The Mother
The evolutionary Work of Śrī Aurobindo was carried forward by the Mother, Mirra Alfassa—and the title “the Mother” naturally refers to the manifestative dimension of the Sanātana dharma, most commonly called Śakti (though the term Śakti has itself been understood in the various doctrines and schools in ways that accentuate one of its aspects to the detriment of others).
The Mother was Śrī Aurobindo’s spiritual companion and heir in the āśrama, and she founded the city of Auroville, a spiritually inspired commune in the heart of Great India.
But above all, the Mother continued the Work of transmutation of herself, of her own body down to its very cells, by channeling the descent of the Supermind. Her experiences are minutely recorded in the Mother's Agenda, compiled by her disciple Satprem, which gathers and amplifies all the themes to which Śrī Aurobindo only alluded in his writings—Śrī Aurobindo ceased to write systematically once he undertook the Work of humanity’s evolution, whereas the Mother gives an account of the daily struggle to impose the supramental light upon matter.
In Śrī Aurobindo’s āśrama, moreover, after the Mother’s departure an interpretive line gradually took hold that was centered on a sola scriptura reading of Śrī Aurobindo—focused exclusively on the words he left in his texts—so that the bodily and all-beneficial dimension of his yoga is today very often treated as secondary to the mental attainments that in fact merely precede the actual transmutation of the body.
The Ṛgveda
It has been said that the young Śrī Aurobindo possessed a perfect command of many Western languages; upon returning to India he devoted himself to the study of Sanskrit, Vedic Sanskrit, and other languages of the subcontinent.
In this field—indeed more esoteric than linguistic—Śrī Aurobindo deserves immortal remembrance for having restored the authentic meaning of the Ṛgveda. The Ṛgveda is acknowledged throughout India as the supreme source (the term Ṛgveda in fact means “Hymns of Knowledge”; the three later Veda are composed mostly of hymns from the Ṛgveda and of magical formulas), yet very few understand what it actually says. Certainly, its content appears extremely obscure and impenetrable, but this is precisely due to the presumption of attempting to read in a theoretical mode what is explicitly pre-theoretical (and the Vedic seers give no shortage of warnings: “otherwise he does not see, though he looks; he does not understand, though he listens; whereas to the one who is prepared the goddess Vāc [Speech] reveals her fairest form”).
Śrī Aurobindo contributed decisively to removing the dense layers of misunderstanding that generations of scholars had deposited upon the hymns of the great Ṛṣi of the past. He made perfectly clear that the view of the Vedic brāhmaṇa (and later of virtually all Eastern and Western academics)—who saw in the Ṛgveda merely the institution of pleasant propitiatory rites addressed to anthropomorphic deities—was nothing but a crudely literal reading, incapable of perceiving that behind the gods, behind the figures and their actions, lay operations of psycho-organic transmutation of the mind. The rationalistic-discursive attitude, it is clear, is not the exclusive mental mode of Western man, but also of the man of the East, since it is the condition of ordinary human nature as such, subjected to representation; the difference between East and West, from this perspective, is that in the East authentic esoteric thought has always been regarded as a source of wisdom, whereas in the West it has been dismissed as illogical credulity, confined to clandestine circles. If the Upaniṣad are, as they are, an esoteric commentary on the Ṛgveda, it is evident that the Ṛgveda deals with far more than rites and capricious deities—and on one of the ancient Upaniṣad, the Īśa Upaniṣad, Śrī Aurobindo left a luminous commentary.
All wisdom is, if one wishes, encapsulated in a single verse of the Ṛgveda: “upon a branch there are two little birds, one eats and the other looks on”—a verse cited by virtually all yogīn of India. What state of consciousness this verse points to is exceedingly difficult to describe (ordinary language and discursive thought are, as noted, discrete and sequential; they can only refer to individuated and distinct entities, whereas here what is implied are conditions of pre-theoretical logic). Yet one may say that the very first step in the direction indicated by the verse is the realization that the ātman is the ātman plus one of the Is—even if this formula is itself extremely brachylogical.
But in truth it is senseless even to think one might understand such a thing rationally: the yoga of the Upaniṣad and of the entire Vedānta—and likewise the yoga-tantra themselves—are nothing but the outgrowth of this verse, of its implications, and of the modalities suited to realizing them (these modalities correspond to the thirty-three so-called gods of the Ṛgveda)—as the Buddha would reply, it is futile to attempt to describe the authentic reality to one who does not experience it, just as one who truly lives it requires no description at all.
The hymns of the Ṛgveda are, in general, descriptions of the surpassing of representation and of immersion into the successive mental states; and Śrī Aurobindo’s exegesis is exceedingly precious in this very direction, even though it appears oriented more toward his own supramental yoga than toward the intrinsic valences of the hymns themselves (for the Ṛgveda moves from Kuṇḍalī, whereas for Śrī Aurobindo it was, as noted, only implicit). The last of these hymns—the CXCI of the tenth maṇḍala, the celebrated saṃgacchadhvaṃ, which proclaims the inner concordance of consciousness, the harmonisation of thought, heart, and will—bathes all the preceding ones in the warm light of the Sanātana dharma, and is such that, in truth, it could by itself dissolve all the superficial readings that have for millennia obscured the splendent radiance of the Ṛgveda.
For Śrī Aurobindo, the Vedic Ṛṣis were the first—and indeed the only—precursors of his yoga, precisely because they did not stop at the Overmind but attained the Supermind.
Śrī Aurobindo Today
Śrī Aurobindo was not a philosopher: “And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher… , I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there, automatically. But that is not being a philosopher!”; “it was only when I went above the mind that I could understand philosophy and write philosophy. Ideas and thoughts began to flow in, visions and spiritual experience. Insight and spiritual perception, a sort of revelation built my philosophy. It was not by any process of mental reasoning or argument”. Nor, as he repeatedly insisted, was he the founder of any religion.
Śrī Aurobindo was a yogī of the highest realizations, and in certain respects he was without doubt an avatāra, a prophet of the Sanātana dharma.
He was a point of arrival—naturally precarious—in the development of the human spiritual dimension, having reached peaks of overhuman awareness granted to very few.
Yet this does not mean asserting that the yoga of Śrī Aurobindo is as such superior to other yoga, and indeed Śrī Aurobindo himself prefaced his systematic statements with the formula “in our yoga”.
Each person finds himself on the path where he finds himself, as Kṛṣṇa says in the Bhagavad-gītā: there are three great ways of yoga, and each way is the best.
Śrī Aurobindo is not like Hegel (Hegel theorizes it, and the other Western philosophers each take it for granted pro domo sua) who proclaims that his own thought is the culmination or the fulfillment of all preceding philosophies.
This is already a fundamental difference between rationalistic thought and esoteric thought: rationalistic thought “believes it knows”, esoteric thought “reveals”. The yoga are a single expanse; there are no methods or plotted routes, but rather directions: yoga is the abiding in superior dimensions of consciousness, there is nothing to systematize—except for protreptic purposes.
The yoga of Śrī Aurobindo is not superior to the other yoga, for the yoga are all different modes of the same reality.
With this one intends to make clear, for the Western reader, that the things Śrī Aurobindo says are not to be “believed”: the representational mind, by its very nature, judges according to the feeling of the moment produced by the whole complex of acquired knowledge; the yoga, instead, in their authentic dimension, are not teachings, but rather a mirror in which one sees oneself reflected.