FELICITY EDWARDS

BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW

Dynamics of Integral Transformation in the Spirituality of Sri Aurobindo1

‘An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic experience is essential for the complete transformation of our nature’ (, The Synthesis of Yoga) ‘All life is yoga’ (Subtitle of ‘The Synthesis of Yoga’)

INRODUCTION

In the rapidly developing field of the academic study of spirituality key ques- tions arise concerning inter-relationships between theory and practice, between theories of transformation and how we practically engage in the process of transformation, deepen it, accelerate it and bring it to new levels. We need to know not only what transformation is or could be, but how to proceed in rela- tion to what we know about it. How do we become what we know? This paper takes up the question in the work of Aurobindo Ghose (1872- 1950) and investigates one central series of principles of transformation among the many that he addressed. Sri Aurobindo was a specialist in the dynamics of spiritual transformation on both the theoretical and the practical levels. As scholar, mystic, sage, seer and spiritual pioneer, he wrote prolifically and was indefatigable in searching for, describing and mapping out the parameters of transformation. In this paper I am keeping generally to Sri Aurobindo’s own terms as he used them. Apart from his neologisms, which are explained, his ter- minology is largely that of the Hindu tradition and particularly of Vedanta,2 to which he gave his own unique spin. A strongly appealing aspect of his work, particularly in the current western context, is that he was exploring ontological

1 The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation: Division for Social Sciences and Humanities toward this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and con- clusions arrived at are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the National Research Foundation. 2 Cf. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Pondicherry 1970, 429; and Letters on Yoga, Pondicherry 1970, 73. 236 FELICITY EDWARDS and epistemological frontiers far beyond any one religious tradition. ‘Religion’, as he uses the term, has largely served its evolutionary purpose;3 all religions tend to be concerned with beliefs, teachings, practices and structures which may have had validity in their original context but now, outwardly at least, they have ceased to be effective to the extent that they have become rigidified, con- ventionalised and disconnected from people’s experience. Accordingly, he chose to define his own context and practice in terms of spirituality, spiritual experi- ence and spiritual transformation. His work abounds with insights that are radi- cal, comprehensive, practical and of conspicuous importance for contemporary spirituality and its goal of transformation. He writes: ‘Transformation’ is a word I have brought in myself (like ‘supermind’) to express certain spiritual concepts and spiritual facts. […] What I mean by spiritual trans- formation is something dynamic. […] It means a bringing down of the Divine Consciousness, static and dynamic, into all these parts (mind, heart, life and body) and the entire replacement of the present consciousness by that.4 Sri Aurobindo’s position on transformation differs from that of most eastern spiritual teachers in that he did not regard ‘the spiritual’ as a goal to be sought above, or in isolation from, the material. For him, the spiritual and the material are two aspects of the one reality for it is one and the same energy that gives rise to both. His concern was with the whole person and the whole cosmos, and he addressed himself to the transformation of all the levels of reality in their dynamic inter-relatedness. He had originally (1903-1910) been a leading polit- ical activist in the liberation struggle against the British in India and came to appreciate the multiple interconnections between the socio-political, personal and spiritual domains. His own experience was such that it informed the under- standing of reality that he posited. At the same time, his experience and his ontology together provided a series of keys to the transformational modality he proposed, and he saw this modality as ‘a philosophy of being, put into spiritual practice’.5 Very much to the point is that, in contrast to the current advaitic soteriology that he so incisively criticised for its negative attitude to the world, his orientation is conspicuously world-affirming. For him liberation is necessar- ily in the world, and it is the liberation of the world. And that has to include the transformation of matter.6

3 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Pondicherry 1987, 861. 4 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 115-116. The term ‘supermind’, like the corresponding term ‘superman’, should not cause alarm. The way in which Sri Aurobindo uses these terms is clearly defined and bears no resemblance to the doctrine of Nazi Germany. 5 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 507. 6 Cf. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 987, 989. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 237

Although thoroughly Indian by descent, Sri Aurobindo had been brought up entirely in the West, as a westerner. Born in Calcutta in 1872, he was the son of a Bengali physician who was an uncompromising anglophile. The father resolved that his son should grow up as an English gentleman, and to this end he deposited the seven-year old child (along with his two brothers), in Man- chester, England, in the care of a Congregational clergyman and his wife, with the instruction that the children were to be kept away from all things Indian. Public school was followed by Cambridge where he scored a First. While at Cambridge he became a member of a student society formed to study and sup- port the liberation movement against the British in India. Returning to India at 21, he started from scratch to connect with his cultural and spiritual roots. He rapidly learnt Bengali, Hindi and Sanskrit, and began to study the sacred texts, at first the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, later the Vedas. Soon he was deeply involved in the politics of the liberation movement in Bengal and com- mitted himself untiringly to activities considered by the British authorities to be dangerously subversive. His active political involvement was interrupted in 1908 when he was imprisoned by the British on a charge of alleged implication in an incident involving the explosion of a bomb. The year he spent in jail awaiting trial was a turning point in his life and he saw it as the personal action of God. After that his life-work was empowered by a new sense of the meaning of liberation and a new knowledge of how it is to be attained. When Sri Aurobindo had first taken up the practice of yoga it was for his own spiritual development.7 As his involvement in the liberation struggle deep- ened he practised specifically with the intention of becoming as powerful as possible against the rule of the British in India. ‘Yoga’ is a technical term from the Sanskrit root yug meaning ‘to yoke’. It means both union with the Divine and the process of attaining this, which includes disciplined spiritual self- training and practice. As his experience intensified in both the political and spiritual domains he came to see that what he was in fact engaged in and com- mitted to was not just the liberation of India from the British, important though that was, but the whole restructuring of the ordinary material and ego- oriented person ‘to create a new centre of vision and a new universe of activi- ties’ which would constitute ‘divine humanity’.8 Through his experience he came to see what this transformational paradigm would entail and how it involved the unfolding and development of what he terms ‘integral spiritual consciousness’.9 He called it ‘’, for it was designed to transform all

7 Cf. Sri Aurobindo, On Himself: Compiled from Notes and Letters, Pondicherry 1972, 68. 8 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 66. 9 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 634. 238 FELICITY EDWARDS aspects of the person, body, mind and psyche, to their highest divine-human potential.

EXPERIENCES OF THE DIVINE: TRANSFORMATION OF THE HUMAN

Sri Aurobindo investigated meticulously the stages of transformation he himself experienced. Based on his own experience, he set out in his writings a detailed modality for transformation across the range of domains in which we operate. It is, of course, traditionally Indian to prioritise experience (anubhava); that which is experienced is regarded as of more value, spiritually, than what is believed theoretically or known intellectually. To Sri Aurobindo, then, it was procedurally correct, as well as empirically the case, that his philosophical, doc- trinal position was the result of his spiritual experience. He wrote at enormous length and he says of these vastly prolific philosophical writings, ‘I only had to write down in terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there […]’.10 What resulted was ‘a schematic […] account of the spiritual transformation, a structural map for transformation’.11 This map is a map of consciousness. Whatever we experience we experience in our consciousness. We experience reality as the phenomena of the inner world and we experience what we designate as ‘the material’ as part of the outer world, but the whole of it takes place in our consciousness. Sri Aurobindo’s map is, like any other map, a map of symbols, a kind of ‘mind- conception’ which can give an idea, a sense, vision, contact even with what it symbolises, and the symbolic representation (the map, the teaching) has to be transcended, as we pierce through its symbolism to the ‘real realities’.12 This means experiencing the processes of consciousness as consciousness transforms. Transformation is complex; it involves the whole of life. Its stages are not sepa- rate, simple or clear-cut and need not even be successive13 except to the extent that certain groundwork has to be laid before the higher stages can be effected. For Sri Aurobindo there is no essential difference in spiritual transformation as between East and West, or anywhere else, because, although there are literally thousands of types, forms, paths, stages and general variations, the spiritual impetus for transformation and the divine life is one everywhere. At the same time, each person has to be led by the Spirit, the inner teacher, to the person- ally appropriate form and practice, for each is unique.

10 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 374. 11 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 955. 12 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 486. 13 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 956. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 239

Sri Aurobindo’s experiences of God fall into four types, each distinct, and each related to his circumstances at the time. The four types correlate with dif- ferent ontological levels set out in his theoretical framework or ‘structural map’ of the process of transformation. He refers to them (writing of himself in the third person) as ‘the four great realisations on which his Yoga and his spiritual philosophy are founded’.14

Type 1 The Nirvana experience This was ‘a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness’15 in which he experienced the formless void, nirva∞a, being the extinction of the false, separative individual we mistake for ourself. This he understood as the experience of the supreme Reality, the Divine, as utterly tran- scendent. He writes of it as ‘the experience of the silent, spaceless and timeless Brahman gained after a complete and abiding stillness of the whole conscious- ness and attended at first by an overwhelming feeling and perception of the unreality of the whole world […]’.16 This experience was foundational and indispensable for what followed.17 It was the advaitic experience par excellence but to have regarded it as ultimate would have been to stop at Vedanta and its negation of the world. Subsequently Sri Aurobindo discovered that it was pre- cisely by waiting in that silence that, as he put it, ‘I begin to enter into relations with that as yet ungrasped Source of myself and my actions; the void begins to fill, there emerges out of it or rushes into it all the manifold Truth of the divine, all the aspects and manifestations and many levels of a dynamic Infinite’.18 The formless void is the source of all things and eventually the Nirvana experience ‘began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness from above’.19

Type 2 The vision of Sri Krishna, the absolute Reality, experienced both as the all- pervading Lord of creation and as the personal God Sri Aurobindo also referred to this as the Vasudeva experience, Vasudeva being a name of Krishna/Vishnu as the all-pervading God. This was the experience of ‘cosmic consciousness and of the Divine as all beings and all that is’20 and it happened during the time he was in Alipore Jail, Calcutta, a prisoner of the

14 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 64. 15 R.R. Diwakar, Mahayogi: Life, Sadhana and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo, Bombay 1988, 136. 16 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 64. 17 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 82, 101-102. 18 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 109. 19 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 50. 20 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 6. 240 FELICITY EDWARDS

British (vide supra). For about a year (from May 1908) he was held mostly in solitary confinement awaiting trial and much of his time was devoted to medi- tation and to the study of the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, doing ‘the sad- hana21 of the Gita’, as he described it.22 After his acquittal and release he spoke publicly of his experience in what is known as the Uttarpara speech. He said: … his [God’s] strength again entered into me. 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 […] and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana23 who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch, and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover. This was the first use of the deeper vision he gave me. I looked at the prisoners in jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies.24 Clearly distinguished then from the Nirvana type of experience, this was now experience of the all-pervading Lord of the universe and of the personal God. It was linked with the shift in his vocation, from the more practical aspects of the liberation struggle to a much more interior, inward role in socio-political trans- formation. Sri Aurobindo knew that he had to work on himself, since each per- son is a kind of laboratory of transformation. In order to do this work inten- sively he extricated himself from political activity, and, for several reasons, including heeding what he understood as ‘the command of God’, the adesa, and also to remove himself from the attentions of the British and the possibility of further arrest, he went first to Chandernagore and in March 1910 settled in South India in what was then the French territory of Pondicherry. The ashram he founded there is flourishing nearly a hundred years later. At this point he was developing more deeply the connections between spiritual experience and transformation, transformation not only of the personal but also of the social and political reality, and he was finding that he could work much more powerfully and effectively for the liberation of the Indian people by working interiorly, working ‘from within’, as he would put it, within the more subtle levels of reality, rather than as an individual, working on what he called ‘the surface.’

21 Sadhana is spiritual practice (training, exercise). 22 Sri Aurobindo, Uttarpara Speech, Pondicherry 1992, 4. 23 Narayana is the name of Vishnu as Preserver and Lord of Love. 24 Sri Aurobindo, Uttarpara Speech, 5-6. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 241

Type 3 The static and dynamic aspects of God Sri Aurobindo’s third distinct type of experience, which started in Alipore Jail and became a major part of his ongoing experience at Pondicherry, may be seen as founded on and extending both the first and second types, that is to say, the Nirvana experience as vision of the formless absolute, and the vision of the all- pervading Lord. This third type was the ‘realisation of the supreme Reality with the static and dynamic Brahman as its two aspects,25 ‘a vision of the supreme Reality as a multiform unity, simultaneously static and dynamic, characterised by silence and expression, emptiness and creativity, infinite and yet composed of manifold forms’.26 A paradigmatic example of this realisation was while he was investigating what he called ‘the dark half of the truth’,27 that is to say, the truth and goodness contained in error and evil not unlike Carl Jung’s notion of the good energy to be found in the darkness of the human shadow. Through this he became increasingly aware not only that there is intense darkness and evil to be contended with but also how this is to be worked with. It became clear to him in this context that it is precisely in the coexistence of good and evil that one of the principal keys to transformation is to be found. This insight is linked, in his theoretical framework, with his view of truth and error, knowl- edge and ignorance, and the ‘half light and half darkness’ with which the human mind knows and creates (vide infra). In terms of the transformational modality he proposes this relates inter alia to the importance of including, rather than rejecting and leaving behind, the stages that are transcended in the process of development. This principle of integrating the lower in the higher became one of the central axioms in Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of being and knowing, and particularly in his practical teaching on transformation (vide infra). Along with this he also verified in his own experience that it is only by increasingly complete self-surrender to God that it is possible to be the channel or instrument for the transforming light from above to descend to each lower level of existence, including the very lowest level which is matter itself. As a gloss on this experience it is illuminating to see what a French disciple, , said about it. Satprem was on very close terms with both Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual counterpart, Richard (1878-1973), the Mother of the ashram community. Satprem wrote extensively on the expe- riences of them both and he records how, when Sri Aurobindo’s awareness began to move deeper than ordinary mental consciousness, downwards into the

25 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 64. 26 H. Chadhuri, Sri Aurobindo: The Prophet of the Life Divine, Pondicherry 1960, 14, cited by B. Bruteau, Worthy is the World: The Hindu Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, New Jersey 1971, 31. 27 Satprem, Sri Aurobindo: The Adventure in Consciousness, Pondicherry 1968, 245 ff. 242 FELICITY EDWARDS inner subtle levels of matter, he encountered first the consciousness of the body by which each part of the body, down to the cells, knows exactly what to do. Going deeper he accessed the physical subconscious, in which, very interest- ingly, he found a layer of behavioural patterns which he identified as a kind of hangover from our evolutionary past, vestiges of the ancient habits of living things, reflexes, habits of hiding, running away, and so on – and particularly the senseless repetition of responses that have become habitual and which need to be deautomatised.28 In the anatomy of the human brain there are levels which are survivals of earlier, more primitive evolutionary stages. Sri Aurobindo not only knew mentally but experienced in practice what it is to be conscious at that level and he became aware that this habitual repetition of these ancient and now often inappropriate responses is part of residual conditioning that blocks our development. These low-level automatic responses have to be dealt with in order that responses can be initiated at higher, more appropriate levels of con- sciousness. Going deeper, he experienced consciously the inorganic, physical level of matter, from within. As the material base of life, this level is also paradoxically the antithesis of life and he called it the Inconscient. His experience of this level was crucially important and the climax of it was that, through and within the material density of the physical, he encountered the presence of God. Satprem writes, ‘At the bottom of “inconscient” matter […] Sri Aurobindo found him- self precipitated into the Supreme Light. […] The supreme divine conscious- ness […] was there at the very heart of matter. The step above the overmind is not ‘above’, it is here and in all things […] and this is the divine life in a body’.29 This became a pivotal discovery in a number of ways, most notably for Sri Aurobindo’s affirmation of the importance of matter, for how he came to regard the interface between matter and consciousness, and because it assured him decisively that God is already here, in the world, in matter and in the body, always already, as Vedanta affirmed. But rather than shunning the world and doing battle with the flesh, as vedantic soteriology advocated, Sri Aurobindo’s position was unequivocally that the appropriate action is cooperation with the Spirit in transforming matter, the body and the world.

Type 4 The parts and planes of being and the pattern of transformation The fourth stage of Sri Aurobindo’s experiential development took place over a long period of intense tapasya in Pondicherry, reaching a high point on

28 Cf. A.J. Deikman, ‘Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience’, in Charles Tart (Ed.), Altered States of Consciousness, New York 1969, 23-43. 29 Satprem, Sri Aurobindo, 227-232. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 243

24 November 1926 with what he regarded as the descent of the very high level of consciousness he had called the Overmind. Tapasya is the effort of concen- trating the will and the energies to work with, control and transform the lower levels of the being, the mind, vital and physical (vide infra). While doing this he was living in seclusion in the Ashram but read widely, keeping up with what was going on, particularly in the political world, and regularly reading the over- seas newspapers. While in Alipore Jail he had experienced planes of being above the mental level and well into the higher spiritual domains up to what he came to call ‘the supramental’ (vide infra). He distinguishes these as the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuitive Mind. Between the Intuitive Mind and the supramental level is the Overmind. His experience of these made it clear to him that it was the active presence of these higher planes that would transform the lower levels, the levels of mind, life and matter, so that they would be appropriate instruments of God’s will and action in the world. Seclusion in Pondicherry gave him the opportunity to put maximal energy into the effort to transform the lower levels by ‘bringing down’, as he expresses it, the higher planes of consciousness. He saw the higher levels of mind itself as gradations of consciousness through which God, as the source of both consciousness and matter, is to be approached. In working with these higher levels he was contin- uously intensifying his self-surrender to God. He considered this inner work the most practical thing he could do in relation to the problems of the world and regarded whatever he achieved as the result of God working in him. There was no doubt for him that it was only by accessing, understanding and master- ing ‘the interior, invisible world that one would be able to act effectively on the planes of physical, social and political life’.30 What Sri Aurobindo termed the supramental level of existence is the effective source of all.31 This is the original creative consciousness and it is the Spirit going into action, as it were. The Supermind ‘acts and creates as well as knows’.32 Unique to Sri Aurobindo’s integral spirituality is both his insistence on bringing down into the lower levels of existence the power of the supramental and his goal of establishing it fully in human life. This is one of the primary keys to transfor- mation. It is most significant that he interprets the levels between the lower mind and the supramental ontologically, in other words, regarding these not only as ways of knowing but as realms of being. So, ‘When a man (sic) ascends to one of them it is not only his knowledge which is affected but his entire being, in all its states and activities, including even his body’.33 Each of these levels interpenetrates

30 Bruteau, Worthy is the World, 36. 31 Cf. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 123-125, 763. 32 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 761. 33 Bruteau, Worthy is the World, 36. 244 FELICITY EDWARDS the others and they mutually modify one another.34 The way in which this hap- pens is examined below. The Overmind is still ‘mind’, as compared with Supermind, ‘the overmind change’ being the final movement of the ‘dynamic spiritual transformation’35 before the supramental. Sri Aurobindo found that in this overmind conscious- ness a threshold is reached where the individual ego-sense subsides. The ego is not obliterated but instead of being centre-stage it arises as a relatively small part of one’s identity within this now vastly expanded consciousness. This shift profoundly affects how one perceives one’s own inner experience, other selves and the world. When the sense of a separate self dims and subsides conscious- ness is no longer focussed on ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’, and attention is then more like ‘a specialised ‘point of view’ within the cosmic consciousness’.36 As Sri Aurobindo experienced this, (admittedly at a much higher level than most of us), ‘in the Overmind one can know through any ‘point of view’ as readily as through any other, and one’s concern likewise is as much for any other being as for one’s own self’.37 When the sense of selfhood is effectively expanded to become cosmic, every other being is a centre of consciousness with whom, or with which, one can identify.38 ‘Self’ and all ‘other selves’ are experienced as arising together out of their deeper common ground. It is at this point, and not before, that compassion and love are possible; this is the point where there is ‘union of self with self’39 such that one is able to love the other not just as one ‘loves oneself’, in ordinary parlance, but as literally oneself.40

In the process of arriving at these higher levels of knowing and being Sri Aurobindo recapitulated in his spiritual practice the traditional yogic modes of knowing oneself, the world and the Divine, and re-experienced many of the attainments of the ancient Rishis, the seers of the Upanishads. He validated many aspects and reformulated others, coming to a new integration appropriate to the contemporary context.41 Within this integration a principle indispensa- ble to the understanding of transformation is that the overall process by which transformation takes place is not other than the process by which the world and all things come into being – the configuration will of course be different which is what distinguishes ‘transformation’ from being the continuing generation of

34 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 955. 35 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 952. 36 Bruteau, Worthy is the World, 36. 37 Cited in Bruteau, Worthy is the World, 37. 38 Cf. Bruteau, Worthy is the World, 37. 39 Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, Pondicherry 1973, 40. 40 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1029-1030. 41 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 37. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 245 more of the same. This principle is prominent in tantric theory and practice, the latter being of much interest to Sri Aurobindo particularly because inter alia it works deliberately with the energy dynamics of the body and of matter, as well as those of the ontologically prior domains, rather than ignoring or trying to escape from the body and matter.42 He says, ‘The integral yoga starts from the method of Vedanta to arrive at the aim of the Tantra’.43 So on his structural map he integrated the principles of cosmic origination with the dynamics of transformation and evolution. In so doing he established the principle that inte- gral transformation arises dynamically from this level of unity, the supramental, which is ontologically prior to multiplicity and diversity. He described the world process in terms of two complementary movements, infolding or involu- tion and unfolding or evolution. is the process in which the Spirit is involved in giving rise to all things and through which Spirit is infolded as the Origin within all things. Evolution is the progressive unfolding of Spirit, the unrolling of all things, from inconscient matter to life to mind, and onwards in what we now call spiritual evolution. The crucial point to internalise here is that creation in Sri Aurobindo’s cos- mology is not reduced to a once-off event ‘in the beginning’. Rather it is ongo- ing, continuous and happening from moment to moment, the constant mani- festation of all that is,44 as the invisible becomes visible. Putting one’s attention on this moment-by-moment coming-into-being, participating in it in one’s awareness, generates what I call a ‘felt-sense of createdness’, a term not used by Sri Aurobindo but implicit in his teaching.45 Integral here is that this continu- ous cosmic creativity is not only the generating of the visible levels of reality, (i.e., surface matter, and the superficial world and body), but is the origination of the ontologically prior invisible levels out of which the visible in turn arises. Although the invisible levels are, by definition, off our normal scale of visibility, they are just as real as ‘the surface’, that is to say, the world of ordinary sense- experience. The invisible levels include mind and the higher spiritual levels of consciousness as well as the inner levels of physicality, for example the subtle physical,46 not to mention the many other invisible realms and realities which constantly affect our identity and functioning. The point here is that since everything is coming into being moment by moment, it can either come into being according to the old configuration or in a new configuration, i.e.,

42 V.V. Merchant, ‘Sri Aurobindo, the Tantra and Kundalini’, in J. White (Ed.), Kundalini, Evo- lution and Enlightenment, New Delhi 1997, 76-92. 43 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 586. 44 Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, 98. 45 E.g. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 594. 46 Cf. Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, 99. 246 FELICITY EDWARDS transformed. This means that, as transformation takes place, it happens moment by moment, like now, this moment, precisely and only in the now. Through involution the Divine presence and activity is involved, infolded, in every level of being and in everything that happens; Spirit is constantly present in matter. This means that there is hidden in matter, in nature, the ‘secret power and principle of being […] and the inevitable force of the principle compelling the process of emergence of its inherent powers and characters, the essential fea- tures which constitute its reality’.47 Through the very process of its coming into being, nature is evolving and transformation is evolutionary; and we human persons are part of that evolutionary process, constituting evolution’s highest conscious point to date. What we have to know is that the higher domains are latent in the lower, equally dynamic and appropriately present, equally coming into being moment by moment from the supramental, the unmanifest becom- ing manifest. And, as the ultimate and only source, God is present in all of them. Sri Aurobindo incorporates this dynamic character of reality, and its aris- ing from and within the presence of God, into his structural map.48 Not surprisingly, the relationship between Sri Aurobindo’s types of experi- ence is reflected in how he came to speak of God, this in turn linking with the pattern of transformation, both conceptually and in practice. God, Brahman, the Divine, self-reveals and is experienced in three ‘poises’ or ways of being: transcendent (nirgu∞a – without qualities), immanent or cosmic, and personal (sagu∞a with qualities).49 All are the same Reality.50 The transcendent nirgu∞a brahman is foundational, and Sri Aurobindo’s Type 1 experience reflects this utter transcendence of God, the static, silent Absolute, the goal of the Nirvana type of self-transcendence. God as immanent and cosmic, as well as personal, were what he experienced definitively in Alipore Jail (Type 2). The relating of the static and dynamic aspects of God, in practice and in theoretical formula- tion, took him into the further ranges of human experience up to the supra- mental which, from the creation/ manifestation part of the map, borders on the unmappable ultimate sat-cit-ananda. This incorporates his Types 3 and 4 expe- riences. As concepts at the mental level, the static transcendence, dynamic immanence and personal nature of God are all mutually exclusive – which is one of the reasons why, for instance, the fundamentalist Christian or Hindu bhakta finds so little in common with the Theravada Buddhist who is engaged in transcending all categories, including the personal. But as the higher levels are experienced, starting with the intuitional as ‘integral truth-finder’ where ‘all

47 Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, 98. 48 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 995. 49 Cf. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Ch. 5. 50 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 555. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 247 existence discovers its unity’,51 the transcendent, cosmic and personal aspects of God are equally valid, true and necessary. Further, the aim of Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga is ‘union with the being, consciousness and delight of the Divine through every part of our human nature […] so that the whole may be trans- formed into a divine nature of being. Nothing less than this can satisfy the inte- gral seer because what he sees must be that which he strives to possess spiritu- ally and, so far as may be, become’.52 It is in our nature to become fully transcendent, fully cosmic and fully personal. It is our destiny. This means that we will not be fully personal, i.e., we will not realise our human potential, until we realise and effectively embody also our cosmic and transcendent aspects. Sri Aurobindo links this again with the three traditional ways to God, the paths of knowledge, works and love, the sadhana of the Gita which he had practiced in jail, and love takes pre-eminence: By knowledge we seek unity with the Divine in his conscious being; by works we seek also unity with the Divine in his conscious being, not statically, but dynam- ically, through conscious union with the divine Will; but by love we seek unity with him in all the delight of his being. For that reason the way of love […] is in the end more imperatively all-embracing than any other motive of Yoga.53 In this love all selves are one in the Self (vide infra). Sri Aurobindo’s Type 3 and 4 experiences built on Types 1 and 2 and, as he consolidated and integrated them, they took him beyond both the non-dual (Type 1) and the cosmic and personal devotional (Type 2) goals of the tradi- tional spiritual paths. His advanced path is spiritually integral and he says of it, ‘it took me ten more years of striving under a supreme spiritual guidance to trace it out […] and found the future’.54 During these years he was largely occupied with a ‘programme’ he received soon after his arrival in Pondicherry and which he referred to as the Sapta Chatusteya, which means simply ‘the seven sets of four elements’. Later he wrote of this as ‘a map of my advance’ which ‘had long been sketched out before me’.55 His ‘supreme inner guidance’ had given him the map, the means and the power/energy/dynamics (a favourite word of his), to follow it.56

51 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 556. 52 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 563 (my italics). 53 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 563. 54 Cited in Archives and Research 10 (1986) no.1, 101. 55 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 426. 56 The text of the Sapta Chatusteya can be found in the Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research 10 (April 1986) no. 1; and Sri Aurobindo presents its essentials in Synthesis of Yoga, Ch. 10ff. The Sapta Chatusteya is a highly technical document and discussion of it is not within the scope of this paper. Sri Aurobindo kept a record of his practice during this time, which has been pub- lished as ‘Record of Yoga’ in consecutive issues of Archives and Research between 1977 and 1994. 248 FELICITY EDWARDS

ONTOLOGY, EPISTEMOLOGY AND TRANSFORMATION – THE METHOD OF GOD IN THE WORLD

This section draws on some of the principles of being and knowing established above and adds others, to set out how Sri Aurobindo maps and uses them in presenting transformation in accordance with what he sees as ‘the method of God in the world’.57 Clearly both existence and consciousness are multidimensional. ‘There are different orders of reality’58 with gradations between them which are not reducible to one another, each having its specific and characteristic dynamics and principles. Mapping these orders of reality, Sri Aurobindo explains: There are in fact two systems simultaneously active in the organisation of the being and its parts: one is concentric, a series of rings or sheaths […] another is vertical, an ascension and descent, like a flight of steps, a series of superimposed planes with the supermind-overmind as the crucial nodus of the transition beyond the human into the Divine.59 The key principle here is that each level of being is a level of consciousness such that each has its corresponding epistemology. Sri Aurobindo verified this in his own consciousness. Within this framework he explains transformation, as he experienced it, as involving three related processes: ‘going within’, and the ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’ of consciousness. ‘Going within’ is ‘to find the inmost psy- chic being’ (the soul, rather than the psyche of western psychology) ‘and bring it out to the front, disclosing at the same time the inner mind, inner vital and inner physical parts of the nature. Next there must be an ascension, a series of conversions upwards and a turning down to convert the lower parts’.60 The process, and its results, are what he calls ‘the triple transformation’.61 Normally the first stage of transformation is psychisation and relates to the ‘going within’ procedure, while the spiritual transformation (spiritualization) and the supra- mental transformation (supramentalisation) build on that and relate to the ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’ of the planes of knowing and being. Once the process is under way the stages continue in such a way that the deepening or heightening of one may lead to more progress in one or both of the others. The processes of ‘going within’, ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’ are realistically and concretely possible because (a) the whole of manifest reality is coming into

57 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 42. 58 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 649. 59 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 251. 60 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 521. 61 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Ch. 25. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 249 being moment-by-moment (vide supra) and (b) all the levels of being and knowing are inter-related in a dynamic which we can, at least to an extent, grasp mentally, access and work with (vide infra). We are always already part of this dynamic in our nature; what is required is the ongoing expansion of our awareness to become conscious of it ever more profoundly and in its multidi- mensionality. The very consciousness of it will affect our being. These points need further explanation. The correlation between being and knowing applies throughout the creative process by which the multidimensional world, the Many, comes into existence in relation to the One. ‘Coming-into-being’ denotes a cosmogeny and, because its forces are not once-off but continuously active, it is also cosmology, a struc- ture of forces and energies, and their interrelations, by which the world works. Internalising this cosmology, if only in terms of a map, is itself part of the trans- formational process; to have even a mental conception of where one is going helps to reach towards the goal, even if the eventual destination is very different from how one originally conceived it. Off the top of the map, as it were, is the ultimate Reality, the infinite, the Brahman of the Upanishads. The divine self- existence is unknowable by the human mind but self-reveals to consciousness in experience as sat-cit-ananda, Being-Consciousness-Bliss. The nature of this Reality is consciousness (cit), which is to say that it is self-aware and all-aware. This consciousness is also uncreated energy or force, sakti, which can both hold itself at rest and release itself in movement. This understanding of conscious energy (cit-sakti) is fundamental to Sri Aurobindo’s work, as is the fact that the nature of conscious energy is bliss, ananda. So the infinite Reality is Being- Consciousness-Bliss, sat-cit-ananda. So far this is basic Vedanta. The mode of the Infinite in bringing its Truth into being, in and as the cre- ation, is the mode of self-limitation.62 ‘Self-limitation’ sets the pattern of how each successive level of the finite comes into being. And so from sat-cit-ananda there arises the next level of being which is the vijñana of the Upanishads and the mahat of the later Puranic tradition. This is Sri Aurobindo’s supramental level of being and knowing, also called the Supermind or Truth-Consciousness, and it holds a key position in his schema. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the supramental as having three movements: (1) where everything is in unity; (2) where the One and the One-as-Many are held in equilibrium; and (3) where the sense of manyness begins and the many preponderate over the unity. At this stage in Sri Aurobindo’s schema of mani- festation there arises the Overmind where ‘each of the Many enjoys its distinct- ness from others’ within the ‘governing, comprehending unity. This is the

62 Cf. M.P. Pandit, Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry 1998, 28-29. 250 FELICITY EDWARDS beginning of the movement that culminates in Mind with its principle of divi- sion’.63 Sri Aurobindo says: The supermind is the total Truth-Consciousness; the Overmind draws down the truths separately and gives them a separate activity – e.g. in the Supermind the Divine Peace and Power, Knowledge and Will are one. In the Overmind each of these becomes a separate aspect which can exist or act on its own lines apart from the others. When it comes down to Mind, they turn into an ignorance and an incapacity.64 So by continuing self-limitation from the supramental level down we get the lower half of the map, which, in descending order, consists of the Overmind, followed by the planes of mind (manomaya), of life (pra∞amaya) and of matter (annamaya). What is dynamising the process is the fact, understood by grasping at least mentally what the map displays, that, down to the depth of the matter at its most unconscious, the core of Consciousness is present (cf. his Type 3 experiences); Spirit is always there. Present, it is impelling the evolutionary process; active, it is giving rise to all that is. Through his ongoing experience Sri Aurobindo had come to see himself as being, as it were, on the fulcrum of the evolution of consciousness and his inte- gral yoga as a genuinely new and pioneering step into the future. Up to the present human level evolution has gone on unconsciously through matter, life and the lower levels of mind, slowly at first but picking up speed. Humanity as it is now is at a critical stage, a pivotal point, because the evolutionary process is becoming conscious; that is to say, we are becoming conscious of evolution and of ourselves as part of it. The choice is open to us now to become increas- ingly conscious of it and to participate ever more sensitively, profoundly and effectively in it, beginning with waking up to the knowledge of the soul, mak- ing it the master of life and action, and ipso facto operating in the world as spir- itual beings. By this deliberate and ‘growing conscious participation’ in the evo- lutionary process, evolution can be accelerated.65 Sri Aurobindo regarded the unconscious development of the physical forms, structures and functions iden- tified in Darwinian evolutionary theory as necessary to get us to our present state of consciousness but as secondary, now, to the evolution of consciousness. ‘Spiritual evolution’ is ‘the meaning of our existence here’.66 Through the conscious practice of ‘going within’ to the level of being and con- sciousness which is our true self and stabilising our awareness there, our con- sciousness can widen laterally as we become aware that that Self which is within

63 Pandit, Sri Aurobindo, 29. 64 Guidance from Sri Aurobindo (cited in Pandit, Sri Aurobindo, 29). 65 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 895, 924. 66 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 47. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 251 us is the Self in all beings and all things. This is the development of cosmic con- sciousness which is a further link with the Truth-consciousness, i.e., the supra- mental level. One realises the Self in and as the all, and becomes aware of oneself as ‘a centre of the divine existence’.67 In other words, we find God in all things and all things in God, and we find ourselves in all things and discover all things as our self. The felt-sense here is that all things are arising from the same divine source, moment by moment, such that ‘If there were not that Source of all things, there could be no universe’.68 The cosmic, dynamic manyness depends moment by moment on the One in its creative stillness – paralleled in Sri Aurobindo’s experience, for instance, in the way in which awareness of the dynamic Infinite arose within in his open waiting in the stillness of the formless Brahman. Linking experience into his map of the levels of consciousness, Sri Aurobindo found that who we experience ourselves to be at any time (i.e., our identity), depends on which level the consciousness centres and concentrates.69 This principle is characteristic of Sri Aurobindo’s teaching and is a way of expressing a major dynamic in the transformative process. Recognising the gra- dations of being is important; identifying with ever deeper and ever higher lev- els is indispensable. As we penetrate within and above, so consciousness becomes wider (more cosmic), and deeper and higher (more transcendent); our experience changes accordingly, as does our identity. Considering current human awareness/ experience as a whole, it is clear that we identify ourselves, most of the time, as individual egos, separate from everyone and everything else. This egocentric self-identification is an error in our present consciousness. It is an error in our self-knowledge, which is to say that we do not know our true selves, and this is a limitation, in reality, to settling for much less than we are. Of course we know this intellectually, or in some deeper felt-sense, but Sri Aurobindo advances us through this by his working with ignorance as well as with knowledge. Because, as he experienced it,70 light is present in darkness and truth in ignorance, it means that ignorance can be understood positively as ‘cloaked knowledge’71 and it ‘has an assigned place in the spiritual economy’.72 In terms of his structural map of transformation linking knowing and being, he identified this ‘self-ignorance’ as ‘many-sided’73 and he analysed it into seven dis- tinct types. This is a ground-breaking step and signals the way in, beyond the mental level and beyond the diffuse and disturbing sense that we do not know

67 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 390- 391, 415. 68 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 109. 69 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 235-236. 70 Cf. his Type 3 experience supra. 71 Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, 107. 72 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 319. 73 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 654. 252 FELICITY EDWARDS what we need to know, for, if ignorance is ‘cloaked knowledge’, then each type of ignorance provides a specific key as to how to break through that particular self- ignorance to the corresponding self-knowledge. In practice, it means that recog- nition of the particular type of ignorance in oneself indicates, mentally at least, how to overcome it by finding the truth concealed in the error. This is a princi- ple typical of Sri Aurobindo’s methodology.74 As the Rig Veda says,75 ‘Let the knower distinguish the Knowledge from the Ignorance’. This technical act of dis- crimination, viveka, is precisely what Sri Aurobindo is doing here.76 In doing this he is, as it were, plotting the coordinates of the different types or ignorance onto his structural map of transformation. This being the case, the specification of each different type of ignorance is important and Sri Aurobindo indicates in which ways each of the seven types misses the point.77

(1) Original ignorance: we see the world as self-existent and self-sufficient and as if the material domain is all there is, not knowing the Absolute as the source of all being and becoming. (2) Cosmic ignorance: we take the movement of life and its changes as the entire character of our reality without being aware that behind the changing world, and supporting it, is the Self, the Atman, beyond space and time and change. (3) Egoistic ignorance: Our mind, life and body are all organised round the ego- self which sees itself as separate from everything and sees everything and every- one else as ‘other’. The ego-self thinks it is autonomous and does not see that it is surrounded by the whole cosmos in all its dimensions and it is the whole that makes the life of this part, i.e., my individual existence, possible. This error is a serious limitation and we miss the unity that holds everything together. It is important to note here that when we speak of unity, ‘unity’ is a mental concept, not the concrete reality; this is part of the map, not the territory. (4) Temporal ignorance: we think the length of time between our birth and our death is the whole of our existence, not knowing that we participate in time in ways not apparent to the physical eye and the lower mind, and not appreciat- ing how time and eternity are related. (5) Psychological ignorance: we live psychologically ‘on the surface’, aware of very little of our own psyche, unaware of our own depths. We are conscious, for the most part, of only the most superficial movements of our minds and when it

74 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 690. 75 Rig Veda IV.2.11. 76 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 33. 77 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 654-655; cf. Pandit, Sri Aurobindo, 30-33 for summary. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 253 comes to feelings and emotions, at best we recognise these when they manifest on the surface, (for instance, when we are angry we can know that we are angry), without knowing how these movements ‘originate and formulate them- selves’. But this surface consciousness with which we identify is only a small part of our whole being. On Sri Aurobindo’s structural map there are four other major levels of our being in addition to the inconscient (vide supra), within each of which there are many subdivisions. These are: the subconscient (similar to the ‘subconscious’ of western psychotherapy); the superconscient (all the higher ranges of consciousness to which we ordinarily have little access); the intraconscient (the subtle consciousness supporting and manifesting the various ‘members of our being’; and the circumconscient, or ‘physical envelope’, which is like a ‘subtle envelope around the physical body, acting as a buffer between our physical being and the impacts from the world outside’. These are major ranges of our being, our depths, and in our ordinary state of consciousness we are not aware of them and carry on life as if they did not exist.78 (6) Constitutional ignorance: we are aware of the body directly and of the mind level and vital, life-force, level through their activities, e.g., we know we have a mind level because we are aware of thinking. This is right as far as it goes but the error arises in that we take any, or all three of these levels together, as if they con- stituted our entire principle of existence. ‘We are ignorant of what really consti- tutes them and determines by its inner presence their activity. We are not con- scious of the soul-principle that governs the whole complex of our being, directly and indirectly. We are not aware that by the emergence of this element from within, our lives begin to acquire a wholeness and a distinct individuality’.79 (7) Practical ignorance; we miss the enjoyment of our lives because, in all this unawareness of so much of what is going on, we are only partially living. The outcome is that, Our thought is incomplete, our will faltering, our sensations superficial, our actions stumbling. Our responses to the contacts and challenges of the world are imperfect and often wrong. We step from error to error. We are driven by igno- rant desires and impulses. Our efforts lack the necessary direction; and failures more than successes characterise our daily life. We live amidst the dualities of pain and pleasure, light and shade. We grope in vain for what we seek.80 As Sri Aurobindo applies the unitive and integral principles of his yoga to this, it means a ‘divinising of the whole nature, a rejection of all its wrong knots of being and action, but no rejection of any part of our being or any field of our

78 Cf. Pandit, Sri Aurobindo, 32. 79 Cf. Pandit, Sri Aurobindo, 32. 80 Pandit, Sri Aurobindo, 32-33. 254 FELICITY EDWARDS action’.81 So considering each of these seven types of ignorance as cloaked knowledge, Sri Aurobindo says that what is needed to counter them is, ‘a seven- fold self-revelation within our consciousness: it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the self’s becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of the true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separ- ative idea and the life of ego; the knowledge of our psychic entity (soul) and its immortal persistence in time beyond death and earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient and supramental being above them; and the knowledge, finally, of the true har- mony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divin- ity, the integral spiritual Reality’.82 This multiple ignorance, as Sri Aurobindo avers, is not only a matter of incorrect understanding. It precludes, moment by moment, our becoming our true self. We live at the mental level, egocentrically oriented, our being and knowing limited to the principles of the mental level, using language derived from experience ‘on the surface’ and the problem is that, using only mental operations, we simply cannot move beyond this. So however much we may learn more intellectually, widen our interests, and so on, this is all at the same level; it is more of the same. Mind can only deal with the surface but what is behind the mind the mind cannot know. We are not dealing with ‘intellectual knowledge which can be learned in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being’.83 The indispensable step in breaking out of this impasse is to develop beyond the mental level by accessing higher spiritual levels. So Sri Aurobindo empha- sises that starting where we are on the mental plane, the spiritual truths of expe- rience have to be recognised. Only by admitting (both in the sense of recognis- ing and in the sense of allowing in) the spiritual element in life and developing spiritual knowledge can we break through constitutional ignorance and get beyond the mental level of knowing – but to do this means dealing with psy- chological ignorance. Psychological ignorance means that our self-knowledge is limited to knowing our surface egoic being, when in fact this surface identity is the equivalent of a wave in relationship to the ocean. In reality we are the ocean

81 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 664. 82 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 655. 83 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 655 (my italics). BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 255 as well as the surface wave; we need to know and identify with, and thus be, the ocean that lies behind our life movements. But how do we do this? How do we develop spiritual knowledge which is not just adding concept to concept? By studying Sri Aurobindo’s conceptual framework we can know it mentally; but how can we become what we know? How do we reach that knowing which is also being? First there are two requisites consistently emphasised by Sri Aurobindo as indispensible: (1) personal endeavour84 in the form of faith,85 aspiration and effort, and (2) self-surrender to the Divine.86 He is insistent both that we can- not do this on our own87 and also that the divine grace is there as we surrender the little ‘I’ to God and cooperate with the divine will – to do which is also our highest destiny. ‘The greatest power of all is grace’.88 Grace ‘wells out from the divine consciousness as a free flow of its being’.89 So we need to be both active and receptive of all the help the Divine is giving us.90 Then, through effort, self-surrender and grace, we endeavour, by practice, to know and experience whatever is going on, moment by moment. We have to bring as much as possible of what is unconscious into consciousness. This is where specific spiritual practices, like various forms of meditation, are essential. In meditation, among the many other things that happen, we open to and access higher levels of consciousness and being, and we allow our consciousness to reorient around the higher level and our identity to reconfigure. This is an ongoing dynamic as we learn to experience more consistently our own con- sciousness, as well as its effects in the world, and we experience our self, the ‘I’, in the process of its transformation. ‘The “I” of this moment, the “I” of this life, is only a formation, a temporary personality […]: it is one step of the many steps of our evolutionary change, and it serves its true purpose only when we pass beyond it to a farther step leading nearer to a higher degree of conscious- ness and being’.91 We always have to ‘go beyond’. In ontological terms Sri Aurobindo sees this process as evolution from limi- tation of being to fullness and completion, and in epistemological terms, as growth from ignorance to knowledge. In mapping together knowing and being on his structural map, he is recognising that each plane or grade of reality has

84 E.g. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 78. 85 E.g. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 743. 86 E.g. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 922; The Synthesis of Yoga, 592-593. 87 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 104-105; The Life Divine, 921. 88 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 611. 89 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 790. 90 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 608- 610. 91 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 821. 256 FELICITY EDWARDS its own mode of knowing, i.e., its own epistemology. He distinguishes two basic modes of knowing: separative knowing and knowing by identity.92 At the mate- rial level all knowledge is separative. Our ordinary knowing of the world is at the mental level, linked with sense perception, recognising the surface only rather than the depths, and we know by making distinctions, separating this from that. In this type of knowing, the knower experiences herself or himself as external to what is known, and what is known is experienced as ‘other’; the ego level of awareness is identified with as ‘the self’ and everything else is excluded and experienced as ‘not-self’.93 Knowledge within the domain of the natural sciences, at least in the way it is normally understood, and before recent inter- pretations in quantum physics, is of this type. At the higher and deeper levels of being we know by identity, which means, precisely, knowing by becoming what we know. Here knowledge is not external and separative; rather we know interiorly and integratively. When we know the other in this mode, the other is not ‘other’ at all. So the crucial question may also be stated as, how does this transition hap- pen, this transition from separative knowledge to knowledge by identity? One part of Sri Aurobindo’s answer is that it happens because the divine being flows freely into our being as grace, which is why self-surrender to the Divine is of such importance, but that is to say, using a different part of the conceptual framework, that it happens because of the nature of reality itself, because of the dynamic multidimensionality of the planes and parts of our being. In this con- text the central key to transformation lies in the way the distinctive levels of being mutually interpenetrate, interact, modify and indwell one another (vide infra). We participate in this dynamic by surrender, trusting the process and engaging in the triple transformation of mind and psyche towards the supra- mental. As we go within, (the concentric circles part of the map, psychisation), we engage the levels of reality behind our physical surface being; as we go above, (the stairway part of the map, spiritualisation), we engage the levels higher than our ordinary mental activity, i.e. the higher spiritual levels of con- sciousness. It is a constant process of self-exceeding, of going beyond.94 In the context of the process of going within, one of the frameworks Sri Aurobindo uses is the Vedantic doctrine of ‘the sheaths’ which the later Puranic psychology referred to as ‘the bodies’, gross, subtle and causal95 and he calls this framework of ‘a practical formula’.96 For instance:

92 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 544. 93 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 530, 1017. 94 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 274-275. 95 E.g., Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 259; The Synthesis of Yoga, 435; Letters on Yoga, 253. 96 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 447; The Life Divine, 259. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 257

The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of the physical and vital being, termed the gross body and doubly composed of the food sheath (annakoÒa) and the vital vehicle (pra∞akoÒa), besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind-sheath or mental vehicle (man- akoÒa), a third, supreme and divine status of supramental being, termed the causal body and composed of a fourth and fifth vehicle (vijñanakoÒa and anandakoÒa) which are described as those of knowledge and bliss.97 These are ‘psychological concepts’ which correspond to ‘states of subjective exis- tence’ present within us.98 In the context of the ascent of consciousness the lev- els from the mental upwards are Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuitive Mind, to Overmind and the supramental.99 As the continually creative source, the supramental is the origin of the patterns and energies of transformation. ‘Man (sic), the microcosm, has all these planes in his own being, ranged from his subconconscient to his superconscient existence’.100 The order of levels of consciousness and being through which ascent is made is in a sense the inverse of the order of the levels of finite existence as it manifests from the infinite.101 This is why the process of manifestation was outlined above and why it is important to be internalising this cosmology. It is the nature of ‘nature’ to ascend to that which is beyond, to ‘transcend and integrate’, as can be seen fairly consistently, mutatis mutandis, throughout the evolutionary process. It is in the nature of the higher levels of consciousness also to descend, to interpenetrate and transform the lower. An obvious example of the latter is the descent of the Overmind in Sri Aurobindo’s Type 4 experi- ence, but ascent, descent and the surface-to-inner and inner-to-surface dynam- ics are happening all the time. In integral yoga ‘the reliance is on the power of the higher being to change the lower existence […] a working mainly from above downward’, and therefore the development of the superior power of the supramental consciousness, through the other ascending levels, as ‘the instru- mentative change’.102 In the process of going within or ascending from the physical and mental to the deeper or higher levels, one accesses increasingly subtle levels of being while the correlative mode of knowing shifts from the separative mode of the lower lev- els of cognition to knowing by identity. Knowledge by identity is the fundamen- tal nature of the supermind.103 In the transformational process the pattern is

97 The Synthesis of Yoga, 12. 98 Cf. The Synthesis of Yoga, 12-13. 99 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 938. 100 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 604. 101 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 13 and vide supra. 102 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 668. 103 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 507. 258 FELICITY EDWARDS similar from level to level. One’s consciousness first identifies temporarily and maybe very fleetingly with the next higher level. As the experience of the higher level of consciousness is repeated and becomes more stable, so this higher level becomes literally incorporated into one’s ontological composition.104 In this way the higher level comes into increasingly stable equilibrium so that this is now who one is. In the process the lower level is transcended, by definition, but, very importantly, rather than being rejected or left behind it is included and inte- grated – hence the pattern of transformation is ‘ascend and integrate’105 or, in dif- ferent terms, ‘transcend and include’. Nothing essential is rejected and all under- goes transformation.106 Each stage can lead to what lies beyond. From the highest level identified with, the whole being becomes integrated, reconfigured round this higher level and with a new higher centre of awareness. From this higher centre the structures and energies of the lower levels can be used as instruments of the higher with ‘new energy behind them’.107 Correlatively, one’s capacities become qualitatively different in accordance with the new higher level of identity, as latent abilities and potentials emerge, develop and become consolidated. Two features of are particularly significant here. Firstly, Sri Aurobindo mapped together God, the human person and all of reality within the same uni- tive framework, on the same structural map of transformation. Secondly and equally important is how Sri Aurobindo accounted for the dynamics of trans- formation in terms of the very structure of reality and its moment-to-moment ever-new arising. The planes of our being are such that they continuously inter- penetrate one another and mutually interact. Every level is potentially intercon- nected with every other. The planes and levels or phases of consciousness and being converge on one another and merge into one another.108 This is because ‘nature is a complex unity and not a collection of isolated phenomena’. There are no gaps, ‘no unbridgeable gulfs’ and, while the planes or levels must not be confused, they ‘may be said in a sense to exist in one another’109 and there is mutual modification going on all the time. While the originally patterned con- figurations tend to resist change, the effects of the newly arising levels reverber- ate down through the planes and parts of the being, bringing about waves of change consistent with their qualities and energies. This part of the process implies that the map itself, including the account of the dynamism of the layers, is assimilated originally at the mental level of our being. There, as information, it changes the structure of that level, but this is still the level of separative

104 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1028. 105 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Ch. 18 and pp. 934, 955ff. 106 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 654. 107 Cf. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 444, 600. 108 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 436. 109 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 434. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 259 thinking and ontological dualism such that there is an individual ‘I’ knowing these notions. Currently it is recognised that meaningful information in the mind changes the physiology of the person. For instance, seeing the bushes near your gate quiver in the moonlight could provoke terror and the consequential adrenalin sequence if you read the situation as one where a potential mugger is waiting for you to come home. But when your neighbour’s cat emerges from the bushes your physiology swings back, with relief, to normality. But this is body- mind functioning, not spiritual transformation. By contrast, when we admit, recognise and accede to the spiritual levels of reality we not only know these levels but are simultaneously, ipso facto, in the process of becoming them. ‘The mental realisation deepens into spiritual experience – a realisation in the very substance of our being’.110 Transcendence and integration come about con- comitantly. Of course this is not simple progress. There are the resistances, surges, swings and general strivings for equilibrium that characterise any dynamic system, but when there is positive change qualitatively and/or quanti- tatively this is what is meant by transformation. Further, because of the inter- connectedness of the planes of being from which all arise, when one person changes in this way, whatever change takes place in that one person affects oth- ers and the cosmos; transformation in one person is not only a positive change in that person but also a contribution to the transformation of the whole. As the result of the smallest change the whole comes into being differently.

Pursuing connections between Sri Aurobindo’s spirituality and other disciplines is not what this paper is about but brief mention may be made of three areas of particular relevance to readers of this journal where the connections are striking. Firstly, in the areas of Christian theology and spirituality much of Sri Aurobindo’s work is highly to the point and I suggest, as a theologian, that learning from him would advance us through many of our current theological conundrums and practical impasses. Two contemporaries in the field who have engaged with his work are theologian and philosopher Dr Beatrice Bruteau and the late English Benedictine, Fr Bede Griffiths, Cam. OSB, who was acharya of Saccidananda Ashram in South India (otherwise known as Shantivanam Ashram), from 1968 until his death there in 1993. I was told there that he read a section of Sri Aurobindo’s work every day and it was evident that Fr Bede’s own profoundly developed spirituality and at times pioneering theology owed a great deal to him.111 Secondly, many of Sri Aurobindo’s insights prefigure some

110 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 347-348. 111 In spite of, or perhaps partly because of, the correspondence between Fr Bede and K D Sethna (Amal Kiran) of the , published in 1996 as A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo. 260 FELICITY EDWARDS of the recent developments in transpersonal psychology and his influence is apparent in quite a few contemporary writers in the field. Ken Wilber, for instance, currently one of the leading transpersonal theorists, appears to have learnt much from him. Thirdly, the terms in which Sri Aurobindo describes the levels of reality as dynamic, constantly in motion, coming into being moment from a more subtle matrix, have been reflected, mutatis mutandis, much later and apparently without conscious influence, in several aspects of the work of the late David Bohm, particularly in his notion of the implicate order, with the super-implicate and super-super-implicate orders as increasingly subtle and ontologically prior levels of reality from which the implicate and the explicate (the surface phenomenal world) arise, and also in his interpretation of the rela- tionship between the whole and its parts. In contrast to contemporary scientific methodology which works with the principle that the whole can be known by knowing the parts, Bohm is recognised for his radical insistence that in the interpretation of the nature of reality we have to start with the whole and know the nature of the parts in relation to the whole. For Bohm this was true in the methodology of quantum physics and he explored parallels with conscious- ness.112 For Sri Aurbindo, supramental consciousness puts everything, including past, present and future, ‘in a single continuous map of knowledge’. So supra- mental knowledge ‘starts form the totality which it immediately possesses; it sees parts, groups and details only in relation to the totality. […] It starts from the unity and sees diversities only of a unity, not diversities constituting the one, but a unity constituting its own multitudes’.113 Sri Aurobindo experienced accessing the supramental level and at times its descent – as spoken of by the Rishis of old.114 His aim was to establish it in human nature, which would be the divinisation of the body and ultimately of the human community and cosmic existence. The rishis had not done this, or envisioned it as the goal of humanity. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the possibility of establishing and stabilising the supramental in human existence is unique to Sri Aurobindo, as is the dynamics of transformation through which he sought to attain it.

112 D. Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, London 1980; D. Bohm & B. Hiley, The Undi- vided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Physics, London 1993. 113 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 464. 114 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 101. BECOMING WHAT WE KNOW 261

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources Sri Aurobindo: 1970a. The Synthesis of Yoga 1970b. Letters on Yoga (Vols I, II and III) 1972. Sri Aurobindo on Himself – Complied from Notes and Letters 1973. The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth 1987. The Life Divine 1992. Uttarpara Speech 1994. The Upanishads 1998. The Human Cycle All published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, Pondicherry.

Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research. Published twice a year by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Relevant issues are those between 1977 and 1994.

Secondary sources Bohm, D., Wholeness and the Implicate Order, London 1980. Bohm, D, ‘Fragmentation and Wholeness in Religion and Science’, in: Zygon 20 (1985) no.2, 125-133. Bohm. D., ‘Science, Spirituality and the Present World Crisis’, in: Revision 15 (1993) no.4, 147-152. Bohm, D., & B. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quan- tum Physics, London 1993. Bruteau, B., Worthy is the World: The Hindu Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, New Jersey 1971. Dikawar, R.R., Mahayogi: Life, Sadhana and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo, Bombay 1988. Dutt, S.A.C., Light to Superlight: Unpublished Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Calcutta 1972. Feys, J., The Life of a Yogi, Calcutta 1976. Griffiths, B., & K.D. Sethna, A follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo: Cor- respondence between Bede Griffiths and K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran), Waterford (CT) 1996. Langley, G.H., Sri Aurobindo: Indian Poet, Philosopher and Mystic, London 1949. Lauchlin, C.D., J. McManus & E.G. d’Aquili, ‘Mature Contemplation’, in: Zygon 28 (1993) no.2, 134-176. Lauchlin, C.D., J. McManus & J. Shearer, ‘Transpersonal Anthropology’, in R.N. Walsh & F. Vaughan (Eds), Paths beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision (pp. 190- 195), Los Angeles 1993. Maitra, S.K., The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy, Pondicherry 1968. Merchant, V.V., ‘Sri Aurobindo, the Tantra and Kundalini’, in J. White (Ed), Kun- dalini, Evolution and Enlightenment (pp. 76-92), New Delhi 1997. Mukherjee, J.K., The Destiny of the Body, Pondicherry 1975. Pandit, M.P., The Yoga of Transformation, Pondicherry 1989. 262 FELICITY EDWARDS

Pandit, M.P., Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry 1998. (The Builders of Indian Philosophy Series) Purani, A.B., The Life of Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry 1958. Satprem, Sri Aurobindo: The Adventure in Consciousness, Pondicherry 1968. Tart, C., ‘States of Consciousness and State-specific Sciences’, in R.N. Walsh & F. Vaughan (Eds.), Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology (pp. 23-43), Los Angeles 1980.

SUMMARY

One of the key questions in the study of spirituality is, ‘How do we become what we know?’ This paper presents some aspects of the answer given by Sri Aurobindo, one- time freedom fighter, who pioneered, described and mapped the dynamics of spiritual transformation as he experienced it. His spirituality is integral in that it involves the whole of life and in that one of its central principles is the integration of the lower in the higher in the process of the transformation of all levels of the person, including the body, to their highest divine-human potential. He speaks of the unfolding and devel- opment of integral spiritual consciousness through what he calls ‘the triple transforma- tion’. The breakthrough in transformation beyond cognitive, theoretical formulations is related ontologically to the nature of reality as it is, in all its parts and planes. Certain aspects of the interpretation of contemporary quantum physics may be seen to coincide with aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s findings. Transformation depends on the descent of the Divine and requires of us effort, faith and ever increasingly complete surrender to God. The central section of the paper relates Sri Aurobindo’s four main types of experience of God to his knowledge of the Divine as transcendent, cosmic and personal, and to the dynamics of transformation. The last section looks at some aspects of the interrelation- ships between ontology, epistemology and transformation – in Sri Aurobindo’s words, ‘the method of God in the world’.

Felicity Edwards, born 1935 in London (England), is Emeritus Professor in Contemporary Spirituality at the Rhodes University, Grahamstown (South Africa). Address: 16 Constitution Street, Grahamstown, 6139 South Africa E-mail: [email protected]