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Section Three
HIS PATH AND OTHER PATHS
SRI AUROBINDO'S
TEACHING AND
METHOD OF SADHANA
The teaching of
Sri Aurobindo starts from that of the ancient sages of India
that behind the appearances of the universe there is the Reality of a Being and
Consciousness, a Self of all things, one and eternal. All beings are united in
that One Self and Spirit but divided by a certain separativity of
consciousness, an ignorance of their true Self and Reality in the mind, life
and body. It is possible by a certain psychological discipline to remove this
veil of separative consciousness and become aware of the true Self, the
Divinity within us and all.
Sri
Aurobindo's teaching states that this One Being and Consciousness is involved
here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself;
consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared
is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and
develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of
this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not
finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness
which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be
towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the
conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release
itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection.
But
while the former steps in evolution were taken by Nature without a conscious
will in the plant and animal life, in man Nature becomes able to evolve by a
conscious will in the instrument. It is not, however, by the mental will in
man that this can be wholly done, for the mind goes only to a certain point and
after that can only move in a circle. A conversion has to be made, a turning of
the consciousness by which mind has to change into the higher principle. This
method is to be found through the ancient psychological discipline and practice
of
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Yoga.
In the past, it has been attempted by a drawing away from the world and a
disappearance into the height of the Self or Spirit. Sri Aurobindo teaches that
a descent of the higher principle is possible which will not merely release
the spiritual Self out of the world, but release it in the world, replace the
mind's ignorance or its very limited knowledge by a supramental
Truth-Consciousness which will be a sufficient instrument of the inner Self and
make it possible for the human being to find himself dynamically as well as
inwardly and grow out of his still animal humanity into a diviner race. The
psychological discipline of Yoga can be used to that end by opening all the
parts of the being to a conversion or transformation through the descent and
working of the higher still concealed supramental principle.
This, however, cannot be done at once or in a short time or by any
rapid or miraculous transformation. Many steps have to be taken by the seeker
before the supramental descent is possible. Man lives mostly in his surface
mind, life and body, but there is an inner being within him with greater
possibilities to which he has to awake — for it is only a very restricted
influence from it that he receives now and that pushes him to a constant
pursuit of a greater beauty, harmony, power and knowledge. The first process of
Yoga is therefore to open the ranges of this inner being and to live from there
outward, governing his outward life by an inner light and force. In doing so he
discovers in himself his true soul which is not this outer mixture of mental,
vital and physical elements but something of the Reality behind them, a spark
from the one Divine Fire. He has to learn to live in his soul and purify and
orientate by its drive towards the Truth the rest of the nature. There can
follow afterwards an opening upward and descent of a higher principle of the
Being. But even then it is not at once the full supramental Light and Force.
For there are several ranges of consciousness between the ordinary human mind
and the supramental Truth-Consciousness. These intervening ranges have to be
opened up and their power brought down into the mind, life and body. Only
afterwards can the full power of the Truth-Consciousness work in the nature.
The process of this self-discipline or Sadhana is therefore long and difficult,
but even a little of it is so much gained because it makes the ultimate
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release and perfection more possible.
There are many things belonging to older systems that are necessary
on the way — an opening of the mind to a greater wideness and to the sense of
the Self and the Infinite, an emergence into what has been called the cosmic
consciousness, mastery over the desires and passions; an outward asceticism is
not essential, but the conquest of desire and attachment and a control over the
body and its needs, greeds and instincts are indispensable. There is a
combination of the principles of the old systems, the way of knowledge through
the mind's discernment between Reality and the appearance, the heart's way of
devotion, love and surrender and the way of works turning the will away from
motives of self-interest to the Truth and the service of a greater Reality than
the ego. For the whole being has to be trained so that it can respond and be
transformed when it is possible for that greater Light and Force to work in the
nature.
In this discipline, the inspiration of the Master, and in the
difficult stages his control and his presence are indispensable — for it would
be impossible otherwise to go through it without much stumbling and error which
would prevent all chance of success. The Master is one who has risen to a
higher consciousness and being and he is often regarded as its manifestation
or representative. He not only helps by his teaching and still more by his
influence and example but by a power to communicate his own experience to
others.
This is Sri Aurobindo's teaching and method of practice. It is not
his object to develop any one religion or to amalgamate the older religions or
to found any new religion — for any of these things would lead away from his
central purpose. The one aim of his Yoga is an inner self-development by which
each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a
higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental
consciousness which will transform and divinise human nature.
August, 1934
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97
THIS-WORLDLINESS, OTHER-WORLDLINESS
AND SRI
AUROBINDO'S YOGA
One thing I
feel I must say in connection with your remark about the soul of India and
X's observation about "this stress on this-worldliness to the exclusion of
other-worldliness". I do not quite understand in what connection his
remark was made or what he meant by this-worldliness, but I feel it necessary
to state my own position in the matter. My own life and my Yoga have always
been, since my coming to India,
both this-worldly and otherworldly without any exclusiveness on either side.
All human interests are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered
into my mental field and some, like politics, into my life, but at the same
time, since I set foot on the Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I
began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this
world but had an inner and infinite bearing on it, such as a feeling of the
Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects
and bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and
planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I
could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have
called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them. For me all is
Brahman and I find the Divine everywhere. Everyone has the right to throw away
this-worldliness and choose other-worldliness only, and if he finds peace by
that choice he is greatly blessed. I, personally, have not found it necessary
to do this in order to have peace. In my Yoga also I found myself moved to
include both worlds in my purview — the spiritual and the material — and to try
to establish the Divine Consciousness and the Divine Power in men's hearts and
earthly life, not for a personal salvation only but for a life divine here. This
seems to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this life taking up
earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish
its spirituality or alter its Indian character. This at least has always been
my view and experience of the reality and nature of the world and things and
the Divine: it seemed to me as nearly as possible the integral truth about them
and I have therefore
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spoken of the
pursuit of it as the integral Yoga. Everyone is, of course, free to reject and
disbelieve in this kind of integrality or to believe in the spiritual necessity
of an entire other-worldliness altogether, but that would make the exercise of
my Yoga impossible. My Yoga can include indeed a full experience of the other
worlds, the plane of the Supreme Spirit and the other planes in between and
their possible effects upon our life and the material world; but it will be
quite possible to insist only on the realisation of the Supreme Being or
Ishwara even in one aspect, Shiva, Krishna as Lord of the world and Master of
ourselves and our works or else the Universal Sachchidananda, and attain to the
essential results of this Yoga and afterwards to proceed from them to the
integral results if one accepted the ideal of the divine life and this material
world conquered by the Spirit. It is this view and experience of things and of
the truth of existence that enabled me to write The Life Divine and Savitri.
The realisation of the Supreme, the Ishwara, is certainly the essential thing;
but to approach Him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve Him with
one's works and to know Him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but
in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga.
28-4-1949
YOGA
OF DIVINE LIFE
You have apparently
a call and may be fit for Yoga; but there are different paths and each has a
different aim and end before it. It is common to all the paths to conquer the
desires, to put aside the ordinary relations of life, and to try to pass from uncertainty
to everlasting certitude. One may also try to conquer dream and sleep, thirst
and hunger, etc. But it is no part of my Yoga to have nothing to do with the
world or with life or to kill the senses or entirely inhibit their action. It
is the object of my Yoga to transform life by bringing down into it the Light,
Power and Bliss of the divine Truth and its dynamic certitudes. This Yoga is
not a Yoga of world-shunning asceticism, but of divine life. Your object, on
the other hand, can only be gained by entering into
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Samadhi and ceasing in it from all connection with world-existence.
THE WAY OUT AND THE WAY TO CONQUER
The universe is certainly or has been up to now in appearance a
rough and wasteful game with the dice of chance loaded in favour of the Powers
of darkness, the Lords of obscurity, falsehood, death and suffering. But we
have to take it as it is and find out— if we reject the way out of the old
sages—the way to conquer. Spiritual experience shows that there is behind it all
a wide terrain of equality, peace, calm, freedom, and it is only by getting
into it that we can have the eye that sees and hope to gain the power that
conquers.
MAYAVADA, NIRVANA AND SRI AUROBINDO'S YOGA
About Nirvana :
When
I wrote in the Arya, I was setting forth an overmind view of things to
the mind and putting it in mental terms, that was why I had sometimes to use
logic. For in such a work —. mediating between the intellect and the
supra-intellectual —logic has a place, though it cannot have the chief place it
occupies in purely mental philosophies. The Mayavadin himself labours to
establish his point of view or his experience by a rigorous logical reasoning.
Only, when it comes to an explanation of Maya, he, like the scientist dealing
with Nature, can do no more than arrange and organise his ideas of the process
of this universal mystification; he cannot explain how or why his illusionary
mystifying Maya came into existence. He can only. say,. "Well, but it is there."
Of
course, it is there. But the question is, first, what is it? Is it really an
illusionary Power and nothing else, or is the Mayavadin's idea of it a
mistaken first view, a mental imperfect reading, even perhaps itself an
illusion? And next, "Is
illusion the sole or the highest Power which the Divine Consciousness or Super-
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consciousness possesses ?" The
Absolute is an absolute Truth free from Maya, otherwise liberation would not be
possible. Has then the supreme and absolute Truth no other active Power than a
power of falsehood and with it, no doubt, for the two go together, a power of
dissolving or disowning the falsehood,— which is yet there for ever ? I
suggested that this sounded a little queer. But queer or not, if it is so, it
is so — for, as you point out, the Ineffable cannot be subjected to the laws of
logic. But who is to decide whether it is so? You will say, those who get
there. But get where ? To the Perfect and the Highest, pūrṇam param
? Is the Mayavadin's featureless Brahman that Perfect, that Complete— is it the
very Highest ? Is there not or can there not be a higher than that highest, parātparam? That is not a question of logic, it is a question of spiritual fact, of a
supreme and complete experience. The solution of the matter must rest not upon
logic, but upon a growing, ever heightening, widening spiritual experience — an
experience which must of course include or have passed through that of Nirvana
and Maya, otherwise it would not be complete and would have no decisive value.
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. This
was no mental realisation nor something glimpsed somewhere above,— no abstraction,—
it was positive, the only positive reality,— although not a spatial physical
world, pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a
physical world, leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing
nothing else-to seem at all actual, positive or substantial. I cannot say there
was anything exhilarating or rapturous in the experience as it then came to me,
— (the ineffable Ananda I had years afterwards),— but what it brought was an
inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom.
I lived in
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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 illusion1 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 or 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. It came unasked, unsought for, though quite welcome. I had
no least idea about it before, no aspiration towards it, in fact my aspiration
was towards just the opposite, spiritual power to help the world and to do my
work in it, yet it came —without even a "May I come in" or a "By
your leave". It just happened and settled in as if for all eternity or as
if it had been really there always. And then it slowly grew into something not
less but greater than its first self. How then could I accept Mayavada or
persuade myself to pit against the Truth imposed on me from above the logic of
Shankara ?
But
I do not insist on everybody passing through my experience or following the
Truth that is its consequence. I have no objection to anybody accepting
Mayavada as his soul's truth or his mind's truth or their way out of the cosmic
difficulty. I object
1 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.
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to it only if somebody tries to push it
down my throat or the world's throat as the sole possible, satisfying and
all-comprehensive explanation of things. For it is not that at all. There are
many other possible explanations; it is not at all satisfactory, for in the end
it explains nothing; and it is—and must be unless it departs from its own logic
— all-exclusive, not in the least all-comprehensive. But that does not matter.
A theory may be wrong or at least one-sided and imperfect and yet extremely
practical and useful. This has been amply shown by the history of Science. In
fact, a theory whether philosophical or scientific, is nothing else than a
support for the mind, a practical device to help it to deal with its object, a
staff to uphold it and make it walk more confidently and get along on its
difficult journey. The very exclusiveness and one-sidedness of the Mayavada
make it a strong staff or a forceful stimulus for a spiritual endeavour which
means to be one-sided, radical and exclusive. It supports the effort of the
Mind to get away from itself and from Life by a short cut into superconscience.
Or rather it is the Purusha in Mind that wants to get away from the limitations
of Mind and Life into the superconscient Infinite. Theoretically, the way for
that is for the mind to deny all its perceptions and all the preoccupations of
the vital and see and treat them as illusions. Practically, when the mind draws
back from itself, it enters easily into a relationless peace in which nothing
matters, —for in its absoluteness there are no mental or vital values, —and
from which the mind can rapidly move towards that great short cut to the
superconscient, mindless trance, suṣupti. In proportion to the
thoroughness of that movement all the perceptions it had once accepted become
unreal to it — illusion, Maya. It is on its road towards immergence.
Mayavada
therefore with its sole stress on Nirvana, quite apart from its defects as a
mental theory of things, serves a great spiritual end and, as a path, can lead
very high and far. Even, if the Mind were the last word and there were nothing
beyond it except the pure Spirit, I would not be averse to accepting it as the
only way out. For what the mind with its perceptions and the vital with its
desires have made of life in this world, is a very bad mess, and if there were
nothing better to be hoped for, the shortest cut to an exit would be the best.
But my experience is
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that there is something beyond Mind; Mind
is not the last word here of the Spirit. Mind is an ignorance-consciousness and
its perceptions cannot be anything else than either false, mixed or imperfect —
even when true, a partial reflection of the Truth and not the very body of
Truth herself. But there is a Truth-Consciousness, not static only and
self-introspective, but also dynamic and creative, and I prefer to get at that
and see what it says about things and can do rather than take the short cut
away from things offered as its own end by the Ignorance.
SHANKARA'S MAYAVADA AND INTEGRAL YOGA
I do not base my
Yoga on the insufficient ground that the Self (not soul) is eternally free.
That affirmation leads to nothing beyond itself, or, if used as a
starting-point, it could equally well lead to the conclusion that action and
creation have no significance or value. The question is not that but of the
meaning of creation, whether* there is a Supreme who is not merely a pure
undifferentiated Consciousness and Being, but the source and support also of
the dynamic energy of creation and whether the cosmic existence has for It a
significance and a value. That is a question which cannot be settled by
metaphysical logic which deals in words and ideas, but by a spiritual
experience which goes beyond Mind and enters into spiritual realities. Each
mind is satisfied with its own reasoning, but for spiritual purposes that
satisfaction has no validity, except as an indication of how far and on what
line each one is prepared to go in the field of spiritual experience. If your
reasoning leads you towards the Shankara idea of the Supreme, that might be an
indication that the Vedanta Adwaita (Mayavada) is your way of advance.
This
Yoga accepts the value of cosmic existence and holds it to be a reality; its
object is to enter into a higher Truth-Consciousness or Divine supramental
Consciousness in which action and creation are the expression not of ignorance
and imperfection, but of the Truth, the Light, the Divine Ananda. But for that,
surrender of the mortal mind, life and body to that Higher Consciousness is
indispensable, since it is too difficult
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for the mortal human being to pass by its
own effort beyond mind to a supramental Consciousness in which the dynamism is
no longer mental but of quite another power. Only those who can accept the call
to such a change should enter into this Yoga.
2-10-1938
THE
REALISTIC AND THE ILLUSIONIST ADWAITA
There is possible a realistic as well
as an illusionist Adwaita. The philosophy of The Life Divine is such a
realistic Adwaita. The world is a manifestation of the Real and therefore is
itself real. The reality is the infinite and eternal Divine, infinite and
eternal Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This Divine by his power has
created the world or rather manifested it in his own infinite Being. But here
in the material world or at its basis he has hidden himself in what seem to be
his opposites, Non-Being, Inconscience and Insentience. This is what we
nowadays call the Inconscient which seems to have created the material universe
by its inconscient Energy, but this is only an appearance, for we find in the
end that all the dispositions of the world can only have been arranged by the
working of a supreme secret Intelligence. The Being which is hidden in what
seems to be an inconscient void emerges in the world first in Matter, then in
Life, then in Mind and finally as the Spirit. The apparently inconscient Energy
which creates is in fact the Consciousness-Force of the Divine and its aspect
of consciousness, secret in Matter, begins to emerge in Life, finds something
more of itself in Mind and finds its true self in a spiritual consciousness and
finally a supramental Consciousness through which we become aware of the
Reality, enter into it and unite ourselves with it. This is what we call
evolution which is an evolution of Consciousness and an evolution of the
Spirit in things and only outwardly an evolution of species. Thus also, the
delight of existence emerges from the original insentience, first in the
contrary forms of pleasure and pain, and then has to find itself in the bliss
of the Spirit or, as it is called in the Upanishads, the bliss of the Brahman.
That is the central idea in the explanation of the universe put forward in
The
Life Divine.
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ContINUE
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