MM: Oh… but if you are looking for someone who described his teachings by being obsessed over the details at an intellectual level you might like to take a look at my paper here
: https://integral-review.org/the-integra ... s-studies/This is only a still superficial bird’s eye view of his metaphysics. If you want to know more, but something that is still condensed and contains also an outline of his spiritual practice, another starting point could be the book “Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching & Method of Practice”. However, if one would like to know really what his spiritual approach is about, I’m afraid the only way is the long one. His books “The Synthesis of Yoga” and “The Life Divine” are a must. His epic poem “Savitri” is less mandatory for the intellect but is ultimately his real testament, and only about the supersensible.
I hope that will help.
Thanks for the paper. The metaphysics and cosmology certainly make sense and align with what we also find through the path of Western esoteric science. But I am wondering more about details on, for example, how souls journey from incarnation to incarnation and these karmic threads advance the evolution of humanity and the Earth organism. Is there anything like that in his writings or those of anyone else who pursued the integral yoga path?
MM: There is a lot about these aspects, but not organized in a single book. You might like to check this page where most of his works can be downloaded in PDF format: https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sria ... itings.php Especially the five volumes series “Letters on Yoga” are organized according to topics and subtopics you can see in the contents table. For example, one finds “Karma and Heredity,” “Death,” “Rebirth,” and “Occult Knowledge and Powers” in section III, IV of vol. I. Or, if you download his “Essays in Philosophy and Yoga,” the part entitled “The Problem of Rebirth” might help also. In “The Life Divine” he writes on similar topics in Ch. XX-XXII. I would use the search function and browse through the other volumes on the same page as well. I guess there is everything what you are looking for, but you will have to do your research.
I will surely visit some of those resources when I have the time. But let me use a more conspicuous example : )
I am sure you can point me to a specific passage of Aurobindo that relates to this quote by Jean Gebser:
"The new mutation of consciousness, on the other hand, as a consequence of arationality, receives its decisive stamp from the manifest perceptual emergence of the spiritual...
Two apocryphal statements of Christian doctrine clarify in their way what is meant here: “This world is a bridge, cross it but do not make of it your dwelling place,”2 and “I have chosen you before the earth began.”3 They point to the spiritual origin prior to all spatio-temporal materialization. We may regard such materialization as a bridge that makes possible the merging or coalescence, the concrescere of origin and the present. The great church father Irenaeus presumably had these sayings in mind when he stated: “Blessed is he who was before the coming of man.”4
We have seen him; he revealed himself in space and time. In his departure he was beheld by his disciples in his transparency, a transparency appropriate only to the spiritual origin (if anything can be appropriated to it), the transparency which a time-free and ego-free person can presentiate in the most fortunate certainty of life. The grand and painful path of consciousness emergence, or, more appropriately, the unfolding and intensification of consciousness, manifests itself as an increasingly intense luminescence of the spiritual in man."
Or similarly by Owen Barfield:
"And now let us further suppose that our imaginary student of the history of language [philology], having had up to now that conspicuous gap in his general historical knowledge, was suddenly confronted for the first time with the Christian record; that he now learned for the first time, that at about the middle of the period which his investigation had marked off, a man was born who claimed to be the son of God, and to have come down from Heaven, that he spoke to his followers of “the Father in me and I in you,” that he told all those who stood around him that “the kingdom of God is within you,” and startled them, and strove to reverse the direction of their thought — for the word metanoia, which is translated “repentance” also means a reversal of the direction of the mind — he startled them and strove to reverse the direction of their thought by assuring them that “it is not that which cometh into a man which defileth him, but that which goeth out of him.”
Can you point me to a passage that discusses the role of these events in the evolution of consciousness? Again, to be clear, I'm not trying to debate this issue, find agreement on it, or find 'errors' in Aurobindo, but simply trying to get a better sense of how he understood the role of cognition in the higher spaces. This can't be discerned through metaphysical descriptions of mind or consciousness or the higher spaces, but requires some more intimate examples and points of reference.
MM: I’m not sure to get it. Sri Aurobindo is all about “The mutation of consciousness receiving its stamp from the emergence of the spiritual,” or about the “spiritual origin prior to all spatio-temporal materialization,” the “path of consciousness emergence,” the “unfolding and intensification of consciousness, manifests in the spiritual in man,” and “the role of cognition in the higher spaces.” If I randomly pick out a page of his writing, I only see this repeated over and over again. So, I’m afraid that I don’t understand what you are missing.
Yes, of course. I am drawing attention specifically to the role of the Christ events - not limited to, but centrally, the incarnation, death, and resurrection. Gebser, Barfield, and many other 20th century spiritual evolutionary thinkers ascribe central importance to these events, such that we cannot even understand the depths of spiritual evolution without taking them into account in a living and imaginative way.
To be clear, I am not speaking of any particular religious sect or theological doctrine, but about the inner significance of these events for the very structure of human cognitive consciousness. Everything we are doing here right now through our thinking, along with the ability to penetrate the higher spaces with cognition, was made possible through these events, in the view of Western esotericism. That is not to suggest we are discovering something other than the ancient Wisdom known in the East, but we are discovering-inventing it in an entirely new way that was not possible before the Mystery of the 1st century.
Does this clarify what I am asking about?
and surely necessary too. There's sort of a gigantic 'freedom padlock' to protect the access to the path. And how absurd this sounds is only a good measure of the elusive difficulty the seeker of truth needs to wrap their head, heart, and whole being around 