SRI AUROBINDO AND THE CRIPPS PROPOSALS The end of March and the beginning of April 1942 are memorable for one of the very few interventions of Sri Aurobindo in India's public affairs. World War II was in full swing and Japan had joined hands with Hitler and posed a threat to Burma and even India, both of which were then under British rule. There was considerable discontent in India and a great reluctance to join the war effort of the British Commonwealth. India could not see much difference between German Nazism and British Imperialism. Most people forgot that the latter was the gradually fading remnant of an old turn of the human political m

-011_A Note on sri Aurobindo's SIDDHI.htm A NOTE ON SRI AUROBINDO'S "SIDDHI" It is bound to be surprising to our ears that a little before December 17, 1918 when Mrinalini Devi died, Sri Aurobindo had written to her that he had attained his "Siddhi" ("Goal-Attainment") and that she should come over to Pondicherry and join him in his world-work. Surprising, for two years later, on April 7, 1920 he wrote to his brother Barindra that he was only rising then into the lowest of the three levels of Supermind and trying to draw up into it all the lower activities and that his Siddhi would be complete in the future. Even as late as November 1926, when the Overmind Consciousness descended in

OPENING SPEECH FOR THE SRI AUROBINDO RESEARCH ACADEMY 24 APRIL 1978 In everything connected with Sri Aurobindo, as this Academy most evidently is, we have to think of the new Truth of the spiritual consciousness, which he has brought to the world — the all-creative and all-transforming Supermind. The Supermind, by the very nature of its comprehensiveness, takes the whole of life into its scope. The new Truth which it represents must, therefore, mean a host of fresh insights waiting for us in all the fields of human activity — philosophy, sociology, history, science, art and even business. Everywhere by it

A FOREWORD TO PHILOSOPHY Unity in Diversity — from Kapila down to Carnap, that is the most comprehensive concept possible to man when he turns a searching eye upon the gigantic enigma presented by the cosmos in which he plays so striking a part. There have been uncompromising monists of stark, immutable, homogeneous Being who have looked upon all diversity as an inscrutable phantasmagoria, and on the other hand implacable pluralists have refused to see any essential unity in the teeming multitude of heterogeneous events which seems to constitute the spatiotemporal process. But in the end these extremes fail to satisfy the integral philosophic sense of th

SUPRAMENTAL AVATAR AND PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION A LETTER You have put me a number of important questions arising from what I wrote to you on the Agenda and the Divine's Will.1 I must not delay to answer them to the best of my ability. (1) "How far limited in their workings are the Avatars who have brought down the Supramental World into this lower triple universe?" I suppose you mean Avatars who came with the mission of establishing the Supermind in mind, life and matter on the earth. For, surely the Supramental World has not yet been brought down. Some Light, Force and Consciousness of it manifested in the subtle-p

THE TRUE TEILHARD AND THE ESSENTIAL SRI AUROBINDO* SOME GUIDE-LINES FOR THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE FUTURE Teilhard de Chardin, throughout his life, stood at a critical crossroads and made moves in different directions at different times and held a complex vision from which it is not easy to arrive at a focus on fundamentals. He1 declared that he had been "born with a 'naturally pantheist' soul"; but, brought up a Roman Catholic and trained to be a priest, he had a habitual reaction of vehement anti-pantheism. By profession and mental affinity he was a scientist drawn towards a secular humanist world-view based on the t

SOME QUESTIONS ON TRANSFORMATION AND SRI AUROBINDO A REPLY TO A LETTER I am glad you liked the way our correspondence has figured in Mother India under the caption "Sri Aurobindo's Views vis-a-vis.the Mother's". The new points you have raised on some other matters are welcome. The issue of 300 years for total transformation has several bearings. In the first place, it is a mistake on your part to set in opposition the later letter dated 6 December 1949 in which Sri Aurobindo speaks of full physical transformation — "the divine body"1 — as a matter of the remote future and the earlier letter where he write

SRI AUROBINDO AND PLATO When a poem by a disciple was read out to Sri Aurobindo he expressed special admiration for the line: Seer-suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain'. We may legitimately surmise that Sri Aurobindo admired this flight of poetic imagination not only because it winged with the right words a certain view of Plato but also because it summed up his own insight into the truth of Platonism vis-a-vis the Ultimate Truth as seized by his yogic consciousness. The line by Amal Kiran suggests at the same time that Plato had his mind set glowing with a wonderful perception of spiritual reality and that, for all the extreme brilliance of this

THE SACRIFICE OF SRI AUROBINDO A FLASHBACK FROM ITS FIRST ANNIVERSARY 1.26 a.m., December 5, 1950. A moment like any other, in a night like many a night — except to those who watched in the room where for over two and a half decades Sri Aurobindo had lived. For them there was all human history coming to a cryptic climax: after summing up in himself the aspiration of man in entirety — man the soul, the mind, the life-force, the body — and after bringing a power of complete godhead to answer this fourfold aspiration, Sri Aurobindo was throwing away the earnest of the final and supreme triumph, a physical being in which the very cells wer

TWO CLARIFICATIONS ANSWERS TO READERS' QUESTIONS 1 On the Agenda and the Divine Will I can see that although you do not favour Satprem for a moment you are genuinely puzzled at the turn that things have taken in relation to the Agenda. Your puzzlement may be summed up as follows: "How is it that the Divine Mother who, by definition, must be both omniscient and omnipotent, has allowed the Agenda to be got hold of entirely by Satprem in spite of her telling her son Andre that in case of publication it should be edited by him — without necessarily meaning utter exclusion of Satprem as collaborator? No matter if the Divine Mother has le