Science and Spirituality - A Brief Life-Sketch of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother

A Brief Life-Sketch
of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother

Sri Aurobindo was born on the 15th August, 1872 at Calcutta. At an early age of seven, he was taken along with his elder brothers to England for education, since his father wanted him to have no Indian influence in the shaping of his outlook and personality. And yet, even though Sri Aurobindo assimilated in himself richly the best of the European culture, he returned to India in 1893 with a burning aspiration to work for the liberation of India from foreign rule. While in England, Sri Aurobindo passed the I.C.S. Examination, and yet he felt no call for it; so he got himself disqualified by remaining absent from the riding test. The Gaekwar of Baroda happened to be there at that time, and Sri Aurobindo accepted the proposal to be his Personal Secretary, and returned to India.

Soon thereafter, however, Sri Aurobindo switched over to the Baroda College as Professor of French and then of English, and when in 1906, he left for Bengal, he was the acting Principal of the College. It was during the Baroda period that Sri Aurobindo assimilated in himself the spirit and culture of India and pre­pared himself for his future political and spiritual work. Indeed, his political work had already begun in Baroda, but it was behind the scenes, largely of the nature of a preparation for an armed revolution for the liberation of India.

The pioneering work that Sri Aurobindo did for the liber­ation of India was evidently a part of his larger work for the entire humanity and for the whole earth. For him, the libera­tion of India was an indispensable part of the new world-order. Moreover, the practice of Yoga, which he had started in 1902, led him, even while in the thick of intense political and literary activity, to major realizations of the Brahmic Silence, Nirvana, and also of the universal dynamic Presence of the Divine. And, in 1908, when he was in Alipore jail during his trial under the charge of sedition, he received through numerous experiences and realizations the assurance of the liberation of the country and also the knowledge of the initial lines on which his own fu­ture work was to proceed. For he saw that even in the field of Yoga something was still lacking, something radical that alone would help resolve the problems of the world and would lead mankind to its next evolutionary stage. And so, in 1910, soon after his acquittal from the jail, he withdrew to Pondicherry to concentrate upon this new research work, to hew a new path. It has been a most dynamic work with the entire earth as its cen­tral field. It was in the course of this work that Sri Aurobindo declared that the Supramental is the Truth and that its advent

Sri Aurobindo has explained the nature of this work, the na­ture of the Supermind, the necessity of its descent, the process of this descent and the dynamic consequences of this descent for the solutions of the problems of the mankind, in his voluminous writings, most of which were written serially in the philosophical monthly, "Arya", which was started in 1914, immediately after the first arrival of the Mother from France to Pondicherry. Some of the most important of these and other writings are : The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Human Cycle, The Foundations of Indian Culture, Essays on the Gita, On the Veda, The Upanishads, The Future Poetry.

The Mother, Mirra Alfassa, was born in Paris on 21 February 1878 in a very materialistic, well-to-do family. A pupil at the Academie Julian, she completed a thorough education in music, painting and higher mathematics and became an ac­complished artist.

Concerning her early spiritual life, the Mother has said: "Between 11 and 13 a series of psychic and spiritual experi­ences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man's possibility of uniting with Him, of realising Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon earth in a life divine." Around 1905 the Mother journeyed to Tlemcen, Algeria, where she studied occultism for two years with a Polish or Russian adept, Max Theon, and his wife. Her primary in­terest, however, was spiritual development. In Paris she founded a group of spiritual seekers and gave talks to various groups.

In 1914 the Mother voyaged to Pondicherry to meet Sri Aurobindo, whom she at once recognised as the one who for many years had inwardly guided her spiritual development. The Mother had already by then attained to the Supramental

After a stay of eleven months, she was obliged to return to France due to the outbreak of the First World War. A year later she went to Japan for a period of four years. In April 1920 the Mother returned to Pondicherry to work with Sri Aurobindo.

In 1926, when Sri Aurobindo entered into a new phase of work for concentration on the work of the Descent of the Supermind on the earth, the Mother collaborated with the task of the de­scent, and also organized and developed his Ashram.

Under her guidance, which continued for nearly fifty years, the Ashram grew into a large, many-faceted spiritual community.

In 1943, a school for the education of children was founded, and after the passing of Sri Aurobindo in 1950, the Mother devel­oped that school into an International University Centre, where numerous original and bold experiments of education were car­ried out under Her guidance. This educational work was a part of the Supramental Yoga, and we have rare insights into education and yoga in the volumes entitled Questions and Answers, which contain conversations of the Mother that took place in Her classes. In 1958, the Mother entered into a new phase in order to concentrate on the yoga of the body, and the supramental trans­formation of the physical consciousness at the cellular level. In 1968, the Mother founded Auroville, an International city as a collective field for the material and spiritual researches required for realizing human unity as a part of the Supramental action on the earth.

The Mother's exploration into the body-consciousness and her discovery of a 'cellular mind' capable of restructuring the nature of the body is contained in a document of more than 6000 pages, published in 13 volumes. This is L'Agenda de Mere (Mother's Agenda), an account of her extraordinary exploration

The Mother left her body on 17 November 1973.

The Mother

Sri Aurobindo

Ideals of Human Aspiration are echoed by
the latest dreams of Science

♦ Ideals of Human Aspiration

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

... To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical men­tality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfac­tions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation,— this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.i^-iv

— Sri Aurobindo

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— Sri Aurobindo