The Life Divine — Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy Explained दिव्य जीवन

Who was Sri Aurobindo?

Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose, 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was educated in England, including at King's College, Cambridge, and returned to India in 1893. After years in the service of the Baroda State he became a leader of the radical wing of the nationalist movement in Bengal. Tried and acquitted in the Alipore Bomb Case (1908–09), he moved to Pondicherry in 1910 and spent the next forty years in yoga and writing. Working with Mirra Alfassa, later called the Mother, he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. His best-known books are The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita and the epic poem Savitri.

When and why it was written

The Life Divine began as a serial in the Arya, the monthly philosophical journal Aurobindo started in Pondicherry in August 1914. It ran in instalments from August 1914 to January 1919, written alongside The Synthesis of Yoga and other works. Aurobindo's aim was to give a philosophical basis to the spiritual experiences of his yoga, and to answer two opposite positions that he thought dominated thought in his time: the materialist view that only matter is real, and the ascetic view, strong in Indian tradition, that the world is an illusion to be left behind.

Two decades later he revised the work thoroughly. Volume I, revised and enlarged, was published as a book in November 1939, and Volume II, recast and enlarged, followed in July 1940 in two parts. The revision added substantial new material, so the book read today is much longer and more developed than the Arya serial. In the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo it fills volumes 21 and 22.

Part by part

• Book One, "Omnipresent Reality and the Universe", chapters I–VII: the human aspiration for God, light, freedom and immortality; "The Two Negations" — the materialist denial of spirit and the ascetic's refusal of the world; then "Reality Omnipresent", "The Destiny of the Individual", "Man in the Universe" and "The Ego and the Dualities". Aurobindo argues that spirit and matter are not enemies but two ends of one Reality.
• Chapters VIII–XII: "The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge", "The Pure Existent", "Conscious Force" and two chapters on "Delight of Existence". Here he sets out Sachchidananda — Existence (sat), Consciousness-Force (chit) and Bliss (ananda) — as the nature of the ultimate Reality, and tackles the problem of why suffering exists if Reality is bliss.
• Chapters XIII–XVIII: "The Divine Maya", "The Supermind as Creator", "The Supreme Truth-Consciousness", "The Triple Status of Supermind", "The Divine Soul", "Mind and Supermind". Supermind is introduced as the creative Truth-Consciousness that links the infinite Reality with the world of forms, and mind is shown to be a limited, dividing form of knowledge.
• Chapters XIX–XXIII: "Life", "Death, Desire and Incapacity", "The Ascent of Life", "The Problem of Life", "The Double Soul in Man". Life is a form of conscious force; death, desire and weakness come from its limitation. The last chapter distinguishes the surface desire-soul from the deeper psychic being.
• Chapters XXIV–XXVIII: "Matter", "The Knot of Matter", "The Ascending Series of Substance", "The Sevenfold Chord of Being", "Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya". Matter too is spirit in its densest form. Being is a chord of seven principles — matter, life, mind, supermind, bliss, consciousness and existence — and an intermediate 'Overmind' explains how a divided world arises from a unified truth.
• Book Two, "The Knowledge and the Ignorance — The Spiritual Evolution", Part One, "The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance", chapters I–VI: "Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable"; "Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara — Maya, Prakriti, Shakti"; "The Eternal and the Individual"; "The Divine and the Undivine"; and two chapters on "The Cosmic Illusion". Aurobindo reconciles the impersonal and personal aspects of the Divine and argues at length against the view that the world is an illusion.
• Part One, chapters VII–XIV: "The Knowledge and the Ignorance", two chapters on memory, ego and self-experience, "Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge", "The Boundaries of the Ignorance", "The Origin of the Ignorance", "Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance", and "The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil". Ignorance is not the opposite of knowledge but a partial knowledge, created when consciousness concentrates on one part of itself and forgets the whole. Evil and error arise from this division and can be cured by its removal.
• Part Two, "The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution", chapters XV–XIX: "Reality and the Integral Knowledge", "The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence", "The Progress to Knowledge — God, Man and Nature", "The Evolutionary Process — Ascent and Integration", "Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge". Evolution works by rising to a higher level and then integrating the lower levels into it.
• Chapters XX–XXII: "The Philosophy of Rebirth", "The Order of the Worlds", "Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality". Rebirth is presented as the means by which the individual soul grows through many lives as part of the cosmic evolution.
• Chapters XXIII–XXVIII: "Man and the Evolution", "The Evolution of the Spiritual Man", "The Triple Transformation", "The Ascent towards Supermind", "The Gnostic Being", "The Divine Life". Humanity is a transitional being. The book ends with the psychic, spiritual and supramental transformations, the ascending planes of consciousness above mind, the 'gnostic being' who lives by Supermind, and the picture of a divine life on earth.

The main ideas in plain language

Involution and evolution. Before evolution there was an 'involution': the infinite spirit, Sachchidananda, hid itself step by step until it was buried in apparently unconscious matter. Evolution is the reverse journey. Life emerged from matter, and mind from life, because they were already secretly there. If that is so, Aurobindo argues, mind is not the end; the higher powers of spirit must emerge too.

Sachchidananda. The ultimate Reality is pure Existence, conscious Force and Bliss in one. Everything, from a stone to a saint, is that Reality in some degree of self-concealment. This lets Aurobindo affirm both the Upanishadic teaching that all is Brahman and the full reality of the world.

Supermind. Between the infinite Reality and our limited mind stands the Supermind, or Truth-Consciousness: a knowledge that sees the whole and the parts together, without the divisions and guesswork of thought. Supermind is the creative principle of the universe, and Aurobindo holds that it can also emerge in earthly evolution.

The triple transformation. The way forward has three stages. First, the psychic transformation: the soul hidden in the heart, the psychic being, comes forward and guides the whole nature. Second, the spiritual transformation: higher light, peace and power descend from above, through planes he calls higher mind, illumined mind, intuition and overmind. Third, the supramental transformation, in which Supermind itself takes charge and changes mind, life and even the body.

The gnostic being and the divine life. The result would be a new kind of being, the gnostic or supramental being, as far beyond present humanity as humans are beyond animals. Such beings would live in unity with others and with the Divine without losing individuality, and their emergence would make possible a collective 'divine life' on earth. The goal is not escape from the world to a distant heaven or into a featureless Absolute, but transformation of the world itself.

In the author's words

The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, — God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that Nature.

Reception and criticism

The Life Divine brought Aurobindo international attention. The Nobel Prize nomination archive records that Sir Francis Younghusband nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1943. Within India it became a standard text in courses on modern Indian philosophy, and it shaped the work of scholars and teachers who carried his ideas abroad. Haridas Chaudhuri, a student of his thought, founded what became the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Michael Murphy, who spent time at the Pondicherry ashram, co-founded the Esalen Institute in California. The integral theorist Ken Wilber has also acknowledged Aurobindo's influence. Academic philosophers have also examined its arguments in detail, for example in Stephen H. Phillips's Aurobindo's Philosophy of Brahman (Brill, 1986).

Admirers value its attempt to reconcile Vedanta with the modern idea of evolution, its affirmation of the world against both materialism and world-denial, and its view of the individual as part of a larger spiritual purpose. Critics raise several objections. Many academic philosophers regard the existence of Supermind and the coming supramental being as claims that cannot be tested by argument or evidence, resting finally on Aurobindo's reported experience. Followers of Shankara's Advaita Vedanta reject his reading of maya and his criticism of world-negating renunciation, which they think misrepresents their tradition. Readers also find the style, with its long sentences and dense technical vocabulary, a barrier. Supporters reply that Aurobindo presented his metaphysics as a statement of spiritual experience meant to be tested in practice, and that the work should be judged as a whole, not chapter by chapter.

Where to read it

The complete text is free online from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, as volumes 21 and 22 of the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, on sriaurobindoashram.org and incarnateword.in. Free e-book editions are also available from Auro e-Books. Printed editions are published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, Pondicherry, and by Lotus Press in the United States. Newcomers often start with Book One, chapters I–VI, which set out the whole argument in brief, and then read the final chapters of Book Two.

Read more on this site

• Sri AurobindoThinkers
• Essays on the GitaAurobindo's reading of the Gita
• Bhagavad Gita — all 18 chaptersA key source for Aurobindo's thought
• Yoga, Pranayama and MeditationTraditional guides

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