Revitalization and the Messianic-Redemptive Vision of Sri Aurobindo
Why have I discussed in detail two cultural revitalizations in America? What does this have to do with Mad Pride? The worlds that sprung up during these revitalizations were infused with a far greater sense of human possibility; I think they bring us into a different universe of the imagination and allow us to recover a sense of how different these worlds were from the one we inhabit today. Thus they help to convey to readers and activists who have accommodated themselves to the postmodernist zeitgeist, a sense of the transformative power of the messianic-redemptive vision. I think these accounts also illustrate the cogency of the Perry-Wallace-McLoughlin-Levy theory as well as the Christian perspective of H. Richard Niebuhr.
As Levy might put it, during cultural revitalizations new leaders emerge who put forward myths and symbols and enact dramatic rituals that mobilize the masses and resonate with the messianic-redemptive archetypes in the collective unconscious. It is my contention—based on evidence presented in the interviews in this book and in the works of those such as Laing and Perry—that it is from the ranks of the mad (those who are today seen as “psychotic”) that such new leaders are most likely to emerge.
The life and writings of Sri Aurobindo also provide some confirmation for the revitalization theory. His ideas on social change (even less well read than his writings on yoga) are in some ways similar to that of Perry and the others I have mentioned. Sri Aurobindo was the only Eastern thinker who formulated a philosophy that fused mysticism—defined in most general terms as the cultivation of “higher” states of consciousness through meditation—and messianism.1 Aurobindo believed that just as life superseded matter and mind superseded life in the process of evolution, humanity would evolve—not biologically, but under the teleological press of the Spirit—to a higher state of existence. This state would be governed not by mind but by an intuitive faculty of knowing that is conscious of its oneness with all beings and with the divine Spirit immanent in nature.
Sri Aurobindo, it is clear, was himself—after his transformation—a forerunner of this type of human being. This next phase of evolutionary transformation requires a conscious cooperation on the part of humanity—a conversion of consciousness. “What is necessary,” Aurobindo wrote, “is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many toward the vision of this change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way.”2 Aurobindo rarely discussed the social preconditions of this conversion, but in his essay “The Human Cycle” he posits that those advanced souls he views as the pioneers of humanity can help to prepare the species to make the eschatological leap into a higher phase of our spiritual and historical evolution: the realization of the divine life on Earth.3
Sri Aurobindo is best known not for his political writings but for his books on integral yoga (meditation)*45 and metaphysical philosophy. Although he was strongly influenced by the Indian religious tradition and its Vedic scriptures, his perspective was singular in one essential respect. Until Sri Aurobindo, all of the Hindu spiritual traditions and their philosophers agreed on one point—that the culmination of the spiritual quest is reached when one has completely overcome and exhausted one’s attachments to the world (one’s karma) and is thus freed from the necessity to reincarnate. In all my research, I have not found any exceptions to this ideal. One then attains the permanent state of absorption of one’s soul into God, or as typically formulated in Hinduism, into “Brahman,” the impersonal absolute (or into Krishna, in the theistic schools of Hinduism). Even the leaders of the great twentieth-century renaissance of Hinduism—from the popularizers like Swami Vivekananda (who brought Hindu Vedanta in its most universal form to the West) to the renowned philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (also the president of India in the 1960s)—for all their worldly activism and advocacy of social reform, accepted this traditional ideal of liberation as escape from the world.
While Eastern Christianity has posited a vision closer to Aurobindo’s based on this worldly transformation,*46 Western Christianity—from the time of its alliance with the Roman empire in the fourth century up until recently—has presented a postmortem “heaven” as the realm of salvation, despite the messianic vision of earthly paradise preached in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the New Testament, including the sermons of Jesus. Thus, Aurobindo states that Christian and Hindu cultures have “joined the great consensus,” crying that “not in this world can there be our kingdom of heaven but beyond.”4 Sri Aurobindo’s messianic-redemptive vision was made all the more forceful by his elaborate, polemical, and luminous deconstructions of the many of the great metaphysical philosophies—particularly the dominant Vedic philosophy of Sankara—that denied the value and potentialities of earthly existence. Aurobindo termed Sankara’s interpretation of Vedanta “illusionism.” As opposed to these world-denying perspectives, Aurobindo testified that the highest attainment of the spiritual life entailed a collective endeavor that would result in the realization of the divine life on Earth.
Sri Aurobindo’s messianic-redemptive vision—articulated in volume after volume of philosophical prose as well as in his epic poem Savitri—was endowed with a depth and specificity it lacked in its Judeo-Christian formulations: Aurobindo sketched out in detail (based on his own spiritual revelations, the result of a lifetime devoted to the practice of meditation) how the realization of this vision would alter the psychology of human beings and the ontology and phenomenology of embodied existence. The attainment of the divine life would even alter the “laws” of nature, making it possible for human beings to attain immortal bodies as well as immortal souls. As one of Aurobindo’s disciples put it, the transformation would not be limited to the creation of a new humanity but would “extend to the entire earth-life—to animals, plants and eventually to matter itself. This change would take place not only within the laws governing their present nature—but more and more by a change of these laws themselves.”5 He notes that these observations are bound to appear “preposterous” to the “circumspect mind of rational man.” Sri Aurobindo’s lifelong spiritual partner and fellow yogi Mira Richard, known to ashram residents as “the Mother,” said, “This looks like madness but all new things have always seemed madness before they became realities.”6
Aurobindo typically spoke not just of changing humanity but of changing the Earth consciousness. Aurobindo stated poignantly, in response to a question by a disciple, that he was seeking through his yogic work to “make life something better than a struggle with ignorance and falsehood and pain and strife. . . . I am seeking to bring some principle of Truth, Light, Harmony and Peace into the earth-consciousness. . . . I feel it ever gleaming down on my consciousness from above. . . . I believe the descent of this Truth opening the way to the development of a divine consciousness here to be the final sense of the earth evolution. . . . Let all men jeer upon me if they will . . . for my presumption. I go on until I conquer or perish.”7
Aurobindo was born in 1872. His father was an Indian doctor, an intellectual and Anglophile who sent Aurobindo to England as a child of seven to make sure he received a superior education. Aurobindo decided to return to India in 1893, shortly before completing college at the University of Cambridge. Aurobindo worked in civil service and then in teaching. He spent all his free time reading and writing poetry in English, the language in which he was most proficient. After a few years he became involved in the movement against British domination—at first from behind the scenes. By 1906 Aurobindo had become a leader in the Nationalist Party and was the first Indian leader to become a vocal advocate for national independence; most of the activists favored greater autonomy for Indians in government. This goal was eventually adopted by the Indian movement due largely to Aurobindo’s influence, which had crescendoed after his second arrest by the British in 1908.
Aurobindo expressed his views through the paper of which he became the editor, Bande Mantaram. Aurobindo’s astute editorials and impassioned calls for “national independence” won the paper “unprecedented popularity and influence.” Even in South Africa, Gandhi read the paper and was impressed.8 In addition to his writings, Aurobindo’s powerful speeches on behalf on his exalted vision of Indian nationalism struck a chord within the community of Indian activists and made him one of the heroes and prophets of the movement. His two arrests and famous trial in 1909 had made Aurobindo a “legendary figure” by the time he retired from political activism in 1910.9
Aurobindo’s first arrest by the British was in 1907, for “seditious” writings. A month later he was acquitted, but the trial had made him a celebrity. Aurobindo resumed the struggle with redoubled energy. India was not an abstraction to Aurobindo. As he wrote in a personal letter in August 1905, “[W]hile others look upon their country as an inert piece of matter . . . I look upon my country as the Mother. I love her. I adore Her. I worship Her as the Mother.”*47, 10 He compared the British to a demon sitting on his mother’s breast and sucking her blood. He could not just continue his normal activities but felt compelled to “rush out” and rescue his mother. He was confident: “I know I have the strength to deliver this fallen race. God sent me to earth to accomplish this great mission.”11
But from the beginning Aurobindo saw the liberation of the nation as a means to an even greater goal. As he stated in June 1909, “Our aim will be to help in building up India for the sake of humanity.”12 The West had achieved technological and scientific superiority, but India had developed its spiritual resources based on the ancient scriptures of India. India could help solve the problems of mankind by teaching it to rise to a higher level of spiritual existence. In his historic Uttaparic speech in May 1909 Aurobindo stressed the universal significance of India’s liberation. In the “seclusion of the [Indian] peninsula from of old,” Hinduism “was cherished” by its sages “for the salvation of humanity.” “It is to give this religion that India is rising. . . . She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world. India has always existed for humanity and not for herself and it is for humanity, and not for herself, that she must be great.”13
Aurobindo had started the practice of yoga in 1904; his primary motive, he wrote later, was to gain through meditation the psychic power to help him liberate India. Over the next few years, as he immersed himself in the study of India’s spiritual traditions, his spiritual experiences became increasingly intense.14 In January 1908 he sought guidance from an accomplished yogi and had his first experience of the silent formless Brahman.15 This is believed by followers of the Sankarite school to be the “highest” spiritual experience possible, prefiguring the ultimate merger with Brahman when one is freed from the cycle of incarnations. For Sri Aurobindo, whose goal was not escape, the experience of Brahman in the world (which he had in prison later) was equally high. In February 1908 he wrote in a personal letter, “From now on all that I do is done not at my will but at the command of God. . . . I hope that God will show you the light he has shown me in his infinite Grace.”16 At the time, Aurobindo had learned to follow a voice from within that gave him guidance—a tradition in India. The experience of the union of the silent Brahman and the active Brahman, a turning point in his yogic practice, took place in 1912 and seemed to follow naturally from his two previous experiences—and he believed it to be a “higher” revelation.17
Life was transformed when Aurobindo was arrested by the British in 1908 for conspiracy to “wage war against the government,” a crime that could result in execution or deportation. Aurobindo’s first response was despair. He thought he had a mission to work for the people of his country and that until that work was done he would have God’s protection.18 Had God abandoned him? Aurobindo was placed in solitary confinement for over a week. He suffered “intense mental agony,” and for the first time his efforts to meditate were futile. His thoughts became so wild and uncontrollable he wondered “whether he was going insane.” In desperation, he called on the Divine for help, and suddenly “his heart was flooded with happiness.”19 From then on, prison life became bearable. Shortly afterward a voice within told him that the Divine had placed him in prison in order to loosen the bonds he had to the independence movement because God had a different task for him to do. He was told his training would begin in prison.*48, 20 Ten days after his imprisonment he was allowed to read. He sent home for the Gita and the Upanishads.
During the year in prison Aurobindo devoted himself to meditating. Much of the time he was in a trancelike state. He had his second profound mystical experience in prison, that of Brahman in the world, “I walked under the branches under the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree. . . . I knew it was Sri Krishna [God in manifest form] whom I saw standing there and holding over me his shade. . . . Everyone and everything seemed to be a manifestation of God.” “I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers” in “these darkened souls and misused bodies,” and “as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva (Krishna].”21 Everything was alive with an “all pervading consciousness.”22
A year after his imprisonment, the trial took place. Aurobindo was acquitted by the judge. As Heehs writes, the charges were nebulous enough that another judge might easily have convicted him. Aurobindo’s brother had been engaged in terrorist activities and had stored the bombs in Aurobindo’s house with Aurobindo’s knowledge. Although Aurobindo did not support his brother’s actions, he was guilty of conspiring to deprive the British of sovereignty of India.23 As he stated later, his goal was eventually to help provoke “an armed revolution in the whole of India.”24 After his release he continued to give speeches until, under threat of being arrested again, an inner prompting from the Divine, an adesh, directed him to take refuge in Pondicherry (the capital of the French settlements in India) and to devote himself to spiritual work.
Thus in 1910 he settled in Pondicherry and began the sadhana*49 that would last until his death. After 1926 he decided his spiritual work required complete isolation (in his bedroom/study meditating and writing) so he only saw the disciples who had gathered around him on special occasions to give them blessings three times a year. The only person he saw regularly was Mira Richard, “the Mother,” whom he recognized as his spiritual partner shortly after she became his disciple in 1920; without the Mother, Sri Aurobindo said he could not have accomplished his spiritual work. (Aurobindo’s relationship with the Mother was not physical, as they were both spiritual renunciates.) It was a profound partnership; “The Mother and I are one but in two bodies.”25
Sri Aurobindo explained his retirement from politics later (writing in the third person).
But this did not mean, as most people supposed that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realize the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness [for the individual] but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to base life on the Spirit and give it a spiritual meaning. In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action.26
Mysticism may be an individual endeavor (although in accord with Indian tradition, Aurobindo acquired disciples, and less conventionally—uniquely—he had formed a partnership with “the Mother”), but its ultimate goal in Aurobindo’s view was the collective transformation of society—of the Earth.
Despite the fact that Sri Aurobindo wrote several volumes on social and political developments after his retirement from active politics, these books were less well known than his more voluminous writings on yoga and metaphysics. One question stands out, How does one get from the present society based on an absence of unity and murderous discord to the society envisioned by Aurobindo? Aurobindo cogently explains the spiritual conditions for a new social order, which in turn is necessary for the attainment of the divine life on Earth. As stated, Aurobindo regards the ideal of individual liberation as specious.*50, 27 The question thus remains: Considering the allegiance of the masses and the economic and political elites to the present order, how is the transition to be effected?
Sri Aurobindo stated that his goal of his sadhana was to bring the Divine (the “Supermind,” he called it, which is the Divine in one of its poises) down to Earth, so that it would make the complete transformation of society possible to accomplish. Aurobindo did not succeed in this task at the time of his death in 1950. However, there is also another theory of change that is implied in Sri Aurobindo’s writings; it parallels Wallace’s theory of cultural revitalization. The theory gains credibility in the light of Aurobindo’s own success as an activist in persuading the Indian movement to take up independence from Britain as a goal.
At the beginning of his activism Aurobindo had written of the necessity for “propaganda intended to convert the whole nation to the ideal of independence which was regarded by the vast majority of Indians as impractical and impossible, an almost insane chimera.”28 Several years after he retired from politics his goal had been accomplished. According to Aurobindo’s biographer, “He succeeded in infusing this will [for freedom] into the mind of a whole generation.”29 Most authors agree that Aurobindo was virtually single-handedly responsible for effecting this change—primarily through the power of his writings and speeches (propaganda is too crude a term), which imbued independence with a spiritual significance and had an electrifying effect on the younger generation (his peers and younger). In Perry’s terms, Aurobindo was the prophet who emerged in the time of India’s cultural crisis with a myth to energize and channel the direction of the emerging movement for change.
Long after his retirement from activism, Sri Aurobindo continued to follow political developments and even, he said, to intervene on the occult plane to effect a favorable outcome on worldly happenings. He believed throughout his life that the independence of India had been an important accomplishment for humanity, although after his death it became clear that his highest hopes for India had not been realized. He believed that Hitler represented a danger to humanity. Unlike Gandhi, he proclaimed his support for the Allies in World War II (to the consternation of the majority of Indian nationalists) and believed that the victory over Hitler had been essential to prevent a terrible retrogression of humanity.
Yet the transformation of humanity that he believed to be the goal of the next phase of our development is a far greater task. Nevertheless, it relies on the same principles. It cannot be achieved by the yoga of a handful of disciples alone. Although Aurobindo knew that people were at different stages of spiritual development and the masses were less evolved and less ready for change than a small number of individuals who were more spiritually advanced, any radical change in life required the support of a majority. As he wrote in “The Human Cycle,” “There may even be a glorious crop of saints and hermits in a forcing-soil of spirituality but unless the race, the society, the nation is moved toward the spiritualization of life or move forward led by the light of an ideal, the end must be weakness, littleness and stagnation.”30
It would have been far easier to adopt the traditional goal of individual liberation from the world. Aurobindo lived through two world wars. He had no naïve belief in human “progress.” All of Aurobindo’s writings reveal that his faith was not based on a facile optimism. As he wrote in Savitri:
This mortal creature is his own worst foe
His science is an artificer of doom
He ransacks earth for means to harm his kind
He slays his happiness and others’ good
Nothing has he learnt from Time and its history . . .
Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre
Are still the pastimes of man’s warring tribes
An idiot hour destroys what centuries made . . .
All he has achieved he drags to the precipice
His grandeur he turns to an epic of doom and fall . . .
A part author of the cosmic tragedy
His will conspires with time and death and fate,
His brief appearance on the enigmaed earth
Ever recurs but brings no high result.
His soul’s wide search and ever recurring hopes
Pursue the useless orbit of their course
In a vain repetition of lost toils
Across a track of soon forgotten lives . . .
Why is it all and wherefore are we here?31
Aurobindo writes that “the coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal existence of man but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity and attempt to effect it in themselves, to lead others to it and make it the recognized goal of the race.”32 Are there an increasing number of individuals in the United States who perceive the need for a greater evolution? It does not seem so at this time, but it certainly was the case in the 1960s.*51 Such a development would be auspicious, the precondition for the change of society. “All great changes find their first clear and effective power and their direct shaping force in the mind and spirit of the individual or a limited number of individuals.”33
In “The Human Cycle,” Aurobindo repeatedly states that there must be an interaction between the spiritual vanguard and the masses, between the individual and the masses, “the communal-mind,” the “group-soul.”34 The pioneers must not only change themselves, they must somehow move the masses, presumably by articulating spiritual ideals that may exist in inchoate form in the chaos of the communal mind. “[I]f the common human mind has begun to admit ideas proper to the higher order . . . and the heart of man has begun to be stirred by aspirations born of these ideas, then there is a hope of some advance in the not distant future.”35
Even in “The Human Cycle” much of what Aurobindo teaches about how the pioneers can transform the communal mind is suggestive rather than explicit; it was exemplified as much by his own practice, as a yogi, as a writer, and in his past as an activist. After Aurobindo had retired from activism, his own contribution to humanity now lay in writing, in meditating, in giving guidance to those who were practicing yoga in his ashram, and in his own occult efforts to bring the divine down to Earth; he tended not to give much thought to the strategy of the activist. Furthermore, as indicated above, he was well aware that all worldly efforts to produce great changes were never more than partial successes—that the Earth was still a vale of suffering and that the human being remains “his own worst foe” despite all our “progress.” More inclined to ravage and destroy than to strive to realize the high ideal of equality, liberty, and fraternity, humanity dwells still in the shadow of Ignorance. Nevertheless, despite the cautionary notes throughout “The Human Cycle,” the formulations hedged with caveats, Aurobindo repeatedly states that the future hinges on the relationship between the human pioneers and the masses.
It is revealing that Aurobindo’s own work consisted not just in yoga but in writing thousands of pages (most of it, except his letters to his disciples, cerebral by the standards of the common man), to communicate to others his own vision of the future. His clearest statement in “The Human Cycle” on how the vanguard can prepare the masses is, “There must be the individual and individuals who are able to see, to develop, to re-create themselves in the image of the Spirit and communicate both their idea and its power to the mass” (my emphasis).36
How?
Sri Aurobindo addressed his books to an elite of intellectuals, yet, judging from the well-known writers of our time, they have remained undiscovered or ignored even by those intellectuals one would expect to be most receptive. (Ken Wilber is an exception, but his understanding of Sri Aurobindo was distorted by his own exaltation of Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta and his attachment to Freudianism.37) As an activist, Aurobindo had written and spoken in simpler terms but with a similar message: he appealed to the masses by placing the goal of independence for India within the context of a messianic-redemptive vision for humanity. And he was successful, although his hopes for India were not realized with its liberation. So his books and his life present the same message for activists and for pioneers of a new order. They must work to remold themselves and find ways to communicate the power of their vision to the masses.
What is the idea that must be communicated? It is not new: it lies in the depths of humanity’s collective imagination. “We have to return to the pursuit of an ancient secret which man, as a race, has seen only obscurely and followed after lamely, has indeed understood only with his surface mind and not in his heart of meaning—and yet in following it lies his social no less than his individual salvation—the ideal of the kingdom of God, the secret of the reign of Spirit over mind and life and body.” “There [will be] a growing inner unity with others. Not only to see the Divine in oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all . . . is the complete law of the spiritual being. But he who sees God in all will serve freely God in all with the service of love. . . . Therefore too is a growing inner unity with others. . . . [Man] will seek not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all, not only his own perfection, but the perfection of all.”38
The “perfectionism” of the nineteenth-century Evangelical Christian reformers (see chapter 15) is paralleled a century later by Aurobindo, who supports it with a philosophical foundation that the reformers lacked. Philosophically, the realization of the divine life, the messianic vision, is marked by a shift in consciousness that enables one to grasp the One behind the many. The law of the perfected being is “unity fulfilled in diversity. . . . The individual would not be cast according to a single type of individuality; each would be different from the other, a unique formation of the Being, although one with all the rest in foundation of self and sense of oneness . . .”39
Besides the perfectionism of nineteenth-century Christianity, Aurobindo’s messianic vision finds another parallel as well. To quote Laing again, “If the human race survives, future men will look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness. . . . The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break in the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”40 John Weir Perry writes, “The vision of oneness is expressed in the messianic ideation, along with the recognition that the world is going to be marked by a style of living emphasizing equality and tolerance, harmony and love. This hope is almost universally seen in persons in the acute [psychotic] episode.”41
Many of the mad have had this vision. Few have taken it seriously. I can think now of half a dozen people who were persuaded by psychiatrists that their messianic visions were symptoms of illnesses, and thus they gave them up. I can think of others who believe that these visions are private matters. I know there are many who have had such visions in their times of mania and madness, who could communicate these visions, both the idea and its power, to others. As I stated above, I think that the secular pluralism of the patients’ liberation movement is based on the mistaken idea that these visions do not have any relevance to the public. Aurobindo’s hope was that there would be a vanguard, pioneers who had experienced the new order of life and would seek to find a way to communicate “their idea and its power” to the masses. Among the mad are these pioneers. This is the basis for Mad Pride and for the Mad Pride movement.
Furthermore, Aurobindo says that the aim of a spiritual age would be one with the essential aim of subjective religions: “a new birth, a new consciousness, an upward evolution of the human being, a descent of the Spirit into our members, a spiritual reorganization of our lives.”42 Aurobindo acknowledged in another book that when Christianity first originated there was such an “awakening.”43 With Christianity in mind, no doubt, he warns of the danger of a new sectarian religion that begins with inspiration and devolves into “a set of crystallized dogmas” and “sanctified superstitions.” Finally “the spirit is dominated by the outward machinery, the sheltering structure becomes a tomb.” The root of this problem is the tendency of a particular religious belief and form “to universalize and impose itself,” which runs “contrary to the variety of human nature and the need of the Spirit . . . for a spacious inner freedom and a large unity into which each man must be allowed to grow according to his own nature.”44 The idea of salvation in an afterlife is also a diversion. What is essential is not man’s ascent into heaven “but rather his ascent here into the Spirit and the descent of the Spirit into his normal humanity.” “For that and not some post mortem salvation is the real new birth for which humanity waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course.”45
And yet although religion poses these dangers I think Aurobindo realized that the new birth would find its expression and motivation in forms and symbols and archetypes derived from one religion or another, just as Aurobindo’s own books were laced with phrases and ideas from the Hindu scriptures. Thus Aurobindo’s terminology even here is religious—“rebirth,” “conversion.” “Even as the animal man has been largely converted into a mentalized humanity . . . so too now or in the future an evolution or conversion . . . of the present type of humanity into a spiritualized humanity is the need of the race and surely the intention of Nature.”46
At the same time as Aurobindo warns the pioneers against imposing religious uniformity, he also acknowledges that a (tolerant) religious diversity is not just the alternative to uniformity but is also a positive feature, an asset. The “evolution or conversion” of humanity will be “the ideal or endeavor” of the pioneers. These pioneers will be “indifferent to particular belief and form and leave men to resort to the beliefs and forms to which they are naturally drawn.” The pioneers will hold as “essential” “the faith in this spiritual conversion, the attempt to live it out and [they will hold essential] whatever knowledge—the form of opinion into which it is thrown does not so much matter—can be converted into this living” (my emphasis).47 Obviously, by “belief ” and “form of opinion,” Aurobindo is referring to what is commonly called religion, and he recognizes human beings are “naturally drawn” to one kind or another of religious mythos and that these religious forms (that is, some kind or another of religious form, regardless of which) are themselves essential. But the religion must serve the ideal of spiritual and collective transformation, not divert persons into a quest for nirvanic escape or a postmortem salvation. Any kind of individualist soteriology is only a diversion from the deepest aspiration of the species.
My impression from my readings is that this kind of spiritual transformation took place among many Christians during the Second Awakening. Clearly by the end of the century, after the trauma of the Civil War, it was also followed by the sordid denouement Sri Aurobindo describes—and worse. The atavistic nature of Evangelical Christianity today is a major obstacle to change in America. Nevertheless, “The Human Cycle” is a sort of manual for those pioneers of the kingdom of God on Earth who need to go out and make converts—converts not to an exclusivist creed but to the way of life Aurobindo describes. No secular utopia can possibly have this kind of ontological reach; for secularists and those who do not accept reincarnation (or resurrection), salvation is only for other future generations, each doomed to extinction in its turn. The messianic element conveys the force of the ideal, its promise to liberate humanity from those very “laws” of nature—in reality, habits of nature—that keep us subject to disease and death.
I think Sri Aurobindo conveyed his vision most powerfully in Savitri—his epic 700-page poem that he considered his most important work. More powerfully than anywhere else, Aurobindo affirms the as yet unfulfilled promise of life on Earth, the potentiality also of romantic love, and reveals the relative effeteness of the ideal of liberation into unembodied existence. Adapted from a Hindu myth, in Savitri the heroine is not only a princess but also, as we discover, an avatar who has incarnated in order to do battle with death (“the last enemy,” to quote St. Paul) and win the final victory for humanity. (Aurobindo manifests his feminism in his presentation of a woman as an avatar—unprecedented in the Hindu tradition.)
The heroine Savitri confronts the god of Death and scorns him when he advises her to accept the death of her husband, Satyavan—who, doomed to an early death, dies one year after Savitri’s meeting with him. She pleads with Death to return her husband. Death tells her that she shares the fate of all human beings and that love on Earth is doomed, that no joy of the heart can last beyond death. Furthermore, by confronting Death, Savitri is quixotically pitting herself against the “laws” of nature, the decree of God. Savitri responds that human love has the sanction of the Divine. Death scoffs and advises her to realize that the world will always be a vale of sorrow and to seek instead the greater bliss (ananda) of extraworldly nirvana.
But Savitri rejects the postmortem nirvanic soteriology of Death. She scorns the boon of bodiless nirvana; she has another vision:
How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind
And Bliss can never invade the mortal’s heart
Or God descend into the world he made?
If in the meaningless Void creation rose,
If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,
If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,
Its green delight break into emerald leaves
And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,
If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell
And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,
And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,
How shall the nameless Light not leap on men,
And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep? . . .
Even now the deathless Lover’s touch we feel:
If the chamber’s door is even a little ajar,
What then can hinder God from stealing in
Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?
Already God is near, the Truth is close:
Because the dark atheist body knows him not,
Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?
I am not bound by thought or sense or shape;
I live in the glory of the Infinite,
I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,
The Ineffable is now my household mate.
But standing on Eternity’s luminous brink
I have discovered that the world was He.48
Savitri has discovered God in the world. She rejects the teaching that God can only be experienced apart from the world. She tells him that she too has experienced the blissful union with the Brahman beyond the world that is considered by Advaita Vedanta*52 to be the greatest mystical experience; she has met “Spirit with spirit,” but she has also experienced human love, and that has changed everything.
Finally after hundreds of pages of a colloquy between Savitri and Death in which Savitri refutes all of Death’s arguments that otherworldly union with the Divine is superior to the experience of God in the soul and body of her mate, Death finally concedes defeat. Death releases Satyavan, and Savitri and Satyavan are united again. They stand entwined “their kiss and passion-tranced embrace a meeting point, in their commingling spirits, one for ever, Two-souled, two-bodied for the joy of time.”49 They are now at the beginning of a new mission. God sends Savitri and Satyavan back to Earth, “a dual power of God in an ignorant world” to persuade humanity to forsake the ways of the past, to prepare humanity for the New Age, when man will “light up Truth’s fire in Nature’s night” and God will “annul the decree of death and pain.” Thus will take place, as Mehta puts it, the indissoluble “marriage between Heaven and Earth.”50 (See the appendix for an excerpt describing the reunion and eternal bonding of Savitri and Satyavan.)
Despite all his caveats, Sri Aurobindo believed a cultural revitalization was the prerequisite for the inner change of the spirit among the masses, which would finally enable us to transcend what Hegel called “the slaughterbench of history.” Such a revitalization requires a conversion of the masses—at least a significant portion of them. Aurobindo warns, “In this as in all great human aspirations . . . an a priori declaration of impossibility is a sign of ignorance and weakness. . . . A true beginning has to be made; the rest is a work for Time in its sudden achievements or its long patient labor.”51 Or in other words, “In proportion as they [the pioneers] succeed, and to the degree to which they carry this evolution, the yet unrealized potentiality which they represent will become an actual possibility of the future.”52
It should be noted that besides perfectionism there is another similarity between Sri Aurobindo’s messianic-redemptive vision and that of nineteenth-century postmillennial Christianity: the transformation will be a result of divine-human cooperation. (For reasons that require too much space to be explained here, Aurobindo believes the force that will assist the transformation will be the Divine Feminine—the Divine Mother.) This, as I noted in the introduction, was also the way Martin Buber interpreted Jewish messianism—as a task involving both humanity and God. Aurobindo writes that “a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below” will be met by “a Supreme grace from above that answers.”53 Mehta explains the fundamental dialectic of Sri Aurobindo’s messianic vision of transformation: “Ascent without descent is a gospel of personal salvation, but Descent without Ascent is a gospel of passive existence. These two must constitute a rhythm of spiritual life—one without the other is incomplete.”54
In summary, if one reads carefully “The Human Cycle” and other essays in Social and Political Thought, it is clear Sri Aurobindo believed, as did Perry and McLoughlin, that a process of cultural revitalization based on conveying a sense of the messianic vision—effecting a social conversion—could provide the conditions necessary for a profound spiritual transformation. He stated that the first step was for a sufficient number of people to become convinced that we could realize the kingdom of God on Earth. Unfortunately, the two revitalizations discussed in chapter 15 (the Great Awakenings) failed to achieve even the worldly changes to which they aspired. However, I would argue that both periods were actualizations of the messianic-redemptive vision and they were prefigurations, however imperfect, of the social-spiritual transformation that is yet to come. How long this will take we do not know, nor do we know how much destruction humanity will wreak first on the Earth. Scientists now tell us that if humanity does not mitigate global warming and reduce carbon emissions that humanity could be entirely destroyed.*53 Aurobindo tells us only that “a true beginning has to be made; the rest is a work for Time in its sudden achievements or its long patient labor.”