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    All Life Is Yoga: Sri Aurobindo – His Life and Work
    All Life Is Yoga: Sri Aurobindo – His Life and Work
    All Life Is Yoga: Sri Aurobindo – His Life and Work
    Ebook188 pages58 minutes

    All Life Is Yoga: Sri Aurobindo – His Life and Work

    By Sri Aurobindo and The (d.i. Mira Alfassa) Mother

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    Sri Aurobindo was very emphatic in stating that only he could write truly about himself; but he never wrote any comprehensive or systematic account of his life. Only in his correspondence with his disciples and others he sometimes explained points by incidentally referring to some event in his own life or some experience in his own Yogic development. Also on a few occasions he corrected misleading statements concerning him published in some journals and books and gave notes about some points in his life to three of his biographers who had submitted their manuscripts to him for verification. Some of this material has been compiled and presented in a systematic arrangement. In addition, statements by the Mother about Sri Aurobindo and his life and work were added.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSri Aurobindo Digital Edition
    Release dateMar 1, 2019
    ISBN9783963870231
    All Life Is Yoga: Sri Aurobindo – His Life and Work

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      Book preview

      All Life Is Yoga - Sri Aurobindo

      Part One

      Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram

      Sri Aurobindo lived at first in retirement at Pondicherry with four or five companions. Afterwards more and yet more began to come to him to follow his spiritual path and the number became so large that a community of sadhaks had to be formed for the maintenance and collective guidance of those who had left everything behind for the sake of a higher life. This was the foundation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram which has less been created than grown around him as its centre. — Sri Aurobindo

      Chapter I

      Early Life and Career

      Sri Aurobindo was very emphatic in stating that only he could write truly about himself; but he never wrote any comprehensive or systematic account of his life. Only in his correspondence with his disciples and others he sometimes explained points by incidentally referring to some event in his own life or some experience in his own Yogic development. Also on a few occasions he corrected misleading statements concerning him published in some journals and books and gave notes about some points in his life to three of his biographers who had submitted their manuscripts to him for verification. Some of this material has been compiled and presented in a systematic arrangement and published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1948 with the title Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram. Sometimes, in order to avoid a direct personal reference, Sri Aurobindo used to write about himself in the third person. This is the reason why at a few places in the book the reference to Sri Aurobindo is in the third person.

      Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on August 15, 1872. At the age of five he was sent along with his two elder brothers, Benoybhushan and Manmohan, to the Loretto Convent School at Darjeeling. After two years, in 1879, he was taken with his elder brothers to England for education. Sri Aurobindo lived in England for fourteen years. He was brought up at first in an English family (the Drewett family) at Manchester. While his two brothers, Benoybhushan and Manmohan went to the Manchester Grammar School, Sri Aurobindo was privately educated by Mr. and Mrs. Drewett. Mr. Drewett was an accomplished Latin scholar; he taught Sri Aurobindo Latin so well that when the latter had joined St. Paul’s School in London in 1885, the Headmaster himself took up Sri Aurobindo personally to ground him in Greek and then pushed him rapidly through the higher classes of the School. Towards the end of 1889 he went from St. Paul’s with a senior classical scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied for two years. Sri Aurobindo gave much attention to the classics at Manchester and at Saint Paul’s ; but in his last three years at St. Paul’s he paid less attention to these subjects, taking them only casually, and spent all his time outside school in general reading, especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, mediaeval and modern Europe. He spent some time also over learning Italian, some German and a little Spanish. He spent much time too in writing poetry. The school studies during this period engaged very little of his time; he was already at ease in them and did not think it necessary to labour over them any longer. All the same he was able to win all the prizes in King’s College in one year for Greek and Latin verse. At Cambridge Sri Aurobindo passed high in the First Part of the Tripos (first class); it was on passing this First Part that the degree of B.A. is usually given; but as he had only two years at his disposal, he had to pass it in his second year at Cambridge, and the First Part gives the degree only if it is taken in the third year; if one takes it in the second year one has to appear for the second part of the Tripos in the fourth year to qualify for the degree. He might have got the degree if he had made an application for it, but he did not care to do so. A degree in England is valuable only if one wants to take up an academical career.

      In 1890 he passed the open competition for the Indian Civil Service, but he neglected his lessons in riding and failed in the last riding test. He was, as is often done, given another chance to pass, but avoided presenting himself in time for the test. He was on this pretext disqualified for the Service, although in similar cases successful probationers have been given a further chance to qualify themselves in India itself. He felt no call for the I.C.S. and was seeking some way to escape from that bondage. He thus deliberately disqualified himself without himself rejecting the Service, which his family would not have allowed him to do.

      At the age of eleven Sri Aurobindo had already received strongly the impression that a period of general upheaval and great revolutionary changes was coming in the world and he himself was destined to play part in it. His father in his letters had bitterly complained of the mechanical character and heartlessness of the British Government in India. He also sent him Indian newspapers marking for attention news items relating to maltreatment of Indians by Englishmen in that country. This and other circumstances raised a feeling of resentment against the subjection of India to a foreign rule. But the decision to take part himself in some action directed towards the liberation of the country took shape only after some years. At Cambridge as a member of the Indian Majlis of which latterly he became the secretary, he delivered many revolutionary speeches which, as he afterwards learnt, had their part in determining the authorities to exclude him from the Indian Civil Service. Among the Indians in London he and his brothers formed a part of a small revolutionary group who rebelled habitually against the leadership of Dadabhai Naoroji and his moderate politics. During the last days of his stay in England he attended a private meeting of Indians in London at which there was formed a secret society with the romantic name of the Lotus and Dagger in which all the members took the vow to adopt each some chosen part which would help in leading to the overthrow of foreign rule. But the society was still-born and its members dispersed without meeting again; some however kept individually to their vow and one of these was Sri Aurobindo.

      When Sri Aurobindo was disqualified for the Indian Civil Service, the Gaekwar of Baroda was in London. Sri Aurobindo was introduced to him by the brother of Sir Henry Cotton and obtained an appointment in the Baroda service and left England in February, 1893.

      Sri Aurobindo passed thirteen years, from 1893 to 1906, in the Baroda service, first in the Settlement and Revenue Department and in secretariate work for the Maharaja, afterwards as Professor of English and, finally, Vice-Principal in the Baroda College. These were years of self-culture, of literary activity-for much of the poetry afterwards published from Pondicherry was written at this time-and of preparation for his future work. In England he had received, according to his father’s express instructions, an entirely occidental education without any contact with the culture of India and the East. At Baroda he made up the deficiency, learned Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages, especially Marathi and Gujarati, the two official languages of the Baroda State. He learnt Bengali very quickly and for the most part all by himself.1 A great part of the last years of this period was spent on leave in silent political activity, for he was barred from public action by his position at Baroda. The outbreak of the agitation against the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave him the opportunity to give up the Baroda service and join openly in the political movement. He left Baroda in 1906 and went to Calcutta as Principal of the newly-founded Bengal National College.

      * * *

      1 Dinendra Kumar Roy lived with Sri Aurobindo in Baroda as a companion and his work was rather to help him to correct and perfect his knowledge of the language and to accustom him to conversation in Bengali than any regular teaching.

      Photo Gallery I

      Almost all the photographs are accompanied

      by a quotation from Savitri.

      with his family

      London circa 1879

      Aurobindo (middle) with his family

      His birth held up a symbol and a sign

      Aurobindo

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