Sri Aurobindo – A Life Divine

Published by auro on 08/15/2017

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I am concerned with the earth, not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfillment of the life and the body for its object.

The story of Life of Sri Aurobindo in pictorial format .

: In 1879 [Sri Aurobindo’s father] took his three sons to England and placed them with a clergyman and his wife with strict instructions that they should not be allowed to make the acquaintance of any Indian or undergo any Indian influence. These instructions were carried out to the letter.

: …and Aurobindo grew up in entire ignorance of India, her people, her religion and her culture.

: At the age of eleven Aurobindo had already received strongly the impression that a period of general upheaval and great revolutionary changes was coming in the world and he himself was destined to play a part in it. His attention was now drawn to India and this feeling was soon canalised into the idea of liberation of his own country.

: But the “firm decision” took full shape only towards the end of another four years. It had already been made when he went to Cambridge and as a member and for some time secretary of the Indian Majlis at Cambridge he delivered many revolutionary speeches which, as he afterwards learnt, had their part in determining the authorities to exclude him from the Indian Civil Service.

: In 1890 he passed also the open competition for the Indian Civil Service, but at the end of two years of probation failed to present himself at the riding examination and was disqualified for the Service. At this time the Gaekwar of Baroda was in London. Aurobindo saw him, obtained an appointment in Baroda Service and left England for India, arriving there in February 1893.

: …Sri Aurobindo had some spiritual experiences, but that was before he knew everything about Yoga or even what Yoga was, -e.g, a vast calm which descended upon him at the moment when he stepped first on Indian soil after his long absence, in fact with his first step on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay : (this calm surrounded him and remained for long months afterwards)

: In England he had received, according to his fathers express instructions, an entirely occidental education without any contact with the culture of India and the East . At Baroda he made up the deficiency learned Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages assimilated the spirit of Indian civilization and its form past and present.

: Sri Aurobindo passed thirteen years from 1893 to 1906, in the Baroda Service, first in the Revenue Department and in secretariat work for the Maharaja, afterwards as Professor of English and, finally, Vice-Principal in the Baroda College. These were years of self-culture, of literary activity-for much of the poetry afterwards published from Pondicherry was written at this time-and of preparation for his future work.

: He had already in England decided to devote his life to the service of his country and its liberation. He even began soon after coming to India to write on political matters (without giving his name) in the daily press, trying to awaken the nation to the ideas of the future.

: (From a letter to his wife) I have three madnesses. The first one is this. I firmly believe that the accomplishments, genius, higher education and learning and wealth that God has given me are His…. My second madness has only recently seized me. It is this: by whatever means I must have the direct vision of God. …. My third madness is that while others look upon their country as an inert piece of matter – a few meadows and fields, forests and hills and rivers – I look upon my country as the Mother.

: The outbreak of the agitation against the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave him the opportunity to give up the Baroda Service and join openly in the political movement. He left Baroda in 1906 and went to Calcutta as Principal of the newly -founded Bengal National College.

: Sri Aurobindo’s first preoccupation was to declare openly for complete and absolute independence as the aim of political action in India and to insist on this persistently in the pages of the journal [Bande Mataram]; he was the first politician in India who had the courage to do this in public and he was immediately successful.

: The journal declared and developed a new political programme for the country as the programme of the Nationalist party, non-cooperation, passive resistance, Swadeshi, Boycott, national education, settlements of disputes in law by popular arbitration and other items of Sri Aurobindo’s plan.

: His idea was to capture the Congress and to make it an instrument for revolutionary action instead of a centre of a timid constitutional agitation which would only talk and pass resolutions and recommendations to the foreign Government; if the Congress could not be captured then a central revolutionary body would have to be created which could do the work.

: Very few people know that it was I (without consulting Tilak) who have the order that led to the breaking of the [Surat] Congress and was responsible for the refusal to join the new-fangled Moderate Convention which were the two decisive happenings at Surat. Even my action in giving the movement in Bengal is militant turn or founding the revolutionary movement is very little known.

: The greatest thing done in those years was the creation of a new spirit in the country. In the enthusiasm that swept surging everywhere with the cry of Bande Mataram ringing on all sides men felt it glorious to be alive and dare and act together and hope….

: Sri Aurobindo never brought any rancour into his politics. He never had any hatred for England or the English people; he based his claim for freedom for India on the inherent right to freedom, not on any charge of misgovernment or oppression; if he attacked persons even violently, if was for their views or political action, not from any other motive.

: The outbreak of the agitation against the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave him the opportunity to give up the Baroda Service and join openly in the political movement. He left Baroda in 1906 and went to Calcutta as Principal of the new

: The part Sri Aurobindo took publicly in Indian politics was of brief duration, for he turned aside from it in 1910 and withdrew to Pondicherry ; much of his programme lapsed in his absence, but enough had been done to change the whole face of Indian politics and the whole spirit of the Indian people to make independence its aim and non-cooperation and resistance its method….

: I did not leave politics because I felt I could do nothing more there; such an idea was very far from me. I came away because I did not want anything to interfere with my Yoga and because I got a very distinct adesa in the matter. I have cut connection entirely with politics, but before I did so I knew from within that the work I had begun there was destined to be carried forward, on lines I had foreseen, by others, and that the ultimate triumph of the movement I had initiated was sure without my personal action or presence.

: In 1909 Sri Aurobindo declared : Since 1907,we are living in a new era which is full of hope for India. Not only India, but the whole world will see sudden upheavals and revolutionary changes. The high will become low and the low high. The oppressed and the depressed shall be elevated. The nation and humanity will be animated by new consciousness, new thought and new efforts will be made to reach new ends. Amidst these revolutionary changes, India will become free.

: …early one morning [in May 1908] while he was still sleeping, the police charged up the stairs, revolver in hand, and arrested him. He was taken to the police station and thence to Alipore Jail where he remained for a year…. In the jail he spent almost all his time in reading the Gita and Upanishads and in intensive meditation and the practice of Yoga.

: When I was arrested and hurried to the Lal Bazar Hajat I was shaken in faith for a while, for I could not look into the heart of His intention. Therefore I faltered for a moment and cried out in my heart to Him, “What is this that has happened to me? I believed that I had a mission to work for the people of my country and until that work was done. I should have Thy protection. When then am I here and on such a charge ?” A day passed and a second day and third, when a voice came to me from within ,”Wait and see”.

: I was taken from Lal Bazar to Alipore and was placed for one month in a solitary cell apart from men. There I waited day and night for the voice of God within me, to know what He had to say to me, to learn what I had to do. In this seclusion the earliest realization, the first lesson came to me.

: It seemed to me that He spoke to me again and said, “The bonds you had not the strength to break, I have broken for you, because it is not my will nor was it ever my intention that should continue. I have had another thing for you to do and it is for that I have brought you here, to teach you what you could not learn for yourself and to train you for my work.” Then he placed the Gita in my hands. His strength entered into me and I was able to do the Sadhana of the Gita.

: When I turned to the Yoga and resolved to practise it and find out if my idea was right, I did it in this spirit and with this prayer to Him, “If thou art, then Thou knowest my heart. Thou knowest that I do not ask for Mukti, I do not ask for anything which others ask for. I ask only for strength to uplift this nation, I ask only to be allowed to live and work for this people whom I love and to whom I pray that I may devote my life.”

: Sri Aurobindo started his Sadhana at Baroda in 1904 on his own account after learning from friend the ordinary formula of pranayama. Afterwards the only help he received was from the Maharashtrian Yogi, Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, who instructed him how to reach complete silence of the mind and immobility of the whole consciousnesses . This Sri Aurobindo was able to achieve in three days with the result of lasting and massive spiritual realisations opening to him the larger ways of Yoga.

: Lele finally told him to put himself entirely into the hands of Divine within and move only as he was moved and then he would need no instructions either from Lele himself or anyone else. This henceforward became the whole foundation and principle of Sri Aurobindo’s Sadhana.

: I began my Yoga in 1904 without a Guru; in 1908 I received important help from a Mahratta Yogi [Lele] and discovered the foundations of my Sadhana; but from that time till the Mother came to India I received no spiritual help from anyone else.

: Since 1908 when I got the silence, I never think with my head or brain – it is always in the wideness generally above the head that the thoughts occur. * In a greater state of emptiness I carried on a daily newspaper and made a dozen speeches in the course of three or four days – but I did not manage that in any way ; it happened. The force made the body do the work without any inner activity.

: [By 1909] Sri Aurobindo had already realized in full tow of the four great realizations on which his Yoga and his spiritual philosophy are founded. The first he had gained while meditating with the Maharashtrian Yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele at Baroda in Jnauary 1908; it was the realisation of the silent, spaceless and timeless Brahman… his second realisation … was that of the cosmic consciousness and of the Divine as all beings and all that is, which happened in Alipore Jail.

: To the other two realisations, that of the supreme Reality with the static and dynamic Brahman as its two aspects and that of the higher planes of consciousness leading to the Supermind he was already on his way in his meditations in the Alipore Jail.

: It took me four years [1904-1908] of inner striving to find a real Way. even though the divine help was with me all the time, and even then, it seemed to come by an accident; and it too me ten more years of intense Yoga under a supreme inner guidance to trace it out and that was because I had my past and the world’s past to assimilate and overpass before I could find and found the future.

: In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action…. this power is greater than any other and more effective.

: The highest truth is truth of the Spirit; a Spirit supreme above the world and yet immanent in the world and in all that exists, sustaining and leading all towards whatever is the aim and goal and the fulfillment of Nature since her obscure inconscient beginnings through the growth of consciousness is the one aspect of existence which gives a clue to the secret of our being and a meaning to the world.

: Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that climb to a divine supermanhood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but troubled and limited mundane existence. * The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth’s evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature’s process.

: The teaching of Sri Aurobindo starts from that of the ancient sages of India that behind the appearance 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 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.

: It is not [Sri Aurobindo’s] object to develop any one religion or to amalgamate the older religions or to found any new religion – for any of these things would lead away from his central purpose. The one aim of this Yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the one Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinise human nature.

: I am concerned with the earth, not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfillment of the life and the body for its object.

: What I received about the Supermind was a direct, not a derived knowledge given to me; it was only afterwards that I found certain confirmatory revelations in the Upanishads and Veda. * I know with absolute certitude that the supramental is truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable.

: The Guru is the channel or the representative of the manifestation of the Divine. according to the measure of his personality or his attainment; but whatever he is it is to the Divine that one opens in opening to him.

: To Thee who hast been the material envelope of our Master. to Thee our infinite Gratitude . Before Thee who hast done so much for us, who hast worked, struggled, suffered,hoped, endured so much, before Thee who hast willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all for us, before Thee we bow down and implore that we may never forget even for a moment all we owe to Thee. -The Mother

Sri Aurobindo – A Life Divine

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Sri Aurobindo – A Life Divine

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