The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

CHAPTER XVII

KARMA YOGA AND ITS INDISPENSABILITY

PART I

THE BASIS OF KARMA YOGA

KARMA YOGA or the yoga of divine works starts from the foundation of a faith or inner perception that the Divine is not only the incommunicable, featureless Absolute with whom one can be united by the abolition of one's individuality and temporal existence, but the omnipresent Reality, the all-creating, all-constituting and all-exceeding eternal Person, at once transcendent, universal and individual, who has to be realised in all His statuses and aspects in a union simultaneously static and dynamic. To be united with Him only in His ineffable transcendence is not an integral union inasmuch as it excludes His universality and individuality. To be united with Him only in His universal play is also a partial realisation, inasmuch as it leaves out His timeless transcendence, and keeps one bound to the cosmic formula and spatial and temporal relations. To be identified with Him everywhere and at all times and beyond all Time, and in all stages and modes of one's being, is the supreme consummation and the highest fulfilment of human life.

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The eternal Witness is also the eternal doer of all actions in the universe. He is the creator, preserver and destroyer of all names and forms. "Karmani varta eva ca,” (I am indeed, occupied with action), says He, though He has no duties devolving upon Him and no obligations to meet. ye is viśvakarmā, the doer of all actions, for. He says that all these worlds would go to pieces if He did not do action, but remained immobile in His inactive silence. His action is to keep the worlds together, to mobilise and marshal the universal energies for the accomplishment of His Will and purpose, and manifest His glory more and more perfectly in every being and creature. In one of its most magnificent chapters, the Gita describes, in words of fire, the Supreme Godhead as the universal Spirit who demands of the human soul a conscious and obedient participation in His world-action. Sri Krishna says to Arjuna before giving him the revealing vision of His universal form: "Thou shalt see my hundreds and thou- sands of divine forms, various in kind, various in shape and hue; thou shalt see the Adityas and the Rudras and the Maruts and the Aswins; thou shalt see many wonders that none has beheld; thou shalt see today the whole world related and unified in my body and whatever else thou wiliest to behold."¹ Sri Krishna then makes His universal Form visible to Arjuna. "It is that of the infinite God- head whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly all

¹ Essays on the Gita by Sri Aurobindo.

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the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world- wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with number less divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees Him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands the tremendous vision. 'I see,' he cries, 'all the gods in Thy body, O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creating lord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divine Serpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces, I see Thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not Thy end nor Thy middle nor Thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form universal. I see Thee crowned and with Thy mace and Thy discus, hard to discern, because Thou art a luminous mass of energy on all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright, fire-bright Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know. Thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, Thou art the imperishable guardian

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of the eternal laws. Thou art the sempiternal soul of existence."¹

It is this supreme Person, Purusottama, who is the object of the love and devotion of the Karmayogi,—Purusottama, who is at once transcendent and immanent, one and many, the eternal Formless and the assumer of all cosmic forms. He is the Absolute, the Indefinable and the Unknowable, of whom the Upanishads speak as "ātmapratyayasāram, śāntam, śivam, adwaitam” ², and at the same time "viśwarūpam, bhavabhūtam” ³ The Karmayogi bases his life and all its movements upon this vision of the integrality of the Supreme, and refuses to twist away from the harsher, sterner and fiercer aspects of Him, in order to take refuge in the fathomless peace and silence of His ineffable transcendence, or the love and bliss and beauty of His spiritual Presence. He seeks union with Him in the multitudinous delight and labours of His universal movement as well as in the peace and tranquility of His supracosmic silence. He aspires to be His playmate in this mysterious and marvellous world-game, and an obedient and efficient collaborator in the working out of His Will and purpose in it. He seeks an integral realisation, an integral union, an integral perfection and fulfilment, and has no exclusive predilection for either peace or power or knowledge or

¹ Essays on the Gita, by Sri Aurobindo.

² Immersed in essential Self-awareness, the Calm, the Good, the One without a second.

³ Universal in form, self-created in the becoming.

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bliss. The all-embracing, all pervading Divine is his goal, and he advances towards it with an aspiration and effort characterise by an increasing inclusiveness and synthesis. For him all is He, Truth and its temporal perversion, falsehood; light and its diminished vibration, darkness; Bliss and its writhing distortion, suffering. An immeasurable hunger for the Supreme consumes all preferences of his mind and heart and imposes a discipline on each part of his being, so that, purified and illuminated, each may seek Him alone, and no objects of its egoistic affections, and express Him alone in itself and its movements. He feels and perceives that his whole being belongs to God, and that it is his whole being he has to offer Him, and not only his naked soul or his mind or heart, and that this offering, this joyous sacrifice, is the only means of his ascent to his essential infinity and immortality, and his real, constant, dynamic union with the One and his unity with all existence. And he resolves to offer not only his whole being, but his whole becoming,—not only all that he is, but also all that he is destined to be. He makes the Divine the very reason of his existence, the source and support of all his striving, and the eternal repose of his consciousness and being. This offering of the becoming marks the real Karmayogi, for he is a seeker not only of liberation, but of perfection and fulfilment—a manifold, full-orbed, rainbow-rich splendour of perfection and fulfilment here, in his earthly life. He does not regard the world as a snare or an illusion, or only a place of trial and training,

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but as a rich field for the harvesting of the highest beatitudes of the divine union and the sublimest glories of the divine manifestation. It is true that life wears at first the aspect of a battlefield; but it does not daunt the Karmayogi; on the contrary, it affords him an occasion for adventure, for staking his all for God's victory in the world of division and darkness. He is born as God's warrior to fight God's battle and establish God's opulent kingdom here,¹ and not to fly away from the grim realities of life and its complex and baffling problems. Envisaging God as the doer of all works as well as the eternal non-doer, he aspires, by an active surrender of his whole being, to climb to the integral divinity of this double poise, and live in the world as a radiant channel of God's transforming Force.

This all-embracing and all-exceeding truth of the omnipresent Reality and Life and Nature having been once accepted as the foundation of Karmayoga, a question naturally arises from the confused mass of spiritual traditions of the past as to how one can become a luminous channel of the divine Light and Force so long as one lives in the world of dualities and in the Nature of the three gunas. The Gita replies to this question with its gospel of life in the Divine, "nivasiśyasi mayyeva,” and the ancient truth of the two Natures, higher and lower, parā and aparā. An accomplished Karmayogi lives, not the normal human life of desire and attachment,

¹ dharmakshetre kwukshetre

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but the divine life of unity and creative harmony in the immortal consciousness of the Infinite, though he apparently moves and works like others in the world; and he does not live in the lower nature of the fettering qualities, but in the inalienable freedom and purity of the parā prakrti, of which the lower Nature is only a darkened derivative. The Gita stops short only at a sparkling hint of the Divine Life and the transcendence of the gunas, but Sri Aurobindo takes up this hint and elaborates it into a glowing evangel of the Divine Life created by the transfiguring and revealing dynamism of the parā prakrti, the supreme Divine Nature, the Mother. The soul of man in its evolution inevitably passes through the lower Nature of the three guṇas, but when it is liberated, it does not shuffle off all Nature and retire into its immutable unembodied essence, but, seated securely in the higher, converts and perfects his lower Nature of mind, life and body, and, manifesting God's glory through this transformed triple instrument, enjoys immortality here, even on this earth.¹ And it is only after liberation that he can really and effectively fulfil the self-law of his essential Nature, swabhāva and swadharma. If liberation meant a disappearance from the field of life, which is a field of self-expression and divine manifestation, thea the self-nature of the soul would find no opportunity for self-unfoldment, but would be condemned to eternal sterility. swabhāva and swadharma rendered nugatory,

¹ avidyayā mṛtyum tīrtwā

vidyayāmrtamaśnute

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life discredited and discouraged, and the world spume a nightmare, the soul would be left with the single alternative of a precipitate retreat, if it were awakened enough to find itself choking in the darkness of its material tenement. That cannot evidently be the intention of god in the world and the denouement of the soul's long and difficult evolution in it. The Gitâ does not countenance this intolerant escapism, and the Veda and the Upanishads declare against it, and affirm in organ tones the reality of life, its teleological significance, and the spiritual necessity and efficacy of its works. In the Isho panishad it is definitely stated that those who follow exclusively after the Knowledge of the One (vidyā) enter into a greater darkness than those who pursue the life of Ignorance (avidā). For, an exclusive pursuit of the One means, in fact, a disregard or ignoring of the same One in the Many; and, therefore, the realisation of the Transcendent One to the exclusion of the universal Many or the One in the Many, is, indeed, a partial realisation, which the Upanishad characterises as a greater darkness, because once the soul has merged in the Transcendent One, it is lost for ever to the Truth of the divine immanence in the world and His Will to universal self expression. The Karmayoga of the Gitâ is founded on the basis of the unity of all existence, and Sri Aurobindo gives it the largest possible extension, both in theory and practice, in order that it may eventually move untrammelled in the infinite rhythms of the supramental" Force. Holding up before humanity the sublime ideal of an

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integrated realisation of all the three kinds of liberation sāyujya, sāmīpya and sārūpya or sādharmya,¹ Sri Aurobindo attaches a very great importance to Karmayoga; for, without it the realisation of sādharmya or sārupya would not be possible. To have the same nature as the Divine's, it is imperative that one should rise from this ignorant and stumbling nature of the three gunas into the supramental nature; and it is Karmayoga alone that can be the ladder of this dynamic ascent. Cessation or diminution of Karmayoga will lead to an arrest of the divine dynamism, and, therefore, of the ascent into sādharmya.

Again, by liberation Sri Aurobindo means not only the freedom of the soul or the purusa from the meshes of Nature, but the emancipation of Nature herself from her own lower formulation of the three gunas into the illimitable freedom of her creative Consciousness-Force. This release and transmutation of Nature demand an uninterrupted Karmayoga, a free exercise of all the parts and elements of the human nature in a growing spirit of dedicated service and in the emergent light of spiritual knowledge. Not escape from Nature, but a sovereign possession and joyous utilisation and enjoyment of a divinised Nature, is the great objective of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo; and it is indispensable for man's perfection and fulfilment on earth through an integral

¹sāyujya means liberation into an absorbed union with the Divine, sāmīpya into a blissful nearness of the Divine, and sārupya or sādharmya into the infinite and luminous Supernature of the Divine.

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union with the Divine. The Integral Yoga aims at union with the Divine not only in His Consciousness but also in His Nature.

There is another conception of Karmayoga which regards works only as a means of psychological purification, cittaśuddhi, and sees no further spiritual utility in it. When the purification is achieved, works are either rigorously clipped and curtailed, or made to flow only through philanthropic or altruistic channels. They feed and represent the sāttwic elements of the nature of the spiritual seeker, and only indirectly and rather dimly reflect his spiritual realisations. According to this conception, too much action distracts the spiritual aspirant, and had better be reduced to its bare minimum, indispensable for the maintenance of his body and his contact with the world. The motor springs of energy, physical and vital, are thus left to starve and atrophy in the heat and stress of an exclusive concentration on the peace and silence of the Immutable.

The philosophy underlying this conception is a life- chilling philosophy of negation which denies reality to the world and its evolutionary labour, and tolerates action only as a preliminary means of purification, to be abandoned as soon as its utility is over. It flies right in the ' face of the comprehensive outlook of the Veda, the Upanishads¹ and the Gita in splitting existence into two:

¹ Sarvam khalvidam brahma (All this world is verily the Brahman), brahmaivedam viśwamidam varistham (All this universe is verily the Supreme Brahman).

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Reality and Illusion. While the ancient wisdom declares that "the world is nothing but Brahman," that "the One Atman, who dwells in the hearts of all beings, has assumed all these multiple forms", and that "all these creatures have the one Existent as their source, the one Existent as their structure, and the one Existent as their foundation", this dialectical pseudo monism tortures and juggles with the scriptural texts to uphold its theory of the unreality of the world, the unsubstantiality of life, and the eventual futility of all action. Against the magnificent vision, recorded in the Gitâ, of "a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from in- numerable mouths...robed in heavenly raiment of deity", it opens up a dismal panorama of mirages and nightmares and delusions and snares, and beckons to the soul of man to free itself and flee, as fast as it can, to a heaven of peace and silence beyond.¹ It breeds in the common run of men a sick world-weariness, a self-justifying indolence, or a morbid asceticism, and corrodes and saps their vitality. If ideas and thoughts have any moulding force, those of this school of philosophy have had the most blighting and enervating effect upon the national life of India, and are to a great measure responsible for the later decline of her culture and the paralysis of her creative endeavours.

The Integral Yoga has nothing to do with this ascetic conception of Karma. It knows that "works are only

¹ Māyāmayamidam nikhilam hitwa brahmapadam praviśāśu viditwā

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outward and distracting when we have not found oneness of will and consciousness with the Supreme. When once that is found, works become the very power of knowledge and the very outpouring of love. If knowledge is the very state of oneness and the love its bliss, divine works are the living power of its light and sweet- ness." Recognising, adoring and seeking union with the Transcendent and universal Master of all works, it regards Karmayoga as an indispensable part of itself, and the most effective medium of manifesting God's Power and greatness upon earth. It knows also that knowledge, exclusively pursued, may lead to an immersion in the motionless Self, away from the creative movement of the universal Spirit, that love and devotion, in their unilateral intensity, may lead to the absorbed ecstasy of the All-Beautiful in the secret chamber of the human heart, impervious to the vibrations of the outer world; but that Karmayoga cannot proceed except at least on an initial basis of incipient knowledge and developing love, and that it cannot progress except through the widening illumination of knowledge and the thrilled longing of love—the very spirit of it is one of harmonisation of the various strands of our being, and antithetical to all exclusiveness. "All works culminate in knowledge," says Sri Krishna, and, one might add, also in exalting and unifying love. The works of a yogi well out of an increasing knowledge and a flaming love—they are radiant and rapturous pulses of power. How can one offer all one's action to the Divine unless one has some perception

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and knowledge of the reality of His existence, and a moved feeling of love and devotion for Him? Karmayoga thus reconciles knowledge and love in itself, and gives the amplest scope to every part of our being and every energy and faculty of our nature for the highest perfection and fulfilment in life.

It is this immense base of the unity of all existence and the unifying vision of the great universal labour upon which Karmayoga stands in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and bids fair to open up a new chapter of spiritual synthesis in the cultural history of humanity.

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