Let me first reproduce here a paragraph from a recent biography of Sri Aurobindo published by the Columbia University Press, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. This is pertaining to the seventy-seven issues of the monthly Arya that came out from 15 August 1914 to 15 January 1921. The biographer considers that Sri Aurobindo was “unable to restructure” these writings in view of their month by month appearance in a magazine. As an example of such a constrain he cites essays presenting The Synthesis of Yoga in which “one part is too long, another too short.” But there are, in his opinion, other criticisms also, criticisms which could be levelled at the entire Arya writings. He says: “The style is involved and, by modern standards, frequently obscure. Like other writers trained in classical tradition, Aurobindo loved the periodic sentence, in which clause follows clause, until sometimes the point of the statement is lost in a maze of qualifications. He was the last generation to write like that in English. The twenty-first century reader of Dryden, Ruskin, Aurobindo, Virginia Woolf, or continental writers such as Michel Foucault, must develop what British literary critic Philip Davis calls “immersed attention” to be able to profit from this style.” (p. 328) This style might have its own rewards which would not come through the journalistic prose favoured by the contemporary writers and, hence, there could be some merit in its employment. But that is to miss the entire point, of a Yogi’s language which comes from another source, with its own diction and its own idiom, with a power the revelatory Word carries in its many-faceted Truth-utterance.

 

If we go by Lester G Fehmi’s Attention to Attention, then we could say that attentional styles and brain wave activity are reflected in each other; this would be particularly so if attentional behaviuors are fundamental to what ordinarily makes us human. In the larger context “while narrow-objective focus allows us to perform some tasks very well, it also results in the accumulation of stress. But there is the opposite of objective attention which distances one from the object of one’s attention, what is called the immersed attention in which there is little or no separation. The opposite of narrow attention in which attention is restricted to one or a few things is diffuse attention which in its most extreme form is inclusive and three-dimensional, giving equal attention to all internal and external stimuli simultaneously as well as the space, silence, and timelessness in which they occur."

 

But the real inquiry is, if these considerations can at all be applied to the yogic experiences, specifically when the Yogi speaks of knowledge, as well as expression, coming through the silent mind from above. No tools of physical sciences can be put into use for investigating it, nor can its authenticity be questioned in any way. As a matter of fact, unless the psychologist’s link with yogic experiences is established on empirical grounds it will be irrational to bring them together. But this is precisely what is being done by our impetuous biographer while summoning the notion of “immersed attention” in such a discussion. This should either mean not understanding either or employing plain diversionary tactics in prejudicial assessments. The whole business gives the impression that there is no spiritual perception at all in seeing things that actually belong to the spiritual domain, that the Rocky Mountains are just hollow, they even casting not simply ignorant but arrogant look at the ancient Himalayas.

In this connection let me briefly narrate an interesting research a friend of mine carried out recently. She was conducting a class in Cambridge when she wanted to find out the kind of responses she would get from students when different styles of prose writings were given to them for study. As a part of the exercise she picked up a number of passages from a particular author and gave these to them, of course without disclosing his identity; nor did she reveal the names of the books from where these passages were selected.

 

The answer from the students was astonishing. They all said: “This author must have been from Cambridge.” They justified it in terms of the sweep and dignity of the style, the depth of thought, the powerful rhythm in which the prose moved,—the hallmark of a Cambridge educated was unmistakable in those passages, they maintained.

 

The author selected by my friend was Sri Aurobindo!

 

It looks as though some of the Americans have difficulty in recognizing it. Perhaps the greater illogicality of our biographer is in his juxtaposing a contemporary literary critic with the author who wrote those Arya articles long decades earlier. But the greater paradox lies elsewhere. Let us take the British literary critic Paul Davis cited in the biography. This critic’s monumental Volume Eight of The Oxford English Literary History is hailed as one of the outstanding works depicting the greatness of the Victorian writers which, according to the Times Literary Supplement, becomes a “persuasive affirmation of why the Victorians are still worth reading.” The paradox is, very often one calls Sri Aurobindo a Victorian but still one denies him the greatness the favoured critic Paul Davis himself gives to the Victorians. In any case, the theories of “immersed attention” etc have yet to get settled down before they can be applied at all to the writings of a Yogi.


 

RY Deshpande