Impossible to read this without thinking of Yeats, who I infinitely love (moved to Ireland just to be close to him). And I’m not going to mention PDO, who I deeply admired through a long period of my life (if not for what he was not, at least for what he was: another miglior fabbro of written language). Sri Aurobindo describes his major deficiency, which many of us unfortunately share, with his usual precision.
“For someone like Yeats, who emptied the contents of a solid education -which he never had- in search of the ecstasy that awaits mystical contemplation -which he never experienced, at least not in the sense that William James gives to that term- there was only one path open: support the pillars of that elusive world in superstition and experience the beyond through a similar theory. For the first he counted on automatic writing, and the invaluable help of his wife, Lady Hyde-Less, who got on wonderfully with the 'communicators'. The second was taken on by Yeats himself, joining the Theosophical Society in 1887. There he became adept to the occult, to Madame Blavatsky and to the Neoplatonists. Towards the end of his life he believed he saw an explanation of the Whole in the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley, more because of his Irish origin than thanks to any dogmatic idealism; although this fitted perfectly, or at least he saw it that way, with his belief in a spiritual world and in the artist as a contemplative being.
The result of all this: A Vision (1925). Where he tells us about the revolutions of the Sun and the Moon, the symbol of the cone, the twenty-eight (or was it twenty-nine?) incarnations and, as if that were not enough, he claims that this battered metaphysics has served him nothing less than to ‘enclose in a single thought reality and justice.’”
(AI, WBY o La Disciplina Del Estilo, Posdata, Insomnia N. 141, p.6, 2000)
Impossible to read this without thinking of Yeats, who I infinitely love (moved to Ireland just to be close to him). And I’m not going to mention PDO, who I deeply admired through a long period of my life (if not for what he was not, at least for what he was: another miglior fabbro of written language). Sri Aurobindo describes his major deficiency, which many of us unfortunately share, with his usual precision.
“For someone like Yeats, who emptied the contents of a solid education -which he never had- in search of the ecstasy that awaits mystical contemplation -which he never experienced, at least not in the sense that William James gives to that term- there was only one path open: support the pillars of that elusive world in superstition and experience the beyond through a similar theory. For the first he counted on automatic writing, and the invaluable help of his wife, Lady Hyde-Less, who got on wonderfully with the 'communicators'. The second was taken on by Yeats himself, joining the Theosophical Society in 1887. There he became adept to the occult, to Madame Blavatsky and to the Neoplatonists. Towards the end of his life he believed he saw an explanation of the Whole in the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley, more because of his Irish origin than thanks to any dogmatic idealism; although this fitted perfectly, or at least he saw it that way, with his belief in a spiritual world and in the artist as a contemplative being.
The result of all this: A Vision (1925). Where he tells us about the revolutions of the Sun and the Moon, the symbol of the cone, the twenty-eight (or was it twenty-nine?) incarnations and, as if that were not enough, he claims that this battered metaphysics has served him nothing less than to ‘enclose in a single thought reality and justice.’”
(AI, WBY o La Disciplina Del Estilo, Posdata, Insomnia N. 141, p.6, 2000)