CONTINUED FROM PART 1
Editor’s Note: In this part, the author emphasizes Sri Aurobindo’s yogic work for the earth’s sublime destiny.
Earth: The Axis of Sri Aurobindo’s Action
In our country where a large majority believe in the concept of rebirth, it is easy to find those who are eager to know about their past lives or are concerned about their future lives. Very seldom are souls around who want to meet and greet life here and now, on this very planet. Even many ‘spiritual masters’ and their disciples deal mostly with questions of and their solutions for the afterlife. There is a growing tendency to know more and more about the fallacies of heaven or hell and to remain hazy and evasive on the burning questions of life on the earth.
Sri Aurobindo adopts a radically different approach regarding this issue. He is a lover of earth and earth alone is the pivot, the radius and the circumference of his Sadhana. He is afflicted with questions of this earth, human possibilities on earth and Life’s story of evolution and spiritual revolution.
Sri Aurobindo wants heaven on earth!
He wants to see men turning into gods through the power of yoga and spirituality. He wants to sow the perpetual seeds of divine humanity here on earth and bond of bonhomie among men and nations. Not bothered with the threats of imaginary hells and the temptations of rosy heavens, the compassionate Avatar in Sri Aurobindo wants to involve himself with the eventful human story and all its twists and turns. In one of his letters, he wrote,
I am concerned with the earth and not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object.
~CWSA, Vol. 29, pp. 482-483
Earth, for Sri Aurobindo, is the ‘heroic spirit’s battlefield’ (Savitri, p. 686), where the Divine envisages and shapes his dreams. Hence, earth is real, a playfield of Lord’s Lila and not an imagination or illusion. Sri Aurobindo came for the earth and worked for the earth’s sublime destiny. And finally, he sacrificed for the future of the earth.
Earth is his only mirth, his cross, crucible, workshop and laboratory of the new man with a new consciousness. He wants to create heaven on earth through the solid realization of the powers of Love, Truth, Bliss and Harmony. “Earth cannot flower if lonely I return” – thunders protagonist Savitri in the epic who is determined to recover the truth consciousness back for earth (Savitri, p. 637).
Sri Aurobindo’s Most Revolutionary Cry: Man is Not the ‘Final Essay of Nature’
One of the most important messages that Sri Aurobindo delivered is his prophecy about the promise that is man. Sri Aurobindo is not satisfied with the present man on earth and never takes him as ‘the best creation of the Creator’. The present man is more a promise than a Perfection. He is more a potential than embodiment of Power and more a receptacle than Rapture incarnate.
Sri Aurobindo writes that to be satisfied with small, banal, bucolic, insignificant and imperfect mould is not the modus operandi of Nature. Nature works until perfect perfection is achieved and is never at a halt before that. How can a perfect and impeccable Nature accept raw, unregenerate and imperfect man? ‘Man is not final’ — is, therefore, one of the most fundamental heralds of Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar of new humanity, new age and new consciousness.
Man is a transitional being, he is not final. He is a middle term of the evolution, not its end, crown or consummating masterpiece.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 12, p. 221
Man is not final, he is a transitional being. Beyond him awaits formation of diviner race, the superman.
Sri Aurobindo elucidates why man is not final and the pithy pinnacle of evolutionary summit:
This imperfect thinker embarrassed by the limitations of his brain and senses, this ignorant mind seeking after the truth of himself and things and never arriving at a certain knowledge, this stumbling reasoner capable only of speculation and stiff logical conclusions but not of indubitable conclusions or of a complete or direct knowledge… this thing of bundles of ideas and sensations and lusts and longings, this hunter after forms and formulas, this suffering and sorrowing mixture of wisdom and imbecility we call man is not the final essay of Nature, her last word, the crown of her evolution, the summit of consciousness, her master creation.
~Ibid., pp. 232-233
Sri Aurobindo came to intervene in ephemeral conditions.
He came to turn the ordinary man into an extraordinary superman, the New Man. With the transformation of man will be gained the transformation of earth. Man is the key; man has with him the key to earth’s ultimate efflorescence, the supreme spiritual evolution.
The majestic march of man is an eventful walk on the inner path from darkness and drossness towards light and luminosity, from suicidal swagger to the crown of true humility, from endless pain to infinite Bliss, from the disgrace of self-pity to the majesty of absolute self -control, from the puerile path of information to the summit of direct knowledge, from reasoned fumbling to the fragrance of wisdom ineffable.
Sri Aurobindo sees the glory and greatness of man in his imperfection because therein lies the key to his life, the secret of his secrets. Man should never whine at his imperfection because, this imperfection is “not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self -development and self-exceeding” (CWSA Vol. 25, p. 234).
It can be said that man’s dissatisfaction with himself and his limits, his sense of hollowness, his anger of limited progress, his hunger for more and more realization is a blessed state of evolution. Man’s dissatisfaction with himself is God’s greatest satisfaction with man! In The Life Divine, he speaks of this glory again, “He [man] is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations” (CWSA Vol. 21, p. 51)
Concluding Thoughts
Sri Aurobindo’s profound intervention in earth’s condition through his Avataric efflorescence is yet to find full acceptance from the world. He is still not read and reflected on in his own country. Mainstream intellectuals are still unaware of his manifold contribution to India and to the world. He came out of love, empathy, maitri, loving kindness and with a great vision to open before humanity the possibility of actual liberation and freedom from shackles of all shades.
Thankfullly, his work is going on subtly, silently and without even the slightest clamour and glamour. Eight billion people of ‘this little whirling globe’ (Savitri, p. 330) and all two hundred odd countries are the receptacles of Sri Aurobindo’s spirituality. He belongs to all. Let us hope that our world opens its mind to Sri Aurobindo as thirsty desert sand opens its heart for vernal showers.
I often feel tempted to quote the following message from Dr. Nirodbaran, one of the closest cohorts of Sri Aurobindo in the last earthly years of the Master:
Never has there been recorded in earth-history a phenomenon where a person of Sri Aurobindo’s supreme eminence has lived secluded from the world-gaze and quietly and unobtrusively passed away. Such a complete self-effacement can be thought of only of one who is a god or who has become a god. It is certain that one day the world will wake up to realize who he was and what it owes to him as he becomes more and more enlightened in its consciousness.
~ Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, p. 273
CONCLUDED
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