Who Was Sri Aurobindo?
And Why is He Key to the Future of Humanity? - 1
PART 1 - WHO WAS SRI AUROBINDO?
This is an article I wrote for Collaboration Journal [www.collaboration.org] for
Sri Aurobindo’s 150 birth anniversary, giving an overview of his life and works.
Part 2 will be an exploration of the profound implications of his, and The Mother’s,
Work and mission to bring the new, Supramental Consciousness into active contact with the Earth.
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Sri Aurobindo
and the
Evolution beyond Mind
Karun Das
A Revolutionary and a Yogi
On May 1, 1908, Aurobindo Ghose1 was
arrested by heavily armed British police on charges of complicity in a bomb plot to assassinate a British judge. He would spend the next 12 months in jail in Alipore (a neighborhood of Kolkata in West Bengal), mostly in solitary confinement. This would turn out to be “the first state trial of any magnitude in India.”2 The British were keen to put him away, as he was quite possibly the most powerful force behind the newly awakened Indian nationalist movement.
At first, he had mostly worked behind the scenes, preferring to move those in the public eye towards the desired goal rather than standing out in the front. His writings in various publications were highly incendiary, but skillfully crafted so as not to give the colonial rulers anything to seize on to charge him with sedition. However, as word of his leadership became common knowledge, nationalist organizers increasingly called upon him as a public speaker and organizer. His voice and skillful political tactics also caught the attention of the British colonial administrators, one of whom wrote that Aurobindo was the most dangerous man in India.
His early days had seemed far from promising for this revolutionary career. Raised by his father to speak only Hindi and English—not his native Bengali—he was educated in England from ages 7–21, and excelled in the classics. Life in England was tremendously challenging, however. Due to sparse and irregular support payments from his father in India, Aurobindo often went hungry and without adequate clothing or shelter.
Afterwards, on his return to Indian soil, he had the first of many spontaneous spiritual experiences. What he referred to later as “a vast calm” descended on him—a welcome-home gift as it were, from his native land—which left him far removed from the dark moods of his time in England.
Other spontaneous spiritual experiences included one serious incident during his first year back in India, when the horse pulling his carriage threatened to upend it. He experienced a vision of the Godhead surging up from within himself. He later wrote a poem about this near accident, called “The Godhead”:
I sat behind the dance of Danger’s hooves
In the shouting street that seemed a futurist’s whim,
And suddenly felt, exceeding Nature’s grooves,
In me, enveloping me the body of Him.
Above my head a mighty head was seen,
A face with the calm of immortality
And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene
In the vast circle of its sovereignty.
His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;
The world was in His heart and He was I:
I housed in me the Everlasting’s peace,
The strength of One whose substance cannot die.
The moment passed and all was as before;
Only that deathless memory I bore.3
A Spiritual Turn
Politics was never a personal pursuit for Aurobindo Ghose. His whole being was consumed by the wish to serve his motherland, and her people, for which he felt a deep love and compassion, and the need to raise her up from her fallen state. Writing of himself in the third person, he later observed, “He always stood for India’s complete independence which he was the first to advocate publicly without compromise as the only ideal worthy of a self-respecting nation.” And also, “I entered into political action and continued with it … with one aim and one alone, to get into the mind of the people a settled will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it.…”4
In a letter to his young wife in 1905, he wrote:
I have three madnesses. Firstly, it is my firm faith that all the virtue, talent, the higher education and knowledge and the wealth God has given me, belong to Him.…
The second madness … is this: by any means, I must have the direct experience of God.… If the Divine is there, then there must be a way of experiencing His existence, of meeting Him; however hard be the path, I have taken a firm resolution to tread it.
The third madness is this: whereas others regard the country as an inert piece of matter and know it as the plains, the fields, the forests, the mountains and the rivers, I know my country as the Mother, I worship her and adore her accordingly. What would a son do when a demon, sitting on his mother’s breast, prepares to drink her blood? Would he sit down content to take his meals … or would he rather run to the rescue of his mother? I know I have the strength to uplift this fallen race; not a physical strength … but with the power of knowledge.… This is not a new feeling in me, not of recent origin, I was born with it, it is in my very marrow. God sent me to the earth to accomplish this great mission.5
But as Aurobindo progressed towards his political goal of awakening his countrymen to the ideal of freedom and independence, the goal of realizing the Divine within him (one of his “divine madnesses”) arose. This awakening was spurred when his brother Barin was dying of a high fever. A wandering sadhu (ascetic holy man) was passing through and saw Barin. The sadhu asked for a glass of water, sliced crosswise through it with a knife while chanting a mantra, and said to give it to the patient. Barin drank it and was cured. This led Aurobindo to decide that if there was a power to be attained by the ancient Hindu spiritual practices, he wanted it to help him in his work to uplift the nation.
From that point onwards, Aurobindo took up ancient yogic practices, all the while continuing unabated with his revolutionary political work. And while he saw no conflict between the two—a stance that marked his entire approach to spirituality—he felt the need to find a guru to give him more direction on the spiritual side. This he found briefly in a yogi named Lele. Lele showed him how to quiet his mind, which he accomplished in a single, one-pointed session over the course of three days. Lele told him that he should surrender himself entirely to the inner guide and move as it moved him. This then became Aurobindo’s rule of sadhana (spiritual practice) and of life itself. He no longer needed an outer guru or guide.
Alipore Jail—A Turning Point
After his arrest in May 1908, Aurobindo spent the next 12 months in mostly solitary confinement in the Alipore jail. At first disheartened, he followed his inner guide and began studying full-time the ancient Hindu sacred texts, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, and applying their teachings to his circumstances. The results were far more powerful than he had expected. In a speech given after his release, he revealed:
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.… It was Narayana6 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….
He continued:
When the case opened in the lower court and we were brought before the Magistrate I was followed by the same insight. He said to me, “When you were cast into jail, did not your heart fail and did you not cry out to me, where is Thy protection? Look now at the Magistrate, look now at the Prosecuting Counsel.” 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 Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled. “Now do you fear?” He said, “I am in all men and I overrule their actions and their words.”7
With these words, Aurobindo reveals the series of experiences that brought him into a living relationship with the divine lover and guide, in the form of Sri Krishna. It was in this way that his faith and trust in his inner guidance became unshakable, by being shown that all—from the British magistrate to the lowliest prisoners—were expressions of the One Divine.
And indeed, precisely 12 months after his arrest, Aurobindo Ghose was cleared of all charges. His defense attorney’s closing statement stands as a prophetic utterance:
[L]ong after this controversy is hushed in silence … long after he is dead and gone his words will be echoed and re-echoed not only in India, but across distant seas and lands. Therefore I say that the man in his position is not only standing before the bar of this Court, but before the bar of the High Court of History.8
Less than a year after speaking of his remarkable experiences in jail, Aurobindo received information that he was in imminent danger of a second arrest, and—after consulting his inner guidance—within ten minutes had left everything behind for a winding, clandestine journey that ended in Pondicherry, a French colony in southern India.
Pondicherry—Yoga
On April 4, 1910, Sri Aurobindo arrived in Pondicherry (now Puducherry), where he would stay for the remaining 40 years of his life. At first he remained in seclusion as guest of loyal supporters, safe from British agents who wanted him returned to British India. Previously he had been too intent on his political work to give his full attention to the spiritual path that had been laid out before him in Alipore. Now, in enforced isolation, he saw that his divine guide had left him no choice but to pursue with undivided effort the greater mission.
That mission was not exclusively focused on outer work, such as his writing, which took a major leap forward here. No, the vision that was given Sri Aurobindo first in the Alipore jail and vastly expanded once he settled in Pondicherry was also that of an inner conquest. He saw that by following a path of ascension of consciousness to higher and higher levels, he would eventually attain a new principle beyond mind, a divine or unity-consciousness he called the supermind.
In the passages below, Sri Aurobindo gives a summary of the course of evolutionary development that humanity teeters on the brink of today, but also hints at the course of spiritual development that he himself had been undergoing at this time:
At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way.… Man9 has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego and its appetites.10
A life of unity, mutuality and harmony born of a deeper and wider truth of our being is the only truth of life that can successfully replace the imperfect mental constructions of the past which were a combination of association and regulated conflict, an accommodation of egos and interests grouped or dovetailed into each other to form a society…. It is such a change and such a reshaping of life for which humanity is blindly beginning to seek, now more and more with a sense that its very existence depends upon finding the way.11
A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself.… It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.12
His attention no longer concentrated on the political arena, Sri Aurobindo’s writing, which had previously been largely in service to his political goals, now became the vehicle for the expression of the rapidly growing inner spiritual consciousness that was forming in him:
In the deep there is a greater deep, in the heights a greater height. Sooner shall man arrive at the borders of infinity than at the fullness of his own being. For that being is infinity, is God—
I aspire to infinite force, infinite knowledge, infinite bliss. Can I attain it? Yes, but the nature of infinity is that it has no end. Say not therefore that I attain it. I become it. Only so can man attain God by becoming God.
But before attaining he can enter into relations with him. To enter into relations with God is Yoga, the highest rapture & the noblest utility. There are relations within the compass of the humanity we have developed. These are called prayer, worship, adoration, sacrifice, thought, faith, science, philosophy.…
We may not know him as God, we may know him as Nature, our Higher Self, Infinity, some ineffable goal.… He is accessible even to the Atheist. To the materialist He disguises Himself in matter. For the Nihilist he waits ambushed in the bosom of Annihilation.13
But Sri Aurobindo’s inner work of personal transformation was not for himself alone. As with his political work, his mission was to raise up humanity, as can be seen in this revelatory passage:
Man’s greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of a living labour in which supermanhood is made ready by a divine Craftsman.
But he is admitted to a yet greater greatness and it is this that, unlike the lower creation, he is allowed to be partly the conscious artisan of his divine change. His free assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that into his body may descend the glory that will replace him. His aspiration is earth’s call to the supramental Creator.
If earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now for that immense and glorious transformation.14
And with these lines, we hear the alluring call of that divine flute, beckoning us, the readers, to participate in this “glorious transformation.” And we see too the first hints of that vaster work, the Integral Yoga, which was soon to become manifest in an outpouring of new, groundbreaking writings on a tremendous variety of subjects from yoga philosophy and practice to the evolution of human societies, a complete reinterpretation of the ancient Hindu sacred texts, the promise of a future poetry, and more. But before all of this could be realized, we see the unexpected arrival of a new personage, one who was to become Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, the Mother.
Mirra—The Mother
In 1914, a Frenchwoman, Mirra Richard, arrived in Pondicherry to meet Sri Aurobindo. She recognized in him the teacher who had appeared to her inner vision many times during her early life in Paris. And he recognized in her the human embodiment of the Divine Mother, the aspect of the Divine which, he saw, would be essential for the spiritual transformation he envisioned for humanity. Indeed she had by then realized in herself the identification with the Divine Mother, and was already far advanced along the spiritual path—a woman whose inner development and vision of the future of humanity matched his almost precisely.
Shortly after her arrival, she assisted Sri Aurobindo in the publication of a monthly journal he called the Arya.
The Arya / Major Works
First published on August 15, 1914, the Arya became the vehicle for Sri Aurobindo’s major works, including The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, and Essays on The Gita, each consisting of between 300 and 900 pages. Remarkably, these were each published one chapter at a time, concurrently. The material for each of these works of profound depth and variety simply descended from above, and he basically transcribed this Niagara of inspiration directly onto the page. Month after month, year after year, this continued for nearly seven years. These works, unmatched in modern literature, covered vast stretches of human endeavor.
For example, The Life Divine presents a philosophical treatment of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual vision while, at the same time, responding point by point to every conceivable earlier school of philosophy. “All life is yoga” is the watchword for The Life Divine, meaning that, whether consciously or unconsciously, all of life is an evolutionary journey whose aim and end is divine consciousness:
The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation,—for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment,—is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality.… The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.15
The Synthesis of Yoga explores in profound detail three primary ancient yogic paths—the yoga of works, the yoga of knowledge, and the yoga of love and devotion.
For Sri Aurobindo, “Yoga is nothing but practical psychology,”16 raised to its ultimate potential. “[I]t is always through something in the lower that we must rise into the higher existence, and the schools of Yoga each select their own point of departure or their own gate of escape. They specialise certain activities of the lower Prakriti [Nature] and turn them towards the Divine.”17 For each one of these three paths, he shows how the practitioner grows and develops and finally reaches the pinnacle of attainment for that path.
However, “if our aim be a transformation of our integral being into the terms of God-existence, it is then that a synthesis becomes necessary.”18
The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the Sadhaka [the practitioner] of the Sadhana [spiritual practice] as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection.19
Years later, when they were published in book form, three of the shorter, related works in the Arya—The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, and War and Self-Determination—were combined into a single volume on social and political philosophy. In each of these works, Sri Aurobindo takes all of human society and history into his vast world-view, and recasts our limited outlook into an evolutionary and spiritual frame.
In The Human Cycle, he explores the evolution of human society from a psychological perspective and traces its growth through five distinct (though often overlapping) psychological phases or ages. One hundred years ago, Sri Aurobindo suggested we may be seeing “the morning twilight of a new period of the human cycle,”20 the fifth of these cyclical ages, one he called the subjective age. This age, once fully realized, then becomes a potential staging era from which can arise an unprecedented spiritual age in which not only individuals but society itself can become spiritualized:
The ascent of humankind into heaven is not the key, but rather the ascent into spirit and the descent also of spirit into normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly nature. For that and not some post-mortem salvation is the real new birth for which humanity waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course.
Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being. Even as the animal man has been largely converted into a mentalised and at the top a highly mentalised humanity, so too now or in the future an evolution or conversion … of the present type of humanity into a spiritualised humanity is the need of the race and surely the intention of Nature; that evolution or conversion will be their ideal and endeavour.21
The thing to be done is as large as human life, and therefore the individuals who lead the way will take all human life for their province.… [T]hey will hold that all can be made the spirit’s means of self-finding and all can be converted into its instruments of divine living…. This endeavour will be a supreme and difficult labour for the individual, but much more for the race.22
But once the foundation has been secured, the rest develops by a progressive self-unfolding and the soul is sure of its way…. [T]he earthly evolution will have taken its great impetus upward and accomplished the revealing step in a divine progression of which the birth of thinking and aspiring man from the animal nature was only an obscure and a far off promise.23
In The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo studies the trend of humankind towards a closer unification through a review of efforts in the ancient world, as well as more recent attempts by some modern nations, including the ill-fated League of Nations. While a political unity can be constructed through administrative means, the unity of the human race can only be made real if the highest shared ideal of humanity spiritualizes itself and becomes the inner law of life.
In War and Self-Determination, he looks at the problems arising out of the First World War, the obstacles to the elimination of war and violent revolution, and the principle of self-determination for individuals and nations.
The Ashram
After ten months in Pondicherry, Mirra was forced to leave India due to the outbreak of WWI. It was only five years later, in 1920, that she was able to return to continue her work with Sri Aurobindo. Over the next few years, Sri Aurobindo began referring to Mirra as “the Mother,” indicating to the increasing number of disciples now gathering around them that he was acknowledging her as a full embodiment of the Divine Mother that he referenced in his writings.
Then in November 1926, Sri Aurobindo experienced the full descent of the overmind consciousness, the highest state of consciousness hitherto available to this outer world of forms, into his physical body. As a result of this experience, he withdrew from outer activity to focus exclusively on the inner work of bringing down a new, even higher divine consciousness that he named the “supramental consciousness,” which alone could bring about the transformation of humanity. Pursuing this goal, however, also necessitated doing the profoundly difficult work of clearing the inner obstacles that have kept humanity enmeshed in the ego-consciousness. And by doing the work within his own being, he was concurrently working for all of humanity. This was possible, and even inevitable, due to the fact—increasingly proven in recent times by the discoveries of quantum physics—that all matter is connected, is one in its essence. So when one body is purified and transformed, it affects all of humanity, indeed all the earth.
As a result of Sri Aurobindo’s withdrawal from outer contacts, the Mother took over the responsibility for the increasing numbers of disciples, and the multitude of outer necessities—as well as giving spiritual guidance and support for their daily needs and spiritual growth. This transition marked the formal creation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
The Master Poet
One of the foremost aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s formidable literary output was his poetic genius. Starting while just a student, his poetry grew in depth and quality as his consciousness deepened and widened. Much of his later poetry was taken up with expressing the inexpressible, the magnificent spiritual experiences and realizations that crowded in upon him. With titles such as, “The Kingdom Within,” “The Witness Spirit,” “Liberation,” and “The Cosmic Consciousness,” the heavens were not too high for his poetic revelations. But we can only hint at the vastness of his output by mentioning that his Collected Poems runs to over 600 pages! As with the Arya, all of his poetry after the session with Lele was written from a silent mind, descending from higher ranges of spiritual consciousness.
And that is only the beginning. Sri Aurobindo’s book The Future Poetry surveys the history and evolution of poetry through the ages with a main focus on poetry in English, then reveals the ideal spirit and form of a future poetry that will give voice to the deepest soul of humanity and the universal spirit in things. His efforts include many poems experimenting in new meters. An essay of this scope cannot hope to do more than dip a toe into that vast empire of the soul expressed through his poetic genius, so we will needs be satisfied with a few brief examples.
One of his breathtaking earlier efforts emerged, rather incredibly, from his time in solitary confinement in Alipore Jail:
Invitation
With wind and the weather beating round me
Up to the hill and the moorland I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?
Not in the petty circle of cities
Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
Against me the wind and the storm rebel.
I sport with solitude here in my regions,
Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.
I am the lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side.24
His poems range from the sublime to the absurd. Of the former, just one of his many sonnets will have to do:
Surrender
O Thou of whom I am the instrument,
O secret Spirit and Nature housed in me,
Let all my mortal being now be blent
In Thy still glory of divinity.
I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind,
I have offered up my will to be Thy will:
Let nothing of myself be left behind
In our union mystic and unutterable.
My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love,
My body become Thy engine for earth-use;
In my nerves and veins Thy rapture’s streams shall move;
My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to loose.
Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee.25
As an example of his incisive humor in the service of social commentary, here is a selection of lines from a 1939 poem about the absurdities of materialist science:
A Dream of Surreal Science
One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink
At the Mermaid, capture immortality;
A committee of hormones on the Aegean’s brink
Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.
[…]
A brain by a disordered stomach driven
Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell,
From St Helena went, perhaps, to Heaven.
Thus wagged on the surreal world, until
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.26
Savitri—A Legend and a Symbol
But no discussion of Sri Aurobindo’s poetic genius has even begun without a presentation of his life’s masterwork, Savitri.
“The tale of Satyavan and Savitri,” Sri Aurobindo once wrote, “is recited in the Mahabharata [an ancient Hindu sacred text] as a story of conjugal love conquering death.”27 Sri Aurobindo has transformed this ancient legend into an epic poem of some 24,000 lines of magnificent blank verse, in which the human soul, represented by Satyavan, is delivered from the grip of death and ignorance through the love and power of the Divine Mother, incarnated upon earth as Savitri.
But it is not simply a poem as we usually understand the term. Sri Aurobindo once explained, “I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote it from that level…. In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.”28
The Mother considered Savitri to be “the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision”29 and called it “that marvellous prophetic poem which will be humanity’s guide towards its future realisation.”30
So how to convey the magic and mastery of this “mantric poetry,” that is, poetry whose words, images, and rhythms call forth or elicit the very aspect of consciousness that is being described? In which Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness itself is embedded and available to one who reads it in a quiet and receptive attitude? All one can do is to present a few lines for you, dear reader, to see for yourself. First find a quiet space, with no distractions and no time pressure. Then read slowly, either aloud or to yourself, as though bathing in a pool of healing waters.
Let us begin with the protagonist’s discovery of the world soul:
As if a beckoning finger of secrecy
Outstretched into a crystal mood of air,
Pointing at him from some near hidden depth,
As if a message from the world’s deep soul,
An intimation of a lurking joy
That flowed out from a cup of brooding bliss,
There shimmered stealing out into the Mind
A mute and quivering ecstasy of light,
A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.
As one drawn to his lost spiritual home
Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,
Into a passage dim and tremulous
That clasped him in from day and night’s pursuit,
He travelled led by a mysterious sound.
A murmur multitudinous and lone,
All sounds it was in turn, yet still the same.
A hidden call to unforeseen delight
In the summoning voice of one long-known, well-loved,
But nameless to the unremembering mind,
It led to rapture back the truant heart.
The immortal cry ravished the captive ear.
Then, lowering its imperious mystery,
It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.
It seemed the yearning of a lonely flute
That roamed along the shores of memory
And filled the eyes with tears of longing joy.
A cricket’s rash and fiery single note,
It marked with shrill melody night’s moonless hush
And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep
Its high insistent magical reveille.
A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells
Travelled the roads of a solitary heart;
Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:
An old forgotten sweetness sobbing came.
Or from a far harmonious distance heard
The tinkling pace of a long caravan
It seemed at times, or a vast forest’s hymn,
The solemn reminder of a temple gong,
A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles
Ardent with ecstasy in a slumbrous noon,
Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.31
And then this selection, introducing the woman, Savitri herself:
All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.…
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple-door to things beyond.
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.32
But Sri Aurobindo is not averse to using the discoveries of science to include among his mystic musings:
She only saw a thin atomic Vast,
The rare-point sparse substratum universe
On which floats a solid world’s phenomenal face.
Alone a process of events was there
And Nature’s plastic and protean change
And, strong by death to slay or to create,
The riven invisible atom’s omnipotent force.33
To conclude our all-too-brief treatment of Savitri, we offer this deeply prophetic yet promising passage that speaks to the historical moment we are presently living through:
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past;
There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;
Earth was o’errun with fire and the roar of Death
Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;
There was a clangour of Destruction’s wings:
The Titan’s battle-cry was in my ears,
Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.
I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude,
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal’s glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the spirit’s light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
[…]
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature’s face.34
The Mother—The Supramental Manifestation
Sri Aurobindo left his largely divinized body on December 5, 1950. Until that time, he had remained in seclusion—other than appearing briefly with the Mother four days each year on “darshan days,” when disciples and visitors could file past them to receive their blessings. All those years, the Mother was overseeing the multitude of details of the Ashram, as well as having direct contact with disciples and visitors.
After Sri Aurobindo’s passing, she was left to do all that, as well as to carry on with their inner work of transformation and create a pathway for the supramental consciousness to descend directly to the earth, to begin the ultimate transformation of life and matter itself. As each of them had observed, while they were two, “for the purposes of the manifestation,” their consciousness was one and the same.
And on February 29, 1956, the Mother was able to declare that during the common meditation at the Ashram that night, this descent of the supramental was exactly what happened:
This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I 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 movement 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.35
Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:
A new light breaks upon the earth,
A new world is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled.36
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 recognize it.37
In Conclusion
We stand at the brink of profound change, with the yawning gap of human ignorance threatening to draw us into its ancient darkness, while at the same time, the pioneers of the New are among us—indeed, they are us! In this pivotal moment, “As on some verge between Time and Timelessness / When being must end or life rebuild its base,”38 we are all called to reach to our highest possibility. The sun-eyed children of a marvelous dawn are all around us, if we but open our eyes to see, and dare to hope and dream. Only so can we invite that radiant new possibility to come and fill our minds and hearts, move our acts, change life’s circumstances. In the deepest darkness, there is always a way through, “when God is guide.”39
Notes
1. Sri Aurobindo did not use the title “Sri” before his name until well into his years in Pondicherry. Therefore it seems more historically accurate to refer to him as “Aurobindo” or “Aurobindo Ghose” in his life previous to this, as this is how he referred to himself at the time.
2. Peter Heehs, Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 57.
3. Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA), vol. 2, p. 607.
4. Georges Van Vrekhem, The Mother: The Story of Her Life (New Delhi, Harper Collins Publishers India, 2000), p.105.
5. Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo’s Letters to His Wife Mrinalini Devi, available in PDF format from Auro e-Books, https://auro-ebooks-in.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/book-uploads/Sri-Aurobindo-Letters-to-Mrinalini-Devi.pdf.
6. Vasudeva and Narayana are both names for the Beloved, the Divine Being, Krishna.
7. Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, CWSA, vol. 8, pp. 3–12.
8. Heehs, Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, p.60.
9. In direct quotations from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, we retain the classical stylistic usage of “man” to signify humanity as a whole, with pronouns he/him/his. In this context, it must be also noted that within patriarchal Indian society, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were pioneers for gender equality in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
10. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, CWSA, vol. 22, p. 1090.
11. Ibid., p. 1092.
12. Ibid., p. 1096.
13. Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human, CWSA, vol. 12, p. 5.
14. Ibid., p. 160.
15. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, CWSA, vol. 21, pp. 3–4.
16. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, CWSA, vol. 23, p. 44.
17. Ibid., p. 45.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, CWSA, vol. 25, p. 23.
21. Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, CWSA, vol. 25, p. 265.
22. Ibid., pp. 266–267.
23. Ibid., pp. 268–269.
24. Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, CWSA, vol. 2, p. 201.
25. Ibid., p. 611.
26. Ibid., p. 614.
27. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, CWSA, vol. 33, “Author’s Note,” p. xvii.
28. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry And Art, CWSA, vol. 27, p. 272.
29. The Mother, Words of the Mother 1, Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), vol. 13, p. 24.
30. The Mother, Some Answers from the Mother, CWM, vol. 16, p. 292.
31. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, CWSA, vol. 33, pp. 289–290.
32. Ibid., pp. 14–15.
33. Ibid., p. 255.
34. Ibid., pp. 343–344.
35. The Mother, Mother’s Agenda, vol. 1 (first published in France under the title, L’Agenda de Mère 1951–1960. English translation copyright 1979 by Institut de Recherches Evolutives Paris), p. 69.
36. Ibid., p. 74.
37. Ibid., p. 75.
38. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, CWSA, vol. 34, p. 461.
39. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, CWSA, vol. 33, p. 339.