Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness

There is in SRI AUROBINDO a revolutionary, a poet, a philosopher, and a visionary of evolution. He is not only the explorer of consciousness but the builder of a new world. For evolution is not over: "Man is a transitional being," he wrote at the beginning of the last century.

This now classic introduction to Sri Aurobindo not only tells us the story of his life, in itself a remarkable adventure; Satprem also takes us along in a methodical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's "integral yoga," showing how it leads to a "divine rehabilitation of Matter" and gives our painful evolution its meaning and hope.

"We have denied the Divinity in Matter to confine it in our holy places, and now Matter is taking it revenge-we called it crude and crude it is. As long as we accept this Imbalance, there is no hope for the earth: we will swing from one pole to the other equally false -from material enjoyment to spiritual austerity, without ever finding our plenitude. We need both the vigor of Matter and the fresh waters of the Spirit.... Now the time may have come at last to unveil the Mysteries and to recover the complete truth of the two poles within a third position, which is neither that of the materialists nor that of the spiritualists."

The signs abound, they are simple and obvious. The most important happening of the sixties is not the trip to the moon, but the "trips" on drugs, the great hippie migration, and the student unrest throughout the world where will they go? There is no more room on the teeming beaches, no more room on the snarled roads, no more room in the ever-growing anthills of our cities. We must find the way out elsewhere.

But there are many kinds of "elsewhere." Those drugs are uncertain and fraught with danger, and above all, they depend on outer means experience ought to be obtainable at will and anywhere, in the marketplace as in the solitude of our room, or else it is not an experience but an anomaly or enslavement.

This Indian tale, which we heard in Bengal where Sri Aurobindo was born, was not unknown to him who said that all is He-gods, devils, men, and the earth, not merely the heavens-and whose entire experience leads to a divine rehabilitation of Matter. For the last half-century, psychology has been ceaselessly reintegrating the demons in man; the task of the next half-century may be, as Andre Malraux thought, to "reintegrate the gods in man," or rather, as Sri Aurobindo willed, to reintegrate the Spirit in man and in the matter - a spiritual preserve - and to create "the life divine on earth": The heavens beyond are great and wonderful, but greater and more wonderful are the heavens within you. It is these Edens that await the divine worker.'

There are many ways to set to Work. Each one of us, in fact, has his own particular opening: for one it may be a well-crafted object or a job well done; for another a beautiful idea, a harmonious philosophical system; for still another a piece of music, a river, a burst of sunlight on the sea-all are ways of breathing in the Infinite. But they are brief moments, while we seek permanence. They are brief moments subject to many elusive conditions, whereas we would have something inalienable, which depends neither on conditions nor on circumstances- a window within us that will never close again. And since these conditions are rather difficult to bring together on earth, we speak of "God," "spirituality," of Christ, the Buddha, and the whole lineage of the founders of the great religions are ways of finding permanence. But perhaps we are not religious or spiritual men, just plain men who believe in the earth, who are wary of high-sounding words and tired of dogmas; perhaps we are weary too of thinking too well we want is our own little river flowing into the Infinite.

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