The Synthesis of Yoga
VOLUMES 23 and 24
THE COMPEETE WORKS OE SRI AUROBINDO
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1999
Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
The Synthesis of Yoga
Publisher’s Note
The Synthesis of Yoga first appeared serially in the monthly review Arya between August 1914 and January 1921. Each instalment was written immediately before its publication. The work was left incomplete when the Arya was discontinued. Sri Aurobindo never attempted to complete the Synthesis-, he did, however, lightly revise the Introduction, thoroughly revise all of Part I, “The Yoga of Divine Works”, and significantly revise several chapters of Part II, “The Yoga of Integral Knowledge”. More than thirty years elapsed between the first appearance of the Synthesis in the Arya and the final stages of its incomplete revision. As a result, there are some differences of terminology between the revised and unrevised portions of the book.
In 1948 the chapters making up “The Yoga of Divine Works” were published as a book by the Sri Aurobindo Library, Madras. No other part of The Synthesis of Yoga appeared in book-form during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime. In 1955 an edition comprising the Introduction and four Parts was brought out by the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre. The present edition, which has been checked against all manuscripts and printed texts, includes for the first time the author’s revisions to the Introduction and Chapters XV -XVII of Part II, and an incomplete continuation of Part IV entitled “The Supramental Time Consciousness”.
Introduction
Theconditionsofthe Synthesis
Chapter I
Life and Yoga 5
Chapter II
The Three Steps of Nature 9
Chapter III
The Threefold Life 20
Chapter IV
The Systems of Yoga 31
Chapter V
The Synthesis of the Systems 41
Part I
The Yoga of Divine Works
Chapter I
The Four Aids 53
Chapter II
Self- Consecration 69
Chapter III
Self- Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita 89
Chapter IV
The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice 106
Chapter V
The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1 The Works of Knowledge — The Psychic Being
Chapter VI
The Works of Love — The Works of Life
Chapter VII
Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
Chapter VIII
The Supreme Will
Chapter IX
Equality and the Annihilation of Ego
Chapter X
The Three Modes of Nature
Chapter XI
The Master of the Work
Chapter XII
The Divine Work
Appendix to Part I
Chapter XIII
The Supermind and the Yoga of Works
Part Ii
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
Chapter I
The Object of Knowledge
Chapter II
The Status of Knowledge
Chapter III
The Purified Understanding
Chapter IV
Concentration
Chapter V
Renunciation
Chapter VI
The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge
Chapter VII
The Release from Subjection to the Body
Chapter VIII
The Release from the Heart and the Mind
Chapter IX
The Release from the Ego
Chapter X
The Realisation of the Cosmic Self
Chapter XI
The Modes of the Self
Chapter XII
The Realisation of Sachchidananda
Chapter XIII
The Difficulties of the Mental Being
Chapter XIV
The Passive and the Active Brahman
Chapter XV
The Cosmic Consciousness
Chapter XVI
Oneness
Chapter XVII
The Soul and Nature
Chapter XVIII
The Soul and Its Liberation
Chapter XIX
The Planes of Our Existence
Chapter XX
The Lower Triple Purusha
Chapter XXI
The Ladder of Self-Transcendence
Chapter XXII
Vijnana or Gnosis
Chapter XXIII
The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis
Chapter XXIV
Gnosis and Ananda
Chapter XXV
The Higher and the Lower Knowledge
Chapter XXVI
Samadhi
Chapter XXVII
Hathayoga
Chapter XXVIII
Rajayoga
Part Iii
The Yoga of Divine Love
Chapter I
Love and the Triple Path
Chapter II
The Motives of Devotion
Chapter III
The Godward Emotions
Chapter IV
The Way of Devotion
Chapter V
The Divine Personality
Chapter VI
The Delight of the Divine
Chapter VII
The Ananda Brahman
Chapter VIII
The Mystery of Love
Part Iv
The Yoga of Self-Perfection
Chapter I
The Principle of the Integral Yoga
Chapter II
The Integral Perfection
Chapter III
The Psychology of Self-Perfection
Chapter IV
The Perfection of the Mental Being
Chapter V
The Instruments of the Spirit
Chapter VI
Purification — The Lower Mentality
Chapter VII
Purification — Intelligence and Will
Chapter VIII
The Liberation of the Spirit
Chapter IX
The Liberation of the Nature
Chapter X
The Elements of Perfection
Chapter XI
The Perfection of Equality
Chapter XII
The Way of Equality
Chapter XIII
The Action of Equality
Chapter XIV
The Power of the Instruments 729
Chapter XV
Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality 740
Chapter XVI
The Divine Shakti 752
Chapter XVII
The Action of the Divine Shakti 762
Chapter XVIII
Faith and Shakti 771
Chapter XIX
The Nature of the Supermind 783
Chapter XX
The Intuitive Mind 799
Chapter XXI
The Gradations of the Supermind 811
Chapter XXII
The Supramental Thought and Knowledge 825
Chapter XXIII
The Supramental Instruments — Thought-Process 841
Chapter XXIV
The Supramental Sense 862
Chapter XXV
Towards the Supramental Time Vision 885
Appendix to Part IV Chapter XXVI
The Supramental Time Consciousness 907
The Synthesis of Yoga
“All life is Yoga.”
Sri Aurobindo in 1950
Introduction
The Conditions of the Synthesis
Chapter I
Life and Yoga
There are two necessities of Nature’s workings which seem always to intervene in the greater forms of human activity, whether these belong to our ordinary fields of movement or seek those exceptional spheres and fulfilments which appear to us high and divine. Every such form tends to¬ wards a harmonised complexity and totality which again breaks apart into various channels of special effort and tendency, only to unite once more in a larger and more puissant synthesis. Sec¬ ondly, development into forms is an imperative rule of effective manifestation; yet all truth and practice too strictly formulated becomes old and loses much, if not all, of its virtue; it must be constantly renovated by fresh streams of the spirit revivifying the dead or dying vehicle and changing it, if it is to acquire a new life. To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality. We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are being subjected to a supreme test and given their opportunity of rebirth. The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuve¬ nated and changed for a fresh term of existence. Indian Yoga, in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the se¬ cret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and utilities. But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
The Conditions of the Synthesis
the profoundest reason of its being in that general truth and that unceasing aim of Nature which it represents, and find by virtue of this new self-knowledge and self-appreciation its own recov¬ ered and larger synthesis. Reorganising itself, it will enter more easily and powerfully into the reorganised life of the race which its processes claim to lead within into the most secret penetralia and upward to the highest altitudes of existence and personality.
In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and — highest condi¬ tion of victory in that effort — a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises self- conscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained. Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compressing one’s evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few months of bodily existence. A given system of Yoga, then, can be no more than a selection or a compression, into narrower but more energetic forms of intensity, of the gen¬ eral methods which are already being used loosely, largely, in a leisurely movement, with a profuser apparent waste of material and energy but with a more complete combination by the great Mother in her vast upward labour. It is this view of Yoga that can alone form the basis for a sound and rational synthesis of Yogic methods. For then Yoga ceases to appear something mystic and abnormal which has no relation to the ordinary processes of the World-Energy or the purpose she keeps in view in her two great movements of subjective and objective self- fulfilment; it reveals itself rather as an intense and exceptional use of powers that she has already manifested or is progressively
Life and Yoga
organising in her less exalted but more general operations.
Yogic methods have something of the same relation to the customary psychological workings of man as has the scientific handling of the force of electricity or of steam to their normal operations in Nature. And they, too, like the operations of Sci¬ ence, are formed upon a knowledge developed and confirmed by regular experiment, practical analysis and constant result. All Rajayoga, for instance, depends on this perception and experi¬ ence that our inner elements, combinations, functions, forces, can be separated or dissolved, can be new-combined and set to novel and formerly impossible workings or can be transformed and resolved into a new general synthesis by fixed internal processes. Hathayoga similarly depends on this perception and experience that the vital forces and functions to which our life is normally subjected and whose ordinary operations seem set and indispensable, can be mastered and the operations changed or suspended with results that would otherwise be impossible and that seem miraculous to those who have not seized the rationale of their process. And if in some other of its forms this character of Yoga is less apparent, because they are more intuitive and less mechanical, nearer, like the Yoga of Devotion, to a supernal ecstasy or, like the Yoga of Knowledge, to a supernal infinity of consciousness and being, yet they too start from the use of some principal faculty in us by ways and for ends not contemplated in its everyday spontaneous workings. All methods grouped under the common name of Yoga are special psychological processes founded on a fixed truth of Nature and developing, out of nor¬ mal functions, powers and results which were always latent but which her ordinary movements do not easily or do not often manifest.
But as in physical knowledge the multiplication of scientific processes has its disadvantages, as that tends, for instance, to develop a victorious artificiality which overwhelms our natural human life under a load of machinery and to purchase cer¬ tain forms of freedom and mastery at the price of an increased servitude, so the preoccupation with Yogic processes and their exceptional results may have its disadvantages and losses. The