind's veil over the self, we live in the Transcendence, enter by the adoration of the heart into the oneness of a supreme love and bliss, and all our forces of being uplifted into the one Force, our will and works surrendered into the one Will and Power, assume the dynamic perfection of the Divine Nature.²⁵

Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is also integral like the Yoga of the Gita, but a new dimension - the bringing down of the Supramental Light and Force - is added, and this makes all the difference.

As in individual life, in collective life also there are ascending levels of conduct above the promiscuous play of personal need, preference and desire. There is the sense of the common good of the community, which governs the actions even of animals; there is the reign of a moral code or of a religious ethic; and there is, above all, the divine law inherent in Nature though obscured and held in check by. the perversions of human egoism. For mankind the ultimate aim should be the realisation of the dream of Satya Yuga, an order of divine dispensation:

...the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being in harmony with the truth of things... right reason, no longer mental but Supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.²⁶

Instead of expecting such an order to be precipitated by a flourish of the wand of the Omnipotent Supreme, it would be for the aspiring and enterprising individual

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to scale these heights as representative pioneer or path-finder of the race. And if a group of such pioneers could form themselves into a "mystic society" or a "Deva Sangha", what might not be capable of accomplishment? "A new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance."²⁷

Such is the ideal, such the possibility. But the question still remains: what is the technique of a world-changing and even Nature-changing Yoga? It cannot take bits of man or society and deal with them in different ways, or deal only with one or some of them, leaving the rest severely alone. And as for the sadhana, there is but one sadhana though with varying intensities of application:

...there is only one sadhana for all parts, not a separate mental sadhana, vital sadhana or physical sadhana - but the action of the sadhana is applied sometimes separately to each part, sometimes on the contrary the action is the mental and vital together, or vital and physical together, or all three together. But it is the same sadhana always.²⁸

Poetic composition, whether one is engaged in writing a haiku, a sonnet, an elegy, an Aeschylean tragedy, a play like Hamlet or Faust, or a stupendous epic like the Mahabharata, poses the same basic problem of paradigmatic expression and effective communication, yet the poetic technique involved cannot be the same everywhere. So too with the older Yogas and Sri Aurobindo's integral and supramental Yoga:

If you take the poem simile, it is the Mahabharata of a Mahabharata that has to be done. And what, compared with the limited Greek perfection, is the technique of the Mahabharata?²⁹

The technique has accordingly to be "multiform, sinuous, patient, all-including as the world itself, and one has to be ready to face unexpected variables and possibilities:

The spiritual life is not a thing that can be formulated in a rigid definition or bound by a fixed mental rule; it is a vast field of evolution, an immense kingdom potentially larger than the other kingdoms below it, with a hundred provinces, a thousand types, stages, forms, paths, variations of the spiritual ideal, degrees of spiritual advancement.³⁰

In The Synthesis of Yoga we see how the essence and methods of the older Yogas are taken up in the inclusive and integral Yoga of Self-Perfection, and hints are also scattered regarding the supramental Yoga. In his letters, Sri Aurobindo went a little further, but even there everything could not be developed "systematically" or schematically, and Sri Aurobindo once confided to a correspondent: "The detail or method of the later stages of the yoga which go into little known or untrodden regions, I have not made public and I do not at present intend to do so."³¹

Although there could be nothing like an altogether "new" Yoga and although some integrality could be claimed for the Gita's Yoga, for some of the Tantra siddhis and for the way of life taught by men of God like Ramanuja and Nanak, it wouldn't be right to minimise the revolutionary newness and integrality of Sri Aurobindo's  

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Yoga. It professedly aims at taking up all sides of the Truth - for example, Veda and Vedanta providing the core of the spiritual philosophy of The Life Divine and of The Synthesis of Yoga, and the Tantric process of the waking up of the Kundalini to pass through the purified centres suggesting the ascending and descending stair of consciousness that is basic to Sri Aurobindo's Yoga - but there is no mechanical joining or dovetailing. With regard to the "newness" of his Yoga, Sri Aurobindo has said:

1. its central aim is the radical change or transformation of life, and "ascent" to the higher consciousness is to be the means of bringing down the power of that consciousness to effect the divinisation of life;

2. its aim is not an individual achievement for the individual's sake, but as preparatory to a larger achievement, comprising all humanity and earth-consciousness;

3. its aim is to bring down the hitherto unrecognised or unmobilised power of supramental consciousness and to make it act directly in human and terrestrial existence;

4. in its method, it is "as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature... not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure".³²

In a field of experience such as the "spiritual" that is apparently so nebulous and so easy to get confused about, it is necessary to avoid entanglement in the coils of self-delusion. To what extent is Yoga "scientific"? Are its processes and experiences controllable, measurable, comparable and repeatable? Sri Aurobindo's answer is guarded and undogmatic, and that is partly the reason why it carries persuasion the more convincingly:

...ultimate truth even on the physical plane seems to recede as Science advances. Science started on the assumption that the ultimate truth must be physical and objective - and the objective Ultimate (or even less than that) would explain all subjective phenomena. Yoga proceeds on the opposite view that the ultimate Truth is spiritual and subjective and it is in that ultimate Light that we must view objective phenomena....

Yoga, however, is scientific to this extent that it proceeds by subjective experiment and bases all its findings on experience; mental intuitions are admitted only as a first step... they must be confirmed by being translated into and justified by experience.... It is a fact that Yogic experience runs everywhere on the same lines. Certainly, there are, not one line, but many; for, admittedly, we are dealing with a many-sided Infinite....³³

Mystics of ancient, medieval and modem times have made similar affirmations about their encounters with Reality, and Hindu, Christian and Islamic ecstatics have borne almost identical witness to the one blissful Existent. Verily intuitions are universal in essence, although our intellectual formulations and interpretations may be different. The experiences of Yoga take place in an inner and not in the outer physical domain, and follow laws and submit to criteria of evaluation

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other than these of the physical sciences. Sri Aurobindo adds:

Just as scientific enquiry passes beyond that of the physical senses and enters the domain of the infinite and infinitesimal about which the senses can say nothing and test nothing - for one cannot see and touch an electron or know by the evidence of the sense-mind whether it exists or not or decide by that evidence whether the earth really turns round the sun and not rather the sun round the earth as our senses and all our physical experience daily tell us - so the spiritual search passes beyond the domain of scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive discrimination which compares the experiences, see what they mean, how far and in what field each is valid, what is the place of each in the whole, how it can be reconciled or related with others that at first might seem to contradict it, etc., etc., until you can move with a secure knowledge in the vast field of spiritual phenomena.³⁴

The practical results of the harnessing of nuclear power may become available to all, but the mathematics, science and technology of nuclear fission and nuclear power-generation can be understood only by savants or super-technicians in the respective fields. Likewise it is only the initiates in spirituality that can properly determine the precise value of particular experiences. This is the reason why Sri Aurobindo had to maintain a continuous correspondence going into the minutest details of spiritual life with his disciples during the first great period of the Ashram's expansion and consolidation (1929-38); and throughout its history Sri Aurobindo or the Mother have been supervising and guiding - directly or indirectly - the inner life of their disciples. In their writings, too, they give abundant evidence of the fact that they were fully acquainted with the latest researches in science and psychology. They had themselves been intellectuals "insistent on practical results more than any Russell can be"; but their own spiritual experiences and realisations - which corroborated one another's - had facilitated the passage across the sea of philosophic doubt and safe landing on the shores of Faith. As Sri Aurobindo wrote to one of his disciples forty years ago:

We know well what is the difference between a subjective experience and a dynamic outward-going and realising Force. So although we have faith, (and who ever did anything great in the world without having faith in his mission or the Truth at work behind him?) we do not found ourselves on faith alone, but on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives. I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane.³⁵  

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V

"Yoga-siddhi," says Sri Aurobindo, "the perfection that comes from the practice of Yoga, can be best attained by the combined working of four great instruments."³⁶ These are śāstra, utsāha, guru and kāla. Śāstra is the body of knowledge - scripture, hymn (stotra), mantra - that helps the progress of the sadhana. But Sri Aurobindo remarks that for the sadhaka of the integral Yoga no written Shastra can be all-sufficient, for even the greatest scripture could have a constricting effect on the free spirit of aspiring man:

The supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every thinking and living being. The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances, becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite.³⁷

And the man who is "enamoured" of the Infinite is also beloved of the Infinite. In fact, the aspirant is already the Infinite in his secret and veiled nature, and Yoga has merely to change this inner fact into an open and conscious and dynamic reality: "All teaching is a revealing, all becoming is an unfolding. Self-attainment is the secret; self-knowledge and an increasing consciousness are the means and the process."³⁸

The supreme Guru or teacher for the sadhaka of integral Yoga is likewise the Master "within us". An external Guru - a messiah like Krishna or Christ or Muhammad - is no doubt helpful in the earlier stages of the Yoga, but the sadhaka should shun sectarianism, he should avoid the egoism and arrogance that cry "My God, my Incarnation, my Prophet, my Guru!" The sadhaka would be wise to see in his ista devatā all other names and forms of the Deity as well, to see in the one supreme Divine all the godheads and their avatāras and manifestations. And while he might gratefully receive whatever is vouchsafed by a human Guru, the sadhak's ultimate dependence should be on the sovereign inner guide alone:

It is he who destroys our darkness by the resplendent light of his knowledge; that light becomes within us the increasing glory of his own self-revelation. He discloses progressively in us his own nature of freedom, bliss, love, power, immortal being.... By the inpouring of his own influence and presence into us he enables the individual being to attain to identity with the universal and transcendent.³⁹

To be able to read the veiled eternal Shastra and to be able to awaken and to hearken to the Jagad-Guru or World-Teacher secret within us, what is needed is utsāha or unswerving aspiration and sustained personal effort; and, of course, kāla, for the auspicious instrumentality of Time must favour us too.

Utsāha or śraddhā or flaming aspiration gives the "decisive turn" that the sadhaka needs to propel his life in a new direction, as when - to cite a classic

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instance - Gautama Siddhartha suddenly decided to leave his wife and son, and go in search of the Truth. There comes a moment when the scales fall, the soap-bubble illusions crash, the pulls of our sheer earth-nature snap, and the sadhaka looks at the phenomenal world with a new understanding and learns to look within finding his way into the mystic cave of his true soul to live from there outward' governing henceforth his outer life by the inner light and force. It is the intensity of this turning, the sureness of the inner opening and the purity and fullness of the inner life that will determine the progress in the sadhana:

The power of aspiration of the heart, the force of the will, the concentration of the mind, the perseverance and determination of the applied energy are the measure of that intensity. The ideal Sadhaka should be able to say in the Biblical phrase, "My zeal for the Lord has eaten me up." It is this zeal for the Lord, utsāha... that devours the ego and breaks up the limitations of its petty and narrow mould for the full and wide reception of that which it seeks, that which, being universal, exceeds and, being transcendent, surpasses even the largest and highest individual self and nature.⁴⁰

The "personal effort" required is described more concretely and with much greater particularity in The Mother which Sri Aurobindo wrote almost immediately after going into retirement in 1926:

The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender, -

an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing - the mind's will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature;

rejection of the movements of the lower nature-rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind, - rejection of the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, - rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, Tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body growing always more divine;

surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the Divine and the Shakti.⁴¹

At first, the Word, the Guru, and even the zeal may apparently have an outside origin; but the external Shastra and Guru only give a start to the catalytic cracking action and kindle the flame within. "The greatest Master," says Sri Aurobindo, "is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him."⁴² In a Yoga that is so unstereotyped and multiform as Sri Aurobindo's, the Word and the Guru - the Guru and his Word - have their essential effective role,

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for without them there may be risk of serious stumbling and grievous error, at least in the crucial earlier stages. For the disciple, then, the Master, his Word, his influence are an insurance of success in the Yoga. But it is equally true that not until Shastra and Guru are unveiled or installed within can the process of Yoga really make headway. Even Time, usually viewed as an impediment, becomes servant and instrument when Shastra, Utsaha and Guru chime to significant purpose and light up the flame of aspiration within.

Sri Aurobindo begins The Mother with this superb seminal statement about the dialectic of the Yoga:

There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.

The call from below, the steady aspiration, the constant striving, the total surrender to the Lord within, the slow ascent of consciousness, all are meant to invite an answering response from above or the sanction and Grace of the Supreme. And between the call and the sanction there is only the Mother, the Shakti with her many powers and personalities - Mother-Wisdom, Mother-Might, Mother-Beauty, Mother-Love, Mother-Perfection - and it is the Mother who mediates between the ego and God, between life in ignorance and division and misery and life in knowledge and harmony and ānanda:

If you desire this transformation, put yourself in the hands of the Mother and her Powers without cavil or resistance and let her do unhindered her work within you....Follow your soul and not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind than leaps at appearances; trust the Divine Power and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of Divine Nature.⁴³

While, in the language of Yoga, the key role is thus given to Shakti or the Divine Mother, in the language of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy a like role is given to the Supermind. It is the coming or the bringing down of the Supermind that is destined to effect the desired total integral transformation of our earth-nature and create the conditions under which the Life Divine can take root and endure. Sri Aurobindo, however, makes it clear that supramental change is only the ultimate. not the next-door, stage; "it must be regarded as the end of a far-off vista".⁴⁴ An arduous journey of self-conquest and self-exceeding and many steps of self-evolution must precede before the goal of supramental change may be sighted. The decisive turn, the triple effort of aspiration, rejection and surrender, the awakening to the veiled psychic entity within, the discovery of its filiations with the psychic selves of all others, the spiritualisation of the being by a descent of the higher powers of Light. Purity, Knowledge, Freedom, Wideness, the destruction of the ego and all separative identifications and formulations - these must precede the call to the Supreme and the descent of the Supermind. What may then happen is for us mere speculation, but for Sri Aurobindo himself, who had grown native to the supramental state, it was something seen, heard, felt, experienced, and this is  

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the reason why his description is so compellingly vivid and carries with it the promise of certain realisation in the not very distant future:

...when we rise from mind to supermind, the new power of consciousness does not reject, but uplifts, enlarges and transfigures the operations of our soul and mind and life....

...The supermind acting through sense feels all as God and in God, all as the manifest touch, sight, hearing, taste, perfume, all as the felt, seen, directly experienced substance and power and energy and movement, play, penetration, vibration, form, nearness, pressure, substantial interchange of the Infinite. Nothing exists independently to its sense, but all is felt as one being and movement and each thing as indivisible from the rest and as having in it all the Infinite, all the Divine....

...the eye gets a new and transfigured vision of things and of the world around us.... There is at the same time a subtle change which makes the sight see in a sort of fourth dimension, the character of which is a certain internally...

...Nothing will be really external to it, for it will experience all in the unity of the cosmic consciousness which will be its own.... It will experience matter, not only gross matter but the subtle and the most subtle, as substance and form of the spirit, experience life and all kinds of energy as the dynamics of the spirit, supramentalised mind as a means or channel of knowledge of the spirit, supermind as the infinite self of knowledge and power of knowledge and Ananda of knowledge of the spirit.⁴⁵

The dream or the ideal is not simply "a healthy mind in a healthy body"; it is a divine life in a divine body.⁴⁶ The spiritual summit and the material base are to come together. This man-changing, world-changing, Nature-changing Yoga aims thus at establishing nothing less than an Earthly Paradise, for not otherwise can the present crisis in evolution be decisively solved. And the Word is given, and Savitri and Satyavan are to be enabled to inaugurate the supramental age:

The incarnate dual Power shall open God's door,

Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.

The superman shall wake in mortal man

And manifest the hidden demi-god...

All then shall change, a magic order come

Overtopping this mechanical universe...

A divine harmony shall be earth's law,

Beauty and Joy remould her way to live:

Even the body shall remember God...⁴⁷  

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