Sri Aurobindo and J.S. Bach – a personal experience

More than half a century ago, I left Egypt, at the age of twenty-one, to pursue graduate studies in Germany. The memory of how Europe impacted me I have included in an autobiographical short story titled “Preparing for the Winter Journey.” I am using a small part of these memoirs as a backdrop for the following experience:

Soon after my arrival in Germany, while leisurely turning the dial of my radio, I discovered Western classical music. Immediately, a whole new world opened for me. Music soon became the haven in which I took shelter at the end of days filled with technical and mental work. As a student, I had the good fortune of renting a room in an apartment owned by a lady of some culture, who encouraged me to buy a piano and allowed me to practice on it in her living room. She introduced me to a pianist of some renown who agreed to teach me from scratch. He did not believe in the efficacy of finger exercises, and started me immediately on the C-major Two-part Invention of Bach. This short invention, my first piece ever, I practiced for hours every day over seven months without ever tiring of it. It was the beginning of an “addiction” to Bach whose music had triggered the first psychic opening in me.

At about the same time, I came across the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (the story of how these writings have impacted me I have published under the title “The Encounter.”)

I was extremely mentally lopsided in those days and, for a long time, I had to inch my way patiently and laboriously into the world of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother until they ultimately became the centre and the circumference of my life. Amazingly, my entry into the world of music happened almost instantly, though I cannot claim any inborn musical talent.

Since these early days, half a century ago to this day, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have been my “staff of life,” while Bach has remained my main emotional-vital support. Strangely, during all this time, I took this happy arrangement for granted and was not aware of any special link between these great masters filling my life. Recently, one such link dawned on me through a remark made by the French philosopher G. Deleuze in a talk he gave in 1978 titled “What is the Creative Act?” Here is an excerpt from this talk:

“…there is a fundamental affinity between a work of art and an act of resistance... What is this mysterious relationship between a work of art and an act of resistance when the men and women who resist have neither the time nor sometimes even the culture necessary to have the slightest connection with art? I do not know. Malraux developed an admirable philosophical concept. He said something very simple about art. He said it was the only thing that resists death. Think about it... what resists death? You only have to look at a statuette from three thousand years before the Common Era to see that Malraux’s statement is a pretty good one. Bach’s music is an act of resistance, an active struggle against the separation of the profane and the sacred…”

For Deleuze, Art plays the same role yoga plays for Sri Aurobindo. Both art and yoga resist the paralysis of the soul under the weight of unconsciousness. Deleuze’s call ties well with the one Sri Aurobindo sounded sixty years earlier: “… the soul, the inner being, its powers, its possibilities, its growth, its expression and the creation of a true, beautiful and helpful environment for it (is) the one thing of first and last importance.”

The unification of the Sacred and the Profane is the cornerstone of the yoga of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother who always maintained that “All Life is Yoga” and who dedicated their lives towards establishing the Life Divine on earth. In this context, one is also reminded of the many instances in which the Mother emphasized the deep affinity between art and yoga: “Art is nothing less in its fundamental truth than the aspect of beauty of the Divine manifestation. Perhaps, looking from this standpoint, there will be found very few true artists; but still there are some and these can very well be considered as Yogis. For like a Yogi an artist goes into deep contemplation to await and receive his inspiration. To create something truly beautiful, he has first to see it within, to realise it as a whole in his inner consciousness; only when so found, seen, held within, can he execute it outwardly; he creates according to this greater inner vision. This too is a kind of yogic discipline, for by it he enters into intimate communion with the inner worlds. A man like Leonardo da Vinci was a Yogi and nothing else. And he was, if not the greatest, at least one of the greatest painters – although his art did not stop at painting alone. Music too is an essentially spiritual art and has always been.”

While listening to Bach’s cantatas and passions, I often wondered how, in scenes describing Christ’s sufferings, his music can be so full of an infinitely tender sorrow and, at the same time, of a sublimely divine joy. In fact, some of his movements are so joyous as to qualify as an invitation to dance (for instance, the ‘cum spiritu sanctu’ of the B-minor mass). Instead of lamenting, Bach celebrates Christ’s consummation of his mission in much the same way as Sri Aurobindo does in the following lines from His epic Savitri:

“It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,

Offered by God’s martyred body for the world; ….

He has trod with bleeding brow the Saviour’s way.

He who has found his identity with God

Pays with the body’s death his soul’s vast light”.

In her last years, the Mother spoke increasingly of vibrations tying the whole universe together. One can only marvel at how a common divine vibration acted across space and time and moved the Avatars of the Supermind Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and “the immortal god of harmony,” Bach, to elevate life and resist death with such irresistible power and mastery, thus helping humanity on its way to the Life Divine.

Zackaria Moursi has visited Auroville several times since 1997 and was a Newcomer in 2002-2003. He finally settled in the USA where he is now one of the members of the Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham, a community dedicated to the practice of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga in Lodi, California.