Instructive Insights into some Principal Characters, Gods and Goddesses related to the Trojan War Extracts from Sri Aurobindo's Ilion On Achilles One in his singleness greater than kings and multitudes sends me. (Sri Aurobindo, Ilion, in Collected Poems, Centenary Edition, Vol.5, p.397) On Paris Happy of light like a lustrous star when it welcomes the morning, Brilliant, beautiful, glamoured with gold and a fillet of gem-fire, Paris, plucked from the song and the lyre by the Grecian challenge, Came with the joy in his face and his eyes that Fate could not alter. Ever a child of t

PART TWO 1. Four Major Experiences and Realisations of the Gita's Yoga The Gita expounds the working of the synthetic method of its yoga and provides us authentic descriptions of the relevant experiences and realizations in great detail. The peaks of these experiences include: (i) the knowledge of divine birth, (divyam janma) and divine work, (divyam karma);69 (ii) the attainment of Brahma-nirvana,70 the total nirvana in the state of immobile Brahman in the freedom of which divine work can take place; (iii) the great perception of the birth and development of divine qualities in the cosmic movement and, the vision of the vibhutis in the cosmos;71 and (iv) the great vision o

Preface In his immortal book 'Essays on the Gita’, Sri Aurobindo has explained the fundamental value of the yoga of the Gita and the contribution it can make to the new age of development in the following words: "We of the coming day stand at the head of a new age of development which must lead to such a new and larger synthesis. We are not called upon to be orthodox Vedantins of any of the three schools or Tantrics or to adhere to one of the theistic religions of the past or to entrench ourselves within the four corners of the teaching of the Gita. That would be to limit ourselves and to attempt to create our spiritual life out of the being, knowledge and nature of others, of th

Front-Page ] THE GITA AND ITS SYNTHESIS OF YOGA This book is addressed to all young people who, I urge, will study and respond to the following message of Sri Aurobindo: "It is the young who must be the builders of the new world, — not those who accept the competitive individualism, the capitalism or the materialistic communism of the West as India's future ideal, nor those who are enslaved to old religious formulas and cannot believe in the acceptance and transformation of life by the spirit, but all those who are free in mind and heart to accept a completer truth and labour for a greater ideal. They must be men who will

PART THREE 1. Towards Sādharmya Mukti It is this union and synthesis which is reiterated by Sri Krishna in the twelfth chapter, and while reiterating it, something more is said in order to bring out all the meaning of the great spiritual change. The twelfth chapter leads up to that which is still to be said, and the last six chapters that follow develop that remaining knowledge leading up to a grand final conclusion. What is that new thing that is said in the twelfth chapter? That new thing is what is repeatedly stated in twelfth to eighteenth chapters by phrases such as dharmāmrtam, immortal law,¹¹² paramā bhaktās te tīva me priyāh, my supreme devotees who are excee

Notes and References The age of intuition appears to be too long as compared to the similar age that we find in the history of comparable cultures. This is because the deliverance of intuition that were gained during the Vedic period came to be once again reiterated and retested during the period of the Upanishads, which did not follow immediately after the age of the Vedas; when the Vedic knowledge began to decline, there intervened a period of a good deal of loss of the secret of the Veda, and even during the period of the Brahamanas, those secrets could not be recovered; but the Upanishadic seers developed powers of intuition and they interpreted the Veda, not by intel

Introduction The Age of the Vedas and the principal Upanishads was the Age of Intuition,¹ but this Age was followed by the Age of Reason. Inspired texts of the Veda and the Upanishads made room for metaphysical philosophy, even as afterwards metaphysical philosophy had to give place to experimental Science. The study of the history of the metaphysical philosophy of India demonstrates the great heights to which the pure reason developed, and the study of the experimental Science that developed in India demonstrates multisided development of the mixed action of the reason in minute subtlety and complexity; this mixed action of the reason explored the domains of experimental and pra

PART ONE 1. Gita as a Yoga-Shastra Against this background of the general trend of the development of Indian philosophy, we may notice that four systems of philosophy, Vedavāda, Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta, were prominent at the time when the war of the Mahabharata was fought and the perplexities arising from the conflict between Sankhya and Yoga bewildered and disabled Arjuna at the crucial moment of the commencement of the war to such an acute point of crisis that Sri Krishna, the charioteer of Arjuna in the war, had to enter into those perplexities and related confusions during the course of the dialogue that ensued between him and Arjuna. It is this dialogue that constit

Part Five Objections against Spiritual Theory of Evolution: Answers Against this spiritual theory of evolution, many objections can be raised. Metaphysical objection against Evolutionary Teleology It may be contended that if there is an ultimate Reality, which is infinite, perfect and absolute, then such a Reality, conceived in the metaphysical theory of the Absolute, cannot have any purpose in manifestation. Even if it is conceded that the Absolute is not only quiescent but also dynamic and therefore capable of manifestation, which could have some kind of purpose, it can have no purpose in manifestation except the delight of manifestation itself. It may

Part Two Philosophical Theories of Evolution Henri Bergson Henri Bergson (1859-1941) developed the theory that there is something more in evolution than merely mechanical urge. He pointed out that the molluscs in the order of evolution proceed by steady steps to develop an eye, which resembles the eye developed by the independent line of vertebrates. How does it happen, he asked, that similar effects appear in two independent lines of evolution, if they were purely accidental? He pointed out that the two developments must have been governed by a common vital impulse to this useful end. He is inclined to attribute a 'rudiment of choice' to the species which, traveling