Sri Aurbindo was complicit in facilitating the growth of a religion around his integral yoga even if he asserted it was not a religion

Aspiration Reply by Barindranath Chaki

Dear all, All life is Yoga, as said by Sri Aurobindo. Hence, I think we may post here a wide variety of things, excepting in favour of or against any political party or any religion, and excepting anything against the Ashram or Auroville. We should not also post anything which against our AIM here. I think, you are a best judge of things to be done or not to be done. Permalink ► Reply to This

Edward Berge: July 7th, 2008 at 9:01 pm Rich responded...

I believe he is mistakenly believing that I am exalting Sri Aurobindo at the expense of Wilber. Although for many reasons I do see Aurobindo and Wilber as incommeasurable figures, in fact I do cite some of the Integral Yoga followers under a Fundamentalist critique. I have engaged much too often with Hindu fundamentalist appropriating Sri Aurobindo’s text to their own ends. Additionally although I do believe Sri Aurbindo would have nothing to do with Hindu Nationalism of today, he was in fact complicit - and I have agreement on this from some of his biographers - in facilitating the growth of a religion around his integral yoga even if he asserted it was not a religion...

In fact, I am skeptical of Sri Aurobindo’s whole evolution of consciousness scheme because in fact IMO he is doing just that, grafting a modernist model of evolution and progress popular in his day onto his integral yoga. In other words although I do think there are other realities Sri Aurobindo sees (aka. darshan), the evolution of consciousness however, is not one of them, it is IMO a well argued discursive construct.