|
Sri Aurobindo on Himself
[Biographical Notes]
Between 1880 and 1884 Sri Aurobindo attended the grammar school at Manchester.
I never went to the Manchester Grammar school, never even stepped inside it. It was my two brothers who studied there. I was taught privately by the Drewetts. Mr Drewett who was a scholar in Latin (he had been a Senior Classic at Oxford) taught me that language (but not Greek, which I began at Saint Paul's [School,] London) and English History etc.; Mrs Drewett taught me French, Geography and Arithmetic. No Science; it was not in fashion at that time.
Sri Aurobindo owes his views on Indian Nationalism to the influence of Rajnarayan Bose. Sri Aurobindo's bent towards philosophy may be attributed to the same influence.
I don't think my grandfather was much of a philosopher; at any rate he never talked to me on that subject. My politics were shaped before I came to India; he talked to me of his Nationalist activities in the past, but I learned nothing new from them. I admired my grandfather and liked his writings "Hindu Dharmer Srestha[ta]" and "Se Kalar E Kal"; but it is a mistake to think that he exercised any influence on me. I had gone in England far beyond his stock of ideas which belonged to an earlier period. He never spoke to me of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.
Sri Aurobindo's intellect was influenced by Greek philosophy.
Very little. I read more than once Plato's Republic and Symposium, but only extracts from his other writings. It is true that under his impress I rashly started writing at the age of 18 an explanation of the cosmos on the foundation of the principle of Beauty and Harmony, but I never got beyond the first three or four chapters. I read Epictetus and was interested in the ideas of the Stoics and the Epicureans; but I made no study of Greek philosophy or of any of the [. . ].1 I made in fact no study of metaphysics in my school and College days. What little I knew about philosophy I picked up desultorily in my general reading. I once read, not Hegel, but a small book on Hegel, but it left no impression on me. Later, in India, I read a book on Bergson, but that too ran off "like water from a duck's back". I remembered very little of what I had read and absorbed nothing. German metaphysics and most European philosophy since the Greeks seemed to me 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. I tried once a translation of Kant but dropped it after the first two pages and never tried again. In India at Baroda I read a "Tractate" of Schopenhauer on the six centres and that seemed to me more interesting. In sum, my interest in metaphysics was almost null and in general philosophy sporadic. I did not read Berkeley and only [. . .]2 into Hume; Locke left me very cold. Some general ideas only remained with me. As to Indian Philosophy, it was a little better, but not much. I made no study of it, but knew the general ideas of the Vedanta philosophies, I knew practically nothing of the others except what I had read in Max Muller and in other general accounts. The basic idea of the Self caught me when I was in England. I tried to realise what the Self might be. The first Indian writings that took hold of me were the Upanishads and these raised in me a strong enthusiasm and I tried later to translate some of them. The other strong intellectual influence [that] came in India in early life were the sayings of Ramakrishna and the writings and speeches of Vivekananda, but this was a first introduction to Indian spiritual experience and not as philosophy. They did not, however, carry me to the practice of Yoga: their influence was purely mental. My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy to intellectual
1 Sri Aurobindo did not complete this sentence. 2 Sri Aurobindo has apparently omitted a word here. 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. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level; they [the ideas from the Higher Mind] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from an experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience. This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.
* * *
Lele1 advised Sri Aurobindo "to trust only to his own inner spiritual inclinations".
[Altered by Sri Aurobindo to] to trust only to the guidance of the Divine within him if once he could become aware of that guidance.
At the time that Sri Aurobindo met Lele he was "wavering between Yoga and public life".
All this was before he left Baroda, some years before he met Lele.
* * *
Ceux-la memes que l'on appelle Babous [those who are called Babus].
This had better be omitted; the word 'Babou' [babu] does not apply to the English educated alone but to the Bengalees of the higher and middle class in general.
1 A yogin whom Sri Aurobindo met in January 1908, Decouverte d'Homere [discovery of Homer].
The Head Master only taught him the elements of Greek grammar, and then pushed him up into the Upper School.
[The police, unable to serve their warrant against Sri Aurobindo (in the Karmayogin case), arrested the printer, a simple "artisan".]
The printer was in fact only someone who took that title in order to meet the demand of the law for someone who would be responsible for what was printed. He was not always the actual printer.
Le seul geste [the only gesture].2
I do not know whether this can be described as a public political gesture. The interest of your chapters is historical rather than concerned with the present course of politics or any new intervention in it. At any rate I did not intend these notes as constituting any such public intervention or gesture.
* * *
[Sri Aurobindo's articles in the Indu Prakash.]
The facts are: After the first two articles, Ranade called the proprietor [saying] that these articles were revolutionary and dangerous and a case for sedition might be brought against the paper. The proprietor alarmed told the editor K. G. Deshpande that this series must be discontinued. It was finally concluded that the tone should be moderated, the substance made more academic and the thus moderated articles could then continue. Sri Aurobindo lost interest in these muzzled productions, sent in numbers at long intervals and finally dropped the whole affair.
2 The biographer had apparently described the notes that accompanied Sri Aurobindo's financial contributions to the Allied war effort (1940) as political gestures. Sri Aurobindo saw Ranade at this time, his only contact; Ranade advised him to take some special subject and write about [it], he recommended Jail Reform, perhaps thinking that this writer would soon have personal experience of jails and thus become an expert on his subject!
[Miscellaneous Notes on Other Subjects]
Intuition (or intuitive Mind). . .
No, what is called intuitive Mind is usually a mixture of true Intuition with ordinary mentality — it can always admit a mingling of truth and error. Sri Aurobindo therefore avoids the use of this phrase. He distinguishes between Intuition proper and an intuitive human mentality.
When war at last becomes a mere nightmare of the past. . . even our dream of the Life Divine will. . . become an actuality.
It is not Sri Aurobindo's view that the evolution of the Life Divine depends on the passing away of war. His view is rather the opposite.
Sri Aurobindo's vision of "transformed Supernature" is "not a reality yet" [1944].
Better write "not, on its highest peaks, a concrete embodied reality as yet; something has come down of the power or the influence but not the thing itself, far less its whole."
* * * Devoir [duty] is hardly the meaning of the [term] Dharma. Performing disinterestedly] one's duty is a European misreading of the teaching of the Gita. Dharma in the Gita means the law of one's own essential nature or is described sometimes as action governed by that nature, swabhava.
[The divine and undivine parts of man's nature complete one another (aussi se completent).]
This is not in the teaching of the Gita according to which the two natures are opposed to each other and the Asuric nature has to be rejected or to fall away by the power and process of the Yoga. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga also insists on the rejection of the darker and lower elements of the nature.
[A Note on Perseus the Deliverer]
Polydaon realizes his failure — Poseidon's failure;. . .he now supplicates to the new "brilliant god", and falls back dead. It is left to Perseus, the new god. . .
The new brilliant god is the new Poseidon, Olympian and Greek, who in Polydaon's vision replaces the terrible old-Mediterranean god of the seas. Perseus is and remains divine-human throughout. |