Śrī Aurobindo’s Yoga
Śrī Aurobindo’s yoga condenses the classical yoga into a single point: to let the light descend from above by allowing the cessation of thoughts (and it is precisely in this descent that this light is also Kuṇḍalī).
This is what happened to Śrī Aurobindo, as he describes in a letter written decades later: “something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative. What this was remained unknown until Sri Aurobindo came to realise the dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara and felt himself moved by that in all his Sadhana and action”.
Śrī Aurobindo later taught stopping thought as a technique for promoting the descent of the light, as virtually all yoga do; yet for him things occurred differently: the light fell upon him, and with it the thoughts stilled, and only afterwards did he learn to abide in the absence of thought. But it does not seem possible to stilling thoughts unless one has accessed a state of consciousness in which discursive thoughts no longer exist, and this is precisely what the teachings—Śrī Aurobindo’s included—say: should the thoughts stop, this very stoppage would be the emergence of access. Yet it is not possible to stop thoughts without the intervention of that state which many call Kuṇḍalī: this, and nothing else, is her manifestation, which is, as said, purely a-causal in itself. This is the meaning of saying that Rāja-yoga presupposes Haṭha-yoga, the two domains having the same object, Kuṇḍalī, regarded from different moments or loci. For Śrī Aurobindo, then, the pivotal moment is the cessation of thoughts, just as for Kashmiri Śaivism the essential condition is vikalpakṣaya (the destruction of dualising thought), and for Tantric Buddhism the psycho-organic attainment of śūnyatā (emptiness): the completion of the Haṭha-yoga mode is the entry into the Rāja-yoga mode.
The passage from Śrī Aurobindo just cited concerns precisely the state he experienced once the thoughts had stilled: discursive thoughts cease, that is, the ordinary mind vanishes and the I is no longer, for the I is the puppet-king fashioned by dualising thoughts; and the mind is free, emptied of phantoms, constituted of its own true nature alone, whose knowing and being known (that is, the ever-deepening recognition of oneself in it) then becomes yoga.
One of the principal theses of cognitive neuroscience is that in the encephalon, in the left hemisphere, there is “the interpreter”, which continuously interprets into narrative the data acquired by the brain, and that this would be consciousness. This “interpreter”, however, is only self-referential consciousness—that is, the ordinary mind, that is, the I. Kuṇḍalī, with her resplendent cobra eyes, silences this chatter.
In another passage Śrī Aurobindo describes his first emergence onto the “other side” as living phenomenal reality as though he were watching a film in which he was at once actor, director, and spectator. As all yogīn say, authentic reality does not differ from conventional reality with respect to the phenomena: saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are the same thing, the Tibetan yogīn often write. The difference is not, of course, merely one of perception or interaction; rather, the very structure of reality itself (of which the yogīn is naturally a portion) changes—though the reality appears identical—and it changes in the sense that authentic reality is a-structural, without thereby being devoid of “structure”; yet the structure it is not devoid of is precisely its “a-structurality,” which allows the yogī to “create” reality itself (how this occurs is not a topic on which Śrī Aurobindo dwells).
All this is evidently contradictory, and not even accurate or truthful; but the point is that non-contradictoriness, accuracy, and truthfulness are nothing but idols of discursive thought, which is such because it is severed—through the veil of representation—from authentic reality: this is precisely the self-deception that conventional reality is.
Conversely, this “structurally modifiable a-structurality” is nothing other than the very śūnyatā of the Buddhist Tantra, or, in its higher seas, Kárman-yoga.
This is the first level of the realisations in the yoga and in the traditional esoteric doctrines, a preliminary condition wholly on this side of any pleasing discursive disquisition: it is not a matter of acquiring notions and concepts about supra-mental states (that would be inauthentic esotericism), but of being them—this alone is yoga; the rest is sādhanā, the practice of attempts.
And this too must be specified: when a yogī employs the verb “to be” for explanatory needs, he does so hoping that the reader will understand that “being”, however conceived, is nothing but the third term—together with ordinary language and discursive thought—that constitutes the vicious circle in which representation unfolds.
Śrī Aurobindo then, over the years, attained many further realisations, up to what he calls the supreme light of the Supermind. According to Śrī Aurobindo, the yogīn of the past certainly crossed the first level of the overcoming of the I, yet they halted at one or another of the further stages (which Śrī Aurobindo calls the Overmind), without reaching the Supermind.
The Overmind, he criticises, was the point of arrival for almost all the doctrines of Mother India, with the exception of the Ṛṣi (seers) of the Ṛgveda, who attained the Supermind and left testimony of it in what in India is universally said to be the source of all knowledge, namely the Ṛgveda. The limit of the classical teachings lies in the fact that they stop before the Work is brought to its fullness; this certainly does not depend on theoretical shortcomings—as is obvious, since here one sails precisely in the pre-theoretical—but on how the Divine disclosed itself to the yogin of the past.
For Śrī Aurobindo it is certainly not a matter of judging the attainments of others, but of recognising that, when one is called, one’s own advance must be available not to squander any superior summons or caress. Naturally, within this yogic consideration there is also the discursive–contextual consideration of the reality in which the various yogin lived: on the one hand the call, on the other the availability. In every case, liberation in life occurs as such to the jīva, that is, to the human being, to Heidegger’s Dasein thrown into the world: one is born a second time, as Jesus also says to Nicodemus, yet so long as one is in the body one remains also the I’s—the difference being precisely that one is not only the I’s—and thus remains to some extent subject to conventional reality even while creating it, as the yogīn have repeated for millennia. What is meant, then, is simply this: no one, Śrī Aurobindo first of all, would ever think of asserting that the yogīn of the past erred in not reaching where Śrī Aurobindo himself reached, for the simple reason that they reached where they reached. Śrī Aurobindo instead criticises without granting appeal the Indian philosophies, particularly the Buddhist and the Vedantic ones (meaning the metaphysical Vedānta of Śaṅkara—though for other yogīn this is by no means merely abstract, it must be said—, not the Upaniṣad or the great later texts such as the Yoga-Vasiṣṭha or the Ribhu-gītā). Śrī Aurobindo criticises the philosophies as philosophies; he criticises the Buddhist philosophies insofar as they are self-limited to the discursive dimension of the Buddha’s teachings—he does not criticise the Buddha (just as the Buddha criticised the Vedic brāhmaṇa, not the Veda). He criticises Śaṅkara because he too metaphysicised the Brahman, not the Brahman itself. Western philosophies, with rare exceptions, are not worthy of criticism.
Beyond these, so to speak, philological clarifications, what Śrī Aurobindo says—let it be repeated—is that the traditional yoga stop at only one level beyond the ordinary mind, which he names the Overmind, whereas one ought to reach the dimension of the Supermind.
For Śrī Aurobindo one must not remain at the level of the mere overcoming of the I and the concomitant reciprocal permeation between the Self and the All; this level is without doubt a striking result, inconceivable to the ordinary mind, and it certainly already allows one to live outside Kárman (as the Tibetan “Buddha of the Three Times,” or as the Goddess Kālī, the destroyer of time, promises), yet one can go further. “No doubt, the Supermind has also acted in the history of the world but always through the Overmind. It is the direct descent of the Supramental Consciousness and Power that alone can utterly re-create life in terms of the Spirit. For, in the Overmind there is already the play of possibilities which marks the beginning of this lower triple world of Mind, Life and Matter in which we have our existence. And whenever there is this play and not the spontaneous and infallible working of the innate Truth of the Spirit, there is the seed of distortion and ignorance. Not that the Overmind is a field of ignorance; but it is the borderline between the Higher and the Lower, for, the play of possibilities, of separate even if not yet divided choice, is likely to lead to deviation from the Truth of things”, writes Śrī Aurobindo.
And this “beyond”, the Supermind, was in my view also attained by Śrī Aurobindo—paradoxically—on the basis, in part, of his analytical and Western mental formation: it was precisely the complete mastery of the “Aristotelian” mind, in its purely aseptic dimension (one that even Aristotle himself, moreover, could not reach), that enabled him to maintain detachment even from the Overmind, and to ascend and interact within the Supermind.
What is meant is that if Aristotle explored the logic of the rational mind—unidirectional, categorial, and self-referential—Śrī Aurobindo, like all yogīn, lived a different logic, one that may be described briefly as non-local and free of enticity; yet the systematic character of Western thought perhaps also contributed to accompanying him into the supramental domain of the Divine.
In other words, the pre-theoretical, the ante-predicative, the pre-representational is not a-logical, but enjoys a logic that is different—not merely deeper or broader—than rational logic. It is only rationalism, grafted into the representational mind, that believes its own paltry logic capable of comprehending reality; herein precisely lies its self-referentiality. This attitude is so thoroughly self-referential that it does not even realise that it must invert the plain and literal meaning of what was said by those who preceded the Aristotelian-analytic turn of Western thought, in order to usurp their sayings and thus childishly deceive itself into believing it participates in something artfully named “the true”.
The Sanātana dharma is instead purely and truly science—the sole and unique matrix of knowledge: it is founded upon the experiencing of authentic reality, on this side of the veil of representation, according to its immanent logos, or logic (as genus), or ante-logic, or dharma, whichever term one prefers. If the revealed texts of India, from the supreme Ṛgveda to contemporary works, are too luxuriant and resplendent for the (ante-)logic that animates them to be easily discerned, let one turn one’s mind to the Tibetan Tantra: while saying the very same things as the Indian texts (being, as is well known, nothing other than their transliteration), the Tibetan revelations reflect a logic—obviously pre-rational—of adamantine clarity, as indeed the Vajrayāna, Tibetan Tantric Buddhism itself, the Vehicle of the Diamond or of the Thunderbolt (the same vajra wielded by Indra in the Ṛgveda—though there described in a manner that, to veiled eyes, appears dystopic), truly is.
The analytical logic of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Organon is not even comparable to that unfolded in the Tibetan texts: crude and commonplace, superficial and vitiated the former; pure the latter. Yet, despite such a negative assessment of Aristotle’s logical merit, it remains undeniable that from the standpoint of formal legitimacy everything he said is correct: rational logic is as Aristotle described it, for he simply wrote down how his own mind functioned, wholly identified as it was with the I—and indeed, throughout Western thought no one was ever able to add or remove anything of significance from it. And it is precisely this Aristotelian “act” that may have propelled Śrī Aurobindo—the systematic impulse to over-understand—whereas the yogīn of the past were content with over-understanding
The Supermind may be described as living the Brahman actively rather than merely being a portion of it. The Supermind is, from another angle, the divine Mind—but it goes without saying that Śrī Aurobindo’s notion of the “divine” is only a name for mortals. In the Tantra of India and Tibet it is better to be a human being than a god (deva): the gods are one of the five classes of non-sentient beings; their condition is one of bliss and relative immortality, yet only the human being has the privilege of being able to witness the transformation of his own mind. The divine, in Śrī Aurobindo as in other yogīn, or buddhahood, is evidently something entirely other than those gods, and likewise other than the Western notions of God or the divine, precisely because the representational mind can conceive only entities, whereas authentic reality—the divine itself—is neither entities nor non-entities.
The Supermind is the very light from above; it is the consciousness that is the All, which not only passes through and permeates the mind (this, indeed, is a valid definition of the Overmind), but also concurs in “unfolding” the higher consciousness by virtue of the particulate coinciding with it—being pre-conscious agents of the light. If one wishes—and even though Śrī Aurobindo neither employs nor would likely have accepted such a categorial definition—it may be seen as a further transcendence of ātman. Now, this supramental light is and is-not the white light of Kuṇḍalī in the Ājñā-cakra mentioned above: Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, is, as said, purely Tantric Buddhism, the Buddhism of the Clear Light, whose declared aim is to unite the “daughter light” (corresponding to that of the Ājñā-cakra) with the “mother light” (the divine light, analogous to the Supermind). The base of the mind of every human being is a “particle” of the Divine, says Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavad-gītā. Śrī Aurobindo lived this supramental light in life in a particular and “active” manner compared to what is written in the Tibetan texts, though the “substance” is the same.
This is the completion of the Integral Yoga.
What is being spoken of, then, are not psychological states—let it be repeated—but dimensions that are in fact real, or rather the only dimensions that may truly be said to be real, since phenomena, the I, and even prophecy itself are already only māyā, illusion. To employ a customary terminology, it is not merely a matter of creating through the logos (as the Memphite theology of the neter Ptah says, long before the Gospel of John), but of being the logos—that is, not merely being its accidental instrument, but enacting it through actual coincidence.
All this, however, is already only a discursive description of the higher states of the mind. Indeed, there is little value in thinking it or trying to understand it, for so long as one remains within the dimension of the ordinary mind that believes itself to be the I—that is, within representation—one evidently cannot experience being anything other than the I. As said, the I is sheer abstract self-referentiality, which experiences nothing actually real, only the concepts it has itself created: to surpass the I is, for Śrī Aurobindo, the Overmind; the Supermind is something further. To experience the higher states it is necessary, in every yoga, that the encephalic matter transcend the common psychic belief—that it ascertain, at a neurobiological level, that it is not the I; and this is precisely the purpose to which the instrument of Kuṇḍalinī-yoga is assigned. Thereafter, living in the progression of the transcending of the I’s is precisely the Overmind, which may then be followed by the supramental dimension.
Śrī Aurobindo adds to the traditional yoga a twofold degree of awareness—not in the sense of inquiring whether these states are or are not included in other yoga, perhaps merely not unfolded, but simply because the purpose here is to set forth Śrī Aurobindo’s yoga.
The first degree of awareness is the awareness of the cells: not the mere hypothesising or asserting that each individual cell already has consciousness, just as the atoms of inanimate matter do (as even Schopenhauer, banal as it may be, affirms; some may be tempted to draw from this assertion parallels with the findings of contemporary physics, from quantum mechanics to string theory, but such parallels would be mere appearances: authentic reality is devoid of entities, and quanta and strings are entities as such); but of being also the consciousness of the cells—which is, of course, neither possible nor thinkable so long as one is the I. As a middle term between this dimension and the one that immediately follows stands the fact that, for Śrī Aurobindo, yoga involves the body first of all, not only consciousness. This is said in “Western” terms, whereas in authentic reality there is no distinction between mind and matter: to be the consciousness of the cells is precisely the outward expression of the overcoming of the dichotomy created by the ordinary mind that represents. That the distinction between mind and matter is already only an unfolding of representation is what all esoteric doctrines have said for millennia; what Śrī Aurobindo emphasises is that the transformation of consciousness is perfected also by consciously transforming the body, making it divine.
The second degree of awareness specific to Śrī Aurobindo is the realisation of the supramental telos: the active participation in the evolution of the human species.
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Continue in Part V