The Life Divine is the culminating point of the Indian mind

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The Dharma of The Gita Sri Aurobindo 7

Sri Aurobindo Arabinda Basu 10

Veda Vyasa’s  Mahabharata  in

Sri Aurobindo’s  Savitri Prema Nanda Kumar 25

Sri Aurobindo and Vedic Riks Dr Sampadananda Mishra 39

The Path of Nachiketa: The journey Alok Pandey 47

Sri Aurobindo’s  The Life Divine:

The Immortal Text On The Divine Truth R.C. Pradhan 54

Sri Aurobindo and Uttarpara Speech Trija Roy 69

The Mother Abides Nolini Kanta Gupta 89

A Canadian Question 92

Twin Prayers 95

November 17, 1973 97

Integrality Matthijs Cornelissen 98

Practices in Integral Yoga Larry Seidlitz 111

Spiritual Knowledge Martha G Orton 121

Sri Aurobindo and the Hindu Muslim Problem Kittu Reddy 134

The Theme Of Urvashi In

The Indian Renaissance:

Madhusudan Datta,

Rabindranath Tagore , Sri Aurobindo Ranajit Sarkar 141

The National Value of Art Pabitra Kumar Roy 159

Cover Design : Dhanavanti’s painting ‘Rainbow rhythm’

Editorial

Space permitting, there is also a proposal to reproduce some of the ‘golden oldies’, essays of extraordinary depth and insight written by authors of eminence, most of whom are no more living. These priceless treasures secreted in the ageold vaults of the Advent, Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, Mother India, Srinvantu, Sri Aurobindo Circle, etc. need to be dug out and their authentic and authoritative views made known to a wider audience, especially among readers of this generation and those who wish to make a serious study of Sri Aurobindo. [Recent developments in analytic philosophy, Language and Mind, Vol. 1: A Western Perspective (Kant, Fodor, Searle, Kripke)]

Sri Aurobindo’s  The Life Divine : The Immortal Text On The Divine Truth

R.C. Pradhan

Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine represents the spirit of man in ascending the higher realms of the divine Truth. It is a text of the immortal voice of man aspiring for the highest Truth realisable in human life. If the Upanishads laid the foundations of the immortal life on earth and the Gita propounded the Karmayoga to effectively make it a part of the worldly life, The Life Divine further established the transforming power of the Supermind to make the earth its home. It has fulfilled the prophetic vision of the Upanishads and the Gita in concretising the immortal Truth of the Divine Reality on the rugged surface of the earthly life surrounded by darkness. The Life Divine is the culminating point of the Indian mind in its evolutionary history from the primitive to the most enlightened forms of spiritual realisation.

What I will do in this essay is not to summarise the vast knowledge unfolded in the text, but to throw hints as to how one could wade through the labyrinth of the divine drama created and enacted in Sri Aurobindo’s immortal text. Mine will not be a textual reading but an interpretation of the most important concepts dealt with in the text.

The National Value of Art

Pabitra Kumar Roy

Man, for Sri Aurobindo, is always the traveller of the cycles of society and his road is forward. This thesis holds no less in the domain of man’s aesthetic adventures. As elsewhere, he gathers in his material from the minds and lives of his fellow-men around him and makes the most of the experience of humanity’s past ages, and does not confine himself in a narrow mentality. The dialectic of individual and humanity is a characteristic of the logic of the evolutionary process. At one pole of man’s being, he is a variation of human individual, and yet belonging to his race and class types. He has his svadharma, according to which man resembles some, and differs from others. Society is formed on the ground of human affinity. Social affinity enriches the individuals, and his enrichment, in turn, enriches the society. For Sri Aurobindo, in modern times, society is the nation. By enriching the national life, the individual helps the total life of humanity. But it should not be understood that he holds that one’s nationality is one’s exhaustive identity. Rather, “if by a part of himself he belongs to the nation, by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity.” 1 (HC, p. 81). 

Man’s societal self-limitation and subjection to his environment and group is hardly the last credential of a man’s existence. He shares something of the infinity, complexity and free variation of the Self manifested in the world, and thus has a necessary tendency of expansion and transcendence of his environmental affinities. The individual lives in humanity as well as humanity in the individual. The point is that nation is a temporary necessity. This view of nation and nationality we have to keep in view when we discuss Sri Aurobindo’s ideas concerning the national value of art. [Beauty Art and Man, David Hume;: A critical introduction to his theory of knowledge]