My meeting with Sri Aurobindo began on the mental plane, through abstract ideas that explored the various aspects of Indian spiritual and philosophical traditions. I already had a working knowledge of the concepts, partly as a seeker and partly as a traveller, through the works and paths of other Indian philosophers and spiritual leaders to whom I was exposed to during my school days, college life and early career as a writer. It was not until I turned thirty that destiny placed me before Sri Aurobindo. More accurately, I was ready to receive his deep, wide and puissant ideas.
This was no coincidence; it was the decisive tread of time that has irreversibly changed my life. Since then, I have embarked on a journey that has gone beyond the mental. Or let us say, the mental has been enriched by the emotional-vital, which in turn has been deepened by the psychic, with all three held together by the spiritual. Sri Aurobindo’s influence on every aspect of my life, from the way I think to the manner in which I express myself, has been, like his yoga, integral.
The Integral Yoga is a process by which not just the soul but the body, right down to the cells, is transformed through the union of two powerful forces—the human aspiration from below, and the divine grace from above. There is no single method, mantra, practice or process that the Integral Yoga professes; the journey and the resultant transformation of each individual soul is unique.
This transformation is destined. The Integral Yoga, according to Sri Aurobindo, accelerates what nature has preordained through evolution.
To clarify, the Integral Yoga is not an admixture of Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga or Jnana Yoga (the yogas of Works, Devotion, and Knowledge). It is not a collection of ideas and words fused together by language. Sri Aurobindo’s synthesis of yogas is wider than an agglomeration of extant schools, deeper than the living philosophical traditions and higher than the spiritual milestones mapped thus far. It is not an easy path. It requires grit, sincerity and the constant fire of aspiration. The Integral Yoga begins where other yogas end.
For Sri Aurobindo, dissolving into the Brahman is not the ultimatespiritual goal. His yoga attempts to transform the earth. Where other yoga paths find fruition in merging with the Absolute, Sri Aurobindo sees this union as an intermediate step.
Divinisation of matter and not dissolution of consciousness is his destination, the transformation of humanity and not merely the individual his aim. Science may place homo sapiens at the pinnacle of evolution. But for Sri Aurobindo, this species is a transitional being, whose evolution is not yet over. Just as life entered matter, and mind entered life, both mind and matter await the descent of the spirit the Supramental consciousness. Any transformation without the transformation of the body will remain incomplete. Life on earth has to be divinised. Life and afterlife are both here and now. The two are one.
“Sri Aurobindo does not believe in salvation,” his spiritual collaborator Mirra Alfassa, better known as the Mother, said. “For us salvation is a meaningless word.” Although his work is rooted in Hindu philosophy—or to put it more accurately, in Sanatana Dharma, itself a wide spiritual rather than a narrow religious endeavour, and where even religious activities such as rituals have deeper meanings through the Integral Yoga, Sri Aurobindo has taken Indian spiritual traditions several steps forward. But neither the divinisation of matter, nor the transfer of consciousness, transformation and evolution, nor aspiration and grace are easy concepts to understand.
‘Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men,’ wrote the Mother, combining all three concepts (man as a transitional being, the Supramental consciousness, and the transformation) elegantly. ‘He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious.
During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it.’ Despite the wide range of themes he engaged with, the essence of Sri Aurobindo’s writings remained spiritual. Be it nationalism or freedom, poetry or drama, analysis or record, the Vedas or the Upanishads, science or metaphysics, all his writings are rooted in spirituality.
What makes reading Sri Aurobindo challenging is the interpretations of ideas like surrender, equanimity or grace, when placed within the wider context of the Integral Yoga. Making the intellectual climb even steeper are other related ideas that we meet on the path man as a divine potential, containing within himself a Swabhava that translates into his swadharma to surpass matter, mind and soul.
Add to this the layers of the being, the knowledge universes from the physical mind to the Overmind, or the ascent of consciousness meeting the descent of grace, and every book of Sri Aurobindo becomes a self-contained force-field comprising a highly-specialized interplay of understandings, experiences and realizations. You can’t read Sri Aurobindo only with the eyes of the mind.
Even the reading has to be integral. The spiritual collaboration of the vital, the psychic and the physical is necessary to reach the depths he envisions. When some readers say they sense a presence while reading his works, we can empathise with what is going on behind the mind.
As far as words go, Sri Aurobindo is as much at ease with poetry as with prose, with philosophy as with politics, with dramas as with stories. His writings, as a prisoner or professor, a leader of revolutionaries or a resident of solitude, resonate with force and depth. I find his writings mantric; his words express Truth in sound. The mantra has to be read not just by the mind, but sensed by the being through words. ‘The Mantra,’ he wrote in The Future Poetry with On Quantitative Metre (See Chapter 22), one volume of his collected works, ‘is born through the heart and shaped or massed by the thinking mind into a chariot of that godhead of the Eternal of whom the truth seen is a face or a form.’This Truth reaches the deepest recesses of our souls.
These truths resonate in different ways. His revolutionary writings, narticularly the ones that explore nationalism, make you sit up. His analytical writings, on silence or science, for instance, cut through all surfaces and bring Truths to you. His philosophical writings get to the core of issues in ways that make traditional philosophers look like amateurs grappling with ideas, which in turn are toying with them.
Sri Aurobindo’s mantric style is ancient andmodern, Vedic and contemporary; it is integral across time, space and ideas, and as all Truths are—eternal.
Above all, every aspect of his writings, from education to freedom, psychological to physiological, physical to mental, the Vedas to the Upanishads to the Gita, is powered by a spiritual force whose presence is perceptible. His insights into political events of the day contain a vision for India that goes beyond it becoming a superpower; his vision of nations and global affairs raises the field of geopolitics to levels unseen.
The excerpt is taken from the book Reading Shri Aurobindo, Published by Penguin Random House.