The Life Divine By Sri Aurobindo Maharshi Aurobindo’s The Life Divine: A Landmark Vision, A Metaphysical Text & Document of Supra Mind And Consciousness (The Yogi & His Yogic View of Life And The World: A Study In Aurobindo’s The Life Divine) Prose As Born Out of Sadhna: A Self-Realization A supreme work of a supreme mind, The Life Divine by Sri Auroibindo is a philosophical text and document; a prose treatise where the minds of the yogi and the sadhaka meet to entwine religion with spirituality, theology with metaphysics, cosmology with transcendental vision. The spiritual evolution of man, of consciousness in matter, the ascent towards the Supermind, the realization of the self, the position of man in the universe, etc. are the things which the philosopher takes to as for discussion. What divine drink wouldst thou have, my God, from this overflowing cup of my life? My poet, is it thy delight to see thy creation through my eyes and to stand at the portals of my ears silently to listen to thine own eternal harmony? Thy world is weaving words in my mind and thy joy is adding music to them. Thou givest thyself to me in love and then feelest thine own entire sweetness in me. ----Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali, with an Introduction by W.B.Yeats, Macmillan India Ltd., 1983, p.44, Rs. 8/) “Brahman the Reality is the self-existent Absolute and Maya is the consciousness and Force of this self-existence; but with regard to the universe Brahman appears as the Self of all existence, Atman, the cosmic Self, but also as the Supreme Self transcendent of its own cosmicity and at the same time individual-universal in each being; Maya can then be seen as the self- power, Atma-Shakti, of the Atman.” -----Maharshi Aurobindo in Chapter II Brahma, Purusha, Ishwara---Maya, Prakriti, Shakti (The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, ibid, p. 361) The Life Divine as a testament of Indian philosophy, religion, spirituality; metaphysics, cosmology and theology is without any doubt one of a larger spectrum and dimension inculcating the things of a supra state of consciousness; picturesque of a mind in sadhna or yogic meditation, rising and rising, riding the steps of ascension, delving in the terminology of Mind, Matter, Consciousness, State, Purusha, Prakriti, Maya, Brahma and so on. Life is but a realization; a self-realization. What it is quintessential is Cosmic Delight; Divine Ananda. How to get it? God is but Sat, Chit, Ananda, Satchidananda. Published in 1939-40, the work went revisions and editions. The essays saw the light long before its publication in a serialized form in the Arya wherefrom these have been brought and added to. Life Mundane not, Life Celestial is the thing of his deliberation. The Mind in Matter and the Matter in Mind are the things of his discussion. The Soul, the Oversoul, the Mind, the Overmind, these continue to engage him and he goes on exploring the things of consciousness. The yogic states transcend the barriers to enrich and endow him otherwise. A yogi and a sadhaka, Aurobindo takes the yogic flights to dwell and delve upon the supra states of meditative realms and domains of the hidden speculation of the contemplative order. Whatever one says about it, it is Vedanto-Upanishadic in reality. Without doing sadhna, one cannot attain the heights envisaged and everything but is sadhna. Without striving to perfect or seeking to fulfill, one cannot accomplish a greater job and success lies it in one’s trial for attainment; struggle, sacrifice and suffering, which but the key to success in life. A book of Integral Yoga, it explains the things of the world, man, mind, matter and spirit as per consciousness felt within and experienced. “We have seen that it was the aspiration of ancient India to live and move and have its joy in Brahma, the all-conscious and all-pervading Spirit, by extending its field of consciousness over all the world. But that, it may be urged, is an impossible task for man to achieve. If this extension of consciousness be outward process, then it is endless; it is like attempting to cross the ocean after ladling out its water. By beginning to try to realise all, one has to end by realising nothing.” -----Rabindranath Tagore in the chapter Soul Consciousness (Sadhna, Macmillan India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, First Edition 1913, Reprinted 1966, p.41) “What is that spirit? The Upanishad says, The being who is in his essence the light and life of all, who is world-conscious, is Brahma. To feel all, to be conscious of everything, is his spirit. We are immersed in his consciousness body and soul. It is through his consciousness that the sun attracts the earth; it is through his consciousness that the light-waves are being transmitted from planet to planet.” -----Rabindranath Tagore in the chapter The Relation of the Individual to the Universe (Ibid, p.33) “The affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognize not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.” ----Aurobindo Ghose in Chapter II The Two Negations, 1 The Materialist Denial (The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 2010, p.8) The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo is such a text and document which trespasses many a trajectory and domain of human thought and its evolution, the mind rising in unison with the Force, Power Unknown and Unseen, transcendental and cataclysmic, undergoing the realms of sadhna to be resolved in terms of yoga and yogic reflections. A sadhaka, a yogi, a teacher and a preceptor, he tried to see life and the course of evolution in his own way, interpreting as per the yoga and its delving. It is not at all maya which he adheres to; it is but sadhna through yogic practices which but took him to the pedestal of thinking and thought and he took to his recourse in wit, intellect, logic and reason apart from different points of purview. The graph of thought and vision is the length of his narration; the curve and lining of it the horizon of his theory. A prophet and a seer, he has seen in this context, the range and purview of his delving, always taking him afar. Human thought and its evolution and the creation of the universe as per the Superman and His Super Mind, he has tried to present them theologically, intellectually, after being into the steps of Milton and Shaw. Shavian and Miltonic, he is graphic and vast, encompassing and dimensional. As the case remains it with the universe and cosmology of Milton, so is his, but recounting the benefits of transcendental meditation. The things have been transcended to show them in a pure and crystal clear metaphysical light. The range and vision, the spectrum and horizon, the plan and execution of his voluminous work The Life Divine is beyond any debate and discussion as it covers a broad space and span of annotation. In the beginning his essays used to appear in the Arya, an ashrama periodical, but later on he collected and edited them from time to time to produce a comprehensive work like this running to hundreds of pages. An ambitious work, The Life Divine contains in two Books, inclusive of so many chapters to take in the transcendental discussions inter-traversing and crisscrossing many a reflection, thought, idea and view-point logically and reasonably. Only explanations lie in to take on the perspectives of life and the world beyond explanation. It is very difficult to say where we reach to finally. Some diversion is there of course; some deviation. The abstract things are beyond the comprehension of the common reader as it is a type of transcendence; a story in progression. A huge work, a massive compendium of human knowledge and advancement, it is an amalgamation of knowledge and wisdom explained through yoga and yogic heights of reflection. A superman as the protagonist speaks in about the super mind at work. As George Bernard Shaw questions and explains similar is the style of the Maharshi; as Bertrand Russell talks about the impact of science on society, the compendium of knowledge and wisdom and the value of comprehensive vision similar is the scope of Aurobindo’s The Life Divine. If to criticize and comment upon differently, Aurobindo’s The Life Divine is full of dull and dry facts, bringing in monotony and dreary readings in its chain of prosaic delineation or the trail of dull and dry facts often put as intellectual explanations. To turn over the pages is to be bored. A dull reading awaits us as and when we turn over the pages leading to nowhere. Had Aurobindo taken to mystically, he would have attained the heights otherwise, but never did he. There is nothing as that Aurobindo concludes, just the vague reflections abound in and he appears to be Machiavellian, pragmatic, pontifical and hypocritical rather mystical, mythical and poetic. Instead of making it lyrical, Aurobindo like Shaw has turned it into a text of ideas, thesis and anti-thesis, his propaganda with regard to transcendental meditation, Integral Yoga and its propagation from Pondicherry. Aurobindo fails and falters miserably as and when we begin to talk poetically. The emotions and feelings of poetry are missing in The Life Divine; those of sadhna and its illumination. Had he told about the mystical experiences of sadhna, it would have been great, but he usually gets lost in the jungle of unnecessary classicism, making his statements terse, vague, ornate, artificial and debatable. What he says that can definitely be contradicted. The other thing is this that Aurobindo does not take the names of the great sadhus and sadhakas of India whose base is there in his The Life Divine and in the absence of whose works we can never think of any modality. Sometimes we feel it we are going somewhere to nowhere and nowhere to somewhere. One negative point of Aurobindo is this that he is very, very intellectual, logical, reasonable and factual and it is but intellect which but mars the poetic beauty of the text under our scrutiny and perusal. There is of course intellectual ananda of enjoying the text, but it is beyond the understanding of the common reader. There is no solution, but only deviation, digression and diversion which but none can ascertain and assure of. Instead of, the book gives knowledge, wisdom, light and joy. A voluminous prose treatise, The Life Divine is the Savitri of Aurobindo in prose and Savitri the The Life Divine in poetry, if we like to entertain a change in statements swapping their positions to see it in a different context. The two Books of The Life Divine just like divided in parts tell of different phases of ascension and meditational stepping. Book One is Omnipresent Reality and the Universe. Chapter I The Human Aspiration, Chapter II The Two Negations: The Materialist Denial, Chapter III The Two Negations: The Refusal of the Ascetic, Chapter IV Reality Omnipresent, Chapter V The Destiny of the Individual, Chapter VI Man in the Universe, Chapter VII The Ego and The Dualities, Chapter VIII The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge, Chapter IX The Pure Existent, Chapter X Conscious Force, Chapter XI The Delight of Existence: The Problem, Chapter XII The Delight of Existence: The Solution, Chapter XIII The Divine Maya, Chapter XIV The Supermind as Creator, Chapter XV The Supreme Truth-Consciousness, Chapter XVI Triple Status of Supermind, Chapter XVII The Divine Soul, Chapter XVIII Mind & Supermind, Chapter XIX Life, XX Death, Desire and Incapacity, Chapter XXI The Ascent of Life, Chapter XXII The Problem of Life, Chapter XXIII The Double Soul of Man, Chapter XXIV Matter, Chapter XXV The Knot of Matter, Chapter XXVI The Ascending Series of Substance, Chapter XXVII The Sevenfold Chord of Being and Chapter XXVIII Supermind, Mind, and the Overmind Maya. BOOK Two is The Knowledge and the Ignorance—The Spiritual Evolution and it is divided into two parts, namely, Part I as The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance and Part II as The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution. Chapter I Indeterminates and Cosmic Determination, Chapter II Brahma, Purusha, Ishwara, Chapter III The Eternal and the Individual, Chapter IV The Divine and the Undivine, Chapter V The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination, Chapter VI Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, Chapter VII The Knowledge and the Ignorance, Chapter VIII Memory Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance, Chapter IX Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, Chapter X Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge, XI The Boundaries of the Ignorance, XII The Origins of the Ignorance, Chapter XIII Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance and Chapter XIV The Origins and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong, and Evil. Part II The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution of Book Two consists of Chapter XV Reality and the Integral Knowledge, Chapter XVI The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, XVII The Progress to Knowledge—God, Man and Nature, Chapter XVIII The Evolutionary Process-- Ascent and Integration, Chapter XIX Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge, Chapter XX The Philosophy of Rebirth, XXI The Order of the Worlds, XXII Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality, XXIII Man and the Evolution, XXIV The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, XXV The Triple Transformation, XXVI The Ascent towards Supermind, XXVII The Gnostic Being and XXVIII The Divine Life. The Divine Maya as a chapter tells about the shaping of things as per His Plan, but the thing is the same, nothing to eliminate it from the other. In Chapter II Brahma, Purusha, Ishwara, the writer discusses many an aspect crucial to the understanding of the text. God is Form as well as Formless Being. The Infinite is nameless, but a collage of names too as is envisaged in it all. In the chapter, The Divine and The Undivine, the Self, the Divine or Brahman is the talk continuing. In the chapter entitled Reality and The Cosmic Illusion, the writer discusses Maya and Reality. Maya is not at all illusory as because it too plays a role in shaping and re-shaping otherwise the Void cannot do it all. “Maya’s creation is a presentation of beings, names, forms, happenings, things, impossible to accept as true, contradictory of the indeterminable purity of the One Existence. Maya then is not real, it is non-existent: Maya is itself an illusion, the parent of numberless illusions.” ---- Aurobindo in Reality and The Cosmic Illusion (Ibid, p.458) This is not just that he has started abruptly, the continuity in tradition can be reverted back to Emerson, Thoreau and other American transcendentalists and Oriental thinkers that he borrows from and applies in after fusing in the Oriental and the Occidental thoughts and ideas. Had he not the Western classics, he could not have produced a book of such a length. Monumental and huge, it is a mammoth work of theology, cosmology and metaphysics; religion, philosophy and spirituality. We do not know what it is that Aurobindo has accomplished as the treatise is confusing and contradictory too instead of being full of illumination. Is happiness possible? As the poet W.H.Auden asks us satirically about the unknown citizen whether he is happy, whether he is free, similar is the thing with the protagonist of Arurobindo which is an unending discussion of the self and the Supreme Self in an abstract way. The myth and mystery is missing in Aurobindo and this is what he lacks in which could have added spectacular things to it. What is life? Where is God? Who can ever say it? But instead of it, the metaphysics of life and the world has taken in the space of it. A path lies it illumined under the light of The Life Divine; things yet to be realized. Brahman-consciousness is the thing of reckoning here in this mammoth work of transcendental vision, contemplative order and some meditative strain. “An involution of the Divine Existence, the spiritual Reality, in the apparent, in conscience of Matter is the starting-point of the evolution. But that Reality is in its nature an eternal Existence, Consciousness, Delight of Existence, not at first in its essence or totality but in evolutionary forms that express or disguise it.” ------ Aurobindo in The Progress to Knowledge—God, Man and Nature (Ibid, p.710)
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 03:38:35 +0000
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