A CENTURY’S SALUTATION TO SRI AUROBINDO
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
Sri Aurobindo Ashram,
The
Greatness of the Great
The
greatness of a person is the greatness of the impersonal in him. He has little
concern about himself. His thoughts, feelings and acts are in relation to a
wider frame of reference. The wider the frame, the higher the status of the
being; there is an ascending scale in the structure of human life and society.
There are gradations that mount from narrower ranges, moving towards vaster and
vaster ranges, taking the person into greater and purer degrees of
impersonality. We start, for example, from the lowest and narrowest range,
namely the family, and extend ourselves more and more to the next range, the
nation, then to mankind and then still farther to
transcendent ranges.
Sri
Aurobindo from his very birth was such an impersonal personality–and, in the
very highest sense. He had never the consciousness of a particular individual
person: all reference to a personal frame of his was deleted from the texture
of his nature and character. There was some reference to the family frame in a
very moderate way, almost casually: the stress was much more on the next higher
frame, the national. In its time the national frame was very strong and played
a great part; and yet even there it was not an end in itself, the frame of
humanity always loomed large behind. In fact it was that that gave a greater
and truer value and significance to the national frame. The nation is but a
ladder to humanity; it is a unit in the human collectivity; it serves as a
channel for international and global welfare. But there is yet a still larger
frame, the frame of the
spirit, the transcendent consciousness. Indeed it was this that lay at the
bottom of Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness as the
bedrock of his being which gave the whole tone and temper of his life, its
meaning and purpose. Even when not overt and patent this noumenal
personality was always there insistent from behind; it gave a peculiar rhythm
and stress, newness and freshness and a profound element of purposefulness to
the whole life, even to the activities of the earlier and narrower frames. For
it was like viewing everything through the eyes of infinity and eternity, the
eye wide extended in heaven, as the Vedic Rishi says, the third eye.
In
other words, the yogi, the Divine, the impersonal man in Sri Aurobindo was the
real person always there from the very birth. Thus we see him starting life
exactly with the thing where one ends. In his inner being he had not to pass
through the gradations that lead an ordinary person gradually towards the
widening ranges of consciousness and existence. In all the stations of his
life, in every sphere and status Sri Aurobindo was doing his duties, that is,
his work–kartavyam
karma–selflessly, which
means with no sense of self, or perhaps we should say, with supreme Self-hoodness: for such is the character, the very nature of the
born yogi, the God-man. The duties done for and within a frame of life tend
always to overflow, as it were, the boundaries and do not always strictly
follow the norm of the limited frame. For example, even while in the family
life, in the midst of relatives and close friends he was never moved by mere
attachment or worldly ties, he was impelled to do what he had to in the
circumstances, unattached, free, under another command. Again, when he chose
the larger field of national life, here too, he was not limited to that frame,
his patriotism was not chauvinism or a return to the parochialism of the past;
his patriotism was broad-based upon the sense of human solidarity and even the
broad-based humanity was not broad enough for the consciousness in him; for
humanity does not me mere humanitarianism, charity, benevolence, or service to mankind
True humanity can be or is to be reached by pushing it still farther into the
Divinity where men are not merely brothers or even portions of the Divine but
one with Him, the self-same being and personality.
Thus,
Sri Aurobindo was an ideal worker, the perfect workman doing the work
appropriate to the field of work according to its norm, faultless in execution.
As a family man, as a citizen, as a patriot, he carried out his appointed
function not in any personal sense with the feeling or consciousness of any
individual personality but a large impersonal personality free from ego-sense
which is the hallmark of a luminous cosmic consciousness, based upon a still higher
and transcendent standing.
Sri
Aurobindo was a man of action absolutely in the Gita’s
sense of the word. He set an example, he was an exemplar showing by his life–his
way of “standing and walking” as the Gita puts it–the actions that should be
done and the way of doing according to the stage and the field given to
oneself. This does not naturally mean that one has to be bound to the current
frame, bound to the conventional, attached to what is customary, traditional
and formal; on the contrary as I have said, Sri Aurobindo in his stride was
always transgressing and overflowing the borders, he was a revolutionary, even
an iconoclast, for nothing short of the supreme and complete and integral truth
satisfied the urge of consciousness in him: in this sense each step of the
scale was a jumping board to the higher, indeed to the highest inherent or
hidden in every one of them.
It
was this secret ultimate truth that overshadowed, brooded over all these stages
and steps and occupations he passed through: they only led up to that
transcendent reality, but it was the sense, constant sense of that reality that
lent a special character to all his karma. This urge towards the supreme
reality, this transcendence, did not mean for him a rejection of the domains
passed through: it is a subsuming, that is to say uplifting the narrower, the
lower status, integrating them into the higher: even as the soul at the root of
the plant is subsumed and transmuted into the living sap that mounts high up
the plant towards its very top, to the light and energy above.
In
the scheme and pattern of human existence in the hierarchy that is collective
life, Sri Aurobindo sought to express the play of the supreme Truth, express
materially that which works always in secret and behind the veil. The supreme
Reality is not merely the supreme awareness and consciousness, but it is a
power and a force; and it holds still a secret source that has not yet been
touched–touched consciously by the human, consciousness and utilised
for world existence. Man’s genius has contacted today in the material world
material forces which are almost immaterial–the extra-galactic radiation, the
laser beams and other energies of that category which are powerful in an
unbelievable unheard of degree. Even so in the consciousness, there is a model of
force which is not only a force that knows but creates, not only creates but transforms.
That force at its intrinsic optimum can enter into dull matter and transfusing
it, transform it into radiant matter, radiant not only with the physical, the
solar light but the light of the supreme Spirit.
This
is the force which Sri Aurobindo has disclosed and put at the disposal of
mankind. This is the force he has set free that is creating a new world, re-organising and re-moulding,
through a great travail indeed, our ancient sphere that will cradle the earth
of the golden age.
In
Sri Aurobindo, we may note, the impersonalisation is
in reality a re-personalisation. Impersonalisation
need not mean de-personalisation, that is to say, a
complete negation and annihilation of all personality: impersonalisation
really means the negation of the ego or rather the replacement of the ego by
the true person. The basic ego-sense is in the individual: but it has its
formations in the collectivity also at all the different degrees and levels of
consciousness. We have spoken of the mounting frames of reference, and
accordingly there is a family ego, a national ego and even there is a humanity
ego. The collective ego is as strong as the individual ego. It is only in the
transcendent consciousness, in the consciousness of the Divine who is the one
true Person, that the inferior egos are eliminated or sublimated and can find
their true person.
Thus
the true process of impersonalisation is re-personalisation; in other words, to be conscious of, to
grow into and become the true reality of the being behind the ego formation. It
means divinisation of the person. The individual divinises himself into the individual Divine and then
around him, first of all in his inner consciousness the frame or field changes
also into a divine structure. Thus even the family for such a consciousness
changes not only its connotation but even its denotation. We may in this
connection remember Christ’s words with regard to his true family. The nation
too assumes its Divine reality, a transcendent
personality appears as an expression of the Divine afflatus, each one a
particular mode of fulfilling the cosmic purpose. Humanity too undergoes a
sea-change and its personality attains a glorious stature in the Sahasra-sirsha purusha as
hymned by the Vedic Rishi.
This
is the cosmos that Sri Aurobindo has expressed, created in his consciousness
and therefore in the consciousness of the cosmos itself. This transcendent
formation the future is holding readymade in its womb and the day is
approaching when this new creation will manifest itself upon earth. The true
truth of things is always there up somewhere in the Supreme, in the
Parabrahman, from time sempiternal:
the question is when and how to
bring down. He who does that is the Avatara,
he who comes down and embodies it.
To
recapitulate: Impersonalisation involves or culminates in divinisation which
means the descent of the Divine,
the supreme Person, from above or His emergence from within (both mean the same thing), with the result that all other inferior or external formulations
are subsumed, as I have said,
integrated into the Supreme Reality forming one single body and personality.
Such
is the content of Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness, such is the work that is
being pursued under the stress of that consciousness towards the realisation of a new, a divine
world.
In
conclusion, here in his own words
is what he stood for and worked
for, what he promises for the future of earth and mankind:
‘All then shall change, a magic order
come
Over tapping this
mechanical universe.
A
mightier race shall inhabit the mortal’s World.
On
Nature’s luminous tops, On the
Spirit’s ground,
The
superman shall reign as king of life,
Make
earth almost the mate and peer
of heaven
And
lead towards God and truth man’s ignorant heart
And lift towards godhead his mortality.
Nature
shall live to manifest secret God,
The
Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.”
–By courtesy of Sri
Aurobindo Action