The Aurobindo Aura

IN THE PREVIOUS column, I outlined the importance of November 24 in the calendar of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and in the lives of the followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. One of the four Darshan Days of the year, it has also been called Siddhi Day, Victory Day, even Immortality Day in Ashram circles. Officially, most have understood and characterised it as the “descent of Krishna into the physical,” to quote the master’s own words.

But what does this mean? We cannot be sure. The phenomenon, quite unprecedented and never repeated, has been variously described. But attempts to clarify it render it even more opaque and difficult to comprehend. In AB Purani’s, the most detailed of the eyewitness accounts, the actual experience into which the 24 fortunate early disciples and apostles were invited, has been described thus: “In the interval of silent meditation and blessings many had distinct experiences. When all was over they felt as if they had awakened from a divine dream. Then they felt the grandeur, the poetry and the absolute beauty of the occasion. It was not as if a handful of disciples were receiving blessings from their Supreme Master and the Mother in one little corner of the earth. The significance of the occasion was far greater than that. It was certain that a Higher Consciousness had descended on earth. In that deep silence had burgeoned forth, like the sprout of a banyan tree, the beginning of a mighty spiritual work. This momentous occasion carried its significance to all in the divine dynamism of the silence, in its unearthly dignity and grandeur and in the utter beauty of its every little act. The deep impress of divinity which everyone got was for him a priceless treasure.”

No wonder, one of the Mother’s early disciples and constant companions, Dorothy Hodgson or Datta, declared, “The Lord has descended into the physical today.”

For many, the avatarhood of Sri Aurobindo was confirmed on this day because the consciousness that is known as Krishna had now, they believed, descended into his body. Mirra Alfassa, later known as the Mother, it may be recalled, had seen visions of a divine being, whom she identified as Krishna, quite before her arrival in Pondicherry. When she sighted Sri Aurobindo for the first time, she recognised him as the luminous form she had encountered in her visions.

It was quite natural, therefore, for Ashramites to accept that something of tremendous import, not just for their own guru, but for planetary existence itself, had manifested. KD Sethna or Amal Kiran, who joined the Ashram a year later in December 1927, records why November 24 was also called Immortality Day: “When the Ananda comes into you, it is the Divine who comes into you; just as when the Peace flows into you, it is the Divine who is invading you, or when you are flooded with Light, it is the flood of the Divine Himself that is around you”.

The spiritual experience sans Ananda or rapture, by this reckoning, is highly suspect. To know the Divine, to open oneself to the Divine, to taste even a tiny morsel of the Divine is to be filled with an ecstasy rarely to be found in ordinary sensory sensations. Sri Ramakrishna compared it to every pore in the body enjoying an orgasm. Sethna continues: “Immortality, in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, necessarily includes this experience.” He decodes the descent of Krishna as establishing on earth of the Overmind consciousness. Overmind, in Aurobindonian terminology, is quite higher than the normal mental level of consciousness but, still, a considerable step below the Supramental.

“When the Overmind came down into his body and the Mother’s,” writes Sethna, “the highest range of past realisation of the Immortal Being was compassed not only in the inner consciousness but also in the outermost, with wonderful consequences in the material sheath itself and an earnest of the full and final result which would come by the arrival of the Supramental Truth: The total earnest of the Godlike future was revealed on November 26—a signal almost incredible to the human mind haunted and obsessed by millennia of mortality. That is why the Mother considered the revelation not only sacred but secret and that is why the memory of it was allowed to hide in the background.” Interestingly, Sethna marks the date as November 26, not 24. But perhaps, this is an error because the Ashram officially observes November 24 as Darshan Day.

Indeed, so widespread was the expectancy that a tremendous change had occurred that some Ashramites were aghast and dismayed at the first few deaths in the Ashram. What, then, of physical immortality that has “haunted and obsessed” humanity for millennia? Sri Aurobindo himself tried to set tamp down on such expectations. On November 13, 1935, 11 days before its ninth anniversary, he categorically tells a disciple, “It has nothing to do with immortality. It is the descent of Krishna”.

Sethna offers this detailed note to reconcile the ideal of physical immortality with the harsh reality of death: “When it is said that by the union with the Divine one attains the consciousness of immortality, it means that the consciousness in us is united with that which is immortal and therefore feels itself immortal. We become conscious of the domains where immortality exists. But that does not imply that the physical substance is transformed and becomes immortal; for that quite another procedure has to be followed, and you must not only let it work out the transformation of the physical consciousness, but also the transformation of the physical substance which is quite a considerable work.” That “considerable work,” however, was very much a part of the Masters’ mission and the Ashram programme of spiritual evolution. As Sethna himself put it, “The ‘Immortality Day’ was the seed assurance that this ‘considerable work’ which has been going on ever since will bear flower and fruit on the earth in the time to come.”

No wonder the idea of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s working diligently towards physical transformation persisted. Sri Aurobindo himself wrote a sonnet called ‘Immortality’ in which he spelled out one version of what the word and idea meant to him:

I have drunk deep of God’s own liberty/From which an occult sovereignty derives:/Hidden in an earthly garment that survives, I am the worldless being vast and free./A moment stamped with that supremacy/Has rescued me from cosmic hooks and gyves;/Abolishing death and time my nature lives /In the deep heart of immortality.

God’s contract signed with Ignorance is torn;/Time has become the Eternal’s endless year,/My soul’s wide self of living infinite Space/Outlines its body luminous and unborn/Behind the earth-robe; under the earth-mask grows clear/The mould of an imperishable face.

The poem, dated February 8, 1940, can be traced back to a handwritten manuscript preserved in the archives of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

The speaker asserts the realisation of his true nature, whose “occult sovereignty” derives from “God’s own liberty.” This true self is much beyond the “earthly garment” because it is “vast and free,” rescued from cosmic hooks and gyves.” The discovery of the speaker’s real soul abolishes death because it has torn “God’s contract signed with Ignorance.” Just as the expansion of self ushers in “living infinite Space,” the quality and experience of time also changes because it is now “the Eternal’s endless year.”

So far, so good. What we have is what some would call the typical Vedantic de-identification of the Self with limitations of the physical and all-too-mortal body. What happens next is variously described, albeit it impossible to define. Why? Because it defies all our normal notions and mental constructs. It may be called a breakout into the vast and timeless plenum of infinite consciousness and beatitude.

But Sri Aurobindo’s sonnet, especially the sestet after the opening octave, signals a transformation and metamorphosis that is quite beyond the sundering of the hard-wired ties with the body. There is the definite indication of a new formation, of a luminous body which is as yet unborn. Anterior to the “earth robe” and “under the earth-mask” something entirely new is coming into being. It is the clear “mould of an imperishable face.”

Should we, then, presume that the promise of physical immortality or, at least, transformation persists?

Most definitely. And that too through yogic means, not cybernetics or AI.

body-mindhuman transformationimmortalitysonnetspiritualitySri Aurobindo