The “Great Encounter”
6th February 1893.
The day on which Sri Aurobindo set foot on Indian soil again for the first time after a 13-year “exile” in England. After disembarking from the ship in Bombay, a “vast silence” greeted him, and this was to fulfil him for months.
It was a strange and meaningful encounter, when in the same year some four months later, Sri Ramakrishna’s spiritual son Vivekananda, also travelled from Bombay to America, to take part in an international conference of the religions in Chicago, where he was met with a wave of sympathy.
Sri Aurobindo and Vivekananda were passionate about their motherland of India, which was languishing under British rule in these final years of the nineteenth century; a country laid low by the utmost apathy. Sri Aurobindo’s aim was, by means of his character, to bring a force of action to India stimulated by the Western way of thinking. Vivekananda on the other hand, inspired like Sri Aurobindo by a will to restore the dignity of India, carried the message of Indian spirituality to the West.
This began to come full circle, and the separation between East and West, which was considered to be irreconcilable for so long, gave way to increasingly more intensive permeation into both hemispheres, which has reached a new peak in our time.
Aurobindo’s mind was fully focused on synthesis, and he expressed himself on this topic with these words: “But, for myself I would rather be disposed to dwell on oneness and unity than on division and difference. East and West have the same human nature, a common human destiny, the same aspiration after a greater perfection, the same seeking after something higher than itself, something towards which inwardly and even outwardly we move. … East and West have always met and mixed more or less closely, they have powerfully influenced each other and at the present day are under an increasing compulsion of Nature and Fate to do so more than ever before.” 1
During his years of education in England – in Manchester, London and Cambridge – Sri Aurobindo had absorbed Western learning to such an extent that he was able to speak from experience. During his studies at Cambridge University, he won all the prizes in Latin and Greek in a year, studied Goethe and Dante in their original languages, developed a great love of the clarity of the French mind, and carried out intensive studies of history.
Overview
Sri Aurobindo, who is nowadays known primarily as the discoverer of the supramental, the originator of “integral yoga”, and the visionary of a new evolutionary stage, was born on 15th August 1872 in Calcutta, and died on 5th December 1950 in Pondicherry. If we take an overview of his entire life, the plethora of external activities alone is impressive: he worked successively as a teacher and head teacher, scholar, poet, political leader, journalist, dramatist, Indologist, psychologist, literary critic, translator and creative interpreter of the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita, and also as a master yogi. However, his endlessly rich inner life largely escapes the eye of the keenest observer. One of his biographers once wrote: The attempt is bound to be a failure, because neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for man to see.” 2 The attempt is bound to be a failure, because neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for man to see.” 3 The truly personal is only to be found randomly in letters, collected dialogues and notes. He preferred to work in the background. He avoided exaggeration and grand gestures, and dissociated himself from widely visible miracles in the fashion of certain gurus nowadays. He used his phenomenal spiritual power without publicising it.
It is possible to list the different facets of his versatile effect, refer to his comprehensive 36-volume work with more than 15,000 printed pages, and perhaps crystallise the essence from it, and nevertheless be left with an unsatisfactory feeling that the substance of his character and his influence are constantly unavailable. Satprem, a French pupil of Sri Aurobindo, who wrote a superb and spirited introduction to his work entitled “Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of the Consciousness”, points out that Sri Aurobindo ultimately remains a mystery. There is something about him that pushes all the boundaries and accounts for the intrinsic magic of his personality. Sri Aurobindo transcended the West as well as the East, having assimilated the best elements of both, and made something of them that is more than a pieced together mix. Instead, something radically new arose from it, which still awaits discovery, despite a plethora of scholarly books about him.
An Authority on the West
Let us take a closer look at his life: he was exposed to great hardships from the outset. This began early when at the tender age of five years he left his family home in Bengal and entered a school in Darjeeling run by Irish nuns. Two years later, his father, an anglicised country doctor with a very strong character and great intentions for his three sons, sent him to the West, to England, where he himself had studied. His foster parents, an Anglican clergyman and his wife, were given “strict instructions”, “that he was not to acquaint himself with any Indians and should not be subjected to any Indian influences”. This is a case of a child growing up completely outside the sphere of influence of his family, his own country and its traditions – a free spirit. This may be what characterises Sri Aurobindo the most: a regal feeling of sacrosanct freedom.
Besides schoolwork, he spent his time on general reading: he was particularly fascinated by European poetry and soon began to write his own poems. This poetic stream in him runs even deeper than the philosophical side of his nature, which by his own testimony, first developed in him through yoga. Notwithstanding this, in the West, he is known in particular as the writer of the monumental works, “The Life Divine” and “The Synthesis of Yoga”. The fact that he also left behind him an extensive work of poetry has been more or less ignored. If you wish to become further acquainted with Sri Aurobindo, it might also be worth picking up his splendid Epos Savitri, with more than 23,000 verses, in which the future fate of the world found its expression.
On the face of it, the life of the three brothers in England was characterised by major privations, as the payments of money by the father increasingly failed to appear. In a letter from that period, Sri Aurobindo talks about a “time of the greatest suffering and poverty”. 4 You can only assume that his own reviews of the suffering of his mother country of India at this time, which he would have read in newspaper reports, were felt even more intensively by him. During this period, his wish to commit himself to the liberation of India grew: “At the age of eleven”, Sri Aurobindo writes, “he had already received strongly the impression that a period of general upheaval and great revolutionary changes was coming in the world and he himself was destined to play a part in it. His attention was now drawn to India and this feeling was soon canalised into the idea of the liberation of his own country.” 5 He became a member of an Indian study group which devoted itself to the emancipation of India, and which gave a number of revolutionary speeches. It was therefore no surprise to anyone when, after completing his second degree for the English administrative service in India, he was dropped by the English authorities.
Early Years in India
His way out of this was employment in the civil service with the maharaja of Baroda, who was staying in London at the beginning of 1893. Other than that, Sri Aurobindo had to completely fend for himself in the years that followed: his father died during his passage back to India, due to the shock of a false report that his son’s ship had sunk. His mother no longer recognised him as her mind had started to deteriorate in the preceding years.
Besides his work in the administrative service and as a professor of English and French, he also carried out his own studies in his mother tongue, Bengali, and the original language of India, Sanskrit, in order to start on translations from the Mahabharata. It was certainly no simple matter, but this approach is typical of Sri Aurobindo: he was a person who rarely moved along the paths mapped out for him and always had the courage to forge ahead. If something was believed to be difficult or even impossible, this only gave him a greater incentive to prove the opposite by his own doing. He had a deep, innate knowledge that there was nothing which could not ultimately be achieved through targeted concentration. This supported his positive attitude to obstacles and difficulties.
Politics and Yoga
At this time, Sri Aurobindo was still an agnostic, and his spiritual purpose had not yet revealed itself. However, in 1904, he took up yoga, not for personal reasons but to help him create an unshakeable basis of strength and energy for his struggle in the liberation of India. This led to a considerable improvement in the condition of his health and an incredible intensification of his poetic inspiration.
The years from 1905 to 1910 were characterised by a deep immersion in politics and yoga, two areas that were not mutually exclusive for Sri Aurobindo. He was particularly inspired by the conviction that spiritual fulfilment contradicted life and the world, but that by contrast they should find their own fulfilment there. In England, he had followed the liberation movements in Italy, Germany and America with interest, and he now gained valuable inspiration from this. His starting point and the aim of his political programme was the concept of full independence for India; in fact, Sri Aurobindo was the very first politician in India who had the courage to publicly promote independence in the journals he had founded, and later in the political arena. It is no coincidence but perhaps due to higher providence that Sri Aurobindo’s 75th birthday fell on the day Indian independence was established, on 15 August 1947. One can only hope that the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence and the 125th birthday of Sri Aurobindo mark the start of a new development, which fittingly takes account of both areas, the worldly and the spiritual.
Sri Aurobindo and Gandhi
One interesting fact is that Sri Aurobindo not only advocated the inalienable right of any nation to freedom and independence, but also – on this basis – the right to armed resistance. Fate had it that India was able to gain its independence 40 years later by non-violent means, which appeared to justify Gandhi’s principle of non-violence. On the other hand, one might wonder whether Sri Aurobindo’s attitude during the Second World War, when he publicly took the side of the Allies, was more reasonable than Gandhi’s adherence to the principle of “Ahimsa”. Had England followed Gandhi’s request to lay down arms and limit the fight against Hitler, deploying purely spiritual strength instead, the world might certainly have been robbed of its future for a very long time. Sri Aurobindo commented on this problem: “It is impossible, at least as men and things are, to advance, to grow, to fulfil and still to observe really and utterly that principle of harmlessness which is yet placed before us as the highest and best law of conduct.” 6
Nirvana
December 1907, saw a period of political agitation and restless activity on the world stage. In terms of his inner world at this time, Sri Aurobindo, was being hurled in a direction which represented a revolution just as great as the external one that motivated it. In December 1907, after his yogic development had come to a standstill, he turned to a Yogi called Lele, who was intellectually far inferior to him, but who was able to inspire him. His first instruction was: “Make your mind empty.” The aim was to achieve complete stillness of the mind and immobilise the whole consciousness. The means of doing this was to dismiss all thoughts coming into your head. Sri Aurobindo later wrote to a pupil: “The first result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness which he [Lele] never intended – for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic and he was against Adwaita Vedanta – and which were quite contrary to my own ideas.” 7To his complete surprise, Sri Aurobindo entered the realm of “the silent spaceless and timeless Brahman” 8, an experience which was accompanied “by an overwhelming feeling and perception of the total unreality of the world”. 9
“In the enormous spaces of the self
The body now seemed only a wandering shell.” 10”
“There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. … But what this experience brought was an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom.” 11 Suddenly, Sri Aurobindo had entered into what the Buddhists called Nirvana and he had achieved the famed “release” (mukti), which is said to be the peak of spiritual life. However, the chasm between the mind and material had opened up again, and against the backdrop of this transcendent reality, the earth and life appeared to him “as a cinematographic play of vacant forms”. 12
Lele was appalled; this had not been his aim. However, when he saw that Sri Aurobindo’s experience could no longer be reversed, he advised him to give himself over to his inner guide, the Divine, “enjoining an absolute surrender to its will, a principle or rather a seed-force”, to which Sri Aurobindo unwaveringly and increasingly adhered, until, as he later wrote in a letter, “through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic development bound by no single rule or system or dogma … – to where and what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter”. 13
The paradoxical situation thereby arose that on the one hand, Sri Aurobindo lived in complete inner silence, but on the other hand, he was compelled by the vortex of political activities to lead an outwardly extraverted life. In this state, he ran a daily newspaper and would give a dozen talks within a period of three or four days. This “just happened”, and he no longer thought “with his head or brain”, but all thinking came from a “wideness generally above the head that the thoughts occur.” 14
For the modern Western mind, this might have been an absurd assertion, but as Sri Aurobindo once wrote to a sceptic, it is “impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature”. 15 The only path was “to collect experience after experience” and based on an increasingly intuitive power of judgment to put things in their right place.
Imprisonment – Cosmic Consciousness or Unity Consciousness
The strength that had led him on this path did not allow Sri Aurobindo to pause for breath. Out of the blue just four months later, Sri Aurobindo was arrested together with a number of co-conspirators from the English authorities. The arrests were due to an assassination attempt on an English magistrate for which he was not responsible. He remained in custody for more than a year, a month of which was spent in solitary confinement, and in complete uncertainty about whether the gallows awaited him. His inner spiritual experiences assumed such an urgent dynamic during his detainment that he left the representation of his case completely in the hands of his defence lawyer and devoted himself entirely to meditation and yoga. The result was the second greatest realisation in his life. The emptiness of infinity which he had felt so overwhelmingly since his “Nirvana experience”, and which had almost swallowed him up in its wake, became more open and began to “fill up”. The world and God passed though into him and became, as Satprem wrote, “at all points, as though they had never been separate, except as the result of an exaggerated materialism or spiritualism.” The place where this new change in consciousness came about was the prison of Alipore: “I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. … I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. 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.” 16
At the final hearing, Sri Aurobindo’s defence counsel was seized by divine inspiration, and Sri Aurobindo was released thanks to the impact of his plea. The revolutionary movement in Bengal had been decimated during the period of Sri Aurobindo’s detainment, but this did not stop his attempts to change track again by founding new political journals and organising the nationalistic Party of Bengal. However, in February 1910, due to the threat of arrest, he was forced to flee to French-administered Chandernagore, where he was safe from the British for the time being.
The Turning Point
His inner experiences in the jail at Alipore and in Chandernagore marked a decisive turning point in Sri Aurobindo’s life. He had scaled the heights of the human mind, and he had integrated everything for which the spirit of India had striven for centuries – yet he saw that it was not enough. His first insight was that he was not finished in his struggle to win the fight against the external oppressors: “It is not a revolt against the British Government which anyone can easily do. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature.” 17
What happened to cause Sri Aurobindo to arrive at this insight? He had attained the highest light. He had climbed ever higher, and in his solitary meditation in jail at Alipore, where the voice of Vivekananda had advised him, he was able to look deep inside and recognise the true extent of global unconsciousness, suffering and death, which was yet to be transformed after centuries of human development. For fourteen days during his detainment, he was forced by his inner guide to view in his mind’s eye all possible scenarios of human torment. And he saw that he would find no peace of mind until he had found the means to bring an end to this universal suffering on the earthly-material plane. The rest of his life – the next forty years – consisted of finding this “magic lever” which would bring the earth to its divine future.
Pondicherry – The Revolutionary of the Future
Under the guidance of a new inner calling, he left Chandernagore at the end of March 1910 to go to Pondicherry. The city was not far from Madras and was still under French sovereignty. He would remain there up to his death. According to the legend, the city had served as the domain of the great Rishi Agastya. In later years, the British, who sensed Sri Aurobindo was still a danger, tried several times to seize him, without success. The majority of his earlier political associates did not understand Sri Aurobindo’s withdrawal from the struggle for emancipation. The retort he gave to this was that he had only retired from politics because he required the “inner certainty” to bring a good conclusion to the work he had begun. He now wanted to concentrate fully on his yoga.
In fact, Sri Aurobindo’s inner journey took a phenomenal upturn in the next few years, leading to the development of a still unknown principle of the highest consciousness – the supramental. In 1914, after a few hard and uncertain years with regard to external relationships, he received crucial assistance in his transformational work. He became acquainted with his spiritual companion and kindred spirit of the highest order, the Frenchwoman Mirra Alfassa, who later generally came to be known as “Mother”. From 1914 – 1921, he made his revolutionary insights known by publishing a philosophical journal called “Arya”, which contained the majority of his work. The fact alone, that he published four, sometimes six, of his main works at the same time, must have made people sit up and take notice; a fact that is unique in the whole history of spirituality.
The Later Years
From 1921, there was not much more to report at the external level. In 1926, he withdrew completely after another decisive inner realisation. He then concentrated intensively on his work regarding the transformation of the whole human experience, down to the subconscious and the body. In 1926, he set up the Ashram which was intended to be the experimental site for his integral yoga, and this was instinctively based around himself and Mother. It was not long before his name became widely known and started to draw attention from abroad as well as throughout India. Shortly before his death, he was put forward for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Further important events after his death on 5th December 1950 were marked by the founding of the future city of Auroville in 1968, which represented an attempt to embody the ideal of supramental transformation at the material level, and the publication of his collected works in 1972.
The Heart of the Matter …
In his essay “The Revolt of the Earth” (1990), Satprem, who carries on the work of Sri Aurobindo and Mother today, wrote the revolutionary sentence: “Let us not delude ourselves; we are not at the end of a “civilization,” the way we were at the end of the Roman Empire. We are at the end of the Human Empire.” 18
Recognising this state of affairs provides the key to the chaotic mystery of our time. In 1927, in the midst of his solitary work, Sri Aurobindo wrote about transformation occurring in the “bedrock” of the unconscious and the body:
“The human is a TRANSITIONAL BEING; he is not final.” 19
Back then, when Sri Aurobindo wrote this thought-provoking sentence, he clearly recognised that the most advanced tool of evolution up to then, human thinking – Sri Aurobindo calls it “mental” – could not create the next step required of humanity on its own. A new force of consciousness had to be found and developed which could provide the required light as well as the power necessary for this. On his search for this “new law” or principle, Sri Aurobindo stumbled upon that luminous layer of thinking or intellect which he called supramental or the consciousness of truth.
Although the Western mind may call for this, it is not possible to give an exact definition of the supramental because, as the name suggests, it transcends the mental and cannot be fully captured. Sri Aurobindo’s observation will suffice here: The supramental is simply the Truth-Consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter.” 20 Thus: ”The Supramental is not grand, aloof, cold and austere; it is not something opposed to or inconsistent with a full vital and physical manifestation; on the contrary, it carries in it the only possibility of the full fullness of the vital force and the physical life on earth.” 21
What is important to realise is that for Sri Aurobindo, the supramental was no mere postulation of thinking, no hypothetical possibility, but an existentially experienced reality. He was therefore able to say with calm certainty in 1935: “I know with absolute certitude that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable.” 22 In his case, the path to this discovery was that of a researcher and experimenter: ”I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane.” 23 And in August 1935 he wrote triumphantly: “Now I have got the hang of the whole hanged thing – like a very Einstein I have got the mathematical formula of the whole affair (unintelligible as in his case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure.” 24 On 21 July 1965, when Mother attained the same point in yoga of the body as Sri Aurobindo had in his time, that is, she was able to satisfy the initially completely unconscious cells of her body with consciousness and put them in touch with the light and power of the supramental, she interestingly used almost the same words.
The pioneering discovery of Sri Aurobindo and Mother of the cells’ own consciousness, makes it possible in principle, to change the course of humans definitively, as was the case with the step from material to life and later from life to thought. Fascinatingly, according to the research of Sri Aurobindo, Mother and Satprem, the body – so undervalued by world religions for centuries – came into its own, and became a bridge whereby the next stage of evolution could take place. It is still barely possible to judge what kind of revolution might come from this fact which was discovered by exploring the inner world.
Impossible?
Sri Aurobindo replied thus to a sceptic: “Only you say that the thing is impossible; but that what is said about everything before it is done.” 25
Mother’s experience in the years between 1956 and 1973, as she followed in the footsteps of Sri Aurobindo with “yoga of the body” or “yoga of the cells”, the results of which are documented in the 13 volume, 6000 page “Agenda”, seems to confirm this. She is first proof that the message of hope which Sri Aurobindo has left us is not another illusion in the long line of efforts at healing that we see in the tormented history of humankind.
Satprem, who continued with the work after Mother’s death in 1973, is another living proof of the reality of the matter. One of his final works, “Evolution II” (1992), a “message in a bottle” to those interested in this work, includes the following propitious words: “For the great floodgate of the new evolution is open, I know it is, the passage is open, I know it is, it no longer is a promise for future times: it is being done […] And who will close that solar floodgate again? It is now shaking the world more inexorably than all our Floods of old. It is the ‘favorable milieu’ such as there has never been, for we have reached the end of man and must hasten before he puts an end to his Earth; for now is the time when, at the end of our road, we are holding in our hands our own destruction or our own mutation.
So let us throw this last lifebuoy for those who want it. For Hope is here, if we want it; the Way is here, if we want it – and the Time has come, whether we want it or not.” 26
1 Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, from 1995. Complete edition in 36 volumes with index volume. – Vol. 36, Autobiographical Notes, A Message to America, p. 551
2 Ibid., p. 11
3 Ibid., p. 11
4 Ibid., p. 28
5 Ibid., p. 32
6 Ibid., p. 42
7 CWSA, vol. 35, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p. 238
8 Brahman = the absolute; the pure mind
9 CWSA, vol. 36, Autobiographical Notes, p. 94
10 CWSA, vol. 33, Savitri, p. 82
11 CWSA, vol. 35, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p. 249
12 Ibid., p. 239
13 Ibid., p. 240
14 Ibid., p. 259
15 CWSA, vol. 28, Letters on Yoga I, p. 383
16 CWSA, vol. 8, Karmayogin, Uttarpara Speech, p. 6
17 A.B. Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p. 37 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1982)
18 Satprem, The Revolt of the Earth, p. …
19 CWSA, vol. 12, Essays Divine and Human, Man and the Supermind, p. 157
20 CWSA, vol. 29, Letters on Yoga II, p. 483
21 SABCL, vol. 26, On Himself, p. 125
22 CWSA, vol. 35, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p. 334
23 Ibid., p. 322
24 Ibid., p. 344
25 SABCL, vol. 23, Letters on Yoga, p. 523
26 Satprem, Evolution II, p. 54