Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

40

The Traveller

To be sure Sri Aurobindo never did anything haphazardly. He had a programme all chalked out which he was following.

When Sarala Devi Chowdhurani, Tagore's niece, and Sri Aurobindo's fellow worker of the revolutionary days, came to meet him towards the end of 1920, Sri Aurobindo hinted as much. "As for myself, I have a personal programme," he told her.

He was more forthcoming in 1923. It was his fifty-first birthday, and the dozen or so assembled disciples wanted to know the actual state of his sadhana. In the middle of the talk Sri Aurobindo let fall that he was "following a certain programme that was laid down for me when I came down to Pondicherry."

Who else but the Divine Guide would do that? That is what Sri Aurobindo said when he expressly stated that there were many things beyond the realization of the Self. "The Divine Guide within urged me to proceed, adding experience after experience, reaching higher and higher, stopping at none as the final, till I arrived at the Supermind. There I found the Truth indivisible and there everything takes its proper place."

When actually did Sri Aurobindo get the idea of the Supermind? Because at first he "did not know about the planes."

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It was Vivekananda who "showed me the Intuitive Plane" during his meditation in Alipore Jail. "Then afterwards I began to see the still higher planes." Sri Aurobindo said, "I myself got the idea of the Supramental after ten years of Sadhana. The Supramental does not come in the beginning but at the end of Sadhana."

Nolini, for his part, told us that it was when they were living in Sundar Chetty's house that Sri Aurobindo began to widen their knowledge from the purely educative exercises he had so far pursued with them. "His first 'instruction' was about the seven Worlds," Nolini said. "Sat, Chit and Ananda above; mind, life and body below; and the Supermind linking them up." The Supermind plane stands between the upper hemisphere—Sat, Chit and Ananda—and the lower hemisphere— life, mind and body.

Nolini specified that "this was later elaborated in The Divine Plan."^] There one finds also the description of Super mind's three layers and its suns. Sri Aurobindo called the highest layer the Imperative Supermind. 'Imperative' because nothing could stand against it: "It is knowledge fulfilling itself by its own inherent power."

In 1923 Sri Aurobindo satisfied the curiosity of the assembled disciples who queried about the work he was then doing. "I am," he replied, "at present engaged in bringing down the Supramental into the physical consciousness, down even to the sub-material."

How did he feel? "One feels as if 'digging the earth,' as the Veda says. It is literally digging from the Supermind above

¹ Cent, ed., vol.17, pp. 28 to 32.

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to Supermind below.... It is this birth after birth on every plane that makes the process complex."

Why did Sri Aurobindo want to bring down the Supramental in our earth-nature? Because this world of matter, he explained, has been for ages the bulwark of darkness, falsehood's most redoubtable citadel where, up to now, inertia has reigned supreme. In 1924, he told Dilip, "Suffice it to say that I want to invoke here on earth the light of a higher world, to manifest a new power which will continue to exist as a new influence in the physical world and will be a direct manifestation of the Divine in our entire being and daily life."¹

Even to arrive at those planes of the Supermind, Sri Aurobindo had to, first of all, traverse the maze of continents that lay in between. Like any rational person Sri Aurobindo did not believe that man was confined to the physical body alone. Actually there are many planes and parts that go into the making of a human being. These planes were fairly well known to the travellers of the inner worlds. India at least never lacked adventurers of the Spirit. Like scouts they marched into uncharted territories, seeking adventure of consciousness, and returned with news of what was there. But with time much was forgotten; weeds grew obliterating the paths; even in India the old knowledge of the Upanishads was almost lost. What to say of the Vedas. Besides, I dare say, nobody before Sri Aurobindo had taken pains to document these worlds so systematically and in such detail. You have but to read his Savitri to check the veracity of my statement.

¹ Among the Great, 221, 226.

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Another important point to note is that "the old Yogins when they went above the spiritual mind passed into Samadhi, which means that they made no attempt to be conscious in these higher planes...." But Sri Aurobindo always kept his eyes wide open. He mapped for us the geography of the planes he traversed. At first, going upwards, he found well-beaten tracks. Then as he crisscrossed the territories the explorer found the crossways and paths made by previous travellers. Some were less travelled, and some were overgrown with weeds, lost among brambly bushes. He even ventured out to the unknown wilderness and met its fearsome denizens.

"The hounds of darkness growled with jaws agape, And trolls and gnomes and goblins scowled and stared"¹

To his surprise he found that "In all the series of the planes or grades of consciousness there is nowhere any real gulf, always there are connecting gradations and one can ascend from step to step." This gradation of planes—worlds in themselves—is a great connected complex movement. This was one of the important discoveries he made as the Divine Guide within urged him on.

"The interpenetration of the planes," Sri Aurobindo wrote on 14 January 1934, "is indeed for me a capital and fundamental part of spiritual experience without which Yoga as I practice it and its aims could not exist. For that aim is to manifest, reach or embody a higher consciousness upon earth and not to get away from earth into a higher world or some supreme Absolute.... But the fundamental proposition in this matter was proclaimed

¹ Savitri, VII, 3.

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very definitely in the Upanishads which went so far as to say that Earth is the foundation and all the worlds are on the earth and to imagine a clean-cut or irreconcilable difference between them is ignorance; here and not elsewhere, not by going to some other world, the divine realisation must come."¹ Then added, "This statement was used to justify a purely individual realisation, but it can equally be the basis of a wider endeavour."

His was an unbelievably 'wider endeavour.' Why do I say that? Because Sri Aurobindo could very well see that though Bringers of Light, Bringers of Knowledge, Bringers of Compassion, so many Bringers had come one after another, come from age to age, yet it was still ignorance and suffering and cruelty that had the material world in their firm grip. Nothing much had changed in the physical life. The human mass go on preferring darkness to light, ignorance to knowledge, falsehood to truth. Life and matter were constantly preyed upon by the nasty undivine forces, as they had always been. Why? What happened? "It is the vital mixture—" Sri Aurobindo explained, "the mixture of the life-forces—that comes in and corrupts the whole spiritual movement." And leaves our life and body ignorant, imperfect, impotent as before.

That is why Sri Aurobindo resolved to replace the reign of corrupting Falsehood by a Truth-creation. That is where the Supermind came in. That New Power does not admit of any mixture. It makes no compromise with the lower forces, with

¹ From Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Kena Upanishad (II, 5): "It is here, ihaiva, in this mortal life and body that immortality must be won.... 'If here one find it not, great is the perdition.' "

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the powers of Falsehood. "By the Truth-Consciousness," he specified, "I mean a dynamic divine Consciousness. This Power must govern even the minutest detail of the life and action of man. The question is to bring it down and establish it on earth and keep it pure. For, there is a gravitational pull downwards. So the spiritual power must be such that it can not only resist but overcome that pull." He was speaking on 18 January 1939. And he threw a challenge. "This is the solution I propose. It is a spiritual solution that aims at changing the whole basis of human nature. But," he cautioned, "it is not a question of a moment or a few years. There can be no real solution unless you establish spirituality as the whole basis of life."

In point of fact the 'spiritual solution' Sri Aurobindo proposed was a rapid evolutionary process compressed into a few years. Nature, in the process of evolution, takes millions and millions of years to effect a little change in matter. As for humanity, it "is moving itself. The only difficulty is that it has a tendency to come back to its starting point again and again!" Sri Aurobindo once said ironically.

That ours is a plane of evolution was freely accepted by the pro-Evolutionist. "In my explanation of the universe I have put forward this cardinal fact of a spiritual evolution as the meaning of our existence here." Of course, by 'evolution' Sri Aurobindo meant an evolution of Consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and "only outwardly an evolution of species." Sri Aurobindo could not see logically why the Consciousness which emerges out of Matter to fashion life, give form to animal, to man, should stop with the last and not become something more than mere man.

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Now, why did Sri Aurobindo say that it felt like 'digging the earth' if indeed the ancient Yogis had prepared the field? The fact of the matter is that their aim in general was to attain the Supermind and escape through the door of the Sun. It is true that many Yogis, after the attainment of Self, had taken pity on the suffering humanity, and had returned to heal the wounds of men and women; only their action was limited. It is also true that no one had really attempted to change the very basis of life. Sri Aurobindo, on the contrary, wanted to bring down all gains to the plane of the ordinary consciousness. "The complete change down to the physical was only sought for by a few and then more as a 'siddhi' than anything else, not as the manifestation of a new Nature in the earth-consciousness." That is the reason why he remarked that "the past efforts had not prepared it. Not that efforts were not made in the past but nothing stable was attained on the physical level; nothing fundamental was established. If it were established, the thing would be there, however partial the achievement." Because all achievements leave some legacy of traces for posterity to follow. Particularly, a spiritual realization once completely achieved could never be entirely obliterated. Said Sri Aurobindo, "I find that the Supramental physical body has not been brought down; otherwise it would have been there."

As he explored the lowest rung of the lower hemisphere, and descended to the sub-material, the subconscient, the inconscient, he found practically no trace of any attempt to change anything whatever. "Up to the present time nobody has cared to bring down and apply this Power [Supermind] to the physical plane," Sri Aurobindo told the assembled group of disciples in

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July 1926. "Something was done in the mind and also in the vital being but not in the physical."

He explained. "Firstly, the Yogis did not care for these questions of the physical plane. Secondly, they had other, more direct, means of dealing with them."

But Sri Aurobindo wanted life's transformation, "complete transformation. My aim is not to disown life but to transmute it through the alchemy of the light of the Spirit."¹

Easier said than done! It was going to be far from easy to make Matter responsive to the shock of Light.

As he worked from level to level he met with fiercer and fiercer resistance. He had to wage a war of attrition, 'a locked struggle' as he put it: "All the hostile forces in the spiritual world are in a constant state of opposition and besiege our gains," he specified in a letter dated 26 June 1916. "That I suppose, is why the religions and philosophies have had so strong a leaning to the condemnation of Life and Matter and aimed at an escape instead of a victory."

He who was so passionately fond of mother Earth refused to abandon her: "Our mother Earth must not feel herself for ever accursed." The Earth in desperate need called to the Soul that had become one with the universe. Our Hero of the Spirit chose to be in the thickest of the struggle.

Admittedly, the first that hews his way through a trackless jungle—the pathfinder—faces much to clear the way, to make it easier for his followers by leaving a legacy of traces.

Let me borrow a few lines from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

¹ Among the Great, 228.

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(Book I, IV) which express so beautifully what I have been trying at some length to say about him.

"A seeker of hidden meanings in life's forms,

Of the great Mother's wide uncharted will

And the rude enigma of her terrestrial ways

He is the explorer and the mariner

On a secret inner ocean without bourne ;

He is the adventurer and cosmologist

Of a magic earth's obscure geography."

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