SRI AUROBINDO

SRI AUROBINDO

We hail Sri Aurobindo as the Recoverer and Vivifier of the submerged Soul of India. For, for nearly a thousand years, it has been just stirring, with occasional spurts towards recovery, in a state of death-in-life. The gods, according to a Vedic myth, seek out Agni who had gone into hiding, fleeing in fear from the toil of the invocation and the eternal tramping between gods and men; and they tell him, so goes the story, "Come forth out of the darkness! Man, desirous of the gods, hankers after worship and sacrifice and is waiting all ready. We shall make your life youthful and unaging, so that when yoked to the work of the sacrifice you shall not stumble and come to harm". And even like these gods unto Agni, Sri Aurobindo says to the Soul of India: "Awake from your death-in-sleep and arise! Humanity is desirous of Godhead. I shall make for you a basis of ever fresh and un aging life, so that, however high you may soar — whether it be into that azure sky of the vast unbounded consciousness where it is ever in mystic meditation, or into its charged fields of golden lightning's where from issue the cosmic energies, or into the very centre of the blazing Sun of the Supreme Spirit, — you shall not fall down to the earth exhausted".

Surprise awaits us at the very start of the career of this great son of Mother India; for such was his up-bringing and education and almost so complete was his lack of acquaintance with his country, its speech and its ways that, when he came home from England a fully formed young man, he had to begin picking up his mother-tongue for the first time. What a strange apprenticeship for the greatest exponent of India's authentic ancient tradition of spiritual culture! Certainly a rare phenomenon, but there seems to be something like a parallel in the history of the renaissance of modern China. A well-known Chinese author now, when a child he was very much isolated from the influences of Chinese life and customs and traditions and was afterwards educated in a foreign land on the other side of the world, almost in entire ignorance of his country and its ways, — it is he who has been acclaimed as having revealed the soul of Chinese culture and tradition to the world and to China itself. The perils are obvious in this kind of transplantation into the soil and climate of a foreign culture; but perhaps, as a compensation, there are some virtues

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which may be derived from it. One in the present conditions of the world is the opportunity which the countries of the West where life is in flood-tide provide for full growth — growth to one's full strength and stature; and another is that one is enabled to look upon the past and present of one's own country with a fresh mind unbiased by garbled traditions and a keen vision unblunted by familiarity. But whatever the dangers or advantages that may lie in this kind of abnormal upbringing and education Sri Aurobindo's career proves in a spectacular way that it is nature that prevails over nurture; and by nature we mean the nature of the soul which robes itself in this carnal body for its sojourn on the earth.

When he burst upon the view of his countrymen for the first time, it was in the guise of a fearless warrior of the Motherland, the torch of her ancient and eternal wisdom fresh-alight held aloft in his hand, sweeping the country from end to end. For, by now he had dived into the depths of India's soul and got hold of its warrior-wisdoms. Weakness of spirit is his sworn enemy and he fights it with weapons from knowledge's armoury. He does not play upon the feelings of patriotism of his hearers or dazzle them with visions of India's vanished glory. If India has fallen, it is owing to a failure of vision. It is not due to her meekness, to her goodness, to her spiritual preoccupations. It is weakness of spirit that goes under these guises and even obtains credentials from others, with the supreme cunning which only the art of self-deception can teach. He can condone anything, for even in evil he sees what is there of good, but weakness of spirit, never.

For at this period he was living the Bhagavad Gita in his life — that marvellous converse, symbolic of the one that is ever taking place between Nara and Narayana, between the Divine Teacher, who is the Refuge-of-Man and man overwhelmed by life's problems and asking to be shown the way. The Gita is a live spring of spiritual force and health, which it gives to all those who come to drink of it. In its stream that appears to be crystal clear are concealed depths under depths of ever-deepening meaning. Its first and final injunction is: Cast away all weakness and be ever the true warrior of the Spirit. Yet what have we extracted out of this great Scripture? Truncated philosophies, emasculated creeds and shallow dogmas. Some make the Gita say: "Action is a deceitful trick of the energy which we call Nature. The Spirit is action less. Action is ignorance and illusion. Man is Spirit. He must therefore rise out of the illusion

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of action into the truth of actionlessness. This is salvation, this is deliverance, this is recovery of his true and eternal status which is merely obscured by a beginning-less power of Ignorance and Illusion. Give up all works. Discriminate between the true and false and arrive at the true knowledge. This is the supreme way to the Truth, the way of Knowledge. All other ways are inferior. But it is not given for everyone to walk on this way. Until you can do it and so that you can do it, discharge the duties of the Vedic commandment to which your birth and your station in life call you."

Others make the Gita say: "The path of love and devotion to God is the highest path, for it is only His grace that can lead man from this world of misery into the beatitude of His Presence. Knowledge or works can help in creating the right conditions for love and devotion to appear, but they have no direct efficacy. It is only love that unlocks the gates of the Divine Felicity." Yet others make the Gita say that works of the Vedic commandment performed with knowledge and devoutness take man to his highest state. And so on. And all of them build an appropriate structure of philosophy as a pedestal for their tenets. And some modern thinkers have not hesitated to dilute the Gita to such an extent as to say that it lays down performance of one's duties and works of altruism as its preferred path that leads to the Highest Good.

But what is the teaching of the Gita? It advocates all these paths — the path of dedicated will and works, the path of spiritual knowledge and the path of devotion. It recognizes no conflict or gradation among them. It puts its soul with equal fervour into each of these paths and shows that any one of them rightly pursued can lead to the goal. But it shows its unmistakable preference for their being made confluent and each enriching and purifying the others. It aims at a full divine bloom of the triple flower of understanding, will and feeling of the soul.

The Gita builds a spacious Way of Works in which all activities of life, however trivial, are made into so many flowers of offering placed at the feet of the Divine. Works bind, the Gita recognises. Is it because of the doctrine of retribution? We feel that in some inexplicable way we reap what we sow. There is mysterious Nemesis, whose scales of justice are indeed a stumbling-block to our moral sense, and yet who seems, through inscrutable ways, to visit the results of our

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deeds upon us. Well, if so, a gospel of good works — works of duty and works of altruism — would meet the situation. Even if we do not believe in retribution at all and feel that man should do good without any selfish considerations, even then a gospel of good works would be adequate. For man would march forward through his good works. But the Gita goes much deeper.

We tie ourselves in knots through our works — even through ethically good works. Our activity cuts grooves in which it gradually gets confined. We act at the behest of desire. First, there is its lashing which sets us to work for some object. Then, there is the wrong absorption and engrossment of ourselves in the doing of the work. At the end, there is wailing or jubilation, according to failure or success. In this way doing our works, we are distracted and thrown off our true centre. And there is no ceasing of desire. Restless desire starting action, self-forgetful involvement in the doing of it and sorrow or happiness in the result of the action — where is the issue out of this mechanical round? This is Nature's technique of action; that is, it is how Nature sends us to work in order to pull us out of tamasic inertia. But there is a way of doing works without their binding us. We may engage ourselves in action without any falling away from our true centre. We may do works in freedom of soul, without Nature driving us in her round. But, for this, we have to acquire a skill, the skill of Karma Yoga, the Way of Works.

The Gita asks the seeker to proceed step by step, beginning with the easiest. First, let him allow himself no personal interest or claim in the fruits of his action, by dedicating them to the Divine. Then let him detach himself from involvement in the doing of action. In order to do this let him look upon all activity of his nature as a play of Nature's forces, a small fraction of her universal play. Finally, let him try to eliminate desire and put in its place the will of the Universal Spirit who holds the movements of the cosmic forces to their ordained goals. Without desire, then, does not action cease altogether? No. A purer action, one more powerfully driven and more enlightened — that is what ensues. This is what is called acting through Yoga, Yoga which is skill in works. And what higher skill can there be than to be able to make of all the out-going energy of action of the human being an instrument of his liberation and freedom and to hitch it to the will of the Cosmic Spirit — the energy which, as it is, only works for poor ephemeral results and then succeeds in

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forging unseen fetters for the soul through which it works! By this way of works man reaches his goal and lives in the Spirit. Works in slavery to Nature — it is they that vanish on man's attainment to knowledge and works in freedom of Spirit take their place.

It is not very difficult to understand the Gita's paths of knowledge and love, if we do not bring with us well-cultivated prejudices of special dogmas. The Gita does not feel obliged to treat the many as unreal in order to establish the reality of the One-without-a-second. It does not feel obliged to treat individuality as illusory in order to justify its ultimate aim of mergence in the ineffable Spirit. It does not advocate spiritual isolationism, for isolationism, in every sphere of life, is a slow but sure mode of self-slaying. First peace and purity, then detachment and even vision, and finally the thousand-faceted experience of the One in and beyond the Many. This is the Gita's path of Knowledge. And no weak revel in the surges of vital emotion and no debilitating turbulence of tears and hallelujahs and surely no path of roses is its path of Love and Devotion. It is a path which more than the others is sharp like a blade-edge, instantly punishing all unwariness. For love can put forth its purest blossom only in a hard and gritty soil of renunciation. The Gita's path of Love is severe, austere, Aryan. First a giving-up — a giving-up to the Lord of all that one has and gets, of all that one does or enjoys; then a constant dwelling upon Him; finally surrender, perfect and blissful, culminating in union with the Divine. And throughout the patient teaching of the different paths comes ordering, from time to time, like a refrain, a stern command of divine urgency: cast away weakness of spirit and give battle — the same divine command which is there at its beginning and close and which we seem to hear as some sacred thunder rolling overhead and spanning, as it were, the entire teaching.

It is with this teaching that Sri Aurobindo vitalised the sinews of India and illumined its darkened soul. It was long after that he gave to the world the first right and adequate interpretation of this sacred book in his Essays on the Gita, whose first and highest virtue is its extraordinary power of inspiration. Yet already, there is ample evidence in his speeches and writings that the Gita has delivered up to him its full meaning¹. But we have dwelt at such length upon the

¹ It is strange that a book written in such simple language as the Gita should have become the battle-ground for the greatest host ever there was of differing interpreters. We are not thinking of the difficulties one may get into with its

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Gita, mainly because Sri Aurobindo's life is a bodying forth of its harmonious ideal and, therefore, to speak on the Gita is, in a way, to speak about Sri Aurobindo. Ever a warrior of the Spirit, he is also a seeker of God through the austere ways of knowledge and the ardent ways of love. Ability to pour out the soul's energy into channels of wide and intense action; an original mind, far-reaching and comprehensive in thinking power and fine in penetration; a high heart of emotion, — not of that kind which supplies an exciting breath of vital fervor and passion to cold thought, but one which, bright and serene, suffuses all thinking with a laying warmth and glow which subtly convince and satisfy, the warmth and glow of its own life and vision — this already is Sri Aurobindo as we see him at this period. Such a complete endowment is a rare thing in Nature; occurring once or twice perhaps in a thousand years. For our great men, our world-shapers, are strong in one side of their nature at the expense of the other sides; they tend to be relatively narrow, if not 'single-track' minds, and, speaking without the least irreverence, not too rarely, something of cranks. These seem to be Nature's devices to get the necessary concentration and drive for the energies of the soul and then to get them applied to a given work. When men like a Leonardo

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metaphysics. It is no matter for surprise that a book with such powerful germinal ideas on final problems should inspire diverse metaphysical constructions. Fashions keep changing and tastes go on differing — even in metaphysics. But the Gita leaves the problem of fully working out its metaphysical syntheses, such as the unacting yet active Self, the personal-impersonal Supreme, not to logic but to spiritual experience to be arrived at by its integral discipline. One might as well follow this procedure as the right one for the purpose. But what is a matter for surprise is the battles royal that have been fought over what is after all a matter of textual interpretation — how to construe the verses, how to paragraph them, how to find out where a topic ends and another begins, and thus to decide what discipline it is that the book teaches: whether withdrawal from life or active participation; whether or not it gives preference to Sankhya over Yoga or to Yoga over Sankhya, etc.; whether or not it gives a clear award of superiority to one among the three paths of Works, Knowledge and Love; or whether it believes at all in placing the apple of discord before these three paths; and so on. But the bewildering variety of interpretation and comment on the Gita conveys one lesson to us with utmost force — what a tremendously difficult thing for the human mind it is to have no bias, how even thinkers of rare abilities fail, especially where their love or reverence is concerned, to keep the instrument of thought pure of all predilection and prejudice.

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or a Geo the make their appearance, men who have not only the stature of greatness but also a full and rich personality powerful on every one of its fronts, they make a tremendous impression. Sri Aurobindo belongs to this order. And what is more and rarer, he has turned the powers of his rich personality into the field of high spiritual endeavour. He is one marked as it were by Nature to make a fine and noble illustration of the complete and integral ideal of the Gita.

We can clearly see that the Lord's Song took hold of his life and shaped it anew. But we would give much to know what he was like before this master influence touched him at the dawn of his career — how he spoke and what it was that he spoke, how he moved and what his manner was. But this much we can safely say — the vessel was fit for the afflatus. And, with great respect, we shall permit ourselves to venture a surmise from what indications we have: the experience of the witnessing consciousness wherefrom radiate the paths of Light leading to the Supreme Reality and to which one usually arrives through the labours of a whole life-time was, from the time he turned his look inwards, within easy reach of him, hidden by the thinnest of veils; he was, so to say, born to it.

It was a most fortunate thing that when Sri Aurobindo took up the Gita he did not fall for any of the current schools of its interpretation. An Indian youth seeking help in face of the world mystery naturally turns to the Gita; but what happens is that it is not its own voice that he hears but something of it as had been caught and recorded by the school of philosophy and religious sect to which his family is born or which prevails in his environment. And then step by step his thinking follows the pattern set for it by his school, and his adventure into the world mystery ends in his being absorbed into a coterie or creed. It is everywhere so in the wide world, a great Scripture rarely gets the chance of being confronted by a fresh and original mind not already under the spell of some traditional formulation of its teaching and not broken in to its special ways of thought. But it is this rare thing that happened when Sri Aurobindo took up the Gita, the Upanishads and later on the Veda. And now the world knows with what result.

Sri Aurobindo has been called a poet-philosopher. A poet-philosopher is usually a risky combination. For the poet works through his aesthetic perception, through his sensibility, feeling and sympathy, and the philosopher through his faculty of thought-mind, intellect,

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analytical ability, speculative imagination. The poet often trips up the philosopher in his logical steps, and the downward pull of the philosopher's syllogisms makes the poet's flights of fancy unsteady and sometimes even grotesque. But it is only on the lower levels of their power that this conflict exists between the poet and the philosopher. On the higher levels, the poet-philosopher is a most happy combination — the marriage of a male and female power, so to say, bringing to birth fruitful visions of the truth of things. Such a poet-philosopher is Sri Aurobindo and such is the great author of the Gita; and such, though with a striking difference in the purely subsidiary role which intellect plays and the peculiarly symbolic manner in which it works, are the seers of the Upanishads. The Vedic Rishis show a near affinity with the seers of the Upanishads; yet their regard on existence is exclusively psychic and mystic — a regard in which intellectual appreciation plays no noticeable part, but in which thinking is carried on not through concepts, but through concrete symbolic images. And therefore naturally Sri Aurobindo has succeeded, as in our view none others have done, in reaching to the heart of their great creations.

We go to the great scriptures for the waters of Life, but the commentators send us away with stone-hard dogma. Their help is much needed and usually they are men of the highest abilities and some of them are great men whose influence we should like to preserve as a permanent factor in our tradition; and it would seem ungraceful to make complaints against them. But their attempt to state in intellectual form the intuitive thought of the Scriptures often impairs its integrity and sometimes sterilizes it; and too often its beauty suffers hurt through rough dialectical handling. How can we suppress our cry of pain when we see that, in their preoccupation to build out of the inspired utterances of Scripture finished philosophical structures complete to the last detail, the commentators seem to be growing unaware of the beauty which is their life-breath? For here, if nowhere else, is beauty truth, and to miss the beauty is to miss the truth. We may bring out the underlying ideas of the inspired utterances of the Rishis with keen analytical skill, collate them and make of them a consistent scheme. But if our hearts do not respond to the surprise of their rare beauty, which is there not only in the delicate poise which idea and thought assume as they shape themselves out of the mystic experience, but also informs the self-impelled measures — chandas —

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in which they are bodied forth with its grace and rhythm, we may be sure that we have lost the very soul of the thought, and however much we may analyze we are not going to reach it. How tyrannical the claims of the systematizing mind have become we can see when the Brahma Sutra seriously takes up the question whether the Rishis and the gods too are entitled to the study and practice of the Vedantic knowledge and disciplines taught by the Scripture. No one can fail to be impressed by the great qualities of many of our commentators. But very often, as we see them at work we feel, to borrow the simile of a mediaeval Hindi poet, that it is like a connoisseur of precious stones entering a lovely flower-garden to appraise the various qualities of the flowers.

It is necessary that we realise what this spirit of mechanical logic has done to us. For in the ratio that it grew in strength the vitality of India decreased. It is in its python coils that her living mind has for too long been held inert and helpless. We look aghast at the endless discussions on minutiae of a bygone age, the discussions such as, for example, on the question whether the sacrificial ladle is to be made out of this or that wood, and wonder at the immense weight of logical armament thrown into this deadly issue. We wonder how strong the grip on the present is of the dead past. But what is wrong with the past? We can take what is there of good in it and crush out the bad. But it is this spirit of mechanical logic that is wrong and it is that which is the enemy of life. It has invaded even our common ways of devotion and worship. O ye gods! Will it be believed when we say that we actually heard an elderly lady earnestly reciting the definitions of the three types of laksana —jahat, ajahat and jahada-jahat — while pouring her offering of water on to the leaves of the sacred tulasi! For, without these definitions, how could she understand the precise significance of what happens when the copula joins the subject with the predicate in the great sentence, Tat Tvam Asi —Thou Art That!

When mind grows feeble and self-forgetful, life goes on in a mechanical round, whose issue is death. But when there remain an insistent pressure of the past in the memory and some glimmer of self-recognition, it invents senseless patterns of repetitive behaviour and goes on trammeling itself in them, much like a delirious patient who makes a winding sheet for himself of his bed-clothes; and of which too the issue still is death, but death by one's own hand. From time to time

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heroic efforts have been made to rescue India from this fate. Our renaissance has been possible because of the great men that began to appear from about the middle of the last century. Anything like satisfactory or lasting success has not yet been achieved, but we believe it is in sight. Sri Aurobindo helped to rouse his countrymen from their forgetfulness and to give them a new hope and daring through his rare spiritual energy, by means of the written or spoken word, and by drawing them together around a common purpose and a common thought. This is not the place to deal with his contribution to the political movement of the time. His was the endeavour to switch it to the spiritual motive power of the race. He had already begun his great work of opening up the lines of communication to the treasures of the ancient mystic knowledge overlaid or blocked up for ages, through the disciplines of Yoga. And it is these disciplines that call him away from the political field and he springs a big surprise on his countrymen. He who had been non-chalantly riding a fierce political storm disappears into his 'hermit's cave' at Pondicherry and India hears nothing of him for a time.

Something of the nature of the work in which he has been engaged and something of his achievement, we now know through his published writings. He has recovered the Soul of India. He has entered into the heart of her mystic knowledge and has brought back for us its right meaning and significance. With an insight at which we simply marvel, he unravels the words of the Rishis. He does -not speak as one of the scribes, but as one with authority. And he has given us a new Philosophy and a new Yoga.

We regard the Age of the Rishis as the fountain-head of our culture in all its subsequent manifestations and developments. We give the names of Muni and Acharya and even Bhagavan to the great founders and exponents of our philosophical systems, but there is no word which tugs at our hearts with such force as this sublime word Rishi. For he is the Soul of India at its purest and highest activity. How long ago this age was we have no means of knowing with any worth-while definiteness, but everyone makes his own guess. Not even a potsherd has come down to us from this age, except its priceless gifts of the mind. Ritual worship, religious emotion and spiritual seeking represented the chief interest of the felite of the age, but surely they and the rest of the general population must have had other interests besides. About them we can only make some hazy inferences. Even the monumental

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literary productions that have come down to us appear to be a mere fraction of the vast actual output. No wonder, then, that opinions and appraisals here clash as with regard to no other period of our history.

Again, we the sons of an intellectual age are out of sympathy with this age of the Rishis in the hoary past. It is almost impossible for us to put ourselves in touch with them so that they can communicate their thought to us. It is not difficult to do this with the author of the Gita, for example. He too is a mystic seer, but also an intellectual. We approach him in a receptive mood and come into rapport with him easily and then all his apparent contradictions get resolved and we find his vast comprehensive thought hanging together beautifully. We follow its movement as it goes forth in a first forward sweep, and then keeps coming back upon itself again and again, all the while enlarging and deepening; and as it eddies round mutually opposing views and finally carries them into the unity of a deeper principle of harmony. But we are unable to gain this kind of close contact with the mind of the Rishis. The mystic seer Sri Aurobindo seems to be able to get into rapport with them with an amazing facility.

We have not as yet a right account of the development of ancient Indian thought, either from traditional commentators or from Western scholars. There are a few who literally believe that every word that has come down to us from the age of the Rishis is the word of God. Such happy innocence of belief is beyond the reach of many. Even if it were not, it does not seem to be a good thing to possess; for, taking the very account of the ritual worship of the Veda given by those who are upholders of this belief, we do not see much that is edifying in this endless petitioning for cows. Or, coming to the Upanishads, say, for example, shall we accept trial by ordeal as the right way of detecting crime, because it seems to be mentioned there as a method then in vogue? The belief that the age of the Rishis was an age of revelatory knowledge is sound. But the crude, literal way this belief is applied to the vast literature of the age, sacred, sacerdotal and philosophic, or ritualistic, occult and magical, is disastrous to that belief itself: the logic of events showed this for once by raising up the vehement protest of the Buddhistic movement. Today perhaps this type of belief can be glorified and urged with some impunity, for now the question of its truth has become almost entirely academic; our way of life is not built on the faith and injunctions of the ritualism of the

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Vedavadins — the fanatics of the external cult and letter of the Veda, whom Sri Krishna mercilessly castigates at the very commencement of delivering his New Dispensation of a renovated Yoga.

From the twilight of primitive ignorance into the noonday light of modern knowledge, of the age of positive Reason and the exact Sciences — this is the story of man's mental development according to modern thinkers, and Western savants try to fit in the Vedic Age as an early portion of this long story. But there is here a dangerous over-simplification of theme. It is quite probable that our scientific knowledge of today is the highest the world has seen, and positive Reason has developed the most efficient technique of investigating its subject-matter that man has ever used; but on that account we cannot say that we now have the fullest light of all kinds of knowledge. Our knowledge of material Nature has increased, but our knowledge of spiritual Nature has not correspondingly risen. On the contrary, it seems to have fallen lower than in certain other periods of man's history. Positive Reason may open to us the knowledge of material Nature, but to open to us the knowledge of spiritual Nature another instrument would seem to be needed. If some period in history witnessed the greatest progress in the development of this instrument and, as a consequence, if that period possessed man's highest knowledge of spiritual Nature, our simple theme of man's development has to be substantially altered. And precisely, the Age of the Rishis is the Age of Intuition, the instrument of Spiritual Knowledge, the age when man seems to have reached farthest into the secrets of spiritual Nature.

Some modern Indian scholars seem to be trying to arrange a sort of compromise between tradition and Western savants, but their efforts are bound to fail in view of the fundamental opposition between the two outlooks. Following the Western savants, they try to trace a gradual development in thought, moral sentiment, religious feeling, spiritual and philosophic perception from the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda, through the Brahmanas and Aranyakas, to their culmination in the Upanishads. They represent the Vedic Rishis as something of Nature poets of a pastoral age, who worshipped the wonders of earth and sky in the shapes of innumerable gods through a very complex ritual, and all that for the sake of rain and pasture, food, cattle and progeny. They seek to show how the Rishis had gradually advanced so far as to conceive of their highest divinity as

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the guardian not only of natural but even of moral law. In the latest hymns, we are assured, are found the germs of a question or two about ultimate issues. But then, gradually, ritual itself became so important as almost to usurp the place of the divinities for whom it was intended, and the Brahmanas represent the period of its full sway. By the time of the Aranyakas, however, the spell of ritual was being broken and there comes to appear some brisk speculation about philosophical problems. And of this intellectual activity the Upanishads are the peak. But unfortunately this chain of gradual development as it is traced from the Veda to the Upanishad seems to be wholly artificial and unconvincing, to be all imaginary. The chain is more a thing of missing links than of connecting links. For how can from such origins as the Vedic hymns are represented to be, spring up the high thought of the Upanishads, with just the intervening phase of an external cult of rites? Our modern scholars seem to be wavering on where to place the highest point of the development of Indian thought whether in Sankara, Ramanuja, Madhwa, etc. as the case may be, or in the original Upanishads themselves. And their difference from the Western savants seems to consist in this: they tend to show a little more regard to the Vedic Rishis — for what reason it is difficult to say; it is perhaps for the primitiveness of their thoughts and feelings — and, decidedly, a greater esteem for the intellectual achievements of the Upanishads.

But their so-called rational explanation of the Upanishadic knowledge seems to be as inadequate as the account they give of the Vedic hymns. What is this Upanishadic knowledge, — is it the fruit of daring speculation? Is it by a bold leap of thought that the Upanishadic thinkers alighted upon their great affirmations? Accepting for a moment that intellectual thought could achieve that, where is its preparatory development that would warrant such a conclusion? Or is it that our valuation of the Upanishadic knowledge is hopelessly biased and we see in its speculations and imaginations, good in their own way, immensely more than what there really is? But no, the knowledge has been confirmed, at least the core of it, by the experience of mystics all over the world and up and down time. The affirmations of the Upanishadic thinkers are realisations gained in true mystic experience. Take, for example, one of their great affirmations, Annam Brahma, Matter is Brahman. Of course they do not say it in the sense in which a physicist might say it, though the first

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approach to the truth which is indicated to the disciple is something like that of a Natural philosopher's. For they declare that Brahman is Boundless Being, Fount of Happiness, and Light of Seeing, all in one. So they mean, Matter too is this Brahman, this Spirit. We can imagine how difficult it would be for a thinker to say this of Matter, for Matter easily gets into disrepute with a thinker; it becomes vile for him. It is only the slow and steady advance of modern Science that has been able to rehabilitate Matter; it is one of Science's great achievements. Even for us of the present-day who have this acquisition of reverence for great Matter, it is extremely difficult to hold this affirmation even as an idea — Matter is Brahman. And in that early age, when man, we are told, walked in fear and ignorance of Nature's phenomena, it is impossible, when we come to think of it, that this affirmation could have been made through speculative daring. It was through intuition, through mystic experience, that this affirmation was reached. It is the same with their central affirmation, the affirmation of unity, of the One-without-a-second.

Now, these Upanishadic thinkers often speak of a tradition handed down to them from the past, iti susruma, incorporate the mantras of the Vedas in their discourses and quote the authority of the Rishis to reinforce their teaching and make it more readily acceptable. Are they indulging in a piece of self-deception while filling old bottles with new wine? Surely no, they are of sterner stuff than that. They give no excessive value to Vedic learning, train the disciple not to the mastery of any sacred literature but to the knowledge by which the highest Reality is reached and to all the knowledge on the way which rests on the clear evidence of one's own experience. And they speak of the rite of sacrifice as "a raft that is frail". They are quite clear about what they are going to receive from the Vedic Rishis. The Upanishadic thinkers regard them as mystic seers who had attained to the Truth and not as poetic but greedy worshippers of the gods for gain. The only conclusion that is now possible is that the age of the Upanishads was the culmination of a great Age of Intuition, of the Age of the Rishis.

A true account of the development of Indian thought is not possible without a proper understanding of this age of the Rishis, of India's mystics. We have perforce to place an age of Intuition before the age of philosophical speculation. It is so in India and may be so even in Europe. Probably, as between intuition and ratiocination, intuition

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was the stronger element in human intelligence in some very early phase of its growth and reached its full development in due course where circumstances favoured it. It is perhaps only when its decadence had set in after its cycle of growth and maturity, that the other element of ratiocination had its chance. We believe that a deep and sympathetic study of the mind of the extant primitive tribes would be quite favourable to such a view. In that case, some of the most important chapters of the Science of Religion would have to be re-writ-ten. From a dim but direct perception of the mystery of God chiefly, religion would have to be derived and not from fear. And we shall certainly preserve that amusing witticism of Voltaire which makes religion to be born from the encounter of the first fool with the first knave, but confine its application to all the fool-knave business that creeps into every religion. Anyway, if our theories of man's mental development do not fit in with known facts, surely it is not the facts that have got to be altered.

Sri Aurobindo has given us the key to the understanding of this age of the Rishis. It is now possible to understand the true significance of the Vedic worship. It was a high spiritual endeavour in which the Rishis sought to liberate the cabined human consciousness into the all-embracing divine consciousness of Aditi, the Indivisible, the Infinite. The agent of this endeavour was the divine energy of will in the human being. The endeavour expressed and fulfilled itself, through a symbolic ritual brimming over with life. But there seems to intervene a yawning gap between this period of the Mantra and that of the Brahmana, for there the informing life of the ancient ritual has almost vanished, the true significance of its elaborate symbolism has been somehow lost and we are slipping into a dead and deadening ritualism. But, apart from this, along some bridges of communication which must have once existed and later collapsed the ancient spiritual endeavour succeeds in reaching into the period of the Brahmanas, continues, and begins to develop on new lines; for there emerges in this period, for the first time, the distinguishing doctrine of Indian Spirituality, the doctrine of Brahman-Atman. It is these new lines of development that find their fulfilment in the period of the Upanishads.

The Upanishadic thinkers do not aim at all at building philosophical systems. Yet the Upanishads are not a mess or medley of stray thoughts and speculations. Though they represent the work

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of many seer-thinkers and of different generations, there is always a unity of vision in the background. We must not forget that the Upanishadic thinkers were essentially poets, poets of the Infinite. Out of their intuitive and integral seeing arises a body of thought, which it is not very difficult to ascertain, but there is variation of emphasis on some aspect of the truth of their seeing from thinker to thinker, depending on mood or temperament. An aggressive, vehement and exuberant personality like Yagnavalkya might easily give a pronounced personal turn to the thinking on the great truths of the age, in order to bring to the fore some aspect of them which in his view needed the utmost emphasis. But we feel all through that, at least as regards the central truths, there is no irreconcilable opposition of thought between different thinkers, in spite of certain extreme statements one way or other. It is not by sheer hazard, we should think, that the small Great Upanishad, the Isavasya, is given the place of honour in our collection of the Upanishads. It is the key to the synthetic thought, which is ever the natural outcome of an integral vision, of the Upanishads. And surprisingly enough, but as is to be expected from what we have said before, its true significance has been missed by the systematisers of the Upanishadic thought from the earliest times downwards. It is again through Sri Aurobindo's original commentary on this work that we are able to understand the harmonising character of its thought and its vast sweep. For Sri Aurobindo's thinking exhibits a fine resilience, when engaged in the task of reconciling irreconcilables: what to abstract conceptual thinking are mutually exclusive and contradictory, may be, in apprehending concrete spiritual reality, different sides or complementary aspects of its truth; we see that the difficulties which its thought at some places presented to the scholastic interpreters are resolved in a most natural way without trace of a tour-de-force. It is this powerful faculty of synthesis that enables him to bring out the deep harmony of the Upanishadic thought without impairing its integrity. Upon much that is obscure in the Upanishadic symbolism he throws the light of the Veda. We consequently reach to a better comprehension of the Upanishads than it had been ever possible to do before.

We shall here make the confession, however, that we do not regard the construction of a philosophical system out of the Upanishads as a matter of the most vital importance at all. It is not that we do not love

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great speculations, for thought should be released as often as possible from its constant cramping service to our day-to-day needs, either worldly or spiritual. Great speculations give it this release, and make it disinterested, strong and austere. But when the mind reaches a clear sense of its own limitations, when it finds that it falls into staggering perplexities over the idea of time, of space, of matter, it learns humility and gives up the vain attempt unaided to encompass the Supreme Principle of existence within its scope. But yet, if thinkers, starting from some basic concepts, however mysterious or difficult to conceive they may be, like, for example, ether, wave-particle, gravitation, Space-Time or Absolute and Maya, succeed in bringing to the mind a greater elucidation of our experience, we shall always be thankful to them. All philosophies aim to do this. The Mayavada, however, seems intent upon achieving the opposite result, for we are assured that, according to it, it is our experience, our world, that is anirvacaniya, not understandable, not definable, while the Absolute is nirvacaniya, is a thing of which a clear definition is possible. It appears to us that Sankara's system, contrary to the very generally held opinion, is mainly pragmatic in its interest. Considered in this way, his philosophy becomes more of a discipline — a great, forceful and even a taking-by-storm kind of discipline for natures that can 'take it' safely. In India most of the systems take their basic concepts from the Upanishads and each philosopher claims that it is his system which is implied by them. So two questions arise as regards these systems, whether new or old: what special elucidation do they bring and how far is their claim of faithfulness to the Upanishads justified. We have already expressed our opinion on the second question. As to the question of bringing new and greater elucidation of experience, it may be claimed that Sri Aurobindo's philosophy succeeds in a greater measure than all the previous systems.

If good people feel hurt in their love and reverence for our great teachers of the past and their systems, let them forgive us; for we intend no disparagement at all. Sri Aurobindo himself does not bring disparagement or destructive criticism to their famous systems. He brings, on the other hand, sympathetic understanding and penetrating insight and shows how they arise from various diverging lines of spiritual experience. There lies their deathless vitality and not at all in the logical strength of their philosophical structures. High praise is bestowed, within India and outside, upon Sankara for instance, for

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what is called the logical perfection of his philosophical system.¹ But to us it appears that the original sin of wrong premises runs throughout, cracking the structure from pinnacle to plinth. Still, we often take up his commentaries — on the Sutras, the Upanishads and the Gita; we find ourselves getting into conflict with his arguments, yet feel that he is easily the most acute, lucid, deep and, in a very important respect, most close in spirit to the originals, of all our mediaeval philosophers. His logic does not satisfy us, but, mysteriously, well-being flows into us from his words and, in his discourse, there is the fire by which a great Teacher is revealed. We say this, not to air our personal reaction to this most indefatigably active spiritual warrior who preached withdrawal and quiescence as the highest ideal, but to draw a general conclusion from it. The best and strongest logical systems of our great teachers may crumble, but the spiritual life that raised them will go on undying, and will reincarnate in other forms. And Sri Aurobindo comes to fulfil and not to destroy.

We are here merely concerned to note the general character of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. We have said before that he has given us a new Philosophy and a new Yoga. We do not mean to say that they are entirely new, but that they mark a fresh, new growth from the tap-root of Indian Spirituality which goes deep into the age of the Rishis. Sri Aurobindo starts from the basic concepts of Spirit-Absolute and Involution-Evolution, the same that have most clearly and definitely emerged in the Upanishads. Involution-Evolution is the mode in which the power of the Absolute becomes active, that is, expresses itself. So, creation is self-expression of the Absolute. The Absolute is absolute because it is not bound by its self-expression and it remains the Absolute both in and beyond the self-expression. But how about these contradictions between the Absolute and the self-expression? They are all incidents to the modes of the activity. The contradiction is most stupendous on the material level, most distressful in life and most poignant on the mind plane. Involution brings the contradiction to a head, evolution is the effort to resolve the contradiction. Evolution is the steady manifestation, in ever enhanced degree and kind, of involved energies. Along with the enhancement

¹ ... Vedantartha-tattvam ekatva-darsanam prati adaravanto mumuksavah syuh iti tarkika-mata-dosa-pradarsanam kincit ucyate asmabhih, na tu tarkika-vat tatparyena.

— Sankara on Prasnopanishad 6-3.

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in manifestation there is re-integration of the already achieved basis of self-expression. The highest status of the activity of the power of the Absolute is designated by Sri Aurobindo as Super-mind. Here all contradiction is entirely resolved. This is the Wisdom and Power and Bliss of God, this the great link between boundless Being above and divided Being below. In it is the perfect self-expression of divine existence. Man can reach the Super-mind, arrive at integral God-knowledge and bring down its power for the transmutation of his entire being — not only for the transmutation of the human consciousness but for the transmutation also of its vital and material basis. And he can bring it down not only for himself but for humanity also. When that is achieved there will be for him and humanity — 'the life Divine'. That is man's greatest fulfilment and that is the aim of Nature's endeavour in him.

How to achieve this transformation? It is by the methods of the integral Yoga. The integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo is not an adjustment into a new harmony and system of the different methods of the various yogas. Its distinguishing character lies in the spirit of integrality which vitalizes and directs the methods that it uses. We have seen that the Gita stands for an integral vision and an integral discipline. Sri Aurobindo goes much farther than the Gita, for he sees the goal of human effort as the divinisation, through the Power of the Super-Mind, of human life here on earth. All Yoga has three fundamental movements — the first is the effort to reach the power and wisdom of God and establish permanent contact with it, then, to make over to it what we are without reservation, and lastly, to work out the transformation of our nature with the knowledge and energy so released. These three movements have to go on together from the beginning, perfecting themselves endlessly. But different yogas choose different parts or sides of our nature as the special instrument through which to gain contact with the higher Power and Wisdom. The Hatha-yoga chooses the psycho-vital energy of our nature, the Raja-yoga selects the mental energy, the Karma-yoga the Will active in works, the Bhakti-yoga the heart of love and devotion, the Jnana-yoga the discernment and thought-power of the purified higher Reason, the Tantra the psychic imagination and the psychic will. And they differ in their aims and in the methods they follow to reach them. The integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo may use some or many of their methods, but because of the different character of the vision

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from which it starts and of the goal to which it presses forward, the same methods naturally acquire a different operation and significance in the new setting.

The integral yoga regards Nature as neither a conjures nor a temptress, but as a mother who does her best for her children in the straitened circumstances of earthly life. To them that understand the desire of her high heart and, with courage and adventure, labour to remove the wrong of circumstance and vow to offer to her the fulfilment of her heart's desire, she unveils her divine face. And with that vision, there can be no labour that can be unfruitful and labour ceases to be labour. The integral yoga leads the seeker to this vision. As its aim is not withdrawal or quiescence, but works of divine knowledge which flow from the Peace of the Spirit that passeth understanding and as it regards self-liberation only as a step in lifting humanity to a divine life, it does not cut off the seeker from his fellow-men except in the measure necessary to all life of intense effort. It does not limit itself to working through a single side of our nature as the specialized methods of Yoga do, but takes up all sides of our nature and all its special bents — artistic, literary, social, etc., and turns them all into the movement of aspiration. Whatever the parts of our nature that happen to have the necessary fitness to be used for its preliminary energizing, it would prefer an early drive withinwards so as to reach their basis in intuition, for all sides of our life, all parts of our nature, have an intuitive basis. Through some side of his outer nature the seeker is made to reach his intuitive being. The aspiration of the intuitive being is more powerful and it easily cuts an opening in his mental covering, enabling him to make contact with the Divine. And then follow a constantly and endlessly self-perfecting movement of self-surrender to the Divine and of self-transformation, both of which lead to the definitive transformation of the entire human nature — of its half-light of consciousness, of its easily tiring energy of life and of the very clay of its body. This is the consummation of the integral yoga — the bringing into play of a force-centre of divinised human life sending forth ever-widening rings of influence to encompass the whole of humanity.

We may therefore say that the unveiling of our intuitive nature is the first concern of the integral yoga. But, what is intuition? We need not make intuition more of a mystery than it actually is, nor dismiss it giving the scornful term of hunch to it. Have we arrived

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at a rational account of instinct? Surely, no. Instinct cannot be regarded as a sort of delayed-action mechanism planted in living beings by Nature; it cannot be a chance stringing together of stray acts that just happen into a purposive whole of behaviour; it cannot be a way of action that had been once perfected by reason, by its method of trial and error and which, in course of long transmission from parent to child, got degraded into an unreasoned automatic process; nor can it be, as mediaeval Indian philosophers facilely explained, a revived memory of that which was learnt in some former birth. The only conclusion, then, is that there is some entity, which may be called life-force or by any other name, which works purposively, yet not in the way of reason. We cannot say what exactly is the nature of the insight into purpose, — of the foresight, that is, — which this life-force has; and if this is anthropomorphism, there is no help for it. Now, this instinct which keeps coming under our eyes constantly, we may say, is something of a mystery. And intuition too, which is subtler, occurs perhaps as constantly, but it is not as well remarked because of our failure to take notice of it we may say that it is a mystery, but in the same sense that instinct is. Any way, it is not at all a stranger to our consciousness.

Have you ever on a dark night lost your way in a countryside with bush and thicket and criss-crossed by all sorts of vague tracks? If that should ever befall to you and you happen to have just some ordinary light, we would advise you not to use it — for you can see with it only a few yards in front of you and that will only increase your confusion; on the other hand, we would ask you to trust to your eyes to see in the darkness. The calm, steady eye gazing on the immense darkness will slowly make out this thing and that thing, by which you are helped to note your bearings and pick your way. The intuition with which the human being is endowed is, at first, something like this calm and steady gaze of the eye which is able to pick its way in the immense darkness. Has any one come across a perfectly satisfactory explanation of our belief in prayer from the point of view of strict rationality? How did man come to pray? Are we so sure that it was just cajoling and bribing, done all out of weakness, ignorance and fear? May it not be that the great mystery of God by which man is surrounded vaguely presses upon his soul and it is out of this pressure that prayer was born, but even as it was being born, fear and weakness and ignorance gathered round it, mothered it and gave it

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their form and physiognomy? However this may be, on every soul presses the mighty mystery of God and in every soul there is this intuition, this immediate sense, however weak and indistinct, of that great mystery. But against the turbidities of man's passion and the half-lights of his mind, which while making him see a few steps in front of him make him blind and undiscerning as regards the immensities, it can make no headway. The purpose of spiritual life is to raise this intuition to its highest power.

There is one remarkable fact which strikes us as extraordinary as we contemplate the life of Sri Ramakrishna — his complete reliance on intuition. His rationalist disciple tells him to his face that his visions are all hallucinations and Sri Ramakrishna does not argue with the disciple, does not argue with himself, but goes straight to the divine Mother for an answer and the answer is vouchsafed. Even questions that seem so naturally to fall within the scope of common-sense reasoning, he refers to the Mother, the giver to him of his intuitive knowledge, though by nature he is shrewd and full of mother-wit. He is a born mystic and his main source of knowledge is intuition. We almost wonder if such sole reliance on intuitive knowledge would be possible at all to men strongly influenced by the intellectual culture of the modern age. And the question naturally occurs to us whether the strong rationality of Sri Aurobindo's mind did not very much come in the way of the development of his intuition. He seems to have had his period of doubt and scepticism, but it definitely ended with a great experience which he had in jail, and from that moment onwards doubt never seems to have reared its head to call in question the authority of his intuitive experiences.

But if spiritual life is growth in intuition, should reason go and is it no good at all? Some mystics seem to adopt this extreme. But this is a dangerous attitude. Without a strong basis of austere reason man's intuitive endeavour is often apt to be unsafe. What we repeatedly meet with in history is that a great teacher brings a new spiritual impulse into men's lives and after his personal influence ceases it gets bogged in the weak reason of his following. Such a calamity should not occur if there were a clear current of reason to nourish and keep pure the spiritual impulse. Reason, however, ought never to be set in authority over intuition; on the contrary, it has to become its handmaid. But by this we do not mean at all that reason should be deprived of what is called its freedom and forced to accept conclusions whose

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necessity it doe^not see. What is meant is that by assimilating the light of intuition, it can lift itself to a superior perception, acquire a higher plasticity, a complex subtlety of movement which belongs only to a living energy, and thus gain the ability to insinuate itself into the intricacies of the living truth of things. Sri Aurobindo stands by himself among the mystics in that, in him, high intuition goes with a strong and rigorous rationality of mind. He is severe to the arrogance of reason which gives itself the name of rationalism, but reason he never detracts. We have felt it very necessary to point this out, because unreason is from sometime trying to become a cult in the West, as one can see from much of its new art and literature, and the repercussions are duly arriving in India. This new law of Nature that ideas should rise in the West and set in the East cannot be broken until India fully recovers her soul.

We have tried to indicate what Sri Aurobindo has done to bring about this recovery. We have said that what distinguishes him is his integral vision. The Gita gave a restatement, in the language and thought of its own times, of the spiritual principles of life and conduct inherited from the past, integrating the Ancient Knowledge with all the new developments that had occurred in it and with all the new streams of influence that had flowed into it meanwhile. In our own day such a statement for us has been long needed. In this long, long period of decadence, which has now happily ended, many developments in Indian thought have taken place and not a few influences have streamed in. Especially the last few centuries through which the world has passed have witnessed movements of great vitality both in thought and action. We needed some one who could not only recover our past — for India to remain India, must remain true to the Rishis — but one who could take in all subsequent developments and all new influences of these great movements of the world, assimilate their truths and give an integrated statement of it all in the language and thought of the present day. Sri Aurobindo came and has accomplished the needed work.

The aim which he has set himself for his Yoga is something difficult for us to conceive. For he says that not only the human consciousness is to be radically changed but also the subconscious life and the unconscious material stuff of the body, by the descent of the Super-Mind into them. Are not the laws of life and the flesh inexorable? Is it not some noble, some splendid, yet wild spiritual enthusiasm

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which says that they can be broken? We ourselves who write here would perhaps have found it very difficult to accept this possibility if some one other than Sri Aurobindo urged it. But why do we admit it now? All that we have said now about Sri Aurobindo, we believe, is a sufficient answer to that question. What is the substance of his teaching? It is that man is Spirit and that his life here must become a perfect expression of its nature. However cultivated and ennobled we may make our life and however complete the self-identification with Spirit in our consciousness, if we allow this weak breath of life and this absurd body to limit us, our spiritual dignity is at stake. We simply offer a more delicious dish to death. Does it mean, then, that the Supramental Yogin will live in an immortal body for ever? We do not think so. It means he will not oblige death, that is all. We think the right way to look at this question is to say, in Napoleon's words, 'On s'engage et plus on voit\ — one enters upon the task and then one sees. However difficult all this may be even to conceive and however weak our strength of aspiration, we can at least pray for Sri Aurobindo's complete victory. For he has not set this aim merely for himself, or for a few who are fit to receive the secret, but for the whole of humanity.

We believe that Sri Aurobindo is in touch with that mighty mystery and power of God which he calls the Super-Mind. What all that means how can we who are in the ignorance say or appraise? But this much we shall say. According to the Ancient Wisdom which we hold in the highest reverence, after a final definitive transformation in the evolving consciousness, the creature and the Deity, soul and God get mixed up, in an illogical manner. The human boundaries of man disappear once for all.

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