Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist, yogin, philosopher, scholar, and poet. Following his brief political career, during which he vehemently fought for India’s outright independence, Sri Aurobindo began to explore the ancient Hindu practices of yoga.
Sri Aurobindo subsequently developed his own style of yoga which he called “Integral Yoga,” because it “takes up the essence and many processes of the old yogas” with a new approach of “aim, standpoint and the totality of its method”.
Sri Aurobindo believed that enlightenment came from the Divine, but that human beings possess a spiritual “supermind” that allows them to reach upward toward awareness. Spiritual perfection is achieved through Yoga practices that lead to “a change of life and existence” through the development of a new power of consciousness, which he called the “supramental”.
Sri Aurobindo was born Aurobindo Ghose in Calcutta, India, on 15th August, 1872. At the age of seven, Sri Aurobindo and his two elder brothers went to England to pursue their studies. Initially, Aurobindo was tutored privately in Latin, French, history, geography and arithmetic.
His proficiency in Latin allowed him to gain admission into St. Paul’s School in London, where he was awarded a Foundation Scholarship. At St. Paul’s, Aurobindo began studying the Latin and Greek classics, writing poetry and prose in both languages, and reading English and French literature.
At the age of fifteen, his studies ceased to interest him and his teachers began to lament that he was wasting his “remarkable gifts” because of laziness. However, two years later, Aurobindo decided to try for one of the Open Scholarships offered by King’s College, Cambridge.
He took the examination and finished at the top of the list. One of the examiners commented that Aurobindo’s classical papers were “the best I have seen in thirteen years as an examiner”. In 1893, after two years at King’s College, during which he devoted much of his time to writing, Aurobindo returned to India.
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Aurobindo became interested in political work amidst the anti-partition movement in the early 1900s. Between 1905 and 1910 Aurobindo acted as a political journalist for the revolutionary newspaper Bande Mataram, and as a leader of the advanced nationalist party known as the Extremists.
In 1908, Aurobindo was arrested on suspicion of his involvement in a bomb plot and was remanded in Alipore Central Jail. Although he was later acquitted and released, his conversion from political action to spirituality occurred while he was incarcerated, where he was inspired by his meditation on the Bhagavad Gita.
After reading it, he was able “not only to understand intellectually but to realize what Sri Krishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands of those who aspire to do His work…to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands”. This realization would become one of the preliminary steps towards Aurobindo’s ultimate awareness of the Divine.
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Sri Aurobindo once wrote that there were “four great realizations on which his Yoga and his spiritual philosophy are founded”. The first occurred in 1907 when Aurobindo encountered a yogin named Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, who introduced him to “the awareness of some sole and supreme Reality” – an experience Aurobindo would later identify as the “passive Brahman”.
Lele instructed Aurobindo to “sit in meditation, but do not think, look only at your mind; you will see thoughts coming into it; before they can enter throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable of entire silence”.
Aurobindo wrote that, “I flung them [thoughts] before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was free”. However, Aurobindo also wrote that he was left with “a cleft of consciousness between the passive and active Brahman”.
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The second realization was achieved as Aurobindo regained his personal harmony by taking refuge with the Divine within him during his solitary confinement in Alipore jail.
Aurobindo read the Bhagavad Gita and his initial realization regarding Sri Krishna soon blossomed into an all-encompassing awareness of the Divine, seen as Krishna in the form of Vasudeva, “as all beings and all that is”.
Aurobindo wrote that “I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there holding over me his shade”.
This universal vision of the Divine was followed by Sri Aurobindo’s awareness into what he called the “cosmic consciousness”.
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As mentioned above, Aurobindo’s first realization left him with “a cleft of consciousness” between the passive and active Brahman. This “cleft” was closed with Aurobindo’s third realization that the two aspects of the supreme Reality were the static and dynamic Brahman.
Three years later, Sri Aurobindo reached his fourth realization through a “prolonged dwelling in Parabrahman” (the supreme Reality). Armed with these four fundamental realizations, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual development grew into his “yoga of self-perfection” or integral yoga.
The aim of the yoga of self-perfection is to enable one to attain conscious identity with the Divine – the true Self – and to transform the mind and body into an instrument for a divine life on earth. Sri Aurobindo emphasized surrender as the most important requisite of integral yoga.
He wrote, “Surrender is giving oneself to the Divine – to give everything one is or has to the Divine and regard nothing as one’s own, to obey only the Divine will and no other, to live of the Divine and not for the ego”. Sri Aurobindo’s “yoga of self-perfection” had four constituent elements: shuddhi or purification, mukti or liberation, bhukti or beatitude, and siddhi or perfection.
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Sri Aurobindo believed that the essence of purification was the organization of the chaotic action of the various parts of man’s nature such as the mind to thought. Ultimately, perfect purification loosens the bonds of nature, specifically the bond of ahankara or ego, which allows actions to be performed without the incentive of personal satisfaction.
This liberation, mukti, leads to perfection of the individual nature, siddhi, and enjoyment of the delight of being, bhakti. The culminating objective of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is the remolding of the body, “even here upon earth” into a fit vehicle of the transformed consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo believed that Nature must “evolve beyond Mind and manifest consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth-consciousness…Into that [spiritual] truth we shall be free and it will transform mind and life and body”.
In his later years, Sri Aurobindo’s practice of yoga was directed towards achieving the effective transformation of the physical in pursuit of freedom of the truth-conscious spirit.
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Sri Aurobindo wrote prolifically in English on his spiritual philosophy and practice. Most notably, he introduced the concept of evolution into Vedantic thought. Although Samkhya philosophy had suggested a similar idea century earlier, Sri Aurobindo rejected the materialistic tendencies of both Darwinism and Samkhya and proposed an evolution of spirit which led to the evolution of matter.
In essence, Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary philosophy centers on the idea that humankind as an entity is not the last rung on the evolutionary ladder, but can evolve spiritually beyond its current limitations to a future state of supramental existence. This spiritually evolutionary step would lead to a divine life on Earth characterized by a realization of the supermind.
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Sri Aurobindo did not believe that the ultimate goal of his yoga – a divine life on earth – could be achieved so quickly. Nor did he foresee a day when a multitude of people would practice and study his philosophies and method of yoga.
Sri Aurobindo wished to bring the Divine into all aspects of life. Although his teachings may be seen as an attempt to re-institute the “spiritual practicality” that he regarded as the great discovery of ancient India, Sri Aurobindo was arguably one of India’s most fascinating and enigmatic leaders.
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