The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published last year by the Columbia University Press dismisses Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri as a possible source for getting some idea about the yoga-sadhana of Sri Aurobindo. Here is what we have on p. 398: “Because his talks entirely ceased and his correspondence virtually so, there are no first-hand accounts of Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana after 1941. One is tempted to mine Savitri to make up for the lack. Sri Aurobindo’s accounts of Aswapathy’s voyage through the worlds of matter, life, and mind before reaching “the kingdoms of the greater knowledge,” and Savitri’s transit through the “inner countries” until she reaches the inmost soul certainly are based on his life and the Mother’s experiences; but the poem is a fictional creation, and Sri Aurobindo said explicitly that “the circumstances of this life have nothing to do with” its plot. [ref: 144, Letters on Poetry and Art, p. 276] …”

Let us examine the phrase “fictional creation” being supported by the reference from Letters on Poetry and Art.

This letter is dated 10 November 1936 and was addressed to Amal Kiran in response to his query. The way it is printed in the Centenary Edition is as follows: “Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in the far past times when the whole thing had to be opened, so as to ‘hew the ways of Immortality’.” —1936. (p. 729) When the 1954 University-edition of Savitri was prepared, Amal had made an error in reading “This incarnation” as “The narrative” and a correction was pasted before the book was released. The Mother was terribly upset with Amal and even remarked to the effect that he was too sure of himself.

From the letter as printed in the Centenary Edition one gets the impression that it is a single letter, dated 1936. But actually it has two dates:

“Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother.” 3 November 1936.

“This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in the far past times when the whole thing had to be opened, so as to ‘hew the ways of Immortality’.” 10 November 1936.

In the following is the full correspondence between Amal and Sri Aurobindo, as presented in the Lives’ ref 144, Letters on Poetry and Art, p. 276:

Amal: What a flight!—nobody can describe so marvellously our Mother. Isn’t Savitri she and she only?

Sri Aurobindo: Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother.

3 November 1936


Amal: If Savitri is represented as an incarnation of the Divine Mother, Aswapati must be meant to represent Théon.

Sri Aurobindo: What has Théon to do with it?

Amal: If Aswapati is he, I’ll learn about his role from the poem—but couldn’t you say something about him in direct reference to Mother and yourself?

Sri Aurobindo: This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in the far past times when the whole thing had to be opened, so as to “hew the ways of Immortality”. Théon and the circumstances of this life have nothing to do with it.

10 November 1936.



The fallaciousness of the argument that Savitri is a “fictional creation” comes out in several respects. The first important point is Sri Aurobindo’s statement here pertains to one of the earliest drafts of Savitri belonging to the 1930s. What validity has it to the sadhana of the 1940s about which our author is opining? In fact none. He is comparing this draft of the epic with a short composition—Is this the End—written on 3 June 1945. I just fail to understand the sense of history of one who claims himself to be a historian.

The second point is of a slightly different nature. While our author dismisses Savitri as a possible source to get material about Sri Aurobindo’s life of the period, Amal himself wanted to learn from the poem about the role of Théon. This means that it was always considered not as a “fictional creation” but as a ‘mine’ for the biographical material.

Now let us look into the following from the Lives: “Sri Aurobindo said explicitly that ‘the circumstances of this life have nothing to do with’ its plot.” What does than mean? “this life” refers to whose life? Is it Théon’s life or Sri Aurobindo’s? Amal was talking about Théon and Sri Aurobindo had bluntly asked him what Théon had to do with it. A clarification was sought about Théon “in direct reference to Mother and yourself.” Therefore the answer was vis-à-vis Théon, that Théon had nothing to do with it. This also implies the validity of the plot in the context of leaning about the life of the concerned. How does it then become a “fictional creation”?



To base one’s argument to suit one’s motivations or intentions is hardly the method of objective research. But it is precisely with such kind of arguments and reasons that The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is infested with it. It is also amazing that intelligent supporters of the biography should fall prey to these illogicalities and absurdities.



~ RYD

The Lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Recycle Bin
Apropos of the previous comment of mine here is a thoughtful private observation from an American friend, and she as an academician deeply studied in Philosophy:

I know how upset you are with the book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, but people of limitation are always trying to explain the experiences of great people—with no success because they haven't received the intuitive, overmind and supermental identity. I wonder if most people who read this book look at the details as you do. You are an Aurobindian scholar and beautiful poet. Peter is neither. Why not let the book die a natural death? Why keep it alive? I read it and having studied Sri Aurobindo since 1964, realized that the author of Lives and I didn't agree on many (most) points. In my opinion, Sri Aurobindo is one of the great masters of all time. I consider him the Plato of the East and really of the world. Peter's book will one day land in the recycle bin. Sri Aurobindo's work will last forever.

I think anyone deeply involved with Sri Aurobindo's work will take this so-called biography with a grain of salt. Of course, that's just an opinion.

Thanks for your very balanced and mature comment. I understand a certain necessity of taking Sri Aurobindo to people, and in the case of this biography to the academic audience. After all, the biography has been published by an academic institution, Columbia University Press, and one of the legitimate ways of dealing with it is to see it from an academic point of view. In that respect I find this publication by the University Press very flawed, defective. The example which we’ve here, and there are any number of them, is quite illustrative of it. In fact that makes me wonder how they—CUP—at all brought out something which does not come up to the truthful academic standards. Or is it that they just didn’t examine it carefully enough, that they went more by the promoters of the book instead of carrying out a peer review? Does it not cause damage to their own prestige? One of my concerns was, in the larger interest, to highlight this utter lack of academic objectivity. The academic façade had to be pulled down. If people who claim to be scholars and academically minded and diehard rationalists don’t look at these details and yet support the work, then it becomes a matter of unease and distress.

But you say something more than that, that I’m “upset with the book”, and I’m not going to deny it. What does one expect from a book on Sri Aurobindo, that his spiritual autobiography that is Savitri is a “fictional creation”? Isn’t that striking at the very roots of his and the Mother’s yogic tree under which we live or try to live? Would not Blake ask for his bow of burning gold and chariot of fire the moment he would hear Savitri is a “fictional creation”?

And remember you needed not a biography to come to Sri Aurobindo—your soul took him there; it has its own way of discovering that for which it had taken the birth, that it had already decided prior to it being born in this world of ours. Isn’t that wonderful, precious? It is that we cherish in our life when turned towards spiritual pursuit in which we may succeed or we may not, but the satisfaction is always there of doing it or trying it. The sad thing about the biography is, it is portraying a spiritual giant dismissing all his spirituality. It is this want of spiritual perception which must be the cause of all opposition to The Lives of Sri Aurobindo.

~ RYD

My friend writes back:

Yes, I agree. Blake would not only take his bow of burning gold and chariot of fire seeing that Savitri is a fictional creation, he would turn over in his grave. It would be like saying Blake's experience of seeing "eternity in a grain of sand" was a complete illusion.

That's wonderful again, and thanks.

RYD

Vijendran writes the following to me:

Many academic institutions publish books that are controversial—even often knowingly, as they feel that they have to give 'freedom of expression' to every point of view—true or false. Otherwise, how does one explain the plethora of books that are published on any and every subject, whether relevant or not? It is like the current day 'painters and artists' producing what are offensive to a majority of people, just to promote themselves. The 'peer review' etc is just an academic 'façade'. As a comparison, see the number of 'so-called' scientists who are on the side of 'creationism'? They are supposedly attached to prestigious schools and yet they have been 'hired' by the interested parties to propagate their ideas. Again, like so many scientists denying 'climate change' just to support their ideology of mass consumption to promote their economy.

I for one, have long ceased to wonder why academics and academic institutions do certain things.

Yes, there is in these matters less of the element of search, seeking yet smaller; self-promotion is generally the motivation behind it. I think we have abundantly experienced these things in our professional life of not too long ago. But it has become too rampant now, I suppose, rampant due to the commercial age into which we have slipped. Even scientists produce fake results and give fake data. And now globalization has made it global! It is a sad commentary on our institutions.

~ RYD

There cannot be a more damaging statement than calling Savitri a “fictional creation” with whatever spin one might like to provide to that phrase. Sri Aurobindo maintains it to be a composition with Overhead Inspiration, the rhythm, the substance, the vision coming from some higher planes of spiritual reality. We have a description of it, for instance, in Book Ten Canto Four, pp. pp. 659-663, and we can have a look at it to see if Savitri can be disregarded as fiction. Here is the description of the Overhead Inspiration.


Higher Mind
On summit Mind are radiant altitudes
Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,
Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,
Upraised estates of Mind and measureless.

There man can visit but there he cannot live.

A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes;
Its smallest parts are here philosophies
Challenging with their detailed immensity,
Each figuring an omniscient scheme of things.


Illumined Mind
But higher still can climb the ascending light;
There are vasts of vision and eternal suns,
Oceans of an immortal luminousness,
Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks,
There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;
A burning head of vision leads the mind,
Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;
The heart glows, an illuminate and seer,
And sense is kindled into identity.


Intuition
A highest flight climbs to a deepest view:
In a wide opening of its native sky
Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack
Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs,
Its fiery edge of seeing absolute
Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,
Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,
Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;
Its spear-point ictus of discovery
Pressed on the cover of name, the screen of form,
Strips bare the secret soul of all that is.

Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes;
The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,
Enters Truth's inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.


Overmind
Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time's buffer state bordering Eternity,
Too vast for the experience of man's soul:
All here gathers beneath one golden sky:
The Powers that build the cosmos station take
In its house of infinite possibility;
Each god from there builds his own nature's world;
Ideas are phalanxed like a group of sums;
Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;
All Time is one body, Space a single book:
There is the Godhead's universal gaze
And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:
The line that parts and joins the hemispheres
Closes in on the labour of the Gods
Fencing Eternity from the toil of Time.


The Truth supreme
In her glorious kingdom of eternal light
All-ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,
Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,
In a golden country keeps her measureless house;
In its corridor she hears the tread that comes
Out of the Unmanifest never to return
Till the Unknown is known and seen by men…


The immortal Supermind
There is a world of everlasting Light,
In the realms of the immortal Supermind
Truth who hides here her head in mystery,
Her riddle deemed by reason impossible
In the stark structure of material form,
Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there
Is Nature and the common law of things.

There in a body made of spirit stuff,
The hearth-stone of the everlasting Fire...

A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense
Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form
And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light
Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless…

The Spirit one and innumerable
A Spirit who is no one and innumerable,
The one mystic infinite Person of his world
Multiplies his myriad personality,
On all his bodies seals his divinity's stamp
And sits in each immortal and unique.

The Immobile
The Immobile stands behind each daily act,
A background of the movement and the scene,
Upholding creation on its might and calm
And change on the Immutable's deathless poise…

The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal
Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,
Its substance a pure gold ever the same
But shaped into vessels for the spirit's use,
Its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase.

All there is a supreme epiphany:
The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event,
The All-Beautiful is a miracle in each shape;
The All-Blissful smites with rapture the heart's throbs,
A pure celestial joy is the use of sense.

Each being there is a member of the Self,
A portion of the million-thoughted All,
A claimant to the timeless Unity,
The many's sweetness, the joy of difference
Edged with the intimacy of the One.


The highest that has descended in several passages of Savitri brings to us the ambiance and power of the speech that belongs to the sheer transcendental world, parā vāņī, and it is something which cannot come unless the poet has those realisations.

~ RYD

When I read the Book



When I read the book, the biography famous,

And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man’s life?

And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?

(As if any man really knew aught of my life;

Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life;

Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clues and indirections,

I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)




Walt Whitman

I’m reproducing John Woodroffe and the Tantric System because of its relevance to the point we are at present discussing:

John Woodroffe (1865-1936) could also perhaps deserve a mention in our list of those who came to serve India. Oxford educated in Civil Law, he became the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court in 1915. But his enduring contributions were in the fields of Indian Philosophy, Yoga, and the esoteric aspects of Tantric System in particular. It is here that he brought a clearer light dispelling the darkness that had covered the interpretations of the ancient Tantra or the Shakti scriptures. He studied the original Sanskrit texts and showed the clarity with which the works were written, that there was nothing obscurantist in the worship of the divine Shakti, Goddess of Power, Mahadevi. His was an attempt to give an authentic account of the Shakti Doctrine. Woodroffe remained a civil servant without indulging in politics but devoting himself entirely to the scriptural aspects. After his retirement from the services he went back to England and continued to study these subjects of great interest to him.

Let us pick up at random a passage from Woodroffe’s Śakti and Śakta, pp. 311-12:

A Mantra is not the same thing as prayer or self-dedication (Atma-nivedana). Prayer is conveyed in the words the Sadhaka chooses. Any set of words or letters is not a Mantra. Only that Mantra in which the Devata Las revealed His or Her Particular aspects can reveal that aspect, and is therefore the Mantra of that one of His or Her particular aspects. The relations of the letters (Varņa), whether vowel or consonant, Nada and Bindu, in a Mantra indicate tire appearance of. Devatā in different forms. Certain Vibhuti or aspects of the Devata are inherent in certain Varņa, but perfect Śakti does not appear in any but a whole Mantra. All letters are forms of the Śabda-Brahman, but only particular combinations of letters are particular form, just as the name of a particular being is made up of certain letters and not of any indiscriminately. The whole universe is Śakti and is pervaded by Śakti. Nada, Bindu, Varga are all forms of Śakti and combinations of these, and these combinations only are the Śabda corresponding to the Artha or forms of any particular Devatā. The gross lettered sound is, as explained later, the manifestation of sound in a more subtle form, and this again is the production of causal "sound" in its supreme (Parā) form. Mantras are manifestations of Kuņdalini which is a name for the Śabda-Brahman or Saguņa-Brahman in individual bodies. Produced Śabda is an aspect of the Jiva's vital Śakti. Kuņdalini is the Śakti who gives life to the Jiva. She it is who in the Mulādhāra Chakra (or basal bodily centre) is the cause of this sweet, indistinct and murmuring Dhavani which is compared to the humming of a black bee. Thence Śabda originates and, being first Parā, gradually manifests upwards as Paśyanti, Madhyamā, Vaikhari. Just as in outer space, waves of sound are produced by movements of air (Vāyu), so in the space within the Jiva’s body, waves of sound are said to be produced according to the movements of the vital air (Prāņavayu) and the process of in and out breathing. As the Svarupa of Kuņdali, in whom are all sounds, is Paramātmā, so the substance of all Mantra, Her manifestation is Consciousness (Cit) manifesting as letters and words. In fact, the letters of the Alphabet which are called Akshara are nothing but the Yantra of the Akshara or Imperishable Brahman. This is however only realized by the Sadhaka, with his Shakti generated by Sadhana is united with Mantra-śakti. Kuņdalini, who is extremely subtle, manifest in gross (Sthula) form in differing aspects as different Devatās. It is this gross form which is the Presiding Deity (Adhishţātri Devatā) of a Mantra, though it is the subtle (Sukşma) form at which all Sadhakas aim. Mantra and Devatā are thus one and in particular forms of Brahman as Śiva-Śakti. Therefore the Shastra says that they go to Hell who think that the Image (or “Idol” as it is commonly called) is but a stone and the Mantra merely letters of the alphabet. It is also ignorance of Shastric principle which supposes that Mantra is merely the name for the words in which one expresses what one has to say to the Divinity… A Mantra, on the contrary, consists of certain letters arranged in definite sequence of sounds of which the letters are the representative signs. To produce the designed effect, the Mantra must be intoned in the proper way, according to both sound (Varņa) and rhythm (Svara). For these reasons, a Mantra when translated ceases to be such, and becomes a mere word or sentence.

This is something solid, with deep understanding of things occult and spiritual. It is a pity that the modern mind has no inclination and capacity to enter into these rich worlds that exist within and around us. Not only this lack of faculty and competence; there is on the other hand utter disregard for such matters, nay, there is arrogance to pooh-pooh them. It should be most disappointing when desultory or disparaging, in fact casual comments are made with respect to the spiritual writings of accomplished Yogis and Siddhas. We have an example of it in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo when its author considers Savitri as a “fictional creation”, when the Mother herself called it a “supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo”, it based on his experiences and realisations. The strangest, and the saddest as well as the cruelest paradox is, the author of the Lives claims himself to be practitioner of the Yoga given by Sri Aurobindo.

~ RYD