Sri Aurobindo

(first published 2003)
Concepts such as the One Reality, Maya and Karma have permeated Indian consciousness. Indians, no matter what their class, caste, or religion are familiar with these terms, which date back to the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra and Shankara. Since then, there have been numerous refinements and analyses of these concepts, and notable among those who provided a fresh view of these ideas, is Sri Aurobindo.
Born in Kolkata on 15 August 1872, Aurobindo Ghose was a philosopher, poet and mystic. He was educated mainly in England and after his return to India in 1892 and took up various administrative and teaching posts and then began to seriously study Yoga. Between 1905 and 1908, he was one of the main nationalist leaders of the extremist school. Imprisoned in 1908, he experienced a ‘divine revelation’, and two years later when there was again a threat of imprisonment, escaped from British India to the French territory of Pondicherry (now Puducherry) where he started an ashram. He was joined in his ashram in 1920 by ‘The Mother’, a Frenchwoman named Mirra Richard, who took over the running of the ashram, while Aurobindo devoted himself to reading, studying ancient texts, and writing philosophical works including The Life Divine, Integral Yoga, the epic Savitri , a poem of 24,000 lines, as well as commentaries on The Bhagavad Gita, the major Upanishads, and other texts.
In these works, Aurobindo, a profound thinker, presented his philosophy and ideas. His basic assumption was that life is still evoving, and a human being is not the highest stage of evolution – a higher being will one day emerge. The light and power of the spirit, called by him, the ‘Supermind’, presiding over human evolution, would transform human consciousness and remould life on earth.
To Aurobindo, there is One Reality, but there are also individual souls. The world is not Maya or an illusion, but real, and needs to be perfected through the spiritual and material evolution of every living being. On karma, Sri Aurobindo challenges the popular concept of a divine accounting system which extends through the successive lives of a person. Instead, he dwells on the nature of cosmic energy, which incorporating all the complexities of one’s inner and outer life, takes one in a particular direction, depending on one’s inclinations and stage of lif. Karma is thus linked with the process of evolution. Growth requires experiences of different kinds, both pleasurable and painful, and Aurobindo says, “the soul may of itself accept or choose poverty, misfortune and suffering as helpful to its growth, stimulants of a rapid development, and reject riches and prosperity and success as dangerous and conducive to a relaxation of spiritual effort... Cosmic existence is not a vast administrative system of universal justice with a cosmic law of recompense and retribution.” Instead it is a movement of the energy of nature, which provides, within the cycle of rebirth, whatever is needed for the next step in its evolution.
Sri Aurobindo died in 1950. His works need to be better known, as he provides a vision of a different world, a perfect creation, which will arise when each individual evolves. For him, there is no nirvana or moksha, providing an escape from sorrow and impermanence, but rather the material world made immortal, through the descent of the divine spirit.