Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo (Bangla: শ্রী অরবিন্দ) (August 15, 1872–December 5, 1950) was an Indian nationalist, scholar, poet, Hindu mystic, evolutionary philosopher, yogi and guru. His followers further believe that he was an avatar, an incarnation of the supreme being.

Sri Aurobindo spent his life—through his vast writings and through his own development—working for the freedom of India, the path to the further evolution of life on earth, and to bring down what he called the Supramental Truth Consciousness Force to enable such progress.

Early experiences

Sri Aurobindo was born Aravinda Akroyd Ghose (usually pronounced and often written as Ghosh) in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, in 1872. His father was Dr K. D. Ghose and his mother Swarnalata Devi. Dr Ghose, who had lived in Britain, and had studied at Aberdeen University, was determined that his children should have a completely European upbringing, sent Aurobindo and his siblings to the Loretto Convent School at Darjeeling. At the age of seven Aurobindo was taken along with his two elder brothers, Manmohan and Benoybhusan, to England. There, they were placed with a clergyman and his wife, a Mr and Mrs.Drewett, at Manchester. Mr and Mrs Drewett tutored Aurobindo privately. Mr Drewett, himself a capable scholar, grounded Aurobindo so well in Latin that Aurobindo was able to gain admission into St Paul's School in London. At St. Paul's Aurobindo mastered Greek and excelled at Latin. The last three years at St Paul's were spent in reading, especially English Poetry. At St. Paul's he received the Butterworth Prize for literature, the Bedford Prize for history and a scholarship to Cambridge University. He returned to India in 1893. Then he was selected for the Indian Civil Services examination in England and was ranked 2nd position. Inspite of an administrative service of high salary, he declined it and turned to a nationalist(swadeshi).

During the First Partition of Bengal from 1905 to 1912, he became a leader of the group of Indian nationalists known as the Extremists for their willingness to use violence and advocate outright independence, a plank more moderate nationalists had shied away from up to that point. He was the editor of a nationalist Bengali newspaper Vande Mataram (spelt and pronounced as Bande Mataram in the Bengali language) and came into frequent confrontation with the British Raj as a result. In 1907 attended a convention of Indian nationalists where he was seen as the new leader of the movement. But his life was beginning to take a new direction. In Baroda he met a Maharashtrian yogi called Vishnu Bhaskar Lele who convinced him to explore the ancient Hindu practices of yoga.

It was at this point that Rabindranath Tagore paid him a visit and wrote the now famous lines:

Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee! O friend, my country's friend, O Voice incarnate, free, Of India's soul....The fiery messenger that with the lamp of God Hath come...Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee.

Final conversion

His final conversion from an active nationalist into a profound Hindu sage and seer occurred while incarcerated for a year in the Alipur jail in Kolkata in the province of Bengal. While incarcerated he was inspired by his meditating on the famed Hindu scripture of the Bhagavad Gita.

While in Alipore Jail, Sri Aurobindo claimed to be visited by the renowned Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu philosopher of great importance to neo-Advaita Vedanta, in his meditation. The swami guided Sri Aurobindo's yoga and helped him to scale great heights. It was there Sri Aurobindo saw the convicts, jailers, policemen, the prison bars, the trees, the judge, the lawyer etc., in the experience and realization of Vasudeva, a form of Vishnu. Sri Aurobindo was even able to see compassion, honesty and charity in the hearts of murderers.

The trial for which he was incarcerated was one of the important trials in Indian nationalism movement. There were 49 accused and 206 witnesses. 400 documents were filed and 5000 exhibits were produced including bombs, revolvers and acid. The English judge, C.B. Beechcroft, had been a student with Sri Aurobindo at Cambridge. The Chief Prosecutor Eardley Norton displayed a loaded revolver on his briefcase during the trial. The case for Sri Aurobindo was taken up by Chittaranjan Das. The trial lasted for one full year. Aurobindo was acquitted.

Afterwards Aurobindo started two new weeklies: the Karmayogin in English and the Dharma in Bengali. However, it appeared that the British government would not tolerate his nationalist program as Lord Minto wrote about him: I can only repeat that he is the most dangerous man we have to reckon with.

Sought again by the Indian police he was guided to the French settlements and on April 4, 1910 he finally found refuge with other nationalists in the French colony of Pondicherry.

Philosophical and spiritual writings

In 1914 after four years of concentrated yoga at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo launched Arya, a 64 page monthly review. For the next six and a half years this became the vehicle for most of his most important writings, which appeared in serialised form. These included The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Foundations of Indian Culture, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, and The Future Poetry. Sri Aurobindo however revised some of these works before they were published in book form.

After this prolific output, Sri Aurobindo's only literary works, apart from some poems and essays, was his epic poem Savitri, which he continued to revise for the rest of his life. However, following his retirement from public life in 1926, he maintained a voluminous correspondence with his disciples. His letters, most of which were written in the 1930s, numbered in the several thousands, and some of these were later published in three volumes as Letters on Yoga.

Although Sri Aurobindo wrote most of his material in English, his major works were later translated into a number of languages, including the Indian languages Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Gujarati, Marathi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, as well as French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, and Russian. A large amount of his work in Russian translation is also available online.

The Mother

His closest collaborator in his yoga, Mirra Richard, was known as The Mother. She was born in Paris to Turkish and Egyptian parents and came to Pondicherry on March 29, 1914, finally settling there in 1920. Sri Aurobindo considered her his equal and because of her astuteness as an organiser, left it to her to plan, run and build the growing ashram. After November 24, 1926, when Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion, she supervised the organization of the ashram and later institutes like Auroville, the international township near the town of Pondicherry. She became the leader of the community after Sri Aurobindo passed away; she is revered by followers of Sri Aurobindo as well.

The Mother's attempts to bring the new consciousness into life and her personal effort of physical transformation of her own body are described in the 13-volume series of books known as The Agenda.

Contribution to Hindu philosophy

One of Aurobindo's main philosophical achievements was to introduce the concept of evolution into Vedantic thought. Samkhya philosophy had already proposed such a notion centuries earlier, but Aurobindo rejected the materialistic tendencies of both Darwinism and Samkhya, and proposed an evolution of spirit rather than matter.

He rejects the Mayavada of Advaita Vedanta, and solves the problem of the linkage between the ineffable Brahman or Absolute and the world of multiplicity by positing a transitional hypostasis between the two, which he called The Supermind. The supermind is the active principle present in the transcendent Satchidananda; a unitary mind of which our individual minds and bodies are minuscule subdivisions.

Aurobindo's evolutionary philosophy

These philosophical and cosmological themes are applied to Sri Aurobindo's vision of cosmic and human evolution. He argues that mankind as an entity is not the last rung in the evolutionary scale, but can evolve spiritually beyond its current limitations, moving out of an essential Ignorance born of creation, to a future state of Supramental existence. This would be a Divine Life on Earth characterised by knowledge, truth, substance and energy of supramental consciousness. (Life Divine bk II, ch 27-8)

There are interesting parallels between Sri Aurobindo's vision and that of Teilhard de Chardin (see e.g. K.D. Sethna 1973 Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo - a focus on fundamentals)

Involution

Sri Aurobindo's cosmology (described in his opus The Life Divine) explains the cosmos as coming about through the Absolute dividing into Existence, i.e. it existed; Consciousness-Force, i.e. It is a force and it is conscious of its existence; and Delight, i.e. it delights in the awareness of Its existence. This triune extended to a fourth aspect, the Supramental power that enabled the Consciousness Force to divide into an essential energy at rest. This is the plane of Life. That energy/life then moved, taking shape first as matter, then animus of life, then mind (predominantly in man). In other words, the supramental is the power that organized the spirit into the forms of creation. It divides the Conscious-Force so that it could take shape as individual forms of creation. All existence is thus forms of the original Force/Energy.

Process of Creation -- The process of creation of the universe is the very same process by which an individual and any collective entity in the cosmos develops, grows, and evolves.

Purpose is Delight of Being -- The universe created a universe in order to extend its own delight into the details of creation. When we discover our higher nature, that discovery results in the delight for which the Absolute enabled the cosmos.

Ignorance to Knowledge Enables Delight -- The universe was born of ignorant forms. In discovering the highest consciousness, one moves from Ignorance to Knowledge, experiencing the delight of being for which the universe was created.

Reason for Ignorance -- All forms were born of an inconscience, unconsciousness, and Ignorance. It was so because it allowed for the greatest multiplicity and possibility of forms, which would enable the greatest possibility for delight in discovery of its highest nature.

Evolution

The process of the universe emerging from the Absolute is referred in The Life Divine as involution. The subsequent process of life emerging from matter and mind from life is evolution. Each level that emerges in the evolution (matter, then the vital, then the mind) is already involved in the previous level, including the spirit in the deepest part of each. (The planes of Spirit/Supermind, Mind, and Life emerged in the descent of the Involution from out of the Conscious-Force, and then were involved, i.e. hidden in the evolution, where they reemerge in the universe after matter is created, through the emergence of animus of life and then mind and then spirit/supermind.)

The process of the evolution is to unfold in the universe the involved planes, and do so at levels of perfection and ultimate possibility, culminating in the supramentalization, spiritualization of everything in creation. It is also to reunite the Consciousness (lost in the Involution) with the (unconscious) Force (which is there in creation) by bringing the Spiritual Being into the Becomings of life, enabling a Divine life on earth, at each point aided by the supramental unifying action.

This evolution occurs on a number of levels:

Evolution of the Individual -- This is described as a dual movement; inward, away from the surface consciousness and into the depths, culminating in the Psychic Being (the personal evolving soul); and then upward to higher levels of spiritual mind (Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, and Overmind), culminating in the final stage of supramentalisation.

Evolution of Collectives of Society -- By opening to the higher consciousness, man facilitates the evolution and transformation of organizations and collectives he is related to. In this way, he enables the mental and spiritual transformation of society, a movement upward from its current predominantly vital status.

Evolution of Life on Earth -- A divine life on earth, in which the collective is peopled with individuals who have attained these ultimate stages of development is the basis for a collective divine life on earth. This fulfills the Divine Intent, the evolutionary purpose of earthly existence.

Evolution of the Universe -- In reaching his ultimate potential, Man not only serves the evolutionary goals of the Individual, but also of the Universe, as well as the Transcendent Reality. The universe is thus seen as evolving through man to Its own spiritual fulfillment.

Other points

The Essential Ignorance -- The Ignorance born of creation serves as great a purpose as the Knowledge, as does the Negative with the Positive, and the Evil with the Good. Both sides of these dualities serves Nature's purpose of evolution.
Overcoming Ignorance -- By discovering the depths, down to the subliminal being and eventually the evolving soul (the Psychic Being) one overcomes ego and separateness, and hence the essential Ignorance of Man born of creation. It culminates when one's consciousness opens to the light of the cosmic planes, culminating in a opening to the supramental. At that point Integral Knowledge and Consciousness replaces the Ignorance born of creation.
Nature, Soul, and Evolution -- Life divides into Nature and Soul -- i.e., Prakriti and Purusha. Normally life evolves through the slow difficult path of Nature. Life/Nature evolves through contradictory opposites to create ever-greater complexities and higher harmonies. (From the perspective of higher consciousness these are seen as complementary, necessary opposites.) When man rises in consciousness, he enables life to evolve through Soul, i.e. without division and duality. When man discovers his own soul, Soul evolution is enabled for the earth.
The Being in the Becoming -- The Rishi connected with Spirit and arrived at Moksha/liberation. He became one with the Being. The householder only knows the becoming of life, lost in finiteness, ego, and time. Sri Aurobindo’s Third Way, or Third Dimension is to bring the spiritual Being into the Becoming moments of our lives.
The Vision of Brahman -- The contradiction between the Spirit and Life is resolved through higher consciousness, in which they are unitary rather than separate. This is the vision of the oneness and unity of Brahman in the form of the unity of the Creator and Creation, of the One and the Many, of Being and Becoming.

Aurobindo's integral yoga

The metaphysical teaching is balanced by a practical method, called Integral Yoga.

Integral Yoga is so-called because it involves the synthesis of the three yogas - bhakti, karma, and jnana - of the Bhagavad Gita. It is also called "Integral" because it embodies and integrates all aspects of life.

Of these three, bhakti is central, and in keeping with the Hindu tradition of the Divine Mother, Sri Aurobindo teaches devotion to the Mother (see his short devotional book The Mother), personified in his co-worker Mirra Richard, henceforth called 'The Mother'. In his letters to his disciples, advises them to consecrates every action to the Mother, and surrender to Her and the Divine Force expressed through Her.

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION (psychic, spiritual, supramental):

In this way the work of self-transformation involves rejecting the "desire soul" or surface ego in the outer being, and opening up to the depths within. Finally the psychic being, the personal evolving soul comes to the fore, along with an opening to higher spiritual realms, moving out of time, and finiteness to oneness, timelessness, and infinity. The spiritual light then descends and begins to transform all aspects of the being -- mental, vital, and physical. A supramental change is beyond that.

In The Life Divine and these two processes are described in detail (book II ch.25), in the Letters on Yoga (part IV sect.1) referred to as Psychicisation and Spiritualisation, both absolutely essential. Psychicisation alone does not mean Enlightenment, and Spiritualisation without the Psychic Being can be disastrous for the individual sadhaka, who may be trapped by snares like those of the intermediate zone (Letters on Yoga vol.II pp.1039ff (3rd ed.)). But the double movement together enable an opening to a descent of the higher levels of Spiritual mind beyond the thinking faculty and limitations of reason, as well as the descent of the light, peace, and power to transform the vital and physical parts of our being into their higher formations. These are intermediate stages on the path of ascent to the Supermind (The Life Divine book II ch.26). The task of the Yoga is to allow the inner Psychic and higher Spiritual consciousness to transform the faculties of the outer being - the mental, vital, physical, subconscient, and inconscient being (Letters on Yoga part IV sect.2-5).

The Psychic and Spiritual transformation can be practically practiced as follows: The three central spiritual methods of connecting to the Spirit are Consecration, Moving to the Depths (Concentration), and Surrender. Consecration is to open to the Force before engaging in an activity. Moving to the Depths (or Concentration) is a movement away from the surface existence to a deeper existence within. In the deepest depths one discovers the Personal Evolving Soul. Surrender is to offer all one's work, one's life to the Divine Force and Intent (Synthesis of Yoga Part I ch.II-III; Letters on Yoga vol.II pp.585ff (3rd ed.)) As we connect to the evolving soul within, we not only move away from ego, ignorance, finiteness, and time; not only perceived our limitations of being and overcome them; but we also open to the universal plane. This is the Psychic transformation in progress. From there the light, peace, power is drawn into and descends into the body, transforming all of its parts – physical, vital, and mental. This is the Spiritual transformation. Beyond that is the Supramental transformation.

The supramental transformation is the final stage, enabling the birth of a new individual fully formed by the supramental power, the same power that enabled the universe to be created in the first place from out of a Divine Source. Such individuals would be the forerunners of a new truth-consciousness based supra-humanity. Among their capacities are: a total oneness and identity with the environment and with others; total integral knowledge replacing our essential ignorance, i.e. knowledge by identity; a unification of knowledge and will (what one knows is automatically created, what is willed is fully known in its truth); the Force of creation reunited with the Consciousness; and a complete unity of the Individual, Universal, and Transcendent purpose expressed through the person. Also, all aspects of division and ignorance of consciousness at the vital and mental levels would be overcome, replaced with a unity of consciousness at every plane, and even the physical body transformed and divinised. A new supramental species would then emerge, living a supramental, gnostic, divine life on earth. (The Life Divine book II ch.27-28)

OTHER POINTS:

-In his essay "The Mother" Sri Aurobindo also describes the yoga as consisting of three essential movements. Aspiration for the Divine in one's life, Rejection of all wanting elements of the individual person (physical, vital, and mental), and Surrender to the Divine Spirit and Force through the Divine Mother.

-Though he provided this approach to yoga, he also subscribed to the idea that all of life is an adventure of consciousness, and that there are no exact fixed approaches for a particular individual. Each person must start from where he is at, and move upward from there, through the adventure of self-discovery.

-Over time the individual moves upward (along a vertical scale) in his consciousness, centering more at the mental and then the spiritually oriented levels of mind, even as he moves inward (in the horizontal scale) to the soul. The more he moves inward, the further upward he moves, and the more each of the existing planes in the vertical scale (physical, vital, mental) are perfected.

-Eventually Man sheds the instrument of mind, replacing it with supermind. Beyond that is the replacement of our current physical attributes (e.g. breathing, digestion, blood circulation, skeletal system, human form, etc.) with more subtler forms of substance of the body. The Mother's preoccupation was with this stage of the supramental evolution of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. A new species of supramentalized being replacing the current human functioning is the ultimate state of the (supramental) yoga.

-As a result of these process, there emerges Gnostic, Supramentalized individuals who are the forerunners of an emerging Divine Life on earth, in which all of life moves to its highest spiritual and supramental status.

Divine Life on Earth

Sri Aurobindo's view of society and the emergence of a spirit-oriented future existence can be explained as follows:

Beyond the physical-based social life of early man (marked by survival, fear, subservience, etc.), the vital-based social life of the past five hundred years (emerging through trade, travel, discovery, adventure, and the fulfillment of the individual needs, wants, and desires), and the currently emerging mental-based age (indicated by freedom, individuality, democracy, education, rationality, technology, and the common man) is the possibility of the emergence of a spirit-based age and collective existence.

In this highest form of social or collective life, the domination of the ordinary mind -- of surface preoccupation, of partial knowledge, as well as the lower physical and vital life is replaced with a mind and life dominated by the spirit.

Thus, the first necessity for the emergence of a evolutionary divinized life on earth is the realization amongst a good number of individuals of the Spirit, the divine reality above and within one's self.

The divinized or gnostic being lives a spiritual existence in an integral way; integral in his own being, and integral and one with the world around him. He has integrated and elevated the physical, vital/emotional, and mental planes of his existence to its greatest heights and fulfillment by finding the spirit within himself and applying and elevating these planes of life with the spiritual. He also discovers that the spirit is everywhere in the world and in every other person, eliminating the separation between himself and life and himself and others around him. In other words he is whole and integrated individually and universally.

"To be in the being of all and to include all in one's being, to be conscious of the consciousness of all, to be integrated in force with the universal force, to carry all action and experience in oneself and feel it as one's own action and experience, to feel all selves as one's own self, to feel all delight of being as one's own delight of being is a necessary condition of the integral divine living." --Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

In addition to integrating the planes and sublevels of one's being (individualization), and becoming one with others and the world around is (universalization), the individuals who will be the harbingers of this divine life will also be united with the transcendent Divine. These individuals will have found the transcendent spirit within, the spiritual force, God, the Divine in the cosmos, and feel, know, act with complete reference to its divine force, power, knowledge, and bliss.

In this context a number of individuals, integrated individually, universally, and transcendently, can work together, near or apart, aware or unaware of one another, to create a new common life, superior to the present individual and common existence. A critical mass of such "gnostic individuals" could create the foundation of a new social life and order; a divine life on earth.

Then what of this divine life? What would its focus, attributes, and tendencies be? For one there would be an inescapable law of unity, mutuality, and harmony.

"...a greater identity of being and consciousness between individual and individual unified in their spiritual substance, feeling themselves to be self and self of one self-existence, acting in a greater unitarian force of knowledge, a greater power of being. There must be an inner and direct mutual knowledge, based upon a consciousness of oneness and identity, a consciousness of each other's being, thought, feeling, inner and outer movements ...." -- Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The current vital and mental constructions of life would be replaced by gnostic individuals who live beyond the vicissitudes of human thought and the push and pull of the forces of Nature. Humanity in the current age does not have the depth of inner knowledge to understand the infinite forces that are involved in the emerging world, (e.g. what can create the greater good of the community). His limiting mind-sense and the limiting mind-sense of the collective hasn't the integral vision and knowledge and force of action to deal with the evolving society. We have created a civilization which has become too big for our limited mental capacities and understanding and our limiting ego, which narrows the truth to our own needs and desires. The current unfolding and limited blossoming of life on earth is bound by the limiting vital animal and passion nature, and the narrow opening to the full truth which is the human mind.

A life of unity, mutuality, and harmony alone, emerging from individuals who are in integral relationship with themselves, others, and the transcendent spirit, can deal with the overwhelming needs of the collective life. Science, economic development, democracy, religion, and other institutions and ideas and ideals are alone incapable of addressing the evolutionary needs of the emerging collective life. If the gnostic beings help establish this integral, unifying gnostic consciousness on earth, it would provide a far greater power and knowledge than mental man has for understanding and acting on the needs of the emerging collective.

Thus it is likely that much that is normal in human life would likely disappear. Mental ideals, systems, would dissolve as a new harmony is created founded on a much wider basis of inner knowledge. Political strife would disappear in a divine atmosphere of unity. Life and body would not completely preoccupy us as it does now in our current existence. A great diversity and freedom of self-expression, based on a spiritual core of being, would emerge. The one rule of this divine life would be the self expression of the spirit, of the divine, in all aspects of life.

"..an existence without the reactions of success and frustration, vital joy and grief, peril and passion, pleasure and pain, the vicissitudes and uncertainties if fate and struggle and battle and endeavor, a joy of novelty and surprise and creation projecting itself into the unknown ... The gnostic manifestation of life would be more full and fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the Ignorance; it would be a greater and happier constant miracle." --Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Aurobindo's influence

Sri Aurobindo comes at a very crucial moment in the history of thought when Marxist materialism, Nietzschean nihilism and Freudian vitalism were popular and fashionable. Besides, phenomenology and existentialism had their run along-side him. On the whole, along with the new-fangled science and Theosophy, these new philosophical formulations fermented enough confusion among the elite. In a way, the disparate positions arrived at in Western thought find their synthesis in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. By aligning them with the ancient Indian wisdom, he comes up with an integral vision that breathes universality as well as contemporarity.

Thus, Kant's sublime, Hegel's absolute, Schopenhauer's will, Kierkegaard's passion, Marx's matter, Darwin's evolution, Nietzsche's overman, Bergson's élan vital, all find their due representation in Sri Aurobindo's grand exposition. His thought successfully overarchs cultural as well as religious chasms. S. K. Maitra and Haridas Chaudhuri are first among the academicians to discern the import of Sri Aurobindo's integral philosophy. D. P. Chattopadhyay wrote a seminal treatise juxtaposing Sri Aurobindo and Marx to examine their utopian prophecies.

Sri Aurobindo's ideas about the further evolution of human capabilities influenced the thinking of Michael Murphy (who studied at Aurobindo's Ashram in India) – and indirectly, the human potential movement, through Murphy's writings. The American philosopher Ken Wilber, although deeply influenced by Aurobindo, has tried to reduce the reliance on metaphysics in Aurobindo's thought. Wilber's interpretation has been strongly criticised by Rod Hemsell. New Age writer Andrew Harvey also looks to Aurobindo as a major inspiration. Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson is also heavily influenced by Aurobindo and the Mother.

Controvery over Supramental Lineage

Vedic Cosmologist Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet claims that she is an integral part of the avataric line initiated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, calling herself "The Third". In her own words, "The Third is a part of the triangular manifestation, without which there can be no Supramental Descent which hinges entirely on this tri-part nucleus, plus a Fourth." Norelli-Bachelet writes that "the Fourth" in the Supramental Lineage, her son born in 1963, is the reincarnation of Sri Aurobindo. These claims are not recognized by the Sri Aurobindo Society or the citizens of Auroville.

Quotation

"The one aim of [my] yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinize human nature."

— "Aurobindo on Aurobindo"

"Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide–overt within the Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling.... Of that which is in mortal in mortals, and possessed of the truth, is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers.... Become high uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in as the things of the Godhead."

—This is an opening quote of Book One of Sri Aurobindo's "The Life Divine" from Vamadeva--Rig Veda (IV.1 7; IV.2 1, IV 4.5)

Partial bibliography

Bases of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-77-9
Bhagavad Gita and Its Message, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-78-7
Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, (compiled by M.P. Pandit), Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-74-4
Essays on the Gita, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-18-7
The Future Evolution of Man, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-940985-55-1
The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-44-6
Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-22-5
The Ideal of Human Unity, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-43-8
The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-76-0
The Life Divine, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-61-2
The Mind of Light, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-940985-70-5
The Mother, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-79-5
Rebirth and Karma, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-63-9
Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-80-9
Secret of the Veda, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-19-5
Sri Aurobindo Primary Works Set 12 vol. US Edition, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-93-0
Sri Aurobindo Selected Writings Software CD Rom, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-88-8
The Synthesis of Yoga, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-65-5
The Upanishads, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-914955-23-3
Vedic Symbolism, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, Wisconsin ISBN 0-941524-30-2