50 Years of Collaboration: A Journal of Integral Yoga in America

Collaboration could be seen as a logical development, for as we might imagine, after the supermind touched down at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in February 1956, it began streaming out in plumes and solar rays, first to Auroville and then around the world, carried by radioactive vectors of consciousness-force till it reached the shores of America, where it began working secretly and incognito—for here in the United States, notwithstanding the bright awakenings of the 1960s, we lacked the ample tradition of spiritual practice that underlay the ground of being in India; here we were steeped in a materialist frame of mind that valued positivist science, objective rationality, and sense data. Americans, it seemed, had a predilection for forklifts, centrifuges, monster trucks, skyscrapers, space telescopes, aircraft carriers, factories, and punch clocks, but minimal metaphysical support for divine realization.

And so to plumb the depths of Integral Yoga, we first had to break through a carapace of physicalist agnosticism, popular suspicions that spirituality was for mysto navel-gazers, and a flaming mistrust of conventional and New Age religiosity. Indeed, if we mentioned that we were devotees of an Indian guru or a woman inexplicably called “the Mother,” a shadowy fear would creep into the eyes of friends who might think, but be too polite to ask, Are you in a cult? Have you joined the Moonies? Do you need to be deprogrammed?

So we were pretty mum about the fact that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had demolished us with awe, love, and delight, and instilled in us an ineffable longing for God. We kept our cards pretty close to our chests — except in the pages of Collaboration. What a relief! Here we could commune with others who’d been similarly touched and changed forever by the compelling vision of Integral Yoga. These folks were hard to find. The U.S. was huge, we were separated by thousands of miles, and back then there were few Integral Yoga centres — “centres,” in fact, were mostly just people’s living rooms. This of course was before the internet; we couldn’t Google “yoga” or “posthuman species” and come across “supramental manifestation.”

And so Collaboration became our nexus — a source of yogic reinforcement and aspiration with distinctly American tones, e.g., a youthful willingness to experiment, an occasional irreverence, frequent doses of humour, and a stress on individual autonomy.

We were curious. We asked questions. What exactly was Integral Yoga? Was it still developing? Was the stricture against sharing experiences still valid? Was celibacy actually required for progress in sadhana? Could we start on physical transformation before psychic and spiritual transformation? Were forces emerging that might change the practice of the yoga itself? Might there be no single path, but a multiplicity of divergent approaches?

We pored over writings from Sri Aurobindo and studied commentaries on The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Savitri, and Essays on the Gita.

We were captivated by narratives of people meeting the Mother in person, accounts of the early Ashram, and memoirs of notable sadhaks—Amrita, Nirodbaran, K.D. Sethna, and many others.

We followed Auroville news and updates, sent money for the Matrimandir crystal, and read about Americans returning after years in Auroville to the wild and woolly West. 

We took an avid interest in personal stories about sadhana, surrender, subliminal states, descents of opalescent light, the witness self, the opening of chakras, the emergence of the psychic being, the importance of physical exercise, and grace.

We loved tales of yogic “bad boys” like Mickey Finn, a soldier, thief, con artist, and heroin addict whose discovery of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother changed his life; Ananta, aka Frederic Bushnell, who made Mother laugh and qualified for more than half the diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; and John Kelly, who had a vision of Sri Aurobindo on a WWII battlefield (“I saw a wisp of white smoke … suddenly I see a mouth and a beard start to form, then the eyes, and the eyes sent out this light that hit me, and I fell back … the voice says (low), “What is it you wish, my child?” It had the accent of a high Englishman. Here I am from Brooklyn. I said, “Oh my God … God is an Englishman! What am I gonna say to God?”).

Collaboration traced the coalescence of Integral Yoga community in the U.S. via the evolution of conferences, organisations, and groups such as the All USA Meeting (AUM), the Foundation for World Education, the Sri Aurobindo Association, Auroville International USA, and centres and study circles that were sprouting up like sunflowers across the land.

And in article after article, Collaboration authors searched for the soul of America.

Meanwhile, the Agenda was being translated from French into English, one volume at a time; portions were published in Collaboration along with stunning accounts by Satprem of Mother’s discoveries in “the yoga of matter.” This was breaking news, seeding in us a deep faith that a new creation was being built and imminent transformation was possible.

Then too, Collaboration chronicled the rise of the internet, when the physical wiring of ambient human awareness seemed to offer a glimpse into an age of harmony, unity, and mutuality. We marveled at the first Integral Yoga website (miraura.org) and gleefully exchanged email addresses. The ease and speed by which we could telecommunicate over long distances promised a new era of global solidarity and oneness.

Much later, Collaboration’s documentation of yogic hope and techno-optimism would phase into a measured consideration of the Anthropocene metacrisis, the dark side of the internet, and the resistance of nature to the descending Force—balanced by the understanding that according to the Mother, opposition is a stimulus to progress and, as Sri Aurobindo says, “even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny” in the Hour of God.

Meanwhile, a new chapter for Collaboration began in 2020 when the Sri Aurobindo Association of America, its publisher since 1987, envisioned a new look and process for the journal: updating its utilitarian format to one with more spaciousness and beauty, and expanding production from a single editor to a network of contributors. Today a number of teams are collaborating on Collaboration, aspiring to maintain a deep and consecrated field of fellowship and collective sadhana. From the start, Collaboration was a labour of love; and so it continues to be.

Here follow some article excerpts from the past 50 years of Collaboration that may give a closer glimpse into its undulating currents, tropisms, and treasures.

John Robert Cornell, from “Visionary Eyes on America: Sri Aurobindo and Mother on the Soul Qualities of the USA” (Winter 2012):

You don’t appreciate how vast a land America is until you drive across it from coast to coast. It takes five days from California to Virginia at freeway speeds. You don’t sense the intimately different qualities of wind, soil, animal community and birds until you get out and walk the land, or better, live its canyons and cities and ride its wild rivers for years, maybe lifetimes. Vegetation strange or immense, trees thorn-covered or thick as a snowstorm find community toeholds in a succession of rainforest, desert, valley, mountain, prairie, alkali flat, meadow and crystal lake. Straggly bristlecone pines in western mountains here were already 2,000 years old when the Buddha was born. In the central prairie state of Kansas, one seems to ride forever across a flatness that never ends. The Rocky Mountains abruptly halt the westward-rising prairie. Ancient Appalachian shoulders in the east still stubbornly lift skyward after eons of wearing away in wind and storm. Joshua trees and saguaro cactus of the desert, the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the hardwood forests of the eastern mountains still find room to grow amid sprawling, buzzing cities and agri-farms.

The wide Mississippi rolls on south down the middle of the continent, gathering, gathering, gathering centuries of raindrops and snowflakes from its basin of 1.83 million square miles. The land itself rolls slowly towards the horizon—or falls abruptly in cliff or fault. Earthquakes twist a blacktop road into spaghetti or drop a ridge 50 vertical feet in a few seconds. And slowly, over eons, mountains rise and seas settle in, ice sheets a mile thick overlay and then wear away the rising mountains and volcanic flows. Sahara-like sand dunes gather across ages and then compress into rainbow-hued sandstone that sprouts yellow stonecrop and ponderosa pine and a bewildering ark of insects and animals.

Scattered all across this explosion of vastness and variation, red, brown, white, black, and yellow Americans find here something of home. And call ourselves Americans. Live inside a particular story, a story with untold individual and collective variations, many strands isolated and unconnected as yet, but nonetheless leaves and branches of one in-progress story-tree.

Devan Nair, “Towards the Great Turning Point” (Summer/Fall 1991), on meeting the Mother:

To this day I cannot explain what really happened when I stood in front of that frail old woman, seated humped in her chair. “Poor old lady,” was my first gentlemanly thought. Then my eyes fell on an extraordinarily radiant face with a vibrant, golden glow.

Words are totally, hopelessly inadequate, to describe what happened next.

I will only say this. I presented the flowers, which she took, and suddenly found myself looking into a pair of the most incredible eyes I had ever seen. There followed a convulsive inner and outer movement. And suddenly, inexplicably, I found myself on my knees, with my head on her lap. I felt a soft and gentle hand on the crown of my head.

I got to my feet in a daze. Not a word was exchanged. She gave me a red rose, which I took, and I left the room. Somehow, I walked back to the guest house, and lay on my bed. I don’t remember anything else, for I woke up only at seven in the evening.

Debashish Banerji, from “Living Laboratories of the Life Divine” (Fall 2020 / Winter 2021):

A new age does not start by astrological factors. It is not because it is written in the calendar that a new age suddenly begins. A new age is an act of consciousness. It is a powerful act of consciousness, willed by the human cooperators and assented to by the Divine. And this is the new age that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have inaugurated. It is a new age, first and foremost, of world yoga. It is a new age of yoga and of world-yoga, the accelerated process towards conscious evolution.

Prakriti, nature, has always been doing yoga. This is why in The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo can say, “All life is yoga.” But the yoga of nature is a slow, semiconscious process. The yoga of human beings who wake up from within by the pointing finger of light that comes as a beacon showing the way is a conscious yoga. It is a conscious yoga that accelerates and quickens the process. It condenses into a lifetime or a few years what would otherwise have taken many lifetimes. It brings the future into the present.

This is exactly what Mother and Sri Aurobindo have done on a cosmic or terrestrial level. They have initiated the earth into a new yoga. The ear of the earth has been privy to the mantra of a new yoga and has accepted it. That yoga has begun. …

In a conversation of December 1938, Sri Aurobindo said that a few hundred people in the Ashram will not be sufficient to make the supramental effective for mankind. Thousands of people doing the yoga sadhana in many walks of life across the world would be needed for that. Individually and collectively, across America, across Europe, across Asia, across the world, we are all invited to be participants in the purpose of the supramental manifestation.

Lynda Lester, from “Napping with the Divine” (Spring 2021):

I’d been to Chicago O’Hare and learned there the airport protocol for exhausted wayfarers: pull up some floor and crash. So I staked out a spot between a pillar and a plate glass window, took my feather pillow out of my canvas bag, lay down, and drew my hat over my eyes….

And there on the cold carpet in the airport, my entire body aching with the pain of sleeplessness and middle age, I looked closely to see what was the truth of this moment.

What it was, was the Divine holding me in his arms. I was cradled in the arms of the Divine Mother, like a baby being rocked to sleep.

“Mr. Mushroom, Mr. Be A. Mushroom; Ms. Mental, Ms. Arlene Mental; Mr. Bread, Mr. Short Bread, please report to a white courtesy phone.” The voices I heard over the PA grew surrealistically comic as I drifted into a cozy, half-awake state.

Underneath me was the concourse, rumbling with the feet of hundreds of passersby; but what I felt most were waves of bliss beating up from the floor—like subatomic radiation, reverse gravity, convection: wave after wave of bliss carrying me like a little Wynken-Blynken-and-Nod boat on a sea galaxy of God. It was impossibly beautiful, impossibly full of peace and sweetness; it infused my aching cells.

And as I lay there crashed out on the floor like some despair-ridden homeless person, transcendence seduced and enveloped me, introduced me to infinity and immortality, brought me face-to-face with the timeless Eternal.

And that is how, cradled on the breast of the Divine, I found shanti and ananda on the floor of Denver International Airport.

Michael Miovic, from “The Story of Ebenezer: The Bird who Wanted to Walk” (Summer 1998):

As Ebenezer zoomed into that last, long curve of road before the beginning of all of Latin America, a Thing, a Monster, a veritable metal dinosaur on wheels came hurtling across the freeway and ran right over him. It was a Mack Truck. Eighteen wheels and 32 tons of steel and cargo came pounding down on little Eb’s back. You can imagine what became of him: He was smashed. Flattened. Crushed. Destroyed. Shredded. Creamed. Plastered. Pureed. Rubbed out. Ground to dust. Vaporized. Knocked back into the Stone Age. Smacked into oblivion. Blown to smithereens. Turned into a pancake, obliterated, decimated, liquefied, totally annihilated! Eb was pummeled into a black-and-red road-pizza topped with two yellowish eyes! It was terrible, a tragedy. Of course it took Ebenezer a while to figure out what had happened. He was moving so fast when he was hit that his soul was knocked out of his body and kept on going.

Matthew Andrews, from “On the Brink” (Spring 2021):

As much as possible, our refuges during this time are hope and surrender. If we can hold onto the hope that a new dawn is approaching, and surrender our will to the greater will that holds the good of all, then we will pass this time with greater ease. Hope will nourish our hearts and keep us at the ready, and surrender will protect us from self-destructive inclinations born of fear.

We know how to do this. Hope and surrender are encoded into our deepest hearts. We just need to look there, beneath the ideas and assumptions and predictions and strategies, into the silent vast within that holds immeasurable wisdom. A map for this traverse into the new terrain of the future will flow from deep within us. Guidance and direction will be spoken in the soul’s language of love and truth. The voices will ring clear, incapable of distortion.

This new day that dawns, this emergent future that requires us to transform in order to enter, cannot be seen by our mind’s eye, which is shaped by the past. It requires a new vision, an intuitive vision of the deepest heart that we will gain as we go.

We stand today in the midst of a million insoluble problems converging upon one another. And we stand in the midst of a million miraculous solutions inarmed with one another. Blessed be this holy moment, this space between breaths. We live on the brink of collective awakening.