The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed
And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.
(Savitri, p. 225)
The
Integral Spiritual Vision
We
may resign ourselves to the present human condition and to our shortcomings,
and argue that such is life: there is nothing we can do to acquire a knowledge
that would not be interfered with by ignorance, a love that would be free of
self-interest, a power of creation that would not be marred by inefficiency and
a joyous living that would not be defiled by pain. We are told that it is an illusion to look
after the higher, the greater, the better (śreyas)—what
we can do is only ask for more, strive for more, more pleasure and comfort (preyas), more riches, more political and
social power, and more reputation. But in this rat race there are no winners.
Some temporary exhilaration there may be, but it is invariably followed by a
sense of existential emptiness.
Even
in such philosophical and social environment some—not all of them losers—feel
that there is something higher. They dream of a plenitude that is not to be
found here below, here in materiality and humanity. Man dreams of perfection.
Religion, beatitude, liberation, eternal life after death, nirvana, all these
are forms of that dream. “His dream of God and Heaven,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “is
really a dream of his own perfection.” [1] But he sees no way for the practical
realization of his dream. In his arrogant self-sufficiency he cannot foresee a
new evolutionary stage, higher than his own, which would manifest more
consciousness and more creative power of self-perfection. And reason asserts itself
and dismisses the dream as made of unreal stuff.
Reason
based on materiality can sublimate materiality and sense-perceptions into
abstract ideas, but it can hardly conceive a real Transcendence. Its idea of
transcendence is an empty concept; it cannot experience the reality of the
Spirit, in the way it experiences the reality of matter. But although reason is
at present the most evolved form of consciousness (cit) universally
present in mankind, there appear sometimes higher powers of knowledge, not yet
universal, that work in some human beings—poets, mystics and seers—and reveal
to them supra-rational truths. We call these powers inspiration, intuition,
revelation, illumination, seer-vision and genius.
At
the root of religion there is always such a supra-rational power. The mystic,
the prophet and the seer receive some flash of the higher evolutionary
possibility, and this spiritual vision does not leave any doubt in their minds
that there exists a higher truth which one must possess for the plenitude of
one’s being. The mind takes the revealed truth-flash as the absolute
transcendence and builds up a religious idealism. But “the inspiration,” Sri
Aurobindo says, “is like the lightning, brilliantly illuminating only a given
reach of country and leaving the rest in darkness intensified by the sharpness
of that light. Vast is our error if we mistake that bit of country for the
whole universe.” [2]
Such
lighting-flashes give men only a tunnel vision, but if the mind is open it can
deduce the existence of a vaster world outside the tunnel. Many different
visions of religions and the openness and universality of the mind can be a
starting point for a higher spiritual life. But there is more. The history of
spirituality has recorded more integral seer-visions. The visionary power, a
presage of things to come, is not a thing of the past. Spiritual seekers and
mystics have either spontaneously or through personal discipline (tapas) seen the face of Truth normally
hidden behind the brilliant lid of Reason.
`
The
Realistic Adwaita does not deny such visions even when they are buried under
the desert sand of creeds and cults. However the vision on which it is founded
is integral; it does not reject one part of existence and valorise another.
Everything that is transcendental, cosmic and individual is embraced in its
vast vision.
The
mystic vision is individual. In the past it was usually the search for the
personal salvation. This life, compared to the sublime vision of the Beyond, appeared
as an obstacle, an illusion, a place of suffering and death. The ideal pursuit
was extra-terrestrial. The Transcendence, the Spirit, Brahman, God seemed to be
in no way involved in earthly matters. Salvation was only possible elsewhere,
but the bulk of mankind was not prepared to abandon what they held for the
uncertainty of something they did not understand. Yet they felt darkly the
presence of something more—a greater power, a greater knowledge, a selfless
goodness and a pure joy. The esoteric experience was not accessible to them.
However there was some curiosity. And to satisfy it and to teach the masses to
live in something more than the crude material life, some mystics, not altogether
merged in the Self, developed a teaching and practice for the benefit of the
world (loka-hitāya). Religions took
the spiritual vision as their kernel, but in order to make it accessible to the
masses, they developed systems of belief, creeds and cults. Mysticism is esoteric,
religion exoteric. But the outerness of religion had an important evolutionary
purpose. The mystics looking for personal liberation rejected the world process
and withdrew into the Transcendence. However, we should remember that the goal
and the working of the evolutionary force are here in the world. The vision of
the Spirit reveals an unattained truth which evolution has the task of
expressing here, in the creatures that necessarily must evolve in the future,
as out of the lower primates the thinking man has evolved.
In
the evolving spiritual process there are two tendencies: one, mystic and
individual which is in its nature intensive, the other religious, which is
extensive. The first is a vertical ascension, the second a horizontal
expansion; the first looks at Heaven only, the second in which Heaven is an
element of belief extends to embrace more and more humans to at least some
spiritual existence. “The mystics,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “founded their
endeavour on a power of supra-rational knowledge, intuitive, inspired,
revelatory and on the force of the inner being to enter into occult truth
experience: but these powers are not possessed by the men in the mass or
possessed only in a crude, undeveloped and fragmentary initial form on which
nothing would be safely founded; so for
them in this new development the spiritual truth had to be clothed in
intellectual forms of creed and doctrine, in emotional forms of worship and in
a simple but significant ritual.” [3]
The
Realistic Adwaita does not deny either the intensive or the extensive tendency.
It is by the uplifting, enlarging and unifying these two that we can have a
total knowledge and a divinized living: the next step to be attained by man in
his evolution.
Brahman
is all. But it has divided itself to become the many. We have seen earlier the
process of this division, the primal division, as Sachchidananda, the higher
pole of Existence and Material Energy produced by involution in which the
consciousness-force (cit-śakti) is
active evolutionally to create forms more and more apt to house and express
knowledge, power and bliss. The primal division was symbolically represented by
the separation of Earth and Heaven. The Vedic seers speak of the one cosmic
germ (hiraņyagarbha) that divided
itself in two—one half became Heaven, the other Earth. And between the two
there was the middle-world, antarikşa.
In the Indian vision it was not a complete separation, the middle-world, axis mundi, joined the two. And thus it
was possible for the children of earth to reach heaven without leaving the
earthly footing, and also for the heavenly light to decent on earth. Evolution
is in fact a double movement: it is an ascent of the earth-force and
earth-consciousness, and a descent of the heaven-force and
heaven-consciousness. Earth cannot hold in its lower forms all the
consciousness-force of the Spirit. Evolution is the process that creates forms
ever more competent to hold the heavenly riches. We should remember that this
is only a metaphorical description. The ascent of evolutionary form does not
mean that the forms, the evolved plants, animals and humans, leave the earth.
It is here that the ascension takes place, not in some imaginary middle-air.
All is one. All is here. There is only progressive self-creation for the ever
greater self-expression of the Transcendence in the cosmic multiplicity. The
above symbol of the worlds is a poetic visualisation and the terms as above and
below, ascent and descent are used for making the idea concrete. Evolution is
not world-negating; it is supremely world-affirming. “The touch of Earth,” Sri
Aurobindo says, “is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he
seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can
only be really mastered… when we keep our feet firmly on the physical.” [4] But
religion negated the earth, the field of evolution. It denied the human dream
of a life of plenitude, the life in the Spirit, spiritual living as chimerical.
Reason rejected spirituality because it was beyond its ken, therefore false.
Religion, although with the kernel of spirituality in its deepest heart
preached that spirituality could never be a thing of the earth. Man’s earthly
aspirations and pursuits were not compatible with the eternal life in the
Spirit. Earthly aims, even the noblest ones—art, philosophy, science—were seen
as obstacles to the attainment of a heavenly abode or the liberation of the
soul merged in the One. In ancient Indian thought although the three earthly objects
of life—desire (kāma), prosperity (artha) and righteousness (dharma) were recognized as means for
living a fulfilled life, yet finally, one was taught that all these worldly
aims were illusions, the world, too, was an illusion, therefore the one real
object of life was to escape from life and earth and seek the liberation of the
self (ātman), the only real thing in
us, from earthly hopes and aspirations. The ideal of liberation (mokşa) cancelled the worldly ideal of
the group-of-three (trivarga).
In
the West it was taught that every human aim was vanity.
There
is also the counter attitude of the materialist: “making of the ordinary life
our one occupation, that to fulfil ourselves by the law of the lower members
divorced from all spiritual seeking.” [5] The Realistic Adwaita rejects both
these attitudes as erroneous. Its vision is vastly inclusive. Both, Heaven and
Earth, God and Nature, Spirit and Matter are true. In order to fulfil life both
the terms have to be incorporated. We do not see the identity of Matter and
Spirit because our mind is obscure and our sense-perceptions crude. If we can
cleanse the doors of perception the two apparent opposites will reveal
themselves in their one unified and infinite reality. “Matter reveals itself to
the realising thought and to the subtilised senses as the figure and body of
the Spirit—Spirit in its self-formative extension. Spirit reveals itself
through the same consenting agents as the soul, the truth, the essence of
Matter.” [6]
When
we have grasped this truth and the truth of evolution as the means of self-
perfecting we can rise to an integral spiritual life.
In
the evolving life in the world there are three steps—ordinary life, religious
life and spiritual life. “The ordinary life is that of the average human
consciousness separated from its own true self and from the Divine and led by
the common habits of the mind, life and body which are the laws of Ignorance.”
[7] Man is a thinking animal, but often he does not use his thought to regulate
his life. The forces that drive him are the animal propensities and the desire
for survival; and with that objective he struggles to be the fittest. This
leads to pain and suffering. Buddha clearly perceived this and declared that
desire or craving was the cause of sorrow: “the craving for sensual pleasure,
the craving for continued life, the craving for power.” [8] Mind is an
expression of consciousness higher than the physical and vital cravings but in
ordinary life, instead of regulating, controlling and directing the lower
instincts, mind uses its reasoning to justify them. The mind that works in our
ordinary life is not self-conscious and free; its will is subjected to the demands
of the body; it is ‘the body’s slave’. Man at this stage is a
…creature
passionate only to survive,
Fettered
to puny thoughts with no wide range
And
to the body’s needs and pangs and joys... [9]
Lashed
by sorrow this creature sometimes senses darkly something that can relieve him
and free him from his misery. He turns to that something. Such is the beginning
of the religious life. But religion, we have seen, is not free from the natural
ignorance (avidyā) that directs
ordinary life. “The religious life,” Sri Aurobindo says, “is a movement of the
same ignorant human consciousness, turning or trying to turn away from the
earth towards the Divine, but as yet without knowledge and led by the dogmatic
tenets and rules of some creed or sect which claims to have found the way out
of the bonds of the earth-consciousness into some beatific Beyond.” [10]
Religious
life could be the first approach to the spiritual, but often it is not,
because religion, as it is lived and
practised, is an extension of the ordinary life; worships, vows, pilgrimages,
offerings, prayers are then just some other means for attaing worldly goals—more
pleasure, more riches, more power. We believe that what we cannot accomplish by
our own efforts will be done by the divine intervention.
Morality
which is regarded by some religions as an essential part of religious life—religionists
argue that if there were no God sternly supervising our actions we would not be
moral—belongs also to the ordinary life: “it is an attempt to govern the
outward conduct by certain mental rules or to form the character by these rules
in the image of a certain mental ideal.” [11] In practice religious morality is
mostly sectarian; it is not the expression of the universal good. A religious
person, ‘good’ to those professing the same faith, may and does discriminate,
abuse, torture and kill those who do not hold the same faith, the infidels.
Therefore the religious injunctions may not and often do not make believers
better people; they may even make them morally reprehensible.
In
his great epic, Sri Aurobindo gives a terrible description of the dark side of
religion. The traveller of the worlds comes to “a fierce and dolorous realm”—like
Dante who passes Hell’s door on the top of which he sees written, Per me si
va nell’ eterno dolore, (Through me one enters in eternal pain)—and sees
the terrible form of religion:
The
dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men
Stiffened
into a pose of agony,
And
from each window peered an ominous priest
Chanting
Te Deums for slaughter’s crowing grace,
Cities
uprooted, blasted human homes,
Burned
writhen bodies, the bombshell’s massacre.
“Our
enemies are fallen, are fallen,” they sang
“All
who once stayed our will are smitten and dead;
How
great we are, how merciful art Thou.” [12]
Yet
not everything in religion is false. We have seen earlier that there is a
kernel of spirituality, a higher mystic experience, a lightning flash of
inspiration revealing partial truths of the Spirit, illumining a part of our
life’s field. Religious life, if one can plunge into the heart of religion and
recognize the primal spiritual experience, may be ‘the first approach to the
spiritual’. But spiritual life is fundamentally other than religious life. It “proceeds
directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary
consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a
greater consciousness in which one finds one’s true being and comes first into
direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine.” [13]
The
religious man is a mental being. Only the mystic, be he within a religious fold
or outside all religions, has some insight into spirituality. In the process of
evolution each new expression and each new action of the consciousness-force
emerge in the already evolved ground. Thus the mind has emerged in the living
matter—neither matter nor life is rejected. Nevertheless the emergence of the
mind has had a wonderful transfiguring influence on them. Matter itself has
become subtle and complex—has produced the prodigious network of the nervous
system and the splendid brain. Also life-principles—desires, passions, emotions—have
undergone changes; mind sublimates these principles, and raises them beyond the
blind, instinctive reactions to something vaster—selfless love, compassion, charity
and altruism. The experience and action
of the mystics, seers and prophets are a presage of what is yet to come. And
when it comes, when the spirit evolves in the thinking man the lower parts of
the being will not be rejected; they will be transsubstantiated to be able to
express the spiritual life. The mental being will be “sublimated by the
endeavour of the evolutionary Energy to develop out of him the spiritual man,
the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer
of his true self and highest nature.” [14]
Spirituality
is not mentality. Often people confuse spirituality with saintliness, high
ethical living, but although these may be first signs of the emerging spirit
they are essentially mental with some influence of the spiritual. The spiritual
is distinct from the mental, and a dynamic vision of evolution leads us to
conclude that one day it will “overtop the mental part and replace it as the leader
of the life and nature.” [15]
The
spiritual life is thus the outcome of the dynamic evolutionary process. There
is first the awakening to the reality of the spirit and soul, and secondly the
desire to be the spirit, to live in the spirit—the spirit that is in us, in all
things of the world and the spirit in its transcendental reality, and finally
the transformation of our present life into a new life.
This
vision of spirituality is different from the ancient vision. In the context of
the Realistic Adwaita the difference has to be clearly formulated. The aim of
ancient spirituality was other-worldly, the aim of this spirituality is the
fulfilment of the Divine, Sachchidananda, here and in earthly life by becoming
divine, by the transformation of the present body, life and mind into a vessel
of the consciousness-force, so that the divine joy, the highest good, beauty,
love and knowledge may be truths of the world.
Spirituality,
in this sense, is then possible only through the expression of the
consciousness-force that lies beyond our mental horizon. This expression, as we
have already noted, can be realized by the conjunction of two movements: one,
the upward evolutionary movement that releases progressively the hidden Sachchidananda,
and the descent of the corresponding elements from above. This double process
can and must one day transform the human body, life and mind by manifesting the
supreme divine substance—the highest expression of the consciousness-force (cit-śakti)—a perfect knowledge-and-will
(vijňāna), the Supramental. The
spirituality in life will be fulfilled when this highest principle takes
possession of the individual souls and of the world, transforming and
divinizing life into the supramental spiritual life.
Conclusion:
Beyond Religion
The
new spirituality as conceived in the Realistic Adwaita is not based on the
notion of a far-off God. The Transcendence here is a thing of living
experience. The divinized creature will be in constant union with the Supreme.
But that is not all. That is only one aspect of the spiritual life which makes
the human spirit free (mukta). This
freedom is necessary for the individual so that, when he lives, moves and acts
in the world, the lower forces of nature may not in any way bind him and impede
the fullness of his life, so that universal love, knowledge and joy may embrace
all manifested forms. The individual being, one with the Divine, will be in
union with the many without losing the oneness. “Into all his acts,” Sri
Aurobindo writes, “the inner oneness, the inner communion will attend him and
enter into his relations with others, who will not be to him others but selves
of himself in the one existence, his own universal existence.” [16] The two
movements of religious living—mystic’s partial experience of the Transcendence
and the religionist’s efforts to expand the experience through theology, creeds
and cults Ý are here fully realized by going beyond the imperfections,
falsehoods, intolerance, arrogance, bigotry and fanaticism that bedevil
religions.
Dogmas
are petrified half-truths; religions are built and walled up by those stones.
Indian religious movements mostly escaped dogmatism and rigidity because men
had the freedom to reject past revelations and undertake freely their personal
spiritual adventure. There have always been rebellious free-seekers and seers
of the Infinity. Whenever there were signs of immobility, someone came with new
spiritual vision. But even then there were nefarious by-products—religions,
social domination, etc.,—which have impeded the free growth of one and all. The
true spirituality is dynamically free. It “respects the freedom of the human
soul, because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; and the deepest meaning of
freedom is the power to expand and grow towards perfection by the law of one’s
own nature, dharma.” [17]
The
spiritual living which will be fulfilled by the supramental transformation is
supremely free. There can be no dogmas, no cults and no moral prescriptions.
Any effort to turn this spirituality into a religion is unthinkable. “I may
say,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “that it is far from my purpose to propagate any
religion, new or old, for humanity in the future.” [18]
Some
elements that make religion are: commemoration and ritual re-enactment of
events from some mythical past, or if it is a historical religion, events that
have taken place in the life of the founder; belief in miracles that God or the
founder has supposedly performed; repetition of cults either ancient or
modelled on some ancient tradition; following rules of daily actions, physical
or moral, laid down by the founder himself or by some powerful follower of the
founder.
In
spiritual life nothing of these is needed. To help the power of evolution to
act on us and through us, so that the supramental spiritual life can be
established, Sri Aurobindo proposes the Integral Yoga. Yoga is not a religion.
And in Integral Yoga every man and woman is free to follow his adventure.
“The
one aim of this yoga,” Sri Aurobindo says, “is an inner self-development by
which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve
a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental
consciousness which will transform and divinise human nature.” [19]
This aim is beyond all that religions have ever imagined.
[1] The
Life Divine, p. 56
[2] Sri Aurobindo, Archives and Research, 9.1, pp. 7-8
[3] The Life Divine,
p. 870
[4] Ibid., p. 11
[5] The Human Cycle, p. 168
[6] The Life Divine, p. 26
[7] Letters on Yoga, Vol. 22, p.137
[8] First Sermon in
[9] Savitri, p.149
[10] Letters on Yoga, p. 137
[11] Ibid., p. 137
[12] Savitri, pp. 228-29
[13] Letters on Yoga, p. 137
[14] The Life Divine, p. 851
[15] Ibid., p. 852
[16] Ibid., p. 979
[17] The Human Cycle, p. 170
[18] Letters on Yoga, p.139
[19] On Himself, Vol. 26, p. 97