PART THREE CHAPTER X PONDICHERRY: 1927 – 1950 Note A. B. Purani's Life of Sri Aurobindo ends with his account of the descent of 24 November 1926 and, in fact the external life of Sri Aurobindo, of which his book is a record, can be said to have ended at this point. As Purani has written in the introduction to his Evening Talks, "After November 24, 1926 the [evening] sitting began to get later and later, till the limit of one o’clock at night was reached. Then the curtain fell. Sri Aurobindo retired completely after December 1926. . . ."¹ On 8 February 1927 Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved from 9, Rue de la Marine to 28, Rue François Martin

CHAPTER III BARODA Sri Aurobindo returned to India in the beginning of 1893. He joined the Baroda service on 8 February. Unfortunately his father died before his return under tragic circumstances. It is clear from Dr. K. D. Ghose's letter of 2 December 1890 that he had high hopes for his three sons, especially Sri Aurobindo. He wanted him to take up judicial or administrative work in the Indian government, and had used his influence to get him a good appointment. But he was wrongly informed by his bankers, Messrs. Grindlay & Co. about Sri Aurobindo's departure from London. The steamer Roumania, by which Sri Aurobindo was supposed to have left, sank off the coast of Portugal near

CHAPTER IV IN INDIAN POLITICS In August 1906 the National College, at Calcutta was established, Sri Aurobindo joined the institution as its Principal. On 6 August the declaration of the Bande Mataram was filed. There are many conjectures about how the Bande Mataram was started, what Sri Aurobindo's connection with it was and how it ended. We give here Sri Aurobindo's own explanation, so as to set all doubts to rest. "Bepin Pal started the Bande Mataram with Rs.500 in his pocket donated by Haridas Halder. He called in my help as assistant editor and I gave it. I called a private meeting of the young Nationalist leaders in Calcutta and they agreed to take up the B

-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