CHAPTER XV   SINGER OF DAWN         That the sun of India's destiny would rise again and herald the dawn of a new day of greatness and glory was the vision of almost all those who led the progressive movements in nineteenth-century India. Some of them also held that India's future would be greater than her great past. Vive-kananda's however was a Yogic vision. In the certitude of this vision he saw 'the Ancient Mother rejuvenated to conquer the world by her spirituality'. He perceived the rebirth of India into the light and strength of her soul, which would, in God's own time, bring about a resurgence of the world's soul. Sri Aurobindo said that this is how man would open to the t

CHAPTER 27   IDENTITY WITH GOD    I   On the eve of the fourth Darshan Day in 1938 (24 November), there was an accident as related in the previous chapter and Sri Aurobindo's right leg sustained an injury and had to be put in plaster. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who had been staying with some of their disciples in the house in Rue de la Marine (now known as 'Library House') from October 1922, moved to an adjoining house in the same street on 8 February 1927. This was the seventh and last of the houses in Pondicherry which Sri Aurobindo was to occupy. Known as 'Meditation House', this and the 'Library House' (with subsequent alteratio

-03_renascent india and sri aurobindo.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 1   RENASCENT INDIA AND SRI AUROBINDO   I   When, by the end of the eighteenth century, the foreigner consolidated his power in India, the country was to all appearance a spiritual "waste land". The Western impact on the Orient had completed the discomfiture of the latter; the old order was seemingly dead, the new one could not be as much as thought of — and only a terrible stupor prevailed, paralysing the secret springs of the nation's high creative endeavour. For nearly three thousand years — or more — India had been in the vanguard of human civilisation. She had, almost continuously

-27_chapter - 25 poet of yoga.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 25 POET OF YOGA I While examining the implications of Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Future, we saw how the probable divinisation of man the individual - the emergence of the Gnostic being - will necessarily inspire his immediate environment leading to a better social order and also accelerate the urge towards the realisation of global human unity. But the new Man would also evolve his own theory of poetry and of art in general, and the poetry and art of the Gnostic Age must have their own distinguishing vitality and significance. Here, again, Sri Aurobindo's contributions - as futurist critic no less than as futurist

-04_chapter - 2 childhood, boyhood and youth.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 PART I HUMANIST AND POET   CHAPTER 2   CHILDHOOD, BOYHOOD AND YOUTH   I   The district of Hooghly in West Bengal — the district that has given to Bengal and to India two such world-famous figures as Raja Rammohan Roy and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa — can almost be called the cradle of the Bengali or even of the Indian renaissance.* Konnagar is a thickly populated area, almost a small town, in the Hooghly district; situated on the west bank of the river Hooghly (otherwise known as the Bhagirathi), it is about eleven miles to the north of Calcutta. Konnagar is apparently a place of con

-26_chapter - 24 the yoga and the ashram.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 24 THE YOGA AND THE ASHRAM I   It is characteristic of man's double nature that he wants both to cultivate the private garden of his personality and to lose himself in a larger collectivity. At one moment he dares to be all alone, but at other times he is eager to mingle and merge his individual identity in his family, his tribe, his caste, his guild, his nation; or he joins a club, or a professional society, or even a political party. And sometimes individual man is athirst for certainty in the realm of ends and means, he is drawn to the Infinite, he is teased by thoughts of Eternity. Everything

-09_chapter - 7 musa spiritus.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 7   MUSA SPIRTTUS   I   During his stay in Baroda, Sri Aurobindo wrote a number of shorter poems, most of which owed their primary inspiration to his growing familiarity with India's philosophical and spiritual heritage, especially the Vedanta. The Upanishads and the Gita had swum into his ken and stimulated in him a spirit of restless philosophical inquiry into the "first and last things" and the realm of "ends and means". Religion, humanism, science: God, man, Nature: Providence, foreknowledge and fate: rebirth, evolution and progress - what did they mean? He would not take things simply on trust. He mus

-17_chapter - 15 chandranagore- inn of tranquility.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 15   CHANDERNAGORE : INN OF TRANQUILLITY    I   Ever since his acquittal in the Alipur case - a turn of events not at all to the Government's liking - Sri Aurobindo had repeated intimations from divers sources that he was a "marked" man still, that the Damocles' sword might fall on him any day. Once before - twice before - he had been prosecuted without a "scrap of reliable evidence"; he had been acquitted on both occasions, but the acquittal was no insurance against the risk of a fresh prosecution on equally flimsy evidence or of arbitrary deportation by a devious recourse to the

-01_preface to the third edition.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION   The first edition of this book was published on 21 February 1945. When I started work on it late in 1942,1 was not slow to realise that the biographer of Sri Aurobindo had himself to be a poet and a prophet, a philosopher and a Yogi; and being fully conscious of my limitations, I knew that the task I had undertaken greatly exceeded my abilities. Nevertheless I persevered, benefiting by encouragement, counsel and criticism from several friends in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, and it was my unique good fortune that Sri Aurobindo himself was magnanimous enough to go through my first and se

-10_chapter - 8 bhavani mandir.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 PART II PATRIOT AND PROPHET CHAPTER 8    BHAVANI MANDIR   I   Sri Aurobindo's involvement in the evolution if India's destiny was, almost literally a life-long process. His birth on 15 August 1872 could itself be viewed, in retrospect, as an augury of the coming of independence to India, exactly seventy-five years later, on 15 August 1947. In a narrower sense, however, Sri Aurobindo's active and open participation in Indian politics was of a much shorter duration: a period of no more than three years and a half, from August 1906 when he joined the National College at Calcutta as its Principal to February 1910 wh