Footprints of God

Cave of Tapasya

Bringing down the spiritual into the material

A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,

And to discern the superhuman's form

He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights,

Aspiring to bring down a greater world.. . .

His soul retired from all that he had done.

Hushed was the futile din of human toil. . . .

The Silence was his sole companion left. . . .

A universal light was in his eyes,

A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;

A Force came down into his mortal limbs,

A current from eternal seas of Bliss. . . .

A living centre of the Illimitable

Widened to equate with the world's circumference,

He turned to his immense spiritual fate.

Sri Aurobindo

Pondicherry is my place of retreat, my cave of tapasya, — not of the ascetic kind, but of a brand of my own invention.

*

Preparing the ground for the new path: 12 July 1911

I need some place of refuge in which I can complete my Yoga unassailed and build up other souls around me. It seems to me that Pondicherry is the place appointed by those who are Beyond, but you know how much effort is needed to establish the thing that is purposed upon the material plane. ...

I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane, and I am now able to put myself into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind. ...

What I perceive most clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness, of error in order that the Truth I shall eventually show to men may be perfect, and of ineffec tiveness in order that the work of changing the world, so far as I have to assist it, may be entirely victorious and irresistible....

1. Pondicherry became the seat of Sri Aurobindo's sadhana for developing an entirely new line of Yoga, and for his spiritual action.

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Opening large tracts and new paths: 18 Nov 1922

I have been till now and shall be for some time longer withdrawn in the practice of Yoga destined to be a basis not withdrawal from life, but for the transformation of human life. It is a Yoga in which large tracts of inner experience and new paths of Sadhana had to be opened up and which therefore needed retirement and long time for its completion. But the time is approaching though it has not yet come, when I shall have to take up a large external work proceeding from the spiritual basis of this Yoga. . ..

Of past dawns and future noons: The old Yoga and the new goal: Apr 1920

What I started with, what Lele gave me, what I did in jail — all that was a searching for the path, a circling around looking here and there, touching, taking up, handling, testing this and that of all the old partial yogas, getting a more or less complete experience of one and then going off in pursuit of another. Afterwards, when I came to Pondicherry, this unsteady condition ceased. The indwelling Guru of the world indicated my path to me completely, its full theory...

The defect of the old yoga was that, knowing the mind and reason and knowing the Spirit, it remained satisfied with spiritual experience in the mind. But the mind can grasp only the fragmentary; it cannot completely seize the infinite, the undivided. The mind's way to seize it is through the trance of samadhi, the liberation of moksha, the extinction of nirvana, and so forth. It has no other way. Someone here or there may indeed obtain this featureless liberation, but what is the gain? The Spirit, the Self, the Divine is always there. What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity — to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not synthesise or unify the Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as an illusion or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of the power of life and the decline of India. ...What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few ascetics, renunciates, holy-men and realised beings attain liberation, if a few devotees dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and bliss, and an entire race, devoid of life and intelligence, sinks to the depths of darkness and inertia? First one must have all sorts of partial experience on the mental level, flooding the mind with spiritual delight and illuminating it with spiritual light; afterwards one climbs upwards. Unless one makes this upward climb, this climb to the supramental level, it is not possible to know the ultimate secret of world-existence; the riddle of the world is not solved. There, the cosmic Ignorance which consists of the duality of Self and world, Spirit and life, is abolished. Then one need no longer look on the world as an illusion: the world is an eternal play of God, the perpetual manifestation of the Self....

Sri Aurobindo

(from letters to Barin, original in Bengali)

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A New spiritual adventure, not a re-treading of the old paths

The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past, but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future. (14.1.1932)

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. The Supramental is simply the Truth-Consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter.... The utmost Ananda the body and life are now capable of is a brief excitement of the vital mind or the nerves or the cells which is limited, imperfect and soon passes: with the supramental change all the cells, nerves, vital forces, embodied mental forces can become filled with a thousandfold Ananda, capable of an intensity of bliss which passes description and which need not fade away.... The supramental love means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire flooding of the body consciousness with the physical experience of oneness, the presence of the Beloved in every part, in every cell of the body. (14.1.1932)

Sri Aurobindo

Parabrahman: *

He is not bound by waking or by sleep;

He is not bound by anything at all.

Laws are that He may conquer them.

To creep Or soar is at His will, to rise or fall....

He is not anything, yet all is He;

He is not all but far exceeds that scope.

Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea:

Time is a wave and Space a wandering drop.

*

Why shouldst thou hunger after departure from manifestation as if the world were an evil? Has not That manifested itself in thee & in the world and art thou wiser & purer & better than the Absolute, O mind-deceived soul in the mortal? When That withdraws thee, then thy going hence is inevitable; until Its force is laid on thee, thy going is impossible, cry thy mind never so fiercely & wailingly for departure.

* By 1912, Sri Aurobindo attained the third major realisation when he experienced an "abiding realisation and dwelling in Parabrahman" - the supreme Reality.

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Therefore neither desire nor shun the world, but seek the bliss & purity & freedom & greatness of God in whatsoever state or experience or environment.

So long as thou hast any desire, be it the desire of non-birth or the desire of liberation, thou canst not attain to Parabrahman. For That has no desires, neither of birth nor of non-birth, nor of world, nor of departure from world. The Absolute is unlimited by thy desire as It is inaccessible to thy knowledge.

Sri Aurobindo

A supramental gnostic person: Reminiscences of A. B. Purani*

The second time I met Sri Aurobindo was in 1921...

But the greatest surprise of my visit in 1921 was the "darshan" of Sri Aurobindo. During the interval of two years his body had undergone a transformation which could only be described as miraculous. In 1918 the colour of the body was like that of an ordinary Bengali — rather dark — though there was lustre on the face and the gaze was penetrating. On going upstairs to see him (in the same house) I found his cheeks wore an apple pink colour and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light. So great and unexpected was the change that I could not help exclaiming:

"What has happened to you?"

Instead of giving a direct reply he parried the question, as I had grown a beard: "And what has happened to you?"

But afterwards in the course of talk he explained to me that when the Higher Consciousness descends from the mental level to the vital and even below the vital, then a transformation takes place in the nervous and even in the physical being.

*

"A supramental gnostic individual will be a spiritual Person, but not a personality in the sense of a pattern of being marked out by a settled combination of fixed qualities, a determined character; he cannot be that since he is a conscious expression of the universal and the transcendent." Describing the gnostic individual he [Sri Aurobindo] says ; "We feel ourselves in presence of a light of consciousness, a potency, a sea of energy, can distinguish and describe its free waves of action and quality, but not fix itself; and yet there is an impression of personality, the presence of a powerful being, a strong, high or beautiful recognizable Someone, a Person, not a limited creature of Nature but a Self or Soul, a Purusha."

One feels as if he was describing in his inimitable way the feeling of some of us — his disciples — with regard to him.

A. B. Purani

* Shri A. B. Purani, an early disciple of Sri Aurobindo who participated in India's freedom struggle and later came to Pondicherry in early 20s and stayed for good.

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