Why Aurobindo was such a vacuous bore

 Aurobindo, like the other great Revolutionaries of his generation, was a sensible enough man. He knew  Gandhi was a nutter and Hindu Muslim unity a pipe dream. Sadly, Aurobindo didn't understand either Hinduism or Yoga or how to write a single sentence which wasn't vacuous, boring, and as stupid as fuck.

This is Sri Aurobindo on the Gita. What school boy error is he making?

... the primal principle that underlies all the power of this manifestation in the universe.. is this that in every being and object God dwells concealed and discoverable;

The answer, obviously, is that concealment does not entail discoverability. In any case, a God who really wants to conceal himself can't be discoverable unless he isn't God at all.  

he is housed as in a crypt in the mind and heart of every thing and creature, an inner self in the core of its subjective and its objective becoming, one who is the beginning and middle and end of all that is, has been or will be.

 So God is basically a corpse buried in the heart and mind and soul and once you die and your body rots, all that is left after your dust has blown away is this invisible cadaver. 

Aurobindo's English was good. He had studied in England from the age of 7. He won a scholarship to St. Paul's. He excelled in Greek and Latin. True, he wrote carelessly and was cut off from cultivated society. Still, when the guy says 'crypt' he knows very well that the word means a place where a corpse is interred. Aurobindo isn't making some sort of Nietzschean point about God being dead. He is saying Life sucks. Die to the part of yourself that is vivacious. Be so vacuous a bore that God himself breaks out of the crypt that is your tedious soul and gets the fuck away from your stinking entrails. 

For it is this inner divine Self hidden from the mind and heart which he inhabits, this luminous Inhabitant concealed from the view of the soul in Nature which he has put forth into Nature as his representative, who is all the time evolving the mutations of our personality in Time and our sensational existence in Space, — Time and Space that are the conceptual movement and extension of the Godhead in us.

But that Godhead is interred in us. While we live, it is just a fucking skeleton in the cupboard. Aurobindo didn't get that Evolution is about adaptation to a shifting, uncertain, fitness landscape. There is some suspense, some drama, to the thing. But, for the Bengali sage, it was some very boring and vacuous process of being so fucking boring and vacuous that God god himself runs away. Immanence is all very well but even God is not immune to ennui.  

All is this selfseeing Soul, this self-representing Spirit. For ever from within all beings, from within all conscient and inconscient existences, this All-conscient develops his manifested self in quality and power, develops it in the forms of objects, in the instruments of our subjectivity, in knowledge and word and thinking, in the creations of the mind and in the passion and actions of the doer, in the measures of Time, in cosmic powers and godheads and in the forces of Nature, in plant life, in animal life, in human and superhuman beings. If we look at things with this eye of vision unblinded by differentiations of quality and quantity or by difference of values and oppositions of nature, we shall see that all things are in fact and can be nothing but powers of his manifestation, vibhutis of this universal Soul and Spirit, Yoga of this great Yogin, self-creations of this marvellous self-Creator.

That's not the Gita's message. God is the sole efficient cause. The 'eye of vision' is always his gratuitous gift. It is not something attainable by any Yoga though, no doubt, the Lord may favor a devotee with it. One implication of this thesis is that being a vacuous bore can cancel immanence. God can choose to run the fuck away from your monotonous imbecility. On the other hand if you are doing cool stuff- like Arjuna who is very good at shooting arrows at other blokes who are also very good at shooting arrows- then, maybe, God himself will turn up and the two of you can have super cool adventures. At any rate, that's the message of the Gita.  

He is the unborn and the all-pervading Master of his own innumerable becomings in the universe, ajo vibhuh. ; all things are his powers and effectuations in his self-Nature, vibhutis. He is the origin of all they are, their beginning; he is their support in their everchanging status, their middle; he is their end too, the culmination or the disintegration of each created thing in its cessation or its disappearance.

But God can run away from a boring blathershite. There is no limitation on his powers. This is a bit like the imkan-e-kibz controversy in Indian Islam. 

People 'looking for God' tend to be more boring than average. They need to understand that the Deus Absconditus runs the fuck away from earnest but deeply boring peeps. I don't deny that God is no connoisseur of my farts- and I am highly flatulent person- but then I experience ever increasing wonderment and delight at their repetition and that makes up for much which others may find sad and dispiriting about my way of life. 

He brings them out from his consciousness and is hidden in them, he withdraws them into his consciousness and they are hidden in him for a time or for ever.

Come to think of it, when I was a kid I could never find any of the very many people who would challenge me to 'hide and seek'. Like God, instead of hiding, they just ran the fuck away. I suppose Aurobindo suffered in the same manner- not because he was flatulent but because he was a vacuous verbose bore.  

What is apparent to us is only a power of becoming of the One:

Or a power of running the fuck away rather than hiding somewhere where the bore might find us.  

what disappears from our sense and vision is effect of that power of becoming of the One.

That is the opposite of the Gita's teaching- viz. Occassionalism. All effects visible or otherwise discoverable are effects of the Lord, the sole efficient cause. This does not mean our being a flatulent bore is the effect of a power of becoming.  It is a modality, self chosen and not determinate in any way, of immanent being which encompasses its own running the fuck away from vacuous, flatulent, bores. 

All classes, genera, species, individuals are such vibhutis.

Unless God doesn't want them to be any such thing.  

But since it is through power in his becoming that he is apparent to us,

Nope. The Gita affirms that 'his being apparent to us' is entirely a matter of his own will.  

he is especially apparent in whatever is of a pre-eminent value or seems to act with a powerful and pre-eminent force.

Aurobindo was, pre-eminently, a force of great vacuity. If bores were valuable, he would be prized above all others. But bores aint valuable and that isn't God's fault- unless he wants it to be.

And therefore in each kind of being we can see him most in those in whom the power of nature of that kind reaches its highest, its leading, its most effectively selfrevealing manifestation.

Only if God so wills. But why the fuck would God want anything about him to become communicable in the tedious lucubrations of a vacuous bore?  

These are in a special sense Vibhutis. Yet the highest power and manifestation is only a very partial revelation of the Infinite; even the whole universe is informed by only one degree of his greatness, illumined by one ray of his splendour, glorious with a faint hint of his delight and beauty. This is in sum the gist of the enumeration, the result we carry away from it, the heart of its meaning.

That may be the meaning a vacuous bore carries away from the Gita. But that isn't its message. God is the only efficient cause. Sadly we don't have any idea as to what 'efficient cause' means. Why would we need to? It is enough for us to follow, like Leibniz, a principle of continuity. What can be usefully said of the finite can also be usefully said of the infinite. We find Aurobindo as boring as fuck and run the fuck away from his shite. An immanent, infinite, Godhead would do the same.