Arya

(Pondicherry 1910–1950)

In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo dedicated himself to his spiritual and philosophical pursuits. In 1914, after four years of secluded yoga, he started a monthly philosophical magazine called Arya. (This ceased publication in 1921. Many years later, he revised some of these works before they were published in book form. Some of the book series derived from this publication were The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Renaissance in India, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and The Future Poetry were published in this magazine.)

Although it is unknown who was responsible for the choice of Arya as the title of the journal, Sri Aurobindo explained what he understood the term to represent. In the second issue (September 1914), he composed an article entitled Arya: Its Significance in which he set forth the meaning of the term as he intended it. He wrote:

Intrinsically, in its most fundamental sense, arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature. He overcomes earth and the body and does not consent like ordinary men to their dullness, inertia, dead routine and tamasic limitations. He overcomes life and its energies and refuses to be dominated by their hungers and cravings or enslaved by their rajasic passions. He overcomes the mind and its habits, he does not live in a shell of ignorance, inherited prejudices, customary ideas, pleasant opinions, but knows how to seek and choose, to be large and flexible in intelligence even as he is firm and strong in his will. For in everything he seeks truth, in everything right, in everything height and freedom.[3]

Program and organization:

The Arya was advertised as "a review of pure philosophy"[4] with a twofold object:

1. A systematic study of the highest problems of existence.
2. The formation of a synthesis of knowledge, harmonizing the diverse religious traditions of humanity, occidental as well as oriental.

The method of the review was described as one of "realism, at once rational and transcendental; a realism consisting in the unification of intellectual and scientific discipline with those of intuitive experimentation."[4]

The material appearing in the Arya was organized under four main headings:

1. Synthetic studies in speculative philosophy.
2. Translations and commentaries of ancient texts.
3. Studies in comparative Religion.
4. Practical methods of inner culture and self-development.

[4]

Research synthesis or evidence synthesis is the process of combining the results of multiple primary research studies aimed at testing the same conceptual hypothesis. It may be applied to either quantitative[1] or qualitative research.[2] Its general goals are to make the findings from multiple different studies more generalizable and applicable.[3] It aims to generate new knowledge by combining and comparing the results of multiple studies on a given topic.[1]

In qualitative research, methods of synthesis include narrative synthesis and meta-ethnography. Narrative synthesis allows researchers to address a wide range of questions in their review, while meta-ethnography aims to preserve the cultural context in which the original findings of the included studies were generated.[2][4][5] The narrative synthesis approach has attracted criticism because of its potential for bias, with critics highlighting the subjective nature of the use of the method to draw conclusions. There is also evidence that reviews using the narrative synthesis approach often suffer from a lack of transparency.[6]