A triple change of consciousness, then, charts our journey on earth: the discovery of the psychic being or immanent Spirit, the discovery of Nirvana or transcendent Spirit, and the discovery of the central being of cosmic Spirit. This is probably the real meaning of the Father-Son-Holy Ghost trinity of the Christian tradition. Our purpose is not to decide which experience is better than the other, but to verify them for ourselves. Philosophies and religions dispute about the priority of different aspects of God and different Yogins, Rishis and Saints have preferred this or that philosophy or religion. Our business is not to dispute any of them, but to realize and become all of them, not to follow after any aspect to the exclusion of the rest, but to embrace God in all His aspects and beyond aspect1--this is the very meaning of an integral yoga. Still, we wonder if there is nothing beyond this triple discovery, because however supreme each of them may seem when we experience it, none gives us the integral fulfillment to which we aspire, at least if we consider that both the earth and the individual must participate in this fulfillment. Discovering the psychic being, for instance, is a great realization--we become aware of our divinity--but it remains limited to the individual and does not extend beyond the personal walls that confine us. Discovering the central being is a very encompassing realization--the world becomes our own being--but we lose the sense of individuality; indeed, it would be a mistake to think of a Mr. Smith sitting in the middle of his cosmic consciousness and enjoying the view--for there is no more Mr. Smith. Discovering the Transcendent is a very lofty realization, but we lose both the individual and the world--there is nothing left but That, forever outside of the human play. In theory, we can say that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one--in theory we can say anything we like--but in practice, when we experience them, each of these changes of consciousness seems to be cut off from the others by a vast gulf. As long as we do not find a practical way of reconciling that triple hiatus among pantheist, individualist, and monist, there will be no fulfillment, neither for the individual nor for the world. It is not enough to find our individual center and leave out the totality of the world, or to find the totality of the world and leave out the individual, and even less so to find supreme Peace if both the world and our individuality are dissolved--"I do not want to be sugar," the great Ramakrishna exclaimed, "I want to eat sugar!" In this chaotic and harried world where we have to act, to confront things, to become, we need primordially to be. Without this being, our becoming is squandered in the prevailing chaos. But without this becoming, our being dissolves into a blissful Zero.2 And without an individuality, what do marvelous realizations really matter, since we are no longer there?
Such is the contradiction we must resolve, not in philosophical terms, but in terms of life and power of action. Until now, such a reconciling path has seemed nonexistent or unknown; this is why all religions and spiritualities have placed the transcendent Father at the top of the hierarchy, outside this whole unfortunate chaos, urging us to search elsewhere for the totality to which we aspire. Yet intuition tell us that if we, beings endowed with a body, aspire to totality, then totality must be possible; it must be possible in a body, otherwise we would not aspire to it. There is no such thing as "imagination"; there are only deferred realities, or truths awaiting their time. In his own way, Jules Verne testifies to this. Is there not something else to discover, then, a fourth change of consciousness that would change everything?
In his iron cage in the middle of the courtroom, Sri Aurobindo had reached the end of the road. One after another, he had realized the Immanent, the Transcendent, and the Universal--that
cage scarcely held anything more than a body: in his consciousness, he was everywhere at will. But perhaps he was recalling an individual named Aurobindo, who since Cambridge and his years in the West had continuously accumulated consciousness in that body, and now the infinite Consciousness was a reality, but that body remained the same as millions of others, subject to the same laws of Nature, hungry, thirsty, and occasionally ill, like all the other bodies, and advancing slowly but surely towards disintegration. The consciousness is vast, luminous, immortal, but underneath everything remains the same. And because he was clear-sighted, because he was no longer fooled by all the masks added on by morality or decency, perhaps he was also espying, in the subconscient, the animal grimace beneath the infinite Consciousness, and the same material squalor intact beneath the lovely halo--for underneath everything continues as usual, and nothing is changed. Perhaps he was also looking, beyond the cage, at all his other selves who continued to judge and hate and suffer. Who is saved unless all is saved? And what did that infinite Consciousness do for all these people? It sees, it knows, but what can it do? Had he not left Baroda to act, to do something concrete? There he was, watching everything in his infinite consciousness, experiencing the immense joy above, feeling joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute,3 but what could his joy do if the above were not also everywhere below? Below, everything continues as before, suffering, and dying. He was not listening to the judges, or even answering the questions on which his life depended; he was only hearing the Voice repeating: I am guiding, therefore fear not. Turn to your own Work for which I have brought you to jail. Thus Sri Aurobindo kept his eyes closed in that cage, searching within. Was there not a totality above that could be also the totality below? Had the road come to an end with this golden impotence?4 What was the sense of this whole journey?
The soul, which for some inexplicable reason has come into this Matter, or becomes this Matter, evolves slowly over the ages; it grows, takes on an individuality through its senses, its mind, its experiences; more and more it recalls its lost or submerged divinity, its consciousness within its force, finally to recognize itself and return to its Origin, transcendent and nirvanic, or cosmic, depending upon its destiny and its inclinations. Is this whole saga, then, only a long and laborious trajectory from the Divine to the Divine through the dark purgatory of Matter? But why the purgatory? Why this Matter? Why ever enter it at all if it is only to get out? Some will say that the cosmic or nirvanic beatitudes of the end are well worth all the grievances of the journey. That may be so, but meanwhile the earth suffers; we may be beaming up there in supreme bliss, but torture, illness and death are still proliferating and thriving down here; our cosmic consciousness makes not an atom of difference in the earth's evolution, and our Nirvana still less. Some will say that every human being should do the same and awaken from his state of error--all right, but again why the earth if it is merely to awaken from the error of the earth? We speak of "the fall," of Adam and Eve, of some absurd original sin which ruined what God had made perfect in the beginning--yet everything is God! The serpent of paradise, if every there were one, was God, and so were Satan and his Pomp and his Works. There is nothing but Him! Would He then be so clumsy as to fall unknowingly, so helpless as to suffer unwillingly, or so sadistic as to play at being at fault just for the fun of getting Himself out of His fault? Is the earth just a mistake? For if this earth does not have a meaning for the earth, if the suffering of the world does not have a meaning for the world, if it is only a place of transit to purge ourselves of some absurd mistake, then nothing and no one, neither supreme bliss nor ultimate ecstasy, will ever excuse this useless interlude--God did not need to enter Matter if it was to get out of it; God did not need Death and Suffering and Ignorance, unless this Suffering, Death, and Ignorance bear their own meaning, unless this earth and this body are ultimately the place of a Secret that changes everything, and not merely instruments of purgation or escape.
I climb not to thy everlasting Day
Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night. . . Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king, Than all the glorious liberties of heaven. . .
Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.
Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.5
Yet, if we look more closely at this enigma, at this kernel of soul around which the whole mystery revolves, we must admit that the soul does not need in the least to be "saved"; it is forever free and pure, forever saved in its own light. The moment we enter the soul with our eyes wide open, we see that it is exquisitely divine and light, untouched by all the mud flung at it. It is the earth that must be saved, because it is overburdened; it is life that must be saved, because it is dying. Where is the seed that can perform that Deliverance? Where is the Power that will deliver?
Where is the world's true salvation? The spiritualists are right in wanting us to taste the supreme lightness of the soul, but so too are the materialists, who churn Matter and seek to bring out wonders from that denseness. But they do not have the Secret. No one has the Secret. The wonders of the former have no body, and those of the latter no soul.
The body, yes, the body, which at first had seemed to be only an obscure instrument for the liberation of the Spirit, may be precisely, paradoxically, the place of an unknown totality of the Spirit: These seeming Instrumentals are the key to a secret without which the Fundamentals themselves would not unveil all their mystery.6 "Turn to your own Work," said the Voice. This Work was not to bask in cosmic bliss, but to find here, in this body and for the earth, a new path that would integrate within a single form of consciousness the freedom of the Transcendent, the living immensity of the Cosmic, and the joy of an individual soul on a fulfilled earth and in a truer life. For the true change of consciousness, the Mother says, is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and make of it a new creation.
The Conditions of the Discovery
If we wish "to change the physical conditions of the world," that is, the so-called natural laws that rule our life and the world, and if we want to implement this change through a power of consciousness, then two conditions are required. First, we must work in our own individual body without seeking any escape in the beyond, since this body is the very point of insertion of consciousness into Matter; and secondly, we must seek to discover the principle of consciousness that will have the power to transform Matter. So far, as we can readily see, none of the forms of consciousness or levels of consciousness known to humanity has had the power to bring about this change, neither mental consciousness nor vital consciousness nor physical consciousness. True, through sheer discipline some individuals have managed to defy natural laws and to overcome gravity, cold, hunger, illness, etc. But, first, these were individual changes that could never be passed along, and secondly, they do not really transform Matter: the laws governing the body remain essentially the same, while certain special effects, supernatural in appearance, are superimposed more or less temporarily over nature. Here we can recall the example of another revolutionary yogi, a companion of Sri Aurobindo's, who was once bitten by a rabid dog. Using his power of consciousness, he immediately blocked the effects of the virus and went on with his life as if nothing had happened (let us note in passing that had this yogi been in a perfect state of consciousness, he could not have been bitten in the first place). But one day, during a particularly stormy political meeting, he lost his temper and flew into a rage at one of the speakers. A few hours later he was dying in the terrible throes of rabies. His power came only from the control of his consciousness, and the instant his consciousness faltered, everything returned as it was before, because the laws of the body had not been changed, only muzzled. Therefore, the kind of change Sri Aurobindo and Mother envision has nothing to do with acquiring more or less temporary
"supernatural" powers and draping them over our natural powers, but with changing man's very nature as well as his physical conditioning; it is not control but actual transformation. Furthermore, if we seek an earth-wide realization, this new principle of existence, which Sri Aurobindo calls supramental, must definitively establish itself among us, at first in a few individuals, then, by contagion, in all those who are ready--much as the mental principle and the life principle have become naturally and definitively established on earth. In other words, it involves creating a divine
superhumanity on earth, which will no longer be subject to the laws of ignorance, suffering, and decay.
The undertaking may seem formidable or chimerical, but this is only because we see things on the scale of a few decades. Actually, it would be very much in keeping with the evolutionary process itself. Indeed, if we take all this earthly evolution to be an evolution of the Spirit in forms, all these human births to be a growth of the soul and Spirit in man, we may doubt whether the Spirit will always be satisfied with human narrowness, just as we may ask why It should, at the end of the journey, simply return to Its supraterrestrial Glory and Joy, which It did not need to leave in the first place; after all, the Light is already there, eternally, immutably, and it hardly represents a conquest for the Spirit! But Matter . . . there is a heaven to be built! Perhaps It seeks to experience the same Glory and Joy in conditions seemingly contrary to Its own, in a life besieged by death, ignorance, and obscurity, in the multitudinous diversity of the world, instead of in a blank unity. Then this life and this Matter would at least have a meaning; no longer a purgatory or an empty transition to the beyond, but a laboratory where step by step--through matter, plants, animals, and then an increasingly conscious human being--the Spirit evolves the superman, the god: The soul has not finished what it has to do by merely developing into humanity; it has still to develop that humanity into its higher possibilities. Obviously, the soul that lodges in a Caribbee or an untaught primitive or an Apache of Paris or an American gangster, has not yet exhausted the necessity of human birth, has not developed all its possibilities or the whole meaning of humanity, has not worked out all the sense of Sachchidananda in the universal Man; neither has the soul lodged in a vitalistic European occupied with dynamic production and vital pleasure or in an Asiatic peasant engrossed in the ignorant round of the domestic and economic life. We may reasonably doubt whether even a Plato or a Shankara marks the crown and therefore the end of the outflowering of the spirit in man. We are apt to suppose that these may be the limit, because these and others like them seem to us the highest point which the mind of man can reach, but that may be the illusion of our present possibility. . . . The soul had a prehuman past, it has a superhuman future.7
Sri Aurobindo is not a theoretician of evolution; he is a practitioner of evolution. We have jumped ahead in this discussion merely to shed some light upon his groping process in the Alipore jail. He could see that that cosmic and blissful vastitude was not the place where any work could be done, that one had to come back down into the body, humbly, and search there. Yet, we may ask, if
"the transformation" is to take place through a power of consciousness and not by some external machinery, what consciousness higher than the cosmic consciousness can there be? Is that not the top of the ladder and therefore the limit of power? The question is relevant if we wish to understand the practical process of the discovery, and eventually experience it ourselves. We might answer with two observations. First, it is not enough to attain higher powers of consciousness; there must be someone to embody them, otherwise we are like a hunter discovering fabulous creatures--through binoculars. Where is the "someone" in the cosmic consciousness? There is no one left. A present-day analogy may explain this better: we can send a rocket into the sun, thus reaching the apex of the world, but not the apex of man, who has not moved an inch in the process. The rocket has gone out of the earth's range. Similarly, the yogi concentrates on one point of his being, gathers all his energies like the cone of a rocket, breaks through his outer carapace, and emerges elsewhere, in another cosmic or nirvanic dimension.
He mounted burning like a cone of fire.*
But who has realized cosmic consciousness? Not the yogi; the yogi goes on drinking, eating, sleeping, being ill at times like all human animals, and dying. It is not he, but a tiny point of his being that is experiencing cosmic consciousness, the very one on which he so earnestly concentrated to break through his carapace. The rest of his being, all the human and earthly nature that he has excluded from the experience, which he has repressed or mortified in order to better
But who has realized cosmic consciousness? Not the yogi; the yogi goes on drinking, eating, sleeping, being ill at times like all human animals, and dying. It is not he, but a tiny point of his being that is experiencing cosmic consciousness, the very one on which he so earnestly concentrated to break through his carapace. The rest of his being, all the human and earthly nature that he has excluded from the experience, which he has repressed or mortified in order to better