-15_chapter - 13 sadhana in prison.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 13   SADHANA IN PRISON   I   We saw in the previous chapter that during the months of march and April 1908 - especially April - an atmosphere of tension and crisis was building up, the known parties to the undeclared war being the Moderates, the alien bureaucracy and the Nationalists. The Moderates had their Convention and their new Congress Constitution, the bureaucracy were paring their nails to come to closer grips with the Nationalists so as to be able to liquidate them, and the underground revolutionaries were chafing at the Nationalists leash and were impatient to let go a campaign of terror

-23_chapter - 21 global comprehension.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 21 GLOBAL COMPREHENSION I   Strange, indeed, are the ironies concocted by the Time-Spirit. An alien bureaucracy sends a patriot to prison and he turns it, as Sri Aurobindo did at Alipur, into a Temple of Sadhana; or, like Tilak at Mandalay, he finds fulfilment in the composition of a masterly commentary, the Gita Rahasya; or he opens himself, as Jawaharlal Nehru did in The Discovery of India, to the influence of the winding movement of his nation's unfolding history. Or, again, a poetaster-laureate writes a foolish panegyric on a dead King, and a Byron answers with the gloriously entertaining satire, The

-24_chapter - 22 lighthouse.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 PART IV ARCHITECT OF THE LIFE DIVINE CHAPTER 22   LIGHTHOUSE     I   The Arya continued to appear month after month throughout the period of the first world war, and discontinued publication only in 1921. The comprehensive Supramental Manifesto for the future - comprising the plea for change, the programme of spiritual evolution (or revolution) and the promise of individual, social and terrestrial transformation, involving man and collective man and global humanity - the grand Manifesto had been broadcast in all its sovereign amplitude and self-sufficiency . While this testament of the Life Divine was un

-31_references.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 REFERENCES   All of Sri Aurobindo's quotations are from the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL) published in 1972. Almost all references from A.B. Purani's The Life of Sri Aurobindo are now from the fully revised and enlarged Fourth Edition of 1978. Most of the quotations from the Mother's writings have been given their references in the Collected Works of the Mother published in the late 70s. The Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education is herein referred to only as Bulletin. The other references have been left as they were in our 1972 Edition.   INTRODUCTION   Chapter 1: Renascent I

-21_chapter - 19 lights on scripture.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 19 LIGHTS ON SCRIPTURE   I If Sri Aurobindo gave the place of honour in the Arya to the The Life Divine, he started two other important sequences also in the very first issue of the journal - The Synthesis of Yoga and The Secret of the Veda. The Synthesis was planned as a survey and as an assessment of various systems of Yoga past and present with reference to their relevance to his own "integral Yoga" which was duly to grow into "supramental Yoga"; it was thus conceived as the practical side to the theoretical or philosophical foundations that were to be established in The Life Divine. The Synthesis appea

-14_chapter - 12 on the eve.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 12   ON THE EVE   I   A brief retrospect may be timely here. When Sri Aurobindo left India for England in 1879, he was but a boy of seven and he had lived a sheltered life at home and at the boarding school at Darjeeling. During his stay of almost fourteen years in England, he first grew in general ignorance of conditions in India. But gradually, during the years at Cambridge, his eyes were opened to Indian realities when his father began sending copies of the Bengalee, with passages marked relating to the instances of British misgovernment in India. Even at the precocious age of eleven, Sri Aurobindo

-34.index.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 INDEX Abercrombie, Lascelles, 177 Agastya, 384 Ahana, 69, 71,169, 619; earlier version, The  Descent of Ahana, 620; dramatic cast, 620; the Divine Charter, 622; Eden and Brindavan, 623ff; a dream and a vision, 624; handling of the hexameter, 626ff Ahmed, Asanuddin, 259 Aiyar, S. Doraiswami, 530, 579, 706 Aiyar, V. Krishnaswami, 221 Aiyar, Nagaswami, 378 Aiyar, V. V. S., 266, 378, 391,405,525 Akbar, Emperor, 8, 11, 293 Ali, Muhammad, 527 Alt, Shaukat, 527 Alipur Case (Manicktolla Bomb Case), 310ff, 359. 367 Alipur Jail, 202, 307, 310, 330, 388, 444, 490,525 Ambedkar, B. R., 496-497 Ambirajan, S., 13fn. Amr

-20_chapter - 18 the supramental manifesto.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 18 THE SUPRAMENTAL MANIFESTO I   Month after month, Sri Aurobindo gave the place of honour in the Arya to The Life Divine sequence, a mighty unfoldment of his vision of the future evolution of Man. Long after the Arya had suspended publication, Sri Aurobindo took up the revision of the series of articles, made substantial additions, and published The Life Divine in book form, the first volume in 1939 and the more sumptuous second in 1940. The one-volume American edition (with the Index) came out in 1949, and the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education edition (also in one volume of 1272 pages)

-07_chapter - 5 epic and romance.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 5   EPIC AND ROMANCE   I   Even before Sri Aurobindo started on his translation. The Hero and the Nymph, he had been sufficiently captivated by the theme to produce a long romantic narrative on the subject. Urvasie* was published in Baroda in 1896; it thus belongs to the period of Sri Aurobindo's first years in India, on his return after a long sojourn in England. When the poem was offered to an English publisher, it was referred to Lionel Johnson who "acknowledged some poetic merit but said that it was a repetition of Matthew Arnold"; and Sri Aurobindo adds: "But Lionel Johnson, I was told l

-22_chapter - 20 man and collective man.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 20 MAN AND COLLECTIVE MAN   I   We have seen that Sri Aurobindo made a move in February 1910 from Calcutta to Chandernagore and in April from Chandernagore to Pondicherry in answer to an ādeś, an unmistakable inner command; and during the few weeks at Chandernagore and the first years at Pondicherry, he devoted himself entirely to "silent Yoga", with a view to consolidating the gains of his sādhanā and working out their practical implications for the larger life of humanity. He had, indeed, retired from active political participation, and cut off his connection with political leaders and movements in