Integral Spiritual Education

“A giant dance of Shiva tore the past;” Savitri-343

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“On Shiva’s breast is stayed the enormous dance.” Savitri-247

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“Behind the rapt smile of the Almighty’s dance.” Savitri-390

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“The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva’s lap,” Savitri-525

 

            “World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole absolute object is the joy of the dancing.”¹

Sri Aurobindo

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           “This spirit is an infinite existence limiting itself in apparent being for individual experience. It is an infinite consciousness which defines itself in finite forms of consciousness for joy of various knowledge and various power of being. It is an infinite delight of being expanding and contracting itself and its powers, concealing and discovering, formulating many terms of its joy of existence, even to an apparent obscuration and denial of its own nature.”²

Sri Aurobindo

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            Other than the Psychic being, Kshara Purusha, there is another Spirit, whose centre is located just above the head, is eternal, undivided and not even seemingly divided by the division of things, inactive and silent witness of all action, the immobile in the mobile, the immutable in the mutable, the imperishable in the perishable and the One. We become aware of this Akshara Purusha, the Spiritual being, in proportion as we draw back our outward-moving mind and phenomenal existence. It is not the highest secret of the Gita, ‘but the first necessity,’¹⁰ of intermittent¹³ impersonal Divine union, after which one can ascend to the state of ceaseless¹³ Divine union of Purushottama. Brahma nirvana is the union with the immutable Self and it is the highest realisation of Jnana Yoga, Vedantic and Sankhya teachings and is accepted as a part of Integral Spiritual Education.

 

            The conditions of attaining Brahma Nirvana which is identified as highest Siddhi, static Perfection, of Spiritual Education, are firstly, mind is established in equality through practice of titikha, endurance, udasinata, indifference and nati, submission to the will of God; titikha is to bear in the body the velocity of desire, wrath, passion, cold and heat, pleasure and pain (The Gita-5.23); udasinata is equal in soul to friend and enemy and neutral and indifferent also to sinner and saint (The Gita-6.9); nati state is that living in God one neither rejoices on obtaining what is pleasant, nor sorrows on obtaining what is unpleasant (The Gita-5.20); secondly, the Soul is no longer attached to the enjoyments born of touches of outward things; thirdly, ‘by worshipping the feet of the Guru,¹⁴ questioning and by service, thou shalt see all existences first without exception in the Akshara Purusha, then in Me, Uttama Purusha, atmani atho mayi’ (The Gita-4.34-35); fourthly, the knot of doubt is cut asunder and sraddha, faith in the Divine and His Shakti is developed; fifthly, food, sleep, action are to be made balanced and moderate; sixthly, renounce the residue of all desires born of the desire-will and master the senses by mind as mind is supreme over the senses, then mind is fixed in buddhi as supreme above mind is intelligent will and buddhi is fixed in the Immutable Self as supreme over buddhi is Akshara Purusha; seventhly, the mind is kept calm and free from fear and the vow of Brahmachraya observed and the vision drawn in and fixed between two eyebrows, the controlled mentality is thus turned to the Brahman.  When the mind is thoroughly quieted, the Yogin enjoys the touch of Brahman, which is an exceeding Bliss.

 

            The experience Brahma Nirvana serves three purposes: firstly, it helps to enter deep Samadhi away from all world-consciousness; secondly, it is a preparatory movement towards cessation of birth in Parmam dhama; thirdly, there are hierarchies of Consciousness in Spiritual planes and dynamic Spiritual forces from these planes can be directed towards apara prakriti, for the transformation of nature. ‘But this transformation through the mind does not give us the integral transformation; the psychic transmutation is replaced by a spiritual change on the rare and high summits, but this is not the complete divine dynamisation of Nature.’⁸ In the Gita, the third possibility was not explored; whereas in integral Yoga, the second possibility is entirely renounced and the static Spiritual being is directed towards the realisation of the third because transformation of the whole nature and cessation of birth are incompatible with each other. In integral Yoga, the Soul liberated and established in Brahma Nirvana continues its work of complete transformation of earth through repeated rebirth in order to fulfil the universal Divine action and transformation in the world, sarvabhuta hiteratah. (The Gita-5.25, 12.4) The other specialised part of the Gita’s teaching of cessation of birth in the supreme abode of Param Dhama is replaced with the descent and manifestation of the same Purushotttama Consciousness here on earth, in the body, ihaiva. (The Gita-5.29)  

 

            With the purification of chitta, manas, buddhi and ahamkara, one becomes aware of higher planes of illimitable Consciousness, an infinite ocean of ananda, power and energy. These ascending higher planes are systemised as higher Mind,⁹ illumined Mind,⁷ intuitive Mind, Overmind and mind of Light. The Divine Mahashakti⁵ from these planes can pour into apara prakriti, which constitutes twenty-four tattvas and three gunas and can bring constitutional change there. The four Mediatrix Spiritual Mother powers from these planes are the action of Para Prakriti of Akshara Purusha; She is Maheswari, the goddess of supreme Knowledge, supreme Truth, Spiritual Will and calm passion of Supramental largeness; She is Mahakali, goddess of supreme strength, severest austerity of tapas, swiftness to battle and victory against the powers of lower nature; She is Mahalakshmi, the goddess of supreme Love, Delight, Beauty and Harmony; She is Mahasaraswati, the goddess of Divine skill of works and perfection. In Integral Yoga, when the Brahmanirvana or the Overmental state is established in the individual Consciousness, through ceaseless and simultaneous practice of four Spiritual disciplines that of Jnana Yoga, Yoga of self-Perfection, Bhakti Yoga and Karma Yoga respectively in Multiple Concentration, then the constant pouring in of four aspects of the Spiritual Mother powers become practicable and they enlarge and universalise the mental, vital and physical sheaths for perfection of the field, kshetra.

 

            The Integral Spiritual Education gives this message ‘the superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things.’⁴ The other specialised side of Spiritual Education is that it treats each aspect of the Eternal and projects them as the whole truth of the Self and can find in each its perfect fulfilment. Its Spiritual achievements follows a dividing line which satisfies itself either of the opposite principles that of Silence of the Divine or the divine Dynamis, the immobile quality-less Brahman aloof from existence or the active Brahman with qualities, Being or Becoming, Person as sole Reality or Impersonal as alone Real; it can regard Lover as sole expression of the Eternal Love or Love as only expression of the Lover. In Spiritual Education, the gulf between static Brahman and dynamic Brahman is bridged by the movement of Consciousness. Through the transformation of human Nature, the intermittent Divine union can be replaced with the ceaseless Divine union. But beyond the partialities and exclusive achievements of Spiritual education, there lies the higher experience of Supramental Truth-Consciousness,⁶ where all oppositions are reconciled and one arrives at the rich totality of the Supreme and integral realisation.¹¹   

 

OM TAT SAT

 

 

References:

1: CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-85,

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2: CWSA-24/ The Synthesis of Yoga/p-624,

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3: CWSA-23/ The Synthesis of Yoga/p-66,

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4: “I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights, – yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t- r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam (their foundation is above, Rig Veda-1.24.7). The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing.” Sri Aurobindo/The Mother’s Agenda-21.01.1962/CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-615-616,

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5: “The Shakti!...Some receive it from above; for others, it rises from below (gesture to the base of the spine). As I once told you, the old system always proceeds from below upwards, while Sri Aurobindo pulls from above downwards. This becomes very clear in meditation (well, in yoga, in yogic experience): for those who follow the old system, it's invariably the kundalini at the base [of the spine] rising from center to center, center to center, until the lotus (in an ironic tone) bursts open here gesture at the crown of the head). With Sri Aurobindo, it comes like this (gesture of descending Force) and then settles here (above the head); it enters, and from there it comes down, down, down, everywhere, to the very bottom, and even below the feet – the subconscient – and lower still, the inconscient…It's the Shakti. He said, you know (I am still translating it), that the shakti drawn up from below (this is what happens in the individual process) is already what could be called a "veiled" shakti (it has power, but it is veiled). While the Shakti drawn down from above is a PURE Shakti; and if it can be brought down carefully and slowly enough so that it isn't (how shall I put it?) polluted or, in any case, obscured as it enters matter, then the result is immediately much better. As he has explained, if you start out with this feeling of a great power in yourself (because it's always a great power no matter where it awakens), there's inevitably a danger of the ego meddling in. But if it comes pure and you are very careful to keep it pure, not to rush the movement but let it purify as it descends, then half the work is done.” The Mother’s Agenda-25.07.1962,

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6: “Overmind and its delegated powers, taking up and penetrating mind and the life and body dependent upon mind, would subject all to a greatening process; at each step of this process a greater power and a higher intensity of gnosis less and less mixed with the loose, diffused, diminishing and diluting stuff of mind could establish itself: but all gnosis is in its origin power of supermind, so that this would mean a greater and greater influx of a half-veiled and indirect supramental light and power into the nature. This would continue until the point was reached at which overmind would begin itself to be transformed into supermind; the supramental consciousness and force would take up the transformation directly into its own hands, reveal to the terrestrial mind, life, bodily being their own spiritual truth and divinity and, finally, pour into the whole nature the perfect knowledge, power, significance of the supramental existence. The soul would pass beyond the borders of the Ignorance and cross its original line of departure from the supreme Knowledge: it would enter into the integrality of the supramental gnosis; the descent of the gnostic Light would effectuate a complete transformation of the Ignorance.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-989-990

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7: “As the Higher Mind brings a greater consciousness into the being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so the Illumined Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through a Truth Sight and Truth Light and its seeing and seizing power. It can effect a more powerful and dynamic integration; it illumines the thought-mind with a direct inner vision and inspiration, brings a spiritual sight into the heart and a spiritual light and energy into its feeling and emotion, imparts to the life-force a spiritual urge, a truth inspiration that dynamises the action and exalts the life movements; it infuses into the sense a direct and total power of spiritual sensation so that our vital and physical being can contact and meet concretely, quite as intensely as the mind and emotion can conceive and perceive and feel, the Divine in all things; it throws on the physical mind a transforming light that breaks its limitations, its conservative inertia, replaces its narrow thought-power and its doubts by sight and pours luminosity and consciousness into the very cells of the body. In the transformation by the Higher Mind the spiritual sage and thinker would find his total and dynamic fulfilment; in the transformation by the Illumined Mind there would be a similar fulfilment for the seer, the illumined mystic, those in whom the soul lives in vision and in a direct sense and experience: for it is from these higher sources that they receive their light and to rise into that light and live there would be their ascension to their native empire.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-980-981, “This greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil daylight, gives place or subordinates itself to an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the spirit: a play of lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from above into the consciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast descent of peace which characterise or accompany the action of the larger conceptual-spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge. A downpour of inwardly visible Light very usually envelops this action; for it must be noted that, contrary to our ordinary conceptions, light is not primarily a material creation and the sense or vision of light accompanying the inner illumination is not merely a subjective visual image or a symbolic phenomenon: light is primarily a spiritual manifestation of the Divine Reality illuminative and creative; material light is a subsequent representation or conversion of it into Matter for the purposes of the material Energy. There is also in this descent the arrival of a greater dynamic, a golden drive, a luminous “enthousiasmos” of inner force and power which replaces the comparatively slow and deliberate process of the Higher Mind by a swift, sometimes a vehement, almost a violent impetus of rapid transformation.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-978-979

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8: “A higher endeavour through the mind does not change this balance; for the tendency of the spiritualised mind is to go on upwards and, since above itself the mind loses its hold on forms, it is into a vast formless and featureless impersonality that it enters. It becomes aware of the unchanging Self, the sheer Spirit, the pure bareness of an essential Existence, the formless Infinite and the nameless Absolute. This culmination can be arrived at more directly by tending immediately beyond all forms and figures, beyond all ideas of good or evil or true or false or beautiful or unbeautiful to That which exceeds all dualities, to the experience of a supreme oneness, infinity, eternity or other ineffable sublimation of the mind’s ultimate and extreme percept of Self or Spirit. A spiritualised consciousness is achieved and the life falls quiet, the body ceases to need and to clamour, the soul itself merges into the spiritual silence. But this transformation through the mind does not give us the integral transformation; the psychic transmutation is replaced by a spiritual change on the rare and high summits, but this is not the complete divine dynamisation of Nature.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-935-936, “The other, the dynamic side of the spiritual urge has not been absent, — the aspiration to a spiritual mastery and mutation of Nature, to a spiritual perfection of the being, a divinisation of the mind, the heart and the very body: there has even been the dream or a psychic prevision of a fulfilment exceeding the individual transformation, a new earth and heaven, a city of God, a divine descent upon earth, a reign of the spiritually perfect, a kingdom of God not only within us but outside, in a collective human life.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-879

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9: “A preliminary spiritual transformation will also reduce the hold of the Ignorance; but neither of these influences altogether eliminates its obstruction and limitation: for these preliminary changes do not bring the integral consciousness and knowledge; the original basis of  Nescience proper to the Inconscient will still be there needing at every turn to be changed, enlightened, diminished in its extent and in its force of reaction. The power of the spiritual Higher Mind and its idea-force, modified and diminished as it must be by its entrance into our mentality, is not sufficient to sweep out all these obstacles and create the gnostic being, but it can make a first change, a modification that will capacitate a higher ascent and a more powerful descent and further prepare an integration of the being in a greater Force of consciousness and knowledge.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-978,

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10: “In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matter; there are considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the mind’s endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in the govern- ment of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change is not often a total perfection even within limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to work within restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life and rigorously control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a perfection and transformation. For that it is necessary to bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and impose them upon the members.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-969

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11: “A consciousness so touched may be so much uplifted that the being turns to an immediate union with the Self or with the Divine by departure from the evolution and, if that is sanctioned, no question of graduality or steps or method intervenes, the rupture with Nature can be decisive: for the law of departure, once it is made possible, is not or need not be the same as the law of the evolutionary transformation and perfection; it is or can be a leap, a breaking out of bonds rapid or immediate, — the spiritual evasion is secured and its only remaining sanction is the destined fall of the body. But if the transformation of earth life is intended, the first touch of spiritualisation must be followed by an awakening to the higher sources and energies, a seeking for them and an enlargement and heightening of the being into their characteristic status and a conversion of the consciousness to their greater law and dynamic nature. This change must go step by step, till the stair of the ascension is transcended and there is an emergence to those greatest wide-open spaces of which the Veda speaks, the native spaces of a consciousness which is supremely luminous and infinite.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-968,

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12: “Because the two are usually confused under the general term of “yogic discipline”, although the goals they aim at are very different: for one it (Psychic Education) is a higher realisation upon earth, for the other (Spiritual Education) an escape from all earthly manifestation, even from the whole universe, a return to the unmanifest.” TMCW-12/On Education/p-35, “It is here that this consciousness lies (Mother points to the chest). That (Mother points to the mind and above) is light, light (gesture of wideness). But in this body, it is here that it lies, this consciousness (Mother points again to the chest). I mean the consciousness... that one is in the Lord.” The Mother/TMCW-11/Notes on the Way/p-137-138,

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13: “The ordinary man  who wishes to reach God through knowledge, must undergo an elaborate training. He must begin by becoming absolutely pure, he must cleanse thoroughly his body, his heart and his intellect, he must get himself a new heart and be born again; for only the twice born can understand or teach the Vedas. When he has done  this he needs yet four things before he can succeed, (1) the Sruti or recorded revelation, (2) the Sacred Teacher, (3) the practice of Yoga and (4) the Grace of God.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-18/Kena and other Upanishads/p-169, “In this Yoga, the psychic being is that which opens the rest of the nature to the true supramental light and finally to the supreme Ananda. If the soul is awakened, if there is a new birth out of the mere mental, vital and physical into the psychic consciousness, then the Yoga can be done; otherwise (by the mere power of the mind or any other part) it is impossible.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-32/The Mother with Letters on the Mother/p-161, “And finally, Sri Aurobindo has told us somewhere in The Life Divine that to follow the path of spiritual experience, one must have within oneself a “spiritual being”, one must be “twice born” as it is said, for if one doesn’t have a spiritual being within, which is at least on the point of becoming self-aware, one may try to imitate these experiences but it will only be crude imitation or hypocrisy, it won’t be a reality.” The Mother/TMCW-9/Questions and Answers-1957/p-344-345,  “A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1087-1088, “If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a Supramental or Gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1054, “As the psychic change has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual change has to call in the supramental transformation to complete it.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-951, “A purified mind and heart and a strong and fine psychical intuition may do much to protect from perversion and error, but even the most highly developed psychical consciousness cannot be absolutely safe unless the psychical is illumined and uplifted by a higher force than itself and touched and strengthened by the luminous intuitive mind and that again raised towards the supramental energy of the spirit.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-896,

“A new life  dawns, he looks out from vistas wide;

The Spirit’s breath moves him but soon retires:

His strength was not made to hold that puissant guest.” Savitri-165 (this line suggests that a dvija experiences intermittent Divine union.)

“He (King Aswapati) came new-born (thrice-born Soul), infant and limitless

And grew in the wisdom of the timeless Child;

He was a vast that soon became a Sun.” Savitri-301

“For now I (Satyavan) know that all I lived and was

Moved towards this moment of my heart’s rebirth;

I look back on the meaning of myself,

A soul made ready on earth’s soil for thee (Savitri).” Savitri-406

“The (twice born) soul that can live alone with itself meets God;” Savitri-460

“Aspiring he transcends his earthly self;

He (man) stands in the largeness of his soul new-born, (dvija)

Redeemed from encirclement by mortal things

And moves in a pure free spiritual realm

As in the rare breath of a stratosphere;

A last end of far lines of divinity,

He mounts by a frail thread to his high source;

He reaches his fount of immortality,

He calls the Godhead (Supreme Self) into his mortal life.” Savitri-486,​

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14: "The work (tamasic sacrifice) will be done without the dakshina, the much-needed giving or self-giving to the leaders of the sacrificial action, whether to the outward guide and helper of our work or to the veiled or manifest godhead within us." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-485-486, "...a masterful government of the lower nature and the heart’s worship given to the Teacher, whether to the divine Teacher within or to the human Master in whom the divine Wisdom is embodied, — for that is the sense of the reverence given to the Guru." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-415, "For other paths of sadhana, especially those which like the Gita accept the reality of the individual soul as an “eternal portion” of the Divine or which believe that Bhagavan and the bhakta are both real, the help of the Guru has always been relied upon as an indispensable aid.” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-200, "...the Yoga proceeds by the results of prescribed methods taught in a Scripture or a tradition and reinforced and illumined by the instructions of the Master. This is a narrower practice, but safe and effective within its limits, because it follows a well-beaten track to a long familiar goal." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-55, “A strict obedience to the wise and intuitive leading of a Guide is also normal and necessary for all but a few specially gifted seekers.” CWSA/22/The Life Divine/p-941,​

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