Response to Aurobindo's "Yoga and the Ordinary Life"

The aim of yoga, according to Sri Aurobindo, “is to rise to a higher consciousness and to live out of the higher consciousness alone, not with the ordinary motives” (12). Aurobindo explains that yoga will transform both your life and your consciousness. That being said, not all individuals are able to live their lives on a permanent retreat. Most practitioners have ties to the material word in the form of child, pets, homes, jobs, etc. Still, the “ordinary” practitioner would still benefit from detachment to the material realm.

Aurobindo advises that if there is nothing holding you back from the spiritual life, by all means transcend the “ordinary life.” But warns not to do so before one is ready or else there will be internal conflict and struggle. A happy medium is to work on “samata” or the balancing of the soul and mind.

There are two states of consciousness, Aurobindo explains: the higher consciousness, connected to the Divine; and the normal consciousness, concerned with the realms of men. “Those who live and act in the normal consciousness are governed entirely by the common movements of the mind and are naturally subject to grief and joy and anxiety and desire or to everything else that makes up the ordinary stuff of life… the but the spiritual consciousness is all light, peace, power, and bliss” (13).

In order to achieve the “spiritual life, Aurobindo recommends: “constant practice to go inward into oneself, to open by aspiration to the Divine and once one is conscious of it and its action, to give oneself to it entirely... to be it’s instrument only for whatever work it gives one to do in the world” (14). Essentially “devotion” to the Divine Spirit, God, Universe, etc. is the first step towards the “spiritual life.”

Aurobindo compared the goals of the “ordinary life” to that of the “spiritual life:”

“The ideal of human life is to establish over the whole being the control of a clear, strong, rational mine and a right and rational will, to master the emotional, vital and physical being, create a harmony of the whole and develop the capacities wherever they are and fulfill them in life… the object of the diving life, on the other hand, if to realize one’s highest self or to realize God and to put the whole being into harmony with the truth of the highest self.” (14)

In sum, Aurobindo details three planes of existence: the “ordinary life,” “the religious life,” and “the spiritual life.” The “ordinary life” is one ruled by Ignorance and one in which man is discounted from the Divine and thus fears death. The “religious life” turns towards the Divine but is still rooted in Ignorance and “dogma.” Only in the “spiritual life” is one free from death since the aim is an absolute union of the Self with the Divine.