Sri Aurobindo, the Spiritual Adventurer

It was when India lay prostrate at the feet of the British that Sri Aurobindo was born. India had almost lost its ancient glory and attained the peace of the desert. The shadow of British rule in India was so thick and dark that people had almost blinded of its past glory. A certain systematic impoverishment in the various fields pervaded the country. Macaulay’s efforts in establishing English in India could create a new class of intellectuals who lost their faith in India’s traditional ground and cultural heritage. It was to this class of people that Dr Krishna Dhan Ghose, the father of Sri Aurobindo, belonged. This class of people, no doubt, had a new activity which was crudely and confusedly imitative of the foreign culture. It was a crucial moment and an ordeal of perilous severity. What India then required was a strong political awakening, a cultural consciousness and a spiritual rebirth. In fact it required a common stream of creative inspiration, progressive contemplation and a peaceful and powerful reaction. Of this dire need for India Sri Aurobindo was one of the leading spirits.

Born to a highly anglicised and denationalised father Sri Aurobindo had become one among the great patriots of India. He got the seeds of this feeling from the very letters of his father when he stayed and educated in England. At the same time he sucked the Western culture to its core. Though Sri Aurobindo was essentially a seer, he was a great mystic poet. He shed light and warmth on his age revitalised the spiritual soil of his land, revealed unknown horizons of Yoga and created new hope in bridging the gulf between the East and the West. When he defined India’s decline as the ebb-movement of a creative spirit which can only be understood by seeing it in the full tide of its greatness he had a unique type of patriotism. He further explained India’s decline as a momentary helplessness which can be overcome by an original dealing with modern problems in the light of Indian spirit and the endeavour to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritual society. To know him fully well it is not enough to read his works or to study the system of his Yoga; one had to dig deep into India’s ancient lore-Upanishads and Gita–to practise the system of his Yoga and to drown deep in his inexhaustible mystic layers of thought and poetry. The whole aroma of Upanishads and Gita, is infused into what Sri Aurobindo said and did. The sharp razor-edged road to spirituality appeared widened and smoothened in his Yogic-Sadhana and man had become elated in admiring him. He who is unsurpassed as a mystic poet, as a scholar of ancient languages, both Indian and European, as the propounder of Integral Yoga, as a prophet of Life Divine, and as an exponent of a new progress for humanity on the basis of Indian tradition, is really a superman!

According to Sri Aurobindo, poetry comes by inspiration but not by reading. Every thing he wrote came from his Yogic experience, knowledge and inspiration. His greater power over poetry and perfect expression was from the heightening of his consciousness. It was Yoga that had developed his poetic style by the development of consciousness, fineness and accuracy of thought and vision, increasing inspiration and an increasing intuitive discrimination of right thought, word-form, just image and figure. The poetic word is a vehicle of the spirit and the chosen medium of the soul’s self-expression. The deeper layers of intense personal experience can never be explained unless there is the mere suggestiveness of words and hence ‘some kind of figure or symbol more than a direct language.’ “Poetry should be half as a prayer from below, half as a whisper from above.”

If Sri aurobindo had been nothing more than a mere Indian mystic poet in English, a great patriot and prophet he would still be remembered as one of the world’s immortals. But he was something more. Whatever he touched–politics, literature, education–was permeated with his highly spiritual outlook. To omit spirituality from Sri Aurobindo’s life and thought would be to miss the very essence of his being. He knew that spirituality was not something to be attained by mere intellect. He saw that the world is almost at the fag end of the material swing. It is getting exhausted and fatigued with its own material exertions and with tears in eyes, despair writ large on her face! It is now looking up to the East for solace and peace. Tagore saw that Sri Aurobindo had been seeking for the soul and had gained it and through this long process of realisation had accumulated within him a silent power of inspiration. Early in life, significantly enough, he had a dream in which a mass of darkness came rapidly towards him, encircled him, entered into him and repeated the same experience while in England. But it was dispelled only when he returned to India. This notable spiritual experience of infinite calm descending upon him had the acme when he stayed in Alipore Jail  as he had described it in his famous “Uttarpara” speech and this historic experience leads him to Pondicherry, a centre and sanctuary from which radiated the new gospel of Integral Yoga and evolved a new life and light. He lived here mostly in the inner world, probing into its innumerable mysteries, taking measure of the depths and heights of consciousness. The inner promptings and the decisive urges of his heart were always there as revealed in his early mystic experiences and ultimately they drove him to the exclusive domain of the spirit. His life in Pondicherry represented one continuous, great and epic struggle against all the retrograde forces of life. It was the result of that strenuous struggle, that Sri Aurobindo evolved his philosophy of the Life Divine, discovered the unique path of Integral Yoga, and laid the foundation for human life on a higher plane – the supramental plane – which is at once subtler, purer, nobler and intrinsically harmonious and evolutionary.

It is said that life is a mighty stream of intangible force pushing forward and upward, ever evolving, ever organising matter for its own purpose, and ever making its way through the encircling inert mass in which it lies involved. Sri Aurobindo felt that a stage in the evolutionary movement had been reached when man himself has to launch on the adventure of contributing to the process by his own efforts. Hence he has an irrepressible aspiration to be master of himself, a deepening of his self-consciousness, an ability to meditate on himself and an understanding of the laws of his own evolution. Consequently his intense search for Life Divine led him to the discovery–the aspiration of man to ascend to Life Divine and the downward descent of the Supermind to lift the spirit of man to the divine level. “He sees the cosmic drama of involution and evolution, the Lila of God descending into clay and clay aspiring to godhead; and the mystery of world-existence is a mystery no more”. The supramental consciousness will enable the evolved man to live simultaneously in the transcendent and immanent dimensions of existence.

What then is this Aurobindonian cult of the new world he promised? Is man to continue to be a prey to the limitations of unavoidable death, unrealizable desire and inflicting incapacity even in this new world? We can aspire an optimistic approach of this great seer to answer the questions. For the heavy task he had undertaken the never ending sources of energy for him are the immortal expressions of the Upanishads and the Gita. He promised a new world surely inhabited by a new race of man. This new man will have ‘a golden body’ or the body beautiful, strong and healthy. His emotions will well up, not from the muddy unconscious or subconscious, but from the depths of the pure spirit. His arts and crafts, his music and song will be an expression of spiritual realities. His sensual and intellectual faculties will be in an integral subservience to the spiritual, the home of Truth, Beauty, Power and Bliss.