Realistic Adwaita

 

Swami Medhananda is a scholar and a member of the Ramakrishna Mission. I recently read his article "Cutting the Knot of the World Problem: Sri Aurobindo´s Experiential and Philosophical Critique of Advaita Vedanta". I find it intriguing that a member of the Ramakrishna Order (associated precisely with Advaita Vedanta) would write insightful polemics against it, but there you go! 

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was a Indian freedom fighter turned mystic who eventually founded his own ashram, based in Pondicherry (then a French territory) in southern India. The utopian community Auroville, founded by Aurobindo´s spiritual collaborator Mirra Alfassa (The Mother) is still situated there. Medhananda believes that Aurobindo was strongly influenced by Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda (who founded the Ramakrishna Mission). The author has written extensively on Ramakrishna´s mystical-philosophical approach, known as Vijnana Vedanta, which is strikingly different from "main stream" Advaita Vedanta. It is, however, similar to Aurobindo´s "realistic Adwaita" (Aurobindo´s spelling). 

To Aurobindo, the sole reality is the Divine Saccidananda (Sat-Cit-Ananda = Being-Consciousness-Bliss). While this may sound "monist", Aurobindo emphasized that reality isn´t just the impersonal Brahman, but also the personal and dynamic Cit-Shakti (Consciousness-Force), which manifests as everything in the universe. Divine Reality is infinite, both personal and impersonal, both transcendent and immanent. Moreover, the "created" world is real, not an illusion, nor a lower form of reality. Hence the term "realistic (i.e. ontologically realist) Adwaita". 

Medhananda believed that Aurobindo had three sources for his position. First, scriptural interpretation. Aurobindo argued that the Vedic hymns, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita showed that the world was real, not an illusion, and that several different spiritual paths can lead to liberation. Second, philosophical arguments. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Aurobindo´s own spiritual experiences. When studying meditation under an Advaita Vedanta guru, Aurobindo did have a powerful mystical experience of a non-dual impersonal Absolute, compared to which everything in the phenomenal world was merely shadows. Later, however, other spiritual experiences came to the fore, experiences which suggested that there is a dimension higher than "nirvana" or the impersonal Brahman. During one particularly dramatic experience in Alipore jail, Aurobindo saw how Krishna had taken the form of everyone and everything around him: trees, walls, jailers, even the other prisoners! While the nirvanic experience isn´t "wrong", it will eventually give way to an even broader and deeper realization. 

A quote from Aurobindo´s writings: "At an early stage the aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine." 

It´s clear that Sri Aurobindo considered his spiritual experiences to be more important than "Shankara´s logic", Shankara being regarded as the main ancient proponent of Advaita Vedanta. Still, Aurobindo did criticize Advaita Vedanta on philosophical grounds, as well. This criticism is the usual one, which I think strikes everyone who studies "pure" Advaita Vedanta: if the phenomenal world is "maya" or illusion, where is "maya" located? Since Brahman is the sole reality, maya must come from Brahman itself, but if so, Brahman can´t be perfect, and might even be "dual" somehow. I noticed that some "mayavadins" try to solve the problem by declaring it unsolvable: "maya" is simply unscrutable, and that´s that! But that doesn´t solve anything, since it still implies that the Divine is imperfect - inscrutably imperfect...

Medhananda believes that Aurobindo´s realistic metaphysics can be used to ground an ecological approach to our current civilizational predicament. Maybe, but the most interesting aspect of Aurobindo´s "integral worldview" is surely the evolutionary perspective, in which humans are just a stepping stone to a higher form of life: Gnostic Man or Overman. If this sounds similar to Theosophy, that´s because it *is* similar to Theosophy. It´s also similar to the idea of resurrection found in Judaism and Christianity! These aspects of Aurobindo´s integral theory aren´t explored by Medhananda, however.

That being said, this is still a very interesting contribution.