Sri Aurobindo Birth Anniversary 2024 – Yogi Arvind Jayanti - Birth Anniversary Of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh
Sri Aurobindo (15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950), also known as Yogi Arvind, was an Indian philosopher, yoga guru, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. His birth anniversary is annually held on August 15. In 2024, it is the 151st birth anniversary of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (Yogi Aravind). Brilliant scholar, revolutionary, spiritual visionary – the worldview of Sri Aurobindo gives each individual a meaningful place in a progressive cosmic unfolding and casts our understanding of human endeavor in a new and purposeful perspective.
The day is observed in centers around the world associated with Sri Aurobindo especially at Auroville in Pondicherry, India. Various programs on the day include scholarly meetings, speeches by eminent personalities, satsangs, reading from the collected works of Aurobindo, and food donation.
Wholly educated in England along with his two brothers, he was given an entirely Western education by their Anglophile father. After infant schooling at a convent in Darjeeling, they were taken to England to live with a clergyman's family in Manchester. From there they joined St. Paul's public school in West London, and later went on to Cambridge University.
He returned to India in 1893 in the service of the Indian princely State of Baroda, where he remained up to 1906.
Sri Aurobindo was the first of the Nationalist leaders to insist on full independence for India as the goal of the movement, and for several years he lent all his considerable abilities and energies to this struggle. This led to him being arrested on a charge of treason and being kept in solitary confinement for almost a year as an 'under trial' prisoner in Alipore jail. During this time he had a number of fundamental spiritual experiences which convinced him of the truth of the "Sanatana Dharma" - the ancient spiritual knowledge and practice of India.
After he was acquitted and released, this spiritual awareness led him to take refuge from continuing pursuit by the British authorities in Pondicherry, then part of French India, where he devoted himself intensively to the exploration of the new possibilities it opened up to him.
The great originality of Sri Aurobindo is to have fused the modern scientific concept of evolution with the perennial gnostic experience of an all-pervading divine consciousness supporting all phenomenal existence.
At Pondicherry, he developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life in divine body. According to him, Jnana (knowledge), Bhakti (devotion) and Karma (work ethics) can lead man to the divine path. But synthesis of spirituality, creativeness and intellectuality is essential for a sound personality. He states that the Higher Mind is a first plane of spiritual consciousness where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the one everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness.
Sri Aurobindo was intimate devotee of Gita. He has presented scientific analysis of Gita’s karma yoga and dhyana yoga.