The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part Three: Future Evolution of Humanity, with Debashish Banerji

Thinking Allowed Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove and this is part three of our three-part series on the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo. With me is Dr. Debashish Banerjee, who is the former director of the East-West Cultural Center in Los Angeles. He is the academic dean of the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles and an adjunct faculty member at Pasadena City College and the California Institute of Integral Studies. In addition, he is the author of Seven Quartets of Becoming, a transformative yoga psychology based on the diaries of Sri Aurobindo. He has also written The Alternative Nation of Abhinindranath Tagore, his great-grandfather, and Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century, an anthology about his great-uncle. Welcome Debashish. Thank you, Jeffrey. Pleasure once again to be with you. Always a pleasure. You know, in our earlier sequence of interviews on the Sanskrit tradition, we pointed out that there's two fundamental approaches one might think of as the Vedantic versus the Tantric approach. The Vedantic approach being to seek liberation from desire, letting go of desire, and the Tantric approach to seek fulfillment of all one's desires. In Aurobindo's work, he strove to integrate both of these. Yes, indeed. You're absolutely right, Jeffrey, because we may say even in a very broad universal sense that humanity has two kinds of drives. One is the drive towards transcendence, towards liberation from all kinds of laws, and the other is the drive towards, you know, fulfillment, towards delight, bliss, pleasure, and ultimately something deeper than pleasure, which is bliss. And the Indian spiritual tradition has spawned two kinds of directions. One is the Vedanta, as you pointed out, which is more seeking moksha, or liberation, and it sees the world as unreal, and we have to get out of the prison house of this world. And the other is the Tantric tradition, which wants to maximize our sense of power and bliss in the body itself. And I'd say so, you know, all levels of consciousness, including the body, can participate in a kind of a divine bliss. And it also looks at the possibility of the enhancement of the powers, the supernormal powers called siddhis within us, and stretching the limits of the body, even for an aspiration towards physical immortality. So these kinds of goals of Tantra are sort of not given the same amount of legitimacy in terms of philosophy. Well, Vedanta has been given a lot of importance. In Sri Aurobindo's case, we find a union of the two. In fact, he has a sentence where he says that he wants to use the means of the Vedanta to arrive at the ends of the Tantra. So in his diaries that we started by, started talking about, his yoga diaries, we find that he combines these two. I will say that he's not only using the means of Vedanta to arrive at the ends of the Tantra, but he's also using the means of the Tantra to arrive at both the ends of the Tantra and of the Vedanta. So in those diaries, we find that the goals that he sets for himself, the seven quartets, the seven sets of fours, are split between these two traditions. So we can talk about the goals that Vedanta brings as the goals of liberation, freedom, peace, and knowledge, knowledge by identity, knowledge that comes from knowing something to be one with it. And the goals of Tantra that arise in the same seven quartets have to do with power, seeing the various forms of shakti that are inside us and maximize those forms of shakti, ultimately reaching back to the supreme shakti of what he calls the Divine Mother, and making that the true agent inside us. And then on the other side, there is perfection in works, which is the teaching of the Gita. And there is also the body. For the body, he's envisaging freedom from disease. He's envisaging the opening up of different forms of bliss in the body. He talks about five forms of bliss in the body itself. And he's talking about maximizing beauty in the body, not in some conventional sense, but he's saying that everybody is beautiful in an essential way. And so the soul's beauty has to manifest in the body. There was a Tibetan teacher several decades ago, very popular in the United States, Chogyam Trungpa, who wrote a book called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. And in that book, he more or less suggested that just to acquire spiritual attainment, such as the ones you've listed, is only another form of materialism, a kind of acquiring. It could be, one could be caught in this sort of addictive pattern, seeking these sorts of attainments. I'm sure Aurobindo addressed similar concerns. Absolutely, he did. And so that's the reason why he actually privileges Vedanta over Tantra in terms of the sequence of achievement. So he feels that true liberation, detachment, and non-possessiveness are some of the conditions after which one can really maximize one's bliss and have these type of powers. Because these powers also belong to the divine. And we come with a package of powers as we stand. We can walk, talk, think, and we use these powers. So other latent powers are similarly just powers that are to be used in the right way. So to feel that they should be denied because one will be attached to them or will misuse them is true. But there is a true use to these powers as well, if we can keep the right attitude. And that's how he looked at it. He thought, in fact, that this was a natural evolution of the human being. Whatever is potential in us has to evolve. And we have to take a conscious role in causing this further evolution. Well, he was particularly focused, I understand, on the body itself. Yes. And he looked at what is the far limits of potential of the human body. Absolutely. And you note that the similar concern occurs in Western philosophy. Indeed. So the whole idea of what are the limits of the human being in every way, in thinking, in feeling, and in terms of the body, we set limits on ourselves. And we say, through our studies or through our empirical statistics, we can set these limits on the human. But you can think about philosophers going way back, even in the Western tradition. But in more modern times, you can think of the existentialists who feel that we can't define the human except in terms of the will to transcendence, how we actually live our lives. And there's no reason to think that humans in the future are going to live under the same limitations we face today. Absolutely. And so a very important modern philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, looks back to Spinoza, who asked this very question, what is the body capable of? And this question is not a static question. It's a dynamic existential question, which we have to ask ourselves all the time, because we are stretching the limits of the body in asking this question and taking it through experiments which allow us to experience other capacities that are now latent. Well, you know, one of my old friends whom I've interviewed, Michael Murphy, he founded the Esalen Institute, which was sort of the flagship institute of the human potential movement. And he wrote a book called The Future of the Body, looking at how the body could surpass itself and noting, for example, that new records in athletic performance are being set every year. We're always exceeding what people thought was possible. He was a student of Aurobindo's. Indeed, he was. He lived in the ashram for some time, Aurobindo's ashram for some time, and was deeply influenced by his teachings. And particularly, I feel that being a sportsman himself, not only was he affected by the potential of sports to induce states of bliss and states of silence, but also the capacities of the body that could be exceeded in these fields. And that is a wonderful book, by the way, the one that you just mentioned. The Future of the Human Body. Yes, where he talks not only about sports people, but also about various mystical traditions where human beings have experienced healing, spontaneous healing, or capacities of levitation, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes through exercises. But all these have to do with the capacities of the body. Yes, Michael Murphy also co-authored a book called The Psychic Side of Sports. Yes, yes, yes. And so this gets a little closer to Aurobindo's thinking that we might be able to apply yoga powers to do things with our bodies that earlier generations had never even imagined. Absolutely. He does talk about that. Also, Jeffrey, I think the reason why we are talking about now all these records being broken and Michael Murphy's study is that he also has a historical sort of idea, philosophy of history where he's saying that we have come to a certain point, and many other philosophers are saying this, where the mind has reached almost the limit of its capacity. And by that, he doesn't mean that we can't do anything more with the mind. But it's as if we have understood the limitations of the mind much better today as a race than we ever did before. We know that we are much more powerful than ever before as a race. We have all kinds of technology. We are global. We are non-local in many ways. But the question still arises, why can't we use our minds to arrive at peace, at global peace? Why can't we have a wonderful divine life for ourselves when we have the capacity to? And the answer, again, is in the limitations of the mind. We build dualities and we fight with our dualities, which the mind creates. One of Aurobindo's contemporaries, Albert Einstein, said we can't solve a problem from the same mindset that created it. Quite absolutely true. But he was saying that at this point, and we mentioned this in the last of the interviews, the second interview, that the plane of consciousness above the mind, which is represented in the tantric system by the thousand-petaled lotus, is much closer to us than ever before because of the universalization of knowledge that is taking place. There's a kind of a global knowledge that has emerged. And this is a sign that the thousand-petaled lotus, which is a plane of universal mind, is becoming active in the human race. And so he was to say that even above that, that there is what he called the plane called super mind, which can be made active. That was his personal yoga, to try and make that active so that the influence of that could be felt on not only the individual but at the human level, at the level of the human race. One of the concerns that he had was for physical immortality. Yes. So he felt that when that happens, the doors for stretching the limits of the body are going to increase at a universal level. And we can see that happening in many ways, that longevity has increased. We could say that it is purely due to our advances in technology, our knowledge of nutrition, our knowledge of exercise, but, you know, all the same, there has to be something subjective in the human being that accepts the steps to make that longevity possible. And so there is a consciousness element in all this, which if you really reflect on it, we see that there is some kind of power of consciousness that is involved in the changes that are taking place at present. Well, I think there was a time when people simply expected that however long their grandparents and great-grandparents lived, that would be their expected lifestyle or lifespan. Yes. Today, that's not quite the case. I think I expect to live longer than my parents did, and my parents lived longer than my grandparents. Sure, sure, exactly. And that also gives us an opportunity to explore our own inner lives for a longer period of time, and to push the frontiers of our own experience with the body. So in the teachings of Aurobindo and his spiritual companion, the mother, talk about cellular regeneration, don't they, through yogic practice? Yes, absolutely. The mother particularly, it's even in Sri Aurobindo's writings, it's in the Seven Quartets, where he talks about one of the quartets having to do with the body. And in both his and the mother's writings, the forms of consciousness at the physical level are kind of delineated, and one of them is cellular consciousness. So there is not only the form of the body, which has its own consciousness. There is the consciousness of the form. And then there is the consciousness of the organs, and the consciousness of the cells. And what he was talking about is ultimately a kind of a, almost like an absolute democracy at the cellular level, where each cell was conscious enough to will its own synchronicity, or its own harmony with the rest of the organism. So that level of yoga is something that one has to arrive at gradually, otherwise it remains abstract and can sound very utopian. But everything is a process, and he felt that by experiment and by stretching the boundaries, we can reach that point where we can become conscious of the consciousness of the cells and all these other things. Now we have the opportunity to look back on Aurobindo's life, and in particular his yoga practice, his extensive diaries and writings, running for roughly 50 years, from the early turn of the century in 1900 to his death in 1950. And we can see that there was some progress. There was some progress. Had he lived longer, there might have been more progress, but now we have our lifespans. Absolutely. To consider. Absolutely. And those teachings and insights that he has given are really the legacy that we can take with us and ask those same questions, you know, of what are we capable of? It's an open-ended question, and it's an invitation in our own times to discover the capacities of the human. One of the things I found very fascinating about your book, The Seven Quartets of Becoming, is the emphasis on bliss and the many different levels of bliss. Very true. So, as you had mentioned earlier, Jeffrey, that in the Vedantic tradition they say out of bliss we come, by bliss all is maintained, and into bliss all returns. And they are talking about this plane of consciousness called Ananda. Ananda. This supreme consciousness that is called Sat, Chit, Ananda, existence, consciousness and bliss are the three primary properties of Brahman. And I think he adds the fourth property of knowledge, Vijnana, existence, consciousness, bliss and knowledge. So bliss can exist at every level of consciousness. It's from bliss that all this takes its forms. And even the suffering that we have is really a perversion of bliss. It's bliss under the umbrella of avidya or ignorance. So he was to study bliss and the goal of existence was to the maximization of bliss at every level. So there can be a bliss of the mind, there can be a bliss in the cosmic levels above the mind, there can be a bliss at the level of the heart, of the different chakras of the tantric system. But for the body itself he outlined five forms of bliss. Each of these forms of bliss were to be experienced and become constant as the body's constant experience. We were always in bliss. So that's the kind of goal that he was setting to himself. These forms of bliss include, so there is the idea of, we see in mystical literature an interesting term that is sometimes used, horripilation. Have you come across this term? Horripilation. It says, I mean the description is when all the hair stands on end. There's a state of bliss when you're so much in rapture that your hair stands on end. So that is one kind of, one of those five forms of bliss. One of those five forms of bliss is the sense of pain as a form of bliss. He's saying that the borderline between physical pain and bliss is very kind of fuzzy. So that, for example, if there is, I mean there are many experiences people have of that kind. For example, fire walking. He himself would walk bare feet on very hot stones that would blister the feet. But he would will his feet to be equal to it, to be completely accepting of it, and the cells of the feet would experience bliss. He called that Rodrananda, very intense. And he would say, pain is an intensity of bliss that the body cannot bear. So if the body learns to bear that intensity, it experiences it as bliss. He also talks about a scorpion bite that he had that he experienced as a form of bliss in Pondicherry. I see. Well, I'm tempted to think maybe he was a masochist of some sort, but I suspect it goes way beyond that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was clear that one shouldn't seek out these forms of pain. But if one was, you know, if pain came to one, physical pain came to one, one could experience it as bliss. And then, of course, there was, there's a place where he says, since everything is in reality divine, then all our senses must be witness to that divine bliss. I should be able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch nothing but God in everything. So this is a kind of, at the sensory level, all material objects become blissful. I see. Every material object is giving the impression of contact with one's lover. So that's the kind of experiences of bliss that, you know, he takes down to the body. Things that go well beyond what we normally consider, sort of like making love with the universe. Yes, making love with all things as one's lover. Now we just have a couple minutes left, but I know at the heart of your seven quartets is the idea of city. Can you define that for our viewers? So Siddhi has two, a specialized meaning and a general meaning. The general meaning is perfection and the specialized meaning is occult powers. And he was using it in both senses because in the general meaning, he meant that at every level of consciousness, we have to achieve perfection and that is to unfold. Perfection is again a kind of a tricky word because perfection is always relative. There's always more perfection possible, but whatever is latent in us for it to be fully expressed was the level of perfection that he was seeking. But also this included all the latent and paranormal powers, particularly powers of telepathy, of defying the laws of matter, what are called the eight Siddhis, the yoga sutras. He has a slightly modified, but very similar sense of those powers of the body actually, like levitation and other becoming sort of atomic disappearing and things like that. And then there is also the idea of Siddhi as having to do with being able to influence things at a distance. So this whole range of paranormal powers is part of what he calls the divine life. He says it's natural. It's not going to remain. It should not remain something occult and esoteric that people raise their eyebrows at. This is the natural future legacy of the human because these powers reside within us. Why should we deny them? Well, there is a school of modern philosophy called naturalism, which suggests anything that suggests that the supernatural must be essentially forbidden and excluded from all discussion. Clearly, that's a school inconsistent with Vedanta and yoga philosophy. Yes, absolutely. Because, you know, I agree with you that there are people who feel that what nature has given us is only what we should accept. But that would, you know, erase the whole technological history of humanity. And yoga is all about transcending nature, not necessarily getting out of nature, but transcending and transforming. So we are agents. We are participants in nature. And we have our own powers with which we interact with what is given to us to exceed the boundaries and limits. And that's how Sri Aurobindo saw the relationship with nature. Debashish Banerjee, thank you so much for sharing these three interviews with me about the important work of Sri Aurobindo. Thank you, Jeffrey. And thank you for being with us.