A
Mystery Worthy of
a
Legion of Sherlocks
Sri
Aurobindo and The Mother
[See
Satprem's Sri Aurobindo or the
Adventure of Consciousness: the reference for what
follows.]
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Two of the most extraordinary pioneering spirits of our age are not all
that well known today, at least in the Western world. From
when I first heard their names years ago, I
had this itch to find out more, but immersed in other things, I dropped
them into the generic pigeon hole of "gurus" and basically
forgot about them. Then one day I ran across a copy of Satprem's book and soon realized what
an incredible misjudgment I had made.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were indeed spiritual teachers, but more to
the point, they were, like Rudolf Steiner, Emanuel Swedenborg, Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, and David
Spangler, exceptionally gifted seers into the nonphysical
dimensions. Astronomers have long recognized and defined countless
entities and phenomena of space -- planets, stars, black holes, and whatnot.
But there are some unique entities
which, according to our present scientific knowledge, cannot be
identified, because their behavior clearly sets them apart. They
are aptly referred to as singularities. Sri Aurobindo and Mother are
likewise [even in the world of gurus], singularities
of which we are at a loss thus far to comprehend fully.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother represent a Mystery such as we rarely
if ever encounter in life, fully capable of piercing the shell of
one's being in a way that, the meaning of everything
is changed "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye!" It is my hope that the
charged enigma that is Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfassa may draw
you into learning more about them and what their larger-than-life
"agenda" may mean for all of us.
The breadth of the core question for Aurobindo originally
addressed the need of his country as described in more detail
below. But in his search, the way he went about it, he began
to have Experiences from the beginning that addressed the
very basis of what it means to be human. The questioning --
the quest -- is what lived in both of them for the remaining
decades of their lives. Thus, they did not set out to teach
or seek out disciples at all, although people flocked to their
doorstep, which eventually became a large ashram or spiritual
community of over 1200 people. These followers [one of whom,
for 12 years, by the way, was Joseph
Chilton Pearce, along with his wife and children] lived
there and tried to implement in highly individual ways the
implications of the mutually corroborative inner Experiences of
Aurobindo and the Mother.
With frankness and humility, they were clear about recounting
as best they could
what they observed, and at the same time, they were able to say what
they were at a loss to understand. In this spirit
they also referred to their work of many decades between them as an "experiment."
So, back to Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother as singularities. For starters, Aurobindo was a revolutionary who was in no small
part responsible for initiating the uprising to end British rule in
India and whose ideas about nonviolence must have had a great
influence on his contemporary, Mahatma Ghandi. He did
not grow up in India, but rather, England, and was a professed
"agnostic .. atheist .. sceptic." In response to
witnessing an incident in which an ash-besmeared holy man
dramatically healed his very ill brother in about five minutes, he
suddenly realized there might be genuine merit ["other than
escape"] to the art and science of yoga after all, that
perhaps it could provide the "power he needed to liberate
India," to which he was passionately committed. Later
describing that incident, he said, "I was not absolutely sure
there was a God at all . . . [and yet] I felt there must be a mighty truth
somewhere in this yoga." He determined "to
practice it and find out if my idea was right," and he later
wrote the essence of a prayerful request he made in that moment:
If
Thou art, then Thou knowest my heart. Thou knowest that I
do not ask for .. [liberation] . . . I ask only for
strength to uplift this nation, I ask only to be allowed to live
and work for this people whom I love."
What followed was what must have been a time of stupendous
inner irony, contending
with the British (and the French) who were by now out to get
Aurobindo, and smack in the middle of this imbroglio, came the unexpected awareness of his Inner Life awakening
in a most powerful way. In short, he ended up in jail for
over a year and for six months of that span, he was on trial for
an event he was not party to, although he certainly had inspired
the revolt against British rule in which this play a part.
Every day he was on display in an iron cage in the middle of the
courtroom and in that dark and heated atmosphere, he sat immobile
and silent, immersed in the very active inner world that was
gifting him with not only knowledge of other dimensions but how
the interpenetrate our daily experience in this world as
well. First experienced in the exercise area of the prison,
Sri Aurobindo says he experienced a shift of
consciousness:
I looked a the jail that secluded me from men, and it was no
longer by is high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was
Vasudeva [a name for God] who surrounded me. I walked
under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, but it was
not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I
saw standing there and holding over me his shade ... I looked at
the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the
swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was
Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused
bodies.
He had acquired this double vision that stayed with him
thereafter, and was also constantly present in the iron cage as
well, where he no longer experienced the hostilities of the crowd
and judges, but instead "I looked and it was===========PAGE
166 QUOTE, SATPREM'S BOOK =======
ALSO ABOUT THE MOTHER: PAGE 6 OF THE MIND OF THE
CELLS: THE QUOTE: .. THE CENTUR OF "POSITIVISM"'
PARENTS 'ALL OUT MATERIALISTS
Also a sublime poet, Aurobindo
wrote:
I
climb not to thy everlasting Day, Even
as I have shunned the eternal Night ... Thy
servitudes on earth are greater, king, Than
all the glorious liberties of heaven ... too
far thy heavens for me from suffering men. Imperfect
is the joy not shared by all.
So
you have a taste of the man whose Great Adventure in
Consciousness, for which he is most known, was about to begin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BREADCRUMBS:
Track them, create your own, and give
us feedback about what you find.
-
Get
your own copy of the book mentioned at the top of the page.
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HINT:
Be prepared to ignore languaging [if it is uncomfortable or
even unfamiliar]. In other words, it doesn't
matter what languaging or culture might be the source of this
work. Actually it probably had a much better chance to
be protected and nurtured in India than almost anywhere else
in the world. If the languaging becomes a hang up, you
might abort this tenuous fetus of Epiphany and entirely miss
its fulsome Glory.
-
Become
familiar with the very unusual, very other in fact lives of
Sri Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfasa [The Mother]. I
really mean it when I say you cannot possibly guess, which is
half the fun. I can assure you they are like no one you
ever met or even imagined!
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Eventually
and reading the pages and chapters in order [you need all the
other words that come before, trust me on this one], pay
special attention to "Chapter 17: The
Transformation."
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In
all these levels being transformed over the great span that is
Evolution, say Aurobindo and the Mother, [the various layers within each, the physical,
the vital, the mental], at the very end, it always comes down
to the stymied challenge physical Matter represents.
Material habit is the culprit, such as, overcoming the need and seeming
inevitability of the "habit" of Death.
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Hint:
What does it mean to be an Immortal? -- we get glimpses in
what Aurobindo and Mother (A&M) have learned and have in
turn given to us as best they can through their writings and
teachings.
-
According
to "A&M," our collective Great Work, however
aware or unaware we may be, is now the sacralizing of Matter,
bringing Spirit into the very heart of Matter. To give
us a glimpse of the enormity of what A&M spent their lives
actively, experientially exploring, Satprem
provides perspective:
From
the appearance of the first amoeba in the world of Life to
that of the mammal, we know how many millions of years were
necessary to overcome Matter's inertia and to
"vitalize" it. Similarly, from the Neanderthal
man to Plato, it took thousands of years to overcome the
resistance of the two preceding stages and to "mentalize"
Life, to become the complete mental man.**
Even today, how many people truly
live under the mental sign, and not under that of the passions
of Life?
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And
here we are, becoming collectively conscious of the next
spiral in the evolutionary dance, as A&M have
brought their experience and insight to us with something even
beyond Courage, the knowledge that our
Journey together now turns to bringing Spirit into
Matter. Imagine losing the "habit" of death!
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See
pages 342-3:
But
suddenly, the moment he decides to transform the body, all his
powers vanish, like water into the sand. Disease strikes
him as if he were a mere beginner, his organs begin to
deteriorate, everything goes wrong. It would seem that
the body has to forget its old false and decay-causing
functioning, in order to learn everything in a new way.
And then death enters the picture. ... the line separating
life from death is often very thin indeed -- perhaps we must
even be able to cross over the line and return in order to
really conquer. This is what Mother called "dying
to death" after undergoing an experience from which she
almost did not return. In short, one has to face
everything -- and everything resists ... [Sri Aurobindo:] we
cannot solve a problem on any plane, without confronting all
the opposites of our Goal. Otherwise there would be no
victory, only oppression.
Nowhere
on any plane, is it a question of severing evil from the rest,
but of convincing it of its own light.
[THIS
LAST LINE IS TO ME THE SUMMATION OF THE FUNDAMENTAL PRECEPT OF
OUR HUMAN / CONSCIOUSNESS JOURNEY, as given by A&M.]
And to toss in a bit of physics, Satprem adds, "Since
nothing can be subtracted from the universe, [the apparent evil
forces] must be converted."
What
good does it do if one man is transformed while the rest of
humanity goes on dying? the body of the pioneer of
transformation is therefore like a battlefield, it is where
the battle of the world is being fought, where everything
meets, where everything resists. There is a single,
essential point at the very bottom, a knot of life and death
where the destiny of the world takes shape. Everything
is gathered in that single point.
I
have been digging deep and long
Mid
a horror of filth and mire,
A
bed for the golden river's song.
A
home for the deathless fire ..
My
gaping wounds are a thousand and one ...
The
pioneer has to face every difficulty, even Death, not to
destroy them but to change them. Nothing can be
transformed unless one takes it upon himself: Thou shalt
bear all things that all things may change, says Savitri.
This is why Sri Aurobindo left his body on December 5, 1950,
officially because of uremia, he who could heal others in
seconds.
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I
don't have statistics on this, it's just something I have long
noticed. It is said that near-death experiences first
became "a phenomenon" officially recognized by those
in medical fields. Technologies came to the fore in the
mid-to-late 1960s that made a huge difference in terms of how
many lives have been prolonged of those who suffered cardiac
arrest. And not just prolonged, but given back to them;
according to a huge sum of well documented cases, many people
have been recognized to have died and come back. And a
substantial number of these folks have come back with memories
intact of another reality. They are always very clear
about this "realer than real" they remember from
such Experiences.
When Dr. Raymond Moody,
Jr. published Life After Life, he gave
enormous hope and peace to the many people who had had
near-death experiences / NDEs, before and since. NDErs up
to that time had no idea how to think about what had happened to
them, much less talk about it in a society that would
immediately pronounce them to be mental cases and perhaps even
institutionalize them if they persisted in their strange belief
in the 'totally irrational'. ..
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So
let's back up here a moment -- back to what I've been noticing
-- can anyone verify or speak to this?? -- which is a hefty
number of people who have come forward since that 1975
publication date, who have revealed their NDEs dating not just
from the 60s but the 50s [including, by the way, Rhea
A. White herself,
whose "accident" / NDE took place in 1951, also David
Spangler, whose cosmic consciousness experience at
age five must have happened circa 1952, and Robert
A. Monroe who started having out-of-body
experiences in the 1950s]. Yes, I know NDEs and all
those other exceptional experiences have probably been around
since we learned to talk back when, by the cave and the first
people-made fires, but either most of them weren't daring to
share their exceptional experiences either, or the Experiences
were comparatively few and far between .. until
the 1950s!
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This
can only be claimed as a thought, but it's really worth
looking into, although I can't imagine how anything could be
proven as such. Nevertheless: I cannot help but
entertain the amazing thought that Sri Aurobindo, whose body
died in 1950, and the Mother, who passed over in 1973, may
have been greatly instrumental in the steadily increasing
numbers of people whose lives have been indeed transformed by
all sorts of EHE-type experiences, since specifically the
1950s and finally to be named and widely recognized for what
they are in 1975. They worked for
several decades each and together in, we could say, "both
worlds" / a multiplicity of dimensions, consciously to
alter, to initiate the process of helping Humanity find the
way into the first steps of this new evolutionary round that
has been remarked through many people, even more so through
many Experiencers, and even far more so in naturally gifted
and practiced Experiencers from a world-wide diversity of
cultures, lifestyles and interests, not to mention types of
experiences.
In the early 90s, NDEs and soon other types of these exceptional
experiences became much more publicly recognized and
talked about as they began to show up in many media. The
decade-plus before that, these were by-and-large the privileged
information of hardly more than a few interested scholars and of
course the Experiencers. This quickly burgeoned into a
popular literature that just exploded in the 1980s and
-90s. But I almost never remember anyone communicating about
these sorts of Experiences from before the 1950s, aside from religious and
spiritual communities -- e.g., Catholic and Indian saints, and a very
few others.
It's a BIG thought, because it could be a genuine example of
those who, once they passed over, had a continued impact on life
in the physical domain. In this case, it would mean a most
extraordinary power of influence, not just on the lives of
personal loved ones, but on the entirety of Humanity. My belief is that both Sri Aurobindo and
The Mother, through their continued and passionately committed
work simply stayed focused on their efforts beyond the confines
of the physical world. They may indeed be Instruments in
helping in an inconceivable way to leverage open the door
through which we could together begin to glimpse -- together,
mind you -- the further steps into our collective Journey.
A
Big, Big Thought.
----
**Re:
'O man' languaging
-- speaking of entrenched, unconscious habits that need to and are
changing!
This speeding up of evolutionary epics -- have you noticed, too?
-- gives us all hope. Here's to the growing healing
influence of the Feminine in all
Life. The denial is lapsing, rather speedily, at last!
It helps to keep this in the perspective of evolutionary ages
[billions -- to millions -- to thousands .. and now..] to
appreciate what a whirlwind of a breath has been this passage
toward wholeness and the crucial reclaiming of the
Feminine. "Women's Suffrage" began earnestly in
the 1800s, which led to a steady expansion of this naturally
embracing, inclusive social conscience movement that continues to
expand in its transformative work -- people of all colors,
children, the Earth
itself in all its wondrous diversity of LIFE, humanity in all its
wondrous diversity of individuation into the
MORE! Without the socializing, deeply relational,
healing, and
wholeness-making wisdom and inclusivity of the Feminine, O man
would not have a prayer of a chance; evolution would
cease.
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