II EVOLUTION - PSYCHOLOGY THE SUPERMIND Man A Transitional Being MAN is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that to a divine supermanhood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but trouble

X HISTORICAL IMPRESSIONS The French Revolution THE greatness of the French Revolution lies not in what it effected, but in what it thought and was. Its action was chiefly destructive. It prepared many things, it founded nothing. .Even the constructive activity of Napoleon only built a half-way house in which the ideas of 1789 might rest until the world was fit to understand them better and really fulfil them. The ideas themselves were not new; they existed in Christianity and before Christianity they existed in Buddhism; but in 1789 they came out for the first time from the Church and the Book and sought to remodel government and society. It was an u

Purna Yoga THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF YOGA  By YOGA we can rise out of falsehood into truth, out of weakness into force, out of pain and grief into bliss, out of bondage into freedom, out of death into immortality, out of darkness into light, out of confusion into purity, out of imperfection into perfection, out of self-division into unity, out of Maya into God. All other utilisation of Yoga is for special and fragmentary advantages not always worth pursuing. Only that which aims at possessing the fullness of God is Purna Yoga; the Sadhaka of the Divine Perfection is the Purna Yogin.                       Our aim must be to be perfect as God in His being and bliss is perfect

I. EARLY LIFE IN ENGLAND: 1879-1893 aurobindo was born on August 15th, 1872, in Calcutta. His father, a man of great ability and strong personality, had been among the first to go to England for his education. He returned entirely anglicised in habits, ideas and ideals,— so strongly that his Aurobindo as a child spoke English and Hindustani only and learned his mother-tongue only after his return from England. He was determined that his children should receive an entirely European upbringing. While in India they were sent for the beginning of their education to an Irish nuns' school in Darjeeling and in 1879 he took his three sons to

MESSAGES ON THE WAR ¹Some forces are working for the Divine, some are quite anti-divine in their aim and purpose. If the nations or the governments who are blindly the instruments of the divine forces were perfectly pure and divine in their processes and forms of action as well as in the inspiration they receive so ignorantly they would be invincible, because the divine forces themselves are invincible. It is the mixture in the outward expression that gives to the Asura the right to defeat them. To be a successful instrument for the Asuric forces is easy, because they take all the movements of your lower nature and make use of them, so that you have no spiritual effort to mak

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE sri aurobindo on himself and on the mother was first published in 1953 as Volume I of the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre Collection. Part One of this volume consisted of Sri Aurobindo's notes and letters concerning his life and Yoga; Part Two contained his letters relating both to himself and to the Mother; and Part Three was a revised and enlarged version of the book letters of sri aurobindo on the mother, first published in 1951 by the Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay The present Volume (No. 26) of the sri aurobindo birth centenary library consists of Parts One and Two of the 1953 edition, revised and cons

                       

Section Two IDENTITY OF THEIR CONSCIOUSNESS IDENTITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND PATH The opposition between the Mother's consciousness and my consciousness was an invention of the old days (due mainly to X, Y and others of that time) and emerged in a time when the Mother was not fully recognised or accepted by some of those who were here at the beginning. Even after they had recognised her they persisted in this meaningless opposition and did great harm to them and others. The Mother's consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. Nothing can be done without her knowledge and force, witho

IV. CORRECTIONS OF WRONG STATEMENTS IN THE PRESS ¹This is my answer to the questions arising from your letter. Except on one point which calls for some explanation, I confine myself to the plain facts. 1. I was the writer of the series of articles on the "Passive Resistance" published [in the Bande Mataram} in April 1907 to which reference has been made; Bepin Pal had nothing to do with it. He ceased his connection with the paper towards the end of 1906 and from that time onward was not writing any editorials or articles for it. I planned several series of this kind for the Bande Mataram and at least three were published of which the "Pa

Section Six THE POET AND THE CRITIC READING AND POETIC CREATION AND YOGA A literary man is one who loves literature and literary activities for their own separate sake. A Yogi who writes is not a literary man for he writes only what the inner Will and Word wants him to express. He is a channel and instrument of something greater than his own literary personality. Of course, the literary man and the intellectual love reading — books are their mind's food. But writing is another matter. There are plenty of people who never write a word in the literary way but are enormous readers. One reads for ideas, for knowledge, for the stimulation of the mind by all tha