The Newness of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga

The blurb on the back cover of The Newness of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga summarises its contents and delineates its main ideas. Expanding Sri Aurobindo's statement that the newness of his yoga lay "in its aim, standpoint and the totality of its method" it says:

Its aim is not a departure out of this world, but a change of life and existence. Its standpoint is not the achievement of an individual realisation, but a universal achievement for the earth-consciousness. Its method is synthetic and integral, for it seeks a total change of the consciousness and nature.

The fourth chapter of the book talks about the aim, while Chapters 1, 2, and 3 present the standpoint, and Chapter 5 describes the method. These five chapters make up the main body of the book, while the last two compare the Integral Yoga to other paths (6) and offer glimpses of the future of mankind (7). Finally, the addendum reveals the Mother's perception of that future as it unfolded itself in the twenty years following Sri Aurobindo's passing.

While Sri Aurobindo calls his yoga integral because it takes up the essence and many processes of the previous yogas of India such as the Vedantic and the Tantric, his departure from those sources lies in his view that

the world is not either the creation of Maya or only a play, līlā, of the Divine, or a cycle of births in the ignorance from which we have to escape, but a field of manifestation in which there is a progressive evolution of the soul and the nature in Matter and from Matter through Life and Mind to what is beyond Mind till it reaches the complete revelation of Sachchidananda in life. (CWSA 29: 445)

A more glorious affirmation of life on earth would be hard to come by. Sri Aurobindo has come up with much more than another approach to yoga—he has given a new sense to life itself: for him, life is a means for a spiritual evolution, a series of ascents from the physical being and consciousness to the vital, the being dominated by the life-self, thence to the mental being realised in the fully developed man and thence into the perfect consciousness which is beyond the mental, into the Supramental consciousness and the Supramental being, the Truth-Consciousness which is the integral consciousness of the spiritual being (Ibid., 396).

Within this general scheme of evolutionary progress the potential role of mankind is a game changer for

while the former steps in evolution were taken by Nature without a conscious will in the plant and animal life, in man Nature becomes able to evolve by a conscious will in the instrument. (CWSA 36: 547)

This is the significance of man: through methodical effort towards self-perfection, known as yoga in Indic culture, the human being can become a conscious participant in the evolution from mind to what is beyond, named supramental consciousness by Sri Aurobindo. Here is his epigram on evolution:

The human being on earth is God playing at humanity in a world of matter under the conditions of a hampered density with the ulterior intention of imposing law of spirit on matter and nature of deity upon human nature. Evolution is nothing but the progressive unfolding of Spirit out of the density of material consciousness and the gradual self-revelation of God out of this apparent animal being. (CWSA 12: 334)

As to ways and means and the division of labour in the terrestrial enterprise:

In all that is done in the universe, the Divine through his Shakti is behind all action but he is veiled by his Yoga Maya and works through the ego of the Jiva in the lower nature.

In Yoga also it is the Divine who is the Sadhaka and the Sadhana; it is his Shakti with her light, power, knowledge, consciousness, Ananda, acting upon the adhara and, when it is opened to her, pouring into it with these divine forces that makes the Sadhana possible. But so long as the lower nature is active the personal effort of the Sadhaka remains necessary.

The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender,— an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing— the mind’s will, the heart’s seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature; rejection of the movements of the lower  nature—rejection of the mind’s ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind,—rejection of the vital nature’s desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being,—rejection of the physical nature’s stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body growing always more divine; surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the Divine and the Shakti.

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In proportion as the surrender and self-consecration progress the Sadhaka becomes conscious of the Divine Shakti doing the Sadhana, pouring into him more and more of herself, founding in him the freedom and perfection of the Divine Nature. The more this conscious process replaces his own effort, the more rapid and true becomes his progress. But it cannot completely replace the necessity of personal effort until the surrender and consecration are pure and complete from top to bottom. (CWSA 32: 6–7)

The Newness of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is a neat little volume: apart from its intriguing cover of two luminous ellipses with variously gaseous nimbi in vertical interaction, it contains everything a reader could wish for—an introduction which is impressively compact for the ground that it covers, a glossary defining Sanskrit and Aurobindonian terms, and an addendum with the Mother's reportage on the first manifestations of the new world posited by Sri Aurobindo as the future.

—Sunam Mukherjee

Sunam reads proof at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Reviewed in February 2022