Sri Aurobindian Ontology

In my practice of Integral Yoga the guiding force has always been the Mystic Fire, Vedic Agni

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:55:46 +0000

Re: The Evolution of Discourse and The Lives of Sri Aurobindo

by Rick on Sun 07 Dec 2008 11:16 PM PST | Profile | Permanent Link

Rich and Debashish,

Yes, but there may be another way on this journey that is neither the “submission of the human will” in the Hegelian representation nor the hypertrophy of it in the Nietzschean zeitgeist. It is the approach of yet another German, Jean Gebser who by his own account may be supportive, complementary, corroborative and—I will add, supplementary—to Sri Aurobindo’s approach to evolution and spiritual transcendence past our current conditioning. His approach to languaging was different from Sri Aurobindo’s. Sri Aurobindo will use familiar words like “evolution” and “transcendence” (and even, “empire”) in a revolutionary way that subverts them always towards a radically transformative agenda and allows them to find their place in an utterly profound sense on a most massive canvas. We, however, when we are hypnotized by the convent-shun-all meaning of the words, may often fail to allow the conscious force behind and within his words to take us where could and will lead if we would. Gebser, on or as the other hand, is so conscious of the languaging he is forced often to invent new words, neologize in order not to be conventionally misunderstood. What Sri Aurobindo calls “synthesis” (as in “The Synthesis of Yoga”) Gebser calls “systasis” and “synairesis”—and in writing he comes from a systatic-synairetic condition much as Sri Aurobindo actually writes from the consciousness of the states he is describing. Gebser eschews the concept “evolution” in favor of “discontinuous transformation” towards a new “integral consciousness structure” that’s neither vertically “transcendent” in any usual sense nor the result of any mere image of a linear evolution—and directly equates this integral structure with the Supermind (Jean Gebser discovered “The Life Divine” and other works of Sri Aurobindo in German translations AFTER he had finished his first edition of “The Ever-Present Origin”). His use of “will” and “volition” is also highly original, as some of you may know. In fact I would wonder, since Rich (in “Integral Ideology”) and Ulrich (especially the latter) have written on Gebser, whether it might be useful or some anyway might find it interesting to attempt to view some aspects of this controversy surrounding the “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” by Peter Heehs in a more Gebserian way that might allow us — if not to reconcile —at least to place some of the elements of this problem in a less polarizing manner that might more effectively express the wholeness of the total situation. If not an evolution of discourse, its discontinuous tranformation…

Rick

by Rick on Tue 09 Dec 2008 08:59 PM PST | Profile | Permanent Link

Rich: The nomenclature of Gebser and Aurobindo representational systems share similarities and differences. You highlight one seeming difference in that Gebser did not view evolution as progressive, since he defined progress as taking one further from Origin.

Additionally, I dont think Supermind squares with what Gebser calls the Integral Structure. Perhaps Origin would be more akin to Supermind but given that both phenomena exceed any attempt to represent them we still maybe comparing apples and oranges.

Rick: Not apples and oranges, Rich. Oranges and oranges. Gebser himself explicitly identifies (not represents) the “newly emergent consciousness” that Sri Aurobindo called the Supermind with the new consciousness structure (certainly not the “Origin” which is more like the Brahman or even Parabrahman) that Gebser did not represent but himself experienced in a “flashlike intuition” in the winter of 1932/33. Gebser stated he and Sri Aurobindo had “differing points of departure” (see “The Ever-Present Origin,” p. xxix) that did not preclude “the one exposition from not merely supporting and complementing, but also corroborating the others” (including here also Teilhard’s Omega Point). Moreover, when Gebser visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in (the ever-present) Puducherry in 1970, he wrote in his diary, and later talked about in a lecture that all his flashes of intuition and flights of the spiritual, all his important ideas, his entire oeuvre in fact, fell within the “force-field” (Gebser’s words) of the consciousness of Sri Aurobindo. This took place 20 years after Sri Aurobindo left his physical body. This is an amazing statement for a respected European intellectual of the very highest caliber to make, one whose erudition rivals Sri Aurobindo’s, and of whom Carl Jung counted himself friend and admirer! I for one take it very seriously. I have heard this from Wolfgang, formerly president of the AVI; from his former secretary; from a Brazilian (I think Aurovilian); and I read it in a published talk of the founder of a new school of interpretation of quantum physics, Ulrich Mohrhoff, an SCIY editor. Neither Sri Aurobindo nor Jean Gebser merely represented what they realized—they presented, and could do so because they were not only reaching for, but experiencing. They were both bringing the same Origin (dynamic Brahman) into the same Present through the power of the integral consciousness that they were both in their own way opening our way to. Gebser is generous in that he considers himself only someone within the force-field that is the consciousness of Sri Aurobindo. They wanted us all to experience the taste of the same fruit which because of certain archaic connotations that have fallen upon the apple, I much prefer to call an orange!

I also feel that if one digs deeply and is not hypnotized by mere words one may find that whereas Gebser did not like the term progress or progressive, the actual meaning of what he was presentiating falls in close harmony with Sri Aurobindo and Mother’s “ever-progressive manifestation.” Ditto with the word evolution.

Rich: The obvious framing of the problems with the Lives of Sri Aurobindo in Gebserian terms would be of the different ways mythic versus mental consciousness apprehend and depict a person whose inner life may best be referred to as Integral.

Rick: Not so obviously, I suppose, I suggest that both the attacks on “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” and the defenses of the book (coupled with attacks on the attackers of the book) exist in a non-original realm of mythic polarity between a deficient magical structure and a deficient mental-rational structure finding no common ground and imparting precious little integrality. But this last statement of mine is too bald a comparison and leaves out most of the truth. None of us “is” any one consciousness structure (any more than any of us represents merely and only the mind or the vital or the physical or the psychic being—to compare apples with oranges)—all of these live in all of us and all our cultures, and it is a difficult task, but a real task of this new world that is born, born, born to try to present these. I do suggest, however, that the mental-rational structure, because it believes so strongly in its exclusive validity, is—when it becomes deficient—more fundamentalist that the archaic-magic-mythical structures that it so blithely attacks. I don’t have time for more now, but I do firmly and fondly believe that if there is some interest, a Gebser-inspired view of these matters could lead to a greater integrality.

Rick

by Rick on Sun 14 Dec 2008 04:51 PM PST | Profile | Permanent Link

The mental-rational tends to regard its structures as exclusively valid so much so that its deficient phase had led to exclusive faith in reason. All other conceptions and constructions must fall; only its structures remain. But this is no mere invective against the mind’s fundamentalism. Because if we come unstuck we may find something deeper that is something like the saving grace of the mind. Inherent in mind also is unquenchable aspiration to break out from its prison, to exceed itself. The most human drive in the human being is to exceed the limited, separative desire-driven machine that is far too much, and increasingly, the techno-human condition. We see this trans-humaning drive in Nietzsch, in many postmodernists as we see it in Sri Aurobindo. The instrument of aspiration within the mind is, at its origin, Will. Aspiration, the inner Vedic Sacrifice, living discriminating choice, self-concentration and self-consecration, the free surrender of a living being: all are aspects of will. Will, the transformative element, opens into infinite possibility. Perhaps this came into play in our human mental being with the advent of the Mental Purusha. But as Nolini points out in “Lines of the Descent of Consciousness” it is the soul, it is its mounting flame of aspiration, that called this mental purusha into the early human to be its psychic instrument. The psychic being of the human invoked the mental purusha to descend; this purusha collaborates with the central inner will to help form the unique human being—unique, because its very existence is a bridge and transition.

Discriminating will, says Nolini, is—much more than mere mechanical rationality—the very faculty that makes us human. The human is precisely the creature who comes to link this world we know with worlds of higher quality, intensity, value. In postmodern terms it is primarily Will that leads us into l’Avenir, the Future, opens into light of boundless potential, “millions of golden birds”—and is a potent agent in our self-deconstruction. Deconstruction is an alchemic process of dissolution and coagulation; or, in Integral Yoga, the separation (through the inner Purusha or inner being) of mind from life from body, layer from layer, so that the Mother’s Force can freely reintegrate, can fully reconstruct our nature and being into an interlinked,integrated instrument of a will that is no longer an only child but now is one with knowledge, love and action. We can open to, are invited to freely participate in this process of divine deconstruction. From the mind’s standpoint, there seems to be some kind of ladder, rungs of a hierarchy, an overly certain linearity, a progress and an evolution; from the standpoint of Origin, or Satchidananda, this is more like a growing intensity, an ever-spiral way, a discontinuous transformation or miraculous mutation—even, at highest pitch, a completely spontaneous, constant rebirth of the universe each moment with free and magnificent expression in “the very heart of fulfilled harmony.”

In my practice of Integral Yoga the guiding force has always been the Mystic Fire, Vedic Agni. I resonate to this ever-new statement of T. V. Kapali Shastry: “And yet this Agni who is so close to us and accessible to devout hearts is not different from the Sun of Truth. For in the last resort, the Rishi realizes him as the force of the Sun of Truth” (“The Initiate and the Mystic Fire”). Here Sastriji imparts the essential—the eventual—unity of the Agni, the Supermind, and the Mother’s Force, three that are one in the stream of the Integral Yoga. I believe Nietzsche and many of the postmodernists, too, could resonate to this if presented to them as a pure form of statement. This Agni is a universal power, yet differs so much from all other gods. Agni alone descends into, labors in the darkness-within-darkness, the Inconscient where the gods refuse to dwell. We, humans, bear a strong kinship with Agni for we are here in great part to illumine our porition of the Inconscient and so have each within us our own personal Agni that is the real worker of this work we freely have consented to. Agni, giving humanity and transhumanity to the human, grows through physical life and mind and beyond and is the Force of evolution, the Immortal in mortals, the earth-universal, the purifier who yet transforms all the other universal powers as necessary, as the intensification of the journey proceeds. All the “gods” are held within Agni as the spokes of the wheel within its nave. When given its fullest freest play Agni reveals itself always leading us on to more abundant operations of the Mother’s Force, and to the Supramental because Agni itself was always essentially supramental (only seemed to be involved in smoke and invoked from the ashes) linking us also to wisdom and to love. Opening to Agni if we are perfectly sincere, we are always protected from hubris because Agni is the most humble of the powers. As the divine builder of forms and the conscious integrator-force, Agni even forms then articulates the psychic being and is that power within the soul to integrate the nature around it and turn all towards—though not as yet into—the Divine and the origin. The soul, to be sure, has its more passive aspects, its urge toward release and escape and exclusive transcendence; and it is the efficient power of the Agni—the effective force ensouled, the Will in it and also presiding over it—that leads the soul with its nature in train into its greater intensities and deeper fulfillments. No transformation is possible without Agni. “It is the Mother’s Force that is in the Agni,” as Sri Aurobindo writes to young Nagen Doshi. It seems that all is like some magnificent train set, all those bells and whistles, set and ready to go, but it is the Mother that sets the train in motion and drives it down the tracks.

Amal wrote: “The psychic being in full blaze was the Mother’s secret of sadhana.” In the Agenda, vol. 2, page 176 and selected through 179, we hear her saying: “Yesterday, this ardor of the Flame was there—burning all to offer all….it wasn’t the god Agni, it was a STATE OF BEING. It was a state of the Supreme, and as such, it was intimate, clear, intense, vibrant and living….Simply, the aspiration must be constantly like this (gesture of a rising flame)….The rest doesn’t matter….The important thing is the Flame…it’s absolutely independent of all circumstances….The cells THEMSELVES aspire.”

To bring it on to ground-level, I’ll conclude with a passage from Amal Kiran where he writes on the real question that burns sometimes: Is there any true free will? Where might it lie for us, who still live so much in our surface state? (Ulrich Mohrhoff, one of the editors of SCIY, also deals with this—is there any “free” will for us, and how and where may it be found?—in “Particles, Consciousness and Volition…” in his journal AntiMatters from a quantum Vedantic perspective).

“When the multi-possible Purusha of us with its centre in the psychic being stands fully back, uninvolved in Prakriti and lord of it, though not united altogether with the Jivatman above, we have a clear realisation of some measure of authentic freewill, because that uninvolved and masterful Purusha, centrally psychic, is in rapport with the totally free Jivatman.” (Amal Kiran, “The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo,” p. 94-95,” essay “Free Will in Sri Aurobindo’s Vision.”)

This can move from the status of exclusively witnessing, on to the status of giver (or refuser) of the sanction—and from there to the status of knower and lord; on to the truly free exercise of will. And we may choose that which leads to the life divine, rather than what merely enmeshes us in the muck and mire of our own making. Amal continues:

“In our present state, obscure and weak and perverted, we are divorced from the wisdom and puissance and beauty that we are on our ultimate heights: we have not the absolute freedom of our own hidden Infinite, nor have we the potent prerogative of our own psychic depths; still, a dim vestige we do possess of what we have put behind and beyond us and part of the vestige is an ability to give to Prakriti’s fluctuations of inertia, vehemence and harmony a Yes or a No and gradually effect a passage from our human imperfection to a supernal splendour. NO FREEWILL OTHER THAN THIS BARE ABILITY IS OURS, BUT IT IS FREEWILL NONE THE LESS (caps mine). And at least a faint glimmer of freewill has indeed to be there in our surface existence if we are meant to be conscious co-operators in the work of rising from humanity to superhumanity and bringing into all our constituents what Sri Aurobindo terms the Supermind, the archetypal truth of all that we are in the evolutionary process.”

Rick Lipschutz

Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

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We practice yoga because we really don’t have any other choice

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 05:45:32 +0000

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Why do we practice?

By Richard Rosen

At the outset, it’s natural to assume that our practice and our life are totally separate, that we practice for an hour or so a day and then forget about it. But after a while, the two inevitably begin to merge. As Sri Aurobindo, the great 20th-century Indian sage and progenitor of Integral Yoga, reminds us, “All life is yoga.”

In Aurobindo’s view, yoga is threaded through the warp and weft of our very existence, and in effect it chooses us. We practice yoga because we really don’t have any other choice. Of course, we do decide what form our practice takes—we can go off and live alone in a cave and meditate, or we can stay at home, raise a family, and root for the Yankees. Performed with the proper attitude, each of our everyday actions can be an asana, each breath a pranayama, each thought (or space between two successive thoughts) a seed for meditation.

Richard Rosen, who teaches in Oakland and Berkeley, California, has been writing for Yoga Journal since the 1970s.

The issue is constitutional. The habits are pathological

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:35:58 +0000

Main Page

A Key to the Flaming Doors of Ecstasy

Hard is it to Persuade Earth-Nature’s Change

by RY Deshpande on Fri 17 Apr 2009 04:34 AM IST | Permanent Link | Cosmos

Hard is it to persuade earth-nature’s change. Harder is it also to impose change on the working of the nature of the earth. The issue is constitutional. The habits are pathological, related to body and health, of various kinds. The last habit is the habit of death. But, before that, there are the habits of suffering, error, falsehood, ignorance, gloom, pain, inertia, tamas, depression, fear, bhaya; there are suggestions of sadness, despair, of suicide, suggestions from what the Mother calls “the thieves of the vital world”. All these are parts of or consequences of our physical and sometimes psychological makeup and hard they are to eliminate. That is what we are presently composed of. Savitri’s task is connected with it, and she has to pay a heavy price, by accepting this world’s ignominy and its stubbornness, stubbornness of the mortal life. Its entire past stands against all progress.

There is nothing that is not a mirroring

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 04:14:50 +0000

The Linguistic Approach to Knowledge – Vladimir (22/9)

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god and the word was god. If you read further you will find what happened to that word. That word began to travel and came down and became flesh. Sri Aurobindo starts his observations from the vibrations of the spoken word, “…Let us suppose a conscious use of vibrations of sound that will produce corresponding forms or changes of form… a vibration of sound on the material plane presupposes a corresponding vibration on the vital…

“As a matter of fact, even ordinarily, even daily and hourly we do produce by the word within us thought-vibrations, thought-forms which result in corresponding vital and physical vibrations, act upon ourselves, act upon others, and end in the indirect creation of actions and of forms in the physical world. …Thus we see that the theory of creation by the Word which is the absolute expression of Truth, and the theory of the material creation by sound-vibration in the ether correspond and are two logical poles of the same idea. They both belong to the same ancient Vedic system (KU p.126).”

Sri Aurobindo defined four planes: supramental, mental, vital, and physical. If the word is tavelling from the highest down, we have these four levels – transcendental speech, mental speech, mediating speech, material speech. In the study of signs and trace, Saussure came to the discovery at the beginning of the 20^th century, to the same one made long ago by Bharatrihari, of the correspondence of signified and signifier. Whatever we say about the object is the signifier, but what is signified is the concept of the object. These two build one sign – Derrida describes it as a trace structure. The signified is never there. Signifier is never that. The never there and never that makes the sign by which we suppose we know. …He never takes it for pure gold.…When you speak about anything or write anything you mean really the signified behind.

If we presume the signifier is the signified we fall into the trap of logocentrism. We think what we speak is true, but there is nothing of the kind. There is a parallel reality to which we have very little relation. ..If we look at the illustration, we have on one side the reality, form, meaning, object; on the other side we have the signifier, and this is what is called vach, nama, speech, name. I propose here a solution: …the form of seeing, the face or form is of a direct nature, of the evidence of the truth; we hear the indirect evidence, vach – seeing is superior to speech. How they correspond – the form of the thing and of the name of the thing are not the same, but they are the same on the level of semantics, of meaning. Both the pen and its name mean the tool for writing. On the higher plane this power of consciousness is one, where the sound and meaning are one, beyond the mind. It is being realized below as word and as form. …They mirror each other. There is nothing that is not a mirroring. …So that was my solution, which I found many years back and I am happy with it.

Listen to the full audio presentation at:
http://www.universityofhumanunity.org/audio_linguistics_talk_vladimir

Université Intégrale: An Exploration into an Integral Approach to … By Université Intégrale
From 15 September 2007 to 15 December 2007 a varied group of people (from Auroville and Pondicherry) came together to create a series of workshops for the purpose of clarifying the vision of the University of Human Unity (UHU) and to …

Fourteen Manus and ten gavas of the Dashagava

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 02:43:33 +0000

Mirror of Tomorrow Recent Articles Poetry Time: 11 April 2009

Towards the Intermediate Race—Sri Aurobindo’s Last Set of Writings 1950 [1]

Towards the Intermediate Race—the Early Writings: Record of Yoga 1914 [4]

Towards the Intermediate Race—the Early Writings of Sri Aurobindo 1909 [3]

Towards the Intermediate Race—the Early Writings of Sri Aurobindo 1909 [2]

Towards the Intermediate Race—the Early Writings of Sri Aurobindo 1909 [1]

Sri Aurobindo’s Prose Style—by Goutam Ghosal

Remembering my Uncle Dr Mangesh V Nadkarni—By Shodhan B Nadkarni

Lake Estate—Harmonious Collaboration

Chapman’s Homer—Keats’s Sonnet

Datta—by Anurag Banerjee

Celebrating an Indian’s breakthrough in Science—by Ashok Parthasarathi

A Search for the Historical Krishna—by NS Rajaram

Towards the Intermediate Race—the Book of Benediction: the Descent of Krishna and Kali

Lijjat Papad—Indian Meal Starter Lasts 50 Years

100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:27:32 +0000

Science, Culture and Integral Yoga – Human Unity and the Illusion of Human Progress: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution (Introduction)

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Human Unity and the Illusion of Human Progress: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution (Introduction)

As the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origins of Species take place this year, it is easy to overlook the fact that 2009 also marks the 100th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo’s first major text on evolution and consciousness. In Process and Evolution and Yoga and Human Evolution (1909) Sri Aurobindo begins to comprehensively articulate his vision of human evolution. Just as Darwin’s book became the foundation for a science of evolution, what has been called evolutionary spirituality can be traced back to Sri Aurobindo’s work. Many are acknowleding this bi-centennial year of Darwin’s birth with a reassessment of his work in light of what we now know about evolution it therefore, also seems to be a good time to reassess Sri Aurobindo’s vision of human evolution in terms of our contemporary understanding of the phenomena……

Even though his view of history is essentially cyclic he starts his consideration of evolution by writing in Yoga and Human Evolution (1909) the following:

“Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact” (Aurobindo)

However, by the early1940s when he is revising the last chapters of The Life Divine he writes:

“the idea of human progress itself is very probably an illusion, for there is no sign that man, once emerged from the animal stage, has radically progressed during his race-history; at most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature “ (Aurobindo 1949 p832)….

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Two Chakras below the body and the three above

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:47:10 +0000

Towards the Intermediate Race—the Supramental Change is a Thing Decreed

by RY Deshpande on Fri 20 Mar 2009 03:40 AM IST | Permanent Link | Cosmos

Narad’s Arrival at Madra by RY Deshpande is a book based on the opening passage of 81 lines of the Book of Fate of Savitri. It has, inter alia, aspects of this evolutionary creation of ours advancing towards what Sri Aurobindo envisaged as the supramental manifestation in plenitudes of the transcendental reality…

Chakras is a great beginning but in the veritable Yoga of Transformation what is necessary is that the two Chakras below the body and the three above have to materialise and become operative. This is what the Mother was told long ago by her occultist teacher Théon, and it was her experience also. For these Chakras to come into operation it is necessary to do another type of occult-spiritual yoga-tapasya. It is only then that the physical can respond to the working of the higher consciousness-force. A new body is necessary for this, a body that must emerge out of the Yajna of the Shakti. In it must be kindled the golden flame invoking the rush of the divine existence-substance as the basis of life in truth-conscient delight of the manifesting Spirit.

But how exactly the new body will be made, that cannot be said or disclosed in the beginning. This however became the main thrust of the Mother’s yoga-tapasya during the last fifteen years or so of her work. The Mantra-japa she discovered was one possible method to achieve this. That was an unexplored technique. The Mother was concerned with the almighty powers that are shut in the body’s cells. She awoke them. Not only that. The cells started joyously vibrating and opening out more and more in the aspiration for the Divine. This was something new.

Novelty of Sri Aurobindo’s message as compared with the Hindu tradition

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:09:28 +0000

Personal Yoga – Sri Aurobindo’s Description of the Yoga

by Kim on Tue 07 Feb 2006 06:45 PM PST | Permanent Link

Being new to this yoga, I notice my mind is still looking for a particular “methodology” for it, rather than simply surrendering to the process of it’s force in action. I came across this description of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga which is one of the more succinct I’ve read.

**********

from The Integral Yoga
Sri Aurbindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice

Selected Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Pg. 28 – The Yoga of the Gita

“. . .It is not a fact that the Gita gives the whole base of Sri Aurobindo’s message; for the Gita seems to admit the cessation of birth in the world as the ultimate aim or at least the ultimate culmination of yoga; it does not bring forward the idea of spiritual evolution or the idea of the higher planes and the supramental Truth-Consciousness and the bringing down of that consciousness as the means of the complete transformation of earthly life.

The idea of the supermind, the Truth-Consciousness is there in the Rig Veda according to Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation and in one or two passages of the Upanishads, but in the Upanishads it is there only in seed in the conception of the being of knowledge, vijnanamaja purusa, exceeding the mental, vital and physical being; in the Rig Veda the idea is there but in principle only, it is not developed and even the principle of it has disappeared from the Hindu tradition.

It is these things among others that constitute the novelty of Sri Aurobindo’s message as compared with the Hindu tradition – the idea that the world is not either a creation of Maya or only a play, lila, of the Divine, or a cycle of births in the ignorance from which we have to escape, but a field of manifestation in which there is a progressive evolution of the soul and the nature in Matter and from Matter through Life and Mind to what is beyond Mind till it reaches the complete revelation of Sachchidananda in life. It is this that is the basis of the yoga and gives a new sense to life.

Our yoga is not identical with the yoga of the Gita although it contains all that is essential in the Gita’s yoga. In our yoga we begin with the idea, the will, the aspiration of the complete surrender; but at the same time we have to reject the lower nature, deliver our consciousness from it, deliver the self involved in the lower nature by the self rising to freedom in the higher nature. If we do not do this double movement, we are in danger of making a tamasic and therefore unreal surrender, making no effort, no tapas and therefore no progress; or else we may make a rajasic surrender not to the Divine but to some self-made false idea or image of the Divine which masks our rajasic ego or something still worse.

The Gita does not speak expressly of the Divine Mother; it speaks always of surrender to the Purushottama – it mentions her only as the Para Prakriti who become the Jiva, that is, who manifests the Divine in the multiplicity and through whom all these worlds are created by the Supreme and he himself descends as the Avatar. The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishwara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from wrold-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it; the Tantric tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishwari aspect and makes all depend on the Divine Mother because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation through it. This yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential, for without it there is no fulfillment of the object of the yoga.”

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Sri Aurobindo’s social vision and his role as a cultural critic

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:51:04 +0000

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Sri Aurobindo

A Contemporary Reader

Edited by Sachidananda Mohanty

List Price: $115.00

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ISBN: 978-0-415-46093-4
Binding: Hardback
Published by: Routledge India
Publication Date: 28/03/2008
Pages: 180

Description
Contents
Bio

About the Book

This book compiles some of the finest writings of Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) — the nationalist, visionary, poet-philosopher. It reflects the range, depth and outreach of the moral, intellectual and spiritual vision of this versatile and multifaceted genius. It aims at providing, at one place, access to the key concepts, tenets, and the spirit of the extraordinary range of texts authored by him.

Although concretely grounded in contemporary times — with its location in a specific socio-cultural matrix — this work projects a body of writings that is certain to have lasting value. In particular, the compilation brings forth Sri Aurobindo’s social vision and his role as a cultural critic: his views on ethnicity, his exposition of the key role language plays in the formation of communitarian identities, his crucial understanding of self-determination which has incidentally become an important aspect of human rights discourse today.

Situating the writings in a specific intellectual, spiritual and historical context, this collection will enable readers to appreciate the overall vision of Sri Aurobindo, in what can be conceived as a caravan of history of ideas in terms of a common heritage of humankind, and recent developments in theory and disciplinary practice, especially those pertaining to consciousness and future studies.

A crime branch enquiry was ordered to go through the contents of the book

Tusar N. Mohapatra — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:53:33 +0000

The police found the book blasphemous

Other States – Orissa Correspondent

Centre, State to ban biography on Aurobindo

CUTTACK: The State Government and Central government on Wednesday told the High Court that they would take immediate steps to ban the publication and circulation of the controversial book titled ‘The Lives of Sri Aurobindo’ written by US writer Peter Heehs.

In their respective counter affidavits filed in HC, the State and the Union governments admitted that the biography contains defamatory and perverse comments on Sri Aurobindo’s character, life, writings and thoughts, which are bound to affect the sentiments of lakhs of the spiritual leader’s followers.

The affidavits came in the wake of a PIL filed in HC by a Balasore-based woman Gitanjali Bhattacharya seeking ban on the publication and circulation of the book in India. The HC after admitting the petition had asked the governments to file counters.

The Orissa Government in its affidavit has mentioned that a crime branch enquiry was ordered to go through the contents of the book and find whether the book had defamatory comments about the popular spiritual leader.

“The police found the book blasphemous”, the State Government affidavit said. The book however, has not been published in India although; the Penguin Books had decided to publish the same in November 2008.

Online edition of India’s National Newspaper Thursday, Mar 05, 2009 ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version | The Hindu : Other States / Orissa News : Centre, State to ban …