Theories of Evolution and Sri Aurobindo's Concept of Complete Person

We are in search of an adequate concept of complete person.

The search that has been presented to us so far cannot be considered to be as complete as it might seem, considering that important evolutionary theories also need to be presented and considered.

The process of evolution was detected in ancient times. Both in India and in Greece, there were important ideas of evolution. In modern times, the theory of evolution is mainly the work of Linnaeus (1707-78), Buffon (1707), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Lamarck (1744-1829), Charles Darwin (1809-82) and his followers.

On the Origin of Species written by Charles Darwin (1859) gave details and demonstrations of his scientific theory of evolution, according to which, life on the earth evolved by a gradual and yet continuous process from the earliest forms of living organisms to the latest product, man. Natural selection, variation and heredity are said to be the factors through the operation of which new species arise out of existing ones. When new characters are produced by the variability of organisms, natural selection decided their survival or death. If the characters do not adapt to their environment, they are eliminated in the competition. If, on the other hand, they equip themselves better for the struggle, they tend to survive. The offsprings of the successful tend to resemble the parents in exhibiting the favoured variation to a greater degree than the parents, and a new type becomes established by a continuous piling up of small useful accretions through many generations.

The two original components of Darwin’s theory were (i) that evolution is gradual, and (ii) that the nature of the change is dictated by natural, not divine, selection. Both of these are closely interlinked, and both are at the heart of controversy today, as they were in Darwin’s time.

Many naturalists accepted Darwin’s gradualism because it accorded well with what they saw in living species. But critics could not accept that all the world’s marvellous species and their extraordinary structures such as those of the eye, could have arisen only by chance. Some biologists accepted that minor changes might be the result of natural selection, but held that beyond extremes within a range of variation, a new species could not arise by natural selection alone. The only way in which the boundaries of species might be breached, they contended, would be through a sudden jump.

Palaeontologists who dug up and classified the remains of extinct species raised another major objection to gradualism. They argued that if Darwin were right, they should be able to find a series of specimens that could be laid out in a gradual continuum from one major type of animal to another. If, for example, reptiles evolved into mammals, there should be fossils representing every gradation between these two groups. Instead, the palaeontologists found more gaps than continua. Darwin conceded this, but he thought that further researches would reveal the intermediate links. As it turned out, only a few links have been found, and this issue is a part of today’s controversy.

But there is still a deeper question. Why do variations occur? Whether they are small or great, gradual or abrupt, we cannot trace them to the influence of the environment. For types without variations seem to be just as well adapted as those with them. Darwin’s view of chance variations is virtually a confession of his inability to explain the source of variations.

Modifications and variations do not come singly but in complexes, involving many minor and consequential modifications and variations. Each single small variation is not independently selected. In other words, the organisms seem to ‘vary’ as a whole.

Bergson pointed out that the molluscs in the order of evolution proceed by steady steps to develop an eye, which resembles very much the eye developed by the independent line of vertebrates. How does it happen, he asked, that similar effects appear in different lines of evolution brought about by different means? How could the same small variations occur in two independent lines of evolution if they were purely accidental? According to Bergson, the two series must have been governed by a common vital impulse to this useful end. There is something more in evolution than merely mechanical urge. He is inclined to attribute a ‘rudiment of choice’ to the species which, travelling by different paths, reach the same goal. Given a new situation, the ‘urge’ (élan vital), common to all members, leads them to meet it by a new method.

According to Bergson, it is the inner urge, or life force, or an upward drive that incites the whole species in a definite direction. The striving of the organism is the creative effort to which evolution is due.

The biological theory of evolution assumes that life always came from life. Herbert Spencer questioned this assumption and attempted to give a philosophical account of the rise of the living from the non-living, the mental from the non-mental. According to him, the differences between these are due to the degree of the complexity of the organisation. But still the question why life should evolve out of Matter or in Matter is not explained. Why should life occur at all? The theory of the survival of the fittest does not carry us far. Life has little survival value as compared with matter from which it is supposed to have sprung. A rock survives for hundreds of millions of years, while even the oldest tree is only a few thousand years old. If survival was the aim of nature, life would never have appeared.

Other significant philosophical theories have also come to be formulated. According to Samuel Alexander, the whole process of the universe is a historic growth from space-time. The original matrix is space-time. Time is the mind of space. In course of time, space-time breaks up into finites of ever-increasing complexity. At certain points in the history of things, finites assume new empirical qualities which are distinctive levels of experience—primary qualities, matter; and secondary qualities, life and mind. As explained in his book Space, Time and Deity, the cosmic process has now reached the human level, and man is looking forward to the next higher quality of deity. According to him, men of religious genius are preparing mankind for this next stage of development. The divine quality or deity is a stage in time beyond the human. The whole world is now engaged in the production of deity. As time is the very substance of reality, no being can exhaust the future. Even God is a creature of time.

Lloyd Morgan, who comes very close to Alexander in his account of emergent evolution, acknowledges God as the nisus through whose Activity emergents emerge, and the whole course of emergent evolution is directed. According to him, God is not the emergent deity, but an Activity within which qualities emerge. God is the breath from the whole movement, the deep root which feeds the whole tree. The course of history is the gradual coming of God to Himself. Lloyd Morgan contends that emergent evolution is not predictable. But it is not strictly undetermined like Bergson’s creative evolution, not only unpredictable for human minds, but in principle for all minds. Lloyd Morgan infers the coming of divinity from the purposeful direction of the universe, and he is inclined to make his God completely immanent. He maintains that the whole course of events subsumed under evolution is the expression of God’s purpose.

Lloyd Morgan is basically an adherent of Spinoza, and although he speaks of ‘emergence’ in the evolutionary process, one suspects that changes occur according to rule, and there is no spontaneity.

According to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the evolutionary process cannot be described or evaluated in terms of its origin. What comes later is more than what was there earlier. There is, according to him, a developing process marked by increasing complexity. It is true that the powers and properties of matter, life, mind, history and values are not entirely different. They interpenetrate and produce an increasing complexity and concentration. In man evolution becomes conscious of itself. Tracing the story of evolution, he examines the phenomena, big and small, from subatomic particles and cells to stellar galaxies, biospheric and noo-spheric. There are, according to him, two complementary tendencies in the evolutionary process, differentiation and integration. In his paleontological studies, he found that evolution tends towards unification.

According to him, all energy is essentially psychic. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, he conceives for man a superhuman future and presents a transcendental vision of omega-workings. Evolution is pushing man towards a higher goal, an omega point, which can be described as collective divinity. A cosmic divine manifestation is in the making.

Whitehead, who recalls the Platonic view of the cosmic process, maintains that nothing can emerge in the evolutionary process of the universe if its constituents were not already in existence. The qualities which are said to emerge historically in the philosophy of Alexander are ingredients into events from the beginning, according to Whitehead. The ingredience of eternal objects into events is the explanation of the historical becoming. He admits that at every step there is the emergence of what is genuinely new. Every event, according to him, is a miracle, but it embodies an idea from beyond the developing series of events in the universe. Whitehead suggests an eternal order and a creative reality. The cosmic series has a nisus towards the eternal order which is beyond itself, though it is increasingly realised in the cosmic.

‘Ingressive evolution’ is a phrase that aptly describes Whitehead’s theory. There is, according to Whitehead, a progressive ingression and incorporation into the cosmic series of the eternal order which God embraces in himself. The ‘primordial’ nature of God is the conceptual consciousness of the possibilities capable of harmonious concurrent realisation. These possibilities are called by Whitehead ‘eternal objects’. They are eternal forms or ideas, to use the Platonic expression, but unlike Platonic ideas, they are not substances, but possibilities, conceptually realised in God. They are not imaginary or abstract. Some of them are apprehended as possibilities logically prior to their manifestation in existence, and others as symbols of values that we pursue. The relation of form to the temporal world is that of potentialities to actualities. In the view of Whitehead, the temporal actualities realise the possibilities surveyed in God’s nature. The order and purpose we see in the world is the result of actuality fulfilling the highest possibilities it sees before itself, which is the vision of God as relevant for it.

According to Sri Aurobindo, the urge to exceed oneself is inherent in the human being. This urge of self-exceeding manifests in the divination of the Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. He points out that this aspiration can be discerned in the texts of the ancient dawns of human civilisation, and we find that even when it is banished during the periods of scepticism, it returns and seizes humankind. Referring to the contemporary humanity, he points out that even though satiated, it is not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature and that it is preparing to return to its primeval longings. He concludes: “The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, light, freedom and immortality.”¹

Sri Aurobindo admits that these persistent ideals of the race contradict its normal experience, but he points out that they are affirmed by verifiable and repeatable experiences which are attainable at higher and deeper levels of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo states:

“To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation,—this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world’s workings, that direct opposition appears rather as a part of Nature’s profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.”²

According to Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), evolution presupposes an involutionary process. If Life evolves in Matter, and Mind in Life, it must be because Life is involved in Matter and Mind in Life. The material Inconscience is the involved Super-conscience. Evolution is fundamentally a spiritual phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of an evolutionary self-building of Spirit on a base of Matter, which is itself a formation of spiritual reality. There is first an involutionary foundation in which all that is to evolve is present, although not yet manifested or not yet organised. An original Inconscience without any previous deployment from consciousness cannot evolve consciousness. In the evolutionary process, there is a development of a triple character. An evolution of forms of Matter, more and more subtly and intricately organised so as to admit the action of a growing, a more and more complex and subtle and capable organisation of consciousness is the indispensable physical foundation. An upward evolutionary progress of the consciousness itself from grade to higher grade, an ascent, is the evident spiral line or emerging curve that, on this foundation, the evolution must describe. A taking up of what has already been evolved into each higher grade as it is reached and a transformation more or less complete so as to admit of a total changed working of the whole being and nature, an integration, must be also part of the process, if the evolution is to be effective.

Man is a transitional being, and the spiritual man is the sign of the new evolution. The intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man is not merely to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself. There is a further intention—not only a revelation of the Spirit but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that nature. There is thus something that is not yet accomplished, and there becomes clear to view the much that has still to be done; ‘there is a height still to be reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe.’

A distinctive feature of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of evolution is that it is not speculative; its premises and conclusions are tested on the anvil of experimentation. “The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?”³ Indeed, Sri Aurobindo made an experiment upon his entire integral being, using it as an evolutional laboratory, so as to evolve and manifest higher and higher grades of consciousness reaching up to the supermind and to supramentalise the human body to the furthest extent possible. Even when he left his body, he assigned the task to his collaborator, whom he called The Mother (1878-1973), to continue the task of the supramentalisation and integral transformation.

Sri Aurobindo discovered in the ancient systems of Yoga some of the basic clues for the experiment. He did not, however, find in any one of them the secret that would enable him to eventually bring about the mutation of the human species. He and The Mother, therefore, experimented, day after day, for years and decades, and they developed a synthesis of Yoga and laboured to perfect it.

The practical necessity of this experiment was not merely to advance knowledge; nor was this experiment directed towards seeking any personal gain, gratification or glory. But Sri Aurobindo and The Mother saw that the contemporary human crisis cannot truly be met without the evolutionary saltation or mutation. There are, according to them, only two alternatives before mankind today; either a revolutionary and evolutionary ascent towards the supramental manifestation on the earth or abyss.

An account of the momentous experiments undertaken by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother cannot truly be given; they can only be glimpsed from the records they have left. Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Letters on Yoga, The Mother, The Surpamental Manifestation upon Earth, and The Mother’s own account of the supramental action on the earth, recorded by Satprem (born 1924) and published in 13 volumes as l’Agenda de Mére, give us some indications of both the secret and the fulfilment of their momentous experiments.

The concept of complete person that emerges from this vast and unprecedented experiment is that of a being whose self-exceeding has reached a point where the limitations of egoistic consciousness have been broken and who has become capable of universality and transcendence as also of that mutuality of relationships correspond to a state of consciousness that is described as follows in the Isopanishad:

यस्तु सर्वाणि भूतानि आत्मन्येवानुपश्यति। सर्वभूतेषु चात्मानं ततो न विजुगुप्सते।।6।। यस्मिन् सर्वाणि भूतानि आत्मैवाभूद विजानतः। तत्र को मोहः कः शोक एकत्वमनपश्यतः।।7।।

But he who sees everywhere the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self, shrinks not thereafter from aught.

He in whom it is the Self-Being that has become all existences that are Becomings, for he has the perfect knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness?⁴

According to Sri Aurobindo, this state of consciousness for the individual is prepared by a long and conscious development of fourfold personality of knowledge, power, harmony and skill. The individual moving towards the growth of complete person will not only continue to transcend the limitations of inertia, obscurity, of tamas, but also the limitations of rajasic feverish and egoistic and blind impulse of egoistic assertion and dynamism, and even the limitations of light and balance or equilibrium that are limited to the narrow grooves of mental consciousness that manifests in rationality, ethical character and aesthetic sensitivity and creativity. In the course of the development towards ever-progressive completeness, the individual will break the limitations of what Indian psychology terms the rajasic and sattvic nature; there will be the growth and development of what can be called super-nature or of what Bhagavadgita terms as parā prakriti. Powers of knowledge, heroism, harmony and skills will manifest the super-nature that is marked by calm strength, luminous love and will that is guided by illumination and enthused by the motive of service to be rendered to all and to uplift all by developing and utilising skills that can remove progressively the causes of suffering and ignorance.

The fourfold personality will mark not any static poise of stagnation but a continuous dynamic poise of equilibrium expressing internal integrality of all the parts and planes of being. Such an integral personality may properly be called a member of a growing nucleus of a new humanity or even of super-humanity. The complete person is an evolutionary being, but a stage will be reached where the evolutionary process crosses the limitations of Ignorance which is a constant movement from error to knowledge and will dwell more and more in a new consciousness that will be liberated from ignorance so as to permit movement from knowledge to knowledge. Such a being that lives in knowledge and manifests dynamics of knowledge integrally may properly be described as superman. But Sri Aurobindo’s concept of superman is totally different from the superman conceived by Nietzsche. Nietzcheian superman manifests an enlarged personality, a magnified and exaggerated ego, an increased power of mind, an increased power of vital force, a force that aims at domination over humanity, and enlarges but does not transform the forces of human Ignorance. The superman conceived by Sri Aurobindo will be a self-realised being which serves humanity to find its own self-exceeding and self-fulfilment by the revelation of the divinity that is striving for birth within it. While describing supermanhood, Sri Aurobindo states:

“Unity is the secret, a complex, understanding and embracing unity. When the full heart of Love is tranquillised by knowledge into a calm ecstasy and vibrates with strength, when the strong hands of Power labour for the world in a radiant fullness of joy and light, when the luminous brain of knowledge accepts and transforms the heart’s obscure inspirations and lends itself to the workings of the high-seated Will, when all these gods are founded together on a soul of sacrifice that lives in unity with all the world and accepts all things to transmute them, then is the condition of man’s integral self-transcendence. This and not a haughty, strong and brilliant egoistic self-culture enthroning itself upon an enslaved humanity is the divine way of supermanhood.”⁵

It is significant that the aim of education for the complete person is rising at frontiers of the highest endeavours of the contemporary world and is being pressed forward in the field of education. It is significant that there is undeniable pressure to explore human personality at different levels of consciousness—subconscious, conscious and superconscious. It is significant that the theme of value-oriented education is being explored more and more intensively and imperatively so as to develop education that is devoted not only to the domain of moral values but also to the integration of rational, scientific, ethical and aesthetic values. Above all, it is salutary for humanity that educationists are now obliged to define and devise ways and methods of integral education that admits the sovereignty of spiritual education as distinguished dearly from religious education.

It is in this context that the exercise that we have undertaken now will be considered to be directly relevant to the highest purposes of education for today and tomorrow.

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother: Yoga of evolution

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother: Yoga of evolution-I

There is a close connection between evolution and yoga; it may even be said that the evolutionary process is basically a yogic process and that yoga is the conscious application of the processes of evolution and principles underlying those processes in order to accelerate the process of natural evolution. However, Yoga and its processes leave behind the ordinary tardy method of slow and confused growth through the evolution of Nature. As Sri Aurobindo points out: “The natural evolution is at its best an uncertain growth under cover, partly by the pressure of the environment, partly by a groping education, and an ill-lighted purposeful effort, an only partially illumined and half-automatic use of opportunities with many blunders and lapses and relapses; a great portion of it is made up of apparent accidents and circumstances and vicissitudes—though veiling a secret intervention and divine guidance. In yoga we replace this confused, crooked crab-motion by a rapid, conscious and self-directed evolution which is planned to carry us, as far as can be, in a straight line towards the goal set before us.”⁶

There are, according to Sri Aurobindo, three stages in the process of evolution. An involution of the spirit in the inconscience is the beginning. Evolution in the ignorance with its play of possibilities of a partial developing knowledge is the middle. A consummation in a deployment of the spirit’s self-knowledge and self-power of its divine being and consciousness is the culmination. It is admitted that the two stages that have already occurred seem at first sight to deny the possibility of the later consummating state of the cycle, but it is stressed that logically they imply its emergence. For, it is argued, if the inconscience has evolved consciousness, the partial consciousness already reached much surely evolve into complete consciousness. It is contended that it is a supramentalised, perfected and divinised life for which the earth-nature is secretly seeking, and that a progressive manifestation of this kind can only have for its secret of significance the evolution of a Being in a perfect Becoming.

These three stages of evolution and the processes that can be observed in these stages can provide with us with a clue as to how the processes of evolution can be applied scientifically on the evolutionary process itself. This scientific application is the central principle of yoga.

For the development of yoga depends on a scrupulous examination of the level at which evolution has reached in our present human consciousness and whether the psychological workings of the human being can be so handled that the causes of the slowness of the natural functionings can be eliminated for purposes of introducing into the evolutionary process those principles and methods which would facilitate its hastening. Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compressing one’s evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few months of the bodily existence.

In this light, yoga no more remains as something mystic or abnormal which has no relation to the ordinary processes of the World-Energy or the purpose she keeps in view in her subjective and objective self-fulfilment. Yoga reveals itself rather as an intense and exceptional use of the powers that Nature has already manifested or is progressively organising in her less exalted but more general operations. As Sri Aurobindo points out, “Yogic methods have something of the same relation to the customary psychological workings of man as the scientific handling of the natural force of electricity or of steam to the normal operations of steam and of electricity. And they, too, are formed upon a knowledge developed and confirmed by regular experiment, practical analysis and constant result.”⁷

In this light, all natural evolution and life is subconscious yoga, and all life can become in the human being a conscious yoga, co-terminus with life itself, so that one can say in a more perfect and luminous sense: “All life is yoga.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother: Yoga of evolution-II

The integral yoga that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have proposed is thus a yoga of evolution, based on the perception that the human being is a transitional being and that the contemporary crisis through which humanity is passing today can be resolved only through even a farther evolution that could eventually bring about mutation of the human species. This Yoga has been developed by their experimentation carried on day after day for years and decades, so as to perfect it for purposes of the supramental manifestation on the earth. If we study the life and work of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, we shall see that prior to their first meeting on 29th March 1914, both of them had a vast and laborious period of preparation. From that momentous date, when The Mother came from France to India and met Sri Aurobindo, they consecrated themselves entirely to the task of discovering the most effective means of meeting what seemed to be insuperable obstacles that the contemporary crisis presented. From that day, they began to prepare new conditions on the earth so that humanity could not only survive the crisis but also arrive at the fulfilment of the deepest aspirations for lasting peace, unity and harmony.

Both Sri Aurobindo and The Mother insisted on the scientific rigour with which research and experimental work needed to be conducted. They required, therefore, a laboratory, a laboratory where experimentation could be carried on for human evolution through the yoga of evolution towards the eventual transformation that would be needed to lift humanity towards its highest possible development and its eventual mutation into a new humanity or superhumanity.

They created the needed laboratory, at Pondicherry, which came to be known as the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from 1926 onwards, and it became a place of an unprecedented experiment in evolution. To this laboratory came men and women, who offered themselves to undergo a process of active support and collaboration and to respond to the evolutionary and yogic demands of the experiment under the constant guidance of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Outwardly, this laboratory provided to each one a specific work that would be suitable to the integral development of personality. Inwardly, this work provided to each one the maximum challenge of the difficulties which have to be overcome and thoroughly replaced by a new consciousness of mutuality, goodwill and harmony. Each individual came with his or her possibilities but also with the obstinate difficulties of the un-regenerate nature. This laboratory, its work and its history, reveals a continuous burning of the fire of aspiration and a continuous movement of achievements. When the work reached a certain point of achievement, it was decided to expand the work of the laboratory so as to include the task of educating children in a new way so that right from early stages of formation, they would breathe the atmosphere of the yoga of evolution, the yoga of universal peace and harmony and the yoga of the ideal of perfection. This nucleus of children and teachers is what came to be known in 1959 as the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.

In the meantime, in 1950, Sri Aurobindo left his body, purposely and deliberately, as a strategic means of hastening the process of the yoga of evolution. In 1956, the work reached a culminating point when the Supermind descended on the earth and began to manifest. The Mother’s supreme majesty, power and force are manifest in the declaration that She made of that momentous event. She described this event in the following text:

“FIRST SUPRAMENTAL MANIFESTATION”

(During the common meditation on Wednesday, the 29th February 1956)

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.

As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that “THE TIME HAS COME”, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.

Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.”⁸

On 3rd February 1958, The Mother had a radical experience, with reference to which, she made a long statement, in which she said:

“The supramental world exists in a permanent way, and I am there permanently in a supramental body. … I now know that for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relationship what is missing is an intermediate zone between the existing physical world and the supramental world as it exists. This zone has yet to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world and it is being built. …”⁹

Towards the end of 1958, The Mother came to a precision and formulated the central question that she was exploring: “How does one FIX the supermind in the body?”

Then on July 24, 1959, she had a radical experience, in respect of which she stated:

“For the first time the supramental light entered directly into my body, without passing through the inner beings. It entered through the feet (a red and gold colour—marvellous, warm, intense) and it climbed up and up. And as it climbed, the fever also climbed because the body was not accustomed to this intensity. As all this light neared the head, I thought I will burst and that the experience would have to be stopped. But then, I very clearly received the indication to make the Calm and Peace descend, to widen all this body-consciousness and all these cells, so that they could contain the supramental light. So I widened, and as the light was ascending, I brought down the vastness and an unshakeable peace. And suddenly, there was a second of fainting.

I found myself in another world, but not far away (I was not in a total trance). And this world was almost as substantial as the physical world. There were rooms—Sri Aurobindo’s room with the bed he rests on—and he was living there, he was there all the time: it was his abode. …

And Sri Aurobindo was there, with a majesty, a magnificient beauty. He had all his beautiful hair as before. It was also concrete, so substantial—he was even being served some kind of food. I remained there for one hour… I spoke to Sri Aurobindo, for I had some important questions to ask him about the way certain things are to be realised. He said nothing. He listened to me quietly and looked at me as if all my words were useless: he understood everything at once. …

I remained in that state for two full days, two days of absolute felicity. And Sri Aurobindo was with me for the whole time, the whole time—when I walked, he walked with me, when I sat down, he sat next to me. …

Sri Aurobindo gave me two days of this—total bliss. But all the same, by the end of the second day I realised that I could not continue to remain there, for the work was not advancing. The work must be done in the body; the realisation must be attained here in this physical world, for otherwise it is not complete. So I withdrew from that world and set to work here again.”¹⁰

In the psychological system, which has been developed by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, there are, in the physical, several distinguishable elements: the gross physical, the subtle physical, the physical mind and the cellular mind. The gross physical is what we see with our physical eyes and what we touch and perceive with our physical senses. The subtle physical is what lies behind our gross physical—that which Mother has described in her experience of Sri Aurobindo in his abode of the subtle physical. The physical mind is that part of our mentality which is entirely at the service of the physical, which is rooted in the physical, which makes our perception of sensations possible. It is also called mental-physical, since it is the mind that sub-serves the physical, and it is as mechanical and repetitive as the physical. The cellular mind is the mind of the cells, the mind which is overtly active in the animals, but which has been overlaid in our human psychology by the physical mind. The physical mind, as a product of evolution, evolved in Matter under the pressures of difficulties, even, of suffering; hence, there is in it an imprint of pessimism and defeatism, which is the greatest obstacle in the task of fixing the supramental consciousness in the body. The physical mind is like a layer on the mind of the cells, it covers up the normal dumb occult consciousness of the cellular mind; the cellular mind, too, under the magic spell of the physical mind betrays a reflected pessimism. But as The Mother discovered, pessimism and the resultant illness, disease or death do not form a normal part of the mind of the cells.

This was a major discovery, paving the way for FIXING the supermind in matter. If the activities of the physical mind can be clarified, controlled, mastered, silenced, and if the mind of the cells can be allowed to function in its purity without being overlaid by the magic spell of the physical mind, and if the mind of the cells can receive and fix the supramental vibrations, a new rhythm of supramental functioning in the body can be established. The cellular mind is, in fact, a link between the purely material substance and the physical mind, and it is the real fixer. Under the influence of the physical mind, it fixes in its movement the repetitive operation of pessimism and of defeatism; but if—and it is here that the repetition of the mantra finds its justification in the yogic process—a new vibration is applied in the cellular mind, it will fix that new vibration.

The Mother’s experiences, after the 29th February 1956, related increasingly to the physical mind and to her experiences of fixing the Supermind in the mind of the cells and in the body-consciousness and of the transformation of the body. After 1959, The Mother met Sri Aurobindo daily in the subtle physical. Her discoveries were momentous, particularly in regard to the nature and origin of Pain and Death. Gradually, she was building a new body—material body—of the supramental light and power. And this entire field of experiences and discoveries was like a virgin forest, and it was in this forest that The Mother hewed a path and a curve of development. There were experiences from day to day, from hour to hour, and many of them have been recorded in the volumes of The Mother’s Agenda.

Between 1959 and 1968, three simultaneous and interrelated processes were going on in The Mother’s body. Firstly, there was a progressive dissolution of the inconscience at its utmost bottom. Secondly, there was infiltration, permeation and invasion of the Supermind in the cellular consciousness and in the physical consciousness so as to counteract Falsehoods in Matter, Life and Mind. Thirdly, there was the gradual transformation of the body by means of the collaboration and change of the physical and cellular mind and by means of radical changes in various functionings of organs and faculties. At the collective level, too, some radical changes were appearing in the functioning of the Ashram. The Mother was placing individuals more and more into conditions where synthesis, unity and harmony would become imperative. A greater and greater stress was laid on the creation of collective consciousness.

Already we find, in the Agenda of 1961, certain indications of the idea of an ideal city which could be a habitation of a collective life and which could serve as the embryo or seed of the future supramental world. In the words of The Mother:

“What I myself have seen … was a plan that came complete in all details, but that does not at all conform in spirit and consciousness with what is possible on earth now (although, in its most material manifestation, the plan was based on existing terrestrial conditions). It was an idea of an ideal city, nucleus of a small ideal country, having only superficial, extremely limited contacts with the old world. One would already have to conceive (it is possible) of a power sufficient to be at once a protection against aggression or bad will (this would not be the most difficult protection to provide) and a protection (which can just barely be imagined) against infiltration and admixture… From the social or organisational standpoint, these problems are not difficult, nor from the standpoint of inner life; the problem is the relationship with what is not supramentalised—preventing infiltration or admixture, keeping the nucleus from falling back into an inferior creation during the transitional period.”¹¹

She added: “The realisation under community or group conditions would clearly be far more complete, integral, total and probably more perfect than any individual realisation, which is always, necessarily—necessarily—extremely limited on the external material level, because it is only one way of being, one mode of manifestation, one microscopic set of vibrations that is touched.”¹²

In due course, something of the idea of an ideal city began to take shape. In 1968, she found the world preparing itself to permit the launching upon a crucial experiment in the task of the realisation of human unity. And she inaugurated a new laboratory for conducting this experiment. This laboratory has been named by her “Auroville”. On February 28, 1968, at the time of the inauguration, she announced the Charter for Auroville through which she gave Auroville to humanity as a whole and called upon people wishing to come to Auroville to consecrate themselves to unending education, constant progress, and to the material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.

UNESCO welcomed this laboratory, which was designed for the meeting of the East and the West, and it declared its support, through several resolutions of its General Conference, to the aims and objectives of Auroville. With the founding of this township, doors were opened to the entire humankind to participate in the unique experiment initiated and developed by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

While Auroville continued to grow, the experiences and realisations of the momentous process of the supramental manifestation continued to follow its inevitable march.

On the 1st January 1969, The Mother had an experience of “new consciousness”, which was later on described by her as the consciousness of the superman, an intermediate between the human and the supramental being. Speaking of this, Mother said:

“It was luminous, smiling, and so benevolent, BECAUSE OF POWER; I mean to say that kindness, in human beings, is generally rather weak, in the sense that it does not like to fight, it does not like to struggle; but it is not that at all. A benevolence which imposes itself. …

It interested me because it was totally new. And so concrete! Concrete like that … like what, usually, the physical consciousness considers as “the others,” concrete like that. It means that it did not pass through some inner being, through the psychic being, it came DIRECTLY to the body.”¹³

The advent of this New Consciousness may be regarded as a crucial development of The Mother’s yoga of the Body. Indeed, this consciousness was a superman consciousness working through The Mother’s body,—a body, human in origin but thoroughly purified and refined, right up to the cellular level and thus capable of the operations of the Supermind—directly in the physical body.

It is true that the entire physical body was not yet fully transformed, but it was yet a vehicle in which the subtle physical was so much supramentalised that its real matter—which The Mother had described as something much more dense and compact and plastic than the gross physical that we see—could manifest, operate and produce results in and through the outer body.

In the beginning of 1970, The Mother spoke of the replacement of knowledge-processes in her body by a new perception which was total, something that comprehended at the same time hearing, vision, and knowledge. There was, she said, no differentiation among her organs. She pointed out that new consciousness insisted on surpassing all divisions and all exclusiveness, including the great division of life and death. The Mother discovered “over-life” which is at once life and death, or which is rather something that cannot be described either as life or as death but some other third state in which contradiction between life and death is overcome.

On 14 March 1970, The Mother spoke to Satprem, during which she made a momentous statement that the work that Sri Aurobindo had given to her was accomplished. Speaking of this accomplishment of the work, she said:

“Previously, those who had inner experiences used to say: ‘Yes, up there it is like that, but here…’ Now the ‘but here’ soon will not be any more. We are making the conquest of that, that formidable change: that the physical life must be directed by the superior-consciousness and not by the mental world. It is the change of the authority … it is difficult. It is laborious. It is painful. Naturally, there will be some damage, but … But really, one can see—one can see. And that is the REAL CHANGE. That’s what will allow new Consciousness to express itself. And the body learns—it learns its lesson—all the bodies, all the bodies. …

…

Obviously, it will take time for it to be truly established. There, it is the battle. From all sides, on every plane, there is an assault of things from the outside which come to say: ‘Nothing has changed’—but it is not true, it not true, the body knows that it is not true. And now it knows, it knows in which sense. …

…

And now I see, I see how his (Sri Aurobindo’s) departure and his work so… so immense, indeed, so constant, in this subtle physical, how much, how much it has helped! How he has (Mother makes a gesture of triturating matter), how much he has helped to prepare things, to change the structure of the physical.

All the experiences that others had had, those of entering into contact with superior-worlds, they left the physical here as it is. (How to say?) From the beginning of existence until Sri Aurobindo’s departure, I was in the consciousness that one can climb up, one can know, one can have all the experiences (in fact, one had them), but when one came in the body, … it was these old for-mi-da-ble mental laws which governed everything. And then, all these years have been years to prepare—to prepare—to free oneself and to prepare –, and these last days, it was … ah! The PHYSICAL confirmation, made by the body, that it had changed.

It must be “worked out” as one says, it has to be realised in all details, but the change IS DONE—the change is done. …

…

The physical is CAPABLE of receiving the Superior Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness and to ma-ni-fest it.

…

It took … a little more than one year for this consciousness to WIN this victory. And yet, naturally, it is visible only to those who have inner vision, but … but it is done.

(Long Silence)

This was that, the work that Sri Aurobindo had given to me. Now, I understand.

…

It seems … it seems like a miracle in the body. …

And everything becomes clear.

We shall see. …”¹⁴

The Mother reiterated, during her conversation with Satprem on 29.4.1970, that the object to be accomplished was the change in the physical consciousness, that the change in the physical appearance was a secondary consequence, and that would be the last thing to change. She said emphatically, that the thing that had to be accomplished was accomplished. In her own words:

“… We believe that this, this appearance (Mother refers to her body), this is … this appears to be for the ordinary consciousness the most important—it is evidently the last thing that will change. And it appears, for the ordinary consciousness that it will be the last thing to change because it is the most important: it will be the surest sign. But it is not that at all! … It is not that at all.

It is this change IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS,—which has been produced,—which is the most important thing. All the rest they are consequences. And here, in this world, this material world, this appears to us to be the most important because it is … it is all upside down, I do not know how to explain.

For us, when this (the body) will be visibly something different from what it is, one will say “Ah! Now thing is done.” This is not true: the thing IS DONE. This (the body), is a secondary consequence…”¹⁵

As a result of this victory, The Mother was moving forward towards the change even of the gross physical, so as to manifest a new divine body. But this was the evolutionary adventure, and, as she said on 7th April, 1973, in a conversation with Satprem:

“Sometimes I wonder, “Does the Lord want me to leave?” I am quite … quite willing, you know, so that’s not the point; but does He want me to stay? ... No answer. No answer, except “Transformation”. And that is …”¹⁶

The Mother had two visions of her “new body”. On 24th March 1972, while describing her second vision, She said:

“Yes, I WAS like that. It was me; I didn’t look at myself in a mirror, I say myself like this (Mother bends her head to look at her body), I was … I just was like that.

… It was around four in the morning, I think. And perfectly natural—I mean, I didn’t look in a mirror, it felt perfectly natural. I only remember what I saw (gesture from the chest to the waist). I was covered only with veils, so I only saw … What was very different was the torso, from the chest to the waist: it was neither male nor female.

But it was lovely, my form was extremely svelte and slim—slim but not thin. And the skin was very white, just like my skin. A lovely form. And no sex—you couldn’t tell: neither male nor female. The sex had disappeared.

The same here (Mother points to her chest), all that was flat. I don’t know how to explain it. There was an outline reminiscent of what is now, but with no forms (Mother touches her chest), not even as much as man’s. A very white skin, very smooth. Practically no abdomen to speak of. And no stomach. All that was slim.

I didn’t pay any special attention, you see, because I was that: it felt perfectly natural to me …

But this form is in the subtle physical, isn’t it?

It must be already like that in the subtle physical.

But how will it pass into the physical?

That’s the question I don’t know. … I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Also, clearly, there was none of the complex digestion we have now, or the kind of elimination we have now. It didn’t work that way.

But how? … Food is already obviously very different and becoming more and more so—glucose, for instance, or substances that don’t require an elaborate digestion. But how will the body itself change? … That I don’t know. I don’t know.

You see, I didn’t look to see how it worked, for it was completely natural to me, so I can’t describe it in detail. Simply, it was neither a woman’s body nor a man’s—that much is certain. And the outline was fairly similar to that of a very young person. There was a faint suggestion of a human form (Mother draws a form in the air): with a shoulder and a waist. Just a hint of it.

I see it but.… I saw it exactly as you see yourself, I didn’t even look at myself in the mirror. And I had a sort of veil, which I wore to cover myself.

It was my way of being (there was nothing surprising in it), my natural way of being.

That must be how it is in the subtle physical.

But what’s mysterious is the transition from one to the other.

Yes—how?

But it’s the same mystery as the transition from chimpanzee to man.

Oh, no, Mother! It’s more colossal than that! It’s more colossal for, after all, there isn’t that much difference between a chimpanzee and a man.

But there wasn’t such a difference in the appearance either (Mother draws a form in the air): there were shoulders, arms, legs, a body, a waist. Similar to ours. There was only….

Yes, but I mean the way a chimpanzee functions and the way a man functions are the same.

They are the same.

Well, yes! They digest the same, breath the same….

Whereas here….

No, but here too there must have been breathing. The shoulders were strikingly broad (gesture), in contrast. That’s important. But the chest was neither feminine nor even masculine: only reminiscent of it. and all that—stomach, abdomen and the rest—was simply an outline, a very slender and harmonious form, which certainly wasn’t used for the purpose we now use our bodies.

The two different things—totally different—were procreation, which was no longer possible, and food. Though even our present food is manifestly not the same as that of chimpanzees or even the first humans; it’s quite different. So now, it seems we have to find a food that doesn’t require all this digesting…. Not exactly liquid, but not solid either.

And there’s also the question of the mouth—I don’t know about that—and the teeth? Naturally, chewing should no longer be necessary, and therefore teeth wouldn’t be either … But there has to be something to replace them. I haven’t the slightest idea what the face looked like. But it didn’t seem too, too unlike what it is now.

What will change a great deal, of course—it had acquired a prominent role—is breathing. That being depended much on it.

Yes, he probably absorbs energies directly.

Yes. There will probably be intermediary beings who won’t last, you see, just as there were intermediary beings between the chimpanzee and man.

But I don’t know, something has to happen that has never before happened.”¹⁷

Indeed, Mother’s consciousness was clearer and greater than ever. She was the seer par excellence. She was living with a new mode of being that was turned exclusively towards the Divine with complete self-effacement right up to the cells in utter surrender. And yet, she had all the dynamism of a hero-warrior engaged in the battle to fight all that resisted or obstructed the effort to bring about the rule of the divine supermind on the earth. On November 14, 1973, at midnight, she began to feel that she might get paralysed. She asked to walk. She said: ‘I want to walk, otherwise I’ll become paralysed.’ She held on to the arm of one of the attendants and walked… until she turned blue.

During the next days, she would ask to be lifted from her chaise longue. On the night of November 16, she again asked to walk: ‘I want to walk,’ she said. She continued to fight till the very end. On the afternoon of the 17th, the signs of choking grew worse. At 7.10 p.m. her doctor massaged her heart. At 7.25 p.m. her breathing stopped.

Such is the account we can make, extremely briefly, of the one who had attained that victory, which consisted of the supramental change in the physical consciousness. We may say that as a result of this victory, a new supramental body was already built,—the body that could be visible to the inner vision which can see a new Matter that is more dense than subtle physical and yet less dense than the gross physical that we can see and touch with our gross physical eyes and gross physical tactile sensation. The body that stopped breathing was only that gross body which had been used as a pedestal for that new supramental body, which is at work and which is carrying on the yoga of evolution, for the multiplication of the intermediate bodies that need to appear as a transition between the human body and the divine body.

History of Yoga

There is a larger perspective in the context of which the theme of Yoga stands out as a subject of great contemporary relevance. That larger perspective is that of the acute crisis through which humankind is passing today. This crisis has arisen, it seems, from the fact that, while on the one hand, it does not seem unlikely that we may succeed in creating a system of life, practically covering the whole globe, which can provide to human beings means and materials to satisfy hedonistic, selfish and egoistic wants on such a scale that, for quite a long indefinite period, humankind might remain chained to circles of lower life marked by hunger and satisfaction, strife and success, and perils of small and great disasters, and yet, on the other hand, the upward human aspiration to build individual and collective life on the basis of mutuality and harmony, of peace and concord, and ever-increasing perfectibility of our highest potentialities must continue to struggle without any sound promise of its eventual fulfilment. In other words, while there is an upward endeavour to break the vicious circle of our present vitalism or economic barbarism, this very endeavour has come to be partly discouraged by the scientist by his demand to provide physical proof of the supraphysical and partly blocked by the religionist by his refusal to look beyond dogma and the revealed word of the past, and has thus come to be rendered unequal to its tasks.

The vicious circle can be broken only if our upward endeavour can get unmixed positive support from science and only if the moral and spiritual foundations can be strengthened and made increasingly unshakable.

This is the real issue.

It has been contented that all true knowledge belongs to science and can be acquired only by scientific methods. Morality, it is argued, is a matter of emotional responses which are themselves relative and carry no authenticity of knowledge in their contents or in their foundations. As far as spirituality is concerned, it is argued that its claims in regard to its insights, intuitions, revelations and other allied operations of knowledge are at the best occasional flashes, somewhat like conjectures which may sometime hit the truth but which escape from any systematic scrutiny by means of criteria that can confidently be applied in any impartial search of validity of knowledge. It is, therefore, concluded that spirituality is a field of light and shadow where it is difficult to distinguish what really is light and what really is shadow.

Now it is true that morality is a field of relativities and that if its claims of knowledge of the good and right are to have some secure foundation, it can find these foundations only in a field which is higher than morality, namely, the field of spirituality. But if spirituality itself is a field of uncertainties besieged by doubtful lights and shadows, we are thrown back into the vicious circle of vitalism which cannot be broken.

But is it true that spirituality is a field of uncertainties, of occasional flashes of light and of doubtful intuitions and revelations? It is here that the claims of Yoga need to be taken into account. For Yoga claims to be, among many other things, a methodised quest of spiritual and eventually of integral knowledge which is found to have succeeded in arriving at certain stable states of consciousness and of plenary illumination and knowledge of truths which can be verified both objectively and in personal experience by means of criteria which can be considered to be a sound as in any inquiry relating to validity of knowledge. In other words, Yoga claims to be a scientific discipline through which authentic knowledge can be gained in regard to any object, particular, universal or transcendental, on which its methods are applied systematically and repeatedly.

It can at once be seen that if these claims of Yoga are valid, then we shall be able to have through Yogic methods that knowledge which, can possibly break vicious circle of the crisis of the present day and deliver us into new possibilities of a better humanity and a better world.

The next question, therefore, before us is whether the claims of Yoga are truly valid and whether they can be found to be sustainable. It has been contended that Yoga has discovered and perfected certain specific methods by application of which human consciousness can be so revolutionised that the ordinary functioning of the human body, human heart, and human mind can be united with superior faculties of knowledge and action, and ultimately the human being can become permanently united with the universal and transcendental states of consciousness and knowledge. It has been further contended that the Yogic science possesses assured data of the knowledge of methods and their processes of application as also of their corresponding results. It has even further been contended that the efficacy of these methods and their results can be verified by everybody who is prepared to acquire the necessary preparation and training, and that the results obtained by others can be confirmed through one’s own personal experience and can be utilised for producing relevant consequences and results. Finally, it is added that there is a long history of the development of this science of Yoga, and as in the case of the history of development of any science, one can trace a credible account of the old methods and old knowledge, of how they have gradually grown and developed by methods of confirmation, modifications and fresh developments resulting from new experiments and fresh acquisitions of knowledge. It is, therefore, concluded that Yoga provides a sound basis of a vast field of knowledge which can even now be studied and reacquired by the present humanity, and that without any need of falling into any traps of dogmatism, blind belief, superstition or even of half-knowledge and half-blindness, we can come to tap those resources of knowledge which can provide us the required guidance for the building up of a world illumined by ever-progressive knowledge and inspired by universal love.

These contentions and the conclusions to which they lead are so important that they deserve to be heard and noted with utmost seriousness, and they also deserve to be studied in full depth with all the required objectivity and even microscopic scruple so that whatever gates of knowledge that Yoga can open up before us are entered into, and we are enabled to ensure that no possibility or avenue of knowledge that we require to break the present crisis has been ignored or allowed to remain under clouds of our dogmatic refusal to inquire and to learn.

While undertaking this journey, three important conditions need to be underlined. Firstly, it should be acknowledged that belief by itself is not evidence of reality. Truths, supra-physical or physical, must be founded not on mental belief alone but on experience, − but in each case experience must be appropriate to the order of truths into which we enter; their validity and significance must be scrutinised, but according to their own law and by consciousness which can enter into them and according to the law of the relevant domain or by a consciousness which can be only of truths of that order; so alone can one be sure of the steps and can one enlarge firmly the sphere of knowledge.

Secondly, we should underline the fact that even though subjective experience can easily be deceptive, error is not the prerogative only of the inner subjective or of the subliminal parts of our being. For error is also appendage of the physical mind and its objective methods and standards too; liability to error cannot be a reason for shutting out a large and important domain of experience; it is a reason rather for scrutinising it and finding out in it its own true standards and its characteristic appropriate and valid means of verification.

Thirdly, it must be pointed out that it is the subjective consciousness that has constructed the standards and criteria of objective knowledge; in doing so the great quality that has played the essential role is the sincerity and honesty of subjective consciousness as also development of various testing grounds and criteria; these can be employed once again when the fields of subjective experience are investigated, and yogic records indicate that yoga has the capacity to deal with the possible pitfalls and impurities of consciousness which are obstructive of the discoveries of the objects of yogic knowledge.

At the outset, it may be said that it is somewhat unfortunate that whenever we speak of Yoga today, we appear to be referring to that system of physical Yogic postures, which have been elaborately described in Hatha Yoga or else to that particular orthodox system of philosophy which has come to be known as the Yoga philosophy and which has been attributed to Patanjali, − a system of Yoga which is also known as Rajayoga. It is even believed in some quarters that while there must have been rudimentary beginnings of Yoga in early stages of the Veda and the Upanishads, the real Yoga is that which has been spoken of in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Actually, as it would be clear to every serious student of the history of Yoga, Patanjali’s Yoga is only one of the specialised systems of Yogic methods. As a matter of fact, every system of Indian philosophy was coupled with its corresponding system of Yogic methods. This is true not only of the orthodox systems of philosophy but also of both Jainism and Buddhism. In a serious study of the history of Yoga, therefore, we shall need to take into account all these systems of Yogic methods. We have also to take into account the fact that the Bhagavadgita, which preceded the final crystallisation of Indian systems of philosophy, is itself looked upon as an authentic text of a synthesis of Jñānayoga, Karmayoga, and Bhaktiyoga, and we have also to note the fact that the Bhagavadgita itself is proclaimed to be a digest of the Upanishads. We are thus led to a much earlier beginning of the science of Yoga, and considering that the Upanishads themselves are a recovery, continuation, enrichment and even a sort of culmination of the knowledge contained in the Veda, we would be quite justified in looking upon Veda as the earliest text available to mankind from which we can hope to trace a secure basis of a sound history of Yoga.

It may, however, be argued that the Veda presents a picture of primitive worshippers praying gods representing natural forces such as fire, rain, wind, dawn, night, earth and sky, for wealth, food, oxen, horses, gold and other kinds of richness and victories. And if so, it may be further argued, how can Veda be regarded as a book of science of Yoga? But this argument rests upon a certain line of Vedic interpretation which is neither conclusive nor in consonance with that Indian tradition which look upon Veda literally as Veda, namely, as a book of knowledge. Not only do the Vedic Rishis themselves declare that their hymns contain secret knowledge, not only do the Upanishads refer to the Vedic declarations as authority of their own discoveries of knowledge, but even in a later period, we have Shankaracharya’s view that the Vedas are mines of all knowledge, knowledge on all the planes of consciousness, and that they fix the condition and relations of the Divine, the human and the animal element in the being. Moreover, we have in recent times, the two great interpretations of the Veda which bring us to the deeper profundities of the Vedic knowledge. These are the interpretations of Maharshi Dayananda Saraswati and Sri Aurobindo. In particular, Sri Aurobindo’s method of interpretation which has been illustrated at length in his “The Secret of the Veda” and “The Hymns to the Mystic Fire” give us conclusive assurance and opens up before us a large body of Yoga contained in the hymns of the Rigveda even though the language of these hymns baffles us from time to time by its antique obscurity. As Sri Aurobindo points out:

“In the deep and mystic style of Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of Medhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Vishwamitra, as in Vasishtha’s even harmonies we have the same firm foundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence to the sacred conventions of the Initiates.”¹⁸

It may still be argued that the Veda is centred on the institution of sacrifice, yajña, and that Veda is rather karmakānda and not jñānakanda. In continuation of this argument, it may be contended that the Veda is a book of ritualistic materialism and that we need not look for any profound knowledge or for science such as that of Yoga. Now we may admit that the Veda is centred on the institution of sacrifice, but we may question whether sacrifice is merely a matter of outer ritualism. There is no doubt that there is an exterior aspect of the Vedic hymns and that the Vedic hymns were used for ritualistic purposes; but a deeper study of Vedic ritualism would suggest that this ritualism was symbolic in character. Moreover, karmakānda went beyond mere ritualism and Veda, in one of its aspects, may be regarded as a gospel of Karmayoga which was continued in the Karmayoga of the Bhagavadgita where, too, significantly, we find that the concept of yajña is not only accepted but also shown to have a profounder psychological meaning by the help of which it could be declared that every action is yajña, provided it is done in the spirit of inner sacrifice to the cosmic and transcendental Reality. As in the Gita, yajña is Yoga, even so in the Veda yajña can be so understood as to be Yoga.

There are, again, in the Veda a number of other terms which are used symbolically, and if we try to understand them in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation, we would be able to enter into the heart of the methods of Vedic Yoga as also into the richness of the great results which were achieved by the Vedic Rishis by the application of these Vedic methods.

What exactly were the methods of Yoga and what were the results achieved by the Vedic Rishis should be a very important subject matter of a long and a detailed study. But there is no doubt that these methods were those of purification of our ordinary consciousness, methods of concentration of our consciousness on higher states and beings of consciousness, methods of perfection by which the lower can be transcended into the corresponding higher realms of being, − and these are again the same methods which we find repeated in the same way or in a more modified manner in subsequent developments in the Upanishads, the Gita and the rest. And we find in the Veda the affirmation of a hierarchy of infinitudes to which the normal existence of man even in its higher and widest flights is still a stranger. And this hierarchy of infinitudes is achieved in the Vedic Yoga by the transcendence of the lower triple being and our lower triple world, a transcendence which has been described by the Vedic seers as an exceeding or breaking beyond the two firmaments of heaven and earth.

Commenting on the basic nature of the methods and results of the Vedic Yoga, Sri Aurobindo refers to the Vedic movement of the descent and the ascent. As he points out:

“The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the mental being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may term the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or the supermind where the One and May meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the Divine truth and the inspiration of the Divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the Spiritual—this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic ‘Sacrifice’—to be converted into the terms of infinite truth of Sacchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence in forms of a Divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality, physical existence till the lower is transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher. This was the double Vedic movement of the descent and birth form the gods in the human creature and the ascent of the human power that struggle towards the Divine knowledge, power and delight and climb into the godheads, the results of which was the possession of the One, the Infinite, the beatific existence, the union with God, the immortality.”¹⁹

We then begin to study of history of science of Yoga, and we shall begin this study with the theme of the Vedic Yoga. The scope of the history of Yoga is very vast, and it should cover not only the Indian history of Yogic science but also the study of Yogic methods and their results as we find in the esoteric score of a number of religions such as Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and even in systems like the Chinese Taoism. Our intention is to bring to ourselves the treasures that are available in the records of Yogic knowledge.

Yoga & Consciousness

(1.03.2002)

Let me begin with the Vedic prayer which marks a decision border of transition when the scientist of the ancient yoga happened to stand at a height of clarity of the mental and over-mental peaks of consciousness, but not deluded by the growth of that clarity stream to arrive at the Sun of Knowledge by crossing the golden lid that covers the Form and Face of the Supramental Truth.

हिरण्मयेन पाात्रेण सत्यस्यापिहितं मुखम्। तत् त्वं पूषन्नपावृणु सत्यधर्माय दृष्टये।।

“The face of Truth is covered with a brilliant golden lid; that do thou remove, O Fosterer, for the law of the Truth, for sight.”

Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad: Isha Upanishad

This prayer is to be found in the Ishopanishad, which is also the last Chapter of the Yajurveda, and it points to profound treasures that lie hidden in the hymns of the Vedic Seers. These treasures are particularly relevant to the theme of the Seminar, since they speak of subtleties and complexities of consciousness, rising from the Inconscient to the Superconscient, all explored through what may be called scientific methods of experimentation and verification, tested by repeatability and constancy of experiences and abiding realizations.

The reason why I am induced to invite scientists and philosophers to study the Veda is threefold: Firstly, since the great Indian scientist, Jagdish Chandra Bose, demonstrated the presence of consciousness in plants and even in metals, the Cartesian and Newtonian dualistic and mechanistic view of the universe was shaken and, consequent upon the latest developments in Quantum Mechanics, such as those in Bell’s Theorem, the one theme that has now emerged as the focus of frontline research is that of Consciousness in Matter, Life and Mind. Secondly, the quest of Modern Science has demonstrated that knowledge of Facts needs to be synthesised with the knowledge of Values, if the world is to be guided by wisdom that can prevent the use of scientific knowledge for destructive forces, for tyranny and for war. And thirdly, it has now become clear that the methods that Science employs for its investigations are not adequate for the kind of synthesis and integrality that is imperatively demanded by the practical needs of the irresistible march of culture of universality and durable peace. We are all poised for a great shift and are looking for a new methodology of knowledge, a new kind of knowledge that blends Facts and Values, and a new form of Science that has no barriers and integrates all the universal domains of extreme.

In respect of these three matters, it is suggested, the study of the Veda can be an invaluable art. Those who have fathomed into the meaning of the Veda, right from Yajnavalkya and Valmiki and Vyasa up to our present-day Seer, Sri Aurobindo, have found in the Veda a mine of knowledge and a systematic body of knowledge of consciousness from its lowest to the supreme levels. As Sri Aurobindo points out, while speaking of the seers who composed the Vedic hymns:

“They may not have yoked the lightning to their chariots, nor weighed sun and star, nor materialised all the destructive forces in Nature to aid them in massacre and domination, but they had measured and fathomed all the heavens and earths within us, they had cast their plummet into the inconscient and the subconscient and the superconscient; they had read the riddle of death and found the secret of immortality; they had sought for and discovered the One and known and worshipped Him in the glories of His light and purity and wisdom and power.”²⁰

National Consultation Seminar on Yoga and Consciousness

Hon’ble Minister of Human Resource Development, Professor Murli Manohar Joshiji, Professor Chattopadhyayaji, Professor Bhuvaneshwariji, Professor Pradhan, Revered Swamijis and Swaminijis, Distinguished Philosophers, Psychologists, Scientists and Experts and Friends:

National Consultation Seminar on Yoga and Consciousness-I

The mystery of consciousness and full revelation of its nature and power by a methodical and disciplined process of human effort that we call yoga is a fascinating subject of this National Seminar, the rationale of which at the present stage of human civilisation lies in the fact that its study promises not only conducive to the individual upliftment and summum bonum but to the development of a precious aid which, it appears, is indispensable for the next steps of upward advancement of humanity and human culture.

The question of the origin of consciousness has begun to occupy the front-ranking leaders of contemporary science. Quantum physics, brain research and bio-engineering, each in its own way, is confronted with the presence of consciousness in the very operations of what seems to be purely material or unconscious. The tide of new data makes it impossible to ignore the drive of set purpose and guidance of tendency which appears to be blind but where the pressure is unmistakable in the eventual or immediate coming to the target sought. This drive is seen increasingly in the operations in the animal, in the plant, in inanimate things. It seems now no more than an outworn paradox to affirm the emergence of human consciousness, intelligence and mastery out of an unintelligent, blindly driving unconsciousness in which no form or substance of them previously existed.

We see, for example, in the animal, operations of a perfect purposefulness and an exact, indeed, a scientific knowledge which are quite beyond the capacities of the animal mentality and which man himself can only acquire by long culture and education and even then uses with a much less sure rapidity.

It has been said, in regard to the realm of the inanimate, that the different groupings and varying number of infinitesimals can produce or serve as the constituent occasion for the appearance of large atomic infinitesimals of different natures, qualities, powers; but we have no account of how these different dispositions can come to constitute the differentiae in the constituted outcomes or results.

Attempts are being made to show that a play of electrons, of atoms and their molecules, of cells, glands, chemical secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on the nerves and brain of a Kalidasa or a Shakespeare or a Plato or a Shankara to be the dynamic occasion for the production of a Shakuntalam or a Hamlet or a Republic or a Vivekachudamani; but here the divergence or the determinants and the determinations become so wide that we are no longer able to follow the process, much less understand or utilise.

Consciousness emerging from a fundamental Inconscient and a Mind of order and reason manifesting as a brilliant final consequence of a world created by inconscient Chance can be pronounced as something quite possible; but we are entitled to ask the question whether chance is a category of explanation or a philosophical or neutral exposition of the denial of any principle of explanation; but in either case, it can not rule out a possibility of a better hypothesis of explanation or a philosophical theory of explanation.

It is at this stage that both scientifically and philosophically we are justified in studying the phenomena of consciousness not merely in their rudimentary stages but also at their advanced points of manifestation. For it is quite possible that just as in the case of a steam engine, piston is not the cause of the steam but it is the steam that causes the movement of the piston, even so it is not the unconscious that produces the conscious but just the reverse of it. In that case, the best way is to examine those phenomena of consciousness which can be called crucial and even extraordinary, and which carry with them their significance and motivation of exploration.

Just to take a random example, we have a short anecdote described by Swami Vivekananda, an anecdote which had come within his own experience. He said:

“I once heard of a man who, if any one went to him with questions in his mind, would answer them immediately; and I was also informed that he foretold events. I was curious and went to see him with a few friends. We each had something in our minds to ask, and, to avoid mistakes, we wrote down our questions and put them in our pockets. As soon as the man saw one of us, he repeated our questions and gave the answers to them. Then he wrote something on paper, which he folded up, asked me to sign on the back, and said, ‘Don’t look at it; put it in your pocket and keep it there till I ask for it again.’ And so on to each one of us. He next told us about some events that would happen to us in the future. Then he said, ‘Now, think of a word or a sentence, from any language you like.’ I thought of a long sentence in Sanskrit, a language of which he was entirely ignorant. ‘Now, take out the paper from your pocket,’ he said. The Sanskrit sentence was written there! He had written it an hour before with the remark, ‘In confirmation of what I have written, this man will think of this sentence.’ It was correct. Another of us who had been given a similar paper which he had signed and placed in his pocket, was also asked to think of a sentence. He thought of a sentence in Arabic, which it was still less possible for the man to know; it was some passage from the Koran. And my friend found this written down on the paper.

Another of us was a physician. He thought of a sentence from a German medical book. It was written on his paper.”²¹

Again to take another random example which has been narrated by Sri Aurobindo:

“I remember when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-images—“these are only after-images!” I asked him whether after-images remained before the eye for two minutes at a time—he said, “no”, to his knowledge only for a few seconds; I also asked whether one could get after-images of things not around one or even not existing upon this earth, since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values—he could not reply in the affirmative.”²²

That there are phenomena such as telepathy and telekinesis is being established by new-born forms of scientific research, the methods of which are still imperfect or crude or defective. In the yogic literature, we have numerous descriptions of these phenomena arrived at by yogic methods of exploration, which begin with the yogic quietude of the mind and unobstructed observation of psychological determinants of consciousness. In fact, when we look at the universe, not with the eyes of familiarity, but with the yogic eyes that are fresh and filled with wonder, even ordinary sensations are felt to be mysterious and we begin to ask, as in the Kenopanishad, by what impelled does the sense grasp its object, and what exactly is the Sight and Hearing and Speech and Mind and whether there is Sight of Sight, Hearing of Hearing, Speech of Speech, and Mind of Mind. (Eaao ̴sya Eaao ̴ma, caxauYa: caxau:, vaacaao h vaacama, manasaao mana:.). Manas, say the Indian philosophers, is the sixth sense, but it can even be said that it is the only sense and that the others, vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, are merely specialisations of the sense-mind. For, as in the case of experiments in hypnosis and cognate psychological phenomena, it is possible for the mind to take the direct cognisance of the object of sense without the aid of the sense-organs. According to the yogic psychology, it is possible, once we have entered through any of the senses into relation with an external object, so to apply the Manas as to become aware of the contents of the object, for example, to receive or to perceive the thoughts and feelings of others without an aid from their utterance, gesture, action or facial expressions and even in contradiction of these always partial and often misleading data. Evidences have been shown that subtle senses are true witnesses to physical facts beyond the range of the corporal organs.

One of the mysteries of consciousness is that consciousness can be extended, that consciousness can be creative and that consciousness has power of self-limitation, and it can maintain various poises simultaneously so that there can be phenomena of exclusive concentration, multiple concentration and even integral concentration. Moreover, along with the extension of consciousness there comes about inner enlargement from the individual into the cosmic existence. It is also found in yoga that the real witness in the world is not merely individual embodied mind but a cosmic consciousness embracing the universe and appearing as an immanent intelligence in all its works. And it may be added that the possibility of cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, although in the psychology of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress.

We have in the Veda and the Upanishads and in numberless records of the Indian tradition of yogic knowledge, detailed descriptions of cosmic consciousness and even of what is called in the Mandukya Upanishad, the fourth state or turiya or transcendental state of consciousness, other than the states of waking, dream and sleep. Mandukya Upanishad, significantly, defines that transcendental as one whose essentiality is awareness of the Self in its single existence, in Whom all phenomena dissolve, Who is Calm, Who is Good, Who is the One, than Whom there is no other, and Who is the object of knowledge. (एकात्मप्रत्ययसारं प्रपञ्चोपशमं शान्तं शिवमद्वैत। चतुर्थे मन्यन्ते स आत्मा स विज्ञेयः) Mandukaya Upanishad, 7

This phrase, object of Knowledge, is very important. It is not an object of belief, accessible to religious dogma or faith, but an object of cognition, which is a power of Consciousness. The experiences of cosmic consciousness and transcendental consciousness and relationship of the individual with these states of consciousness have been the central themes of Yoga in Indian culture, and it seems that at the present juncture of humanity, the study of consciousness can best be aided and perfected by the study of Yoga.

Yoga may be defined as a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being as a result of which the human individual can arrive at a union with the universal and transcendental being or That which is even indescribable by any terms of limitation. Yoga is thus practical psychology that studies utmost capacities and powers of consciousness and applies that study to the attainment of higher and higher states of perfection. In doing so, it leads to the awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body; it nourishes an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being; and it leads to establishment of our communion with the Reality and union with It; finally, it effects a conversion and transformation of our whole being into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature, including the nature of the mind, life and body.

In the light of yoga, consciousness is not synonymous with mentality but indicates a self-aware force of existence of which mentality is middle term; below mentality it sinks into vital and material movements which are for us subconscient; above, it rises into the supramental which is for us the superconscient. Consciousness, as studied, examined and verified by yoga, is one and the same thing organising itself differently in different states, and what we call Mind and Matter are rather different grades of the same energy, different organisation of one conscious Force of Existence.

The entire field of yoga and yogic psychology and the data of consciousness that we can gain through yoga is generally looked upon with much scepticism and disbelief. This scepticism is not entirely unfounded. For the vast field of evidence and experience of yoga, if seized by untrained mind lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imagination. In the past, real nucleus of truth of this field got encrusted with such an accretion of perverting superstition and irrationalising dogmas that any advances in true knowledge was rendered impossible. For the faculties that transcend the senses are greatly exposed to a mixed functioning in which they are in danger of illuminating confusion rather than clarifying truth. It is, therefore, necessary that advancing Knowledge should base itself on a clear, pure and disciplined intellect. It is necessary, too, that it should correct its errors by a return to the restrains of a sensible fact. But still, the important point is that the human mind can be properly trained and disciplined; it can be purified and made fit for concentration so as to enter into a journey of exploration, and this journey can be made to yield the right knowledge of its object and consequently to deliver to the individual and collectivity the alchemy of liberation and fulfilment.

While undertaking this journey, three important conditions need to be underlined. Firstly, it should be acknowledged that belief by itself is not evidence of reality. Truths, supra-physical or physical, must be founded not on mental belief alone but on experience,—but in each case experience must be appropriate to the order of truths into which we enter; their validity and significance must be scrutinised, but according to their own law and by consciousness which can enter into them and according to the law of the relevant domain or by a consciousness which can be only of truths of that order; so alone can one be sure of the steps and can one enlarge firmly the sphere of knowledge.

National Consultation Seminar on Yoga and Consciousness-II

In any case, the project that is being undertaken and in promotion of which we have assembled here has a more modest programme. Our object in the project is to understand the history of the great disciplined effort that we have called in India the effort of yoga. Our aim is to collect and compile systematically and scrupulously the important data which pertain to this great domain of knowledge and power. We have to bring together in a systematic manner the important and useful data that have accumulated over millennia in our country; we may have to classify them under suitable categories of classification; we have to bring out the conditions that have been laid down in order to ensure utmost purity and sincerity of the conquest, the criteria that have been developed and employed in the tasks of testing and verification; our aim will be to compare different systems of yoga which have been developed in the long course of Indian history; we have also to examine the claims and counter-claims of the efficacy and integrality of various systems; our aim will also be to study those systems of yoga which have attempted at a synthesis and considered question of a new synthesis that may be necessary at the present juncture of India’s history of yoga.

In this task, we need to have wide consultations with those who have studied yoga and particularly those who have practised yoga. In India, philosophy has been an instrument of yogic realisation, and hence every system of Indian philosophy (except the philosophy of Lokayata) has a system of yoga. Consultation with philosophers is thus indispensable in this task. Finally, since yoga has been pursued and practised as a practical psychology, psychologists will also have to play their due role. And since yoga has been practised as a scientific exploration of consciousness, and since in the contemporary world physical sciences themselves are drawing nearer to the theme of consciousness, it will be indispensable to have consultation with scientists belonging to various branches and disciplines of knowledge.

Mere consultation is not enough. We have to articulate and expound all the relevant aspects of yoga authentically, clearly and scrupulously. We need to have the active collaboration of philosophers, scientists, psychologists and experts who can write and who can expound with scrupulous accuracy. And we shall also need a good deal of research work that can uncover unknown facts and systems and enrich our knowledge pertaining to this difficult domain.

The time has come when India’s great treasure of knowledge of yoga needs to be presented to the world, because the world needs it, and India has the responsibility to answer this need as competently as possible.

It is a matter of gratification that the Government of India have themselves suggested that the project of consciousness and yoga should be undertaken and the inaugural address of the Hon’ble Minister for Human Resource Development at this Seminar is a sure testimony of the full support of the Government of India. It is also gratifying that we have in Professor D.P. Chattopadhyaya a great leader who can shoulder the responsibility of this project, which is extremely difficult and yet which is at the same time most essential, if it is realised that the world cannot move forward without a radical human transformation and that yoga is the most potent instrument of that transformation, which is based upon authentic and verifiable knowledge, and which has been constantly developing and stimulating research in new fields and processes of yogic knowledge.

We need to underline that yoga is not a closed book; it is not a body of revelations made once for all. It has no dogmatism; and even the Vedas and Upanishads marked, not a culmination, but a great beginning of the yogic endeavour. They are themselves records of developing experiences and enlargements of knowledge and power. They been themselves an original great synthesis, based upon loftiest discoveries, and yet they opened further gates of fresh discoveries. In the words of the Vedic poet:

ब्रह्माणस्त्वा शतक्रत उद्वंशमिव येमिरे । (Rig Veda, 1.10.1) यत्सानोः सानुमारुहद्भूर्यस्पष्ट कत्र्वम्। (Rig Veda, 1.10.2)

“The leaders of the Word climb thee like a ladder, O hundred-powered. As one climbs from peak to peak, there is made clear the much that has still to be done.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle: The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age

I am sure that the present Seminar will indicate the readiness of all who have assembled here to collaborate and to take this project towards its difficult journey and fulfilment.

Synthesis of yoga (Guahati)

Synthesis of yoga (Guahati)-I

A pilgrim of our times, earnest in his quest and scrupulous in his methods, burning with a single aspiration to search for truth and to consecrate himself to the tasks that would flow from that search for the fulfilment of himself and for the eventual fulfilment of the human journey, finds himself arrested by various forms of denial and scepticism that pronounce the message that the present organisation of consciousness is the last limit and that the only course of rationality or reasonableness is to limit himself to the boundaries of that organisation and be content with limited certainities and probabilities and ever crumbling ideals of tolerable existence for oneself and the world.

There is, indeed, a layer of human intellectuality which is tied to senses so exclusively that it finds its station and resting place in what these instruments perceive and cognise, and even if it reflects, it finds nothing more satisfying than the argument that senses are our sole means of knowledge and that nothing can be known and nothing can be valid if it does not refer back to its origin in sense experience.

Not long ago, materialism held the central filed of inquiry, and it had predominant influence over the seekers of knowledge and persuaded them to limit the aim of life to a feverish effort of the individual to snatch what he may from a transient existence or to dispassionate and objectless service of the race and of the individual, knowing well that the latter is a transient fiction of the nervous mentality and the former only a little more long lived collective form of the same nervous spasm of Matter.

It is true that materialism is no more being advanced so overwhelmingly, and it has been largely conceded that materialism cannot be defended as a metaphysical philosophy. This is because, in the first place, those who are inclined psychologically to favour materialism have largely come to the conclusion that no metaphysical philosophy, including materialism, is logically sustainable. It has also come to be recognised increasingly that it is impossible to argue that just because physical senses are our instruments of knowledge, we must conclude that they are the only means of knowledge and that from the premise that matter is an object of cognition by physical senses, it cannot be argued that matter alone exists.

Nonetheless, materialistic bias has continued to preponderate in the field of philosophy, epistemology, science and philosophy of science. And this preponderance can be seen in the way in which concepts such as those of infinity, eternity, universality, essence, explanation, causality and others have come to be dealt with during the last hundred years. All these concepts have been scrutinised with the microscopic lends which permits only those deliverances which are ultimately warranted by physical senses.

At one time, the knowledge of the phenomena was sought to be understood in the light of noumena, but this is no more considered to be a necessary requirement of rational understanding. At one time, there seemed to be in the world an iron insistence on order, on a law basing the possibilities. But today even while granting some apparent operations of laws of nature, what is predominantly emphasised is the unaccountability and freak and fantasy and random action. It is increasingly being recognised that the theory of Mechanical Necessity by itself does not elucidate the free play of the endless unaccountable variations which are visible in the universe as also in the evolutionary processes. Perceiving, however, that there is a good deal of freak and fantasy combined with a good deal of order, there is a trend to explain the world by pointing to a self-organising dynamic Chance or to give up the idea altogether of explanation in terms of any universal law of causation. It has even been argued that one should not aim at explanation of the phenomena of the world, but one should remain content with their descriptions.

It is true that science still aims at explaining phenomena apart from describing them in terms of the how and the why. But considering that induction is a necessary method of science, and since the assumptions of induction in regard to the law of uniformity of nature and the law of causation now are seen to be inconsistent with the freak and fantasy of the world-phenomena, various theories have been developed to explain induction empirically without the need to acknowledge non-empirical belief in the laws of universality and causality. As a result, philosophers of science have largely come to the conclusion that scientific knowledge is bound to remain subject to various shades of scepticism or fallibility.

It is against this background that science is being looked upon as a body of knowledge, the certainty of which can never be guaranteed, and which will constantly be subject to corrigibility and fallibility. It is being admitted that on account of fallibility of scientific knowledge, while the boundaries of knowledge can be indefinitely expanded in course of time, questions such as those of the origin of the universe, mysteries and wonders of the universe, the paradoxes of the universe as also questions pertaining to the aim of life and those relating to fulfilment of the individual and the collectivity need not be raised, even if raised cannot be answered. It is also acknowledged that this conclusion and consequent attitude may be found unsatisfactory, but it is argued that there are no ascertainable faculties other than those of physical senses and those of anthropological rationality by the help of which any higher knowledge can be attained.

Bertrand Russell, speaking on his own behalf as that of like-minded philosophers stated towards the end of his History of Western Philosophy, “They confess frankly that the human intellect is unable to find conclusive answers to many questions of profound importance to mankind, but they refuse to belief that there is some ‘higher’ way of knowing by which we can discover truths hidden from science and the intellect.”²³

Professor D.P. Chattopadhyaya in his book, Induction, Probability and Scepticism has stated:

“The real world and the objects in it are not revealed to us at once. We know them gradually, historically, and can never be cognitively sure of their absolute certainty. The knowing self and the known (and knowable) world are differently interlocked, inter-animated, and interactive, both biologically and epistemologically. In our knowledge of the world we do not, rather cannot, stand totally apart from it. From the evolutionary point of view what is called survival value is in a way akin to truth value, truth of what our organism is informed about the world around us. Situated in the world, we have to know t. in spite of our ability to transcend our situation, in a limited way, we cannot totally get out of it. It is some what like our inability to jump out of our own skins and schemes.”²⁴

Science and philosophy of science have thus come to advise us to accept in all humility our limitations in respect of knowledge, in respect of truth and in respect of certainty. But is this the end of the journey? Human aspiration refuses to accept it, and a question is raised: Are there any avenues which we can justifiably pursue, such as those proposed by religion, occultism, rationalistic philosophy and spirituality and persuade science and philosophy of science to join what can become a combined or synthetic quest, not only for the purposes of expanding conquest of the realms of truth but also those of the realisation of the highest possible ideals of human welfare, human solidarity and human fulfilment?

Synthesis of yoga (Guahati)-II

In an important development in the recent march of science, the phenomenon of consciousness has begun to command increasing attention. As a matter of fact, as far back as the close of 19th century, the great Indian scientist, Jagdish Chandra Bose, had demonstrated the presence of consciousness in plants and even in animals. (?) But consequent upon the latest developments in Quantum Mechanics, such as Bell’s Theorem, scientists have begun to inquire into the mystery of consciousness.

Roger Penrose has in his celebrated book Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, attempted to address the question of consciousness from a scientific standpoint. He has strongly contended that an essential ingredient is missing from the contemporary scientific picture. He acknowledges the precision and scope of physical laws but he complains that they contain no hint of any action that cannot be simulated computationally. He points out that there are, however, reasons for believing that there is in them a hidden non-computational action that the functioning of our brains must somehow be taking advantage of. He further argues that questions should be asked as to why the scientists have failed to recognise the fact that a non-computational phenomena like consciousness should be inherent at least potentially in all material things. According to him, it is quite possible in physics, to have a fundamentally new property completely different from any contemplated hitherto, hidden, in the behaviour of ordinary matter.

David Bohm in his book, Wholeness And The Implicate Order, argues that the Quantum Theory presents a serious challenge to the mechanistic order. He points out that the key features of the quantum theory that challenge mechanism are:

Movement is in general discontinuous, in the sense that action is constituted of indivisible quanta (implying also that an electron, for example, can go from one state to another, without passing through any states in between).
Entities, such as electrons, can show different properties (e.g., particle-like, wavelike, or something in between), depending on the environmental context within which they exist and are subject to observation.
Two entities, such as electrons, which initially combine to form a molecule and then separate, show a peculiar non-local relationship, which can best be described as a non-causal connection of elements that are far apart (as demonstrated in the experiment of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen).

These three key features of quantum theory, according to Bohm, clearly show the inadequacy of mechanistic notion. Thus, if all actions are in the form of discrete quanta, interactions between different entities (e.g. electrons) constitute a single structure of indivisible links, so that the entire universe has to be thought of as an unbroken whole. In this whole each element that we can abstract in though shows basic properties (wavelike and particle like, etc.) that depend on its overall environment, in a way that is much more reminiscent of how the organs constituting living being are related, than it is of how parts of a machine interact.

Bohm discusses the relationship of matter and consciousness on the basis of some common ground and propounds an idea of a new world-view based on the concept of unbroken wholeness. He states:

“To obtain an understanding of the relationship of matter and consciousness has, however, thus far proved to be extremely difficult, and this difficulty has its root in the very great difference in their basic qualities as they present themselves in our experience. This difference has been expressed with particularly great clarity by Descartes, who described matter as ‘extended substance’ and consciousness as ‘thinking substance’. Evidently, by ‘extended substance’ Descartes meant something made up of distinct forms existing in space, in an order of extension and separation basically similar to the one that we have been calling explicate. By using the term ‘thinking substance’ in such sharp contrast to ‘extended substance’ he was clearly implying that the various distinct forms appearing in thought do not have their existence in such an order of extension and separation (i.e. some kind of space), but rather in a different order, in which extension and separations have no fundamental significance. The implicate order has just this latter quality, so in a certain sense Descartes was perhaps anticipating that consciousness has to be understood in terms of an order that is closer to the implicate than it is to the explicate.”

According to Bohm, matter as a whole can be understood in terms of the notion that the implicate order is the immediate and primary actuality (while the explicate order can be derived as a particular, distinct case of the implicate order). The question that arises here, he pointed out, is that whether or not the actual substance of consciousness can be understood in terms of the notion that the implicate order is also its primary and immediate actuality. He contends that if matter and consciousness could be understood in terms of the general notion of order, the way should opened for comprehending their relationship on the basis of some common grounds. He concludes that in this way one could come to the term of a new notion of unbroken wholeness, in which consciousness is no longer to be fundamentally separated from matter.

Synthesis of yoga (Guahati)-III

With the increasing evidence of the presence of consciousness or of the possibility of presence of consciousness in the physical, we seem to have entered into a new phase of the development of scientific knowledge and of the philosophy of scientific knowledge. We seem to be arriving at a meeting point of matter and consciousness, of the physical and the supra-physical. But it would be premature to conclude that the identity of matter and consciousness and of the physical and the supra-physical has been proved, and that, therefore, we have arrived or that we are soon going to arrive at the synthesis of science and spirituality.

The presence and operation of consciousness in the physical world has been admitted by a number of philosophical systems, and these philosophical systems, even though they contain valuable insights, do not provide as yet any firm ground for verifiable knowledge. It has been found necessary, in order to know with greater certitude, to follow the curve of evolving consciousness until it arrives at a height and largeness of self-enlightenment in which highest subjective consciousness is discovered to be capable of the generation of objective universe.

But let us pause a little.

Science demands physical valid proof of facts for building up justified or justifiable beliefs regarding them. Consciousness, on the other hand, is intrinsically supra-physical, and spirituality is the domain of consciousness and of supra-physical facts. Even though a supra-physical fact may impinge on the physical world and produce physical results, the action of the supra-physical on the physical and its effect on our senses cannot be its invariable action and most normal character or process. Ordinarily, the supra-physical produces a direct effect or a tangible impression on our mind and our life-being, and can only indirectly and through them, if at all, influence the physical world and physical life. If it objectivises itself, it does so to subtler senses in us and only derivatively to the outward physical sense. In examples of the faculty of second sight and also of those of psychic faculties, this is what happens. It is to those subtle faculties that one can gain various kinds of evidence of the existence of other planes of beings and communication with them. It is then that one becomes aware that our physical mind and our physical senses are not the whole of us or the best or greatest part of us; and one begins to realise that reality cannot be restricted to a sole field of narrowness of the physical world.

It is, however, argued that the supra-physical experience is essentially subjective, and that subjective experiences or subtle-sense images can easily be deceptive, since we have no recognised method or standard of verification. But the counter-argument is that error is not the prerogative of the inner subjective experience alone; it is also a part of the knowledge that can be gained by physical senses, and even of the objective methods and standards. And just as in the physical domain, methods of scrutinising physical experiences have been worked out, and valid means of clarifications have been greatly standardised so that barren scepticism is no more defensible in regard to physical experiences, even so, in the occult sciences or in the yogic sciences, true standards and valid means of verification have been developed. Supra-physical experiences, when rightly interrogated and tested by their own characteristic appropriate standards of verification, are found to be valid and the testimony of these experiences is confirmed again and again even in the physical and objective filed. But it should be admitted that there is a too great a tendency to admit the extraordinary and miraculous or supernatural at its face value, and there is, therefore, a reason to be more scrupulous and stringent in applying appropriate valid means of verification.

The richness and complexities of Vedic system of yoga cannot be adequately captured within a brief compass that we have in our scope. But from whatever we have said so far we may be able to gather that,

The Veda is humanity’s earliest composition available, which may enable us to discern a well developed yogashastra which consists of a systematic body of the knowledge of the truths, principles, powers and processes that govern realization or yoga-siddhi, the perfection that comes from the practice of yoga;
This shastra is illustrated in the examples of hundreds of Rishis, ― not only those who have composed the hymns of the Veda, but also those forefathers like Angirasas, Ribhus and others whose yogic achievements have been variously described;
This shastra is not only a record of the subjective experiences of the composers or others, but owing to the fact the symbols and figures which have been used by these Rishis are fixed and shared by the composers and their disciples, the objective veracity of contents of knowledge that have been expressed in these compositions can be studied and can be objectively determined;
The quest contained in this yoga-shastra is undogmatic and open ended, so that the yogic system presented in the Veda (yoga) can be continued to be developed in the light of new enquiries and new methods of quest and verification.

One of the important features of the Vedic pursuit is marked by intense goodwill and concern for universal welfare, spread of universal goodwill and openness to thoughts of goodwill that may come from all directions. The following verses from Rigveda, Mandala I, sukta 89, bring out the emphasis that is laid in the Veda on universality, goodwill, well-being, selflessness and all-round good health: “May thoughts of goodwill come to us from all directions, without any obstruction or restraint, leading us to higher ideals, so that we may be recipients of divine protection without any hindrance, day to day, for our well deserved growth”. (I.89.1)

“May Indra, with the opulent power of divine hearing, be propitious to us. May the omniscient be propitious to us. May Garuda with his irresistible weapons, be propitious to us. May Brahaspati be auspicious to us.” (I.89.6))

“O Gods, may we hear with ears what is auspicious; may we see with eyes what is auspicious, O gods worthy of worship. May we sing songs of gratitude with all our bodies endowed with firm faculties and live full span of our life devoted to the divine welfare.” (I.89.8))

“Hundred autumns are assigned to us by the divine in this fleeting existence of bodies, subject to old age and decay. May we have no affliction or infirmities in the midst of our life-span.” (I.89.9))

There are, in the Yajurveda, six verses which are devoted to a prayer for the mind mind to be filled with Good Will. They are as follows:

“The mind, irrespective of whether one is awake or asleep, travels to far distant corners; this far distant-moving mind is a light of lights.