Sri Aurobindo

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

Sachchidananda is at once impersonal Being and divine Person

Both personal and impersonalStated explicitly

In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo builds a metaphysics in which the Absolute is Sachchidananda, existence, consciousness-force and bliss, not merely a featureless silence. He rejects both the materialist denial and the ascetic refusal that declares illusory everything except the motionless Brahman. The Supreme is at once impersonal and personal: a limitless being and a conscious Ishvara who, through his Shakti, involves himself in matter and re-emerges through evolution. In his writings on the Mother he presents that Shakti as the consciousness and force of the Supreme, at once transcendent, universal and individual. For Aurobindo the personal God is no concession to human weakness, nor is the impersonal Absolute the last word: both are truths of a reality that exceeds and integrates them.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The psychic being, a divine spark that grows from life to life

An evolving soulStated explicitly

Sri Aurobindo distinguishes several levels in the person. The ego is a provisional formation of nature, useful while ignorance lasts. Behind body, life and mind stands the psychic being, a spark of the Divine in the heart that grows and takes shape over many lives, assimilating the essence of each experience. Above it is the Jivatman, the central being, eternal and one with the Divine, which does not evolve but presides. In The Life Divine and in his Letters on Yoga he explains that the task of sadhana is to discover the psychic being, bring it forward and let it transform mind, life and body. The true self does not merely contemplate its origin: it takes part in the evolution of consciousness on earth.

Why do we suffer?

Pain arises from separative consciousness, a stage in an evolution

Ignorance of what we areStated explicitly

In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo devotes several chapters to the origin of falsehood, evil and suffering. His answer is that pain does not belong to the ultimate nature of things, which is bliss (ananda), but to the Ignorance: the consciousness that, emerging from inconscient matter, perceives itself as a separate ego and experiences the world as foreign and threatening. Suffering is the reaction of a limited being not yet able to receive with equanimity the touch of universal life. It is neither a punishment nor a mistake of the Creator but a condition of evolution, meant to disappear when consciousness opens to its source and is transformed. Hence he rejects both resignation and flight from the world.

What happens after death?

The psychic being is reborn to grow, not merely to pay debts

Rebirth according to karmaStated explicitly

In The Problem of Rebirth Sri Aurobindo accepts reincarnation but reinterprets it. He does not understand it as a punishment or a mechanical chain of moral causes, but as the means by which the psychic being grows and consciousness evolves on earth. After death the outer parts of the personality dissolve; the psychic being withdraws to its own world, assimilates the experience of the life and is born again when its development requires. Unlike the schools that seek to escape the cycle, Aurobindo does not see liberation as the end of rebirth: the goal is a divine life on earth, which even envisages the transformation of the body and the overcoming of physical death.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Aspiration from below, grace from above: surrender to the Mother

Through grace and loveStated explicitly

Sri Aurobindo proposes an integral yoga that seeks not merely individual liberation but the transformation of the whole nature. In The Synthesis of Yoga he integrates knowledge, works and devotion, and in The Mother he sums up practice in three movements: aspiration, rejection of what opposes the light, and surrender. But he insists that personal effort is not enough: only two powers can accomplish the work, a constant aspiration calling from below and a supreme grace answering from above. That grace acts through the divine Shakti, the Mother, to whom the disciple must open ever more. Liberation is the first step; the goal is to let the Divine do the yoga in oneself.

Is a teacher necessary?

The true guru is the Divine in the heart; the human guru helps

The teacher is withinStated explicitly

In the introduction to The Synthesis of Yoga Sri Aurobindo lists four aids to yoga: knowledge of the scriptures, persistent enthusiasm, the teacher and time. Of the teacher he says that the true guru is the Lord dwelling in the heart, the world-teacher, who guides the seeker even when the seeker does not know it. The human teacher is valuable when acting as a channel for that presence and teaching by example and influence more than by precept; he should not impose himself or create dependence. In practice, however, Aurobindo and the Mother acted as guides of the Pondicherry ashram, and in his letters he insists that the disciple must open to the Mother’s force.

Is the world real?

The world is real: Spirit involved in matter, now evolving

Manifestation of the divineStated explicitly

Sri Aurobindo expressly rejects the idea that the world is an illusion. In the first chapters of The Life Divine he examines two negations: the materialist’s, which denies Spirit, and the ascetic’s, which denies the world; he considers both partial truths. The universe is a real manifestation of Sachchidananda, which has involved itself in inconscient matter and emerges again, through evolution, as life, mind and, in the future, supermind. That evolution also passes through planes of consciousness, from matter up to spiritual levels. The world is not a mistake to escape from but the stage on which the Divine discovers itself and is called to be transformed.

What is love?

Divine love descends and transforms; Savitri sets it against death

Longing and unionStated explicitly

The third part of The Synthesis of Yoga is devoted to the yoga of divine love: Sri Aurobindo presents it as one of the great paths to the Supreme, in which the soul turns to the Divine with all its emotions and discovers that He is the Beloved in all beings. Human love, mixed with desire and ego, is for him a still obscure form of a force that comes from the Divine. In Savitri, his epic poem, the heroine’s love defies Death to restore Satyavan to life, a symbol of a spiritual love able to overcome the law of mortality. Love is not merely longing for union: it is a force that transforms life.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

Lower nature is determined; freedom lies in the Spirit

We are machines until we awakenStated explicitly

In the Essays on the Gita Sri Aurobindo devotes a chapter to the determinism of nature. Following the Gita, he holds that on the level of lower nature all acts are performed by the qualities (gunas) of prakriti, and that the ego which thinks itself free is only an instrument of those forces; its supposed freedom is that of choosing among already conditioned impulses. True freedom exists, but on another level: in the Purusha, the spiritual being, which can awaken to itself, rise above the qualities and become a conscious instrument of the divine Will. One who is freed does not stop acting, but stops being moved by blind nature.

Why meditate or pray?

Go within, find the psychic being and open upward

Returning to the source of the IStated explicitly

Sri Aurobindo proposes no single technique: in The Synthesis of Yoga he states that all life is yoga. But in his Letters on Yoga he gives concrete guidance for meditation: quieten the mind, concentrate in the heart to discover the psychic being, the inner divine presence, or above the head to open to the higher consciousness, and offer up whatever arises. The aim is not only silence but for that silence to allow the descent of a force that transforms nature. He distinguishes meditation, which works with ideas, from contemplation and concentration, and warns against tense effort. To meditate is to return to the inner source so that it may act in life.

Can reason know the ultimate?

Reason is an intermediate instrument; above it lie intuition and supermind

The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly

Sri Aurobindo, educated at Cambridge and author of an extensive philosophical body of work, does not despise reason: in The Human Cycle he analyses its historical role as an agent of progress and critic of custom. But he holds that it is an intermediate instrument, unable on its own to reach ultimate truth, because it divides and works with concepts. Above the rational mind he describes a ladder of planes of consciousness: higher mind, illumined mind, intuition, overmind and, at the summit, supermind, a truth-consciousness that knows by identity. Spiritual experience completes what reason cannot, and reason then serves to order and communicate what has been experienced. His own work is an example of that use.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

Without a change of consciousness, no social reform suffices

The revolution is innerStated explicitly

Sri Aurobindo was first a leader of radical Indian nationalism, imprisoned by the British in 1908. In prison he had spiritual experiences that led him in 1910 to withdraw to Pondicherry. He did not experience this as flight: in The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity he argues that political, economic or cultural revolutions fail if human consciousness does not change, and that humanity is heading towards a subjective and then a spiritual age. His yoga rejects both the asceticism that abandons the world and the activism that reforms it without transforming itself. The goal is a divine life on earth, which can only arise from a collective inner transformation.