The essay below, The Message of Sri Aurobindo: God, Romantic Love, and Physical Immortalitywhich I recently wrote, is based on my study of the writings of the great Indian philospher and mystic Sri Aurobindo, particularly of his epic 700 +page poem Savitri.  Sri Aurobindo is in my opinion the greatest spiritual  philosopher of the modern era—he was also an immortalist. (I define immortalism as the belief that physical immortality is desirable and attainable and necessary for the fullest flowering of life.)
     Modern immortalist philosophy, for notable exceptions, tends to be conservative and secular, if not technocratic. This is not necessarily a consequence of its alliance with science. The later is fully compatible with a panpsychic and theistic(transcendental) perspective as David Ray Griffin has shown repeatedly.
    Science and messianism dovetail in the immortalist project. The belief in the prospect of physical immortality need no longer rely upon faith in the "miraculous"---whether in its Christian version or the Eastern yogi's conviction that the disciplined mind can be trained to transcend the "laws" of nature (now believed by modern science to be habits of nature). The credibility of immortalism is enhanced today by little-known advances in the science of gerontology, with many leaders in the field asserting we are within a century at most of being able to stop aging or to nullify its consequences. The charismatic Cambridge biologist and well known public speaker Aubrey De Grey believes we are even closer.
    Most immortalist philosophy is so one-dimensional that it fails to mobilize more than a small sliver of the population. This is because it fails to connect biological immortalism with the deepest and most ancient messianic yearnings of humanity for the recovery of the lost paradise that long haunted the collective imagination. It depicts a immortal society as essentially the same as ours –minus aging and disease. Poverty will continue to exist, wars will continue to exist, shopping malls will continue to exist,the nuclear family will continue to be the locus of social life, and people will continue to have children. Romantic love will not change, despite the possibility of really living “happily ever after”! Of the secular immortalists only Aubrey De Grey seems to realize that there is something about our culture that has undermined the power of the modern imagination and tethered it to the status quo.
 It is the loss of the centuries old nostalgia for paradise, the loss of any kind of vision of paradise in secular society, the loss of any kind of messianic(utopian) eschatology, that is the main reasons for the spiritual stagnation that is leading humanity to the brink of self-destruction.  Those who do maintain a vision of paradise fail  to grasp the soteriological potential of romantic love in the modern age. Thus they do not understand that it is romantic love in the age of immortalism, a new union between male and female, that can provide a new foundation for the religious eschatologies of previous eras—for a new Great Awakening.
       In other words I am advocating the revival of a Romantic eschatology. We know this can be done. It happened in the counter-cultural 1960s–but it was limited in the 60s for many reason, including the confusion of romantic love with non-commital sex( “free love.”). But above all it was limited because romantic love requires physical immortality in order to fulfill its promise to bring us true and abiding happiness–ananda or bliss.Philosopher and Christian mystic Vladimir Solovyov was the first to realize this in the 1890s.
        (I believe all true love, including LGBT, between human beings is redemptive. But I do not feel knowledgeable enough to claim or to deny that other forms of love have a soteriological force equivalent to eternal male-female unions. Thus I leave it to others to address this issue.)
      Sri Aurobindo was the first to marry the ideals of western Romanticism with Eastern mysticism. Thus he provides the foundation for a new immortalism, one which will appeal to the most profound yearnings of human beings.
    It is my argument in this essay that commentators on Savitri, including Aurobindo’s own disciples, have failed to recognize or fully affirm the main argument of Savitri--- that romantic love based on physical immortality—eternal love-- is instrumental to the redemption of humanity and to the realization of our greatest aspirations for paradise on earth.