... as God. He will never use the analogy of the pot and the clay or of sparks coming from a fire or of a drop of water mingling with the ocean. All these images imply a sameness of essence. The Christian mystics speak rather of iron which is heated by the fire, so that it becomes red-hot and is wholly penetrated by the fire, so as to be transformed by it and yet remains iron and does not actually become... can air, if different from light, be wholly filled with it. The Christian soul cannot wholly participate in God if it is different in essence. However, contrary to theory, even Christian mystics speak in the Indian vein at times. Teilhard 46 himself notes Vedantic "fusionism" in them: "Mystically speaking, it is difficult not to be aware of considerable traces of fusionism in ... experienced, yet the difference remains. It is like light shining in a mirror. The mirror may be totally filled with light and reflect nothing but light, but the mirror is not the light. When Christian mystics speak of Page 146 being one with God and seeing no difference, they must be understood in this sense. I think that this is important because if you say that everything ...
... being within us. He speaks of the transition as a darkness created by the rejection of the outer mental light, a darkness intervening before the true light from the Invisible can come. Certain Christian mystics have said the same thing and the Upanishad also speaks of the luminous Being beyond the darkness. But in India the rejection of the mental light, the vital stir, the physical hard narrow c... surface vision is capable of seeing—the very intensity and condensation of the light itself which withholds itself from the shallowness of all superficial seeing. Very fine intuition, kin to the Christian mystics' experience of the Night of God, which is to the ordinary consciousness a sheer blackness bare of all things Page 242 but into which one has to plunge to find that in it is all ...
... Shunyam by the nihilistic Madhya-mika Buddhists, the Tao or omnipresent and transcendent Nihil by the Chinese, and as the indefinable and ineffable Permanent by the Mahayanists. 5 Many Christian mystics too, notably St. John of the Cross with his doctrine of noche obscura, speak of 'a complete ignorance', 'a divine Darkness' through which the spiritualised Mind has to pass before one can... II.2.10. Page 112 supreme Nature, Parā Prakṛti. It is that Light of which the Vedic mystics got a glimpse, and it is the opposite of the intervening darkness of the Christian mystics, for the supermind is all light and no darkness. To the mind the Supreme is avyaktāt param avyaktam, but if we follow the line leading to the supermind, it is an increasing affirmation rather ...
... the mystery sought to be conveyed in the Christian sacrament of transubstantiation. The bread and wine that the initiate has to take in represent— are or become actually and physically, as the Christian mystics assert—the flesh and blood of Christ. One has to become the Divine Person in flesh and blood, wholly and integrally. As the fossil is a transmutation in stone, grain by grain, of a living body—organic... structure, the mental, vital and physical formation will be translated, grain by grain, atom by atom into the divine substance by the infusion and imposition of the Divine figure. The Christian mystics themselves, however, do not seem to have aimed at real physical transubstantiation—although that might have been at the back of the older Hebrew sacrament of the Eucharist; the perfection sought ...
... the mystery sought to be conveyed in the Christian sacrament of transubstantiation. The bread and wine that the initiate has to take in represent —are or become actually and physically, as the Christian mystics assert—the flesh and blood of Christ. One has to become the Divine Person in flesh and blood, wholly and integrally. As the fossil is a transmutation in stone, grain by grain, of a living body—organic... human structure, the mental, vital and physical formation will be translated, grain by grain, atom by atom into the divine substance by the infusion and imposition of the Divine figure. The Christian mystics themselves, however, do not seem to have aimed at real physical transubstantiation—although that might have been at the back of the older Hebrew sacrament of the Eucharist; the perfection sought ...
... the mystery sought to be conveyed in the Christian sacrament of transubstantiation. The bread and wine that the initiate has to take in represent – are or become actually and physically, as the Christian mystics assert – the flesh and blood of Christ. One has to become the Divine Person in flesh and blood, wholly and integrally. As the fossil is a transmutation in stone, grain by grain, of a living... human structure, the mental, vital and physical formation will be translated, grain by grain, atom by atom into the divine substance by the infusion and imposition of the Divine figure. The Christian mystics themselves, however, do not seem to have aimed at real physical transubstantiation-although that might have been at the back of the older Hebrew sacrament of the Eucharist; the perfection sought ...
... Page 83 Vedantins, the Sunyam of the nihilistic Buddhists, the Tao or omnipresent and transcendent Nihil of the Chinese, the indefinable and ineffable Permanent of the Mahayana. Many Christian mystics also speak of the necessity of a complete ignorance in order to get the supreme experience and speak too of the Divine Darkness—they mean the shedding of all mental knowledge, making a blank of... divine Consciousness begins the domain of the supreme nature, parā prakṛti . It is that Light of which the Vedic mystics got a glimpse and it is the opposite of the intervening darkness of the Christian mystics—for the supermind is all light and no darkness. To the mind the Supreme is avyaktāt param avyaktam , but if we follow the line leading to the supermind, it is an increasing affirmation rather ...
... being within us. He speaks of the transition as a darkness created by the rejection of the outer mental light, a darkness intervening before the true light from the Invisible can come. Certain Christian mystics have said the same thing and the Upanishad also speaks of the luminous Being beyond the darkness. But in India the rejection of the mental light, the vital stir, the physical hard narrow concreteness ...
... been strained and purified, uplifted and redeemed. He has anointed, it and given it a place in Heaven even by the side of the Father. Again, Mary—symbolising the earth or body consciousness, as Christian mystics themselves declare—was herself taken up bodily into the heavenly abode. The body celestial is this very physical human body cleared of its dross and filled with the divine substance. This could ...
... Disciple .) Disciple : You said yesterday that realisation of God is not sufficient to change human nature. Disciple : The question arose from a conversation which we had about the Christian mystics. They have an idea that once they realise the Divine Consciousness there is nothing else to be done. They also maintain that after that all the work a man does is., not his but God's, Page ...
... been strained and purified, uplifted and redeemed. He has anointed it and given it a place in Heaven even by the side of the Father. Again, Mary – symbolising the earth or body consciousness, as Christian mystics themselves declare – was herself taken up bodily into the heavenly abode. The body celestial is this very physical human body cleared of its dross and filled with the divine substance. This could ...
... mounting flame of the soul's devotion: for it is found wherever that devotion has entered into the most secret shrine of the inner temple. We meet it in Islamic poetry; certain experiences of the Christian mystics repeat the forms and images with which we are familiar in the East, but usually with a certain timorousness foreign to the Eastern temperament. For the devotee who has once had this intense experience ...
... by one way or another from consciousness to an incommunicable Supraconscience. That is indeed what much mystical seeking Page 187 actually reached both in Europe and India. The Christian mystics spoke of a total darkness, a darkness complete and untouched by any mental lights, through which one must pass into that luminous Ineffable. The Indian Sannyasis sought to shed mind altogether ...
... go our dependence on conditioned things; and that actually to do this reveals to us the nature of our true life as a human being — these three beliefs are not only those of Dionysius and the Christian mystics who followed him but also the basic beliefs of all religions, particularly Buddhism — indeed the Four Noble Truths are echoed time and again in medieval words.’ (p. 6) Those ‘essential beliefs’ ...
... principle to look at the facts, like there were some who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. There is, for instance, Arthur Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy ; or the literature of great Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, Margarete Porete, Hadewych, St. John of the Cross; or the heritage of the Zen Masters, whose poetry is truth and truth poetry; or the Indian mystics; or the Ramayana and ...
... orthodoxy." 7 This footnote, whose text reappears almost verbatim in The Phenomenon of Man, 8 is vulnerable on more than one count. The mystical love-union actually experienced by Christian mystics, as against its description by the mere theorists of it, is not always clearly marked by a unifying that differentiates. Not only Meister Eckhart, who is never quite in good odour among his f ...
... one way or another from consciousness to an incommunicable Supraconscience. That is indeed what much mystical seeking actually held up as the one thing essential both in Europe and India. Many Christian mystics spoke of a total darkness through which one must pass into the Ineffable Light and Rapture, a falling away of all mental lights and all that belongs to the ordinary activity of the nature; they ...
... because they are obliged here to look to a higher ideal in which these things have no value. What is kept of Hinduism is Vedanta and Yoga, in which Hinduism is one with Sufism of Islam and with the Christian mystics. But even here it is not Vedanta and Yoga in their traditional limits (their past), but widened and rid of many ideas that are peculiar to the Hindus. If I have used Sanskrit terms and figures ...
... begins the domain of the supreme Nature, parā prakṛti . It is that Light of which the Vedic mystics got a glimpse and it is the opposite of the intervening Page 142 darkness of the Christian mystics, for the supermind is all light and no darkness. To the mind the Supreme is avyaktāt param avyaktam but if we follow the line leading to the supermind, it is an increasing affirmation rather ...
... others; the symbol hue of Supermind is gold, and Overmind, which is in contact with Supermind, has an iridescent brilliance which is anything but grey. Unless we are to under stand it like the Christian mystics of the negative path (see the Christa Seva Sangha journal) to whom the Divine is a supreme Darkness and the plane of consciousness through which he is reached a supreme Ignorance! Then again, ...
... psychic and the superconscious, on the other. Of the soul, of the psychic consciousness, and of the superconscious, there are, in Yoga, numerous descriptions; among the Sufis, among the Christian mystics, among the Lamas, there are parallels in their descriptions, and in the Indian Yoga itself there are various classifications of the states of consciousness that pertain to these domains. The release ...
... grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier temperaments, like the present one, for example ...
... to be got rid of by the good. There are already sufficient evil things in the world without evoking the evil person. The Europeans have very imperfect understanding of these things. Even the Christian mystics have hardly any clear idea about them. Disciple : That is so because, perhaps, they do not want to get rid of their individuality. Sri Aurobindo : Yes. They mix up the self ...
... that they were a very happy pair. SRI AUROBINDO: I don't know why Middleton Murry says that. His wife was an ordinary Christian and it took her a long time to come to his standpoint. It was because she could not chime in with him that there was the tragedy. All the Christian mystic poets from Donne onward regard sex as permissible in the man-and-woman relation. ...
... spiritual effort, it will be difficult for us to receive the bounty of divine Grace in a free and uninterrupted flow nor can we in that case expect to grow in genuine love for the Divine. A Christian mystic of Europe of the Middle Ages has succinctly stated the same truth: "As soon as one begins to seek oneself in one's spiritual life, he ceases to love the Divine at that very moment." Indeed ...
... India it is generally known as Maya. Grief and sorrow, weakness and want, disease and death are its external and ubiquitous forms. It is a force of gravitation, as graphically named by a modern Christian mystic, that pulls man down, fixes him upon earth with its iron law of mortality, never allowing him to mount high and soar in the spiritual heavens. It has also been called the Wheel of Karma or the... at the other end, the reality of brute matter was not given sufficient weight, the spiritual light disdained to reach it (vijigupsate). The integral Divine not merely suffers (as in the Christian tradition) a body material, He accepts it in his supernal delight, for it is his own being and substance: it is He in essence and it will become He in actuality. When he comes into the world, it is... inextricably as it appears, with the noble metal in the natural ore; but the dross can be eradicated and the free metal brought out, pure- and noble in its own true nature. It is, as Rumi, the Persian mystic, says in his famous Page 280 imagery, like a piece of iron, dull and dismal to look at, but when put into fire slowly acquires the quality of fire, turning into ...
... quieter force and a gentler vividness. Perhaps the lines that sum up best the Christian courage and the Christian mystic tendency that are his main theme are those already quoted: That they cast their hearts out of their ken To get their heart's desire: while the most beautiful picture of the mystic truth which is believed to be evoking and guiding that courage through the ages... defiance stumbled dead. Then Alfred, prince of England, And all the Christian earls, Unhooked their swords and held them up Each offered to Colan like a cup Of chrysolite and pearls. And the King said, "Do you take my sword Who have done this deed of fire, For this is the manner of Christian men, Whether of steel or priestly pen, That they cast their hearts... pleasure, adding a new facet to the rich quality of the word-music. Chesterton also brings a large interpretative vision, marred here and there by a too obvious moral and pro-Christian colour, but often resplendent with a true Christian idealism and a vivid if partial understanding of alien ardours. In addition, his sparks of "high seriousness" bear a cryptic tinge, so that the supernatural is never far ...
... and shaped that verse of Dante's: The great Florentine's phrase has kindled in a recent poet a vision unlike both the original and the one commonly supposed to be there by the mass of Christians. The mystic nuance has receded and its place is taken by a humanistic-cwm-scientific shade. Sir John Squire, influenced by Dante's picture of heavenly bodies touched to activity by love, has created another ...
... Aurobindo replied:] "I have no criticism to offer it is very well done. I don't know why it is called Freudian; it seems, so far as I can understand it, an agnosticisation of a semi-Christian-mystic materialised Buddhist-Adwaita Inconscience-subconscience-superconscience worship. Is that right? Probably not,—for as I am not in sympathy with the worship of Divine or Undivine Darkness, my penchant... the two weak lines and make the three or four slight alterations 1 suggest, it will make a fine poem, close-knit and single idea'd as you want it, and also grave and profound, with a very penetrating mystic and symbolic image." (1931) Page 668 On my poetry up to the end of August 1931: "Your possibility lies in a combination of refined elevation and subtle elegance, the... you propose makes a deep and solemn psychic truth turn at once into an intellectual statement." [ On a new closing line: ] "The closing line should Page 671 agree more with the mystic suggestiveness of the phrasing of the rest." (22.6.32) c) [ On a third version, with an entirely new opening stanza ] "The first verse is very good; but I don't know whether "We venture to ...
... death. How can we not get scared of such an uncertain situation? As one Western mystic has observed: "Death is always there, watching, watching." And do we not remember the chilling verse of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri?. - "Death prowls baying through the woods of life." In the fourteenth century, an unknown Christian mystic, the writer of the justly famous Latin treatise, The Imitation of Christ, elaborated... themselves..." (The Synthesis of Yoga, Cent. Ed., pp. 314-15) So one has to learn in time how to love men and objects without Page 22 out any inordinate attachment. The Baul mystics of India have a principle of sadhana which they significantly call "jyanté mora" "to die while still living": that is to say, to eliminate attachment in all its forms and from all objects and persons... have no assured knowledge about what death is or why is there death at all or, again, what happens to the being after the physical event of death. In different ages and climes, poets, thinkers and mystics have deeply pondered over this mystery of death and expressed their uncertainty and misgivings in the matter in various characteristic ways. Thus Tagore, the Nobel Laureate poet, sang: ...
... lived as a golden spark of natural light." This emotional translation may indeed come from the same plane of consciousness, or have the same frequency, we might say, as that of the Indian or Christian mystic, even though the poetic transcription of the vibration seems far removed from any religious belief. The mathematician suddenly discerning a new configuration of the world may have touched the... consciousness of the person who opens himself to them or invokes them. A Christian saint having a vision of the Virgin and an Indian having a vision of Durga may see the same thing; they may have entered in contact with the same plane of consciousness, the same forces; yet Durga would obviously mean nothing to the Christian. On the other hand, if this same force manifested itself in its pure state... understand him, and Sri Aurobindo would remain alone. We could search Sri Aurobindo's life in vain for those moving or miraculous anecdotes that adorn the lives of Page 124 great sages and mystics, in vain for sensational yogic methods; everything seemed so ordinary, apparently, that nothing attracted one's attention, just as in life itself. Perhaps he had found more miracles in the ordinary ...
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