Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo is a central, pioneering figure in the field of consciousness evolution and the development of an ../awakening-society. His life exemplified an integration of the major development lines and leading edges of onto-social development: born in colonial India, educated at King's Cambridge, a senior civil servant in the Raj, then a leading nationalist, and finally a spiritual figure whose work pioneered an integration of east and west.
Indications of this importance:
- Integral movement owes its naming directly to Aurobindo's naming of integral yoga
- Aurobindo set out a specific evolutionary model of human consciousness and connected it to cultural evolution.
- Gebser independently came to these ideas (he explicitly )
Notes
Key works and ideas
- Collected works available from: https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/writings.php
TODO:
-
The supramental manifestation upon earth (published 1949)
From 21 February 1949 she started a quarterly magazine called "The Bulletin" in which Sri Aurobindo published a series of eight articles under the title "The supramental manifestation upon earth" wherein for the first time he wrote about transitional being between man and superman. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirra_Alfassa#School_in_ashram_and_the_death_of_Sri_Aurobindo]
-
The Overmind
- "A detailed description of the Overmind is provided in Book I ch.28, and Book II ch.26, of Aurobindo's philosophical opus The Life Divine"w
Biography
https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/
Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872. At the age of seven he was taken to England for education. There he studied at St. Paul's School, London, and at King's College, Cambridge. Returning to India in 1893, he worked for the next thirteen years in the Princely State of Baroda in the service of the Maharaja and as a professor in Baroda College. During this period he also joined a revolutionary society and took a leading role in secret preparations for an uprising against the British Government in India.
In 1906, soon after the Partition of Bengal, Sri Aurobindo quit his post in Baroda and went to Calcutta, where he soon became one of the leaders of the Nationalist movement. He was the first political leader in India to openly put forward, in his newspaper Bande Mataram, the idea of complete independence for the country. Prosecuted twice for sedition and once for conspiracy, he was released each time for lack of evidence.
Sri Aurobindo had begun the practice of Yoga in 1905 in Baroda. In 1908 he had the first of several fundamental spiritual realisations. In 1910 he withdrew from politics and went to Pondicherry in order to devote himself entirely to his inner spiritual life and work. During his forty years in Pondicherry he evolved a new method of spiritual practice, which he called the Integral Yoga. Its aim is a spiritual realisation that not only liberates man's consciousness but also transforms his nature. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, the Mother, he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Among his many writings are The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and Savitri. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950.
