This is an essay aimed at clarification and is written in the form of a letter, dated 28 June 1988, addressed to Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran. It arose out of Jugal Kishore Mukherjee’s deep concerns apropos of certain kinds of assertions made in the Ashram’s Archives and Research biennial. He wondered whether controversial statements made in it were seen and approved by them, they constituting the two-member supervisory committee looking into these publications. The letter was written solely with the intention of rectifying the inadvertent slips and restoring the right perspective in the matter of publications in an official periodical. Did it happen? It is a big question but the answer is short: it didn’t. We could discuss this aspect separately, but first in the following is the full essay Jugal Kishore Mukherjee had drafted in the interest of the Ashram, in terms of values to which one must adhere. Retrospectively, it may be pointed out that had a due note of his well-studied and well-documented concerns taken seriously by the advisory and official members, the present imbroglio regarding The Lives of Sri Aurobindo would have been avoided. That could also be true in the case of Savitri-editing. ~ RYD

IV: 4th Archival assertion we object to...

Sri Aurobindo’s formulations lacking the immediacy of experience?

This is a most serious charge levelled against Sri Aurobindo’s writings on Yoga, and this unwarranted assessment is altogether subjective not based on any objective validation. It may very well be the writer’s personal view but why foist it on others as a piece of indubitable general truth? Our Archives journal should not be used as a convenient medium to air such opinions which are bound to hurt the feelings of many a devotee of Sri Aurobindo. [The role of the journal should be to bring out the research findings.]

But before we discuss this question in more detail let us quote the relevant line from the Archival Notes:

All of Sri Aurobindo’s published formulations of his yoga, whether in books like the Synthesis, or in the Letters, lack the immediacy of experience that is present in Record of Yoga.” (Archives, April 1988, p.83)

Well, prima facie this appears to be too staggering as assertion to be easily believed. But perhaps we misunderstanding the writer: we must first of all be clear in our mind about what he means by “immediacy of experience”.

In one of its meanings the word “immediate” means “occurring at once, without delay”. But surely this cannot be the meaning intended by the writer; for in that case he would not have written “immediacy of experience” but rather “immediacy of recording or narration”. Also, that would be too banal a statement. For surely it is not expected that great Yogis have to keep day-to-day diaries of their experiences and publish these in time to prove the validity and veracity of their spiritual experiences! [... to be scrutinized by others! A & R April ’86; rather it is generally to fix the experience as a guideline.]

So we discard this first meaning of “immediate” and go over to the consideration of the second sense which is accepted in philosophical discourse and which fits the context here.

According to this second sense, ‘immediacy” means “immediate presence of an object of knowledge to the consciousness, without any distortions, inferences, or interpretations, and without involvement of any intermediate agencies.” [immediacy: the state of being immediate; direct appeal to intuitive understanding.—Chambers]

This is akin to what is known in Indian spirituality as pratyaksa upalabdhi as distinct and distinguished from indirect knowledge or paroksa jnana. Here we may be allowed to quote with profit 3 passages from Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis of Yoga, dealing with the same topic of pratyaksa:

(i) There are two kinds of knowledge, that which seeks to understand the apparent phenomenon of existence externally, by an  approach from outside, through the intellect,—this is the lower knowledge, the knowledge of the apparent world; secondly, the knowledge which seeks to know the truth of existence from within, in its source and reality, by spiritual realisation. (SY, pp. 491-92)

(ii) This realisation consists of three successive movements, internal vision, complete internal experience and identity. This internal vision, drsti, the power so highly valued by the ancient sages, the power which made a man Rishi or Kavi and no longer a mere thinker, is a sort of light in the soul by which things unseen become as evident and real to it—to the soul and not merely to the intellect—as do things seen to the physical eye. (Ibid., p. 290)

(iii) In the physical world there are always two forms of knowledge, the direct and the indirect, pratyaksa, of that which is present to the eyes, and paroksa, of that which is remote from and beyond our vision. ...

Precisely the same rule holds good of physical things and of the Self. We may hear clear and luminous teachings about the Self from philosophers and teachers or from ancient writings; we may by thought, inference, imagination, analogy or by any other available means attempt to form a mental figure or conception of it; we may hold firmly that conception in our mind and fix it by an entire and exclusive concentration; but we have not yet reaslised it, we have not seen God. It is only when after long and persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over to the awakened mentality, jyotirmaya Brahman, and conception gives place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real, concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen. (SY, pp. 290-91)

So, this is what is meant by “immediacy of experience” and we are asked to believe that all of Sri Aurobindo’s published formulations of his yoga... lack the immediacy of experience that is present in Record of Yoga.” That means, in default of the publication of this “Record” which has come to light only in the very recent past, we would have been entitled to conclude that all, all of Sri Aurobindo’s writings on his Yoga, including the Synthesis, Essays on the Gita, sonnets in the Last Poems and More Poems, Letters on Yoga, even the incomparable Savitri—because the Archival Notes stresses the point “All Sri Aurobindo’s published formulations”—lack “immediacy of experience”. [It must be understood that the Arya was a philosophical review.]

Then, what do these writings represent?—Philosophically speculative knowledge? Mental formulations of traditional spiritual ‘knowledge’? or indirect second-hand narration of other Yogis’ experiences? Or what? Surely such cannot be the case.

In our humble opinion, most of Sri Aurobindo’s formulations as printed in the above-mentioned books are based on an exact transcription of his own personal pratyaksa experiences and realisations.

One may ask, “How do you know that it is so?” our counter-question is, “How do you know that it is not so? By the exercise of which faculty of knowledge do you come to this conclusion? What criteria do you have to judge that they lack ‘immediacy of experience’? Simply because the unilluminated critical mind of the reader thinks so? Or, perhaps, because these ‘formulations’ are not put in the 1st Person narrative form? Surely these cannot be the standards by which to judge the “immediacy of experience” in any particular description offered by a genuine Yogi.”

In this connection we cannot but recall what St. Teresa of Avila spoke on one occasion. Towards the close of Chap. 18 of her Four Degrees of Prayer, while trying to put in word one of her ineffable experiences she wrote:

These should be spoken of by those who know them; for as they are beyond understanding, so are the beyond description. ... Anyone who has experienced this will to some extent understand. It cannot be expressed more directly.

As we have introduced the of St. Teresa we may mention in passing that an ordinary uninitiated person will be struck by the “immediacy of experience” in her Relations Spirituelles while the same person will miss this “immediacy” altogether in her Le Chateau de l’Ame because there some of her profound experiences are described in an impersonal form.

The Mother in one of her Conversations refers with admiration to the significant fact that Sri Aurobindo very often hid his personality behind the description/ narration of his personal experiences although these descriptions/narrations exactly corresponded to his own experience.

So we ask again: How does the critic know that Sri Aurobindo’s formulations of his yoga fail to capture and reveal the “immediacy”, it is solely due to his own insensitivity and not due to the “lack of immediacy” in Sri Aurobindo’s formulation.

All of us know what Sri Aurobindo wrote to Amal-da (KDS) on the subject of his poem Nirvana; it is worth quoting it here:

(i) The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations. He is writing of experiences that are foreign to ordinary mentality. Either they are unintelligible to it and in meeting them it flounders about as if in obscure abyss or it takes them as poetic fancies expressed in intellectually devised images. That was how a critic in the Hindu condemned such poems as Nirvana and Transformation. He said that they were mere intellectual conceptions and images and there was nothing of religious feeling or spiritual existence. Yet Nirvana was as close a transcription of a major experience as could be given in language coined by the human mind of a realisation in which the mind was entirely silent and into which no intellectual conception could at all enter. (Letters on Savitri in Savitri, p. 735)

As we have had occasion to quote from Sri Aurobindo’s letter to Amal-da on the poem Nirvana, we feel tempted to quote here a few more extracts from other letters Amal-da received from Sri Aurobindo, for these have great bearing on the issue we have been discussing: “immediacy” or otherwise of Sri Aurobindo’s description of his experiences in his published writings. Although many of these comments refer specifically to Savitri, we dare say these equally apply to Sri Aurobindo’s writings on yoga as published in his other books like The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita and even The Life Divine. We shall elaborate this point a little later on but for the moment let us ponder over the implications of the following extracts from Sri Aurobindo:

(ii) The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psyche-physical concreteness. (Letters on Savitri, Savitri, Cent. Ed. p. 750)

(iii) you may have seen in the line about the cloak only the objective image in a detailed picture of the dawn where I felt a subjective suggestion in the failure of the darkness and the slipping of the cloak, not an image but an experience. (op. cit., pp. 754-55)

(iv) At any rate this ‘picture’ or rather this part of the vision is a complete rendering of what I saw in the light of the inspiration and the experience that came to me. ... This last line (‘The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky’) is an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times and I am unable to find any feebleness either in the experience or in the words that express it. (p. 790)

That’s the difficulty with the ordinary readers. Without having any access to the experiences behind, one is apt to feel their verbal expressions empty and flat missing the “immediacy of experiences” animating them. But this would betray their own incapacity and, as the French would say, tant pis pour eux. Instead of passing a hasty judgment on the quality of the ‘formualtions”, these readers should develop a sense of humility before the ‘mysterious’ and try to grow in the adequacy of their sensitivity. As Sri Aurobindo has so beautifully put it:

(v) If the critic or any reader does not feel or see what I so often felt or saw, that may be my fault, but that is not sure, for you and others have felt very differently about it; it may be a mental or temperamental failure on their part and it will be then my or perhaps even the critic’s or reader’s misfortune. (p. 790)

Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo writes:

(vi) Is it meant that they are abstract philosophical terms and can have no real or concrete meaning, cannot represent things that one feels and senses or must often fight as one fights a visible foe? The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come into collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass. In fact, in writing this line(‘Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance’) I had no intention of teaching philosophy or forcing in an irrelevant metaphysical idea, although the idea may be in implication. I was presenting a happening that was to me something sensible and, as one might say, psychologically and spiritually concrete. (pp. 734-35)

Here is another pertinent passage from Sri Aurobindo:

(vii) To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote: ‘His anger climbed against me in a stream’, it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would be only describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the Guest-house, the truth of it being confirmed by the confession of the person who had the movement. (p. 736)

And then Sri Aurobindo forcefully adds:

This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. (p. 736)

Should one assert then that “All of Sri Aurobindo’s published formulations of his yoga... lack the immediacy of experience...”? Or is it claimed that Savitri does not fall in this category for it does not contain any “formulations his yoga”? It would be too absurd a claim to merit any refutation.

Here is a last quotation from Sri Aurobindo’s letters to Amal-da:

(viii) I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt, or experienced. (p. 794)

And this applies to Sri Aurobindo’s other books too. Here is something to ponder over: in his Essays on the Gita (pp. 449-52 of the Cent. Ed.) Sri Aurobindo describes in detail the divine counterparts of the three Gunas of the present lower Nature (Rajas, Tamas and the Sattwa) but immediately hastens to add in a footnote:

(ix) The account given here of the supreme spiritual and supramental forms of highest Nature action corresponding to the Gunas is not derived from the Gita, but introduced from spiritual experience. (p. 452, fn)

“introduced from the spiritual experience”: Please mark Sri Aurobindo’s  what Mother called ‘divine humility’. He does not state ‘from my spiritual experience’ but simply in the impersonal ‘from spiritual experience. And this is the style of description of his own experiences in the “published formulations”, but for that one need not surmise the lack of “immediacy of experience”. If one misses this point of capital importance, one misses everything of substance in Sri Aurobindo’s writings.

All those who have carefully studied books like The Life Divine or The Synthesis must have noted one significant point. Sri Aurobindo has invariably introduced his own personal experiences with preliminary phrases or clauses like “As is known to all who have gone far enough” or “Those who have gone within know that” or “When one has attained to it, the result is” or “If experience is at all a test of truth, we can say that” or “If we choose, we can proceed further and see that” etc, etc. But these introductory clauses should not lead us to the wrong track to think that what follow represent only speculative statements or mere indirect recording of traditional spiritual lore. No, these are faithful intimate transcriptions of what Sri Aurobindo realised in the depths and heights of his own consciousness.

In other cases where Sri Aurobindo does not necessarily want to corroborate the experiences in terms of his own personal realisations, he introduces the description of this second class of experiences by phrases and clauses like “It is reported that” or “They say that” or “It is claimed that” or “so they would say”, etc, etc.

We cite below a few representative instances to exemplify the point that in his ‘private’ and ‘public’ formulations, Sri Aurobindo often varied the style of introduction while preserving all the time the “immediacy of experience”.

1st Instance:

(i) Sri Aurobindo writes on p. 122 of The Life Divine (Cent. Ed.):

We may by progressive expanding or a sudden luminous self-transcendence mount up to these summits in unforgettable moments or dwell on them during hours or days of greatest superhuman experience.

This is as it is in The Life Divine and now compare it with what Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy in 1913(?):

(ii) 15th August is usually a turning point or a notable day for me personally either in Sadhana or life,—indirectly only for others. This time it has been very important for me. My subjective Sadhana may be said to have received its final seal and something like its consummation by a prolonged realisation and dwelling in Parabrahman for many hour. (Early Letters in SABCL Vol. 27, p. 433)

2nd instance:

(i) Sri Aurobindo writes on pp. 29-30 of The Life Divine:

We find that this Nirvana, while it gives an absolute peace and freedom to the soul within is yet consistent in practice with a desireless but effective action outside. This possibility of an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly the works of the eternal verities, etc.

“Void Calm within doing outwardly the works”: This is how Sri Aurobindo exemplifies it in terms of his own personal experience, in one of his letters:

(ii) The proof is that out of an absolute silence of the mind I edited the Bande Mataram for 4 months and wrote 6 volumes of the Arya, not to speak of all the letters and messages etc. I have written since. .. Out of that calm and silence I conducted a pretty strenuous political activity and have also taken my share in keeping up an Ashram... (Letters on Yoga, p. 163)

3rd Instance:

(i) Sri Aurobindo writes in an altogether impersonal way in his “The Valley of the False Glimmer”:

All can be turned into a first means towards the realisation of the Divine. ... You stand before a temple of Kali beside a sacred river and see what? – a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother.” (The Riddle of This World, 1969, p. 44)

If Sri Aurobindo himself would not have revealed the fact, could any ordinary critic, by reading this account, could have imagined that Sri Aurobindo was in fact putting into words what was one of his most memorable experience? As Iyengar has pointed out, “The living presence of Kali in one of the temples at Karnali near Chandod on the banks of sculptured confines.” (Sri Aurobindo: a biography and a history (1985), p. 368)

This experience has been immortalised by Sri Aurobindo in one of his sonnets of which we quote below only the first stanza:

(ii) The Stone Goddess

In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,

From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me,

A living Presence deathless and divine,

A Form that harboured all infinity.

4th instance:

Here is a passage from The Life Divine (p. 63):

Mind is then able to assert its true character as the one and all-sufficient sense and free to apply to the objects of sense its pure and sovereign instead of its mixed and dependent action. Nor is the extension of faculty really impossible but only more difficult in our waking state,—as is known to all who have been able to go far enough in certain paths of psychological experiment.

That Sri Aurobindo is referring to his own experimentation and experiences here can be proved by reference to his Record of Yoga.

5th Instance:

(i) Here is another interesting passage from The Life Divine:

Nor do we become merely conscious of this cosmic existence, ... receiving it in sensation, but also entering into it in awareness. In it we live as we lived before in the ego-sense, active, more and more in contact, even unified more and more with other minds, other lives, other bodies than the organism we call ourselves, producing effects not only on our moral and mental being and on the subjective being of others, but even on the physical world and its events by means nearer to the divine than these possible to our egoistic capacity.

That here too Sri Aurobindo is alluding to his own experiences is made clear when we read the Record of Yoga. The following extract from one of his early letters (January, 1913?) to Motilal Roy throws a flood of light on the question:

(ii) ... the crowning movement of my Sadhana—vis. the attempt to apply knowledge and power to the events and happenings of the world without the necessary instrumentality of physical action. What I am attempting is to establish the normal working of the Siddhis in life i.e. the perception of thoughts, feelings and happenings of other beings and in other places throughout the world without any use of information by speech or any other data; 2nd, the communication of the ideas and feelings I select to others (individuals, groups, nations) by mere transmission of will-power; 3rd, the silent compulsion on them to act according to these communicated ideas and feelings; 4th, the determining of events, actions and results of action throughout the world by pure silent will-power. ... In the 1st, 2nd and even in 3rd I am now largely successful, although the action of these powers is not yet perfectly organised. It is only in the 4th that I feel a serious resistance. (1913-letter to Motilal Roy, SABCL Vol. 27, pp. 428-29)

6th Instance:

(i) Sri Aurobindo writes on p. 52 of The Life Divine:

States of consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection.

Does it appear to be an abstract metaphysical document devoid of all “immediacy of experience”? Not so, for Sri Aurobindo hastens to add, evidently depending on his own personal experience:

and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and in constant and substantial experience. (LD, p. 52)

Can we forget to recollect in this connection Sri Aurobindo’s experience with ant-bitings in the Alipore jail or his Meditations of Mandavya wherein he writes vis-a-vis a scorpion-bite:

(ii) While on a terrace hushed I walked at night,

He came and stung my feet. My soul surprised

Rejoiced in lover’s contact; but the mind

Thought of a scorpion and was snared by forms.

Still, still my soul remembered its delight

Denying mind, and midst the body’s pain,

I laughed contented.

We need not, we hope, cite more instances. Indeed, every chapter of the The Life Divine contains passages and passages which describe with exactitude Sri Aurobindo’s own experiences and realisations with “immediacy” vibrant in them. And The Synthesis of Yoga?—Here almost every page abounds in Sri Aurobindo’s intimate experiences. And yet the writer of the Archival Notes specially singles out the Synthesis and the Letters to say that they “lack the immediacy of experience that is present in Record of Yoga. How strange! We have already come to the 20th page of this present paper, so it is time that we cry halt. Otherwise we could have quoted some representative passages from the Synthesis to substantiate our point.

Let us content ourselves with citing here only a single passage which transcribes with exact precision Sri Aurobindo’s experience of Nirvana as described in the 1st person in one of his letters.

7th Instance:

(i) Here is how he describes his experience:

Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world—only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. ... it was positive, the only positive reality,—although not a spatial physical world, pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world, leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing nothing else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial. ... It brought... an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom. (Letters on Yoga, p. 101)

Now please compare this with the following passage from the Synthesis and see for yourself whether it lacks any “immediacy of experience”:

(ii) There is another basic realisation, the most extreme of all, that yet comes sometimes as the first decisive opening or an early turn of the Yoga. It is the awakening to an ineffable high transcendent Unknowable above myself and above this world in which I seem to move, a timeless and spaceless condition or entity which is at once, in some way compelling and convincing to an essential conscious in me, the one thing that is to it overwhelmingly real. This experience is usually accompanied by an equally compelling sense either of the dreamlike or shadowy illusoriness of all things here or else of their temporary, derivative and only half-real character. For a time at least all around me may seem to be a moving of cinematographic shadow forms or surface figures... (SY, pp. 108-09)

We have at last come to the end of our paper and let us make a resume of our discussions by stating that we have not been happy with the following assertions appearing in the pages of the latest issue of the Archives journal:

(i) Only in Letters of Yoga and in The Mother, surrender emerges as the fundamental principle it is.

(ii) Surrender took shape after coming of the Mother (in1920).

(iii) The term psychic being does not occur (in its developed sense) in the Arya.

(iv) When Sri Aurobindo revised the first part of the Synthesis he devalued the role played by the mental being and brought out the fundamental importance of the psychic.

(v) All of Sri Aurobindo’s published formulations of his yoga, whether in books like the Synthesis, or in the Letters, lack the immediacy of experience that is present in Record of Yoga.

Well, if there is any substance in what we have tried to say through all these 20 pages, please see to it that at least in the future issues of the Archives, such unwarranted subjective assertions touching vital aspects of the Integral Yoga-sadhana do not find place after having escaped your scrutinising notice.

If however, even after carefully going through our paper, you hold on to the judgment that the above views expressed in the Archives are in total conformity with your own assessments, well, we have, in that case, nothing more to say or do but to keep quiet.

One final request. In an attempted refutation of our arguments, please do not quote anything from any unauthoritative “records” (!) of Sri Aurobindo’s talks or views.

In the service of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother,

JUGAL