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Selected Quotations |
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India preserves the
Knowledge that preserves the World.
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Man is a transitional being. He is not
final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching
achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is
at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of nature's
process.
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It is always the right thing when it is done in the right spirit.
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The Spirit that manifests itself in man and dominates secretly the
phases of his development, is greater and profounder than his
intellect and drives towards a perfection that cannot be shut in by
the arbitrary constructions of the human reason.
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The spiritual life does not need, for its purity, to destroy
interest in all things except the Inexpressible or to cut at the
roots of the Sciences, the Arts and Life... On the other hand, it is
possible at any period of the inner spiritual progress that one may
experience an extension rather than a restriction of the activities;
there may be an opening of new capacities of mental creation and new
provinces of knowledge by the miraculous touch of the Yoga-Sakti...
any power or ear or hand or mind-power may awaken where none was
apparent before.1
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The Essence of the Teaching
of Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo synthesized
Eastern and Western philosophy, religion, literature, and psychology in
writings.
Central theme of Sri Aurobindo's vision is the evolution of
human life into life divine.
The teaching of Sri Aurobindo starts from that
of the ancient sages of India that behind the appearances of the universe
there is the Reality of a Being and Consciousness, a Self of all things, one
and eternal. All beings are united in that One Self and Spirit but divided
by a certain separativity of consciousness, an ignorance of their true Self
and Reality in the mind, life and body. It is possible by a certain
psychological discipline to remove this veil of separative consciousness and
become aware of the true Self, the Divinity within us and all.
One of Sri Aurobindo's main philosophical
achievements was to introduce the concept of evolution into Vedantic
thought. Samkhya philosophy had already proposed such a notion centuries
earlier, but Aurobindo rejected the materialistic tendencies of both
Darwinism and Samkhya, and proposed an evolution of spirit along with that
of matter, and that the evolution of matter was a result of the former.3
Sri Aurobindo describes the limitation of the
Mayavada of Advaita Vedanta, and solves the problem of the linkage between
the ineffable Brahman or Absolute and the world of multiplicity by positing
a hitherto unknown and unexplored level of consciousness, which he called
The Supermind.
Sri Aurobindo rejected a major conception of
Indian philosophy that says that the World is a Maya (illusion) and that
living as a renunciate was the only way out. He says that it is possible,
not only to transcend human nature but also to transform it and to live in
the world as a free and evolved human being with a new consciousness and a
new nature which could spontaneously perceive truth of things, and proceed
in all matters on the basis of inner oneness, love and light.
Integral Yoga
In the teachings of Sri Aurobindo,
Integral yoga refers to the process of the union of all the parts of one's
being with the Divine, and the transmutation of all of their jarring
elements into a harmonious state of higher divine consciousness and
existence.
Sri Aurobindo defined integral yoga in the
early 1900s as "a path of integral seeking of the Divine by which all that
we are is in the end liberated out of the Ignorance and its undivine
formations into a truth beyond the Mind, a truth not only of highest
spiritual status but of a dynamic spiritual self-manifestation in the
universe."...
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