Finding Auroville

In the previous post I had gone through the descriptions of Bhakti Yoga (the yoga of devotion), Jnana Yoga (the yoga of knowledge) and Karma Yoga (the yoga of action) by Sri Aurobindo in Essays on the Gita. These three together constitute the basis of Integral Yoga.

The core purpose of Yoga is the dissolution of the ego, the movement that takes us away from identification with and attachment to our material selves and material nature, and towards the universal and transcendent Divine consciousness that resides within us and is beyond nature. As we saw in the previous post, the purpose of the three yogas of devotion, knowledge and action is also the same, each in their specific way, and they then synthesize together to help each other move the individual being towards the goal of the dissolution of the ego and the transformation of consciousness. In Integral Yoga the objective of this movement away from material nature is not the complete renunciation of material life, but rather an inner renunciation that allows for continued interaction with and action in the material world. This action, informed by self-knowledge and devotion to the Divine, and enwrapped in the love and ananda of the Divine, is a completely selfless and desireless action, the goal of which is service to the Divine and to humanity. To be called yoga, all three: devotion, knowledge and action, have to be completely selfless and desireless, or have to be part of a completely sincere and earnest movement towards selflessness and desirelessness. This is the characteristic that transforms these three into yoga, as opposed to any other form of devotion, knowledge and action. In this post I will go over how putting the yoga into devotion, knowledge and action changes them, and I will situate this discussion in the context of Auroville.

Jnana Yoga, the yoga of knowledge, is perhaps the easiest to differentiate from other forms of knowledge accumulation. The knowledge of jnana yoga is specifically self-knowledge, which is gained by completely objective observation of and contemplation on oneself and others, with the aim of understanding the root motivations for human action, which is always ultimately the vital ego, and thus understanding the root causes of human unhappiness and suffering. Through this personal experiential understanding gained through observation and contemplation, one reaches the realization that it is our attachment to and identification with our material selves and material nature that is the cause of all unhappiness, suffering and negativity. And one reaches the realization that moving beyond this identification with material nature towards identification with the immaterial all-pervading Divine consciousness, that also lies within us, is the key to fundamentally removing the unhappiness and negativity in us and in humanity.

All other forms of material knowledge only become part of jnana yoga if they help to facilitate our movement towards this self-knowledge. Many of the posts of this blog have dealt with progressivism and progressive thinking, and how progressive thinking is akin to the intellectual religion of humanity (which can be called intellectual humanism) and sattwic thinking in humanity. Progressive, sattwic thinking is humanity’s attempt to use its mental faculties to move towards a more harmonious, united, egalitarian and peaceful future for humanity. This intellectual humanism will always fail because it seeks to find solutions within the realm of material nature, and will always be thwarted by the vital ego of the individual and the collective. It is only by going beyond the tamasic, rajasic and sattwic qualities of material nature towards the immaterial trigunateet state that rests with the Divine consciousness, by going beyond the intellectual towards the spiritual religion of humanity (spiritual humanism) that harmony and unity in humanity will be able to be achieved.

In Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo writes that the path towards spiritual humanism passes through the sattwic intellectual humanism of the mental faculty. The mind has to turn away from wanting to gratify the animalistic desires and urges of the vital that wallows in emotional insecurities, and turn towards aspiring for altruistic aims for humanity. It is only after this attempt to pursue intellectual humanism that the intellect will be able to realize that the vital ego will never allow the intellect to achieve the intellect’s altruistic aims. The intellect will then understand that the dissolution of the ego is the key to the achievement of these altruistic aims, and that it is only with spiritual humanism that these aims of a harmonious and united humanity can be manifested.

“The evil-doers attain not to me,” says the Purushottama, “souls bewildered, low in the human scale; for their knowledge is reft away from them by Maya and they resort to the nature of being of the Asura.” This bewilderment is a befooling of the soul in Nature by the deceptive ego. The evil-doer cannot attain to the Supreme because he is for ever trying to satisfy the idol ego on the lowest scale of human nature; his real God is this ego. His mind and will, hurried away in the activities of the Maya of the three gunas, are not instruments of the spirit, but willing slaves or self-deceived tools of his desires. He sees this lower nature only and not his supreme self and highest being or the Godhead within himself and in the world: he explains all existence to his will in the terms of ego and desire and serves only ego and desire. To serve ego and desire without aspiration to a higher nature and a higher law is to have the mind and the temperament of the Asura. A first necessary step upward is to aspire to a higher nature and a higher law, to obey a better rule than the rule of desire, to perceive and worship a nobler godhead than the ego or than any magnified image of the ego, to become a right thinker and a right doer. This too is not in itself enough; for even the sattwic man is subject to the bewilderment of the gunas, because he is still governed by wish and disliking, iccha-dvesa. He moves within the circle of the forms of Nature and has not the highest, not the transcendental and integral knowledge. Still by the constant upward aspiration in his ethical aim he in the end gets rid of the obscuration of sin which is the obscuration of rajasic desire and passion and acquires a purified nature capable of deliverance from the rule of the triple Maya. By virtue alone man cannot attain to the highest, but by virtue he can develop a first capacity for attaining to it, adhikara. For the crude rajasic or the dull tamasic ego is difficult to shake off and put below us; the sattwic ego is less difficult and at last, when it sufficiently subtilises and enlightens itself, becomes even easy to transcend, transmute or annihilate.

Man, therefore, has first of all to become ethical, sukrtı, and then to rise to heights beyond any mere ethical rule of living, to the light, largeness and power of the spiritual nature, where he gets beyond the grasp of the dualities and its delusion, dvandva-moha.

The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge, Essays on the Gita

When material knowledge is at the service of sattwic, intellectual humanism, it can only conceptualize a future for humanity that is harmonious and united, it cannot help in truly achieving it. However when material knowledge helps in the attainment of the self-knowledge of jnana yoga, the individual moves beyond the material ego towards spiritual humanism. And as more and more individuals are able to move towards spiritual humanism, a truly harmonious and united future becomes possible.

This movement from the sattwic towards trigunateet, from intellectual humanism to spiritual humanism is the reason why Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have laid so much stress on education, as did other thinkers such as Jiddu Krishnamurti. An education that incorporates intellectual and spiritual humanism can help move the individual intellect from the tamasic and rajasic to the sattwic, and then help the individual move beyond the sattwic intellect towards the Divine consciousness beyond material nature. When The Mother says in the Auroville Charter that “Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages”, she is referring to an unending quest and zeal to move towards intellectual humanism and then towards spiritual humanism, so that we can progressively fulfill our roles as “willing servitors of the Divine Consciousness”. This is the movement of jnana yoga that we must pursue in Auroville. It is a movement through self-knowledge towards the selfless and desireless state of trigunateet, from which our actions in the material world will be completely at the service of the Divine.

We now turn to Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion. When we usually think of devotion in the realm of religion and spirituality, we think of devotion to a deity or a guru. For the devotion to become a yoga, it has to ultimately be at the service of the individual moving to the selfless and desireless state of union with the Divine.

We have now set before us three interdependent movements [action, knowledge and devotion] of our release out of the normal nature and our growth into the divine and spiritual being. “By the delusion of the dualities which arises from wish and disliking, all existences in the creation are led into bewilderment,” says the Gita. That is the ignorance, the egoism which fails to see and lay hold on the Divine everywhere, because it sees only the dualities of Nature and is constantly occupied with its own separate personality and its seekings and shrinkings. For escape from this circle the first necessity in our works is to get clear of the sin of the vital ego, the fire of passion, the tumult of desire of the rajasic nature, and this has to be done by the steadying sattwic impulse of the ethical being. When that is done, yesam tvantagatam papam jananam punyakarmanam, —or rather as it is being done, for after a certain point all growth in the sattwic nature brings an increasing capacity for a high quietude, equality and transcendence,—it is necessary to rise above the dualities and to become impersonal, equal, one self with the Immutable, one self with all existences. This process of growing into the spirit completes our purification. But while this is being done, while the soul is enlarging into self-knowledge, it has also to increase in devotion. For it has not only to act in a large spirit of equality, but to do also sacrifice to the Lord, to that Godhead in all beings which it does not yet know perfectly, but which it will be able so to know, integrally, samagram mam, when it has firmly the vision of the one self everywhere and in all existences. Equality and vision of unity once perfectly gained, te dvandva-moha-nirmuktah, a supreme bhakti, an all-embracing devotion to the Divine, becomes the whole and the sole law of the being. All other law of conduct merges into that surrender, sarva-dharman parityajya. The soul then becomes firm in this bhakti and in the vow of self-consecration of all its being, knowledge, works; for it has now for its sure base, its absolute foundation of existence and action the perfect, the integral, the unifying knowledge of the all-originating Godhead, te bhajante mam drdha-vratah.

The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge, Essays on the Gita

Bhakti in Integral Yoga does not refer simply to a feeling of reverence to someone or something above us (though that type of reverence is a part of this bhakti), but rather to a complete surrender to the Divine when the knowledge and realization of the fundamental unity of the individual self with the Divine and all things in material nature is achieved. This surrender is a complete capitulation of the individual material self to the Divine of which the material self is now realized to be a part, and the complete devotion to the Divine is a part of this complete capitulation and surrender. The reason why this surrender is willingly undertaken is because of the experience of Ananda that one gains when in proximity to the Divine consciousness. This experience of Ananda is so much deeper, vaster and purer than an experience of happiness or satisfaction that one can achieve by pursuing any material pleasure, goal or achievement, that surrender to the Divine becomes the only conceivable pathway forward for the individual. This is the source of the devotion of Bhakti Yoga. Once this surrender is achieved, all action in the material world is willingly and happily undertaken in the service of the Divine.

Sri Aurobindo stresses that this devotion, which comes with the attainment of self-knowledge, is the devotion that is aimed at in Integral Yoga, even though other forms of devotion also have their place:

For note that it is bhakti with knowledge which the Gita demands from the disciple and it regards all other forms of devotion as good in themselves but still inferior; they may do well by the way, but they are not the thing at which it aims in the soul’s culmination. Among those who have put away the sin of the rajasic egoism and are moving towards the Divine, the Gita distinguishes between four kinds of bhaktas. There are
those who turn to him as a refuge from sorrow and suffering in the world, arta. There are those who seek him as the giver of good in the world, artharthı. There are those who come to him in the desire for knowledge, jijnasu. And lastly there are those who adore him with knowledge, jnanı. All are approved by the Gita, but only on the last does it lay the seal of its complete sanction. All these movements without exception are high and good, udarah sarva evaite, but the bhakti with knowledge excels them all, visisyate. We may say that these forms are successively the bhakti of the vital-emotional and affective nature, that of the practical and dynamic nature, that of the reasoning intellectual nature, and that of the highest intuitive being which takes up all the rest of the nature into unity with the Divine. Practically, however, the others may be regarded as preparatory movements.

This highest form of selfless and desireless devotion, which comes from union with the Divine, should be the aim of the sadhak. Any other form of devotion should be seen as an intermediate step in the movement towards this union.

Finally we come to Karma Yoga, the yoga of action. In Auroville, karma yoga is often translated as “the yoga of work”, and the performance of regular tasks or involvement in any kind of work is considered adequate for fulfilling the requirements of karma yoga. As long as an individual is involved in some sort of work, they will magically make progress on the path of Integral Yoga, even if their approach to work is no different to anywhere else in the world.

We have seen in the previous post that the term “karma” does not denote just “work” but instead means “action”. This action encompasses all action undertaken by an individual in material nature, which includes all physical activity, mental activity as well as our emotions, our outlook on things, our preferences, our mental and emotional orientation etc. In karma yoga, all action is dedicated to the Divine. Sri Aurobindo stresses on “works” done in material nature by the individual to help move humanity towards the Divine, but this does not refer just to work in terms of jobs or tasks that we perform, but to all our actions. Work in terms of jobs and tasks is an important part of our actions in the material world, but our whole being and all our actions have to be oriented towards the Divine, which is when our jobs and tasks also begin to be at the service of the Divine. All our actions, all the works that we do, have to be consecrated to the Divine. They have to be completely selfless and desireless. This can only happen once we are on the path of self-knowledge and the dissolution of the ego. And once we are on this path, our selfless actions themselves help us move further along this path. This is the difference between karma and karma yoga, the difference between action and the yoga of action. For actions to become a yoga, they have to be informed by an aspiration towards selflessness and desirelessness, and in turn they assist in our movement towards selflessness and desirelessness.

“This [self-knowledge] however is not all the truth of the Yoga and this end and way of departure, though a great end and a great way, is not the thing I propose to you. For I am the eternal Worker within you and I ask of you works. I demand of you not a passive consent to a mechanical movement of Nature from which in your self you are wholly separated, indifferent and aloof, but action complete and divine, done as the willing and understanding instrument of the Divine, done for God in you and others and for the good of the world. This action I propose to you, first no doubt as a means of perfection in the supreme spiritual Nature, but as a part too of that perfection. Action is a part of the integral knowledge of God, of his greater mysterious truth and of an entire living in the Divine; action can and should be continued even after perfection and freedom are won. I ask of you the action of the Jivanmukta, the works of the Siddha. Something has to be added to the Yoga already described,—for that was only a first Yoga of knowledge. There is also a Yoga of action in the illumination of God-experience; works can be made one spirit with knowledge. For works done in a total self-vision and God-vision, a vision of God in the world and of the world in God are themselves a movement of knowledge, a movement of light, an indispensable means and an intimate part of spiritual perfection.

…

“The Creator of the worlds is not limited by his creations; the Lord of works is not bound by his works; the divine Will is not attached to its labour and the results of its labour: for it is omnipotent, all-possessing and all-blissful. But still the Lord looks down on his creations from his transcendence; he descends as the Avatar; he is here in you; he rules from within all things in the steps of their nature. And you too must do works in him, after the way and in the steps of the divine nature, untouched by limitation, attachment or bondage. Act for the best good of all, act for the maintenance of the march of the world, for the support or the leading of its peoples. The action asked of you is the action of the liberated Yogin; it is the spontaneous output of a free and God-held energy, it is an equal-minded movement, it is a selfless and desireless labour.

“The first step on this free, this equal, this divine way of action is to put from you attachment to fruit and recompense and to labour only for the sake of the work itself that has to be done. For you must deeply feel that the fruits belong not to you but to the Master of the world. Consecrate your labour and leave its returns to the Spirit who manifests and fulfils himself in the universal movement. The outcome of your action is determined by his will alone and whatever it be, good or evil fortune, success or failure, it is turned by him to the accomplishment of his world
purpose. An entirely desireless and disinterested working of the personal will and the whole instrumental nature is the first rule of Karmayoga. Demand no fruit, accept whatever result is given to you; accept it with equality and a calm gladness: successful or foiled, prosperous or afflicted, continue unafraid, untroubled and unwavering on the steep path of the divine action. “This is no more than the first step on the path. For you must be not only unattached to results, but unattached also to your labour. Cease to regard your works as your own; as you have abandoned the fruits of your work, so you must surrender the work also to the Lord of action and sacrifice. Recognise that your nature determines your action; your nature rules the immediate motion of your Swabhava and decides the expressive turn and development of your spirit in the paths of the executive force of Prakriti. Bring in no longer any self-will to confuse the steps of your mind in following the Godward way. Accept the action proper to your nature. Make of all you do from the greatest and most unusual effort to the smallest daily act, make of each act of your mind, each act of your heart, each act of your body, of every inner and outer turn, of every thought and will and feeling, of every step and pause and movement, a sacrifice to the Master of all sacrifice and Tapasya.

The Message of the Gita, Essays on the Gita

The misplaced notion that is prevalent in Auroville is that an individual just needs to be engaged in some sort of work, and that is adequate for it to be considered yoga. Yoga is the movement away from material nature towards the Divine. It is a movement towards complete selflessness and desirelessness. The three yogas of knowledge, action and devotion are the instruments with which we make that movement. The actions and works we undertake as part of the yoga of action have to be informed by selflessness and desirelessness, and have to help in taking us further towards them. Our life in Auroville has to be dedicated to service, seva. It has to become a service to the Divine. If this seems like too difficult an ask, then our work here has to at least move in that direction. Instead if we begin to ask for too many things in return, if the work becomes a rajasic expression of the ego, it ceases to be a service, and it ceases to be dedicated to the Divine. In the current conflict in Auroville, the blatant holding on to power and control, and the blatant possessiveness that is on display is a sure sign that Aurovilians have a long way to go before their efforts can become a yoga of action.

Fundamental selflessness and desirelessness are the core of yoga. They are at the heart of the transformation of consciousness. They are the aim of the dissolution of the ego. The yoga of knowledge aims at the attainment of selflessness and desirelessness. The yoga of action aims at selfless and desireless action in the material world. The yoga of devotion is a selfless and desireless surrender to the Divine consciousness. This selflessness and desirelessness is what differentiates the yogas of knowledge, action and devotion from other forms of knowledge, action and devotion. This is what makes Yoga, Yoga. These three yogas working in tandem then move the individual towards the Divine, and allow the individual to work in the material world with the aim of moving humanity towards the Divine. Our lives and our activities in Auroville should be centered around the pursuit of this movement, not just at a rhetorical level, but sincerely and wholeheartedly. At the very least, it should be thoroughly understood that the purpose of Auroville is the pursuit of this movement.