All Life is Yoga

Why is Sri Aurobindo important? I occasionally encounter this question from a lot of people. But I am never quite successful to give a qualified answer. My awkwardness and surname often create a hindrance making others speculate that I am closely related to Sri Aurobindo. In this blog, I have attempted to answer this question through my experiences gathered over the past four decades of my life.

I accidentally encountered the world of Sri Aurobindo and the Divine Mother around 1995 after getting admitted to The Future Foundation School in Kolkata. We used to have classes on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. My monkey mind back then wasn’t receptive to these teachings. The only thing I noticed is the dominance of the word “consciousness” in the writings of Sri Aurobindo. This observation became the key to my understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy in the later years.

As a young teenager, I always aspired to leave India and pursue my higher studies in the West. Fortunately, I came to Canada for my doctoral studies around 2008. I embraced the challenges of academic life and the Canadian winter very quickly. However, the feeling of being away from my roots in India led to a state of depression. My detachment from the Indian soil gave me a sense of void which I could not figure out then. It was not about the family, but something more. Certainly, material pleasures in the West were not sufficient to dampen my depressive state of mind. I needed something else.

During the reading breaks, I used to flip pages of the books that reminded me of India. Sri Aurobindo was one of them. I carried some books of Sri Aurobindo while leaving India. One of them was “Sri Aurobindo for All Ages” by Nirodbaran. I still have a copy in my bookshelf. I started reading more analytically about various Indian Saints including Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, Swami Vivekanada, Anandamayi Maa, Ramprasad Sen, Mother Mirra and Sri Aurobindo. Furthermore, I attended weekend lectures on Indian Philosophy and Yoga from well-known Universities, including Harvard. But I noticed that most Saints focused on the process of Yoga, whereas Sri Aurobindo discussed the consequences of pursuing Yoga at various stages of life of the practitioner. This was indeed very novel and exciting. Many years later, I met a Physicist and an Endocrinologist, who confirmed my interpretation of Sri Aurobindo.

As students of science, we were taught to break down complex processes into simple ones by “analytical deconstruction”. Sri Aurobindo has done the same for Indian Philosophy on a massive scale by performing various experiments. In this process, he created some remarkable creative works such as “Savitri” and discovered the “Integral Yoga”. This understanding further led me to some of His works including “Letters on Yoga”, “Synthesis of Yoga” and, “Life Divine”. Reading these texts created a story arc about the Schools of Hindu Philosophy from Vedas to Tantra. But most important, I gained a lot of knowledge about the human body (microcosm) from the works of Sri Aurobindo. This opened many exciting avenues for me.

I practice Integrative/Energy Medicine and Yoga plays a big role in my life. I feel very proud to say that I have used Energy Medicine to reverse four of the major metabolic anomalies in my body without a significant medical intervention. I strongly feel that just like me everyone has an inner healer present within themselves. We can recognize the healer through Yoga – the very core of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy.

I am deeply connected to the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Here, I have summarized some pointers which may help others to live a mindful life.

They are:

1. Pursue every activity with utmost devotion or bhakti towards the Highest Consciousness as a product of your psychic being and not just as a mere act. 
2. Practice “surrender” especially in your darkest times and never lose your inner connect with the Divine. This will help you to cope with failures and issues of lower nature (e.g., anger, greed, lust).
3. Journal your activities daily or weekly. As a Yoga practitioner you will experience that many tendencies will disappear, and new ones will be manifested. 
4. Pursue at least one artistic activity (painting, singing, or learning an instrument) to stimulate the dormant areas of the brain.
5. Avoid “junk food” or “processed food” and pay more attention to “clean food”. Also focus on the quality and not the quantity of the food ingested.
6. Acknowledge material (e.g., good car, nice perfume) and non-material experiences of life (e.g., the inner bliss after listening to soulful music). They both belong to the same consciousness and help us to evolve through experiences.
7. Be diligent and repetitive in whatever you do. There is no shortcut to success. Human evolution is a slow process but yields sure shot results over a longer period.

Sri Aurobindo’s teachings collectively point towards the universal nature of consciousness. This includes both the quantum and the material world. But is the quantum world real? The answer is yes – pointing to the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics shared among Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zellinger.

Quoting from the “Letters on Yoga”, Sri Aurobindo has mentioned that – 

“The whole humanity cannot be changed at once. What has to be done is to bring the Higher Consciousness down into the earth-consciousness and establish it there as a constant realised force.”

Overall, Sri Aurobindo’s teachings are an integral part of our own development and evolution. Many studies are confirming today what Sri Aurobindo deciphered over a hundred years ago.

This is a great starting point for the humanity as long as we progress.

- Abhishek Ghosh, PhD (Canada)

Keywords: Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga, Spiritual practice, Social change, Personal change, Energy medicine