Sri Aurobindo’s Thought and Humanity

Sri Aurobindo’s thought is drawing humanity more and more towards itself. This is only bound to increase as mankind evolves and seeks to find complete answers to the cosmic riddle of which man is a part. Among this humanity, that is turning towards Sri Aurobindo, there is a section that seeks to engage primarily with his thought and the new ideas that Sri Aurobindo has seeded into the earth atmosphere. Many of them engage with these ideas in an academic way and it goes as far as it could, which is not very far. One soon encounters the first difficulty, since these ideas are so new that all our previous understanding of yoga and man and life’s goal stands in the way. The more we compare Sri Aurobindo to various other similar or dissimilar thoughts, the more we get confused. We perhaps enter into a cocoon constructed by our ignorant receiving of the profound truths, that have descended from the plane of Truth into the realms of our mortal ignorance and its small, cramped up understanding of life. One plays with the ideas, churns them in the mind, tries even to digest them mentally or understand intellectually, seeks to discover the truths concealed within the words. But that cannot be done by the mind alone since these ideas were never born from the Mind. What Sri Aurobindo has brought to this earth in terms of Idea-forces has been born through the fire of yoga. It is the gift of his intense and arduous tapasya, the kind of which one hardly had even in far back times. The true understanding can therefore only come as one engages with the yoga itself. The mental lights are not sufficient, it is the fire of yoga that can illumine our understanding and reveal to us what is hidden behind the written word. Still to an extent this difficulty begins to be overpassed if one persists. The words themselves then kindle the fire in one who is now prepared through the readings, and he begins to see what was unclear before.