I want to share how I learned to decode Sri Aurobindo’s writing.

I approached it like source code.

Very similar experience to my first time reading Spring code after undergrad.

I could read the Java, I knew all the keywords, method definitions, control structures. But as a whole it made no sense to me. Why were there at signs everywhere. What are these xml files. Someone explain a bean and dependency injection to me.

In the case of Java. I needed a more experienced dev to tell me what to look up and read about.

So I asked the elders that I was able to access. Not helpful. The typical advice, you need to pray to Aurobindo for permission to read him.

I need permission to release to prod. I’m not seeking permission to read fucking words on a page.

But back to the point, harder to find that with Aurobindo so I had to go digital.

My reading group attempted. We had to go through his prose with a dictionary in hand. Very tedious. The combined brains of a software developer, Big Four Auditor, professor, and bank executive kept hitting walls. Vivekananda’s speeches were a much lower cognitive lift for us and we got cocky.

But.

Dr. Alok Panday does a great job taking the prose of Aurobindo. Then showing you the map on how to decipher it.

Every sentence needs to be read multiple times. Same for the paragraphs. Words need to be looked up. And cross references need to be considered.

Recursion. Who would’ve thunk it’s useful outside of traversing a graph or generating “secure” passwords to store a De la Briandais trie to later search against. Joys of algorithms class.

Quite thankful I learned this before starting this iteration of the blog, love weaving in tangents.