PART 1 – UNITY IN THE WORLD
Introduction
We start in 1947, on the occasion of India’s independence. Sri Aurobindo has marked it with a message to All India Radio that sets out the significance of it coinciding with his own birthday. It is, he says, nothing less than the “seal of the Divine Force” that has guided him until now, the beginning of the “full fruition” of five “impractical dreams” that he has nurtured in his mystical vision.[1] The dreams are ambitious, seeking ever greater harmony and unity in the world and man. One of his dreams calls for “a world-union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind.” Bluntly, he states, “only human imbecility and stupid selfishness can prevent it.”[2]
Perhaps the holocaust of two world wars had changed his view on how to address a people unable to see the need of the hour: The time for gentle warnings had passed. In September 1915, when he embarked on his major exposition on the nature of such a world union, his view was different. “I have,” he then said, “begun… the Ideal of Human Unity. I intend to proceed very cautiously and not go very deep at first, but as if I were leading the intelligence of the reader gradually towards the deeper meaning of unity…”. [3] In this essay we sketch out Sri Aurobindo’s view on unity. We emphasise its breadth, encompassing as it does not only an external unity, a fraternity of people, but also an inner unity that requires the unifying of the disparate parts of our being – for it is only when the latter is completed that the former can find fulfilment.
Unity amongst people – a ‘real’ prospect
The world and those within it are real. Both are aspects of the Divine’s manifestation.[4] Sri Aurobindo’s was a philosophy of what he called a realistic or true Adwaita. It was one “which admits all things as the one Brahman and does not seek to bisect Its existence into two incompatible entities, an eternal Truth and an eternal Falsehood…”.[5] Brahman is the fabric of the universe, “the material of the world as well as its base and continent…. Phenomenon,” said Sri Aurobindo, is not phantasm. It is “the substantial form of a Truth.”[6] As a form of the Truth, it was not a forlorn exercise to seek a divine existence within it. It was this, the affirmation of the possibility of a divine life upon earth, that would lie at the heart of the integral yoga that Sri Aurobindo would come to be indelibly associated with.
Love, fraternity, oneness, these too were real. Whether they were offered to the Divine or to one’s fellow man, they were capable of reciprocation because that to which they were offered was real, and not some “eternal mockery and illusion” from a higher power[7] that sought our liberation from some earthly dream or nightmare to a transcendental reality in which all sense of being was obliterated, where all that was was an “objectless ecstasy.”[8] Such a mighty realisation was not excluded or denied its place in the integral yoga, but it was denied its place as the acme of truths. To a disciple, Sri Aurobindo wrote, “The psychic realisation is one of diversity in unity (the portion and the whole); it is not one of dissolving like a drop of water in the sea — for then no love or devotion is possible unless it is love of oneself, devotion to oneself.”[9] Freedom was the natural state in which such love was to be kindled. Sri Aurobindo cautioned against mistaking “uniformity and mechanical association for unity.” [10] Such uniformity “ kills life.” By contrast, “real unity, if well founded, becomes vigorous and fruitful by a rich energy of variation.”[11]
The psychological basis of unity amongst people
Real unity, if it is to exist within groups of people, can only flourish if there is what Sri Aurobindo termed a psychological basis that underpins any outer manifestation of political union. This is how it was with India,[12] but it need not be that way. Psychological affinity between differing peoples could come after political union had been secured. Sri Aurobindo saw the melding of Scottish, Welsh and English peoples into a Great Britain as one such example of that.[13] Extrapolating further, he pondered the possibility of the British Empire undergoing an alchemical transformation. Britain would no longer be the “dominant country compelling all the parts of her dominions to uniformity with her or to perpetual subordination, but that of the centre of a great confederation of States and nations coalescing….” Sri Aurobindo was obviously taken with this idea, refusing to relinquish it. Three decades later, in 1944, he would refer to it again. The British Commonwealth, he would say, was a “beginning of new things,” a sign that Britain was moving from outmoded ideas of empire “towards a world-union of some kind in which aggression is to be made impossible…”. [14] The force of this idea, of the need towards greater union and Britain’s tentative step away from “outmoded ideas,” was seen with the creation of the post-war European Union and Britain’s belated joining of it in 1973. Its subsequent exit in 2020 (known as Brexit) doesn’t detract from that force. In July 2022, the Prime Minister for Britain, Liz Truss, echoed words from her predecessors when she said, “I will ensure the Commonwealth sits at the heart of my plans for Global Britain,”[15] Such a pivot towards the east for allegiances and economic security show how Sri Aurobindo’s words have never been more prescient.
Any confederation of the form Sri Aurobindo envisaged would “scrupulously respect the free internal life and will, the social, cultural, economic tendencies of the colonies while giving them an equal part with herself in the management of the great common questions of the Empire.”[16] What a large confederation would not do is signal the demise of a nation founded on a “real inner oneness” for this had become the chosen vehicle of nature as a means of progress. Older grouping such as clans, communes and regional people would merge into nations. Once a nation was constituted in a manner in which its people felt this inner allegiance to each other, the moving of its formal land borders, whether through war or otherwise, could not affect the truth of that inner existence. Such a nation could suffer. It could be broken up by circumstances. But it would always “preserve a tendency to recover and reassert its oneness.” [17] To put it differently, it would reassert its soul.[18] He gave Italy as an example of a nation which recovered its “external unity again after so many centuries because, though no longer a State, she never ceased to be a single people.”[19] The same rationale could be applied to the post war division and subsequent reunification of East and West Germany. It is in this context that we view Sri Aurobindo’s comments on the post war partition of India and what he once referred to as the Pakistan Imbroglio.[20] He said, “… unity may come about under whatever form… But by whatever means, the division must and will go.”[21] How could it not if the split was an artificial one between a single people destined to “reassert its oneness”?
Difficulties in achieving unity amongst people
In any trend towards greater groupings, only the oxygen of freedom of choice, freedom of allegiance, would ensure the survival of whatever burgeoning entity came into being. As the myriad of examples of secessionist territories within nations today reveal, one must rise to a higher consciousness and manifest a profounder wisdom in order to determine if such territories (and the people within them) are truly part of a nation’s soul, an integral part of an embodiment of a nation’s oneness. If they are but territorial accretions, not truly one with the rest of a nation, they should be permitted to go their separate ways. How is one to determine such profound questions of what comprises national identity? Obviously the democratic instinct alone would not suffice for such a task. There must, ultimately, be some sort of spiritualising of the democratic process, an injection of a higher wisdom than that in the ordinary demos. The demands on world leaders could not be greater.
“We repress and over standardise life at our peril,”[22] said Sri Aurobindo. An elastic approach to questions regarding the need of unity and diversity amongst peoples would be essential if world unity was to take root in humanity. The capacity to adapt, to ensure that the appearance (actual or perceived) of injustice and inequality was dealt with, would be critical. If any grouping, whether it be a federation of States or a monolithic World State, proved incapable of dealing with problems with the requisite element of liberality, it would be “condemned by its very nature to transience.”[23]
“Modern Socialism… promises to be the master of the future.”[24] This was Sri Aurobindo’s considered view and in any analysis of what he meant by this perhaps two features stand out: First, his was not an advocacy of Marxist class struggle with its classical belief in economic factors being the driver of history. Something far profounder than tawdry cash did that. Second, nor was his an endorsement of societies that suppressed individual freedom in the name of a greater social good. He regarded it as a key understanding of the “present socialistic tendency of the world,” that “…social development and well-being mean the development and well-being of all the individuals in the society and not merely a flourishing of the community in the mass.”[25] Each man had “his own individual truth and law as well as his natural or his assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence.”[26] As part of that collective existence, an assessment of the distribution of wealth was an obvious factor. We may surmise therefore that economic inequity and inequality were prominent in his consideration of what would need to be confronted for world unity to succeed. To do so successfully demanded an international outlook where each nation “would produce and distribute only what it could to the best advantage… for the common need and demand of mankind…. It would do this according to a system settled by the common will of mankind through its State government.”[27]
Only a self professed “idealist to the marrow” could have magicked this vision: World unity amongst people that avoids over-standardisation and the repression of life, a unity that is able to deal with injustices and inequalities that rise like bubbles from the massive pool of humanity, and all the while retaining the ability to decipher the “common will of mankind.” This, however, brings us to the nub of the problems: How do you determine “the common will of mankind?” How do you determine if there are grievances that cannot be resolved through internal State mechanisms and therefore require supranational attention? For that matter, if a nation could not deal with a problem, how were grievances and inequality to be dealt with in a World forum? This clearly needs to be done in a manner that is fair and which does not favour the strong and rich, and which gives full freedom to the “diversity of cultures and differentiation of soul-groups…”. Getting the answers to these questions wrong could only lead, as Sri Aurobindo was keenly aware, to the “inevitability of decline and stagnation”[28] of whatever union had been established, no doubt because it would be tantamount to an admission that any purported psychological basis for unity was a fiction, destined to go up in a puff of smoke.
Naturally, therefore, the question comes down to the mechanics of how an egalitarian World forum could practically function. What form could it take? Clearly, it must be fit for purpose, supple enough to avoid ossifying amidst rigid rules and bureaucracy. Cognisant of the lessons of the League of Nations (and of the later United Nations), Sri Aurobindo considered different options. A centralised World State, a World Parliament with representatives from individual nations, and that of a Supreme Council redolent of the current United Nations Security Council, these were all carefully assessed options.[29] The United Nations, as indeed the earlier League of Nations, received his support, but it was based on the pragmatic understanding that there was nothing better on offer. He analysed its flaws and saw that it was but a step in the right direction, an “imperfect beginning,” towards the “single international unity” that was needed and which would, he said, inevitably come.[30] Nothing was ideal. He would therefore conclude by saying, “What precise form the framework [for human unity] might take, it is impossible to forecast and useless to speculate…”. [31] The answer must have been received with the same frustration as it is now by a world still troubled by deep sorrows from which it is unable to extricate itself.
As overwhelmingly difficult (and intractable) as these problems may appear from humanity’s current vantage point, they are but secondary issues. Ultimately, they are meaningless unless the core, primary issue is addressed: How can humanity foster the psychological basis for unity on large scales? Could countries with radically different cultural backgrounds and histories really forge an “inner oneness?” There were tentative signs in world events that Sri Aurobindo discerned as pointing to nature’s intention. The Commonwealth was one such sign, as was the greatening cohesion amongst European nations. The creation of the United Nations, however, was the clearest indication of the direction nature was moving in. Sri Aurobindo could say that with a clear appreciation of the problems and “malignancies” that bedevilled it after a devastating world war. Pessimism towards its prospects of success may have been justified but he counselled against declaring it too readily. Pessimism would have been like a magnet that attracted the very thing to be avoided.[32] It was as if, in 1950 when he wrote these words, the existence of the United Nations was as precarious and tentative as the signs of a future world unity that Sri Aurobindo glimpsed. Humanity was resigned to waiting for “rapid leaps and transitions”[33] for those glimpses to translate into a permanent basis for world unity. Nothing more about it could be said. We return therefore to Sri Aurobindo’s five dreams. He was the first to say, with glaring understatement, that they were “impractical.” The divine seal on them may have been secure but it was not accompanied by a note of the method by which they were to be achieved – and when.
Unity amongst people: The need for urgency.
The problems of achieving world unity are legion. Perhaps the road towards it feels overwhelming, littered as it is with the hopes of all the seers and philosophers who have prophesied and yearned for it since the dawns of time. But the goal will be reached. Sri Aurobindo was clear on that. But he was also clear that humanity had tarried long enough. Action was required.
In 1950, just months before he left his body, Sri Aurobindo wrote a postscript chapter to The Ideal of Human Unity. In it, he pressed the existential nature of the predicament the human race found itself in. The postscript was his clarion call for internationalism.[34] He said:
“It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might…render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation.”[35]
The tone was foreboding. The sense of urgency was transparent, contrasting markedly with one of the aphorisms he wrote most probably in 1913, before the opening salvos of the Great War. Back then, he seemed more forgiving of human tardiness. Gently, he had observed:
“With the present morality of the human race a sound and durable human unity is not yet possible; but there is no reason why a temporary approximation to it should not be the reward of strenuous aspiration and untiring effort. By constant approximations and by partial realisations and temporary successes Nature advances.”[36]
By 1950, the time for “temporary approximations” and successes on the road towards unity had passed. He had coupled his hopes for the success of the United Nations with a warning of a reckoning: Leaders who stood in its way would be held responsible by posterity for avoidable failures in its mission. The time had come for man – not God – to “give the answer” as to what steps he would take to herald a brighter future for humanity. In so saying, we are reminded of Sri Aurobindo’s injunction that to call “…on God to do everything and save one all the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection.”[37]
Why we seek unity amongst people
Sri Aurobindo’s comments on the risk of a “series of increasing catastrophes” unless world unity was achieved should not be viewed in isolation. Alone, they present a bleak picture, suggesting that fear of humanity’s imminent destruction was the sole reason for seeking a “durable human unity.” [38] Fear, however, was the one word absent from the Sri Aurobindo lexicon when addressing the rationale for undertaking action. The push for unity ultimately comes because we know within ourselves that we cannot find fulfilment without it. Unity “… provides a means and a framework for a better, richer, more happy and puissant individual and collective life.”[39] We understand too the futility of turning our backs on our fellow man in the quest for a Brahman or God that can only be attained once the world has been shunned: “We seek to realise our unity with God, but for us that realisation involves a complete and absolute recognition of our unity with man and we cannot cut the two asunder.”[40] This he would call the knowledge of unity. [41]
The Religion of Humanity
This was the vision Sri Aurobindo placed before humanity:
“Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement. The body of man is to be respected, made immune from violence and outrage, fortified by science against disease and preventable death. The life of man is to be held sacred, preserved, strengthened, ennobled, uplifted.”[42]
“..brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else.”[43]
A living recognition of the soul and godhead in each one of us was then essential. Mighty as such a realisation may seem it was not enough. Nor was that of a Self that awaited above us or that of a Nirvana into which we could obliterate all identity and ego. There was more to do, even to the extent that we may say that Sri Aurobindo’s yoga only truly commenced after the high mountains of these spiritual realisations had been scaled. The same soul and the same godhead that resides in our breasts resides in all human beings. Realising that was the monumental scope of the work that would lead down the road towards the crowning achievement of human unity.
The notion of man becoming sacred to man was part of what Sri Aurobindo referred to as the religion of humanity. This was not his term. It was popularised by Auguste Comte, an early-19th-century French Enlightenment thinker influenced by Henri de Saint-Simon, a man deemed (dismissively) by Karl Marx to be a utopian socialist. In Comte’s hands, this new religion of humanity was a secular one, created as a deliberate counterpoint to Christianity. Humanitarianism, said Sri Aurobindo, was its most prominent emotional result. While its aims of liberty, fraternity and equality were laudable and widely shared, they missed, said Sri Aurobindo, “the central thing; they can only be secure when founded upon a change of the inner human nature and inner way of living.”[44] See the list of things that Sri Aurobindo said this creed sought to prevent:
“War, capital punishment, the taking of human life, cruelty of all kinds whether committed by the individual, the State or society, not only physical cruelty, but moral cruelty, the degradation of any human being or any class of human beings under whatever specious plea or in whatever interest, the oppression and exploitation of man by man, of class by class, of nation by nation and all those habits of life and institutions of society of a similar kind which religion and ethics formerly tolerated or even favoured in practice, whatever they might do in their ideal rule or creed, are crimes against the religion of humanity, abominable to its ethical mind, forbidden by its primary tenets, to be fought against always, in no degree to be tolerated.”[45]
International lawyers would see how these ideas provided the philosophical underpinning for modern human rights law and would see their echoes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The issue with this list, as Sri Aurobindo identified – and it is the same issue for modern human rights law – was that it sets out intellectual ideas incapable of having lasting impact by themselves. Something more than fickle goodwill is needed to sustain them. The problem with an “intellectual idea, even when it supports itself by an appeal to the sentiments and emotions, is that it does not get at the centre of man’s being.”[46] It was for this reason that Sri Aurobindo subverted the secularism of the religion of humanity. He added the missing wisdom, which was knowledge of the significance of the soul. The soul was the lever for transforming society as much as it was for transforming the individual. Unless it led the way man would flounder on his quest for unity, getting lost in the abysm of ego. Nothing other than soul would do. He said:
“it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the race.”[47]
The need to understand the stage that humanity has reached on the road towards unity
It is easy to see how the power of Sri Aurobindo’s vision could swerve men towards it, inspire some to give everything they have for its realisation. Amidst the heady optimism, it is important to note the caution he urged at both the individual and national level (the key forces through which the world moves towards unity), and even at the level of any World Union that was to be achieved, in seeking to dissolve identities within a greater mass or in behaving prematurely as if the haloed goal had been achieved.
Speaking of individual aspiration, he said:
“The altruistic ideal, the discipline of self-sacrifice, the need of a growing solidarity with our fellows and a growing collective soul in humanity are not in dispute. But the loss of self in the State is not the thing that these high ideals mean, nor is it the way to their fulfilment.”[48]
Separately, he would add:
“Our business is to break down & dissolve the mental ego & get back to our divine unity without losing our power of individual & multiple existence in the universe.”[49]
And while he was on record as saying that real unity only became “fruitful by a rich energy of variation,”[50] he was equally clear in saying that “until we can arrive at that perfection, the method of uniformity has to be applied, but we must not over-apply it… .”[51]
Clearly, it is a fraught task for a society in its current state of consciousness to determine the balance between permitting uniformity and liberty for citizens, particularly as Sri Aurobindo was clear about the calamitous consequences for a society standing in the way of an individual’s perfection. But how is a society to know if an individual is truly acting with a higher aspiration, sincerely working towards their own perfection and therefore meriting support? Indeed, how is an individual himself to know if he is not being prompted by a cunning ego when even “those who have inner experiences and some opening — are not yet free in their outer selves from ego and wrong ideas and wrong movements.”?[52]
It is easy to see the potential for tension between the demands of individual liberty and the needs of a group “…with the new-born necessity of a more united life for the human race.” [53] No easy answers presented themselves on how to bring harmony between these potentially competing interests. “A new powerful movement” of mind or sprit would have to descend to heal any divides, to bring reconciliation where needed. This was an immense problem in the way of unity. All Sri Aurobindo hoped to do was to shed “a ray of light….[in the hope that it] may help to diminish its difficulty and darkness.”[54]
For nations, he counselled that the world must be made ready for the great boons of what he called “underlying unity with a free differentiation.” While the world was in a state of disharmony, caution was imperative: “To lay down one’s arms in a state of war is to invite destruction and it can serve no compensating spiritual purpose.”[55] International diplomacy was fickle, capable of descending at the drop of a hat into shameful barbarity with nations having “mutual relations as noxious engines meant to discharge poisonous gas upon each other in peace and to rush in times of clash upon each other’s armed hosts and unarmed millions….”[56] Naïve pacifism in a hostile world was an invitation for disaster.
The “transforming shock” of the First World War may have been the catalyst for putting the issue of world unity firmly on the international agenda[57] but human repulsion at the barbarity it perpetrated on itself was not transforming enough for Sri Aurobindo’s liking. He understood that any world union that came into being was not immune from assault, certainly in its early, fragile days. The consolidation of military force in its hands would be “an early and pressing need.” [58] He said no more about this but the potentially bloody implications of consolidating weaponry, taking it from the hands of recalcitrant entities, must surely have been at the forefront of his mind. Another pressing need would be the ordering of international commerce. The latter was vital because in modern warfare political motives for fighting were mainly an artifice, a cover for commercial ones.[59] When it came to diplomatic relations, money was, indeed, the sovereign lord. To control the principles by which it flowed was a major step to world peace. We see then that Sri Aurobindo may have described himself as “an idealist to the marrow”[60] but his idealism was tempered by realism, an understanding of the world’s degraded realpolitik and how it penetrated international commerce: He understood the pitiful state from which humanity must lift itself.
Sources of help for humanity on the road towards human unity
Sri Aurobindo’s ideas on achieving human unity are challenging. He articulates the pressing, existential, need for world unity but ultimately leaves the oppressive burden of discovering the route to that unity on humanity’s shoulders. It cannot do it alone. It would flounder if left without assistance from a higher source. He knew this and one of his five dreams addressed the problem. This dream concerned the gift that India offered the world, this being its spirituality. He saw it “entering Europe and America [the denizens of world power] in an ever increasing measure.” [61] It was a trajectory that he was confident would continue, fulfilling, as it did, a pressing need in volatile times. His own spiritual assistance towards humanity he would affirm on numerous occasions. Just to give one example, he would tell his disciples on his birthday in 1925, “if I were seeking my own liberation and perfection my yoga would have been finished long ago.” [62] The Mother would subsequently add that Sri Aurobindo’s influence was even more pervasive and accessible after he had left his body. His spiritual assistance towards the manifestation of unity (as, of course, the Mother’s) can be regarded within the context of this dream.
The importance of the individual to achieving human unity and the sources of help
This still leaves the question of what practical steps could be taken towards the manifestation of world unity. We have spoken already of Sri Aurobindo’s discouragement of a pessimistic attitude (towards a fledgling United Nations): Optimism (no doubt armed with pragmatism) was not something to be belittled. Another clue that Sri Aurobindo gave was in urging man to live from his soul. Man, the individual, was “..the key of the evolutionary movement; for it is the individual who finds himself, who becomes conscious of the Reality. The movement of the collectivity is a largely subconscious mass movement…”.[63] It would therefore be folly to expect the collectivity to take large (or small) synchronised steps towards greater world unity. For a society to develop on its path towards oneness, towards unity, it must take the influence of “the consciousness of its most developed individuals.” His logic was simple: “A perfected human world cannot be created by men or composed of men who are themselves imperfect.” Naturally, therefore, the first necessity was for an individual to discover the divine reality within himself and “express that in all his being and living.”[64] Only then could he contribute meaningfully to the making of a perfected world, by which he meant an evolution that entailed the raising of humanity to a larger, higher and truer consciousness. This was something more than the alleviation of the physical ills like hunger and disease that have shadowed humanity since time immemorial. Trying to scientifically define what that more entailed is a futile task. Perhaps it is part of the ineffable mystery, something to be revealed in glorious glimpses like flashes of the northern lights.[65] Apart from that, perhaps we are to confine ourselves to the gleanings we get from the seers.
From the perspective of society, Sri Aurobindo was clear that it had a duty to, at the least, not hinder an individual’s development: “the social aggregates which stand in the way of this perfection of the individual and seek to coerce him within their limited mould and into the rigidity of a narrow culture or petty class or national interest, must end their term and their day of change or destruction under the irresistible impulsion of progressing Nature.”[66]
The relationship between the growth of the individual’s and humanity’s consciousness
There is a relationship between collective and individual spiritual growth; the one cannot truly find its fulfilment without the other. Sri Aurobindo would undoubtedly have agreed with the clear summary of the position that the Mother gave five years after he had left his body:
“But no individual realisation can be complete nor even approach this perfection if it is not in harmony with at least a group of consciousnesses representative of a new world. In spite of everything there is so great an interdependence of the individual and the collectivity.” [67]
Sri Aurobindo discussed this interdependence between the individual and the collectivity. He spoke of three needs or, more formally, desiderata, that followed each other sequentially:
- The first desideratum: “the first essential condition of a perfected life on earth” was for the individual to find his spiritual fulfilment, his “inner completeness.” This, he described as “our first supreme business”;
- The second desideratum: The individual would then perfect his relations with those around him “in a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth”;
- The third desideratum: “a new perfected collective life in the earth-nature” would follow as many perfected- or rather Gnostic – individuals would emerge to create “a new common life superior to the present individual and common existence.”[68]
We see that in the search for human unity Sri Aurobindo suggested that people started at the most obvious point to work on, themselves: “……the individual must be preoccupied with his own problem of entirely changing his mind and life into conformity with the truth of the spirit… Any premature attempt at a large-scale collective spiritual life is exposed to vitiation…”[69] The preoccupation Sri Aurobindo urged did not in any way detract from whatever form of work or sadhana an individual chose to engage in. He would say that “it is the spirit or consciousness in which the work is done that matters most; the outer form can vary greatly for different natures.”[70]
PART 2 – UNITY IN OURSELVES
Unity within the individual
It is clear from the three desiderata that Sri Aurobindo posited that before man can find peace and harmony in a disordered world he must at least seek a little of that harmony within the disordered elements that comprise his own being: The latter is the first step towards the former. The language of unity, the search for That which can harmonise, therefore becomes an overarching expression of the innermost need of the collective and individual. To quote what is an iconic statement of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga:
“For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity.”[71]
Sri Aurobindo described his yoga as a rising out of “self-division into unity,”[72] of becoming “aware of all this discord and disparateness” in the parts of the being to arrive at a harmony of mind, life and body, a harmony of knowledge and will and emotion, a harmony of all our members.[73] In one of his letters, he would use the metaphor of an individual being a piano with “several pianists at a time each with his own different musical piece to play! …every man is full of these contradictions…”.This was, in part, he would say, because there was not even the surety of a single personality speaking with one voice from within man that he could take for granted.[74] Clearly, the discordant parts of our being, the inner cacophony of voices and desires, need to be harmonised every bit as much as the discordant elements in any society. They need a wise guide an accomplished conductor. Sri Aurobindo spoke of the need to bring forward the “secret psychic being as leader… All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide…”.[75] Subsequently, the Mother would phrase it like this:
“The most important thing for an individual is to unify himself around his divine centre; in that way he becomes a true individual, master of himself and his destiny. Otherwise, he is a plaything of forces that toss him about like a piece of cork on a river.” [76]
To appreciate the necessity for this psychic being, divine centre, or more simply soul, to form the nucleus around which an individual unified his disparate elements is to understand its importance: It is the fulcrum around which man can evolve to a higher and larger consciousness. Sri Aurobindo would say that it is this psychic being or soul that “is in direct relation with the transcendent divine and leads the nature upwards towards the Supreme.”[77] The importance of finding and understanding the soul’s needs, giving it the freedom it demands to express its unique beauty, is therefore of critical importance within the wider scheme of discovering the soul of any collective such as that of a nation and allowing that too to find its voice. To find that harmony between individual and collective soul expressions, or to even understand the possibilities inherent in such a hope, is an obviously forlorn task for the rational mind fettered by the constraints of mental logic. Something greater, something wiser, is required to reconcile and bring forth the infinite possibilities of perfect unity that such a hope expresses. But what could that be? With this thought, we return once more to where we started, to 1947 and the five dreams Sri Aurobindo spoke of when marking the occasion of India’s independence.
Conclusion
The fifth dream called for a “step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness.” “Man,” of course, is to be seen in the plural (mankind) and in the singular (the individual). This then, the final of Sri Aurobindo’s dreams, ties together the notion of unity as a necessity on an individual and a collective level because, as we have seen, it is only when man – both in himself and in the world – has achieved unity and taken that step to elevate and expand his consciousness that he can begin to fix “ the problems which have perplexed and vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society.” [78] To manifest that perfect society in which man is sacred to man, in a perfect world unity as it were, Sri Aurobindo points, as we have said, to the importance of at first seeking that same perfect unity within, amongst the disparate parts of our being. To manifest some of that perfection both at an individual and societal level requires an evolutionary step that could only be achieved by an act of grace, a descent of a force of consciousness higher and more potent than any seen before. It was the work of Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother, to bring down that force. They called it the Supramental, the Supermind. Sri Aurobindo wrote much about this Supermind but sometimes, upon reviewing his correspondence with his disciples, it feels as if the more he wrote the more mysterious this new force was to mortal comprehension. He wrote:
“The nature of Supermind is always the same, a being of knowledge, proceeding from truth to truth, creating or rather manifesting what has to be manifested by the power of a pre-existent knowledge, not by hazard but by a self-existent destiny in the being itself, a necessity of the thing in itself and therefore inevitable. Its manifestation of the divine life will also be inevitable; its own life on its own plane is divine and, if Supermind descends upon the earth, it will bring necessarily the divine life with it and establish it here.”[79]
Mother would later say that this force did, indeed, descend upon the earth. That event took place on 29 February 1956, just over five years after Sri Aurobindo left his body. He had predicted that the advent of such a momentous event would mark a possibility that “if fulfilled, would mean that the human dream of perfection, perfection of itself, of its purified and enlightened nature, of all its ways of action and living, would be no longer a dream but a truth that could be made real and humanity lifted out of the hold on it of inconscience and ignorance.” [80] There could be no more powerful a statement of what human unity would comprise.
Perhaps it was inevitable that in discussing Sri Aurobindo’s views on Unity, the views of a self professed “idealist to the marrow,” that we would start with his five dreams of 1947 and let them lead us to yet another dream; “the human dream of perfection.”
Perfection then is the end goal on the road towards unity, the human dream to which we strive. In truth, it is a road and dream that never ends. It leads only to ever greater degrees of perfection towards which we strive, in a “farther divine progression, an infinite development.” [81] In verse, Sri Aurobindo alluded to this never ending scale of possibilities before humanity. He would write:
“…An artist Godhead here
Ever remoulds himself in diviner shapes,
Unwilling to cease
Till all is done for which the stars were made,
Till the heart discovers God
And soul knows itself. And even then
There is no end.”[82]
To manifest Sri Aurobindo’s fifth, “impractical,” dream would be the miracle by which the world’s “evolution in the ignorance with its chequered joy and pain” could be cast aside. It would usher in the era of “a greater and happier constant miracle.”[83] It would usher in unity.
[1] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical Notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 478-480. There are two versions of this message. Sri Aurobindo’s reference to himself as a mystic is in the longer version, not the shorter, broadcast, one.
[2] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical Notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 479
[3] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical Notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 286.
[4] “The world is a manifestation of the Real and therefore is itself real. The reality is the infinite and eternal Divine, infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This Divine by his power has created the world or rather manifested it in his own infinite being”: CWSA Vol 29, Letters on Yoga vol 2, Page 393
[5] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 35.
[6] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 36.
[7] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 35.
[8] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 486.
[9] CWSA Vol 29, Letters on Yoga vol 2, Page 337.
[10] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical Notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 286.
[11] CWSA Vol 20, The Renaissance in India, Page 40.
[12] CWSA Vol 20, The Renaissance in India, Page 429: “..it was inevitable that the unity India first created for herself should be the spiritual and cultural oneness. It could not be, to begin with, a political unification …”
[13] CWSA, Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 311.
[14] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical Notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 465.
[15] The Hindu, 28 July2022, “Liz Truss announces new Commonwealth deal to counter Beijing’s influence”
[16] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 332.
[17] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 306.
[18] Sri Aurobindo was emphasizing the essential nature of what comprises what we call a nation. He accepted the possibility that it could radically transform into something “less strenuously compact” which would be less “separative in spirit”: See CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 547.
[19] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 306.
[20] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical Notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 507.
[21] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical Notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 476.
[22] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 332.
[23] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 429.
[24] CWSA Vol 25, The Human Cycle, Page 488.
[25] CWSA Vol 25, The Human Cycle, Page 24.
[26] CWSA Vol 25, The Human Cycle, Page 24.
[27] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 499.
[28] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 519.
[29] “Above all, a Parliament of the nations must necessarily be a united parliament of free nations and could not well come into successful being in the present anomalous and chaotic distribution of power in the world. The Asiatic problem alone, if still left unsolved, would be a fatal obstacle and it is not alone; the inequalities and anomalies are all-pervasive and without number. A more feasible form would be a supreme council of the free and imperial nations of the existing world-system, but this also has its difficulties. It could only be workable at first if it amounted in fact to an oligarchy of a few strong imperial nations whose voice and volume would prevail at every point”: CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 473.
[30] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 585.
[31] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 545.
[32] His exact words were: “…many feel a growing pessimism and regard with doubt the possibility of its final success. This pessimism it is unnecessary and unwise to share; for such a psychology tends to bring about or to make possible the results which it predicts but which need not at all ensue.” CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 581.
[33] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 311.
[34] On 29 June 1926, he would say, “do you want me to prophesy? But the modern tendency seems to be towards some kind of internationalism”: A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, Page 296.
[35] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 586.
[36] CWSA Vo1 12, Thoughts and Aphorisms, Karma (aphorism 335), Page 467.
[37] CWSA Vol 32, The Mother with letters on The Mother, Page 7.
[38] One may wonder whether Sri Aurobindo would still regard the dangers for humanity as imminent. We can but speculate on what he would have made of recent scholarship by the likes of Steven Pinker, Joshua L. Goldstein, and Francis Fukuyama all of whom have suggested that the historical trend in recent times has been towards the reduction of violence in the world. Perhaps, of course, Sri Aurobindo was not solely referring to violence as the predominant reason for urgency. One can easily see how the climate change crisis could now be regarded as the current pressing rationale for world unity.
[39] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 281.
[40] CWSA Vol 22-23, The Synthesis of Yoga, Page 328-329.
[41] In one of his commentaries on the Isha Upanishad, he would say: “All manifestation proceeds by the two terms, Vidya and Avidya, the consciousness of Unity and the consciousness of Multiplicity. They are the two aspects of the Maya, the formative self-conception of the Eternal. Unity is the eternal and fundamental fact, without which all multiplicity would be unreal and an impossible illusion. The consciousness of Unity is therefore called Vidya, the Knowledge”: CWSA Vol 17, Isha Upanishad, Page 51.
[42] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 565.
[43] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 570.
[44] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 569.
[45] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 565.
[46] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 568.
[47] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 570.
[48] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 300.
[49] CWSA Vol 12, Purna Yoga, The Entire Purpose of Yoga, Page 100.
[50] CWSA, Vol 20, The Renaissance in India, Page 40.
[51] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 425.
[52] CWSA Vol 32, The Mother with letters on The Mother, Page 397.
[53] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 410.
[54] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 414.
[55] CWSA, Vol 20, The Renaissance in India, Page 59-60.
[56] CWSA Vol 25, The Human Cycle, Page 257.
[57] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 463.
[58] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 492.
[59] CSWA Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 489.
[60] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical Notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 258.
[61] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 480
[62] A.B. Purani, Evening talks with Sri Aurobindo, Page 520.
[63] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 1087.
[64] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Pages 1058 – 1059.
[65] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page7: “And if there is any higher light of illumined intuition or self-revealing truth which is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or works with intermittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional displays as of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we need not fear to aspire. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever highest state is humanity’s ultimate resting-place.”
[66] CWSA, Vol 25, The Ideal of Human Unity, Page 288-289.
[67] CWM Vol 7, 12 October 1955, Page 319 – 320. Sri Aurobindo put it like this: “Therefore if the spiritual change of which we have been speaking is to be effected, it must unite two conditions which have to be simultaneously satisfied but are most difficult to bring together. There must be the individual and the individuals who are able to see, to develop, to re-create themselves in the image of the Spirit and to communicate both their idea and its power to the mass. And there must be at the same time a mass, a society, a communal mind or at the least the constituents of a group-body, the possibility of a group-soul which is capable of receiving and effectively assimilating, ready to follow and effectively arrive, not compelled by its own inherent deficiencies, its defect of preparation to stop on the way or fall back before the decisive change is made.”: CSWA Vol 25, The Human Cycle, Page 247.
[68] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine Page 1067
[69] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 918.
[70] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 446.
[71] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 4.
[72] “By Yoga we can rise out of falsehood into truth, out of weakness into force, out of pain and grief into bliss, out of bondage into freedom, out of death into immortality, out of darkness into light, out of confusion into purity, out of imperfection into perfection, out of self-division into unity, out of Maya into God”: CWSA Vo1 12, Purna Yoga, The Entire Purpose of Yoga, Page 98
[73] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 229.
[74] CWSA Vol 31, Letters on Yoga vol 4, Page 27.
[75] CWSA Vol 22-23, The Synthesis of Yoga, Page 166.
[76] CWM Vol 5, Questions and Answers, 1 Jul 1953, Page 138
[77] CWSA Vol 28, Letters on Yoga Vol 1, Page 102.
[78] CWSA Vol 36, Autobiographical notes and other writings of historical interest, Page 480.
[79] CWSA, Vol 13, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga,The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, page 559-560.
[80] CWSA, Vol 13, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga,The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, page 566.
[81] CWSA Vol 28, Letters on Yoga Vol 1,Page 271.
[82] CWSA Vol 2,Collected Poems, The End?, Page 643-644.
[83] CWSA Vol 21-22, The Life Divine, Page 1106-1107.