So my family is overall very liberal and largely nonreligious but we have this one uncle... He is educated, I think lawyer or engineer or something, but he started getting into Sri Aurobindo and now he has become very religious but in a different way to the usual Hindutva idiocy. (But he has become less tolerant towards others and evangelical in his behaviour.) His child has picked it up too and says strange things about religion but I am mainly worried for my uncle. I think he is giving a lot of money and he has started saying things about Messiahs, the age of the Earth, the need to return to nature, and about how Sri Aurobindo has the answers to everything but has not been recognized in the West... (Even though I think his writings have been translated and shared widely?)
Its weird and my wider family is becoming concerned for him. I do not know much about Sri Aurobindo or Auroville, I thought they were mostly foreigners living in a commune and not that religious. I know I should have done more research before posting here but I'm not sure this is a rabbit hole I want to go down. Mainly I was wondering if any of you have experience with this group and how insidious/dangerous they are. Thank you all
Entire post copied verbatim from Swarajya article:
Sayajirao Gaekwad III (1863–1939), the Maharaja of Baroda State from 1875 to 1939.
In 1892, the Maharaja and Aurobindo met. Sayajirao Gaekwad asked him to take up a teaching job in Baroda University.
From February 1893 to February 1906, Sri Aurobindo spent full thirteen years in Baroda. He ended up as both the Vice-Principal of the college as well as the king’s personal secretary.
In this capacity, Sri Aurobindo also wrote the speeches for the king. This was also the time Sri Aurobindo was contributing to the magazines run by freedom fighters in Bengal.
The British already had their doubts about the Baroda king as being sympathetic to the Hindu revolutionaries. British officials, including the regent, started giving trouble to the ruler and Aurobindo being in the employ of the princely state was one of the major causes.
But far from being disturbed by that, the king was defiant. For example, the British had banned Bengalis from joining the military. But the Baroda king gave military training to Jatin Bannerji, one of Aurobindo's friends, making him join the Baroda cavalry.
Sri Aurobindo, not wanting to cause any problem for the king, left Baroda. The king requested Sri Aurobindo not to leave. But Aurobindo was already determined. He took up a job in Bengal that paid only one-fifth of the salary of what he got in Baroda.
Even after Sri Aurobindo left, the British viewed the king with strong suspicion.
In his secret letter to the British government, Viceroy Hardinge traced the hostility that the king had for the British 'to the pernicious influence of the Poona Brahmins’ who 'with a concerted object ...kept up a constant glorification of the Gaekwad.'
The letter also speaks of the influence Aurobindo had on the king even years after he had left, observing that 'his employment in the State gave a great impetus to the anti-British movement.'
Then there was an 'akhara', a wrestling club in the heart of Baroda that was run by Hindu monks, which the report pointed out, was where 'sedition has been openly preached ... without any opposition from the State police.'
**The intelligence reports of the British also spoke about Shankar Wagh, a
... keep reading on reddit ➡The Tiger and the Deer by Analysis Aurobindo's genius manifested itself not only in his major works but also in exquisite shorter poems. In small proportions also we see just beauties and life becomes perfect in short measures too.
https://www.eng-literature.com/2021/09/the-tiger-and-the-deer-analysis.html
>"But what is the Hindu religion? What is this religion which we call Sanatan, eternal? It is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it, because in this Peninsula it grew up in the seclusion of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred and ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages.
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>But it is not circumscribed by the confines of a single country, it does not belong peculiarly and forever to a bounded part of the world. That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose. This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy."
"Foundations of Indian Culture" is a book by Sri Aurobindo. It's a collection of series of articles published between 1918 and 1921 in the ARYA. I'll be publishing excerpts from this book here. Excerpt 1.1 is from the first article under the series 'The Issue: Is India Civilised?' -
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A book under this rather startling title was published some years ago by Sir John Woodroffe, the well-known scholar and writer on Tantric philosophy, in answer to an extravagant jeu d’esprit by Mr. William Archer. That well-known dramatic critic leaving his safe natural sphere for fields in which his chief claim to speak was a sublime and confident ignorance, assailed the whole life and culture of India and even lumped together all her greatest achievements, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, sculpture, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, in one wholesale condemnation as a repulsive mass of unspeakable barbarism. It was argued by many at the time that to reply to a critic of this kind was to break a butterfly, or it might be in this instance a bumble-bee upon the wheel. But Sir John Woodroffe insisted that even an attack of this ignorant kind ought not to be neglected; he took it as a particularly useful type in the general kind, first, because it raised the question from the rationalistic and not from the Christian and missionary standpoint and, again, because it betrayed the grosser underlying motives of all such attacks. But his book was important, not so much as an answer to a particular critic, but because it raised with great point and power the whole question of the survival of Indian civilisation and the inevitability of a war of cultures.
The question whether there has been or is a civilization in India is not any longer debatable; for everyone whose opinion counts recognises the presence of a distinct and a great civilisation unique in its character. Sir John Woodroffe’s purpose was to disclose the conflict of European and Asiatic culture and, in greater prominence, the distinct meaning and value of Indian civilisation, the peril it now runs and the calamity its destruction would be to the world. The author held its preservation to be of an immense importance to mankind and he believed it to be in great danger. In the stupendous rush of change which is coming on the human world as a result of the present tornado of upheaval, ancient India’s culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the indifference
... keep reading on reddit ➡