Being Evolution and Immortality: An Outline of Integral Philosophy (A Quest Book)

By Haridas Chaudhuri

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0835604497
• ISBN13: 9780835604499
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Theosophical Pub House
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.1" x 5.1" x 0.7"

Customer Reviews

An excellent general philosophical context for Integral Yoga

My general impression of this work was that Chaudhuri was writing in a very philosophical style about a topic which is far more than philosophical. The extent to which he took pains to delineate some various philosophical perspectives so that he could present the viewpoint of the integral yoga surprised me; I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but I kept feeling like I was back in my undergraduate philosophy program, reading and comparing different works. The intellectualism that accompanies the philosophical world has some excellent and unfortunate consequences. In the case of this book, I felt that on the one hand it provided a strong case for the philosophical underpinnings of the integral yoga, which can be useful for those who work through and towards the difficult topics he discusses in an intellectual way. By doing this, it can be possible for the intellect to contextualize the various meanings and approaches to things like the Divine, to the Non-dual, Being, the Absolute, and so forth, in such a way as to allow the rest of the human being to begin to find a way of moving with the material at a different level. I find that sometimes the intellect, lacking this context or ability to engage, results in either an over or under-attachment to the real content that is attempting to be addressed through philosophical language. In other words, the philosophical nature of the presentation calls forth the part of ourselves that is capable of dealing with the concepts in a direct, wakeful, conscious manner, which helps to mitigate either sympathetic or antipathetic reactions which may otherwise arise in its absence. On the other hand, presenting material like this through a philosophical standpoint also lessens its potential impact by restricting itself to a style of address whose major target is the mental part of the human being. This is true even if the content of the words include ideas like love, goodness, and so forth; what comes across is often only the shell of an experience, rather than words designed for the immediate evocation of the experience. This is not so much a criticism as just how things like this often go, because we can only write and express so much through words without seeming almost schizophrenic. It seems that Sri Aurobindo, the major synthesizer of Integral Yoga (in concert with The Mother) worked on both sides of this issue, writing both intellectually and poetically as the need arose. In reading Being I felt like I was assuming the posture of a bird in flight, soaring over a vast landscape and beneath an even vaster sky. I had the sense of swooping down occasionally towards the Earth, or of straining my wings to fly ever higher... but never did I feel either truly connected to either the Earth or the Heavens, but rather somehow suspended in between, almost as if in a strange form of limbo. I really wanted Chaudhuri's discussion to find much more direct and explicit contact with experiences and realiti