Sri Aurobindo 1872 – 1950

Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher, yogi, poet, and anti-colonial revolutionary. After studies at Cambridge and early activism in the Bengali nationalist movement, he withdrew in 1910 to Pondicherry, where he developed an elaborate philosophical system known as integral yoga and lived in relative seclusion for the rest of his life. His Life Divine articulates an evolutionary metaphysics in which consciousness is steadily ascending toward what he called the supramental, while The Synthesis of Yoga prescribes the spiritual practice corresponding to that vision. His ashram at Pondicherry is now a site of pilgrimage.

Sri Aurobindo — Aurobindo Ghose — was born in 1872 in Calcutta into a westernized Bengali family. At the age of seven he was sent to England, where he was educated privately in Manchester, at St Paul's School in London, and at King's College, Cambridge. He returned to India in 1893 to enter the service of the Maharaja of Baroda, taught at Baroda College, and from around 1905 became one of the leading figures of the radical wing of the Indian nationalist movement.

Arrested in connection with the Alipore bomb conspiracy in 1908, he experienced during a year of imprisonment a series of decisive spiritual realizations. Acquitted, he withdrew in 1910 to French Pondicherry, where with Mirra Alfassa, known as the Mother, he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. From here came his major writings: The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, and the long visionary poem Savitri.

Aurobindo's integral yoga and his philosophy of evolution toward a 'supramental' divine consciousness re-imagined the Vedantic tradition as a project for the spiritual transformation of human life on earth. The international township of Auroville, founded in 1968 in his name, embodies that aspiration. He died at Pondicherry in December 1950.