I am in Auroville, India 🇮🇳, as I write this reflection in honor of the 153rd birthday of Sri Aurobindo.
Auroville is an experimental town in India inspired by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo.
Sri Aurobindo was a political activist during the British occupation of India. His birthday, August 15, falls on the same day as India’s Independence Day. This alignment of his life with the destiny of his country is highly symbolic.
He lived at the same time as Mahatma Gandhi. While Gandhi believed in nonviolent resistance, Sri Aurobindo considered such methods insufficient to secure freedom.
Man cannot not be free merely because external conditions allow it; that would contradict the very essence of freedom. Like we often explore together here, freedom is an inner journey willed into being and it only becomes real when we consciously choose and act out of higher nature rather than compulsion, ignorance, or mechanical habit.
Sri Aurobindo saw that to accept injustice without meeting it with decisive force, was to enable it.
Peace is no virtue if it comes at the expense of truth.
His activism and leadership in the freedom movement eventually led to his arrest and he spent about a year in jail.
During this imprisonment, he underwent profound spiritual experiences. These transformed his outlook and shifted the core of his mission from political liberation to spiritual liberation.
This was not a change in the core of the mission of the freedom movement. It was a realization that the battle for India’s freedom was not just against political oppression but a part of a larger human struggle between ignorance and truth. And that battle has to be fought within each and everyone of us individually to have long lasting political effects. Otherwise, no political freedom can last. True liberation could not be achieved by political freedom alone, but requires a spiritual transformation at the very root of human life.
Spirituality is used in this context in a practical sense. It is about recognizing that every human creation; our cities, political institutions, technologies, and the very chairs we sit on, before they became matter, they were thought. However, thought alone is not enough; it must be warmed by feeling, directed by will, and realized through skillful action.
If these inner faculties in each of us are left in ignorance, then ignorance continues to rule and build the world. Ignorant thoughts can only lead to ignorant creations. And no political transformation can prevail against this ignorance ruling in our personal lives.
A spiritual transformation is to become conscious of these processes and to each take responsibility for the quality of what we think, feel, and will, so that freedom is not only proclaimed in politics but embodied in each of our lives.
After his release, he moved to Pondicherry, a French territory then, effectively living in exile. There he spent the rest of his life in spiritual practice and writing. His days were devoted to yoga and writing monumental works such as The Life Divine and Savitri.
The Life Divine is one of his major works and it is how I have become more familiar with his teachings. I downloaded the book on my tablet, thinking I would just read it in a few weeks like any other book. Little did I know what I was getting myself into, including moving to Auroville just to read it in an environment where I would be immersed in his thoughts. Ten months later, I am still studying the same book. Luckily, I did not see the physical book first, otherwise, I would not have started it this innocently.
The Life Divine is not a book in the traditional sense; it is a journey.
A beautifully guided exploration of questions so vast and perilous that without Sri Aurobindo’s crystal-clear intellect and unwavering integrity, we could easily be led astray into fear, dogma, personal bias, or simply, as I have often done, the urge to form naive incomplete conclusions too quickly to avoid staying in the uncertainty of not knowing.
The journey starts by addressing questions I have personally contemplated more than any other in my life: « Why do we exist? ».
Sri Aurobindo argues that if there is an absolute behind the universe that is indeed truly infinite, all-wise, all-loving, all-powerful, then creation cannot be out of compulsion or lack. It must be the expression of its own inherent delight of existence, which takes form as the unfolding universe.
The claim that creation might exist only for the delight of existence was something I had never considered before and I found it deeply intriguing.
To put this into a more practical relatable yet extremely reductive analogy: we could imagine a human being who is truly and completely free, not compelled to act for any of the usual reasons that drive us, such as survival, salary, belonging, recognition, status or the many other reasons. Such a person is under no external or internal compulsion. If this person still chooses to create whether to write, paint, build a company, or dance; then what could the motive be?
The next obvious question for me was: What about the suffering, death, evil and pain in this world? Why would that be part of creation if it is for delight? What is their role?
This is exactly where Sri Aurobindo guides us next on that journey. He discusses the tension between the individual and the universal, the divine and the undivine. He explores how falsehood, error, and evil arise and how they might be remedied.
Sri Aurobindo does not go on to give direct answers to any of these questions, there can be none, but he takes us on a journey to explore all of those questions and much more in exhaustive details and nuance.
He discusses the two extremes of the materialist who believes “only matter is real” and the ascetic who says “only spirit is real”, arguing they both miss something essential. The materialist risks reducing life to just physical processes without meaning. The ascetic risks rejecting the value of earthly life and matter altogether. He shows that neither denial gives us the full picture of reality.
He examines the major spiritual systems of the world, taking each to their logical and material consequences. He shows both the truths they capture, the points where they fall short and the existential and material discomforts they cause in human life.
In many spiritual teachings, the goal of life is seen as transcendental, outside of earthly existence. Life is a test, an evaluation for heaven or hell, it is called an illusion (Maya), or a school and many other metaphors that make it subordinate to a higher, non-material reality. In this perspective, we revere the Absolute as formless and often dismiss form as a fall from grace.
The Life Divine challenges these limitations. If we think this way, life on earth will always be second to eternal life. Earth will always fall short of heaven. We will live for ulterior motives, to pass a test, to go to heaven, to escape rebirth, to endure for the sake of some otherworldly goal, or perhaps to live for pleasure instead of finding meaning in life itself.
There are ever-increasing degrees of understanding. Each level is a necessary step in our journey and cannot be skipped, but none of them is the final truth. Along the journey, each of those partial understandings solidify into a belief system, requiring further systems to clarify and break their limitations.
Sri Aurobindo examines most paths humanity has taken; spiritual renunciation, material progress, the pursuit of heaven, the retreat into nirvana, then he asks: What if the goal is not a divine outside of material life, but to grow the divine into material life? What if evolution is the slow awakening of a spiritual being destined for a life of knowledge, and the realization of the divine here on earth?
From this emerges his vision of an evolving universe where consciousness progressively unveils itself in matter, matter becoming increasingly spiritualized. The purpose of evolution is to make the inherent Delight of existence conscious in every part of our being, from spirit to body. The Earth then is not an inconvenient detour on the way to the divine, but a field for the full manifestation of the Divine in time; from imperfection toward ever greater perfection.
The Life Divine is not reached by running away from life’s difficulties or by tolerating ignorance. It is built by facing falsehood within ourselves and casting it out, by refusing to withdraw from the world, and by continuously choosing to live according to higher ideals and what moves us closer to truth.
In this sense, physical wars reflect the same struggles that play out within each of us between ignorance and clarity. To fight our own inertia and ignorance and choose instead to serve beauty and what is real.
This path to spirituality demands courage, discipline, and endurance. Unlike purely contemplative paths, it forges the body and the mind together as vehicles for the spirit.
If the divine is infinite, then formless and form, transcendent and material, are equally real expressions of that infinity. There is no need to escape life to find the divine; life itself is the manifestation of the divine.
The Life Divine is an invitation to shift our perspective of life from escaping matter to embracing and transforming matter, honoring both the time and eternity as equal faces of divinity.
Thank you for reading,
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Written in Auroville, India 🇮🇳