The Refusal of the Ascetic

For Sri Aurobindo, the second of the “Two Negations”, the refusal of the ascetic, is based on a powerful spiritual experience: the awareness of the Transcendent Spirit that exceeds this entire universe of name and form, mind and matter, living beings, and everything else we encounter in normal human experience. Compared to that Transcendent Reality, our world appears as only a shadow or an illusion – what seemed so real before, no longer does so after this overwhelmingly concrete inner experience. As ordinary sense experience provides support for the materialist view, this overpowering spiritual experience provides the empirical basis for the ascetic's view. Each side sees the other as caught in a delusion.

Interestingly, both the materialist and the ascetic end up denying any real significance or value for human life. Either we are all some temporary “nervous spasm of matter”, or we are an inexplicable fiction and illusion. For Sri Aurobindo, the “great underlying fact” is Consciousness, and the extension and “inner enlargement” of Consciousness is what will lead to “a larger and completer affirmation”, harmonizing the polar perspectives of transcendent Spirit and corporeal Matter.

Sri Aurobindo feels that, especially since the advent of Buddhism, the ascetic emphasis on liberation from the bondage of this illusory world has dominated Indian thought and spirituality, producing a mixed legacy. He actually describes the ascetic refusal as “more perilous” than the materialistic, but also notes that its “pure spiritual impulse” has pointed toward the summits of human possibility, and its overall contribution to the development of human consciousness has been great.

Much of The Life Divine will involve argument against this illusionist spiritual philosophy, in favor of Sri Aurobindo's world-affirming approach. Although he will focus on concepts and terminology drawn from the Indian spiritual tradition, one can readily find similar world-shunning attitudes in other culture's religion and mysticism; positing always a spiritual salvation elsewhere, seeking to leave this broken and irreparable world behind.