Sri Aurobindo's Life*

Suniti Kumar Chatterji

I

SRI Aurobindo came into the world on 15 August 1872 and passed into the Great Beyond on 5 December 1950. He had thus lived and trod upon this earth for about seventy-eight years and three months. But before he joined the majority, by the glory of both his Thought and his Action in the living world, and by his Vision of the Unseen (glimpses of which out of the abundance of the Grace he had received from the Unseen, he brought within the ken of seeking souls), he had already become one of the Immortals of history.

    Sri Aurobindo has been one of the great band of divine choristers in the history of man, who have sung, age after age, in diverse languages and forms, the glory of That Which Is; the only attribute of this Unseen Entity, both transcendent and immanent, that we can think of in our limited power of understanding and feeling is that it is the Highest Knowledge, all-embracing and perennial, and our contemplation of this Entity can only begin with a feeling of a 'Rapturous Amazement', as it has been said by Albert Einstein, the rest being the Silence of the deep merging into the Deep. The Sages, Saints and Prophets in all lands and ages have sought to dispel the darkness of ignorance and despair from the mind of Man, after (for unknown reasons and for some mystic purpose unexplained to us) Man was transformed from the unthinking beast into Man endowed with the divine power of thinking, and was able to start on his journey for discovering his self in relation to the Reality. The Priest-Kings of Babylon and of Egypt, the Rishis of India, the Prophets of Israel, the Sages of China, the Philosophers of Greece, the Sufis or Wise Men of Islam: — they form a noble band of singers and choristers of the Unseen. Their words still enable men everywhere to lift up their hearts for a vision of Truth and Beauty. And among the bearers of this great tradition in India, one of the greatest, particularly in the present age, has been Sri Aurobindo.

    * Speech at the National Seminar, New Delhi, August 1972.

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SRI AUROBINDO — Baroda 1906

I

SRI AUROBINDO — 1950

    Like all great personalities, men and women who in the words of the Gita can be looked upon as fragments of the Splendour of the Supreme, Sri Aurobindo, as a Leader of his countrymen in their march to Freedom, as a Thinker and a Yogi who sought to attain to the realisation of the supreme by both the path of Wisdom and the p£th of Discipline, and as a Poet who had the divine Urge and Ecstasy and Insight for the Glory and the Radiance of the Beauty and Bliss which suffuse Life and Being, is like a Diamond of many facets, each facet showing one aspect of his many-sided activity. Like all mortals, he had a continuous unfoldment of his being — his interests and activities and his personality. We first see him as a scholar and a poet, who acquired with the seriousness of a seeker the intellectual equipment which would enable him to serve his people as an administrator, access to which position was in the control of the English rulers. They had instituted elaborate and exclusive tests, intellectual and otherwise, for Indians in the matter of this elementary right to join the Civil Service in their own country. His years of stay and study in England from his seventh to his twenty-first year would have transformed him from an Indian boy of a high family into a deracine in his mind and speech and his way of thinking and his way of living. But a person of a divine intellect like Sri Aurobindo could not be spoiled quite so easily. He of course acquired the English language as if it was his own language, and he could handle this language with power and beauty. The English language became the main vehicle of his contact with the world, including his own people, even for the expression of his deepest thoughts and his most intimate teachings. He also obtained a remarkable gift of poetry in English, and an astonishing control over English versification in all its ramifications, even coming out as a successful innovator in his experiment with the complications of the metrics of English. As one trained in the classical, i.e. the Graeco-Latin tradition of scholarship in Europe, which was during his young days at college in England still a living and fruitful tradition, the intellectualism and catholicity of Greek thought and literature and the aesthetics of Greek art gave him a solid and a strong basis for his litera-rary, his philosophical and his aesthetic as well as his political being. So, after failing to get admission into the charmed circle of the Indian Civil Service because of a technical reason although he had done remarkably well in his examination (and this ultimately proved to be a blessing not only for the young Indian scholar who secretly wished to avoid the I.C.S., but also for India herself), he came back home, to serve his people as an administrator, and then as an educator. From this it was almost a natural

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transition to a politician and a journalist. In all these capacities, his mind and his activities were oriented towards one great objective — the freeing of his country from the British yoke.

In his political attitude, Sri Aurobindo became a convinced radical and a leftist; he wanted freedom for his people, not in doses, but immediately and right then. The complacent peace-loving Congress method ceased to have an appfl&l for a dynamic and restless personality like Sri Aurobindo. This alarmed the old style senior politicians all over India, who were too timid to think of any violent break or clash with the almighty British Government. The English contact with India had, as a result of the Time Spirit working all over the world, brought to India some benefits, notably that of Education and of a Modernism with its intellectual approach to things, and its restrictions on obscurantism. But the price for these intellectual and even spiritual benefits was too high to pay. This price meant not only the decay of our economic life, but a growing poverty through ruthless exploitation of the people for the advantage of the British, and an attendant crippling of the mind and general loss of nerve in all the departments of life.

    Sri Aurobindo came to Calcutta from Baroda in Western India where the Gaek wad of Baroda, an enlightened Indian Prince, gave him his first job in his state. In Calcutta he became a Professor in the National Council of Education, and began to edit his great nationalistic paper, the Bande Mataram, and he put himself at the head of a group of ardent young workers for the freedom of the country. A revolutionary group within the Indian National Congress which so far was the only important organisation for Indian political advancement, which the British were afraid of and hated, soon manifested itself and became prominent under Sri Aurobindo and Bipin Chandra Pal, and other leaders from outside Bengal like Bal Gangadhar Tilak from Maharashtra and Lala Lajpat Rai from the Panjab; and this group became quite a disturbing force, with its insistence on taking up a strong line. And Sri Aurobindo's national policy was not to sit idle and remain inactive, but he was prepared even to take recourse to force, to wage not only an ideological and a psychological war against the British Government, but also by violence to retaliate for the various cruelties, the soul-killing and spirit-and-body-destroying means which were employed to curb and shatter the nationalist workers, the patriotic students and other young people who were now joining the National Movement in their thousands, particularly after 1905 when Sri Aurobindo came to Calcutta.

    In the meanwhile, an immense change had come in the mind and spirit of Sri Aurobindo. If one were to describe it in one sentence, one could

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just say that he had undergone a sea-change — it was the completion and sublimation of his intellectual being which was essentially European and Greek and modern, through his newly found spiritual personality which was based on the thought and mysticism of India, her Vedas and Upanishads, her Puranas and Tantras, her Vedanta and Yoga. Yet this was not a fulfilment and a sublimation by mere revival and repetition of the bases of Indian thought and religion, mental and spiritual culture and mysticism only. Each great thinker who has the elements of greatness in him is never just a copyist or a revivalist. He cannot but bring in a new addition or interpretation, something from his own realisation, which is a part of his being in the context of the Reality. So, in a word, we may say that Sri Aurobindo's doctrines, his philosophy, his mystic experience, his teachings, are not just ancient Vedic or Indian, Jewish or Christian or Sufi or Islamic, Yogic or Tantric Consciousness. It is something of Sri Aurobindo himself, a part of his own self. Its immediate and profound appeal for Indians, however, is in its being broad-based upon Indian religious and secular experiences through the centuries.

III

    Sri Aurobindo's new lead in Politics led to the militant meeting of force by force — to retaliation for the use of brute force to suppress the legitimate aspirations of the people by the use of the bomb and whatever other arms the freedom-fighters could find to give a reply to whipping and inhuman torture and all kinds of oppression and finally to hanging of these soldiers in the fight for freedom. The sequence of events during this phase of our fight for freedom in the first decade of the 20th century is well-known. The salient fact was that Sri Aurobindo was arrested with his associates and followers, and there was their historical trial in what has become famous as the 'Alipore Bomb Case'. After a protracted trial, Sri Aurobindo was finally acquitted. As his arrest and detention even after this acquittal was contemplated by the British Government, Sri Aurobindo was persuaded to seek asylum in the French colonial territory of Pondi-cherry in South India in 1910 where he stayed for the rest of his life.

A great transformation by this time had taken place in the personality of Sri Aurobindo. From a political leader who had dedicated himself to the cause of his country's liberation, enunciated the philosophy of liberation and had taught and practised it with conspicuous courage, firing the imagination of the people, he had become a true Devotee of God, dedicating himself to self-training and meditation and surrendering himself to

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God. This withdrawal from active politics to apparently passive spirituality was not understood by some of his followers and fellow-workers in politics. There is no question that Sri Aurobindo's first and foremost appeal to his people, from the days of the Swadeshi Movement and the movement for Swaraj or Independence, was as one of our most dynamic political leaders, who had not only the freedom of the people from foreign yoke as his immediate objective, but also their mental and spiritual emancipation from ideologies that were opposed to the true background of Indian thought and culture and above all of India's spiritual heritage. At the same time he could never think of abjuring the heritage of the best that is in European culture, the greatness of European — Greek, English and French — poetry and art. To him honour and power, wealth and fame, were nothing, and he had no fear of any suffering and torment and physical pain which might come to him from the forces of repression which an Imperialist Power sought to use ruthlessly against him and his people. This aspect of his character, which was at first so obvious and on the surface, made him immediately understood by the people, and only gradually little by little the other aspect — his being a true Yogi, the discoverer of the nature of Ultimate Reality, for himself first and then teacher of it to others, — came before the people and was enthusiastically accepted by a growing number of devotees, men and women of the highest intellectual attainments, not only in India but also abroad. Early in his career in 1907, when he was distinguished as a Nationalist leader, and his religiophilosophical or spiritual role as a teacher had not yet become manifest, Rabindranath Tagore paid to Sri Aurobindo his enthusiastic homage of respect, as to a noble, selfless and self-sacrificing leader, in a long poem which is one of the highest encomiums paid to him; and the sentiments of this great poem (which begins with the words — Arabindo, Rabindrer Laho Namaskar: 'O Arabindo, accept the salutation of Rabindra') reverberated in the hearts of all readers of Bengali who were cognisant of the part he was playing in the national struggle at the time. The poet was eloquent in his tribute to Sri Aurobindo, with fervent faith in the belief that the dauntless spirit of a servant of truth could never be crushed by all the forces of repression, and that such ministry as Sri Aurobindo's for a suffering people was sure to triumph. In our student days when the great trial — the Alipore Bomb Case — was being held, with the barrister Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das fighting for the nationalist side in the law court set up by the English, we were thrilled by what Sri Aurobindo had been doing for his country's liberation, and were also apprehensive that the British anxiety to suppress the national movement might manage in the name of peace and order to send Sri Aurobindo and his fellow-workers to long terms

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in prison or deportation from India with other concomitants, to say the least, and Rabindranath's poem came to us as a just appraisement and a vindication which heartened us all.

IV

     The third phase of Sri Aurobindo's life (the first phase embraced his days of study and preparation in the intellectual domain in England; the second was the period of his service to the country as a political leader and freedom fighter up to the end of the Alipore Bomb Case; and the third took up the rest of his life at Pondicherry, when he gradually emerged as a spiritual personality and a World Teacher) is really the greatest and most fruitful of his life. Finding an asylum in French-occupied India, he virtually abandoned active politics and sought earnestly to re-discover, for himself and for the world, the Soul of India, with a view to understand the nature of the Reality, for the final redemption of Mankind. A programme like this all great Teachers, Sages, Saints and Prophets always have before them. Only the place and time factors — the country where the teacher was born and lived and worked, and the age and circumstances in which he flourished — determined some of the outer accidentals or paraphernalia or colourings of his teachings. As a Hindu born in India, and having his mental pabulum from the world of Europe, Sri Aurobindo in his deeper being and in his outward expression was a confluence of two mighty rivers, the more profound culture of India — her deep spiritual wisdom — manifesting itself through the medium of European speech and European knowledge. This inner search and discovery, which enabled him to formulate his Vision of India and his Vision of the Ultimate Reality, started before his arrival in Pondicherry. He found congenial spirits there in a cultured French couple, Paul and Mirra (Mira) Richard. They began to bring out jointly a journal of a very distinguished quality, the Arya, giving among other things early statements of Sri Aurobindo's views. For the realisation of the higher quest, Sri Aurobindo formed an Ashrama or institution where a number of his followers, ardent seekers after truth, gathered round him. After a while the Richards left India, but Mirra, who became Sri Aurobindo's disciple, returned in 1920 and stayed on. She organised the Ashrama and became fully associated with Sri Aurobindo in his work, and she is now deeply respected by all followers of Sri Aurobindo as the Divinely inspired Mother of the Ashrama.

Sri Aurobindo's works, mostly in English, and in both verse and prose, have been published by the Ashrama in beautiful editions. In his poetry

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as well as in prose, he is deep and meaningful, and although his outpourings in both the forms have a divine eloquence and a most distinctive beauty and power seldom attained in English verse even by a born Englishman, it must be said that, while his language is simple and direct, he is for the ordinary person, not attuned to the mystic feel, a bit abstruse. He is emphatically for the intellectually mature and the spiritually advanced elite — truly "a Poet's Poet". The collected volume with the smaller poems makes easy reading enough, but his magnum opus, the great mystic poem Savitri, although it has passages of universal appeal, still requires for the average man a Commentary, in this resembling, for example, the Second Part of Goethe's Faust. But while the Faust belongs mainly to the mundane world of history and literature, Savitri is an epic of the human soul in relation to the Oversoul. The world is waiting for the time when a new and a general understanding of Savitri will dawn upon all enquiring spirits. In all his poems, particularly some of the smaller ones, we see a most harmonious wedding of the spirit of Vedic sublimity, of Puranic depth and mysticism, and Hellenic aestheticism, particularly with the grandeur and beauty of its myths.

V

    What vision did Sri Aurobindo have of India, in order to fit him to serve her, as well as humanity through her? Here we must also bring in the Vision that another great Modern Indian, a writer of great poetry and prose, had — the illustrious Bankim Chandra Chatterji, the thinker and novelist, who was the great Master for all Indian writers of the present age who are Indian in their inspiration and outlook and self-expression, including Sri Aurobindo himself. Bankim Chandra's vision is given a practical expression in that great nationalist Hymn to India of his dreams, the Vande Mataram. The place of this hymn in our national struggle has been admitted, and Vande Mataram, T salute my Mother', became a national slogan and a mantra or prayer to charm and conjure inert souls to enthusiasm and activity. After India's independence, the value of this hymn of Bankim Chandra (with the opening words which had become a national cry, Vande Mataram) was recognised by the Indian National Government who made it, and that other poem by Rabindranath Tagore, the Jana-gana-mana adhindyaka, the two National Anthems of India. Bankim Chandra has further elaborated this vision as expressed in the hymn in his novel of Nationalism, the Anandamath (first published in book form in 1882), Part I, Chap. 11, in three passages describing the Mother (i.e. the

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Motherland of India) as She Was, the Mother as She Is, and the Mother as She will Be. Here Bankim freely used the Symbolism of the Cult of sakti, the Power of the Divinity conceived as His Consort, as Jagaddhatri seated on her Lion, as Kali standing on the prostrate body of the Divinity, inert and inactive and as Ten-Armed Durgd Mahisdsuramardini mounted on Her vehicle, the Lion, and slaying the Buffalo Demon, Mahisha, representing all Evil and Sin, in terms of the Bengali iconographic representation which is Puranic also. In his Vision of India Sri Aurobindo could not, as an Indian and a Bengali Nationalist and as a mystic in the atmosphere of the Vedas, the Puranas and the Tantras, escape this visualisation which Bankim Chandra made on behalf of his people. But of course as a Philosopher and an original Thinker in the World context, Sri Aurobindo in the sum-total of his own Vision was far wider and more comprehensive than Bankim Chandra, as will be seen from his own scattered writings. I can only quote here one or two short passages from Sri Aurobindo himself in illustration of his Vision of India, in the mythologico-idealised vein:

      (i) There are many who, lamenting the by-gone glories of this great and ancient nation, speak as if the Rishis of old, the inspired creators of thought and civilisation, were a miracle of our heroic age, not to be repeated among degenerated men and in our distressful present. This is an error and thrice an error. Ours is the eternal land, the eternal people, the eternal religion, whose strength, greatness, holiness may be overclouded but never, even for a moment, utterly cease. The hero, the Rishi, the saint, are the natural fruits of our Indian soil, and there has been no age in which they have not been born.

We are no ordinary race. We are a people ancient as our hills and rivers and we have behind us a history of manifold greatness, not surpassed by any other race, we are the descendants of those who performed tapasya and underwent unheard-of austerities for the sake of spiritual gain and of their own will submitted to all the sufferings of which humanity is capable. We are the children of those mothers who ascended with a smile the funeral pyre that they might follow their husbands to another world. We are a people to whom suffering is welcome and who have a spiritual strength within them greater than any physical force, we are a people in whom God has chosen to manifest himself more than any other at many great moments of our history. It is because God has chosen to manifest himself and has entered into the hearts of his people that we are rising again as a nation.

     (ii) In spite of all drawbacks and in spite of downfall, the spirit of Indian culture, its central ideas, its best ideals have still their message

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for humanity and not for India alone. And we in India hold that they are capable of developing out of themselves by contact with new need and idea as good and better solutions of the problems before us than those which are offered to us secondhand from Western sources.

     If the spiritual ideal points the final way to a triumphant harmony of manifested life, then it is all-important for India not to lose hold of the truth, not to give up the highest she knows and barter it away for a perhaps more readily practicable but still lower ideal alien to her true and constant nature. It is important too for humanity that a great collective effort to realise this highest ideal — however imperfect it may have been, into whatever confusion and degeneration it may temporarily have fallen,— should not cease, but continue. Always it can recover its force and enlarge its expression, for the spirit is not bound to temporal forms but ever-new, immortal and infinite. A new creation of the old Indian svadharma, not a transmutation to some law of the Western nature, is our best way to serve and increase the sum of human progress.

    (iii) MOTHER DURGA! Rider on the lion, giver of all strength, Mother, beloved of Shiva! We born from thy parts of Power, we the youth of India, are seated here in thy Temple. Listen, O Mother, descend upon earth, make thyself manifest in this land of India.

Come, Revealer of the hero-path. We shall no longer cast thee away. May our entire life become a ceaseless worship of the Mother, all our acts a continuous service to the Mother, full of love, full of energy. This is our prayer, O Mother, descend upon earth, make thyself manifest in this land of India.

   Every people with a sense of pride in its history and culture naturally associates its country or homeland as being specially favoured of God, and the Hindus are no exception. The Hindus think that India is the holy land par excellence, above all lands, — it is the punyabhumi, "the land of Virtue", the dharma-bhumi, 'the land of Righteousness', the karma-bhumi, 'the land of good actions'. So with the Jews, "the chosen People of God", the land of Israel is the Holy Land. Believing Shintoists in Japan have no doubt that Japan is the blessed land inhabited by the noblest people on earth, the Japanese, who with their country were created by the Sun Goddess who protects them specially. And so China, for the Chinese, is the Hua Kuo or 'Flower Land' and Chung Kuo or 'the Middle or Central Land' and the Chinese land and people are greater than all other lands and peoples. In a spirit of pardonable zeal and enthusiasm, love and pride, for their own land and its people, we are frequently a little too fervent in our

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praise of ourselves and our homeland. Of course a just and a proper estimate of our national virtues and achievements, studied in the context of the virtues and achievements of the whole of humanity will pinpoint our excellences as well as our deficiencies, and help us to feel humility within ourselves, as well as anxious to remove our weaknesses and failures. Like all patriots and lovers of their country and their people, Sri Aurobindo had to use the language and the manner of his own people. He wants us to look to the great ideals which our people have always cherished, and to feel exalted by them, and to try to make them effective in our life. His Vision of India has nothing of the vapid and the chauvinistic about it. It is linked up with the eternal virtues.

I can close with one of his sonnets composed between 1930 and 1950, and to my mind it sums up within its 14 lines Sri Aurobindo's personality as a soul liberated even within the meshes of this present mundane existence. The age-long vision which India has been seeking all through, at least for the three millennia of her existence as an integrated and civilised and spiritually emancipated people, is nobly expressed in these most beautiful and forceful English lines of this and some other sonnets in this sequence (and elsewhere in Sri Aurobindo's poetry) — e.g. Cosmic Consciousness, Life-Unity, Bliss of Identity, etc., etc. I cannot read without deep emotion and ineffable joy poems like these from Sri Aurobindo, the poet of the divine Vision of India and the World, and of Man and Nature and of the Ultimate which includes everything, as I cannot read without similar joy and exaltation of emotion some of the great passages of the Vedas and the Upanishads, of the Gita, of Lao Tzu, of Isaiah, of Manikka-vasagar, of Kabir, of Rabindranath Tagore. And for the bliss and the fulness which I feel while reading a poem like the one given below, I conclude with my homage of reverence for the spirit of Sri Aurobindo:

LIBERATION

My mind, my soul grow larger than all Space;

     Time founders in that vastness glad and nude: 

The body fades, an outline, a dim trace,

     A memory in the spirit's solitude.

This universe is a vanishing circumstance

     In the glory of a white infinity,

Beautiful and bare for the Immortal's dance,

     House-room of my immense felicity.

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In the thrilled happy giant void within

     Thought lost in light and passion drowned in bliss,

Changing into a stillness hyaline,

     Obey the edict of the Eternal's peace, i

Life's now the Ineffable's dominion;

Nature is ended and the spirit alone.

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Sri Aurobindo's Experiences in

the Realm of the Spirit*

Kireet Joshi

MAY I begin with an apology? The subject that has been given to me is ambitious, and I must confess that I have not the true knowledge of the subject. The only thing I can do is to share with friends something of what I have read on this subject.

(1)

    It is well known that Sri Aurobindo had a thorough Western education, and he had a period of agnostic denial. But from the moment he looked at yogic phenomena, he could never take the attitude of doubt and disbelief which was for so long fashionable in Europe. Abnormal, otherwise supraphysical experiences and powers, occult or yogic, always seemed to him something perfectly natural and credible.

    It was after a long stay in India at Baroda, that Sri Aurobindo turned decisively to Yoga in 1904. He had, however, a few spiritual experiences even in his pre-yogic period. The first was in London, in 1892, the year of his departure from England. The next experience was when Sri Aurobindo set foot on Indian soil at Apollo Bunder, Bombay, on his return from England. A vast calm descended upon him and surrounded him and stayed with him for months afterwards.

    Then, in the first year of his stay in Baroda in 1893, an experience came to him at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to his carriage. He has described this experience later on in the poem, "The Godhead".¹

    Another noteworthy experience was when he went to Karnali (near Chandod in Gujarat) and there in a temple of Kali looked at the image and he saw the living presence there. He has described this experience in the poem, "The Stone Goddess".²

In 1901, Sri Aurobindo witnessed some occult phenomena during his

     * Paper read before the National Seminar, New Delhi, August 1972.

     ¹ Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, Vol. 5), p. 138. ² Ibid., p. 139.

younger brother Barin's experiments with the planchette. There were also some experiments of automatic writing. A direct proof of the power of Yoga came to him when a Naga Sadhu cured Barin of mountain fever by mantra. The sadhu took a glass full of water and cut the water cross-wise with a knife while repeating the mantra. He then told Barin to drink it saying he would not have the fever the next day. And the fever left him.

   In April 1903, Sri Aurobindo was on a tour of Kashmir and he visited the hill of Shankaracharya (also known as the Takht-i-Suleman — Seat of Solomon), and experienced the vacant Infinite in a very tangible way. He has described this experience in his poem, "Adwaita".¹

(2)

    In 1904, Sri Aurobindo began practising Yoga on his own account, starting with pranayama, as explained to him by a friend, a disciple of Brahmananda. The purpose of this Yoga practice was to find the spiritual strength which would support him and enlighten his way.

    Explaining the results of this practice, Sri Aurobindo has written: "What I did was four or five hours a day pranayama .... The flow of poetry came down while I was doing pranayama, not some years afterwards. If it is the flow of experiences, that did come after some years, but after I had stopped the pranayama for a long time and was doing nothing and did not know what to do or where to turn once all my efforts had failed."²

    "After four years of pranayama and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss."³

    In another letter, Sri Aurobindo has explained an interesting aspect of the subtle sight experiences. "I remember when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-images — 'these are only after-images'! I asked him whether after-images remained before the eye for two minutes at a time — he said, 'no', to his knowledge only for a few seconds'; I also asked him whether one could get after-images of things not around one or even not existing upon this earth, since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values — he could not reply in the affirmative. That is how these so-called

     ¹ Ibid., p. 153. ² Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Centenary Edition, Vol. 26, p. 77.

   ³ Ibid., pp. 78-9.

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scientific explanations break down as soon as you pull them out of their cloudland of mental theory and face them with the actual phenomena they pretend to decipher."¹

(3)

     The first decisive turn and experience came to Sri Aurobindo in 1907, when he was groping for a way. At this juncture he was induced to meet a Maharashtrian Yogi, Lele, who showed him the way to silence the mind. And by meditation with him at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo attained to an entire silence of thought and feeling and all the ordinary movements of consciousness within three days.

      Describing this meditation and experience, Sri Aurobindo wrote in one of his letters:

     "It was my great debt to Lele that he showed me this. 'Sit in meditation', he said, 'but do not think, look only at your mind, you will see thoughts coming into it; before they can enter throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable of entire silence.' I had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into the mind from outside, but I did not think either of questioning the truth or the possibility, I simply sat down and did it. In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit and then I saw one thought and then another coming in a concrete way from outside; I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire."²

     Elaborating upon the same experience in another letter, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

     "There was an entire silence of thought and feeling and all the ordinary movements of consciousness except the perception and recognition of things around wihout any accompanying concept or other reaction. The sense of ego disappeared and the movements of the ordinary life as well as speech and action were carried on by some habitual activity of Prakriti alone .... This condition remained unimpaired for several months and even when the sense of unreality disappeared and there was a return to participation in the world-consciousness, the inner peace and freedom which resulted from this realisation remained permanently behind all

    ¹ Ibid., p. 90. ² Ibid., pp. 83-4.

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surface movements and the essence of the realisation itself was not lost."¹

      In his poem, "Nirvana",² we have a vivid description of this experience.

    This experience and realisation of the utter reality of the Brahman and the unreality of the world is a recognised culmination of the classical path of Knowledge and Adwaitic Mayavada. For Sri Aurobindo, however, this turned out to be only one of the foundational experiences, and a series of spiritual experiences and realisations that followed led Sri Aurobindo to a new exploration and a new discovery. This is how he explained in one of his letters:

    "Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world — only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real.... I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience, a constant memory of it and its power to return remained until in the end it began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness from above. But meanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion³ is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape of shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth, it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine.

    "Now, that is the whole trouble in my approach to Mayavada. Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale."⁴

¹ Ibid., pp. 85-6. ² Collected Poems, Centenary Edition, Vol. 5, p. 161.

³ "In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence." (Sri Aurobindo's note).

⁴ Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Centenary Edition, Vol. 26, pp. 101-102.

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(4)

    Of the next major realisation we learn from Sri Aurobindo's Uttarpara Speech in which he has given a soul-stirring description of the experiences he had in the Alipore jail in which he was detained in May 1908 under a charge of sedition until May 1909 when he was acquitted. In the jail Sri Aurobindo spent almost all his time in reading the Gita and the Upanishads and in intensive meditation and the practice of Yoga. It was here that the realisation which had continually been increasing in magnitude and universality and assuming a large place took him up entirely and his work became a part and result of it and besides far exceeded the service and liberation of the country and fixed itself in an aim, previously only glimpsed, which was world-wide in its bearing and concerned the whole future of humanity.

    The major realisation that he had here was that of the Universal Presence of the Divine. As he says:

   "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. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover. This was the first use of the deeper vision He gave me. I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies____

    "I looked and it was not the Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench. I looked at the Prosecuting Counsel and it was not the Counsel for the prosecution I saw; it was Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled."¹

The following two interesting experiences in the Alipore jail may be noted:

    "I ... knew something about sculpture," wrote Sri Aurobindo in one of his letters, "but [I was] blind to painting. Suddenly one day in the Alipore jail while meditating I saw some pictures on the walls of the cell and lo and behold! the artistic eye in me opened and I knew all about

¹ Uttirpara Speech, Centenary Edition, Vol. 2, pp. 4-5.

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painting except of course the more material side of the technique. I don't always know how to express though, because I lack the knowledge of the proper expressions, but that does not stand in the way of a keen and understanding appreciation."¹

    His other experience, that of levitation, he has described as follows:

   "I was ... having a very intense sadhana on the vital plane and I was concentrated. And I had a questioning mind: 'Are such siddhis as utthd-pana (levitation) possible ?' I then suddenly found myself raised up in such a way that I could not have done it myself with muscular exertion. Only one part of the body was slightly in contact with the ground and the rest was raised up against the wall. I could not have held my body like that normally even if I had wanted to and I found that the body remained suspended like that without any exertion on my part."²

(5)

   While in the Alipore jail, Sri Aurobindo was also on his way in his meditations to two other realisations: that of the Supreme Reality with the static and dynamic Brahman as its two aspects, and that of the higher planes of consciousness above the Mind leading up to the Supermind.

   It is a fact that Sri Aurobindo received help from Vivekananda in regard to a transition to some of the planes of consciousness above the Mind. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: "It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence.... The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it finished saying all that it had to say on the subject."³

(6)

    It was again in the Alipore jail that Sri Aurobindo received the messages from Sri Krishna which opened up before him a passage to a new work. And it was in this direction that Sri Aurobindo was moving after his release from the jail in May 1909 when he got the Divine ades in early 1910 to go to Chandernagore, and there another ades to go to Pondicherry where he reached on 4th April 1910.

¹ Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Centenary Edition, Vol. 26, pp. 226-27.

² Reported by A. B. Purani in The Life of Sri Aurobindo (1964), pp. 128-29.

³ Ibid,, p. 129.

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THE MOTHER — 1960

Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

    What the nature of the new work was can be glimpsed from a letter that Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1911:

    "I need some place of refuge in which I can complete my Yoga un-assailed and build up other souls around me. It seems to me that Pondicherry is the place appointed by those who are Beyond, but you know how much effort is needed to establish the thing that is purposed upon the material plane____

    "I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane____

   "What I perceive most clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness, of error in order that the Truth I shall eventually show to men may be perfect, and of ineffectiveness in order that the work of changing the world, so far as I have to assist it, may be entirely victorious and irresistible. It is for this reason that I have been going through so long a discipline and that the more brilliant and mighty results of Yoga have been so long withheld. I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work severe and painful. It is only now that the edifice is beginning to rise upon the sure and perfect foundation that has been laid."¹

(7)

    This was a period of intense search and exploration.

    On the 29th March 1914, The Mother came to Pondicherry and met Sri Aurobindo. And what she said much later about this meeting indicates what a momentous day it was. She said: "I was in deep concentration, seeing things in the Supermind, things that were to be but which were somehow not manifesting. I told Sri Aurobindo what I had seen and asked him if they would manifest. He simply said, 'Yes'. And immediately I saw that the Supramental had touched the earth and was beginning to be realised! This was the first time I had witnessed the power to make real what is true."²

    In one of the letters, Sri Aurobindo has written the following: "Mother was doing Yoga before she knew or met Sri Aurobindo; but their lines of Sadhana independently followed the same course. When they met, they helped each other in perfecting the Sadhana. What is known as Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is the joint creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ...."³

¹ Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Centenary Edition, Vol. 26, pp. 423-24.

² Words of the Mother, Third Series (1959), pp. 31-2.

³ Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Centenary Edition, Vol. 26, p. 459. 3

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(8)

    That the world is not an illusion, that the phenomena of ignorance, suffering and evil in the world are temporary results of the evolutionary movement of Nature in which is concealed the superconscient Light which is intended to be fully manifested, that this manifestation is dependent upon the descent of the Supermind on the earth, that this descent was a thing to be achieved that had not yet been achieved, not yet clearly visualised, even though it was the natural but still secret outcome of all the past spiritual endeavour — these are the chief affirmations of Sri Aurobindo based upon his abiding experiences and realisations.

    Stressing the novelty of the aim and method of the supramental descent upon the earth, Sri Aurobindo has written in one of his letters: "It is the descent of the new consciousness attained by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the Sadhana." "... a method has been preconized for achieving the purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive. I have not found this method (as a whole) or anything like it professed or realised in the old Yogas. If I had, I should not have wasted my time in hewing out a road and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public. Our Yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure."¹

    Describing the difficulties of the hewing of the new Path, Sri Aurobindo has written in one of his letters: "As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure, ways to cleave through impenetrable morass and desert and forest, hostile masses to cpnquer — a work such as, I am certain, none else had to do before us. For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience, not in a mere play or Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path."²

     The spirit in which Sri Aurobindo pursued the Path is described in a letter as follows:

¹ Ibid., p. 109. ² Ibid., p. 464

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    "It is not for personal greatness that I am seeking to bring down the Supermind. I care nothing for greatness or littleness in the human sense. I am seeking to bring some principle of inner Truth, Light, Harmony, Peace into the earth-consciousness; I see it above and know what it is — I feel it ever gleaming down on my consciousness from above and I am seeking to make it possible for it to take up the whole being into its own native power, instead of the nature of man continuing to remain in half-light, half-darkness. I believe the descent of this Truth opening the way to a development of divine consciousness here to be the final sense of the earth evolution. If greater men than myself have not had this vision and this ideal before them, that is no reason why I should not follow my Truth-sense and Truth-vision.... It is a question between the Divine and myself — whether it is the Divine Will or not, whether I am sent to bring that down or open the way for its descent or at least make it more possible or not. Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption, — I go on till I conquer or perish. This is the spirit in which I seek the Supermind, no hunting for greatness for myself or others." ¹

(9)

   Thus the aim that Sri Aurobindo pursued was to transform by the descent of the supramental Light the physical life into the life divine. Not merely the liberation of the Spirit, but also the liberation of Nature, the transmutation, radical and complete, of the Apara Prakriti into the Para Prakriti, of the lower Nature into the Supreme and supramental Nature, — this has been the aim and also the achievement of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga.

   This achievement implies what Sri Aurobindo has called the triple transformation. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: "... there must first be the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into a soul-instrumentation; on that or along with that there must be the spiritual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force, Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must supervene the supramental transmutation, — there must take place as the crowning movement the ascent into the Supermind and the transforming descent of the supramental Consciousness into our entire being and nature." ²

¹ Ibid., pp. 143-44. ² The Life Divine, Centenary Edition, Vol. 19, p. 891.

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    This would also mean a complete synthesis of divine knowledge, divine love and divine action, leading to an integral perfection of all the members, parts and planes of being — the divine Supermind in the divine body, a temporal sign of the spirit's victory here over Death and Matter.

It is impossible to describe or even to give a faint or distant indication of the experiences and realisations that Sri Aurobindo had in the pursuit of this aim. One may only refer to his works: The Synthesis of Yoga, The Life Divine, Letters on Yoga, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, and Savitri. (A few poems of Sri Aurobindo entitled, "The Self's Infinity", "Surrender", "The Divine Worker", "The Golden Light", and "Transformation",¹ and a few passages on the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind and Supermind² may be seen for their relevance to the present subject.)

(10)

     It needs to be stressed that Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is a collective Yoga, a cosmic Yoga. And so, every movement and experience and realisation of Sri Aurobindo has a most intimate connection with the world-movements and with human progress. Not a personal salvation, but the leading of the entire humanity to the surpassing of its limitations for a collective new order and harmony and unity, to fix the supramental consciousness in the earth-consciousness, to lead the evolutionary species of man to a new status, to lead man to the divine superman, —this wide, world-embracing and world-affirming power, compassion, action, — nay, the very Divine in all its integrality embodying the human form for a new evolutionary saltus — this has been the wonderful mystery of the realm of the presence and experience and work of Sri Aurobindo on the earth.³

    If Sri Aurobindo had to withdraw from the body, it was because of the world-condition. Humanity was not sufficiently receptive to the supramental light, and it was thought necessary in order to hasten the process to make the supreme sacrifice. As the Mother said: "People do not know what a tremendous sacrifice He has made for the world. About a year ago, while I was discussing things I remarked that I felt like leaving this body of mine. He spoke out in a very firm tone, 'No, this can never be. If necessary for this transformation I might go, you will have to fulfil our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation!' "

¹ See Collected Poems, Centenary Edition, Vol. 5, pp. 142,143, 134 and 161.

² See The Life Divine, Centenary Edition, Vol. 19, pp. 953-55.

³ See "A God's Labour", Collected Poems, Centenary Edition, Vol. 5, pp. 99-102.

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    It was on December 5, 1950 at 1.26 a.m. that Sri Aurobindo left his physical body, and yet for 111 hours the body remained intact and un-decomposed. As The Mother announced:

    "... His body is surcharged with such a concentration of Supramental Light that there is no sign of decomposition and the body will be kept lying on his bed so long as it remains intact."

    In another message, The Mother said:

    "When I asked him to resuscitate, he clearly answered: T have left this body purposely. I will not take it back. I shall manifest again in the first supramental body built in the supramental way.' "

    In a prayer, The Mother said:

   "Lord, this morning Thou hast given me the assurance that Thou wouldst stay with us until Thy work is achieved, not only as a consciousness which guides and illumines but also as a dynamic Presence in action. In unmistakable terms Thou hast promised that all of Thyself would remain here and not leave the earth atmosphere until earth is transformed. Grant that we may be worthy of this marvellous Presence and henceforth everything in us be concentrated on the one will to be more and more perfectly consecrated to the fulfilment of Thy sublime Work."

   It was on December 9 after the Light had begun to withdraw that the body was laid in a rosewood casket and placed in the Ashram courtyard.

   A few days later, in one of the conversations with a disciple, The Mother said:

   "As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he had called the Mind of Light got realised here..."

   "The Supermind had descended long ago — very long ago — into the mind and even into the vital: it was working in the physical also but indirectly through those intermediaries. The question was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light: the physical mind was the instrument for direct action upon the most material. This physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light."

   Sri Aurobindo's withdrawal from the body has therefore been a self-chosen step to hasten the supramental descent upon the earth. And, indeed, it has been affirmed by The Mother that Sri Aurobindo has been working constantly towards this end.

   And on February 29, 1956, the descent of the Supermind on the earth took place. The Mother described it as follows:

   "This evening, the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there among you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe and I

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was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine. As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single moment of consciousness, that 'the time has come', and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow, on the door and the door was shattered to pieces. Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow."

    On April 24, 1956, The Mother declared:

    "The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality.

    It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it."

    It has been affirmed that the supramental force has now come to a stage of decisive action on events and people, and that it is Sri Aurobindo Himself who is in Action that is omnipotent and irresistible.

    Let me conclude with The Mother's message on Sri Aurobindo:

    "Sri Aurobindo does not belong to the past nor to history.

    Sri Aurobindo is the Future advancing towards its realisation.

    Thus we must shelter the eternal youth required for a speedy advance, in order not to become laggards on the way."

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Action and Contemplation in

the Life and Works of Sri Aurobindo*

Angelo Morretta

ALTHOUGH he was born a century ago and 22 years have passed since he died, it is still difficult to place the work of Sri Aurobindo, the most imposing and original thinker of modern India — let alone assimilate it in the history of philosophy, whether Indian or Western.

Simone Weil said that today we require "another type of saint". I would like to say that in Sri Aurobindo we are confronted with "another type of philosopher" upon whom we would do well to meditate. In making this assertion I refer both to the individual personality of the great sage of Pondicherry and to a general appreciation of Indian culture itself. For some thousands of years it has subtly penetrated man's consciousness in a manner peculiar to itself and therefore not definable according to the general concepts we have, in the West, of both "philosophy" and "sainthood".

   No one can deny that Western philosophy is in a critical state. The various histories of philosophy which discuss both the theories and the philosophers who expound them make this abundantly clear. Even the great Western thinkers who appeared at the dawn of the twentieth century — from Russell to Wittgenstein, from Whitehead to Husserl, from Heidegger to Jaspers or Sartre — reflect that crisis to a greater or a lesser extent in their works. Their method or their language may vary, but each one of them tries to find a solution to the dilemma. And fails. In other words, there is a strange vacuum in modern Western philosophy, a sense of disquiet, which we find again in all the essential aspects of modern life and thought. We are left perplexed and discontented. This is why we hear on all sides a call for a "return to the sources", that is to say to a way of thought that is complete and essential to the pre-Socratic school, for example. Plato himself, who was the greatest idealist of the Graeco-Western world, has had a "come-back" among the intellectuals of today.

In a period of "transmutation of all values", as Nietzsche defined the nineteenth-century, men are looking not only for these same genuine values but also for a method: a method that will enable them to re-discover

    * Paper presented at the International Seminar, New Delhi, December 1972.

those fundamental values which at one time in the past constituted the glory of Western thought too. Today, more than ever, we feel the lack of a philosopher "of a peculiar stamp", capable of leading us to those "primary" certainties upon which Hegel, the last of the great thinkers of the Western world, based his own absolute certainties. This type of philosopher existed in ancient Greece. He was Plato. Before Plato there was Heraclitus, (and it was no mere chance that led Sri Aurobindo to devote an essay to this philosopher). There were Pythagoras and Anassimandros. In the period of decadence, even Rome had a Greek called Plotinus, the author of the Enneads. In order to understand the relationship between these ancient Western philosophers and those of India, we need only refer to the fundamental study of another great modern thinker, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Eastern Religions and Western Thought.

    But before coming to the subject of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as such, I would like to show how the author of The Life Divine was able to develop his philosophy in the humus of Indian tradition, a tradition which Sri Aurobindo appears to have overthrown, but which in reality he strengthened, while giving it different values and aims. This "new type of thinker", to which I have referred, a thinker the whole world is seeking or needing, has never been lacking in Indian tradition, whether today or in the past. From the ancient poetical-metaphysical revelations of the mighty ancestral Rishi up to modern times, the search into the problems of knowledge within the limits of Indian culture has never wandered from the main theme of genuine philosophical thought which is, essentially, not only a research into the nature of the Absolute, but also the attainment of human perfection, that is to say, man's liberty in the most complete meaning of the term. The problem of the conflict between Science and Knowledge, for instance, has reached a decisive point, both in the West and in the East. Any solution but that which Sri Aurobindo offers us, a solution that is both practical and theoretical, is senseless. We should remember that The Life Divine was written between 1914 and 1921, that is to say, when Science and Technique were already well on the way to representing what they do today. But the conflict between Science and Knowledge is as old as the world, if we consider it properly, and may be resolved in the terms of a balance between para knowledge and apard knowledge, that is to say, primary or spiritual knowledge and secondary or material knowledge, as laid down by the Mundaka Upanishad from the very dawn of Indian culture.

    Whenever men and society withdraw from primary knowledge in order to dedicate themselves only to secondary knowledge., the result is the drama of fixed schemes of values and of human life itself. Therefore we find

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many similarities and dissimilarities between the greatest idealist of ancient Greece and the greatest idealist of modern India, that is, between Plato and Sri Aurobindo. The comparison is not intended to be merely illustrative and historical. On the contrary, it comprises the whole idiom of Western thought in contrast with Eastern thought.

     Even his life shows that Sri Aurobindo had many elements in common with Plato. It is a fact that the greatest Greek philosopher longed to be a man of action, a reformer, although he was an idealist to the highest degree. He wanted to apply his own ideas to the living reality of mankind and history. Plato's philosophy was not only theory, it was also practical. The perfection he desired, the moral life in the polis and deriving from the polis, was aimed at achieving human liberty based on a maximum degree of knowledge. This could not be other than "realisation" (in practical terms). At heart this is the vision, the desire, of every genuine philosopher at all times and in all countries: to contribute something to the evolution of mankind, so that man, even as a historical being, may really become MAN.

     But why did Plato and other great philosophers of the West fail to succeed in this undertaking? Although the divine master of Athens offers us, in his Republic, the most brilliant mimesis that may be attained in the human condition between history and pure spirit, between the world of the senses and the principles guiding it, he tragically fails. Undeniably, the maximum ideals in this world of minimum spiritual requirements must inevitably fail, to a certain extent and in a certain sense. But nowadays we are better able to distinguish the fleeting aspects of the Platonic vision of reality: that is, a Utopia which tried to impose itself indiscriminately upon both history and meta-history. In fact, Plato considered Truth as Truth-Beauty only to be contemplated and therefore for him Knowledge became chiefly a kind of aesthetic enjoyment, even if it was sublime. The Philosopher in Plato's Republic therefore symbolises the archetype of the Perfect City itself. In other words, even at that time the West lacked a hierarchy of real values for Being. A sharp distinction between Action and Contemplation, the sensible and the super-sensible, the world of phenomena and that of noumena, to use Kant's terminology, had not yet been properly defined according to a natural and spiritual, universal and social perspective.

    Nothing of this kind occurred in India. From the very beginning the theme was not only contemplation but also "knowledge synonymous with realisation". This conception of knowledge, which is at the same time realistic, is the hinge upon which Indian thought turns, and has been, since the days of the Purusha-Sukta of the Rishi Paramesthin, up to the Integral

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Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Neither action nor contemplation can be conceived or realised without a real perception of the "scale of reality", which leads in its turn to the four fundamental human structures, symbolically represented by the "four castes" as they appear in the Veda. There is a structural difference between them. India has always recommended the technique of Yoga, which is a kind of "science of the spirit", to those desirous of attaining a real and efficient state of knowledge. This is why Sri Aurobindo himself developed his theory of Integral Yoga as the practical foundation or basis of spiritual realisation.

     In his youth Sri Aurobindo was a man of action, at least in a common sense. When he retired to Pondicherry at the age of thirty-eight, however, a real and proper mutation occurred in his personality and in his vision of the world. It was a structural change in his very being, such as we shall not find in the history of our great Western thinkers. Possibly St. Francis may give us some idea of a similar change occurring in medieval Europe: in his youth he was a soldier who later devoted himself to realising the ideal of Christian sainthood. Pascal is another striking example from the seventeenth century. Indeed, he is an extremely modern example, for when he was only twenty-three years old and already a great physicist, he decided to drop everything and become an apologist of Catholicism in its purest form. Tolstoi may perhaps be counted among such examples, although in his case the transformation had, in the main, a social basis. Among Western writers we may number Dostoievsky, who, on discovering the Gospels during his exile in Siberia, changed his ideological concepts completely and was transformed from a "progressive" to an apologist of a genuinely Russian tradition.

    Many of Sri Aurobindo's old companions-at-arms, unable to understand his abrupt transformation from a man of action to a contemplative, have considered this development as a fall, indeed, as a kind of betrayal. Until the years preceding his exile he had been a leader of those in favour of the use of violence in the struggle for independence and a passionate nationalist, together withTilak, so much so that his friends had already singled him out as their political leader and statesman in the liberated India of the future. Nowadays we no longer consider the transformation as something strange or as a betrayal. On the contrary, it appears inevitable and essential, not only with regard to Sri Aurobindo's own genius but also with reference to the varying relationships between action and contemplation that India has to offer. The change undoubtedly occurred, not only because this particular man of genius willed it to be so, but also due to the truth inherent in the message which Indian culture has always possessed. Sri Aurobindo was bound to discover this truth at some time or other. Only the Buddha

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himself offers us an example of a similar transformation. He renounced the kingdom he had inherited from his father, renounced the world, in order to devote himself entirely to the life of the spirit. Perhaps the very fact that men of this kind were thoroughly familiar with the temptations and limitations of a life of mere action, before dedicating themselves to a life of contemplation, makes their renunciation doubly significant.

    To return to Plato: we can trace still another kind of spiritual bond he shared with Sri Aurobindo. Both the philosopher of Athens and the saint of Pondicherry are revivers and "revolutionary" transmitters of a tradition older than that of their respective founders. For Plato it is Socrates who represents the matrix of a philosophy that was to be accepted throughout the Western world. Sri Aurobindo, on the other hand, found his Socrates in the great Vedic seers: the Kanwa, the Atri, the Angiras and Vashishtha or Vishwamitra, are his ideal models, as well as being the forerunners of an incomparable ontological and cosmological revelation.

   As always, it is a matter of a different presentation of the problem of means and ends in the two traditions, although they spring from similar roots. As soon as Sri Aurobindo had discovered the full significance of that "knowledge-realisation", intuited so powerfully by the Fathers of the Aryan-Hindu tradition, he had no other choice — and there is really something superhuman in the energy he devoted to following his vision. His works are the fruit of that "mutation" which at a cursory glance appears inexplicable. During the forty years he passed in a semi-monastic retreat, his vast work comes to life as the product of a labour that was as immense as it was binding. Without his work Indian culture today, as well as that of the past, would be immeasurably poorer. The energy he exhibits in the Ashram of Pondicherry, with the support of that extraordinary woman whom we call "The Mother", is but another aspect of the Karma-Yogi he was. This is the path of action that is not exhausted in the mere glory of history, but is fulfilled in divine glory. It is the more arduous path, since the spirit follows other paths than that of action itself and requires perfect humility in addition to tenacity—just as the real "conquerors" of the world do. The greatest victory, especially in a period such as the one we are living in today, is to realise the highest ambition it is given man to know : that is, to apprehend in oneself and for the benefit of others, the living spirit of the whole universe. This is a "performance" that today seemed to be impossible even in India.

    Plato is still here among us today, for since he followed the same path up to a certain point, he discovered the real image of the world in the ideal archetypes. Sri Aurobindo, who follows that very same path right to the very end and as an Indian, found that these "archetypes" are effective and living,

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an organic element in human nature — indeed, they are able to lead us on to a new humanity whose framework is, essentially, supreme knowledge. This is the point of departure of The Divine Life. Our maxims and highest ideals are not considered in this work as sporadic evasions or impulses leading us upwards, but as innate virtues, the raw material of an organic evolution of the Spirit we bear within us, which one day we shall (or we should) realise as "normal" realities.

    The text of the Purusha-Sukta, in fact, clearly indicates not only the goal we are striving towards, but also the means that will enable us to reach it. Out of the four original castes we may choose, in addition to the social significance they possess, the four types of man which Nature has foreordained from primitive creation. As far as we are concerned at the present, we may limit ourselves to two only : the man of action and the man of thought, or the contemplative. In these days of violent revolution we are co-involved in a state of indescribable confusion, for we are no longer able to distinguish between para knowledge and apara knowledge; this inability, however, leads to a dangerous state of chaos, and at times even to catastrophe. The spiritual man does not differ from the man of action only because he observes the rites of an established religion or holds forth on philosophical concepts or creates works of art, but also because he is actuated, in himself, by para knowledge. The man of action, therefore, cannot refuse to listen to the suggestions the spiritual man or the contemplative may have to offer him, for they show him the principles governing the world. Even the ideals of the great visionaries have to be revealed in a concrete manner, often at personal cost and sacrifice among men — although men repeatedly betray them and are incapable of comprehending them in all their entirety.

   As a modern Indian who had acquired his youthful culture in the West, Sri Aurobindo learnt from the Western tradition to appreciate the problem of the difference between East and West. The most important lesson, however, was that of coming to know his uttermost limits. Even from the very beginning, in the philosophy of its earliest thinkers, the West has tended towards the attainment of historical and social liberty. India, on the other hand, has aimed at spiritual liberation. There is no natural discrepancy between liberty and liberation. Socrates said: Know thyself. Sri Aurobindo (as Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhwa had said previously) proclaimed: Realise thyself. This is to say that philosophy stands at the cross-roads between knowledge and realisation. Man's real fulfilment, however, resides in the complete union between knowledge and realisation. That the saint may philosophise and enjoy the delights of an aesthetic contemplation of the truth, in the meantime, is accepted in both Indian and Western

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ways of thought. Both Shankara and St. Augustine teach us this lesson in a superlative way.

    After returning from the West at the age of twenty-one, Sri Aurobindo might have become a "progressive" in the most common sense of the world, given the economic conditions in his country. Many other Indians who had imbibed European illuminism did so. Sri Aurobindo, on the contrary, having resumed contact with the foundations of Indian thought, became a fiery participant in the national political field, the most orthodox interpreter of Indian culture in the spiritual field. His Indian nationalism became sublimated in the sphere of universal values which later, in his vision of the Supermind, were to become values of permanent significance for mankind of the future, mankind transformed by the light of the sat-cit-dnanda. In this way, his work becomes a "message for the future"; we may call it prophetic, for it is addressed to the world of tomorrow and to all peoples, as a bridge not only between East and West but also between the present and the past.

    There is still another reason which led Sri Aurobindo as a philosopher and writer to re-evaluate the most genuine and authentic Indian tradition. This time it is historical and cultural. The India of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was traversing a period of decadence, at least from the social point of view. Meanwhile, the orientalists had discovered the hitherto unsuspected relationship between the Indo-European races and languages. But the interpretation of ancient Aryan texts by orientalists was inadequate, it failed to give them their genuine and original aspect. Sri Aurobindo therefore set himself to carry out a more authentic re-valuation, made in the proper spirit. The fruit of his labours was The Secret of the Veda, a work which helps all of us living today to comprehend the most hidden meaning and thought of the Vedantic masters. Sri Aurobindo has many traits in common with the seventeenth-century Madhwa, in the sphere of the newly-revived Vedanta — he too, the solitary of Pondicherry, swept away the dust of ethnical-linguistic and formalistic super-structures from the Vedantic texts, in order to restore them to their own pristine splendour. By this means the Indians of today regained a new knowledge of the treasures concealed within their own tradition.

   The Indian Renaissance had already begun this process of revaluation, with Ram Mohan Roy, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Dayananda Saraswati, Tilak and many others, before Sri Aurobindo appeared on the scene. But he was the only one to carry the process to its highest level, in a language suited to the understanding of the modern world. He undoubtedly possessed the means enabling him to achieve this synthesis — a synthesis which modern India needed. The impressive mass of culture which Sri Aurobindo

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had at his disposal helped him to achieve for us today what the geniuses of India in other periods had achieved for their contemporaries. His cultural bounds are so wide, in fact, that they embrace all those fields of knowledge which are known today as para-psychology, ethnology, semantics, and the philosophy of science, psycho-analysis and the anthropology of the myths. In other words, he realised that India required, in addition to her political freedom, a renewal of the best part of Indian culture. In fact, once she had regained her independence, a country such as India needed a new cultural basis on which to found her freedom. Sri Aurobindo's work provides this basis. For this reason it is so much alive today and attracts the younger generations both in the East and in the West.

    But Sri Aurobindo did more than this. His genius and his will — which was as powerful as his genius — carried the traditional "philosophy of the divine" to undreamt-of limits. This philosophy had always been at the bottom of any form of research in India. And thus he was led to give us his masterpieces, his Essays on the Gita and on the Upanishads, his studies of the four Yoga classics united in his Integral Yoga, and finally The Life Divine the summa theologica of all his thought. At the same time he by no means neglected the theme of social policy. It appears in all its real significance in his works, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Human Cycle, et cetera.

    A great poet, he also established his own view of aesthetics in the essay The Future Poetry, while his book The Foundations of Indian Culture is both a defence and an affirmation of the particular values or merits of Indian art. After having analysed the great poetical works of Vyasa and Valmiki, Kalidasa and Vidyapati and thrown a new light upon them, and after having written the most original poems in modern Indian literature, — they are to be found in the volume Last Poems, — Sri Aurobindo wrote his Savitri, a work of Dantesque proportions. He was engaged upon this work intermittently throughout his life. Not even in India is it as well-known and understood as it deserves to be, and it has not yet found its rightful place in the history of literature.

   The stages of his thought, therefore, are those of a genius, of an "integrated man". The problems he treats gofromthoseof everyday life to the supreme heights of human evolution. Sri Aurobindo, as has been pointed out, takes up the Bergsonian theme of "Creative evolution" and the "elan vital" and gives them a precise metaphysical trend, thus enabling man to attain the Supermind, the real Superman, not the Nietszchean vitalistic version. We in the West have been given a hint of a spiritual renaissance proceeding hand-in-hand with new scientific discovery in the work of Teilhard de Chardin. As Professor Zaehner says in his book, Revolution in Religion:

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A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Char din, it is by no mere chance that these two writers are contemporaries. In this age of space-flights and the disintegration of the atom, man is seeking new answers to the problem of his own destiny, because science, by uprooting him from surrounding nature, has carried him too far along an erroneous path. But Teilhard de Chardin is no philosopher. He is only a biologist, at most an anthropologist, who, although he "rehabilitates" science and matter itself, cannot offer us a finished system, a complete metaphysic of Being, as Sri Aurobindo does. Neither must we forget that it was a modern Indian who gave us a positive and organic philosophy, in a period when philosophy was in a state of crisis — gave us a philosophy concretely implicit in the visible and invisible world. Although he adopts the Darwinian concept of evolution, he transposes it into the plane of spiritual evolution so that man is no longer a kind of ape which has reached a certain stage of development, but is the highest expression of spirit on this earth, a being destined to continue along the path of evolution until he attains the Divine.

    Bearing all this in mind, we find in Sri Aurobindo's work not only a consolation of an optimistic nature, but the reintegration of the human being in the material and spiritual world, tending, as he does, towards the realisation of a superior form of life. Indian tradition in the past offered us the elements of a similar transfiguration of existence in a cosmic sense: in the mythology of the Purana, the idea of the kalpa and the avatara conceives of the whole world and mankind as being involved in the divine spiral — as in Dante's Divine Comedy. For instance, Sri Aurobindo gave these myths a magnificent philosophical significance in The Problem of Rebirth. Modern man may derive from such works the far-reaching solutions he has been seeking to his problems throughout the ages. The existential triad — Matter, Life, Mind — has found its right place once more in the scheme of Manifestation which is Abundance, as the Brihadaran-yaka Upanishad declares. The Brahman does not become the World through the Maya of Shankara, but is Brihad the great, which is the universe of all beings transformed into the supreme Joy of Being.

   After reading such works as The Life Divine and The Human Cycle, we no longer feel disintegrated and torn by the void surrounding us wherever we may look. The greater the dimensions of external time and space the greater our capacity to expand our inner life.

   From the very dawn of her history India has been offering us a practical means with which to face this reality. This is Yoga: a discipline which becomes a really modern science, thanks to Sri Aurobindo's new system, a discipline and a science capable of uniting the body to the soul once more,

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and the soul to the Atman. It is by no more coincidence that the Western world of today is devoting its attention more and more often to the discipline of Integral Yoga. Sri Aurobindo not only amalgamates the four ancient Yogas, but he helps us to keep the planes of existence clearly defined and helps us by diligent exercise to realise the gradual transformation of ourselves with the aim of becoming a whole man. If Truth does exist, then it is in fact the concreteness of Atman which dissolves us into becoming one with the "utter fulness" (purnam) of the Upanishads.

   Sri Aurobindo, then, becomes the most brilliant example of the saint-philosopher, pointing out the path we have to travel if we are not to go astray in a world becoming daily more vast and more complex, a world in which all values are in a state of chaos, but where they are also tending or striving towards more elevated and more positive aims. Sri Aurobindo, that is to say, is not only the greatest idealist in modern India, greater even than Plato in the aims and the goals towards which he points the way. He is also the most powerful representaive of "Knowledge-Realisation", his message being living and concrete. If by "sainthood" we mean only a flight from the evils of the present day and self-denial or self-negation, Sri Aurobindo was certainly no saint. But if by sainthood we mean joy in the fullest possible development of all the maximum potentialities man bears within himself, being capable even of including the divine in his own evolution, then Sri Aurobindo is really a complete Plato, fit to rank with the most supremely "realised" Mahaviras, the Conquerors of ancient India.

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