Sri Aurobindo and the Condition of

Vedic Wisdom in India

 

 

 

 

A series for

The Movement for the Restoration

of Vedic Wisdom (MRVW)

(Thea) Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet

2 February 2007

After my closure with the Hindu Calendar Forum, it is time to draw the experience into this Movement since it is the best means of assessing where the restoration of Vedic Wisdom stands today. Any further correspondence with Avtar Krishen Kaul of the Forum, and with others of his persuasion, will be posted on this Yahoo group site so that our members can follow - precisely - THE MOVEMENT out there, as it is taking shape in India and throughout the world via our operations. Without these postings from time to time our work remains lifeless and without purpose. Therefore all are invited to participate by this means.

To assist us in the delicate work that lies ahead, I am reproducing for you a brilliant analysis of the problems we face today, written by Sri Aurobindo in 1912, almost a century ago. Have things changed in the interim? This is what we are going to assess.

What is important in the present review is that we find Sri Aurobindo had reached exactly the same conclusions as I have. But there is also one most important and striking factor to take note of: there stands revealed an indisputable need for a revelation of the cosmological foundation out of which the Veda arose and which is the repository down the ages of the great Secret, the supreme Rahasya. Because it is an eternal source Hinduism is known as the Sanatana Dharma. Exactly what the Rishis used as the backdrop for their Seeing can be used today by anyone willing to undergo the same tapasya. For the only experience of Eternity and the Eternal that we can have in this material universe of the number 9 is the cosmos that surrounds us. That is our Laboratory; that is where we carry out our experimentation and where we live the Dharma.

But it too is changing; hence the need to discover what the Rishis had discovered: the immutable Source, the ‘skambha’ upholding the worlds, - that is, the Stable Constant amid change, the axis, the sacred-most Pillar. That was the supreme Vedic Experience and the foundation of that cosmological model, but which has since been lost. It was lost precisely because the cosmology of the Veda was lost as a conscious and lived experience. Even in Sri Aurobindo’s brilliant exposition we note that Skambha is absent; for if he had made this discovery he would have given us those cosmological formulas which are in our possession today. This was not meant to be, as we now know on the basis of the new cosmology that had not descended in its complete form in his time. For it was not his task as the Transcendent 9 of the Formula.

On the basis of Sri Aurobindo’s analysis, we are able both to have confirmation of a similar assessment of the state of the civilisation such as I have arrived at, as well as the terrain crossed since then and the gains that we have actually made. On this basis we can better appreciate the tasks that lie ahead.

The analysis in question was published for the first time in the Sri Aurobindo Archives & Research Vol. 4, No. 2, December 1980. It bears the title ‘The Life Divine, Chapter II’, as found in Sri Aurobindo’s notebooks. But as it turned out, this and the previous Chapter I were never used in Arya, the monthly review started in 1914 where ‘The Life Divine’ and his other major works were serialised. What this unpublished chapter reveals instead is just what Sri Aurobindo had distilled from his involvement in those early days with the Veda. These are precious for us today to confirm what we have come to through the same means of the Yogic process or tapasya, just as Sri Aurobindo underwent. But my experience goes further. And that is what I intend to present to The Movement. I start with the first few paragraphs as introduction:

The Life Divine

Chapter II

The perfect truth of the Veda, where it is now hidden, can only be recovered by the same means by which it was originally possessed. Revelation and experience are the doors of the Spirit. It cannot be attained either by logical reasoning or by scholastic investigation… [Sanskrit text]…‘Not by explanation of texts nor by much learning’, ‘not by logic is this realisation attainable.’ Logical reasoning and scholastic research can only be aids useful for confirming to the intellect what has already been acquired by revelation and spiritual experience. This limitation, this necessity are the inexorable results of the very nature of Veda.

It is ordinarily assumed by the rationalistic modern mind, itself accustomed to arrive at its intellectual results either by speculation or observation, the metaphysical method or the scientific, that the sublime general ideas of the Upanishads, which are apparently of a metaphysical nature, must have been the result of active metaphysical speculation emerging out of an attempt to elevate and intellectualise the primitively imaginative and sensational religious concepts of the Veda. I hold this theory to be an error caused by the reading of our own modern mental processes into the very different mentality of the Vedic Rishis. The higher mental processes of the ancient world were not intellectual, but intuitive. Those inner operations, the most brilliant, the most effective, the most obscure, are our grandest and most powerful sources of knowledge, but to the logical reason, have a very obscure meaning and doubtful validity. Revelation, inspiration, intuition, intuitive discrimination were the capital processes of ancient enquiry. To the logical reason of modern men revelation is a chimera, inspiration only a rapid intellectual selection of thoughts or words, intuition a swift and obscure process of reasoning, intuitive discrimination a brilliant and felicitous method of guessing. But to the Vedic mind they were not only real and familiar, but valid processes: our Indian ancients held them to be the supreme means of arriving at truth, and, if any Vedic Rishi had composed, after the manner of Kant, a Critique of Veda, he would have made the ideas underlying the ancient words dristi, sruti, smriti, ketu, the principal substance of his critique; indeed, unless these ideas are appreciated, it is impossible to understand how the old Rishis arrived so early in human history at results which, whether accepted or questioned, excite the surprise and admiration even of the self-confident modern intellect. I shall try to show at a later stage what I hold to be, in the light of the psychological experience of Yoga, the exact processes involved in these ancient terms and their practical and philosophical justification. But whatever the validity attached to them or the lack of validity, it is only by reproducing the Vedic processes and recovering the original starting-point that we can recover also whatever is, to the intellect, hopelessly obscure in the Veda and Vedanta. If we know of the existence of a buried treasure, but have no proper clue to its exact whereabouts, there are small chances of our enjoying those ancient riches; but if we have a clue, however cryptic, left behind them by the original possessors, the whole problem is then to recover the process of the cryptogram, set ourselves at the proper spot and arrive at their secret cache by repeating the very paces trod out by them in their lost centuries.