On The Life Divine
The first parts of the book deals with the major problems and issues of modern, ancient and Indian philosophy and religion. After presenting the theories and views of various schools of philosophy lucidly as if it was his own, Sri Aurobindo elucidates his own integral view
The key concepts in Sri Aurobindo’s synthesis is the concept of supermind and the concept of spiritual evolution or the evolution of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo provides a spiritual alternative to the Darwinian theory of evolution.
While the first parts of the book spell out the metaphysical aspects of Life Divine, the last parts describe the mystical, yogic, spiritual and the prophetic dimensions of the divine life on earth. - M.S. Srinivasan
...
A Divine Life Peter Heehs
The prospectus of the Arya promised readers “synthetic studies of speculative Philosophy,” of which the first would be Aurobindo’s “exposition of Vedantic thought in accordance with the Ishopanishad.”824 The philosopher in him was still subservient to the commentator. Most of the writings that fill his notebooks from 1910 to 1914 were based more or less directly on the Upanishads and Rig Veda. The most extensive of these were the aforementioned commentaries on the Isha Upanishad entitled “The Life Divine.” Presumably he intended to draw on them when he wrote the promised “exposition,” but when he started a new draft of “The Life Divine” in the middle of May 1914, he hardly mentioned the Isha Upanishad. Instead he dealt with Indian philosophy in general, particularly its experiential basis. After working on this draft for about a month, he set it aside and in just three days wrote the opening chapter of another Life Divine that would become a thousand-page treatise of spiritual philosophy. He was happy with this chapter when he wrote it and he remained satisfied with it for the rest of his life. In it he presented, in four taut pages, the principal themes of his philosophy:
These ideas and their synthesis were self-validating for Aurobindo, and most of his followers accept them as unquestionable truths. But if a philosophical system is to merit acceptance as philosophy, it has to be defended by logical arguments; otherwise it joins other infallible revelations that depend on faith for acceptance and persuasion or coercion for propagation. In other words, it becomes a religion. Aurobindo did not want his teaching to be regarded as a religion and therefore used logic to present and defend it — but not, he stressed, to arrive at it. In reaching his conclusions, he owed nothing, he said, “to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others.” If the spiritual value of Aurobindo’s system can only be gauged by one who has had the same experiences, its philosophical value is measurable by the usual critical means: studies of sources, arguments, and conclusions, and evaluations of rhetoric and style.
AUROBINDO HAD LITTLE INTEREST in philosophy and read few of the major Eastern or Western philosophers. At Cambridge he read a few Platonic dialogues as part of his study of Greek literature. He tried to acquaint himself with Hume, Kant, and Hegel, but retained little of the little he read. In general, European philosophy seemed to him to be “a mass of abstractions with nothing concrete or real that could be firmly grasped and written in a metaphysical jargon to which I had not the key.” Most of the ideas that he absorbed were “picked up desultorily” in his general reading. This included the works of the English Romantic poets, some books by Friedrich Nietzsche, and secondhand accounts of the theory of evolution. His study of Sanskrit literature led him eventually to the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Rig Veda, but he did not study the dialectics of Vedanta or other Indian philosophical systems; only some “general ideas” stayed with him. Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to say that he was innocent of philosophy when he began to write The Life Divine. The books he read were enough to introduce him to the classic problems of the discipline and to acquaint him with some of the leading schools.
The only works that Aurobindo regularly cited in The Life Divine were the Gita, Upanishads, and Rig Veda. His philosophy, he explained, “was formed first” by the study of these works, which were also “the basis of my first practice of Yoga;
...
Sri Aurobindo on individualism and collectivism, The State-Idea and Anarchy - By Dr. Soumitra Basu http://motsac.org/humanitycahpsrevised.php
Sri Aurobindo's aspiration may sound utopian but actually the seeds of what he termed as ANARCHY have already been sown in the social psyche. The word anarchy was loosely used till popularized as a valid political construct by Proudhon (1840) and Bakunin (1872).Though suppressed by Fascism in the 1930s, anarchism re-emerged in 1950s and 1960s by influencing the civil rights movement and students movements in the West. In fact the contemporary radical ecology movement that was initiated in the 1970s was very much inspired by anarchism. There is every reason to be optimistic that an uplifted and higher anarchism based on the freedom of soul-poise can really be operative one day.
Sri Aurobindo reminds, "Our destiny may be the conversion of an original animal association into a community of the gods. Our progress may be a devious round leading from the easy and spontaneous uniformity and harmony which reflects Nature to the self-possessed unity which reflects the Divine" (18Ibid)
http://motsac.org/humanitycahpsrevised.php...
Savitri Era: Modalities of social action need to be examined against present constraints
Tusar Nath Mohapatra @NathTusar Director, Savitri Era Learning Forum (SELF) and Founder of Savitri Era Religion
Savitri Era of those who adore,
Om Sri Aurobindo & The Mother.
No comments:
Post a Comment