truth consciousness or supermind aurobindo

The Contemporary Evolution of Religious Thought in England, America and India.

In Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science, ed. Vivekananda and the Scientific Legitimation of Advaita Vedanta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.īrown, C. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. Madras: Theosophical Publishing House.īlavatsky, Helena Petrovna. London/Benares: Theosophical Publishing House. Esoteric Christianity or the Lesser Mysteries. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.īergson, Henri. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.īasham, A.L. Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.īarzun, Jacques. Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest. It is impossible to understand a forest without a detailed knowledge of the genealogy and anatomy of its constituent trees.Īurobindo, Sri. For all that, Skinner, Foucault and most other historians of thought since 1970 have spent a lot of time examining individual texts, ideas and terms. Simply stated, the Lovejoy method missed out on particular forests by looking too closely at individual species of trees. Foucault felt similarly that Lovejoy-style historians were too narrowly focused on tracing the origin and transmission of thoughts and images to be able to comprehend discourses “in their specificity” (Foucault 1972: 135–140). To Skinner the weakness of the unit-idea method was its blindness to historical context this frequently resulted in “empirically false claims” of historical continuity (Skinner 1969: 35). This approach dominated the history of ideas until the late 1960s, when it was attacked by Quentin Skinner, Michel Foucault, and others. His analytical approach allowed him to trace unit-ideas as they combined, separated, and re-combined across cultures and periods. Lovejoy wrote that the history of ideas should be concerned not with doctrines or systems but their “component elements” or “unit-ideas.” Lovejoy demonstrated his method by showing that “the great chain of being,” a dominant literary and philosophical topos from the time of Neoplatonism till the eighteenth century, was composed of the unit-ideas of plenitude, continuity, and gradation (Lovejoy 2001: 3, 61–62, 183). Lovejoy, which he presented to the world in his 1936 book The Great Chain of Being Keywordsīy thus breaking down Aurobindo’s theory into units of idea and influence I am mirroring the methodology of Arthur O. In this essay I give a synchronic as well as diachronic presentation of Aurobindo’s theory, attempting to trace intellectual influences but taking seriously the idea that individual minds may arrive at independent formulations of ideas that recur across historical periods. It also may be viewed as an attempt to show that life is not the product of chance but has a long-term purpose.

Viewed historically, Aurobindo’s theory was one of many attempts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers to harmonize science and spirituality. To this Vedantic basis he added two ideas that he found implicit in the Upanishads and the Vedas-the development of higher levels of consciousness and the emergence of a “supramental” and spiritual consciousness-as well as two ideas he seems to have encountered in esoteric and religious sources: the “involution” of consciousness prior to its evolution and the possibility of the divinization of the human being. It also incorporates two key elements of Vedanta (the philosophy based on the Upanishads) as he understood it: the One Being or brahman and the perfection of the soul through rebirth. It incorporates the central idea of nineteenth-century Western evolutionary philosophy as he understood it: the development of complex forms through physical evolution. Although his theory as a whole was original, it is possible to break it down into its constituent elements. Born in India, he was educated in England between 18, when the question of evolution dominated British scholarly and popular discourse. Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of spiritual evolution was based on ideas found in Indian spiritual texts but also incorporated Western ideas.

Truth consciousness or supermind aurobindo