Integral yoga and Evolutionary Mutation

Preface

Yoga has for long been conceived as the discipline that necessitates rejection of life and its activities. The Integral Yoga, on the contrary, maintains that all life is Yoga and that life can greatly be helped if we apply the principles of yoga to the problems of life. All life must be accepted, but all life must be transformed by the application of the Integral Yoga. It is further contended that the contemporary problems of life have reached a critical stage and that criticality can be resolved only if we apply principles of Integral Yoga to the problems of the contemporary crisis.

The purpose of this book is to elucidate this view of the Integral Yoga and to bring out how Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) and the Mother (1878-1973), while they were developing Integral Yoga, have confronted the problems of the contemporary crisis and have shown that the Integral Yoga can become an aid to humanity and it can even be used as an aid to the development of the next step of evolution itself.

According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the contemporary crisis of humanity is evolutionary in character and that the basic solution to the crisis requires, and even necessitates, evolutionary progression that leads to the emergence of the next species. In 13 volumes of 'Mother's Agenda', we find an evolutionary graph traced by the Mother between 1951 and 1973 of the descent of the Supramental Consciousness in how the problems of matter and life can be confronted and solved so as to bring about the mutation of

human species. During this process, the problem of the law of physical death has been questioned, and we have an account of the corporeal and psychological difficulties that stand in the way of transformation of the human body and the development of -a new instrumental structure of the Divine Body.

All this is directly relevant to all those whose interests extend beyond the present horizons of the current fields of physical and biological sciences as also of the psychological and spiritual sciences. The question of synthesis of science and spirituality is one of the problems that occupies the concerns of those researchers who want direction of science to be centered on the highest human welfare and who feel that spirituality can best sub-serve the highest aspirations for durable peace and new world-order of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The problems and concerns are, indeed, deeper. In this context Integral Yoga can be looked upon as a process by which the synthesis of science and spirituality can be expected to be realized.

This book invites the readers to study the original works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and particularly, Sri Aurobindo's book 'The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth' and 13 Volumes of 'Mother's Agenda.'

Kireet Joshi