Sri Aurobindo: The Revolutionary Who Stopped Writing to the Papers

Two things happened in 1908 and the second one is the reason he is in this series.

Lele

Early in 1908, at Baroda, Aurobindo met a yogi named Vishnu Bhaskar Lele.

He asked to be taught, and what Lele told him was very simple: sit, and reject every thought that comes, and do not treat any of them as yours.

Aurobindo's own account is that within three days the mind went completely silent and stayed that way, and that the silence did not lift afterwards, and that he then had to learn to function, speak and write from a condition in which no thought was arising in the ordinary way.

Which is either the most consequential three days in modern Indian religious history or an extraordinary claim, and the useful thing is that he wrote about it repeatedly, in letters, in plain language, without embellishment, and treated it as a technical event rather than a wonder.

The arrest

In May 1908, after the bombing at Muzaffarpur which killed two English women, the police swept up the Bengal revolutionary network, and Aurobindo was arrested and charged in what became the Alipore Bomb Case.

He spent about a year in Alipore jail awaiting and undergoing trial, much of it in solitary confinement in a small cell.

He was defended by Chittaranjan Das, whose closing address is one of the famous speeches of the period, and he was acquitted in May 1909.

What happened in the cell

And this is what he later described in his Uttarpara speech, delivered soon after his release, in public, to an audience expecting a political speech.

He told them that in jail he had seen Vasudeva everywhere.

Not as a figure of speech. He described looking at the cell, the bars, the tree in the yard, the blanket, the food bowl, the warders, the prisoners, the magistrate and the prosecuting counsel, and finding the same presence in every one of them.

And he told the audience that what had been given to him in jail was not a political instruction.

The Uttarpara speech is where his public life turns, and people who came to hear a nationalist leader heard a man talking about God in a courtroom.

What he did next

He continued in politics for a short time, edited the papers Karmayogin and Dharma, and then in 1910, on receiving what he described as an inner instruction, he left.

He went first to Chandernagore, which was French territory and out of British jurisdiction, and then to Pondicherry, arriving on 4 April 1910.

He never left Pondicherry again. He lived there for forty years.

And he did not go back to politics.

Not when asked. Not when independence came. He was invited to preside over the Congress and declined, he refused public office and public roles, and he treated the entire political career as a completed phase rather than a resource to be drawn on.

Which is worth noticing. A man with that much political capital, in that country, in those decades, who never spent any of it.

The complication that belongs here

In 1940 he publicly supported the Allied side in the Second World War and contributed money to the war fund.

This was extremely unpopular among Indian nationalists, for whom the British war effort was the enemy's war effort, and it was held against him.

His stated reasoning was that a Nazi victory would be a catastrophe for the world including India, that it was not a question of British interests, and that some things outrank a national grievance.

A reader can disagree with him. The entry records it because it is the one occasion he broke his own silence on politics, and because leaving it out would make him more comfortable than he was.

Forty years in one town, most of it in one set of rooms.

The Mother

Mirra Alfassa, born in Paris in 1878 to an Egyptian and Turkish Jewish family, a painter and occultist who had already been practising for years in France, came to Pondicherry in 1914, returned to stay in 1920, and from 1926 ran everything.

She is called the Mother, and Aurobindo's own position was unambiguous: she was not his assistant but his equal in the work, and after 1926 the ashram, the practical order, the finances, the building, the discipline and the people were hers.

24 November 1926

Called Siddhi Day in the tradition, and after it Aurobindo withdrew into seclusion.

He stopped seeing people. For the remaining twenty four years of his life he appeared publicly on four darshan days a year, and otherwise communicated in writing.

And the writing is enormous. He answered thousands of letters from disciples on the smallest practical questions of practice, and the Letters on Yoga compiled from them are the most useful part of his output for an ordinary reader.

What he was actually claiming

And this needs stating clearly because it is unlike anything else in this series.

Aurobindo's aim was not liberation from the world.

He accepted that moksha, the escape of the individual from embodiment, is real and achievable and had been achieved by many. He said it was not enough.

His claim was that a further consciousness, which he called the supermind or supramental, exists above the levels the tradition already maps, and that it can be brought down into matter, transforming not just an individual's inner state but the physical body, life on earth, and the species.

Which is a claim about the future of the material world, made in the vocabulary of yoga, and it is why his system is called integral or purna yoga: it refuses to leave any part out, including the part everybody else was trying to escape.

The status of the claim

Unfulfilled, and this article is going to say so.

Aurobindo died in 1950. The Mother continued the work on the body, described it in the Agenda recordings, and died in 1973.

The transformation of matter that the system exists to produce has not been demonstrated.

The tradition's own position is that the work is long, that a descent occurred, that the process operates on a timescale of ages rather than lifetimes, and that this is not a failure but a stage.

That is a coherent position and it is also unfalsifiable, and a reader is entitled to know which kind of claim they are being offered.

What is not affected by any of this

The psychological material, which is where almost all of the practical value is.

Aurobindo's analysis of the inner instrument is careful, specific and usable regardless of what you think about the supramental: the distinction between the psychic being and the surface personality, the description of the mental, vital and physical levels and how each of them resists change differently, the handling of the vital, which is his term for the desire and energy nature and is the part of the machinery that actually causes people trouble.

And the practical instruction is ordinary: aspiration, rejection and surrender, repeated, in daily life, with the observation that the resistance is not in the mind where you are looking but lower down where you are not.

The body after death

A specific claim that gets repeated, and here is its status.

When he died on 5 December 1950 the ashram reported that his body showed no sign of decomposition for several days, and the burial was accordingly delayed, and a certificate from a French physician is cited by the ashram to that effect.

It cannot be independently examined now. A reader may accept it or not.

And it is worth noting that nothing in the system depends on it, which is the test worth applying to any such claim: if the teaching would be unaffected by the wonder turning out to be wrong, the wonder was never the argument.

A warning about the prose

Aurobindo is hard.

Not obscure, and not badly written. His English is excellent and his sentences are long, dense, heavily subordinated, and written in a nineteenth century register by somebody educated at Cambridge who never adjusted downward.

A reader who opens The Life Divine at page one and gives up is having the standard experience, and should not conclude anything about themselves.

Read in this order

One. Letters on Yoga, or any selection from it. Short answers to real questions from real people about real difficulties. This is where he is most direct and least architectural.

Two. Essays on the Gita. He is explaining somebody else's text, which disciplines him, and the Gita is familiar ground.

Three. The Synthesis of Yoga. The systematic account of the practice: the yoga of works, of knowledge, of love, and of self perfection.

Four. The Life Divine. The metaphysics. Nine hundred pages. Attempt it after the others or not at all, and there is no obligation.

Five. Savitri. An epic poem of around twenty four thousand lines, which is the longest in English, built on the Mahabharata episode of Savitri and Satyavan. It is his own preferred vehicle and he revised it for decades. Some readers find it the only part of him that lands. Others cannot get through fifty lines. Try twenty and see which you are.

The practice, stripped down

• Aspiration: wanting it, actively, as a movement rather than a mood
• Rejection: declining what rises against it, without fighting it and without following it
• Surrender: handing over the outcome and the effort both

And his repeated practical observation, which is worth more than most of the metaphysics: the difficulty is not usually in the mind. People try to solve a vital problem, a matter of desire, anger, resentment or fear, with mental effort, and it does not work, and the honest first step is locating which level the thing is actually operating on.

Auroville, and the current dispute

The Mother founded Auroville in 1968 as an international township near Pondicherry, intended as a place with no money, no nationality and no religion, and it exists, with residents from many countries.

And it has been in serious and public dispute since 2021.

The conflict is between the Auroville Foundation, the statutory body under the Government of India, and a substantial part of the resident community, over implementation of the original master plan, the clearing of land and trees for a planned road and the Crown circuit, governance, and control of the community's institutions.

There has been litigation, including in the National Green Tribunal and the higher courts, and there have been evictions and expulsions of residents.

This entry does not take a side. It records that the dispute is live, that both parties hold positions with substance, and that anybody planning to visit or move there should read the current situation for themselves rather than rely on either party's material.

Visiting

• Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, where the Samadhi of Aurobindo and the Mother is, in the courtyard, open daily, free, and silent
• The four darshan days: 21 February, the Mother's birthday; 24 April, her final arrival; 15 August, Aurobindo's birthday; 24 November, Siddhi Day. Pondicherry is very full on these
• Auroville and the Matrimandir, which requires advance booking for the inner chamber
• Pondicherry itself, the French quarter, the promenade

And the standard note this batch applies everywhere: any residential institution holding children is subject to POCSO 2012 without exception, religious or spiritual status is not a defence, reporting is mandatory, and a child in such a place should be able to attend school, contact family freely and leave. Childline 1098. Police 112.

A daily practice from this entry

• Om Namo Bhagavate, or the Mother's simple instruction, which was to remember and offer
• One page of the Letters on Yoga
• And the Aurobindo question, which is his actual contribution: is this problem in my thinking, or in what I want

Who: Sri Aurobindo, born Aurobindo Ghose in Calcutta on 15 August 1872, died at Pondicherry on 5 December 1950. His father, a British trained doctor and thoroughgoing anglophile, arranged his sons' education so they would have no Indian influence at all: Aurobindo went to England at seven, stayed fourteen years, was educated at St Paul's and King's College Cambridge, and did not know Bengali. He passed the ICS examination and then disqualified himself deliberately by not presenting for the riding test, returning to India in 1893 at twenty one. He worked thirteen years for the Gaekwad of Baroda, in administration and then teaching, and read himself into Sanskrit, the Veda, the Upanishads, the Gita and Bengali as an adult.

The politics: between roughly 1902 and 1910 he was one of the most consequential political figures in India, arguing for complete independence when the Congress mainstream was petitioning for reform within the empire. He wrote for Bande Mataram, belonged to the extremist wing with Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai, and was involved with the revolutionary groups including through his brother Barindra. He supported armed revolution against the colonial state, which should be stated rather than softened.

1908: at Baroda he met the yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, who told him to sit and reject every thought and treat none as his own, and his own account is that within three days the mind went completely silent and stayed that way. In May 1908, after the Muzaffarpur bombing, he was arrested and charged in the Alipore Bomb Case, spent about a year in jail much of it in solitary confinement, was defended by Chittaranjan Das and acquitted in May 1909. In the cell, as he described soon afterwards in the Uttarpara speech to an audience expecting politics, he saw Vasudeva everywhere: the bars, the tree, the blanket, the warders, the prisoners, the magistrate and the prosecuting counsel.

After: he edited Karmayogin and Dharma briefly, then in 1910 on an inner instruction left for Chandernagore and then Pondicherry, arriving 4 April 1910, and never left for forty years. He never returned to politics, declined an invitation to preside over the Congress, and refused public office, which is remarkable given how much political capital he had and never spent. The one exception was 1940, when he publicly supported the Allied side in the Second World War and contributed money, which was extremely unpopular among Indian nationalists; his reasoning was that a Nazi victory would be a catastrophe for the world including India.

The Mother: Mirra Alfassa, born in Paris in 1878 to an Egyptian and Turkish Jewish family, a painter and occultist already practising in France, came in 1914, returned to stay in 1920, and ran everything from 1926. Aurobindo's position was that she was his equal in the work, not his assistant. After 24 November 1926, Siddhi Day, he withdrew into seclusion, appearing publicly on four darshan days a year and otherwise answering thousands of disciples' letters, compiled as Letters on Yoga.

The claim: his aim was not liberation from the world. He accepted moksha as real and achievable and said it was not enough. He held that a further consciousness he called the supramental exists above the levels the tradition maps and can be brought down into matter, transforming the physical body, life on earth and the species. That claim is unfulfilled: he died in 1950, the Mother continued the work on the body and died in 1973, and the transformation of matter has not been demonstrated. The tradition holds that the work operates on a timescale of ages, which is coherent and also unfalsifiable, and a reader is entitled to know which kind of claim they are being offered. The report that his body did not decompose for several days cannot be independently examined now, and nothing in the system depends on it, which is the test worth applying to any wonder.

What survives regardless: the psychological material. The distinction between the psychic being and the surface personality, the description of the mental, vital and physical levels and how each resists change differently, and above all the handling of the vital, his term for the desire and energy nature. The practice is aspiration, rejection and surrender, and his most useful repeated observation is that the difficulty is usually not in the mind, so people apply mental effort to vital problems and it does not work.

Reading order: Letters on Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Life Divine if at all, and Savitri, his twenty four thousand line epic, which some readers find the only part of him that lands and others cannot get fifty lines into.

Auroville: founded by the Mother in 1968 near Pondicherry as an international township with no money, nationality or religion, and in serious public dispute since 2021 between the Auroville Foundation, the statutory body under the Government of India, and a substantial part of the resident community, over the master plan, the clearing of land and trees for a planned road and the Crown circuit, governance and control of institutions, with litigation including in the National Green Tribunal and with evictions and expulsions. This entry does not take a side and advises anyone planning to visit or move there to read the current situation for themselves.