--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "emptybill" <emptybill@...> wrote: > > > 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.
Yes, I agree. > His understanding of Tantra was minimal and his comprehension of > Buddhism was so truncated it was useless. Right. But you should look into some people in his invironment, like MP Pundit, and his teacher Kapaly Shastri, who was a Sri Vidya scholar, originally a devotee of Ramana, changed to be a disciple of SA and Mira. These people provide a necessary context to SA in more traditionaly terms. They were experts of Tantra. > 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. He was surely a child of his time and his upbringing, no doubt, like so many others. > 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. Right, I find the letters the most valuable books. He spend the whole night answering letters. The books of the Arya period, like his main philosophic books, were basically adressed to the western intelectual, they were building a bridge between the western intelectualism of the time and the yogic philosophy. > 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. Well, it's clear that he had prostate cancer, which he originally self-healed, but which returned towards the end http://savitriera.wordpress.com/anurag-banerjee/nirodbaran-amal-kiran-and-udar-pinto-vis-a-vis-satprem/ > 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. > > >
