The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

THE

VISION AND WORK

OF

SRI AUROBINDO

SECOND REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION

BY

K.D.SETHNA

Publisher's Note to the First Edition

With the selection of K. D. Sethna's writings, Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture from Pondicherry, comes out for the first time in the role of a Publisher of books.

The twenty-two articles offered here have previously appeared either in Mother India itself or in other periodicals connected with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, except for the very last one which was included in an Aurobindonian symposium from America. Readers have, off and on, expressed their wish about several of them that they should be gathered within convenient covers. What has prompted us to carry out their wish at the earliest opportunity possible is a couple of facts that are, to us, deeply significant.

First, many of these essays, ranging as the selection does from the early 'forties to the present, have passed under Sri Aurobindo's own eyes and been approved by him for publication at the time. Some inkling of his attitude may be had from a comment on one, that has reached us. As was his wont with K. D. Sethna's writings, he must have pronounced on each of them, but unluckily all his words are not available. However, the single verdict that is in our hands is extremely encouraging. Of "Free- will” in Sri Aurobindo’s Vision he conveyed through his disciple-scribe Nirodbaran the opinion: "It is excellent. In fact, it could not be bettered."

The second spur to our publishing venture has come from the Mother who is the Head and Guide of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. When this book was suggested to her as the first one on our list, she replied to the author in words that could not but be emboldening:

SRI AUROBINDO

Introduction

The Publisher's Note has quoted Sri Aurobindo's appreciation, for which no thanks can suffice, of an article of mine. Mention of this article may well serve as a starting-point for a few remarks on the general theme, temper and treatment the reader will find in the book.

The problem which "Freewill” in Sri Aurobindo’s Vision explores may seem fairly academic at first thought, but actually it is one of the most acute from the standpoint of practical action within a spiritual context. On it hinges the relation of what is felt as human responsibility to what is conceived as divine omniscience and omnipotence. To bring out its living concerns along with its metaphysical cruxes and put them all in a brief compass under the broad illumination of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of Integral Yoga was my aim. A like objective with regard to other topics has been followed in various ways at greater or smaller length in the rest of the volume. Everywhere the ideal is an interplay of light and life.

Then there is the question: "What readership mainly is here in view?" These essays were not always addressed directly to the disciples of Sri Aurobindo, though in one manner or another all are bound to touch them more intimately. Several were originally letters to individuals hovering on the fringe of the Pondicherry circle, and some spoke to sheer outsiders who needed to be informed of the profound experiment undertaken by Sri Aurobindo. In fact, all are basically written with an eye to the wide world ofinquiring minds and questing hearts. And thatsuch should be the case is in harmony with Sri Aurobindo's own position.

Sri Aurobindo stands for no narrow cult: he kindles a vision and initiates a work that bear on thewhole human situation, meeting its most central and recurrent as well as its most external and diverse issues. Man in every mode and field - the thinker and the scientist no less than the artist and the mystic - man individual and man collective - the modern breaker of new ground side by side with the heir of the ages - is Sri Aurobindo's material for probing and guidance. Especially is he concerned with man the conscious evolving agent and with the powers

within, around and beyond him that help or hinder his steps towards true Supermanhood, a transformative evolution of the entire nature rather than a glorified extension of this or that group of qualities.

To serve as effectively as possible the vision and work with which these pages deal, an attempt has been made - in the midst of whatever exposition or argumentation the subject chosen may call for - to write from a sense of concrete contact with Sri Aurobindo's many-sided spiritual personality and the radiant Presence, co-worker with Sri Aurobindo, that has Mothered, at once gently and firmly, the Pondicherry Ashram through more than four decades towards a momentous future. The adventure of a mysticism which takes in all the genuinely creative movements of the earth and seeks to establish on firm ground a new all-consummating power of the Divine - that is the cause to which this book is pledged. And the cause will go home best if in the writer's words there can come alive to the reader something of the reality of the two path-finders who have embodied it and lived it out.

K. D. SETHNA

Publisher's Note to the Second Edition

In response to the appeal of many Aurobindonians, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press has undertaken the functions of a publisher for the second edition of this book of K.D. Sethna's.

Prominent among those who have felt greatly helped by the clarity and penetrativeness and power of an exposition set in a variety of keys and pointed in a multitude of directions is Shri Gopal Bhattacharjee, Joint Secretary, Sri Aurobindo Society, In-charge of International Division and a Representative Executive Committee Member of the UNESCO (NGO) on behalf of the Sri Aurobindo Society. Shri Bhattacharjee had recently the extra-ordinary privilege to be invited by Sri Aurobindo’s own alma mater, King's College, Cambridge, to speak on his Master's life and spiritual message to humanity. Thanks are due to him for popularising, wherever he has been in his frequent tours abroad as well as in India, K.D. Sethna's work on Sri Aurobindo and thus rendering urgent the re-issue of the present book.

The author has taken the opportunity of this re-issue to add five new pieces. Four of them are the articles: "Waste in Nature", "The Goal and the Guide", "Linguistic Formations and Usages connected with the name 'Sri Aurobindo' ", "Sri Aurobindo and the Veda". The fifth is a short poem, "Mind of Light", which was appreciated by the Mother and to whose opening lines she paid the highest possible compliment from the spiritual point of view, as quoted in the introductory note to it.

Some of the old articles have been touched up here and there. One of them, "The Mother", has undergone considerable change in some portions in the light of events subsequent to its first composition in 1958.

A general new feature is that references have been supplied wherever necessary from the volumes of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL) published in 1972.