The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 1

I

A Yoga of The Art of Life

(1)

WHEN Sri Aurobindo said, "Our Yoga is not for ourselves but for humanity," many heaved a sigh of relief and thought that the great soul was after all not entirely lost to the world, his was hot one more name added to the long list of Sannyasins that India has been producing age after age without much profit either to herself or to the human society (or even perhaps to their own selves). People understood his Yoga to be a modern one, dedicated to the service of humanity. If service to humanity was not the very sum and substance of his spirituality, it was, at least, the fruitful end and consummation. His Yoga was a sort of art to explore and harness certain unseen powers that can better and ameliorate human life in a more

Page 1

successful way than mere rational scientific methods can hope to do.

Sri Aurobindo saw that the very core of his teaching was being missed by this common interpretation of his saying. So he changed his words and said, "Our Yoga is not for humanity but for the Divine." But I am afraid this change of front, this volte-face, as it seemed, was not welcomed in many quarters; for thereby all hope of having him back for the work of the country or the world appeared to be totally lost and he came to be, looked upon again as an irrevocable "metaphysical" dreamer, aloof from physical things and barren, even like the Immutable Brahman.

(2)

In order to get a nearer approach to the ideal for which Sri Aurobindo is labouring, we may combine with advantage the two mottoes he has given us and say that his mission is to find and express the Divine in humanity. This is the service he means to render to humanity, viz., to manifest and

Page 2

embody in it the Divine: his goal is not merely an amelioration, but a total change and transformation, the divinisation of human life.

Here also one must guard against certain misconceptions that are likely to occur. The transformation of human life does not necessarily mean that the entire humanity will be changed into a race of gods or divine beings; it means the evolution or appearance on earth of a superior type of humanity, even as man evolved out of animality as a superior type of animality, not that the entire animal kingdom was changed into humanity.

As regards the possibility of such a consummation,—Sri Aurobindo says it is not a possibility but an inevitability—one must remember that the force that will bring about the result and is already at work is not any individual human power, however great it may be, but the Divine himself, it is the Divine's own Shakti that is labouring for the destined end.

Here is the very heart of the mystery, the master-key to the problem. The advent of the superhuman or divine race, however stupendous

Page 3

or miraculous the phenomenon may appear to be, can become a thing of practical actuality, precisely because it is no human agency that has undertaken it but the Divine himself in his supreme potency and wisdom and love. The descent of the Divine into the ordinary human nature in order to purify and transform it and be lodged there is the whole secret of the sadhana in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. The sadhaka has only to be quiet and silent, calmly aspiring, open and acquiescent and receptive to the one Force; he need not and should not try to do things by his independent personal effort, but get them done or let them be done for him in the dedicated consciousness by the Divine Master and Guide. All other Yogas or spiritual disciplines in the past envisaged ah ascent of the consciousness, its sublimation into the consciousness of the Spirit and its fusion and dissolution there in the end. The descent of the Divine Consciousness to prepare its definitive home in the dynamic and pragmatic human nature, if considered at all, was not the main theme of the past efforts and achievements. Furthermore, the descent

Page 4

spoken of here is the descent, not of a divine consciousness—for there are many varieties of divine consciousness—but of the Divine's own consciousness, of the Divine himself with his Shakti. For it is that that is directly working out this evolutionary transformation of the age.

It is not my purpose here to enter into details as to the exact meaning of the descent, how it happens and what are its lines of activity and the results brought about. For it is indeed an actual descent that happens: the Divine Light leans down first into the mind and begins its purificatory work there— although it is always the inner heart which first recognises the Divine Presence and gives its assent to the Divine action—for the mind, the higher mind that is to say, is the summit of the ordinary human consciousness and receives more easily and readily the Radiances that descend. From the Mind the Light filters into the denser regions of the emotions and desires, of life activity and vital dynamism; finally, it gets into brute Matter itself, the hard and obscure rock of the physical body, for that too has to be illumined and made the very

Page 5

form and figure of the Light supernal. The Divine in his descending Grace is the Master-Architect who is building slowly and surely the many-chambered and many-storied edifice that is human nature and human life into the mould of the Divine Truth in its perfect play and supreme expression. But this is a matter which can be closely considered when one is already well within the mystery of the path and has acquired the elementary essentials of an initiate.

Another question that troubles and perplexes the ordinary human mind is as to the time when the thing will be done. Is it now or a millennium hence or at some astronomical distance in future, like the cooling of the sun, as someone has suggested for an analogy. In view of the magnitude of the work one might with reason say that the whole eternity is there before us, and a century or even a millennium should not be grudged to such a labour—for it is nothing less than an undoing of untold millenniums in the past and the building of a far-flung futurity. However, as we have said, since it is the Divine's own

Page 6

work and since Yoga means a concentrated and involved process of action, effectuating in a minute what would perhaps take years to accomplish in the natural course, one can expect the work to be done sooner rather than later. Indeed, the ideal is one of here and now—here upon this earth of material existence and now in this life, in this very body—not hereafter or elsewhere. How long exactly that will mean, depends on many factors, but a few decades on this side or the other do not matter very much.

As to the extent of realisation, we say again that that is not a matter of primary consideration. It is not the quantity but the substance that counts. Even if it were a small nucleus it would be sufficient, at least for the beginning, provided it is the real;- the genuine thing—

Swalpamapyasya dharmasya trayate mahato bhayat.

Now, if it is asked what is the proof of it all, how can one be sure that one is not running after a mirage, a chimera? We can

Page 7

only answer with the adage, the proof of the pudding is in the eating thereof.

(3)

I have a word to add finaly in justification of the title of this essay. For, it may be asked, how can sprituality be considered as one of the Arts or given an honourable place in their domain ?

From a certain point of view, from the point of view of essentials and inner realities, it would appear that spirituality is, at least, the basis of the arts, if not the highest art. If art is meant to express the soul of things, and since the true soul of things is the divine element in them, then certainly spirituality, the discipline of coming in conscious contact with the Spirit, the Divine, must be accorded the regal seat in the hierarchy of the arts. Also, spirituality is the greatest and the most difficult of the arts; for it is the art of life. To make of life a perfect work of beauty, pure in its lines, faultless in its rhythm, replete with strength, iridescent with light, vibrant with delight—an

Page 8

embodiment of the Divine, in a word—is the highest ideal of spirituality; viewed as such, spirituality—the spirituality that Sri Aurobindo practises—is the ne plus ultra

Page 9

II

Nature's Own Yoga

(1)

Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is in the direct line of Nature's own Yoga. Nature has a Yoga' which she follows unfailingly and inevitably—for it is her innermost law of being. Yoga means, in essence, a change or transformation of consciousness, a heightening and broadening of consciousness which is effected by communion or union or identification with a higher and vaster consciousness.

This process of a developing consciousness in Nature is precisely what is known as Evolution. It is the bringing out and fixing of a higher and higher principle of consciousness, hitherto involved and concealed behind the veil, in the earth consciousness as a dynamic factor in Nature's manifest working. Thus, the first stage of evolution is the status

Page 10

of inconscient Matter, of the lifeless physical elements; the second stage is that of the semi-conscious life in the plant, the third that of the conscious life in the animal, and finally the fourth stage, where we stand at present, is that of the embodied self-conscious life in man.

The course of evolution has not come to a stop with man and the next stage, Sri Aurobindo says, which Nature envisages and is labouring to bring out and establish is the life now superconscious to us, embodied in a still higher type of created being, that of the superman or god-man. The principle of consciousness which will determine the nature and build of this new being is a spiritual principle beyond the mental principle which man now incarnates: it may be called the Supermind or Gnosis.

For, till now Mind has been the last, term of the evolutionary consciousness—Mind as developed in man is the highest instrument built up and organised by Nature through which the self-conscious being can express itself. That is why the Buddha said: Mind

Page 11

is first of all principles, Mind is the highest of all principles: indeed Mind is the constituent of all principles—mano puvvangama dhāmma. The consciousness beyond mind has not yet been made a patent and dynamic element in the life upon earth; it has been glimpsed or entered into in varying degrees and modes by saints and seers; it has cast its derivative illuminations in the creative activities of poets and artists, in the finer and nobler urges of heroes and great men of action. But the utmost that has been achieved, the summit reached in that direction, as exampled in spiritual disciplines, involves a withdrawal from the evolutionary cycle, a merging and an absorption into the static status that is altogether beyond it, that lies, as it were, at the other extreme—the Spirit in itself, Atman, Brahman, Sachchidananda, Nirvana, the One without a second, the Zero without a first.

The first contact that one has with this static supra-reality is through the higher ranges of the mind : a direct and closer communion is established through a plane which is just

Page 12

above the mind—the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it. The Overmind dissolves or transcends the ego-consciousness which limits the being to its individualised formation bounded by an outward and narrow frame or sheath of mind, life and body ; it reveals the universal Self and Spirit, the cosmic godhead and its myriad forces throwing up myriad forms; the world-existence there appears as a play of ever-shifting veils upon the face of one ineffable reality, as a mysterious cycle of perpetual creation and distruction—it is the overwhelming vision given by Sri Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita. At the same time, the initial and most intense experience which this cosmic consciousness brings is the extreme relativity, contingency and transitoriness of the whole flux, and a necessity seems logically and psychologically imperative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness.

This has been the highest consummation, the supreme goal which the purest spiritual experience and the deepest aspiration of the human consciousness generally sought to attain.

Page 13

But in this view, the world or creation or Nature came in the end to be looked upon as fundamentally a product of Ignorance : ignorance and suffering and incapacity and death were declared to be the very hall-mark of things terrestrial. The Light that dwells above and beyond can be made to shed for a while some kind of lustre upon the mortal darkness but never altogether to remove or change it—to live in the full light, to be in and of the Light means to pass beyond. Not that there have not been other strands and types of spiritual experiences and aspirations, but the one we are considering has always struck the major chord and dominated and drowned all the rest.

But the initial illusory consciousness of the Overmind need not at all lead to the static Brahmic consciousness or Sunyam alone. As a matter of fact, there is in this particular processus of consciousness a hiatus between the two, between Maya and Brahman, as though one has to leap from, the one into the other somehow. This hiatus is filled up in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga by the principle of Supermind,

Page 14

not synthetic-analytic¹ in knowledge like Overmind and the highest mental intelligence, but unescapably unitarian even in the utmost diversity. Supermind is the" Truth-consciousness at once static and dynamic, self-existent and creative: in Supermind the Brahmic consciousness — Sachchidananda — is ever self-aware and ever manifested and embodied in fundamental truth-powers and truth-forms for the play of creation; it is the plane where the One breaks out into the Many and the Many still remain one, being and knowing themselves to be but various self-expressions of the One ; it develops the

¹ The Supermind is not merely synthetic. "The Supermind is synthetic only on the lowest spaces of itself, where it has to prepare the principles of Over-mind,—synthesis is necessary only where analysis has taken place, one has dissected everything, put in pieces (analysis), so one has to piece together. But Supermind is unitarian, has never divided up, so it does not need to add and piece together the parts and fragments. It has always held the conscious Many together in the conscious One."

Sri Aurobindo

Page 15

spiritual archetypes, the divine names and forms of all individualisations of an evolving existence.

The Upanishads speak of a solar and a lunar Path in the spiritual consciousness. Perhaps they have some reference to these two lines—one through the Mayic consciousness of the Overmind enters into the static Bliss, ecstatic Nihil, and the other mounts still farther to the solar status which is a mass, a sea, an infinity of that light and ecstasy but which can at the same time express and embody itself as the creative Truth-consciousness (surya savitri).

In the Supermind things exist in their perfect spiritual reality; each is consciously the divine reality in its transcendent essence, its cosmic extension, its spiritual individuality; the diversity of a manifested existence is there, but the mutually exclusive separativeness has not yet arisen. The ego, the knot of separativity, appears at a later and lower stage of involution ; what is here is indivisible nexus of individualising centres of the one eternal truth of being. Where Supermind and Overmind

Page 16

meet, one can see the multiple godheads, each distinct in his own truth and beauty and power and yet all together forming the one supreme consciousness infinitely composite and inalienably integral. But stepping back into Supermind one sees something more— Oneness gathering into itself all diversity, not destroying it, but annulling and forbidding the separative consciousness that is the beginning of Ignorance. The first shadow of the Illusory Consciousness, the initial possibility of the movement of Ignorance comes in when the supramental light enters the penumbra of the mental sphere. The movement of Supermind is the movement of light without obscurity, straight, unwavering, unswerving, absolute. The Force here contains and holds in their oneness of Reality the manifold but not separated lines of essential and unalloyed truth: its march is the inevitable progression of each one assured truth entering into and upholding every other and therefore its creation, play or action admits of no trial or stumble or groping or deviation; for each truth rests on all others and on that which harmonises them

Page 17

all and does not act as a Power diverging from and even competing with other Powers of being. In the Overmind commences the play of divergent possibilities—the simple, direct, united and absolute certainties of the supra-mental consciousness retire, as it were, a step behind and begin to work themselves out through the interaction first of separately individualised and then of contrary and contradictory forces. In the Overmind there is a conscious underlying Unity but yet each Power, Truth, Aspect of that Unity is encouraged to work out its possibilities as if it were sufficient to itself and the others are used by it for its own enhancement—until in the denser and darker reaches below Overmind this turns out a thing of blind conflict and battle and, as it would appear, of chance survival. Creation or manifestation originally means the concretisation or devolution of the powers of Conscious Being into a play of united diversity; but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the

Page 18

Divine Consciousness. Creation as it descends towards the Ignorance becomes an involution of the Spirit through Mind and Life into Matter; evolution is a movement backward, a return journey from Matter towards the Spirit: it is the unravelling, the gradual disclosure and deliverance of the Spirit, the ascension and revelation of the involved consciousness through a series of awakenings — Matter awakening into life, life awakening into mind and mind now seeking to awaken into something beyond the mind, into a power of conscious Spirit.

The apparent or actual result of the movement of Nescience—of Involution—has been an increasing negation of the Spirit, but its hidden purpose is ultimately to embody the Spirit in Matter, to express here below in cosmic Time-Space the splendours of the timeless Reality. The material body came into existence bringing with it inevitably, as it seemed, mortality; it appeared even to be fashioned out of mortality, in order that in this very frame and field of mortality, Immortality, the eternal Spirit Consciousness which

Page 19

is the secret truth and reality in Time itself as well as behind it, might be established and that the Divine might be possessed, or rather, possess itself not in one unvarying mode of the static consciousness, as it does even now behind the cosmic play, but in the play itself and in the multiple mode of the terrestrial existence.

(2)

The secret of evolution, I have said, is an urge towards the release and unfoldment of consciousness out of an apparent unconsciousness. In the early stages the movement is very slow and gradual; there it is Nature's original unconscious process. In man it acquires the possiblity of a conscious and therefore swifter and concentrated process. And this is in fact the function of Yoga proper, viz., to bring about the evolution of consciousness by hastening the process of Nature through the self-conscious will of man.

An organ in the human being has been especially developed to become the effective

Page 20

instrument of this accelerated Yogic process— the self-consciousness which I referred to as being the distinctive characteristic of man is a function of this organ. It is his soul, his "psychic being"; originally it is the spark of the Divine Consciousness which came down and became involved in Matter and has been endeavouring since to release itself through the upward march of evolution. It is this which presses on continually as the stimulus to the evolutionary movement; and in man it has attained sufficient growth and power and has come so far to the front from behind the veil that it can now lead and mould his external consciousness. It is also the channel through which the Divine Consciousness can flow down into the inferior levels of human nature. It is the "being no bigger than the thumb ever seated within the heart", spoken of in the Upanishads. It is likewise the basis of true individuality and personal identity. It is again the reflection or expression in evolutionary Nature of one's essential self—jivātman—that is above, an eternal portion of the Divine, one with the Divine and yet not dissolved and lost in it. The psychic

Page 21

being is thus on the one hand in direct contact with the Divine and the higher consciousness, and on the other it is the secret upholder and controller (bhartā, antaryāmin) of the inferior consciousness, the hidden nucleus round which the body and the life and the mind of the individual are built up and organised.

The first decisive step in Yoga is taken when one becomes conscious of the psychic being, or, looked at from the other side, when the psychic being comes forward and takes possession of the external being, begins to initiate and influence the movements of the mind and life and body and gradually free them from the ordinary round of ignorant nature. The awakening of the psychic being means, as I have said, not only a deepening and heightening of the consciousness and its release from the obscurity and limitation of the inferior Prakriti, confined to the lower threefold status, into what is behind and beyond; it means also a return of the deeper and higher consciousness upon the lower hemisphere and a consequent purification and illumination and regeneration of the latter.

Page 22

Finally, when the psychic being is in full self-possession and power, it can be the vehicle of the direct supramental consciousness— which will then be able to act freely and absolutely for the entire transformation of the external nature, its transfiguration into a perfect body of the Truth-consciousness—in a word, its divinisation.

This then is the secret of, not the renunciation and annulment, but the transformation of the ordinary human nature:-—fifst of all, its psychicisation, that is to say, making it move and live and be in communion and identification with the light of the psychic being, and, secondly, through the soul and the ensouled mind and life and body, to open out into the supramental consciousness and let it come down here below and work and achieve.

The soul or the true being in man uplifted in the supramental consciousness and at the same time coming forward to possess a divinsed mind and life and body as an instrument and channel of its self-expression and an embodiment of the Divine Will and Purpose—such is the goal that Nature

Page 23

seeking to realise at present through her evolutionary elan. It is to this labour that man has been called so that in and through him the destined transcendence and transformation can take place.

It is not easy, however, nor is it necessary for the moment to envisage in detail what this divinised man would be like, externally— his mode of outward being and living, kim asita vrajeta kim, as Arjuna queried—or how the collective life of the new humanity would function or what would be the composition of its social fabric. For what is happening is a living process, an organic growth; it is being-elaborated through the actions and reactions of multitudinous forces and conditions, known and unknown; the precise configuration of the final outcome cannot be predicted with exactitude. But the Power that is at work is omniscient; it is selecting, rejecting, correcting, fashioning, creating, co-ordinating elements in accordance with and by the drive of the inviolable law of Truth and Harmony that reigns in Light's "own home"—swe dame—the Supermind.

Page 24

It is also to be noted that as mind is not the last limit of the march of evolution, even so the progress of evolution will not stop with the manifestation and embodiment of the Supermind. There are other still higher principles beyond and they too presumably await manifestation and embodiment on earth. Creation has no beginning in time (anādi) nor has it an end (ananta). It is an eternal process of the unravelling of the mysteries of the Infinite. Only, it may be said that with the Supermind the creation here enters into a different order of existence. Before it there was the domain of Ignorance, after it will come the reign of Light and Knowledge. Mortality has been the governing principle of life on earth till now; it will be replaced by the consciousness of immortality. Evolution has proceeded through struggle and pain; hereafter it will be a spontaneous, harmonious and happy flowering.

Now, with regard to the time that the present stage of evolution is likely to take for its fulfilment, one can presume that since or if the specific urge and stress has manifested

Page 25

and come up to the front, this very fact would show that the problem has become a problem of actuality, and even that it can be dealt with as if it had to be solved now or never. We have said that in man, with man's self-consciousness or the consciousness of the psychic being as the instrument, evolution has attained the capacity of a swift and concentrated process, wich is the process of Yoga ; the process will become swifter and more concentrated, the more that instrument grows and gathers power and is infused with the divine afflatus. In fact, evolution has been such a process of gradual acceleration in tempo from the very beginning. The earliest stage, for example, the stage of dead Matter, of the play of the mere chemical force was a very, very long one ; it took millions and millions of years to come to the point when the manifestation of life became possible. But the period of elementary life, as manifested in the plant world that followed, although it too lasted a good many millions of years, was much briefer than the preceding period—it ended with the advent of the first animal form. The age of animal

Page 26

life, again, has been very much shorter than that of the plant life before man came upon earth. And man is already more than a million or two years old—it is fully time that a higher order of being should be created out of him.

Page 27

III

SRI AUROBINDO AND HIS ' SCHOOL'

ACONSIDERABLE amount of vague misunderstanding and misapprehension seems to exist in the minds of a certain section of our people as to what Sri Aurobindo is doing in his retirement at Pondicherry. On the other hand, a very precise exposition, an exact formula of what he is not doing has been curiously furnished by a well-known patriot in his indictment of what he chooses to call the "Pondicherry School" of contemplation. But he has arrived at this formula by "openly and fearlessly" affirming what does not exist; for the things that Sri Aurobindo is accused of doing are just the things that he is not doing. In the first place, Sri Aurobindo is not doing "peaceful contemplation"; in the second place, he is not doing active propaganda either; in the third place, he is not doing prānāyāma or

Page 28

even dhyāna in the ordinary sense of the word; and, lastly, he is not proclaiming or following the maxim that "although action may be tolerated as good, his particular brand of Yoga is something higher and better."

Evidently the eminent politician and his school of activism are labouring under a Himalayan confusion: when they speak of Sri Aurobindo, they really have in their mind some of the old schools of spiritual discipline. But one of the marked aspects of Sri Aurobindo's teaching and practice has been precisely his insistence on putting aside the inert and life-shunning quietism, illusionism, asceticism and monasticism of a latter day and decadent India. These ideals are perhaps as much obstacles in his way as in the way of the activistic school. Only Sri Aurobindo has not had the temerity to say that "it is a weakness to seek refuge in contemplation" or to suggest that a Buddha was a weakling or a Shankara a poltroon.

This much as regards what Sri Aurobindo is not doing; let us now turn and try to understand what he is doing. The distinguished

Page 29

man of action speaks of conquering Nature and fighting her. Adopting this war-like imagery, we can affirm that Sri Aurobindo's work is just such a battle and conquest. But the question is, what is "nature" and what is the kind of conquest that is sought, how are we to fight and what are the required arms and implements? A good general should foresee all this, frame his plan of campaign accordingly and then only take the field. The above mentioned leader proposes "ceaseless and unselfish action" as the way to fight and conquer Nature. He who speaks thus does not know and cannot mean what he says.

European science is conquering Nature in a way. It has attained to a certain kind and measure, in some fields a great measure, of control and conquest; but however great or striking it may be in its own province, it does not touch man in his more intimate reality and does not bring about any true change in his destiny or his being. For the most vital part of nature is the region of the life-forces, the powers of disease and age and death, of strife and greed and lust—all the instincts of

Page 30

the brute in man, all the dark aboriginal forces, the forces of ignorance that form the very-groundwork of man's nature and his society. And then, as we rise next to the world of the mind, we find a twilight region where falsehood masquerades as truth, where prejudices move as realities, where notions rule as ideals.

This is the present nature of man, with its threefold nexus of mind and life and body, that stands there to be fought and conquered. This is the inferior nature, of which the ancients spoke, that holds man down inexorably to a lower dharma, imperfect mode of life— the life that is and has been the human order till today. No amount of ceaseless action, however selflessly done, can move this wheel of Nature even a hair's breadth away from the path that it has chalked out from of old. Human nature and human society have been built up and are run by the forces of this inferior nature, and whatever shuffling and re-shuffling we may make in its apparent factors and elements, the general scheme and fundamental form of life will never change. To displace earth (and to conquer nature

Page 31

means nothing less than that) and give it another orbit, one must find a fulcrum outside earth.

Sri Aurobindo does not preach flight from life and a retreat into the silent and passive Infinite; the goal of life is not, in his view, the extinction of life. Neither is he satisfied on that account to hold that life is best lived in the ordinary round of its un-regenerate dharma. If the first is a blind alley, the second is a vicious circle,—both lead nowhere.

Sri Aurobindo's Sadhana starts from the perception of a Power that is beyond the ordinary nature yet is its inevitable master, a fulcrum, as we have said, outside the earth. For what is required first is the discovery and manifestation of a new soul-consciousness in man which will bring about by the very pressure and working out of its self-rule an absolute reversal of man's nature. It is the Asuras who are now holding sway over humanity, for man has allowed himself so long to be built in the image of the Asura; to dislodge the Asuras, the Gods in their

Page 32

sovereign might have to be forged in the human being and brought into play. It is a stupendous task, some would say impossible; but it is very far removed from quietism or passivism. Sri Aurobindo is in retirement, but it is a retirement only from the outward field of present physical activities and their apparent actualities, not from the true forces and action of life. It is the retreat necessary to one who has to go back into himself to conquer a new plane of creative power,— an entrance right into the world of basic forces, of fundamental realities, into the flaming heart of things where all actualities are born and take their first shape. It is the discovery of a power-house of tremendous energism and of the means of putting it at the service of earthly life.

And, properly speaking, it is not at all a school, least of all a mere "school of thought", that is growing round Sri Aurobindo. It is rather the nucleus of a new life that is to come. Quite naturally it has almost insignificant proportions at present to the outward eye, for the work is still of the nature of experiment and trial in very restricted limits, something

Page 33

in the nature of what is done in a laboratory when a new power has been discovered, but has still to be perfectly formulated in its process. And it is quite a mistake to suppose that there is a vigorous propaganda carried on in its behalf or that there is a large demand for recruits. Only the few, who possess the call within and are impelled by the spirit of the future, have a chance of serving this high attempt and great realisation and standing among its first instruments and pioneer workers.

Page 34

IV

Sri Aurobindo's Gita

THE supreme secret of the Gita, rahasyam uttamam, has presented itself to diverse minds in diverse forms. All these however fall, roughly speaking, into two broad groups of which one may be termed the orthodox school and the other the modern school. The orthodox school as represented, for example, by Shankara or Sridhara, viewed the Gita in the light of the spiritual discipline more or less current in those ages, when the purpose of life was held out to be emancipation from life, whether through desireless work or knowledge or devotion or even a combination of the three. The Modern School, on the other hand, represented by Bankim in Bengal and more thoroughly developed and systematised in recent times by Tilak, is inspired by its own Time-Spirit and finds in the Gita a gospel of life-fulfilment. The older interpretation laid

Page 35

stress upon a spiritual and religious, which meant therefore in the end an other-worldly discipline; the newer interpretation seeks to dynamise the more or less quietistic spirituality which held the ground in India of later ages, to set a premium upon action, upon duty that is to be done in our work-a-day life, though with a spiritual intent and motive.

This neo-spirituality which might claim its sanction and authority from the real old-world Indian discipline—say, of Janaka and Yajnavalkya—labours, however, in reality, under the influence of European activism and ethicism. It was this which served as the immediate incentive to our spiritual revival and revaluation and its impress has not been thoroughly obliterated even in the best of our modern exponents. The bias of the vital urge and of the moral imperative is apparent enough in the modernist conception of a dynamic spirituality. Fundamentally the dynamism is made to reside in the elan of the ethical man,—the spiritual element, as a consciousness of supreme unity in the Absolute (Brahman) or of love and delight in God, serving

Page 36

only as an atmosphere for the mortal activity.

Sri Aurobindo has raised action completely out of the mental and moral plane and has given it an absolute spiritual life. Action has been spiritualised by being carried back to its very source and origin, for it is the expression in life of God's own Consciousness-Energy (Chit-shakti).

The Supreme Spirit, Purushottama, who holds in himself the dual reality of Brahman and the world, is the master of action, who acts but in actionlessness, the Lord in whom and through whom the universes and their creatures live and move and have their being. Karmayoga is union in mind and soul and body with the Lord of action in the execution of his cosmic purpose. And this union is effected through a transformation of the human nature, through the revelation of the Divine Prakriti and its descent upon and possession of the inferior human vehicle.

Arrived so far, we now find, if we look back, a change in the whole perspective. Karma and even Karmayoga, which hitherto seemed to be the pivot of the Gita's teaching,

Page 37

retire somewhat into the background and present a diminished stature and value. The centre of gravity has shifted to the conception of the Divine Nature, to the Lord's own status, to the consciousness above the three Gunas, to absolute consecration of each limb of man's humanity to the Supreme Purusha for his descent and incarnation and play in and upon this human world.

The higher secret of the Gita lies really in the later chapters, the earlier chapters being a preparation and passage to it or partial and practical application. This has to be pointed out, since there is a notion current which seeks to limit the Gita's effective teaching to the earlier part, neglecting or even discarding the later portion.

The style and manner of Sri Aurobindo's interpretation is also supremely characteristic: it does not carry the impress of a mere metaphysical dissertation—although in matter it clothes throughout a profound philosophy; it is throbbing with the luminous life of a prophet's message, it is instinct with something of the Gita's own mantrashakti.

Page 38

Works by the Author

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo (in five parts)

The Coming Race

Towards a New Society

The Malady of the Century

The Approach to Mysticism

The World War (1939-45)—Its Inner Bearings

Towards the Light (Aphorisms)

Towards the Heights (Prose Poems)

Page 39