Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, Auroville

An overview about Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, Auroville

25 May 2011 Leave a comment

by Bhaga in AUROVILLE, HUMAN UNITY, SRI AUROBINDO & THE MOTHER, THE NEW EVOLUTIVE STEP Edit

Through a recent long and important discussion here, I realized many of those who may one day visit this blog will probably not know much – if anything at all – or on the contrary have completely wrong notions about Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, and Auroville, three names I am bound to mention often here and there in my posts, as they are what led me to the discovery of Conscious Evolution as an overall process now happening more and more among us human beings  everywhere on this little planet Earth.
So to fill up the obvious need for some background information on this blog about those names, I’m posting here some relevant extracts, slightly enlarged, from that discussion. All together they give the necessary overview that hopefully will enable those visiting this blog to understand better what I may refer to in some of my posts or comments.

“Sri Aurobindo is described as a thinker who blended East and West in founding his own “school of thought’ as a somewhat westernized offshoot of Hinduism”.
– If Sri Aurobindo were only that, one would really wonder why his Birth Centenary in 1972 has been celebrated the world around, not just by his and the Mother’s disciples, but also by speeches everywhere from eminent people (Michael Murphy of the Esalen Institute, among others) highly honoring him and his evolutive vision and work – even for example at La Sorbonne, the main Paris University, where a whole brochure was especially published in his honor.
The ‘UNESCO Courier’ have dedicated an entire special issue to Sri Aurobindo and his Centenary for August I5th, 1972, presenting at the same time Auroville, as the enthusiastically praised and welcomed project adopted unanimously by UNESCO for Humanity as a whole, already in 1966, then again for the Foundation Day on February 28th, 1968 (with a special plane bringing the young delegates from every country). Auroville has been repeatedly recommended again by UNESCO several times along the years after that, including just a few years ago, with every time exhibitions centrally held in Paris or other events, abroad or in Auroville itself, convening international audiences to study the progress of the project and bring back to their own countries the lessons learned here.

“Your belief system is tied to a specific historical individual, Sri Aurobindo – whose follower, Mother….”
– Totally inaccurate statement, on several points – going backwards:
    1- First of all, to call  the Mother just ‘Mother’ is inappropriate for those who don’t have an inner relationship with her nor the resulting love and trust for her.
    2- Second, the Mother never was a follower of Sri Aurobindo, but received inwardly separately the same vision of the Earth’s future with its new evolutive step. Her own natural strong spiritual presence and wisdom had attracted to her a number of seekers in France, before she heard in 1912 of Sri Aurobindo, whose recent coming (1910) from Calcutta in British India to then French Pondicherry, although kept as discrete as possible, was already giving to the sleepy little town a whole new aura of deep and concentrated spirituality.
In March 1914 she was able to come for a visit, and the two of them at once recognized each other as the unknown spiritual being they had been sharing spiritual work with from afar during sleep for some years. When World War I started in August 1914, the Mother could stay a little more only, then had to leave. Just like some others before, Sri Aurobindo had immediately perceived in her a full embodiment of what they call in India the Divine Mother, and his full spiritual equal, especially born like himself for the difficult evolutive work to be done in our time; the whole process of what they came to call the ‘Integral Yoga’ was developed later by both of them together, as they were, in the words of Sri Aurobindo himself, ‘the two needed aspects of the same consciousness’.
Before the Mother left, from their collaboration (the Mother translating into French) a spiritual magazine was launched, ‘Arya’ (yes, the Sanskrit word Hitler later distorted and misused along with the Swastika for his Nazism), in which Sri Aurobindo wrote until 1927 all the celebrated big ‘philosophical’ books that started a whole revolution in the current understanding of Life, Spirit, Matter, and Evolution. It is Sri Aurobindo’s writings that led a Ken Wilber, for example, and several other major contemporary philosophers, to their own present evolutive concepts, and Sri Aurobindo’s books are read now even in China, after Japan, and after having been the most precious inner support secretly circulating among a huge number of spiritual people in Russia while it was the aggressively materialist U.R.S.S.
After Sri Aurobindo asked in 1926 the Mother to formally create an Ashram for taking care inwardly and outwardly of the followers who had flocked around them especially after her return in 1920, he himself withdrew in the solitude of his room to concentrate on the other inner work that was even more urgently required: to bring down into the terrestrial atmosphere and very matter the higher spiritual Consciousness-Force that he and the Mother had both re-discovered after the Vedic Rishis had discovered it millennia ago, but that had been forgotten since the Vedic times by the spiritual quest both in the East and in the West. The new evolutive step now foreseen would be led this time by this vaster and truer Divine Power – and that new era could start happening possibly sooner, if only the coming down of that Higher Power directly here could be accelerated… so this is what Sri Aurobindo’s huge task has secretly been for decades in his solitary room.
After the Second World War was nearly lost to Nazism – which was nothing actually but the very same evolutive new step Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were working for, but horribly misrepresented and distorted into the perverted ideal of the Nietzchean sadistic and cruel type of ‘Superman’ – in December 1950 Sri Aurobindo withdrew voluntarily from his physical body in order to hasten further from behind the scenes the coming down of what he called, for lack of a better name, the ‘Supramental’, while the Mother was staying on in the physical plane so that her body, endowed with exceptional endurance, could be the first body to receive that new Energy and learn to function in the new way made possible by that new evolutive power now activated right within physical Matter.
In the big political and social changes at the end of the Fifties, and then the ‘Flower Power’ etc of the ‘Sixties’, the Mother recognized at once the first results of the action of the Supramental Force upon Earth. This is why the new experiment for collective evolution, on the scale of a small but complete City, that she and Sri Aurobindo had envisaged since long, could at last be started here near Pondicherry , as ‘Auroville’ –  two months only before the ‘Paris Spring’ of May 68, which the Mother was extremely happy to hear about.
    3- There is no ‘belief system’ (that belongs to religions) but a vast method of deep self-discovery and integral self-training that enables the human beings interested to gradually experience directly in themselves the higher and truer levels of consciousness that the ongoing terrestrial evolution process is making increasingly possible for all of us. It’s like a new continent that has been discovered, and how to go about going there, for those interested to do so.
    4- In the same way, no one is tied especially to any ‘specific historical individual’, either Sri Aurobindo, the Mother or any one else: just as no one needs to be tied to Christopher Colombus to reach America. One may of course want to read his Traveling Diary, or know more about his own life, but that’s all. In a case like this, when the historical figures being mentioned happen to be spiritual Masters, it is possible also to establish an inner relationship with them, and some people do, but it is not a necessity nor an obligation or requirement.

“He and the Mother are two major historical figures whose words, instructions for spiritual (‘growth’, I suppose, is the missing word) and agenda for dissemination of beliefs”.
– There is no such agenda at all, and this is exactly where assumptions like this one have been in error all along. Sri Aurobindo was entirely against any publicity, ‘movement’, or ‘any such damned nonsense’, and even regarding Auroville there is only the normal information needed about its existence and aims. As for the 13 volume document called by the Mother her ‘Agenda’  (‘Mother’s Agenda’), it is simply her Diary, the word ‘agenda’ in French being the equivalent of the English ‘diary.’  It is a most extraordinary and moving account of  the changes in her body consciousness and in the whole world thanks to the new Force between 1956 and 1973 when she died.
 Some people insist on negating a Conscious Evolution process that on the other hand they admire and honor when it is told in the form, for example, of ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. They don’t realize it is essentially just the same thing we are talking about here.

Those teachings are much simpler and  much more open than usually imagined: what is proposed is a new, vaster, all-encompassing form of Yoga,  called ‘the Integral Yoga’, in which  some central specific methods are recommended because of the evolutive and transformative nature of this new Yoga, but all the truths and means of the traditional ways of Yoga, or any other spiritual path, can also be integrated if the individual feels it is helping him or her one way or the other, or for a time. So  the form it takes is very individualized and as constantly changing as required, to follow the varying needs of the progressive transformation, from within, of the whole being. In the process, people are able to verify by their own experience that, as Sri Aurobindo put it, “All life is Yoga”, and that ‘True spirituality is simple, very simple.’, as the Mother used to say.
I find that more and more people everywhere are in fact following that new way spontaneously, under whatever name or no name at all, without having read any books, simply by following as best they can the guidance of their true Self, whatever that means for them… and that too has been foreseen by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, for they knew it is like this that Evolution works: directly inspiring people (or before, the previous animal species, and the plants before, etc) to try new things, just the way the same Force of Evolution does it for Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his friends… my blog does nothing but simply point out that, well, we are, many of us, in the process of evolving further, which is an entirely natural and normal process, every time opening up new possibilities not seen or not believed possible before on this terrestrial plane.
This is why, far from being exclusively or even particularly focused on Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, Auroville and the Integral Yoga as such

this blog, as its name indicates, presents the vastest possible view of what has been written and what is going on everywhere on the planet , that is actually Conscious Evolution. In whatever form and under whatever name it may exist presently upon Earth, it is preparing people quietly or intensely to the vast changes in our individual and collective lives that are taking shape more and more visibly in all aspects of human existence and endeavor, in spite of the obstinate resistance of those who are so used to the way things have been until now, and so satisfied with it – or on the contrary so utterly desperate about it – that they can’t imagine it could be otherwise, let alone imagine that one day it will be otherwise.

But there are many texts by many authors, among which these few lines from Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Savitri’,  to wonderfully announce it all:

‘In Matter shall be lit the spirit’s glow,

In body and body kindled the sacred birth,

Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,

The days become a happy pilgrim march,

Our will a force of the Eternal’s power,

And thoughts the rays of a spiritual sun.

A few shall see what none yet understands;

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;

For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done.’