Essays on the Gita

Sri Aurobindo was born on August 15, 1872, in Calcutta, India. At the age of seven, he went to England for his education. After taking a Tripos in the Classics from Kings College, Cambridge, he returned to India in 1893. For the next fourteen years, he worked in the Princely State of Baroda, in various government departments and as a professor in Baroda College. During this period, he mastered Sanskrit, Bengali and several other Indian languages and produced a prolific output of poetry and literary criticism. In 1906, Sri Aurobindo quit his post in Baroda and went to Calcutta, where he became one of the leaders of Indias struggle for independence from British colonial rule. In this context, he envisaged and organized a two-pronged approach non-violent Boycott and non-cooperation for the masses and revolutionary action leading to armed insurrection for those who were ready to sacrifice themselves for the country. Arrested in May, 1908 for conspiracy, he spent one year in jail as an undertrial prisoner, but was then acquitted. from 1905, at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo took to the practice of the spiritual discipline of yoga, initially as a means to enhance his capacity to bring India her independence. Subsequently, in 1910, he withdrew from politics and moved to Pondicherry to devote himself exclusively to the practice of yoga. After gathering up in himself the essential elements of past spiritual experience, he moved on in search of a more complete realization, one which would unite the two poles of Spirit and Matter. During his forty years in Pondicherry, he worked out a new system of spiritual development which he called the Integral Yoga. The aim of this yoga is a spiritual realization which will not only liberate mans consciousness but transform his nature and divinize life. In 1926, Sri Aurobindo withdrew to the seclusion of his room, but continued to maintain contact with disciples through a large correspondence and by giving darshan four times a year. Among his many writings of the Pondicherry period, the best known are The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays of the Gita and Savitri. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5th December, 1950.