Tag Archives: karma

Aurobindo: The Only Law That Matters, The Only Freedom That Matters

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Correction: I should say that the western elites could not co-opt Aurobindo, because he taught an evolutionary spirituality grounded in individual spiritual practice, whereas the goal of modern gnosticism (of the anti-communist variety) is a technological paradise, in which most human beings become redundant, and the few who remain possess their power, not through traditional spiritual discipline and transcendence of the senses (as Aurobindo taught), but through the defiance of traditional religious training.

ORIGINAL POST

Aurobindo, the great Hindu polymath, and freedom-fighter turned yogi, whom the Western elites could never embrace  publicly as they did Gandhi, because Gandhi was a product of Western theosophy, Illuminist misdirection, and familial psychodrama, even if he was a remarkable man nonetheless:

“But all is not Law and Process, there is also Being and Consciousness; there is not only a machinery but a Spirit in things, not only Nature and law of cosmos but a cosmic Spirit, not only a process of mind and life and body but a soul in the natural creature. If it were not so, there could be no rebirth of a soul and no field for a law of Karma. But if the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual and not mechanical, it must be ourself, our soul that fundamentally determines its own evolution, and the law of Karma can only be one of the processes it uses for that purpose: our Spirit, our Self must be greater than its Karma. There is Law, but there is also spiritual freedom. Law and Process are one side of our existence and their reign is over our outer mind, life and body, for these are mostly subject to the mechanism of Nature. But even here their mechanical power is absolute only over body and Matter; for Law becomes more complex and less rigid, Process more plastic and less mechanical when there comes in the phenomenon of Life, and yet more is this so when Mind intervenes with its subtlety; an inner freedom already begins to intervene and, the more we go within, the soul’s power of choice is increasingly felt: for Prakriti is the field of law and process, but the soul, the Purusha, is the giver of the sanction, anumanta, and even if ordinarily it chooses to remain a witness and concede an automatic sanction, it can be, if it wills, the master of its nature, Ishwara.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 22, Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality.”

Vandana Shiva on Nishkama Karma

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Physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva on the practice of Right Attitude, or in Hindu terms, devotion to work without attachment to reward (nishkama karma):

“If you do anything with a narrow mindset, it makes you think according to a calculus of success and failure. Obviously when you are up against powerful interests, there are greater chances of failure than success. But when your work is inspired by a way of life and thinking, that process becomes a reward unto itself. That’s also what the Gita says, that you don’t count the results, you do the right thing according to your context. A spiritual outlook helps you see what the right thing in your context is. What matters is fulfillment, and that cannot be measured by the yardstick of society and its view of you, but by how your soul feels. Then the awards don’t matter, the brickbats don’t matter, the lousy rumors don’t matter. Nothing affects you.”