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Archival Notes
SRI AUROBINDO'S SADHANA IN PONDICHERRY
Once he had settled down in Shankara Chettiar's house. Sri Aurobindo was free for the first time since May 1909 to give his undivided attention to yoga. Not that the eleven months that followed his release from Alipore jail. where his sadhana had gone on with great intensity, had been a spiritual blank. The diary extract from June 1909 published in the present issue shows that Sri Aurobindo's inner life was active even while he was on a busy speaking tour. But certainly his settling down in Pondicherry permitted him to concentrate on his yoga in a way that before had not been possible. In this issue of Archives and Research we present four important documents of Sri Aurobindo's Pondicherry sadhana. To begin with, we publish two versions of Sapta Chatusthaya — the outline of the yoga that Sri Aurobindo himself practised. Secondly, we reproduce portions of a journal or "Record" he kept during this period. Finally we reprint for the first time since 1933 the book Yogic Sadhan, which Sri Aurobindo "received" as automatic writing during his stay at Shankara Chettiar's.
Sri Aurobindo's Early Sadhana
In order to understand Sri Aurobindo's spiritual development after his arrival in Pondicherry. one must have some familiarity with his sadhana up till then. A brief review is provided in the paragraphs that follow. Little of the material will be new to readers of Archives and Research : but it is hoped that this presentation of documents long in the public view will help in the understanding of others that have hitherto remained unpublished. Sri Aurobindo began his practice of yoga in 1904 or 1905; but even before this he had had a number of preliminary spiritual experiences, such as the mental experience of the Atman or Self, the realisation of the "vacant Infinite", and the awareness of the Godhead active within him. None of these are insignificant experiences, but they did not immediately turn Sri Aurobindo to a life of spiritual seeking. At the time his main interest lay in the liberation of his homeland, a cause he had felt destined to play a part in since his childhood. When finally he did take up yoga, it was with the idea of getting power to help him in his political work. He began with pranayama (breath control), and obtained some positive, if "minor". results before pressure of work caused his practice to become irregular. He then suffered a "complete arrest".1 Wishing to get guidance from a guru, he was brought into contact with a yogi named Vishnu Bhaskar Lele. Sri Aurobindo met Lele in January 1908, just after the Surat session of the Indian National Congress, remembered as one of the major turning points in the course of India's freedom struggle. Sri Aurobindo's political influence was then at its height. He was recognised as one of the half-do/en most prominent men in the country and was at the centre of the historic events at Surat. Less than a week later he found himself closeted with Lele. Following his instructions. Sri Aurobindo succeeded in
1 On Himself. pp 85.79 establishing "a complete and abiding stillness of [his] whole consciousness". This led to the realisation of the "silent, spaceless and timeless Brahman",2 the "inactive" side of the one Reality. This realisation, which some have called Nirvana, and which often cannot be achieved even after a lifetime of effort, had come to Sri Aurobindo in less than three days. Many, after obtaining this realisation, retire from a world now perceived as vain and illusory, to become absorbed in the peace or bliss of the unmanifest. Such was not the path of Sri Aurobindo The force that had impelled him into the political arena still drove him to action, and he did not resist it. A few days after his Nirvana experience he was again meeting people, giving speeches, even, it is said, inspecting a bomb factory. Before one meeting he complained to Lele that he was too absorbed to give the speech expected of him. "Lele told him to make namaskara [formal salutation] to the audience and wait and speech would come to him from some other source than the mind. So, in fact, the speech came." And so from this time on "all speech writing, thought, and outward activity" came to him "from the same source above the brain-mind". Sri Aurobindo kept the experience of silence "for many months and indeed always thereafter", but a diverse and powerful action continued "on the surface" of his immobile mind. What it was that "spoke and acted through him without any personal thought and initiative" on his part, "remained unknown" to him until he had completed the next stage of his sadhana.3 Four months after the Surat Congress, Sri Aurobindo was arrested as a revolutionary conspirator. While under trial for the capital offence of "waging war against the king", he was placed in solitary confinement in the jail at Alipore, a locality of Calcutta. Soon he was plunged in an intensive practice of yoga. The chief landmark of Sri Aurobindo's Alipore sadhana was his experience of "the cosmic consciousness and of the Divine as all beings and all that is". This was his second great realisation, and with it an overwhelming feeling and perception of the total unreality of the world" which had accompanied his first realisation, (hat of the silent Brahman, disappeared. Sri Aurobindo was now aware that it was the "dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara" (Master) who had been moving him and continued to move him "in all his Sadhana and action".4 During the year that he was imprisoned at Alipore, Sri Aurobindo had a number of ancillary experiences, some of an "occult" nature. Among them were various types of subtle vision and hearing, the "first movement" of the powers which lead to utthapana or levitation,5 and a multifarious experience of ananda or spiritual bliss. By this time — early in 1909 — Sri Aurobindo had "realised in full two of the four great realisations on which his yoga and his spiritual philosophy are founded"6: the silent Brahman. Nirvana, and the dynamic Brahman, the divine as all that is. These realisations represent the two ends — impersonal and personal, nirguna and saguna — of traditional spirituality. Each of them, to one who has attained it, is complete in itself. Indeed the (wo are often considered to be mutually exclusive. The devotee
2 Ibid., p. 64. 3 Ibid., pp. 49, 50, 86 4 Ibid., pp. 64, 86. 5 Record of Yoga (hereafter RY). 18 May 1918. 6 On Himself, p. 64. and servant of God who has found union with the Beloved has no need for liberation or the "extinction" of Nirvana. The contemplative who has realised his identity with the formless is no longer attracted to the world of manifestation — not even to experience the bliss of oneness in duality. For the adept of the latter way, the traditional Yoga of Knowledge, the realisation of the silent Brahman, of Nirvana, is the end of spiritual seeking. For Sri Aurobindo, however, it was "the beginning of the higher Truth".7 He once wrote that his experience of Nirvana in 1908 was for him the finding of "a real Way"; once the path was discovered, he continued, "it took me ten more years of striving under a supreme inner guidance to trace it out . . . and found the future." What was Sri Aurobindo, secure already in a twofold realisation, occupied with during this ten-year period? In a letter of 1946 he wrote that the realisations mentioned above, and "others which followed upon them" had "presented to him no long or obstinate difficulty. The only real difficulty," he went on, which took decades of spiritual effort to work out towards completeness was to apply the spiritual knowledge utterly to the world and to the surface psychological and outer life and to effect its transformation both on the higher levels of Nature and on the ordinary mental, vital and physical levels down to the subconscience and the basic Inconscience and up to the supreme Truth-Consciousness or Supermind in which alone the dymanic transformation could be entirely integral and absolute.8 This work of world-transformation to which he had dedicated himself made it impossible for Sri Aurobindo to rest in any realisation, however lofty. As early as 1911 he wrote : 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.9 Before he could "apply the spiritual knowledge utterly to the world". Sri Aurobindo had to bridge the gap between the divine spirit and the apparently undivine creation. To do this, a first necessary step was to reconcile in his own consciousness the two sides of the divine — one static and world-transcendent, the other dynamic and world-creative which he had already realised separately. This reconciliation was brought about by his third major realisation, that "of the supreme Reality with the static and dynamic Brahman as its two aspects". This did not come in its fullness until 1912, but to it "he was already on his way in his meditations in the Alipore jail". During these meditations he also gained entry into "the higher planes of consciousness leading to the Supermind".10 The graded ascent to this "Truth-Consciousness" and its descent into the lower nature—which when complete would constitute his
7 Letters on Yoga. p. 59. 8 On Himself, p. 86. 9 Ibid., p. 423 10 Ibid., p. 64 fourth and greatest realisation — was the goal towards which his subsequent sadhana was directed. Sri Aurobindo was acquitted and released from jail in May 1909. Still absorbed in sadhana, he re-entered the political field, and soon found himself again the object of unfriendly British attention. Early in 1910, following an inner adesa or command, he became an exile in French India — first in the enclave of Chandernagore, near Calcutta, and two months later in Pondicherry. 1910, the year of Si Aurobindo's arrival in Pondicherry, marks a major watershed in his practice of Yoga. Ten years afterwards he wrote to his brother Barin: What I started with, what Lele gave me, what I did in jail all that was a searching for the path, a circling around looking here and there, touching, taking up, handling, testing this and that of all the old partial yogas, getting a more or less complete experience of one and then going off in pursuit of another. Afterwards, when 1 came to Pondicherry, this unsteady condition ceased. The indwelling Guru of the world indicated my path to me completely, its full theory, the ten limbs of the body of the yoga.11 Sri Aurobindo went on in the same letter to identify the central clue of his yogic path as the ascension to supermind or vijnana. We have seen that his climb to this "gnostic" level had begun in Alipore jail; but it was, as he later wrote, not until his "first coming to Pondicherry" that the "sadhana (of the vijnana)" truly commenced.12 Likewise, as he related in a talk of 1923, it was only after his arrival in Pondicherry that "a certain programme" was laid down that he thereafter followed. 13 He did not say in the talk what this programme was. but other documents make it all but certain that it was the system made up of seven times four elements called Sapta Chatusthaya (seven tetrads), of which several explanations survive.14
The Date of Sapta Chatusthaya
None of Sri Aurobindo's explanations of Sapta Chatusthaya are dated. Even if they were, or even if the dates that can be assigned to them were certain, we would still not know when the Sanskrit formulas of which the system is composed first came to him. Since it is important to determine when this occurred, the question will be examined here in some detail.15 Sri Aurobindo did not mention Sapta Chatusthaya by name in any talk that has been recorded. Neither did he write about it explicitly in any letter or in any of his published writings. But there are a few indirect references to the system referred to as a "programme", a "map", etc.— in scattered letters and talks, and these point to
11 Archives and Research, vol. 4(1980). p. 11 12 RY, 25 November 1913. 13 Talk of 15 August 1923. Reproduced in A.B.Purani, ed., Evening Talks (Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Society, 1982), p. 485. 14 The proper transliteration of the Sanskrit compound is sapta-catustaya. When writing in English, Sri Aurobindo invariably transliterated it "sapta chatusthaya". The present writer will do the same in this article 15 The material in this section has already been presented in a different form in Mother India (vol. 36 [1948]. pp. 377 80). the period just after his arrival in Pondicherry as the time when the seven chatusthayas came to him. One reference occurs in a talk of 1926. Asked whether he had "received" a certain formula in Alipore jail, Sri Aurobindo replied that it was not then but when I came to Pond[icherr]y when a programme of what I would do was given to me & it came to me independently and I took it down.16 It is evident that the programme spoken of here is the same as the one mentioned in the talk of 1923 cited above. And the fact that the formula in question — saktyam bhagavati ca sraddha is one of the elements of the third chatusthaya, makes it virtually certain that the programme was the system of the seven chatusthayas. A letter of 1916 contains another reference that shows even more clearly that Sri Aurobindo's "programme" was Sapta Chatusthaya. After mentioning a certain "map of my advance" — evidently the same as the "programme" - which he had "long had sketched out before me",17 Sri Aurobindo went on to describe the different stages of the advance; these tally with the seven chatusthayas.18 The clearest reference to Sapta Chatusthaya comes in a talk of April 1923. Asked about the "ten parts of Yoga that you wrote about to Barinda" in the letter of 1920 cited above, Sri Aurobindo said that the system of his "own yoga" consisted of "not ten but rather 7 parts with a cluster of four in each".19 He then listed the seven chatusthayas by name. The present writer believes that the phrase "ten limbs of the body of the yoga" in the letter of 1920 was a metaphorical expression signifying the utter completeness of the "theory" given him in Pondicherry. In any case this talk of 1923 makes it clear that his own yoga was based on the seven chatusthayas. All this evidence, taken together, makes it certain that the mantras of Sapta Chatusthaya came to Sri Aurobindo during the first part of his stay in Pondicherry. Is it possible to be more precise? Certainly it happened before November 1913, the date of the earliest written version of Sapta Chatusthaya. An even earlier limit is set by the first mention of a chatusthaya in Record of Yoga, which occurs under the date 16 January 1912 (see page 39). This narrows down the likely period to the twenty-one months between April 1910 (when Sri Aurobindo arrived in Pondicherry) and January 1912. This dating disagrees with that of Shri Arun Chandra Dutt, late head of the Prabartak Samgha, Chandernagore, who in 1972 first published the text of the principal version of Sapta-Chatusthaya in the book Light to Superlight. Dutt felt that Sri Aurobindo had received the mantras in Alipore jail. The present writer has examined Dutt's argument and refuted it at some length in the article referred to in footnote 16. There is no need to go over that ground again here.
RECORD OF YOGA
Sri Aurobindo kept a log of his own practice of the yoga of the seven chatusthayas in a series of diaries. At different times he gave this document different names, among
16 Manuscript transcript of a talk of 10 July 1926. 17 On Himself, p. 426 18 Ibid., pp. 426-27. 19 Manuscript transcript of a talk of 21 April 1923. them "Journal of Yoga", "Record of the Yoga", "Record of Yoga", "Notebook of the Sadhana", "Yoga Diary" and "Yoga Record". The title he used most often is "Record of Yoga". In the text he generally referred to the work as "the Record", and used the verb "record" for the act of writing in it. For these reasons the editors have selected Record of Yoga as the general title of the work.
The Period of the Record
The full period covered by the Record is 1909 to 1927; but there are dated entries for only twelve of these nineteen years. Notations in diary form do not begin until January 1912. The years 1909 and 1911 are represented by entries that differ in type from what follows,20 and there is no dated material for 1910. Not until November 1912 did Sri Aurobindo begin what he called the "regular record of the sadhana". He continued it until October 1920. But even during this "regular" period there were frequent and sometimes lengthy suspensions. All told there are entries for a little less than half of the ninety-six months of the regular period. After a six-year hiatus, the Record was begun again in December 1926 or January 1927. There are entries for only four months of the latter year, the last of which is October. Then the Record ceases. About the last twenty-three years of Sri Aurobindo's sadhana — exactly one-half its duration we know practically nothing.
The Writing of the Record
Sri Aurobindo used an assortment of notebooks and loose sheets for the writing of the Record. The notebooks are of the same kinds as those used for his other writings of the period; indeed many of them also contain notes, prose articles, poems, etc. Most of them are cheap student exercise books, some simply perforated pads of letter paper. There are also a few bound pocket notebooks; only one of these is a printed diary. Twenty-eight notebooks were used exclusively or principally for the Record. Eight others contain significant amounts of Record material. A number of diary entries, mostly undated, and an assortment of Record-related jottings have been found scattered in two dozen notebooks, and on loose sheets and odd scraps of paper. Most diary entries, as opposed to records of "script" and lipi (these terms are explained below), seem to have been written down directly without notes. But at least one jotting has been found that was later incorporated in a formal entry. The handwriting is mostly neat and unhurried, in contrast to that of many of Sri Aurobindo's other writings of the period. Most entries were probably written on the dates by which they are headed; sometimes there were two or more sittings in a day.21
20 See Diary Entries: 17-21 June 1909 and Categorical Record Notes: 28 January-17 February 1911 in the present issue. 21 The single and double lines dividing many Record entries into sections may mark where one sitting ended and another began. That the lines had a specific purpose is indicated by the fact that Sri Aurobindo sometimes cancelled them. So far as typography permits, such lines will be reproduced exactly as they occur in the notebooks. But the sadhana of the preceding night and, less frequently, the preceding evening, was often noted down the next morning. Occasionally a single entry covers two or more days ; certain other entries seem to have been written a day or two in retrospect. Over the course of the years the Record was written in a number of different forms. Recurrent features were abandoned only to recur months afterwards. Some entries consist of only the briefest notations. These were sometimes presented in tabular fashion. At other times statements were elaborated in discursive prose that occasionally was given literary polish. Often headings and subheadings were used; these usually follow the system of the seven chatusthayas. The terminology of the Record is based on the same system. (All technical terms, whether they are Sanskrit, English, Greek or of other languages, are explained in the Glossary, which begins on page 89). Sri Aurobindo occasionally abbreviated recurrent sadhana terms, as well as the names of people, etc. These abbreviations, together with the unfamiliar terminology, give parts of the Record a rather exotic appearance. But once the significance of the terms and abbreviations is understood, these passages are seen to be not so cryptic after all.
The Purpose of the Record
Like all diaries — conscious literary productions excepted — the Record was written chiefly as an aid to the diarist. But Sri Aurobindo, unlike many keepers of journals, did not use his diary simply to bolster his memory. His conception of its purpose is contained in certain early entries. It was meant, first, to be a "pure record of fact and experience".22 The "condition of the activity" of his sadhana was "to form the substance" of the notations.23 It was the "progress of the siddhi" that was "to be recorded".24 It is clear from this and other uses of the verb "record" that his writing down an experience was a means by which he established it in his consciousness. In many traditions the written word is said to have this fixing power. It was "definite results" and not "every fluctuation of the siddhi"25 that Sri Aurobindo wished to record. But on a path like his, where "all life is yoga", this involved not only noting down such purely yogic activities as, for example, "trikal-drishti. aishwarya, samadhi-experience", but also mentioning "work, literary & religious", and even making "brief note of the physical siddhi".26 All parts of the sadhana were given attention. We find one passage in which Sri Aurobindo speaks first of applied yogic knowledge and force (trikaladrsti and tapas), then the subtle physical power of levitation and then, in the next sentence, the condition of his teeth. This is followed, without a pause, by a note on the intensity of ananda (bliss) then being felt in his body. The paragraph closes with a mention of the state of "the personal lilamaya relation with the Master of the Yoga", the personal divinity who guided Sri Aurobindo's sadhana.27
22 RY, 13 January 1912. 23 RY, 2 January 1913 24 RY, 31 December 1912. 25 RY, 15 August 1914 26 RY, 27 December 1912. 27 RY, 17 September 1913. The second purpose of the Record was to act as a register of the guidance received. It was to "include not only the details of what is accomplished & the lines of the accomplishment that is being attempted, but also the record of experiences and the indications of future movement".28 Such indications were regularly supplied by "the Master of the Yoga", and other sources, usually in the form of what Sri Aurobindo called "script".
Script
An examination of Record passages headed "Script" — which are found both as parts of diary-entries and as separate notations - shows that script was akin to what is usually called "automatic writing". This term does not occur in the Record,29 but it is known that Sri Aurobindo practised automatic writing, and referred to it as such, from some time before he took up yoga in 1905 until after 1920. A number of pages of what is clearly automatic writing have been found among Sri Aurobindo's papers. Many of them belong to the same period as Record of Yoga; but they have not been considered by the editors to form parts of it. Nevertheless, they are of considerable interest, and throw light on a certain aspect of Sri Aurobindo's sadhana. It will therefore not be out of place to deal briefly with the subject of automatic writing here.
SRI AUROBINDO'S AUTOMATIC WRITINGS
Sri Aurobindo first tried automatic writing—writing not "dictated or guided by the writer's conscious mind"30 — towards the end of his stay in Baroda (i.e. around 1904). He took it up "as an experiment as well as an amusement" after observing "some very extraordinary automatic writing" done by his brother Barin. "Sri Aurobindo was very much struck and interested and he decided to find out by practising this kind of writing himself what there was behind it."31 Barin seems at least sometimes to have used a planchette for his experiments, but Sri Aurobindo generally just "held the pen while a disembodied being wrote off what he wished, using my pen and hand".32
Yogic Sadhan
None of Sri Aurobindo's automatic writings from Baroda have been preserved. The earliest extant example is a piece from 1907, a time when he was deeply involved in revolutionary politics. Three years later, shortly after his arrival in Pondicherry, he received what is certainly the most famous, and probably the most important of his automatic writings — the nine chapters of instruction and advice on yoga later published under the title Yogic Sadhan. In his biography of Sri Aurobindo, A. B. Purani writes :
28 RY, 18 November 1914. 29 "Automatic script" does occur twice: RY, 4 July 1912 and 21 January 1913. 30 On Himself, p. 65 31 Ibid. 32 Dilip Kumar Roy, Among the Great (New York: Jaico Publishing House. 1950). pp. 206. During the first three months of the stay at Pondicherry there used to be séances in the evening in which automatic writing was done. The book Yogic Sadhan was written in this way. At the rate of one chapter per day. the book was finished in a week or eight days. On the last day it seemed to Sri Aurobindo that a figure that looked like Rammohan Roy disappeared into the subtle world near the corner of the ceiling of the room. It was inferred that Rammohan Roy had dictated the book. The Editor's Epilogue added after the last chapter was written by Sri Aurobindo himself. The editor's name is given as "the Uttar[a] Yogi".33 Purani goes on to tell the story of the origin of the name "Uttara Yogi". This is sufficiently well known not to require repetition here. It is enough to say that a certain K.V.R. Iyengar came to Pondicherry in 1910 and recognised Sri Aurobindo as the "Yogi from the North" whom his guru had told him would come. Iyengar undertook to give Sri Aurobindo some badly needed financial assistance. Besides presenting him with a large sum of money, he had Yogic Sadhan printed at the Sri Vani Vilas Press in Srirangam. The Srirangam edition of Yogic Sadhan was brought out in 1911. The book was much read by early followers of Sri Aurobindo. Three editions were published between 1920 and 1933: but no subsequent edition was issued, even though a demand for one existed. Sri Aurobindo apparently did not want it to remain in print He always denied being the author of the work. In 1924 he said to a future disciple : "But. incidentally, I am not the author of the book Yogic Sadhan." "How do you mean?" "Haven't you heard of automatic writing?". . . "May I ask why you lent yourself to such writing?" (("At the time I was trying to find out how much of truth and how much of subliminal suggestion from the submerged consciousness there might be in phenomona of this kind."))34 Sri Aurobindo's "final conclusion" about automatic writing was that though there arc sometimes phenomona which point to the intervention of beings of another plane, not always or often of a high order, the mass of such writings comes from a dramatising element in the subconscious mind: sometimes a brilliant vein in the subliminal is struck and then predictions of the future and statements of things known in the present and past come up. but otherwise these writings have not a great value.35 Among Sri Aurobindo's automatic writings are some that evidently originated not from the subconscious, but rather that "brilliant vein of the subliminal" or inner mind that is mentioned by him in this passage. These include some remarkable predictions, the most striking of which is the statement made in 1914 that Sri Aurobindo's work would be "in 1956-57 complete".36 The Mother was certainly not thinking
33 A.B.Purani. The Lite of Sri Aurobindo (Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. 1978). pp. 143 44 34 Dilip Kumar Roy, (Among the Great, pp. 206 07 The double marks of parenthesis indicate that the passage was a "subsequent explantory note" added by Sri Aurobindo after the talk 35 On Himself, p. 65. 36 Automatic writing circa 1914. back to this long-forgotten prediction when she announced in 1956 that "the manifestation of the Supramental upon earth"37 had taken place.
Script in the Record
The scripts found in the Record have a different tone or "feel" — not to mention a different physical appearance — from ordinary automatic writings. While they do not always appear to have come from the highest source (the Master of the Yoga), they did speak authoritatively about Sri Aurobindo's current and future sadhana, and they were taken quite seriously by him. Such scripts form integral parts of Record of Yoga. Script was a "means of spiritual communication" which was used "for all sorts of purposes".38 Chief among these was the prediction of future events — mostly events in Sri Aurobindo's sadhana, but also outward happenings, ranging from great world events to trivial domestic matters. Scripts relating to sadhana were often called Prediction or Programme: they gave indications about inner movements a few days or a week in advance. "I do not know about the distant future," wrote Sri Aurobindo in the letter of 1920 already referred to. "The light God sometimes gives me falls one step ahead of me; 1 move forward in that light."39 Scripts were recorded by Sri Aurobindo in his own handwriting, but he cannot strictly be called their author. The source of the script sometimes identified itself as "I" and addressed Sri Aurobindo as "you". In diary entries "I" refers only to Sri Aurobindo. In writing script, he wrote down only the replies of the source, not the questions in his mind to which replies were given. This makes some script texts seem discontinuous and incomplete; reading them is like overhearing one end of a telephone conversation. Sri Aurobindo considered the lower form of automatic writing to be transcriptions of "the thing that is present in the subconscious self of the medium".40 He evidently did not consider Record scripts to be of this nature But what belonged to the source and what to the recipient? Certain expressions originating in script were later used by Sri Aurobindo in his published writings. To take one striking example, the key word "supermind" occurs first in something approaching its final sense in a script.41 One does not know how much Sri Aurobindo's ordinary writing made use of script methods or script information. Inspired writing has traditionally been considered to come from a source higher than the writer's ordinary mind. Script was not Sri Aurobindo's only channel of prediction. The Record mentions many forms of trikaladrsti or time-knowledge. Some of them arc direct, others make use of an upaya or means. Naturally those methods that relied on the written word were most frequently recorded. Two forms often encountered in the Record are lipi (written words seen by subtle sight in the ether or elsewhere) and sortilege
37 The Mother. Words of the Mother, Centenary Volume 15 (Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. 1980), p. 104 38 RY, 14 January 1912, see page 34 of the present issue 39 Archives and Research, vol. 4. (1980). p 22. 40 Talk of 1 January 1924. Reproduced in A.B.Purani. ed., Evening Talks p 43 41 RY, 28 June 1914 (materially printed or written words either sought or found by chance and then interpreted). Scripts and lipis were sometimes jotted down on a handy piece of paper and later copied neatly into the Record. A few rough notations of recopied scripts exist; the latter show some amplification. For certain scripts only rough notations have survived; these have been among the most difficult parts of Record of Yoga to transcribe. Sri Aurobindo often used quotation marks, or headings, or both, to set off script from the rest of the record. Sometimes what was written as script seems to be a sort of paraphrase of what was received. At times no clear line was drawn between script and Record. It may be that none can be drawn. Sri Aurobindo sometimes looked back on old scripts, predictive lipis and sortileges to check their accuracy. He occasionally jotted down whether they were fulfilled or not. Such notations are among the only evidences we have that Sri Aurobindo read back over the Record. He certainly never revised it, as he did almost all his other writings. Additions to and corrections of the Record manuscript were evidently done during the act of writing. There are only one or two exceptions to this rule.
Sapta Chatusthaya, the Record, and the Synthesis of Yoga
The terms of Sapta Chatusthaya occur with great frequency throughout Record of Yoga. This makes an acquaintance with the system a prerequisite to any understanding of the diary. For this reason the most complete version of Sapta Chatusthaya is reproduced in this issue of A & R, before the text of the Record proper. If the present editors' dating of the "reception" of the original formulas is correct, this placement is somewhat unchronological. It is justified by the fundamental importance of the system. Sri Aurobindo never wrote a complete explanation of Sapta Chatusthaya. The manuscript of 1913, published in the Supplement to the Centenary Library, deals adequately with only three of the seven chatusthayas ; the other four are given only the briefest mention. The next most important treatment that exists in the form of an authorial manuscript deals only with a single element of the first chatusthaya.42 The "scribal version" published in the present issue covers all seven; but it does not always go into details. In the Record Sri Aurobindo gave here and there an explanation of this or that part of the system. But the only really exhaustive explanation — unfortunately left unfinished — is to be found in the last part of Sri Aurobindo's major published work on yoga, The Synthesis of Yoga.43 The Synthesis was written contemporaneously with the Record; the last part, "The Yoga of Self-Perfection", appeared in the review Arya between December 1918 and January 1921. Towards the beginning of the tenth chapter of the part, entitled "The Elements of Perfection". Sri Aurobindo wrote: We must fix in order to find a clue and method on certain essential and fundamental elements and requisites of perfection, siddhi; for if these are
42 This manuscript, entitled "Shanti Chatusthaya". was published in a previous issue of Archives and Research (vol. 2. no. 2; December 1978). 43 Shri Arun Chandra Dutt was the first to note the relation of Sapta Chatusthaya to The Synthesis of Yoga. See Light to Superlight (Calcutta: Prabartak Publishers, 1972). p. 208. secured, all the rest will be found to be only their natural development or particular working. We may cast these elements into six divisions, interdependent on each other to a great extent but still in a certain way naturally successive in their order of attainment. The movement will start from a basic equality of the soul and mount to an ideal action of the Divine through our perfected being in the largeness of the Brahmic unity.44 What Sri Aurobindo introduces here, and describes in detail in the rest of the chapter, are the first to sixth chatusthayas. The seventh is not another "division" but "the means, the sum and the completion of all the rest" ; its four elements are the "four powers and objects" of the yoga.45 Only two chatusthayas and part of the third are treated in the 200 pages of the Synthesis that follow "The Elements of Perfection". The exposition was broken off suddenly in January 1921 when the Arya ceased to be published. Although the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh chatusthayas were not covered systematically, some details about them can be gleaned from other parts of the Synthesis, as well as from other writings of Sri Aurobindo.
The Numbers, Names and Elements of the Chatusthayas
Throughout the Record the chatusthayas are refered to both by number and by name. The number is the one given them by Sri Aurobindo according to their "normal" order (see below). The name is generally that of their most prominent element. The numbers, names and four main elements of each chatusthaya are as follows: First Chatusthaya: Samata chatusthaya [earlier, Shanti chatusthaya] Samata, Shanti, Sukha, Hasya [later, (Atma)prasada] Second Chatusthaya : Shakti Chatusthaya Viryam, Shakti, Chandibhava [later, Daiviprakriti], Shraddha Third Chatusthaya : Vijnana Chatusthaya Jnanam, Trikaldrishti, Ashtasiddhi, Samadhi Fourth Chatusthaya: Sharira Chatusthaya Arogya, Utthapana. Saundarya. [Vividh]Ananda Fifth Chatusthaya : Karma Chatusthaya [or Lila Chatusthaya] Krishna, Kali, Karma. Kama [sometimes the last two are reversed] Sixth Chatusthaya : Brahma Chatusthaya Sarvam Brahma, Anantam Brahma, Jnanam Brahma, Anandam Brahma Seventh Chatusthaya: Yoga Chatusthaya [or (San)siddhi Chatusthaya] Shuddhi, Mukti, Bhukti, Siddhi The elements, or "siddhis", of each chatusthaya are often referred to by the number of the chatusthaya and of the element within the chatusthaya: "the second element of the fifth chatusthaya", for example, would stand for "Kali". In addition the siddhis of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh chatusthayas are often referred to by the numbers 1-21—21 because in this enumeration the third chatusthaya is considered to have five instead of four elements:
44 The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 665. 45 "Sapta Chatusthaya", in Supplement (1973), p. 375: The Hour of God and Other Writings, p. 43. 1. Jnana 2. Trikaldrishti 3. Rupa(-siddhi) 4. Tapas 5. Samadhi 6. Arogya 7. Ananda 8. Utthapana 9. Saundarya 10. Krishna 11. Kali 12. Karma 13. Kama 14. Sarvam Brahma 15. Anantam Brahma 16. Jnanam Brahma 17. Anandam Brahma 18. Shuddhi 19. Mukti 20. Bhukti 21. Siddhi
The Order of the Chatusthayas
The order of the chatusthayas given above is their "natural and logical" one.46 It is this order that is used by Sri Aurobindo for his principal expositions of Sapta Chatusthaya. But he once told a disciple "it is not required of you to put them in practice in this given order".47 In fact he has himself provided, in "Yoganga".48 an alternative order with useful applications. 1. Siddhi chatusthaya 2. Brahma chatusthaya 3. Karma chatusthaya 4. Shanti chatusthaya 5. Shakti chatusthaya 6. Vijnana chatusthaya. 7. Sharira chatusthaya Here the three "general chatusthayas" come first, the one that is the "means, sum and completion of all the rest" heading the list. Then follow the "four chatusthayas of the Adhara siddhi", the perfection (siddhi) of the individual "vehicle" or being (adhara). This instrumental perfection is grounded in its basis of peace and equality (samata chaiusthaya), passes through the supramental transformation (vijnana chatusthaya) and culminates in the "last physical result" of this transformation of consciousness, namely the transformation of the body and "conquest of death".49 Still other orders occur. In the talk of 21 April 1923 referred to in footnote 19, the fourth, fifth and sixth chatusthayas are given as Karma, Brahma (or, in another version: Brahma, Karma), and Sharira; the others follow the usual sequence. Finally, the order is not of great importance. "One may begin with a chatusthaya which [one] finds to be easier and in this way he is expected to practise. Why they are arranged in this way, how we are to effect them in us. when we will have success, all will be known to us when we finish writing [and, it may be added, reading] and sincerely practise."50 P.H.
46 "Methods of Yoga", a "reproduction from memory" by an early disciple of oral remarks by Sri Sri Aurobindo 47 Ibid 48 See page 1 of the present issue 49 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, pp. 1232-33. 50 "Methods of Yoga". |