Editor’s Note: The author highlights that the essence of Sri Aurobindo’s Avataric work is the complete transformation of the earth-nature.
Sri Aurobindo defines Avatar as a “Godward consciousness acting upon the soul of the individual and the soul of the race, so that it may receive new forms of revelation of the Divine in man and may be sustained, renewed and enriched in its power of upward self-unfolding.” (CWSA, Vol. 19, p. 168).
At various points in history we find that the Divine intervenes and gives a push so to say, to the human evolutionary struggle to effect some change or for breaking a new path so that the evolution can move forward. Parashurama appeared to correct the unbridled violence and unrighteous license of the Kshatriya class. Rama appeared to destroy the Rakshasa menace and to spell out an ideal Kshatriya idea, to establish the rule of the Sattvic man. Each Avatar comes to fulfil a specific purpose for which the time is ripe. So what was the Avataric work of Sri Aurobindo?
Casting a deep, penetrative look at the stage of evolution that mankind is in right now, we find that for centuries we have been stuck in a kind of existential and evolutionary rut – suspended between two metaphysical poles: those who affirm Matter and deny the Spirit, and those who affirm Spirit and deny Matter. The Materialist’s Denial or the Ascetic’s Refusal – these are the terms used by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine.
The entire Western world enamoured of its material riches is stuck in the first groove. And the Eastern world is stuck in the second – following Buddha for whom the world is Dukkha and redemption lying in the transcendental plane of Nirvana, or Shankara for whom the world is Maya, Mithya or Illusion and the end of life being Mokhsa – a union with Brahman – again in a transcendental dimension beyond this world.
“Escape, however high, redeems not life”
For a long time it had been either the denial of the Spirit or the denial of Matter. There was hardly any way to reconcile both. Perhaps because that work was left for Sri Aurobindo. As the Avatar of Tomorrow, Sri Aurobindo showed to mankind that the summum bonum of human life cannot be the denial or escape from life.
But how shall a few escaped release the world?
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, CWSA, Vol. 34, p. 448
The human mass lingers beneath the yoke.
Escape, however high, redeems not life,
Life that is left behind on a fallen earth.
Escape cannot uplift the abandoned race
Or bring to it victory and the reign of God.
Against the hallowed and revered states of Moksha and Nirvana, which for centuries were considered the ultimate aim of life, Sri Aurobindo makes the bold statement: “How shall a few escaped release the world?… Escape, however high, redeems not life.” This authority can only come from someone who himself is an Avatar!
Only the everlasting No has neared
~ Savitri, CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 310
And stared into they eyes and killed thy heart:
But where is the Lover’s everlasting Yes…
So far mankind had only found the way of the “everlasting No.” It was Sri Aurobindo’s work to lay down the path for the “everlasting Yes.”
For Sri Aurobindo, Matter and Spirit are not two antipodes or irreconcilable binaries – but two sides of the same coin of Reality. Matter is Spirit. Spirit and Matter are one – Ekam-eva-advitiyam. In Sri Aurobindo’s vision:
The Spirit’s tops and Nature’s base shall draw
~ Savitri, CWSA, Vol. 34, p. 709
Near to the secret of their separate truth
And know each other as one deity.
The Spirit shall look out through Matter’s gaze
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face.
Matter is nothing but Spirit veiled and buried under layers of Inconscience and Nescience and it is only a matter of time when Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face. So there is no question of denying the world or escaping from the world. Not denial or escape from Matter but transformation of Matter – that is what Sri Aurobindo envisioned. For him, Nirvana or Moksha was not an end in itself. Sannyasa was not an ideal for him. He was staunchly against the idea of the abandonment of the world for the sake of personal liberation. This is a radical departure from the approaches of the earlier prophets and teachers.
That is why in Sri Aurobindo’s mystical-spiritual epic, Savitri, after winning her victory over Death, strongly rejects even the joys of everlasting heaven (Moksha/Nirvana) and chooses Earth for the redemption of mankind.
I climb not to Thy everlasting Day…
~ Ibid., pp. 685-686
Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield…
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven…
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all….
From Mind to Supermind
For all the other great teachers in the past, man as he is now, was the final term of God’s creation. But for Sri Aurobindo, man is a transitional being. For he says that the whole journey of mankind has been a gradual unfoldment of evolution of consciousness, – from Matter to Life to Mind, it has been a gradual evolution of consciousness.
Life evolves out of Matter because it is already involved in it. You cannot take out of a bag what has not been put in there before! For an evolution to take place, there has to be an evolutionary push. Sri Aurobindo explains in The Life Divine, nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not therein already contained. There seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life.
He further adds that the evolution of consciousness has not cried a halt at the level of the Mind but is progressing towards the next higher level – of the Supermind. If the animal can be said to be a living laboratory in which Nature has worked out Man, then Man himself may be a living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the Superman, the god. This divine destiny of Man has not been chalked out by any Avatar in the past.
However, we should not get the impression that it is an immediate jump from the Mind to the Supermind. For Sri Aurobindo tells us that between the Mind and the Supermind, there are four intervening stages, four higher levels of the mind through which the human mind has to carry out its upward climb towards the ethereal height of the Supermind.
Though the acclaimed Western psychologists from Freud to Adler to Jung have given us a blueprint of the levels below the mind – unconscious, subconscious, collective unconscious and so on – they have hardly uttered a word about what lies above the mind. This was the work of Sri Aurobindo. He not only spelt out Supermind as the final evolutionary destiny of man but also the four intermediate levels that lead up from Mind to the Supermind. He also mapped the higher levels of the mind with precise terminology and the nature and character of each of these levels:
| Higher Mind | Unitarian sense of being, mass ideation, comprehending relations in an integral manner |
| Illumined Mind | Seeing things not by Thought but of spiritual Light, by vision. A kind of truth-seeing |
| Intuitive Mind | Nearer and more intimate to getting knowledge by identity. Its powers being truth-seeing, truth-hearing or inspiration, truth-touch and discrimination |
| Overmind | A cosmic consciousness where individuality is still retained. Revelations come from this plane |
No one other than Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar who would bring down the Supermind, could do such precise mapping of the higher states of consciousness above the mind.
Transformation of the Earth-nature
Satprem in his book The Adventure of Consciousness writes that if the subconscient is our evolutionary past, the Superconscient is our evolutionary future. When Life appeared during the course of our evolutionary journey, it changed the nature of Matter itself. And in its turn when Mind appeared, it changed the nature of Matter and Life. With the appearance of Supermind, it would mean the change of Matter, Life and Mind.
Sri Aurobindo was not interested in the salvation of the individual or in the escape into some transcendental plane in Nirvana – for that has been the work of the Avatars of the past. His work consisted nothing short of redemption of the whole of mankind and transformation of the earth-nature itself by the supramental consciousness.
But Sri Aurobindo made it clear that the Supermind was not just another higher level of the mind but was a different kind of consciousness altogether.
The Supermind is an entirely different consciousness not only from the spiritualised Mind, but from the planes above spiritualised Mind which intervene between it and the supramental plane. Once one passes beyond Overmind to Supermind, one enters into a consciousness to which the norms of the other planes do not at all apply and in which the same Truth, e.g. Sachchidananda and truth of this universe, is seen in quite a different way and has a different dynamic consequence.
~ CWSA, Vol. 28, p. 134
If the Supramental consciousness had to be brought down to the earthly plane, it could not be done with the usual methods of Yoga which were in vogue till then and which were sufficient and adequate means for the attainment of individual salvation. If the goal was the descent of the Supermind and the transformation of the earth-nature itself, then the individual paths of Jnana, Bhakti or Karma yoga were not adequate because they transformed only some aspect of our being.
For the bringing down of the supramental consciousness, our entire nature had to undergo a transformation and that was the aim of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. He writes,
The way of yoga followed here has a different purpose from others, – for its aim is not only to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of the mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter.
~ Ibid., p. 19
And giving the philosophical justification and the need for Integral Yoga, he writes,
The universe is not only a material but a spiritual fact, life not only a play of forces or a mental experience, but a field for the evolution of the concealed spirit. Human life will receive its fulfilment and transformation into something beyond itself only when this truth is seized and made the motive force of our existence and the means of its effective realisation discovered. The means of realisation is to be found in an integral Yoga, a union in all the parts of our being with the Divine and a consequent transmutation of all their now jarring elements into the harmony of a higher divine consciousness and existence.
~ Ibid., p. 374
Also read:
The Mother on Sri Aurobindo’s Avataric Work
In The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo spells out the destiny of the evolving human consciousness in these words:
The ascent of man into heaven is not the key, but rather his ascent here into the spirit and the descent also of the Spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly nature. For that and not some post mortem salvation is the real new birth for which humanity waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course.
~ CWSA, Vol. 25, p. 265
Mankind is still plodding along this long and winding road towards a new birth. But the way to the next evolutionary leap from mind to the Supermind, the way of Integral Yoga, has been shown by Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar. Now it is up to us to walk that road and reclaim that divine destiny for ourselves, as well as for mankind as Sri Aurobindo had envisioned it.
~ Design: Beloo Mehra
