Sri Aurobindo and The Future Psychology (Supplement to a Greater Psychology)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

“There is no question about it: the modern world has irreversible discovered the modern world has irreversibly discovered the fact that the world evolves – Matter evolves, life evolves, mind evolves. And Spirit evolves – or, we might say, Spirit is the entire evolutionary process of its own unfolding, from matter to life to mind to the higher and superconscient realsm of Spirit’s own being. This evolutionary unfolding of Spirit own being. This evolutionary unfolding of Spirit – as it plays out in psychology, religion politics, the arts, and spiritual practice itself – is the central message of Aurobindo’s voluminous writings.

Readers of A Greater Psychology may have noticed that whereas Part One of the book contains a fairly comprehensive anthology of Sri Aurobindo's psychological writings, Part Two of that book, consisting of the author's expository essays, deals with only a small number of the topics contained in Part One. The present book, which is a supplement to A Greater Psychology, consists of additional essays which aim at throwing light on more of those topics. Like the essays in A Greater Psychology, most of the essays in this book draw heavily from Sri Aurobindo's own words for presenting his thought. Some of the essays draw also from the Mother's words which express Sri Aurobindo's thought in a more easily understandable manner and are more directly connected to spiritual practice.

Besides hitherto unpublished essays, this book brings together in a single volume articles from several published sources, some of which are not easily accessible to the reading public at large. To add to its usefulness, the book also includes contributions by Brant Cortright, Michael Miovic and Alok Pandey - three practitioners who have made an in-depth study of Sri Aurobindo's psychological thought and who attempt to apply it in their clinical work.

The essays were written over a considerable stretch of time and for different publications. This explains the occasional repetition of ideas found in the essays. It also accounts for the fact that references to literature which were relatively recent at the time of writing the essays are not now as recent.

Because Sri Aurobindo is not easy to read, especially some of his major works, the majority of readers are likely to find helpful the explanatory comments in the essays which try to clarify Sri Aurobindo's thought without altogether dispensing with, by paraphrasing, his own writings for which there is no substitute. Moreover, one is apt to get a better and more comprehensive understanding of Sri Aurobindo through a study of his works by subjects rather than by reading them from cover to cover. The essays are meant to serve this purpose as well.

Most of the Sanskrit and special terms found in Sri Aurobindo's writings in this book have already been defined in the Glossary appended to A Greater Psychology. A few additional terms have been defined in the brief Glossary here.