THE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY OF

SRI AUROBINDO

DR. P. NAGARAJA RAO, M. A., D. LIT.

Tagore Professor of Humanities, Madras University

Aurobindo is one of our great spiritual savants that has left us a rich spiritual heritage in the form of prodigious literature, in poetry, prose, drama, epic and a cluster of letters. Besides this has built an imposing international spiritual centre where he lived for over half century in Pondicherry.

After an early intellectual training abroad he became a master of several foreign languages and returned to India and was for some time Principal, Baroda College. After this he flung himself in the militant anti-British campaign and was held up for his political action and tried. In this period he spent in the Alipur jail a long time. He came out of the Alipur jail and made his famous Uttarapara speech. In the jail he was given God vision and was commissioned to preach the new yoga for the regeneration of the humanity. In the Uttarapara speech he observes as follows:

“As I sat here there came into my mind a word that I have to speak to you, a word that I have to speak to the whole of the Indian nation. It was spoken first to myself in jail and I have come out to speak to my people.”

After intense religious experience of Krishna Consciousness Sri Aurobindo set to his task. He came down to Pondicherry and practiced integral yoga and the French lady Mira Alfasso, The Mother, built his spiritual Ashram. This has been the rallying spot for earnest spiritual aspirants all over the East and West.

Sri Aurobindo in a letter to his wife speaks of three aspirations. They are: “To identify himself with his people, to see and experience God, and to rid Mother (India)–a prostrate bleeding mother India of the rakshasa of an alien rule that was draining her lifeblood.” These three motives kept our Prophet moving on in his silent and powerful life. His life is described as an Epic of contemplation and action in union.

Sri Aurobindo’s message on India’s Independence Day, 15th August 1947, spells out his five cherished dreams. 1. A free and united India, 2. A free puissant and resurgent Asia, 3. A world union of differing nationalities, 4. A diffusion of India’s spirituality all over the world, 5. To take a step in the Evolution which would rise man to the highest consciousness resulting in the individual growth and perfect society. In a moderate sense he achieved all these dreams though not to the extent he wished and longed for.

Sri Aurobindo is a radical thinker. In his own words he is “a metaphysician doubled with a yogi.” Our national poet Tagore in 1928 exclaimed on seeing Sri Aurobindo the following words: “You have the word and we are waiting to accept it from you, India will speak through your voice to the world.”

After his spiritual experience in Pondicherry he has outlined his theory of reality and his philosophy of Sadhana in all his works. His literary output was given to the world first in a journal called Arya which he edited and whose columns he filled with his long serialised articles from 1914 to 1920 for over 7 years. Most of them are collected in the book-form today. Some of the important ones are: 1. The Life Divine 2. Essays on the Gita 3. Synthesis of Yoga 4. Ideal of Human Unity, 5. The Human Cycle and 6. Savitri.

It is difficult to summarize Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. It goes by the name Integral yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, Supreme Reality is not a homogeneous Consciousness. It is Consciousness force and bliss. This Reality has seeped into all the things in the world including insentient matter. This process of the Divine descent into the world is called involution. It is because of this matter is able to evolve Life into Mind, mind into consciousness, and till into Divine life. Evolution according to Sri Aurobindo is neither a straight line nor is merely physical. It is a spiral curve in which everything that went before must he taken up and integrated.

Man according to Sri Aurobindo is a term of transition. He has to develop his potentialities. He cannot grow by the use of his reason alone. “The logic of Infinite is the magic of the Finite.” Man cannot attain his best by relying on the past. Writing about the past, Sri Aurobindo says, “There cannot be a healthy victorious survival if we make of the past a fetish instead of an inspiring impulse.” Sri Aurobjndo suggests that the ‘ego-bound’ reason of man must surrender to the Super-mind. The descent of the Super Mind in man divinises him. It makes his powers angelic, and his comprehension God life. The descent of the Super Mind has the capacity to transform all things into divinity.

Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is integral and does not exclude anything. He does not despise samsara Matter and the body of man. He seeks to use all of them as instruments of God, channels for divinity to flow in. He stands for the positive outlook on life. He has given his ideal of life, and the purpose of creation in a celebrated sentence. “To know, possess and be the Divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss when there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death constant mutation,-this is offered to us as a manifestation of God in matter and the goal of nature in the terrestrial evolution.”

The integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo is a glorious chapter in the history of the contemporary Indian philosophy. He combined self a commanding intellect, a massive astounding scholarship and was one of most powerful spiritual forces of the present century.

“The perfect Yogin is no solitary musing on the Self in his ivory tower of spiritual isolation, but a many-sided universal worker for the good of the world, for God in the world.”

–SRI AUROBINDO

Back