Essays in philosophy and yoga

13
Essays in
Philosophy and Yoga


VOLUME 13
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO

© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1998
Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA


Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Shorter Works
1910 – 1950



Publisher’s Note
Essays in Philosophy and Yoga consists of short works in prose
written by Sri Aurobindo between 1909 and 1950 and published
during his lifetime. All but a few of them are concerned with
aspects of spiritual philosophy, yoga, and related subjects. Short
writings on the Veda, the Upanishads, Indian culture, political theory, education, and poetics have been placed in other
volumes.
The title of the volume has been provided by the editors.
It is adapted from the title of a proposed collection, “Essays
in Yoga”, found in two of Sri Aurobindo’s notebooks. Since
1971 most of the contents of the volume have appeared under

the editorial title The Supramental Manifestation and Other
Writings.
The contents are arranged in five chronological parts. Part
One consists of essays published in the Karmayogin in 1909 and
1910, Part Two of a long essay written around 1912 and published in 1921, Part Three of essays and other pieces published
in the monthly review Arya between 1914 and 1921, Part Four
of an essay published in the Standard Bearer in 1920, and Part
Five of a series of essays published in the Bulletin of Physical
Education in 1949 and 1950.
Many of the essays in Part Three were revised slightly by the
author and published in small books between 1920 and 1941.
The editors have retained the titles and arrangement of most of
those books.
The texts of the pieces have been checked against the texts
published in journals and books during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime.



CONTENTS
Part One
Essays from the Karmayogin (1909 – 1910)
The Ideal of the Karmayogin
Karmayoga
Man — Slave or Free?
Yoga and Human Evolution
Yoga and Hypnotism
The Greatness of the Individual
The Process of Evolution
Stead and the Spirits
Stead and Maskelyne

Fate and Free-Will
The Three Purushas
The Strength of Stillness
The Principle of Evil
The Stress of the Hidden Spirit

3
9
13
18
23
29
33
38
43
47
51
57
60
64

Part Two
The Yoga and Its Objects (circa 1912)
The Yoga and Its Objects
71
Appendix: Explanations of Some Words and Phrases 92
Part Three
Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921)
Notes on the Arya
The “Arya’s” Second Year

Appendix: Passages Omitted from “Our Ideal”

101
103


CONTENTS

The “Arya’s” Fourth Year

105

On Ideals and Progress
On Ideals
Yoga and Skill in Works
Conservation and Progress
The Conservative Mind and Eastern Progress
Our Ideal

111
119
127
133
140

The Superman
The Superman
All-Will and Free-Will
The Delight of Works

151
158
163

Evolution
Evolution
The Inconscient
Materialism

169
176
184

Thoughts and Glimpses
Aphorisms
Thoughts and Glimpses

199
208

Heraclitus
Heraclitus

215

The Problem of Rebirth
Section I: Rebirth and Karma
Rebirth
The Reincarnating Soul
Rebirth, Evolution, Heredity

Rebirth and Soul Evolution
The Significance of Rebirth
The Ascending Unity
Involution and Evolution
Karma
Karma and Freedom

259
270
277
285
295
307
317
330
338


CONTENTS

Karma, Will and Consequence
Rebirth and Karma
Karma and Justice

351
358
367

Section II: The Lines of Karma
The Foundation

The Terrestrial Law
Mind Nature and Law of Karma
The Higher Lines of Karma
Appendix I: The Tangle of Karma
Appendix II: A Clarification

379
386
398
413
427
433

Other Writings from the Arya
The Question of the Month
The Needed Synthesis
“Arya” — Its Significance
Meditation
Different Methods of Writing
Occult Knowledge and the Hindu Scriptures
The Universal Consciousness

439
441
445
448
451
453

The News of the Month

The News of the Month

459

South Indian Vaishnava Poetry
Andal: The Vaishnava Poetess
Nammalwar: The Supreme Vaishnava Saint
and Poet
Arguments to The Life Divine
Arguments to The Life Divine

465
467
471

Part Four
From the Standard Bearer (1920)
Ourselves

509


CONTENTS

Part Five
From the Bulletin of Physical Education (1949 – 1950)
The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth
Message
Perfection of the Body
The Divine Body

Supermind and the Life Divine
Supermind and Humanity
Supermind in the Evolution
Mind of Light
Supermind and Mind of Light

517
521
536
558
568
578
585
588


Part One
Essays from the Karmayogin
1909 – 1910



Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry



The Ideal of the Karmayogin

A

NATION is building in India today before the eyes of
the world so swiftly, so palpably that all can watch the
process and those who have sympathy and intuition distinguish the forces at work, the materials in use, the lines of
the divine architecture. This nation is not a new race raw from
the workshop of Nature or created by modern circumstances.
One of the oldest races and greatest civilisations on this earth,
the most indomitable in vitality, the most fecund in greatness,
the deepest in life, the most wonderful in potentiality, after
taking into itself numerous sources of strength from foreign
strains of blood and other types of human civilisation, is now
seeking to lift itself for good into an organised national unity.
Formerly a congeries of kindred nations with a single life and
a single culture, always by the law of this essential oneness
tending to unity, always by its excess of fecundity engendering fresh diversities and divisions, it has never yet been able
to overcome permanently the almost insuperable obstacles to
the organisation of a continent. The time has now come when
those obstacles can be overcome. The attempt which our race
has been making throughout its long history, it will now make
under entirely new circumstances. A keen observer would predict its success because the only important obstacles have been
or are in the process of being removed. But we go farther and
believe that it is sure to succeed because the freedom, unity and
greatness of India have now become necessary to the world.
This is the faith in which the Karmayogin puts its hand to
the work and will persist in it, refusing to be discouraged by
difficulties however immense and apparently insuperable. We
believe that God is with us and in that faith we shall conquer. We believe that humanity needs us and it is the love
and service of humanity, of our country, of the race, of our


4

Essays from the Karmayogin

religion that will purify our heart and inspire our action in the
struggle.
The task we set before ourselves is not mechanical but moral
and spiritual. We aim not at the alteration of a form of government but at the building up of a nation. Of that task politics
is a part, but only a part. We shall devote ourselves not to
politics alone, nor to social questions alone, nor to theology or
philosophy or literature or science by themselves, but we include
all these in one entity which we believe to be all-important,
the dharma, the national religion which we also believe to be
universal. There is a mighty law of life, a great principle of
human evolution, a body of spiritual knowledge and experience
of which India has always been destined to be guardian, exem¯
plar and missionary. This is the sanatana
dharma, the eternal
religion. Under the stress of alien impacts she has largely lost
hold not of the structure of that dharma, but of its living reality.
For the religion of India is nothing if it is not lived. It has to be
applied not only to life, but to the whole of life; its spirit has
to enter into and mould our society, our politics, our literature,
our science, our individual character, affections and aspirations.
To understand the heart of this dharma, to experience it as a
truth, to feel the high emotions to which it rises and to express
and execute it in life is what we understand by Karmayoga. We
believe that it is to make the yoga the ideal of human life that
India rises today; by the yoga she will get the strength to realise
her freedom, unity and greatness, by the yoga she will keep the
strength to preserve it. It is a spiritual revolution we foresee and

the material is only its shadow and reflex.
The European sets great store by machinery. He seeks to
renovate humanity by schemes of society and systems of government; he hopes to bring about the millennium by an act of
Parliament. Machinery is of great importance, but only as a
working means for the spirit within, the force behind. The nineteenth century in India aspired to political emancipation, social
renovation, religious vision and rebirth, but it failed because
it adopted Western motives and methods, ignored the spirit,
history and destiny of our race and thought that by taking over


The Ideal of the Karmayogin

5

European education, European machinery, European organisation and equipment we should reproduce in ourselves European
prosperity, energy and progress. We of the twentieth century
reject the aims, ideals and methods of the Anglicised nineteenth
precisely because we accept its experience. We refuse to make
an idol of the present; we look before and after, backward to the
mighty history of our race, forward to the grandiose destiny for
which that history has prepared it.
We do not believe that our political salvation can be attained
by enlargement of Councils, introduction of the elective principle, colonial self-government or any other formula of European
politics. We do not deny the use of some of these things as
instruments, as weapons in a political struggle, but we deny
their sufficiency whether as instruments or ideals and look beyond to an end which they do not serve except in a trifling
degree. They might be sufficient if it were our ultimate destiny
to be an outlying province of the British Empire or a dependent adjunct of European civilisation. That is a future which
we do not think it worth making any sacrifice to accomplish.
We believe on the other hand that India is destined to work

out her own independent life and civilisation, to stand in the
forefront of the world and solve the political, social, economical
and moral problems which Europe has failed to solve, yet the
pursuit of whose solution and the feverish passage in that pursuit
from experiment to experiment, from failure to failure she calls
her progress. Our means must be as great as our ends and the
strength to discover and use the means so as to attain the end
can only be found by seeking the eternal source of strength in
ourselves.
We do not believe that by changing the machinery so as to
make our society the ape of Europe we shall effect social renovation. Widow-remarriage, substitution of class for caste, adult
marriage, intermarriages, interdining and the other nostrums
of the social reformer are mechanical changes which, whatever
their merits or demerits, cannot by themselves save the soul of
the nation alive or stay the course of degradation and decline.
It is the spirit alone that saves, and only by becoming great and


6

Essays from the Karmayogin

free in heart can we become socially and politically great and
free.
We do not believe that by multiplying new sects limited
within the narrower and inferior ideas of religion imported from
the West or by creating organisations for the perpetuation of the
mere dress and body of Hinduism we can recover our spiritual
health, energy and greatness. The world moves through an indispensable interregnum of free thought and materialism to a new
synthesis of religious thought and experience, a new religious

world-life free from intolerance, yet full of faith and fervour,
accepting all forms of religion because it has an unshakable
faith in the One. The religion which embraces Science and faith,
Theism, Christianity, Mahomedanism and Buddhism and yet is
none of these, is that to which the World-Spirit moves. In our
own, which is the most sceptical and the most believing of all,
the most sceptical because it has questioned and experimented
the most, the most believing because it has the deepest experience and the most varied and positive spiritual knowledge, —
that wider Hinduism which is not a dogma or combination of
dogmas but a law of life, which is not a social framework but
the spirit of a past and future social evolution, which rejects
nothing but insists on testing and experiencing everything and
when tested and experienced turning it to the soul’s uses, in this
Hinduism we find the basis of the future world-religion. This
¯
sanatana
dharma has many scriptures, Veda, Vedanta, Gita,
Upanishad, Darshana, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the
Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in
the heart in which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner
spiritual experiences that we shall find the proof and source of
the world’s Scriptures, the law of knowledge, love and conduct,
the basis and inspiration of Karmayoga.
Our aim will therefore be to help in building up India for the
sake of humanity — this is the spirit of the Nationalism which
we profess and follow. We say to humanity, “The time has come
when you must take the great step and rise out of a material
existence into the higher, deeper and wider life towards which
humanity moves. The problems which have troubled mankind

The Ideal of the Karmayogin

7

can only be solved by conquering the kingdom within, not by
harnessing the forces of Nature to the service of comfort and
luxury, but by mastering the forces of the intellect and the spirit,
by vindicating the freedom of man within as well as without
and by conquering from within external Nature. For that work
the resurgence of Asia is necessary, therefore Asia rises. For that
work the freedom and greatness of India is essential, therefore
she claims her destined freedom and greatness, and it is to the
interest of all humanity, not excluding England, that she should
wholly establish her claim.”
We say to the nation, “It is God’s will that we should be
ourselves and not Europe. We have sought to regain life by
following the law of another being than our own. We must
return and seek the sources of life and strength within ourselves.
We must know our past and recover it for the purposes of our
future. Our business is to realise ourselves first and to mould
everything to the law of India’s eternal life and nature. It will
therefore be the object of the Karmayogin to read the heart of
our religion, our society, our philosophy, politics, literature, art,
jurisprudence, science, thought, everything that was and is ours,
so that we may be able to say to ourselves and our nation, ‘This
is our dharma.’ We shall review European civilisation entirely
from the standpoint of Indian thought and knowledge and seek
to throw off from us the dominating stamp of the Occident;
what we have to take from the West we shall take as Indians.

And the dharma once discovered we shall strive our utmost not
only to profess but to live, in our individual actions, in our social
life, in our political endeavours.”
We say to the individual and especially to the young who
are now arising to do India’s work, the world’s work, God’s
work, “You cannot cherish these ideals, still less can you fulfil
them if you subject your minds to European ideas or look at
life from the material standpoint. Materially you are nothing,
spiritually you are everything. It is only the Indian who can
believe everything, dare everything, sacrifice everything. First
therefore become Indians. Recover the patrimony of your forefathers. Recover the Aryan thought, the Aryan discipline, the


8

Essays from the Karmayogin

Aryan character, the Aryan life. Recover the Vedanta, the Gita,
the Yoga. Recover them not only in intellect or sentiment but in
your lives. Live them and you will be great and strong, mighty,
invincible and fearless. Neither life nor death will have any terrors for you. Difficulty and impossibility will vanish from your
vocabularies. For it is in the spirit that strength is eternal and
you must win back the kingdom of yourselves, the inner Swaraj,
before you can win back your outer empire. There the Mother
dwells and She waits for worship that She may give strength. Believe in Her, serve Her, lose your wills in Hers, your egoism in the
greater ego of the country, your separate selfishness in the service
of humanity. Recover the source of all strength in yourselves and
all else will be added to you, social soundness, intellectual preeminence, political freedom, the mastery of human thought, the
hegemony of the world.”

Karmayoga

W

E HAVE spoken of Karmayoga as the application of
Vedanta and Yoga to life. To many who take their
knowledge of Hinduism secondhand this may seem
a doubtful definition. It is ordinarily supposed by “practical”
minds that Vedanta as a guide to life and Yoga as a method of
spiritual communion are dangerous things which lead men away
from action to abstraction. We leave aside those who regard all
such beliefs as mysticism, self-delusion or imposture; but even
those who reverence and believe in the high things of Hinduism
have the impression that one must remove oneself from a full
human activity in order to live the spiritual life. Yet the spiritual
life finds its most potent expression in the man who lives the
ordinary life of men in the strength of the Yoga and under the law
of the Vedanta. It is by such a union of the inner life and the outer
that mankind will eventually be lifted up and become mighty
and divine. It is a delusion to suppose that Vedanta contains no
inspiration to life, no rule of conduct, and is purely metaphysical
and quietistic. On the contrary, the highest morality of which
humanity is capable finds its one perfect basis and justification in
the teachings of the Upanishads and the Gita. The characteristic
doctrines of the Gita are nothing if they are not a law of life,
a dharma, and even the most transcendental aspirations of the
Vedanta presuppose a preparation in life, for it is only through
life that one can reach to immortality. The opposite opinion is
due to certain tendencies which have bulked large in the history

and temperament of our race. The ultimate goal of our religion is
emancipation from the bondage of material Nature and freedom
from individual rebirth, and certain souls, among the highest we
have known, have been drawn by the attraction of the final hush
and purity to dissociate themselves from life and bodily action
in order more swiftly and easily to reach the goal. Standing like


10

Essays from the Karmayogin

mountain-peaks above the common level, they have attracted
all eyes and fixed this withdrawal as the highest and most commanding Hindu ideal. It is for this reason that Sri Krishna laid
so much stress on the perfect Yogin’s cleaving to life and human
activity even after his need of them was over, lest the people,
following, as they always do, the example of their best, turn
away from their dharma and bastard confusion reign. The ideal
Yogin is no withdrawn and pent-up force, but ever engaged in
doing good to all creatures, either by the flood of the divine
energy that he pours on the world or by himself standing in the
front of humanity, its leader in the march and the battle, but
unbound by his works and superior to his personality.
Moreover the word Vedanta is usually identified with the
strict Monism and the peculiar theory of Maya established by
the lofty and ascetic intellect of Shankara. But it is the Upanishads themselves and not Shankara’s writings, the text and
not the commentary, that are the authoritative Scripture of the
Vedantin. Shankara’s, great and temporarily satisfying as it was,
is still only one synthesis and interpretation of the Upanishads.
There have been others in the past which have powerfully influenced the national mind and there is no reason why there

should not be a yet more perfect synthesis in the future. It
is such a synthesis, embracing all life and action in its scope,
that the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda have
been preparing. What is dimly beginning now is a repetition
on a wider stage of what happened once before in India, more
rapidly but to smaller issues, when the Buddha lived and taught
his philosophy and ethics to the Aryan nations. Then as now a
mighty spirit, it matters not whether Avatar or Vibhuti, the full
expression of God in man or a great outpouring of the divine
energy, came down among men and brought into their daily life
and practice the force and impulse of utter spirituality. And this
time it is the full light and not a noble part, unlike Buddhism
which, expressing Vedantic morality, yet ignored a fundamental
reality of Vedanta and was therefore expelled from its prime seat
and cradle. The material result was then what it will be now,
a great political, moral and social revolution which made India


Karmayoga

11

the Guru of the nations and carried the light she had to give
all over the civilised world, moulding ideas and creating forms
which are still extant and a living force. Already the Vedanta
and the Yoga have exceeded their Asiatic limit and are beginning
to influence the life and practice of America and Europe; and
they have long been filtering into Western thought by a hundred
indirect channels. But these are small rivers and underground
streams. The world waits for the rising of India to receive the

divine flood in its fullness.
Yoga is communion with God for knowledge, for love or for
work. The Yogin puts himself into direct relation with that which
is omniscient and omnipotent within man and without him. He
is in tune with the infinite, he becomes a channel for the strength
of God to pour itself out upon the world whether through calm
benevolence or active beneficence. When a man rises by putting
from him the slough of self and lives for others and in the joys
and sorrows of others; — when he works perfectly and with love
and zeal, but casts away the anxiety for results and is neither
eager for victory nor afraid of defeat; — when he devotes all
his works to God and lays every thought, word and deed as
an offering on the divine altar; — when he gets rid of fear and
hatred, repulsion and disgust and attachment, and works like the
forces of Nature, unhasting, unresting, inevitably, perfectly; —
when he rises above the thought that he is the body or the heart
or the mind or the sum of these and finds his own and true self; —
when he becomes aware of his immortality and the unreality of
death; — when he experiences the advent of knowledge and feels
himself passive and the divine force working unresisted through
his mind, his speech, his senses and all his organs; — when having thus abandoned whatever he is, does or has to the Lord of
all, the Lover and Helper of mankind, he dwells permanently in
Him and becomes incapable of grief, disquiet or false excitement,
— that is Yoga. Pranayam and Asans, concentration, worship,
ceremonies, religious practice are not themselves Yoga but only a
means towards Yoga. Nor is Yoga a difficult or dangerous path,
it is safe and easy to all who take refuge with the Inner Guide
and Teacher. All men are potentially capable of it, for there is no

12

Essays from the Karmayogin

man who has not strength or faith or love developed or latent in
his nature, and any one of these is a sufficient staff for the Yogin.
All cannot, indeed, reach in a single life the highest in this path,
but all can go forward; and in proportion as a man advances
he gets peace, strength and joy. And even a little of this dharma
delivers man or nation out of great fear.

-vSpm=y-y Dm-y Ayt
 mhto ByAt^.
It is an error, we repeat, to think that spirituality is a thing
divorced from life. “Abandon all” says the Isha Upanishad “that
thou mayst enjoy all, neither covet any man’s possession. But
verily do thy deeds in this world and wish to live thy hundred
years; no other way is given thee than this to escape the bondage
of thy acts.” It is an error to think that the heights of religion
are above the struggles of this world. The recurrent cry of Sri
Krishna to Arjuna insists on the struggle; “Fight and overthrow
thy opponents!” “Remember me and fight!” “Give up all thy
works to me with a heart full of spirituality, and free from
craving, free from selfish claims, fight! let the fever of thy soul
pass from thee.” It is an error to imagine that even when the
religious man does not give up his ordinary activities, he yet
becomes too sattwic, too saintly, too loving or too passionless
for the rough work of the world. Nothing can be more extreme
and uncompromising than the reply of the Gita in the opposite
sense, “Whosoever has his temperament purged from egoism,

whosoever suffers not his soul to receive the impress of the
deed, though he slay the whole world yet he slays not and is
not bound.” The Charioteer of Kurukshetra driving the car of
Arjuna over that field of ruin is the image and description of
Karmayoga; for the body is the chariot and the senses are the
horses of the driving and it is through the bloodstained and miresunk ways of the world that Sri Krishna pilots the soul of man
to Vaicuntha.


Man — Slave or Free?

T

HE EXCLUSIVE pursuit of Yoga by men who seclude
themselves either physically or mentally from the contact
of the world has led to an erroneous view of this science as
something mystic, far-off and unreal. The secrecy which has been
observed with regard to Yogic practices, — a necessary secrecy
in the former stages of human evolution, — has stereotyped this
error. Practices followed by men who form secret circles and
confine the instruction in the mysteries strictly to those who
have a certain preparatory fitness, inevitably bear the stamp
to the outside world of occultism. In reality there is nothing
intrinsically hidden, occult or mystic about Yoga. Yoga is based
upon certain laws of human psychology, a certain knowledge
about the power of the mind over the body and the inner spirit
over the mind which are not generally realised and have hitherto
been considered by those in the secret too momentous in their
consequences for disclosure until men should be trained to use
them aright. Just as a set of men who had discovered and tested

the uttermost possibilities of mesmerism and hypnotism might
hesitate to divulge them freely to the world lest the hypnotic
power should be misused by ignorance or perversity or abused in
the interests of selfishness and crime, so the Yogins have usually
preserved the knowledge of these much greater forces within us
in a secrecy broken only when they were sure of the previous
ethical and spiritual training of the neophyte and his physical
and moral fitness for the Yogic practices. It became therefore
an established rule for the learner to observe strict reserve as
to the inner experiences of Yoga and for the developed Yogin
as far as possible to conceal himself. This has not prevented
treatises and manuals from being published dealing with the
physical or with the moral and intellectual sides of Yoga. Nor
has it prevented great spirits who have gained their Yoga not