The Tao,Nirvana,And Non Being

EVENING

PURANI: J asks: Is there a universal plane called the universal psychic, like the universal vital or the universal mental? He thinks of the psychic as being only individual.
SRI AUROBINDO: It is a mistake to suppose that the psychic is only individual or consists only of individuality. There is a universal psychic like the rest.
PURANI: Is it there that the soul retires after leaving the body and gathers material for a new birth?
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes.
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PURANI: He also asks how the distinction is made in The Life Divine between Being and Non-being. Does the Non-Being come after Overmind - or before it?
SRI AUROBINDO: Why is he particular about the Non-Being? You arrive at the Non-Being by following the negative path. That is to say, when you start from mind, I mean spiritual mind, you come or open yourself to the experience of Nirvana. This Nirvana is the negation of all that the mind can affirm as the Being but it is only a gate of entry into the Absolute. From this Nirvana you can either take up the negative or the affirmative path. By the negative you reach the Non-Being or what the Gita calls anirdeshyam (the intermediate). This Non-Being is the Buddhists Nirvana or Chinese Tao. The Buddhists consider it as Shunya, the Void, while to the Taoists this void, contains everything. Again, this Nirvana is not the same as the Brahmanirvana of the Gita.
By following the affirmative path you arrive at the Supermind and pass through it to the Sachchidananda . In my own case, I passed to the supermind from a Nirvana which was not of the Buddhist type but a state of mere being with the most indispensable positive element. The Goraknath people also follow this affirmative way.
From the point of view of realisation, there are three aspects of Brahmana - Atman or self, Purusha or Soul, Ishwara or God. The Adwaitins negate both Purusha and Ishwara and arrive at the unity of the Atman and Brahman. The Buddhists negate all the three aspects and arrive at Non-Being.

When the others had gone, Purani brought up again the subject of Non-Being.

PURANI: Did you say the other day that by following the affirmative way one also arrives at Non-Being? I was not very clear about it.
SRI AUROBINDO: (with a surprised look): No. Only by the negative path you arrive at Non-Being, or what the Gita calls the Indeterminate. As I said, it is the same as in Taoism and Buddhism. But it is not really Nothing. What we can say is that no attribute of Being can be posited of it. Taoism says that Non-Being is Everything rather than Nothing. By the affirmative path you come through Supermind to Sachchidananda which is both static and dynamic, while through the negative path you come to Non-Being.
PURANI: Then the the negative path doesn't lead to Sachchidananda.
SRI AUROBINDO: No.
NIRODBARAN: Is Non-Being the final stage of the negative path or does one pass through it to something else?
SRI AUROBINDO: Non-Being is only a term of the mind to express the Supreme Existence. It is the Buddhists' way of expressing the Supreme they contact. In reality it is nothing but an aspect of the Supreme. What is called the Indeterminate is not really indeterminate. It can be called so because it is not limited or confined to any one determination, not because it is incapable of
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any determination. That is what I have tried to show in The Life Divine.
PURANI: In fact, it is the source of infinite determination. How is Non-Being related to the Supermind, etc., of the affirmative way?
SRI AUROBINDO: Both are gates to the Absolute. Non-Being is an aspect of the Absolute. When you enter the Absolute you can't describe it.

Beyond Nirvana

In our yoga the Nirvana is the beginning of the higher Truth, as it is the passage from the Ignorance to the higher Truth. The Ignorance has to be extinguished in order that the Truth may manifest.

I don't think I have written, but I said once that souls which have passed into Nirvana may (not “must”) return to complete the larger upward curve. I have written somewhere, I think, that for this yoga (it might also be added, in the natural complete order of the manifestation) the experience of Nirvana can only be a stage or passage to the complete realisation. I have said also that there are many doors by which one can pass into the realisation of the Absolute (Parabrahman), and Nirvana is one of them, but by no means the only one. You may remember Ramakrishna's saying that the Jivakoti can ascend the stairs, but not return, while the Ishwarakoti can ascend and descend at will. If that is so, the Jivakoti might be those who describe only the curve from Matter through Mind into the silent Brahman and the Ishwarakoti those who get to the integral Reality and can therefore combine the Ascent with the Descent and contain the “two ends” of existence in their single being.

The realisation of this yoga is not lower but higher than Nirvana or Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

If Buddha really combated and denied all Vedantic conceptions of the Self, then it can be no longer true that Buddha refrained
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from all metaphysical speculations or distinct pronouncements as to the nature of the ultimate Reality. The view you take of his conception of Nirvana seems to concur with the Mahayanist interpretation and its conception of the Permanent, dhruvam, which could be objected to as a later development like the opposite Nihilistic conception of the Shunyam. What Buddha very certainly taught was that the world is not-Self and that the individual has no true existence since what does exist in the world is a stream of impermanent consciousness from moment to moment and the individual person is fictitiously constituted by a bundle of samskāras and can be dissolved by dissolving the bundle. This is in conformity with the Vedantic Monistic view that there is no true separate individual. As to the other Vedantic view of the one Self, impersonal and universal and transcendent, it does not seem that Buddha made any distinct and unmistakable pronouncement on abstract and metaphysical questions; but if the world or all in the world is not-Self, anātman, there can be no more room for a universal Self, only at most for a transcendent Real Being. His conception of Nirvana was of something transcendent of the universe, but he did not define what it was because he was not concerned with any abstract metaphysical speculations about the Reality; he must have thought them unnecessary and irrelevant and any indulgence in them likely to divert from the true object. His explanation of things was psychological and not metaphysical and his methods were all psychological, – the breaking up of the false associations of consciousness which cause the continuance of desire and suffering, so getting rid of the stream of birth and death in a purely phenomenal (not unreal) world; the method of life by which this liberation could be effected was also a psychological method, the eightfold path developing right understanding and right action. His object was pragmatic and severely practical and so were his methods; metaphysical speculations would only draw the mind away from the one thing needful...READ MORE

Wu Wei

29 August 1956



I suppose most of you come on Fridays to listen to the reading of Wu Wei. If you have listened, you will remember that something's said there about being “spontaneous”, and that the true way of living the true life is to live spontaneously.

What Lao Tse calls spontaneous is this: instead of being moved by a personal will — mental, vital or physical — one ought to stop all outer effort and let oneself be guided and moved by what the Chinese call Tao which they identify with the Godhead — or God or the Supreme Principle or the Origin of all things or the creative Truth, indeed all possible human notions of the Divine and the goal to be attained...READ MORE

To be spontaneous means not to think out, organise, decide and make an effort to realise with the personal will.

I am going to give you two examples to make you understand what true spontaneity is. One — you all know about it undoubtedly — is of the time Sri Aurobindo began writing the Arya,¹ in 1914. It was neither a mental knowledge nor even a mental creation which he transcribed: he silenced his mind and sat at the typewriter, and from above, from the higher planes, all that had to be written came down, all ready, and he had only to move his fingers on the typewriter and it was transcribed. It was in this state of mental silence which allows the knowledge — and even the expression — from above to pass through that he wrote the whole Arya, with its sixty-four printed pages a month. This is why, besides, he could do it, for if it had been a mental work of construction it would have been quite impossible.

Brahmavidya-The Science Of Knowing Brahman

WHEN MEN SEEK AFTER THE IMMUTABLE,THE INDETERMINABLE,THE UNMANIFEST,THE ALL PERFADING,THE UNTHINKABLE,THE SUMMIT,THE IMMOBILE,THE PERMENANT,EQUAL IN MIND TO ALL,INTENT ON THE GOOD OF ALL BEINGS,IT IS TO ME THAT THEY COME