Savitri Era Learning Forum: April 2010

April 29, 2010

Plotinus, Bruno, Schelling, Bradley, and Sri Aurobindo

Supramental Consciousness and the Logic of the Infinite by Marcel Kvassay from Posthuman Destinies

The Life Divine (LD), Sri Aurobindo’s comprehensive and definitive philosophical statement. http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/ashram/sriauro/writings.php

The Life Divine is composed of two books. “Book One,” titled “Omnipresent Reality and the Universe,” comprises twenty-eight chapters. These form three distinct blocks: an introduction (chapters 1 to 7), an overview of Vedanta (chapters 8 to 12), and a portion dealing with Supermind (chapters 13 to 28). Through them run several threads of thought. Prominent ones belong to Materialism, Illusionism, and “the logic of the Infinite.” These represent key philosophical positions competing to provide, among other things, an adequate explanation of our existence (or non-existence) in the universe. Since “the logic of the Infinite” stood for Sri Aurobindo’s own position, we should not be surprised to find its traces in each chapter of the book. Explaining right at the start how the “direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact” could be “part of Nature’s profoundest method,” he wrote: […]

Unlike in formal logic, where the opposites exclude each other, in Nature they seem to need and support each other. This complementarity of contraries was the corner-stone of Sri Aurobindo’s approach. Regarding the Absolute, which the orthodox Materialism flatly denied and the orthodox Illusionism affirmed as the sole Reality, Sri Aurobindo argued that its timeless, unconditioned way of being (verifiable, in principle, by direct spiritual experience) did not annul the validity of cosmic and individual existence. The concept of the Absolute was pivotal: it constrained and predetermined all subsequent problems and solutions. Being versus Becoming, the nature of individual existence, the problem of evil – they all unfolded seamlessly from this initial point of departure.

To the materialist, the concept of the Absolute must appear impractical, to say the least. Not only does it lie beyond any objective verification but – even worse – it cannot be adequately captured in intellectual terms. How, then, can it help in explaining the universe? No wonder he shies away from it. The initial exploration of the universe seemed to justify his attitude: […]

A deeper inquiry, however, revealed a puzzle to which there was no simple solution. […]

In the opening chapters of “Book Two,” Sri Aurobindo occasionally referred to Supermind but did not go into details. Instead, he relied on the extensive treatment of Supermind in the second half of “Book One.” He actually used the term right from the beginning, but there he simply meant a kind of consciousness above and beyond the reach of normal mentality. For example, when he commented on the Non-Being or “the Nihil of certain Buddhist schools,” he wrote: […]

Marcel Kvassay, a graduate of Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, worked for Oxford University Press in the area of English Language Teaching, and for Alcatel as a trainer and a software development methodologist. He spent several years in Puducherry,

India

, most of the time working at SABDA, a book distribution unit of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department.

Knowledge, consciousness and religious conversion in Lonergan and Aurobindo - Page 179 Michael T. McLaughlin - 2003 - 318 pages

Aurobindo's monism in which the One differentiates itself in time and space (extension) as finite souls in the infinite has many similarities with Schelling in his work Bruno. He refers to this process of differentiation of the One as ...

April 28, 2010

Sri Aurobindo, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Stella Kramrisch, and Alice Boner

e g r e g o r e s: "The Basis of Universal Spirituality ... by Apuleius Platonicus
Sages such as Sri Aurobindo who have meditated on Hindu iconography, and savants such as Ananda Coomara-swamy, Stella Kramrisch, and Alice Boner who have studied the subject, assure us that the forms and features of Hindu icons have a source higher than the normal reaches of the human mind. The icons are no photocopies of any human or animal forms as we find them in their physical frames. They are in fact crystallizations of the abstract into the concrete, of the infinite into the finite. They always point beyond themselves, and a contemplation of them always draws us from the outer to the inner.

Marketime: Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo had a love-hate ...

Some of the important stations in this journey are Dayananda Saraswati followed by Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda and finally V.D. Savarkar. ... The narrative is so absorbing that one does not until the end realize that the lineage it traces – of the idea of Hindu nationalism from Dayananda Saraswati to V.D. Savarkar via Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda – leaves one almost ...

Symposium on Integral Consciousness Dedicated to the pioneering work of CIIS Founders Friday April, 9 2010 10:00 a.m. – 9:30 p.m. 10:25 AM

All Orissa Sri Aurobindo Study Circle Conference, 4th to 7th April, Matrubhaban, Cuttack

National Seminar on Sri Aurobindo's Contributions toward a Global Culture March 27-29, 2010 (SACAR), Puducherry 12:40 PM

Mutation ... a process. Conference in Auroville. February 12-14, 2010 (UHU) Feb 12, 2010, 9:00 am - Feb 14, 2010, 6:00 pm

"Spirituality Beyond Religions" International Congress Program (UHU) Jan 5, 2010, 9:00 am - Jan 8, 2010, 6:00 pm

Sri Aurobindo’s Political Life, the Alipore Bomb Trial and his Uttarpara Speech – A Centennial Perspective (The Institute of Integral Yoga Psychology, Mirravision Trust) National Library Auditorium, Alipore, Kolkata, August 1 & 2, 2009; 10 AM – 5 PM

April 26, 2010

Thibaud Roy spontaneously offered a sum of money to realize this project

Yoga is nothing but practical psychology... Sri Aurobindo Login Register Search featured: Spirituality beyond Religions

Announcements

STUDIES OF THE RIG VEDA Hymns to the Rising Sun, Surya‐Savitri

ICIS Courses of the Fall Semester 2010

The Study of The Bhagawad Gita in the light of Sri Aurobindo

more announcements

April 25, 2010

Ken Wilber integrated Sri Aurobindo's thought with that of Western philosophers

Integral (spirituality)

Integral thinkers draw inspiration from the work of Sri Aurobindo, Don Beck, Jean Gebser, Robert Kegan, Ken Wilber, and others. Some individuals affiliated with integral spirituality have claimed that there exists a loosely-defined "Integral movement"^[12]. Others, however, have disagreed^[13]. Whatever its status as a "movement", there are a variety of religious organizations, think tanks, conferences, workshops, and publications in the

and internationally that use the term integral.

Background and historical figures

The adjective integral was first used in a spiritual context by Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) from 1914 onward to describe his own spiritual teachings, which he referred to as Purna (Skt: "Full") Yoga. It appeared inThe Synthesis of Yoga, a book that first published in serial form in the journal Arya and was revised several times since.^[14]. Sri Aurobindo's work has been described as Integral Vedanta, andpsychology,^[15][16] as well as the Integral Psychology (the term coined by Indra Sen) and Psychotherapy that emerges from it.^[17]. His writings influenced others who used the term "integral" in more philosophical or psychological contexts.

As described by Sri Aurobindo and his co-worker The Mother (1878–1973), this spiritual teaching involves an integral divine transformation of the entire being, rather than the liberation of only a single faculty such as the intellect or the emotions or the body. According to Sri Aurobindo,

(T)he Divine is in his essence infinite and his manifestation too is multitudinously infinite. If that is so, it is not likely that our true integral perfection in being and in nature can come by one kind of realisation alone; it must combine many different strands of divine experience. It cannot be reached by the exclusive pursuit of a single line of identity till that is raised to its absolute; it must harmonise many aspects of the Infinite. An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic experience is essential for the complete transformation of our nature. — Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 114

Important themes include: Evolution, Involution, the Integral psychology, Integral yoga, and the Supramental principle. Major works include: The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, and Savitri. The Mother continued Sri Aurobindo's work of Integral and spiritual transformation after his passing, and founded Auroville, an international community dedicated to human unity, and based on their teachings.

At the same time that Sri Aurobindo was developing Integral yoga, Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), a Russian-born Harvard sociologist who advocated a cyclic view of history, began referring to the emergence of a future, spiritually-based integral society which will replace the current "sensate" society.^[18] Writing at the same time as Sri Aurobindo, but independently, he began using phrases like "integral philosophy" and "integralist".^[19]

It has also recently been noted that Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) an Austrian spiritual scientist, educator, and esotericist who founded Anthroposophy, Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, and Eurythmy, used the term integral in a similar way to Sri Aurobindo and Gebser very early on, by 1906 comparing "integral evolution" with "Darwinian evolution."^[20] Jennifer Gidley points to Steiner’s earliest use of the term integral, in reference to integral evolution in a lecture in Paris on the 26 May 1906.

The grandeur of Darwinian thought is not disputed, but it does not explain the integral evolution of man… So it is with all purely physical explanations, which do not recognise the spiritual essence of man's being.^[21] [Italics added]

The word integral was independently suggested by Jean Gebser (1905–1973), a Swiss phenomenologist and interdisciplinary scholar, in 1939 to describe his own intuition regarding the next state of human consciousness. Gebser was the author of The Ever-Present Origin, which describes human history as a series of mutations in consciousness. he only afterwards discovered the similarity between his own ideas and those of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin ^[22].

The idea of "Integral Psychology" was first developed in the 1940s and 50s by Indra Sen (1903–1994) a psychologist, author, educator, and devotee of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. He was the first to coin the term "Integral psychology" to describe the psychological observations he found in Sri Aurobindo's writings (which he contrasted with those of Western Psychology), and developed themes of "Integral Culture" and "Integral Man".^[23]

Although these basic ideas were first articulated in the early twentieth century, the movement originates with the California Institute of Integral Studies founded in 1968 by Haridas Chaudhuri (1913–1975), a Bengali philosopher and academic. Chaudhuri had been a correspondent of Sri Aurobindo, who developed his own perspective and philosophy. He established the California Institute of Integral Studies (originally the California Institute of Asian Studies), in 1968 in San Francisco (it became an independent organisation in 1974), and presented his own form of Integral psychology in the early 1970s.^[24]

Again independently, in Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Chris Cowan use the term integral for a developmental stage which sequentially follows the pluralistic stage. The essential characteristic of this stage is that it continues the inclusive nature of the pluralistic mentality, yet extends this inclusiveness to those outside of the pluralistic mentality. In doing so, it accepts the ideas of development and hierarchy, which the pluralistic mentality finds difficult. Other ideas of Beck and Cowan include the "first tier" and "second tier", which refer to major periods of human development.

In late 1990s and 2000 Ken Wilber, who was influenced by both Aurobindo and Gebser, among many others, adopted the term Integral to refer to the latest revision of his own integral philosophy, which he called Integral Theory^[25] . He also established the Integral Institute as a think-tank for further development of these ideas. In his book Integral Psychology, Wilber lists a number of pioneers of the integral approach, post hoc. These include Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Gustav Fechner, William James, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, James Mark Baldwin, Jürgen Habermas, Sri Aurobindo, and Abraham Maslow.^[26].

The adjective Integral has also been applied to Spiral Dynamics, chiefly the version taught by Don Beck, who fora while collaborated with Wilber^[27].

In the Wilber movement "Integral" when capitalized is given a further definition, being made synonymous with Wilber's AQAL Integral theory,^[28]whereas "Integral Studies" refers to the broader field including the range of integral thinkers such as Jean Gebser, Sri Aurobindo, Ken Wilber, and Ervin Laszlo.^[29]

Integral psychology Main article: Integral psychology

Integral psychology is psychology that presents an all-encompassing holistic rather than an exclusivist or reductive approach. It includes both lower, ordinary, and spiritual or transcendent states of consciousness. It originally is based on the Yoga psychology of Sri Aurobindo. Other important writers in the field of Integral Psychology are Indra Sen,^[39] Haridas Chaudhuri,^[40] Ken Wilber,^[41] and Brant Cortright.^[42] From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

April 24, 2010

Fundamentalism, Freedom, & Immortality

Fundamentalism refers to a variety of thinking involving a religious system which broadly has five attributes…Fundamentalism works as an intravenous morphine for those who cannot cope with the burden of being sane. Being sane involves coping with six problems…

It is not easy to bear such a burden. In return, we are offered a feeling of safety, identity, continuity in time, sexuality and efficacy. When these compensatory factors are threatened, sanity becomes hard to bear and fundamentalism steps in…

Fundamentalism absolves us of conflict and misery by turning us from adults to children — in fact, worse, because children try to overcome their innocence. To prevent fundamentalism, we need to make it possible to bear the burdens of sanity. The burden of being sane Fundamental Truths Times of India: May 7, 2005; Salman Akhtar 6:06 AM [Freud Along the Ganges: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the People and Culture of India, Intimacy and Infidelity: Separation-Individuation Perspectives, The Damaged Core: Origins, Dynamics, Manifestations, and Treatment, ]

Freedom is a false hope given the finite nature of our reality

This trajectory of sincere political action assumes that just such a state exists and is possible to attain, a variant on the Manichean theology that supplants good and evil for power/oppressed and freedom. Experience, on the other hand, tells us that things are not so simple.

In reality, the ability to gain a degree of freedom is a sense of false hope held tight by those who have articulated the context bound nature of our understanding and, indeed, existence, but are unwilling to grapple with the ultimate and logical conclusion of those realizations. Not only our understanding of the world, but our very experience of and existence in the world are bound within the context of a particular set of experiences. We can seek to expand the boundaries of our experiences, but the finite nature of our reality makes the kind of omniscience required to overcome our contextual circumstances both physically and logically impossible. Post-postmodern Politics - A Going Under by Scott Payne Saturday, 30 January 2010 9:26 AM

The Age of Enlightenment popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it. But the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking nonetheless, and it has not made the world a safer place. In fact, this naive theological groupthink—call it Godthink—has made the world more dangerous by blinding us to the clashes of religions that threaten us world-wide.

Faith in the unity of religions is just that—faith, and perhaps even a kind of fundamentalism. And it does not just infect the perennialists. Denying differences is a recipe for disaster APRIL 23, 2010 A Dangerous Belief By STEPHEN PROTHERO 1:56 PM

The Beams of the Absolute and The Struts of Discipline: Religion in the Post-postmodern Age by Chris Dierkes Friday, 15 January 2010

The second flaw of postmodernism with regard to religion was not having a sufficiently grounded yoga or practice—or spiritual technology—to help illuminate the transcendent in the immanent in a profound and really transformative way…

As such, postmodernity became a “talking school” of spirituality and religion. It was still all too identified with the eye of mind. All of the postmodern writers above, though they write beautifully and at times transcendentally, have no real way of teaching how they got to the point of view that they did that offered them such a majestic vista on the life process.

Without a mature intellectual understanding of the spiritual nor a practice to help reveal and deepen it in one’s life, postmodernism floundered.

Opposed to (but ultimately aided by and dependent upon) that postmodern school of religion has been the rise of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is an attempt to return to the premodern world of imposed traditional myth and social formation. This drive towards fundamentalism is occurring in all of the world’s major religions: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and yes even forms of Buddhism. Fundamentalism is ultimately about a drive for power, in its most disturbing cases, through the use of violence. Buddhism has merged with Sinhalese nationalism in

Sri Lanka

to lead one of the most bloody horrific counterinsurgency campaigns in contemporary history. Right-wing Hindustanis proclaim

India

a Hindu country for Hindus. The “settler” movement to claim the whole of the supposed ancient land grant from God to the Jews in modern

Israel

is driven by a religious apocalyptic messianic Zionism. Evangelicals in the

United States

seek to undermine the teaching of science, the civil rights of gay persons, and the rule of law in a pluralist secular society. And of course there are Islamic fundamentalisms of all kinds of shapes and sizes some seeking utopian states others nihilistic terrorists.

Fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon—it is only at most one hundred years or so old. As religious scholar Karen Armstrong has brilliantly shown, fundamentalism is just another one of the utopian modernist visions of an unstoppably progressive march into a perfect future for all beings under the umbrella of one ideology and anyone who stands (stupidly) opposed to their own social salvation will just be crushed to a pulp. This worldview is the same mentality that drove communism, fascism, nationalism, modern globalizing capitalism, and socialism.

Fundamentalists have assumed the modern understanding of truth—whereby things are true only if they are materially real and provable (usually via science). Islamists argue the Qu’ran offers the real form of human social, political, and economic organization. Creationists argue The Bible is the real source of true science in the world. And on and on. In the actual traditional world to which all these fundamentalist claim to stand for and desire to revive, modern science did not exist and was not afforded such a prime value. Traditional Christian theology—like in St. Augustine from the 5^th century—did not believe The Bible’s ultimate truth rested on its scientific value. It did not rise or fall on whether creation happened in exactly 7 days or not. As Augustine said, if the science shows The Bible to not be scientifically true, fine go with the science, as The Bible’s truest message is about the nature of God as Love and the redemption of the universe, something to which science cannot speak.

Fundamentalism, particularly since the 1960s, has also taken advantage of the postmodern (or pluralistic) world. It has cloaked itself in the aura of an oppressed minority needing special rights. It displays itself in aggressively emotional, anti-intellectual forms of social protest, like a collective mass of 3 year olds throwing an enormous temper tantrum—though possibly a temper tantrum with bombs and guns. 9:26 AM

Often people pin their sense of self on a group identity. As a group develops, things may get done at certain times in certain ways and over time these characteristics get fixed in the minds of that group as defining that group’s reality. This reality is reinforced by a theology or ideology – the fundamental yet invisible pillars around which identity is built – as well as parables, metaphors and stories, mythologies, which make the members of the group identify with the ideology at the personal, core level. Finally certain people start authorizing these characteristics as defining a movement and rigidly controlling what can or cannot be done or believed. As the characteristics of identity crystallize in a group, people seeking power gravitate inevitably to set themselves up as self-appointed controllers of the boundaries of the group.

The need for a clear self-identity is also fostered by ‘othering’, the feeling that “I am who I am because you are not who I am.” In its most extreme form, the members of the group may see outsiders as evil, as not worthy of a place in this world. All this may crystallize in what I call fundamentalism. Auroville Today interview with Debashish Banerji

If we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment that has empowered us to be so. Terry Eagleton 2:11 PM

For it is only through life that one can reach to immortality. Sri Aurobindo, 19.6.1909 (CWSA.13.9). 3:47 PM

April 15, 2010

Kant prepared the way for Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, and William James

We the Harappans

Business Standard - Danino, who is an amateur scholar in the good, old sense (he has also done copious translations of writings by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; ...

How do morals change?

yale.edu [PDF] P Bloom - Nature, 2010 - nature.com

Satprem's book "Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness" (1996-2003, translated from 1970 French by Michel Danino) is relevant here in its connection between levels of human consciousness called the vital, the psyche and so on, as gleaned from spiritual ...

Contemporary perspectives on spirituality and mental health

ijpm.info [HTML] P Sharma, R Charak, V Sharma - Indian Journal of Psychological …, 2010

reconcile men to the cruelty of fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common had imposed on them." In a similar vein, leading spiritualist of the twentieth century, Sri Aurobindo [10] warned ...

Hinduism and Mental Health

RS Murthy - Religion and Psychiatry: Beyond Boundaries, 2010 - books.google.com
Sri Aurobindo [25] summarizes the importance of Gita to mankind as follows: The argument of the Gita resolves itself into three great steps by which action rises out of the human into the divine plane leaving the bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law. ...

Psychosocial Learning Environments and the Mediating Effect of Personal …

integralelementary.com [PDF] PR Smith - 2010

2010 Page 4. iv DEDICATION Like my life and all my work as a school founder and principal, this dissertation is dedicated, first of all, to the transformational work of my spiritual teachers, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. ... Sri Aurobindo Savitri Book III, Canto IV Page 6. vi

Calcutta review‎ - Page 32

University of Calcutta, University of Calcutta. Dept. of English - 1934

Aurobindo is nearer to Schopenhauer than to Bergson in laying emphasis upon Sakti. It is not different from Schopenhauer's will- Will in Schopenhauer is the

Concepts of reason and intuition: with special reference to SriAurobindo, K ...‎ - Page 132

Ramesh Chandra Sinha - Philosophy - 1981 - 234 pages

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason prepared the way for voluntarism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the intuitionism of Bergson, the pragmatism of William James

East-West understanding of man, Volume 1‎ - Page 138

Vedre Narayan Karan Reddy - Human beings - 1974

Sri Aurobindo most appropriately calls this impediments and limitations are...
have also pleaded for the similar end According to Schopenhauer, ...

The Vedanta kesari‎ - Page 109

Sri Ramakrishna Math, Madras - Philosophy - 1969

Sri Aurobindo was very much influenced in the development of his thought by the ... But Sri Aurobindo. believing in the rediscovery of subtle sources by ...

World union, Volume 24‎ - Page 19

World Union (Organization) - History - 1984

Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich Schlegel, Anquetil du Perron, Sir John Woodroffe. Deussen, Schopenhauer, Adano Ley. Sri Aurobindo, Judith Tyberg and others ...

April 13, 2010

Spiritualised religion of humanity alone can bring together man and man

The Hindu Tamil Nadu News The relevance of Aurobindonian philosophy today

Is it the epoch that chooses its prophet or is it the prophet who chooses the epoch ripe for his gospel? This is one of the imponderables of philosophy and the quest for the right answer continues.

In what way is Sri Aurobindo relevant today? Instead of promising that there is a heaven after death he tells us that man's spiritual evolution is inevitable and consequently he redefines the very concepts of life, death and deliverance. When it is the norm to treat devastation and destruction as Nature's retribution for man's earthly sins he tells us that these are methods of shaking man out of his complacency and pushing him towards self-realisation. His philosophy reveals a vision of the Almighty as a benign creator who shaped the universe out of Ananda or the divine delight. This vision may seem a little out of place in to-day's world which groans under threats of doom and destruction. Even those who are not thoroughly impatient with the Aurobindonian philosophy will demand to know how fast it can save the earth from the next holocaust. Can there be quick-fix methods for problems that have festered for centuries together?

There is a growing realization that our perspectives on life must change so that the earth and its inhabitants do not perish ignominiously. For such people who are consciously struggling to establish a new law of life Sri Aurobindo's philosophy has its unique relevance.

If we trace the biographical outline of the Master covering all the major aspects of his life we see that both in life and in thought he was preoccupied with man's terrestrial evolution and the definite manifestation of a higher force on earth to give it a concrete shape. The core ideas of Sri Aurobindo's magnum opus, The Life Divine, highlights his vision of a highly evolved being who will be very different from what human beings are at present. In other words, man is an evolutionary being who is not at the apex of Nature and he has to further evolve into a divine being embodying the Divine Gnosis. The evolution of the new race (which he terms as the Supramental race) will usher in simultaneously its complete biological transformation- since the very cells of the body will be illumined. The philosopher systematically constructs the pathway of practical discipline of yoga. This charted route over unfamiliar terrain will lead to the transformation of man into a spiritual being. The concept of Reality, the highest Truth pervading all existence, can be further grasped if one turns to Savitri -- in this epic what is abstract philosophy becomes illuminated poetic rhythm. Sri Aurobindo's theory of evolution and involution as a parallel movement guiding the destiny of the earth since the beginning of creation has been illustrated with fine examples.

For Sri Aurobindo no aspect of life is too insignificant for inclusion in the process of yoga and he gave the mantra “All Life Is Yoga”. We can clarify that the main tenets of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga are aspiration, rejection, surrender and definitely patience. First, there must be a strong and overwhelming aspiration for the Divine. One must eliminate the hurdles preventing one from advancing on the path. Since it is nearly impossible to do yoga all alone it is necessary for the individual to surrender himself to Divine Grace and Force. There are many methods for realizing one's goal and many broad steps are defined by Sri Aurobindo. In the beginning one starts treading the path of yoga with one's limitations. As one proceeds the conventions and dogmas get eliminated by the power of one's aspiration. The four broad paths of Yoga according to Sri Aurobindo are the Yoga of works, the Yoga of Integral Knowledge, the Yoga of Divine Love and the Yoga of self-perfection. One can choose the path according to one's temperament. As the individual progresses on the path of Integral yoga he needs an environment that will help him find other like-minded seekers. The larger society and even nations also need to create an atmosphere of peace and co-operation so that the individual does not have to surmount unnecessary hurdles at every corner. Sri Aurobindo expounded this idea of world unity in one of his major works, The Ideal of Human Unity. He explains that a spiritualised religion of humanity alone can bring together man and man, nation and nation. This unifying religion is not a mental idea but one infused with true knowledge. The spiritual basis of society will usher in an era of peace, harmony and unity. Rita Nath Keshari

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