Excerpts from Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness – Part 1 : Sri Aurobindo would soon put this fundamental lesson of experimental spirituality into practice.

…….the task of the next half century will be “to reinstate the gods in man,” or, rather, as Sri Aurobindo put it, to reinstate the Spirit in man and in matter, and to create “the life divine on earth”: The heavens beyond are great and wonderful, but greater yet and more wonderful are the heavens within you. It is these Edens that await the divine worker.

………Actually, it is not one but several windows that open one after another, each time on a wider perspective, a new dimension of our own kingdom; and each time it means a change of consciousness as radical as going from sleep to the waking state. We are going to outline the main stages of these changes of consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo experienced them and described them to his disciples in his integral yoga, until they take us to the threshold of a new, still unknown experience that may have the power to change life itself.

Indeed, perhaps this is the true meaning of Sri Aurobindo’s humor: a refusal to see things tragically, and, even more so, a sense of inalienable royalty..

Perhaps we still confuse unity with uniformity. It was in the spirit of that tradition that Sri Aurobindo was soon to write: The perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends the nature.
“Strange” is indeed the word, because spontaneously, in their very physical substance, without the least “thought” or even “faith,” Indians sink their roots very deeply into other worlds; they do not altogether belong here. In them, these other worlds rise constantly to the surface; at the least touch the veil is rent, remarks Sri Aurobindo. …… If we leave behind our light and open cathedrals that soar high like a triumph of the divine thought in man suddenly to find ourselves before Sekmeth in the silence of Abydos on the Nile, or face to face with Kali behind the peristyle of Dakshineshwar, we do feel something; we suddenly gape before an unknown dimension, a “something” that leaves us a little stunned and speechless……

…….Nor can we say that this “self” has any true fixity:
The appearance of stability is given by constant repetition and
recurrence of the same vibrations and formations, because it is
always the same wavelengths that we pick up or, rather, that picks us
up, consistent with the laws of our environment or education; it is
always the same mental, vital or other vibrations that return through
our centers, and that we appropriate automatically, unconsciously, and
endlessly. In reality, everything is in a state of constant flux, and
everything comes to us from a mind vaster than ours (a universal
mind), a vital vaster than ours (a universal vital), from lower
subconscious regions, or from higher superconscious ones. Thus this
small frontal being is surrounded, overhung, supported, pervaded by
and set in motion by a whole hierarchy of “worlds,” as ancient wisdom
well knew: “Without effort one world moves in the other,” says the
Rig Veda (II.24-5), or, as Sri Aurobindo says, by a gradation of
planes of consciousness, which range without break from pure Spirit
to Matter, and are directly connected to each of our centers. Yet we
are conscious only of some bubbling on the surface.

Sri Aurobindo’s first secret is probably a persistent refusal to cut life in two – action vs. meditation, inner vs. outer, and the whole range of our false divisions; from the day he thought of yoga, he put everything into it, high and low, inside and outside, and he set out without ever looking back. Sri Aurobindo does not come to demonstrate exceptional qualities in an exceptional environment; he comes to show us what is possible for man, and to prove that the exceptional is only a normal possibility not yet mastered, just as the supernatural, as he said, is that the nature of which we have not attained or do not yet know, or the means of which we have not yet conquered