"...In a non-modern society, what
is central is neither rationality nor its opposite,
but something else, call it wisdom, which includes
but supersedes rationality..."
The starting point for this paper is the premise
that alternatives to modern epistemology can hardly
come from modern (Western) epistemology itself. This
idea has been voiced quite forcefully in recent
thinking by scholars such as Walter D. Mignolo s, from
whose book Local Histories/Global Designs the above
phrase is taken.
But even if we were to agree with such a premise, it
still begs the question of where to look for these
alternatives. For critics such a Mignolo, the challenge
is to rehabilitate subaltern knowledge systems so as to
bring about, to invoke a phrase from Foucault, an
insurrection of subjected knowledges. Gnosis,
gnoseology and border thinking have been used to
describe these knowledge systems that are on the
margins of or outside the world colonized by Western
modernity.
My project is to oppose the dominance of rationality
(or, more recently, irrationality) in modern and
postmodern philosophy by invoking ideas of the
supra-rational from Classical as well as modern
traditions of thinking, especially in India. These
traditions, for lack of a better word, may be called
wisdom traditions. That they share something with
gnosticism should be obvious.
I would like to focus on the work of one modern
Indian thinker, Sri Aurobindo, particularly his idea of
the Supermind, to suggest a slightly different way of
conceiving postcolonial futures. Sri Aurobindo's
thought has important implications for the discipline
of consciousness studies because it posits the
naturalization of a higher conscious than the mental.
Is there, I ask, a bridge somewhere between the secular
critics of Western modernity or colonial discourse, on
the one hand, and their rather more mystical
counterparts, on the other? If this missing link were
to be discovered, it might contribute to a critical
step forward in conversations on planetary futures and
actually pave the way for a new global renaissance.
It is being increasingly acknowledged that colonial
difference is a factor not just of economic or
political power but also of contending knowledge
systems. These knowledge systems, apart from being
differentiated by the amount of power they enjoy, are
also based on alternative epistemologies. Those who
wish to critique colonialism have done so in economic
and political or in philosophical, even metaphysical
terms. For instance, we might argue that modernity is
imperialistic as an ideology and modernity in turn
under girds colonialism ideologically.
This M. K. Gandhi realized only too well, which is
why, when the attacked imperialism in Hind Swaraj
(1909) he also attacked modernity. But Gandhi was one
of the few to do so is so clear a fashion. In the
discourse of postcolonial studies, it has taken critics
almost a hundred years after Gandhi to make similar
connections. In recent years a whole host of scholars
and thinkers have begun to see that overthrowing
imperialism requires a certain critique of what might
be called Occidental reason. For instance, a recent
book on the subject by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is
tellingly entitled A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason.
Those who wish to make a connection between post
colonialism and post modernism quickly leap to the
conclusion that the anti-foundationalism of the latter
informs the eclectic critique of power of the former.
Thus Aijaz Ahmed castigates Edward Said of abandoning
the teleology of history and the grand narrative of
Marxian emancipation, in favour of a neo-Nietzcheian
critique of reality as linguistically constructed.
The Enlightenment project has its adherents both on
the right and on the left-the classic debate has been
between pro-market liberals and pro-statist socialists,
both of whom accept the supremacy of reason as the
arbiter of human destiny and as the primary tool to
re-shape society.
Those who debunk the Enlightenment project, on the
other hand, resort to a sort anti-rationalism or
irrationalism. What Mignolo and the others add to this
debate is a different set of knowledge systems which
are subaltern because they have been suppressed or
because they are generated on or from outside the
borders of the dominant West. Mignolo has used the word
gnosis or gnoseology to characterize these knowledge
systems. For Mignolo, alternatives to modernity are
located in spaces outside the imperium that is outside
the dominant West.
He characterizes colonial difference as the space
where local histories inventing and implementing global
designs meet local histories, the space in which global
designs have to be adapted, adopted, rejected,
integrated, or ignored. The colonial difference is,
finally, the physical as well as imaginary location
where the coloniality of power is at work . (ix).
Border thinking or border gnosis is the fractured locus
of enunciation from a subaltern perspective a response
to the colonial difference (x). So, gnosis here is a
term given to knowledges which are suppressed by the
dominant: border thinking is more than a hybrid
enunciation. It is a fractured enunciation in dialogic
situations with the territorial and hegemonic cosmology
(x). One of Mignolo interesting contributions to the
discourse of decolonization is to propose a new kind of
university, based on a critique of knowledge and
cultural practices (xii) as opposed to the Kantian
university based on reason , the Humboltdtian
university based on culture and the neoliberal
university based on excellence and expertise (xii).
Speaking of the connection between imperialism and
knowledge systems, Mignolo points out how Spanish
missionaries judged and ranked civilizations in terms
of whether they possessed alphabetic writing. They used
translation (especially of the Bible into these
languages) to absorb this difference; border thinking
works to restitute that difference (3). He alludes to
border thinking not just from Latin America, but also
to African gnosis. The key text here is Valentin
Mudimbe The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and
the Order of Knowledge (1988).
Mudimbe says that gnosko means seeking to know,
inquiry, methods of knowing, investigation, and even
acquaintance with someone. Often the word is used in a
more specialized sense, that of higher and esoteric
knowledge (ix).
Mignolo, too, uses the word gnosis in a special
sense, which needs to be understood: Border gnosis as
knowledge from a subaltern perspective is knowledge
conceived from the exterior borders of the
modern/colonial world system, and border gnoseology as
a discourse about colonial knowledge is conceived at
the conflictive intersection of the knowledge produced
from the perspective of modern colonialisms (rhetoric,
philosophy, science) and knowledge produced from the
perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa,
and the Americas/Caribbean.
Border gnoseology is a critical reflection on
knowledge production from both the interior borders of
the modern/colonial world system (imperial conflicts,
hegemonic languages, directionality of translations,
etc.) and its external borders (imperial conflicts with
cultures being coloized, as well as the subsequent
stages of independence and decolonization).
Finally, border gnoseology could be contrasted with
territorial gnoseology or epistemology, the philosophy
of knowledge, as we know it today (from Descartes, to
Kant, to Husserl and all its ramifications in analytic
philosophy of languages and philosophy of science): a
conception and reflection on knowledge articulated in
concert with the cohesion of national languages and the
formation of the nation- state. (11)
But I would like to invoke the older meaning of the
word gnosis. Gnosticism, a religious sect dating back
at least to the first century C.E. held that salvation
came from knowledge or what in India would be called
jnana . But the moot question was knowledge of what
.
Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion: The Message of
the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity
says:
As for what knowledge is about, the associations
of the term most familiar to the classically trained
reader point to rational objects, and accordingly to
natural reason as the organ for acquiring and
possessing knowledge.
In the gnostic context, however, knowledge has an
emphatically religious or supra natural meaning and
refers to objects which we nowadays should call those
of faith rather than of reason. Gnosis meant
pre-eminently knowledge of God , and from what we
have said about the radical transcendence of the
deity it follows that knowledge of God is the
knowledge of something naturally unknowable and
therefore itself not a natural condition . On the one
hand it is closely bound with revelatory experience,
so that reception of the truth either through sacred
and secret lore or through inner illumination
replaces rational argument and theory . on the other
hand, being concerned with the secrets of salvation,
knowledge is not just theoretical information about
certain things but is itself, as a modification of
the human condition, charged with performing the
function in the bringing about of salvation. Thus
gnostic knowledge has an eminently practical
object.
Mignolo argues that the target of gnosis need not be
God or salvation now but the uncertainties of the
borders (12): Our goals are not salvation but
decolonization (12).
But, I would suggest, that decolonization is nothing
but another name for a special kind of salvation, a
secular salvation, perhaps, or salvation from
oppression, from inequality, and therefore from
ignorance. The problem before us today is that of post
colonial or planetary futures.
I agree with Mignolo that the future of a diverse
planetary civilizations cannot simply be the
universalism of either Western neoliberalism or Western
neo-Marxism (8) and that alternatives to modern
epistemology can hardly come only from modern (Western)
epistemology itself (9). That is why, I want to discuss
the specific category of gnosis to ask if can be the
basis for an alternative (post) modernity. Gnosis,
which was a part of the Western semantics of knowledge,
vanished after the ascendancy of rationality (9). The
word was associated with gnosticism, which were branded
as an an anti-Christian sect by the Church fathers,
which it turn gave it a bad name.
Mignolo uses gnosis and gnoseology to suggest these
alternative knowledge systems. Gignosko verb to know,
to recognize (like jignasa ) and epistemai to know, to
be acquainted with, suggest two different conceptions
of knowledge and knowing (9).
In ancient Greek thought, gnosis emerges as word to
suggest a special or hidden kind of knowledge-but Greek
philosophers do not establish a rigid distinction
between gnosis and episteme (10).
To invoke the ancient Gnostics for just a minute
longer, it is fundamental to recognize that the God of
the Gnostics is not the God of this world.
According to Gerd Ludemann and Martina Janssen The
creator of the world to whom the Christians of the
church pray is a lower God who out of envy leaves the
human soul in ignorance about it heavenly home. The God
who brings the Gnostic redemption is the good, unknown
Father. He cannot be understood by human efforts.
Accordingly, it can only be said of him what he is
not. This negative theology occupies a good deal of
space in all forms of Gnostic literature (17).
What this quotation actually suggests is that
Gnostics had a totally different theology from the
Christians, one that is closer the Vedic view, which
regards human beings as amritasya putraha or the
children of immortality.
In gnosticism there is no original sin, purgatory,
or damnation, nor is God a vengeful and punishing
deity. Gnostics were branded as heretics by the Church
and exterminated (11). What makes them special for us
is that they believed in salvation by knowledge, jnana
, or vijnana -the knowledge of the Self not by dogmas
of belief or some prescribed set of ritual practices:
For the Gnostic, knowledge is primarily self- knowledge
This knowledge brings it salvation and reunites it with
the Pleroma (=fullness) from which it comes (Ludemann
and Janssen 12).
Of course, it is important to remember that
gnosticism is not uniform or homogenous, nor is it
entirely Christian-there was Jewish, Iranian, Egyptian,
and a philosophical Gnosticism. (12). Some sects
include the Mandaeans of southern Iraq, the
Manichaeans, the Hermeticists, and the Neoplatonics
(12-13). For a long time, the Gnostics were known only
by what was quoted against them by the heresiologists
until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi corups around
1945 in a small town in Egypt by that name. Thirteen
codices in Coptic were found which contains several
Gnostic texts dating back to the 4th century C.E.
In his controversial book Black Athena (1987) Martin
Bernal argues that much of the new knowledge, including
the beginnings of modern science, that erupted after
the renaissance was due to the Greek transmission of
Egyptian wisdom (see Chapter II, 121-160). Bernal's
thesis that the triumph of the Aryan Model and the
defeat of the Ancient Model coincided with the
emergence of a violent, racist, intolerant, and
dominating Western modernity which saw itself as
specially privileged and superior to the rest of the
world. However, according to the Ancient Model which
had prevailed right up to the first half of the
nineteenth century, ancient Greece, which was the
source of modern Europe, was itself a creature of the
even more ancient Egypt, which was an Afro-Semitic
civilization.
What is pertinent to this paper in Bernal's argument
is his positing a holistic wisdom tradition, derived
from ancient Egypt, as both the precursor and the
source of modernity itself, until it is overthrown by
the regime of modern rationality after the
Enlightenment. He identifies three strands of this
tradition which influenced, even triumphed over Europe,
until they were crushed: Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism,
and Gnosticism.
Before the advent of modern Egyptology, all of
Egyptian wisdom was attributed to a single author,
somewhat like Veda Vyas in India. Called Hermes
Trismegistos, this mythical figure was thought to be
older than Moses. Major figures of the renaissance such
as Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and even Newton were
hermeticists (see Chapter III, 161-188). The other
interesting aspect of Bernal's argument is that the
European enthusiasm for India also served to diminish
its regard for Egypt. Of course, like Egypt, India too
had to be degraded and discarded in the nineteenth
century for the emergence of a racist and supremacist
imperial Europe (see Chapter V, 224-280).
My paper, however, is concerned primarily with India
and what it has to contribute to this debate. What
seems to me to be very important here is that India had
a variety of knowledge systems in mutually supportive,
dialogic relationships. In other words, it had smaller,
localized, subaltern knowledge systems, some of which
survive to this day among our so-called tribal
populations. It also had extremely well- worked out
systems of rational thought, called the sastras.
But what is more, it's deepest philosophical urges
were grounded neither in empiricism or rational
speculation, but on what might be called wisdom or
gnosis. It is commonplace to claim that Indian
philosophy is intuitive while Western philosophy is
rationalistic. S. Radhakrishnan called it the contrast
between creative intuition vs. critical intelligence
(quoted in Sinha 9). Both in Upanishadic and Buddhistic
thought not buddhi but prajna take us to the Absolute
(4). And yet, as Ramesh Chandra Sinha puts it, though
Indian philosophical tradition does not regard reason
as the supreme source of knowledge It is reason which
gives a coherent, systematic and consistent
interpretation of intuitive experience (9).
If I were to sum up my argument I would say that
this paper takes as its starting point Sri
Aurobindo's critique of what might be termed
Occidental reason.
I first came across it in what was almost a
textual aside in along polemic that Sri Aurobindo
first mounted in his periodical Arya from December
1918 to January 1921. These essays were later
collected under the title The Foundations of Indian
Culture and appeared as vol. 14 of the SABCL. In the
Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA), designed to
supercede the former, the title of the volume has
been changed. The ostensible pretext for Sri
Aurobinodo's critique was a wholesale dismissal of
Indian culture by noted drama critic, William Archer.
Archer s book, India and Its Future is certainly
forgotten today, though it was immortalized by Sri
Aurobindo s detail rebuttal.
The second series consisting of seven essays that
Sri Aurobindo wrote against Archer was called A
Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture. In essay four
of this series, Sri Aurobindo says: Modern Europe
separated religion from life, from philosophy, from
art and science, from politics, from the greater part
of social action and social existence. And it
secularised and rationalised too the ethical demand
so that it might stand in itself on its own basis and
have no need or any aid from religious sanction or
mystic insistence. (SABCL 14: 83). But it is after
this remarkably clear but somewhat expected
assessment of modernity occurs the radical insight
that is so carelessly tucked away in the corner of
what is a larger polemic:
At the end of this turn is an antinomian
tendency, constantly recurring in the life-history
of Europe and now again in evidence. This force
seeks to annul ethics also, not by rising above it
into the absolute purity of the spirit, as mystic
experience claims to do, but by breaking out of its
barriers below into an exultant freedom of the
vital play. (ibid )
This struck me as quite a prophetic pronouncement
on the anti-foundationalism of postmodernism thought,
with its emphasis on absolute freedom and play, but
which is not supra-rational as much as anti- or ir-
rational. Sri Aurobindo's more extended critique on
reason as the sole arbiter of human destiny in series
of essays first published in Arya from 15 August 1916
to 15 July 1918 and collected later as The Human
Cycle (SABCL: 15).
Here he states in detail why reason cannot
deliver humanity: The whole difficulty of reason in
trying to govern our existence is that because of
its own inherent limitations it is unable to deal
with life in its complexity or in its integral
movements; it is compelled to break it up into
parts, to make more or less artificial
classifications, to build systems with limited data
which are contradicted, upset or have to be
continually modified by other data, to work out a
selection of regulated potentialities which is
broken down by the bursting of a new wave of yet
unregulated potentialities. (102)
Sri Aurobindo concludes that only a widespread
spiritual transformation that will usher in a
universal Spiritual Age will be the natural
culmination of the human quest for individual as well
as social perfection. What emerges from such a
critique is that the central philosophical enterprise
of the West proceeds in cycles of affirmation and
negation of a certain kind of rationality. In the
last two hundred years or so, this has meant the
enthronement of instrumental reason and then its
recent repudiation at the hands of several thinkers.
Neo-classicism, romanticism, modernism, and, now,
postmodernism also show traces of a similar cycle of
affirmation and negation. Seeing its own history in
terms of a progression from the pre-modern, to the
modern, to the post-modern, the West has relegated
other societies to a space equivalent to its own
irrational past, thereby turning geography into
history.
However, I would like to argue that a
civilization such as India is neither pre-modern,
nor modern. In fact, one cannot call it post-modern
or anti-modern either, though that is how some
choose to see it. I would argue that India is best
understood either as a traditional or a non-modern
society. By this is meant that it does not
subscribe to the logic of History that the West has
invented. In a non-modern society, what is central
is neither rationality nor its opposite, but
something else, call it wisdom, which includes but
supercedes rationality.
The debate between the West and India is not
between modernity and tradition or between modernity
and pre- or anti- modernity, but between modernity
and non-modernity. Indeed, in the ultimate analysis,
this is a debate between two kinds of rationality,
two ways of seeing, two visions and version of the
world.
A new global renaissance is possible not by
rejecting or negating the West or by posting some
kind of dissenting knowledge system against the
dominant one, but by trying to change the world order
on the basis of a mass inner awakening and
transformation. In this process, wisdom, which is
signified by the opening of the third eye, has to
play a key role, not just the
rationality-anti-rationality axis in which we seem to
be ensnared at the present.
The opening of the third eye is a symbolic way of
suggesting the opening of higher consciousness; the
third eye corresponds to the ajnachakra or forehead
center, the sixth chakra in the yoga-tantra system.
It suggest the awakening of inner sight, or insight,
what Sri Aurobindo calls occult vision and occult
power ( Letters on Yoga SABCL 22 372).
It seems to me that this aspect of Sri Aurobindo s
thought has direct bearing on the crucial debate over
the status and position of Enlightenment rationality
within Western thought. The key text here is
obviously Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of
Enlightenment (1944). Composed during World War II
and in exile, this book is an anguished searching
into the mind of Europe. How did fascism emerge in
Europe in spite of the liberating ideals of the
Enlightenment and the progressive Marxist doctrine of
History? Their answer was sobering: "Enlightenment is
totalitarian (quoted in Young 7).
The project of the Frankfurt school was to rescue
the promise of the Enlightenment from the
instrumental rationality that led to the will to
power and to asphyxiating collectivism. If the
Frankfurt School showed that irrationality lurked
within the hidden recesses of rationality, the French
post-structuralists went further to interrogate in
Foucault's words, the relations between the Western
project of a universal deployment of reason, [and]
the positivity of the sciences and the radicality of
philosophy (quoted in Young 8): In the history of the
sciences in France, as in German critical theory, it
is a matter at bottom of examining a reason, the
autonomy of whose structures carries with it a
history of dogmatism and despotism a reason,
consequently, which can only have an effect of
emancipation on condition that it manages to liberate
itself from itself. (Quoted in Young 9)
While most poststructuralists, postmodernists, and
post colonialists are in agreement that a new type of
knowledge needs to be invented or discovered, its
precise definitions or characteristics elude
consensus. At best this auto-critique of the dominant
has only produced various forms of negative
dialectics, an example of which is Foucault s
intriguing phrase that reason should liberate itself
from itself. Typically, a positive statement of what
this alternative epistemology will be is avoided for
the fear that a statement of it will prove to be
oppressive and totalizing. This is what accounts for
what I have called the chakravyuva of much of
postal-thought: once you get in, you can t get out;
it s a sort of prison-house of language, to invoke
another famous phrase of Paul de Man's, from which
there is no exit. Much of postal thought thus feeds
off itself in a pathology of extreme self-reflexivity
and narcissism. That is why it is useful to make it
speak to another tradition, the so called spiritual
tradition of thought, which has addressed some of
these concerns from a different location.
The remaining part of my presentation will be an
exposition of exactly what this means in Sri
Aurobindo s scheme of spiritual evolution. In
Synthesis of Yoga , Sri Auorobindo uses the words
vijnana and gnosis interchangeably, as synonyms
(457).
He defines these terms carefully because they are
central to his argument; in fact, he devotes several
chapters to them (Chapter XXII-XXIV).
For Sri Aurobindo, vijnana or gnosis is not only
truth but truth-power, it is the very working of the
infinite and divine nature; it is the divine
knowledge one with the divine will in the force and
delight of a spontaneous and luminous and inevitable
self-fulfillment. By the gnosis, then, we change our
human into a divine nature (457).
He clarifies that vijnana is not the same as
buddhi , neither is buddhi the same as reason
(457).
He argues that those who consider buddhi to be the
same as reason and consider these to be the highest
mental faculty pass at once from a plane of pure
intellect to a plane of pure spirit (457); their
error is in mistaking the limited human means for
facing truth for the highest possible dynamics of
consciousness (457).
The opposite error is to identify vijnana with the
consciousness of the Infinite free from all ideation
(457).
But for Sri Aurobindo, vijnana or gnosis is an
intermediate power, at once concentrated
consciousness and infinite knowledge of the myriad
play of the Infinite (458). In other words, it
contains all ideation but is not limited by ideation
(458).
Unlike reason, it is not intellectual or mental
but self-luminous, supramental (458). That is, it is
not accumulative, consciously deductive or inductive,
but direct and spontaneous.
Of course, Sri Aurobindo tells us rather
intriguingly that there is relation, even a sort of
broken identity between the two for one proceeds
covertly from [the] other. Mind is born from that
which is beyond the mind (458).
But having said this, he is quick to show how
different the two modes are-they belong, as it were,
to different planes of conciousness. To complicate
matter farther, he posits other levels between them,
for instance intuitive reason, which is akin to
buddhi -higher than reason, but lower than vignana
.
Thought and its movements for Sri Aurobindo are
slow, methodical, while intuition is swift and sure,
a leap, a flash, a supralogical process of rapid
insight or swift discernment (459). But even this
intuitive reason is not gnosis, it is only an edge of
light of the supermind finding its way by flashes of
illumination (460).
But the elevation of the mind from the rational to
the intuitive is itself an important step up the
ladder of consciousness; Sri Aurobindo believes that
we can train our minds to attain it by purifying the
interfering intelligence but this is difficult
because the mind in nature is bound by the triple tie
of mentality, vitality, corporeality to its own
imperfection and ignorance (461).
The difference between the two, between reason and
gnosis is a fundamental one: the former proceeds from
ignorance to truth but the latter from truth and
shows the appearances in the light of the truth
(462-463). The reason proceeds by inference but
gnosis proceeds by identity or vision (463).
To the reason only what the senses give is direct
knowledge, pratyaksa - to the gnosis all its truth is
direct knowledge, pratyaksa (463). To define gnosis
thus in contradistinction to reason is, Sri Aurobindo
realizes, still to adhere to the rational process. On
its own terms, it is hardly possible to speak of it
except in figures and symbols (465).
For Sri Aurobindo, gnosis is the link which can
give us back our lost divinity. It is the bridge
between the Supreme Reality of Satchidananda and the
lower reality of our world; both are triunes-
infinite existence, consciousness, bliss on the one
hand and lower triad of matter, life, and mind. That
is why gnosis is not just light but force, creative
knowledge the self-effective force of the divine Idea
(465). It is an embodiment of will as conscious force
of eternal knowledge (465).
Described in the Vedas by the symbol of the sun,
tat savitur varennyam , the whole creation has been
inspired by this divine delight, the eternal Ananda
(466). Indeed, the supramental world that Sri
Aurobindo wishes to harbinger is such a true and
happy creation, rtam, bhadram (466).
It is for gnosis to reestablish the link between
Divine Nature, Prakriti as it is, and fallen nature,
prakriti as she seems to be.
In order to do so, vijnana has three powers: it
receives supreme knowledge and transmits it; it
concentrates supreme consciousness to act on matter;
and a divine delight with which it harmonizes the
illimitable diversity of manifestation (466).
As evolutionary beings, the Purusha or conscious
being in us must ascend into the vijnanamaya so as to
transform Prakriti-this, according to Sri Aurobindo,
is the fundamental experience of the mental being
transformed and fulfilled and sublimated in the
perfection of the gnosis (467).
According the Sri Aurobindo, a human being is
constituted of multiple materials. Therefore, all of
us carry the effects of these materials which have
gone into building us. The human, the homo sapiens,
or man -as the root of the word suggest, is primarily
a mental being. That is we are distinguished from
other species by our ability to think, by the fact
that we possess what may be called a mind. Men and
women, thus, are so called because of their minds,
their manas .
But we do not live in a mental world, except
internally or occasionally. Our world is, in fact,
primarily, physical. Our whole quest in the march of
civilization which we call progress has been to gain
greater and greater control over our physical
environments.
So, it is the physical existence that must be
touched and transformed as the ultimate object of
yoga. The proof of the pudding is in the eating-it
is when this physical world around us is
transformed that we can truly change the conditions
of our existence.
How is this to be done? One step is to understand
the nature of the physical itself. The body, made up
of the gross elements, the same ingredients that make
up matter, is nevertheless not untouched by something
else, something other than itself and its own nature.
The mental works on the body through the intermediacy
of the nervous system.
Even the most physical things that we experience
are not without their mental component, or else we
would never experience them.
Between the mind and the body, connecting them
both is the vital, the pranic. According to the
Brihadranyaka Upanishad, prana is the essence, the
subtle substance of life. It is indestructible and of
the same material as the eternal divine. It may leave
the body, but it does not perish. By the same token,
between the mind and what is above it, what is higher
than it, are subtle connectors, sort of like an
interface, which when activated, will help divinize
our mental consciousness.
That is the vijnanamaya sheath or envelope. This
transformation of consciousness is what all yoga
wishes to accomplish, regardless of the different
philosophical or theological bases from which it
proceeds. The ancient truth that the kabala presents
was, as above so below.
As the Tantrics say, what is not here, meaning in
the human body, is nowhere. In other words, there is
a correspondence above the human to what we
experience in the human plane.
Gnosticism would mean an awareness of this
correspondence. All will be originated from above;
from above, all that corresponds in gnosis to our
present mental activity takes place (471).
So there is already a higher mind that ours to
which we have access if we wish. Between the mental
and the absolute is the supramental or the gnostic;
between the mental and the gnostic are a whole range
of levels which Sri Aurobindo calls the overmind
planes.
As we gradually ascend to higher levels of
consciousness, the mental faculty expresses itself in
a differential rather than separative fashion. The
centre - the brain, the body, is still there, but it
is merely for convenience, a point of reference as it
were; the being is not tethered to it, but expands
and diffuses over a larger area. This is a different
form of individuality or personality, one that
operates universally: It has become the awareness of
an infinite being who acts always universally though
with emphasis on an individual formation of its
energies (471).
This state of consciousness may appear to be
rather abnormal at first, but as Sri Aurobindo says,
it vindicates itself even to the mental intelligence
by its greater calm, freedom, light, power,
effectivity of will, verifiable truth of ideation and
feeling (471-472). In this state, the ultimate truth,
the infinite reality, becomes more true to us than
the world of phenomenal existence: it becomes, as Sri
Aurobindo puts it, the primal, the actual reality
(472).
In the plane of gnosis the infinite is at once our
normal consciousness of being, its first fact, our
sensible substance unlike the normal state in which
the finite, phenomenal world is our default mode of
being, from which we rise only occasionally to
glimpse intimations of immortality. Once we are
seized of and by this power of gnosis or vijnana, Sri
Aurobindo believes that it has the ability to
transform and reshape the very physical and material
aspects of our being in accordance with its own
nature.
Krishnamurti and David Bohm spoke of
a similar process but in with a different
terminology. But the idea was that the higher
energy of gnosis or intelligence as Krishnamurti
called it, can affect even the cells of the brain,
altering them so that they function differently.
This is the opening of the third eye, the rise of
the kundalini, and the transformation of the jiva
to Shiva or the pashu to pashupati.
According to Sri Aurobindo, in the vijnanamaya ,
there is no place for sin; for all sin is an error of
the will, a desire and act of the Ignorance (474). As
in Buddhism, when desire ceases entirely, grief and
all inner suffering also cease (475).
In the Vijnana, the Divine is no longer veiled in
Maya. Therefore, there is no Jiva who says I think I
act, I desire, I feel (476); what is left, instead,
is the infinite play of what Swami Muktananda called
chitshakti vilasa or as Sri Aurobindo puts it God
himself by his Prakriti knows, acts, loves, takes
delight through my individuality and its figures and
fulfils there in its higher and divine measures the
multiple lila which the Infinite for ever plays in
the universality which is himself for ever (476).
The gnostic soul is akin to the supreme Godhead,
free, but active, sovereign but taking delight in its
apparent limitedness. The freedom that it enjoys is
the same as nirvana, not an annihilation, but
play.
An important distinction before I conclude
this section: in Sri Aurobindo's scheme, this
transformation is not just for a few select
individuals, but for the whole human
species.
It will happen because the Supramental will be
naturalized and normalized on earth just as mental
consciousness was a few million years ago. So, when
this happens, what the earth will see is a quantum
shift in consciousness, which will ensure that every
dimension of human life, political, social, economic,
cultural, and so on, will be radically
transformed.
This paper has been premised on the idea of a
dynamic absolute that through its force of love and
knowledge can act to transform this world. As such, it
departs from notions of a static absolute aloof from
this world or from ideas that regard the world itself
as an illusion. This world as it appears may not be
taken as the ultimate reality; indeed to do so would be
to make a category error. Yet, whatever is and appears
to be has some basis in reality. This much we must
concede. Otherwise, any attempt to be change agents in
our world would be futile. In other words, we must act
on the assumption that our collective efforts and
intentions can, indeed, change the world for the
better.
What is more, we might even go on to assert that
such a change can actually be proposed, explained,
discussed, accepted or rejected by other actors and
agents. It is only through such ceaseless interaction,
even striving, that some breakthrough will occur. The
path forward, moreover, may not be a single one, but
may have multiple branches and possibilities. It would
be an unfortunate error to attempt to impose one
uniform prescription to the whole of humankind. My
exposition of Sri Aurobindo s thought was to suggest
one way forward, not to foreclose others.
The idea that the European renaissance of the 15th
century was both incomplete and partial is not a new
one. In the early 19th century, for instance, Friedrich
Schlegel mooted the idea of an Oriental Renaissance
(Clarke 55). The phrase itself occurs as the heading of
a chapter in a book Edgar Quinet published in 1841
(Schwab 11). Raymond Schwab picked it up again towards
the end of the last century, using it as the title of
his book. As he says at the opening of the book, An
Oriental Renaissance a second Renaissance, in contrast
to the first: the expression and the theme are familiar
to the Romantic writers, for whom the term is
interchangeable with Indic Renaissance. What the
expression refers to is the revival of an atmosphere in
the nineteenth century brought about by the arrival of
Sanskrit texts in Europe, which produced an effect
equal to that produced in the fifteenth century by the
arrival of Greek manuscripts and Byzantine commentators
after the fall of Constantinople. (11)
Of course, we might argue that what goes by the name
of ancient wisdom was not especially Indian or Eastern,
but prevailed in several parts of the world before the
advent of modernity. What makes India special is the
persistence of these traditions in a powerful and
coherent form to this day. Indeed, in the last two
hundred years, there have been repeated attempts to
bring Western and and all such esoteric knowledges or
inner sciences into some sort of grand synthesis.
Apart from the more spiritualist attempts such as
Theosophy or the New Age, such connections have existed
in practically every branch of knowledge including
literature, philosophy, religious studies, and even in
certain aspects of the hard sciences (see Clarke for an
account of some of these dialogues). Even if these
attempts haven't succeeded entirely, we could argue
that they haven t failed totally either. It is
therefore not only possible but highly desirable to
push such endeavours forward.
The new global renaissance that Rajiv Malhotra and
Bob Thurman wish to effect is thus very much the demand
of our times. In this presentation I have argued
against two ways of (un)knowing the absolutist
rationalism that characterizes the dominant strand of
Western thought as well as the dissenting irrationalism
of the postmodernists. Instead, a third way of knowing
suggested by the opening of the third eye has been
suggested as the way forward. The way points to the
development of a gnostic being with an enhanced
consciousness, a being that may be able better to shape
a global future for our numerous planetary
civilizations. Thank you.
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