Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects

SRI AUROBINDO—A SHORT INTRODUCTION

Sri Aurobindo does not perhaps need any introduction now at this late stage. He has already become like his own SAVITRI a legend and a symbol. Still to those of us who have not known much or studied much of Sri Aurobindo, this small introduction may prove useful.

Sri Aurobindo is unique in this sense that in history of culture both of East and West, there is none who can compare with or come near him in learning and scholarship. If only we take account of the vastness of his erudition, neither Plato nor Shankara nor both of them together approach him although at the initial stages of his life, he had to learn from both of them in depth and breadth, height and subtlety of knowledge not acquired from external sources but intuitive and over mental and latterly supramental he has no second. If the title "sakala-sastra-parang-gata" (One, who has acquired mastery over all branches of knowledge) is really applicable to any one, it is justly applicable to him and him alone in the' whole range of human history.

While our economists and politicians and educationists and social reformers like those of other countries of the world are groping in the dark for finding a solution to age-long human problems and have failed and are failing to find any solution, he had in a single line offered us the prescription : If once mankind consents to be spiritualised, the whole human problem will be solved. Later on, as his own consciousness evolved

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from the spiritual to supramental, he found a remedy for all human ills in the supramentalisation of the race. He has prescribed the highest height of spirituality, the Supermind, as the only panacea for the whole human race and for the whole of earth-consciousness, for mind is not its last stage and its upward ascent has not ended. He therefore turned all the energy of his mind spirit to the discovery of the Truth-consciousness or Super-mind as he has termed it, and was not content till he had himself reached it in his own mind and life. In the whole evolutionary process beginning from vegetable to life-consciousness in the worms, insects, reptiles, birds and thence to the mental consciousness of the animals and finally to the emerging higher consciousness of man, the mental being, the earth is progressively moving towards the yet un evolved spiritual and supra-mental consciousness which is at the summit of our evolutionary destiny. When the summit is reached humanity will progress from a basis of knowledge to higher knowledge and not from ignorance to increasing knowledge as now. In the Truth-consciousness, there is an all-round and overwhelming order, peace, harmony and bliss. Not the transitional joy and pleasure of our conception but the Ananda of the Divine with His omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence and these are to be embodied in the superior types of mankind who open themselves to its influence and strive for it for the change of their whole consciousness and nature. The whole world will profit by this descent of super-mind in the terrestrial life. There will be a peace and progressive harmony in the lives of all the lower and inferior creation.

Sri Aurobindo came to assure us of the beauty of

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the future of earth-life freed from all sorrows and sufferings and struggles and strifes of the present life of the world with its ignorance, darkness and falsehood which are bound to be replaced by their divine opposites and earth-life will be transformed into divine life even assuring physical immortality to the body.

He has himself offered his body for the hastening of this process of the descent of the immortal Supermind on earth and the Mother of the Ashram, his divine collaborator in this stupendous task of world-transformation, has assured us that Supermind has descended in the earth-consciousness and taken a permanent abode here. It has to wage a strenuous and unceasing war against the forces of the ignorance, darkness and hostility of the forces that rule the earth-nature but its conquest over all these hostile and opposing forces is sure and inevitable. All that is needed on our part is collaboration with this slowly emerging force of Truth-consciousness and everything will be all right in time.

"The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,

More and more souls shall enter into light,

Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear

And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame

And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight

And human wills tune to the divine will."

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