In this context it is interesting to note that the decision to take an action is made before we are conscious that we make a decision. This has been shown by Benjamin Libet decades ago. When we think that we are going to act, the decision has already been made on another level of consciousness. Who then decides and under which conditions?
Nothing surpasses the emotional richness of Hindu cosmology. It received a proto-geometric vase from the Greeks and turned into real substance, a spiritual delicacy of epic proportions. The only thing I have issue with is the suggestion of an evolution happening “through time”, as of course what we are referring to here does not happen “in (physical) time”, but in that thing that we might want to call the absolute present. Otherwise, it might seem that something we voluntarily “do” or “stop doing” would make “a difference”. Which is obviously not the case. That’s the way the Greeks, which is to say the Romans, congratulated with their local deities. We admire Ashoka (and Aurobindo) more for what they saw than for what they did. His remarks (Aurobindo’s) about our subjection to Nature are so accurate and clear that is hard to to add anything. The logical conclusion, which is what everyone is oblivious about these days, and he probably had the discretion of not to mention it, is that if we carry on “in that direction” of a false emancipation through our individual pitiful egos, that will precisely be the ultimate triumph of Nature over mankind. When you pay the ultimate price, everything has been taken from you.
As regards to the eukaryotes, Gould couldn’t have agreed more with your comments. They are not only volitional subjects, but alongside bacteria they will outlive us by billions of years.
Back to NK though (and Kant): “L'établissement de ce monde objectif requiert qu'il existe à son fondement un apriori consistant, pour le particulier, à contenir l'universel. C'est par conséquent notre volonté qui inclut l'universel dans le particulier. On peut affirmer pour cette raison que le «monde empirique » s'établit par l'apriori de la volonté. L'autoéveil qui constitue le fondement de l'objectivité de la connaissance ne pourrait s'établir sans l'autoéveil volontaire. L'agir et le connaitre s'unifient dans l'autoéveil, lequel réside dans cette union. [...] Comme y a insisté Kant, notre « monde empirique » est construit du fait que les formes de la pensée se combinent au contenu sensible. Le «je» du «je pense» ne pourrait pas construire un monde objectif unique en combinant la raison et le contenu empirique s’il était une conscience normative transcendant complètement l’individu.”
Adrian: The only thing I have issue with is the suggestion of an evolution happening “through time”, as of course what we are referring to here does not happen “in (physical) time”, but in that thing that we might want to call the absolute present.
As a matter of fact, I have stressed elsewhere that evolution involves two kinds of causality, a "horizontal" or trans-temporal one and a "vertical" or atemporal one. The evolution of freedom could be characterized as a progressive disentanglement of the evolving consciousness from the horizontal or physical causality and and its increasing participation in the vertical causality, which proceeds from the individual's svabhava or from the quality/delight of the Everpresent Origin.
Here is a paragraph from my textbook (2nd edition 2018), echoes of which also occur in some of my papers: Because the manifestation of the world includes the manifestation of space and time, it cannot be conceived as a process that takes place in space and time. We keep looking for the origin of the universe at the beginning of time, but this is an error of perspective. The origin of the universe is a Being transcending spatial and temporal distinctions, and the manifestation of the world is an (atemporal) transition from undifferentiated Being to a world that allows itself to be described in the classical language of interacting objects and causally related events—a transition from absolute unity to the multiplicity of the macroworld.
While I cannot speak for Ashoka, I most certainly admire Sri Aurobindo for what he *did* (rather than merely for what he saw), which can be inferred, for instance, from the extract from an autobiographical note that I quoted in https://aurocafe.substack.com/p/august-15th.
Thank you for that quotation, it’s a very important idea and much clarifies the point.
Regarding Sri Aurobindo’s inspiring autobiographical notes, they seem to highlight what I just mentioned: “It was this force which, as soon as he had attained to it, he used, at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with the results or to feel the necessity of any other kind of action.”
I intentionally did not mention Libet’s experiments. I mentioned the drawing-of-hands-out-of-fires example as a fairly solid piece of evidence that free will can be and often is illusory. It was only meant as a transition to the *stronger* evidence *for* the illusoriness of free will that is provided by yogic experience. But let’s stay with the automatic/involuntary drawing of hands out of fires and the illusion that it was a voluntary act. I heartens me in two ways. First, I am thankful to the autonomous motor system, which is much faster than any conscious intentional action could be. Second, I appreciate the ingenuity of staging the drama of evolution as a transition from illusory freedom to genuine freedom, so as to make it experience all the way from the beginning.
I agree with your estimation of Dennett, Dawkins. Harris, Pinker and their ilk. However, I don’t think you can base the free will of folk psychology on the will as conceived by the Upanishads, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Bergson. For while these sources affirm the existence of a genuine free will, they either are insufficiently specific about who enjoys it or insist that several radical transformations of consciousness are needed before we can fully participate in it. Sri Aurobindo:
“This question of free will or determination is the most knotty of all metaphysical questions and nobody has been able to solve it—for a good reason, that both destiny and will exist and even a free will exists somewhere—the difficulty is only how to get at it and make it effective.” (Letters on Yoga-I, p 516)
I also agree with you that the (individual) nature v nurture (collective nature) debate is important, but since both are manifestations of Prakriti, it does not seem germane to the evolution of freedom from both kinds of nature (individual and collective).
I love the Whitehead quote: “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving themselves purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.”
Rich, apart from confirming your insight that you are “going a bit off topic” — actually not just a bit — I want to set the record straight with respect to India’s characterization as “the guru of the nations.” This phrase, which you ascribe to the Mother, is actually Sri Aurobindo’s. In the Bande Mataram he wrote:
"India is the guru of the nations, the physician of the human soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to new-mould the life of the world and restore the peace of the human spirit. But Swaraj is the necessary condition of her work and before she can do the work, she must fulfil the condition."
(The Bande Mataram, whose policy from the beginning of 1907 till its abrupt winding up in 1908 when Aurobindo was in prison was wholly directed by him, circulated almost immediately all over India. During its brief but momentous existence it changed the political thought of India which has ever since preserved fundamentally, even amidst its later developments, the stamp then imparted to it.... The Bande Mataram was almost unique in journalistic history in the influence it exercised in converting the mind of a people and preparing it for revolution.)
The phrase occurs for a second time in the first issue of the Karmayogin, shortly after Sri Aurobindo’s release from prison in 1909:
What is dimly beginning now is a repetition on a wider stage of what happened once before in India, more rapidly but to smaller issues, when the Buddha lived and taught his philosophy and ethics to the Aryan nations. Then as now a mighty spirit ... came down among men and brought into their daily life and practice the force and impulse of utter spirituality.... The material result was then what it will be now, a great political, moral and social revolution which made India the Guru of the nations and carried the light she had to give allover the civilised world, moulding ideas and creating forms which are still extant and a living force. Already the Vedanta and the Yoga have exceeded their Asiatic limit and are beginning to influence the life and practice of America and Europe; and they have long been filtering into Western thought by a hundred indirect channels. But these are small rivers and underground streams. The world waits for the rising of India to receive the divine flood in its fullness.
The Mother referred to India thrice as “the guru of the world.” In 1954 she wrote:
“The future of India is very clear. India is the Guru of the world. The future structure of the world depends on India.”
Evidently, for the time being this future remains the future. In 1964 she responded to the question “If you were asked to sum up, just in one sentence, your vision of India, what would be your answer?” by saying:
“India’s true destiny is to be the Guru of the world.”
In answer to a follow-up question she wrote:
“India ought to be the spiritual leader of the world. Inside she has the capacity, but outside... for the moment there is still much to do for her to become actually the spiritual leader of the world.”
I agree with you that tropes that are creative and inspiring during liberation struggles lose their original intent and often (not just sometimes) come to signify something different altogether. This on a finer time scale is what according to Jean Gebser happens on a coarser time scale, when a consciousness structure ceases to be efficient and becomes deficient due to the irruption of a richer consciousness structure. I would however dispute the notion that Sri Aurobindo’s use of “guru of the nations” was *merely* (it was, but not solely) an instance of strategic essentialism. It was also a genuine vision if not of the actual future then of a strong possibility for the future. And by “vision” I do not mean a mere thought or idea.
That culture is implicit in universal Nature is a valid point, but neither individual Nature nor universal Nature is impervious to genuinely psychic and spiritual influences (in Sri Aurobindo’s meaning of these terms). Needless to say, the universal is much more recalcitrant than the individual, and the individual is often needed as catalyst.
To your point that the binary of soul/nature or purusha/prakriti is not precise enough for explaining the individual’s freedom struggle today, my answer is that the problem lies with word “freedom.” There are many notions of freedom and many kinds of struggle for freedom. This is essential to the very adventure of evolution for which this world exists and in which we (qua “aspects of the One,” as Schrödinger put it) take part. To me, it is important to keep in mind (1) that (as I wrote) there is only one way that genuine freedom is possible, namely to be the sole determinant of all that happens or is the case in the world, and (2) that (in Sri Aurobindo’s words) “to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities” is one aspect of “the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.” Between now and then there are a gazillion of intermediate goals to be realized and a gazillion of steps to be taken to realize the ultimate goal. So if you read me as “explaining away as nature” what is but an aspect of the enormous complexity of forces at play (which make this adventure so worthwhile and fascinating), you are projecting.
I suppose you are aware of the acronym SSDD (the polite form of which is “same stuff different day”). In the context of math education it has a more interesting meaning: “same surface different depth.” This can be understood in an even more profound way: there are different depths below the surface of reality, and the deeper we can see, the more we can understand and the more sense it all makes.
Rich, I accidentally and unintentionally deleted your last comment. I repost it here:
Ulrich Lol… you are certainly right that was a long digression!, thanks for your indulgences and the description of the usage of “guru of nations” in SA/M, especially it is helpful to know the last time she used the expression (although the followers are of course another story) I will try to be a succinct as possible in bringing this full circle to the original issue of human freedom.
First I’d like to respond to the guru of nations concept along the time table you laid out because there is a need to differentiate context when referencing such essentialist tropes. Generally tropes used during liberation struggles that are creative and inspiring become reified and loose their original intent, sometimes even signifying something different altogether. Such tropes as "guru of nations" of the "sanatan dharma” are good examples. In post colonial theory however, there is a concept pioneered by Gayatri Spivik called "strategic essentialism" defined as a "political tactic in which minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilize on the basis of shared gendered, cultural, or political identity to represent themselves”. This also occurs by inspiring people in the movement for self determination to unify around a shared vision of future and freedom. And of course it was just during these periods in India’s liberation and early years of nationhood when Sri Aurobindo & Mother spoke of India as a “guru of nations", In that context of Sri Aurobindo’s life long struggle during the liberation movement this statement makes perfect sense not only as an inspiring poetic vision but as a sort of strategic essentialism: “India is the guru of nations, physician of the human soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to mould the life of the world and restore peace to the human spirit,” Once a nation however, enters a more mature phase and has governed itself for sometime these essentialist tropes take on ideological baggage to become slogans meant to shore up the political base. So although the trope is the same its meaning changes drastically so that when the current guru mimic man PM, and his cronies deploy the term today, one can describe it only as cynical and as coded language to unify his political base. So that today the phrase “guru of nations” besides being an empty political slogan, exoticizes India in much the same way as other orientalist tropes do. In the quest for ones own freedom it is important to be aware of how language evolves and how the regimes of power that manufacture consent in the population, do so, do so both consciously and at levels below conscious awareness.
Unfortunately as we have seen, even many of those professing to work at Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, seem to mentally foreclose any attempt at interrogating the intellectually bankrupt ideology of hindu-nationalism that has appropriated Sri Aurobindo’s words for their hollow slogans. As well as just how many collapse his multi-dimensional vision of human unity into fundamentalist screeds So when Sri Aurobindo talks about "Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature” it seems vital to me to foreground Culture as implicit in universal Nature. Most especially, since we all immersed universally in the culture of technology. I think today by "universal nature” we can understand this to also refer to transindividual processes, through which culture is constructed, that harness emotions, feelings thoughts that are passed among the population both consciously and below the field of conscious awareness; social media has mastered that ability. These forces of control are only accelerating in our lives as we are increasingly living in the cloud of virtual space/time. So much so that even what we refer to today as the subject has evolved psychically in ways that differ significantly from the subject of modernity that Sri Aurobindo encountered.
Thats why I think the binary of soul/nature or purusha/prakriti is not precise enough for explaining the individual's freedom struggle today. The programming of the population by culturally determining social technologies are way to complex to simply explain away as nature, prakriti, phusis .
Moreover, as I tried to also demonstrate - by going of topic- that historically when the state or the collective is essentialized in terms of having qualities akin to a human soul and placed on the side of purusha, then the identification of individuals with the state intensifies so that the assimilation of the ideologies espoused by the leadership that govern the state becomes nearly automatic. Just how much collective forces determine the individual was certainly not lost on Sri Aurobindo who writes:
The individual too cannot flourish by himself; for the universal, the unity and collectivity of his fellow-beings, is his present source and stock; it is the thing whose possibilities he individually expresses, even when he transcends its immediate level, and of which in his phenomenal being he is one result. Its depression strikes eventually at his own sources of life, by its increasing he also increases. This is what a true subjectivism teaches us, — first, that we are a higher self than our ego or our members, secondly, that we are in our life and being not only ourselves but all others; for there is a secret solidarity which our egoism may kick at and strive against, but from which we cannot escape. (HC 47)
Evolution may therefore be likened to the construction of a bridge, a construction that takes place from both sides. The first principle to emerge from the “outer” side is life, which in essence is the power to realize ideas in material form. This is followed by the emergence of mind, which in essence is the ability to generate ideas.
The bridge building from the “inner” side begins in earnest when the Purusha disengages himself from the deterministic operations of Prakriti, becoming first a passive witness and then an active giver or withholder of sanctions. Becoming aware of his svabhāva, the Purusha begins to modify the determinisms of Prakriti in its light. In this way an initially disempowered self evolves a dynamic personality, a “psychic being” as Sri Aurobindo calls it, which “rests its formation, its dynamic self-building on the power of soul that has been actually and more or less successfully, against the resistance of the Ignorance and Inconscience, put forth in the evolution upon the surface” (LD, 928).
Simplicity of Image.
Did I mention that we are looking a great distance into our evolutionary future?
With Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's help and your encouragement may mankind make some progress along that distance towards that station on the horizon.
In this context it is interesting to note that the decision to take an action is made before we are conscious that we make a decision. This has been shown by Benjamin Libet decades ago. When we think that we are going to act, the decision has already been made on another level of consciousness. Who then decides and under which conditions?
Nothing surpasses the emotional richness of Hindu cosmology. It received a proto-geometric vase from the Greeks and turned into real substance, a spiritual delicacy of epic proportions. The only thing I have issue with is the suggestion of an evolution happening “through time”, as of course what we are referring to here does not happen “in (physical) time”, but in that thing that we might want to call the absolute present. Otherwise, it might seem that something we voluntarily “do” or “stop doing” would make “a difference”. Which is obviously not the case. That’s the way the Greeks, which is to say the Romans, congratulated with their local deities. We admire Ashoka (and Aurobindo) more for what they saw than for what they did. His remarks (Aurobindo’s) about our subjection to Nature are so accurate and clear that is hard to to add anything. The logical conclusion, which is what everyone is oblivious about these days, and he probably had the discretion of not to mention it, is that if we carry on “in that direction” of a false emancipation through our individual pitiful egos, that will precisely be the ultimate triumph of Nature over mankind. When you pay the ultimate price, everything has been taken from you.
As regards to the eukaryotes, Gould couldn’t have agreed more with your comments. They are not only volitional subjects, but alongside bacteria they will outlive us by billions of years.
Back to NK though (and Kant): “L'établissement de ce monde objectif requiert qu'il existe à son fondement un apriori consistant, pour le particulier, à contenir l'universel. C'est par conséquent notre volonté qui inclut l'universel dans le particulier. On peut affirmer pour cette raison que le «monde empirique » s'établit par l'apriori de la volonté. L'autoéveil qui constitue le fondement de l'objectivité de la connaissance ne pourrait s'établir sans l'autoéveil volontaire. L'agir et le connaitre s'unifient dans l'autoéveil, lequel réside dans cette union. [...] Comme y a insisté Kant, notre « monde empirique » est construit du fait que les formes de la pensée se combinent au contenu sensible. Le «je» du «je pense» ne pourrait pas construire un monde objectif unique en combinant la raison et le contenu empirique s’il était une conscience normative transcendant complètement l’individu.”
Adrian: The only thing I have issue with is the suggestion of an evolution happening “through time”, as of course what we are referring to here does not happen “in (physical) time”, but in that thing that we might want to call the absolute present.
As a matter of fact, I have stressed elsewhere that evolution involves two kinds of causality, a "horizontal" or trans-temporal one and a "vertical" or atemporal one. The evolution of freedom could be characterized as a progressive disentanglement of the evolving consciousness from the horizontal or physical causality and and its increasing participation in the vertical causality, which proceeds from the individual's svabhava or from the quality/delight of the Everpresent Origin.
Here is a paragraph from my textbook (2nd edition 2018), echoes of which also occur in some of my papers: Because the manifestation of the world includes the manifestation of space and time, it cannot be conceived as a process that takes place in space and time. We keep looking for the origin of the universe at the beginning of time, but this is an error of perspective. The origin of the universe is a Being transcending spatial and temporal distinctions, and the manifestation of the world is an (atemporal) transition from undifferentiated Being to a world that allows itself to be described in the classical language of interacting objects and causally related events—a transition from absolute unity to the multiplicity of the macroworld.
While I cannot speak for Ashoka, I most certainly admire Sri Aurobindo for what he *did* (rather than merely for what he saw), which can be inferred, for instance, from the extract from an autobiographical note that I quoted in https://aurocafe.substack.com/p/august-15th.
Thank you for that quotation, it’s a very important idea and much clarifies the point.
Regarding Sri Aurobindo’s inspiring autobiographical notes, they seem to highlight what I just mentioned: “It was this force which, as soon as he had attained to it, he used, at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with the results or to feel the necessity of any other kind of action.”
Hi Rich, thank you for your comments.
I intentionally did not mention Libet’s experiments. I mentioned the drawing-of-hands-out-of-fires example as a fairly solid piece of evidence that free will can be and often is illusory. It was only meant as a transition to the *stronger* evidence *for* the illusoriness of free will that is provided by yogic experience. But let’s stay with the automatic/involuntary drawing of hands out of fires and the illusion that it was a voluntary act. I heartens me in two ways. First, I am thankful to the autonomous motor system, which is much faster than any conscious intentional action could be. Second, I appreciate the ingenuity of staging the drama of evolution as a transition from illusory freedom to genuine freedom, so as to make it experience all the way from the beginning.
I agree with your estimation of Dennett, Dawkins. Harris, Pinker and their ilk. However, I don’t think you can base the free will of folk psychology on the will as conceived by the Upanishads, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Bergson. For while these sources affirm the existence of a genuine free will, they either are insufficiently specific about who enjoys it or insist that several radical transformations of consciousness are needed before we can fully participate in it. Sri Aurobindo:
“This question of free will or determination is the most knotty of all metaphysical questions and nobody has been able to solve it—for a good reason, that both destiny and will exist and even a free will exists somewhere—the difficulty is only how to get at it and make it effective.” (Letters on Yoga-I, p 516)
I also agree with you that the (individual) nature v nurture (collective nature) debate is important, but since both are manifestations of Prakriti, it does not seem germane to the evolution of freedom from both kinds of nature (individual and collective).
I love the Whitehead quote: “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving themselves purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.”
Thanks also for the interesting references.
Rich, apart from confirming your insight that you are “going a bit off topic” — actually not just a bit — I want to set the record straight with respect to India’s characterization as “the guru of the nations.” This phrase, which you ascribe to the Mother, is actually Sri Aurobindo’s. In the Bande Mataram he wrote:
"India is the guru of the nations, the physician of the human soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to new-mould the life of the world and restore the peace of the human spirit. But Swaraj is the necessary condition of her work and before she can do the work, she must fulfil the condition."
(The Bande Mataram, whose policy from the beginning of 1907 till its abrupt winding up in 1908 when Aurobindo was in prison was wholly directed by him, circulated almost immediately all over India. During its brief but momentous existence it changed the political thought of India which has ever since preserved fundamentally, even amidst its later developments, the stamp then imparted to it.... The Bande Mataram was almost unique in journalistic history in the influence it exercised in converting the mind of a people and preparing it for revolution.)
The phrase occurs for a second time in the first issue of the Karmayogin, shortly after Sri Aurobindo’s release from prison in 1909:
What is dimly beginning now is a repetition on a wider stage of what happened once before in India, more rapidly but to smaller issues, when the Buddha lived and taught his philosophy and ethics to the Aryan nations. Then as now a mighty spirit ... came down among men and brought into their daily life and practice the force and impulse of utter spirituality.... The material result was then what it will be now, a great political, moral and social revolution which made India the Guru of the nations and carried the light she had to give allover the civilised world, moulding ideas and creating forms which are still extant and a living force. Already the Vedanta and the Yoga have exceeded their Asiatic limit and are beginning to influence the life and practice of America and Europe; and they have long been filtering into Western thought by a hundred indirect channels. But these are small rivers and underground streams. The world waits for the rising of India to receive the divine flood in its fullness.
The Mother referred to India thrice as “the guru of the world.” In 1954 she wrote:
“The future of India is very clear. India is the Guru of the world. The future structure of the world depends on India.”
Evidently, for the time being this future remains the future. In 1964 she responded to the question “If you were asked to sum up, just in one sentence, your vision of India, what would be your answer?” by saying:
“India’s true destiny is to be the Guru of the world.”
In answer to a follow-up question she wrote:
“India ought to be the spiritual leader of the world. Inside she has the capacity, but outside... for the moment there is still much to do for her to become actually the spiritual leader of the world.”
Indeed.
I agree with you that tropes that are creative and inspiring during liberation struggles lose their original intent and often (not just sometimes) come to signify something different altogether. This on a finer time scale is what according to Jean Gebser happens on a coarser time scale, when a consciousness structure ceases to be efficient and becomes deficient due to the irruption of a richer consciousness structure. I would however dispute the notion that Sri Aurobindo’s use of “guru of the nations” was *merely* (it was, but not solely) an instance of strategic essentialism. It was also a genuine vision if not of the actual future then of a strong possibility for the future. And by “vision” I do not mean a mere thought or idea.
That culture is implicit in universal Nature is a valid point, but neither individual Nature nor universal Nature is impervious to genuinely psychic and spiritual influences (in Sri Aurobindo’s meaning of these terms). Needless to say, the universal is much more recalcitrant than the individual, and the individual is often needed as catalyst.
To your point that the binary of soul/nature or purusha/prakriti is not precise enough for explaining the individual’s freedom struggle today, my answer is that the problem lies with word “freedom.” There are many notions of freedom and many kinds of struggle for freedom. This is essential to the very adventure of evolution for which this world exists and in which we (qua “aspects of the One,” as Schrödinger put it) take part. To me, it is important to keep in mind (1) that (as I wrote) there is only one way that genuine freedom is possible, namely to be the sole determinant of all that happens or is the case in the world, and (2) that (in Sri Aurobindo’s words) “to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities” is one aspect of “the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.” Between now and then there are a gazillion of intermediate goals to be realized and a gazillion of steps to be taken to realize the ultimate goal. So if you read me as “explaining away as nature” what is but an aspect of the enormous complexity of forces at play (which make this adventure so worthwhile and fascinating), you are projecting.
I suppose you are aware of the acronym SSDD (the polite form of which is “same stuff different day”). In the context of math education it has a more interesting meaning: “same surface different depth.” This can be understood in an even more profound way: there are different depths below the surface of reality, and the deeper we can see, the more we can understand and the more sense it all makes.
Rich, I accidentally and unintentionally deleted your last comment. I repost it here:
Ulrich Lol… you are certainly right that was a long digression!, thanks for your indulgences and the description of the usage of “guru of nations” in SA/M, especially it is helpful to know the last time she used the expression (although the followers are of course another story) I will try to be a succinct as possible in bringing this full circle to the original issue of human freedom.
First I’d like to respond to the guru of nations concept along the time table you laid out because there is a need to differentiate context when referencing such essentialist tropes. Generally tropes used during liberation struggles that are creative and inspiring become reified and loose their original intent, sometimes even signifying something different altogether. Such tropes as "guru of nations" of the "sanatan dharma” are good examples. In post colonial theory however, there is a concept pioneered by Gayatri Spivik called "strategic essentialism" defined as a "political tactic in which minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilize on the basis of shared gendered, cultural, or political identity to represent themselves”. This also occurs by inspiring people in the movement for self determination to unify around a shared vision of future and freedom. And of course it was just during these periods in India’s liberation and early years of nationhood when Sri Aurobindo & Mother spoke of India as a “guru of nations", In that context of Sri Aurobindo’s life long struggle during the liberation movement this statement makes perfect sense not only as an inspiring poetic vision but as a sort of strategic essentialism: “India is the guru of nations, physician of the human soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to mould the life of the world and restore peace to the human spirit,” Once a nation however, enters a more mature phase and has governed itself for sometime these essentialist tropes take on ideological baggage to become slogans meant to shore up the political base. So although the trope is the same its meaning changes drastically so that when the current guru mimic man PM, and his cronies deploy the term today, one can describe it only as cynical and as coded language to unify his political base. So that today the phrase “guru of nations” besides being an empty political slogan, exoticizes India in much the same way as other orientalist tropes do. In the quest for ones own freedom it is important to be aware of how language evolves and how the regimes of power that manufacture consent in the population, do so, do so both consciously and at levels below conscious awareness.
Unfortunately as we have seen, even many of those professing to work at Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, seem to mentally foreclose any attempt at interrogating the intellectually bankrupt ideology of hindu-nationalism that has appropriated Sri Aurobindo’s words for their hollow slogans. As well as just how many collapse his multi-dimensional vision of human unity into fundamentalist screeds So when Sri Aurobindo talks about "Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature” it seems vital to me to foreground Culture as implicit in universal Nature. Most especially, since we all immersed universally in the culture of technology. I think today by "universal nature” we can understand this to also refer to transindividual processes, through which culture is constructed, that harness emotions, feelings thoughts that are passed among the population both consciously and below the field of conscious awareness; social media has mastered that ability. These forces of control are only accelerating in our lives as we are increasingly living in the cloud of virtual space/time. So much so that even what we refer to today as the subject has evolved psychically in ways that differ significantly from the subject of modernity that Sri Aurobindo encountered.
Thats why I think the binary of soul/nature or purusha/prakriti is not precise enough for explaining the individual's freedom struggle today. The programming of the population by culturally determining social technologies are way to complex to simply explain away as nature, prakriti, phusis .
Moreover, as I tried to also demonstrate - by going of topic- that historically when the state or the collective is essentialized in terms of having qualities akin to a human soul and placed on the side of purusha, then the identification of individuals with the state intensifies so that the assimilation of the ideologies espoused by the leadership that govern the state becomes nearly automatic. Just how much collective forces determine the individual was certainly not lost on Sri Aurobindo who writes:
The individual too cannot flourish by himself; for the universal, the unity and collectivity of his fellow-beings, is his present source and stock; it is the thing whose possibilities he individually expresses, even when he transcends its immediate level, and of which in his phenomenal being he is one result. Its depression strikes eventually at his own sources of life, by its increasing he also increases. This is what a true subjectivism teaches us, — first, that we are a higher self than our ego or our members, secondly, that we are in our life and being not only ourselves but all others; for there is a secret solidarity which our egoism may kick at and strive against, but from which we cannot escape. (HC 47)
Gratitude for the Clarity.
Evolution may therefore be likened to the construction of a bridge, a construction that takes place from both sides. The first principle to emerge from the “outer” side is life, which in essence is the power to realize ideas in material form. This is followed by the emergence of mind, which in essence is the ability to generate ideas.
The bridge building from the “inner” side begins in earnest when the Purusha disengages himself from the deterministic operations of Prakriti, becoming first a passive witness and then an active giver or withholder of sanctions. Becoming aware of his svabhāva, the Purusha begins to modify the determinisms of Prakriti in its light. In this way an initially disempowered self evolves a dynamic personality, a “psychic being” as Sri Aurobindo calls it, which “rests its formation, its dynamic self-building on the power of soul that has been actually and more or less successfully, against the resistance of the Ignorance and Inconscience, put forth in the evolution upon the surface” (LD, 928).
Simplicity of Image.
Did I mention that we are looking a great distance into our evolutionary future?
With Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's help and your encouragement may mankind make some progress along that distance towards that station on the horizon.
Grace and Blessings
Michael