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Philosophy and Writings
Sources of His Philosophy
Sri Aurobindo’s intellect was influenced by Greek philosophy.
Very little. I read more than once Plato’s Republic and Symposium, but only extracts from his other writings. It is true that under his impress I rashly started writing at the age of 18 an explanation of the cosmos on the foundation of the principle of Beauty and Harmony, but I never got beyond the first three or four chapters. I read Epictetus and was interested in the ideas of the Stoics and the Epicureans; but I made no study of Greek philosophy or of any of the [? ]. I made in fact no study of metaphysics in my school and College days. What little I knew about philosophy I picked up desultorily in my general reading. I once read, not Hegel, but a small book on Hegel, but it left no impression on me. Later, in India, I read a book on Bergson, but that too ran off “like water from a duck’s back”. I remembered very little of what I had read and absorbed nothing. German metaphysics and most European philosophy since the Greeks seemed to me a mass of abstractions with nothing concrete or real that could be firmly grasped and written in a metaphysical jargon to which I had not the key. I tried once a translation of Kant but dropped it after the first two pages and never tried again. In India at Baroda I read a “Tractate” of Schopenhauer on the six centres and that seemed to me more interesting. In sum, my interest in metaphysics was almost null, and in general philosophy sporadic. I did not read Berkeley and only [? ] into Hume; Locke left me very cold. Some general ideas only remained with me. As to Indian Philosophy, it was a little better, but not much. I made no study of it, but knew the general ideas of the Vedanta philosophies, I knew practically nothing of the others except what I had read in Max Muller and in other general accounts.
Page – 112 The basic idea of the Self caught me when I was in England. I tried to realise what the Self might be. The first Indian writings that took hold of me were the Upanishads and these raised in me a strong enthusiasm and I tried later to translate some of them. The other strong intellectual influence [that] came in India in early life were the sayings of Ramakrishna and the writings and speeches of Vivekananda, but this was a first introduction to Indian spiritual experience and not as philosophy. They did not, however, carry me to the practice of Yoga: their influence was purely mental. My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level; they [the ideas from the Higher Mind] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience. This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.
Polydaon realises his failure — Poseidon’s failure; . . . he now supplicates to the new “brilliant god”, and falls back dead. It is left to Perseus, the new god, to sum up the career and destiny of Polydaon…
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[Sri Aurobindo struck through “the new god” and wrote:] The new brilliant god is the new Poseidon, Olympian and Greek, who in Polydaon’s vision replaces the terrible old-Mediterranean god of the seas. Perseus is and remains divine-human throughout.
[Dharma = devoir (duty)]
Devoir is hardly the meaning of the [word]1 Dharma. Performing disinterested[ly] one’s duty is a European misreading of the teaching of the Gita. Dharma in the Gita means the law of one’s own essential nature or is described sometimes as action governed by that nature, swabhava.
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[The asuric and divine natures complement each other.]
This is not in the teaching of the Gita according to which the two natures are opposed to each other and the Asuric nature has to be rejected or to fall away by the power and process of the yoga. Sri Aurobindo’s yoga also insists on the rejection of the darker and lower elements of the nature.
The…articles that Sri Aurobindo contributed to Arya under the general caption, The Future Poetry, [were] initially inspired by a book of Dr. Cousins’s: in the fullness of time, however, the review became a treatise of over three hundred pages of Arya.
[Altered to:] . . . started initially with a review of a book of Dr. Cousins’s; but that was only a starting point for a treatise . . .
It was not the intention to make a long review of Cousins’ book, that was only a starting point; the rest was drawn from Sri Aurobindo’s own ideas and his already conceived view of art and life.
1 MS (dictated) phrase
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Many of the letters that deal mainly with Yoga have now been edited and published in book form. The Riddle of This World, Lights on Yoga, Bases of Yoga, and The Mother . . . are all the fruits of the Ashram period.
The Mother had not the same origin as the other books mentioned. The main part of this book describing the four Shaktis etc. was written independently and not as a letter, so also the first part.
These discernable slow gradations — steps in the spiral of ascent — are, respectively, Higher Mind, Intuition (or Intuitive Mind) and Overmind.
No, what is called intuitive Mind is usually a mixture of true Intuition with ordinary mentality — it can always admit a mingling of truth and error. Sri Aurobindo therefore avoids the use of this phrase. He distinguishes between Intuition proper and an intuitive human mentality.
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When war at last becomes a mere nightmare of the past, peace will indeed reign in our midst, and even our dream of the Life Divine will then become an actuality in the fullness of time.
It is not Sri Aurobindo’s view that the evolution of the Life Divine depends on the passing away of war. His view is rather the opposite.
He has caught indeed a vision, a vision of the Eternal, a vision of triune glory, a vision in the furthest beyond of transformed Supernature; but the vision is not a reality yet [1944].
Better write “not, on its highest peaks, a concrete embodied reality as yet: something has come down of the power or the influence but not the thing itself, far less its whole.”
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