Finding Auroville

Over the past few posts we have been looking at the commonalities between the aims of progressive thinking and the spiritual philosophy of Integral Yoga, as well as the limits of progressive thinking in being able to find true solutions for humanity. Humans are on the path of perceiving a sense of unity, oneness and harmony with an ever-widening group of humanity, starting from the family, village, tribe, region, religion, nation and ultimately with all of humanity together. On this expanding scale, progressive thought is further along than conservative thought, since progressivism strives to broaden the reach of unity, while conservatism always delineates restrictions and constricts the contours of the group it feels united with. Both however exist within the mental and intellectual sphere, and are limited and restricted by their immersion in material nature. As opposed to this, the transformation of consciousness that Integral Yoga expounds allows individuals and groups to move beyond nature and the material world. With this movement, the sense of unity, oneness and harmony that people feel with each other will not rely any more on any material affinity or affiliation of emotion or thought or action, but instead will rest on the universal fact that we are all a part of the Divine consciousness, and are thus ultimately, fundamentally the same and indivisible.

Progressive thought at its widest is able to perceive the unity of all of humanity. At this expansive level it is able to conceptualize a purely sattwic space or community, at any scale. However even though this progressive, sattwic thought can conceptualize such a space, progressive action is not able to achieve it, because tamasic and rajasic energies will always come in the way of achieving it. To be able to achieve such a purely sattwic space, the leap to self-realization will have to be made, the dissolution of the ego will have to be undergone. Ultimately, the aims of both progressive thought and Integral Yoga are the same, but it is only through spirituality, through the transformation of consciousness, that the aim can be achieved.

So why then is there so much daylight between progressive thinkers and spirituality? Why is spirituality so often and so easily ceded to the realm of conservatism and religiosity? For example in India, spirituality is well established as being part of religious thinking, no matter which religion we look at. Integral Yoga is considered to be firmly rooted in Hinduism, even though it preaches a universal philosophy that goes beyond Hinduism and does not require any aspect of ritualistic religion at all. Of course the roots of Integral Yoga lie in Vedantic texts such as the Upanishads and the Bhagvad Gita, which is one of the reasons for the misallocation. But it needs to be understood that Yoga and Integral Yoga propound a psychological and sociological transformation that, as mentioned above, is universal and goes beyond ritualistic Hinduism. It is ironic that practices such as Hatha Yoga and aspects of “Eastern spirituality” have gained traction among liberals and progressives in other parts of the world, while in India spirituality is still seen very much to be in the conservative realm.

Another reason for spirituality to be considered conservative is because ritualistic religion has, throughout human history, appropriated spiritual tendencies. And on the other side progressivism has, over the past few centuries since the enlightenment in Europe, moved towards rational, scientific thinking. Since the teachings of spirituality are not directly materially provable, progressive thinking has mostly abandoned spirituality. This has allowed organized and ritualistic religion to continue to appropriate the spiritual aspirations of humanity into the modern age.

In fact organized religion can be considered a perversion of humanity’s spiritual aspirations. Religion drags spirituality back to the material realm, mixes it with tamasic and rajasic fears and desires, and packages it as rituals and idolatry to be adhered to by the masses as a means of power and control. This is the opposite of the purpose of spirituality.

For Integral Yoga to work, spirituality will have to be delinked from religiosity and appropriated by progressive thought. The three foundational yogic practices of Integral Yoga are Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga and Jnana Yoga, which can be understood as selfless devotion, selfless action and selfless knowledge. The “selfless” aspect of these practices requires a movement towards the dissolution of the ego. This in turn requires us to understand ourselves and humanity at a very deep, fundamental level. In a previous post we compared what Sri Aurobindo refers to as the “intellectual religion of humanity” versus the “spiritual religion of humanity”. And we have also seen how the human intellect, our mental faculty, is what separates us from the animals that came before us in the evolutionary process, and it is this mental faculty that will be the conduit of the transference of the central controlling facet of our being from our vital material energies to the psychic and spiritual ananda that lies beyond material nature. Therefore the human intellect is the key tool that will help us in our movement towards the transformation of consciousness. Progressive thinking is a sign that humanity aspires to unity and harmony, but is still stuck in the material and so cannot realize this aspiration. Through progressive thought, we have understood the intellectual religion of humanity, and we now need to realize the spiritual religion of humanity. For this to happen, progressive thinking will have to align itself with spirituality, and understand that this transformation is the only path to unity and harmony. And we will have to unshackle spirituality and Integral Yoga from the grips of ritualistic religion of any sort.

It is because humanity’s mental faculty is the key to the movement from the vital to the spiritual that so much importance has been given to education not just by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother but also other thinkers such as Jiddu Krishnamutri. This education has to be free and flexible, but it also needs to be intense, deep and expansive. It needs to cultivate free but critical thinking, and a rigorous understanding of humanity and the material self among other things. This rigorous, dedicated, progressive, sattwic, compassionate intellectual understanding is what will enable humanity to move beyond the intellect towards self-realization. The restrictions of ritualistic religion or any other form of parochialism will only serve to obstruct this movement.

There are abundant examples from the writings and teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother that discuss the limitations of ritualistic religion when compared with the spirituality that they spent their lives expounding. The compilation Letters on Yoga – I by Sri Aurobindo contains a chapter titled “Religion and Yoga”, from which the three quotes below have been taken. The third quote is a strong statement made by Sri Aurobindo about life in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and how the aspiration for the Divine goes beyond all religious affiliations.

The Divine Truth is greater than any religion or creed or scripture or idea or philosophy — so you must not tie yourself to any of these things.

Religion is always imperfect because it is a mixture of man’s spirituality with the errors that come in trying to sublimate ignorantly his lower nature.

It is news to me that I have excluded Mahomedans from the Yoga. I have not done it any more than I have excluded Europeans or Christians. As for giving up one’s past, if that means giving up the outer forms of the old religions, it is done as much by the Hindus here as by the Mahomedans. The Hindus here — even those who were once orthodox Brahmins and have grown old in it, — give up all observance of caste, take food from Pariahs and are served by them, associate and eat with Mahomedans, Christians, Europeans, cease to practise temple worship or Sandhya (daily prayer and mantras), accept a non-Hindu from Europe as their spiritual director. These are things people who have Hinduism as their aim and object would not do — they do it because they are obliged here to look to a higher ideal in which these things have no value. What is kept of Hinduism is Vedanta and Yoga, in which Hinduism is one with Sufism of Islam and with the Christian mystics. But even here it is not Vedanta and Yoga in their traditional limits (their past), but widened and rid of many ideas that are peculiar to the Hindus. If I have used Sanskrit terms and figures, it is because I know them and do not know Persian and Arabic. I have not the slightest objection to anyone here drawing inspiration from Islamic sources if they agree with the Truth as Sufism agrees with it. On the other hand I have not the slightest objection to Hinduism being broken to pieces and disappearing from the face of the earth, if that is the Divine Will. I have no attachment to past forms; what is Truth will always remain; the Truth alone matters.

The next two quotes by The Mother are along the same lines and can be found in Collected Works of the Mother Volume 15 – Words of The Mother:

Religions are based on creeds which are spiritual experiences brought down to a level where they become more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth. the time of religions is over. We have entered the age of universal spirituality, of spiritual experience in its initial purity.

13 May 1970

You must not confuse a religious teaching with a spiritual one. Religious teaching belongs to the past and halts progress. Spiritual teaching is the teaching of the future – it illumines the consciousness and prepares it for future realisation. Spiritual teaching is above religions and strives towards a global Truth. It teaches us to enter into direct relation with the Divine.

15 July 1972

The Mother also formulated a message about religion specifically for the nascent Auroville in May of 1970:

It is clear from all these quotes that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother see ritualistic religion as a barrier to spiritual development, and see Integral Yoga as something way beyond religiosity. The “spiritual religion of humanity” has much more affinity with and will be obtained via the progressivism of the “intellectual religion of humanity” rather than the restrictiveness and parochialism of ritualistic religion. And as mentioned in a previous post and reiterated in Sri Aurobindo’s powerful quote above, even if the terminology, symbolism and iconography that is currently being used to describe Integral Yoga is rooted in Hindu tradition, in the future this terminology, symbolism and iconography will have to be pluralized to suit different cultures and societies, in order for Integral Yoga to become universalized.

If ritualistic religion gains hold in Auroville, it will act as another barrier to the growth of the project in the direction it is meant to grow in. In fact even the ritualism around the devotion to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother will eventually have to give way to a rigorous focus on understanding and pursuing the teachings of Integral Yoga. And our understanding and experience of Integral Yoga itself will have to change and evolve as we move into the future and as humanity takes the needed steps towards self-realization and beyond.

To end this post and indulge in some mild irony in view of the paragraph above, here is a quote from The Mother in which she responds to a question about Sri Aurobindo’s teachings becoming a religion. She reiterates the point that Integral Yoga goes beyond all mental, material formations, of which ritualistic religion is but an example:

And then she added another question: “Many people say that Sri Aurobindo’s teachings are a new religion. Would you call it a religion?…” You understand, I began to fume!

I wrote (Mother reads her answer):

“Those who say that are simpletons and don’t even know what they’re talking about! It is enough to read everything Sri Aurobindo has written to know that it is impossible to found a religion upon his writings, since for each problem, for each question, he presents all aspects and, while demonstrating the truth contained in each approach, he explains that to attain the Truth a synthesis must be effected, overpassing all mental notions and emerging in a transcendence beyond thought.”

…

“Let me repeat that when we speak of Sri Aurobindo, it is not a question of teaching nor even of revelation, but of an Action from the Supreme; upon this, no religion whatsoever can be founded.”

…

“Men are such fools that they can change anything at all into a religion, so great is their need for a fixed framework for their narrow thought and limited action. They don’t feel secure unless they can affirm: “This is true and that is not”—but such an affirmation becomes impossible for anyone who has read and understood what Sri Aurobindo has written. Religion and yoga are not situated on the same plane of the being, and the spiritual life can exist in its purity only if it is free from all mental dogma.”

Mother’s Agenda Volume 2, April 29, 1961