Aurobindo In one of the more peculiar coincidences in the world of 20th century religious and philosophical thought, at the same time that the French priest Teilhard de Chardin was developing his evolutionary model of religion, the Indian revolutionary-turned-Hindu Vedanta yogi Aurobindo Ghose was developing a remarkably similar model in India, each without knowledge of the other’s work. Each was familiar with the story of biological evolution as developed by Darwin, and each created a model in which biological evolution was extended to the evolution of consciousness and hence also to what they both saw as an emerging future spirituality. There is no evidence to suggest that Aurobindo knew anything about Teilhard’s work (which is to be expected, given that the Catholic Church suppressed the publication of his philosophical and religious works), and there is only a brief account of Teilhard, late in his life, reading part of Aurobindo’s Life Divine and commenting that it appeared to be essentially an Asian version of his own ideas. Born in 1872, Aurobindo Ghose (Shri Aurobindo to his followers) lived most of his life in India, until his death in 1950. His only noteworthy travel outside India was for a university education at Cambridge, where he was exposed to not only Darwin’s work on biological evolution but also earlier proponents of cultural evolution such as Hegel and Bergson. As a devout Hindu, Aurobindo was also familiar with the extensive Hindu philosophical tradition, from the early Vedas and Upanishads to the Vedantic philosophers such as Shankara and Ramanuja. After returning to India, Aurobindo became a prominent figure in the political resistance movement against British rule, ultimately leading to his arrest and imprisonment on terrorist charges. During his solitary confinement in prison, Aurobindo had a profound religious experience which eventually led him to move away from political life and toward a semi-reclusive life as a spiritual seeker and philosopher. Establishing an ashram in Pondicherry, and engaging in prolonged periods of solitude for the rest of his life, Aurobindo created an enormous opus of evolutionary spirituality, including the classics The Life Divine (1,130 pages in the English edition) and The Synthesis of Yoga (918 pages). In these and other works Aurobindo developed a sophisticated interpretation of a modernized Vedanta which was world-affirming, compatible with science, and evolutionary. At times Aurobindo's works, despite being composed in English, can be dense and ambiguous, partly the product of his effort to describe such a novel vision for which there was little precedent (other than, perhaps, in the work of his unknown contemporary, Teilhard), and partly due to his occasional use of sometimes non-traditional translations of Sanskrit words from ancient Hindu texts. Aurobindo might have written in English, but it sometimes seems as if he is thinking in Sanskrit. Like Teilhard, Aurobindo constructs a model which is empirically grounded in a scientific understanding of the evolution of the Cosmos. While both Teilhard and Aurobindo value the scriptural texts of their respective traditions of Christianity and Hinduism, neither sees their model as grounded in or dependent on sacred texts, doctrines, or other religious traditions. Both Teilhard and Aurobindo sprinkle passages from sacred texts throughout their writings, but always in the context of supporting observations that are rooted in empiricism, not the text. Aurobindo, working from an emanationist model which although grounded in science also has ancient roots in the Upanishads, sees the Cosmos as an unfolding evolutionary process of God/Brahman/Spirit emanating the material Universe (involution) and the long history of the Universe as the gradual restoration of awareness of its true spiritual source and nature (evolution). Similar to Teilhard, Aurobindo sees evolution as proceeding from matter to life to mind/consciousness. In Teilhard’s thought, the next step in the evolution of consciousness and the transformation of the human species is the Omega Point, which he variously and ambiguously characterizes as both God and the final stage of cosmic and human evolution. Similarly, Aurobindo posits an evolution of human consciousness into future stages of the Overmind and, in the culmination of evolution, the Supermind. As with Teilhard, Aurobindo’s account of these higher stages of the evolution of consciousness and their relationship (perhaps identity) with God/Brahman/Spirit can be somewhat vague and dense. And yet, considering that both Teilhard and Aurobindo attempt to articulate something that, in one sense at least, is not yet fully existent, such absence of clarity should not be surprising. One significant difference between Aurobindo and most of his predecessors in the Hindu Vedanta tradition is his positive evaluation of the material world. Aurobindo strongly objects to what is perhaps the dominant Vedantic position, defended by Shankara, that sees the material world as an illusion and advocates an ascetic denial of the value of this world. In his affirmation of this world as the emanated presence of the divine, Aurobindo shares with Teilhard a world-affirming perspective of the Cosmos, along with the recognition that it is an unfinished Cosmos that has yet to reach its evolutionary goal. Aurobindo and Teilhard have many critics in both the scientific and spiritual communities, and we hope to explore some of these criticisms in later posts. Nonetheless, both are certain to remain seminal figures in the development of a 21st century post-Axial spirituality which will, of necessity, be grounded in an evolutionary, rather than static, understanding of the Cosmos and all that emerges in it, including consciousness and religion. [Note: For those who wish to further explore Aurobindo’s thought, see The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga. However, given the difficulty of these works, a more accessible starting point would be Satprem’s Sri Aurobindo: The Adventure of Consciousness or The Future Evolution of Man, a nicely organized anthology of passages from Aurobindo’s major works. For a comparative exploration of Teilhard and Aurobindo, see R.C. Zaehner’s Evolution and Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Given some of his biases, Zaehner is not for everybody, but overall he offers a useful comparison of these two comparable but by no means identical expressions of evolutionary spirituality.]
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