Building an Intuitive Mentality: The NeoVedantic Knowledge Project of Sri Aurobindo

Debashish Banerji

doi:10.4172/2469-6676.100136

Abstract

Post-Enlightenment philosophy, which is largely creative of and dominates the modern consciousness, has defined humanism in terms of rationality and its control over the irrational. This has led to our technological age but has also spawned counter philosophies critiquing the limits of reason and the epistemic possibilities of experience and intuition. Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (1872-1950) was an Indian thinker who was schooled in England and arrived at a cosmopolitan grasp of modernity, including the ideals of the Enlightenment and its limitations. Looking to the discursive and experiential traditions of India, particularly those of the Upanishads (Vedanta) he sought for hermeneutic keys to address the human possibilities of knowledge. In his reading of the Upanishads, he saw a fundamental division between Knowledge (Vidya) and Ignorance (Avidya) and a practical tradition (yoga) which negotiated this division by rejecting worldly or relative knowledge (Avidya) for a Knowledge-by-identity (Vidya). Whereas such a transcendentalism had been idealized even within the counter-movements of the Enlightenment as "the Eastern Enlightenment," Sri Aurobindo sought traces of an intuitive mediating consciousness which would enable a new kind of worldly knowledge based in Truth-Seeing (darshan) and Hearing (sruti). He has referred to this knowledge project as "building an intuitive mentality," a transformative process based on Vedantic knowledge and leading more to an integral consciousness than what we would call a mentality. Looking for the operations of absolute Knowledge in the Vidya that translate to operations of relative knowledge in the Avidya, he located four forms of intuition that could be cultivated and normalized towards the end of preparing such an intuitive consciousness and leading ultimately to an integral consciousness foundational to a divine collective life on earth. In this paper, I will outline these operations of knowledge and discuss the processes by which Sri Aurobindo sought to bridge our human "rational ignorance" (Avidya) to the integral knowledge (Vidya) spoken of in the Upanishads.

Highlights

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was an Indian nationalist, philosopher and spiritual teacher, who spent most of his school and college years in England, before returning to India to participate in India’s anticolonial struggle and later become the philosophersage of Pondicherry
It behooves us to start with an understanding of Enlightenment epistemology as Sri Aurobindo encountered it in some of the best exemplars of the British and European knowledge academy
The powers of being and the identity with Vijnana through trance or Samadhi are areas that exceed the scope of this essay but can be read about in Sri Aurobindo’s diaries (The Record of Yoga) [7] and in his text on yoga, The Synthesis of Yoga [13]

Summary

Introduction

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was an Indian nationalist, philosopher and spiritual teacher, who spent most of his school and college years in England, before returning to India to participate in India’s anticolonial struggle and later become the philosophersage of Pondicherry. The telos of an absolute epistemology and the scientific method utilized to arrive at it may be more fitting to an objective material reality (the “hard sciences”) than knowledge of the subjective world, studied through the “human sciences” of psychology, anthropology and the “social sciences;” or through the “humanities.” The latter (i.e. the human sciences and the humanities), constituting the pole of the “who” as against the “what” of the epistemological project, are yoked with difficulty to its goals and methods due to the impossibility of objectification of the self, the fuzziness of definable categories of experience and fibrous or rhizomatic complexity or multiplicity of its relationships rendering absolute classification suspect [1] This has led to a number of results, prominent among which is the unevenness in the progress of modern knowledge, slanted towards a privileging of the “hard sciences” and technologies. One may summarize the critiques of Enlightenment epistemology : 1. The faith in piecing together a single logical “systems theory of everything” is impossible and misplaced

Through the creation of an absolutist exteriorized goal

Conclusion