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Certitudes 
Circa 1911-13.
In the deep there is a greater deep, in the heights a greater height.
Sooner shall man arrive at the borders of infinity than at the fulness
of his own being. For that being is infinity, is God - I aspire to
infinite force, infinite knowledge, infinite bliss. Can I attain it?
Yes, but the nature of infinity is that it has no end. Say not therefore
that I attain it. I become it. Only so can man attain God by becoming
God.
But before attaining he can enter into relations with him. To enter into
relations with God is Yoga, the highest rapture and the noblest utility.
There are relations within the compass of the humanity we have
developed. These are called prayer, worship, adoration, sacrifice,
thought, faith, science, philosophy.
There are other relations beyond our developed capacity, but within the
compass of the humanity we have yet to develop. Those are the relations
that are attained by the various practices we usually call Yoga.
We may not know him as God, we may know him as Nature, our Higher Self,
Infinity, some ineffable goal. It was so that Buddha approached Him; so
approaches him the rigid Adwaitin. He is accessible even to the Atheist.
To the materialist He disguises Himself in matter. For the Nihilist he
waits ambushed in the bosom of Annihilation.
ye yatha Mam prapadyante Tamstathaiva bhajamyaham
[transliteration of a phrase that Sri Aurobindo wrote in Sanskrit. It is
a citation from the Bhagavad Gita (4.11) and means "as men approach
me, so I accept them to my love"]
Moksha
Circa 1911
The pessimists have made moksha synonymous with annihilation or
dissolution, but its true meaning is freedom. He who is free from
bondage, is free, is mukta. But the last bondage is the passion for
liberation itself which must be renounced before the soul can be
perfectly free, and the last knowledge is the realisation that there is
none bound, none desirous of freedom, but the soul is for ever and
perfectly free, that bondage is an illusion and the liberation from
bondage is an illusion. Not only are we bound but in play, the mimic
knots are of such a nature that we ourselves can at our pleasure undo
them.
Nevertheless the bonds are many and intricate. The most difficult of all
their knots is egoism, the delusion that we have an individual existence
sufficient in itself, separate from the universal and only being,
ekamevadwitiyam, who is one not only beyond Time, Space and Causality.
Not only are we all Brahman in our nature and being, waves of one sea,
but we are each of us Brahman in His entirety, for that which
differentiates and limits us, nama and rupa, exists only in play and for
the sake of the world-drama.
Whence then comes this delusion of egoism, if there is no separate
existence and only Brahman is? We answer that there is separate
existence but only in manifestation not in reality. It is as if one
actor could play different parts not in succession but at one and the
same moment; each part is He Himself, one and indivisible, but each part
is different from the other. Brahman extends Himself in Time, Space and
Causality which do not condition Him but exist in Him and can at any
time be changed or abolished, and in Time, Space and Causality He
attaches Himself to many namarupas which are merely existences in His
universal being.
They are real in manifestation, unreal outside manifestation.
Man
Circa 1911.
The Shastras use the same word for man and the one divine and
universal Being: Purusha, as if to lay stress upon the oneness of
humanity with God.
Nara and Narayana are the eternal couple, who, though they are two, are
one, eternally different, eternally the same. Narayana, say the
scholiasts, is he who dwells in the waters, but I rather think it means
he who is the essence and sum of all humanity. Wherever there is a man,
there there is Narayana; for the two cannot be separated. I think
sometimes that when Christ spoke of himself as the Son of Man, he really
meant the son of the Purusha, and almost find myself imagining that
anthropos is only the clumsy Greek equivalent, the literal and ignorant
translation of some Syrian word which corresponded to our Purusha.
Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that man is full of divine
possibilities - he is not merely a term in physical evolution, but
himself the field of a spiritual evolution which with him began and in
him will end. It was only when man was made, that the gods were
satisfied - they who had rejected the animal forms, - and cried
sukritameva [altered citation from the Aitareya Upanishad (I.2.3), means
"well-built, indeed"]: "Man indeed is well and
wonderfully made; the higher evolution can now begin." He is like
God, the sum of all other types and creatures from the animal to the
god, infinitely variable where they are fixed, dynamic where they, even
the highest, are static, and, therefore, although in the present and in
his attainment a little lower than the angels, yet in the eventuality
and in his culmination considerably higher than the gods. The other or
fixed types, animals, gods, giants, Titans, demigods, can rise to a
higher development than their own, but they must use the human body and
the terrestrial birth to effect the transition.
Philosophy
Circa 1911
The knowledge which the man of pure intellect prefers to a more
active and mundane curiosity, has in its surroundings a certain
loftiness and serene detachment that cannot fail in their charm. To
withdraw from contact with emotion and life and weave a luminous
colourless shadowless web of thought, alone and far away in the infinite
azure empyrean of pure ideas, can be an enthralling pastime fit for
Titans or even for Gods. The ideas so found have always their value and
it is no objection to their truth that, when tested by the rude ordeal
of life and experience, they go to pieces. All that inopportune disaster
proves is that they are no fit guides to ordinary human conduct; for
material life which is the field of conduct is only intellectual on its
mountaintops; in the plains and valleys ideas must undergo limitation by
unideal conditions and withstand the shock of crude sub-ideal forces.
Nevertheless conduct is a great part of our existence and the mere
metaphysical, logical or scientific knowledge that either does not help
me to act or even limits my self-manifestation through action, cannot be
my only concern. For God has not set me here merely to think, to
philosophise, to weave metaphysical systems, to play with words and
syllogisms, but to act, love and know. I must act divinely so that I may
become divine in being and deed; I must learn to love God not only in
Himself but in all beings, appearances, objects, enjoyments, events,
whether men call them good or bad, real or mythical, fortunate or
calamitous; and I must know Him with the same divine impartiality and
completeness in order that I may come to be like Him, perfect, pure and
unlimited - that which all sons of Man must one day be. This, I cannot
help thinking, is the meaning and purpose of the Lila. It is not true
that because I think, I am; but rather because I think, feel and act,
and even while I am doing any or all of these things, can transcend the
thought, feeling and action, therefore I am. Because I manifest, I am,
and because I transcend manifestation, I am. The formula is not so clear
and catching as the Cartesian, but there is a fuller truth in its
greater comprehensiveness.
The man of unalloyed intellect has a very high and difficult function;
it is his function to teach men to think clearly and purely. In order to
effect that for mankind, to carry reason as far as that somewhat
stumbling and hesitating Pegasus will go, he sacrifices all the bypaths
of mental enjoyment, the shady alleys and the moonlit gardens of the
soul, in order that he may walk in rare air and a cold sunlight, living
highly and austerely on the peaks of his mind and seeking God severely
through knowledge. He treads down his emotions, because emotion distorts
reason and replaces it by passions, desires, preferences, prejudices,
prejudgments. He avoids life, because life awakes all his sensational
being and puts his reason at the mercy of egoism, of sensational
reactions of anger, fear, hope, hunger, ambition, instead of allowing it
to act justly and do disinterested work. It becomes merely the paid
pleader of a party, a cause, a creed, a dogma, an intellectual faction.
Passion and eagerness, even intellectual eagerness, so disfigure the
greatest minds that even Shankara becomes a sophist and a word-twister,
and even Buddha argues in a circle. The philosopher wishes above all to
preserve his intellectual righteousness; he is or should be as careful
of his mental rectitude as the saint of his moral stainlessness.
Therefore he avoids, as far as the world will let him, the conditions
which disturb. But in this way he cuts himself off from experience and
only the gods can know without experience.
Sieyès said that politics was a subject of which he had made a science.
He had, but the pity was that though he knew the science of politics
perfectly, he did not know politics itself in the least and when he did
enter political life, he had formed too rigidly the logical habit to
replace it in any degree by the practical. If he had reversed the order
or at least coordinated experiment with his theories before they were
formed, he might have succeeded better. His ready-made Constitutions are
monuments of logical perfection and practical ineffectiveness. They have
the weakness of all logic; - granting your premises, your conclusion is
all-triumphant; but then who is going to grant you your premises? There
is nothing Fact and Destiny delight in so much as upsetting the
logician's major and minor.
The logician thinks he has ensured himself against error when he has
made a classification of particular fallacies; but he forgets the
supreme and general fallacy, the fallacy of thinking that logic can, as
a rule, prove anything but particular and partial propositions dealing
with a fragmentary and one-sided truth.
Logic? But Truth is not logical; it contains logic, but is not contained
by it. A particular syllogism may be true, so far as it goes, covering a
sharply limited set of facts, but even a set of syllogisms cannot
exhaust truth on a general subject, for the simple reason that they
necessarily ignore a number of equally valid premises, facts or
possibilities which support a modified or contrary view. If one could
arrive first at a conclusion, then at its exact opposite and, finally,
harmonise the contradiction, one might arrive at some approach to the
truth. But this is a process logic abhors. Its fundamental conception is
that two contradictory statements cannot be true at the same time and
place and in the same circumstances. Now, Fact and Nature and God laugh
aloud when they hear the logician state his fundamental conception. For
the universe is based on the simultaneous existence of contradictions
covering the same time, place and circumstances. The elementary
conception that God is at once One and Many, Finite and Infinite, Formed
and Formless and that each attribute is the condition of the existence
of its opposite, is a thing metaphysical logic has been boggling over
ever since the reign of reason began.
The metaphysician thinks that he has got over the difficulty about the
validity of premises by getting to the tattwas, the ideal truths of
universal existence.
Afterwards, he thinks, there can be no fear of confusion or error and by
understanding and fixing them we shall be able to proceed from a sound
basis to the rest of our task. He fashions his critique of reason, his
system of pramanas, and launches himself into the wide inane. Alas, the
tattwas are the very foundation, support and initial reason of this
worldwide contradiction and logically impossible conciliation of
opposites in which God has shadowed out some few rays of His luminous
and infinite reality, - impossible to bind with the narrow links of a
logical chain precisely because it is infinite. As for the pramanas,
their manipulation is the instrument of all difference of opinion and
the accompaniment to an unending jangle of debate.
Both the logician and the philosopher are apt to forget that they are
dealing with words and words divorced from experience can be the most
terrible misleaders in the world. Precisely because they are capable of
giving us so much light, they are also capable of lighting us into
impenetrable darkness. Tato bhuya iva te tamo ya u vidyayam ratah:
"Deeper is the darkness into which they enter who are addicted to
knowledge alone." This sort of word worship and its resultant
luminous darkness is very common in India and nowhere more than in the
intellectualities of religion, so that when a man talks to me about the
One and Maya and the Absolute, I am tempted to ask him, "My friend,
how much have you experienced of these things in which you instruct me
or how much are you telling me out of a vacuum or merely from
intellectual appreciation? If you have merely ideas and no experience,
you are no authority for me and your logic is to me but the clashing of
cymbals good to deafen an opponent into silence, but of no use for
knowledge. If you say you have experienced, then I have to ask you, 'Are
you sure you have measured all possible experience? ' If you have not,
then how can you be sure that my contradictory experience is not equally
true? If you say you have, then I know you to be deluded or a pretender,
one who has experienced a fragment or nothing; for God in His entire
being is unknowable, avijnatam vijanatam." The scientist thinks he
has corrected the mistakes of the metaphysician because he refuses to
deal with anything but a narrow and limited circle of facts and condemns
everything else as hallucination, imposture and imagination. His parti
pris, his fierce and settled prejudgments, his determined begging of the
question are too obvious and well known to need particular illustration.
He forgets that all experiences are facts, that ideas are facts, that
subjective knowledge is the one fact of which he can be decently sure
and that he knows nothing even of the material world by his senses but
only by the use his subjective knowledge makes of the senses. Many a
materialist will tell you that only those facts can be accepted as a
basis to knowledge which the senses supply, - a position which no man
can substantiate and which his science daily denies in practice. These
reasoners consent to trust to their sovereign subjective instrument when
it settles for them the truths about this world visible to their lower
instruments, but the same sovereign instrument is condemned as wholly
fallacious and insane when it deals in precisely the same way with
another field of perceptions and experiences. When my subjective
experience tells him, "I am hungry", he consents; "Of
course, you must be since you say so." But let it tell him, "I
am full of bliss from an immaterial source"; or "By certain
higher instruments repeatedly tested I know that I have wandered in
regions illuminated by no material sun," and he answers, "You
are only fit for the gaol or the lunatic asylum." No one has seen
the earth whirling round the sun, indeed we see daily the opposite, yet
he holds the first opinion obstinately, but if you say "Although
God is not seen of men, yet He exists," he turns from you angrily
and stalks into his laboratory.
The practical man avoids error by refusing to think at all. His method
at least cannot be right. It is not right even for the practical uses he
prefers exclusively to all others. You see him stumbling into some pit
because he refuses to walk with a light and then accusing adverse
circumstances or his evil fortune, or he shouts, elbows, jostles,
tumbles and stumbles himself into a final success and departs at last,
satisfied; leaving behind a name in history and a legacy of falsehood,
evil and suffering to unborn generations. The method of the practical
man is the shortest and most facile, but the least admirable of all.
Truth is an infinitely complex reality and he has the best chance of
arriving nearest to it who most recognises but is not daunted by its
infinite complexity. We must look at the whole thought-tangle, fact,
emotion, idea, truth beyond idea, conclusion, contradiction,
modification, ideal, practice, possibility, impossibility (which must be
yet attempted,) and keeping the soul calm and the eye clear in this
mighty flux and gurge of the world, seek everywhere for some word of
harmony, not forgetting immediate in ultimate truth, nor ultimate in
immediate, but giving each its due place and portion in the Infinite
Purpose. Some minds, like Plato, like Vivekananda, feel more than others
this mighty complexity and give voice to it.
They pour out thought in torrents or in rich and majestic streams. They
are not logically careful of consistency, they cannot build up any
coherent, yet comprehensive systems, but they quicken men's minds and
liberate them from religious, philosophic and scientific dogma and
tradition. They leave the world not surer, but freer than when they
entered it.
Some men seek to find the truth by imaginative perception. It is a good
instrument like logic, but like logic it breaks down before it reaches
the goal.
Neither ought to be allowed to do more than take us some way and then
leave us.
Others think that a fine judgment can arrive at the true balance. It
does, for a time; but the next generation upsets that fine balancing,
consenting to a coarser test or demanding a finer. The religious prefer
inspiration, but inspiration 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. Is there then
no instrument of knowledge that can give us the heart of truth and
provide us with the key word of existence? I think there is, but the
evolution of mankind at large yet falls far short of it; their highest
tread only on the border of that illumination. After all pure intellect
carries us very high. But neither the scorner of pure intellectual
ideation, nor its fanatic and devotee can attain to the knowledge in
which not only the senses reflect or the mind thinks about things, but
the ideal faculty directly knows them.
The Siddhis
Circa 1911
Some men sneer at the Siddhis because they do not believe in them,
others because they think it is noble and spiritual to despise them.
Both attitudes proceed from ignorance. It is true that to some natures
the rule of omne ignotum pro magnifico holds and everything that is
beyond their knowledge is readily accepted as true marvel and miracle,
and of such a temper are the credulous made, it is also true that to
others it is omne ignotum pro falso and they cannot forbear ridiculing
as fraud or pitiable superstition everything that is outside the reach
of their philosophy. This is the temper of the incredulous. But the true
temper is to be neither credulous nor incredulous, but calmly and
patiently to inquire. Let the inquiry be scrupulous, but also
scrupulously fair on both sides. Some think it shows superior
rationality, even when they inquire, to be severe, and by that they mean
to seize every opportunity of disproving the phenomenon offered to their
attention.
Such an attitude is good rather for limiting knowledge than increasing
it. If it saves us from some errors of assertion, it betrays us into
many errors of negation and postpones developments of the utmost
importance to our human advance.
I do not wish to argue the question of the existence or non-existence of
Yogic siddhis; for it is not with me a question of debate, or of belief
and disbelief, since I know by daily experience that they exist. I am
concerned rather with their exact nature and utility. And here one is
met by the now fashionable habit, among people presuming to be Vedantic
and spiritual, of a denunciation and holy horror of the Yogic siddhis.
They are, it seems, Tantric, dangerous, immoral, delusive as conjuring
tricks, a stumbling block in the path of the soul's liberation. Swami
Vivekananda did much to encourage this attitude by his eagerness to
avoid all mention of them at the outset of his mission in order not to
startle the incredulity of the Europeans. "These things are
true" he said, "but let them lie hidden." And now many
who have not the motives of Vivekananda, think that they can ape his
spiritual greatness by imitating his limitations.
There was no such weakness in the robust temperament of our forefathers.
Our great Rishis of old did not cry out upon Siddhis, but recognised
them as a part, though not the most important part of Yogic
accomplishment, and used them with an abundant and unhesitating vigour.
They are recognised in our sacred books, formally included in Yoga by so
devotional a Purana as the Bhagawat, noted and some of their processes
carefully tabled by Patanjali. Even in the midnight of the Kali[yuga]
great Siddhas and saints have used them more sparingly, but with power
and effectiveness. It would be difficult for many of them to do
otherwise than use the siddhis since by the very fact of their spiritual
elevation, these powers have become not exceptional movements, but the
ordinary processes of their thought and action. It is by the use of the
siddhis that the Siddhas sitting on the mountains help the world out of
the heart of their solitude and silence. Jesus Christ made the use of
the siddhis a prominent feature of his pure, noble and spiritual life,
nor did he hesitate to communicate them to his disciples - the laying of
hands, the healing of the sick, the ashirvada, the abhishap, the
speaking with many tongues were all given to them. The day of Pentecost
is still kept holy by the Christian Church. Joan of Arc used her siddhis
to liberate France. Socrates had his siddhis, some of them of a very
material nature. Men of great genius are usually born with some of them
and use them unconsciously.
Even in natures far below the power and clarity of genius we see their
occasional or irregular operation. The West, always avid of knowledge,
is struggling, sadly hampered by misuse and imposture, to develop them
and gropes roughly for the truth about them in the phenomena of
hypnotism, clairvoyance, telepathy, vouched for by men and women of
great intellectuality and sincerity. Returning Eastwards, where only
their right practice has been understood, the lives of our saints
northern and southern are full of the record of Siddhis. Sri
Ramakrishna, whose authority is quoted against them, not only made
inward use of them but manifested them with no inconsiderable frequency
in His lila. I see nothing in this long record immoral, dangerous or
frivolous. But because Europe looks with scorn and incredulity on these
"miracles" and this "magic", we too must needs be
ashamed of them, hustle them into the background and plead that only a
few charlatans and followers of false paths profess their use. But as
for us, we are men of intellect and spirituality, ascetics, devotees,
self-deniers, Vedantins; for these things we are too high and we leave
them to Theosophists, immoral Tantrics and deluded pseudo-Yogins.
Let us have done with cant and pretension in all matters. There are no
such things as miracles in this world of divine processes, for either
there is no such thing as a miracle or, if we consider more closely,
everything in this world is a miracle. A miracle is, literally, a
marvel, a thing to be wondered at - so long as the process is [not]
known. Wireless telegraphy is a great marvel, the speechless passage of
a thought from brain to brain is a yet greater, yet it happens daily
even in the most commonplace minds and existences. But when the process
is known, nothing is left to be wondered at except the admirable
greatness of wisdom, width and variety of conception and subtlety and
minuteness in execution with which this universe is managed. And even
that wonder ceases when we know God and realise that the most wonderful
movements of the cosmos are but trifles and "conjuring-tricks"
compared with His infinite Reality. And as it is with this siddhi of
science which we call wireless telegraphy and with this other siddhi of
nature which is exampled in the momentary or rapid spread of a single
thought or emotion in a mob, a nation, an army, so it is with the Yogic
siddhis. Explain and master their processes, put them in their proper
relation to the rest of the economy of the universe and we shall find
that they are neither miraculous nor marvellous nor supernatural. They
are supernormal only in the way in which aviation is supernormal or
motoring or the Chinese alphabet. Nor is there anything magical in them
except in so far as magic, the science of the Persian Magi, means
originally and properly the operations of superior power or superior
knowledge. And in that sense the occultism of the present day is magic
precisely in the same sense as the scientific experiments of Roger Bacon
or Paracelsus.
There is a good deal of fraud and error and self-deception mixed up with
it, but so there was with the earliest efforts of the European
scientists. The defects of Western practitioners or Eastern quacks do
not get rid of our true and ancient Yoga.
The Psychology of Yoga
Circa 1911.
Sri Aurobindo used this title again for another piece that was written
independently a year or two later and yet again as the general title of
a first group of essays.
Yoga is not a modern invention of the human mind, but our ancient and
prehistoric possession. The Veda is our oldest extant human document and
the Veda, from one point of view, is a great compilation of practical
hints about Yoga.
All religion is a flower of which Yoga is the root; all philosophy,
poetry and the works of genius use it, consciously or unconsciously, as
an instrument. We believe that God created the world by Yoga and by Yoga
He will draw it into Himself again. Yogah prabhavapyayau, Yoga is the
birth and passing away of things.
When Sri Krishna reveals to Arjuna the greatness of His creation and the
manner in which He has built it out of His being by a reconciliation of
logical opposites, he says "Pasya me yogam aishwaram", Behold
my divine Yoga. We usually attach a more limited sense to the word; when
we use or hear it, we think of the details of Patanjali's system, of
rhythmic breathing, of peculiar ways of sitting, of concentration of
mind, of the trance of the adept. But these are merely details of
particular systems. The systems are not the thing itself, any more than
the water of an irrigation canal is the river Ganges. Yoga may be done
without the least thought for the breathing, in any posture or no
posture, without any insistence on concentration, in the full waking
condition, while walking, working, eating, drinking, talking with
others, in any occupation, in sleep, in dream, in states of
unconsciousness, semiconsciousness, double-consciousness. It is no
nostrum or system or fixed practice, but an eternal fact of process
based on the very nature of the Universe.
Nevertheless in practice the name may be limited to certain applications
of this general process for specific and definite ends. Yoga stands
essentially on the fact that in this world we are everywhere one, yet
divided; one yet divided in our being, one with yet divided from our
fellow creatures of all kinds, one with yet divided from the infinite
existence which we call God, Nature or Brahman. Yoga, generally, is the
power which the soul in one body has of entering into effective relation
with other souls, with parts of itself which are behind the waking
consciousness, with forces of Nature and objects in Nature, with the
Supreme Intelligence, Power and Bliss which governs the world either for
the sake of that union in itself or for the purpose of increasing or
modifying our manifest being, knowledge, faculty, force or delight. Any
system which organises our inner being and our outer frame for these
ends may be called a system of Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo
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