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Sri Aurobindo’s Return to India

A podcast by Sri Aurobindo Society 'Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change' (Savitri) The moment Sri Aurobindo put his foot down on Indian soil at age 21 on 6 February 1893, after a three-week voyage from England at Apollo Bunder in Bombay, he experienced a vast peace and calm which never left him. From then on, attaining India's freedom became his overwhelming concern, and he advocated Swaraj – complete freedom via the fiery articles he wrote in Bande Mataram. This well-presented and concise talk sketches Sri Aurobindo's remarkable life from Bombay to Pondicherry, where he finally settled for the last 40 years of his life. Spiritual life, he said, is not an escape from the world; indeed, the field of action is still here on earth and the secret of transformation of all life lies within.

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Sri Aurobindo’s Return to India
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Five Dreams of Sri Aurobindo

The fifteenth of August 1947. (This message was given by Sri Aurobindo at the request of the All India Radio, Thiruchirapalli. It was broadcast on 14th August 1947). August 15th is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance. I take this coincidence, not as a fortuitous accident, but as the sanction and seal of the Divine Force that guides my steps on the work with which I began life, the beginning of its full fruition. Indeed, on this day I can watch almost all the world-movements which I hoped to see fulfilled in my lifetime, though then they looked like impracticable dreams, arriving at fruition or on their way to achievement. In all these movements free India may well play a large part and take a leading position.

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Five Dreams of Sri Aurobindo
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Significance of Death

It was the conditions of matter upon earth that made death indispensable. The whole sense of the evolution of matter has been a growth from a first state of unconsciousness to an increasing consciousness. And in this process of growth dissolution of forms became an inevitable necessity, as things actually took place. For a fixed form was needed in order that the organised individual consciousness might have a stable support. And yet it is the fixity of the form that made death inevitable. Matter had to assume forms; individualisation and the concrete embodiment of life-forces or consciousness-forces were impossible without it and without these there would have been lacking the first conditions of organised existence on the plane of matter. But a definite and concrete formation contracts the tendency to become at once rigid and hard and petrified. The individual form persisted as a too binding mould; it cannot follow the movements of the forces; it cannot change in harmony with the progressive change in the universal dynamism; it cannot meet continually Nature's demand or keep pace with her; it gets out of the current. At a certain point of this growing disparity and disharmony between the form and the force that presses upon it, a complete dissolution of the form is unavoidable. A new form must be created; a new harmony and parity made possible. This is the true significance of death and this is its use in Nature. But if the form can become more quick and pliant and the cells of the body can be awakened to change with the changing consciousness, there would be no need of a drastic dissolution, death would be no longer inevitable.

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