THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS THESE YOGAS IN A ASCENDING SERIES OF UNDERSTANDING

Jnana Yoga
Bhakti Yoga
Karma Yoga
and then finally a good view of Integral Yoga of Transformation...

Volume: 12 [CWSA] (Essays Divine and Human), Page: 344 - Sri Aurobindo

Partial Systems of Yoga
=======================

Jnana Yoga: The Yoga of Knowledge
---------------------------------

128

All existence is the existence of the One, the Eternal and Infinite,
the beginning and middle and end, the source and substance and
continent and support of all things. There is not and cannot be any
other existence, anything that is other than or outside of or above
or below or beyond or in any way separate from the existence of
the one Eternal and Infinite. All that appears as finite, temporal,
multiple and phenomenal is still in reality being of the being of the
Infinite and the Eternal. Ekam evadvitiyam.
This is the first and abiding truth without which no other can
be understood in the truth of things or put in its proper place in the
integrality of the Whole. It is therefore the fundamental realisation
at which the seeker of the Yoga must arrive.

129

God is, is the first seed of Yoga. It is Tat Sat of the Vedanta.
I am, is the second seed. It is So'ham of the Upanishads. God is
infinite self-existence, self-conscious force of existence,
self-diffused or self-concentrated delight of existence; I too am
that infinite self-existence, self-consciousness, self-force,
self-delight; this is the double third seed. It is Sachchidananda of
the worldwide transcendental conclusion of all human thinking.

130

Self-knowledge is the foundation of the complete Yoga.
Affirm in yourselves self-knowledge.
Page 344

Self-knowledge and knowledge of the Brahman is one; for I
am He. Of this let there be no doubt in thy mind.
Self is twofold, essential and phenomenal, being &
becoming[.]

131

First be aware of thy inner self and spirit. Next be aware of
that self and spirit one with thine in others.

132

All Yoga starts from the perception that what we are now or
rather what we perceive as ourselves and so call is only an
ignorant partial and superficial formulation of our nature. It is not
our whole self, it is not even our real self; it is a little
representative personality put forward by the true and persistent
being in us for the experience of this brief life; we not only have
been in the past and can be in the future but we are much more
than that in the present secret totality of our being and nature.
Especially, there is a secret soul in us that is our true person; there
is a secret self that is our true impersonal being and spirit. To
unveil that soul and that self is one of the most important
movements of Yoga[.]

133

The sense of a greater or even of an ultimate Self need not
be limited to a negative and empty wideness whose one character
is to be without limitation or feature. The first extreme push of our
recoil from what we now are or think ourselves to be may and
does often at first carry us over into this annihilating experience.
A negation of our present error, a release from our petty irksome
aching bonds may seem to be the only thing worth having, the only
thing true. The rest is infinity, freedom, peace. We feel an Infinity
that needs nothing but its own infinite to fill it. We rejoice in a
freedom of which any form, name or
Page 345

description, any creative activity, any movement, any impulse
would be a disturbing denial and the beginning of a relapse into the
error of will and desire, the ignorance of the illusory finite. To
accept nothing but the bare bliss of infinity is the condition of this
peace. The mind escaping from itself denies all thought, all
form-making, all motion or play of any kind; for that would be a
grievous return to itself, a miserable imprisonment and renewed
hard-labour. The life released from the toil of labouring and
striving and living, demands only immobility and no more to be, a
sleep of force, the surety and rest of an immutable status. The
body accepts denial and dissolution, for to be dissolved is to cease
to breathe and suffer. A bodiless, lifeless, mindless infinite breadth
and supreme silence shows to us that we are in contact with the
Absolute.

134

This method of extinction is imposed on our mind and our
mental ego, because all that is eternal, infinite, absolute is
superconscient to mind; mind and its ego cannot remain awake in
that greater consciousness, they must disappear. But if we can
change or evolve from mental into supramental beings, then the
superconscient becomes our normal consciousness. We can then
hope to wake in That and not fall asleep in it, to grow into it and
not abolish ourselves in it, to last in identity and not lose ourselves
in identity with the supreme Existence.

135

It is possible for the reason, the thinker in us to rest and cease
satisfied in this sole spiritual experience and to discard all others
on the ground that they are in the end illusory or of a minor
phenomenal significance. The logical mind drives naturally
towards a pursuit of the abstract, towards pure essences, an
indefinable substratum of all experiences, a nameless X without
contents, an ineffable and featureless Absolute. Itself a creator of
definitions without which it cannot think but none of which
Page 346

can give it any abiding sense of an ultimate, it escapes from itself
with a sense of relief into the Indefinable. But if the mind finds its
account in cessation and release, the other parts of our being have
in this solution to be cast away from us or put to silence. The
heart remains atrophied and unfulfilled; the will is baulked of its
last dynamic significances. These too tend towards an absolute,
the heart towards an absolute of ineffable Love and Bliss, the will
towards an absolute of ineffable Power. And there is nothing to
prove that the knowledge at which the reason arrives is alone
true. There is no reason to suppose that the heart and will and the
deeper soul within us have not too their own sufficient doors
opening upon the Supreme, their key to the mystery of the Eternal.


Bhakti Yoga: The Yoga of Devotion
---------------------------------

136

The integral Yoga of Devotion proceeds through seven stages
each of which opens out from the one that precedes it:
Aspiration and self-consecration; devotion; adoration and
worship; love; possession of the whole being and life by the
Divine; joy of the Divine Love and the beauty and sweetness of
the Divine; the absolute Bliss of the Absolute.
Faith is our first need; for without faith in the Divine, in the
existence and the all-importance of the Divine Being there can be
no reason to aspire or to consecrate, there can be no power in the
aspiration or force behind the consecration.
Doubts do not matter, if the faith central and fundamental is
there. Doubts may come, but they cannot prevail against [the
rock] of faith in the centre of the being. The rock may be covered
awhile by surges of doubt and despondency, but the rock will
emerge firm and indestructible. Faith is of the heart, the inner
heart where lives the psychic being. The outer heart is the seat of
the vital being, the life personality. That like the mind may
Page 347

believe and then lose its belief, doubt comes from the mind, the
vital and the physical consciousness. [The greater the intensity] of
the psychic fire, the less will be the power of doubt to soil and
darken the mind, the life and the consciousness of the body.

137

Three are the words that sum up the first state of the Yoga of
devotion, faith, worship, obedience.
Three are the words that sum up the second state of the
Yoga of devotion, adoration, delight, self-giving.
Three are the words that sum up the supreme state of the
Yoga of devotion, love, ecstasy, surrender.

*

These are the seven ecstasies of Love—
The ecstasy of the body in the clasp of the Lover.
The ecstasy of the life consecrated and self-given to the
Lord.
The ecstasy of the Mind made one in idea and [will] with the
divine Consort.
The ecstasy of the supermind united with mind and body and
enjoying the bliss of difference.
The ecstasy [of the] soul in the pure bliss of the Beatific.
The ecstasy of the spirit united in consciousness and force
with the Universal.
The ecstasy of the pure being absolute and one with the
Transcendent.


Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Works
-----------------------------

138

All spiritual paths lead to a higher consciousness and union with
the Divine and among the many paths one of the greatest is the
Page 348

Way of Works: it is as great as the Way of Bhakti or the Way of
Knowledge.
Do not imagine that works are in their nature nothing but a
bondage, they can be a powerful means towards liberation and
divine perfection. All depends on the spirit in our works and their
orientation towards the inner and the higher Light away from
desire and ego.
Works are a bondage when they are done out of desire or for
the sake of the ego, by a mind turned outwards, involved in the act
and not detached and free, bound to the ignorance of this lower
nature.

139

To create the union of his soul with the Divine Presence and
Power through a perfect surrender of the will in all his activities, is
the high aspiration of the seeker on the Way of Works.
To put off like a worn-out disguise the ignorant consciousness
and stumbling will that are ours in our present mind and life-force
and to put on the light and knowledge, the purity and power, the
tranquillity and ecstasy of the divine Essence, the spiritual Nature
that awaits us when we climb beyond mind, is the victory after
which he reaches.
To make mind and heart and life and body conscious,
changed and luminous moulds of this supramental Spirit,
instruments of its light and power and works, vessels of its bliss
and radiance, is the glory he assigns to his transfigured human
members.
On one side a darkened mind and life, ignorant, suffering,
spinning like a top whipped by Nature always in the same obscure
and miserable rounds, on the other a soul touched by a ray from
the hidden Truth, illumined, conscious, concentrated in a single
unceasing effort towards its own and the world's Highest,—this is
the difference between man's ordinary life and the way of the
divine Yoga[.]

*

Page 349

It is not a mental or moral ideal to which is turned the seeker of
the Way, but a truth of the spirit, the experience of a hidden
Reality living and concrete, a Light, a Power, a Joy that surpasses
the mental understanding and is beyond any merely mental
experience.
The ideals created by the mind are constructions in the air
that have no sufficient foundation in our vital and physical nature;
therefore they can change a side of our mind and colour a part of
our actions, but they cannot transform our lives, cannot find here
their physical body. Ideals touch and pass, mankind remains the
same; after religions, ideals, moralities without end we keep
always the same ignorant and imperfect human nature.
Moral rules and ideals are a harness for the ignorant soul,
bridle and bit for the passions, reins that compel it to an assigned
road, yoke and poles and traces that bind it to be faithful to the
burden it carries. Morality checks and controls but does not purify
or change the vital nature.
In ethics there is an artificial shaping of the mind's surfaces,
but no spiritual freedom, no satisfying perfection of the whole
dynamic nature.
The mind's ideals like the life's seekings are at once absolute
each in its own demand and in conflict with one another; neither
mind nor life knows the means either of their complete or their
harmonised fulfilment. The mind labours through the centuries but
human nature remains faithful to its imperfections and man's life
amid its changes always the same.
Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the
Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us
from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are
tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once
transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.

*

The first secret of Yoga is to get back behind the mind to the
spirit, behind the surface emotional movements to the soul,—
Page 350

behind the life to the universal force that builds these outward
shapes and movements,—behind matter to the eternal Existence
that puts on the robe of the body.
The second secret of Yoga is to open these discovered
powers to their own supreme Truth above matter, above life,
above the mind. This Truth, secret in the Superconscient, has four
gradations or movements of its power, infinite supermind or
Gnosis, infinite Bliss, Ananda, infinite Consciousness and Power,
Chit-Tapas, infinite Being—Sat-Chid-Ananda.
The third secret of Yoga is, once arisen beyond mind, to bring
down the power [sentence not completed]

140

The progressive surrender of our ignorant personal will and its
merger into a greater divine or on the highest summits greatest
supreme Will is the whole secret of Karma Yoga. To bring about
the conditions in which alone this vast and happy identity becomes
possible and to work out the lines we must follow to their end if
we are to reach it, is all the deeper purpose of this discipline. The
first condition is the elimination of personal vital desire, for if
desire intervenes, all harmony with the supreme Divine Will
becomes impossible. Even if we receive it, we shall disfigure its
working and distort its dynamic impulse. To give up all desire, all
insistence upon fruit and reward and success must be renounced
from our will and all vital attachment to the work itself excised
from our nature; for attachment makes it our own and no longer
the Godhead's. The elimination of egoism is the second condition,
not only of the rajasic and tamasic egoisms that twine around
desire, but of the sattwic egoism that takes refuge in the idea of
the I as the worker.

The ordinary consciousness of man cannot accept this difficult
renunciation or, if it accepts it, cannot achieve this tremendous
change. The human mind is too ignorant, narrow and chained to its
own limited movements, the human life-instincts too blind, selfish,
obscure, shut up in their own earth-bound pursuits and
Page 351

satisfactions, the human body too clumsy and hampering a
machine. There is here no freedom, no large and infinite room, no
willing and happy plasticity for the greater play of the Divine in
Nature. A certain half-seeing and imperfect subordination of the
personal will to an ill-understood greater Will and Power, a
stumbling and occasional intuition or at best a brilliant lightninglike
intimation of its commands and impulsions, a confused, clouded
and often grossly distorted execution of the little one seizes of a
divine Mandate seems to be the uttermost that the human
consciousness as it is at its best seems able to accomplish. Only
by a growth into a greater superhuman and supramental
consciousness whose very nature is to be attuned to the Divine
can we achieve the true and supreme Karma Yoga.
This transformation is only possible after certain steps of a
divine ascent have been mastered and to climb these steps is the
object of the Yoga of Works as it is conceived by the Gita. The
extirpation of desire, a wide and calm equality of the mind, the life
soul and the spirit, annihilation of the ego, an inner quietude and
expulsion or transcendence of ordinary Nature, the Nature of the
three gunas and a total surrender to the Supreme are the
successive steps of this preliminary change. Only after all this has
been done, can we live securely in an infinite consciousness not
bound like our mental human nature. And only then can we
receive the Light, know perfectly the will of the Supreme, attune
all our movements to the rhythm of its Truth and execute perfectly
from moment to moment its imperative commandments. Till then
there is no firm achievement, but only an endeavour, seeking and
aspiration, all the stress and struggle of a great and uncertain
spiritual adventure. Only when these things are accomplished is
there for the dynamic parts of our nature the beginning of a divine
security in its acts and a transcendent peace.

141

Desire is always sinning against the Truth; it thins it and
prevents it from taking body. Desire does not eternalise
descending Truth;
Page 352

it disintegrates, makes temporal, minimises and soon or at last
abandons from dissatisfaction (vairagya) its maimed creation.

142

To do works in a close union and deep communion with the
Divine in us, the Universal around us and the Transcendent above
us, not to be shut up any longer in the imprisoned and separative
human mind, the slave of its ignorant dictates and narrow
suggestions, this is Karmayoga.
To work in obedience to a divine command, an eternal Will, a
transcendent and universal impulsion, not to run under the whips
of ego and need and passion and desire, and not to be goaded by
the pricks of mental and vital and physical preference, but to be
moved by God only, by the highest Truth only, this is Karmayoga.
To live and act no longer in human ignorance, but in divine
Knowledge, conscient of individual nature and universal forces
and responsive to a transcendent governance, this is Karmayoga.
To live, be and act in a divine, illimitable and luminous
universal consciousness open to that which is more than universal,
no longer to grope and stumble in the old narrowness and
darkness, this is Karmayoga.
Whosoever is weary of the littlenesses that are, whosoever is
enamoured of the divine greatnesses that shall be, whosoever has
any glimpse of the Supreme within him or above him or around
him let him hear the call, let him follow the path. The way is
difficult, the labour heavy and arduous and long, but its reward is
habitation in an unimaginable glory, a fathomless felicity, a happy
and endless vastness.
Find the Guide secret within you or housed in an earthly body,
hearken to his voice and follow always the way that he points. At
the end is the Light that fails not, the Truth that deceives not, the
Power that neither strays nor stumbles, the wide freedom, the
ineffable Beatitude.
The heavens beyond are great and wonderful, but greater
Page 353

and more wonderful are the heavens within you. It is these Edens
that await the divine worker.

143

A peace and bliss inconceivable to the pleasure-bound and
pain-racked mind, and immeasurable by the limited capacities of
our present bodily sense, is the reward of the seeker's insistent
self-discipline, his painful struggle, his untiring endeavour.

*

At first a consecration, then a surrender and subordination of
our human personal will, then its merger in a greater divine or
greatest supreme Will is the central secret and core of intention of
the Karmayoga. But this cannot be entirely done by our mental
consciousness in its little human boundaries. Our Yoga must help
us to leave it and enter into a greater consciousness enlightened
by a truer radiance of knowledge, armed with a mightier unerring
strength, open to that vaster delight in which are drowned for ever
our petty human pain and pleasure. Still even what can be done
within the limits of our human consciousness brings a great
liberation.
But even to do that little is not easy to the physical mind of
man, even when his higher mind and will consent and demand it.
There is something in us wedded to ignorance, eternally in revolt
against all surrender, attached to its own blind activity, its own
freedom of will, a “freedom” that rattles its hundred chains at
every step;—but to that element in us even that seems a divine
music. And our human mind will invent a hundred good reasons
against any such surrender to something not ourselves or even to
our highest Self,—unless that be nothing more than a magnified
reflection of our ego; for then it will be willing enough to
surrender. And even our highest spiritual achievement on the
mental plane is tainted and limited, when it is not distorted, by this
ever unredeemed element in our nature.
Page 354

Our only safety is to push on beyond the mind to a
Truth-consciousness with a larger dynamic light in it that is ever
free by its inherent knowledge and illumined power from these
pettinesses and this egoistic darkness. For in this supramental
consciousness is the Truth and there we meet it and its Master.
The supermind is the primal creative and organic instrument of the
Supreme Will, the Will that is free from error because eternal, one
and infinite.
Page 355


                 Integral Yoga
                 =============


Integrality
-----------

144

Most Yoga has for its aim one or other of two great ends, either
the abandonment of the world and departure into some reality of
supracosmic existence or some form of limited perfection,
knowledge, bliss or mastery in the world. But there is a third
objective of Yoga in which there is a harmony between world
existence & supracosmic freedom. God is possessed; the world is
not renounced or rather renounced as an aim in itself, but
possessed as the play of God. A selfless and transcendent
perfection in the divine existence is the goal in this path of Yoga.

145

There are many Yogas, many spiritual disciplines, paths
towards liberation and perfection, Godward ways of the spirit.
Each has its separate aim, its peculiar approach to the One
Reality, its separate method, its helpful philosophy and its practice.
The integral Yoga takes up all of them in their essence and tries to
arrive at a unification (in essence, not in detail) of all these aims,
methods, approaches; it stands for an all-embracing philosophy
and practice.

146

To enter into the entire consciousness of the Divine Reality
with all our being and all parts and in every way of our being and
to change all our now ignorant and limited nature into divine nature
so that it shall become the instrument and expression of the
Page 356

Divine Reality that in our self and essence we are,—this is the
complete fulfilment of our existence and this is the integral Yoga.
To enter into the Divine either by the way of the thinking
mind or by the way of the heart or by the way of the will in works
or by a change of the psychological nature-stuff or a freeing of
the vital force in the body is not enough; all this is not enough.
Through all these together it must be done and by a change of our
very sense and body consciousness even to the material
inconscience which must become aware of the Divine and
luminous with the Divine.
To be one with the Divine, to live in and with the Divine, to be
of one nature with the Divine, this should be the aim of our Yoga.

147

The integral Yoga is so called because it aims at a
harmonised totality of spiritual realisation and experience. Its aim
is integral experience of the Divine Reality, what the Gita
describes in the words samagram mam, “the whole Me” of the
Divine Being. Its method is an integral opening of the whole
consciousness, mind, heart, life, will, body to that Reality, to the
Divine Existence, Consciousness, Beatitude, to its being and its
integral transformation of the whole nature[.]

148

Our Yoga is the integral Yoga. Its object is the harmony of a
total spiritual realisation and experience, a supreme consummation
of the spirit and the nature.

149

This Yoga is called the integral Yoga, first because its object
is integral covering the whole field of spiritual realisation and
experience. It takes existence at its centre and in all its aspects
and turns it into a harmony at once single and entire. It is the
method
Page 357

of an integral God realisation, an integral self-realisation, an
integral fulfilment of the being, an integral transformation and
perfection of the nature[.]

150

What is the integral Yoga?
It is the way of a complete God-realisation, a complete
Self-realisation, a complete fulfilment of our being and
consciousness, a complete transformation of our nature—and this
implies a complete perfection of life here and not only a return to
an eternal perfection elsewhere.
This is the object, but in the method also there is the same
integrality, for the entirety of the object cannot be accomplished
without an entirety in the method, a complete turning, opening,
self-giving of our being and nature in all its parts, ways,
movements to that which we realise.
Our mind, will, heart, life, body, our outer and inner and
inmost existence, our superconscious and subconscious as well as
our conscious parts, must all be thus given, must all become a
means, a field of this realisation and transformation and participate
in the illumination and the change from a human into a divine
consciousness and nature.
This is the character of the integral Yoga.

151

The integral Yoga is a single but many-sided way of the
growth of our spirit and development of our nature. A total
experience and a single and all embracing realisation of the
integral Divine Reality is its consequence. There is too implied in it
a radical change and transformation of the whole being and of
every part of the nature. Our being is a nexus of the human
mental-vital-physical nature of Ignorance, it is transmuted into a
spiritual and supramental consciousness: it becomes a divine unity
in a harmony of the infinite and universal and integrated will, love,
bliss and knowledge.
Page 358

The Infinite Reality presents itself to our limited
consciousness in an infinity of aspects; different ways of Yoga try
to realise one or other of these aspects. The integral Yoga takes
all of them in its movement, but it limits itself to no aspect; its sole
desire is to embrace the whole Divinity (samagram mam—Gita).
A highest aspect of the infinite Reality is the supracosmic
Absolute, unthinkable, ineffable, without relation to the universe.
There is a path of Yoga that [sentence not completed]

152

The heart of the integral Yoga is in a triple spiritual
endeavour. It is a realisation of the Divine, of all the Divine by our
whole being and through all the parts of our being. It includes a
discovery and harmonisation, a unification of our total
consciousness subliminal as well as supraliminal, the now
superconscient and subconscient as well as the now conscient and
its surrender to the Divine for a spiritual instrumentation here; it
culminates in an evolution of this consciousness [sentence not
completed]

The integral Yoga is integral by the totality or completeness of its
aim, the completeness of its process and the completeness of the
ground it covers in its process. This kind of integrality must by its
nature be complex, manysided and intricate; only some main lines
can be laid down in writing, for an excess of detail would confuse
the picture.
The aim the Yoga puts before itself is in essence the same as
the object of other Yogas—the realisation of the Divine. But it is
not the Divine in one of its aspects, personal or impersonal, cosmic
or transcendent, Self or Lord or [sentence not completed]

153

That Yoga is full or perfect which enables us to fulfil entirely
God's purpose in us in this universe.
All Yoga which takes the soul entirely out of world-existence,
is a high but narrow specialisation of divine tapasya.
Page 359

God's purpose in us is that we should fulfil His divine being in
world-consciousness under the conditions of the Lila.
With regard to the universe God manifests Himself triply, in
the individual, in the universe, in that which transcends the
universe.
In order to fulfil God in the individual, we must exceed the
individual. The removal of limited ego and the possession of
cosmic consciousness is the first aim of our sadhana.
In order to fulfil God in the cosmos, individually, we must
transcend the universe. The ascension into transcendent
consciousness is the second aim of our sadhana.

154

All Yoga aims at oneness or union or a close communion or
contact with the Divine, infinite and eternal. To reach to this union
or come by this contact it is necessary to enter or at least open
into a greater consciousness than that of the human mental being
who is shut up in the limitations of an individualised living body. To
arrive wholly at the union or the constant communion one must
enter the consciousness of the Divine,—whether into its infinite
cosmic consciousness or that of its supracosmic eternity. Or else,
uniting both these terms, one may add to them that of the
individualised Divine in oneself and through this trinity arrive at a
perfect union, one, satisfying and complete.
But the Divine Consciousness can manifest itself through any
and every plane, on the mental, on the vital, on the physical, or on
those which are higher than the mental[.]

155

All Yoga done through the mind alone or through the heart or
the will or the vital force or the body ends in some one aspect of
the infinite and eternal Existence and rests satisfied there, as the
mind imagines for ever. Not through these alone shall thy Yoga
move, but through all these at once and, supremely, through that
which is beyond them. And the end of thy Yoga shall be the
Page 360

integrality of thy entrance not into one aspect, but into all the
Infinite, all the Eternal, all the Divine in all its aspects indivisibly
unified together.
Whatever is beyond mind and life and body is spirit. But spirit
can be realised even on these lower levels, in the spiritualised
mind, in the spiritualised life-force, even in the spiritualised
physical consciousness and body. But if thou rise not up beyond
the mind-level, then in these realisations the spirit must needs be
modified by the medium through which thou attainest to it and its
supreme truth can only be seized in a reflection, partial even in
widest apparent universality, and the utmost essential integrality
will escape thy seizure.
Rise rather into the supramental levels and then all the rest
shall remain a part of thy experience, but wonderfully changed,
transfigured by a supreme alchemy of consciousness into an
element of the supramental glory. All that other Yogas can give
thee, thou shalt have, but as an experience overpassed, put in its
place in the divine Whole and delivered from the inadequacy of an
exclusive state or experience.


The Supramental Yoga
--------------------

156

All Yoga is in its very nature a means of passing out of our
surface consciousness of limitation and ignorance into a larger and
deeper Reality of ourselves and the world and some supreme or
total Existence now veiled to us by this surface. There is a Reality
which underlies everything, permeates perhaps everything, is
perhaps everything but in quite another way than the world now
seen by us; to It we are obscurely moving by our thought, life and
actions; we attempt to understand and approach by our religion
and philosophy, at last we touch directly in some partial or, it may
be, some complete spiritual experience. It is that spiritual
experience, it is the method, it is the attainment of this realisation
that we call Yoga.
Page 361

But the Reality is an Absolute or an Infinite; our
consciousness, even our spiritualised consciousness is that of a
finite being. It is inevitable therefore that our spiritual experience
should be not that of a concrete integrality of this Absolute or
Infinite, but of aspects of it; we are, so long at least as we are
mental beings, the blind men of the story trying to tell what the
Elephant Infinite is in its totality by our touch upon a part of it,
some member of its spiritual body, tanum svam. One experiences
it as Self or Spirit. It may be a Self of himself in which he finds his
spiritual consummation, integrality, infinity, perfection. It may be a
Self of the universe in which his individuality loses itself forever. It
may be a Self transcendent in which the Ego disappears, but
cosmos too is annulled forever in a formless Eternal and Infinite.
Another may experience it as God; and God may be either the All
of the Pantheist, a cosmic Spirit, an individual Deity, a
supracosmic Creator; or all of these together. A Personal
Godhead may be the spiritual Form in which He presents Himself
to us or rather He may reject forms from his being [and] resolve
Himself into an impersonal Existence. Moreover each of these
aspects of the Reality can be variously experienced; for each suits
itself to the grasp of our consciousness, even though it can be very
apparent that it is the same Reality that these variations differently
account for. But also there may [be] other realisations of the
Reality such as the Zero of the Nihilistic Buddhists which is yet a
mysterious All, a negation that is a positive Permanence. It is an
error to take these variations as a proof that spiritual experience is
unreliable. All religions, all philosophies are equally desperate in
their attempts to give an account of the Real and Ultimate;
science itself for all its matter of fact physical positivism draws
back bewildered from the attempt to touch the Real and Ultimate.
It is the nature of Mind to arrive at this result of uncertain
certainty; our experience is true but it is not and cannot be the sole
possible integral experience.

157

All human Yoga is done on the heights or levels of the mental
Page 362

nature; for man is a mental being in a living body. But mind if it is
able to reflect some light of the divine Truth or even admit some
emanations from her power, is incapable of embodying her.

There is an eternal dynamic Truth-consciousness beyond mind;
this is what we call supermind or gnosis.
For mind is or can be a truth seeker, but not truth-conscious in
its inherent nature; its original stuff is made not of knowledge, but
of ignorance.

158

All Yoga has one supreme object; a permanent liberation
from the ignorance and weakness of this limited and suffering
human and earthly consciousness is its purpose and either an
escape or a growth and swift flowering into a greater
consciousness beyond mind, life and body, into a wider and diviner
existence.
But this greater consciousness is differently conceived by
different seekers, for in itself it is to the mind unseizably infinite.
One, but multitudinously one, it presents itself in a million aspects.
To some it appears as a great permanent Negative or a
magnificent, a happy annihilation of all that we know as an
existence. To others it is a featureless Absolute; the annihilation of
personality and world-Nature is its key and silence and an
ineffable peace its gate of our entrance. To others it is a Supreme,
positive beyond all positives, an Existence, an absolute
Consciousness, an illimitable Beatitude. To others it is the one
Divine beyond all Divinities, an ineffable Person of whom all these
three supreme things are the attributes. And so through an endless
chapter. As is the power of our spirit and the cast of our nature,
so we conceive of the one Eternal and Infinite.
This Eternal and Infinite, however we conceive it, is the one
ultimate aim of Yoga. Other smaller aims there are that can be
achieved by it and are pursued by many seekers; but these are
crowns of the wayside or even flowers of the bye-paths and their
pursuit for their own sake may lead us far aside or far away from
our eternal home.
Page 363

The object of supramental Yoga combines all the others, but
uplifts and transforms the smaller aims into a part of the
completeness of the one supreme object.
Not to lose oneself altogether in some ineffable
featurelessness is its object, but to renounce ego for our true
divine person one with the universal and infinite; not to abolish
consciousness, but to exchange ignorance for a supreme and
all-containing Knowledge, not to blot out joy but to renounce
human pleasure for a divine griefless beatitude, not to give up but
to transform all world-nature and world-existence into a power of
the Truth of the Divine Existence. Asceticism is not the final
condition or characteristic means of this Yoga, although it does not
exclude, whenever that is needful ascetic self-mastery or ascetic
endeavour.

To become one in our absolute being with the ineffable Divine and
in the manifestation a free movement of his being, power,
consciousness and self-realising joy, to grow into a divine
Truth-consciousness beyond mind, into a Light beyond all human
or earthly lights, into a Power to which the greatest strengths of
men are a weakness, into the wisdom of an infallible gnosis and
the mastery of an unerring and unfailing divinity of Will, into a
Bliss beside which all human pleasure is as the broken reflection
of a candle-flame to the all-pervading splendour of an
imperishable sun, but all this not for our own sake [but] for the
pleasure of the Divine Beloved, this is the goal and the crown of
the supramental path of Yoga.
This change is a thing in Nature and not out of Nature; it is
not only possible, but for the growing soul inevitable. It is the goal
to which Nature in us walks through all this appearance of
ignorance, error, suffering and weakness.

159

The supramental Yoga is at once an ascent of the soul
towards God and a descent of the Godhead into the embodied
nature.
The ascent demands a one-centred all-gathering aspiration
Page 364

of soul and mind and life and body upward, the descent a call of
the whole being towards the infinite and eternal Divine. If this call
and this aspiration are there and if they grow constantly and seize
all the nature, then and then only its supramental transformation
becomes possible.
There must be an opening and surrender of the whole nature
to receive and enter into a greater divine consciousness which is
there already above, behind and englobing this mortal
half-conscious existence. There must be too an increasing
capacity to bear an ever stronger and more insistent action of the
divine Force, till the soul has become a child in the hands of the
infinite Mother. All other means known to other Yoga can be used
and are from time to time used as subordinate processes in this
Yoga too, but they are impotent without these greater conditions,
and, once these are there, they are not indispensable.
In the end it will be found that this Yoga cannot be carried
through to its end by any effort of mind, life and body, any human
psychological or physical process but only by the action of the
supreme Shakti. But her way is at once too mysteriously direct
and outwardly intricate, too great, too complete and subtle to be
comprehensively followed, much more to be cut out and defined
into a formula by our human intelligence.
Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man,
but he can call down the divine Truth and its power to work in
him. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human
receptacle. Self-surrender to a supreme transmuting Power is the
key-word of the Yoga.
This divinisation of the nature of which we speak is a
metamorphosis, not a mere growth into some kind of
superhumanity, but a change from the falsehood of our ignorant
nature into the truth of God-nature. The mental or vital demigod,
the Asura, Rakshasa and Pishacha,—Titan, vital giant and
demon,—are superhuman in the pitch and force and movement
and in the make of their characteristic nature, but these are not
divine and those not supremely divine, for they live in a greater
mind power or life power only, but they do not live in the supreme
Truth, and only the supreme Truth is divine. Only those who live in
a
Page 365

supreme Truth consciousness and embody it are inwardly made or
else remade in the Divine image.
The aim of supramental Yoga is to change into this supreme
Truth-consciousness, but this truth is something beyond mind and
this consciousness is far above the highest mind-consciousness.
For truth of mind is always relative, uncertain and partial, but this
greater Truth is peremptory and whole. Truth of mind is a
representation, always an inadequate, most often a misleading
representation, and even when most accurate, only a reflection,
Truth's shadow and not its body. Mind does not live in the Truth or
possess but only seeks after it and grasps at best some threads
from its robe; the supermind lives in Truth and [is] its native
substance, form and expression; it has not to seek after it, but
possesses it always automatically and is what it possesses. This is
the very heart of the difference.
The change that is effected by the transition from mind to
supermind is not only a revolution in knowledge or in our power
for knowledge. If it is [to] be complete and stable, it must be a
divine transmutation of our will too, our emotions, our sensations,
all our power of life and its forces, in the end even of the very
substance and functioning of our body. Then only can it be said
that the supermind is there upon earth, rooted in its very
earth-substance and embodied in a new race of divinised
creatures.
Supermind at its highest reach is the divine Gnosis, the
Wisdom-Power-Light-Bliss of God by which the Divine knows
and upholds and governs and enjoys the universe[.]

160

The supramental Yoga is a path of integral seeking of the
Divine by which all that we are is in the end liberated out of the
Ignorance and its undivine formations into a truth beyond the
Mind, a truth not only of highest spiritual status but of a dynamic
spiritual self-manifestation in the universe.
The object of this Yoga is not to liberate the soul from
Nature, but to liberate both soul and nature by sublimation into
Page 366

the Divine Consciousness from whom they came.

The aim of the ordinary Yoga is to liberate the soul from Nature
or, perhaps sometimes, to liberate the soul in Nature.
Our aim is to liberate both soul and nature into the Divine.
Our aim is to pass from the Ignorance into the Divine Light, from
death into Immortality, from Desire into self-existent Bliss, from
limited human-animal consciousness into all-consciousness and
God-consciousness, from the ignorant seeking of Mind into the
self-existent knowledge of Supermind, from obscure half animal
life into luminous God-force, from the material consciousness
[sentence not completed]

161

It is at the high line where the surrender can become absolute
that a divine gnostic consciousness commences and the first
authentic and unconditioned workings of the supramental Nature.

162

The first word of the supramental Yoga is surrender; its last
word also is surrender. It is by a will to give oneself to the eternal
Divine, for lifting into the divine consciousness, for perfection, for
transformation, that the Yoga begins; it is in the entire giving that it
culminates; for it is only when the self-giving is complete that
there comes the finality of the Yoga, the entire taking up into the
supramental Divine, the perfection of the being, the transformation
of the nature.


The Yoga of Transformation
--------------------------

163

This is a Yoga of transformation of the being, not solely a Yoga of
the attainment of the inner Self or the Divine, though that
Page 367

attainment is its basis without which no transformation is possible.
In this transformation there are four elements, the psychic
opening, the transit through [the] occult, the spiritual release, the
supramental perfection. If any of the four is unachieved, the Yoga
remains incomplete.
I mean by the psychic the inmost soul-being and the soul
nature. This is not the sense in which the word is used in ordinary
parlance, or rather, if it is so used, it is with great vagueness and
much misprision of the true nature of this soul and it is given a
wide extension of meaning which carries it far beyond that
province. All phenomena of an abnormal or supernormal
psychological or an occult character are dubbed psychic; if a man
has a double personality changing from one to another, if an
apparition of a dying man, something of his mere vital sheath or
else a thought-form of him, appears and stalks through the room
of his wondering friend, if a poltergeist kicks up an unseemly row
in a house, all that is classed under psychic phenomena and
regarded as a fit object for psychic research, though these things
have nothing whatever to do with the psyche. Again much in
Yoga itself that is merely occult, phenomena of the unseen vital or
mental or subtle physical planes, visions, symbols, all that mixed,
often perturbed, often shadowy, often illusory range of
experiences which belong to this intervening country between the
soul and its superficial instruments or rather to its outermost
fringes, all the chaos of the intermediate zone, is summed up as
psychic and considered as an inferior and dubious province of
spiritual discovery. Again there is a constant confusion between
the mentalised desire-soul which is a creation of the vital urge in
man, of his life-force seeking for its fulfilment and the true soul
which is a spark of the Divine Fire, a portion of the Divine.
Because the soul, the psychic being uses the mind and the vital as
well as the body as instruments for growth and experience it is
itself looked at as if it were some amalgam or some subtle
substratum of mind and life. But in Yoga if we accept all this
chaotic mass as soul-stuff or soul-movement we shall enter into a
confusion without an issue. All that belongs only to the coverings
of the soul; the soul itself is an inner divinity greater than mind
Page 368

or life or body. It is something that once it is released from
obscuration by its instruments at once creates a direct contact
with the Divine and with the self and spirit.

164

In the integral Yoga there is a progressive discovery of our
spiritual status; this progression is accompanied by a dynamic
new-creation of our nature. A triple transformation is its process
and the revelation of its entire significance.
A first discovery is the unveiling of the soul out of its
disguising mask, concealing curtain, blockading wall of mind, life
and body—the psychic entity, the divine element in our nature
which gives it its permanence and immortality, becomes the open
ruler of our instruments and transmutes them into conscious
spiritualised agents so that they are no longer a changing
formulation of the nature of the Ignorance.

165

Yoga is not only a discovery of our concealed spiritual status
but a dynamic spiritual self-creation; a triple transformation is the
heart of its process and the revelation of its entire significance.
Its first step is the unveiling of the soul;*
Footnote:
Reproduced below is another, incomplete version
of this passage:
  Its first step is the unveiling of the soul, the psychic
entity, now covered by the superficial activity of
mind and life and body. The soul is the deep hidden
natural divine element in us, a permanent portion of
the Godhead which persists in a spiritual permanence
and ensures our immortality of being; for without it
there could be only a temporary mechanical
formation and action of nature-energy and its
phenomenon of substance. This unveiling is
accompanied by a psychic transformation of the
nature; mind, life and body become truly ensouled
and ready for a spiritual change.
  Its second step is the revelation of a self and spirit
which supports our individual soul manifestation and
soul development, but knows itself to be one being
with cosmic Godhead and universal Nature and can
stand back from that even as a transcendent spirit.
By this discovery the being in us exceeds its
separate individuality, enters into a cosmic
consciousness, is released into a supracosmic
transcendence.

for there [is a] secret psychic being, a divine element in our depths
that is concealed even more than garbed by the mind, body and
life. To bring it
Page 369

out of its seclusion where it lives like a spiritual king without
apparent power served and replaced by its ministers, so that it
may take over the whole active government of the nature is the
first great unfolding, the initial potent self-discovery of the Yoga.
Mind the thinker is the prime minister in us who covers the king,
but mind too is dominated and led by the vital powers, the strong
and violent of the realm, who force it to serve their purpose and
these too can only act with the means given them by the body and
physical nature, the inert hardly conscious subject existence
whose passive assent and docile instrumentation is yet
indispensable to its rulers. This is our present constitution and it
amounts to no more than a sort of organised confusion, a feudal
order that is an ignorant half anarchy and cannot make the most
of the possibilities and resources even of the limited tract of nature
which we inhabit, much less reveal to us and exploit our spiritual
empire. To reinstate the king-soul is the first step in a needed
revolution—the soul directing the mind will exercise through it its
sovereign power over the powers of life and subject to them in
their turn an enlightened and psychically consenting body. But this
is not all; for soul-discovery is not complete without a psychic new
creation of the mental, vital and physical instrumentation of nature.
The mind will be recast by the soul's intuition of Truth, the vital
being by its perception of power and good, the body and whole
nature by its command for light, harmony and beauty. Our nature
will become that of a true psychic entity, not a brute creation
unified by a precarious life and illumined by the candlelight of a
struggling intelligence.

166

I mean by the integral Yoga a manysided way or means of
self-liberation and self-perfection, a radical change of our entire
being by which we grow out of its present mental, vital and
physical human ignorance into a large and integral spiritual and
divine Consciousness;—as a result of this liberation, this change or
transformation there is a union in the spirit with our Divine Origin
in its integral Reality, an ascent of all our being
Page 370

and nature into the Divine Existence, the Divine Consciousness,
the Divine Bliss or Ananda, and a descent of the Divine infinite
Wideness, Light, Knowledge, Force, Joy, Ananda into our entire
nature.

167

Our Yoga is a Yoga of transformation, but a transformation
of the whole consciousness and the whole nature from the top to
the bottom, from its hidden inward parts to its most tangible
external movements. It is neither an ethical change nor a religious
conversion, neither sainthood nor ascetic control, neither a
sublimation nor a suppression of the life and vital movements that
we envisage, nor is it either a glorification or a coercive control or
rejection of the physical existence. What is envisaged is a change
from a lesser to a greater, from a lower to a higher, from a
surface to a deeper consciousness—indeed to the largest, highest,
deepest possible and a total change and revolution of the whole
being in its stuff and mass and every detail into that yet unrealised
diviner nature of existence. It means a bringing forward of what is
now hidden and subliminal, a growing conscious in what is now
superconscient to us, an illumination of the subconscient and
subphysical. It implies a substitution of the control of the nature by
the soul for its present control by the mind; a transference of the
instrumentation of the nature from the outer to the now more than
half-veiled inner mind, from the outer to the inner vital or life-self,
from the outer to an inner subtler vaster physical consciousness
and by this transference a direct and conscious instead of an
indirect and unconscious or half conscious contact with the secret
cosmic forces that move us; a breaking out from the narrow
limited individual into a wide cosmic consciousness; an ascension
from mental to spiritual nature; a still farther ascension from the
spirit in mind or overspreading mind to the supramental spirit and a
descent of that into the embodied being. All that has not only to be
achieved but organised before the transformation is complete.
Page 371


168

The ascent to supermanhood will be a radical change of
consciousness, force and bliss-power, a potent building of all that
is necessary to manifest the new godhead in mind, life and body.
There will be at once an inner revelation and an outer
transformation. Something will be born that was not here or was
latent and hidden in its own invisible radiances and at the same
time there will be a metamorphosis and reversal in our existing
structure.
A creation by a consensus of superior and nether powers is
the condition demanded by the Spirit for its decisive works; and
this double action, this meeting, consensus, unification of the
superconscient and subconscient gods in a growing consciousness
is the key to the critical revolutions of Nature.
The creation of conscious supermind on the terrestrial plane
will be done therefore not only from above by the Spirit but from
below by the Earth-Power. The sun of supramental Truth will
descend into the body, but also it will awake another secret sun of
supramental Truth that was asleep in the foundations and very
principle of Matter.

169

The boon that we have asked from the Supreme is the
greatest that the earth can ask from the Highest, the change that
is most difficult to realise, the most exacting in its conditions. It is
nothing less than the descent of the supreme Truth and Power into
Matter, the supramental established in the material plane and
consciousness and the material world and an integral
transformation down to the very principle of Matter. Only a
supreme Grace can effect this miracle.
The supreme Power has descended into the most material
consciousness but it has stood there behind the density of the
physical veil demanding before manifestation, before its great
open workings can begin, that the conditions of the supreme
Grace shall be there, real and effective. And the first condition is
Page 372

that the Truth shall be accepted within you entirely and without
reserve before it can be manifested in the material being and
Nature.
A total surrender, an exclusive self-opening to the divine
influence, a constant and integral choice of the Truth and rejection
of the falsehood, these are the only conditions made. But these
must be fulfilled entirely, without reserve, without any evasion or
pretence, simply and sincerely down to the most physical
consciousness and its workings[.]

170

Victory in this effort depends upon the sincerity within you,
the purity of your aspiration, the burning core of your faith, the
absoluteness of your will and surrender[.]

171

Two things are needed if thou wouldst follow the steep and
difficult way of Yoga, the need and will within thee and the call of
the Spirit.
The need is the need of the soul, awakened or awaking or
striving to come to the surface. For all other may be transitory or
false; but the soul's need is lasting and true.
Thy soul's need of divine light and the spirit's perfection can
alone bear thee across the darkness of the many nights through
which thou must pass, beyond the open or hidden pitfalls of the
road, past the dangers of the precipice and the morass, through
the battle with giant forces and the clutching of hands that mislead
and the delusions of the night and the twilight, through false light
and illusive glamour, triumphant over the blows and ordeals and
nets and temptations of the gods and on and up to the
immeasurable summits[.]
Page 373

-Sri Aurobindo, ESSAYS DIVINE AND HUMANN