The new brand of intuition, the integral insight

Sri Aurobindo: The Consummate Expression of the Indian Spirit of Synthesis

SWAMI SIVANANDA

And it needed the supreme cultural genius of a Sri Aurobindo, the like of whom the spirit and the creative vision of India alone can create, to give a yet bolder or rather the boldest manifestation to a synthesization of insights in philosophic, cultural and religious or spiritual wisdom and experience and to an invaluable integral conception of the triple Reality that the inquiring reason and metaphysical awareness of man encounters in creative endeavours against the facts and events of experience and reflection. Sri Aurobindo is indeed the consummate expression of the spirit of synthesis inherent in Indian culture.

Apart from the greatness we discern and admire in the uniqueness of the philosophic experience and statement of Sri Aurobindo, there is one thing more which needs and claims our recognition and consequent admiration, the fact that the methodology Sri Aurobindo had requisitioned as a means to his grasp of the fundamental facts of existence, of the great values of integral life, of the nature of the Divine in the human individual, the Divine in the universe and the Divine in its own timeless eternity and transcendentality, was constituted by no mere power of speculative reason, no mere philosophic vision, no building upon what has been handed over to him as his heritage, but by the intuition, the new brand of intuition, the integral insight that he had obtained in the seclusion of Pondicherry, in experience of the supernormal factors in the spiritual world, in an experimenting richness of personal sādhanā and siddhi.

With a joy that only a mother who has borne a genius-babe can know, India is proud of Sri Aurobindo and the phenomenon of his extraordinary contributions; but the profit accruing from the gifts of Aurobindo is not only its own, it is of all the world! May the spirit of Aurobindo shower its choicest blessings upon all mankind! The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo: A Commemorative Symposiumby Haridas Chaudhuri, Frederic Spiegelberg.