CWTVKS Volume 2

2) Sadhana of the Supermind

It is not seldom that one is faced with questions raised by well-meaning people interested in Sri Aurobindo's teachings.

What is it that Sri Aurobindo's Yoga aims at? What is it that is new about it in its means or ends? If it is a fact that the highest Truth or God is One, then are there not various ways of finding Him? What is it that the Integral Yoga seeks to achieve which cannot be got at by any of the well-known lines of spiritual discipline handed down to us by saints and seers from times immemorial? Has not in our own age, in recent times, the prophet of Dakshineshwar lived and taught the sublime truth that all yogas and all forms of religious worship are but different roads leading to the same goal? How is it that so much stress is laid on the synthesis of diverse paths, of the various yogas while each of them has for its ultimate aim the realisation of the Higher Truth, the Self or the Divine Being? Is not a single path sufficient, when fully pursued, to lead to the ultimate Truth?

And then, there is the path of knowledge, leading to the Vedantic Truth of the Absolute Brahman. Have not hundreds of saints borne testimony to the Upanishadic statements of the Adwaitic Truth of Brahman, One-without-a-second, so ably restated and established in the system of Acharya Sankara? Have not the Alwars, devotee-saints, borne evidence in their lives to the rich realisations of the Godhead through devotion and surrender, that Sri Ramanuja in later times found and concluded to be the best and sole means of reaching the goal? Where in all the world can we find a life of unsurpassed love and devotion as revealed in the life of Lord Gouranga? As for control over the material body and its functionings and even for prolonging the human life to an abnormal period, the Rasa Siddhas, the Tantriks are adepts; and the Shaiva and Shakta Siddhas of South India are well-known for combining in their yogic disciplines knowledge and devotion and using the device of medicinal drugs as a temporary measure for the upkeep of the bodily machine until it becomes fit to realise the supreme purpose of life.

If these questions and others of the kind were to emanate from sheer curiosity in a scoffing spirit, an attempt to answer them would be futile and may be given up as irrelevant. But there are spiritual aspirants attracted to Sri Aurobindo's teachings with genuine interest in the Yoga, who may not lack in ardour, but have no leisure or equipment for a study and assimilation of his published works. Misconceptions or doubts may and do cross them in regard to the aims and means of the line of Yoga that Sri Aurobindo has adopted and admitted us to follow. We shall, therefore, present a few of the fundamentals of the teachings here in order that they may be of some help to the enquiring aspirant to resolve such of the questions and doubts as may come upon him bringing with them a certain force or semblance of conviction; for certain doubts are hard to dissolve as they are at every turn reinforced by environmental influences and nurtured by current and customary notions that afford them their bases.

Now, Sri Aurobindo, like the great teachers before him in India, is first a Yogin; next comes his philosophy giving an account of the ultimate truths envisaged by yogic vision. The metaphysical basis of his system is secure, because it is related at every turn to experiences of spiritual life, to truths that are verified and verifiable by yogic knowledge. His philosophy is not the outcome of speculative groping nor does he battle in the clouds for the sake of dialectics, though there is no dearth of dialectics in the bulky volumes of his prolific writings. Indeed, as long as reason is the highest instrument nearest to the human Spirit, one cannot minimise the theoretical value of metaphysical expositions of the truths that are aimed at for realisation through yogic disciplines.

We shall presently mention some of the basic principles that have direct bearing on the aims of this Yoga. Sri Aurobindo starts with the Vedantic position that Brahman, Sat-Chit-Ananda, is One-without-a-second. But his is an Adwaita that comprehends all worlds, all beings, all forms of existence as derivations, manifestations of the All-powerful, All-conscious Supreme Existence, Brahman. It is the One Absolute beyond and above the worlds. It is He again that is the All, the One that is the Many. Thus Brahman is the Infinite which is all-inclusive, manifests in its omnipotent infinitude any number of finite worlds and beings, their source, support, their very substance, yet remains the Inexhaustible above all manifestation, absolved of all relatives, all conditions. The Infinite is a positive existent Something full of and transcending all qualities and creations, and not a negative Nothing from which or against which creation has sprung into existence. Thus Brahman is at once the Absolute beyond, the Universal everywhere, the Individual within. He is at once the Personal and the Impersonal, sakala and nishkala.

That creation has proceeded from above downwards, urdhvamulam, culminating in the Earth is an ancient truth. There are in the downward course of manifestation many creations, formations of various grades of Being, of different states of Consciousness with their corresponding fields of activity, called planes of which ours is the last, the Earth-plane. The Earth-Being has within it involved all the Higher powers of the Divine Being, the powers of the intermediary planes i.e., the principles and graded powers of Consciousness through which Creation has proceeded downwards from the original creative—what we call the Supramental—plane to our own. It has been the labour and problem of Earth, ever since her formation as a definite unit began, to evolve the higher powers involved in her and to develop more and more into something nearer and nearer the creative Godhead. This evolutionary urge in the earth-consciousness may be called in human terms a kind of aspiration calling upon the Godhead's higher powers to get down into her so that she may, by the downward instilling of the higher principles with their increasingly powerful and conscious forces in response to her call, be able to release and manifest her potentialities through the units of her differentiated being. Thus, there is a double movement in the creative process by which higher principles of cosmic existence get down to the lowest plane, the material world—an evolutionary urge from the earth-consiousness below, and a responding involutionary higher Force of Consciousness from above.

The first distinct step in the earth's evolution is the development of life in Matter as a result of the descent of Life into the world of Matter from the Life-world which is the one above next to the Earth. The next stage is the descent of the Mind into the living Matter, enabling the living Matter to evolve mind and establish it as an organ and part of an organised unit in the earth-life and earth-consciousness. In man, the offspring of Manu, the Divine Thinker, she has developed the evolved and established the principle of Mind to a very high degree with all its powers seeking to outreach itself and to meet and bring down into it what is still above it. It is obvious that the course of evolution in the earth's nature has not completed its round and mind is not its last term, its destination. The evolutionary urge cannot rest satisfied until it meets through the Call the divine creative principle of Super-mind and gets it established in the Earth through her developed human units. Also, the creative principle took the form of an involutionary response reaching down to the world of Matter, answering to its needs for the release of its potentials, of the higher principles involved in it, of the latent forces preparing and waiting for the organisation of the higher powers and consciousness of the supramental principle, the next step—a crucial, inevitable step—ordained in the onward march of this Evolution.

The above succinct account will suffice to show that Sri Aurobindo obviously holds that when the Supermind gets down into the earth-consciousness, it gets organised in the highly evolved human unit which is the most developed mental being on earth. Such a supramental being on earth does not discard the lower principle of Mind embodied in living Matter, even as in the past stages of evolution the newly evolved Mind did not throw away life and body, in which it made its appearance, but tried to use them, however imperfectly it may have done it, and to translate their functionings and movements into its own terms. The spiritual being of the supramental type will similarly use the mind, life and body, not imperfectly or in ignorance as the mind has done, but in a masterly way which is the way of the Divine Creator presiding over this cosmic manifestation of which our own world is the lowest rung.

Therefore, the evolution of Supermind in man is, strictly speaking, a devolution of the Divine principle of the original creative Supermind. It means an organised supramental consciousness here which takes a spiritual, supramental divine view of the individual and the existence around, and in its own supreme way, the way of the Truth-Force and Truth-Consciousness, orders and harmonises the functionings of the lower instruments, of mind, life and body and transforms their very substance and reorganises them for the indispensable adjustment needed for the fulfilment of the Divine purpose in human life on earth.

Now this is the aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga; it is an aim which is inescapable for any evolutionary being on earth. It is an aim in which is implicit the displacement of the human ego by the Divine Individual and the corresponding conversion of consciousness with its supreme Force establishing divine elements of the supramental creative world in the human being, in those human parts and instruments which are their disfigured and perverted earthly counterparts. It therefore means a divine perfection of man in all the parts of his being which is the immediate next fruit of the evolutionary labour. It is then the present imperfect creation with its perverse formations made into a perfect Divine creation which it is intended to become, but which it has not been as yet, because of the very conditions of the evolutionary process worked out in Time.

We have stated that every decisive step in the upward march of evolution is effected by means of a double movement. Double movement of what? Effected by whom? It is the Divine Being who presides over this creation, this evolutionary manifestation, who by an intervening Grace, whenever a crucial step is to be taken, helps the lower creation to move more and more towards the Lights of the higher grades of existence, emerging as it does from the inert and dark and half-lit rungs of the evolutionary ladder. It is the Grace that responds to the Call from below; the evolutionary urge is the Aspiration that leads the movement of Ascent. It is the devolutionary response of the Divine Grace that intervenes that is the movement of Descent. Thus the original creative Force of the Divine Being takes on the double movement of the Yoga Force of which really the First and Final Sadhaka is the Divine Lord himself.

Surely, the Earth does not receive the Supermind into her body of inert matter, nor into her life in the vegetable kingdom, nor into her crude mind in the lower or higher animal, man. She receives it in her best developed part, in the most highly evolved element which is the aspiring Soul in humankind. Here too, it is not all the units of the kind that are at first ready and fit to receive and hold the higher spiritual principle of Supermind in its descent into the evolutionary earth-nature. The choice therefore falls upon that human unit who is most ready and born for it, in whom the fire of Aspiration flames up from Earth to Heaven solely for the Divine Descent to the exclusion of everything else, and who therefore lays bare absolutely open without reserve all the parts of his being surrendered to the Will and Power of the descending Supermind, that it may get itself established as the ruling divine principle of human life on earth. From such a one flow, like light from the sun, the Influence, the Light and Power of the established Supermind transmitted to those who in the heights of their being are prepared or born competent to receive them. Well has it been said that the dawn breaks upon the peaks when the valleys are still dark in the night and it is they that receive the last rays of the setting sun.

From what has been stated it would be clear that in this great endeavour that Sri Aurobindo has taken upon himself to pursue, it is the quality of the achievement that matters first, and the extension of it, the quantity, naturally follows it in course.

Now that we have stated the aims and means of this Yoga, it would be better to leave the careful reader to judge if in the light of the position taken up in this Yoga, the doubts mentioned earlier in the beginning are not dissolved and set at rest. We may well ask if an attempt of this kind has ever been made at all in the past history of the human race; it is doubtful even if such a conception was harboured by any group of humanity in any age. It is true that an attempt at human perfection was made by the Tantric Siddhas with their synthetic view of human life, but it was done with the object of personal self-fulfilment—even the perfect control of the material body was aimed at to subserve that end. This Yoga we call new at least for one reason. We have to distinguish it from other disciplines and aims of Yoga some of which, though not always in their details and forms, but surely in spirit and result, enter into the framework of the Supramental Sadhana. For, when it is taught here that the Supreme Peace is absolutely essential without which nothing stable can be achieved, a simple mind can easily leap forward exclaiming, “This is not new, this is in the Vedanta, it is the Nirvana that the Buddha taught; it is after all the Peace of the Absolute that Shankara preached. " If it is instructed here that surrender is a fundamental principle of the Sadhana, someone immediately jumps up to say, “This is not new, Sri Krishna taught it. The great Ramanuja has written so much upon it.”

In the same way every element that enters into the Sadhana here can be taken up for discussion to prove, as if to please oneself, that it is not new. But one must remember that the greatness and importance of this yogic discipline does not lie in its newness. But what if out of the previously existing materials a new construction is put up? What then is new on earth if it is not in its formation and purposefulness?

This is the supramental Yoga—supramental because it is a Yoga of the Supermind for earth worked out by the Supramental Divine. It is sometimes called the Integral Yoga because an integral, not a partial, realisation by the human being in all his parts is the spontaneous outcome of the Supramental founding itself in human life. It is, in its results as well as its workings, synthetic in character, applies itself to the human synthesis, and so in this sense may be called a Synthetic Yoga. Lastly and immediate to us, it is the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, because he is the seer of this Truth, the path-finder of this Sadhana, opening out the divine possibilities of human life here, unveiling the evolutionary necessity of the human being for transformation into the terms of a Spiritual and Divine manifestation in terrestrial existence.

"He rises to the good with Titan wings
     And this the reason of his high unease,
     Because he came from the infinities
To build immortally with mortal things;

"The body with increasing soul to fill
     Extend Heaven's claim upon the toiling earth
     And climb from death to a diviner birth
Grasped and supported by immortal Will."

Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: In the Moonlight