-001_Publisher^s Note.htm PUBLISHERS' NOTE During his American tour in 1962, Sri A. B. Purani delivered eighty-two lectures on the Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo at the Crescent Moon Center, Sedona. Part of these, were on The Life Divine, the magnum opus of Sri Aurobindo. These lectures (July 2-August 9)were followed by Questions and Answers in the study-group. Thanks to the keen interest taken by the hosts, Mrs. Lois and Mr. Nicholas G. Duncan, all the proceedings were tape- ecorded. The contents of this volume are compiled from those records. A talk on the Origin of Ignorance by the author has been appended to this collection though it was not part' of this programme, as it is v

Lecture X Chap. 16. The Triple Status of Supermind Chap. 17. The Divine Soul Chap. 18. Mind and Supermind It is perhaps good to take chapters 16, 17, 18, together as all the three deal with the subject of the Supermind. Then the chapters that follow upto chapter 28th may be regarded as applications of the working of the Supermind. The 17th gives the status of the Divine Soul,—the central being, in the Supermind; the 18th deals with Mind and Supermind, while Chapters from 19th to 22nd deal with Life and its nature and the working of the Supermind. Chapter 23 deals with the Double soul and then 24th-27th deal with Matter, and in Chapter 28th the d

Lecture I Chap. 1. The Human Aspiration Chap. 2. The Two Negations : The Materialist Denial When I first read the Life Divine it came as a great intellectual architecture and I thought it was so, perhaps, because I was so much impressed by it. But later on I met Dr. S. K. Maitra who first came to pay his respects to Sri Aurobindo in Pondi-cherry, and he did not come as a disciple. He came as a devotee and an admirer. I asked him how it was that a philosopher like him was so taken up with The Life Divine and how was it that he got the conviction from The Life Divine. He said : "As a young man in college I was faced with the alternative of choosing a voluntary

Lecture XII Chap. 22. The Problem of Life Chap. 23. The Double Soul in Man And when evolution arrives at mind, life awakes to the necessity of giving up the finiteness or the inconscience with which it started. Its business first was to create a conscious centre of experience, a subjective being which could receive the whole universe. Having created such a centre in life, that is, the mental being, it forces the mind to go back, to reverse the process of individualizing into a necessity of accepting collective life, the need for interchange, the need for exchange, the need for "other" in order to fulfill one's self. That is what the process of nature seems

Lecture III Chap. 6. Man in the Universe Chap. 7. The Ego and the Dualities Last time we got to the point where the emergence of the self-aware being was a great fact of evolutionary life. Man in the universe is really Conscious Existence which has become self-aware. In the language of the Vedas it is the Dawn. This Dawn is the awakening of human consciousness to its divine possibility, and the basis of this self-aware being we call Satchidananda. The Dawn represents the awakening to this infinite existence, infinite consciousness, infinite delight, Satchidananda. In one sense we can say that Satchidananda is here as the universe which the human consc

Lecture XIII Chap. 24. Matter Chap. 25. The Knot of Matter Chap. 26. The Ascending Series of Substance We were dealing with Matter and how it is related to an Omnipresent Reality. It is not a world of chance or accident even though to our mind it wears the appearance of an inconscience. The world of mind, of life, of matter—the human, the animal and vegetable and the material world— even though so different and disparate is not without an Ordering Reality. The whole universe seems, then, to be the veiled working of an Omnipresent Reality. And Matter which seems to be the categorical refusal of the Spirit, the last term nearest to the Nescience, is its

SRI AUROBINDO'S LIFE DIVINE Lectures delivered in the U.S.A. A. B. PURANI First Edition: 1966 Second Impression: 1989 Third Impression: 1997 ISBN 81-7058-142-7 © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1966 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA

Lecture VI Chap. 10. Conscious Force Chap. 11. Delight of Existence : the Problem We were discussing a universal or an infinite,—existing in its unlimited or infinite power, infinite force,—and the nature of this force. All that exists is surcharged with a force, whether that force is conscious or unconscious. We found that the rhythms of the force that is working cast themselves into an ordered movement. There must be a consciousness behind, because if we grant that the force is conscious, then only the question why, the aim purpose, fulfilment can, arise. An unconscious force can have no purpose, no end, no fulfilment. It could not necessarily cast it

Lecture II Chap. 3. The Two Negations : the Refusal of the Ascetic Chap. 4. Reality Omnipresent Chap. 5. The Destiny of the Individual Chap. 6. Man in the Universe I will read a quotation from a book written by Mr. G.H. Langley who was the Vice-Chancellor at the Dacca University and who, on his retirement was asked by the Royal India-Pakistan-Ceylon Society to write a book on Sri Aurobindo. The Society published the book under the heading Sri Aurobindo, Indian Poet, Philosopher and Mystic. In that book Mr. Langley writes: "Sri Aurobindo is both a poet and a speculative thinker. The same is true of Rabindranath

Lecture XI Chap. 19. Life Chap. 20. Death, Desire and Incapacity Chap. 21. The Ascent of Life We were dealing with the force of life representative of the Truth-Consciousness—and we came to know that all these derivatives here that happen to appear to our mind as if they were the result of the Inconscient are in fact supported, guided and governed by a veiled Truth-Consciousness. To the mind the universe appears as a chance world or a world of accident or a world of inconscience only. But mind is half-knowledge and half-ignorance; it is a movement projected for effecting the division of the Infinite into the finite. It is a movement necessitated by keeping the eg