The Essence of Sri Aurobindo
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About this ebook
We are souls and not the surface person, and every problem we say is ours, physical, mental or spiritual, is the result of the veil of Ignorance God placed over us, making us believe we are the surface person and its ego; and that veil will not be removed until we, the souls, have collected the required experiences that are indi-rectly created by the surface persons we falsely identify with.
As life unfolds its drama to the eyes,
And our joys and pains easily exchange,
It would be wise to remember the fact
That, the compliment heard, the song of the bird
The friendly clasp, the dagger in the back,
The child’s contagious smile, the repulsive and the vile
The slap on the face, the love and its grace
The hideous whip or the dreadful rod
Come not from another—other than God. l
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The Essence of Sri Aurobindo - Bruce Cameron Elliot
Introduction
The Essence of Sri Aurobindo will be presented in two summaries; one called the Bare Bones and the other Bones With Flesh. I have chosen these titles so as to contrast them with the ultimate summary, The Full Robust Body Of Truth, which to me will only be found in the depths of our own inner selves.
My reason for writing these is twofold: To give an outline of Sri Aurobindo’s works to those who want only the bare essentials, and to give a deeper more comprehensive picture to those who want more, but not too much more.
Most people I’ve spoken with simply find Sri Aurobindo’s prose too difficult to enjoy, and the mystic poetry of Savitri, his masterpiece, beyond their reach. As for his prose, I feel the addition of more commas and some parenthetical brackets would have made things easier, but I’m quite sure some of his fluid poetic-prose style and its grand rhythms would have been lost—that breathless speed and confidence of a photographic memory. The English of Savitri is impeccable, but the difficulty is in this new form of mystic poetry and its inherent depth of spiritual knowledge. Of course anyone with even the slightest sensitivity to spiritual poetry can peek below the surface and gain some experience of its truth, but to get to any significant depth a combination of patience and sincerity is needed, along with a willingness to let its rhythm and sound pull you in.
To complete the introduction three very important things have got to be presented:
First, Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo was extraordinary in many ways and unique in his moment of history.
• He recorded his spiritual experiences in detail.
• He had easy access to all the religious and spiritual information that came before him.
• He had a photographic memory which helped tremendously his reading speed and comprehension.
• He mastered all the classic languages including Sanskrit, and the poetry of these languages.
• He was gifted with an impartial mind that could synthesize the most complex and contrary ideas and transcribe the result into his marvelous English.
• He could read about some secret or rare experience, then go into a state of deep concentration (raising his consciousness to remarkable heights), and verify or dismiss its truth.
• He had realized and made part of himself the three major spiritual experiences:
- Cosmic Consciousness: seeing himself in everything and everything in himself; thus living as his true self, the soul, clearly detached from the surface ego.
- Nirvana: The passive and complete absorption into God’s immobile silence and peace.
- Finding that the Cosmic Consciousness and Nirvana exist together like two sides of one coin; both real at the same time.
• He discovered a fourth realization: Supermind. It’s one of the original branches of God that controls the descending and ascending steps of thought and mind.
Second, God—the basic meaning
This is