Aurobindo was a poet and yogin, not a philosopher and certainly not a scholar-yogin.
He carried 19th century ideas from British and Continental philosophical idealism into his understanding of yoga. Thus he emphasized "historical and spiritual evolution" as a way to contextualize yogic development. His understanding of Advaita Vedanta was misinformed and almost pedestrian in its descriptions. His understanding of Tantra was minimal and his comprehension of Buddhism was so truncated it was useless. The most unfortunate reality is that as a speaker and translator of Classical Greek he could have read the great Neo-Platonists in their own language, i.e. Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus and Damascius. It would have widened his yogic view in a dramatic way. However, he left them alone showing himself to carry within him the prejudices of his era. In many ways he was the consummate British-educated Indian and his evolutionary-stratified "integral yoga" was the encoding of these ideas. At the individual level, he had great yogic power which he used many times to help and heal his many disciples around the world. To describe his yoga as "for the world" and "not for the individual" is a bit extreme. If you have ever read his "Letters On Yoga" then you would know how personal and committed to his disciples he was as a guru. He searched for the key to physical human immortality as a yogic ideal but did not achieve any such thing. Neither did Mira. In the end he died from kidney failure - just like so many white-rice eating Asians. FWIW The Glycemic Index: Bhasmati white rice = 58 and Table sugar = 64 **************************************************** --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, blusc0ut <no_reply@...> wrote: > Sure. But then Sri Aurobindo did have a completely different cosmology. For him the above view would be some kind of escapism. He believed that his yoga was for the world, not the individual, and that the creation of the supramental body, would be a necessary evolutionary step toward a different kind of creation. >
