8.
We shall not be surprised to discover that Subhas also developed boundless admiration for the great spiritual giant Sri Aurobindo [Arabinda in Bengali], who was also a Bengali. Sri Aurobindo was one of India's foremost revolutionary leaders before he retired to Pondicherry to devote himself to perfecting his spiritual realisation. He felt that he could be of greater service to his country and to the world at large through his prayer and meditation. Subhas tells us that Sri Aurobindo's profound inner message provided a spiritual foundation for his outer life of nation-service:"The reconciliation between the One and the Many, between God and the creation, which Ramakrishna and Vivekananda had preached, had indeed impressed me but had not till then succeeded in liberating me from the cobwebs of Maya. In this task of emancipation, Arabinda came as an additional help. He worked out a reconciliation between Spirit and Matter, between God and the creation, on the metaphysical side and supplemented it with a synthesis of the methods of attaining the truth" — a synthesis of Yoga, as he called it.
