Aspects of Sri Aurobindo
AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA)
The Integral Life Foundation.
P.O. Box 239
Waterford CT. 06385
U.S.A.
First Published: 1995
Reprint: 2000
(Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino)
© Amal Kiran (K. D.Sethna)
Published by
The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A.
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
Unity in Diversity — from Kapila down to Carnap, that is the most comprehensive concept possible to man when he turns a searching eye upon the gigantic enigma presented by the cosmos in which he plays so striking a part.
There have been uncompromising monists of stark, immutable, homogeneous Being who have looked upon all diversity as an inscrutable phantasmagoria, and on the other hand implacable pluralists have refused to see any essential unity in the teeming multitude of heterogeneous events which seems to constitute the spatiotemporal process. But in the end these extremes fail to satisfy the integral philosophic sense of the human mind: all life and thought are based on a fundamental recognition of identity and difference, the universal and the particular, the one and the many.
All things tend to indicate a ground of unity just as much as each thing tends to express a unique shade of it: cosmos is at once a universe and a pluriverse. The most satisfying as well as finally inevitable act of both reason and intuition is to affirm and believe in the bedrock reality of a single yet multiply-realised Fact.
However, once we have admitted that if Philosophy seeks to evade this Fact it is always likely to be so much the worse for Philosophy, we must, in order to have a clear insight into the ultimate nature of the bedrock reality, take into account the two poles of evolutionary history — the material existence from which man is apparently sprung and his look upward from it towards spiritual truth. He is, somehow, always subject to the dual attraction of Matter and Spirit. Living and thinking in a physical body, he cannot neglect the demands and necessities of his material nature, its comfort, gratification and development, its insatiable push towards a perfect secular fulfilment. But at the same time there is in him a conviction of something else than his first insistent experience of terrestrial being. Set like flint against the invasion
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of doubt from a certain part of his nervous psychology which harps on the paramount importance of secular growth is the feeling that life on earth is not the sole reality and that its vicissitudes do not exhaust his entire duration. Soul, After-life, God — these intuitions shine out through whatever thick veils he chooses to put upon them: he cannot for long hold them at bay, they persist in returning, in moulding his action as a step towards meriting celestial enjoyment, in suggesting a chain of rebirth as developing his spiritual potentialities in order to deserve an ever more ample heaven and, if too unwisely thwarted, they acquire a morbid hold on him, casting over his whole terrestrial existence a hue of futile disorder and incorrigible sinfulness.
Thus, no age of scepticism which denies the Spirit and refuses to investigate sympathetically the data of religious experience can last long; it is condemned to transience by the unconquerable aspiration in man towards the immortal, the infinite, the divine. Neither does any feverish emphasis on other-worldliness give him permanent satisfaction: the moment religion, no matter with what conciliatory compromises, regards in the main a supra-terrestrial sphere as the scene of his final fulfilment it becomes suspect to the equally unconquerable impulse in him towards material self-consummation, individual and communal. What Philosophy has to find is the sovereign equation which perfectly harmonises these two master-passions. The very fact that they are equally inevitable, creating by their perpetual conflict the whole course of man's advance and destiny, seems to imply that there is such a comprehensive equation possible and that the very instinct of Nature is somehow to arrive at it.
Hence we must take the human aspiration towards the immortal, the infinite, the divine as not just the fallen soul's home-sickness for a post-mortem paradise but rather as the evolutionary urge by which Nature is striving to produce the superman in whom mind, life and body have received the law and light of a higher Consciousness and Power which have purified, subtilised, intensified and transformed them
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into perfect images on earth of their own ideality. In that case, Nature is at bottom a supreme Spirit conceptively self-extended as the basis and substance of all cosmic existence, a Spirit of which the implicit diversity is necessarily of living soul-truths enjoying a play of divine consciousness, force and bliss, and which guides overtly or covertly a phenomenal mould of itself which starts with a complete involution of all its powers in order that they may be progressively manifested in the terms and figures of their own seeming opposites — apparently inanimate Matter and unconscious Force.
What we call evolution is a process by which the multiplicity of the soul-truths inherent in the Spirit shape various series of formulations on earth for the gradual revelation of their own shades of divine diversity at play in the divine unity. This, again, means that each soul-truth gathers and assimilates through these formulations or rebirths a certain growing experience which helps it to express its diversity on evolutionary lines, and which it holds together in an evolving intermediate psychological form of itself between its pure spiritual status and its expression here. That is to say, midway between the material existence in which life and mind develop because of a hidden Spirit in it and the spiritual existence which contains the ideal realities of all that is gradually worked out here, there is a subtle psychological existence which reveals itself with its derivative light and power in the form and scope afforded them by nature-force on the material plane.
For, matter contains, on this hypothesis, everything in potentiality; it is the action of what is hidden in it that aids to compel the emergence of the higher values, the action of the Spirit's single yet multiply-realised splendour through intervening terms of itself which are mind and life-force. This explains the rise of living and thinking forms, half-obscure and half-enlightened, in the material universe as a preparatory step to the emergence of a spiritual consciousness which will display and fulfil all that life and mind hint at in matter.
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The first objection to such a promising vision of our possibilities is that there is no evidence even of a consciousness, much less a supreme Spirit, in crude inanimate matter. But this argument derives its seeming strength from the fact that we have assumed our mental awareness or whatever else appears to approximate to it as the sole criterion of consciousness, forgetting that there may quite easily be in what is to us the sleep or insensibility of matter and unconscious inanimate force a consciousness differing from ours in its action, its pitch, its organisation and hence incommunicative to us, so that apparent matter may be merely the most involved manifestation of the conceptively self-extended substance of Spirit.
The second objection is that the huge amount of waste in Nature, the plethora of blind and useless expenditure of energy we notice all around, gives the lie to the presence of a secret spiritual Consciousness. But the impartial philosopher must reply that what we consider waste may be precisely a necessary feature in Nature's plan, an unavoidable element in the logic of the aim to manifest her innermost truth through various symbols of involution or superficial contradiction of that truth.
We might indeed resort to a sort of tertium quid between Spirit and unconscious Force, a rudimentary consciousness fundamental to matter and attaining higher intensities according to the growing complexities of physical structure. But we can rest in such a theory only at the risk of leaving it unintelligible why neither a religionism which lays up its treasure in a future heaven nor a materialism which ignores the mystic in man ever seems to afford lasting and integral satisfaction. Whereas, if we accept the hypothesis that a sovereign Consciousness has in one of its interminable self-deployments used its power of variable realisation in order to find itself through a process beginning with an increasing concealment of itself in what it formulates, we explain not only this fact but also all the anomalies of evolution.
For, such a hypothesis makes us understand better than
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any other view how, out of the terrible phenomenon of an apparent non-mind and non-life, living and conscious creatures emerge, how at last human beings come to be, yearning for truth and bliss and freedom and God, rising towards the contemplation of absolute values and thrilling with the emotion of supernal ideals. That these beings should be callous, ferocious and stupid is explicable on account of the vast superficial insentience of matter out of which their natures are compounded, but whence spring beauty, harmony and unbounded compassion, how out of a heartless and inexorable unconscious energy are born the heart of a Chaitanya, the intellect of a Plato and the exquisite sensibility of a Da Vinci? If we accept a Spirit as well as its secondary powers as concealed in the material shell, we can comprehend both sides of human nature no less than all those intermediate impulses between the brute and the superman which constitute average humanity.
The one last question which intrudes itself hails from the moralist quarter: the moralist tries to arraign Omnipotence for choosing this particular possibility of involution and evolution. He becomes melodramatic in gathering up all the details of sorrow, pain and futility and asks the Supreme how it could stoop to the baseness of manifesting so laborious a cosmos, how it could ever mix with loveliness, harmony and delight the bitter drop of ugly discord and suffering.
Thus one of the most idealistic minds of our day has uttered the crashing blasphemy that he would spit in the "empty face" of a God who did not utilise His almightiness to lend a fiat to the "Open Conspiracy" by which an ignorance-besotted, capitalist-ridden world is to be saved. The same humanitarian type of conscience anxious to spare an almighty Maker the responsibility of an imperfect world has compelled another reactionary against Materialism to conceive a universal Life-Force originally blind and undeveloped, stumbling experimentally towards perfection.
No doubt, there is a certain truth in this theory of trial and
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error, but the main dilemma is purely intellectual, and solved the moment we are humble enough to acknowledge that our human standards of benevolence cannot be wholly applied to the ultimate Being. Our intuitive aspiration towards an absolute Good, a final Law of Righteousness, is indicative, like all feeling-out towards absolute values, of something in the constitution of this Being, yet we have to realise that this Being is not good in our sentimental human way: His is a benevolence which in its wisdom and far-sightedness must surpass our notions just as considerably as our notions would exceed those, say, of the most altruistic gorilla possible. For, while the essence of rationality is the sublime feeling that there is Intelligence at the back of the universe, it is the very essence of irrationality to suppose that this Intelligence is only of a much magnified man.
All we can ask is that somehow our nature's highest desires and noblest longings must get fulfilled, and this much is amply provided for in the view we have sponsored. The grim involution is accomplished only so that the self-finding by the Spirit may be through a varied battle and not that the end of the cosmic manifestation may mark the frustration of all the terms through which the Spirit expresses itself.
Indeed, to bring the battle of the ages, the slow travail of phenomenal Nature to a rapid victory by not merely extending the limits of our vital and mental faculties but by predominantly seizing on the true psyche, the inmost soul, hidden behind life and mind, the spontaneously spiritual part of our nature which possesses the dynamic to develop the vision, the faith and the will required for the discovery of our supra-mental Self with its masterful ability to perfect by its highest law our entire earth-life — this indeed is the practical outcome of all spiritual philosophy. It is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Integral Yoga.
The Integral Yoga is the methodised effort towards perfection by a constant urge towards the Divine as a Presence and Power capable of all relations of identity-in-difference
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with us — by an incessant surrender to it and consecrated invocation of it in the midst of work no less than in restful meditation — by a steady awareness of it within and without and an appeal to it to fill the whole system and take charge of all our nature, substituting for our activities its own supramental Light which will give us the uttermost freedom of our own highest soul-truth without sacrificing anything essential in us because it will reject only those inferior operations which will become superfluous because superior faculties will do their work with greater certitude, efficiency and synthesising prescience.
No easy task is this for man, says Sri Aurobindo, "but in the end the difficulty resolves itself into two adverse tendencies, one of his lower nature, a downward attraction to what he has been and still partially is, one of his higher nature, too much attachment to what he has become and satisfaction with partial achievements. It is the joys of the way, useful in themselves as a support to his strength on the journey, that hold him, when clung to with too much attachment, back from the splendour of his goal. To know himself for a pilgrim of the heights called on to press ever upwards, to know the principle of his life as a constant self-becoming and self-exceeding of which each step is a present form out of which something higher is to be delivered, is the sign of his election. This constant upward will is his true heroism, his true greatness, his sane and sound asceticism. To discover more and more highly and widely the goal and the way his complex and ascending powers of knowledge were given, to follow it more and more strenuously and indomitably his forces of will and infinite aspiration. The Spirit within him supports him by its universal delight, by its growing largeness in his consciousness, by its inexhaustible treasuries of will and capacity, by all the vastness of its infinite being. When he tears away the veils of the Spirit, when he sees God and delivers his outward nature into the hands of the divinity within, what is now impossible will be revealed as his one possibility and his eternal certainty; his obscure and
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difficult journey will become a rapid and luminous ascension. Then will he climb to that fulfilment of the apparent and discovery and possession of the real Man which is the meaning of supermanhood."
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When a poem by a disciple was read out to Sri Aurobindo he expressed special admiration for the line:
Seer-suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain'.
We may legitimately surmise that Sri Aurobindo admired this flight of poetic imagination not only because it winged with the right words a certain view of Plato but also because it summed up his own insight into the truth of Platonism vis-a-vis the Ultimate Truth as seized by his yogic consciousness.
The line by Amal Kiran suggests at the same time that Plato had his mind set glowing with a wonderful perception of spiritual reality and that, for all the extreme brilliance of this perception, there is a realm of revelation filled with a greater light of Eternal Verities than Platonism could compass.
Sri Aurobindo's general outlook on Plato may be appreciated from some statements found in his letters to his disciples. The longest of them runs: "Plato was a great writer as well as a philosopher — no more perfect prose has been written by any man — in some of his books his prose carries in it the qualities of poetry and his thought has poetic vision."2 The historical background to the poetic vision in Plato's thought is touched upon by Sri Aurobindo when he writes apropos of Heraclitus and the Age of the "Mysteries" in Greece:
"To ignore the influence of the mystic thought and its methods of self-expression on the intellectual thinking of the Greeks from Pythagoras to Plato is to falsify the historical procession of the human mind. It was enveloped at first in the symbolic, intuitive, esoteric style and discipline of the Mystics, — Vedic and Vedantic seers, Orphic secret teachers, Egyptian priests. From that veil it emerged along the path of
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a metaphysical philosophy still related to the Mystics by the source of its fundamental ideas, its first aphoristic and cryptic style, its attempt to seize directly upon truth by intellectual vision rather than arrive at it by careful ratiocination, but nevertheless intellectual in its method and aim. This is the first period of the Darshanas in India, in Greece of the early intellectual thinkers. Afterwards came the full tide of philosophic rationalism, Buddha or the Buddhists and the logical philosophers in India, in Greece the Sophists and Socrates with all their splendid progeny; with them the intellectual method did not indeed begin, but came to its own and grew to its fullness. Heraclitus belongs to the transition, not to the noontide of the reason; he is even its most characteristic representative. Hence his cryptic style, hence his brief and burdened thought and the difficulty we feel when we try to clarify and entirely rationalise his significances. The ignoring of the Mystics, our pristine fathers, purve pitarah, is the great defect of the modern account of our thought-evolution."?
What is particularly relevant for us is the juxtaposition in the phrase: "from Pythagoras to Plato." The coupling of the two Greeks is meaningful, there is a line of thought joining them. But, in the context of mysticism, they are not on a par. "A mystic," Sri Aurobindo declares, "is currently supposed to be one who has mystic experience, and a mystic philosopher is one who has such experience and has formed a view of life in harmony with his experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term, though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics."!
Yes, Pythagoras, unlike Plato, is unchallengeable; actually elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has gone so far as to say: "Pythagoras was one of the greatest of the mystics."5 But, although Plato is different, we should note the way in which
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the Master of the Academy is excluded from the company of the mystics: "Even Plato..." This means that Plato has something about him which the other eminent intellectuals lack. Sri Aurobindo sees in him a subtle sight such as cannot be traced in his encyclopaedic contemporary Aristotle. Sri Aurobindo read the Republic and the Symposium in the original when he was at Cambridge, he also went on to imitate the Platonic dialogue-form in a remarkable work, fairly long yet unfinished, of his late teens, The Harmony of Virtue; and a deep sense of the value of both the Platonic matter and the Platonic manner persisted. About Aristotle he has said: "I always found him exceedingly dry. It is a purely mental philosophy, not like Plato's."! In Plato Sri Aurobindo recognises an inspiration from above the mere mind, creating simultaneously a profound philosophy and a superb style through which his thoughts come to us "in large streams of subtle reasoning and opulent imagery".7
Sri Aurobindo's estimate of Plato crystallises further in two brief phrases. One of them again brings in the adverb "even": "We may reasonably doubt whether even a Plato or a Shankara marks the crown and therefore the end of the outflowering of the spirit in man.:" Here Plato stands for the highest reach of evolution which nevertheless to Sri Aurobindo is not the grand terminus: he looks forward to a superhuman achievement, with a more-than-mental "gnosis" as the day-to-day instrument of self-awareness and world-awareness.
The second phrase occurs in a letter where Sri Aurobindo answers the question: Can any part of our nature, the mental or the vital, be retained after death by the true soul, the psyche, and carried over to the next birth instead of there being a complete reinsouling, the taking up of an altogether new subtle vehicle along with the physical by the psyche? Sri Aurobindo's answer is that, while a person with "a strong spiritual development" could certainly retain his vital-mental being, the carrying-over is possible also to "one like Shelley or like Plato for instance" who has a developed mental
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personality centred around the psychic individual.9 Here Plato represents the philosopher, just as Shelley represents the poet, who has lived intensely in the light of his inmost being which is ever open to divine influences.
The fact that Plato, though acutely intellectual, yet reflects a supra-intellectual source of knowledge affines him essentially to Sri Aurobindo. What is more, the mode in which he embodies in mental terms the substance of the "seer-suns" creates an intimate affinity in Platonism to Sri Aurobindo's mystic philosophy. This affinity comes of - to quote Sri Aurobindo's own words on Plato — "his eternal, ideal plane of fixed ideas, by which he seems to have meant at once an originating real-idea and an original ideal schema for all things."10 Real-idea: that is an Aurobindonian expression of capital significance. It connotes something quite other than the mental idea which is a thing apart from the reality concerned. The mental idea creates an abstract figure of an existence outside itself. Whether we regard that existence as of a different kind from the stuff of ideation or of a similar kind, there is always the sense of detachment of the subjective being from objective reality in order to observe, understand and judge. The real-idea belongs not to Mind but to a superior Consciousness which Sri Aurobindo names Super-mind. Supermind is an infinite Reality bringing out as Idea the truth of its own being. This idea is a coming forth, in creative self-knowledge, of that which lay concentrated in uncreative self-awareness. It is a pregnant vibration of reality itself and therefore a real-idea. Differentiations of the one truth, a multiplicity and diversity of real-ideas expressing what is infinitely implicit in the Absolute, are held in the Supermind, which is the ultimate existence itself in its aspect of Creator, and there they are organised in a perfect harmony before they are cast into the mental-vital-material mould which we know as our universe. "Mind, Life and Body," says Sri Aurobindo, "are an inferior consciousness and a partial expression which strives to arrive in the mould of a various evolution at that superior expression of itself already
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existent to the Beyond-Mind. That which is in the Beyond-Mind is the ideal which in its own conditions it is labouring to realise."!'
Sri Aurobindo goes on to sum up: "The Real is behind all that exists; it expresses itself intermediately in an Ideal which is a harmonised truth of itself; the Ideal throws out a phenomenal reality of variable conscious-being which, inevitably drawn towards its own essential Reality, tries at last to recover it entirely whether by a violent leap or normally through the Ideal which put it forth. It is this that explains the imperfect reality of human existence as seen by the Mind, the instinctive aspiration in the mental being towards a perfectibility ever beyond itself, towards the concealed harmony of the Ideal, and the supreme surge of the spirit beyond the ideal to the transcendental. The very facts of our consciousness, its constitution and its necessity presuppose such a triple order; they negate the dual and irreconcilable antithesis of a mere Absolute to a mere relativity."12
And, just as between the Absolute and the relativity there stands the Supermind (or the Truth-Consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo often designates it) to connect the overwhelming multiplicity of the latter to the all-absorbing unity of the former, Sri Aurobindo sees standing between the Supermind and our sphere of ignorance a delegate power of the Truth-Consciousness, an inferior or diminished supramental Knowledge-Will from which a lapse into the mental-vital-physical diffusion and division can occur. This is the Over-mind. "The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition,
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yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity.... The one total and many-sided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself."13
Thus the Overmind, itself above Ignorance, can be a first parent of it. "For if each principle loosed into action must follow its independent line and carry out its complete consequences, the principle of separation must also be allowed its complete course and arrive at its absolute consequence; this is the inevitable descent, facilis descensus, which Consciousness, once it admits the separative principle, follows till it enters by obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation...into the material Inconscience...."14 The line at which the fall takes place is the formulation of the mental consciousness which can either build a constructed whole out of separate units or else grasp a commonality or an essentiality of things by an insubstantial-seeming abstraction. And, when out of the material Inconscience, the One emerges on its way back, it is again at the dividing line of the Mind that the self-aware reaching upward takes place. In the philosophic mentality, the point de depart is a piecing together of things to find a whole or a penetrating through abstractions towards their unity.
Plato is the example par excellence of such a starting-point. But with his poetic vision he was able to have some glimpse of spiritual realities instead of spinning out mere dialectic. All the same the terms in which he caught a reflection of them could not help remaining somewhat uncertain, if not wavering. He was not quite sure whether he was dealing with what logicians label as Universals, each idea the general and common essence of a class of objects, or with the laws according to which things operate, the Pythagorean "numbers", the mathematical constancies and regularities ruling
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the sensible world, or with archetypal models, divine originals, forms of perfect purpose, whose broken shadows and faulty imitations we perceive around us. He was not quite sure also whether the world-creative Power whom he called the Demiurge is one with the supreme reality of Ideas, their self-manifesting aspect, or a subordinate deity copying out in mutable phenomena transcendent patterns passive for ever. Nor was he quite sure again whether these phenomena were created out of nothing or compounded of the ideal realities and an alien "chaos", an enigmatic "non-being" on whose vacant flux they set their shaping seals.
Many of his ambiguities appear to stem from his mind's translation of the Overmind's version, rather than the Super-mind's authenticity, of the Real-Idea. Pertinent here is a reply by Sri Aurobindo to a question concerning the following quotation from Plato: "The world of sense is the copy of the world of Ideas. In our visible world there is a graduation of beings.... The same holds true of the intelligible realm or pattern of the world; the Ideas are joined together by means of other Ideas of a higher order;...the Ideas constantly increase in generality and force, until we reach the top, the last, the highest, the most powerful Idea or the Good, which comprehends, contains or summarizes the entire system." The question put was, in effect: "Is not Plato here nearly on the verge of understanding in mind the realisation of the Overmind? Can the passage be taken as due merely to mental ideas?" Sri Aurobindo wrote back: "He was trying to express in a mental way the One containing the multiplicity which is brought out (created) from the One, — that is the Overmind realisation. Plato has these ideas not as realisations but as intuitions which he expressed in his own mental form."Is
In passing we may remark that here we have the keyword to the setting apart of Plato from Pythagoras on the one hand and from Aristotle on the other: "intuitions." It points to flashes of truth which hail from above the mental plane and which are to be distinguished from "realisations" that
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are established spiritual experiences as well as from the mental plane's typical seekings to build truth by its limited and uncertain though ingenious and multi-mooded power.
The key-word recurs when Sri Aurobindo discusses some correspondences between Indian spirituality and the mystic thought in the background of a certain line of Greek philosophy. Broadly he writes: "The ideas of the Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profoundest part of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West."16 Again, observing how the Greek intellectuals give by their philosophy "some light on the spiritual destiny of man,"17 Sri Aurobindo tells us: "Plato who was influenced by Heraclitus, tried to do this...; his thought sought after God, tried to seize the ideal, had the hope of a perfect human society. We know how the Neo-Platonists developed his ideas...and how they affected Christianity. The Stoics, still more directly the intellectual descendants of Heraclitus, arrived at very remarkable and fruitful ideas of human possibility and a powerful psychological discipline, — as we should say in India, a Yoga, — by which they hoped to realise their ideal."18 Yes, an India-Greece rapprochement on the spiritual plane cannot help being seen. But simply because Sri Aurobindo is Indian by birth he does not attribute to India all that bears the stamp of spirituality in Greece. He has himself mentioned some proofs of the independent growth: the Apollonian mystics, Pythagoras, the oracles, the reformed Mysteries. And in this connection a letter of his throws into sharp relief the originality of Plato.
Now the answer is to a straight query about India. The query, inspired by a passage from Plato on the Idea of the Good and on God the Creator, wondered whether Plato had obtained his thoughts from Indian books. Sri Aurobindo said: "Not from Indian books — something of the philosophy of India got through by means of Pythagoras and others. But I think Plato got most of these things from intuition."19
However, the Platonic intuition is far from being perfect.
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And, in relation to his realm of ultimate Ideas, the ambiguities of it arise from lack of knowledge of the "various evolution" that Sri Aurobindo speaks of. Evolution implies in the Aurobindonian scheme the hidden activity of real-ideas within the phenomenal flux, their godhead lying in a state of "involution" and gradually awaking to its own glorious plenitude until what is flawless above is manifested in flaw-lessness below. That complete self-disclosure of the Divine on earth in a radiant future was utterly beyond Plato's conception, however much he might dream of a political Utopia. Dim approximation, temporary a peu pres — this constituted in his philosophy all that was possible of the True, the Beautiful and the Good in the kingdom of man. But once we accept the process of evolution within a Platonic cosmology we have not only to think of a divine counterpart to the whole triple strain of mental-vital-physical being: we have also to think of a divine mentality, a divine vitality and even a divine physicality as forming the covert nature of the Platonic "chaos" and unfolding on earth in answer to their counterpart in the Supermind. For, the fluctuant "non-being" in which the Real-Idea comes to have a partial play is nothing save the supreme existence projected as a total "Inconscience": there everything of that existence seems lost, but the loss is as if by a tremendous wager of the Supermind with itself to bring forth its perfection under the initial terms of its own dire opposite.
Sri Aurobindo tells us that the ancient Indian scriptures have pointers to the Supermind. But the nearest philosophical statement in the past of the broad basis though not of the detailed superstructure and still less of the many-lustred crown of his Yogic knowledge of it is in Plato. A modern seeing of the Platonic Ideas in a spiritually new dimension bringing out their true significance and value may be considered Sri Aurobindo's greatest work in the context of his interchange with Greece the metaphysician, just as a modern revival of the Homeric hexameter with its Olympian pace naturalised in a new language — English — may be
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counted his greatest accomplishment vis-a-vis Greece the bard.
*
* *
True, Sri Aurobindo has not devoted a special essay to either that metaphysician or that bard — and this omission may lead us to underestimate their presence in his consciousness. At least we may tend to overlook the full force of Plato's impact. We cannot do so with regard to Homer, since Sri Aurobindo has several substantial passages on him in The Future Poetry as well as in his numerous letters and there is a whole long epic Ilion (over 4,500 lines) which directly takes up a Homeric theme and treats it masterfully with a Homeri-cised Aurobindonian art whose blueprint, as it were, is in his extensive disquisition, On Quantitative Metre. But how an awareness of the Athenian Academy's Master no less than of the singer from "Scio's rocky isle" glowed within Sri Aurobindo the Yogi is evident from a number of signs. It is not only to be surmised from declarations like: "I had steeped myself...in the original Hellenic spirit..."20 It can also be glimpsed time and again from their spontaneous alignments in his writings.
Thus, when he laughs at the pseudo-scientific reduction of mind to matter on account of "a response, interaction, connection, a correspondence if you will" between them, he begins by saying that no amount of this can prove that "love is a chemical product" and concludes with three dissimilar yet concordantly decisive examples of what can never be shown as "only a combination of physiological reactions or a complex of the changes of grey brain-matter or a flaming marvel of electrical discharges". These examples are: "Plato's theory of ideas or Homer's Iliad or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin."21
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Notes and References
1."Lammergeyer", Altar and Flame : Poems by Amal Kiran (Aspiration, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1975), p. 19.
2.The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972), p. 546.
3.Heraclitus (Calcutta, 1947), pp. 8-9.
4.The Future Poetry, p. 547.
5.On Yoga, II, Tome One (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1958), p. 201.
6.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953), p. 339.
7.Heraclitus, p. 10.
8.The Life Divine (Sri Aurobindo Library, Greystone Press, New York, 1949), p. 679.
9.On Yoga II, Tome One, p. 463.
10.Heraclitus, p. 36.
11.The Life Divine, p. 110.
12.Ibid.
13.Ibid., pp. 256-7.
14.Ibid., p. 261.
15.Sri Aurobindo Circle Annual, 1963 (Pondicherry), p. 1.
16.The Foundations of Indian Culture (The Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, 1953), p. 306.
17.Heraclitus, p. 52.
18.Ibid.
19.Sri Aurobindo Circle Annual, 1963, p. 2.
20.The Foundations..., p. 232.
21.The Problem of Rebirth (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1952), p. 30.
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A LETTER
Your little disquisition on Plotinus vis-a-vis Abbe Moncha-nin's article on Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is delightful.1 Especially appealing to me is your statement that according to Plotinus "the original emanation of Nous from the One is not a temporal distinction (Ennead, V. I, 6th section), for they are as intimately conjoined as the Sun and its rays to which these hypostases are compared (Ennead, V. I 6th and 7th sections)." Here we have two points: (1) the One is not only a self-locked stasis but, in spite of its absolute supremacy and without abrogating its unity, its "aloneness", it is also and always a self-expressive dynamis; (2) the archetypal Ideas are inherent in and intrinsic to the supreme Reality and not either a secondary realm of manifestation or else themselves an abstract primal pattern which a secondary being, a demiurge, has to imitate or work by: they are both an original self-expression of the One and, in their own right, a primary creative power.
I don't know whether Plotinus elaborates these points, but the image of the Sun and its rays must, in my view, imply them. Perhaps a more accurate image would be to compare Nous itself to the Sun. It is a mass of gathered knowledge-light — gathered by the One from its own illimitable self-luminous essence, which we may compare to an immense nebula, for an organized play of its own infinite verities, a play still within its unmodified being and not projected into space and time as phenomenally known. The rays, then, would be the power-efflux of Nous towards phenomenal creation, but still in a kind of planning potentiality, a controlled corona of world-initiatives.
A vision similar to Plotinus's is, I believe, behind Platonism, though Plato seems to reduce it more than Plotinus to
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intellectual terms, except perhaps in the Symposium. Plotinus too perhaps loses the wholeness of the vision while putting it into a philosophical system. For the problem of the One and the Many appears to be worrying that system in some way or other: else the emphasis on the flight of the alone to the Alone would not be so great and the concept of the absorption of the soul into the One would not be so extreme — at least in appearance.
The same problem has lain heavy on the mind of Indian spiritual philosophy and has led to uncompromising Monism at the end, to utter a-cosmism, with whatever head-ache and heart-ache accompanying it. The whole work of Sri Aurobindo, on the conceptual level, is occupied with resolving the problem from the yonder side rather than from the hither side as done so far. That is to say, he explicates it not by tackling it from the viewpoint of the mind that looks at it from below but by dealing with it from above and, as Coleridge would put it, "defecating it to a transparency" through the use of "That which thinks not with the mind but by which the mind is thought". (Kena Upanishad)
The oldest Indian seers also used this "That": what they did not succeed in keeping alive was the fine distinction between — to use Sri Aurobindo's terminology — Supermind and Overmind. In the Supermind there is a perfect balance among the three modes of divine dynamism: Brahman is all, all is in Brahman, Brahman is in all. The Over-mind, while never losing the first two, stresses the last and lets each member of the all, each God-name and God-form of the multiple One, act to the fullest stretch of its individuality though without actually reaching a breaking-point with the rest. The failure of the seers — to differentiate the Super-mind's "integral" harmony, where every detail is in perfect balance, from the Overmind's "global" accord where there is a perfect balance only on the whole — was, I believe, due to their living at their highest not quite in the Supermind but midway the Supermind and the Overmind, with a pull towards the latter all the time because the latter is more in
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tune with the spiritualised mentality as well as with the phenomenal world where the Many stand out and the One is far in the background if not even submerged.
The One, however, always remained the magnet par excellence and the spiritualised mentality could not give a satisfying reconciliation of it with the Many. All spirituality worth the name has this passionate attraction towards unity —The one entire and perfect chrysolite — and if it cannot be fully reconciled with multiplicity, then hang the multiplicity! That is what the post-Rigvedic sages tended to do and finally the very secret of the Supermind was lost or at any rate hazed off. The lack of a concrete complete grasp of the Supramental is clear to me from the fact that the last formula of Indian spiritual thought was Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) — surely a magnificent summing up of Reality and yet containing the seed of a static realization in which no vision of a universe sprouting from that Reality was inevitable.
As you know, Sri Aurobindo has introduced a basic change in the formula. He speaks of Chit-Tapas, not Chit. Tapas means "energetic heat". To Sri Aurobindo Consciousness is always Force, and to leave this truth inexplicit is to open the door to misunderstanding of the original summing-up. This key-statement came really from the Supermind where Consciousness is inherently Force and so there was no need to make a special point of the identity of the two, but it has been seized by the Overmind and interpreted by the spiritualized mentality, with the result that cosmic creativity is not taken necessarily as involved in it. If the transmission of the triple synthesis had been done by a seerhood stationed in the Supermind instead of in a middle vastness between what is Super and what is Over, a clear expression would have been given and we would have had Chit-Tapas rather than Chit. The compound is most vital to spiritual meta-
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physics, for without it the cosmic movement is left shorn of an indubitable ground in the Supreme.
Nor is the introduction of the compound the sole change Sri Aurobindo has brought about in Indian philosophy. There is also the concept of Vijnana added. Creative Con-scious Force at blissful self-deployment is only the first step towards giving a foundation to the cosmic movement. The second step is the ordering out, by this Conscious Force, of the truths implicit in the Supreme, the organization of these truths in a perfect interrelation and interaction by a faculty of harmonizing unity and multiplicity in a universal self-deployment. This faculty is Vijnana, the maker of a detailed design, at once a mass of particulars and a gestalt, on a divine scale. Vijnana is the Aurobindonian Supermind, the "Truth-Consciousness", which is part and parcel of the Ultimate. The term exists in the Taittiriya Upanishad with at least an Overmind-suggestion but later was misunderstood as merely the highest or intuitive intelligence. Vijnana is the reality behind Plotinus's notion of the intimate conjoinment of the Sun and its rays. It is involved in Chit-Tapas, just as Tapas is involved in Chit, but unless one is poised in the Supermind itself the involvement is likely in the long run to be overlooked. But, whereas Tapas and Chit stand together, Vijnana is a special mode of them and is best conceived as an extra term. Hence it is not enough to speak of a Divine Trinity: we have to speak of a Divine Quaternary in order fully to formulate the Transcendent which is yet the Arche-typally Cosmic, as it were. With Vijnana there, we have also the Personal or Super-personal Godhead, the omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent Creator in whom the ideal blueprint of all phenomena is held forever and with whom the phenomenal can be in a kinetic love-relation.
Yet here too we must pass beyond the implications of a merely Aurobindonianised Platonism and Plotinism. The latter's Nous and the former's World of Ideas come out in their true colours in the concept of the Supermind. The Christian God also finds his grandest form there. But the
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Supermind or Vijnana is more than just creative. It is also transformative. And because the post-Rigvedic sages and even the oldest Indian seers did not have their poise in the sheer Supermind they missed altogether the transformative aspect. God was indeed taken as omnipotent but it was never thought that he could totally divinise mind, life and matter. Indeed the thought of doing so was never taken as having entered God's consciousness! Just as even God cannot make a square circle or effect 2+2=5, so also He cannot be ascribed the power to do such an impossible, such a logically self-contradictory thing, as a divinised mentality, vitality, physi-cality. And once the omnipotent is considered impotent in this concern, we cut away the phenomenal world from the Ultimate. If, behind whatever veil in this world, Brahman is all and yet this world cannot be divinised, it cannot truly be Brahman, however incognito, but only a Brahman-semblance and therefore real-unreal, a magic of Maya, an illusionist trick. In Platonic, Plotinian and Christian terms, the world is temporal and must finally pass away; the Divine Plenitude cannot be totally materialised, and the soul's fulfilment is in the Beyond.
The instinct of transformation has always been there because the Supermind is always behind everything: the ideal of a perfect knowledge here and now, the ideal of an all-effecting life-force, the ideal of a radiantly perpetuated body have never stopped haunting man but they have come to be regarded as magnificent will-o'-the-wisps even while felt to be compulsive. They are both unavoidable and futile unless the Supermind is possessed, and without a revelation like Sri Aurobindo's from the Supermind they will never have a rationale.
5-8-1975
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1. "From my reading of Plotinus, it would seem that Monchanin errs (Mother India, December 1974, p. 924) when drawing a distinction between the systems of Plotinus and Spinoza as to the coincidence of the points of departure and arrival in the Eternal, the One. In Plotinus, the original emanation of Nous from the One is not a temporal distinction (Enneads, V. I, 6th section) for they are intimately conjoined as the Sun and its rays, to which these hypostases are compared (Enneads, V. I, 6th and 7th sections). The soul's laborious return to the All-Transcending culminates in an ecstatic reunion beyond all distinction of space and time, a reabsorption into the Eternal. Plotinus rarely includes both 'fall' and resurgence in one passage, as he does at VI. 9, 11th section: 'It is not in the soul's nature to touch utter nothingness; the lowest descent is into evil and, so far, into non-being: but to utter nothing, never. When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is in nothing but itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the Supreme.' (From Stephen Mackenna's translation of The Enneads, VI. 9, 11th section, p. 625.)" — Rand Hicks
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THE TRUE TEILHARD AND THE ESSENTIAL
SRI AUROBINDO*
SOME GUIDE-LINES FOR THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE FUTURE
Teilhard de Chardin, throughout his life, stood at a critical crossroads and made moves in different directions at different times and held a complex vision from which it is not easy to arrive at a focus on fundamentals. He1 declared that he had been "born with a 'naturally pantheist' soul"; but, brought up a Roman Catholic and trained to be a priest, he had a habitual reaction of vehement anti-pantheism. By profession and mental affinity he was a scientist drawn towards a secular humanist world-view based on the theory of evolution, from which the only religion that could be derived was the sense of an infinite and unitary universe moving forward with the drive of an immanent cosmic consciousness or world-soul. But his religious upbringing and discipline would not allow him to take physical reality as the changing and developing body of such a pantheos.
As a member of the Society of Jesus his aim was to "baptize" pantheism and humanism, whereas his innate temperament and modern turn of mind insisted on pan-theizing traditional Christianity and making it conform to the demands of what he termed "ultra-physics". His continual problem was: how to reconcile Christianity's transcendent personal God — "God Above", as he named Him — with the universal divinity posited by pantheism and the immanent "ultra-human" — "God Ahead" — that he considered to be implied by evolutionary humanism?
* Those parts of this essay which deal with Teilhard have appeared in the form of a separate article in an issue of the American Quarterly, Human Dimensions, devoted to Teilhard and guest-edited by Dr. Beatrice Bruteau. They are reproduced here with grateful acknowledgments to the Guest-Editor and the Publishers.
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Taking pantheism and evolutionary humanism to be exclusive of the transcendent personal God, he was at a loss to effect their harmonization. Yet, being equally drawn to both the sides, he could not help showing, at various places of his writings, diverse stresses and penchants, so that we are faced with conflicting statements which no interpreter of him has been able to overlook. His fellow-religionist admirers attempt to assimilate him into the tradition of the Church which suppressed him all through his life as dangerously heterodox if not perniciously heretical. Teilhard himself gives them a handle for this interpretation since he was always eager to be a part of the historic Church. What they forget is his ineradicable conviction that Teilhardism was the real essence of Christianity and that the Church, not he, needed to be "converted" or "transformed". On March 21, 1941 he2 wrote from Peking to Lucille Swan: "According to my own principles I cannot fight against Christianity; I can only work inside it, by trying to transform and 'convert' it...I know that the tide is rising which supports me."
In the light of this attitude we must strive to disentangle the basic Teilhard from his own indecisions and ambivalences as well as from the facile one-sidedness of his co-religionist admirers. In particular, we need to set forth his concept of the cosmic Christ in all its far-reaching revolutionary implications and free it from two restrictive connections he gave to it. First, the conventional notion of cosmi-cality which goes with all ideas of Godhead and with which Teilhard often tried to identify it in order to link to St. Paul and St. John the " 'new' Christianity"3 he was fighting for. Secondly, the irrational idea that the cosmic Christ was necessarily a consequence and extension of the historic Jesus rather than the historic Jesus being a concentrated manifestation of the cosmic Christ.
As might be expected of so complex and tension-fraught a thinker, Teilhard himself comes to our help here. Piet Smul-ders,4 a fellow-Jesuit, notes a "typical exaggeration" on Teilhard's part: "the primacy of Christ over the whole of
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creation, hitherto thought of in an exclusively juridical and extrinsic fashion, can only become reality in an evolutionist notion of the world. As if St. Paul and the Fathers of the Church and indeed even the numerous contemporary theologians who highlight the cosmic role of Christ, had need of the evolutionist thesis!" This surprised exclamation from a most sympathetic commentator is enough to prove that the cosmicality of Christ a la Teilhard can never be equated to the cosmic role attributed to Christ by any other Catholic theological thinker past or present. If, according to Teilhard, Christ's cosmicality can become a reality only when modern evolutionism is accepted, it is impossible for his cosmic Christ to figure in whatever St. Paul or contemporary religion posits in non-scientific terms. By insisting on evolutionism, Teilhard makes himself irrevocably unorthodox.
As for the historic Jesus in this context, his being subsequent and subordinate to the cosmic Christ cannot be denied the moment we correctly grasp Teilhard's identification of the latter with what he has made famous as Omega. Omega is the supreme focus of unity which draws the evolving world, through more and more complex organizations of structure and increasingly centred interiorizations of consciousness, towards a final collective unanimity of reflective beings. Teilhard arrives at the vision of Omega by his "ultra-physics" and then argues that at the human level of evolution Omega may be expected to communicate with us by means of religious messages and, for full effect, incarnate the divine Super-Person in humanity. Such a special act would give a great push to the work of world-unification, the gathering together of personal centres by a Super-Centre. The incarnate divinity is thus a step and a stage in the progressive history of a universal Soul of Evolution. And Teilhard, when he aligns his "ultra-physics" with his Christianity, speaks up for that religion on the strength of its close correspondence with his scientific vision. "What gives Christianity its peculiar effectiveness and sets it in a particular key," he5 informs us, "is the fundamental idea that the
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supreme focus of unity is not only reflected in each element of consciousness it attracts, but also, in order to produce final unification, has had to 'materialize' itself in the form of an element of consciousness (the Christic, historical 'I'). In order to act effectively, the Centre of centres reflected itself on the world in the form of a centre (Jesus Christ)." Obviously, if the cosmic Christ is Omega, he must precede and prepare the appearance of Jesus. What that appearance, with its life and death and resurrection and "glorified body", may be thought to bring about is a more dominant, a more trium-phant role played in the future by Christ-Omega.
How exactly should we characterize what Teilhard6 con-sidered his whole life's concern, "this half-scientific, half-religious faith", involving "a mutual form of love, based on the consciousness of a common Something (or rather Somebody) into which all together we converge"? He was frequently at pains to distinguish his faith from a "false pantheism" and to designate it as a "true pantheism". He could never get away from the pantheist nomenclature. The old Christian terms — "immanence" and "omnipresence" — did not satisfy him: they signified only God's Will sustaining the universe He had created as well as possessing the power to intervene in the universal process — both the sustenance and the intervention coming from a Being who is other than the world He has created not out of Himself but out of nothing. Concerning his "gospel" — "the feeling that the whole world is permeated by a creative love" — he7 wrote: "This is, of course, essentially the Christian attitude,but made richer by a confluence with the best and subtle essence of what is hidden behind the various pantheisms." To Teilhard there is a truth of indispensable value, beyond Christian "immanence" and "omnipresence", in the pan-theist experience. This truth, purified of a distortion he saw in that experience, he sought to catch in his cosmic Christ. "The 'universalised' Christ," he8 declared, "takes over, correcting and completing them, the energies that undoubtedly lie hidden in modern forms of pantheism.... If
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Christianity is to keep its place at the head of mankind, it must make itself explicitly recognisable as a sort of 'pan-Christism'...."
The falsehood that, in Teilhard's eyes, sullied pantheism was the absence he read in the latter of (1) a personal God transcendent of the cosmos and (2) an eternally subsisting individual element along with the All. The pantheist truth that filled a yawning gap in Christianity was a God intrinsic to the universe and co-extensive with it and inwardly energizing all evolution. This truth and its centrality to his life-work is perhaps best expressed in a letter of June 24, 1934:9 "What increasingly dominates my interest and my inner preoccupations...is the effort to establish within myself, and to diffuse around me, a new religion (let's call it an improved Christianity, if you like) whose personal God is no longer the great 'neolithic' landowner of times gone by, but the Soul of the world — as demanded by the cultural and religious stage we have now reached.... My road ahead seems clearly marked out; it is a matter not of superimposing Christ on the world, but of 'panchristising' the universe. The delicate point.. .is that, if you follow this path, you are led not only to widening your views, but to turning your perspectives upside down; evil (no longer punishment for a fault, but 'sign and effect' of progress) and matter (no longer a guilty and lower element, but 'the stuff of the Spirit') assume a meaning diametrically opposed to the meaning customarily viewed as Christian. Christ emerges from the transformation incredibly enlarged.... But is this Christ really the Christ of the Gospel? And if not, on what henceforward do we base what we are trying to build?.... One thing reassures me; it is that, in me, the increase of light goes hand in hand with love and with renouncement of myself in the Greater than me. This could not deceive."
Although his evolutionary pan-Christism opened for man's destiny "a new compartment or rather an additional dimension..., of which there is no explicit mention in the
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gospel",10 Teilhard felt that the spirit in which he was discovering "true pantheism" in terms of Christ was the spirit of the Gospel (love and self-renouncement in the Greater than one). There was also his conviction that, no matter what new shade he introduced into St. Paul, he was yet following "his line".11 Hence his belief that Christianity could still serve and that in "the Christian stem...the sap of the religion of tomorrow is forming".12 But neither his own innate pantheist turn to feel the world as divine in its depths and matter as "the stuff of the Spirit" nor the modern sense of a single colossal cosmic process inwardly moved to evolve "a kind of 'God of ahead' (in extension of the Human)"13 could be quite satisfied with Christian-sounding confessions of faith. On the other side, no Christian mind could find satisfaction in certain directions of Teilhard's thought and expression. Two remarks of Henri de Lubac are typical. "He tried to show in our Lord Jesus Christ 'the synthesis of the created Universe and its Creator': did he not sometimes seem to establish this synthesis at a too accessible level and thus, in spite of the qualifications and corrections we have noted, and against his unmistakable intention, to some degree naturalize Christ?"14 "We believe, as Pere Rabut does, that the elliptical form and the emphasis of some of Pere Teilhard's expressions would seem to suggest a sort of natural identity of Christ and the Universe."15 Teilhard's tendency to cosmi-calize Christ and Christify the universe while holding fast to a transcendent personal God could have found proper play only if he had built from his half-scientific half-religious faith an evolutionary Christ-coloured version of what he repeatedly misunderstood and condemned: the ancient Indian Vedanta, especially as disclosed in the Bhagavad Gita. This scripture combines a transcendent Person, a dynamic Pan-theos and a supreme Incarnation as well as a human soul-hood which is an eternal portion of the Divine Nature and called towards the Personal Divinity through an extreme of love and of self-renouncement in a Greater than it at the
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same time that the human realizes its essential oneness with the Divine, its inherent sameness of substance as the Absolute.
However, even as an evolutionary Vedantic Christianity, the Teilhardian Weltanschauung, , because of a number of shortcomings caused by its failure to rise to the full implications of blending modern evolutionism and the Gita's synthesis, cannot be the religion of tomorrow, the spirituality of the future. This spirituality is best recognized in the vision and work of Teilhard's contemporary, Sri Aurobindo, with whom he has often been compared but who goes far beyond him in mystical insight and experience no less than in bringing out the deepest significance of progressive evolutionism.
Sri Aurobindo's mystical insight and experience centre in what he calls the Supermind. The Supermind is not merely a magnified mind nor is it simply any faculty which is above mind. It is a specific supra-intellectual light — a hitherto unexplored dimension of the Divine Consciousness. It is a supreme dynamism which is originally creative and ultimately transformative of the space-time cosmos. It not only holds the perfect truth of all that evolves here — mind, life-force and body organized around an individual soul passing progressively from grade to grade of evolutionary existence through a series of rebirths: it also has the power to manifest that truth in all these terms here upon earth. And it manifests that truth not by a superimposition of the divine upon the earthly but by developing it as the very nature of those terms. For it is not just a realm of perfection high above, like the Platonic Ideas: it is simultaneously the perfection hidden below in what Plato labelled as the flux of phenomena and in what Sri Aurobindo names the Inconscience, an apparent negation of everything divine, where yet the full divinity lies "involved" as a prelude to its being "evolved" individually and collectively. Perfection is thus the inherent destiny of all evolving forces — a total fulfilment in the space-time cosmos itself by means of a push from the "involved" Supermind
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and a pull plus pressure from the Supermind eternally free in its transcendent status, which is personal God as well as All-Self.
Thus Sri Aurobindo drives towards consummating in the most integral sense both the Vedantic discovery, "All here is Brahman", and the perfectionist dream of modern science — a totally realised existence, both individual and collective, in the field of matter.
In this context arises, between Teilhard and Sri Aurobindo, the issue which Dr. Beatrice Bruteau has discussed in a penetrative article, "Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Char-din on the Problem of Action".16 She begins by stating the issue: "By the problem of action I mean the problem of justifying human efforts to improve the spatio-temporal environment and of motivating men to make such efforts." Whatever practical attention Hinduism and Christianity may have given to the world in relation to God, the eyes of both were ultimately fixed on the Beyond: "the paradigm of holiness...was the world-renouncing monk." Aware of the conflict between God and the world in their respective religious backgrounds, Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard set about resolving the conflict by "extending to the world the value traditionally accorded to God" — while never permitting "the value of the Transcendent to suffer the least dimi-nishment" by "their efforts to enhance the importance of the finite world". Each of them relates this world, with its imperfections, to the Absolute by means of "the perspective of evolution", the modern world-picture.
Teilhard, Bruteau tells us, visualizes evolutionary fulfilment in a sort of "super-organism" where the sovereign Centre which he calls Christ-Omega constitutes the converging point for a multitude of personal centres enjoying a "differentiating union", of love with it. When the peak of development is attained, there will be a breakthrough outside Time and Space by the very excess of unification and co-reflection of the numerous personal consciousnesses. There will be a final "critical point" of evolution at which mankind,
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its convergence complete, will detach itself from this planet and join the transcendent Christ-Omega. Bruteau well remarks: "At this point we may feel that somehow we have come full circle and that the finite, material, spatio-temporal world, whose value we were trying to justify, has quietly slipped through our fingers, leaving us with our supreme value again attached only to the spiritual realm."
Bruteau rightly traces Teilhard's self-contradiction to his failure to be thorough in putting God at the heart of the universe. Because he still held that "the world travails, not to bring forth from within itself some supreme reality, but to find its consummation through a union with a pre-existent Being", he was "obliged in the end to abandon the world of space, time, and matter for another world beyond". Sri Aurobindo's position is in contrast to this. "He announced from the outset that the absolute is transcendent, cosmic, and individual. The evolving temporal world is essentially nothing but the Absolute itself. So is every individual." Sri Aurobindo understood the true condition required for evolutionary fulfilment. "The world and the individual must be divine by right of nature; the evolving world must have all divine values involved in it awaiting unfoldment; evolution, both cosmic and individual, must infallibly attain its goal of perfect manifestation of the Godhead by continuous development...; and this manifestation, when complete, must include, not only the expansion of human consciousness to the awesome level of the supramental, but the impassibility, elevation, and immortality of the human body." Bruteau sums up: "If we are to hold all that we know of reality, and all that we can surmise, invent, or dream of reality, together in one, all of it having the maximum of meaning and value that we can find for it, then the way pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, or something very like it, would seem to be the only way."
According to Bruteau, while Teilhard's vision of the world evolving towards a single collective state of "super-humanity" with a "super-consciousness" does undoubtedly
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contain powerful sources of motivation for action in the world, especially for those who share his theological presuppositions, it does not thoroughly succeed in justifying the world and satisfactorily solving the problem of action in the space-time framework. Sri Aurobindo's vision, rooted not in Omega but in the Supermind, does so.
Only four further observations we may offer a propos of Bruteau's essay. As in most other respects, Teilhard is double-voiced even about what the world travails for. He could not help feeling that a super-humanity with a super-consciousness expressing itself in a super-organism is in fact some supreme reality which the world would be evolving from within itself. No doubt, something more is there, a pre-existent Being; but is not the same Being brought forth gradually in the evolutionary process? What Teilhard17 says about Omega is: "While being the last term of its series, it is also outside all series." In noting the underlined facet of Omega, that in which it is seen as already present or emerged, we must not overlook its "evolutive facet",18 in which we see "that it emerges from the rise of consciousness"19 and "is discovered to us at the end of the whole processus, inasmuch as in it the movement of synthesis culminates".20 Omega's two-facetedness is also brought home in religious language. "God, the eternal being-in-itself, is, one might say, everywhere in process of formation for us."21 These are words of Teilhard's at almost the start of his career. They are echoed in his old age: "God for himself ever complete and yet for us ever and endlessly being born."22 The full implication of such statements should take Teilhard alongside Sri Aurobindo, and here and there we do find him talking of "another mankind" that "must inevitably emerge"23 and establish on earth a sovereignty of universal love. De Lubac24 is puzzled and wonders whether "even in such rare passages" Teilhard, "without making it quite clear", was not speaking of the end of the world, a supernatural terminus. But these passages have no reference to any eschatological breakthrough into a Beyond.
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And what clinches their this-worldliness is a merger of two important expressions. De Lubac has often insisted that the "ultra-human" of Teilhard's evolutionary perspective coincides with the "trans-human" of his eschatology, so that the final "critical threshold" marks an extra-cosmic movement. But here Teilhard does not merely mention "an ultra-human synthesis":25 he also goes on to characterize this "further degree of organization and therefore of consciousness and therefore of freedom"26 as the actualized "possibility" and "potentiality" of "a further trans-human syn-thesis of organic matter".27 The "trans-human", like the "ultra-human", is now an earthly vision. Nor is this fusion of the two terms the aberrancy of a single occasion. Elsewhere too Teilhard fuses them, as, for instance, when he poses "the problem of knowing whether, and up to what point, it is physically (planetarily) possible for man to trans- or ultra-hominize himself".28 However, the grip of the traditional Christian hope proves too strong for Teilhard in the main and cuts short his Aurobindonian tendency, the true trend of his evolutionist religion.
Our second observation concerns a gap in Teilhard's view of the evolutionary process. Like Sri Aurobindo he evaluates evolution in terms of growth of consciousness. And he is particular about the ultimate value of the personal. Evolution aims at the production of persons, reflective intensely inte-riorized selves. Again, it is because the further line of evolution passes through the personal human that Teilhard envisages the fullness of evolutionary achievement as a centring of personal consciousnesses on a supreme Person. But what is the medium through which the personal human comes into its own? Each of us, in Teilhard's thought, has an individual "soul" but he has no answer to the question: how has the soul-individuality come up? He does not subscribe to the orthodox theory that each soul is newly created by God at the birth of a body. He29 says of the man deeply convinced of the evolutionary viewpoint: "Body and soul, he is the product of a huge creative work with which the totality of
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things has collaborated from the beginning." And he also believes30 that the personal consciousnesses can leave their bodily vehicles when the latter dissolve: they detach themselves and collect around the pre-existent Omega. Bruteau quotes him as declaring: "All around us, 'souls' break away, carrying upwards their incommunicable load of consciousness." But, if the soul can survive physical death and has not been Christianly new-created at physical birth, how can it not have a pre-existence of its own as the ground of its individual personality? And, if it pre-exists, must we not posit a series of births for it, contributing to its development? It would be logical to assent to Sri Aurobindo's argument:31 "...if there is an evolution of consciousness in an evolutionary body and a soul inhabiting the body, a real and conscious individual, then it is evident that it is the progressive experience of that soul in Nature which takes the form of this evolution of consciousness: rebirth is self-evidently a necessary part, the sole possible machinery of such an evolution."
Thirdly, we may probe the content of Omega Point. Teilhard has written, as we have seen, of "God, the eternal being-in-itself,...everywhere in process of formation for us". But what do we actually have at the climax of Teilhardian evolution? When Omega serves as the supreme evolutionary Pole, it is figured as an infinite divine reality, to be approached through an inward resonance to the All and an outward pooling of progressive enterprises. But, when evolving humanity reaches Omega Point, can we say that its maturation is equal to the cosmic "Within" coming into its own and revealing its transcendence? There is only a certain expansion of consciousness in the human degree. Teilhard calls it a "planetization" of "co-reflection": all reflective units of the earth cohere and there emerges a single human consciousness thinking collectively on a planetary scale. What we may call in Indian nomenclature the Vishwa Manava, the World-Man, in complete unitary and multiple thought-expression, is evolved. To dub this earthly "totalization" of Mental Mankind the cosmic consciousness, the
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realization of the All, the God Ahead joining with the God Above — as Teilhard does — would be an exaggeration. No supreme divine reality is here. However magnified into something "super" or "ultra", as compared with the present reflective rather than co-reflective condition that is ours, we are still in the sphere of the "human, all too human". To take this race-wide state of harmonious religion and research and relationship to be the term of evolution is logically inconsistent with the original vision of Omega.
Hence the fulfilled humanity it will constitute — glorious though it might be — would be far indeed from that complete divinisation of mind, life and body, which Sri Aurobindo names "Supramental Transformation".
Even the cosmic consciousness, the realisation of the All, the God Ahead joining with the God Above — even Omega figured as an infinite divine reality would not be able to effectuate that transformation; for, it would not answer to the Aurobindonian Supermind. Bruteau, for all the comparable factors she may discern in the two, never identifies them, but less knowledgeable commentators might easily do so. They would be committing a capital mistake. The Teilhardian Omega would only bring about in a Christianised evolutionary mode an approximation to the manifold Theophany invoked by the Gita. And the Gita does no more than magnificently prepare the ground for Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga.
Our last query vis-a-vis Teilhardism is: can there be at all a term to evolution? Is not "God ... for us ever and endlessly being born"? Omega Point, whether viewed as an earthly transformation in its own right or as a passing of the ultra-human into the trans-human outside space-time, negates this concept of Teilhard himself. But, unlike the grandiose dead-stop that is Omega Point, the Supramental Transformation is not the end of evolutionary history. In accord with the modern perspective, though in a much more profound sense than any that the scientific world-picture carries, Sri Aurobindo looks forward to a continuing progression. Fol-
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lowing upon Supramentalisation there will be the embodiment of a still deeper aspect of Divine Existence — what Sri Aurobindo, employing the ancient Indian terminology, would call the Bliss-state, the Ananda-aspect, of the Absolute, which is behind the supramental Truth-consciousness, the Vijnana-aspect. Behind the Bliss-state there will be something else — and so on, as it should be when we are dealing with the Absolute and His manifestation. For, to use Meredith's phrase,
His touch is infinite and lends
A yonder to all ends.
1.Quoted in Henri de Lubac's The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin
2.Letters to Two Friends (Collins, The Fontana Library, Theology and Philosophy, London, 1972), p. 155.
3.Ibid.,
4.The Design of Teilhard de Chardin:
5.Christianity and Evolution
6.Letters to Two Friends,
7.Ibid.,
8.Science and Christ
9.Letters to Leontine Zanta
10.Christianity and Evolution,
11.See de Lubac's Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning
12.Letters to Two Friends,
13.Ibid.,
14.The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin,
15.Ibid.,
16.International Philosophical Quarterly
17.The Phenomenon of Man
19.Ibid.,
20.Ibid.,
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21.Hymn of the Universe (Collins, Fontana Books, London, 1971), p. 51.
22.Le coeur de la Matiere, quoted in Emile Rideau's Teilhard de Chardin: A Guide to HisThought (Collins, London, 1967), p. 502.
23.Activation of Energy (Collins, London, 1971), p. 74.
24.The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, p. 358,note 67.
25.Activation of Energy, p. 69.
26.Ibid.
27.Ibid., p. 68.
28.Ibid., p. 369.
29.The Vision of the Past (Collins, London, 1966), p. 137.
30.The Phenomenon of Man, p. 272.
31.The Life Divine (The Sri Aurobindo Library, The Greystone Press, New York,1949), pp. 680-681.
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Your extremely friendly letter and the enclosed fine-feeling'd articles of Bede Griffiths have been lying in front of me for quite a time. Now at last I have sufficient leisure to give them the lengthy consideration they deserve.
Let me at the very start tell you that I remember our meetings in the Ashram with great warmth and also that I have never wavered in my general admiration for Bede Griffiths ever since I came across a pamphlet of his on Hinduism. Recently I went through his Return to the Centre, marking several passages of keen insight which go beyond the conventional and traditipnal in common Christianity and make living contact with the basic truths of all mystical experience. Orthodox Catholicism might get shocked on finding grounds to suspect what may be called "panpsy-chism" or even "pantheism" — but actually these "heresies" appear not in their European form which can be taken to exclude or negate the transcendent Divine but in their Indian version in which, as far back as the Rigveda, the Seers perceived about the Supreme Purusha that "one quarter of him is here on earth, three quarters are above in heaven". In these matters as well as in many others one would not be wrong to term Griffiths an Aurobindonian Christian. And how indeed can he be essentially anything else when his book contains the truest and greatest compliment ever paid to Sri Aurobindo by any Catholic? Perhaps he is the only Catholic interpreter — except for Abbe Monchanin and Beatrice Bruteau — who gives Sri Aurobindo his due. Compared to him, writers like Father Feys, for all their show of intellectual acumen, are plausible frauds in the end. So memorable is Griffiths's passage on Sri Aurobindo that I should like to cull it for you from his book:
"In his philosophy there is a wonderful synthesis, based
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on the Vedanta, of ancient and modern thought. In him the values of being and becoming, of Spirit and matter, of the One and the many, of the eternal and the temporal, of the universal and the individual, of the personal God and the absolute Godhead, are integrated in a vision of the whole, which has never been surpassed in depth and comprehensiveness. In the integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo the values of matter and life and human consciousness and the experience of a personal God are not lost in the ultimate Reality, the divine Sachchidananda. Matter and life and consciousness in man are seen to be evolving towards the divine life and the divine consciousness, in which they are not annihilated but fulfilled." (p. 137)
The Supramental Physical and the Body
of the Resurrection
Just after these words Griffiths writes:
"This is the goal of a Christian Yoga. Body and soul are to be transfigured by the divine life and to participate in the divine consciousness. There is a descent of the Spirit into Matter and a corresponding ascent, by which matter is transformed by the indwelling power of the Spirit and the body is transfigured..." (pp. 137-8)
I can understand Griffiths's seeing a general analogue of Aurobindonianism in Christianity, but what he says here applies to every via mystica, especially the Sufi kind, which is a blend of Vedanta and Vaishnavism. The comparison can bear uniquely on Christianity if Griffiths's next paragraph can hold true. He continues:
"For a Christian this had already taken place in the resurrection of Christ. In his body matter has already been transformed, so as to become a spiritual body, which is the medium of the divine life..." {Ibid.)
In the address delivered at the International Transper-sonal Conference held in Bombay from the 14th till the 20th February this year, Griffiths touches on the theme again and,
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referring to Sri Aurobindo, says:
"He conceived that...the Supermind descends not only into the soul or psychic consciousness but also into the body or physical consciousness. In fact, it is well known that he and the Mother, who accompanied him in all his work, were both attempting to transform the body, so that it would not be subject to death. Their attempt was not successful, but it corresponds to a deep human instinct, which urges us to seek for an immortal body, a diamond body, as it has been called in Buddhist tradition...
"In the Christian belief the body of Jesus in the resurrection underwent precisely this transformation..."1
Surely, Griffiths must know that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were aware of all that had happened or been sought for in spiritual human history. They knew their Bible very well and never hesitated to point out in it legends or symbols, visions or intuitions having some link or other with their own spiritual quest just as they noted doctrinal or experiential affinities elsewhere to their Integral Yoga. If they were trying to repeat in their bodies and hoping to achieve in those of their followers what had taken place in Jesus, why did they not ever give a hint of it? It should be clear to us that there were radical differences between the Aurobindonian transformation and what the Resurrection of Jesus could be.
First of all, Jesus died before he was "raised". Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother thought of a post-mortem transformation.
Secondly, the Resurrection, whether in Jesus or in his followers, was never conceived in terms of a crowning evolution. There was no question of an aeonic development of earth-history by an evolutionary process starting with matter, passing through vital and mental stages and culminating in a supramental race. Nor was there any question of a prolonged Yoga, a concentrated and accelerated evolution by a mystical growth over self-dedicated years, moving gradually through what Sri Aurobindo has named psychici-
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sation and spiritualisation, which would cover all that the via mystica attempted to compass in the past, and then progressing towards supramentalisation which, according to Sri Aurobindo, was mostly something "new though, since the Divine Supermind is at the back of all earth-history in however concealed a form, there has always been a striving not only after an illuminated mind, a love-suffused heart, an ultra-capable life-force but also after a body of radiant health, free from the encroachment of tempus edax, "time the de-vourer". The Resurrection implies no practice of sustained mysticism: it is said by St. Paul to happen "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" (1 Corinthians 15:52) — a sheer sudden miracle with merely a faith in Jesus and an ordinary religious piety as its antecedent or its conditio sine qua non.
Thirdly, the Resurrection is promised solely at the end of time. No one doing the Christian Yoga gained or even hoped to gain by his inner development a body such as is attributed to the risen Christ. I don't understand what Griffiths means in his book (p. 139) by writing: "The body of the Virgin Mary is said to have been transformed in the same way, and doubtless there are other saints and Yogis of whom this is true." I have not come across a reference to the Virgin Mary's body in the Gospels or in the Epistles of St. Paul. Indeed, St. Paul does not refer even to the virginity of Mary which one or two verses in the infancy accounts in a couple of books (Matthew and Luke) out of the twenty-seven or more comprising the New Testament state or suggest. Actually, St. Paul, whose Epistles are the earliest Christian documents, simply speaks of Jesus as having been "made of a woman, made under the law" (Galatians 4:4) or, as the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible phrases it, "born of a woman, born a subject of the Law".2 The second part refers, of course, to the common unredeemed world with its constituents ruled by an established universal Law. The first part alludes to another facet of the same condition, as is obvious from the Bible itself when Jesus speaks of John the Baptist who, for all
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his greatness, is shown by Luke (1:13) to be the product of Zechariah's marital relations with Elisabeth. Luke puts into Jesus's mouth the words: "Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist..." Matthew (11:11) has, almost verbatim, an identical report of Jesus's pronouncement. Paul's two expressions are invariably associated in the Bible with natural humanity. To St. Paul the birth of Jesus was like that of any other man. But, even granting that there is scriptural authority for something extraordinary happening to Mary's body, how can it be compared to that of the resurrected Christ when Griffiths compares it also to those of "other saints and Yogis"? Has any saint or Yogi obtained a body comparable to "the body of Christ, which is no longer limited by space and time" (p. 138)? On a certain instance in Griffiths's mind I shall touch a little later. Here I shall express my opinion that it would be a mistake of Christian thought to ascribe a Christ-like resurrectionist body to any person before the end of time. For, the transformed body, which Griffiths mentions, is necessarily eschatological. The transformation a la Sri Aurobirndo was envisaged as a goal to be reached in the present age, as Griffiths himself admits when he alludes to the lack of success in the efforts of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to accomplish here and now a transformation of the body by the Supermind's descent into the physical no less than the psychic consciousness. The objective of the Christian Yoga is poles apart from that of the Aurobindonian.
Fourthly and lastly, Christ's resurrected body is not an example of transformation that has stayed on the earth. It is reported to have appeared and disappeared, a mysterious visitant acting occasionally as grossly physical and occasionally as subtly substantial, and never in any case meaning to be a permanent part of terrestrial life in the course of history. It was not intended to be an achievement by a revolutionary evolution, as it were, which would serve as the beginning of a race of Supermen carrying to perfection both the inner and the outer existence, the individual and the
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collective being, in the immediate or near future. The physical transformation, divinisation, supramentalisation at which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aimed has no anticipatory parallel in the resurrected body which Matthew, Luke and John and the author of the Acts picture Christ as possessing.
Ramalingam's "Golden Body" and the
Supramental Physical
In addition, quite relevantly in the Griffiths-context, I may deny any presaging likeness to the Aurobindonian goal in the body of light which the songs of the nineteenth century's South-Indian saint Ramalingam describe. Griffiths has written an Introduction to a full-length biography and interpretation of Ramalingam by G. Vanmikanathan,3 who argues that the Saint's celebration of a "golden body", won by him and enjoying deathless life or immortality, is an inner experience consequent on the soul's union with the Supreme and its liberation thereby from our doomed physical existence. Griffiths demurs to such a gloss which harks back simply to the famous Upanishadic passage "from the unreal to the Real, from the darkness to the Light, from death to Immortality". Part of his comment4 on Ramalingam's spirituality runs: "This idea of an immortal body is found in Taoist mysticism and in the concept of a 'diamond body' in Tibetan mysticism as also in the 'spiritual body' of St. Paul and Christian tradition. Mr. Vanmikanathan seems to diminish the significance of this state of deathlessness by reducing it to the state of the delivered soul freed from the body in videha mukti."
No doubt, Vanmikanathan's terms are too general. But the shade of the Vedantic liberation cannot be washed away from a cry like Ramalingam's
Oh men of the delusive world!
It is not fair to perish in this world of ignorance.
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Come along to live the great deathless life.
Come here and settle down in the status
Of (a member) of the purposeful Pure Blissful
True Creed! —5
or from a proclamation by Ramalingam like:
The talk of the adepts and the Jeewan-mukthas
is about me.
What have I to do any more in this reviling world?
All the miseries of birth and death have vanished
from today!6
What can legitimately be said by Griffiths is that the Vedantic mukti is not all in all in Ramalingam. Then his objection would be both correct and salutary. However, he errs in taking the Saint too literally. He overlooks the fact that Ramalingam speaks of "the primeval Civam", who is "transcendental Brahman",7 having a "golden body" and of Ramalingam "embracing" it and, as a result of that "moment" of "union", becoming "transformed into the form of eternal bliss that is Civam".8 Here is indeed something ignored by Vanmikanathan, a sense of another state of corporeality than the gross and no bare infinite of illumination. And yet to suggest a change of the gross body into a golden one is to overshoot the mark: all that can be read is a subtle occult form of light experienced within the gross and felt as infiltrating it: Shiva's "golden body", his "form of eternal bliss", is then realised as the devotee's own inner body-sense — possibly leading now and again to some extraordinary functioning in the natural organism.
This is no exclusive or utterly new realisation of Rama-lingam's. Manikavachakar, 3rd century A.D., sings also of two bodies, a beatific imperishable one replacing in awareness the ordinary mortal sheath. In his Thiruvachakam, a book to which Ramalingam was much attached,9 Manikavachakar10 records:
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The Superb One...
the effulgent Being
Who, for my sake, coming today,
Without any effort on my part,
did away with the body which spells ruin...
and abode in me;...
He made for me a body which yields ecstasy...
This is precisely Ramalingam's "form of eternal bliss", about which he has further chanted:
My Lord comes to give me a blissful form...
The Great Effulgence of Grace
Who has transcended the Fourth State is corning
To give me a form of bliss...11
I have gained the boon of the mortal body
turning into a golden body!12
I hugged the golden form,
which he pressed on me,
and rejoiced!...13
I am experiencing the great Fourth State,
I have joined the Universal True Path,
And, gaining the embrace of my Husband...
I have become His form;
I live, delighting in it...14
Mysticism of a high order is before us, joining up, as Griffiths15 remarks, with "that kind of bridal mysticism, which is so well known in Tamil Nadu and which has its parallels in both Islamic and Christian mysticism". But no question arises here of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother intended by a supramental divinisation of the actual physical substance and shape. The Taoist "immortal body" and the Tibetan "diamond body" are also inner subtle realities which, it is hoped, will produce a marvellous exterior effect at some future period of the Divine Manifestation, like the Resurrection looked forward to by St. Paul as the taking on of
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a "spiritual body". Nowhere is any evidence of an already established lasting transfiguration of the gross physical.
The very description we have of Ramalingam's person by a long-standing eye-witness is enough to disprove the claim on his behalf. Vanmikanathan16 informs us: "Photography had come to India in the life-time of our Swamikal, but no photograph of him is available to us. It is said that attempts to photograph him always ended in failure. Nor do we have any portrait of the Swamikal. What we have today and what appears now in books and periodicals is a modern artist's impression of the Swamikal, a product of the imagination based on certain accounts of the appearance of the Swamikal and on certain of his poems. Fortunately, we have on record a vivid description...by one of his contemporaries, Sri Velayutha Muthaliyar of Tholuvoor, a disciple of the Swamikal."
As Vanmikanathan17 records, Muthaliyar was a disciple for a quarter century and survived Ramalingam. From intimate knowledge he18 writes: "In personal appearance, Ramalingam was a moderately tall, spare man — so spare, indeed, as to virtually appear a skeleton — yet withal a strong man, erect in stature, and walking very rapidly; with a face of a clear brown complexion, a straight nose, very large fiery eyes, and with a look of constant sorrow on his face. Towards the end, he let his hair grow long; and what is rather unusual with Yogis, he wore shoes." Then Muthaliyar goes on to speak of Ramalingam's abstemious habits and his abnormal capacity to fast for long periods. But not the slightest hint of a material body of golden light is here.
Even if we go along with Griffiths about Ramalingam, what do we reach? He19 writes: "Ramalingam's mysticism does not involve the loss of the body in the final state of liberation but its transfiguration... It is filled with the divine life and becomes a spiritual body no longer conditioned by the present laws of matter, but transfigured in the divine light. The story of his own passing that he simply disappeared, whether it is literally true or not, is surely of deep
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symbolic value in this respect." The last sentence is my cue for an Aurobindonian comment.
In one of his letters Sri Aurobindo20 observes: "Whatever may have happened to Chaitanya of Ramalingam, whatever physical transformation they may have gone through is quite irrelevant to the aim of the supramentalisation of the body. Their new body was either a non-physical or subtle physical body not adapted for life on the earth. If it were not so, they would not have disappeared..." Another letter21 says: "The idea of a transformation of the body occurs in different traditions, but I have never been quite sure that it meant the change in this very matter. There was a yogi sometime ago in this region who taught it, but he hoped when the change was complete, to disappear in light. The Vaishnavas speak of a divine body which will replace this one when there is the complete siddhi. But, again, is this a divine physical or supraphysical body?" A body of light perpetually present amongst men has not been known so far: one that does not stay on the earth to mark a novel evolutionary turn in physical existence is certainly not the sort Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had in view as the grand finale of their all-harmonising, all-fulfilling Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo does not refuse to see some approach or other in the past to his ideal. But he is explicit about the basic divergence even where an apparent similarity may be discerned. He22 speaks of "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature — not by imposing siddhis [= abnormal faculties] on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution." And he continues: "I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic or other process. Mental or vital occult power can only bring siddhis of the higher plane into the individual life — like the Sannyasi who could take any poison without harm, but he died of a poison after all when he forgot to observe the conditions of the siddhi. The working of the supramental power envisaged is not an influence on the physical giving it
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abnormal faculties but an entrance and permeation changing it wholly into a supramental physical." Again, Sri Aurobindo23 points out: "...the endeavour towards this achievement is not new and some yogis have achieved it, I believe — but not in the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi maintained by yoga-siddhi — not a dharma [= inherent law] of the nature." The Aurobindonian supra-mentalisation has to be an intrinsic permanent state of the body by the junction of the descending free Supermind from above the mental plane with the Supermind evoked from matter where, according to Sri Aurobindo, it lies involved. Both the spiritual vision and the spiritual dynamics of his Integral Yoga differ from those recognisable in past "saints and Yogis".
We may pause a little over Sri Aurobindo's words: "this achievement" — and then the following "some yogis have achieved it, I believe". His meaning is not quite clear. What "this achievement" signifies is most probably "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature" spoken of in the other letter, as a result of "siddhis" imposed by "mental or vital occult power". The term "transformation" can cover many Yogic changes. A supramental transformation by means of "siddhis" is not likely to be intended. But, even if it is, how does it bear on the case of Ramalingam?
His case is of particular relevance because not only did Sri Aurobindo and the Mother show special interest in him at one time but also because the Mother on two occasions made a remark on what Ramalingam had named "Grace-Light" or, as Vanmikanathan puts it, "Effulgence of Grace". On July 12, 1970 she greatly appreciated the term and the experience it stood for, which corresponded to one of her own experiences. She was even reported as equating the Grace-Light to the supramental consciousness and as saying that a number of individuals, known or unknown, are likely to have brought this consciousness to the earth throughout the ages but that now instead of an individual possibility Sri
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Aurobindo and she were working to establish it as a collective possibility, as a terrestrial fact and a possibility for all. On July 22 the topic was raised once more. She was pointedly asked whether the Grace-Light and the Supramental Light were one and the same thing and whether she had meant that Ramalingam had already worked out the individual supramentalisation rather than that even this was specifically her endeavour and Sri Aurobindo's. She replied: "It is a pity, but you make me say what I have not said. Thus I have nothing to answer to your conclusions which are unfounded." Asked if she had really implied Ramalingam to have been directly in contact with the Supramental, her reaction was: "Why not?...I have the feeling that men have big scissors and always want to cut off bits of the Lord!"24 However, she categorically countered the earlier report which had equated the Supramental Light with the Grace-Light. She declared: "The Grace-Light is not the Supramental Light but one aspect of it, rather one activity of the Supramental."25
The last statement is a decisive clarification. Face to face with it we should be absolutely illogical if we attributed to Ramalingam a supramentalised body. How can just a single aspect or activity of the multifarious Supermind, which is not only light but also consciousness, force, bliss and whose light even is not confined to being "Grace-Light", be claimed to have accomplished so radical and extreme a phenomenon as the total supramentalisation of the body — a most difficult task which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who were in possession of the entire Supermind in their inner consciousness and had suffused with it even their subtle forms, considered nobody to have done and which they were themselves still seeking to do?
With the help of Grace-Light Ramalingam must have had a remarkable result in his subtle form, as compared to most other Yogis of the past, but even there the supramentalisation could be no more than partial. As for the physical body, the consequences are bound to have been still less —
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certainly the powerful sense of a rare glory outflowing from the inner self yet as certainly falling short of any appreciable physical supramentalisation, no matter what unusual capacities it may have brought about. The question whether by means of them Ramalingam, as Griffiths words it, "simply disappeared" cannot be settled. Griffiths, for one, is not sure that the story "is literally true".
Have we any sign of the Mother's attitude here? Her outlook can be gauged from a talk in January 1960.26 The problem was put to her: "I have read that the bodies of some saints, after their death, have disappeared and become flowers or just vanished into the sky. Can such a thing happen?" The Mother replied: "Everything is possible, it could have happened, but I do not believe it did. We cannot always believe what is said in books. Nor is there a necessary connection between such phenomena and sainthood." Then the Mother affirmed that some "mediums", who are often people of very low character, perform dematerialisation and rematerialisation under the strictest scientific control. So such phenomena do genuinely occur in rare instances. After this, the Mother returns to the point originally raised and concludes: "In connection with great or holy men all sorts of stories get started. When Sri Aurobindo had not left his body, there was circulated a story that he used to go out of the roof of his room — yes, physically — and move about in all kinds of places. It is even written down in a book. He told me about it himself."
Returning from Ramalingam to Griffiths's main theme, namely Christ, I may reiterate in conclusion on this subject that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew what Christ's resurrected body might connote and they did not regard the description of it as reflecting the transformation they had in mind. Not without significance did the Mother, in evident reference to religious history in general and to Christianity in particular, give the New Year Message of 1957: "It is not the crucified body but the glorified body that will save the world." As a later talk (September 13,1967) clarifies, if Christ
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had a glorified body it belongs not to the world but to heaven.
Christianity, Reincarnation and Krishna
In Griffiths's remarkably wide-visioned book as well as in his recent elevating speech another sad deficiency is in regard to Reincarnation. He quotes Shankara to the effect that "the Lord is the only transmigrator". Reasoning from this, he infers that the one Self dwelling in humanity as in everything is alone the reality that passes from life to life. In support he quotes Aquinas's dictum: "All men are one Man." The whole argument strikes me as an evasion of what the theory of reincarnation implies.
Did not Aquinas write at some length on the individual soul created by God at birth? And did not Shankara too grant a "jivatman"? He may have regarded the "jivatman" as ultimately an illusion, but then he regarded the "Lord" also as the highest illusion and believed the birthless and deathless, undivided and qualitiless Atman or Brahman, a-cosmic and free from name and form, to be the one and only Existent. In the world which for all practical purposes he took as real, even though from the final spiritual experience it might be mere Maya, he granted the traditional Indian view of the individual soul reincarnating or transmigrating. Aquinas can escape just as little as Shankara the destiny, whatever it may be, of each separate man. Both Shankara and Aquinas are brought in by Griffiths in order not to abandon the dogma of a new soul called into existence ex nihilo at every birth and to evade the concept of a soul going through many lives, getting diverse experiences, gradually rising higher and higher. If evolution is a fact and if it is to have a spiritual meaning, the spiritual evolution can proceed only through the progress of an individual soul through a series of lives across the ages. Reincarnation in a literal sense is unavoidable in a spiritually evolutionary world-vision.
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Doubtless, there is a host of subtleties and the popular idea is too school-masterish: Sri Aurobindo has discussed all the aspects of "rebirth" in a few exceedingly insightful chapters of The Life Divine and put it in the right framework. If Griffiths is drawing strength, as he does, from modern science for his spiritual outlook he can ill afford to get round the individual soul's spiritual evolution. He has accepted many truths of the Spirit from India, which his too conservative co-religionists would be inclined to look askance at. It is best not to jibe at literal reincarnation. Perhaps it should be enough for him to believe that the soul was created out of nothing at the very start of the evolutionary process and that afterwards it goes on getting reborn in the manner Sri Aurobindo expounds.
Is of Indian seerhood should have to make concessions to his accepted religion and feel compelled not only here but in a number of other insta personally don't fancy this compromise. It is a pity that one so profound in his spiritual practice and so finely touched by the tremendous truthnces to argue the superiority of that religion: thus "Christian love" is sought to be made out so much greater than the love that flows from the heart of both Hinduism and Buddhism to all creatures and not merely to human beings. Similarly, Krishna, though appreciated, is cut down in comparison to Christ and also relegated to the world of myth. Krishna is obviously historical in the Chhandogya Upanishad. In the Mahabharata he is depicted fully as a human being who is the Divine Incarnate. Even in the Brindavan story the substratum of reality is clear in the midst of the poetry and the symbolism. And why does Griffiths sidetrack to the Brinda-van-context the phrases quoted from Chapter XVIII. 65 of the Bhagavad Gita and declared to have been spoken on the battlefield of Kurukshetra: "Give me thy mind and give me thy heart and thy sacrifice and thy adoration. This is my word of promise: thou shalt in truth come to me, for thou art dear to me"? R. C. Zachner, a convert to Catholicism, looks on the Gita as the greatest scripture in the world, and indeed
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the range of spiritual vision and experience it sets before us cannot be matched by anything in any other sacred book. (Here I hold no brief for the Gathas of Zarathustra, though I was born a Parsi.) The Krishna who emerges from whatever myth and legend have grown around his historicity is a uniquely many-sided and magnificently soul-satisfying figure at once ideal and actual, immense and intense, oceanic and intimate, Himalayan and heart-luring — Lord and lover, Master and life-companion. Those who inwardly know him are not just indulging in poetic ecstasy: he is to them both the Supreme and a fact of history. It is out of such knowledge that Sri Aurobindo has said that in Krishna we have the certainty of the Divine having at least once touched the earth.
Scriptural Translation
There are a few other points in the book and in the address which I could question, but I'll pass over them at the moment, for they are mostly concerned with secondary matters like scriptural translation — I mean rendering of some Biblical passages, which strike me as misguided. Only one text I'll mention in passing. The famous "Logos" prelude in John's Gospel has a controversial reading at one point (1:13). The commonly accepted version uses the third-person plural, but the Jerusalem Bible prepared by French scholars differs from it, although admitting in a footnote the general opinion against which it runs. The eminent Roman Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown is quite frank about the untenableness of the minority view to which Griffiths subscribes. He27 remarks: "The third-person singular reading in John 1:13 'He who was begotten, not by blood, nor by carnal desire, nor by man's desires, but of God', is considered by most an early patristic change from the original plural in order to make the text christologically useful." Brown28 expresses his surprise at quite a number of French-speaking exegetes favouring this reading although it is "not found in a
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single Greek Gospel ms". I don't know why Griffiths flouts the scholarly consensus. But I won't dwell overmuch on these things lest I should convey to you a wrong impression of my attitude to him.
1."Science Today and the New Creation", The Examiner (Bombay), February 27, 1982, p. 138
2.The Jerusalem Bible (Longman, Darton and Todd, London, 1966), p. 326 of the New Testament.
3.Pathway to God trod by Ramalingam Swamikal (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1976).
4. Ibid., p. xviii.
5. Ibid., p. 677.
6. Ibid., p. 659.
7. Ibid., p. 728.
8. Ibid., p. 730.
9. Ibid., p. 46.
10.Ibid.
11.Ibid., p. 710.
12.Ibid., p. 730.
13.Ibid., p. 731.
14.Ibid.
15.Ibid., p. xvii.
16.Ibid., p. 44.
17.Ibid.
19.Ibid., p. xviii.
20."Letters on Yoga", Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, 1972, Vol. 22, p. 94.
21.Ibid., Vol. 24, p. 1237.
22.Ibid., Vol. 22, pp. 78-79.
23.Ibid., p. 95.
24.Letter to the author by Satprem after an interview with the Mother.
25.Ibid.
26."Words of the Mother", The Birth Centenary Edition (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1980), Vol. 15, p. 395.
27.The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (Paulist Press, New York, 1973), p. 59.
28.Ibid., fn. 96.
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A NOTE ON AN "AIR" NATIONAL BROADCAST
ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1972
An appreciation from a mind like Dr. T. M. P. Mahadevan, Director, Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy, Univer-sity, of Madras, cannot but have value. Similarly any philosophical difficulty felt by such a mind has to be considered. A discussion in philosophy is usually a lengthy affair, for one issue arises out of another. But, within a limited universe of discourse, a few pointed remarks may not be inutile.
Dr. Mahadevan has, in passing, mentioned two difficulties for him in Sri Aurobindo's philosophical system. The first is: How can the supreme Spirit be viewed as really changing?
I believe it is fundamentally a question of whether any change at all can be thought of as real. If change is not an illusion, it must be, in whatever manner, a reality. But if it is real, then it must be some aspect of the supreme Spirit which is the sole Existent. In other words, the supreme Spirit must be capable of putting forth a changing expression of itself. The reality of such an expression does not imply that the supreme Spirit has no changeless being. It only implies that changeless being has the power to manifest changeful being, to bring about what is commonly called "becoming". We may remember that Sri Aurobindo posits not merely Consciousness (chit) along with Existence (sat) and Bliss (ananda) as the ultimate. He posits Consciousness-Force (chit-tapas). His Absolute is not impotent to act: it is omnipotent and, where there is the power to do things, there is bound to be a change as a result. Changelessness is not the sole character of the supreme Spirit. To make it so is to deny power to the Absolute. The difficulty felt in conceiving power and peace, being and becoming, changelessness and change as simultaneous characters of the supreme Spirit arises out of our
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customary dichotomies of seeming opposites. According to Sri Aurobindo's experience the Absolute suffers from no self-contradiction in having a twofold reality. In Sri Aurobindo's philosophy the so-called opposites are even more than mere complementaries in the supreme Spirit. They are an identity. What are opposites to the mind are harmonious complementaries to the Overmind and a total identity to the Supermind. As a line from a poem of Sri Aurobindo's has it, there is in the supreme Spirit
Force one with unimaginable rest.
Dr. Mahadevan's second difficulty is: How can the Infinite and the finite be equally real? The solution should stem essentially from the answer to the first difficulty. The formation of the finite is an act of the supreme Spirit's power: it is the Infinite's self-expression or self-becoming in a certain mode. In that sense the finite is the Infinite itself and therefore equally real, though logically the latter is the primary reality and the former the secondary. In another sense, however, there is a difference. The Infinite may be self-figured as the finite with a certain veil between the figurer and the figured. This is what we find in the universe that is ours. But the cosmos we live in does not exhaust the full manifesting activity of the Absolute. So the partly veiled self-figuration we have in it is not necessarily the character of all finite existence. Even here it is not the basic stuff of being that can be considered less real: only the play of consciousness and bliss is restricted, creating a psychological diminution, as it were, of the existence-status. Sri Aurobindo never denies the unequal realness in this connotation. The condition of Cosmic Ignorance has to be psychologically less real than the supreme Spirit's, direct consciousness and delight of itself — less real even than the condition of Cosmic Knowledge which obtains on "planes" where the supreme Spirit is luminously self-deployed in organised interplay of permanence and change, infinity and finitude. The sense in which
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Sri Aurobindo puts the Infinite and the finite on a par as realities is the one that cuts down to the question whether the supreme Spirit has the power of manifestation or there is just an incomprehensible and indescribable Maya which can be regarded as neither real nor unreal and which ultimately gets reduced to an appearance negligible, inconsequential, empty, null. The Infinite and the finite are equally real only as against the shadow of unreality cast on the latter by the illusionist school of thinkers basing themselves on Shankara.
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It is legitimate for scholars to seek the identity of the marvellous Soma of the Rigveda. Their efforts claim justification from the fact that an actual plant was used in rituals of the times succeeding those of the ancient scripture which had made Soma famous. But, as the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement1 of R. Gordon Wasson's monumental study, Soma, the Divine Mushroom of Immortality,2 clearly tells us, the plant in question was acknowledged to be a substitute. The fundamental fact, as pointed out by the reviewer, is: nobody could tell, even in antiquity, what plant the original Soma had been. Surely, therefore, it is legitimate for one to counter the scholars by asking: "Was the Rigvedic Soma ever a plant at all?"
This question is supported by the reviewer's words: "... the Vedic Indians and the pre-Zoroastrian Iranians worshipped a plant called soma (Avestan haoma) which was at the same time a god." There is also the information to be derived from the reviewer that even in later times Soma was more than a mere plant: it was "firmly identified with the moon". A sense of the deific, the numinous, in the "high-lights", so to speak, of Nature is evident here, taking us beyond a mere earth-plant and indicating much more than the reviewer's inference that the original plant must have had not only the colour but also the shape of the moon. An esoteric tradition seems to have persisted from the Rigvedic time into a later period, a lingering remembrance of the usages natural to an age of spiritual symbolism. The Sun and the Moon are obvious symbols of Divine Knowledge and Divine Delight. Identification of the God Soma with the moon argues for more than a plant's colour and shape — more even than for the urge of Nature-worship. It harks back to the psychology of the cult of "Mysteries" — the ancient mind's resort to a set of symbols which, to the adept, signified realities and realisations of the inner mystical or Yogic life while to the
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commoner it stood for external objects and forces and a religious ritual, a sacrifice at which professional priests officiated.
The unearthliness of the Rigveda's Soma is hinted even by the account of it as if it were a plant of the earth. The reviewer writes: "It was golden-red in appearance, grew on high mountains, its stalks were crushed to extract the intoxicating juice, but there is no reference to roots or leaves, blossom or seed." The lack noted in the last two phrases is puzzling indeed for an earthly plant. The growing on high mountains is extremely suggestive too — and when we find, in Rigveda X.34,1, Soma described as coming especially from the mountain named Mujavant the suggestion acquires extra concreteness, for no mountain of that name has ever been identified. Zimmer3 tried to equate it with one of the lower hills on the south-west of Kashmir, but, as Hillebrandt4 has asserted, the equation lacks evidence. We can conjecture a connection with a people designated as Mujavants in the Atharvaveda (V.22) and the Yajurveda Samhitas (e.g. Tait-tiriya Samhita, 1.8.6,2) and considered as dwelling far away and typifying distant folk. Such a connection can only convey a vague remoteness for the provenance of Soma, agreeing with the total blur in the minds of both the Indians and the Iranians about the identity of the scriptural plant.
What clinches the unearthliness of Soma is the manner in which the supposed "sieve" purifying it — pavitra, as the Rigveda (e.g. 1.28,9) terms it — is spoken of. We have to take into account two points about it.
First, its "material." No doubt, it is said to be made of a ram's or sheep's wool (IX.75,4). But we have to weigh Sri Aurobindo's gloss:5 "The strainer in which the Soma is purified is made of the fleece of the ewe. Indra is the Ram [1.10,2; 51,1; 52,1 & VIII. 2,40; 87,12]; the Ewe must therefore be an energy of Indra, probably the divinised sense-mind, indriyam." Such a psycho-spiritual view is natural if we look at what the Aitareya Upanishad has to say. To quote Sri Aurobindo6 again: "In the Aitareya Upanishad Soma, as the
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lunar deity, is born from the sense-mind in the universal Purusha and, when man is produced, expresses himself again as sense-mentality in the human being. For delight is the raison d'etre of sensation, or, we may say, sensation is an attempt to translate the secret delight of existence into the terms of the physical consciousness. But in that consciousness, — often figured as adri, the hill, stone, or dense substance, — divine light and divine delight are both of them concealed and confined, and have to be released or extracted. Ananda [the divine principle of Bliss] is retained as rasa, the sap, the essence, in sense-objects and sense-experiences, in the plants and growths of the earth-nature, and among these growths the mystic Soma-plant symbolises that element behind all sense-activities and their enjoyments which yields the divine essence. It has to be distilled and, once distilled, purified and intensified until it has grown luminous, full of radiance, full of swiftness, full of energy, gomat, asu, yuvaku. It becomes the chief food of the gods who, called to the Soma-oblation, take their share of the enjoyment and in the strength of that ecstasy increase in man, exalt him to his highest possibilities, make him capable of the supreme experiences. Those who do not give the delight in them as an offering to the divine Powers, preferring to reserve themselves for the sense and the lower life, are adorers not of the gods, but of the Panis, lords of the sense-consciousness, traffickers in its limited activities, they who press not the mystic wine, give not the purified offering, raise not the sacred chant."
It is because of the spiritual nature of Soma that it is "called sometimes amrta, the Greek ambrosia, as if it were itself the substance of immortality".7 And this nature stands out in Rigveda IX.83,2, where the true sense of pavitra emerges beyond a doubt. In the course of commenting on that hymn, Sri Aurobindo writes: "This strong and fiery wine has to be purified and the strainer for its purifying has been spread out wide to receive it in the seat of heaven, tapos-pavitram vitatam devaspade; its threads or fibres are all of pure
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light and stand out like rays, Scanto asya tantavo vyasthiran. Through these fibres the wine has to come streaming. The image evidently refers to the purified mental and emotional consciousness, the conscious heart; chetas, those thoughts and emotions are the threads or fibres. Dyau or Heaven is the pure mental principle not subjected to the reactions of the nerves and the body. In the seat of Heaven, — the pure mental being as distinguished from the vital and physical consciousness, — the thoughts and emotions become pure rays of true perception and happy psychical vibration instead of the troubled and obscured mental, emotional and sensational reactions that we now possess. Instead of being contracted and quivering things defending themselves from pain and excess of the shocks of experience they stand out free, strong and bright, happily extended to receive and turn into divine ecstasy all possible contacts of universal existence. Therefore it is divaspade, in the seat of Heaven, that the Soma-strainer is spread out to receive the Soma."
Surely such a strainer cannot be the seive for the juice of any actual plant. True, the hymn in question "begins with an imagery which closely follows the physical facts of the purifying of the wine and its pouring into the jar".8 But even here we get hints that what appears like a wine used in an external sacrifice is a symbol of a deity who is the supernal wine of Bliss and Immortality. Soma "is pressed out by the pressing-stone (adri, gravan) which has a close symbolic connection with the thunderbolt, the formed electric force of Indra also called adri. The Vedic hymns speak of the luminous thunders of this stone as they speak of the light and sound of Indra's weapon. Once pressed out as the delight of existence Soma has to be purified through a strainer (pavitra) and through the strainer he streams in his purity into the wine bowl (camu) in which he is brought to the sacrifice, or he is kept in jars (kalasa) for Indra's drinking. Or, sometimes, the symbol of the bowl or the jar is neglected and Soma is simply described as flowing in a river of delight to the seat of the Gods, to the home of Immortality. That these things are
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symbols is very clear in most of the hymns of the ninth Mandala which are all devoted to the God Soma. Here, for instance, the physical system of the human being is imaged as the jar of the Soma-wine...."9
Sri Aurobindo10 continues: "But it is not every human system that can hold, sustain and enjoy the potent and often violent ecstasy of that divine delight. Ataptatanur na tad amo asnute, he who is raw and his body not heated does not taste or enjoy that; srtasa id vahantas tat samasata, only those who have been baked in the fire bear and entirely enjoy that. The wine of the divine Life...cannot be held in the system unprepared for it by strong endurance of the utmost fires of life and suffering and experience. The raw earthen vessel not baked to consistency in the fire of the kiln cannot hold the Soma-wine; it breaks and spills the precious liquid. So the physical system of the man who drinks this strong wine of Ananda must by suffering and conquering all the torturing heats of life have been prepared for the secret and fiery heats of the Soma; otherwise his conscious being will not be able to hold it; it will spill and lose it as soon as or even before it is tasted or it will break down mentally and physically under the touch."
Sri Aurobindo11 also elucidates the Godhead of Soma in IX 83: "Aruruchad usasah prsnir agriyah, the supreme dappled One, he makes the dawns to shine: uksa bibharti bhuvanani vajayuh, he, the Bull, bears the worlds, seeking the plenitude. The word prsnih, dappled, is used both of the Bull, the supreme Male, and of the Cow, the female Energy; like all words of colour, sveta, sukra, hari, harit, krsna, hiranyaya, in the Veda it is symbolic; colour, varna, has always denoted quality, temperament, etc., in the language of the Mystics. The dappled Bull is the Deva in the variety of his manifestation, many-hued. Soma is that first supreme dappled Bull, generator of the world of the becoming, for from the Ananda, from the all-blissful One they all proceed; delight is the parent of the variety of existences.... He makes the Dawns shine out, — the dawns of illumination, mothers of
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the radiant herds of the Sun; and he seeks the plenitude, that is to say the fullness of being, force, consciousness, the plenty of the godhead which is the condition of divine delight...."
To complete the picture we may cull from Sri Aurobindo12 a few more passages about the same hymn. Now the last two verses (4 and 5) are under comment. They begin with the mention of "Gandharva". The name is additional testimony to the unearthly status of Soma. It first occurs in the Rigveda in 1.22,14. In the well-known translation of Ralph T. H. Griffith, which seeks no esoteric sense, we have the sufficiently esoteric pointer13 in a note to the phrase "the Gan-dharva's steadfast place": "Though in later times the Gan-dharvas are regarded as a class, in the Rigveda more than one Gandharva is seldom mentioned. He is commonly designated as 'the heavenly Gandharva', whose habitation is the sky, and whose especial duty is to guard the heavenly Soma, which the Gods obtain through his permission." In the hymn under comment, Griffith14 proposes the Sun as the Gandharva, while in hymn 85,12 his note15 says: "here Soma, the Moon." But his translation16 of the relevant phrase in 83,4, where so far only Soma has been mentioned, indicates the same meaning: "Gandharva verily protects his dwelling-place; Wondrous, he guards the generations of the Gods." In any case we are clearly directed towards Heaven and not Earth for Soma's original status. Sri Aurobindo's comment on the two concluding verses runs:
"Soma is the Gandharva, the Lord of the hosts of delight, and guards the true seat of the Deva, the level or plane of the Ananda; gandharva ittha padam asya raksati. He is the Supreme, standing out from all other beings and over them, other than they and wonderful, adbhutah, and as the supreme and transcendent, present in the worlds but exceeding them, he protects in those worlds the birth of the gods, pati devanam janimani adbhutah. The 'birth of the gods' is a common phrase in the Veda by which is meant the manifestation of
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the divine principles in the cosmos and especially the formation of the godhead in its manifold forms in the human being. In the last verse [3] the Rishi spoke of the Deva as the divine child preparing for birth, involved in the world, in the human consciousness. Here he speaks of Him as the transcendent guarding the world of the Ananda formed in man and the forms of the godhead born in him by the divine knowledge against the attacks of the enemies, the powers of division, the powers of undelight (dvisah aratih), against the undivine host with their formations of a dark and false creative knowledge, Avidya, illusion (adevir may ah).
"For he seizes these invading enemies in the net of the inner consciousness; he is the master of a profounder and truer setting of world-truth and world-experience than that which is formed by the senses and the superficial mind. It is by this inner setting that he seizes the powers of falsehood, obscurity and division and subjects them to the law of truth, light and unity; grbhnati ripum ridhaya nidhapatih. Men therefore protected by the lord of the Ananda governing this inner nature are able to accord their thoughts and actions with the inner truth and light and are no longer made to stumble by the forces of the outer crookedness; they walk straight, they become entirely perfect in their works and by this truth of inner working and outer action are able to taste the entire sweetness of existence, the honey, the delight that is the food of the soul. Sukrttama madhuno bhaksam asata.
"Soma manifests here as the offering, the divine food, the wine of delight and immortality, havih and as the Deva, lord of that divine offering (havismah), above as the vast and divine seat, the superconscient bliss and truth, brhat, from which the wine descends to us. As the wine of delight he flows about and enters into this great march of the sacrifice which is the progress of man from the physical to the superconscient. He enters into it and encompasses it wearing the cloud of the heavenly ether, nabhas, the mental principle, as his robe and veil. Havir havismo mahi sadma daivyam, nabho
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vasanah pari yasi adhvaram. The divine delight comes to us wearing the luminous-cloudy veil of the forms of mental experience.
"In that march or sacrificial ascent the all-blissful Deva becomes the King of all our activities, master of our divinised nature and its energies and with the enlightened conscious heart as his chariot ascends into the plenitude of the infinite and immortal f a victorious king, sunlike in force and glory, conquering a wide territory. It is the immortality that he wins for man in the vast Truth-Consciousness, sravas, upon which is founded the immortal state. It is his own true seat, ittha padam asya, that the God concealed in man conquers ascending out of the darkness and the twilight through the glories of the Dawn into the solar plenitudes."
Having made out the case that the Rigveda is not merely religious ritualism directed at deified nature-forces but a spiritual cult aiming at the human soul's realisation of the Supreme Being by an inner Yogic process of deepening, widening and heightening theerstate. Like a Sun or a Fire, as Surya, as Agni, engirt with a thousand blazing energies he conquers the vast regions of the inspired truth, the superconscient knowledge; raja pavitraratho vajam aruhah, sahasrabhrstir jayasi sravo brhat. The image is th consciousness and that it has both an esoteric and an exoteric side and that its true understanding comes by a symbolic vision of it, we have still to ask: "If there are two sides, have we not to assume an actual plant whose juice represents the occult expat oience of the Divine Delight? Was there not a physically drinkable wine as a symbol of the Wine of Immortality with which the aspiring soul was filled when it invoked, under the particular name of Soma, the one Existent to whom the seers give different names (I.164,46), the timeless Unknowable beyond the mind (I.170,1), the Unmoving and Infinite which is the single mightiness of the Gods (III.55,1), the transcendent and universal Deva, "the Father of things who appears here as the Son in the human soul",17 "the Blissful One to whom the movement of the Gods ascends, manifest as at once the
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Male and the Female, vrsan, dhenu"?18
We can only answer: "There are hymns like IX.83 where the physical interpretation is impossible. There are no hymns where this interpretation alone stands forth. There are double-aspected hymns where, in spite of physical appearances, the spiritual-symbolic interpretation can be maintained. Therefore all the hymns are capable of such an interpretation and the sole logical course is to give it to them. Thus nowhere in the Rigveda can an actual plant be taken as intended." But this need not imply that no plant existed in the Rigveda's day by the name of Soma. Just as the fire, the clarified butter which was put into it, the cow, the horse, the wealth, the hills, the rivers existed as physical counterparts to their psycho-spiritual originals and served as symbols for the processes of the inner Yogic life, so too an actual plant whose juice was pressed out must have been present for the exoteric sense to have some bearing here as everywhere else. However, it would be a mistake to look for a sort of point-to-point correspondence with the divine amrta which was meant by Soma. We should not bother to search for some extraordinary herb whose extract, as Mr. Wasson's reviewer puts it, "was intoxicating, gave strength in battles as well as a widening of consciousness". The Rigveda (X.85,3,4)19 very clearly forbids any quest for point-to-point correspondence:
"One thinks, when they have brayed the plant, that he hath drunk the Soma's juice;
Of him whom Brahmans truly know as Soma no one ever tastes.
"Soma, secured by sheltering rules, guarded by hymns in Brihati,20
Thou standest listening to the stones: none tastes of thee who dwells on earth."
Some sort of winy liquid was obtained, but it was not more unusual or in a class by itself than were all the other
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physical analogues of inner realities. The only thing we can affirm with certainty is that it differed from common "spirituous" drinks. The Rigveda calls these drinks Sura as distinguished from Soma and sometimes frowns upon them (e.g., VII.86,6) and twice (VIII.2,22; 21,14) regards them as causing broils. It is possible that its actual Soma was more or less like the creepers or grasses later epochs employed as substitutes. Perhaps those creepers or grasses were not really substitutes but believed to be so because the Rigvedic symbolism and esotericism were forgotten and the high qualities ascribed to Soma were taken literally to belong to an earthly plant.
1.May 5, 1969, p. 561, cols. 3-8.
2.New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1969, p. 381.
3.Altindisches Leben, 29.
4.Vedische Mythologie, I, 65.
5.The Secret of the Veda (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1971), p. 541, fn. 2.
6.Ibid., p. 249-50.
7.Ibid., p. 249.
8.Ibid., p. 343.
9.Ibid., pp. 342-3.
10.Ibid., p. 344.
11.Ibid., pp. 345-6.
12.Ibid., pp. 346-8.
13.The Hymns of the Rgveda, translated with a Popular Commentary (The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, Varanasi, 1971), Vol. I, p. 26, note to line 14.
14.Ibid., p. 338, note to line 4.
15.Ibid., p. 342, note to line 12.
16.Ibid., p. 339.
17.Ibid., pp. 341-2.
18.Ibid., p. 342.
19.Griffith, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 501.
20.That is, by hymns in that metre.
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SRI AUROBINDO'S INTERPRETATION
OF THE RIG-VEDA
A CRUCIAL QUESTION AND ITS POSSIBLE ANSWER
Sri Aurobindo has given a symbolic interpretation to the Rigveda with a great deal of penetrating analysis, showing it to be a powerfully imaged story of the soul's adventure towards Light, Freedom, Infinity, Immortality — a mystical adventure in which Gods are helpers and Demons hinderers. Objects of the physical world are spoken of in such a way that to the initiates they represent realities of the inner life while to the common herd they appear in a literal sense.
This sense is associated with a ritualistic religion devoted to a worship of personified Nature-powers by means of an elaborate "sacrifice" and invocatory chant. But the hymnody of ritual remains at best a semi-clear semi-obscure utterance. Hardly a consistent interpretation is possible of the imagery and phraseology employed. The mind bent on an understanding of this poetry on the basis of a primitive humanity's outer existence is bound to be baffled again and again and driven — as is the greatest traditional commentator, Sayana — to give different meanings to recurring turns of speech in order to make some head or tail of the strangely moving body of an antique religious poetry. Thus Sayana explains one of the key-words, rtam, which connotes "truth" or "right", as "truth", "sacrifice", "water", "one who has gone", even "food", not to speak of a number of other meanings.1 The reading that Sri Aurobindo has proposed brings clarity, order and cogency as well as a persistent high-seriousness of significance into the Rig-veda, doing justice both to its intrinsic mantra-quality and to its reputation as a divinely inspired revelatory scripture.
Once we admit this reading, not only the cows, horses, rivers, mountains, treasures and booties of the hymns become symbolic but also the sacrificial gestures, journeys
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and wars as well as the heroes, sons, kings, nations and men in general. Yes, even men in general are symbols — for collective powers affined in the occult realm to human psychology. But here a crucial question arises. The evil forces of supernature are fought at the same time by the Gods and by the Aryan seers and workers in whom the Gods progressively take shape. If so, would there not be anti-Aryan human beings too, who are opposed to the Gods and the Aryan seers and in whom the demonic powers have progressively found embodiment?
Sri Aurobindo's answer in one place is that, though he has established a very strong prima facie case on a large scale, nothing except a complete and thorough examination in detail of the whole Rig-veda can finally decide whether those who figure as human-looking antagonists in the events and incidents pictured in the Rig-veda are entirely or only partly symbolic.2 At another place he is quite confident and writes: "We may, if we like, suppose that there was a struggle between two different cults in India and that the Rishis took their images from the physical struggle between the human representatives of these cults and applied them to the spiritual conflict, just as they employed the other details of their physical life to symbolise the spiritual sacrifice, the spiritual wealth, the spiritual battle and journey. But it is perfectly certain that in the Rig-veda at least it is the spiritual conflict and victory, not the physical battle and plunder of which they are speaking."3 A third context in Sri Aurobindo seems to allow room for a dissimilar conclusion: "The one thing that seems fairly established is that there were at least two types of culture in ancient India, the 'Aryan' occupying the Punjab and Northern and Central India, Afghanistan and perhaps Persia and distinguished in its cult by the symbols of the Sun, the Fire and the Soma sacrifice, and the un-Aryan occupying the East, South and West, the nature of which it is quite impossible to restore from the scattered hints which are all we possess."4
Synthesising the three statements, we may say: "Accord-
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ing to Sri Aurobindo, there were two different cults in ancient India and there may have even been a conflict between them but from what he has studied and expounded of the Rig-veda we are led to affirm that whatever the theoretical uncertainty until the whole Rig-veda is analysed, the actual practical upshot is absolutely definite: we may generalise that the possible conflict does not appear directly at all in the Rig-veda. Everything there is symbol and apologue of the inner spiritual development."
However, there is one extremely taxing point. And here some remarks by Sri Aurobindo at an earlier period of his Vedic study gives us pause. Repeatedly in the Rig-veda we come across expressions like the following:
"...whatsoever mortal being exceeds us by the keenness of his actions, may he not as our enemy have mastery over us"(I.36.16).5
"...may we overcome the battle-hosts of mortals" (V.4.1).6 "The mortal of evil movements who gives us over to the stroke, guard us, O Fire, from him and his evil" (VI.16.31).7
"Protect us, deliver us not, O knower of all things born, to the mortal, the evil-thoughted one who would bring on us calamity" (VIII.71.7).8
What is more, a prayer like the last one is preceded immediately by the declaration: "Thou bringest, O Fire, the wealth in which are the many strengths to the mortal giver...."9 The same word "mortal" is applied to the Aryan Rishi and to an enemy of his. In numberless instances the Aryan Rishi is called "mortal" as distinguished from the Gods. Most often occurs the great phrase about the in-dwelling Agni: "the Immortal in the mortal" (e.g., 1.77.1; IV.2.1). Is then the word used in two different senses, one literal and the other symbolic?
Again, what are we to make of consecutive verses like:
"O Fire, consume utterly the demon magicians...
"Not even by magic can the mortal foe master the man
who offers worship to the Fire with his gifts of the oblation"
(VIII.23.14-15).10
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A distinction seems to be made between "demon magicians" — beings that in the Sanskrit original are named as rakshasas employing their power of maya — and the "mortal foe" employing such a power. A comparable cleavage appears to be driven between two categories when we read: "O Fire, guard us by thy lights from every hostile force and from mortal foe" (VIII.71.1).11
Further, apropos of the verse — "Let not mortal men do hurt to us, O Indra who delightest in the mantra; be the lord of our bodies and give us to ward off the stroke" (I.5.10)12 — Sri Aurobindo, at a time earlier than his Arya-series, The Secret of the Veda, has the note: "The Rishi has already prayed for protection of his spiritual gains against spiritual enemies; he now prays for the safety from human blows on the physical body."13 Then Sri Aurobindo adds that, though the Sanskrit marta undoubtedly means "mortal" in the Rig-veda, the termination ta may have either a passive or an active force so that the word may be like the English "mortal" itself which means either subject to death or deadly. Here he is inclined to accept an active rather than a passive sense and to understand "slayer, smiter, deadly one". Then the translation would be: "Let not the slayers of the body do hurt towards us, Indra who delightest in the mantra; govern them (our bodies with thy mental force) and give us to ward off the stroke."
Taking our cue from all this gloss of Sri Aurobindo's of an earlier phase when he clearly admits outer human enemies no less than inner spiritual ones, we may come to the aid of his later outlook by holding that "mortal" when applied to the enemies of the mortal Rishi connotes "body-slayer" without implying a human agency. Thus there may be, on the one hand, inner enemies who could hurt the inner being of the Rishi and, on the other hand, those who could destroy his outer being by an occult power. In that case the "mortal foe" employing "magic" would be the sort of supernatural demonic agency that can kill the body of the Rishi.
But is it possible to equate "mortal" to "body-slayer" in
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all contexts? What about the verse: "O God, repulse on every side with thy tongue of flame that doer of wickedness; oppose the mortal who would slay us" (VI.16.32)?14 Now the sense of slaying is differentiated from the meaning of "mortal". The latter word emerges as signifying no more than one who is subject to death — like the Rishi himself — unless we can light upon a connotation which would not be tautologous with the slaying-phrase.
Some translations of Sri Aurobindo's at another time may be looked at for help. Thus V.4.1, which we have already quoted as "...may we overcome the battle-hosts of mortals", is now rendered: "...may we...overcome the embattled assaults of mortal powers."15 The hymn preceding this has the phrases: "The creature of whom thou becomest the guest, O godhead, prevails by sacrifice over all that belong to the mortality"(5) — "...we by the felicity, O son of Force, overcome all that are mortal"(6).16 We might resort to the idea that the elements of weakness and obscurity in our nature are what the last-named hymn, mentioning the worshippers of Agni, names "mortal dwellers in this substance" (8),17 but will this idea suit the description: "all that are mortal"? Beings loom out of these words.
The connotation we need does not yet emerge. But it is surely to hand in the very set of terms Sri Aurobindo has offered on the strength of the double edge of the termination ta. If we choose the last term out of the three, our problematic verse will end with "...the deadly one who would slay us." There is emphasis here but no tautology. And a way- is opened to pass beyond the human world into the supernatural.
We may well regard this particular active aspect of marta as evident only to the initiate and as helping — by the mask it wears of the apparent passive aspect in consonance with the Rishi's own case — to put the layman off the esoteric track of the hymns.
Perhaps a further shade needs to be added in order to lend full substance to the term's esotericism. "Mortal" calls
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for an implication exceeding the mere vocable "man" which too occurs for the occult enemy the Rishi meets with, as in the verse: "O Fire,... may Atri overcome the destroyers who satisfy thee not, may he overcome forces and men" (V.7.10).18 We may consider "mortal", when applied to the Rishi's occult enemy, as pointing to a hostile supernatural power which not only brings a deadliness towards the Rishi's body but also looks to his inner eye like an embodied human being subject to death such as his own outer physical self.
Thus, to my mind, the challenging "mortal" may be seen as falling into line with the symbolic character of the Rig-veda's heroes, sons, kings, nations and men in general.
1.Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Vol. 11 of the Birth Centenary Edition (Sri Aurobindo Ashram), p. 9.
2.The Secret of the Veda, Vol. 10 of the Birth Centenary Edition, p. 237.
3.Ibid., p. 215.
4.Views and Reviews (Sri Aurobindo Library, Madras), p. 47.
5.Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. 49.
6.Ibid., p. 209.
7.Ibid., p. 281.
8.Ibid., p. 358.
9.Ibid.
10.Ibid., p. 332.
11.Ibid., p. 357.
12.The Secret of the Veda, p. 500.
13.Hymns to the Mystic Fire, pp. 500-01.
14.Ibid., p. 281.
15.The Secret of the Veda, p. 373.
16.Ibid., p. 371.
17.Ibid., p. 372.
18.Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. 217. The last part of this verse Sri Aurobindo elsewhere translates interpretatively: "...these souls that rush upon him with their impulsions may he overcome" (The Secret of the Veda, p. 383). No clue is afforded to the status and nature of "these souls".
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A FLASHBACK FROM ITS FIRST ANNIVERSARY
1.26 a.m., December 5, 1950. A moment like any other, in a night like many a night — except to those who watched in the room where for over two and a half decades Sri Aurobindo had lived. For them there was all human history coming to a cryptic climax: after summing up in himself the aspiration of man in entirety — man the soul, the mind, the life-force, the body — and after bringing a power of complete godhead to answer this fourfold aspiration, Sri Aurobindo was throwing away the earnest of the final and supreme triumph, a physical being in which the very cells were beginning to flower into a divine substance such as the world had scarcely dreamt of in even its most apocalyptic hours.
The doctors who were his attendants knew their patient to be no mere mortal: they treated his body for what they recognised it to be, a vehicle of supernatural light, and they had to accept the mysterious "No" he had categorically returned to their anxious question which had meant: "Are you not using on yourself the sovereign spiritual force with which you have saved hundreds?" The body that seemed able to live without end by the protection of an all-transformative power was being allowed by its master to suffer extreme uraemia and pass into profound unconsciousness. Indeed the doctors were permitted — as if out of compassion for them — to try their palliatives after the Mother had declared: "He has decided to withdraw." But there was no suspension of Sri Aurobindo's fiat that though he had the whole perfection of man in his own hands he should lay
After the Mother's passing away on 17 November 1973, what is said at the end of this article, which was written in December 1951, on the event of 5 December 1950, does not hold in every respect, but the basic truth that is the main theme of the article remains unchanged.
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aside its last victory in himself and embrace death.
No doubt, it was not death in its utter commonness. The uraemia that preceded it had been unique. Every medical sign was there of its absolute hold over the body's reactions — save one: Sri Aurobindo, as if by an independence of comatose brain and nerve, could command consciousness again and again, inquire what the time was or ask for water. Unique also was the sequel of the uraemic poisoning. Between the instant when life clinically ended and the instant when the body was laid in a casket and lowered into a special vault in the Ashram courtyard, nearly five days passed without a trace of decomposition. And many saw with even their physical eyes the body glowing with what the Mother had called the concentration in it of the light of the Supermind, the Divine Consciousness in its integrality which Sri Aurobindo and she had been labouring with the patience of heaven-sent pioneers to bring down for the first time to suffering earth. Mortality in its normal form was not here; yet something of its age-old doom was present and that was a question-mark glaring in the face of every disciple and making most enigmatic that varied wonderful life of seventy-eight years, triumphant over all human difficulties.
The question-mark cannot be completely removed. Depths beyond depths lie in an event of this nature: the human mind is unable to compass them all. But a few significances gleam out for an initial understanding and set a general perspective in which our aching and groping gaze may rest.
There was no failure on Sri Aurobindo's part: this is certain from the psychological and physical details put together — of the preceding months as well as of the actual illness. There was only a strange sacrifice. And if Sri Aurobindo the indomitable made the sacrifice, it must be one that was a sudden terrible short-cut to some secret victory for God in the world at the cost of a personal consummation. We may remember the opening of his sonnet entitled "In the Battle":
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Often in the slow ages' long retreat
On Life's thin ridge through Time's enormous sea,
I have accepted death and borne defeat
To gain some vantage by my fall for Thee.
What occasioned the present sacrifice appears to have been earth's insufficient receptivity to the Aurobindonian gift of the descending Supermind. Something in the gross constitution of terrestrial creatures would not thrill to the Grace from on high, would not appreciate with a response deep enough the colossal work that was being done at a selfless expense of energy and with a silent bearing of "the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal". If the earth's consciousness had been more receptive, the crisis of the human body's conversion into terms of divinity would have begun in a less radical shape and without so extreme an upshot for one individual in the van of life's fight towards perfection. Hence much of the responsibility for the upshot lies with the absence of co-operation by the mind of the race. It was as if the beings Sri Aurobindo had come to save had turned his enemies — not deliberately in all cases, yet with a dullness of perception and an inertia of the will that were as crucial.
This dullness and this inertia were not only an obstacle to the descending Divine: they were also perilous for the world itself. To the obscure occult forces — powers and principalities of darkness — which always oppose the Divine's work and which were reacting against the tremendous pressure of the Aurobindonian light in a vast upsurge, to these forces bent on a final calamitous counter-attack across the battle-field that is man, man's dullness and inertia gave a ground of support and thus signed his own doom. Sri Aurobindo, born to put his mission above everything else, could not but follow the course he did: how could he betray the long-invoked Supermind whose hour on earth was preparing to strike, or let the world which he had bound to his heart pay disastrously for its unreadiness for the divine advent? He gathered, as it were, the myriad antagonist spears into his own breast, took upon himself a globe-wide catastrophe.
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Most unlike him would it have been to do anything in the crisis save sanction the very worst that could happen to him because of humanity's unresponsiveness, and somehow weave it with his invincible spiritual art into the design of his own master mission.
That mission was the conquest of the very foundations of life's imperfect structure through the ages. Not only to build a golden dome but to transform what he symbolically called the dragon base in the Inconscience from which the universe has evolved: this was Sri Aurobindo's work. And it had to be done one way or another. There could have been a way of slow conquest, preserving his own body by a careful rationed spirituality which would run no deadly hazards for the sake of rapid salvation of the sorrow-burdened world. The way of revolutionary evolution, thrown open like an abyss, was to let his body admit an illness symbolic of the drive of the Inconscience from below and, after a limited though intensely significant contest, carry in an actual death its own godlike presence into the stuff of the Inconscience. Death was the glory-hole desperately blown into the massive rock of that stuff for the physical divinity of Sri Aurobindo to permeate in a direct and literal sense the darkness wrapped within darkness which the Vedic seers had long ago intuited to be Nature's cryptic womb of lightward creation. By identifying his physical divinity with that primal Negation of the Divine, he has effected an immediate entry into the heart of the enemy's camp: he has taken by surprise the central strong-hold of all that frustrates and destroys, all that renders precarious the body's beauty, frail the life-energy's strength, flickering the mind's knowledge, and swallows up in its monstrous void the marvellous legacy left to mankind by the hero and the sage.
By passing beyond the visible scene he has not passed to some transcendent Ineffable. He who had held incarnate within himself both the potence and the peace of the Transcendent — the creative Supermind, the Truth-Consciousness of the ultimate Spirit — needed no flight from the
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universe to reach the Highest. Nor like a background influence would he act now on earth, he whose whole aim was not only to widen and heighten the individual but make all wideness and height focus themselves and become dynamic in the individual instrument. Still in the foreground of events, in the thick of time's drama with eternity as his theme, still as a concentrated individualisation of the wide and the high, an organised being in whom the Supramental karana sarira or causal divine body has descended into the suksma sarira or subtle body built of mind-stuff, life-stuff and even what we may term subtle-physical as distinguished from gross-material stuff, he stands close to earth with his sacrificed corporeal substance as a firm irremovable base and centre in the Inconscience for spreading there his immortal light and changing earth's fate from the sheer bottom of things no less than from the sheer top.
This is how the occult eye sees the paradoxical climax whose first anniversary falls today. And as one watches the holy spot that is Sri Aurobindo's samadhi in the midst of his Ashram and all about is the aroma of flowers and incense-sticks expressing the mute prayer of the thousands of hearts to whom he is the Avatar of a super-humanity to be, the concrete close reality of the Master of the Integral Yoga requires no proof. But the entire sacrifice, with its immense mysterious potency, was possible because, commemorating each future anniversary and conducting the Ashram, there is amongst us his co-worker, his manifesting and executive Shakti, the Mother. It is because she, in harmony with his plan to fight from two bases, remains on earth to foster the golden future, that he could draw back from the visible scene as if to pull inward the taut string of the spiritual bow and make the God-tipped arrow fly swifter and farther. She who has been one with him in the Supramental attainment, one in vast vision and integral work, joint-parent of the new age in which the outer physical as well as the inner psychological is meant to be Godlike and wonderfully immune, she is the bridge across which Sri Aurobindo's triumph of winning all
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while seeming to lose everything moves in ever-increasing beauty and power into Matter's ignorant world of a life that is but death in disguise. Without her embodied mediation, without her retention of the Aurobindonian consciousness in full visibility before us, the upward illumining of the Inconscience by Sri Aurobindo for Matter's transformation would lack in completeness of result. Her protective hold on earth justifies the withdrawal he has accomplished: her radiant presence fulfils the miraculous power of his absence.
By the co-operation between that absence and this presence a leap in spiritual evolution has been made. A hint of it is in a new expression that comes again and again over the Mother's face. The Supermind, whose realisation and subsequent descent are the Aurobindonian Yoga, seems now not only active as before from above, unfolding its gigantic downward dynamism in its own time, but also operative as a gleaming nucleus of World-Will from even the physical brain-level of the embodied consciousness that is the guru, day after day, to the Godward movement of our souls. In other words, the Supermind possessed overhead by the Mother is now commanded more and more by her from its own growing poise below. The wish of the very earth-self in her begins to be binding, so to speak, on the creativity of her own Supreme Self in the Transcendence. This means a developing adjustment of the incalculable time-rhythm of the Supramental descent from on high to the impatient beat of the aspiring human heart. The possibility dawns of a rapturous acceleration of the Truth-Consciousness's transforming process — and a greater, more luminous mastery of material life, a deeper invasion of the body by the Immortal Existence, a swifter and more palpable progress towards the conquest of darkness and death for which the secret decisive blow was struck in that strangely fateful moment in the dead of night one year ago.
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AN OLD CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN
DR. IMMANUEL OLSVANGER AND K. D. SETHNA
1
3, Gaza Road, Jerusalem, Israel, 7-2-52
Dear Mr. Sethna,
I acknowledge with many thanks the receipt by airmail of your article "The Mystical and the Misty" in Mother India of January 19, 1952.
I have read and reread it several times and was frequently carried away by the exquisite beauty of the language and by the poetry of the thoughts. It is in such poetry that my soul finds temporary repose and rest. But the appeal of this poetry does not depend upon the correctness of the thoughts.
My questions, to which your article was a reply, were, however, concerned not with poetry but with the correctness or otherwise of thoughts and facts.
In this respect, they remained, as far as my judgment goes, without reply. You repeat the well-known Upanishadic "psychotomy" of the soul, with its Sthula, Sukshma and Karana Shariras. An arbitrary assumption, transmitted from ancient times, poetic, but based on nothing but fancy. "A permanent leaving of the physical sheath so that, unconnected with the subtle sheaths, the physical loses its support and vitality", is, when translated into common language, a euphemistic expression for death. But you say about the yogi that "the terms 'death' aijd 'suicide' cannot have for him the meaning ordinarily attached to them", and yet some thirty lines later you say that "Sri Aurobindo decided upon death in the fullest meaning" of that word. He decided, consequently, and he died in the fullest meaning of that word, like
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all men from Adam down to our days. "He decided", i.e. he did consciously commit suicide, whether by means of poison or by an act of will (if this is possible) makes no difference.
I do believe that a man, not a-superman or a Yogi, can, unfortunately for him, succumb to a disease, if his will to fight it is not strong enough, or if he consciously refuses to use his will-power. This is true for some diseases, not for all. It is most decidedly not true in the case of uraemia, which was the cause of Sri Aurobindo's death.
If, as you maintain, Sri Aurobindo consciously decided to die (or, in your euphemistic language, to leave his body), why were there Indian and French doctors about him (who, as you write, testified to the miracle of his body remaining intact for several days, in spite of the tropical climate and in spite of uraemia!)? Did he need their help to die? Some doctors do render such help, indeed!
These doctors testified to what, if true, was an obvious miracle. If they were to publish an article about it in some serious medical magazine, such as The Lancet, it would create a tremendous sensation!
The Mother's announcement (only 41 hours after death, which word you preface with an apologetic "clinical"), giving an explanation for that miracle, "that his body is charged with such a concentration of supramental light", makes no sense. A body can be charged with anything but light. Evidently, the Mother wanted to say something else. But how can one guess what she wanted to say?
If, however, that "concentration of supramental light" (whatever it may mean) was the reason of the miracle, how is this reconcilable with your statement that it was due to Sri Aurobindo's "last act of Grace"? Was it his act of Grace that before death he still managed to charge his body with a concentration of supramental light? If not, how could he, after his death, have exercised any influence upon his body? Did his soul remain hovering in the room, still clad in the Sukshma Sharira, and keep watch over the body?
Lastly, regarding the same consciousness divided in two!
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Your reply does not satisfy me. I believe in God, in His Consciousness, in His Power. But He, His Consciousness, His Power, and any other attribute which we may try to ascribe to Him, is One and the same That, Ekamevadvitiyam!3I do believe that my consciousness is a reflection of that One. The degree of perfection of my consciousness is, I believe, dependent on how well the lens of my soul is polished. But the reflexion focussed in my soul cannot be 'same' divided into two, the second twin-reflexion being focussed in someone else's soul, — I still maintain, that such a statement has no meaning and no sense, unless taken as a figurative expression, as when we speak of two "kindred" souls.
Any attempt to hypostatise the Consciousness of God, as apart from Him, or some special reflexion of that Consciousness, leads to idolatry in the very worst sense. Bad service is done to Sri Aurobindo's memory by referring to him as to one endowed with "superhuman" power. That is deification. It must lead to a final degeneration of the circle of his readers and students to a new religious sect with new arbitrary dogmas and a new form of worship. A repetition of the fate of Sri Ramakrishna and "the Holy Mother"!
Good service to his memory would be a shortened edition of his books, freed from unnecessary repetitions, provided with annotations for the benefit of readers not familiar with Sanskrit words and Vedantic ideas.
Of special importance would be, in my opinion, such an edition of Savitri and of his letters dealing with questions of literature.
I shall be grateful if you let me know where I could order a copy of Savitri.
I hope, dear Mr. Sethna, that you will not take amiss my frank words, and I must thank you for the trouble you took in replying to my previous letter with such an elaborate dissertation.
With cordial greetings
Sincerely yours,
Dr. I. OLSVANGER
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Hamilton Villa, Nepean Sea Road, Bombay, 16-5-52
Dear Dr. Olsvanger,
I am glad you liked my article — but I am deeply disappointed with the reason for which you liked it. I don't at all mind your writing to me frankly. What depresses me is that you proceed from a certain purely intellectual bias and seem to have made no effort to come into contact, in a direct and concrete manner, with spiritual or occult realities. You don't even appear to understand that the major Upanishads are not mere poetry but factual statements of spiritual and occult realisations and experiences — they are poetic in form because the measured intensity of poetry is the natural medium for the mantra, the word-body of the highest truths of the mystical life. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, too, is not intellectual ideas decked out in imaginative colour: it is, as Sri Aurobindo has clearly said, an expression of spiritual vision and realisation: beauty and truth are one single power in it. What may be called fictitious in it is only the story which is used as a symbol of the spiritual reality known by Sri Aurobindo.
Sri Aurobindo, by the way, is not just a philosopher with a mystical bent. I was amazed at the conclusion to your fine tribute to him published in India and Israel. You spoke of Radhakrishnan taking up the baton dropped by Sri Aurobindo. Without minimising Radhakrishnan's gifts, one may state categorically that he and Sri Aurobindo belong to two entirely different classes. Radhakrishnan himself would never claim to be a God-realised man. Sri Aurobindo is a master of Yoga who employs the form of philosophy or of poetry to pattern out for the intellect or the aesthetic sense the actual experiences he has had. Unless you grasp this, you will never be in a state of mind to appreciate any truly spiritual figure — spiritual as ancient India conceived that term and not as a part of modern India and most of the West
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wash it down to the level of high metaphysics or disciplined ethics. Neither Radhakrishnan nor Gandhi can be called, in the real sense, spiritual.
Now to your criticisms of my reply. Apart from what seems to me a quibble about the word "death" and your insistence on "suicide" as a general term which, in spite of all subtle shades of difference, should cover the phenomenon of voluntary departure from the physical body, I think your statements rest on lack of proper information or of relevant experience. The sthula, suksma and karana sariras are not an arbitrary assumption. The Upanishads speak of them because the Seers of the Upanishads experienced them and their experience can be repeated and verified. Of course, the real karana Sarira is a rare experience, but some approach can be made to it. The suksma sarira is one of the commonest experiences in Yoga. I myself have moved in it out of my sthula sarira scores of times, in as concretely conscious a manner as getting up from my bed and moving in my physical body! So, when you say that the well-known Upanishadic "psychotomy" is based on nothing but fancy, I can only smile and ask you to do a bit of Yoga.
When you make sweeping assertions about what is true and what is "most decidedly not true" about uraemia, you are only talking of ordinary cases. Of course I am not asking you to believe all that I say, but the capital defect is that you have not made an attempt to understand Sri Aurobindo's Yoga or even the philosophical structure of his system of thought and of his spiritual work. Without such an attempt it is difficult to get certain things in the right perspective or focus.
The presence of the doctors was part of the same process which included Sri Aurobindo's "accepting" many other ordinary-looking physical arrangements. But I may tell you that the doctors were allowed to do a few things at their own request and as a concession to their solicitude. And their chief ministrations were permitted after the withdrawal from the body had decisively begun. Sri Aurobindo never took
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any medicines or injections in any of the physical crises through which he passed in the course of his Yoga.
I have in my hands, as I write this, the actual notes of Dr. P. C. Sanyal, an eminent Calcutta physician and surgeon. He writes: "The Mother said that Sri Aurobindo's body would be kept till it began to show signs of decomposition. I told her that 48 hours was the maximum time for which a body could be kept. After 48 hours there were no signs of decomposition. But the French law does not permit a period longer than that, unless the French Civil Surgeon certifies. The Civil Surgeon came and we both examined the body: there was not a trace of decomposition. For more than 100 hours the body was intact. People wondered whether Sri Aurobindo was in samadhi or dead."
I was myself an eye-witness, together with hundreds of others. Whether the case will be reported to The Lancet in order to create a tremendous sensation — this lies with the doctors. But there is no getting past the fact that the "miracle" was "obvious" to even scientific eyes and was genuine according to scientific tests.
However, we don't basically build on this miracle. Sri Aurobindo's mission is independent of it and even if this miracle had not happened, the truth of his teachings could stand.
When you comment on the Mother's announcement I again can't help being amused. "Light" is a very common experience in the Yogic life. One sees and feels light breaking out from several occult centres in one's body or descending from above the head and touching or pervading or settling in one part of the body or another or in even the whole body. Light is also of various kinds and colours. This is testified by thousands of practitioners of Yoga, past and present. Light in the spiritual sense is not a mere metaphor, any more than spiritual consciousness or bliss is metaphorical. And if a human body is completely transformed, as wanted in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, one of the constant attributes of the transformed body will be a subtle luminousness visible even
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to the sceptic, the agnostic and the atheist. Spiritual phenomena are concrete things and compared to their concreteness the phenomena of material reality are insubstantial. It is because of this comparative insubstantiality that the theory of Maya or World-illusion acquires its real strength — until a wider experience than that of the silent and featureless infinite Brahman, or Atman, restores the balance and makes the world a spiritually real manifestation of the Divine.
On the point about the same Consciousness divided into two or into many, I cannot do anything further than ask you to read The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo's philosophical statement of his Yogic realisations. It is evident that you have not studied this book at all: even your turn of argument against what I have said would be different and more subtle and more cognisant of crucial issues.
I won't at present enter into any discussion as to whether one should fight shy of a word like "idolatry" or "superhuman" power or what constitutes the best service to Sri Aurobindo. The one whom we call the Mother is with us and she knows best what we should do.
You can order your Savitri (both volumes) from the Sri Aurobindo Books Distribution Agency, Limited, 32 Rampart Row, Fort, Bombay.* You may order also the book called Sri Aurobindo's Letters on "Savitri", a compilation made by me from my private correspondence with Sri Aurobindo: it is designed to serve as a substitute for the long Introduction Sri Aurobindo wanted to write.
May I in my turn ask you not to take amiss anything I have spoken out in the course of this letter?
With kind thoughts, dear Dr. Olsvanger,
Yours sincerely,
K. D. Sethna
* Editor's Note: SABDA at present is based in Pondicherry.
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A NOTE ON SRI AUROBINDO'S "SIDDHI"
It is bound to be surprising to our ears that a little before December 17, 1918 when Mrinalini Devi died, Sri Aurobindo had written to her that he had attained his "Siddhi" ("Goal-Attainment") and that she should come over to Pondicherry and join him in his world-work.
Surprising, for two years later, on April 7, 1920 he wrote to his brother Barindra that he was only rising then into the lowest of the three levels of Supermind and trying to draw up into it all the lower activities and that his Siddhi would be complete in the future. Even as late as November 1926, when the Overmind Consciousness descended into his body, he declared that he would be going into retirement for a dynamic meditation to bring about the Supermind's Descent. November 24 of that year is generally called the Siddhi Day or the Day of Victory, and this is understandable since the Overmind's descent forms the firm base and promise of the final step. The Overmind, the World of the Great Gods, may rightly be considered the Supermind's delegate, constituting the door to the Supreme Dynamic Divine. The ultimate Siddhi, of course, was still in the future and it was so as late as 1950 in which on December 5 Sri Aurobindo left his body. Early that year he had told the Mother in anticipation of his own departure: "You have to fulfil our Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation." How, then, shall we come to terms with the letter to Mrinalini Devi at the end of 1918?
The mystery gets further deepened when we come across a letter Sri Aurobindo wrote in late August 1912 to Motilal Roy of Chandernagore: "My subjective sadhana may be said to have received its final seal and something like its consummation by a prolonged realisation and dwelling in Para-brahman for many hours... My future sadhana is for life, practical knowledge and shakti — not the essential knowledge or shakti in itself which I have got already — but knowledge and shakti established in the... physical self and
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directed to my work in life..." And the crowning shade of the puzzling situation comes in a letter, again to Mrinalini Devi, not from Pondicherry but from Calcutta itself. The English translation reads:
"I have not written to you for a long time. I feel that a great change will soon take place in our life. If it does, all our wants will come to an end. I am waiting for the Mother's Will. A final change is also going on in me. Frequent avesh ('afflatus') of the Mother is happening in me. Once this change is finished and the avesh becomes permanent, there will be no farther separation between us, because that day of Yoga-siddhi is near. After that will begin a full flow of action. By tomorrow or the day after it some signs will appear. Then I shall meet you."
It seems certain that at different times Sri Aurobindo had different goals in view and, once they were achieved, there was a sense of Siddhi during the interval before he saw a further path ahead.
What, however, renders the letter of 1918 the most astonishing is the fact that the other two announcing the Siddhi were penned before the Arya was started in August 1914, the year in which earlier (March) the Mother had come to Pondicherry from France. We can understand that when Sri Aurobindo wrote those letters the full ideal whose realisation consisted in the Supermind's taking possession of the physical being itself had not been formulated. But by 1918 the Arya, expressing this ideal, had already run for over four years, the Mother had begun co-operating with Sri Aurobindo and, though she left in 1915 with her husband owing to the outbreak of World War I, she was expected to return, as she did in 1920. Some definite spiritual milestone of great moment must have been reached at the end of 1918 and required some immediate assistance in work. Such a milestone alone could have prompted that letter. But we have no clue to its nature.
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GLIMPSES FROM A PERSONAL STANDPOINT
A line in the opening passage of Sri Aurobindo's Ilon runs;
Ida climbed with her god-haunted peaks into diamond lustres...
A sacred mountain of ancient Greece, Ida as seen by the poet, an ever-uplifting vigil, full of secret divine presences, now emerging in the dawn-light which has the purity and transparent depth of an ethereal diamond — here is an apt symbol for Sri Aurobindo's Ashram on November 24, 1986, the sixtieth year of its establishment, what is termed in traditional reckoning its diamond jubilee.
It is also apt that Ida should be spoken of in the feminine gender — indeed in classical poetry the mountain is sometimes addressed as "Mother Ida". The Ashram of Sri Aurobindo stands as the outermost body, so to speak, of the radiant personality in whose hands Sri Aurobindo put his followers when he withdrew from public contacts on November 24, 1926 in order to expedite by "a dynamic meditation" (to use his own words) the fulfilment of his Integral Yoga — the personality whom these followers, inspired by him, called the Divine Mother.
There was no organised life among them before this date. The occasion marked the spiritual event known as the descent of the Overmind, the world of the Great Gods, the plane of Krishna-consciousness, into the physical being of Sri Aurobindo. It is named the Victory Day, for it gave him the prospect of the culminating descent of the Highest Reality, the Supermind which holds the perfect model of all that evolves here — physical form, vital drive, mental energy, with the hidden spark of the Supreme, the inmost soul, acting upon and through different aspects of them in birth after birth.
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What the Ilion-line suggests is the Mother of the Ashram carrying her creation in herself and bearing it upward into her own universal and trancendent Self. This Self of hers, in terms of luminous coloration, is, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "the white light... of the pure conscious force from which all the rest come" — the shining power productive and transformative which is often visioned by the disciples in the form of diamonds. "Diamonds," in Sri Aurobindo's symbology, "indicate the Mother's Light at its intensest, for that is diamond-white light." It is into "diamond lustres" that the Mother climbs in her deepest being for her children and, through them, for the world-nature they represent.
Therefore the Diamond Jubilee of the Ashram should put us most in mind of the Mother gloriously on the way to consummating the destiny of the earth with which Sri Aurobindo charged her six decades ago. And that the Greece-suffused hexameter we have quoted should prove suggestive of her is in the fitness of things for me to whom ancient Hellas is still alive despite the sweep of destructive ages over her history. To me, as to Shelley,
Greece and her foundations are,
Sunk beneath the tides of war,
In Thought and its eternity.
Why the Greece-ward turn was so strong from my boyhood became intelligible when both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother told me that most distinctly to their eyes I had been an ancient Athenian in a past life. My bond with Sri Aurobindo may have been close at that time too, for Nolini has reported that two of Sri Aurobindo's incarnations in the past were Pericles and Socrates — Pericles who stood at the sovereign centre of the Classical Age of Greece which was one of the finest efflorescences of the human spirit, literary as well as political — Socrates who came at the end of this Age and initiated most brilliantly and profoundly the reign of the inspired reason in European history. Literary power, political
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wisdom, philosophical insight, besides Yogic seerhood, distinguish Sri Aurobindo who was a master of Greek and whose Ilon, next to his Savitri, is the greatest poetic work he has achieved. The Mother, born in Paris, steeped in French culture, has also a strain of Hellas, for, when someone in Sri Aurobindo's Cambridge days compared London to ancient Athens, the young Indian student of history as well as of literature and languages remonstrated that it could be compared only to Corinth of antiquity whereas the counterpart of ancient Athens in modern times was Paris.
But, of course, whatever the play of a modernised Athenian temper with its love of beauty and clarity and liberty in the new world which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aim to manifest, the principal moving element in it is Spiritual India of the ages with her face of past illuminations turning to a yet vaster light from the future. An immense precursor of that light brought about the birth of the Ashram and threw into relief the Mother's mission. A. B. Purani, who was one of the twenty-four disciples present on the memorable 24th of November, has written vividly of the occasion. We may quote the concluding part of his narrative:
"From the beginning of November 1926 the pressure of the Higher Power began to be unbearable. Then at last the great day, the day for which the Mother had been waiting for so many years, arrived on the 24th. The sun had almost set, and everyone was occupied with his own activity — some had gone out to the seaside for a walk — when the Mother sent round word to all the disciples to assemble as soon as possible in the verandah where the usual meditation was held. It did not take long for the message to go round to all. By six o'clock most of the disciples had gathered. It was becoming dark. In the verandah on the wall near Sri Aurobindo's door, just behind his chair, a black silk curtain with gold lace work representing three Chinese dragons was hung. The three dragons were so represented that the tail of one reached up to the mouth of the other and the three of them covered the curtain from end to end. We came to know
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afterwards that there is a prophecy in China that the Truth will manifest itself on earth when the three dragons (the dragons of the earth, of the mind region and of the sky) meet. Today on 24 November the Truth was descending and the hanging of the curtain was significant.
"There was a deep silence in the atmosphere after the disciples had gathered there. Many saw an oceanic flood of Light rushing down from above. Everyone present felt a kind of pressure above his head. The whole atmosphere was surcharged with some electrical energy. In that silence, in that atmosphere full of concentrated expectation and aspiration, in the electrically charged atmosphere, the usual, yet on this day quite unusual, tick was heard behind the door of the entrance. Expectation rose in a flood. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could be seen through the half-opened door. The Mother with a gesture of her eyes requested Sri Aurobindo to step out first. Sri Aurobindo with a similar gesture suggested to her to do the same. With a slow dignified step the Mother came out first, followed by Sri Aurobindo with his majestic gait. The small table that used to be in front of Sri Aurobindo's chair was removed this day. The Mother sat on a small stool to his right.
"Silence absolute, living silence — not merely living but overflowing with divinity. The meditation lasted about forty-five minutes. After that one by one the disciples bowed to the Mother.
"She and Sri Aurobindo gave blessings to them. Whenever a disciple bowed to the Mother, Sri Aurobindo's right hand came forward behind the Mother's as if blessing him through the Mother. After the blessings, in the same silence there was a short meditation.
"In the interval of silent meditation and blessings many had distinct experiences. When all was over they felt as if they had awakened from a divine dream. Then they felt the grandeur, the poetry and the absolute beauty of the occasion. It was not as if a handful of disciples were receiving blessings from their Supreme Master and the Mother in one little
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corner of the earth. The significance of the occasion was far greater than that. It was certain that a Higher Consciousness had descended on earth. In that deep silence had burgeoned forth, like the sprout of a banyan tree, the beginning of a mighty spiritual work. This momentous occasion carried its significance to all in the divine dynamism of the silence, in its unearthly dignity and grandeur and in the utter beauty of its every little act. The deep impress of divinity which everyone got was for him a priceless treasure.
"Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went inside. Immediately Datta was inspired. In that silence she spoke: 'The Lord has descended into the physical today.' "
A year and twenty days later I arrived in Pondicherry with my wife Daulat whom Sri Aurobindo and the Mother gave a new name shortly afterwards: "Lalita." Sri Aurobindo explained it: "Beauty of refinement and harmony — this is the idea underlying this word. It is a name also of one of the companions of Radha." I too got a new name but it took Sri Aurobindo long to strike on it. The complexity of my nature may have caused the delay. At last it came: "Amal Kiran", with the meaning "The Clear Ray." All that complexity had to be made straight and pellucid and one-pointed, though without losing the essence of whatever richness might go with it. Indeed a tall order to live up to if it directed one to a future such as is glimpsed in that line in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:
A ray returning to its parent sun.
In the period before we came, the Ashram-life had passed through its brightest phase — in the sense that marvellous experiences filled every hour. The Great Gods of the Overmind were felt descending and the Mother could bring out most- markedly into her physical being something of the
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powers and personalities which Sri Aurobindo speaks of as being hers: Maheshwari the vast and calm and all-controlling Knowledge, Mahakali the Truth-flashing Warrior of the Worlds, Mahalakshmi the Ever-blissful and All-beautiful, Mahasaraswati the Doer of Perfect Work and the Maker of Flawless Form. With hardly any sleep and very little food she could carry on her day's spiritual activities and her night's occult labours. But the transformative process she had set going in the sadhaks from a poise high above met with the resistance of the human ego in them as soon as the action turned from the inner to the outer. Evidently the earth-nature was not ready for a direct pressure from high above. A new technique of transformation seemed called for.
A sign of this need may also be discerned in an extraordinary event in the Mother's own career of manifesting the Divine. I vividly remember the substance of her account of it to me in an interview. She said she had come to possess the Word of Creation. When I looked a little puzzled she added: "You know that Brahma is said to create by his Word. In the same way whatever I would express could take place. I had willed to express a whole new world of superhuman reality. Everything was prepared in the subtle dimension and was waiting to be precipitated upon earth." On the eve of the precipitation she went to Sri Aurobindo and told him of what her Creative Word was about to do. He heard in silence the entire splendid story, then made the comment to the following effect: "It is the Overmind you will manifest. It will be a new religion full of miracles. But the Overmind on earth will be so glorious that people will want nothing beyond it. The Supermind will be held up for millenniums. It is the Supermind we want to establish." The Mother went back to her room, plunged into meditation for two hours and swept away the whole future which she had conjured up and in which she would have been the dazzling creative centre. This was surely the mightiest act of renunciation in spiritual history.
When I reached Pondicherry the old line of work had
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already been modified. Though the "overhead" reality's descent was always the goal, now the process was a working from below. Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother came down into the physical consciousness and assuming all its difficulties and dangers set themselves on a long arduous course. To open up the obscure recesses of earth-nature and evoke the secret flame in the human heart, the psychic being with its cry of love from the depths to the Ultimate Unknown: such was the mode of Yoga when I joined the Ashram on December 16, 1927.
The Ashram then was a very small community, numbering perhaps forty members or so. I came most in touch with forceful Purani, gentle Pujalal, poised Nolini, sympathetic Amrita, diligent Champaklal, disciplined Dyuman, simple Rajangam, enthusiastic Dara, scrupulous Premanand, cordial Pavitra, dignified Anilbaran and courteous Doraiswamy on his week-ends from Madras. All of them were devoted workers. I sought to catch the light which they channelled in their diverse ways. I was the youngest among them — having just completed 23 years — and studiously watched their general mode of life. It was not ascetic in the old sense. They ate well and had decent rooms, but there was a subdued tone in all they did. Their living style was rather different from the one in the Ashram at present. People sometimes remark that Yoga has become so much easier now, with comforts and contacts increased and restrictions lessened. The truth is quite the opposite. The old life, spare and somewhat reserved, induced naturally the Yogic mood. The new one demands all our energies to keep the concentrated attitude. Those who have gone through the earlier regime may have the habit of practising the presence of God at all moments, but the temptation to make-do with a watered-down self-consecration is always round the corner. It is much more difficult now to keep the psychic flame burning every hour as one's guide and guardian.
It is, however, vain to think of reviving old conditions. As Nolini once wrote, the original Ashram was too self-
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enclosed: the world tended to be shut out. Although this was necessary at one stage, a time had to come when the Ashram-doors would be thrown open. Especially during World War II people from all parts of India sought protection and safety in the Ashram for their families. A great influx of children took place and life in general had to be altered. We have to adjust ourselves to the new conditions and make them harmonious with the inner intensity. At times an attempt seems to be made to lift some rules out of their old context and set them up as if intended for all periods. Any warning that neglect of them might have undesirable consequences strikes one as ill-conceived. To apply a practice from early days wholesale to living-styles very different would be unrealistic. Of course, discrimination as regards the outside world has always to be exercised by the Ashramites, but there is little room for doctrinaire restrictions which everybody knows to be obsolete if not obstructive under present circumstances.
Psychologically, one of the most central facts of the early days was the conviction that complete divinisation of the physical being was not only an aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga but also a practical goal. "Supramentalisation" was clearly understood to include a complete change in the body itself. What is most significant is that by "body" was meant the physical instrument of even the sadhaks and not simply of the Master and the Mother. A letter of Sri Aurobindo on January 14, 1932 has the phrase: "... I want to divinise the human consciousness, to bring down the Supramental, the Truth-Consciousness, the Light, the Force into the physical to transform it..." Again, a letter of September 5,1935, which couples the Mother with Sri Aurobindo by name, says: "What is being done is meant to prepare the manifestation of the Supermind in the earth-consciousness down to Matter itself, so it can't be for the physical of myself or the Mother alone."
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In this context I remember some words of Amrita, one of the earliest sadhaks. He used to be often in my room. Once when he was there we heard the sound of a funeral passing in the street. In a whisper as if conveying a secret he said: "I have the feeling that this will not happen to me." I did not raise my eyebrows in the least, for most of us who understood the originality of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision and his reading of the Supermind's implications could not help the expectation of a radical bodily change. Had not the Mother declared to me once that she hoped to cure me of the infantile paralysis that had struck at one of my legs? She had added that only the Supermind's power would be able to effect the cure, which meant my waiting for the Supramental descent into her outermost substance. Right down to the subtle-physical which lies behind this substance the new Consciousness had made its appearance. In a letter of August 1936, after affirming that "perfection on the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item" and that till it would be achieved "one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body", Sri Aurobindo admits that the overcoming of "difficulties of the realisation and transformation... has been done to a sufficient degree on the other planes — but not yet on the most material part of the physical plane." Yes, the Master and the Mother stood transformed just short of the last lap of the Yogic journey. And not only did they seem sure — under the circumstances they faced at the time — that they would finish the course; they seemed sure also of several others following suit. Nor was it merely the feeling of the sadhaks that the all-transmuting work of the Supermind would touch them, removing "the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to" in Shakespeare's tragic vision. A case may be cited in which the Master and the Mother themselves gave the promise in the most explicit terms.
A sadhak had been riddled with a sense of unfitness for the immense result such as our Gurus looked forward to in the very letter just quoted: "We have not sought perfection
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for our own separate sake, but as part of a general change — creating a possibility of perfection in others." The mist in the sadhak's mind was dispelled with the deepest compassion during an interview with the Mother. He has never disclosed the fact in print before, but in this survey of the Ashram's existence he has been persuaded to communicate what may be deemed the most heartening event in his early spiritual life.
His private record, dated May 1929, of his inner response to the interview reads:
"Mother divine, ever since the day you told me that it is my destiny to be transformed, I have tasted something of the Peace that belongs to the time-transcending Consciousness in which the future is no uncertain possibility but a path already traversed, a goal already attained, a truth of Eternity waiting only to be revealed and realised in Time.
"I remember how I approached you with a tortured mind, preyed upon by doubts and misgivings. I asked you if I would have to give up the Yoga and return to the life that is a death. And you said: 'If it were your destiny that you should go back, I would not uselessly keep you here.'
"Catching the prophetic suggestion of your words, I begged of you to speak in a more positive manner and tell me whether it was really my destiny to remain with you and undergo the Great Transformation. You replied that it was so; and with eyes that held in their vision all the three times together you looked at me and said: 'All this talk of your going away and forsaking God has no meaning for me.'.Not believing my own ears, still unconvinced that I was already marked out by your Grace, I ventured to doubt if you had this my present life in view or the ultimate goal to be reached in the course of many births. But with utter finality came the answer: 'When I refer to your destiny, I mean this life and no other.'
"Destroyed was my delusion, my fears and hesitations dissolved like clouds, and I stood for ever in the peaceful foreshadow of the light that was to be.
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"Mother — divinest — dearest — how shall I be grateful enough for your love?"
Some years later a critical necessity arose for a harking-back to the interview. The sadhak wrote:
"Mother, I have been feeling wretched at the thought of going from here to Bombay, even for a short time, and in spite of whatever desire I might have to go you never said 'Yes' all these years; now that you have, Yoga seems to grip me all the more. I think I must now go to the end of this venture I have undertaken, but I hope you will always protect me and be near me and bring me back safe. I had a talk with you years ago — a talk which meant so much to me — from my personal point of view it was the most precious thing I ever had the good fortune to record. I am sending you what I wrote then — that is, in May 1929: this sheet lay in my drawer but I have dug it out today because I felt uncertain whether you had really promised what I thought you had. I wish, Mother, you could tell me that I had not mistaken your meaning. I feel sure that I did not misrepresent you, but we are such self-gratifying fools — so I implore you to write to me whether it was a truth I recorded. For, if it is a truth, then life is indeed worth living." (30.1.1934)
Sri Aurobindo replied on the Mother's behalf:
"Your account of the conversation with Mother is quite accurate.
"Mother is letting you go now because she thinks it is the best way to cure you of your lingering desire. But beware of any sentimental attachment to a woman which would hinder your destiny — for that is the one real danger to it. The Mother expects you to come back soon."
The sadhak left Pondicherry a few days after February 21, 1934 and returned some days before August 15 the same year. In the years that followed there were other departures by him from Pondicherry and one that lasted a long time. Before this particular visit to Bombay the Mother warned, along with a reassurance of victory, that the sadhak should run no risk of any accident doing serious damage to his body.
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All care was taken but he never dreamt that harm could come to him by his own hands. What the harm was can be gathered from extracts out of a letter of Sri Aurobindo's on 1.8.1938 when the sadhak was eager to return:
"You must on no account return here before your heart has recovered. No doubt, death must not be feared, but neither should death or permanent ill health be invited. Here, especially now when all the competent doctors have gone away or been sent to a distance from Pondicherry, there would be no proper facilities for the treatment you still need, while you have them all there. You should remember the Mother's warning to you when she said that you would have your realisation in this life provided you did not do something silly so as to shorten your life. That 'something silly' you tried your best to do when you swallowed with a cheerful liberality a poison-medicine without taking the least care to ascertain what was the maximum dose. You have escaped by a sort of miracle, but with a shaken heart. To risk making that shaky condition of the heart a permanent disability of the body rendering it incapable of resisting any severe physical attack in the future, would be another 'something silly' of the same quality. So it's on no account to be done..."
This extract is very relevant even outside the particular sadhak's life because apropos of it we may speculate why the extreme goal, envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for themselves, of a total transformation, down to the most external being, the material bodily instrument, as the initial step for a wider world-fulfilment, was given up in view of humanity's condition — first on December 5, 1950 when Sri Aurobindo passed away and finally on November 17, 1973 when the Mother made her exit.
Sri Aurobindo's letter of 1.8.1938 ends with the words: "You need not be afraid of losing anything great by
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postponing your return to Pondicherry. A general descent of the kind you speak of is not in view at the moment and, even if it comes, it can very easily catch you up into itself whenever you come if you are in the right openness; and if you are not, then even its descending would not be of so urgent an importance, since it would take you some time to become aware of it or receive it. So there is no reason why you should not in this matter cleave to common sense and the sage advice of the doctors."
These words were in answer to the sadhak's reference to a disclosure the Mother had made to him on the eve of his departure from the Ashram. She had told him that she was expecting something great and decisive in the course of the year and that he should be back before the event. The sadhak's reference ran: "This is a year in which, I believe, the Truth-Consciousness may make up its mind, or rather its Supermind, to descend. I was expecting a wire from the Mother in May. She had mentioned approximately the middle of the year and had promised to inform me at once. It's almost the end of July now — but the year is not out yet, and August 15 is pretty close. Won't I be losing something great if I don't throw all caution to the winds?"
Strictly speaking, what Sri Aurobindo, taking up the terminology used by the sadhak, called "a general descent" has been named by the Mother "the Supramental Manifestation" when the event at which she had hinted occurred at last — after nearly 18 years' delay — on February 29, 1956. Elucidating it indirectly on March 29 of the same year the Mother made a change in one of her old "Prayers and Meditations" and made the passage go:
"Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute,
A new light breaks upon the earth,
A new world is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled."
Next year she made a direct mention of the manifestation of
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the Supermind's Consciousness, Light and Force, though not yet its "Ananda", in the earth's atmosphere, meaning by the last expression the subtle-physical layer of the earth. This declaration gave us to understand that now the Supermind had taken the first fundamental step to become an organic part of the earth's evolution and would eventually manifest in the gross-material layer through the transformed bodies of future Yogic aspirants and make its way gradually towards the revelation of "a new world" for all mankind.
So we have to look at the vision and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother under two aspects. One is the general manifestation of the Supramental principle in terrestrial history, urging evolution to pass from Man to Superman in the broad span of centuries. Such a goal has been essentially accomplished. No wonder that the Mother, not too long after the glorious February 29, said to a few sadhaks, including my close friend Nirodbaran, that she saw no reason why she should not leave her body now that the things that had been promised had been fulfilled. The attendants were perturbed and pleaded with the Mother not to leave us but to continue her labour towards the divinisa-tion of her body.
Bodily divinisation here and now is the second aspect. This aspect was made prominent in the early days of the Ashram, and we took it usually as a straightforward problem the solution of which was understood as a practical certainty in the Integral Yoga. But actually the problem is very complicated. To begin with: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had the choice of transforming their own bodies in isolation from common humanity. In 1933 a sadhak asked Sri Aurobindo whether he was right in believing that if the Supermind was not established in the Mother's body-consciousness, it was not because she was not ready for it like us, but because in order to establish it she had first to prepare the physical of the sadhaks and of the earth to a certain extent. Sri Aurobindo answered: "Certainly. If we had lived physically in the Supermind from the beginning nobody
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would have been able to approach us nor could any sadhana have been done. There could have been no hope of contact between ourselves and the earth and men." The implication of Sri Aurobindo's answer is that the Mother and he could from the beginning have had not merely a completely divinised consciousness but also a completely divinised bodily existence. In fact, without such an existence which would set them totally apart from earth and men, some "hope of contact" would remain. The utter transformation was within their reach. Intrinsic possibility of failure is ruled out. The same conclusion follows from another statement of Sri Aurobindo's in August 1936: "The Mother's difficulties are not her own: she bears the difficulties of others and those that are inherent in the general action and working for the transformation. If it had been otherwise, it would be a very different matter."
However, when the burden of humanity's unregenerate nature is assumed and a constant close intimate link with it from day to day is accepted for its salvation, the risk is run of being impeded from complete success. Although Sri Aurobindo and the Mother spoke of success not only for themselves but for their disciples as well, they were always aware of unfavourable contingencies. And there is the character of the world-play, a colossal wager of the Divine with himself. Evolution starts from the very opposite of the Divine — a total involution of all of the Divine's powers and a full chance is given to anti-divine forces to challenge each move forward. Always the Grace intervenes of the free Divine beyond, yet a heavy price is paid again and again, and for all the certainty of the ultimate triumph time is often a grim battlefield even for the Divine's own incarnations. Particularly hard is the lot of the world-redeemer if he is bent on attacking the last stronghold of Matter — the body with its ills, its ageing process, its fate of mortality so far. Sri Aurobindo's letter of December 28, 1934 says that "the Supramental's advent is in the very nature of things inevitable", and that "a number of souls have been sent to see
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that it shall be now", and that his own "faith and will are for the now"; but the letter also tells us that "the when and the how... is decided and predestined somewhere above", and it adds: "it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces. For in the terrestrial world the predetermined result is hidden and what we see is a whirl of possibilities and forces attempting to achieve something with the destiny of it all concealed from human eyes." Even from the eyes of the Avatar a part of the future is veiled. In a recent issue of Sri Aurobindo's Action (September) these lines are quoted from Savitri —
All that transpires on earth and all beyond
Are parts of an illimitable plan
The One keeps in his heart and keeps alone —
and the Mother is asked: "Does the man, who is united with the One, know that 'plan'?" She replies: "To the extent that is necessary for the execution, yes; and to the needed extent, but not in its entirety all at once."
Gradually, in the years approaching the mid-century Sri Aurobindo appears to have intuited a mighty block in the path of his plan. He wrote to me in 1948 that things were getting too serious for him to spare time for intellectual arguments. In early 1950 the Mother and he felt that one of them would have to go and work from behind the physical scene. Evidently the going would be a seeming defeat yet serve as a secret means of victory. And indeed his withdrawal in the small hours of December 5 brought about a breakthrough that had been lacking since 1938 when the expected "general descent" was held up but the Mother used to see the Supermind come into Sri Aurobindo's bodily substance without getting fixed there. A year after his departure she told me that the moment Sri Aurobindo had left his body what he had called the Mind of Light had been realised in her. Here at last was the reason for the desperate-looking step the Avatar of the Supermind had taken, an
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acceptance of death in all its realism of a fatal disease (extreme uraemia, in medical parlance) in order to win by the self-sacrifice a long-awaited boon. For, the Mind of Light has been defined by the Mother in a note I got in Bombay from Nolini as "the physical mind receiving the Supramental Light". Some years later these words sparked off a poem whose two opening lines the Mother pronounced to be a sheer Mantra exactly revealing what had happened in her body on December 5, while the rest of the piece was considered an imaginative reconstruction of the general psychophysical effect. The couple of verses specially picked out for praise were:
The core of a deathless Sun is now the brain
And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.
December 5, 1950 was another and greater Victory Day than November 24, 1926.
This Victory Day, marking a prelude to the revolutionary transformation as distinguished from the evolutionary one, marked too a radical change in the posture of the Aurobindonian future. The original vision was of the Master and the Mother forming together the nucleus of the Supramental Race. Now that the Mother was left alone on the physical plane, a luminous blank was felt by the sadhaks ahead of them. Luminous because the Mother was still there, blank because the Master was absent. But the future acquired focus when the Mother announced that when she appealed to Sri Aurobindo to take up his body again he emphatically said "No" because he had given it up on purpose but reassured her by saying further that he would be the first to come back in a new supramental body made in the supramental way — that is, without the common process of birth as the result of a sex act. So we looked forward to a time when the Mother
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would represent the human supramentalised and Sri Aurobindo the Supramental humanised, she consummating the earth's Godward travail, he initiating an entirely superhuman race with no earthly past and directly precipitated into Matter with the help of the powers natural to the consummation she would exemplify.
To one whose every piece of writing had been offered to Sri Aurobindo and who had received his comment on it and with whom he had kept up correspondence even during the years when there had been no correspondence except with one other sadhak, Dilip Kumar Roy, the passing of Sri Aurobindo was like a universal sunset. But the Mother assured him: "Nothing has changed. Turn to Sri Aurobindo for inspiration as before and you will always receive it. Nothing has changed." Her words have proved true — and to minimise my feeling of physical loss her own unfailing graciousness did the utmost possible with her personal presence throughout the years from 1954 when I came back to the Ashram with my life's companion Sehra. I may mention, in passing, that Sehra fitted very well into the new life and the Mother has been recorded as counting her to be one who loved her truly.
Those years, ending with the near-close of 1973 when the Mother let her own body go, were perhaps the most productive in the Ashram's career. Life flowered both outwardly and inwardly as never before, owing to the intensity with which the Mother sought to obey Sri Aurobindo's call to her in the year he departed: "You have to fulfil our Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation." In the middle of 1973 she had to stop meeting people. The influx of a Power which had never been experienced by any humanly built receptacle in the whole history of the earth became so divinely disturbing that she wondered whether it was the Will of the Supreme that she should continue her arduous task. After all, she had already made the Supramental Consciousness, Light and Force a secret splendour in the earth's evolution. Need she wait upon the earth still further?
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A few years earlier she had stated about her body's future: "Will it continue or will it get dissolved?... But the body knows that it has been decided, and that it is not to be told to the body. It accepts, it is not impatient, it accepts, it says, 'It is all right, it is as Thou wilt'..." Not much later she had the inner experience of the new body that was ready to be manifested. Recounting it in the Bulletin of August 1972, p. 75, she said: "I was like that, I had become like that." And shortly afterwards, in the Bulletin of February 1973, p. 85, she announced: "I have had for a moment (the body) — just a few seconds — the supramental consciousness. It was so wonderful." There we have the Mother on the verge of fulfilling Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. But the last step of precipitating the new body into the old was not taken. The Mother appears to have found out that the Supreme's decision for the body was to end its struggle and suffering. She ceased in her efforts to keep the body going. Against the common-sense advice of her attendants she had been insisting for reasons of her own on walking, even though there had once been a frightening break-down. Now came a pause. The whole day of November 14 she was quiet but at night again she wanted to walk. The attendants said: "Mother, you should not walk." She, as her main attendant Pranab tells us, "obeyed" them. Pranab continues: "That was on the 15th. From that day she became absolutely obedient. Whatever we told her she did." This calm passivity of the Mother was obviously the pointer to the knowledge that had come to her that her embodied being was to be abandoned at last. The obedience which had been noted was not to her attendants but to her own transcendent Self. We may be certain that the decision was sealed also by the Will of Sri Aurobindo from the subtle-physical plane where, according to a message of hers to us in the wake of his departure, he had established himself to help the aspiring world reach the golden future he had prophesied for it.
If ever in a weak moment, in spite of our inmost convictions, the word "failure" arises and tends to bring a strain of
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sadness, let us turn to another passage in the same issue of Sri Aurobindo's Action to which we have referred earlier. Quoting the unforgettable verse from Savitri —
His failure is not failure whom God leads —
the question is put: "Because it is part of the play?" The Mother writes back: "It is the human mind that has the conception of success and failure. It is the human mind that wants one thing and not another. In the divine plan each thing has its place. What matters is to be a docile and if possible a conscious instrument of the Divine Will. To be and to do what the Divine wants, this is the truly important thing."
We cannot close on a wiser note in the 13th year since the Mother joined the Master. Symbolising their union is the single monument, covered perpetually with a homage of flowers, in which their physical remains lie — the all-soothing Samadhi. Her presence, along with his, has been felt throughout the intervening period. It has sustained her beloved child, the Ashram, and led it firmly yet tenderly towards its diamond jubilee. When we shall look back upon the occasion we shall surely record, with a phrase from Savitri, that on that happy date, out of the depths of the Supreme Consciousness, blessing and rewarding her eager workers,
There poured awakening streams of diamond light.
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SOME DIARY-NOTES OF 1956, THE YEAR OF THE
SUPRAMENTAL MANIFESTATION
ON FEBRUARY- 29
(As February 29, 1988 will mark the eighth anniversary of
the great event which took place thirty-two years ago in a
leap year, a dip into a sadhak's Diary of 1956
will be of interest.)
Bombay, March 4
On December 18, last year, on a Sunday night the Divine Grace came forth to meet me and lift me up. I was feeling a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Then, towards early morning, perhaps at 4.30 or 5, I had a dream. Even after waking, I could not think it a dream, so concrete it had been, so intensely real — more real than any event in so-called waking life.
I found myself sitting at the top of the staircase leading to the darshan room. Suddenly the door of that room opened and the Mother came out and sat near the threshold, facing me. We held each other's hands and looked into each other's face. All of a sudden, with a smile she put her face forward and kissed me on my right cheek. I was so surprised, and I spoke from the depth of my heart, "O Mother, thank you!" She kept smiling.
A couple of days later I wrote to her, asking if this dream had been based on any genuine occult experience. In answer to my letter, she smiled as she passed by me after tennis and said: "It's all right." I said: "Was it real?" She nodded, saying "Yes" and, still smiling, passed on. I was extremely happy.
Today after two and a half months the Divine Grace has again come to me. It is a Sunday once more and I have just got up from sleep. I was feeling lost and depressed, so far away from Pondicherry. In my dream last night I found myself going to the Mother for pranam. She was sitting
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cross-legged. As soon as I reached close to her she caught my right hand and pulled my face to her own and again kissed me on my right cheek. Our faces kept touching for some time. Love leaped out from my heart to her and I was happy. I felt saved — and, on waking, resolved to let no depression, no influence from the past, overcome me.
I had dreamt of the Mother on the 29th of February, too, in the train on the first night of the journey from Madras. There also I was going for pranam. I saw a wide open space in the centre of which the Mother was seated. People were flocking towards her to do pranam. Somehow I could not throw off my slippers quickly enough in order to join them and reach the Mother. My left foot failed to get clear and while shaking it I woke up. But right in front of me, in the compartment, I saw the Mother standing in a faint patch of light coming from a window. I looked steadily at her. On examining her body I noticed that some part of the berth opposite mine and a bit of the woodwork above it were making up her face and form. But this observation on my side did not make any difference to my seeing her. The material things were the support of her projection into the physical plane. I saw her for nearly one-fourth of a minute. It was fine to feel that she was with me even when I was not in Pondicherry. Then I shut my eyes for a moment and opened them once more. She was still there. A second time I shut my eyes. On opening them, I found her gone.
May I feel her presence all the time! I shall be in Bombay for about three weeks. Before I left Pondi, I said to the Mother: "I wonder how long I'll have to be away." Without any hesitation she replied: "You must be here on the 29th of March." I said: "All right, Mother. I shall come back for that date." Evidently this date which will mark the forty-second anniversary of her first arrival in Pondicherry has a particular importance this year. She has called Eleanor Montgomery also for it — up to the end of April. From March 29 to April 24 is the period of a special descent — the culminating point being 23.4.56 — a series of consecutive numbers.
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Bombay, March 18
Again last night I had a dream of the Mother — a very warm and intimate one.
Pondicherry, March 26
Yesterday in the morning I wrote to the Mother, asking what had happened on two dates about which I had heard Ashramites talking: February 29 and March 8.1 opined that it was something connected with the Supermind's gripping the physical world.
In the evening, after tennis, the Mother passed by, smiling — and said: "You are behind by a century."
I gave her a note at the Distribution of groundnuts at the Playground: "From what you said after tennis I am sure that the whole blooming thing has come down. Hurrah! And now there is hope for such as I."
She read the note and laughed and said: "Years ago I had told you that I would call you when the Supermind would come down. So I did call you. But you didn't understand."
I replied: "Mother, I came as soon as I could. And on the very day of the descent — February 29, as I hear — I saw you standing in the railway compartment of the Bombay Mail in which I had left Madras."
"Oh, it was the same day? It is very good that you saw me.
Far back in 1938, just before I left for Bombay at the end of February, the Mother promised to call me home if the Supermind came down. She was expecting the descent some time in May. I, however, got no telegram — and Sri Aurobindo later explained to me that the kind of descent expected had not happened.
I learnt many years afterwards that the Supermind did come but could not be fixed in the very substance of Sri Aurobindo's body.
Now, on February 29, late in the evening it came down
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for good. What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had worked for during 30 years happened at last.
I wonder when the world will realise that the greatest event in its history took place. Of course the detailed working out of the Supermind upon earth and even in the Mother's body will take long, but the full general presence of it in her is there now and also its general working on ourselves and the world.
There is now hope for the weakest amongst us, for the Supermind is above the universe's laws and brings sheer omnipotence to our aid.
It seems that three immediate effects are possible. One is a sudden and radical clearing of difficulties. Another is a slow but quite perceptibly sure clearing. Still another is a final gathering up of difficulties prior to their clearance: difficulties may appear to increase but really what will take place is like the sweeping together of the dust of a room before throwing it out. One must have no fear: one must face everything with faith and certitude.
I find examples of all these effects here in the Ashram. I myself feel the second effect.
I can hardly contain myself with joy at the Mother's victory. May all our hearts belong to her!
March 27
I asked the Mother to clarify to me the exact thing that had occurred. She said Nolini had told her that I had been putting all kinds of questions to him and that I could not grasp what he had been telling me. I said to the Mother: "I was not satisfied with his answers. I had the impression that he himself did not quite know." She remarked: "I had the same impression."
I asked: "Can we say that the involved Supermind has burst open as a result of the descent?"
"No. That is what you thought. But, though it has not come up, its coming up is now a certainty. It is only a matter
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of time. And I may tell you that to talk of a descent as we commonly do is also not correct. We can speak of a descent only when there is a question of something below and something above. In the human frame of consciousness there are levels and there is something above which can descend. But for the universe as a whole there is no below or above. A descent can be spoken of only in relation to an individual. In relation to the entire universe we have to speak of a manifestation. The Supermind's light, consciousness and force have manifested. The Ananda hasn't yet done so."
"But surely something has to manifest from somewhere? The Supermind was not in the universe. Where did it manifest from?"
"You are being too intellectual. You can't understand things that way."
After this talk I figured to myself that somehow, in the universal framework, all that we call "planes" must be not in , a ladder but all together — the non-physical universes subtly and secretly present along with the physical in a single original self-extension of divine consciousness.
March 31
This is the poem I wrote before the Supramental Manifestation was announced. In fact, I wrote it in Bombay.
Doors in the ultimate Secrecy cleave wide
And out of them dances an immortal dust,
A shower of scintillating silences
Falling for ever on a city of dream.
Softly the splendour stirs in every stone.
One single wideness grow the seeds of sleep.
A fathomless flower exploding with no sound,
Ommnipotence unfolds from earth to sky.
(Note on December 3, 1987: The poem is a strange production.
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The first stanza seems to prophesy in another frame of vision what happened in late evening on February 29, 1956. The second appears to go even beyond that event to the breaking out of the involved Supermind.)
May 6
Today I feel somehow that at last I am quite ready to be taken up entirely by the Mother into the New Life.
May 24
I wrote to the Mother: "Ever since I came back from Bombay I have been constantly feeling supported by the new Power that has come into the earth's atmosphere. I have been feeling that all difficulties belong to an old world that is really dead. But, although the sense of being a part of your life and of your work is often strong, I seem to be lingering just within the borders of the new world instead of penetrating right to its centre. I want so much to be wholly yours. Won't you do something to absorb me into yourself? What should I do on my side?"
When the Mother came out from her bathroom after reading my note, she said: "Ca viendra" ("It will come"). I asked her: "When?" She replied: "Surely you don't want me to mention the date?" Then I said: "No — but please make it come soon." She smiled.
May 30
I wrote to the Mother: "Is it true that you have said the following or something like it? — 'Only four people realised the fact of the Supramental Manifestation — one in the Ashram and three outside'? I can very well believe that there was only one person in the Ashram — namely, yourself! But the three outsiders puzzle me. How did they manage to do what hundreds here didn't?"
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The Mother told me: "What I said was not that four people knew it to be the Supramental Manifestation, but that when the Manifestation took place they had some unusual experiences because of it even if they did not understand why. I at first thought there was only one person in the Ashram to whom an unusual experience had happened, but afterwards I found there had been two. Among those outside, I counted you."
I was surprised to hear this. The Mother continued: "You wrote to me — didn't you? — that on the night of February 29 I was with you. I had promised you long ago when you had gone from here that I would inform you at once if the Supermind manifested. I never forgot this. And when the Supermind did manifest I went out to tell you."
"You actually did that, Mother, for one like me?" I asked. She answered "Yes."
I feel unspeakably grateful to find that she thinks me so connected with her work.
September 20
This is what happened in the train from Pondicherry to Madras between 11.45 p.m. and 12.45 a.m. I was seeing my sister-in-law off up to Madras. I had a dream ending with a very vivid impression as if of an experience. I found the Mother sitting and I came and knelt down. On the palm of my right hand, just below the base of the index finger, she placed something with the fingers of her right hand. She said: "I am giving you the Supramental Purity." I felt extremely happy and for a moment I thought she was about to kiss me on the forehead. I said to myself: "My face is unwashed and grimy. It won't be nice for Mother to kiss it." Then she brought her face close to mine and touched my forehead with her own. She remained like this for a little while. I was deeply moved and clung on to her legs or perhaps arms, I can't say for sure. Then I woke up, with the emotion and the happiness still with me, as well as with the
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sense of the beginning of a new important working in my sadhana. But was this only something with a personal significance? Or did the Mother really visit me to announce some new supramental truth manifested?
September 22
I spoke of my dream to the Mother. She said: "On that very night I wanted to give you something and I did so."
November 25
In the morning the Mother said: "I am not giving you any books on this birthday. You have all of them." I replied: "Not all. I don't have On the Veda and Poems from Bengali." She asked Champaklal to keep them ready. When she went for lunch, I kept a note for her on the table by which she would pass on her way to the bathroom: "The books you will be giving me are certainly welcome, but what I would most like to read today is something else. You once told me that you would show it to me one day — but I think you said that you would do so when I would be more worthy. If greater worthiness is the standard, I feel sure I shall not be shown what I want. But one can always hope for Grace. I am referring to what you wrote on February 29, just after the Supramental Manifestation."
On finishing her lunch the Mother stopped at the table and picked up my note. Usually she takes my notes to the bathroom and reads them there. But this one she read, standing by the table. Then she went to the bathroom and afterwards came to me as usual. I had kept ready the flower whose significance is "Prayer". On taking it from me she said: "I have read your prayer. If I can find the paper on which I have written, I shall bring it for you in the evening's interview. If I have to search for it for an hour I shan't be able to show it to you.
In the evening when I went into her Playground room, I
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saw that she had brought the paper with her. She said: "You won't understand what I have written, but try to keep your mind absolutely quiet and receive it." I said: "Perhaps it is not meant to be understood." She laughed and said: "Probably." Then she explained the background of the writing: "The whole thing is not so much a vision or an experience as something done by me. I went up into the Supermind and did what was to be done. There was no need for any verbal formulation as far as I was concerned, but in order to put it into words for others I wrote the thing down. Always in writing, a realisation, a state of consciousness, gets somewhat limited: the very act of expression narrows the reality to some extent. Well, here is what I wrote."
Then she read out the French. It began with the words: "La presence divine est la parmi nous." She was as if addressing all of us. The next sentence was: "J'avais une forme d'or plus immense que tout 1'univers." Then she went on to say that she found herself in front of a massive door, on whose other side was the world. And she heard the words "The time has come." She heard them in English and not in French. Then she lifted up with her hands a huge hammer of gold and struck one blow upon the door. The door crumbled down. A tremendous flood of light poured out and swept all over the universe.
When the Mother had finished reading, I asked to take the paper in my hands and to read it by myself so that I might catch better the French. She hesitated just a bit and said, a little shyly and doubtfully: "You'll give it back to me?" "Of course," I replied, laughing. After I returned the paper she remarked: "When I came back from the Supermind I thought that, since the outpour was so stupendous, everybody would be lying prostrate. But when I opened my eyes I found everybody sitting quietly and perfectly unconscious of what had happened."
I thanked the Mother very much for the act of Grace in her showing me the precious document.
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(Note on November 25,1987: It was more than three years later than 1956 that on February 29, 1960 the Mother made public the contents of "the precious document." I knew I was not meant to disclose to anybody the act of Grace on November 25,1956. So I kept the secret. It appears that the Mother had told Dr. Sanyal what exactly had occurred. He wrote down something afterwards and asked Norman Dowsett to correct the English. Norman, instead of returning the report to Dr. Sanyal, seems to have sent it straight up to the Mother. Referring to what had been submitted to her, she told me some time in April of the same year that human beings have no proper understanding of things and make a mess of what is wonderful. It was in this connection that she mentioned having written of the event of February 29.)
November 26
No hope for me unless you break
Even from within my cave
The gate of God the Gloom,
Just as you broke from the infinite room
The door of God the Gold
And set free wave on dazzling wave,
Omnipotence-sea that rolled
Over all earth and gulfed all things
In the Love that turns clay Supermind.
But, O sweet splendour, find
Yourself not only high above
But deep below in the blindnesses
And crumble down my stone
Of a heart! Unless
You are one With my night I shall never be
One with your solar infinity.
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AN EXPLANATORY LETTER
May I proceed as in a classroom, taking nothing for granted?
The lines you wish me to explain in brief —
Akin to the march of unaccomplished Powers
Beyond life's arc in spirit's immensities1 —
occur in a passage where the soul of Aswapati (Savitri's royal father) is released from Ignorance and his mind and body undergo their "first spiritual change" by a Knowledge drawn from above and within. What pours down from the overhead planes is called "a wide self-knowledge" and what broadens out from the subliminal and the psychic depths is termed "a new world-knowledge". With a combination of both, Aswa-pati faces the objective and subjective Nature that constitutes our common habitual experience, our life of Ignorance, the physical and psychological field of our works. These works are changed and surpassed by Aswapati's soul-release, as we learn from the two lines just preceding your quotation:
A genius heightened in his body's cells
That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works...
Now it is the set process of embodied existence that ordinarily determines all the outer and inner activities of one's life: the activities are "fate-hedged". But behind this process are "cosmic forces", "occult impulse", "the unknown Guardians of the world". One who gets into touch with them can bring new energies into play — either the dynamism of "an inner Light" or the Shakti of "spirit's immensities" or both together. A cosmicity other than known Nature's is drawn forth into action, a deep universal Will and an archetypal Harmony from beyond even that Will,
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the Harmony of the Original Divine Ideas that have to be fulfilled on earth. Aswapati's consciousness of the secret creativity that can alter everything is pictured in the phrases:
Awakened to the lines that Nature hides,
Attuned to her movements that exceed our ken,
He grew one with a covert universe.2
These phrases anticipate the four verses from "A genius..." to "spirit's immensities". Within the "covert universe" are the "unaccomplished Powers" on their march in the Spirit-space transcending the limited arc of life: those Powers are the hidden lines and movements of a Super-nature, with significances and purposes pressing to be realised through the slow and restricted and seemingly deterministic works of the human individual in a small earth-pattern of evolution. When Aswapati won his soul's release from Ignorance and
His daily thoughts looked up to the True and One,
His commonest doings welled from an inner Light,3
there took place in his very physical substance — "his body's cells" — an extraordinary growth of consciousness, a supernormal intensification of perception and puissance, due to the unfoldment of the real being in him, the essential animating self of him, and resulting in a wide-awake sustained ascent to a visionary and intuitive plane. This is summed up in the words: "A genius heightened". "Genius" seems used in the ordinary connotation as well as in the connotation of "in-dwelling soul". From the high plane reached, Aswapati caught the concealed sense of all his embodied existence, a sense akin to or instinct with the drive of the Primal Truths of the Transcendent that have to become the Final Realities of the Individual in the life-terms of the physical universe.
Henceforth Aswapati's "walk through Time outstripped
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the human stride" and every step of his brought nearer to accomplishment the Powers of the immense Spirit from the Overworld. Part of the means towards that accomplishment was a join-up with cosmic forces:
The universal strengths were linked with his;
Filling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths,
He drew the energies that transmute an age.4
1.Book 1, Canto 3, p. 51 (One-volume Edition, 1954)
2.Ibid.
3.Ibid.
4.Ibid. Please note in the second line the word "filling". In the printed version it has got distorted into "feeling".
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In the Indian Express, Saturday, September 11, 1982, p. 14, Dr. V. K. Gokak was interviewed on his latest literary work, an epic in Kannada due to be published in November of the same year. Asked why, being an English scholar who had taught the language for more than three decades, he wrote his epic in Kannada, Dr. Gokak was quoted as replying:
"...I was hesitant to write in a language which I have not mastered completely. Aurobindo who had mastered the language wrote his Savitri in English and, though it contained most beautiful passages, I felt the language was a bit awkward. If a scholar like Aurobindo can have problems in English, what about an ordinary man like me?"
Dr. Gokak's humility is to be appreciated. And, if we study the four pictures of him, three small and one big, reproduced on the page, we can at once observe that he has not only admiration but also devotion for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, for behind him there is an open photo-folder bearing the pictures of the Mother and the Master. So we cannot attribute to him any prejudiced and hostile attitude such as found in a number of poets and critics of a much smaller stature than he. A clique of so-called modern-minded writers never loses an opportunity to have a dig at Sri Aurobindo who, while fully conversant with all modern moods and techniques, refused to confine himself to them. He used the English language in varied ways to express high spiritual visions and experiences in the framework of a Legend that is a Symbol in the nearly 24,000 blank-verse lines of Savitri. It is therefore very surprising that one holding no truck with this coterie should label as "a bit awkward" the English of Sri Aurobindo's epic.
The surprise becomes sheer puzzlement when we notice that Dr. Gokak's phrase is in flagrant contradiction of his own accompanying remarks. First of all, if somebody admits that he has not mastered English completely and grants that
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another has done so, it is anomalous for the former to adjudge the latter linguistically unskilful to a small extent everywhere. Again, how can one who is declared to have mastered the English language be said to make it move with a slightly clumsy gait throughout? Lastly, is it not odd to refer to "most beautiful passages" as being couched in a speech that is a trifle ill-adapted for use in them? Dr. Gokak has cut the ground from under his own proposition that Sri Aurobindo had "problems in English".
Surely, he has himself been "a bit awkward" in the verdict he has given. What he should have said is that he, unlike Sri Aurobindo who had mastered the English language and shown his mastery in Savitri, could not venture on this language for his own epic but stick to his native Kannada over which he had a hold such as he could not claim over English. The propriety of a statement on these lines as regards Sri Aurobindo is driven home to us not only by the context of his present unfortunate inconsistency. It is driven home also by all that he has pronounced on other occasions apropos of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.
When we open his Introduction to that admirable compilation by him, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglican Poetry, published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 1970, what do we read? " 'The Book of Love' (the fifth Book of Savitri) combines the freshness and lyric bloom of Romeo and Juliet with the idealism and platonism of Shelley and fuses them with a philosophical and mystical profundity all his own (p. xxxi)... His Savitri is an epic which sets forth with great precision and fidelity some of the highest states of mystical awareness (p. xxxiv)... Sri Aurobindo developed many kinds of style before 1950 and the best of them are all illustrated in Savitri. The style in this epic is flexible and varies according to its context and theme and Savitri is rich in its contexts and themes. It can be 'neoclassical' or 'romantic', symbolic or modernistic. There is his narrative or dramatic style employed when he has to present a character or situation, an encounter or a debate. His reflective style is of three kinds —
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the balanced and antithetical style employed when the matter is familiar to the reader, the paradoxical style where he writes at a more intense level or where the thought is subtly metaphysical, and the learned style where he is out to capture in precise words the contours of a theme which is likely to be difficult or unfamiliar to the reader. Then there is the expository or analytical style employed while presenting rare perceptions and levels, introducing the structuring and ordering of the intellect into the mystical consciousness. There is also the lyric style rising into a great height of intensity and passion. Lastly, there is the allusive style. As T. S. Eliot uses literary quotation to enrich his own meaning, Sri Aurobindo uses literary allusions to throw a bridge of understanding before the reader and to communicate to him effectively the thrill and the ecstasy which he himself has experienced at a higher level of consciousness" (pp. xxxvi-vii).
In all these detailed and penetrating encomiums Dr. Gokak is not merely referring to Sri Aurobindo's manifold subject-matter, his diverse "contexts and themes". He has in mind, too, Sri Aurobindo's manner of dealing with them in English, suiting his style flexibly to each. The very term "style", along with phrases like "freshness and lyric bloom", "precision and fidelity", "height of intensity and passion" and along with a mention of the means adopted "to communicate effectively" to the reader the writer's own spiritual "thrill and ecstasy" — the term "style" itself, repeated appreciatively, implies that vision, word and rhythm are fused together in successful self-expression in the tongue chosen by the poet. Not even the ghost of any awkwardness can be slipped in as a suggestion into Dr. Gokak's elaborately considered and expounded opinion of Savitri's achievement in English poetry.
If Dr. Gokak here is to be believed, gaucherie in the ordinary accepted sense should strike us as the last thing to be hinted at — no matter how moderately — for Sri Aurobindo's epic. Could he be having in view a special
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significance? It would seem impossible that a fellow-poet should complain in a generalising tone if Sri Aurobindo is in some places a little complicated in verbal turn or structure and may thus be regarded by those who make a fetish of the simple and the straightforward as in some degree unnatural, artificial, awkward. Milton, speaking of Satan's expulsion from Heaven and interposing nearly four and a half lines between a "him" and the "who" related to it can have those three adjectives shot at him — and yet the passage is one of the peaks of grandeur in English poetry:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.
Similarly, Keats's supremely exquisite evocation of a moment of breathless silence might be charged with awkward English because he has used a double-negatived indirectness to enforce the subdued key set by an opening negative:
No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
Especially in presenting occult or spiritual vision one may appear complex and out-of-the-way, not open to immediate understanding, but if one transmits the true afflatus from an inner or higher world the reader is bound to be carried along by a surge of felicitous audacity, as in that snatch of mysterious imagery from Sri Aurobindo's long description of his heroine:
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As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple-door to things beyond.
Such a breath of beauty and profundity sweeps through these lines that, whether we catch the exact drift or not at the first reading, a categorisation like "a bit awkward" for the English seems utterly irrelevant.
Sri Aurobindo, however, is not always so directly mystical in expression. He has numerous clear-cut pictures of unusual insight like that seizure of symbolism in what another poem of his calls "the dawn-moment's glamour". The picture in Savitri runs:
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
It is a matter of astonishment how Dr. Gokak could have fallen foul of Sri Aurobindo's masterpiece when he has acknowledged the outstanding merit of even the earlier poetry of Sri Aurobindo: e.g., the blank-verse narrative Love and Death written in 1899. Dr. Gokak's discriminative faculty is seen almost at its true function and as at least free from any quirk when he writes in that Introduction on which we have
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already drawn: "Some of Sri Aurobindo's lyrics in [the youthful] Songs to Myrtilla have the preciosity of 'Decadent' poetry in them. But his grand manner asserts itself in Love and Death..." (p. xxxi). If, as far back as the end of the last century, Sri Aurobindo could write grandly in an English unsullied anywhere even by "preciosity", how could he at the top of his development persistently stumble a little in his language? Mind you, the tendency to be "precious" — that is, over-refined in the choice of words — which Dr. Gokak notes in part of the production of Sri Aurobindo's Cambridge-days is not at all pointed at as "a bit awkward" in its Engligh embodiment. The English of Songs to Myrtilla is nowhere found un-English in the least measure. All the more amazing, then, that a highly respected and responsible critic should commit such a gaffe about Savitri.
If he had shown us Sri Aurobindo facing "problems" in managing on a large scale the type of blank-verse he had selected — the end-stopped variety instead of the kind that flows over or is enjambed — he would have drawn our attention to a difficulty Sri Aurobindo himself envisaged at the start of his epic. Again, if he had touched on "problems" connected with rendering the English tongue more and more plastic to the stress of what Sri Aurobindo describes as the "overhead planes", levels of Yogic consciousness beyond the mental, he would have justly indicated the reason why Sri Aurobindo rewrote some portions of Savitri nearly a dozen times. But it is quite another matter to speak of Sri Aurobindo, who was educated in England from his seventh to his twenty-first year, as having "problems" in English as such in the whole course of his crowning poetic performance. The dictum is extremely gratuitious in itself no less than against the background of Dr. Gokak's other remarks in the present interview and all that he has carefully written as a scholar in the past.
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(With acknowledgements to Srinvantu, August 1986)
(A few of us have been trying to read and study
Savitri in a group. We requested Amal Kiran (K. D.
Sethna) to kindly give us a guide-line, so that our u
nderstanding as well as enjoyment of Savitri might
be enhanced and enriched. We put some specific
questions which would show him the trend of our
mind. Given below are the first two of them along
with his answers. — Ed. Srinvantu)
Q. One may approach Savitri (1) with a devotee's attitude as the
spiritual autobiography of the Master, (2) as a book or store-
house of spiritual wisdom comparable to the Vedas, the Upani-
shads or the Gita, and (3) as great poetry. Can these approaches
merge? What should be the basic approach for a full and just
appreciation?
A. To make the right approach we must understand what Sri Aurobindo intended Savitri to be. A few statements of his may be cited. "I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular — if part seemed to me to come from any lower levels I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint. In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative."
We can gather several points here. First and foremost, Savitri is an adventure in poetry. But the aim is not merely to write good poetry. The poetry has to be good by an ascension in poetic quality to the highest spiritual plane possible: this
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plane has to be creative in terms of poetic values. Savitri should express poetically the ever-higher peak reached by Sri Aurobindo's progressive spiritual ascension. Therefore we cannot consider it either as sheer poetry or as sheer spirituality. It must help us at the same time to ascend to Sri Aurobindo's own peak and do so with the full awareness of the poetic way in which that peak has become communicative of its truth, its power, its delight. Savitri has to be taken as Sri Aurobindo's poetically spiritual autobiography which is meant to make us re-live his inner life of both poetic creativity and creative spirituality.
Further, we must attend to some details of these two creativities, keeping in view Sri Aurobindo's disclosure: "there have been made several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As [Savitri] now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." Mention of Overmind aligns Savitri to the top reach of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita, and the enormous mass of it, nearly 24,000 verses, renders it a super-scripture, an unparalleled storehouse of spirtual wisdom. But we must remember that this wisdom comes at its best in the form of what the ancients called the Mantra, which Sri Aurobindo characterises in a line which is itself mantric as
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.
Here the final emergence of the Overmind's truth-light and truth-vibration is suggested, the surging up of the supreme Word from the secret heart of things which is one with our own inmost heart and which has received that Word for manifestation from the hidden heights. What is pertinent in this connection is that the Mantra is borne to us in "sound-
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waves", not simply the luminous sense but also the harmonious verbal embodiment of it is important. Thus the poetry that is Savitri is inseparable from the spirituality of this master-work of Sri Aurobindo and the latter cannot be appreciated and assimilated in a living manner unless we are responsive to the mode of vision, the cast of word, the mould of rhythm — the Spirit's varied poetic avatar. The heart of Savitri — the mystery from which the poem has sprung — yields its pulsation most intimately when we approach it with sensitiveness to the art of Savitri.
I may add that the wisdom we have to absorb from this poem has an intellectual element too. That is why Sri Aurobindo says that in its final form Savitri is "a sort of poetic philosophy of the Spirit and of Life". But we have to mark the qualifying noun "sort", for the "philosophy" is no more than the mental look the eyes of Yogic vision and experience put on, and we have to note the qualifying adjective "poetic" which brings in the artistry with which that look is worn.
Q. If somebody is fond of poetry and would prefer to come to
sadhana via the road of poetry , will the study of Savitri as
poetry help him much? Would you kindly explain to us how
and where poetry becomes yoga and yoga poetry in Savitri?
A. I should think that all poetry, like all of the other arts, tends at its intensest to take us not only into magic but also into mystery. An impact of flawless form is felt: an impression of the ideal, the perfect, is received through the inevitable rhythmic expression. Even a descriptive line like
Sweet water hurrying from reluctant rocks from Sri Aurobindo's early poetry enchants us with its apt surprises — the choice of the contrasting epithets "hurrying" and "reluctant", the easy run of the voice in the first half of the line and the retardation of it in the second half with its
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close consonantal conjuncts "ct", "nt" "cks", and yet the weaving together of the opposing senses by the alliterating "r" in the five words out of six, and finally through all these bespelling effects the disclosure of some hidden life in things which apparently are inanimate but occultly carry on a play of their own. Not only is a surface beauty of natural events delineated: a secret design of interacting and counteracting mobility and stability is also hinted at. We are given simultaneously a satisfying sight and a felicitous insight. This is the function of all inspired poetry. We get an inner experience through an outer stimulus: our perceptions get subtilised. Without even a directly spiritual communication attempted we undergo an exquisite refinement which can prepare us for it. As a critic has intuitively said, "Poetry may not save souls but it makes souls worth saving."
When we come to poetry like Savitri we have this power eminently exercised. Savitri can serve the poetry-lover as a road to sadhana. Here, over and above an account of spiritual states and by means of it a conceptual as well as imaginative sign-post to the mystical goal, we have a vibrant evocation of these states in a language that is born out of them and is no mere reflection of the profundities beyond the mind in mental terms. The process and the product of this special language are thrillingly pictured in the Savitri passage whose concluding line I have already quoted to illustrate the Mantra. Sri Aurobindo is describing the various orders of ascetics whom Savitri comes across in the course of her search for her destined mate. The Rishi-like occupation of one order is conveyed to us:
Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,
Seized, vibrant, kindling with the inspired word,
Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers
In metres that reflect the moving worlds,
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As Savitri exemplifies, by and large, this sort of spiritual composition, the reading of it is bound to induce movements of yoga. But the reader must approach it rightly. He should imagine the twofold birth of the Mantra: high above in an ether of Superconsciousness and deep within where the Rigvedic hrdaya samudra, the heart-ocean, the wondrous in-world into which opens the individual emotional-psychic experience, echoes and images the over-world. Then he should practise a dedicated silence in the mind in order to imitate something of the "hushed intense receptivity turned upwards" which Sri Aurobindo, in a letter to me, stressed as the state for the Rishi to draw the Mantra into his utterance. Such a state is necessary for two reasons. First: the full impression of the Mantric speech would be missed unless the mind were made a blank sheet on which the script of the Eternal could come out absolutely clear. Second: that speech is itself most typically, most fundamentally from a similar state. Sri Aurobindo, in Savitri, writes of
Silence, the nurse of the Almighty's power,
The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word —
and in the same context he recounts how the Goddess of Inspiration
Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,
And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths
Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.
A final requisite for the reader to make Savitri his mode of sadhana is to read it not with the eye alone but also with the ear. The silence with which he approaches this poem which is born from "the omniscient hush" can be most effectively employed for "the immortal Word" to leave its mark upon it if we peruse the verse audibly. We have to hear and not just see the lines. In a slow subdued voice we have to com-
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municate Savitri to our consciousness. All poetry has to be vocalised if its total magic and mystery are to go home to us. Much more is it necessary to vocalise Savitri. It has rhythmic properties more subtle than in any other poem, since it hails from realms of expression rarely tapped and unless we are so adept as to get inwardly the complete shape, as it were, of its "vibrant cry" we need to realise that shape by an audible transmission. Even to understand something, it is advisable to read it aloud — and Savitri too is best understood through the ear. But what I am asking for is meant to bear us beyond understanding. Poetry sets up a stirring within us answering to the life-throb of a vision or emotion or intuition, a life-throb which repeats itself in us and gives us a reality of the poet's substance exceeding the mere idea of it. Understanding poetry amounts to acquiring an idea of the vision, emotion, intuition concerned and reflecting upon the way they are conveyed. Such reflection is part of winning access to the art-element. It cannot be dispensed with, but even more important for the access is to catch the life-throb of those psychological faculties at work. Audible reading most fruitfully carries into us the life-throb and the basic shape of the poetry, transmitting both its aesthetic and its spiritual truth. Of course the value and efficacy of this double aspect of the poetic phenomenon — and particularly of a super-phenomenon like Savitri — will differ from reader to reader, depending on the inner sensitivity and on the intimacy with the English language. But all readers will receive the maximum they can by reciting Savitri instead of simply running the eye over the page.
As for the "how" and "where" of poetry becoming yoga and yoga poetry in Savitri I cannot make absolutely definite observations. I should say that the poetic and the yogic interplay throughout but there are several degrees which we may attempt to mark off in a rough way. Let me take a single theme and distinguish the modes of its recurrence. There is the straightforward statement, fusing the mental and the ultra-mental with a fine ease:
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His mind transfigured to a rapturous seer...
This seems to be what Sri Aurobindo has termed the "adequate style" at an inevitable pitch. Then there is, in my opinion, his "effective style" keyed up to inevitability:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight...
Next we may show an example of the inevitable "illumined style":
In the light flooding thought's blank vacancy...
The "illumined" merges in the "inspired" when we read:
Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought...
A mixture of all these styles — with perhaps the "adequate-effective" as an overall tone — may be found in:
His seeking mind ceased in the Truth that knows...
A keener articulation of such a mixture meets us when Sri Aurobindo speaks of sages escaping from the confines of thought
To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth...
This verse draws near to the style which, according to. Sri Aurobindo, goes out of all classification, however inevitable a line may be within its own class — the style which is the "sheer inevitable" and whose undeniable example, in my eyes, is:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient....
Here poetry passes wholly into the mood of yoga and yoga becomes most intensely articulate in poetry.
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An alternative scheme of distinction might take the first two instances as the "Creative Intelligence" in a couple of varying phases: quiet felicity in the one and vivida vis (lively force) in the other. Perhaps the second instance is half-way into the "Higher Mind". The next two seem to be the "Higher Mind" taken up into the "Illumined Mind" and verging on the "Intuition". The first of the pair of pen-ultimate instances looks like the direct penetrative simplicity of the "Intuition" under the guise, as it were, of the "Creative Intelligence" 's clear-cut drive rather than of its colourful play. The second member has a greater sign in it of the "Intuition" 's thrilled power going straight to the heart of a subject, be it a scene, an event, a state or a person. Beyond this power lies the revelation of the "Overmind" which brings us the intensest inmost of the calmest immense, a sovereign seizure of spiritual truth in all its beauty of vision, voice and vibrancy.
In the line I have quoted —
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient —
we have the vision of the thinker in us losing his loud self-assertive limits in a spontaneous super-knowledge which lights up everything. This vision finds voice in a compact pattern, the intransitive verb "hush" acquiring an extra impact, a depth of force, by standing in an inverted foot, a trochee in a virtually iambic verse, and that too as the second unit in the scansion, a surprise suddenly interrupting the expected metrical run. At the line's end comes another surprise, a noun made out of an adjective packed with tremendous significance. I believe that it is the first time in English literature that "Omniscient" is used as a noun with an indefinite article. Apart from that singularity is the question: "Why is 'omniscience' not used?" The habitual noun would indicate a state of all-knowledge and not a being who knows all. The personal identity of the yogi is preserved in some supreme form in a realm where the basic Universal
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wears numerous individual faces and the One Omniscient manifests in a multiplicity of Omniscients. There is also a sound-effect to be appreciated. The sh-sound in "hush" is caught up in "Omniscient" which is pronounced "Omni-shyent", the suggestion of the echoed sound is that the hushing of the mind deepens and widens and heightens by a natural process the mind-possessing finite being that we are into an infinite supernal self who is by contrast a knower of everything and yet mysteriously continuous with our present finitude. Finally, both for sense and for sound the epithet "bright" is the mot juste. "White" could have been put instead, connoting shadowless purity. But the special effect of the conjunct consonants br would have been absent. These consonants carry as if by the very modulation of the lips and tongue the hint of a spreading out as well as a glowing forth. The psychological impression is of a bursting into light. In addition we have to note that "bright" has a long i just as "minds" has. The sound-parity suggests the "minds" themselves turning "bright" through the hushing experience. Besides, "bright" is at the tail-end of a series of five monosyllables, a sort of climaxing of the process they represent. And this fivefold process thus climaxed terminates and culminates in a massive reality of transcendent transformation indicated by the single four-syllabled word "Omniscient".
To feel and recognise the spiritual afflatus of so superb a kind, borne magically home to us in a design of manifold artistry, is indeed a preparatory movement of sadhana. Again and again we get a chance to develop the sadhana-mood. The fundamental attitude necessary for advance in spirituality is hit off to perfection in the middle verse of the three powerful inward-drawing lines which yet turn one's soul outward to master the world's "crass casualty":
A poised serenity of tranquil strength,
A wide unshaken look on time's unrest
Faced all experience with unaltered peace.
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The absolute of this peace, the self-existent infinitude of it meets us in a life-changing passage when Aswapati's as-piring consciousness breaks beyond the barrier of both individual and universal existence:
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
Everywhere, in some places more directly and in others through a transparent veil, Savitri which is the self-expression of a master yogi can lead us towards yoga. But its most creative function is to kindle in us a flame burning at all times so that we may build up in ourselves the living presence of that master yogi and through the illumining art of this epic of the Spirit quicken at each moment with the invocation:
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride....
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"THE MIND OF LIGHT" IN SRI AUROBINDO'S PHILOSOPHY AND YOGA "
AN ATTEMPT AT A SCHEMATIC SUMMARY
1)"The Mind of Light" is a coinage of Sri Aurobindo's, applicable not to all the levels of mental being where Light (Divine Knowledge) has open play in various degrees, but only to the human mental level — which we may designate broadly as the physical-mental — when its ignorance essentially ceases and it becomes a plane in which, even within all measures and limits, withholdings and gradualities, there is no obscurity at all: everything is a self-chosen process of Light.
2)Ignorance of the human physical-mertal cannot essentially cease by the descent of the "overhead" grades of Spiritual Mind, which are — from below upwards — Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. For, the descent of these grades, even of Overmind, can never be complete when made under their own power. The physical-mental always dilutes their Light. It dilutes it because of two factors. First, this Light is not absolutely sovereign, and ignorance itself has resulted inevitably by the lessening or, rather, by a crucial poise-change of Supermind's Light which harmonises or fuses unity and multiplicity. In the grades of Spiritual Mind, multiplicity is in the forefront and unity, although not concealed as in the lower planes, is only in the background. These grades, therefore, are impotent to. remove ignorance radically. On their own levels there is no ignorance as such, but under their own power they are bound to fail to reproduce completely in the physical-mental their own state of Light. What their descent can do is to prepare the descent of Supermind. The second factor making for dilution of the Spiritual Light is that the physical-mental partakes of the evolution from the Inconscient where everything arises out of a total submergence of Himself by the Divine for the stupendous experiment of self-manifestation
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from His own opposite, as it were. Nothing except the full Dynamic Divine which is Supermind has the competence to deal successfully with the clinging original darkness due to that submergence.
3)After Overmind has done its utmost by descent under its own power, Supermind descends. By its descent it brings about in essence the end of ignorance in the physical-mental, and the state it creates by that radical change is the Mind of Light. The Mind of Light is Supermind openly itself in human Mind-terms.
4)The first form the Mind of Light takes seems an added last rung of the luminous ladder of Spiritual Mind. It appears to stand below Higher Mind in quality of Light. But it is superior to all degrees of Spiritual Mind, even Overmind, if its quality of Light is compared to the quality the grades of Spiritual Mind have achieved in the physical-mental in their descended forms. It is in terms of descent and embodiment that a proper comparison can be made between the state that is this Mind and the grades of Spiritual Mind. In such terms this Mind outshines them all from the very beginning, for it is the Supermind's own manifestation.
5)That manifestation develops a second and greater form, which is a completely descended Spiritual Mind — an entire embodiment by Spiritual Mind of itself, which under its own power it could not achieve. The full conversion of the physical-mental into the Light of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, which these grades could not formerly bring about, is done now by them on the basis of Supermind's establishment in the physical-mental. This conversion constitutes a mental Gnosis like what Spiritual Mind is in its overhead status, but with two differences. It is a mental Gnosis embodied. And it is a mental Gnosis which Supermind has assumed or put forth without a crucial poise-change as in Spiritual Mind.
6)The third form of the Mind of Light goes farther than such mental Gnosis. It embodies the Supramental Gnosis free from any frontal appearance of Spiritual Mind. Not,
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however, all of the Supramental Gnosis, for the Mind of Light expresses that in the Supermind which is the divine counterpart of all Mind — "Divine Mind", as Sri Aurobindo calls it. It is specifically the third strand of the Supermind's three-stranded unity. In this strand the projecting, confronting, apprehending power which the second strand brings forth is developed to its extreme, restraining still more, without yet relegating to the background, the constituting, pervading, comprehending power which is the first strand and from which the second is a development.
7)Yes, the third form of the Mind of Light establishes in the body the third strand of the Supermind and prepares the establishment of the whole Supramental Gnosis, with itself in prominence as its Inherent power of making pragmatic divisions and fixing pragmatic relations between seemingly independent centres. But we must not forget that all the forms assumed by the Mind of Light are a manifestation of the Supermind's third strand. What the third form does is merely to release to the utmost the supramental magnificence which was released a little by the first and more by the second. All are degrees of one and the same apocalypse of something in the supreme Truth.
8)The Mind of Light in its plenary form, leading on to the fullness of what we may call the Life-force of Light and the Body of Light, would constitute the Intermediate Race between the Human and the Supramental Races. The Supramental Race would be a directly manifested line of Divine Beings who have never gone through the process of earthly evolution: they would be the Supermind humanised, as differentiated from Humanity supramentalised. Humanity would be supramentalised by a natural means of spirituali-sation; the Supermind would be humanised by an occult means of materialisatipn developed by Humanity when it has supramentalised itself. The two achievements would be complementary aspects of the complete manifestation of the Divine upon earth — the crowning vision of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and the all-consummating goal of his Yoga.
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The end of March and the beginning of April 1942 are memorable for one of the very few interventions of Sri Aurobindo in India's public affairs. World War II was in full swing and Japan had joined hands with Hitler and posed a threat to Burma and even India, both of which were then under British rule. There was considerable discontent in India and a great reluctance to join the war effort of the British Commonwealth. India could not see much difference between German Nazism and British Imperialism. Most people forgot that the latter was the gradually fading remnant of an old turn of the human political mind, which had once played a necessary role in history but had lost its raison d'etre in the modern age of national freedom, whereas the former with its dogmas of master race and absolute dictator and merciless regimentation was a current contrary to the drive of human evolution with its many-sided variation both individual and collective.
Churchill was England's Prime Minister at the time. He had been known as a die-hard Imperialist. All of a sudden he appeared to have felt that in the war he was conducting against Hitler the cause of civilisation was at stake and that to serve it at all costs was more important than to preserve the sanctity of the British empire. He wanted India to give up her distrust of the British and throw in her lot whole-heartedly with Britain's own valiant effort to fight the barbarism that was on the march from Germany under the emblem of the Swastika. He gave ear to the advice of liberal thought in England which was in favour of conceding greater freedom to India that had been agitating for independence, especially since the days when Sri Aurobindo had become for a few years the leader of the Nationalist Movement. The well-known liberal thinker, Sir Stafford Cripps, was prominent as a spokesman of this advice. Churchill chose him to carry to India certain proposals meant to meet her basic demands and
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induce her to join the united front of Britain and her allies against Hitler and his associates. In connection with what came to be known as the Cripps Proposals it may be interesting to put together all the documents relating to Sri Aurobindo's intervention.
Sir Stafford, on arriving in India, issued the following Draft Declaration on behalf of the British Government: "His Majesty's Government, having considered the anxieties expressed in this country and in India as to the fulfilment of promises made in regard to the future of India, have decided to lay down in precise and clear terms the steps which they propose shall be taken for the earliest possible realization of self-government in India. The object is the creation of a new Indian Union which shall constitute a Dominion associated with the United Kingdom and other Dominions by a common allegiance to the Crown but equal to them in every respect, in no way subordinate in any aspect of its domestic and external affairs."
On hearing this declaration on the radio, Sri Aurobindo had the insight that the offer sent by Churchill through Sir Stafford Cripps had come on the wave of a divine inspiration and that it gave India the substance of independence. At once he sent a telegram to Sir Stafford: "I have heard your broadcast. As one who has been a nationalist leader and worker for India's independence, though now my activity is no longer in the political but in the spiritual field, I wish to express my appreciation of all you have done to bring about this offer. I welcome it as an opportunity given to India to determine for herself and organise in all liberty of choice her freedom and unity and take an effective place among the world's free nations. I hope that it will be accepted and the right use made of it putting aside all discords and divisions. I hope too that a friendly relation between Britain and India replacing past struggles will be a step towards a greater world-union in which as a free nation her spiritual force will contribute to build for mankind a better and happier life. In this light I offer my public adhesion in case it can be of any
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help in your work." (March 31, 1942)
Cripps immediately telegraphed back to Sri Aurobindo: "I am most touched and gratified by your kind message allowing me to inform India that you who occupy a unique position in the imagination of Indian youth are convinced that the declaration of His Majesty's Government substantially confers that freedom for which Indian Nationalism has so long struggled." (April 1, 1942)
On the heels of this telegram came one from Arthur Moore, editor of the Calcutta Daily, The Statesman: "Your message to Sir Stafford Cripps inaugurates the new era. Nothing can prevent it. I am glad that my eyes have seen this salvation coming." (April 1, 1942)
By now negotiations had started between Cripps and the Congress leaders.
Arthur Moore the very next day sent to his paper an editorial comment on Sri Aurobindo's message: "We have not doubted that Sir Stafford Cripps's mission will succeed nor were we depressed by Tuesday's wave of pessimism.... But since then an event has happened which will change a whole army of doubters and pessimists into optimists. After listening to Sir Stafford's broadcast, Sri Aurobindo has, from his Ashram in Pondicherry, offered his public adhesion 'in case it can be of any help in your work's. Rarely in history can so great a help have been so unostentatiously offered. This is the release not only upon India but upon the world of a great spiritual force which has long been awaiting its appointed time." (New Delhi, 2-4-1942)
Seeing that the negotiations with the Congress were not going right Sri Aurobindo decided on a further intervention. This took two forms. On the one hand he sent messages to some important figures in Indian politics. Through Mr. Shiva Rao he communicated to Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru that Cripps's offer should be accepted unconditionally. He also sent a couple of telegrams. One was to "Raja-gopalachari, Birla House, New Delhi": "Is not compromise defense question better than rupture? Some immediate
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solution urgent face grave peril. Have sent Duraiswami insist urgency. Appeal to you to save India formidable danger new foreign domination when old on way to self-elimination." (2-4-1942, 9-30 a.m.) The reference to the danger of a new foreign domination was evidently to the presence of Japanese forces approaching India. The other telegram was addressed to "Dr. Moonje, Hindu Mahasabha, New Delhi": "Settlement India Britain urgent face approach grave peril menacing future India. Is there no way while reserving right repudiate resist partition Motherland to accept cooperation purpose war India Union. Cannot combination Mahasabha Congress Nationalist and anti-Jinnah Muslims defeat League in elections Bengal Punjab Sind? Have sent advocate Duraiswami Iyer to meet you." (2-4-1942, 9-30 a.m.) Here an important point is the grave possibility of a division within the country due to Jinnah's movement to separate Muslims from Hindus. One of the salutary effects of accepting the Cripps Proposals would be to keep India united in the face of the Japanese threat and thus lead to an unpartitioned free India in the future.
As the telegrams indicate, Sri Aurobindo also took the extraordinary step of sending a personal representative so that his appeal might go home better to the wrangling negotiators. Nirodbaran in his book Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo has memorably painted the scene:1 "It was the evening hour. Sri Aurobindo was sitting on the edge of his bed just before his daily walking exercise. All of us were present; Duraiswami, the distinguished Madras lawyer and disciple, was selected as the envoy, perhaps because he was a friend of Rajagopalachari.... He was to start for Delhi that very night. He came for Sri Aurobindo's blessings, lay prostrate before him, got up and stood looking at the Master with folded hands and then departed. We may remind ourselves of Talthybius's mission to Troy in Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Won. Similarly, Duraiswami went with India's soul in his frail hands and brought it back, down-hearted, rewarded with ungracious remarks for the gratuitous advice."
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Nirodbaran has also written:2 "Cripps flew back a disappointed man but with the consolation and gratified recognition that at least one great man had welcomed the idea. When the rejection was announced, Sri Aurobindo said in a quiet tone, 'I knew it would fail.' We at once pounced on him and asked him, 'Why did you then send Duraiswami at all?' 'For a bit of niskama karma,'3 was his calm reply, without any bitterness or resentment. The full spirit of the kind of 'disinterested work' he meant comes out in an early letter of his (December, 1933), which refers to his spiritual work: 'I am sure of the results of my work. But even if I still saw the chance that it might come to nothing (which is impossible), I would go on unperturbed, because I would still have done to the best of my power the work that I had to do, and what is so done always counts in the economy of the universe.' We know the aftermath of the rejection of the Cripps proposals: confusion, calamity, partition, blood-bath, etc., and the belated recognition of the colossal blunder."
Gradually the colossal blunder is being rectified in general conformity with, though not yet in precise adherence to, the vision expressed by Sri Aurobindo when on his seventy-fifth birthday on August 15, 1947, India obtained her independence and, as Nirodbaran puts it,4 "Sri Aurobindo's 'bardic' voice was heard once again", declaring about the partition of British India into India and Pakistan as a price of freedom: "...by whatever means, in whatever way, the division must go: unity must and will be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India's future." Nirodbaran has noted5 that "Sri Aurobindo's prediction has been half-fulfilled, for Bangladesh (East Pakistan) is now entirely independent..."
We may conclude our account with a significant letter written by M. C. Desai, on September 29,1942 to the Bombay Daily, The Times of India. It is entitled "Complex of Dependency" and runs:
"It is amusing to find such Congress and liberal stalwarts as Mr. Rajagopalachari and Sir Chimanlal Setalvad openly advocating almost unconditional acceptance of the Cripps
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Proposals and denouncing the Congress leaders for rejecting them.
"But what the Indian man-in-the-street would like to know is why these wise and eminent gentlemen did not speak out their real mind at the right time when Sir Stafford Cripps was here. What prevented 'C. R.', for instance, from breaking with the Congress Working Committee during the negotiations, when he knew it was giving a wrong lead to the country?
"Similarly, one remembers that Sir Chimanlal Setalvad saw Sir Stafford Cripps on behalf of the Indian Liberals and submitted their resolution. The elaborate resolution did not fail to emphasise such minor omissions in the scheme as that of a specific mention of women's vote in the provincial plebiscite. But on the crucial question whether the country should accept or reject the scheme the resolution neither definitely said yes or no — quite like the Liberals.
"Curiously, the solitary Indian statesman who took a realistic view and had the courage of his conviction to advise his countrymen unequivocally to accept the Cripps Proposals was that mystic and visionary of Pondicherry — Shri Aurobindo Ghose. The belated wisdom of our leaders emphasises the truth of the ancient Sanskrit proverb: 'The Brahmin always thinks too late.'
"Instead of harping on the Mahatma's admittedly 'un-practical idealism', let our leaders organise a countrywide educative propaganda to convince the wide mass of the people of the wisdom of accepting a compromise solution like the Cripps plan if India's problem is to be resolved peacefully and create opportunities for ordinary people to express their honest opinion."
1. P. 153.
2. Pp. 153-54.
3.Disinterested work, the essence of which is that the work is inwardly dedicated to the Divine with no attachment to the result.
4.P. 154.
5. Ibid., fn. 2.
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While reading Sri Aurobindo's Bengali book of jail-reminiscences Karakahini (Tales of Prison-life), many readers have been puzzled by certain passages depicting the distressed state of mind in which Sri Aurobindo found himself.
Knowing that already before going to jail he had the experience of Nirvana shortly after his meeting with the Maharashtrian Yogi Lele in Baroda, one is apt to wonder how the distressed state could ever occur.
The answer can be derived from a statement of Sri Aurobindo's in the course of the talks which Nirodbaran has recorded. On December 22, 1938 Sri Aurobindo refers to the Nirvanic realisation and explains:
"My experience of peace and calm after my first contact with Lele never left me, but in my outer nature there were many agitations and every time I had to make an effort to establish peace and calm there. Ever since that early experience the whole object of my Yoga has been to change this nature into the mould of the inner realisation."
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A LETTER FROM KRISHNA PREM (RONALD NIXON)
TO MR. KOSKE AND A COMMENT BY K. D. SETHNA
The Letter
September 1946
Dear Mr. Koske,
"Whom should I believe?" You can cut Bradley, Bergson, Hegel, etc., out of the list as admittedly their views are mere speculations. They do not even claim to have reached the other shore. How, then, will they guide us? It is useless to reach one unique and final philosophical system. All such systems are relative. The Buddha described his teachings as like a raft — useful to cross the river but to be left behind on the further bank. Though not admitted by all others, this is true of all systems. Each is useful and helpful to certain types of aspirants. None is absolute or finally true but all contain truths of a relative sort useful to people in a certain position. A great Western Mystic — Eckhart — wrote: "Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue." And another: "Neither God nor Heaven nor Hell nor the World can be otherwise honourable in you or by you except by their own existence and manifestation in you." All pretended knowledge of these things without this self-evident perception of their birth within you is only such knowledge as the blind man has of the light he has never seen. Which one to choose then? Whichever most stirs your heart and clarifies your ideas will be most helpful to you but if you think it is absolutely true you are asking for trouble. All statements are true from one point of view — false from another. Where to get the final Unmistakable Truth? In your heart. Nowhere else. Yes, books are a help — if not taken too seriously. Characteristic signs of such a man? See Gita II verse 53
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onwards and XII verses 13-20. And many other places elsewhere. How to know that a man has these qualities? That is the difficulty and all of us are liable to make mistakes of judgement there. The purer one's heart the freer from desires, the truer becomes our judgement.
"Relative and absolute; Finite and Infinite: where do these meet?" Nowhere; but also in Sri Krishna; and your own heart. These three answers are the same.
"Whose interpretation of symbols shall I take as correct?" Whichever one helps you most — till you find a better one.
"The fully liberated man is beyond all progress and time. He dwells in Eternity. But there are many stages on the road and some of them are so high above us that we often think of them as the End. The actual final transformation is, I believe, sudden but it is certainly prepared for by ways that are gradual — the various Yogas. All that the imagination can imagine and the reason conceive is not and cannot be a proximate (i.e., direct, immediate) means of union with God." But all things can be indirect means, i.e., they can help us to get to that place from which we can see for ourselves which we can do suddenly.
"When this is attained, what next?" There is no next. Do not ask me whether so and so is such a man. How do I know?
"We are free to act either for Krishna or for self. Ii is like a fork in a road; you can go either way freely but, having chosen, what happens is determined." But this fork occurs at each point in the road; we have to choose each moment. Most people act only for self and hence their lives can be largely foretold by palmistry, astrology, etc. It is well known that such sciences fail with Mahatmas, i.e., those who serve Sri Krishna.
As for the foreseeing by "supermind" — if it were intelligible to the mind it would not be supramental.
I don't think I can have said, "Mind, evolution and supermind are not important at all." If I did, it was a slip. I should have said, "Theories and views about mind, etc., are not important." If you surrender to God you will come to
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know about the realities that are referred to by all such descriptions.
Because certain Mahatmas do not use the word "supermind" proves nothing about the thing. All the great seers have taught that there are divine levels of being 'lower' than the Ultimate Transcendent Reality but beyond or above the mind. What does Supermind mean except just that — above the mind? Why worry about the absence of the Latin word "super"? Not all, however, have thought it fit to emphasise these divine levels. That was their business and for them to judge. Some have desired their pupils to fix their thoughts only on the Ultimate Eternal. Times and needs vary.
"If sorrows, etc., are ordained by God, why seek to interfere?" But supposing it is God Himself in your heart who urges you to "interfere" or transmute? After all, the game is His game and He plays it from His Seat in all beings (Gita VIII.61). Especially if a heart is surrendered to Him He uses it to bring about His masterpieces. If your argument was true, then what to say of transmuting? None of the great Teachers and Avatars would have taught it at all but would just have said: "All things are equal to my vision — let others do what they please." The Lila will never be complete as long as there is a spot anywhere that is resistant to the Divine Light. That means transmutation.
Sri Krishna and Buddha had doubtless destroyed their egos (or never had them), and yet they undoubtedly talked and acted "in terms of individual being". Note that I am neither supporting nor attacking Sri Aurobindo's special Yoga. I merely say that the divine levels beyond the mind are certainly a fact. It is said that "earth consciousness" will be transmuted. When, where and how and "by whom" I neither know nor care.
I cannot tell you what Sri Aurobindo means by "central being". There is that within us which is the ray, or image, of Krishna Himself. It is in the very centre of one's being and in our inmost Self. It is untouched by all sorrow, pain, etc. It is divine in origin because it has no origin. If I spoke of "central
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being", that is what I should mean. What others mean by it they must explain.
No, the man who has attained the state does not "take part in worldly activities". But he may easily appear to do so to worldly men.
"Beliefs turning to realities." No. What happens is that the reality which the belief partly referred to and described comes to be seen as it really is. The belief is always partly true partly false. Certainly beliefs lead to experiences. So do maps — but the map cannot become the countryside, can it?
"Is Sri Aurobindo's supramental a reality for him?" I imagine so, but how should I know?
Your question about the terrible sufferings of men. I certainly believe them all to be Karma Phala.
"Two things provoke horror when one contemplates them: (1) the sufferings of men, (2) the evil in men's hearts." These two things are the same things.
"How do you expect me to trust myself in God's hands?" I don't expect. I merely say that if you do you will find peace. The choice is yours and I expect nothing. Yes, the multitude of conflicting views is certainly perplexing — Buddha referred to the saint as "liberated from the jungle of views, the tangle of views, the labyrinth of views". Yet, after all, each man on his own house-top in Bombay would give a different description of what he saw. Ignore everyone who you think has used words unscrupulously for some end of his own. But, if you think him sincere, then try and understand why he has used just those words to describe his vision.
Sri Aurobindo's words have helped many. My own (which you refer to) have perhaps assisted a few. If words help you then use them. If not look elsewhere.
"My second fear is whether I have the complete freedom to choose." No. I don't suppose you (or anyone) has complete freedom. But we have some and anyhow if you give way to all these "fears" you will get nowhere at all.
"There may be a lion round the corner." Yes, there may be — and there may not. Anyhow, get on.
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"How to end this long series of contradictions?" Contradictions are inherent in all finite things. All contradictions are resolved in Him. If you seek the Truth beyond the world you must not fear contradictions and paradoxes.
My principal objection as to the fact that all this so-called "knowledge" is passively received often through an entranced medium and where or who it comes from no one knows. The psychic realm is full of illusions and all such communications are a mixture. I don't say there is never any truth in them but it is hard to sift it from the error, and the practice of such spiritistic communications is harmful to medium, sitter and to the "spirit" of the dead when any such is present which is by no means always so. That is why I think all great Teachers have condemned it. A celebrated Buddhist scholar became a spiritualist towards the end of her life. She re-wrote many of her books in the light of what the spirits told her of Buddha. Unfortunately they also told her some things about contemporary events which proved to be incorrect. Quite apart from that, however, the whole method seems to me harmful.
What you quote from Romain Rolland is excellent. I entirely agree. I, at least, cannot give you the ultimate Secret. I am myself but a wayfarer. My experience is that all the great mystics have said the same thing. Only they have naturally used different words on account of the different types of people they were addressing. If you read Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy (Harper and Co.), you will see from his extensive and wide-spread quotations how great-an agreement there has always been among them. But difference in presentation and emphasis there will always be because of different needs of the different types of men.
Try to give up this craving for the one unique point of view. It was for this reason that the Buddha abstained from all such and merely emphasised the conditions we must develop in ourselves to see the truth for ourselves. But human nature craves a "view" of some kind and so views are forthcoming — but, naturally, they are all relative. The
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absolute Truth must be found and experienced by each seeker for himself. There is no other way. All the seers have said it cannot be expressed.
The fact is that that Reality is already within you. Various impurities (which all reduce to egoism) prevent its shining forth. Nevertheless some degree of shining forth does occur and that is what we term "faith". Therefore follow this light of your faith and you will come to the Reality. The various types of faith are due to various types of impurity. Therefore do not seek one faith for all but follow what you yourself have. Perhaps you will say that your faith goes out to things that seem contradictory. Very likely. In that case do not attempt to deny either but hold both as it were in solution (even in defiance of logic). Sooner or later, as you advance, the position will clear and you will see that what were two contradictory views are merely two aspects of one truth. The North Pole of a magnet is not contradictory of the South. The great thing is to get a move on — any direction is better than none. You will find "the one unwavering voice" you seek in your own heart. It is there always, but we confuse it with the other voices (desire) that are also sounding there. As we learn to turn away from them we hear the one Voice more and more clearly.
Sorry I have to be brief with many of your questions. To answer them properly would require a book not a letter. Good luck to you. We must not hesitate to stake our lives. They are of no real value anyhow unless they are united with Krishna. And everything else goes down the drain even-tually anyhow.
P.S. When I suggested that "Gurus" could make mis-takes it referred to them as general expounders — not as personal teachers of their disciples. For the disciple his Guru's teachings are and must be absolute, so if you seek absolute truth find your Guru and abandon everything at his feet.
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The Comment
January 1947
Krishna Prem's letter has several beautiful and luminous hints. Coming from a heart of true spirituality they cannot but prove of living use to a sincere aspirant. However, a few points he does not seem to touch with sufficient clarity — at least in my view.
When he says that no philosophical system is absolute and finally true, he is not wrong if he means that times and needs change and philosophical expression must keep pace with them and constantly change, so that no absoluteness and finality can be considered possible. He is not wrong either if he means that no intellectual formulation is such as would satisfy every intellect. Some sort of non-conviction every system will carry to some minds. This is because logic is an instrument adaptable to various possibilities: minds are made differently and different lines of argument occur and appeal to them.
Krishna Prem is, again, not wrong if he means that no matter how perfect-seeming and complete-appearing a system of philosophy may be, there is always something that it cannot bring out, a mystery that eludes its statements, a subtlety that transcends its expository terms. The precise stance, so to speak, of the final and absolute truth is not imageable in philosophical language: another kind of speech comes nearer to it — the speech of intuitive and symbolic poetry derived from the highest available range of inspiration. But we may say that even this mantra of poetry will not convey the totum simul of truth's multitudinous stance, because the time-consciousness through which it must come to us and the time-conditions under which it must get embodied by us bring in a succession of revelatory masses and can never directly present the simultaneous whole of the
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divine reality. In any case, philosophical language falls short somewhere.
Still, I feel that so far as a particular period of human evolution is concerned and so far as the nature and scope of philosophical language permit we can speak of absoluteness and finality. At the present moment, for instance, there is a certain stretch of possibility of human evolution into the Divine: with reference to this stretch, that system is final and absolute which reflects, however shadowily, its main implications. These implications will be caught if the right sort of light is behind the philosopher's intellect and if that light is held by it in the right position. Whether everybody will find convincing the system concatenating these implications is a different matter: it need not affect the correctness of the conclusions, the broad conformity of the argument to the disposition of the full spiritual reality today. The correctness and the conformity would be all the less impugnable if Krishna Prem believes not that spiritual possibilities vary with the times but that there is at all times the possibility of our attaining by Yoga the absolute and final truth; for, if an absolute and final truth one and the same for all times is attainable, why should there not be as far as the intellect is illuminable an absolute and final system of philosophy? A system may not give every colour and contour of truth, yet it can be accurate in general outline and general proportion. Of course, as Krishna Prem writes, mere speculators like Bradley, Bergson, Hegel, etc., can never give us the ultimate philosophy. Only those who philosophise through but not with the intellect can be said to be in the running, since they speak out of a light beyond the human.
I should like also to comment on Krishna Prem's words: "Theories and views about mind, evolution, supermind are not important and you should not worry about these things but trust yourself in the hands of God." This is excellent advice for whoever is being obstructed by theories and views from plunging into spiritual practice. But two facts are slurred over. There is a type of mind which requires some
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sort of intellectual support for taking the plunge into Yoga wholly. All are not able to give themselves into the Guru's charge with an all-absorbing heart-movement and with no appeal by the intellect for philosophical guidance. No doubt, we must approach a Yogi primarily as a spiritual Guru if even his philosophy is to mean all it can to us, but the perfect Guru takes into account the intellectual type and does his best to answer its appeal. He would certainly warn against getting caught in theories and views instead of living the mystical life, but he would not deny importance altogether to them. The intellect is a legitimate part of us and, if properly used, has an undeniable importance. That is my first point.
The second is that it is too easily assumed that if one puts oneself into the hands of God under the Guruship of any Yogi one would attain the utter divine truth: in other words, there is no need to bother about what the Guru has to say about things like mind, evolution, supermind, for all his theories and views boil down ultimately to the same thing as those of any other teacher. I think that all Yogis do not realise the identical range of truth and that in choosing one's Guru one cannot easily afford to ignore his views about the goal of life and the destiny of man. These views are an index to his realisation and also a pointer — generally speaking — to what one will be heading for in spiritual attainment. Of course one cannot go on for ever chopping logic and discussing the philosophical expressions of various teachers: one must make up one's mind as soon as possible and take the actual yogic leap — and if one is unable to choose mentally, it is best to follow one's heart and select some Guru or other rather than remain whirling in endless debate. As Krishna Prem says, "the great thing is to get a move on, any direction is better than none"; but provided one does not get into an interminable whirl, the theories and views such as Krishna Prem relegates to the background may well have, if one is inclined to mental reflection, a hand in determining the Guru one throws in one's lot with. For, as I have said, there are Gurus and Gurus and they give us different
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realisations in spite of a certain glorious common factor arising from the One that is differently realised. You are quite right in thinking that what is called the Supermind is Sri Aurobindo's speciality and that it is not compassed by Masters of the Silent Self like Raman Maharshi or even by the more catholic Vivekananda: the synthetic genius of Rama-krishna himself has not embraced its basic implications. Krishna Prem seems to me mistaken in saying that if you surrender to God under any Guru you will come to know the reality that is referred to by the term "Supermind".
"Supermind" does not, as he imagines, mean only "above the mind" and does not coincide simply with what other seers have discovered to be divine levels of being, above the mind yet lower than the "Ultimate Transcendent Reality". The Latin word "super", as used by Sri Aurobindo, has a particular significance which emerges with unique force once we look at his table of what is above the mind. He speaks of the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition, the Overmind and then the Supermind. The word "super" does not indiscriminately cover all these levels. It acquires, as distinguished from the word "over", a shade of utter supremacy, and in his expositions the Supermind does not stand for merely the highest level of being below the "Ultimate Transcendent Reality" but for a part and parcel of that very Reality: only, it is the part that is turned towards creation, towards the bringing forth and harmonisation of the truths implicit in the Transcendent for world-play. I agree with you that in the Aurobindonian scheme it points to Yogic obligations which are not present in the schemes of other Masters or Mahatmas.
I am afraid Krishna Prem has somehow missed these obligations in his reading of Sri Aurobindo — and the central obligation is the integral transformation of human nature. All Yogis talk of transformation or, to employ Krishna Prem's version, "transmutation", but they do not mean what Sri Aurobindo means, and to show what he means he has spent the last forty years in doing Yoga and still declares that he
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has not completed his realisation. Could one think that Sri Aurobindo had to spend forty years in nearly attaining what Buddha attained in five years, Ramakrishna in almost as few and Raman Maharshi in about the same or even less? Sri Aurobindo would then be not the greatest Yogi of our day but the greatest dunce of the divine life! Surely it is clear that he is at a mighty unparalleled job and is trying to compass and establish on earth a truth which has not been known so far. If, as Krishna Prem declares, the final unmistakable truth is to be found in the heart and if by surrendering to God one
There is one difficulty of yours which Krishna?rem hasn't dealt with, though he has made some remarks on matters allied to it. You have said, in effect: "If I accept Sri Aurobindo as my Guru and take him to stand for the Divine and to share the Divine's qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence, then what about the fact that Sri Aurobindo is sometimes doubtful, vague, uncertain and unable to give his final opinion on certain subjects in authoritative words? How am I to account for sentences like: I am totally unacquainted with McTaggart's thought and his writings; so it is a little difficult for me to answer you with any certainty' or 'I don't quite seize what is his conception of the Absolute'? If Sri Aurobindo represents the Divine, as a Guru must, why should he be unable to say confidently and unmistakably, for instance, what happened a thousand years
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back or what will happen a thousand years hence? Why shouldn't he solve all the problems of science with the help of his cosmic knowledge?"
Well, I fear your idea of God-realisation by a Guru does not take into consideration the terms of the world-play and the terms of individual nature and the terms of true Guru-ship. There are certain limitations of procedure which are part of the world-play: the world-play is carried on under certain rules and conditions and one of these is that a Guru has to be the vital centre of a great and luminous activity but not himself assume every kind of activity. His own particular individual nature has a certain mould and though he may at times change this mould to fit special occasions he keeps on the whole to what its functions are. Thus Sri Aurobindo has a wide and vari-aspected mould, he is a poet, literary critic, philosopher, politician, social thinker besides being a spiritual teacher; but even his mould does not include the functions, say, of a painter, a musician, a scientist. I dare say that if he put himself to the task he could bring out of the cosmic potential the qualities of a painter or a musician or a scientist. But they are not exactly according to the lines, overt or covert, of his own individual nature in this birth. At the same time, the spiritual light that he holds and that he imparts contains the source of all possible activities and he can make a man who has a musician in his nature create grand symphonies, a painter in his nature produce master-pieces of colour, a scientist in his nature become a Niels Bohr or a Jagadish Chandra Bose. He can give illuminating inspiration along any line of individual nature in his disciples, but he does not himself assume the functions of all individual natures. It is not necessary for his work: in fact, it is contrary to his mission, for then the God-realisations of other men who follow him would be superfluous and inutile so far as world-work is concerned.
Even in poetry, literary criticism, philosophy, politics and social thought he does not exhaust all trends: he leaves quite an amount of individuality, originality and uniqueness to be
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achieved by others. Also, he accepts limitations in the domain of brain-knowledge — he does not know in the outer mind's manner all the details of what is written or done: he has to read McTaggart's books to ascertain precisely what that thinker is driving at and he has to read newspapers to get informed of events in the world at large or even in Pondicherry, though he is never misled by false reports and has an intuition as to what is true news and what is mere fabrication. This does not deny his inner acquaintance with the currents of world-forces or the possibility of his getting by inner concentration the essential substance of any trend of thought. What is denied is the necessity of his knowing, automatically and invariably, in the external sense what is written or said or done here, there and everywhere.
At the same time, it is not denied that even knowledge, in an external sense, of small matters may be acquired straight away by Yogic force when the call for it comes with a divine drive. Yes, such a call is required — and the mention of it leads me to stress another thing to be remembered. The one whom we regard as Sri Aurobindo is the manifestation of a divine power and all that the instrumental side of him does is done by that power and in consonance with the vision and the purpose of that power: if that power chooses not to act as you imagine a Guru should, then there can be no questioning its right, and the best you can do is to alter your ideas of Guruship. Every Guru has a particular field and mission and, if he does not do what you think he must, he is not rendered less a Guru. You are attempting to chalk out and determine with the mere mind matters which far exceed it, you are trying to judge actions which are guided by the aim and method of a consciousness beyond the human. Your fashion of arguing should prompt us also to ask: "Why has the Divine to take so many years for making a spiritual Guru out of anybody? The Divine is omnipotent and so He can turn a man a Guru with one all-sufficing illumination: why the long labour of sadhana? Again, why does the Divine who manifests Himself in the Guru fail to give God-realisation to
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the disciples in a single flash? If omnipotence is there, how to explain the slow and devious process of training them up and especially the occasional set-backs if not complete failures? When the disciples are in front 6f
You forget we are in an evolutionary world and a world of evolution along a myriad lines, with numberless differentiations of capacity and personality: God Himself often acts apparently in a non-omniscient, non-omnipotent, non-omnipresent manner and He takes a multitude of shapes and instruments and adopts a large variety of processes and follows a thousand diverse tempos: you should expect some resemblance to this mode of God's behaviour in the behaviour of a Guru who is God's medium. Of course, through the Guru, God manifests Himself more directly, more con-centratedly, more abundantly, but He still observes a set of conditions and, though He does many marvellous things in order to establish His truth and beauty and goodness and force on earth, He does not act the all-round miracle-man, nor does His refrainings from thus acting diminish the Godliness of the Guru or interfere with the spiritual work the Guru has to accomplish.
One further subtlety. What do we mean by the Guru's Godliness? God is indeed "omni" in an infinitude of senses, and yet it would be untrue to declare that He is realised in His total capacity by all the Gurus. When there is God-realisation, there is generally a union with some one aspect or at most some few aspects of the Divine: the Silent Self, for example, is certainly an aspect of the Divine, but it is as certainly not omniscient or omnipotent in itself — it is too absorbed in peaceful bliss and light to have either the dynamic ecstasy or the dynamic knowledge — it is omnipresent, but God's omnipresence is multiple, He is everywhere in all His aspects while the Silent Self is ubiquitous in
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one aspect alone. Similarly those who live only in the Inner Heart-centre have an intense divine sweetness and radiance, yet there is wanting the vast cosmic sweep and the pouring transcendent solar splendour. Even the complete cosmic consciousness will not exhaust the Divine: at least the kinetic as distinguished from the static Self of it is a reduced formulation from above of a perfect and integral truth in which not the slightest discrepancy exists between status and kinesis and the latter is as absolute as the former. That perfect and integral truth is the top-range of what is above — the range of the Supermind. Only the Supermind is the full divinity, it has not only the absoluteness of immutable Existence, Consciousness and Bliss spoken of by those who leap towards the Transcendent without keeping a wholly aware hold on the cosmic and the individual, but also an active and creative absoluteness in the palm of whose heavenly hand, as it were, rests the individual and the cosmic. In the Supermind and nowhere else are all the "omni" 's of the Divine. God when He acts through a Guru has the Supermind, but unless the Guru is supramentalised and not only Inner-Heart-centred or Silent-Selfed or Cosmic-Consciousnessed what will function in him will not be the perfect and integral Divine. I am not saying the supramentalised Guru will act always with a clear indication to the disciples of his omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. Such action is not required by Guruship. But even the possibility of it comes solely with supramentalisation.
It would really be a pity if, because the rigid and superficial yardstick constructed by your doubting brain did not succeed in measuring Sri Aurobindo to your satisfaction, you remained away from so wonderfully many-sided, so immensely far-reaching and so intimately deep-delving a Guru. The feats you expect from him are nothing compared to the actual miracles he does perform — in the soul and heart and mind and even body of his disciples. Get in contact with the divine freedom that is aglow in him and you will see not only the divinity of his undeniable powers but also the divinity of
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his so-called limitations. For then you will not just sit reasoning and arguing about a Guru: you will know a supramentalised Guru's beautiful and beatific being, his comprehensive and creative consciousness, and in the light of this being and consciousness you will understand how and why he even elects at times to fall short of the demand that he should act God in the way we want him to act.
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Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision of the world can be considered an all-round revelation because it finds some essential truth in every world-view reached by mystical, philosophical or scientific research, and weaves it into its own comprehensive system. There is nothing it rejects or fails to explicate.
Take even the very denial of it, the most extreme Materialism of our day, basing itself on blind physical phenomena, random genetic mutation, mindless natural selection of mutated forms by the environment, extensively wasteful processes of evolutionary life, mechanical reactions and reflexes of organisms, dependence of psychological movements on bodily processes. This very world-view can obtain its rationale in the Aurobindonian Weltanschauung when the latter is taken in its coverage of the lowest rung of things, no less than of their highest.
What is, in outline, Sri Aurobindo's scheme of reality? The supreme aspect of reality for him is an infinite and eternal quaternary of Existence, Consciousness-Force, Bliss and Supermind — the last-named a creative divinity bringing forth the truths inherent in the triple depth of Spirit behind it and holding in a perfect or archetypal cosmos a balanced interplay of the One and the Many.
The Supermind manifests below itself a hierarchy of "planes" disclosing the reality in various partial ways. At the lower end of the ladder there are the realms of Universal Mind, Life-Force and Subtle-Physical Substance, each organised into a set of interacting individual features. A realm of Soul-principle — a plane of World-Soul — exists at the back of them and is related to the universe we commonly know in our daily experience. The realms at the lower end of the hierarchy lie beyond this universe though they press upon it constantly for the expression of their powers and the evocation of its potencies.
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Our commonly known universe emerges from a tremendous concealment not only of the supreme aspect but also of all its partial manifestations. That concealment constitutes an utter opposite of all we may regard as divine, a boundless "Inconscient" where the quaternary "Superconscient", along with everything below it, lies "involved", locked in. From this involution, which the ultimate reality achieves as an extreme challenging adventure of self-loss and self-discovery, all evolves, progressively releasing the higher in the lower and integrating the lower with the higher. But the evolution marches across the huge obstacles put up by the reality's initial negation of its own being. With the Soul-principle stirring from behind, Matter is evolved from the chaos of the Inconscient, then Life from Matter and Mind from Life. Veiled by Mind, as Mind is by Life and Life by Matter, Supermind and its accompaniments wait to be evolved. What is initially veiled will be of necessity laid bare in the terminal outcome.
Here is a basic spiritual monism that prevents reality from being a jostle of disparates. At the same time there is a diverse pluralism that does justice to all agencies obviously different from one another though closely associated.
Such a synthesising vision recognises, even while it exceeds, the grounds from which all one-sided views derive, including the most extreme Materialism, the ground for which would here be the multi-moded Inconscient taken as all in all. Logically, the Inconscient would give rise to whatever blindness, randomness, mindlessness, wastefulness, mechanicality and Matter-dependence that science notes as fundamental in its study of our universe.
Sri Aurobindo does not need to proceed, as science does, from these data in order to posit them. He starts the other way round and posits the Highest Spirit, yet provides a valid reason for their appearance.
Without denying them or explaining them away, he supplies also a valid reason for all that extreme Materialism faces as a paradox — the outburst of sentient vitality from
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brute Matter, the breaking forth of self-conscious mentality from instinctive organic process, the upsurge of idealistic soul-sense and luminous spirituality from the perceptual-conceptual half-knowledge of the labouring intelligence. That upsurge carries even the promise of a fulfilled Mind, an accomplished Life-Force and even a perfected body because of the divine archetypes of these principles already subsisting in the Supermind and pressing upon their counterparts in the evolutionary world studied by extreme Materialism.
Such a promise is eminently in accord — although in a key undreamt-of by science — with this Materialism's own finest hope and endeavour — the push towards an ever greater achievement of all human powers within an embodied existence on earth rather than in a postulated Hereafter to which "souls" may be called, leaving earth as a mere temporary passage of little importance in the final assessment.
Thus the Aurobindonian spiritual vision assimilates and consummates instead of contradicting even the apparent stark antithesis of it. In doing this it renders itself acceptable automatically by the Age of Science and provides to this Age not only a self-transcendence but also a self-justification which makes the self-transcendence a natural move forward rather than a defeat and an annulment.
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SOME QUESTIONS ON TRANSFORMATION
AND SRI AUROBINDO
A REPLY TO A LETTER
I am glad you liked the way our correspondence has figured in Mother India under the caption "Sri Aurobindo's Views vis-a-vis.the Mother's". The new points you have raised on some other matters are welcome.
The issue of 300 years for total transformation has several bearings. In the first place, it is a mistake on your part to set in opposition the later letter dated 6 December 1949 in which Sri Aurobindo speaks of full physical transformation — "the divine body"1 — as a matter of the remote future and the earlier letter where he writes "My faith and will are for the now." You believe that this earlier communication belongs to 1923-24 and that around 1933-1934 some spiritual events occurred to alter Sri Aurobindo's perspective. Actually the letter in question dates to 28 December 1934, your very period.2 Besides, I was present in the Ashram at the time and can vouch that nothing happened of the sort you suppose. Furthermore, the statements of the two letters do not fall within the same universe of discourse. The one of 28 December 1934 relates to the "advent" of the "Supramental". This should properly connote the first decisive descent into the physical, as a result of which the final supramentalisation of the body could take shape if the descent increased and expanded and became integrally detailed in the course of a long time. We cannot imagine Sri Aurobindo holding that the body's supramentalisation could be achieved pretty soon. What he wanted pretty soon was only the first descent. There is no contradiction between the two letters.
In respect of the 300 years, what your visitor friends have told you makes little sense to me. All who joined the Ashram in the 1930s with a grasp of what Sri Aurobindo was doing believed — and, according to me, on Sri Aurobindo's own
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authority — that the total transformation was certain, but nobody with his wits about him would fancy that it was round the corner. So no room was really left for disappointment on learning of the 300 years. Again, not to decide to. take up the Aurobindonian Yoga if one knew that the body could be supramentalised only after three centuries strikes me as utter incomprehension of what Sri Aurobindo was attempting. Was one ever told that one would surely die before becoming 300 years old? If one were so informed, one might feel some justification in fighting shy of the whole venture. But in fact the understanding was that this Yoga would keep on sustaining one, lengthen one's life and give one a long-enough span of years to complete the Aurobindonian programme.
Even otherwise — even if one were not persuaded of life-prolongation — I should imagine that one would not back out of a Yoga whose guides were such grand beings as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and which could achieve under them wonderful inner results beyond all previous spiritual dreams. The entire picture presented to you of the early period of Yogic initiation seems to me distorted and irrational.
Furthermore, you write of people telling you of having kept pace with Sri Aurobindo's sadhana and, in this connection, you mention the Overmind. I can't help laughing. On 24 March 1934 Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Even the Overmind is for all but the Mother and myself either unrealised or only an influence, mostly subjective."3 If anybody makes the claim you record, then he or she must be a paragon of spiritual conceit and was bound to go wrong and deserve the epitaph we framed for one who in the same context suffered a spiritual fall in the 'thirties: "Undermined by Overmind." There is also the suggestion to you by your friends that some people left the Ashram because they failed to keep pace. But if everybody acted on such failure, who could ever remain in the Ashram? The Ashram would become a howling wilderness. All are bound to fail in this respect — though the
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inability to move with ease constantly from a Nanga Parvat through a Kanchenjanga to an Everest need not spell doom: it is the natural characteristic of the plodding sadhaks of so exalted and exacting a Yoga. The other pretension, that this Yoga had nothing more to give and further progress — beyond the Supermind, I suppose! — was possible only outside the Ashram, bespeaks abysmal ignorance. No Yoga outside has even heard of the Supermind. Besides, even much below the Supermind there is quite a lot in this Yoga to be received and it makes no sense to say that one has reached a "finis" to what the light and power and grace of our two gurus had to pour into the receptive vessel. Sadhaks quitted the Ashram simply because they either had strayed too much from the path or could no longer control their common egoistic urges and wanted a free field for them. Several of the names you cite are well known to me. We were all fellow-strugglers and from my own deficiencies as well as acquaintance with their difficulties I am aware of what went on in their beings and I refuse to accept the explanations now offered.
About the Master's departure, there was a purpose in it. Whoever asks about it may be advised to con carefully my long article: "The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence", which the Mother fully approved and endorsed on three separate occasions.
As for the accident to Sri Aurobindo on the night of 23 November 1938, he has himself said, as reported by Nirod-baran: "The hostile forces have tried many times to prevent things like the Darshan but I have succeeded in warding off all their attacks. At the time the accident to my leg happened, I was occupied with guarding the Mother and I forgot about myself. I didn't think the hostiles would attack me. That was my mistake."4 Perhaps the tiger-skin on which he slipped is symbolic of the fierce forces of the physical-vital world. I don't think it was deliberately used — as you suspect — by any black magician to topple Sri Aurobindo during his pacings.
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Your speculation about the supramental change in dust and rocks as a result of the transformation of human cells is rather a bit of science-fiction. True, the appearance of the Supermind in the gross-physical world will have a universal action — the Supermind is just the Power whose action is bound to be universal — but the action will be very subtle at first and the Supramental will be expressed according to the stage reached by material objects. Merely because the ultimate constituents — proton, electron, neutron, etc. — of a human body are the same as those of dust and rocks, the supramental transformation of the latter can be almost as little expected in the immediate future as the mental transformation of them might have been expected when the Mind appeared in evolution and mentalised the physico-vital organisation. The human body's ultimate constituents have been built up into cells — and this structure makes a lot of difference to the domains where the descended or manifested Supermind can be effective.
9 December 1979
1.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 1953), pp. 423-4.
2.Ibid., pp. 233-4.
3.Ibid., p. 397.
4.Talks with Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Pathmandir, Calcutta, 1966), p. 44.
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SRI AUROBINDO'S SUPERMIND AND THE
ANCIENT INDIAN SCRIPTURES
Sri Aurobindo has said that the Vedic Rishis knew the Supermind as "satyam-ritam-brihat" — "the True, the Right, the Vast". In their earliest scripture, the Rigveda, the terms most frequently used in a joint form are "satyam" and "ritam". "Brihat" additionally comes in as applied to one or the other: e.g., "ritam-brihat" (1.75.5). The full Aurobindonian phrase occurs as such only in the Atharvaveda's great hymn to Earth (XII.1.1).
According to Sri Aurobindo, the Supermind is also denoted in the Rigveda by the expression "turiyam .svid" (X.67.1) — "a certain fourth" — whose discoverer is said to have been Rishi Ayasya. This "turiya", however, is not to be mixed up with the fourth state going by that name in the Mandukya Upanishad (7, 12). The Rigvedic "fourth" is not the Mandukyan grand finale, the indescribable Supracosmic who is neither the concentrated "Prajna", the creator and lord of all, nor the subtle "Tejasa", the brilliant dweller in the mid-world, nor the gross-physical "Vaiswanara", the universal godhead of Matter. The "turiya" of the Rigveda stands "fourth" from below as well as from above: it is above the lower triplicity of "prithivi" (earth), "antariksha" (vital mid-world) and "dyau" (mind-heaven) but below the higher triplicity, "tridhatu", constituted by "vasu" (substance), "urj" (abounding force of being) and "priyam" or "mayas" (delight or love), the Rigvedic equivalents of the Vedantic "sat-chit-ananda" (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) and the Puranic "satya-tapas-jana" (truth-energy-creative joy).
Sri Aurobindo appears to be in no doubt that the Vedic seers and the early Upanishadic sages were aware of the Supramental plane. But, in his view, the later sages of the Upanishads concentrated on the infinite "Atman", the sheer
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Self of selves, which is one with the eternal "Brahman", the ever-silent One without a second, instead of taking it as a supreme basis in the ultimate Reality for that Reality's illimitable power of expression or manifestation. The reason, to Sri Aurobindo, for this concentration on the inactive all-transcending Brahman-Atman is threefold. (1) The Vedics found no way to make the Supermind effective for transformation or divinisation of embodied life. The Upanishadics even held that once one definitely entered "the gates of the sun", symbolising the Supermind, there could be no return to earth-concerns. (2) The Upanishadics came more and more to mistake what the Isha Upanishad calls the "golden lid, covering the face of Truth", as the ultimate dynamic side of the Divine. The "golden lid" Sri Aurobindo distinguishes from the Supermind as the Overmind, a similar-dissimilar delegate of the supreme Truth-Consciousness. Since the Overmind lacks the power to divinise the nature-part of man's existence, the sages began to be convinced that this part which looked undivinisable could not be a real feature of the Brahman who is all: in other words, it must be a strange anomaly, an unreality wearing the appearance of the real. The world thus was regarded in a manner which in philosophical history was the forerunner of the later Shankarite idea of Maya, the indescribable illusionist world-magic. (3) The experience of the supracosmic Absolute, the "nirguna" or quality-less Infinite and Eternal, brought home to the post-Rigvedic Yogis the "proof" of their conviction of the world's non-divinity and unreality, because in this experience the world does actually figure as an insubstantial floating phantasm.
Sri Aurobindo further says that originally the old Indian terms "vijnana" and "mahas" answered also to his Supermind. "Vijnana" occurs in the Taittiriya Upanishad as the level which is beyond the being of "manas" (mind) and precedes the being of "Ananda" (Bliss). The same Upanishad mentions "mahas" and informs us that Rishi Mahachamasya discovered this level. Both "vijnana" and "mahas" came, in
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course of time, to denote the Overmind. At a still more subsequent period, most probably later than the main Puranas, "vijnana" got identified with "buddhi", the highest stratum of the human intelligence; the pure reason as distinguished from the sense-mind which was labelled as "manas". Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan carried on this practice in our own day. Possibly "mahas" suffered the same degringolade.
Now between the intellect and the Beyond there stood nothing, and the Beyond was identified with the silent Brahman or passive Atman. The concept of "Ishwara" or God remained and was deemed useful for a devotion-oriented or dynamism-motived practical sadhana preparatory to the realisation of the ultimate Supracosmic — but, theoretically and in the final reckoning, this concept was understood as the silent Brahman (alias passive Atman) experienced within Maya as Creator and Lord. The moment Maya was got rid of in the experience of the supracosmic One without a second, Ishwara would disappear, having been rendered superfluous. He was classed as the Highest Illusion,
The last infirmity of noble minds (to adapt a Miltonic phrase to our purpose).
In the Gita we have a great attempt to go back to the ancient integrality of spiritual vision. The "purushottama" — the Supreme Being — who is higher than the "kshara (mutable) purusha" and the "akshara (immutable) purusha" and who subsumes them — does strike one as a Supramental reality, especially when accompanied by the concept of "para-prakriti", the creative Supernature. But this latter concept is rather shadowy and what in the last resort encompasses our minds as "purushottama" is the shining shadow of the Supermind in the top-layer, the synthesising crest of the Overmind from where Sri Krishna who, in Sri Aurobindo's view, is the Being of Bliss ("ananda") come as an Avatar, using the Overmind-divinity as his instrument of manifestation. He wove together the three Yogas — "karma" (Work) "jnana" (Knowledge) and "bhakti" (Devotion) — and
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suggested the secret of secrets, the abandonment of all "dharmas" (rules, laws, creeds) to take refuge solely in the "purushottama" who would deliver the mortal from all grief and evil. But still the world in the Gita's vision does not quite escape being "anityam asukham" (transient and unhappy), for all the field it offers of a mighty victory of Righteousness as in the Bharata War.
The way in which the Acharyas, the erudite commentators, have interpreted the Gita, each in favour of his own penchant, is not entirely unconnected with the Gita's own many-sided synthesising failure to express what the Over-mind fundamentally moves towards yet is unable to point out unequivocally, much less to reveal convincingly. Taking advantage of whatever temporary stress the Gita,puts on "karma", "jnana" or "bhakti", the Acharyas harp on their spiritual predilections and feel self-justified because the Gita in fact falls short of a fully satisfying unification. The fault with the Acharyas lay in their missing its nisus towards that unification. Sri Aurobindo alone has brought it out unmistakably and disclosed the Overmind Godhead as a help towards the Supermind even though it may be a sublime danger if dwelt in too concentratedly. Hence his designation of the descent of it into his physical being on 24 November 1926 as "siddhi" (fulfilment) and yet his "No" to the Mother some nine months later when she was ready to precipitate the Overmind creation on earth.
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SRI AUROBINDO'S SUPERMIND, CAUSAL
CONSCIOUSNESS AND "TURIYA"
The following are my ideas after reading p. 256 of the book you wanted me to consult: Sri Aurobindo's Letters on Yoga, Tome I.
In the first letter, after the mention of the external waking consciousness and then the inner subliminal whose movements are felt like things of dream and vision, there is the phrase: "the Superconscient (Supermind, Overmind etc.) is beyond even that range and is to the mind like a deep sleep."
All that is above the inner subliminal is here considered "the Superconscient", and Supermind no less than Over-mind and the other "overhead" ranges comes under the rubric.
The next letter (in reference to the one Self that is at the base of all the states) alludes to this third state as "the Self that supports the Deep Sleep State or Causal Consciousness, Karana is all the "overhead", with Supermind as its top. Supermind is evidently the Karana consciousness par excellence.
The fourth state or "the Self in the Supracosmic Consciousness", therefore, cannot be Supermind, strictly speaking. Inasmuch as Supermind, the organising Truth-Consciousness, is the original divine plane where the term "cosmos" (= organised play of One and Many, truths of the Unmanifest brought forth and put in order for a manifestation of the universal and the individual) becomes meaningful, Supermind is not "Supracosmic."
But inasmuch as the cosmos manifested on that plane is the archetypal cosmos, the Truth-world, Supermind is not cosmic in the sense that would apply to Overmind, etc. The fact that it is part of a transcendent quaternary — Sat (Existence), Chit-Tapas (Consciousness-Force), Ananda (Bliss),
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Vijnana (Knowledge) — renders it "Supracosmic": it is the Supracosmic turned towards cosmicisation, or the Transcendent Cosmified. It is both transcendent and universal. Perhaps this is what the third letter on the same page means by its closing phrase: "Prajna or Ishwara = the Superconscient Spirit, Master of all things and the highest Self on which all depends."
The last seven words here would seem, strictly speaking, to apply to the second letter's "Self in the Supracosmic Consciousness". But in this letter Sri Aurobindo is referring, as the opening sentence says, only to "two sets of three names". The fourth name is not in question.
In Sri Aurobindo's outlook, Supermind is the Supreme Karana or causal consciousness which is continuous with the Self in the Supracosmic Consciousness.
As for "turiya" — the term on the strength of which you have argued differently from me — I should say that Supermind is "turiya" or "fourth" when we descend from Sat, Chit-Tapas and Ananda as well as the same when we ascend from Matter, Life and Mind. It is known by that term in the Rigveda as Sri Aurobindo interprets that scripture. It is not the "turiya" of the Mandukya Upanishad's gradation, the sheer Self beyond all manifestation, the utter Absolute distinct from the Self of "Sleep", "Dream" and "Waking". Or we may consider this "turiya" in the sense that for Sri Aurobindo the Supermind is continuous with it and is itself that "fourth" in an archetypally cosmifying activity on which all cosmos from Overmind downward depends and which is their cause or Karana.
Once we stop identifying the Rigveda's "turiya" with the Mandukya Upanishad's without any reservation, we shall grasp Sri Aurobindo's vision correctly in the context of our discussion.
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You have put me a number of important questions arising from what I wrote to you on the Agenda and the Divine's Will.1 I must not delay to answer them to the best of my ability.
(1) "How far limited in their workings are the Avatars who have brought down the Supramental World into this lower triple universe?"
I suppose you mean Avatars who came with the mission of establishing the Supermind in mind, life and matter on the earth. For, surely the Supramental World has not yet been brought down. Some Light, Force and Consciousness of it manifested in the subtle-physical on February 29, 1956 and the Supermind was at work in both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but there was no substantial establishment of it in the stuff of their bodies. The process of transforming the cellular consciousness was going on in the Mother but there seemed to have been no definitive supramentalisation of the physical stuff. The difficulty lay in the fact that these Avatars had assumed human nature with all its fundamental difficulties, the human constitution as evolved in the course of millennia, for then alone whatever change they would achieve in themselves would be meaningful for us, be a hope and a promise for our transformation. The limits accepted were immense. The Supermind's power too was great and its extraordinary action went on constantly, but except at certain times it was not exercised in an apparently miraculous manner. I say "was not" rather than "could not be" — and this brings me to your second question.
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(2)"Are the 'luminous interventions', which you have mentioned in your last letter, law-bound or do they have their own laws not to be understood by intelligence or in mental terms? Nolini Kanta Gupta, just after the Mother's passing away, said in his message that 'further was not possible'. Not possible even if Grace intervenes?"
The Supramental Avatars come from the Transcendent — that is, from beyond the cosmic law. So they cannot be cosmically law-bound. They obey cosmic laws for their own reasons but they are free and omni-capable. When I showed to the Mother soon after December 5, 1950 a short write-up, for the readers of Mother India, on Sri Aurobindo's departure from his body, she picked out the phrase: "the mortal remains of Sri Aurobindo" — and said: "You cannot say this. There was nothing mortal about Sri Aurobindo. He did not die of physical causes. He had complete control over his body." This was a staggering eye-opener. Although I had instinctively felt the same way, the direct explicitness of the Mother's statements was like a lightning flash. It amounts to saying that neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother would be compelled to leave the body. If physical maladies came about and if they were responsible for the deaths of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, everything happened by their consent and for a purpose of their own. Nolini's message I take to have been worded from what we may call the absolute point of view: since nothing further was done, it was the Divine's Will that it should not be possible. Perhaps "possible" is an inadequate term and one could have said: "further was not chosen." Here enters your third question.
(3)"Is there any concrete explanation why the new process of 'mutation' culminating in complete divinisation of the body was, as Nolini later declared and as you agreed, 'postponed' when originally the Mother as well as Sri Aurobindo had been sure of it? Of course, I know the answer
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is sometimes given along lines indicated by Sri Aurobindo once: what if the apparent failure suits the Divine's plan better in the long run? But to me this is a mystifying answer, just consoling rather than concrete."
I think we have to look at the situation from two angles. There is the Avatar's transcendent self and there is his or her cosmically manifested or embodied self. The Avatar acts by being in touch with the Supreme Truth above and with the evolutionary conditions and needs below. In his embodied state he may not act with full knowledge of that Truth: whatever is required for his action is held by him in his consciousness. At any moment his own transcendent being, which is ever-free and whose ever-freedom is essentially present also in his cosmically incarnate form, may send a command running counter to what was decided to be necessary before. As you know, the Mother said in effect: "Somewhere it has been decided whether this body is going to be supramentalised or not, but this body is not yet given to know the decision." I am convinced that when the Mother came to know the decision of her own highest self, she let the accepted physical troubles take their course and lead her to leave her body. Why the Transcendent reversed the trend we had been taught to affirm is hardly possible to gauge fully. All we can say is that somehow it was for a greater future benefit to the Divine Mother's beloved children. Your fourth question seems to fumble towards an idea of this benefit, but, according to me, too hastily.
(4) "Why has the Mother to reappear on earth — as you envision — in order to supramentalise the human body? Is not the Divine free to complete her mission through any other body she may choose, a body which we are not aware of at the moment and which may not be known for a prescribed period?"
You do not appear to realise the tremendous pre-requi-
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sites. Sri Aurobindo2 tells us: "The psychic and spiritual trans-formation must come first, only afterwards would it be practical or useful to discuss the supramentalisation of the whole being down to the body." Again, we learn from him:3 "One has first of all to supramentalise sufficiently the mind and vital and physical consciousness generally — afterwards one can think of supramentalisation of the body." Who is capable of the full preparation? I have not come across anyone who can sufficiently represent the Mother or Sri Aurobindo. But that is precisely what is wanted. Is there any sadhak with their oceanic knowledge, their light of intuition, their infinite peace, their occult force, their profound immediate understanding, their vast impartiality and compassion?
Moreover, has not Sri Aurobindo clearly outlined for his followers the necessity of the Guru's physical nearness to enable them to do the Integral Yoga, observing to the full all the conditions laid down for it? Here are a few words of his:
"In this discipline, the inspiration of the Master, and in the difficult stages his control and his presence are indispensable — for it would be impossible otherwise to go through it without much stumbling and error which would prevent all chance of success."4
"The guidance of one who is himself by identity or represents the Divine is in this difficult endeavour imperative and indispensable."5
Q. — "Is there any special effect of physical nearness to the Mother?
A. — It is indispensable for the fullness of the sadhana on the physical plane. Transformation of the physical and external being is not possible otherwise."6
The refrain in the three passages is the word "indispensable", referring to the physical presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother or of at least one of them as the sole condition for the disciple's doing the Integral Yoga with the hope of complete success in overcoming all obstacles:
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that is, of going right up to the body's total transformation, which will fulfil the Integral Yoga.
The central reason is that the Supramental Force which alone can effect the fulfilment cannot be brought into suffi-cient action without an Avatar of the Supermind being in our midst.
Certainly we can go a long way — even in bodily changes — by our self-dedication to the subtle presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and by drawing upon the power they have established on the earth in general and in the Ashram in particular, but I am afraid the logic of their revelations can conduct us only to one conclusion: the Mother has first to come back in whatever manner and stand before us physically transformed before we can reach the last stage of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation.
29.5.1982
1."Two Clarifications", Mother India, July 1982
2.On Yoga II, Tome One (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1958), p. 101.
4.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), p. 253.
5.Ibid., p. 523.
6.Ibid., p. 566.
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"SEVEN DOUBTS"
Here is my attempt to answer your "seven doubts".
1.It is according to Sri Aurobindo that Sri Krishna is known to have revealed what you designate "the plane of Purushottama" in the Gita. I venture to suggest that he could disclose Sri Krishna's ultimate status because he was himself Sri Krishna in a past birth: the status of an Uttama (supreme) Purusha beyond either the Kshara (mutable) or the Akshara (immutable) Purusha. The existence of Purushottama was part not only of Sri Aurobindo's philosophical knowledge but also of his own experience. Both he and Sri Krishna were Purushottama incarnate, the latter using, in consonance with the need of the time, what Sri Aurobindo has called the Overmind, the highest Cosmic Consciousness, as his instrument of manifestation while the former used the Supermind, the transcendent creative Truth-Consciousness whose hour in spiritual history has struck now. The Supermind is directly an aspect of Purushottama, the Overmind is indirectly so. To divide Purushottama from the Supermind as something higher is a mistake.
2.Every Avatar has a special divine aspect to incarnate and a special plane to employ as his instrument of manifestation. It was Sri Krishna's purpose, according to Sri Aurobindo, to manifest the Bliss-Self, the Anandamaya, through the Overmind. Other Avatars had other purposes. An intense expression of the Bliss-Self through their particular planes of manifestation was not a part of the purpose of any of them who came before Sri Krishna.
This is not in disagreement with Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision that there is a progressive incarnation, each Avatar descending from a higher plane than his predecessor, even though all the Avatars may be regarded as coming ultimately from the Bliss-Self.
3.Chaitanya was, as you say, a case of possession, but in the highest sense of that word: he was possessed at intervals
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by Sri Krishna. Perhaps the more correct way of putting the matter would be to say: "Chaitanya was an emanation of Sri Krishna and manifested not only the Lord himself but also an extreme relationship of the psychic-emotional being in the human consciousness with the Lord."
4.After the incarnation of the Supermind, the Bliss-Self has to be incarnated — but not necessarily in a new Avatar. The Supramental Avatar can serve in the future as the vehicle and tabernacle for the Bliss-Self because Supermind and Ananda are front and rear of the same Transcendence.
The Bliss-Self may be considered the final phase in the sense that it carries in itself the Self of Chit-Tapas and the Self of Sat, but these two Selves would not be in the fore from the beginning. They would emerge later in human history, but, again, not necessarily in another Avatar. If we like, we may count them to be further phases of the Bliss-Self.
5.The soul — Chaitya Purusha or Antaratman — in the body which is destined to hold the Avatar's descent would feel itself essentially one with its own supreme Jivatman counterpart but would not fuse with it in the sense of disappearing in it. Its existence as an entity is needed for the Divine's manifestation upon earth through the human individuality.
6.I don't follow your phraseology here. What is meant by "the involutionary being" and by its "embodied state" or "disembodied state"? The Avataric being has a subtle form of its own and this form may be thought of as achieving its presence within the physical body in which the soul destined to receive the Avatar is itself housed.
7. I do not know Valmiki's Ramayana sufficiently to pronounce whether he pictures Rama as conscious of the Divine born in him from the beginning of his life. This phenomenon is not essential. The Avatar-being is, of course, present from birth, but there is no fixed rule as to when it would manifest in the outer personality. The Mother appears to have been more aware of her Avatarhood, or rather the essence of it, in her outer personality from childhood than
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was Sri Aurobindo in his. Still, even she went through the stages of a progressive awareness. And such stages were indispensable — along with certain human experiences — in order that there might be a manifestation of what we may term "evolutionary Avatarhood" — a type of incarnation peculiar to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother because they came to start a new race, the next step in earthly evolution, a job none of the other Avatars had come to carry out. The very idea of "evolution" as understood and expressed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in our present post-Darwinian age could not be there in the times of Rama or Krishna or any other Avataric descent.
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LETTER TO A LAY NUN
Your account of your new life in Bihar is a bit of an eye-opener to us. Your own eyes too must have opened somewhat — but it must have been a good thing for all around you to receive so much of their fine blue in the midst of a rather grey existence.
I am sure you have managed to adjust yourself as a soldier of God is bound to do. The only thing which may keep you unadjusted is the absence of a typewriter! Well, this absence will help keep my presence actively remembered — if at all I am in danger of being swallowed up
In the dark backward and abysm of Time,
as Shakespeare puts it, though elsewhere than in his son-nets, my exploration of which you were kind enough to start typing for me in those luminous afternoons in the Ashram.
Poverty in India is something far beyond what an American could dream of (rather, could "nightmare" of). But you will also find an attitude of acceptance not discoverable in the U.S. I don't mean a fatalistic attitude, though that is there at times. I mean an attitude which can allow one to smile again and again despite the sad circumstances. This comes of not laying on the outer life such an enormous stress as falls on it in the West. Even bodily infirmities and accidents don't loom very large in the Indian mind. Provided the lesser looming does not render one passive, it tends to make for more of quiet happiness than elsewhere.
Leprosy is still a big problem in our subcontinent. Pondicherry itself has a sorry exhibition of lepers. Luckily the disease is not very communicable. In fact, hardly any adult catches it. If it appears in adult life, it is only after long incubation from the time of childhood. Children are more
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exposed. Usually, there is no risk except when one comes in extremely close contact, such as sleeping in a leper's bed or being wrapped in his clothes. Adults, however, have to be careful not to be carriers to children, which they can be in spite of the practical immunity they themselves enjoy.
The subject of leprosy brings up that of philanthropy, on which you have put me a question. St. Francis undertook to kiss the wounds of lepers. Gandhi used to go out of his way to handle leprous bodies and massage them and make them comfortable. We must admire the compassion and the courage involved — but foolishness too is involved, a certain perversity of philanthropic goodness. Fellow-feeling can be exercised in a wiser way and, as for helping lepers, one does not need to do such exceedingly out-of-the-common things as might invite infection — especially a gesture like St. Francis's. Perhaps the saintly passion with which he burned had the subtle power to protect him, but his example does not cry out to be followed. Even some such passion did not protect Father Damien. Most of whatever else of philanthropy the little friar of Assisi did may be worth following if one's turn of temperament points in that direction. But Francis was not merely a philanthropist. And his life gives me the cue to say a few things which I consider to be of central importance.
It is not easy to say them in an understandable manner. One is likely to be misinterpreted as running down a noble activity. I call the activity noble when I have in mind persons like you who are genuinely devoted to the service of their fellow-creatures. Often it is merely a noble-looking means of pandering to one's ego — the desire to be accounted good, the greed for publicity and fame, the urge to use one's high reputation for one's private benefit. But there is surely a fine species of philanthropy and there are natures that have a true bent for it, just as there are natures with a true penchant for art or science or philosophy, industry or business or even warfare. Then philanthropy becomes a worthy occupation — a mode of fulfilling one's destiny. However, there is a human
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destiny and there is a divine destiny. The former proves one a dedicated brother or sister of God's children. The latter shows one to be a consecrated child of God.
This is certainly the essential, the fundamental destiny of each one. Along with it, one has to pursue the right line — or lines — of one's nature, whether philanthropy or any of the others I have listed. There is no compulsion to give oneself exclusively to philanthropic activity. We can't wish a Shakespeare to stop writing plays or a Beethoven to cease composing symphonies and carry on social service any more than we can wish them to become doctors or engineers when their natural turn is towards drama or music. What we can unquestionably ask them, as well as everybody else, is to be considerate and honest and to exercise some control over their "drives". Such a call on them goes inevitably with their being members of a community. If they answer it while being playwright or composer or anything else, they fulfil their human destiny, as much as does he or she whose being is drawn towards philanthropy as a career.
Still, in none of these expressions of one's being is there the fulfilment of what I have termed one's divine destiny. That destiny is met only when one moves towards the realisation of God by the via mystica. All may not have it in them to be a Saint Teresa or a Mirabai, a Meister Eckhart or a Ramana Maharshi — much less to come anywhere near the Mother or Sri Aurobindo. But all can make a beginning in the inner life. By the inner life I do not mean merely the practice of religion — going to Church or temple, saying prayers or doing puja. I do not here envisage even the adoption of the life of a priest or a sadhu. No doubt, a priest or a sadhu is nearer the inner life than the ordinary religious person, yet the critical threshold may still remain uncrossed. A direct devotion to the Divine is required — a constant habit of what I would summarise as: "Remember and offer." As a background to this movement there would be an attempt at detachment from one's common self, a stepping back from its immediate reactions and, as a result, a wide equanimity, a
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deep peace. The formula of "Remember and offer" would take the whole of one's life, outer no less than inner, into the compass of spirituality and establish a persistent connection with a Higher Light, Love and Power — until in an in-creasing degree they descend into one's mind, one's heart, one's centres of vitality and stream out in their pure state into the world through one's soul which feels spontaneously the Divine as its Source and Sovereign.
Not philanthropy alone, but all other forms of living are insufficient. They fall short of the basic demand on man from the great Beyond, the great Around, the great Within that variously haunt every consciousness which is not immersed totally in the passing moment. The danger of the intensely philanthropic outlook and movement is that, more than the other forms of living, it is prone to regard itself as the ne plus ultra of being what life is meant to be. Not only does it incline to forget that there are hundreds of ways of human fulfilment, but it also overlooks the fact that it fails to be authentic spirituality. The ringing slogans of high ethics — "Love thy neighbour as thyself", "To love man is to love God" — can deafen us to the still small voice from the inmost silence and the call of Krishna's flute from dream-distances. Yes, such is the allure of the altruistic mission that we are tempted to consider ourselves as obeying God's dictate to the full. Actually, the altruist is doing no more than serving, however creditably, an attenuated and subtilised version of the ego. Here is nothing to be ashamed of: far from it, here is something to be happy about. But we must guard ourselves against growing oblivious of the real aim in life.
If one's altruistic act is not inwardly offered to God, if His Presence is not invoked to enter us and guide the philanthropic gesture correctly, if an endeavour at mystical communion at all times is not made while serving our brothers and sisters, then all such service remains in the realm of Ignorance and there is no direct awakening of the soul, no straight flowering into a sense of God's fatherhood and motherhood. Here the figure of St. Francis is an apt re-
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minder. For, he was, first and foremost, one swept by mystic communion with God — and, even if he had not been philanthropic, he would have consummated his divine destiny.
I would be the last to dissuade a person like you from philanthropic activity. What I would point out, first, is that it is not the ultimate and, secondly, that there are other activities equally legitimate if one's nature tends towards them and, thirdly, that those who are seriously intent on progressive union with God are not obliged to be remorse-stricken if they do not give themselves to social service. On this last matter I may add that these people are not in-different to humanity — they simply put humanity next to divinity, holding as they do that the greatest boon they can bring to the former is to become radiating centres of a Consciousness higher than the human, centres from which a luminous sweetness and strength and wisdom can flow out to ease the sorrowful, nerve the weary, enlighten the seeker and help all of them to get into touch with their souls and thereby acquire some awareness of the Super-human in a direct manner.
Not that the mystics, the Yogis, should shirk the several functions of a collective existence. They must work harmoniously in whatever mode they can to build a fairer future on earth — but the work, again, is not in itself the goal. The Latin proverb goes: Quis laborat orat, "He who works prays." But I would say with our Mother: "To work for the Divine is to pray with the body." What counts is the spiritual attitude, the remembering and offering. To be free from the ego and to channelise what the Rigveda hymned as satyam ritam brihat, "the True, the Right, the Vast" or, in more open language, the eternal and infinite Godhead — this has to be the motive of all work. For, it is through such work that the Aurobindonian transformation can have the chance to take place both within and without.
I have rambled along, spurred by your question about the responsibility for philanthropy. I have done so because I am
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positive that you are in tune with the old injunction, "Love thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy body" and that therefore you vibrate sympathetically to our life here. Whatever your physical background, whatever your psychological training, whatever your ostensible vocation — all of them valuable in my view — and wherever you may be by choice or by duty, I feel you always at the Samadhi and, on a lesser plane, in my office-room in which, too, I hope, some light and delight drawn by the Integral Yoga from beyond the ordinary world are at play. Always I see you as a lovely and loving companion in the adventure to which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have beckoned those who are ready to recognise themselves as their children. Officially, outwardly you may have a life apart, but, just as many shall come from the East and the West to sit at the table of the Divine, so too many may go to the East and the West and yet be in spirit where Sri Aurobindo's ambrosia and the Mother's nectar are invisibly but most palpably spread out.
9.11.1979
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OPENING SPEECH FOR THE SRI AUROBINDO
RESEARCH ACADEMY
24 APRIL 1978
In everything connected with Sri Aurobindo, as this Academy most evidently is, we have to think of the new Truth of the spiritual consciousness, which he has brought to the world — the all-creative and all-transforming Supermind.
The Supermind, by the very nature of its comprehensiveness, takes the whole of life into its scope. The new Truth which it represents must, therefore, mean a host of fresh insights waiting for us in all the fields of human activity — philosophy, sociology, history, science, art and even business. Everywhere by its influence we should be able to discover novel aspects which would change the views and interpretations hitherto prevalent.
Sri Aurobindo should lead us not only to look more energetically for the verities of life but also to look in a way not done so far, look again and again — with an ever more penetrating eye. What he should bring about is not merely a search for things: he should bring about a re-search, a new quest, a fresh exploration, a movement along unexpected lines. In this sense of the word the Sri Aurobindo Research Academy has to function.
However, for this sense to be fully operative we must go beyond mental means of questing and exploring. The quest and exploration have to be by the mind but not from the mind exclusively. We must aim to draw upon sources deep within, founts far above, and make the mind their instrument. Then alone will the Academy research basically in the Aurobindonian spirit.
In the hope of its fulfilling such an ideal I declare it open today. And in doing so I cannot do better than quote some lines from Savitri, that epic of supreme research, which might take for a subtitle the name of one of Balzac's novels: La
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Recherche de I'absolu. The mood at our opening ceremony, at which I was honoured with the job of cutting the ribbon at the Academy's door, should be inspired by what Aswapati, the father of the poem's heroine, experienced:
Awakened to new unearthly closenesses,
The touch replied to subtle infinities
And with a silver cry of opening gates
Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible.
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SRI AUROBINDO, PARTHASARATHY IYENGAR
AND PONDICHERRY
A NOTE TOWARDS CLARIFYING THEIR CONNECTION
This article by the Editor of Mother India is published at
the request of readers who wanted his views on the subject
apropos of some views already in print.
In the issue of Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research for December 1987 the "Archival Notes" are partly aimed at settling certain queries raised by some statements of the writer two years earlier in the same periodical. His new statements too have come in for criticism. It may be that his true drift has failed to be caught, but the cause of the failure, if any, must lie at his own door. For, whatever his intentions, a persistent trend in his way of putting things has led to an impression of inaccuracy and of hazing the real posture of some extraordinary events.
This is rather unfortunate, for in his article the dissatisfying portions are in the midst of much admirable analytic matter — acute comparative evaluation, pointedly phrased, of documents and of the various shades of historical fact. There should be no question of disqualifying all his work or doubting in general his talents. That would be sheer injustice to him as a researcher. We are now concerned only with one particular theme of his, which calls for serious reconsideration: "What role did the man named Parthasarathy Iyengar play in Sri Aurobindo's connection with Pondicherry?"
Parthasarathy belonged to a group of patriots which included his brother Srinivasachari and Subramania Bharati. They had established an office in the French enclave of Pondicherry for a Tamil weekly, India, in order to carry on more securely their anti-British work as well as their work of regenerating Indian Culture. Previously Parthasarathy was the Secretary of the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company
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which the Iyengar family was financially supporting for patriotic reasons. During his tour in Northern India in that capacity he met Sri Aurobindo in Calcutta and discussed the nationalist and cultural activities in which both the parties. were engaged, mentioned the group of patriots in Pondicherry conducting India
Some time after Sri Aurobindo had gone to Chander-nagore in French India he sent through Suresh Chakravarti a letter to Pondicherry requesting the friends there to make arrangements for his stay in that town. The letter was received by Srinivasachari, but he has himself reported that it was addressed to "S. Parthasarathy Iyengar, 'India' Press". As Parthasarathy was away at the time, Chakravarty, on learning that Srinivasachari was connected with India, gave it to him and asked him to read it and do the needful. The fact that Sri Aurobindo remembered Parthasarathy more than half a year later than the meeting in Calcutta shows the significance of that meeting for him in relation to Pondicherry:
The readers' queries raised by the earlier Archives issue seem to centre on a passage which is reproduced now as a point de depart for, among other matters, a defence against a charge of minimising the role of the adesh (divine command) Sri Aurobindo had received about going to Pondicherry:
"We have seen that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry at the suggestion of no one, but in obedience to a divine command. But by speaking to Sri Aurobindo about Pondicherry, Parthasarathy may have played an instrumental role in his coming."
The opening sentence in the above makes it clear that the writer does not support what M. A. Narayana Iyengar, who
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had no idea of the adesh which Sri Aurobindo had obeyed, wrote in his Foreword to Parthasarathy's posthumously published Bhagavad Gita: A Simple Paraphrase in English. After recounting, apparently from information supplied by his friend and relative Parthasarathy himself, the interview with Sri Aurobindo in which Pondicherry had been recommended to him and the story of the letter addressed to "Parthasarathy Iyengar, c/o India, Pondicherry" and opened by Srinivasa-chari in the addressee's absence from the place, Narayana ends: "It may thus be seen that a suggestion from Sri S. Parthasarathy Iyengar lay behind Sri Aurobindo's visit to Pondicherry, which led in turn to the establishment of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram." In fact, the Archives article says that Narayana "was evidently giving his relative's meeting with Sri Aurobindo more significance than it deserves". But the writer also tells us that, as a historian, his acceptance of the adesh as the cause of Sri Aurobindo's coming to Pondicherry does not oblige him "to suspend all considerations of the political and other circumstances surrounding his departure" from British India. He bases himself on Sri Aurobindo's view in a letter of 1936 that the divine Force does not act independently of cosmic forces. Sri Aurobindo has written: "The Force does not act in a void and in an absolute way... It comes as a Force intervening and acting on a complex nexus of Forces that were in action and displacing their disposition and interrelated movement and natural result by a new disposition, movement and result." It seems to the Archives writer that an adesh operates also within the same nexus and he concludes: "I think it at least plausible that the adesh that directed Sri Aurobindo to go to Pondicherry operated within a nexus of forces that included the attempts of the British to have him arrested, and the recently established contact between him and the revolutionaries of Pondicherry."
The writer's impression is not unnatural at first sight. I was myself inclined at one time to agree broadly. But a closer look should lead us to doubt if one can equate the action of the divine Force with that of an adesh like Sri Aurobindo's. As
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far as we can gather, the latter has nothing to do, as the former has, with a nexus of other forces. It acts exclusively in the consciousness of one individual alone and it acts but once: there is no continuity of action as with the divine Force which may be concerned with several circumstances outside an individual, circumstances on which it goes on exerting itself. The adesh such as Sri Aurobindo received is also described by him in a letter of 5 January 1936 as "imperative": "it is clear and irresistible, the mind has to obey and there is no question possible, even if what comes is contrary to the preconceived ideas of the mental intelligence." The divine Force of which Sri Aurobindo has written does not seem quite like this single absolute momentary stroke from the Supreme within only one person. Its comparison with the adesh would hold simply in both having their source outside the common natural world: the modus operandi of each appears to be different. But we can grant that the situation in which the imperative adesh occurs may include political factors. The Archives writer demonstrates easily the impossibility of overlooking these factors in the case of Sri Aurobindo, but his summing-up is challengeable: "I have no difficulty in accepting that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry as the result of an adesh, and at the same time accepting that there were political factors behind his departure."
What does the last phrase mean? Does it just mean that the adesh operated in the midst of politics and with an awareness of their trends? If it does, there can be no quarrel, for here we have plain history and its call for attention. But the word "behind" gives us pause. It prompts the notion that "political factors" were pushing Sri Aurobindo towards what actually transpired. To put the matter in an extreme form: we may start thinking that even without the adesh Sri Aurobindo would have gone to Pondicherry out of political considerations. Surely, the writer could not have meant this, though such an interpretation is possible on the ground of the unfortunate preposition "behind". A more likely interpre-
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tation would be that the adesh operated for political reasons. If such was the idea, the writer has failed to plumb the depths of the spiritual intervention.
Among the documents quoted before the "Archival Notes" we find Sri Aurobindo saying in a talk of 18 De-cember 1938: "I heard the adesh 'Go to Pondicherry.' ...I could not question. It was Sri Krishna's adesh. I had to obey. Later on I found it was for my yogic work that I was asked to come here." A variant of the closing words of this record by Nirodbaran is Purani's version: "I found it was for the Ashram and for the work." In either instance Sri Aurobindo takes us clean beyond any political causes for the adesh. The divine command came in the midst of a political situation and must have had its current posture in sight but its drive was wholly spiritual. If Sri Aurobindo's own gloss is to be credited, no political factors can be taken to lie behind his departure in answer to Sri Krishna's adesh.
One may protest: "You are bringing in 'teleology' and explaining an event by what lay ahead and came later: you should act the historian and give weight to what went before." But should we not ascribe to the adesh its own vision, its own aim? Although we may not know the goal it had in view, we should be certain that it did not come purposelessly. Hence its purpose was definitely in play before Sri Aurobindo went to Pondicherry. Once a historian admits the adesh he has to judge things in terms of it. To cry "teleology!" in such a case is a hasty move.
Besides, we are now looking backwards to 1910 and seeking explanations. We are not writing in that year itself, ignorant of the motive of Sri Krishna's command. With our present knowledge of it we cannot write of 1910 as though we knew nothing. From our coign of vantage today, all talk of "teleology" would be inapposite.
If the adesh brought Sri Aurobindo to Pondicherry for only his Yogic work, there is little point in being told after Narayana's exaggeration of the significance of Partha-sarathy's meeting with Sri Aurobindo has been countered:
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"Still, it is not at all far-fetched to suppose that when Parthasarathy spoke to Sri Aurobindo about Pondicherry... he dwelt on its political advantages. After all, the India, with which Parthasarathy was connected, was being brought out from Pondicherry for political reasons." Whatever Parthasarathy had said was irrelevant in relation to the adesh. We also perceive the oddity of the opinion expressed on the heels of the declaration about Sri Aurobindo's coming to Pondicherry at the suggestion of no one, but in obedience to a divine command: "But by speaking to Sri Aurobindo about Pondicherry, Parthasarathy may have played an instrumental role in his coming."
Apart from the causative irrelevance of politics to the adesh concerned, the opinion I am discussing is couched in a questionable turn of language. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1979), p. 680, col. 2, defines "instrumental" as "acting as an instrument or means: serving to promote an object: helpful." The word "instrumental" in the context of "coming" would imply either that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry because Parthasarathy had put the idea into his mind at an earlier time, thus serving to promote the coming, helping to bring about the transition — or else that Parthasarathy was used by some causative agency other than himself to send Sri Aurobindo to Pondicherry at a later date. The first alternative is impossible to entertain when it has been unequivocally said at the very start that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry at no one's suggestion but in answer to an adesh. There is a patent self-contradiction here. The second alternative makes Parthasarathy a "means" in Sri Krishna's hands, the mouthpiece of a plan by the Supreme Being to hint to Sri Aurobindo in advance at what was to happen. It is as if Sri Krishna played secretly in modern Calcutta a variant on his great declaration to Arjuna at Kurukshetra in remote antiquity: "The Kauravas have already been slain by me in my mind. Be you only my instrument to slay them now." In our context we may imagine Arjuna's Charioteer (called "Parthasarathy" in the
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Gita because Arjuna is known as "Partha") to have brought Sri Aurobindo to Pondicherry already in his mind and was using his namesake of the Iyengar family as his instrument to let Sri Aurobindo know the advantages of settling there. However, there are a number of snags to this highly poetic picture.
Sri Aurobindo went to Pondicherry on the afflatus of a divine injunction and not on a hint from Parthasarathy: a special message from Sri Krishna himself had to be received. And this injunction differed radically from the hint: whereas the hint was in connection with politics as the moving power, Sri Krishna's message turned out, according to Sri Aurobindo, to have had nothing to do with them in its purpose. If we have to think of Parthasarathy as influencing Sri Aurobindo by acquainting him with the advantages of Pondicherry, we must seek a different light in which to look at him.
Before we do that, let us trace from another angle the incongruity we are trying to focus. How does Parthasarathy figure at all when the town outside British India to which Sri Aurobindo went from Calcutta, the sphere of the harassment by the British Government to which Parathasarathy had referred in his meeting with Sri Aurobindo, was Chander-nagore in French India and not Pondicherry? In a letter of 15 December 1944 which the Archives quotes, Sri Aurobindo recalls the situation in the Karmayogin office in Calcutta where a search by the police was expected: "While listening to animated comments from those around on the approaching event, I suddenly received a command from above in a Voice well known to me, in the three words: 'Go to Chander-nagore.' In ten minutes or so I was in the boat for Chander- nagore.... I remained in secret entirely engaged in Sadhana.... Afterwards, under the same 'sailing orders', I left Chandernagore and reached Pondicherry on April 4th 1910."
The original adesh, taking Sri Aurobindo away from the obstructed political field mentioned by Parthasarathy, did
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not concern Pondicherry. Thus his advice to Sri Aurobindo had no direct relation to the latter's move out of British India. Surely, we cannot plead the general fact that Chandernagore no less than Pondicherry was a non-British French enclave? Their common Frenchness does not blur their geographical difference. Nor can we say that Chandernagore was obviously a stepping-stone to Pondicherry. The divine command did not tell Sri Aurobindo: "Go to Pondicherry via Chandernagore." Chandernagore alone held the stage at the time: Pondicherry was completely off it. Even when Sri Aurobindo reached Chandernagore we cannot claim to discern an involvement of Pondicherry in his thoughts. He continued to stay there as if there were nothing further to do or at least as if he had no notion of any future step. In the talk of December 1938, Purani adding to Nirodbaran's transcript makes Sri Aurobindo say: "some friends were thinking of sending me to France." In Nirodbaran's transcript we read simply: "and there as I was thinking what to do next, I heard the adesh 'Go to Pondicherry.' "
It was after this second adesh that, recollecting what he had learnt from Parthasarathy over six months earlier, Sri Aurobindo wrote the note to which we have already alluded. Apropos only of this note we have to set Parthasarathy in our picture. And he emerges in a role quite other than that which the Archives writer with unconscious self-contradiction surmises for him. The true role is to be spotlighted by the request Sri Aurobindo made to him from Chandernagore. Through Parthasarathy's group in Pondicherry about which he had learnt in the interview at Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo wanted arrangements to be made for, as Srinivasachari has put it in his memoirs, "a quiet place of residence... where he could live incognito without being in any way disturbed". While his coming to Pondicherry was due exclusively to the adesh, his getting privately accommodated in that town was the result of his meeting with Parthasarathy.
Not that Parthasarathy actually arranged for Sri Aurobindo's residence. He was not present to do so. Srini-
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vasachari and Bharati, accompanied by Suresh Chakravarty, made the proper arrangements. Direct credit in the concrete sense goes to them. But inasmuch as Sri Aurobindo's memory of Parthasarathy led him to write the letter given to Suresh Chakravarty to take to Pondicherry where the addressee was supposed to be, Parthasarathy formed a link between the adesh at Chandernagore and Sri Aurobindo's finding a suitable residence in Pondicherry among solicitous friends. And as such he has a significance in Sri Aurobindo's life at an important turning-point.
In an earlier issue of Archives — Vol. IX, No. 17 — we read: "Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in April 1910 with no intention of staying more than a few months. He remained in the French Colony for the rest of his life." This confirms that he had never thought of following Parthasarathy's suggestion of establishing his political headquarters in Pondicherry and acting from there. The indefinite prolongation of stay was due exclusively to his discovering Sri Krishna's far-reaching spiritual plan for him that was implicit in the adesh to go to Pondicherry. But in the years after his arrival the patriotic group which included Parthasarathy, Srinivasachari and their associates contributed to his welfare. Srinivasachari's family is known to have been in intimate relation with him up to 1926.
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A MASTERPIECE OF DISTORTION
AN ANSWER TO A READER'S REQUEST FOR LIGHT ON A
CRITICISM OF SRI AUROBINDO AND HIS YOGA
The Reader's Letter
I am enclosing extracts, translated by me into English, from a Hindi book by an author of some repute in circles appearing to be of spiritual seekers — Rajneesh. I came across it recently and found serious misconceptions about Sri Aurobindo and his work. Would you care to set right such blatant misrepresentations of what the Master was and worked at?
The Answer
You have sent me a veritable masterpiece of distortion. I wonder how Rajneesh, who claims to have an insight into spirituality, can pen such a criticism.
Rajneesh seems to have dipped into Sri Aurobindo's "logical" and "philosophical" books but missed completely the great sweep of the spiritual experience that is behind the grand progression of his argument. The direct vision and the concrete realisation that have used a master-intellect to build the thought-system have not been felt at all. One who feels them would know that the "logical" and "philosophical" books were written, first, to employ fully the mental instrument which is a powerful means of manifestation and which for a world-accepting Yoga is a valuable help in establishing that Yoga's hold on the world. Secondly, the usual jibe that mysticism and spirituality are only for emotional and non-intellectual beings is met right royally by these books. Thirdly, there is the need of the present age to satisfy itself on the mind-plane. The books answer to this need in a magnificent manner.
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The Integral Yoga is for man in his integrality: it brings its spiritual revelations to him on all levels and in whatever various modes are possible on them. If Sri Aurobindo is a logician and a philosopher par excellence, it is not because logic and philosophy are a substitute for genuine spirituality but because they are an additional expression of it — just as poetry is. And the diverse additional expressions are there because Sri Aurobindo is an integral person, a full being, accomplished on all sides. And his happening to be many-sided is in tune with not only the Integral Yoga which he propounds and communicates but also with the character of his own time. The Integral Yoga has to cope with man in his wholeness, which includes the reasoning intellect. Also, contemporary homo sapiens is exceedingly complex in his demands and particularly requires a structure of rationality to convince him and assure him of the suprarational. Ours is the age of analytic science.
Not understanding all this, Rajneesh launches on his anti-Aurobindo campaign. But he lands himself pretty soon in confusion and self-contradiction. He says about Sri Aurobindo: "He is an extremely logical system-maker, and system-makers are never suprarational, for systems are made only by reason. How can there be any system in non-argumentation and the non-thinkable? That is why anyone who has gone even a little beyond reason puts forward fragmentary not systematic views." A little later, Rajneesh tells us: "After Shankara, no greater system-maker has been born in India than Aurobindo. But this is also his greatest limitation." If Rajneesh, who has been setting forth a case, knew even the elementary logic needed for doing so, he would realise the implication of his statement. The unes-capable implication is: "Shankara, who is the greatest system-maker before Sri Aurobindo, was subject to the same 'greatest limitation' as Sri Aurobindo and cannot have gone even a little beyond reason. In other words, Shankara had no spiritual experience at all of the suprarational." Will any Indian agree to this conclusion? Does even Rajneesh suggest
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it? Not at all. He has no censure to pass on Shankara the outstanding system-maker. Nowhere does he dub him a spiritual ignoramus, as he consistently should. But what can we expect when self-satisfied mush instead of inquiring grey matter talks? One should say "ultra-mush", for even ordinary mush would try not to pull in two utterly opposite directions.
Elsewhere also Rajneesh fails to keep a hold on his own initial premise that one who argues as much as Sri Aurobindo and who says so much cannot be experienced in spirituality, cannot have true spiritual knowledge. He contrasts Sri Aurobindo with Ramana Maharshi about whom he informs us: "Aurobindo remained knowledgeable but Ramana really knew. Ramana does not know the language of reason; he has no system; his statements are all atomic and he has little language to say what he knows." Then, surprisingly, Rajneesh goes on to assert that merely because a man has a lot to say we cannot affirm that he lacks spiritual knowledge; "for Buddha too had much to say" and yet "experience-wise Buddha is like Ramana". Surely here Rajneesh refutes himself out of his own mouth? If Buddha, who said a great deal, could be equal to Ramana in knowledge, Sri Aurobindo with his abundant speech need not be devoid of knowledge and could be at least equal in it to Buddha and Ramana!
In the matter of "descent of the Divine" our self-appointed "Daniel-come-to-judgment" is ridiculous. He says that Sri Aurobindo talked only of the Divine descending and completely ignored the question of the human ascending. Actually what Sri Aurobindo said is that ascending is not enough: there must be the descent of what is ascended to: then alone can our nature-parts and life and the world be transformed. Even without the ascent, certainly the Divine can be invoked to descend — and certainly the descent can take place if the invoker prepares himself. Sometimes the descent can occur because the Divine wills it. There is no laying down the law for the Supreme or dictating the
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operation of the Grace. Has Rajneesh never heard of the overwhelming appearance of Christ to the anti-Christian Paul on the road to Damascus? Has he never read "The Hound of Heaven"? Again, what does he mean by saying that the Divine will descend only if man ascends? What is the need of the descent if the ascent is accomplished and the Divine reached? Rajneesh writes: "Mankind's history till now shows that man must strive upwards and lose himself in the divine consciousness." What sense then is there in speaking of a descent at all? Rajneesh does not know what he is talking about.
He pours ridicule on the idea of Sri Aurobindo bringing down the Divine for the world. He reminds us that all spiritual development is "individual-centred", and asks: "If I am determined to stay ignorant, can the Divine descend in me?" What he suggests is that Sri Aurobindo tried to ram the Divine down people's throats, whether they wanted the Divine or not. Obviously, such an absurdity could never have been perpetrated by Sri Aurobindo or, for that matter, by any spiritual guru. Again and again Sri Aurobindo has insisted on each individual's co-operation and preparation: even if the Supreme Grace makes the first move, the beneficiary has to follow up and carry out a course of sadhana, launch on a definite via mystica for receiving the higher consciousness in a continuous stream and for ultimately settling it in himself. The descent which Sri Aurobindo laboured to effect was of a new power which he distinguished as Supermind or Truth-Consciousness. From his own experience of the entire range of spiritual realisation in the world's past, he said that it was his special mission to reach beyond that range and invoke and embody the Supermind so as to serve as the radiating centre of it for whoever had the aspiration to share in the new age of earth-life which such a realisation would inaugurate. He also strove for a general descent charging the earth's atmosphere, as it were, with a supramental consciousness ready to enter all who would be prepared for it, so that in the long run this
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consciousness might be accessible to the race just as the mental, in various degrees, is now part and parcel of the human condition. Rajneesh has gone quite off the track. He has no insight into Sri Aurobindo's personal role, nor has he the ghost of a notion of the Aurobindonian Supermind in its distinction from the diverse other aspects of the Divine that have so far been embodied and manifested.
This is the reason for his next fatuity in the utterance he puts into Sri Aurobindo's mouth. He makes Sri Aurobindo brag: "I am physically immortal." Then he gives us his own adverse reflections on the possibility of physical immortality. Nowhere in the voluminous writings of the Master can we find the statement attributed to him or even any approximation to it. The actual Yogic situation related to the question of physical immortality is entirely missed by Rajneesh.
According to Sri Aurobindo, what he termed Supermind or Truth-Consciousness can alone transform or divinise the human entity totally, down to the very body. And it is clear why Sri Aurobindo considered the divinisation of the body not only possible but in the long stretch of earthly evolution inevitable. The Supermind is the complete dynamic Divine, a creative Unity-in-Multiplicity from whom our universe has derived and by whom secretly it is being worked out with its starting-point in apparently the opposite end of perfection — an immense Inconscience, the Rigveda's original "darkness wrapped within darkness". The working out spells the expression of the supreme Divine in all the evolutionary terms — mind, life-force, even matter. The Supermind holds in itself the ultimate truth, the archetypal model of these terms: a divine mentality of which our seeking mind is a half-lit image, a divine vitality whose semi-effective reflex is our struggling life-force, a divine materiality which our embodied existence shadows forth with its fumbling stress towards health and beauty and secure duration. Within mind, life-force and matter the Supermind itself is concealed: it is their inmost substance, with its absoluteness their implicit dharma: the concealed or involved Supermind is the urge
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behind the emergence or evolution of our nature-powers. But the urge cannot be fully successful — labouring as it does under conditions antithetical to the Divine — unless the free and un-involved and eternally expressed Supermind from beyond the mental-vital-physical complex comes down in response to the call of that complex, a call centrally spurred by what Sri Aurobindo names the psychic being, the true soul which is the immortal spark in us of the Eternal, a delegate of the individual aspect which subsists in the Supermind's flawless unity-in-multiplicity. That is why immortality, which is the nature of the Divine and represented inwardly here by the developing and reincarnating soul, is the goal of all evolutionary terms, including the physical. There is nothing illogical in the Aurobindonian Yoga's vision of the body becoming, as a result of its supramentalisation, immune to disease, free from the ageing process and safe from final disintegration.
Without grasping the rationale of Sri Aurobindo's vision, Rajneesh throws out the dictum: "He who is born will have to die: this is nature's law. Yes, the yogi can be physically immortal who does not take birth but appears all at once, not through the union of parents. It is strange that Aurobindo, born of parents, should dream of physical immortality."
No doubt, Sri Aurobindo did not fulfil the ideal he had set up — and occult reasons have been offered for what we believe to be his choice of non-fulfilment. But the fact of it is neither here nor there to the logic of the ideal. The "laws" we have observed until now relate to the state of nature reached thus far. If nature is as Sri Aurobindo envisaged and experienced it, birth from a union of parents cannot rule out what would be natural to a new dimension of spiritual realisation in the body. Towards that dimension the whole effort of the Ashram established by Sri Aurobindo tends, with a host of wonderful inner experiences on the way and with the helping presence of the Master subtly behind his Ashram always. Certainly, it is the height of gratuitous impudence for Rajneesh to proclaim: "The work at Pondi-
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cherry is the most useless in the world and in the sphere of spirituality."
Even in discussing Sri Aurobindo vis-a-vis Lele, the Maharashtrian Yogi whom he had consulted in the early part of his spiritual search, Rajneesh is utterly at sea. He has read nothing of Sri Aurobindo's notes on his relationship with Lele and on what he experienced as a consequence of Lele's instruction. Sri Aurobindo has repeatedly and in some detail recounted his Nirvana-realisation in the wake of Lele's initiating guidance. Rajneesh dismisses the experience as "the petty technique of becoming a witness". He adds: "Aurobindo made the great mistake of thinking that this was the ultimate thing while it is really the first step." Rajneesh is unaware that here he is practically quoting Sri Aurobindo himself. Does he not have any inkling of Sri Aurobindo's express declaration that the Integral Yoga begins where the other Yogas end? And has he not gauged the immensity of what happened when Sri Aurobindo implicitly followed Lele's advice but realised something which Lele had never anticipated: the infinite, eternal, featureless, world-transcendent, silent Brahman who is the grand terminus of traditional Vedanta and, in a negative version, the culmination of the Buddhist enlightenment?
Until Rajneesh studies Sri Aurobindo's life and reads his books carefully, making an honest and humble endeavour to understand the spirituality Sri Aurobindo wanted to establish on earth and progressively work out in his Ashram, we must totally regret his putting pen to paper in this field. The smallest of small minds, the most distorting eye, the most ignorant babbler of spiritual themes — such is Rajneesh as he emerges from these several pages of pretentious gibberish.
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1. A LETTER FROM PRADIP BHATTACHARYA
Here is something for the Editor of Mother India: I have been in correspondence with Dr. K. K. Nair (Krishna Chaitanya), the eminent philosopher and litterateur, apropos his comment apropos the Peter Brook film on the Mahabharata, "Anticipating Buber, he (Vyasa) saw history as the encounter of the temporal and the eternal, the empirical and the transcendental; and anticipating Berdyaev, he saw in history a divine programme for divinising human existence." I had asked Nair why he had to refer to Berdyaev when India's very own Sri Aurobindo had posited the same thesis. Nair replies, "I had dodged your query in my earlier letter. But you have brought it up again. So I have to say something though I am afraid it will be a dodge in disguise. Briefly: I hero-worshipped Aurobindo in my college days; but now, half a century later, I am terribly disappointed. His discussion of time and eternity is wholly derived from that of Boethius; page after page in Life Divine is watered down Plotinus. His vision of History has the bookishness of Hegel's tidy schema, Spirit fulfilling its schedule of progress with no problem whatever. But history is fatefully open-ended, for man can abuse his freedom to become an Asura and wreck himself too thereby. Man can regress to a cannibal, Bhima drinking Duhsasana's blood. Man may commit race-suicide, as nearly happened in Kurukshetra where only nine men survived out of 18 vast armies. I am afraid Aurobindo's inflated rhetoric does not see the terror and the tears at the heart of things. I must confess your casual rating of Vyasa and Berdyaev vis-a-vis Aurobindo shocked me."
Coming from someone who is an acknowledged name in these matters, this needs an answer from you. To provide you with some insight into this argument against Sri
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Aurobindo, I enclose a xerox from his latest book, The Betrayal of Krishna (Clarion Books, 1991).
(15.10.1993)
2. K. D. SETHNA'S COMMENT
The letter you have quoted from Dr. K. K. Nair (Krishna Chaitanya) "the eminent philosopher and litterateur", as you put it, and the xerox you have sent of the "Epilogue" to his latest book, The Betrayal of Krishna, have been lying before me for quite a time. Now I have a bit of leisure and feel inclined to make the comment you have asked for.
The trouble with Nair is that he is amazingly ill-versed in Sri Aurobindo — amazingly because he is expected to be a good student of both spiritual thought and spiritual experience. At the very outset he should know that Sri Aurobindo is not spouting mere philosophy: he is putting in intellectual terms the insights brought him by Yogic realisations. The question of plagiarising an early Christian writer or profusely pouring out Plotinus-cum-water does not arise at all. Again, an acknowledged intellectual and literary master plus Yogi does not need to cast about for adequate language from past philosophers to couch his illuminations. Besides, I am pretty sure that Sri Aurobindo had less than nodding acquaintance with De Consolatione Philosophiae and was very far from being immersed in the Enneads. Furthermore, I begin to doubt not only whether Nair has read Sri Aurobindo enough but also whether he has even dived sufficiently into Boethius and Plotinus. Boethius expounds the "Blessedness" of a good life according to God's self-revelation as seen by him in the Christian Bible and glimpsed in Neoplatonism — a good life with its eye all the while on a heavenly hereafter. What could he have genuinely in common with Sri Aurobindo's setting forth of the Yogic process of "psychi-cisation, spiritualisation, supramentalisation" on this very earth — a process which brings about a relation between Time and Eternity quite apart from Boethius's idea of tem-
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poral values having to be sacrificed for eternal ones? A radical difference is bound to exist too between Plotinism's ultimate "flight of the alone to the Alone" and Sri Aurobindo's vision of a collective terrestrial fulfilment due to the supreme Divine operating not only from a free status beyond and a subtle omnipresence around but also from a Rigvedic "darkness wrapped within darkness" below — an "Inconscient" in which the Divine has figured its own opposite as the starting-point of a difficult evolution which is yet meant to express the supreme plenitude in earthly terms in what has been till now the Gita's "transient and unhappy world". What has the Aurobindonian "divine life" in common ultimately with the philosophy of one who, according to his biographer Porphyry, was such an intransigent mystic that "he seemed ashamed to be in a body"? Indeed a world away is Sri Aurobindo who affirms that "anyone who wants to change earth-nature must first accept it in order to change it"1 — Sri Aurobindo of those lines of his "A God's Labour", which he himself quotes in this context:
He who would bring the heavens here,
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
I should like to know if any mystic has had more sense of "the terror and the tears at the heart of things", as Nair finely puts it with reminiscence of Virgil's "Sunt lacrimae rerum" ("Tears in the nature of things") and Wilfred Owen's "heartbreak at the heart of things", than he who talked of having undergone more difficulties than any spiritual seeker before him because he wanted to face in full all the grievous lack and sorrowful strain which man in his imperfection suffers and to assure him of the possibility of overcoming them. Has Berdyaev, to whom both you and Nair refer, or even the great Vyasa ever written words like the following in a letter of Sri Aurobindo's to a disciple? — "No, it is not with the
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Empyrean that I am busy: I wish I were. It is rather with the opposite end of things; it is in the Abyss that I have to plunge to build a bridge between the two. But that too is necessary for my work and one has to face it."2
Let me cite also some other words to bring home to Nair's unseeing mind the character of the work Sri Aurobindo undertook: "It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine. The Gallio-like 'Je m'en fiche'-ism (I do not care) would not carry me one step; it would certainly not be divine. It is quite another thing that enables me to walk unweeping and unlamenting towards the goal."3
When Nair brings in Hegel and connects him with Sri Aurobindo's "vision of History" and talks of Hegel's "tidy schema, Spirit fulfilling its schedule of progress with no problem whatever", he forgets one central point: whoever posits an Absolute has to attune the world of change to the Permanent and the Eternal in the final reckoning. This does not necessarily mean failure to take stock of the world as it is or to deny man's sense of freedom and the open-endedness of history. In the absolutely free Absolute pervading no less than subsuming everything can lie the only possibility of freedom and open-endedness anywhere. No doubt, all these are recondite matters but unless we appreciate them we cannot understand the various aspects of Sri Aurobindo's vision and work. Nair seems to stumble at every step. He can only see "contradictions". Nor can he get to the core of key-concepts like "the supramental Truth-Consciousness". I find him peppering his "Epilogue" with the adjective "supramental" six times,4 aware — as his quotation-marks show — that it is a special term of Sri Aurobindo's but using it as if it signified nothing more than "above the mind". Sri Aurobindo focuses in it what he specifically calls "Supermind" or "Truth-Consciousness" and distinguishes it from the several other "overhead" levels such as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition (or Intuitive Mind), Overmind. Sri
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Aurobindo does not just posit these levels and beyond them the Supermind: having had direct experience of them by means of his "Integral Yoga" he has described them and their workings in detail and, in his works of literary criticism, illustrated their peculiar seeing, verbal quality and expressive rhythm. Not finding any knowledge of these "planes" in Gopi Krishna, Vivekananda or even Ramakrishna, Nair finds fault with Sri Aurobindo's statements that the Gita "does not bring forward the idea of the higher planes and the supramental Truth-Consciousness..."5 Similarly, not understanding what precisely Sri Aurobindo intends by the word "transformation"6 in spite of his making it quite clear what he does not mean and what he means by it, Nair objects to his adding that the Gita overlooks "the bringing down of the supramental Truth-Consciousness as the means of the complete transformation of earthly life".7 Nair asserts: "the great central aim of the Gita has in fact been to inspire men to work for the 'complete transformation of earth life,' actually the divinisation of history."8 Then comes Nair's confession of faith and sight of Pisgah: "The last verse of the Gita affirms that this can be achieved only by a conjoint action by man and deity which means that man can and should attain similitude (sadharmya) to God, accepting deity who incessantly works for the world as his own soteriological model and working in the same manner. This I would regard as the highest perception, mental or supramental." Now we know how far-removed Nair is from the Aurobindonian universe of discourse and how little he has cared to penetrate the deliverances of the Master of the Integral Yoga.
His own insensitivity to shades of meaning lead Nair to convict Sri Aurobindo of misjudgment and contradiction in the above issue. The charge of contradiction is also laid at Sri Aurobindo's door in the matter of what Nair calls the former's "philosophy of action". "According to him," writes Nair again in relation to the Gita, "Krishna demands of Arjuna (which means all of us) 'to be free from repulsion and desire... to renounce self-will and become a passive and
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faithful instrument in his hands.' "9 Nair believes such freedom and such renunciation illegitimate and ineffective. "It is Arjuna and not the Cosmic Divinity (Visvarupa)," argues Nair, "that had to liquidate the hordes of Duryo-dhana. For this historic end Arjuna had to resume his action... Krishna does not want man to renounce his volition and become a passive instrument... When we work with dedication, our conviction that we are real agents of action is not a deluded belief... Desire and revulsion also should not be surrendered in a mental or supramental state of bemused apathy."10 This is a strange doctrine to be put into Krishna's mouth. Surely, what Krishna wants is no bemused apapthy. Nobody, he avers, can cease from action. True, but action should not arise from personal desire, from private like or dislike, from any motive of the separate ego. There must be a vast equanimity and a surrender of the individual self to the Divine Presence, the Inner Lord, the Universal Oversoul. By a constant spiritual gesture of union (Yoga) with the dynamic Divinity (Ishwara) by the intelligent will (buddhi), the individual has to be active with the illumined energy of a more-than-human consciousness. Krishna is teaching Arjuna Karma Yoga: Karma implies Work, not passivity, but Work by Yoga (inner spiritual unification with God), not by ego-impelled desire and revulsion. Nair completely misconstrues the true drift of the Gita and the basic drive of Sri Aurobindo's interpretation in this context.
There is some mis-seeing by Nair of Sri Aurobindo's experience of Vasudeva (Krishna) being behind everything. This experience is identical with what is implied by the Gita's own pronouncement which later Vaishnavism formulated as Vasudeva sarvam iti (Vasudeva is all). Although Duryodhana's armies were also Vasudeva, Krishna as Vasudeva incarnate exhorts Vasudeva-Arjuna to destroy them. The universal Vasudeva plays many roles according to the situation presented each moment by the many-sided phenomenon of a world moving under multiform aspects. Once one has realised in Yogic experience Vasudeva's unity and multi-
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plicity, sameness and difference, openness and disguise, friendliness and enmity, one discerns by an inner light the proper mode of action and reaction. Thus Sri Aurobindo the politician is a relentless freedom-fighter against the British rule in India, was imprisoned under inhuman conditions for a long while and yet he finds Krishna's hand behind everything and even sees him, as Nair notes, during the sedition-trial in 1908, in the magistrate and the prosecuting counsel: "It was Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled."11 Years later, this very Sri Aurobindo took whole-heartedly the side of the British and their allies in World War II and regarded Hitler as the instrument of a demonic force and set his own spiritual power working against him and later against Japan. Nair, unable to fathom the fact that, as a line in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri puts it,
Our life is a paradox with God for key12
and unable to follow the varying steps of an intuitive guidance in Sri Aurobindo's facing of diverse situations and problems, can only cry: "Contradictions within contradic-tions."13
I am sorry to mark a lack of suppleness as well as of depth in Nair's mind. It is a sharp weapon in several respects but it fails to cut sufficiently beneath the surface and to cope with the diversity no less than the complexity of event and attitude. There is also an incapacity to appreciate an expository style like Sri Aurobindo's in a book like The Life Divine. In this book there is at times an alliance of the direct, the lucid, the profound, the harmonious, at other times a concomitance of the wide-wheeling, the multi-layered, the symphonic. An allergy to the second stylistic mode seems to be responsible for so sweeping a characterisation by Nair of The Life Divine as "inflated rhetoric". I wish he had given samples.
In a mischievous spirit of tit for tat I am tempted to cite some parts of Nair's "Epilogue" as reprehensible style. At
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the very start he quotes the epigram: "When the gods decline, the nations wither." After five and a half lines deprecating the possible "pettifogging schoolmen-type vivisection", he puts forth his own reading of "this living truth" as follows: "It merely means that, as far as men are concerned, God can live only in their hearts and that if the hearts turn inhospitable, he will die to men and men too will die — as beings who could have grown to some similitude to him — even if they may continue to infest the world and altogether ruin its character as sacred precincts."14
This interpretation strikes me as ingenious, extravagant and pompous, a pseudo-profundity showing off. The epigram appears to mean simply that when the religious and spiritual temper fades, the community loses its inner sustaining vigour.
On p. 542 Nair notes that "in the time of Emerson (1803-1882) not much knowledge of Indian religious traditions had percolated into the West; thus he refers to the Gita as "the much renowned book of Buddhism'." Then Nair comments: "He was responding to the pure poetry of the Gita, the way it sees the halations around facts when it conceptualises, and transfigures concepts into images whose charges of affect can achieve the remaking of man; and he found the poem 'wonderful'." Here undoubtedly in a couple of places is a deplorable dash of jargon, an unnecessary infusion of gob-bledegook.
There, Pradip, you have what "the Editor of Mother India" is provoked by you to say. Perhaps I have said too much. But what is writ is writ. You may do what you like with it. Don't think I have no admiration for Nair. He has penned a series of penetrating surveys of modern thought. I only object to his sallies into regions unsuited to his intellect — and superficial sallies, at that!
(10.1.1994)
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1.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo International University Centre Collection, Vol. 1, Pondicherry 1953), p. 222
2.Ibid.,pp. 222-23.
3.Ibid., p. 221.
4.Epilogue, pp. 535, 536, 537.
5.Ibid., p. 221.
6.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, pp. 162-64, 168-69.
7.Epilogue, p. 535.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., pp. 535-36.
10.Ibid., p. 536.
11.Ibid.
12.Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (Revised Edition, Pondicherry 1993), p. 67, last line.
13.Epilogue, p. 536.
14.Ibid., p. 531.
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APROPOS OF UDAR'S COMMENT
IN THE MOTHER INDIA OF DECEMBER 1981
A Letter to a Friendly Critic
I am sorry Udar's article in Mother India has proved so offensive to you. I know it hits hard at places but it does not seem to me more offensive than the extract Udar has quoted from the Introduction to Vol. I of the Agenda. Perhaps your reaction is really to what he has said in reply to that extract? As you have singled out this reply, let me first say something about it.
Obviously it is subjective in most part but the provocation is to be understood before one judges it. It is very likely that the "flag" Satprem has mentioned in a derogatory way is metaphorical, but surely he must know that his metaphor happens to answer to a very concrete and significant reality in the Ashram. Possibly you are unaware of the circumstances associated with the Mother's flag. On the Independence Day in 1947, the Mother had her flag hoisted over the building where Sri Aurobindo and she were staying. She said it would fly for 3 days, including August 15. There was an anti-Ashram riot and in it a sadhak was murdered, the sadhak who used to massage Sri Aurobindo's right leg every day. There was even a threat given that the hostile elements would climb up the building and pull the flag down. The Mother refused to take it off until her 3 days would be over. Udar was prominently involved, by the Mother's own orders, in organising the Ashram defence. I was on a visit to the Ashram from Bombay on this occasion. The Mother's flag was the centre of the whole conflict. At that time Golconde too was in great danger of attack: the Mother's flag was flying there also. It still flies and is meant never to be taken down. You should be able to imagine Udar's feelings about it.
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Besides, doesn't the Mother attach to it in the Agenda itself a great symbolic importance?
You consider as "nonsense" Udar's suggestion that there may be a fifth column in the Ashram planning to break up the Samadhi. I do not know anything about breaking up the Samadhi. A friend abroad has been asking that the Samadhi be opened so that one may know whether the Mother's body is really lifeless or is a radiant living presence in spite of the decomposition which was going on while it was lying in state. What put the idea of a plan to break up the Samadhi into Udar's mind was Satprem's reference to "fraternal iconoclasts" who would have "the courage to shatter all effigies". We may think Udar jumped to a wrong conclusion by taking Satprem's menacing words literally. But I am surprised at your implied disbelief in "a fifth column" in the Ashram. The description could well cover certain members. They want the present Trustees — who were appointed by the Mother — to be thrown out and themselves or their supporters installed in their place. They would be very happy if they could persuade — after Nolini has departed — the Government to take over the Ashram in their interests. They do not disapprove of Satprem's hostility to the Ashram.
Before I published Udar's article I sent for all the relevant documents — the Trustees' letter to Satprem and the letter to him by the Mother's son Andre telling him that the Mother had explicitly asked Andre to edit the Agenda. Evidently she had confidence in Andre and not in Satprem. This point brings me to your theme — broached in good faith, I am sure — of people looking at the negative instead of the positive side of Satprem's work. The basic negative side is that he has not attended to the Mother's wish that Andre should read and judge things. To avoid this wish from being carried out he managed to take charge of the typed copy of the Agenda which used to be kept in the Mother's room and towards which she had pointed when giving Andre her instructions. When the basis is an absolute falsehood, what you call the positive side is bound to be a specious splendour.
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No doubt, the Mother's talks are very illuminating — the Agenda in itself (minus the parts the Mother would never have published) is a divine gift to the world, but we cannot forget the ambitious and unfaithful hands that are offering it to us — not only with those parts included but also with malicious and misguiding footnotes. While benefiting as much as we can from the Mother's wealth of wisdom we must not let ourselves be over-impressed and carried away by the labour which Satprem has spent on it and which you in your innocence want us to profoundly appreciate. Have we not always to look first at the sort of force at work behind a project? Constructive energy on a large scale lay behind both Hitlerism and Stalinism, but even though we may learn something from it we cannot get lost in admiration of it. Of course, Satprem is neither a Hitler nor a Stalin, yet a clear tinge of the totalitarian in him is evident from the intolerant, exclusivist single-type mentality he has fixed in the group which follows him.
I have observed that people who are not steeped in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother turn against the Ashram on reading the Agenda. Even an old-time Swiss sadhika stopped coming to the Ashram for years because of the propagandist spirit which has moulded the Agenda. A friend of mine in Holland was also affected with anti-Ashramism by it. I who knew his warm and sincere heart wrote him a clarifying letter and he began to see differently. Apart from this there is the question: "What picture does it present of the Mother?" The Mother, complimentary or critical, spoke from a divine consciousness — and her personal comments were never meant to be carved in "monumental alabaster" for all time. They were made for a purpose and she could say the very opposite the next minute. Even people in the Ashram don't always realise this but people outside who have no feel of the divine consciousness in the Mother are liable to be completely misguided both as to her aim and as to the level of being from which she spoke. While getting a bad opinion of those whom at a particular moment she has criticised they
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are likely also to see her as a repeatedly grumbling back-biter as well as a sower of discord between people and countries.
Then there is the question of fairness in the editor. On the strength of some tapes and letters, I have been assured of subtle manipulation and even of certain talks cut out because they were complimentary to a person who has fallen from grace in Satprem's eyes. The spirit behind the Agenda is very far from being admirable. That is why Nolini refuses to encourage it and not just because Satprem has not let the Trustees have a hand in it.
It is not my intention to show Satprem as all black. I knew him very well for years, I have known his difficulties and his good points and I am sure the Mother has given him some genuine spiritual experiences. But I am afraid they have gone to his head and have failed to touch with refining fire the outer being, the lower part of him to which the Mother's reference can be traced in the Agenda itself. And the Agenda has been turned by him into a powerful means of self-aggrandisement and self-advertisement: he uses it to make himself out to be the one and only apostle of the Mother.
Have you seen the folder he or someone inspired by him has prepared to go with the two English volumes of the Agenda? It smacks of sensational journalism and tries to focus the limelight on him and to present the Mother not as she was — a real Divine Mother working for the good of her children with deepest love and understanding — but as a kind of super-occultist bent only on one object with the help of her single confidant. Do you know that in a recent interview Satprem has allowed the impression to be made that the sole Yoga of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and himself is to change the "programming" of the cells and reveal the Supermind in them by a certain inner process? Except for an endeavour to silence the intellect, the vital being and the physical mind, no sadhana is required. It is as if the numberless spiritual experiences which lay behind the final stage of the Mother's sadhana for the world were of no importance and could be bypassed. What Sri Aurobindo
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called "the one thing needful" — as you may gather from some passages I have published in the December Mother India
—is completely ignored in the new Gospel a la Satprem. To bring out the inmost Psychic Being, the true Soul, to experience the In-dwelling Deity and the immutable Self of selves and the Cosmic Consciousness, to realise the Transcendent Divine, to be filled with the Supreme Peace and Wideness and Illumination and Compassion and Dynamism
—all these sine qua nons of the Supramental Yoga are never mentioned.
Do you believe it is possible to transform the cells of the body without a long process of psychic and spiritual Yoga? The Life Divine, The Synthesis, Savitri and Letters seem to have become superfluous just because the Mother towards the last part of her life was concentrating on supramentalising the cellular consciousness. Could she have hoped to succeed if she had not had behind her a plenary life of Yoga answering to all that is said in those books? What Satprem is preaching to his admirers is a mutilation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother — a path that cannot lead the aspiring soul of the West anywhere near the "Divine Materialism" (to adopt a fine phrase of his own) at which the Mother was at work for the last 15 years of her stay on earth — without, of course, stopping to help us all the time towards the realisations which she herself had compassed and which alone can prepare us for the culminating Cellular Sadhana.
17 December 1981
2
Postscript
I have spoken of Satprem's aim of self-aggrandisement and self-advertisement by means of the Mother's Agenda. A note has come to me from an independent party — a keen-eyed western disciple — drawing attention to a few points which acutely illustrate this very aim:
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Perhaps the most ludicrous of the wild claims made throughout the Agenda, and in televised and published interviews given by Satprem, is in Vol. 13, p. 319 — it would be in keeping with the psychological theorem that "If a lie is big enough, repeated often enough, it will come to convince the most unbelieving".
Satprem twists the Mother's remark that her body must have the conviction that "it is useful for something" into meaning that the single conceivable usefulness of the Mother's body was not her unparalleled endeavour to supramentalise the corporeal consciousness but rather its usefulness consisted of the support and succour she afforded to her one and only true disciple, and to deprive her of physical meetings with him meant death.
Footnote assertion, p. 319:
"When Mother's door was closed to us [the editorial 'we' he uses throughout] she was being condemned to death. This is the simple truth. But nobody, not a single person, understood or wanted to understand. No-one. Of what were [her jailors'] hearts made?"
The facts are that Andre, the Mother's son, who visited her every evening all through her self-imposed seclusion — except for the first few weeks — would have been entirely co-operative in summoning Satprem or anyone else she might ask to see, and so would her doctor and attendants, but she summoned no-one. The picture which Satprem paints of a woman encircled by malevolent and omnipotent conspirators, while Sri Aurobindo stood idly by and heeded not her abject helplessness in their hands, has been actually accepted by a considerable number of otherwise sane individuals in Auroville and abroad.
Perhaps the saddest part of the frequent misleading twists and the contrary-to-fact assertions rampant in the Agenda is their effect of denigrating the Mother's stature in the juggler's attempt to glorify his own. One thinks in
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particular of the heart-rending episode of the Mother's suffering in 1970 (Vol. 10, September) when a small intimate detail is bared which was spoken in deepest confidence at the moment of a desperate plight, the Mother never dreaming that Satprem would put it on a loud-speaker to the world to enhance his own glory while exploiting a moment's weakness of the Mother at a time of unspeakable bodily stress.
All the falsifications committed in the Agenda, both deliberately and/or unwittingly, diminishing and exploiting the Mother will one day fall away and the incalculable value of her experiments and experiences will be available, stripped of the dross of an errant disciple.
The greatest of falsifications is at the end of the 13th volume where the all-but-shouted drift is that the Mother was driven to her death by the Ashramites she had appointed to look after her. It is true that before her retirement she spoke more than once of some expedient she might employ of forcing the issue of physical transformation which did not seem to get solved in a normal progressive manner. She spoke of the possibility of entering into a cataleptic trance and warned against mistaking it for death. But side by side with this possibility she hinted that, if the body failed to endure and hold out, a new attempt in the future would have to be made. What she might actually do in the present life was never precisely announced. A general clue as to whether she would be in a cataleptic trance or had left the body Would be the fact of decomposition. She let it be understood that, unless decomposition started, the body was not to be put in the Samadhi-vault. Of course, departure from the body would be contingent on her receiving from her own Supreme Self the word that the venture to transform the body would not succeed in this birth. She had said about her body's future: "(...as if the world put the question) Will it continue or will it get dissolved?... But the body knows that it has been
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decided, and that it is not to be told to the body. It accepts, it is not impatient, it accepts, it accepts, it says, 'It is all right, it is as Thou wilt'..."1
What exactly happened on the evening of November 17, 1973? There were unmistakable symptoms of physical distress. The respiration was acutely in trouble. There was no entering into any kind of trance. A life-crisis was evident. And the upshot was as if the Mother had come to know that the work would not be completed and that no point remained in continuing in a body which was suffering intensely under the pressure of the first experiment in supra-mentalising flesh and blood and bone.
There was not the slightest doubt that the Mother had left her body. The proof of it came soon enough. Small spots of decomposition appeared after a day or so — and then the process increased its speed until the doctors came to the conclusion that the time had arrived for placing the holy and heroic body in the Samadhi.
It is high time a halt was called to the anti-Ashram propaganda whose agitated centre is Satprem — propaganda which can also be termed anti-Mother in the sense that it goes not only against her principal field of work but also against the spirit of Truth, the Truth-Consciousness, which she represented on earth.
3 February 1982
1. Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, April 1969, p. 87.
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ANSWERS TO READERS' QUESTIONS
On the Agenda and the Divine Will
I can see that although you do not favour Satprem for a moment you are genuinely puzzled at the turn that things have taken in relation to the Agenda. Your puzzlement may be summed up as follows: "How is it that the Divine Mother who, by definition, must be both omniscient and omnipotent, has allowed the Agenda to be got hold of entirely by Satprem in spite of her telling her son Andre that in case of publication it should be edited by him — without necessarily meaning utter exclusion of Satprem as collaborator? No matter if the Divine Mother has left her body she cannot cease having all-knowledge and all-power: why then did she not prevent its being published wrongly? Could not her Will have even destroyed by some means the very original if she had wanted? Is it possible that she had changed her once-expressed intention?"
Just because the intention the Divine Mother had once expressed has not been fulfilled you need not suppose she has changed it. Such a philosophy would be too facile. You forget that she undertook her world-work under certain conditions of the universe as it has been and still is — conditions of a difficult and long-drawn-out evolutionary process in which anti-divine no less than undivine forces have play and, because of the Inconscience and the Ignorance that are part and parcel of this process, get the chance of impeding the Divine Mother's work. If it were not so, all could be achieved by a miraculous wave of the wand by her and there would be no need for slow laborious sadhana and no call for what we have termed "the sacrifice of
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Sri Aurobindo" or for the Divine Mother to suffer as she did.
Doubtless, the action of a superhuman will goes on behind the scenes and there are even direct luminous interventions at times but not everthing that we consider as deserving to be done is carried out by it or even regarded as possible to carry out. The universe being what it is, many wrong turns can occur and we have to fight them as best we can with aspiration in our minds and devotion in our hearts. Just because something occurs in a certain way, we are not justified in thinking that this way is divinely ordained.
Of course, we have to believe — with Hamlet — that
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may.
The Supreme has an over-all action and guides the world's evolution subtly, secretly, on the whole, but in details a host of undivine and anti-divine movements can take place in an evolution that starts from the Inconscience and proceeds through the Ignorance towards the Knowledge. There are thoughts to be rejected, words to be averted, deeds to be countered. Invoking the Divine Mother's help we have to go forward to the best of our lights and take our share in the inner and outer battle. We may commit mistakes, but that does not imply that we should never dare to correct anything but must accept everything as being perfectly in order and requiring no opposition from us. The easy argument, that Satprem could not have ignored the Divine Mother's wish unless she herself had been helping him, is a specious one. If it is right, why do you not equally argue that unless she herself were helping us we could not oppose him? According to this argument whatever happens has automatically her support and assistance. In that case we would end with visioning a chaos of conflicting activities, all of them right at the same time. The element of discrimination and choice, on which the Divine Mother has always insisted, would lose all significance. Her appeal to us to do Yoga, which constantly
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involved that element, would be meaningless.
I know that from a certain standpoint she can be seen as doing everything — and indeed if we pray to her to reveal her hand in all that is unfortunate and tragic and disastrous in our lives we shall get the touch of her Grace and move more and more out of darkness towards her light and feel the worst circumstances aiding the progress of our souls. But even to pray thus to her and gain the benefit of her hidden hand we have to discriminate and choose, encourage faith and aspiration, set aside the cry of despair rising from our all-too-human hearts. Mere fatalism or a blind acquiescence in the formula "Whatever is, is right" should not be the result of the standpoint which I have spoken of. The true result should be a deep equanimity, a freedom from hatred and malice, a calm self-dedicated dynamism — the state of consciousness in which Sri Krishna commanded Arjuna to make a crucial choice and to fight. Let me, however, add that a self-righteous frame of mind in which we grow fanatical and intolerant and exclusivist is not a movement towards a general "Krishna-consciousness" for any fight, but a drive towards a species of Spanish Inquisition or of a Herrenvolk Hitlerism.
What you say at the end of your letter is to my mind correct: "Satprem's Agenda minus Satprem (the Mother's temporary private references, the editor's personal footnotes, etc.) would be quite all right." Perhaps in relation to "minus" I should draw a distinction between the Divine Mother's Satprem and Satprem's own Satprem. She disclosed a great deal to the former and expected him to live up to her will and wish. What a pity that the latter has got so badly mixed up with the "True love" or "Truth-love" that is the real self his spiritually given name was intended to evoke and bring forward!
23.4.1982
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On the El Chinchonal Eruption and the Supramental Future
What Sri Aurobindo has said about India's Independence on 15 August — that the date being the same as of his birthday is not a mere coincidence nor a fortuitous accident but the seal and sanction of the Divine Force that guided his steps in the work with which he began life — this statement cannot be generalised to mean that whatever occurs on certain great days in our spiritual calendar or even on this very day is symbolic and significant. Although I have written a long article on many events in world-history that took place on 15 August — an article which was approved by Sri Aurobindo for Mother India — I cannot bring myself to attach much meaning to the eruption of the El Chinchonal volcano in south-east Mexico after centuries of quiescence on 29 March, the date on which the Mother first came to Pondicherry and met Sri Aurobindo — much less to the army reporting about it on 4 April, the date of Sri Aurobindo's arrival in Pondicherry. The Mother never encouraged too much speculation along such lines. Fancy can easily start playing if we take too seriously this sort of matching. When an earthquake occurred in a certain year, Gandhi declared that it was due to old-fashioned Hindus refusing the entry of Harijans into temples. His opponents countered that, because in certain temples the Harijans had been allowed, Mother India had protested by an earthquake. What either party said could be a good occasion for a mirthquake!
Besides, south-east Mexico seems far too out of the range of immediately meaningful places in the Aurobindonian world-vision. And to think of Rudra Pralaya, the world-destructive dance of Shiva, commencing in El Chinchonal is quite a fantasy. The present manifestation, which is to culminate in a supramentalisation of earth-life, has been said by the Mother to need no Pralaya at all. A Pralaya is needed when the beings
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nitely in spirituality. A new experiment has then to be tried. Occult knowledge says that several such experiments were made in the course of universal history. At last has come an experiment which is capable of making endless progress and manifesting the Supermind. So to think in terms of any Pralaya is to forget the special nature of an earth which is assured of an Aurobindonian future.
Don't, however, run away with the idea that this future is just round the corner. I am amazed at your proclamation: "Sri Nolini was wrong when he said (1973) that Transformation was not cancelled but postponed. Neither cancelled nor postponed. Sri Aurobindo Himself said in The Mother India, Letters (p. 49), letter dated 13.8.1933: '...Afterwards there will be a further transformation by the Supramental.' Afterwards' means after 1973."
What Sri Aurobindo wrote about was two steps in transformation made possible for the earth-consciousness by the Divine Mother's embodiment. The first step would be a preparation "to receive the Supramental". The next step, which would come "afterwards", would be the supramentalisation brought about by what has been received, leading initially to a limited new race and not to a supramentalisation of all beings who represent the earth-consciousness. There is not the slightest reference to 1973 or any other date, for no disembodiment of the Divine Mother such as took place on 17 November of that year was in view at that time. Another manner of putting the same situation in essence is in a letter dated 14.1.1932,1 which begins by speaking of the descent of the Supermind as "a rapid evolutionary process compressed into a few years which proceeds by taking up the present nature into its Light and pouring its Truth into the inferior planes". Then Sri Aurobindo says: "That cannot be done in the whole world at a time, but it is done like all processes first through selected Adharas and then on a wider scale. We have to do it through ourselves first and through the circle of sadhaks gathered around in the terrestrial consciousness as typified here. If a
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few open, that is sufficient for the process to be possible." The letter to which you draw my attention has as little bearing as this one on Nolini's statement.
Nolini meant that since even the second of the two pioneers who were on earth for supramentalisation did not carry out the plan we cannot hope to see the plan achieved in her absence. This is a logical conclusion from Sri Aurobindo's clear-cut declaration in April 1935,2 selfless yet underlining the indespensability of his own attainment: "If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself it cannot be done in others." I may add in tune with Sri Aurobindo's basic intention: "If it is also not done in his equal and partner, the Mother, how can it be done in us?" However, workers like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never give up: so they will find ways and means of consummating in the time to come the vision they tried to materialise in the 20th century. There can be no cancellation of it but humanity will have to wait now that both the Gurus are disembodied. There has to be a postponement. At least one of the Gurus will have to return to carry further the project of evolving man into superman.
Indeed, with the Supramental Manifestation on 29 February 1956 in the earth's subtle-physical layer a fact, the advent of supramentalisation of even the gross physical is certain — but in a long process of evolution. The immediate victory the Mother had toiled for in her own body and wished to extend to the bodies of those who had been open to her has not been won and therefore none of us can expect to win it in the present age without her. We must surely do the Aurobindonian Yoga as far as it lies in our power — and a great deal does lie in it. What Sri Aurobindo has termed psychicisation and spiritualisation are within our capacity. We are capable too of at least a touch of the Supermind in our inner being and perhaps some reflection of this touch in our outer nature. But a full establishment of the Supermind in
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anyone cannot be hoped for unless the Mother comes back to the earth.
You may recall Sri Aurobindo's command to her in 1950 some months before he launched his mysterious "sacrifice": "You have to fulfil our Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation." If her endeavour to obey it is to succeed, she cannot but visit our earth once more. How she will do it is past anybody's guessing. She may make an extraordinary entry through a selected womb or she may fuse her psychic being from beyond with the psychic being in a grown-up body that is somehow ready on earth or else she may by an occult action project a form of herself directly into our space-time form the subtle-physical plane. Since her work has to be completed she must and will choose to be a part of earth-life again.
Let us do our utmost to prepare ourselves for the mighty event instead of indulging in grandiose dreams about our own abilities and letting our imagination go gambolling over a Mexican eruption or any earthquake such as Gandhi and his critics commented on. Beyond earthquake and mirth-quake let us aspire for the divine birthquake in whatever mode the Mother may adopt.
24.4.1982
References
1.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953), pp. 382-3
2.Ibid., p. 216.
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WEIGHING IN THE BALANCE OR RUNNING AMUCK?
( This article, which is a rejoinder by the editor of Mother India to an attack published in the Bombay bi-monthly Quest, was originally offered to that very periodical. Professor A. B. Shah, co-editor of Quest, had been eager from the beginning to have a counter-attack by a member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. But he wanted it to be about 6000 words long. The present piece, although shortened a great deal from its first detailed draft, still considerably exceeded the required length. So he wrote to the author: "I see your point in trying to deal with Mr. Alvares's article as thoroughly as possible, but I am afraid in the process your rejoinder has become much too long for Quest. From the point of view of the non-specialist reader 1 would be committing an unpardonable error, particularly in view of the fact that it would be more than 18 months after the publication of Mr. Alvares's article that the rejoinder appears in print. I am, therefore, much against my personal inclination, returning the typescript. However, I shall look forward to its publication in Mother India." As Mr. Alvares has already shot his bolt, Mother India will not afford space to any reaction he may now have to our attempt at exposing his pretensions. The controversy will be considered closed with each party having once had his say.)
It is over a year and a half since Mr. Claude Alvares declared in effect Sri Aurobindo a spiritual charlatan and his philosophy nonsense.1 I chose to ignore his attack, in spite of requests by friends to join issue with him. "This absurd article," I said to myself, "will soon be forgotten." But now I learn that he is busy writing a whole volume on Sri Aurobindo in the same vein.2 I should like to warn unwary
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readers against any such projected magnification of the ineptitudes with which the article teems.
Mr. Alvares has decided that science and contemporary world-insights flatly contradict Sri Aurobindo. But is he truly au fait with them and does he at all know, even in outline, what Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is?
According to Sri Aurobindo, the ultimate Reality is an Absolute, an Eternal, that is at once a self-merged freedom beyond conception and a fullness self-manifested in a multiple unity as Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) and Vijnana, a creative Supermind or Gnosis which brings forward the hidden truths of Being-Consciousness-Bliss and organizes them into an ideal harmony of the infinite and the finite, an archetypal or perfect cosmos. In addition it formulates various subsidiary cosmic "planes" and sets going the time-process of our universe. In relation to that process it acts in a diversity of ways the role of God — One who is the Lord and Lover of His creatures or else the World-Mother, no less than the Self of all things, a secret Omnipresence at once constituting and containing its creation even while outwardly projecting each individual and object as other than the deity. But here Sat-Chit-Ananda and Supermind have also an opposite aspect of themselves, the Inconscient, a state of entire involution or apparent self-loss as the starting-point of an aeonic evolution by grades and degrees towards their plenary state in the form of a totally transfigured and divinized humanity upon earth.
Mr. Alvares has failed in several respects to express Sri Aurobindo's philosophy correctly. Thus he has not understood Sat-Chit-Ananda and Supermind as ever-existing plenitudes side by side with their own involution. To him the Aurobindonian Sat-Chit-Ananda "is the world and its forms, progressing through an evolutionary process from the initial stage of Complete Ignorance (matter) through Life and Mind to Supermind (Spirit, absolute consciousness)".3
This is a lopsided presentation, leaving no scope for the central theme of Sri Aurobindo's "Integral Yoga": descent of
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the Truth-consciousness or Supermind into our fumbling humanity. The supramental Light is to be invoked to come down into our nature in order to change it. That "gnostic" Power would perfect the organization of this nature around our inmost soul-element or psychic being and call forth the Divinity which is involved in material existence and which serves, by its covert presence there, to give that existence ultimately a permanent Divine Life as an intrinsic luminous right, a dharma or self-law, rather than as a mere super-imposition, however brilliant, a siddhi or infused and hence insecure capacity.
Intellectual acumen is obviously not Mr. Alvares's forte in face of a comprehensive and therefore complex spiritual vision. But a true grasp will not make any difference to his verdict on the Aurobindonian philosophy, for it must still bring in terms like "Absolute" and "Eternal", to which he is acutely allergic beyond any restraint by reason. Oblivious of Sri Aurobindo's terrestrial aim, he affirms: "I prefer to stick to the fundamental insight of Heidegger's being-in-time, and relegate all non-temporal conceptions to the sphere of non-being, non-existence, non-meaning."4
He falls foul also of certain linguistic turns in Sri Aurobindo in connection with the Eternal's self-deployment as space and time, and he cannot make head or tail of some subtle distinctions Sri Aurobindo makes when discussing the Eternal's diverse possibilities of poise in regard to past, present and future. He talks of Sri Aurobindo's "stylistic gaucheries" and "excruciating gibberish".5 Obviously, again, he is ill-acquainted with the occasions for an intricate play of thought and word in the difficult universe of metaphysical discourse.
But what most strikes us in Mr. Alvares is not only a blind animus and a chronic incompetence in his chosen field but also a huge muddle-headedness and a pretentious exploitation of "little learning".
To expose briefly the inadequacy behind his persistent "name-dropping" would be almost enough to disqualify his
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approach to Sri Aurobindo. For, it is on the basis of this appeal to modern thinkers that he condemns Sri Aurobindo as irrelevant "for our times".6 However, I shall take him up in essentials on the other count, too — the hostility that sees no good at all in his subject.
The Misfire about Heidegger
Whenever an original thinker expresses profound ideas, a number of his formulations are bound to seem at first obscure and prolix to most readers. One needs to get steeped in an innovator's vision before one can see its lines in sharp focus everywhere. There are also in such a writer large areas of lucid depth-exposition. To ignore these and fasten on the apparent densities is to falsify the picture. But glaring indeed would the falsification be if one picks, as does Mr. Alvares, on a treatise like The Life Divine of Sri Aurobindo, which Aldous Huxley, as a pronouncement published in Mother India (July 1956, p. 10) proves, considers "a book not merely of the highest importance as regards its content, but remarkably fine as a piece of philosophic and religious literature".
And surely it is "batty" and self-defeating to accuse Sri Aurobindo of being awkward or unintelligible and show partiality for the most forbidding of modern German philosophers, who is an "oddball" in style if ever there was one. As a note to a subsequent reference shows,7 Mr. Alvares has drawn upon Heidegger's Being and Time. On the style of this work, Marjorie Grene, an authority, comparing it to that of his later writings, pronounces: "The earlier book is written as though with a sledge hammer: repetitive though its blows are, they are heavy and the syntax is notoriously twisted and obscure."8 Heidegger's later works are smoother in construction, but, as H. J. Blakham observes, they are "oracular in tone and one can have no confidence in interpreting the
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cryptic sentences in which his thought is condensed".9
Linguistically, Heidegger is "tough going" in one way or another. His substance, too, is a stumbling-block to a lot of readers. It is not only a Logical Positivist like Carnap who considers "much of metaphysics like Heidegger's 'The nothing naughts' ...meaningless".10 Many outside the Vienna Circle have had to struggle with his concepts no less than his phraseology. Particularly his copious talk of "Nothing" has rendered him for realistic or rigorous minds a purveyor of "non-being, non-existence, non-meaning".
Patient and sympathetic students, however, have worked their way to the central Heidegger. And the message they have found makes one wonder whether Mr. Alvares, invoking his name, appreciates in the least the true drift of this philosopher's system.
To give another instance of Mr. Alvares's muddle-head-edness we may well ask: "Is his claim really justified that Heidegger, as a contemporary witness, is at odds with Sri Aurobindo?" One has only to look at Grene's article in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy to see that Mr. Alvares has grasped Heidegger very partially when he writes: "Temporality...is the primordial state of being or existence, for each of us exists 'toward our end', which is death. What Heidegger calls 'within-time-ness' is something given along with existence itself..."11 Mr. Alvares refers only to Heidegger's Being and Time with its stress on dread or anxiety (Angst) over one's finitude; but that book is not all of this philosopher. Even if Mr. Alvares be taken to represent its thesis correctly, his version would merely be of the early Heidegger. Being and Time was published in 1927. A work like Introduction to Metaphysics which appeared in 1953 makes almost a contrast as if feeling an incompleteness in the old theme and widening it out to its true shape and thus, without annulling it, playing on it a most momentous variation.
To the mature Heidegger, we have "fallen out of Being", we have lost Being's "nearness and shelter". We run after one thing or another instead of seeking the "Ground"
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through which all things are — Being in its own self, Being that is "the Holy" (Heilig) and that is "Healing" (Heilen) and is "Whole".12 We should not get lost in the superficial mass-man nor in the outer life's disconnected "beings" — "from genes to space-ships", as Grene puts it:13 an inner return to a direct experience of the one Being should be our pursuit. The negative inner intensity of each of us existing "toward our end", which is death, and thus facing Nothingness, has been transformed into a positive expansion of the self into its basic reality which, as the absence of all separate superficial states, is a superb Nothing.
Even in Being and Time, contrary to Mr. Alvares's perception, there is a sort of oblique mysticism. The negative inner intensity is sought to be so deepened that, in the act of confronting in one's very marrow, so to speak, one's own "death" in prospect and one's past "guilt" for not living authentically, one attains a paradoxical liberation, such a peak of subjective pain at one's finitude that a sheer breaking through one's false surface life takes place. It is natural and not freakish that two great theologians, Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, have based themselves on the "existential" analysis in Heidegger's Being and Time.
As if guarding himself against the possible narrowness attaching to the label, Heidegger repudiated the description of himself as an "existentialist". More properly he is that bete noire of Mr. Alvares: an "ontologist", concerned with that which underlies or persists through the fluctuations of time and history.
Another authority than Grene is A. B. Naess who writes in the New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1975). Naess distinguishes the nature of Heidegger's Being from the psychological means by which it is to be attained. Those means are dreadful and dark, yet they conduct us to a different state, one of radiant happiness. Quoting Heidegger, Naess tells us: " ...'Knowing joy... is a door to the Eternal'... Being is associated with 'light' and with 'the joyful'... Being 'calls the tune'; 'to think Being' is to arrive at one's (true) home."14
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After referring to Heidegger as "a critic of technological society and of the role of science", Naess also notes his turning away from common religion but acutely remarks: "Heidegger has no place for God, whose absence nevertheless plays an important role in his thinking. He does not exalt human goals but sees human existence as a cult of Being — a notion not unlike certain notions of God."15
Without any direct naming, we have in the account of both Grene and Naess the great formula of the Upanishads: Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) as the Ultimate for Heidegger. Sri Aurobindo's Absolute and Eternal is essentially here. Is it surprising that Frederic Spiegelberg, once a student of Heidegger's in Germany, later Professor of Asiatic and Slavic Studies at Stanford University, California, should inform us that "back of Heidegger's system... there is a great deal of mysticism" though "Heidegger would be the last one to admit that", because he does not want to use "the expressions of traditional theology" and "remains unaware of his interrelation... with the great thoughts of Indian philosophy"?16
Similar is the considered opinion of Rhoda P. Le Cocq in her methodical survey, The Radical Thinkers: Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo. She concludes: "To the present writer, reading Sri Aurobindo's works makes Heidegger's meaning more explicable, and vice versa."17
The Fumble with Weizsacker
Another of Mr. Alvares's gaffes is to summon to his aid "the German physicist Carl F. Von Weizsacker" as the author of The History of Nature.18 We are made to think that Weizsacker stands at the opposite pole to Mr. Alvares's bugbears — a system like Plato's, which focuses on a stable realm of "Being-Ideas" beyond time and history, and a concept like Sri Aurobindo's Eternity and Supermind. But
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what do we actually find in the chapter "Man: Inner History" in Weizsacker's book? Talking of religion, he writes:
The rationalistic explanation quickly comes to mind that man has made God in his image. The Bible has it the other way: God created man in His image... This, I believe, is the profounder truth. In non-mythical language: the image in which God appears to man does not show what man is but what he might be. It is the image of man's potentiality of being, that which determines his life...
I do not say that this image of the objective potentiality exhausts the idea of divinity. The metaphysics behind the fact that the divine reveals itself to us in this fashion, that is something 1 do not dare touch upon.19
Then Weizsacker dwells on how this image helps us to understand "the combination in religion of the supra-historical with the historical", and he goes on to speak of the "challenges" posed by the image "in different ages, among different peoples". "But every one of the challenges is as such inescapable and absolute. The challenge cannot be derived from history, since it determines history."20 Basically, "the German physicist" is worlds away from Mr. Alvares.
I may add that Weizsacker visited the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo a few years back. A major theme in his talk with some of us for nearly two hours was that modern scientific theory needed to link up in its own way with the essentials of Plato. Before he left, he presented me with a copy of the only book of his which he had with him in English translation, The History of Nature, and using my Ashram name, he inscribed it:
To Amal Sethna
from C. F. Weizsacker
who is leaving Sri Aurobindo Ashram
with a thankful heart.
10.12.69
Well might Weizsacker have felt happy in the Ashram, being in mind very different from Mr. Alvares. If he were not
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different, he would not be sufficiently interested in the idea of that mysterious power of Yogic psychology, the kundalini, to contribute a 47-page introduction to a book about it.21 Touching on what he calls "the esoteteric concept of prana" he comments: "prana is not necessarily incompatible with our physics. Prana is spatially extended and vitalizing. Hence above all it is moving potency. The quantum theory designates something not entirely remote from this."
3
The Miscalculation from Simpson, Monod and Dobzhansky
Coming to the topic of evolution Mr. Alvares gibes at Sri Aurobindo's phrase about biological history: "the fact of a successive creation with a developing plan in it..."22 According to Mr. Alvares, the elements at work in this history "have now been mapped out in such great detail by scientists like Simpson, Monod and Dobzhansky that no vestige of any 'plan' is anywhere in evidence".23 Random genetic mutation and unseeing natural selection are the agencies of evolution these scientists have stressed. But it is unphilosophical to decide for evolution's planlessness without first paying attention to what Teilhard de Chardin calls "the Phenomenon of Man". The crucial question is: "Can an utterly planless universe be conceived as giving rise to so inherently planning an animal as Man, who is admittedly its highest product?" Is it not possible to think of an animal like man as the result of a hidden or disguised plan in the universe, which by being hidden or disguised would naturally create a large initial impression of planlessness? One has no right to make with a sweeping finality the choice of an alternative which seems highly improbable, while the other — which equates to the Aurobindonian view of an involved Supermind within the "Inconscient" from which evolution starts — is at the worst ingenious. As we shall see later, even
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scientifically the theory Mr. Alvares accepts for evolution's phenomena is under fire.
I venture also to query whether Dobzhansky can be lumped, without any reservation, with Simpson and Monod. Whatever be his look backward, his look forward is at total variance with theirs. And, quite unlike them, he is an ardent though not indiscriminate admirer of Teilhard and devotes the whole last crowning chapter of his most significant book, The Biology of Ultimate Concern, to the theme: "The Teil-hardian Synthesis."24 His attitude in general towards the future is best summed up in the words: "Modern man ...needs nothing less than a religious synthesis. This syn-thesis...must include science but it cannot be science alone, and in this sense it cannot be 'scientific'."25
The Teilhardian Synthesis ends with a vision of a convergence of human beings on a planetary scale in a sort of super-organism charged with super-consciousness — the famous "Omega Point" in which progressive evolution goes past "reflective" individuality to a "co-reflective" collectivity. Here the developing character Sri Aurobindo mentions of the successive creation becomes relevant to the issue of a planned or unplanned universe. Not that the development is in a straight line: there are zigzags, ups and downs, blind alleys, and yet we mark an overall advance. It is as if a plan leading to Man across innumerable hurdles were secretly unfolding. Mr. Alvares himself admits: "It appears that there has been a tendency in evolution for matter to assume increasingly complex forms of organization in a hierarchy whereby the more complex are assembled out of the less."26 How is this tendency to be accounted for? Mr. Alvares accepts it complacently, feeling no need for an explanation. But even so anti-Teilhard a scientist as Medawar confesses:
We have...no convincing account of evolutionary progress — of the otherwise inexplicable tendency of organisms to adopt ever more complicated solutions of the problem of remaining alive. This is a 'molecular' problem, in the newer biological usage of that word, because its
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working out depends on a deeper understanding of how the physicochemical properties and behaviour of chromosomes and nucleoproteins generally qualify them to enrich the candidature for evolution...27
Elsewhere Medawar pinpoints the problem by speaking of "nucleic acids and the chromosomal apparatus" proffering "genetical variants...more complex and more elaborate than the immediate occasion calls for."28 On the very "level of the miqrosphere", where "the elucidation of evolutionary processes" is claimed by Mr. Alvares to go against Sri Aurobindo,29 we have a kind of nisus towards a series of successive increasing developments. The Aurobindonian alternative to the one which Mr. Alvares favours on the authority of Simpson and Monod is certainly more plausible.
Nor is it that apart from the spot of "finalistic" mystery here — albeit a central spot — everything promises to reduce biology to a science of molecules, as Monod would claim, and so to a special branch of inorganic physics. Everybody knows that modern physics has grown rather peculiar and is no longer such as nineteenth-century materialism thought it could rely on. But, leaving aside ultimate reaches, do we have a riot of reductionist triumphs in all its observable phenomena?
The biologist Barry Commoner, Director of the Center for the Study of Natural Systems at Washington University, St. Louis, is explicit in returning a negative answer: "The complete experience of modern physics does not support the precept — however deeply rooted this may be — that all complex systems are explicable in terms of the properties observable in their isolated parts."30 A prominent example is "superconductivity." No explanation has been found by putting separate electrons together. Superconductivity was explained by John Bardeen only by considering the interaction of the electrons with the pre-existing molecular structure of the metal.31 Here is a "holistic" approach entirely at odds with reductionism. Similarly, says Commoner, the property of self-duplication, which is "uniquely associated
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with the intact living cell", fails to be accounted for by "the properties of those separable cellular constituents, such as DNA, which participate in this process".32
The Watson-Crick "template" theory of DNA synthesis on which the notion of DNA's self-duplication rests — the theory which is the mainstay of Monod and thus of Mr. Alvares — has proved too simplistic in the face of accumulating evidence. Various elements outside its terms have become basic data, thanks to the researches of Kornberg, Khorana, Karam, Ehrenstein et al.33 Commoner sums up: "There is no known mechanism, apart from the unknown one which exists in the intact cell itself, which provides a specific co-ordination of these elements sufficient to insure precise replication of a complex DNA fiber, nor is there any good evidence that this has yet been achieved in vitro. It cannot be said, therefore, that precise replication of DNA, which is the hallmark of biological reproduction, is due solely to the inherent chemical capabilities of the DNA molecule."34 Rightly does Commoner title his article with the critical query: "Is Biology a Molecular Science?"
4
The Confusion about Entropy, Evolution and Supermind
Closely connected with the question of a divine plan of progress is the great play which Mr. Alvares, to show his acquaintance with scientific ideas, makes with the second law of thermodynamics which is also the law of entropy. This law expresses the observation that in energy-changes within a closed system more and more energy gets dissipated in the form of heat beyond practical use, thereby causing increasing randomness and disorder among the molecules. It suggests that ultimately the energy of our universe will reach a maximum of dissipation and disorder devoid of any prospect of "mechanical work".
Mr. Alvares's main theme here is the bearing of entropy
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on the future of evolution. But before we come to grips with this problem we may touch on a bit of fanciful philosophical naivete pompously paraded by him in the matter of entropy and time. He says:
...Time-sense is a primary fact of consciousness.
Time itself is not however a part of the external world, as Aurobindo believed. Change is a fact of nature. And biological change within our own organism is experienced subjectively in consciousness as time. Our human condition is firmly linked to the order of nature, throughout which there is a single direction of change. To the subjective awareness this is the direction of time.
The direction of time, or time's arrow as Eddington put it, we perceive from the operation of the law of entropy... This law...stands for a definite trend in the natural order. And this trend points to a direction in time.
...Of course, it is not suggested that the experiencing subject recognizes his internal change as change of entropy, but that change which is so characterized in the language of physical science is what underlies temporality as a fact of consciousness.35
It is most curious how Mr. Alvares fails to perceive that in noting the dissipation of energy the physicist has to remember the order in which he took the readings of his thermometer. He has to know which record was "before" and which "after", for the purpose of detecting the increase of entropy in what appears to be an irreversible direction.36 To be aware of "before" and "after" in the study of entropy is to be aware not of spatial positions but of temporal ones, what is "earlier" and "later" in time. This sequence which cannot be reversed in any particular context gives us an irreversible temporal direction, "time's arrow". Entropy can be found to increase only as time proceeds uni-directionally in the universe independently of entropy-increase.
The uni-directional time-factor is always involved in every exposition of the law of entropy. Thus Isaac Asimov tells us that the briefest way he knows to state the first and
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second laws of thermodynamics is: "In any closed system the total energy-content remains constant while the entropy continually increases with time."37
The given-ness of time is also accepted by Eddington: "Progress of time introduces more and more of the random element into the constitution of the world"38 — "Like other physical quantities time enters [our consciousness]...as a particular measurable relation between events in the outside world..."39 The sole thing Eddington does not grant is that objective time enters our consciousness with an arrow. He differentiates time's "duration" from its "going on" which he associates with increase of entropy.40 What he overlooks is that time has still its "before" and "after", "earlier" and "later", to indicate its irreversible uni-directionality, its intrinsic arrow.
Even Mr. Alvares indirectly discloses this character of time when he says: "...Mankind and history must one day find an end, if the law of entropy follows its rigorous course."41 The implication is that entropy will reach its maximum at some point of time enormously "after' or "later": this is the oblique suggestion in Mr. Alvares's "one day".
If time has an intrinsic arrow in the sphere of what he calls "nature" and "change", it is absurd to propose that entropy-increase within our organism underlies temporality as a fact of consciousness. Subjective time consists essentially of an experienced movement in the present away from the past towards the future. This movement, for all its difference from objective time, shares with it a perception of "before" and "after", "earlier" and "later" and it continuously causes an inner sense of change as the present keeps handing over its character to the past and assumes a new one. Change is already a part of subjective time and is not confined to the physical world. Also, even more than there, entropy is irrelevant here where the uni-directionality of time is an immediate datum of our inner life.
Mr. Alvares comes a cropper at all points. What one can
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really say is not that the trend of entropy constitutes or determines time's arrow but that it makes us see an already existent arrow of time in a special light.
Turning to evolution Mr. Alvares sees Sri Aurobindo as bypassing the law of entropy and not realising that it is a brake to his ideal of human beings evolved beyond themselves and transformed into supramental ones leading a collective divine life on earth of unity-in-diversity and illumined dynamism. How it could be a brake is not quite clear. Is it because such a life would mark a supreme height of energy-organization and thus flout the second law of thermodynamics? Or does a supramental fulfilment assort ill with a world which must entropically end "not with a bang but with a whimper"? In our opinion, Mr. Alvares has completely confused the relevance of entropy to evolution and Supermind.
The amount of available energy for evolutionary and transformative use may be diminishing, but surely for a very long time a good deal will be to hand. It is not after the prophesied "heat-death" of the universe that Sri Aurobindo's "gnostic beings" are envisaged as developing out of us by human aspiration and the response of divine grace. Long before the anticipated low-temperature dead-end the involved Supermind will have evolved in co-operation with the free descending Supermind. And the evolution of something beyond the mind is warranted by the very tendency Mr. Alvares has admitted for matter in evolution to assume increasingly complex forms of organization. His own intended argument here is that, with this tendency before us, there is no "logical or empirical need" to posit an involved Supermind for any evolutionary rise.42 But indirectly his argument grants that both logically and empirically a rise in evolution like the advent of the Supermind may be expected anyhow. If so, surely something supramental can evolve in the future, like life and mind in the past, despite "the limitations put on nature by the law of entropy".43 To think thus is precisely to bypass entropy, as does Sri Aurobindo
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who never refers to it, in a survey of evolutionary progress.
The only difference is that Sri Aurobindo looks behind the "tendency" which Mr. Alvares admits. Scientifically, by virtue of the unity of nature, all that is manifested must be already present in some mode, however rudimentary or latent. Such presence is one aspect of the Aurobindonian "involution". Sri Aurobindo points out another aspect: "...if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is."44 In that case, we should accept the "Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind" — states towards which we are directed by "the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Immortality".45
The contingency that "mankind and history must one day find an end, if the law of entropy follows its rigorous course",46 cannot with its remotely far future stand in the way of the Aurobindonian super-evolution. And, if indeed "gnostic beings" come to be, can one say what they will do about the problem of entropy? Put an active Supermind both below and above the evolutionary process and you immediately imply a divine intention to manifest God from a starting-point which seems totally antithetical to Him. Be-cause of God's self-chosen adventure of that antithesis the entropic movement is quite in place — just as much as is the apparent lack of purpose in genetic mutation and natural selection — but cannot be taken as the last word for Heidegger's "being-in-time" by which Mr. Alvares sets much store. The whole biological history which science sees as a line of "increasingly complex forms of organization" for many hundreds of millions of years and which Sri Aurobindo reads as "the fact of a successive creation with a developing
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plan in it" is an index of a counter-entropic current. Not only is biological history irreversible on the whole, as Julian Huxley puts it, but also, as he stresses, the rise in the level of physical organization goes hand in hand with "the emergence and increasing organization of what we must call 'mental properties' ".47 Here we have an index to the possibility — nay, the certainty — of a triumphant divine life on earth with new organs and faculties supremely supra-phy-sical in power and therefore likely to be capable of changing the inexorable-looking second law itself of thermodynamics. A universe like ours, though seen running down in physical energy at present, is not necessarily such as to render a supramental fulfilment improbable as an event in the time to come or even as an indefinitely sustainable phenomenon of the future.
The law of entropy, let us remember, is an empirical discovery and carries no a priori validity. Eddington has argued, along with all other physicists, that if the universe is held to run down completely at some calculable future point, we must postulate a calculable point in the past when its organization was at a maximum.48 How did it come to be in that totally wound-up state? If entropy must always increase, such a state is impossible. Weizsacker conceives that perhaps our universe passes through a periodic round of world-beginning and world-end.49 A cyclic universe of this sort must imply at some epoch a framework even of purely physical events lacking the rule of the second law. Or if, with Eddington, we refuse that framework, nothing save a supra-physical power is left in to reverse that rule in toto.50
In any case, on the strength of the entropy-law we cannot negate a universe of the Aurobindonian type with a Supermind plus Sat-Chit-Ananda as its secret motive-force progressively manifesting itself.
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5
The Unawareness of the Problem of Life and Mind
Even apart from biological history's ascending gradation of what Teilhard terms "complexity-consciousness", the study of the living and perceiving organism has led a number of distinguished scientists to believe that there are vital and mental forces transcending physical ones. These scientists help to cast grave doubt on the Monod-Simpson picture of a planless evolution. Mr. Alvares is blissfully unaware of their existence.
Perhaps he does not bother to be aware because he declares, in connection with life and mind, that "there is no more any necessity to think of 'critical' points of transition" in the evolutionary process.51 May I remind him of Dob-zhansky's words: "The origin of life and the origin of man are, understandably, among the most challenging and also most difficult problems of evolutionary history. It would be most unwise to give a fictitious appearance of simplicity to these singularly complex issues....The flow of evolutionary events...contains crises and turning points which, viewed in retrospect, may appear to be breaks of the continuity. The origin of life was one such crisis, radical enough to deserve the name of transcendence. The origin of man was another.... The appearance of life and of man were two fateful transcendences which marked the beginnings of new evolution."52
Mr. Alvares's attitude is strange, since Monod, his master, although a materialist, is honest enough to notice a few eminent contemporaries as upholders of "vitalism". He first names Elsasser and Polanyi, then adds with some astonishment: "Even the great Nils Bohr himself, it seems, did not dismiss such hypotheses. But he did not claim to have proof that they were necessary."53 Monod forgets to include the equally great Erwin Schrodinger who went to the length of envisioning mind as the unifying and indeed
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unitary principle of all reality.54 We have also the famous zoologist Alister Hardy who has cogently argued even for a telepathic background to the psychic factor he demonstrates as constituting through "behavioural selection" the main evolutionary determinant, with genetic mutation and natural selection its blind-looking helpers.55
Further, there is Albert Szent-Gyoergyi, twice awarded the Nobel Prize (1937,1955), researcher in Monod's own field of molecular biology.56 On various grounds he supposes "an innate 'drive' in living matter to perfect itself" and humorously remarks: "I know that many of my colleagues, especially the molecular biologists, will be horrified, if not disgusted, to hear me talk about a 'drive' and will call me a 'vitalist' which is worse than being called a communist..." Not that he advocates a dogmatic vitalism but he repels the charge that he has been a vitalist "while the real situation was clear and simple". To him "many of the greatest problems of biology are unsolved, if not untouched" and "physics in its present state hardly allows the analysis of the underlying mechanisms" and "and we have to wait for the discovery of entirely new physical sciences till we can penetrate deeper into the nature of life." This is not a position built on "gaps" in knowledge, though gaps in plenty are visible. Also, "physical sciences" have to be there, but with the sense of an ultra-physical background by which the harmonious organizations typical of vital events acquire a true rationale and are not explained away in terms of what are in fact merely instrumental processes. Those sciences have to be newly oriented both in experiment and understanding. Seeing that Sidney Fox in Florida built protein-like substances without the intervention of living matter, Szent-Gyoergyi dares to cross the very borderline between the "inorganic" and the "organic" and write: "Maybe this drive is not an exclusive property of living systems, but is the property of matter in general." His last word actually is still more extreme: "Since I was not afraid to use the word 'drive',
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I might as well be even more audacious and use the word 'wisdom'."
Of course, mental phenomena are to Szent-Gyoergyi totally beyond the possibility of detailed physical analysis. Monod himself confesses about the mind-body question: "There lies the frontier, still almost as impossible for us as it was to Descartes.. .Brain and spirit are ideas no more synonymous today than in the seventeenth century."57 A few sentences earlier, Monod, though ever hopeful of materialism's triumph, candidly notes about "subjective experience": "Physiological experimentation has so far been unable to help us." Does the "analysis of language" give us help? Again, Monod confesses that this analysis discloses the subjective experience only after it has been "transformed" and "certainly does not reveal all its operation".
A whole troop of master-neurologists and cerebral specialists — Sherrington, Hinshelwood, Burt, Russell, Brain, Eccles, Penfield — can be cited as the support of Monod's negative statement on "physiological experimentation". They are at one with what Penfield writes in an article in the Spring 1974 issue of The American Scholar, drawn from his latest book, The Mystery of the Mind:
After years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain action alone, I have come to the conclusion that...it will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain.... The mind is peculiar. It has energy. The form of that energy is different from that of neuronal potentials that travel the axone pathways.
In fact, "mystery" to the extreme degree enfolds not only the mind but also in another way the mind's very instrument, the brain, making it outstandingly an "evo-lute" inexplicable in sheer neo-Darwinian terms. Hinting at a secret planning elan, one of the authorities on genetics and evolution, A. Tetry, has pronounced:
"It is hard to believe that such complex organs as the
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human brain really have resulted from purely fortuitous mutations. Complex organs introduce new elements, new co-ordinations and a different architecture and organization. In order to be effective an evolutionary mutation must adjust itself to the preceding mutation and occur at precisely the right place and time. Even large-scale pleiotropic effects are unable to account for the characteristic correlations and co-ordinations found in all living organisms."58
Thus scientific attitudes and contemporary world-insights in many fields are not so materialistically simple and single-tracked as Mr. Alvares pretends. They leave ample room for and even demand a vision like Sri Aurobindo's of the universe and man, in which one sole yet multi-powered divine Reality acts in numerous forms and modes, through changing degrees and designs, with various oppositions and interplays, by diverse disguises and revelations of itself.
6
The Muddle over Einstein
A favourite tactic of Mr. Alvares is to appeal now and again to Einstein's theory of relativity in order to castigate Sri Aurobindo for speaking of an Absolute, an Eternal, or even a cosmically manifesting Supermind. Mr. Alvares strikes me as having not the slightest glimmer of either Einstein's mentality as a physicist or the total philosophical "aura" of his relativity theory and his basic theoretical method.
Not that we can directly annex Einstein to religion or spirituality. He has plainly repudiated belief in a Personal God occasionally tampering with the cosmic process, and in belief in the survival of death by the human personality. But such beliefs are not the only possible sign of the religious-spiritual temperament. Even Buddhism with its Nirvana and Adwaita with its impersonal Absolute Brahman do not
subscribe to them. Einstein has acutely characterized his own
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stance in regard to such beliefs as well as to membership of any established church by calling himself a profoundly religious unbeliever. And, on the positive side, he has expressed his profound religiousness by his very commit-ments in scientific thought.
These commitments are wittily stated by him in a famous pair of epigrams. One is: "God may be sophisticated but he is not malicious." Einstein means by this that though reality may be very complex it has a structure of rationality and is not impervious to definite and objective formulation in causal terms. The other epigram runs: "God does not play dice with the world." Both the utterances involve a denial, by relativity physics, of the basis of quantum physics — namely, the unavoidable disturbance of reality by our measuring instruments and therefore the formulation of it in terms of probability alone. Because of that denial many physicists today look on Einstein as a "metaphysician", one who introduces assumptions which are not demanded by the pointer-readings on our measuring apparatus — the very type of "metaphysics" which in an older form he set out to banish when he threw overboard Newton's absolute space, time and motion. His ultimate attitude is thus more akin to that of Newton than Mr. Alvares realizes. And the kinship extends significantly to the free use of the word "God".
Mr. Alvares is also quite in error in believing that Einsteinian physics has rendered every concept of absolute reality invalid. He prates of relative space and relative time. Does he not know that science can never rest with relative quantities? Its whole quest is for absolute quantities. Science busies itself with two kinds of measurements: local, variant, relative measurements and universal, invariant, absolute measurements. What any observer records from his limited frame of reference is measurements of the former class. Science begins with them but aims at discovering what will hold for all observers: such measurements are of the second category. There is an Einsteinian universal, invariant or absolute and it is couched not in the old-fashioned linkage of
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three space-readings with one separate time-reading but in what Minkowski designated as the four-dimensional continuum of indivisible space-time — with a semi-Euclidean or "hyperbolic" geometry in the special theory of relativity and a "curved" Riemannian, instead of a "flat" Euclidean, geometry in the general theory. The perspectives achieved for both the theories can be gathered from Einstein beyond any misconception.
"According to the special theory of relativity," he writes, "the four-dimensional continuum formed by the union of space and time retains the absolute character which, according to the earlier theory, belonged to both space and time separately..."59 In the general theory, absolutism or relativism would result from the way we answer the question: "Are particles to be thought of as singularities of space-time or is space-time to be understood as a system of relations between particles?" Einstein's own trend of mind is evident from his assiduous quest to launch from general relativity into a unified field theory. Such a theory would give us a complete mathematical picture of particles as being simply regions of a certain "curvature" of space-time: we should have nothing more than point-instants of a single ultimate field. The theory of relativity, whether special or general, was to Einstein not only an exposure of the old physical quantities as relative but also a trail blazed towards a new absolute.
No doubt, "absolute" here does not connote quite the same thing as in philosophy. But we are in the same realm of mental disposition: we seek to overpass mere relativities, merely limited visions of spatio-temporal events. It is illuminating in this context to mark what Lincoln Barnett in his book The Universe and Dr. Einstein,60 to which Einstein contributed a foreword, sees when looking forward to the unified field theory: "the urge to consolidate premises, to unify concepts, to penetrate the variety and particularity of the manifest world to the undifferentiated unity that lies beyond." Barnett could not help discerning in that theory,
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which was Einstein's ideal, an affinity to Platonism: "More than twenty-three hundred years ago Plato declared, 'The true lover of knowledge is always striving after being.... He cannot rest at those multitudinous phenomena whose existence is appearance only'."
Along Barnett's line of vision, the fusion of time with space must imply that they are expressions, essentially alike, yet with a dual functional shade, of one and the same reality which is a substratum existing beyond immediate experience and appearing in that experience as relative space and time.
We seem to be in deep waters. If, as Mr. Alvares says, "the theory of relativity...is the most perfect representation of external reality available to us" for "the purposes of natural philosophy",61 we are plunged indeed in "metaphysical" depths. But the view we have taken is in full accord with Einstein's own mental bent. In addition to the pair of epigrams we have quoted, there are those memorable and penetrating pronouncements: "Religion without science is blind; science without religion is lame" — "the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible to our mind" — "Cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research". Einstein conceives of a secret harmony pre-established between a universal Intelligence and the human mind, a harmony creating the possibility for this mind to understand the workings of the cosmos.62 He has avowed himself a Spinozist,63 one to whom the pantheos of Spinoza — the rational Intelligence immanent in the world — is the God science must recognize. Does Mr. Alvares get the hang of such a statement? Einstein was not a practising philosopher, but Spinoza was, and the foundational implication of Spinozism is a single infinite world-substance with an infinite number of attributes, each of which is infinite, but only two of which our human minds can deal with: infinite thought and infinite extension. Spinozism is pretty close to something like an Absolute, though in pantheistic and not transcendental terms.
We are in deep waters too with the revolution in scientific
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theoretical method Einstein's discovery of general relativity brought in. Formerly the physicist believed he reached his fundamental axioms by generalization from observed phenomena through a kind of inductive reasoning. In the place of that picture has come the mode of mental activity which Karl Popper calls "hypothetico-deductive". A scientist builds a hypothesis (often resting on a "hunch"), then makes deductions from it and submits the end-product of the long logical process to an experimental test. Experiments decide the ultimate validity of the hypothesis: the hypothesis itself subsists in a domain which experiments do not directly touch at all. Since the validated hypothesis is logically demanded, however distantly, by the experiments, it cannot be rated even by quantum physicists as "metaphysical" in any pejorative sense. But, unquestionably, it has to a high degree a non-empirical status.
One may try to water down the starting-point of the theorist to mean "guess-work", but Einstein warns us against equating the theoretical effort to "idle day-dream-ing".64 A great ardour and rigour of the inner consciousness are needed. And when he asks the theorist to "give free rein" to the faculty which a carping critic might dub "fancy" he exacts "much intense hard thinking".65 The theoretical flight which leaps far beyond observed phenomena is best described from Einstein's own account66 as an act of free fiction or free invention or free creation of the mind.67 No wonder he could assert: "In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed."68
A creative activity of the mathematical consciousness, akin to the activity of the artist in the non-mathematical sphere, lies at the base of the Einsteinian method. The fundamental concepts of Einstein are compassed by a species of inner vision, divination, "intuition" (Einstein's own word).69 Somehow the mind at its acutest is able to have direct insight into reality, to be one with reality and know it from the inside, as it were, by getting a touch of merger with it. The oneness, the inside knowledge by a glimmer of
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identification, argues for reality itself a secret nature analogous to the mind. We could hardly be surprised then to find Einstein, for all his aloofness from conventional religion, subscribing to — as he puts it70 — "the firm belief, which is bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind revealing itself in the world of experience".
Here, on a certain level, we have a straight contact of the world of science with that of Sri Aurobindo.
Here light is shed also on the background of Einstein's indifference to survival of death by the human personality. When the body falls apart, the individual mood in the mental component would be gone. But the "superior mind" to which it had responded in its scientific explorations would still have the essential mind-stuff that had once formed Einstein's genius. In the information we have about Einstein's outlook on death a hint of his instinct of such a result can actually be traced. Boris Kuznetsov, Chairman of the International Einstein Committee, has recounted:
In Einstein's attitude towards death we find a certain synthesis of Tolstoy's sense of kinship with nature and the absorption in human problems characteristic of Dostoyevsky. When a visitor once asked Einstein how he would judge his life on his death-bed, Einstein answered: 'I would not be interested in such a question, either on my death-bed or at any time. After all, I am only a tiny particle of nature.'
He gave a similar answer in 1916, when he was seriously ill, to Hedwig Born (Max Born's wife), who asked him whether he feared death. 'No,' he said, ' I feel myself so much a part of everything living that I am not in the least concerned with the beginning or ending of the concrete existence of any person in this eternal flow.'
This awareness is not only of the eternal flow of natural processes but also of the eternal flow of human knowledge and activity.71
Above all, the awareness is a far-off touch of pantheistic mysticism's sense of the ever-living universal Whole that is
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the Spinozistic "superior mind" self-revealed in Nature. And in this touch, which is organic to the totality of the scientific posture of consciousness associated with Einstein, we have once again a sympathetic sign towards Sri Aurobindo's world.
7
Blunders and Slanders about Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and the Ashram
Sri Aurobindo's world, however, is not merely of speculative philosophy, of conclusions "we reach...by a process of thought, by abstraction", as Mr. Alvares opines.72 It is a world of spirituality with philosophical systematization coming in its wake. Immediate spiritual experience and mystical realization are here concerned. Mr. Alvares appears to be congenitally incapable even of asking whether any value can be attached to what William James broadly termed "the varieties of religious experience".
How, with such a handicap, is he to take anything Aurobindonian by the right end? For instance, he is puzzled that Sri Aurobindo, while giving importance in his philosophical scheme to the fact of evolution as discovered by science, refuses to bind himself down to any specific theory of the manner in which the evolution of forms has proceeded. Mr. Alvares waxes indignant that a stand like this would ignore even the theory advocated by Simpson and his followers. But, supposing science to have the final say, is the Simpsonian construct really the last word from its mouth?
An impartial survey in Science in the Twentieth Century tells us about "the so-called 'synthetic' or neo-darwinian theory of which G. G. Simpso has been one of the leading exponents":73 "...despite its many advantages and despite the mathematical analyses of Fisher (1930), Wright (1931) and Haldane (1932), the synthetic theory fails to account for all the observed phenomena." At the end of our section 5 we
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have already mentioned perhaps the most serious failures, those listed apropos of the human brain. Now we may place them in their proper order and quote the entire roll of the synthetic theory's failures and follow on with the general conclusion of the author:
Thus, it cannot really be said to explain the emergence of co-adaptation (Cuenot) or of 'tools' (Cuenot and Tetry) based on the mutual adjustment of two independent parts. And it is hard to believe that such complex organs as the human brain really have resulted from purely fortuitous mutations. Complex organs introduce new elements, new co-ordinations, and a different architecture and organization. In order to be effective, an evolutionary mutation must adjust itself to the preceding mutation and occur at precisely the right place and time. Even large-scale pleiotropic effects are unable to account for the characteristic correlations and co-ordinations found in all living organisms. No wonder, therefore, that J. K. Kalin has called the synthetic theory a kind of 'synthetic euphoria,' and that even such eminent members of the American school as Waddington and Olson have mentioned difficulties and raised objections.74
We are finally told: "In point of fact, none of the theories we have been discussing provides an entirely satisfactory account of all the facts of evolution, particularly of the emergence of taxonomic groups and of adaptations."75
Hence from the scientific viewpoint itself Sri Aurobindo would be justified in his indifference. Besides, we have marked how the factors set in prominence by the Simpso-nians can themselves acquire a different over-all meaning so as to accomodate non-physical agents: all depends on where the stress for explanation is put.
Centrally, however, what we have to understand is that Sri Aurobindo founds his perception of the evolutionary ascent of consciousness not on the current data of biology but on his vision of both involved and free Supermind. Science has provided a helpful milieu for his call upon man to evolve
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from the limited mental into the boundless supramental in consonance with the two earlier impossible-seeming harmonizations of opposites: the accord of apparently brute matter with sentient life and the accord of instinctive and apparently non-reasoning vitality with self-aware, nature-probing, value-questing, ever-aspiring intelligence. Sri Aurobindo is not essentially tied up with one explanation or another which science at the moment offers of changes in the organism and of species-development. Were science to deny evolution, his call to man would still go forth. But most probably there is an inner relationship between the modern evolutionist age with its emphasis on matter's configurations and the epoch of Sri Aurobindo's experiential philosophy of Supermind with its basic transformative drive, its world-acceptance and its demand for concrete results of spirituality on the material plane.
As for the problem of spirituality in general, we cannot but admit the occurrence of numberless inner "encounters", during human history, between man and what he has been convinced of as being superhuman or divine realities. Sri Aurobindo is fundamentally in the line of the seers of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and the world's other scriptures. If we are to run down those seers and later mystics like St. Francis and St. Teresa, Rumi and Baha-ullah, Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi as deluded fools, we needs must keep away from Sri Aurobindo. But all these mystics were, in a high sense, empiricists, practical masters, demanding that their followers subject themselves to strict disciplines, experiment in extraordinary experiences without the aid of any drugs and go beyond hallucination or even a flash-in-the-pan mystical moment to a permanent realization which would leave them calmer, wider, deeper, sweeter, stronger. As compared to mere philosophers, they would actually merit the title of super-scientists.
Sri Aurobindo stands in very commendable company and there is no cause to accuse him, as Mr. Alvares does,76 of inventing on after-thought an adesh, a divine command from
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within, to lend a halo to his abrupt departure from British India in 1910. Mr. Alvares pictures him as flying perforce from imminent arrest and deportation. This is a perversion of fact. Every student of the political history of those days is aware that by a timely astute article Sri Aurobindo made arrest and deportation impossible. Nor, as Mr. Alvares suggests,77 was it necessary for him to go into political exile in order to start Yoga. The experience of Nirvana — silence of the mind in the Absolute Brahman — is dated to 1908; the realization of the Cosmic Krishna — Vasudeva sarvam — came later in the same year during his detention in Alipore Jail; even the vision of what he afterwards was to call the "overhead planes" of "gnostic consciousness" began in prison. Of course, Mr. Alvares is free to look on all this as bogus, but he must at least get right his chronology of the bogus before leaping to certain historical conclusions or to "debunking" inferences.
And how ridiculous is all his talk of "The mystification of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother"78 to anyone who has come into touch with either of them! Whoever has stood in Sri Aurobindo's presence can testify to its wonderful illuminative and peace-creative effect. The same applies to the one whom he put at the centre of his work: the Mother. None of the prejudicial accounts Mr. Alvares constructs can make the slightest impression on those who, like myself, have been in long contact with her profound understanding of our nature, her guiding technique of fortiter in re, suaviter in modo, her happiness-giving radiance of look and gesture, her charmingly human blend of sympathy and irony, seriousness and wit. There was also her keen sympathy with the underdog, so that any servant could appeal to her over the head of his boss. Above all, no-one can ever forget how with her eyes and her smile she could produce an astonishing impression of beauty. Many of us perhaps carry this impression as our strongest and dearest memory of her. Possibly knowing this, Mr. Alvares has prepared that phrase which marks the nadir of his bad taste: "...when she died — this must be admitted
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— she was one of the ugliest women in the world."79 Another vulgar stroke is his joining hands with Morarji Desai in saying disparagingly that she "dressed in costly saris and used all the modern accessories of make-up".80 Morarji Desai, a prudish puritanical mind with old-world ideas of spirituality, cannot be expected to understand the Mother or Sri Aurobindo. The Mother was modern and had lived once in the finest art-circles of France. Sri Aurobindo was also modern and fully approved what she did. The "costly saris", however, were never the Mother's own purchases. They were people's gifts and the givers expected her to show her appreciation by wearing them. Sometimes, in spite of her exquisite taste, she put on somewhat loud clothing just for the sake of pleasing the devoted but indiscriminate donor. She had no attachment to anything. We can appreciate the non-attachment also when we mark that, contrary to Mr. Alvares's statement, she completely dropped "the modern accessories of make-up" after "the time of Aurobindo": there was no "later" for them such as Mr. Alvares insinuates.81 He shows himself irresponsible, carried away by what I have called his "blind animus".
He keeps suggesting that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo must always be split apart: "...no serious student of Aurobindo's philosophy considers the Mother's ideas as part of the sage's system."82 The word "sage" is a little odd in Mr. Alvares's mocking mouth; but surely Sri Aurobindo could be no sage at all if he, when he put her side by side with himself on darshan days for twenty-four years, failed to see as potential in her the perversity Mr. Alvares with a super-sage vision has been able to discern. It would be, on Sri Aurobindo's part, a more than Himalayan blunder to make her not only the heart of his Ashram's Yogic activity but also the cynosure of all aspiring eyes turning everywhere in the world towards his earth-oriented, life-embracing, time-fulfilling Yoga of integral transformation of bodily existence no less than of mind and vital force by the power of the Supermind which holds the secret truth, the perfect original,
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of all manifested modes. From day-to-day relationship with the Mother we knew that Sri Aurobindo had her in mind when he penned those lines about the chief character of his epic Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, lines beginning with an. occult yet vividly moving vision and continuing to a clear large play of luminous language:
Or golden temple door to things beyond.
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.
A wide self-giving was her native act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all that came
And gave a sense as of a greatened world.83
Mr. Alvares will most probably make nothing of this burst of poetic inspiration. He has a rare genius for not understanding heights and depths. But more marvellous still is his genius for misunderstanding even surfaces if they are a little unusual. I shall give one supreme instance.
Charging Sri Aurobindo with "megalomania", he writes:84
Such an attitude of general superiority is radically evident in Aurobindo's claim, for example, to have written the perfect poetry, the future poetry. The literary critic, Mr. Nissim Ezekiel, has mercifully laid that claim to rest. What could any critic do when confronted with passages such as these?:
'In poetry anything can pass — for instance, my
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"voice of a tilted nose":
O voice of a tilted nose,
Speak but speak not in prose!
Nose like a blushing rose,
O Joyce of a tilted nose.
This is high poetry but put it in prose and it sounds
insane.'
Mr. Alvares is convinced that Sri Aurobindo is dead serious here. But any reader can see what Sri Aurobindo is driving at. He is in one of his tomfooling moods, his warmly human bouts of humour. We have only to focus on that pun — "Joyce" — to realize the tricks the writer is up to. And, if we care to look up the context of this hilarious outburst, we shall gather at the same time how utterly lacking in a sense of humour is Mr. Alvares and how utterly absent is even a moron's perceptiveness in this self-appointed authority on literary style no less than philosophy and science. Here is the context, to which Mr. Alvares himself refers in a note.85 I wrote to Sri Aurobindo:
The English reader has digested Carlyle and swallowed Meredith and is not quite unwilling to re-Joyce in even more startling strangenesses of expression at the present day. Will his stomach really turn at the novelty of that phrase which you wouldn't approve; "the voice of a devouring eye"? "The voice of an eye" sounds rather idiotic, but if the adjective "devouring" is added the phrase seems to become effective. "Devouring eye" is then a synecdoche — isolating and emphasizing Shakespeare's most remarkable quality, his eager multitudinous sight, and the oral epithet provides a connection with the idea of a voice, thus preventing the catachresis from being too startling. If Milton could give us "blind mouths" and Wordsworth
Thou Eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, is there very much to object to in this visioned voice? In Sri Aurobindo's reply, the passage which Mr. Alvares has
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quoted came on the heels of the following:
Can't accept all that. A voice of a devouring eye is even more re-Joycingly mad than a voice of
eye pure and simple. If the English language is to go to the dogs, let it go, but the Joyce cut by the
way of Bedlam does not recommend itself to me.
The poetical examples have nothing to do with the matter.
Poetry is permitted to be insane — the poet and the madman go together: though even
there are limits. Meredith and Carlyle are tortuous or extravagant in their style only —
though they can be perfectly sane when they want.
From Mr. Alvares's presentation of Sri Aurobindo's laughing answer we can infer one of two things. Either Mr. Alvares is deliberately dishonest and tries to distort Sri Aurobindo or else he is a dunce of the first water. Here he seems to be the latter.
As for his ideal critic, Mr. Nissim Ezekiel, I would refer Mr. Alvares — if I could believe that he was capable of a lucid spell freeing him for a moment from his peculiar schizophrenia of duncehood and dishonesty — to the article, "A Cross Critic Cross-examined", on pp. 447-72 of my book Sri Aurobindo — the Poet.
I must close now, but not before I illustrate most clearly an act of deliberate dishonesty by Mr. Alvares. He tells us: The tiny town of Pondicherry is conveniently sliced into two residential units, a 'white' section and a 'black' section, by an 18-foot-broad canal called the Quai de Gingy. When the French ruled the roost, they occupied the white section and the local Tamils the other. The white section is bounded on the East by the sea.
When the French left in 1954, the Ashram and its inmates came to monopolize this white section (the buildings are all painted white)...86 Mr. Alvares distinctly says that white is the colour in which the buildings occupied by the Ashramites and standing in the old white section are painted. In itself the state-
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ment would be harmless and one may even surmise that somehow an impression of white was produced. But the subtle insinuation of his bracketed phrase is that the Ashram-ites are the successors of the once-roost-ruling French and have put themselves against the poor black Tamils whom the French must have despised and exploited. There was no need to specify the colour of houses except for the sake of that suggestion. The section was called white in the days of the French because white people lived there, not because the houses were painted white. Surely the other section was not called black because its buildings were painted black? A strong hostile hint is what Mr. Alvares is after. And its barb gets sharpened when in the course of his article he begins a sentence with: "The week I was in Pondicherry...."87 We acquire the sense of an eyewitness talking. Yet the fact remains that, from long before the French ceased to be the rulers of Pondicherry, the buildings owned by the Ashram and its inmates have been blue-grey and the houses rented by them brick-coloured.
It is possible that at some distance the blue-grey, acted upon by the sun over years, may look whitish in the exposed parts. But what about the unexposed parts and those buildings whose colour has not faded enough and especially the buildings which have had — as all do have at some time or other — their coat of blue-grey renewed? A survey of the several phases of one and the same colour, which is never pure white, must prevent one from making a statement like Mr. Alvares's. To make such a statement, in spite of the unmistakable varied evidence before one, is to stand convicted of deliberately distorting the truth.
Or else one is so careless an observer that one lets oneself be carried away by the whitish appearance of some houses and never uses one's eyes to make a correct all-round appraisal. The conclusions of an observer of this type, even if honest, are worthless and lead one to disvalue his testimony in other matters, too. If Mr. Alvares really believes all Ashram houses to be painted white, he is a poor witness to
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the state of the Ashram and of Pondicherry. But can we write him off with a bit of pity as an innocent myopic? Everywhere in his account of the Ashram's activities in the town he claims acuity of observation and judicial perceptiveness. Can we let him off here as having slipped somehow just in one place? This is hardly possible. For, having visited or at least looked at the main complex of buildings which is technically known as the Ashram, the complex within which there are the Samadhi and the house of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as well as the Meditation Hall, he could not have missed seeing from the Ashram gate a huge house diagonally opposite the Ashram block and painted yellow because it was not an Ashram property. (At present it is and has the typical blue-grey.) In spite of seeing it he could write that the Ashram has monopolized the old white section of the town. It should be obvious that he is bent on falsifying facts. How then shall we excuse him for the whiteness ascribed to the Ashram buildings? Here is a case of wilful mendacity no less than of pushing forward a minor aspect like colour with malice prepense.
Nor is it only one building in the old white section that was a non-Ashram property when Mr. Alvares paid his visit to Pondicherry. The Indian Government House and various Government offices, the Town Hall, the town hospital, the public library, the courts, the two biggest banks, several Roman Catholic institutions, the Institut Francais of Indo-logy, a number of non-Ashram hotels, several shops, many non-Ashram families both Indian and European — all these have been for years in the section "bounded on the East by the sea". To generalize that the Ashram and its inmates have monopolized this section is a gross exaggeration, a "terminological inexactitude", as Churchill would have ironically said, on a grand scale.
A third calculated inaccuracy is the glaring implication that no Ashramites or Ashram activities are to be found on the West side of the canal. Scores of followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have their houses there. I lived
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for 10 years on that side. An Ashram restaurant and guest-house are also just beyond the canal.
Neither is it in the least true that, as Mr. Alvares reports,88 all local people on the west of the canal live in "pretty gruesome conditions". Some of the richest Tamil families have their fine houses there. And can we speak of the long varied market place, which is beyond the canal, as all subsisting in conditions that are pretty gruesome? Mr. Alvares makes statements too sweeping for a week's tourist. Perhaps he could not find out enough. But then he should have held his peace.
About the East side, however, he has gone out of his way venomously to babble nonsense in order to put the Ashram in the wrong box. And this kind of "ulterior motive" creating mischief by twisting truth or withholding inconvenient facts is at play in different forms all over the article. I was present during many an event he reports and my direct testimony negates the conclusions he tries to draw. He has not attempted to weigh things in the balance: he has just run amuck. But his running amuck is actually no more than "sound and fury, signifying nothing" — "nothing" in a non-challenging and non-regenerative connotation that Heidegger would have been ashamed to have encouraged in this world of "being-in-time".
"Being-in-time": the expression is a most meaningful one to end with, for it is on the temporal existence that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother concentrated whatever perfection of Eternity, whatever power of Supermind, they could reach and draw earthward, hoping with their high and happy light to convert into Superman even such resistant material as Mr. Alvares.
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1."Sri Aurobindo: Superman or Supertalk", Quest 93, January-February 1975 (Bombay), pp. 9-23.2."Aurobindo and Science", Quest 96, July-August 1975, p. 71, col. 2
3.P. 17, col. 2
4.P. 20, col. 1
5.P. 19, col. 2; p. 20, col. 1.
6.P. 18, col. 1, fn.
7.As the note to a subsequent quotation shows. See p. 23, n. 23.
8."Heidegger, Martin", The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Editor in Chief, Paul Edwards (The Macmillan Co. & The Free Press, New York, 1967), Vol. 3, p. 463, col. 1.
9.Six Existentialist Thinkers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., London, 1951), p. 103.
10.The Age of Analysis
11.P. 20, col. 2.
12.The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3, p. 462, col. 1.
13.Ibid.
14."Heidegger, Martin", The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1975), Vol. 8, p. 740, col. 1.
15.Ibid., p. 738, col. 2.
16."Sri Aurobindo and Existentialism", The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, Edited by Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, 1960), p. 53.
17 The Radical Thinkers: Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo (California Institute of Asian Studies, San Francisco, 1969), p. 189.
18.P. 19. col. 1.
19.The History of Nature (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949), pp. 181-82.
20.Ibid., p. 182.
21.The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius by Gopi Krishna (Harper & Row, Religious Perspective Series, New York).
22.P. 18, col. 2.
23.P. 19, col. 1.
24.The Biology of Ultimate Concern (Collins, Fontana, London, 1971), pp. 108-37.
25.Ibid., p. 109.
26.P(Pelican Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1969), p. 117..
27.The Art of the Soluble
28.Ibid., , p. 89.
29.P. 16, col. 1.
30."Is Biology a Molecular Science?", Anatomy of Knowledge, edited by Marjorie Grene (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969), p. 90.
31.Ibid.
Page 273
32.Ibid., p. 91.
33.Ibid .,pp. 80-82.
34.Ibid., p. 81.
35.P. 20, col. 2; p. 21, col. 1.
36.Cf. L. Susan Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists (Pelican Books, Har-mondsworth, Middlesex, 1944), p. 195; also H. Levy, The Universe of Science (The Thinker's Library, Watts & Co., London, 1947), pp. 28-31.
37.View from a Height (Lancer Books, New York, 1963), p. 147
38.The Nature of the Physical World (Everyman's Library, J. N. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London, 1935), p. 84.
39.Ibid.,p,105
40.Ibid.,p.85
41.P. 22, col. 2.
42.P. 18, col. 1.
43.P. 20, col. 2.
44.The Life Divine
45.Ibid.
46.P. 22, col. 2.
47.Issues in Evolution, Vol. 3 of Evolution After Darwin, Sol Tax, Editor (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964), pp. 139, 112.
48.Op. tit., p.90
49.Op. cit.,139-97
50.Op. cit., p.91
51.P. 18, col. 1.
52.Op. cit., pp.45,59
53.Chance and Necessity (Collins, London, 1972), pp. 35-36.
54.My View of the World (The Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1964).
55.The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and Its Relation to the Spirit of Man
56."Drive in Matter to Perfect Itself", Synthesis (Redwood City, California), 1974, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 17, 21-24.
57.Op. cit., p,148
58."Genetics and Evolution", Science in the Twentieth Century, Edited and with a Preface by Renee Taton, translated from the French by A. J. Pomerans (Thames & Hudson, London, 1966), p. 447.
59.The World As 1 See It, Translated by Allan Harris (John Lane, The Bodley Head, London, 1941), p. 164.
60.A Mentor Book, The New American Library, New York, 1963, p. 122.
61.P. 21, col. 2.
62.Op. cit.,p.120
63.lbid.131
64.Ibid., p.180
65.Ibid.
66.Ibid., , pp. 134-36.
67.Cf. C. P. Taylor and F. Barron, Eds., Scientific Creativity and Its Recognition and Development (New York, 1963).
68.Op. cit., p. 136.
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69.Ibid., p. 135.
70.Ibid., p. 131.
71.Einstein and Dostoyevsky,
72.P. 19, col. 2.
73.See "Genetics and Evolution" by A. Tetry in Science in the Twentieth Century, p.446
74.Ibid.p.447,
75.Ibid.
76.P. 9, col. 1.
77.Ibid.
78.Ibid.
79.P. 11, col. 1.
80.Ibid.
81.Ibid.
82.Ibid.
83.Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1970), p. 15.
84.P. 15, col. 1.
85.P. 22, col. 2, note 9: "Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, Vol. 26, p. 315 (Centenary Ed.)." The correspondence originally appeared in the collection edited by me, Life — Literature — Yoga, Revised and Enlarged Ed. (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1967), pp. 157-58.
86.P. 11, col. 1.
87.P. 13, col. 1.
88.P. 11, col. 2.
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