Every great philosopher proposes a frame, a new
window through which to encounter the world… We no less frame selections of the
world than we are seized by selections of the world.
The
Seven Quartets of Becoming by Debashish Banerji permalink
The book is dedicated to Richard Hartz who completed
the Herculean task of making the diaries of Sri Aurobindo available for the
first time and who served as an important guide to the text for Banerji. It is
Banerji’s genius however, to have offered an interpretation of the text that
both renews Sri Aurobindo’s relevance for 21st century intellectual culture and
also provides the follower of Aurobindo’s yoga with an exegesis of the Record
of Yoga that enables them to comprehend this extremely important text. POSTHUMAN DESTINIES
Comment on The Seven Quartets of Becoming by Debashish Banerji
by debbanerji from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji Posted March 14, 2012 Permalink
How does one know what he
has abandoned? SA used different terminologies and different formulations in
different texts; this doesn’t necessarily mean he abandoned one for the other.
Finally, the siddhis and anandas spoken of in the
Record are not addressed anywhere else but can clearly be seen in Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother’s own functioning. Comment on The Seven Quartets of Becoming by Debashish Banerji
by debbanerji from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji
I may add that in my opinion, in the physical
absence of the Mother, the danger of distortion by the vital emotional being
that Sri Aurobindo wrote about in the chapter on the Intuitive Mind is very
much increased, so that the demand for the shuddhi of the prana and the
importance of the emergence of the mental pursha as a purifying agent, is
greater today. Without these, we are seeing the repeated and insistent mouthing
of the need for psychic emergence accompanied by fanatical narrowness and
disturbed emotionalism.
debbanerji
Posted March 15, 2012 at 1:54 pm | Permalink
Of course, this is the guru tradition of India and
it was undoubtedly a tremendous advantage to have the physical presence and
action of the Mother, but I think it was reduced to a formula by the devotees
and reified into a habitus, that “helped cultivate an atmosphere that over time
has facilitated the development of fanatical extremism in certain followers.”
debbanerji
Posted March 15, 2012 at 3:59 pm | Permalink
What he taught to disciples after 1930 seems to me
to be a fomulation which he found most suitable to its practice for those
disciples given the prevailing conditions of the ashram, not necessarily a
formulation he privileged over others which he saw or practised himself…
According to Sri Aurobindo, terminology and
structire are never absolute, they are devised to follow process. Changes of
emphasis in practice would demand a change in terminology and structure.
Practices, on their part, would change depending on milieu and circumstance,
not necessarily due to new understandings…
The yoga the Mother made available arose from the
direct access to the psychic being which her physical presence and occult
action made possible. However, even this needed the sadhak to distinguish
between an active and a passive surrender and open to the detailed work (which
I believe is what is given in the Record) whose possibilities the Mother’s action
would open up. The Record equally relies on the Mother’s (the Divine Shakti)
and the Ishwara’s power and presence, only here the physical component of the
shakti avatar is missing.
debbanerji
Posted March 16, 2012 at 8:47 pm | Permalink
Sri Aurobindo privileges the purification of the
buddhi and the emergence of the mental purusha in the Synthesis (not only in
Part IV), calling man primarily “a mental being” and saying that the evolution
of nature has prepared in man an intelligence (buddhi) which is an impartial
seeker of the truth and saying that it is easier to build a quiet mind (silence
in the inner mind) or even to still the mind for the emergence of the mental
purusha and rise to the planes above the mind. For this reason also, he calls
for the Shakti to be invoked from above the mind, to descend and purify the
lower parts of the being. A quiet mind or silent mind also facilitates this
descent of the Shakti. With the Mother’s presence in the ashram, this necessity
is replaced by the Mother’s physical action (though this also aids in the
descent of Shakti from above)…
I do think he felt the psychic change to be
difficult before the Mother came. The Indian tradition has developed schools of
bhakti yoga to aid in the purification of the emotional being and Sri Aurobindo
gives us his own integral version of this in the Yoga of Divine Love; but the
kind of access to the psychic being provided by these traditional schools are
generally partial at best. All I’m saying is that the access to the psychic
being was made much easier by the physical presence of the Mother;
Kepler Posted March 16, 2012 at 10:27 pm | Permalink
Baring that, it would seem at least as plausible to
me that the meeting of the oceans of spiritual consciousness that were Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother in the flesh resulted in some genuinely new yogic
possibilities and orientations, and some of the terminology subsequently
developed (e.g. psychic being) reflected that. In this view the reason he
didn’t use the same language and give the same stress to the psychic earlier
was not that he thought it was too difficult and dangerous, but that it wasn’t
as fully known or experienced (or experienceable) in quite the same way
earlier. There are a number of places where Sri Aurobindo refers to earlier
stages of his sadhana and the writings corresponding to those periods, as
having been superseded in various ways by later developments in his sadhana.
(Given that sadhana is all about ever-increasing consciousness and experience,
this doesn’t really seem surprising.)
Nothing wrong with making a bold claim, but if the
primary support of yours is that some of the people violently upset by PH’s
book also talk a lot about the psychic being, thus the pursuit of the psychic
opening must have become dangerous, I guess I’m still looking for some
additional justification.
debbanerji
Posted March 16, 2012 at 11:29 pm | Permalink
At one place, he writes about the development of the
“yogic consciousness” as a prerequisite to the emergence of the true soul. The
yogic consciousness is the purified inner being under the control of the mental
purusha. [Yoga of Works, Supermind and the Yoga of Works: Synthesis, CWSA:
281-82]. In this light, one may think of four transformations, not three. A
part of the Record could be thought of as relating to the development of a
yogic consciousness.
Comment on The Seven Quartets of Becoming by Debashish Banerji
by Kepler from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by Kepler
I don’t think you can take texts from very different
periods and assume he is talking about exactly all the same things and only
choosing a different word here and there. Thus there’s reason to give more
importance to his later expressions over much earlier ones.
