Sri Aurobindo and Mrinalini in 1901
Part 1—A Harmless Endnote?
Embedded deep in the endnotes
of Chapter 3 of The Lives of Sri
Aurobindo by Peter Heehs (published by the Columbia University Press, May
2008) is a highly objectionable definition of a term used by Sri Aurobindo in
his spiritual diary entitled Record of
Yoga. I am referring to endnote 76 on page 425 in which the term maithunananda
has been defined by Heehs as “a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic
delight”. His logic is simple: maithuna in Sanskrit means “coitus” and ananda
means “bliss”, therefore maithunananda means the bliss of coitus or erotic delight.
So what is wrong about it? Why make such a big fuss about an apparently simple and
straightforward conclusion? Because, by this very simplification, truth has
been turned into falsehood, for which you can pardon a newcomer to Sri Aurobindo’s
Yoga but not someone who has spent 37 years studying it. And if, in spite of so
many years of research, this self-styled scholar has come up with this
definition, then his credentials should certainly be questioned.
But first about the
definitions, or rather the lack of them in the Record of Yoga, and in particular
with regard to the Sharira Chatusthaya, which makes it so difficult for us to
understand Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual diary. Sri Aurobindo wrote the Record for
himself and mostly did not bother to explain the terms he used except in the
barest outlines. These are often incompletely stated, and even when stated, don’t
make much sense to us because we don’t have the corresponding experience. For
example, what do we understand by tivrananda, vaidyutananda, vishayananda and
raudrananda, which are the four anandas of the body other than maithunananda, according
to the classification quoted below? And mind you, even this bare classification
is from the scribal version of a disciple and is published in the appendix of
the Record of Yoga—the Master himself did not care to list them in his own hand,
leave alone elaborate on them: (p. 1456)
Kamananda:
1. Maithunananda
2. Vishayananda Sense-objects
3. Tivrananda Thrill
4. Raudrananda Pain
5. Vaidyutananda Electric
We do get a notion of
these various anandas from the diary notations in the Record, but, beyond a certain point of fascination, one has the
strong sense of being outsiders to this unfamiliar realm of spiritual
experience. Thus apart from a certain authentication of data for those who are
not ready to believe that such spiritual experiences are possible, the Record does
not seem to serve any purpose for the seeker who is looking for practical
spiritual instructions within his reach. Not that it is not interesting in
itself as the diary of a supreme Yogi, not that it should not have been
published, nor that it might one day be of interest to us when we are equally spiritually
advanced (God knows when!), but because it is always good to remind ourselves
of our inherent limitations when we study it. More so when certain minds are too
eager to distort the meaning of the terms used by Sri Aurobindo on the basis of
the popular dictionary, knowing well that he gave them an entirely different significance.
So what is the exact
meaning of the word maithunananda in the Record
of Yoga? Sri Aurobindo himself did not define it, and in the absence of
such a definition, you would naturally proceed to find one for kamananda of
which maithunananda is an intense form, according to the ten occurrences of the
term in the Record. The term kamananda occurs around 600 times and the one
thing that catches your attention is the slow and victorious consolidation of
the siddhi in Sri Aurobindo’s body. But again we don’t have any description of it
either, though we do have two short definitions in the scribal version of the
Sapta Chatusthaya. Describing the four elements of the Sharira Chatusthaya
which are Arogya, Utthapana, Saundarya and Ananda, the scribal version provides
us the following two definitions under Ananda:
Ananda referred to here
is Physical Ananda or Kamananda. This is of various kinds, sensuous, sensual
etc. (p. 1477)
Kamananda—Physical
Ananda, [e.g.] Vishayananda, i.e. sensuous pleasure (p. 1481)
We note that Kamananda is
defined here as Physical Ananda, which does not oppose the classification that
has been previously quoted from page 1456. But we are a little confused when
Sri Aurobindo uses the term a number of times in the sense of being one of the
five anandas of the body and not as synonymous to Physical Ananda. I quote one
such instance:
Motions of contact are
now commencing in which, starting with the vishaya and the tivra, all the five
physical anandas manifest together raudra, vaidyuta and
Kamananda in this case should
be classified with the four other anandas under Physical Ananda, and maithunananda
would be a sub-classification of kamananda and not one of the five anandas listed
under kamananda as on page 1456! The matter gets more complicated when we note
that these five anandas can follow or even develop out of each other. “How can
they develop out of each other when they are different?” would cry out our
intellects in despair, but this is what happens when we try to mentally understand
spiritual experiences without having any real knowledge!
But let us proceed to
the next stage in our quest for definitions. Keeping at abeyance the above
confusion between Kamananda as synonymous with Physical Ananda or as one of its
five constituents, let us ask the question: What does Physical Ananda mean? Or,
as Ananda is the fourth element of the sharira Chatusthaya, what does Sharirananda
mean? Unfortunately, here also Sri Aurobindo has given us only the barest
outline: (p. 23)
The sharirachatusthaya,
likewise, need not be at present explained. Its four constituents are named
below.
Arogyam, utthapana,
saundaryam, vividhananda iti sharirachatushtayam.
The scribal version is
not as disappointing: (p. 1477)
IV. Sharira Chatusthaya
Arogya, Utthapana,
Saundarya, Ananda
Arogya is the state of
being healthy. There are three stages:
(1) When the system is
normally healthy and only gets disturbed by exceptional causes or very strong
strain, such as continual exposure to cold, overstrain of any kind.
(2) When even
exceptional causes or great overstrain cannot disturb the system; this shows
that there is full Arogya Shakti.
(3) Immortality in the
body.
Utthapana is the state
of not being subject to the pressure of physical forces.
There are also three
stages here:
(1) When there is a
great force, lightness and strength in the body (full of vital energy); this
shows that the body is full of Prana Shakti.
(2) When there is no
physical weariness, no exhaustion of the brain or nervous centres.
(3) When one is not
necessarily subject to the law of gravitation or other physical laws.
Saundarya is the state
of being beautiful. There are also three stages here:
(1) When there is
brightness in the body combined with sweetness of voice and charm of expression
etc.
(2) Continual youth.
(3) When the features
and figure can be changed to a form of perfect beauty.
Ananda referred to here
is Physical Ananda or Kamananda. This is of various kinds, sensuous, sensual
etc.
The explanatory notes
throw some light on the first three elements of the sharira Chatusthaya—Arogya,
Utthapana and Saundarya—but we are no wiser than before on the fourth element –
Ananda. In fact, I have already quoted the last two sentences to define
kamananda and, due to a scarcity of definitions, I am forced to repeat the same
for sharirananda.
Let us now look up the
Synthesis of Yoga which was written around the same time as the Record. Even here, there is only one
paragraph on the sharira chatusthaya in the “Elements of Perfection” (Chapter
10 of the Yoga of Self-Perfection). In this chapter, Sri Aurobindo briefly
describes the first six chatusthayas before taking them up in greater detail in
the chapters following it. As he never finished this task and went up to only the
first three chatusthayas before he wound up the Arya in which he was serialising the Synthesis, all that we are
left with is the paragraph below on the sharira chatusthaya:
The gnostic perfection,
spiritual in its nature, is to be accomplished here in the body and takes life
in the physical world as one of its fields, even though the gnosis opens to us
possession of planes and worlds beyond the material universe. The physical body
is therefore a basis of action, pratistha, which cannot be despised, neglected
or excluded from the spiritual evolution: a perfection of the body as the outer
instrument of a complete divine living on earth will be necessarily a part of
the gnostic conversion. The change will
be effected by bringing in the law of the gnostic Purusha, vijnanamaya purusa,
and of that into which it opens, the Anandamaya, into the physical
consciousness and its members. Pushed to its highest conclusion this movement brings
in a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness and a
divinising of the law of the body. For behind the gross physical sheath of
this materially visible and sensible frame there is subliminally supporting it
and discoverable by a finer subtle consciousness a subtle body of the mental
being and a spiritual or causal body of the gnostic and bliss soul in which all
the perfection of a spiritual embodiment is to be found, a yet unmanifested
divine law of the body. Most of the physical siddhis acquired by certain Yogins
are brought about by some opening up of the law of the subtle or a calling down
of something of the law of the spiritual body. The ordinary method is the opening
up of the cakras by the physical processes of Hathayoga (of which something is
also included in the Rajayoga) or by the methods of the Tantric discipline. But
while these may be optionally used at certain stages by the integral Yoga, they
are not indispensable; for here the reliance is on the power of the higher
being to change the lower existence, a working is chosen mainly from above
downward and not the opposite way, and therefore the development of the
superior power of the gnosis will be awaited as the instrumentative change in
this part of the Yoga.
(The Synthesis of Yoga, Elements of Perfection, p. 695)
I have marked the
sentences in bold which describe the method of the gnostic conversion of the
body. Sri Aurobindo says that the change will be effected by “the law of the
gnostic Purusha, vijnanamaya purusa, and of that into which it opens, the
Anandamaya, into the physical consciousness and its members”. This will bring
about “a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness”
leading eventually to “a divinising of the law of the body”. I quote one more
passage to give a better idea of the entire range of Ananda in the being of
which Kamananda (or sharirananda) is only one segment. The following passage is
from the scribal version of the Siddhi Chatusthaya and comes under its third
element “Bhukti”: (p. 1481)
Bhukti is the Delight of
existence in itself, independent of every experience and extending itself to
all experiences. [It has three forms:]
(1) Rasagrahanam or
taking the Rasa in the mind: (a) bodily sensations, (b) food, (c) events, (d)
feelings, (e) thoughts.
(2) Bhoga in the Prana,
i.e. Bhoga without
(3) Ananda throughout
the system.
Kamananda – Physical
Ananda, [e.g.] Vishayananda, i.e. sensuous pleasure
Premananda – Getting
delight by positive feeling of Love (Chitta)
Ahaitukananda – Delight
without any cause (Manas)
Chidghanananda Ananda – of
the Chit in the object full of the gunas (Vijnana)
Shuddhananda Ananda – of
the Beauty of everything (Ananda)
Chidananda Ananda – of
pure consciousness without the gunas (Chit-tapas)
Sadananda Ananda – of
pure existence apart from all objects and experiences (Sat)
Even here, the explanation
of Kamananda in the above passage has already been quoted separately. The
paucity of definitions thus suggests that Sri Aurobindo hardly cared to provide
explanations of his experiences to his disciples.
So I come back to the
point from where I began to enquire about the source of Heehs’s definition of
maithunananda. I have subjected my reader to this tedious search for
definitions precisely to show that the source is not Sri Aurobindo but the popular
Sanskrit dictionary, which is rather shocking, because surely the context of
the Record of Yoga has to be taken into account for the exact denotation of the
word. I quote his definition:
Maithunananda means
literally the bliss, ananda, of coitus, maithuna. In the Record it refers to a
particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight. (Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p. 425)
Heehs does make a qualification
in the context of the Record of Yoga,
but it hardly changes the basic meaning of the dictionary. “Spontaneous” or not
and whatever be the “intensity”, maithunananda remains “erotic delight” or more
plainly sexual bliss, and it is with regard to this basic sense that I express
my strong objection. Not because the dictionary is wrong, but because the term has
an entirely different meaning in the Record.
Let me now analyse Heehs’s
definition of maithunananda. My first objection to it stems from sheer common
sense and not at all from the study of definitions. The first occurrence of this
term in the Record is in the diary notation of 15 January 1913. Let us figure
out how many years of Yoga Sri Aurobindo had completed at this point of time. If
he had begun his Yoga in 1905, he would have spent 8 years from his practice of
Pranayama to the two important realisations of Nirvana and the cosmic
consciousness up to the “prolonged
realisation & dwelling in Parabrahman for many hours” in Pondicherry around
August 1912. [1] Now it is hard to believe that after so many years of Yoga and
so many major spiritual experiences, Sri Aurobindo was still in the process of attaining
“spontaneous erotic delight”! I would, personally, fall off my chair and be convulsed
with prolonged fits of laughter!
Recovering from my
laughter, I would ask Heehs one simple question: “What is the necessity of
having ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ when just plain sex would do or bring about
the same net result? Or is it that ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ comes after
many years of difficult yogic practice in spite of it being perfectly useless
for man’s physical health?” The next grand conclusion that you can perhaps
expect from him is that it is indeed the highest consummation of Yoga! It is precisely because of this eventuality that
I would like to alert readers beforehand that they are being taken for a ride. It
is dangerous to commit mistakes of this kind in spirituality because by the
time you realise that you have gone astray, you would have ruined your life for
good. Traditional wisdom (apart from plain common sense) has been repeating it
from hoary times not to mix sex with spirituality and Sri Aurobindo has been
uncompromisingly clear on this issue. His
Yoga can be practised in spite of sex, but not through sex, and he forbade his
disciples from any immixture of it. The sexual energy, however, has to be
sublimated and transformed into the “pure divine Ananda in the physical”, of
which sexual pleasure is “a coarse and excited degradation”. [2] I quote at
length from a letter of Sri Aurobindo:
The whole principle of
this yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody and
nothing else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother-Power
all the transcendent light, force, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness
and Ananda of the supramental Divine. In this yoga, therefore, there can be no
place for vital relations or interchanges with others; any such relation or
interchange immediately ties down the soul to the lower consciousness and its
lower nature, prevents the true and full union with the Divine and hampers both
the ascent to the supramental Truth-consciousness and the descent of the
supramental Ishwari Shakti. Still worse would it be if this interchange took
the form of a sexual relation or a sexual enjoyment, even if kept free from any
outward act; therefore these things are absolutely forbidden in the sadhana. It
goes without saying that any physical act of the kind is not allowed; but also
any subtler form is ruled out. It is only after becoming one with the
supramental Divine that we can find our true spiritual relations with others in
the Divine; in that higher unity this kind of gross lower vital movement can
have no place.
To master the
sex-impulse,—to become so much master of the sex-centre that the sexual energy
would be drawn upwards, not thrown outwards and wasted—it is so indeed that the
force in the seed can be turned into a primal physical energy supporting all
the others, retas into ojas. But no error can be more perilous than to
accept the immixture of the sexual desire and some kind of subtle satisfaction
of it and look on this as a part of the sadhana. It would be the most effective
way to head straight towards spiritual downfall and throw into the atmosphere
forces that would block the supramental descent, bringing instead the descent
of adverse vital powers to disseminate disturbance and disaster. This deviation
must be absolutely thrown away, should it try to occur and expunged from the
consciousness, if the Truth is to be brought down and the work is to be done.
It is an error too to
imagine that, although the physical sexual action is to be abandoned, yet some
inward reproduction of it is part of the transformation of the sex-centre. The
action of the animal sex-energy in Nature is a device for a particular purpose
in the economy of the material creation in the Ignorance. But the vital
excitement that accompanies it makes the most favourable opportunity and
vibration in the atmosphere for the inrush of those very vital forces and
beings whose whole business is to prevent the descent of the supramental Light.
The pleasure attached to it is a degradation and not a true form of the divine
Ananda. The true divine Ananda in the physical has a different quality and
movement and substance; self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is
dependent only on an inner union with the Divine. You have spoken of Divine
Love; but Divine Love, when it touches the physical, does not awaken the gross
lower vital propensities; indulgence of them would only repel it and make it
withdraw again to the heights from which it is already difficult enough to draw
it down into the coarseness of the material creation which it alone can
transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through which it will
consent to enter, the gate of the psychic being, and cast away the lower vital
error.
The transformation of
the sex-centre and its energy is needed for the physical siddhi; for this is
the support in the body of all the mental, vital and physical forces of the
nature. It has to be changed into a mass and a movement of intimate Light,
creative Power, pure divine Ananda. It is only the bringing down of the
supramental Light, Power and Bliss into the centre that can change it. As
to the working afterwards, it is the supramental Truth and the creative vision
and will of the Divine Mother that will determine it. But it will be a working
of the conscious Truth, not of the Darkness and Ignorance to which sexual
desire and enjoyment belong; it will be a power of preservation and free
desireless radiation of the life-forces and not of their throwing out and
waste. Avoid the imagination that the supramental life will be only a heightened
satisfaction of the desires of the vital and the body; nothing can be a greater
obstacle to the Truth in its descent than this hope of glorification of the
animal in the human nature. Mind wants the supramental state to be a
confirmation of its own cherished ideas and preconceptions; the vital wants it
to be a glorification of its own desires; the physical wants it to be a rich
prolongation of its own comforts and pleasures and habits. If it were to be
that, it would be only an exaggerated and highly magnified consummation of the
animal and the human nature, not a transition from the human into the Divine.
(Letters on Yoga, Vol. 24, p. 1508)
The above letter should settle
this argument and I would refer the reader to the full chapter of Sri
Aurobindo’s letters on the subject in his Letters
on Yoga, pp. 1507-49. Strangely, references to the same letters have been
given by Heehs in this very endnote, which all the more shows his confused
state of mind. You don’t have to hunt for references to rebut him, because he himself
provides them to his critics. Of course, in this case he provided them with
great glee to prove Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex” (I take up this issue in
Part 2) without realising that those who are going to read them attentively
will at once challenge his definition of maithunananda in his endnote.
But the argument is not
over and I anticipate a few more objections from his side. “Why did Sri
Aurobindo use the word maithunananda if not to indicate its relation to sexual
bliss?” That would be the next short-sighted question. Yes, relation there is,
but the relation of the higher to the lower, in which case you interpret the
lower in terms of the higher and not the reverse, that is, misinterpret the
higher in terms of the lower, as Heehs has done. What difference does it make?
It makes a world of difference! It is the difference between “spontaneous
erotic delight” and “pure divine Ananda”: erotic delight or sexual bliss is a
coarse degradation of that pure divine Ananda and not its consummation. It is
the difference between brahmacharya which turns retas into ojas, for which many
lives of yoga are necessary, and plain simple bhoga, which requires none at all.
In short, it is the difference between man and the next stage of evolution, and
it will result in either spiritual progress or an evolutionary regress to a
stage below the present mental man. Sri Aurobindo may well have used the word
maithunananda because of the unavailability of terms to describe the higher
Ananda—a frequent problem with spiritual experience—and not in the sense of the
definition in the popular dictionary. The same problem occurs with Sri
Aurobindo’s usage of the term “superman”, which is likely to be misunderstood as
“a highly developed mental man”. According to him, the difference between man
and superman is not merely in degree but in the very nature and substance of
the consciousness embodying them, and the difference is more than that between man
and the animal. So is the word “psychic”, and a number of other terms to which
Sri Aurobindo has assigned significances which do not match with those given in
the dictionary.
“Why does Sri Aurobindo then
refer to sexual ‘emission’ or ‘effusion’ when he speaks of maithunananda?” That
is perhaps the final defence of this sort of mind bent upon finding some textual
support for the satisfaction of its desires. I quote the two instances of this
term where this confusion can occur:
Kamananda, usually
intense only in isolated touches more or less rapidly repeated, became yesterday
intense to the point of maithunananda with continuously repeated touches, but
owing to the fear of effusion, it was stayed before it could develop.
Nevertheless the habitual intensity is now much greater & keener than formerly,
but varies in continuity. (p. 300)
In the fourth, it is now
evident that what is being prepared by the apparent reaction towards asiddhi of
continuity in the kamananda, is the ability of the body to bear the high
intensity of maithunananda without emission and its distribution as ananda throughout
the body. (p. 302)
Sri Aurobindo does not
speak here of emission as a positive effect of the divine Ananda that he was
experiencing in the body, but as a negative mechanical response of it due to
its inability to “to bear the high intensity of maithunananda”. He surely did
not mean that maithunananda ends in emission or that it consummates in
“spontaneous erotic delight” without emission. I quote a portion from the Evening Talks which supports my theory, even
though the term being discussed is kamananda. Recall that Sri Aurobindo’s usage
of the word maithunananda in the Record
indicates that it is an intense form of kamananda, in which case the remarks
below should apply to it.
Disciple: Barin, I heard, had a lot of experiences.
Sri Aurobindo: They were
mere mental and he gathered some knowledge, much information or understanding
out of them. I heard that when he had begun yoga he had an experience of kamananda.
Lele was surprised to hear about it. For he said that experience comes usually
at the end. It is a descent like any other experience but unless one's sex
centre is sufficiently controlled it may produce bad results etc. emission and
other disturbances. [3]
Now that all textual arguments
have been answered, I suppose our scholar will resort to diversionary tactics
by shouting at us, “Why do you make such a big fuss about sex, as if you are
above it? All of us have to go through it. So why be so prudish? In any case, I
am free to draw my own conclusions!” I won’t respond to the issue of freedom of
speech because it has been already answered at length by Alok Pandey. As for
being above sex, no, none of us have made such tall claims. All that we insist upon
is that Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga be not misinterpreted under the guise of academic
research. Neither are we forcing our interpretation on the others because Sri
Aurobindo has amply expounded his Yoga. As for being a prude, it is not a
question of moral restraint as much as accepting a yogic discipline once you are
serious about it. Nobody compels you to take it up; it is your own choice. And
if you fall on the way, you simply pick yourself up, change your life style or carry
on quietly instead of reading your own limitations into the Master’s works in
order to justify your failures!
I would like to make one
more observation. The endnote over which I have spent so much time is not as
innocuous and harmless as it appears to be. In fact, most readers will not even
read it and, even if they do, will accept on faith the definition of maithunananda
provided by the Heehs. First-time readers of Sri Aurobindo will automatically
conclude that Sri Aurobindo not only approved of sex in his Yoga but gave it an
important place. It is only those who are sufficiently familiar with Sri
Aurobindo’s Yoga who will raise their eyebrows, check for the actual denotation
of the term as used by Sri Aurobindo and realise the dangers of the wrong
definition. It is precisely this “first layer of falsehood” which prepares the public
mind to absorb greater twists in the future until it can make a veritable u-turn
and interpret the Integral Yoga in exactly the opposite way to what Sri
Aurobindo meant. In fact, it is by basing himself on this definition of
maithunananda and a few other statements made by Heehs that the infamous
Jeffrey Kripal writes in his book on Esalen that Sri Aurobindo “associated the
way of Ananda with the left-handed path of Tantra”. [4] How far can you stray
from the Truth on the basis of one wrong definition and a couple of crazy
conclusions!
It is true that Sri
Aurobindo integrated in his Integral Yoga some of the elements of the Tantric
tradition such as the worship of the divine Shakti or the ascent of the
consciousness through the various centres of the subtle body, but there is not
a single iota of evidence to show that he ever associated himself with the
sex-rituals of the left-handed path of Tantra. He spoke of Tantric kriyas in
his letters to Motilal Roy, but there is no mention of what sort of kriyas they
were. If it be concluded on the basis of such (lack of) evidence that they were
indeed sexual kriyas, and that they were not mentioned because of social
compunctions as Kripal suggests, then no logic on earth can convince such a
perverted mind! Moreover, why would Sri Aurobindo hide facts from others when
he was writing his private spiritual diary (Record
of Yoga) if he had found these sex rituals useful to his Yoga? In the
Record, the term “Tantric kriyas” is used only twice in the sense of
“mechanical means” or “special processes” by which you employ siddhis such as
Aishwarya, Ishita and Vashita.
The fact that Sri
Aurobindo smoked cigars and partook of meat and wine during the pre-1926 period
of his life in
Disciple: In our yoga we
have to discontinue the lower movement of nature as being an obstacle to
Sadhana, but the Tantrics—specially the Vira Sadhakas—turn these obstacles to
account and, taking help from these, they build up spiritual life.
Sri Aurobindo: How?
Disciple: That is my
question.
Sri Aurobindo: I have no
objection to taking fish and even you can take wine, if it suits you, but how
can the sexual act be made to help in spiritual life? In itself the sexual act
is not bad as the moralists believe. It is a movement of nature which has its purpose
and is neither good nor bad. But, from the yogic point of view, the sexual
force is the greatest force in the world and if properly used helps to recreate
and regenerate the being. But, if it is indulged in the ordinary way, it is a
great obstacle for two reasons. First, the sexual act involves a great loss of
vital force, it is a movement towards death, though this is compensated by
creation of new life. That it is a movement towards death is proved by the
exhaustion felt after it; many people feel even a disgust. [5]
Part 2—Marriage and Brahmacharya
Let us now take up the passage
on pp. 55-56 of The Lives of Sri
Aurobindo to which endnote 76 on p.
425 (discussed in Part 1) is attached. I will first draw the attention of the
reader to the desperate attempts of Heehs to prove what he calls Sri
Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex”. Apart from the most uncouth manner with which
he treats this subject, which so many have already objected to, I would like to
point out a few glaring deficiencies in his so-called scholarship. He quotes a
long passage from an early commentary of Sri Aurobindo on the Isha Upanishad in
which an imaginary Guru describes the scale of human love to his student. [6] The
passage begins:
If sensual gratification
were all, then it is obvious that I should have no reason to prefer one woman
over another and after the brute gratification liking would cease; I have seen
this brute impulse given the name of love; perhaps I myself used to give it
that name when the protoplasmic animal predominated in me. (The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p. 55)
He then concludes on the
basis of this evidence that it was “the usual desire for gratification” that was
presumably a factor in Sri Aurobindo’s decision to get married. Now is this scholarship
or speculation? I thought historians base themselves on concrete evidence and
not on what imaginary characters say in Vedantic commentaries. If the teacher in
the commentary speaks as if he has had marital relations, does it prove that
Sri Aurobindo went through the same experience in real life? Extend that argument
to other authors in their respective fields, and you can come to ridiculous
conclusions. How many novelists would be accused of committing murder, robbery
and rape just because they have convincingly described them in their crime
thrillers! Good writers are precisely distinguished by their creative
imagination, their ability to identify themselves with the world around them
and capacity to convey their stories realistically to their readers.
Even admitting for the
moment that the passage from the commentary has some connection with Sri
Aurobindo’s married life, we need not hunt for material to counter Heehs’s
conclusion. The very next two sentences in the same paragraph read:
If emotional
gratification were all, then I might indeed cling for a time to the woman who
had pleased my body, but only so long as she gave me emotional pleasure, by her
obedience, her sympathy with my likes & dislikes, her pleasant speech, her
admiration or her answering love. But the moment these cease, my liking also
will begin to fade away. This sort of liking too is persistently given the
great name and celebrated in poetry & romance. (p. 55)
By the same method of
direct inference from what the teacher says, emotional gratification also must
have been a factor in Sri Aurobindo’s decision to get married and not merely physical
gratification, as Heehs presents. The teacher in the commentary discusses next
aesthetic and intellectual gratification, so they too must have been contributory
factors. Why were not these factors taken into consideration and only the first
highlighted as if it were all that mattered? Because Heehs has never the
patience to follow a line of argument to its logical end; he stops midstream as
soon as his purpose is served, which is nothing but public denigration of Sri
Aurobindo. He will of course say that there was no scope for intellectual
gratification with Mrinalini, so the text does not apply in that case. But then
who decides when and where the text applies or not? Logically, if it does not
apply in one case, it need not apply in the other cases too.
The teacher concludes by
telling us the sublime reason why a man’s love for a woman does not cease even
after the cessation of the above-mentioned four gratifications—physical,
emotional, aesthetic and intellectual. I quote from the same commentary:
Whence then comes that
love which is greater than life and stronger than death, which survives the
loss of beauty and the loss of charm, which defies the utmost pain & scorn
the object of love can deal out to it, which often pours out from a great &
high intellect on one infinitely below it? ... That Love is nothing but the
Self recognizing the Self dimly or clearly and therefore seeking to realise
oneness & the bliss of oneness. (Isha Upanishad, p. 139)
He then discusses the
same with regard to friendship and concludes similarly that even the love of a
friend is actually based on the recognition of one’s universal Self in him: (Ibid.)
What again is a friend?
Certainly I do not seek from my friend the pleasure of the body or choose him
for his good looks; nor for that similarity of tastes & pursuits I would
ask in a mere comrade; nor do I love him because he loves me or admires me, as
I would perhaps love a disciple; nor do I necessarily demand of him a clever
brain, as if he were only an intellectual helper or teacher. All these feelings
exist, but they are not the soul of friendship. No, I love my friend for the
woman’s reason, because I love him, because in the old imperishable phrase, he
is my other self.
So does the love of the
patriot for the nation, the love of the philanthropist for mankind and the love
of the whole world by great beings such as the Buddha, depend on this essential
unity of the Brahman, by which you see “your Self in all creatures and all
creatures in your Self”. The teacher is in fact explaining the sixth verse of
the Isha Upanishad which Sri Aurobindo translates:
But he who sees
everywhere the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self, shrinks
not thereafter from aught. (Ibid., p.
7)
I need not further
summarise this long commentary as I have given a sufficient idea of the sublime
topic discussed by the teacher as opposed to Heehs’s attention which is riveted
only on one aspect of it—sensual gratification. Heehs then quotes in his
endnote the occurrence of the term maithunananda in the Record of Yoga to prove Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex” and
refers to his letters on Yoga as additional material to prove the same. Now is
this genuine scholarship or a mania for sex which reflects his own psychological
abnormalities? I am reminded of the hilarious example of a psychopath who saw
sex not only in the image of a goat, but a circle, a triangle, a hexagon and even
a square. I may add that, in this case, Heehs seems to see it everywhere like
the Self in all existence. I would not be surprised if one day he solemnly
declares to the world that the Self is nothing but a personification of Sex!
Why is he so desperate
about proving Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex” as if his disciples would not
believe it at any cost? Had it been undeniably true and authentic information
on it was available, I don’t think they would have had any objection to it. For
instance, don’t they hold the Mother in equal esteem as their Master despite
her marriage and the birth of her son? All that they would insist upon is that
the subject be dealt with deference and dignity and not in the repugnant manner
that Heehs has done. Even the biography of an ordinary person deserves more
discretion and respect for privacy in these matters.
Let us see what the
documents have to say on the subject of Sri Aurobindo’s married life. I quote four
documents below which Heehs has deliberately left out; these are what a writer on
this site has called “active omissions”, a frequent trick played by Heehs in
order to deceive his readers.
Document 1:
One day I had asked him
in the course of conversation, “Chief, you knew that you were going to plunge
into the vortex of revolutionary politics. Why did you marry? Don’t tell me if
you don’t want to.” He thought for a moment and replied very slowly, “Well,
Charu, it was like this. Just then I was very despondent and felt that I was
destined to lead the life of a pedagogue. Why, then, should I not marry?”
Aurobindo married, be it noted, in April 1901. (Charu Chandra Dutt, My Friend and My Master, Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1952, p 137)
Document 2:
In 1909, after his
acquittal, I once invited Sri Aurobindo for lunch....
We discussed whether one
can maintain brahmacharya after marriage. I was of the opinion that one can’t.
He was explaining how it was in fact possible. I was curious to know whether
Sri Aurobindo himself maintained it but could not muster the courage to ask
him. After a while he told me, “I can see what is in your mind. You are eager
to know whether I have sexual relations with my wife or not. I don’t,” he
declared. “I have been able to maintain my brahmacharya even after marriage.” (Manomohan
Gangopadhyaya, Shruti-Smriti, Part 1,
1927, p. 13)
Document 3:
I asked Sri Aurobindo
one day: “Sejda, on the one hand you practise the austerities of yoga and on
the other you sleep in one bed with your wife. What kind of austerity is that?”
Smiling sweetly he said: “It is not simply by sharing one’s bed with one’s wife
that brahmacharya is lost. To form a group of naked ascetics is not my
intention. We have thirty-three lakhs of such ascetics in
Document 4:
He never slept on a soft
cotton-bed, as most of us do, but on a bed made of coir (coconut fibres) on
which was spread a Malabar grass-mat which served as a bed-sheet. Once I asked
him why he used such a coarse hard bed and he said with his characteristic
laugh, “My boy, don’t you know that I am a Brahmachari? Our shastras enjoin
that a Brahmachari should not use a soft bed, which may induce him to sleep.” I
was silenced but I thought myself that he must be a great man…. One day … in
the beginning of 1905, Messrs. Arvind Babu, Deshpande and Jadhav went to
Chandod, a small town on the bank of the
According to Document 1,
the reason why Sri Aurobindo got married was to overcome his despondency and avoid
the prospect of being a lonely pedagogue. It is obviously an understatement but
nevertheless suggests that Sri Aurobindo was looking for companionship and perhaps
all that goes with it in married life. In that case, physical gratification
would be only one of the factors in his decision to get married and not the
only one as Heehs seems to be obsessed with. But what happened after the marriage?
Documents 2–4 show that he lived the life of a brahmachari! Do these documents
contradict each other? No, because it matches with what he wrote to Nirodbaran
in 1936:
Nirodbaran: So we don't
understand why they [Confucius, Buddha, Sri Aurobindo] marry and why this
change comes soon after marriage.
Sri Aurobindo: Perfectly
natural—they marry before the change—then the change comes and the marriage
belongs to the past self, not to the new one….
Nirodbaran: I touch upon
a delicate subject, but it is a puzzle.
Sri Aurobondo: Why
delicate? and why a puzzle? Do you think that Buddha or Confucius or myself
were born with a prevision that they or I would take to the spiritual life? So
long as one is in the ordinary consciousness, one lives the ordinary life—when
the awakening and the new consciousness come, one leaves it—nothing puzzling in
that.
(Nirodbaran, Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, p. 576, 1983)
Sri Aurobindo began his
Yoga in 1904-1905, after which you would expect him to have taken to
Brahmacharya. As both years have been separately mentioned by him, let us for
the moment consider 1905 as the year he commenced his yoga on the basis of his
famous letter to Mrinalini regarding his three madnesses, which I quote below:
The second madness has
recently taken hold of me; it is this: by any means, I must have the direct
experience of God. The religion of today, that is, uttering the name of God
every now and then, in praying to Him in front of everybody, showing to people
how religious one is—that I do not want. If the Divine is there, then there
must be a way of experiencing His existence, of meeting Him; however hard be
the path, I have taken a firm resolution to tread it. Hindu Dharma asserts that
the path is there within one's own body, in one's mind. It has also given the
methods to be followed to tread that path. I have begun to observe them and
within a month I have been able to ascertain that the words of the Hindu Dharma
are not untrue. I am experiencing all the signs that have been mentioned by it.
Now, I would like to take you also along that path; you would of course not be
able to keep up with me as you have not yet acquired so much knowledge, but
there is nothing to prevent your following me. Anybody can have the realisation
by following the path, but it is left to one's will to choose to enter the
path. Nobody can force you to enter it. If you are willing, I will write more
on the subject….
Now I ask you: What do
you want to do in this matter? The wife is the sakti (the power) of the
husband. Are you going to be the disciple of Usha and adulate the sahibs? Would
you be indifferent and diminish the power of your husband? Or would you double
his sympathy and enthusiasm? You might reply: "What could a simple woman
like me do in all these great works? I have neither will power, nor
intelligence, I am afraid even to think of these things." There is a
simple solution for it—take refuge in the Divine, step on to the path of
God-realisation. He will soon cure all your deficiencies; fear gradually leaves
the person who takes refuge in the Divine. And if you have faith in me, and listen
to what I say instead of listening to others, I can give you my force which
would not be reduced (by giving) but would, on the contrary, increase. We say
that the wife is the sakti of the husband, that means that the husband sees his
own reflection in the wife, finds the echo of his own noble aspiration in her
and thereby redoubles his force.
(Bengali Writings, pp. 349-54)
In this letter dated 30
August 1905, Sri Aurobindo is very clear about his resolution to tread the path
of Yoga and is, in fact, exhorting his wife to help him in his aspirations. The
turning point in his life seems to have been recent. Note the sentence, “I have
begun to observe them [yogic methods] and within a month I have been able to
ascertain that the words of the Hindu Dharma are not untrue.” After this, you surely
cannot expect him to have led an ordinary married life.
But what happened during
the interim period between the time he got married in April 1901 and his
decision to take up Yoga in 1905? First of all, Mrinalini hardly stayed with
him during this period, because she went away to her parents’ place unable to
bear life in
Let us now take Heehs on
his own ground of speculation. He seems to assume that speaking authoritatively
about sex or giving yogic advice on it necessarily implies its experience in
real life. The hypothesis at first seems quite convincing, but is it really so?
Are not sexual thoughts and impulses so natural to man that they really don’t need
any outward support? Are not sex-emissions inbuilt in his physical constitution
so that they can occur without any external agent? It is precisely because of
this reason that it takes ages to overcome sex in Yoga. Brahmacharya is not accomplished
by mere celibacy but by the expunging of all sex-thoughts and corresponding physical
and psychological reactions in your being. Sri Aurobindo says that when
sex-thoughts are driven away from the mind, they take refuge in the vital.
Driven away from there, they take shelter in the physical being, and pushed away
from there, they go into the subconscient and inconscient from where they can
rise up in dreams or once again invade the waking state. There is thus a whole range
of operations which are not taken into account by Heehs’s naive approach to sex.
In fact, the outward act is only the tip of the iceberg visible to us while the
real forces behind are invisible in the seas of our consciousness.
How do you explain, for
example, the frequent phenomenon of bala brahmacharis in
It is evidently because Heehs
is overwhelmed by his own limitations with regard to brahmacharya that he is
unable to accept it in the case of Sri Aurobindo’s married life. Now, had the
author frankly expressed his personal hesitations with regard to the matter,
people would have been more sympathetic with him. This is a standard difficulty
of our present state of mind which cannot look beyond its own parameters, especially
so with Westerners who have had no spiritual background. Not that Indians have
to be patted on their back, but, because of long standing spiritual traditions,
they have no fundamental difficulty in admitting the extraordinary and
supernormal without being mentally bound by their own limitations. Spiritual
experience and Yogic attainment precisely belong to this realm which is reached
by the few who are great and chosen by destiny to guide humanity to the next
stage of evolution.
I quote two more replies
of Sri Aurobindo, the references to which have been given by Heehs in his long endnote:
Does your above answer
mean that the Avatars too satisfy the vital desires, cravings, lust etc. as a
layman?
What do you mean by
lust? Avatars can be married and have children and that is not possible without
sex; they can have friendships, enmities, family feelings etc. etc.—these are
vital things. I think you are under the impression that an Avatar must be a
saint or a yogi.
The Avatars can of
course be married and satisfy the vital movements. But do they really indulge
them as ordinary people? While satisfying their outer being do they not remain
conscious of their union with the Divine above?
There is not necessarily
any union above before the practice of yoga. There is a connection of the
consciousness with the veiled Divinity and an action out of that, but this is
not dependent on the practice of yoga.
(Nagin Doshi, Guidance from Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 1,
1974, pp 280-281)
Though Heehs has
referred to these replies of Sri Aurobindo in order to prove Sri Aurobindo’s conjugal
life, they do not necessarily support his assumption. As we see from the first
reply, Sri Aurobindo had no moral inhibitions about an Avatar’s experience of
ordinary life, in which case you could suppose that he himself might have gone
through it. At the same time, he says in the second reply that the divine consciousness
behind the Avatar may influence him even when he is not practising Yoga.
Applying that to his own case, he may have thus avoided the conjugal life
without having formally commenced his spiritual practice. The inner
consciousness behind the external one could have kept him away from it even
though he might have not yet decided to practise Yoga, which obviously cannot
go with sex. Moreover, he had spiritual experiences long before his marriage in
April 1901. A “vast calm” had descended upon him the moment he stepped on
Indian soil at Apollo Bunder in 1893. A few months later he had the “vision of
the Godhead surging up from within when in danger of a carriage accident in
Thus a very different
picture of Sri Aurobindo’s married life emerges from practically the same
documents used by Heehs, not counting, of course, the crucial omission of the three
documents on his Brahmacharya. These documents have been deliberately
omitted so that the balance of evidence does not tilt in favour of his
Brahmacharya. This is a standard strategy of Heehs who omits or downplays
positive evidence, makes negative statements based on secondary evidence or
even on purely conjectural grounds as has been done here, and then pretends to
balance the scale with a few positive statements in order to be appreciated by a
few sceptic scholars and be promoted by them to the academic world. It is like trying
to please your enemies at the expense of displeasing your friends. The result
is that you often end up displeasing both or falling on that side of the fence
where you never wanted to be.
Let me sum up my article
with a short analysis of the objectionable passages on Sri Aurobindo’s marriage.
Heehs begins by a speculation based on the questionable assumption that if Sri
Aurobindo wrote about sex and advised his disciples on sexual problems, he
would have necessarily gone through a conjugal life. I quote what I consider to
be one of the most distasteful passages in this biography:
The usual desire for
gratification, as Aurobindo has the guru call it, was presumably a factor in
his decision to get married, but it does not seem to have been an important
one. His later writings show that his knowledge of human sexuality was more
than academic, but the act seems to have held few charms for him. [endnote 76]
Consummation may have been delayed because of Mrinalini’s youth, and his own
stoicism, partly innate and partly learned from philosophers such as Epictetus,
would have helped him to keep his sexual tendencies in check.
(The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, p. 56)
The speculation here is
only matched by the state of confusion in the writer’s mind! If the “desire for
gratification” was not an all-important factor in Sri Aurobindo’s decision to
get married, then what made him take the decision? And why did he quote such a
long passage from the Isha Upanishad commentary to prove that it was precisely because
of this desire for gratification that he wanted to get married? Replace Sri
Aurobindo by an ordinary person in this passage, and you will easily understand
what I am trying to point out. Next, if Sri Aurobindo’s knowledge was not
merely academic but profound enough to have written “more than forty pages” on
overcoming sex to his disciples, how is it that “the act seems to have held few
charms for him”? How could he advise on the very propensity that never really affected
him? From what did he then derive his knowledge? The presentation of these
apparently contradictory statements without giving an adequate yogic
explanation puts the new reader of Sri Aurobindo’s writings in a fix. He would
carry home the impression that Sri Aurobindo was a bundle of contradictions
instead of being made aware that he went through the lower nature in order to
master it, and it is because of this mastery that he had profound knowledge of
it. He rose so fast and so far above human nature that he had an aerial view as
it were, by which he could see and explain things better than the person who
was entangled on the ground. It is because of this missing Yogic background
that the presentation becomes false, by default as it were, even if the facts
and statements mentioned may have been correct.
There is a repetition of
this unwanted speculation and confusion on page 318:
About their connubial
relations nothing is known. Her father [Mrinalini’s father, Bhupal Bose] summed
up the situation in a sentence: “There was no issue of the marriage."
After Aurobindo entered what he called “the sexual union dignified by the name
of marriage,” he seems to have found the state bothersome and uninteresting.
If nothing is known
about their connubial relations, how does the Heehs say that the consummation may
have been delayed by Mrinalini’s youth and Sri Aurobindo’s stoicism? How I wish
he had simply kept his mouth shut on these matters! Further damage is done by
quoting Sri Aurobindo’s description of marriage as if it were his own: the
phrase “sexual union dignified by the name of marriage” is actually from a
letter written to Nolini Kanto Gupta in 1919, in which he humorously dissuades
the latter from getting married. [8]
Lastly, the worst and
most subtle distortion is in endnote 76 on page 425, which is attached to the
passage I have quoted from page 56. He defines the term maithunananda used in
the Record of Yoga as “a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight”. As I have already consecrated the first part
of my article on this definition, I will note here only the implications of
this wrong interpretation. What is indirectly suggested without openly stating
is that it is because Sri Aurobindo found conjugal life “bothersome and uninteresting”
that he sought yogic satisfaction in “spontaneous erotic delight”. It implies
that his yoga has ample space for erotic delight of a subtle kind and not of
the gross type. Nothing can be farther from the Truth than this conclusion. You
have only to read the first four of the forty pages of Sri Aurobindo’s letters
on sex or even the long letter that I have quoted in Part 1, to know his stand
on it. Sri Aurobindo certainly did not advise suppression for those who are not
ready for the yogic life, but he made it unambiguously clear that sex of
whatever kind has no place whatsoever in the spiritual life.
For those who are
disappointed by my conclusion because they are attached to sex and cannot ever conceive
of conquering it, I will only say the following. Let us not mix up the issue of
yogic capacity with the goal of Integral Yoga. Let us be at least mentally clear
as to what the goal is despite our inability to follow the straight and high
road to it. And indeed most of us need to take detours and diversions and have
to often end up in a blind alley in order to be convinced about the right
direction. Sri Aurobindo never told us to eschew the experience of life if it
is necessary; neither did he put life in opposition to Yoga, but he certainly
insisted on the eventual transformation of life. He also gave considerable
freedom for each one to walk on his own path, but this means that there are
many paths leading to the summit of the same
Finally, the best thing
about his Yoga is that it provides various stages in order to make a gradual
scale of progression for those who are willing to participate in this evolutionary
process. This aspect particularly comes out in his letters to disciples written
in the late twenties and thirties during the first expansion of the Ashram. It is
all the more evident in the Mother’s practical application of his yoga to life in
the forties and after Sri Aurobindo’s passing away. How the life of a community
of about 1500 members consisting of a large number of school children got organised
around such a high ideal is a marvel that has still to be fully appreciated by
those who have never experienced it. From this point of view, the founding of
Auroville in the sixties with no yogic restrictions should be considered as a step
farther in this direction than an abandoning of the original spiritual aim. Of
late, the large scale positive response to Sri Aurobindo’s ideals first in
Orissa and now in Tamilnadu, apart from the hundreds of centres that have
sprung up all over
Additional Document on
Sri Aurobindo’s Marriage
[The document below is
from Charu Chandra Dutt’s reminiscences of Sri Aurobindo. I have provided it
here as an appendix in order to show Sri Aurobindo’s relation with his wife.]
One afternoon,
subsequently to Rabindranath’s visit to Aurobindo above described, Bhupal Babu,
Aurobindo’s father-in-law, came to see us in the
Next morning, quite
early, a servant came upstairs and said to Subodh, “Ghose Saheb wants know,
sir, if you are all coming down to tea.” “Ghose Saheb? When did he come back?”
“He returned about 11 p.m.” We all trooped downstairs. There he sat in his arm-chair,
quietly smiling to himself. We fired a volley of questions at him. He replied
calmly, “Well, I had a superb dinner and returned here about 11 p.m. Lilavati,
your instructions regarding the garlands were carried out to the letter.”
Lilavati asked plaintively, “But why did you come away so soon?” The Chief’s
reply was, “I explained things to her and she allowed me to come away.” I
suppose these explanations were later on embodied in the famous letters.
(Charu Chandra Dutt, My Friend and My Master,
References
[1] Autobiographical
Notes, p 177
[2] Nirodbaran’s
Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, (1983), p 795
[3] A.B. Purani, Evening
Talks with Sri Aurobindo (2007), 18 December 1938, p 567
[4] Jeffrey Kripal,
Esalen (2007), p 64
[5] AB Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo (2007), On Sadhana, 9
Sept 1926, p 354
[6] Isha Upanishad, pp
138-139
[7] Autobiographical
Notes, p 110
[8] Autobiographical
Notes, pp 295-296
http://www.thelivesofsriaurobindo.com/2010/03/sri-aurobindos-marriage-part-1-by-raman.html
http://www.thelivesofsriaurobindo.com/2010/03/sri-aurobindos-marriage-part-2-by-raman.html
24 February 2010