THE
VISION AND WORK
OF
SRI AUROBINDO
SECOND REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION
BY
K.D.SETHNA
Publisher's Note to the First Edition
With the selection of K. D. Sethna's writings, Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture from Pondicherry, comes out for the first time in the role of a Publisher of books.
The twenty-two articles offered here have previously appeared either in Mother India itself or in other periodicals connected with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, except for the very last one which was included in an Aurobindonian symposium from America. Readers have, off and on, expressed their wish about several of them that they should be gathered within convenient covers. What has prompted us to carry out their wish at the earliest opportunity possible is a couple of facts that are, to us, deeply significant.
First, many of these essays, ranging as the selection does from the early 'forties to the present, have passed under Sri Aurobindo's own eyes and been approved by him for publication at the time. Some inkling of his attitude may be had from a comment on one, that has reached us. As was his wont with K. D. Sethna's writings, he must have pronounced on each of them, but unluckily all his words are not available. However, the single verdict that is in our hands is extremely encouraging. Of "Free- will” in Sri Aurobindo’s Vision he conveyed through his disciple-scribe Nirodbaran the opinion: "It is excellent. In fact, it could not be bettered."
The second spur to our publishing venture has come from the Mother who is the Head and Guide of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. When this book was suggested to her as the first one on our list, she replied to the author in words that could not but be emboldening:
Introduction
The Publisher's Note has quoted Sri Aurobindo's appreciation, for which no thanks can suffice, of an article of mine. Mention of this article may well serve as a starting-point for a few remarks on the general theme, temper and treatment the reader will find in the book.
The problem which "Freewill” in Sri Aurobindo’s Vision explores may seem fairly academic at first thought, but actually it is one of the most acute from the standpoint of practical action within a spiritual context. On it hinges the relation of what is felt as human responsibility to what is conceived as divine omniscience and omnipotence. To bring out its living concerns along with its metaphysical cruxes and put them all in a brief compass under the broad illumination of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of Integral Yoga was my aim. A like objective with regard to other topics has been followed in various ways at greater or smaller length in the rest of the volume. Everywhere the ideal is an interplay of light and life.
Then there is the question: "What readership mainly is here in view?" These essays were not always addressed directly to the disciples of Sri Aurobindo, though in one manner or another all are bound to touch them more intimately. Several were originally letters to individuals hovering on the fringe of the Pondicherry circle, and some spoke to sheer outsiders who needed to be informed of the profound experiment undertaken by Sri Aurobindo. In fact, all are basically written with an eye to the wide world ofinquiring minds and questing hearts. And thatsuch should be the case is in harmony with Sri Aurobindo's own position.
Sri Aurobindo stands for no narrow cult: he kindles a vision and initiates a work that bear on thewhole human situation, meeting its most central and recurrent as well as its most external and diverse issues. Man in every mode and field - the thinker and the scientist no less than the artist and the mystic - man individual and man collective - the modern breaker of new ground side by side with the heir of the ages - is Sri Aurobindo's material for probing and guidance. Especially is he concerned with man the conscious evolving agent and with the powers
within, around and beyond him that help or hinder his steps towards true Supermanhood, a transformative evolution of the entire nature rather than a glorified extension of this or that group of qualities.
To serve as effectively as possible the vision and work with which these pages deal, an attempt has been made - in the midst of whatever exposition or argumentation the subject chosen may call for - to write from a sense of concrete contact with Sri Aurobindo's many-sided spiritual personality and the radiant Presence, co-worker with Sri Aurobindo, that has Mothered, at once gently and firmly, the Pondicherry Ashram through more than four decades towards a momentous future. The adventure of a mysticism which takes in all the genuinely creative movements of the earth and seeks to establish on firm ground a new all-consummating power of the Divine - that is the cause to which this book is pledged. And the cause will go home best if in the writer's words there can come alive to the reader something of the reality of the two path-finders who have embodied it and lived it out.
K. D. SETHNA
Publisher's Note to the Second Edition
In response to the appeal of many Aurobindonians, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press has undertaken the functions of a publisher for the second edition of this book of K.D. Sethna's.
Prominent among those who have felt greatly helped by the clarity and penetrativeness and power of an exposition set in a variety of keys and pointed in a multitude of directions is Shri Gopal Bhattacharjee, Joint Secretary, Sri Aurobindo Society, In-charge of International Division and a Representative Executive Committee Member of the UNESCO (NGO) on behalf of the Sri Aurobindo Society. Shri Bhattacharjee had recently the extra-ordinary privilege to be invited by Sri Aurobindo’s own alma mater, King's College, Cambridge, to speak on his Master's life and spiritual message to humanity. Thanks are due to him for popularising, wherever he has been in his frequent tours abroad as well as in India, K.D. Sethna's work on Sri Aurobindo and thus rendering urgent the re-issue of the present book.
The author has taken the opportunity of this re-issue to add five new pieces. Four of them are the articles: "Waste in Nature", "The Goal and the Guide", "Linguistic Formations and Usages connected with the name 'Sri Aurobindo' ", "Sri Aurobindo and the Veda". The fifth is a short poem, "Mind of Light", which was appreciated by the Mother and to whose opening lines she paid the highest possible compliment from the spiritual point of view, as quoted in the introductory note to it.
Some of the old articles have been touched up here and there. One of them, "The Mother", has undergone considerable change in some portions in the light of events subsequent to its first composition in 1958.
A general new feature is that references have been supplied wherever necessary from the volumes of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL) published in 1972.
"I have no intention of giving any sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco."¹ These ringing challenging words come from the greatest spiritual figure of modern India: Sri Aurobindo. They were meant to refuse acceptance of what he called "a partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the law of the external nature."² Although originally applied to a particular crisis in a disciple's career, the surmounting of the habitual outer personality with its petty and egoistic ways of thought, feeling, character and action, they can be taken in general to suggest Sri Aurobindo's keen sense of the need for a new principle and power of spiritual life to solve the many- sided problem of man's imperfect nature.
To grasp what Sri Aurobindo stands for, we must first seize the significance of the phrase "spiritual life". Historical India has had no uncertainty about it. "Spiritual" does not mean merely "cultural" or, as is mostly the case today, merely "moral". Of course, spirituality has in its essence a supreme refinement and liberality as also an extreme honesty, purity, unselfishness and benevolence. Yet its essence goes beyond the values of the intellectual, the aesthetic and the ethical being. Even religious values - concerned primarily as they are with a set of dogmas, pietistic practices, modes of external worship to support and satisfy one's faith in and fervour for the supernatural - cannot be quite equated with it. It does not deny all these values, but it goes to the concrete experience of a more-than-human Reality hidden from us, a Reality eternal and infinite whose partial and divided reflections are caught in all that we ordinarily consider the highest humanity. Spirituality is oneness with or at least effective participation in that secret existence: it is for evolutionary man the act or state of what India has called Yoga. The word "Yoga" has the same root as the English "yoke" - it connotes the being yoked or joined or united with the more-than-human, the divine, the perfect, through a disciplined process of inner development.
This process is sometimes preluded by the practice of certain
¹. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 24, p. 1306.
². Ibid.
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extraordinary physical postures and breathing exercises. But they have never been considered necessary to the central object of Yoga. The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo starts straight with the consciousness and puts a double aim before it: transcendence and transformation. That double aim is in general all Yoga's, but much depends on the precise content read in it. In the past, the whole meaning of transcendence lay in getting beyond the ordinary human self into some aloof Absolute or some Cosmic Consciousness or some Oversoul that is this self's Lord and Lover. Transformation meant sagehood and saintliness, a calmly compassionate, wisely energetic and helpful living from within outwards, which brings others not only happiness but also touch of the transcendence achieved by the sage and the saint. The philosophy behind this spirituality has been either that the world is a huge illusion from which its victims have to be drawn away into an illimitable peace, or that here is a mysterious play of God with the soul around a theme of love's hide and seek, or else that a creative divine Force is sweeping the soul upward through various phases of effective self-expression to an ultimate identity with the Supreme Spirit above Nature. Ascetic quietism, ecstatic devotionalism, enlightened dynamism have been the three main strands of the Indian spiritual life. But the first has acquired prominence because of a tremendous trenchancy in it, its impatience with any kind of "make-do" with a world which, whatever the transformative influence brought to it, seems compounded of some stuff of radical and irremediable imperfection. After all, even the other ways of spirituality end up with a passing out of the world-scene, an attainment of a Beyond where alone is fulfilment found. A clean cut, therefore, between matter and Spirit has often struck the baffled aspiring mind of man as the most satisfying solution.
Sri Aurobindo holds that by such a clean cut nothing is really solved: the problem is shirked and shelved and, though the Nirvana of Buddha and the Absolute Brahman of Shankara are grand experiences that no aspirant to all-round spirituality can afford to ignore or miss the original Indian drive towards a many-sided harmony, towards an accord of the Here and the Beyond, is left uncompleted. At the same time he recognises that the means adopted so far for changing the earth from a mêlée of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, beauty and ugliness,
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strength and weakness, into a mould for the Divine's manifestation have been inadequate. The Yoga of God's enrapturing love and the Yoga of God's uplifting power have indeed a splendour which cannot be depreciated, they have unsealed great springs of idea and action; and yet they have failed to break the ultimate rock, so to speak, from which the full fountain of the Life Divine may leap. Philosophically, though they did not deny like the Illusionists the world's value, they overlooked three basic points.
First, the world is a field of evolution in which through a succession of births the growing inmost soul in us prepares three instruments - the physical, the vital, the mental - and unless these instruments find a perfection of their own, there can be no fulfilment of the evolutionary scheme. Merely for a sojourning soul to develop itself and utilise them exaltedly for a while and then, discarding them as incapable of entire divinisation, pass on beyond is surely to bypass the purpose of evolution. Together with the inmost being's growth into the Divine we must have the instrumental nature's completion if we are to appease the urge that has always found voice in human history - the mind's search for flawless knowledge of the world's dynamics, the life-force's cry for happiness and co-operative abundance and triumphant activity, the body's passion for health, stability, continuance. Transformation must signify the perfecting of our nature-parts to the full, a total conquest of the difficulties with which evolution is beset, the establishment of a divinised mind, a divinised life-force, a divinised body - a spiritual victory in the very field that is the concern of science. The Yogi must prove to be the super-scientist. Then alone can spirituality have integral and utterly incontrovertible justification for earth-beings. That is the first point to be emphasised.
The second point is the rationale of the spirituality which is super-science. Is the required divinisation possible by the way things are constituted? "Yes," answers Sri Aurobindo. Evolution starts with a seeming opposite of all that we can imagine of Godhead: a vast welter of blind brute energy - insensitive, unconscious, amoral matter. Out of this arises the élan of life and out of life arises the activity of mind. Sri Aurobindo says that evolution occurs because the emergent powers are already in a state of involution within the physical cosmos. And the involution is the last stage in a series of grades downward - a
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devolution - from the supreme Spirit, a series in which plane of mind and life occultly exist between Spirit and matter. Forces of these planes press upon matter and enter into it to assist the push within it to evolve life and mind in material terms. The supreme Spirit also has an involved figure of itself in matter and that is why there can be no ultimate satisfaction in earth existence without a straining towards the spiritual. Once the mental level has emerged, the inmost soul is able to function with some of its light in the forefront and, through the pursuit of ideals and values, through the ache for the infinite, the eternal, the deific, it helps its instruments, our nature-parts, in that onward and upward straining. But since the Spirit is not only beyond but even here - and here not only as a Cosmic Consciousness containing and enveloping all but also as an entity hidden in the very atoms of the physical universe and progressively active in the stuff of life and mind - its outflowering in our nature-parts must be possible and the liberating touch and penetration from the Spirit's uninvolved status above can be no alien intrusion but God's coming into His own through an evolutionary process. Divinisation of mind and life and body can be accomplished only if there is a fundamental identity of substance between the higher and the lower: that is, if the lower is a particular phenomenal organisation put forth for working out some potentiality of the masterful infinite that is the higher.
Having seen what the spiritual goal of the evolutionary process is and how its attainment is grounded in the nature of things, we must get into conceptual focus the exact principle and power of the Spirit which provides the ground and goal. In Sri Aurobindo's view, the Spirit is the Truth of existence not in the sense of the Real as opposed to the unreal that is the universe of mind and life and matter, or in the sense of the Perfect that can never be found in the world's formations. Sri Aurobindo avers that if all things have come from the Spirit, there must be in the Spirit a supporting original of them. No doubt, the Spirit is an ineffable freedom from all that is here, it is not limited by anything, it exceeds all that we can conceive; but, while exceeding all, it does not negate all: of its reality they are phases and init must be the archetypes, the perfect patterns, of which all the formations of the world are evolving terms. Divine counterparts of mind and life and matter must reside in it, fully manifested in
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a flawless harmony in the Beyond and concealed in their fullness within the laboriously evolving terms here, the twofold presence of them constituting by descent and ascent a manifestation upon earth. Such presence alone, with its descending and ascending movement, can provide the exact goal and ground of evolutionary fulfilment, it alone can be the genuine significant Truth of the cosmos and of the individual centres through which the involved cosmic possibilities blossom forth. Sri Aurobindo calls it Supermind, Gnosis, Creative Truth-Consciousness.
The Aurobindonian Supermind is not an entirely new discovery. As early as the Vedas, there was the vision of it as Satyam Ritam Brihat - the True, the Right, the Vast - and it was symbolised as the Sun of Knowledge in the highest heaven. But either it was experienced in deep trance from which its whole import could not be transmitted or what was seized was its reflection in the several grades between it and the mental level - grades distinguished by Sri Aurobindo from that level upwards as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. On each of these levels the Spirit has an organised existence in which it is self-revealed, each carries something of which our universe seems a half-lit image-echo; but the Spirit's self-revelation differs in intensity from grade to grade. In the Overmind it is so intense that most yogis and mystics have hardly looked further, they have believed the ultimate omniscience and omnipotence to be here, and yet this greatness has not the secret of the total transformation. No more than grand hints and glimmerings of the Supermind have been caught up to now. If there had been a clear and concrete seizure of it, its precise potentialities in reference to the evolutionary process would have been gauged. The realisation of the Supermind's significance and intention, by a wide-awake union with its Truth-Consciousness, is Sri Aurobindo's contribution to spiritual experience. The systematic detailed exposition of them is his contribution to philosophy. And the direct application of them to the problems of individual and collective living in his Ashram at Pondicherry is his contribution to practical world-work.
These three contributions render Sri Aurobindo the most important influence for humanity's future, the spiritual India of history reaching its climax and giving modern times a stimulus of the profoundest creativity. Behind the stimulus was a versatile
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personality who could claim to be representative of both East and West and who seemed to hold in himself, like a greater Leonardo da Vinci, the seeds of a new age. A Bengali by birth, he was yet educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England, first at St. Paul's School, London, and then at King's College, Cambridge. Over and above using the English language as if it were his mother-tongue, he was a brilliant classical scholar who made his mark not only at Cambridge but also in the open competition for the I.C.S. by his record scoring in Greek and Latin. Fluent knowledge of French, Italian and German was another of his accomplishments. Together with his linguistic proficiency, close study of European history and institutions gave him insight into the whole heart of Western culture. On return to India, after deliberately absenting himself from the riding tests in the I.C.S. examination and thus getting disqualified for official co-operation with the British Government, the years that he spent in state service with the then Gaekwad of Baroda were used by him for literary self-development, mastery of Sanskrit as well as several modern Indian languages, and intense absorption of the culture of the Orient. A period of educationist activity followed. Soon he launched into politics and became an all-India figure as the leader of Bengal in the struggle against foreign rule. In eight years he changed the face of the Indian political scene: working with Tilak he fixed the idea of complete independence in his country's mind. Here it is interesting to note that India's Day of Independence, August 15, is not symbolically connected with any event in the life of Gandhi or Nehru but happens to be the birthday of Sri Aurobindo.
Three times in those momentous eight years he was accused of sedition, yet never convicted: on the most famous occasion of the three, when he went through a year's undertrial detention in jail and C.R. Das, the future leader of Bengal, appeared as his counsel and, by a curious stroke of fate, the judge at his trial was one Mr. Beachcroft whom he had beaten to second place in Greek and Latin in the I.C.S. competition, Rabindranath Tagore addressed to him a long stirring poem opening, "Aurobindo, Rabindranath bows to you." During his political career he began the practice of Yoga and rapidly went through the traditional spiritual experiences which had been considered the crown of mystic realisation. He pressed on farther in order to cure the
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defect which had rendered spirituality in the past, for all its gigantic achievements, incapable of altering radically the life of the race. In response to an inner call he left the field of politics and withdrew in 1910 to Pondicherry in French India for concentrated attainment and manifestation of the Supermind. There he was joined after a few years by one who in far Europe had been fired by the same integral aspiration and had proceeded on similar lines of spiritual experience. She settled in Pondicherry and became, at his express wish, the head and guide of his Ashram and the chief radiating centre of the new Light which he sought to establish in earth-terms.
In 1950 Sri Aurobindo, at 78, departed from his body-which was laid in a specially prepared vault in the Ashram courtyard after lying in state for five days during which it was testified by French as well as Indian doctors to be showing in spite of the tropical climate no sign of decomposition or even discolouration.¹ Sri Aurobindo's samadhi (resting-place) has grown a venue of pilgrimage. The Ashram instead of suffering a setback by his departure developed on the contrary a new intensity of spiritual life, as if the passing of the Master whom innumerable people had known by experience to possess supernormal power over even physical circumstances were a sort of strategic sacrifice in the interests of his own work. His co-worker whom the disciples have called the Mother was determined to carry on until the goal set by him would be reached: the beginning of a divine humanity, a new step in evolution as definite as the one from animal to man and not just an enrichment or enlargement on the same level.
The Ashram today is an organisation in which hundreds of souls - men, women and children from several countries - are being shaped to be the nucleus of the new humanity. It is a scene of varied enterprise, with engineers, doctors, craftsmen, physical culturists, sportsmen and manual workers no less than artists, poets, musicians and thinkers, trying to be the instruments of a novel inspiration. Sri Aurobindo's call is not to the wilderness: modern times in all their subtlety and complexity are accepted by him, for the spiritual life can be most fruitful only when it is organic to the age, takes stock of whatever is current, keeps in touch with contemporary problems and needs. Typical of the
¹. The author was himself one of the thousands of eye-witnesses to this phenomenon.
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modernity of the Aurobindonian Yoga is the insistence that the production of a few extraordinary individuals is not the object. A collective, a social transformation is wanted. And that is why the spiritual work, though unimplicated in politics, is never indifferent to the crises brought about in any part of the world by tyrannies that seek to arrest into a single-typed thought-fettered uniformity the many-sided evolutionary nature of man which can be fulfilled only by a diversity in unity, a freedom within co-operation. But Sri Aurobindo has always reminded the world that its dreams of liberty and democracy and international harmony cannot really come true unless there is a progressive inward dedication to the service of the divine Supermind which is the whole sense of his Yoga.
Here a few words would be in place about Sri Aurobindo's attitude to the scientific temper of modern times. We have already said that the Aurobindonian Yoga does not dissociate itself from the current and the contemporary. This should imply that there is nothing obscurantist about it. In fact it welcomes many of the mental qualities science has helped to cultivate. Sri Aurobindo's stay in England coincided with the heyday of scientific materialism. And, though he prophesied quite early that its negation of the extra-sensory and the supra-physical would break down by the very force of its own narrowness, he always appreciated the austere discipline, fostered by science, of emotion-free intellect which insists on putting everything to rigorous test, and he set an immense value on science's demand for tangible results of all endeavour and for building by evolution upon terra firma whatever heaven the idealist visions among the clouds. By what he criticised and what he approved he went to the core of the scientific adventure, cleansing it of all adventitious dogmatism and making its essential integrity and clarity and progressive this-worldliness one with his insatiable hunger for not only the surfaces but also the depths of Reality. It is this rare union of the scientific and the spiritual, each intensifying and completing the other, that finds expression in a letter he wrote apropos of an inveterately sceptical intellectuality like Bertrand Russel's as contrasted with the temperament which easily and eagerly believes or rests happy with lofty speculations. The letter begins:
"I must remind you that I have been an intellectual myself and
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no stranger to doubts, - both the Mother and myself have had one side of the mind as positive and as insistent on practical results and more so than any Russell can be. We could never have been contented with the shining ideas and phrases which a Rolland or another takes for gold coin of Truth. We know well what is the difference between a subjective experience and a dynamic outward-going and realising Force. So although we have faith, (and who ever did anything great in the world without having faith in his mission or the Truth at work behind him?) we do not found ourselves on faith alone, but on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives. I think I can say that I have been testing it day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane. That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse Forces who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer to the field of earth and Matter."?²
"The Field of earth and Matter" - that is the final objective of the scientist of the Spirit that is Sri Aurobindo. And to prepare in this field the requisite inner receptivity to the Supermind's Light in a comprehensively cultured and efficient consciousness, he had conceived an International Centre of Education in Pondicherry, with residential quarters for students and teachers from all over the globe. After his passing away, the Mother started to materialise the gigantic scheme. It was her aim to offer free studies in every accepted branch of learning. A unique feature is the intention to teach the different nationals in their own languages. But this Centre would not be just one more educational institution added to the hundreds of others in India and elsewhere. It would always have the Aurobindonian world-vision as its background. And this vision would be conveyed not only by study, in the higher classes, of the Master's own books like The Life Divine (the metaphysical structure of that vision). The Synthesis of Yoga (the exposé of an integral technique of spiritual progression), The Human Cycle (studies in the psychology of social development and the search for values). The Ideal of Human Unity (an analysis of man's political aspirations and of present-day social, political and economic history), The Future
². SABCL vol. 26, pp. 468-69.
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Poetry (essays on poetry in general and English poetry in particular, on the various grades and powers of consciousness finding poetic expression and on a new direction of poetic development under the stress of spiritual experience). Savitri (a blank-verse epic of nearly twenty-four thousand lines turning legend of the past into a symbol of the supramental transformation and variously exemplifying "the future poetry"). Over and above Sri Aurobindo's books which are part of India's most living and significant literature, as well as the illuminating publications of the Mother, what would convey his vision would be the constant presence of its very source - the new spiritual consciousness made dynamic for earth-use by him and the Mother and in process of establishment in their disciples. Thus the Centre of Education in its full development would be at the same time a great meeting-ground of the East and the West and a rich soil for the first shoots of a harmonised world in which the spiritual would not be cut off from the material, the outermost would be illumined with the innermost and there would not be in any form "a new edition of the old fiasco".³
³. The latest project for the birth of a harmonised world has been the construction of a new township, about 8 miles north of Pondicherry, covering about 15 square miles - AUROVILLE, "the City of Dawn", named with the suggestion of "Dawn" by the French "aurore" combined with "ville", the French for "city". There is the added indirect hint of Sri Aurobindo by the first component of the name.
Sponsored by the Sri Aurobindo Society, unanimously recommended by UNESCO, and directed by a voluntary team of architects and engineers from various countries, under M. Roger Anger of Paris, the town was originally developed for 50,000 inhabitants on a circular or concentric plan, with equal place given to the four fundamental aspects of man's activity: Dwelling (Residential Zone), Culture (Cultural Zone), Social Relations (International Zone), Work (Industrial Zone). Each zone must be in relation to the spiritual centre of the town which would dominate the architectural ensemble and serve as a constant reminder of the very reason of Auroville's existence. This "Sanctuary of Truth" and "Shrine of the Mother", amidst gardens surrounded by a lake, would be the point of Unity upon which the four fundamental aspects of activity would converge.
Auroville, in the words of the Mother, would be "a place where all human beings of good will, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world." To quote her again: "Auroville is the shelter built for all those who want to hasten towards a future of knowledge, peace and unity." - "Auroville must be at the service of the Truth, beyond all convictions, social, political and religious." It is a call to whoever desires to participate in the advent of a new race beyond the human level.
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Sri Aurobindo and the Philosophers
A LETTER
[This letter was addressed to the well-known English author, Paul Brunton, two of whose early books were at one time bestsellers bridging the worlds of popular interest in the occult and of profound thought aspiring to the Unknown. He twice visited the Ashram at Pondicherry and was deeply impressed by Sri Aurobindo and, for all his doctrinal differences, remained a great admirer. He and the writer of this letter struck up a friendship which carried on a correspondence for a number of years. The letter marks a middle stage in the happy exchange of ideas.]
The difficulties you have mentioned in the way of your seeing eye-to-eye with Sri Aurobindo in the realm of philosophy can very well be insuperable. All difficulties in that realm can be insuperable: if this were not so, there would be a universal consensus of philosophers instead of Aristotle at loggerheads with Plato, Kant going hammer-and-tongs at the Schoolmen as well as the Empiricists, Bertrand Russell spitting fire at Bergson. The spectacle, though extremely fascinating, is a trifle ludicrous too. Seeing that all these men possessing first-class minds cannot agree, one is inclined to think that the heat of utter self-certainty with which they fight is rather a defect. The history of thought shows that there is endless argumentation possible: the mind can take up any standpoint and plead plausibly for it. To philosophise is one of our instincts, but no philosophising can arrive at indisputable truth. Certain aspects of the ultimate reality appeal to certain types of mind or chime with certain types of experience — and these we erect into a system by means of logical reasoning which seems cogent to us but which others with equal cogency for themselves put aside as erroneous. The only system which is likely to be accepted in the long run is one which satisfies all the sides of our nature. The acceptance will not be merely by intellectual argument: it will be by a deep instinct which wants harmony and integration rather than the apotheosis of one side at the expense of the others.
You declare with Berkeley that we can know only our own
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minds and that what we call matter is really a form of mind. I shall not for the present try to argue against Berkeley. Any history of philosophy will provide you with the traditional counter-attack and the work of the neo-realists in our own day will show the modern technique. I shall not try, because it is pretty futile until your penchant for Berkeley is weakened: you will be able to argue back and the neo-idealists of our own day will help you to return the blitz of neo-realism. What I want to say is simply this: there is no sense of rest in the Berkeleyan philosophy for that in us which strives for harmony. It leaves something in us unconvinced, for, opposed to Berkeley, we have the very strong feeling that, instead of matter being a form of mind, mind seems often to be a form of matter. Most of our practical life is based on what appears to be the independent existence of matter. And when we ask ourselves: wouldn't matter be more amenable to mind if it were just an idea? - the answer makes us seriously doubt Berkeley's position. Matter does impress us as a power in itself which we contact by means of mind. Mind does not bring us perfect harmony and fulfilment: it struggles and gropes, it is not the master-magician of life. Nor does matter as known in practical experience hold the secret we are vaguely aware of. There must be something else. Matter and mind seem to be two forms of some other reality which contains the archetypes of them both, archetypes from which they have derived and deflected.
Only when the mind is stilled, there dawns a deeper and higher consciousness which bears golden within it the harmony we are hungering for. Yes, it bears it within itself, but for us to get that harmony we need profound progress in the supramental domain. The limitation of the whole superb school of ātman-knowers is that they stop with the pure infinite Self beyond our narrow human selves and make no attempt to realise a divine dynamic to replace the dynamic that is human and discordant. At most there is some light reflected in the ordinary workings of the mind - a degree of intuition comes into play - but where is the divinisation of which we dream? The mind must be completely divinised after being stilled and a new faultless activity initiated and substituted for the old stumbling one. Mind must begin to function according to the archetype of it which must exist in the ultimate reality and without which we would
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never feel in ourselves that urge for perfection which is the mainspring of all our mental life. But. can mind realise wholly its archetype without the other parts of our being doing the same? No: if, as experience teaches us, we cannot rest finally in mind and, for the sake of a harmonious sense of life, grant matter a separate status, we must strive after an archetype of matter too. Here also the perfection we are seeking cannot be got out of matter itself. Not by material progress - though that is useful in its own way just as mental progress is - can we attain the perfection our bodily being desires. Again we must tax the Beyond, the supramental which is at the same time the supramaterial. In that Beyond are powers that transcend Nature. Many Yogis catch snippets, so to speak, of these powers, but the real and final miracle to work on Nature is what Sri Aurobindo calls transformation - the utter divinisation of the physical body so that it becomes a form of the Consciousness that is luminous and immortal.
Remember that Sri Aurobindo's teaching is Integral Yoga. The word "integral" denotes the Aurobindonian search. Sri Aurobindo says it is no use denying that man is in quest of an all-round harmony of perfection. If that quest is a fact, there must be in the unknown depths of the Divine the secret of an all-round fulfilment. Once you feel this, you will not stress intellectually your differences with his teaching. He is not primarily arguing out a system. With his instinct towards harmony he has pressed on in spiritual experience. His is not an integral philosophy for the sake of philosophy, his is an integral Yoga, and all his philosophising is a statement in mental terms of what he has realised. The Life Divine expresses nothing except his experience, his realisation. Having attained in constant waking life and not merely in a sealed samadhi the reality which he terms Gnosis, he has but laid out in intellectual exposition what the gnostic consciousness is and what yogic possibilities it holds and what the results of its full descent into our earth-existence will be. Sri Aurobindo does not proclaim to the world: "Read my book and I shall argue you into my beliefs." His call is: "Read this book in which I have clothed in philosophical language my actual experience and if you feel in your heart the urge towards the integral realisation I have pictured and propounded, come to me and I will give you every living and glowing bit of it."
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The best way in which I can dissipate your difficulties is to ask you to feel in your heart that the essence of all our human endeavour is the thirst for perfection and that there can be no true perfection unless it is integral, all-round, top-to-toe. It is not very easy to have this feeling. In a weak form it can never be escaped. What I am asking for is not such a form; Iwant you to have it like a fire - keen and clear. In the path of it there is the whole debris of failure cumbering human history. "Man is finite, man is mortal" - this has been the cry through the ages. "Something indeed is infinite and immortal," the religions say, "but there is a residue of finitude and mortality which is irreducible" - and this contention is not based only on argument: it has behind it a lack of realisation. The great prophets have all striven to their utmost and come short. It is the concrete coming short in actual spiritual experience that has created the tremendous obstacle to a keen and clear recognition of the élan towards harmony. Yet the élan is there. "Thou art That", "Brahmaloka is here and now", "The Kingdom of God is within you", "I and my Father are one" - all these words are trying to let that élan find voice. The Vedic search for the Sun lost in the cave of Earth, the Vaishnava worship of the Incarnate Divine, the Word become Flesh of neo-platonic Christianity, the belief in the resurrection of the body - these too are the same élan seeking an outlet. And an outlet is sought in all our straining towards perfect beauty in art, perfect truth in philosophy, perfect law in science, perfect conduct in ethics, perfect health in day-to-day living. The mind yearns to immortalise its products and find means to transcend the limits of space and time, the body longs for blissful perpetuation, seeks it vicariously through the process of child-birth, ransacks the entire realm of Nature and of chemistry for the conquest of disease and for the elixir vitae. We are labouring to deliver some perfect all-embracing Godhead. Alas, we have laboured and failed, even Sri Krishna came and went without delivering the hidden Divine in a complete invulnerable form. Is it any wonder that we do not see keenly and clearly the hunger for perfection? It is natural that we should envisage it vaguely: veil on veil of disappointment and defeat has covered it. These veils have to be pierced and struck aside, so that the true secret may shine out.
If you hold naked before you this secret and contemplate Sri
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Aurobindo's teaching in its light, you will perceive how sublimely, how exquisitely, how accurately that teaching answers to every little nuance of the world's aspiration. If like a flame you enshrine it in your mind you will put yourself in the right receptive mood to follow Sri Aurobindo's philosophy to its ultimates. The Berkeleyan penchant, the scepticism about avatarhood, the shying away from the doctrine of absolute union will slowly dissolve and the intellect, inclined to move along new tracks, will fall into line with the Aurobindonian teaching. Does not perfection imply the human ascending to absolute union with its own concealed origin, the Divine? Can there be perfection unless the Divine descends into the human mould - and what in general is the Avatar except the most centrally creative of the descending splendours? Is perfection possible if the mind's idea and experience be the last word on matter and no evaluation be made of the material in terms of a supreme spiritual Consciousness? My impression of you is of a man of great mental plasticity and breadth, a man capable of meeting the challenge of many unknown directions: there is no blind rigidity in you to check any movement towards new horizons. I am afraid, however, that you have slipped into an overstress on philosophical pursuit and not kept the living relation advised by all Indian wisdom between philosophy and Yoga. You have thus not seen, for what it is, the philosophical process of The Life Divine and other writings of Sri Aurobindo. There is a mighty intellect in The Life Divine which we at once feel to be no whit less than Plato's or Spinoza's or Hegel's, but none of these giants was a full-fledged Yogi. Sri Aurobindo's intellect is an instrument used by a spiritual realisation: not one sentence anywhere is inspired by the intellect alone.
If the philosopher's realisation is poor and fragmentary, the philosophy will seem narrow in spite of the intellect being gigantic. In some respects Plato, Spinoza and Hegel seem very narrow, they do not cover our full sense of things: the cause is that each of them elaborated in terms of the intellect a one-sided intuition of a limited set of intuitions. The elaboration was stupendous, the root-sense of the real did not feed on wide intuitive experience. Even where, added to intuition, there is in philosophy actual spiritual contact with the unknown, we often get the impression of a narrow emphasis. Buddha and Shankara
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and Plotinus are powerful spiritualised intellects, yet their single-track extremism is apparent. Nirvana, the featureless Brahman, the absolute Alone are indeed grand and no Yoga can be complete without them, but as known and presented by the three arch-transcendentalists they cast on much of our life a blank of unfulfilment. Though they are grander than anything in ordinary human life, something in Nature weeps and weeps, the clinging clay of us feels torn, Mother Earth stands defeated and baulked. The hidden instinct of integral harmony is not satisfied, even as it is not satisfied by the mere vicissitudes of Time, however colourful and varied. Does Sri Aurobindo's philosophy strike us as narrow in any such sense? The trouble here is quite the opposite: Sri Aurobindo is too broad for most minds, he is too comprehensive, he posits things which seem too good to be true, too far-reaching to be believable, too gloriously integral to be realised by human capacity. We are led to say, "Yes, yes, all this is exactly as it should be, it is precisely what the age-old hunger for perfection and harmony wants, but can we really have the moon?" Sri Aurobindo's reply is: "That hunger in you exists because the moon is just what you are made for: in fact, you have the moon, you are the moon - only you don't know it. Do the Yoga which I have done and you shall know."
So, there is a twofold solution I offer to your difficulties. First, bring forward into the utmost brightness and with all its facets before you the fiery gem of our secret élan towards perfect harmony, so that you may move with ease along thoughts put forth by one who plunged into the Unknown with that occult diamond for his guide. Then across those thoughts reach out for the concrete spiritual experience, the actual harmonious realisation which the Integral Yoga of that master-explorer is bringing to the world's view.
Perhaps you will be disappointed by my letter, since I have not argued out in explicit detail Sri Aurobindo's position vis-à-vis the points you have raised. I am hoping that what I have written will attune you to the Aurobindonian note and automatically suggest the arguments. Even if the arguments do not arise of themselves and only some attuning is achieved, I shall be rewarded, for then my future arguing will go home more swiftly.
1941
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TWO LETTERS
[These letters are to the same English author to whom the preceding
one was written and they form a sequel to it.]
1
You say that it is not in the mind alone that endless contradiction can happen. I concur with you. It is not only philosophers who keep disagreeing. Yogis also take up positions poles apart from one another on the basis of their actual spiritual experiences. This is possible because reality can be spiritually experienced, no less than intellectually reconstructed, in various aspects. But we are naturally led to inquire what should be considered the ultimate truth of which so many aspects are possible. You suggest that to ascertain that truth we require a new faculty which you call "insight" - a faculty "which, if its possession is gained, will function in precisely the same manner in all persons." And you add the important remark: "Such a faculty was, I believe, used by sages like Krishna and Buddha."
Two implications I read in your belief. One is indirect - namely, that reality has been "insighted" in past ages and that all we can do is to repeat their performance: the new faculty is in fact old and is new only for those who have not developed it. The other and direct implication is that Sri Krishna and Buddha had the same insight into reality. I hope you will excuse me if to neither implication I can give a fervent Yea. I don't think that except on very general grounds we can speak of Buddha's insight and Sri Krishna's as the same. As soon as we probe into the matter we come upon a big difference. And the difference serves to indicate the line of progress which, despite my acknowledging the grandeur of past spirituality, I consider to be beckoning us beyond everything the past has achieved.
Buddha made an ultimate dichotomy between the world and reality. The world he regarded as an illusion to be discarded at
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last for a formless and featureless and impersonal beatific acosmism which he named Nirvana. Before the final dropping of the world there goes on a strange concomitance of reality and illusion, Nirvana and embodied nature. During that prelude Nirvana throws a luminous quiescence on our mind, vitality and body. Rather, since it is itself actionless, we should say our mind, vitality and body reflect the luminous quiescence of Nirvana. This quiescence means a lot of wonderful change in our nature - a change dynamic as well as static since our nature or Prakriti is a dynamism and unavoidably puts whatever light it catches to active uses. But the change due to Nirvana is not all that is involved in the Gita nor is Nirvana there the summum bonum. Though Sri Krishna in the Gita speaks of Nirvana - Brahma-Nirvana he terms it, suggesting a difference from the utterly negative shade given by Buddha - it is for him one aspect of Brahman, an aspect we cannot do without, yet not all-fulfilling. Brahman is Purushottama, the Transcendental Being who is not limited by His own static eternity and who dynamically manifests our universe and acts as its Lord. And Purushottama manifests our universe through His Para-Prakriti or Super-Nature. Super-Nature is marked out from Nature here which is a derivation or veiled play of it: it is that which is divine and has the power of divinising all that is below. Its dynamism is the perfect original of the lower one which is the sole dynamism Buddha deals with and which catches illumination from Nirvana. Towards the Supreme Being who is both impersonal and personal and towards His divinising Super-Nature we with our instruments of mind, vitality and body have to move by the Krishnaesque insight: in our experience in the cosmos we have to manifest them. The ideal of divinising the person in us and our embodied existence is involved in Sri Krishna's pronouncements as it certainly is not in Buddha's, for it is clear that in Nirvana there can be no divine counterpart of the varied complexity that is active in Nature.
In the works of Sri Aurobindo the ideal is brought out in its clearest fullness. His Yoga is founded on his experience of a Consciousness which, over and above combining all that Yogis in the past have known, holds the secret of satisfying and fulfilling on earth our whole embodied existence. Such a Consciousness seems to me, because of its integral character, the ultimate Reality - and "insight", therefore, is in my opinion developable
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with utter completeness only through the Aurobindonian Yoga.
The conditions mentioned by you for developing it are very good indeed, but, as formulated by you, are they not liable to appear somewhat one-sided, since they are, in your words, "a ruthless self-pruning"? "Only by this ruthless self-pruning," you write, "can we respond utterly impersonally to reality and not falsify it." One may suggest that self-pruning is necessary and impersonality is necessary, yet there is the fact of a diverse personality in us. By self-pruning and impersonality we rise above personality's defects, but, if carried to an exclusive extreme, they might throw personality entirely into the shade and move finally to submerge it in some Beyond which takes us for good out of the manifested universe. Personality is an important fact of our existence and for manifestation it is indispensable. It wants fulfilment in the Divine and not just to be transcended until it can be annulled. Reality must answer to its impassioned many-toned appeal. So, except at the risk of one-sidedness, "insight" cannot be developed by paying scarce heed to the essence of personality and to personality's complex richness. We must not grow bare in growing pure.
I don't think you actually mean "bareness" by your "purity". Manifestation to the utmost is not outside your path. Yet, I may say, your utmost does not reach far enough because you believe we can do nothing save ring appropriate changes of application on the spiritual possibilities revealed in the past. I do not wish to sound cocky. I have a deep reverence for the rishis and masters and prophets whose souls shine from the past like everlasting torches upon our troubled ways and I see that we cannot throw aside the core of their realisations. But I can't help seeing too that the evolution Sri Aurobindo is bent on accomplishing has no exact precedent.
Taking up the synthesis Sri Krishna made of the Yoga of Knowledge, Works and Devotion, he goes forward to a spiritual integrality exceeding even that splendid synthesis. He says that liberation is not enough; nor is it enough to let our embodied nature be influenced by the light of the Divine, not even the dynamic light that was displayed by the synthesis à la Sri Krishna. If everything came originally from the Divine, there must be in the Divine the archetypal truth of everything, a truth not lying idle in the Transcendental but ever pressing for
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manifestation. And the manifestation of it would be a divine person with a divinised mind, vitality and body. So Sri Aurobindo speaks of a descent into us of what he designates as Gnosis or Supermind as well as of an ascent to it. The descent will mean an embodied existence of a divine order in every respect and no longer of an order that is flawed by the human and the mortal. Yes, in every respect there must be Godhead and immortality: even our physical stuff must be entirely transformed! A new apocalypse is here beyond the visions of the past - divinisation has, in Sri Aurobindo's vocabulary, a novel significance¹ - and yet we feel that the unprecedented is most logical. Anything short of the Aurobindonian divinising leaves Nature without sufficient justification of her being: as an emanation of the Divine she must be capable of divinisation in every inch of her when her whole principle is a progressive evolution.
Because she is capable we have the thirst for perfection. The thirst has been recognised since the dawn of history, but up to now the integral logic of it has not been grasped. Until it is grasped we shall never be satisfied: always a clash will take place in our psychology and under various guises we shall have "the refusal of the ascetic" and "the denial of the materialist." No compromise will be lasting: every apparent equilibrium will collapse. For, there is an imperative in man's constitution driving him towards the spiritual integrality insisted on by Sri Aurobindo. Without our openly feeling that imperative, there will never be a common "insight" for all persons. How can we reach in the sphere of spiritual experience a common insight unless we envisage with unblurred eyes our total constitution's bedrock need? The bedrock need shows itself in our thirst for perfection - and the common origin, in God, of everything denotes the integral range of the need and the integral range of its satisfaction. You say you believe with me that the thirst for perfection is a pointer to its eventual slaking in the Spirit. But you erect a certain barrier: "there is," you write, "no necessary implication that this will be attained whilst we are here in the flesh and on a level of existence where everything is doomed, as Buddha points out, to decay and death. It is more likely to be done on a higher
¹ The novelty, of course, is not restricted to body-transforming. The latter is a sign of the utter integrality of the divinising process and the integrality extends also a transforming to mind and vitality beyond anything done before.
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level where such limitations could not exist." If you attend closely to the words "thirst for perfection" you will seize Sri Aurobindo's view. Can our thirst be for perfection if the cry of the physical being is left without an answer from God? Our physical being has its innate demand for joy, for luminous effectivity, for healthy perpetuation. These demands are summed up in the agelong quest for the elixir vitae. Can you ignore the intensity of such a quest?
The misery of an imperfectly constituted body open to attack on every side and gravitating towards dissolution is not due simply to our attachment to material things: it is due also to our innate sense of a great lack - a lack of what our body is hungering after. We try and try to appease its hunger. Blind alleys meet us everywhere because we do not turn to "the secret path" of mysticism for the body's fulfilment. Our failure leaves us frustrated: we may detach our attention from the failure but deep in our subconscious there lurks a brooding dangerous sadness packed with resistance to spirituality if spirituality finds no means to justify earth in terms of earth itself. Not to see in bodily life the thirst for perfection is to close our eyes to a mighty fact. To seek its appeasement outside the Divine is to keep groping for ever. To hold that it will never be slaked in the Divine is to give up aiming at integral realisation of Him, for that realisation must consist in His descent on all the levels of our nature as well as in our ascent to Him in the Gnosis. If we admit that matter has come originally from God and if we admit that matter cries out for fulfilment, there can be no getting away from the conclusion that our body can be divinised and should be divinised. Perfection would not be perfect without fulfilment on our level of flesh no less than on every other level.
By acquiescing in Buddha's doctrine of the doom of the body we erroneously take a present condition for an everlasting one. It is quite obvious that the body as at present inhabited by us decays and dies. But Sri Aurobindo discerns no inevitability of decay and death. What is the doom Buddha speaks of? Who or what has fixed the doom? The doom, to Buddha, is consequent on the body's being compounded of parts. The compounded lust fall asunder: that is his logic. It is, however, conceivable that a force counteracting the tendency of a compound to break up can hold together the parts indefinitely. It is all an affair of
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balance. The mere compounding need bring no decomposition and disintegration. So the real cause must lie deeper. The real cause is that no force in Nature is able to maintain the body for good, much less to keep it up at a pitch of perfect health. Must we accept this inability in Nature as final? We must if our attitude is, like Buddha's, illusionist. Buddha's logic is binding only if our attitude argues no support or archetype of the body in the Spirit. Give up illusionism and the logic crumbles down. Declare that it is the Spirit that has become all things immediately we unchain ourselves from Buddha's dictum. For then there must be, unknown to us, a connection between incorruptible substance of Spirit and matter's corruptible substance. Not only this, but, as the Spirit must be one-yet-multiple to manifest a multiple universe, there is a spiritual formation connected with the material formation that is our body. A spiritual body, whose substance and form are in absolute tune with the light and perpetuity that are proper to the Spirit, is all the time behind our unstable aggregate of elements and waits to manifest itself in it. Indian Yogas have often spoken of a causal body - kāraṇa śarīra - governing the gross and the subtle ones from its occult station above in the Spirit's ether. No complete descent, emergence and organisation of the causal in both the gross and the subtle were taught or methodised. Sri Aurobindo is the first to proclaim the necessity and practicableness of making the kāraṇa śarīra totally active in the open. When the substance, form, law and force of that body are brought into play within our present material being, there is no reason why our components, freed from their imperfections, should not perpetually hold together in unmarred health. We are mortal simply because we have not yet discovered how to make our body share in the Spirit's perfect and immortal consciousness. There is no radical gulf between that consciousness and our body, there is only an apparent and pragmatic gulf.
Everything depends on what power of being is in charge. The vital or mental power is unable to bring about a divinisation. Buddha's spirituality, though gigantic in itself, also misses the superb secret. Buddha looked for liberation from the cycle of births, not for divinisation of all that birth involves. The Vedic attempt to establish the Gods in our nature-parts, the Vaishnava attempt to incarnate the personal deity through the love-surge
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of the central person in us, the soul or psyche round which our personal nature is organised, and the Tantric attempt to render the Shakti, the Mother-power, of the Supreme effective in all our chakras come near to it. There has, however, been a general falling short both in idea and practice because the particular dynamism of the Divine which Sri Aurobindo names Supermind or Gnosis was never completely possessed - or, if possessed, it was mostly in the tranced consciousness and seldom in the wide-awake one. In Sri Krishna the wide-awake possession may have been there, but it was not directly operative: the directly operative dynamism was a secondary power of the Supermind - the Overmind. The Overmind is a global and not an integral truth-consciousness: there is in it a well-rounded harmony, on the whole, of the one-yet-multiple Spirit but in detail a penchant for multiplicity and hence for division, while in the Supermind a precise all-balancing and hence all-fulfilling harmony subsists both on the whole and in detail. Under the Overmind's rule we can grow divinised on earth to a considerable extent without being able to preserve ourselves from that outermost dividing-up which is the body's death. Under the sway of the Supermind there can be entire divinisation and no compulsive dragging away from it: we are free to cast aside what we have done, we are not bound to it but we are also able to manifest perfection and preserve it here and now. This capacity and that freedom are the goal of earth: they are the Supermind's prerogatives which Sri Aurobindo wants exercised. Sri Krishna in the Gita heads towards them without overtly disclosing them: while the Supermind seems to be his background the Overmind is his Forefront. If his forefront had been supramental he would have done what Sri Aurobindo has indicated for us today.
But the reason why, where dynamic operation was concerned, the Supermind stayed in the background is not just some individual defect in Sri Krishna. Buddha's a-cosmic extremism is also not traceable to merely a lacuna in him. There are universal Factors no less than individual: the stage of world-evolution, the Zeitgeist and the urgent need of the hour combine to colour the spirituality of leaders like Buddha and Sri Krishna. To deem them altogether myopic and incapable is a mistake, as it is also a mistake to deem them the ne plus ultra and forget new conditions and the new spirituality those conditions must demand. Sri
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Krishna used the Overmind dynamism and could not help doing so because the time was not ripe for the work of the Gnosis, especially on the body. Many ups and downs, many divergent zigzags had to occur before the time could ripen for the Aurobindonian Yoga. It appears that, among several factors, an age of Science had to emerge for such a work to be taken in hand. Nothing save a stress on the physical as blindly strong as at the beginning was Science's could help the psychological moment of an unusual task like laying the Spirit's touch on its old enemy and despised impediment, the body, for integral divinisation. Then there is the subconscious effect of Science's brilliant endeavour to see in the body the cause, function and aim of everything that we are: by. its advances towards proving all spiritual states to be material it also paved the way for a vision of matter as no utterly incommensurate contrary of spiritual states. Further, the development of radio has in a very impressive manner given the human mind a sense of effective wideness and of practical simultaneity of presence everywhere through a sort of physical translation of the Spirit's consciousness. As impressive in diminishing the incubus of unconquerable inertia and grossness associated with matter in opposition to Spirit is dissolving of matter into pure energy - "radiant energy", as the suggestive technical designation goes. Lastly, we have the admission that so far as the science of physics is concerned we do not require to know the nature of the entities we discuss but only their mathematical structure, the way they affect our measuring instruments; physics, indeed, reflects the fluctuations of world qualities but our exact knowledge is of their "pointer-readings", not of the qualities and as a result it leaves us open-minded as to what reality is. Developing out of this open-mindedness there are the celebrated Jeans-Eddington trends: what began as a tremendous stress on the physical has, in an important domain of Science, ended in a doubt in the mind of one scientific school whether the physical universe is its own explanation. The doubt does not remove the stress on the physical which is now an inalienable portion of whatever life-programme we may adopt, but it has robbed of trenchant finality the line once drawn between the actual spatio-temporal phenomena and the hypothetical mystery of God. In addition, it has suggested a change in our idea of Nature's laws. Both in Jeans and Eddington you will
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observe the disposition to consider the nineteenth century's "laws of iron" statistical and nothing more. So the obsession about decay and death is weakened and Buddha's "doom" for the body is found likely to be a statistical law, a generalisation from a large number of past and present cases rather than an absolute inevitability. Thus Science has by many routes co- operated obliquely or straightforwardly with Sri Aurobindo's mission. Apart from the scientific milieu the integral Yoga would be an anachronism. Apart from the integral Yoga the scientific milieu would lose its deepest rationale.
Living in that milieu and wanting to do Yoga, a man is bound to be restless and discontented until he embraces Sri Aurobindo's integrality.
2
It is a pity a genuine traveller like you of the via mystica does not follow to the full the finger of light Sri Aurobindo points ahead of us. Will you pardon my daring to suspect that the "critical intellect", which keeps you dissatisfied and which you wish to keep in action, omits to criticise certain magnificent spiritual philosophies of the past sufficiently and fails to interpret Sri Aurobindo with the requisite piercing through from words to their meaning? How else am I to understand the overweight you give to pronouncements of long ago which come from realisations apt once but not necessarily for all time and "the hurdle of anti-mentalism" you encounter in the Aurobindonian world-view with which you are in sympathy in several respects?
I have touched already on past spiritual systems. I should like now to figure out clearly what your "hurdle" consists in. You urge that metaphysical idealism has been held by a number of leaders in the mystical field and this not merely through intellectual activity but also through mystical experience. Your faith in it seems to be strengthened by Sir James Jeans's exposition of modern physics in his most important book so far, Physics and Philosophy. According to you, Berkeley's view of mentalism was a limited and imperfect one, only a beginning in fact, but a beginning in the right direction, which agrees with the trend of present-day physics.
When you ascribe anti-mentalism to Sri Aurobindo you are at
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once right and wrong. Right if you mean that he does not accept the mental consciousness in any form as the world-creator. Wrong if you mean that he does not accept consciousness at all as the creator of the world. Mind, to Sri Aurobindo, is not a synonym of consciousness: it is just one degree. Are you ascribing anti-mentalism to him by yourself employing the word "mind" broadly to signify consciousness and thinking he assumes for matter an existence outside consciousness altogether? I can quote you passages galore from The Life Divine to demonstrate that when a broad sense is read into the word "mind" Sri Aurobindo is not anti-mental in the least. Here is one: "The world is real precisely because it exists only in consciousness; for it is a Conscious Energy one with Being that creates it. It is the existence of material form in its own right apart from the self- illumined energy which assumes the form, that would be a contradiction of the truth of things, a phantasmagoria, a night- mare, an impossible falsehood." Sri Aurobindo is anti-mental only when the sense is narrowed. Correctly, the sense should be narrowed; else we confuse the issue at stake. I for one act the anti-mentalist with the narrow sense in view, and if I aver that the drift of Science is away from Berkeley I must be taken to mean not that modern physics thinks matter contains its own explanation but that, in the first place, it does not agree to Berkeley's foundational premiss - "matter exists wholly as a percept of our consciousness" - and that in the second place, the term "mentalism" or "idealism" is mal à propos in science as in philosophy.
On page 203 of Physics and Philosophy Jeans says that before mentalism "can be seriously considered some answer must be found to the problem of how objects can continue to exist when they are not being perceived in any human mind". Is it not evident that Berkeley's foundational premiss is negated by Jeans? And once it is negated, what remains of Berkeley? You will argue that Berkeley postulates the mind of God as that in which objects when unperceived in any human mind exist. But this is an arbitrary step on the Bishop's part. If our percepts are sufficient, God's mind is not required; if they are not, why choose God's mind rather than matter's independent externality? Berkeley's final conclusion flatly contradicts his initial premiss. Logically the conclusion should be solipsism: as Hume
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reasoned, we have no right even to speak of many human minds, we must reduce other human beings to the same status as objects and they must be deemed a percept in the experiencing mind: I who perceive am the sole mind: everything I perceive - person or object - is my idea! Surely, Science, assuming both the plurality of scientific observers and the common field in which they work, cannot hold any truck with Berkeley's foundational premiss: it cannot be dubbed Berkeleyan in its tendencies.
Can it be dubbed mentalist or idealist at all, even though in an un-Berkeleyan way? In my opinion, whatever holds matter's explanation cannot be described as "mentality" or "ideas" if by these things we mean, as we strictly should, either the contents of our own small consciousness or anything akin to their peculiarity on a large scale. I therefore maintain further that for Science, as for any other branch of knowledge, no mind of any sort can be the fons et origo of the universe. Science may be drifting away from materialism and it may be legitimately doing so, though the legitimacy is not granted by all scientists; nonetheless, Jeans is not justified in his mentalist inferences. Perhaps I am puzzling you by blowing hot and cold. Let me state my view in some detail, also glancing en passant at Jeans's philosophical position.
According to Physics and Philosophy, in order to explain what happens in space and time to the world of "matter and radiation" that we know, we have to construct mathematical formulas which are such that they imply a substratum in which our perceptual experience of matter and radiation in space and time do not apply at all. What kind of substratum is this? Jeans argues that since all mechanical models of it based on perceptual experience fail us and since the new mathematics is the only representation we can make and since this mathematics is mental, the universe's substratum is likely to be one of thought in a universal mind existing free of the phenomenal world but acting as the origin of it. To such an argument certain scientists retort by asking us to understand that the new mathematics is purely a conceptual scheme by which we connect phenomena and that to speak of its corresponding to any substratum-reality existing as a universal mind, is misleading: an abstract device within our own minds, correlating phenomena, is all that we can regard as existing besides those phenomena themselves with their queer character which puzzles the model-making
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engineer beloved of classical physics.
I do not want at the moment to cast my vote for or against the retort. My own point in the discussion is that, even if our present mathematics and the hypothesis underlying it are correct and serve as a sign towards an originative reality immaterial and free of the phenomenal world, it is hopelessly inadequate to consider it a universal mind instead of a consciousness higher than the mind. The universe's substratum must be such as would be able to produce the world of phenomena which we name physical, it must be able to hold the origin of matter and radiation in space and time. Jeans seems to think a universal mind fulfils this condition. You agree with him. Of course I must not forget you have mentioned not only Jeans but also mystics as bearing you out. Mystical evidence is certainly to be given importance. Yet I make bold to submit that if mystics have spoken of a universal mind as holding in its mental stuff a full and final origin of matter and radiation they have ill-chosen their language as much as Jeans has done. A simple consideration will elucidate my point.
Mentalism can describe a universal mind only by analogy with the nature of mind known to us. What is that nature? A universal mind would differ in many respects from the individual mind. Suppose we grant that, unlike the individual mentality, it does not labour under the defect of perceiving in matter and radiation an objectivity beyond itself, an objectivity which cannot be equated with its own perceiving. Would it even then be adequate? If it is still to be a mind and not a higher form of consciousness it must have some characteristic affinity to our mode of being, to something in our awareness of the subjective world if not of the objective. The utmost we can do is to concede the universal mind an experience of the so-called objective world as though that world were subjective to it, so that it knows objectsas its own stuff put out for play. In that case, as long as its stuff is mental, it must hold physical objects in the way we hold what we name our mind's subjective contents. As we develop and arrange and order our conceptions and feel them to be emanations of our own self, the universal or cosmic mind would deal with matter and radiation. But just as we are aware of a background of which our self appears to be a projection and our thoughts a semi-mysterious substance which we do not feel to be entirely
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controlled by us as our own, so too the cosmic mind would be conscious of a secret background and the physical objects which are its substance would be a half-mystery which it cannot master and shape to integral perfection. The cosmic mind would not escape the dim sense that it is working out what it receives from it-knows-not-where and that, while its working out is as if it were acting in itself and by its own right, it is being used by some power vaguely present behind it. Its own triumph of unity would be a harmony of arranged accords and discords - it would have an organised equilibrium haunted by an internal incapacity for a perfect ordering and out-flowering of things. As we individuals are conscious of depths unplumbed within us, of a check upon our subjective life from backgrounds unknown, of a limited sway over our own thoughts, of a bound to our creativity and our will, even so the cosmic mind must feel in its consciousness of matter and radiation as its own mental stuff an inherent absence of fullness and finality.
If we assert that there is no such absence we are talking of a status of consciousness to which it is illicit to apply the name "mind". An infinite consciousness, omniscient and omnipotent, limiting itself freely and without the least ignorance or incapacity, may be spoken of as mind in the broadest of senses, but then the term we employ loses all meaning. It becomes a synonym of consciousness in any and every degree. In the West the tendency to "mentalise" everything is habitual. But when we cast about to examine consciousness in the world around, we discern several degrees. The animal's is one degree, the plant's is another, the metal's as shown by Bose's detection of a power of response to stimuli is a third. We may generalise beyond the metal and say that a hidden consciousness resides in the atom itself. But it would not be proper to class all these degrees as mental: they are obviously sub-mental. On our own level we may conceive an extension, a universality. We may go on conceiving a diminution of many defects, but we cannot blot out every resemblance to the ideative stuff and self that is mind as experienced by us. Remove every shade of likeness and you will have only consciousness in common and nothing mental.
Indeed we may aver that the sub-mental is really the mental concealed or involved, but when we reach the mental stage and widen and intensify it to the furthest, do we come to the
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ultimate? Are we not obliged to overpass the mental frontier if we speak of an omniscient and omnipotent consciousness? Are we not compelled to speak of mind at even its widest and intensest as the Beyond-mind concealed or involved? I think we are, unless both psychology and language are to be amorphous and inaccurate. No mind, universal or cosmic though it may be, can possess the essentials of being the first and last reality. It must always be an intermediate light. No doubt, a universal mind exists and mystics have experienced it, but if they have not experienced a greater reality which puts it forth as an instrument, they have not found an all-containing, all-constituting, all penetrating, all-creative consciousness. Neither by physics, metaphysics nor mysticism can we ever hope to make mentalism adequate to a consciousness absolutely and ultimately originative of spatio-temporal phenomena from a poise free of constraint by space and time.
The cosmic mind can only be a particular mode of action adopted by a far superior consciousness which is spiritual and not mental. The principle of all mind is endlessly to divide and endlessly to aggregate: to measure off, limit and depiece, then put the pieces together and keep adding up to arrive at a whole. Evidently such a principle must be there for the Spirit to originate the physical universe of divisibility into infinitesimal units and diverse heaping up of those units to make objects. Evidently such a principle is also responsible for the ignorance which shuts us off from the Spirit's light, for ignorance means the fragmentation of the Infinite, in which the fragments stand apart, forgetting the Infinite that makes them one and striving to reach it by being added up. Division and fragmentation, however, do not per se cause ignorance. At their root, they are just the Spirit's self-play of multiplicity. As long as the basic unity is not lost, there is no lapse from knowledge. The dividing and fragmenting mind, therefore, is in essence a movement of the Spirit: the creative Gnosis, following its one-yet-multiple trend, brings about the divine archetype of mentality. In that archetype there is no ignorance, since the mind-movement is fully aware of itself as formulated by the Spirit and undivided from the Spirit. This mind-movement is not self-sufficient as would be by definition the universal mind which mentalism supposes to be final: it is part and parcel of a supra-mental reality. A new
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projection from the archetypal mind which is in union with the supra-mental blaze of knowledge is needed to render ignorance possible. That projection is the cosmic or universal mind - mentality unliaisoned with the omniscient and omnipotent Spirit. The lack of liaison does not affect the archetype with ignorance, it affects only the projection. Ignorance occurs when, though the archetype is aware of the mental cosmicity it has formulated as an instrument, the instrument becomes oblivious of the power formulating it, even as one side of a man's personality sometimes forgets the many-sided whole of which it is a portion and becomes exclusively concentrated in itself.
The ignorance that is ours would not be there without the cosmic mind becoming ignorant. Of course the cosmic mind is not completely ignorant, the complete ignorance takes place when a total plunge is made by the Spirit into a self-formulation at the opposite pole of its supreme knowledge. We physical beings are "evolutes" out of the total plunge: we rise, as the Vedic hymn of creation has it, out of a darkness that is wrapped in darkness, we are emergents from a sea of the "unconscious", a formidable abysm of black self-loss. So our ignorance is a special one. Behind our individual mentality there is a purer individualisation which is less ignorant, a standpoint of the cosmic mind. Experiencing that standpoint and breaking from it into the cosmic mentality we reduce our ignorance as much as we can without exceeding the mind-formula divided from the Beyond-mind. Yet the true knowledge is not there until the division between us and the Spirit is destroyed. The integral destroying is in the Sun of consciousness which is the Vedic and Upanishadic description of the Gnosis. There are lower grades of mystical experience in which, despite the division not being there, the dynamic use of the Spirit's knowledge is less intense, less luminous, less effective. It is these grades that mystics mostly attain, grades from the Overmind downwards to the frontier where the cosmic ignorance starts on that descensus Averno ending in the terrible catastrophe of the "unconscious" from which our world evolves. At even the lowest grade above that frontier something more intense, more luminous, more effective than any universal mind is attained. The first country of the cosmic ignorance is the universal mind itself, cut off as it is from its spiritual and supramental source. Consequently, I rate mentalism an error for its
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failure to look further than this mind and to discern as inevitable to this mind the vague feeling of a profundity and a puissance hidden behind and above.
I may, in justice to Jeans, remark that he uses the terms "mind" and "mentalism" about the universe's substratum when what he actually intends is, as he phrases it in one place, "a consciousness superior to our own". So my quarrel with him resolves at bottom to one of terminology. My quarrel would be of more than terminology if he were a Berkeleyan, which he surely is not in his present book, believing as he does that things in the universe "cannot be mere constructs of our individual minds and must have existences of their own." He differs from the materialists inasmuch as he opines that the way we can best understand in physics the course of events creates the likelihood of a universal substratum analogous in character to mathematical knowledge - that is, a substratum of consciousness. His argument may be right or wrong; but I agree with his central thesis about consciousness and differ only from his use of the word "mind" to cover "spirit".
I think my quarrel with you is also due to the same reason. If you drop "mind" and "mentalism" and urge that the physical world has no reality independent of and outside a basic consciousness, every Aurobindonian will shake hands with you and say "Right-O!" According to Sri Aurobindo it is a spiritual and supramental Gnostic consciousness that has originally emanated the physical world as one particular infinity of its multi-infinitied substance and force, knows it with complete identity both static and dynamic and is working out divine possibilities in what it has emanated as apparently the very opposite of all that is divine.
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[Adapted in places and slightly enlarged from a reply, during the
course of the Second World War, to the recipient of the three
preceding letters, this study was first published on the fourth
anniversary of the end of that conflict and subsequently reprinted
when Totalitarianism was on the rampage from Red China.]
Now that Hitler is past history we are liable to forget the true significance of those six years of sweat and tears and blood which were required to beat Nazism to its knees. And, forgetting it, we may fail to see how there can arise new threats which may really be of a piece with the terrible menace of that period.
The truth about World War II will not be grasped simply by looking at the material surface or even by examining the ideological forces at work. The New Order of Hitler, in the aid of which his Panzers and Luftwaffe went out to battle and the Gestapo and the Fifth Column of Quislings spread everywhere their tentacles, was not a mere man's conception. Its origin was occult, lying in the mystery that the world has always felt vaguely as the background against which the mundane drama is enacted. The truth, therefore, about it will best be seized if we consider the support given to the Allied cause from the very outset and all through its darkest hours by one who has stood in the modern world as the greatest explorer of the occult background - Sri Aurobindo.
The support was given with an extreme decisiveness that cut down to roots deeper than a difference between one human way of life and another, between even a human civilisation and a human barbarism. That extreme decisiveness coming from a master of spirituality like Sri Aurobindo pointed to a vision of Hitlerism as the archenemy not just of Britain's or France's or America's outer dominion and of their type of culture but also of all that Sri Aurobindo himself has made it his mission to accomplish. He saw much more at stake than a political, social or cultural issue. He saw an issue beyond the human, the growth of God in man opposed from regions occult to our normal consciousness. And he saw that secret opposition as the most colossal in history and not confined to a brief outbreak.
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Many people believed that Nazism would be a temporary phase and its enormities would pass and the true Germany automatically rise to the fore and there would again be lovely music and great literature and towering philosophy. Sri Aurobindo never subscribed to this sunny view. On the contrary, he held that Nazism, in the form in which we then saw it, was, in spite of its horrible ugliness, no more than a small and slight beginning of a darkness of which we had no idea! It was to him the spearhead of an all-out offensive from the Pit. Its success would not be a passing phenomenon which would exhaust itself and let human life return to its old way of understandablefrailties relieved by admirable strengths. Its success would herald the beginning of an age in which the diabolic would reign over the human and make the advent of divine forces impossible for untold centuries and render the fight for the Spirit, whenever the fight did manage to come, a far more difficult and doubtful Armageddon than anything we could know during those days. Nazism, in Sri Aurobindo's opinion, had to be struck dead: there could be no tolerance of it, no sitting on the fence comparing it to the savageries of past times and hoping for a swing-back to normal humanity.
From the occult standpoint, Nazism is the exact opposite pole to the Aurobindonian dynamic. It is no brief outbreak touching the superficies of material life or a few domains of it but an attempt at total supremacy because the Aurobindonian dynamic is also bent on an all-comprehensive integrality of effect on earth. Sri Aurobindo's spirituality is not a grand escape from life's riddle: it is a radical solution of it. If his work had been meant to be nothing more than a going inward and upward from the material plane to a hidden soul-status unborn and unmanifest, he would not have bothered about the Hitlerite colossus striding over mankind. Sri Aurobindo is for creating lebensraum for the Spirit here and now. And what is finally determinative of his being the upper pole to Hitler's nether is that he is for divinising the material consciousness and substance and form no less than the subtle parts of our nature - a transformation never clearly envisaged by the saints, sages and prophets of the past despite their intuition that the material world has come originally from the Divine. The Yoga of those saints, sages and prophets, even when not thoroughly escapist,
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would not be completely baulked if its function of manifesting the Divine on earth were checked or nullified, for its ultimate goal is still a fulfilment in some Beyond at the end of earth-life. But a unique Yoga insisting on fulfilment by an integral divine manifestation in matter itself and not proceeding to an unearthly hereafter, a Yoga aiming to lay hands on every side of us for the creation of a new race would have its bottom blown clean away by the triumph of Nazism. Conversely, if the Aurobindonian New Order were allowed to make headway, the powers embodying themselves in movements like Nazism would suffer definite defeat and their hold on earth be fundamentally loosened. So, against this divine march upon the terrestrial plane with the purpose of basing there for good the Truth-consciousness, there is the counter-march from the occult home of Falsehood to gain a permanent grip. Because Sri Aurobindo knew what he himself was luminously labouring at, he perceived in one flash the whole character and menace of Nazism.
To gauge that character and menace we must look through Sri Aurobindo's eyes at Nature and her evolution towards the Spirit. Nature on earth starts with an involution of the Divine, an immense "Inconscience". Out of this, life and mind and soul emerge, by slow purblind groping through the potentialities of life and mind and soul involved in matter and by a strong guiding pressure of these things from the planes above the material, where they have their own occult organised activities. Spirit and Supermind are the highest terms involved, holding in themselves the key to an entire fulfilment of all the others in a perfected physical frame. The difficulties of evolution lie, in the first place, in the pervading unconsciousness which is our base as Nature and the separative half-consciousness which crystallises out of it. These are undivine factors, posited at the beginning of a special form of manifestation of the Divine, the working out of a particular possibility, the possibility of the Divine's emergence from what seems at the outset the very negation of Him. But there is another factor at work which derives from beyond material Nature. This is not merely undivine: it is also anti-divine. The undivine resists by sheer inertia, the anti-divine by a various strategy of attack. And the attack comes from occult dimensions of being.
Behind the evolutionary earth-scene there are typal worlds
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fixed in a certain order and harmony of their own. These worlds are of darkness as well as of light. There is no progress on their own levels, they are content with their own types, possessing their peculiar nature fully expressed and deploying it in diverse fashions. But that contentment with full self-play does not preclude their desire to extend the play of their satisfaction from the occult to the material. They make the earth-scene their battlefield. And, as the earth-scene starts with an involution of the Divine, a concealment of the Spirit, the occult worlds of darkness find an easier role than those of light. "On the black rock of the Inconscience" they build their edifices with greater immediate success. That is why evolution is not only aeonic but chockful of studpendous setbacks, demolitions of half-achieved good, perversions of delicately established beauty. That is why man in spite of his Godward urge makes so little advancement and centuries see him but grandiosely shifting from tweedledum to tweedledee, remaining pitifully the same in his heart under all variations of outer form. That is why every truth gets twisted in the long run and becomes actually a species of untruth, religion grows an obscurantist blight and art a decadent saturnalia, philosophy a riot of sophisms, and politics a huge machinery for exploiting the many in the interests of the few. O so slow is the journey of the Gods! Always the path is clogged and broken by jagged masses of influence from mysterious worlds where brutality and blindness are the principles on which existence is founded in a non-evolving immutable mould.
Three kinds of beings dwell in the hideous harmony of those worlds. The Indian terms are: Asura, Rakshasa, Pishacha. In English they may be translated: Titan, Giant, Demon. Each has his special function. The Asura is a being who comes with great powers of thought, not a beautiful and systematic turn but a formidable vehemence of it. He has also great "moral" powers, he can be self-controlled, ascetic and chaste in his own life, a sort of inverted Yogi, but all his gifts of tapasyā he uses for selfish and violent ends. His aim is to pluck civilisation from the roots, destroy all humane and progressive impulse, regiment the spontaneous diversity of life into a ruthless movement of robots, drink the exultation of triumph by breaking with an iron heel the dreaming heart of man. The Rakshasa is a devourer without
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brains, the ravager who builds nothing save a pyramid of skulls. He ploughs up the world into a myriad graves and leaves it a chaos of corpses. He is pure greed run amok. The Pishacha fouls and pollutes all things, he is the wallower in dirt and the necrophage, the inventor of obscene tortures, the mutilating maniac. The Asura is the General, the Führer of the army of darkness; the Rakshasa is the lieutenant, the henchman; the Pishacha is the private, the storm-trooper.
They are no symbols or imaginary figures by which man visualises his own imperfections and evil instincts. Rather the evil instincts are the signs in him of the subtle presence of powers and personalities that have their habitat in non-human and preternatural spheres. It is because these spheres are of a perverse bliss in which the wry, the cruel and the filthy are hideously harmonised for ever to yield enjoyment, that man feels a pleasure in his own basenesses, an attachment to his crookedness and suffering, a reluctance to give up his blindness and lust in spite of all the misery his higher self sees and feels in them - a reluctance as if blindness and lust were things to be cherished, precious components of the life-drama, indispensable art-elements of the cosmic scheme. But man's love of the base and the torturesome becomes not just one part of his nature but almost his whole being when the Asura, with his attendant Rakshasa and Pishacha, so clutches human nature that it becomes one with that occult and rigid reality. Then we have an incarnation of adverse forces, the dark deities, and they shape out a collectivity, a nation, a State with the purpose of goose-stepping on the world and smashing the entire fabric of civilisation. Such a catastrophic invasion has taken place in our own times and with a thoroughness proportionate to the thoroughness with which the spiritual Light has sought embodiment and out-flowering.
Hence the last war was not like any other war and Nazism was not a recrudescence of man's ignorance but the attempt to begin a new era of changeless horror and terror, the most monstrous onslaught made from Preternature to found here the empire of Satanism. The human consciousness is well-nigh dead in those who embody the preternatural hierarchy - for the simple reason that the human has become as good as possessed. And because
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the possession is so extreme, the task of defeating the Asura and his band was both so imperative and so arduous. It is no wonder a large number of combatants as well as neutrals kept asking: "Can Hitler be defeated?" Yet the very enormity of the invasion called forth the hidden powers of Light from behind the veil. And though it is harder for the human instrument to be a channel of the Divine than to be a medium of the Diabolic, we must remember that the Divine is the infinite while the Diabolic is nothing save the immense. If the Diabolic finds an easier role, the Divine brings a vaster capacity - and slowly, step by step, the forces of Light were mobilised and trained and hurled against the foe. There could be no parleying, no compromise, no appeasement. The Asura cannot be converted: he has got to be broken.
However dimly, this truth was seized by the Allied nations. Churchill gave it the most dynamic push possible, short of direct occult and spiritual vision. When France lay prostrate and Hitler announced that on the fifteenth of August that year he would address the world from Buckingham Palace and the endless Luftwaffe over Britain seemed a goddess of winged victory for him, Churchill knew that there could be neither turning back nor knuckling under. Whatever his defects in colonial policy, he was magnificent under that day-to-day rain of high-explosive, and his instinct of the superhuman truth at stake marked him out as an instrument par excellence of the Divine in the war. In far-away India was raised a voice guided not by instinct but by a shining insight. Strangely enough, the voice was of one whose day of birth was the fifteenth of August, the exact day on which Hitler hoped to celebrate the death of all that mankind valued. It was the sole clear and clarion-like voice amidst a chaos of political quarrels that was confusing India's mind vis-à-vis the occult conflict which has made our world its stage. India, who had known God as no other country in the past, was weak, fumbling and hesitant, obsessed by her political animosity against Britain and oblivious of the wider and deeper call to which Churchillian Britain had responded. Sri Aurobindo stood alone in his sunbright seeing of the war's inner significance. He declared his unrestricted sympathy, his unconditional support - "no matter what may happen", as his own words had it in his
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message to the Governor of Madras in connection with the Viceroy's fund. At the back of those words was the whole mystical puissance of an integral Yoga, a puissance that worked secretly like a dynamo sending out world-currents, driving a vast invisible inspired strength into the armies and navies and air-forces ranged against Hitler.
When history-books are written, these armies and navies and air-forces together with the men at the head of the Allied governments figure large in them. The praise they get is amply deserved by their idealism, courage, perseverance and skill. But whoever understands the profound meaning of the war and senses the incorporeal clash of which it was the outer reverberation will surely recognise, as the active antithesis to the occult evil that threatened utterly to engulf mankind through Hitler, the occult good that promises to lift mankind utterly to the heights through Sri Aurobindo.
And whoever understands the war's profound meaning will also realise that Nazism, though defunct in its Hitlerite shape, may yet prepare a new attack and that it would be an error to regard all enemies of Hitler as having been children of Light. In the world of the Titan, the Giant and the Demon there are many principalities and the wrestle among them is part of the hideous harmony in which evil exists independently behind the earth- scene. Hence, against one principality trying to precipitate itself upon earth, another doing the same may be pitted side by side with the resistance-movement of evolving man. As soon as that principality has been crushed, those who were comrades because of a common enemy may break up and once again evolving man may confront man acting under the spell of the Titan, the Giant and the Demon. Some element of the anti-Nazism of the past may itself be dyed with essentially the same darkness. The future must learn to see behind the masks. The outward political structure may vary. 'There may not be any talk of the Master Race, of discrimination between white man and black or brown or yellow. But there may be an ideological colour that seeks to make all men "Red" and smear out from great slogans like "Equality" and "People's Democracy'' all their true and deep shade of meaning. The face of the same evil can show itself in different circumstances as Hitlerite Nazism or as Stalinist
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Communism. The deceptive exterior must be pierced and the one dreadful reality identified through a combination of four signs - the denial of a Godward evolving divine spark in man, the totalitarian freedom-stifling grip on the individual's mind and body, the acceptance of aggressive violence as basic to self- expression, the conspiracy to spread by all available means discontent and disorder in every country whose government pursues the ideal of political democracy.
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A LETTER OF 1947
I myself have gone through many of your doubts and waverings. I have none of them any more. I may not be able to dispel all your difficulties, but some remarks may be of help to you.
You seem to be struggling against three kinds of obstructions. The first is a fundamental uncertainty about the Divine's presence. This uncertainty cannot be removed by reasoning only. I dare say I can intellectually make out some sort of a case for the Divine's presence, but I cannot wholly prove anything. Neither, for that matter, can you wholly prove to me the contrary by mere logic. This should make you see that we are in a region where more than the mind's argumentation is of genuine avail. The mystical path and the mystical illumination demand a certain deep instinct to start you off and sustain you. When this instinct is strong and takes a central place in your being, the mind's doubt about the Divine's presence becomes ineffective and you are aware of that presence even in the most dark and distressing situations. To make the most of this instinct you have to turn towards somebody who has followed it in himself firmly and far - a Guru. Then you are enabled to go beyond a living faith into a living radiance, for you contact the soul in you that is always filled with the Divine. I can't say that such a radiance is very intense in me, much less that I have illumined knowledge or the supreme realisation. I am only on the threshold of the mystical life, but Sri Aurobindo has helped me to stand there and not fall hopelessly back. And he has helped me mainly by giving something of his own being, by casting on me something of his own atmosphere. Of course his writings have greatly influenced me, but I could not have properly absorbed their influence without my approaching him primarily for spiritual rather than intellectual aid - a direct touch of his own Yogic state rather than an indirect touch through a mental exposition or arrangement of his experience.
The first thing, therefore, to do if you are mystically inclined and yet have misgivings about the Divine's presence is to open yourself to one you feel to be a Yogi. Nothing else will truly and
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basically help you. And the emergence of the soul's radiance will also go a long way towards curing you of the restlessness born of the second kind of obstruction - namely, the puzzlement vis-à-vis the problems of karma and rebirth, death and after-death, the why and whither of the universe, the raison d'être of pain and suffering, poverty and destitution. Even if no complete answer is forthcoming at the start, you will have a profound tranquillity. The mind may go on revolving its problems, but you will not be upset by them - and nothing will make you deviate from the conviction that there is surely an answer even to the most baffling riddle. What is more, you will feel that since the Divine is there, it is only by getting into full communion with Him that the complete and satisfying solution can be arrived at, for the mind has not made the world or woven its manifold texture and so cannot grasp in an "interior" way its warp and woof. The Divine's consciousness is not like the mind, it is not divided from the essence of things but is aware of it by an identity because that essence is ultimately the Divine Himself. If there is such a consciousness - and we cannot doubt its existence once the soul in us has put its radiant finger upon our normal being - then evidently our perplexities can end only by our rising into it. The soul by itself is able to give quite an amount of instinctive understanding, but it cannot provide total knowledge. To get that knowledge vaster and higher realisations have to be won through the soul: the Cosmic Consciousness has to be compassed and the Transcendental Truth attained.
Here, however, I must say that the Cosmic Consciousness and the Transcendental Truth have many shades and grades. Various Yogis have given out of their realisations various answers to the enigmas that are plaguing you. These answers they have couched in mental terms according to the type and quality of their minds. As far as India is concerned, there are for example, Buddha's answer and Shankara's and Ramanuja's and Madhwa's and Vivekananda's. I have mentioned answers more or less philosophically expressed. Some have the character of philosophical intuition rather than philosophical intellection: those of the Upanishads. Others are a blend of the two: the Gita's. Still others have a symbolic poetic character: the Rig Veda's. Some have an air of homely wisdom and a species of commonsense-coloured depth: Ramakrishna's. Sri Aurobindo
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has an affinity, in the basic message, with the Rig Veda, the early Upanishads, the Gita and the gospel of Ramakrishna, though he brings in addition to the manner of the seer or the poet or the pragmatist a fully formed philosophical expression which can compare quite well with any in the past. The affinity I speak of arises from the many-sidedness which is present in the Rig Veda, the early Upanishads, the Gita and Ramakrishna's gospel. Sri Aurobindo is not inclined to make trenchant divisions and to erect an extreme into the whole truth. He is disposed to be comprehensive and global and not confine himself to a limited and exclusive intensity of insight. He favours no sharp cutting asunder of the Gordian knot of the universe's mystery: his is the attempt to unravel all the devious strands and show how each of them has a part to play and does not deserve to be ripped off suddenly and summarily.
An Aurobindonian does not run down any Yogi; he refuses, however, to be single-tracked. Ramana Maharshi, for instance, has a wonderfully luminous realisation of the Silent Self and all that he says is charged with its truth. Just because a man follows Sri Aurobindo, he does not reject Ramana Maharshi as a false guide: the latter has caught hold of spiritual Reality - but in one aspect out of many, an aspect that cannot be overlooked or left unseized but is not the sole one. If it were the sole one, a devotee like Chaitanya who is all absorbed in a Personal Active Deity would be a hallucinated fool. Even Buddha would be reckoned as misguided since, though he too was the apostle of a Supreme Silence and Impersonality, he did not call it the Self but named it Non-Being or Nirvana. The large variety of spiritual experience creates the presumption not, as sceptics suppose, that here is a field of hopeless contradiction and therefore purely subjective individual illusion but that here is some Reality which has a thousand faces and that individuals usually see one face or another. A many-sidedness and comprehensiveness and globality seem to be eminently called for. Those who have tended towards them appear to have got nearest the ultimate Truth-Consciousness. Sri Aurobindo goes even beyond all past realisation and expression of them, so much so that he will not reject any part of our nature as lying for ever outside the possibility of divinisation: even our most material being has, for him, a supporting truth or archetype in the Divine Reality and can be
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transformed by a descent of that archetype. If many-sidedness and comprehensiveness and globality are pointers to the highest Truth, then Sri Aurobindo by his super-synthesis, his absolute integrality, can surely be regarded as "more advanced on the spiritual path, more perfect, more correct, more enlightened than others". And it is not unreasonable to suppose that one who is such is likely also to give us the last word on sundry problems literary and artistic and philosophical and political and sociological, provided there is ample development in him of the literary, artistic, philosophical, political and sociological consciousness. This, of course, does not debar a disciple of Sri Aurobindo's from discussing matters with him and making suggestions to him. Sri Aurobindo encourages discussion and invites suggestion, for often a lively give-and-take of the mind the best means of preparing the right mental state for a formulation of the truth of things.
I personally find Sri Aurobindo's answers very satisfying because of their integrality: he brings into his vision all the aspects of a case and presses towards such a solution as would draw out the truths of them and combine these truths into a final light. His light is not exclusively of this colour or that, but like the sun's, a sovereign lustre in which the hues of the entire rainbow are held in an ultimate fusion. And with that light playing, the tone and turn of the reply, which you imagine an Aurobindonian giving when the undesirable phenomena of life challenge him, are impossible. I do not maintain my "peace of mind" by a reply like the one you construct for me: "Oh, this is quite simple and clear; this is due to that and that is the result of this; God is in all and all are in God; the world is the manifestation of the One in its process of becoming the Many; there is in fact no sorrow, grief, suffering, and evil but all is an appearance and the Inner Being is indestructible and eternal." Mind you, I am not saying that the reply you imagine is quite off the mark. It has a certain truth, though a limited one: what in it is uncharacteristic of an Aurobindonian is as much the facile form of it as the limitation of its truth. It seems to hail from a rather queer creature - a robustly optimistic Browningesque Mayavadin!
An Aurobindonian is not a Mayavadin nor robustly optimistic; he is a Yogi radiantly realistic: he does not brush aside obnoxious things with an easy wave of the hand and a cheerful shutting of
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the eyes as if by ignoring them he could prove them to be not there: he does know that the Inner Being is indestructible and eternal and that behind all the discord and distress the divine felicity abides and the divine unity reigns, but he faces fully the terrible surface of things and regards it as very real indeed though a reality of the surface and he strives his utmost to change and transform and divinise it instead of fleeing from it as if it were Māyā, an illusory appearance. No Yoga has the shallow Browningesque attitude - it may be optimistic, yet without minimising sorrow, grief, suffering and evil. What does Sri Krishna in the Gita say? "Thou that hast come into this transitory and unhappy world, turn thy love to Me." Surely there is no cheap cheerfulness here. Deeply and poignantly the misery of time is felt; but together with it is felt also the possibility of a huge and happy escape by way of love of the Divine, the Inner Being, the indestructible and eternal Reality. Indeed, all Yoga is radiantly realistic - even Buddha with his notion that all cosmos is an illusion recognises intensely the duhkha, the suffering of life in it, while dwelling with great exultation on the exit he has found from this duhkha. Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga is all the more realistic by not subscribing to illusionism in the Buddhist sense or even to the Gita's doctrine that though action in the world is never to be disdained as a revolving in a field of Māyā our true and final abode is in some supra-cosmic status after death has brought the God-realised soul its liberation from bodily existence. Sri Aurobindo is not content with substituting Līlā, or God's play in the world, for Māyā or the universal illusion of activity. Līlā too looks beyond, it does not offer a complete fulfilment here and now of the whole self and nature of us, it does not provide for total divinisation. And inasmuch as it does not, it stresses the Beyond as the goal and puts earth life into a minor place and tends to see it as less real than the Beyond.
Sri Aurobindo never stresses the Beyond at the expense of earth-life: the call of earth is to him as insistent and as real as that of heaven, and a final liberation into the latter does not solve for him the acute problems around us. Unless sorrow, grief, suffering and evil are accepted as realities that will brook no forsaking of them, the Aurobindonian cannot reach the con- summation of his Yoga. He must tackle them until they are changed and replaced not by a Beyond but by a divinisation on
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earth itself of earth's constituents. Yes, he is most realistic. At the same time, he exceeds all other types of Yogis by being most radiantly so, for he has the largest hope - the hope of transforming what others accept either only for the time being or as only part brightenable by the Divine's presence. He does not merely realise the Consciousness in which everything is for ever and unchangeably divine - God is in all and all are in God. He adds to it another vision and experience - God not only in all but coming out in all, all not only in God but bringing out God. This simultaneously implies for him an unflinching realism and world-labour on the one hand and on the other an unqualified radiance and world-fulfilment. And an Aurobindonian's reply to the challenge of an imperfect world would be: "Life is no simple scheme of events and it has many chequered passages: its intricacy cannot be explained away or its difficulty met on the cheap; the process of the One becoming the Many is hardly the entire rationale of a world emerging from the brute blindness of matter into the hungerings of life and the dreamings of mind; God's presence is indeed everywhere and yet in terms evolution He has still to be everywhere present; the world's essence is divine but the world's appearance which is undivine is no phantasm and it has not to be left at last by the ascending soul but to be transformed by the descending Spirit; the Inner Being's indestructibility and eternity are insufficient for me, the most outer being also must become a stuff that neither perishes nor remains a miserable victim to fate and chance and powers of darkness."
Mention of the integral divinisation which is the aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga brings me to the third kind of obstruction in your way. Excuse my dubbing this kind shallow and flimsy. Is it not absurd to prevent Sri Aurobindo from using the words "I" and "me" and "my" just because he has destroyed his ego and surrendered his self to the Divine? Why should his use of them point to any egoistic motive? All Yogis use personal pronouns for themselves - from the Vedic Rishis down to Ramakrishna. Such using is at times absolutely necessary for intercourse in the world of men. Besides, why do you confine the "I" to the ego? The ego is a particular formation in ignorant Nature; but behind it is the real "I", the individual soul. To ignore the individual soul is to make nonsense of almost every spiritual attainment, for
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if the attainment is real and not just one more illusion in a world of illusions there must be someone who attains something, someone who gets liberated from mortal bondage, someone who evolves and reaches fulfilment. Surely the ego cannot perform these acts; it is the individual soul which does so. And the individual soul is not, like the ego, the opposite of the universal or a perversion of the transcendental, it can open into them and be united with them, for it is the complement of the former and the delegate of a divine archetype of itself existing in the latter. When Sri Aurobindo speaks in terms of "I" and "me" and "my", he means the individual soul of him that has become united with its own archetype in the transcendental and embraced its own complement, the universal. A divine triad, with one member of it - namely, the individual soul - as the frontal instrument: that is what Sri Aurobindo the Yogi is. There is nothing egoistic in his employing that frontal instrument. And since the new work he is doing, the work of integral transformation and supramentalisation which none of the past masters attempted with full consciousness of its possibility - since this work is carried on by that frontal instrument of his own highest being, it is quite appropriate that he should occasionally employ terms with a colour of individuality in them.
Furthermore, who told you that it is the impersonal consciousness of the Eternal that works the transformation of the earth-consciousness? If the impersonal consciousness were the only eternal factor, there would be no personal existence anywhere: personality implies a divine truth of itself which is trying to get manifested in the earth-consciousness: a supreme Personal Consciousness is also an eternal factor and it is this that carries on the transforming process of which Sri Aurobindo speaks and this, whenever a special call for direct utterance is felt, can best utter its messages and its purposes through the incarnate Figure of Sri Aurobindo by words like "I" and "me" and "my": there is no incongruity in his saying, "My Integral Yoga." Your notions of individuality and personality strike me as very superficial: individuality and personality are not opposed to self-surrender and self-dedication to the Divine Mother nor are they destroyed by those gestures and acts; nor, I may add, are they incompatible, in the manifold and harmonious truth of the Divine, with a realisation of the impersonal infinite, the impersonal
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eternal. What is opposed and destroyed is the desire-ridden feverish fragment that is the ego - and the ego also is what is incompatible with the impersonal realisation.
I have tried to clear your mind. I cannot, however, be sure that you will find peace and light by my efforts. Mental aid in spiritual matters can be effective only if you want it to be so or if you are really open to conversion. There is in our minds a perpetual doubter doubting for doubt's own sake. Don't let him take possession of you under the guise of the genuine spirit of inquiry and the genuine mood of perplexity.
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Is Philanthropy Enough?
I have no doubt you are sincere in your desire to bring sunshine into other people's lives. This desire arises from something deep in our nature, but the form it usually takes is not true to the arch-image within. To outgrow our narrow personality and our self-absorbed consciousness is indeed a great aim; but we have to do this with the purpose of expressing no longer the mere human ego but the supreme Divine: we have to manifest in the world the ultimate Being instead of the lower limited "I". Now, the ordinary form this high intention dwelling in the recesses of our soul assumes is philanthropy - the extension of the consciousness not upward and then outward but only outward - a going beyond the ego yet not above it. Philanthropy is not a bad discipline provided love of fame does not motivate it; it can, however, stand in the way of a light that is larger still. I am sure you are not fame-hungry and so it is bound to broaden your range of consciousness; you must, nevertheless, fight clear of the fallacy that it is itself the largest light.
For one thing, where is the certainty that what we conceive to be good for the world is really so? The Grand Inquisitors roasted Jews and Protestants in the sincere belief that they were benefiting not only the world but even the souls of their poor victims! As Bernard Shaw has been at pains to explain, even Joan of Arc was burned with the most pious and society-preserving motives! Perhaps you will say I am choosing extreme instances. I have taken them to emphasise the fact that mere belief constitutes no guarantee of real good. Oscar Wilde has somewhere a prose-poem in which he describes how a man on being cured of blindness by a philanthropist ran immediately after a woman of the streets! One may act according to one's conscience or one's principles, but is there a definite proof, an incontrovertible assurance, that one is conferring true benefit on mankind?
How to define benefit? According to several modern sociologists, easy access to divorce and spread of birth-control are mighty boons; the Roman Catholics deem these boons the devil's own stepping-stones to an earthly hell. For an English-minded
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Indian, charity on Poppy-day was always a beautiful act; for a nationalist it used to be, for many years after the First World War, treachery to the motherland, since till a little before the second Armageddon the collection was made to help only English soldiers - that is, members of the dominating race - and not one pice went to the poor Indians who had fought to save both India and England. We are in such a welter of conflicting consciences and principles that to apotheosise one's personal idea of philanthropy is sheer illogic, whatever be the comfortable sensation one may get of doing one's duty.
What, then, is the way out of the welter? Only a divine consciousness can know what is truly good for the world: it possesses the inalienable truth of things, it keeps the secret certainties of the universe. So the sole endeavour of all true philanthropy should be to rise into that divine consciousness and become, by a perfect self-consecration and self-transformation, a clear channel for its work in the world. Then you begin to be a centre of real light, radiating an influence around you which is filled with the divine initiative, the truth-conscious impulsion. Then your actions are bent automatically towards the certain good which God alone can know: whether the results of your actions be beneficial in any conventional sense or not, you have the firm assurance that in being a pure instrument of the super-human knowledge you are carrying out the highest ideal, the truest conception of Good. There can be no room for error, no room for doubt, because you are manifesting an infallible Benevolence.
You will be tempted to retort that a yogi may be mistaking his own notions of Good for the supreme command. Yes, there is a palpable danger in being a half-baked yogi: many are deluded - but that is precisely why it is necessary not to plunge into the world-mêlée in a half-baked condition: one must keep a little apart until the full illumination has possessed one and there is no risk of spoiling the authentic Spirit-force. So if you feel, as you do, that you have received an imperative call to a Higher Life which you interpret as a call to serve mankind genuinely, I should advise you to be Indian enough to do yoga first - and what better place for such practice of perfection than the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo?
We are all sick souls, and even as sick bodies require a partial
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aloofness under medical care to get cured, so also our inner selves need a partial detachment under a guru to be able to recover their true health. This is just what is supplied by the Ashram-life. A curb is put on indiscriminate contacts, but that is no escapism. The Ashramites are not hiding in a jungle or in caves; they live in the midst of the world as really as the people in Pondicherry who do not embrace yoga. They move about in the same streets, eat sufficient and well-cooked though not sumptuous food, wear normal clothes and have decent lodgings: there is no external flying from the world in any extreme sense. They undergo no strenuous austerities, shoot up in no prolonged trances: while entering, with the Master's and the Mother's help, more and more into a vast inner light and joy beyond the human and the mortal, they live serious busy lives, do their daily work in the Ashram as if they were earning their own livelihood or else educating themselves, and have sufficient commerce with their fellowmen to keep aware of earth-realities. In what way are they "suspended," as you put it in your reference to them, "out of the world"? Well, they do not throw cocktail parties, they do not attend the Stock Exchange, they take no part in deceptive politics - and they do not indulge their sexual appetites. Nor do they intend to do so even when they feel that the sickness in the soul is cured; for, though more extended world-activity must come, to fall back upon the old unhealthy habits would mean courting disease once more.
Is that an irrational precaution? Are the things they avoid so valuable that for abandoning them they should be accused of flying from the world? If living in the world means liking its slush and slime, they are world-forsakers; but who does not strive to keep as much as possible out of such contaminations? If they have no taste for sense-excitements, are they to be regarded as "selfish"? If they control their passions instead of letting them be gratified, are they practising "artificiality"? You have expressed your doubt whether they live as God meant human beings to live, you think they are tending to be unnatural. But what is "natural" and what is God's ordinance for us? If the Creator whom you imagine to be arranging out things with finality put a man in a filthy slum, is that man not to try his best to get into a less hoggish way of existence? Would you call him "artificial" because he goes against "his Creator's will" that he
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should be born and bred in dirt and squalor and misery? If the Creator made a man a physical wreck because his father happened to have a foul disease, would you call him artificial if he endeavours to get rid, medically, of his Creator's gift to him of the rot in his bones and the canker in his brain? Why on earth should we do anything to improve ourselves or our fellow-creatures when the Creator has made us what we are?
Or perhaps it is your conviction that the manner in which most people have lived down the ages is the manner their Creator intended for them for ever and ever. But you must not confuse what has been with what ought to be. Every act of progress, every step of evolution is a going against the routine of the has-been: it is an outgrowing of old habits, a changing of Nature. New organs are developed, new faculties are formed by a refusal to accept the status reached and to acquiesce in what has seemed "natural". Truly speaking, the most unnatural thing is to remain what we are instead of falling into line with Nature's universal movement of changing from a lower level to a higher, giving up accustomed responses and reflexes, modifying both the physical and psychological organisation of life from time to time. Indeed, Nature is not to be wholly rejected, but we need not complacently keep to the path we have been treading: we must blaze other trails and attempt to contact the original hidden starting-point in the Divine for discovering what route is the right one and where lies our goal.
The fact is - we know very little of the Creator's wish and will; and that is what I have been hammering at in the first part of my letter. It is, however, extremely important that we should know His mind, for how otherwise can we act rightly and be His genuine instruments in the world? And do you think that remaining in the crude rut of normal desire tends to a deeper union with the Spirit's light? It is only in their striking out of this rut that the Aurobindonians may be said to live "out of the world". In every other respect they are radically in the world and what they are trying to do - with unselfish labours undreamable by the mere philanthropist - is to bring down some ray of truth which would really solve the terrible problem of life.
Of course, if you feel very strongly that you will brim the void in your present mode of being by doing social service, you may give social service a trial. I am positive the soul in you will not be
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placated by it. Whatever my own faltering in the practice of the Higher Life, I have never lost the vision of the ideal and I have always subscribed to St. Augustine's declaration: "Thou has made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." Only, I should like you to understand properly the resting spoken of and not carry away the idea that God is mere repose. He is immense illumined activity but that activity is, as Sri Aurobindo puts it,
Force one with unimaginable rest.
The Augustinian release from restlessness is in such force. And the force-aspect of the Divine is at its finest and intensest in the Ashram towards which I have pointed you, for the work of the Master there is to make the human race take the next step forward in evolution of consciousness and to divinise the ways of earth and not fly for good to remote summits beyond. The divinisation of all our parts through an integral yoga is a stupendous job, and maybe as a final shot you will fling at me the argument that to be fully illumined and to channel a deific dynamism are impracticable - but I must reply that the effort is worth making and even if the whole journey be not accomplished there will be gained enough in the passage to justify the endeavour. And unless one endeavours how is one to get anything? And if this is the completest ideal and the most logical path towards truth, surely it is worth following through years and years. Something transcendental is bound to get manifested - and is not that more precious, more authentic, more reliable than all things weakly and gropingly human put together?
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Misunderstandings of Mysticism
Professor K has fallen foul of the advice I gave a friend of mine to make an attempt at Yoga under the guidance of Sri Aurobindo before trying to solve the problem of life's misery by taking to social service and philanthropy as the arch-panacea. In a nutshell my plea was that to do real good to the world we must become by a yogic self-transformation conscious channels of God's will and purpose, for otherwise we with even the best intention can never be sure of our work being truly beneficial. We are not sufficiently illumined to do always the right thing in the right way - there is not only our human ignorance as an obstacle but also our human frailty which often interferes with whatever in us happens to be genuinely inspired. And my words to my friend were coloured by the mood in which he was turning to social service and philanthropy: he was surcharged with an extraordinary idealistic fervour, an intense desire to outgrow the limited ego in him and merge in a larger reality. His state had all the symptoms of a mystical awakening without his knowing it and the milieu of ideas in which he lived was such as might keep him in the dark for quite a long time.
Prof. K says that my argument puts a discount on the whole ethical endeavour of mankind. I am not against ethical endeavours, but in the case at hand there was a pointer to something else much greater which does not discard ethics but floods it with a more-than-human light. Even apart from my friend's case, I should opine that ethical endeavours by themselves are not the highest activity possible to a man who wants to do good to the world. If Prof. K were an atheist he might rank them above attempts at God-realisation, though of course he would be hard put to it to produce from atheism a satisfying ground or sanction for the moral passion as also for the aesthetic hunger and the intellect's cry for truth. Since he does believe in the Divine he must automatically imply that God being the highest reality the direct union with Him is the highest value: not only philanthropy but art, philosophy, science, politics, industry fall into a lower place. This is simple logic. My advice to my friend has
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respect for sincere social service: what it does not acknowledge is the giving to it a status at the very top. At the very top there can be nothing save union with God.
"There is no guarantee," complains Prof. K, "that the perfect Yogi will be of use to the world." How to be sure that God-union will build a world-worker rather than a world-shirker? I am suspected of suggesting that from the Yogic point of view "all fight against disease, hunger, ignorance and various other miseries the flesh is heir to may be utterly futile." This is strange, because my entire letter to my friend was concerned with the best way of helping mankind to get rid of its troubles: I never doubted the need to succour and salvage humanity - I merely doubted the supreme efficacy ascribed to philanthropy and social service without any Yogic illumination. The fight against the ills of the flesh is not futile, but there is a lot of difference between waging the fight humanly and waging it divinely, between a fight full of natural errors as well as subtle egoistic perversions and a fight radiantly guided and free from the insidious ego. My attack was never on action in and for the world - and that is precisely why, for my friend, I chose Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram. The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo is dynamic, aiming at the world's regeneration, wanting ardently the manifestation of the Divine here and now and in all our parts and in all human creatures. The life its followers are asked to lead is so framed by the Master as to keep them awake to the significance of the earth and prepare them for fulfilling and not rejecting all that the earth has been labouring for through the ages.
Of course there are Yogis who reject the world. Even here it is wise to distinguish between those who do the rejecting from the ultimate standpoint and those who do it from the immediate. The latter are "cave-dwellers" immersing themselves as much as possible in a samādhi in which all outward things are lost to the consciousness. They may be considered as of no perceptible use to the earth - but uselessness cannot be charged against those who believe that our goal is to get out of the round of rebirths and be absorbed ultimately in a supracosmic Eternal but who still live in the world and work for it as long as the body lasts. Buddha was such a Yogi; also Vivekananda. Surely these great men did not do less good than ordinary social workers and philanthropists? Even what they did in the specific field of social work and
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philanthropy was much more potent; add to that the blissful spiritual light they radiated, uplifting the consciousness of their fellows as no ordinary social worker and philanthropist can ever hope to do, and we see at once how a mysticism that finds earthly values false in the ultimate reckoning can still produce colossal benefactors of the earth.
In an integral vision of reality, the samādhi-sunk "cave-dweller" must be pronounced defective, but he is not more defective than those who never do Yoga of any sort. The former seeks the Divine and ignores the Divine's world; the latter acknowledges the Divine's world but ignores the Divine - except in the weak and watery way of popular religion. If God exists, to refuse to be mystically united with Him can be no less a shortcoming than to refuse a share in His world's activity. To say this is not to recommend entranced isolation; it is but to rectify the wrong emphasis laid by Prof. K on the world to the neglect of what is greater than the world. The balanced harmonious course is to accept both - to be a Yogi as well as a world-worker - and this is the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo.
No Aurobindonian would deny, as Prof. K supposes me to do, that "feeding the poor, clothing the naked, healing the sick and sharing a tear with the stricken neighbour are acts of value." But those elementary acts which do not present much of a problem are not the whole of the philanthropic field: there are many more complicated acts to be chosen from, acts varying according to various consciences and codes. And even if the elementary acts were all, they could not bring the end of humanity's toil and tribulation. What is wrong at the root of things is the lack of the divine consciousness in the inward and outward man. Without the divine consciousness in toto there will always be the poor, the naked, the sick, the stricken, no matter how much we go feeding, clothing, healing and sharing a tear with them. Over and above practising generosity and charity we must try to impart the divine consciousness, and how can we do this unless we have first done Yoga? With the help of Yoga we would even do generous and charitable deeds far more beneficially because we would avoid the manner and form which sometimes harm those whom we serve and aid. So the prime necessity from every standpoint is to transcend the half-obscure and semi-stumbling condition of mind which is ours at present. And if that transcending demands
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that we should withdraw for a while from directly and apparently serving and aiding the destitute and the unfortunate, we surely must not let humanitarian sentimentalism distract us. We do not ask a scientist absorbed in cancer-research to start "slumming" and paying comfort-visits. He is at a job of the utmost importance to the welfare of the world. Similarly, the Aurobindonian Yogi is at a mighty magnificent job - combating an evil far more heinous than cancer, the bacillus of ignorance and selfishness, the germ of man's failure to evolve the god that is involved in him.
Here I may, in passing, draw attention to the truth that genuine world-work does not connote only social service and philanthropy. It includes inspired art, acute philosophy, constructive science, wise politics, fair industry. The swabhāva or innate nature of a man should determine his vocation; to ask a Beethoven, for instance, to stint for the problem of bad housing of the poor the time wanted for his symphonies and sonatas and quartets is to rob humanity of priceless boons. Every Yogi, too, is not compelled by the concept of world-work to devote himself to such problems. Only those whose innate nature is cast for social service and philanthropy will tackle them under spiritual impulsion. The rest will be just in warm contact with the world while mainly pursuing under spiritual impulsion the jobs they are best fitted for by their soul-bents.
There is a school of altruistic extremism as there is of egoistic. And it believes that all human beings can naturally labour with unselfishness. I am surprised to find Prof. K naively remarking: "Particularly to-day, after the second great war, we are convinced that mutual service and philanthropy alone can save us from destruction." It is like saying that if the sky fell we would all catch larks. The trouble is that the sky won't fall. The only sense in which it can fall is the Aurobindonian "descent of the divine consciousness." From high above the mere mind the hidden glories and powers and beatitudes of the Supreme have to come down and make us their moulds. When the Spirit's sky falls, the larks of light will be in our hands. But till then we shall not save ourselves from destruction. There is a flaw in our consciousness and out of this flaw derive all our vice and folly. Mutual service and philanthropy cannot be practised by each Tom, Dick and Harriett; when practised by those who can they go a certain way
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to alleviate our troubles, but can never remove them for ever. Ambition, greed, lust, cruelty, strife will always be with us - they will erupt even in our so-called altruists - as long as we are men and not recast in God's image by a sustained and difficult and self-consecrated and self-transforming Yoga on Aurobindonian lines: that is, lines dynamic for world-change and not questful of a supracosmic aloofness. Mutual service and philanthropy to the degree and extent required for saving us from wars are impossible until what Sri Aurobindo calls the Truth-conscious Super-mind has been attained and brought down into all our self and all our activity. In the supramental Truth-consciousness lie the basic unity and harmony and egoless infallible compassion by which the ideal altruism that would be our saviour can be born.
I am afraid Prof. K goes off the rails also as regards the psychology of the mystical search. He traces the hunger for God to a feeling of inferiority or a sense of frustration in us: when life does not provide us with the proper mundane satisfaction we want, we fly to God's arms - mysticism is an escape and a hiding from our own failures, a gilded sham substitute for what we really desire and ought to possess. From what I have already said, it should be evident that even if a sense of frustration sets us off towards the Aurobindonian Yoga the result is splendid and just the thing the world needs: the more rampant such a sense the better for humanity! But it is not true that such a sense is the real motive-power behind mysticism. The real motive-power is the divine origin of us all: we have come from the absolute Godhead and that is why we seek the absolute Godhead: if the Supreme Spirit is our starting-point, it is also our goal, and because it is our starting-point as well as our goal we ache for the perfect in the midst of imperfection. Our venturing out, in this direction and that, in order to perfect ourselves and our life, is due to the Divine within us waiting to be delivered. Frustration is there because we fail to let the Divine outflower. It is not simply the consequence of our missing one or another of the common joys our outward nature craves. We shall be discontented in the midst of a thousand such joys! Frustration is of the essence of a life divorced from the all-consummating Divine. It takes diverse forms and, in the Final perspective, reveals itself as the outcome of our falling short of the Absolute which is our inmost core. Many people turn to the via mystica after disappointments - but
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disappointments are only the superficial cause: the fundamental cause is the urge in our central being towards God. Since the outward being is hard and crude, it sits up and takes notice of that urge mostly when outward blows fall thick upon it and make it look within. But without that urge the blows would soon be forgotten and a man would return to his ordinary existence. Many would-be mystics fall back upon their old mode of living and never think again of God-realisation: in their case, the inward urge has not taken hold of the outward being and there was just a temporary process of escape. The vast difficulties of a thorough Yogic discipline far outweigh the so-called hardships of the normal routine and they cannot be met by one who has no qualification except that he has been beaten down by life. A lion's heart alone can hunt for God and get Him.
Hence the sevenfold questionnaire Prof. K elaborately draws up to ascertain the source of the mystical turn strikes me as childish, to say the least. According to him, if the feeling is very strong about any one of the shortcomings he mentions, then a man is psychologically ready to join Sri Aurobindo's Ashram. Let us look at the very first question: "Am I getting two square meals a day and am I satisfied with my income?" It seems that if I am not, my heart is on the verge of saying, "Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, I am yours!" But just a minute: is it not a fact stressed again and again that three-fourths of the people of India never have even one square meal a day, that they are always hungry and underfed and that the average income of the Indian is no more than a few rupees a month? How is it that not even one-fourth of the numerous crores of India, leave aside three-fourths, are packed in the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo? Not all the Yogic Ashrams in our whole sub-continent house even one-fortieth of its ill-nourished and ill-paid population. As a rule, when a man is poor and hungry and feels very strongly about his condition he either doubles his efforts to get on in the world or starts stealing or else drowns himself in alcohol for spells of temporary forgetfulness. The genuine spiritual aspiration does not arise so cheaply. Mere failure and frustration in the matter of food and money never light that exalted flame in the heart and mind, that gigantic ego-devouring passion for purity and perfection that we find in the true God-seeker.
As inane as the question I have quoted are the rest put by Prof. K.
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To be dissatisfied with one's status in society, to have any serious fault or defect that makes one feel inferior in the presence of others, to lack children or, having them, lack the means of giving them a fair start in life, to be unable to satisfy one's sex properly and adequately, to be conscious of having committed a sin of which one is acutely ashamed, to be insufficiently enjoying social importance - all these conduce mostly to some secular readjustment and not to a single-pointed quest for the Superhuman and the Absolute with the countless trials and hardships natural to a swimming up-stream and against the current of common desires a-flow in the human constitution for centuries. Millions of men suffer from at least one of these defects: several perhaps from all, and yet how few plunge into the unknown abysses of the Divine! Social anxieties set a man nosing for a better job, personal inferiority makes him vindictive or assertive, childlessness sends him to a long series of doctors or else incites him to divorce his wife and remarry, sexual infirmities turn him towards aphrodisiacs or self-abuse, sense of sin converts him to church-going or charity. When none of these steps are taken nor any "sublimating" mental or physical activity initiated to pull him somewhat out of himself, there is a smouldering despair which renders him a pest or a drunkard or a listless melancholic or at the worst a suicide. Sometimes he develops a sort of hysteria with a religious penchant, a semi-deranged pseudo-mystical state. Very rarely indeed does he blossom into a real God-lover, casting aside greed and lust and ambition as well as social attachments, facing the lure and the danger of the undiscovered Infinite, helping humanity not with an ego assuming altruistic colour but as a selfless medium of the Supreme Will that wants to evolve man into Superman. When he does blossom into a real God-lover, it is the sleeping God in himself that has stirred and the failure or disappointment has but served to direct his gaze inward: the failure or disappointment is only the occasion and not the source of the blossoming. If it were the source, the majority of human beings would be at Sri Aurobindo's feet by now, since the majority suffer from some frustration or other. I at least have not yet come across a perfectly happy man in the ordinary round of life: there is always a strong lack in some place, but I look in vain for a teeming of the mystical mood!
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No, Prof. K, mysticism does not take birth from cheap negatives and it is not a flight from life's call. The basic call of life, of all evolutionary Nature, is the struggle for the Divine, the pursuit of a more-than-mortal Truth and Goodness and Beauty. The mystic goes forth in answer to this call - it is the ordinary man, the non-Yogi, who shirks it, keeps revolving in the mortal groove because such revolving is far more comfortable and easy than entering God's mysteries and magnitudes. The peace that passeth understanding, the ecstasy that never sinks are won through tremendous bravery and endurance: the hero and not the escapist makes the mystic. No doubt, all Yogas are not dynamic in the Aurobindonian way. Several believe, as I have already said, that our fulfilment cannot be totally achieved in earth-terms and so they make the Supracosmic their final status. But here too there is no escapism in the sense of running away from earth like a broken-hearted coward. A journey as beset as Yoga with enormous struggles and self-conquests and renunciations of egoistic desire is not escapist in a depreciatory sense of that word. Superficial failures in the ordinary existence provide a mere chink or fissure for the bursting out of the hidden soul, the concealed divine spark. By that spark essentially is created the Yogi. Nor are superficial failures always necessary. Often the spiritual thirst is there without any measurable occasion of failure. A masterpiece of art, a splendid scene in Nature, an act of human nobility have been known to start a man suddenly on the mystical pilgrimage. There are even men who from their childhood have shown a mystical turn: later circumstances have just brought things to a head, not given rise to them. Modern psychologists who see a mechanism of compensation or flight in the mystical process do not look beyond their noses. At most they catch sight of the morbid imitations. As an Indian, Prof. K should have avoided this western myopia.
And if those whose eyes wait ever for the Supracosmic are no escapists but braver than the normal flock of men, though interpreting life's call towards the Divine in a one-sided fashion, how much less of escapism must be in the Aurobindonians who embrace and do not reject earth, who exceed the normal flock both by following with immense difficulty the Divine beyond the human and by bringing with still immenser difficulty the Divine into all our earth-terms! To dub the Aurobindonians frustrated
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fugitives from life's demands is the height of misunderstanding.
The three or four queries Prof. K puts about Sri Aurobindo at the close of his article offer a clue to how he could get perched on that obscure height. He has not acquainted himself with Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and that is why he has put the queries whose answers have already been given in Sri Aurobindo's books. The don has left a big hole in his learning: no wonder he misunderstands so much. To talk about spirituality in general and the Aurobindonian brand in particular without getting intimate with the writings of Sri Aurobindo, our greatest modern Yogi, is rather rash. Every point raised will be found tackled in that magnum opus from the Ashram at Pondicherry, The Life Divine, which even a westerner like Sir Francis Young-husband has declared the most significant and vital book to appear in our day. There Prof. K will read exactly what Sri Aurobindo is doing, what consequences his work will have, what use his vision and realisation will be to the world and how mankind's "ever-increasing misery" which Prof. K laments, will be victoriously dealt with if people with faint hearts and bewildered minds will only try to have enough courage and open-sightedness, enough patience and humility to become Aurobindonians.
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Is Sri Aurobindo New?
[This letter was first published in 1947, after being seen by Sri Aurobindo. The essential thesis of it still holds and needs to be underlined. It does not suffer because Sri Aurobindo himself has left his body. Apropos of this act of his on December 5, 1950, the author's booklet, The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence, which was fully approved by the Mother, may be read. For immediate concentrated light we may refer the reader to the Messages of the Mother soon after December 5 and to the following two given some time later. One is dated 1951: "The lack of receptivity of the earth and men is mostly responsible for the decision Sri Aurobindo has taken regarding his body. But one thing is certain: what has happened on the physical plane affects in no way the truth of his teaching. All that he said is perfectly true and remains so. Time and the course of events will prove it abundantly.” The other Message came in 1953: "Sri Aurobindo has given up his body in an act of supreme unselfishness, renouncing the realisation in his body to hasten the hour of the collective realisation. Surely if the earth were more responsive, this would not have been necessary.” The present letter is concerned to set forth the essence of "the realisation” whose pursuit constitutes the ultimate form in which Sri Aurobindo's teaching is "new”.]
The western world is often declared to be so engrossed in its new materialism that it cannot listen to any of the old spiritual messages. In a similar way the eastern world seems at times so engrossed in its old spirituality that no spiritual message that is new reaches its mind.
There are some good reasons for this unprogressive tendency. First, the spirituality of the past is really immense and its hold, therefore, cannot help being great. Second, civilisations that are, like India's, very old and have still a living continuity with their past develop an intent look backwards. Third, the accustomed meanings of spiritual terms have got impressed on our minds with such prolonged force that new complexions given them are liable to be overlooked. I was hoping, however, that there would be more than a handful who might keep on the qui vive for the
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genuinely new in spirituality and be subtle enough to understand it when it got explained in various ways and with a marvellously illuminating style as has happened in a book like The Life Divine. But if you declare that you have given days and nights to the consideration of Sri Aurobindo's vision and yoga and yet found nothing new, I am brought to the verge of despair. How shall I strike upon your eyes the novel shades of his thought, the original turns of his experience? Perhaps it is best to concentrate on presenting his newness under one aspect that would be the most spectacular, the most sensational.
To say that Sri Aurobindo is new is, of course, not to deny the many common factors between him and the Indian rishis and yogis that are gone. He stands grounded in India's colossal experience of God, and from the God-experience of no other country could he lead on to what is his own individual contribution to spirituality. In fact, the starting-point of his contribution is not anything unknown to the ancient scriptures: the Creative Consciousness of the eternal and infinite Divine putting forth the world-play and taking part in it for a various expression of Himself by purifying and illuminating our mind and life-force and body. In Vaishnavism and Tantricism the ideal of God's self-expression in our nature was the most openly held. But everywhere a definite irreducible quantity was recognised in which no self-expression of the Divine could take place. And that is why, on the most external plane, the fact of death was accepted as inherent in earth-existence. The triple formation of mind, life and body that makes up earth-existence was regarded as never capable of perfection and so always to be dropped after a time. Perfection abided somewhere beyond, whither the soul was bidden to rise, either to stay there for ever or to return after a while for the sake of suffering humanity. Birth was either to be escaped from or accepted in an endless series: in both cases no birth could be such as to allow absolute perfection of the mind-life-body formation. Disease and decay and deathwards-progressing old age were always inevitable: even the hathayogis who commanded extra-ordinary powers of reinforcing the ageing physical system by subtle vita) energy never claimed even as a possibility a complete partaking by the body in a divine physicality which by the presence of the immortal consciousness and substance would not ever die by age or disease or stroke of accident.
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You must admit that since the body is our characteristic vehicle of earth-existence there can be no entire self-manifestation of the Divine here without this vehicle being thoroughly divinised and changed into stuff of the immortal divine being with its incorruptible illumination and imperishable bliss and power. No so-called natural law or necessity should compel this body to suffer disease and grow aged and finally die or remain open to accident and be a victim to "crass casualty". Disease and old age and the death consequent upon them or due to sudden violent circumstance are a stamp of undivinity - they are in the body what ignorance and falsehood and obscuration are in our mental and vital consciousness. A divinised being on earth is one in whom not merely the mental and vital consciousness but also the physical instrument has been changed into divine and therefore fully illumined and immortal and immune substance. Indeed, no such change can be wholly effected in the former without a corresponding change in the latter - unless they stand aloof from it and do not associate themselves with it for God's manifestation on earth. As there is the association indispensable for manifesting God on earth, the imperfection of the body would interfere with the perfect working of the mental and vital elements for terrestrial purposes. Hence it follows that, so long as the body's imperfection is accepted as in the last resort irremediable, there can be no vision by any yogi of integral transformation.
And if you give close thought to the matter you will observe that, so long as an irreducible quantity of imperfection is acknowledged, a tremendous hiatus is caused between the Divine and earth-existence. All, says the ancient wisdom, is the Divine. But if all is the Divine, then all can manifest divine values perfectly in an evolutionary scheme like our earth's: there cannot be an irreducible quantity of the imperfect in man's career through time. Once the quantity is granted in spite of the process of evolution, we automatically make a division in ultimate being: there is the Divine and there is the undivine which cannot wholly express and be transformed into divine values. To fight clear of this dualism arises the theory of māyā, Illusion. Whatever holds the irreducible quantity of the imperfect cannot really exist - it must be a hallucination, a strange non-being that yet seems to have existence. The only thing to do
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for the seeker of "the one entire and perfect chrysolite", the innate idealist in man wanting the Absolute, the Flawless, the hundred per cent Divine, is to get rid of this illusion and pass into the formless and nameless samadhi, Nirvana, Nirguna Brahman. If we are told that something undivinisable is present in the world-elements, we may yet choose to work for the world and look upon the world as valuable because there are also so many God-expressive parts in it, but the deepest self in us will always feel discontented, unappeased, impatient and know that not here is the Grand Terminus of the soul's evolution, the scene of its integral fulfilment. And in the long run the countries where this deepest self is most active will yield, in spite of all theories of the world as līlā or God's play, to the theory of the world as māyā.
India is overshadowed by the māyā theory not just because India has lost her ancient vigour: it is also because India is irrepressibly influenced by the deepest self and that perfection-haunted dweller within cannot accept as real whatever fails to admit of total divinisation. Nothing save extreme Shankarite sannyāsa, nothing save extreme Buddhistic tyāga can be the logical result for a spiritual aspirant who accepts an undivinisable factor in our nature's constituents. The pull towards the Beyond, towards utter rejection of the world for a supra-cosmic status cannot be helped - and really should not be opposed if the Divine, the wholly Perfect, is our goal. And yet even Shankara and Buddha with their illusionist attitude were drawn to world-work, to some effort at manifestation of the Spirit, at irradiation of our nature by the Secret Splendour. Here also is an instinct that is innate. But it can have justification only if our nature is really capable of divine irradiation. Between the instinct to withdraw to the Beyond because of our nature's ultimate residue of the undivinisable with its consequent Mayic emptiness and the instinct to illumine our nature as much as possible as though it were something real and not Mayic - between these two instincts the fight must go on, with a trend more and more towards the former because the allure of the aloof Perfection to the dreamer in us of spiritual plenitude is greater than that of the world-intimate imperfect shedding of manifesting light. This fight is the history of Indian spirituality in the past. It can end only if a NEW vision is both entertained and practised - the vision of
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complete illumination down to the very cells of the body - the vision of the body's utter divinisation!
Can you aver that such a vision has been in the past? Can you quote to me any yogi who has said as the Mother has said: "Physical death is no part of our programme"?¹ Where in any scripture is the assertion that the completely God-realised man has a body which is no longer subject to disease, decay and death and that this body need not be given up because of the operation of any so-called Nature's law or necessity? Great yogis are declared to leave the body and depart from life, at will; but this they do in anticipation of the stroke of death and the body they leave is no intrinsically incorruptible substance but generally the seat of some disease or other - cancer of the throat in Ramakrishna, asthma and diabetes in Vivekananda, blood-poisoning in Dayananda. Even that champion hathayogi, Pavhari Baba, whom Vivekananda was at times sorely tempted by his own ailments to consult and take as master, gave up his corporeal frame because of some affliction that had overtaken it. Never in the past has there been any vision of the thoroughly divinised body, immune even from accidents, as the external support for an integrally divine manifestation. If that vision put forth by Sri Aurobindo is not NEW, and revolutionarily NEW at that, tell me what significance the word NEW has!
You may be sceptical about the probability of so radical a transformation or even argue that it is not desirable. But how can you say that what Sri Aurobindo is asking for is old? Most certainly the transformation he has in mind is not "a statement in another language of the age-old cry of the mystic". It does not stand for merely a purified saintly life - not even for the magnificent selflessness of a Gautama. It is something no mystic has ever wholly dreamed of in a practical positive manner, though some intuition of it has always been vaguely at work behind all our efforts at manifesting the Divine. Despite that faint intuition, no mystic has dared to place in the forefront a transformation such as Sri Aurobindo wants. They may employ the same term but his meaning cannot be theirs. This is so
¹. It must be understood that life's perpetuation for the sake of an unending activity of the unregenerate human ego is not the immortality aimed at. In fact, any perpetuation as such is not desired: what is desired is the Divine in the body and the Divine's inherent deathlessness as part of the body's realisation of Him.
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because no mystic had the full organised wide-awake knowledge of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind or Truth-Consciousness, nor the active effective experience of its mighty alchemic process. There is a tendency to think that Supermind means only "above the mind" and coincides with what other seers have discovered to be divine levels of being, higher than 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 Intuitive Mind, 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 do service for merely the highest level of being below the "Ultimate Transcendent Reality" but is part and parcel of that 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.
There are many terms both in western and eastern mysticism which appear on the surface to contain the essence of the Aurobindonian Supermind, but they basically do not. Take the "Nous" of the Neo-Platonists. The Supermind is not this Nous: it is the consciousness of which the Neo-Platonic Nous is a weak, vague and diffuse description. All the planes above the mind are spiritual ones and are the play of a luminous unity in a diversity of delight: there is natural to them what I have called in a poem of mine "the shining smile of the one Self everywhere", they form a pattern and harmony whose wavering reflex and echo we find in our universe. All of them, therefore, are Nous - the consciousness whose multiple singlehood is the formative arche-type of things here. The apex of this consciousness is the Overmind. I cannot tell whether Plotinus had a glimpse of the Overmind: perhaps it was his glimpse of it that he put into the poetic account in his Enneads of the ecstatic interfusion of glorious God-forms in the spiritual world. But all this does not identify Nous with the Supermind. Just as the Overmind, the world of the greatest Gods, seems to be the archetype of our universe, so also the Supermind is the archetype of the "over-
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mental" plane. In other words, as compared to "life here the Overmind is perfection; but, as compared to what is still beyond, the Overmind is imperfect Nature rounded off in general without a flawless balance and harmony between the One and the Many. The Overmind is not Ignorance: it is Knowledge, yet it is Knowledge on the way to being Ignorance. So the Neo-Platonic Nous is very distant from being "supramental" - and the proof is simply this: complete conscious awareness of the Supermind must mean the awareness and revelation of the chief secret of the Supermind, namely, that man's entire nature, down to his material substance, can be divinised in an immortal perfect existence on earth. Nor would such awareness and revelation stop short of a spontaneous effort to divinise and immortalise the earth-sheath. The Supermind's essence is the power it possesses to effect a total and integral divinisation. That power could never have been plumbed before, nobody ever thought it possible to produce so fundamental a change. Not merely is Plotinus's Nous ruled out: even the Vedas and the Upanishads and the Gita were not acquainted with any direct dynamic realisation of the Supermind in relation to terrestrial Nature. They have grand hints and glimmerings of it: the Vedas' Satyam Ritam Brihat, The True, the Right, the Vast - the Upanishads' Vijnāna, the all-comprehensive Knowledge - the Gita's Purushottama with Parā-prakriti, the Supreme Being with His Super-Nature. But no radically transforming intimacy with it was present. To be uplifted into it in a trance or to be lost in it and pass through its golden gate into the supracosmic Unknown or else to work under its glowing guidance from afar and above is not the same thing as to ascend to it and live in it with one's physical eyes open and bring about its progressive descent - as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do.
The constant day-to-day living in the light of the Supermind and the supramental descent into our whole constitution in order to shape a divine mind, a divine life-force, a divine body: this is the aim and the decisive condition of Sri Aurobindo's yoga. But there is a long and difficult way to go, a hard task of self-consecration, self-purification, self-discipline, a development on many lines and an opening to the Divine Shakti and Her working on all the planes to be carried through before this
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decisive condition can he reached. That an opportunity may be given to others for this long training and process and a nucleus formed of seekers after this great transformation, Sri Aurobindo has let an Ashram grow around him. In this nucleus the seekers have to grow out of the habits and tendencies created by the past opposite trends of human existence, the clinging to the egoistic life and its ignorance and the revolt against life and finally the satisfaction with a half and half spiritual effort and realisation, and so make themselves fit for the final movement of an integral and supramental Yoga. A successful formation of such a nucleus is evidently a necessary preliminary condition for the work Sri Aurobindo has undertaken for the world since he aims not only at an individual realisation but at a great collective descent of the highest truth into life and a new power on the earth for the liberation and perfection of mankind.
I may point out further that it is this yoga's newness that is responsible for the length of Sri Aurobindo's labour. Though forty years have passed since he set forth on the via mystica and though all the achievements of Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Karma Yoga seem compassed and though on the one hand the Nirvana of Buddha and on the other the Tantric awakening of all the occult chakras in the body appear to be realised, Sri Aurobindo still declares that his labour has not come to its end. Do you imagine that a spiritual genius like him has to continue for forty years to nearly attain what others have got within half a dozen years or so? Surely it is clear that he is at a mighty unparalleled job: there is an obvious case for considering his goal momentously new. The period of time taken depends, where spiritual geniuses are concerned, on what their goals are and the goal of Sri Aurobindo is not reached yet because that stupendous thing - the integral descent of the Supermind - has not shown itself utterly in the most outer physical. What has already happened, however, is more significant than anything in the history of Indian spirituality, for only the last steps in the top-to-toe descent remain and not even the first extraordinary steps that lead to these last have been taken by anyone hitherto. Even before the last hundredth step there must be the sovereign entry into the Supermind with its clear vision of total transformation: can you point to any yogi or rishi who gives
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signs of that clear vision, leave aside indications of the practice of the full dynamics of the supramental descent? Is there any wonder the disciples of Sri Aurobindo say that this path is new and different?
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SOME GENERAL TRUTHS AND PERSONAL FACTS
The One whom we call the Supreme is the utter Unmanifest. The creative Conscious Force of the Supreme is the Divine Mother in Her transcendent poise, Aditi, holding the Truths that have to be manifested out of the absolute Mystery. Through the transcendent Mother and by Her creativity the whole universe has taken birth. And when the Supreme manifests in the world His own personal being, He does it also through Her transcendence. In Her universal aspect She is Mahashakti. All the Gods and Goddesses are of Her making - they are but powers that express Her.
There are many powers of the universal Mother which are not yet made manifest to us, and many universes too which are still in the Unmanifest and which the Divine Mother can create. What has been created is just one system of possibilities out of the innumerable that She and the Supreme can realise.
Time and again this Divine Creatrix takes a direct hand in the workings of the world. Through individual forms She manifests some ray of Herself: being Supernature, the truth of all that Nature here strives to express, She makes one aspect or another of Her light descend in all the ages of history and, when the hour is ripe, even a full individual embodiment can come forth.
It is such an embodiment, amidst a world of human beings, that Sri Aurobindo set before us when, on November 24, 1926, he charged with the care of his Ashram the radiant personality whom he called the Mother and into whose shaping hands he asked us to put ourselves as children.
For forty-seven years and even past the age of ninety-five she played her mighty part to perfection. Born on February 21, 1878, she passed away on November 17, 1973. Her Ashram is still full of her though without her bodily presence. But no! we should only say: "without her bodily existence." For, if ever there was a bodily presence which could never be effaced, it was the Mother's. Timeless she was not only in her inmost being but also in all the expressions of it in her outermost activity. During her last few years she was not up and about in the same way as
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before, but we must remember what she said to some disciples gathered in her room on April 2, 1972: "The body has some difficulty, so I can't be active, alas. It is not because I am old - I am not old... I am younger than most of you. If I am here inactive, it is because the body has given itself definitively to prepare the transformation. But the consciousness is clear and we are here to work - rest and enjoyment will come afterwards. Let us do our work here." That is the typical Mother. And even in her last days, when her body had become exceedingly weak, she would say: "Make me walk." As late as November 14 she made her attendants lift her out of her bed. She tried to walk but staggered and almost collapsed. She took about 20 minutes to recover. But the moment she felt better she started saying: "Lift me up again, I shall walk." The constant urge towards activity of such an indomitable spirit could not help rendering her bodily presence a perennial part of our awareness. Naturally, therefore, she is in our memory most as we knew her before an acute form was taken by the difficulties of the body which she attributed to the exacting incalculable experiment of what she and Sri Aurobindo called "supramentalisation" - that is, the total "divinisation" of the physical being.
Right up to her ninety-third year the Mother was visibly true to her role of Divine Shakti on earth, but her best manifestation as the Ageless One was round about her eightieth year. For, contrary to expectation, it would have been the extreme of ineptitude to say on her eightieth birthday that she was eighty years old. Few of her disciples were up in the morning as early as she, few turned to repose as late. And it was hardly four or five years before this time that she used to be on her feet, without a moment's respite, from five in the morning to nearly two in the afternoon - meeting people, ministering to their spiritual needs, considering their physical requirements, attending to the reports of numerous departments, giving flowers charged with the soul's secrets, making those secrets breathe out more sweetly with that flower of flowers, her smile. In the evening again, from four she would be active, with a little recreation by way of tennis for an hour and then with a large amount of re-creation of lost joy or clouded light in the thousand disciples who would move past her to receive from her hands a spoonful of nuts or a sweet through which their very bodies could absorb Grace. Even after eighty,
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her manifold activity was of one young, and at the day's end there was none who left the Ashram Playground with a fresher face and a brisker step.
Watching her, day after day, we realised that more than mere words were what she had once spoken on old age. She had said, in effect: "The coming of old age is due to two suggestions. First, the general collective suggestion - people telling you that you are getting old and can't do one thing or another. There is also the individual suggestion which keeps repeating, 'I am getting old, I mustn't attempt this or that.' The truth is quite different. Before thirty, the energy goes out in a spendthrift way because of the play of impulses. After thirty, there is a settling down and one is expected to have a plenitude of energy. At fifty, blossoming begins. At eighty, one becomes capable of full production."
Marvellously full indeed has been the Mother's productiveness, for it is rich with the power of a consciousness more than human. Even at the age of five she was aware that she did not belong to this world, that she did not have a merely human consciousness. Her Yoga may be said to have begun in that early period. Her parents had a small chair, with a little back, made for her - she would sit in it and meditate. She used to see a column of light above her head. As her brain was yet a child's and therefore insufficiently developed, she could not make out what it was, however much she tried. But the general sense of a high and vast mission accompanied always that experience.
Neither of her parents knew anything about this or who she was. And she did not tell them anything. On rare occasions, at a little later period, she tried to give some hint, but they failed to understand; nor, if they had caught its meaning, would they have believed her. Her mother was a positivist and materialist, in keeping with the tendency of those days, and wanted her and her brother to be ideal children according to her own notions. As for her father, he did not care one way or the other: he was a businessman.
All during her girlhood she was conscious of a more than human force behind her and often entering her body and working there in a supernormal way. This force she knew to be her own secret being. A few instances of its working may be given. She was about seven. There was a boy of nearly thirteen, a
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bully who always used to mock at girls, saying that they were good for nothing. One day she asked him, "Will you shut up?" He kept mocking. Suddenly she took hold of him, lifted him up from the ground and threw him down with a thump though she was so much smaller than he. The force that had come down into her and made her tremendously strong was recognised by her later in life as Mahakali.
Another instance. She had gone to play in a forest near Fontainebleau. She was climbing a steep hill, when her foot slipped and she began to fall down. The road below was strewn with sharp black stones. As she was falling, she felt somebody supporting her in a lap, as it were, and slowly bringing her down. When she reached the ground she was standing safely on her two feet, to the glad astonishment of all her companions.
In her sixteenth year she joined a Studio to learn painting. It was one of the biggest Studios in Paris. She happened to be the youngest there. All the other people used to talk and quarrel among themselves, but she never took part in these things - she was always grave and busy with her work. They called her the Sphinx. Whenever they had any trouble or wrangle, they would come to her to settle their affairs. She could read their thoughts and, as she replied more often to their thoughts than to their words, they felt very uncomfortable. She would also make her decisions without the least fear, even if the authorities were concerned. Once a girl who had been appointed monitrice of the Studio got into the bad books of the elderly woman who was the Head of the place. This woman wanted to send away the monitrice. So the Sphinx was sought out by the young ones for help. She felt sympathy for the girl, knowing how poor she was and that if she left the place it would be the end of her painting career. The Head of the Studio had now to confront a determined little champion. Sensible pleading was first tried, but when it fell on deaf ears the champion took another line. With a bit of anger she caught the elderly woman's hand and held it in a firm grip as if the very bones would be crushed. It was soon agreed that the monitrice would be allowed to stay on. Mahakali had been at work again.
The Sphinx of the Studio was also the same serious self at home. She rarely smiled or laughed. And for this, once when she was about twenty, she got a scolding from her mother. She simply replied that she had to bear all the sorrows of the world.
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Her mother thought she had gone crazy. On another occasion she was scolded by her for not listening to what she had been ordered to do. Then she answered that no earthly power could command her obedience.
We must not imagine that the Sphinx was morose or rebellious in general. She had enough of true joy and consideration. She was just weighted with the secret of the great work she had to do, and she could let nothing out of tune with it shape her actions.
Before this time, she had already arrived at a fairly precise idea of her mission. Between the ages of eleven and twelve, a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to her not only the existence of God but man's possibility of uniting with Him, of realising Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon earth in a life divine. And during her body's sleep occult instructions were given to her by several teachers, some of whom she met afterwards on the physical plane. Later on, as the inner and outer development proceeded, a psychic and spiritual relation with one of these beings became more and more clear and frequent and, although she knew little of the Indian philosophies and religions at that time, she was led to call him Krishna and henceforth she was aware that it was with him, whom she knew she would meet some day, that the divine work was to be done. Being a painter she made a psychically impressionist sketch of him and waited for it to spring to life some day for even her physical eyes.
A number of years she spent in Algeria, learning the higher occultism from a Polish adept, Theon by name, and his still more profoundly experienced English wife: Alma. Under them she would put her physical body into a trance and awake progressively in her subtle sheaths: putting to sleep the subtle sheath next to the physical, she would grow aware in the one on a deeper level: she thus climbed the whole grade of what occultists have charted out as supraphysical planes, and became acquainted with their laws and powers and operations, so that she might place all available means at the disposal of her spiritual ideal. On more than one occasion, so complete was her withdrawal from the body that the latter lay in a condition of temporary death. But the release, which could have absorbed her into the Divine Existence for good and plunged the embodied being into its
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Supreme Origin, was refused by her. She saw the world in its long travail and returned to the body by sheer force, a painful process when the connecting link between the subtle and the gross has been snapped.
In 1910 she came to hear of Sri Aurobindo who had settled in Pondicherry earlier in the same year. From then onwards her one desire was to visit India, the land which she had always cherished as her true mother-country. And in 1914 the joy of seeing India was granted her - and the very heart of that joy was the meeting with Sri Aurobindo. But even before she caught sight of him she must have entered the ambience of his presence at Pondicherry. For we know how, six years later when returning by sea from Japan and drawing closer to the town, she had the occult experience as of a great light shining from some centre in it. Now, in 1914, she was soon face to face with the centre. And when she saw Sri Aurobindo she recognised the original of her visionary sketch. This was enough to convince her fully that her place and her work were near him in India.
Here we may remark that the whole truth about her choice to reside in India is not told when we have noted this meeting with Sri Aurobindo. The whole truth is compassed only when we realise why Sri Aurobindo himself, who had a wide Western education in England and wrote creatively in English and could have easily made his mark in Europe in whose culture he had been steeped, took India for his field, not only politically but also culturally and spiritually, assimilated the whole genius of this country and made it the central fount of his own future. India holds within her a supreme potentiality of spiritual response and development because of an extraordinary history of soul-culture: a vibrant psychological atmosphere is there, breathing life and vigour into all formations of the soul and rendering possible new evolutions of the Spirit's power. That is why Sri Aurobindo came an Indian and went to the West to bring the West to India for a novel world-wide synthesis of spiritual aspiration; that is also why the Mother came a Westerner but with the eternal Indian within her, the born God-seeker and God-realiser, and joined forces with Sri Aurobindo to complete by her Indianised West his Westernised India, so that all mankind might grow to supermanhood with secret sustenance drawn from the soil where the wonderful seed of Avatarhood had often been sown.
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The Mother saw the all-consummating Avatar in Sri Aurobindo, and Sri Aurobindo saw in her the Shakti that would make his Yoga an organised starting-point of a new chapter of earth's history. In the meeting on March 29, 1914, the true relationship between her and him, which she later expressed in a pithy sentence, must have flashed into awareness: "Without him, I exist not; without me, he is unmanifest."
But the master-means of manifestation, no less than the One who was to be manifested, was directly approached only on that day. Before meeting Sri Aurobindo the Mother used to find for her various spiritual experiences and realisations a poise for life-work by giving them a mould with the enlightened mind. All kinds of powerful ideas she had for world-upliftment - ideas artistic, social, religious. At sight of Sri Aurobindo she aspired to a total cessation of all mental moulds. She did not speak a word to him nor he to her: she just sat at his feet and closed her eyes, keeping her mind open to him. After a while there came, from above, an infinite silence that settled in her mind. Everything was gone, all those fine and great ideas vanished and there was only a vacant imperturbable waiting for what was beyond mind. For days and days she carefully guarded her absolute silence and then slowly the Truth began to flow down from above. The Truth alone grew the substance of consciousness. No mental activity was left. And from that day in 1914 she never lived in the mind. Ideas got formed not on a mental initiative but in response to the Truth and in order to make the Truth mentally comprehensible and in order to transmit some experience of the truth to the ordinary world.
Sri Aurobindo had known in 1908 the cessation of all mental activity in an utter Nirvana which became the basis on which the dynamic and creative side of his Yoga proceeded. Although he experienced this cessation six years before the Mother, both of them soon found on comparing notes that they had worked essentially on the same lines of an integral development, seeking to gather together all the movements of the spiritual life and carry them to a new goal. Only, a question that had haunted her from humanity's past had remained unanswered till she met Sri Aurobindo: Must always the attempt to establish a Kingdom of Heaven on earth fall tragically short of fruition? When she put the question to Sri Aurobindo he looked tranquilly
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at her and said, "This time it will next be so."
The secret of averting failure was what he called the Supermind, the Divine's own self-dynamism that had never before been brought into action in the world - the Supermind not only as reached in its free and sovereign height but also as carried down from there into Matter's depths to release in them its own hidden counterpart which is the buried source of all evolutionary striving towards divinity.
In those first few months of the Mother's stay in India, the mission of which she had been aware since childhood grew increasingly clear. She had hinted at this in the entry dated June 26, 1914, of her Prayers and Meditations:
"O Lord, grant that we may rise above the ordinary forms of manifestation, so that Thou mayst find the instruments necessary for Thy new manifestation.
"Do not let us lose sight of the goal; grant that we may always be united with Thy force; the force which the earth does not yet know and which Thou hast given us the mission to reveal to it."¹
An idea of the intensity with which the Mother devoted herself, from 1914 onwards, to her work for the world can be faintly formed if we remember what Sri Aurobindo remarked later to a disciple. He said that he had never known what spiritual self-surrender could be until she had thrown her whole being at his feet.
It was in 1914 too that she experienced an identification of even her most outer consciousness with the Universal Mother. She has written about this in her Prayers and Meditations. She has described there two successive identifications. Of course, she had known, long before, that she was the Mother: only the complete identification took place now, after her coming to India. This was but natural, since no other country has felt and known the universal aspect so intensely.
Her diary which comprises the Prayers and Meditations had been started two years earlier. Every day at 5 a.m. she used to sit to meditate near her window with a Kashmiri shawl wrapped round her. The meditation being over, she would note down her thoughts and experiences; but they were meant only for herself and she always used to lock up her diary. In 1916 she stopped
¹. The Mother's Collected Works (Birth Centenary Edition), Vol. 1, p. 183.
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writing, but on her final arrival at Pondicherry in 1920 she took it up again. Later, it was only occasionally that she wrote. What she wrote covered five big volumes. The first to see them was Sri Aurobindo and it was he who asked her to get them published as they were sure to be of immense help to others and would at the same time show what the physical consciousness could achieve. So he made a selection and she got it printed. She had the rest burnt in a boiler which is still in use at the Ashram.
The utter absence of self-attachment which is in this act impresses us in all the acts of the Mother. She never seemed to think of her own ends or comfort or satisfaction. For many years she did not have a regular bed to rest in. There was hardly even any privacy. Then some disciples pleaded with her to let them build a room of her own. Her constant gesture was to give and give, and there was no regret if the giving bore no palpable fruit. Nor did her vision admit failure. Once she indicated how Sri Aurobindo and she worked. She said that even when they saw that a disciple was acting under wrong forces or was about to revolt and leave the Ashram they would not envisage a dark end for him but set the delicate balance so that the other side, the spiritually receptive part, might not go down. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo never saw things in small blocks of time and space: a boundless vista was ever in their eyes. And even beyond time and space their sense of being extended. Vividly does one of her disciples remember what she said apropos of her own paintings. Himself an amateur with the brush, he was acutely concerned about the almost thoughtless scatter of her best work over many countries. She mentioned a decade in which she had done her finest pieces and said that most of them had been given away to various people at different times and in different places. The disciple said: "Should we not do something to collect them again?" The Mother calmly replied: "Why? Is it so important?" "Surely, such masterpieces deserve to be found and kept safely. You took so much pains over them." "It does not matter." "But, Mother, don't you think there will be a loss if they are not preserved?" Then the Mother, with eyes far away yet full of tenderness for the agitated disciple, said in a quiet half-whisper: "You know, we live in eternity,"
Suddenly the disciple woke up to the truth of the Mother's being. "Of course, of course," he broke out, realising how often,
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seeing her walk our little ways, we forgot the ineffable Plenitude that was She behind and beyond her dealings with us, the Plenitude which yet took on itself the difficulties and limitations that were ours, so that passing through them she might be the exemplar of not only a divine victory but also a human fulfillment.
An open reminder of the truth of her being came most emphatically in 1926 when Sri Aurobindo put the Ashram in her charge. To be precise, there was on November 24 of that year a descent of what Sri Aurobindo terms the Overmind, the highest dynamic divine consciousness that had been realised so far in the world: he brought it down into the very material being, thus carrying one step forward the work done by the previous Avatar Sri Krishna who had brought down its influence into earth-life. With the descent of this consciousness into Sri Aurobindo the ground was prepared for the future descent of the Supermind, the integral Truth-Consciousness of the Divine in which lies the secret power of a complete transformation of earth-existence, even to the very cells of the body. When the Overmind was brought down, Sri Aurobindo summoned all those who were staying near him and told them that the time had come for him to withdraw into seclusion for concentrated work towards the Supermind's descent and that henceforth the Mother would be in the forefront, his Shakti and their Guru.
The few months immediately after the Overmind's descent were a history of spectacular spiritual events. All who were present have testified that miracles were the order of the day. What can be called miracles happen every day even now in the Ashram - wherever a great spiritual Force is at work the miraculous is inevitable - but many such events occur without any éclat and often wear even the appearance of natural phenomena. Those which were common occurrences in those months were most strikingly miraculous and, if they had continued, a new religion could have been established with the whole world's eyes focussed in wonder on Pondicherry. But the spectacular period terminated with an incident of profound significance which the Mother recounted to the present writer. She received one day what she has called the Word of Creation. Just as the God Brahma is said to have brought forth the world with his Word of Creation, the fiat of a new world that could be marvellously built lay ready with the Mother. A superhuman world was on the verge of being materialised.
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With this power the Mother went to Sri Aurobindo's room and told him: "I have got the Word of Creation." Sri Aurobindo sat silent for a while and then said: "This Creation is from the Overmind. And we do not want that. We have to build the Supermind's world." The Mother went back to her own room. She concentrated intensely for two hours and at the end of them she had completely dissolved the whole new Creation that had been on the brink of precipitation on earth. The greatest power in any hands during human history was set aside as if it were a trifle - and all because Sri Aurobindo had said that nothing short of the highest divine Truth was the ideal of manifestation for him and her. Miraculously grand though the manifestation would have been of the Overmind deities, it would not have been an utter transformation of life and would have stood in the way of a still greater glory. The very grandeur of it would have filled the aspiring gaze of mankind and checked it from straining for anything beyond it - at least for millennia.
With that unparalleled act of obedience and surrender by the Mother at one gesture from Sri Aurobindo the long laborious period of gradual preparation for the Supermind's world started - on the one hand the drawing down of the supreme Truth-Consciousness from above and on the other the digging into what Sri Aurobindo designates the Inconscient, the apparent origin of evolution on earth, the seeming negation of the Divine within which the integral Divinity has to be manifested, converting all the painful terms of the Ignorance into the terms of Knowledge and Bliss.
Twelve years after the descent of the Overmind into the physical being of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother the greater aim seemed on the point of achievement. The Mother remarked in 1954 that even as far back as 1938 she used to see the Supermind appearing in Sri Aurobindo's body but what could not be done at that time was to fix it in the most outer physical being. The first fixing took place in circumstances mind-bafflingly dramatic. Twelve more years elapsed, and then Sri Aurobindo gave up his body, went through what seemed to be a disease with a fatal ending but what, in consideration of the extraordinary concomitants of that illness and that death, can only be regarded as a supreme strategic sacrifice.
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Sri Aurobindo, in view of the lack of preparedness in the world to receive and hold the descending Supermind, gathered as it were the whole force of mortal fate into his semi-divinised body and in the act of giving up this body exhausted that force in essence and principle and drew down to earth and fixed there the supramental Light. He took a drastic short cut towards a goal which otherwise would have taken decades to approach. Soon after he withdrew from his physical envelope the Mother and a number of disciples saw the supramental Light suffusing it. And at the very time of his withdrawal the Supramental Power made its permanent base in the Mother's body, beginning with the brain-mind. This is what is known as the "Mind of Light."
From then onward a deeper and deeper digging-in by the Light continued. In reaction against the invasion by the Truth-Consciousness the powers of the Ignorance attempted a desperate obstruction again and again. But Sri Aurobindo's sacrifice had already delivered the first of the finishing strokes to them. And with the Supramental Manifestation on February 29, 1956, when the Supermind's Light, Consciousness and Force became part of the earth's atmosphere, as it were - an agency subtly yet directly at work on a universal scale in the midst of the old powers - the complete victory was assured, whose ultimate outer sign would be what the Mother called in her New Year Message of 1957 "the glorified body" which can conquer all Evil.
The process of the "glorified body" went on in the Mother - visible to a few whose sight, piercing through the outer eye's blindness, could catch the descended kārana śarīra, the causal sheath, at work within the Mother, a white glory into which the outer substance was gradually being absorbed or, rather, which slowly projected itself into that substance to transform it. The Light played about in the limbs, coming forward, drawing back, now a soft beauty enshrined in the flesh, now a great power possessing bone and tissue till one beheld no longer the familiar shape we adored but a perfect Goddess suffusing it and for a while blotting it from the gaze. But not rapidly enough could the supramental sheath exteriorise itself, for the Mother stood in no immune isolation, she took hundreds of imperfect conscious- nesses into herself, worked out their defects, repaired in her own body the constant damage which this comprehensive compassion
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inevitably brought: her aim was to carry the world with her and to prepare it for the full manifestation which it would scarcely have been able to bear if she had sought her own perfection to the neglect of humanity's cry for inner help and divinity's call to live for a collective triumph instead of an individual achievement.
A farther step towards the conquest of all Evil was disclosed in the Message of January 1, 1958, in which she spoke of the consent of material Nature to the demand for transformation. Nature has always been rejected by spiritual seekers and left to its own devices of slow circuitous development and aeonic travail with ill-lit forces. Nature, by being thrown back on itself, has avenged the rejection by obstructing with those forces the occasional pull on it for collaboration by seekers of the Spirit. The Mother's mission was to take Nature into herself, for indeed she was in essence all that is here in the very stone of material existence: a saviour love has been hers that shirks nothing, uplifts everything and makes even dust divine without annulling it, since even dust has its counterpart in the Supreme and a destiny of fulfilment here and now.
Over nine and a half decades was the saviour love the earth's companion. A blessed day is every February 21 in its reminder to us of the long labour and of the fateful moment which saw its beginning. May our hearts beat in tune with that moment and be re-born from the sweetness and strength of this day that is effulgent with the Spirit's own sun - the Mother's face.
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"A Pathway towards Immortality"
November 24, 1926, was the day on which Sri Aurobindo went into seclusion for concentrated Yogic work towards the creation of a new humanity. In the forefront he put, as guru and guide to his disciples, one whom he regarded as the spiritual Mother of the greater world that was to be. On this day, when the Mother's genius of spiritual organisation took up the group of souls dedicated to the Aurobindonian ideal, the Ashram was conceived and set growing to be the nucleus-light of the divine Consciousness into which mankind was intended to be reborn. In the years that followed, this day was one of those few on which Sri Aurobindo, seated side by side with the Mother, used to give darśan to the hundreds who gathered in Pondicherry to pay them homage.
But since 1950 the Mother alone has been visible on this day as on others like it. For, Sri Aurobindo who had retired for twenty-four years from common outer contact with the world chose to retire still further and, on December 5, 1950, withdrew from even his body. Then followed those five days of magnificent mystery when he lay in state, with not a sign of decomposition, and men and women in their thousands filed past that picture of imperial repose which was yet to the deep-seeing soul the dynamo of a divine energy let loose on the earth. Also, to the deep-seeing soul, on every darśanday after the great withdrawal the Mother has never sat alone: Sri Aurobindo, conscious and alive though not in the corporeal sheath, has been there, unmistakably felt in the double intensity of spiritual light that the Mother's bodily presence has manifested in Sri Aurobindo's physical absence. It is as if the wonderful work that was his could be, after a certain point of progress, best done by packing the whole force of it into one form instead of two. Two can indeed be glorious company for revealing what the Upanishads have called "the Light by whose shining all this shineth", but sometimes a solitude of one can be a more potent focus for setting aflame what the Vedas have termed "the darkness which is enwrapped within darkness".
To get a glimmering of what happened on November 24 in 1926 and what lies behind the Mother's apparent solitariness on
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the same date after 1950 and what Sri Aurobindo brought about on December 5 in that year, we must understand this Vedic phrase. While the Rishis saw an absolute and perfect Spirit that is all and more than all, a transcendent and a universal Godhead, at once personal and impersonal, while they saw also within all a divine dweller ever developing forms higher and higher, they did not fail to see that this development (which we now recognise as evolution) is often a most paradoxical story because the transcendent and universal and immanent Godhead has worked out the dynamics of our cosmos from a first foundation of gigantic unconsciousness, a vast welter of blind brute energy. Hidden in the energy are all omniscience and omnipotence, but the secret divinity is formidably locked and breaks out by a most difficult process. Hence the rise of life and mind in a context of enormous randomness and devious waste, as though it were an emergence through layer on obstructive layer, through labyrinth on misleading labyrinth of gloom.
Yes, the Rishis recognised the immense obstruction at the roots of life and mind. They recognised too the necessity not only of ascending to the domains of knowledge and bliss beyond earth but also of disclosing in its full splendour the Sun, as they put it, lost in the Cave of Night. To bring about that disclosure, the cave-walls must be demolished. But how were the ancient barriers to be broken down? The question seems to have met with no positive answer. Hence the later Indian masters of Yoga read, in that irreducible opposition which introduced some ever-resistant element of the undivine into all our parts of nature, an enigmatic māyā which, being unconquerable, has to be evaded by a world-exceeding absorption of the inner being into an infinity that has no form, an eternity that has no movement. Even the less intransigent masters felt that ultimately the world was the field of a play, līlā, without a denouement, a play which could be inwardly ecstatic to a God-lover but never completely resolvable in its outward terms to God's freedom and light and beatitude and immortality.
Sri Aurobindo harks back to the Vedic endeavour. Not only the Godhead above, around and within but also the Godhead below is the object of his Yoga. Unless the Godhead below is compassed and set free completely in the forms of evolution, there can be no overcoming of those resistant elements that have
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made mysticism a magnificent failure, the grandest human achievement that yet could not bring heaven to earth. Of course nothing else than mysticism can hope to build a perfect life fulfilling man to the innermost and the outermost. However, mysticism must open its eyes to the darkness enwrapped within darkness and find some means of irradiating it.
If the old spirituality fell short, it was because the means remained undiscovered. Sri Aurobindo's teaching is that there must be in the infinite Divine the power that put forth the formula of a huge involution as the starting-point of an endless evolution and that in this power must reside the key to the irradiation of the Vedic darkness so that the Godhead may stand manifest in the very atoms of matter, secure in them as in its own home since matter would release in its own terms the Supreme Spirit crypted within it. This power he calls Supermind, Truth-Consciousness, Gnosis. To make the Supermind descend into earth-life, to carry it down into the Cave of Night and, by making the "Sun on the head of the Timeless" join the Sun immured below the feet of Time, render possible a perfect existence here and now, an existence no longer open to invasion from the nether glooms nor liable to slip down into their abyss: this is the epic of the Aurobindonian Yoga. Its uniqueness lies, on the one hand, in the full realisation of the hitherto unexplored and undynamised Supermind where the Truth is wide-awake and, on the other, in the full fathoming of the hitherto evaded and untransformed "inconscience" of matter where the Truth is deep-asleep. This uniqueness leads us to look upon Sri Aurobindo as, in the most literal sense, the Scientist of the Spirit - one who in the light of the highest spiritual Knowledge grapples with the plane of matter, the basic sphere of Science, and asserts that, until the heart of matter's mystery is spiritually entered and possessed, the Life Divine can never become for embodied souls an assured reality, an established and consolidated evolution. For evolution means not just the emergence of the higher from the lower: it means also the transformation of the lower by the higher, the integration of it into a richer value. To evolve is to climb to the top of the scale and then turn back to the bottom in order to master it with the peak's puissance.
But the significance of mastery must be properly grasped. There is the old word siddhi doing duty for it in spiritual
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parlance. It is not sufficient, as ordinarily interpreted. For, it suggests a gripping and shaping of recalcitrant substance - the substance itself regarded as alien to the force that grips and shapes. Such siddhi can never have permanence inherent in it nor can it reach down to the very essence. Whatever it does is by way of sustained miracle and constitutes a splendid superimposition: it is not something natural, intrinsic, inevitable. The latter is possible only if the gripped and the shaped is not essentially different from the gripper and the shaper, but is the same being in a phenomenal form put out of the original Perfection for a particular process of self-loss and self-finding. The utter concealment, the absolute involution, comes as the last step of a graded devolution from the Supermind and serves as the first step of a graded evolution due to an expressive push upward from below by the hidden powers and an evocative pressure downward upon them and a progressive entry into them by the same powers - life, mind, Supermind - which have their planes above. What Sri Aurobindo, therefore, means by mastery of the black nadir of existence by the golden zenith is nothing super-imposed by a miraculous seizure: it is the Supreme coming into His own and fulfilling in evolutionary Time a figure of the perfect that He is in His Truth-Consciousness, His plane of creative archetypes which joins the eternal to the temporal. That is why Sri Aurobindo has said that the supramental manifestation is in the very logic of earthly things and is the final sense of the developing terrestrial nature. As such it will be intrinsically sustained, permanent - matter itself crystallising as Spirit.
However, the luminous crystallisation cannot take place without unprecedented labour on the part of those whose mission it is to turn the potentiality of it into actuality. The promise that the potential would be the actual as a result of his Yoga is the significance of November 24, 1926, when the towering ascent that Sri Aurobindo had accomplished was matched by the crossing of a critical point of descent. This day was the culmination of year on long year of travel along uncharted ways of the inner life - travel far beyond the goals of Nirvana, Moksha, Cosmic Consciousness, Krishna-realisation, union with the World-Creatrix which were reached before he withdrew from the political field of British India to Pondicherry in 1910. It is known as the Day of Victory because it marked a
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decisive turn pregnant with the divinisation of material existence. But between the casting of the seed and the advent of flower and fruit there must again be a mighty passage through the unknown. And here the unknown was the penetration more and more of the Vedic darkness with the supramental Gnosis. All the old Yogas move out of the gloom of mortal ignorance into the Immortal's light. The Aurobindonian discipline alone wants the illumined soul not to pause there but to adventure into a gloom of which mortal ignorance is only an attenuated form - the abyss from which evolving life and mind have sprung and which must be conquered if life and mind are to be completely divinised, for, unless matter is also divinised, the embodied deity will always have feet that are fragile. The promise of Victory could grow a realised Triumph only by Sri Aurobindo's becoming at the same time a Pilgrim of Day and a Pilgrim of Night.
The pilgrimage through occult regions of consciousness totally involved within matter is the stupendous sacrifice Sri Aurobindo was giving for decade on decade from the time the Victory had been promised, bearing - as a line of Savitri phrases it - "the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal." Nothing save Divine Love in the supreme degree could support him in such a journey - Divine Love that throws itself out infinitely to lead the evolving world, sparing itself no struggle however dangerous, no self-immolation however exorbitant. A body that housed the illimitable power of the Supermind and could become permeated with the Light beyond this universe of death took upon itself not the mere task of an extraordinary individual transformation but the giant labour of being representative of all bodily life and hence accepting a universal responsibility so that the hope of an entire transformed mankind might result from its achievement. In a Yoga thus representative and responsible the greatest apparent advantages, the most striking personal benefits can be thrown away in a dire strategy of losing the immediate all to gain the ultimate all for the race. Understanding this, we have to view the events that occurred in the first week of December in 1950 - the attack by a fearful malady, uraemia, symbolic of the "inconscience" of the depths surging to drown the heights, the acceptance of it in spite of the Supermind's inherent ability to ward off all disease, the day-to-day aggravation on the one hand and on the other the response of the
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descending Supermind to the sacrifice being given by a leader of the evolution for the whole earth's sake, the deadly suffusion of the leader's body with the uprising poison and yet the lack of the least trace of discolouration and decay for over 111 hours in the tropical climate, the spectacle at once of death and of its transcendence, as though to proclaim in a convincing parable that through the aspect of defeat a triumph was being worked out in the future that lay with Sri Aurobindo behind the visible scene and, here before us, with his companion in the creation of a super-humanity: the Mother.
We await the flaming up of that future from the tenebrous fuel offered to the imperishable Splendour by the strategic sacrifice of Sri Aurobindo. What marvels the flaming will lay bare none can fully gauge. But, if the words of one who incarnated the Truth-Consciousness can be believed, the flaming is certain, and the Mother's eyes are a mirror of the things to be. They bear ever brighter witness to the prophetic close of that poignantly profound sonnet written by the Master of the Supermind's everlasting Day:
I made an assignation with the Night;
In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:
In my breast carrying God's deathless light
I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.
I left the glory of the illumined Mind
And the calm rapture of the divinised soul
And travelled through a vastness dim and blind
To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.
I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime
And still that weary journeying knows no end;
Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,
There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,
And yet I know my footprints' track shall be
A pathway towards Immortality.¹
1952
¹. SABCL Vol. 5, p. 132.
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"Freewill" in Sri Aurobindo's Vision
Sri Aurobindo's views on the crucial choice that must be made of the way of living, if we are really to be fulfilled and the calls of existence truly to be answered, are clear to most of us: we sum them up as "the Integral Yoga." But we are not equally familiar with his outlook on the power to choose. Wherever there is the activity of the will, there is the phenomenon of choosing - and yet there is no warrant in this for believing that the choice is freely made and not occasioned by subtle or unknown factors other than our will itself. How exactly does Sri Aurobindo stand with regard to the problem whether the human will is free?
A couple of points which he puts before us may appear, in isolation and at face value, to deny man freewill altogether. First, genuine freedom of will as of consciousness and delight and being can only be in a divine state, for only the Divine is genuinely free; and so long as we are in the unregenerate condition, which is subject to ego and desire and the drive of Nature, Prakriti, untransformed by the Luminous and the Eternal, we can never speak of authentic freewill. Second, once we postulate a divine Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence, we must conclude it to have originated and decreed whatever arises and acts in the universe which is its emanation. Is there then any room left in us for freewill as usually understood? If no genuine freewill can be except in the freedom of the Divine, can we be thought free even to choose that freedom or stay away from it? Again, if all things are originally decreed by the Divine, is not our feeling of being real doers a delusion given us for some purpose of the Divine's world-play? This question is akin to the time-old one: if God, having all-knowledge, has foreseen everything, have we any power to deviate from His plan, and do we not have inevitably to carry out the details of it?
Many Christian theologians have attempted to solve the dilemma: some have said that God's knowledge is in eternity and eternity is different from time and such knowledge does not clash with free action within a different order of being; others have said, "God cannot be a true creator if He cannot create creators." No proposition of this type is in itself satisfactory, though each may have a faint inkling of some truth which is ill-
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caught and ill-expressed by it. To drive a wedge between God's knowledge in eternity and man's actions in time is to indulge in a quibble: if by eternity is meant a status in which past and present and future are not a sequence but an all-at-once, an endless total Now, then every "now" of our ordinary life as well as of all existence is not something fixed by God from the past, but would it cease to be actuated by Him in the very present? God's hold from the past is avoided; yet unless eternity and His all-knowledge are rendered otiose and meaningless, His hold at every present moment remains complete. In the face of this complete hold, the proposition about God being no creator unless creators are created by Him is no more than a brilliant epigram if understood in a Christian context. Christianity conceives the human soul as a creature brought into existence by God at some point of time and existing with some resemblance to Him yet with no essential identity with Him. Such a soul cannot be a creator in any Godlike sense and must be entirely subject to God's endless total Now underlying and actuating all its "nows" or else to His foreknowledge in the past determining its career.
The primary sine qua non to be recognised for making any freewill valid is: God who originates and decrees everything must somehow be not different from our own souls. Without identity with God no freewill anywhere can be. This identity would be the truth behind the epigram about creators: only, that epigram does not openly put man's soul on a par with the Divine, does not conceive it as an eternal aspect of the Divine - an eternal aspect possible because the Divine would Himself be conceived as being simultaneously single and multiple, unitary yet many-poised, essentially one but numerically not bound by oneness. Does Sri Aurobindo grant the identity?
It is a cardinal characteristic of his vision, bound up with God's being One-in-Many. Unless God is at the same time multiple and single, the manifold world would have no basis in God. We should have to rest with a fundamental dualism or resort to an illusionist theory of the manifold world. Even an illusion, however, must have at least a subjective existence and it can exist, be it ever so subjectively, in nothing save God if He is the Sole Reality, and to understand such an existing is as much a hurdle as to understand God's being One-in-Many. Besides, our
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evolution, difficult and shot with evil and suffering, out of the Inconscient, demands that God should be such. All other accounts would fail to explain fully the type of evolutionary process adopted. "To explain it," says Sri Aurobindo, "there must be two missing elements, a conscious assent by the soul to this manifestation and a reason in the All-Wisdom that makes the play significant and intelligible."¹ The reason in the All-Wisdom is not here our direct concern, though we may mention that it is the extreme attractiveness of the strenuous joy lying in self-concealing and self-finding, the joy which would be at the utmost when the self-concealing is the awful plunge into the sheer Inconscient and the self-finding is through the absolute opposite of the Divine. What is of pertinence to the issue at stake is the soul's conscious assent. Can the assent be an explanatory feature and a meaningful fact under any circumstance other than that the soul is free to will? And can the soul be free unless it is not created at a certain point of time to be sent willy-nilly on a world-journey through imperfection but is a particular eternal aspect of the Divine, a mode of His manyness, so that the Divine's fiat and the soul's assent are automatically the same thing? Sri Aurobindo's vision, therefore, is not inimical to the primary sine qua non for freewill, and his pronouncement on the universe's utter dependence on God's decree is not deterministic when taken in combination with his full outlook.
But a second indispensable condition has to be satisfied for freewill's validity. It is obvious that we, as we are from day to day, cannot be described as souls that are eternal aspects of the Divine. We are too obscure and weak and perverted: we have a tremendously long way to go to realise ourselves as individualised divinities. Individualised divinities we may be in our secret recesses: our daily surface existence is pretty far from Godliness. Hence the important query: does our souls' assent from their God-poise to the strange cosmic play confer on what we do in even our ordinary moments a true freewill? All our actions are really of our souls carrying out the free decisions they have taken in their role of divine creators; but, on our surface, are we in any sense our own souls and do we share at least some of their freewill? No freewill can be in us if even as we are, if even in our
¹. The Life Divine, SABCL Vol. 18, p. 409.
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state that is human and not ostensibly divine, we have no power, however small, to choose or not to choose. Freewill can have little relevance to us if our normal selves are wanting in some touch of identity with our souls that are essentially identical with God: to exercise any freewill our ordinary moments must be identical in some degree or other with God Himself! Does Sri Aurobindo take them to be thus identical?
Let us glance at his scheme of our selfhood, our soulhood. Above all manifestation and evolution is the Jivatman, our highest self or soul, the individualised divinity, a supreme transcendental form in the play of the One as the Many. Presiding over manifestation and evolution, the Jivatman projects a representative into the cosmic process: this representative is the Antaratman, our inmost or deepest self or soul with all the potentialities of the Divine in it, and it passes from birth to birth, making for evolutionary purposes a bright nucleus round which the duller tones of mind-stuff, vitality-stuff and matter-stuff are gathered, infusing its own sweetness and light and strength into them stage by stage and developing them to serve as its transparent mediums. Through experience in birth after birth the nucleus too grows and will at last be able to offer to the Supreme, whence the Antaratman came, a full manifested personality - many-sided though single, individualised yet embracing all cosmos and partaking of all Transcendence beyond both individuality and cosmicity in time. But, while dealing with mind-stuff, vitality-stuff and matter-stuff, this true psyche here below makes a projection of itself into them, a projection which gets steeped in their tones. Now, all existence has a biune reality - Purusha and Prakriti, conscious being and Nature. Wherever consciousness plays, this biune reality is present in one form or another, openly concordant or apparently divided. We have thus in the realm of evolutionary existence a mental being facing mental Nature, a vital being fronting vital Nature, a physical being opposite physical Nature: these beings are experienced by us according as our consciousness assumes a mental or vital or physical poise. And all of them are representative of the true psychic Purusha. When the multi-possible Purusha of us with its centre in the psychic being stands fully back, uninvolved in Prakriti and lord of it, though not united altogether with the Jivatman above, we have a clear realisation of some measure of
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authentic freewill, because that uninvolved and masterful Purusha, centrally psychic, is in rapport with the totally free Jivatman. But even when the projection of the psyche into mind, vitality and matter acts as something involved in Prakriti and is the stumbling surface being of us, the self as ordinarily cognised, then also it carries a touch of freedom with it; for that involvement, that enslavement, is freely made and there remains with us the power to withhold sanction to the current play of Nature in our members and to bring about a turn towards the Perfect, the Divine, the Un-enslaved. Precisely on that power is based Sri Aurobindo's appeal to us to choose the life divine instead of the life human. He² states: "The Divine can lead, he does not drive. There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called 'man' to assent or not to assent to the Divine leading: how else can any real spiritual evolution be done?"
If it is asked what becomes of Sri Aurobindo's assertion that only in a divine state there can be genuine freedom of will, the answer is: he evidently means by genuine freedom of will a quality of the full experience of being not what we apparently are at present but a luminous superhuman entity that is cosmic while being individual, and transcendental while being cosmic. Such freedom we cannot experience when we are unregenerate. In our present state, obscure and weak and perverted, we are divorced from the wisdom and puissance and beauty that we are on our ultimate heights: we have not the absolute freedom of our own hidden Infinite, nor have we the potent prerogative of our own psychic depths; still, a dim vestige we do possess of what we have put behind and beyond us and part of the vestige is an ability to give to Prakriti's fluctuations of inertia, vehemence and harmony a Yes or a No and gradually effect a passage from our human imperfection to a supernal splendour. No freewill other than this bare ability is ours, but it is freewill none the less. And at least a faint glimmer of freewill has indeed to be there in our surface existence if we are meant to be conscious co-operators in the work of rising from humanity to superhumanity and bringing into all our constituents what Sri Aurobindo terms the Supermind, the archetypal truth of all that we are in the evolutionary process. The free assenting highest soul of us, the Jivatman,
². Letters on Yoga, SABCL Vol. 23, p. 598.
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that has been creative of the world-play from its eternal poise in the Divine, cannot but keep of its vast freewill a pin-point in conscious co-operators, in minds that discriminate and argue and weigh, in beings that have enough detachment from Nature to at least enable them to reflect on themselves and to study and judge Nature. On that pin-point the whole of mental human life is fulcrummed for activity, and the conceding of it is implied in the Aurobindonian outlook which holds our intelligent will to be a ray, deformed though it may be, of the Gnosis, the Supermind.
Two sine qua nons we have tabulated and both we have discovered to be granted by Sri Aurobindo. But there is a third which emerges from one special question concerning the dynamics of the world-play. Has the world-play been decreed from the past by God and is it going on inexorably since that old decree of the Eternal or does eternity connote an all-at-once, an endless total Now? If every "now" of ours were what our souls as portions of the Divine had foreseen and forefixed from the past and there were no endless total Now, there might be an experience of freewill by us since we would not be bound by any past other than that in which had acted our own divine selves with whom we would have a pin-point contact. But an endless total Now can alone explain in entirety the sense we have of freewill in the "nows" of our common life, the sense that nothing of the past, even if the past be of our highest selves, wholly binds us and that at every moment we are creative of our actions. Of course, creativity in full cannot be felt by us from our poor human standing-ground; nevertheless, a tiny bit of it we would intensely feel only when our own highest selves would be acting in an endless total Now and not merely from a deific past. The truth behind the idea that eternity and time are different orders and God's foreknowledge in the former need not clash with man's freewill in the latter seems to be just this that for an entire explanation of the real creative feeling which we have, however pin-pointed, eternity should carry time in an all-at-once constituting an endless total Now: what the idea took no account of are the two other indispensables of freewill. Sri Aurobindo does take account of them: does he also envisage the last indispensable?
In The Life Divine he distinguishes three statuses in God's eternity: a timeless immobile status, supremely self-absorbed,
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without developments of consciousness in movement or happening - a status of simultaneous integrality of time, which is a stable whole-consciousness of the successive relations of all things manifested - a status of processive movement of consciousness and its successive working out of what has been seen in the stable vision. Statuses second and third, combined, would give us an endless total Now underlying and actuating all the "nows" of the time-movement - Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnipresence acting everywhere and in everything and at every moment but exceeding limitation by the moments and, while it spreads out a past, present and future, embracing them also in one whole. This one whole is the deific Ever-Present, with a pin- point of which our poor human "now" coincides, acquiring thereby the fullest reality possible for its speck of freewill.
People might lift their hands in shock or protest, crying: "If all we do is, for Sri Aurobindo, traceable to the Divine's eternal fiat, the choice in an endless total Now of our highest selves, a faint spark of whom abides in the Tom, Dick and Harry that we are, what is there to make us choose good and reject evil? If we cannot have freewill of any kind unless the Divine be taken as somehow acting in us, would anything we freely do be bad or blamable?"
The first answer is: there is a sense in which nothing is wrong, for spiritual realisation actually testifies that in a certain state of experience everything is perfect. Brahman is all and all is Brahman - but that sense is truly attained by an experience of the All-Brahman, not by a mere idea of Him, and so long as the experience is lacking we cannot speak, with living conviction or direct right, of everything being equally good. What is more, to have that very experience we have at each moment to stand away from egoistic desire which is the arch-vice, the subtle root of iniquity. To realise that all is Brahman we have to reject something as not Brahman! This paradox has to be accepted and it provides a hint that the cry of shock or protest is irrational. The irrationality resides in that the fact of Brahman being all and all being Brahman is considered not only without spiritual experience but also without another side of the divine reality. Brahman has projected in His infinity a negation of the essentially divine and an emergence of divine values from the Inconscient. According to this arrangement by Brahman there is a
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constant and persistent and ubiquitous fight between the Divine and the undivine, between good and evil. Of course by "good" we must not mean always what puritanism or prudery or pacifism or any rigid rule or code sets up for our guidance: we must mean some profound urge towards surpassing our ignorance, meanness, cruelty, incapacity, ugliness and becoming like Zoroaster, like Christ, like Buddha, like Sri Krishna or, best of all, like Sri Aurobindo. There is an incumbence on us to follow this urge, since the entire evolutionary process of the hidden and negated God holds it as its secret law and it is precisely because the attainment of the All-Brahman is also an evolutionary step, a finding of a certain side of divine reality which too was concealed, that paradoxically we have in even this attainment to follow that urge and choose good and reject evil. In man the mental being, the conscious self-evolver, the urge is an unavoidable open ingredient of his constitution and cannot help being insistent and deeply desirable. We may tend to justify the non-following of it by arguing from one half of God's truth: the vision of Pantheos. But when both halves are taken together and we do not overlook God from above calling to God from below to rise and evolve in the milieu of God that is all, then the urge to choose good and reject evil is found to be a decree the soul in us has passed from the supramental identity-in-difference it enjoys within the multiple yet single Divine.
Surely this decree is not the only one and even its overruling at times may be deemed after the event a valid soul-act subserving God's purpose, since in God's subtle play real good may come out of seeming evil; but before an act has happened and while alternatives are still felt as possible this decree is logically the most valid, the most to be regarded, in an evolutionary scheme of Upward no less than Onward. The overruling of it may, on a back-look, prove itself justified in God's complex economy, but the overruling can never be justifiable in the moment of action. If it can, the process of upward evolution by us would lose support altogether and could never be a plan of the supreme Creative Consciousness for our freewill to carry out.
1947
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A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PROBLEM
One of the most burning issues in the controversies about God is Waste in Nature. Philosophies that do not admit a Divine Being as the source and support and goal of the world, or only admit a rudimentary consciousness fundamental to Matter and attaining higher intensities according to the growing complexities of physical structure, or at most admit a non-perfect élan vital progressing through repeated trial and error - such philosophies can have no quarrel with Nature's huge amount of waste. But the plethora of blind and useless expenditure of energy we notice all around seems to give the lie direct to the presence of a secret Divine Consciousness.
How would the world-view of Sri Aurobindo face the objection? In his first glance at the problem Sri Aurobindo says: "... obviously this is an objection based on the limitations of our human intellect which seeks to impose its own particular rationality, good enough for limited human ends, on the general operations of the World-Force. We see only part of Nature's purpose and all that does not subserve that part we call waste. Yet even our own human action is full of an apparent waste, so appearing from the individual point of view, which yet, we may be sure, subserves well enough the large and universal purpose of things. That part of her intention which we can detect, Nature gets done surely enough in spite of, perhaps really by virtue of her apparent waste. We may well trust to her in the rest which we do not yet detect."1
All this certainly has cogency, but there is a note of "trust" and "perhaps" and "we may be sure", and it does not tend to carry conviction quite home. Something is left unsaid, which possibly is premature at the stage where the problem is tackled. And Sri Aurobindo returns to the subject in another context which touches upon his earlier reference to "our own human action". He writes: "A narrow selection, a large rejection or reservation, a miserly-spendthrift system of waste of material and unemployment
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of resources and a scanty and disorderly modicum of useful spending and utilisable balance seems to be the method of Nature in our conscious becoming even as it is in the field of the material universe. But this is only in appearance, for it would be a wholly untrue account to say that all that is not thus saved up and utilised is destroyed, becomes null and has passed away ineffectually and in vain. A great part of it has been quietly used by Nature herself to form us and actuates that sufficiently large mass of our growth and becoming and action for which our conscious memory, will and intelligence are not responsible. A still greater part is used by her as a store from which she draws and which she utilises, while we ourselves have utterly forgotten the origin and provenance of this material which we find ourselves employing with a deceptive sense of creation; for we imagine we are creating this new material of our work, when we are only combining results out of that which we have forgotten but Nature in us has remembered. If we admit rebirth as part of her system, we shall realise that all experience has its use; for all experience counts in this prolonged building and nothing is rejected except what has exhausted its utility and would be a burden on the future. A judgment from what appears now in our conscious surface is fallacious: for when we study and understand, we perceive that only a little of her action and growth in us is conscious; the bulk of it is carried on subconsciously as in the rest of her material life. We are not only what we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know; our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our existence."²
A deeply helpful gloss on Nature's waste is here, suggesting pointers from what happens in our conscious becoming to what must be happening in the field of the material universe. But here also is not an entirely satisfying statement. Once again, waste is essentially denied, and the appearance of it attributed to our limited human view. But have we not to realise that our human view is limited because we are living in a certain sort of universe and are evolving portions of a particular kind of cosmic movement? If the universe, the cosmic movement, is such that a limited human view must inevitably occur in it, surely Nature is
² . Ibid., p. 555.
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working under conditions that are imperfect. And, though we may assert that only her individual items are faulty but her sum-total is faultless, we still do not quite get rid of our conclusion. To hold that in the divine reason of things there is a key beyond us to all the waste we witness is no sufficient answer. Sri Aurobindo himself starkly observes: "A Divine Whole that is perfect by reason of the imperfection of its parts, runs the risk of itself being only perfect in imperfection, because it fulfils entirely some stage in an unaccomplished purpose; it is then a present but not an ultimate Totality. To it we could apply the Greek saying Theos ouk estin alla gigentai, the Divine is not yet in being, but is becoming."³
Thus the cosmic movement, not possessed of the Divine, proves to be capable of real waste. And to reconcile this aspect with the one noted earlier we must say in extenuation: "The amount of real waste is the least possible, since a Divine Intelligence managing an imperfect world is making the best ever of a pretty bad job. This amount is the minimum necessity for that Intelligence to accomplish its plan. Indeed, everything is being made use of - but in the manner and the measure conforming to the type of manifestation that this world is. The type is such that - speaking figuratively - to reach the target once we need to expend a hundred arrows instead of just a single arrow, even though the hundred are the smallest number under the inauspicious circumstances, for a supreme Intelligence pits itself against the difficulties and is able to take the greatest advantage of them."
The light in which we see waste here is the same as that in which we see with Sri Aurobindo the oppositions he makes between the Divine and the Undivine. Under the latter head he puts "grief, pain, error, falsehood, ignorance, weakness, wickedness, incapacity, non-doing of what should be done and wrong-doing, deviation of will and denial of will, egoism, limitation, division from other beings with whom we should be one, all that makes up the effective figure of what we call evil."4 These, he says, are "facts of the world-consciousness, not fiction and unrealities."5 Of course, he is careful to add: "they are facts
³. Ibid., p. 395.
4. Ibid., p. 405.
5. Ibid.
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whose complete sense or true value is not that which we assign to them in our ignorance" - but he also continues: "Still our sense of them is part of a true sense, our values of them are necessary to their complete values."6
Sri Aurobindo affirms the undivine as an ingredient of cosmic existence. Although he does not specifically name waste in this connection, waste is undoubtedly one of the aspects of the undivine, it is a result of "error" and "incapacity" which Sri Aurobindo does name and it can be subsumed also under "non-doing of what should be done and wrong-doing." The waste in our human activity is but an example of all waste in Nature: it is due to insufficient knowledge and insufficient power. When conscious man is liable to such a lot of error and incapacity, what should we not expect of phenomena in which Nature has no surface consciousness at all or at best a very restricted one?
On looking at "evil" as a component of world reality, Sri Aurobindo is not standing on a universal or transcendent height which corrects our human outlook. Now his earlier treatment of the problem of waste becomes no more than half the answer of his spiritual philosophy. That half is part of the vision of the world as perfect from the standpoint of the Supreme Consciousness, the vision that all is Brahman. There is another vision which is more typically Aurobindonian on the whole: according to it, perfection has to emerge and evolve, Brahman has to manifest from non-Brahman and anti-Brahman. Both visions have their validity and the latter is indispensable to the Integral Yoga with its insistence on transforming all that is erring and false and feeble in our nature into the Divine. In this vision waste, featuring as a reality to be confronted, is not seen to be there because we are short-sighted: a ground for it has to be discovered in the cosmic scheme just as much as for suffering and falsehood, a formula that would make it possible in God's universe without impugning God's supreme Intelligence.
The required ground and formula in Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy is God's "involution". Out of the infinite possibilities of manifestation the possibility that has been made the key-note of the present manifestation is that a sovereign Consciousness has used its power of variable self-play to find itself through a
6. Ibid.
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process beginning from an utter concealment of itself in what it puts forth. In contrast to its unobscurable status of ever-existing plenitude at the top, as it were, it effects at the bottom a complete involution of all its divine figures. Then a reverse movement takes place to evolve those figures in the terms of their negation and achieve a greater, a unique intensity of Light and Power and Bliss. But, when slowly the involved divinity is released from the chaos of the Inconscient, there is bound to be the brutal and the blind, the cruel and the wasteful. An irrational and useless expenditure of energy is inevitable if evolution starts from a plan to manifest God's innermost truth through diverse symbols of an entire contradiction of that truth.
With God becoming the Inconscient and then growing out of that abyss towards His own summit of Superconscience, so few would be the holds and vantage-points, so much would slip into the yawning chasm! Could there be anything save real gigantic waste? And this waste would exist and not be a mere seeming though a supreme Intelligence were at work. But in spite of this waste that Intelligence would not be called in question. For, it has itself settled the conditions of a paradoxical self-consummation and afterwards goes converting to the utmost utility possible the constraints and checks of those conditions so that the vast number of misfires is actually the smallest in a world of total initial darkness where, by the law of probability, nearly every move should be a misfire.
So one of the most burning issues in the controversy about God would be completely and convincingly met in the Aurobindonian world-view without our blinking any of the facts.
(May 1970)
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"The Mind of Light"
SOME FACTS, INTERPRETATIONS AND
SPECULATIONS
Whoever has studied the full circumstances, both inner and outer, of the momentous event that was the passing of Sri Aurobindo from the material scene knows this event to have been, for all its so-called "clinical picture", no inevitable hour of mortality. It reveals itself as an extreme measure freely adopted, for reasons of his own, in significant yet never dominant mortal detail by one who, after having ascended in consciousness to a new and hitherto unmanifested power of the Divine Reality, sought to effect a descent of it for earth's complete perfection, including a transformation of the very body of man. The spiritual perfectionist found at a critical turn of his battle with entrenched powers of darkness in earth's being that to take his own semi-transformed body through the process of a death at once normal and supernormal was a paradoxical short-cut towards the revolutionary evolution of humanity into divinity that was his aim. Whoever has studied the full circumstances knows too that as a result of this grand and dreadful strategic sacrifice the new power which Sri Aurobindo had variously termed Supermind, Gnosis, Truth-Consciousness came down at last into earth's being and established there a first centre of action. This wonderful descent charged most conspicuously for a while the Master's own body, rendering it strangely luminous to the eyes of many as well as keeping it absolutely incorrupt for over a hundred hours in even the tropical climate. Also, the descended marvel settled permanently in his spiritual co-worker, the Mother, for transformative earth-use and was responsible for the phenomenon that the Aurobindonian work, instead of dwindling after the Master's self-withdrawal, leaped gloriously forward under her leadership.
But what exactly was the centre of action established, by which the Supermind has been ever since in operation no longer from merely high above or deep within but even from the level of the embodied nature, in a gradually increasing degree marking
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manifestation after greater manifestation of the Divine in the stuff of the human? To put the query in other words: what exactly got realised and was set working when the Supermind descended into the body? The answer - at once a definition of the result achieved and a disclosure of the logic of the event - is to be found in a succinct pronouncement made by the Mother to the present writer. She¹ said:
"As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he has called the Mind of Light got realised in me."
"The Supermind had descended long ago - very long ago - into the mind and even into the vital: it was working in the physical also but indirectly through those intermediaries. The question was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light: the physical mind was the instrument for direct action upon the most material. This physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light."
Face to face with such a clear-cut statement our sole task is to use as exegesis on its conjunction of physical mind, Supermind and Mind of Light Sri Aurobindo's own treatment of the last. His phrase, "Mind of Light", except for an occurrence in Book IV, Canto I, of Savitri² in connection with Savitri's early development -
A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,
A body instinct with hidden divinity
Prepared an image of the coming god -
is used with a specific connotation for the first time in the concluding essays in the series originally published in the Mother's Bulletin of Physical Education and later collected in book-form under the title, The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth. The connotation is indeed specific but packed with subtleties, all of which are not expounded in full in the essays before us, and it displays a sort of spectrum-band of more than one shade. Sri Aurobindo intended to write further on the theme and in the existing essays he discusses the Mind of Light with reference less to the initiation of this novel state in the course of his Integral Yoga than to the general life afterwards of a humanity to which
¹. MCW Vol. 13, pp. 64, 63.
². SABCL Vol. 29, p. 357.
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such a state might spread and even become, instead of our present mentality, native. So we must examine the phrase carefully with an eye to both the implicit and the explicit and combine with the clues derived from these last writings those available from his major philosophical work, The Life Divine, to which The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth is, in many senses, a sequel. Then we shall be best able to correlate his declarations with the Mother's pronouncement and by their help fill out the significance it reveals of the supramental descent into the body, which started on December 5, 1950.
I
Preliminary to our exposition of the Mind of Light as treated by Sri Aurobindo we must seize the meaning of the words, "physical mind", employed by the Mother. Elucidation of them will also elucidate those two other terms of hers: "the mind" and "the vital". Evidently these terms denote parts of our nature that are to be distinguished from the physical mind and the physical vital. After the physical mind, the physical vital is what has to receive the supramental light and be its second centre of operation if the most material, the physical proper, is to be supramentalised and a complete divinisation of earth-nature accomplished. It should be obvious that, strictly speaking, the physical vital is the vitality, the life-force, that has assumed the aspect of nervous energy in us, sustaining and activating the material form into which it is intimately infused, and carrying on not only the organic process but the complex play of bodily desire. Similarly, the physical mind, strictly speaking, is mind assuming the aspect of brain-activity in us by which we get the experience of physical things, are engrossed in that experience and respond in various ways of thought, feeling, volition to sense-contacts.
But this matter-obsessed brain-mind does not exhaust our mentality, for the latter is not concerned only with physical things. Even science which is ostensibly thus concerned goes beyond them, for it has its abstract theorist of unvisualisable concepts. Also, there are the pure mathematician, the idealistic dreamer and planner, the artist, the philosopher, the ethico-religious disciplinarian and the spiritual aspirant. And behind
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the multifold mentality that is man's in his normally conscious state are reaches and recesses which he is not ordinarily aware of and among which the most immediately potent and productive are the subliminal. All those parts that are not preoccupied with or mainly governed by physical things are linked with the subliminal and in many respects are, as it were, its projections. Yet, inasmuch as they function within man's conscious state, they form one team with the part which is matter-obsessed. And, like that part, they work in close connection with the brain and are not ordinarily known to be independent of it. A pragmatic continuity they have with the brain-mind, are often hampered by it and in a general manner conditioned by its matter-obsession. In this respect also they stand with the brain-mind over against the subliminal. If we call the subliminal the inner mind and take it to pass beyond the physical formula, the rest is the outer or surface mind and the physical formula covers the whole of it in one way or another. Broadly speaking, what is not subliminal is the physical mind.
Likewise the physical vital, broadly speaking, is all that functioning of the life-force which is not subliminal vitality: the outward-thrown energy of the mighty creators, destroyers, achievers no less than the body-confined organic process and desire-play is then the physical vital. The physical vital and the physical mind are not only life-force and mind which have arisen in the physical proper and, while giving it a rudimentary mechanical sensitiveness and perceptiveness, have themselves taken up the role as of physical functions in the shape of nervous energy and brain-activity: they are also the entire mass of established human workings of vitality and mentality, whatever is not usually independent of the nervous and the cerebral but is pragmatically continuous with them even in its keenest and finest manifestations.
This description equates the mind and the vital mentioned by the Mother with the subliminal or inner mentality and vitality, mind and life-force in their own right apart from matter though thrusting their powers into matter, joining up with and developing the mental and the vital evolving from the "inconscience" of matter in which they lie "involved". The involved vital and mental that have evolved are mind and life-force physical in the strict sense, while in the broad sense the vital and mental
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"evolutes" of earth, in addition to being these, are constituted by their development under the pressure of mind and life-force from above matter and by their juncture with the powers thrust from the subliminal into terrestrial evolution.
Physical mind, in the broad sense, is just what Sri Aurobindo means whenever he speaks of the Mind in us that has to change under the influence of Supermind. Although he often brings out the narrow sense when demarcating the many layers or folds of our mentality, the broad sense is obvious as soon as he talks of the subliminal in contrast to the Mind of our ordinary possession. The latter he generally names the waking or surface consciousness, but he sometimes names it the "corporeal mentality" and even the designation, "physical mind", is not always absent. Thus, while discussing Mind and Supermind in Chapter XVIII of The Life Divine, he³ writes: "To us mind seems to be determined by the body, because it is preoccupied with that and devoted to the physical workings which it uses for its conscious superficial action in this gross material world. Employing constantly that operation of the brain and nerves which it has developed in the course of its own development in the body, it is too absorbed in observing what this physical machinery gives to it to get back from it to its own pure workings; those are to it mostly subconscious.... This corporeal mentality is merely our surface of mind, merely the front which it presents to physical experience." Here, "subconscious" which Sri Aurobindo usually demarcates from "subliminal" is used loosely as a synonym for the latter: in fact, in the same context occurs the phrase, "subconscious or subliminal to us". Clearly, the corporeal mentality is all that we normally know as Mind in ourselves, including "most of the larger, deeper and more forceful dynamic action of our surface mind" as well as "the pure thinker in us", the immediate origin of both of which Sri Aurobindo in this context traces to the subliminal. In Chapter XI of Part II of The Life Divine4 he says: "The subliminal self... has the same capacities as our waking being, a subtle sense and perception, a comprehensive extended memory and an intensive selecting intelligence, will, self-consciousness; but even though the same in kind, they are wider, more developed, more sovereign. And it
³. SABCL Vol. 18, p. 168.
4. Ibid., pp. 559-60.
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has other capacities which exceed those of our mortal mind because of a power of direct awareness of the being, whether acting in itself or turned upon its object, which arrives more swiftly at knowledge, more swiftly at effectivity of will, more deeply at understanding and satisfaction of impulse. Our surface mind is hardly a true mentality, so involved, bound, hampered, conditioned is it by the body and bodily life and the limitations of the nerve-system and the physical organs. But the subliminal self has a true mentality superior to these limitations; it exceeds the physical mind and physical organs although it is aware of them and their works and is, indeed, in a large degree their cause or creator." The waking human mental in its totality, the whole of embodied Mind whether in its strictly physical or in its subtler and higher yet generally brain-dependent or at least brain- influenced workings is here what Sri Aurobindo terms surface mind or physical mind.
The embodied human mental, to which the epithet "physical" is broadly appropriate, is, in The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth, the Mind spoken of as being converted into the Mind of Light and utilised for supramentalisation of bodily vitality and bodily matter. Take the following passage5: "In place of the human mind as it now is, a mind limited, imperfect, open at every moment to all kinds of deviation from the truth or missing of the truth, all kinds of error and openness even to the persuasions of a complete falsehood and perversion of the nature, a mind blinded and pulled down towards inconscience and ignorance, hardly arriving at knowledge, an intellect prone to interpret the higher knowledge in abstractions and indirect figures seizing and holding even the messages of the higher intuition with an uncertain and disputed grasp, there could emerge a true mind6 liberated and capable of the tree and utmost perfection of itself and its instruments, a life governed by the free and illumined mind, a body responsive to the light and
5. SABCL Vol. 16, p. 48.
6. "True mind" mentioned in this passage must not be confused with "true mentality" of the passage in the previous paragraph. One is mind embodied yet no longer ignorant; the other is mind ignorant yet not grossly so like our embodied mentality, it is ignorant mind in its true and not body-falsified extra-impeded form. (K.D.S.)
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able to carry out all that the free mind and will could demand of it."
Again, what else than the physical mind in the broad sense is described when Sri Aurobindo, apropos of the Supermind whose "consciousness lives always in an immediacy of knowledge and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge", writes7: "In Mind as we see it here the action is very different; it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at all immediate but rather knowledge at first seems utterly impossible and foreign to the very substance of this matter."
Finally, the totality of the human mental, with its higher no less than its lower powers gripped within the evolutionary bodily formula and physicalised into gross ignorance and incompetence, is strikingly summed up thus8: "It is a power for creation, but either tentative and uncertain and succeeding by good chance or the favour of circumstance or else, if assured by some force of practical ability or genius, subject to flaw or pent within inescapable limits. Its highest knowledge is often abstract, lacking in a concrete grasp; it has to use expedients and unsure means of arrival, to rely upon reasoning, argumentation and debate, inferences, divinations, set methods of inductive or deductive logic, succeeding only if it is given correct and complete data and even then liable to reach on the same data different results and varying consequences; it has to use means and accept results of a method which is hazardous even when making a claim to certitude and of which there would be no need if it had a direct or a supra-intellectual knowledge. It is not necessary to push the description further; all this is the very nature of our terrestrial ignorance and its shadow hangs on even to the thought and vision of the sage and the seer and can be escaped only if the principle of a truth-conscious supramental knowledge descends and takes up the governance of the earth-nature."
7. SABCL Vol. 16, p. 48.
8. Ibid., p. 57.
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Having fixed the province of the physical mind which the supramental re-creates into the Mind of Light, we should do well as the next step to mark systematically though briefly the main contrast between it and Supermind, basing ourselves on the citations we have already made from Sri Aurobindo as well as on others in The Life Divine. This will pointedly serve to suggest what the re-creation would be like.
Mind in its established human workings is a profound ignorance trying to acquire knowledge and the very knowledge it acquires is of appearances, of nature's surface activity, objective or subjective, rather than of nature's depth and of the under-lying ultimate reality. Further, both in its practical knowledge and in the theoretical constructs it makes to correlate observations it grasps not the substance of things but only an image or eidolon of them: it stands outside what it seeks to know, and knows nothing from the inside by a sense of oneness with it. Again, its mode of operation is analysis and synthesis. It divides, distinguishes, differentiates - it breaks up everything into parts and strains at a whole by merely aggregating them on a basis of similarity or affinity. It never arrives at a final totality or unity or infinity or essentiality, except as an abstract conception to which nothing in its contact with things concretely answers: whatever concrete sense it has through image or eidolon is of sections, fragments, finites, particulars. On its dynamic side also it is circumscribed and indirect: it can will within just a narrow range and to carry out its volition it has to employ instruments, external or internal, instead of being effective by its own strength. Even between its thought and its volition, however close they may seem, there is always a state of strain, as if the thought were not intrinsically effective and the volition not intrinsically conceptive. Though capable of striking originality in some respects, it falls lamentably short of consummately organising the world or fulfilling the self according even to its own restricted sense of the good, the beautiful, the true.
Unavoidably, when our highest power is like this, impulse and emotion tend ever to tear individual as well as collective life with discords and imbalances, and whatever little harmony and happiness is the human lot proves precarious and superficial. If
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bodily mind and bodily life-force are so imperfect, bodily matter is bound to be still more limited, gross and insecure despite the show of strength, beauty and stability put up by it at times. There is no doubt that unless mind - not only in its inner or subliminal recesses where, though ignorant, it is a freer and less dense agent, but also in the physical formula of it which is the principal power in us - can be radically converted, earth-existence is doomed to imperfection; for this power alone can be the first decisive fulcrum to move the rest of our members.
Can the human mental shed its ignorance radically or is ignorance in one degree or another the very grain of its composition? According to Sri Aurobindo, our mind is what it is, not because it is intrinsically a mode of ignorance but because it is cut off from Supermind, the Truth-Consciousness, the divine Gnosis, of which it is an obscured derivate and whose covered-up parenthood is still hinted in our insatiable dreams and aspirations, our pursuit of ideals and values, our ventures after Soul and Spirit. The Supermind is eternally aware of essentiality, infinity, unity, totality, and its knowledge of particulars, finites, fragments, sections proceeds on the basis of that awareness and is indeed a diverse freely demarcated play of it. We may guess that such awareness implies an inside knowledge of everything, a knowledge by oneness with the known. Yes, the Supermind does not know by mere image or eidolon: it knows by identity and all that it knows is truth and every truth known by it is a truth of itself formulated and held within its own substance and consciousness. Idea and reality are not separate for it: they are a single consciousness and a single substance: knowledge here consists of "Real-Idea".
And, we should add, the Supermind's will, unlike the mind's, is automatically self-effectuating: what is seen by the Supermind as a truth to be actualised is instantly made actual because the vision of the thing to be done and the will to do it are not rent asunder and do not have to be brought into a sort of fallible liaison as is the case with mind: they are a single movement of sovereign creativity and indeed it is on account of their being such that all supramental knowledge is not separated into idea and reality, the conceived and the existent.
Further, the supramental will's automatic self-effectuation ensures perfect bliss: frustration and unfulfilment have no place.
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Nor is the will of one being ever against the will of another, for the Supermind's eternal awareness of essentiality, infinity, unity, totality implies that there is no discord or strife. A spontaneous universal happy harmony which nothing can mar and which we with our mind as at present can never reproduce is the constant life on the plane of the Truth-Consciousness. Form, too, is flawless there, an artistry practised by eternal bliss with infinite consciousness in absolute substance.
If our mind were not cut off from Supermind, if it could connect with the supramental power, it would initiate in the most genuine sense a divine existence on earth and not be in its cognition the groper and stumbler or, at best, the totterer that it is. The Truth-Consciousnesss would be at work in mental terms. The mind would be no movement of darkness or of twilight but of Light. Then, even within all limits and measures, withholdings and gradualities, it would be unmixed with falsehood. However restrained in intensity and immensity its Light, it would still proceed from truth to truth - from small to less small truth instead of large to less large error or, at most, to truth mingled with error and thus superficialised and devitalised.
3
Here it is necessary to conceive clearly what Sri Aurobindo means in his last writings by mind's being not cut off from Supermind and becoming by connection with it the Mind of Light. For, being not cut off can be one of two things: either to be actual part of the supramental or to be like the graded ladder of world-being which Sri Aurobindo declares to be intervening between Supermind and mind as it functions in us. The rungs of this ladder he has designated in The Life Divine as those of Spiritual Mind, employing the epithet "spiritual" in a particular sense in distinction from "supramental". Downward from Supermind these gradations he labels as Overmind, Intuition,9
9. This is to be distinguished from the intuitive mind constituted by the mere intelligence functioning intuitively. The intuition, coated over with intellectual elements, that is sometimes ours is different from the Intuition proper that belongs to a level of Spiritual Mind.
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Illumined Mind,10 Higher Mind, - a series running from greater to less knowledge until it lapses into the labouriously learning ignorance distinguishing the mental grade on which human beings live at present. Most in Overmind but definitely in even Higher Mind the consciousness is linked with the supramental Gnosis, "devolved from it" and "dependent upon it". That linking secures on each rung of Spiritual Mind's ladder a play of Light.
To regard the Mind of Light as being created by a linking up of the human mental with the Supermind in the manner of Spiritual Mind's ladder is a misconception. But it may arise from certain passages in Sri Aurobindo if they are read in isolation instead of in continuity with all the rest on the subject. And associated with it there can be another misconception even more off the mark, which we should first dispose of. This misconception makes the Mind of Light the last rung of Spiritual Mind's ladder, an already existent plane on its own, in which that ladder continues at the end where Higher Mind is stationed, instead of breaking at this end and leaving the human mental a level of ignorance.
But the Mind of Light does seem a plane that is the lowest part of the luminous ladder above the human mental if we shut ourselves up in the following passage11: "What we have called specifically the Mind of Light is indeed the last of a series of descending planes of consciousness in which the Supermind veils itself by a self-chosen limitation or modification of its self-manifesting activities, but its essential character remains the same... we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-conscious into ignorance.... We have passed into Mind but Mind has still not broken its inherent connection with the Supramental principle.... In the order of the evolutionary descent we stand in the Mind of Light on that border and a step downward can carry us beyond it into the beginnings of an ignorance which still bears on its face something of the luminosity that it is leaving behind.
10. This "Illumined Mind" does not stand for the same thing as "the free and illumined mind" we have mentioned earlier in connection with "true mind". The latter phrase is a synonym for "true mind" and does not connote a specific stage in the hierarchy of Spiritual Mind but is a general description of embodied mentality no longer obscured by Ignorance.
11. SABCL Vol. 16, pp. 71-73.
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On the other hand, in the ascending order of the evolution we reach a transition in which we see the light, are turned towards it, reflect it in our consciousness and one further step carries us into the domain of the Light. The Truth becomes visible and audible to us and we are in immediate communication with its messages and illuminations and can grow into it and be made one with its substance. Thus there is a succession of ranges of consciousness which we can speak of as Mind but which belongs practically to the higher hemisphere although in their ontological station they are within the domain of the lower hemisphere."
What is forgotten, vis-à-vis this passage, is that Sri Aurobindo writes¹², a little later, of the manifestation of life and mind in the earth's history and of the Mind of Light as another development "in the series of the order of existence and as the last word of the lower hemisphere of being, the first word of the higher hemisphere" - that is, something which is not exclusively in either hemisphere already but forms between the two in the course of time a link of transition by which the human passes towards and fuses with the superhuman, a state in which the lower itself finds a culmination in Light and becomes a plane of knowledge like those of the higher hemisphere, a plane which preludes the realisation of the whole higher hemisphere in the human. It is when we look at this link after it has been formed, this state after it has got realised, that it stands as "the last of a series of descending planes of consciousness in which the Supermind veils itself by a self-chosen limitation or modification".¹³ It does not stand already existent but takes shape as a result of the Supermind's action upon the human mental: it is a conversion of ignorance into Light, making, as Sri Aurobindo says14, "human mentality an adjunct and a minor instrumentation of the supramental knowledge."
Sri Aurobindo also speaks 15 of "the pressure of the supermind creating from above out of itself the mind of Light" at a certain stage of earth's development and, although he frequently refers to the replacing of the human mental ignorance by the Mind of
12. Ibid.. p. 74.
13. SABCL Vol. 16, p. 71.,
14. Ibid., pp. 53-54.
15. Ibid., p. 67.
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Light, he nowhere alludes to the Mind of Light descending, as he does to Spiritual Mind descending or Supermind descending - an omission impossible if the Mind of Light were a pre-existent plane above the human mental instead of the "physical mind receiving the supramental light". Besides, if this Mind were a plane belonging to Spiritual Mind's ladder, Sri Aurobindo would certainly mention it in The Life Divine where he gives a detailed description of the various rungs. Of course, there are many things not mentioned in that book, but what is not mentioned is what was too high or too complex to be touched upon at the time the book was published. Surely, if Sri Aurobindo could mention high and complex things like Overmind and even Supermind, what sense could there be in refraining from mention of a plane which, according to the interpreters whom we are correcting, is below even Higher Mind?
However, we must admit that two definite suggestions could be received from the quoted passage. The first is: the Mind of Light, when it does take shape, is a creation of Supermind on the same principle as are the grades of Spiritual Mind, so that it seems to be not Supermind itself in the physical mentality but a newly arrived member of the family of Spiritual Mind. The second is: the Mind of Light gets its membership in this family pretty low in the scale, for it appears to be a state inferior to Higher Mind though still a state of knowledge and not of ignorance. At the moment we are concerned directly with the first and general suggestion. By tackling it correctly we shall also know how to catch hold of the second and particular suggestion by the right end. It may be said to get confirmed when Sri Aurobindo uses analogous language about the family in question and about the Mind of Light. About the family he writes 16: "We may say that there is a higher hemisphere of our being in which Mind luminous and aware of its workings still lives in the Light and can be seen as a subordinate power of the Supermind; it is still an agent of the Truth-Consciousness, a gnostic power that has not descended into the mental ignorance; it is capable of a mental gnosis that preserves its connection with the superior light and acts by its power. This is the character of Overmind in its own plane and of all the powers that are dependent on the
16. Ibid., p. 72.
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Overmind: the Supermind works there but at one remove as if in something that it has put forth from itself but which is no longer entirely itself but is still a delegate of the Truth and invested with its authority." The Mind of Light is similarly spoken of17 as "a subordinate action of Supermind, dependent upon it even when not apparently springing direct from it.... This too proceeds from the Supermind and depends upon it even though it is limited and subordinate."
Hence, even if the Mind of Light is not a pre-existent plane but stands as a luminous kingdom by a conversion of the physical mentality, it still gives the impression of being "spiritual" and not "supramental". The distinction is highly significant, for it is as between two typal orders, each with its own principle of world-organisation and is not meant to point only to different degrees of the Light of Gnosis. The very top of Spiritual Mind's ladder, Overmind, directly neighbours Supermind and receives the latter's action immediately and not distantly as do Intuition, Illumined Mind, Higher Mind and yet it is not merely a self-chosen limitation or modification of Supermind in the sense of restrained deployment of the Truth-Consciousness: it is a limitation or modification in the sense that, though there is no lapsing of the Truth-Consciousness, there is a change of characteristic poise in the deployment of knowledge. That is what is implied in Sri Aurobindo's saying at the same time that it is invested with Supermind's authority and that Supermind works in it at one remove as if in something not entirely itself. We shall soon see what is the change of characteristic poise. Here it is enough to note that it is there. So, the question whether the Mind of Light stands with Spiritual Mind or with Supermind is important and to dispel the misconception that Sri Aurobindo anywhere intends it to be classed with the former is as necessary as to dispel the misconception that it is a pre-existent plane.
The clue to right understanding lies in remembering just this latter misconception and realising that even the fitting on, as it were, of the Mind of Light to the ladder of Spiritual Mind is by conversion of the stuff of ignorance: the Mind of Light is not a level of knowledge naturally existing as a diminution of Higher
17. Ibid., pp. 70-71.
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Mind; it is a manifestation from above in the human mentality, a manifestation in which, to quote Sri Aurobindo's words18, "in-conscience, ignorance and error can claim no place". Can a state of this kind where a radical conversion has occurred be one of Spiritual Mind? Of course, Spiritual Mind can be a state of knowledge from the beginning, but here is a case of ignorance radically ceasing for the first time - an entirely different case. And what we have to decide is whether Spiritual Mind at even its highest can bring about such a state. For, if it can, it can itself be a state in which a condition of ignorance has radically ceased by its action.
In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo has made it abundantly plain that the Overmind itself, the highest spiritual mental, cannot effect a radical ceasing of ignorance in the human mental. The reason for the Overmind's insufficiency is the peculiar posture of relation in it between the One and the Many. All the levels of world-being are a play of the Many and the One: the nature of each level is defined by the terms characteristic to it of this play. In the Supermind the One and the Many are balanced and integrated and, while the One does not annul or engulf the Many, the Many always cast back to the One and there is no such stress on them as might bring about the possibility of their running away from it and causing a genuine fissure between it and them as well as among themselves - the fissure which is the ignorance, the lack of Light, on our human mental plane. On the other hand, in the Overmind, though there is no ignorance yet and Light prevails, the ominous stress occurs: the Many are allowed to run to the utmost distance, so to speak, from the One without breaking their connection: the connection never fails but it is subdued, thrown into the background, functions only as an overall and general instead of immediate and prominent principle. No discord and still an infinity of divergences and counter-actions: extreme opposites and yet a holding of them together as finally fitting complementaries. The Self of selves is not abrogated, but a dangerous game of innumerably multiplied mutual exclusion is carried on. It is this that, as the Light grows less intense and immense in the downward gradation of Spiritual Mind, culminates in the fall from Higher Mind into the sharp
18. Ibid., p. 71.
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division felt between self and self, object and object, individual and universe, on the plane of our mentality. Given the Overmind, there is an inevitability of ignorance happening at some point in the series of worlds issuing from it below.
The presence of this inevitability proves that the Overmind has not the sovereign Truth which can transform all human parts and activities completely into divine ones: the Overmind does not hold the impeccable and all-harmonising Archetype of the evolutionary mind, life-force and matter that are our cosmos. The Supermind is the supreme Creator, and everything, including our cosmos of ignorance, is actualised by it freely, through Overmind and other planes, for the purpose of gradual self-discovery by the Divine under conditions commencing with the very opposite of all that is deific - blind brute matter in which neither life-force nor mind seems to exist, much less what is beyond mind, but which yet holds them involved for evolutionary emergence by their own nisus from below and by a pressure from above of planes where their principles stand in typal manifestation, uninvolved. Yes, Supermind is the supreme Creator, and in its own plane it keeps the divine original of everything: ignorance does not come out of it anywhere in the world-series as an inevitability but as a mode of its infinite freedom founded in the perfection its plane manifests through the balance and integration of the One and the Many: its plane alone is free enough and perfect enough to fulfill evolutionary mind, life-force and matter by converting the progressive Lightward straining of darkness and dusk into a process of ever-unfolding Light.
Hence only the Supermind can create the radical change marked by the Mind of Light in the stuff of ignorance resulting from a breaking of the luminous ladder. No grade of Spiritual Mind can repair that break. So, the Mind of Light, however restrained its movement from truth to truth, no matter if seeming to be connected at many removes with Supermind, is really an expression of the supramental power operating in persona propria and not, as in Spiritual Mind, with a change of characteristic poise in the deployment of knowledge. It is itself Supermind creative in the field of terrestrial evolution and operating in human mind-terms.
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4
All this we must keep in focus if we are to arrive at a proper comparison between the Mind of Light and the grades of Spiritual Mind, unembodied or in embodiment. Without it we shall stop short with regarding the Mind of Light as just an added last rung to the luminous ladder and as inferior even to Higher Mind. The paradox would persist: how can a creation by Supermind of itself in the embodied mentality be inferior to a plane which, for all its lack of ignorance, is still pretty far from Supermind? Now we are led to see that the Mind of Light, holding as it does a principle superior to all Spiritual Mind, may have - nay, must have - several forms in the field of terrestrial evolution where it manifests. If at any stage it looks inferior to Higher Mind, it is something that can develop beyond it. Within its very initial form it contains, hidden like a miniature sun, the whole Supermind which escapes all Spiritual Mind and which the vastness of Overmind itself cannot comprise. What appears inferior in Light to even Higher Mind is the first peep of an effulgence before which the Overmind lustres pale.
By this fact it differs also from and in a certain sense surpasses all states of the human mental into which Spiritual Mind has descended. Evidently when the grades of Spiritual Mind descend into the human mental they introduce qualities which in themselves exceed the actual quality the Mind of Light manifests in its initial form. But while these grades in their undescended poise are free from ignorance they do not completely keep their freedom when under their own power they get embodied in the human mental. If they cannot create in the human mental a continuation downward of the luminous ladder, much less can they thoroughly assimilate it so as to acquire entire embodiment of their typical glories. It is because not even Overmind can affect radically the stuff of ignorance that no continuation can be brought about by it; and if Overmind is impotent in the task of continuation how can it be potent in a much greater task - namely, entire assimilation of this stuff? An entire assimilation would imply the absence of ignorance in the human mental as on the plane of Overmind, an absence far intenser and immenser than when the human mental might be rendered a diminished continuation of Higher Mind! The inevitability of
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ance concretising at some point in the series of planes issuing downward from Overmind incapacitates the latter for not only repairing the break in the luminous ladder but also, a fortiori, totally assimilating the human mental and converting it into a mode of its own intensity and immensity. The change effected can be very extraordinary but it is never dynamically absolute: the stuff of ignorance hampers and dilutes to a larger or smaller degree the descended Light of even the top of Spiritual Mind.
In contrast, the initial form of the Mind of Light, for all its apparent inferiority to Higher Mind, has still not an iota of ignorance. The Light is less intense and immense in actual outburst, but it is perfectly clear. The mass-ideation of Higher Mind, the far-ranging colourful vision-glow of Illumined Mind, the piercing intimate ubiquitous lightning-seizures of Intuition, the resplendent multitudinous catholicity and globality of Overmind may import into the human mental on their descent into it a certain richness as well as swiftness which the initially realised Mind of Light does not exhibit; yet, while the richness and swiftness will not always work in utter purity everywhere since they are still working on an unabolished though subdued ground of ignorance, the Mind of Light from the very start is utterly pure in whatever restrained quality of knowledge it exhibits.
But here the query which must have occurred to the reader at several points in our discussion arises inevitably: How is it that Supermind which is the acme of richness and swiftness of Light creates, on its descent, a state which has in any respect a quality of knowledge more restrained than that of embodied Spiritual Mind? We should expect this state to be not only devoid of ignorance in a radical way: we should expect it also to be superior in every respect to what Spiritual Mind could do by embodiment. Why, then, inferiority on any score at all? Inferiority on any score can come only if somehow, previous to the creation of the Mind of Light, Spiritual Mind has not descended into the human mental and got established there to the extent possible to it under its own power. But can such an "anomaly" ever happen? Unless Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind have been realised in descent and have functioned on the level of the physical mentality, can the Mind of Light which is a result of Supermind's descent be created in the body?
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The answer is at once Yes and No. For, we have to draw a line between the Mind of Light forming at a highly advanced stage in the course of the Aurobindonian Yoga and the same essential power manifesting afterwards in humanity in general as an effect of this formation or in those who have not gone far in that Yoga. The one presupposes in the individual a whole history of spiritual realisations and it climaxes a long series of descents and it preludes the descent of the Supermind into bodily life-force and bodily matter. The other is a condition of various sorts. Broadly, it is that produced in people not yet ready for embodying the supramental Gnosis but sufficiently responsive to change radically from mere mind under the sovereign pressure of a Supermind descended on a large scale through the Aurobindonian Yoga into the occult atmosphere, so to speak, of earth's being. In the long run it could be in mankind a condition even from birth as mere mind is today and that would be most in line with what is generally meant by evolutionary achievement. In many cases the condition will be of those who, though responsive to the supramental Gnosis, have not had any substantial commerce with Spiritual Mind's gradation and into whom therefore there cannot have been a previous descent of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition or Overmind. But this condition will be precisely what facilitates substantial commerce by rendering it natural. And, through that commerce, one who lives in this Mind of Light will be by right effort able to climb towards and into Supermind as well as call it down. But neither the substantial commerce with Spiritual Mind nor the dealings with the supramental Gnosis will everywhere be present. While in a number of human beings they will both be present, in others Spiritual Mind alone will be more or less freely contacted and in still others no free contact with even Spiritual Mind and so none with Supermind either will be there. From the first group recruits will be drawn for the expansion of the gnostic race whose nucleus we may expect to take shape out of those who are living in the Aurobindonian Yoga. The remaining two groups will be stages between this race and whatever of the human species with mind, as we ordinarily observe it, may persist for a shorter or longer time.
The Mind of Light, realised through Sri Aurobindo's sacrifice and set operating for gradual formation of the nucleus of the
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gnostic race, is the real subject of our essay. But mostly we have discussed what will manifest in the future in the world outside this nucleus or else in those who have not progressed much in the Aurobindonian Yoga - a wonderful gift to humanity from Sri Aurobindo by means of the realisation his sacrifice won for earth. And we must continue the discussion if we are to turn his writings to account in understanding that realisation.
5
We have already studied the initial form of the Mind of Light and the difference between it and the fullest creations possible of Spiritual Mind before Supermind has descended. The difference provides the clue to the forms the Mind of Light assumes in its farther development. We are here talking of forms developed by supramental descent. But we can also speak of the progression of the Mind of Light by ascent, what we have already mentioned as its climbing towards and into Supermind. Once shaped, the Mind of Light can first reflect accurately in its purified and exalted condition something of the overhead planes and then rise to the plateaus and peaks of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, Supermind. However, this rising will not be the same experience as that of the ordinary mentality making an ascent. For now they will be attained by something that is itself Supermind in mental terms and the experience of them will all be a progressive movement from the lowest to the highest note of Supermind's own gamut, as it were, rather than a conversion from the ordinary mental to the spiritual mental by a change of characteristic poise and again, by another such change, to the supramental. This new kind of ascent will be an accompaniment and a help to the greater descent, a descent not only into the physical mind but also into the physical vitality and the physical proper. As Sri Aurobindo puts it, "there would be a new mental being", "a liberated mind... aware of its affiliation to Supermind, a natural agent of Supermind and capable of bringing down the supramental influence into the lower reaches of being,... aspiring to release the secret divinity into self-finding and self-fulfilment and self-poise, aspiring towards the ascension to the divine consciousness, able to receive and bear the descent of the divine light and power,
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fitting itself to be a vessel of the divine Life."
It is the descent with which we are concerned in this essay and the further forms of the Mind of Light resulting from the descent have to be envisaged. Its initial form which seems a continuation, below Higher Mind, of the luminous ladder is the precursor of one in which the human mental acts as if it has been completely assimilated, step after step, by the Light of descended Spiritual Mind. The word "completely" is of capital importance. For, as we have noted, when Spiritual Mind descends under its own power assimilation does occur but is never complete. The presence of the Mind of Light in one indicates that the stuff of ignorance, in which no change can be dynamically absolute before Supermind has come on the scene, is not resistant in one any longer: the Supermind has come and ignorance has radically ceased. But now not only has a continuation of the luminous ladder been brought about; a possibility has also been introduced of the total assimilation by Spiritual Mind of the human mental. The thorough descent and embodiment, therefore, of all the grades of Spiritual Mind can happen now after Supermind has started taking a direct hand instead of playing on the human mental indirectly through those grades. Once the Mind of Light begins its reign Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind can found themselves securely and authentically on its supramental basis and reach their own perfection as embodied powers. When they do this, the Mind of Light assumes its second form. Repeating the name Sri Aurobindo gives to Spiritual Mind in its own undescended hierarchy as well as to the Mind of Light ascended there, we should call the Mind of Light in its second form in the body mental Gnosis as distinguished from the Gnosis proper which is Supermind.
Beyond mental Gnosis the Mind of Light manifests, in complete assimilation of the human mental, the Gnosis proper and assumes its third and sovereign form. But what the two kinds of Gnosis are in the hierarchy above the human mental is not what they are here. There they are separate though connected levels, each a cosmos with its own type and function: here the one is merely the other partially unfolded. For, the Mind of Light is not anywhere anything else than the Supermind in progressive manifestation in embodied nature. As we have observed, its very inception signalises that the Supermind is acting directly and is
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in immediate presence on the level of the physical mentality. But in its initial and middle forms the directness and the immediacy are, in different measures, restrained: the third form employs them freely. The supreme divinity which releases a little of its magnificence under the form of an apparent continuation at the lower end of Spiritual Mind's gradation and then "an ampler ether, a diviner air" in the form of wholly descended mental Gnosis, is utterly laid open - a towering apocalypse in the terms of the human mental - by the third form the Mind of Light takes.
"In the terms of the human mental" - the phrase is important for grasping what, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, the Mind of Light ultimately manifests. The Mind of Light is not only Supermind descended into and divinising the physical mentality: it is also the manifestation of that which is the counterpart in Supermind of this mentality's terms. The counterpart, whose apocalypse is the third form of the Mind of Light, must be a power which is not all "supra" but is in some sense "mental": otherwise no mind, whether of Light or of twilight, can result and Spiritual Mind also will lack foundation in the Supreme. We shall understand what that power is if we remember that, according to The Life Divine, the Supermind has a triple status or a three-stranded unity. The first strand is closest to the unitarian Consciousness in which the One contains the Many indiscernibly in an unmanifest potentiality beyond space and time. The Supermind brings the Many forth into manifestation, sets them in an archetypal space and time which are extensions of Consciousness. But in its first strand it is a multitudinous yet equable self-distribution, a vast Identity infinitely repeated. Though the multiple is indeed present the single stands out: here All are not lost in the One, but All are indefeasibly the One. This is a Consciousness constituting, pervading and comprehending everything. The second strand is a Consciousness that apprehends no less than comprehends. In its own vast unity of multiplicity it creates distinguishable centres and from these centres views everything else, yet everything is known by each centre to be essentially itself: the multiple stands out as an infinite repetition of Identity. All are not indefeasibly the One, they are distinct, but still they are in the One. The third strand is a further development of the apprehending Consciousness. Each centre knows itself as other
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than the rest, and on the basis of an innumerable otherness the Many weave themselves into the One: difference has been added to distinction, and the multiple stands out not as an infinite repetition but as an infinite variation or diversity of the One. All are not in the One so much as the One is in All, concentrating itself in each and following the movement of that particular in pragmatic separation from, and independence of, the remaining particulars and from the totality containing that particular and these. However, the knowledge is never overclouded that what is concentrated in each separately and independently for pragmatic purposes is the Identical and through that knowledge there is an act of union simultaneously with the fact of division and difference.
Clearly, in the apprehending Consciousness of the Supermind we have, remotely, the beginning of a movement like that of the human mental. And in the further development of it that is the third strand this movement is in full form and could be the high-uplifted parent of our fallen mentality with a recognisable family-likeness, except for the saving grace of a simultaneous reverse side to it which balances the characteristic mind-turn of standing back in divided different centres and apprehending from them. The further development kins the apprehending movement more closely to Spiritual Mind where there is also a species of reverse side. On all the planes of Spiritual Mind the One is not lost in the Many and there is thus no play of darkness as in the human mental: in that respect no less than in respect of increase in the projecting and confronting Consciousness, the dissimilarity between Supermind and Spiritual Mind is of no more than degree. Overmind exhibits this dissimilarity attenuated to the utmost and is thereby entitled to be regarded in general as a delegated Supermind and in particular as the delegate of the Supermind's third strand.
But we have already seen how the Overmind's stress on the Many renders ignorance ultimately inevitable and the radical conversion of ignorance to Light a feat beyond this delegated Supermind. In view of that stress we have to consider the dissimilarity between the supramental and its delegate as of kind in a certain undeniable sense, and not just of degree. It obliges us to pass beyond merely terming the Supermind's third strand a sort of Spiritual Mind which overtops the hitherto-mentioned top of the luminous ladder.
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The right name for it, as much "supra" as "mental"', and hitting off precisely the nature of what in the Supermind creates the Mind of Light and is fully active in this Mind's third form, is found in The Life Divine. There Sri Aurobindo writes that the last of the three strands of Supermind may be called "Divine Mind". For, this Mind carries in itself a perfect corrective to the extreme developed in it of the apprehending Consciousness and is by virtue of that corrective saved from becoming not only like the human mental but also like the spiritual mental whose gradation prepares in luminousness our obscurity. Here are absent both the twilight of our mind of ignorance fumbling towards knowledge and the Light of Spiritual Mind lessening gradually towards ignorance. Here is Mind with a secure and undiminishable radiance. Mind not simply unsundered from the supramental or a subordinate action of it but itself an inherent mode of it by which measuring and delimiting are freely done and relations freely fixed - operations necessary for creating any cosmos - without the least ignorant obscuration or even the smallest possibility of being the parent of ignorance. Here is the original face of the Truth reproduced on earth by the Mind of Light at its highest and in its full orb.
Thus the designation coined by Sri Aurobindo is seen to cover several phases of one and the same supramental reality in process of embodiment. We may sum up in words culled from his own last writings. When "untransformed mind or human mind burdened with its hampering disabilities" recovers, as a result of Supermind's "descent into the human world", its true character which is that of "a principle of Light and a power of Light or a force for Knowledge specialised in its action for a subordinate purpose", namely "the work of differentiation... in the Supermind itself" and "in all its creation" - when mind is made to outgrow its defects and discover that some of the "characteristics which we conceive to be the very signs of its nature... belong to Supermind also and the difference is in the way and scope of their action, not in the stuff or in their principle", then it will manifest, roughly, a threefold progression. "At its highest it might pass out of its limitations into the supramental truth and become part and function of the supramental knowledge or at the least serve for a minor work of differentiation in the consensus of that knowledge: in the lower
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degree below Supermind it might be a mental gnosis, a spiritual or spiritualised perception, feeling, activity, sense which could do the works of knowledge and not of ignorance. Even at a still lower level it could be an increasingly luminous passage leading from light to light, from truth to truth and no longer a circling in the mazes of half-truth and half-nescience."19
We may figure in greater detail the phases of the Mind of Light in terms of moon-phases. But these terms must be differentiated from those that would characterise a vision by us of the partial levels of Spiritual Mind rising into the roundness of the Divine Mind. In such a vision we might say there would be growth of Light from silver to more ample silver until we passed the Overmind, an argent disc almost whole and striking one as actually whole unless one has a sharp sense of the plenary. The full moon itself would be Divine Mind, but it would be a mass of perfection white only at first sight when the dissimilarity of merely degree and not of kind between the spiritual mental and the supramental is glimpsed. As soon as the latter is discerned, the silver is felt to become gold, the full moon shows itself as a sun white-seeming in its immediate front before the aureate depths are found shining out.
The phases of the Mind of Light would be of a moon golden from the very start or, rather, of a sun behaving like a moon because Divine Mind is viewed not in its original inherence in Supermind as the third strand of the latter's triple status but in its manifestation in an evolving scheme on earth, in which there is a stage-by-stage expression of the supramental epiphany. The phases of this sun-moon stand for successive states of Supermind's embodiment. Nowhere is any dissimilarity of kind, everywhere is dissimilarity of nothing more than degree. Even when the grades of Spiritual Mind are symbolised, it is neither in their own statuses above mind nor in their descents into mind under their own power which never radically alters the ignorance of the human mental. They are symbolised in their descended condition as brought about by a direct action of Supermind. And when the Supermind acts directly, the preliminary to their descended condition as brought about by it is the Mind of Light in its initial form. Thus, in terms of phases of a
19. SABCL Vol. 16, p. 55.
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sun-moon, the human mind re-created as a somewhat diminished continuation of Higher Mind will be the crescent, a thin bright curve with upward-pointing arms within which the rest of the sun-moon's rondure is faintly visible, a rim of Light which is not really severed from the solar-lunar globe but only put forth for a certain purpose and play as the apparent edge of a secret splendour. Higher Mind - as the entire establishment, on the physical mentality's level, of further reaches of this splendour - will be a brighter disclosure en route to a semi-circular revelation, the half sun-moon which will be Illumined Mind in a state in which the human mental has been utterly assimilated by it. Beyond this, where the gibbous or three-quarter stage is reached, will be the phase of Intuition wholly established in incarnate mind. Much past the gibbous and close to the complete circle, leaving just a crescent-thread unencompassed by its glow, will be Overmind similarly established. The sun-moon in its rounded plenitude will be Divine Mind descended in full into the physical mentality.
Looking at these phases we have now to ask: What phase was realised when Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body? It cannot be any except the last. The first phase of the sun-moon development we have figured can apply only to a case in which none of the grades of Spiritual Mind have come down and yet an initial supramental state has been created in consequence sooner or later of Sri Aurobindo's holocaust to kindle heaven upon earth. All the other phases, short of the last, apply to various cases in which one or more of the grades have already come down and the grace of the holocaust catches them to convert what was a considerable enlightenment of ignorance into limited disclosures of Supermind in which, though ignorance could never be, knowledge does not integrally out-flower. But when all the grades have already come down and, though in the absence of Supermind's descent no Mind of Light as such has been created, the human mental has been packed with more and more Light until the utmost that Overmind descended under its own power can do has been effulgently consummated, then the next step which is the coming down of Supermind can only be the precipitation of the integral knowledge in the shape of Supermind's third strand into that utmost: in other words, Divine Mind makes its appearance, secures embodiment, perfects
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the descent of Overmind, acts for a time partly through an Overmind which is no longer its delegate at a remove but rather its own direct though apparently modified projection and partly through an open dynamic of itself, and then the whole action becomes openly supramental. Logically, too, nothing less than Supermind's third strand would manifest when Supermind for the first time got embodied and established a centre in the human mental; for, nothing supramental can come down for the first time unless Overmind has effected a descent and after Overmind's descent what else save Divine Mind can manifest? Anything lower in supramental quality would lack the element of richness and swiftness that Overmind's descent, no matter if incomplete, imports on a huge scale into the human mental: something richer and swifter could be the sole sequel to that importation.
Yes, the Mind of Light at its supreme and in its absolute orb, is what was realised in descent into earth's being in December, 1950. This does not mean that merely the third strand of the Supermind descended into the physical mentality. Supermind is one whole, taking three simultaneous poises, and the descent which gave birth to the Mind of Light in its full orb brought the progressively unfolding action of the whole. What that Mind did was just to throw into frontal relief the third strand while not excluding either the second of which the third is an extreme extension or the first whose modification is the second. This frontal relief is natural in all supramental embodiment - not only bodily mind but also bodily life and bodily matter must show it, the latter pair even more since they represent further stages of the differentiation, the fragmentation beginning with mind. Supermind's third strand we have called the divine counterpart or archetype of our mentality, but really it archetypes vitality and matter as well. We give prominence to the mind-aspect because the work of conscious demarcation and differentiation to which we refer is most like the activity in us of mind. Actually, the process of delimitation within the gnostic Vast is, in Sri Aurobindo's words,20 "a process by which the ever dividing and reuniting consciousness of Mind, the ever divergent and convergent action of Life and the infinitely divided and
20. SABCL Vol. 18, p. 164.
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self-aggregating substance of Matter come, all by one principle and original act, into phenomenal being." According to him, when Supermind cosmicises its own Truth and fixes many centres or standpoints by deploying the measuring and defining power that archetypes mind, then archetypal life and matter immediately follow; for life is simply the determination of force and action, of relation and interaction of energy from many fixed centres of consciousness, while matter is nothing else than the substance that provides for the determination of form at each centre, form without which the cosmic interaction would not be possible.
Yes, the third strand would be in frontal relief everywhere - yet, as we have said, with the two others precluded in no way. In fact, we may surmise that their dynamism would be more and more drawn upon as the descent passes from bodily mind to bodily vitality and bodily matter, for it will meet with increasing atomisation and separative concentration. The third strand, in which the One is in All, may be considered sufficient in general to transform mind which is the least obscure of the lower trinity and therefore needs the least divine puissance for its fulfilment. Life-force, with its larger obscurity, requires a more effective Truth-energy to divinise it: the second strand of the Supermind, in which All are in the One, is perhaps its principal transformer. Where obscurity has touched the nadir, the zenith must be called for: against the infinitesimally fragmented and unconscious nature of matter the first strand, in which All are the One and a vast Identity equably constitutes and pervades and comprehends everything and no multiplicity stands out at all, is likely to be the main Godhead that delivers.
On the other hand, since mind is the least obscure member of the lower trinity and has a quicker and larger turn towards essentiality, infinity, unity, totality than its associates, the second and first strands of the Supermind will always be more easily and perceptibly expressed in it. Though the third strand will be in frontal relief, the second and the first will constantly keep projecting their colour, so to speak, and we shall have the most vivid evidence possible of the fact that Supermind is one whole and, whatever the manner in which it acts, it acts with all of itself.
Thus the realisation in December, 1950, was an invasion of a part of the physical being by Supermind in its entirety - and,
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through that part's organic relation with the rest, the spearhead of an invasion of the entire physical being. It started the bodily nucleus of the supramental race and also laid the foundation of all that future play of the Mind of Light in a race not yet supramental, whose broad picture Sri Aurobindo's last writings provide. The marvellous kingdom on earth of the Gnosis proper has begun. The integral epiphany prophesied in Savitri 21 Book XI Canto 1 is on way to fulfilment:
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
The body of earth a tabernacle of God.
6
With the direct action initiated in our midst of embodied Supermind, we may well inquire by what extraordinary signs its operative presence is accompanied. Among those that can be objectively gauged we may mention at least four. First, the most general, a many-sidedness of spiritual action: one single outflow of Yogic energy produces a far-flung network of vibrant victorious consequences. An inter-connectedness, subtle yet keenly living, is to a considerable extent rendered evident between persons or fields or events very much remote and detached even though within more or less the same province. Often it becomes necessary to lay a creative stress on just one spot, so to speak, in order to touch through it various other spots not only in the individual but also in the group and put them all in a unison of progress. Something of the essential integrality of the Supermind's manifold comprehensiveness is seen in this achievement of maximum diverse result with a minimum expense of force, at times no more than a casual word, gesture or look. It is as though some intrinsic automatism or spontaneity of Truth-development in disparate centres were appreciably awakened.
A second supramental sign is an almost incredibly swift, a well-nigh irresistible influence on not only mental movements and vital turns but certain bodily processes. Many things accounted impossible by medical science get accomplished. And these "miracles" differ from the results of occult-spiritual practice such
21. SABCL Vol. 29, p. 699.
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as many Yogis are capable of. In that practice a force from beyond the physical plane is brought to bear upon bodily ailments like, to a considerable extent, a foreign agency subduing defects and lapses felt to be natural to the body. The occult-spiritual "miracles" are, in the last resort, superimposed. The astonishing effects of the supramental Will are at the same time from above the stuff of body and from entirely within it. The irreducible minimum of imperfection, which even the Overmind admits in matter, as to a less degree also in life-force and mind, because the Overmind is not the ultimate Creator and Archetype, is not there for this Will: hence the miraculous operation has no foreignness about it. Everything corporeal may not be miraculously reached by the Supermind radically converting the physical mentality, but the genuine Omnipotence is at last at work here from even the earth-level, however self-restrained in several ways this Omnipotence may be in order to conform to its own laws of a manifestation that blends the evolutionary with the revolutionary. And inasmuch as this Omnipotence, being of the ultimate archetypal creativity, is one substance with matter so that matter may be looked upon as itself omnipotent in its hidden nature and destined to reveal its consubstantiality with Supermind, the supramental Will's miracles in the body are as if with roots there and seem to grow out of matter itself on contact between the supramental and the material. There is no superimposition anywhere, no forcible subduing of the body's so-called natural defects and lapses: rather, whatever defects and lapses are common to the body are here like temporary provisional states in the history of an unfolding intrinsic perfection: a concealed perfection and not any irreducible minimum of the imperfect is active as the body's natural quality, and so a response is felt in the body like the secret co-operation, from one end, of the same Will that is openly exercising its omnipotence from the other. This kind of work in the body, from beyond and yet from completely inside, is exclusive to Supermind, for Supermind alone can solve radically the riddle of obscurity set by the Sphinx of matter.
A third sign of Supermind's working from a physical centre is a unifying sweep through which persons touched by or attracted towards spirituality and Yoga are rapidly and triumphantly caught up into them. Obstructions of long standing in the outer
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self, obstructions that were adamantine as if they had been part and parcel of our embodied make-up, get broken at a stroke. Though some momentum from the past may keep a ghost of the old unregenerate nature going for a while, nothing appears to have the strength to stand against the invasion of the finite and the divided by the Infinite and the divinely One. The vast inalienable unity-in-multiplicity of the Truth-Consciousness seems to send forth a fiat which is automatically self-fulfilling. And, not seldom, on the individual who is gathered into the divine harmony this fiat works as if some supreme decree or decision were flamingly fixed in a Spirit-space above the brain: a Will not his own though mysteriously reflected in his volition is almost palpably master of his destiny and gives him peace and illumination and happy certainty of spiritual realisation, even in spite of himself! The imperious Grace from "overhead" is typically the Supermind's largesse. The converse of this integrating of sincere yet in some respects hopelessly weak souls into the scheme of the new Truth-world in the making is, of course, the throwing out with a vehement definitiveness of those who, though carrying on some sort of Yoga, lack central sincerity. The hour of final choice strikes with a two-way effect, for the Truth-Consciousness entering earth's being and setting each one's human self into connection with the Truth-counterpart of it beyond does not as a rule tarry or compromise long in its dealings with practitioners of Yoga.
A fourth sign of the supramental descent into the physical mind is the repeated flow of mercy and power in extremities. People in their last gasp of inner struggle and on the black verge of total failure, people in a practically irredeemable situation of soul and about to sink into helpless despair, people overwhelmed by even material misfortunes that look mountainous are suddenly aided, uplifted and carried over to safety and at times to the very opposite of their state. The only condition laid down for this salvation is that a modicum somewhere of tenacity and faith should aspire, however blindly, to the Divine. This salvation is illustrative of the Supermind's power to deliver the Light or Truth from the deepest darkness or falsehood, its capacity to turn the very Inconscient on which our universe is to all appearances based into a mould for the Superconscient which is the real secret support of the universal evolution, its omnipotent
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ability to manifest "one entire and perfect chrysolite" out of a maximum wreck of glittering dreams. Perhaps such power is, from a general point of view, the most important sign of the supramental Presence: a civilisation in crisis needs it acutely. And in recognition indeed of its importance now and in the future and as also a reminder that the apparently extreme tragedy of Sri Aurobindo's passing from the material scene is in fact the most glorious triumph of his life-mission to bring the Supermind here bodily amongst us, the Mother gave on the first of January this year her message to the world which is as much Sri Aurobindo's message: "Lord, Thou hast told us: Do not give way, hold tight. It is when everything seems lost that all is saved."22
1953
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A POEM ON A CRUCIAL EXPERIENCE
(When the Mother read this poem she said: "The first two lines are sheer revelation.
They catch exactly what took place. The rest is an imaginative
reconstruction of the event.”)
The core of a deathless sun is now the brain
And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.
Thought leaps - and an inmost light speaks out from things;
Will, a new miracled Matter's dense white flame,
Swerves with one touch the sweep of the brute world.
Eyes focus now the Perfect everywhere.
In a body changing to chiselled translucency,
Through nerve on fire-cleansed nerve a wine of the Vast
Thrills from heaven-piercing head to earth-blessing feet.
The whole sky weighs down with love of the abyss.
Deeper than death the all-penetrant rays take root
To make the Eternal's sun a rose of the dust.
4.4.1954
22. MCW Vol. 15, p. 183
The Grace of Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother
SOME REMINISCENCES
There is a lot of " I " in these reminiscences. But that is an unavoidable accident. For, they are penned not because of the person to whom certain things occurred: they are penned because of these things themselves. And if the person has any significance it is that he serves to set off all the more the incalculable play of Grace from the Karmic Law of Deserved Returns.
It all goes back to the very beginning of my spiritual search. Something had awakened, of which I had never dreamt in my ultra-modern philosophy. And as a result I who had always kept my head intellectually high and looked down with a cool superior smile at the heat and hurry of that strange thing called "God-intoxication" - I looked around hungrily in the mundane twentieth-century city of Bombay for those flitting figures out of the past, clad in ochre robes - the sadhus and sannyasis. Several of them I caught in various corners of the metropolis and questioned about the Unknown that had come like a wind out of nowhere into my life and blown away all my worldly wits. I thus learned a few methods of meditation but the central self in me remained unsatisfied.
Then - of all persons - a Theosophist broke the name of Sri Aurobindo to me. That I should bump into a Theosophist who should speak of what he termed Sri Aurobindo's Cosmic Consciousness and not preach to me of the "White Lodge" and the "Great Masters" and the Isis-unveiling Madame Blavatsky - this was a touch of Sri Aurobindo's Grace already. What made it the more Grace-ful was that the Theosophist told me: "Nobody except Sri Aurobindo will satisfy the complex problem that you are, particularly the side of you which on the one hand is poetic and on the other philosophic."
A little later I came across a booklet in which there was a
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picture of Sri Aurobindo. I do not remember what the booklet was entitled or who its author was. Two memories have stayed with me: Sri Aurobindo was credited with the power of being in several places at once and he was described as a great linguist, having Greek and Latin at his tongue's tip and knowing French like a Frenchman - apart from being, of course, a master of English. I don't know which of the two siddhis - multi-presence and polyglottism - appealed to me more. Perhaps the latter struck me as the more unusual in a Yogi. But neither drew me into any Virgilian stretching of hands for love of the other shore. I must have been especially dense: many have become Aurobindonians at a slighter pull.
I continued my quest. But there was also the ordinary life and its material needs. One day I noticed that my shoes looked rather shabby. So I drove myself to visit the market for a new pair. I never thought the Gods could have anything to do with such a locality, though I had read of Bacon's idola fori, "idols of the market-place". I bought the shoes I had wanted and the shop-man wrapped the box up in a newspaper sheet. When, at home, I unwrapped it, the part of the sheet that fell over right in front of me bore the headline in bold type: "The Ashram of Sri Aurobindo Ghose." It was like a sun-burst. A visitor had written a long article. I devoured it and when I got to the end and understood how the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga stood for a new life not rejecting but transforming the main activities of man (including perhaps even the market-place), I rose up with the conviction that I had found what I had been seeking. Soon after, I wrote to the Ashram asking for permission to come. I got the permission and some months later - in December 1927 - I reached Pondicherry. The shoes I had gone to buy were meant by Sri Aurobindo to be those of a Pilgrim!
٭
Grace in the next ten and a half years during which I was an Ashramite - with the name "Amal Kiran" given by Sri Aurobindo and explained by him as "The Clear Ray" - is a story apart. I shall not deal with its abundance now. I pick up the thread from when I went back to Bombay for a long stay, keeping in contact inwardly, as well as by correspondence, with Sri Aurobindo and
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the Mother but outwardly unable to return and resume my life in the Ashram. Of course I used to make short trips. And one of them was for the darshan of November 24, 1950.
It was reported that Sri Aurobindo was not keeping well. I knew that he had complete control of the physical being. So whatever illness might be his would be something which he had consented to for some inscrutable purpose - had consented to and yet would fight against in order to work out some paradoxical victory. But there was a little tremble in my nerves. Everything, however, seemed to go right when as usual we saw the calm magnificence that was he - grand and gracious at the same time, sitting beside the radiant Mother.
From the other end of the long room across which we were going up to both of them I saw the Mother glance ahead and then lean a little to one side and say something to Sri Aurobindo. His face broke into a smile and he kept looking and smiling. My wife who was just behind me said afterwards that he was smiling until I disappeared into the next room through which we had to pass out again. Such a thing he had never done with me before.
On the night of December 3, I caught the train for Madras on way to Bombay. The Mother was to meet us before we left, but owing to a slight turn for the worse in Sri Aurobindo's condition the meeting was said to be cancelled. Then suddenly news was brought that she would see me. I rushed to the Ashram courtyard and at the bottom of the central staircase she came and sat in a chair while I sat at her feet. Cool and "translucent" she was as ever and we talked of several things connected with my work.
A day or so before fixing my departure I had had a vague feeling that I should stay on. But I gave no importance to it. I reached Bombay in the afternoon of December 5 and before I could leave the station a telegram by a friend in the Ashram was brought to me from my house that Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn from his body early the same morning.
In the midst of this news that shook me to my foundations and still shakes me somewhat after all these years of understanding why Sri Aurobindo took so drastic a step, I remembered how he had shed that wonderful sustained smile. The thought of it is always a quenchless light in the deepest darkness that may try to cover me.
But the whole afternoon and evening of December 5 in
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Bombay were a cry to get back to Pondicherry and see once more the countenance which had granted that sweet parting grace. I requested the sister of a friend of mine, whose efficiency I admired, to manage somehow a seat for me on the night-plane. She herself and another Aurobindonian who had returned with me from Pondicherry wanted also to come. So I said, "We must have three seats." The air-office declared that no seats were available. There was the additional problem of securing accommodation at Nagpur where our plane would touch down and people not only from Bombay but from Delhi and elsewhere would catch another plane to reach Madras. It might become possible to go up to Nagpur; but what then? My friend's sister would accept no defeat. She pleaded with the officials to keep inquiring in all directions. After anxious hours we heard that just three seats could be found right up to Madras owing to sudden cancellations in several places.
We arrived at Madras early next morning and took a taxi to Pondicherry. By eleven we were in Sri Aurobindo's own room, standing beside the glorious body with the face on which there was not merely the far look of peace that one often finds when the soul has gone out: here was the look of a victorious tranquillity, a power that with no effort, with no loss of peace, was radiating itself and breaking through all obstacles in the earth's consciousness. Never in all our years in the Ashram had there been such an overwhelming experience of what Sri Aurobindo himself had called in a line of poetry - Force one with unimaginable rest. With a thundering intensity, as it were, from above our heads the presence and power of Sri Aurobindo plunged down to the depths of the heart. Sri Aurobindo had never done anything so stupendously creative as his own passing from the body!
Later I learned from the Mother that the moment he had left his body what he had termed the Mind of Light, the physical mind receiving the supramental Light, had been realised in her. The strange golden light that many saw upon his body that lay without a touch of discoloration or decay for five days was a sign of the triumph that he had wrested for the earth by sacrificing his own physical frame.
Deep within, each of us felt the glory that looked outwardly a tragedy. But the little human heart in us, the outer emotional
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self, could not always share in the sense of this glory. And I who had depended so much on Sri Aurobindo in all my writing-work - when he had woken to inspiration the labouring poet, stirred to literary insight the fumbling critic, shaped out of absolute nothing the political commentator - I who had almost every day despatched to him some piece of writing for consideration felt a void at the thought that he would not be in that room of his, listening so patiently to my poetry or prose and sending me by letter or telegram his precious guidance. A fellow-sadhaka spoke to the Mother about my plight. On December 12 the inmates of the Ashram met her again and each received from her hands a photograph of Sri Aurobindo taken after his passing. It was dusk, as far as I recollect. She must have seen a certain helplessness on my face. Smiling as she alone could do, she looked me in the eyes and said, "Nothing has changed. Call for inspiration and help as you have always done. You will get everything from Sri Aurobindo as before."
This was simultaneously the Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the crowning touch to all that they had done in those three weeks from November 24 onwards for a poor aspirant whose dependence on them was abject.
I went back to Bombay with the prayer within me that soon, very soon, the Mother might help me and my wife to be near her. At least the second Pilgrimage became a possibility. As if from something above the head, some uplifted luminous watching Will, as it were, the decision seemed to come in February 1953. When it was conveyed to the Mother, she confirmed its authenticity. But to make the decision practicable in terms of rupees, annas and pies was not easy. During one of my short visits, I laid before her all the difficulties. At that time I was somewhat hard-up and I said, "Mother, I must have Rs.500 to settle a few matters and pay for a thorough migration with my wife and our dog." The Mother replied, "You must have Rs.500."
I went back and fixed the time of the second Pilgrimage a few months ahead. Weeks rolled by, but there appeared no prospect of those Rs. 500 materialising in a lump sum. In the December
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of the previous year an American journalist, Harvey Breit, had come to Bombay with a scheme of the Ford Foundation for a special India-supplement to the Atlantic Monthly. I met him and he commissioned an article on Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram. I wrote my piece, two thousand words or so. It was approved. I asked hesitatingly whether there would be any payment. "Of course," was the answer, "we'll write to you from the States." But even after months there was no sign of payment. Now the September of the next year was approaching, the month in which I had fixed my return to Pondicherry. Within a fortnight of D-Day (Divine Day, of course) I got a letter from America. It said that a cheque was enclosed on the Ford Foundation's account in an Indian Bank. I unfolded the cheque. There, unbelievably, was an order for Rs.500. Not a pie more, not a pie less.
But the story of the Grace does not end here. A week later I received another letter. It was apologetic, saying that owing to certain unavoidable circumstances the supplement had to be cut down considerably and that though my article was much appreciated it could not be used. This did not mean the withdrawal of the payment. The payment would be made and I was even told that the compilers claimed no right on my article: it could be sold by me anywhere else.
So my article went all the way from India to the United States and came back to me with a gift of the exact amount which I had mentioned to the Mother and which she had confirmed. And, to take me to the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo, it had to be appropriately an article on Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram!
In connection with my second coming home there is the extraordinary incident of the house in which I was to be put. Although I got those Rs.500, I could not carry out the migration as planned. A few months earlier I had heard from the Ashram Secretary that a certain flat had been selected for me with the approval of the Mother. But the negotiations fell through. A man in Pondicherry stepped in and took away the flat. The Secretary wrote to me that the house-problem remained unsolved and was difficult to solve. He suggested that I should
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myself make a trip and help in the solution.
I arranged to come for the darshan of November 24 and stay on till December 9. I rang up a Travel Agency and made sure about my ticket. A day before leaving Bombay I went by bus to the Agency office to collect it. The bus stops a little way off from the office. I got down and was about to walk towards the office when somebody hailed me from the bus stand. It was a young man I had been introduced to in Pondicherry, a merchant. After the mutual "Hullo", I was asked where I had been hurrying. Mentioning the office, I said, "I am preparing to go away to Pondi. I shall settle there."
"Where will you be putting up?"
"God knows! Nothing fixed. I'll have to hunt for a flat."
"But why? I have a flat there. And as my business is not at all looking up I am clearing out. Why don't you take the place over?"
"Well, it must suit me. Will you give me the address and write to the landlord about me?"
He scribbled the address down - "13 rue Ananda Rangapoullé" - and I went with it to Pondicherry. When I showed it to the Ashram people they were surprised. It was the very flat that the Mother had approved of but had been snatched away at the last minute. Aided by a sadhaka who knew the landlord well, I got the place transferred with ease, and moved into it in February 1954.
The Mother's Grace is a tactician of unthinkable accuracy. It seemed to withdraw, as it were, during the first negotiations. But that was evidently a matter of "reculer pour mieux sauter" - "draw back for a better leap forward". And when it leaped, it was with an infallible aim. The number of factors combining to bring me my destined flat on a platter is quite big. The man who had butted in must be known to me: his business had to force him to leave Pondicherry: he had to be present at a particular place at a precise minute: he had to catch sight of me: he had to bring up the subject of my settling in Pondicherry. The Mother's Grace is just like the Mother herself - unexpected in turn and attentive to the smallest detail.
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On February 29, 1956, I left for Bombay on account of my grandfather, 98 years old, who had been threatening to expire for quite a long time. The Mother had told me that I should be back before the 29th of March. It was the year in which great things were expected. I left by the morning train, reached Madras in the evening and caught the night mail to Bombay.
I went to sleep in the compartment and had a dream. I saw a wide open place, with the Mother seated at one end and people going to her to make pranām. I was at the very boundary of the place. It seemed I might miss the chance of the pranām. So I tried to hurry. But in the hurry I somehow could not get my feet out of my slippers and in the excitement I woke up. When I opened my eyes I saw, against the opposite berth and the facing wall of the compartment, the Mother standing. Her body was in shadow, her face was in moonlight and both were transparent so that through them I could see the woodwork and part of the upholstery of the berth. I kept gazing for some time. Not believing my eyes, I shut them and opened them again. It made no difference to the vision. There still stood the transparent form of the Mother, the face softly shining. After looking for a quarter minute I once more shut my eyes. When I reopened them the form was gone.
On reaching Bombay I wrote to the Mother about this mysterious apparition. I got no reply, but after a time I received letters from my wife in which it was said that the Mother wished me to return soon. From a friend I got the hint that something wonderful had happened. I came back as soon as I could. What had happened was the long-awaited Manifestation of the Supermind as a universal Force in the earth's subtle-physical atmosphere. And it had happened on the 29th of February, late in the evening, during the collective meditation with the Mother, in the spacious playground of the Ashram.
Word got round that the Mother had remarked: "Only five people knew what took place - two in the Ashram and three outside." To get some clarification I took the report to the Mother. She said that she had not referred to people's knowing what had taken place: she had meant that something extra- ordinary had been experienced by five people as a result of the Manifestation: they might not at all have been aware of the true nature of the event. And she added: "Among those outside, I
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counted you. You wrote to me of your experience in the train on the night of the 29th February. Well, I had come to inform you. Don't you remember that many years ago, when you went to Bombay and the Supramental Manifestation was expected here, I promised you that I would let you know at once? I came to you now in fulfilment of my promise."
I was absolutely overwhelmed. The promise had been kept after no less than 18 years! I could only stammer out, "Mother, you came to inform me, a person like me? Oh, I feel so grateful, so grateful..."
Perhaps after this, everything would read like an anti-climax. But the Mother's Grace has a variety and a versatility that cannot but be marvellous. I have already spoken of my grandfather who had been long a-dying and making fools out of the best doctors who, night after night, kept predicting the worst within hours, only to find that the next morning he would be heartily munching his breakfast. In the middle of April, 1957, he seemed to get over his troubles very markedly. He was enjoying the best health he had known for months. But just at that time the Mother suddenly called me to say, "You must go to Bombay soon. I have a strong impression that your grandfather will pass away shortly."
It was rather important that I should be in Bombay when he would die: the family situation and the financial problems demanded my presence there to take charge of everything. So I took the Mother's words as again a visitation of her Grace. But it proved difficult to book a berth from Madras. None was available till May 8. I told the Mother that I would be able to leave only on May 7 from Pondicherry. "Will this be all right?" She smiled and said, "Yes." Then she added, "I have been packing you with power all these days."
The train was delayed a little and I reached Bombay towards 4 p.m. on May 9. Everybody was surprised at my sudden appearance. Grandfather had unexpectedly taken a bad turn. The doctor was pessimistic, but, wise with past experience, did not dare to make any prediction. In the course of the next morning, grandfather breathed his last. And, strange to say, I who had
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come from a thousand miles away happened to be the only member of the family present to see him die. Nobody else, in spite of living in the same house, could appear in time for it when summoned by his secretary.
In the management of grandfather's affairs I was amazed how the several factions in the family disappeared and all worked as one. Whether I was directly thinking of the Mother or no, something seemed to move irresistibly as if the power which she had "packed" into me unfolded itself automatically and brought success everywhere. The most impossible-looking things became child's play.
Announcing grandfather's demise to the Mother I wrote jocularly of my new status as the eldest male survivor in the family. She replied, to my astonishment: "You say as a joke 'Now I am the grand old man of the family!' - but it is not a joke, it is true; for all in your grandfather that was turned towards the good and the right went straight into you when he left his body." Of course the good and the right, acting as if in tune with grandfather's own will, were much needed by me in managing his estate to everyone's satisfaction. And the Mother's remark showed clearly that she had been occultly watchful over all the results of the working of her Grace.
February 21, the birthday of the Mother, is also the day on which Mother India was born, seventy-one years later. And the day of its birth in 1949 had behind it a special outbreak of the Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
This journal was in several senses a desperate venture. It was the idea of a businessman, K.R. Poddar, but conceived without any narrow concern for business: it sought to make current the gold of a spiritual light at any material expense, and there was no calculation made about the length of time it might take for that celestial coinage to be accepted. It was because Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had taken interest in the project and blessed it that the journal was launched in the form of a fortnightly in the midst of that very centre of frantic business, the commercial capital of India, Bombay, where the word "Spirit", if it meant anything at all, might connote simply what Prohibition puts out
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of the way of celebrating or relaxing businessmen. The desperateness of the publication and its sheer need of Grace from the Divine was well hit off by the message (dated January 29, 1949) received from Aldous Huxley for the first issue:
"I wish you all success in your venture. You will, of course, be a voice crying in the wilderness. But if a few individuals pay attention, something will have been accomplished."
A further point added to the apparent quixotism: Mother India had, as part of its aim, the object of plunging into political problems with a spiritual vision. It strove to look at national and international situations from the height of Sri Aurobindo's thought. In the hubbub of political slogans it brought a standard of judgment that was non-political. In general this standard may be summed up by saying that in every field of activity the aim was to criticise whatever militated against humanity's instinct of an evolving divinity within itself and to give the utmost constructive help to all that encouraged that instinct. Without flinching, Mother India spoke forth on many political subjects in direct contradiction of official or popular ideas.
Those were the days when Stalin overshadowed, almost overawed, the world, especially the Asian world. But Mother India, while never advocating stark individualism or boosting rank capitalism, never hesitated to expose the sham of the Stalinist sociology and its rigid negation of the two beliefs or intuitions that are the authentic stamp of homo sapiens: the key-importance of the creative individual in the evolutionary process, the presence of a secret Godhead who can inspire and enlighten the consciousness of the individual. Mother India went all out in support of the American intervention in Korea, regarding as it did the attack of the communist North Koreans as inspired by Mao and Stalin and as the first step of communism towards conquest of all Asia, including our own country. Mother India, again, refused to accept any right of Red China's to invade Tibet: the historical suzerainty of China over Tibet could only be accepted if at the same time the equally historical internal autonomy of Tibet were granted. Our uncompromising protest, argued out at great length, created a bit of stir in Indian parliamentary circles. Perhaps even more disturbing to current thought was the protest, voiced in three slashing editorials, against recognition of Red China - a protest based on an all-
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round survey of the situation. We also spotlighted the delusion that there could be real cultural bonds between India and any country wedded to totalitarianism, or that a China gone Red and furiously working for world-communism would have no aggressive intentions against India. In regard to Pakistan there was the same attempt on our part to look into the heart of the matter and judge issues from insight into the psychological and occult forces at work behind the scene of the immediate physical event: India, however varied, is indivisible and her wholeness must somehow return if her full destiny is to be fulfilled: partition, a product of perverse or panicky politics, violated the country's essential oneness of being, it cut up the bodily symbol, as it were, of the single Goddess-Spirit by whose presiding genius this manifold nation had been enabled to live its history of cultural synthesis and diverse approaches to the Infinite. In everything our guide was the vast and impartial yet dynamically precise wisdom of Sri Aurobindo, and we did not care whether we found favour with persons or institutions, whether our circulation soared or slumped as a result of our unconventional views. Did we not have the blessings of the Mother to make us a success in the sense of being a force that made its mark?
The blessings of the Mother: thereby hangs a tale, particular no less than general. But before we come to it a glance may be thrown at the peculiar case of the Editor of Mother India. He was in love with poetry and deeply attached to literary criticism; he was a fast friend of philosophy and on fairly intimate terms with science; he could even have a close relationship with history; but politics was his bête noire, politics gave him the shivers. So when the privilege of editorial appointment came his way, he stood at once delighted and dazed: it was an honour indeed to fight with the pen for the Aurobindonian ideal, but the foreignness of the field, the disagreeableness of the ground, on which battle was to be waged, gave him pause. He was expected to write thousands of words on various political themes in a manner that would be clear, cogent, exact, penetrating, widely informed, easily authoritative. Here was a feat the poor fellow could not have performed even in his wildest dreams. But he had learnt from experience as well as observation that the Mother was no chaser of rainbows: if she put him in the Editor's Chair, it was surely to get solid results out of him in that position. Trusting in her
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wonderful practical flair, he unburdened his mind of fears to her. "Mother, I have to be an expert political thinker and writer. But I have no turn for politics, no touch on politics." She smiled a cool sweet smile and answered: "Neither have I." I got a start. "Well, then what shall I do?" Again the imperturbable sweetness and then the reply: "There is Sri Aurobindo. He will guide you in everything." A sudden flood of power swept over me. "Oh yes," I said, "Sri Aurobindo will do the impossible." And he did. Out of absolute nothing he created a prolific commentator on political questions. Articles simply streamed forth and it was most amazing how their author was called in by people for views on this, that and the other burning topic, as if he were a political oracle! And the wonder was that he successfully acquitted himself like one. His hearers thought that it was but natural he should talk with expertness and far-sightedness: he alone knew that the Grace of Sri Aurobindo did all the talking.
This Grace, fashioning a new mind from poor or no materials, worked in many modes at its job which was like that of Napoleon who was said to have made generals of genius out of mud. Sri Aurobindo not only put from afar his mighty spiritual force to the task of "politicising" the Editor's grey cells. He also got every editorial, however lengthy, read out to him before publication and sent a telegram of approval or modification or rejection. Matter for Mother India received preferential treatment among the sundry calls on the precious time of the Avatar of Supermind. And his interest in it had a directly personal touch. On one occasion, when a sadhaka's sceptical attitude to the opinions expressed in the fortnightly was reported to him, he said: "Doesn't he know that Mother India is my paper?" Here was Grace in abundance and without stint - initiating, fostering, shaping, supporting, championing.
The presence of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was felt constantly in all the turns of the editorial activity in Bombay. In fact, there would have been no such activity at all if this presence had not openly taken charge of things. And here what I have called the particular tale of the Mother's blessings falls into place. Let us go to the period of preparation before the first issue saw
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the light. We were about to launch a fortnightly without any experience of the brass-tacks of such an adventure. When the office was set up we had only six or seven weeks to go before the date fixed for the opening number. We had no materials in reserve except for two or three issues. One day a veteran journalist dropped in and told us that we were heading for the rocks: unless we had six months' matter in hand it was foolhardy to start by February 21. We said that our opening number would be a brilliant one and it was a shame to suppress it. A warning finger was wagged in front of the novice Editor's nose: "It is better to lie quiet for some months than go up a rocket and come down a stick." We suggested that we would work frenziedly and keep going. "Impossible! All journalistic experience is against you. Mass your forces sufficiently - six months' stuff in hand - and then make your entrance."
We were in a quandary. To commence and then flop - this was an unbearable thought. The editor had at times the apparently irrational feeling that if hard-pressed he could write the whole journal single-handed. But could one rely on such delusions of grandeur? Not to be published according to the original plan was galling. Yet he could not involve everything in a rapturous risk. He thought it best to consult the Mother. So he sent her an urgent note: "All journalists advise us to postpone publication for some months. They say we are doomed otherwise. My own instinct is that of Foch at the Battle of the Marne. When he was asked by his superior at the headquarters for a report from the field, he sent the message: 'Mon centre cède, ma droite récule, situation excellente, j'attaque!'¹ But what do you say?"
On January 27, 1949, I received the telegram: "Stick to the date. Live on faith. Blessings, - Mother." With a whoop we went into action - and our faith in the Mother's Grace has kept us in action up to now.
Both the Editor and the Associate Editor, S.R. Albless, experienced again and again in their day-to-day movements in the office and at the press the blessing and guiding hand of the
¹. "My centre is giving way, my right wing is in retreat, situation excellent, I am attacking !"
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Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Difficulties rose up of various kinds - psychological, physical, technical. But all got solved and never was Mother India late by even a few hours. Occasionally there was a sudden dearth of contributions. An appeal would go forth to the secret presence. Not only would the immediate need be answered but also "God's plenty" would pour in, making possible a sumptuous Special Number close on the heels of an ordinary issue that had seemed hard to fill. On some occasions the Editor would have a relapse into his old non-political self. A helplessness would settle like a cloud over him and he would be afraid that the deadline might find him unready. But a deep inner aspiration at night cried out to the Master, "After all, Mother India is your concern. I am only your instrument. You have to look after it and see that everything is in order. Please get an editorial written tomorrow morning." And the next dawn would break on the early-risen Editor thumping away on his typewriter in a gust of inspiration.
When matters other than political were treated - and there were a lot of them, since Mother India touched on politics as only one side of its multiple Aurobindonian work - the situation of stand-still in any sense was non-existent. For, there the Editorial Staff was in its own element. But here too the enlivening stream of inner help from Pondicherry was clearly felt. And, paradoxically, the most intense experience of it came after the Master had left his body! I had flown to the Ashram on getting the heart-shattering news. As already recounted, the Mother had assured the appalled disciple that nothing had really changed and that he would get as ever the fullest help possible from Sri Aurobindo. But now the greatest challenge was to be faced: what must be written about the mystifying event that had just taken place? All the readers of Mother India would be looking up to the Editor for enlightenment.
Before leaving Pondicherry I was granted an interview by the Mother. She said, "The whole event is quite clear to me. But I will not tell you anything. You must write on it all by yourself." I meditated with the Mother for a while and then left the same night for Bombay. All through the railway journey to Madras and the flight from there to Bombay, I kept inwardly invoking Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to make me do well the job which seemed the greatest my life could confront me with - namely,
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the reading of at least some part of the spiritual secret that was behind what looked so mighty a tragedy, the secret which would reveal in this apparent tragedy a triumph in accord with all the earth-divinising Yoga taught and lived out by Sri Aurobindo.
Bombay held nothing of interest for me. I would hardly go even out of my room lest the concentration on the hidden light should flicker for a moment and my search fall short of its goal. I said to myself: "What use my whole career of writing if now I cannot bring forth words aglow with God's own truth?" And the prayer rose up: "O Mother, O Sri Aurobindo, if I could now see into the heart of this mystery and draw out of its depth the speech of revelation, I should be content to drop the pen for ever. I do not care whether I write anything else after it: but here let me not fail." Once again the old appeal took shape in my mind: "My Master, Mother India is your concern after all. Will you not save it from failure, from frustration?"
Slowly through the empty days and the hopeless nights a mass of light was felt invisibly moving towards expression. I had the urge to write. But something told me to control it. Not till I felt absolutely surcharged with that mass should I put pen to paper. I waited. Then at last came the feeling that now I should find utterance. For several days I went on writing - at times sitting at my typewriter hour after hour, producing nothing rather than let anything unworthy of the colossal theme take form. A long essay progressed towards its end - perhaps the longest editorial I had written. I had the sense that the Grace had worked, bearing me through my supreme trial as a writer.
I posted my composition to the Mother. It was entitled: "The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence." It was read out to her in two sittings. The Ashram Secretary sent me on December 27, 1950, the telegram: "Your Passing of Sri Aurobindo admirable. Fully approved by Mother. Nothing to change. - Nolini." My Associate Editor who was still in Pondicherry wrote to me what the Mother had said to our Manager Yogendra Rastogi on December 28. Her words were: "I have read Amal's article. It is excellent. Tell him I am extremely satisfied. I would like to have it printed in booklet form. He can get it printed in Bombay, if he wants. Otherwise I shall have it printed here." A little later my Associate Editor again reported her as having remarked: "It is quite the best thing
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Amal has written. I would like to print 15,000 copies of it."
Face to face with all this, I could only bow my head with inexpressible gratitude. Mother India had found its fulfilment through the Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
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The Integral Yoga is a matter of all or nothing. Not that the Guru rejects partial offerings: whatever movement is towards the Divine is welcome and can be made the starting-point for a larger gesture. The Grace answers to even the smallest sincere gift. But its call is towards more and more, a new starting-point each moment. And if to this insatiable call a deaf ear is turned, then in terms of the Integral Yoga it is as if nothing was done.
The call is insatiable not only because the Grace wants the whole human to be surrendered to the Divine but also because it wants the whole Divine to be lavished on the human. Surely, since the very nature of Grace is to exceed mere tally and equation, its self-lavishing is always greater than the aspirant's self-surrender. Yet the aspirant cannot receive and retain it unless he holds up to it a being that increasingly widens and deepens and grows a less and less partial offering.
In the integral offering that has to be made in the Integral Yoga, one understands fairly well the need of entire detachment from the non-divine and of absolute love for the Supreme and of perfect service to the Master. What is not often understood is the way of action in the midst of the world where the Supreme's manifestation has to take place, the way of dealing with the humans amongst whom the Divine has put us. There are two extremes into which we are likely to fall. One is the position that the mere practice of goodness is spiritual. No doubt, every movement that loosens one's self-centredness is a help to spirituality. But it is not till the ego which is one's common centre is replaced by the true soul and the universal Self that spirituality is established. Otherwise all that happens is a subtilisation of the ego, a diffusion of it in place of a concentration - a state in which it is at times more difficult to detect and therefore more difficult to outgrow, more liable to induce a self-haloing complacency and prevent the release into true Light. A constant remembrance of the Divine, a direct life-offering to the Supreme, a conscious motive and élan beyond mere goodness, an unremitting cry to the Master Light to manifest its own will in all human relations: this is spirituality in action.
The other extreme cares little for how we act among men. We feel that all our capacity of sweetness is to be exercised only with
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the Guru and that it does not matter how we behave with others. We tell ourselves: "The incarnate Divine is our concern: nobody else is of any importance and what helps us in Yoga is simply the way we love and serve the Master. It is of no moment whether we are just and generous and calm and helpful to others." Here a great truth is shaded off into a great falsehood. Even apart from the fact that the Divine who is incarnate is also hidden in all beings and requires from the secret station there a fineness and largeness of attitude and action, we have here an oblivion of two ingredients of the Integral Yoga.
First, this is a Yoga of manifestation no less than realisation. Not only is the Supreme to be centrally reached: the Supreme is also to be radiated to the farthest peripheries of the world. The innermost soul has to look forth and touch the outermost: all crudity of attitude, all meanness of action in our dealings with earth's creatures would cut across the ultimate aim of this Yoga.
Secondly, it is a delusion that one can divide oneself into parts and be always fine and wide with the Guru without practising fineness and wideness twenty-four hours of the day. Of course, the Divine is our concern, but can we ever hope to love and serve the Divine wholly if in some part of our being, in some field of our activity we tolerate the crude and the mean? As long as the soul remains somehow in force during the hours in the sanctuary we may be able to exclude the unregenerate movements from our relations with the Master. But it is not only the soul that has to be offered: the soul must lead the rest of the being to the sanctuary. And when the rest is touched by the Divine and called upon to co-operate, then if it has not trained itself to be fine and large outside the sanctuary it will tend to be resentful, angry, jealous, self-seeking with the Divine as it has been with the human. The soul's sweetness and light may fail to curb and convert it if that sweetness and that light have not been accustomed to do so everywhere and at all times. Resentment, anger, jealousy, self-seeking on any occasion can be a secret seed of the same ego-expression against the Supreme. In the Integral Yoga, with its stroke on each part for response to the Supreme, the total self-offering is not possible unless one takes to heart Sri Aurobindo's command: "Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present."¹
¹ . SABCL Vol. 25, p. 105.
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Difficulties in Yoga*
The nature of your difficulty indicates the nature of the victory you will gain, the victory you will exemplify in Yoga. Thus, if there is persistent selfishness, it points to a realisation of universality as your most prominent achievement in the future. And, when selfishness is there, you have also the power to reverse this very difficulty into its opposite, a victory of utter wideness.
When you have something to realise, you will have in you just the characteristic which is the contradiction of that something. Face to face with the defect, the difficulty, you say, "Oh, I am like that! How awful it is!" But you ought to see the truth of the situation. Say to yourself, "My difficulty shows me clearly what I have ultimately to represent. To reach the absolute negation of it, the quality at the other pole - this is my mission."
Even in ordinary life, we have sometimes the experience of contraries. He who is very timid and has no courage in front of circumstances proves capable of bearing the most!
To one who has the aspiration for the Divine, the difficulty which is always before him is the door by which he will attain God in his own individual manner: it is his particular path towards the Divine Realisation.
There is also the fact that if somebody has a hundred difficulties it means he will have a tremendous realisation - provided, of course, there are in him patience and endurance and he keeps the aspiring flame of Agni burning against those defects.
And remember: the Grace of the Divine is generally proportioned to your difficulties.
The most difficult thing in our difficulties is the sense they give us that they stand in stark opposition to the workings of the
* Section 1 is based on an unrecorded talk of the Mother.
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Divine. They seem to come from outside the Divine's intention and plan and make us feel that they are there wholly by some devilish power within or without us, bent on dragging us away from the Light. The Light appears to pull one way, the Darkness the other, and between the two we are torn.
But, if the Divine is the one ultimate reality, can anything be utterly independent of His Will? No doubt, a Darkness keeps opposing the Light and it must be rejected as an enemy. To forget this is to overlook the entire meaning of the process of evolution, the constant urge to rise from the animal to the godlike and to make Nature an instrument, an expressive form, of the soul. But, on the other hand, if we forget that the very process of evolution, the struggle itself towards godhead, is set by the Divine, we let the Darkness seem more dense than it really is. For we then see it as it shows itself to our frailty rather than as it can be revealed to us by the power of the Light.
What the Light reveals within, behind, above each difficulty is the figure of Sri Aurobindo. And this is what one may hear Sri Aurobindo say:
"Difficulties are part of the cosmic plan. I would wish to lift you beyond all need of them, so that yours may be a spontaneous flowering into divinity. But there are a thousand checks put by you and by the world to my Grace. Even so, it can reach you - through the very difficulties where you see the opposite of my face. Since only by their stroke can you be awakened to all that has to be changed in yourself, I choose to come to you in their stroke. Invite not the Darkness; but, when it is there, let not your mind be troubled or your heart burdened. Everything I weave into my pattern of perfection. Do not feel as if some incomprehensible devilry were dooming you: feel as if I with one hand were giving the difficulty and with the other the will and the power to overcome it. Safely you may take even the Darkness as part of my own workings, provided you recognise that I send it not to be accepted but to help your growth by being mastered at once with my love's ever-pouring Light. Keep this double vision clear, and you will not be torn as between two enemies, nor sink into the despair of human weakness."
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The Series of Avatars
A COMMENT ON THE MOTHER'S MESSAGE OF
APRIL 24, 1957
This Message of the Mother¹ -
"In the eternity of becoming, each Avatar is only the announcer, the forerunner of a more perfect realisation" -
has prompted in some minds the question: Is the work of establishing the Supermind on earth not the work of the culminating Avatar, not the fulfilment of earth-existence but only a step further, like so many earlier steps, on an endless path where every realisation proves to be imperfect in comparison to what comes after it?
Behind this question there are a number of misconceptions. It is indeed true that no end can be set to the Divine's manifestation on earth. If the Divine is the Infinite, then His manifestation can never be exhausted: depth after depth must keep disclosing itself. When the Supermind, the Vijnana-plane, has established its splendour amongst us, it will serve as the beginning of a movement towards establishing the wonder that is the Transcendent Bliss, the Ananda-plane. After that, other secrets of the Supreme will work out their revelation. But we must not overlook a great difference between the Supermind's manifestation and the manifestation of divine powers that have preceded it. And we must not omit to note that the Mother's Message, in its complete form, has a second sentence running:
"And yet men have always the tendency to deify the Avatar of the past in opposition to the Avatar of the future."
This sentence makes us throw a glance backward at man's spiritual history and it suggests in relation to the Supermind the error of sticking to past realisations as if they were ultimate instead of preparatory of the Supermind's epiphany. The opposing tendency spoken of can take two forms. One is to deny the supramental revelation and make a jealous cult of what Rishi and Saint and Prophet have taught in ages gone. The other is to consider this revelation of today nothing save the old truth
¹. Bulletin, April 1957, MCW Vol. 13, p. 22.
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retold in novel terms and therefore fit for acceptance by those who like novelty but not imperative for acceptance by all.
Of course, as we have said, the supramental realisation also is not final. And the Mother's second sentence does not imply its finality. But by the word "past" contraposed to the word "future" it brings the generality of the first sentence to a certain particularisation which, without making a fresh fetish of today against tomorrow, flashes out the need of opening the eyes to the new Day of God that has dawned.
The new Day can be seen in proper focus by divesting the epithet "supramental" of all looseness of significance. Every Yoga has sought for what is "supra", or superior, to the mental. But Sri Aurobindo attaches a special meaning to the epithet he has brought into use. People not intimate with his thought understand by it one of two things. Either they apply it to an infinite and eternal Silence exceeding all cosmic activity and making the whole cosmos seem an inexplicably created enigma that has no basic reality - or else they apply it to a spiritual Force beyond the mind, standing against the background of that Silence and governing its own creation, this universe in which the souls of creatures rise from birth to birth but in which, despite all spirituality, a certain imperfection is inherent and irreducible. The first conception culminates in a sense of māyā, World-Illusion; the second in a sense of līlā, World-Play. But both point in the end to a fulfilment above the earth - the one to a merger in the sheer Absolute, the other to a heavenly abiding within the Godhead.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the Supreme is totally defined by neither of these conceptions. Each has certainly a validity in experience. The sense of World-Illusion comes by experience of the utter freedom of the Divine from the universe of forms, an entire independence that can be asserted by turning away from the phenomena of body, life and mind as if they were trifles and even phantoms adding nothing to the essential self-existence of the Spirit. The sense of World-Play comes by experience of a constant sustainment of phenomena by that self-existence as if they emerged from its own being and lived by its conscious force and expressed, overtly or covertly, its boundless delight. But the Supreme, for Sri Aurobindo, is not only the utter freedom above cosmic existence, not only the inalienable divine presence within
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the cosmos and the Lord and Lover of it: He also renders possible a fulfilment of the terrestrial adventure in its own terms of mind, life and body. The Supreme holds a divine mentality, a divine vitality, a divine physicality awaiting to manifest by a descent from above where they stand in open glory and by an emergence from below where they lie hidden in the profundities of all that appears the very opposite of the Divine. The Supreme, as unfolding from His absolute freedom this threefold Truth of Nature and dynamising this Truth in an evolutionary self-expression, is the Supermind. By the Supermind a godlike evolution in the most literal sense can result: the formation of an earthly being who by his very nature shall be free from ignorance, incapacity and the deathward movement that is all embodied life at even its most powerful.
Once the Supermind is realised on the earth we have no longer a disparity between Spirit and World. Nothing of Here and Now will fall short of the Divine who is infinite and eternal. The division of basic reality from phenomenon, of the Creator from the creation, will be abolished without putting away form and becoming. Thus a radical change will take place which will distinguish the supramental realisation from all others. Hence to say that this realisation is not final is never the same thing as to say that the realisations before the Supermind's advent are not final but part of an endless process of world-perfection. As Sri Aurobindo puts it, there is conversion before the Supermind and progression after it. Until the supramental change has occurred, something of the phenomenal and the created remains imperfect and needs to be converted. With the occurrence of that change, what remains is only the inexhaustible exploration of the perfect: what remains is the "more perfect" in the sense of more quantity, as it were, of the perfection hidden in the Divine and not the "more perfect" in the sense of a superior quality. After the supramental realisation the Divine cannot be diviner but He can still be various and show design on miraculous design of ordered flawlessness in an eternity of becoming.
This fact should also clarify the problem of Avatarhood. Avatarhood, essentially manifesting the supreme Godhead, takes place from various planes of being by an incarnation of the central Divine Personality poised on a plane. It can take place from the Mind plane to establish the rule of an ideal and Spirit-
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touched Dharma answering to the finest mental aspiration; or from the Overmind plane to bring a many-sided direct impulsion from a spiritual state that is vaster than the mental and beyond all merely ethico-religious rule. Again, it can take place straight from the supreme Truth-Consciousness, the Supermind, where the ultimate marvel of the Transcendent is organised for time-creation and the all-transformative archetype of earth-existence is dynamic. The Avatarhood from the Supermind carries not only in the inward but also in the outward the utter Godhead and all potentialities of future Avatarhood are continuous with those which it manifests and come out not so much from a higher plane as from a plane in its own background. A new form or incarnation for a new manifestation is no longer a necessity. It is the intuitive inkling of this absence of further embodiment, rather than the anomalous idea of putting a term to the Infinite's manifestation on earth, that has led Hinduism to speak of Kalki as the last Avatar.
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The "I" who wants to do Yoga
I did not reply to your first letter because I thought you would soon be in Pondicherry to exemplify concretely the good news you had conveyed to me that the Mother had approved of your resuming your stay in the Ashram. Your second letter puts off that exemplification for a time. So I am hurrying to reply, particularly as you say you are pestered by a metaphysical question without having the capacity to give a metaphysical answer!
The way you have stated the question carries in itself an answer, though in negative terms. You have said in effect: "If it is the ego who wants to become conscious of the soul and ultimately becomes conscious of it, he must be a very fine fellow. So his existence should not be grudged and his disappearance and destruction would be a misfortune. In addition, there would be the problem why he should be interested in following a course resulting in suicide." Well, it should be pretty clear from the contradictions inherent in this statement that the ego cannot be the "I" who wants to do Yoga and grow conscious of the "real I", the soul, who loves the Mother.
Evidently, if there is going to be a continuity between you who are an aspirant and you who will be aware of yourself as the soul, there must be something in common between the two, something that makes the transition and will know that it has done so. If "knowledge", if "awareness", is implied in the whole process, it is logical to say that what makes the transition is fundamentally "consciousness". Consciousness gets identified with this or that state of being - with the ego at the beginning and with the soul later. Whatever the consciousness identifies itself with, that is the state realised. Here we have the first step of the solution.
The second step will be clear when you consider that you are trying to do Yoga and to realise your soul. Such an aspiration can come only if something in affinity with the Yogic condition and with the soul is already there in the consciousness which is you, along with its identification with the ego. Mental man has always, within his ego-consciousness, a projection made by his soul, a
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projection which mingles with his sensational, emotional and conceptional being and creates in that being all that we call idealism, the sense of values, the courage to live up to them, the aspiration to become better and better, "the desire of the moth for the star" and the longing to realise more and more the truth of the world and of oneself. It is this psychic projection into the ego-consciousness, that is the part of you which could not be happy outside the Ashram and which the Mother has allowed to come back and start exulting and agonising once more in the heavenly hell that is the Yogic passage from the hell of ordinary life to the heaven of God-realisation.
I hope all this is simple enough to pull you out of what you term "the fog" and save you from being "an old foggy" if not "an old fogey"!
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A Physical "Confrontation" and some
Spiritual Issues
Of course I am sorry to read the story of your physical "confrontation" but I don't think it is so very serious an affair as you feel. Your appearance is hardly that of an easily thrashable pigmy or of a habitual shiverer-in-his-shoes. The fellow who threatened you must have seen this and that is why he added the further threat to call his friends to help him deal with you. The calm and inoffensive behaviour you put up was just the right thing - both to impress the bully and to receive the Mother's help and grace. The bully was impressed and the Mother did come to your protection. Wasn't it a signal favour to you that the man summoned to assist in pulping you happened to be of a gentle sort and a distant relative of yours to boot?
No need to blame yourself as a coward just because you did not start fisticuffs at once. One should not confuse fear with discretion or give up discretion merely to show that a lion is hidden in the Yogi. I don't remember - for that matter - that Krishna anywhere in the Gita calls Arjuna a lion: as far as I can recollect, his highest apostrophic compliment is: "O Bull among the Bharatas!" If I may interpret Krishna à la Chesterton, I should say: "A bull is one who is never cowed, yet never bullies." In the same vein I may define: "A lion is one who leaps to lie on another." A lion is a beast of prey, seeking to be on the offensive. A bull is a beast of burden, brave but preferring to be on the defensive. A lion is always independent, a bull usually looks up to a master. To play Chesterton again: "A lion in his might ever roars, 'Let me prey!' " A bull with all his strength still bellows, 'Let me pray!' " You acted the Gita's Bull, stood unafraid without being violent, appealed to the Divine and awaited the Divine's Word for fighting. Even the dejected mood in which you have written to me is not quite un-Gita-like: only, your dejection differs from that of Krishna's friend in coming after the event instead of before; but the heart-searching is typical.
As to your future line of action, it would be wrong to run away from the field of potential danger. I would not assert that one
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should never leave such a field. But your circumstances don't strike me as justifying any packing up. The sudden discovery of a relative, however distant, in the most unexpected place is a sign that the turn of events will be favourable. Carry on your work as this chap has advised you. Possibly your initial mistake was to interfere in somebody else's wrangle so soon after arrival for service in a strange town. Get settled, get known, get your true character familiarised: then people won't misunderstand you when you speak out on one side or the other. Maybe there is - in my sense of the term - a bit of a lion lurking within the bull in you and it relishes picking little quarrels. Instead of talking in a quiet tone, expressive of impartial sobriety and common sense, to the woman who was abusing the School's Headmaster, you may have indignantly raised your voice and sounded aggressive. Rather than appearing somewhat of a hothead on behalf of your boss you should have been your own head-master. Then she might have respected you if not him and stopped abusing him in your presence. Perhaps you don't live consciously enough all the time. Be more self-watchful - and I think you won't get into scrapes.
Now to your question about the Mother's help. No doubt, those who are in what you call "conscious contact" with her can draw her help better in a continuous way. But that does not mean others can't have it effectively. To appeal to her with sincerity and intensity even at an isolated moment ensures response. Even people who do not directly know her can have her aid. You who know her directly and have her as at least the background, if not the foreground, of your life should be more assured of her intervention. You further ask me: "When we call on her, should we completely rely on her and do nothing ourselves but only keep calling her name?" Surely we should completely rely on her but we should also make certain, when we do nothing, that it is she who makes us do nothing: ourselves to decide to do nothing is actually to do something rather than relying on her! Mere passivity is no sign of openness or obedience. A quick sensitive feel within oneself of her impulsions is the right thing. Doing something or doing nothing should come out of that feel. No rule can be laid down.
The word "sensitive" which I have used brings me to your own statement: "Life has no charm if I have to live under such
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humiliations. It is the most sensitive part of me that is being hit often and hit hard." Your sensitiveness is of the wrong type: it is one form of the ego, amour propre, self-regard. Self-respect is not wrong, born of a just appraisal of one's positive qualities, the powers particular to one. But there is no reason in the world why one should not be subjected at times to what you call "humiliations". We are not so extraordinary that everybody should show respect for us always. Of course, to humiliate a man hardly argues for a fineness of nature: we should try not to insult anybody, not to make him look cheap. But if somebody is unrefined enough to pull us down, we should not be upset. We should take all circumstances humbly as well as calmly. In fact, we cannot be truly calm without giving up exaggerated notions about ourselves.
However, I must add that true calmness implies our giving up exaggerated notions about others, too. We should not only ask: "Am I so important that nobody should insult me?" We should also ask: "Are others so important that I should attach value to their insults?" You will see that the second question, counter-balancing the first, should take away the sting from the latter. Being upset at "humiliations" is due no less to putting others at a premium than to setting a premium on oneself. There should be a quiet discounting on either hand. Often one's sensitiveness on being "humiliated" comes of the imagination that one's lowered condition means the elevated condition of others. But can others be felt as elevated unless you consider them so important that their attitude towards you should matter all the world in your eyes? They are men like yourself: if you are not exceptional, neither are they. It is the common element in them that seeks to humiliate you: recognise that stock of poor stuff and refuse to be humiliated by what is akin to the poor stuff in yourself.
Of course, true calmness goes, for its ultimate basis, beyond the equal depreciation of yourself and others. It results from two spiritual realisations. One is the experience of That which is infinite and eternal and identical within all beings and things, what the Upanishads term ātman, the Self in all. This Self is, first, a supreme stability amidst and above the fluctuations of the phenomenal world. As such, it cannot but be calm. Secondly, as it is undifferentiated, it takes away the ground of feeling that somebody other than oneself interacts with one. Who then
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humiliates whom? There is only the One without a second in the universe. Thirdly, ātman stands as the mere Witness. It is for ever detached not only from the world outside but also from the world inside, our thoughts, emotions, sensations. It gives no reaction. How will it suffer humiliation or, for that matter, any psychological phase whatever?
The other spiritual realisation on which true calm is based is the experience of the Psychic Being, the Soul in us, the Upanishad's antarātman and caitya purusa. The Psyche is not an undifferentiated and detached stability: it is an evolving consciousness, individualised with a thinking, feeling, sensing personality. But it is a spark, as it were, of the Dynamic Divine and all the values of its response are divine, intrinsically free from the ego and the disequilibriums that accompany the ego-consciousness. It has also an inherent happiness and, although it is intense in its being, its intensity is - to quote a figure from the Gita - a flame burning upward in a windless place. A pure steady dynamism is its nature - pure by being devoted only to the Lord of the universe, the Supreme Person whose Will is behind the whole play of phenomena - steady by being dedicated to the same Supreme Person as enshrined within each being, the Lover of lovers who is at play in every life. How does one figure in the eyes not of oneself or of others but of this Inmost Beloved Presence, that Utmost Adored Master? That is the decisive question here and it liberates us from all perturbation.
Some reflex of the Spirit as the single Self and of the Spirit as the Psychic Being we have to catch in our ordinary nature in order to escape at all times from the sense of humiliation - before we have compassed actually the two spiritual realisations that bring true calm in its very essentiality.
You have said at the end of your letter: "Please give practical ways to solve my problem." I don't know whether what I have written will strike you as practical. But it is practical in the sense that it refers to the practice of Yoga in a general way at each step.
1967
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A BOOK-REVIEW
Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. Compiled from the Writings of
Sri Aurobindo by M.P.Pandit. Sponsored by C.C. Mulgund.
Dipti Publications, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry,
1966. Rs.10.¹
This is a most welcome addition to the various experiments in compiling passages from Sri Aurobindo to serve particular practical ends. What Sri Aurobindo has written on Culture, on Science, on Education, on Yoga - we have had fine anthologies of such matter, the largest and of the greatest interest being on the last-named theme. But these, in spite of helpful headings, cannot immediately enlighten one on a question vexing one's unhelpful head. An alphabetical arrangement, combing all the works of Sri Aurobindo for pronouncements that would pointedly assist one towards a specific goal, is an excellent inspiration.
And the purpose for which the present book has been made by M.P. Pandit goes to the very heart of the Aurobindonian body of the Truth-Word. Yoga ("Yoga means union with the Divine, but it also means awaking first to your inner self and then to your highest self, - a movement inward and a movement upward", as one of the definitions in the book has it ²) - Yoga is indeed the luminous centre of Sri Aurobindo's action in the world, and to be able to consult him at a moment's notice and draw the rays of his seer-wisdom on to a pressing problem is a boon.
Nor is Pandit's Dictionary a treasure-trove for just a coterie of spiritual aspirants. The very nature of Sri Aurobindo's personality and authorship breaks through an exclusive utility. This Master of the Via Mystica is at the same time, in a super-Aristotelian sense, "the Master of those who know" (to quote a phrase from Dante) and, we may add, the Master of all who love literature. Philosopher and stylist at every instant, Sri Aurobindo
¹. Printed at the Jupiter Press Private Ltd., Madras-18.
². P. 312.
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comes out in the Dictionary not only as a boon to disciples bent on Yoga but also as "boon nature" to students looking for ideas and as "a boon companion" to connoisseurs of the mot juste.
Just one example picked out from the section we have already opened will serve to illustrate the threefold drive of Sri Aurobindo. Here are psycho-spiritual profundity, intellectual perspicacity and literary felicity - and all with a natural ease befitting what was written by way of a letter to a disciple:
"Yoga and Occident: The difficulties of the occidental nature are born of the dominant trend of the European mind in the immediate past. A greater readiness of essential doubt and sceptical reserve; a habit of mental activity as a necessity of the nature which makes it more difficult to achieve a complete mental silence; a stronger turn towards outside things born of the plenitude of active life; a habit of mental and vital self-assertion and sometimes an aggressively vigilant independence which renders difficult any completeness of internal surrender even to a greater Light and Knowledge, even to the divine influence - these are frequent obstacles.
"But these things are not universal in Westerners; they are super-structural formations, not the very grain of the being. They cannot permanently stand in the way of the soul, if the soul's aspiration is strong and firm, if the spiritual aim is the chief thing in the life."³
Yes, the lexicographer cannot help bringing out Sri Aurobindo in a trmürti aspect - Brahma of the Creative Word, Vishnu the World-Preserver and Dharma-Saviour, Shiva the Destroyer of Darkness. But naturally the stress falls on the main work for which the Truth-Consciousness that is Sri Aurobindo brought East and West together in one living light of all-round development. And many indeed are the flashing surprises of insight the seeker of the Spirit receives on turning the pages. The present reviewer has been an assiduous reader of the Aurobindonian corpus, but he has been happily struck with several discoveries - or, rather, with the springing of several known lines of Sri Aurobindo's thought and teaching into sudden bright relief. The trouvailles range from cross-illuminations on a surface spot to specialist information on subtle details and little peeps into huge depths.
³ . Pp. 310-11.
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Thus there is a double approach to difficulties in one's nature:
"When there is something in the nature that has to be got over, it is always drawing on itself incidents that put it to the test till the sadhaka has overcome and is free....4 It very often happens that when there is an exceptional power in the nature, there is found in the exterior being some contrary element which opens it to a quite opposite influence."5
Again, we have the arresting definition of the cross-symbol: "Sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns life into a state of suffering and misfortune."6 To pass from the sublime to what may seem ridiculous but is still a terror for all its tinyness, the dream of teeth falling is given its de-terrifying significance which has even a subliming touch: "The falling of teeth means disappearance of old or fixed mental habits belonging to the physical mind."7
Finally, here are two bits of "inlook" achieved effortlessly. First, on how Knowledge can by itself be Power: "Knowledge, when it goes to the root of our troubles, has in itself a marvellous healing power as it were. As soon as you touch the quick of the trouble, as soon as you, diving down and down, get at what really ails you, the pain disappears as though by a miracle."8 Next, on what the Ideal Prayer is: "Not prayer insisting on immediate fulfilment, but prayer that is itself a communion of the mind and heart with the Divine and can have the joy and satisfaction of itself, trusting for fulfilment by the Divine in his own time."9
In an undertaking which calls for a concentrated and systematic movement of study over a vast terrain, a few slips or omissions are bound to occur. If we notice any of them, it is not in the mood of cavil but with the aim of helping the second edition. We are sure a perfectionist like Pandit will welcome our procedure.
One feels a small oversight in the definition of "aparārdha": "Lower half of world-existence: Mind, Life, Matter."10 This has sanction from Sri Aurobindo's pen, but strictly speaking either in early writings or in a special universe of discourse. It was valid when beyond Mind he put Supermind in a wide connotation. Afterwards it could hold when he extended the range of Mind to
4. p. 29.
5. p. 42.
6. p. 44.
7. p. 274.
8. p. 143.
9. p.193.
10. p. 8.
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include in general the Spiritual Mind, the domain of the Cosmic Knowledge, which he described as standing between the Cosmic Ignorance and the Transcendental or Integral Truth - Supermind. But the definition falls short when he distinguishes Mind from Spiritual Mind as well as demarcates the highest grade of the latter - namely, Overmind - from Supermind. In the final detailed vision, the aparārdha begins with Overmind, of which Mind is the extreme lopsided diminution. Thus The Life Divine¹¹ says of Overmind: "It is a power, though the highest power, of the lower hemisphere." A reference to the Dictionary's own section on Overmind" can broadly clarify the point.
With assistance from the omitted portion of a passage appearing in that section and from a sentence in The Life Divine,¹² we may propose, instead of a single-titled entry, a double-titled one, expanding the present definition thus:
Parārdha, aparārdha: Higher and lower halves or hemispheres. A line is drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness and the lower half. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) - the lower half of Mind, Life, Matter. This line is the intermediary Overmind. In certain contexts, the knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemispheres, is where Mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them.
No doubt, the little lacuna we have somewhat heavily put our finger on can be defended on the ground that the distinction we have laboured is after all a fine philosophical nuance and the book is essentially one of day-to-day Yogic guidance.
In a guide to the Godly a couple of printer's devils may be considered odd presences; but, in a world of multitudinous mixture resulting from the Overmind's vidyā-avidyā, so rare an intrusion is almost an entry on the credit side. Indeed, only two misprints we have spotted of a possibly confusing type, and we are attending to them merely in order to save some readers' grey cells from getting greyer with puzzlement. But even this pair of errors can be relished once they are seen through. One of them constitutes a pleasant paradox of merging opposites by turning
11. SABCL Vol. 19, p. 952. 12. SABCL Vol. 18, p. 264.
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"none" into "more" in a sentence on "Absolute": "... It is the individual soul and all souls and more of them; it is the formless Brahman and the universe."¹³ The other instance effects an entertaining anagram on the nature of dead matter by giving us "cold" for "clod" in a phrase on the surrender, in "Adhyātma Yoga", to the transcendent, infinite and universal Personality who "informs with his being not only the Gods above, but man and the worm and the cold below."14 Such diminutive misprints are passing occurrences of mystification quite enjoyable in a compendium of mysticism. They are rather "intelligence tests" for the common reader than a blot on the reputation of the proof-reader.
Talking of "tests", one cannot - in closing the review of so useful and "luminiferous" a medium of vibrant Word meant to become Flesh in us - do better than quote an extremely helpful hint for all who are troubled on the spiritual path by "tests" when they make sincere efforts to overcome defects: "One does not always know whether it is the hostiles who are trying to break the resolution or putting it to the test (for they claim the right to do it) or whether it is, let us say, the gods who are doing it so as to press and hasten the progress or insisting on the surety and thoroughness of the change aspired for. Perhaps it helps most when one can take it from the latter standpoint."15
Rs.10 for a Dictionary of such secrets of Yogic attitude and action is almost like getting everything for nothing - and one may well include in "everything" on the material side a fine finish in printing and get-up and binding and jacket. No Aurobindonian can afford to go without this publication.
13. P. 2.
14. P. 3.
15. P. 29.
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The Goal and the Guide
Path to Perfection. Compiled from the Writings of the Mother
by Keshavmurti. Dipti Publications, Sri Aurobindo Ashram,
Pondicherry, 1968. Rs.12.
Close on the heels of M. P. Pandit's compilation, Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, comes this ordered ensemble from another disciple, aiming to do for the Mother's writings what the former book did for the Master's. The work has been admirably done, spreading out in a super-rainbow spectrum of multiple tones the white light of the Mother's truth-consciousness.
The word "tones" is apt, for here we get not only the diverse shades of a spiritual being's vision-moulded thought but also the varied modulations of a living voice - the soft or strong, intimate or commanding, piercing or wide-vibrationed utterance of one who stands amongst us with a face and form at once human and divine. As we read the extracts we see her and hear her, we feel permeated with her personal aroma, as it were, and the alphabetical arrangement of the extracts renders this presence accessible at a moment's notice for a word of wisdom, as warm as it is luminous, on any problem of spiritual knowledge or practice.
Yes, a light, to make us both know and do, comes to us in these pages. The Mother, no doubt, does not philosophise in any intellectual fashion, but she often transmits in a systematised intellect-stirring shape the discoveries she has made in the realms of psychology, occultism, the universal consciousness, the transcendental being. To every subject discussed she brings a quickening insight. Sometimes the insight is simultaneously profound and piquant. Thus we read under Meditation and Progress: "The number of hours spent in meditation is no proof of spiritual progress. It is a proof of your progress when you no longer make an effort to meditate. Then you have rather to make an effort to stop meditating...." Equally felicitous and striking, with a flash of originality that goes to the heart of the theme, is the opening passage on Old Age: "Old age does not come with a great number of years, but with the incapacity or
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refusal to continue to grow and to progress. As soon as one wishes to settle down in life and to rest on the benefits of past efforts, as soon as one has done what one had to do, and accomplished what one had to accomplish, in short, as soon as one ceases to progress, to advance along the road to perfection, one is sure to fall back - to grow old."
"Progress" and "Perfection": here are the two guiding concepts, the two key-mantras. But what is the Perfection towards which we must progress? The Mother's answer is clear: "Perfection is not a maximum or an extreme. It is an equilibrium and a harmonisation.... Perfection is not a static state, it is a poise and a dynamic poise. The human being cannot attain perfection unless he comes out of himself. He must pass into a higher species or must give up this species to create another."
To evolve from the human into the divine: that must be the story of our progress. And here we may give a few glimpses of the Mother as the pragmatic Guru. "Nobody can say, 'there is no hope for me,' because the Divine Grace is there." - "The ego thinks of what it wants and has not. That is its constant preoccupation. The soul is aware of what it is receiving and lives in endless Gratitude." - "There is no better way to show one's gratefulness to the Divine than to be quietly happy." - "If you remember what you have given to the Divine, He will have no need of remembering it Himself; and if you were to mention the gift or speak of it to anybody, it is not to the Divine that you have made the offering but to the demon of your vanity." - "To give to the Divine what one has in excess is not an offering. One should give at least something out of what one needs."
On every page we strike upon living truths. Indeed, it seems as though with one single book in our hands we could hold the shining secret of fulfilling our lives. If any hands are still vacant of these 195 pages in their finely bound form, with a snow-white jacket bearing in gold letters a title that alliterates Time's movement with Eternity's plenitude, there is poverty indeed!
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To One on the Eve of a New-birth
Perhaps you want philosophical answers to your questions about the spiritual life you wish now to begin. But I am in a poetic mood and cannot pen you a discourse. All I can write is a sort of birthday letter of the soul and send you my best wishes by giving you in a few flashes what I feel and see from several sides.
What is the spiritual life? Every moment a remembrance of God, every moment an offering to God, and no prayer for any gift from God save God's own self!
And what is God! An infinite stillness behind all motion, an infinite motion without losing that stillness. A pure radiance within, an immense grace above, a myriad love around, a dense delight below. A perfection that needs nothing yet refuses nothing - not even the least of tributes. He holds in Himself the fulfilment of all desires when He is desired for His own sake. A King, He is to be served directly and not alone through service to His subjects: family, friends, society, the nation, all mankind, the whole earth, the entire universe - these you may serve yet not find Him unless you hold Him to be more than these. Nor is He a cold vacuity stripped of the colours of life: when life's colours are stripped away from Him, they fall like clothes from a naked body burning with love. But remember that in the love of this nakedness your own body is lost and forgotten.
Yes, lost and forgotten in the sense that its usual greed and jealousy and ambition have play no longer. There is, however, a sense in which the body must never be thrust out of thought. The clay from which we are made, the clay that is also the cosmos our body lives in - surely it did not emanate from the Spirit in order to get belittled and cast aside. The physical world is a form of the Spirit, a mode of slow struggling manifestation. Its impurities are to be shed but we are placed in it for realising God in physical terms and as part of the body's daily experience.
Men ask for strange signs from Eternity - I for nothing except daydawn and nightfall. The golden sun within the immeasurable blue and the silver stars against a black infinity are revelations enough for me of God magnificent and God mysterious. Not that my aspiration should stop with these phenomena; but they suffice for a start of the soul's journey. No other apocalypse is
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needed to set us on our way to the supreme Truth. Nor will that Truth be ours in full unless it finds in the revolvings of Nature its last even as its first apocalypse. Not in subtle meditation or rarefied love away from the visible objects is the Spirit finally possessed; it is through our two common eyes seeing far and seeing deep that the Eternal fulfils Himself in us. No amount of holding the Divine in a beyond of trance can satisfy us: He can be for our earth-life a lasting reality only if we behold Him every time we behold the universe.
And this beholding can best be done and at the same time the impurities cleaned from the temple of the body if we submit ourselves to the ancient practice of sitting at the feet of a Guru. The Teacher and the Master in flesh and blood, the Man of accomplished Yoga, is the safest as well as the easiest gate of entry into the Ineffable - and it is the gate that leads us deepest into the beatific destiny awaiting creatures of flesh and blood. He takes us out of the ego's prison that in various cunning ways can darken our sight and impede our search: he also takes us into the light our flesh and blood secretly are, the crystalline palace into which the ego's prison must grow.
O mystic about to be born, would you that your aspirations were crowned with success? The crown will come most quickly from the Guru's touch of blessing, day after day, upon your head.
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What is Essence?
A Note on Two Answers —
Shankara's and Sri Aurobindo's
THE ONTOLOGICAL VIEW: ESSENCE AS BEING
Essence, according to both Shankara and Sri Aurobindo, is the Reality which persists through all states and changes and of which all things and beings are ultimately constituted. It is the permanent underlying oneness which is the Self of all, the Supreme Spirit besides which nothing else exists.
But Shankara makes an irreconcilable opposition between the one and the many. In his eyes, what appears as many is really one: the manyness is seen because of ignorance, and all that characterises it is inapplicable to the one. Thus, consequent on his opposition of the one and the many, is the impassable gulf he digs between the status and the movement, the formless and the forms, the qualitiless and the qualities, the immutable and the mutable, the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal.
The complete division of the one from the many he considers implicit and inevitable in true reasoning about ontology. And his philosophy, which is founded on an intense experience of the one Spirit or Self of all, has built out of that experience a system where essential reality is posited on one side and on the other a pragmatic or phenomenal reality which from the standpoint of the supreme essence is unreal, insubstantial, illusory. Instead of questioning whether his experience of stark unity is final or not, whether such unity can be ultimate in face of the endless multiplicity and diversity of the pragmatically real which it is said to underlie, he holds that logic itself demands finally the sole acceptance of this unity to the exclusion of phenomenal existence.
Sri Aurobindo does not deny the distinction between phenomenal existence and essential reality. But he differs from Shankara in his view of the nature of essence. To him the essential cannot be exclusive of the phenomenal in the sense that
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it holds no supporting truth of the terms in which the phenomenal exists. The terms of the phenomenal - the many, the forms, the qualities, the mutable, the finite, the temporal - must have their origin in the essential if the latter is truly to be their essence. According to Sri Aurobindo, there is no point, no logic, in speaking of the essence of phenomena if essence is irreconcilably opposed to phenomenal existence. No doubt, they must differ, for unless they differed there would be no logical point in talking of the two. But to be essential is to base and make possible the phenomenal by something non-phenomenal in which the phenomenal terms are transcended without being annulled: that is to say, transfigured as well as transcended.
So Sri Aurobindo speaks of Reality and its manifestation rather than of Reality and illusion. His Absolute has two sides to its nature - the essential and the self-creative or dynamic. Both the sides are real and all that the self-creative or dynamic does is to bring out in form and movement what the essential contains in substance and status. Since Shankara's essential Spirit or Self does not contain in substance and status what exists phenomenally as form and movement, Sri Aurobindo considers it an experience partial with regard not only to the full Reality's two-sided nature but also to that nature's one side called essential: it is the spiritual perception of an aspect of this side. As all aspects of the Infinite are themselves infinite in their own way, the Shankarite experience and perception is tremendous and splendid; yet, however grand, even however inevitable in the course of spiritual realisation, it is far indeed from being the supreme truth and terminus of Yoga.
The nature of the essence which is the rationale of phenomenal existence is very illuminatingly indicated by Sri Aurobindo in the following passage. "Since the spirit and essence of things is one, we are obliged to admit that all these many must be that One, and it follows that the One is or has become many; but how can the limited or relative be the Absolute and how can man or beast or bird be the Divine Being? But in erecting this apparent contradiction the mind makes a double error. It is thinking in the terms of the mathematical finite unit which is sole in limitation, the one which is less than two and can become two only by division and fragmentation or by addition and multiplication; but this is an infinite Oneness, it is the essential and
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infinite Oneness which can contain the hundred and the thousand and the million and billion and trillion. Whatever astronomic or more than astronomic figures you heap and multiply, they cannot overpass or exceed that Oneness; for, in the language of the Upanishad, it moves not, yet is always far in front when you would pursue and seize it. It can be said of it that it would not be the infinite Oneness if it were not capable of an infinite multiplicity; but that does not mean that the One is plural or can be limited or described as the sum of the Many: on the contrary, it can be the infinite Many because it exceeds all limitation or description by multiplicity and exceeds at the same time all limitation by finite conceptual oneness. Pluralism is an error...."1
The same point is made in Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Isha Upanishad. "Brahman is one, not numerically, but in essence. Numerical oneness would either exclude multiplicity or would be a pluralistic and divisible oneness with the Many as its parts. That is not the unity of Brahman, which can neither be diminished nor increased, nor divided."² Sri Aurobindo goes on to say that Brahman is "identical, not single. It is identical always and everywhere in Time and Space, as well as identical beyond Time and Space. Numerical oneness and multiplicity are equally valid terms of its essential unity."³
The whole question of trying to explain away multiplicity can arise only if we confuse essential with numerical oneness. If the question did arise with Shankara, he must have made a confusion of the two. This is a hard dictum but there is no escaping it. Not that he never truly conceives the oneness which is essential. He evidently does so when he says that Brahman's unity is not affected by the multiplicity in which we find it; but to him the world of essence has only one-way traffic. Brahman, he holds, cannot actually be multiple although its essence is unaffected by being found in the many. To be many is, in his opinion, to be divided and, if Brahman is actually many. Brahman suffers real division and would be composed of parts. It is on this ground that he combats the doctrine passing by the name of one Vrittikara who propounded it. Vrittikara reduced the unity of
¹. The Life Divine. SABCL Vol. 18, pp. 335-36.
². Isha Upanishad, SABCL Vol. 12, p. 80.
³. Ibid.
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Brahman to a collection of finite objects in the universe and yet declared that that unity was as real as the multiplicity composing it. Shankara dubbed such unity a mere empty logical abstraction because it has no nature of its own. If anything is constituted only of its parts, then the parts alone are real. Here Shankara was irrefutable. Where he went wrong was in arguing that the existence of finites as a real expression of the essence must reduce the essence to a composite of parts. His basic axiom in this context runs: what has no parts cannot be multiple. The axiom is a tautology or a truism if both sections of it refer to essentiality: a tautology because it is tantammount to asserting that non-composite essence is non-composite and a truism because it boils down to postulating that essentiality, qua essentiality, is one and indivisible. If, however, the axiom bears upon the numerically multiple, as Shankara intended, the two sections are not genuine contradictories and Shankara, in passing to the second, has substituted in his mind numerical oneness for the essential unity which is not contradicted by even infinite multiplicity of number and in relation to which there is no need to regard the diverse phenomenal world of parts as irreconcilable with it and consequently unreal, insubstantial, illusory.
Once we grasp how the true essence transcends the opposition of one and many, we can proceed to grant that it need not be confined to the static, the formless and qualitiless, the immutable and infinite and eternal, to the exclusion of movement, forms and qualities, the mutable and finite and temporal. For, what is here excluded by Shankara is what he takes to be the equivalents of the many, and if the many are in no way opposed to the true essence all that is equivalent to them should become ipso facto reconcilable with it. This certainly does not mean that the true essence is not static, formless and qualitiless, an immutable infinity and eternity: it is indeed such and because it is such it is different from the terms of phenomenal being. But its difference does not constitute an inability to be the source of those terms: its difference only implies that the true essence is more than what Shankara signifies by his account of it.
Shankara's account should be reinterpreted by us to indicate the freedom of the essence from limitation by those terms: the essence does not depend on them, they depend on it and it is not bound to a single kind of movement, form, quality, mutableness,
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finiteness, temporality or to a sum of possible kinds. The essence can be independent of those terms and manifest them in all possible kinds and this freedom from limitation by them can come only if it is what Shankara describes it to be. Shankara's mistake lies in converting the freedom itself into a limitation and saying that the essence is devoid of the power of manifesting itself in those terms. The terms in question are, in Sri Aurobindo's vision, perennial possibilities of the essence and while the essence lasts they can always be manifested. They may disappear, but they only pass out of manifestation into non-manifestation.
As manifestation and non-manifestation are more vividly contrasted by Shankara in terms of unitary status and multiple movement, than in any other, it will suffice for all of them to quote a few passages from Sri Aurobindo on their being complementary and inseparable. He writes: "The Self that is quiescent, at rest, vacant of things and happenings is a support and background to existence, a silent channel or a hypostasis of something Supreme: it is not itself the one entirely real existence, not itself the Supreme. The Eternal, the Supreme is the Lord and the all-originating Spirit. Superior to all activities and not bound by any of them, it is the source, sanction, material, efficient power, master of all activities. All activities proceed from the supreme Self and are determined by it; all are its operations, processes of its own conscious force and not of something alien to Self, some power other than this Spirit."4
Sri Aurobindo tells us that it is such essence, Self, Spirit, one entirely real existence that the ancient Indian mind seized spiritually and philosophically. This mind declared: "Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva and Kali, Brahman and Shakti are one and not two who are separable. Force inherent in existence may be at rest or it may be in motion, but when it is at rest, it exists none the less and is not abolished, diminished or in any way essentially altered."5
To put the matter from the other side: "The immutable silent Spirit may hold its infinite energy silent and immobile within it, for it is not bound by its own forces, is not their subject or instrument, but it does possess them, does release them, is capable of an eternal and infinite action, does not weary or need
4. The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL Vol. 20, p. 276.
5. The Life Divine, SABCL Vol. 18, p. 82.
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to stop, and yet all the time its silent immobility inherent in its action and movement is not for a moment shaken or disturbed or altered by its action and movement; the witness silence of the Spirit is there in the very grain of all the voices and workings of Nature."6
Sri Aurobindo renders plausible to our understanding the inseparableness of status and movement by a few striking suggestions. Thus he says: "A solely silent and static Infinite, an Infinite without an infinite power and dynamis and energy is inadmissible except as the perception of an aspect; a powerless Absolute, an impotent Spirit is unthinkable."7 Again, he says: "All energy, all kinetic action has to support itself on status or by status if it is to be effective or creative; otherwise there will be no solidity of anything created, only a constant whirl without any formation: status of being, form of being are necessary to kinesis of being. Even if energy be the primal reality, as it seems to be in the material world, still it has to create status of itself, lasting forms, duration of beings in order to have a support for its action: the status may be temporary, it may be only a balance or equilibrium of substance created and maintained by a constant kinesis, but while it endures it is real and, after it ceases, we still regard it as something that was real. The principle of a supporting status for action is a permanent principle, and its action is constant in Time-eternity."8 From spiritual experience too Sri Aurobindo gives us a hint. Apropos of the silent Self he says: "It is when we arrive at something of this silence, stability, immobility that we can base on it a force and energy which in our superficial restless state would be inconceivable."9
Here we may note that the greatness and importance of Shankara's silent Self is never denied by Sri Aurobindo. He has even called this experience the realisation of essentiality, but we must appreciate the context in which he has done it. As against exclusive knowledge of totality and exclusive knowledge of parts he speaks of exclusive knowledge of essentiality and puts it above the others and, with regard to the integral or whole knowledge which looks at all sides and all aspects and realises them in that in which they are one, he labels it as "a penultimate knowledge."10
6. Ibid., p. 337.
7. Ibid.. p. 336
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However, he hastens to add that since this knowledge negates the totality and the parts "here too there is a capital ignorance" just as a capital ignorance is there when we see only the parts or only the totality. For, as he elsewhere remarks, there is not merely essence of being: there is also essence of nature.11 The nature manifests the being and in the ultimate essence the being and the nature are one and though the totality and the parts in their phenomenal character are transcended they are not negated and the immobility of status holds all potentiality of movement packed in it so that no contradiction enters into our saying that "it is only a pure infinite essence that can formulate itself in infinite ways."12 The Shankarite Self is essentiality by contrast to totality and parts: it is not the essentiality by which the totality and the parts are explicable: it does not carry their raison d'être. So we should refrain from making too much play with Sri Aurobindo's designating the knowledge of it as "a penultimate knowledge": the designation gives no prominence to the realisation of the Shankarite Self as compared with the various other realisations found in Indian spirituality down the ages.
Vis-à-vis those realisations Sri Aurobindo has written of it: "There can certainly be no doubt of the validity, - complete within itself, - of this experience; there can be no denial of the overwhelming decisive convincingness - ekātma-pratyaya-sāram, - with which this realisation seizes the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. But still all spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite and it takes a multitude of directions; some of them, - and not this alone, - are so close to the Divine and the Absolute, so penetrated with the reality of Its presence or with the ineffable peace and power of the liberation from all that is less than It, that they carry with them this overwhelming sense of finality complete and decisive. There are a hundred ways of approaching the Supreme Reality and, as is the nature of the way taken, so will be the nature of the ultimate experience by which one passes into That which is ineffable. That of which no report can be given to the mind or expressed by any utterance. All these definitive culminations may be regarded as penultimates
11. Ibid., p. 475.
12. Ibid., p. 334.
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of the one Ultimate; they are steps by which the soul crosses the limits of Mind into the Absolute."13
It would be well to observe the word "penultimates" here and take the epithet "penultimate" of the other context in the proper perspective supplied by the former. The Shankarite experience is put on a par with other experiences that come with a sense of complete and decisive finality, yet, like it, fall short of the integral or whole realisation. In this connection we may quote the following: "An overwhelming self-evident convincingness, an experience of absolute authenticity in the realisation or experience is not an unanswerable proof of sole reality or sole finality: for other spiritual experiences such as that of the omnipresent Divine Person, Lord of a real Universe, have the same convincing, authentic and final character."14
The integral or whole experience is clearly indicated by Sri Aurobindo. He speaks of the Supreme Reality as "an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being" and he adds: "this founds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things." He is careful not to identify the Supreme Reality with what Shankara describes as "Self" or "Atman". For, he says: "This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature, - Self, Conscious Being or Spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory, - Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara." He also writes: "As there are three fundamental aspects in which we meet this Reality,... so too its power of Consciousness appears to us in three aspects: it is the self-force of that consciousness conceptively creative of all things, Maya; it is Prakriti, Nature or Force made dynamically executive, working out all things under the witnessing eye of the Conscious Being, the Self or Spirit; it is the conscious Power of the Divine Being, Shakti, which is both conceptively creative and dynamically executive of all the divine workings. These three aspects and their powers base and comprise the whole of existence and all Nature..."15
Here Sri Aurobindo mentions three terms of the Supreme Reality's "essential nature". Again, even with regard to "self" he writes in another place: the "realisation of Self as something intensely silent and purely static is not the whole truth of it, there
13. Ibid., pp. 469-70. 14. Ibid.. p. 467. 15. Ibid.. pp. 323-325.
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can also be a realisation of Self in its power. Self as the condition of world-activity and world-existence."16 The Self in its power is what Sri Aurobindo calls "the self-force" of the supreme Consciousness "conceptually creative of all things, Maya" - Maya in the old Vedic sense: no illusive inexplicable magic somehow superimposed on the Self but that Self's own marvellous energy of measurement and formulation, energy which is as much the ultimate essence as is status or silence, although in its essentiality it is not energy expressed but energy contained.
The Supreme Reality, according to Sri Aurobindo, is on the one side the essence that is status and silence holding all creativity potential, and on the other the actual creativity within which all status and silence is yet inherent. The truer way of putting the fact is that the two sides are never separate but coexistent, or rather one existence severable only in our thought or our partial spiritual experience. The ultimate essence not only carries all form and movement in potentiality in the depths of sheer Being: it is also never dissociated from a sovereign all-formative all-moving expansion of Becoming. It is the Self that is posited in the Gita as Purushottama with His Prakriti deployed in a higher Nature that is a divine phenomenon and in a lower Nature that is a phenomenon of mixed light-and-darkness progressively releasing the luminous from the obscure.
Compared to this Self, this essence, Shankara's selfhood and essentiality gives us but a certain spiritual abstraction from the truth, a partial glory of the Godhead's status and silence.
Of course, this self of Sri Aurobindo's which holds in substance and status what is released in form and movement by the self-creative or dynamic side of the Absolute is a reality whose concept the mind cannot entertain with an easy familiarity. A sense of fathomless mystery, if not of impossibility, accompanies the mind's attempt to figure it, but that is to be expected of all mental figurations of the Absolute. This or that figuration may be more congenial to a certain bent of the mind: what, however, is gained in one respect is offset by a loss in another. The advantage the Shankarite may feel he has won by making the Being of Brahman void of the world and irreconcilable with it is counterbalanced by making the world an illusion, an enigma
16. Had., p. 347.
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which cannot be and yet is or which can exist and yet is nothing. Anirvacanīya, meaning indescribable or inexplicable, is Shankara's characterisation of the mystery, the seeming impossibility, inevitable to his system and difficult for the mind to entertain in an easy or familiar concept. The mysteriousness involved by Sri Aurobindo's essence is therefore no disqualification: it is what all reasoning about the supra-rational involves. We have only to ask whether his mysteriousness is not more comprehensively reasonable than Shankara's in an ontological view of essentiality.
THE AXIOLOGICAL VIEW: ESSENCE AS VALUE
Essence, according to both Shankara and Sri Aurobindo, is not only the ultimate Reality but also the ultimate Value, for it is not only permanent being but also permanent consciousness and bliss. The supreme Self of all, it is our absolute perfection and fulfilment.
Shankara contends that essence cannot be our absolute perfection and fulfilment unless it is the one to the exclusion of the many, and the opposite of all the terms applicable to phenomenal existence. In Sri Aurobindo's view, we who pass from phenomenal terms to the essence can never be said to find our absolute perfection and fulfilment unless we reach what gives us the final divine truth of all these terms as well as release from them, a supreme transfiguration rather than an entire annullation of them in the midst of their transcendence.
"All our experience of phenomenal terms," says Shankara in effect, "is an experience of limitation and imperfection: they bring no fulfilment." Sri Aurobindo agrees that phenomenal terms as at present experienced lack fulfilment, but he argues that this does not mean the absence of a fulfilling version of them in the ultimate essence nor the impossibility of a fulfilling version being realised even in phenomenal existence here and now. In fact, logic, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, demands not merely a fulfilling version in what is the sole basic reality and therefore the sole basic origin of phenomena: it demands too that if there is such a version in the essence the possibility, nay even the certainty, is there of its realisation in phenomenal terms.
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The failure to realise it so far is no argument: the failure may be due, must be due, to our not having found the supreme divine dynamism by which the phenomenal terms can be made to manifest in human development what they are implicitly in the essence and what they must be explicitly in the superior Nature of which the Gita speaks and which must be a divine phenomenon as contrasted to the phenomenon of mixed light-and-darkness that is the inferior Nature of our common experience. The Gita even says that our souls are portions of this superior Nature but it does not follow up its own clue and points to no dynamism whereby the qualities of the inferior Nature - sattva, rajas, tamas - can cease to be mental, vital and physical limitations on the soul and Self and become free modes of a fully divine play on earth of the one who is the many and of the many who are the one. The dynamism which the Gita does not provide has to be discovered: that is all.
The question, however, of discovering this dynamism is not directly connected with the problem of Value in relation to the essence. Suppose the phenomenal terms are destined for ever to be limitations and imperfections. Then it does not help more to regard them as unreal, insubstantial, illusory than to regard them as real, substantial, actual. To regard them as the latter, says Shankara, is to impute lack of absolute goodness as well as of absolute manifesting power to the essence, for these terms remain at best with an irremovable element of evil and suffering in them. To regard them as the former, says Sri Aurobindo, is to deprive the essence of being the sole existent, for somehow what is not of its reality, substantiality, actuality is admitted, and if a limit of however inexplicable a kind is admitted to its existence a limit is set also to its consciousness and bliss which are co-essential with that existence, and thus its ultimate Value is abrogated and then it cannot be our absolute perfection and fulfilment.
When we do not grant the possibility and the certainty of discovering an all-transformative divine dynamism, we have to hobnob with a paradox whether we look on phenomena as an illusive magic unfounded in Brahman or as an actual strangeness founded in It. Of the two paradoxes the one that takes the world to be insubstantial Maya can be shown ontologically to have less reason on its side, and axiologically it amounts to sitting
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in judgment on the Divine Goodness and to foisting on the Divine Power an incapacity of manifestation instead of humbly accepting the non-manifestation as an act of Divine Will beyond our comprehension. The paradox that takes the world to be enigmatic Lila or Play is not only more reasonable: it is also more virtuous and hence more justifiable from the axiological standpoint no less than from the ontological.
Against all these ideas we may imagine Shankara as recommending the experience on which he bases his philosophy. His plea would run: "Silent static unity of infinite selfhood gives absolute fulfilment because in it alone are all problem-consciousness, all nisus and hazard overcome. Other realisations do not overcome them since they are not self-sustained but sustained only by a relationship, no matter if the relationship be to a divine Lord and Lover. In these realisations nisus and hazard are allayed, not lost. They are lost only when the Seer abides within himself. In the silent static unity of infinite selfhood there is no going into a realisation or coming out of it, just to be is to have the realisation. That is also why other realisations are 'got' and hence liable to fall away from us, whereas this is intrinsic, inherent."
The first reply Sri Aurobindo would make is: "Does the Shankarite realisation involve being absorbed in what is called nirvikalpa samādhi, featureless trance? If it does, we have no proof of nisus and hazard being lost, any more than we have it in other experiences by which one is rapt away from the problem-consciousness where nisus and hazard have place. Even dreamless sleep could then be considered freedom from nisus and hazard. A wakeful realisation is alone worth arguing about."
Shankara may be thought of as retorting: "I am not speaking of the nirvikalpa samādhi but of the sahaja avasthā, the wakeful condition in which there is nothing except the Self and all plurality is assimilated by being realised as only the Self."
Here Sri Aurobindo's reply would be: "In what way is plurality assimilated? Are the many not seen at all? If so, how can the condition be called wakefulness? On the other hand, if the many are seen as merely the one multiplied or multi-present then plurality is assimilated in the sense that the many are not seen as independent of the one or as other than the one, but is it assimilated so far as the manyness of the many is concerned? No
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ground in the one is experienced for the undeniable perception that while the many are seen as the one the one also is seen as the many. And it is precisely because no ground is experienced for the manyness of the many that the many are felt to be unreal, insubstantial, illusory. Otherwise they would be felt as real, substantial, actual. If plurality were completely and satisfyingly assimilated, the theory of an illusive magic unfounded in Brahman would never be conceived."
Of course, the oneness remains unaffected by the plurality, even as the status by the many's movement, the formlessness by the forms, the immutable infinity and eternity by the mutable finites and transiences. And because it remains unaffected there comes what Sri Aurobindo calls the "overwhelming decisive convincingness", the impression of "authentic and final character" of the experience, "the sense of finality complete and decisive"; but Sri Aurobindo points out, as we have already noted in the first essay, that "other spiritual experiences such as that of the omnipresent Divine Person, Lord of a real Universe" have the same convincingness, authenticity and finality. The completeness the Shankarite feels is genuine, but it is of one son and along one line and we have to see it from an independent standpoint and not take his feeling of loss of nisus and hazard as evidence of no lack in his realisation. Other realisations can claim the same loss: the Shankarite realisation is not unique here.
And this leaves little room for saying that other experiences are liable to fall away while the Shankarite experience cannot. One can have glimpses and snatches of the silent Self, brief attainments from which one drops back, just as one can have temporary reachings of other aspects of the Supreme Reality. Nor is this realisation the only one deserving to be called "self-sustained". All realisations are attained through identity with something. Identity occurs when oneself becomes something or, rather, when something is found as oneself. In the Shankarite experience there is identity with the Atman. In the others there is identity with some other aspect of the self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of the Supreme Reality. The identity is always founded in one's own being. One may keep losing the identity for a time, but the moment the permanent abiding within any aspect of the Supreme Reality is gained, that aspect is something intrinsic, inherent in the experiencer and there is no
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going into a realisation or coming out of it, for it is with one's own being that one gains it and the realisation is therefore self-sustained.
Merely because in this case we are found aspiring towards a God who is figured as other than ourselves we must not make a mistake about what is attained and how it is attained. The Shankarite too moves at the start towards a Self that is other than his usual selfhood: he has no initial experience of identity with it. The only difference is that he seeks an other by deepening his sense of his own selfhood, while the non-Shankarite does so by deepening his sense of an other. Still, they both reach a greater realisation of their own being and the reaching also is done by means of their own being. The fact that in some realisations, unlike in the Shankarite, there is a relationship does not alter the self-sustained foundation of them all: the relationship introduces no insecurity or extraneousness, since it is a permanent relationship rooted in our own automatically possessed greater depth of existence. The Shankarite realisation is "self-sustained" by excluding relationship, the rest are "self-sustained" by including relationship: that is the only point of dissimilarity.
There is nothing to mark out Shankara's selfhood as the sole freedom from nisus and hazard and the problem-consciousness. Whatever freedom it affords is due, as with non-Shankarite spiritual attainments, to the exceeding in it of the human and mortal mind. But so long as the manyness of the many as well as their activity remains such as to necessitate a theory of illusion the true losing of nisus and hazard and of the problem-consciousness is wanting: the seed of them all is present, and it sprouts in the metaphysical system which, as Sri Aurobindo says, "gets rid of an original contradiction, a problem and mystery which may be otherwise soluble, by erecting another contradiction, a new problem and mystery which is irreconcilable in its terms and insoluble."¹ Sri Aurobindo also remarks: "In the philosophy of Shankara one feels the presence of a conflict, an opposition which this powerful intellect has stated with full force and masterfully arranged rather than solved with any finality."² This conflict and this contradiction derive from and reflect a spiritual experience that is partial and one of several "penultimates" in
¹. Ibid., p. 453.
². Ibid., p. 461.
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which the problematic, the hazardous, the nisus-natural is ever latent.
The experience, in its general character and at its common pitch, is well summed up by Sri Aurobindo: "It is aware of names and forms, it is aware of movement; but this movement does not seem to proceed from the Self, but to go on by some inherent power of its own and only to be reflected in the Self. In other words, the mental being has put away from himself by exclusive concentration the dynamic aspect of consciousness, has taken refuge in the static and built a wall of non-communication between the two; between the passive and the active Brahman a gulf has been created and they stand on either side of it, the one visible to the other but with no contact, no touch of sympathy, no sense of unity between them."³
At its higher pitch the experience .is described in some letters by Sri Aurobindo. In one he speaks of his seeing "with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman."4 In remarks about himself dictated apropos of a phrase of Aldous Huxley's, he says: "There was an entire silence of thought and feeling and all the ordinary movements of consciousness except the perception and recognition of things around without any accompanying concept or other reaction. The sense of ego disappeared and the movements of the ordinary life as well as speech and action were carried on by some habitual activity of Prakriti alone which was not felt as belonging to oneself. But the perception which remained saw all things as utterly unreal; this sense of unreality was overwhelming and universal. Only some undefinable Reality was perceived as true which was beyond space and time and unconnected with any cosmic activity, but yet was met wherever one turned."5
Another description, calling the experience Nirvana and formulating it in its extreme terms, runs; "It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world - only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms,
3. The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL Vol. 20, p. 386.
4. Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, SABCL Vol. 26, p. 79.
5. Ibid., pp. 85-86.
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materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. This was no mental realisation nor something glimpsed somewhere above, - no abstraction, - it was positive, the only positive reality, - although not a spatial physical world, [yet] pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world, leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing nothing else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial."6
Here we have an account of what Shankara meant by Para-brahman, the indeterminate transcendence where the numerical categories of both one and many are inapplicable and an essential soleness is all. But when it is said that what is real is nothing save That, an indescribable Absolute, the sense of an unreality within it or borne upon it is still there, for though the many have disappeared as a reality they persist as "a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without substance." The many are left as an unreality - and that is exactly the stamp of latent nisus and hazard, the seed of the problem-consciousness, the proof of the partial, showing that plurality and activity have not been completely assimilated. And as long as the complete assimilation is absent, the experience, judged from an independent standpoint, is not final and falls short of fulfilment, does not carry the supreme Value.
This lack of ultimateness was found by Sri Aurobindo himself, for in the autobiographical though "third-person" letter in relation to Huxley he says: "This condition remained unimpaired for several months and even when the sense of unreality disappeared and there was a return to participation in the world-consciousness, the inner peace and freedom which resulted from this realisation remained permanently behind all surface movements and the essence of the realisation itself was not lost. At the same time an experience intervened: something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative. What this was remained unknown until Sri Aurobindo came to realise the dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara and felt
6. Ibid.. p. 101.
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himself moved by that in all his sadhana and action."7
The same thing is stated in more detail in the letter about Nirvana: "I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience, a constant memory of it and its power to return remained until in the end it began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness from above. But meanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusory world gave place to one in which illusion8 is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine."9
Sri Aurobindo goes on to say: "Now, that is the whole trouble in my approach to Mayavada. Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale.... It slowly grew into something not less but greater than its first self. How then could I accept Mayavada or persuade myself to pit against the Truth imposed on me from above the logic of Shankara?"10
Sri Aurobindo refuses to accept Shankara's philosophy as "the sole possible, satisfying and all-comprehensive explanation of things." He observes: "It is not that at all. There are many other possible explanations; it is not at all satisfactory, for in the end it explains nothing; and it is - and must be unless it departs from its own logic ― all-exclusive, not in the least all-comprehensive."11
7. Ibid., p. 86.
8. In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence. (Sri Aurobindo's footnote)
9. Ibid.. pp. 101-02. 10. Ibid.. p. 102. 11. Ibid.. p. 103.
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Elsewhere he has said: "The Brahman, the supreme Reality, is That which being known all is known; but in the illusionist solution it is That, which being known, all becomes unreal and an incomprehensible mystery."¹² And about the fulfilment offered by Shankara he writes: "The theory of Illusion cuts the knot of the world-problem, it does not disentangle it; it is an escape, not a solution: a flight of the spirit is not a sufficient victory for the being embodied in this world of the becoming; it effects a separation from Nature, not a liberation and fulfilment of our nature. This eventual outcome satisfies only one element, sublimates only one impulse of our being; it leaves the rest out in the cold to perish in the twilight of the unreal reality of Maya."¹³
Not that the Shankarite experience is negligible or can be bypassed by the seeker. If Sri Aurobindo criticises it, he does so on behalf of other experiences equally grand or from a coign of spiritual vantage far beyond it. But, however great, clearly the essence it claims to give us cannot provide the ultimate Value. We move towards the truly fulfilling essence when we seek what, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole."14. "It is only if you approach the Supreme through his double aspect of Sat and Chit-Shakti, double but inseparable, that the total truth of things can become manifest to the inner experience. This other side was developed by the Shakta Tantriks. The two together, the Vedantic and the Tantric truth unified, can arrive at the integral knowledge.... It is already indicated in the Gita's teaching of the Purushottama and the Parashakti (Adya Shakti) who becomes the Jiva and upholds the universe."15
Essence as all-fulfilling Value can only be the substance and status which yet holds as potential truth whatever is brought out in form and movement by the other side of the two-natured Absolute - the side that is self-creative or dynamic and that constitutes with the side of the essential a unity of existence severable only in our thought or in partial spiritual experience and that in Sri Aurobindo's realisation and philosophy carries a luminous harmony of divinely dynamic manifested truth called by him Supermind whose evolving expression in phenomenal terms here is the entire meaning and justification of our cosmos.
12. SABCL Vol. 18, p. 470.
13. Ibid... p. 468.
14. Ibid., p. 468.
15. Letters, SABCLVol. 22, p. 39.
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Linguistic Formations and Usages Connected
with the Name "Sri Aurobindo”
I see that you have adopted the adjectival form "Aurobindian" rather than "Aurobindonian" which I employ. Both can be propped up from Sri Aurobindo himself. On p.109 of Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (Second Series) we have the Master writing: "I groan in an unAurobindian despair when I hear such things." On p.154 of Life-Literature-Yoga (Revised and Enlarged Edition) we find: "But even if I had no justification from the dictionary and the noun 'empy'rean' were only an Aurobindonian freak and a wilful shifting of the accent, I would refuse to change it; for the rhythm here is an essential part of whatever beauty there is in the line ['His heart a chaos and an empyrean']."
Perhaps the only thing in favour of "Aurobindonian" as against "Aurobindian" is that it is dated 4.8.1949 while the other is as old as 23.2.1935. I believe it was Dilip Kumar Roy who first used it and we took it up. Possibly our frequent employment of it tilted Sri Aurobindo himself towards it.
Or we may say that the introduction of one or the other should depend for us on the context. "Aurobindonian freak" conveys much better the freakishness than "Aurobindian freak". But I wonder whether from this we should think of the form "Aurobindonian" itself as freakish. My view is that the accord comes of the gesture of sweeping boldness suggested by the longer epithet. "UnAurobindian despair" is also more apt-sounding than if the alternative adjective were there. But "Aurobindian hope" does not somehow have an equally appropriate ring. Although it may suit Sri Aurobindo's own modesty, it seems to cramp the meaning in our mouths, taking away something of the largeness and grandeur of the hope spoken of.
Of course, other possibilities exist: "Aurobindean, Aurobindoan, Aurobindoesque, Aurobindoic, Aurobindovian." But they are somewhat outlandish - and the Master himself never tried them out.
In passing we may note that he designates his own system not
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by a formation from any adjective but directly from the noun. Thus he writes to Dilip: "You can't expect me to argue about my own spiritual greatness in comparison with Krishna's. The question itself would be relevant only if there were two sectarian religions in opposition, Aurobindoism and Vaishnavism, each insisting on its own God's greatness. That is not the case..."¹
Then we have the question about the "Sri" in "Sri Aurobindo". I for one never omit the "Sri", but I have no particular attachment to it and I do not think there is anything reprehensible in the use simply of "Aurobindo" by European and American admirers and interpreters of his spiritual philosophy. Indeed, originally his name was just this and so there is no illogic in employing it even now. Moreover, the adjective formed by the Master from the name is without the "Sri". If he had taken the "Sri" to be sheer part and parcel of the appellation, perhaps he would not have detached it in the epithet.
What further leads Westerners to do without the "Sri" is that nowadays this vocable or its equivalent "Shri" has been made by our Government the Indian for "Mr." In India too there is the likelihood that in putting "Sri" before "Aurobindo" we may be assumed to give conventional respect to the Master as to any other Indian. But, against all this, both we and the Westerners must remember the ancient Indian practice of using that honorific as a special mark of spiritual status: we speak of Sri Rama and Sri Krishna but not of Sri Dasaratha (Rama's father) or Sri Arjuna (Krishna's close companion in the Battle of Kurukshetra) - or even, for that matter, of Sri Asoka though the Buddhist emperor happened to be a highly religious figure. And, most of all, we must remember that "Sri" was adopted by our Master himself at a certain point of time in the course of his spiritual career. He used to sign himself "Aurobindo Ghose" or "A.G." Even in the days of the Arya it was like that. I believe it was some time in the middle twenties of the century that "Aurobindo Ghose" became "Sri Aurobindo". The change of signature denoted a change in the personality manifested. Maybe the change came after 24 November 1926, the day of the Overmind's descent into his very body-substance. It is a point worth researching. And it is deeply significant. The new name is
¹. Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL Vol. 26, p. 136.
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of importance because it emerged out of spiritual realisation. It does not have its origin or ground merely in the veneration paid by disciples. As such, I feel that it should be kept up as far as possible - though we need not make a fetish of it.
Do we make a fetish of "Sri Krishna" or "Sri Rama"? Quite frequently we just say "Krishna" or "Rama". Sri Aurobindo himself does it. In the very explanation of the Victory Day, as 24 November 1926 is called, he writes:
"24th was the descent of Krishna into the physical.
"Krishna is not the supramental Light. The descent of Krishna would mean the descent of the Overmind Godhead preparing, though not itself actually, the descent of Supermind and Ananda. Krishna is the Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the Overmind leading it towards the Ananda."²
Elsewhere, in one and the same context Sri Aurobindo has "Krishna" and "Sri Krishna":
"Sri Krishna never set out to arrive at any physical transformation, so anything of the kind could not be expected in his case.
"Neither Buddha nor Shankara nor Ramakrishna had any idea of transforming the body. Their aim was spiritual mukti and nothing else. Krishna taught Arjuna to be liberated in works, but he never spoke of any physical transformation... "³
The same practice by Sri Aurobindo we find in relation to another spiritual Figure who stood very high in his eyes:
"I would have been surprised to hear that I regard (in agreement with an 'advanced' Sadhak) Ramakrishna as a spiritual pygmy if I had not become past astonishment in these matters.... Is it necessary for me to say that I have never thought and cannot have said anything of the kind, since I have at least some faint sense of spiritual values? The passage you have quoted is my considered estimate of Sri Ramakrishna."4
Yes, we may thus cite Sri Aurobindo in support of our employing, if we like, merely "Aurobindo". But here we may advert to what the Mother said apropos of the foreigners' practice of omitting the "Sri". She commented that they do so because they think the name "Auroville" which she had coined for the new model-city contains as its opening portion the sound
². Ibid., p. 136.
4. SABCL Vol. 26, p. 134.
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"Auro" as short for "Aurobindo". She made it plain that "Auro" was from the French "aurore" meaning "dawn", so that "Auroville" stands for "Dawn-city". She added that "Sri" is an integral part of the name by which we know our Master. This implies that she would like all of us - Westerners no less than Indians - always to use the form "Sri Aurobindo".
(1980)
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Sri Aurobindo and the Veda
Abbé Jules Monchanin, in his long article La Pensée de Shri Aurobindo in the Paris periodical L'Eglise Vivante,¹ often shows himself to be a perceptive admirer, especially where "Sri Aurobindo the Philosopher and Prophet" is concerned. But he finds himself completely at odds with Sri Aurobindo over the Veda.
Walking in the steps of Indologists like Louis Renou, he subscribes to the theory that the Veda is, as the mediaeval Indian commentator Sayana held, a manual of ritual practices and that in it natural phenomena are invested with life and worshipped as superhuman powers and that its terms are to be taken literally as part of a primitive hymnal. The mentality behind it is considered as being grossly down-to-earth and preoccupied with purely physical objects, events and relationships.
Monchanin suggests that Sri Aurobindo, when he interpreted the Veda spiritually and symbolically, indulged in loose amateurish fancy, unmindful of historical data and scholarly linguistics. Monchanin does not realise that here was a master of languages. Sri Aurobindo was expert in Greek and Latin, intimate with French, sufficiently familiar with Italian and German, besides being a supreme specialist in English. He was acquainted with several modern Indian tongues, including Tamil. His knowledge of Sanskrit was consummate and was further enlightened by his direct Yogic experience of all that the Sanskrit scriptures of India express of the highest and widest spirituality. Further, his was a most sensitive literary sensorium, capable of insight into the fountainheads of inspiration as well as alert to the various layers of being from which utterance could spring. And the conclusions at which he has arrived about the matter and manner of the Veda are set forth after a scrupulous review of old and current theories and follow a clear chain of philological, historical and psychological arguments.
Sri Aurobindo demands, as a background to the Upanishads and to the later developments of Indian religion and philosophy, an Age of the Mysteries such as preceded in European antiquity
¹. No. 4, 1952, pp. 312-36.
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the emergence of systematic and discursive thought. The Veda is to him the full articulate scripture of an epoch resembling the one whose failing remnants survived in Greece in practices like the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries. In the Age of the Mysteries, "the spiritual and psychological knowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons now difficult to determine, in a veil of concrete and material figures and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and revealed it to the initiated."² According to Sri Aurobindo the Veda is composed on a double plane of esoteric and exoteric.
On general grounds what we may term the psychologico-historical argument is the strongest in Sri Aurobindo's favour. He³ writes: "Such profound and ultimate thoughts, such systems of subtle and elaborate psychology as are found in the substance of the Upanishads, do not spring out of a previous void. The human mind in its progress marches from knowledge to knowledge, or it renews and enlarges previous knowledge that has been obscured and overlaid, or it seizes on old imperfect clues and is led by them to new discoveries. The thought of the Upanishads supposes great origins anterior to itself, and these in the ordinary theories are lacking. The hypothesis, invented to fill the gap, that these ideas were borrowed by barbarous Aryan invaders from civilised Dravidians, is a conjecture supported only by other conjectures. It is indeed coming to be doubted whether the whole story of an Aryan invasion through the Panjab is not a myth of the philologists4.... Much indeed of the forms and symbols of thought which we find in the Upanishads, much of the substance of the Brahmanas supposes a period in India in which thought took the form or the veil of secret teachings such as those of the Greek Mysteries."
The Upanishads are at present regarded as a movement breaking away from Vedism. In the words of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan,5 they evince "a protest against the externalism of the
² . The Secret of the Veda. SABCL Vol. 10, p. 6.
³ . Ibid., pp. 3-4.
4. Editor's Note: Even fifty-two years after this was penned, the well-known American archaeologist, George F. Dales, familiar with excavations in the Indus Valley, could write in the Scientific American (May 1966, p. 95) about the supposed Aryan invaders: "They have not yet been identified archaeologically."
5. Indian Philosophy (Indian Edition, 1941), p. 144.
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Vedic pratices and an indifference to the sacredness of the Veda". True, a ritualistic cult based on the Veda, a ceremonial of religious Works as distinguished from what the Upanishads came to consider spiritual Knowledge, is an object of strong revulsion in the Upanishadic period. But does not Radhakrishnan6 himself tell us that the Upanishads "adopt a double attitude towards Vedic authority"? Here surely is a puzzle. Why should Radhakrishnan7 have to go on to say that in places the Upanishads "concede the scriptural origin of the Veda"?
The fact is that these Upanishads, which condemn the form popularly taken by Vedism and which are said to have borrowed their spirituality from "Dravidian" sources, profess again and again to bring out the truth of the Riks, the Mantras, the Verses of the Vedic Rishis. As M.P. Pandit8 reminds us, "They quite often quote the Riks as seals of approval for their own findings." As examples9 we may pick out: "This is said by the Riks" from the Mundaka Upanishad (III. 2.10) - "That is said by the Rishi" from the Aitareya (IV.5) - "So also says the Verse" from the Prashna (1.10) - and "Seeing this the Rishi said..." from the Brihadaranayaka (II.5.18).
A fact even more directly significant is the clear Upanishadic echoes of Rig-vedic religious figures. Thus the Isha has an appeal to Surya, the Sun, as a god of revelatory knowledge by whose action we can arrive at the highest Truth. Sri Aurobindo10 points out: "This, too, is his function in the sacred Vedic formula of the Gayatri which was for thousands of years repeated by every Brahman in his daily meditation; and we may note that this formula is a verse from the Rig-Veda, from a hymn of the Rishi Vishwamitra" (III. 62.10) - and in it "the Sun in its highest light... is called upon... to impel our thoughts".¹¹ Actually, as Sri Aurobindo¹² has shown, the very verses of the Isha about Surya are a recasting of an invocation in the Rig-Veda. The Isha (15-16) cries: "The face of the Truth is covered with a golden lid.
7. Ibid.. p. 149.
8. Mystic Approach to the Veda and the Upanishads (Ganesh & Co., Madras, 1966), p. 110.
9. Ibid.
10. Op. cit., p. 5.
11. Hymns to the Mystic Fire, SABCL Vol. 11, p. 14.
12. Ibid.
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O Pushan, that remove for the vision of the law of the Truth. O Pushan (Fosterer), Seer, O Yama, O Sun, O Child of the Father of beings, marshal and gather together thy rays; I see the Light which is that fairest (most auspicious) form of thee; he who is this Purusha, He am I." Sri Aurobindo asks us to mark how the seer of the Upanishad translates into his own later style, keeping the central symbol of the Sun but without any secrecy in sense, a mystic thought or experience in a passage of the Rig-veda. "Pushan", "Kavi", "Yama", "Prajapati" are also Rig-vedic names though not present in that passage itself. The earlier formulation (V.62.1) runs: "There is a Truth covered by a Truth, where they unyoke the horses of the Sun; the ten hundreds stood together, there was That One. I saw the best of the bodies of the Gods." The basic parallelism is unmistakable.
Sri Aurobindo¹³ has taken the trouble to elucidate it. "The golden lid is meant to be the same as the inferior covering of truth, rtam, spoken of in the Vedic verse; the 'best of the bodies of the Gods' is equivalent to the 'fairest form of the Sun', it is the supreme Light which is other and greater than all outer light; the great formula of the Upanishad, 'He am I', corresponds to That One, tad ekam, of the Rig-vedic verse; the 'standing together of the ten hundreds' (the rays of the Sun, says Sayana, and that is evidently the meaning) is reproduced in the prayer to the Sun 'marshal and mass his rays' so that the supreme form may be seen. The Sun in both the passages, as constantly in the Veda and frequently in the Upanishad, is the Godhead of the supreme Truth and Knowledge and his rays are the light emanating from that supreme Truth and Knowledge. It is clear from this instance - and there are others - that the seer of the Upanishad had a truer sense of the meaning of the ancient Veda than the mediaeval ritualistic commentator with his gigantic learning, much truer than the modern and very different mind of the European scholars."
Unlike the opinions of that commentator and these scholars, Sri Aurobindo's view of a double plane of esoteric and exoteric is not single-tracked but allows the co-existence of several approaches while stressing one of them. He14 writes: "The ritual system recognised by Sayana may, in its externalities, stand; the
¹³. Ibid., pp. 14-15.
14. The Secret of the Veda, SABCL VoL 10, p. 6.
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naturalistic sense discovered by European scholarship may, in its general conceptions, be accepted; but behind them there is always the true and still hidden secret of the Veda, - the secret words, ninyā vachāmsi, which were spoken for the purified in soul and the awakened in knowledge." Indeed, Rishi Vamadeva himself, who in the fourth Mandala (3.16) uses these two vocables, follows up with: Kāvyāni kavaye nivachanā - "seer-wisdoms that utter their inner meaning to the seer."15
The very name given to Vamadeva and his likes - Kavi - which subsequently came to mean any poet but has the connotation of "seer" in the Veda is quite evidently connected with messages from a divine source, for the Rishis are described in the Veda itself as kavayah satyaśrutah, "seers and hearers of the Truth".
Pointers to the esoteric plane are not only in this phrase and in that sentence of Vamadeva's, but also in what Rishi Dirghatamas has to tell us in the very first Mandala. In I.164.46 we have one of the most spiritual declarations of India: "The Existent is One, but the sages express It variously; they say Indra, Varuna, Mitra, Agni..." The same hymn (I.164.39) openly speaks of the Riks as "existing in a supreme ether, imperishable and immutable, in which all the Gods are seated", and Dirghatamas adds: "one who knows not That, what shall he do with the Rik?" (The answer, of course, is: "He will make the mess which Monchanin, following Renou's lead, approves and encourages.")
Thus it is not only in the tenth and final Mandala, which is later in time and is acknowledged to have philosophical contents, that we have direct links with the explicit spirituality of the Upanishadic and post-Upanishadic eras. From the earliest Vedic utterances we get support for Sri Aurobindo's vision of the oldest Indian book of worship. And in the last Mandala itself (X.71) "the Vedic Word is described as that which is supreme and the topmost height of speech, the best and the most faultless.... But all cannot enter into its secret meaning. Those who do not know the inner sense are as men who seeing see not, hearing hear not, only to one here and there the Word desiring him like a beautifully robed wife to a husband lays open her body [X.71.4]. Others unable to drink steadily of the milk of the
15. SABCLVol. 11, p. 5.
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Word, the Vedic Cow, move with it as with one that gives no milk, to him the Word is a tree without flowers or fruits. This is quite clear and precise; it results from it beyond doubt that even then while the Rig-veda was being written the Riks were regarded as having a secret sense which was not open to all."16
Sri Aurobindo17 continues: "The tradition, then, was there and it was prolonged after the Vedic times. Yaska speaks of several schools of interpretation of the Veda. There was a sacrificial or ritualistic interpretation, the historical or rather mythological explanation, an explanation by the grammarians and etymologists, by the logicians, a spiritual interpretation. Yaska himself declares that there is a triple knowledge and therefore a triple meaning of the Vedic hymns, a sacrificial or ritualistic knowledge [ādhi-yajñika], a knowledge of the gods [ādhi-daivika] and finally a spiritual knowledge [ādhyātmika]; but the last is the true sense and when one gets it the others drop or are cut away. It is this spiritual sense that saves and the rest is outward and subordinate. He says further that 'the Rishis saw the truth, the true law of things, directly by an inner vision'; afterwards the knowledge and the inner sense of the Veda were almost lost and the Rishis who still knew had to save it by handing it down through initiation to disciples and at a last stage outward and mental means had to be used for finding the sense such as Nirukta and other Vedangas. But even then, he says, 'the true sense of the Veda can be recovered directly by meditation and tapasya', those who can use these means need no outward aids for this knowledge. This also is sufficiently clear and positive."
Modern scholarship, which dates the Rigveda to c. 1500 B.C., computes that Yaska compiled his Nirukta in the period c. 700-400 B.C. His status as an authority is therefore fairly ancient even by the rather over-short modern chronology. Nor is it Yaska alone who has pressed the adhyatmic view. In the 13th century A.D., a hundred years before Sayana, Anandatirtha, more popularly known as Madhwacharya, wrote in a spiritual vein on the first 40 hymns." Sayana himself yields evidence of a spiritual, philosophical or psychological interpretation. "He mentions, for instance, but not to admit it, an old interpretation
16. Hymns to the Mystic Fire. SABCL Vol. 11, p. 6.
17. Ibid., pp. 6-7.
18. Mystic Approach to the Veda and the Upanishads, p. 27.
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of Vritra as the Coverer who holds back from man the objects of his desire and his aspirations. For Sayana Vritra is either simply the enemy or the physical cloud-demon who holds back the waters and has to be pierced by the Rain-giver."19. After Sayana we have Raghavendra Swami amplifying Madhwacharya and even quoting an ancient Puranic text which declares the Vedas to have three meanings - trayorthāḥ sarvavedaṣu.20 In our own times Swami Dayananda, founder of the Arya Samaj, made a remarkable attempt to re-establish the Veda as a living religious scripture.
So Sri Aurobindo's vision of the Veda cannot be looked askance at as quite unnatural or quite new-fangled. It differs from the earliest ones, which are affined to it in principle, by its thoroughness, its flexibility and its insight. He has used penetrative scholarship of the highest order as well as the "meditation and tapasya" recommended by Yaska to reach it.
And it is not only a number of learned commentators who have anticipated Sri Aurobindo in their own inadequate ways. He²¹ has noted about the hymns: "In the fixed tradition of thousands of years they have been revered as the origin and standard of all that can be held as authoritative and true in Brahmana and Upanishad, in Tantra and Purana, in the doctrines of great philosophical schools and in the teachings of famous saints and sages. The name borne by them was Veda, the knowledge, - the received name for the highest spiritual truth of which the human mind is capable."
Then Sri Aurobindo²² notes a supreme irony: "But if we accept the current interpretations, whether Sayana's or the modern theory, the whole of this sublime and sacred reputation is a colossal fiction. The hymns are, on the contrary, nothing more than the naive superstitious fancies of untaught and materialistic barbarians concerned only with the most external gains and enjoyments and ignorant of all but the most elementary moral notions or religious aspirations."
Surely here is a strange state of affairs but the Veda itself must bear the responsibility for it. And Sri Aurobindo does not ignore
19. The Secret of the Veda, SABCL Vol. 10, p. 19.
20. Mystic Approach..., pp. 27-28.
21. The Secret of the Veda, SABCL Vol. 10, p. 3.
22. Ibid.
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whatever lends itself to gross interpretations: references to food, wine, gold, children, servants, cows, horses, travel, forts, enemies, war, plunder on the one hand, and night, dawn, fire, water, rivers, hills, forests on the other. By his double outlook - esoteric and exoteric - he does full justice to the paradox that is the Veda. He is also aware that23, even in the past, side by side with the extreme veneration accorded to this manual of Mantras a censorious eye was turned upon it by mystics for its earthy-seeming concerns. Not only the Upanishads but the Gita too criticises the champions of Vedism, saying24 that all their flowery teachings were devoted solely to material wealth, power and enjoyment. Yet, with apparent inconsistency, the Gita,25 like the Upanishads, does not hesitate to regard the Veda always as divine knowledge. Nothing except Sri Aurobindo's double outlook can have validity. Those who deny the esotericism fly in the face of all indications in its favour and, when despite Sri Aurobindo's masterly treatment of these clues they cling to their pet prejudices, one despairs of academic qualifications.
Sri Aurobindo has no difficulty in demonstrating that in some cases of reference to external objects the Veda has dropped definite hints of their symbolic usage. "Cows" occurs very frequently. There is no doubt that the Vedic word gau means both "cow" and "ray" (or "light"). In the Vedic hymns to the Dawn "Sayana himself is obliged... to interpret the word sometimes as cows, sometimes as rays, - careless, as usual of consistency..."26 Sri Aurobindo adds that twice the Veda removes the veil of the image entirely. In the one instance a synonym for "rays" is used and the word "gau" comes in as a simile, indicating the true Vedic content of this word: prati bhadrā adṛkṣata gavāṁ sargā na raśmayaḥ (IV.52.5) - "her happy rays come into sight like the cows released into movement."27 Still more conclusive is the verse: saṁ te gāvas tama ā vartayanti, jyotir yacchanti (VII.79.2) - "Thy cows (rays) remove the darkness and extend the light."28 Similarly, the Veda discloses the true sense of ghṛita meaning
23. Ibid., p. 20.
24. Gita. II. 42.
25. Gita, XV. 15.
26. The Secret of the Veda. SABCL Vol. 10, p. 119.
27. Ibid.. p. 121.
28. Ibid.
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ghee or clarified butter. This word can also mean light, from the root ghṛi to shine. In a Vedic expression like dhiyaṅ ghṛitācīm the thought is compared to pure clarified butter and we can only speak of "luminous thought",29 just as ghṛitapruṣā manasā, "a mind pouring ghee", has to be translated a "mind pouring the light".30 Again, when the Rishi asks Agni (Fire-God) to "hearken to the anthem our thoughts strain out pure to the godhead like pure clarified butter" (VI. 10.2), we have in the comparison the clue to the symbol of ghṛita in the sacrifice.31 Ghṛita is "the light-offering", the labour of the clarity of an enlightened or illumined mind.
Perhaps the easiest way to rout Renou and his tribe of modern expositors, on whom Monchanin leans so confidently, is to employ the argument Sri Aurobindo brings to bear on the nature of the Panis, a certain type of enemy of the aspirants to Aryanism, the cult of Light. The general term for the enemies of Aryanism is Dasa-Dasyu and, as not only Sri Aurobindo but even Western authorities like A.A. Macdonell and A.B. Keith"32 inform us, the Panis are also designated as Dasas and Dasyus in some passages. Hence what Sri Aurobindo says in connection with the Panis must hold throughout the Rig-veda, and Sri Aurobindo himself intends it to hold when he" writes apropos of the Panis: "It is either an uncritical or a disingenuous method to take isolated passages and give them a particular sense which will do well enough there only while ignoring the numerous other passages in which that sense is patently inapplicable." The situation which arises when we take as a whole all the references in the Veda to the Dasa-Dasyus and adopt the conclusion which issues from all the passages thus taken together - the total situation may be formulated with indications from Western scholarship itself. Macdonell and Keith" state: "Dasyu, a word of somewhat doubtful origin, is in many passages of the Rig-veda clearly applied to superhuman enemies... Dasa, like Dasyu, sometimes denotes enemies of a demoniac character in the Rigveda." About the Panis the same savants35 say: "In some
29. Hymns to the Mystic Fire, SABCL Vol. 11, p. 12.
30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 264.
32. The Vedic Index of Names and Subjects (London, 1912), I, pp. 471, 472.
33. The Secret of the Veda, SABCL Vol. 10, pp. 215-16.
34. Op. cit., I, pp. 347, 356.
35. Ibid., I, pp. 471,472.
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passages the Panis definitely appear as mythological figures, demons who withhold the cows or waters of heaven." With this fact established from non-Aurobindonian expositors about the anti-Aryans, we may quote Sri Aurobindo36 on what the Panis must turn out to be throughout the Veda in consequence of the comprehensive method he has proposed:
"When we follow this method we find that in many of these passages the idea of the Panis as human beings is absolutely impossible and that they are powers either of physical or of spiritual darkness; in others that they cannot at all be powers of physical darkness, but may well be either human enemies of the god-seekers and sacrificers or else enemies of the spiritual Light; in yet others that they cannot be either human enemies or enemies of the physical Light, but are certainly the enemies of the spiritual Light, the Truth and the Thought. From these data there can be only one conclusion, that they are always and only enemies of the spiritual Light."
Perhaps sympathisers with Monchanin's stricture on the Aurobindonian attitude may try to make a dent in the latter by asking: "Are there not any passages where the Dasa-Dasyus are definitely something else than demons?" - and then by citing Macdonell and Keith's opinion37 about their being human: "this may be regarded as certain in those passages where the Dasyu is opposed to the Aryan, who defeats him with the aid of the gods." But surely if a Dasyu or Dasa is a demon-enemy, he is hostile both to the gods and to the Aryan who worships the gods and is favoured by them: it can make little difference to the enemy's essential character whether the gods fight him directly in the inner occult world or through the aid they give to the soul of the worshipper fighting him there.
No, Sri Aurobindo's case is unassailable. And we may well conclude with him:38 "The whole Rig-veda is a triumph-chant of the powers of Light, and their ascent by the force and vision of the Truth to its possession in its source and seat where it is free from the attack of the falsehood."
(1974)
36. SABCL Vol. 10, p. 216.
37. Op. cit., 1, p. 347.
38. Op. cit., SABCL Vol. 10, p. 223.
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in India*
India's decision to remain a member of the Commonwealth in spite of being an independent sovereign Republic has given a new lease of life amongst us to the English language. Until recently English was apt to be regarded as the remnant of a foreign imposition, an inappropriate growth in the way of an authentic indigenous literature. Today it seems an appropriate and desirable link between us and the group of English-speaking nations with whom we have formed a voluntary association: it has become the medium of a larger existence in which we have elected to share. This is all to the good - especially as America with whom we shall have more and more to deal is English-speaking. But we shall be underestimating the significance of the English language in India if we think that it is only a valuable means of promoting our political, economic and technological interests in the democratic world. English is, above all, an immense cultural asset. And it is such an asset not simply because it renders available to us magnificent countries of the mind, but also because it renders possible to us the most magnificent expression of our own soul.
The first impulse, vis-à-vis this statement, will be to cry, "Absurd paradox!" and to follow up with the question: "Can India really take to the English language as an instrument other Indianness and make her utterance in it anything more than an exotic curiosity?" The answer, surely, cannot be given with a facile pointing out of the great increase in the number of Indians who talk and write fair English. The answer can only be given by seeing whether there is what Galsworthy termed "flower of author". Disclosure of the inmost individuality through the subtlest potentialities of the language: this is "flower of author". Such "flower" need not be in one particular style as opposed to others. Simplicity and complexity, plainness and richness, urbanity and intense vibrancy - all these can equally allow it. Can we affirm that, in any style whatever, "flower of author" is
* This essay is a slightly enlarged version of one that has already appeared in the author's book, The Indian Spirit and the World's Future (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953).
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possible in English-writing India as something more than a rare, almost accidental growth? Yes, we can. For two reasons.
What is called Indianness possesses as one of its main characteristics a power of multifold assimilation arising from a many-sidedness, a globality, in the unique penchant that is the Indian genius. The Indian genius is, of course, best described as spiritual; but it is not spiritual in a narrow way: it is an urge of synthesis of a hundred approaches to the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. Not only does it spiritualise everything in the long run: it also spiritualises everything without depriving any term of its own essential quality. It annuls nothing by the transforming change it induces: it induces the change by raising all things to their own hidden heights of Supernature, as it were - heights at which they are most authentically themselves by being spiritual, by being facets of the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal. Wonderfully synthetical and assimilative, it can also embrace and Indianise the quality of any race, the force of any culture; hence it can make both the mind and the movement of the English language part of its activity. This mind and this movement do not confront it as utterly foreign: they come to it striking sympathetic chords in its multi-rhythmed heart. That is the first reason why "flower of author" in English can be an Indian growth drawing not unnaturally or accidentally its nourishment from the soil of the Indian soul.
The second reason is the character of the English language itself. No other modern language is so varied in mentality, so diverse in turn. It is a fusion of many strains - the Celtic, the Roman, the Saxon, the Teuton, the French, the Italian have mingled in it, and the Greek "psyche" and the Hebrew "ruach" have also coloured it. As a result, it is an extremely plastic and versatile instrument capable of being expressive of numerous types of consciousness. No wonder it does not have any marked tradition of persistent mood or manner - as, for instance, French has; no wonder, too, it is notable for countless idiosyncrasies: and no wonder, again, it has proved so adequate a medium for every innovation in outlook and in-look whether it be the adventurous imaginative gusto of the Renaissance, the gorgeous oriental religiosity of Hebraism, the passion and wonder and Nature-feeling of the Romantic Movement, the vague poignancies and dim wizardries of Celtic paganism. The synthetical and
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assimilative Indian genius meets in the English tongue a multiplicity and pliancy of temper and tone which give that genius all the more chance of taking hold of this tongue for living self-expression.
There is no doubt that "flower of author" is, for Indians, possible in English. This does not, of course, imply possibility for all and sundry. Such possibility is not there for Indians in even the indigenous languages: every Indian is not a literary master. And, where English is concerned, it is quite to be expected that "flower of author" should be less common than in those languages. But to maintain that Indian utterance in English can only be an exotic curiosity and never an organic unfolding of genuine Indianness is to indulge in a sweeping superficiality. What now remains to be shown is that true Indian utterance in English is more than just possible and that it can be in quality finer and greater than in any language spoken by Indians today. This is the supreme paradox we have to elucidate - and if we can elucidate it we shall have dealt the death-blow to all efforts by our educationists to minimise the importance of English in our cultural self-expression.
English is unquestionably the most highly developed of modern languages both by virtue of the large variety of racial and psychological strains in it and by virtue of the extraordinary crop of poets in English history. Poetry is the sovereign power of all language: where poets of high quality abound, there the language reaches the highest development, especially when the language itself has immense potentialities. No student of the world's literature will dispute that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse giant, Whitman. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely suggestive effects - the super-subtle phrase, the packed visionary phrase, the phrase of indefinable intonation. Even in prose that unique capacity has its play and, within the less daring terms proper to prose, English
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still surpasses all modern languages, including those of India herself, in the immediacies and intimacies of intuitive speech. If this is so, then English is bound to be most valuable to the genius of a country which is not only synthetical and assimilative in the extreme but also spiritual to the nth degree; for, a speech with extraordinary potentialities of strangely suggestive effects suits most the magic, the mystery, the depth, the sudden and sublime revelatory reach of the spiritual consciousness. English promises, therefore, to be the expressive body par excellence of our true soul.
What adds to our conviction about this promise is the fact that the strangely suggestive potentialities of English have already been pressed into service of the spiritual consciousness by English writers themselves. Herbert's religious simplicity at once piquant and passionate - Crashaw's rich sensuousness kindling into ecstatic devotion - Donne's nervous intricate power troubling the Inscrutable - Vaughan's half-obscure half-bright straining beyond thought into mystical vision - Wordsworth's profound contemplative pantheistic peace - Blake's deeply delicate radiance or his mighty mythology of events in Eternity - Coleridge's glimmering occultism of the weird, the haunting or the honey-dewed - Shelley's rainbowed rapture of some universal Light and Love and Liberty - Keat's enchanted artistic luxuriance, through allegory and symbol and legend, in the Sovereign Beauty that is Sovereign Truth - Patmore's pointed polished ardour of the intellect for "the unknown Eros" - Francis Thompson's colourful heat of response to "the many-spendoured Thing" - Gerard Manley Hopkins's quiver and flash of aspiration within a God-dedicated discipline - Yeats's bewitched or passionate echo to the Immortal Loveliness in its world-wandering - AE's crystalline contact with superhumanly populated twilights within and divinely inhabited dawns above - all these quickenings of the spiritual consciousness, together with the American Whitman's dynamic delight under the touch of a Cosmic Life and the miniature snapshotting of an infinite Mystery by the American Emily Dickinson, are already present in English and have turned it to what may be called Indian uses. Doubtless, the uses are still somewhat elementary in comparison to what the Indian genius has achieved in the ancient Sanskrit of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita. But the fact stands that English
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lends itself as the fittest body to this genius with an actually accomplished functioning, however initial, along our own national soul-trend. Hence, if we are to fulfil that trend, the most natural no less than the most desirable act on our part is to find voice in English.
Not that the indigenous languages should be neglected. They must be developed. But English at present comes to us with a face of supreme destiny. And what that destiny is can be seen even now. For, even now, before our very eyes, it is being wonderfully worked out. A band of Indian poets remarkably gifted are uttering in English the mystical experience with an intense fidelity and felicity, and at their head is one of the greatest figures of the contemporary world and he has banished all shadow of doubt regarding the destiny we have spoken of. Sri Aurobindo has given the world what is at once the finest and grandest literary achievement of modern India and the deepest and highest articulation of Indian spirituality today - the epic with which he was occupied in the spare hours of a Yogi and which grew to nearly twenty-four thousand lines: Savitri, a Legend and, a Symbol. In Savitri, we have proof as ample as we could wish that, while our vernaculars more easily provide us with footholds for climbing beyond commonplaces into the revelatory intensities of literature, English alone enables at present the soul of India to attain the absolute peak of self-expression.
And from that peak the soul of India will communicate, to the whole Commonwealth and to all America and to whatever country is in touch with them, the harmonious rhythms of its own greatness. Far and wide, by means of English, the Indian genius will spread the word born from the occult immensities that are the luminous source and support and goal of its unique history. Embodied in this language by India, Inspiration
...with her lightening feet,
A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,¹
will conquer the heart and mind of humanity. Not through translations from Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil or Hindi -
¹. Savitri, SABCL Vol. 28, p. 38.
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beautiful and powerful instruments of truth though they may prove - but directly through the tongue that was Shakespeare's and is now Sri Aurobindo's, the peoples of the earth will most vividly know India as the creative bride of the Divine and as the mighty mother of a new age which shall justify the light on man's upward face.
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French Culture and India
The India Government's plan to let the French Settlements enjoy, even when they are a part of the larger Indian sub-continent, a degree of cultural and linguistic autonomy is a wise one. It reflects the enlightened international outlook of Jawaharlal Nehru. The same outlook that has led him to keep India within the Commonwealth without abrogating her independence has recognised the French cultural influence as an enriching value worthy to play its part in the free future that is modern India's in a world of increasing internationalism.
England and France - these are the two countries whose cultures we should do well to assimilate by means of our naturally synthesising and multiform genius. England gives us on the one hand a practical dynamic expansive life-instinct which can serve profitably to re-stimulate what was ours in the days of our past greatness - namely, a deep creative life-intuition flexibly functioning to give birth to a richness of varied and complex, adventurous and even fantastic-seeming forms of existence which yet carry a certain stability and self-balance by being rooted in a spontaneous organic energy. On the other hand England gives us a language of extremely subtle poetic possibilities in which our innate mysticism of soul can most fittingly express itself and from which we can convey quickening colour and tone to our comparatively undeveloped vernaculars.
France comes with other gifts. There is, to begin with, her gift of prose as distinguished from poetry. English prose can be very great, but at its most characteristic it flourishes rather as a beautiful suburb of the poetic metropolis: it is poetry in a less intense medium, it has not its own typical self and movement. Poetry sings and visions and enraptures; prose converses and expounds and pleases, its power is persuasion and its progression has a controlled order and an accurate sober effectiveness. Not that it lacks fire and speed, but its glow is steady and tastefully tempered, its run is a vigorous continuity. There have been English prose-writers who did not want in the clarity, the justice, the care, the firmness and the ease that constitute prose an art distinct from poetry which comes with a flashing flooding force; but only French culture provides us with this art in its
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most perfect as well as most cumulative form. It is a valuable art, since what is best said by way of pointed and animated conversation cannot be replaced, however sublime the substitute offered. So, French prose cannot but be a cultural asset if the mind of modern India is to be adequate in expression of a certain quality of keen and serious thought or quick and refined feeling - a quality requiring a humane and natural manner.
Behind this prose there is the whole French civilisation. France brings, at her truest, a clear-seeing accurately organising idea-force and a considerately warm, liberty-loving, graciously and gracefully radiant sentiment. Here is a supple logic putting delicately discerned parts together to make a precise systematic whole, aided by a happy feeling for form which is an artistic eagerness at once to fashion total harmony and to keep unblurred the contours of individual entities. Ordered ensemble and sharp individuality in a brilliant combination - there we have the essence of the French genius. To resist standardisation or mass-reproduction and to make everything sparkle with a definite outline free of irrelevance and still to join all things to one another in a neat pattern which avoids waste and discloses their interrelation in a lucid crystalline loveliness - this is the French genius's ruling passion. In other words we may say that what the French genius attempts is a reasoned and tasteful, vivid and diversified integration.
But integration, we may note further, does not consist for the French genius in only combining system and individuality in a brilliant way. It consists in also bringing together the physical and the intellectual. The body with its senses, the mind with its conceptions - these are not, for the French, contrasting modes of living, opposed means of the joie de vivre. They are a single two-toned design and delight, complementaries and not contradictories. Hence, in general, so little dryness or abstractness in the French intellect and such a wide-spread intellectual flavour in the commonest walks of French life.
The things of the mind are not limited to a small group: even the sailor and the barman and the concierge will surprise you with intelligent interest in literature or science or the fine arts. As a charming instance of the general appreciation of serious literature in France F.L. Lucas remembers the case of one Laurent, called "Coco", accused of burglary in April, 1905, who proved an
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alibi because: "Juste à cette heure-là je me trouvais chez un marchand de vin de la Rue de Tracy et je discutais avec un camarade au sujet de la mère de Britannicus dans la tragédie de Racine." This discussion at a wine-merchant's on a personnage out of a classic drama in verse was proved to have lasted three-quarters of an hour. "No doubt," remarks Lucas, "burglars in England might discuss the character of Hamlet in a public-house; but no magistrate would believe it."
And, just as the apache, the restauranteur or the chorus-girl may talk with some esprit about Claudel, Camus, Picasso or perhaps even de Broglie, and, we may add, just as the window-dressers of the Faubourg Saint Honoré seem to bring to everyday objects the art of a Chardin composing with devoted care a still life, so also in their turn the littérateurs, the artists, the scientists live not like specialists but as men with broad sympathies and with an interest in day-to-day mundane occupations, men who are no bunglers in physical things but are aware of their niceties. It is difficult to come across, anywhere else in the world, the easy friendship between mind and body which is found where France is most French - that is, in Paris - and in those sections of Paris where, as Charles Morgan tells us, the foreigner's influence is least felt - the Rue Bonaparte, the square of St. Germain des Prés, the Ile St. Louis, the neighbourhood of Notre Dame.
No doubt, here is not the mystical harmonisation of all the terms of existence so as to lift each to its divine counterpart. But here is what can afford to the urge towards that harmonisation a fine co-operating zest, even as the French bent for a bright ordering of details without diminishing each detail's clear-cut uniqueness can be finely helpful to the balanced splendour of divine unity and divine diversity that, together with the ascent of earth to heaven and the descent of heaven to earth, is the complete aim of the spiritual consciousness.
When we go back to the Vedas, the early Upanishads and in later times the Bhagavad Gita, we discover a large synthesising movement careful of all aspects and forces of existence. Owing to various circumstances this movement got broken up and the Indian genius began to satisfy its hunger for the absolute by seeking keen separate culminations and carrying each trend to its farthest solitary limit, instead of by questing for an all-round interrelated perfection keyed to the highest spiritual yet orchestrating
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all the instruments of being. It is integration in this exalted sense that the Indian genius must ever toil for; it is integration of this kind that is most native to it; and to achieve it we must draw inspiration from our own spiritual depths and surcharge with their quality our outer life. But to help create in our outer life a response to those depths we might interfuse with our own spiritual temper the turns of the French genius, for we have to a considerable extent allowed important powers of our own to withdraw into the background and, in the modern milieu, these turns can go far both to resuscitate and to enrich them.
Of course, the French genius can degenerate into the sceptical, the superficial and the sensual, just as the English can become crudely commercial or deviously opportunist at one extreme and, at the other, lose itself in a labyrinth of fancy or in a conceptual muddle. But this does not detract from their intrinsic worth. We must do our best to absorb their positive virtues. The English language promises to remain a living force in all India and therefore the virtues of the culture of England are not likely to vanish from amongst us. But the centres of French culture are small - in fact, a few towns - and its peculiar essence is likely to be elusive unless we are studious to capture it.
After the Merger in 1954, a local non-governmental association was formed in Pondicherry: the Friends of French Language and Culture. Also, with the willing co-operation of the India Government which had already accepted the continuance of French Colleges, France founded, with Dr. Filliozat, an eminent orientalist, as Director, a French Institute in the same town. These have been hopeful signs. But surely the most effective means of capturing for our country the essence of French Culture is to give full support to the idea mooted some years ago that Pondicherry should be converted into a University town, a cultural meeting-place between India and France consciously organised around the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education which was initiated in 1951 and is fast flowering now. This Centre draws its inspiration from the creative genius of Sri Aurobindo, a master of East-West synthesis, as well as from that of his co-worker, the Mother, who, appealing for a double nationality, declared at the time of the Merger: "I am French by birth and early education, I am Indian by choice and predilection. In my consciousness there is no
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antagonism between the two, on the contrary they combine very well and complete one another. I know also that I can be of service to both equally, for my only aim in life is to give a concrete form to Sri Aurobindo's great teaching and in his teaching he reveals that all the nations are essentially one and meant to express the Divine Unity upon earth through an organised and harmonious diversity." From a cultural meeting-place such as Pondicherry can become, a great impetus would be gained by the new India which is arising today, an India true to her own nature and fulfilling it but also embracing and absorbing all that is best in the world and developing an international entity out of herself.
By developing such an entity she will extend her own spiritual influence in the world. France will not fail to respond to her. The French consciousness is not lacking in the capacity to answer the mystical call. A certain side of it is mystically perceptive, the side which turns with instinctive enthusiasm to the Figure of Jeanne d'Arc and does not feel alien to Pascal with his "reasons of the heart that Reason does not know" and his Pensées that all Europe has hailed as one of the most penetrating spiritual apologias produced by the West, the side which in the modern age has found expression in that exquisite search for the essence within the appearance, the single within the many, the infinite in each finite - the Symbolism of Mallarme and his heirs. It would be difficult to surpass in any poetry of our day the sublime profundity of insight in that line of Mallarme's on the dead Poe:
Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,
(At last to Himself he is changed by eternity)
or the rapturous visionariness that uplifts us in Rimbaud's
Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur!
(Millions of golden birds, O Vigour to come!)
What is, in several respects, the modern opposite of Symbolism à la Mallarmé by a stress not on the secret and unifying, universal and eternal essence but on the concrete and separate, individual and time-fissured existence - Existentialism à la Sartre may itself be traced to a perversely orientated pressure of the
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mystically inclined side of the French temperament. For this is not an atheism that is happy in its denials: it is an atheism avowedly torn by angoisse at the unending nothingness, ńeant, which it feels to be the fundamental fact against which the feverish little dramas of conscious life are futilely played out, an atheism unable to get over the calamity of its conviction that there is no God. It even luxuriates in that calamity, keeping it ever keen: the existentialists, as Jolivet has discerned, are intoxicated with the void and worship it because the void is as if not a non-existence but a paradoxical negative existence, a nihil tremendum et fascinans, inducing at once a strange death-wish and by reaction an intense leap inward into self-subjectivity, into utterly individual isolation. Born of such a leap is the disbelief of Sartrean Existentialism in any blind and iron fate ruling us by some inherent human or cosmic nature whose expressions we may be: each man is a unique activity, possessed of an ineradicable freedom from the tyranny of type, faced with an unescapable responsibility of choice, called to a valorous creativeness fighting the nausée which is felt on realising the meaninglessness, the absurdity of brute fact, the given world into which one is thrown without knowing why and incapable of saying no. And each man's free and constant self-creation should move towards "personal engagement" in a collective pursuit of values whose justification cannot be found in any scientific or philosophical formula. Sartrean Existentialism, inspiring the youths in chequered shirts and the girls with straight uncurled hair who used to flock to the Café de Flore, seeks, in misguided theory and often aberrant practice, to transcend the limitations of both the merely "natural" and the purely "rational".
The rival Existentialist school to Sartre's - that of Marcel - is not atheistic at all and is rather the complement of Symbolism than its opposite. Although Sartre is more in vogue because the French post-war psychology is shot through with a feeling of world-tragedy, Marcel has perhaps deeper roots in the soil of French history, connecting up as he does with the Christian tradition without being really committed to it. It was after his philosophy had been developed in most of its characteristics that he entered the Roman Catholic Church and its true ties are with all mystical aspiration in general that is founded on what he calls "the Mystery of Being". To this Mystery he brings a concrete
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approach - by music, art, drama, literature, poetry and by a philosophy of action which accepts exterior life with its myriad contacts yet springs, as he says, from a recollected interior life in communion with the supreme Ground and Source of all things, an all-enveloping secret Presence in which man is not a bundle of "functions" to be described by psychologists, sociologists and scientists nor by his Government, profession or trade union, but partakes of sheer ultimate Being, a world "méta-problématique". Marcel, we may remark, has here an affinity with that earlier French philosopher who has profoundly influenced modern thought - Bergson - by his analysis of the time-experience and his clarification of what he termed "intuition", the supra-intellectual in-feeling of the very flow of life. Marcel and Bergson are two of the most powerful factors tending the contemporary French mind in the direction of the basic Indian method of experiencing Reality, Together with Bergson's Introduction à la Métaphysique which kindled a new vision for a whole generation by its few pages of concentrated yet self-revelatory subtlety, Marcel's short treatise Positions et Approches Concrètes du Mystère Ontologique has been a luminously seminal document for European thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century.
In the second half the most significant event so far for Europe's thought has been the publication of Le Phenomène humain (The Phenomenon of Man) by the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who too was once influenced by Bergson. The book is physics and biology argued out along lines prompted by poetic and religious intuition in a language at the same time precise and wide-suggestion'd. Teilhard begins with one main insight: whatever manifests in the physical world must be there at the very base of things, although the manifestation takes place at certain "critical thresholds" of development. Just as the increase of mass with motion, which is detected at high speeds, is taken to be always there and just as the radio-active break-down of atoms, which is seen in particular heavy elements, is accepted to be omnipresent, so also life and mind, which show themselves at specific stages of material organisation, must be supposed to lie at the root of the cosmos. A "Within" of consciousness in some form or other has to be posited for the physical "Without" of Nature everywhere. Panpsychism is inevitable to consistent scientific thought. A progressive outbreak of
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the Within occurs at certain points of evolution when there is an "involution"¹or turning-in of material existence upon itself, a concentration or convergence of energies. Thus a threshold is crossed from Pre-life to Life, from Life to Mind. And when this happens a new earth-layer is formed, first a "biosphere" and then a "noosphere". The next layer is now in the making: the scientific age of rapid communication and spread-out of culture leads towards a unification of the human consciousness, a coming together of the psychological ends of the earth, a convergence of manifold mentality. A total earth-consciousness will develop and out of it a superhuman universality of awareness, which Teilhard names Omega Point. He discerns, in the heart of human aspiration and idealism, what he terms "Resonance to the All" - and he concludes that the All which will be realised as Omega Point is secretly a Reality already, a divine Alpha Point, a hidden Godhead urging and organising evolution, a Being who is the core of each soul, a Super-Person in whom every person can attain his utter fulfilment. Teilhard therefore builds a new version of Pantheism which we may term Pan-en-theism ("all-in-God" rather than "all-is-God") upon his Panpsychism and describes evolutionary history as the unfoldment of the "Cosmic Christ". The French sense of the free individual flowering within and through an ordered and ordering Whole seems to discover here its sublimest religio-scientific expression.
So much for what directly or indirectly has prepared conditions for a response from France to India's spiritual genius. But, the most sensitive temperament in Europe, the French race in even its older brand of atheism than the Sartrean, the scepticism which, unlike Sartre's chafing against science and intellectuality, is based on the "natural" and the "rational", is not quite closed to the haunting ambience of the ideal around the actual, no matter how firmly the intellect may refuse to admit any religious tinge in the strange sense of loss that is often felt in the midst of the most tangible fullness of physical preoccupation or achievement. Has not the agnostic Anatole France, ironical about the aspirations of the all-too-human, pitiful of blind pieties, shown also the
¹. This is an Aurobindonian term but obviously it does not bear the same meaning, just as Lloyd-Morgan's identical term in his philosophy of "Emergent Evolution" differs also.
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irony of the negativist attitude, the piercing pitiableness of the denying posture, when he penned that sentence of delicate inexplicable nostalgia: "Ce que la vie a de meilleur, c'est l'idée qu'elle nous donne de je ne sais quoi qui n'est point en elle"? A sentence, we may observe, that is typical also of the beautiful directness of French prose in even the glimmers it gives of the far and the faint, a combination of the subtle with the simple and straightforward, a fearless use of the almost colloquial without sacrificing euphony. Paul Bloomfield remarks that this sentence is as mellifluous in French as it would be awkward in English if translated word for word; and we may add that the soul of its liquid elegance as well as of its pellucid poignancy would be a little missing even in the finest free English rendering: "The best in life is the idea it gives us of a something that is not in it."
To return to our point: a certain side of the French consciousness is not wanting in mystical perception. But the emphatic and open mystical turn cannot come readily to the French consciousness, and when it does come it frequently gets grooved in conventional religiousness and deviates from its true goal. The genius of France, on the idealistic plane, is usually what the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram once described in warning that country against a violation of her svadharma by becoming utilitarian, calculating, mercantile: "France meant generosity of sentiment, newness and boldness of ideas and chivalry in action. It was that France which commanded the respect and admiration of all: it is by these virtues that she dominated the world." Yes, hers is not automatically the emphatic and open mystical turn. Of course, these virtues can help to prepare her, but her mystical tendencies will not acquire a steady right direction in general unless a greater natural force of mysticism comes to her aid. Only a movement like Indian spirituality's, at once illumined and elemental, free from narrowness and obscurantism without losing intensity, can bring about such a turn in its purity sooner or later in at least a marked nucleus of progressive minds. And all the more can it do so in its Aurobindonian version as a Yoga which embraces life in all its dynamism, endeavours to transform rather than reject any part of it and makes for the evolution of a supramental divine man in an ideal society on earth - a Yoga including yet transcending the ancient Indian realisations of the Vedanta and other paths as well as carrying in an ampler and
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completer spiritual Super-science what Teilhard the Roman Catholic scientist has glimpsed with the French esprit in him at its most brilliantly penetrating.¹
Yes, France can answer India's call. However, there must be the proper conditions. If the erstwhile French India becomes a cultural meeting-place and if India takes as much as possible into herself the best that France can show, the answer will be all the . more intimate and strong. And once there is the answer from France, all Europe will echo it in the course of time. For, France is still the vital core of European civilisation. Hence, both from the standpoint of helping out in the cause of the Divine some of our receded powers and from the standpoint of accomplishing as widely as we can the mission of mysticism that is India's, it is desirable to promote a Franco-Indian culture.
¹. A treatment, at some length, of the resemblances and the differences between Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo and of the validity as well as the error of putting together, as often done, the author of Le Phenomène humain and the Master of the Integral Yoga - a many-sided treatment built up by collecting the present writer's essays on Teilhardism first printed in Mother India has been published under the title: The Spirituality of the Future - A Search apropos of R.C. Zaehner's Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin, by Associated University Presses, Inc., New Jersey, 1981.
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Old....New
OLD
POETRY
Lovely fictions of the luminous, delightful fantasies of the perfect - these alone I let loose in a winging adventure of harmonious speech.
PAINTING
All that the eye can seize of transient line and colour, all that the eye can trace of finite form, my brush sets playing and glowing in a dream that can never come true.
SCULPTURE
I shape out a body of beauty that life can hope to reach in an utmost of poise or passion which yet is no more than human.
MUSIC
Mine is the work of soothing or stirring man's heart with rhythms that weave for him a paradise of sounds - but sounds echoed only from this earth.
DANCE
A gesture, a turn, a leap - and I strike into graceful intensities the movements of manifold nature within the limits of space, the bounds of time.
THOUGHT
I seek to measure and relate the steps of Reality. But what I find goes no further than a fitting together of Reality's shadows and a changing of them from one system to another.
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NEW
Truth's sun-gold silence breaking into words that move in unison like laughing gods through depth on depth of self-discovery.
Lines that tear all veils, colours that awake all mysteries, forms that gather up all the ends of existence - earth's play touched by an all-revealing light.
I break off with every stroke of time the mass of sleep concealing the faultless figure that lives and shines eternally in the heart of Matter.
An everlasting rhythm runs through the universe, holding the earth together with the stars. This rhythm, an outburst of rapture from the Infinite, I pass in a thousand tones through the common air we breathe.
The body sways, the limbs undulate, the face and form flower and flame - all to the heart-beat of a timeless Love, all in a space full of immortal watchers.
Not seeking to measure Reality but letting Reality measure me, I have become soft silent ground on which She leaves for ever the footprints of her secret ways linking the worlds and leading them upward.
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The Poet of Integralism*
The term "integralism", in our treatment of Sri Aurobindo the poet, the wielder of an intense art-form, must go beyond the discovery of a special spiritual experience and vision which we may designate by it. It must connote primarily an integral style, an integral word-power to match that experience and vision. But this style and this word-power cannot be defined just by saying that the former is one which commands with consummate versatility divers modes and attitudes of speech and that the latter seizes articulately on all possible objects with a vivid intimacy as well as a large sense of their interrelations within a world-harmony.
We have also to speak in terms of "planes" of expression. For, no matter how high or wide or deep the state of consciousness, how supra-intellectual the mystic's realisation, the poetic expression may take the mould of the mere mind's manner of utterance, the moved imaginative speech proper to the plane distinguished by Sri Aurobindo as the creative intelligence which is no more than a particular intensified operation of the same mental consciousness we find in the bulk of human activities. Most poetry is written from the creative intelligence, though the founts of it are more inward, more secret than those of our habitual mental life. Rarely do these founts deliver not only the significance but also the very word and rhythm native to their greater inwardness and secrecy. Poetic integralism would lie in an expression springing straight from the highest, widest, deepest fount of spiritual experience and vision instead of getting shaped in the mere mind or even predominantly in the intermediate planes whose lights and shadows play in the usual universe of poetry.
How the style and word-power of the creative intelligence differs from the Aurobindonian expression which we may consider poetically integral can be concretely seen if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of Milton's Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri:
* First published in The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. A Commemorative Symposium edited by Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg (Geórge Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1960).
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A Legend and a Symbol. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit:
Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast abyss
And mad'st it pregnant.¹
He also addresses the original spiritual Light:
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!....
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God as with a mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.²
About the advent of this illumination, we may quote him further in the verses:
But now at last the sacred influence
Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of the Night
A glimmering dawn.³
He has depicted too an ethereal revelation, an entrance to God's grandeur, in the illumined distances:
The work as of a kingly palace-gate,
With frontispiece of diamond and gold
Embellished, thick with sparkling orient gems
The portal shone, inimitable on Earth
By model, or by shading pencil drawn.4
Now look at Savitri:
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
¹. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 19-22.
². Ibid., Book III, lines 6, 9-12.
³ . Ibid., Book II, lines 1034-7.
4. Ibid., Book III, lines 505-9.
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Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;.. .5
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps;....
Intervening in a mindless universe,
Its message crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy
And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness's depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:...6
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.7
The passages from Milton are blank verse in a philosophico-religious mood conveying strongly-cut imaged ideas in a tone of exalted emotion with the help of words that have a powerful stateliness and a rhythm that has a broad sweep. But Milton's substance, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out in a letter, "is - except at certain heights - mental, mentally grand and noble"8 and his "architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no
5. Savitri, SABCL Vol. 28, p. 1.
6. Ibid., pp. 2-3:
7. Ibid., p. 3.
8. Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL Vol. 9, p. 347.
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deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence".9 He may employ certain turns resembling Sri Aurobindo's and there is the largeness of breath which seems to make his suggestions break through the intellectual grip, yet on attending closely we miss the sheer spiritual vision going home to us with a vibrant vastness and stirring up in us an intuitive sense of mystical realities. Something in the rhythm remains unsupported by the sight and the word. God, Light, Infinity, Heaven do not reveal their own body, as it were, and do not utter themselves in their own tongue: they are reflected in the mental imagination and given forceful speech there. But because of the rhythm the critical ear is likely to be deceived about the mostly intellectual-imaginative quality of Milton and it is with this possibility in view that Sri Aurobindo, for all his admiration for the poetry of Paradise Lost, has warned a disciple-poet who wanted to write authentically of the supra-intellectual: "The interference of the mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."10
What Sri Aurobindo here terms writing from "above" is generally spoken of by him as "overhead" poetry and described as an inspiration that is felt in yogic experience to be descending from some ether of self-existent consciousness extended boundlessly beyond the brain-clamped human mind. This overhead inspiration can come even when one is not a practising mystic, but then it manifests like a shining accident and is a rare note. Milton himself at times catches it suddenly and at least in one line he has it, according to Sri Aurobindo, at its highest pitch:
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity.11
Sri Aurobindo distinguishes a fourfold gradation of the overhead planes as having acted so far in the world's literature on a few occasions: higher mind, illumined mind, intuition, overmind. On all these planes the experience of the Infinite is automatic, and there is a light of direct knowledge of the universe's fundamental being and becoming. But the light varies in intensity. The higher mind is like a broad clear day revealing
9. Letters of Sri Aurobindo, SABCL Vol. 29, p. 807.
10. Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL Vol. 9, p. 347.
11. Milton, op. cit., Book II, line 148.
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through a spiritual rather than intellectual thought the divine substance and its multiform activity: it is, as it were, the arche-type of the mental Miltonic, the plane active behind Milton's grand style but unable to send its own spiritual stuff of thought in an authentic shape and motion through his genius. The illumined mind is more a luminous seeing than a luminous thinking: it is a play of spiritual sight, the divine secrecies are disclosed through a crowd of colourful yet subtle images in a swift or slow design with thought as a subordinate element. One may say it is the plane active behind Shakespeare's leap and coruscation and felicitous ingenuity of the life-force but mostly translated into vivid passion and sensation and idea-impulse instead of being transmitted in its multi-toned seerhood of divine values. Intuition is not what usually passes by that name, a quick abbreviated movement of thought itself or a rapid seizing through the vital drive: it is a profound penetration into the essence of things by a spontaneous inner intimacy on a super-human level. It differs from the illumined mind in that it is a flash by which divine realities bare themselves rather than are bared by a flood of illumination thrown upon them. Heart-beat upon essential heart-beat of Truth is felt more than Truth's opulent limb-gesture and robe-undulation. Intuition is at work behind the revealing reticence that is the Dantesque utterance: only, the style of the decisive sparing stroke in the Divina Commedia mostly converts into a mental incisiveness the sheer piercing Truth-touch. Even in that touch, however, the direct knowledge is not complete; the whole sense of the divine being and becoming is not caught in pure identity.
The entire directness is really the privilege of the supermind, the sovereign Truth-consciousness that is the special dynamic of the Aurobindonian yoga, but a radiant representative of it is possessed by the overmind which is what the world has hitherto known as the extreme Godhead. Also, the overmind vision, word and rhythm are at once intense and immense to the utmost. The line of poetry charged with them carries vastly a movement as if from everlasting to everlasting - thought, image, expression, vibration bear a value and form in which all the qualities of the other planes fuse in something diversely ultimate and variously transfigured by an inmost oneness with the cosmic harmony and with the supracosmic mystery. The voice of the overmind is the
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mantra, the eternal word spoken of and sought for and often found by the Vedic Rishis. Perhaps it is the pressure of this voice that from far behind gives, in Homer, through his nearness to something elemental, a ring of greatness and an air of divinity to everything said by him and endows his power of straightforward yet splendid speech with a rush of oceanic sound. But Homer's eye is ever thrown outward. Physical gesture, movement, act - these always he seeks to interpret. A subtilisation and elevation of the sheer physical on its own level, rather than a sweeping condensation of the pure spiritual without any loss, is the genius animating the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The typical mark of the passages quoted from Sri Aurobindo is the general overhead atmosphere breathing one or another level beyond the mind, either distinctly or in combination, and everywhere a lift towards the mantra, culminating now and again in that sovereign speech itself. The higher mind inspiration passes distinctly through
and mixes with that of the illumined mind in
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps
and is replaced completely by it with
The illumined mind works up to the intuition in the phrases about the "gold panel and opalescent hinge" fixed by the wandering hand of dawn-glamour, and blends exquisitely with the intuitive revelation in
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
We may note also something of the ineffable amplitude that is the overmind's power in all the lines, a pervading influence which perhaps looms out most undeniably in another verse:
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.
It is not always easy to distinguish the overhead style or to get perfectly the drift of its suggestion. There must be as much as possible a stilling of ourselves, an in-drawn hush ready to listen
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to the uncommon speech; and we must help the hush to absorb successfully that speech by repeatedly reading the poetry aloud, since it is primarily through the rhythm that the psychological state with which overhead verses are a-thrill echoes within us, quickening the eye to open wider and wider on spiritual secrecies and the brain to acquire a more and more true reflex of the transcendental that is the truth of things, waiting for manifestation.
The truth of things, however, need not always be concerned with the occult and spiritual and we should be ready to perceive the overhead utterance, even the mantra, in a delineation of earthly matters. Of course, Sri Aurobindo could not be loyal to his revelatory mission if Savitri did not give wide scope to the occult and spiritual themselves and, with vision and rhythm proper to the summits, seek to poetise them, either
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone¹² -
or the domains of divine dynamism, either the solitary Unmanifest or the "Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe" -
O radiant fountain of the world's delight
World-free and unattainable above,
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek thee outside and never find¹³-
either the levels and beings of the mid-worlds or the mysteries and travails of cosmic evolution, like that dreadful commerce of Savitri with one to whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Assignor of the ordeal and the path
Who uses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow for the spirit's goads,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.14
¹². Ibid.. SABCL Vol. 28, pp. 33-34. ¹³. Ibid., p. 345. 14. Ibid., p. 17.
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Yes, Savitri would hardly be the unique poem that it is if it did not try in passages like these to bring home to us the Unknown as it is in itself. However, it is a poem of many layers and no mean part of its excellence lies in its deploying the imponderables of sight and sound and remaining intensely spiritual even when its innumerable ranges and changes are not ostensibly concerned with spirituality. It is legend as well as symbol, a story with many scenes and levels of development at the same time that it is instinct with a mystical light. That light itself plays over many regions and does not fail to cover most aspects of world-thought.
There is a variety not only of matter but also of style in Savitri. The double phenomenon may be illustrated in several ways. The Homeric note of simplicity and depth is struck:
But Narad answered not; silent he sat,
Knowing that words are vain and Fate is lord.15
The Virgilian accent of poignancy and dignity reaches us:
His words were theirs who live unforced to grieve
And help by calm the swaying wheels of life
And the long restlessness of transient things
And the trouble and passion of the unquiet world.16
Homer and Virgil combine in an Aurobindonian tertium quid:
Bear; thou shall find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.17
The descent as of a beatific Beatrice into Inferno, untouched by its flames, is felt with a typical Dantesque brevity of suggestion at the end:
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.18
15. Ibid., p. 423
16. Ibid., p. 427.
17. Ibid., pp. 453-54
18. Ibid., p. 592.
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We have glimpses of Nature's moods, coming with a powerful haunting evocation as in that transference into English of a phrase of Vyasa:
some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry.19
or with an exquisite profundity that hints at the whole secret of art-expression:
I caught for some eternal eye the sudden
Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool.20
Glimpses of the human situation mix often with those of natural objects, as in that simile cosmically sublime in its sweep:
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone.²¹
The inner strength of the great is also made intimately vivid in that gesture of Savitri when, confronting Death's subtle arguments and refusing to employ the frail artifices of Reason, which are vain because always open to doubt, she chooses to match all fate with the nude dynamism of her heart and soul in a terrific line which we may term, in a phraseology popular today, superexistentialist:
I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.²²
Here is an utterance deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades:
Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
19. Ibid., p. 385
20. Ibid., p. 405
21. Ibid., p. 460.
22. Ibid.. p. 594.
.
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Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life:
Before thy memory,
I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died.²³
The insufficiency of the mere reason as compared either to the inner soul's moved perception or to the puissant supra-intellectual sight is pictured with an inspired conceit the Elizabethans or the Metaphysicals would have welcomed with a whoop:
A million faces wears her knowledge here
And every face is turbaned with a doubt.24
As unexpectedly striking and happy, though in a different key of inspiration, is the simile applied to the truth-direct ways of the higher harmonies of consciousness to which Savitri's father Aswapathy climbed:
There was no gulf between the thought and fact;
Ever they replied like bird to calling bird.25
The felicity and the novelty that are prominent features of Sri Aurobindo's style in Savitri take at times a compact, strangely figured epigrammatic form heightened as well as enlightened the more by being immediately followed by a verse of simple surprise:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
The impossible God's sign of things to be.26
Ancient motifs and motifs of our own day are equally caught up by the integral inspiration. Even modern totalitarianism is seized in its essence in the occult figure of it that from demoniac planes behind earth precipitates amongst us the Hitlerite power and propaganda:
²³. Lines 198-9.
24. Savitri, SABCL Vol. 28, p. 251
25. Ibid., p. 327.
26. Ibid., p. 52.
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A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue:
Its hard and shameless clamour filling space
And threatening all who dared to listen to truth
Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;
A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,
And braggart dogmas shouted in the night
Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god
The pride of its abysmal absolute.27
Even the new physics that has replaced the classical concepts in which "all was precise, rigid, indubitable" enters the poetry:
Once more the world was made a wonder-web,
A magic's process in a magical space,
An unintelligible miracle's depths
Whose source is lost in the ineffable....
A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance
In Energy's stupendous tripping whirl:...
The rare-point sparse substratum Universe
On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face.
Alone a process of events was there
And Nature's plastic and protean change
And, strong by death to slay or to create,
The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force.28
But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The overhead breath flows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is remarkable, with its dense humming sound dextrously mixed with other expressive vibrations, and all moving in a metre packing fourteen syllables and a predominantly anapaestic run into a scheme of five strong stresses which are helped to beat out clearly as well as to contain the overflowing music by massed consonants in several places. The five i's and the four o's suggest at once penetration and expansion, the latter as if from an all-round fastness. The v in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the v in "invisible" not only supports and
27. Ibid., p. 216. 28. Ibid., pp. 254-55.
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increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring in that particular word and in the midst of several syllables successively short in quantity the marvellous carrying of the power of fission into the mystery of the infinitesimal that constitutes the unseen atomic nucleus. Then there are the two m's with their movement of lip-closure corresponding to the closed secrecy that is being spoken of and they are preceded and followed by the labials b and p respectively which correspond to the initial motive of breaking open the closed secrecy and to the final accomplishment of that explosion. The hard strokes of the three t's mingle a further nuance of breaking. The f of "force" picks up again the fission-power of the v's and completes it with its own acute out-loosening sound accompanied by the somewhat rolled sibilance at the end. The sibilance itself, giving clear body to the softer sound of the pair of s's earlier in the line, achieves the idea of a full escape of the power that was so far not sweeping out of the charmed circle, as it were, of the atom's vibrant energy.
Indeed, the craftsmanship of the line is superb, but its success is different from what most poets might have attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an overhead consciousness. One could be grandly resonant or else deploy a crowded colourful strength and prove a perfect poet thereby, yet fail to charge one's utterance with that vision-thrill - especially when it is a question of infusing into verses about apparently non-mystical subjects the very enthousiasmos of the mantra. Sri Aurobindo succeeds everywhere because he not only is familiar both as mystic and artist with the magnitudes and intensities of our subliminal and supraliminal being, but has also endeavoured to lay on the poor dust of the outer self "the high Transcendent's sunlike hands". Man's earth-born heart is never forsaken by him and it is shown, on the one side, the misery with which it falls short of the Infinite and, on the other, the apocalyptic fulfilment here and now that is possible to it. And the fulfilment is again and again depicted in terms which go home to us and which set forth in a colossal clarity the eternal in the movements of time. For, Sri Aurobindo did not write his epic of 23,813 lines with the disposition of either a sworn surrealist wedded to the obscurely entangled or a strict symbolist cherishing a cult of the glimmeringly elusive. Behind the poet in
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him is the master of the integral yoga whose work, however distant on occasion from familiar experience, was to enlighten and not to puzzle and who, for all his roots in India's hoary past of spirituality, was yet a modern among the moderns and the seer of a new mystical progression, a collective advance in dynamic consciousness from mind to supermind, a whole world evolving Godwards and breaking the fetters not only of political or social tyranny but also of mortal ignorance. A democracy of the Divine liberating the human was his goal, as in those words he puts into the mouth of his Savitri:
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit's liberty I ask for all.29
29. Ibid., p. 649.
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