Looking from Within — Summary and Conclusions

There is a deeply embedded aspiration wtihin humanity to discover some purpoe or significance to our lives, and to the very existence of the creation within which we live and act. Our training and education, from our earliest childhood, is fixated on achieving our standing within the exte
al reality of the society within which we live. We are asked to learn a trade, have a career, marry and raise a family. We are then told that we should seek for enjoyment and we search for happiness through exte
al actions and material gratifications. For many people, this seems to be sufficient, yet at times almost every suffers from the inner struggle as to whether there is more to life than a seemingly mindless round of eating, sleeping, working and enjoying ourselves through some form of entertainment.

Occasionally someone concludes that there must be something more, something deeper, something significant to make this entire immeasurable creation and energy worth the effort. In some cases there is a traumatic event, a near death experience, a catastrophic failure in the outer life, grief from loss of loved ones, pressures to succeed at what appears to be a meaningless life. This causes a period of soul-searching and people look into various directions to find the meaning of their lives. They explore religions. They investigate philosophies of life. They try out various entheogenic substances and experience the temporary dissolution of the ego-core. They may take up life-challenging activities, adventures and explorations, or they may immerse themselves in some science or art, or skill that helps them reach beyond their limits. Eventually they recognise that they have only received partial answers, incomplete solutions, and third-hand recitations about the reality. At that point, they are ready to take up their own practice of inner growth and development, which is called ‘yoga’.

When an individual takes up yoga, he begins to experience the shift from an exte
ally-focused life to an inner-developed life. He begins “looking from within’. This leads to a two-pronged effort in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. First, the liberation of the awareness, the consciousness, as a separate witness of the nature and the illusory forms and results that are achieved in the exte
al world. This liberation can lead the seeker away from the life, as in the way of the ascetic. Or it may become a foundation for the second prong of the effort, which Sri Aurobindo calls the ‘yoga of self-perfection’. This yoga seeks to bring the divine Reality into full and conscious manifestation here, by bringing a next level of consciousness into manifestation to create the harmony and balance that the current accommodation of the physical-vital-mental being has not yet worked out.

Dr. Dalal writes: “Three chief categories of seekers have been kept in view in selecting passages for this compilation: those who wish to obtain a greater life-mastery and self-mastery; those who, while pursuing the common goals of life, also aim at something beyond the ordinary life and seek to grow towards a higher or spiritual state of being; those for whom spiritual growth is the primary purpose and preoccupation of life….”

“All of the many approaches for the attainment of mastery and inner growth involve the cultivation of certain attitudes which… are related to inner or psychological states from which we look at and react to everything in life, both within us and outside us. This book deals with such basic attitudes in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Summary and Conclusions [with citations from the Preface and back cover]