Sri Aurobindo Or The Yogi Of The Life Divine
Aju Mukhopadhyay
29 May 2008, 15:53Introduction:
Of the many aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s life, yoga and philosophy based on spirituality is the highest and most important. Sri Aurobindo is known throughout the world more as a philosopher than as a poet or politician. But his philosophy was not born out of speculative thought-process. A great scholar and poet, a revolutionary politician, he grew from height to height.
His philosophy was based on his spiritual experiences, which guided him to a conviction of the existence of the divine and the possibility of founding a Divine Life on earth. The path to achieve the Divine Life was yoga. Synthesizing all the ancient yogas, he founded a path called Purna Yoga or Integral Yoga.
The highest goal of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga was to attain the Supermind, to bring down the supramental consciousness for the transformation of the earth. To achieve this he willingly gave up his body so that supramental light and consciousness might get a footing on earth consciousness, and in that he succeeded.
Sri Aurobindo’s politics was gradually moulded according to his spiritual experiences and convictions. He was the founder of Spiritual Nationalism. His aim was to bring harmony and unity among mankind on spiritual basis. His ultimate aim was the World Union on the basis of Divine Life on earth. To know Sri Aurobindo as a philosopher we have to know his political philosophy, philosophy of human unity and the philosophy of the Life Divine.
As the basis of his philosophy was spiritual experiences, we have to know the story of such experiences. As the path to achieve his philosophical goal was yoga, his yoga philosophy becomes a part of our study. As Supermind, a word coined by him meaning Truth Consciousness, was his highest goal to attain, the story of the supermind also becomes an essential part of it. Sri Aurobindo willingly gave up his body to bring down the Supermind. So the story about his last earthly days will complete our knowledge about Sri Aurobindo the Philosopher. The whole subject is divided in the following nine chapters with brief synopsis at the beginning. The total length of the book is approximately 32000 words.
Spiritual Experiences before Pondicherry
Sri Aurobindo, during the Evening Talks with his disciples on 28.6.1926 (as recorded by A. B. Purani) said, “If you want the truth it was not light but darkness that I saw at Darjeeling. I was lying down one day when I saw suddenly a great darkness rushing into me and enveloping me and the whole of the universe. What I told Moti babu was that I had a great Tamas- darkness-always hanging on to me all along my stay in England. I believe that darkness had something to do with the Tamas that came upon me. It left me only when I was coming back to India.”
At Darjeeling he was a child of five or six years. He came back to India at the age of 21 years. During the same conversation he confirmed that he had no extraordinary spiritual experience in his early life, except that he had two mental experiences, a suggestion that he should give up selfishness and a realization about the Atman.
“It was mental rather than spiritual experience of the Atman. I felt the one only as true; it was an experience absolutely Shankarite in its essence. It lasted only for a short time.”
We also know of his dream-vision of the presiding deity of India, Bharat-mata, and a sannyasi with a trident in his hand, before his riding test for the I.C.S. Though Sri Aurobindo had some minor visions and had received some mental suggestions, he really had no significant spiritual experience until he stepped on Indian soil at Apollo Bunder at 10.55 in the morning of 6 February 1893. He said, ‘. . . 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. . .’ 1
All such experiences were happenings without asking for them, before his entering the path of yoga. Once, a Naga sannyasi miraculously cured the mountain fever of Barin, his younger brother. He did it by a mantric power while cutting a cup of water with a knife and asking Barin to drink it. K. G. Deshpande, his friend, practiced Hatha-yogic asanas. He was trying to convert Sri Aurobindo to his view. Sometimes they were experimenting with the planchette. Sri Aurobindo had neither any knowledge of yoga nor any great belief in God. But evendually faith was instilled in him.
He started doing pranayama after consulting Devdhar, an engineer, in 1904 and that was the beginning of his entering the path of yoga. Devdhar was a disciple of Brahmananda of Chandod. Sri Aurobindo practiced pranayama for five to six hours a day. The result was that he experienced an electric energy around his brain. He could write poems with tremendous speed, which continued whenever he thought of writing them. Gradually he began to have some subtle visions.
Actually Sri Aurobindo remained in Baroda State service up to 17 June 1906. From 18 June he took a year’s leave without pay and never joined it again, contrary to the Maharaja’s wish.
Before leaving Baroda he visited Brahmananda, the sage of Ganganath Math. The yogi, who usually kept his eyes shut, looked fully at Sri Aurobindo with his beautiful eyes when he offered his pranama, as if he had recognized him.
While he had many great experiences later on, he had a few unexpected but different kinds of spiritual experiences during his stay in Baroda. He recorded each of his experiences in beautiful sonnets. Sri Aurobindo had a horse-cart, known in those days as Victoria. Dinendra Kumar Roy, a novelist who loved humour, was appointed his Bengali teacher. He commented that the horse was very big but its speed was slower than a donkey’s. Even whipping could not induce it to trot faster. No one could say how old the cart or the horse was. All things were strange about Sri Aurobindo, he remarked.
Once in the year 1893, when he was going from Camp Road towards the city in his Victoria, he became aware of an impending accident at the crossing of roads in front of the public garden. As he wished to come out of it, there appeared a ‘Being of Light’ out of him and helped to avert the accident. The experience remained with him.
Long after the poet reproduced, on 13 September 1939, his experience in a sonnet titled, “The Godhead”. It begins like this:
‘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.’
Sri Aurobindo with K.G.Deshpande and others visited Chandod a few times. We come to know from a letter by one Ranadhir Upadhyay, dated 10 November 1974, that some 300 years ago one Sri Somvargiriji, a Mahant of Niranjan Akhada, took to Sri Chakra upasana at Karnali. He had some siddhi in his Tantra Sadhana. He had established a small temple and installed inside it a three feet high Kali idol of stone with a wooden tiger as her mount, near the yagna-kund. Thenceforth the Kali of Karnali, in a temple not very famous, had been worshipped by Naranjani sadhus. The letter further states that Sri Aurobindo had visited the temple with Deshpande and Lele in 1906. 2
But according to records, Sri Aurobindo met Lele for the first time in January 1908. However, there is no doubt that he visited the temple around the time he remained in Baroda. Later he made brief references to such visits while clarifying events about himself, like the realization of the vacant infinite while walking on the ridge of the Takht-i-Suleman in Kashmir; the living presence of Kali in a shrine on the banks of Narmada; the vision of the godhead surging up from within when in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay, etc. 3
At the time when he visited the temple, he was not attracted to worshipping an image, rather he was averse to it. But when he went inside the temple, the black image of the Goddess became living. He realized the truth of image-worship. On the same day he wrote another sonnet, The stone Goddess, immortalizing his experience about Kali:
‘In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,
From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me,-
A living Presence deathless and divine,
A form that harboured all infinity.’
In May 1903 Sri Aurobindo accompanied the Maharaja to Kashmir as his Secretary. While on tour he visited the Takht-i-Suleman or Hill Sankaracharya. There, in a very tangible way, he suddenly experienced the vacant the infinite. The result was that he wrote, long after the incident, on 19 October 1939, the sonnet Adwaita:
‘Around me was a formless solitude:
All had become One strange Unnamable,
An unborn sole Reality world-nude,
Topless and fathomless, for ever still.’
Sri Aurobindo, after the Surat Congress, visited Baroda in December 1907. We take it to be the extended Baroda period of his life. In January 1908 he, as a nationalist leader, delivered lectures at a number of places. He had an experience of Nirvana while he was in Bombay. During one of the evening talks on 13.4.1923 he said:
‘When I was in Bombay, from the balcony of a friend’s house, I saw the whole busy movement of Bombay city as a picture in a cinema show- all unreal, shadowy. That was a Vedantic experience. Ever since I have maintained that peace of mind, never losing it even in the midst of difficulties.’
We may say that it was a phase of his Nirvanic experiences under the influence of Lele, who had the power to transmit yogic experience to others. Sri Aurobindo himself mentioned this.
He wrote a sonnet titled Nirvana, to record his nirvanic experience. Though it was published undated, A. B. Purani said, in his The Life of Sri Aurobindo, that it was written in 1930. Its structure and rhyming pattern is a little different from the other three sonnets quoted above. The first stanza of the poem is:
‘All is abolished but the mute Alone.
The mind from thought released, the heart from grief
Grow inexistent now beyond belief;
There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown.
The city, a shadow picture without tone,
Floats, quivers unreal; forms without relief
Flow, a cinema’s vacant shapes; like a reef
Foundering in shoreless gulfs the world is done.’
The effect of these experiences never left him. We find that he had different incomplete experiences, even contrary to his belief at a particular point of time. In the light of his later realisations he made a synthesis and reviewed the validity of each experience in his life. We may say that such experiences occurred to help him realize the wholeness of the things with different facets. He never forgot them. From time to time he referred to them as examples, during the ‘30s he put them in his sonnets. Talking about Nirvana he said, ‘Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realization, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale…. And then it slowly grew into something not less but greater than its first self’. 4
In a letter he not only referred to his experiences but also beautifully explained their significances as follows: ‘A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience; yet sometimes the Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there comes the touch, a revelation, a flooding, the mental loses itself in the spiritual, one bears the first invasion of the Infinite. Or you stand before a temple of Kali, beside a sacred river and see what?- a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother. Similarly touches can come through art, music, poetry. . . All things in the Lila can turn into windows that open on the hidden reality. Still so long as one is satisfied with looking through windows, the gain is only initial; one day one will have to take up the pilgrim’s staff and start out to journey there where the Reality is for ever manifest and present.’ 5
While all such things of the past, including Sri Aurobindo’s experiences, have almost become forgotten stories, of which the public park, the roads, the swing, the balcony of a house and the mute river are the only witnesses, the poet never forgot them. He etched the sonnets on the body of eternity to commemorate his experiences.
After meeting Sakharia Baba, another yogi, Sri Aurobindo asked Barin to find someone who would help him in his sadhana. When V. B. Lele had received the telegram at Gwalior to come to Baroda, he perceived intuitively that he would have to give initiation to a great soul. He later related this to A. B. Purani in 1916.
Amidst tremendous political activity Sri Aurobindo agreed and was whisked away to a small room on the top floor of Sardar Majumdar’s house (wada) in Baroda. There he remained for three days with Lele. Lele asked him to drive back all thoughts as they would try to enter his brain. He saw the thoughts approaching independently and drove them back. ‘In three days- really in one- my mind became full of eternal silence- it is still there.’ He wrote later. 6
There was a radical change of consciousness. They were Adwaitic and Vedantic experiences which he himself had never wanted. Such a result was unexpected, even to Lele. As he remained for some days with Lele, he had many more astounding experiences, like delivering speeches without thinking about them.
After those days in Bombay, Baroda, Pune and other places, Sri Aurobindo went on in his own way with political activities without following Lele’s routine. After he had returned to Calcutta in the third week of January 1908, a telegram was sent to Lele to come. Lele came and tried to persuade Sri Aurobindo to follow his advice. He wanted to take Prafulla Chaki, the young revolutionary, with him (as he felt that spiritually the boy had a great future) for yogic initiation. But Chaki refused to go. Later chased by police he committed suicide. When he could not do anything to dissuade them from the dangerous political path, he left in a huff.
During his stay in Alipur jail for a year, Sri Aurobindo had epoch-making spiritual experiences. He saw Vasudeva in everything, and everywhere. At Chandernagore too he had extraordinary visions, and yogic experiences, and after coming to Pondicherry, he heightened his earlier efforts. With his spiritual experiences and realizations he created new a spiritual history in collaboration with the Mother.
References:
1. Sri Aurobindo. On Himself. SABCL. Pondichery; Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1972. Vol-26. p.98
2. Sri Aurobindo in Baroda. Compiled and Edited by Roshan and Apurva. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1993. pp.150-151
3. Sri Aurobindo. op.cit. p.50
4. Sri Aurobindo. op.cit. p.102
5. Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. SABCL. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1972. Vol-22. p.199
6. Sri Aurobindo. op.cit. p.82
Continued at “Sri Aurobindo’s Political Philosophy”
I have been following Sri Aurobindo since 1970. The following in your article is not appropriate: “Synthesizing all the ancient yogas, he founded a path called Purna Yoga or Integral Yoga.”
His Integral Yoga much more beyond ‘past’ yogas.
Hemant
— Hemant Tewary · Aug 15, 06:05 · #