Professor Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Shri V. V. Giri and Dr. Karan Singh (sitting)
at the Inauguration of the National Seminar on 16 August 1972
Inauguration of the International Seminar on 5 December 1972
Left to right: Dr. Karan Singh (speaking); Prof. Nurul Hasan, Education Minister;
Shrimati Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister; Prof. Arabinda Basu, Director of the Seminar
At the release of Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Commemoration Stamp
by Shri H. N. Bahuguna in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi Branch. Dr.Karan Singh
examining the stamp; Sri H. N. Bahuguna and Sri Surendra Mohan Ghose looking on
V. V. Giri
It is not a mere coincidence that the twenty-fifth anniversary of Indian Independence and the Birth Centenary of Sri Aurobindo Ghose are being celebrated simultaneously. India throughout the ages has attached primacy to spiritual values. This great cultural heritage has been kept alive as a living tradition by an unbroken line of seers and saints. Sri Aurobindo was a many-sided personality. He was a poet, patriot and a saint. By honouring Sri Aurobindo we honour a great Indian tradition. He is rightly looked upon as one of the builders of modern India.
Sri Aurobindo was born in Bengal, but he belonged to the whole of India, nay to the entire humanity. In him the east and the west, the north and the south, forgot their differences. His gurus were Bankim Chandra and Vivekananda, Tilak and Lele Shastri. His co-workers and disciples included persons from all parts of India: Subramanya Bharati and V. V. S. Iyer, Sir Akbar Hydari and K. M. Munshi. In the words of Romain Rolland, he was "the completest synthesis that has been realized to this day of the genius of Asia and the genius of Europe". Sri Jawaharlal Nehru hailed Sri Aurobindo as "one of the greatest minds of his age".
Sri Aurobindo was a contemporary of Gandhi, the idol of Rabindranath Tagore and Chittaranjan Das, a colleague of Baptista and Lajpat Rai. He was one of those illustrious sons of India who moulded the destiny of this nation at a crucial time in its history. The contribution he made to the development of modern Indian political thought will always be remembered by a grateful nation. He was a Prophet of Indian Renaissance but his concept of nationalism eschewed the narrow urges of chauvinism and revivalism. I would like to quote from his famous "Open Letter to My Countrymen" written in 1909. He said: "Our ideal of patriotism proceeds on the basis of love and brotherhood and it looks beyond the unity of the nation and envisages the ultimate unity of mankind." This ideal of human unity is in consonance with the spirit of real internationalism. About India's role in the world he said: "India has always existed for humanity and not for herself and it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great."
* Speech at the Inauguration of the National Seminar at Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi, on 16 August 1972.
It was in the fitness of things that the Sahitya Akademi, the premier National Academy of Letters, organized four regional Seminars on this occasion to discuss Sri Aurobindo's influence on Indian Literature; followed by the National Seminar which will be in session from this afternoon. The best tribute to a poet and thinker of his eminence is to discuss his contribution to various aspects of contemporary Indian thought and philosophy. Sri Aurobindo's work has inspired many learned men and women who have gathered here.
The Sahitya Akademi has been doing excellent work in translation of Indian classics into all languages, and celebration of important occasions by holding seminars. It held the Tagore, Guru Nanak and Lenin centenaries wherein scholars of different regions read their papers. In this Seminar, Sri Aurobindo's "Vision of India" will be discussed in its different aspects. Sri Aurobindo had realized the importance of integrating all aspects of human life. He was never one-sided, never stressed only one aspect of life at the cost of others. He knew several languages: Bengali was his mother-tongue; he learnt many languages including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Gujarati; but English was the language he voluntarily chose for his expression. In the Book Exhibition you will see the translations of his works in various languages as well as a set of his original complete works. Such a prolific and untiring writer, Sri Aurobindo stimulates his readers with new thoughts. The world has still much to learn from his philosophy, which is really meant for the Future Man. We are rightly proud of his being an Indian and having had this opportunity of living in such exciting times, when many of his prophecies are coming out to be true.
I am very happy to associate with this function. I declare the Book Exhibition and the Seminar on Sri Aurobindo's Birth Centenary open.
Jai Hind
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INDIA has gone through tremendous upheavals in its long and tortuous history over the last five thousand years, but there is one thing unique about India that sets it apart from other great civilisations that nourished in the past, the Babylonians and the Egyptians; the Greeks and the Romans; the Mayas and the Aztecs. They were great civilisations, some of them contemporaneous with the dawn of Indian civilisation, and yet all of them have vanished and live today only in the minds of museumologists and research scholars, whereas India continues to be dynamic and vital, in touch with the sources of its tradition and firmly based on its past heritage. One of the main reasons is that in India, whenever it seemed that the past was going to be extinguished or the essence of India was going to succumb to the forces of tyranny, the forces of annihilation that have been unleashed upon it countless times in its history, always great men and women have been born who have once again relighted the lamp that is India, who have once again given fresh hope and courage and inspiration to the masses of this country. These great men and women — many of them are known, some are worshipped as Avataras, others as saints, and others have worked unknown in manners mysterious and beyond normal comprehension — have all of them contributed towards the continuance of India from the very earliest times, from the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Buddha and the Puranas, the great Acharyas of South India and the medieval saint Singers.
And then, of course, the tremendous renaissance that took place here in the 19th century. It is a fascinating history of how our philosophy and-our religion have been constantly reinterpreted through the centuries. This is a field into which I cannot go today, for my present subject is Sri Aurobindo; but in order to understand Sri Aurobindo, I would like first to place before you the major contours of the Indian renaissance, because unless we know the setting in which a man worked and lived and rose to fame, it is not really possible fully to assess his impact.
The great Indian renaissance began, as you know, with Raja Ram
* A slightly abridged version of two lectures given at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Borabay, in February 1972.
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Mohan Roy in the 19th century. It was an extraordinary efflorescence. In the entire history of the world, with the possible exception of the ancient Greeks of the time of Pericles and Plato, I do not think you will find compressed within half a century such a remarkable wealth of genius and talent in every sphere of human activity as there was in Bengal during this period. In 1857, the year of what we now call the first Indian War of Independence, also known as the Indian Mutiny, India lay broken and prostrate at the feet of her foreign conquerors. At a time like this, it was first within the Hindu social reform movement that the awakening began. This was inevitable because, before the British came, the Muslims were rulers of a large part of India, particularly Bengal. When the British impact came, the Muslims became sullen and went into the background, whereas the Hindus, who were intellectually more resilient, began looking into their society and soon realised that the real weakness in India lay in Hindu society itself. While all sorts of ridiculous superstitions flourished in the name of religion, the supreme vision of the Vedanta, of the Upanishads, had been narrowed down through ignorance and bigotry into a mere desert trickle of dead habit. That was why the best minds of the time decided first of all to concentrate upon Hindu social reform.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, and his two main followers, Devendranath Tagore and Keshub Chandra Sen, in due course founded the Adi Brahmo Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj of India. In 1867 the Prarthana Samaj was founded in Maharashtra by Sri Ranade and Sri Bhandarkar. In Punjab in 1875 that spiritual dynamo, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, founded the Arya Samaj. And all these movements in their own ways began to attempt to remove the accretions that had developed upon Hinduism through centuries of servitude to foreign rule. There were other causes too for the Indian revival at the time — the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and Col. Olcott, the work of the great Orientalists like Max Miiller, Fergusson, Cunningham and others. To these Westerners who helped to rediscover for us our language, our archaeology and the total wealth of our heritage, to them India owes a deep debt of gratitude.
But all this was outside the heart of traditional Hinduism. But presently there was a revolution within the heart of Hinduism when Sri Rama-krishna and Swami Vivekananda, two of the most remarkable people to have been produced by any country in any age, appeared on the scene. It is a saga in itself, this magnificent relationship between them, and how out of the glowing spiritual realisation of Ramakrishna and the marvellous power and dynamism of Vivekananda was produced what was virtually a revolution, not only in Hinduism but in our whole concept of religion as well.
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The political implications of this were obvious. The British domination of India was based, not upon its military might alone, but perhaps even more upon the myth of Western superiority; and once this myth was broken and we began to realise the causes of our own weakness in order to shed them, it would be only a matter of time before the British rule came to an end. In 1885 an Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume, founded the Indian National Congress, the party that was destined to lead India to Independence and beyond, and in 1893, after spending 14 years in England, Sri Aurobindo returned to India.
Although brought up entirely in the Western tradition, in Greek and Latin, English and French, yet so powerful were his samskaras that, soon after he came back to India, he plunged into political activity. He first contributed a series of seven articles to the Indu Prakash, a journal of considerable importance at the time, under the title of 'New Lamps for Old'. This was where Sri Aurobindo raised his voice against the British rule, against the servitude and slavery to which India had been reduced by its Western masters. Actually Sri Aurobindo's political activity was very brief. In 1905 he left his job of Vice-Principal of the Baroda College and went to Bengal at the time of the partition. He came to be involved in what has come to be known as the Alipore Bomb Conspiracy Case, and he was arrested and tried for attempting forcibly to overthrow the British Government. He had already begun the practice of Yoga, but it was during his year of confinement in prison — his asramvasa — that he had an overwhelming spiritual experience. It will be useful if I quoted from him as to what exactly he felt at the time:
"I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me His shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door, and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. I lay on the coarse blankets that were given to me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover."
It was thus during this period that Sri Aurobindo's spiritual nature began to assert itself more and more clearly. The trial itself must rank as among the most dramatic and exciting in the annals of modern jurisprudence. It is a fascinating story as to how Sri Aurobindo was arrested, how Desh-
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bandhu Chittaranjan Das, then an unknown lawyer, went out to defend Sri Aurobindo and used words in his peroration which perhaps had never before been used in a criminal case:
"My appeal to you is this, that long after the controversy will be hushed in silence, long after this turmoil and agitation will have ceased, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone, his words will have echoed and re-echoed, not only in India but across distant seas and lands. Therefore I say that the man in his position is not only standing before the bar of this Court, but before the bar of the High Court of History."
The Judge was Mr. Beachcroft who, by an amazing coincidence, had been a class fellow of Sri Aurobindo at Cambridge. It is very obvious to anybody reading the records today that Sri Aurobindo was in fact deeply involved in the conspiracy, and it is clear from his writings that he did accept the necessity of violence when a violent power was trying to dominate us. Nevertheless, such was the system of justice that he was acquitted because the specific charge against him could not be proved. After acquittal, Sri Aurobindo started the Karmayogin, but his writings now had a more overtly spiritual tone. And when finally he got in 1910 what he termed an "adesha" to leave Bengal, he went first to Chandernagar, and from there to Pondicherry, and was henceforth completely out of politics. So flashed Sri Aurobindo across the Indian sky like a meteor, but it was a meteor so portentous and so charged with dynamism and power and light that it left an indelible impression upon his time and in fact upon all time.
With regard to the political message of Sri Aurobindo, I would like to draw your attention only to a few salient points. The first was his clear recognition of the role of the masses in the Indian National Movement. Until that time, the Indian National Congress had been dominated by the so-called Moderates, very able and good men like Sir Phirozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji, M. G. Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, men of the highest integrity and learning but nevertheless people who did not really have a mass base. The Congress in its early years was very much of an armchair sort of undertaking where people met to pass resolutions urging the British Government to part crumb by crumb with the loaf of Independence. But Sri Aurobindo realised that this simply would not do. This policy of 'petition, prayer and protest', as he put it, was not going to lead India anywhere, and he was one of the first leaders in India to stress the importance of the masses, of the proletariat. Without involving the
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masses in the freedom movement, it would never really get off the ground. To use an aviation simile, it was like a plane lumbering along the runway, without the necessary power and the lift to take off.
Second, Sri Aurobindo was an incisive and fearless critic of the British. Before him, among the Indian intelligentsia there was an almost superstitious awe of the British. But Sri Aurobindo's mind had been sharpened by the Western tradition, and he realised that the rulers had to be attacked frontally if the bond of intellectual enslavement was to be broken. As he wrote about them in 1893 when the British were at the zenith of their power in India:
"... they are very commonplace men put into a quite unique position. They are really ordinary men — and not only ordinary men, but ordinary Englishmen — types of the middle class of Philistines, in the graphic English phrase, with the narrow hearts and commercial habit of mind peculiar to that sort of people."
And Sri Aurobindo was not only fearless in attacking the British, but equally in attacking the system of British administration. For example, he said about the educational system:
"Our system of public instruction, the most ingeniously complete machine for murder that human stupidity ever invented, and murder not only of a man's body but of a man's soul, of that sacred fire of individuality in him which is far holier and more precious than this mere mortal breath."
Nor was Sri Aurobindo entirely negative. With every criticism that he made he put forward a positive programme of action. While he advocated economic boycott, he also put forward the logical corollary of Swadeshi. He advocated educational boycott, but with it a system of national education. In fact he went to Calcutta as the Principal of the first National College. While advocating judicial boycott, again, he suggested in their place National Arbitration Courts. Sri Aurobindo realised clearly that, if the British had to go, if the institutions built by them had to go, they must be replaced by national institutions. Thus his whole approach — as may be inferred from his writings in the Bande Mataram and the Karmayogin — was one of constructive suggestions and programmes along with an implacable attack on British rule.
While this was his main political approach at the time, the spiritual strand in his life was always very important. He had a remarkable experience
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at the very moment he set foot on India when he came back from England. Then he had another major experience of the "vacant infinite" when he went to the Shankaracharya hill in Kashmir and looked across the valley and the lake from the magnificent temple of Shiva. Presently he became interested in the practice of Yoga, and when the Maharashtrian Yogi, Lele, initiated him into Yoga, Sri Aurobindo had very powerful experiences. So while he was politically active, his sadhana and his Yogic practices were also continuing. And therefore his three key political concepts that I will put before you now are very considerably influenced by this spiritual background.
The first is his concept of the Nation. He looked upon India, not merely as a geographical or political entity; he looked upon India as in fact a living dynamic spiritual entity, a living being as it were, a 'Devatatma'. You will find Kalidasa in his magnificent opening of the Kumarasambhava using the term 'Devatatma' for the Himalayas:
Astyuttarasyām disi devatātmā,
Himālayo nāma nagādhirājah.
Sri Aurobindo looked upon India as a Devatatma, and he found the key to this concept in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Ananda Math and Bande Mataram. I would like to read one or two passages to show how major a factor this spiritual nationalism is in Sri Aurobindo's whole political thought:
"What is a Nation? What is your mother country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty sakti, composed of all the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhavani Mahisha Mardini sprang into being from the Shakti of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity."
You will remember how in the story in the Durgasaptasati it was necessary for all the Devatas, all the shining ones, to pool their power in the form of a Goddess who alone could defeat the demon Mahishasura. Similarly, Sri Aurobindo implied that unless all Indians pooled their power in a mighty spiritual endeavour, the demon of foreign rule could not be defeated. And if the nation is a spirit, a great Divine and Maternal power, then nationalism is also not just a convenient method of politics; it is verily a Sadhana, the highest duty of which we are capable, a mighty yajna into which we must be prepared to sacrifice everything:
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"Love has a place in politics, but it is the love of one's country, for one's countrymen, for the glory, greatness and happiness of the race, the divine dnanda of self-immolation for one's fellows, the ecstasy of relieving their sufferings, the joy of seeing one's blood flow for country and freedom, the bliss of union in death with the fathers of the race. The feeling of almost physical delight in the touch of the mother-soil, of the winds that blow from Indian seas, of the rivers that stream from Indian hills, in the hearing of Indian speech, music, poetry, in the familiar sights, sounds, habits, dress, manners of our Indian life, this is the physical root of that love. The pride in our past, the pain of our present, the passion for the future are its trunk and branches. Self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, great service, high endurance for the country are its fruit. And the sap which keeps it alive is the realisation of the Motherhood of God in the country, the vision of the Mother, the perpetual contemplation, adoration and service of the Mother."
His concept, then, was of the nation as a spiritual entity and of nationalism as the highest sadhana. Before I go on to the final point, I would like to deal for a moment with this question of "violence". Sri Aurobindo felt that because India had been violently subjugated, she was fully justified if necessary in using violence to achieve her freedom:
"It is the common habit of established governments, and especially those which are themselves oppressors, to brand all violent methods in subject peoples and communities as criminal and wicked. But no nation yet has listened to the cant of the oppressor when itself put to the test, and the general conscience of humanity approves the refusal. Under certain circumstances a civil struggle becomes in reality a battle, and the morality of war is different from the morality of peace. To shrink from bloodshed and violence under such circumstances is a weakness deserving as severe a rebuke as Sri Krishna addressed to Arjuna when he shrank from the colossal civil slaughter on the field of Kurukshetra. Liberty is the life-breath of a nation; and when the life is attacked, when it is sought to suppress all chance of breathing by violent pressure, any and every means of self-preservation becomes right and justifiable, just as it is lawful for a man who is being strangled to rid himself of the pressure on his throat by any means in his power."
Besides his exalted concept of Nation and of Nationalism, there was
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also the third aspect of Sri Aurobindo's politics, his view that India has a special role to play in the welfare and progress of humanity. He constantly reiterated that the freedom of India was not only important for India, but for the world too, for without freedom India could not make the contribution that it was her destiny to make for the future development of the human race. This is extremely crucial when we study Sri Aurobindo, because without this aspect we might fall into the error of dismissing him as an ardent and eloquent nationalist and no more. One key passage may be quoted here:
"India must be reborn, because her rebirth is demanded by the future of the world. India cannot perish, our race cannot become extinct, because among all the divisions of mankind it is to India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal religion which is to harmonise all religions, science, philosophies and make mankind one soul."
And again:
"This is the Dharma that for the salvation of humanity was cherished in the seclusion of this peninsula from of old. It is to give this religion that India is rising. She does not rise as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak. She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the whole world."
This, then, is the note upon which I would like to end today's talk, because this is the link as it were between Sri Aurobindo's politics and his Yoga, between Sri Aurobindo before 1910 and Sri Aurobindo after 1910.
II
From 1910 to 1950, for 40 years Sri Aurobindo never once moved out of Pondicherry, and he perfected there a most remarkable and startling system of Yoga with which he sought to usher in a new dimension of consciousness. I will try today to speak about this aspect of Sri Aurobindo's message, but I must say at the outset that I am not an Ashramite, and it is therefore possible that there may be some who may not fully agree with what I say. The second difficulty, of course, is that it is simpler to speak
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about politics, but when you start speaking about things of the spirit, it becomes very difficult to put it into words. Yato vdco nivartante aprdpya manasa saha, as the Upanishad says; "Where the words fall back along with the mind, unable to comprehend!" With these limitations, therefore, I will try to place before you what I consider to be the salient features of Sri Aurobindo's approach.
Sri Aurobindo subscribed to the basic theory of the Vedanta, the theory of the immanence and transcendence of the Divine, Isdvasyamidam sarvam yatkinca jagatyam jagat. Sri Aurobindo accepted it with certain special features to which I will refer shortly. His Vedanta is beautifully expressed in a poem of his in eleven stanzas, and I think it conveys better perhaps than a large number of his books the spirit in which he approached the Divine. The poem is called 'Who' and begins and concludes as follows:
"In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest,
Whose is the hand that has painted the glow?
When the winds were asleep in the womb of the ether,
Who was it roused them and bade them to blow?
He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature,
He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought;
In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven,
In the luminous net of the stars He is caught....
It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight his shadow is thrown;
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it, immense and alone".
So the first point is that Sri Aurobindo did subscribe to the Vedanta's view that Divinity is both immanent in the cosmos and transcendent. In other words, whereas everything that exists is as a result of the Divine, the Divine itself is not limited by its own creation.
Then there is the problem of cosmogenesis. Now here Sri Aurobindo has a very interesting and original approach. He subscribed to the theory of spiritual evolution, that it is only because the Godhead plunged into the densest matter that there was an involution from which an evolution can take place. Something cannot evolve out of nothing, and the fact that the spirit has evolved from the cosmos means that at some stage the spirit must have been fully involved in it, must have plunged into the opposite pole to
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pure consciousness which is the densest matter. First, then, there is matter pervaded by the Divinity but not conscious at all of its inherent nature. After millions of years, as a result of certain inner forces, life makes its appearance, first as algae and amoebas, and then, as science tells us, with increasing complexity there is a gradual movement upwards on the evolutionary ladder. Again after millions of years, mind starts making its appearance, and with the advent of mind there is an important leap in the evolutionary process. With the advent of man, a thinking being, there appears on the scene at last a creature who can become aware of his own existence.
A rock is not aware of its existence, an animal is only vaguely aware of its existence, but with man we come to a creature who can, as the Upanishad says, look within and become aware of what in fact is a nucleus of his being. However, according to Sri Aurobindo, man too, despite his remarkable capacities, is not the peak of creation, its final form. He is in fact an intermediate creature on the evolutionary ladder, with one part of his being still deep in matter, in animal consciousness, and the other striving and stretching upwards towards the Divine. He is the hinge between the conscious and the super-conscious.
Sri Aurobindo postulates that above our present level of consciousness there are other levels reaching up to the Divine, and the destiny of man now is to take the leap from the limited mental consciousness that man is at present to the luminous sphere of the superconscious. The difference in this leap is that, whereas evolution hitherto has been largely blind, now man has the capacity to speed up the evolutionary process, to telescope millions of years of blind evolution into a much shorter time span. Therefore, according to Sri Aurobindo, the truest destiny of man is to take the next leap forward into the supramental. But this will be a quantum leap, because man to superman is going to be a larger leap than from animal to man. The new leap into the divine consciousness will be a climactic one, and Sri Aurobindo says that his Yoga is essentially geared to this end. We have thus in Sri Aurobindo the Vedantist, we have his theory of cosmo-genesis, and we have his anthropogenesis, the creation of man and his role in the spiritual destiny of the cosmos. And we have the leap from manhood to supermanhood, from the mental to the supramental.
There are very interesting corollaries to this new leap. There is, to begin with, a reconciliation between matter and spirit. In the same way as Einstein reconciled energy and matter in the famous equation E=MC2, according to Sri Aurobindo, once the supramental level is reached, the dichotomy between matter and spirit disappears. In fact the relationship is something like that between water and ice. Matter is spirit which is visible,
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and spirit is matter in a different shape; there is no real difference between the two. Then there is a reconciliation of many of the problems that face mankind today, many of which were not solvable at all at the mental level of consciousness. Unless a step forward is taken on the evolutionary ladder, these problems can simply not be reconciled, because human consciousness itself is so limited and imperfect at this level. Another simile I can think of is from aviation. It is as if, when you take off, you enter a zone of turbulence which is very bumpy, and it is only when you transcend that zone that you finally come into a calm and quiet area. While you are in the turbulent zone, you can be the best pilot in the world, you can have the biggest plane in the world, nevertheless you will get knocked and bumped around. It is only when you transcend that zone of turbulence that you will be able to get into the atmosphere of peace and tranquillity. Similarly Sri Aurobindo feels that the present human consciousness is a zone of turbulence because of the imperfections and limitations inherent in the mental consciousness, and only by transcending it can you get into the zone of tranquillity.
Now the question arises as to how this is to take place, how does one in fact move upwards on the evolutionary scale. This is where Sri Aurobindo postulated what he called his Integral Yoga, an instrument whereby a few people, to begin with, could start to move into the rarefied atmosphere of the supramental consciousness. His goal is not individual liberation, and in fact he felt that we "have had a lot of individual liberation in this country with great sages and saints who achieved realisation but whose passing left the world very much as it was. What Sri Aurobindo wanted to do was to bring about a new state of consciousness in the world, nothing less than a "new heaven and a new earth". This is a goal which I do not think any philosopher in the history of the world has ever postulated. The only parallel that strikes me is that of Vishwamitra in ancient times who tried his own srsti, a new creation, because he was dissatisfied with the creation as it was. To achieve the desired transformation of the very texture of the world, Sri Aurobindo perfected and put into practice his Integral Yoga.
But what is "Integral Yoga" ? First a surrender to the Divine, a complete surrender, not only a mental or physical surrender, but a surrender in all parts of our being. The second movement would be the ascent of the human consciousness to the sphere of the supramental through various Yogic disciplines. Then, after the ascent, the Yogi would try to absorb this supramental consciousness and return to earth with that power and that light so that the force of the supramental is brought to bear directly upon this level of consciousness. That is the third movement of the Yoga,
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and it is tremendously important because Sri Aurobindo always said that a lot of other people have ascended but have gone out, whereas what he wanted to do was to come back to the earth consciousness and bring to bear the power and the light and the glory of the supramental upon this terrestrial consciousness so as to hasten the transformation of man and effect the next leap in the evolutionary process.
These, as I see them, are the broad contours of what Sri Aurobindo wanted to do, and his Yoga is integral because it comprehends every aspect of human endeavour. Traditional Bhakti is a part of it, for unless the emotions flow nothing can happen. What is involved is essentially the power, and the light, and the glory of the spirit itself, and without the emotions yoked to the chariot of Yoga, it is not possible to move forward. Then there is Jnana, the spiritual wisdom, which is essential; without Jnana, Bhakti itself can degenerate into sheer sentimentalism. Then there is Karma, and in the Sri Aurobindo Ashrama, as you know, everybody is given a sphere of activity in which to work out their Yoga. And then there is also the Rajayoga, the mystic system whereby through certain practices man comes into contact with higher states of being and consciousness.
So Integral Yoga covers all these, and covers all aspects of life, art and literature, politics and science, and everything that you do. Some people feel that, well, religion is all right, half an hour a day may be kept apart for it, and for the rest of the 2312 hours we may forget all about it; half an hour for lunch , 15 minutes for breakfast, 45 minutes for dinner, and half an hour for God! perhaps better half an hour God than nothing at all, but if you are to make a real movement upwards, you have got to integrate you personality around the nucleus of you spiritual endeavour. You have got to integrate all your activities, how ever nonreligious or religious they may appear to be, around the one central core. As one very great man whom I know puts it, is like a series of concentric circles with the nucleus in the middle. whatever you do, the center must remain the same. If the circles are concentric, you go as far as you like, but you will never go away from the centre. But if the circles become eccentric, then the whole personality goes out of gear and one becomes a fractured and fragmented and probably a neurotic personality.
Thus the spiritual quest is nothing if it is not a process of integration around the spiritual core, and this I think is what Sri Aurobindo meant when he talked of the Integral Yoga and of the necessity for a total one-pointed surrender to the Divine. Here was a Yogi whose system comprehended the entire planet. The question of its being confined only to a certain country or religion did not arise. As far as Sri Aurobindo is con-
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cerned, it is utterly immaterial as to what religion one follows; one can be a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu or a Buddhist, or have no formal religion at all — it simply makes no difference whatsoever. Whether one goes to a church or a mosque or a temple or to none of them is immaterial; what is needed is the inner dedication, and to do the inner work.
Humanity today is on the crossroads. Man in this nuclear age is going through a terrible crisis, walking as it were on the razor's edge, ksurasya dhdrd. But it is only by travelling that path that one will be able to reach any type of integration. It is not easy, but there is no other way. As the Shwetashwatara Upanishad has it —
Vedāhametam purusam mahāntam
Ādityavarnam tamasah parastāt.
Tameva viditvāti mftyumeti
Nānyah panthā vidyate ayanāya.
"I know that great being glowing with a thousand lights like unto the sun on the other shore beyond the darkness. It is only by knowing him one can attain immortality; there is no other way."
This is the message of Sri Aurobindo, to work one-pointedly towards the supramental transformation. Remember, not all rocks have become animals, not all the animals have become men, and not all men are going to become supermen overnight. This is a task which only a few will be able to undertake, the path-finders, the great ones who are there shining efful-gently and throwing light upon the path. Sri Aurobindo is one of those great beings who come from time to time to show a new path and a new light to humanity. It is for us to try and derive whatever light we can from him and to follow the path, so that we can reach that glorious stage which the Mundakopanishad describes:
Brahmaivedam amrtam purastāt
Brahma paācāt brahma daksina tas cottarena
Adhaścordhvam ca prasrtam
Brahmaivedam viśvam idam varistam.
.
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