Languaging Trails of Sound and Light

JOHN ROBERT CORNELL

Language is breath—specially formed bursts of air from the lungs. Like breathing, language is mostly automatic. Word sounds come sliding and tripping out, bypassing reflection about grammar or pronunciation. Writing cascades down the arm, hand, and pen without thinking out each curve and dot of written shapes.

Language’s variety dazzles. Casual, it barely makes a dent. Powerful and focused, it can rearrange our inner furniture. Words can be careful, as in “full of caring,” or as in walking a precarious line between dangerous edges. Flaming emotion rides words like stampeding horses. Inspired speech may flow like a river, perhaps from an unnamed and unknown spring. Are words then an expression, a symbol and structure pointing to something else? Or, even living story-beings with their own consciousness, substance, and direction?

Think of stranger-talk in the supermarket waiting line, intimate words in bed or in the moments before death or after birth, bureaucratic language, pet talk, baby talk, advertising language, political rhetoric, prophetic proclamation, storytelling, sign language, body language, poetry, scripture, mantra, music as language and language as music, software languages, dialoging with the wind and trees to find the way home in the north woods, the dance of bees …

Language reflecting about itself may already be problematic. More problematic is using a particular language to talk about language in general, as we will see. But perhaps language is more than flexible, is richer than we realize.

Let’s attend to this automaton language for a while. Something so effortlessly out of view is likely to hide some surprises. What can we gather from stories and reflection, maybe even intuition, about its mystery?

Language and Light

Susan Schaller stumbled onto American Sign Language (ASL) when she was 17 at a Cal State University class called Visual Poetry.[1] The class was so exuberant, so celebratory, that she fell in love with ASL, its beauty, its richness and subtlety, even though she had full hearing in both ears. After she graduated from college, a job counselor sent her to a community college to translate English into ASL for the deaf in a mixed class of deaf and hearing students.

The class was so chaotic on her first day that she was about to leave when she noticed a young man wedged alone in a corner of the room, arms folded over his chest. He looked bewildered and frightened. At the same time he was watching, intently studying the faces crowded around the class instructor as if he was trying to decipher what those people, moving their lips and gesturing, were doing.

Susan paused. There was something about this frightened man—a look of intelligence mixed with determination and fear …

She walked up to him and signed, “Hello, I’m Susan.”

Still looking worried, he hesitatingly and clumsily signed back to her, “Hello, I’m Susan.”

Wait. What?

She tried again. Same thing. He was copying her gestures instead of conversing. He didn’t seem to know what the signing meant. Maybe he didn’t know what a conversation was.

After a while she realized that he had neither spoken nor visual (sign) language. An adult in his late 20s, he was without language! How could this be in Los Angeles in the twentieth century? Probably he had managed to survive in life by copying what other people did. And he was completely deaf, so he did not know that sound even existed.

She was only 22 and not yet an expert on anything, but something in her wanted to help.

For the next four intense months the two met regularly on weekdays—she trying to teach American Sign Language to an adult who had never had any language at all. How does one do that? Many experts had said it couldn’t be done. She didn’t know if he would keep coming back to their sessions, and sometimes she wondered if she would.

One evening she had an idea: She would mime both sides of an interaction between a language teacher and a student without language instead of trying to address the man directly. At their next meeting she placed two chairs facing each other. She sat in one chair and pantomimed a teacher signing “cat” in ASL with visual props. Then she switched to the other chair and dramatized a student’s responses, from uncomprehending to ahah. Back and forth, back and forth. The young man, whose name was Ildefonso, watched from the side. This went on all week.

She remembers vividly the moment when the first breakthrough happened. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him suddenly sit up in his chair, rigid, face flushed. He began pointing frantically at different things in the room and then looking to her to sign each one. After some minutes of this he put his head down on the table and began to weep uncontrollably.

What he got, that first time, was that things have names! A world opened up to Ildefonso that he had never seen before: names, and a magical way of sharing with other people from which he had been excluded his whole life. And this was just the beginning. There was much more to learn. Languages are immensely complicated when you start from scratch at 28 years old. Besides individual objects, there are named qualities like color that are objects only in the mind. There are names for actions, not just objects. Abstract concepts like time have names. There are correct and incorrect ways—grammar—of putting these elements together into simple and then complex sentences. Written words require another leap of understanding.

Susan and Ildefonso worked together for four months, slow tedious progress mixed with sudden illuminations and a gradual equalization of their relationship, as Ildefonso began to ask for more of what he wanted to know instead of Susan trying to guess or intuit what should be next for him.

Then Susan moved on to other parts of her life, but she managed to get in touch with him again after some years. By then he had learned to communicate effectively with ASL. And she wanted to know what that first moment of discovery was like for him. “It was light!” he told her, “before was darkness, after there was light.”

It was light.

It was a whole new magical power that was opening up in him.

Nothing can be taught,[2] Sri Aurobindo wrote. But the teacher can help prepare the ground, the context, for something to surface in the student that was already there, but closed. Perhaps words and signs and personal relationships help create a context for something more fundamental: light, insight, meaning, an opening from within or above.

So it appears that we are also tracking intuition of some kind when we speak about language.

Shaped Earth

Once I asked my mother what special moments stood out from her years of teaching. She had taught for decades, and continued tutoring individuals after she retired from the classroom.

She described tutoring a boy, eight or nine years old, who could speak but could not read or write. All of his classmates were swimming and frolicking in the playgrounds of reading; he was alone on dry land. He couldn’t make out the relationship between the funny black marks on the paper and the words they signified.

She remembered the moment when the connection came for him. He stopped breathing. Then slowly he whispered, “So that’s how they do it!”

I wonder if his ah ha! was also an influx of light.

The connection handed him a radical new power: access to all of the libraries of the world, literatures, sciences, fantasy, humor, philosophy, drama, religion. If spoken language opens one up to the power of shaped air (breath) formed momentarily by the vocal organs of a group of humans, written language opens the door to shaped earth (material) formed in innumerable ways that can last for thousands of years.

Early writing, like early spoken language, was magic. The magic remains visible to us in great works of literature or certain moments of speech. Spelling is a part of that magic, as we might guess from the root meaning of the word, as in “cast a spell.” Even casual conversation casts nets of meaning back and forth. Considered in this way, a blessing might be called “casting a form of light.” And a vast epic poem like Savitri might be called “casting an emerging worldview of superconscious light.”

Anna and Spirit

The owners of Jukani Wildlife Sanctuary in South Africa were desperate for help with a big black leopard that they had recently received from a European zoo. The sanctuary owners were skeptical that any human could reach this snarling, unmanageable “Diablo,” as they called him; but a filmmaker who was recording segments of a film about Anna Breytenbach convinced them to call her.

The Animal Communicator[3] shows Anna sitting quietly and respectfully in view of the leopard. He becomes relaxed and attentive even the first time she approaches his shelter at the sanctuary. During that sitting she learns that he doesn’t like the disrespect implied in the name Diablo and that he will tolerate no pressure to perform for or interact with humans. The caretakers at the sanctuary could hardly believe the change in his demeanor after Anna assured him that there would be no pressure to perform and that they would called him “Spirit” in the future in recognition of his sheer beauty and power.

Anna Breytenbach[4] is a professional animal communicator from Cape Town, South Africa. She calls her work interspecies communication, a two-way “energetic transference of direct knowing and of shared experience.”[5] She finds this kind of communication accessible with any species and even with rocks and other “inanimate” matter.

In an interview she explains that it “really is live, clear and present two-way communication between myself and the animal in question,”[6] and not about learning any fancy technique. The essential preparation is cleaning out one’s internal baggage and then continuing to clean regularly. It’s about letting the ego personality recede, and being deeply present, receptive, and intentional. She describes how the “limbic bathing” she receives may eventually reach some word structures in her brain to allow the experience to form itself into words.

Perhaps here we are looking at Illdefonso’s “light” in a subtle form initially without words. We can consider intention, receptivity, response as shapes of energy felt at a more subliminal level.  

But is this communication really language? Or is it telepathy or intuition? These questions seem to call for some kind of definition: What is language really? We need to pin down what we are talking about.

Let’s acknowledge the desire for definition … but also step back from this particular runway until later. Perhaps the impulse to define is also part of the automatism of a way of thinking and speaking.

Tell My Story

Jane Rosen is a celebrated sculptor and visual artist who started her artistic career in New York City. Once on a visit to Northern California, she noticed a red-tailed hawk flying over head. As she looked up at the hawk, she heard the clear words, “Tell my story!” That experience, those words, launched her life in a new direction. Eventually, she settled on the West Coast and started sculpting hawks from marble. You can see examples of her work here.[7]

One morning she awoke to her dogs barking in another room of her countryside ranch south of San Francisco, California.[8] The barking was distinctive, not aggressive or fearful, but more like “what the heck?” She got up and found them focused at a safe distance on a big black raven under a chair at the dining room table. Rosen surmised the raven was a mom looking for food. She looked at the raven, and the raven looked at her and blinked. She got a clear message from the bird: “I’m in a fix here. I don’t know how I got under this chair, and you have two big dogs there.” Rosen told the visitor that she would get her outside if she did not try to peck or claw her. As a test, she bent down and gently stroked the bird’s back. Rosen then picked her up and cradled her in her arms. The raven folded her claws under her body and put her beak down into her chest; she was completely still. Rosen carried the raven outside and put her on the porch picnic table. The raven turned, looked at her, and nodded.

There seems to be an equality in her actions as Jane Rosen tells this story. She and this wild raven became friends, the raven sometimes coming back to the porch for a visit.

Her communications go beyond animals and plants. The marble itself speaks to her sometimes as she works. In one interview she described chiseling the beak of a hawk sculpture. This is precarious work; one wrong move and the sculpture is ruined. She was doing something with the chisel she thought was stupid. “What the hell are you doing, Rosen?” she said to herself. But her hand was following a different guide. She remembered her assistant watching the process anxiously. The chisel broke off a piece of marble. Suddenly the beak was perfect. She would not have seen or dared that maneuver with her outer, intellectual mind.

Jane Rosen is articulate about her inner process. There is a going out and a going in, she says, going out to the raven, for example, or to the marble she is sculpting, and at the same time going in to her own experience of the event. She says we have a satellite dish from our knees to our shoulders where something new can come in or through from that different guide. When the two movements, out and in, come together, a fuller, truer hidden world behind the outer one comes into view. “You’re serving something else. You’re not in charge,” she says. “You’re just there and it’s moving through you, and you’re not in the way.”[9]

If you watch animals—like a cat poised in front of a mouse hole—”you see an absolute, attentive awareness with their whole being,” she says. “Mostly we’re in our heads. If you get down in your body, you have a chance” of attuning with that kind of integral awareness.

Aleut wisdom keeper Larry Merculieff agrees that we in Western culture are mostly in our heads. Disconnected, he says, dissociated from our bodies.

Glimpses of Indigenous Languaging

Larry Merculieff is a member of the last generation of Aleuts raised in the fully traditional way extending back about 10,000 years on the Pribiloff Islands in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia. Although he describes that upbringing vividly in English,[10] he acknowledges how hard it is to translate his experience from his native Aleut language. This difficulty of translating from one language like Aleut, to a radically different language like English, will become more prominent as we proceed. How can Western people, with such a different upbringing and language, really grok what he is saying?

But let’s try. Slipping down into a silent receptivity that we may ordinarily find only in meditation or a solitary walk in the forest, let’s imagine a childhood where the companions and relatives of our young world are the texture of rocky soil and ice, the greens and grays of the island bush, the rhythms and smells of the sea, and the cry of the seabirds. This world is inside of us as Aleuts, because we are not called out of it to separation, dissociation, and individuality by our families and upbringing and language, but are born and welcomed into this island world, our relatives, our larger being, from birth.

When Larry was very young he had a traditional mentor, a teacher, who arranged for him to join a winter hunting party near a place frequented by sea lions. These animals stay in the water during winter because it is too cold for them on land. Even as a five-year-old, Larry wondered how the adult hunters could sit so still for hours at a time, so connected, so locked in that they knew when a sea lion would surface within range before there was any outward sign. This hunting was a matter of survival for his people, but putting it that way abstracts the situation into thought and logic. They didn’t think or reason themselves into that effort of concentration. But how did they do it?

He didn’t pose his question to his mentor or his parents. That wasn’t the traditional way. Instead, when he was six, an inspiration came to him. Early one morning he walked alone to the shoreline beneath one of the seaside cliffs, riddled, honeycombed, with the nests of thousands and thousands of seabirds. When dawn colored the landscape and water, an unfathomable chaos of tens of thousands of winged beings simultaneously calling, diving, slicing, soaring, landing, and taking off arose in the air in front of the cliff.

As he settled into an inner silence and heightened alertness that he learned from the hunting party, he noticed something. Not a single bird collided with another, not even a wing was clipped in passing! All of the birds were somehow present in each moment of flight. They were completely alive, as if a single being! Again we could say that this was a matter of life or death for their chicks. Again we can say that the birds didn’t need to create an abstract version of the situation in that way. Abstraction would have inhibited their full presence in the “chaos,” which evidently wasn’t chaos to them. It would have separated them from themselves. But they weren’t separate, from themselves or one another.

And the answer didn’t come to him in a mental abstraction either. He entered that fullness of presence in his own body. With practice, he became that. Fully present, fully embodied. “They” were him. He was in that fullness of presence in the moment.

His people call that kind of embodied presence the “real human being.” This “real human being” of the Aleuts seems to have striking similarities with what Sri Aurobindo calls the “real man” or the “true being” in a chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga called “The Soul and Its Liberation”: “When we get back to our true being, the ego falls away from us; its place is taken by our supreme and integral self, the true individuality. As this supreme self it makes itself one with all beings and sees all world and Nature in its own infinity.”[11]

How does a community live on a 43-square-mile island in the frigid Bering Sea for thousands of years, without forests, without fossil fuels, without metal, without electricity, without writing, through the midnight sun, the storms, the long dark of winter?

Not by being separate from their land.

And this is where language comes back into the picture for us. Larry says that each landscape has a particular vibration and that Indigenous languages develop from that vibration.

This “land vibration” may sound obscure or abstract to Western ears, but I have, as many of you may also, vivid recollections of the hills and soil and especially flowing waters of my childhood—even a dim longing to be back there in that, in contrast to the beautiful mountains and streams of California where I live now. Memory of connectedness to that Appalachian childhood landscape still vibrates my heart in very particular situations.

Still, how could a deep connection to the vibration of the land turn into a language, even in thousands of years?

In many Indigenous languages, words or sounds that represent the beings and relatives and flowings of the land are the human version of the sounds made by those beings and relatives. In English the sound of names like “tree” or “creek” seems arbitrary. The sound of the word “tree” has no relationship to the sound that the California black oak outside my window makes. The sound of English is separate from the landscape. In addition the sounds of American English arose on an island thousands of miles from our home here in the U.S.A.—separation multiplied.

By contrast, the word for a local tree in a native language might be the very sound that the drying leaves of that tree make when the north wind sets them dancing in the fall. The human voice imitates the sound of nature—but putting it this way surfaces the assumption that we humans and our voice are separate from this nature that we imitate. Perhaps we could say that the human voice speaks the language of that landscape, but still an implicit separation remains.

So, let’s try, less abstractly, “the human, like other beings of the land, is the land languaging.”

This is not how we speakers of English ordinarily think or speak, but we start to imagine what “being the land languaging” might mean. This kind of languaging implies an identification, an intimate participating in the process, the flow of the people’s surroundings.

Perhaps we are beginning to notice the difficulty of translating from Aleut to English. This difficulty is not unique to English.

English and other Western European languages emphasize distinction, difference, classification, and abstraction. We want to define what we are talking about. “Define” means to set boundaries around a concept, separating it out from other similar concepts. Sleet is not exactly rain or snow or hail. To define “sleet” we identify qualities that separate it from those other forms of falling water so that we know where sleet fits in the classification hierarchy. We cut that piece of the pie out so we can have a closer look at it. We often find meaning by separating. We have built a whole science that way. And we have built much of a worldwide culture on this kind of understanding.

Some, perhaps most, North American Indigenous languages privilege connection, relationship, unfolding experience, and fluidity instead.

For example, Larry describes how his people use a particular plant poison on their spears to hunt whales. The poison goes to the whale’s heart but nowhere else. A Western anthropologist might wonder how they discovered that poison and its use. Did they see some animal die after eating the plant? Was it a matter of trial and error? Did they form an hypothesis and test it over the centuries?

Questions like these come from a certain way of thinking, assuming we are separate from the land and the plants, and have to wrestle out nature’s secrets as well as we can.

It was nothing like that, Larry says. We talked to the plant, asked permission to use it and how to use it. The plant told us when to harvest the leaves or roots, how to prepare them, and how to use them. This is not metaphor; it is “everything is connected” as a way of life. Think Jane Rosen and Anna Breytenbach. Perhaps remember your own synchronicities with bird or butterfly or redwood. And imagine living within yourself and your world that way.

Jeannette Armstrong, fluent speaker of Syilx Okanagan and a traditional knowledge keeper of the Okanagan Nation, told Derrick Jensen:  “Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between Western and Indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive Western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor. It’s not a metaphor. It’s how the world is.”[12]

Elsewhere she wrote about how her people’s language expresses their relationship to the land, the Okanagan, where they live in what is now called British Colombia:

In the Okanagan, our understanding of the land is one in which we are not just part of the land, nor just part of the vast system that operates on the land, but that the land is us. In our language, the word for our bodies contains the word for land. Our word for body literally means ‘the capacity for land-dreaming’ — the first part of the word invokes my ability to think and dream, and the latter part of the word invokes the land. Therefore, every time I say the word for my body, I am reminded that I am from the land. I’m saying that I’m from the land and that my body is the land.[13]

We could say that language participating in earth-life this way is integral with the flowing of “the manifesting” into “the manifest.”

Owen Barfield calls this process “original participation,” where the people’s preconscious stance is that language evokes, pulls forth from the manifesting into the manifest, rather than merely refers; it is a way of being watchful in a process world of verbs rather than taking the “it- ness” of things for granted as nouns, and being careful what they speak. And when these people speak to us from within this view of “participation between perceiver and perceived, between [hu]man and nature”, their oratory and writings sound to us like poetry rather than prose.[14]

Here, language itself, its very sounding, is a powerful manifesting, not just a static and arbitrary reference to the “real thing out there” or to the meaning that the words refers to. This may suggest how Indigenous people participate in the rising of the sun and the bringing of rain in ceremony. Language is powerful here because it is experienced as an integral part of the processes of nature. Therefore care must be taken with speech, else casually spoken words may cast a form that comes into manifestation to the regret of the speaker who cast it.

Given this depth of connection between land and language, we may better understand Mohawk[15] speaker Douglas George-Kanentiio’s lament to historian Huston Smith about the disappearance of native Mohawk speakers. Their language , he says

was developed and born in the land in which we find ourselves. We are taught that it is the language of the Earth. It is the language in which we communicate with the natural world … we are told that is the means by which we can effectively communicate with the natural world. If we don’t have that language, then we can no longer talk to the elements. We no longer can address the winds. We no longer can address the natural world, the animal species.”[16] 

This discussion may also give us some sense of why Sri Aurobindo wrote how important it is for colonized peoples to retain their original language.[17] Otherwise a crucial pillar of their collective soul dissolves and their survival as a people is crippled, if not destroyed.

Dynamically Unfolding Reality

What if there was a language that takes this flow, this participatory fluidity to what would be an extreme for English speakers? People speaking Algonquin languages like Cree, Mi’kmaq, and Blackfoot say they regularly speak all day without using nouns. This is very difficult for English-only speakers to fathom. We fill our language world with things, which, grammatically, are nouns. What are we going to say if we have nothing to talk about? And things/objects/nouns are distinct from one another. A lamp is not a table, and neither is an oyster. Which is to say we fill our world with separation.

For stability.

We want to … slow down … the flow … into snapshots—things.

So that we can master them. Separately. One at a time. Or one class at a time. We keep dividing things into parts until we reach the indivisible—atoms. Oops, the atoms are divisible, composed of smaller things.

Now we’ve got them!

Oops, some of these subatomic particles have no mass! Are these things things? Are electrons really particles? The stability of the world keeps slipping away.

Some English speakers call native languages “verb-based” or “process languages” because they express the world as flux, as movement, as flow of experience instead of as a stable of objects. A simple example: Imagine an English-speaking mother directing her toddler’s attention to a bouncing ball. The mother would likely say something like, “Oh, look at the ball!” Whereas the Cree-speaking mother might say the equivalent of, “Oh, look at the bouncing!” Bouncing is a moving. It’s a wave, not a particle. Then consider how important the directing of attention is in learning one’s culture, one’s place in the world. It tells us what is important, where to focus, even what is real. The movement, the flow comes to the foreground in these languages—and in their worldview.

The title of the film Dances with Wolves is also the name of the film’s hero. “Dances” is a verb that has usurped, so it seems, the proper place of a noun. The person is a verb!

Here is Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) describing some examples of his Tiwa language of the Picuris Pueblo in New Mexico:

Tiwa words convey a dynamically unfolding reality that is constantly in process. The Tiwa language has no nouns or pronouns, so at Picuris things don’t exist as concrete, distinct objects. Everything is a motion and is seen in its relationship to other motions …

For instance, a cup is tii, but tii likewise means crystallized awareness, or awareness that is in the process of crystallizing and uncrystallizing. That cup is not fixed. In Tiwa it is a continual unfolding of tii, and tii means “the essence of the power of crystallization that is influencing awareness” and that awareness is the awareness of holding something in, like a spoon, or like tea or coffee. That coffee or tea that is in the cup is not static, either, but it’s also in continuous motion.

            Of course, “tii” is not a noun or a pronoun, but a verb; therefore, it means not a cup but a cupping, the holding of energy in the process of cupping, and it is cupping another energy that is in the process of being coffee. Everything is a process in relationship with another process.[18]

Trying to carry this change of focus into all of the other “things” that we speak and think about during the day quickly becomes mind-boggling for the English speaker, but perhaps these process languages more completely catch the nature of substance in the manifestation that Sri Aurobindo wrote about below in English:

All substance of being in Space is a flowing stream not divided in itself, but only divided in the observing consciousness because our sense faculty is limited in its grasp, can see only a part and is therefore bound to observe forms of substance as if they were separate things in themselves, independent of the one substance.[19]

No Nouns No Verbs

To take this sense of flow further, let’s focus for a bit on a language that not only has no nouns, but also no verbs, in fact no words, and no vocabulary in the English and European languages sense of these structural elements. This presents a challenge not only to our English medium but also to our science of linguistics itself, which largely presumes that the structure of Western European languages—subject/noun, verb/action, object/noun—is universal. People who study history from a lens other than Western will not be surprised by this presumption of universality, which so often hides a presumption of superiority.

Native Blackfoot speakers and professors Leroy Little Bear and Ryan Heavy Head wrote an essay some years back with the tongue-in-cheek title of “A Conceptual Anatomy of the Blackfoot Word.”[20] They start off the piece—written in English, but sprinkled with Blackfoot “soundings”—with the admission that the title is a contradiction, because the Blackfoot language does not have anything that corresponds to “word” in English or other European languages. Nor does it have anything corresponding to the word or concept “anatomy.” Using “anatomy” in the title of their article as a metaphor to visualize the components of “word” sounds plausible to English speakers because of the way we think and speak. We break things down into their component parts to understand how they are put together and how they work. Blackfoot, however, is not concerned with “things” composed of other things, but with experiences that manifest out of a flux of movement. It doesn’t have sentences (a bounded set of words including a verb and a related noun). Its emphasis is not on difference and distinction but on flow, flux, and patterns of experience and relationship.

If Blackfoot doesn’t use words and sentences, how does it work? Not being a Blackfoot speaker, I’m not about to try to tell you, but you can look at the article cited above for a taste. My best guess as a metaphor is jazz, which uses specific scales, and the notes and octaves in those scales. An isolated note by itself is not jazz, but its jazz meaning emerges in the improvised and momentary relationship among notes as they are played, the voices and instruments that are sounding them, the musicians that are playing the instruments, and the physical and emotional circumstances in which they are played. This web of relationships becomes a flow of information and energy.

It may be a surprise that the Blackfoot language and way of understanding make describing quantum mechanics almost a breeze, according to Leroy Little Bear, who has been fascinated with science, and physics in particular, since childhood.

David Bohm, the American physicist and protégé of Einstein, was long in search of a non-mathematical verbal language that could make sense of quantum mechanics. David and his friend J. Krishnamurti tried to create such a language, called Rheomode,[21] but David was not satisfied with it.

It happened that F. David Peat, an English physicist, was both a friend of and collaborator with David Bohm and also a friend of Leroy Little Bear. David Peat arranged a meeting of his two friends along with a small gathering of other relatives, Indigenous elders, and Western scientists in Michigan in 1992. This gathering was the beginning of what became the annual Language of Spirit dialogs between Indigenous elders and wisdom carriers on one hand and Western physicists, poets, and philosophers on the other—perhaps the first, or one of the first times that these groups sat together with an attitude of full mutual respect.

So Dr. Leroy Little Bear, a Blackfoot elder and university professor fluent in his mother tongue who loves physics, and Dr. David Bohm, a celebrated American physicist who was interested in language, finally got a chance to meet and talk on equal terms, just two months before David’s death. In a video, Leroy recalled David Bohm’s question about his unsatisfactory attempt to create a nonmathematical language to explain quantum mechanics. “What should I do?” he asked Leroy. With a twinkle in his eye, Leroy remembered his reply: “Learn Blackfoot.”

Now that we know what a human language is, not to mention animal and plant languages …

OK, that’s a joke. We are deep in the linguistic woods now, so to speak. And we want an answer that satisfies our assumptions about language and the way we view “things” with the help of our language—what the heck is a language after all? We in the West have assumed that we knew what languages were. We developed our science of linguistics based on our own European and Indo-European languages. This version of linguistics doesn’t fit North American Indigenous languages and probably many other languages in the world. There is a gap that hasn’t been bridged not only between languages but between worldviews. “A Conceptual Anatomy of the Blackfoot Word” openly acknowledges that translations into English of Blackfoot examples are “loose” and that its mission is not to create a bridge—to translate—between two mutually incompatible worldviews and language structures. “Instead, our aim is to convincingly relay merely the existence of another intellectual tradition”[22] and its potential value when clearly “the imposition of Western methodology and theoretical models upon worldwide phenomena has not worked.”[23]

Maslow’s Surprise

In the summer of 1936, Abraham Maslow, originator of the motivational theory of the hierarchy of needs, visited the Siksika (Blackfoot) reserve for six weeks. Evidently he went there to test his theory that social hierarchies are maintained by dominance of some groups over others.[24] To his surprise, he found stark differences between the dominance patterns in his own society and the huge levels of cooperation, minimal inequality, and high degrees of social satisfaction at Siksika. He estimated that “80–90% of the Blackfoot tribe had a quality of self-esteem that was only found in 5–10% of his own population.”[25]

Large differences of life satisfaction between Western societies and relatively whole Indigenous societies of contemporary or colonial times is not a recent discovery. In fact leaders and thinkers of American Indigenous societies leveled devastating critiques at both American colonial societies and European societies as far back as the sixteenth century. Some scholars, like anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow, authors of The Dawn of Everything,[26] contend that the critique of Native scholars like Wendat leader Kondiaronk (c. 1649–1701) about poverty, homelessness, private property, slavery, and domination of the many by the few in Western Europe had a profound impact on the development of norms of freedom, democracy, and equality among European thinkers of the Enlightenment.

This critique has been growing again in our time, aimed at the devastation of world peoples, life forms, and natural systems by Western colonial and industrial society.

Old assumptions of separation, domination, superiority, and privilege are sagging as submerged voices from all over the world resurface to call for a different, integral approach to individual, social, natural, and global relationships.

Language and Worldview

We have been following forms of language moving from particular to more universal. We have seen some of the power and shapeshifting of this magician language.

Following stories like these of the many-colored exuberance of language brings into focus the narrowness of aspects our Western worldview and limitations of our European languages. It may also suggest to us that a deeper appreciation of lifeways and languages of connection may be valuable for yoga and for humanity in a troubled contemporary world dominated by worldviews and languages of separation. Noticing how language mirrors the way its speakers think and act, its grammar almost demanding that they think a certain way, suggests that language itself may be one lever for more integration.

There is one lurking obstacle to widening our view about these worldviews and languages of connection. Because we think and speak a certain way, and those ways are effective to a certain degree, we’re likely harboring a belief or assumption that our kind of science, astronomy, for example, cannot be replaced by some native creation story. Oakley Gordon, Ph.D., author of The Andean Cosmovision[27] about the precolonial practices and worldview (cosmovision) still present among some of the Quechua people of the high Andes in South America, tackles those implicit assumptions and beliefs directly. He points out that a worldview like the that of the Quechua is not simply a “primitive” or inferior version of our modern worldview without the superstitions and illogical suppositions removed. It may be qualitatively different than the Western way of understanding or even reasoning—and equally valid. And more than valid—precious, a unique and rich contribution of knowledge, insight, method, and delight for the human family.

Somewhere Dan Moonhawk Alford[28] (1946-2002), beloved professor of linguistics at the California Institute of Integral Studies for many years, suggested that Indigenous languages bring a participatory energy that is creative and suggested how this might be possible also in English, Sri Aurobindo’s preferred language of writing. Participatory engagement appears easier in Indigenous languages because the structures (grammar) of participation and manifestation are already present in the language. But with intention, like Ildefonso’s desire to have language communication, the automatic structures of one’s original language can become conscious. Sri Aurobindo’s poetry suggests that conscious linguistic structures can become evocative for a transformed consciousness. Because worldview and language are so tied together, reading Savitri and Sri Aurobindo’s other works is a doorway into his vision and consciousness, his operating worldview.

Language Love

Sri Aurobindo wrote that a “greater era of man’s living seems to be in promise … But first there must intervene a poetry which will lead him towards it from the present faint beginnings.”[29] And Mother repeatedly voiced her dissatisfaction with French and English to express the transformational experiences of the body. She once implied that a new level of consciousness would bring a new language when she spoke about the problems created by the many distinct languages of India: “Unity must be a living fact and not the imposition of an arbitrary rule. When India will be one, she will have spontaneously a language understood by all.”[30] 

Perhaps some of these future languages are just waiting for appropriate conditions to appear.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was a lover of language. This anyone could gather by the sheer beauty, the magic of his writings. One could get the same impression with a glance at his life.[31] By the time he started high school, he knew English, Greek, Latin, French, and German. In high school, he fell in love with Gothic, an ancient European language that became extinct in the eighth century. Tolkien wrote of Gothic that for the first time he was learning a language purely out of love, not for its utility nor for the sake of the literature it carried. He would even show up at debate events in school dressed as an envoy from the Goths and regale the audience in Gothic!

A parade of language proficiency followed during his life: Middle English, Old English, Finnish, Italian, Old Norse (Old Icelandic), Spanish, Welsh, and Medieval Welsh. He became familiar with many more.

When he discovered the Finnish language in college, he was so inspired by the musical quality of its “long, loping words,” that he began to work, from scratch, first on a whole new language that he eventually called Quenya, and then on another new language, parent to Quenya, called proto-Quenya.

Something similar happened to him when he was introduced to Welsh. He started developing still another new language based on his love of the beautiful sounds of the Welsh tongue, eventually naming the new language Sindarin, another offspring of proto-Quenya, but quite different from its sibling, Quenya.

How does someone create a new language and also a proto-language parent of that new language? Is that even possible? Tolkien’s experience was not that he was creating new languages, but that he was discovering them. In some sense, somewhere, they already existed.

Quenya and Sindarin were elvish languages and became, by Tolkien’s own account, the sources of his writings about the Elves and Middle Earth. He did not start with the stories, the people, or the worldview that he developed in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The stories came through the languages. To come into a fullness of being, the languages needed both people who spoke them and a way of understanding life embedded in the languages.

How did he do it? His good friend, C.S. Lewis, once wrote that Tolkien lived inside language. Tolkien wrote, “Always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere, not of ‘inventing.’”

Tolkien’s experiences suggest that languages have a life of their own in some other realm. They can be discovered before one knows anything else about them. They can carry stories and their own unique metaphysical understandings of the way things are.

Mother’s difficulties with language during her yoga of the cells may have arisen because the languages for the transformation of the body have not yet been downloaded by humanity. Could the transformation of the body be assisted by a blending of the progressive urge of Western languaging and the balancing and harmonizing languaging of Indigenous peoples?

---

John Robert Cornell currently serves on the Collaboration Editorial Advisory Board and the Collaboration Steering Committee.

---

Notes

[1]. This material is synthesized from Susan Schaller, A Man Without Words (New York: Summit Books, 1991) and from an interview by Richard Whittaker at https://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=200

[2]. Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA), vol. 1 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2003), p. 384.

[3]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2vhV63lx2k

[4]. Anna Breytenbach’s website is https://animalspirit.org.

[5]. Most of this section is from an interview of Anna Breytenbach at https://batgap.com/anna-breytenbach-transcript/

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. https://www.janerosen.com

[8]. Details of this story can be found at an interview with Jane Rosen by Richard Whittaker: http://www.dailygood.org/story/599/looking-with-your-whole-body-richard-whittaker

[9]. Ibid.

[10]. The material in this section comes from David E. Hall, Native Perspectives on Sustainability: Larry Merculieff (Aleut):

Click to access Larry_Merculieff_interview.pdf

[11]. Sri Aurobindo, Synthesis of Yoga, CWSA, vols. 23–24 (Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Trust, 2007), p. 439.

[12]. Quoted in Derrick Jensen, A Language Older than Words (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004), pp. 67-68. Libby Digital version.

[13]. Jeanette Armstrong, “An Okanogan Worldview of Society.” Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020), p. 164.

[14]. Dan Moonhawk Alford, “Manifesting Worldviews in Language,” So What? Now What?, ed. by Matthew C. Bronson and Tina R. Fields (Newcastle on Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), p. 303.

[15]. Mohawk is the name of one of the nations and languages of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy located in what is today northeastern United States and southeastern Canada.

[16]. Huston Smith, “Native Language, Native Spirituality, From Crisis to Challenge,” A Seat at the Table, ed. Phil Cousineau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 83.

[17]. Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination, CWSA, vol. 25 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1997), pp. 514–517.

[18]. Joseph Rael, House of Shattering Light (San Francisco, Council Oak Books, 2003), p. 124.

[19]. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, CWSA, vols. 21–22 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2005), p. 517.

[20]. Leroy Little Bear and Ryan Heavy Head, “A Conceptual Anatomy of the Blackfoot Word,” ReVision, A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 30–38.

[21]. For more on Rheomode, see F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics (Boston, Massachusetts: Weiser Books, 2002), p. 238.

[22]. Little Bear and Heavy Head, p. 32.

[23]. Ibid., p. 38.

[24]. Teju Ravilochan, The Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy—The Esperanza Project: https://esperanzaproject.com/2021/native-american-culture/the-blackfoot-wisdom-that-inspired-maslows-hierarchy/

[25]. Ibid.

[26]. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

[27]. Oakley E. Gordon, The Andean Cosmovision (Publisher: Oakley Gordon, 2014).

[28]. I can no longer find the reference.

[29]. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 26 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1997), p. 221.

[30]. The Mother, Words of the Mother—I, Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 13 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2004), p. 363.

[31]. Oakley Gordon, “The Path to Faërie: Part 1” provided most of the material about Tolkien in this section. See https://salkawind.com/blog/archives/1863#stalactites

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

A Planetary Initiation

SEAN KELLY

THE COLLABORATION  JOURNAL SPECIAL FEATURES series highlights notable articles from Collaboration journal and makes them available to readers without a subscription. This article appeared in Collaboration, Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 2023.

If we could take time-lapse photography of our local piece of the cosmos, after the last great supernova from the sun that preceded our own, we’d see a lot of floating rock and dust, and eventually some of that rock and dust would have pulled together through gravitational attraction and become this molten ball of hot, flaming rock which is our Earth. That’s all there is in the beginning. There’s molten rock, it begins to cool and suddenly rock becomes not only air and fire and water and earth and plants and so on, but Beethoven and Sri Aurobindo and beautiful children playing and art. All of the things that we consider to be of the highest value, suddenly, mysteriously, pop out of molten rock. Now tell me that’s an accident! When you look at the relationship between the fundamental cosmological forces like the rate of expansion of the universe, and the density of matter, and the ratio of regular matter to dark matter and dark energy and so on, we see that these ratios are so finely tuned that if they had been ever so slightly different than what they are, just unimaginably small differences, there would have been no life. Not only would there have been no life, but matter would not have organized in such a way to even have light.

Once you see how finely tuned and calibrated the cosmos is at the most basic physical level in terms of the fundamental forces like gravitation and the electromagnetic force, the electroweak force, and the strong nuclear binding force, these are so finely tuned as to suggest that the cosmos, as Brian Swimme[i] puts it, was rushing towards life. Once you see life appear in the cosmos and you know something about how finely tuned the physical forces are, you see that life is somehow intended by the cosmos, that it’s woven in, folded in, involved, that life is already involved in matter, in the cosmos as its subtler, deeper intention. So, after the big bang you would see seemingly inanimate matter suddenly coming alive, presumably everywhere in the cosmos. In this infinitely vast cosmos there is no reason to believe that there isn’t life sprinkled, peppered throughout it, and where there’s life, of course there’s mind or consciousness.

Life is the first awakening of matter to itself, and if matter is rushing toward life, then life seems to be rushing toward something else, which we could call consciousness, and at its most actualized level, wisdom, compassion, love, insight, bliss, there are different ways of describing it.

The first flowering of consciousness seems to involve the awakening of the cosmos to the sheer fact of its own beingness, and we see this in language, in the creation of images, in stories, and myths. So it’s as though, through consciousness and culture and symbols, the cosmos starts to awaken to itself, that it is, and is able to, in a sense, sing its own song, sing the song of its own being through myth and poetry and ritual and so on. But it would seem that there is something more that consciousness is aiming at than a mere representational or even aesthetic reflection of the cosmos.

Why have we arisen, why has the cosmos taken the form that it has, what is the purpose of it all? One of the answers to this seems to be that there is a great delight or satisfaction, some people would even say bliss, that is possible once matter or life has actualized itself to the point where it can radiate its fullest potential. Now, what is that fullest potential? If you’re a Buddhist you’d say it’s the potential to act out of selflessness and through compassion by seeing the other as yourself, and similarly for the Abrahamic traditions, except there it’s more spoken of in terms of love and forgiveness. Or in Hinduism, and Sri Aurobindo, there is this idea of an underlying bliss, of a sheer delight, of a kind of uncontainable and otherwise indescribable delight that is the deeper suchness of being, which is always there, but won’t become fully manifest and conscious of itself until life or embodied being, which is us, is able to organize itself in such a way that it overcomes what was necessary in the beginning.

What’s necessary in the beginning is a certain degree of selfishness and short-sightedness. If individual organisms, and then individual families and individual groups don’t look out for themselves, then they die. So you can see that life proceeds necessarily in the early phases according to a certain selfishness, but life now, and human life at its head, has organized itself throughout the whole planet to such a point where it’s in danger of extinguishing itself, so it needs to transcend this first directive, this prime imperative of biological life, and develop beyond the selfishness of mere biological being.

There is a clearer and clearer sense that we’re all engaged in an unparalleled transformation and mutation of consciousness that centers around the planet as a whole.

There is a clearer and clearer sense that we’re all engaged in an unparalleled transformation and mutation of consciousness that centers around the planet as a whole. Just imagine this, the whole of human evolution, not only our own species, homo-sapiens, but all of the Hominids stretching back maybe a million, two million years, all of that has happened within a vast geological period called the Cenozoic that’s lasted 65 million years. That period began at the end of the previous period which was brought to an end by the catastrophic impact of a meteor, which wiped out the dinosaurs and much of life on the planet. So within the last 65 million years all the mammals as we know them evolved, and toward the end of that humans emerged, very recently actually. This 65-million-year period is coming to an end in our own time. What we’re doing on the planet is bringing a geological age to a close. The only thing that has done that in the past has been the impact from a meteor big enough to wipe out the dinosaurs, or perhaps the eruption of massive volcanoes in the early period of the earth, which also stimulated mass extinctions.

So, we’re bringing this period to a close, and it’s closing because the global climate, which had been more or less stable for the last 10 thousand years, is changing, it’s warming at alarming rates. According to James Lovelock, the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, now Gaia theory, it may already be too late. Hopefully he’s wrong, but if he is right the warming of the earth will take at least one hundred thousand years to recover. So that gives you a sense of the magnitude of the shift that’s going on at a planetary scale. It’s not just human beings and their cities, it’s all of life on the planet.

About four-fifths of the world’s original forests are gone, about 80 per cent of commercial fish stocks are gone. Half the world gets most of its protein from seafood so just imagine that, 80 per cent of seafood stocks are gone. We saw this initially with the collapse of the Atlantic cod off the east coast of Canada a couple of decades back, but it’s happening with all kinds of species and the massive industrial trawlers are having to spread their nets deeper and deeper to bring up rarer and rarer specimens so that we can have fishcakes and so on.

We know now that the dire predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were much too optimistic. The polar ice caps are melting fast, sea levels are already rising, the global mean temperature is rising. The number of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which that panel had fixed at 350 parts per million, is already at 400 parts per million. So, we’ve already passed what the world’s consensus of experts had agreed was a level that we cannot surpass if we want to keep the global temperature within this sort of Goldilocks zone that it has been in for the last 200 thousand years so that life, as we know it, could not only evolve, but sustain itself. Add to that a world population that’s already past 8 billion, and with the mode of life that particularly we in the West, but now increasingly China and India are wanting, quite understandably, to emulate, and we are already using the equivalent of 1.5 Earths per year in terms of the capacity of Earth to sustain itself. So, these are some of the indicators.

We know that human beings had spread out of Africa about 70 thousand years ago, and as of about 20 thousand years ago there were human beings on every continent on the planet. But for those thousands and thousands of years human beings didn’t really know that there were human beings on other continents. It was only starting about 500 years ago when marine technology and navigation skills allowed colonial Europeans to “discover” the “New” World, that we started to get a continuous exchange of goods and of peoples, and an awareness that there are human beings and different cultures on all of the continents.

By the 20th century, we have not only the telegraph and wireless technology, but in our own time, fairly recently, the internet, where suddenly we have what Teilhard de Chardin has described as a thinking envelope, or a mental envelope, that he called the noosphere. Along with the biosphere, now there’s the noosphere, a subtler thinking envelope that surrounds Earth with information circulating around at the speed of light, and increasing numbers of people are participating in that. So there is an amplified continuous fabric of consciousness held by human beings that we are participating in. Now this is happening at exactly the same time that the biosphere, upon which the noosphere rests, is being threatened with mass extinction, habitat loss, global warming, and so on.

The thinking envelope includes everything that we would call culture and values and, as we know, what dominates culture and our values right now is money and power and baser psychological urges like greed, avarice, fear, and so on. It’s at a pretty primitive level if you think in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.[ii] So, insofar as that’s the case, the biosphere is being threatened by the thinking envelope, and the values that continue to proliferate and be reinforced are those that are eating up the last remaining resources on the planet. At the same time, as more and more people become conscious of their organic participation in this living earth, they are awakening to higher values, to subtler dimensions of consciousness that are not motivated by fear and greed, but by a sense of communal participation and of wonder at the mystery of being alive.

Why is it all happening? Is there a goal, is there a telos, or directionality, a purpose to it all? I think at the very least it seems that the planet as a whole is trying to become conscious of itself as a planet. We can think of Gaia, which is the name that many people are calling the planet, as in some sense like a person that is awakening to itself and we humans are the vehicle for that awakening. We’re also the vehicle for the potential collapse of the biosphere, which would be a great tragedy for Gaia.

The planet may have only wanted to awaken to itself as a planet, but I believe that there is more than that. I think that is a kind of minimal version of what the planet is trying to do, simply to awaken to itself as a planet, which it is doing now. I believe that what the planet is wanting to do is to maximize the conditions for life where there can be increasing magnitudes and higher qualities of truth and goodness and beauty as the natural, spontaneous expression of life’s deepest potential.

If the goal of Earth is to awaken to itself as a self-conscious being, motivated by higher urges and desires and aspirations, then it might be the case that the only way that that could happen was for Earth to simultaneously be brought to the precipice of its own catastrophe. We see this pattern in initiation rites. It is quite common for a transformation of consciousness to require a kind of near-death experience, which is what we as a planet are on the verge of experiencing.

We’re being forced to undergo a kind of mutation of consciousness, bringing us out of our narrower personal, ethnic, egoic identity to a wider sense of participation with the totality of the earth community.

Now that we are being brought to the point of potential collective death, to the collapse of civilization, the collapse of the biosphere, we’re being forced to undergo a kind of mutation of consciousness, bringing us out of our narrower personal, ethnic, egoic identity to a wider sense of participation with the totality of the earth community, with life as a whole, perhaps even beyond. We’re being invited to think in the long term for our survival and also in the longer-term in terms of a deeper emotional, spiritual meaning. It seems that this would not have happened unless we had been brought to our knees, as it were. We have to remember that the crises that we are experiencing and that we are causing are paradoxically at the same time the very means through which we are awakening. Personally, I can’t imagine that it could have happened any differently. Human beings, like other mammals, did not evolve to think in the long term. We’re not prepared as biological beings, as mammals, to think in the long term. If we look at the history of the human project that has brought us to this looming catastrophe, we can see that most of it is the result of not being able to think in the long term, or even in the middle term.

What we’re really being called to do at this point is to respond with urgency and all of the wisdom and courage that we can muster to halt the unravelling of life on the planet, to stop the situation of planetary apartheid that is condemning billions of people to poverty and suffering. This is what we’re being called to do.

What is required for a successful and sustainable earth community? We would need to widen our identity to include all beings on the planet.

So, what is required for a successful and sustainable earth community and planetary consciousness? Well, we would need to think in the long term, we would need to widen our identity to include all beings on the planet, which requires a cultivation of compassion and wisdom. So it seems as though evolution, at a biological and planetary scale, has brought us to the point where, if evolution is to succeed, we need somehow to embody the traditional core spiritual values of wisdom and compassion, or insight and love. This is where the spiritual and the biological start to intersect in the grand evolutionary project of our moment.

What will be required is for us to let it into our hearts and bodies that, despite appearances, we are essentially one body, not only on Earth, but of Earth. We share the same flesh, the same breath, the same destiny with every living being on the planet. Our fellow human beings of course, but all of the animals and the plants, we’re all woven out of one life, one fabric of life, which is being threatened with its own unravelling right now, so we’re being called to awaken to that shared body, that shared life. We know now that we have a shared origin in the primal flaring forth. We know that we all come mysteriously out of molten rock. We know that we have a common destiny and it’s our challenge right now to celebrate that common origin and destiny and to act as one to save what we can, to allow for whatever deeper mysterious potentials still remain to unfold so that the mystery of who we are can, perhaps, find expression.

As we awaken to our potential as vehicles of a higher consciousness, for a deeper consciousness, we awaken to our true selves.

When I say that we are the vehicles for that awakening, that to me already implies a kind of openness. To the extent that we awaken to that, that we are vehicles for this awakening, then we’re transformed in the process, we’re no longer who we thought we were. As we awaken to our potential as vehicles of a higher consciousness, for a deeper consciousness, we awaken to our true selves, whatever that might be. The only thing I can imagine that is more than being the vehicle for the Divine to awaken and experience itself fully in existence would be that we are That itself, that we are in fact That Being, that infinite being and consciousness and bliss, as Sri Aurobindo would say, for instance.

I know that there are some people who believe that the dolphins and other cetaceans are as aware and conscious as we are, and some people believe that all animals and beings are carriers of a certain consciousness. However, the fact remains that, apart from bacteria, you have to wait until you have humans before you have a species that actually starts to change things like the atmosphere and influence whole geological ages. So, we have bacteria at the beginning, and humans at the end.

One thing we can say about humans now is that we are the instigators and privileged carriers of planetary consciousness. Well, “so what?” some might say. What is it about a planetary consciousness that is special or unique? A planetary consciousness is very different than a personally-centered egoic consciousness, it’s different than even a consciousness that is focused on one’s own family, or one’s local community, or one’s ethnicity, or one’s nation, or even one’s federation. It is the largest possible circle that we can imagine while still being embodied beings.

It’s conceivable that with the fact that the world has seen the emergence of true love, true beauty, true compassion, full awakening in some individuals and in some communities that it’s enough, that the goal has already been reached in that sense. But it’s also conceivable that the goal is for more and more communities, larger and wider communities to achieve that in some sort of stable fashion, and it might be that that’s what’s wanting to happen. I imagine that the deeper goal is to achieve and stabilize the widest-possible circles of awakening in love, compassion, and radical insight. That seems to be the deeper goal. That gives us a clue to what evolution might have in mind in that it is pushing individual consciousness toward a sense of identification with the widest possible circle of participation.

It is a fascinating irony of our times that, just as we are awakening to the unparalleled planetary crisis of our beautiful, fragile, unique planet, we are discovering that our galaxy is chock-full of Earth-like planets, that the universe, which contains billions of galaxies, is in all likelihood full of billions of Earth-like planets. So in that sense, we’re not alone, but of course, we are alone on this planet. This is the planet that matters to us. We’re left with this situation where, as we’re awakening to our, in a sense, cosmic citizenship, we’re also faced with the challenge of saving this planet, this one planet that we belong to. We have the opportunity now to participate creatively in cosmic evolution, but here on Earth is the only place that we can experience it.

To the extent that we widen our circles of identity to include all beings on the planet, that is how we are going to be fulfilling our higher evolutionary potential. We are being presented with choices where we need to vote, as it were, put our will, our affirmation behind something, and if we pick the shorter term, we’re picking the road to catastrophe. If we want to sustain and maximize the diversity of life and of culture, we need to make choices for the long term. Obviously, there are some short-term choices that need to be made, but we need to start thinking in the long term.

At each one of these phase shifts or mutation points, there’s something unavoidably unpredictable.

I have a guarded optimism because on the one hand the signs are very, very grave, and by some estimates not only discouraging but even hopeless. So many tipping points seem to have been passed that it’s hard to imagine how we can get ourselves out of this fix. At the same time there are two things to remember, one is the unbelievable innovation and creativity popping up all over the planet in terms of sustainable technologies, in terms of communications, the sheer enthusiasm and innovation coming from the youth in particular. That’s one thing that gives grounds for hope and counters the pessimism.

Also, there is the ineradicable uncertainty of complex situations. This is true of the whole history of life on the planet. If you go back to every single moment where there has been a mutation of life on the planet as a whole, when life first emerged let’s say, or when the first flowers emerged, or when mammals took off after the dinosaurs, or when humans emerged from mammals, or when agriculture was invented, at each one of these phase shifts or mutation points, there’s something unavoidably unpredictable. There’s an inescapable uncertainty in the complexity of our situation so that, although things seem so bad from one perspective, there’s really no way, knowing all that we do, that we can predict what’s going to happen even two years down the line, let alone ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now.

SEAN KELLY teaches evolution of consciousness, integral ecologies, and transpersonal and integral theory at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

---

[i] Brian Swimme is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies and author of The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos and The Universe is a Green Dragon. He recently hosted the 60-minute film Journey of the Universe, broadcast on PBS television stations nationwide. 

[ii] Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory states that human actions are motivated by certain needs that progress from basic to complex, e.g. physiological needs followed by needs for safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

Subscribe to Collaboration

Collaboration explores the vision and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the theory and practice of Integral Yoga, and themes such as consciousness, emergence, and transformation. To subscribe, visit https://www.collaboration.org/journal/subscribe/

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

The Transitional Being and Mother’s Yoga of Matter

LYNDA LESTER

THE COLLABORATION  JOURNAL SPECIAL FEATURES series highlights notable articles from Collaboration journal and makes them available to readers without a subscription. This article appeared in Collaboration, Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring 2023.

In Integral Yoga, the divine feminine is seen as the self-existent, self-cognitive, self-effective power of the Divine whom we know as the Divine Mother. She is the conscious force of knowledge, will, harmony, and love that upholds the universe and links the world to the transcendent Supreme. Mother of creation, she manifests all things in herself, supports the million processes of life, and mediates between the human personality and Absolute Being. It is she who drives evolution and transforms our ordinary nature into divine nature. She is the apotheosis, the ultimate essence of the divine feminine.

Mirra Alfassa Richard, who embodied this quintessential force, was an artist, occultist, and advanced spiritual being who first met Sri Aurobindo in in 1914 and returned permanently to Pondicherry in 1920 to become his close spiritual collaborator. Sri Aurobindo recognized her as a full incarnation of the Divine Mother and wrote the famous book The Mother about her. Soon she became known by seekers simply as “the Mother.” Years later, Sri Aurobindo explained that without her, all his realizations would have remained theoretical; no organized manifestation would have been possible. It was she who showed the way to a practical form.[1] Her embodiment, he said, was a chance for the world to receive into it a new consciousness, which he called supramental, and to undergo the transformation that would make that possible.[2]

Together Sri Aurobindo and the Mother labored for 30 years to bring down the supramental consciousness into earth-nature, and when he passed on, she continued this work for another 23 years. To understand the sheer magnitude of this work, which was nothing less than the divinization of matter, we must understand the evolutionary vision they shared.

An Evolutionary Leap

According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, evolution is the gradual development of incarnate, physical forms that increasingly embody higher and more powerful modes of consciousness. Humans, who are mental beings, are about halfway up the ladder. But the world is on the threshold of a great leap to the next level of consciousness, a supramental cognition that exists above the mind; and a new species is emerging in which the faculty of supermind will be native.

The Mother, who experienced it, said that the supramental is a limitless golden immensity, a luminous, eternal, omnipotent force as vast as the universe. Its powers are light and bliss and beauty and perfection. It contains within it an infinite multiplicity of colors and vibrations, forces and forms, but all these diversities are held as integral harmonies in a boundless, undivided reality. The essence of the supermind is oneness; there, the feeling of separation vanishes.

Nature is now working out the transition from mental to supramental consciousness in humanity. But these evolutionary transitions generally take a long time, and so Sri Aurobindo and the Mother developed what they called the Integral Yoga to help us along, that we might accomplish in one lifetime what might otherwise have taken many lifetimes or ages.

Interestingly enough, however, the further they advanced in their work, the more they saw all the stages that had to be crossed between mind and supermind. They realized that entering directly into supermind would produce such an abrupt change that the human body would be unable to support it. Hence they saw the necessity of a transitional being or an intermediary race between humanity and the coming supramental species. Mother called this intermediary race the surhomme, which has been translated as superman or overman.

In fact, Mother was born human; and through yoga, she became a living example of this transitional being. It was an inconceivable evolutionary leap—but to comprehend how inconceivable it was, we need to look at the difference between mind and supermind.

Mind and Supermind

Mind is the power of consciousness to measure, limit, separate, and differentiate. It cuts out forms from the whole and divides it into smaller and smaller pieces—by deconstructing, analyzing, and taking things apart, or by constructing, synthesizing, and aggregating—but always dealing with discrete elements and separate components. Mind can see the whole as the sum of its parts, but it can’t see the unified reality behind; it can’t possess the Infinite.

But the supermind can. In the supermind, reality is indivisible, for supermind is a consciousness of unity. In the supermind, oneness is simultaneous with multiplicity; all powers work in harmony without opposition or collision, according to the one Will inherent in all—because supermind is the wisdom, power, light, and bliss by which the universe is upheld.

Now, all this oneness and sublimity may sound like just another description of enlightenment and most of the spiritual realizations of the past; but those realizations were not supramental. They took place at the highest level of spiritualized mind, a level of consciousness Sri Aurobindo called overmind.

The overmind is luminous and full of power, but it’s also where cosmic separative awareness begins. Therefore many spiritual traditions, assuming this was the highest consciousness attainable to seekers, have seen an unbridgeable gap between spirit and matter—because separative awareness leads to the great fall from knowledge into ignorance, suffering, and death.

Some Indian spiritualities have thought that the overmental power of maya,  deemed a power of illusion, is what created the universe. Since they believed the world was an illusion, and an illusion full of misery at that, they decided the best thing to do was to turn away from embodied life—to seek enlightenment and obtain release from the cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation.

But for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the universe is not an illusion created by overmind maya; it’s real, and it comes into being through the dynamic manifesting power of the supermind. Supermind is the missing link between the spiritual heights and the material base of existence, and it has what the overmind does not: the power to integrate spirit and matter and divinize earth nature.

However, in order for this to happen, matter itself must become capable of bearing this massive, omnipotent force of light and love. Yet matter as we know it is hard, resistant, closed, and unconscious—it must be taught to wake up.

The Yoga of Matter

Meanwhile, Sri Aurobindo had once told the Mother, “We can’t both remain upon earth, one of us must go.” He said she could not withdraw because her body was better than his and could better undergo the transformation.[3]

And in 1950, he left the body.

It then became Mother’s task, working alone, to bring supramental consciousness into matter. She turned herself into a living laboratory, using her own body as a test bed, an intermediary by which earthly substance could be transmuted. Her yoga was material—she called it the yoga of matter, the yoga of physical vibrations, the yoga of the cells—and it presented a unique set of problems.

Mystics of all ages have universalized their inner consciousness and felt one with all beings and with the Divine; and Mother and Sri Aurobindo had supramentalized their mind and vital energies long ago—but how do you universalize a body? How can a body spread out to infinity and be one with everything without losing its shape or dissolving into nonphysical reality?  

The body is made from material structures—muscles, bones, organs, nerves, blood. How do you cosmicize your elbow? How do you make your knees omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent? Because we’re talking here about the divinization of matter, not just of the inner consciousness.

And of course tissues and bones are made up of even smaller units, the cells, that function autonomically, far below the level of awareness, obeying habits that go back millions of years—repeating endlessly, mechanically, instinctively.

So what Mother had to do was go down, down into the cells, and change their subconscious functioning into a conscious activity under the direct guidance of the Divine. You can see that it would be a miniscule work—and in fact, that’s what she was doing for 23 years: cell by cell, teaching her body to open to the supramental light, teaching each cell a new way of supramental being.

But the ordinary human body cannot bear the touch of the supermind, which it feels to be strange, terrifying, and devastating. So, often when Mother made the transition from old cellular habits to a supramental functioning—a transition she called the “transfer of power”—the normal working of her body stopped. Nerves, heart, brain, respiratory system—her physical was in a permanent state of crisis. She went through a series of emergencies that looked like critical illnesses.

But in Integral Yoga, each difficulty is a means for greater progress; and through these ordeals, Mother came upon an astonishing discovery. It had to do with how the body is deeply, hypnotically, fantastically affected by the mind.

Different Modes of Mind

As humans, we’re mental beings, and everything we perceive—thoughts, emotions, sensations, forms—is perceived with mental consciousness. But mental consciousness has various modes: there’s the intellectual mind with its rationality, philosophy, and logical thought; the emotional mind, with its feelings, justifications, and desire-based reasonings; and the physical mind with its obstinate materialism.

For the physical mind, what’s real are solid objects, external happenings, deterministic causes and effects—and, of course, scientific discoveries and doctors’ opinions. It is also a mind of habit and repetition, endlessly looping small, programmed subroutines.

Moreover, because the physical mind was formed under the pressure of suffering and struggle, it’s stamped with an almost indelible sense of incapacity and defeatism. It pessimistically foresees every possible disaster and disease and accident.

The further down into the physical mind, the worse it gets. And way down at the bottom, where primal mind meshes with bodily matter, is the mind of the cells. This is a material mind that lives in a constant state of alarm and anxiety, a trembling that comes from fear ingrained in matter. It’s apprehensive, it’s automatic, and it’s closely related to physical illnesses.

And what Mother discovered, to her astonishment, was that the cells of the body obey this material mind. Therefore, if you can bring it under control, the body too will change—to the extent that what seemed to be absolutely irrefutable physical disorders and illnesses can vanish in a moment. Mother did many experiments and found this to be true.

She found that if she could still the material mind and make it receptive to the Divine, problems in the body that seemed incontrovertibly real and concrete changed instantly. Indeed, Sri Aurobindo said that once the physical mind is transformed, the transformation of the body will follow naturally.

A New Substance

So we come back to the nature of the mind: Mind imposes a grid on omnipresent reality and views the pieces it’s made as separate objects. Matter as we know it is a mental perception of omnipresent reality chopped into bits.

We call these bits “atoms.” Incredible as it may sound, according to Sri Aurobindo, atomic matter is the one unified reality perceived through mental consciousness. What we call matter is the substance of that reality divided by the action of universal mind. That substance is like a flowing sea—it’s not divided in itself, it’s only divided in the observing consciousness. So if the material consciousness is supramentalized, matter will be perceived as un-atomic substance—a unitary self-extension of omnipresent reality.

And so it was that in Mother’s body, the supramental consciousness, working through the mind of the cells, began to touch and transform matter, and as it did, it began to change it into a new kind of substance. Mother began speaking of this new substance as true matter, unified matter. She said, it’s more powerful, more luminous, more resistant than ordinary matter. It has certain subtler, penetrating qualities and a kind of innate capacity of universality. Its refinement allows the perception of vibrations in a much wider way. And, Mother said, it removes the sensation of division that’s found in mentalized substance—the sense of separation disappears quite naturally and spontaneously.

As the supramental consciousness permeated Mother’s body, its capabilities increased a hundredfold. It was no longer even individual in the separate sense—its boundaries seem to be gone, as if it were spread out everywhere, without limits. Her body consciousness felt like a movement of waves, she said—vast as the earth, infinite, like an eternal vibration with no beginning and no end, filled with power and carrying the universe in its undulatory movement.

The Materialization of the Psychic Being

Now, in Integral Yoga, one of the first necessities is to discover one’s innermost being or deepest self. This is the actual presence of the Divine within us, often called the soul. Sri Aurobindo borrowed a word from the Greek, psyche, and called it the psychic being. A self-aware portion of the Divine, the psychic being is immortal: it evolves from life to life, starting out as a spark and growing into a complete individuality expressive of a unique, fully realized divine personality.

Each time the psychic being incarnates, it draws to itself physical, vital, and mental elements to create a complex form through which it experiences and enjoys material existence. And till recently, that’s all it had to work with—physical, vital, and mental elements were the only ones that had evolved in earth nature. But since Mother did her work, there’s a new element it can gather around itself: supramental matter.

And one day in 1968, Mother noticed that there seemed to be a new intermediary form developing between her psychic being and her body. Two years later, she realized that in fact it is the psychic being that’s going to materialize itself and become the supramental being, that is to say, the next species in evolution.

According to Georges Van Vrekhem, who’s written some wonderful books on the Mother, the psychic being will do this by clothing itself in supramental matter—transformed earthly substance that’s sufficiently refined to give it an enduring and immortal shape. But this will only be possible when a sufficient quantity of gross matter is transformed by the process of supramental permeation. This supramental permeation is happening now, and it’s contagious. Mother started it and it continues. It’s a direct action from matter to matter that can be perceived and felt, not with the mind, but with the supramental sense.

An Archetypal Supramental Body

Georges Van Vrekhem also says that in the course of her experiences over 23 years, Mother gradually evolved an archetypal supramental body made out of supramentalized matter. As I understand it, this supramental body, which is immortal, is living in what Mother called the true physical, the subtle physical. She also called it the New World. This is a world that’s developing and gathering force just behind surface reality as it comes closer and closer to full manifestation. Because before things appear, they take form in the subtle physical and then precipitate out.

But again, in order for this New World and Mother’s supramental body to fully manifest, there has to be a certain critical mass of receptivity in people on earth and a sufficient supramentalization of matter—which there wasn’t in 1973 when she left the body, but which there may be in years to come.

What We Can Do Today

In the meantime, for those of us who are not ready for full supramental transformation, is there anything in Mother’s yoga of matter that can translate into something we can understand and realize in our own lives? Yes, there is.

First of all, Mother’s yoga was based most of all on a single methodology: surrender to the Divine. Surrender is something we can make part of our own practice: we can work each day to progressively offer ourselves, all we are and have, in every part of our being, in every moment, to the light, love, and beauty of the Divine. Because as Sri Aurobindo said, the first word of the supramental yoga is surrender; its last word also is surrender.

Second: We can learn to live in the consciousness of our soul, the psychic being, the Divine within—to bring it forward, to unify our being around it, to live in it more and more. This is something we can do here and now that is directly relevant to supramental transformation—for we know now that it is the psychic being that will manifest the supramental body.

Third: We can awaken our physical consciousness and improve our bodies to the highest degree possible—through fitness training, sports, hatha yoga, movement awareness, disciplined health habits—so that our bodies can be capable of serving as fit instruments for the higher consciousness. Because, Mother said, the skills developed in physical training are exactly those we must have to be fit for receiving and manifesting the new forces. Physical mastery, she said, leads to an improved body in which the cells acquire a plasticity and receptivity that makes the material substance more supple for the permeation of supramental power.

So now we come back to the idea of the transitional being, the surhomme, and how that relates to us. Sri Aurobindo said, humans are born for transcendence. Our inmost need is to be greater than what we are, to be more than human, to be divine.

And Mother said that all those who strive to overcome their ordinary nature, who try to realize materially the deeper experience that brought them into contact with divine truth, all those who try to realize physically and externally the change of consciousness they have found within themselves—all are apprentice surhommes.

She went on to say that each time we try not to be an ordinary person but to express in our actions that higher truth, rather than being governed by the general ignorance, we are apprentice surhommes. And according to the success of our efforts, we are more or less able, more or less advanced on the way.

Thus it is through our own practice of yoga, sincere surrender, and receptivity to the inner touch of the Divine Mother that this work may continue in us, leading us individually and collectively ever closer to the New World.

Bibliography

For further reading on the Mother’s life and the yoga of matter:

• Mother, Mother’s Agenda, vols. 1–13 (New York: Institute for Evolutionary Research).
• Mother, The Mother’s Yoga 1956–1973: A Compilation from the Mother’s Agenda, vols. 1–2 (Auroville: Mother’s Photographs, 2012).
• Mother, Notes on the Way, Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 11.
• Satprem, The Mind of the Cells (New York: Institute for Evolutionary Research: 1992).
• Sri Aurobindo, The Mother with Letters on the Mother, Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 32.
• Van Vrekhem, Georges, Beyond the Human Species: The Life and Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1997).
• Van Vrekhem, Georges, The Mother: The Story of Her Life (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2000).

[1] Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, vol. 1 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram), p. 4.

[2] Sri Aurobindo, The Mother with Letters on the Mother, Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 32, p. 32.

[3] Perhaps around February 1927; see Mother’s conversation of July 26, 1969 in Mother’s Agenda, vol. 10.

---

LYNDA LESTER edited the Integral Yoga journal Collaboration for ten years, is a past president and current board member of the Sri Aurobindo Association, and has given many presentations on Integral Yoga, including a six-part series on “Our Many Selves: Moving toward Mastery of Our Complex Being.” Her talk on “The Union of Spirit and Matter: Science, Consciousness, and a Life Divine” was hosted by La Grace Integral Life Center as part of its New Perspectives series.

---

Subscribe to Collaboration

Collaboration explores the vision and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the theory and practice of Integral Yoga, and themes such as consciousness, emergence, and transformation. To subscribe, visit https://www.collaboration.org/journal/subscribe/

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

Spiritual Tips for Living in the United States

MICHAEL MIOVIC

THE COLLABORATION  JOURNAL SPECIAL FEATURES series highlights notable articles from Collaboration journal and makes them available to readers without a subscription.

Collaboration has issued a call for essays on the “Soul of America,” but since honesty is integral to yoga, I must say that I don’t know much about this topic because I’ve never experienced the psychic being of the nation. However, I have lived in the U.S. long enough to learn a useful American solution which is, when faced with not knowing something, to just talk about something else instead. So, in that spirit here I will talk about the land of the U.S. and hope that no one minds the shift in focus. FYI, if someone does, at least they can’t sue me because I provided this little disclaimer up front, which is another American solution. And if you come to my weekend workshop or buy my book, then I’ll learn you more great American solutions at half price—plus show you how to get the Brooklyn Bridge for free. Believe me, you’ll never see a deal like this again.

Relax, that was a joke. But in all seriousness, the land of the United States is very special because she is conscious. I don’t know how to describe this other than to say that she is. The rocks are alive, the soil speaks to you, and you can feel it even in things like cement, asphalt, walls, windows, and telephone poles. Everything physical somehow feels close, awake, and intimate. I’ve been to India and Europe and things are different there. In Europe the land glows more than here in the U.S., and it’s truly beautiful to behold, but it’s a sort of light from the mental plane while the physical substance feels further away and less full. And in India the situation is even more dramatic: one feels a profound spiritual atmosphere everywhere, but the physical substance seems forgotten or, in some places, even disrespected or somehow dirty. Of course, this is not so in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville where physical things are conscious, but step outside of these zones and you will see what I mean. The cement in Hyderabad is just no match for that in New York City, because the latter simply feels more present, like it matters.

Now, one of the most important things in any culture is to know where to find God, or whatever you call that big thing we can’t define. But let’s not get lost in words and keep the issue down to earth: suppose you have a problem in life and you have to make a decision. What do you do or where do you go to get an intuitive answer from that thing we call “God”? Well, in Europe they have many churches and cathedrals that are truly awe-inspiring, and in Asia they’ve got a wealth of ancient and beautiful temples that represent many different religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and even Zoroastrianism. Those places all work well, you can get quiet, go deep into inside or feel your consciousness opening into other worlds, and then an answer comes. So, the bottom line is that Europe and Asia have excellent places to talk with God—or Gods and Goddesses, take your pick. Personally, I like the ancient temples of Greece, where you can meet with Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Pan, and so on. Lots of choices and possibilities in the Eastern hemisphere.

The problem over here in the Western half of the world, however, is that our churches and temples don’t work that well. They’re nice for people to get together to pray and sing, and there’s nothing wrong with that, to socialize and prevent loneliness. However, these places just don’t have much power apart from the people; that is, you can’t walk into one of these buildings and easily feel God or Gods revealed. Apart from a few ancient Mayan temples that are still awake, I can’t say that I’ve met many conscious churches, mosques, or temples in the Americas. There might be a few budding Hindu temples built by immigrants where you can feel a little something, but these are nothing like the ones in India in terms of spiritual power.

So why is this? The U.S. is full of Christians who have more money and building technology than just about anyone in the world, and yet they can’t seem to make a church that really works. It’s odd. They’ve built massive skyscrapers that show plenty of engineering and architectural ability, but their churches are a bunch of woodsheds, brick boxes, or faux copies of Europe. Where is the inspired expression of aspiration? Where is the conscious power that we call God? Not in the buildings, it’s in the land, that’s where it is. In America “God” does not like to be cooped up in churches or temples, because she prefers to spread out across the land that she created and inhabits. Little buildings made by human beings are too small to hold her massive spirit, so she built something bigger in which to dwell, places like the Grand Canyon and towering redwood forests that speak to your soul. Those are the real churches and temples of America, and I think that’s why this earth we’ve got here is so conscious. You see, this land can talk to you, teach you, provide for you, guide you—anything you need she can do it. She’s like a spiritual mother, always close and comforting but also wise and disciplined, so don’t get lazy or she’ll teach you a lesson.

All right, now that we got that first thing straight, let’s talk about roads because they also matter. You can’t separate life and God because they come together in a package deal. We’ve got to have these roads to do work and business, or else we’ll all die. That’s just a fact of modern life. However, we also need these roads to get to all those national parks and other sacred places I just mentioned, and it’s out there on the road that most Americans meet the land, so roads are also spiritual. You’ve got to know that or else you’ll die spiritually, and that’s another fact of living in the U.S. So, whenever you’ve got a real life problem to solve, that’s when you have to hit the road—and you can talk to God in between doing other personal or professional business. You don’t have to pull life and God apart because the land can do both together and therefore you can, too.

Here’s how to do a road trip: get in your car, get out on the highway, and drive away from all the buildings. Go to the open land or where the forests start. Now just relax and hear the sound of the tires on the road and feel those rhythmic thuds along the way. Listen to the engine droning and the wind whipping by, it’s like a mantra or some kind of chanting. Slowly your awareness will stretch out sideways like a pancake and just settle down onto the land. Let that happen—you’ll see how your mind widens, thoughts get quieter and farther apart, and the spaces between them larger. You might even feel your consciousness sink down into the earth. And then the answers start to come: that’s the land speaking, that’s her way of communicating with you, and when she speaks you should listen. Even her silence is a blessing, so that’s a good thing too. It might take a while for her to answer, but she will. You can rely on her, in fact, I’d say she’s more reliable than many of the people around here.

After you’ve got the hang of road trips, the next step to living in the U.S. is to pay more attention to the roadcuts[1] because they are, to the best of my knowledge, the only product of modern engineering that actually enhance the consciousness of the earth. So much has been said about how current U.S. culture consumes and abuses the earth, and it’s true. We are a civilization of waste and misuse, and future generations will pay dearly for our lack of consciousness. Nevertheless, let us not forget the positive and give credit where it is actually due, and the fact is that American roadcuts are divine. These little human-made miracles release the hidden powers of the earth, reveal her consciousness, and are scattered across our land like periodic blessings along the way. Roadcuts are mini canyons where one is suddenly reminded of the mysteries of Time and the miles upon miles of rock below our feet. One sees all the layers of past eons summarized in sediment, meets faces of elemental beings, feels the ancient presence of wisdom and power and hidden love and the yearning of sacred substance to manifest God on earth. So whenever you do a road trip, be sure to commune with roadcuts. It only takes a few moments, but you will be glad you did it.

You see, human life is so small and strange once you start to think about it. All of our hopes and dreams and whorl of drama and worry transpire in a thin layer of greenery that is scarcely a few hundred feet thick. Our concerns rarely reach above the treetops, or down more than a few feet into the soil. So, when you are doing a road trip and meditating with the land, most of that meditation does not reach deep into the ground—that is, until you meet a roadcut. Then suddenly you feel it: the rock below your feet comes up to meet you and pulls your awareness down into the worlds of bedrock below us. That meeting is a blessing, a healing, a reconnection with the earth. It happens to me every day while driving to and from the office, and my life would be a waste without it. Without roadcuts, I would be just another white guy with a massive carbon footprint who produces tons of garbage per year and has an unresolved national history of exploiting both land and people. With roadcuts, however, I receive the blessings of Mother America and feel whole again, and holy. I don’t understand it, but I have never once felt the land punish me for all my transgressions against her, nor what my ancestors did. It’s a real mystery how she can be so loving and forgiving, but she is. She does not seem to hold grudges, nor ask much in return for her gifts.

Another tip for living in America is not to forget the seafloor; remember to include her in your meditation, too. This advice is probably not relevant to people who live far away from the seacoasts, and of course people who live in the Great Plains are standing on an ancient seabed, so they can just commune with that. I’ve done it and it works. But when you live near the big waters and great lakes, it’s important to remember the rock hidden beneath them. The religions from the Eastern part of the world say it’s good to pray to God in heaven before going to bed, and they must be right. But what happens to me at bedtime is that my prayers sink down to God below us, on the seafloor. I suspect that happens because the jewel centers (chakras of the earth) in the East open to nonmaterial planes of consciousness, so prayers tend to rise upwards over there, while here in the physical center of the world the consciousness is denser, so our prayers tend to go down into the ground.

In any case, whatever the reason, here’s what happens: as I’m lying there in bed with my body aching and my mind tied into knots from forgetting the earth all day while I was doing some b.s. in the office, I suddenly remember that I completely forgot about the seafloor. And this feels disturbing, like being subtly cut in half, because the seafloor is also an important part of the earth and so we should remember her even though we cannot see her. Her labors matter, too, and in fact the scientists say she invented life itself a few billion years ago, and that all land animals evolved from some ancient fish, including us. There is more land on this planet below the sea than above it, so how can we say that seafloors do not matter? We must remember the seafloors, and bedtime is good time to do it. Thus, as I close my eyes, I start to see the land of Boston stretch out towards the harbor, like she’s reaching to reunite with the sea. I follow the land out to the beach and then down into the dark waters, sliding along her back as she dives ever deeper into the darkness. Sand turns to bare rock, crags emerge, cliffs drop down and the water rises ever higher above. The darkness grows denser and deeper as the seabed descends towards a bottomless bottom. All becomes still, quiet, stable and solid, and at last one feels whole and reconnected with something or someone very ancient. A presence is there, a knowing, and then it is a good time to sleep. The work is too big for any one person or nation, so while people in the East remember heaven at bedtime, in the Americas we can remember the seafloor. Maybe one day our joint efforts will bring earth and heaven together. That would be nice.

There are many, many worlds below our feet and it’s hard to put this into words. The geologists have learned extraordinary things about the evolution of the Earth, plate tectonics, how she has changed over time. It’s a gift to have this knowledge and we should share it. However, it’s also tricky because only part of the earth is physical and with the physical movement of rocks and lava comes an opening into other worlds that are subtle. Hard to describe, but there are Gods and Goddesses down there, spiritual beings, dimensions of past and future, memories of things that were and will be. It is truly amazing, this wisdom of the earth. An ancient being of ananda lies wrapped in the purusha consciousness of the Adirondacks, Rhode Island has a drop of divine love in the mind of matter, and the bedrock of Lake Superior yearns to do pranam at the feet of Sri Aurobindo. These are mysteries we cannot understand, but that is all right because we do not have to. We can just let the land hold us and carry us forward to whatever is her goal. She will find a way to get there—and bring us with her.

The next tip for living in the U.S. is to understand that even though it appears like people can carve up the land and own it, in fact she owns herself. You can put up some fences and pay lawyers to defend your property rights, but that doesn’t control the consciousness of the land. She remains forever free, undivided, and impartial to all the people who walk across her surface.  There is no way human beings can own all those miles of bedrock below our feet. The land was here long before we were and will remain long after we’ve given way to some other species, hopefully one that is more conscious than we are. This land has been talking with the Divine Mother for much longer than we have, so she can probably teach us a thing or two.

This situation leads to another American lesson, which is how to get the Brooklyn Bridge for free. Here’s what you do: do a road trip to New York, then stand in front of the Brooklyn Bridge and feel the miles of rock all around and below your feet. To me this New York bedrock radiates a greenish aura, but maybe to you she shows another color. Anyway, you feel the power, the tremendous energy of the bedrock, and now you know why New York City has so much muscle. Feel how the Brooklyn Bridge grows out of that consciousness, expresses the dreams of the land, and now you’ve got that bridge for free. Go across town to commune with the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge, and now you own that one too. Keep going west across the continent to San Francisco and feel how the Golden Gate grows out of Marin headlands to span the waters, and now you have all three bridges for free. Keep on going like that and pretty soon you’ll own the whole continent—and then you’ll also realize that in fact you grow out of her and she owns you. Let that blessing grow bigger, and then you’ll feel the consciousness of the land stretch even further, from pole to pole and sea to sea until she covers the entire Western half of the globe, with her seafloors. That is Mother America and she is not divided by those little lines people draw on maps. No, she is one gigantic goddess with all the chakras and planes of consciousness arranged very nicely in her earth, as I’ve explained in a prior article on jewel centers in this journal.[2]

Well, those are some basic tips for living well anywhere in the Americas, North or South. Of course, you will have to go deeper into the particular land where you live, because each part of Mother America is conscious and has her special ways and secrets. But if you get your relationship with the land straight, then everything else will work out. Eventually even the people will fall into place, sooner or later … well, later, given the nature of people. We are a very difficult bunch because our minds got too big as we evolved from monkeys. Then we developed the ability to dream up nasty schemes to exploit each other and the earth, and that’s why we’re in this global crisis now. It’s very dangerous, you know, to carry a human brain around in your head, like a bomb up there just waiting to go off. I don’t think many people on this planet are actually qualified to operate the human mind, maybe only the Dalai Lama. I know I’m not and yet I’ve got one nonetheless. What a mess.

This problem brings us to the last tip for living in the U.S., which is where to find the land’s psychic center in case you would like to tap into that support for evolving in consciousness beyond the mind. In my experience Massachusetts radiates a powerful psychic presence and is a fully conscious being, although of course others are free to disagree and have a different experience of land in the U.S. But before you form your own opinion of Massachusetts, it’s worth meeting her in person because she’s a marvel: even though she appears to be rather plain and ordinary on the outside, on the inside she is extraordinary. Of all the road trips you can take in North America, this one is the most uncanny: drive on I-95 from Connecticut northwards, and as you approach Massachusetts note what happens. The trees grow more compact and wizened, as if you are ascending onto an alpine plateau—and yet the impression is odd because the elevation is in consciousness rather than altitude.  It feels as though you are rising into a zone that is on the ground yet somehow hovers just above it, and you wonder what on earth is happening. Then you see the road sign that says “Welcome to Massachusetts,” and pretty soon you realize like Dorothy that you’re not in Kansas anymore.

Now, once you have arrived in the little land of Oz that is Massachusetts, it helps to understand the ways of this wonderful witch of the East so that you can absorb her blessings deeply. She has three M’s to her outer method, which are merit, measure, and mettle, and she uses these to manifest the two M’s of her inner soul-power, which are mystery and magic. The first three of these qualities are visible in her effects on human culture, but the last two can only be known directly, through communion with her land.

The first “M” of Massachusetts is merit: she seeks always for truth and judges things not by their appearances but by their inner substance.  However, to her, truth is always progressive, so past and present are but preparations for tomorrow. Thus, Massachusetts reaches ever towards the future and is constantly growing towards a higher perfection. We see this psychic influence of her land on people very clearly in the last 400 years of history. Massachusetts supported democracy well before Europeans arrived upon her shores by participating in the Iroquois League of Nations in her west. She then gave a home to the one of the earliest settlements of Europeans in her east, purified these Puritans by demonstrating how witch trials lack merit, and finally taught these immigrants democracy. Massachusetts is thus the only land on earth to have developed democracy twice, in quick succession, among two different human cultures whose only similarity was where they lived. This tends to show that democracy was transmitted from land to people, since the two peoples involved were largely separated by conflicts and thus had limited transmission of consciousness with each other. And, for the record, the subsequent history of wars and land grabs pursued by European immigrants across the continent are not the fault of Massachusetts, for she offered friendship. If you go visit the land near Plymouth Plantation you can still feel this friendly aura welling up from the low hills and wind-swept trees that face the sea. Massachusetts is still waiting for her offer to be fulfilled, for the simple reason that collaboration has more merit than monarchy, witch trials, colonialism, bigotry, racism, and capital greed.

In support of merit, Massachusetts went on to develop ideas and knowledge in all spheres. She built the first public school in the Americas (Boston Latin) and the first university (Harvard). She gave birth to its first great scientist (Ben Franklin), made room for the Shakers,[3] and within the single town of Concord read the Bhagavad Gita and started transcendentalism; wrote Walden Pond and launched environmentalism; and raised the Alcott sisters who gave us the beloved story of Little Women. Massachusetts inspired writers and poets in her western lands, such as Melville and Dickinson, while in her east she advanced the causes of feminism and abolitionism and gave the U.S. four presidents and one founding father. She performed the first surgery with general anesthesia in the world and went on to make both her educational and medical institutes among the finest on the planet. She is the home of American psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience, and through the Kennedy family brought us civil rights, NASA, and the greatest quantity of progressive legislation ever written by a single senator. Massachusetts also gave Mahatma Gandhi the method of civil disobedience, brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to study and develop his ideas, and elevated a once unknown fellow named Barack Obama into the national spotlight at Boston’s Democratic National Convention in 2004. He went on to become the nation’s first biracial president. Human beings have cures for childhood cancer because Massachusetts said they could, set foot upon the moon because she said they would, and now have mRNA vaccines because she said they should.

And all these accomplishments are but a small sampling of her achievements, as no object is above the ability of Massachusetts and no subject below her interest. She was quick to join the industrial revolution, built sailing ships to rival the fastest in the world, and in Waltham even made a watch more accurate than those of Switzerland. She has one of the best life-insurance companies in the industry (MassMutual), opened the first mutual stock fund (MITTX), and is the headquarters for Fidelity. Massachusetts gave children Dr. Seuss, invented basketball, and even made sneakers popular via her Converse factory in Malden. She plays many sports, hosts world-class marathons, produced the first undefeated heavyweight boxing champion in history, and her Celtics and Bruins have won umpteen championships. Her Patriots are the best football team ever to take the field, and with the greatest quarterback of all time. And how about those Red Sox? Legend has it they were absent from the World Series for 86 years due to a curse, and yet when Massachusetts finally broke that losing spell, she didn’t just swing for the bleachers, she swung for the ages: the Sox came from three games down to beat the Yankees in multiple overtimes to clinch the pennant, and then went on to become the only team in history to come from that far behind to win the World Series. Or if you prefer humor to sport, then Massachusetts has that base covered, too, for she created Car Talk for public radio, which was hosted by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates who sported with callers about their car-related life problems. Massachusetts also produced the actor whose character of Spock made Star Trek iconic, and then she turned around and filmed the iconic Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard. The only thing she cannot do, and will not do, is to lower her standards and trim her vision of what is possible.

The second “M” of Massachusetts is for measure, which is the poise with which she shows her merit. Excellence is her very nature but excess is not, and therefore she always prefers to do a small thing well rather than large one poorly. That is why she keeps the scale of Boston restrained compared to the ungainly cities of the world, for she has an innate sense of balance, of harmony and proportion, and these combine to express her beauty. Massachusetts gave the U.S. its first great painter (James Whistler), built outstanding art schools and museums, and has always attracted artist colonies to her delicate fingertips at the end of Cape Cod. She engineered the first concert hall with perfect acoustics in the Western hemisphere and plays classical music via the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Pops in Boston while hosting Tanglewood in the Berkshires. Her conservatories are as good as any, and she is not limited in her tastes and styles: she is a master of European classical music but also plays jazz and contemporary music at Berklee, and at the New England Conservatory of Music gives jobs to Grammy winners who teach children how to find their voice. Her seventh-inning “stretch” at Fenway is the most melodious in the country, where the crowd’s rendition of “Sweet Caroline” is truly sweet, and Massachusetts can even rock. For example, she is the home of Aerosmith, the Cars, and New Kids on the Block, and to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, she released the album Boston from a basement in Waltham. The clean and uplifting sound of that classic purified an entire genre of its drug-infused haze and gave to rock and metal her classic touch. For the same reason Massachusetts prefers candlestick bowling to that large and loud kind that is so unbecoming, because her way is more beautiful and also easier for the young and old. It is true that her tastes in homes, clothing, and interior décor tend to run a bit conservative, but that is because she sees the beauty and merit of tradition and has the grace to balance old and new. Such is the charm and elegance of Massachusetts, yet even these she expresses with a certain simplicity and plainness, just to show that she is American not European.

Nevertheless, though Massachusetts may be small and delicate, this does not mean that she cannot defend herself when needed, for her third “M” is mettle. You feel a hint of this in her sports teams and frank citizens, but where she really hits you with it is in defense of truth and justice. For that she will fight. India gave the world its first inspiration for democracy, and Europe incubated these ideas further, but never forget that it was little Massachusetts who fired the shot heard round the world. She sent Black regiments to wage the Civil War, launched one-third of all landing ships used at D-Day from her shores, gave three Kennedy brothers who stood for her dreams to the last breath, and she still sails Old Ironsides from Boston Harbor once a year to defy the monarchy of Time itself. She does not accept inaction on global warming, racism, homophobia, and gender rights, or sex abuse in churches; and she still fights to fulfill the ideals of equality which she nurtured in her cradle of liberty. Yes, it is true that Massachusetts is small, makes mistakes, and loses battles, yet even so her spirit remains undefeated. For defeat exists only for those who surrender to hostile powers, and Massachusetts surrenders only to the Divine Mother. She has fought demons, darkness, ignorance, and falsehood across centuries, and she will defeat these in the end because she has the endurance to go the distance. So a word to the wise, there are two paths you can take in life: the way which Massachusetts points out nicely to you today, or the way she will drag you kicking and screaming down that path tomorrow if she has to. Those are the options she gives you, and the first option is better because Massachusetts is the physical tip of the spiritual spear that drives the evolution of consciousness in matter.

And yet one must never think that Massachusetts is a hard and cold master, for her methods are just the means she uses to manifest her spiritual mysteries and her magical soul of sweetness. And what a soul she has, so full of light and love and beauty, and so simple and sincere in her aspirations. She just knows that matter is sacred and conscious, and in her innocence she wants all souls to share in that blessing. To Massachusetts it is a self-evident truth that earth can house a life Divine, and she has faith that with the help of the Divine Mother this can actually be achieved. If there is something unholy or impure about matter then Massachusetts does not know it, nor does she recall that her Mother ever told her. Thus, if you really want to know Massachusetts, just approach her gently and tell her that you would like to grow in consciousness. That will not only disarm her, it will completely undo her. For what will Massachusetts not do for the soul who yearns to feel the sanctities of substance? She has a psychic light and touch and consciousness that join earth and heaven, and her whole joy is to join these in us. All you have to do is ask, and she will show you: she will haunt you with pastel skies and musing clouds that paint earthly scenes of delicacy unearthly and bewitch you with her mystical moons and nights mysterious. She will glow for you in every type of weather, enchant you in every season, nourish your meditations with her conscious forests and meadows, and whisper to you with breathes of psychic light that waft up from her soil and infuse straight into the depths of your soul. She will heal you on her seashores, teach you to talk with her at Walden, widen your witness consciousness at Mt. Wachusett, elevate your thoughts in the Berkshires, and even cleanse your subconscient at Shelbourne Falls.

And whatever spiritual opportunity Massachusetts cannot give to the soul who seeks it, she will obtain from other jewel centers of the earth, for she has neither ego nor envy. She scans the globe for quality and sends souls there to get it, or imports the gifts of other lands so that everyone at home can learn and grow as well. It was thus that Massachusetts summoned Mother Ann[3] from England with a vision, and when a certain Indian yogi aspired to come to America, it was she who sent a soul to greet him on the train from Vancouver and bring him back to Boston after he was rejected in Chicago. Massachusetts gave this swami a warm welcome, put a Harvard professor at his service, and even paid his ticket to the Parliament of Religions.[4] [5] And so it is that today people on every continent know of Vivekananda and Indian yoga, and yet how many of these souls have ever thanked the land of Massachusetts for making this growth of consciousness possible? But never mind, it doesn’t matter, for that was then and this is now, and Massachusetts is focused always on the future. She does the work the Divine Mother gives her, she does it with all her soul of love and beauty, and she does it so perfectly that she even signs her letters with a prayer to the big MA from the little one in Massachusetts. Friends, if all this is not mysterious and magical, then what is?

In closing, since honesty is integral to yoga, I must acknowledge that many lands are grander and more glorious than Massachusetts, not only outwardly but also inwardly in the planes and powers of consciousness to which they open. And yet, as a purely personal statement made from one subject to another, for me these wonders would be insubstantial and unfulfilling without the love of this mini miracle, this tiny treasure who goes by the name of Massachusetts. For I have never met a land of finer substance and higher aspirations, an earthly being who is more beautiful, more conscious, more sincere and pure than she is. And when I stand in the presence of this little princess of the Americas, my soul rejects the very notion of possessing any piece or part of her, not even one pebble or particle. No, may Massachusetts remain forever free and beholden only to the power of the Divine Mother, to her own soul, and to her dreams of an extraordinary future.

OK, I think I better stop here before Massachusetts decides I’ve gone to excess. When you are in the United States, just stay focused on the Divine Mother, the land, the road trips, and the road cuts. And if you ever come to Massachusetts, then try asking her for some tips on how to do the Integral Yoga.

---

[1] A roadcut is a cut through a hill or mountain for the purposes of building a road through it, rather than over it.

[2] Jewel centers are chakras of the earth, as explained in Miovic, M. (2012), “The Seven Jewel Centers of the Earth Mother,” in Collaboration, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 9–13.

[3] See “The Shakers: Gift for the American Soul” by Susan Curtiss in this issue of Collaboration.

4] Burke, M.L., Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1972). See Chapter 1.

[5]   Swami Vivekananda in the West: A Chronology (Vedanta Society of Southern California, 2016). Accessed from https://vedanta.org/swami-vivekananda-in-the-west-a-chronology/

---

MICHAEL MIOVIC is a clinical psychiatrist and long-time student of the Integral Yoga. He has collaborated extensively with colleagues around the world to apply the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to psychology and psychiatry. He has a special interest in geospiritual studies based upon the seven jewel centers, or chakras, of the Earth Mother.

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

The Role of the Avatar

MARTHA ORTON

THE COLLABORATION  JOURNAL SPECIAL FEATURES series highlights notable articles from Collaboration journal and makes them available to readers without a subscription. A discussion of this article with Martha Orton, Jonathan Kay, and Marco Masi is available on the Sri Aurobindo Association YouTube channel, Collaboration Podcast, Episode 4.

HUMANITY INHERENTLY HAS a sense of a higher and better life beyond our usual earthly existence. Those who believe in a higher power often seek solace in such an idea and also hope, or even expect, that a divine presence has lived among us in the past and may do so again. They also may believe that the Divine is involved in life and cares about humanity to the extent that a personal relationship with the Divine can be a component of daily life. Such a view is consistent with the beliefs in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, especially for those who accept them as the divine presence that engages with them in their spiritual seeking and also offers the potential to transform their human nature to a higher expression of itself.

In his description of the evolution of consciousness, Sri Aurobindo explains that the purpose of human life is to evolve in consciousness and to engage in a transformative process which brings all of humanity, in fact all of creation, closer to the Divine and, ultimately, to union with the Divine in a wonderful Oneness. We cannot imagine this process being at all possible without help from a higher power. While the Divine is always involved in life on earth and involved with humanity, at times the Divine has made the sacrifice of taking on human form and living among us, doing so from its great love and compassion. These beings who have made this sacrifice, divine beings in human form, are spoken of as avatars. For many in the Integral Yoga, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are seen as the most recent avatars to live among us on earth. As Sri Aurobindo has described, human nature benefits from the presence of the avatar as an intermediary, a being close to our humanity and whose example we can use as a model.

Sri Aurobindo has written about the role of the avatar in multiple texts, including in Essays on the Gita, where he gives specific focus to the avatar in the form of Lord Krishna, the aspect and form of the Divine central to the Gita. Also, writing on the theme of offering and sacrifice in The Synthesis of Yoga, he addresses the nature of the sacrifice which the Divine makes when it comes to earth in human form. We also discover much about the role the avatar plays in human spirituality in Sri Aurobindo’s profound small volume, The Mother. The present essay proposes to highlight some of the aspects of this topic which Sri Aurobindo has shared with us with greater eloquence and fullness in his writings.

The primary and central role played by the avatar is to establish a physical, concrete link between heaven and earth, the Divine and its creation. Sri Aurobindo explains in his conceptualization of the evolution of consciousness that not only did the Divine create the universe and all in it out of itself, but the Divine is naturally integrally within it (i.e., involved in it in the most literal sense). Furthermore the concept of Brahman necessarily includes the inherent connection between the Divine and the manifestation, for as Sri Aurobindo quotes from the Bhagavad Gita, “All is the Divine Being.”³ Sri Aurobindo gives us the most complete and comprehensive interpretation of Brahman in asserting that this applies to all of the material universe down to the atomic level. He writes: “For all here is God, is the Spirit or Self-existence, is Brahman, ekamevādvitīyam,—there is nothing else, nothing other and different from it and there can be nothing else, can be nothing other and different from it …”⁴ Accepting this as truth, we might ask why such a physical link as the presence of the avatar is necessary.

The answer to this salient question also lies within Sri Aurobindo’s conceptualization of the evolution of consciousness; for he explains that what is involved must evolve—that is, the Divine presence in the creation both enables the evolution of its consciousness and makes this evolution inevitable. The avatar comes to earth to help advance this process—to enable humanity and all the material world to evolve and manifest their inherent divine nature more fully than they might otherwise be able to do. One of the most powerful and compelling passages in the Gita is Krishna’s declaration to Arjuna, the warrior who faces the challenge of battling his kin, of his presence and purpose, which Sri Aurobindo translates as follows:

Many are my lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know, but thou knowest not, O scourge of the foe. Though I am the unborn, though I am imperishable in my self-existence, though I am the Lord of all existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature and I come into birth by my self-Maya. For whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right I am born from age to age. He who knoweth thus in its right principles my divine birth and my divine work, when he abandons his body, comes not to rebirth, he comes to Me, O Arjuna. Delivered from liking and fear and wrath, full of me, taking refuge in me, many purified by austerity of knowledge have arrived at my nature of being (madbhāvam), the divine nature of the Purushottama [the Supreme Divine]. As men approach me, so I accept them to my love (bhajāmi); men follow in every way my path, O son of Pritha.⁵

While recognizing the role of the avatar as bringing humanity closer to the Divine, Sri Aurobindo additionally asserts that the avatar’s purpose extends even farther to enabling and assisting in the transformation of human nature into its divine counterpart. He writes specifically to this point in Essays on the Gita when he explains that it is not only for upholding the Dharma that Lord Krishna has come to earth to assist Arjuna:

But we have to remark carefully that the upholding of Dharma in the world is not the only object of the descent of the Avatar, that great mystery of the Divine manifest in humanity; for the upholding of the Dharma is not an all-sufficient object in itself, not the supreme possible aim for the manifestation of a Christ, a Krishna, a Buddha, but is only the general condition of a higher aim and a more supreme and divine utility. For there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhāvam āgataḥ; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve.⁶

Sri Aurobindo further emphasizes the significance he gives to the role of the avatar in transforming humanity:

This double aspect in the Gita’s doctrine of Avatarhood is apt to be missed by the cursory reader satisfied, as most are, with catching a superficial view of its profound teachings, and it is missed too by the formal commentator petrified in the rigidity of the schools. Yet it is necessary, surely, to the whole meaning of the doctrine. Otherwise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma, a popular superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deification of historical or legendary supermen, not what the Gita makes all its teaching, a deep philosophical and religious truth and an essential part of or step to the supreme mystery of all, rahasyam uttamam.

If there were not this rising of man into the Godhead to be helped by the descent of God into humanity, Avatarhood for the sake of the Dharma would be an otiose phenomenon, since mere Right, mere justice or standards of virtue can always be upheld by the divine omnipotence through its ordinary means, by great men or great movements, by the life and work of sages and kings and religious teachers, without any actual incarnation.⁷

Reflecting on the role of the avatar, we cannot but recognize the vast extent of divine compassion in engaging so directly with humanity at its own level of being. Without this direct example to lead us forward, we would be much more likely to stay mired in the smallness of our surface being and nature. Sri Aurobindo describes the great mission and purpose of the avatar:

The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in the human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood, in order that the human nature   may by moulding its principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into the divine. The law, the Dharma which the Avatar establishes is given for that purpose chiefly; the Christ, Krishna, Buddha stands in its centre as the gate, he makes through himself the way men shall follow. That is why each Incarnation holds before men his own example and declares of himself that he is the way and the gate; he declares too the oneness of his humanity with the divine being, declares that the Son of Man and the Father above from whom he has descended are one, that Krishna in the human body, mānuṣīṁ tanum āśritam, and the supreme Lord and Friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the same divine Purushottama, revealed there in his own being, revealed here in the type of humanity.⁸

Further reflecting on the role of the avatar, we can feel deeply humbled and grateful for the concrete physical presence of the Divine on earth and consider the enormity of the sacrifice which this represents. Sri Aurobindo has written of the nature of this sacrifice in The Synthesis of Yoga, describing the concept of sacrifice as a dynamic process central to the Integral Yoga. He has written extensively on this concept and given it particular emphasis in three chapters of Book I of The Synthesis of Yoga. In Chapter IV, titled “The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice,” Sri Aurobindo describes two major forms of sacrifice that occur in the universe.

The first of these is the sacrifice made by the Divine through the descent of the purusha from the vast transcendent oneness into the world and matter. This sacrifice, the highest and greatest, precedes the second, the sacrifice made by the manifest universe to the Divine. The sacrifice made by the Divine in coming into matter initiates and enables the sacrifice which the manifestation can make through its self-offering to the Divine. Sri Aurobindo states: “This descent, the sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them, is the seed of redemption of this world of lnconscience and Ignorance.”⁹

The second form of sacrifice is that made by the manifest existence in its unconscious or conscious growth towards the Divine. This sacrifice ultimately leads human beings onto the triune path of yoga, in which the paths of works, knowledge, and devotion merge, and to union with the Divine. The arduous and immeasurably lengthy sacrificial process of humanity’s evolution is indeed great. Yet we can barely imagine the magnitude of the sacrifice made by the Divine in taking on human form and living among us in that guise. The avatar takes on the human body, with all the difficulties and forms of suffering implied in this manifestation. Although the avatar has the capability of performing miracles and avoiding any form of personal suffering, he or she takes on the sufferings associated with life in a human body for our sake, showing how they can be endured as a form of redemption or overcome even within our nature. Sri Aurobindo conveys a sense of this reality in Savitri, as we can see in the following lines:

Thou hast come down into a struggling world.
To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;
If thou wouldst save the toiling universe,
The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure?
If far he walks above mortality’s head,
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?
If one of theirs they see scale heaven’s peaks,
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.
God must be born on earth and be as man.
That man being human may grow even as God.
He who would save the world must be one with the world,
All suffering things contain in his heart’s space
And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.¹⁰

For humanity, immense gratitude needs to be our response, along with receptivity to change and transformation. We can ask ourselves the question: “Where would we be without some recognition in our awareness of the Divine?” The answer for most of us would be simply that we would feel lost. The very presence of the avatar assists humanity in its recognition of the reality of the Divine. Moreover, the actual physical presence of the Divine in human form also greatly assists in developing a personal relationship with the Divine, because the avatar is much more approachable than the vaster forms and aspects of the Divine. In essence, the greater divine reality is far too vast for the human mind to conceive of and, in its vastness, too impersonal for it to approach. Even if we could conceive of it, the Divine in its transcendent aspect would be overwhelming to us. Since the divine reality exists at levels beyond our grasp, as the transcendent and the universal, humanity is blessed with the Divine in the personal, individual form of the avatar. Humanity greatly needs the avatar in order to develop personal connection with the Divine. Without developing a personal relationship with the Divine, we can have little sense of guidance, and certainly little experience of emotional connection and devotion. The interplay and  exchange of both of these is essential to our growth and transformation.

Sri Aurobindo explains that the presence of the avatar among humanity on earth offers a concrete example of how we can progress in our personal and individual development. He writes: “It is, we might say, to exemplify the possibility of the Divine manifest in the human being, so that man may see what that is and take courage and grow into it.”¹¹ This presents itself as a dual action beginning with the birth of the Divine into human form, and subsequently followed by the ascent of humanity into its higher, divine nature. Moreover, the avatar offers a teaching which usually has become a sacred text for his or her followers to enrich their understanding and practice of the path which the avatar presents as a possibility for their future.

Sri Aurobindo also explains that the influence of the Divine on earth manifested in the form of the avatar leaves a lingering vibration and presence that continues to have profound and wide-reaching effect on human life and the evolutionary advance. Pertinent to this inspiring understanding, Sri Aurobindo writes: “The divine manifestation of a Christ, Krishna, Buddha in external humanity has for its inner truth the same manifestation of the eternal Avatar within in our own inner humanity. That which has been done in the outer human life of earth, may be repeated in the inner life of all human beings.”¹²

Writing in The Mother, Sri Aurobindo describes wonderfully all the ways in which the Divine interacts with humanity in its sacrifice of engagement with us and he also describes the necessity of our full receptivity and surrender to the Divine in order to receive the blessings offered to us. The following passages reflect some of the beauty of this text and speak powerfully to necessity of the role of the avatar:

The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence. The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates. But something of her ways can be seen and felt through her embodiments and the more seizable because more defined and limited temperament and action of the goddess forms in whom she consents to be manifest to her creatures.

There are three ways of being of the Mother of which you can become aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe. Transcendent, the original supreme Shakti, she stands above the worlds and links the creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal, the cosmic Mahashakti, she creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces. Individual, she embodies the power of these two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and mediates between the human personality and the divine Nature.¹³

Notes

¹   The Mother, Words of the Mother—I, Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 13, p. 4

²   Ibid., p. 37

³   Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA), vols. 21–22, p. 309

⁴   Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, CWSA, vol. 19, p. 151

⁵   Ibid., pp. 146–147

⁶   Ibid., pp. 147–148

⁷   Ibid., p. 149

⁸   Ibid., pp. 148–149

⁹   Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, CWSA, vols. 23–24, p. 106

¹⁰  Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, CWSA, vols. 33–34, 536–537

¹¹  Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, CWSA, vol. 19, p. 159

¹²  Ibid., p. 160

Martha Orton is a writer and scholar with a PhD in Sri Aurobindo Studies and a member of the Sri Aurobindo Association’s Editorial Advisory Board. She has been a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for many years, having lived in both the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, and is the author of several books and numerous journal articles on Integral Yoga. Her books include The Quest for Knowledge and Mastery: A Comparative Study of Motivation in the Light of Sri Aurobindo; Oneness; Sri Aurobindo’s Perspective on Reality & Other Essays; and Calling into the Dark (poetry).

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

The Time Has Come

PATRICK M. BELDIO

The blossom of a new creation from the humus of ecological crisis

TODAY WE ARE WITNESSING both a planetary dissolution and a planetary progress that is largely unnoticed. Such an experience can be captured, though imperfectly, in the Sanskrit word pralaya. Although the denotation of pralaya means “complete annihilation,” it also connotes “excessive rest,” which signals something positive.¹ The Mother offered supportive ways to interpret this experience of both annihilation and new life in our global context. As readers of this journal will know, along with Sri Aurobindo, she claimed that the oppositions to growth processes on our planet will take hundreds of years to resolve into what they called a “new supramental creation” and a new human species that the Mother called “the new being.”² She agreed in principle with dharmic traditions that at least six mahāpralayas have occurred in the past, but that owing to the universal work she did with Sri Aurobindo, this seventh time our universe will not be destroyed but “will go on progressing, without retreat. This is why, in fact, there is in the human being that need for permanence and for an uninterrupted progress—it’s because the time has come.”³

Not only this, she said that the very growth dynamic that has characterized the old creation will eventually change from one that uses opposition to achieve progress to one that will no longer require conflict; it will be “eternally progressive.”⁴ In this short space I want to focus on the Mother’s experience of these issues considering her recognition that asuric or “hostile” forces are in fact invaluable aids to the divine work for a new creation and human species.⁵ Her understanding and work with flowers, which her devotees see as archetypal labors on behalf of all reality, symbolize this understanding. Hopefully, by joining this way of seeing reality, what might be called “a flower-based” worldview, we can see the killing nature of our times in a new light, inspiring the aspiration and courage to set out on the “supreme adventure,” as she called it, to aid the divine labor to sprout a longed-for yet vulnerable new creation, even as we give end-of-life care to an old creation and an old humanity that have begun to fertilize the next phase of growth.⁶

A Fact-Based World View

BEFORE I DESCRIBE THE MOTHER’S WORK WITH FLOWERS, it is helpful to understand that she and Sri Aurobindo were not alone in their diagnosis of what they called “the old creation” and the positive prognosis for “the new creation.” Meher Baba (1894–1969) was a key collaborator that I do not have space here to review.⁷ He worked tirelessly from 1922 to 1969, as he claimed, to clear the world of old impressions or saṃskāras so that a new “Life,” “new humanity,” and “new world culture” would manifest over the next few hundred years, just as the Mother and Sri Aurobindo predicted.⁸ His work to ensure the materialization of this vision spans the same period that begins with the founding of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926 and ends with the Mother’s passing in 1973. In this time frame, we can also see scientific evidence that corroborates many important features of this spiritual perspective if one can view the evidence dispassionately.

The Swedish physician and scholar of international health, Hans Rosling (1948–2017), coordinated much of these evidentiary data into helpful kinetic bubble charts and more importantly, interpreted the data in intelligent ways. He wrote that the most salient threats to our life on planet earth are global pandemics, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.⁹ Arguably, one might add casteism, as the work of Isabel Wilkerson shows.¹⁰ However, as the Mother knew well, since the beginning of the 20th century we have been living with these threats simultaneously, and with every passing year in the 21st, their presence intensifies and combines in ways that make it clear that we cannot solve any unless we solve all.

Rosling founded the Gapminder Foundation with his son and daughter-in-law, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling-Rönnlund. Their objective is to fill our mental “gaps” in knowledge, that is, to help us understand exactly what the global threats are and how to measure their impacts so that we are not left in the dark, or worse, led by this ignorance to fight imagined threats with real resources. Their goal is simple: to help us all share a “fact-based” worldview while we combat a “overdramatic” worldview that cries wolf. The first goal helps us to build on real gains and the second helps us to not inadvertently add to our losses. The foundation gathers statistical data from 1800 to today using reliable sources from every nation, measures ignorance about it, and provides practical ways to overcome this ignorance so that we can achieve the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals.¹¹

Taking this longer view beginning in 1800, when one measures the development of phenomena like greenhouse gas emissions, threatened species, poverty, violence, education for girls, or life expectancy, we find that we are living through both a planetary destruction and an improvement; but the improvement far outweighs the destruction in many important areas. This is especially noticeable in the almost 50-year-timeframe (1926–1973) during which the Mother and Sri Aurobindo witnessed the inchoate new creation and new being brought about by what they called “the supramental manifestation,” which was their name for a new “descent” of the universal Mother’s wisdom, strength, harmony, perfection, and bliss on earth.

To take a country that the Mother knew well: according to the data gathered by Gapminder, the average life expediency in India in 1926 was about 28 years. In 1973 it was about 52 years and in 2018 it grew to about 70 years. Indian women had about six babies on average in 1926. In 1973, they had about five and as of 2018, the average dramatically decreased to two children. As Hans Rosling was fond of saying, until recently human beings died in balance with nature when having six children was the global average and four were expected to perish in the first few years. Now, after a mere century, we are living in balance with nature since the majority of mothers on earth give birth to two children who have a good chance at quality education even if the child is a girl, and to live lives freed from extreme poverty ($2/day), sexual harassment, and violence. It is crucial to note that this evidence is about trends and not isolated events. Rosling was amazed by this data, calling it “the secret silent miracle of human progress” comprised of “fundamental improvements that are world-changing but … too slow, too fragmented, or too small one-by-one to ever qualify as news.”¹²

There are countless issues that one can explore on the Gapminder website, and I recommend that the reader take the tests they offer that measures ignorance about the world and to investigate any topic of interest using their helpful tools and videos. It is fun in this case to flunk a test! The Roslings argue that trends are not guaranteed to always lean positive or negative, for indeed we have maintained positive trends with vigilance and constant measurement; and when there is political will, vigilance, and constant measurement, negative trends can be reversed. However, in their view, we also still need more reliable data and a shared understanding about how all the risks to our planetary health are linked.

Besides these issues, one of the most difficult obstacles to achieving the United Nations sustainable development goals for them is ignorance about the encouraging trends. The Roslings write that such unfamiliarity causes unnecessary worry, an overdramatic worldview, and bad decision making that disrupts progress. This mental susceptibility becomes even more problematic when a given issue is trending downwards. Instead of defining a given problem with clear-eyed facts, the overdramatic worldview and worry of the mind drives unhelpful solutions, divisive blaming, or worse, conspiracy theories that perpetuate non-responsive or confused action, as we witness now in the Covid responses to mask mandates and life-saving vaccines. Issues that have to do with the climate crisis are also of this nature. The Rosling’s “fact-based” worldview is a helpful tool to train the mind to solve its problems at its own level. This means mitigating against what they call “the ten dramatic instincts” that the mind developed in its evolutionary past that have outlived their usefulness today for they keep us unable to interpret our reality intelligently.¹³

A Flower-Based Worldview

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTEGRAL YOGA, the Gapminder Foundation rightly intuits that the difficulty of our context is the weaknesses of the human mind. However, the Mother’s experience was that the trouble is even more severe: the weaknesses are chronic. There is no hope for a mental solution, even though we need to sharpen that tool in the process of our growth as a species. Late in her life she said, “You understand, [the mind and vital] are a phase in the universal development, and they will be … they will fall off as instruments that have outlived their usefulness.”¹⁴ She found that filling mental gaps is an endless work that must be replaced with a completely new authority; one that has no gaps. In addition to the mental “fact-based” worldview discussed above, the Mother might encourage a “flower-based” worldview. This is a vision of the world based on what any flower demonstrates: a spontaneous responsiveness to light and the consequent blossoming in perfection and beauty.

For her, what is centrally important about flowers is their automatic love and longing for the sun, which is the yogic labor of “aspiration” in plant form. She said, “plants have more [aspiration] in their physical being than man. Their whole life is a worship of light. Light is of course the material symbol of the Divine, and the sun represents, under material conditions, the Supreme Consciousness. The plants have felt it quite distinctly in their own simple, blind way. Their aspiration is intense, if you know how to become aware of it.”¹⁵ As the Mother observed, this longing leads to special forms of expression in organic life, which is the stage of the evolving divine or “psychic” presence in which the Mother said, “the vital element comes in … which gives to flowers the sense of beauty.”¹⁶ And “in the physical world, of all things it is beauty which best expresses the Divine. The physical world is the world of form, and the perfection of form is beauty.”¹⁷

The Mother’s use of flowers with her students was a practice to awaken this kind of intense longing, awareness, and expression in an intentional, human way, which can lead to a new form of consciousness and integral way of life, one that is beyond the inherent limits or gaps of the mind; one that is “supra-mental.” To achieve this “birthright,” as she called it, the Mother said, “Let us do our best to prepare the coming of the New Being. The mind must fall silent and be replaced by the Truth-Consciousness—the consciousness of details integrated with the consciousness of the whole.”¹⁸ Sri Aurobindo similarly wrote that this supramental wisdom is the “knowledge of the One and the Many, by which the Many are seen in the terms of the One, in the infinite unifying Truth, Right, Vast of the divine existence.”¹⁹

The Gapminder Foundation demonstrates how we can capitalize on the mind’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses, and the supermind, as the Mother and Sri Aurobindo described it, is of a completely different order, providing gapless and reliable knowledge and expression of knowledge. It is beautiful like a flower as well, which means it expresses “perfection in form,” the “birthright” of our planet. Supramental expression has to do with seeing and communicating both the “details and the whole” of reality simultaneously, a feat completely unimaginable to the mind, which expresses itself sequentially, in partial “details” only, never the whole, and rarely the details in terms of the whole.

This blindness to wholeness and unity becomes increasingly important as we face multiple ecological threats that are linked in ways that baffle the lower mind. The Mother said, “New means of expression must be worked out to make it possible to express the supramental knowledge in a supramental way…. Now, we are obliged to raise our mental capacity to its utmost so that there is only, so to say, a sort of hardly perceptible borderline, but one that still exists, for all our means of expression still belong to this mental world, do not have the supramental capacity.”²⁰ Spending time with flowers, as the Mother demonstrated, is one important way in which one can begin to grow this reliable, beautiful, and perfect capacity even as we “raise our mental capacity to its utmost.”

The Mother’s “flower-based” worldview involves developing increased refinement of the senses, the emotions, the intellect, and the spiritual heart where is hidden the intuition and other inchoate faculties that can indeed see, hear, and remember the divine self, “the whole” in all its “details.” Mother named almost 900 different flowers in her life. She named them according to the unique blend of divine forces she felt in their forms as well as their inner subtle characters. For instance, if a flower or plant manifested “power of perfect endurance,” as she called the Persian shield plant, she might have offered this to a student who either lacked this quality or possessed it. In either case, the goal was always to increase the progress of the soul or “psychic being” within that person towards the goal of supramental consciousness and material transformation.

She often gave flowers as a love-gift to her students, as encouragement, challenge, or blessing, for she found that flowers were incredibly receptive to one’s force of consciousness. Her sādhakas or spiritual students also gave her flowers, but this was a risky thing to do. She said, “When, therefore, you offer flowers to me, their condition is almost always an index of yours. There are persons who never succeed in bringing a fresh flower to me—even if the flower is fresh it becomes limp in their hands. Others however always bring fresh flowers and even revitalize drooping ones. If your aspiration is strong your flower offering will be fresh.”²¹

The Mother recommended communing with nature at specific times to revitalize one’s aspiration. She wrote,

When the sun sets and all becomes silent, sit down for a moment and put yourself into communion with Nature: you will feel rising from the earth, from below the roots of the trees and mounting upward and coursing through their fibres up to the highest outstretching branches, the aspiration of an intense love and longing,—a longing for something that brings light and gives happiness, for the light that is gone and they wish to have back again. There is a yearning so pure and intense that if you can feel the movement in the trees, your own being too will go up in an ardent prayer for the peace and light and love that are unmanifested here.²²

The Mother was paradoxically inviting one to physically see nature in the dark. There and then aspiration and its stimulus to growth occurs. Of course, it is true that the light of the sun helps plants to grow. The Mother made the obvious observation that “plants need sunlight to live.”²³ However, her point is about the indispensable role of darkness in the growth of a plant. This is instructive when trying to describe spiritual progress and the way she guided her own spiritual students. She is known for placing her students “in the dark” to awaken more intense aspiration for the divine and subsequent divinization of the body in beauty. With this flower-based worldview, we might say that the universal Mother as Mahākalī is doing the same at the cosmic level of creation.

Applying a Flower-Based Worldview

THE MOTHER’S “FLOWER-BASED” WORLDVIEW is not easy to adopt, for it requires two important understandings at the outset that usually cause a reaction in the ego: 1) the mind and the scientific instruments it needs are not capable of understanding the purpose of creation and how it grows because 2) this principle is hidden in the very things the mind abhors. The Mother’s teaching is that we are indeed experiencing a kind of universal dissolution and not only on a planetary scale, but on the unimaginable scale of creation itself. The problem, in other words, is not limited to our planet and is not ultimately human-made, though we human beings in our ignorance and false pride contribute to it just fine. For her, the problem is something more fundamental and tied to the very will of the Divine for the fulfillment of the psychic being. She constantly asked her students to face this squarely and with equanimity (samatā), to welcome the pralaya as it manifests in what the mental consciousness perceives as darkness, suffering, and evil. These are the experiences that hold the key to understanding growth and progress of the psychic being in the universe.

When speaking to her students about negative forces in the world, Mother controversially said, “evil, what we call ‘evil,’ has its INDISPENSABLE place in the whole.”²⁴ For her, the growth of the whole only happens through the dynamic of reaction between the “details,” what the mind thinks are “evil” and “good” or “dark” and “light” rubbing up against one another. This friction sparks forward progress, progress of the psychic being into conscious union with the Divine (or “That” which is beyond good and evil) and then the psychic being into conscious union with the earth, the home of potential “perfection of form.” In a succinct way, she said “opposition and contraries are a stimulus to progress.”²⁵ Just as with the growth of a flower or plant in places of darkness, with small progress, small amounts of opposition are needed, but for large progress an equally large measure of opposition is required. For what she and Sri Aurobindo called supramental progress, when they said the human species will grow beyond the limits of the mind and the psychic being materialize as a human body, an unprecedented counterforce will fuel the development.

In a similar understanding, in what Meher Baba called “the law of reaction,”²⁶ he would often create opposition to his own spiritual work based on this principle. In other words, he would strategically invite or even author something “evil” to happen because he viewed it as the precious energy needed to achieve his desired outcome. In a striking image that captures this progressive growth dynamic, he said, “The more the bow string is drawn back, the greater the force for the arrow to fly farther…. The greater the opposition, the greater the force to my work; and for the welfare of humanity, as all my work is, I don’t mind in the least.”²⁷ Neither did the Mother, whose work encompassed creation as well. Sri Aurobindo said, “She has leaped an arrow from the bow of God,” drawn back by the extreme counterforce of death (Yama) so that she can reach the impossibly far target of supermind, bringing all of creation along for the ride.²⁸

Like anyone who lived through the 20th century, the Mother witnessed the forces of death grow to unimaginable proportions. However, she interpreted events like the Holocaust or the Great Purge in the Soviet Union and unseen contrary events on the inner planes of consciousness as a manifestation of the universal dissolution of what she called the “old creation.” This is the creation in which the mind was birthed, nourished, and reached the end of its utility.

Simultaneously, beginning in the early part of the 20th century and more fully in the late 1950s through the early 1970s, she witnessed the blossom of a “new creation” and the start of an age of joy and universal kinship, but unfolding gradually through severe means: the reaction of the old against the new. She said our human nature “is still so crude that [it] needs extremes” to true its growth at every stage, and especially to true its growth into the new supramental creation. She continued: “That is what Sri Aurobindo said: For love to be true, hatred was necessary; true love could be born only under the pressure of hatred. That’s it. Well, one must accept things as they are and try to go further. That is all.”²⁹ “Things as they are,” in her view, is that all growth is fueled by crude oppositions.

Beginning in the early part of the 20th century and more fully in the late 1950s through the early 1970s, the Mother witnessed the blossom of a “new creation” and the start of an age of joy and universal kinship, but unfolding gradually through severe means: the reaction of the old against the new.

In our context, we experience an extreme version of this principle where an old mental life is in process of dying and a new supramental life is beginning to take its place. However, the old will not go without a fight and the new cannot be strengthened without the contest. The Integral Yoga, in the effort to “accept things as they are and try to go further,” is a refined and unprecedented methodology to negotiate this conflictual growth dynamic in a self-conscious way, welcoming the principle that “opposition and contraries are a stimulus to progress.” The yoga is palliative care for a dying old world governed by the mind and simultaneously it is neonatal care for a vulnerable world just born, though guided by a completely new inner authority. In other words, the Mother’s yoga seeks to help the mind go as the supermind comes.

She said that she experienced this in her own body as the supramental forces ravaged it over many decades. She found that by August 1968, five years before she passed, the “vital and the mind [were] sent packing so that the physical may truly be left to its own resources.”³⁰ Though this was an arduous process, she found that the body responded in “wonderful” ways.

In May 1970 she experienced another turning point, a sense in which the normal patterns of aging and dissolution were changing, and not just for herself, but as a potential for all who will come after. She said, “I was really miserable, you might say (I mean on the purely physical level: nausea and everything imaginable, CONSTANT, constant), and then it went like this (same gesture of slight reversal): a bliss… For the BODY.”

She continued, “You know, ordinary sight—gone; ordinary hearing—gone; capacity to work (Mother makes a gesture of writing)—gone. And it can ONLY come back in the true way, when … But I’ve had the proof that EVERYTHING can come back WONDERFULLY.”

She summed up the experience of “bliss in body” and the truing of the senses in this image of fashion and beauty: “It’s the MATERIAL Nature, the physical Nature, the material Nature, and she said, ‘I’ve put on the dress, I’ve put on YOUR dress—I’ve put on your dress to tell you that I’ve adopted it.’ It means that material Nature has adopted the new creation.”³¹

In other words—if we return to her work with flowers—the decomposition of the mind has fertilized the blossom of the supermind.

——

THE MOTHER’S MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE of the supramental forces on earth and the ways in which she experienced their influence on her body seems directly related to the kinds of changes that the Gapminder Foundation is tracking on the earth. These changes are miserable, yet there is evidence of real bliss. Like her, I suggest that we need a way to honor both the misery and the bliss as they oppose one another in “the law of reaction.” The Mother’s flower-based worldview offers this understanding and consolation. Just as darkness stimulates perfection of form in beautiful blossoms, ecological crisis, the Mother might say, stimulates a new supramental creation and humanity. The difficulty now is discernment of what parts of our being need to go and what parts need support to live. An overdramatic worldview and worry cannot discern this, but a mind led by supramental faculties can and eventually a supermind freed from any mental legacy.

Notes

All books by Sri Aurobindo cited below are from the Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo. Except for Mother’s Agenda, all books by the Mother cited below are from the Collected Works of the Mother.

1. See Sir Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2005), s.v. “pralaya,” “pra,” and “laya.”
2. See the Mother, Questions and Answers 1953, p. 58.
3. Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 4 (New York: Institute for Evolutionary Research, 1987), November 13, 1963, p. 378.
4. The Mother, On Thoughts and Aphorisms, p. 166.
5. My forthcoming book Mirra Alfassa: Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Āśrama & Apprentice to the Divine of Tomorrow (working title) will deal more fully with this topic in comparison to the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Meher Baba.
6. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1956, p. 40.
7. See Patrick Beldio, “Meher Baba’s Spirituality of Sustainability and Transformation,” Religion & Sustainability: Interreligious Resources, Interdisciplinary Responses, ed. Rita Sherma and Purushottama Bilimoria (New York: Springer, 2021).
8. See Meher Baba, Discourses I (Myrtle Beach, South Carolina: Sheriar Foundation, 2007), p. 12.
9. Hans Rosling, Anna Rönnlund Rosling, and Ola Rosling, Factfulness (London: Flatiron Books, 2018), Kindle location 3111/5342.
10. See Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020).
11. See https://www.gapminder.org and https://sdgs.un.org/goals; accessed 7.15.21. See also Ola Rosling’s compelling comments about these issues here: https://youtu.be/v7WUpgPZzpI; accessed 7.15.21.
12. Hans Rosling, Anna Rönnlund Rosling, and Ola Rosling, Factfulness (London: Flatiron Books, 2018), Kindle location 684/5342.
13. See https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness/instincts/; accessed 8.8.21.
14. Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 9 (Paris: Institute de Recherches Évolutives, 1981), August 28, 1968, pp. 234–235. Emphasis in the original.
15. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1929–1931, p. 132.
16. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1950–1951, p. 166.
17. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1956, p. 215.
18. The Mother, Some Answers From the Mother, p. 438.
19. Sri Aurobindo, Synthesis of Yoga, p. 414.
20. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1957–1958, p. 195.
21. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1929–1931, p. 132.
22. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1929–1931, p. 72.
23. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1957–1958, p. 211.
24. Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 10 (Paris: Institute de Recherches Évolutives, 1981), November 19, 1969, p. 435. Emphasis in original.
25. The Mother, On Thoughts and Aphorisms, p. 165.
26. See Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher, online edition, p. 1712. https://www.lordmeher.org/rev/index.jsp?pageBase=page.jsp&nextPage=1712; accessed 8.6.2021.
27. Ibid., p. 1450.
28. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, p. 427.
29. The Mother, On Thoughts and Aphorisms, p. 199.
30. Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 9 (Paris: Institute de Recherches Évolutives, 1981), August 28, 1968, p. 229.
31. Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 11 (Paris: Institute de Recherches Évolutives, 1981), May 9, 1970, p. 187.

---

PATRICK BELDIO is a professor of comparative theology and religion at Marymount University and George Washington University in the Washington, DC metro area. He has been a student of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo since the early 1990s. His current book project features the Mother and her contribution to the Integral Yoga. Patrick is also a professional sculptor with a studio at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, DC.

---

Subscribe to Collaboration

Collaboration explores the vision and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the theory and practice of Integral Yoga, and themes such as consciousness, emergence, and transformation. To subscribe, visit https://www.collaboration.org/journal/subscribe/

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

The Ideal Spirit of Poetry

SRI AUROBINDO

The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the unrealized potential of this art form, contains two parts. Part one weaves together mantra, mechanics, and the history of poetry. The following first chapter of part two summarizes his whole thesis. The paintings of Marie-Claire Barsotti beautifully illustrate the chapter.—Editors     

TO ATTEMPT TO PRESAGE THE FUTURE TURN OR DEVELOPMENT of mind or life in any of its fields must always be a hazardous venture. For life and mind are not like physical Nature; the processes of physical Nature run in precise mechanical grooves, but these are more mobile and freer powers. The gods of life and still more the gods of mind are so incalculably self-creative that even where we can distinguish the main lines on which the working runs or has so far run, we are still unable to foresee with any certainty what turn they will yet take or of what new thing they are in labour.

It is therefore impossible to predict what the poetry of the future will actually be like. We can see where we stand today, but we cannot tell where we shall stand a quarter of a century hence. All that one can do is to distinguish for oneself some possibilities that lie before the poetic mind of the race and to figure what it can achieve if it chooses to follow out certain great openings which the genius of recent and contemporary poets has made free to us; but what path it will actually choose to tread or what new heights attempt, waits still for its own yet unformed decision. What would be the ideal spirit of poetry in an age of the increasingly intuitive mind: that is the question which arises from all that has gone before and to which we may attempt some kind of answer.

I have spoken in the beginning of the Mantra as the highest and intensest revealing form of poetic thought and expression. What the Vedic poets meant by the Mantra was an inspired and revealed seeing and visioned thinking, attended by a realisation, to use the ponderous but necessary modern word, of some inmost truth of God and self and man and Nature and cosmos and life and thing and thought and experience and deed. It was a thinking that came on the wings of a great soul rhythm, chandas. For the seeing could not be separated from the hearing; it was one act. Nor could the living of the truth in oneself which we mean by realisation, be separated from either, for the presence of it in the soul and its possession of the mind must precede or accompany in the creator or human channel that expression of the inner sight and hearing which takes the shape of the luminous word.

The Mantra is born through the heart and shaped or massed by the thinking mind into a chariot of that godhead of the Eternal of whom the truth seen is a face or a form. And in the mind too of the fit outward hearer who listens to the word of the poet-seer, these three must come together, if our word is a real Mantra; the sight of the inmost truth must accompany the hearing, the possession of the inmost spirit of it by the mind and its coming home to the soul must accompany or follow immediately upon the rhythmic message of the Word and the mind’s sight of the Truth. That may sound a rather mystic account of the matter, but substantially there could hardly be a more complete description of the birth and effect of the inspired and revealing word, and it might be applied, though usually on a more lowered scale than was intended by the Vedic Rishis, to all the highest outbursts of a really great poetry.

But poetry is the Mantra only when it is the voice of the inmost truth and is couched in the highest power of the very rhythm and speech of that truth. And the ancient poets of the Veda and Upanishads claimed to be uttering the Mantra because always it was this inmost and almost occult truth of things which they strove to see and hear and speak and because they believed themselves to be using or finding its innate soul rhythms and the sacrificial speech of it cast up by the divine Agni, the sacred Fire in the heart of man.

The Mantra in other words is a direct and most heightened, an intensest and most divinely burdened rhythmic word which embodies an intuitive and revelatory inspiration and ensouls the mind with the sight and the presence of the very self, the inmost reality of things and with its truth and with the divine soul-forms of it, the Godheads which are born from the living Truth. Or, let us say, it is a supreme rhythmic language which seizes hold upon all that is finite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinite.

This is a theory of poetry, a view of the rhythmic and creative self-expression to which we give that name, which is very different from any that we now hold, a sacred or hieratic ars poetica only possible in days when man believed himself to be near to the gods and felt their presence in his bosom and could think he heard some accents of their divine and eternal wisdom take form on the heights of his mind.

And perhaps no thinking age has been so far removed from any such view of our life as the one through which we have recently passed and even now are not well out of its shadow, the age of materialism, the age of positive outward matter of fact and of scientific and utilitarian reason. And yet curiously enough—or naturally, since in the economy of Nature opposite creates itself out of opposite and not only like from like,—it is to some far-off light at least of the view of ourselves at our greatest of which such ideas were a concretised expression that we seem to be returning. For we can mark that although in very different circumstances, in broader forms, with a more complex mind and an enormously enlarged basis of culture and civilisation, the gain and inheritance of many intermediate ages, it is still to something very like the effort which was the soul of the Vedic or at least the Vedantic mind that we almost appear to be on the point of turning back in the circle of our course.

Now that we have seen minutely what is the material reality of the world in which we live and have some knowledge of the vital reality of the Force from which we spring, we are at last beginning to seek again for the spiritual reality of that which we and all things secretly are. Our minds are once more trying to envisage the self, the spirit of Man and the spirit of the universe, intellectually, no doubt, at first, but from that to the old effort at sight, at realisation within ourselves and in all is not a very far step. And with this effort there must rise too on the human mind the conception of the godheads in whom this Spirit, this marvellous Self and Reality which broods over the world, takes shape in the liberated soul and life of the human being, his godheads of Truth and Freedom and Unity, his godheads of a greater more highly visioned Will and Power, his godheads of Love and universal Delight, his godheads of universal and eternal Beauty, his godheads of a supreme Light and Harmony and Good.

The new ideals of the race seem already to be affected by some first bright shadow of these things, and even though it be only a tinge, a flush colouring the duller atmosphere of our recent mentality, there is every sign that this tinge will deepen and grow, in the heavens to which we look up if not at once in the earth of our actual life. But this new vision will not be as in the old times something hieratically remote, mystic, inward, shielded from the profane, but rather a sight which will endeavour to draw these godheads again to close and familiar intimacy with our earth and embody them not only in the heart of religion and philosophy, nor only in the higher flights of thought and art, but also, as far as may be, in the common life and action of man.

For in the old days these things were Mysteries, which men left to the few, to the initiates and by so leaving them lost sight of them in the end, but the endeavour of this new mind is to reveal, to divulge and to bring near to our comprehension all mysteries,—at present indeed making them too common and outward in the process and depriving them of much of their beauty and inner light and depth, but that defect will pass,—and this turn towards an open realisation may well lead to an age in which man as a race will try to live in a greater Truth than has as yet governed our kind. For all that we know, we now tend to make some attempt to form clearly and live. His creation too will then be moved by another spirit and cast on other lines. And if this takes place or even if there is some strong mental movement towards it, poetry may recover something of an old sacred prestige.

There will no doubt still be plenty of poetical writing which will follow the old lines and minister to the old commoner aesthetic motives, and it is as well that it should be so, for the business of poetry is to express the soul of man to himself and to embody in the word whatever power of beauty he sees; but also there may now emerge too and take the first place souls no longer niggardly of the highest flame, the poet-seer and seer-creator, the poet who is also a Rishi, master singers of Truth, hierophants and magicians of a diviner and more universal beauty.

There has no doubt always been something of that in the greatest masters of poetry in the great ages, but to fulfil such a role has not often been the one fountain idea of their function; the mind of the age has made other demands on them, needed at that time, and the highest things in this direction have been rare self-exceedings and still coloured by and toned to the half light in which they sang. But if an age comes which is in common possession of a deeper and greater and more inspiring Truth, then its masters of the rhythmic word will at least sing on a higher common level and may rise more often into a fuller intenser light and capture more constantly the greater tones of which this harp of God, to use the Upanishad’s description of man’s created being, is secretly capable.

A greater era of man’s living seems to be in promise, whatever nearer and earthier powers may be striving to lead him on a side path away to a less exalted ideal, and with that advent there must come a new great age of his creation different from the past epochs which he counts as his glories and superior to them in its vision and motive. But first there must intervene a poetry which will lead him towards it from the present faint beginnings. It will be aided by new views in philosophy, a changed and extended spirit in science and new revelations in the other arts, in music, painting, architecture, sculpture, as well as high new ideals in life and new powers of a reviving but no longer limited or obscurantist religious mind.

A glint of this change is already visible. And in poetry there is already the commencement of such a greater leading; the conscious effort of Whitman, the tone of Carpenter, the significance of the poetry of A. E., the rapid immediate fame of Tagore are its first signs. The idea of the poet who is also the Rishi has made again its appearance. Only a wider spreading of the thought and mentality in which that idea can live and the growth of an accomplished art of poetry in which it can take body, are still needed to give the force of permanence to what is now only an incipient and just emerging power. Mankind satiated with the levels is turning its face once more towards the heights, and the poetic voices that will lead us thither with song will be among the high seer voices. For the great poet interprets to man his present or reinterprets for him his past, but can also point him to his future and in all three reveal to him the face of the Eternal.

An intuitive revealing poetry of the kind which we have in view would voice a supreme harmony of five eternal powers, Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit.These are indeed the five greater ideal lamps or rather the five suns of poetry. And towards three of them the higher mind of the race is in many directions turning its thought and desire with a new kind and force of insistence. The intellectual side of our recent progress has in fact been for a long time a constant arduous pursuit of Truth in certain of its fields; but now the limited truth of yesterday can no longer satisfy or bind us. Much has been known and discovered of a kind which had not been found or had only been glimpsed before, but the utmost of that much appears now very little compared with the infinitely more which was left aside and ignored and which now invites our search. The description which the old Vedic poet once gave of the seeking of divine Truth, applies vividly to the mind of our age, “As it climbs from height to height, there becomes clear to its view all the much that is yet to be done.”

But also it is beginning to be seen that only in some great awakening of the self and spiritual being of man is that yet unlived truth to be found and that infinite much to be achieved. It is only then that the A greater era of man’s living seems to be in promise … But first there must intervene a poetry which will lead him towards it from the present faint beginnings. fullness of a greater knowledge for man living on earth can unfold itself and get rid of its coverings and again on his deeper mind and soul, in the words of another Vedic poet-seer, “New states come into birth, covering upon covering awaken to knowledge, till in the lap of the Mother one wholly sees.”

This new-old light is now returning upon our minds. Men no longer so completely believe that the world is a machine and they only so much transient thinking matter, a view of existence in the midst of which however helpful it might be to a victorious concentration on physical science and social economy and material well-being, neither religion nor philosophic wisdom could renew their power in the fountains of the spirit nor art and poetry, which are also things of the soul like religion and wisdom, refresh themselves from their native sources of strength. Now we are moving back from the physical obsession to the consciousness that there is a soul and greater self within us and the universe which finds expression here in the life and the body. But the mind of today insists too and rightly insists on life, on humanity, on the dignity of our labour and action. We have no longer any ascetic quarrel with our mother earth, but rather would drink full of her bosom of beauty and power and raise her life to a more perfect greatness. Thought now dwells much on the idea of a vast creative will of life and action as the secret of existence.

That way of seeing, though it may give room for a greater power of art and poetry and philosophy and religion, for it brings in real soul-values, has by its limitation its own dangers. A spirit which is all life because it is greater than life, is rather the truth in which we shall most powerfully live. Aditi, the infinite Mother, cries in the ancient Vedic hymn to Indra the divine Power now about to be born in her womb, “This is the path of old discovered again by which all the gods rose up into birth, even by that upward way shouldst thou be born in thy increase; but go not forth by this other to turn thy mother to her fall,” but if, refusing the upward way, the new spirit in process of birth replies like the god, “By that way I will not go forth, for it is hard to tread, let me come out straight on the level from thy side; I have many things to do which have not yet been done; with one I must fight and with another I must question after the Truth,” then the new age may do great things, as the last also did great things, but it will miss the highest way and end like it in a catastrophe.

There is no reason why we should so limit our new birth in time; for the spirit and life are not incompatible, but rather a greater power of the spirit brings a greater power of life. Poetry and art most of all our powers can help to bring this truth home to the mind of man with an illumining and catholic force, for while philosophy may lose itself in abstractions and religion turn to an intolerant otherworldliness and asceticism, poetry and art are born mediators between the immaterial and the concrete, the spirit and life. This mediation between the truth of the spirit and the truth of life will be one of the chief functions of the poetry of the future.

The two other sister lamps of God, colour suns of the Ideal, which our age has most dimmed and of whose reviving light it is most sadly in need, but still too strenuously outward and utilitarian to feel sufficiently their absence, Beauty and Delight, are also things spiritual and they bring out the very heart of sweetness and colour and flame of the other three. Truth and Life have not their perfection until they are suffused and filled with the completing power of delight and the fine power of beauty and become one at their heights with this perfecting hue and this secret essence of themselves; the spirit has no full revelation without these two satisfying presences. For the ancient Indian idea is absolutely true that delight, Ananda, is the inmost expressive and creative nature of the free self because it is the very essence of the original being of the Spirit.

But beauty and delight are also the very soul and origin of art and poetry. It is the significance and spiritual function of art and poetry to liberate man into pure delight and to bring beauty into his life. Only there are grades and heights here as in everything else and the highest kinds of delight and beauty are those which are one with the highest Truth, the perfection of life and the purest and fullest joy of the self-revealing Spirit. Therefore will poetry most find itself and enter most completely into its heritage when it arrives at the richest harmony of these five things in their most splendid and ample sweetness and light and power; but that can only wholly be when it sings from the highest skies of vision and ranges through the widest widths of our being.

These powers can indeed be possessed in every scale, because on whatever grade of our ascent we stand, the Spirit, the divine Self of man is always there, can break out into a strong flame of manifestation carrying in it all its godheads in whatever form, and poetry and art are among the means by which it thus delivers itself into expression.

Therefore the essence of poetry is eternally the same and its essential power and the magnitude of the genius expended may be the same whatever the frame of the sight, whether it be Homer chanting of the heroes in god-moved battle before Troy and of Odysseus wandering among the wonders of remote and magic isles with his heart always turned to his lost and far-off human hearth, Shakespeare riding in his surge of the manifold colour and music and passion of life, or Dante errant mid his terrible or beatific visions of Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, or Valmiki singing of the ideal man embodying God and egoistic giant Rakshasa embodying only fierce self-will approaching each other from their different centres of life and in their different law of being for the struggle desired by the gods, or some mystic Vamadeva or Vishwamitra voicing in strange vivid now forgotten symbols the action of the gods and the glories of the Truth, the battle and the journey to the Light, the double riches and the sacrificial climbing of the soul to Immortality.

For whether it be the inspired imagination fixed on earth or the soul of life or the inspired reason or the high intuitive spiritual vision which gives the form, the genius of the great poet will seize on some truth of being, some breath of life, some power of the spirit and bring it out with a certain supreme force for his and our delight and joy in its beauty. But nevertheless the poetry which can keep the amplitude of its breadth and nearness of its touch and yet see all things from a higher height will, the rest being equal, give more and will more fully satisfy the whole of what we are and therefore the whole of what we demand from this most complete of all the arts and most subtle of all our means of aesthetic self-expression.

The poetry of the future, if it fulfils in amplitude the promise now only there in rich hint, will kindle these five lamps of our being, but raise them up more on high and light with them a broader country, many countries indeed now hidden from our view, will make them not any longer lamps in some limited temple of beauty, but suns in the heavens of our highest mind and illuminative of our widest as well as our inmost life. It will be a poetry of a new largest vision of himself and Nature and God and all things which is offering itself to man and of its possible realisation in a nobler and more divine manhood; and it will not sing of them only with the power of the imaginative intelligence, the exalted and ecstatic sense or the moved joy and passion of life, but will rise to look at them from an intenser light and embody them in a more revealing force of the word. It will be first and most a poetry of the intuitive reason, the intuitive senses, the intuitive delight soul in us, getting from this enhanced source of inspiration a more sovereign poetic enthusiasm and ecstasy, and then, it may even be, rise towards a still greater power of revelation nearer to the direct vision and word of the Overmind from which all creative inspiration comes.

A poetry of this kind need not be at all something high and remote or beautifully and delicately intangible, or not that alone, but will make too the highest things near, close and visible, will sing greatly and beautifully of all that has been sung, all that we are from outward body to very God and Self, of the finite and the infinite, the transient and the Eternal, but with a new reconciling and fusing vision that will make them other to us than they have been even when yet the same. If it wings to the heights, it will not leave earth unseen below it, but also will not confine itself to earth, but find too other realities and their powers on man and take all the planes of existence for its empire. It will take up and transform the secrets of the older poets and find new undiscovered secrets, transfigure the old rhythms by the insistence of the voice of its deeper subtler spirit and create new characteristic harmonies, reveal other greater powers and spirits of language, proceeding from the past and present yet will not be limited by them or their rule and forms and canon, but compass its own altered perfected art of poetry.

This at least is its possible ideal endeavour, and then the attempt itself would be a rejuvenating elixir and put the poetic spirit once more in the shining front of the powers and guides of the ever-progressing soul of humanity. There it will lead in the journey like the Vedic Agni, the fiery giver of the word, yuvā kaviḥ, priyo atithir amartyo mandrajihvo, ṛtacid ṛtāvā, the Youth, the Seer, the beloved and immortal Guest with his honeyed tongue of ecstasy, the Truth-conscious, the Truth-finder, born as a flame from earth and yet the heavenly messenger of the Immortals.  

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

Decade of Illuminations

WAYNE BLOOMQUIST

Travel back to the 1970s with this “A Barfight for the Earth” protagonist (see p. 30 in the journal) and longtime practitioner of Integral Yoga as he shares his memories of Haridas Chaudhuri and Nolini Kanta Gupta, spiritual experiences in Auroville and Pondicherry, and even the founding of Auromere, with Collaboration editor Bahman Shirazi. Here are some condensed excerpts from their conversation.—Editors

---

COLLABORATION: Growing up, did you have any experience with spirituality or religion, or another context in which your future engagements with Integral Yoga might be understood?

WAYNE BLOOMQUIST: Well, there really wasn’t anything in my early life. I was brought up as a Presbyterian, and that kind of left me cold. There wasn’t much there, so I went from one thing to another. For example, I used to try to hypnotize myself, working on the different parts of the body, and I think once when I was traveling for business one of the attempts was successful and I experienced, not a trance, but something similar. That was a start. When I was in the Army up in Alaska, I was just taking stuff out of the magazines. For example, I wrote and asked for some information about the Rosicrucians, and that didn’t go too far. So I was dabbling here and there. Eventually, I got into meditation, and I liked that a lot.

C: So this mediation phase was roughly when? In the early 60s?

WB: Well, I was in my 20s, so it would have been in the 50s. Things were just starting to develop in the U.S. I forget the sequence now of what happened, but I used to do some automatic writing. I sat there with a piece of paper and a pen and waited for it to move [laughs]. I started writing and one thing led to another, and I did quite a bit of spontaneous writing that got things moving.

C: When did you come to the Bay Area?

WB: Let’s see. I still had a couple of years of college left, so I went into the Army. I was in Arkansas, and then they shipped me to Alaska. In Alaska I was writing away for anything, any kind of religion, like the Rosicrucians. So I was getting a lot of mail from various sources like magazines. Anyway, I got out of the Army and finished my undergraduate education at San Jose State College [now University] in business. So I was in the Bay Area at that time.

C: I suppose when you were around San Francisco, you somehow found out about the Cultural Integration Fellowship?

WB: Eventually, yes. I read about the Fellowship and Dr. Chaudhuri in San Francisco. That interested me, so I started going over to his Sunday lectures, taking night classes with him at the California Institute of Asian Studies. I liked what I heard, and he was a great teacher and speaker. I remember taking Sanskrit at the school there. I kept going, and eventually I got a [Ph.D.] degree in the mid-1970s.

WB: I was working on dreams a lot at this time. I would wake up at night and write my dreams down. They started coming quite a bit, like three or four a night, which would interrupt my sleep of course. That’s how I got started. And the more I heard Dr. Chaudhuri, the more I got interested in Sri Aurobindo and the Yoga. Before that I wasn’t getting any dreams, and then I got a lot of dreams that I was concentrated on. So it was kind of a self-discovery process, and then I got into the Yoga with Dr. Chaudhuri. The next thing I knew I was going to India. That was my goal, so I started saving up some money.

C: What was it like for you, going to Pondicherry?

WB: Well, I guess it changed my life. When I got there it was all Greek to me, going to the Samadhi and watching people, and then Jacqui, my wife (we weren’t married at the time) also went with me. I invited her along, as well as my adopted daughter Cathi—so the three of us went. Jacqui was very disappointed at first. She said, “This isn’t what I expected at all.” But once she got there, she saw Nolini Kanta Gupta for the first time. I had given her a little booklet about him, so she knew about him. When she saw him she immediately went to his feet. It was spontaneous on her part. She would see him around the Samadhi and developed a relationship with him, and when she got back she wrote him letters. Once she wrote,“I feel there is something you can give me.” He gave her the name Surama, which means “most pleasing person,” and that was their connection. She would write him and ask him for advice often, and he would guide her.

C: So the name Surama was given by Nolini Kanta Gupta?

WB: Yeah. This brings back a lot of feelings. We had that connection, and I remember being with her and going to Nolini’s room, and he would come shuffling out—he was quite old at the time. So we had our first trip to Pondicherry just after the Mother had passed away. By the time we got there the Ashram was very peaceful. People had accepted it in a way, and all the turmoil had subsided or was passing. I think we were gone for six months.

C: Oh, that’s great!

WB: Auroville was still pretty raw. It was pretty rough out there. There wasn’t a lot of development—it was just starting. So we were kind of in that group. And when we got back we decided to do some importing from Auroville, and set up a shop in Berkeley. This was a big experiment for us. We rented a place in Berkeley and were selling clothing and some goods from Auroville. We were barely making it, just being able to pay the expenses by selling the merchandise. We went back about every couple of years.

C: Was Dr. Chaudhuri still alive when you went to India for the first time? He died in 1975.

WB: Oh yeah! He was alive. I remember I had just come back and was at the Fellowship. He saw me standing there and his face lit up and he said, “Aha” [Laughs]. He saw something. I remember that very distinctly.

C: During this time, were you reading about the Yoga and absorbing some of the energies firsthand when you traveled there? Would you say at that time you were already committed to the Yoga? Was that the real force behind it all?

WB: Oh yeah. I think on the first trip, if I remember it right, I was trying this and that and I wasn’t getting too far and I finally let go of everything and just surrendered, and that’s when I started making progress—that was the key for me.

C: Did you feel that behind Integral Yoga there was something that you already had in you in some way, and it was being articulated for you and you resonated with it, or was that something new to you?

WB: Yeah, I thought that I had done something like this before. I think I wrote about it in my book. I felt a descent or something that came into me in Pondicherry. It was an illumination and it changed me. In fact, it was a pivotal point for me. This is hard for me to reconstruct. All this was going on at the time of being in San Francisco and part of the Fellowship.

C: So here we are in the 70s and you were already introduced to Integral Yoga for a few years, and your dissertation is done. How would you describe the decade of the 70s in terms of your connection with the Yoga?

WB: It started in the 70s. We started importing from Auroville—Auromere Creations—and selling mer­chandise. Surama was running the shop. I would still go back to Pondicherry every couple of years. Surama went with me the first few times, and then I started going by myself.

C: These trips must have been important. Can you think of any unusual experiences?

WB: Somehow I established a connection with somebody from a past life. I was reading Sri Ramakrishna’s work, and I felt that I knew somebody in that story. There was a photograph in one of his books about his maha­samadhi, when he passed, and they had people in the photograph with names below it, so you could identify some of them, and I picked out one of them that I kind of resonated with. His name was Nityagopal, so I started reading about him. He was one of Ramakrishna’s favorites, but he was kind of an innocent young boy.

C: Did you feel that you knew this person or perhaps that might have been you in a past life?

WB: I thought so, and had three meetings in the spirit world with him. I know that in one of them he came toward me and embraced me and I told Surama about it at the time. She was pretty psychic herself, and she said that a holy man came to me that was Nityagopal. She could see him and she could describe him to me. So there was that connection that was made with Ramakrishna and Nityagopal. He came to me once in Berkeley, and once in the Ashram, and there was a third time somewhere, and no more since then.

C: You mentioned something about Satprem before; that you were at the Fellowship once and he appeared in your consciousness. Do you recall that?

WB: I was at the Ashram in San Francisco and I was sitting there meditating by myself and I felt this energy beside me that was kind of swirly and intense, and I heard the name Satprem. I think he was announcing that he was there. I was just sitting there and experienced this swirling of energy next to me, and then I heard the name Satprem in my head. I didn’t know where it came from at the time. but I figured out that he put it there.

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

Art of Diversity

GLORIA SAYAVEDRA

Long Beach, California, June 2020

IT WAS ONLY A FEW MONTHS AGO, in what now seems like a different age, that we witnessed one of the largest mass protests in the history of this country. The Los Angeles area was no exception. Millions saw their streets flooded with crowds, marching to the chant of “Black Lives Matter.”

These men and women left behind their marks as fleeting art forms on the once inert wood panels erected to protect windows from the crowds. Those voices—voices of color—broke their silence. They did so in the name of pain and the uncountable accumulated losses in their history, a history of powerlessness.

---

Hace apenas unos meses, que ya parecen años, fuimos testigos de una de las más grandes movilizaciones que haya habido en el país, y el área de Los Ángeles no fue la excepción. Millones vimos las calles inundadas de gente, marchando al unísono de “Black Lives Matter.”

Esos hombres y mujeres dejaron su huella, su arte fugaz, en paneles de madera otrora inertes que estaban ahí para proteger las ventanas de la posible violencia de la multitud. Esas voces de colores rompieron el silencio, en nombre del dolor y las pérdidas acumuladas en sus historias de impotencia.

---

The depth of their wounds was expressed through art that refuses to fade. These works continue to vibrate and are a manifestation of an indomitable spirit. The murals are also a reminder of the invisible crowd; they are active witnesses that continue to chant after other voices have gone quiet.

Some protests are silent, while others resound and acquire the multiple shades of a ray of light traversing the sky. Art offers the possibility to leave behind reason and, instead, acknowledge and celebrate each individual’s singularity.

---

Sus heridas profundas quedaron plasmadas ahí, en un arte que se niega a desvanecerse produciendo una continua vibración, una manifestación de un espíritu indomable. Esos murales siguen ahí recordándonos a esa multitud invisible, cual testigos activos, gritando en nombre de esas voces que ahora callan.

Hay manifestaciones silenciosas, otras estrepitosas, multito-nales como el trazo de un rayo en el cielo. El arte nos da la posibilidad, más allá de la razón, de reconocer y celebrar la singularidad de cada individuo.

---

In my understanding, each manifestation of the Divine is full of opposites: Knowledge-Ignorance, Light-Darkness. They remind us that creation in essence means diversity, multiplicity, and duality.

“…[F]or one who knows Thee, thou art everywhere, in all things, and none of them seems more suitable than another for manifesting Thee…”—The Mother, Prayers and Meditations, March 14, 1914

---

En mi entendimiento, toda manifestación de lo Divino está colmada de opuestos: Conocimiento-Ignorancia, Luz-Oscuridad. Nos recuerda que la creación en esencia significa diversidad, multiplicidad y dualidad.

“Para quien Te reconoce, Tú estás en todas partes, en todas las cosas, y ninguna de ellas es mejor que otra para manifestarte a Ti.”—Madre, Plegarias y Meditaciones, 14 de marzo de 1914

---

GLORIA SAYAVEDRA is a member of the Sri Aurobindo Association board of directors and a resident of Los Angeles County, California. Her writing has been translated from Spanish to English by Diego Olavarría S. All photos courtesy of the author.

Collaboration Journal
Special Feature

Yoga in Crazy Times

PHILIP GOLDBERG

This article appeared in Collaboration journal, Vol. 45, Nos. 2–3, Fall 2020–Winter 2021

EVER SINCE MY NEW BOOK WAS RELEASED in August, I’ve been congratulated on my impeccable timing. What better time for a title like Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times? The truth is, I deserve about as much credit as a gardening shop that sells shovels does when a blizzard hits. The book was conceived this past spring, when life in America was already pretty crazy; the final editing and proofreading were completed this past winter, when the coronavirus was largely confined to Asia and the phrase “shelter-in-place” had not yet been uttered. I’m happy to accept credit for producing a useful book, but I can’t claim to have known just how insane the world would become by the time it was published.

In the early days of 2019, a little more than halfway through the Trump era, I began to hear normally stable and happy people say that current events were making them anxious, worried, depressed, bewildered, enraged, or otherwise discombobulated. I knew many of those people to be genuinely spiritual. They included earnest veterans of one path or another who had kept up a daily sadhana for decades; relative neophytes who had set foot on their paths only recently; and dabblers with a sincere spiritual orientation to life but complacent about engaging that impulse. To my surprise, even some members of the first group were neglecting their practices. When I asked why, I heard—in addition to the usual excuse of being too busy—two reasons that reflected the challenges of this period in history.

One set of people said they were too agitated, too stressed out, and too unsettled by what was going on in the world to meditate (or practice yoga, or mindfulness, or prayer, or whatever else their sadhana might consist of). A second consisted of activists who were trying to fix the social conditions that upset them. They were getting involved in political campaigns, raising money for social justice groups, organizing demonstrations, blogging, or otherwise trying to make a difference. They saw spiritual practice as a luxury they couldn’t afford. In my book, I quoted a woman who gave voice to a sentiment I’d heard from others as well: “I don’t want to waste time on my inner life when there’s so much at stake out there.” She didn’t want to lose the anxiety and righteous anger that were driving her efforts; she feared being neutered by spiritual practice.

I found both arguments understandable but radically misconceived, and I said so in an article. About the first set of objections I wrote by way of analogy that taking a shower can be good for our well-being when we’re relatively clean, but it’s absolutely vital when we’re filthy. Waiting till we’re calm and content before sitting to do a centering practice is like showering only when we’re clean, or seeing a doctor only when we’re feeling well. Meditation, yoga asanas, breathwork, prayer, mindfulness—they don’t require calmness as a prerequisite; they produce that calmness. You can’t be too agitated to do the very things that are designed to reduce agitation. I argued that it’s precisely in conditions of turbulence and turmoil that we need the refuge of spiritual practice the most.

To the honorable and compassionate individuals who were busy making the world a better place, I said that the spiritual methods developed by the rishis of old and the mystics of all traditions are not escape mechanisms. They don’t necessarily lead to withdrawal or disinterested detachment. They’re not like tranquilizer darts or the drugs that turn mental patients into docile creatures. They don’t make you a religious fanatic who thinks God will take care of everything so we don’t have to bother, or a renunciate who sees the material world as a mere illusion and the human drama as a stage play they can witness without playing a role. On the contrary, I proposed, spiritual practices can be a foundation for engaged citizenship— and a platform for soulful, compassionate, effective action. It may seem too obvious to mention, but it was necessary to remind my activist friends that Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, and countless venerated saints were social warriors whose roots were planted firmly and deeply in spiritual soil.

Spiritual practices can be a foundation for engaged citizenship—and a platform for soulful, compassionate, effective action. It may seem too obvious to mention, but it was necessary to remind my activist friends that Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, and
countless venerated saints were social warriors whose roots were planted firmly and deeply in spiritual soil.

The article was well received and led to conversations with the publisher of my previous book, Hay House, about expanding the core premise into a book.

Faced with filling a couple hundred pages mostly with practical tools, guidelines, and instructions, I began harvesting every practice I’d learned about over half a century. I ferreted out other methods to fill the gaps in my own knowledge base, drawing mainly from the yogic tradition. I favored techniques that have been validated by studies in psychology and neurophysiology.

As a guiding framework, I was immediately drawn to two passages from the Bhagavad Gita that had hit me like lightning bolts in the early days of my path, and have held up ever since. The first is from chapter 2, verse 38, when Krishna tells Arjuna that it’s possible to maintain “equanimity in gain and loss, victory and defeat, pleasure and pain.” When I read that for the first time, circa 1968, the suggestion that one might achieve a state of unruffled, composed, imperturbability in the midst of life’s ups and downs blew my troubled mind. It was enough of a promise to make me dive more deeply into the spiritual teachings of the East, and to try out the yogic technologies that, I came to realize, were the keys to developing that desired equanimity. Soon enough I took up transcendental meditation (this was only months after the Beatles put it on the global map and made their watershed journey to India).

I discovered quickly that daily practice did give me more equanimity. The inner calm from meditation carried over when I went about my day, at least for a while, like a sponge staying wet for some time after it’s been soaked. In my youthful naiveté, I expected to soon get to a point where I’d never ever again get upset by setbacks. I’d be immune to the ravages of life. I’d be above it all, supremely unattached, in the world but not of it, soaked in peace and bliss at all times, no matter what.

Imagine my surprise. Needless to say, human life being what it is, shocks, upheavals, losses, crises, and ordinary annoyances continued to erupt. However, as time went by I realized that I did, in fact, have more equanimity at those times than I had in the past, and when I lost it—as I did often enough—I regained some measure of equilibrium fairly quickly. That personal observation, I was pleased to discover, has been shown in studies to be typical of long-term practitioners of meditative methods.

Sri Aurobindo referred to the quality I’m calling equanimity as “perfect equality.” In The Synthesis of Yoga, he says, “The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a perfect equality. Perfection in the sense in which we use it in Yoga, means a growth out of a lower undivine into a higher divine nature.” He described it as “putting on the being of the higher self and a casting away of the darker broken lower self or a transforming of our imperfect state into the rounded luminous fullness of our real and spiritual personality.” He called it “a means by which we can move back from the troubled and ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven and possess the spirit’s eternal kingdoms … of greatness, joy and peace.”1

And so, when I started outlining my book in 2019, that Gita verse became a lodestone. My goal was to help people access the source of equanimity within themselves, by opening up to what I call a sanctuary of peace within—to absorb it, sustain it, and carry it with them in good times and bad. This, it should be obvious, is especially important in chaotic times like ours, when gain and loss, victory and defeat, pleasure and pain are being experienced en masse in unpredictable and unprecedented ways.

The second Gita passage that has guided my life and also framed my book is from chapter 2, verse 48. Like every sentence in the Gita, it’s been translated in dozens of ways, but they all come down to the pithy version I favor: “Established in Yoga, perform action.” I’ve never found a more concise and powerful formula for living.

Having grown up in a secular, quasi-Marxist household in which religion was the opium of the masses, I had an abiding suspicion that the Eastern philosophies that seemed so rational, empirical, and practical would let me down by lapsing into dogma—or by asking me to turn my back on worldly life. I knew I was not cut out for either renunciation or believing in anything on faith alone. But here was Krishna, the voice of the divine, saying that responsible, dynamic action was not to be avoided. And if the words themselves weren’t convincing enough, the context certainly was. The message was delivered to a warrior, Arjuna, and he wasn’t being told to ride off to an ashram or settle into a Himalayan cave. Rather, he was implored to get off his butt, pick up his weapons, and vanquish the bad guys who threatened his civilization. It doesn’t get more dynamic or worldly than that.

I call it the Spiritual Two-Step: 1) Turn within, get immersed in the silent core of Being, and ground yourself in the unified consciousness that defines yoga, and 2) Come out better equipped to perform your duties, fulfill your responsibilities, and engage human life to the fullest.

But first, the divine messenger said, establish yourself in yoga. I call it the Spiritual Two-Step: 1) Turn within, get immersed in the silent core of Being, and ground yourself in the unified consciousness that defines yoga, and 2) Come out better equipped to perform your duties, fulfill your responsibilities, and engage human life to the fullest.

With those verses as a touchstone, I felt confident as an author to present spiritual practice not as just a refuge in crazy times, but as a strategy for practical living—not merely a rest stop, but a refueling station; not just an escape valve, but a launching pad from which to spring into action.

To be fair, there are plenty of renouncers in spiritual circles, not only vow-taking monks and nuns, but people who are reclusive by nature and whose paths draw them to disengage as much as humanly possible from the world’s travails. But even India’s wandering sadhus have to feed and shelter their bodies; most monastics live in communities and perform works of service to others; and dedicated householders have to manage their relationships with family members, neighbors, colleagues, and others. Whatever our degree of worldly involvement, the truth of that two-step applies: transformative spiritual practices tend to make people calmer, clearer, wiser, more compassionate, more empathetic, and more discerning than they would otherwise be. This does not, of course, suggest that regular sadhana will turn ordinary seekers into geniuses, perpetual winners, or saints. But experience and research clearly indicate that practice improves the odds that our actions will be more productive, harmonious, and benevolent—and less likely to overwhelm our inner stability.

As Sri Aurobindo puts it in Essays on the Gita, the state that Krishna points Arjuna to is not one of “disinterestedness” or “dispassionate abnegation.” How could it be? Would you want a soldier who’s protecting your loved ones not to care? Yes, you’d want him to be unattached to the fruits of his actions, as the Gita teaches. But indifferent? Certainly not. Rather, says Sri Aurobindo, “it is a state of inner poise and wideness which is the foundation of spiritual freedom. With that poise, in that freedom we have to do the ‘work that is to be done,’ a phrase which the Gita uses with the greatest wideness including in it all works … and which far exceeds, though it may include, social duties or ethical obligations.”

It’s analogous to the state of cool composure we look for in athletes when the game is on the line; in leaders when decisions have to be made in a crisis; in parents when kids are in trouble; and in ourselves at all times, but especially in emergencies. No guarantees, of course, but the evidence suggests that such an inner state can be cultivated. We may never achieve the wished-for perfection, but we can at least creep closer to it inch by inch, making fewer mistakes along the way.

That’s the practical, everyday take on “Established in Yoga, perform action”—and most readers of a book like mine will relate to it. But in truth, the Gita calls us to a higher perspective and a greater purpose. I allude to it in the final chapter, titled “Sacred Citizenship: Giving Back from the Inside Out.” As I said earlier, I completed the book before the COVID-19 lockdown took hold, and before all the astonishing and unsettling events during this past summer of our collective discontent. I assumed early on that when the book was released, in August 2020, the presidential election would be heating up and the crazy world would be even crazier. No one knew it would be this insane, of course, but I’m glad I included my humble appeal for spiritual practitioners to take seriously their role as citizens. Sri Aurobindo alluded to the reason that’s so important:

The Gita does not teach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower, it does not ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on the altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the social status. It calls us higher and not lower; from the conflict of the two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the mainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic consciousness. It replaces the conception of social duty by a divine obligation. The subjection to external law gives place to a certain principle of inner self-determination of action proceeding by the soul’s freedom from the tangled law of works.2

Not everyone is a social activist, of course, but we can all do something, however seemingly insignificant, to make the world a better place. We can all access the silent source within and listen to the voice of higher wisdom, or feel the faint stirring of a conscience that’s in tune with divine intent, and then act with strength and compassion in whatever sphere of life we’re drawn to. At this moment in history, we are all Arjunas, and every gesture counts. I concluded the book, and I’ll conclude this offering (which I’m honored to have been asked to contribute), by quoting the Buddha: “Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit. Even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”

Notes

1. Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vols. 23-24, pp. 698, 699
2. Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 19, p. 35

---

PHILIP GOLDBERG is the author of numerous books, including the award-winning American Veda, the biography The Life of Yogananda, and Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times. A popular public speaker, he blogs on the Spirituality & Health website, cohosts the Spirit Matters podcast, and leads American Veda Tours to India. His website is philipgoldberg.com.

Title image and smaller images derived from it: Elizabeth Teklinski
Philip Goldberg photo and books: Philip Goldberg
All other images: MaxPixel, https://www.maxpixel.net/

Subscribe to Collaboration

Collaboration explores the vision and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the theory and practice of Integral Yoga, and themes such as consciousness, emergence, and transformation. To subscribe, visit https://www.collaboration.org/journal/subscribe/