... persistence of the body and bodily life alone, we must regard — so runs the argument of the Charvakas — the carnal pleasures as the only desirable things of which we can be sure and certain. Also, simply because sense pleasures are irretrievably mixed up with their quota of pain, it would be the height of absurdity to forgo on that score all pleasures of bodily life; for it would then be like ... in whatever way his personal nature demands, until it passes out of him in the course of inevitable and not so far-off individual annihilation. 1 To exemplify the attitudes to body and bodily life this cosmic-terrestrial theory of existence tends to engender in the mind and heart of its adherents, let us consider in turn two schools of thought one of which arising in ancient India even... the level of his senses, his sensations, his unenlightened and unchast-ened emotions, his gross utilitarian practicality." 6 Leaving aside this Charvaka-Philistine attitude to body and bodily life we now proceed to the consideration of the scientifically controlled physical culture of the bodily system, so much prevalent in our day. 1 "Na hi ajīrṇa-bhayāt āhara-parityāgo, yūka-bhayād ...
... interject at this point: "The waking realisation that you are aiming at — has it not been already possessed by those who have been variously termed j ī vanmukta ('liberated while still leading a bodily life'), sthitaprajña ('established in the true Knowledge and Wisdom'), ativarṇāśramī ('beyond all standards of conduct') or brahmavid ('one who has known and become the Brahman' 1 ) ?" — the ... current body-formation and the attainment to the status of videhamukti. Jivanmukti represents the status of that seeker who has already attained Self-Knowledge but is still leading the present bodily life awaiting the day when this will cease for good and he will become "liberated in bodylessness" (videhamukta). It follows then that the Jivanmukti status is the more valued, the more it... before that, contrary to our own attitude to the body and physical existence, the Jivanmukti ideal does not attach much importance to any terrestrial realisation as such; it only tolerates the bodily life so long as it has to be borne and thus tries, if we may say so, make the best of a bad bargain. But whatever be the nature of the ideal sought, how does a Jivanmukta behave so far as his ...
... is most divine or else most diabolical, but in either case the most puissant to bring her rapidly forward towards her goal. That which Nature has evolved for us and has firmly founded is the bodily life. She has effected a certain combination and harmony of the two inferior but most fundamentally necessary elements of our action and progress upon earth,—Matter, which, however the too ethereally... ignores the body or makes its annulment or its rejection indispensable to a perfect spirituality. Rather, the perfecting of the body also should be the last triumph of the Spirit and to make the bodily life also divine must be God's final seal upon His work in the universe. The obstacle which the physical presents to the spiritual is no argument for the rejection of the physical; for in the unseen ... noxious activities. Their purification, not their destruction,—their transformation, control and utilisation is the aim in view with which they have been created and developed in us. If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as her base and first instrument, it is our mental life that she is evolving as her immediate next aim and superior instrument. This in her ordinary exaltations ...
... most divine or else most diabolical, but in either case the most puissant to bring her rapidly forward towards her goal. That which Nature has evolved for us and has firmly founded is the bodily life. She has effected a certain combination and harmony of the two inferior but most fundamentally necessary elements of our action and progress upon earth,— Matter, which, however the too ethereally... at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in humanity.... If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as her base and first instrument, it is our mental life that she is evolving as her immediate next aim and superior instrument. This in her ordinary exaltations... and in animals always imprisoned. It accepts this life as not only the first but the whole condition of its activities and serves its needs as if they were the entire aim of existence. But the bodily life in man is a base, not the aim, his first condition and not his last determinant. In the just idea of the ancients man is essentially the thinker, the Manu, the mental being who leads the life ...
... secret existence, with three successive forms as her three steps of ascent. And we have consequently as the condition of all our activities these three mutually interdependent possibilities, the bodily life, the mental existence and the veiled spiritual being which is in the involution the cause of the others and in the evolution their result. Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental... harmonious rhythm and so create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect Man. In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic and governing impulse. The characteristic energy of bodily Life is not so much in progress as in persistence, not so much in individual self-enlargement as in self-repetition. There is, indeed, in physical Nature a progression from type to type, from the vegetable... aspect of a continual enlargement, improvement and better arrangement of its gains and so of a continual passage from a smaller and simpler to a larger and more complex perfection. For Mind, unlike bodily life, is infinite in its field, elastic in its expansion, easily variable in its formations. Change, then, self-enlargement and self-improvement are its proper instincts. Mind too moves in cycles, but ...
... Supramental consciousness fully in the physical body. There is also a mention in the Upanishads43 that if one enters into the Supramental Consciousness fully, one cannot return from there into the bodily life. In the case of Socrates, we find that he advocated full life of the intellectual and spiritual consciousness in the mind, life and body. He also maintained that since the soul is planted... Divine Providence, the body should not be discarded. At the same time, he insisted that one should not crave to continue to live in the body, when by natural means or natural circumstances, the bodily life comes to an end. In this regard Socrates was following the Orphic44 view of life. Socrates maintained that in the ultimate analysis, bodily consciousness imposed on the soul the limitations of cravings... there is a full acknowledgement of the limitations of the physical life as it is lived under the conditions of the present organisation of consciousness. What is proposed, therefore, is that the bodily life should undergo a great perfection and even an evolutionary mutation so that the material life of the body becomes fully transformed. Divine life in a divine body is thus proposed as the aim of the ...
... accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself..." 5 There are three rungs in the ladder of life - bodily life, mental life, divine life - which God and Nature have provided for man's ascent towards self-perfection culminating in a "trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight (Sac... forms, man alone is "perfectly made" - so the gods of the Aitareya Upanishad thought! - and man could therefore be the mould for the further divine perfection to come. The distinctive feature of bodily life is not so much progress as persistence through the perpetuation of the species. In mental life, the keynote is continual enlargement, improvement and the pull towards endless change and variability... . In spiritual life or divine existence, the mind longs for a self-existent perfection and immutable infinity and can find peace only when these are realised. If the mind starts regulating the bodily life, the externals alone are rapidly changed and we may be caught up in a materialism that can only bring "great wearinesses, swift exhaustions, startling recoils". 6 On the contrary, if spirituality ...
... effectivity of will, more deeply at understanding and satisfaction of impulse. Our surface mind is hardly a true mentality, so involved, bound, hampered, conditioned is it by the body and bodily life and the limitations of the nerve-system and the physical organs. But the subliminal self has a true mentality superior to these limitations; it exceeds the physical mind and physical organs although... life with discords and imbalances, and whatever little harmony and happiness is the human lot proves precarious and superficial. If Page 111 bodily mind and bodily life-force are so imperfect, bodily matter is bound to be still more limited, gross and insecure despite the show of strength, beauty and stability put up by it at times. There is no doubt that... far in that Yoga. The one presupposes in the individual a whole history of spiritual realisations and it climaxes a long series of descents and it preludes the descent of the Supermind into bodily life-force and bodily matter. The other is a condition of various sorts. Broadly, it is that produced in people not yet ready for embodying the supramental Gnosis but sufficiently responsive to ...
... repetition. Like other non-materialistic solutions it gives the right to the soul's suggestion as against the body's and sanctions the demand for survival, but unlike some others it justifies the bodily life by its utility to the soul's continued self-experience; our too swift act in the body ceases to be an isolated accident or an abrupt interlude, it gets the justification of a fulfilling future as... of being is only an extension from our first matter-governed sense of the universe, of our creation in it and of our decisive cessation. It takes up at every point our first obvious view of the bodily life and restates all its circumstances in the terms of a more psychical and spiritual idea of our existence. What we see in the material universe is a stupendous system of mechanical recurrences.... Nothingness or some ineffable bliss of a superconscientNon-Being. The affirmation of Page 299 the mechanical occurrence or recurrence of birth is the essence of this view; but while the bodily life suffers an enforced end and dissolution, the soul life ceases by a willed self-extinction. The Buddhistic theory adds nothing to the first obvious significance of life except an indefinite pr ...
... always followed by an age of occultism, of mystical creeds, of new religions and profounder seekings after the Infinite and the Divine. The knowledge of our superficial mentality and the laws of our bodily life is not enough; it brings us always to all that mysterious and hidden depth of subjective existence below and behind of which our surface consciousness is only a fringe or an outer court. We come... Page 458 him too of that possibility of which he has always dreamed, but of which his ordinary life gives him no assurance, the possibility of transcending himself and growing out of bodily life and mortality into the joy of immortal life and spiritual existence. It also confirms in him the sense that there are worlds or planes of existence other than that in which his lot is now cast, worlds ...
... Samadhi that it is sometimes asserted that an absolute eradication of Ignorance or a complete ascension of consciousness from the "mortal mentality" become feasible only when the body and the bodily life cease to function at death. (Cf. Yoga-Shikhopanishad, I .163: pi ṇ dapātena yā muktiḥ sā muktirna tu hanyate.) The foregoing discussion makes it clear that trance-experiences may be... the thorn with the help of a thorn"; and Yoga-Vasishtha: "Renounce that with which you renounce" (yena tyajasi taṁ tyaja). But this can by no means be our attitude to the body and bodily life. For the Integral Yoga has for its objective: (i)to make spiritual experiences real to the whole consciousness including that of the outer being; (ii)to establish the highest possible ...
... the emission of such parts of the food as are rejected by the body and over procreation, it is intimately connected with the processes of decay and death. Udana is the vital power which connects bodily life with the spiritual element in man. As in the purely vital operations, so also in the motional and volitional Prana is still the great agent of Will, and conducts such operations of Mind also as depend... art of breath-regulation or Pranayam can suspend inhalation and exhalation for many minutes and some not only for minutes but for hours together without injury to the system or the suspension of bodily life; for internal respiration and the continuance of the vital activities within the body still maintain the functions necessary to life. Even the internal respiration may be stopped and the vital activities ...
... the divine freedom, the transcendent force and the supernal impulse. After the strait path of the ascent the wide plateaus on the summit. There are three stages of the ascent,—at the bottom the bodily life enslaved to the pressure of necessity and desire, in the middle the mental, higher emotional and psychic rule that feels after greater interests, aspirations, experiences, at the summits first a... a deeper psychic and spiritual state and then a supramental eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations and seekings Page 208 discover their own intimate significance. In the bodily life first desire and need and then the practical good of the individual and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant force. In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are h ...
... likely to be broken in upon by any strong or persistent call on the bodily life. And when one returns to the mental consciousness, one is back again in the lower being. Therefore it has been said that complete liberation from the human birth, complete ascension from the life of the mental being is impossible until the body and the bodily life are Page 395 finally cast off. The ideal upheld before ...
... catabole, descent; metabole, change. Page 270 in the body such as synthetic, degradative, hydrolytic, oxidative or condensation reactions, so essential for the maintenance of bodily life because of their responsibility for virtually all metabolic processes in the body, have been appropriately termed by Prof. Arthur W. Galston the direct superintendents of the cell's chemical machinery... on the bed, climbing a staircase or executing a sustained piece of work, there is invariably an expenditure of energy due to muscular contraction. So a provision of energy must be made if the bodily life has at all to be dynamic. Also, the ability to maintain a constant body temperature through a complex physiological process of thermo-regulation gives to man and other homothermic organisms ...
... must eat because of his body's need of hunger and not because of the demands of his greed." 1 The intake of food should be regarded as only a physical necessity, a means for the maintenance of bodily life, prāṇasaṁdhāraṇārtham, 2 and for the upkeep of the physical instrument, bahiḥ svār-the. 3 But at the same time the Sadhaka should guard against going to the other extreme and falling... the bodily matrix, for, as the Taittiriya Upanishad affirms, "verily, Prana...is food, and the body is the eater; the body is established upon Prana." 1 Indeed, the material aspect of bodily life, of which alone we are normally aware, is no more than its outermost movement. In reality, the universal and immortal Life-Principle, anilam amṛtam, is superior to the principle of birth and ...
... to be broken in upon by any strong or persistent call on the bodily life. And when one returns to the mental consciousness, one is back again in the lower being. Therefore it has been said that complete liberation from the human birth, complete ascension from the life of the mental being is impossible until the body and the bodily life are finally cast off. The ideal upheld before the Yogin who ...
... to speak of an imminent realisation. But, if this conscious self-evolutionary attempt, on the part of some pioneers, to score a total victory over all the present limitations of man's body and bodily life, looks like an act of folly, we may only quote what the Mother herself has said in another context — that of the physical conquest of death: "That seems a madness. But all new things have... Gave of the problem and the race and strife." 3 This, then, is the attitude of the Sadhakas of the Integral Yoga vis- à -vis the seeking after the perfection of the body and bodily life (kāyā-siddhi) including as its ultimate term the physical conquest over death as an outer physical symbol and sign of Spirit's total mastery over matter. Now about this book. The series ...
... except by a poise of contending forces won out of many actual and potential discords, but also no continued existence of life except by a constant self-feeding and devouring of other life. Our very bodily life is a constant dying and being reborn, the body itself a beleaguered city attacked by assailing, protected by defending forces whose business is to devour each other: and this is only a type of all ...
... recover that oneness in our waking state becomes the supreme aim and meaning of every individual existence. Nothing connected only with the movement of division can be of any moment to us, neither our bodily life and health, nor our Page 421 family welfare, nor our communal wellbeing compared with this immense self-fulfilment; they can only be of importance as means or movements in the self-fulfilment ...
... God's intended self-fulfilment in man, átmahano janáh, self-slaying births,—not less, but in a way even more so, bhúya iva, than the more numerous herd of beings who by an ignorant attachment to bodily life and outward objects maim that self-fulfilment on its other necessary side. To renounce the condition of self-fulfilment is no less a blind darkness, andham tamas, than to be bewildered by the condition ...
... individual by the attainment of the Transcendence would be logically its supreme conclusion. The integral view of the unity of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as we need not give up the bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point of view where the preservation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness ...
... organic Nature and, evolved considerably though we are, it is still forced to find an indirect channel, our children, for expressing outwardly the Immortal in itself. The imperfect conditions of bodily life compel this indirectness, but does not even the compulsion take place because our love-gusto is the leap of a Godhead into the frailties and crudities of earth? We may call this Godhead our own secret ...
... absence of consciousness, the being begins to awake and rise to a gradually developing — widening, deepening and heightening — consciousness. That is how Aswapati advances, ascends from a purely bodily life and consciousness, to the next rung of the ladder, the first appearance and expression of life-force, the vital consciousness — energies and forms of the small lower vital. He moves on, moves ...
... difference between man and the animal is that the animal mind, as we know it, cannot get for one moment away from its origins, cannot break out from the covering, the close chrysalis which the bodily life has spun round the soul, and become something greater than its present self, a more free, magnificent and noble being; but in man mind reveals itself as a greater energy escaping from the restrictions ...
... Tennyson's words, only on earth are there Tears from the depth of some divine despair and hence an environment and provision to seek a remedy for its ache and realise the Divine. Bodily life is precious for the chance given us of questing for God through birth after birth and turning all conditions here into a happy home for Him. At present He is only a visitor; we have to build a permanent ...
... concern was out of place: I should just sit calmly without any thought and feel blessed with the soul's awakening and allow its sweetness to keep streaming forth up and down and on all sides of the bodily life. Page 87 If such a state could go on at all hours in an utter intensity of what I can only call a serene strength of love, at once soft and irresistible, the future would indeed ...
... to provide us with the chance to do to the maximum the work of belonging integrally to the Mother. A spur towards such a stand is the Mother's reminder that in the adventure of earthly evolution bodily life is naturally the only field of sadhana The main object of a sound body living as long as possible is an ever-increasing openness to the realisation of the fourfold ideal of our Yoga as flashed forth ...
... for the support, comfort, use, satisfaction and entertainment of his physical and sensational existence. For the physical mind takes its stand on matter and the material world, on the body and the bodily life, on sense-experience and on a normal practical mentality and its experience. All that is not of this order, the physical mind builds up as a restricted superstructure dependent upon the external ...
... practice the siddhi . × As the Jivanmukta, who is entirely free even without dissolution of the bodily life in a final Samadhi. ...
... eliminate it would be to extinguish the impulse of life by a quietistic asceticism. But the real motive power of the life of the soul is Will; desire is only a deformation of will in the dominant bodily life and physical mind. The essential turn of the soul to possession and enjoyment of the world consists in a will to delight, and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical ...
... environment in the way intended; his knowledge would be too great for him, it would necessarily alter the whole spirit and balance and form of his action. He has to live in the mind absorbed by this bodily life and not in the supermind; for otherwise all these protecting walls of ignorance created by the limiting, dividing, differentiating power of mind would not be built or would become too thin and t ...
... swiftly at effectivity of will, more deeply at understanding and satisfaction of impulse. Our surface mind is hardly a true mentality, so involved, bound, hampered, conditioned is it by the body and bodily life and the limitations of the nerve-system and the physical organs. But the subliminal self has a true mentality superior to these limitations; it exceeds the physical mind and physical organs although ...
... to which superficially it has become irresponsive and oblivious. The Soul identifies itself with this mental dynamo or station and says "I am this mind." And since the mind is absorbed in the bodily life, it thinks "I am a mind in a living body" or, still more commonly, "I am a body which lives and thinks." It identifies itself with the thoughts, emotions, sensations of the embodied mind and imagines ...
... mould & in the tenth Manvantara into the Devasura who enthrones the vijnana and glorifies the Asura existence by the vijnanamaya illuminations playing on the whole of the triple mental[,] vital & bodily life of man. In the eleventh & twelfth manwantaras the Devasura evolves into the Sadhya, the Anandamaya Asura who at first with the pure Ananda, then with the Tapomaya Ananda, then with the Sanmaya Ananda ...
... regulated as to serve like other activities the ethical and spiritual development which was then regarded as the whole real object of life, war destructive within certain carefully fixed limits of the bodily life of individual men but constructive of their inner life and of the ethical elevation of the race. That war in the past has, when subjected to an ideal, helped in this elevation, as in the development ...
... and then comes a light, so warm, so deep, so powerful, which puts everything back in order, in its place, and opens the way to transformation. These periods are very difficult periods of the bodily life; one feels that there is now only one thing which decides, the Supreme Will. There is no longer any support—any support, from the support of habit to the support of knowledge and of will, all the ...
... presence of the supramental by physical appearances. For these will be the last to change and the supramental force can be at work in an individual long before anything of it becomes perceptible in his bodily life. To sum up, one can say that the supramental education will result no longer in a progressive formation of human nature and an increasing development of its latent faculties, but in a transformation ...
... personality. New souls are those that have just emerged or are now emerging out of the mere physico-vital existence; they are like simple organisms, made of fewer constituents related mostly to the bodily life, with just a modicum of the mental. It is the soul, however, that grows with experiences and it is the soul that builds and enriches the personality. Whatever portion of the outer life, whatever ...
... in our subconscious there lurks a brooding dangerous sadness packed with resistance to spirituality if spirituality finds no means to justify earth in terms of earth itself. Not to see in bodily life the thirst for perfection is to close our eyes to a mighty fact. To seek its appeasement outside the Divine is to keep groping for ever. To hold that it will never be slaked in the Divine ...
... conquest of sleep. But is this total victory over physical sleep at all feasible in the present human body? And, if not, what are the essential conditions that have to be met before this prospect for bodily life enters the field of realisable possibilities ? By way of answering these crucial questions we propose to put forward two related problems and venture some tentative solutions thereof. ...
... be its possessors. 2 (Rig Veda, VII.41-5) We have ventured to put forward the suggestion that because of the actually prevailing predatory method of satisfying its hunger , bodily life has ultimately to fall a prey to death, and this is due to some occult interlinking between the two processes. We are therefore in search of a solution that will obviate for the body the necessity ...
... achieved here in the conditions of terrestrial life. But be it noted that this seeking after physical immortality is in no way related to the finite being's blind and egoistic attachment to body and bodily life, or to the limited self's fearful shrinking from the mystery of death and from the prospect of his physical dissolution. For, with either of these dark disabilities of nature still present ...
... finite mind involved in living body can attain. This change of form cannot be allowed to remain merely a constant renewal of the same form-type such as constitutes Page 379 our bodily life between birth and death; for unless the form-type is changed and the experiencing mind is thrown into new forms in new circumstances of time, place and environment, the necessary variation of ...
... of the body govern and determine the reactions of the subjective being, is thus seen to be only a minor truth. The major truth is that Consciousness is the real and original determinant of our bodily life; it can, if it so wills and under proper conditions, transmit its commands to the bodily instrument and govern its reactions "even to the overriding of its normal law or conditions of action." ...
... then there is no limit to [our] energy.... [We] can take it in and absorb as much as we are capable of it." 8 It will then sustain all our physical energies and maintain the functionings of our bodily life with a far greater and effective power than any that our present body-bound energy can command. It is then in the direct and unlimited tapping of this Life-Energy 1 2 Sri Aurobindo ...
... Perhaps the full implications of the importance of the body to the spirit and of the spirit to the body were not worked out. As a result, in the course of history, India tended to neglect bodily life. The time has come now when the right balance of the body and the spirit should be achieved under a new ideal of divine life in a divine body. ___________________________ ...
... attitude towards the body has been summed up as follows: (a)the body, whether of men or of higher beings, can never be the abode of anything but evil; (b)a final deliverance from all bodily life, present and to come, is the greatest of all blessings, the highest of all boons and the loftiest of all aims (Monier Williams, Buddhism). Indeed, 'the body is the sphere of suffering'; ...
... what goes before that instead of seeking to dissolve the bane of Ignorance while still in the physical body, if a person ventures on an ill-conceived short-cut by voluntarily terminating his bodily life , it will utterly be of no avail to him; on the contrary, the misconceived act will add to the burden of his sañcīyamāna-karma which he will have to exhaust in a future body under conditions ...
... determine the reactions of the subjective being, is thus seen to be only a minor and secondary truth. The major and primary truth is that Consciousness is the real and original determinant of our bodily life; it can, if it so wills and under proper conditions, transmit its commands to the bodily instrument and govern its reactions "even to the overriding of its normal law or conditions of action." ...
... progress? (c) Limitations of man 2. The phenomenon of death. What is death? (in the physical, psychological and yogic senses). Can death be conquered? 3. Dependence of bodily life on respiration, food, blood circulation and sleep. Is this dependence necessary or indispensable? 4. The yogic powers of mastery over food, sleep, respiration and blood circulation. ...
... total absence of consciousness, the being begins to awake and rise to a gradually developing—widening, deepening and heightening—consciousness. That is how Ashwapati advances, ascends from a purely bodily life and consciousness, to the next rung of the ladder, the first appearance and expression of life-force, the vital consciousness—energies and forms of the small lower vital. He moves on, moves upward ...
... absence of consciousness, the being begins to awake and rise to a gradually developing - widening, deepening and heightening -consciousness. That is how Ashwapati advances, ascends from a purely bodily life and consciousness, to the next rung of the ladder, the first appearance and expression of life-force, the vital consciousness - energies and forms of the small lower vital. He moves on, moves upward ...
... be his mind. Mother, can one enter into communion with his Jivatman without the ego being dissolved? That's what Sri Aurobindo says. He says that the ego survives the physical life, the bodily life; this is perfectly correct. There is a vital ego and a mental ego which can continue to exist for quite a long time. But one can have experiences without the ego being dissolved. Otherwise who would ...
... Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order. Sri Aurobindo God's final seal ...the perfecting of the body also should be the last triumph of the Spirit and to make the bodily life also divine must be God's final seal upon His work in the universe. Sri Aurobindo Faith in Sri Aurobindo Live rather in the constant hope and conviction that Page 95 ...
... except by a poise of contending forces won out of many actual and potential discords, but also no continued existence of life except by a constant self-feeding and devouring of other life. Our very bodily life is a constant dying and being reborn, the body itself a beleaguered city attacked by assailing, protected by defending forces whose business is to devour each other.... It is good that we should ...
... been schools of heroism; they have preserved the heroic in man, they have created the kṣatriyās tyaktajīvitāḥ of the Sanskrit epic phrase, the men of power and courage who have abandoned their bodily life for a cause; for without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead; courage, energy and strength are among the very first principles of the divine nature in action. All this great vital, political ...
... physical Nature, but vital and mental Nature. It might discover her secret yet undreamed-of mind-powers and life-powers and use them for a freer liberation of man from the limitations of his shackled bodily life. It might arrive at new psychic relations, a more sovereign power of the idea to realise itself in the act, inner means of overcoming the obstacles of distance and division which would cast into ...
... we have to start from; but it adds to it a perception of other worlds or planes of existence which have an eternal or at least a more permanent duration; it perceives behind the mortality of the bodily life of man the immortality of the soul within him. A belief in the immortality, the eternal persistence of the individual human spirit apart from the body is the keyword of this conception of life. That ...
... sole infinity to which the finite mind involved in living body can attain. This change of form cannot be allowed to remain merely a constant renewal of the same form-type such as constitutes our bodily life between birth and death; for unless the form-type is changed and the experiencing mind is thrown into new forms in new circumstances of time, place and environment, the necessary variation of experience ...
... body, mind emerges in and depends on life in the body, supermind emerges in and lends Page 645 itself to instead of governing mind, soul itself is apparent only as a circumstance of the bodily life of the mental being and veils up the spirit in the lower imperfections. This second defect of our nature is caused by this dependence of the higher on the lower parts; it is an immixture of functions ...
... the self and spirit, not to depend upon life, not to be identified with it, to transcend it and control and use it as an expression and instrumentation of the self, is a third condition. Even the bodily life does not possess its own full being in its own kind if the consciousness does not exceed the body and feel its physical oneness with all material existence; the vital life does not possess its own ...
... whole difference between man and the animal is that the animal mind, as we know it, cannot get for one moment away from its origins, cannot break out from the covering, the close chrysalis which the bodily life has spun round the soul, and become something greater than its present self, a more free, magnificent and noble being; but in man mind reveals itself as a greater energy escaping from the restrictions ...
... become permeated with the Light beyond this universe of death took upon itself not the mere task of an extraordinary individual transformation but the giant labour of being representative of all bodily life and hence accepting a universal responsibility so that the hope of an entire transformed mankind might result from its achievement. In a Yoga thus representative and responsible the greatest ...
... chrysalis of our limited selves to flower into oneness with the Divine Self that we are. For this is not an egoistic will in us but the meaning of the Divine Inhabitant for which he has undertaken bodily life and terrestrial existence. 51 Before there could be any evolution, there must needs be an involution of the Divine All that is to emerge. Otherwise there would be not an evolution, but ...
... within each stratum. The analysis of the successive couches of the earth is a simple matter compared with the analysis of this wonderful creation we call the personality. The mental being in resuming bodily life forms a new personality for its new terrestrial existence; it takes material from the common matter-stuff, life-stuff, mind-stuff of the physical world and during earthly life it is constantly absorbing ...
... concern was out of place. I just sat calmly without any thought and felt blessed with the soul's full awakening and allowed its sweetness to keep streaming forth up and down on all sides of the bodily life. If such a state could go on at all hours in an utter intensity of what I call a serene strength of love, at once soft and irresistible, the future would indeed be an unperishing thousand ...
... figures for different parts being 83%for blood, 80%for the brain, 75% for muscles, 70% for the skin, 30% for bones and 10% for the fat deposit. 1 The essentiality of water to the functioning of bodily life cannot thus be overestimated. Oxygen: Since, in general and in the last analysis, an organism has to gather energy so vital to its life-processes by the oxidation of the ingested foodstuffs ...
... morning. Obviously a great, great deal of stability and inner calm is required.... There was a keen sense of the absolute pettiness, stupidity and dullness of all outer circumstances, of this whole bodily life in its external form, and AT THE SAME TIME a great symphony of divine joy. And both states were together like pulsations. But it makes your head spin. You have to be very careful, it... it makes ...
... Isaiah hails as "Messiah", Zoroastrian doctrines entered Judaism and through Judaism infiltrated Christianity. Zoroastrianism believes in heaven and hell, the soul's survival and the resurrection of bodily life at the end of time when a saviour, mystically continuous with Zoroaster's "seed", is expected, with a Last Judgment following. In the traditional Indian vision there is a pralaya, a drawing ...
... g in his victory of Resurrection. When they are submerged in water they inwardly enter into his death and burial and when they rise out of it they in the same psychological manner enter his new bodily life. Would it not be a jolt to the salvific vision of the ceremonial concerned if the inner resurrection ensued on a symbolic fall into a death ignominious to the limit with yet an honourable burial ...
... elementary particles. Such a view of nature brushed aside the privileged position conventional religion had given to man, and the contempt in which religious philosophy had held the world of matter and bodily life, and the straining it had encouraged towards a Beyond as the scene of human completion. Science reacted in the direction of the opposite extreme, putting a premium on the Here and Now and condemning ...
... the support, comfort, use, satisfaction and entertainment of his physical and sensational existence. For the physical mind takes its stand on matter and the material world, on the body and the bodily life, on sense-experience and on a normal practical mentality and its experience. All that is not of this order, the physical mind builds up as a restricted superstructure dependent upon the external ...
... man and the animal is that the animal mind, as Page 12 we know it, cannot get for one moment away from its origins, cannot break out from the covering, the close chrysalis which the bodily life has spun round the soul, and become something greater than its present self, a more free, magnificent and noble being; but in man mind reveals itself as a greater energy escaping from the restrictions ...
... at effectivity of will, more deeply at understanding and satisfaction of impulse. Our surface mind is hardly a true mentality, so involved, bound, hampered, conditioned is it by the body and bodily life and the limitations of the nerve-system and the physical organs. But the subliminal self has a true mentality superior to these limitations; it exceeds the physical mind and physical organs although ...
... to dwell in union with the Supreme Being, and in that case, at the fall of the body, all connections with Nature or Prakriti are cut off without any possibility of return. However, as long as the bodily life continues, the psychology of a liberated soul is so poised that the inner freedom from the bondage is not lost even when outer activities of Prakriti of the body, life and mind continue Page ...
... to dwell in union with the supreme Being, and in that case, at the fall of the body, all connection with Nature or Prakriti is cut off without any possibility of return. However, as long as the bodily life continues, the psychology of a liberated soul is so poised that the inner freedom is not lost even when outer activities of Prakriti of the body, life and mind, continue by the momentum of the ...
... to dwell in union with the Supreme Being, and in that case, at the fall of the body, all connection with Nature or Prakriti is cut off without any possibility of return. However, as long as the bodily life continues, the psychology of a liberated soul is so poised that the inner freedom is not lost even when outer activities of Prakriti of the body, life and mind, continue by the momentum of the ...
... Limitations of man The phenomenon of death. What is death? (in the physical, psychological and yogic senses). Can death be conquered? Page 54 Dependence of bodily life on respiration, food, blood circulation and sleep. Is this dependence necessary or indispensable? The yogic powers of mastery over food, sleep, respiration and blood circulation. Limitation ...
... determines the reactions of the subjective being, is thus seen to be only a minor and secondary truth. The major and primary truth is that Consciousness is the real and original determinant of our bodily life; it can, if it so wills and under proper conditions, transmit its commands to the bodily instrument and govern its reactions "even to the overriding of its normal law or conditions of action..." ...
... Has man made progress? (c) Limitations of man 2. The phenomenon of death. What is death? (in the physical, psychological and yogic senses). Can death be conquered? 3. Dependence of bodily life on respiration, food, blood circulation and sleep. Is this dependence necessary or indispensble? 4. The yogic powers of mastery over food, sleep, respiration and blood circulation. Limitation ...
... their own unsupported by any conscious initiation on the part of the witnessing self. The ideal of course is to reduce action to the barest minimum possible compatible with the maintenance of the bodily life. Of course, there is another possibility, an alternative choice. Through a proper discipline one may come to a state where a perfect inner passivity may co-exist with perfect outer dynamism ...
... pointed out that for a really dynamic life with purposive action, a certain fall from the supreme state of spiritual realisation becomes inevitable. Simple actions meant for the maintenance of bodily life may be altogether innocuous, but other actions are sure to involve the embodied soul in some sort of bondage and obscurity. And since actions tend to carry the consciousness outward and downward ...
... absence of consciousness, the being begins to awake and rise to a gradually developing—widening, deepening and heightening —consciousness. That is how Ashwapati advances, ascends from a purely bodily life and consciousness, to the next rung of the ladder, the first appearance and expression of life-force, the vital consciousness—energies and forms of the small lower vital. He moves on, moves upward ...
... personality. New souls are those that are just emerged or emerging out of the mere physico-vital existence; these are like simple organisms, made of fewer constituents, referring mostly to the bodily life, with just a modicum of the mental. It is the soul, however, that grows with experiences and it is the soul that builds and enriches the personality. Whatever portion of the outer life, whatever ...
... absence of consciousness, the being begins to awake and rise to a gradually developing – widening, deepening and heightening – consciousness. That is how Ashwapati advances, ascends from a purely bodily life and consciousness, to the next rung of the ladder, the first appearance and expression of life-force, the vital consciousness – energies and forms of the small lower vital. He moves on, moves upward ...
... since they no longer have a center. And when the center is asleep, everything is more or less asleep, since the nonphysical mental and vital elements exist only in relation to, and to serve, the bodily life. In this primary state, whenever the consciousness falls asleep, it slips back into the subconscient (we use the word subconscient as Sri Aurobindo used it, in the etymological Page 109 ...
... . For it is the "distance-haunted" character of the mystic mind - the inner consciousness's straining ever beyond the apparent and the immediate - that tends to free it from disturbance by the bodily life's claims and clamours. In the creative field of art with which I am dealing, there is one important thing to remember: every level of consciousness has its own pitch to confer on the aesthetic... Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3) 33 ' It gratifies me indeed that you have given so fine a response to my poetry at even the first reading. Poetry of the sort I write - seeking to be in tune with the Aurobindonian Muse - is not always easy to enjoy immediately: one has to live with it for a while, listen to it intently with the inner ear... counteracted by "no longer". This living suggestion would be absent if the line commenced with these two words: No longer flickering with the cry of clay. Even more would the suggestive life go out on our transferring the present participle to the line's end, and beginning the phrase with the last three words: With the cry of clay no longer flickering. Thus not only the ...
... dissever the soul from the communion of the body. — Very true. — Whereas, Simmias, the rest of the world are of opinion that to him who has no sense of pleasure and no part in bodily pleasure, life is not worth having; and that he who is indifferent about them is as good as dead. Page 97 — That is also true. — What again shall we say of the actual acquirement of... then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the Page 100 body, and are not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having... with your eyes? — Certainly not. — Or did you ever reach them with any other bodily sensed and I speak not of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of the essence or true nature of everything. Has the reality of them ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs? or rather, is not the nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures made ...
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