Sri Aurobindo turns to Yoga (age 32)

While in Kashmir with the Maharaja of Baroda, Sri Aurobindo experiences the ‘vacant Infinite’ when walking the hills of Takht-i-Sulaiman near the temple of Shankaracharya.

A few years later, he has darshan of Swami Brahmananda at his ashram. Afterwards, visiting one of the temples of Kali in the neighborhood, he sees not just an image but a Presence: “With my Europeanised mind I had no faith in image worship and I hardly believed in the presence of God. I went to Karnali [near Chandod] where there are many temples. There is one of Kali, and when I looked at the image I saw the living Presence there. For the first time I believed in the presence of God.”

It is to these two singular experiences that Sri Aurobindo refers in the following passage in one of his letters:

“A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience; yet sometimes the Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there comes the touch, a revelation, a flooding, the mental loses itself in the spiritual, one bears the first invasion of the Infinite. Or you stand before a temple of Kali behind a sacred river and see what? — a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother.”

The following year, Sri Aurobindo turns his attention to Yoga

“I had thought that a yoga which required me to give up the world was not for me. I had to liberate my country. I took it seriously when I learnt that the same Tapasya which one does to get away from the world can be turned to action. I learnt that yoga gives power, and thought why should I not get the power and use it to liberate my country?

 So when I turned to the Yoga and resolved to practise it and find out if my idea was right, I did it in this spirit and with this prayer to Him, “If Thou art, then Thou knowest my heart. Thou knowest that I do not ask for Mukti, I do not ask for anything which others ask for. I ask only for strength to uplift this nation, I ask only to be allowed to live and work for this people whom I love and to whom I pray that I may devote my life.”

Sri Aurobindo begins to practice pranayama which becomes an indispensable preparation for his yoga.

Later, Sri Aurobindo writes: “It took me four years [1904-1908] of inner striving to find a real Way, even though the divine help was with me all the time, and even then, it seemed to come by an accident; and it too me ten more years of intense Yoga under a supreme inner guidance to trace it out and that was because I had my past and the world’s past to assimilate and overpass before I could find and found the future.”