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SRI AUROBINDO: THE AVATAR AND THE SHADOW

RUNNING HEAD: Sri Aurobindo: Avatar, Shadow

David Johnston

Sri Aurobindo: Avatar, Shadow

ABSTRACTI was stimulated to write this essay because of the heated discussion unleashed by Peter Heehs’ book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo recently published in the United States. I argue that a complete picture of Sri Aurobindo as Avatar includes not only the Divine Consciousness, but his human instrumentality with its shadow side that was subjected to transformation. I indicate the nature of several shadow characteristics and experiences that he had to work through for the sake of humanity, as well as his comments on the nature and mission of the Avatar. I also discuss Jung’s view on the errors of Christianity in an attempt to introduce a warning on what could happen, or is happening, to some followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and what is essential for the development of integral consciousness. Jung is particularly concerned with the fact that Christ is depicted as all light and stainless, without shadow in both his divine and human aspects. He is also troubled by the Christian doctrine that evil in itself is insubstantial. He believes the devil and the feminine need to be integrated into the Christian Godhead and that a superior symbolic image to that of the crucified Christ alone is Christ crucified between the opposites, two thieves, one ascending to heaven, the other descending to hell. He warns that the shadow must be understood as substantial and needs to be integrated and transformed, and recognized as part of the image of Christ. I add a section on the Hindu tradition that indicates its greater interiority in comparison to Christianity and propose that that is the essential difference between the Hindu-born disciples and Western disciples understanding of Sri Aurobindo as Avatar [and the Mother]. I also argue that The Lives of Sri Aurobindo suffers from the author’s critical judgements on the nature of Sri Aurobindo’s life and work, as well as not treating Sri Aurobindo’s life as an inner myth. I finish by observing that the symbolic image the Mother originally designated for the centre of the inner chamber of the Matrimandir is the perfect symbol for humankind in the present unfolding age of the Self in God, multiplicity in-Oneness and integral consciousness.

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SRI AUROBINDO: THE AVATAR AND THE SHADOW

“For evil and good an equal tenure keep Wherever Knowledge is Ignorance’s twin.”

Sri Aurobindo: Savitri: Book 2, Canto 6, p. 185.

"...It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance, He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth….(The Mother, 1980, p. 124)."

Introduction

Beginning in the Sixties a psychological and social liberation took place in the

West that appeared to promise the potential transformation of the world in the

direction of more humanistic and higher, less materialistic values. For some,

particularly idealistic individuals, this involved embracing the teachings of Indian

Gurus, Buddhist teachers and other spiritual masters and, in some cases,

discipleship. Some made their way to India and spent time living in Ashrams or

otherwise close to a living Guru. They included those who found their way to

Auroville, a city-in-progress in South India that aspires to embody spiritual values

and the vision of a new community based on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and

the Mother, a prototype for a new and integral way of living. There are, in

addition, other attempts at realizing what can best be described as new-age

communities spread throughout the world.

Now, some forty to fifty years later, that sense of liberation has all but closed

down and there is a growing recognition that attaining spiritual fulfilment and/or

realizing Auroville or other new-age communities is fraught with difficulties that

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were unimaginable by the seeker at the outset. At least as far as Westerners are

concerned, the adventure of consciousness that began in the Sixties was

undertaken by naïve seekers, at best with good will and an idealistic cast of

mind, but with a lack of in-depth psychological sophistication, let alone life-

experience. In particular, there was an almost complete lack of recognition of the

shadow side of life and the urgent need to assimilate experiences of the shadow

into consciousness. From one point of view, the shadow refers to anything that

is unconscious. When I use the word shadow in this paper, however, I am

particularly referring to the inferior aspects of the psyche that lie in the

unconscious, both of a personal and a collective nature, including what the

psychologist, C. G. Jung, refers to as the unassimilated anima/animus as well as

the shadow proper.

Increasing Consciousness and the Question of the Shadow

In the case of the personal shadow, these attitudes and values refer to

unconscious qualities that, when brought to consciousness and assimilated and

no longer unconscious, add considerably to consciousness and potential for

effective action. They also refer to the need to consciously integrate experiences

that are largely unconscious, in order to glean from them the essential qualities

embodied in however a perverted form as hostile anti-divine or disintegrative

forces that can be put to enlightened use and purpose. There is, in other words,

a need to bring new potential qualities of being to the light of consciousness for

the sake of more integral living. Thus, Sri Aurobindo (1972a, pp. 148, 149)

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writes, “I had no urge toward spirituality in me… I was incapable of

understanding metaphysics, I developed into a philosopher. I had no eye for

painting. I transformed my nature from what it was to what it was not. He [Sri

Aurobindo] did it with the help of Krishna and the Divine Shakti. I had help from

human sources also.” He achieved greater consciousness and active purpose

by bringing latent qualities of being to consciousness through the practice of

yoga. Thus, he writes: “Practically what I know is that I had not all the powers

necessary when I started, I had to develop them by Yoga, at least many of them

which were not in existence in me when I began, and those which were I had to

train to a higher degree (ibid, p. 149).”

As Sri Aurobindo describes them, the new aspects of being that he speaks of

here are qualities of the spiritual Self that had hitherto not been accessible to

consciousness and not personal shadow values per se. For most of us, there is

first a need to work through and integrate the personal shadow to consciousness

before we can advance to the next level of integration, relatively speaking, to

begin assimilating something of the order Sri Aurobindo speaks of here, in

however a lesser degree. Although he does not directly respond to the question

of whether he is an Avatar or not, in fact, his indirect allusions are strongly

suggestive of his admission that he is, indeed, the Avatar of our time. In

response to a disciple’s statement that “I have a strong faith that you are the

Divine incarnation,” for instance, Sri Aurobindo (1972a, p. 150, 151) replies:

”Follow your faith – it is not likely to mislead you.” The Mother supports this

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contention, while Sri Aurobindo openly acknowledges that she is an incarnation

of the Divine Shakti.

As Avatar, Sri Aurobindo has no personal karma or personal shadow that

requires deliberate attention, as he is born with a psyche realized beyond the

collective consciousness with a mandate to uplift earth-consciousness to the next

level of evolution; as he writes, “For my yoga is done not for myself who need

nothing and do not need salvation or anything else (ibid, p. 147).” The fact that

Sri Aurobindo’s (ibid, p. 153) “whole life has been a struggle with hard realities

…. [and a] battle….” implies that even when he was living a so-called ordinary

life, he was, in fact, even if unconsciously, involved in his vocation and living his

swadharma [truth of being] as Avatar, perhaps better said, as Avatar-in-the-

becoming. Although there is no personal shadow as such for him to be

concerned about, there is a collective shadow as part of the human condition that

is of great concern to Sri Aurobindo and it affects him directly. Indeed,

according to the Mother (1953, p. 63), “the law of his [the incarnate Divine’s]

personal self-expression is in a way linked to the general law of earthly

progress.” “Thus,” she observes “even the embodied god cannot be perfect on

earth until men are ready to understand and accept perfection.” In this regard,

the following lines of Savitri are relevant:“This hidden foe lodged in the human breastMan must overcome or miss his higher fate.This is the inner war without escape (Sri Aurobindo, 1970d, p. 448).”

Sri Aurobindo’s imperfections therefore point to and mirror the individual’s own

personal imperfections and shadow, which is a noteworthy and memorable point.

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At this juncture, it is interesting to observe that the psychologist, C. G. Jung

emphasises the need to integrate the inferior side of [one’s] nature, which

involves establishing a conscious relationship to both the Divine Feminine and

the collective shadow, a difficult task, in order to concretely realise one’s inner life

processes and the dynamic aspect of the Self.

In relation to his own path, Sri Aurobindo writes to a disciple: “we [the Mother and

Sri Aurobindo] have had sufferings and struggles to which yours is mere child’s

play (ibid, p. 463).” Elsewhere, he amplifies his struggles and writes: “As for the

Mother and myself, we have had to….surmount mountains of difficulties, a far

heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far

more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure, ways to cleave

through impenetrable morass and desert and forces, hostile masses to

conquer.…(ibid, p. 464).” In Savitri he writes:“An adversary Force was born of old:Invader of the life of mortal man,It hides from him the straight immortal path.A power came in to veil the eternal Light,A power opposed to the eternal will………………..Hard is the world-redeemer’s heavy task;The world itself becomes his adversary,………………..He lives through opposition of earth’s Powers And Nature’s ambushes and the world’s attacks.………..………..The heart of evil must be bared to his eyes,He must learn its cosmic dark necessity, Its right and its dire roots in Nature’s soil (Sri Aurobindo, 1970d, pp. 448-450).”

Here Sri Aurobindo is asserting that his personal path of yoga, done for the

purpose of advancing earth-consciousness, involves bringing to the light of

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consciousness great amounts of perverted or hostile and anti-divine experiences

in order to bring in the Supramental manifestation. According to Sri Aurobindo’s

own witness, his personal yoga, in other words, involves the assimilation of

unprecedented amounts of archetypal shadow of a collective nature, which is

necessary in order to raise consciousness and bring in the new manifestation

down to and including matter. Anybody who has seriously come under the

spiritual influence of Sri Aurobindo or studied his written works with any integrity

will attest to the intense drive for concrete and integral manifestation, which

includes coming to terms with this archetypal shadow, found in both his being

and in his written word, and not simply a flight to the beyond.

To put this discussion in perspective, the idea of the divine man, who is both

human and divine, has a long history, not only in India but in the West as well. In

India this has taken the still conscious belief in a line of 10 evolutionary Avatars,

the last still to come riding a white horse, Kalki, to bring in a new consciousness.

In ancient Egypt it took the form of Osiris, and initially only the Pharaoh

possessed an Osiris-soul, a belief that over time was extended to include all of

the Royal family and then members of the Royal court. Eventually the

understanding was democratised and everyone was considered to have an

immortal soul. Other examples of the divine man in the Middle East and West

include Attis from Phrygia, Adonis from the Mediterranean, Tammuz from

Babylonia, and the Anatolian Mithras.

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In pre-Christian Hellenistic times the doctrine took shape of the Anthropos or

primal man and emanation of the Personal Divine, who was, according to a well-

known parable, the “bait” by which “the essence of the darkness is fished up out

of the deep (C. G. Jung, 1960, p. 140).” This parable is also applied to Christ,

the divine man and Messiah [anointed one] whose teachings continue to

dominate Western consciousness, either directly through the Church or indirectly

through secular humanistic values. This evolutionary development led to a

transformation of religious practices and a longing for human redemption as,

inasmuch as humans participated in the fate of the divine man, they became

conscious of the unblessed state of the ego and the need for transformation.

According to this account then, it is not only a question of the incarnation of the

God-man, but also of his necessary entanglement in darkness, which allows him

to foster the transformation of the consciousness of humanity.

A Time of Darkness

We are living in a time of darkness under the reign of Diti, the Dark Mother, a

time when we are well advised, according to Jung (as recorded in Edinger, 1996,

p. 56), “to cling to the Good.” The shadow is so pervasive in life today that it is

as if we are being told collectively that we need to experience and learn about

the nature of the shadow and assimilate its essence to consciousness. Although

for many, this is a time of discouragement and despair, thanks to investigative

reporting and books, some investigative television programming and internet

exposure, the interested individual is helped in coming to terms with the

situational collective shadows. It is also helpful to understand that the

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fundamental source of the shadow is ignorance, and ignorance, Sri Aurobindo

(1970a, p. 591) observes, is “really knowledge awakening progressively out of

original nescience” that needs to undergo divine transformation within the

conditions of the manifestation in order to fulfill its original purpose. Becoming

conscious of shadow character traits and how they operate, in other words, is

essential in one’s quest for knowledge, both of world knowledge, its effect on

one’s life and inner knowledge. In terms of inner knowledge and growth in

strength of being, becoming increasingly conscious of the inner shadow is

essential in order to participate consciously in bringing in the new manifestation.

One aspect of the shadow that particularly affects Western idealists, with their

moralistic bias and externally-oriented interest in verifiable evidence, is the

apparent fall from grace of several prominent spiritual masters. I say apparent,

because it is not at all evident that the whole story is being told in the following

allegations made against different spiritual leaders. Nor, do I personally claim to

know the truth behind these allegations. What is relevant, from the point of view

of this essay, however, is that they exist and seem to reflect a reaction to the

earlier naïve embrace of spiritual life by Western practitioners. They are, in fact,

widely circulated in the West through essays, books, internet sites and TV

investigative reporting.

The spiritual leaders in question include such Indian Gurus as Rajneesh [Osho],

who is reported to have conned his devotees out of huge amounts of money,

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owned a large fleet of Rolls-Royces, and used the excuse of Tantra to justify any

number of indiscretions with young women, as well as Maharishi Yogi, who is

reputed to have been similarly engaged, although, according to a former disciple

I spoke with, it is difficult to imagine. Sai Baba, meanwhile, is accused of having

engaged in paedophilia with pre-pubescent boys, covering up a murder of two

young devotees in his bedroom, then being present at the murder of the four

assailants without batting an eye, making several false predictions [prophecies],

magic trickery, and making false claims about his spiritual status. Tibetan,

Chogyam Trumpa, the self-professed tulku with claims to have been born

enlightened and off the wheel of karma, incarnated for the sake of compassion,

and who moved to the United States and taught the need to flow with the energy,

is reputed to have engaged in several indiscretions with women and manipulative

practices, and died as a severe alcoholic. Then, there is the illustrious Swami

Muktananda, the highly reputed Guru of C hit-Shakti yoga, who was reported to

have engaged in sexual voyeurism along with multiple sexual indiscretions, to

have violent bouts of anger and to use strong-armed techniques of control.

Darwin Gross, formerly head of an American-based worldwide spiritual

organization called Eckankar, and self-declared vehicle for what he claimed to be

the highest consciousness on earth, the Mahanta consciousness, was reportedly

charged with embezzling a large amount of funds by his successor, Harold

Klemp, after which they engaged in what amounts to mutual public name-calling.

The latter promptly turned the organization and its message from a way of life

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into a religion, a diversion from the initial more spiritually-oriented ideals and path

or, at least, a movement towards popularization.

Even in the case of Tenzing Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, although personally morally

and spiritually impeccable, hopes and expectations regarding his being

instrumental for the liberation of Tibet from Chinese dominance and its cultural-

genocide have not been fulfilled, disappointing many native Tibetans, as well as

disciples and humanitarians throughout the world. Moreover, he has dropped his

objective of seeking full independence for Tibet to one of accommodation with

the Chinese and Tibetan self-rule within China, although this idea has also been

squelched by the Chinese. His ‘middle-way’ approach, along with years of

frustration has led to angry protests against the Dalai Lama, mainly amongst the

Tibetan youth, and the call for a more active and strength-based approach to

liberating Tibet.

Otherwise, based on repeated counsel from his oracle, the Dalai Lama has

imposed a ban against the reverence of Dorje Shugden saying he has become

demonic and his worship dangerous to Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama,

himself. According to Tibetan Buddhist tradition this deity is strong, powerful,

wrathful and a supreme protector. The Dalai Lama’s suppression of devotion to

Dorje Shugden has angered many monks and lay followers, who consider him to

be an important protective deity, as well as inciting other Tibetans to violent acts

against the devotees of the deity. Although his actions may seem unwarranted

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to some, it is certainly possible that the Dalai Lama is actually purging Tibetan

Tantric-Buddhism of an inferior aspect with wisdom that is not readily apparent.

I personally have the highest regard for the Dalai Lama and, as do many others,

experience him as emanating sweetness, compassion and peace, and find what

is actually transpiring here somewhat perplexing. As the public face of Tibetan

Buddhism to the world he, in fact, strikes me as elegantly fulfilling the Mother’s

(2003b) message to the Buddha on an inner plane, after her meditation dated

December 20, 1916. There she counsels him to overcome his doubts, fears of

the storms of ignorance and incomprehension, and allow the “soft radiance that

flashes from the [diamond] in his heart” to “change many things in the hearts of

men (ibid, p. 333).” In sharp contrast to the more usual experience of a world of

hostilities and self-serving pronouncements, this is an excellent description of the

way the Dalai Lama comes across in his many public appearances.

The fact that many people are touched in their hearts and changed by his

presence is clearly evident by the fact that he has been granted he has been

honorary citizenships to Canada, Paris, Warsaw and Rome as well as several

honorary degrees, all despite the protests of Chinese authorities. To receive his

honorary Canadian citizenship he was welcomed by the Canadian Minister of

Immigration on September 09, 2006 in front of a crowd of 12000 people in

Vancouver with these words: “Welcome to our great country.” We will welcome

you each and every time you return to Canada to share your message of

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kindness and compassion (The Office of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama,

September 11, 2006).” Such heart-felt sentiments are not normally expressed by

contemporary politicians.

As a middle-aged man the Dalai Lama visited the Mother at the Sri Aurobindo

Ashram and, although she indicates the contact was not profound she has the

impression he is “a very strong man…..with “a large force of tranquility (The

Mother, 1982, p. 355).” According to the Mother, then, he is also a man of quiet

strength. Nonetheless, a shadow seems to lie across the middle-way path of the

Dalai Lama in his dealings with the Chinese and/or a re-vitalized Tibetan

Buddhism. I write this reluctantly and with great respect for the Dalai Lama, but,

at least, psychologically, this could be another explanation for the Dorje Shugden

to have turned dangerous. Whether this view is mistaken or not, a long term

perspective is essential in order to understand the eventual destiny of Tibet. In

fact, the Dalai Lama’s consistent warnings to other Tibetan leaders in exile to be

prudent in their push for independence for Tibet in dealing with China can be

viewed as a position of realistic strength.

During his visit with the Mother, he told her: “It is my dream to have the perfect

economic development of Tibet, the perfect organization, the efficiency that we

find in Communism, but all this based upon, founded upon the Buddhistic

qualities of Compassion and Love, so that the people in power do not degenerate

into corruption (as recorded in ibid, p. 356).” Her response was: “it is not a

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dream. It will naturally be. But the time it will take, I do not know.”….. “It is

bound to come, it will come; but if it goes as it is going now, it will take hundreds

of years. But if the Supramental is manifested, it may come quick,” by which the

Mother (ibid, pp. 356, 357) did not mean in the next 10-20 years, but much

longer, the length of time dependent upon the receptivity of the world conditions

to truth.

As far as Auroville is concerned it, too, is destined to come into full manifestation,

and, happily, visible advancement in that direction is readily discernable to the

disinterested witness. Yet, there are difficulties and obstacles to realization of

the city that appear to be related to both the un-integrated personal shadow of

individuals as well as the unconscious collective shadow of the community-as-a-

whole and collective sub-cultural shadows. The unassimilated personal shadow

ultimately means that psychological complexes contaminate the individual’s own

life, while pejoratively affecting others as they are ultimately “in the wrong place”

and not in harmony with their swadharma [truth of being]. Examples include

individuals taking personal profit from their position of power to the detriment of

the community as a whole, those unjustifiably assuming and asserting power, or

individuals living ineffectively or living a transitional life. There have been several

expressions of the collective shadow over the years that speak of intolerance and

an unwarranted attitude of cultural superiority, including two incidents of book

burning and harassment. Otherwise, there continues to be deep-seated disunity

based on racial and cultural differences between Westerners, Northern Indians,

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and Tamils and other ethnic and cultural groups. A related collective shadow has

to do with Auroville’s uneasy relationship with surrounding villagers.

My general impression is that Aurovilians, in general, are chained to a wheel of

fire, hyper-sensitive to any criticism and live defensively as if their survival is in

jeopardy, while presenting an unrealistically positive image to the world. Many

seem to identify with their governing ideals or else they have fashioned a

collective persona largely based on them. There is, for instance, a stubborn

refusal by Aurovilians in positions of authority to rationally consider and openly

debate a challenge put to them by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet regarding the

measurements of the inner chamber as well the nature of the symbol at its

centre, Exhibit 2 being a rough illustration of the original image as envisioned by

the Mother and championed by Norelli-Bachelet. Whether she is ultimately right

or wrong in real and practical terms related to execution, her argument has an

overarching logic to that is worked out in considerable detail.

What may lie at the core of this shadow is insufficient awareness of the raison

d’être and goals of Auroville based on the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s vision.

Equally, if not more important, is full understanding of what is required of

individuals in order to bring Auroville into manifestation according to the Mother’s

teachings, at least according to each person’s psychological and spiritual

maturity. Psychologically, priority needs to be given to an inner turn and an

active concern about psychological matters, while potentially developing a living

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relationship with the heart-Self or psychic being for the spiritual regulation of

everyday living and decision-making. Otherwise, belief or faith in the Mother and

Sri Aurobindo and their vision, without such a living relationship, can easily breed

intolerance.

Whatever may be the full truth of any one of the individuals and situations

referred to above, what many people are beginning to become aware of is that

their idealism and idealistic expectations have been marred by their general level

of ignorance and the reality of the shadow. This can lead to considerable

cynicism or, as in the case of the choice of Barack Obama as president-elect of

the United States, unrealistic expectations in a time of darkness. In either case,

one does well to bear in mind and understand the implication of Sri Aurobindo’s

observation that ignorance along with the shadow are an essential aspect of

unfolding reality and without ignorance the “object of the manifestation of our

world would be impossible (ibid, p. 590).”

There is ignorance, error and falsehood; there is shadow, and, in order for the

divine to be realized in daily life, it is essential to undergo feeling experiences of

the shadow as one half of the reality of the immanent Divine, and to integrate its

essence into consciousness. The conscious working through of shadow aspects

is necessary in order for a divinely transformed world to be realized through the

concretization of the dynamic aspects of the Self. I am not aware of evidence to

indicate one way or the other whether any of the spiritual masters mentioned

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above have been able to do this although, on the surface, it typically does not

seem to be the case. The case of the Dalai Lama and Tibet is complex; although

there may be un-assimilated shadow related to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that

does not sufficiently take into account the fullness of the unfolding reality of the

world.

The psychologist C. G. Jung has also been the target of a litany of accusations,

much of which were not true, grossly exaggerated or taken out of context. He

has, for instance, been accused of being anti-Semitic and of identifying himself

as the Aryan Christ and a cult leader, in either case without any legitimate

foundation. He was, at times, accused of being irritable and inconsiderate and

being surrounded by sycophants. He was also accused of having more than one

romantic affair while being married. In fact, his relationship with Toni Wolf lasted

over twenty years, the excuse for which, his supporters argue, being that she

introduced him to the feminine psyche and the collective unconscious.

Whatever may be the truth of these allegations, Jung certainly had his human

imperfections. What is more important, however, is the fact that he took his life

and the need to integrate the shadow, both personal and collective, very

seriously. He has left an important legacy of having worked through shadow-

issues with integrity, something like with Sri Aurobindo if not at the same level,

for the sake of humanity. In a letter to the English Dominican, Victor White, Jung

writes: “As soon as a more honest and more complete consciousness beyond

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the collective has been established, Man is no more an end in himself, but

becomes an instrument for God, and this, he writes, “is really so, and no joke

about it.”, clearly referring to himself (Lammers and Cunningham, editors, 2008

p. 265). In another letter to White he writes: “I was often sorry to be a petra

scandali [stumbling block and source of indignation]. It is my fate however, not

my choice. I had to fulfill this unbecoming role. Things had to be moved in the

great crisis of our time. New wine needs new skins (ibid, p. 287).” The new

wine includes the fact that the manifest God-Image is not just Good, but a

complex of Opposites, including Good and Evil, and that, without coming to terms

with this reality, humans have not assimilated the shadow side and, by projecting

it, are their own worst enemy.

Sri Aurobindo: The Avatar, the Ignorance and the Transformation of the Shadow

Sri Aurobindo, the effectively self-professed Avatar of our time, along with the

Mother, the Para-Shakti, bring new skins for new wine in the most integral way

conceivable. What Jung writes about regarding being an instrument of God was

fulfilled in Sri Aurobindo since midway through his life. The full implications of the

incarnation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and what is involved in their yoga,

especially in terms of involvement in ignorance and the assimilation of the

essence of shadow values and character traits may, however, not be so easy to

appreciate. Indeed, the controversy around Peter Heehs’ recent book The Lives

of Sri Aurobindo published by University of Columbia Press in the United States,

suggests that he has hit a nerve that, I believe, is related to the question of the

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shadow and its integration. Even Sri Aurobindo, with his claim of having attained

unsurpassed perfection of being, has not escaped the Westerner’s present

concern for unveiling the Guru’s dark side. I have read several commentaries on

the book, along with a letter by Heehs defending his position and an interview

with him about the book.

Considerations on The Lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Nature of a valid Biography on Sri Aurobindo

When I first wrote this paper, I had not read Peter Heehs’ biography on Sri

Aurobindo, and I had no opinion on the appropriateness of what he wrote. I was

and still am interested in the reaction to it, the heated discussion and intense

animosity expressed towards Heehs and his dismissal from the Sri Aurobindo

Ashram, all of which tells me that not psychic or spiritual light, or mental reason,

but a fundamentalist shadow has been constellated. As Edward Edinger (as

reported in George R. Elder and Dianne D. Cordic, editors, 2009 p. 264),

remarks regarding a public attack on Jung and his disciples by Richard Noll,

malice “cannot be met in honest intellectual terms because it is cunningly

fraudulent and does not seek the truth.“ Attention only feeds the beast.”

According to the wisdom embodied in this statement, whatever is dark in Peter

Heehs’ biography, whether done intentionally or not, is best left alone, or, at least

not engaged with in polemical fervour. I have, in fact, since read the book and

have also formed some opinions on what he writes, which I will indicate further

on.

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In an interview in the August 2008 edition of Auroville Today, Heehs states that

he wanted to write a biography based on verifiable evidence and that he took an

academic approach, without writing in a reductionist way. He makes statements

in his book on Sri Aurobindo’s life that some people take exception to in the belief

that it detracts from his truth and the purity of his being to the point of being a

falsehood, or that, in any case, the statements are not conducive to a proper

devotional attitude of an ashramite of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram or of other

devotees elsewhere for that matter. According to my reading of the public

discourse on the internet that has come my way, Sri Aurobindo is described in a

pejorative way on several accounts. He is pictured as having had excessive

anger at one point in his life, and he admitted to having been a liar and a coward

in his youth in a talk recorded by A. B. Purani dated June 28, 1926 and cited on

p. 18 in Sri Aurobindo in England. Politically, he was not regarded as being an

effective builder and steady worker, nor an impressive orator. According to

Heehs, he also had romantic longings and got married to a much younger

woman according to the convention of the day in India for the usual reason of

desire of gratification. There was also recorded hand-holding with the Mother

observed by a well-respected disciple, opening up the suggestion of a romantic

relationship, which is highly unlikely. There is, in addition, the opinion that Sri

Aurobindo and his colleagues more or less excluded Muslim India in their

revolutionary activities and, consequently, they have to take some blame for the

partition of India in 1947 into two countries based on Muslim-Hindu religious

lines. The question was also raised on whether or not his spiritual experiences

21


were those of a schizophrenic, although dismissed given his vast creative output

and equanimity. Indeed, the heroic quality and scope of Sri Aurobindo’s

endeavour and the eloquent nature of his integral vision for world-cultural

renewal as well as his spiritual synthesis for integral yoga is that of the Avatar

and Prophet, not possible for lesser folk, even well-balanced and inspired

creative individuals, let alone people with fragmented personalities, or individuals

struggling to keep their personal sense of self intact.

According to the author’s own assessment of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, it

reveals a “much more lifelike” and “complex” figure of a man, who is open to

unforeseen currents of life than is found in previous biographies (Peter Heehs, as

reported in Debashish, 2008). The popularity and the clearly perceived merit of

the book by many readers notwithstanding, one could question the legitimacy of

a biography on Sri Aurobindo that mainly relies on outer events, no matter how

well researched and rigorously based on verifiable facts, as being too superficial.

Sri Aurobindo (1972a, frontispiece) himself rejects its relevance, noting that his

life “has not been on the surface for men to see and that “a man’s value does

not depend on” learning, fame “or what he does but on what he is and inwardly

becomes.” He also notes: “It would be only myself who could speak of my past

giving them their true form and significance.”

In fact, any genuine biography of such an intensely inner-directed multifaceted

personality, with an unprecedented level of consciousness and transformation of

22


being, would have to tie together the inner and outer worlds, giving precedence

to the inner life, synchronicity and the verifiable evidence of dreams, visions,

creative productions and significant world events. Given his intimate

identification with the consciousness of the Mother, it would ideally include

meaningful coincidences with experiences of the Mother, both inner and outer,

prior to her living in Pondicherry and afterwards, as well. As far as some of the

alleged shortcomings to Sri Aurobindo’s personality are concerned, for instance

in the political and revolutionary realm, what is really relevant is his finding his

true vocation and place as Avatar and living his swadharma [truth of being]

accordingly, and not any manifested weaknesses en route to that realization. His

revolutionary instinct was transformed from engagement in the liberation of India

from the British, to the harbinger, along with the Mother, of a world revolution in

consciousness as the present evolutionary necessity.

Given these observations a biography of Sri Aurobindo to be valid at all must

perforce acknowledge the magnitude of Sri Aurobindo’s [and the Mother’s]

consciousness and the fact that nobody can truly understand his life in its

wholeness and significance. No individuals, therefore, are competent to judge it

or the works he produced unless they have attained a similar level of

consciousness. To critically evaluate Sri Aurobindo’s work in any way is

therefore out of the question for a researcher of integrity. What can be done is

explication with examples, associations and amplifications of the body of work

that Sri Aurobindo [and the Mother] has bequeathed us as well as to organize the

23


material around his inner myth, where myth in this sense means patterns of

interests and behaviour based on the flow of archetypal realities.

Here it is interesting to note that by far the most unique and meaningful

biography on the life of C. G. Jung was written by Marie-Louise von Franz in

precisely this fashion, with profound respect and love accorded to Jung (George

R. Elder and Dianne D. Cordic, editors, 2009). In the Introduction to the book

entitled, C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time , she writes: “I have throughout this

book tried to follow the basic melody of Jung’s inner myth (Marie Louise-von

Franz, 1975, p. 14).” Following the poetic cadence of Sri Aurobindo’s inner myth

would be a challenge, but a sound basis for a valid biography of his life. It can

only be accomplished by a highly individualized [individuated] person, who writes

with conviction as well as having a genuine attitude of trust and loving loyalty

towards Sri Aurobindo [and the Mother] and their path.

In the case of Sri Aurobindo, the study of his magnum opus, Savitri, the Mother

(as reported in Sri Aurobindo 1989, frontispiece) calls “the supreme revelation of

Sri Aurobindo’s vision” would be an important source for determining his [and the

Mother’s] mythological ground. There is considerable evidence, anecdotal and

other, that the Mother is depicted as Savitri and Sri Aurobindo as Aswapaty in Sri

Aurobindo’s opus. R Y Deshpande (2009), for instance, relates the Mother and

Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga of Ascent to the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, as a

pre-cursor to the Yoga of Descent, which finds its beginnings in the Book of the

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Divine Mother. According to Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s

tapasya were eventually entirely concerned with the Yoga of Descent.

Heehs (2008, p. 378) acknowledges that Savitri is a “vast symbolic account of his

yoga” and a “ladder that helped him” to reach higher levels of being with greater

powers of poetic expression. He exemplifies the mythological nature of Savitri

with a description of the sunrise being “a symbol for the breaking of the

supramentral light into the obscurity of the inconscient (Ibid p. 378),” which can

be directly related to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s yoga. Moreover, he refers

to Aswapaty’s journey to “the kingdoms of the greater knowledge” and Savitri’s

journey through the “inner countries” to “her inmost soul” as being “certainly

based on his [Sri Aurobindo’s] and the Mother’s experiences (ibid, p. 398).”

However, he goes on to write “but the poem is a fictional creation” referring to a

statement made by Sri Aurobindo [as reported in ibid, p. 398) in response to a

query of whether or not the Mother’s former guide, Theon, was Aswapaty, in

reply to which Heehs reports him to have said: “the circumstances of this life

have nothing to do with” its plot (p. 398).” In fact Sri Aurobindo (2004, p.276)

actually writes: “Theon and the circumstances of this life have nothing to do with

it,” circumstantially colouring this statement significantly. By making such a

disastrous misreading and misinterpretation, the author abandons the most

profound source for understanding Sri Aurobindo’s life in terms of an inner myth,

despite having initially written as if he accepted its value.

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Sri Aurobindo (1970d, pp. 727, 728) writes that he “used Savitri as a means of

ascension, and that he rewrote it, apparently ten or twelve times, from different

levels of being. He regarded the poem as “a field of experimentation” to see

how much poetry could be creatively written to reflect one’s yogic consciousness.

Referring to the different drafts of the poem could therefore be interesting fodder

for understanding the development of Sri Aurobindo’s inner myth. So could

references to other key poems such as A God’s Labour.

With regard to the other requirement for a valid biography on Sri Aurobindo,

which is to avoid critical assessments and judgements and only to explain and

mediate his message, Heehs (2009, pp. 327, 414) falls short in that, on several

occasions, he makes critical judgements, for example that Sri Aurobindo didn’t

do enough to include the Muslims in the Indian Independence movement, that

“his prose and poetry seem dated today,” and “some of the works are

unbalanced,” including The Synthesis of Yoga. Moreover, although he writes

that it is impossible to judge the success or failure of the endeavour in “bringing

down a new principle into the “earth-consciousness,”” he leaves an ambiguous, if

not negative, impression, which does not harmonize with the evident nature of

the extraordinary transformative work done by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

who, by definition, must be taken together as a package (ibid).

In fact, Heehs writes that “To accept Sri Aurobindo as an avatar is necessarily a

matter of faith, and matters of faith quickly become matters of dogma (ibid, p.

26


413).” An individual with pistis, meaning fidelity or trustful loyalty, and writing with

conviction could easily find ample ammunition to argue otherwise, even while

admitting this shadow difficulty. Nor does he write convincingly about the

powerful spiritual and life-transforming effect Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have

on their disciples and their individualization [individuation], to which many people,

to this day, would attest. In one place, he writes somewhat disparagingly about

them, for instance, that experiences of the higher consciousness were

“comparatively infrequent” even for advanced sadhaks, and, as a rule, time was

spent in a lower consciousness involving slander, “jealousy,” in “sexual

daydreams,” with occasional experiences of the psychic fire in the heart or the

spiritual plane of oneness (ibid, pp. 372, 373). There does not seem to be any

recognition here of the natural rhythm of the psyche and the ways and byways of

the path of individualization (individuation] for the sake of conscious integration of

the shadow and other unconscious material. Heehs writes, rather, as if there

were intermittent inner experiences of value along with continuous indulgence.

The above observations on the nature of a valid biography on Sri Aurobindo

aside, and despite the objections on the nature of the spiritual shadow, given the

reality of Sri Aurobindo’s existence and his spiritual presence as well as his

extraordinary creative outpouring, the allegations about his shadow side seem

relatively insignificant. Moreover, according to Heehs’ personal admission, his

manner of presentation is a sop to the American publisher and academia and it’s,

what I would refer to as narrow, interest in external verifiable facts. Still, in light

of the goal of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, the apparent arduous path of self-discipline

27


he underwent himself, as well as the general image of Avatar he presents and

the esteem people hold of him, they loom large, at least for some. How could Sri

Aurobindo ever have had such negative qualities and character traits as

indicated above, or if he did, are they not irrelevant to his being as Avatar of

Truth? For some devotees, therefore, pointing them out and dwelling on them is

considered to be an outrageous act of infidelity and irreverence unworthy of a

disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, a challenge that needs to be examined.

Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar and the Transformation of the Shadow

As I point out above, the shadow is an essential aspect of the manifestation and

needs to be understood as an aspect of knowledge emerging out of ignorance

that, when consciously worked through, becomes assimilated to consciousness

and psychically/spiritually transformed accordingly. In fact Sri Aurobindo himself

notes that he began yoga about 1904, when he would have been 32 years of

age. Prior to that he lived a so-called normal life, about which he writes: “So long

as one is in the ordinary consciousness one lives the ordinary life” without any

sense of spiritual destiny (Sri Aurobindo, 1972a p. 75). This presumably means

that at that time, he was subjected to the collective mind and all its pressures like

anybody else, including getting married in the traditional Hindu fashion of his time

to a woman much younger than himself. His life included “some inward

depression in his adolescence,” a “period of agnostic denial” and “no urge

towards spirituality (ibid pp. 20, 90, 148).” Otherwise, he reports that he “had

always in him a considerable equanimity in his nature in face of the world and its

28


difficulties” and he did not take up Yoga as a “cure for sorrow” as there was none

to cure (ibid, p. 20). He also writes that “I was also noted in my earlier time

before yoga for the rareness of anger (ibid p. 158).” Psychologically, then, the

youthful Sri Aurobindo seems to have lived a normal life of his times with some

ups and downs, although endowed with an essentially sattwic nature, one based

on reason, balance and harmony.

All this suggests that, even if Sri Aurobindo had no personal karma to work

through, he was affected by the collective karma or normal collective conditions

and responded according to his naturally sattwic nature. When he took up Yoga,

his engagement with the prevailing ignorance and shadow, rather than

alleviating, became more intense. At that time, he evidently became engaged in

an encounter with the archetypal unconscious including the universal shadow.

Regarding anger, for instance, he writes “At a certain period of the yoga it rose in

me like a volcano and I had to take a long time eliminating it,” observing that it

“must have come from universal nature (ibid). One example of his explosive

anger during that period may be the experience witnessed by Hemendra Prasad

Ghose, and recorded by Heehs, who found him excessively insensitive to the

secretary of the publication the Bande Mataram, because his name was printed

as editor-in-chief, which he found exposed him with too much publicity. Sri

Aurobindo (1972a, p. 59) himself writes that “he spoke to the secretary pretty

harshly and had the insertion discontinued.”

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For anybody who believes the Avatar and his life is pristine and pure, reading

what Sri Aurobindo himself, effectively the self-declared Avatar of our times,

writes about the subject is of great value. To begin with, it is noteworthy that,

according to Sri Aurobindo (ibid, p. 149), “the Avatar’s life and actions are not

miracles.” “If they were,” he continues, “his existence would be perfectly useless,

a mere superfluous freak of Nature. He accepts the terrestrial conditions, he

uses means, he shows the way to humanity as well as helps it.” “Otherwise,” he

asks, “what is the use of him and why is he here?” Considering these words from

the point of view of this essay, the question then becomes: just how was Sri

Aurobindo affected by the terrestrial conditions and, ultimately what are the

implications for the practitioner of integral Yoga or the individual on the path of

individuation?

First of all, it is important to understand that Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana was not

done for himself but for the sake of humanity. He declares that his Yoga “is done

not for myself…. but precisely for the earth-consciousness to open a way for the

earth-consciousness to change (ibid, p. 147).” In order for this to be realized,

however, as the pathfinder, he, along with the Mother, was subjected to an

unfathomable amount of suffering and difficulties that had to be overcome. Thus,

he observes: “I have born every attack which human beings have borne,”

including “doubt and despair (ibid p. 154).” “We [Sri Aurobindo and the Mother]

have had,” he writes, sufferings and struggles to which yours is a mere child’s

play (ibid, p. 463).” He also describes his plunge into the physical as an

30


experience of “obscurity and inertia (ibid p. 159)”. There was even a time of

hopelessness and a sense of failure and he refers to a time long past “when I

was in a black depression and could not see my way out of a sense of

hopelessness and failure (ibid, p. 363).

The last stanza of Sri Aurobindo’s (ibid, p. 153) lovely poem, A God’s Labour,

captures the role of the Avatar and the reason for his incarnation in a feeling way:

“He who would bring the heavens here, Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear And tread the dolorous way.”Sri Aurobindo [and the Mother] had unparalleled feeling experiences of ignorance

and falsehood, the shadow-side of the manifest universe, gaining in knowledge

and strength, which enabled them to realize the divine unitary reality-in-

multiplicity, the Supermind, and to show the way for others. In addition to having

experiences of incomparable amounts of Light, Power and Bliss, the path of the

Avatar is equally burdensome and full of suffering.

“The Avatar is a special manifestation,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “…necessary when

a special work is to be done and in crisis of the evolution [ibid, p. 448].”

Furthermore, he writes: “We act as we do because we take it as a fact that the

Divine can manifest and is manifested in human body (ibid)” clearly linking his

mission to that of the Avatar, as he did elsewhere. As the Avatar and “Leader of

the Way”, he observes, he is commissioned to “bring down and represent and

embody the Divine, on the one hand, and “to represent too the ascending

31


element of humanity….,” on the other (ibid p. 464). The fact that Sri Aurobindo

[and the Mother] also represents humanity in its ascension means he must by

necessity fully experience all the human difficulties, resistances and

impossibilities on the path in order to be true guide for others.

It is easy to comprehend and accept the fact that the Avatar is required to suffer

the burden of humanity in order to help it ascend to a higher consciousness.

Despite that the question still remains on how to reconcile Sri Aurobindo’s

equation of the Avatar with the Divine Consciousness with his need to fully and

feelingly experience and assimilate the essence of ignorance and the shadow.

How can one reconcile that with the belief and inner experiences of him as the

Avatar and inner guide par excellence, as a luminous integral Divine

Consciousness that guides one towards spiritual light and truth and more integral

being?

Sri Aurobindo comes to our rescue with the following elucidation on the nature of

the Avatar. He writes: “There are two sides of the phenomenon of Avatarhood,

the Divine Consciousness and the instrumental personality. The Divine

Consciousness is Omnipotent but it has put forth the instrumental personality in

Nature under the conditions of Nature and it uses it according to the rules of the

game-though also sometimes to change the rules of the game (ibid p. 149).” It is

evident that Sri Aurobindo [and the Mother]’s human personality subjected itself

to the conditions of Life for the purpose of the transformation of Nature. This

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involved a descent “into clay”, taking on the burden of humanity and bringing in

the Light and Force of the Divine Consciousness for purposes of its

transformation. This resulted in the supramental transformation of Sri

Aurobindo’s human instrumentality and his integral perfection in terms of

completeness of being.

In the final analysis, Sri Aurobindo is the complete Person, aware of his Divine

Consciousness, having assimilated unparalleled amounts of ignorance and

shadow. This would not have been possible without his full identification with the

Mother, the Para-Shakti, which he once referred to as “Sri Aurobindo’s force (ibid

p. 458).” In fact he writes that “The Mother and Sri Aurobindo are completely

identified (ibid p. 459).” The significance of the Mother as the Divine Shakti is

that She is the Consciousness-Force of the Divine, the Creatrix of all that is,

which means the manifestation, including all the ignorance and the unconscious

shadow. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother together point the way for humanity in the

realization of a higher consciousness, which involves intense experiences of

ignorance and the shadow along with assimilation of the essence of shadow

values and character traits.

Without relationship and surrender to the Mother there is no transformation of

human nature and the earth-conditions. Moreover, what emerges in the psyche

of the Avatar, although of greater degree, is, in essence, identical to what

emerges in the psyche of others, given the objective reality of the collective

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unconscious and the spirit of the times; and the Avatar “comes to awaken that

(Sri Aurobindo 1970b, p. 412).” He comes inwardly, in other words, to “reveal

the divine nature in man”, which requires coming to terms with the inferior nature

in order for it to be transformed and/or surpassed, and to show the impersonal

and archetypal quality of “divine works” (Sri Aurobindo, 1970e, p. 166). The

forgoing suggests that the path of integral yoga is essentially the same for

everybody, even though opening to the psychic being and following its guidance

brings in a unique flavour to the life of each person. At the least, the path

involves full acceptance of both the Divine Masculine principle as well the Divine

Feminine, of Sri Aurobindo and surrender to the Divine Mother. The feminine

principle in itself brings Eros or relatedness and interrelationship, while the

masculine brings Logos or differentiation and discernment.

Avatarhood has meaning, according to Sri Aurobindo, “….only if it is part of the

world-arrangement that he should take upon himself the burden of humanity and

open the Way” for the transformation of earth-consciousness (ibid p. 463).

While admitting that sadhak’s succumbing to struggles, periods of darkness,

despair and suffering is part of the yogic tradition in all yogas, as it is in

Christianity, and he is personally aware of such states of mind, he observes that

it was not necessary for his disciples and that he and the Mother took on such a

burden in order to “ensure an easier path to others hereafter (ibid p. 465).” Given

Sri Aurobindo’s endearing sense of humour and his insistence that he does not

live in Himalayan austerity and grandeur as one of his disciples believed, is

34


reassuring. “O rubbish!” he writes, “I am austere and grand, grim and stern!

Every blasted thing I never was! I groan in un-Aurobindian despair when I hear

such things (ibid p. 354).” It takes genuine love and sympathy for humankind

and close touch with the earth to express this kind of genuine warmth and

humour.

That easier path, what Sri Aurobindo refers to as the sunlit path, involves quieting

the vital and the mind and accessing the psychic being, the inner light of the soul-

in-evolution, that carries his sadhaks [disciples] on a sure path of self-knowledge,

creative unfolding and ascending consciousness. Rather than emphasis on a dry

asceticism and struggle the psychic being encourages opening to new potential,

creative living, experiences of synchronicity and the joy of self-discovery, while

establishing a relationship to the higher Self. Essential to this path, observes Sri

Aurobindo, is trust in Divine Grace and the soul’s aspiration for “a higher truth, or

a higher life” that automatically calls down its intervention in the conduct of one’s

life (ibid p. 466).

Although he assures us that this is an easier path than relying on tapasya and

struggle and does not involve periods of darkness and despair like he

experienced, this surely does not mean that there is no need for the sadhak

[disciple] to enter feelingly into the ignorance, along with times of darkness and

despair, for the sake of assimilating the essence of shadow values. At least, in

my experience, this is decidedly the case and a necessity for the sake of

35


consciousness; and it seems to me inevitable, at least to the degree that it can

be humanly borne, even if it is immeasurably less than in the case of the Avatar.

Thus, as a matter of practical advice, Sri Aurobindo writes: “….first detachment is

the rule. To reach the freedom without the discipline and development is given to

few (ibid p. 467).” “Nobody,” he writes, “has found this Yoga a Grand Trunk

Road, neither X nor Y nor even myself or the Mother. All such ideas are a

romantic illusion (ibid p. 463).” Although affirming elsewhere that most of the

work of transformation is done by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the relative

ease of the sunlit path, here he includes others than himself and the Mother with

regard to the effort required on the path. Moreover, there is a need to assimilate

experiences of darkness as indicated in his poem, Savitri, which is full of well-

articulated psychological truths. Sri Aurobindo (1970c) writes:

“For even the radiant children of the gods To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.

None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.” Book 2, Canto 8, p. 227.This poignant poetic observation finds corroboration in C. G. Jung’s description

of the individuation process, where assimilation of the shadow [including

anima/animus] plays a prominent part. It is, in fact, psychologically important to

realize that the inferior aspect of the psyche is the portal to the Self, to both

“God” and the “devil”. In the final analysis, Jung recommends holding the

opposites, including good and evil, in creative tension in order to find the third

point of resolution in what he refers to as the transcendent function. The

transcendent function reconciles both the conscious [light] and unconscious

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[darkness], having characteristics of the psychic being [heart-Self] in relationship

with the higher Self.

It is noteworthy that there is, according to Jung, a need to hold the tension of

opposites over and over again with different life experiences, in order to access

the transcendent function. This would be equivalent to quieting the mind and

vital in order to attain the psychic being [heart-Self] according to the teachings of

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, although with a different emphasis. The apparent

difference in approach may be due to the more extraverted-thinking and highly

vital [life-oriented] and desire-laden nature of the Western psyche in relationship

to the more introverted-feeling tone of the Indian mind, less vitally inclined and

more apt to be more readily linked inwardly through feeling. Morality for Hindus

tends to be based more on feeling evaluation and vocationally appropriate

character traits and is, typically, less judgmental than has been the case for

Westerners.

From a psychological perspective, discerning and fully accepting the opposites

for the sake of finding a transcendent third position and not repressing or

suppressing either of the opposites is, in any case, essential for the attainment of

psychological and spiritual wholeness, whether one is from India or from the

West. The Mother (as recorded in Satprem, 1982) herself held this attitude in her

search for a reconciling third position between the opposites of life and death.

The modern and post-modern Indian, in any event, has been highly influenced by

the Western mind and is embracing a fuller vital [life-oriented] and desire-driven

37


life along with making moral distinctions in something of a Western-like fashion,

coloured by intricacies of cast and Indian social values.

Jung on the Errors of Christianity and their Rectification

Christianity was the main religious force during the recently ended Age of Pisces,

and its lingering blueprint, for better and for worse, still affects life, especially in

the West and amongst Westerners. Based on his inner experiences and

knowledge, C. G. Jung was critical of Christianity and made a serious attempt to

bring the healing waters of psychological understanding to its troubled spirit. It is

worthwhile to understand his viewpoint as, I believe, it can help us understand

our relationship to the image of Sri Aurobindo as Avatar and the yoga of Sri

Aurobindo and the Mother, and avoid the errors inherent in Christianity. I also

believe that it can help understand what forces lay behind the present

controversy over Peter Heehs’ biography on Sri Aurobindo.

Christ is the full sacrificial embodiment of the Divine in the material world, which

includes the mystery of the incarnation of divine love and the embrace of worldly

suffering. His mission includes accepting the entanglements of life and the need

to come to terms with the shadow. He brings love to a suffering humanity,

teaching his disciples to lead a life of self-sacrifice for the sake of a more

abundant life as well as enriching the lives of their fellow human beings. Jung

(1970, pp. 95, 96) writes about what “were felt to be defects in the Christ Image”

during the time of its flowering in the early Middle Ages; “an air too rarefied for

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human needs, too great a remoteness, a place left vacant in the human heart.

Men felt the absence of the “inner Christ” who belonged to every man.” “Christ’s

spirituality” writes Jung, “was too high and man’s naturalness was too low.”

This rarefied Christian spirit found compensation in alchemy, where, in the image

of the lapis [philosophorum] [the philosophers’ stone], the glorified flesh “fixed the

spirit in stone,” where, writes Jung, “the lapis may… be understood as a symbol

of the inner Christ, of God in man.” By the sixteenth century the alchemist

Khunrath understood the lapis theologically to be the filius macrocosmi, “Son of

the Great World”, in recognition that the source of the lapis derives from “those

border regions of the psyche that open out into the mystery of cosmic matter

(ibid).” By bringing the Christ image down to the material world at a macrocosmic

level, the experience of the inner Christ, otherwise felt to be too remote, became

accessible to everybody, at least through alchemy. In this way the lapis

complemented the common understanding of the remote Christ image. Sri

Aurobindo’s reassurance that he is not stern, grand and distant and his having

“descended into clay” should therefore be taken as valuable reminder of his

relatedness and proximity to the inner reaches of the human soul and his

transformative influence there at all levels of being including matter.

Yet, like Sri Aurobindo, Christ also suffered, took on the burden of humanity, and

told his disciples that they could take something like a sunlit path and connecting

to “grace and truth….through Jesus Christ (John 1:18).” Thus, he is recorded as

39


saying: “Shoulder my yoke [do yoga] and learn from me, for I am gentle and

humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke [yoga] is

easy and my burden light (Matthew 11:29, 30).” Over the course of time, it

became evident that people in the West generally did not take up their cross,

however light, but came to believe that all that was necessary was a moral life,

which became oppressive, along with faith in the redemptive power of Christ

(Clodagh Weldon, 2007).

Christ is reported to have taken on the burden of humankind in his suffering

which included his death and resurrection and the harrowing of Hell. He also

promised his apostles a visitation and baptism by the Holy Ghost, “when you will

receive power,” which is reported to have taken place on Pentecost (Acts: 1: 8).

However, he did not ask them to go through their own spiritual transformation but

charged them to spread the word as witness to Christ’s Resurrection, a decidedly

extraverted position. Access to grace through the Holy Ghost is today limited to

receiving spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues, the power to do healing, and

spreading the “truth of Christianity”, especially prevalent amongst Evangelical

and Pentecostal Christians, always with the same extraverted bias.

Jung believes that the Christian belief in a God “outside man” and beyond

humankind led to the lack of psychology sophistication and “turning away from

our psychic origins [origins in the psyche] (as reported in Clodagh Weldon, 2007

p. 78).” Christian salvation through faith, according to Jung, corresponds to faith

40


in a God external and transcendent to the psyche, while his Gnostic belief in

knowledge through certain experiences of a numinous nature, gives “pistis in the

Pauline sense”, “trustful loyalty” to the experience and its meaning, and locates

God within the psyche (ibid, p. 81) (Jung, as reported in Edward F. Edinger,

1999, p. 26). For this reason Jung enjoins his followers to turn within and take on

the burden of their own lives, which includes coming to terms with the shadow,

and not to passively believe it has already been done for them.

The warning here is that humans can too easily turn away from taking on their

own spiritual burden, given the belief that it has already been done for them,

along with an insufficient relationship to the psychic being [heart-Self] with its

feeling connection to the immanent God in the individual soul. Moreover the

extraverted bias of modern and post-modern minds undervalues the relevance of

the inner life in building a new integral and spiritually-centred society. Heedless

of the truth that, according to Jung (as reported in Lammers and Cunningham,

editors, 2008, p. 237), “man will be essentially God and God man,” an idea alien

to the Christian West, although firmly ensconced in the Hindu tradition, people

can easily overlook their higher destiny, the way to access it and its significance.

The sunlit path is not just passive but, in addition to forging a relationship to the

psychic being [heart-Self), there is a need for a triple movement involving

aspiration, rejection and surrender, as well as opening to the workings of Grace.

It also involves experiencing a feeling relationship with the shadow for the sake

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of the transformation of different levels of being. Relating to and differentiating

archetypal experiences through dreams and visions is an essential ingredient in

the work, where extraverted activities are increasingly related directly to inner

reality. The study of Jung and his school of psychology, which has extensively

researched these psychological phenomena, can be of considerable help in

coming to terms with this reality.

Jung is also critical of the Christian notion that God as Being is Summun Bonum,

All Good, and that evil is nothing but privatio boni, the deprivation of Good, non-

being without substance. This Christian concept actually derived from Platonic

and Aristotelian philosophy, where only Good has Being. This led to the other

Christian belief initiated by Basil the Great (330-379 CE) that omne bonum a

Deo, omni malum ab homine, all good from God, all evil from humankind,

emphasizing humankind’s sinful nature and its dubious role in the perpetuation of

evil acts. He countered these creedal beliefs, which he acknowledged may have

a metaphysical truth, at least in the case of privatio boni, with the need for a

feeling relationship to existential psychological reality. He argues that there is

both good and evil in the world and that, according to the laws of reason, both

have to be authored by a unitary paradoxical God beyond both good and evil,

which he argues are based on human judgements and relative. These beliefs,

Jung contends, over-emphasize human sinfulness and devalue human nature,

while undervaluing the inner divinity, as well as make God one-sidedly Good and

discounting evil as being without substance.

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Westerners have a particularly difficult time in acknowledging that what they refer

to as God or the God-image can be anything but Good and that He can have

anything to do with evil at all. However, it is clear that Sri Aurobindo and the

Mother hold beliefs similar to Jung’s. Sri Aurobindo argues that evil is a

psychological reality on the vital or life planes, and human judgement is relative

because of the surrounding ignorance. In his highly differentiated understanding,

he sees the author of good and evil as “the cosmic Self and Spirit pervading and

upholding the universe and its beings,” along with the original cosmic Force [the

Para-Shakti] that “moves all things” amongst which are “Powers of Knowledge or

Forces of the Light and Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of Darkness

(Sri Aurobindo, 1970a, p. 602).”

The psychological significance of such a reality is brought out in bold relief in a

well-known aphorism, where Sri Aurobindo (1972b, p. 107) writes: “If I can’t be

Rama, then I would be Ravana; for he is the dark side of Vishnu.” Rama was the

“Avatar of the sattwic mind,” the balanced, harmonious and luminous mind of

reason and moral ideals, and a warrior, whose purpose was to destroy Ravana

and establish civilised rule based on the virtues he embodied (Sri Aurobindo,

1970b, p. 413). Ravana was a demon King and Chief of the Rakshashas, a

rajasic being or magnified ego of vital desire, strength and power, and

considered to be the terrible embodiment of evil. Here Sri Aurobindo seems to

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be referring to the fact that he is open to assimilating the qualities embodied in

Ravana for the sake of fulfilling the Divine work.

In her more straight forward way, the Mother (2004, p. 81) says that “what we call

evil has its indispensable place in the whole.” Given the unitary nature of reality,

however, “It will not be felt as evil the moment one becomes conscious of That —

necessarily (ibid).” Just as Jung (as reported in Clodagh Weldon, 2007, p. 141)

argues that, psychologically, “good and evil are the equivalent moieties of a

logical judgement” she insists on the need to accept the experience of evil as one

half of the experience of life and that “what we call “evil” is as much necessary as

what we call “good” (The Mother, 2004 p. 77).” In psychological parlance this

means there is a need to shed light on the shadow in order to come to terms with

it and assimilate its essential meaning to consciousness. “Instead of repression

or rejecting it as something to be destroyed (it cannot be destroyed!),” observes

the Mother, “it has to be projected into the Light,” that is brought to

consciousness, which has the effect of transforming its nature (ibid, p. 77, 78).

Sri Aurobindo observes that although there are human vital, mental, moral and

religious judgements that are brought to bear to discern good from evil. In the

final analysis, however, true discernment comes from the psychic being (heart-

Self), which “insists on the distinction” as it “turns always toward Truth, Good and

Beauty” as “their opposites” error, wrong falsehood and evil….“have to be

outgrown” in its yearning for truth of being (1970a, p 610). Likewise, “In dealing

with darkness,” writes Jung (as recorded in Edinger, 1996, p. 56), “you have got

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to cling to the Good” where “His [God’s] goodness means grace and light and His

dark side the terrible temptation of power.” Increasing consciousness depends

on the differentiation of good and evil amongst other dualities, as without

differentiation there is no consciousness. Not only has the Christian position lead

to over-zealous moralizing and a moralistically determined universe, it represses

in-depth psychological reality and the truth of the need to ultimately feelingly

differentiate good and evil in experiential reality in order to advance spiritually.

The present tendency in the postmodern world to relativise good and evil along

with the abdication of ethical judgement is an intellectual reaction to the past

while ignoring or denying feeling values. The fact that in the Christian worldview

God is not connected to evil at all, while humankind is the proximate source of

evil, in Jung’s (as reported in Clodagh Weldon, 2007, p. 156) opinion, actually

encourages humans “with the seductive power of doing evil.” The Western

history of war and cultural and political domination of others, including

perpetrating a massive slave trade, as well as ecological insensitivity, is

testimony to this phenomenon. One way or another, there is a need to engage in

in-depth psychological introspection in order to realize the forces at work in

determining one’s attitudes, values and character traits. It is noteworthy in this

regard that Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga has a well developed psychological

system and that both he and the Mother insist on psychological self-scrutiny.

The Christian image of Christ partakes of the same one-sidedness as the image

of God as Summun Bonum. According to John 1: 14, “Christ was the Word

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….made flesh;” he was all light, stainless and pure, full of “grace and truth” and

without any darkness at all. Christ is of two natures, Divine and human, and

according to Catholic doctrine, although not dogma, even his human mind was

omniscient and “knew everything,” the logical consequences of his exemption

from original sin (White, as reported in Lammers and Cunningham, editors, 2008,

p. 228). The Christian confession of faith resulting from the Council of

Chalcedon (451CE) declares Jesus Christ to be “the same perfect in Godhead

and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man” without division (J. N.

D. Kelly, F. B. A., 2007, p. 339). Taking a more psychological view, Jung (as

reported in Lammers and Cunningham, editors, 2008, p. 233) observes that, as

Divine, “Christ knew his shadow-Satan-” from whom he separated at the outset

of his ministry. As human he was also to some degree conscious of his shadow,

he argues but, not altogether, and as Victor White (ibid, p. 228) observes, his

negative projections “possibly on the devil, certainly on the Pharisees” are

testimony to this. Indeed, Jesus himself is recorded as saying: “Why do you call

me good? No one is good but God alone (Luke 18:19), in answer to a wealthy

aristocrat who called him ‘Good Master’.”

According to Jung, as Divine, Christ is a symbol of the Self, but only the light

side. Separating the light from the dark in the image of the Self, in his opinion,

had the effect of “enabling man to become morally conscious (ibid, p. 235-36).”

Moreover in a time of darkness like today, there is a need to make decisions for

the Good the True and the Beautiful, for which Christian virtues are essential.

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Thus, according to Jung, Christ, although only representing the light half of the

archetype of the Self, remains a valid symbol for many people and should not be

dismissed out of hand. Although Christ alone is not a complete symbol of the

Self, missing the shadow side, Jung believes he “is still a valid symbol” despite

the fact that we are “living in the time of the splitting of the world and the

invalidation of Christ (ibid, p. 222).” “Only God himself,” writes Jung (ibid, p.

222), “can “invalidate” him through the Paraclete,” while acknowledging that a

few people have already been granted a vision of the future of the unity of the

Self in God.

Thus, in Jung’s (ibid, p. 220) view, the first step in the distant “goal of the union of

the Self in God” is suffering the “conflict with the shadow” as modeled in Christ

versus Satan. This is essential as assimilation and integration of the shadow

remains a goal that is hardly understood, let alone undertaken as an important

task by people on their spiritual journey today, let alone the bulk of humankind.

However, this Christ-like conflict, observes Jung (ibid, p. 220), eventually leads to

“peacemaking helped by the anima,” the feminine connecting principle, and

ultimately attaining the goal of “Oneness of the Holy Spirit” where the essence of

shadow values is integrated, transformed, and assimilated to consciousness. It is

noteworthy that without a living and conscious inner connection to the feminine

principle, attaining this level of consciousness is not possible.

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In fact, Jung believes that a better symbol than Christ alone on the Cross is the

image of Christ on the Cross between the two thieves, one ascending to heaven

and the other descending to Hell [Exhibit 1]. Here Christ is pictured as being

crucified between the opposites, one aspiring to spiritual realms, and the other

descending to the chthonic underworld. One can appreciate this image as an apt

symbol for the integration of the opposites, the experience of which, prior to

being reconciled in the Self, feels like a crucifixion between opposing views of

life. Jung also argues that the image of the near-dead Christ on a cross of dead

wood emphasises salvation after death. This is, in fact, Christianity’s principal

position, whether taken crudely and literally or symbolically, based on the

promise that the faithful will be resurrected body and soul and elevated to heaven

to enjoy eternal life at the Parousia, the Second Coming of Christ, when

Christians believe he will judge the living and the dead. Those judged wanting,

the ostensibly Christian but morally not up to the mark and everybody else,

unless they convert, will be condemned to eternal Hell. This view is of a piece

with Christianity’s extraverted emphasis, its tendency towards moralistic

fundamentalism, hyper concern for sin and guilt and its lack of any meaningful

psychology.

Jung argues that there is a need for integration of the devil and the feminine into

the Christian Trinitarian Godhead of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in order to

make it a quaternity and more complete. For this reason, he applauds the

dogmatic declaration in 1950 of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in “her corpus

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glorificationis, characterized by almost “corporal” distinctiveness” in what

amounts to a sacred marriage with Christ in the bridle chamber (ibid p. 160).

Jung believes that this raises Mary’s status to that of a goddess, while

representing the spiritualization of the feminine, including matter. This

development, from his point of view, opens the way for assimilation of shadow

values and the feminine and union of the Self in God. This is not a view accepted

by Catholic Christianity, which sees Mary as the first among the redeemed and

the “prototype of the human being sharing in the divine life of God (Clodagh

Weldon, 2007, p. 121)”. Although this understanding has its own value and

validity, becoming more conscious of the full psychological implications of the

Assumption of the Virgin Mary remains a future task for Christianity as it unfolds

towards a more comprehensive truth in keeping with the challenge of the times.

The present movement of the Roman Church to come into greater harmony with

Eastern Christendom suggests more introversion and openness to the mystical

psyche. Its interest in integrating psychology to its study of theology and

“psychic conversion”, under the influence of Jung and others, opens up the

possibility of a highly dogmatised religion to eventually become more the

proponent of a way of life, less reliant on dogma, doctrine and tradition (Robert

M. Doran S. J. , 2006, 119-245 passim). Should this ever happen, Christianity

would become less inclined to be moralistic and fundamentalist, closer to the

attitude of early Christians, although more psychologically sophisticated, whose

members referred to themselves as the people of the way.

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The Hindu Tradition: The Incarnation of the Divine and Divine Matter

Given the Westerner’s extraverted bias, history of repression and contemporary

felt-need to critically examine the apparent shadow of Gurus and spiritual leaders

of all stripes including Christian, it is not surprising that a spotlight would be

shone on Sri Aurobindo’s ‘human’ personality by an American writer, especially

in a book directed at an American audience. The fact that some Hindu Indians

are extremely upset at this is, at first glance, difficult to understand. After all, in

the Hindu tradition the Asura, the Hindu devil, is considered to be the dark side of

God or his dark brother, not necessarily completely antagonistic to God’s will,

unlike his Christian counterpart. For example in the Puranic Creation Myth, at

the Dawn of Time Vishnu brought order out of chaos by insisting on the

cooperation of both the demons and the gods. This indicates a more tolerant,

less repressed and more moderate attitude towards the shadow that one

traditionally finds in the West. Why then would Hindu disciples of Sri Aurobindo

and the Mother be so incensed by the suggestion that Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar

of our time, would have to come to terms with the shadow side of life, not as an

abstraction, but as an aspect of his own personality?

As a Westerner, I have always been favourably impressed with the spiritual and

religious tolerance of Hindu India, although, over time, I have become aware of a

growing Hindu fundamentalism, with which, in some measure, I can even

sympathise. From the point of view of this essay, however, my observation is

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that Hindu India is being challenged to come to terms with Western values and

comprehension of spiritual matters, which may, in the process, upset some of its

own dearly held beliefs as well. This challenge can potentially open up a

dialogue between born Hindus and Westerners that will enrich everybody’s

understanding.

Western seekers, relatively speaking, typically tend to be extraverted and

interested in the realization of the perfection of ideals in external life. At least it is

difficult for them to comprehend spirituality that does not promise perfection in

outward expression. The plethora of psychological systems that have been

developed in the West during the past 100+ years eloquently speaks to this

need. Hindu seekers rather tend to be naturally introverted and related more

directly to their interiority through the Self behind the heat or psychic being, while

being interested in finding perfection inwardly in their relationship to the Guru,

who speaks to them inwardly, and the Divine. Should there be perfection in

external expression, it comes as the result of a natural flow out of their inner

being, although it may still require a special tapas or discipline. Despite this, It is

worthy of note that contemporary India is now being influenced by the Western

psychology along with everything else Western in search for liberation from

excessively conservative beliefs and practices.

The relative extraversion of Christianity can be seen in the way Roman

Catholicism understands the nature of the priest and his role of mediation. He is

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considered to be fully human, although, during ritual occasions, for instance

during the Eucharist, a ritual re-enactment of Christ’s activities and deliberations

at the Last Supper, it is believed that he reflects the image of Christ, the High

Priest and Son of God, “to such an extent that he can speak Christ’s words as his

own…and offer up the sacrifice of Christ, being an image of Christ’s offering of

Himself to the Father (James Colin Daly O’Rourke, 2002, p. 279).” Although the

priest/bishop shares a likeness to Christ and embodies his presence, he is

considered to be human and not himself divine. Perhaps it is better explained by

saying that during ritual occasions the priest assumes a role “as if” he were

Christ, while remaining human. The Protestant position is even more extraverted

and puts greater emphasis on the person of Jesus and the personality and

humanness of the priest. In fact, today, many Westerners have a difficult time

accepting the fact that Jesus Christ was actually an incarnation of the Son of God

at all, dispensing with any inner connection to religious or spiritual practice.

The contents of the Eucharist itself, which to the naked eye consists of bread and

wine, is in the Roman Catholic tradition, transformed during the ritual of the mass

into the actual body and blood of Christ. According to Aristotelian reasoning, the

accidents of the bread and wine continue to exist, but the essential nature of the

substance becomes the body of blood of Christ, God the Son, through the ritual

act. In the more extraverted Christian Protestant tradition, the bread and wine is

considered to only “symbolically” represent the body and blood of Christ. One

could say that in the Roman Catholic tradition, the essential nature of the

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Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ, is presented “as if” it were bread, a

position that is actually close to the traditional Hindu tradition although with a

difference. Amongst the Śrīvaishnavites of South India, for instance, the arcā or

sacred image is a full or partial manifestation of God while the material is ritually

transformed into divine matter [suddha sattwa]. The image or statue takes on a

likeness of the god, āỊvār, acāryā, the goddess Ãntāl/ Śrī or Vishnu in such a way

as to render it accessible to human devotees. They are regarded “as if” material

or human while being essentially divine. In sharp contrast and in an opposite

way, apart from the eucharist, sacred images of Christ or saints in the Roman

Catholic tradition are understood to be material embodiments that reflect the

prototype “as if” divine.

South Indian Śrīvaisnavism, with its āỊvārs, acāryās and avatāras, very clearly

indicates the extent to which the Hindu tradition reflects interiority relative to

Western Christianity. To begin with, in Christianity there has only been one

incarnation of the Divine in Christ, while in Hinduism there have been multiple

incarnations of the Divine, either full or partial. This in itself arguably suggests a

greater inner awareness, interiority and openness to incarnations of the Divine or

of the gods/goddesses and spiritual realization in India than in the West. In

psychological terms, this means that, although there is a growing population of

Westernized Indians, Indians in general live in closer proximity to the archetypal

and instinctual psyche than Westerners, even if or when unconsciously.

Westerners typically tend to apprehend the world and organize it through

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scientific reason and/or the commercially oriented mind. The West, of course, is

not without its own figures of evolutionary importance in addition to Christ, with its

saints, mystics, prophets and creative heroes who often, although not always,

emphasise ethical conduct and outer realization, again with a comparatively

extraverted bias.

A devotional religious path along with the notion of āỊvārs, 12 poet-saints

according to Śrīvaishnavite belief, began in South India around 5 C. E.

According to tradition, the āỊvārs are actually divine beings, “incarnations of the

weapons, adornments or companions of Vishnu (ibid, p. 160).” Alternatively,

they are considered to be one of the five forms or attributes of the Saguna

Brahman, God’s essential qualitative nature, truth, knowledge, bliss, infinity and

purity. They are generally considered to be “partial incarnations [amśas]” of God

embodied with a mission to make the sacred teachings of the Vedas accessible

to the common person by revealing it in the vernacular tongue (ibid, p. 142). As

a part of God they are inseparable form Him, yet they are psychologically distinct

as part to the whole. Their body is considered to be composed of suddha sattva,

divine matter, and not ordinary matter, which is the result of karma.

In some cases they are considered to be full Avatars of Vishnu, thus manifesting

the full presence of the Divine without any distinction from Him. In other cases

the āỊvārs are not clearly described as divine beings although in some

understanding, they are humans whose body has been taken possession of by

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the Divine, and transformed into the suddha sattva or divine matter, becoming

God’s own body. In general, their human characteristics are believed to be only

an appearance that allows them to become accessible to the devotee, as their

incarnate body consists of divine substance. In a way that is opposite to the

Christian position then, where the priest is fully human who, in ritual occasions,

acts “as if” he were Christ, the āỊvār is understood to be a full or partial

manifestation of God who acts “as if” he were human.

Inasmuch as Christian saints partake in the life of Christ, they are considered to

be living images of Christ manifesting his presence, yet fully human. Like

priests/bishops during ritual acts, they are regarded to act in various ways and

times to mediate his presence, “as if” they were Christ. In addition they are

considered to intercede on behalf of humanity during their life and after death. In

the Śrīvaishnavite community the acāryā acts as mediator of divine grace and

instructor on the path of liberation for his devotees. Like the āỊvārs, the acāryās

are considered to be incarnations of divine beings or divine objects, while

existing in a seamless relationship with the Divine. Disciples believe they

incarnate at will for the sake of helping humanity, and similar to the āỊvārs, they

believe the acāryā appear “as if” human in order to be humanly accessible.

My purpose in comparing the Hindu and Christian perspectives is to indicate the

extreme divergence between the way Hindu Indians and Western Christians

relate to the Divine and the world. I believe that this difference is psychologically

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present regardless of whether or not one is a practicing Christian or Hindu, but

that it is imprinted in the genes and the blood, bones and sinews of our individual

and collective lives, and the way we perceive and relate to the world. Given the

greater extraversion of the Western psyche, especially American, it is no wonder

that emphasis is placed on external behaviour and psychological questions of

perfection, and there is interest in and concern about the shadow side of reality

including in the lives of Gurus. Given Hindu India’s greater natural propensity to

interiority and its long conscious spiritual tradition that reflects this value, which

often includes the spiritual goal of liberation from the entanglements of life and

the realization of non-dual reality, it is perfectly understandable that Hindu-raised

devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would be upset with the extraverted

bias, especially when it is directed towards their Guru, and especially when he is

perceived as the self-declared Avatar of our times.

Further support for the Hindu-based position, it seems to me, comes from the

fact that inner experiences of Sri Aurobindo [and the Mother], as is no doubt also

true of other Gurus for Hindus and Westerners alike, are typically perceived as

being of psychopompic divine beings of light, wisdom, love and power and that

they are in the business of conquering forces of darkness. In fact, they attempt

to come to terms with Asuras and other demonic forces, preferably through their

conversion rather than conquest.

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Healing would involve Westerners and Hindu devotees alike appreciating their

own natural bias and its deficiency as well as better understanding the other’s

position and reasoning. This could open a fruitful dialogue leading to greater

understanding for everybody involved, on whatever side of the issue. In the final

analysis Westerners and Indians are both on the same path, even if their points

of departure differ radically.

Sri Aurobindo’s view on the incarnation of the Divine as avatar is not quite the

same as that held by the Śrīvaishnavite tradition. He also recognizes vibhutis as

aspects, powers and qualities of the Divine, which incarnate in different fields of

endeavour to foster the evolution of humanity, often without being aware of their

divinity (The Mother, 2003a). Regarding the Mother and himself he writes that

“we take it as a fact that the Divine can manifest and is manifested in human

body (Sri Aurobindo, 1972a, p. 448).” There is no question here of either of a

body consisting of divine matter [suddha sattva] or “as if” human for the sake of

being humanly accessible, but rather, incarnation in order to effect a great work

involving humanity for the sake of the Divine. In fact, he notes that it was a long

and arduous spiritual process for him to realize the “integral and absolute”

transformation of “the surface psychological and outer life” on both the higher

levels of nature down through ordinary mental, vital and physical natures to the

subconcience and inconscience (ibid, p. 86). Integral transformation includes a

divinized body, but it is not a given and required intense sadhana and time for it

to be achieved.

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Sri Aurobindo [and the Mother]: The Symbolic Reality for Integral Consciousness

In Hindu India, God has always believed to have a dark brother in the Asura and

there has never been such a radical split between good and evil as in the

Christian West. The feminine aspect of the Godhead has also been considered

to be equally as important as the masculine side. Moreover, in the Vedas and

Upanishads and now with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, with more explicit

realization of the full consequences in the material world, the Supermind or Truth

mind brings in the fourth principle to complete the Hindu trinity of Sat Chit-Shakti

Ananda [Existence Consciousness-Force Bliss]. All is not perfect in

contemporary India either, however, as, in practice, women have not had equal

access to worldly achievement as men, although this is, however reluctantly,

changing, and moral differentiation is less than adequately lived as exemplified

by the huge amount of corruption in India from top to bottom of the social

network. There is also a long history of Hindu-Muslim conflict and, now, Hindu

Nationalism with a disturbing fundamentalist aspect that needs to be watched

with a close eye.

The invalidation of the Christ symbol and its replacement with a symbolic reality

that fits the present age, which is limping towards a unitary world of mulitplicity-

in-Oneness, exists in the symbol of Sri Aurobindo as Avatar in identification with

the Mother as Para-Shakti. As Avatar, Sri Aurobindo is wholly the Divine

Consciousness that was embodied in his human instrumentality, which also

made him wholly human and directly related to humans and the human condition.

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Significantly, unlike in the Christian conception of Christ, who is without shadow

in both his Divine and human natures, as human, Sri Aurobindo experienced

ignorance and shadow in an unprecedented way, integrating and effecting a

transformation in the essence of shadow values and his relationship to

ignorance. He not only knew the Shadow but brought down the Divine Light and

Force into nature for purposes of engendering its transformation and for the

realization of the truth of Divine multiplicity-in-Oneness. He convincingly claims

to have realized this state of consciousness at the spiritual and supramental

levels of being (Sri Aurobindo, 1972a). The Mother joined him in this enterprise

to the point of their consciousness becoming identified, and she gives equally

strong evidence of having experienced a supramental transformation of the cells

(Satprem, 1982).

According to Sri Aurobindo’s (1970e, p. 342) own description, the Avatar is “that

Wonderful who is beyond expression of any kind…..as well as “the one divine

efficient cause of all ...... becoming.” Elsewhere he writes, “In the Avatar, the

divinely-born Man, the real substance shines through the coating……..the vision

is that of the secret Godhead, and it breaks through the seals of the assumed

human nature; the sign of the Godhead, an inner soul sign (Sri Aurobindo, 1997,

p. 158, 159).” Yet, unlike in the traditional Hindu view where the Avatar is a priori

embodied in divine matter, there is a need for the inner divinity to lay hold of the

human part and transform it. Inasmuch as Sri Aurobindo’s symbolic image

consists of the Light of Divine Consciousness as well as his human

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instrumentality, there is an exceptionally high degree of integration, assimilation

and transformation of the Shadow. With the Mother there is also a complete

integration of the Divine Feminine, the Para-Shakti as Consciousness-Force,

bringing in relational values, including in the material world, which foretells the

eventual transformation of humanity. In fact they both attained a level of

consciousness where all conceivable contraries were reconciled in the

supramental light. Those who feel the need to hold only to the perfection of Sri

Aurobindo and his Divine Light as Avatar as well as the Mother’s Consciousness

and Force of transformation, may have a difficult time relating to Sri Aurobindo’s

[and the Mother’s] human side along with its human weaknesses that needed to

undergo transformation. They may still need to cling to the Light and separate

themselves from the becoming and its shadow as Jung believes is still necessary

for the bulk of humankind.

Sri Aurobindo is not fazed by the Guru’s human defects arguing that what is

important is the “psychic opening, confidence and surrender” of the disciple. In

fact he himself writes that “The Guru is the channel or the representative or the

manifestation of the Divine, according to the measure of his personality or his

attainment; but whatever he is, it is to the Divine that one opens in opening to

him (Sri Aurobindo (1972a, p. 80).” One opens to the Divine in the spiritual

master, but a fuller appreciation of the reality of Sri Aurobindo [and the Mother]

and his personality and attainment, in my estimation, essential psychologically, -

that is concerning the transformation of personality, also fully recognizes the play

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of the shadow and its transformation in his human psyche. That gives a more

complete symbolic image of the spiritual journey required today, which involves

the need for the assimilation and transformation of the essence of shadow values

and the realization of the unity of the psyche. It is a symbolic image of the path

we all need to follow. Although with the incarnation, the Avatar divinely

dominates human nature, human nature is such that it represses its divinity until

a decisive change takes place involving gradual infusion of the Godhead,

including assimilation of its shadow values. In fact, from a psychological

perspective, the image seen in inner vision and originally proposed by the Mother

(1981), although later changed, to be contained at the centre of the inner

chamber of the Matrimandir is, in my judgement, a perfect symbol for humankind

in this Age of realization of the Self in God and integral consciousness [Exhibit 2].

It involves the Mother’s symbol supporting four orange-gold images of Sri

Aurobindo’s symbol, each carved in stone, one on each side of a square

pedestal of stone. Specifically, the pedestal rests on top of the central circle and

the four innermost petals of the Mother’s symbol, symbolizing the Divine

consciousness, and the four principal powers of the Mother, Mahashwari

[Wisdom], Mahakali [Strength], Mahalakshmi [Harmony and Beauty] and

Mahaswaraswati [Perfection in detail], according to Sri Aurobindo’s

understanding (The Mother, 1982). Both the square and the four have the same

symbolic significance, perfection in the sense of wholeness and realization of the

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Divine in the material world, here specifically related to and supported by the four

main aspects of the Mother. One is reminded of the alchemical pursuit of fixing

the spirit in stone as a compensation for a too ethereal Christ, while symbolizing

the God within. To bring this symbol to an even greater relevance, in the

Mother’s vision, the pedestal supports a translucent globe, receiving a ray of light

from above. This seems to symbolize the human individual soul open and

receptive to Grace from above, as Sri Aurobindo declares is essential to follow

the sunlit path. Although she subsequently blesses an alternative conceptual

image, It is particularly relevant that the Mother (1981, p. 33), initially insists that

“it is not transparent but translucent,” which emphasises the quality of receptivity,

infusion and absorption.

***

The controversy set off by Peter Heehs’ book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, in

some degree cuts to the question of the nature of the Avatar and the place of

ignorance and shadow in his life. As I mentioned above, I initially had no opinion

on the validity of Heehs’ book, especially with regard to what he writes about the

way Sri Aurobindo lived his shadow side, either before he began doing yoga or

after. After reading the book, despite my reservations, I admit to having

appreciated the apparent dedication of the author and much of its content,

especially regarding Sri Aurobindo’s life prior to 1914. I have come to the

conclusion, nonetheless, that The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is too often reductive

and far from adequate for two main reasons, notably Heehs’ presumptuous

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critical judgements on both Sri Aurobindo’s life and works and, secondly, he

essentially ignores Sri Aurobindo’s life as an inner myth. I have the feeling that

not only did the author capitulate to American academia, but that he personally

writes without conviction. The answer to the challenge of Peter Heehs’

biography of Sri Aurobindo is not polemical debate, however, but a more valid

biography, - one, written by a true child of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, which

portrays Sri Aurobindo’s [and the Mother’s] life as an inner myth, while not going

beyond mediation and explication of his powerful and integral teachings.

Outside of these considerations, my interest is mainly on the image of Sri

Aurobindo as Avatar including his human instrumentality, and the psychological

implications. As he himself attests, prior to doing yoga he lived an ordinary life,

with all that implies, and after he started doing yoga, he had intense experiences

of ignorance and the archetypal shadow, which evidently led to assimilation and

transformation of the essence of shadow values and character traits in a

consciousness of Divine multiplicity-in-Oneness. From a psychological

perspective, appreciating Sri Aurobindo as Avatar with both Divine

Consciousness and a spiritually and supramentally transformed human

instrumentality is, in my opinion, superior to one that understands Sri Aurobindo

as only consisting of the Divine Light unblemished by his engagement with the

human condition.

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Westerners, in particular, need to understand the lingering influence of the

Christian blueprint in their psyches, even if they have consciously rejected

Christianity. The Christian influence has no psychological ground, and tends to

see the Avatar [or Messiah] as all-Light and only Good, without ever having had

any imperfections or need for personality transformation. There is also a

tendency to emphasise the extraverted world, without adequately realizing that

the outer world corresponds to the world within, and consciously building any

new world community must begin with the inner transformation of individuals.

Moreover, its quality of realization depends on the level of individuation and

spiritual realization of its individual member-citizens. Thus, according to Sri

Aurobindo (1972b, p. 158) “the outer change in the world is only possible if and

when that inner transmutation is effected and extends itself.” Although the

Mother and Sri Aurobindo may have already done the most important work,

those following their path can still learn from their example, at least insofar as

turning within with intense aspiration for truth, and participating in the conscious

assimilation and integration of both the shadow and the light.

In this regard, it is noteworthy that the Mother (1981, p. 28) does not encourage

worship, which she feels is expressed to her by some people out of “laziness to

change.” She writes: “it is much better to become than to worship,” which

requires a dynamic psychological attitude and not just passive meditation (ibid, p.

27). I don’t take this to mean that one shouldn’t have feelings of gratitude

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towards Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for what they have accomplished for each

of us and the earth-nature, as well as devotion and love for them, but that what is

psychologically important is each person’s individuation; finding and fulfilling

one’s uniqueness through psychic, spiritual and ultimately supramental

transformation, and that involves integrity and conscious involvement in time and

the becoming.

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Sri Aurobindo (1970d). Savitri: A legend and a Symbol: Parts two and three. Birth Centenary Library. Popular Edition. Volume 29. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. pp. 448, 447-450 passim, 727, 728.

Sri Aurobindo (1970e). Essays on the gita. Birth Centenary Library. Popular Edition. Volume 13. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. pp. 166, 342.

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Ashram. frontispiece, pp. 20, 59, 75, 80, 85, 90, 128, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 158, 159, 163, 354, 363, 448, 458, 459, 463, 464, 465, passim.

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of Religious Studies: McGill University. Unpublished Doctoral thesis. pp. 160, 279.

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EXHIBIT 1

CHRIST CRUCIFIED BETWEEN TWO THIEVES: ONE ASCENDING TO HEAVEN, THE OTHER DESCENDING TO HELL: SYMBOL FOR

INTEGRATION OF THE OPPOSITES

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EXHIBIT 2

SRI AUROBINDO AND THE MOTHER AND THE DESCENT OF GRACE TO THE RECEPTIVE INDIVIDUAL SOUL [AT THE CENTRE OF THE INNER

CHAMBER]: SYMBOL FOR INTEGRAL CONSCIOUSNESS

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Sri Aurobindo: Avatar, Shadow 72

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