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India of the Ages
What is the specific genius of India,
her characteristic soul? What allowed her to survive for so many centuries
when all other antique civilisations today lie in their graves ? Does spirituality
make all that the spirit of India has been in its past, or did the ancient
Indian mind possess other powers too? And if as Sri Aurobindo says, we
do not belong to the past dawns but to the noons of the future, how can
India, understanding, assimilating and conquering modern knowledge and
ideas, arise once again, not only for herself but also for helping the
future of humanity ? What should be the work of a renaissance in India
?
To all these questions which are
generally dealt with in an inaccurate or incomplete manner Sri Aurobindo's
essay, The Renaissance in India provides an illuminating, all-embracing
and inspiring answer On August 15, 1998, in his address from the Red Fort,
the Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, declared: Today the celebrations
of the 125th Birth Anniversary of Mahayogi Sri Aurobindo are ending. He
envisaged a spiritual, moral and cultural rebirth of India. Today let us
resolve to realise his vision. If we want to understand what Sri Aurobindo
meant by a rebirth of India, this text is an indispensable key.
We present here a few extracts from
its first chapter. These are the same texts which we have attempted to
illustrate in the audio-visual presentation India of the Ages'.
Spirituality is the master-key of
the Indian mind
Spirituality is indeed the master-key
of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw
from the beginning, - and even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing
ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, - that life cannot be rightly
seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of
its externalities. She was alive to the greatness of material laws and
forces; she had a keen eye for the importance of the physical sciences;
she knew how to organise the arts of ordinary life. But she saw that the
physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right relation
to the supra-physical; she saw that the complexity of the universe could
not be explained in the present terms of man or seen by his superficial
sight, that there were other powers behind, other powers within man himself
of which he is normally unaware, that he is conscious only of a small part
of himself, that the invisible always surrounds the visible, the suprasensible
the sensible, even as infinity always surrounds the finite. She saw too
that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely
and profoundly than he is.... She saw the myriad gods beyond man, God beyond
the gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw that there
were ranges of life beyond our life, ranges of mind beyond our present
mind and above these she saw the splendours of the spirit. Then with that
calm audacity of her intuition which knew no fear or littleness and shrank
from no act whether of spiritual or intellectual, ethical or vital courage,
she declared that there was none of these things which man could not attain
if he trained his will and knowledge; he could conquer these ranges of
mind, become the spirit, become a god, become one with God, become the
ineffable Brahman. And with the logical practicality and sense of science
and organised method which distinguished her mentality, she set forth immediately
to find out the way. Hence from long ages of this insight and practice
there was ingrained in her her spirituality, her powerful psychic tendency,
her great yearning to grapple with the infinite and possess it, her ineradicable
religious sense, her idealism, her Yoga, the constant turn of her art and
her philosophy.
She creates and creates...
But that was not and could not be
her whole mentality, her entire spirit; spirituality itself does not flourish
on earth in the void, even as our mountain-tops do not rise like those
of an enchantment of dream out of the clouds without a base. When we look
at the past of India, what strikes us next is her stupendous vitality,
her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably
prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least, - it is indeed
much longer, - she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly,
with an inexhaustible manysidedness, republics and kingdoms and empires,
philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems
and all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works, communities
and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical
sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of politics and administration,
arts spiritual, arts worldly, trades, industries, fine crafts, - the list
is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. She
creates and creates and is not satisfied and is not tired; she will not
have an end of it, seems hardly to need a space for rest, a time for inertia
and lying fallow.... European critics complain that in her ancient architecture,
sculpture and art there is no reticence, no holding back of riches, no
blank spaces, that she labours to fill every rift with ore, occupy every
inch with plenty. Well, but defect or no, that is the necessity of her
superabundance of life, of the teeming of the infinite within her. She
lavishes her riches because she must, as the Infinite fills every inch
of space with the stirring of life and energy because it is the Infinite.
Order and arrangement
But this supreme spirituality and
this prolific abundance of the energy and joy of life and creation do not
make all that the spirit of India has been in its past.... For the third
power of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, at once
austere and rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in
principle and curious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and
arrangement, but an order founded upon a seeking for the inner law and
truth of things and having in view always the possibility of conscientious
practice. India has been pre-eminently the land of the Dharma and the Shastra.
She searched for the inner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity,
its Dharma; that found, she laboured to cast into elaborate form and detailed
law of arrangement its application in fact and rule of life.
The pursuit of the most opposite
extremes
Indeed without this opulent vitality
and opulent intellectuality India could never have done so much as she
did with her spiritual tendencies.... The European eye is struck in Indian
spiritual thought by the Buddhistic and illusionist denial of life. But
it must be remembered that this is only one side of its philosophic tendency
which assumed exagerated proportions only in the period of decline. In
itself too that was simply one result, in one direction, of a tendency
of the Indian mind which is common to all its activities, the impulse to
follow each motive, each specialisation of motive even, spiritual, intellectual,
ethical, vital, to its extreme point and to sound its utmost possibility....
It knew that without a "fine excess" we cannot break down the limits which
the dull temper of the normal mind opposes to knowledge and thought and
experience; and it had in seeking this point a boundless courage and yet
a sure tread.
Yet it is notable that this pursuit
of the most opposite extremes never resulted in disorder; and its most
hedonistic period offers nothing that at all resembles the unbridled corruption
which a similar tendency has more than once produced in Europe. For the
Indian mind is not only spiritual and ethical, but intellectual and artistic,
and both the rule of the intellect and the rhythm of beauty are hostile
to the spirit of chaos. In every extreme the Indian spirit seeks for a
law in that extreme and a rule, measure and structure in its application.
Besides, this sounding of extremes is balanced by a still more ingrained
characteristic, the synthetical tendency, so that having pushed each motive
to its farthest possibility the Indian mind returns always towards some
fusion of the knowledge it has gained and to a resulting harmony and balance
in action and institution.
The work of the renaissance in India
The recovery of the old spiritual
knowledge and experience in all its splendour, depth and fullness is its
first, most essential work; the flowing of this spirituality into new forms
of philosophy, literature, art, science and critical knowledge is the second;
and original dealing with modem problems in the light of Indian spirit
and the endeavour to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritualised society
is the third and most difficult. Its success on these three lines will
be the measure of its help to the future of humanity.
The roots of our being
The method of the West is to exaggerate
life and to call down as much - or as little - as may be of the higher
powers to stimulate and embellish life. The method of India is, on the
contrary, to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities
of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as
to make it responsive to and expressive of the spirit and in that way increase
the power of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic
and emotional being is to sound indeed their normal mental possibilities,
but also to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own
highest intuitions. The work of the renaissance in India must be to make
this spirit, the higher view of life, this sense of deeper potentiality
once more a creative, perhaps a dominant power in the world. But to that
truth of itself it is as yet only vaguely awake; the mass of Indian action
is still at the moment proceeding under the impress of the European motive
and method and, because there is a spirit within us to which they are foreign,
the action is poor in will, feeble in form and ineffective in results,
for it does not come from the roots of our being. Only in a few directions
is there some clear light of self-knowledge. It is when a greater light
prevails and becomes general that we shall be able to speak, not only in
prospect but in fact, of the renaissance of India.
Title: Sri Aurobindo HIS Life and
Action
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Sri Aurobindo was born on August
15, 1872 in Calcutta. At the age of seven, he was sent with his two elder
brothers to England to he educated, and was entrusted to an Anglican clergyman
of Manchester, "with strict instructions that they should not be allowed
to make the acquaintance of any Indian or undergo any Indian influence".
Thus, not until the age of twenty would he learn his mother-tongue, Bengali.
At the age of twelve, Sri Aurobindo
knew Latin and French. He enrolled in St Paul's School in London where
he learnt Greek among other subjects. He was just eighteen when he was
given a scholarship to go to Cambridge. The liberation of his country,
the independence of India began to haunt him. He became secretary of an
association of Indian students, delivered many revolutionary speeches and
cast off his English first name. He passed brilliantly the ICS examination,
yet he felt no call for it, so he got himself disqualified by not appearing
for the riding test. The Gaekwar of Baroda happened to be there at that
time, Sri Aurobindo accepted the proposal to be his Personal Secretary,
and returned to India.
When he sailed back to his native
land in 1893, Sri Aurobindo was twenty. He had been brought up in a purely
European culture. When he went ashore on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, he
was suddenly overtaken by a spontaneous experience: "a vast calm" descended
upon him, surrounded him and stayed with him for Months afterwards.
He joined the Baroda State Service,
but soon thereafter, he switched over to the Baroda College as Professor
of French and then of English, and later on became the acting Principal
of the College. It is at Baroda that Sri Aurobindo plunged into the spirit
and culture of India, studying Bengali and mastering Sanskrit, and prepared
himself for his future political and spiritual work. Indeed, his political
work had already begun but it was behind the scenes, largely of the nature
of a preparation for an armed revolution for the liberation of India. In
1904, Sri Aurobindo had begun practising Yoga, starting with pranayama.
The purpose of this Yoga practice was not to find liberation, but to acquire
"the strength to uplift this nation".
In 1906, following the partition
of Bengal, Sri Aurobindo left Baroda and, invited by the nationalist leaders,
joined in the newly started National College at Calcutta as its first Principal.
It was here that Sri Aurobindo, while working secretly for the revolution,
chalked also out a plan of outer action. This plan consisted of the programme
for Passive Resistance, Boycott and Swadeshi, which was later adopted as
the policy of the struggle for freedom.
In August 1906, B.C. Pal launched
the famous English daily, the Bande Mataram. Sri Aurobindo joined in and
soon took up its editorship. "Sri Aurobindo's first preoccupation was to
declare openly for complete and absolute independence as the aim of political
action in India and to insist on this persistently in the pages of the
journal; he was the first politician in India who had the courage to do
this in public and he was immediately successful. The [new Nationalist]
Party took up the word Swaraj to express its own ideal of independence
and it soon spread everywhere." Sri Aurobindo wrote may articles aimed
at destroying the superstitions of the Moderate party, such as the belief
in British justice, the faith in the adequacy of the education given in
schools in India; he stressed the poverty and economic dependence and all
other evil results of a foreign government. He insisted especially that
even if, as sometimes alleged, an alien rule were benevolent, that could
not be a substitute for a free and healthy national life. The Bande Mataram
was almost unique in journalistic history in the influence it exercised
in converting the mind of a people and preparing it for a revolution. In
the enthusiasm that swept surging everywhere with the cry of Bande Mataram
ringing on all sides, men felt it glorious to be alive and dare and act
together and hope; the old apathy and timidity was broken and a force was
created which nothing could destroy and which rose again and again in wave
after wave till it carried India to the beginning of a complete victory.
In 1907, the Nationalist party,
with Sri Aurobindo presiding over its conference, broke away from the Congress
Moderates at the Surat session. The reason being that the Moderates had
refused to reaffirm the demands of Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott and National
Education. About his role in the revolutionary movement in general and
in the Surat episode in particular, Sri Aurobindo will say later: "History
very seldom records the things that were decisive but took place behind
the veil; it records the show in front of the curtain. Very few people
know that it was I (without consulting Tilak) who gave the order that led
to the breaking of the Congress and was responsible for the refusal to
join the newfangled Moderate Convention which were the two decisive happenings
in Surat. Even my action in giving the movement in Bengal its militant
turn or founding the revolutionary movement is very little known."
The first decisive turn and experience
in Yoga came to Sri Aurobindo in January 1908, when he was groping for
a way. At this juncture, he was induced to meet Lele, a Maharashtrian Yogi,
who showed him the way to silence the mind. By meditation with him at Baroda,
Sri Aurobindo attained to an entire silence of thought and feeling and
all the ordinary movements of consciousness within three days. Ever since,
all his speeches, writings, and outward activity came to him from the same
source above the brain-mind.
On May 1908, Sri Aurobindo was arrested
as the police tried to implicate him in the terrorist activities of a group
led by his brother, Barin. In the Alipore jail, Sri Aurobindo spent almost
all his time reading the Gita and the Upanishads and in intensive meditation
and the practice of Yoga. There, the realisation which had continually
been increasing in magnitude and universality and assuming a large place
took him up entirely and his work became a part and result of it and besides
far exceeded the service and liberation of the country and fixed itself
in an aim, previously only glimpsed, which was world-wide in its bearing
and concerned the whole future of humanity.
The major realisation that he had
in the jail was that of the Universal Presence of the Divine. As he said
later in the famous speech that he gave at Uttarpara: "I looked at the
jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that
I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under
the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I
knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and
holding over me his shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating
that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who
was guarding and standing sentry over me.... I looked and it was not the
Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting
there on the bench. I looked at the Prosecuting Counsel and it was not
the Counsel for the prosecution I saw; it was Sri Krishna who sat there,
it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled."
In May 1909 Sri Aurobindo was acquitted.
By that time, the Bande Mataram
had been stopped by the British, and most of the Nationalist leaders had
been jailed or were in exile, Sri Aurobindo started a new English weekly,
the Karmayogin as well as a Bengali weekly, the Dharma. But in February
1910, following news of an impending arrest, Sri Aurobindo received an
Adesh, or divine order, to go to Chandernagore, then under French rule,
and later another Adesh to go to Pondicherry where he arrived on April
4, 1910.
Sri Aurobindo withdrew from active
politics; he saw that enough had been done to change the whole face of
Indian politics and the whole spirit of the Indian people to make independence
its aim. Besides, "the magnitude of the spiritual work set before him became
more and more clear to him, and he saw that the concentration of all his
energies on it was necessary." But that did not mean that he retired into
some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the
world or in the fate of India. In his retirement, he continued the battle
on an another plane; he kept a close watch on all that was happening in
the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary, but
solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action. For, as he said,
"it is part of the experience of those who have advanced far in Yoga that
besides the ordinary forces and activities of the mind and life and body
in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can act and do act from
behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic power which can
be possessed by those who are advanced in the spiritual consciousness ...
and this power is greater than any other and more effective."
From 1914 to 1921, Sri Aurobindo
published an English monthly, the Arya, in which he wrote most of his major
works (The Foundations of Indian Culture, The Secret of the Veda, Essays
on the Gita, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Synthesis of
Yoga, The Life Divine).
On March 29, 1914, the Mother came
to Pondicherry and met Sri Aurobindo for the first time. She went back
to France and in 1916 journeyed to Japan where she remained until her return
to Pondicherry on April 24, 1920. For thirty years, she was going to work
with Sri Aurobindo. In one of his letters, Sri Aurobindo has written :
"Mother was doing Yoga before she knew or met Sri Aurobindo; but their
lines of Sadhana independently followed the same course. When they met,
they helped each other in perfecting the Sadhana. What is known as Sri
Aurobindo's Yoga is the joint creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother..."
Stressing the novelty of his Yoga
aimed at the supramental descent upon the earth, Sri Aurobindo had this
to say: "It is the descent of the new consciousness attained by the ascent
that is the stamp and seal of the Sadhana", "a method has been preconized
for achieving the purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set
before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and
nature..."
On December 5, 1950 Sri Aurobindo
left his physical body. He had asked the Mother to continue his work. From
1958 to 1973, she withdrew to her room to slowly uncover the "Great Passage"
to the next species and a new mode of life in matter. This fabulous journey
in the new world heralded by Sri Aurobindo has been recorded in what is
today known as Mother's Agenda, the day-to-day account of twenty-three
years of experiences and discoveries in the cellular consciousness.
"Sri Aurobindo does not belong to
the past nor to history.
Sri Aurobindo is the Future advancing
towards its realisation.
Thus we must shelter the eternal
youth required for a speedy advance, in order not to become laggards on
the way."
