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Tommaso Iorco
FROM VEDA TO KALKI

- India into the Design of the Earth -


La Calama
Publishing House



Here is a short excerpt from each chapter of the book.


      Introduction

1.   Vedic Rishis - Pioneers of Immortality

2.   Upaniṣad - The Everest of the World

3.   Sāṁkhya - The Analythical Method

4.   Yoga - The Art of Self-finding

5.   Bhagavad-Gītā - The Beloved Lord’s Song

6.   Vedānta - A Sublime Metaphysical Skyscraper

7.   Purāṇa - A Collection of Vedic Fables

8.   Tantra - The Power of the Goddess

9.   Other Currents of the Great River

10. Buddha - The Way to Nirvāṇa

11. Modern India - Toward Apokalypse

12. Sri Aurobindo - India’s Gift to the Whole World



from the Introduction

India had a predominantly positive attitude towards life, and this encouraged the birth of an impressive, magnificent civilisation, but it is true that understanding this does require a degree of open-mindedness in the non-expert. “Doing verily works in this world one should wish to live a hundred years. Thus it is in thee and not otherwise than this; action cleaves not to a man” urges the Īśa Upaniṣad (II stanza) as do all the others, insisting on a widespread spiritual realisation that will eventually generate terrestrial prosperity. In the Taittirīya Upaniṣad, for example, a clear injunction not to reject Matter is repeatedly sung (in section VII) : annam na nindhyāt, annam na paricakṣita — “great is the joy of those who thrive on Matter and are possessed by it, rich with herds and full of glory”, annādo annavān kīrtyā mahān paśubhiḥ saha.

Those who have conducted careful investigations in this area can confirm that the discoveries of ancient Indian researchers really did touch all the domains of ancient knowledge: mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, grammar, medicine and surgery, and all of this would have been impossible for a people exclusively devoted to metaphysical abstractions. [...]

We can state with confidence that in India science was never the mother of research. Rather it was regarded as an auxiliary power for the progression of spiritual knowledge. “What should I do with all of this” cries the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad “if it doesn’t bring me the nectar of immortality?”, an attitude which indicates integrity on the part of the ancient researchers rather than falseness. This is unlike the approach of the Catholic Church, which often not only repressed scientific investigation but preferred religious dogma to the pursuit of true spiritual knowledge. Even Galileo was at the same time a scientist and a true man of faith, indeed more so than the ecclesiastics who condemned him. In more recent years, William Macintosh expressed an opinion similar to Voltaire’s, when he said “all of history confirms India as the mother of science and art... That country was so famous for its knowledge and wisdom in the ancient times that Greek philosophers were eager to journey to India in order to perfect their knowledge” (Guy Deleury, Les Indes florissantes: Anthologie des voyageurs français). The French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat acknowledged that “In India there are the remains of the most ancient civilisation [...]. We know that every people travelled there for obtaining the elements of their knowledge [...]. India, in its splendour, distributed its gift to all the other peoples; the Greeks and the Egyptians also took their myths and wisdom from it” (ibidem). In India science was seen as but one expression of a broader spiritual flourishing, as were poetry, singing, music, the dramatic arts, sculpture and architecture. They were all matters to be presented reverently before the ṛṣi, who reminded everybody that only after a man has finally rooted himself in the finite he can hope to reach the infinite, the Timelessness which can be fully grasped only by those who agree to be modelled by time and thus become an accomplished human being. “Protect the refulgent paths open by thought, and flawlessly weave the work of great poets; BECOME THE HUMAN BEING, GENERATE THE DIVINE PEOPLE; sharpen the spear of gnosis and progress towards the Immortal”, was the warning of the ancient seers (Ṛg Veda, X.LIII.6). The dynamic aspect of the Divine was not regarded as antithetic in any way to its static and stable aspect and the perpetual cosmic motion was not an awkward and meaningless gyration. While the mythical Wheel of Brahman is described as spinning for eternity, it never stays in the same place: it always proceeds onwards as a perpetually progressing perfection.


from chapter 1. Vedic Rishis

The Vedic gods would be symbols, we said, but what really is a symbol to us? When men need to understand matters to which they normally have no access, a transposition is commonly used that we call a symbol. This is what happens, for instance, with some dream images and with some visions of ultra-physical worlds or creatures (which may well assume different features according to the witness’s psychological background and manifest as Lakṣmī, Venus/Aphrodite, the Morrigan or the Holy Virgin). Another example of the same pattern might be the invention of ideographic writing or of some kind of symbolist and abstract painting. Now, although on the human level symbols are but transpositions, on other, higher planes of consciousness they could represent, for the Rishis, something more. Essentially, the symbolism used by the Vedic poets is a representation of hidden realities or saṇketa, and the various gods are the powers responsible for maintaining the order of worlds while trying to help men attain a state of perfect joy (gods are, indeed, often called mayobhuvaḥ, bringers of happiness). They are prototypes, more or less accurate, of active, living realities, although at first glance they may seem mere personifications of natural forces such rain, fire, the sun etc. In such a framework, as mentioned before, the physical sun or physical fire are but the material placeholders of supra-physical powers, which are themselves different emanations of the single primordial Energy. This, in the Vedas, is such a plain concept that no substantial opposition can be traced, within the texts, between what is visible and what is not, and the veil dividing material reality from other levels of existence must have been very thin for ancient Rishis, and somewhat transparent, since the visible world was held to be simply the external aspect of supra-physical forces, which were invisible only to those who had no divine vision (dīvya dṛṣṭi).

The human mind naturally tends to analyse the world by means of comparison and differentiation, organising in closed categories a reality which is, rather, one single continuum, thus often missing the fundamental unity of all things. The category of Being is therefore perceived as clearly separated from that of Becoming, what is connected with personality is opposed to everything that is impersonal and we see monism on one side and dualism on the other, endlessly dividing what is, in fact, inseparable. Such a rigid logical process makes monotheism appear the exact opposite of polytheism, even though no such a strict distinction really exists, at least not as an exclusive contraposition in which only one term can be true, since a unique, causal, immanent and transcendent energy, the source and origin of everything and beyond everything is the sole foundation both of what is conceivable and of what is not. In these respects, gods are all aspects of an eternal and infinite variety — powers of the only Consciousness-Force (cit-śakti) allocated to various functions, encouraging and sustaining human actions. “To what is One in the essence, rishis give different names” says the Ṛg Veda (X.CIV.5), and “those who adore the gods filled with faith, truly Me only they adore”, added Śri Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavad-Gītā (IX.23). In India, monotheism and polytheism live peacefully next to each other as two sides of the same coin, and everything melts in the One, as sparks of one single flame.


from chapter 2. Upaniṣad

The Upanishads belong to the age when human thought began developing its speculative potentials while still taking advantage of a certain plasticity of vision, which needed to be expressed in verse, poetry being man’s supreme mode of linguistic expression, and which would later become weaker as the human mind constructed more complex analytic structures. The Upanishadic seers always held the true meaning of the Vedas in high regard and, indeed, used the ancient mantras as tools by which to validate their own personal intuitions and spiritual perceptions. For the Vedic word was a sort of seed from which they were able to grow ancient truths, newly beautiful and vigorous. The fruits of their efforts were of course expressed in the language of their time, which also makes it more accessible to us. Their aim, however, was neither to formulate a well-structured philosophy (which they never did) nor simply to provide a new interpretation of the Vedas, but only to enlighten. True researchers that they were, they longed first and always for direct experience, preferring the exploration of new paths over repeat visits to well-known ones.

It is worth repeating that the Upanishads do not convey a philosophical system intended for merely intellectual understanding, as do the works of, for instance, Hume or Locke: they provide, rather, one vision of the world that can be accessed through experience only — naiṣā tarkena matir āpaneyā (Kaṭha Upaniṣad, I.II.9); na manasā prāptum śakyaḥ (ibidem, II.III.12).

At the time of the Upanishads, the symbolic rite of yajña was already losing its real meaning, becoming increasingly superficial and cumbersome, to the point that the Vedas were left to priests. This was the context in which Vedānta were created, in order to meet the needs of those who searched for truth through their own personal experience, and were written in a more direct language so as to offer powerful and enlightening intuitive assistance. The Vedas, though, embraced their decline and, after passing from the hands of the Rishis into those of the priests (purohits), eventually fell under the control of paṇḍita (lit. ‘learned’), and so became dead letters. This always happens when a degradation of this kind takes place but the monument, although lifeless, can still deserve great admiration. It was at this point that the class of kṣatriya, great conquerors and men of action, dissatisfied with the priests’ superficial rites, their machinations of intrigue and their charlatan’s cerebral twists, devoted themselves to brahmavidyā and produced the cycle of the Upanishads which connect heaven and earth as do the Himalayas, like the rod in Kālidāsa’s poetical image (pṛthivyā iva mānadandaḥ). A new age was rising: the Age of Intuition was shifting inexorably into the Age of Reason.


from chapter 3. Sāṁkhya

When the Puruṣa recovers consciousness of its motionless and detached Nature, it is no longer enslaved to Prakṛti and returns to its immaculate and perennial state of stillness. This process must take place during life, so that the mukta, the liberated man, can relinquish his corporeal form through an act of will (iccha-mṛtyu) and become videhamukta, a body-less liberated one. Alternatively he may let Nature continue a sort of mechanical action, consuming his samskāra (any remains of the actions of the current or previous incarnations that were not extinguished at the moment of liberation) until the moment of departure arrives naturally (ādehanipātāt). Such a man is then called jīvanmukta, a liberated who is still alive in a human body.

Indian tradition identifies three different forms of karma-bandha, the actions binding an individual to the wheel of saṁsāra and the cycle of rebirths (punarjanman): sañcita-karma, resulting from the actions of past lives whose fruits are still unripe, prārabdha-karma, or the actions that, ripened in a previous life, give their sweet and bitter fruits in the current existence, and sañciyamāna-karma, actions that accumulate consequences in our current life that create the need for future rebirths (this last karma is also known as vartamāna or kriyamāna). It is said that the awakening of the motionless, coiled up Puruṣa would cause sañcita-karma to evaporate from the “karmic tank” (karmāśaya) and make its actuation unnecessary, and that sañciyamāna-karma would also be erased in that way, whereas prārabdha-karma would still need to be consumed, although the Jīvanmukta would no longer be effected by it. Lastly there are some particular karmic effects, or utkaṭa karma, that should be taken into account and which, considered unmodifiable, would need to be extinguished in a natural way. The living liberated man, in any case, has no individual initiative left, as he is saṅkalpārambha: inwardly completely motionless. Without tensions and without any inner conflict, he desires nothing, he is not interested in determining any orientation for his actions, has no initiative and lacks any centrifugal impulses — niśesta, aniha, nirapekṣa, nivṛtta, niskriya, sarvārambha — and is deeply immersed in the eternal, inalienable supreme Peace, praśānti, here as well as elsewhere: iha ca amutra ca.


from chapter 4. Yoga

India’s ancient seers knew very well that man is not separated from the rest of the universe, but is one with it as a wave is part of the ocean. An infinite ocean of Energy, of Śakti, pervades everything, projecting itself in every name and in every shape, nāma-rūpa, and minerals, plants, animals and men are, in their phenomenal existence, simply more or less effective receptacles of that divine Energy. The same Force animating the stars and the planets also dwells inside us: it moves us, and all of our actions, all of our thoughts are its game and are produced by the complexity of its interactions with itself. Each of us is a sort of dynamo in which energy is generated and stored to be preserved, used and recharged.

Some processes exist by which man can clean up what William Blake called “the doors of perception” and so remove all obstructions in the communication channel (that is the human being) and the Supreme Energy that we see partially expressed in man and the cosmos: the passage between the external mind and the internal being must be cleaned out, the wall separating them torn down. Potentially, everybody is able to perform such kátharsis and the men who achieve it consciously practice some form of Yoga. “In yoga experience the consciousness widens in every direction, around, below, above, in each direction stretching to infinity” (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III).

Essentially, yoga is a radical revolution of man’s systemic nature, a total change of reference points and an axis shift. We usually live on the surface, rotating more or less uselessly around a false, transitory ego, but Yoga can take us inside ourselves and put us in direct contact with the sun around which the various planets of our nature orbit. And in that profoundness we can find the harmonious balance of our surface, eternally established at the bottom of an unchangeable Silence from which can arise any energy.

Man indeed commonly lives on the surface of his own being, unaware of his own complexity and more or less satisfied by the usual circle of the recurring thoughts, feelings, desires, habits, impulses, which he considers to be his, that is to say, generated by him. From Sāṁkhya we learned that, on the contrary, it is Nature that, acting through us, generates the illusion of an id which — despite its believing it is the author of its own movements — is but a puppet hanging from the strings of the Gunas. Nature is the puppeteer that enacts “our” character, “our” preferences, “our” limits, “our” virtues, “our” flaws. The ambitious aim of Yoga is to break all of those strings and abolish man’s subjugation to Prakṛti and thus to achieve a total overturn of his consciousness: from a state of universal determinism — in which a small amount of free will gives us the illusion that we are the creators of our destiny — to a new condition in which we really are the free, legitimate masters and owners of our nature, able therefore to determine its direction and choices.

Given that everything secretly seeks evolution and that Mother Nature slowly works to manifest higher, more divine powers of consciousness in order to realise the great Design secretly requested by the Being, we can affirm that everything seeks some sort of Yoga. We saw it through Earth’s long evolutive spiral which from Matter (the pure mineral kingdom) reached Life through a process of increasing complexification (from Plants to Animals) that eventually made possible the emergence of Mind. However, it is also true that, at least on this planet and as far as we know, man is the only species that can know of such a process, mainly thanks to the instrument which allows self-awareness, albeit incompletely: the reason. And among men, very few actually practise any aware form of Yoga and try to lend themselves thus to the evolutive process — just to avoid hindering it would be good — by organising within themselves the powers inherent in Nature for accelerating the Great Mother’s intentions by conscious collaboration. In the current state of humanity, it is up to everyone who feels such a pull to become the forerunners and pioneers climbing these high peaks.

We can find evidence in every country of man’s search for higher realities and of his attempts to get in touch with them: not only in India but in Chaldea, Egypt, China, Greece, among the Celtic tribes and the Amerindians, according to Plato on the isle of Atlantis, and according to Tamil tradition in the mythical Kumarikhandam, the centre of a highly evolved civilisation that flourished until it was submerged by waters around the 12th century BCE. Similarly, many practices were developed around the world which we might define as yogic because, although their systems and disciplines developed different features, they all emerged from the same basic truths.


from chapter 5. Bhagavad-Gītā

The Bhagavad-Gītā is an extraordinary, fecund, early synthesis of the Sāṁkhya, Yoga and Vedānta. Indeed, together with the Upanishads and the Brahma-Sūtra, the Gītā is acknowledged as one of the three authorities of the Vedānta, collectively referred to as the prasthāna-traya or triple canon. All the Vedantic ideas present in the Gītā are strongly influenced by samkhyan and yogic principles, from which its nature as a synthesis — the particular characteristic of its philosophy — derives. Essentially it is a work of mystic poetry, like the Ṛgveda and the Upanishads and, in its seven hundred verses, Vyāsa reveals the essence of the teaching of Śri Kṛṣṇa. In the text, the Avatār explains to his loyal Arjuna the threefold Path of works (karma), devotion (upāsanā) and knowledge (jñāna). The essential principles on which the Gītā establishes its teaching are equanimity, detachment, the accomplishment of one’s true task (svadharma), work performed with yogic consciousness, action without desire (niṣkāma karma, which implies renouncing the fruits of action), surpassing Nature’s three inferior modes and, last and crowning them all, a complete surrender to the Supreme, causing the individual to plunge into Divine Consciousness. This is what Śrikṛṣṇa defines as the supreme knowledge and the deepest of secrets. [...]

From the time of its creation, the Bhagavad-Gītā exerted a primary influence and generated enthusiastic appreciation wherever it landed. In the twentieth century, Mircea Eliade defined it as “the cornerstone of Indian spirituality” (Patañjali et le Yoga) and Aldous Huxley wrote that “The Bhagavad-Gītā is one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the Perennial Philosophy ever to have been made. Hence its enduring value, not only for Indians, but for all mankind” (from the introduction to The Bhagavadgītā by Prabhavananda and Isherwood). Émile Burnouf, the first French translator of the Gītā, maintained in 1861 that it “may be the most beautiful book ever written by human hand; the principle of absolute unity between beings and things, which is the essence and acme of Indian philosophy, was never announced with greater strength” (La Bhagavad-Gîtâ ou le Chant du Bienheureux). Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, in his excellent Essays, wrote “In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all beings in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavad-Gītā [...]. “The whole world (says the supreme Kṛṣṇa) is but a manifestation of Viṣṇu, who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing from, but as the same as themselves”.” (Plato; or, the Philosopher). Among the oldest praises, we can read in the Varāha-Purāṇa that “he who can penetrate the meaning of the Gītā, although immersed in the ways of the world, must be considered as jīvanmukta, a living liberated, and when he will leave his body, he will reach the highest level of Knowledge”. There is no doubt that this text has an unmatchable importance for the spiritual history of India and of the whole of humanity. “Sri Aurobindo considers the message of the Gītā to be the basis of the great spiritual movement which has led and will lead humanity more and more to its liberation, that is to say, to its escape from falsehood and ignorance, towards the truth. From the time of its first appearance, the Gītā has had an immense spiritual action; but with the new interpretation that Sri Aurobindo has given to it, its influence has increased considerably and has become decisive.” (Mère, Pensées et Aphorismes de Sri Aurobindo, 29.06.1960).


from chapter 6. Vedānta

Vedānta took India’s philosophical thought leaping through to the bravest peaks of pure metaphysics. The task of the Upanishads, as we saw, was to provide poetical truths of extraordinary abundance and vibrating formulas of astonishing profoundness, intended always to aim at the heart of things without lingering too much on the details. Eventually, the golden pillars of the Upanishads served the Vedantic philosophers as the foundations for a majestic metaphysical skyscraper or, more properly, we should say a magnificent abhraṁliha, where all those details which had only been sketched into the Vedic and the Upanishadic fabric would be developed analytically.

Among the most representative Vedantic scholars we must mention the great Śaṁkara (8th-9th centuries CE), Nimbārka (9th century), Rāmānuja (end of 11th century), Madhva (12th-13th centuries) and Vallabha (15th-16th centuries). Each of the above represents a different current of Vedānta, and although they all acknowledged the authority of the Vedic and Upanishadic traditions1, still they differ in their interpretations of the same traditional truths.

Nature, along its path, often shows a disjunctive, specialising tendency which, as we mentioned previously, is hugely useful in exploring every fragment of truth down to its tiniest details in order to reach synthesis and unity in a more fruitful way (a somewhat analogous process took place in the West when science eventually replaced alchemy and metaphysical philosophy). We must therefore consider all those interpretations with respect, without any partisan spirit towards any of them and consequently without bias against the others. In this dispersion of the one original white light into the colours of the spectrum, each single specialisation achieved an accurate and broadly commendable examination of its own favourite colour, eventually offering a detailed description of all its various shades. It is not important that each school takes its chosen colour as the only true one: we worship the original white light and we are grateful for the fruitful crops that those currents left for us to harvest, thus allowing us to enjoy unity within diversity even more concretely. One famous funny story from India tells of a group of blind men trying to describe an elephant, each touching a different part of its body (hasti-darśane iva jātyandhāḥ): the man who touched the ear likened the animal to a big fan; the one who touched the tail said it resembled a rope, while the one who just felt a leg claimed that it was a column. Of course, whoever knows the elephant as a whole (akṛtsnavidaḥ, the Bhagavad-Gītā would say), understands that each of the blind men simply stated a part of the truth and so they were all both right wrong.


from chapter 7. Purāṇa

We find some very beautiful and effective images in these Puranic texts, such as “Brahman’s egg” (brahmāṇḍa), from which the mythical “golden embryo” (hiraṇyagarbha) emerged to be hatched by the primeval Tapas, with many surprising analogies with several modern scientific hypotheses on the origin of the universe. The famous series of ten Avatāra (daśavatāra) contained in the Puranas can be interpreted as a parable of evolution, a metaphor for the progressive growth of the divine consciousness inside terrestrial unconsciousness and man’s partial consciousness. Here is the sequence of incarnations as reported in the Matsya-Purāṇa: “Matsya (fish), Kūrma (turtle), Varāha (boar), Narasimha (lion man), Vāmana (dwarf), Paraśurāma (axe-armed Rāma), Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, Buddha, Kalki” (285.67). Therefore we have a first Avatār in the shape of a fish, the second a reptile, then a mammal, followed by something halfway in-between man and animal, then a presumably partially developed man (a dwarf or, as we might say today, an anthropomorphic primate), then the purely rajasic man gifted with divine dynamism, then the apotheosis of the sattvic man (Rāma), who in a sequence of this kind cannot but precede the incarnation of the divine Puruṣottama (Kṛṣṇa) and the avatār who raised above the opposites (Buddha). The list ends with Kalki, the future Incarnation, who must complete the previous Avatārs’ work, bringing God’s reign down to earth. Kalki is described riding a white horse with a flaming sword in his hand and his coming should take place in a time very similar to ours. “At the twilight of this current era, when all rulers will have become thieves [here we are!], the Lord of the universe will be born to a Viṣṇuyaśas and will be named Kalki” (Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, I.III.26). This descent of Kalki has such a special importance that it is also mentioned in other Puranas such as Brahma-Purāṇa (213), Agni-Purāṇa (16), Vayu-Purāṇa (98 and 104), Liṅga-Purāṇa (I.40), Varaha-Purāṇa (15), Bhaviśya-Purāṇa (III.IV.26) and in the Mahābhārata.

The various Puranic versions of the different Yugas are also very interesting. While during the second age, the age of Power, Viṣṇu would descend among mortals as a king, in the third age of Balance he would incarnate as the highest legislator and codifier, acting as Manu; in the age of Truth he would descend as Yajña, that is to say as Lord of Sacrifice, and would manifest in his creatures’ hearts. In the Golden Age, the Viṣṇu-Purāṇa tells us, everyone would be born “knower of the Truth”, and for this reason that age is defined as the satya-yuga, “the age of Truth”, or even kṛtayuga, “the perfect age”. During the last Satya Yuga witnessed by men, so the scripture say, life was innocent and happy, spontaneously harmonious as in Hesiod’s kryséon génos or in Ovid’s aura ætas, when only one caste existed and OṀ was the only Veda (no text was necessary as truth was carved indelibly in every man’s heart). The long curve of evolution eventually forced man to drop his original innocence and fall from such a happy and genuine condition, yet not because of some divine punishment as in the famous Semitic apologue but following a precise Design: Kaliyuga would in fact be followed by a new and bigger Satyayuga. The Liṅga-Purāṇa affirms that “what can be achieved in one year during tretāyuga takes but one month in dvāparayuga and one day in kaliyuga”. Of the four ages, the Kali Yuga is surely the worst, but at the same time it is also the richest in opportunity: it is the age of total degradation and at the same time the period when a new creation arrives to destroy and replace the old one. First comes the fall, followed by an apparent degeneration which, however, leads to a new evolutionary leap.


from chapter 8. Tantra

Tantrism, as mentioned above, essentially aims for union with the Divine through His Energy. The condition in which every opposition and distinction ceases is called advaya (non-dualism) and can be attained in realising the fundamental unity of the Supreme Absolute through its Divine Śakti. This highest condition can be reached by detaching oneself from the desire for possessions, emancipating oneself from enslavement to duality, and through the dissolution of one’s ego — niḥspriha, nirdvandva, nirahaṁkāra. However, instead of seeking this abolition by a negative approach (that is to say by ending one’s identification with the motions of the lower Prakṛti, aparā-prakṛti), a tāntrika would try a positive method, (trying to raise those same drives to the level of the higher Prakṛti, parā-prakṛti). The most important result of this conception is a divine dynamism largely unknown to Vedantic schools (and we distinguish them carefully from the original Vedānta of the most ancient Upanishads, which was not at all quietist) whose yogis rather aimed at the cessation of all activities into the silent and immutable Brahman, into the Immutable Absolute (akṣara brahman). Moreover, Tantric liberation from the sense of ego automatically destroys — without any ascetic volitional effort — the so-called six imperfections (śada ripus, ahaṁkāra-dośa) correlated to it: kāma (lust), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha (infatuation), mada (pride) and mātsarya (envy). Instead of trying to suppress certain negative inclinations by the imposition of some rigid ascetic principle (or ethic, but that is not the yogi’s case) — which is always precarious, and risky, as it can rather strengthen and harden one’s ego instead of abolishing it — a Tantric yogi would act to extirpate evil at its roots, eliminating the very sense of ego that generates said deformations while paying attention not to eradicating the principle of the individuated self.

Whereas, for example, Patañjali defines the essence of Yoga as the end of cittavṛtti, or coils of mental consciousness (in the famous aphorism opening his Yoga-Sūtra: yogaścittavṛttinirodhaḥ — I.2), a Tāntrika would reach much further, and in a much more comprehensive way. He would indeed realise that if the abolition of cittavṛtti may lead to yogic trance and probably result, by a drastic suppression of mental faculties, in a state of mokṣa, it would also cause a final paralysis of man’s instrumental nature. This can fit perfectly any purely quietist Yoga that only aims to melt its destiny into an extra-temporal Absolute, abandoning life, body, matter, earth, (seen as illusory and unreal) to their destiny. If on the contrary we want to transform our instrumental nature (as Tantrism tried to with some limits, and as also Vedic Rishis had attempted long before) into the likeness of the Divine Being, to have it participate in the Supreme delights of the Spirit, we would need to start from wider premises so that the divine Śakti is allowed to accomplish a process of palingenesis within the ādhāra (in Tantrism this term defines the system of our mental-vital-physical nature). Stopping or inhibiting the activities of citta leads to immobility, to instrumental inertia, if on the contrary we learn how to control the vṛtti of mental consciousness, dominating them and becoming their absolute master through our cittaśuddhi, we would be equally able to have an active or a still external behaviour without disturbing the eternal quietness of our sovereign spirit, which dwells far above those inferior drives. In this way we may banish nature’s deformed drives, admitting exclusively what has an intrinsic usefulness and truth while refusing everything that does not flow directly from true consciousness and from authentic spiritual experience.


from chapter 9. Other Currents of the Great River

Apart from Tantra, there are other philosophical currents that are, at least superficially, independent of the Vedic tradition and, like emissaries of one great river, share the same legacy: Śaiva, Jaina, Sikh, Bauddha.

Before introducing a brief description of these philosophies let us try to provide some context and understand how they were born and in particular what is the common denominator linking them with the other ‘pearls in the same necklace’.

In order to do so we must go back to the beginning of Kali-Yuga, specifically to the Iron Age (more or less to the beginning of our present age): old truths had lost their strength and become pure conventions, eventually being relegated — if to anywhere — to some remote, secluded hermitage, so many more ascetics seemed more interested in supernatural powers, the famous siddhis, than in the quest for spiritual realisation. At that time the very fact of dwelling in a physical body began to be perceived negatively, as a sort of sentence or punishment, and the world was conceived as a place of sorrow and expiation branded with the indelible mark of transience and unhappiness. Grief was increasingly tightening its fatal bite on creatures, men were seized with hurriedness and utilitarianism became the unquestioned ruler of peoples.

Consequently, all the philosophies born in this period, despite their enormous diversities and divergences, share the same common angst: they are all obsessed with the impermanence of life and, therefore, by the search for a way to escape the burdensome wheel of saṁsāra, the trail of continual rebirths tying us to this “vale of tears”. Renunciation was perceived as the only way to salvation: acceptance of life was an act of ignorance and the interruption of rebirths was the most appropriate way to make use of our human birth. [...]

According to the Brahma Sūtra no human being incarnated in a physical body can access the solar body, that is to say the Truth-Consciousness granting divine palingenesis to the natural being: once passed through the doors of the sun, sūryasya dvāre, it is not possible to go back, na ca punaravartate. The physical body, according to the late Vedantic texts, cannot stand the overflowing waterfall of solar splendour and the researcher needs to get rid of his physical vessel (happily or not depends on one’s personal view). The physical body whose consciousness penetrated the sphere of divine Gnosis would be able to survive for twenty days, after which it would be turned to ashes by the unbearable solar irradiation. Rather than a definitive statement, this seems however an authentication of inadequacy made by Vedantic philosophers, who for objective or subjective reasons were not able, and maybe did not even try, to forge their physical nature so to endure the tremendous effulgence of supramental solarity without being shuttered by it. We can affirm that this inadequacy was, in a certain way, the true cause of India’s spiritual failure and of its fall, albeit temporary, into māyāvāda.


from chapter 10. Buddha

Buddhism still hides in its wide bosom many treasures which, if unveiled and considered in the light of the inspiring principle we adopted for this book, can provide important elements for a better understanding of the nature of consciousness and existence, and which may therefore be very useful for a new universal figuration of thought and experience. Buddhism is too generically associated with the search for a transcendental state, namely nirvāṇa, placed beyond pain and ignorance and beyond the phenomenal sphere of existence. There are, however, aspects and nuances of its doctrine which have not yet been sufficiently analysed by scholars, and that might suggest a much wider and more inclusive direction. As a Tantric Buddhist motto goes: “if Buddha is the reality of reality, then nothing can exist which negates it”. Buddhist Tantrism, just like its older brother, was born to oppose the gloating of a static and stagnating monastic existence, and used a new, anti-conventional language crafted to shake its reader and which still hides powerful truths, although it was eventually interpreted literally by many, and many were thus misled into a quest for magical powers or orgiastic rites. In a very controversial passage of the Prajñopāyaviniścayasiddhi (one of the major Vajrāyana texts) it is for instance stated that all the women in the world must be enjoyed by the sādhaka and, literally interpreted, this image appears paradoxical and absurd, apart from being an unfeasible intention. The sentence, though, refers to all the elements constituting the principles of our personality, which Buddha Gautama also considered equivalent, in his words, to “the world”, as every man can well be considered a veritable microcosm. In this case, too, Tantra contributed in its own way to the pregnant concreteness of the mystical experience, pulling it from the sky of intellect down into the psychological and practical sphere of human experience. Taking the same teaching literally, on the contrary, would mean distorting its entire essence. Tantric Buddhism texts, for instance, often mention the need to “break the skull”, clearly alluding to the practice of liberating the energy located at the basis of our being (kuṇḍalinī) into the free space above our heads, which means beyond our cerebral prison, breaking the hard armour that divides our mental consciousness from pure spiritual awareness. No Buddhist, at least as far as we know, ever took this image literally and smashed his head against his cell walls. It is very meaningful that in Tantric Buddhism the conquest of one’s unregenerated nature, of one’s animal drives, must be achieved not as a personal and limited success, but as a victory over those cosmic powers of which human vices and weaknesses are but a pale deformation derived from false moralist perspectives. This also means that these forces must be faced in their dreadful essentiality if they are to be eradicated, at least potentially, from the whole of human nature (and trainees in this discipline are accordingly called viriya, “heroic”). We mentioned that these practices derived mostly from Indian Tantra, but Tantric Buddhism also links itself to the Buddhas who preceded Śakyamuni and it is said its roots go back to the dawn of time and to be explicitly associated with pre-Buddhist Tantra.

For Buddhist Tantrism, as well as for Hindu Tantrism, the world is not only the place of Liberation, but even of Realisation, where the first is intended as emancipation from one’s own egoic limits, the latter as the inauguration of a reign of peace and universal harmony determined by the presence and the guidance of beings liberated from those limitations, gifted with right discernment, active powers, caring kindness and the ability to give these out and spread them to all mankind.

In the same way the five groups (skandha) or aspects of individual existence, which Śakyamuni defined as elements that need to be transcended if one is to emancipate oneself from suffering and to reach enlightenment, are said in some texts to transform into the corresponding qualities of the consciousness of enlightenment (bodhi-citta). This would apparently confirm that, in the Buddhist view, the world is not at all condemned to struggle between irreconcilable opposites and that a bridge exists capable of transporting the human being from the common temporal world of sensorial perception, limited and fragmented, to an eternal and timeless knowledge that is nonetheless immersed in temporal personality, a bridge that does not pass through negation but through conciliation of the condition and characteristics of our current existence.


from chapter 11. Modern India

The French writer Pierre Loti, appointed honorary president of the French-Indian Committee just before World War I, expressed the following wish for India, which we fully agree with and would like to share: “May your awakening shake the debased and ill Occident, blinded by daily routine, disruptor of nations, gods and souls, and may it bow before you, most ancient India, and before the marvels of your primeval creations” (Foundation document of the “Comité Franco-Hindu”).

We will close this chapter on India’s upcoming resurrection with some of Sri Aurobindo’s reflections from 1905 as a sort of summary and as an ideal introduction to the last chapter of this book, which will be about him (whose work we have looted, shamefully indiscretely and with deep gratitude). His be all merits, and ours the flaws.

“The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo; even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous; for they discovered down to its ultimate processes the method of Yoga and by the method of Yoga they rose to three crowning realisations. They realised first as a fact the existence under the flux and multitudinousness of things of that supreme Unity and immutable Stability which had hitherto been posited only as a necessary theory, an inevitable generalisation. They came to know that It is the one reality and all phenomena merely its seemings and appearances, that It is the true Self of all things and phenomena are merely its clothes and trappings. They learned that It is absolute and transcendent and, because absolute and transcendent, therefore eternal, immutable, imminuable and indivisible. And looking back on the past progress of speculation they perceived that this also was the goal to which pure intellectual reasoning would have led them. For that which is in Time must be born and perish; but the Unity and Stability of things is eternal and must therefore transcend Time. That which is in Space must increase and diminish, have parts and relations, but the Unity and Stability of things is imminuable, not augmentable, independent of the changefulness of its parts and untouched by the shifting of their relations, and must therefore transcend Space; — and if it transcends Space, cannot really have parts, since Space is the condition of material divisibility; divisibility therefore must be, like death, a seeming and not a reality. Finally that which is subject to Causality, is necessarily subject to Change; but the Unity and Stability of things is immutable, the same now as it was aeons ago and will be aeons hereafter, and must therefore transcend Causality. This then was the first realisation through Yoga, NITYOṆNITYĀNĀM, the One Eternal in many transient. At the same time they realised one truth more,—a surprising truth; they found that the transcendent absolute Self of things was also the Self of living beings, the Self too of man, that highest of the beings living in the material plane on earth. The Puruṣa or conscious Ego in man which had perplexed and baffled the Samkhyas, turned out to be precisely the same in his ultimate being as Prakṛti the apparently non-conscious source of things; the non-consciousness of Prakṛti, like so much else, was proved a seeming and no reality, since behind the inanimate form a conscious Intelligence at work is to the eyes of the Yogin luminously self-evident. This then was the second realisation through Yoga, CETANASCETANĀNĀM, the One Consciousness in many Consciousnesses. Finally on the basis of these two realisations was a third, the most important of all to our race, — that the Transcendent Self in individual man is as complete because identically the same as the Transcendent Self in the Universe; for the Transcendent is indivisible and the sense of separate individuality is only one of the fundamental seemings on which the manifestation of phenomenal existence perpetually depends. In this way the Absolute which would otherwise be beyond knowledge, becomes knowable; and the man who knows his whole Self knows the whole Universe. This stupendous truth is enshrined to us in the two famous formulae of Vedanta, SOṆHAM, He am I, and AHAM BRAHMA ASMI, I am Brahman the Eternal. Based on these four grand truths, NITYOṆNITYĀNĀM, CETANASCETANĀNĀM, SOṆHAM, AHAM BRAHMA ASMI, as upon four mighty pillars the lofty philosophy of the Upanishads raises its front among the distant stars.” (Kena and Other Upanishads).

“It was the soul, the temperament, the ideal mind formed and expressed in them which later carved out the great philosophies, built the structure of the Dharma, recorded its heroic youth in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, intellectualised indefatigably in the classical times of the ripeness of its manhood, threw out so many original intuitions in science, created so rich a glow of aesthetic and vital and sensuous experience, renewed its spiritual and psychic experience in Tantra and Purāṇa, flung itself into grandeur and beauty of line and colour, hewed and cast its thought and vision in stone and bronze, poured itself into new channels of self-expression in the later tongues and now after eclipse reemerges always the same in difference and ready for a new life and a new creation.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India).

Sri Aurobindo deserves a special place because of the unique synthesis whose centre he represents, not limited to India but embracing the whole of Euro-Asiatic civilisation and the entire world.

Jean Filliozat, director of the French Institute of Indology and author with Louis Renou of the pivotal L’Inde Classique: Manuel des études Indiennes, said during a public commemoration of Sri Aurobindo at the Sorbonne University, on 5 December 1955: “Beyond radical philosophies and their condemnation of human nature, Sri Aurobindo wanted to restore for India and exalt for the entire world hope in life. The point is not escaping the human for the divine, but reaching the Divine and infusing it into life” (Séance commémorative de Sri Aurobindo à la Sorbonne).

On the same occasion professor Félicien Challaye, remembering India’s fundamental role in the enrichment of the whole world, concluded his speech by affirming that “such magnificent contribution to the evolution of the world, we owe it especially to the great and beloved Aurobindo” (ibidem).


from chapter 12. Sri Aurobindo

Today the intimate correlation linking our individuality to the whole world appears increasingly evident. All the scenarios of the momentous transformation which is now taking place are interconnected and interdependent: technology, politics, culture, arts, ecology, science. Everything seems to swirl like a sort of cosmic vortex meant to reshuffle the world into a new figuration. This is therefore the time of the great ordeal, of the great turning point: the time both of the great danger and of grace.

Really, everything is upside-down in our current human world. A veritable chaos from where, perhaps when we expect it least, a new harmony will rise: the supramental and solar Harmony. The tragedy staged by Mind is coming to an end and all actors start wandering, lost like many characters in search of an author. It is indeed time to drop all masks and finally witness the first, luminous verse written on the great Book of the World, the epic of Love!

In our dark age we are going through all sorts of collective initiatory phases, involving our descent to chaos and our rebirth. It is often precisely in the anguish of our current world that the most profound meanings of what is happening does manifest. “The stifling of the individual may well be the stifling of the god in man.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga).

We all live, although mostly ignorant of it, in the age of the greatest revolution ever attempted: a veritable world coup against the ancient ruler, His Lordship the Mental who, as time goes by, sees his once-so-solid throne swaying dangerously. “Mind has not been able to change human nature radically. You can go on changing human institu­tions infinitely and yet the imperfection will break through all your institutions. [...] It must be a Power that can not only resist but overcome that downward pull.” (Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo).

Mind must, at this point in our evolution, leave room for a greater divinity, whose light is intrinsic and not a reflection. Unfortunately, as we all know, sovereigns are not usually very keen on being overthrown.

May this be the actual meaning of that unique and mostly enigmatic Rigvedic hymn describing the conflict of Indra and Uṣas? Why should the god Indra hurl himself against Uṣas’ chariot, the same divine Dawn whom he had previously helped? Indra, as we discussed, represents the Power of Mind and his duty is starting, not accomplishing. His appearance was necessary for certain realities to emerge, so that a first sparkle of self-awareness could filter through the fissures in the thick walls of the unconscious. After that, he would need to leave room for the auroral invasion of light. It was not Indra, after all, who gave order to Nature. A precise cosmic order (ṛtam) already existed, and also there was the Mountain between Heaven and Earth, although it kept its secrets well, hidden inside its womb. Indra’s task was to cut the Mountain open (vi parvato jihīta) and to create a bridge between the unconscious animal divinity and the conscious divinity of a god. This bridge or, better, this narrow boardwalk, is the mental being we all are. Having completed his task, Indra would be replaced by a child god, Skanda. Indra, however, is not really willing to give away his throne: he attacks Uṣas’ chariot, to try to get everything to remain unchanged so that he can reign for longer. Would the Sun-god allow Indra’s victory over his daughter and his own bright herds?

Millennia have passed since the Vedic Rishis physically lived on this earth, and yet they were able to fathom the possibility of a divine transformation of matter. They discovered the “honeycomb under the rock” of material unconsciousness and, today, we can see how accurate those Vedic images were: when spiritual experience manages to join with the most material sphere, the physical body concretely perceives a rocky fragment under his feet, it feels a surge flowing around him from everywhere and the sun over him from above: these are all real experiences, much more real than physical stone, water or sun. Vedic ṛṣis eventually disappeared and took their secret with them: clearly humanity was not ready yet. So much time needed to pass since then, so much blood has been shed, so many miseries. Today we can touch, or anyway we are about to, the bottom of the absurdity and the horror comes to the surface everywhere in all its repulsing ugliness.

All the sewers which we carefully kept sealed underground for centuries have now been flung open and revealed: apokálypsis! The 20th century ended with many burning questions unsolved: gas chambers, greenhouse effect, oil wells on fire, GMOs, scorched ecosystems, the exploitation of resources, children and women. From the beginning of history until the 19th century, it has been estimated, there were forty million human victims; in the 20th century alone they have numbered one hundred and ten million! Moreover these figures do not account for all animal victims, the many currently endangered species nor the cruelty we use against our animal brothers (the mad cow syndrome is but an example of our lack of respect). And again what about all the trees we took down (even in the wonderful, drastically reduced Amazonian forest): are they not, too, admirable life forms worth of our respect? We must most surely be in that age of executioners envisioned by Rimbaud — voici venir les temps de assassins. Correct: Barbarity in broad daylight… and for all budgets! Sri Aurobindo pointed out in 1909: “the end of a stage of evolution is usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evo­lution” (Karmayogin).

Of course we do not mean to sound millenarian and we do not believe in the end of the world. Moreover the homo technologicus has taken over and the future of this planet seems to be his! Meanwhile a few prigs (old brontosaurs, endangered as well) try to convince us that the solution is to restore old moral values despite their being agonising and buried under the ruins of this cataclysm: to hell with both of them! Revolutionaries still are the salt of the earth.

“As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise, up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history of mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. But always these resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity).

The air is growing unbreathable and a rotting stink exhales from a million cadaveric ideas and from the nth inconclusive bestseller (the dead are asking dead books for another dead, quoting Saba). It should not be long before the end of this falsehood, looking at its paroxysm which is now visible everywhere. “This material world of ours, besides its fully embodied things of the present, is peopled by such powerful shadows, ghosts of things dead and the spirit of things yet unborn. The ghosts of things dead are very troublesome actualities and they now abound, ghosts of dead religions, dead arts, dead moralities, dead political theories, which still claim either to keep their rotting bodies or to animate partly the existing body of things. Repeating obstinately their sacred formulas of the past, they hypnotise backward-looking minds and daunt even the progressive portion of humanity. But there are too those unborn spirits which are still unable to take a definite body, but are already mind-born and exist as influences of which the human mind is aware and to which it now responds in a desultory and confused fashion.” (Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity). Eric Hobsbwan, considered by many the greatest 20th century historian, seems to echo those very words in Age of Extremes, the Short 20th Century: “If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness”.

It is time for SOMETHING ELSE.

Indeed, precisely because everything is falling apart, we have the privilege of living in the most fecund era of all history. We should not forget that, in fact, the end of man corresponds to the beginning of a new species. The Kālīsantarana Upaniṣad maintains that many spiritual researchers of past ages expressed the desire to be born again in this current Kali-Yuga, because in this way their spiritual growth would develop a hundred times faster than in their era. As human beings we tend to a contrary interpretation of signs and so we are worried by the absurdities, the desperations and the foolishness popping up from every corner of this world which becomes every day more unliveable. And yet, were we able to see clearly, we would realise that such darkness is but the harbinger of the coming dawn: “It is the work of the Kali Yuga to destroy everything by questioning everything in order to establish after a struggle between the forces of purity and impurity a new harmony of life and knowledge in another Satyayuga”, as Sri Aurobindo wrote, acutely, around 1912 (Kena and Other Upanishads).

And, in Savitri, he added:

“Or we may find when all the rest has failed

Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.”

[I.II.X.652-653]

And he goes on, announcing the glorious imminence:

“When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast,

And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp,

As a thief’s in the night shall be the covert tread

Of one who steps unseen into his house.

A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,

A Power into mind’s inner chamber steal,

A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors

And beauty conquer the resisting world,

The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,

A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss

And earth grow unexpectedly divine.”

[I.I.IV.321-331]

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