(Excerpts from Shree Aurobindo's letters written to his disciples.)
I
Surely for the earth-consciousness the very fact that the Divine manifests himself is the greatest of all splendours.Consider the obscurity here and what it would be if the Divine did not directly intervene and the Light of Lights did not break out of the obscurity - for that is the meaning of the manifestation.An incarnation is the Divine Consciousness and Being manifesting through the body. It is possible from any plane.It is the omnipresent cosmic Divine who supports the action of the universe; if there is an Incarnation, it does not in the least diminish the cosmic Presence and the cosmic action in the three or thirty million universes.The Descending Power (Avatar) chooses its own place, body and time for the manifestation. The Avatar is necessary when a special work is to be done and in crises of the evolution. The Avatar is a special manifestation while for the rest of the time it is the Divine working within the ordinary human limits as a Vibhuti.
Avatar hood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it was, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the over mental superman.Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development - Krishna opens the possibility of over mind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.As for the lives in between the Avatar lives, it must be remembered that Krishna speaks of many lives in the past, not only a few supreme ones, and secondly that while he speaks of himself as the Divine, in one passage he describes himself as a Vibhuti, vrisnînâm vâsudevah. We may therefore fairly assume that in many lives he manifested as the Vibhuti veiling the fuller Divine Consciousness. If we admit that the object of Avatar hood is to lead the evolution, this is quite reasonable, the Divine appearing as Avatar in the great transitional stages and as Vibhutis to aid the lesser transitions.I was of course dealing with the ten Avatars as a “parable of the evolution”, and only explaining the interpretation we can put on it from that point of view.I only took the Puranic list of Avatars and interpreted it as a parable of evolution, so as to show that the idea of evolution is implicit behind the theory of Avatar hood. Whether the Divine in manifesting his Avatar hood could choose to follow the line of evolution from the lowest scale, manifesting on each scale as a Vibhuti is a question again to which the answer is not inevitably in the negative. If we accept the evolutionary idea, such a thing may have its place.Krishna is not the supramental Light. The descent of Krishna would mean the descent of the over mind Godhead preparing, though not itself actually, the descent of super mind and Ananda. Krishna is the Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the over mind leading it towards the Ananda.One can be the head of a spiritual organization or the Messiah of a religion or an Avatar without in this life reaching the super mind and beyond.But each being in a new birth prepares a new mind, life and body - otherwise John Smith would always be John Smith and would have no chance of being Piyusha Kanti Ghose. Of course inside there are old personalities contributing to the new life - but I am speaking of the new visible personality, the outer man, mental, vital, physical. It is the psychic being that keeps the link from birth to birth and makes all the manifestations of the same person. It is therefore to be expected that the Avatar should take on a new personality each time, a personality suited for the new times, work, surroundings. In my own view of things, however, the new personality has a series of Avatar births behind him, births in which the intermediate evolution has been followed and assisted from age to age.
An Avatar, roughly speaking, is one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action; he feels identified inwardly with this divine power and presence.A Vibhuti is supposed to embody some power of the Divine and is enabled by it to act with great force in the world, but that is all that is necessary to make him a Vibhuti: the power may be very great, but the consciousness is not that of an inborn or indwelling Divinity. This is the distinction we can gather from the Gita, which is the main authority on this subject.If we follow this distinction, we can confidently say from what is related of them that Rama and Krishna can be accepted as Avatars; Buddha figures as such although with a more impersonal consciousness of the Power within him. Ramakrishna voiced the same consciousness when he spoke of Him who was Rama and who was Krishna being within him. But Chaitanya's case is peculiar; for according to the accounts he ordinarily felt and declared himself a bhakta of Krishna and nothing more, but in great moments he manifested Krishna, grew luminous in mind and body and was Krishna himself and spoke and acted as the Lord. His contemporaries saw in him an Avatar of Krishna, a manifestation of the Divine Love.Shankara and Vivekananda were certainly Vibhutis; they cannot be reckoned as more, though as Vibhutis they were very great.
II
There are two sides of the phenomenon of Avatar hood, the Divine Consciousness and the instrumental personality. The Divine Consciousness is omnipotent but it has put forth the instrumental personality in Nature under the conditions of Nature and it uses it according to the rules of the game - though also sometimes to change the rules of the game. If Avatar hood is only a flashing miracle, then I have no use for it. If it is a coherent part of the arrangement of the omnipotent Divine in Nature, then I can understand and accept it.
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I have said that the Avatar is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness - if nobody can follow the Way, and there is no possibility of following because of the conceptions that the struggles and sufferings of the Avatar are unreal and all humbug, and there is no possibility of struggle for one who represents the Divine. Such a conception in my opinion makes nonsense of the whole idea of Avatar hood; there is then no reason in it, no necessity in it, no meaning in it. The Divine being all-powerful can lift people up without bothering to come down on earth. It is only if it is a part of the world-arrangement that he should take upon himself the burden of humanity and open the Way that Avatar hood has any meaning.The Avatar is not supposed to act in a non-human way - he takes up human action and uses human methods with the human consciousness in front and the Divine behind. If he did not his taking a human body would have no meaning and would be of no use to anybody. He could just as well have stayed above and done things from there.
As for the Divine and the human, that also is a mind-made difficulty. The Divine is there in the human, and the human fulfilling and exceeding its highest aspirations and tendencies becomes the Divine. When the Divine descends, he takes upon himself the burden of humanity in order to exceed it - he becomes human in order to show humanity how to become Divine. But that cannot be if there is only a weakling without any divine Presence within or divine Force behind him - he has to be strong in order to put his strength into all who are willing to receive it. There is therefore in him a double element - human in front, Divine behind - and it is that which gives the impression of unfathomableness. If you look upon the human alone, looking with the external eye only and not willing or ready to see anything else, you will see a human being only - if you look for the Divine, you will find the Divine.It is impossible for the limited human reason to judge the way or purpose of the Divine, - which is the way of the Infinite dealing with the finite.It is not by your mind that you can hope to understand the Divine and its action, but by the growth of a true and divine consciousness within you. If the Divine were to unveil and reveal itself in all its glory, the mind might feel a Presence, but it would not understand its action or its nature. It is in the measure of your own realization and by the birth and growth of that greater consciousness in yourself that you will see the Divine and understand its action even behind its terrestrial disguises.An Avatar or Vibhuti have the knowledge that is necessary for their work, they need not have more. There was absolutely no reason why Buddha should know what was going on in Rome. An Avatar even does not manifest all the Divine omniscience and omnipotence; he has not come for any such unnecessary display; all that is behind him but not in the front of his consciousness. As for the Vibhuti, the Vibhuti need not even know that he is a power of the Divine. Some Vibhutis like Julius Caesar for instance have been atheists. Buddha himself did not believe in a personal God, only in some impersonal and indescribable Permanent. Men's way of doing things well is through a clear mental connection; they see things and do things with the mind and what they want is a mental and human perfection. When they think of a manifestation of Divinity, they think it must be an extraordinary perfection in doing ordinary human things - an extraordinary business faculty, political, poetic or artistic faculty, an accurate memory, not making mistakes, not undergoing any defeat or failure. Or else they think of things, which they call superhuman like not eating food or telling cotton-futures or sleeping on nails or eating them. All that has nothing to do with manifesting the Divine.... These human ideas are false.The Divinity acts according to another consciousness, the consciousness of the Truth above and the Lila below and It acts according to the need of the Lila, not according to man's ideas of what It should or should not do. This is the first thing one must grasp; otherwise one can understand nothing about the manifestation of the Divine.
The Divine is in essence omnipotent, he can be omnipotent anywhere - whether in the supra mental or anywhere else. Because he chooses to limit or determine his action by conditions, it does not make him less omnipotent. His self-limitation is itself an act of omnipotence....
Why should the Divine be tied down to succeed in all his operations? What if failure suits him better and serves better the ultimate purpose? What rigid primitive notions are these about the Divine! Certain conditions have been established for the game and so long as those conditions remain unchanged certain things are not done, - so we say they are impossible, can't be done. If the conditions are changed then the same things are done or at least become licit - allowable, legal according to the so-called laws of Nature, and then we say they can be done. The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them, but he has to change them first, not proceed, while maintaining the conditions, to act by a series of miracle. The manifestation of the Divine in the Avatar is of help to man because it helps him to discover his own divinity and find the way to realize it. If the difference is so great that the humanity by its very nature prevents all possibility of following the way opened by the Avatar, it merely means that there is no divinity in man that can respond to the Divinity in the Avatar.
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I repeat, the Divine when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely and without any conjuring tricks or pretence. If he has something behind him which emerges always out of the coverings, it is the same thing in essence, even if greater in degree, that is behind others - and it is to awaken that that he is there....The psychic being does the same for all who are intended for the spiritual way - men need not be extraordinary beings to follow it.As for conventional morality, all morality is a convention - man cannot live without conventions, mental and moral, otherwise he feels himself lost in the rolling sea of nature. Only by rising above mind can one really get beyond conventions - Krishna was able to do it because he was not a mental human being but an over mental godhead acting freely out of a greater consciousness than man's. Rama was not that, he was the Avatar of the sattwic mind - mental, emotional, and moral - and he followed the Dharma of the age and race.
Vibhuti, Avatar are terms which have their own meaning and scope, and they are not concerned with morality or immorality, perfection or imperfection according to small human standards or setting an example to men or showing new moral attitudes or giving new spiritual teachings. These may or may not be done, but they are not at all the essence of the matter. An Avatar has to be taken as a whole in the setting of that particular time to give a divine meaning to its personality, deeds and works. If it is pulled out of it’s setting and analyzed under the dissecting knife of a modern ethical mind, it loses all its significance at once. Krishna so treated becomes a debauchee and trickster who no doubt did great things in politics - but so did Rama in war. Achilles and Odysseus pulled out of their setting become, one a furious egoistic savage, and the other a cruel and cunning savage. I consider myself under an obligation to enter into the spirit, significance, and atmosphere of the Mahabharata, Iliad, and Ramayana and identify myself with their time-spirit before I can feel what their heroes were in themselves apart from the details of their outer activities.
An Avatar is not at all bound to be a spiritual prophet - he is never in fact merely a prophet, he is a realize, an establisher - not of outward things only, though he does realize something in the outward also, but, as I have said, of something essential and radical needed for the terrestrial evolution which is the evolution of the embodied spirit through successive stages towards the Divine. It was not at all Ram’s business to establish the spiritual stage of that evolution - so he did not at all concern himself with that. His business was to destroy Ravana and to establish the Rama-rajya - in other words, to fix for the future the possibility of an order proper to the sattwic civilised human being who governs his life by the reason, the finer emotions, morality, or at least moral ideals, such as truth, obedience, co-operation and harmony, the sense of domestic and public order, - to establish this in a world still occupied by anarchic forces, the Animal mind and the powers of the vital Ego making its own satisfaction the rule of life, in other words, the Vanara and Rakshasa. This is the meaning of Rama and his life work and it is according as he fulfilled it or not that he must be judged as Avatar or no Avatar. It was not his business to play the comedy of the chivalrous Kshatriya with the formidable brute beast that was Bali, it was his business to kill him and get the Animal under his control. It was his business to be not necessarily a perfect, but a largely representative sattwic Man, a faithful husband and a lover, a loving and obedient son, a tender and perfect brother, father, friend - he is friend of all kinds of people, friend of the outcast Guhaka, friend of the Animal leaders, Sugriva, Hanuman, friend of the vulture Jatayu, friend of even Rakshasa Vibhishana. All that he was in a brilliant, striking but above all spontaneous and inevitable way, with a certain harmonious completeness. But most of all, it was his business to typify and establish the things on which the social idea and its stability depend, truth and honour, the sense of Dharma, public spirit and the sense of order. To the first, to truth and honour, much more than to his filial love and obedience to his father - though to that also - he sacrificed his personal rights as the elect of the King and the assembly and fourteen of the best years of his life and went into exile in the forests. To his public spirit and his sense of public order (the great and supreme civic virtue in the eyes of the ancient Indians, Greeks, Romans, for at that time the maintenance of the ordered community, not the separate development and satisfaction of the individual was the pressing need of the human evolution) he sacrificed his own happiness and domestic life and the happiness of Sita. In that he was at one with the moral sense of all the antique races, though at variance with the later romantic individualistic sentimental morality of the modern man who can afford to have that less stern morality just because the ancients sacrificed the individual in order to make the world safe for the spirit of social order. Finally, it was Rama's business to make the world safe for the ideal of the sattwic human being by destroying the sovereignty of Ravana, the Rakshasa menace. All this he did with such a divine afflatus in his personality and action that his figure has been stamped for more than two millenniums on the mind of Indian culture, and what he stood for has dominated the reason and idealizing mind of man in all countries, and in spite of the constant revolt of the human vital, is likely to continue to do so until a greater ideal arises. You may dethrone him now - for man is no longer satisfied with the sattwic ideal and is seeking for something more - but his work and meaning remain stamped on the past of the earth's evolving race. When I spoke of the gap that would be left by his absence, I did not mean a gap among the prophets and intellectuals, but a gap in the scheme of Avatar hood - there was somebody who was the Avatar of the sattwic Human as Krishna was the Avatar of the over mental Superman - I can see no one but Rama who can fill the place.Spiritual teachers and prophets (as also intellectuals, scientists, artists, poets, etc.) - these are at the greatest Vibhutis but they are not Avatars.
The unconscious Avatar--As for the unconscious Avatar, why not? Chaitanya is supposed to be an Avatar by the Vaishnavas, yet he was conscious of the Godhead behind only when that Godhead came in front and possessed him on rare occasions. Christ said, “I and my father are one”, but yet he always spoke and behaved as if there were a difference. Ramakrishna's earlier period was that of one seeking God, not aware from the first of his identity. These are the reputed religious Avatars who ought to be more conscious than a man of action like Rama. And supposing the full and permanent consciousness, why should the Avatar proclaim himself except on rare occasions to an Arjuna or to a few bhaktas or disciples? It is for others to find out what he is; though he does not deny when others speak of him as That, he is not always saying and perhaps never may say or only in moments like that of the Gita, “I am He.”
* * *
I start from the standpoint that ancient Avatars except Buddha were not either standards of perfection or spiritual teachers in spite of the Gita which was spoken, says Krishna, in a moment of supernormal consciousness which he lost immediately afterwards. They were, if I may say so, representative cosmic men who were instruments of a divine Intervention for fixing certain things in the evolution of the earth-race.
If you follow my line and don't insist on a high specifically spiritual consciousness for the Avatar. I shall point out what I mean by it.
By sattwic man I do not mean a moral or an always self-controlled one, but a predominantly mental (as opposed to a vital or merely physical man) who has rajasic emotions and passions, but lives predominantly according to his mind and its will and ideas. There is no such thing, I suppose, as a purely sattwic man - since the three gunas go always together in a state of unstable equilibrium. In my view Rama was a predominantly sattwic man and that is the value that Valmiki was conveying in Ramayana.By the way, a sattwic man can have a strong passion and strong anger - and when he lets the latter loose, the normally vicious fellow is simply nowhere. My own view is that Rama was not unconscious of his Avatar hood, only uncommunicative about it. Chaitanya also for the first part of his life was simply Nimai Pandit and had no consciousness of being anything else. Then he had his conversion and became the bhakta Chaitanya. This bhakta at times seemed to be possessed by the presence of Krishna, knew himself to be Krishna, spoke, moved and appeared with the light of the Godhead - none around him could think of or see him as anything else when he was in this glorified and transfigured condition. But from that he fell back to the ordinary consciousness of the bhakta and, as I have read in his biography, refused then to consider himself as anything more. These, I think, are the facts. Well, then what do they signify? Was he only Nimai Pandit at first? It is quite conceivable that he was so and the descent of the Godhead into him only took place after his conversion and spiritual change. But also afterwards when he was in his normal bhakta-consciousness, was he then no longer the Avatar? The rational explanation for this is that in the phenomenon of Avatar hood there is a Consciousness behind, at first veiled or sometimes perhaps half-veiled, which is that of the Godhead and a frontal consciousness, human or apparently human or at any rate with all the appearance of terrestriality which is the instrumental personality. In that case, it is possible that the secret Consciousness was all along there, but waited to manifest until after the conversion and it manifested intermittently because the main work of Chaitanya was to establish the type of a spiritual and psychic bhakti and love in the emotional vital part of man, preparing the vital in us in that way to turn towards the Divine - at any rate, to fix that possibility in the earth-nature. It was not that there had not been the emotional type of bhakti before; but the completeness of it, the élan, the vital's rapture in it had never manifested as it manifested in Chaitanya. But for that work it would never have done if he had always been in the Krishna consciousness; he would have been the Lord to whom all gave bhakti, but not the supreme example of the divine ecstatic bhakta. But still the occasional manifestation showed who he was and at the same time evidenced the mystic law of the Immanence. But, if Chaitanya, the frontal consciousness, the instrumental personality, was all the time the Avatar, yet except in his highest moments was unconscious of it and even denied it, that pushed a little farther would establish the possibility of what you call an unconscious Avatar, that is to say, of one in which the veiled consciousness might not come in front but always move the instrumental personality from behind.
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Conscious or unconscious, the value of Avatar hood depends on what value we attach to spiritual experience and to the data of other planes of consciousness, other than the physical, as also on the nature of the relations between the cosmic consciousness and the individual and collective consciousness of man. From the point of view of spiritual and occult Truth, what takes shape in the consciousness of man is a reflection and particular kind of formation, in a difficult medium, of things much greater in their light, power and beauty or in their force and range which came to it from the cosmic consciousness of which man is a limited and, in his present state of evolution, a still ignorant part.
* * *
For the human mind it is difficult to get across the border between mind and spirit without making a forceful rush or push along one line and that must be some line of pure experience.
It is also a fact that nobody can give you any spiritual realization which does not come from something in one's true Self, it is always the Divine who reveals himself and the Divine is within you; so He who reveals must be felt in your own heart.
* * *
The inner fruit of Avatar’s coming is gained by those who learn from it the true nature of the divine birth and divine works and who, growing full of him in their consciousness and taking refuge in him with their whole being, purified by the realizing force of their knowledge and delivered from the lower nature, attain to the divine being and divine nature.
Note- These excerpts have been taken from Shree Aurobindo’s letters on Yoga – Part 1 section 7. In creating a shorter version I have omitted many pages. Other then that a very little editing was done to maintain the thought current and flow of language.
For a full version follow the link below.
in SABCL, volume 22, pages 401-430
published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
Savita Tyagi
