Volume VI, Issue 11-12
Video by Suhas Mehra
Editor’s Note: This video features two selected passages from Sri Aurobindo’s writings on Indian culture and civilisational history. Here Sri Aurobindo speaks of the master idea that has governed the life, culture and social ideals of Indian people over the millennia. This is the ideal of man’s seeking for his true spiritual self and the whole life as a frame and means for that discovery.
Sri Aurobindo reminds us that to whatever extent possible ancient India tried to integrate the highest aim of life, namely, spiritual fulfilment of man, with various aspects of life such as art, literature, religion, intellectual pursuit, etc. But the difficulty of making the outer social life an expression of man’s true self and some highest realisation of the spirit within him is immensely greater — a work, Sri Aurobindo says, to be taken up by a future India. This is the work for New India, the new Bhārat that is rising!
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Passage 1
And the first thing we see is that the principle, the essential intention of Indian culture was extraordinarily high, ambitious and noble, the highest indeed that the human spirit can conceive. For what can be a greater idea of life than that which makes it a development of the spirit in man to its most vast, secret and high possibilities,—a culture that conceives of life as a movement of the Eternal in time, of the universal in the individual, of the infinite in the finite, of the Divine in man, or holds that man can become not only conscious of the eternal and the infinite, but live in its power and universalise, spiritualise and divinise himself by self-knowledge?
What greater aim can be for the life of man than to grow by an inner and outer experience till he can live in God, realise his spirit, become divine in knowledge, in will and in the joy of his highest existence? And that is the whole sense of the striving of Indian culture.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA 20: 231
Passage 2
The master idea that has governed the life, culture, social ideals of the Indian people has been the seeking of man for his true spiritual self and the use of life—subject to a necessary evolution first of his lower physical, vital and mental nature—as a frame and means for that discovery and for man’s ascent from the ignorant natural into the spiritual existence. This dominant idea India has never quite forgotten even under the stress and material exigencies and the externalities of political and social construction.
But the difficulty of making the social life an expression of man’s true self and some highest realisation of the spirit within him is immensely greater than that which attends a spiritual self-expression through the things of the mind, religion, thought, art, literature, and while in these India reached extraordinary heights and largenesses, she could not in the outward life go beyond certain very partial realisations and very imperfect tentatives,—a general spiritualising symbolism, an infiltration of the greater aspiration, a certain cast given to the communal life, the creation of institutions favourable to the spiritual idea.
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Sri Aurobindo and Indian Cultural Renaissance
Politics, society, economics are the natural field of the two first and grosser parts of human aim and conduct recognised in the Indian system, interest and hedonistic desire: Dharma, the higher law, has nowhere been brought more than partially into this outer side of life, and in politics to a very minimum extent;…. The coordination or true union of the collective outward life with Moksha, the liberated spiritual existence, has hardly even been conceived or attempted, much less anywhere succeeded in the past history of the yet hardly adult human race.
…This much endeavour, however, she did make with persistence and patience and it gave a peculiar type to her social polity. It is perhaps for a future India, taking up and enlarging with a more complete aim, a more comprehensive experience, a more certain knowledge that shall reconcile life and the spirit, her ancient mission, to found the status and action of the collective being of man on the realisation of the deeper spiritual truth, the yet unrealised spiritual potentialities of our existence and so ensoul the life of her people as to make it the Lila of the greater Self in humanity, a conscious communal soul and body of Virat, the universal spirit.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, 20: 397-398
