Philosophy supplies guidelines for living as we move more and more into the heart center. It dispels our ignorance and feeds our aspiration. Purna Yoga looks to the teachings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the Vedas, the Gita, and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras for the foundation of its philosophy. It embraces the essence of all religious faiths.
Purna Yoga values philosophy for its application to life and never just for its own beauty or brilliance. Philosophy, like all other knowledge, is useless unless it is applied. The truths of great yoga philosophy are not simply meant to be known; they are meant to be lived. Purna Yoga teaches students to do this by simplifying and clarifying the underpinnings of seminal yogic texts, and offering examples of how these truths may be applied to daily life.
An Introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s Philosophy
Sri Aurobindo’s teachings are the primary philosophical underpinning of Purna Yoga, and Purna Yoga is essentially a methodology of actualizing Sri Aurobindo’s vision. Through direct spiritual experience, Sri Aurobindo recognized that evolution is a tool of spirituality, and not in conflict with it. God did not create the universe; he became the universe, plunging Himself into the inconscience of matter in an act of Self-discovery. The Divine has since been drawing the universe back towards its fundamental essence, which is Light, creating life out of inconscient matter, and mind out of life. Evolution, viewed from this perspective, is the universal movement of liberation from ignorance and inconscience, not simply an organic process creating more advanced life forms. And the world is not an illusion or a place of suffering to be escaped, but the tool through which this liberation takes place. Sri Aurobindo taught us that true spirituality does not reject the world; it perfects it.
Thus far, the evolutionary process has been slow; however, humanity has the power to exponentially increase the rate of evolution. Man has two unique capacities: (1) an ability to perceive the presence of the Divine and transcend the limitations of his animal self; and (2) a self-reflective consciousness that allows him to observe himself with detachment. As a result of these abilities, man has the option of actively participating in the evolution of his consciousness – of making choices that move him as an individual (and thereby humanity as a whole) toward Light and away from ignorance. For those who so choose, Purna Yoga is a methodology for speeding the evolutionary process and moving us into the next great phase of evolution, which will be the spiritual.