-003_Sri Aurobindo and his School

A CONSIDERABLE amount of vague misunderstanding and misapprehension seems to exist in the minds of a certain section of our people as to what Sri Aurobindo is doing in his retirement at Pondicherry. On the other hand, a very precise exposition, an exact formula of what he is not doing has been curiously furnished by a well-known patriot in his indictment of what he chooses to call the "Pondicherry School" of contemplation. But he has arrived at this formula by "openly and fearlessly" affirming what does not exist; for the things that Sri Aurobindo is accused of doing are just the things that he is not doing. In the first place, Sri Aurobindo is not doing "peaceful contemplation"; in the second place, he is not doing active propaganda either; in the third place, he is not doing pranayama or even dhyana in the ordinary sense of the word; and, lastly, he is not proclaiming or following the maxim that "although action may be tolerated as good, his particular brand of Yoga is something higher and better."

Evidently the eminent politician and his school of activism are labouring under a Himalayan confusion: when they speak of Sri Aurobindo, they really have in their mind some of the old schools of spiritual discipline. But one of the marked aspects of Sri Aurobindo's teaching and practice has been precisely his insistence on putting aside the inert and life­-shunning quietism, illusionism, asceticism and monasticism of a latter-day and decadent India. These ideals are perhaps as much obstacles in his way as in the way of the activistic school. Only Sri Aurobindo has not had the temerity to say that "it is a weakness to seek refuge in contemplation" or to suggest that a Buddha was a weakling or a Shankara a poltroon. 

This much as regards what Sri Aurobindo is not doing; let us now turn and try to understand what he is doing. The distinguished man of action speaks of conquering Nature and fighting her. Adopting this war-like imagery, we can affirm that Sri Aurobindo's work is just such a battle and conquest. But the question is, what is "nature" and what is the kind of conquest that is sought, how are we to fight and what are the required arms and implements? A good general should foresee all this, frame his plan of campaign accordingly and then only take the field. The above-mentioned leader proposes "ceaseless and unselfish action" as the way to fight and conquer Nature. He who speaks thus does not know and cannot mean what he says.

 European science is conquering Nature in a way. It has attained to a certain kind and measure, in some fields a great measure, of control and conquest; but however great or striking it may be in its own province, it does not touch man in his more intimate reality and does not bring about any true change in his destiny or his being. For the most vital part of nature is the region of the life-forces, the powers of disease and age and death, of strife and greed and lust – all the instincts of the brute in man, all the dark aboriginal forces, the forces of ignorance that form the very groundwork of man's nature and his society. And then, as we rise next to the world of the mind, we find a twilight region where falsehood masquerades as truth, where prejudices move as realities, where notions rule as ideals.

This is the present nature of man, with its threefold nexus of mind and life and body, that stands there to be fought and conquered. This is the inferior nature, of which the ancients spoke, that holds man down inexorably to a lower dharma, imperfect mode of life – the life that is and has been the human order till today. No amount of ceaseless action, however selflessly done, can move this wheel of Nature even by a hair's breadth away from the path that it has carved out from of old. Human nature and human society have been built up and are run by the forces of this inferior nature, and whatever shuffling and reshuffling we may make in its apparent factors and elements, the general scheme and fundamental form of life will never change. To displace earth (and to conquer

nature means nothing less than that) and give it another orbit, one must find a fulcrum outside earth.

Sri Aurobindo does not preach flight from life and a retreat into the silent and passive Infinite; the goal of life is not, in his view, the extinction of life. Neither is he satisfied on that account to hold that life is best lived in the ordinary round of its unregenerate dharma. If the first is a blind alley, the second is a vicious circle, – both lead nowhere.

Sri Aurobindo's sadhana starts from the perception of a Power that is beyond the ordinary nature yet is its inevitable master, a fulcrum, as we have said, outside the earth. For what is required first is the discovery and manifestation of a new soul-consciousness in man which will bring about by the very pressure and working out of its self-rule an absolute reversal of man's nature. It is the Asuras who are now holding sway over humanity, for man has allowed himself so long to be built in the image of the Asura; to dislodge the Asuras, the Gods in their sovereign might have to be forged in the human being and brought into play. It is a stupendous task, some would say impossible; but it is very far removed from quietism or passivism. Sri Aurobindo is in retirement, but it is a retire­ment only from the outward field of present physical activities and their apparent actualities, not from the true forces and action of life. It is the retreat necessary to one who has to go back into himself to conquer a new plane of creative power, – ­an entrance right into the world of basic forces, of fundamental realities, into the flaming heart of things where all actualities are born and take their first shape. It is the discovery of a power-house of tremendous energism and of the means of putting it at the service of earthly life.

And, properly speaking, it is not at all a school, least of all a mere "school of thought", that is growing round Sri Aurobindo. It is rather the nucleus of a new life that is to come. Quite naturally it has almost insignificant proportions at present to the outward eye, for the work is still of the nature of experiment and trial in very restricted limits, something in the nature of what is done in a laboratory when a new power has been discovered, but has still to be perfectly formulated in its process. And it is quite a mistake to suppose that there is a vigorous propaganda carried on in its behalf or that there is 

a large demand for recruits. Only the few, who possess the call within and are impelled by the spirit of the future, have a chance of serving this high attempt and great realisation and standing among its first instruments and pioneer workers.