The Way of the Philosopreneur: Where Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo Meet
Secure and free in His eternal immutability the Lord projects Himself into the play and the movement, becoming there in His self-existence all that the Seer in Him visualises and the Thinker in Him conceives.
-Sri Arurobindo, Isha Upanishad (42)
Never does man enjoy freedom from action by not undertaking action, nor does he attain that freedom by mere renunciation of action.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi (22)
It has been 73 years since India attained liberation from British rule. Spanning across 90 years, the Indian independence movement progressed under the leadership of many remarkable individuals. Most notably though, Mahatma Gandhi has been given the title of “Father of the Nation.” Embracing India with his policies of non-violence, civil disobedience and self-sufficiency, Gandhi managed to overthrow colonial rule with love as the weapon. To most, Gandhi was a lawyer, politician, activist, and writer. However, I believe above everything else he was a relentless entrepreneur. In fact, through his entrepreneurial efforts he managed to unleash the hidden soul of capitalism.
Prior to Gandhi’s leadership, Aurobindo Ghose, a highly educated radical started a revolutionary movement in Bengal. While Aurobindo did promote passive resistance, he also advocated for the preparation of an insurrection (Banerji & McDermott, 2020), which ultimately led to his imprisonment. During that time, he meditated deeply on the Bhagavad Gita, and by the end of his incarceration he had transformed into a spiritually enlightened man. Thereafter, he came to be known as Sri Aurobindo, a yogi who devoted the rest of his life to “silent spiritual action.” Thus, Aurobindo transitioned from the role of a political reformer to a spiritual reformer. He attained tremendous philosophical depth in his writings on human and spiritual evolution, and developed the practice of Integral Yoga.
Unlike Gandhi, who devoted his life to “loud physical action,” Sri Aurobindo spent years in his apartment philosophizing and meditating on the Divine. One embraces the role of the entrepreneur, and the other, that of the philosopher. It was unfortunate that Gandhi and Aurobindo did not have the opportunity to collaborate. While Gandhi did send his son to invite Aurobindo to lead the country to freedom, the two never met face-to-face. As Robert McDermott said, “It is one of those places where not just these two figures, but two ontologies meet or miss. They meet in the sense that they approach each other but they also miss in that they do not join, they stay separate, either separate levels or seperate paths (1994).” Thus, I hope to explore the merging of these two souls through the birth of the philosopreneur. Describing the unfolding path in which the philosopher (Aurobindo) and the entrepreneur (Gandhi) “meet.”
One could also understand the concept of the philosopreneur through Vedanta. In the Isha Upanishad (2006), Sri Aurobindo writes:
There is a clear distinction in Veidic thought between kavi, the seer, and manīsī, the thinker. The former indicates the divine supra-intellectual Knowledge which by direct vision and illumination sees the reality, the principles and the forms of things in their true relations, the latter the labouring mentality which works from the divided consciousness through the possibilities of things downward to the actual manifestation in form and upward to their reality in the self-existent Brahman.
Thus, from this perspective, Aurobindo is the seer. He is Kavi who illuminates potentiality and scribes it into philosophy. On the other hand, Gandhi is the thinker. He is Manīsī who manifests actuality and builds it into materiality. The seer and the thinker, the philosopher and the entrepreneur, dance together as intuition and intellect merge to aid in the dynamic unfolding of the evolution of consciousness.
While Gandhi was practicing satyagraha (truth force), Sri Aurobindo was developing Integral Yoga as a practice to enable the evolution of human life into divine life. According to Aurobindo, evolution occurs in the first place because the possibility already exists in involution. He writes:
The power of the Flame cannot be divided from the Flame; where the Flame is, there is the power, and where the power is there is the fiery Principle. We have to come back to the idea of a Spirit present in the universe and, if the process of its works of power and its appearance is in the steps of an evolution, there imposes itself the necessity of a previous involution (McDermott, 2001).
In other words, “the inner precedes the outer realization (McDermott, 2001).” Therefore, spirit holds and molds the manner in which material evolution unfolds. To some extent, Aurobindo’s philosophy of evolution has a reflexive quality to it. Consciousness shapes institutions, which then reflects back onto consciousness, and then the shaping of institutions occurs again. This reflexive process is continuously unfolding. “Historical progress,” writes McDermott “is determined by the growth and refinement of consciousness.”
Grasping such a vast vision of the evolution of humanity is not an easy task. Furthermore, it is one thing to write and describe such a philosophy, but it is another to develop an entire practice around it. This is exactly what Aurobindo did with his Integral Yoga, as it provides one with a spiritual model for transformation into the Supermind. This is the stage in which human evolution integrates Matter, Life and Mind into a synthesis. Aurobindo elucidates:
The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of Consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of Supermind towards the divine being. The knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemisphere, is where mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them. The rendering of the veil is the condition of the divine life in humanity (McDermott, 2001).
Thus, the Supermind is the bridge between the higher and lower hemispheres of existence. As one ascends through matter, life and mind, satcitananda (truth consciousness) descends, and the two realms meet as the Supermind. Through the synthesis of karma yoga, jnana yoga and bhakti yoga, Aurobindo created an integral pathway towards Divine life.
As we descend from pure divinity to the physical ground on which we stand, we find Mahatma Gandhi walking and spinning. Gandhi practiced karma yoga on quite a deep level, which ultimately led him to realize an independent nation. While Aurobindo, on the other hand, practiced jnana yoga quite religiously through his eloquent synthesis of all the yogas. As for bhakti yoga, both practiced it on a daily basis through their devotion for the work that they were respectively engaged in. The primary difference in their ways of life can be attributed to satchitananda and satyagraha. As a mystic, Aurobindo focused on manifesting truth within the realm of consciousness; and Gandhi, being the activist, enabled truth to unfold on the ground of matter. “Truth (Satya),” writes Gandhi “implies Love, and Firmness (Agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force...that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or Non-violence (Fischer, 1962).” Herein lies Gandhi’s warrior spirit - his entrance into the battlefield of Truth and Love, and his resilience to actualize agraha in various ways.
One of the ways in which satyagraha was practiced by Gandhi was in his boycotting of British-made clothing. The art of weaving has been an ancient practice of India, but it was made obsolete during colonization. Millions of Indian weavers lost their livelihood to British machine-made textiles, which hijacked the market (Pal, 2017). The reality of this poverty led Gandhi to ground his policies in economic regeneration with India’s natural resource: cotton. By making the charka (spinning wheel) available to millions of households, he created a pathway out of foregin reliance. Instead, he paved the way for sustainable living by making the khadi into a symbol of freedom. Gandhi elucidates on his decision:
[It] is not merely the wages earned by the spinners that are to be counted but it is the whole reconstruction that follows in the wake of the spinning wheel. The village weaver, the village dyer, the village washerman, the village blacksmith, the village carpenter, all and many others will then find themselves reinstated in their ancient dignity, as is already happening wherever the spinning wheel has gained a footing...The plan...is not merely to induce the peasant to refuse to buy the cheap and nice-looking foreign fabric, but also by teaching him to utilize his spare hours in carding and spinning cotton and getting it woven by the village weaver, to dress himself in khaddar so woven and thus to save him the cost of buying foreign, and for that matter, even Indian mill-made cloth (Fischer, 1962).
By reviving the khadi industry, Gandhi managed to flip capitalism around. Today, we are able to understand Gandhi’s economic policies under the label of distributed capitalism. Although economist Jeremy Rifkin utilizes this term to describe the third industrial revolution and its effects on the energy sector, Gandhi’s homespun khadi movement most definitely falls under this revolutionary infrastructure. Distributed capitalism enables “virtually everyone to become a potential entrepreneur and collaborator, creating and sharing information and energy in open commons (Bauwens, 2013).” Besides distributed renewable energy networks, the manufacturing industry is also predicted to begin witnessing the effects of distributed capitalism. With 3-D printing gaining popularity, centralized factories with their heavy machinery and assembly lines may find themselves being outdated. As Rifkin states: “In the new era, everyone can potentially be their own manufacturer as well as their own internet site and power company. The process is called 3-D printing (Bauwens, 2013).”
The progression towards distributed capitalism is evidence that Gandhi was ahead of his time. Although some might argue that his resistance to industrialization was misguided, the current state of the fashion industry is proof that Gandhi’s thinking and strategy holds a timeless essence. Today, the khadi still maintains tremendous value and symbolism. When you wear khadi, you are representing a worldview; a worldview that is instilled in non-violence. As Gandhi so eloquently said:
If we have the ‘khadi spirit’ in us, we would surround ourselves with simplicity in every walk of life. The ‘khadi spirit’ means infinite patience. For those who know anything about the production of khadi know how patiently the spinners and the weavers have to toil at their trade, and even so must we have patience while we are spinning the thread of Swaraj (Pal, 2017).
This is precisely why Gandhi should be considered a great entrepreneur. He not only helped provide sustainable work and income for weavers and spinners, but he aided in popularizing a great product. A product that would carry a timeless message, and hold the essence of what a nation stands for. Ultimately, he enabled the villagers of India to become both producers and customers. Besides providing value and jobs, commercial entrepreneurship is also defined by its capacity to generate profit. However, since Gandhi was not motivated by profit, I would label him as a social entrepreneur. That being said, he was quite clear about the fact that he sees no conflict between capital and labor:
But none of my activities are one-sided, and as my religion begins and ends with Truth and non-violence, my identification with labor does not conflict with my friendship with capital...Capital...and labor should supplement and help each other. They should be a great family living in unity and harmony, capital not only looking to the material welfare of the laborers but their moral welfare also, capitalists being trustees for the welfare of the laboring classes under them (Fischer, 1962).
Inspired by the Gita, Gandhi truly saw labor as a spiritual and moral practice. To some extent, it transcended the realm of capital. Thus, I am inclined to push further than social entrepreneurship, and introduce the term integral entrepreneurship.
Twenty-nine years after India’s independence, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy founded Aravind Eye Care System in Madurai. Dr. V - as most call him - was both a Gandhian and a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. Living in a region with the largest blind population in the world, Dr. V was determined to find a solution to eradicate needless blindness in an efficient and compassionate way. Although he was a doctor, Dr. V looked to the business world to find the most radically sustainable solution to providing cataract surgeries for the poor. Out of which, he was tremendously inspired by McDonald’s. What he saw in the fast-food chain was the power of standardization, product recognition, accessibility, and scale. Thereafter, Aravind’s model adopted a tri-part mantra of “high volume, high quality, and affordable cost.” Alongside creating innovative solutions to poverty and healthcare, Dr. V lived a deeply spiritual life. In fact, “Aravind is an unconventional model that came into being not despite but because of the deep-seated compassion at its core (Mehta & Shenoy, 2011).” Each morning he would start his day with a reading from Aurobindo’s Savitri; and said: “It is very difficult to understand Savitri, just like it is very difficult to realize the soul. But you keep trying, and sometimes you get an inkling of it (Mehta & Shenoy, 2011).” “Do the work, and the money will follow” was an idea Dr. V grounded himself in, and thus practiced karma yoga in a Gandhian way. Today, 70% of Aravind’s eye surgeries are performed for free or below cost, while 30% are performed for above cost without compromising on quality of care on either side of the price range. Alongside affordability and efficiency, Aravind manages to maintain a 50% profit margin, of which 100% is reinvested into the hospitals. Rooted in spirituality, Dr. V’s vision was clear. In a journal entry in the 1990s he wrote:
My interest in my profession is how to make this work a field for inner growth and perfection. Aravind Hospital aims at bringing higher consciousness to transform mind and body and soul of people. It is not a mechanical structure repairing eyes. It has a deeper purpose (Mehta & Shenoy, 2011).
Dr. V truly integrated Aurobindo’s spiritual philosophy with Gandhi’s practical entrepreneurship. Therefore, he is a shining example of what it means to be an integral entrepreneur. An integral entrepreneur grounds their work in the inner realms of civilization, by focusing on creating a shift in the consciousness of people. As one works through the inner dimensions, they enable the outer transformation of human evolution to occur. Thus, an integral entrepreneur is truly a philosopreneur at heart.
We can now see how Aurobindo and Gandhi work hand-in-hand. By allowing the two to meet, satchitananda and satyagraha carry a deeper purpose for the evolution into divine life. Furthermore, while Aurobindo was focusing on radiating the light of existence, Gandhi was facing the shadow of it. It could very well be that together they created a shift in the field of human consciousness. While both were influenced by the Gita, their interpretation of it was quite different. Gandhi focused on the first three chapters and emphasized karma yoga and its teachings on selfless action. On the other hand, Aurobindo focused “not only on the revelation by Krishna but more significantly on Krishna’s revelation of his transcendent divinity (Banerji & McDermott, 2020). Through their diverse interpretations, the differences in their personality and outlook also become quite apparent. As Banerji and McDermott (2020) elucidate:
Aurobindo believed in overcoming opposites, while retaining the freedom of deploying them at the same time. His support and use of both non-violent and violent means for the independence movement is an example of this. Gandhi, on the other hand, believed in unswering adherence to principles, under assumptions of their correctness. This is what made him an uncompromising proponent of non-violence. It made him call off the struggle at crucial moments, if there was an eruption of native violence. It also made him voice naive and insulting advice to “turn the other cheek” to people under the yoke of inhuman suffering such as inflicted by Nazi Germany.
Although the Gita is open to various kinds of interpretation, it seems that Gandhi and Aurobindo’s interpretation can also be held together. While Gandhi embraced the idea of ‘being’ through a literal understanding of the Gita’s message, Aurobindo embraced the idea of ‘becoming’ with a more metaphysical understanding of the Gita. Seeing reality through the lens of ‘being,’ we can recognize the power of the moment and the desire to undertake it with full responsibility. However, witnessing reality through the notion of ‘becoming,’ one may experience the creative power of the Divine that permeates the cosmos, longing for something that goes beyond time. The ‘being’ thinks, acts, and undertakes. While the ‘becoming’ sees, transforms, and evolves. Thus, by integrating Gandhi and Aurobindo into the philosopreneur, we are able to see how “logos turns into flesh.”
Ultimately, the concept of philosopreneur is trying to articulate and model a way in which the in-betweenness of life can continuously unfold. Like the symbol of Dawn in Savitri, the middle way is what the philosopreneur strives for. As John Collins beautifully explains:
Dawn comes with a sense of hope combined with despair. It feels the light but cannot liberate itself from darkness. Dawn is a time for looking backward as well as forward. It is a time of neither a beginning nor an ending, but of a motionless middle ground which endures for a while and feels itself pulled in both directions but does not know which way to turn [...] It is only from the perspective of being in the middle between contraries that all realities can be observed and understood. Light sees only light; darkness is immersed in itself; but dawn sees both at the same time (McDermott, 1974).
Journeying through the souls of two great national heroes, we come to recognize the tragic beauty of an endless dawn. Gandhi and Aurobindo held onto opposite poles, but in the end they found each other in the equilibrium of the human psyche. Like alchemists, they fused matter and spirit to birth the soul of a nation. Ascending in the form of satyagraha, and the descending in the form of satchitananda, the two meet to create a revolution in the evolution of human consciousness.
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