SRI AUROBINDO

Commonly known as Sri Aurobindo, Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) was a Bengali political extremist who became a noted yogi.  He was the son of an English-educated, Western-oriented Bengali doctor who sent him to Britain at age seven for his education.  While studying at Cambridge, he was isolated from all Indian influences, to the extent of becoming "denationalized"as he put it.  When he returned home at age twenty, however, he set about recapturing his Indian heritage.  To begin with, he learned Sanskrit and read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita.

Aurobindo entered the civil service, but as anti-British agitation grew, he joined the nationalist movement.  When he tried public speaking against the British, though, his extreme shyness got the better of him.  This was when a holy man advised him to empty his mind of all thought so as to receive spiritual inspiration.  His mind blank, he went on to speak often, as the spirit moved him.

He then began experiencing a series of intense spiritual experiences, so that by 1910 he was driven to renounce politics in favor of the ashram.  He was much influenced by his fellow Bengalis, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, but would not say that his own system, fully developed as it was becoming, was superior to theirs.  His system was what he termed "Integral Yoga," in which, as he said to his disciples, "Knowledge, Bhakti, light of Consciousness, Ananda and love, will and power in works--meditations, adoration. service to the Divine, all have their place." 

His greatest work, Life Divine, is a highly complex presentation in which he lays out his thesis of the divine energy at work everywhere.  This energy, he purported, manifests itself in an ascending order in matter, through various stages of life to consciousness and finally to supraconsciousness.  It is through yoga that man will transcend his fragmentary knowledge of the universe, and his individual consciousness.