Sri Aurobindo - Famous Philosophers

Sri Aurobindo

Introduction

Sri Aurobindo (August 15, 1872–December 5, 1950) was an Indian/Hindu nationalist, scholar, poet, mystic, philosopher, yogi and guru.

After a short political career in which he became one of the leaders of the early movement for the freedom of India from British rule, Sri Aurobindo turned to the development and practice of a new spiritual path which he called the integral yoga.

Sri Aurobindo

Hindu philosophy

One of Sri Aurobindo's main philosophical achievements was to introduce the concept of evolution into Vedantic thought.

Samkhya philosophy had already proposed such a notion centuries earlier, but Aurobindo rejected the materialistic tendencies of both Darwinism and Samkhya, and proposed an evolution of spirit along with that of matter, and that the evolution of matter was a result of the former.

Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary philosophy

Sri Aurobindo argues that humankind as an entity is not the last rung in the evolutionary scale, but can evolve spiritually beyond its current limitations associated with an essential ignorance to a future state of supramental existence. This further evolutionary step would lead to a divine life on Earth characterized by a supramental or truth-consciousness, and a transformed and divinized life and material form.