“The best among all Lights has come; the Splendid, born with manifold Rays,
Uṣās is born — and Savitar through Her; Night clears away to make place for Dawn.
Daughter of Sūrya, the Radiant has arrived; Darkness has relinquished her dwellings”.
(Ṛgveda, I.CXIII.1)
Śrī Aurobindo was one of the greatest yogīn of the last century, revered by many as an avatāra, a divine incarnation.
His yoga bears traits that are peculiar—indeed unique—in relation to the actual work he set before himself and in fact began to accomplish, a work not restricted to his own realisations alone.
Equally rare is the plasticity of his exposition: it proceeds, to be sure, from the influxes of a higher consciousness, yet in some manner mediated by the Western mentality in which he was formed during his youth.
Śrī Aurobindo’s yoga constitutes one of the absolute summits of the Sanātana dharma, the eternal order.
The Sanātana dharma
The point of departure is precisely the Sanātana dharma—called Sacred Science in other Traditions—for it forms the foundational ground of all yoga and of all esoteric doctrine.
The Sanātana dharma constitutes an “other beginning” with respect to the form of thought founded on representation—namely, the mind’s belief that it is the I, set apart from the external world. Western thought—as the expression of ordinary discursive thought—is grounded precisely in representation; the Sanātana dharma is the anterior alternative, pre-theoretical, preceding the installation of representation as the mind’s mode of operation.
Discursive thought is nothing other than the conceptualisation carried out by an I on the basis of what the body sees and touches: mere thoughts, not actual reality. Whereas the Sanātana dharma is the very authentic reality itself, unwarped by representation; and authentic esoteric thought—emanating from Sacred Knowledge and therefore naturally ante-predicative—gives direct expression to this dimension of reality.
If one does not allow for the possibility of this presupposition, then any discourse on what Śrī Aurobindo said or did is rendered futile.
The difficulty faced by Western scholars and readers when approaching texts arising from spiritual personalities proves to be an insurmountable obstacle precisely because revealed texts deal with a type of reality that discursive thought simply ignores as even existing.
The fundamental issue is that the Western reader reduces what he encounters to what he already knows, categorising it according to what discursive thought believes to be basically existent or non-existent, true or false. Western thought seeks to reduce “everything” to its own domains—that is, to its limited sensory experiences as more or less elaborated, often fancifully, by the rationalising neocortex—and this even when it encounters descriptions of experiences that explicitly declare themselves to be, in principle, alien to the ordinary sensory spheres and therefore to representation.
This is inherent in the “common” mind—that is, in the non-pre-theoretical mind—despite the fact that Socrates and Plato had already made it explicit, and that in our day Heidegger has elucidated it in every possible way: the tragic erroneousness of “believing one knows” as a cognitive mode. Rationalistic knowledge can only be grounded in what it already knows, and is simply unable to grasp the noetic black swan—unless it experiences it: this, and nothing else, is yoga.
The rationalistic-representational mind of the Western world—except, naturally, for the esoteric enclaves—believes that materialism and logical calculation are the boundaries of reality (that is, it believes that the structure of reality is onto-theo-logical, in Heidegger’s sense). This coincidence between ontology and logic at the elementary level of representation had already been recognised by Aristotle, who lacked the gift, possessed by Socrates and Plato, of grasping the depths. Spiritual authorities, on the other hand, speak of things that transcend materialism and the logic known to reason, precisely because they withdraw from representation, into a domain anterior to the moment when representation itself installed the constraints and ties that go under the name “I” — the “I” being the comforting belief that what one sees or thinks “is”, and that the mind exhausts itself in its own subjectivity.
The incommunicability between pre-theoretical language and ordinary language thus arises from the evident fact that the pre-theoretical domain knows, in addition to conventional reality—that is, the phenomenal reality ordinarily known—also the authentic one, whereas the domain of ordinary language is confined to the conventional dimension alone. Discursive thought (and the ordinary language of which it is the mirror) is sequential and discrete, therefore unidirectional, and has as its object “entities”: objects, words, thoughts, things. Authentic esoteric thought (and the pre-theoretical language of which it is the mirror), by contrast, unfolds—that is, it manifests, occurs, descends, is received: one word being as good as another—in the arising of interior “images”; unlike poetry, art, music, or symbol, all of which are forms of representation that merely evoke or associate.
The intrinsic consequence of discursive thought and of its correlated ordinary language is therefore that the reader of esoteric texts, on the one hand, believes he knows that whatever exceeds the limits he takes to be insurmountable is essentially false, and on the other hand finds himself—just as naturally as forcibly—reducing whatever sounds familiar to him into notions already known. That this incommunicability exists between operative esoteric thought on the one side and rational, representational thought on the other—whether Eastern or Western—is a well-known fact, already lamented by Plato in the Seventh Letter and reiterated by hosts of adepts everywhere. What is particular to Śrī Aurobindo’s texts is that they treat the Sanātana dharma in a language that sounds almost as if filtered also through the analytical discursiveness that is typical of Western thought.
The Formation of Śrī Aurobindo
Śrī Aurobindo’s life-story is almost unique, for it forms a taut cord stretched between East and West.
By his father’s decision—an atheist and positivist physician thoroughly Westernised—Śrī Aurobindo and his brothers received a purely European education: they were forbidden to hear accounts of Indian facts or myths, or even to speak bengali. At the age of four, Śrī Aurobindo was placed in a boarding school run by Irish nuns in Darjeeling, and in 1879, when he was only seven, he was put on a ship to England, where he would live for thirteen years. He attended King’s College, Cambridge, on a scholarship, and excelled across the disciplines—Śrī Aurobindo read Homer and the tragedians in Greek, Ovid in Latin, and Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe in their original tongues, often winning poetry competitions.
He returned to India only in 1893, accompanying the Maharaja of Baroda, who had offered him a position at the local university; and he did so with a cultural formation that was almost exclusively Western, marked by uncommon breadth and depth.
Upon setting foot on his native soil he was, however, seized by śaktipāta, the “descent of power”—“grace”, as Śrī Aurobindo calls it (analogous to the dià apokalypseōs of Paul of Tarsus)—which he cultivated, also through occasional yoga instruction, at first primarily in order to contribute, and decisively so, to the liberation of his homeland from British rule. Śrī Aurobindo was repeatedly appointed president of the Indian National Congress, and was later succeeded by Gandhi. Once he regarded his contribution to that aim as complete, and also in order to escape further imprisonment for political reasons, Śrī Aurobindo took refuge in 1910 in Pondicherry, in French India, where he devoted himself to his Work.
Śrī Aurobindo did not renounce his Western formation; on the contrary, he made use of it to render what he said more significant even at the level of ordinary language—Śrī Aurobindo lived in a higher form of awareness and wrote when necessary, yet he wrote almost exclusively in English.
Even while articulating the supramental depths of his yoga, he maintained a certain regard for the positivism and materialism in which he had been raised for twenty years. Naturally, his assessment of non-spiritual positions could only be marked by a comprehensive detachment; yet it is precisely this constant regard that enables the reader to grasp directly the rationalistic and analytical standpoint from which he set out—and thereby the titanic nature of his “reversal”. Śrī Aurobindo did not “choose” to devote himself to the practice of yoga; rather, he was called to it by a descent of grace, through which he found himself restored to the authentic (that is, pre-representational) dimensions of reality—dimensions that utterly transcend the positions of conventional reality, whether materialistic or idealistic. His Western formation and heritage, however, allowed him on the one hand to appreciate, so to speak, the degree of awareness reached by European thinkers and scientists, and on the other to communicate in a manner not formally remote from Western patterns of discourse.
For these very reasons, Romain Rolland could write that Śrī Aurobindo “represents the highest synthesis ever achieved between the genius of Asia and the genius of Europe”.
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Continue in Part II