The End of the Curve of Reason The rational collectivist idea of society has at first sight a powerful attraction.  There is behind it a great truth, that every society represents a collective being and in it and by it the individual lives and he owes to it all that he can give it.  More, it is only a certain relation to the society, a certain harmony with this greater collective self that he can find the complete use for his many developed or developing powers and activities.  Since it is a collective being, it must, one would naturally suppose, have a discoverable collective reason and will which should find more and more its right expression and right

Unity in Diversity, Law and Liberty The social evolution of the human race is necessarily a development of the relations between three constant factors, individuals, communities of various sorts and mankind.  Each seeks its own fulfillment and satisfaction, but each is compelled to develop them not independently but in relation to the others.  The first natural aim of the individual must be his own inner growth and fullness and its expression in his outer life; but this he can only accomplish through his relations with other individuals, to the various kinds of community religious, social, cultural and political to which he belongs and to the idea an

Transition from Mind to Supermind It is not to be supposed that the circumstances and the lines of the transition would be the same for all, for here we enter into the domain of the Infinite: but, since there is behind all of them the unity of a fundamental truth, the scrutiny of a given line of ascent may be expected to throw light on the principle of all ascending possibilities; such as scrutiny of one line is all that can be attempted. This line is, as all must be, governed by the natural configuration of the stair of ascent: there are in it many steps, for it is an incessant gradation and there is no gap anywhere: but, from the point of view of the

A Vision of Spiritual Society It is this kingdom of God within, the result of the finding of God not in a distant heaven but within ourselves, of which the state of society in an age of the Truth, spiritual age, would be the result and the external figure.           Therefore a society which was even initially spiritualised, would make the revealing and finding of the divine Self in man the whole first aim of all its activities, its education, its knowledge, its science, its ethics, its art, its economical and political structure.  As it was to some extent in the ancient Vedic times with the cultural education of the higher classes, so it would be then

Contemporary Crisis our nature is complex and we have to find a key to some perfect unity and fullness of its complexity.  Its first evolutionary basis is the material life: Nature began with that and man also has to begin with it; he has first to affirm his material and vital existence.  But if he stops there, there can be for him no evolution; his next and greater preoccupation must be to find himself as a mental being in a material life, — both individual and social, — as perfected as possible.  This was the direction which the Hellenic idea gave to European civilisation, and the Roman reinforced, — or weakened, — it with the ideal of organised power: the cult of r

Cosmic Consciousness Transcendence and Omnipresent Reality The Possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more elastic instruments of knowledge, although still classified, even when its value and power are admitted, as a hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress. The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-k

Supermind and Humanity What then would be the consequence for humanity of the descent of Supermind into our earthly existence, its consequence for this race born into a world of ignorance and inconscience but capable of an upward evolution of its consciousness and an ascent into the light and power and bliss of a spiritual being and spiritual nature? The descent into the earth-life of so supreme a creative power as the Supermind and its truth-consciousness could not be merely a new feature or factor added to that life or put in its front but without any other importance or only a restricted importance carrying with it no results profoundly

Index to Philosophy of Supermind Book Title:                             Philosophy of Supermind And Contemporary Crisis Authored/Edited:                  Kireet Joshi Associate Editor:                  Ashoke Sen Gupta Delivered at:                              Round-Table on The Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo                                 (15TH August 2003) organised by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research at the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy at Istanbul (Turkey), August 10-17, 2003 Classification:                       Philosophy Sub-classification:                Language:    

The Human Aspiration The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, — for it survives  the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, — is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its pri

V Mind, Overmind, and Supermind It is only when we follow the yogic process of quieting the mind itself that a profounder result of our self-observation becomes possible. For first we discover that mind is a subtle substance, a general determinate — or generic indeterminate — which mental energy when it operates throws into forms or particular determinations of itself, thoughts, concepts, percepts, mental sentiments, activities of will and reactions of feeling, but which, when the energy is quiescent, can live either in an inert torpor or in an immobile silence and peace of self-existence. Next we see that the determinations of o