The author reminds us that it is the errors of an egoistic and self-divided creation that are the central practical concern of every human being striving to fulfil the purpose of his life on earth. The errors are inevitable; indeed, they are the means of fulfilment, the fertiliser by which the seed of the spirit is made to grow and fructify on the plane of human life.
The author writes that sacrifice is commonly thought of as leaving the participant worse off than he was – except for the anticipation of any calculated reward or quid pro quo. Or it may be associated with atonement or punishment for wrongs done. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the intention or effect of the sacrifice which is to be performed by the Spirit of Man if he is to achieve his true destiny.
Sri Aurobindo summarises the essence of verses 9-14 of Isha Upanishad in ‘The Life Divine’: “Through Avidya, the Multiplicity, lies our path out of the transitional egoistic self-expression in which death and suffering predominate; through Vidya consenting with Avidya by the perfect sense of oneness even in that multiplicity, we enjoy integrally the immortality and the beatitude. By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated from this lower birth and death; by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity.”
In this part 3 of our ongoing series, the focus is on verses 6-8 of Isha Upanishad. We are reminded that it is the Brahman that is the origin, the end and the container of the things; creating, he indwells the forms of his manifestation, enjoys variously his thousand abodes. He is the One, the same everywhere. And if each individual formation behaves and acts as if it is a separate entity, different from others, it is because it is clouded in its outer consciousness, it has temporarily lost touch with the unifying knowledge and consciousness at its back—that which sustains it as well as it does all the rest in a common extension.
In this part, the author focuses on the first 4 verses of Isha Upanishad. He reminds that this Upanishad addresses itself to the question of world-existence, the problem of harmonising human life and activity with the Reality of Immutable Brahman. The solution it finds is one of the most remarkable found by the ancient Indian mind.
In this six-part series, we present an essay by M.P. Pandit which summarises some of Sri Aurobindo’s commentaries on the Isha Upanishad. The first introductory part highlights Sri Aurobindo’s comments on translating the Upanishads, and the errors made by Max Muller and other Indologists who fail to capture the spirit of the scripture because they lack the inner vision of the Truth expressed in scripture.
Rasa: The Semantic Approach RASA is one of those quintessential words in Sanskrit which sum up a whole philosophy or even a …
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Rasa: The Transcendental And Immanent Reality The evolution of the subjective and objective meanings of Rasa as “essence” …
CONTINUED FROM PART 2 Rasa: The Seership of the Artist It has been shown that Rasa connotes the Supreme Reality. In what …
CONTINUED FROM PART 3 Rasa: The Seership of the Artist The seer has, in him, the sattwic buddhi or ahaṅkāra, – the …
Destruction: The First Condition of Progress Now that the Supramental Truth which will create a New Age in human evolution is increasingly …
Will the New Creation be Preceded by Destruction? (Part 1) Read More »
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 True Meaning of the Destroyer Aspect of the Divine This Gita’s conception of God as the Time-Spirit in …
Will the New Creation be Preceded by Destruction? (Part 2) Read More »
CONTINUED FROM PART 2 The Two Choices Before Humanity These are the two alternatives facing humanity from which it will have to …
Will the New Creation be Preceded by Destruction? (Part 3) Read More »
CONTINUED FROM PART 3 Furthering the Evolutionary Transition Therefore whether at the present moment the manifestation of the supramental Truth will or …
Will the New Creation be Preceded by Destruction? (Part 4) Read More »
INTRODUCTION All spiritual greatness is a surpassing of the normal human consciousness and an embrace of the universal and transcendent. It is …
Sri Aurobindo’s love of man and earth is a love of God in man and earth, or rather of God as man and earth. That he did not develop it but was born with it, will be amply illustrated and confirmed by his writings, prose and poetical. No greater lover of man has ever been born, – of the entire being of man, and not only of his soul; and no greater prophet of man’s divine destiny.
A dizzy height of lyrical magnificence is reached in the ‘Rose of God’, the crest-jewel of Sri Aurobindo’s shorter mystical poems, the iridescent Mantra of supra-mental transformation. His love of man and earth attains here a depth and concentrated intensity of expression which makes the poem at once an invocation and a revelation, a prayer, a prophecy and a promise.
Renaissance, the monthly e-journal of AuroBharati, features inspiring articles, essays, book reviews or book excerpts, interviews, reflections and artworks that speak of how the eternal spirit and creative genius of India are being reborn and renewed in various domains – spiritual, artistic, literary, philosophic, scientific, aesthetic.
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