Heraclitus
The essay on Heraclitus, published in instalments in the periodical Arya in 1916–17 and later, in expanded form, in 1924, enables the reader to appreciate the depth of vision inherent in Śrī Aurobindo.
Scholars still today, for the most part, examine the individual constituent elements of Heraclitus’s thought—fire, polemos, logos, “the All is One”—and from this aggregate they see confirmed the traditional opposition between Parmenides, the philosopher of Being, and Heraclitus, the champion of Becoming. The dimension of becoming, conceived in various nuances, is consistently taken to be the foundation of Heraclitus’s thought, the very source from which his philosophising springs; that is, it is assumed, since Aristotle, that Heraclitus proceeded from a representational evidence of reality, namely the changing of things that are.
Śrī Aurobindo’s reading, however, has a different inspiration: he does indeed linger on the various Heraclitean notions, yet instead of deepening each of them singly and analytically, he always considers them as expressions of Heraclitus’s “single thought” (much as Heidegger would later interpret both Heraclitus and Parmenides). And this single thought, according to Śrī Aurobindo, is not the crude becoming understood as the birth, change, and perishing of things, but consists in Heraclitus’s direct, pre-representational apprehension of the authentic dimension of reality—though expressed in an elliptical and seemingly chaotic manner.
Śrī Aurobindo writes: “I have tried to show how often his thought touches and is almost identical with the Vedic and Vedantic. But his knowledge of the truth of things stopped with the vision of the universal reason and the universal force; he seems to have summed up the principle of things in these two first terms, the aspect of consciousness, the aspect of power, a supreme intelligence and a supreme energy. The eye of Indian thought saw a third aspect of the Self and of Brahman; besides the universal consciousness active in divine knowledge, besides the universal force active in divine will, it saw the universal delight active in divine love and joy. European thought, following the line of Heraclitus’ thinking, has fixed itself on reason and on force and made them the principles towards whose perfection our being has to aspire… Of this last secret power Western thought has only seen two lower aspects, pleasure and aesthetic beauty; it has missed the spiritual beauty and the spiritual delight… There is the gate of the divine ecstasy. Heraclitus could not see it, and yet his one saying about the kingdom of the child touches, almost reaches the heart of the secret. For this kingdom is evidently spiritual, it is the crown, the mastery to which the perfected man arrives; and the perfect man is a divine child! He is the soul which awakens to the divine play, accepts it without fear or reserve, gives itself up in a spiritual purity to the Divine, allows the careful and troubled force of man to be freed from care and grief and become the joyous play of the divine Will, his relative and stumbling reason to be replaced by that divine knowledge which to the Greek, the rational man, is foolishness”.
For Śrī Aurobindo, Heraclitus is not a pre-theoretical thinker standing in isolation within the context of ancient Greece; quite apart from the fact that it was Western philosophers themselves who determined who counted as a “philosopher” according to their own criteria—thus excluding, for instance, the Sages and the Orphics (who nonetheless still inspired Socrates and Plato)—one can readily agree with Śrī Aurobindo that the earliest Greek philosophers, the physikoi in Aristotle’s sense, were still, at least in part, mystics. A terminological clarification is necessary. If, in common usage, “mystic” denotes someone who finds himself in states of ecstasy, with greater or lesser swoon, in reality—technically speaking—a “mystic” is one who abides in some way on this side of the dualism of subject and object, regardless of the type of yoga that leads him there; thus both the bhakti-yogī or the European monk seized in abandonment to the divine, and the jñāna-yogī pursuing the tantric or vedantic paths of knowledge, are mystics.
Nietzsche and the Unconscious
In his essay on Heraclitus, Śrī Aurobindo refers several times to Nietzsche as a modern Heraclitus, and writes of him: “it is the great distinction of Nietzsche among later European thinkers to have brought back something of the old dynamism and practical force into philosophy, although in the stress of this tendency he may have neglected unduly the dialectical and metaphysical side of philosophical thinking”.
Indeed, Nietzsche—initially regarded more as a moralist and a poet—was restored as a great philosopher by Heidegger in the 1930s (Nietzsche and Heidegger were, first revered and then removed, the wellspring of contemporary continental philosophy).
As early as 1917, Śrī Aurobindo recognised the strictly philosophical stature of Nietzsche’s thought; and in the years that followed he often engaged with Nietzsche, for his conception of the necessary evolution of the human condition toward a state higher than its merely mental one naturally evoked the Nietzschean notion of the Übermensch (“overman”).
The point is that the only correct and adamantine key to understanding Nietzsche—indeed one in itself inaccessible to Western philosophers—is provided precisely by Śrī Aurobindo, thereby confirming the unspoken substratum of the Heideggerian interpretation: Nietzsche “was an apostle who never entirely understood his own message”.
Nietzsche had, in fact, a highly peculiar mode of apprehending reality, grounded in a natural openness of mind toward the authentic dimension of reality; yet, since he had neither an inherited body of “sacred” knowledge to draw upon nor the clarity of pure vision, he was unable truly to understand—and therefore to cultivate—the prophetic gift. And yet, as more than a few passages show, he knew he possessed it. “Prophet”, needless to say, is here to be understood in its etymological sense: a spokesperson for higher dimensions of consciousness (as, for instance, in the prophetic Qabbalah of Abulafia; in the East, the notion of prophecy is not contemplated for the simple reason that Kuṇḍalī is the goddess of language).
It is only by recognising this pre-representational dimension—prior to the I and to logic, as Nietzsche repeatedly proclaims—that Nietzsche can be understood. Otherwise, if one remains ensnared in logical-metaphysical discourse, his words sound indeed bold and thunderous, yet trivial or self-contradictory. The eternal return and the “thus I willed it to be”, the overman and the “beyond good and evil”, are notions that descend from a pre-theoretical dimension of consciousness; to attempt to grasp them through representational and rational modalities, as philosophers try to do, renders understanding impossible.
Śrī Aurobindo—and likewise other great contemporary yogīn, from Swami Satyananda Saraswati to Gopi Krishna—regard Nietzsche in precisely this way: as a prophet misunderstood by himself. At times he experienced states of consciousness anterior to the I, states assimilable to yogic states and therefore mystical in the sense clarified above; but he could not seize their scope, and revealed them only as they appeared to him.
Śrī Aurobindo—as did other yogīn as well—spoke on many occasions about the unconscious as identified by Freud and further elaborated by Jung. This should cause no surprise, for Sacred Science is the science of the mind and therefore of the actual nature of the human beings (whereas ordinarily one knows only secondary outward manifestations of the mind). In India it has been known for millennia that the unconscious is one of the strata of the mind taken as a whole, which—together with the I, or rather the I’s (the plurality of I’s in each person is by no means merely what Pirandello saw)—abides in self-reference upon the natural and uncontaminated ground of the mind. This conception of the unconscious is common to adepts of every latitude: some Traditions set it forth explicitly, others less so, for the actual nature of the mind is precisely that—however much Western psychologists and neuroscientists may remain unaware of it.
Śrī Aurobindo, however, went further: in his pioneering work on the evolution of the human species, he entered—indeed with the aim of purifying them for the common good—into what Jung calls the archetypes of the collective unconscious. When he touches on this, particularly in the significant letters collected in the Letters on Yoga, he explains how these archetypal figures are indeed real, although Jung perceived only a superficial dimension of them and objectified them.
Like Nietzsche, Jung too was an “unconscious prophet” (one need only read his Red Book to grasp this), with the difference that whereas Nietzsche allowed the images that appeared to him simply to be, Jung attempted to force them within the limits of his calculating rational faculty, thereby drying them up and losing their authentic value.
The Path of Yoga
As noted, Śrī Aurobindo did not choose to practise yoga; rather, he was seized by grace and, as a consequence, yielded to the gift that had befallen him. He therefore asked a yogī for instruction, who could do nothing but remark that within only three days the novice Śrī Aurobindo was already able to witness the natural cessation of discursive thought—one of the decisive moments in the yogic path.
It was only when he withdrew to Pondicherry that he devoted himself entirely to his yoga.
Before entering into Śrī Aurobindo’s yoga, however, it is necessary to clarify what the yoga actually are.
The yoga are complexes of techniques of various kinds, all directed toward a single aim: enabling one to find oneself on this side of the I—that is, on this side of representation, in the terms of Western thought—and thereby to gain access to one’s true nature, for the belief that one is the I is precisely the veil of ignorance (avidyā) that must be torn. The yoga are simply means—often called “skillful means”—oriented toward the attainment of higher states of consciousness. And here lies the fracture between authentic esoteric thought and discursive thought, as noted above: if discursive thought denies a priori the higher states of consciousness, then reading about them is meaningless.
Finding oneself outside the I is an event, that occurs of itself; it is not the consequence of actions or thoughts. It goes without saying that the I cannot will to exit itself: the I is an “entity”, and the attempt of an entity to negate itself is an affirmation of itself. For millennia the revealed texts have repeated that the descent of power can only happen; it is a-causal. (The causal nexus known to the ordinary mind is, moreover, obviously created by the ordinary mind itself: it is clear that phenomena appear “in some way concatenated”, but the ordinary mind knows only what it is able to know; the causal nexus is fundamental in Buddhism, as is Kárman in the Hindu currents, yet neither is the theoretical-rational causal nexus.)
The yoga, then, serve to verify the possibility of this event’s occurring; and in parallel, they constitute a viaticum for understanding and realising grace when it has occurred, for it may happen in many ways, and thus for accompanying spiritual becoming. Going deeper still, one may discover that these two functions of yoga are in fact one and the same: each person carries grace within himself, that is, each is already a Buddha; the point is to be able to recognise this (this being the moment generally called “awakening”), given that it cannot, as is repeatedly stated, be recognised by an act of will—if this violates logic as discursive thought believes it to be a law of reality, that remains an internal matter of discursive thought itself.
The yoga, then, are not ends in themselves; they are neither gymnastic exercises nor mental relaxations. There are three great paths of yoga, as Kṛṣṇa teaches in the Bhagavad-gītā: Bhakti-yoga, the yoga of surrender to the Divine; Karma-yoga, usually translated as “the yoga of action”, although this rendering cannot convey its true meaning; and finally the great path of Jñāna-yoga, the yoga of knowledge, which encompasses the yoga usually known. Jñāna-yoga thus includes the Path of Tantra, the Royal Path or via brevis, centred on the manipulation of subtle energies and capable of leading to liberation in life (jīvanmukti), though at the perilous price of dissolving the boundaries of the ordinary mind; and the Path of Sūtra, the path of renunciation and study, which may lead to liberation over the course of countless rebirths.
Some yoga are purely tantric, others are paths of the slow way; and yet other yoga—such as, above all, the Asparśa-yoga of Vedānta—may fall into either of the two domains, Tantra or Sūtra, according to one’s capacities and disposition. But this should not surprise us, given what was just said: realisation is an event that is accidental in itself and must, depending on the intensity with which it manifests, be recognised and cared for—just as Śrī Aurobindo did. (In his case it occurred with considerable intensity; others are born avatāra, like Śrī Anandamayi Ma; otherwise, as is more generally said in India, Kuṇḍalī’s yawns may occur often, and one must be fortunate enough to notice them and then steadfast in exalting them.)
When Śrī Aurobindo underwent the śaktipāta, he understood it; he sought a guru who could teach him how to relate to the capacities that now manifested themselves in him with greater intensity—capacities that, over the ensuing decades, became ever more established in his psyche, namely, the progressive dissolution of the bonds and constraints by which representation keeps the bare condition of the base of the mind separate from the higher consciousness of which it truly consists. One may also say that yoga is the Ereignis of the later Heidegger, the “event” consisting in the reciprocal appropriation of man (Dasein) and destinal Being (Seyn)—on condition that Ereignis be understood as the progressive, and in a phantasmagorically practical sense experiential, undoing of the separation between authentic individual consciousness and cosmic consciousness, and certainly not, as one might superficially suppose, as a dissolution into an undifferentiated ocean or a vanishing into the ether; rather, one’s (authentic) individuality is retained.
Naturally, discursive thought—whether in the form of ordinary thinking or of the neurosciences—cannot understand yoga, precisely because discursive thought is grounded in its own emptily self-referential rules, such as the principles of identity and non-contradiction, the distinction between mind and matter, the illusion of linear time, and so forth. And it is exactly for this reason that all adepts—and indeed Heidegger himself, Giordano Bruno, Jung, and others—have repeated for millennia from every corner of the planet that the higher conditions can only be experienced; otherwise the speaking about them, the believing one understands on the part of the listener, and the desire to illustrate them on the part of the teacher are futile.
Yoga is precisely the exiting of the cage of self-referentiality, the being outside the I’s—and obviously not psychologically or psychiatrically, nor physically, but through a neuroplastic transmutation. Once one has learned how to swim, one does not, with every stroke, need to attend to the individual movements of each single muscle; one simply glides over the foam of the waves. This is vidyā, knowledge, for the esoteric doctrines (the authentic ones, for the graves are full of pseudo-esotericists), as Śrī Aurobindo himself repeats: “true knowledge is not that which we reach by thought, but that which we are, that which we become”—as Nietzsche, citing Pindar, said, “become what you are”.
This introduction on the nature of yoga leads into a theme that Śrī Aurobindo unfolds repeatedly: the path of yoga is an intermediate path, narrow and enchanted, between materialism and credulity or faith. There are those who believe only what they can touch with their hand and what their I believes it can infer from this: the mind of the materialist confines itself within that portion of logic called rationalistic logic (from Aristotle—who, from motion on Earth, generated the first unmoved mover—to the bare and ingenuous realists or contemporary pragmatists, and to the idealists, who by definition believe their own crude thoughts to be true: idealisms are nothing but an exaltation of the egoic mind). Then there are those who believe in what they hope or wish to hope for: the enthusiasts, who feel themselves woven into nature or perceive signs in the falling of leaves, who delight in superstitions. This distinction corresponds, moreover, to the one Plato draws in one of his most austere dialogues, the Sophist, where the Stranger of Elea says that one must keep distance both from those who believe only in “that which offers resistance to contact” and from the “friends of the ideas.” And it is precisely this notion of “friends of the ideas” that shows how Western thought has long lost contact with the simple depth of what Plato said: the Ideas, as is known, are the heart of Platonic metaphysics, so that scholars find themselves in the difficulty of having to guess who these tōn eidōn philoi are, given that they cannot fathom how Plato could call in error those who follow what is taken to be his own crucial philosophical creation.
The path of yoga is therefore the narrow path that, on the one hand, requires the overcoming of crude materialism, and on the other must be well oriented and austere so as not to give way to childish enthusiasms of a psychological or emotional kind. What all yoga share, as do all operative esoteric doctrines of the various Traditions, is, as said, the dimension of experience. The yoga have as their aim the experiencing of states of consciousness anterior to the I. All techniques are directed to this result, as every Sanskrit and Tibetan text (Tibetan Buddhism is the Vajrayāna, purely tantric Buddhism) declares, provided one understands what is written; the deeper we move into the Kālī Yuga, the present age of darkness, the more explicit the teachings become.
Indeed, with the exception of certain fundamental psycho-organic techniques—those are what they are, and as such are repeated by all—every yoga is nothing other than the retrospective description of the path that a yogī has successfully traversed. Once a goal has been reached, the yogī has the obligation to set out how he reached it, so as to indicate a path that others may follow—for each person can follow only the way on which his Kárman has placed him, as Kṛṣṇa himself makes clear.
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Continue in Part III