Sri Aurobindo and The Mother: the deeper meaning of their works

• In this area of our site on Sri Aurobindo and The Mother we offer our readers our best attempt to interpret and explain the key ideas and principles of the sage and seer Sri Aurobindo.
• This is a vast challenge for us because to truly understand the deeper meaning of his ideas requires a great steadiness, focus, and intensity of thought.
• We are not only required to give up our preconceived notions about spirituality, since his ideas are in one sense a radical break with spiritual tradition, but we need to change the very way we understand and comprehend principles of life.
• To truly understand his works, we must give up some of our normal notions of logic, and settle ourselves in an inner silence that can more readily absorb principles that often defy our normal mentality.
• From such a poise we can more readily understand the subtleties, complexities, relations, transcendent ideas, and spiritual planes and levels that he is addressing in his works.
• Ultimately, however, we will need to move further still into the deeper planes of spiritual mind, where we absorb knowledge not through the hard workings of thought, but through descents of light, illumination, and intuition.
• Fortunately, even if we do not rise to such lofty heights as reader, we can still gain a solid understanding of his thought, since so much of what is expressed with such impeccable reason and logic. What is minimally required of us is a certain level of curiosity, focus, and patience.
• Most past interpretations of Sri Aurobindo's work -- and there have been a plethora by many sincere and dedicated individuals - have provided mostly a surface understanding of his meaning; or perhaps we can call them conservative interpretations based on traditional understanding and perceptions of what spirit and evolution are.
• Many others have merely restated his words, with only slight comment; i.e. they have let his original words speak for themselves.
• Though in one sense this is sincere approach, in another we are still left to interpret and explain these not easily understandable, though thoroughly rational cosmic ideas and principles.
• Even those who have keen minds, even a keen spiritual sense, have found it to be a very difficult endeavor to explain his central ideas.
• After all he is writing about a future mode of existence, whose nature transcends our current level of understanding.
• Still we are dedicated to making this effort, for we believe that an understanding of his ideas are key to moving the human race forward to its spiritual purpose and destiny.
• Our goal then is to take his writings, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and understand its deeper meaning as he intended.
• We hope you can appreciate the fact that this is an evolving process, continually changing, as we ourselves change and come to understand and appreciate his ideas at hopefully ever-deeper levels.
• Fortunately our work has been made much easier as a result of the pioneering work of The Mother's Service Society, who have systematically studied Sri Aurobindo's and The Mother's work for over thirty years, have interpreted them at the greatest depths and level of understanding we have found anywhere, and have then further extended and applied them to various field of life, including social and business development, economics, education, literature, science, personal growth, psychology, and others.
• We wish to express our deepest gratitude to The Mother's Service Society; for their tireless effort to reveal Sri Aurobindo's deepest and most profound insights into the nature of the cosmos.
• In this site then we will address the key ideas and principles of Sri Aurobindo's thought. Among the areas to be covered are --

  1. His overall vision of creation, existence, and a divine life on earth.
  2. The path he has laid out to achieve individual spiritual progress and transformation.
  3. How the universe emerged from a Divine source (i.e. the involution), and how the universe, the individual, and humanity are evolving upward from matter to spirit (i.e. the evolution), fulfilling the purpose of creation.
  4. The nature of his great discovery, the supramental consciousness and force, which was the key to the emergence of the universe in creation, and the vital link to our own future evolution.
  5. An overview of how life on earth fundamentally operates, changes, and evolves.
  6. An analysis of what a person is fundamentally made up of; i.e. what are the planes that make up our being; what are their limitations and potentials, the keys to their development, etc.
  7. The nature of the integral yoga that can take an individual to our ultimate evolutionary status.
  8. His views on the nature of religion, science, literature, history, social development, human unity, including the unity of nations and societies, and other topics.

  We thank you for your patience as we develop this area on the ideas of Sri Aurobindo, and we hope you can use them in your own life, so that you may find the keys to your own growth, development, evolution, and transformation. INTERPRETATION OF KEY IDEAS OF SRI AUROBINDO Roy Posner Growth Online.