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Living Laboratories of the Life Divine by Debashish Banerji

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Living Laboratories of the Life Divine
Debashish Banerji
 (text of a talk delivered for the AUM Conference, Los Angeles, May 2003)

 
The topic I will attend to today is “Living Laboratories of the Divine Life.”   By ‘living laboratories’, I am referring, of course, to Sri Aurobindo’s justly famous phrase taken from ‘The Life Divine’, where he designates the human being as a ‘living laboratory’ for the experiment leading to what he has termed ‘the Superman’. But before turning our attention to that phrase, I would like to back up a little in time and consider the idea of the Superman as it makes its modern appearance in the utterance of Frederick Nietzsche.
 
In many ways  Nietzsche, as a philosopher, can be said  to inaugurate  the modern age .  Modern philosophy, where it has been fruitful, has been largely an engagement with Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche is a controversial figure, a very complex figure.  Complex because he received intuitions from above and uttered them in a new kind of way which challenged the metaphysical tradition.  Moreover, his ideas were often not well-formed and were sometimes apparently inconsistent.  So to denigrate him or to adulate him is, in either case, a dangerous thing.  Rahter we must see what he has to say and probe the complexity of his thought. Nietzsche introduces the idea of the Superman in his work Thus Spake Zarathustra. I will read a passage from this work.  In recent translations of this work, the German term Ubermensch has been rendered as ‘Overman’ instead of ‘Superman’.  Some of us are familiar with a similar kind of replacement proposed by Georges von Vreckhem who has translated the Mother’s Surhomme as ‘Overman’ rather than ‘Superman’.  I do not wish to enter into technical controversies or debates over these terms, but bring to your notice that there is a degree of fluidity about these things that lend themselves to varieties of interpretation. 

I read you Walter Kaufman’s translation of Nietzsche’s passage:

I teach you the Overman.  Man is something that shall be overcome.  What have you done to overcome him?  
 All beings so far have created something beyond themselves.  And do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?  What is the ape to man?  A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Overman.  A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.  You have made your way from the worm to man and much in you is still worm.  Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.  
 Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost.  But do I bid you to become ghosts or plants?  
Behold, I teach you the Overman.  The Overman is the meaning of the earth.  Let your will say: the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth!  I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of other-worldly hopes!  Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not.  Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go…  
Verily, a polluted stream is man.  One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean.  Behold, I teach you the Overman: he is this sea; in him, your great contempt can go under.  
 What is the greatest experience you can have?  It is the hour of the great contempt.  The hour in which your happiness, too, arouses your disgust,  and even your reason and your virtue. ….
 Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.  
 What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.  
 I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.  
 I love the great despisers because  they are the great reverers and arrows of longing for the other shore.  
 I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, but who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth may someday become the Overman’s….  
 I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.

It’s a very interesting passage, a profound passage, a passage that I wanted to read out because many who have read Sri Aurobindo have never read Nietzsche and acquire some preconceptions of what the Nietzschean Superman is all about.   I’d encourage them to divest themselves of these ideas.  Nietzsche inaugurates the future destiny of the human race in the modern age; at a crisis point in western civilization, he holds out the goal of the self-exceeding of man in the Super/Over-man. We don’t need to assume that Nietzsche himself knew with clarity what he meant by the term ‘superman’ or ‘overman’ as the case may be, but it’s best to receive the complexity of his thought and see its vastness and its greatness, see it side by side with the Superman as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, how their Superman relates, if at all, to Nietzsche’s idea.

I read first from the Mother a familiar passage.  It is from a talk to the children of the Ashram:  

There is an ascending evolution in Nature which goes from stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from animal to man.  Because man is for the moment the last rung  on the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes there is nothing on earth superior to him in that he is still in his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal  but still an animal in his material habits and instincts.  Undoubtedly Nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result.  She endeavors to bring out a being that will be to man what man is to the animal, a being that will remain a man in its external form and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mind and its slavery to ignorance.  Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to man.  He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness , the truth consciousness  and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, happy and fully conscious .  During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish himself in this consciousness, which he called Supramental and to help those gathered around him to realize it. 

There is much in this that bears resemblance with Nietzsche’s description of the Overman. Both texts are explicit about the transitional character of the human species. The Mother’s statement actually contains within it Sri Aurobindo’s famous assertion “Man is a transitional being” and for Nietzsche, “Man is a rope tied between beast and overman” and again, “Man is a bridge and not an end…” Secondly, both texts emphasize an earthly destiny. And finally, note the not so noble appraisal of the human being. Man is no longer the “measure of all things” extolled in the European Renaissance, the source of western civilizational hubris. While the human being in the Mother’s formulation may not be the contemptible worm of Nietzsche, it isn’t too far from that either. The Mother quickly disabuses humanity of its exalted notion of itself.

 I now read Sri Aurobindo’s passage from ‘The Life Divine’ where he likens us to ‘living laboratories’:  

 The animal is a living laboratory in which nature has, it is said, worked out man.   Man himself may be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the Superman, the God .  Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God.   For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by nature of that which slept or worked in her involved it is also the overt realization of that which he secretly is. 

Let us ponder these three texts.  In all three, there is the notion of the self-exceeding of man. The human being has to exceed himself, because from the viewpoint of the imperfection of nature, humanity is as faulted as the animal, the worm is to the human being and it is to set our sights on that kind of goal that Nietzsche is calling us through the voice of Zarathustra. But Nietzsche’s call is going out to the will of man. It is not a simple call to the ego – it is not a call to titanism as has been popularly supposed, it is a call to sacrifice, to vastness, it is a call to the formation of the gods within us. The overman according to Nietzsche is like the gods of the Greek classical heritage. It is Nietzsche’s allergy towards the Christian tradition that makes him deny god, but it is in the becoming of god or of the gods in human guise that his message lies. But it ends here. What apart from the human will is there to lead us to this goal? If we are hardly more evolved than the worm or the animal in most of our nature, what hope do we have except for willing something which is faulted into existence in our drive upwards?

If we look at Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s texts, we see there one critical element which is missed out by Nietzsche. They are not talking about the human will attaining to the superman. They are talking about the human being as the site where the superman is formed by agents other than the human. In both cases they use the term ‘Nature’ to indicate this extra-human agency. What is it that they mean by “Nature”? Evidently, if there is something which ties these uses of the word to some common ground, we have to think of “Nature” as the evolutionary force in a conscious form, the evolutionary will.

Sri Aurobindo’s texts needs to be read in a cross-cultural context. They have contexts which are equally eastern and western. “Nature”, in Sri Aurobindo’s usage, is backgrounded by the entire metaphysical romantic tradition, the European tradition of Nature as a cosmic presence and power. With the metaphysical “death of God” and the birth of the Modern Age at the turn of the 18th/19th c. in Europe, German Romanticism found Nature as replacement for God – Nature as a power with an intelligence instinct in it, as a cosmic container, a Mother-Force. It is in this sense that the English Romantic poets also extol Nature. Sri Aurobindo draws partly on this tradition in his usage. But Nature is equally and perhaps even more for him all that that term means in the Indian tradition when you translate it as Prakriti.

 Prakriti – and Sri Aurobindo has written extensively about this term, the various things it means and has meant. The term comes to us from Sankhya as that mukhya, that Chief of the manifest world which is the primary manifesting force manifesting. It is that which runs us, drives us, drives everything, Matter, Life and Mind. It gives us the sense of agency through the creation of an Ego, ahamkara, but actually is the complete authority through the operation of its three gunas – sattwa, rajas and tamas – of all that happens in us – conditionings, all is conditioning. But Prakriti also, from an even earlier tradition, lost and then revived in the Gita – Prakriti that has two faces to it, returning to us through another guise in the Tantra, two colors – dark and golden. Prakriti which occupies two hemispheres in two different modalities – Para and Apara. Apara Prakriti of the lower hemisphere, of Avidya, Ignorance, wearing the dark guise of Unconscious Nature, the automatisms of Sankhya, the laws that are coded into Matter, Life and Mind, that run everything within which we are given the illusion of Consciousness – and Para Prakriti, the unveiled Force, Nature-Force of the Supreme Divine, the calling forth into Becoming of Being, of the One Being, the only Being there is.  And this dichotomy, this two-fold nature, is something that is contained, encapsulated in that simple word “Nature” that  Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are using in their texts.  Because, indeed, the way to the Superman as far as Sri Aruobindo is concerned, is in these two hands of Nature, this twin-aspected Nature. 

The lower Nature, ignorant, is still instinct with the force of divinity.  It has moved matter into the domain of Life. It has moved Life into the domain of Mind.  It will move Mind into the domain of Supermind.  But the question is when?  Nature has eternity in her hands, as the Mother has said.  Nature doesn’t care for our time schemes.  Nature experiments, plays with forms, plays with possibilities, with ideas and creates this plethora of manifest reality that we find so delightful in this world.  We build our botanical gardens and our zoos so that we can  travel to these parks  and delight in these multitudinous and wonderful creations of Nature.  Nature has thrown up our human diversity too, our diversity of types, our diversity of thinking, our diversity of cultures.  It’s all the doing of Nature, and She is here to play an infinite number of games because She is the creative spirit, and progress takes place at her own slow pace through all this. 

But the human being, as Aswapathy, in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, expresses in his appeal to the Supreme Mother, is a hapless unfinished experiment of Nature, a product of its half-grown march toward super-humanity, caught between the worm and the God. From life to life we suffer the pains and discords of a half-baked consciousness that yearns to exceed itself, that is replete with complex problems which it can never solve because of fundamental incapacity, that feels trapped and imprisoned and cries out for moksha, liberation, ultimate escape out of this prison-house of the round of suffering and insoluble complexity, finding no other goal.  

This is where Sri Aurobindo intervenes to indicate that Nature has another poise – the poise of Nature in the Knowledge, in the Vidya, the golden Mahakali behind the black Kali, the body of light, of knowledge, of gnosis, the Gnostic Mother.  And it is this Gnostic Mother, if she descends now, becomes active as the unveiled Power controlling the lower Nature, that can change everything within the Avidya, that can change the conditions of the Avidya.  For then, it will be no longer a play of trial and error, a slow and painful growth through eternity of the ascending powers of consciousness, but of the future bringing the present into itself, a precipitation of the goal that begins working within the present transforming it to its own conditions.  This is the one reason why Sri Aurobindo chose to spend all his time and all of his superhuman yogic power to focus on the bringing down of the Supermind.  He could very easily have sat in his room in Pondicherry and accomplished what he has said some yogis have done in the Himalayas – brought about revolutions in the world.  Why ‘could’, he did – a number of them.  But he wasn’t satisfied with this because it didn’t solve mankind’s problems.  The problems of humanity cannot be solved by a change of the external conditions, or even a temporary change in the inner consciousness of individuals or peoples that causes them to do exalted things beyond their habitual or normal capacity.

For an hour God resides in a nation or in a time.  We experience an Hour of God.  Human beings are empowered temporarily to do deeds they never could have done; but then, as in the first canto of Savitri, the Symbol Dawn, inevitably the Power recedes and we are left to “the common light of earthly day”, we are back to business as usual, the sordid poverty of human life.  There is only one way that this can change and that is not through our unaided effort.  It is through the bringing down of a force which, in spite of us, can change conditions here.  But the “in spite of us” has to be understood in its right dimensions.  This change of conditions is not an external or a temporary change, it is first and foremost a radical change of consciousness – and this cannot change without our conscious cooperation.  That is why in the statement I have quoted from The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo puts it, as always in his wonderful global sentences, with every aspect of the question included. As he says there, “Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the Superman, the God.”  
 
Let us make no mistakes about the priorities of this process.  It is the Para-Prakriti, Supreme or Higher Nature, who is the Scientist of this laboratory.  It is we who serve her purpose through our adherence.  We are the conscious cooperators.  Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s primary yogic work has been to change the agency of this process from the Lower to the Higher Nature, or rather, to establish the Higher within the Lower.  And what is called the Supermental descent and manifestation is exactly this collapse of the division between the Vidya and the Avidya.  It is the implosion of the Power, the Knowledge, the Vijnana-Shakti into earth and that entry has initiated a New Age. 

A New Age does not start by astrological factors.  It isn’t because it is written in the calendar that a New Age suddenly begins.  A New Age is an act of consciousness.  It is a powerful act of consciousness, willed by the human cooperators and assented to by the  Divine.  And this is the New Age that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have inaugurated.  It is an Age, first and foremost, of world yoga.  It is a New Age of Yoga and of World Yoga – Yoga, the accelerated process towards conscious evolution.  Prakriti, Nature, has always been doing yoga.  This is why in The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo can say,  “All life is yoga.”  But the yoga of Nature is a slow, semi-conscious process. The yoga of human beings who wake up from within by the pointing finger of light that comes as a beacon showing the way is a conscious yoga, a conscious yoga that accelerates, quickens the process, that condenses into a lifetime or a few years what would otherwise would have taken many lifetimes, that brings the future into the present.  And this is exactly what Mother and Sri Aurobindo have done on a cosmic or terrestrial level. They have initiated the earth into a new yoga.  The ear of the earth has been privy to the mantra of a new yoga and has accepted it.  That yoga has begun.

Now we heard yesterday about the conditions of the earth and about the earth as the Ashram, the Ashram of the world.  Someone spoke of the entire world as the home of the Lord and the circumstances that come to us in the world as provided by the Lord for our yoga. Indeed it is the Ashram of the world that all humanity can be said to inhabit today and in a profounder sense than of providing materials for the growth of consciousness in those who have chosen to grow in consciousness.  It is the ashram of the world because the world itself has been moved into a world yoga. This is the meaning of the New Age.
I would like to draw your attention at this point to an ancient story, a story from the Puranas, a story which talks about an occult event that happened in eternal time, an eternal event.  It is a story about the churning of the ocean – there is a great churning of the cosmic ocean and the purpose, the objective, is for the pot of Amrita, the ambrosia of Immortality that is at the bottom of the ocean, to be brought to the surface, churned up from the bottom.  And it is the gods and the demons who together undertake this churning.  And it is the great world mountain Mount Meru, which is also represented individually in each of us  – meru-danda, the spine – this world axis, Axis Mundi, the pillar of the world, that is used as the rod for doing the churning.  And it is the great serpent, base and bed of the evolutionary fountain of avatarhood, Vishnu, the serpent Ananta, the coiled infinite potential of Time, Eternity on one side and Perpetuity on the other, eternally changing, never changing, that becomes the churning rope.  And Vishnu himself, as the Tortoise avatar, becomes the base on which the churning rod, Meru is stationed.
 
The first thing that happens with the churning is the rise of the poisons of the ocean. The poisons of the ocean are so dense, so acrid, so corrosive, that even the demons can’t continue.  Both the gods and the demons are completely stalled.  The sky turns black with poison.  What we today call pollution is as nothing compared to that condition. Man cannot even envisage that condition of poisonous darkness.  Neither the gods nor the demons can cope with it.  And it is at this point that the great Lord Shiva himself comes to the rescue by drinking the poison and holding it, by his yoga-power, in his throat, which is therefore stained blue and which is why Shiva has as one of his names, Nilakanta, the blue-throated. 

A number of mystics had experiences around 5th December 1950, at the time when Sri Aurobindo left his body and several of them saw a vision of the great Shiva drinking the cup of poison.  Indeed, the departure of Sri Aurobindo can be understood in this light. The myth of the churning of the Ocean is an image of the world yoga initiated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Sri Aurobindo has prepared the process, he has initiated it and he has sacrificed himself that our unprepared nature may be able to bear the intense difficulties of the beginning. It is the first stage of this world yoga that he has made possible by drinking the acrid poison that rose up from the depths.  He has held the Supramental light in his body and he has broken the backbone of earthly karma, which would have otherwise made it impossible for us to move into this New Age.  This is why the Mother has addressed Sri Aurobindo’s “material envelope” and said “….Before Thee who has willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all for us, before Thee we bow down and implore that we may never forget, even for a moment, all we owe to Thee.”

All that we see today, experience today are the physical repercussions of occult events of this kind.  The pollution that we see is inevitable. It is the result of our collective consciousness.  It is the poison-fruit of our world karma facing us as we take our first steps in the New Age.  It is necessary.  It will pass. It has already been dealt with by the Lord himself. 

But this world yoga, though much quicker than the processes of Prakriti, is still a process of collective preparation which is impersonal and relatively slow, because it is a process of bringing consciousness to the unconsciousness.  It is awakening it, but awakening it over time, slowly.  People receive ideas.  There are many today who are doing the work of the Mother without knowing that they are the Mother’s instruments.  Yet the purpose has not yet become conscious in them, the fullness of divine intent has not dawned on them.  They are serving the world yoga. But the work of the Supermind, the work of the supramental consciousness is not merely at the universal level of the world yoga. It is at the individual level, it is at the cosmic level and it is at the level of several other possible experiments that are being conducted all simultaneously and in an interrelated fashion too complex for the human mind to comprehend. As Sri Aurobindo says in the book ‘The Mother’, the Mother’s steps are too complex, “one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence” -  which is why the surrender is demanded of us. It is only through this surrender that we can progressively become more enlightened instruments of her workings and in the process find ourselves more and more a part of Her. By this means, we are to rise to a consciousness one with her consciousness, a state from which our present condition will seem indeed very embarrassing.  In this progression of the world yoga, we have to be open to the vast, complex, global and minute working of Her supramental Shakti, that reality which is here among us. And this is why for this experiment, the living laboratory is not just the individual, nor is it merely the work to ameliorate world conditions, it is these and a variety of other experiments that are going on at the same time.

When Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were in Pondicherry, the Mother has said that there was a question whether they would do the yoga with just a handful of disciples, intensely try to accelerate the process of the descent of the supermind, bring it down and then radiate it. She said the other option was to go slower, but to gather around them representative specimens of humanity that would be able to bring a much wider possibility of the manifestation of supramental consciousness on earth. She says the decision was not made mentally. The Lord made the decision. It happened by itself – and it is the second course that was followed. This was how the ashram developed, the Sri Aurobindo ashram. You and I and all of us here who have been touched by the message of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have taken maybe a few faltering steps in the direction of the life that they have shown, the goal that they have shown, have inevitably felt at some point how privileged we are, how fortunate we are, what a Grace we have received. Let us not be fooled that it is due to any credit of ours that we have been chosen for this Grace. It is a process which has selected us, and to which all are equal, and again the phrase ‘living laboratories’ is very relevant here. We `are ‘cultures’ both in the sense of social expressions as well as in the biological sense. We are cultures on petri dishes that are being experimented on. We have been chosen because we are representative of something, something which goes far beyond our own understanding. We are here to serve a purpose that will be revealed to us not today, but only when the work is done. Today or tomorrow, all the earth, every individual, will receive this blessing, this Grace, because this is the condition of the world yoga. The world yoga progresses through smaller collectives, not only as the entire body of the earth, but much quicker, much more consciously, through the conscious intention of people who awake to the reality of what the supramental force is bringing. As with the ashram – the growth of the ashram was around Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s ascension, it was around their attempt to reach the supermind and bring it down for humanity, so the roots had to extend far into the possibilities of terrestrial manifestation. Diverse specimens of humanity gathered around Mother and Sri Aurobindo at the ashram, as we all know – a tremendous variety, tremendous diversity. And yet, each individual carried a personality that was molded into its highest possibilities of individuality by Sri Aurobindo, by the Mother – as possibilities of manifesting the yoga force.

The Mother did not stop with this process.  They had been physically present at the center of the ashram community as a laboratory of the supramental experiment. But in 1968, She spawned another such community, a community with an even wider, more global, planetary basis that would not have them physically at its center, that would have to open to them internally, that would have to be the conscious collaborators in the inner sense, no longer externally guided in the material details of their existence, no longer capable of dragging them down, of pulling at the hem of their robes and soiling them, but who would have to receive the problems of humanity and open to them from within and receive the Grace of the transformation through collaboration with the Para-prakriti, with the supreme Mother Force. This is Auroville.  Auroville today is continuing in this work. It is also a sphere of churning. These are other spheres of the churning of the waters, but these are more conscious spheres – these are spheres, cradles, crucibles, birthplaces of the superman, of the overman.
 
And yet, this is not all. In a conversation of December 1938, Sri Aurobindo said that a few hundred people in the ashram will not be sufficient to make the supramental effective for mankind. Thousands of people doing the yoga sadhana in many walks of life across the world will be needed for that.  Individually, and collectively, across America, across Europe, across Asia, across the world, we are all invited to be participants in the purpose of the supramental manifestation. The supermind is interested in us. We’re not here merely to make conscious efforts, to make titanic wills, to fling ourselves from this orbit to the higher orbit. We can be heartened by the fact, but we should also be extremely attentive to the fact that the supermind is interested in us. It is a Force that is seeking us out. It is an agency, an active power. And in seeking us out, it is seeking us not merely as individuals because its purpose is a divine life on earth. A ‘divine life on earth’ is not manifested by one person. A divine life is a social context, a divine life is an opening up of a world of phenomena that make for a rich collective existence in all its forms. And if we cannot provide it with the conditions for this, its work is to that extent hampered or thwarted of the cooperation that it seeks. We need to be conscious of this, because it is only to the extent that we are conscious of this that we can be its collaborators. We need to gravitate together; we need to unite our wills; we need to form collective individualities. We need to form collective flames of aspiration – integral collective flames of aspiration that will be able to invoke that higher Consciousness and call down that Light, that Power to work among us, to form itself in us, to radiate through us in our acts, in our bodies.

That, indeed, is what it seeks. The power of the Supramental Shakti, here on earth, seeks unity, seeks integration and seeks perfection. It seeks these in an integral way. We are first called in consciousness to these experiences of integrality. This is the pressure. Can we be integral within? Can we integrate ourselves? Intergate our mind, life and body around the psychic being? Can we feel whole, become one? This is the pressure and the help that’s coming. But again, it’s not merely at the individual level. Can we experience the unity of collective consciousness? In an earlier talk, we were very fortunate to receive a message which I’ve heard for the first time – very refreshing – the fact that the signs of the supramental manifestation are not to be sought primarily in the breakdown of the Berlin Wall or the Fall of Soviet Communism, but within us, in the change in the modality of consciousness that is going on.  Are we aware of this?  Let us become aware of it.  Today, we live in God.  Are we aware of this?  It is the consciousness that has to turn within and see what is being done by the supramental shakti inside first, not outside. This means an awareness of the process of integration of the being and it also results, as Aster was saying, in the recognition of the fact that  unity manifests when you least expect it, it manifests in and through us.  We experience it and we don ‘t know it.

There is a form of experience which the Supermind is calling us to have, to feel, which is new – a new form of spiritual experience.  Individually, great yogis have experienced the divine, have experienced the Oneness, the One Being there is, and yet  when they’ve come out of it, they’ve seen  that every individual has remained in the Ignorance that they always were in.  Why?  Even when they had the oneness experience, it was only they who had it.  When the Mother experienced the descent of the Supermental force into the earth at the ashram Playground, it was such a powerful experience, she felt that when she would open her eyes she would see that everybody was  flat on the ground.  But nobody except for a handful, a very few, even knew what had happened.  The Ignorance encases us so densely that we are unaware of what is going on within.  But the experience, the new spiritual experience to which we are called by the Supermind, first in symbolic form, in collectives , and finally as a world phenomenon,  is that of Collective Oneness.

Collective oneness seems at the outset to be a trivial phrase, one of those catch-alls of the New Age.  But it isn’t that.  Collective oneness is arriving at a poise of consciousness above the mind, not individually,  but collectively, where a number of people  can experience at once that they are the One Being .  They know themselves simultaneously as one and yet irreducibly different – a difference because this One Being is not a finite being, it is the Infinite One. The Infinite One wonders at its own infinity.  It is one and yet infinite.  It has no limits.  Its own potentialities come to it from its own infinity, and it wonders, it is wonderful.  This is the content of the experience of collective oneness that the Supermind is calling us towards as a possibility of being. 

But the possibility of being is not the only aspect of the Supramental invitation.  It is also the possibility of becoming, integral becoming, becoming integral, an integral perfection in becoming.  And for this we need collectively not merely to aspire to the Supermind to be manifest through us, not merely for those few rare experiences where we rise above ourselves  and become privy to a consciousness beyond ourselves  moving us as a collective but where we participate collectively in an expressive field, an integral field, a field of knowledge, a field of work , a field of love and of the emotional life, a field of physical labor and activity.  We offer it an integral field collectively.  But the whole consciousness of this offering is that we are doing this work, not to create an edifice that others will marvel at as some kind of institutional radiation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother or a new religion, however universal, but to allow the Supermind the conditions that it seeks for our cooperation.  In the works of knowledge, in education, in the works of will, in business, in politics, in the works of culture, of the emotional life, of the refinement of the sensations, in works of the body, of labor, of service, dasya, let us give all our parts of being fully and collectively because that is what the Supramental force is interested in.  I call upon all of us to meditate on this invitation, if we are to be conscious collaborators.

We are called upon to be conscious collaborators, but even more importantly we are the living laboratories of the divine life.  We are living laboratories individually, collectively, and in more ways than one.  To be conscious of this, to hold these possibilities in our being, to be always receptive, this is the call.  To have a will is good.  To surrender the will is better.  But to be receptive to the messages of the scientist who is using us as the site of Her experiment, as the living laboratory, is perhaps the best.  Thank you.  

The Soul of a City: The Crystal Cathedral as Organizing Metaphor for (Post)Modern Architecture at the Bauhaus

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THE SOUL OF A CITY: THE CRYSTAL CATHEDRAL

AS ORGANIZING METAPHOR FOR (POST)MODERN

ARCHITECTURE AT THE BAUHAUS

By Debashish Banerji

The Bauhaus, founded in 1919 at Weimar, Germany by Walter Gropius, was arguably the most influential school of design in modern times, set up in the form of a residential creative community of designers, craftsmen, architects and artists. “The Crystal Cathedral” is a familiar name in contemporary Southern California, and stands, almost literally, for what it says – a religious monument with the appearance of a transparent four-pointed crystal. It was designed by Philip Johnson (1906-2005) and completed in 1980. Johnson was an American architect, who entered the limelight since 1932, the year of the closure of the Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany, with the publication of an article called “The International Style”. One may call this piece the clarion call heralding the approach and dominance of the “Bauhaus idea” in the U.S., since the International Style was that style of modernist architecture that was “crystallized” at the Bauhaus from important, often contradictory ideological approaches to individual and social identity and form which had come into prominence at the turn of the 20th century and its pre World War I years. Clarion call also, of course, since the next few years were to see the emigration to the U.S. of several major creative personalities from the Bauhaus, including both its founding and terminating directors, the architects Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe(1886-1969), and the consequent shaping of modern American and world architecture by the ideas of this school. In this, the ‘synthesis’ that was creatively realized in Weimar Germany, may be seen, like the Hegelian Zeitgeist, to have migrated to a more favorable environment for its manifestation and further evolution – America, the nation with no history, the ‘international nation’, where “starting from zero” (Gropius’ term), mankind might build the structure of the ideal life, “like the crystal symbol of a new faith”.

Though, by 1980, when the Orange County “Crystal Cathedral” was being built, Philip Johnson, in typical ‘modernist’ style, was re-identifying himself, altering his stance from that of the founder of the “International Style” to that of the originator of “Post-modernism”, the shift was to be seen as not a break but a modification and an evolution, a ‘re-dressing’ of some of the issues implicit in the International Style, which had, since, more clearly articulated their cohabitational discomforts. Nor are these discomforts absent in Johnson’s structure, the anticlimactic appropriation of visionary idealism and architectural genius by questionable dehumanizing and mediocratizing interests, be they garbed as consumerism, socialism, nationalism or religion, being the ironic and somewhat quixotic adventure of modern architecture in its search for the perfect structure to house the human spirit. In this adventure, a grand initiatory note is struck by the Bauhaus, Johnson’s work being a continuation of the ongoing text. Johnson’s “Crystal Cathedral” is pre-figured in the Bauhaus Manifesto, as hinted already, both terms of his appellate being present in it : the Manifesto is illustrated by Lyonel Feininger‘s woodcut, “The Socialist Cathedral”, and Gropius’ text mentions “the crystal symbol of a new faith”. Moreover, several other features of resemblance between the two are noteworthy:

1) In the illustration for the Bauhaus Manifesto, Feinenger’s soaring cathedral spires are illuminated by five-pointed stars, an echo of which may be seen in the four-pointed star shape of Johnson’s cathedral;

2) Though the illustration supposedly shows a Gothic cathedral, the depiction of space in it is complicated by deliberate continuations in lines constituting the cathedral, as if through transparencies, the emphatic verticality of sheer rising columns, surrounding and including the cathedral lines, and oblique rays streaming out from the three apical stars. These create the impression of the cut faces of a crystal, with its multiple internal reflections; while being echoed also in the vertical glass faces of Johnson’s cathedral.

3) Gropius’ text invokes the image of the cathedral of the ‘future’, therefore presumably built with new ‘futuristic’ materials, ‘rising towards heaven’, emphasizing the verticality.

Finally, as if inviting the association between this ‘future’ and its content, comes the phrase, “like the crystal symbol of a new faith” .

At the outset, the ideas of ‘crystal’ and ‘cathedral’ as references in the Manifesto seem innocent enough. But more persistent attention draws out a complexity of connotation that relates these terms to varied idea-forces that can be seen as trying to define individual and social identity in terms of structure, material and function. Spiritual, social, political, economic and aesthetic issues clamor for dominance behind this symbol of the future trajectory and habitation of the universal human. In this essay, focusing on the metaphor of the “crystal cathedral” as central to the Bauhaus idea, I will attempt to identify what these background issues were and how they were sought to be harmonized by the style and community that evolved at the Bauhaus.

The turn of the 20th century in Europe in general, and Germany in particular, was an extremely fertile period for the shaping of new ideologies. Rapid industrialization in the latter part of the 19th century had introduced pervasive social changes, giving rise in result, to humanistic reactions against mechanization. These reactions took many forms, ranging from the proliferation of esoteric cults to the study of metaphysical writings. The teachings of German mystics such as Jakob Bohme and Meister Eckhart became popular, as did non-western philosophies, such as Hinduism and Buddhism and esoteric “sciences” such as Rosicrucianism and Theosophy. On the other hand, German imperialism and nationalism were on the rise, and were contended by ideas of democracy, anarchism and socialism. Creative artists of all kinds felt and spoke about a crisis of the human soul and strove to load their work with the messages which would shape a new individual in a new society. In this sense, the creative artist took on the role of the prophet, the soul or conscience of afflicted humanity, who as the founder or follower of an ideological stylistic movement, saw his or her work as significant and propagative of transformational values. This background is important in understanding the artist’s perception of him/herself as fulfilling a self-appointed sacred function in society and of the creative act as an independent power, equal in importance to political or economic agendas.

One such stylistic movement that swelled in its importance in Germany and elsewhere in the European continent, influencing varied practices until the 1920s, when post-war disappointment discredited it, was Expressionism. The stylistic category Expressionism first came to be used to describe the brilliant color effects and textures originated in French Fauve painting and carried over into the works of the Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter in Germany. Among the artists of the Blaue Reiter, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) published, in early 1912, his “On the Spiritual in Art“, equating abstraction with spirituality. Prior to Kandinsky, the art historian Wilhelm Worringer had published a treatise “Abstraction and Empathy” in 1908, linking abstract styles with transcendental points of view. Kandinsky and the other members of the Blaue Reiter were familiar with Worringer’s ideas, and his publication combined with their group’s artistic practices, became instrumental in the relating of abstraction and Expressionism; and with the equation of antinaturalism with antimaterialism and antipositivism to such an extent, that this new style was soon perceived as a means for expressing visions of an utopic spiritual world.

Kandinsky’s interest in eastern philosophies and his explicit affiliation with Theosophy and the ideas of the leader of the German Theosophical Society, Rudolf Steiner(1865-1921), played no meager part in the development of his own artistic ideas and those of many of the creative personalities of his time. Moreover, the universalism of Theosophy and its development of correspondences between shapes, colors, sounds and psychic states led him to see in abstraction an international visual language, equally applicable and influential for all humanity.

An important publicist for transcendentalist Expressionism was the art dealer Herwarth Walden, who operated the Sturm gallery in Berlin. Through his exhibitions, publications and the periodical he edited, Der Sturm, an entire generation learned about Expressionism and abstraction as the essence of the international modern movement and Kandinsky as its high priest. Soon, architects too began to claim the term Expressionism for architectural innovations and to use Kandinsky’s theories and interpretations of color as support for new theories in architecture.

As in the visual arts, in the field of architecture, important innovations were in progress. The impact of the Industrial Revolution in England had already resulted in a decided reaction in decorative style, with William Morris and his Arts and Crafts movement, which sought to resist mechanization through the preservation of fine craftsmanship. This revivalism of the medieval organization of decorative practice in the form of craftsman’s guilds and the abolition of distinction between artist and craftsman became part of Germany’s ideological matrix, elements of it showing up prominently in Gropius’ Manifesto : “Artists, sculptors, painters, we all must return to the crafts! For art is not a ‘profession’. There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the primary source of creative imagination. Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.”

However, the contrary view of architecture as allied to industry, conditioning it aesthetically, while utilizing its new materials and enhanced handling methods, was even more prevalent, Gropius’ own designs for the Fagus and Werkbund exhibition factories bearing testimony to this trend. Important in the establishment of the close relationship of industry and craftsmanship in German architecture was Hermann Muthesius, who in 1907, founded the Deutscher Werkbund, the first of many societies, which sprang up throughout Europe to improve standards in design and industry. Its aims, laid down in its statutes, were, to unite “artists, craftsman, experts and patrons, intent on an improvement of production through the collaboration of art, industry and the crafts.” This statement can be seen to be very similar to Gropius’ Manifesto, except for its conscious inclusion of “industry”, (omitted in Gropius) and its prosaic lack of mystical romanticism. Gropius was a member of the Werkbund, as was Bruno Taut (1880-1938), a close associate and friend of Gropius. Bruno Taut was also closely connected with Herwarth Walden’s Sturm circle, and befriended there the poet, Scheerbert, whom Walden called “the first Expressionist”. Since the 1890s, Scheerbert had been associating with the Theosophists and drew on their theories as well as Eastern spiritual writings and the works of Boehme and Meister Eckhart to describe the colored lights of the astral planes. Taut met Scheerbert in 1912, and was impressed by his views on architecture as an art which could transform human consciousness through the induction of meditative processes. Just before the outbreak of World War I, at the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition at Cologne, Taut collaborated with Scheerbert on a glass pavilion where colored glass and Scheerbert’s mystical inscriptions were combined to evoke a transcendental atmosphere. Scheerbert’s aphorisms reflected both men’s mystical faith in color and light : “Light wants to penetrate the whole cosmos and is alive in the crystal.” Clearly, once again, the crystal cathedral!

The polar ideas of the new art and architecture as being on the one hand, a revival of the German Gothic in modern times, and on the other, an international futuristic style, persisted in the perceptions of both commentators and practitioners of these arts. Where Walden saw Expressionsim as an international drive against materialism, Paul Fechter in his 1914 book, Expressionismus, emphasized its rootedness in the communal metaphysical tradition of the Gothic. In his essays in Der Sturm, Taut emphasized the “religious intensity” needed to strive for forms expressive of metaphysical thoughts. He extolled the Gothic period as a time when artists had collaborated to create monumental works, but also urged architects to use new materials – glass, iron and concrete – in designs that would intensify spiritual feelings as they worked with other artists to create a temple to art.

Gropius’ views were influenced to a great extent by Taut. Immediately after the November Revolution, Taut and Gropius formed an artists’ council based on the Soviet model : the Arbeitsrat fur Junst (Work Council for Art). The aim of this council was to unite art and the people by reforming art education, organizing exhibitions and bringing together all the arts to build a great temple to the future. Taut’s theories dominated the Arbeitsrat. He advised architects to learn from such painters as Kandinsky, methods that could assist in the creation of an ideal communitarian society. As symbols of such a society, he envisaged monumental colored-glass temples of culture rising from the center of small, decentralized communities. In 1920, Taut published “The Dissolution of the Cities“, which he called a parable for the “Third Millenium”, and in which he advocated a form of architecture combining colored glass and music to create meditation environments, in which individuals would become one with their community and ultimately with the universe.

These ideas had a strong influence on Gropius. In April 1919, he teamed up with Taut and Adolf Behne to organize “The Exhibition of Unknown Artists“, inviting architects, painters and sculptors who had “faith in the future” and believed that “one day a philosophy of life [would] exist and then its symbol, its crystallization – architecture – [would] also exist.” (italics mine) A majority of the exhibitors presented representations of visionary structures, a typical case being that of Johannes Molzahn,

illustrating crystalline tower shapes as exemplary monuments of future utopian society. In fact, the intersection of Molzahn with Gropius and Taut was not coincidental. An important participant of Walden’s Sturm group, Molzahn lived in Weimar, and though he never joined the Bauhaus faculty, was closely connected with it, recommending other young artists, such as Georg Muche for appointment to the school.

In the same month as “The Exhibition of Unknown Artists“, Gropius opened the Bauhaus. The idea of the merging of all arts in order to create the transformational structures for society, along with Gropius’ choice of painters to lead the design and fine arts courses from among the proponents of abstract transcendentalist Expressionism, established the tenor of the Bauhaus as the think tank and the experimental society for fashioning the future crystal cathedral. With the exception of Gerhard Marcks, the major fine arts instructors, Johannes Itten (1888-1967), Georg Muche (1895-1986), Lyonel Feininger, and eventually, Kandinsky – all shared Gropius’ mystical, utopian vision of transforming society through architectural and educational reform. When he wished to appoint Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) to the staff, Gropius had to write to Edwin Redslob, minister of culture, for assistance in dealing with the new government’s fears that the two Swiss-born artists were “more wildly expressionistic than the artists already present”. In making the Bauhaus a residential educational system, organized in the fashion of medieval guild societies, with the instructors addressed as Meisters, Gropius echoed both traditional German metaphysics as well as some of the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement of England. However, a third connotational component went into this choice – that of the secret esoteric lodge, whose members practiced magical ceremonies, seeking the collective experience of a higher consciousness. In an early speech to Bauhaus faculty and students in July, 1919, Gropius drew explicit attention to this reference, as, once again, to the image of the crystal cathedral. He mentioned that they should all see themselves as part of a “secret lodge” that would help work out a “new, great world idea”; and that the times were a catastrophic period of world history in which much misery and privation would have to be endured before “spiritual and religious ideas” would find their “crystalline expression” in a great “cathedral [shining] its light into [the] smallest things of everyday life.”

A brief consideration of some of the artists spoken of also reinforces the prevalence of these ideas, both as pre-Bauhaus tendencies in them and as shaping influences during their Bauhaus days. The case of Johannes Itten is perhaps the most striking. Itten had also been acquainted with the Expressionist circles around Walden and had exhibited at the Sturm gallery in the spring of 1916. During these years, his experimentation with abstraction as a transcendental style intensified, and he explained in a letter to Walden that his paintings would henceforth be directed towards “primary matter” through the search for crystalline shapes, referring to the crystal as “fermenting mother’s milk”. Like Scheerbert, Itten used the crystal metaphor to convey his own commitment to communicating spirituality through the purest means. In the fall of 1916, Itten moved to Vienna, where he remained till he was invited by Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus. It was here that he read Indian philosophy and pursued Theosophy, to which Gropius’ first wife, Alma Mahler, is said to have introduced him. In 1918, he found the theosophical text Thought Forms, by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, and noted that after comparing their charts with his paintings, he was impressed by their equations of color and psychic states. At the Bauhaus, his spiritual interests further intensified, as he turned, with cult-like intensity, towards the practice of the principles of the Zoroastrian-based Mazdaznan ideology, with its heightened awareness of a battle between the forces of Good and Evil and the need for conscious choices at every instant and in all one’s works. Itten’s spiritual extremism combined with his dominating personality at the Bauhaus soon plunged the community, willy-nilly, into a disciplinarian environment of yoga practices and vegetarianism, ultimately leading to a split into two camps and Itten’s resignation from the Bauhaus in 1922. However, two facts are noteworthy and often overlooked in discussions of Itten’s contribution at the Bauhaus:

  1. Itten’s own artistic style at the Bauhaus showed a subtle shift from figurative references through abstraction, to a play of pure geometric form and luminous color. The paintings of this period, apart from the experiments using artistic lettering, (and often, even there) resemble kaleidoscopic visions, as seen through the impact of light on multicolored crystals.
  2. The fact that Itten could succeed in determining Bauhaus communal practice so completely for a while may be seen as at least partially due to the ideological orientation given to it by Gropius from the beginning, with the expectation that members of the community were participants of a model society leading to an utopian future.

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Post-Itten Bauhaus veered away from spiritual extremism to a more moderate idealism and a greater concern for the prevalent social condition in the environment. Moderatism also in the alignment with industry as against an uncompromising visionary stance was emphasized by Gropius, both in recognition of the need for architecture to engage with mechanization and its dependence on industry and government for funds to survive. However, Gropius did not abandon his idealism due to the Itten episode, bringing in Kandinsky, who had returned from a disappointing liaison with communism in Russia, to fill in Itten’s place. Considering that Kandinsky was already considered one of the founders of transcendentalism in art, Gropius’ choice evidences his continued faith in the power of spirituality to shape art and identity.

Though Kandinsky’s contribution to the fundamental ideas that went into utopian expressionism have already been discussed, his stay at the Bauhaus, saw a shift in his own artistic expression. While his earlier abstract forms had a more free-flowing appearance, his choice of forms now, like Itten’s, began

showing a greater concern for geometry. Typical paintings of this period are “Circles within a Circle” and “Several Circles”, where circular forms seem to reflect and refract one another, as in a regular transparent colored object struck by light – another echo of the crystal. With the closure of the Bauhaus, Kandinsky’s abstraction returned, once again, to a new direction – this time, the exploration of more organic forms, resembling microbiological life-forms as seen under a microscope. Thus, the Bauhaus period, seems unique in Kandinsky’s output, determined quite probably, by the guiding influence of the symbol of the crystal cathedral.

Feinenger’s cubist-influenced crystallic human and other natural forms and apparitional presences manifesting in intersecting light rays, Georg Muche’s cosmic themes and Josef Alber’s color experiemnts may all be seen in this light. The matter can be fruitfully further investigated; however, it may be more useful to draw together, at this point, the various meanings that the metaphor crystal cathedral had/has become associated with at the Bauhaus, as form representative of identity:

  1. Crystal as pure – as in crystalline. The idea of a transformed identity as being purified of its “mire and complexities”
  2. Crystal as transparent – The idea of identity as fully articulated and thus without the need for hiding anything. Gropius advocated the exposure of inner processes to the outward gaze as conducive to a total view of identity. Of course, this is an extreme form of idealism, open to abuse by unscrupulous elements in a control society, as in Bentham’s panopticon. It can work only in a sufficiently psychologically transformed community of trust; but the faith of Gropius and others of his leaning in the shaping power of architecture as a transformative influence, caused him to espouse this view.
  3. Crystal as reflective and refractive – The idea of identity as revelational and polyvalent, holding within itself living images of its community (refraction) and mirroring its community (reflection).
  4. Crystal as vibrational – The idea of identity as sympathetic, vibrating in unison with others of the community at a pre-verbal level of consciousness.
  5. Crystal as sacred – The idea of identity as historically linked to occult traditions and magical practices in all times and societies and housing a powerful mystery
  6. Crystal as international – the idea of identity as lacking any historical or national bias. This became the foundation of the International Style.
  7. Crystal as futuristic – the idea of identity as materially constituted so as to evidence miraculous powers of control and handling. This idea leads to the alignment and fascination of the Bauhaus with modern technology, and combined with its international styling, to contradictions with medievalism, nationalism and decentralization.
  8. Crystal as perfection – the idea of identity as partaking of the miraculous regularity of perfection evidenced in the natural world through the crystal.
  9. Crystal as synthesis – the idea of individual and social identity as being the minimal distillate of many forces or varied individualities/particularities uniting in the crucible of transformation and emerging as simple identity, an alchemical usage.
  10. Crystal as united diversity – the idea of individual and communal identity as united but not through the suppression of individual expression, these having become articulated as the different facets of the crystal.
  11. Cathedral as the temple – the idea of identity as sacred space. The difficulty here is what is installed at the center of this sacred space. In transcendentalist terms, it is a formless mystery, the source of creative inspiration and mystical revelation that is installed here. But that interpretation has been and remains constantly subjected to the manipulative impulses of partial, partisan answers – the nationalist Swastika, socialist or industrial uniformity, religious dogma.

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As exampled in Philip Johnson’s building, near to us in time and space, this organizing metaphor of the Bauhaus idea can be seen to be still very much alive and among us. Also, as in that example, its anticlimactic and dubiously compromised usage continues to be equally evident, spotlighting a central deficiency in the image of the architect as an independent creative shaper of society through spatial and environmental conditioning.

The crystal cathedral as an utopic form representative of identity in the future, as envisaged by Gropius and his associates, thus remains unmanifest, in spite of its many approximations and compromises with false gods, its idealism a magnetic image whose subtle pressure continues working on human identity, its transformative influence more astral than material. It is a structure whose idea was before its time and doomed to remain so until mankind changes.

The primary deficiency of modernism may be observed in this failure. The endeavor to build a collective communitarian space, which Gropius and Taut attempted in principle, was given the lie by the exigencies of the time. Modernism is the artistic response to modernity, a paean song to the gigantism of the human ego, driven by the larger-than-life unified Subject and its rejection of anchors in time, with the towering monolithic skyscraper as his totem and dwelling space.  The “crystal cathedral” here had to shear its communitarian function and stand isolated in its libidinous alienation, the ironic intersection of creative ego and the market. With its seeking for “a new beginning” this crystal became an appropriate emblem of Modernity’s Machine Age, cold, abstract, lacking any cultural or historical reference. Modernity’s ecology of speed, the production of accelerated surplus and accelerated obsolescence found its simulation of ruptured time, an eternal  succession of futures without past well suited by its rhetoric. When Philip Johnson tried to distance himself from Modernism, with the founding of Postmodern Architecture, all he could address of this deficiency was the ahistoricity of the symbol. Deliberately working in motifs of nostalgia, he reinvented collective memory in the American dwelling. But such memory was spurious, since the dweller and dwelling were still under the thralldom of techno-capitalism, ubiquitous modernity, which offered the subjective ideal of the individual with one hand and conditioned subjectivity to the global market with the other. The hour of true postmodernity, that defined by Gropius’ or Taut’s original dream, community which prioritizes creative intersubjectivity free from conditioning, was still distant.

Can we think of this today? Could there be a structure, the soul of a decentralized utopic collective, as Taut envisaged, whose sheer perfection could transform identity in the community at whose center it stands? Without a collective will to an alternate habitus, free from the determining agency of the world market, it would be impossible.  Auroville is the Mother’s experiment to give body to this ideal. And the Matrimandir is her crystal cathedral, the soul of the city. And in this, in its communitarian subjectivity, it is less monolithic quartz than multi-faceted diamond. But nevertheless, though oriented through its charter, towards the sustainable collective expansion of spiritual subjectivity, the lessons of Gropius and Taut cannot be neglected by it if the structure at its center is to manifest its truth as the soul of a city. For this, the aspiration for perfection of identity in the inhabitants of the city would need to reach a critical mass before it could manifest. An uncompromising purity, a will to Harmony, a collective universality, a clear discrimination and a refusal to suffer conditioning by the forces of sectarian, economic or egoistic interests in a sufficient number are perhaps the exacting psychological conditions that need to be fulfilled.

From Mother’s Prayers and Meditations, May 25, 1914, we read:

Oh, to be the pure flawless crystal which lets thy divine ray pass without obscuring, colouring or distorting it. Not from a desire for perfection, but so that Thy work may be done as perfectly as possible.

And when I ask Thee this, the “I” which speaks to Thee is the entire Earth, aspiring to be this pure diamond, a perfect reflector of Thy supreme light.

The crystal cathedral is not a mere material construct. It is the Mother’s Body and the future earth, which seek human collaboration to manifest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. Wingler, Hans M., The Bauhaus Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969.
  2. Forgacs, Eva, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, Central European University Press, 1995.
  3. Wolfe, Tom, From Bauhaus to Our House, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1981.
  4. Naylor, Gillian, The Bauhaus, Studio Vista, London, 1968.
  5. Naylor, Gillian, The Bauhaus Reassessed, Dutton, New York, 1985.
  6. Tuchman, Maurice et al., The Spiritual in Art : Abstract Painting 1890-1985, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986.
  7. Bax, Marty, Bauhaus Lecture Notes : 1930-1933, Architectura and Natura Press, Amsterdam, 1991.
  8. Poling, Clark V., Bauhaus Color, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, 1975.
  9. Conrads, Ulrich and Sprelich, Hans G. ed., The Architecture of Fantasy, ed., Praeger, New York, 1962.
  10. Whyte, Iain Boyd, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982.
  11. The Mother, Prayers and Meditations, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1997.
  12. Jhunjunwala, Shyam Sundar, From the Editor’s Desk, Sri Aurobindo’s Action, Pondicherry, 1998.

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The Promise of the Future

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Debashish Banerji
AUM 2005
Port Townsend Conf. Ctr., WA
Fri. 10 June, 2005

The theme of this conference is the promise of the future; so let us
start with a namaskar from the present to the future. When this
conference was formulated, in the mind of Richard Carlson, he had
certain pressing objectives in mind. And we started an email forum to
discuss some of these; and at this conference it is hoped that some of
these objectives, issues, debates will come to surface in the minds of
all the people here, and we take back with us something that fertilizes
our lives and our sadhana, our yoga, our engagement with the world, our
orientation towards the future.

Somewhere in her prayers and meditations, the Mother had written:

“A new light will break upon the
world, upon the Earth, a new world will be born, the things that were
promised will be fulfilled.”

On the 24th of April, 1956, she reiterated this message in a new form. She said:


“A new light breaks upon the Earth, a new world is born, the things that were promised are fulfilled.”

Of course the Mother was referring to the event that occurred on the 29th of February, 1956, an occult event that she called “the manifestation of the supramental on Earth.”
What are we to make of this statement, this promise that “has been
fulfilled?” And what are we to make of the meaning of the future that we
all strive to gain some sort of insight into, some kind of orientation
towards, in the light of the Mother's statement?
Some people asked the Mother, “What were the promises that were fulfilled?” And she said:

“Don't you know? All traditions have
spoken about this. This is the hope, the aspiration, the dream of
humanity that there will come a time when perfection will be achieved
on earth.”

Yes indeed, many traditions have spoken about this. Buddhism waits for
the coming of Maitreya, the future Buddha who will create a perfect
world. St. John's gospel predicts the arrival of the perfect Kingdom of
Heaven on Earth. And the Initiates, the faithful, the followers believe
that by following, by being faithful, by being initiated, they are
somehow privy to this coming, that it will come of its own. That it
will come, and they will be there in the Ark, the ship that will
suddenly one day alight upon the other shore, and the world will be
perfect for them.

In Religious Studies departments throughout the United States of
America, they have coined a term for this: it is called Millenarianism.
It means 'waiting for the Divine Millennium,' whichever Millennium it
may be [laughter]. Some turning of an age that will suddenly part the
curtains, and the future will spill into our lives. But do we have any
place for consciousness in this? Is it just a waiting of the faithful?
Or is there something to be done, something to prepare? Today in
America, there is a growing New Age movement. The New Age Movement
believes that we have moved into a new age, the Age of Aquarius.
Everything is changing, the Spirit is close to us, and all we have to
do is in some ways to tailor the surface of our lives, become
vegetarians, do yoga of the physical kind, have a smattering of
ecological discourse in our everyday lives, and we will be part of the
New Age. A day has arrived in the calendar that marks the astrological
shift called the Age of Aquarius.

Are we to be satisfied with this? Are the promises that are fulfilled an
astrologism? Is it just the turning of the page of some calendar? Or is
the future, which is in some sense the present, now, today, to be
experienced in consciousness as a present-future? And what does that
mean?

These are some of the questions I hope we carry with us, that can be
stimulated by this conference, and that we really internalize — not
only in our minds, but in our feelings, in our will, and in our
actions. We come into this world, and we are already on a number of
trajectories. There are a number of clocks that are ticking as soon as
we arrive. These are not just individual, subjective clocks. These are
given clocks, clocks that expand to include the world. And in some
sense, when we talk of the future, all over the world today, we are
talking of a single calendar, which we use in our home, our offices. It
is the calendar of what is called “the Common Era.”

The Common Era, it's a new name, to disguise the earlier name
[laughter] which pins its origin at the birth of Christ. Today we don't
want to call it that because this calendar has spilled its religious
intent, and in any case the religious intent was not the real intent,
it was another intent. The religious intent was a convenience for a
secular intent. But it is a single clock, a clock, whenever it ticks
from, that includes us all. And this clock is another ship that is
taking us to a certain destination. What is happening in the captain's
cabin is not so easy to know, perhaps an occult hijacking is in
process. And that change, or that determination of the movement of the
ship, is also something that I hope we will bring into our thoughts,
understandings, and our actions.

The Common Era is a term that makes sense today, in a global age, all
over the world, because of a process, that has been named in various
ways by various thinkers, but one particular German thinker, Heidegger,
has given it a very appropriate name. He has called it “the
Europeanization of the world.” Today, maybe it's a little anachronistic
to talk of Europeanization, but nevertheless, this is where this
movement begins. The time period of its beginning is hazy; it is
sometime in the 16th or 17th century, and it begins with a change of
faith. It is not a loss of faith, as people usually believe, it is a
change of faith. There is a shift from what is known as the Middle Ages
in Europe, the ages of darkness and superstition, but at the same time
of belief and faith, to an age which turns from the notion of a
transcendental God determining our lives through its elect church, to a
notion of a direct contact with some principle that from then on is
assumed to be the goal of our endeavors – and this principle is
'Reason.'

The change in faith that occurs is because it is suddenly realized that
there is no need to turn to some kind of a priesthood to interpret the
word of God, because the word of God is everywhere around us. It is in
Nature, it is in our lives, it is around us, it is in the stars, it is
a patterning, it is an order, it is a causation that has intelligence
to it. The intuition of an intelligent universe marks the shift in the
age of the Common Era. The world has Reason.

But the shift from that understanding to the hubris of Man, who
believes that with his Reason he can match the Reason of God, that in
some sense we can use our minds, our intelligence, to become equal to
the intelligence that is distributed so perfectly around us, is the
beginning of what is called the Enlightenment. It is not a conspiracy,
it is not a school of elect who begin this process of thinking, it is a
variety of thinkers, a variety of approaches.

But perhaps from our point of view, looking back, it is a conspiracy. It is an occult conspiracy.
It is the spirit of the Age, the Zeitgeist, that chooses to bring about
a change in Time, and a change in our relationship with experience, a
change in our fundamental experience. It launches us into a new world.
It launches us into the world in which we are today, a world that is
continuing to be with us and is taking us towards its own future. It is
the most obvious future that people all over the world are faced with.
It begins with the glorious, noble idea of Omniscience – man will know
all things by engaging with knowledge everywhere, using his mind.

And in this process, there is an immediate division between Man and his
world. I use the word “Man” advisedly, because who is the subject of
this investigation becomes one of the major debates that has pursued us
through all these centuries. And to start with, it is Western, White
Men who is the subject of this objectification of the world, of this
turning of the world into a object of study, of investigation, of the
yielding up of the reason of its existence.

And somehow, though made in the name of humanity everywhere and for all
time, made in the name of a knowledge that will enlighten us, a reason
that will liberate us, because, once we know fully we will be free, it
has yet persisted through all these centuries in maintaining its
stance, its question, on “Who is that Man, for whom, in whose name this
inquiry is conducted?” That somehow the voyages of discovery, the
movements all over the world, have been done in the name of Science,
because Western White Man has brought his civilization to the hapless
peoples, yellow, brown, and black [and red!], who somehow are less
human than the subject of this inquiry – brought a civilization, and
has felt justified in exploiting, using, treating as fodder, treating as
condition-able, these other peoples of the world.

This movement very soon shows its other face, that indeed, it is not a
Will to Knowledge, but a Will to Power that drives the will to
Knowledge. A will to power that is less noble than what it makes itself
to be, that turns itself on the world, exploits its resources, turns
itself on the peoples of the world, and wherever it finds weakness,
exploits it, in the name of Science. So perhaps Omnipotence, rather
than Omniscience, is the watchword of this ship, a kind of coming to
absolute power.

A variety of critiques have been launched against this, but this is the
world that persists, its machinery becoming ubiquitous and more and
more invisible with time. Its markets spread all over the world,
homogenizing everybody, everything, creating desire – because indeed,
to persist in its trajectory, to create surplus, to create markets
where that surplus can be off-loaded, to draw on people who will
willingly give their bodies, minds, feelings, lives to its purpose, it
needs to create desire.

The production of desire in the modern world, is indeed one of the
primary machineries, prime machineries, of this trajectory in which we
find ourselves from our birth, which is leading in a certain direction -
which had foreseen, many, many centuries before the Mother's statement
- the globalization of the world, the unification of the world, the
homogenization of the world, and the bringing of Reason to all human
beings.

But this Reason, where does it reside? Have we arrived at Omniscience,
have we arrived at Omnipotence, or is there someone, anyone, any human
being who has arrived at these things? Who is the Subject of this? Is
there any individual that can claim to be the possessor of these gains,
today, in this late stage of the Enlightenment's trajectory?

Or are these gains in some way resident in some occult power that has become materialized,
that in some sense has become pure Machinery, pure Circulation, to
which people, whatever position they may occupy, wherever they may be,
are both subject and object, objects of its will, created in its
shapes, bound by its laws, forced by its hand?

Is this the future, or is there another future, another future that
coexists with this? There has been a sudden multitude of voices that
comes to us from the mid 20th Century, that hold out a hopeful view of
the globalization of the world, of the unifying technologies, of the
sudden spurt of integration of our technological world, which is beyond
our control, that is leading us. Is it perhaps that we have been opened
up, willy-nilly, to experiences that would not be possible to us, that
even as we suffer the standardization of the Enlightenment, what opens
up in us is a new consciousness, a new spirituality, a new spirituality
which is a new materiality, an intuition of the Spirit in Matter, of
united, or unified, Matter?

Is it possible that certain experiences are being prepared in us, even
as we are plowed under by the machines that are preparing this global
age? This is a question to ask, a question that I hope will pursue us,
follow us, through this conference and beyond it. I draw attention to
the fact that the Mother was keenly aware of the possible
misconstruction of her Promise, of the “things that were promised which
are [now] fulfilled.” She tells us time and again,

“This is not the time for rest and complacency, this is the time to be heroic.”

We are not called to be the initiates of an order that will catch us
just by dint of the fact of being initiates. Perhaps in 1969, the
Mother gave a New Year message. She said:


“Blessed are those that take a leap towards the future.”


Again the question arises, what is this future? This is, among the
other late messages of the Mother, a very enigmatic message. What is
the future, what is the blessing, and what is the leap?

This future can be named by us, but named only through the vocabulary
of Sri Aurobindo, named from the dictionary of Sri Aurobindo. We can
call this future “the Life Divine.” Or the Divine Life, if you would
have it simply, without Sri Aurobindo's inversion.

But what is the Divine Life? Again, using his terminology, we can call
it “an integrality of being and experience.” And this is not an
individual integrality, it is a total integrality, an integrality which
is global, and therefore takes in its scope the integral body of
humanity. The Divine Life is not led by one human being, the Divine
Life is a social context. What are the conditions that make this social
context possible? Is it an unquestioning acceptance of what happens
around us, what we find ourselves in, what determines our world for us?
Or is it an openness to the world that we are being called upon to
create, to co-create? Because it is already here among us. Is it an
invitation, an invitation to understand and to participate?

What is the Blessing? Is it perhaps Mother's way of saying that it is
easy to conform, it is easy to be one with whatever choices are given
to us by that which is creating us, determining us, but that if we
choose to open ourselves, not merely in essence, but in nature, not
only in nature, but in action, to open those parts of our Will, of our
destiny, to a higher truth, a greater law of world becoming, that maybe
her Blessing is with us? Maybe that difficult enterprise, that seems so
impossible, of going against the grain of the prevalent forces that
structure the world, has been given that special sanction, guidance and
Grace? How can we know, if we haven't even tried?

It is that which we need to bring into the Yoga. Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother have given us two collective contexts. They have given us
Pondicherry, the Ashram, and they have given us Auroville. These are
collective contexts for the carrying out of the Integral Yoga, social
contexts. They are not immune to technology; in fact technology is
fully represented there. They are as much a part of this global world
as New York, Los Angeles, or Tokyo. But they offer different conditions
for the flowering of technology.

And it is perhaps these different conditions that open up for us those
different experiences — experiences of the Spirit in Matter, of the
Oneness that is organizing matter today, as a form of consciousness.
What are those conditions and how do they differ internally and
externally, psychologically and materially from the conditions of our
modern cities? Can we make those conditions possible in our lives? Can
we take the steps towards that? To answer that question, we have to
first ask the question – Do we feel the imperative for that? Do we feel
the danger of its opposite? Has our aspiration made itself detailed
enough? Has it included in itself enough of the integrality of being?
Or is our aspiration partial, does it stop somewhere, where it believes
“This is the inward life, and that is all that's needed?”

And finally, to ask the question about the “Leap” – “Blessed are those
who take a leap towards the future.” What is that leap? What does it
imply? What gives us the motor power to achieve it? And where does it
lead us? The first thing to realize in Mother's statement is a
fundamental sense of the word “future” that is directed toward the idea
of the leap. The “future” is a discontinuity from the present, the
future is not the present extending itself. The future is not the
Enlightenment that knows from the very beginning what it will achieve,
even though its effects are unpredictable.

Just as Life appeared in Matter, Mind appeared in Life, and at each
stage there was a discontinuity in consciousness – we still carry in
ourselves the scar, the mark, of that discontinuity. Our lack of
integration is the mark of that discontinuity. So too, a discontinuity
faces us today, the discontinuity of the future. In a radical sense,
the future is not coextensive with the present; and the only attitude
we can have towards the future is a radical openness to the
transcendent.

Our aspiration proceeds from the present. What returns to it from above
is an increasingly, progressively clarifying vision and an integration
of our own aspiration. The aspiration clarifies, it becomes more
detailed, it knows what it's about. There is a progress to aspiration.
But there is another side  as the engine of aspiration and Grace
propels us forward, there is required in us one other necessary
component  and that is the surrender to the future, the
receptivity to that which has not come into being, that which invites
us.

And to remember at all times that we are not the creators of this
future but that the future is creating us in its image. “A divine
perfection is moulding us in its own image”  Sri Aurobindo's
words. But until we can aspire for that and hold that openness to the
radically Other, to the Transcendent, we cannot reach there, that Day
will not dawn on us, the present will always remain present and the
future, which is already here, the promise which is already fulfilled -
that the Mother has given us – will remain beckoning without our
participation.

I hope this forms the scope of some of the ideas which we take up in this AUM and with that I will take your leave.

_____________
Transcribed by
Ron Anastasia
Marina del Rey, CA, USA
(rjon@vzavenue.net)

Life Divine Studies via Skype by Debashish Banerji

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Life Divine classes via Skype, by Debashish Banerji
by Ron on April 13, 2007 11:00AM (PDT)
Debashish Banerji conducts Skype-based online studies on Sri Aurobindo’s opus “The Life Divine” every Thursday from 7:30-9:30 PST. The audio recordings are archived. You can listen to recordings of these classes in their archived location at:
Life Divine studies via Skype, by Debashish Banerji, Ph.D.

To join the Skype conference, please send your Skype Id to Debashish at debbanerji@yahoo.com

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Two Japanese Poems by Debashish Banerji

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These two poems were written after a trip to Japan in December 2003. The first, titled Uji, refers to a town with a famous bridge where the late 12th c. hero Yoshitsune fought a legendary battle and where Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the 16th c. shogun initiated the Zen cult of tea. Uji is famous to this day for its tea but its earliest claim to fame was the Phoenix Hall or Byodo-in built by a Fujiwara aristocrat in 1053. This building, so called, because it seems poised for flight with outspread wings (while simultaneously plunging into the underworld through its reflection in water), replicates within the perfect world of Amitabha Buddha holding this aspiration for the world’s future. The second poem, titled Taikan’s House is about the home of the famous nationalist (Nihonga) painter Yokoyama Taikan. Taikan’s house in the Ueno suburb of Tokyo is now a museum of his works. When I visited during a brief stopover in Tokyo, the curators were exhibiting Taikan’s wate-related paintings.

1. UJI

Cars flowing across Uji bridge at sunset
Fail to see the ghost of Yoshitsune
Grimacing in his exotic and bloodied armour.

And here now appears Hideyoshi
With his long spoon dipping for tea-water
As in a moryoga painting laughter fading around him.

The sighing wind ripples through tea branches
Fields once strewn like fruit with felled bodies
The mind hollows with the earthy scent of Zen.

Like a sorrow-mad and tongue-uprooted stork
Mourning its dead lover, on the desolate shore
A girl runs back and forth aimlessly.

The rapids swallow the restless sound of her steps
The spare and lonely trees gesture weirdly
White sand cools the fevered brow of Time.

Above, the moon, like an enormous golden lantern –
Byodo-in like a phoenix poised for flight
Its slender legs anchored in still water.

As it pulls upward its perfect replica shadow
Prepares unceasingly for the plunge below,
Sleeplessly the Fujiwara nobles witness.

Along the rim of stillness only their sentinel eyes
Behold the shimmering incandescent country
Spilling like dawn across the extended earth.

2. TAIKAN’S HOUSE

Tokyo machined without excess
Light and shiny as aircraft
Manicured to atomic precision.

Patterned city of tamed matter
Standing still and speechless
With the erasure of personality.

Ultramodernity
The aesthetic of machined minimalism
Machine no longer the braggart of yesterday
Shy machine which hides its name
Hides its process.

Shy machine or sly machine
Submerges the senses the feelings
In pure visibility
Design that stops the mind
And conditions aesthesis.

The city is design
Turning the still mind in unexpected constellations
Turning a corner a new pattern a new meaning
A new machine.

Machine within machine
Clock within clock
Fractal within fractal
Taikan’s house a green ticking gear
A magic throb in the still heart of the beating.

Bamboo and the wind of silence
Shino on the threshold human and ephemeral
Corridors shining with rain, fish, boatmen
The stillness harvests everything.

Inside is outside
As outside is inside
Nature is painting
Painting is Nature
Nature is machine
Machine is painting
Catalog the fruit of amazing print technology
Green tea, plum and sticky rice on table
Boy-haired red-jumpered Tokyo adolescent
Framed against the window
The textured trunk snaking upward
The cicadas’ raucous violins.

Mono-no-aware
The anime of temporality
The touch of tears in transient things
At the foot of Mount Fuji different actors
The same play – interminably.

The slow hour aches to its close
Shino walks me through Ueno Park
Tall unruly sedges and lotus leaves like elephant ears
Nod and sway
Ducks glide aimlessly children play
The deafening cicadas from Taikan’s house
Claim the day.

Blue sky above
Patterned clockwork the houses the cars the traffic lights
The street clean as a whistle
The call of the superfast train
The waiting aeroplane
The kaleidoscopic turning of the world
Taikan the avatar of painting
Masks, unmasks.