Sri Aurobindo was born in 1872 in Calcutta during the British colonial occupation of India. At a young age, Sri Aurobindo left India to move to England, where he spent the duration of his childhood. Throughout this time, Sri Aurobindo received a formal education and was taught how to read and write in a number of Romance languages, including Latin, French, German and Italian. Sri Aurobindo later attended King’s College at Cambridge University “where he had earned a First Class in the Classical Tripos (honours examination)” (Heehs 69). As Banerji states, “this education prepared him as a modern subject, who had internalized the post-enlightenment values of social critique and creative freedom” (95). Indeed, Sri Aurobindo’s education in England had a significant impact on his approach to social, economic and political issues in India, as well as his overall outlook and approach to yoga, especially in terms of thinking about yoga in a way that synthesized traditional
and modern perspectives connected to yogic practice (Banerji 95).
Upon his return to India, Sri Aurobindo “joined the service of the Maharaja of Baroda”, in what is now present-day Gujarat. As Banerji notes, “at this time he took up serious study of two texts that were to last him until the end of his life, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. He also began reading the books of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda.” These two texts were essential for the development of Sri Aurobindo’s personal and spiritual life. As Banerji states,
The Upanishads introduced to him the proto-philosophical complexity of the Vedanta, particularly its concern for embodied freedom and delight (jivanmukti); while the Gita gave him the active doctrine of spiritual works and its revolutionary nature; as also a theistic and more integral spirituality, involving surrender to, and identity with, the Personal Divine. (Banerji 96)
Throughout Sri Aurobindo’s corpus of written material it is clear that his perspective of the yoga tradition had been profoundly shaped by the spiritual and philosophical insights of the Upanishads and the Gita. For Sri Aurobindo, these texts provided an important framework that helped him to develop his theory of the evolution and transformation of individual and social consciousness. Therefore, it is important to note that although Sri Aurobindo’s understanding and approach towards integral yoga is often framed in a way that might be described as distinctly modern, it is nonetheless rooted in and shares continuity with the ancient philosophical yoga traditions that emerged in the Indus Valley region.
Throughout this latter period of spiritual development, Sri Aurobindo began to cultivate personal relationships with a number of yoga practitioners, including Swami Brahmananda, a renowned disciple of Sri Ramakrishna. Sri Aurobindo would often visit sacred sites and participate in regional religious and spiritual practices (Banerji 96). During this time, Sri Aurobindo started to practice the ancient yogic breathing technique of pranayama that was “taught by a friend who was a disciple of Brahmananda and close to the circle of hatha yogis surrounding Brahmananda” (Banerji 96). Sri Aurobindo also began to incorporate asanas (postures) into his spiritual exercises.
For Sri Aurobindo, this period of spiritual discernment and development created the conditions for his own greater self-awareness and self-perception. One particularly important spiritual experience occurred at the temple of Kali in Chandod near the Narmada river in western India, where Sri Aurobindo had an encounter with the “World Mother”. As a symbol for India’s goddess traditions, the “World Mother” would become a salient motif in Sri Aurobindo’s spirituality (Banerji 96). Sri Aurobindo’s poem, “The Stone Goddess,” represents a poetic description of this experience:
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.
The great world mother and her mighty will
Inhabited the earth’s abysmal sleep,
Voiceless, omnipotent, inscrutable,
Mute in the desert and the sky and deep. (Banerji 96)
According to Banerji, “the poem records a moment with darshan, which indeed, is also a moment of identity with Kali” (darshan which is a Sanskrit term describing Indian spiritual metaphysics) (96). For Sri Aurobindo, the symbolic relationship between Kali and Krishna, both the feminine and masculine divine archetypes, represent an integral aspect of his understanding of the yoga tradition, as a tradition that involves a harmonious union between feminine and masculine energies as aspects of ultimate reality (Brahman).
During his time in Baroda, Sri Aurobindo was also politically active and often involved in Indian nationalist politics. In this context, Sri Aurobindo spent time “in the company of Maharashtrian revolutionaries like Bal Gangadhara Tilak and his associates”, and advocated for poorna swaraj or “unconditional independence based on the right of a people with its own cultural history to have independent expression and self-determination” (96). In the context of the swadeshi movement, which called “for a boycott of British goods and their replacement with indigenous manufacture”, there “rose a call for national education and Sri Aurobindo was offered the post of principle of the proposed national college by its primary patron” (Banerji 96). Sri Aurobindo accepted this offer and moved to Calcutta to teach at the “college and to pioneer and engage himself fully in the anticolonial resistance movement” (Banerji 96). It is clear that Sri Aurobindo’s life at this point was firmly committed to the Indian liberation movement, which had significant consequences for the trajectory of his spiritual life.
In the context of the Indian nationalist movement, there were strong regional forms of yoga which drew on the traditions of Tantra and Vaishnavism (Banerji 97). As Banerji states, “Shakti Tantra practices around the worship of the mother Kali and Bahkti traditions based on love for Krishna and amplified by Sri Chaitanya in the 16th century, were very alive in Bengal and available for mobilization in the freedom movement” (97). According to Banerji, the mythic symbolism of these traditions and practices translated into the secular mythos of India as the “Mother”, which formed a significant spiritual aspect of the liberation movement that was prominent among Indian nationalists during the early years of the 20th century (97). Another fascinating spiritual aspect of nationalist politics concerns the use of the Gita to encourage a kind of selflessness and self-sacrificial attitude towards the liberation movement, as nationalists protested British colonial power structures and self-sacrificed for an independent India (Banerji 97). For Sri Aurobindo, who was actively participating in these movements, this engagement with yoga as a form of political dissent, in a “process of popular identity formation,” created the necessary conditions for the next stage of his personal spiritual development, moving beyond the more narrow regional approach that was evident in the Indian nationalist movements towards a more transcendental and universalistic approach to yoga (Banerji 97).
Therefore, it seems that Sri Aurobindo’s early life, like many of his contemporaries during the revolutionary period of Indian nationalistic politics, is characterized by the escalating violence and political turbulence of India at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, this period is distinguished by a variety of changes to the social, cultural, political and economic environment of modern India. Moreover, this part of Sri Aurobindo’s life was highly impacted by this time of political instability. Furthermore, it represents what I believe to be an important point in this discussion: that both religious and spiritual life is conditioned by the political dimensions of human existence, and that these aspects of life cannot easily be separated from the political because they are deeply intertwined and mutually shaped. In this case, the dialectical transition between traditional modes of life in India and the colonial expansion of the modern west represents an important historical context in the spiritual and philosophical evolution of Sri Aurobindo’s thought and practice. It is in this context that I approach the topic of Sri Aurobindo’s “integral yoga”, as a particular way of approaching the yoga tradition that appears to synthesize ancient philosophical teachings with the language of the modern west. Indeed, as I have mentioned, it is a philosophy that moves far beyond the narrow confines of nationalist identity and class differences, but moves towards what might be described as a transcendental paradigm of human enlightenment.
In 1908, three years after the partition of Bengal, Sri Aurobindo was accused of conspiracy, allegedly becoming involved in the bombing of the local magistrate and the “killing of two English ladies” (Banerji 100). In 1909, Sri Aurobindo spent one year in a confined and solitary prison cell in Alipore Jail in Calcutta. These were crucial moments in Sri Aurobindo’s life, as he found himself increasingly drawn to the spiritual life during the time that he spent in prison. As Sri Aurobindo wrote, “I have spoken of a year's imprisonment. It would have been more appropriate to speak of a year's living in an ashram or a hermitage. The only result of the wrath of the British Government was that I found God”. Indeed, this time spent in prison seems to have led to a spiritual renewal and an increased awareness of the Divine. However, despite the positive sentiments described above, these were also very testing and difficult times, as Sri Aurobindo had to deal with the mentally and physically exhausting effects of isolation and solitary confinement.
Throughout this time, Sri Aurobindo felt as though God was testing him, giving him “necessary lessons” about his life’s purpose. The first lesson was a realization of the injustice of the Indian prison system, as Sri Aurobindo believed God was calling him towards action, in order to aid his countrymen and reform the prison system, “so that these hellish remnants of an alien order were not perpetuated in a self-determining India”. The second lesson pointed towards the need to develop a greater awareness of the yogic path, that “for the one who seeks the yogic state crowd and solitude would mean the same”. The third lesson that Sri Aurobindo describes reveals a deeper spiritual truth, a theme that is found in the Bhagavad Gita: that all of our efforts to still the mind and retain a degree of “mental poise” are best accomplished through the simple act of surrendering to the imperishable self (17). As Sri Aurobindo wrote:
A spirit of faith and reverence (shraddha) and complete self-surrender (atma-samarpana) were the road to attain self-perfection in the yoga, and whatever power or realization the Lord would give out of His benignity, to accept and utilize these should be the only aim of my yogic endeavour.
Furthermore, there are several moments in these passages where it is clear that Sri Aurobindo describes his interior strength as being derived from a transcendental place of consciousness, beyond that of his own. According to Sri Aurobindo, through the “power of prayer” God gave him the gift of strength to endure through this experience of extreme solitude, so that “the suffering seemed as fragile as water drops on a lotus leaf”. Throughout all of these experiences it seems that Sri Aurobindo’s time in prison represents a momentous turning point in his spiritual life, one that provided the yogi with the spiritual strength to persevere through his sentence and to arrive at a clearer picture of his life’s purpose and vision.
In 1910, after Sri Aurobindo was released from prison, the yogi moved from Calcutta to Pondicherry, a coastal French colony in southeast India. According to Heehs, at this point Sri Aurobindo “abandoned politics” and began to focus more on cultivating his personal yoga practice (66). Sri Aurobindo spent the remainder of his life in Pondicherry where he built an ashram (which as Heehs notes, the Sanskrit asrama translates into hermitage) to facilitate a communal and solitary practice of yoga. Many people began to be attracted to Sri Aurobindo and his teachings, and he started to develop a loyal group of followers. Among these individuals, one in particular stood out, Mirra Alfasa, a French woman of Sephardic Jewish descent from a wealthy middle-class family (Heehs 66).
In 1920, upon moving to Pondicherry, Alfasa, who had previous experiences with occult spirituality, was drawn to Sri Aurobindo, who had begun to regard Alfasa as his “spiritual equal”, speaking of her as “the Mother” (Heehs 66). In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo and Alfasa developed a lifelong friendship, and their spiritual relationship would become a vital aspect of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical teachings, which required surrender to the “Mother” which I believe is symbolic for the importance of goddess spirituality in Sri Aurobindo’s teachings.
In any case, according to Heehs, Sri Aurobindo felt that it was important to practice yoga in “solitude”, thereby giving Alfasa responsibility over the ashram and the community of followers (Heehs 66). As Sri Aurobindo’s followers grew, it was clear that a new religious movement was emerging around the ashram, as the community grew to as many as 1,500 dedicated followers, and over 3,500 local people who participated in the activities of the ashram (Heehs 67). Unfortunately, however, Sri Aurobindo’s ashram would become a source of political tension, as one “fundamentalist” group claiming to represent Sri Aurobindo began to follow their own political, legal and financial agendas, attempting to file unsuccessful lawsuits and prosecute members of the ashram community and its trust board (Heehs 67). As Heehs points out, this was clearly not what Sri Aurobindo had in mind when he constructed the ashram for his community of yoga practitioners (67).
It seems that there is certain irony to this narrative, especially because Sri Aurobindo believed that yoga was a deeply personal and individual practice. As Heehs states, Sri Aurobindo “made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with any sort of movement” (66). Furthermore, as Sri Aurobindo wrote, yoga “has to be done in each individual, otherwise it cannot be done in the collective at all”, and that “yoga was a ‘way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded” (Heehs 67). Despite Sri Aurobindo’s reluctance to be the leader of any sort of new religious movement, a growing community of followers began to take root, spreading Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical teachings across the world. In what follows, I will turn to the particular teachings of Sri Aurobindo in order to arrive at a clearer picture of his teachings on integral yoga.
What exactly is integral yoga? In what ways do we find continuity with the ancient yoga tradition of the Indus Valley Region in the teachings of Sri Aurobindo? And how do they diverge? According to Chaudhuri, Sri Aurobindo’s purna yoga, or integral yoga, promotes the integration of human consciousness through the concept of the Supermind which transforms individual, social and collective life, bringing it into a greater spiritual and philosophical awareness of Being (7). Indeed, this is an important point, because while Sri Aurobindo’s thought might be interpreted as isolationistic, this further perpetuates the misleading modern perspective that misinterprets the classical yoga tradition, especially the work of Patanjali in The Yoga Sutras, as a solitary, isolationistic, world-denying and exclusive practice based on a kind of dualism that appears to distinguish a fundamental disjunction between purusa (consciousness) and prakrti (nature) (Whicher 133).
On the contrary, it seems to reflect the opposite approach, especially as a practice that works through the individual, affecting the collective or community through which the individual takes its place. According to Heehs, the transformation of individual and collective life is made possible through the establishment of the Supermind, a concept that denotes an advancement of consciousness in terms of humanity’s stage of spiritual development (69). Moreover, this was Sri Aurobindo’s reason for the ashram, “a place where new forms of individual and collective life could be tried and perfected” (Heehs 69).
According to Sri Aurobindo, in his classic work The Synthesis of Yoga, the author highlights the fundamental aspects of integral yoga, which are represented in the text as a kind of synthesis of a variety of different forms of yoga, including hatha yoga (psycho-physical), raja yoga (mental and psychic), jnana yoga (knowledge), bahkti yoga (devotional) and tantric yoga (610). Moreover, each of these yogic techniques represent different stepping stones along the path of liberation. As Sri Aurobindo states, “all aim in their own way at a union or entity of the human soul with the supreme Spirit” (610). From this it follows that because of the unity that is inherent among the different yogic paths it is possible to practice a synthetic yoga that incorporates different aspects of the various types of yogas listed above. However, in order to affect the transformation of personal consciousness, it is necessary to surrender oneself to the workings of a greater universal consciousness. As I have discussed, this indeed appears to be a fundamental principle of integral yoga, as Sri Aurobindo writes:
The principle in view is self-surrender, a giving up of the human being into the being, consciousness, power, delight of the Divine, a union or communion at all the points of meeting in the soul of man, the mental being, by which the Divine himself, directly and without veil master and possessor of the instrument, shall by the light of his presence and guidance perfect the human being in all the forces of the Nature for a divine living. (613)
Therefore, in order to understand the idea of integral yoga, it is important to note the fundamental principle of surrender which enables the perfection of the soul and the establishment of Supermind which transforms personal and collective life.
As I have discussed, Sri Aurobindo’s approach to yoga is greatly informed by the broader philosophical tradition of yoga, which encompasses a variety of approaches in the traditional yoga texts including the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. It is clear that Sri Aurobindo is very familiar with these texts, and has conducted exhaustive and detailed studies in order to extract and interpret the deeper meanings of these texts. Moreover, his perspective of them presents a careful understanding of the ideas and spiritual insights contained in these texts. It is precisely due to this wide range of textual and philosophical influences that Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga describes a synthesis of the yoga tradition, which describes a spectrum of ways of arriving at spiritual truth and divine consciousness.
According to Sri Aurobindo, his teaching “starts from that of the ancient sages of India that behind the appearance of the universe there is the Reality of a Being and Consciousness, a Self of all things, one and eternal. All beings are united in that One Self and Spirit but divided by a certain separativity of consciousness, an ignorance of their true Self and Reality in the mind, life and body” (177). Moreover, according to Chaudhuri, in the above statement lies one of Sri Aurobindo’s most important contributions to philosophy: that “Being is the indivisible unity of existence and energy (Brahman and sakti)” (8). As Chaudhuri states, Sri Aurobindo’s “metaphysical-spiritual” and philosophical scheme consists of classical Indian terminology wherein the yogi interprets Being as “the ultimate ground of the universe, as the Supreme Person (Purusottama) or the Supreme Being (Parabrahman) endowed with infinite creative energy” (77). For Sri Aurobindo it seems that although all beings are connected to the universal grounds of Being, the issue arises when individuals become divided, and begin to associate themselves with a false or constructed sense of themselves. As Sri Aurobindo describes, in order to see beyond the veil of ignorance it is necessary to engage with the practice of yoga, which aims towards the liberation of the self, and ultimate union with the Divine.
One important aspect of this idea that is worth noting is that there is a sense that the evolution of consciousness is already at work in nature, and that the human mind becomes a secondary facet for the evolutionary process. From this perspective, it seems that the role of human beings in attaining a higher evolutionary nature is ultimately dependent on the human will, intention and action. From this it follows that it is crucial to surrender to the evolutionary workings of consciousness and to the Divine life. In order to enable this process, it is necessary to remove the “veil of separative consciousness” to “become aware of the true Self, the Divinity within us all” (Sri Aurobindo 177). Overall, I think that the idea of “separative consciousness” is a significant concept in Sri Aurobindo’s thought. What I have described as the veil of ignorance is directly connected to the perception of a separate self, which forms the fundamental conditions for the illusion of “being” in the world. According to Sri Aurobindo, our attachment to this separate self hinders our ability to attain divine perfection (616). Of course, yoga presents a profoundly effective way of relinquishing this attachment. However, it becomes clear that this is a difficult, long and complex process in the life of the practitioner and requires daily commitment. Furthermore, it presents itself as hard, but very sustainable and fulfilling work.
From this point of view, Sri Aurobindo’s teachings share a deep level of continuity with the ancient philosophical tradition of classical yoga. According to the classical definition of yoga by Patanjali, yoga is “the cessation (nirodha) of [the misidentification with] the modifications (vrtti) of the mind (citta)” (Whicher 134). Although Sri Aurobindo’s way of framing the idea of separate consciousness is presented in a different language than that of Patanjali, the core problem of a separate self is relayed in Sri Aurobindo’s thought, and plays a central role in his theory of integral yoga. And of course, this another important aspect of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical perspective, that once the veil has been removed, and human beings begin to see themselves as part of a greater whole, the individual and collective transformation of society will have been affected leading to transcendence. In what follows, I will discuss another aspect of the discussion that I believe is important, the use of modernist language to describe the path of yoga.
One of the main differences in the way in which Sri Aurobindo’s thought has developed concerns the use of modern language to describe his theory of yoga. One might argue that Sri Aurobindo’s use of language to think about his teachings is couched in scientific terms, as he often refers to the expansion of consciousness as an evolutionary process that emerges through the progression of human experience (Sri Aurobindo 177). In this sense, it could be argued that Sri Aurobindo often takes a more modern scientific approach to yoga, especially in the sense that throughout his work he evaluates knowledge based on the faculties of reason and logic (Stinson 152). However, while it is clear that Sri Aurobindo places an emphasis on both reason and logic to arrive at truth, it seems as though the combined factors of experience and intuition play a more important role in the process of self-realization and awakening. As I have discussed, Sri Aurobindo’s use of language is highly contextual, and relates to both his upbringing in England and his university education at Cambridge.
Of course, the way Sri Aurobindo frames his teachings also depends on the particular audience he is addressing. As Banerji notes, for example, the use of language in the revised edition of The Life Divine, in a chapter entitled “The Triple Transformation,” was written for the French cultural milieu, many of whom, such as Mira Alfasa and Satprem, were being introduced to Sri Aurobindo’s writings by the 1920’s. In the aforementioned book, we find the conceptual terminology that Sri Aurobindo uses to describe his theory of integral yoga, including the use of the terms, “the psychic being, Overmind and Supermind” (Banerji 40). It is interesting to note that Banerji, as a scholar of Sri Aurobindo, finds resemblances with Sri Aurobindo’s conceptual writing and the writing of modern French and German philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon (45). Indeed, there are also more obvious similarities between Sri Aurobindo’s concept of the Overmind with Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch” (45). And of course, there are many similarities with the way in which Sri Aurobindo discusses the emanation of spirit as part of a greater evolution of human consciousness with that of Hegel’s theory of the movement of world spirit. Nevertheless, this speaks to the adaptability and fluidity of yoga, as it has the capacity to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries and to connect with different theories and ideas about the fundamental aspects of human nature, being and purpose.
How do we measure Sri Aurobindo’s legacy and impact on culture? While it is beyond the scope of this paper to reflect on this question in its entirety, it seems that Sri Aurobindo’s legacy had a profound impact on many contemporary thinkers who have incorporated the yogi’s thought into their work, especially in the field of transpersonal psychology (Miovic 199). Furthermore, it is clear that Sri Aurobindo’s teachings have impacted many people throughout the world, and his thought has been interpreted and used in a variety of ways in different social, cultural, political and religious contexts. In this paper I have briefly discussed and contextualized Sri Aurobindo’s teachings, focusing on his life’s trajectory, and how his later years as a spiritual and seemingly apolitical figure need to be contextualized into the shifting cultural, social and political landscapes of modern India. However, due to the wide range of material I have only just skimmed the surface of a deep ocean of intellectual and philosophical insights. Overall, I think that the combination of metaphysical, spiritual and social philosophy in the teachings of Sri Aurobindo presents a highly important take on the yoga tradition, as a tradition that often encourages social responsibility in order to further the greater good of the human condition. I think that for further research it would be very interesting to reflect on the role of Mirra Alfassa in the life of Sri Aurobindo, and to further contemplate and perhaps trace the history of the community at the ashram in Pondicherry.
Bibliography
Aurobindo, Sri. The Synthesis of Yoga. Pondicherry, India. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1999.
http://www.sriaurobindo.nl/docs/Sri%20Aurobindo/23-24TheSynthesisofYoga.pdf
Web.
Aurobindo, Sri. “Stories of Jail Life,” intyoga.online.fr. Last accessed on April 8, 2019.
http://intyoga.online.fr/tales1.htm. Web.
Banerji, Debashish. “Sri Aurobindo’s Formulations of the Integral Yoga.” International Journal
of Transpersonal Studies 37.1 (2018): 38–54. Web.
Banerji, Debashish. “Traditional Roots of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga.” Integral Review 9.3
(2013): 94–106. Web.
Chaudhuri, Haridas. “The Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo.” Philosophy East and West 22.1
(1972): 5–14. Web.
Heehs, Peter. “Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram, 1910–2010. An Unfinished History.” Nova Religio:
The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19.1 (2015): 65–86. Web.
Miovic, Michael. “Integral Yoga Psychology: Clinical Correlations.” The International Journal of
Transpersonal Studies 37.1 (2018): 199–225. Web.
Sivananda, Sri. The Bhagavad Gita. Uttar Pradesh, India. The Divine Life Society, 2000. Web.
http://www.dlshq.org/download/bgita.pdf#page629
Stinson, Walter. “Original Minds: Sri Aurobindo – Integral Scientist.” Cadmus 3.3 (2017): 152–
153. Web.
Whicher, Ian. “A RE-EVALUATION OF CLASSICAL YOGA.” Annals of the Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute 91 (2010): 133–154. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment