Aurobindo ghosh autobiography for kids

In his philosophy of education Sri Aurobindo has tried to arrive at an integral synthesis of the Eastern spirituality and Western materialism. He has synthesised both spirit and matter. From this point of view he is at the same time an idealist as well as a materialist. To Aurobindo the ultimate aim of education is the fullest and most perfect realisation of the Divine in man.

He considers education as a source of illumination of the inner self which transforms and leads to progressive and harmonious development of our physical, mental, intellectual, and spiritual powers and faculties. The eternal truths of philosophy must fulfill the needs of the present age. Pessimism and escapism do not represent the whole truth.

A happy and practical synthesis of pessimism and optimism is the need of the hour. This is perhaps the most dynamic approach to life and education today. Philosophy today needs a common platform for the meeting of the extremes. As in other branches of knowledge and activities, so in philosophy, a happy synthesis of East and West should be developed.

The Western philosophers should include and realise Eastern spirituality and the East should embrace the true and dynamic reality of the West. The psychological findings of the West should be synthesised with the spiritual discoveries of the East. The educational philosophy of Sri Aurobindo presents an ideal which satisfies the whole being of man, in a perfect harmony within himself as well as with his fellow beings.

In educational philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, the ideal explains the real, the end the beginning, the present the past. In the integral perspective, the higher explains the lower, as it integrates as well as transcends it. As a philosopher of education he is most idealistic and yet his idealism is founded on stark realism. To Sri Aurobindo, acquisition of information is not education.

It is one of the means of education. The principal aim of education is the building of the powers of the human mind and spirit. It is the evoking of knowledge, character and culture. But modern scientific knowledge has an important role to play in nation building. Hence true national education cannot ignore modern scientific knowledge. But our national education must have its foundation on our own being, our own mind, our own spirit.

The purpose of life — individual, national and universal — is spiritual development. Education is life-centered. The purpose of education is to bring out to full advantage all that is in the individual man. The human race is composed of nations and a nation is composed of individuals. Like the individual, a nation has its universal life, mind and soul.

There is something common about the universal man, and yet there is something unique about the individual man. It all depends upon how we look at it. Different people may have their different conceptions of man, of the nation, of humanity and the life of the human race. According to these different ideas the function and purpose of education will also differ.

India has had her own unique idea and vision of man. Man is the conscious manifestation of the universal spirit. He has different aspects of his existence such as mental, intellectual, ethical, practical, aesthetic, physical and the like, but all these have been as powers of a soul that manifests through them and yet they are not all the soul. The soul ascends higher and higher and becomes something greater than all, and changes man into a spiritual being.

In this, man finds the supreme manifestation of the soul, realizes his ultimate divine manhood. The individual and the nation may be raised into the life, mind and soul of humanity. Education is thus the manifestation or discovery of the soul. The central objective of education is the growth of the soul. Born at a time when India was struggling for freedom and educationists were planning a national system of education, Sri Aurobindo advocated a scheme which is a meeting ground of almost all the contemporary Indian and Western educational philosophies.

In his philosophy of education we find a common platform for the views of the foremost contemporary philosophers of education — Dayananda, Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and S. The main theme of the philosophies of these thinkers is the Neo-Vedantism coupled with modern Western science. The aim of education, according to Sri Aurobindo, is the integral development of the educand.

The educator, the educand and the school together constitute the integral pattern of education. In this integral scheme the educand, the educator and school each has been given its suitable place. None has been neglected. In ancient India, the teacher was the focal point of education, while modern education is child-centered. In the integral scheme of education neither the educator nor the educand may have the sole importance but both are united in a common bond.

Sri Aurobindo has recommended spiritual rapport between the teacher and the taught as the most important basis of education. All the contemporary philosophies and thinkers of education as stated above have shown a synthetic approach. Everyone is against one-sidedness in education. The integral approach, however, has been most comprehensively explained and consistently advocated by Sri Aurobindo.

The past is our foundation, the present our material, the future our aim and summit. Each must have its due and natural place in a national system of education. Ancient Indian education aimed at multisided development of human personality. Education to be complete must have five principal aspects relating to the five principal activities of the human being — the physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and the spiritual.

Usually these phases of education succeed each other in a chronological order following the growth of the individual. Sri Aurobindo stands for a multisided school curriculum though he recommends successive and not simultaneous teaching of different subjects. All the contemporary Indian philosophers of education emphasise with Sri Aurobindo the need of moral and religious education.

Ancient Indian education was primarily idealistic as its chief aim was liberation or emancipation from bondage. But the present approach to education is primarily pragmatic. Sri Aurobindo has no doubt emphasised spirit but he has not neglected the material world. This has also been attempted by Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath. Sri Aurobindo, too, has always tried to synthesise the East and the West.

Sri Aurobindo has given spiritual explanation of human nature. Man, according to the Indian view, is neither solely biological nor purely social. He is the expression of Divine in the individual form. Therefore, his only aim is to realise and practice his divine nature. Divinity is inherent in man. It is already in the human child.

Sri Aurobindo has always laid emphasis upon the divine element in the child. At the beginning of his stay at Pondicherry, there were few followers, but with time their numbers grew, resulting in the formation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in For some time afterwards, his main literary output was his voluminous correspondence with his disciples.

His letters, most of which were written in the s, numbered in the several thousand. Many were brief comments made in the margins of his disciple's notebooks in answer to their questions and reports of their spiritual practice—others extended to several pages of carefully composed explanations of practical aspects of his teachings. These were later collected and published in book form in three volumes of Letters on Yoga.

In the late s, he resumed work on a poem he had started earlier—he continued to expand and revise this poem for the rest of his life.

Aurobindo ghosh autobiography for kids

On 15 August , Sri Aurobindo strongly opposed the partition of India , stating that he hoped "the Nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever settled, or as anything more than a temporary expedient. Sri Aurobindo died on 5 December , of uremia. Around 60, people attended to see his body resting peacefully. National and international newspapers commemorated his death.

In her 20s she studied occultism with Max Theon. Along with her husband, Paul Richard, she went to Pondicherry on 29 March , [ 60 ] and finally settled there in Sri Aurobindo considered her his spiritual equal and collaborator. After 24 November , when Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion, he left it to her to plan, build and run the ashram, the community of disciples which had gathered around them.

Sometime later, when families with children joined the ashram, she established and supervised the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education with its experiments in the field of education. When he died in , she continued their spiritual work, directed the ashram, and guided their disciples. As such he argued that the end goal of spiritual practice could not merely be a liberation from the world into Samadhi but would also be that of descent of the Divine into the world in order to transform it into a Divine existence.

Thus, this constituted the purpose of Integral Yoga. Sri Aurobindo believed that Darwinism merely describes a phenomenon of the evolution of matter into life, but does not explain the reason behind it, while he finds life to be already present in matter, because all of existence is a manifestation of Brahman. He argues that nature which he interpreted as divine has evolved life out of matter and the mind out of life.

All of existence, he argues, is attempting to manifest to the level of the supermind — that evolution had a purpose. At the centre of Sri Aurobindo's metaphysical system is the supermind, an intermediary power between the unmanifested Brahman and the manifested world. In his writings, talks, and letters Sri Aurobindo has referred to several European philosophers with whose basic concepts he was familiar, commenting on their ideas and discussing the question of affinity to his own line of thought.

Thus, he wrote a long essay on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus [ 75 ] and mentioned especially Plato , Plotinus , Nietzsche and Bergson as thinkers in whom he was interested because of their more intuitive approach. After reading some chapters of The Life Divine , he is reported to have said that Sri Aurobindo's vision of evolution was basically the same as his own, though stated for Asian readers.

Several scholars have discovered significant similarities in the thought of Sri Aurobindo and Hegel. Steve Odin has discussed this subject comprehensively in a comparative study. Although Sri Aurobindo was familiar with the most important lines of thought in Western philosophy, he did not acknowledge their influence on his own writings. He assumes that the seers of the Upanishads had basically the same approach and gives some details of his vision of the past in a long passage in The Renaissance of India.

Even Buddhism with all its developments was only a "restatement" from a new standpoint and with fresh terms. And, furthermore, the ideas of the Upanishads "can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profound part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism Sri Aurobindo's indebtedness to the Indian tradition also becomes obvious through his placing a large number of quotations from the Rig Veda , the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita at the beginning of the chapters in The Life Divine , showing the connection of his own thought to Veda and Vedanta.

The Isha Upanishad is considered to be one of the most important and more accessible writings of Sri Aurobindo. Iyengar quotes R. Mugali as stating that Sri Aurobindo might have obtained in this Upanishad the thought-seed which later grew into The Life Divine. Sisir Kumar Maitra , who was a leading exponent of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy, [ 95 ] has referred to the issue of external influences and written that Sri Aurobindo does not mention names, but "as one reads his books one cannot fail to notice how thorough is his grasp of the great Western philosophers of the present age This influence is there, very clearly visible, but Sri Aurobindo He has made full use of Western thought, but he has made use of it for the purpose of building up his own system Puligandla supports this viewpoint in his book Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy.

He describes Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as "an original synthesis of the Indian and Western traditions. The vision that powers the life divine of Aurobindo is none other than the Upanishadic vision of the unity of all existence. From Puligandla's standpoint this is a misrepresentation of Shankara's position, which may have been caused by Sri Aurobindo's endeavour to synthesize Hindu and Western modes of thought, identifying Shankara's Mayavada with the subjective idealism of George Berkeley.

However, Sri Aurobindo's critique of Shankara is supported by U. He points out that Sri Aurobindo's system presents an integral view of Reality where there is no opposition between the Absolute and its creative force, as they are actually one. Furthermore, he refers to Sri Aurobindo's conception of the supermind as the mediatory principle between the Absolute and the finite world and quotes S.

Dubey proceeds to analyse the approach of the Shankarites and believes that they follow an inadequate kind of logic that does not do justice to the challenge of tackling the problem of the Absolute, which cannot be known by finite reason. With the help of the finite reason, he says, "we are bound to determine the nature of reality as one or many, being or becoming.

But Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaitism reconciles all apparently different aspects of Existence in an all-embracing unity of the Absolute. Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist but is best known for his philosophy on human evolution and Integral Yoga. His influence has been wide-ranging. In India, S. Maitra , Anilbaran Roy and D. Chattopadhyaya commented on Sri Aurobindo's work.

Writers on esotericism and traditional wisdom, such as Mircea Eliade , Paul Brunton , and Rene Guenon , all saw him as an authentic representative of the Indian spiritual tradition. Bose writes, "The illustrious example of Arabindo Ghosh looms large before my vision. I feel that I am ready to make the sacrifice which that example demands of me. Karlheinz Stockhausen was heavily inspired by Satprem's writings about Sri Aurobindo during a week in May , a time at which the composer was undergoing a personal crisis and had found Sri Aurobindo's philosophies were relevant to his feelings.

After this experience, Stockhausen's music took a completely different turn, focusing on mysticism, that was to continue until the end of his career. Jean Gebser acknowledged Sri Aurobindo's influence on his work and referred to him several times in his writings. After meeting Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in , the Danish author and artist Johannes Hohlenberg published one of the first Yoga titles in Europe and later on wrote two essays on Sri Aurobindo.

He also published extracts from The Life Divine in Danish translation. The Chilenean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral called Sri Aurobindo "a unique synthesis of a scholar , a theologian and one who is enlightened. Thompson has called Sri Aurobindo's teaching on spirituality a "radical anarchism" and a "post-religious approach" and regards their work as having " Sri Aurobindo's ideas about the further evolution of human capabilities influenced the thinking of Michael Murphy — and indirectly, the human potential movement , through Murphy's writings.

The American philosopher Ken Wilber has called Sri Aurobindo "India's greatest modern philosopher sage" [ ] and has integrated some of his ideas into his philosophical vision. Wilber's interpretation of Aurobindo has been criticised by Rod Hemsell. The following authors, disciples and organisations trace their intellectual heritage back to, or have in some measure been influenced by, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. Indian philosopher, yogi, maharishi, poet and nationalist — For the pharmaceutical company, see Aurobindo Pharma. Aurobindo, c. Integral yoga Evolutionism Intermediate zone Supermind.

Political career. Speeches and books. Integral yoga Intermediate zone Supermind. Matrimandir Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Auroville. The Mother Champaklal N. Pandit P. Bhattacharya A. Purani D. Journals and forums. Teachers Acharyas. Ramanuja Vedanta Desika. Madhvacharya Jayatirtha Vyasatirtha. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Tantra Shakta.

Vivekananda Aurobindo Radhakrishnan. There is clearly an idealist streak in Aurobindo's interpretation of Vedanta. This becomes even more clear when we see that he solves the problem of the linkage between the ineffable unitary mind[? The supermind is the active principle present in the mind of Brahman or perhaps more accurately, in the mind that is Brahman of which our individual minds are minuscule subdivisions.

The birthday of Sri Aurobindo, August 15 — which Aurobindo also pointed out was the Assumption of Mary in the Catholic church — is celebrated each year by Indians — it is the Independence Day of India. The average household size is 2. In the city the population is spread out with Link to Kids. Au - kids safe portal for children, parents, schools and teachers.

Search the Kids Internet. Table of contents 1 Early nationalist experiences. Search Encyclopedia. Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything! He was also a journalist , editing newspapers such as Vande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule , until was one of its influential leaders, and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution.

After returning to India he took up various civil service works under the Maharaja of the Princely state of Baroda and became increasingly involved in nationalist politics in the Indian National Congress and the nascent revolutionary movement in Bengal with the Anushilan Samiti. He was arrested in the aftermath of a number of bombings linked to his organization in a public trial where he faced charges of treason for Alipore Conspiracy.

However, Sri Aurobindo could only be convicted and imprisoned for writing articles against British colonial rule in India. He was released when no evidence could be provided, following the murder of a prosecution witness, Narendranath Goswami, during the trial. During his stay in the jail, he had mystical and spiritual experiences, after which he moved to Pondicherry , leaving politics for spiritual work.

The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life in divine body. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. His main literary works are The Life Divine , which deals with the philosophical aspect of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga , which deals with the principles and methods of Integral Yoga; and Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol , an epic poem.

His father, Krishna Dhun Ghose, was then assistant surgeon of Rangpur in Bengal and later civil surgeon of Khulna , and a former member of the Brahmo Samaj religious reform movement who had become enamoured with the then-new idea of evolution while pursuing medical studies in Edinburgh. She had been sent to the more salubrious surroundings of Calcutta for Aurobindo's birth.

Aurobindo had two elder siblings, Benoybhusan and Manmohan, a younger sister, Sarojini, and a younger brother, Barindra Kumar also referred to as Barin. Young Aurobindo was brought up speaking English, but used Hindustani to communicate with servants. Although his family were Bengali , his father believed British culture to be superior.

He and his two elder siblings were sent to the English-speaking Loreto House boarding school in Darjeeling , in part to improve their language skills and in part to distance them from their mother, who had developed a mental illness soon after the birth of her first child. Darjeeling was a centre of Anglo-Indians in India and the school was run by Irish nuns, through which the boys would have been exposed to Christian religious teachings and symbolism.

To achieve this it was necessary that they study in England and so it was there that the entire family moved in The three brothers were placed in the care of the Reverend W. Drewett in Manchester. The boys were taught Latin by Drewett and his wife. This was a prerequisite for admission to good English schools and, after two years, in , the elder two siblings were enrolled at Manchester Grammar School.

Aurobindo was considered too young for enrolment, and he continued his studies with the Drewetts, learning history, Latin, French , geography and arithmetic. Although the Drewetts were told not to teach religion, the boys inevitably were exposed to Christian teachings and events, which generally bored Aurobindo and sometimes repulsed him.

There was little contact with his father, who wrote only a few letters to his sons while they were in England, but what communication there was indicated that he was becoming less endeared to the British in India than he had been, on one occasion describing the British colonial government as "heartless". Drewett emigrated to Australia in , causing the boys to be uprooted as they went to live with Drewett's mother in London.

He learned Greek and spent the last three years reading literature and English poetry, while he also acquired some familiarity with the German and Italian languages; Peter Heehs resumes his linguistic abilities by stating that at "the turn of the century he knew at least twelve languages: English, French, and Bengali to speak, read, and write; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit to read and write; Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi to speak and read; and Italian, German, and Spanish to read.

A blue plaque unveiled in commemorates Aurobindo's residence at 49 St Stephen's Avenue in Shepherd's Bush , London, from to The three brothers began living in spartan circumstances at the Liberal Club in South Kensington during , their father having experienced some financial difficulties. By , Manmohan had determined to pursue a literary career and Benoybhusan had proved himself unequal to the standards necessary for ICS entrance.

This meant that only Aurobindo might fulfill his father's aspirations but to do so when his father lacked money required that he studied hard for a scholarship. To become an ICS official, students were required to pass the competitive examination, as well as to study at an English university for two years under probation. Aurobindo secured a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge, under recommendation of Oscar Browning.

He passed the written ICS examination after a few months, being ranked 11th out of competitors. He spent the next two years at King's College. Aurobindo had no interest in the ICS and came late to the horse-riding practical exam purposefully to get himself disqualified for the service. Cotton secured for him a place in Baroda State Service and arranged for him to meet the prince.

He left England for India, arriving there in February In India, Krishna Dhun Ghose, who was waiting to receive his son, was misinformed by his agents from Bombay now Mumbai that the ship on which Aurobindo had been travelling had sunk off the coast of Portugal. His father died upon hearing this news. In Baroda , Aurobindo joined the state service in , working first in the Survey and Settlements department, later moving to the Department of Revenue and then to the Secretariat, and much miscellaneous work like teaching grammar and assisting in writing speeches for the Maharaja of Gaekwad until He was later promoted to the post of vice-principal.

At Baroda, Aurobindo self-studied Sanskrit and Bengali. During his stay at Baroda, he had contributed to many articles to Indu Prakash and had spoken as a chairman of the Baroda college board. He started taking an active interest in the politics of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, working behind the scenes as his position in the Baroda state administration barred him from an overt political activity.

He linked up with resistance groups in Bengal and Madhya Pradesh , while travelling to these states. Aurobindo established contact with Lokmanya Tilak and Sister Nivedita. Aurobindo often travelled between Baroda and Bengal, at first in a bid to re-establish links with his parents' families and other Bengali relatives, including his sister Sarojini and brother Barin, and later increased to establish resistance groups across the Presidency.

He formally moved to Calcutta in after the announcement of the Partition of Bengal. In , on a visit to Calcutta, he married year-old Mrinalini, the daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose, a senior official in government service.