Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects

Sri Aurobindo as a Literary Genius

Sri Aurobindo is better known as a philosopher and yogi than for his literary creations. That he is the pioneer of the integral philosophy of life and has done all that could be done to bring down the supramental power and principle in the earth life is well known to the elite of humanity. What however is less known of him is his most remarkable and original contribution to English language and literature. His letters, essays, aphorisms, poems, dramas and philosophical writings stand out as something unique in literature both as regards the originality of their thought-points as their wonderful literary and artistic excellence. Each one of his major works, such as The Foundations of Indian Culture, The Ideal of Human Unity, Human Cycle and The Future Poetry is a marvel of its kind. To delineate the value of his philosophical writings as embodied in his Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Yoga and his magnum opus the Life Divine would be beyond the scope of this short and so necessarily perfunctory and inadequate appreciation of his literary genius. As for his epic Savitri, it is already a part of the great classics of the world and has only to be repeatedly studied for the appreciation of its beauty, sublimity, grandeur and the novelty of its theme. His sonnets, lyrics and longer narrative poems are always redolent with a singular grace, charm and power. His poems Past and Present and Last Poems are simply marvellous and masterly contribution to the mystic and metaphysical poetry of the world. A detailed study

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and appreciation of his literary excellence are the work of the critic and connoisseur but no man or woman with a modicum of literary taste and inclination can ever fail to relish and enjoy the wonderful beauty of his prose, poetry, drama and other literary creations. His Life Divine, for example, is a singular and masterly exhibition of sustained and faultless literary style, perfectly chaste and elegant and quite in consonance with the spirit of its sublime and majestic philosophy. All his writings are replete with intuitive and over-mental truth and are therefore a source of perennial inspiration as much to the truth-seeker as to those? who approach them from merely intellectual standpoint for his logic is cogent, consistent and flawless. As he writes from a silent mind, he is always divinely inspired and his words carry the mantra, i.e., the charm and power of spirituality in them as is usual with the Masters. He who has once tasted the nectar of Sri Aurobindo will be satisfied with nothing else. One or two quotations from his writings will not be out of place here :

He who would bring the heavens here

Must himself descend into the clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.

The gifts of the spirit came crowding to him ;

They were his life's pattern and his privilege.

A pure perception lent its lucent joy :

Its enveloped all Nature in a single glance,

It looked into the very self of things ;

Deceived no more by the form he saw the soul.

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When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence, infinite movement, infinite activity pouring itself in limitless Space, in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum numberless myriads count only as a petty, swarm.

A guidance, a governance begins from within which exposes every movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false, obscure, opposed to the divine realisation : every region of the being, every nook and corner of it, every movement, formation, direction, inclination of thought, will, emotion, sensation, action, reaction, motive, disposition, propensity, desire, habit of the conscious or sub-conscious physical, even the most concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the unerring psychic light, their confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled, their obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions, precisely indicated and removed : all is purified, set right...etc.

Where judge ment ceases and the word is mute And the Unconcealed lies pathless and alone. There came not form or any mounting voice ; There only were Silence and the Absolute.

— Sri Aurobindo

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