Finding Auroville

In this post we continue to contextualize progressive thinking and its limitations within the framework of Integral Yoga and Sri Aurobindo’s writings. In the previous post we had gone through how humans as we exist today are a transitional being in the evolutionary journey on Earth. We are transitional because we have developed our mental faculty to a very complex level, which sets us apart from the animal species that came before us, but our mental faculty is still under the grasp and control of our animalistic vital and physical instincts and passions. The next evolutionary step will see the loosening of the vital and physical’s control over our actions, and the transfer of this control to the psychic, which is the representative of the Divine in each individual human. This transfer will happen via the mental faculty by a sincere aspiration for and movement towards the Divine, which is an aspiration for the dissolution of the ego and our attachment to our material selves. All quotes in this post are from Sri Aurobindo’s writings.

We perceive, then, these three steps in Nature, a bodily life which is the basis of our existence here in the material world, a mental life into which we emerge and by which we raise the bodily to higher uses and enlarge it into a greater completeness, and a divine existence which is at once the goal of the other two and returns upon them to liberate them into their highest possibilities. Regarding none of them as either beyond our reach or below our nature and the destruction of none of them as essential to the ultimate attainment, we accept this liberation and fulfilment as part at least and a large and important part of the aim of Yoga.

The Three Steps of Nature, The Synthesis of Yoga

What this passage shows is that in Integral Yoga, renunciation of the vital’s control over our mental faculty and actions is not synonymous with renunciation of the material world, as is the assumed goal of the “old” Yoga. In Integral Yoga, material life, including our physical abilities, vital energies and mental faculties have to be pressed into action at the service of the Divine through selfless action at all levels, so that humanity and the world can move towards the transformation of consciousness. While this transformation at the individual level is a necessary step in the process, the aim is for more and more individuals to move in this direction, till humanity as a whole realizes this transformation as being essential for the betterment of the world, and acts to move towards it. To achieve this, instead of retreating from and renouncing the material world, individuals who have arrived at this realization will need to engage with and work in the material world in order to help move humanity in this direction. Therefore work in the material world with this aim and aspiration is an essential part of Integral Yoga.

In our interactions with the material world, Vedantic literature expounds that humans predominantly utilize or inhabit three modes of action or gunas (qualities, attributes or principles). These three gunas are tamas, rajas and sattwa. All human interactions with others and with the material world involve a combination of these three attributes, with one of the three usually being at the forefront and the other two playing lesser roles in the interaction. Just as human beings, with their physical, vital and mental faculties, are a part of material Nature, so are these three attributes of tamas, rajas and sattwa part of material Nature. They are the modes with which material beings interact with the material world.

Tamas is the quality of inertia, inaction, dullness and ignorance. The Tamasic principle involves doing the bare minimum work required for existence, with fear as a controlling emotion for one’s actions, both directly and indirectly. The Rajasic tendency on the other hand is towards action, but action driven and motivated by our vital passions and impulses. Sri Aurobindo describes rajas as the “power of life, with its capacity of the nervous reactions which in us are recognisable as pleasure and suffering”. The rajasic principle brings with it “desire, emotion, passion, pleasure, suffering”. He goes on to say further: “desire and its companion wrath, children of rajas, the second guna, the principle of passion, and this desire is the soul’s great enemy” (The Determinism of Nature, Essays on the Gita).

The third Sattwic principle “acts not only as intelligence and intelligent will, but as a seeking for light, for right knowledge and right action according
to that knowledge, as a sympathetic perception of the existence and claims of others, as an attempt to know the higher law of his own nature, which the sattwic principle in him creates, and to obey it, and as a conception of the greater peace and happiness which virtue, knowledge and sympathy bring in their train. He knows more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his rajasic and tamasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends the
perfection of his normal humanity” (The Determinism of Nature, Essays on the Gita). So the sattwic attribute in humans is the one which seeks to go beyond the needs and desires of the self towards altruistic action, thinking not just of the individual or their immediate group, but of an ever-widening circle of humanity and the world. The sattwic principle seeks higher truths and vaster solutions.

However, the sattwic principle is still a part of Nature, and the sattwic quality in humans is always still mired in ego. It is always mixed with aspects of the tamasic and rajasic.

Even the most sattwic will is so overborne or mixed up with or circumvented by the rajasic and tamasic gunas as to be only in
part sattwic, and thence arises that sufficiently strong element of self-deception, of a quite involuntary and even innocent make believe and hiding from oneself which the merciless eye of the psychologist detects even in the best human action. When we think that we are acting quite freely, powers are concealed behind our action which escape the most careful self-introspection; when we think that we are free from ego, the ego is there, concealed, in the mind of the saint as in that of the sinner. When our eyes are really opened on our action and its springs, we are
obliged to say with the Gita “guna gunesu vartante”, “it was the modes of Nature that were acting upon the modes.”

For this reason even a high predominance of the sattwic principle does not constitute freedom. For, as the Gita points out, the sattwa binds, as much as the other gunas, and binds just in the same way, by desire, by ego; a nobler desire, a purer ego,—but so long as in any form these two hold the being, there is no freedom. The man of virtue, of knowledge, has his ego of the virtuous man, his ego of knowledge, and it is that sattwic ego which he seeks to satisfy; for his own sake he seeks virtue and knowledge.

The Determinism of Nature, Essays on the Gita

So the sattwic tendency, even though it aspires for higher principles and a higher way of life, is always mired by its mixture with rajasic and tamasic attributes. It is only when we are able to go beyond the ego, which is a part of Nature, and move towards identification with that hidden self which is one with the Divine, that we can start acting in a truly selfless way. This state is called trigunateet, which is beyond the three principles of Nature.

Only when we cease to satisfy the ego, to think and to will from the ego, the limited “I” in us, then is there a real freedom. In other words, freedom, highest self-mastery begin when above the natural self we see and hold the supreme Self of which the ego is an obstructing veil and a blinding shadow. And that can only be when we see the one Self in us seated above Nature and make our individual being one with it in being and consciousness and in its individual nature of action only an instrument of a supreme Will, the one Will that is really free. For that we must rise high above the three gunas, become trigunatıta; for that Self is beyond even the sattwic principle. We have to climb to it through the sattwa, but we attain to it only when we get beyond sattwa; we reach out to it from the ego, but only reach it by leaving the ego. We are drawn towards it by the highest, most passionate, most stupendous and ecstatic of all desires; but we can securely live in it only when all desire drops away from us. We have at a certain stage to liberate ourselves even from the desire of our liberation.

Ibid.

It is part of the evolutionary process of Nature that humans have to move from the lower to the higher gunas, and then finally beyond the gunas to the state of being trigunateet. At that point, we stop acting from the ego, and instead our actions become completely selfless, with only the betterment of humanity and the world as our aim.

What has been described in this and the previous post is a specific framework of conceptualizing the world and the place and role of humanity in it. In this conceptualization, the evolutionary process is ongoing, and while humans as we are today are the culmination of the evolutionary process for the time being, there is more evolution set to happen. As part of this process, humans have evolved a very complex mental faculty, and the purpose of this faculty is to move the center of power and control in our being from the passions and impulses of the physical and vital to the psychic and spiritual that is beyond material Nature and is the seat of the Divine in us. This is a movement in Nature from the tamasic to the rajasic to the sattwic principle and finally to the transformation of consciousness that will lead us beyond these three to the trigunateet state, at which point we will act in material Nature from the position of identification with the Divine in us, and our actions will become completely selfless.

If we situate progressive thought in this conceptualization, we can quite easily see that progressive thought has reached a point where it has embraced the sattwic principle. The definition of sattwa that is given above above can also apply as a definition of progressive thought: “[it] acts not only as intelligence and intelligent will, but as a seeking for light, for right knowledge and right action according to that knowledge, as a sympathetic perception of the existence and claims of others, as an attempt to know the higher law of [its] own nature … and to obey it, and as a conception of the greater peace and happiness which virtue, knowledge and sympathy bring in their train. [It] knows more or less imperfectly that [it] has to govern [the] rajasic and tamasic by [the] sattwic nature and that thither tends the perfection of his normal humanity.”

And it is the same flaw that is in the sattwic principle that also plagues progressive thought and blocks the progress of humanity towards a more harmonious future. Both the sattwic principle and progressive thought are mired by the influence of the tamasic and rajasic, by the influence of the insecurities, fears, desires and attachments of the physical and the vital in us. This influence invariably leads to self-centered thought and action, even when attempts are being made to act for the betterment of the wider community. To remove this influence is the only way forward for humanity, and to do that we will have to move away from identifying with the material self and the material world, move towards the dissolution of the ego, and move towards the transformation of consciousness that this path leads to. This requires, among other things, the deep, objective self-introspection and introspection of the world at large that is part of jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge), which ultimately leads to the ego’s dissolution.

If progressive individuals and groups are serious about wanting to move the world towards a more harmonious, peaceful and unified future, then the only option in front of them to overcome the limits of progressive though and action, and the constant failure of progressive solutions, is the movement towards a transformation of consciousness.

Without the transformation of consciousness, we as individuals will only ultimately continue to work for ourselves, for the fulfillment of our individual egos, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves of the altruism of our actions. And as a collective we will keep dividing ourselves into factions, opposing each other for one reason or the other, with each faction using collective vital desires, fears, insecurities and attachments as justification for for disharmony and disunity towards the other.

Conservative thinking, if it wants to do good in the world, will have to understand that it is impossible to achieve peace and harmony at a limited level, and at the expense of others. It is always the entirety of humanity that will have to be taken forward, or we will keep moving in circles without making any actual progress. Conservative thought is in many ways even more in the grip of of human vital instincts than progressive though, because at least progressive thought has been able to understand the need for universalism if not yet implement it. It is not by restricting human action to one or another set of prescribed material ritualistic practices, nor by one set of material beliefs or another, that true solutions can be found, but by the opening and widening of our mental faculty to ever expanding heights, till our small, limiting material vital needs are replaced by the vastness of our psychic beings.

If we are completely committed to achieving human harmony and unity, and we contemplate on the reasons why apparently good-willed solutions keep failing, we cannot help but come to the conclusion that, ultimately, again and again and again, it is the human ego, at both the individual and collective levels, that derails the movement towards that harmony and unity. And it then only makes sense that committing ourselves wholeheartedly to removing the control of that ego on our thoughts and actions is the way forward towards a better future for humanity.