Sri Aurobindo lived an amazing life. He was a scholar of Greek classics at Cambridge, college professor, revolutionary and nationalist, and a mystic. He left behind a prodigious output of writing, which was cataloged in the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL), published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Until I read The Life of Sri Aurobindo
by A.B. Purani, I thought that his life could be neatly organized by his various careers and places of residence. Sri Aurobindo began his revolutionary activities at Cambridge, continued them through his tenure in Baroda and his stay in Calcutta, and effectively ended them when he departed to Pondicherry. Even after his withdrawal from politics in 1920, he continued to write cogently about worldly affairs. His sadhana साधना began as long ago as his stay in Baroda (1893-1906), intensified when he was imprisoned in Alipor jail, and culminated in Pondicherry. His life could not be as neatly compartmentalized as I had thought.Through reading The Life of Sri Aurobindo, I also began to understand why his writings are so difficult to read. Jeffery Paine, author of Father India
, told me that Sri Aurobindo ultimately wrote for himself. After I read the book, I came to believe that the problem is that Sri Aurobindo was trying to articulate in words and intellectualize mystical experience. He acknowledged,What I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little, for people really do not understand what I write …
Another problem is that Sri Aurobindo invented new vocabulary. His levels of consciousness, for example, seem to correspond to the koshas कोश or sheaths of the individual.
I drew inspiration from Sri Aurobindo’s vision for India, Asia, and the world, which he wrote for the occasion of India’s independence, August 15, 1947, which was also his birthday. Other readers will find The Life of Sri Aurobindo revelatory and inspiring.
