Although the Institute has no official spiritual path, some of its historical roots lie among followers of the Bengali sage Sri Aurobindo.
There, he read the writings of Sri Aurobindo, particularly the Life Divine and became his lifelong admirer and disciple.
Important writers in the field of integral psychology are Sri Aurobindo, Indra Sen, Haridas Chaudhuri, and Ken Wilber.
He was selected for I.A.S. in 1955 but in 1956 he resigned in order to devote himself at Pondicherry to the study and practice of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
The theory owes to the work of Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, which was published in 1949 but originally written in 1916-1918 under the title The Psychology of Social Development.
Topics on which he has written or lectured include the evolution of consciousness, the spiritual mission of America, classic and modern spirituality and spiritual masters (East and West), Sri Aurobindo, and Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy.
A particularity of the book is that Sethna often refers to Sri Aurobindo's interpretation of the Rig Veda.
The spelling Mahapudma originates as a misprint of Mahapadma in Sri Aurobindo's 1921 retelling of a story of the Mahabharata,
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On the other hand, it also follows in the tradition of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and the German Idealist philosophers.
A significant and torch-bearer poet is Nissim Ezekiel and the significant poets of the post-Derozio and pre-Ezekiel times are Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo.
His deeper quest led him to mysticism and he has been an inmate of Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry since 1973 where he currently teaches English Literature and the Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo at the Sri Aurobindo International University.
Well entrenched in the philosophy of Vedas, Upanishads and Gita, he has followed in detail the thoughts and writings of Western thinkers like Karl Marx and Arnold Toynbee and the Indian seers like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Sree Narayana Guru, Mahatma Gandhi and Deendayal Upadhyaya.
He was acquainted with the classical and folk traditions of the Gujarati, Marathi and Sanskrit languages and was influenced by the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Max Muller, Walt Whitman, Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda.
The Great Aranyaka, a translation and commentary on the first chapter, first Brahmana of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, appeared in the Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual in 1953.
Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, a Hindu spiritual leader