Integral Yoga

Having spent nearly my whole first day getting a crash course on the Mother, by my second afternoon I was ready to get back to Sri Aurobindo. Reading about his extraordinary life had been one thing. But now, finally, I was going to get a chance to meet someone who had actually known him. Well, sort of. My appointment that afternoon was with a man Sri Aurobindo had named Amal Kiran, or "the Clear Ray," a widely loved and highly respected poet, author, and cultural critic more commonly known as K. D. Sethna, who had moved to the ashram in 1927. Having arrived on the scene when there were still only a handful of disciples, one would naturally assume that Amal would have had a close personal relationship with the Master. So when he told me that he had never actually heard Sri Aurobindo's voice, I was slightly taken aback. Until I remembered reading that Sri Aurobindo withdrew into seclusion in 1926, and after that, no one except the Mother, the occasional visiting V.I.P., and a handful of physicians who helped him recover after an injury had heard his voice. In those days, if you wanted to have a relationship with Sri Aurobindo beyond the thrice-yearly darshans [audiences with the Master], there was only one way to do it. You wrote letters to him. And, at least most of the time, he wrote back. Amal, I would learn, had been one of the ones who wrote the most. In fact, being a poet of high repute himself, he had the good fortune to enter into an ongoing correspondence with Sri Aurobindo about the creation of the Master's epic poem, Savitri. And Amal, with Sri Aurobindo's help, had also cultivated the art of writing "overhead poetry," although, as he would confess, he hadn't quite been able to write from the very highest planes of consciousness.

Now ninety-seven, Amal was, without a doubt, the most radiant presence I would meet during my time there. Realizing at the outset that I was talking with someone who had been doing Integral Yoga for seventy-five years, I didn't waste time on history or philosophy. What is the essence of the practice? I wanted to know. Amal didn't hesitate for a second.

"This path has to be approached in a spirit of complete spiritual self-surrender," he explained. "It is not an individual achievement, but a lending of oneself to what the Supreme Divine wants. And in the daily functions, remember the Divine, and offer yourself to the Divine. And along that path of self-giving, it is the Divine who will decide how far you will go. One must approach the Divine with a spirit that says: 'Whatever You want, do. Make me what You want me to be, and not what I might dream of being.' The yoga has to be in that spirit."

Over the course of my conversation with Amal that afternoon, which ranged widely across the territory of Integral Yoga, for the first time I began to get a sense of how much it really takes to practice this comprehensive path that Sri Aurobindo had deemed "more difficult than any other."

My talk with Amal had run right through the ashram dinner hour, and desperate for some Western food, I took my chances at one of the Italian restaurants along the oceanfront. Halfway through one of the wateriest plates of fettuccine I've ever encountered, my phone rang again. Sure enough, it was the home team.

"I'm meeting some incredible people," I started off. "Remember K. D. Sethna, or Amal Kiran—the famous Indian writer I told you about who was a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and who had that long-standing correspondence with Father Bede Griffiths, the revered Christian sannyasin? We spent an hour together this afternoon, and he was beautiful. Ninety-seven years old, more or less immobilized in a wheelchair at the ashram nursing home, but totally present, awake, sharp as a razor, and radiating something extraordinary. I mean, the presence in the room by the end of our talk was profound."

"What did you talk about?" Elizabeth asked.

"Integral Yoga. I think I'm getting a better handle on it. You know how we've never been able to quite get what Integral Yoga was?"

"Yeah," they responded.

"Well, I think it's because we were trying to find some sort of list of practices. But there isn't one."

"Yoga without practice? It must be easy to get people to sign up for that!" Andrew joked.

"No, it's not that they don't do practices. I think pretty much everybody does some sort of practice, be it meditation or mantra or contemplation or what have you. But the point is that it's not about the practices per se. It's about a whole orientation toward life. Sri Aurobindo's goal was to bring about the total transformation of the human being on every level, and likewise the transformation of life as a whole, so he created what he called 'a world-changing or Nature-changing yoga,' an approach to the spiritual path that could be applied to every aspect of life."

"What does that mean practically?" Amy wanted to know.

"Well, as I understand it, Integral Yoga is basically a set of principles to guide one all the time, in every circumstance. I mean, he's written about it in various ways, and there are many dimensions to it, but in its essence, it's actually simple. It comes down to three things, which he called aspiration, rejection, and surrender. So first, you have to aspire one-pointedly to realize the Divine with your whole being. And although this aspiration can start as simply a mental act of will and intention, it ultimately has to come from a much deeper place, from your own soul's longing for that divine perfection. Then, when he speaks of rejection, he's saying that you have to reject anything that arises within you or outside of you that would obstruct the fulfillment of your aspiration. Granted, at first the subtlety of what to reject and what not to reject might not be so obvious. But if your aspiration is genuine, you will fairly quickly come to a place where it's easy to see directly what is a help and what is a hindrance. And then your aspiration is tested because you have to be willing to make the right choice."

"So where does surrender fit into the equation?" Carter asked.

"Well, according to him, surrender is the most important of the three. Because the whole point of Integral Yoga, in the end, is to become a pure vehicle so that a Higher Force can take over and begin to live in you and through you. He's very precise on this point. He says it's not enough to want to open yourself up to the Divine Power, to want to experience its glory. You have to want to become its willing servant. Because, as he sees it, the Divine Consciousness has its own will, its own law, in a sense, in accord with the highest Truth, and in the end the only way we can create a truly divine life is to live by that perfectly, to be wholly given over to that—and not in any passive way, but actively surrendered to it, giving our whole life to it."

"You're right—it is powerful," Amy said. "Simple, but profound."

"Yeah. And where this gets really interesting," I continued, "is where he starts talking about transformation. To Sri Aurobindo, there were three distinct transformations that had to happen: the psychic, the spiritual, and the supramental. I don't get the supramental transformation yet, so I'm not even going to try to explain it. And the spiritual transformation is, I think, what most of us probably have in mind when we speak about enlightenment or Self-realization. It's the realization of the Infinite, the Absolute Self, or Ground of Being. But there's something unique about what he calls the psychic transformation, particularly in relationship to evolution. For Sri Aurobindo, this was the key to the whole path."

"Apparently, when he first started teaching, and for several years after that, he used to teach people in the way he had been taught, by trying to get them to have the experience of the silent mind, presumably hoping that this would lead to the same kind of breakthrough into nirvana and beyond that happened to him. But in the mid-1920s, based on his findings after working with people for several years, he shifted his emphasis radically. In that shift, he started to emphasize, as the first and foremost priority, the discovery of what he called the 'psychic being' or 'soul.' Now the word 'soul,' particularly these days, is used to refer to all kinds of different things. But Sri Aurobindo meant something very specific. He was basically saying that there is an individual spark or seed of the Divine in each of us, what could be called our true self or, as he sometimes said, 'true being.' And although this true being is usually obscured or veiled by the outer personality and ego identity, its promptings can be felt even in that veiled state as our own spiritual impulses or aspirations. What's significant about this psychic being is that, according to him, because its nature is the Divine itself, not only does it want us to evolve toward perfection, but it knows the way to get there perfectly. This is why he put so much emphasis on it. Because once the soul, or psychic being, comes forward or emerges in the individual, there is a natural dynamic aspiration that overrides all of the resistances of the ego and lower nature. It's like the ego gets kicked out of the driver's seat and God takes over the wheel, as you. And once that happens, the path changes completely. Then one is aspiring and evolving ever upward. It's clear which choices will take one in that direction, and all the passion and interest is there to make the right choices. So from there, he felt the rest of the path could unfold organically and without much difficulty. In my interview with Amal, he couldn't stop talking about this. I could tell that for him this had been what had changed everything. He said it's like a shift into a completely different dimension. And when I asked him what his ongoing experience is now, he just said there is 'a warmth and a glow in the heart center,' and you could feel it coming out of him."

After a brief silence, Carter spoke up. "It's a serious teaching and Amal sounds like quite a guy. It seems like Sri Aurobindo had a big effect on people."

"It sure does," Andrew agreed. "Well, from the sound of things, you're already in deep. Why don't you see if you can get a sense of the 'supramental,' and let's talk again tomorrow night."