We can divinize each activity, each act and circumstance of our daily lives

An ANALYSIS OF SRI AUROBINDO'S "THE LIFE DIVINE" by Roy Posner

Requirements for the Reader
Fortunately, we can get through The Life Divine if we make a serious and determined effort to do so. Also, if we follow the guidance of this web-based helper book, we think that journey can be made considerably easier, at least for those who are of a thinking bent. [Perhaps later if we add practical examples of life to elucidate the principles, then we can also attract more of the general reader who is moved more by life than ideas.] In one sense that’s why we are writing this summation; to make it possible for those who have never experienced knowledge through the spiritual mind of silence, light, and intuition to understand certain fundamental concepts through the clear logic of mind. It is our goal then to translate his perfection of wisdom and revelation into a first "imperfection" of our own logical understanding. The halfway measure between our knowledge and his Knowledge -- logic -- will become the bridge between him and ourselves. A fitting irony indeed!

Reading The Life Divine is really doable if one has the curiosity to discover the deepest truths of life, a patient stamina and determination to find the Truth Nuggets behind the immense logic and long paragraphs, and a certain quietude of mind (rather than the ferocious impatience of our normal thought processing and gathering) that enables these spiritual bits of wisdom to seep into one's consciousness. So the challenge is this: If you are willing to make the extra effort to embrace the principles that rise to the pinnacles of spiritual wisdom, you will be rewarded with the revelation of the way of a whole new way of living and of life.

The Language of Tomorrow Experienced in His Today
Then there is the language itself. Those of you who think you are going to read a stuffy old treatise on philosophy, or a traditional Indian religouso-moral view of existence filled with unrecognizable, untranslated Sanskrit terminology, or a tone of writing foreign to the Western mind, you may be in for a small shock. Rather The Life Divine is filled with terminology that seems straight out of some future human existence, transcending even the most modern vocabulary, including the forward-looking coinage of technology, science, and the latest developments of modern life. Expressions like "atomic existence," "conscious force," "the Real Idea," "reversal of consciousness," "supramental transformation," "involution," and many others sound like the coinage of the future.

But then how could he have developed such language, when it didn't exist in his time? Perhaps we can say that when one is writing about the future evolutionary destiny of life on earth from one's own real experience, not from a hypothetical knowledge, that he must in part live in that future in some way; that he in a way lived simultaneously in that future consciousness in his own present existence. And yet his Terms are not terms from out of a some science fiction of the imagination, whose terminology moves in and out of fashion, whose veracity later falls short at the finishing flag of True truth [remember "truth is stranger than fiction!"], but is rather the language of a true future human existence which is coming to pass now, and will come to pass in the future, because it is the logical outcome of the movement of the past, including its spiritual roots and the historical spiritual progressions of the past.

Perhaps we can call the True truths of the future the Real Divine Future. Sri Aurobindo was tapping this Future Unfolding and Truth.

Sri Aurobindo came to tell the story of Everything, and was, in one sense, God's scribe telling the story of God, even as he experienced God's essence and reality. Perhaps that would make him truly God incarnate, the avatar who brings the Needed New truth of the current age. Or, if you don’t like the term "God" with its questionable overtones due to human folly, we can substitute expressions such as the "Divine," or "the Absolute," or "the Omnipresent Reality," or "Brahman," or simply the "Spirit." Anyway you put it, he experienced, or rather perceived and embodied all the past-present-future realities he wrote about. He even became to a degree an embodiment, the first embodiment of supramentalized evolutionary human being that he wrote would be the outcome of our human evolution.

Utility of The Life Divine for the Reader
And yet even though he has given us the deepest insights into the reasons for and the purposes of the cosmos, he has brought these ultimate truths of existence so that we can use them in the most practical ways in our daily lives. He calls his book "The Life Divine" because we can learn to take our current daily functioning and change it into a divine functioning, and that divine functioning will be in life; not apart from human daily activities in some monastic retreat or some inner journey into a remote bliss or nirvana. He says that we can divinize each activity, each act and circumstance of our daily lives into something greater, because that something greater is inevitable in the big scheme of things. It is the progress that the spirit is moving towards; or rather is leading life towards. And he has made the effort to present us with the cosmology of the infinite so we learn how to apply it in the very details of our lives.