Sri Aurobindo - Gita, Vasudev, Sanatan Dharma and India

100 years back, on 30th May 1909, a man delivered his last political speech before retiring from active political life and moving to Puduchery for his spiritual pursuits. He was Sri Aurobindo.

http://www.searchforlight.org/Anubhuti/Anubhuti%20Vol%202/UttarpadaSpeech.htm

You'll enjoy the speech if you read through full text but for those with time constraints ... :), highlights are given below

* How he saw Vasudev (Shri Krishna) everywhere in Jail, his conversations with God (Vasudev) and also how Vasudev helped him.

I looked the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me his shade.

* Bhagavad Gita and Sanatan Dharma.

Then He placed the Gita in my hands. His strength entered into me and I was able to do the sadhana of the Gita. I was not only to understand intellectually but to realise what Sri Krishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion and desire, to do work for Him without the demand for fruit, to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure, yet not to do His work negligently. I realised what the Hindu religion meant. We speak often of the Hindu religion, of the Sanatan Dharma, but few of us really know what that religion is. Other religions are preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatan Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as lived.

Above description is what Gita explains as 'Karma-Yoga'.

* India's rise, nationalism and Sanatan Dharma

She (India) does not rise as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak. She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world. India has always existed for humanity and not for herself and it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great.......When therefore it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall be great........I spoke once before with this force in me and I said then that this movement is not a political movement and that nationalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. I say it again today, but I put it in another way. I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows. When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatan Dharma it would perish.