Volume V, Issue 8
Author: Georges van Vrekhem
Continued from PART 4
Editor’s Note: In this concluding part, the author focuses on the Complete Avatar that are Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, connecting their work to the Kalki Avatar from Sanatana Dharma tradition.
5. The Complete Avatar
“There are Two who are One and play in many worlds … This whole wide world is only he and she …” wrote Sri Aurobindo in Savitri (pp. 61-63). The Two-in-One at the origin of the Manifestation were not only known in the Indian tradition, they were also part of the wisdom traditions elsewhere in the world. There was the Absolute, self-existent and self-sufficient in its eternal existence, sometimes called the Silent Brahman; but there was also the duality in the Active Brahman, the self-manifesting Divine, of Ishwara and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti.
A Gnostic text from the second century CE has the Great Mother say in words which echo the Vedic scriptures:
It is I who am the offspring of what gave birth to me
[what gave birth to her being the One];
And it is I who am the Mother
[the Great Mother, the one original transcendent Shakti];
It is I who am the wife
[Shakti to Ishwara, in human metaphorical language];
It is I who am the virgin
[for ever the untouchable Origin of all] … etc.
Until now, and throughout the course of the evolution of life on Earth, the Avatars have always been of the male gender, and a female Avatar may seem rather unorthodox, especially to people familiar of old with the line of male Avatars. It is however obvious that one gender does not represent the full human constitution and condition, nor does it take into account the divine sexless Archetype which supports the evolution and directs it towards its goal.1 The time has come to draw the full conclusions from certain well-known formulations by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Mother and I are one but in two bodies.”
“The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. … If anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers.” “Whatever one gets from the Mother, comes from myself also – there is no difference.” “The Mother and myself stand for the same Power in two forms.”
~ CWSA, Vol. 32, pp. 79-82
The Mother wrote: “Without him, I exist not; without me, he is not manifest.” (CWM, Vol. 13, p. 32) (Cf. Sri Aurobindo: “There is one force only, the Mother’s force – or, if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo’s Force.”) “Sri Aurobindo and I are always one and the same consciousness, one and the same person.” (Agenda, Vol. 1, p. 117)
“When in your heart and thought you will make no difference between Sri Aurobindo and me, when to think of Sri Aurobindo will be to think of me and to think of me will mean to think of Sri Aurobindo inevitably, when to see one will mean inevitably to see the other, like one and the same Person – then you will know that you begin to open to the supramental force and consciousness.”
~ CWM, Vol. 13, p. 32
And at one time she unified in writing both their names in the mantric formula “mothersriaurobindo is my refuge”. (ibid.)
All this is of crucial importance because the mission of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was to effect the transition of our human world to a new, supramental world, to “the life divine.” The supramental being will be a-sexual, sexuality having been a means of Nature to render the evolution of life possible. This is the reason why the Avatar of the Supermind, transcending the evolutionary sexuality, had to be male/female in one, while still, because of the evolutionary necessity, incarnated in two bodies.
The Mother’s remark about the white warrior with the halberd, a figure of her own vital, also refers to this: “He was a-sexual, by which I mean that he was neither female nor male.” And those familiar with her work in the Ashram will no doubt remember how, in the youth of the Ashram School, she worked to create a mentality surpassing the common sexual attitudes in order to prepare them for the transition to an asexual species.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were one being, one Avatar. They were:
…the deathless Two-in-One,
~ from Savitri (p. 295, 411, 399)
A single being in two bodies clasped,
A diarchy of two united souls.
In a new act of the drama of the world
The united Two began a greater age.
An hour began, the matrix of new Time.
6. The Kalki Avatar
In Hinduism, the Kalki Avatar is thought of as the last of the succession of Avatars, who will come at the end of the present Kali Yuga. The victor of the last, decisive battle with the hostile forces, he will ride on a white (winged) horse and brandish a sword or scimitar. He will vanquish Yama, or Death, and resolve all opposites as well as overcome darkness. He will be the divine man, at one with infinite divinity.
Sri Aurobindo wrote, however: “Too much importance need not be attached to the details about Kalki – they are rather symbolic than an attempt to prophesy details of future history. What is expressed is something that has to come, but it is symbolically indicated, no more.” (CWSA, Vol. 28, p. 489).
The description of the Avatars dates from the Puranas, in other words from a traditional view that saw the evolution of the cosmos as cyclic. As mentioned before, the Aurobindonian conception of the cosmic evolution is cyclic but progressive. Although the evolutionary development can be traced back to the ancient Hindu scriptures, as did Sri Aurobindo, the general thinking and imagining did not take evolution into account, and one may say that the supramental transformation of the human species into divine beings was not a part of the traditional vision.
In his book Dasavatara – The Ten Incarnations of Vishnu, V. Ashok, for instance, writes:
“Lord Vishnu mounted on a white horse, with a drawn scimitar, blazing like a comet will come to end the present Kali Yuga and inaugurate a reign of universal goodness, peace and prosperity, renovate the creation with an era of purity, a Krita Yuga. The four Yugas will then proceed in the same order once again, with similar characteristics, and this process will repeat itself till the final dissolution or Mahapralaya. …
“At this nadir in human existence a divine Being, who comprehends all things and is the beginning and the end, shall descend upon the earth. He will be born in the family of Vishnuyasas, an eminent brahmin of Sambal village, as Kalki. He will be endowed with eight superhuman faculties. He will destroy the mlechchas, thieves and all those whose minds are set on wickedness.
“He will then re-establish righteousness on earth, and the minds of the good people who survive at the end of Kali Yuga will be awakened and be made as clear as crystal. These men, who are changed in virtue of that particular time, shall be those who will give birth to a race which shall follow: the Krita Aga or Age of Purity.”
~ pp. 292-294
Sri Aurobindo has closely related the Kalki Avatar with the Krishna Avatar.
Krishna is the Anandamaya, he wrote. And added, “he supports the evolution through the overmind leading it towards Ananda.” Further, “… the last Avatar, Kalki, only accomplishes the work Krishna began – he fulfils in power the great struggle which the previous Avatars prepared in all its potentialities …”.
“Krishna opened the possibility of overmind with its two sides of realization, static and dynamic. Buddha tried to shoot from mind to Nirvana in the Supreme, just as Shankara did in another way after him. Both agree in overleaping the other stages and trying to get at a nameless and featureless Absolute.
“Krishna on the other hand was leading by the normal course of evolution. The next normal step is not a featureless Absolute, but the supermind. I consider that in trying to overshoot, Buddha like Shankara made a mistake, calling away the dynamic side of the liberation. Therefore there has to be a correction by Kalki.”
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 28, p. 488
“No system indeed by its own force can bring about the change that humanity really needs; for that can only come by its growth into the firmly realized possibilities of its own higher nature, and this growth depends on an inner and not an outer change.
“But outer changes may at least prepare favourable conditions for that most real amelioration – or on the contrary they may lead to such conditions that the sword of Kalki can alone purify the earth from the burden of an obstinately Asuric humanity. The choice lies with the race itself; for as it sows, so shall it reap the fruit of its Karma.”
~ CWSA, Vol. 25, pp. 661-662
Mothersriaurobindo: the Kalki Avatar
Here the time has come to repeat our question at the beginning: According to the Hindu tradition, the evolution of life and consciousness on Earth has been supported by a succession of Avatars. If Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were Avatars, or an Avatar, what or which Avatars or Avatar were they?
The reason that this question has to be put now, sixty years after Sri Aurobindo left his body and thirty-seven years after the Mother left hers [this article is dated 2011], may have been the misleading picture of the Kalki Avatar as upheld by tradition: a male warrior on a white horse with a sword.2
The reality seems to be quite different, although it agrees in every detail with the world as it has evolved since ancient times.
Divinization, i.e. supramentalization of humanity in a material Earth, requires a more complete representation of the human being, it requires the complete male/female Avatar. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, two great warriors in one, waged the last battles against the hostile forces, some of which we know about (e.g. the twentieth century wars), most of which we are ignorant of, as we are ignorant of the totality of their being and action.
Their all-important mission as the last Avatar was to lay the foundations of a new, supramental world, in which “evolution itself will evolve.” (In 1956, after the supramental manifestation, the Mother cried out, almost chanted: “A new world is born, born, born!”)
Most important, and rarely referred to, was the role Sri Krishna played in Sri Aurobindo’s avataric realization, thereby demonstrating Sri Aurobindo’s statement: “The last Avatar, Kalki, only accomplishes the work Krishna began.”
Sri Krishna was the guide of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, as well in Alipore Jail, when studying the Gita and putting it into practice, as in Pondicherry, where it was from Sri Krishna that he received the detailed programme of his yoga. The Thoughts and Aphorisms and The Record of Yoga bear witness to this. In 1926 Sri Krishna descended into Sri Aurobindo’s body. This means that from 1926 till 1950 Sri Krishna was incarnated on Earth, without anybody being aware of it. (This may, moreover, be the reason that the light or aura of Sri Krishna and Sri Aurobindo is the same light blue light.)
About the historical Krishna, king of the Vrishnis, Sri Aurobindo wrote:
“I suppose very few recognized him as an Avatar – certainly it was not at all a general recognition. Among the few those nearest to him do not seem to have counted – it was less prominent people like Vidura etc.
“Those who were with Krishna were in all appearance men like other men. They spoke and acted with each other as men with men and were not thought of by those around them as gods. Krishna himself was known by most as a man – only a few worshipped him as the Divine.”
~ CWSA, Vol. 28, pp. 499-500
The same could now be said about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who are hardly known outside the circles of their followers, and, if known, not recognized for what they were and did – for what they are and are doing.
Krishna, like Christ and the other Avatars, has only gradually grown into a recognized incarnation of the Divine. It would actually be better to say “a generally recognized incarnation of the Divine,” given the ease with which chelas see their guru, sometimes rightly, as a realized being which they declare, unrightly, to be an Avatar. The task of the Avatar is always out of the ordinary, relevant for the whole of humanity, and revolutionary, initiating a radical new element in the spiritual evolution of life on Earth.
In 1957, the Mother said:
“The intervals separating these various incarnations seem to become shorter and shorter, as if, to the extent that Matter became more and more ready, the action could accelerate and become more and more rapid in its movement, more and more conscious too, more and more effective and decisive.”
~ CWM, Vol. 9, pp. 333-334
The dazzling pace at which Mother Earth and her human offspring are changing, in ways unprecedented in history, is a sure sign that something huge is happening, equivalent to the coming about of a new world, which could only be effected by the spiritual and material action of the ultimate Avatar, Sri Kalki.
Notes
- Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have stressed time and again that the divine Purusha, the Supramental Being at the origin of creation is asexual, and that the sexes are a means created by Nature on her lower levels to attain her ends.
- In persons knowledgeable about Christianity, this image will bring to mind the figure of the Messiah in the biblical book of Revelation, written by John of Patmos. The Mother herself pointed out the similarity: “Saint John has said that there would be a new earth – that, moreover, there would be a new Christ who corresponds with the one of the Hindus. Yes, Kalki. The description is quite similar.”
CONCLUDED
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