Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

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SRI Aurobindo's Yoga, it has been said, begins where other yogas end. Other yogas end by the attainment of the Brahman or some form or mode of it or something akin to it, which means the transcendent Reality, the supreme status of the Spirit beyond name and form, beyond all particular manifestation. It is the final realisation of the soul in its upward ascent, the nee plus ultra. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga takes that poise for granted and upon it bases its own development and structure. In other words, it works for the descent of the Spirit upon the level from which the Spirit worked up. The Mystery of the descent is the whole characteristic secret of this Yoga.

The general idea of a descent of the Spirit, that is to say, the Divine, the conception of avatāra and avatarana is, of course, not new. But here there is a difference. Avatara or Avatarana in the older disciplines was more or less an intervention of God as God, the working of a Force come specifically in the midst of the world circumstances, maintaining still its divine transcendental character, to work out a given problem, accomplish a special mission and then, when the work is done, retire to its own status. It is, as it were, a weapon of flame and light hurled into the earthly fray – even like the discus of Vishnu – and having accomplished its mission, going back into the hand of the thrower, its fount and origin. The task of the Avatara was usually bhūbhāra-haralJa, lightening earth's load: it means removing the sinful and preserving the virtuous, re-establishing the reign of Law. Esoterically, he also embodied the Way to spiritual fulfilment. There was no

 

question of saving humanity – it was more serving than saving – by transfiguring it, giving it a new body and life and mind, nor was there any idea of raising the level of earth-consciousness.

The Divine acts in three different ways in his three well-known aspects. As the transcendent Reality he is above and beyond creation, he is the U nmanifest, although he may hold within either involved or dissolved the entire manifestation. Next, he is the manifestation, the cosmic or the universal; he is one with creation, immanent in it, still its master and lord. Finally, he has an individual aspect: he is a Person with whom human b.eings can enter into relations of love and service. The Divine incarnate as a human being, is a special manifestation of the Individual Divine. Even then, as an embodied earthly person, he may act in a way characteristic of any of the three aspects. The Divine descended upon earth, as viewed by Sri Aurobindo, does not come in his transscendental aspect, fundamentally aloof and away, in his absolute power and consciousness, working miracles here; for transcendence can do nothing but that in the midst of conditions left as they are. Nor does he manifest himself only as his cosmic power and consciousness, imbedded in the creation and all-pervading, exercising his influence through the pressure of Universal Law, perhaps in a concentrated form, still working gradually, step by step, as though through a logical process, for the maintenance of the natural order and harmony, lokasamgraha. God can be more than that, individualised in a special, even a human sense. His individual being can and does hold within itself his cosmic and transcendental self covertly in a way but overtly too in a singular manner at the same time. The humanised personality of the Divine with his special role and function is at the very centre of Sri Aurobindo's solution of the world enigma. The little poem A God's Labour in its short compass outlines and explains beautifully the grand Mystery.

The usual idea of God (as the theists hold, for example) is that he is an infinite eternal impassible being, aloof from human toils and earthly turmoils, himself untouched by these and yet, in and through them, directing the world for an inscrutable purpose, unless it is for leaning towards it and stretching out the hand of Grace to those of the mortals

 

who wish to come out of the nightmare of life, sever the coils of earthly existence. But the Divine in order to be and remain divine need not hold to his seat above and outside the creation, severely separated from his creatures. He can, on the contrary, become truly the ordinary man and labour as all others, yet maintaining his divinity and being conscious of it. After all, is not man, every human being, built in the same pattern, a composite of the earthly human element supported and infused by a secret divine element? However, God, the individual Divine, does become man, one of them and one with them. Only, his labour thereby increases manifold, hard and heavy, although for that very reason full of a bright rich multiple promise. The Divine's self-hurilanisation has for it a double purpose: (I) to show man by example how he can become what he truly is, how he can divinise himself: the Divine as man lives out the life of a sadhaka wholly and completely; (2) to help concretely by his own force of consciousness the world and man in their endeavour for progress and evolution, to give the help wholly and completely from the innermost status of the self down to the most external physical body and the material field. This help again is a twofold function. The first is to make available, gather within easy reach, the high realisations, the spiritual treasures that are normally stored in a heaven somewhere else. The Divine Man brings down the divine attributes close to our earth, turns them from mere far possibilities into near probabilities, even imminent realities. They are made part and parcel, constituent elements of the earthly atmosphere, so that one has only to open one's mouth to breathe in, extend one's arms to seize and possess them: even to this opening and this gesture man is helped by the concrete touch and presence of the Divine. Further, the help and succour come in another way which is more intimate, more living and appealing to man.

A great mystery of existence, its central rub is the presence of Evil. All spiritual, generally all human endeavour has to face and answer this Sphinx. As he answers, so will be his fate. He cannot rise up even if he wishes, earth cannot progress even when there is the occasion, because of this besetting obstacle. It has many names and many forms. It is

 

Sin or Satan in Christianity; Buddhism calls it Mara. In India it is generally known as Maya. Grief and sorrow, weakness and want, disease and death are its external and ubiquitous forms. It is a force of gravitation, as graphically named by a modern Christian mystic, that pulls man down, fixes him upon earth with its iron law of mortality, never allowing him to mount high and soar in the spiritual heavens. It has also been called the Wheel of Karma or the cycle of Ignorance. And the aim of all spiritual seekers has been to rise out of it – some-how, by force of tapasyā, energy of concentrated will or divine Grace – go through or by-pass and escape into the Beyond. This is the path of ascent I referred to at the outset. In this view it is taken for granted that this creation is transient and empty of happiness – anityam asukham (Gita) – it is anatta, empty of self or consciousness (Buddha) and it will be always so. The only way to deal with it, the way of the wise, is to discard it and pass over.

Sri Aurobindo's view is different. He says Evil can be and has to be conquered here itself, here upon this earth and in this body-the ancients also said, ihaiva tairjitah, they have con. quered even here, prākśariravimoksanāt, before leaving the body. You have to face Evil full-square and conquer it, conquer it not in the sense that you simply rise above it so that it no longer touches you, but that you remain where you are in the very field of Evil and drive it out from there completely, erase and annihilate it where it was reigning supreme. Hence God has to come down from his heaven and dwell here upon earth and among men and in the conditions of mortality, show thus by his living and labour that this earthly earth can be trans­formed into a heavenly earth and this human body into a "body divine".

Matter or the physical body is not by itself the centre of gravity of the human consciousness; it is not that that pins the soul or the self to the life of pain and misery and incapacity and death. Matter is not the Evil, nor made up of Evil; it contains or harbours evil under the present circumstances, even as dross is mixed up, inextricably as it appears, with the noble metal in the natural ore; but the dross can be eradicated and the free metal brought out, pure- and noble in its own true nature. It is, as Rumi, the Persian mystic, says in his famous

 

 

imagery, like a piece of iron, dull and dismal to look at, but when put into fire slowly acquires the quality of fire, turning into a glowing and radiant beauty, yet maintaining its original form and individuality and concrete, even material reality. Now, the crust or dross that has to be eliminated in Matter is called by Sri Aurobindo "Inconscience". Matter is inconscient, therefore it is unconscioas and ignorant. Make it conscious, it will be radiant and full of knowledge. That is the great transformation needed, the only way to true and total reformation. The Divine descends into Matter precisely to work out that transformation.

It is a long dredging process, tedious and arduous, requiring the utmost patience and perseverance, even to the absolvte degree. For Inconscience, in essence, although a contingent reality, local and temporal, and therefore transient, is nonetheless the hardest, most obdurate and resistant reality: it lies thick and heavy upon the human vehicle. It is massed layer upon layer. Its first formation in the higher altitudes of the mind is perhaps like a thin fluid deposit; it begins as an

individualised separative consciousness stressing more and more its exclusiveness. Through the lower ranges of the mind and the vitality it crystallises and condenses gradually; in the worlds of thinking and feeling, enjoying and dynamic activity, it has still a malleable and mixed consIstency, but when it reaches and possesses the physical being, it becomes the impervious solid obscurity that Matter presents.

The root of the Cosmic Evil is in Matter. From there it shoots up and overshadows the upper layers of our being and consciousness. Even if the mind is cleaned, the vital cleared, still if the physical consciousness is not sufficiently probed into, purified and reclaimed, then nothing permanent is done, one would build upon sand. All efforts, spiritual or other, at the regeneration and reformation of mankind and a good many individual endeavours too have come to a sorry end, because the foundation was not laid sufficiently deep and secure. One must dig into Matter as far down as possible – like Rishi Agastya in the Veda – even to the other end. For there is another mystery there, perhaps the Mystery of mysteries. The deeper you go down into Matter, as you clear up the jungle and bring in the higher light, you discover and unlock strange

 

 

and mighty energies of consciousness secreted there, even like the uranium pile in the atomic world. It is revealed to you that Inconscience is not total absence of consciousness, it is simply consciousness asleep, in-gathered, entranced. And this nether consciousness is, after all, one with the supreme Consciousness. It is itself the best weapon to bring about its own transformation. Not only the higher self, but the lower self too must be salvaged and saved by its own self – ātmanā ātmānam uddharet.

 

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The Divine brings down with himself his shaft of light, and the light, as it spreads, begins to scatter and dissolve the clouds of ignorance. The Divine comes here below and as he formulates and concentrates his consciousness in or as an individualised channel, the power of the consciousness becomes dynamic and concrete and works out the desired change in th_ material plane. In the descent the Divine has to assume the lower potentials on the inferior levels and this involves an apparent veiling and lessening of his higher and divine degrees. In other words, the Divine in becoming human accepts and embraces in that embodiment all that humanity normally means, its weaknesses and frailties, its obstacles and difficulties, all the ignorance and inconscience. This sacrifice he has agreed to, has undertaken in order to create out of it a golden body, a radiant matter, a heavenly or divinised earth.

God made man, the spirit become flesh: this is Grace, the benediction of the Holy One upon the sinful earth. The working of Grace in one of its characteristic movements has been beautifully envisaged in esoteric Christianity. The burden of sin-that is to say, of weakness, impurity and ignorance – lies so heavy upon man, the force of gravitation is so absolute, that it is divine intervention alone, and in the most physical sense, which can save him. God takes upon himself man's load and relieves him of it: thus freed he can soar up easily and join the company of the Happy in heaven alongside God. This is the ransom paid by God to His Enemy, the vicarious atonement suffered by the Divine, the cross he has to bear when he comes

 

upon this earth, into this vale of tears. I t is said, in terms of human feeling, pity so moved him that he left the happy abode of heaven, came down among men and lived like one of them, sharing their sorrow and pain and, what is divine, taking up the evil into himself, drinking, as it were, out of the poisoned bowl, so that man, frail mortal creature, may escape his doom.

This way too, as all other ways, has indeed been the way of escape. God came down in order to take away some men with him. They were the blessed ones, but the normal humanity remains as it is, as it has been, on the whole. The few that pass beyond do not seem to leave any trace here below. There was no regeneration of mankind, no reformation of earthly life.

Sri Aurobindo aims at a power of consciousness, a formulation of the divine being that is integral. It takes up the whole man and it embraces all men: it works on a cosmic scale individually and collectively. That force of consciousness identifies itself with each and every individual being in all its parts and limbs; establishing itself in and working through their normal and habitual functionings, it moulds and refashions the earthly vessel. It is a global power, first of all, because it is the supreme creative Power, the original energy of consciousness that brought out this manifested universe, the matrix or the nodus that holds together and in an inviolable unity and harmony the fundamental truth-aspects of the' one and indivisible Reality. This luminous source and substance of all created things consists of their basic true truths which assume disguised and deformed appearances under the present conditions of the world. It is therefore, in the second instance, the secret power in created things which manifests in them as the evolutionary urge, which drives them to rediscover their reality and re-form the appearance as the direct expression and embodiment of this inner soul.

The Divine incarnates, as an individual in the concrete material actuality, this double aspect of the utter truth and reality. There are, what may be called, intermediary incarnations, some representing powers – aspects of the Divine – in the higher mental or overmen tal levels of consciousness, others those of the inner heart, yet others again those of the dynamic vital consciowmess. But the integral Divine, he who unites and reconciles in his body the highest height and the lowest

 

depth, who has effectuated in him something like the "marriage of Heaven and Hell" is an event of the future-even perhaps of the immediate future. The descent into hell is an image that has been made very familiar to man, but all its implications have not been sounded. For what we were made familiar with was more or less an image of hell, not hell itself, a region or experience in the vital (may be even in the mental): real hell is not the mass of desires or weaknesses of the flesh, not "living flesh", but dead Matter whose other name is Inconscience. In the older disciplines the central or key truth, the heart of reality where the higher and the lower – Brahman and Maya, the Absolute and the Contingency, the One and the Many, God and the World – met and united in harmony was bypassed: one shot from below right into the supreme Absolute; the matrix of truth-creation was ignored. Even so, at the other end, the reality of brute matter was not given sufficient weight, the spiritual light disdained to reach it (vijigupsate).

The integral Divine not merely suffers (as in the Christian tradition) a body material, He accepts it in his supernal delight, for it is his own being and substance: it is He in essence and it will become He in actuality. When he comes into the world, it is not as though it were a foreign country; he comes to his own, – only he seeks to rebuild it on another scale, the scale of unity and infinity, instead of the present scale ofseparativism and finiteness. He comes among men not simply because he is' moved by human miseries; he is no extra-terrestrial person, a bigger human being, but is himself this earth, this world, all these miseries; he is woven into the fabric of the universe, he is the warp and woof that constitute creation. It is not a mere movement of sympathy or benevolence that actuates him, it is a total and absolute identification that is the ground and motive of his activity. When he assumes the frame of mortality, it is not that something outside and totally incongruous is entering into him, it is part and parcel of himself, it is himself in one of his functions and phases. Consequently, his work in and upon the material world and life may be viewed as that of self-purification and self-illumination, self-discipline and self­realisation. Also, the horrors of material existence, being part of the cosmic play and portion of his infinity, naturally find shelter in the individual divine incarnation, are encompassed

 

in his human embodiment. It is the energy of his own consciousness that brought out or developed even this erring earth from within it: that same energy is now available, stored up in the individual formation, for the recreation of that earth. The advent and acceptance of material existence meant, as a kind of necessity in a given scheme of divine manifestation, the appearance and play of Evil, the negation of the very divinity. Absolute Consciousness brought forth absolute unconsciousness – the inconscient – because of its own self-pressure, a play of an increasingly exclusive concentration and rigid objectivisa­don. That same consciousness repeats its story in the individual incarnation: it plunges into the material life and matter and identifiesltselfwith Evil. But it is then like a pressed or tightened spring; it works at its highest potential. In other words, the Divine in the body now works to divinise the body itself, to make of the negation a concrete affirmation. The inconscient will be embodied consciousness.

The humanist said, 'INothing human I reckon foreign to me," In a deeper and more absolute sense the divine Mystic of the integral Yoga says the same. He is indeed humanity incarnate, the whole mankind condensed and epitomised in his single body. Mankind as imbedded in ignorance and inconscience, the conscious soul lost in the dark depths of dead matter, is he and his whole labour consists in working in and through that obscure "gravitational" mass, to evoke and bring down the totality of the superconscient force, the creative delight which he is essentially in his inmost and topmost being. The labour within himself is conterminous with the cosmic labour, and the change effected in his being and nature means a parallel change in the world outside, at least a ready possibility of the change. All the pains and weaknesses normal humanity suffers from, the heritage of an inconscient earthly existence, the Divine takes into his incarnated body-all and more and to the highest degree-into a crucible as it were, and works out there the alchemy. The natural man individually shares a1so each other's burden in some way, for all are interconnected in life-action at one point has a reaction at all other points: only the sharing is done unconsciously and is suffered or imposed than accepted and it tends to be at a minimum. An ordinary mortal would break under a greater pressure. It

 

is the Avatar who comes forward and carries on his shoulders the entire burden of earthly inconscience.

Suffering, incapacity and death are, it is said, the wages of earthly life; but they are, in fact, reverse aspects of divine truths. Whatever is here below has its divine counterpart above. What appears as matter, inertia, static existence here below is the devolution of pure Existence, Being or Substance up there. Life-force, vital dynamism here is the energy of Consciousness there. The pleasure of the heart and emotions and enjoyment is divine Delight. Finally, our mind with its half-lighted thinking power, its groping after knowledge has at its back the plenary light of the Supermind. So the aim is not to reject or withdraw from the material, vital and mental existence upon the earth and in this body, but house in them, make them concrete vehicles, expressions and embodiments of what they really are.

Pain and suffering, disease and incapacity, even age and death are fortuitous auxiliaries; they have come upon us simply because of the small and partial scale of our life to which we agreed. One can live here below, live a full life, upon a larger scale, upon the scale of infinity and eternity. That need not dissolve body and life and mind, the triple ranges that make up our earthly existence. In brief, man himself is not truly man, he is the reverse aspect of God; and when he becomes divine and remains not merely human, he but realises what he is truly and integrally himself.

 

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