Sri Aurobindo’s Vision and the 20th Century by Rod Hemsell

Posted on January 6, 2010 by admin

Sri Aurobindo’s Vision and the 20th Century

Physics and the Philosophy of Evolution

Nature’s Dialectic

Few among humanity have yet undertaken the challenge, availed the opportunity, transcended their conventional mental formulas, and achieved the clarity of intention necessary to see the vision of Sri Aurobindo. Fewer have gone so far as to integrate his vision into their thought and life, and so to understand it fully, to grasp its historical significance, and to realize its force, its evolutionary potential. Therefore it can truly be said that Sri Aurobindo belongs to the future.1 And yet his vision, and the thought forms and literary expressions that he created to embody it, are vibrant within the epoch of human achievement known as the 20th Century – that moment in time and the history of civilization that can be understood as the culmination of the rational cycle of human development and the beginning of a suprarational, integral cycle – like a subtle ether flowing through everything.

Abundant are the signs of that evolutionary transition of which he was the harbinger, indications of the integral and supramental structures of consciousness that he said would emerge. But the emergence of creative thought formations, and of new evolutionary forms, takes time. And very little is known about this process of emergence in any case. It is not common knowledge, and it is not the way we have been conditioned to understand how evolution happens. The signs, nevertheless, are most evident in the subtler, more spiritual thought of the century, but clearly perceptible also in the arts and literature, and in the human sciences – philosophy, psychology, sociology. They are progressively apparent in the startling theoretical discoveries of the natural sciences, in physics, evolutionary biology, ecology. But there, in the mental disciplines, the fundamental aporias and enigmas of thought that permeate the epoch are still, as always, the questions of man, of consciousness, of our ability, or inability, to know and conquer our human limitations. The new has not yet emerged, but its emergence is presaged by new perspectives, flashes, intensities, forebodings, and irrepressible facts, and by the failure and breakdown of old structures.

In an epoch of incomparable human cruelty, depravity and destruction, paired with almost miraculous advances in the products and processes of global technological civilization, when the human has become godlike in its mastery of nature, humanity is being forced, at last perhaps, to seek hope shrouded in its most desperate moment of deficient self-revelations, and the self-realization of its shadow identity as creator of the culture of nihilism and extinction.^2 It is perhaps inevitable, then, that we rewrite Sri Aurobindo, that we revision and rethink his vision as the background of this passing age of scientific and technological hubris, and that we narrate the necessary emergence of the trans-human. For, as he saw and wrote in the first few pages of his massive literary life-work, early in the century:

“…today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. …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 pain and emotional suffering, to establish infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities…
“… all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilized, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour.^3

But the dialectic of progress that evolutionary Nature utilizes to achieve her ends is a difficult lesson for us; it is one that we would in fact prefer to ignore. Or, perhaps it is because of our ignorance and unwillingness to learn, that she chooses to use this method. However that may be, it is by negation that she affirms and by destruction that she creates, as Sri Aurobindo stated unequivocally in those first pages, in 1914:

In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal.^4

The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence. …For the march of Nature is not drilled to a regular and mechanical forward stepping. She reaches constantly beyond herself even at the cost of subsequent deplorable retreats. …And these self-exceedings are the revelation of that in her which is most divine or else most diabolical, but in either case the most puissant to bring her rapidly forward towards her goal.^5

The First World War was then upon us, soon to be followed by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. These were followed, in turn, by the liberation of many new nations formerly subjugated by Colonialism, and the ascendancy of the civilization of affluence, with Germany and Japan, ironically, near the top. It appears that the will to power evolved rapidly in these cases, from a lower, infrahuman and destructive form into a form of creativity, efficiency and excellence. Perhaps a reverse paradox might be represented historically by the invention and widespread use of antibiotics during and after World War II, followed by the exponential increase of the human population from 2.5 billion in 1950 to over 6 billion in 2000. (It had already almost doubled from 1.6 billion at the turn of the century, largely in response to the spread of mechanized agriculture.) If, as a result of the population explosion, pollution, global warming, and the depletion of natural resources this “progress” were to bring an end, or a rapid decline, to our species, we might see a parallel with the end of the age of the dinosaurs, which apparently made room for the rise of primates just a few million years later. This pattern of reversals would apparently illustrate and be the justification for what Sri Aurobindo terms, poetically, Nature’s harsh economy, and yet the indication of a process of change that is neither random nor arbitrary, but is rather characterized by order and purpose. It is one in which Nature sets up the oppositions necessary to create the circumstances, structures, conditions for the emergence of that next stage of development, without which her processes could not continue to evolve. Therefore it might be said, to reaffirm the theoretical insights of critical thought with Sri Aurobindo’s more holistic, spiritual vision: if the apparent oppositions are terms of Nature’s intentional process, there are in fact no oppositions.

Could it perhaps then be said, that the extraordinary developments of scientific thought, knowledge, and technology in the 20th Century have set the stage for the further evolution of consciousness, not so much by what they have accomplished for humanity and the Earth, but rather by having created the possibility of such catastrophic circumstances that survival can only be achieved by overcoming and transcending this “intelligent human” with his righteous violence? Such speculation is at least not out of place in the context of the English literary traditions of Blake and Huxley to which Sri Aurobindo’s prophetic writing might also be said to belong.

Uncertainty and Complementarity

In 1914, Sri Aurobindo wrote, in the context of his speculations about the development of scientific thought, “It will be evident that essential Matter is a thing non-existent to the senses and only… a conceptual form of substance; and in fact the point is increasingly reached where only an arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of energy.”^6 He was making a comparison between the truths of the ancient Vedic knowledge and the new discoveries of modern science, for the purpose of illustrating a possible trend of the latter towards “a Monism which is consistent with multiplicity, towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many becomings.”^7 And then, within a few short paragraphs, he formulated the integral knowledge, towards which science only now, at the beginning of the next century, tentatively begins to move: “Life…begins to reveal itself as an obscure energy of sensibility imprisoned in its material formulation; and when the dividing ignorance is cured which gives us the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter, it is difficult to suppose that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything else than one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers. Nor will the conception then be able to endure of a brute material Force as the mother of Mind.”^8 As we shall see, this understanding is still a step before which scientific thought hesitates. And the one beyond, the final destined leap, it does not yet dare to think: “The Energy that creates the world can be nothing else than a Will, and Will is only consciousness applying itself to a work and a result.”^9

Einstein had published the special theory of relativity in 1905 and then developed the general theory of relativity in 1915, definitively altering the traditional conceptions of Space and Time. Commenting on the subsequent development of quantum theory in the 1920s, Capra (1982) says, as if to confirm Sri Aurobindo’s prediction, “The most important consequence of the new relativistic framework has been the realization that mass is nothing but a form of energy.”^10 And the Nobel physicist, Ilya Prigogine (1984), currently at the forefront of cosmic evolutionary theory, writes: “Quantum mechanics teaches us that… on all levels reality implies an essential element of conceptualization.”^11

The seminal discoveries of quantum mechanics in that theoretical “golden age” of physics in the 1920s, made by Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, Dirac, Shrodinger, etc., have been described by Hawking (2001) as “a new picture of reality” in which, “No longer did any particles have a definite position and speed. Instead, the more accurately one determined a particle’s position, the less accurately could one determine its speed, and vice versa.”^12 Thus it became uncertain whether matter is something stable and solid or something fluid and in motion. And this “uncertainty principle,” as formulated by Werner Heisenberg, has become perhaps the most often cited, because the most profoundly disturbing, discovery of scientific thought in the Twentieth Century. Let us therefore ask why this should be so, and how it happens to be especially significant in the context of Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary vision.

The theory of relativity presented a conception of the universe in which Space was not a boundless container lasting through an eternal Time, in which material objects move and change in predictable ways. Rather it replaced this static view of the physical universe, which had been held by scientific and philosophical thought at least since Plato and Aristotle, with the view that space and time are relative dimensions of a universe in which everything is in motion. As Capra puts it: “In such a framework space and time are intimately and inseparably connected and form a four-dimensional continuum called “space-time”. … Physicists have now lived with relativity theory for many years and have become thoroughly familiar with its mathematical formalism. Nevertheless, this has not helped our intuition very much. We have no direct sensory experience of the four-dimensional space-time…”^13

Moreover, with the development of quantum mechanics, which presents a picture that Capra says “clashes with our deepest intuition of reality,” subatomic particles, or quanta of matter-energy, do not really appear to exist except insofar as they are defined by observers. Matter is a conceptual form of energy as Sri Aurobindo said. And according to quantum physics, the behavior of this matter-energy is determined by non-local events, as if the “particle” were spread throughout great expanses of space as a “wave” and the existence and behavior of this energy – of which everything is made – is known only through a mathematics of probability. Thus, the principle of uncertainty, which defines a dynamic world that appears to be, as Heisenberg said, “a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”^14 Contrary to the conventional, analytical, and mechanistic paradigm, the part is determined by the whole, rather than the other, common sense, way around.

Hawking, who helped to prove, in the late 60s, that space-time had a beginning with the Big Bang and that the universe is continually expanding and evolving, says that Einstein himself refused to accept these bounded implications of his theory, preferring the classical view of a static, essentially unchanging and eternal universe. And of the implications of quantum theory, Einstein reportedly said, “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could build.”^15

And so, the universe at bottom is not mechanical and not made up of well defined building blocks (atoms, quarks, etc.), with cause and effect relationships that determine the whole in predictable ways, but is rather a whole which determines its parts through an interconnected web of vast energy fields, and this whole appears to be somehow self-determining, and unpredictable by our way of understanding. Several troublesome implications seem to follow. One is that, if the universe is not deterministic and predictable, it must be ultimately random, chaotic, irrational; another is that, if we can neither know nor determine the structures and processes of Nature with certainty, then we haven’t much reason for hope. It would seem that we are led necessarily to a position of existential nihilism. And in fact, the 20th Century has often been characterized as such an irrational age of nihilism.

However, our mathematical understanding of the physical universe has also led to a very impressive sort of control, extraordinarily effective within certain limits, and we are able to construct quite an orderly “picture” or “concept” of this uncertain “reality.” As Hawking says, the quantum laws of physics have been “the basis of modern developments in chemistry, molecular biology, and electronics, and the foundations for the technology that has transformed the world in the last fifty years,”^16 referring of course primarily to digital computer and laser technologies. In addition, the visionary inclinations of many physicists has tended more and more toward the conclusion that the universe is not only orderly and self-determining, but it evolves in ways that tend to produce consciousness. It would seem that Niels Bohr, in formulating the principle of complementarity as a corollary to the uncertainty principle, had given a nod to the idea with which we began: that the contrariness of Nature is quite meaningful in its results. Bohr’s principle suggests that both terms of any empirical duality, such as particle/wave, position/velocity, space/time, structure/process, order/chaos, stability/change should be recognized, measured, and considered holistically as aspects of a unity. Thus the uncertainty principle leads in fact to a more complete and complex grasp of reality.

Evolution and Consciousness

Many scientists, including especially Capra, Prigogine, Penrose and others who have applied the principles of uncertainty and complementarity, analogically and metaphorically as well as computationally perhaps, in the domains of chemistry and biology, have been led to the proposition that apparently stable structures in nature are the product of processes of constant energy transformations at all levels: subatomic, molecular, and biological. According to Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures, all physical systems, from electromagnetic fields to molecules, weather systems to amino acids, cells and organs to organisms, are self organizing and self replicating as a result of energy flowing through their systems. The structures of physical systems reproduce their own stable forms through constant structural interactions with their environment. Such self-making, self-sustaining structural transformations are on-going within and between organisms, according to this theory, exhibiting patterns of deliberate response and reaction, memory and choice, which are thought to be parallel to and indicative of mental processes, or intelligent behavior. The ability of organisms to co-exist and co-evolve, through processes of non-local energy field causation, whether at the quantum, biological or mental levels, and at moments of extreme disequilibrium to diversify or evolve new structures and processes of ever greater complexity and viability, are leading some scientists to conclude that the organization of life itself is in fact a kind of mental process.

As Capra puts it in The Web of Life – A new scientific understanding of living systems (1996):

To understand the nature of life from a systemic point of view means to identify a set of criteria by which we can make a clear distinction between living and nonliving systems. …the recent formulations of models of self-organization and the mathematics of complexity indicate that it is now possible to identify such criteria. The key idea of my synthesis is to express those criteria in terms of the three conceptual dimensions, pattern, structure, and process. …I propose to understand autopoiesis, as defined by Maturana and Varela, as the pattern of life; …dissipative structure, as defined by Prigogine, as the structure of living systems; …and cognition, as defined by Gregory Bateson and more fully by Maturana and Varela, as the process of life. …Autopoiesis (self-making) and cognition (process of perceiving and knowing) are two different aspects of the same phenomenon of life. In the new theory all living systems are cognitive systems, and cognition always implies the existence of an autopoietic network.(p.160)

Although these theories are still based on observable physical, chemical, and biological processes, and as such remain materialistic and structural theories, it is clear that the wave-fluctuations of this line of thought, from Heisenberg and Bohr to Capra, Prigogine, and Penrose, approach that knowledge of which Sri Aurobindo spoke, and perhaps herald a time when, as he said, scientific knowledge would reach conclusions similar to those of the Vedas. It seems that matter, life, and mind are in fact beginning to be understood as different formulations of one unknown Energy. But a strong reductionist bias is still evident, even in Capra’s attempts to formulate a synthetic, unified theory of life and mind, and even more so in Hawking’s positivist version of anthropomorphism.^17 Maturana and Varela, two scientists of consciousness whose work forms a substantial part of Capra’s synthetic point of view, state the bias unequivocally: “as scientists we can only deal with unities that are structurally determined.”^18 And in their interpretation of apparently conscious linguistic behavior, they state the qualifying paradigm “to operate in languages is to operate in a domain of congruent, co-ontogenic structural coupling.”^19 What this means is that what the observer perceives and interprets as linguistic behavior in animals is accompanied by a parallel but dissimilar underlying set of nervous and muscular system behaviors characterized as “structural coupling.” For these scientists, there is ultimately no difference between structural coupling and conscious behavior or “cognition;” the latter is reduced to the former.

The next step that Sri Aurobindo predicted, “at which stage of development the conception of material Force as the mother of Mind would not be able to endure,” has obviously not occurred. If it had, instead of reducing consciousness to structural coupling or an emergent quantum event, there would be the realization that Consciousness was the first principle, from which the structures and processes of the universe proceed, rather than being the penultimate outcome of those physical processes. This next step would make it evident that the reason why stable structures appear to evolve in matter by means of self-determining processes, and why patterns or forms persist without change even though everything of which they are composed is constantly changing, is that there is a Will in them, infinitely diverse and omnipresent, a will of self-manifestation and self-being, and not a merely physical evolutionary dynamism, whether inherently one of chance/necessity or of chaos/order.

This is a form of understanding that is of course more characteristic of philosophy than of science, especially if we look back to the time, in ancient Greece, and perhaps as early as Vedic India, when the distinction between these modes of thought was not yet clearly defined. Aristotle’s works are burdened throughout with the attempt to understand the relationship between form, which is apparently unchanging, and matter, energy, motion, which are the elements of change from potential to actual form. And at that time the distinction was also not being made between form as such, and form as concept derived from perceptions and observations of the material world; the idea that the material world is separate from mind, or consciousness, had not yet intervened in the history of knowledge. For Aristotle, who was a biologist, mind was a form of nature whose activity was to know and understand other forms like itself. And especially important to the history of knowledge, the idea had also not yet intervened that our measurements of matter, energy, motion – and on a macro level, patterns, structures, processes – tell us what “reality” is. For the ancient thinkers, the world of stable forms and values that we experience, and that the invisible physical micro-world of change upholds, was the reality. This inversion of the known and unknown, and the reduction of form to mechanical forces or subatomic measurements and mathematical probabilities has been precisely the work of modern scientific thinking.

It would be ironic indeed, if as Hawking and others seem to half-seriously suggest, the universe has evolved from an invisible world of Platonic forms to a world of Platonic solids, through the vast infinitude of the forms of cosmic life and mind, just so that physicists could reduce everything to mathematical probabilities, parallel universes, and imaginary dimensions of time. But Hawking’s colleague, Roger Penrose, seems to have reached a considerably more serious point of departure, and one quite pertinent to our present concerns. In his book Shadows of the Mind – A search for the missing science of consciousness (1994), Penrose states:

If Einstein’s general relativity has shown how our very notions of the nature of space and time have had to shift, and become more mysterious and mathematical, then it is quantum mechanics that has shown, to an even greater extent, how our concept of matter has suffered a similar fate. Not just matter, but our very notions of actuality have become profoundly disturbed. How is it that the mere counterfactual possibility of something happening – a thing which does not actually happen – can have a decisive influence on what actually does happen? There is something in the mystery of the way that quantum mechanics operates that at least seems much closer than is classical physics, to the kind of mystery needed to accommodate mentality within the world of physical reality. I have no doubt myself that when deeper theories are at hand, then the place of mind in relation to physical theory will not seem so incongruous as it does today. (p.419)

Penrose argues in this book that consciousness – which he defines as awareness, understanding, and will or intention – will be explainable when physical science itself evolves its own theories and methods beyond their present limitations, because consciousness is beyond any possibility of computational understanding. And yet he believes that the ground of consciousness will ultimately be found at the interface between the world of quantum effects and the world of biological structures. While still adhering to the reductionism and structuralism characteristic of the scientific paradigm, he is able to foresee the possibility of an entirely knew understanding yet to come: “For physics to be able to accommodate something that is as foreign to our current physical picture as is the phenomenon of consciousness, we must expect a profound change – one that alters the very underpinnings of our philosophical viewpoint as to the nature of reality.”^20

Perhaps what this means is that the next quantum leap in consciousness, one foreseen by Sri Aurobindo as necessary in order to resolve the dilemmas of matter and mind, will be an even more disturbing paradigm shift than the ones already brought about by the new physics of the 20th Century. In Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of the Vedic cosmology, everything in the universe, from the physical to the mental plane, is an expression of the will-force of consciousness. Therefore it is possible that the non-computational interface between the quantum world and cellular structures theorized by Penrose, which brings about the “objective reduction” of quantum reality to the real-time world of phenomena that we know, is one level where consciousness-will can indeed be found. Penrose’s intuition is that the phenomenon of objective reduction will be related to gravity; though the phenomenon must be a Force, it is likely to be one that is as yet unknown to science. To observe this phenomenon will require a movement of consciousness toward such an understanding, which is not currently a movement characteristic of science. At the beginning of his discussion of this possibility of scientific knowledge, Sri Aurobindo said, “If modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, it will be unable to cry a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense knowledge and of the reasoning from sense knowledge, its very rush will carry it beyond and the rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe is only an earnest in the conquest of what lies beyond, once the stride is taken that crosses the barrier.”^21

The “stride” that Sri Aurobindo hints at here, and which he refers to in the same context as being “attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness” but also as “escaping the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition” implies another methodology than the one normally employed by science, which is always based on observation of the external world, on “sense-knowledge”, and on reasoning from that knowledge, even if it is sometimes accompanied by a more global phenomenon of inspired seeing. The proposed methodology entails a process often referred to by Sri Aurobindo as a transformation of consciousness. Vedic knowledge apparently used that method and was of that type. But it was at the same time not “other worldly.” It was, however, “spiritual knowledge” achieved by a supra-mental consciousness which can could know the world from within. It is knowledge of the Self, which is one with everything in time and space because everything is essentially That. This is obviously a rather mystical view of things, and yet the philosophy of evolution proposed by Sri Aurobindo, in which consciousness and force, spirit and matter are complementary, non-dual polarities at each level of existence – physical, vital, mental, and spiritual – has as its foundation precisely this premise. And such a theory is in fact consistent with the underlying connectedness and evolutionary self-determination of everything in the universe, as proposed by quantum physics. What is missing from that theory is the principle that would explain the emergence of a highly ordered self-determining physical universe in the first place, and then the emergence of consciousness from such a material base. Sri Aurobindo’s basic argument for the evolution of consciousness in a material universe is that it could not happen from an inconscient base; consciousness must be a fundamental principle of the universe itself in order for it to emerge; it is “a self-involution of Consciousness in form and a self-evolution out of form.” Therefore the fundamental complementarity of consciousness-force provides an explanation at every level of the order that exists in the observable universe, and of every other complementarity that we can identify as being essential to an adequate understanding of things. In this vision of reality, the ancient and modern dualities that have always presented insoluble paradoxes, such as form and substance, stability and change, chaos and order, life and death, self and other, are finally resolved into unities rather than contraries.

Do the current limitations of our knowledge therefore indicate something essential about the limited nature of “mind,” or do they indicate an essential indeterminacy and consequent unknowability in the nature of “reality?” Both of these questions, surprisingly, must be answered in the negative. The sense mind, the rational mind, and the inspired imagination, etc., as we know them, are limited, but the limitations are evolutionary, temporal, structural limitations; they are not essential. And the indeterminacy of processes, beyond the conservation of structural histories and patterns of adaptation, especially at the point of disequilibrium where novel forms can emerge, does not make them essentially unknowable simply because they are non-computational. Reality is infinitely complex but it is also only What Is; the evolutionary structures at every level of matter, life, and mind are only structures of consciousness, knowable by the Self through Identity. But that requires the evolutionary emergence of another potential of consciousness beyond mind, which Sri Aurobindo chose to call “supermind.” In his descriptions of its characteristics, he speaks of the necessity of realizing in oneself an extraordinary force of concentration, an absolute stillness, and a cancellation of the mind’s normal patterns of reactions and responses to external stimuli. It is a process in which the personal will merges with the universal Will, the individual mind with universal Consciousness.

So, if we ask then, Is reality Finite or Infinite? the Unchanging or Change? Being or Time? Spirit or Matter? Substance or Form?, the answer in every case is “both,” although any particular definition will depend on the point of view, just as Heisenberg said. And after a century of unparalleled advances in both scientific and spiritual knowledge, a scientific mind like Prigogine’s can therefore now think, along with the mystic philosopher:

Each great period of science has led to some model of nature. For classical science it was the clock; for nineteenth-century science, the period of the Industrial Revolution, it was an engine running down. What will be the symbol for us? …In some of the most beautiful manifestations of sculpture, be it in the dancing Shiva or in the miniature temples of Guerrero, there appears very clearly the search for a junction between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing. We believe that this confrontation will give our period its uniqueness. ^22

During the brief period of historical time known as the 20th Century, as the discoveries of the new physics were taking place, and Sri Aurobindo’s discovery of the supermind was being formulated, in the forefront of the “human sciences” also many barriers of consciousness were ceding: Husserl wrote The Idea of Phenomenology in 1907 and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in 1933. Freud published his theory of the three-fold structure of mind in 1923, Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927, Whitehead’s Process and Reality was published in 1929. And one could go on: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in 1945, Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin in 1949/53, Sri Aurobindo’s later works,1940-50, Heidegger’s writings on technology and language,1950-60, to the newer physics of the 1960s, the post-structural philosophies of the 1970s, the quantum biology of the 1980s, and the super-technology of the 1990s.

As we shall perhaps see, if we explore in greater detail the explosion of ideas that characterized this epoch in the development of thought, within the context of the century’s equally dramatic “outer” developments, the arc of the entire project of human consciousness throughout may appear to have been delimited inspired by one evolutionary formula for human advancement: to reconcile Spirit and Matter. To achieve the realization of their unity; to consciously perceive the stillness and force that combined constitute the essence of the infinite energy of existence; and to know directly by a “supramental consciousness” – one with the world it perceives – that unity and diversity, identity and difference are the principles of all Being in Time, could be the outcome of the pursuit of Knowledge, as Sri Aurobindo indicated. But for it to be so, he said, the human mind “must traverse the degrees which our inner consciousness imposes on us and, whether by objective method of analysis applied to Life and Mind as to Matter or by subjective synthesis and illumination, arrive at the repose of the ultimate unity without denying the energy of the expressive multiplicity.”^23 A study of the 20th Century in relation to the vision of Sri Aurobindo should reveal the progress made along this arc of potential human development, and also give us a clear indication of the distance still to be traversed if we are to complete the journey.

Physics and the Philosophy of Evolution

Bibliography

1. The Mother, “Sri Aurobindo does not belong to the past nor to history. Sri Aurobindo is the Future advancing towards its realization…” (April 2, 1967)
2. See Arthur Kroker (2004), The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism and Frederic Bender (2003), The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology
3. Sri Aurobindo (1970ed.), The Life Divine, pp.1-5
4. Ibid., p.12
5. Sri Aurobindo (1970ed.), The Synthesis of Yoga, p.1,6
6. Sri Aurobindo, op.cit. (LD), p.14
7. LD, p.14
8. LD, p.14
9. LD, p.14
10. Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, p.90
11. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger (1984), Order Out of Chaos, p.226
12. Stephen Hawking (2001), The Universe in a Nutshell, p.12
13. Capra, op.cit. p.89
14. Capra, op.cit., p.81
15. Capra (1996), The Web of Life, p. 39
16. Hawking, op.cit., p.26
17. Hawking (p.85) gives this rather droll characterization of the anthropic principle: “While it may be that intelligent beings can evolve without galaxies ands stars, this seems unlikely. …The anthropic principle says that the universe has to be more or less as we see it, because if it were different, there wouldn’t be anyone here to observe it.” And although he frequently equates the physical universe with “reality,” he qualifies his position as a positivist in a manner that is pertinent here (p.59): “From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?”
18. Humberta Maturana and FranciscoVarela (1987), The Tree of Knowledge – The biological roots of human understanding, p.96
19. Ibid., p.211
20. Roger Penrose (1994), Shadows of the Mind, p. 406
21. LD, p.13
22. Prigogine & Stenger, op.cit., p. 22-23
23. LD, p.13

The Yoga of Self-Perfection and the Triple Transformation, by Richard Hartz

Posted on January 3, 2010 by debbanerji

The Yoga of Self-Perfection and the Triple Transformation

by Richard Hartz

Introduction: Yoga and Evolution

A remarkable result of the meeting of the “timeless” East with the progressive West is the idea of Yoga as a process related to evolution. The origins of this idea can be traced back at least to Swami Vivekananda. But it was left to Sri Aurobindo to arrive at a synthesis of the principles and methods of Yoga that is profoundly evolutionary in its spirit.

As early as 1909, Sri Aurobindo declared: “Yoga must be revealed to mankind because without it mankind cannot take the next step in the human evolution.”[1] It was soon after his release from Alipore jail that he wrote this sentence in an essay entitled “Man—Slave or Free?” A year’s enforced withdrawal from the Indian freedom struggle had given him an unexpected opportunity for concentration and spiritual realisation. The sentence in his essay foreshadowed the view of the evolutionary significance of Yoga on which his future work would be based.

But “Yoga” has meant many things in India’s long history. In all its forms, it has aimed at some kind of surpassing of the ordinary human condition through the development of supernormal capacities or states of consciousness. In the Indian tradition, however, the recognition of the limitless inner potential of the individual human being was not accompanied by an equally dynamic ideal of outward, collective progress. Nor was there an explicit idea of evolution in anything like the modern sense, in spite of some tantalising hints.[2] It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that, under the stimulus of Western thought, a Vedantic conception of evolution arose and provided a framework for reinterpreting Yoga in an evolutionary context.

The theory of evolution provoked heated controversy in the West due to its perceived conflict with Christian doctrines. But it was readily assimilated by Indian thinkers, who adapted it to their philosophy by seeing it as a kind of cosmic Yoga. In both evolution and Yoga, there is an unfolding of higher and higher grades of consciousness. Consciousness is a puzzling anomaly to Western science. In contrast, it is central to the neo-Vedantic theory which posits a prior involution of Spirit in Matter as a precondition for evolution.[3] A major problem of materialistic reductionism is thus avoided. Moreover, the involution hypothesis suggests the possibility that mind is only an intermediate outcome of the evolutionary process. Yoga, which attempts to go beyond the rational mind, can therefore be redefined as a deliberate means of accelerating our further evolution. As Swami Vivekananda put it:

Now… take the whole of the animal creation, man and the lower animals, as one whole. There is an end towards which the whole is moving. Let us call it perfection. Some men and women are born who anticipate the whole progress of mankind. Instead of waiting and being reborn over and over again for ages until the whole human race has attained to that perfection, they, as it were, rush through them in a few short years of their life.[4]

No culture has had a monopoly on these forerunners, among whom Vivekananda included all the great incarnations and prophets. But he went on to speak of methods by which even those not born with extraordinary gifts can hasten their progress. The Indian subcontinent has long been the scene of particularly intensive, systematic and many-sided efforts to work out such methods. These are the various forms of Yoga as it has been transmitted and elaborated from ancient times. Yoga in this sense remains largely unknown to the world in spite of the popularity of the postures and breathing exercises of Hathayoga, which recently have all but usurped the name “yoga”.

Yoga means literally “joining”.[5] Its basic aim is, as Sri Aurobindo phrased it, “the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality.”[6] But there are two possible views of the results of this union. The choice between them is crucial for the connection between Yoga and evolution.

One view holds that the soul’s return to its origin brings its participation in the life of this transient world to an end. For centuries this is what most systems of Yoga and related spiritual traditions have assumed in one way or another. Whatever positive life-values they affirm are means of loosening the knot of the ego that is the cause of ignorance and bondage. But the untying of that knot leads, we are told, to a permanent exit from this world of separative existence once the momentum of life in the present body is exhausted.

Conceivably, this is the nature of the final “perfection” towards which we are moving: an exclusive liberation of each soul, not only from its egoistic limitations, but from cosmic existence itself, seen as a prison of divided being from which all must try to escape sooner or later. If so, many disciplines for accomplishing this end have long been known. There would seem to be no need for any fundamentally new developments in spirituality and little reason to talk about evolution when speaking of Yoga. Even so, much progress could surely be made by the revival and restatement of ancient spiritual knowledge, its harmonisation with modern discoveries and the creation of a more enlightened global civilisation on that basis. This by itself, if it happens, might seem momentous enough to call it an evolutionary advance for the human race. It is evidently what Vivekananda meant by “the evolution of spiritual humanity”.[7] It is perhaps what Sri Aurobindo had in mind in 1909 when he wrote of “the next step in the human evolution”. But he would soon go on to conceive of a more radical leap forward in evolution and explore the means to achieve it.

Swami Vivekananda, as we have seen, seemed to suggest that the end-point of evolution has already been reached by a few, however distant it may be for most of humankind. But he added: “Continuously, we are growing as a race…. Where do you fix the limit?”[8] The intrepid spirit of Vivekananda was an inspiration for Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary audacity. Speaking of the past “messengers of God”, the Swami once exclaimed:

I fall down and worship them; I take the dust of their feet. But they are dead!… And we are alive. We must go ahead!… Religion is not an imitation of Jesus or Mohammad. Even if an imitation is good, it is never genuine…. The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves!… These [great souls] are signposts on the way. That is all they are. They say, “Onward, brothers!” We cling to them; we never want to move. We do not want to think; we want others to think for us. The messengers fulfill their mission…. A hundred years later we cling to the message and go to sleep.[9]

One unintended result of the modernising of the Indian mind by British education was that the newly imported idea of collective progress became spiritualised. Certain movements in Indian spirituality became as progressive as any form of rationalism—if not more so, since rationalism by definition restricts its notion of progress to what can be done without exceeding our normal mental consciousness. This forward-looking spirituality is seen in Sri Aurobindo, who saw the material world as “a progressive manifestation of the Divine” and maintained:

It is possible for the spiritual life in the world, and it is its real mission, to change the material life into its own image, the image of the Divine.[10]

This affirmation, published by Sri Aurobindo in 1914 in his Introduction to The Synthesis of Yoga, challenges traditional views regarding the aim of spiritual life and departs from age-old assumptions about the purpose of Yoga. Yet Sri Aurobindo held that Indian spirituality in its “total movement” has all along, without fully acknowledging it, been trying to find the way to “transmute all the instruments of the human into instruments of a divine living”.[11] More broadly, throughout history the Spirit has pressed for manifestation and has not merely called world-weary souls to flee from the afflictions of mortal life:

Therefore, besides the great solitaries who have sought and attained their self-liberation, we have the great spiritual teachers who have also liberated others and, supreme of all, the great dynamic souls who, feeling themselves stronger in the might of the Spirit than all the forces of the material life banded together, have thrown themselves upon the world, grappled with it in a loving wrestle and striven to compel its consent to its own transfiguration.[12]

Despite the tremendous resistance they have encountered, these indomitable spirits have shaped whole civilisations and their influence has persisted through millenniums:

These attempts have been the supreme landmarks in the progressive development of human ideals and the divine preparation of the race. Every one of them, whatever its outward results, has left Earth more capable of Heaven and quickened in its tardy movements the evolutionary Yoga of Nature.[13]

History presents us, then, with mixed evidence to support or refute the hypothesis that spirituality is the key to the next step in evolution. On the one hand, past spiritual outbursts have shown the Spirit to be the most powerful force that can act upon human life. The effects of its intervention have spread over continents and outlasted empires. In most cultures, extraordinary faculties of various kinds have been attested in individuals with a high degree of spiritual development. And all this can be said to have happened although humanity is spiritually still in its infancy. If the spiritual consciousness is that which is beyond the rational intelligence, it would seem natural and inevitable that evolution, unless cut short by a catastrophe, will proceed onward to this higher level whose possibilities we have barely begun to glimpse.

On the other hand, skeptics might reject the high claims made for spirituality and point to the dubious history of the world’s religions. They would say it is the revolt of reason against the irrationality of religion that has brought about progress. Even if spirituality aspires to the suprarational, it has lent its authority to religions which are bastions of obscurantism. In short, religion and spirituality have worked at cross-purposes with progress and evolution. They have looked backward instead of forward and have promised escape from earthly life, not its transformation—except perhaps by an improbable apocalypse abruptly and unaccountably ushering in the millennium.

The element of truth in this cannot be denied. But we are not concerned here with the record of ordinary religion, but with the evolutionary potential of spirituality, specifically in its Indian form called Yoga. That potential need not be undermined by the world-negating tendency that Yoga contracted under past conditions and the influence of an archaic worldview. The value of Yoga for the future depends on what it can become under new circumstances, especially if spirituality becomes allied with the progressive mind at its highest and begins to see itself as a means of conscious evolution and the transformation of life.

Since the premodern world had no clear concept of evolution, Yoga could not have been knowingly developed for an evolutionary purpose. But let us remember that, according to scientists, the wings of birds cannot have originally evolved for the purpose of flying. Partial wings would have been useless for flight during the hundreds of thousands of years it would have taken for wings to evolve. Therefore it is supposed that during that long period they must have had some other function. It is speculated that the precursors of wings were used for gliding or as aids to running, making them advantageous for survival even in a rudimentary form.

Human evolution obeys its own laws which are not those of natural selection. But if spirituality acquires a radically new meaning, its previous cultivation for purposes relevant to the concerns of former ages could be compared to the evolution of wings for uses other than flying. In that case, if humanity is going to take flight into a luminous future, it will have to learn to use in a new way the wings of spirituality or Yoga—of union with a higher reality—which it has been evolving for centuries without realising their full potential. Sri Aurobindo poetically envisioned our collective destiny as such a flight:

Ascending from the soil where creep our days,
Earth’s consciousness may marry with the Sun,
Our mortal life ride on the spirit’s wings,
Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.[14]

The Triple Path and the Yoga of Self-Perfection

The distinctive ideas of Indian culture, Sri Aurobindo observed, were such as to “exalt the life of man and make something like godhead its logical outcome.”[15] Yoga was the means by which this godhead was to be realised. But it was an inner divinity that was realised, leaving the life of this world untransformed. India’s initially disastrous contact with the West exposed the weakening effects of a one-sided emphasis on the inner life to the neglect of outer progress. At the same time, there has been a danger that India could swing to the other extreme, discarding her spiritual heritage just when the knowledge it contains is most necessary for the future. Conservative efforts to revive the tradition as it was are unlikely to succeed in halting the forward surge of the time-spirit. A creative synthesis such as Sri Aurobindo undertook in his integral Yoga offers a more promising way of revitalising Indian spirituality to meet today’s challenges.

During his last forty years on earth, Sri Aurobindo explored possibilities of the further evolution of consciousness that had rarely, if ever, been contemplated. But his starting-point was to renew in himself spiritual experiences that had been cultivated in India from ancient times. His first major breakthrough came in January 1908. Meditating with a Yogi who instructed him on silencing the mind, within three days he reached a state of consciousness he would later describe as one of Nirvana or extinction of the sense of separate self. In the months that followed, he continued his outward life as before, giving speeches and playing his part as a national leader. But inwardly he now lived in the awareness of a spaceless and timeless Reality, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real… pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world, leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing nothing else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial.[16]

To our ordinary consciousness, the material world is solid and tangible, while the spirit is a tenuous abstraction. Plunged into Nirvana, Sri Aurobindo experienced an extreme reversal of this relation between matter and spirit. Such an experience had led others before him to reject the world as an illusion. But Sri Aurobindo did not succumb to that temptation. Soon his spiritual experience itself began to develop in a manner that no longer seemed in any way to support a negation of life. As “realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience”, the sense of the unreality of things disappeared. It was replaced by the perception of a world in which illusion was only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow.

All the subsequent developments of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga and the philosophy founded on it would follow from this more integral realisation. He emphasised that this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine.[17]

One who has attained spiritual liberation and continues to participate in the life of this world is known in India as a Jivanmukta. Maintaining his “freedom in Infinity” as he led a revolutionary movement, Sri Aurobindo was a Jivanmukta with a difference. Traditionally it is assumed that the Jivanmukta has achieved the highest realisation and only has to keep it intact while living with complete detachment as long as he remains in the body. But for Sri Aurobindo, the liberation of Nirvana was a stepping-stone to further realisations. His work in the world also took on a deeper significance as part of the terrestrial unfolding of the Divine and was not just a prolongation of his former activity. A “constant heightening and widening”, with no end in sight, became the character of the Yoga he practised and taught during the remainder of his life on earth.

Sri Aurobindo was an explorer of the realms of consciousness. Like Aswapati in his epic Savitri, he was a “voyager upon uncharted routes”,[18] an untiring and undaunted discoverer and experimenter. The vision of this pioneer of a higher evolution was continually evolving. In his writings, he was capable of building massive structures of thought. But as he was more intent on forging ahead than on consolidating and publicising what he had already done, he left many of his works unfinished or incompletely revised. Not only did his terminology vary from one book to another and change in the course of time, but even within a single book he sometimes left us with layers of writing and revision belonging to different stages of his development.

This is particularly true of The Synthesis of Yoga, which cannot be accurately understood without knowing something about the history of the text. The incompleteness of this book reflects the exigencies of the attempt to refashion Yoga into a means of further evolution. A transition of the magnitude Sri Aurobindo envisaged could not be accomplished in one lifetime. By leaving The Synthesis unfinished he emphasised, as it were, the point made in the book itself that one who sets out on the adventure of this Yoga “is not the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the Infinite.”[19]

Of the works Sri Aurobindo published in monthly instalments in the Arya, there was only one that continued from beginning to end of the six and a half years of the journal’s existence—from August 1914 to January 1921. This was The Synthesis of Yoga. Years later, after he had substantially reformulated some aspects of his Yoga, Sri Aurobindo returned to this book. In the 1930s and 1940s, he thoroughly revised Part One, “The Yoga of Divine Works”, which was published as a separate volume in 1948. He partially revised Part Two, “The Yoga of Integral Knowledge”, but did not publish the revised version.[20] The Introduction remained almost untouched. Part Three, “The Yoga of Divine Love”, was left as it was written in 1918. The half-finished Part Four, “The Yoga of Self-Perfection”, also remained unrevised. Thus its terminology is that of the Arya period, unlike Part One and some chapters of Part Two which reflect later developments.

Part Four of The Synthesis contained, when it was first published, Sri Aurobindo’s most original contribution to the theory and practice of Yoga. This is not said with the intent of minimising the significance of the other parts of the book. The Introduction placed Yoga in an evolutionary context and gave a new meaning to the word “integral”. Today more than ever, these chapters deserve the attention of all who are concerned with the future of spirituality, even if they read no further. “The Yoga of Divine Works”, in the form in which Sri Aurobindo eventually expanded it, was to become his definitive account of the most dynamic aspect of his teaching. As for “The Yoga of Integral Knowledge”, it is a monumental treatment of a subject on which he could write with unrivalled depth and insight. The beautiful part that follows, “The Yoga of Divine Love”, has an importance out of proportion to its comparative brevity.

But the paths of selfless action, transcendent knowledge and ecstatic love—Karmayoga, Jnanayoga and Bhaktiyoga—are ancient disciplines, however new the light Sri Aurobindo shed on them. The idea of harmonising them in a single synthesis also had the support of no less a scripture than the Gita. Most of the experiential knowledge needed to speak with authority on the “triple path” of Indian spirituality came to Sri Aurobindo with astonishing ease in the first few years of his practice of Yoga. It was after this that he began to break new ground and faced challenges for which the knowledge received from the past provided relatively little guidance.

The real difficulty, he explained, “was to apply the spiritual knowledge utterly to the world and to the surface psychological and outer life and to effect its transformation”. It was this that “took decades of spiritual effort to work out towards completeness”.[21] This effort proceeded for many years along certain lines that were revealed to Sri Aurobindo from within. When he wrote The Synthesis of Yoga and needed a name for this discipline of life-transformation, he called it the Yoga of self-perfection.

His exposition of the triple path in Parts One to Three of The Synthesis anticipates several elements of the Yoga of self-perfection. But the latter as a whole is presented as belonging to a more advanced stage of spiritual practice. It begins in its own right only when there has been a “growth out of the separative human ego into the unity of the spirit”. For only then can the “liberated individual being, united with the Divine in self and spirit,” begin to become “in his natural being a self-perfecting instrument for the perfect outflowering of the Divine in humanity.” Until that time, the first need is for the mental being “to enlarge itself into the oneness of the Divine”. As Sri Aurobindo pointed out, explaining the large place given in The Synthesis of Yoga to his restatement of the main spiritual approaches of the Indian tradition:

That is the reason why the triple way of knowledge, works and love becomes the key-note of the whole Yoga, for that is the direct means for the soul in mind to rise to its highest intensities where it passes upward into the divine oneness.[22]

The Magic Leverage

The idea behind Yoga is that any human faculty can be turned from its ordinary functions to a higher purpose by purifying and concentrating its action. Even apart from spirituality, all intellectual, ethical and aesthetic culture does this to some degree. Reason, will and emotion are freed from the confusions of their haphazard workings in the undisciplined nature and trained to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of truth, good or beauty. The primary task of culture has always been to lift these most conscious powers of our normal being out of subjection to the obscure and disorderly movements of the lower nature into the clear light of self-awareness. But throughout history, as Sri Aurobindo shows in The Human Cycle, the supreme expressions of thought, art and moral idealism have tended to go further than this. Not content with raising humanity from the infrarational to the rational level, culture at its highest has been in effect a preparation for Yoga, where the same psychological powers are directed deliberately towards a superhuman and suprarational object.

The great dreamers and doers rise above our ordinary limits by sheer force of genius and character despite the resistance of human nature and society. But these are exceptional cases which seem to have no rational explanation. In Yoga, on the other hand, a principle is recognised by which the surpassing of the current stage of general development becomes a natural and intelligible possibility. Three factors have to be taken into account: the individual, the universal and the transcendent. Referring to the second of these as “Nature”, Sri Aurobindo reveals how the link between the individual and the transcendent that is the secret of Yoga can change the rules of the cosmic game:

If the individual and Nature are left to themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to exceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension.[23]

So far, human evolution as a whole has proceeded at the pace of Nature’s “lingering march”, however much it may have speeded up in comparison with the staggering expanses of time involved in biological evolution. If the individual’s evolution is quickened by introducing another factor with a freer law, this should have an effect on the general movement.

But if individual liberation is seen as an end in itself, drawing souls away from the world, its potential impact on the collective evolution will be neutralised. That is what tended to happen in India in the past. Sri Aurobindo, on the other hand, refused to regard a quietistic liberation as the ultimate goal of Yoga. According to his experience, a one-pointed concentration of thought, will or feeling that brings us into contact with something beyond ourselves canand should have more dynamic consequences. It may even set in motion the “magic leverage” whose effect he evokes in Savitri:

A prayer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man’s strength to a transcendent Force.
Then miracle is made the common rule,
One mighty deed can change the course of things;
A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.[24]

This suggests the possibility of not only a union of the human soul with a transcendent Existence—the traditional conception of the aim of Yoga—but a linking of all human powers with the Force or Shakti of that Transcendence.

This linkage can be brought about by a heightened working of the same emotional, volitional and cognitive faculties as are directed to more exclusively spiritual purposes in the paths of Bhakti, Karma and Jnana as usually conceived. “Prayer” in these lines from Savitri represents the emotional relation with the Divine—though prayer is not the only way of establishing that relation. It can create “the contact of man’s life with God, the conscious interchange” that “is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort”,[25] with results that could well seem miraculous. The disinterested work of the Karmayogi is done with calm detachment, unmoved by success or failure. Yet by serving as the instrument of a greater Will, his “master act” may change things far more effectively than a vehement activism could do. The “lonely thought” of the Jnani or man of knowledge turns from the mutable appearances of life to the unchanging Truth that underlies them. But if it discovers behind these appearances the secrets of the manifestation of the Eternal in Time, it might return with the “king idea” that can transform the world.

When divested of otherworldly tendencies, therefore, any one of these three approaches could provide a starting-point for a dynamic spirituality. A convergence of all three would lead naturally to “the wideness of the integral way by which the liberated soul transcends all, embraces all”.[26] Yet Sri Aurobindo found that something more was needed for a Yoga which, without lowering its aspiration or compromising its integrity, accepts life in order to uplift and transfigure it. It is not enough that a divine Force should act through us and override our limitations. Our nature itself must change from top to bottom:

The aim of our effort at perfection must be to make the spiritual and supramental action no longer a miracle, even if a frequent or constant miracle, or only a luminous intervention of a greater than our natural power, but normal to the being and the very nature and law of all its process.[27]

This defines, as concisely as possible, the aim of the Yoga of self-perfection where it goes beyond what is attempted in the other paths. Anything less than this would fall short of the transformation Sri Aurobindo considered necessary to establish “a secure and settled new principle, a new creation, a permanent new order of being in the field of terrestrial Nature.”[28] Such a thoroughgoing change of our complex nature may look forbiddingly difficult, even impossible. The difficulty must be admitted, but not the impossibility. It should be kept in mind that each manifestation of a new principle in the evolution—as when living creatures and, later, thinking beings first appeared—would, if there had been anyone to observe it, have seemed equally impossible until it actually happened.

A spiritual evolution beyond this reasoning animal who now regards himself as the summit of earthly possibility has been in preparation throughout most of the known history of the race. Diverse means have been found for taking the step from mind, the principle of separative consciousness, to a higher principle that is at home with oneness and infinity. What has still to be done is, first, to make the liberating, unifying and transformative knowledge of the Spirit the object of widespread seeking in place of the divisive and regressive beliefs that have so often travestied it; and, second, when that knowledge is attained, to apply it as integrally as possible to our inner and outer life. That application in its fullness is what Sri Aurobindo called the Yoga of self-perfection. The outline of his approach to it in Part Four of The Synthesis of Yoga, incomplete though it is, may yet play a role in shaping the spirituality of the future.

Life and the Suprarational

At the heart of the difficulty of spiritualising human existence and elevating it towards the suprarational is the resistance of the parts of our being that seem to belong intrinsically to the domain of the infrarational. Our physical nature offers an inert obstruction to any radical change. But before we can even hope to deal with it, we must master the life-force connecting mind and body—the vital being, as Sri Aurobindo called it—whose problematic character already raises serious doubts about the possibility of an integral transformation.

We have seen that the leading powers of human nature—the intellect, the ethical will and the aesthetic and higher emotional faculties—may be said to be pursuing, each in its own way, some ideal of truth, good or beauty that points beyond itself to the Divine and Infinite. The vital being, on the other hand, appears to have no motive except its own self-assertion and enjoyment. Ethics, religion and spirituality have generally responded to its waywardness with coercion and repression, frustrating or throttling its impulses instead of transmuting them. Yet its free and enthusiastic cooperation is needed for the fullness of living. The vital nature dominates much of our individual and social existence. If it cannot be converted, the idea of spiritually perfecting our embodied life would seem to be a chimera.

The viability of a Yoga of self-perfection depends, therefore, on the discovery that “this great mass of vital energism contains in itself the imprisoned suprarational”. It has, in other words, an “instinctive reaching out for something divine, absolute and infinite which is concealed in its blind strivings”. Sri Aurobindo makes this point in a chapter of The Human Cycle entitled “The Suprarational Ultimate of Life”—the longest chapter in the book, whose extensive revision indicates the importance he gave to it. He goes on to observe: “The first mark of the suprarational, when it intervenes to take up any portion of our being, is the growth of absolute ideals”. As instances of vital ideals of this kind, he continues, we need only note, however imperfect and dim the present shapes, the strivings of love at its own self-finding, its reachings towards its absolute—the absolute love of man and woman, the absolute maternal or paternal, filial or fraternal love, the love of friends, the love of comrades, love of country, love of humanity.[29]

It is relevant to note that one of these ideals, “the absolute love of man and woman”, is the theme of the ancient story of Savitri and Satyavan. If Sri Aurobindo, instead of completing The Synthesis of Yoga and other works, devoted most of his literary energy in his later years to an epic based on this legend, it was evidently because through this tale of the victory of love over death he could symbolise a truth that was central to his message. That truth, we may say in the terminology of The Human Cycle, is the presence of “the imprisoned suprarational” in human life and the possibility of releasing it, with a consequent transformation extending even to the conquest of death.

It is the depiction of the Yoga of King Aswapati in Part One of Savitri, especially in the third canto, that resembles most closely in a number of places the Yoga of self-perfection as described in The Synthesis and in Sri Aurobindo’s diary, the Record of Yoga. But the poem as a whole, through the way the legend itself is told, conveys symbolically an essential aspect of the Yoga: the power of the Spirit over life and matter and the deliverance of our vital and physical being from subjection to the determinism of the present laws of Nature. Moreover, the debate between Savitri and Death provides an opportunity for bringing out the significance of the ideals which Sri Aurobindo saw as signs of a suprarational influence. In The Human Cycle, after mentioning the various expressions of love’s “reachings towards its absolute”, he goes on to say:

These ideals of which the poets have sung so persistently, are not a mere glamour and illusion, however the egoisms and discords of our instinctive, infrarational way of living may seem to contradict them. Always crossed by imperfection or opposite vital movements, they are still divine possibilities and can be made a first means of our growth into a spiritual unity of being with being.[30]

In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo joins his own voice to those of the poets who have chanted through the ages “the anthem of eternal love”.[31] In Book Ten, Canto Two, “The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal”, and in “The Debate of Love and Death” which follows, he takes up precisely the question raised in The Human Cycle. Are such ideals mere self-delusion or do they point to a divine possibility? Death heaps scorn on them, harping on human selfishness and the mutability of this world. Savitri’s reply is reminiscent of The Human Cycle, where Sri Aurobindo maintains that human relations, however disfigured by our present egoism, can become “not the poor earthly things they are now, but deep and beautiful and wonderful movements of God in man fulfilling himself in life”.[32] Savitri traces love to its source in a transcendent Bliss that is seeking to manifest in our lives:

Even in all that life and man have marred,
A whisper of divinity still is heard,
A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.
Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man
A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.
There is a hope in its wild infinite cry;
It rings with callings from forgotten heights,
And when its strains are hushed to high-winged souls
In their empyrean, its burning breath
Survives beyond, the rapturous core of suns
That flame for ever pure in skies unseen,
A voice of the eternal Ecstasy.[33]

This passage is preceded by a more personal declaration on the part of Savitri. In response to Death’s contemptuous appraisal of love as nothing but a “hunger of the body and the heart”, she asserts:

My love is not a hunger of the heart,
My love is not a craving of the flesh;
It came to me from God, to God returns.[34]

A close look at what this implies brings us back to the Yoga of self-perfection, whose first stage is one of purification, called in Sanskrit śuddhi.

Purification and the Will to Delight

The “heart”, or emotional being, is one of the parts of our nature whose perfection as an instrument for expressing an aspect of the Spirit is—like the ideal working of the mind, vital energies and body—an essential element of the integral Yoga. The characteristic function of the heart is love. But before its capacity for love (prema-sāmarthya)[35] can be fully realised in a tranquil intensity of feeling not subject to fluctuations of mood, it must be freed from illegitimate interference by other parts of the being and from its own natural deformations in an egoistic consciousness. Love, in other words, must cease to be “a hunger of the heart” or “a craving of the flesh”, as it all too often is because of the intrusion of vital demands and physical desires. By this purification it becomes a movement of something deeper in us, “a soul of love and lucid joy and delight, a pure psyche”, capable of “receiving with an untroubled sweetness and clarity the various delight which God gives it in the world”.[36] Love is then revealed in its true essence as a feeling that comes to us “from God, to God returns.”

As this example suggests, “purification” in this Yoga means unravelling the confused and self-defeating mutual interference of the various parts of our nature which normally prevents them from functioning at their highest potential. What this psychological operation brings about is not what is usually meant by purity in a moral, religious or even spiritual sense. Morality and religion ordinarily try to inculcate purity mainly by the negative method of prohibiting certain kinds of actions and, if possible, suppressing the thoughts, feelings and impulses that motivate them. Contemplative disciplines often go further and cultivate a quietistic, ascetic purity intended to prepare the being for a liberating immobility and passivity. “But here,” Sri Aurobindo notes, “we have the more difficult problem of a total, unabated, even an increased and more powerful action founded on perfect bliss of the being”. What is needed for this purpose “is not a negative, prohibitory, passive or quietistic, but a positive, affirmative, active purity”.[37]

The difference between these two approaches will become clearer if we consider the case of the vital being, whose purification is a crucial step in the process of clearing away the obstacles to a higher perfection. For this part of our nature, with its desires and passions, is likely to present the most effective opposition to any attempt to transfer the basis of life and action from the separative ego to the unity of the Spirit. So antagonistic to inner peace and illumination are its normal impulses that for spiritual purposes there might seem to be no alternative to the negative, coercive method of dealing with it.

Yet according to Sri Aurobindo, desire and the disturbances it generates are not inherent in the very nature of the life-force. They belong to a particular stage in the evolutionary struggle of life to emerge out of matter and they may disappear at a higher stage. Behind the surface phenomena of the thirst for power and pleasure is something deeper:

The essential turn of the soul to possession and enjoyment of the world consists in a will to delight, and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical degradation of the will to delight.[38]

Once this is discovered, it becomes possible to conceive of purifying the vital being, not negatively by repression, but positively by eliciting its true in place of its deformed working. All depends on learning to “distinguish between pure will and desire, between the inner will to delight and the outer lust and craving of the mind and body”. Subtle as this distinction may seem, the necessity of making it is inescapable. The inability to do so has been responsible for the failures of religion, spirituality and ethics in their dealings with life. “If we are unable to make this distinction practically in the experience of our being,” Sri Aurobindo observes, “we can only make a choice between a life-killing asceticism and the gross will to live or else try to effect an awkward, uncertain and precarious compromise between them.” These unsatisfactory alternatives account for almost the whole range of attitudes that human beings have adopted with respect to their own vital nature. To be more precise, a small minority trample down the life instinct and strain after an ascetic perfection; most obey the gross will to live with such modifications and restraints as society imposes or the normal social man has been trained to impose on his own mind and actions; others set up a balance between ethical austerity and temperate indulgence of the desiring mental and vital self and see in this balance the golden mean of a sane mind and healthy human living.[39]

But if our aim is an integral spiritual perfection in which all the energies of the being will participate freely and fully, none of these solutions is adequate. Rigid suppression or uninhibited indulgence of the vital force, or any compromise between these extremes, implies in each case accepting desire as intrinsic to the life-principle and the motive of all its activity. Underlying the disagreements about the amount of control to which the vital impulses should be subjected is a widely shared assumption that their fundamental nature cannot be changed. But it was Sri Aurobindo’s experience that the vital being can be radically purified in a “positive, affirmative, active” sense and converted into a magnificent vehicle for the manifestation of the Spirit. This depends only on our ability to “get at the pure will undeformed by desire,—which we shall find to be a much more free, tranquil, steady and effective force than the leaping, smoke-stifled, soon fatigued and baffled flame of desire,—and at the calm inner will of delight not afflicted or limited by any trouble of craving”.[40]

Self-Perfection and the Triple Transformation

This “calm inner will of delight” is an attribute of a mysterious psychological entity for which Sri Aurobindo gradually adopted the name “psychic being”. This term occurs mainly in his later writings, especially in letters of the 1930s and 1940s and in portions of his major works that were added or revised during the same period, such as the last chapters of The Life Divine and Part One of The Synthesis of Yoga. But even in the original versions of these works as published in the Arya between 1914 and 1921, the word “psychic” was already used occasionally to refer to the innermost soul or “psyche” concealed deep within us. Later Sri Aurobindo abandoned other uses of “psychic” and placed more and more explicit emphasis on the psychic being as the key to the first of the transformations to be accomplished in the integral Yoga.

In two chapters of The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga as published in the Arya in June and July 1916, respectively, we find the expressions “psychic being”, “psychic principle” and “psychic entity”. The twenty-third chapter of The Life Divine, entitled “The Double Soul in Man”, was originally preceded by an “Argument” where the chapter’s opening paragraphs were summed up as follows:

The ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things from its dumb conception in Matter to its luminous consummation in Spirit. Like the other original divine principles, this Delight also must be represented in us by a cosmic principle corresponding to it in the apparent existence. It is the soul or psychic being.[41]

Most of the occurrences of “psychic being” in the final version of this chapter were not present in the original text, but were introduced in Sri Aurobindo’s later revision of the concluding paragraphs. But even the 1916 version included a sentence, only slightly revised in 1939, which defines the psychological entity through which the supreme Bliss or Ananda is manifested in our lives. This entity is described as something in us which we sometimes call in a special sense the soul,—that is to say, the psychic principle which is not the life or the mind, much less the body, but which holds in itself the opening and flowering of the essence of all these to their own peculiar delight of self, to light, to love, to joy and beauty and to a refined purity of being.[42]

In July 1916, a month after he wrote about this psychic principle in The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo published a chapter in The Synthesis of Yoga called “The Release from the Heart and the Mind”. This chapter, which is now the seventh chapter of Part Two, “The Yoga of Integral Knowledge”, was never revised. Here he returned to the nature of the soul and the true meaning of “psychic”. He explained that the real soul, the real psychic entity which for the most part we see little of and only a small minority in mankind has developed, is an instrument of pure love, joy and the luminous reaching out to fusion and unity with God and our fellow-creatures.

He went on to comment on the normal relation of the psychic to the Prana or vital being:

This psychic entity is covered up by the play of the mentalised Prana or desire-mind which we mistake for the soul; the emotional mind is unable to mirror the real soul in us, the Divine in our hearts, and is obliged instead to mirror the desire-mind.[43]

In the Yoga of self-perfectionas described in The Synthesis and the Record of Yoga, a purification of the Prana enabling the emotional mind to “mirror the real soul in us, the Divine in our hearts”, would be regarded as part of śuddhi. In Sri Aurobindo’s later reformulation of the integral Yoga it would come under the heading of psychicisation or psychic transformation. It is clear that there has been a change in terminology reflecting other significant developments. At the same time, there was nothing entirely new in the use of the word “psychic” to designate “the divine element in the individual being”, as Sri Aurobindo put it in a letter, an element whose characteristic power is to turn everything towards the Divine, to bring a fire of purification, aspiration, devotion, true light of discernment, feeling, will, an action which transforms by degrees the whole nature.[44]

Changes of terminology are also to be found in the more advanced stages of the Yoga. In the Yoga of self-perfection, śuddhi or purification is followed by mukti or liberation, then by bhukti, “a cosmic enjoyment of the power of the Spirit”,[45] and siddhi or perfection. The order of the last two was sometimes reversed, with implications which we will see. But in the subsequent period, instead of four stages of self-perfection we hear of a triple transformation: psychic, spiritual and supramental. At first sight, the systems appear to be quite different. Yet there are correspondences between them which shed light on the continuity as well as the evolution of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experience.

Purification is a preparation for liberation. It can even be said that it is itself a kind of liberation:

Śuddhi is the condition for mukti. All purification is a release, a delivery; for it is a throwing away of limiting, binding, obscuring imperfections and confusions…. But all this is an instrumental liberation. The freedom of the soul, mukti, is of a larger and more essential character; it is an opening out of mortal limitation into the illimitable immortality of the Spirit.[46]

The concept of liberation, like that of purification, acquires a more dynamic sense in the integral Yoga than is conventionally associated with it—although this was amply foreshadowed in the Gita and elsewhere, where liberation does not imply cessation from action. Just as he makes a distinction between negative and positive purity, Sri Aurobindo also distinguishes negative from positive freedom, insisting in this case on the necessity of both. The “negative movement of freedom” is defined as “a liberation from the principal bonds, the master-knots of the lower soul-nature”, these bonds being “desire, ego, the dualities and the three gunas of Nature”. The “positive sense of freedom”, on the other hand, “is to be universal in soul, transcendently one in spirit with God, possessed of the highest divine nature”.[47]

What concerns us here is how mukti or liberation, as a step towards self-perfection, relates to the spiritual transformation which follows the psychic transformation in Sri Aurobindo’s later accounts of the Yoga. We have seen that the purification of the nature, liberating as it is in itself, is insufficient unless it is completed by a larger freedom which universalises the soul and brings it into union with the transcendent. Likewise the psychic transformation is not all that is needed for the largest spiritual change. In the first place, since this is the individual soul in Nature, it can open to the hidden diviner ranges of our being and receive and reflect their light and power and experience, but another, a spiritual transformation from above is needed for us to possess our self in its universality and transcendence.[48]

But even the freedom that the spiritual transformation brings was not enough for Sri Aurobindo. In almost all traditional systems of Yoga except Tantra, inner liberation was pursued as an end in itself. In the Yoga of self-perfection, on the other hand, not only is the meaning of mukti enlarged to include liberation of the nature as well as liberation of the spirit, but even this leads beyond itself to bhukti and siddhi. We meet a similar situation in the case of the triple transformation, as described by Sri Aurobindo near the end of the revised text of The Life Divine and in other writings of the 1930s and 1940s. In a letter of that period, he indicates the liberating and other effects of spiritualisation, the second transformation, but also points out why a still greater transformation is needed to complete it:

Spiritualisation means the descent of the higher peace, force, light, knowledge, purity, Ananda, etc., which belong to any of the higher planes from Higher Mind to overmind, for in any of these the Self can be realised. It brings about a subjective transformation; the instrumental Nature is only so far transformed that it becomes an instrument for the Cosmic Divine to get some work done, but the self within remains calm and free and united with the Divine. But this is an incomplete individual transformation—the full transformation of the instrumental Nature can only come when the supramental change takes place. Till then the nature remains full of many imperfections, but the Self in the higher planes does not mind them, as it is itself free and unaffected.[49]

The process of spiritualisation occupied Sri Aurobindo for many years. It involved not one, but several transformations by the ever-increasing power of a series of ascending planes. On each of them “the static realisation of Infinity and Eternity and the Timeless One remains the same,” but “the vision of the workings of the One becomes ever wider and is attended with a greater instrumentality of Force”. From the point of view of knowledge, “what is thought-knowledge in the Higher Mind becomes illumination in the Illumined Mind and direct intimate vision in the Intuition”. Still higher is the overmind, which sees not “in flashes”, like the Intuition, but “calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally”. But even here there “is not the absolute supramental harmony and certitude”.[50] Sri Aurobindo saw in the end that nothing short of what he called a supramental transformation could bring about the integral perfection or siddhi “which finishes the passage of the soul through the Ignorance and bases its consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete and completely effective self-knowledge”.[51]

We find, then, that there is a broad correspondence between the “triple transformation” and three stages of the earlier Yoga of self-perfection termed śuddhi, mukti and siddhi, or purification, liberation and perfection—we will see in a moment why there is nothing in the later scheme that seems to correspond to bhukti. The system presented in the unfinished Part Four of The Synthesis of Yoga appears to be superseded by the three transformations—psychic, spiritual and supramental—as the definitive statement of Sri Aurobindo’s distinctive approach to an evolutionary spirituality. But just as the old triple way of Karma, Bhakti and Jnana was surpassed but kept in a new form, so Sri Aurobindo continued to speak of self-perfection as the consummation of the Yoga. In a passage in a letter summarising the Karmayoga as he had “developed it for the integral spiritual life”, he concluded:

Finally, works, bhakti and knowledge go together and self-perfection becomes possible—what we call the transformation of the nature.[52]

There seems to be no good reason to regard the Yoga of self-perfection as out of date or irrelevant in the light of later developments, even though Sri Aurobindo’s account of it published in his major work on Yoga remained incomplete and unrevised. But because the last part of The Synthesis was never revised, its terminology has to be interpreted according to the period when it was written. When “supramental transformation” is mentioned in a chapter written in 1920, for example, it should not be assumed that it means exactly what Sri Aurobindo intended by these words after a decade or two. For his experience was constantly evolving. As a result, not only did he invent new terms such as “overmind”, but words he had used previously, including “psychic” and “supramental”, have to be understood in a different context.

A comparison of the main terms of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga of self-perfection with his later terminology reveals parallels, as we have seen, which show more continuity in the development of his Yoga than is apparent at first glance. This does not mean that the “supramental transformation” of which he spoke in his latest period was the same as his earlier conception of siddhi, but that it evolved out of it. A similar evolution may explain what happened to bhukti in the transition from the Yoga of self-perfection to the triple transformation. For Sri Aurobindo does speak of a fourth transformation; but ultimately the fullness of this “beatific” transformation became such a distant prospect that he rarely alluded to it. However, the enjoyment of spiritual bliss (ānanda) which he had called bhukti did not disappear from the Yoga.

Undreamed Ecstasy

Bhukti is literally “enjoyment”. In the Yoga of self-perfection it refers, of course, to a more exalted type of enjoyment than what is usually meant by that word. Sri Aurobindo explains:

A really perfect enjoyment of existence can only come when what we enjoy is not the world in itself or for itself, but God in the world, when it is not things, but the Ananda of the spirit in things that forms the real, essential object of our enjoying and things only as form and symbol of the spirit, waves of the ocean of Ananda.[53]

It may be objected that this kind of rarefied enjoyment would not satisfy the demand of the vital being for tangible pleasures. Sri Aurobindo maintained, on the contrary, that what we call pleasure is no more than a faint and evanescent shadow of the real thing. Our half-conscious nature cannot fulfil its own seeking for enjoyment unless it undergoes a spiritual transformation:

Life… seeks for pleasure, happiness, bliss; but the infrarational forms of these things are stricken with imperfection, fragmentariness, impermanence and the impact of their opposites. Moreover infrarational life still bears some stamp of the Inconscient in an underlying insensitiveness, a dullness of fibre, a weakness of vibratory response,—it cannot attain to true happiness or bliss and what it can obtain of pleasure it cannot support for long or bear or keep any extreme intensity of these things. Only the spirit has the secret of an unmixed and abiding happiness or ecstasy, is capable of a firm tenseness of vibrant response to it, can achieve and justify a spiritual pleasure or joy of life as one form of the infinite and universal delight of being.[54]

Sri Aurobindo added this passage to the chapter entitled “The Suprarational Ultimate of Life” when he revised The Human Cycle around 1937. Almost two decades earlier he had dealt with the same question in expounding the Yoga of self-perfection. In The Synthesis of Yoga, he clarified what he meant by the “capacity for enjoyment”, bhoga-sāmarthya, that is to be developed by the Prana or vital force:

The enjoyment it will have will be in the essence a spiritual bliss, but one which takes up into itself and transforms the mental, emotional, dynamic, vital and physical joy; it must have therefore an integral capacity for these things and must not by incapacity or fatigue or inability to bear great intensities fail the spirit, mind, heart, will and body.[55]

The vital being’s capacity for enjoyment depends on a power that has to be developed in the body “to hold whatever force is brought into it by the spirit and to contain its action without spilling and wasting it or itself getting cracked”. This general “faculty of holding”, termed dhārana-śakti or dhārana-sāmarthya, is considered “the most important siddhi or perfection of the body”,[56]since it is required for a higher working of all the other parts of the being. It is especially necessary if the bhoga-sāmarthya of the life-force is to be imparted to the physical consciousness, creating there a “capacity for bliss” such as is attributed in Savitri to Aswapati at a certain stage in his ascension:

His earth, dowered with celestial competence,
Harboured a power that needed now no more
To cross the closed customs-line of mind and flesh
And smuggle godhead into humanity.
It shrank no more from the supreme demand
Of an untired capacity for bliss….[57]

Many entries in the Record of Yoga show that Sri Aurobindo was systematically perfecting the body’s ability to sustain a more and more intense and continuous physical Ananda. What he ascribed to Aswapati was evidently his own experience. In cultivating such experiences, his Yoga of self-perfection seems to part company with almost all spiritual disciplines in the Indian tradition except Tantra. But in its methods it also differs widely from Tantra of either the right-hand or the left-hand path. Sri Aurobindo made his relation to Tantra clear when he affirmed that this Yoga “starts from the method of Vedanta to arrive at the aim of the Tantra.”[58] It attempts to achieve “a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body.” But “the reliance is on the power of the higher being to change the lower existence” and “a working is chosen mainly from above downward and not the opposite way”.[59] Entries on the subject of physical Ananda in the Record of Yoga illustrate this distinction. For instance, Sri Aurobindo writes on 19 June 1920:

An Ananda of a much greater potentiality of continuity, pervasion, largeness and intensity felt on the vijñāna summit and descending into the sukshma body….[60]

Later the same day, the Ananda which had thus descended from the vijñāna or “supramental” level—as Sri Aurobindo understood it at that time—into the sūkshma or subtle body is described as “insistent on possession of the sthula [physical] body”.[61]

Twenty years later when he added several new chapters at the end of The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo wrote about the physical manifestation of the delight of the Infinite in terms reminiscent of the experiences he had once recorded in his diary:

In the body it reveals itself as an ecstasy pouring into it from the heights of the spirit and the peace and bliss of a pure and spiritualised physical existence.

This statement in the chapter entitled “The Gnostic Being” follows the observation that even “before the gnostic change there can be a beginning of this fundamental ecstasy of being translated into a manifold beauty and delight.” Sri Aurobindo then proceeds to enumerate a few of these “manifold” forms of Ananda as it is felt by different parts of the nature. They include the Ananda of the mind, heart and senses to which he had often referred in the Record of Yoga, where he designated them by the Sanskrit terms ahaituka ānanda, premānanda and vishayānanda:

In the mind, it translates into a calm or intense delight of spiritual perception and vision and knowledge, in the heart into a wide or deep or passionate delight of universal union and love and sympathy and the joy of beings and the joy of things. In the will and vital parts it is felt as the energy of delight of a divine life-power in action or a beatitude of the senses perceiving and meeting the One everywhere, perceiving as their normal aesthesis of things a universal beauty and a secret harmony of creation of which our mind can catch only imperfect glimpses or a rare supernormal sense.[62]

Sri Aurobindo himself had begun to experience all these things at a comparatively early stage in his spiritual development. In the Record of Yoga he grouped them under the heading bhukti, enjoyment. Initially he placed this term after mukti, liberation, in the yogachatushtaya or siddhichatushtaya which summed up in four terms (chatushtaya) the steps to the siddhi of his Yoga.[63] This sequence had an experiential basis which he recognised later when he wrote in his revision of The Life Divine:

In the liberation of the soul from the Ignorance the first foundation is peace, calm, the silence and quietude of the Eternal and Infinite; but a consummate power and greater formation of the spiritual ascension takes up this peace of liberation into the bliss of a perfect experience and realisation of the eternal beatitude, the bliss of the Eternal and Infinite.[64]

In the Introduction to The Synthesis of Yoga, written in 1914, “integral beatitude” follows directly after “integral purity” and “integral liberty” and precedes “integral perfection” in a paragraph giving a brief synopsis of the integrality of the Yoga. But when in March 1919 he came to the fourth chapter of “The Yoga of Self-Perfection”, Sri Aurobindo reversed the order of the last two items and listed them as “purification, liberation, perfection, delight of being… śuddhi, mukti, siddhi, bhukti.”[65]

It could be argued that this reversal of bhukti and siddhi prepared the way for the omission of a distinct stage of transformation corresponding to bhukti when Sri Aurobindo reformulated his Yoga as three transformations, psychic, spiritual and supramental, corresponding to the former śuddhi, mukti and siddhi. However, the place of Ananda in the Yoga was not diminished, but greatened by regarding its consummation as a consequence of the supramental change. In a sense, Sri Aurobindo recognised a quadruple transformation as the complete aim of the integral Yoga. But he insisted that “one must pass through the supermind to arrive to the highest Ananda”.[66] Supramentalisation, the transformation whose accomplishment would constitute the next decisive step in evolution, was his immediate concern. For most of us, the psychic transformation is already enough of a challenge. Yet it is of at least theoretical interest to note that Sri Aurobindo looked beyond even the supramental transformation to what would follow it. He wrote in 1940 in his expansion of The Life Divine:

A supramental manifestation in its ascent would have as a next sequence and culmination of self-result a manifestation of the Bliss of the Brahman: the evolution of the being of gnosis would be followed by an evolution of the being of bliss; an embodiment of gnostic existence would have as its consequence an embodiment of the beatific existence.

A central feature of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and Yoga is the recognition that an “aspiration, a demand for the supreme and total delight of existence is there secretly in the whole make of our being”. This trend, moreover, is founded in the truth of the being; for Ananda is the very essence of the Brahman, it is the supreme nature of the omnipresent Reality. The supermind itself in the descending degrees of the manifestation emerges from the Ananda and in the evolutionary ascent merges into the Ananda.[67]

Humankind, as it is now, has a limited capacity to experience Ananda. Even “a diminishing transmission through an inferior consciousness”, however, gives “the sense of an ecstasy and an unsurpassable beatitude.” Sri Aurobindo asks: “And what will be the bliss nature when it manifests in a new supramental race?” His answer gives a glimpse of what our future evolution may have in store for us:

The fully evolved soul will be one with all beings in the status and dynamic effects of experience of a bliss-consciousness intense and illimitable. And since love is the effective power and soul-symbol of bliss-oneness he will approach and enter into this oneness by the gate of universal love, a sublimation of human love at first, a divine love afterwards, at its summits a thing of beauty, sweetness and splendour now to us inconceivable.[68]

Notes

[1]. Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, vol. 13 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998), p. 14.

[2]. In some passages in the Upanishads and other Sanskrit texts one can find insights into the processes of Nature that seem to prefigure elements of evolutionary theory. Sri Aurobindo noted a few of these in The Karmayogin: A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, written around 1905-6. (See The Upanishads – I: Isha Upanishad [Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2004], p. 228.) He also discerned “a parable of evolution” in the traditional series of Avatars beginning with Vishnu’s incarnations as a fish and a tortoise. (See Letters on Yoga: Part One [Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971], p. 402.)

[3]. See Richard Hartz, “India and Evolution”, Mother India, March 2005, pp. 249-55.

[4]. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 2002), vol. 2, p. 18.

[5]. Sri Aurobindo uses the word “joining” to describe the culmination of the spiritual search in Savitri (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1993, p. 307):

Transcending every perishable support
And joining at last its mighty origin,
The separate self must melt or be reborn
Into a Truth beyond the mind’s appeal.

[6]. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2005), p. 32.

[7]. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 4, p. 332.

[8]. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 19.

[9]. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 483-84.

[10]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 27.

[11]. Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2004), p. 198.

[12]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 27.

[13]. Ibid., p. 28.

[14]. Savitri, p. 256.

[15]. The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture, p. 156.

[16]. Letters on Yoga: Part One, p. 49.

[17]. Ibid., p. 50.

[18]. Savitri, p. 91.

[19]. The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 55-56.

[20]. Most of Sri Aurobindo’s revision of Part Two was incorporated in the first complete edition of The Synthesis of Yoga, published five years after his passing. Some minor revision of the Intro°©duction and more substantial alterations in Chapters 15-17 of Part Two were discovered later and first appeared in print in 1999.

[21]. Sri Aurobindo, On Himself (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), p. 86.

[22]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 614.

[23]. Ibid., p. 32.

[24]. Savitri, p. 20.

[25]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 567.

[26]. Ibid., p. 445.

[27]. Ibid., p. 805.

[28]. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2006), p. 923.

[29]. Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998), p. 165.

[30]. Ibid., pp. 165-66.

[31]. Savitri, p. 462.

[32]. The Human Cycle, p. 166. Sri Aurobindo began to publish The Psychology of Social Development (later renamed The Human Cycle) in the Arya in August 1916, the month of the first drafts of Savitri.

[33]. Savitri, pp. 612-13.

[34]. Ibid., pp. 611-12.

[35]. See Sri Aurobindo, Record of Yoga (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2001), pp. 12, 686, 1471, and The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 737.

[36]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 661.

[37]. Ibid., p. 643.

[38]. Ibid., p. 658.

[39]. Ibid., pp. 658-59.

[40]. Ibid., p. 659.

[41]. Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 478.

[42]. The Life Divine, p. 233.

[43]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 351.

[44]. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga: Part Four (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971), p. 1197.

[45]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 612.

[46]. Ibid., p. 674.

[47]. Ibid., pp. 674-75.

[48]. The Life Divine, p. 240.

[49]. Letters on Yoga: Part One, p. 106.

[50]. Letters on Yoga: Part Four, p. 1154.

[51]. The Life Divine, pp. 951-52.

[52]. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga: Part Two and Part Three (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971), p. 529.

[53]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 655.

[54]. The Human Cycle, pp. 171-72.

[55]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 735.

[56]. Ibid., p. 731.

[57]. Savitri, p. 236.

[58]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 612.

[59]. Ibid., p. 695.

[60]. Record of Yoga, p. 1235.

[61]. Ibid., p. 1236.

[62]. The Life Divine, p. 1027.

[63]. Record of Yoga, pp. 23, 1478.

[64]. The Life Divine, p. 1026.

[65]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 639.

[66]. Letters on Yoga: Part One, p. 92.

[67]. The Life Divine, p. 1025.

[68]. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 509.

Sri Aurobindo and Transpersonal Psychology – by Michael Miovic, MD

Posted on January 2, 2010 by admin

ABSTRACT:

This article provides an overview of Sri Aurobindo’s psychological
thought and system of Integral Yoga Psychology (IYP). Relevant
biographical and historical background is introduced, and his influence
on the development of transpersonal psychology reviewed. Using Sri
Aurobindo’s cosmology of consciousness as a framework for transpersonal
experience, IYP’s model of planes of consciousness and parts of the
being is explained and illustrated with quotations from Sri Aurobindo’s
writings. Emphasis is placed on the psychic being (soul) and overhead
planes of consciousness, as these are central to IYP’s psycho-spiritual
method of transforming the ego. Finally, implications for transpersonal
development and transpersonal therapy are formulated, and some clinical
applications given.

Introduction

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), the noted Indian spiritual teacher, is a
seminal thinker whose writings have immense value for transpersonal
psychology. In addition to interpreting the “perennial philosophy” to
the West in an experientially authoritative and intellectually accurate
fashion, he also made original contributions to transpersonal
psychology. While several important transpersonal thinkers have been
influenced by Sri Aurobindo’s work (including Murphy, Wilber,
Cortright, and others), this journal has never undertaken a
comprehensive presentation of his psychological system. The purpose of
this essay, therefore, is to explain Sri Aurobindo’s contributions to
transpersonal psychology and provide readers with an overview to use in
approaching his complex writings directly. Due to limited space, this
article will be more theoretical than clinical, although clinical
applications will be indicated in several places.

Biographical and Historical Background. Born Aurobindo Ghose in
Calcutta, on August 15, 1872, Aurobindo was educated in England and
graduated at the top of his class at Cambridge, where he studied
classics and imbibed both Christianity and the paradigm of Western
rationalism. Aurobindo returned to his homeland in the 1890s with the
aim of fostering Indian nationalism, and as a young man helped lead the
first movement for Indian independence, which was put down by the
British and later resuscitated by Gandhi. In 1910, after serving a
yearlong prison sentence for sedition, Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry,
then in the French territory of India, where he dedicated the rest of
his life to his spiritual practice and teaching.

By the early 1920s, Aurobindo had gained recognition in India as an
accomplished yogi, prompting the appellation of “Sri” Aurobindo (Sri is
a Sanskrit term of respect given to important spiritual figures). In
1926, he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, a small spiritual community,
in conjunction with Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973), his French collaborator
and co-teacher. Within the Ashram, Alfassa came to be called “the
Mother,” in accordance with how female spiritual figures are honored in
India. As the Mother, she administered all of the daily functions of
the Ashram and personally guided residents in their sadhana (spiritual
discipline). Sri Aurobindo always considered the Mother to be his
spiritual peer, and contrary to some popular misconceptions, they were
never married and had no romantic liaison. At the end of her life, the
Mother also founded Auroville (located a few miles north of
Pondicherry), an international community that seeks to evolve a new
spiritually and materially sustainable lifestyle for the 21st
millennium.

By the time of Sri Aurobindo’s passing in 1950, his reputation had
grown international. Pearl Buck and others nominated him for the Nobel
Prize in literature in 1950, and many think he would have won it had he
lived. Since his passing, India has made stamps and coins in Sri
Aurobindo’s honor, schoolbooks remember him as a founding father of the
Indian nation, his bust sits permanently in the Indian Parliament, and
he has become recognized as one of the leading Indian spiritual figures
of the 20th century (see Heehs, 1989, for biographical details).

Culturally and philosophically, Sri Aurobindo’s key contributions to
the ancient tradition of Indian yoga were to emphasize the spiritual
possibilities of matter and embodied life on earth, and to
counterbalance male images of the Divine (e.g., as Shiva, Vishnu,
Brahma) with a renewed appreciation for the Divine as Mother
(Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1957; Aurobindo, 1999). Sri Aurobindo thus
belongs to the resurgence of the feminine principle that is felt
elsewhere in modern religious and spiritual discourse, and the work of
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother upholds the core values of modern
feminism. Psychodynamically, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are
especially interesting because they represent one of the rare instances
in cultural history where both paternal and maternal role models are
figured simultaneously in the role of spiritual teacher, and the
distribution of authority between them is equal and symmetrically
reciprocated. That fact alone should warrant further study of their
work by transpersonal psychologists.

Influence on Transpersonal Psychology

Sri Aurobindo’s ideas have already influenced the development of
transpersonal psychology in many ways. Spiegelberg, who helped found
the American Academy of Asian Studies, was an Aurobindo enthusiast and
introduced Michael Murphy to the writings of Sri Aurobindo. Murphy
actually studied in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in the late 1950s, and his
project at Esalen was in part inspired by this experience, as was his
later work on transpersonal experiences of the body (Murphy, 1992;
Taylor, 1999). At the same time, Chaudhuri, whom Sri Aurobindo
handpicked to represent his Integral Yoga in the United States, was
friendly with many of the leading figures of the West Coast renaissance
in the 1950s and 1960s, and founded the Asian Institute of Integral
Studies, which later became the California Institute of Integral
Studies (Chaudhuri, 1965). Parsons, who is currently documenting
Murphy’s work at Esalen, has also written insightfully on the subject
of spiritual psychology with reference to Aurobindo (Parsons, 1999, and
personal communication, 2004). Cortright, too, uses many of Sri
Aurobindo’s ideas in his transpersonal approach to psychotherapy and
T-groups, and recently led a conference on transpersonal/yoga
psychology in Auroville (Cortright, 1997, 2001; Cortright, Kahn, &
Hess, 2003; and personal communication, 2005).

In addition, Wilber cites Sri Aurobindo often and ranks him as one of
the pioneers of integral studies. Although Wilber feels Sri Aurobindo
never fully assimilated the intersubjective (cultural) and
interobjective (social) differentiations of modernity (Wilber, 2000,
pp. 74-85), one may disagree as Sri Aurobindo’s life and work suggest
otherwise. Biographical evidence shows that he successfully blended
Asian and Western values in his personal life (Heehs, 1989), thus
demonstrating assimilation of the cultural relativity proposed by
modernism, and his works on socio-cultural and geo-political evolution,
The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, are all about the
developments in and differentiations among the three value spheres of
art, ethics (morals), and science that Wilber considers central to
modernity (Aurobindo, 1970c; Wilber, 2000, pp. 59-73). Furthermore, one
has only to read accounts of Sri Aurobindo’s support of the Allies in
World War II, or his parting reflections on the cold war and the United
Nations, to see that he grasped the fundamental issues of the 20th
century as lucidly as any (Nirodbaran, 1972; Aurobindo, 1970c, pp.
556-571). Indeed, it is precisely because of Sri Aurobindo’s modernism
that contemporary Aurobindonian thinkers are so concerned about the
pressing interpersonal, cultural, social, and political issues of our
times (Lithman, 2003).

In India, Sri Aurobindo’s work has had more impact through yoga than
psychology, probably because yoga has such a long history in Indian
culture. Nonetheless, several authors have published important
presentations of Sri Aurobindo’s psychological thought, many of them
under the auspices of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of
Education. Sen was the first to write on the subject and coined the
term “integral psychology” to characterize Sri Aurobindo’s approach
(Sen, 1986). Dalal has written several excellent collections of essays
that compare Sri Aurobindo’s ideas and Western psychology, and this
article owes much to his efforts (Dalal, 2001a, 2001b). Vrinte has
written comparative studies of Sri Aurobindo, Maslow, transpersonal
psychology, and Wilber’s work (Vrinte, 1995, 1996, 2002). Basu, a
psychiatrist, developed an integral model of health based on Sri
Aurobindo’s work, which importantly gives due credit to scientific
biomedicine and moves beyond the current model of
complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) to a fully consciousness-based
model (Basu, 2000). Cornelissen has organized several international
conferences on integral psychology, resulting in two collections of
essays (Cornelissen, 2001; Cornelissen & Joshi, 2004), and is
presently collaborating with others to compile the first comprehensive
textbook of Indian psychology (Cornelissen, Dalal, & Rao, in
press). Rao, who is co-heading this project and dedicated a career to
research in parapsychology, has authored an insightful exposition of
classical Indian psychology and modern non-local research, in which Sri
Aurobindo’s contributions are duly noted (Rao, 2002).

Integral Yoga Psychology

Overview

Integral Yoga Psychology (IYP) is eminently transpersonal in that it is
interested in studying and promoting the highest levels of spiritual
development, and of transforming human egoic consciousness into an
organized center for manifesting the Divine on earth. As a worldview,
IYP is theistic, experiential, empiric, and evolutionary. However, it
is not a religion, entails no proscribed beliefs or practices, and does
not ask anyone to view Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as gurus. Although
IYP is more an approach to transpersonal development than it is a type
of transpersonal therapy, it has points of clinical relevance that will
be discussed later.

In addition to the fact that IY P is based on experiential insights,
there are three main challenges in coming to a balanced understanding
of IYP, which are as follows:

1. The recorded works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother comprise a vast
literature that spans over 60 years and encompasses both written and
oral, public and private, communications;

2. Sri Aurobindo’ s writings can be difficult to grasp, because his
Victorian prose is long and meditative, while modern readers are
accustomed to shorter sentences and bullets of information;

3. Sri Aurobindo’s cosmology is the opposite of the materialist
worldview of Western science, and one must understand his metaphysics
in order to understand IYP . This essay will attempt to mitigate these
problems by presenting a concise overview of IYP, drawing selectively
from Sri Aurobindo’s writings so as to illustrate key concepts. Several
passages from Sri Aurobindo’s letters to disciples are quoted because
his letters are usually more succinct and practical than his formal
writings. Readers interested in the Mother’s life and work are referred
to Van Vrekhem for further
information (Van Vrekhem, 1998, 2000).

Cosmology of Consciousness

In terms of cosmology, Western science begins with the operational
assumption that matter is the only reality, and then directs all of its
energies at studying the details of how the material universe evolved
after the “big bang,” and how life evolved on earth much later.
However, Sri Aurobindo questions the basic assumption of materialism
and proposes an alternate, spiritual hypothesis for interpreting
evolutionary biology, psychology, and consciousness studies. In his
magnum opus on philosophy, The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo argues that
matter is simply a finite and dormant manifestation of the infinitely
conscious Divine Reality, and that biological evolution is the ordered
process through which transcendent Spirit expresses itself under the
conditions of matter (Aurobindo, 1970b).

Central to Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of the evolution of
consciousness is his cosmological account of how matter came to exist
in the first place. In brief, Sri Aurobindo says that the supreme
Being/Reality sequentially delimits or differentiates a portion of its
infinite nature to become finite matter, and that this compressive
process happened (or is constantly happening) before time and space
came into existence, because the space-time continuum is a material
phenomenon. Sri Aurobindo calls the descending process through which
Spirit becomes matter involution, while evolution is the secondary
process through which Spirit slowly discloses the divine potential
involved in matter (Aurobindo, 1970b). Thus, Sri Aurobindo’s ideas
build upon and extend the range of classical Indian philosophy. In his
own words (written in the third person for public circulation):

The teaching of Sri Aurobindo starts from that of the ancient sages of
India that behind the appearances of the universe there is the Reality
of a Being and Consciousness, a Self of all things, one and eternal.
All beings are united in that One Self and Spirit but divided by a
certain separativity of consciousness, an ignorance of their true Self
and Reality in the mind, life and body. It is possible by a certain
psychological discipline to remove this veil of separative
consciousness and become aware of the true Self, the Divinity within us
and all. Sri Aurobindo’s teaching states that this One Being and
Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by
which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be
inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher
and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a
greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release
of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish
with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness
which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must
be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant
power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity
in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to
manifest perfection. (Aurobindo, 1972a)

Consequently, for Sri Aurobindo transpersonal experiences and strivings
are the mark of evolution at work, and indeed human beings are only a
transitional species on the way to a more spiritual (i.e., supramental)
life-form that will evolve on earth in the future. While one may
certainly question Sri Aurobindo’s predictions, one has at least to
respect his intellectual integrity in taking a stance on key issues.
For instance, now that we have brain scans of Tibetan monks and
Christian nuns that reveal a unique pattern of cerebral metabolism
associated with transcendent states (Newberg & d’Aquili, 1998,
2001) one can expect such studies to become more nuanced in the future,
perhaps describing a variety of psycho-spiritual states and capacities
according to different associated neuro-physiologic and neuro-anatomic
parameters.

Unless transpersonal psychology is willing to let transpersonal
experiences be reduced back to brain chemistry, it will need to
articulate how the brain can be a correlated substrate of experience
rather than its generator and final cause. Almost a century ago, in his
first draft of the Life Divine (written 1914-19), Sri Aurobindo
anticipated this dilemma and articulated a consciousness paradigm that
can absorb emerging developments in neuroscience without needing to
accept to the dogma of materialism (Miovic, 2003, pp. 113-32, and
2004).

Planes of Consciousness and Parts of the Being

Sri Aurobindo describes the sequential involution of the infinite
Reality into finite matter using the metaphor of a series of descending
steps on a staircase, which he calls “planes of consciousness.” Listed
from highest to lowest in descending ontological order, the major
planes of consciousness are as follows (based on Aurobindo, 1970a, pp.
233-77):

1. Sacchidananda (Brahman, the transcendent Divine)
2. Supermind (the self-determining infinite consciousness)
3. Overmind (cosmic consciousness, plane of the Gods and Goddesses)
4. Intuitive Mind
5. Illumined Mind
6. Higher Mind
7. Mind (with several layers)
8. Vital (with higher, middle, and lower subdivisions)
9. Subtle Physical
10. Physical proper (usually refers to the body)
11. Subconscient (individual and universal “unconscious” of psychology)
12. Inconscient (matter proper and existential Non-Being)

According to Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experience, all of the
non-material planes of consciousness listed above (i.e., everything
from the subtle physical up to the Sacchidananda) exist in their own
right, independent of matter, and would continue to exist even if our
current material universe came to an end. Thus, Sri Aurobindo views
each plane of consciousness as a universe unto itself, and the sum of
created existence as a spectrum or stacked series of universes that
ascend from densely unconscious but manifest matter at the base, to
fully conscious but unmanifested Sacchidananda at the peak
(sacchidananda is a Vedantic term that means
“existence-consciousness-bliss”).

In addition to this vertical scale of consciousness, Sri Aurobindo also
describes a concentric dimension of consciousness, which he refers to
as “parts of the being.” While the planes of consciousness are
impersonal states or gradations of existence, the “parts of the being”
refer to organized centers and faculties of consciousness that exist or
can emerge in the human being. Through these, the human being becomes
aware of and enters into relationship with the aforementioned planes of
consciousness. The major parts of the being are listed below, from most
interior on the left to most exterior on the right:

- Inmost Being Inner Being Outer Being
- Psychic being Inner mental Mental (cognitive) (evolving soul)
- Inner vital Vital (affective)
- Inner physical Physical (biological)

Essentially, the outer being with its physical, vital (i.e. emotional
and libidinal), and mental awareness constitutes the “self” or “ego” of
the Western biopsychosocial model. Between the psychic being (evolving
soul) and the inner being stands the Purusha, or pure witness
consciousness that people sometimes experience in meditation, while
behind the psychic being stand the Jivatman and Atman (non-evolving
Self). The Jivatman and Atman will be described later, but space does
not permit a discussion of the Purusha, so readers are referred to
Dalal for further exposition of that topic (Dalal, 2001a).

Experientially, Sri Aurobindo observes that the planes of consciousness
above the Mind, when clearly perceived, are subjectively felt to exist
above the head and pour their influence down into the inner being from
there. For this reason, he often refers to them as the “overhead”
planes. In contrast, the parts of the inner and inmost beings are
experienced as follows:

The chakras as residing within the body or along the spine and opening
to the inner mental, vital and physical sheaths of consciousness (see
Table 1); the psychic being (soul) behind the heart chakra; and the
Jivatman and Atman entirely above the body (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp.
233-377).

The neuro-physiological correlates for this somatotopic organization of
experience are not currently known, but offer a fascinating subject for
future research. In the following letter, Sri Aurobindo summarizes the
psychological and spiritual functions of the various parts of the
being:

There are, we might say, two beings in us, one on the surface, our
ordinary exterior mind, life, body consciousness, another behind the
veil, an inner mind, an inner life, an inner physical consciousness
constituting another or inner self. This inner self once awake opens in
its turn to our true real eternal self. It opens inwardly to the soul,
called in the language of this yoga the psychic being which supports
our successive births and at each birth assumes a new mind, life and
body. It opens above to the Self or Spirit which is unborn and by
conscious recovery of it we transcend the changing personality and
achieve freedom and full mastery over our nature. (Aurobindo, 1970a,
pp. 1020-21)

The rest of this essay will elaborate and illustrate the various
relationships among the planes of consciousness and parts of the being
outlined
above, and describe their relevance to transpersonal development.

Liberation vs. Transformation

One of the perennial sources of confusion for Western transpersonalists
interested in the perennial philosophy is the question of what
precisely constitutes “enlightenment.” Variously referred to as moksha,
mukti, nirvana, satori, Self-realization, or realization of the Atman
or Brahman in different traditions of Buddhist and Hindu literature,
Western readers may well wonder if the Buddhists who experience nirvana
as no-self (anatta or anatman) are achieving the same enlightenment as
the Vedantists who experience the transcendent Self alone as real.

Also, some teachers and traditions have described enlightenment as a
sudden and final awakening (such as Ramana Maharshi and various Zen
masters), while others (including Sri Aurobindo) maintain the
experience can be gradually cultivated and grow in frequency,
intensity, depth, and duration. Sri Aurobindo accepts all of these
terms as roughly equivalent, and notes both the commonalities and
nuanced variations in people’s experience of enlightenment:

The Buddhist Nirvana and the Adwaitin’s Moksha are the same thing. It
corresponds to a realisation in which one does not feel oneself any
longer as an individual with such a name or such a form, but an
infinite eternal Self spaceless (even when in space), timeless (even
when in time). Note that one can perfectly well do actions in that
condition and it is not to be gained only by Samadhi [yogic trance
state]. (Aurobindo, 1970a, p. 62)

The impressions in the approach to Infinity or the entry into it are
not always quite the same; much depends on the way in which the mind
approaches it. It is felt first by some as an infinity above, by others
as an infinity around into which the mind disappears (as an energy) by
losing its limits. Some feel not the absorption of the mind-energy into
the infinite, but a falling entirely inactive; others feel it as a
lapse or disappearance of energy into pure Existence. Some first feel
the infinity as a vast existence into which all sinks or disappears,
others, as you describe it, as an infinite ocean of Light above, others
as an infinite ocean of Power above. If certain schools of Buddhists
felt it in their experience as a limitless Shunya [void or non-being],
the Vedantists, on the contrary, see it as a positive Self-Existence
erected into various philosophies, each putting its conception as
definitive; but behind each conception there was such an experience.
(Aurobindo, 1970a, p. 63)

Sri Aurobindo often refers to the realization of the non-dual awareness
described above as spiritual liberation, because it brings a release
from the egocentric consciousness of the outer mind, life, and body.
However, he notes that this first realization of the Self is passive,
and can be followed by a dynamic heightening and widening of
consciousness that leads eventually to transformation of both the inner
and outer beings. The following letter to a disciple further describes
the difference between liberation and transformation in the sequence of
transpersonal development:

The realisation of t he Spirit comes long before the development of
overmind or supermind; hundreds of sadhaks [spiritual seekers] in all
times have had the realisation of the Atman in the higher mental
planes, buddheh paratah, but the supramental realisation was not
theirs. One can get partial realisations of the Self or Spirit or the
Divine on any plane, mental, vital, physical even, and when one rises
above the ordinary mental plane of man into a higher and larger mind,
the Self begins to appear in all its conscious wideness. It is by full
entry into this wideness of the Self that cessation of mental activity
becomes possible; one gets the inner Silence. After that this inner
Silence can remain even when there is activity of any kind; the being
remains silent within, the action goes on in the instruments, and one
receives all the necessary initiations and execution of action whether
mental, vital or physical from a higher source without the fundamental
peace and calm of the Spirit being troubled.

The overmind and supermind states are something yet higher than this;
but before one can understand them, one must first have the
self-realisation [Self-realization], the full action of the
spiritualised mind and heart, the psychic awakening, the liberation of
the imprisoned consciousness….(Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 105-6)

In short, Sri Aurobindo opines that what people usually mean by the
word “enlightenment” is not necessarily the end of transpersonal
development, but can be rather the beginning of a higher evolution. Sri
Aurobindo’s views on the Buddha and Buddhist psychology are complex and
deserve a separate essay. Briefly, Buddhist phenomenology has certainly
described aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s transpersonal anatomy of
awareness, but using different terminology and often an agnostic
world-view. Sri Aurobindo accepts this phenomenology as a statement of
experience, but notes that more comprehensive experiences are possible,
too, and he rejects Impermanence as the ultimate truth of existence.
For Sri Aurobindo, omnipresent Reality is the ultimate truth of
existence, of which the Buddhist Void and phenomenal impermanence are
only partial aspects. Also, he feels that no school of Buddhism ever
clearly set the goal of achieving a supramental evolution on earth
(Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 59-69).

Self, Overmind, and Supermind

Whatever one decides to make of Sri Aurobindo’s larger claims about
cosmology and the evolution of consciousness, his phenomenological
descriptions of the “overhead” planes of consciousness are a useful
contribution to transpersonal psychology. Space does not permit a
detailed study here of the differences among the Higher Mind, Illumined
Mind, and Intuitive Mind, but the following statement nicely summarizes
some of the essential qualities and characteristics of each, and also
describes further the relationship between static (passive) and dynamic
realizations of the Self (Atman):

The Self governs the diversity of its creation by its unity on all the
planes from the Higher Mind upwards on which the realisation of the One
is the natural basis of consciousness. But as one goes upward, the view
changes, the power of consciousness changes, the Light becomes ever
more intense and potent. Although the static realisation of Infinity
and Eternity and the Timeless One remains the same, the vision of the
workings of the One becomes ever wider and is attended with a greater
instrumentality of Force and a more comprehensive grasp of what has to
be known and done. All possible forms and constructions of things
become more and more visible, put in their proper place, utilisable.
Moreover, what is thought-knowledge in the Higher Mind becomes
illumination in the Illumined Mind and direct intimate vision in the
Intuition. But the Intuition sees in flashes and combines through a
constant play of light—through revelations, inspirations, intuitions,
swift discriminations. The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great
masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally;
it creates and acts in the same way—it is the world of the great Gods,
the divine Creators. Only, each creates in his own way; he sees all but
sees all from his own viewpoint. There is not the absolute supramental
harmony and certitude. These, inadequately expressed, are some of the
differences. I speak, of course, of these planes in themselves—when
acting in the human consciousness they are necessarily much diminished
in their working by having to depend on the human instrumentation of
mind, vital and physical. Only when these are quieted, they get a
fuller force and reveal more of their character. (Aurobindo, 1970a, p.
1154)

As stated above, Sri Aurobindo describes the Overmind as the plane of
the great gods and goddesses of Greek, Hindu, Mayan, and other
traditions. In his view, the Gods are real beings who exist eternally
on the overmental plane, and are not merely creations of a primitive
human mentality. The human mind can build forms that the Gods accept,
but the Gods exist in their own right and can inspire various forms of
manifestation into the human mind. For example, Sri Aurobindo noted
that the Greek goddess Pallas Athene and the Indian goddess Maheshwari
are not two different beings, but the same being manifested differently
in two separate cultures (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 383-87, 389). According
to this principle, the Egyptian Aman-Re, the Greek Apollo, the Hindu
Surya, and the Mayan Sun God are not four separate beings, but one and
the same, as it is for the Greek Poseidon, Hindu Varuna, and Mayan
Chac. In my experience, the presence of these immortal beings can still
be felt at various temples in Greece, Mexico, and India.

A second important characteristic of the Overmind, according to Sri
Aurobindo, is that people generally have experiences of cosmic
consciousness through opening to this plane of existence. Since Bucke
introduced the term “cosmic consciousness” to describe various mystical
states drawn from biographical data (Bucke, 1969), the term has been
used loosely to denote a broad range of transpersonal experiences. Sri
Aurobindo uses the term “cosmic consciousness” specifically to describe
the awareness of cosmic or universal (i.e., not personal or individual)
forces operative on each plane of consciousness. Such cosmic
consciousness may come before spiritual liberation, but usually it
comes later, with the overmental realization, which Sri Aurobindo
evokes vividly here:

When the Overmind descends, the predominance of the centralizing
ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness of being and
finally abolished; a wide cosmic perception and feeling of a boundless
universal self and movement replaces it: many motions that were
formerly egocentric may still continue, but they occur as currents or
ripples in the cosmic wideness. Thought, for the most part, no longer
seems to originate individually in the body or the person but manifests
from above or comes in upon the cosmic mind-waves: all inner individual
sight or intelligence of things is now a revelation or illumination of
what is seen or comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not
one’s separate self but in the universal knowledge; the feelings,
emotions, sensations are similarly felt as waves from the same cosmic
immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross body and responded to
in kind from the individual centre of the universality. In this
boundless largeness, not only the separate ego but all sense of
individuality, even of a subordinated or instrumental individuality,
may entirely disappear; the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness,
the cosmic delight, the play of cosmic forces alone are left.
(Aurobindo, 1970b, p. 987)

Obviously, to live in such an overmental consciousness permanently
would constitute an extraordinary transpersonal achievement, for it
would entirely alter one’s normal awareness and whole sense of self.
Nonetheless, Sri Aurobindo still considers the Overmind as pertaining
to the “Ignorance,” because it is a consciousness of multiplicity not
absolute unity. In contrast, the Supermind is a unitary
Truth-Consciousness: The Supermind is in its very essence a
Truth-Consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance
that is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence
and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and
world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our
existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a
Truth-Consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power
of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim,
its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its
very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses
it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into
the imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right
perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from
illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing
widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it
possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an
evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it
would eventually reveal its own highest heights it must be in its very
nature essentially free from ignorance and error: It starts from truth
and light and moves always in truth and light. (Aurobindo, 1971, pp.
79-80)

In Sri Aurobindo’s judgment, the central limitation of the perennial
philosophy is that it leads only to a passive perception of the
transcendent Self (Atman), whereas supramental realization would confer
an active mastery of phenomenal existence, because Supermind is the
subsidiary aspect or movement of Sacchidananda that has, in fact,
created all the worlds and planes of phenomenal manifestation. Sri
Aurobindo’s final prose writings describe possible individual, social,
and biological routes a supramental evolution could take in the future.
The following passage highlights
some of his intimations about the future of the body:

New powers have to be acquired by the body that our present humanity
could not hope to realize, could not even dream of or could only
imagine. Much that can now only be known, worked out, or created by the
use of invented tools and machinery might be achieved by the new body
in its own power or by the inhabitant spirit through its own direct
spiritual force. The body itself might acquire new means and ranges of
communication with other bodies, new processes of acquiring knowledge,
a new aesthesis, new potencies of manipulation of itself and objects.
It might not be impossible for it to possess or disclose means native
to its own constitution, substance, or natural instrumentation for
making the far near and annulling distance, cognizing what is now
beyond the body’s cognizance, acting where action is now out of its
reach or its domain, developing subtleties and plasticities that could
not be permitted under present conditions to the needed fixity of a
material frame…. (Aurobindo, 1971, pp. 76-77)

Note well that Sri Aurobindo views the “new powers” described here as
new properties and abilities of the physical body itself, not the usual
clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, and other parapsychological
phenomenon that arise from the inner being (see below). For IYP, this
distinction is relevant to correctly interpreting Murphy’s extensive
documentation of mind-body phenomenon (Murphy, 1992), and related data
from contemporary non-local research (such as Braud, 2000; and Rao,
2002). Whether or not certain esoteric doctrines implied a supramental
transformation of the body is open to debate, however, Sri Aurobindo
makes his own position clear. It should also be clearly understood that
Sri Aurobindo’s notion of a supramental evolution would necessarily
encompass all four quadrants of Wilber’s model of psychology, as Wilber
seems to think differently (Wilber, 2000). Finally, note that future
alterations to the human brain and body through genetic engineering
would not contradict Sri Aurobindo’s proposition of a supramental
evolution, but would rather constitute one route (among others) through
which such an evolution could proceed.

The Psychic Being

Practically, the central process of IYP is the evocation (“bringing
forward”) of the true soul, or seat of divine individuality within each
person, as the soul alone can lead towards a radical transformation of
the outer ego. Sri Aurobindo calls the soul the “psychic being,”
coining his term from the original meaning of the Greek root psyche,
and credits the Mother with having shown him the full practical import
of the psychic being. The following letter lucidly differentiates the
parts of the inmost being (Atman, Jivatman, and psychic being) and
describes their respective roles in the process of spiritual liberation
and spiritual transformation:

The Jivatman, spark-soul and psychic being are three different forms of
the same reality and they must not be mixed up together, as that
confuses the clearness of the inner experience. The Jivatman or spirit,
as it is usually called in English, is self-existent above the
manifested or instrumental being—it is superior to birth and death,
always the same, the individual Self or Atman. It is the eternal true
being of the individual. The soul is a spark of the Divine which is not
seated above the manifested being, but comes down into the
manifestation to support its evolution in the material world. It is at
first an undifferentiated power of the Divine Consciousness containing
all possibilities which have not yet taken form, but to which it is the
function of evolution to give form. This spark is there in all living
beings from the lowest to the highest.

The psychic being is formed by the soul in its evolution. It supports
the mind, vital, body, grows by their experiences, carries the nature
from life to life. It is the psychic or caitya purusa. At first it is
veiled by mind, vital and body, but as it grows, it becomes capable of
coming forward and dominating the mind, life and body; in the ordinary
man it depends on them for expression and is not able to take them up
and freely use them. The life of the being is animal or human and not
divine. When the psychic being can by sadhana [spiritual practice]
become dominant and freely use its instruments, then the impulse
towards the Divine becomes complete and the transformation of mind,
vital and body, not merely their liberation, becomes possible.

The Self or Atman being free and superior to birth and death, the
experience of the Jivatman and its unity with the supreme or universal
Self brings the sense of liberation, it is this which is necessary for
the supreme spiritual deliverance: but for the transformation of the
life and nature the awakening of the psychic being and its rule over
the nature are indispensable…. (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 282-283)

IYP’s emphasis on the role of the psychic being in transpersonal
development is one of the key ways in which IYP differs from those
schools of Buddhist psycho-spiritual that do not recognize the
existence of a true soul (see Epstein, 1995). Subjectively, the psychic
being is usually felt as residing deep within the center of the chest,
behind the heart chakra, with which it is frequently confused. Opening
to the psychic being brings feelings of spiritual devotion, surrender
to the Divine, gratitude, sweetness, quiet joy, love of all that is
good and beautiful and harmonious, and a spontaneous recoil from all
that is false, evil, dishonest, selfish, or discordant (Aurobindo,
1970a, pp. 1092-1117).

Note that the intuitive tact or guidance of the psychic being is quite
different from the intuitions of “psychics” in the West, which usually
arise from various levels of the inner being, and are far more prone to
error (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 458-61).

Now, a topic of perennial interest that involves the psychic being is
the process of reincarnation, which Sri Aurobindo accepts as a fact of
life (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 433-63). However, he clarifies that it is
not the outer personality that reincarnates, but rather the psychic
being, whose aim is to grow through the process of evolution. In
another letter to a disciple, Sri Aurobindo commented on this in a
somewhat humorous vein:

You must avoid a common popular blunder about reincarnation. The
popular idea is that Titus Balbus is reborn again as John Smith, a man
with the same personality, character, attainments as he had in his
former life with the sole difference that he wears coat and trousers
instead of a toga and speaks cockney English instead of popular Latin.
That is not the case. What would be the earthly use of repeating the
same personality or character a million times from the beginning of
time till its end? The soul comes into birth for experience, for
growth, for evolution till it can bring the Divine into Matter. It is
the central being that incarnates, not the outer personality—the
personality is simply a mould that it creates for its figures of
experience in that one life. In another birth it will create for itself
a different personality, different capacities, a different
life and career…. (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 455)

Psychologically, an important corollary of IYP’s view of evolution is
that the future is more important than the past, because the whole
mission of the psychic being is to grow towards a supramental
manifestation on earth. Consequently, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did
not advocate “past-life regression” as a primary therapeutic method
(which is not to say that past-life memories cannot be healing in some
instances), and also warned that people’s purported past-life memories
are easily distorted by imagination and autosuggestion. Only the
psychic being’s memory of the past is veridical, and even when one has
the true psychic memory, that fact alone does not solve the problem of
what to do with one’s present and future lives (for comparative views,
see Weiss, 1992; June, 1996).

As Sri Aurobindo noted succinctly:

But too much importance must not be given to the past lives. For the
purpose of this yoga one is what one is and, still more, what one will
be. What one was has a minor importance. (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 451-2)

In my experience, discussing this future-orientation can help prepare
clients who are considering visiting a “psychic” to get a past-life
reading, or who are interested in past-life regression therapy. By
setting realistic expectations as to what can be achieved with such
consultations, and by maintaining focus on current choices and future
development, the therapist can help the client maintain a
growth-orientation that is both emotionally and spiritually healthy.
This approach also tends to reduce using spirituality to defend against
or bypass psychological issues (see Battista, 1996; and Cortright,
1997).

For example, I once consulted on a case where the client developed an
erotic transference to the therapist t hat was simultaneously defensive
and based on a real past-life relationship as determined by a psychic.
In this situation, acknowledging both the spiritual and psychological
components of the transference allowed the therapy to proceed
productively, because the client felt genuinely understood.

The Inner Being

In the process of trying to contact the psychic being, people often
experience some aspect of the inner being, which stands between the
psychic being and the outer personality (ego). In the terminology of
IYP, the inner being consists of the subtle bodies or sheaths of
consciousness (inner mental, vital, and physical), the chakras of
classical Indian yoga, and an individual element of the subconscious.
The correspondences among the traditional yogic descriptions of the
chakras and Sri Aurobindo’s elucidation of their psycho-spiritual
functions are interesting, and are listed in Table 1. Again, IYP views
most parapsychological and non-local phenomenon studied in the West as
arising from the inner being (for instance, precognition and telepathy
involve the inner mental, “astral travel” the inner vital, and
spontaneous or “miraculous” healing the inner physical).

Sri Aurobindo views the chakras as subtle (i.e., non-material) organs
of perception and action that put the individual consciousness into
relation with the larger universe of forces and beings that operate on
each of the non-material planes of consciousness described previously.
Sri Aurobindo generally agrees with classical Tantric descriptions of
the chakras, however, he does add original insights based on his notion
of the evolution (see Table 1).

For example, he discerns a complex interaction among several parts of
the being and planes of consciousness associated subjectively with the
levels of the subtle body that correspond roughly to the physical
region of the throat, neck, and lower face. This nexus of consciousness
accounts for a variety of psychological and clinical phenomenon,
including the “mental vital,” through which strong emotions and
affective drives can rise up and cloud reasoning (as in the defense
mechanism of rationalization); and the “vital mind,” which is involved
in day-dreaming and narcissistic fantasies of grandeur (Aurobindo,
1970a, pp. 334-38, 1329).

This nexus also encompasses the “mechanical mind,” which can produce
the clinical syndrome of obsessive-compulsive disorder (now known to
have a specific neuropsychological substrate whose function can be
modified both pharmacologically and by cognitive behavior therapy); and
the “physical mind,” which is responsible for problems in speech,
self-expression of mental will, and dealing mentally with the physical
world (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 373-75).

[INSERT TABLE 1 HERE]

With regard to other aspects of classical Tantra, it is important to
note that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not recommend raising the
kundalini shakti (force or power) from below, because doing so can lead
to a variety of psychological disturbances acknowledged by
transpersonal psychology (Scotton, Chinen, & Battista, 1996, pp.
261-270). Instead, IYP proceeds by bringing forward the psychic being
and infusing the psychic into the entire inner being first, and then
the outer being, as well. The advantage of this method is that by
virtue of its inherent contact with Divine, the psychic being can
gently open the chakras and canalize the kundalini power without danger
of inducing what transpersonal psychologists now call “spiritual
emergencies” (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 1146-51, 1091-1239).

The Subconscious and Inconscient

The final elements of IYP that will be reviewed here are the
subconscious and the Inconscient. The Inconscient refers to a densely
unconscious inversion of the Sacchidananda in which all being and
existence seem to disappear. From this arises the subatomic and atomic
consciousness of matter, as well as the molecular organization of
matter into intracellular machinery. In yogic experience, the
Inconscient can be felt externally as extending through all material
substance (e.g., even rocks have a consciousness according to Sri
Aurobindo), and internally as supporting the consciousness of the
body’s cells. The Mother’s statements about her “cellular yoga” in the
latter part of her life afford extraordinary glimpses into the
spiritual transformation of the Inconscient (Van Vrekhem, 1998, 2000).
However, this goes well beyond the current purview of transpersonal
psychology, and transpersonal therapists should not confuse the
emotional memories clients frequently have during bodywork with the
true cellular consciousness of supramental yoga.

Psychologically, a much more common clinical phenomenon is the
interfusion of the vital plane with the physical consciousness of the
body, leading to a variety of ways in which emotion can be somatized.
This is how and why body-oriented therapies (massage, acupuncture,
myofascial release, therapeutic touch, etc) can be helpful in expanding
the range of consciously experienced emotion, and in resolving
somatized psychological distress (Basu, 2000).

Alternatively or simultaneously, repressed emotion can be pushed down
and back from frontal awareness into what Sri Aurobindo calls the
subconscious. This plane of consciousness accounts for the
“unconscious” of Western psychology, as well as chronic or recurrent
physical illnesses and habits:

The subconscient is universal as well as individual like all the other
main parts of the Nature….It contains the potentiality of all the
primitive reactions to life which struggle out to the surface from the
dull and inert strands of Matter and form by a constant development a
slowly evolving and self-formulating consciousness; it contains them
not as ideas, perceptions or conscious reactions but as the fluid
substance of these things. But also all that is consciously experienced
sinks down into the subconscient, not as precise though submerged
memories but as obscure yet obstinate impressions of experience, and
these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of
past thought, feelings, action, etc., as ‘complexes’ exploding into
action and event, etc., etc. The subconscient is the main cause why all
things repeat themselves and nothing ever gets changed except in
appearance. It is the cause why people say character cannot be changed,
the cause also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got
rid of for ever. All seeds are there and all Sanskaras [fixed patterns]
of the mind, vital, body,–it is the main support of death and disease
and the last fortress (seemingly impregnable) of the Ignorance. All too
that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and
remains as seed ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment.
(Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 354-5)

Sri Aurobindo is careful to differentiate the subconscious from the
inner being (subtle physical, inner vital, and inner mental), which he
also calls the “subliminal being.” From the perspective of IYP, Jung’s
memoirs reveal a rich and detailed subliminal awareness (see Jung &
Jaffe, 1961), and his notion of the collective unconscious reflects an
interaction between the subliminal being and portions of the
subconscious. Also, note that Jung did not definitively settle on the
immortality of the soul until the end of his life (McLynn, 1996), so it
is debatable to what degree specific passages from his writings do or
do not reflect the influence of the psychic being on human personality.

Implications: Transpersonal Development

The implications of Integral Yoga Psychology (IYP) for transpersonal
psychology can be divided into two broad categories, transpersonal
development and transpersonal therapy, which will be addressed in
sequence.

Evidently, IYP is consonant with the central thesis of transpersonal
psychology that development proceeds from pre-personal, to personal, to
transpersonal levels (Walsh & Vaughan, 1993). However, because IYP
is theistic and views reincarnation as a fact, for IYP the development
of the psychic being (true soul) across multiple lives, and the outer
personality (ego, self) in one life, are two distinct yet interacting
trajectories of growth. Thus, one can find emotionally immature
children with well-developed psychic beings, as well as adults whose
psychic expression is inhibited by Axis I and II disorders, while much
of public life is organized by “generative” adults who are well-meaning
but may have less psychic sweetness than certain low-functioning
schizophrenics I have been privileged to meet. Such observations could
not arise if inner and outer development were invariably synchronized.

By the same token, psychic development does not erase or obviate the
normal sequence of outer development described by Erikson (Erikson,
1997), but rather heightens the spiritual consciousness brought to each
stage of the lifecycle. Wilber arrives at a similar conclusion about
childhood spirituality, but seems tentative, perhaps because he
discusses the issue as if all children had equal psychic (soul)
development (Wilber, 2000, pp. 139-42), while Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother observe that they do not.

At the same time, interactions routinely arise between the psychic
being and outer personality, some of which are reflected in Fowler’s
research on stages of faith development (Fowler, 1981). The most
pervasive example of this interaction effect is captured in the Western
construct of “ego strength,” which for IYP includes positive effects
the psychic being exerts on ego development and functioning. Thus, what
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would call “highly psychisized”
personalities, such as Mother Teresa and the current Dalai Lama, score
extremely well on ego strength (GAF nearing 100) even though their
level of development is clearly post-egoic. In terms of IYP, such
transpersonal growth is possible precisely because the psychic being
(soul) is entirely real and can, through its direct link with the
Divine, bring to the outer being a deep source of psychological
strength and sustenance. Practically, this means the psychic being
(soul) has the power to transform ego functioning, even to heal
psychological wounds that seem
therapeutically unsolvable.

Conceptually, a simple way to operationalize IYP is to extend
vertically the well-known hierarchy of ego-defense mechanisms, so as to
append psychic (soul) processes of ego-transformation (Table 2). Thus,
whereas ego defense mechanisms deny, disguise, or distort
negative/painful/frightening psychological content so as to make it
more bearable, psychic (soul) “movements” accept such content unaltered
and work to transmute it. In between ego defense mechanisms and psychic
movements proper, stand the psychological capacities familiar to
dynamic psychotherapists as the observing ego and to
cognitive-behavioral therapists as cognitive skills of affect
regulation (these functions are dubbed “therapeutic movements” in Table
2). Epstein (1995) has lucidly explained how these functions can be
strengthened by Buddhist meditation practices, and the present author
has suggested elsewhere that such ego-transformational processes
mediate between soul and ego (Miovic, 2001, 2003, pp. 90-112).

Table 2. Hierarchy of Ego Functioning

I. Ego defense mechanisms (adapted from Vaillant, 1993)

Psychotic
Delusional projection
Denial
Distortion
Immature
Projection
Fantasy
Hypochondriasis
Passive aggression
Acting out
Dissociation
Intermediate (Neurotic)
Displacement
Isolation/Intellectualization
Repression
Reaction formation
Mature
Altruism
Sublimation
Suppression
Anticipation
Humor

II. Ego transformational processes

- Therapeutic movements
- Observing ego (e.g. “witnessing” in meditation, “sitting with affect” in therapy)
- Psychic (soul) movements
- Aspiration
- Surrender
- Rejection

Sri Aurobindo names and defines the psychic (soul) movements of
ego-transformation as follows. Aspiration is an inner invocation of and
yearning to feel the presence of the Divine and to manifest its
spiritual qualities in one’s life. By surrender he means to open
oneself entirely to that higher power and to it alone, and to let
oneself be a vehicle for its dictates. Rejection he defines as using
the psychic being’s discriminative tact to evaluate the source and
quality of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and to discard or
transform all that is false, weak, divisive, harmful, ego-centric, or
simply not conscious of the Divine (Aurobindo, 1999).

For both clients and therapists, it is critical not to confuse these
psychic (soul) movements with ego conflicts and deficits, or
unconscious drives and wishes (desires). “Surrender” here means to the
inner Divine as mediated via one’s own psychic being (soul), not to any
absolute human authority or the vulnerabilities of one’s own ego. True
spiritual practice requires the application of correct understanding
(insight), good judgment, willpower, and appropriate boundaries—all of
which are encompassed in Sri Aurobindo’s concept of “rejection.” Also,
true rejection proceeds directly from the soul, unlike suppression,
which is a psychological defense that involves trying to control
emotions with mental willpower (Miovic, 2001, 2003, pp. 90-112).

Finally, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother placed special emphasis on the
role of artistic endeavors in transpersonal development, as the
creative arts can be used as a field for learning to receive and
express inspiration from the inner being and higher planes of
consciousness. Sri Aurobindo’s commentaries on the spiritual sources of
poetic, literary, musical, and artistic inspiration are probably the
most insightful statements on the subject ever written (see Aurobindo,
1972b).

Implications: Transpersonal Therapy

In the 1930s, Sri Aurobindo criticized the early psychoanalytic
practice of rapidly raising the lower vital subconscious through
Oedipal interpretations (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 1605-6), and this has
led some to conclude incorrectly that he would be against contemporary
psychotherapy. On the contrary, psychoanalysis has evolved greatly
since the 1930s and is now generally in agreement with Sri Aurobindo’s
suggestion to strengthen ego functioning before delving into the
subconscious (Miovic, 2004; Mitchell & Black, 1995). Also, many
contemporary therapies (such as CBT, DBT, EMDR, interpersonal and
short-term models) avoid the subconscious entirely, or work at the
pre-conscious level and allow issues to emerge from the subconscious at
their own pace.

Thus, today one can say that the chief rationale for mental health
treatment from the perspective of IYP is that all manner of Axis I and
II issues engender much mental and vital (emotional) noise that
distracts one from spiritual practice offered calmly and quietly to the
Divine. In as much as IYP’s central strategy is to “quiet” the outer
being so that the psychic being can emerge, both psychotherapy and
psychotropic medications can be employed as tactical means to achieve
that strategic end. As a clinical framework, IYP is inclusive and
concurs with the many excellent insights and perspectives in the
Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology (Scotton, Chinen,
& Battista, 1996). IYP would simply encourage all clinicians to
develop a clearer functional analysis of the planes of consciousness
and parts of the being involved in any given clinical presentation and
treatment modality, and of helping clients to grow in awareness of the
same.

IYP would, however, offer a few caveats for current transpersonal
practice to consider. First, although psychedelics, kundalini yoga, and
breathwork (called pranayama in yoga) can alter consciousness and
induce transpersonal experiences, these are all potentially dangerous
methods and even when done safely, they are either unnecessary or
incomplete in comparison to IYP’s method of opening to the psychic
being within and gradations of higher consciousness above. Second, it
is important to understand that classical meditation practice certainly
helps people develop a witnessing consciousness, but in order to
transform ego-functioning it is essential to find and evoke the psychic
being (evolving soul) as well. Third, understanding and dealing
effectively with the issue of hostile influence is the most difficult
problem a clinician can face, and is best avoided unless one truly has
the inner calling and spiritual protection needed to engage in such
work. Although possession and so-called alien abduction can lead
eventually to spiritual renewal (Lukoff, 1996; Mack 1994), clinicians
would be wise not enter this territory naively.

More specifically, Sri Aurobindo interprets many cases of psychosis and
epilepsy as due to the interaction among hostile vital beings who
invade or possess the individual, psychological issues that invite such
attacks (such as narcissistic and histrionic tendencies), and
underlying physical brain defects (whether genetic or acquired)that
permit and perpetuate the condition(s). However, Sri Aurobindo also
recognizes that some cases of psychosis and epilepsy may be purely
organic, as is the medical condition of delirium (Aurobindo, 1970a, pp.
1768-1775). Importantly, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother observed that
hostile vital beings are polymorphic in nature and can manifest
themselves in various forms, according to the mental schema of
different times and cultures. Thus, the demons and devils of old and
the inimical space aliens of today are related phenomenon that involve
the same hostile forces that have been plaguing humanity since its
beginning. Mack (1994) entertains this possibility in his seminal work
on alien abduction, but his discussion would have benefited from IYP’s
consciousness perspective.

For example, I once had a Haitian patient with affective psychosis who
presented with vivid descriptions of being attacked and possessed by a
voodoo spirit. Later in treatment, she spontaneously reported an
episode of “alien abduction” during which her “soul” (actually either
subtle physical or inner vital in IYP terms) was lifted up into a UFO
and experimented upon. Notably, she described this frightening event in
purely supra-physical terms, probably because her cultural acceptance
of voodoo spirits allowed her not to translate this powerful subtle
experience into solely physical terms, as many contemporary
Euro-Americans are prone to do because they lack non-materialist
explanatory models. Basu recently presented a paper on IYP’s approach
to possession and psychosis at the World Psychiatric Congress, with
compelling case studies (Basu, 2004).

Finally, transpersonal clinicians need not disparage synthetic
psychotropic medications, because they are useful treatment tools and
are backed by the rational methodology of science, which is itself a
considerable progressive force put forward by the Divine to aid in the
evolution of consciousness on earth. Nonetheless, there is hope that
ongoing work with flower remedies (as in Bach and other flower
essences) based on the Mother’s extensive insights into the
psycho-spiritual qualities of flowers (Mother, 2000), will lead
eventually to reliable supra-rational methods of psychopharmacology to
complement rational ones (Vandana, 1998; Miovic, 2003, pp. 133-160;
Basu, personal communication, 2004)

Conclusion

This article has presented an overview of Sri Aurobindo’s cosmology of
consciousness and Integral Yoga Psychology (IYP). Because the scope of
IYP is vast, this essay has compressed many topics into a short space
in order to show how IYP interprets the central relationships among
metaphysics, transpersonal psychology, and clinical practice. In
summary, IYP agrees with the general model of transpersonal psychology
and psychiatry, but would expand and refine current understandings in a
few areas. The most important of these are distinguishing between
spiritual liberation and transformation; recognizing the existence and
function of the psychic being; differentiating the parts of the inner
being and various overhead planes of consciousness; and holding open
the possibility of a supramental evolution of life in the future.
Clinically, IYP offers novel approaches to avoiding spiritual
“emergencies,” dealing with past-life memories, distinguishing between
the subliminal being and the subconscious, and conceptualizing cases of
hostile influence and possession.

[TABLE 1 ATTACHED]

Note:
This article appears in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2005,
Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 111-133. Copyright belongs to the JTP.

Table 1. The Inner Being
(based on Aurobindo, 1970a, pp. 328-9, 334-8, 364-77)

- Chakra Sahasradala Thousand-petalled lotus; top of head; blue with gold light
- Ajna Forehead; two petals; white
- Visuddha
- Throat region; sixteen petals; grey
- Hrtpadma or Anahata Sternal region; twelve petals; golden pink
- Chaitya purusha, not a chakra per se and not emphasized in older yogas]
- Nabhipadma or Manipura Region from heart to navel; ten petals, violet
- Svadhisthana Between the navel and base of spine; six petals; deep purple red
- Muladhara Base of spine; four petals; red

Sri Aurobindo’s Description

- Higher Mind,
- Illumined Mind: Commands the higher thinking mind (buddhi) and the
illumined mind, and opens upwards towards the intuitive mind and
Overmind.
- Dynamic Mind: Commands thought, will, vision, inner mental formation. “Third eye.”
- Externalizing Mind: Commands expression and externalization of all
mental movements and forces; also called physical mind when it gives a
mental order to external things and deals with them practically.
Different from other gradations of consciousness associated with the
face, neck, throat, and upper sternal
region that have no specific chakra:
- Mechanical Mind (Mental Physical): Repeats customary ideas and habits endlessly, strong in childhood.
- Vital Mind: Involved primarily in dreaming, imagining, planning for
the future (e.g., fantasies of greatness, happiness, wealth, fame,
heroism, etc).
- Mental Vital: Gives mental expression to vital movements such as
emotion, desire, passion, and nervous sensations. Through this avenue
vital movements can rise up and cloud or distort reasoning (e.g.,
rationalization).
- Emotional Mind and Higher Vita: : Perceived as more external; seat of
various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred, affection, etc.
The “heart” chakra.
- Inner Heart (Psychic Being): Perceived as deep inside center of
chest; the evolving soul that grows from life to life and is the seat
of true individual identity.
- Central Vital: Seat of the stronger vital longings and reactions,
e.g., ambition, pride, fear, love of fame, attractions and repulsions,
desires and passions,
life-forces and life-energies.
- Lower Vital: Connects all centers above with the physical
consciousness below, and is concerned with small desires, such as for
food and sex, as well as small likings and dislikings, such as vanity,
quarrels, love of praise, anger at blame, little wishes.
- Physical Consciousness: Governs the physical being down to the
subconscious. The physical, when not transformed, is prone to inertia,
ignorance, repetition of habits, slowness, resistance to spiritual
consciousness. The subconscious has no organized chakra, but arises
from below the feet.

References

Aurobindo, S. (1999). The mother. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust: 1-14.

Aurobindo, S. (1972a). The teaching of Sri Aurobindo. In: Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (Vol. 26, pp. 95-97). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

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Transcript of Matthijs Cornelissen: Sri Aurobindo’s Theory of Knowledge (Port Townsend WA 2005)

Posted on January 1, 2010 by admin

Transcript of Matthijs’ AUM2005 talk: “Sri Aurobindo’s Theory of Knowledge”

Talk by Matthijs Cornelissen
Port Townsend, WA
June 11, 2005

Good Morning,

Why do we think we know?

What I want to discuss this morning is something that underlies what we
have discussed the previous two days and I hope that together we can go
to a greater depth and get into some of the absolute mystery that is
behind everything that we do and say. It is a mystery, and this is
another embarrassment of speaking, because we know much less than we
think. I guess I should talk only about myself, but I think it applies
to all of us. We think we know, and this naïve certainty that we can
know things is really amazing. We are supposed to make a link with
science and even science has this. Science as we now know it is to
quite an extent based on the philosophy of Descartes and Descartes is
much maligned; but actually he was an amazingly naïve and religious
man. What everybody knows is that he said “‘Cogito ergo sum”, i.e. “I
think, therefore I am” and of course everybody who knows a little about
Yoga knows that you can very well be without thinking, and that your
real existence has nothing to do with your thought. So we tend to look
down on him, but what’s most amazing is not that famous sentence, it is
one that follows a little later. His attempt was to start with absolute
doubt and then find out what would stand as certain knowledge. The
first thing he could not doubt was his own thinking. But even when he
looked outside, his doubt didn’t go very deep. When he divided the
world into two, the inner, thinking part that was to be looked after by
religion and the outer, extended part that was to be studied by
science, even for the science part, his doubt really didnt go further
than the first step. He said, all I can build upon is what the senses
give me, and then he added that the senses could not be wrong “because
God has given them to us and God cannot be that malicious that he would
give us false witnesses.” I think that’s really touching and so
incredibly naïve. The later existentialists doubted on a much deeper,
more psychological level, but even they didnt doubt very deep, because
they still took the outer existence as fully real. And of course they
took themselves far too serious.

Some ancient Indians like Nagarjuna and some Western mystics like
Eckhart carried their doubts much further. And they came to a space
where any expression became doubtful and needed to be transcended by
something higher that was inexpressible. But still that something
higher was there. So it appears that in the last instance we cannot
doubt for the full hundred percent. We always assert something and even
if we pretend to doubt fully, then we don’t doubt our doubt. So we
cannot escape some certainty at the very root of everything, even at
the very root of nothing, even Buddha’s emptiness is still a pregnant
void. We simply cannot escape having somewhere deep inside a certainty.
I have always found it very amazing that speakers, even in a group like
ours, who know that Reality is far beyond us, still all talk as if they
know, me included. I’m saying something, because I believe in it. So
that’s very, very strange.

I am very puzzled about what really is and I think collectively, we are
not remotely puzzled enough about that. Especially Science is still
living in an amazing, almost childish world of make-belief, in which we
presume that the physical reality is real, and more or less as we see
it. It proceeds as if it is sufficient to polish a little bit the
obvious defects of our senses, expand them with machinery and
equipment, and then go a bit deeper in on their interrelationships, and
then that’s it. And it is true that the models science makes of reality
are sufficient to make the gadgets we all love so much work. But it
doesn’t bring us much closer to the deeper answers to the questions of
life. The social sciences have detected the social pressures that
influence our thinking, and they do try to get at the truth behind
those pressures, but this also remains entirely on the surface.

One can wonder why it is like that. Why do we always think that we
know? and why can we not escape this tendency? Within the Indian
tradition, this amazing certitude even at every level of ignorance, is
perfectly understandable, because it follows, as so many things in
psychology, directly from the concept of Sachchidananda. Absolutely at
the very root of things, being and knowing, and joy of course, are
essentially one. So essentially we know what we are and we are what we
know. There can be no gap between the two. We are our own
consciousness, we are our own knowledge, however limited and ignorant
it is. This is the pervasive presence even in all other types of
knowledge of the special type of knowledge, which Sri Aurobindo calls
knowledge by identity.

Knowledge by identity, if you really begin to take it seriously and
begin to understand all its implications, is an absolutely fantastic
concept. Especially if you combine it with Sri Aurobindo’s insight in
the evolution of consciousness, and with the old Indian idea of many
levels and types of consciousness, arranged in layers and patterns
between the surface and the inner most psychic being.

The constructed reality of the sense-mind
So let’s see how that goes. This may seem a little bit of sidetrack,
but if you look at Patanjali’s Yoga sutras, you see that the central
point of his whole system is the need to silence the mind. Silencing
the mind is for him the very definition of yoga. Sri Aurobindo stresses
the need to silence the mind as the very first step of yoga. But how do
you do it? There are two big enemies that prevent us from silencing our
mind. The first are the desires that come up and keep us continuously
busy, and the other are our senses.

When I started with yoga many years ago, I found this very surprising.
Desire I could understand. Desire obviously corrupts: when we like
something we want to hear that alone, we don’t want to hear the other
side, and when desire enters into a discussion, we begin to worry who
wins the argument, not who is actually right. So that desires corrupt
our thinking is very obvious, but why would the senses corrupt it? The
senses at their best make us see beauty, and beauty is very close to
truth, and what about systems like some forms of Zen Buddhism which are
entirely based on sharpening the senses. So I wondered why in the
Indian tradition so much is made of the need to get rid of the senses.
Once one understands Sri Aurobindo’s theory of knowledge, it becomes
very clear why our senses are a problem, and one realises it has
nothing to do with disdain for beauty, on the contrary, but it has
everything to do with the possibility of cultivating knowledge by
identity.

To put it very simply, our problem is that our consciousness is
entrapped in the workings of our sense-mind, and our sense-mind is
entrapped in the workings of our brain. To get back to the infinite
consciousness, which we actually are in our essence, we have to free
our consciousness from these entanglements. This is simple enough, but
to understand fully, not only how to get out, but also why we got
entrapped in the first place, and what might happen after we have
liberated ourselves, what the next step could be, that gets quite
complicated. The best way to sort all that out, is probably to look at
the whole thing in the framework of the evolution of consciousness. I
think all of us as we are sitting here are fairly familiar with Sri
Aurobindo’s concept of consciousness so I can just indicate it very
shortly and simply.

The typal planes
Sri Aurobindo says, in line with the entire Vedic tradition, that this
physical world is the end result of a process of exclusive
concentration by which the Divine manifests the physical world out of
himself. On the way from the absolute, indeterminate, infinite,
omniscient and all-powerful divine Consciousness to the almost totally
inconscient and fully determinate state of physical hard matter, a
whole series of intermediate typal planes of conscious existence are
created. Science ignores all these intermediate planes (except perhaps
one specific layer of the mental worlds which contains the descriptions
of a certain class of physical relations and processes). Science deals
only with the ultimate end result of that whole process of immersion of
the Infinite Brahman into inconscience, matter, and so it studies the
physical world which is made out of fundamental particles like, for
example, the electrons that circle around in atoms.

Of course these are metaphors. We should not at any moment think that
matter really consists of electrons and protons and things like that.
An electron is our human conception, our human model, of a part of the
material world. There are no such things in reality. Electrons,
protons, quarks, and so on are part of our image of reality, just like
everything else that we see is a construct of our manas, our
sense-mind. Nothing is as it seems to be.

We are so trapped in our sense-mind that we inevitably think that the
physical reality we see and feel consists of real stuff, while all that
we see as real stuff “out there” is at least partially the product of
our mind, it is the result of an interaction between what is out there
and our imagination about it. We really live in a virtual world of our
own making that is to some extent guided by the world out there, and to
some extent by our own pre-knowledge, or prejudice, of how that world
should be. It is not an entirely virtual world, there’s something out
there, but it is certainly not exactly that what we see. What we see is
our construction of reality, which is always an interaction of at least
two different types of consciousness and being, the conscious being of
ourselves as the observer, and the conscious being of what we observe.
These interactions create entirely different worlds depending on the
type of conscious being, which is there in the observing self and in
the observed nature.

I think this is something we lose track of, because we get habituated
to live in a certain manner, in a certain type of consciousness, and
then we start taking that manner absolutely seriously, but it’s
arbitrary, the worlds in which we live are the way they are, because we
are habituated to construct them that way and we can be shaken out of
them. By music, by meditation, by an encounter, by grief, by all kinds
of things, we can be shaken out of those habits. And suddenly we are in
an entirely different space.

From matter to mind
Now to come back to that electron and proton, let’s presume that the
world is more or less like scientists model it. Then there are things
called electrons, or at least wave-forms that can be considered as
little particles, that circle around protons. So those little “things”
must have some kind of built in knowledge. Everything must have. The
electron must know how to do its thing, just like we must know how to
walk, how to ride a cycle, digest food, etc. Riding a cycle is a very
good example, because to ride a cycle goes differently than most people
think. We think that we go to the left by turning the steering handle
to the left, but it doesn’t work like that. You go to the left by
shifting your weight to the left, and then, because the fork of the
front wheel is a little bent forward, this shift of weight makes you
turn left. If you try to force the steering handle left while staying
straight-up, you will fall, as all children know who ever had enough
courage, will-power (and folly) to try. So the body knows how to do it,
while our mind doesn’t know.

In a similar way as the body must know how to ride a cycle, one can
imagine that the electron must know how to turn around the proton.
Obviously it doesn’t have the type of mental knowledge that we have of
the outer world, but it has all the necessary know-how to play its
specific role in this huge world. In this context it is useful to note
that there is actually no substantial difference between a quality and
know-how: one can say that this paper is white, describing its
whiteness as a quality, or one can say that this paper has the know-how
needed to emit white light. One sounds more active and human than the
other but it comes to the same thing. So we can describe the quality of
whiteness in this paper as a kind of consciousness that involves a
certain “know-how-to-be-white”, a certain knowledge of how to be. At
the level of the physical, the consciousness is entirely involved in
its own action and in an electron the type of physical consciousness it
has, or rather is, is not more than a specific habit of form. The
electron we can presume, doesn’t go out of its way to make a model of
the world in order to decide on its action, it just is its own action.
For our type of representational knowledge, we need our sense mind, our
fantastically complicated brain and so on. All that is not there in the
electron. The electron is far too simple for all that, but, and this is
terribly interesting, what little bit it knows, it knows perfectly.
This many people have mentioned before. Matter doesn’t lie, it doesn’t
make mistakes. It doesn’t have that capacity, because it just is. Even
our body just is. It cannot pretend to be something else.

Similarly, our body-consciousness also cannot go out of itself and then
make a model of itself and then deal with that model, it just does
something, or just is something. It simply is. That it has in common
with very simple things like electrons and protons. Now let us see how
the ability to respond to the surrounding gets more complicated as
things become more complex during the process of evolution. Even
electrons have the ability to react to what happens in their
surrounding. When another atom comes nearby, an electron may jump to
another orbit, so the electron reacts to some extent to its
surrounding. Even when the electron is simply racing around the nucleus
of the atom in which it “lives”, it is doing that, because it somehow
senses the presence of the protons and other electrons there and knows
how to behave accordingly, all according to its fixed habits.

As the physical aggregates get more complicated, you get plants, which
have very intricate and subtle interactions with their surroundings.
The tree moves with the wind, it breathes in some chemicals from the
air, it pulls up some chemicals through its roots, it breathes out
other chemicals; it has some very subtle and complicated interactions
going on with other plants, with the air, with the soil and so on. But
basically it is in itself. There is no reason at all to presume that
the tree makes any internal representation of what’s going on around
it. It knows only what it feels directly, and in that sense it is very
similar to our vital nature. That is probably why in the Vedic system
of classification, which Sri Aurobindo follows, the plants belong to
the life world just as our emotions. Emotions also belong to the
pranamaya kosha, to the life world, because in our emotions also we
don’t make a model of the outside world, we don’t have an objective
conception of how the world is. We react directly; it consists of
horizontal I and thou kind of relationships. Our reactions to someone
else can be very subtle, very complicated, but they are not objective
like the mind is. It is direct, in and out.

Making maps
The objective mind becomes possible when our brain-stuff becomes so
complex that it can make some kind of a map of the world around it. Our
brain is capable of making a hugely complicated representation of the
reality in which our organism lives. Of course it is not a map in the
sense of the 2D printed maps you can buy of different geographical
regions, it is also not a purely verbal map. It is something very, very
complex consisting of spatial relationships, smells, sounds, meanings,
intentions, reactions, all kind of things.

There area few things that are good to note at this stage. The visual
aspect takes up a very large part of our mapping of the world but it is
certainly not the whole of it. It is also good to realize that
perception is a very active process. Young children generally think,
like the ancient Greeks and Indians, that when we see something, a ray
goes out from the eye, envelopes the thing, takes its shape and
returns. Since the 13th century in Europe this “emissive theory of
sight” has lost out on the “immissive” theory, and primary school
teachers teach children now that nothing goes out from the eyes and
that “in reality” the light from the object falls on our retina, which
passively absorbs that light and as a result gives off a signal that
goes straight into the brain where we become conscious of it. (How
exactly consciousness comes in at this stage, is hard, perhaps
impossible to explain in this scheme of things, but that the teacher of
course does not betray.) Though there is some truth in what the teacher
says, it is only part of the story and in some respects her version is
worse than the child’s. The reason for this is that seeing is not a
passive process at all. Modern psychology is becoming more and more
aware of the extent to which seeing, and sensing in general, are active
processes. What we see, is to a very high degree determined by what we
want to see, or what we expect to see, or fear to see, but in any case,
by some kind of mental set that is determined at least partially from
inside. Even purely physiologically, seeing is a very active process.
The main centre in the brain where we do our visual imaging of the
world has more efferent neurons coming from the back, from the deeper
layers of the brain, going out, than it has afferent neurons that come
from the eye and go in. Perhaps the full story is something like this
that first our consciousness goes, as the ancients and children say,
out to the object, and negotiates with the consciousness in the object
what kind of information it will receive from it, somewhat like a
fax-machine which first negotiates with the fax-machine on the other
side of the telephone line what the highest protocol is that both
machines can understand, before the real transmission starts. The
object then sends that kind of information out and the organism
receives it: the purely physical mind gets only physical info, the
psychic gets the emotional values attached to the object, the artist
its beauty, the mystic the divine presence in its core.

For simplicity’s sake, let us for now focus on the idea that our brain
makes a map of reality, because that it does that, in some fashion or
another, seems clear enough. Someone has claimed that it can do that
because the number of connections in the brain, — there are billions
and billions and billions of neuron cells, and billions and billions
and billions and billions and more billions of connections between
them, — because the number of connections between our brain-cells is
about the same as the number of events that have taken place in the
universe till now. How anyone could make a guess of the number of
events in the universe, I don’t know, but what is sure is that the
numbers of neuronal connections are absolutely staggering, and that all
this complexity has been squeezed in these little skulls of ours is
absolutely incredible. Because of that complexity, we can make quite
sophisticated maps of reality, we can calculate the beginning of the
universe, construct mobiles, write poetry, make music, and maintain
human relationships. We can do things that are actually incredibly
complicated. But there is another fascinating aspect to this.

The universe in a speck of dust
When we look at ourselves from the outside, “objectively”, we see
ourselves as small 5-6 foot high, 60, 70 kilograms creatures on a tiny
planet in a medium size solar system, in a small milky away, somewhere
in a corner of this enormous universe. But on the other hand, it’s we
who see it like that. So if we look at things in another way, stressing
the subjective aspect, then we can say that this whole universe takes
up just one thought in our consciousness, the universe happens
somewhere in a corner of our being. And that’s true for every one of
us. We all can think of the universe, as if it were just one of our
many possible thoughts, which is absolutely fantastic. Are we inside
that, or is that inside us? There is no way to decide. Now there is
nothing special about this idea. Every twelve-year-old who takes his
own thinking a bit seriously discovers this problem at some stage, gets
worked up about it for a while and then drops it on his pile of
unsolved riddles of existence, and gets on with life.

The fascinating point is, at least for those of us who manage to remain
forever like twelve-year-olds, that something very similar must be true
for every thing in the universe. However little the speck of dust we
take, if we turn it inside out, it shows the entire universe hiding
within it. Mystics have of course always said so. Mystics say not only
that everything is conscious, but also that they can see The Divine in
absolutely everything, in big things, in small things, everywhere. In
“God’s Labour”, Sri Aurobindo describes how the supramental is there,
hidden deep inside matter. To our ordinary mind this sounds quite
unbelievable, but then, even for the ordinary mind one can make it at
least somewhat plausible. If we take the electron as our example, the
logic runs like this:

The electron obviously does not have a mind like we have. It misses the
billions upon billions of cross-connected neurons needed to make
representational maps of reality in the way we do. And yet, in some
other way, each electron must contain in itself all the knowledge of
the universe. And this has to be so, even in a very technical pragmatic
sense. The reason for this astonishing aspect of reality is, that if an
electron wants to move exactly in the right way, which is what it does,
it must know everything: it must know all of physics because all the
laws of physics form one integrated web and you cannot understand any
part really completely, without knowing all of it. It is clear that it
must know all about electromagnetism, as its orbit is mainly determined
by electromagnetic forces, but gravity also plays a role, and so do so
many other forces. Physicists presume that even if we don’t always know
exactly how, in reality all physical laws should be interconnected and
ultimately derivable form just a few basic elements. And the electron
must know whatever laws are there completely because it never makes
errors. One of the most basic elements of physics is that if we see
something behave erratically, the fault is always ours: we haven’t
fully understood what is going on. Anyhow, in a similar way our
tiny-winy electron must know all of the world, because the whole
surrounding world impacts on it. According to physics there is no limit
to influences. If there is a force, the effect of the force becomes
smaller at a distance, but it does go on and on, in however small a
degree, right to the borders of the universe. So everything influences
everything. If our electron would miss out on even a tiny detail of
either type of knowledge, it would not move correctly. So if the
electron is to move exactly right, which is what it does, then it
should know the whole lot of it, in however and implicit manner. And so
for an electron to move exactly as it does, it must know everything,
point. Obviously not in the way we know, but the knowledge must be
there in some implicit way.

There is sill a second angle to this. Earlier, we saw that we can look
at qualities as know-how, and vice versa. This is the active side of
knowledge. But there is also a passive side to knowledge. If you look
at the knowledge available in a system, you can always look at in two
ways. One is the dynamic knowledge, the know-how that the system needs
to act according to its svadharma, and the other is the information
that’s passively present in it, and which we could extract out of it if
we would take the trouble. For the same reason that the electron must
have all the dynamic know-how in the world, it must also have all the
passive information about the universe inside.

An example on a slightly bigger scale will make this clearer. A glass
of water knows in some way how high it is located above the sea level.
The simple reason for this is that I can extract that knowledge out of
it: I can boil the water in the glass and measure the temperature at
which it starts boiling, and from that temperature I can calculate its
height above sea-level. At sea-level it boils at 100 °C, but if I take
it 10km up, it may start boiling at 70 degree, or whatever it is. The
temperature at which the water boils can tell me how high it is above
sea-level. So in some implicit way the information about its height
above the earth’s surface must be hidden in each cup of water. In a
similar way, it must contain the speed by which the earth moves around
the sun, for again, if I want to know how fast the earth turns around
the sun, I can in principle measure the speed of this glass of water
and derive the speed of the earth from there. All the basic information
about the solar system must be in there in the glass, because I can
take it out from there. In principle, certainly not in practice, but in
principle, I can study everything in the universe by studying this one
glass of water. And as everything impinges on it, it must in some way
have the effect of everything embedded in it.

As this may seem at first sight quite an outrageous idea, it should be
possible to raise loads of objections against this reasoning, but in
the end I have the feeling that it should be possible to deal with all
these objections, for intuitively, it actually does makes sense that
all the know-how and all the information in the universe, must be
present in each little part of it. Many mystics have said so, and the
idea that deep, deep within the omniscient omnipotent Divine is
secretly present in each little bit of matter is a deeply satisfying
thought.

Maps and the brain
Now let’s see how this works out in bigger things. In a cup, it is
still very much like in the electron. Implicitly, non-manifestly, all
knowledge must be there in the cup; explicitly, manifestly, there is
only a certain habit of form: the only thing the cup knows actively, in
a physically manifest way, is how to remain this particular cup under a
certain set of circumstances. If it gets too hard a knock, it cannot
maintain its form and breaks. One may wonder what happens to its habit
of form, once the physical cup has been ground back into dust. It seems
plausible to me that the habit of form remains, if not forever then
still for a possibly long time after the physical cup has gone. The
reason is that the accident that broke the physical cup, did not
destroy the habit as such, it only prevented one specific manifestation
of it to stick together. Whether this is true or not is in principle
very well testable. Sheldrake has done wonderful work in the related
area of “morphogenetic fields”, and if interest in such things
increases, we can expect much more of this type of research in the
future.

Now what happens at our level of complexity? We have this fantastic
brain, which is continuously busy, on the one hand to help maintain law
and order within the complexity of our organism, and on the other hand
to plan and execute external action, which involves maintaining a
tremendously complex database about the outer reality, which we will
call for shortness sake our map of the world around us. It does this in
millions of ways, one of them consists of complicated word schemes like
the one I’m brewing now, and by which your poor mind is being
beleaguered when you hear or read this.

The interesting thing is that just like the electron is the electron,
infinite inside but on the outside limited to being electron-like, and
just as the cup is inside the Infinite, and yet on the outside only
busy manifesting its specific form of cuppiness, so we are infinite
inside, but on the outside we are a peculiar mixture of a basic
body-sense, feelings, volitions, intentions, thoughts, memories, plans
and what not that seem to be engendered by our brain on the basis of
the millions of inputs that reach it at any given moment. In our
ordinary physical consciousness, our consciousness simply aligns with
whatever the body-embedded mind does, or perhaps rather, as all the
mind does is far too complicated, it aligns with a tiny “executive
summary” which the mind regularly sends to its own surface. And in its
turn, what the mind does in our ordinary physical state is largely what
the brain and the rest of the nervous system do, and our consciousness
is thus still embedded in a little chunk of matter, even though that
chunk of matter is fabulously complicated and capable of “mapping”, or
presenting the world around it.

Beyond the maps
Now the fascinating thing is that at this stage in our evolution, we
cannot only make an objective map of ourselves and the world around us,
but we can also free ourselves from the sense mind, just enough to open
up to some environmental influence, as in telepathy, or even, and there
it gets really interesting, to enter a state of pure consciousness. The
latter especially is not so easy, because the attachment to the
sense-mind is an old habit that comes from our evolutionary past. So by
habit we identify with our nervous system, or more accurately, with a
tiny surface summary of the billions of mental processes that take
place in our brain-based sense-mind, but it is not by necessity so, we
have the capacity to refuse our thoughts, to throw out anything that’s
not absolute, to quieten the mind and to enter into an absolute
silence. Mystics of all times and cultures have done that, and if one
really puts oneself to it, it can be done. There is the famous
description of how Sri Aurobindo silenced his mind; most people take
slightly longer, but in principle it’s something that can be done and
many people have reached a state where at least for sometime, when they
look inside, there’s nothing but a wide open inner space. This is
something that can be done. Most people, when they begin to look
inside, see an endless flow of useless thoughts popping up
continuously, but it’s not necessarily so. There can be quiet.

In many esoteric traditions this seems to be the main aim, to get out
of the web in which the ordinary consciousness is caught, so that one’s
consciousness is not tied any longer to the small map that our body
makes of the reality around it, and to reach a kind of absolute inner
freedom. At this stage many interesting questions can be asked. The
main question is perhaps why a consciousness without content brings
with it such an overwhelming sense of liberation, of having reached the
Absolute, the Truth, or even The Divine. But our immediate aim in this
talk is something much more mundane, and perhaps more immediately
practical, and we will concentrate on that. The topic of this talk is
knowledge and our immediate next question is what the relation is
between this fully automatic, brain-based map-making business, silence
of mind, and knowledge?

Now it gets very interesting. We know how to make these maps. Because
we do it all the time, and in our ordinary consciousness we identify
with our map of reality, and we know also that we can get out of maps
altogether in some absolute silence of mind. Now what is knowledge in
this context?

What is knowledge?
When people talk about the increase in scientific knowledge, or about
the knowledge society, what do they mean by knowledge? It seems to me
that much of what we nowadays take for knowledge is at best a poor
symbolic reflection of what people used to mean by knowledge.

The confusion probably began when we started writing. Think of a book
with a story. What is this book, is it a bound pile of paper with ink
dotted all over it in the form of letters, is it the long string of
words formed by those letters, or is it the story that somehow got
caught in those words and that will remain hidden forever in the
patterns of the ink on the paper unless someone reads the book? Does
Hamlet exist only in patterns of ink on paper, does he come into
existence for as long as someone somewhere reads or watches the play,
or is he part of a story that exists in itself, in its own realm of
stories, quite independent of individual books and human minds? It
appears quite obvious to me that the essence of the book is not the
paper but the story printed on it, and that this story exists in its
own realm and is only reflected, imprisoned in the letters that are
printed on paper. In other words, I’m inclined to think that once
created, Hamlet does exist quite independent of printed books and human
minds thinking of him.

Since stories got printed, and thousand times more so since computers
can process the digital rendering of information, we are getting
increasingly confused between maps and the reality they represent. We
make a presentation of reality, and then we somehow think that that map
is the reality. And then we say that we can store knowledge in
libraries, computer disks, and the internet. This is total confusion,
because it is not the knowledge that is stored. Computers don’t process
knowledge. They process bits, they process electrical current. It is we
who give the meaning to the patterns they store and process. It is we
who put meaning in, it is we who get it transformed in some material
substrate according to rules we have made, and it is we who take the
meaning out. The meaning is in our consciousness, the meaning is not in
the computer. Someone gave the good example of a thermometer. The
thermometer doesn’t measure the temperature. It is we who measure the
temperature by looking at the thermometer. Computers are far more
complex, they process patterns of electrical currents that represent
information, but it is only in us that the streams of information
finally turn into knowledge. Now it’s conceivable that if computers get
complex enough, they also begin to know consciously like we do. In the
AI community many people believe so, but I have no idea whether that is
true or not. I don’t experience my computer as more conscious than my
pencil, but I may quite well be wrong. As far as I can see, the camera
which is recording the whole proceedings is not more aware of what it
is recording than the ceiling. The camera is just a bunch of
electronics registering sound and light inputs. But we are conscious,
and the more I think about it, the more amazing it appears to me.

We do have this secret ingredient that makes us aware of what we see,
and touch and hear, and do, and we are aware of all those things in a
highly peculiar manner, we experience it as a 3D world, largely visual
but spruced up with the other senses, and in a rather strange and vague
way mixed with verbal meanings, a world of which we accept part as our
“self” and part as “not-self”, a world forever in flux. Somehow we can
get out of that presentation, experience an absolute purity, emptiness,
and then have an acute, exhilarating awareness of truth, of reality.
And this capacity to get out of the map, this ability to enter the
void, become consciousness pure, is the central point of yoga and
perhaps the turning point that can make human life really worth the
trouble.

Planes of pre-existing knowledge

For knowledge the important point is that once our consciousness is
free and in itself, we can try explore these inner realms of conscious
being and to tap directly into those typal planes that precede the
whole physical manifestation. Sri Aurobindo has several chapters in The
Life Divine devoted to these issues, but the most directly relevant is
the chapter on “Separative knowledge and knowledge by identity”. He
says here that it’s absolutely crucial at some stage to become aware of
the inner worlds in ourselves. Because that has to be the beginning of
an entry into the subtle worlds from where the outer manifest and
material worlds are actually being determined. Once we are in those
inner worlds then there’s no limit to our possibilities for evolution
into a higher harmony, beauty and truth. Sri Aurobindo here also says
that even our knowledge of the outer world which seems to be
constructed by the sense mind on the basis of the workings of the
senses and the nervous system is actually possible only because we know
subconsciously already what the world looks like. The sense-based input
is only an excuse that triggers a pre-existent knowledge which is
already there.

Sri Aurobindo says that all that’s there in The Life Divine, all the
knowledge that’s there in The Synthesis of Yoga, the Foundations of
Indian Culture, The Human Cycle and so on, all those things he wrote in
the Arya, just came to him pouring down. Historically, physically it
must indeed have been like that, because he wrote the Arya in a rather
special manner. The Arya came out every month for about 6 years. Sri
Aurobindo serialized in each 64 page issue of the Arya, typically one
chapter of The Life Divine, one of The Synthesis of Yoga, one of Secret
of the Vedas, one of The Ideal of Human Unity and one or two of other
books, in total some 5-6 chapters every month. And he did not work on
that the whole month. He asked on of his disciples to warn him a week
before the text had to go the press, and then he must have written
something like one full chapter a day. Many of you must have been
writing at some stage, but to write one chapter of The Life Divine in a
day is almost physically impossible, it’s really amazing. And he did
not make mistakes; we have many of his manuscripts, and they clearly
just came, to perfection. Later he did make changes, but again in those
changes there were hardly ever mistakes; there were, once in a while,
but extremely rare, and always minor things like commas.

Sri Aurobindo describes the higher mind as a state in which knowledge
comes entirely ready-made from above. And it has the unitary vision of
the global whole. The higher mind is not partial or one-sided, the
higher mind understands the harmony of the whole. And if you go there,
it is quite fancy, because the answers come first and the questions
afterward, and the answers come with all their connections. Like a huge
interconnected web that straight away gets the whole point. How to put
that kind of knowledge into words may also be given, or it may remain a
problem, but that broad understanding is there straight away. All that
was written in the Arya, Sri Aurobindo ascribes to the higher mind,
which in Sri Aurobindo’s later hierarchy is only the lowest plane above
the ordinary mind. There are many people who seem to have reached
similar levels, because we can see from their writing that they have
that global vision, but Sri Aurobindo discovered later a whole
hierarchy of worlds of a higher consciousness above it.

Top-down and bottom-up
What should we understand by knowledge pouring down? Cognitive science
says that we generate knowledge by the chemistry in our brain, on the
basis of the input from our physical senses, probably in the form of
patterns of synapses or whatever the physical substrate is. The social
scientists add another layer of complexity saying that everything we
know is a social construct. But Sri Aurobindo says that the knowledge
in these books descended like that, as a continuous stream of intuitive
thoughts. In standard science, when intuition is discussed, it is seen
as a very fast subconscious processing of known facts, but that is
something entirely different. Sri Aurobindo calls that
pseudo-intuition, because the real intuition, doesn’t come
horizontally, it also doesn’t come from below; it comes ready-made from
above. Once more, what does that mean? Is that a real possibility? And
if it is, how does that relate to the constructed knowledge in the
physical brain?

There is a more or less similar phenomenon within the physical plane
itself. Here the outer physical reality seems to be only the final
expression, the final condensation of what manifest first in the subtle
physical. It seems to be like that because when you contact the subtle
physical you can sometimes see there things that are bound to happen in
the future, because in that subtle plane they have already happened.
Similarly there are subtle mental planes where the ideas are already
ready before they crystallizes in our language. Sri Aurobindo says that
all knowledge is basically already there, it pre-exists our human
awareness of it. And if you silence your mind you can sometimes see how
ideas enter your mind from other realms.

I had one student who described it very nicely. We were doing a little
silencing exercise in the class, and most students then described how
the mind goes on buzzing, darting off, then on this sidetrack and then
on that, but this kid said, “it’s not difficult, you just stop these
thoughts from coming in” and she meant it. I don’t know if she had read
Sri Aurobindo about this, she may have or may not have, but you could
clearly see that she was simply describing what she was actually doing.
She apparently identified with the pure Purusha, and in that inner
silence, she was seeing how thoughts come in, and she could stop them
right there at the point of entry. It’s rare that someone of that age,
20 or so, can do that and can see it so clearly, but that’s what she
did. The idea comes in, very thin and ethereal, and once it is in the
mind, it clothes itself, it dresses itself up with words, and then it’s
too late, then you cannot get it out anymore. Most of us miss that
first part, so we know what we think only after we have thought it,
after the idea has solidified itself into words. We don’t catch the
idea at the moment that it comes in.

Many people who have studied the history of science say that science
moves in leaps and bounds. Someone has one bright idea which gets
formulated more or less perfectly right at the beginning, and then
there are hundreds of other scientists who just corroborate that idea.
So it moves in spurts. The people who initiate those jumps are the ones
that really bring science further, and some of them have described how
they got to their ideas in a sudden intuition.

A mathematician friend of mine, who is not doing any form of yoga, told
me once that he was very concerned that in the teaching of mathematics
people stress so much the proving stage where you try to show that the
thing is really true. This is a laborious and technical process, and
though it takes time, it is generally not that difficult. But, he said,
what we don’t teach at all is how to get at the initial intuition.
Another mathematician I know expressed the same idea, when he told me
that in mathematics people first “see” the solution and then with their
knowledge and their experience they fill in the details on how to get
there, but they don’t get at the solution by the same road by which
they prove it afterwards. The initial insight comes ready-made from
above, and then the proof is built up from the bottom. Perhaps it is
somewhat like with a building: the owner starts with a vague idea, then
the architect makes exact building plans and the engineers work them
out in all technical detail, and then finally the craftsmen build it
from the bottom up, brick by brick. But the original plan did not come
from the bottom up, it came just like that from above, and was refined,
detailed out in a series of mixed up-down and down-up interactions. I
think we’ll get in the afternoon to education and obviously, if one
really grasps this, education should be entirely different. We should
allow children to stay in contact with the inner, higher knowledge much
longer, so that they can get used to it, trust it, and learn from
there.

There are many interesting aspects to this dual process. We tend for
example to think of science, especially physics as dealing with the
physical reality, but this is only half of the truth. Physics is half
mathematics. Math is not a physical reality at all, it’s a purely
mental stuff. Physics moves ahead sometimes by mathematics going ahead
first and sometimes by experiments getting there first, but in the end
both are needed to make a solid step forwards. What we see at the
moment is a fast increasing knowledge of the physical domain and at the
same time we are become more and more sophisticated mentally. We become
better and better at playing in those mental worlds that somehow render
in the mental domain, in the mental substance, some aspects of the
physical world.

The Psychic Being
To close, I still want to say something at least about the psychic
being because that’s really the most important part of us. As we all
know, in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga the psychic being came to occupy a larger
and larger place as time went on. And it’s quite interesting why this
is so, and why this is different from the previous systems of yoga and
meditation. If you just want to reach the absolute, you definitely
don’t need the psychic being. You can go there, it is one path, but
there are 1000s of other paths. You can follow any path, and as long as
you follow it to its absolute end, it reaches the absolute, and whether
you reach the absolute this way or that way, really doesn’t matter that
much because what you want is to get rid of the relativities in which
the ego gets entangled.

But the psychic being, as the centre of our own nature, is absolutely
crucial for the transformation and indispensable for a new creation
that’s fully conscious. The main reason for this is simply that the
psychic being is the divine kernel in us. So it is the most important
part of us, it is what we actually are in the very core of our
incarnate being. But to get there we have explore all those in between
layers that determine our outer nature. And it’s only when we have that
full knowledge that we can begin to think of transformation. We have to
know why we say what we say, why we do what we do, everything that’s
going on inside. We have to become entirely transparent, there can be
no dark spots left, because as long as they are there, the supramental
cannot get in. It’s simple, straightforward. We have to go to that
secret that’s behind all this, to our absolute kernel, and from there
we can begin to work on the rest of our nature. This psychic reversal
is essential, but it is not sufficient because we have also to reach
those higher layers of consciousness above the ordinary mind. In other
words, we have to get the full spiritual transformation as well,
because only then will we have the full knowledge which Sri Aurobindo
obviously had, and even that full knowledge again is not sufficient. Is
like what Ron said in the morning: Integrality is not a joke, it is not
just amalgamating things

There’s a chapter in The Life Divine where Sri Aurobindo goes on
saying, that higher and higher layers of consciousness are still not
integral enough. He first describes the higher mind and when you read
the description you think, wow, that’s it. And then he says that’s not
enough, and then he describes the illumined mind where you have direct
visions of the truth beyond verbal thought. He describes it as a sea of
lightning. It’s very far beyond a simply inspired mind, and then again
he explains why that’s not integral enough. Then he goes to the
intuitive layer, the source of the two previous layers, where there’s
absolute truth beyond words and forms. It is beyond the vision mind, it
is beyond the unitary mind, it is beyond thought, it’s absolute truth,
as high as you can reach on an individual level. Then again that’s not
yet it, and then he describes the Overmind, which is entirely beyond
the ego, which is cosmic, which is vast, which has a full opening to
the transcendent. But even that is not integral enough. And then when
you are completely blasted and spaced out, he says something about the
Supermind which I won’t even quote because I don’t understand it. Only
then he says that that’s the real truth that creates the worlds. Now
that supramental reality is entirely beyond our sense mind. So you
should never think that we can have a supramental consciousness as long
as we look at the world from outside. The supermind does not need the
sense-mind. We are caught in that sense mind, which is in principle the
same mind that dogs have; we have our intellectual super-layer, but, in
a way, that’s just making life complicated. Our higher faculties help
us to jump out of our routine once in a while, write a piece of nice
poetry, do something special, but as far as most of our life goes, it
is not that different from the way dogs live. We haven’t got much
further, we do things in a more complicated and sophisticated manner,
but the basic principle is still the same. For the supramental this
will not do. We have to go entirely beyond the sense-mind. Even
physically, literally, the sense-mind is based on reflections, it is
based on seeing surfaces, and the supramental consciousness is not
reflective, it is a knowledge that comes directly from within. Sri
Aurobindo describes it as a consciousness where every little particle
of our being, every little cell of the body is itself conscious of its
divine origin; it knows its connection with the world, and from that
inner strength and Light, does its true job in the world.

Mother describes that at the end of her life she could see better with
her eyes closed than with her eyes open. There are many people who have
had that experience, she is not the only one. Our knowledge about
reality does not need to come through our senses. We can live from
within and we can have that Truth in every little part of our being.
The transformation Sri Aurobindo envisages is very much more radical
than people think. This doesn’t mean that people cannot work even now
on their bodily consciousness, that they cannot work on the
consciousness of the cells. The Divine, I think is, is in a hurry, she
is very busy, and she works on all those planes simultaneously. Even
our increasing knowledge about the physical and mathematical reality,
is part of the process. She is working that out so that we can do there
things, it’s a cliché, but we can do there things that have never been
done before. When you travel, for example, it’s fantastic, you get into
an airplane which is just like a cinema hall and you don’t travel, at
least you have no sense of movement except a little bit at takeoff and
landing, otherwise you just get in and you get out somewhere else. And
this is very significant, it is getting very close to gross-physical
bi-location, being in one place and being in another place at the same
time, and this is now common place. Anybody who watches TV is instantly
somewhere else. The farmer in India spends half his time in Bombay and
a quarter in NY and then only the little rest in his own village. We
all live in a loose virtual space, we have left our bondedness to
earth. We begin to do things with matter that are quite far out. Where
are you when you talk through a telephone, are you here, are you there,
are you no-where? Our whole sense of space has collapsed. Even time is
becoming strange. Any time you have a moment of infinity in your day,
one second of eternity in your experience, your whole perspective on
the day changes. If for a minute you enjoy your eternal soul, then it
looks that anything before that was ages ago, so a day can look
infinitely long, while years can just pass by like that. Both time and
space have disappeared. Something essential is changing even in our
stupid physical sense mind.

The Divine is working on all those things at the same time but the
saving grace is in the finding of the eternal being in yourself. There
is no way we could get an immortal body before we know we are immortal
in any case. There are these beautiful stories in the Upanishads where
Indra comes to Prajapati to learn the knowledge that makes immortal.
They are strange stories because Indra is already immortal as it is.
But in the story he wants to get “the knowledge that makes immortal” so
that he can fight the Asuras better. It must mean that he wants to find
his eternal being, so that from that sense of eternity he can fight the
dark forces in his mind. He stands for the lord of the mind and the
mind can fight the darkness in itself only when it knows its eternal
origin. And in us that is the knowledge of the psychic.

Summary
The “ordinary” world of which our sense-mind makes such entrancing
representations, is a mixed world in which ever more sophisticated
types of consciousness are embodied in ever more complex physical
substrates. Besides this evolving mixed world, there are also typal
worlds, where different types of consciousness form static worlds of
their own. Everything in existence, whatever its size, and whatever the
plane of consciousness on which it exists, carries deep within it all
the knowledge, power and joy of the Divine.

The symbolic, representational knowledge that plays such an enormous
role in our knowledge-society is actually the symbolic rendering of one
particular form of knowledge, somewhere half-way between the totally
embedded knowledge that we find in matter’s “habit of form”, and the
truth-ideas of the supramental plane which are the ultimate blueprints
for all that exists. Our ordinary waking consciousness identifies
itself with the workings of the sense-mind, which is in its turn
largely determined by the workings of the nervous system which through
the immense complexity of its interconnectedness can embody complex
maps of reality. Still, even the knowledge of this sense-mind is
secretly informed by our pre-existing knowledge from within. All our
knowledge, whether outwardly triggered by our senses and laboriously
built-up by our sense-mind, or inwardly triggered by ready-made
intuitions from the higher planes of pre-existing knowledge, is in the
end not more than an evocation, an awakening of the knowledge we have
already within us. To the extent that we can silence the brain-based
sense mind, we can become more aware of the inner knowledge in its
purity and intrinsic power. The silent brain-based mind can then be
used as a passive instrument to express that inner knowledge in the
outer physical world.

If we approach the higher knowledge through a movement in our subtle
body upwards towards the sahasrara, we open ourselves to the impersonal
knowledge planes above the ordinary mind. Though liberating and
exhilarating, the higher knowledge obtained here is of a general,
impersonal nature, and does not help us directly with the conduct of
our individual lives. For this we need to go inwards to psychic being
deep behind the heart, where our individual divine kernel is situated.
It is this centre that can guide our individual transformation from a
being living in ignorance to a fully divinised centre of consciousness
in matter. To accomplish this we need first a full psychic conversion,
not only of our essential being, but also of our instrumental nature,
and then to bring the higher types of consciousness down into every
corner of our being, right into the lowest recesses of the inconscient.

There is still much to do. Happy Journey!

Culture Industry Redux: Stiegler and Derrida on Technics and Cultural Politics By Robert Sinnerbrink

Posted on December 30, 2009 by R.C

Issue No. 17 2009 — Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics

Culture Industry Redux: Stiegler and Derrida on Technics and Cultural Politics
By Robert Sinnerbrink

In the conclusion to his landmark 1996 study, Derrida and the Political, Richard Beardsworth outlines “two possible futures” for Derridean deconstruction. The first he describes as a “left-wing Derrideanism,” which would foreground “Derrida’s analysis of originary technicity,” and develop the supplementary logic of the trace “in terms of the mediations between [the] human and the technical” (Derrida and the Political 156). Such a future has been powerfully realised in the work of Bernard Stiegler, notably in his massive multi-volume work Technics and Time (1994-2001), of which only volumes one and two have so far been translated into English. [2] The second possible future for deconstruction, what Beardsworth dubs “right-wing Derrideanism,” is perhaps more familiar. The latter, Beardsworth suggests, would pursue “Derrida’s untying of the aporia of time from both logic and technics,” and argue that it is the gift of time that remains to be thought; such a path would enact a messianic promise that requires a Derridean mobilization of religious discourse, and a “passive” orientation towards the advent of the future, of the incalculable “to-come” (Derrida and the Political 156). [3] Although Beardsworth then immediately qualifies this apparent opposition, stating that there is here, in fact, “no answer and no choice” (156), that what we have, rather, is an aporetic dynamic between the one and the other, there is nonetheless a clear sense in which his book – one that carefully situates Derrida’s thought within the history of philosophical reflection on the political from Kant and Hegel to Marx and Heidegger – affirms the “Left-Derridean” path while critically questioning its “Right-Derridean” counterpart.

Beardsworth’s gesture is symptomatic of a certain “hesitancy,” as he remarks, regarding Derrida’s thinking of the nexus between the historical, the political, and the technical. One might have expected a more explicit acknowledgement, for example, of Derrida’s own speculative remarks concerning the history of Hegelianism, whose endlessly doubled, two-track rhythm – from Right to Left and back again, without closure or resolution, a performative undoing of the claims of totalising dialectic – is indicative of the movement of différance, as Derrida might say, within Hegelian metaphysics. Hegel is, after all, for Derrida, both the last metaphysician of the book and the first thinker of writing; Hegelian dialectic is both the culmination of the metaphysics of presence and the moment of its nascent self-deconstruction (Derrida, Of Grammatology 24-26; Positions 77-79). This Hegelian dynamic is broken only by Marx; indeed, modern thought, as so many exorcisms of Hegelian Geist, remains haunted by Marx’s uncanny spectre (Derrida Spectres of Marx). This, I suggest, is the underlying motif of the apparent opposition Beardsworth proposes and then disavows between a “Left-” and “Right-Derrideanism”: how far one acknowledges the spirit, the uncanny spectral power, of Marxist thought in relation to the task or promise of deconstruction in respect of politics, time, and technics.

Given Stiegler’s remarkable outpouring of books since 2001, and his prominent internet and institutional activism (see the website for Ars Industrialis, of which Stiegler was a co-founder), it is striking that the English-language critical reception of his work has only recently begun to gather momentum. [4] The following essay thus seeks to further the critical reception of Stiegler’s philosophy of technology by situating his work within the legacy of critical theory (broadly understood) and deconstruction (broadly understood). To this end, I shall reflect on what Beardsworth described as the twinned futures of deconstruction, focussing, in particular, on the “Left-Derrideanism” developed in Stiegler’s radical re-thinking of the problem of technics, and on his related call for a “politics of memory” as a critical response to debilitating effects of global techno-capitalism. In doing so, I want to develop and extend Beardsworth’s helpful insight by suggesting that Stiegler’s transformation of Heidegger and Derrida retrieves and renews the interrupted Frankfurt school tradition of culture industry critique. Stiegler’s “Left-Derrideanism,” I argue, reinvigorates the project of a “cultural politics” that would take place in the intersection between culture, technics, and politics. In this respect, Stiegler’s critical thinking on the problem of technics – what we might call his culture industry redux – points to a number of important practical cultural responses to the debilitating malaise that increasingly afflicts politics in liberal capitalist democracies.

1. From Culture Industry to Global Teletechnologies

Stiegler notes in the first volume of Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998) that there is an important history of attempts to think the relationship between technics, time, and experience. Heidegger, for Stiegler, is the most important thinker to have explored the question of technics, while the anthropological, historical, ethnographical, and psychological dimensions of the relationship between technicity and humanity have been extensively elaborated in the work of Bertrand Gille, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, and Gilbert Simondon (T&T1 2). What do we make, then, of the relationship between culture and technology? Here we need to consider the important Marxist/critical theory perspective on technics and modernity, stretching from Walter Benjamin’s reflections on art and technical reproducibility, Adorno and Horkheimer’s stark analyses of the culture industry, to Herbert Marcuse’s “Heideggerian” theorisation of the dialectic between techno-scientific rationality and political domination (T&T1 1). These analyses, in turn, shape Jürgen Habermas’s influential 1968 text “Technics and Science as ‘Ideology’,” which examines the dichotomy between “purposive-rational activity” and “symbolically mediated interaction,” and proposes a critique of the pernicious dominance of purposive-rational activity over communicative action (T&T1 11). I shall begin, then, by sketching a brief genealogy of recent critical thinking on technics, culture, and politics, focusing on Heidegger’s and Habermas’s respective approaches, before turning to Stiegler’s critical diagnosis of the maladies afflicting our technocultural age. I conclude by suggesting, very briefly, what a Stieglerian “cultural politics of memory” might entail.

In their classic text, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer developed a powerful, if frequently misunderstood, critique of the commodification of culture in modernity. Their central thesis concerning the relationship between culture and technics is to be found in their famous chapter on the “Culture Industry.” Under conditions of generalised commodity exchange, Adorno and Horkheimer claim, all aspects of cultural practice, technique, and meaning-making – whether high or low, elite or popular – become subsumed within the industrial system of production, exchange, and consumption. This commodification of culture results in a general homogenisation of cultural artefacts, an instrumentalisation of autonomous art, and the penetration of processes of reification to the very roots of our psychic and social formation as individuated subjects. With the intersection of the commodity form, instrumental rationality, and processes of reification, individuals increasingly experience themselves as exchangeable “things” within a social arena dominated by principles of market exchange. On the side of consumption, moreover, the loss of autonomous art through commodification, and increasing convergence of art, advertising, and marketing, results in a condition of universal spectacle and narcissistic consumerism that increasingly precipitates regressive forms of failure to achieve ego independence. Autonomous subjectivity, in short, is dissolved and replaced by commodified forms of “pseudo-individuality.” Adorno and Horkheimer locate the source of this dissolution of the individual in the dominance of abstract forms of instrumental rationality in modernity. According to their bleak diagnosis, the only “saving power,” so to speak, against total reification is to be found within the threatened sphere of autonomous art, whose “negative presentation” of freedom, albeit at the level of aesthetic form, is the only glimmer of an autonomy that remains foreclosed in social reality.

For all of their focus on the pernicious effects of the culture industry, one can argue that Adorno and Horkheimer fall foul of Heidegger’s critique of the ontologically reductive, instrumentalist-anthropological account of technics. According to Heidegger, the subject-object model of instrumental reason cannot think the essence of technics; that is, of modernity as an epoch of technological en-framing, the disclosure of beings (including human beings) as a totality of calculable resources (“Question Concerning Technology”). For technics, Heidegger claims, names the way that Being and beings are ontologically revealed or disclosed in modernity. Human existence [Dasein] is destinally thrown into the contingent historical clearing of Being within which, in the epoch of global technics, beings increasingly show up as nothing more than calculable resources. This technological revealing of Being, however, also opens up the possibility of an experience of what Heidegger later called das Ereignis or the “event of appropriation”: the historically singular event of mutual appropriation between human beings, beings, and Being that enables a meaningful world to open up. It is precisely this inherent ambivalence of technics – encompassing both the threat of a total reduction of beings to calculable resources, and the “saving power” of a more poetic, world-gathering mode of dwelling – that leaves open the possibility of alternative (non-totalising) forms of world-disclosure, notably through art and novel forms of cultural practice (cf. Stiegler, T&T1 6-9).

From this Heideggerian perspective, the Frankfurt school analysis of the “culture industry” remains caught within the prevailing instrumental-anthropological understanding of technology. In focusing on the question of means and ends, this approach obscures, indeed forgets, the question concerning the essence of technics in modernity (which Heidegger will reflect upon and analyse as en-framing [Ge-stell], the forcible revealing of beings solely as resources). This anthropological approach to technology, which stretches from Aristotle to Habermas, presupposes the technical revealing of world. It does not address, however, how such a revealing of world as resource makes possible precisely the instrumentalisation of reason, the processes of societal and cultural rationalisation, indeed of psychological and social “reification” so powerfully analysed within the Frankfurt school tradition of critical theory.

Such an approach, moreover, fails to think how technics and subjectivity have not only an external relationship (one of instrumental means to attain a chosen end) but rather an internal or intrinsic one. Fully-formed autonomous subjectivity does not just confront technology as a readymade set of instruments. Rather, technology itself participates in the formation and individuation of the human, in the development of diverse historical and cultural forms of humanisation, or what Stiegler calls, in Technics and Time, 1, the process of “epiphylogenesis” (175-179): the co-evolution of the human and the technical whereby the human is able to evolve “through means other than life.” The adventure of the human begins once we become dependent upon the “organised inorganic matter” (namely technics) that makes possible, so Stiegler will argue, our historical experience of time, memory, and consciousness.

From the critical theory perspective, Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of the ideological dimensions of scientific rationalisation, and the dialectic between technological development and socio-political domination, nonetheless represents an important (Marxist) “offshoot” of the philosophical genealogy of technics (T&T1 10). Habermas follows Marcuse’s theses on technology and power; namely that what originally emerged in modernity as a power to liberate humankind from its debilitating dependence upon nature is now inverted into a means of social and political domination (T&T1 10). As Weber famously theorised, technology is the fruit of processes of rationalisation, which have extended the principles of calculation, planning, and rational decision-making across all levels of society and culture (T&T1 11). Habermas transforms this thesis on rationalisation into a massive extension of “purposive-rational activity,” which is linked, by way of justification, to “the institutionalisation of technical and scientific progress” (T&T1 11). Rationality in the form of purposive-rational activity, Habermas argues, becomes increasingly dominant over reason understood as “communicative action,” which must nonetheless be presupposed as a condition of any kind of linguistic exchange and social interaction. The forms of political domination that emerge from the extension of purposive-rational activity, moreover, are legitimated by means of the principle of scientific and technical progress. Hence they do not even appear to be forms of domination at all. The promise of Enlightenment emancipation through reason, in short, has been inverted into the threat of social and political domination by techno-scientific means.

As Stiegler points out, Habermas goes on to reject Marcuse’s allegedly “Heideggerian” thesis concerning the need for a science that would be “in dialogue with nature,” arguing that such a conception remains “utopian” (T&T1 11). The history of technics, rather, represents an extension of forms of purposive-rational activity that have become “objectified” through the development of complex technical systems. Habermas’s well-known alternative is to contrast “symbolically mediated interaction” – that is, communicative action based upon intersubjectively acknowledged social norms – to “purposive-rational activity,” whose empirically grounded technical rules are embodied in rationalised forms of work and technical systems. Indeed, for Habermas, human historical and social development can be tracked according to the dialectic between purposive-rational activity and communicative action (T&T1 11). Whereas so-called “traditional” societies maintain the authority of communicative action (whether through religious, mythical, or metaphysico-political means), modern societies elevate techno-scientific rationality to the primary legitimating discourse, one that now threatens to “colonise” the shared normativity of social-cultural lifeworld and thus undermine the basis and legitimacy of communicative rationality. Modern technocracy, Habermas maintains, is born of the coalescing of the sciences and technics, which leads to the increasing dominance of techno-scientific over communicative forms of rationality (T&T1 12). Indeed, the modern technocratic state is no longer concerned with communicative action or critical reflection upon purposive-rational activity; it is concerned instead with administering the most efficient, instrumentally rational, and technical solutions to social, economic, and political problems. Communicative action is thus superseded by purposive-rational activity, which means that intersubjective forms of communication – and so processes of individuation, socialisation, and politicisation – begin to be distorted or even damaged. Hence Habermas’s critical argument that we must emancipate communicative reason from its instrumentalisation; we must liberate “communication from its technicisation,” which, as Stiegler notes, is a repetition of a traditional and decidedly “metaphysical” theme – namely the antagonism between logos and techne (T&T1 12).

As Stiegler observes, there is a striking parallel here between Heidegger and Habermas on the question of technics. They both recognise that technics, “which appears to be a power in the service of humanity, becomes autonomous from the instance it empowers” (T&T1 13). Although technics ought to be “an act on the part of humanity,” it ends up undermining the very autonomy of human communication, decision-making, individuation, and rational action that it was supposed to enhance and extend. At the same time, Habermas and Heidegger differ sharply on the nature of this paradoxical character of modern technology, analysing it in profoundly different ways. For Stiegler it is important to note both this convergence and divergence in their respective approaches to technics (T&T1 13). The convergence consists in their both regarding “the technicisation of language as a denaturation” (T&T1 13). Human beings are both bearers of speech (the speech of being) and bearers of tools (whose equipmental nexus defines the shared meaningfulness of the world in which we exist); yet these two aspects are difficult to reconcile, at least in the modern world, without one instance “proper” to our nature seemingly usurping the other.

Thus Heidegger, for example, moves away from his earlier analysis (in Being and Time) of the way “technical” comportment towards beings remains our primary mode of access to the world, advocating in his later work a poetic saying of Being and a reflective withdrawal from the “danger” posed by technological en-framing. Habermas, for his part, insists upon the contrast between instrumental purposive-rational activity, articulated in technical systems, and non-instrumental communicative action, which must be liberated from its inappropriate “technicisation.”

The divergence consists in Habermas’s endorsement of what Heidegger, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” described as the “instrumental-anthropological” interpretation of technics (317). It is not enough, Heidegger maintains, to consider technology as a “means” requiring greater communicative action or intersubjective agreement as to its deployment, or greater public discourse concerning its legitimate and illegitimate uses (for example, in biogenetics). Rather, the very question of the relationship between the human and the technical needs to be rethought, since even Habermas agrees that technology is no longer entirely under human rational or social control. Hence, Stiegler argues, we need to “forge another relationship to technics”; one that would enable us to rethink “the bond originally formed by, and between, humanity, technics, and language” (T&T1 13).

Nonetheless, even though Habermas and Heidegger agree on considering the “technicisation of language” as a perversion of our nature (whether as communicatively rational agents or as poetic shepherds of Being), there is nonetheless a radicality in Heidegger’s thinking of technology that moves beyond the “ends-means” account of technics characterising the Frankfurt school culture industry critique. For Heidegger’s confrontation with the relationship between Being and technics opens up what is for Stiegler the more pressing question of technics and time. This questions opens up a number of related themes: the acceleration of time and of technical development; the decoupling of technical from cultural development; the impact of such temporal dislocation upon forms of intersubjective communication; the correlated threat to processes of psychic (subjective) and collective (socio-cultural) individuation, the intertwined processes by which we become individuated beings embedded within a shared form of life; the transformation of our very experience of the “taking place” of time and of space; their dematerialisation and virtualisation thanks to “real-time” media technologies, and the pervasive audiovisual mediation of individual and collective forms of experience – all of these developments are essential manifestations, for Stiegler, of the fundamental question of technics and time.

How does Stiegler confront this question? The difficulty with both Heideggerian and Habermasian approaches to technics, he argues, is that they both fail to think the essential co-emergence and co-dependency of technics and the human. To do so more adequately, Stiegler proceeds to confront the Heideggerian analytic of existence with the Greek myths of Epimetheus and Prometheus, which, he argues, both express in striking fashion the fundamental interdependency between the human and the technical. They are myths of the de-fault of origin, of the essential lack defining the human, whose originary incompletion is such that our existence is always already supplemented by technical prosthesis; they express what Stiegler calls the “originary technicity” that constitutes, he claims, the only way to adequately think through the question of technics, the human, and time. Heidegger and Habermas, by contrast, remain committed to the essential distinction and even opposition between the human and the technical. They consequently separate communication or language from technicity, and hence share a common fault, one that defines philosophical reflection on technics from Plato to Heidegger and Habermas: namely, a forgetting of our originary “prosthetic” nature as human beings; an ignorance of the way technicity opens up, rather than simply threatens, the adventure of human individuation and collective co-existence.

This is where the originality of Stiegler’s project of thinking the relationship between technics, culture, and politics becomes apparent. Even Heidegger does not really think the essence of technics, according to Stiegler, because Heidegger maintains that technics, even as horizon of world-disclosure, ultimately remains opposed to time, to (authentic) temporalisation. For the phenomenological experience of authentic temporality, at least according to Heidegger’s Being and Time, requires a radical withdrawal from, or breakdown of, our habitual immersion in the everyday world of practical comportments within a shared equipmental whole. For Stiegler, however, everyday equipment or ready-to-hand beings available for use should be understood, rather, as the enabling condition – rather than ontic obstruction – of our phenomenological experience of temporality, above all our authentic appropriation of finitude or comportment towards death (T&T1 4-10; “Technics of Decision” 154-166).

In this sense, Stiegler transforms Heidegger’s thesis in Being and Time, infusing it with elements from his later thought: our temporal comportment towards the finitude of our existence, what Heidegger calls our being-toward-death, is made possible precisely through technical supplements, exteriorised forms of memory, and prosthetic forms of meaning (including language). For it is precisely through these “mnemotechnical supplements” that we can at all gain access to the “having-been” [das Gewesene], that is, the historically disclosed possibilities of past forms of life that must be taken over and appropriated anew by each generation. Indeed, technical artefacts, material supplements, and inherited forms of technique, meaning, and practice (culture and language) are precisely what enable us to experience a “past we have never lived.” For the world into which we are thrown, whose possibilities we both inherit and must somehow appropriate, is not of our own making. The language I speak, the gestures and norms that I learn, the technique that shapes my thought, action, and bodily comportment; all of these elements enable me to inherit a world in which I can individuate myself as part of a community that also individuates itself in time and history. And for this to be possible we must recognise the central role of technics in making possible the inheritance and transmission of meaning – language, technique, culture – across generations inhabiting distinct, even temporally and spatially distant, social-historical worlds.

As Stiegler remarks, if Life is the conquest of mobility, then technics, as a “process of externalisation,” can be defined as the “pursuit of life by means other than life” (T&T1 17). Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon, in particular his analysis of psychic and collective individuation – the processes by which an individuated “I” emerges in relation to a collective, which in turn is individuated and transformed by the various individuals of which it is composed – Stiegler aims to show how the concept of “trans-duction” enables us to think the “originarily techno-logical” constitution of temporality, that is, the co-dependent emergence of the human and the technical (T&T1 18). Technics, for Stiegler, therefore does not represent the reduction or destruction of temporality but rather its originary condition of possibility. It is what makes possible the shared inheritance of past possibilities – through language, technique, and culture – that we reactivate through futural projection in order to individuate ourselves in relation to our shared community.

At the same time, Stiegler argues that the question of technics today encompasses not only the dangers to psychic individuation posed by the “culture industries,” but also the threat posed to the possibility of alternative forms of technologically mediated, collective individuation. The simultaneous synchronisation of consciousnesses across the globe via media teletechnologies increases the tendency towards the “massification” and homogenisation of cultural forms of meaning. The tendency towards homogenisation threatens to damage or destroy the available possibilities for the original and transformative exercise of our intellectual, affective, and aesthetic capacities, thus resulting in a progressive loss of our shared human capacity for psychic (subjective) and collective (socio-cultural) individuation (“Le désir asphyxié, ou comment l’industrie culturelle détruit l’individu”). Given this threat to the possibility of successful psychic and collective individuation, Stiegler argues – much as Adorno and Heidegger before him – that we need a new cultural politics of memory: practices of art, communication, creation and resistance that would keep open and promote, both individually and collectively, the ethical and political desire for a meaningful future.

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