The Tragedy of the Earth (From Sophocles to Sri Aurobindo)

About the Book SOPHOCLES, contemporary of Socrates and Buddha, embodies a great Turning Point of the human consciousness and our destiny, just as we were about to plunge into the modern barbarism of our post-Socratic era. "Are we slaves?" asks Sophocles, "Are we doomed to Nothingness?" And he looks at Death with another mute question: "0 unvanquished monster...." At this other end of our Iron Age, which was the age of the great religions and of science, some ten thousand years after, those extraordinary Vedic Seers who sang the dawn of men, Sri Aurobindo, the revolutionary of consciousness and Evolution, looks at the same questions, but with Vedic eyes, and a will to DO something "this time."

Between a post-Socratic West which only believes in its mechanical powers over Matter, and a post-Vedic Asia which only believes in its "liberation" from Matter, Sri Aurobindo embodies a second great Turning Point of our human des-tiny, perhaps its last turning point, when we must find again our own "divine powers over Matter," as the Vedas already sang, our own immortal reality in this Matter, or perish of our own mechanical impotence. The whole cosmogony of the world unfolds, as in a Greek tragedy, but it is the Earth that must break out of its walls, or meet with defeat once more, like Antigone.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages