... sanction, for its will and pleasure; the Conscious Being imparts its consciousness to the Energy we call Nature, receives in that consciousness her workings as in a mirror, accepts the forms which she, the executive cosmic Force, creates and imposes on it, gives or withdraws its sanction from her movements. The experience of Purusha-Prakriti, the Spirit or Conscious Being in its relations to Nature, is of... self-aware-ness, self-delight of being; this founds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature,—self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory,—Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have... none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and ...
... consciousness-symbols, they are the first symbols. Chit or Self-Awareness of Brahman has again a double status, a status of rest in self-conscious being and a status of apparent motion in self-conscious being. In this double status it has the value in Conscious Being of a self-existent omnipotent Will manifesting in the extension of Brahman or retaining concealed in its unextension whatever it chooses... nigúdhá, the self-power of Divine Being hidden by the modes of its own workings, because it is, to use another Sanscrit formula, Chit-Shakti of the Sat-Purusha, Conscious Power of Conscious Being, & because that Conscious Being is infinite, absolute and unlimited in its possibilities and its Conscious Power infinitely, absolutely and illimitably a Free Will choosing freely Its own harmonies and not bound... world-being which the gods have made and which they maintain eternally against the powers of dissolution. For the world in the old Vedic conception is a rhythm of action and movement in God's conscious being; or rather it is a combination and concord of rhythms; it is chhandas, it is metre, it is a choral symphony of Jagati & Gayatri, Brihati & Pankti, Tristubh & Anustubh; it is Vak, a formation of ...
... to go back, while imprisoned in that form, to its real self, to the integral conscious being and the integral force of conscious being which it has put behind it, of which in its ecstatic trance of mere working and energy it has become oblivious. Prakriti, the executive Force, becomes unaware of Purusha, the Conscious Being, holds him hidden within herself and becomes again slowly aware only with the... concentration in practice which does not prevent the full existence and working of the whole conscious being behind, but a working in the conditions chosen and self-imposed on the nature. All conscious self-limitation is a power for its special purpose, not a weakness; all concentration is a force of conscious being, not a disability. It is true that while the Supermind is capable of an integral, comprehensive... the facts of existence. Integral Brahman cannot be in its integrality the source of the Ignorance, because its integrality is in its very nature all-consciousness. The One cannot in its integral conscious being exclude the Many from itself, because the Many would not then at all exist; at most it can stand back somewhere in its consciousness from the cosmic play so as to enable a similar movement in the ...
... fact of our conscious-being and relates that to Time. It says, "I am now, I was in the past, I shall therefore be in the future, it is the same I in all the three ever unstable divisions of Time." Thus it tries to render to itself in the terms of Time an account of that which it feels to be the fact, but Page 520 cannot know or prove to be true, the eternity of the conscious being. By memory... established will only be a greater continuity and not the eternity of the conscious being. In fact, if we look at the mind's concept of this eternity, we see that it comes only to a continuous succession of moments of being in an eternal Time. Therefore it is Time that is eternal and not the continuously momentary conscious being. But, on the other hand, there is nothing in mind-evidence to show that... movement of Memory, there he ranges at will. Chhandogya Upanishad. (VII. 13.) This is he who is that which sees, touches, hears, smells, tastes, thinks, understands, acts in us, a conscious being, a self of knowledge. Prasna Upanishad. (IV. 9.) In any survey of the dual character of our consciousness we have first to look at the Ignorance,—for Ignorance trying to turn into ...
... as mind runs swifter than any material force? Something of which mind & matter are lower movements,—that which is the essence of the jagati, the essential conscious being of which mind, life & matter are particular currents. This conscious-being is That—the sole Reality which assumes so many appearances. It does not run, for where should it run when it does not exist in time & space, but time & space... human development are the matter of its brief & pregnant sentences. The Taittiriya takes for its subject the Anandam Brahman, the constitution of the soul in relation to the Infinite Delight in Conscious Being which is God & the reality of existence & reveals the way & the result of its attainment; it develops for us our gospel of eternal Bliss. The Kena starting from the present constitution of con... passing hence resort who are self-slayers." Otherwise it is the worlds farthest removed from the Sun, our symbol & principle of divine Knowledge. There are materialised states of darkness in the conscious being in which they must work out the bewilderment & confusion they have fastened on themselves by an obstinate persistence in self-will & ignorance. In either case the intention of the Sage is evident ...
... sanction, for its will and pleasure; the Conscious Being imparts its consciousness to the Energy we call Nature, receives in that consciousness her workings as in a mirror, accepts the forms which she, the executive cosmic Force, creates and imposes on it, gives or withdraws its sanction from her movements. The experience of Purusha-Prakriti, the Spirit or Conscious Being in its relations to Nature, is of... none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the timeless and Time; he is Space and... is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti ...
... a Conscious-Force which presents the workings of its force to its consciousness as forms of its own being. Since Force is only the action of one sole-existing Conscious-Being, its results can be nothing else but forms of that Conscious-Being; Substance or Matter, then, is only a form of Spirit. The appearance which this form of Spirit assumes to our senses is due to that dividing action of Mind from... of Conscious-Force working in the conditions of the Ignorance created by this descent of Mind, so Matter, as we know it, is only the final form taken by conscious-being as the result of that working. Matter is substance of the one conscious-being phenomenally divided within itself by the action of a universal Mind, 2 —a division which the individual mind repeats and dwells in, but which does not... and subordinate. Substance, then, as we know it, material substance, is the form in which Mind acting through sense contacts the conscious Being of which it is itself a movement of knowledge. But Mind by its very nature tends to know and sense substance of conscious-being, not in its unity or totality but by the principle of division. It sees it, as it were, in infinitesimal points which it associates ...
... universe, no play of being is represented to itself in the eternal Conscious-Being, but only an intuitive perception that the world that we know can and does appear from That and return into It perpetually. Still world is Maya because it is not the essential truth of infinite existence, but only a creation of self-conscious being,—not a creation in the void, not a creation in nothing and out of nothing... true solution of the problem we are examining. The self of things is an infinite indivisible existence; of that existence the essential nature or power is an infinite imperishable force of self-conscious being; and of that self-consciousness the essential nature or knowledge of itself is, again, an infinite inalienable delight of being. In formlessness and in all forms, in the eternal awareness of infinite... necessity imposed on it by the very existence of the Consciousness that possesses or regards it. It is then the play of Prakriti, the executive Force, to satisfy Purusha, the regarding and enjoying Conscious-Being or it is the Page 110 play of Purusha reflected in the movements of Force and with them identifying himself. World, then, is the play of the Mother of things moved to cast Herself for ...
... before of our conscious being a preparation by heredity or by some other physically vital or physically mental operation in universal Matter specialising its action and building Page 772 the individual through the bodies of our parents, through seed and gene and chromosome. The after of the body would be a dissolution into the material elements and the after of the conscious being a relapse... of an illusion, or it is an additional revolving wheel among the many wheels of the complex machinery of the Becoming, or it is excluded since a single birth is all that can be asked for by a conscious being fortuitously engendered as part of an inconscient creation. In these views, whether we suppose the one Eternal Existence to be a vital Becoming or an immutable and unmodifiable spiritual Being... individual body with the appearance of the physical form and end with its cessation. Individual would follow individual as wave follows wave, the sea remaining always the same; 4 each formation of conscious being would surge up from the universal, roll for its allotted time and then sink back into the Silence. The necessity for this purpose of an individualised consciousness persistently continuous, assuming ...
... partial wakefulness of a living body pervaded by a crude stuff of external consciousness more or less alive and attentive to the outward impacts of the external world in which we are developing our conscious being. In the animal this stuff of externalised consciousness organises itself into a well-regulated mental sense or organ of perceiving and acting mind. Sense is in fact the mental contact of the embodied... in himself and has formed into a separate power the buddhi. But what is this buddhi? From the point of view of Yogic knowledge we may say that it is that instrument of the soul, of the inner conscious being in nature, of the Purusha, by which it comes into some kind of conscious and ordered possession both of itself and its surroundings. Behind all the action of the chitta and manas there is this... identical with that Truth, the power of this greatest knowledge and the enjoyment of that greatest being and consciousness to which it opens. This must be the final result of the evolution of the conscious being in Nature. To arrive then at the whole truth of our self and Spirit and the knowledge, greatness, bliss of our free and complete being must be the object of the purification, liberation and ...
... universe, no play of being is represented to itself in the eternal Conscious-Being, but only an intuitive perception that the world that we know can and does appear from That and return into It perpetually. Still world is Maya because it is not the essential truth of infinite existence, but only a creation of self-conscious being, — not a creation in the void, not a creation in nothing and out of... true solution of the problem we are examining. The self of things is an infinite indivisible existence; of that existence the essential nature or power is an infinite imperishable force of self-conscious being; and of that self-consciousness the essential nature or knowledge of itself is, again, an infinite inalienable delight of being. In formlessness and in all forms, in the eternal awareness of infinite... the very existence of the Consciousness that possesses or regards it. It is then the Page 135 play of Prakriti, the executive Force, to satisfy Purusha, the regarding and enjoying Conscious-Being or it is the play of Purusha reflected in the movements of Force and with them identifying himself. World, then, is the play of the Mother of things moved to cast Herself for ever into infinite ...
... kṣobha or disturbance. If there is no movement of the conscious being, it can only know its own pure static existence. Without vibration 2 or movement of being in consciousness there can be no act of knowledge and therefore no sense; without vibration or movement of being in force there can be no object of sense. Movement of conscious being as knowledge becoming sensible of itself as movement of... But this vibration of conscious being is presented to itself by various forms of sense which answer to the successive operations of movement in its assumption of form. For first Page 58 we have intensity of vibration creating regular rhythm which is the basis or constituent of all creative formation; secondly, contact or intermiscence of the movements of conscious being which constitute the... the properties of form, even the most obvious such as colour, light, etc. merely operations of Force, but form itself is only an operation of Force. This Force again proves to be self-power of conscious-being 1 in a state of energy and activity. Practically, therefore, all form is only an operation of consciousness impressing itself with presentations of its own workings. We see colour because that ...
... fundamental division within between force of Nature and the conscious being which is the original cause of this incapacity. Not only is there a division between the mental, the vital and the physical being, but each of them is also divided against itself. The capacity of the body is less than the capacity of the instinctive soul or conscious being, the physical Purusha within it, the capacity of the vital... itself by a sort of inexorable accident, an inevitably happy chance, even while all the while it really obeys faultlessly the law of the Right and Truth fixed for it by the will of the supernal Conscious-Being concealed within its movement. Where the Consciousness is divided in itself, as in Mind, limiting itself in various centres, setting each to fulfil itself without knowledge of what is in other... Unity and yet fulfils each thing in the diversity according to its proper rule and function; it will be a life in which all the individuals live at once in themselves and in each other as one conscious Being in many souls, one power of Consciousness in many minds, one joy of Force working in many lives, one reality of Delight fulfilling itself in many hearts and bodies. The first of these four positions ...
... it is the conscious being. There is the being and the becoming. The conscious being is Purusha, the becoming is Prakriti. But then each inner being has its Purusha? Or is there one Purusha in all the beings? (Nolini) In each part of the being: that is, there is a vital Purusha, a mental Purusha, a physical Purusha.... It is what we call consciousness? Yes, the conscious being. The... The conscious being in its continuity? Yes. But how can one do the sadhana if the conscious being within does not consent, for it seems to me that it is this being which must take the resolution to begin. Page 128 Yes. ( To the children ) It is I who am asking questions! (A child) Sweet Mother, the following question has been put here: "What is the sign to indicate that a ...
... that has arisen out of the inconscient, the human, seeks a truth or untruth, etc. That would be the rise of something positive out of something negative. But if we suppose that existence is conscious being or force, the question of why can arise. Then we find, as we first saw in the 4th chapter, that there is a conscious subjective Purusha at work in the whole universal existence which is... we accept the Force as being conscious, immediately the intuition and the presence of the Infinite subjective Being, the Self of the cosmos, comes into our acceptance. We accept that it is a conscious Being, an independent entity of existence who is the witness, the seer; who is perhaps the supporter also of the whole movement. This becomes a possible assumption. If existence is conscious it has... creation becomes potential. It does not cease to exist. The power to manifest the rhythms of cosmic existence do not cease because they are not projected from the Self of the Being. The Infinite Conscious Being can either hold the power of expression in repose or passivity as potential, Page 84 or can activate and throw Itself out into movement. Both are possible. Therefore, even if ...
... And 'form' presents itself as consciousness - between 'form' and 'form'... there is no veil that interposes Page 298 itself. There is only a direct contact of 'conscious being' with 'conscious being'... in a space of utter transparency. A change that is beginning to take place on earth, with us humans... and with nature, as the first instrument to respond to this new ... and moves into action in one direct movement of conscious being. And the concrete result and effect on life is both immediate and visible. There is no 'thought' - but there is 'seeing', which effectuates itself at the level of existence, in a 'self-realising' manner. There is no effort, no straining. A totality of process of the conscious being existing in life and matter begins. There is no... constructive or Page 299 sequential. Or, it even has a glimpse of totalities or vast interconnections - but it cannot turn them into direct and concrete 'experience', in which the conscious being, in its integrality, takes part. Mind spins its world, takes it to a lofty perfection and, by the very perfection of this cogency and well-orderedness, shows its limitations! Limitations that are ...
... is a state of consciousness that seems to be indicated and not a world. Nevertheless, the two statements differ little in effect; for in the Vedantic conception a world is only a condition of conscious being organised in the terms of the seven constituent principles of manifested existence. According to the state of consciousness which we reach here in the body, will be our state of consciousness and... possesses the material birth, accepting in them a means towards the divine manifestation in which they form a condition of its fullness, each being one of the parts in a series of organised states of conscious being which is linked with and supports all the rest. TRANSCENDENCE Transcendence is the goal of the development, but it does not exclude the possession of that which is transcended. The soul need... understand entirely the place and function of Surya we must enter a little more profoundly into the Vedic conception of the seven worlds and the principles of consciousness they represent. All conscious being is one and indivisible in itself, but in manifestation it becomes a complex rhythm, a scale of harmonies, a hierarchy of states or movements. For what we call a state is only the organisation of ...
... contrivance. Its movement is calm, self-possessed, spontaneous, plastic; it arises naturally and inevitably out of a harmonic identity of the truth which is felt in the very substance of the conscious being, a spiritual substance which is universal and therefore intimately one with all that is included in its cognition of existence. A mental description of supramental nature could only express itself... transcendent and universal Self and Spirit; all his action would originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit's divine governance of Nature. All life would have to him the sense of the Conscious Being, the Purusha within, finding its self-expression in Nature; his life and all its thoughts, feelings, acts would be filled for him with that significance and built upon that foundation of its reality... the conscious pressure of a free soul or intelligence from within than by a response to our environment and the world-Nature acting upon us: but what we move towards in the development of our conscious being is an inner existence creating by its knowledge and power its own outer form of living and self-expressive environment of living. In the gnostic nature this movement will have consummated itself; ...
... Consciousness Essays Divine and Human The Problem of Consciousness The Triple Enigma 83 Existence, consciousness and the significance of our conscious being,—a triple enigma confronts us when we look at them to discover their origin, foundations, nature, their innermost secret. We begin with a riddle, we end with a mystery. Existence itself is the... to the world as a whole? or is it peculiar to individual being? Or has it come from elsewhere into this inanimate and inconscient universe? To what end this entry? The significance of our conscious being in an inconscient material world is the last and worst enigma. What is the sense and justification of the individual, his consciousness, his feeling of self, his personality? Is our individuality... we suppose Being-Consciousness to carry in them an eternal and infinite energy that creates, as we say, expresses, as the Sanskrit term better puts it, the universe, then the bliss of eternal conscious being would contain in itself a bliss of eternal energy of consciousness and being finding itself in the joy of self-expression, self-manifestation, self-creation. That would be a sufficient explanation ...
... Purusha or the Conscious Being, and Prakriti or Nature. Three aspects of Nature are distinguished, namely, matter, life, and mind. Corresponding to these three aspects of Nature (Prakriti), three aspects of the Conscious Being (Purusha) are spoken of, namely, physical Conscious Being [Annamaya Purusha], the vital Conscious Being [Pranamaya Purusha], and the mental Conscious Being [Manomaya Purusha]... Purusha]. The Conscious Being or the Purusha is regarded as the Witness Page 57 [Sakshi]. Are there different types of Presence corresponding to the three Purushas—physical, vital, and mental? ECKHART: There are many ways of looking at these things. So, that is not a division that I use. [To] the question of whether there are different kinds of Presence, I would say no, but there ...
... – the only reality in a world where one wonders if people are alive or just pretending to be. This is the self of fire, the one true self in the world, the only thing that does not fail us: "A conscious being is at the center of the self, who rules past and future; he is like a fire without smoke.... That, one must disengage with patience from one's own body," says the Upanishad. 81 It is "the child... by a conscientious friend, if not by oneself. Thus, we can usefully participate in many activities that prepare our own tomorrows, or more extensive tomorrows, depending upon our capacities. "A conscious being, no larger than a man's thumb, stands in the centre of our self; he is Master of the past and the present... he is today and he is tomorrow," says the Katha Upanishad. (IV.12, 13) We need to have... its origin, the Son recovers the Father or, rather, the Father, who became the Son, becomes Himself again: There is a pushing back and rending or a rushing down of the walls that imprisoned our conscious being; there is a loss of all sense of individuality and personality, of all placement in Space or Time or action or law of Nature; there is no longer an ego, Page 146 a person definite and ...
... spirit that we are. Above it, in ourselves, there are higher reaches of conscious being represented in the body and in bodily existence but exceeding it by awakening which we can rise into ranges of experiences, manifest faculties and amplitudes of which the body-bound mortal is incapable.We have to awake those reaches of conscious being in the body and through their activity in the body to have access to... existence & by taking delight generates it on the foundation of the luminous Truth of things. That Force of divine self-Awareness, too, is an expression of a seventh & ultimate principle, pure divine Conscious Being which is, as it were, the surface of the Absolute & the source of Its world. All this existence is the ascending hill of our being & its successive summits rise out of our manifest being here and... which they also dwell in & enjoy, the Vast, the Delightful, the True, the Light, — mahas, brihat, ratnam, ritam, satyam, jyotih, various epithets by which the seers expressed the manifestation in conscious being of the Page 362 inexpressible because unthinkable Parabrahman. The Vedic sacrificer is continually described by the Veda as devayu, devayan, one who desires the gods, one who is developing ...
... 213 and that I have failed to see that, if I draw an analogy between the calculator and the human brain, I must logically conclude that the brain, like a calculator was designed by a conscious being. "To this I can only reply that (1) I did not 'overlook' the first point -1 took it for granted; and (2) no analogy is perfect, and I do not want to press this particular analogy nearly as... and the camera, but this does not mean that I 'equate' the two. "I agree that if I regarded the brain/calculator analogy as perfect I should have to infer that the brain was designed by a conscious being. But I do not regard the analogy as perfect, and I have no need to draw this inference, though most theologians would do so. I am content to say that the machine is a product of design and the... Mrs. Knight's peculiar presentation of my thought with regard to her analogy. While my discussion revolved round what I have called truth-quality, she makes it out to have been about design by a conscious being. She puts me in the same box as "most theologians" and thus subtly discredits my position. My letter was not couched in the somewhat naive and crude terms in which "most theologians" might state ...
... reactions that in us are the foundation of pleasure and pain or of attraction and repulsion; but still it is a form of life, not of mere matter, nor is it, so far as we know, at all a mind-conscious Page 738 being. Man and the animal are both mentally conscious beings: but the animal is fixed in vital mind and mind-sense and cannot exceed its limitations, while man has received into his sense... outer form-consciousness is still in the state of sleep, but a sleep full of nervous dreams, always on the point of waking, but never waking. Life has appeared; in other words, force of concealed conscious being has been so much intensified, has raised itself to such a height of power as to develop or become capable of a new principle of action, that which we see as vitality, life-force. It has become... already by his possession of intelligent will, deformed ray of the gnosis though it be, he begins to put on the double nature of Sachchidananda; he is no longer, like the animal, an undeveloped conscious being entirely driven by Prakriti, a slave of the executive Force, played with by the mechanical energies of Nature, but has begun to be a developing conscious soul or Purusha interfering with what was ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXV The Triple Transformation A conscious being is in the centre of the self, who rules past and future; he is like a fire without smoke.... That, one must disengage with patience from one's own body. Katha Upanishad. (II. 1. 12, 13; II. 3. 17.) An intuition in the heart... after-death contact with discarded phantasms or remnants of the sheaths of the personality, the difficulty is due to our ignorance of the subliminal parts of our nature and the form and powers of the conscious being or Purusha which preside over their action; owing to this inexperience we can easily mistake something of the inner mind or vital self for the psyche. For as Being is one yet multiple, so also... never be entirely easy, but the way will have been made open and practicable. One effective way often used to facilitate this entry into the inner self is the separation of the Purusha, the conscious being, from the Prakriti, the formulated nature. If one stands back from the mind and its activities so that they fall silent at will or go on as a surface movement of which one is the detached and ...
... figures reflected in the Purusha, but real forms of which Brahman, Self, conscious Being is the substance and, as it were, the material of their formation. The name attaching to the form will be not a mere conception of the mind answering to no real existence bearing the name, but there will be behind it a true power of conscious being, a true self-experience of the Brahman answering to something that it... has been created and they stand on either side of it, the one visible to the other but with no contact, no touch of sympathy, no sense of unity between them. Therefore to the passive Self all conscious being seems to be passive in its nature, all activity seems to be non-conscious in itself and mechanical ( jaḍa ) in its movement. The realisation of this status is the basis of the ancient Sankhya ... of the infinite One into the movement of the infinite multiplicity. He has to concentrate on and realise the one Brahman in all things as conscious force of being as well as pure awareness of conscious being. The Self as the All, not only in the unique essence of things, but in the manifold form of things, not only as containing all in a transcendent consciousness, but as becoming all by a constituting ...
... qualities but is yet infinite quality, who contains and combines all relations, yet is ever Page 385 absolute, who is no one person and yet all persons because He is all being and the one conscious Being. For the individual centre we call ourselves, to enter by its consciousness into this Divine and reproduce its nature in itself is the high and marvellous, yet perfectly rational and most supremely... the self of the cosmos having been discovered to be one, there must be between them an intimate unity. In fact all these opposite terms are merely general conditions for the manifestation of conscious being in that Transcendent who is always one not only behind, but within all conditions however apparently opposite. And the original unifying spirit-stuff of them all and the one substantial mode of... physical being, another which is that of plant-life, and another which is that of the lower animal creation around us. All these are so much dominated and conditioned by the thinking and reasoning conscious-being in us that we have no real awareness of these lower planes; we are unable to Page 387 perceive in their own terms what these parts of us are doing, and receive it very imperfectly in ...
... also divided against itself. Thus, "the capacity of the body is less than the capacity of the instinctive soul or conscious being, the physical Purusha within it, the capacity of the vital force less than the capacity of the impulsive soul, the vital conscious being or Purusha within it, the capacity of the mental energy less than the capacity of the intellectual and emotional soul, the... and Force The individual self or being is in essence one with the Divine and is secretly aware of its divine potentialities. In manifestation it assumes the aspect of Purusha or conscious being supporting the Prakriti or Nature that is the executive side of Chit-Shakti. This one and unique Being projects itself on each plane of nature, in the form of a representative Purusha... earth, the dual aspect of Chit-Shakti — the aspect of consciousness and the aspect of force — have not quite marched in step, thus creating a deleterious division between the demands of the conscious being, Purusha, and the capacities of the force of nature, Prakriti-Shakti. In man, for example, there is not only a division and conflict between the diverse demands and pulls of the mental, the vital ...
... distinctive features. The ultimate state of consciousness in the view of the Buddhists and those influenced by them is that of the Non-Self. Vedanta on the other hand takes its stand on the Self, the Conscious Being who is extra-cosmic and beyond all manifestation. Buddha did not take cognisance of this Self, the Buddhists have altogether denied Its existence. The followers of Tantra, whether Buddhistic or... sought to escape from the world into some extra-cosmic state, Nirvana or Self. They have brought down into this world and established here another kind of Self, an inner Page 115 conscious being. In their experience, Shiva has his abode (as the Jiva in the form of the inner Witness) within man and this earth. Creation or the manifested worlds include the earth, the earth includes man,... g it. The result has been to declare the world to be a falsehood and an illusion, mithya , maya. Akin to this line of Vedantic thought is the doctrine of Sankhya which makes the Purusha or Conscious Being separate from Prakriti or Nature, places Purusha outside or above Prakriti, declares the Purusha as entirely conscious whereas Prakriti is unconscious. Tantra on the other hand places Purusha not ...
... of Nature and Conscious Being are everywhere in the universe. There is always a dichotomy in it, a sort of division between the force of Nature and the conscious force of Being that holds the same force of Nature. For example, there is a mental person and there is a mental force. If you carefully observe, the force that is working as mental energy is not the same as the conscious being who holds himself... second term. The second term is Conscious Existence. Satchidananda is not triple. If you look at the Infinite like that, then you have A+B+C. But ABC is nothing but the Infinite—Satchidananda. This Conscious Being or Conscious Power has become Life, and it is this aspect of Life which we are considering. We have already considered the knowledge aspect of it. Now, of the three conscious aspects, we take up... the nature does not necessarily carry out. In fact, very often it carries out the very opposite of what the mental person wills. There is no correspondence between conscious force of nature, and conscious being that holds that nature as its form, or as its mould. It holds mind as its mould for expression, but mental force or mental energy that is working is not under the control of the mental Puru-sha ...
... may well be held that this urge is the evolutionary will of a secret Conscious Being and its push of progressive manifestation the evidence of an innate intention in the evolution. This is a teleological element and it is not irrational to admit it: for the conscious or even the inconscient nisus arises from a truth of conscious being that has become dynamic and set out to fulfil itself in an automatic... mentality struggling towards knowledge but itself, in what seems to be its fundamental nature, an Ignorance. Thus hampered and burdened, mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood or a spiritual and supramental supermanhood which shall be the next product of the evolution. That transition will mark the passage from the evolution in the Ignorance to a greater... and be ready for salvation. Here, again, there is implied the conception of vegetable and animal life-forms as the lower steps of a ladder, humanity as the last or culminating development of the conscious being, the form which the soul has to inhabit in order to be capable of the spiritual motive and a spiritual issue out of mentality, life and physicality. This is indeed the normal conception, and it ...
... have divine vision set Him within as a child that is to be born. Rig Veda. (III. 38. 7; IX. 83. 3.) Existence that acts and creates by the power and from the pure delight of its conscious being is the reality that we are, the self of all our modes and moods, the cause, object and goal of all our doing, becoming and creating. As the poet, artist or musician when he creates does really... as it has been realised by Sachchidananda in the vastness of His existence Page 121 extended as Space and Time, we have to conceive first of an involution and a self-absorption of conscious being into the density and infinite divisibility of substance, for otherwise there can be no finite variation; next, an emergence of the self-imprisoned force into formal being, living being, thinking... governs and determines its constant curve and destination. And since consciousness is the nature of the original Existence and the essence of its Force, this truth must be a self-perception in Conscious-Being and this determination of the line taken by Force must result from a power of self-directive knowledge inherent in Consciousness which enables it to guide its own Force inevitably along the logical ...
... nervous energy. What we call vitality is for the purposes of our normal human existence power of conscious being emerging in matter, liberating from it and in it mind and the higher powers and supporting their limited action in the physical life,—just as what we call mentality is power of conscious being awaking in body to light of its own consciousness and to consciousness of all the rest of being... have to treat them as different and diverse in power,—for in practice of consciousness this difference is valid,—although they are only two sides of the same reality, pole and pole of the one conscious being. Purusha or soul is spirit cognizant of the workings of its nature, supporting them by its being, enjoying or rejecting enjoyment of them in its delight of being. Nature is power of the spirit... multitudinous aspect of oneness. It may dwell too in the principle of supermind, in a luminous self-determining knowledge, will and action which develops some coordination of perfect delight of conscious being. In the higher gnosis unity is the basis, but it takes its joy in diversity; in lower fact of supermind diversity is the basis, but it refers back always to a conscious unity and it takes joy in ...
... apparent is this imperfect and struggling humanity, the real is the Purusha, the conscious being within us. The Conscious Being within us, one with the Being in whom we live and move, is indeed the cause and beginning and the end and aim of existence. But our humanity is only a transitory phase of the Conscious Being within us. Man is not final. Page 263 79 The transition from... destiny of the evolving spirit, the last before it assumes something of its own divinity delivered and apparent; his imperfect life and consciousness must develop itself into the type of the fully conscious being, after man or out of him must be born the superman. Page 266 This consummation can only take place by an evolution of the consciousness of the individual and humanity beyond its present... individual and social life. If the psychological truth of our being is the real and central truth, more central and important than the physical, this Page 267 must be its true nature, a conscious being growing towards its own completeness of consciousness and growing too towards its expression and formation in a complete individual and social life. Page 268 ...
... for its will and pleasure; the Conscious Being imparts its consciousness to the Energy we call Nature, receives in that consciousness her workings as in a mirror, accepts the forms which she, the executive cosmic Force, creates and imposes on it, gives or withdraws its sanction from her movements. The experience of Purusha-Prakriti, the Spirit or Conscious Being in its relations to Nature, is... according to their predilections by the Self the Immutable and by Maya the power the Self has of imposing on itself the cosmic illusion, or by the Self the Divine Being and by Maya the nature of conscious-being and the conscious-force by which the Divine embodies himself in soul-forms and forms of things. Others spoke of Ishwara and Shakti, the Lord and His force, His cosmic power. The analytic philosophy... and there are means and processes by which we can awaken its greater and potentially infinite force and liberate it to its larger workings. The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 724-26 The Conscious Being, Purusha, is the Self as originator, witness, support and lord and enjoyer of the forms and works of Nature. As the aspect of Self is in its essential character transcendental even when involved ...
... that builds the world is a conscious Force, the Existence which manifests itself in them is conscious Being and a perfect emergence of its potentialities in form is the sole object which we can rationally conceive for its manifestation of this world of forms."24 Page 27 The supreme conscious being and its infinite awareness is free, in the sense that it is not subject to any being and... swoon, which are all apparently unconscious states of our physical being. He also points out that even in our waking state what we call our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. Sri Aurobindo refers to phenomena of a vaster system of psychology, based upon verifiable data of yoga, — the true science of consciousness and Conscious Force, — which demonstrate that (i) behind... man who first makes this upward gaze consciously his own business. In the Indian terms of the play of Purusha and Prakriti, it can be said that man is no longer, like the animal, an undeveloped conscious being or Purusha entirely driven by Prakriti, a slave of the executive Force, played with by the mechanical energies of Nature. Man begins to become a developing conscious soul or Purusha and manifest ...
... unconscious and unintelligent, there cannot be any purpose or final goal in evolution or any original cause or intention. But if we suppose or find Existence to be conscious Being, the problem arises. We may indeed suppose a conscious Being which is subject to its nature of Force, compelled by it and without option as to whether it shall manifest in the universe or remain unmanifest. Such is the cosmic... only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights... below Mind, it emerges in Mind, it shall ascend into yet superior forms beyond Mind. For the Force that builds the worlds is a conscious Force, the Existence which manifests itself in them is conscious Being and a perfect emergence of its potentialities in form is the sole object which we can rationally conceive for its manifestation of this world of forms. Page 97 ...
... consisting in its formation, building and organisation. For the psychic starts by being only a kind of tiny divine spark within the being and out of this spark will emerge progressively an independent conscious being having its own action and will. The psychic being at its origin is only a spark of the divine consciousness and it is through successive lives that it builds up a conscious individuality. It is... a progress similar to that of a growing child. It is a thing in the making. For a long time, in most human beings the psychic is a being in the making. It is not a fully individualised, fully conscious being and master of itself and it needs all its rebirths, one after another, in order to build itself and become fully conscious. But this sort of progress has an end. There comes a time when the... birth again in a body. Till then rebirth is a necessity, for it is through rebirth that he grows; it is in the physical life and in a physical body that he gradually develops and becomes a fully conscious being. But once he is fully formed, he is free, in this sense that he can take birth or not, at will. So there, one kind of progress stops. Page 203 But if this fully formed being wants to ...
... some very advanced cases the psychic can, before leaving the body, decide what kind of life it will have in its next incarnation. When it has become an almost completely formed and already very conscious being, it presides over the formation of the new body, and usually through an inner influence it chooses the elements and the substance which will form its body in such a way that the body is adapted... consisting in its formation, building and organisation. For the psychic starts by being only a kind of tiny divine spark inside the being and out of this spark will emerge progressively an independent conscious being having its own action and will. The psychic being at its origin is only a spark of the divine consciousness and it is through successive lives that it builds up a conscious individuality. It is... a progress similar to that of a growing child. It is a thing in the making. For a long time, in most human beings the psychic is a being in the making. It is not a fully individualised, fully conscious being and master of itself and it needs all its rebirths, one after another, in order to build itself and become fully conscious. But this sort of progress has an end. There comes a time when the ...
... in its formation, building, and organisation. For the psychic starts by being only a kind of tiny divine spark within the being and out of this spark will emerge progressively an independent conscious being having its own action and will. The psychic being at its origin is only a spark of the divine consciousness and it is through successive lives that it builds up a conscious individuality. It is... a progress similar to that of a growing child. It is a thing in the making. For a long time, in most human beings the psychic is a being in the making. It is not a fully individualised, fully conscious being and master of itself and it needs all its rebirths, one after another, in order to build itself and become fully conscious. Page 63 But this sort of progress has an end. There... birth again in a body. Till then rebirth is a necessity, for it is through rebirth that he grows; it is in the physical life and in a physical body that he gradually develops and becomes a fully conscious being. But once he is fully formed, he is free, in this sense that he can take birth or not, at will. So there, one kind of progress stops. But if this fully formed being wants to become an instrument ...
... born, not manifested, in Page 613 the waters of our sevenfold being, in the working of the seven sisters, the seven states of our consciousness which begin from Sat the pure state of conscious being & descend to Bhuh, its material state. The gods, that is to say, the great powers which work in our being to uplift the mortal to divinity, find the hidden Force of God concealed in the secret... disorder & errors of the mortal mind. He wears brilliance like a robe,—the various brilliance of Tapas poured into many kinds of workings, and builds up throughout the whole range of our sevenfold conscious being powers which are vast as proceeding from the infinity of the ideal consciousness, that mahas which is satyam ritam brihat, and not like our human & mental powers subject at every step to defect... naked; here the eternal damsels born of a common womb held, seven women, their one common child. The divine force pervading this mortal kingdom with its bright limbs goes all about the sevenfold conscious being manifested in the heaven of pure mind, it fills our whole purified & liberated mentality with itself. Then these activities in us of mentalised infinite being, mentalised infinite force, mentalised ...
... to take two other poises. He can have an intuition of himself as a soul in body, which puts forth life as its activity and mind as the light of that activity. This soul in body is the physical conscious being, annamaya puruṣa , which uses life and mind characteristically for physical experience,—all else being regarded as a consequence of physical experience,—does not look beyond the life of the body... self-identified with a great movement of becoming in Time, which puts forth body as a form or basic sense-image and mind as a conscious activity of life-experience. This soul in life is the vital conscious being, prāṇamaya puruṣa , which is capable of looking beyond the duration and limits of the physical body, of feeling an eternity of life behind and in front, an identity with a universal Life-being... seemed; action of Nature continues and is what it is because of the sanction of the Purusha. The regarding Purusha sees that he supports and in some way fills and pervades the action with his conscious being. He discovers that without him it could not continue and that where he persistently withdraws this sanction, the habitual action becomes gradually enfeebled, flags and ceases. His whole active ...
... the Infinite, they arrive not at an abstract existence or non-existence, a Sat or else a Nirvana, but at an existent, a Sat Purusha, not merely at a consciousness, Page 579 but at a conscious Being, a Chaitanya Purusha, not merely at a purely impersonal delight of the Is, but at an infinite I Am of bliss, an Anandamaya Purusha; nor can they immerge and lose his consciousness and bliss in... himself through infinite quality; in absolute impersonality, an absolute existence or an absolute non-existence, which is yet all the time the unexpressed Absolute of this divine Person, this conscious Being who manifests himself through us and through the universe. Even on the cosmic plane we are constantly approaching the Divine on either of these sides. We may think, feel and say that God is... abstract way of experience. As we ourselves are not merely a number of qualities or powers or a psychological quantity, but a being, a person who so expresses his nature, so is the Divine a Person, a conscious Being who thus expresses his nature to us. And we can adore him through different forms of this nature, a God of righteousness, a God of love and mercy, a God of peace and purity; but it is evident that ...
... conscious Existence, Purusha, and not something inconscient and mechanical; it exists eternally in its delight of the force of its own conscious being founded in an equilibrium of unity; but it exists also in the no less eternal delight of its force of conscious being at play with various creative self-experience in the universe. Just as we ourselves are or can become aware of being always something... indefinite result and sum or else a high contradiction of self-experience. The old philosophical quarrel between Being and Becoming is not possible to the eternal self-knowledge. An active force of conscious-being which realises itself in its powers of self-experience, its powers of knowledge, will, self-delight, self-formulation with all their marvellous variations, inversions, conservations and conversions... Page 438 an infinite experience, from many standpoints, on many planes, through many conscious powers or selves of itself, individualities—in our limited intellectual language—of the one conscious being. Each one of us is one of these individualities. To stand away from God in limited ego, limited mind is to stand away from ourselves, to be unpossessed of our true individuality, to be the apparent ...
... not mind has created the world. Chitshakti is the thing which the Scientists call in its various aspects Force & Energy, but it is no material Force or Energy, it is the divine power of self-conscious Being forming itself not materially, not in substance of matter but in the substance of that self-consciousness into these images of form and force which make up the world. What we call world, is a harmony... Reality. Existence, Consciousness-Force, Bliss 33 The nature of the Eternal is infinite Being, the nature of Being is Self-Awareness and all-Awareness or Consciousness, the nature of conscious Being is conscious Force aware of its self and its action, the nature of conscious self-awareness is infinite Bliss[.] 34 Identity is the first truth of existence; division is the second... existence, consciousness of existence, bliss of the consciousness of existence; but it is a pure existence without other feature or any relation. But how is this proved to be the ultimate state of our conscious being? Well, it is the knowledge of the sages who have entered into it that it is the ultimate state, it is the knowledge left behind them that they have finally passed away into it not to return to ...
... mentalised cosmic consciousness. What then compels embodied mind to see objects externally and by separation? It is compelled by the fact of physical embodiment. Body is a self-limitation of conscious being by Page 303 which mind is rigidly bound down to its own tendency of separative individuation. Body, including all physical formations from the atom upwards, is a device of Nature... Empirically it is immaterial whether it is an image created by consciousness or a real substance of being. For practical purposes we may take it as a substantial formation. In fact body is a knot of conscious being built up by its own energy, instinct with nervous or subnervous life,—because the energy is in dynamic actuality a living energy—cognizing and cognized by subconscious or superficially conscious... knowledge of the process of Being, a metaphysical knowledge of its principles and essentiality. We find that one of these principles of being is energy. Energy is an eternal and inherent power of conscious being. Since all energy is convertible to action, this knowledge also contains a side of psychological and spiritual utility,—eventually perhaps even, since life and body are results of the energy of ...
... go back, while imprisoned in that form, to its real self, to the integral conscious being and the integral force of conscious being which it has put behind it, of which in its ecstatic trance of mere working and energy it has become oblivious. Prakriti, the executive Force, becomes unaware of Purusha, the Conscious Being, holds him hidden within herself and becomes again slowly aware only with... it, whatever be its appearance or particular poise of activity, is in essence Chit-Shakti, a conscious creative Force, and the Existence that is manifesting itself in this world of forms is conscious Being "that is awake in those who sleep". 3 But what is then the difference between diverse forms in existence, between plants and animals and men, between inert and inanimate 1 ...
... unconscious and unintelligent, there cannot be any purpose or final goal in evolution or any original cause or intention. But if we suppose or find Existence to be conscious Being, the problem arises. We may indeed suppose a conscious Being which is subject to its nature of Force, compelled by it and without option as to whether it shall manifest in the universe or remain unmanifest. Such is the cosmic... only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights... below Mind, it emerges in Mind, it shall ascend into yet superior forms beyond Mind. For the Force that builds the worlds is a conscious Force, the Existence which manifests itself in them is conscious Being and a perfect emergence of its potentialities in form is the sole object which we can rationally conceive for its manifestation of this world of forms. Page 122 ...
... continuity and coherence. Still Memory is not all; it is only a mediator between the mind-sense and the coordinating mind.—It is the mind-sense which shapes the object of experience as a wave of the conscious being into a movement of emotion, vitality, sensation or thought-perception. There is also an act of mental observation and valuation of this wave in the sense-mind. There is also the subject or mental... mental experience of becoming, nor of its continuity, nor of the recurrence of the same experience or the same cause and effect in Time. These are circumstances of the movement of the stuff of conscious being and conscious force of being, a movement which is really undivided though only seen by mind in artificial divisions. Memory is a device by which the experiences of the mind-sense are linked together... mental being develops towards knowledge of that which experiences as well as of that which is experienced. Memory only tells us that the successive experiences have happened in the same field of conscious being; it is the coordinating and distinguishing mind which tells us that it is the same mental being who experiences.—Mind-substance suffers the changes of becoming; mind-sense experiences them; memory ...
... ājñāna . It will comprehend all things in its energy of conscious knowledge, control all things in its energy of conscious power. These energies will be the spontaneous inherent action of its conscious being creative and possessive of the forms of the universe. What part then will be left for the apprehensive consciousness and the sense? They will be not independent functions, but subordinate operations... inadequate image of the unity of the supreme action of the supreme energy. If we consider, we shall see that this must be so. The supreme consciousness must not only comprehend and possess in its conscious being the images of things which it creates as its self-expression, but it must place them before it—always in its own being, not externally—and have a certain relation with them by the two terms of... terms of our organisation the movements of the supreme Energy. But by the very fact that the images of things are there held in front of an apprehending consciousness within the comprehending conscious being and not externalised as our individual mind externalises them, the supreme Mind and supreme Sense will be something quite different from our mentality and our forms of sensation. They will be terms ...
... physical state of consciousness as fundamental and no longer considers it as a reality separate from consciousness. All this world is only one conscious Being. Matter to the Vedantist is only one of several states—in reality, movements—of this conscious being,—a state in which this universal consciousness, having created forms within & out of itself as substance, absorbs & loses itself by concentration... Purusha in matter, the Knower in the leaf, clod, stone, is involved in form, forgets himself in this movement of his Prakriti or Mode of Action and loses hold in outgoing knowledge of his self of conscious being & delight. He is not in possession of himself; He is not Atmavan. He has to get back what he has lost, to become Atmavan, and that simply means that He has to become gradually aware in matter of ...
... Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that conscious force, terms of that delight of... is often farther confused by a false issue starting from the idea of a personal extra-cosmic God and a partial issue, the ethical difficulty. Sachchidananda, it may be reasoned, is God, is a conscious Being who is the author of existence; how then can God have created a world in which He inflicts suffering on His creatures, sanctions pain, permits evil? God being All-Good, who created pain and evil... be brought back in a modified form; All-Delight being necessarily all-good and all-love, how can evil and suffering exist in Sachchidananda, since he is not mechanical existence, but free and conscious being, free to condemn and reject evil and suffering? We have to recognise that the issue so stated is also a false issue because it applies the terms of a partial statement as if they were applicable ...
... all beings, it is to Me that they come. Gita. (XII. 3, 4.) High beyond the Intelligence is the Great Self, beyond the Great Self is the Unmanifest, beyond the Unmanifest is the Conscious Being. There is nothing beyond the Being,—that is the extreme ultimate, that the supreme goal. Katha Upanishad. (I. 3. 10, 11.) Rare is the great of soul to whom all is the Divine Being... body's functionings are a necessary machinery or instrumentation for the movements of this mental Inhabitant; it is only by setting the corporeal instrument in motion that Page 319 the Conscious Being emerging, evolving in it can transmit its mind formations, will formations and turn them into a physical manifestation of itself in Matter. The capacity, the processes of the instrument must to... spiritual Page 329 determinates of the absolute Existence; they are its triune powers, necessary first postulates for all its self-creation or manifestation,—Self, the Divine, the Conscious Being; Atman, Ishwara, Purusha. If we pursue the process of self-manifestation farther, we shall see that each of these aspects or powers reposes in its first action on a triad or trinity; for Knowledge ...
... In the terrestrial evolution itself the overmind descent would not be able to transform wholly the Inconscience; all that it could do would be to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious being, inner and outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff and impose that upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and knowledge. But a basis of Nescience would remain;... physical being, another which is that of plant-life, and another which is that of the lower animal creation around us. All these are so much dominated and conditioned by the thinking and reasoning conscious-being in us that we have no real awareness of these lower planes; we are unable to perceive in their own terms what these parts of us are doing, and receive it very imperfectly in the terms and values... these varied and heterogeneous planes on each other. For man here is the result of an evolution and contains in himself the whole of that evolution up from the merely physical and subvital conscious being to the mental creature which at the top he is. But this evolution is really a manifestation and just as we have in us these subnormal selves and subhuman planes, so are there in us above ...
... Divine Being, Sachchidananda, is at once impersonal and personal: it is an Existence and the origin and foundation of all truths, forces, powers, existences, but it is also the one transcendent Conscious Being and the All-Person of whom all conscious beings are the selves and personalities; for He is their highest Self and the universal indwelling Presence. It is a necessity for the soul in the universe... the Absolute basing all relatives, the Absolute governing, pervading, constituting all relatives..." 15 "...there are three fundamental aspects in which we meet this Reality, - Self, Conscious Being or Spirit and God, the Divine Being or to use the Indian terms, the absolute and omnipresent Reality, Brahman, manifest to us as Atman, Purusha, Ishwara..," 16 "...with regard to the universe... Self in which it is felt not only sustaining and pervading and enveloping all things, but constituting everything and identified in a free identity with all its becomings in Nature." 17 "The Conscious Being, Purusha, is the Self as originator, witness, support and lord and enjoyer of the forms and works of Nature. As the aspect of Self is in its essential character transcendental even when involved ...
... Or else we may imagine that there is one plane only, the material existence; there is no superconscient apart from the Soul of the material universe. If we find that there are other planes of conscious being and that there already exist other worlds than the material universe, these ideas might become difficult to substantiate; but we can escape from that annulment if we suppose that these worlds have... power of transference are of immense importance. On the one side they immediately justify, at any rate as an actual possibility, the ancient tradition of at least a temporary sojourn of the human conscious being in other worlds than the physical after the dissolution of the physical body. On the other side they open to us the possibility of an action of the higher planes on the material existence which... of his own being, an artificial environment corresponding to his attempt during life to image these other worlds,—heavens and hells projected by the image-creating faculty in his human power of conscious being. But neither of these two contributions at all means a total creation of a real plane of being founded and acting on its own separate principle. These planes or systems are then at least coeval ...
... stage still impossible. If the inmost being, the psychic, takes charge, then indeed a deeper mutation, not mental, can make the descent of spiritual force more effective; for the totality of the conscious being will have undergone a preliminary soul change which emancipates mind, life, body from the snare of their own imperfections and impurities. At this point, a greater spiritual dynamisation, the working... In the terrestrial evolution itself the overmind descent would not be able to transform wholly the Inconscience; all that it could do would be to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious being, inner and outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff and impose that upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and knowledge. But a basis of Nescience would remain;... organised natural individuality, were a traveller mounting the degrees of consciousness cut out in universal Nature, each ascent carrying it totally as a definite integer, as a separate body of conscious being, from one state of its existence to the next in order. This is so far correct that a sufficient integration of one status has to be complete before an ascent to the next higher station can be entirely ...
... Gita. (IX. 33.) This Self is a self of Knowledge, an inner light in the heart; he is the conscious being common to all the states of being and moves in both worlds. He becomes a dream-self and passes beyond this world and its forms of death.... There are two planes of this conscious being, this and the other worlds; a third state is their place of joining, the state of dream, and when he... existence, this world and the other world. When he sleeps, he takes the substance of this world in which all is and himself undoes and himself builds by his own illumination, his own light; when this conscious being sleeps, he becomes luminous with his self-light.... There are no roads nor chariots, nor joys nor pleasures, nor tanks nor ponds nor rivers, but he creates them by his own light, for he is the ...
... the narrow and incompetent human mind is likely to be the key to a divine suprahuman knowledge. The heart, the will, the life and even the body, no less than the thought, are forms of a divine Conscious-Being and indices of great significance. These too have powers by which the soul can return to its complete self-awareness or means by which it can enjoy it. The object of the Supreme Will may well be... from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of Page 293 human life were not a useless excursion of the conscious being, an otiose blunder. Here they were planned as a rough ground for the self-expression of the Soul that comes from the Infinite, a material foundation for its self-unfolding and self-possessing in... here afterwards. For what we gain at first with its release and immeasurable silence and quietude is only the eternal Page 298 self-realisation by the individual in the essence of his conscious being; there will still remain on that foundation, unannulled by the silence, one with the release and freedom, the infinitely proceeding self-fulfilment of Brahman, its dynamic divine manifestation ...
... shall not deny ourselves; we shall admit both the play of the love and the delight and its ineffable union. By knowledge we seek unity with the Divine in his conscious being: by works we seek also unity with the Divine in his conscious being, not statically, but dynamically, through conscious union with the divine Will; but by love we seek unity with him in all the delight of his being. For that reason... all-embracing than any other motive of Yoga. The way of knowledge tends easily towards the impersonal and the absolute, may very soon become exclusive. It is true that it need not do so; since the conscious being of the Divine is universal and individual as well as transcendent and absolute, here too there may be and should be a tendency to integral realisation of unity and we can arrive by it at a spiritual ...
... operation of mind with substance and form as its object of apprehension; it is rather an energising of conscious being which is a cause and support of the formation of substance and an intermediate source and support of conscious mental apprehension. Life, as this intermediate energising of conscious being, liberates into sensitive action and reaction a form of the creative force of existence which was... they are present in the Force which builds up and constitutes the atom. That Force is fundamentally the Chit-Tapas or Chit-Shakti of the Vedanta, consciousness-force, inherent conscious force of conscious-being, which manifests itself as nervous energy full of submental sensation in the plant, as desire-sense and desire-will in the primary animal forms, as self-conscious sense and force in the developing ...
... is in its nature absolute power; the nature of Chit is Shakti: Force or Shakti concentrated and energised for cognition or for action in a realising power effective or creative, the power of conscious being dwelling upon itself and bringing out, as it were, by the heat of its incubation 1 the seed and development of all that is within it or, to use a language convenient to our minds, of all its... self-exhausting identification is impossible; for no action, however vast, exhausts the original power from which it proceeds, leaving nothing behind it in reserve. When we get back into our own conscious being, when we stand back from our own action and see how it is done, we discover that it is our whole being which stands behind any particular act or sum of activities, passive in the rest of its i... y, active in its limited dispensation of energy; but that passivity is not an incapable inertia, it is a poise of self-reserved energy. A similar truth must apply still more completely to the conscious being of the Infinite, whose power, in silence of status as in creation, must also be infinite. It is immaterial for the moment to inquire whether the passivity out of which all emerges is absolute ...
... the conscious sense of itself as a manifestation of the Absolute. Its immutable existence it would be aware of as the original "self-form" 2 of that Transcendent,—Sachchidananda; its play of conscious being it would be aware of as manifestation of That in forms of Sachchidananda. In its every state or act of knowledge it would be aware of the Unknowable cognising itself by a form of variable self... unexpressed and therefore to our mental experience of that state non-existent, and of the One in its extended consciousness holding the multiplicity thrown out and active as the play of its own conscious being, will and delight. It would equally be aware of the Many ever drawing down to themselves the One that is the eternal source and reality of their existence and of the Many ever mounting up attracted... tranquil Force, the ray of self-cognition gleaming out from the sun of timeless self-awareness, the wave of becoming rising up into shape of self-conscious existence out of the eternally self-conscious Being, the joy and love welling for ever out of the eternal still Delight. It will be the Absolute biune in its self-unfolding, and each relativity in it will be absolute to itself because aware of itself ...
... mind; he passes to the Self of knowledge; he passes to the Self of bliss; he moves through these worlds at will. Taittiriya Upanishad. (III. 10. 5.) They say indeed that the conscious being is made of desire. But of whatsoever desire he comes to be, he comes to be of that will, and of whatever will he comes to be, he does that action, and whatever his action, to (the result of) that... own final and lowest term, receive its reactions, admit a secret communication and commerce. Man can become conscious of these Page 824 planes, can even in certain states project his conscious being into them, partly in life, presumably therefore with a full completeness after the dissolution of the body. Such a possibility of projection into other worlds or planes of being becomes then s... absolute determinant of the life-workings of the cosmos, unless the cosmos is itself entirely mechanical in its character. It is indeed held by many that all is Law and Process and there is no conscious Being or Will in or behind the cosmos; if so, here is a Law and Process that satisfies our human reason and our mental standards of right and justice and it has the beauty and truth of a perfect symmetry ...
... minds Page 555 we daily communicate. Yoga proceeds by conscious union, the conscious being is its instrument, and a conscious union with the Inconscient cannot be. It is true that it goes beyond the human consciousness and in Samadhi becomes superconscient, but this is not an annullation of our conscious being, it is only its self-exceeding, the going beyond its present level and normal limits... existence to seek Him. Therefore that there may be at all any possibility of a Yoga of devotion, we must assume first that the supreme Existence is not an abstraction or a state of existence, but a conscious Being; secondly, that he meets us in the universe and is in some way immanent in it as well as its source,—otherwise, we should have to go out of cosmic life to meet him; thirdly, that he is capable ...
... knowledge; all the totality of works, says the Gita, finds its rounded culmination in knowledge, sarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ jñāne parisamāpyate . By union in will and works we become one in the omnipresent conscious being from whom all our will and works have their rise and draw their power and in whom they fulfil the round of their energies. And the crown of this union is love; for love is the delight of conscious... light by which it knows itself and its realities, the power by which, starting from action, we are able to hold the inner results Page 545 of thought and act in a firm growth of our conscious being until it accomplishes itself, by union, in the infinity of the divine being. The Divine meets us in many aspects and to each of them knowledge is the key, so that by knowledge we enter into and... perfect knowledge of it fulfilled in identity, yet is delight the Page 546 nature of consciousness and of the acme of delight love is the key and the secret. And if will is the power of conscious being by which it fulfils itself and by union in will we become one with the Being in its characteristic infinite power, yet all the works of that power start from delight, live in the delight, have ...
... arising out of the depths of the soul or being. It is a voice of the rhythm which has created the worlds and creates perpetually. All world is expression or manifestation, creation by the Word. Conscious Being luminously manifesting its contents in itself, of itself, tmanā , is the superconscient; holding its contents obscurely in itself it is the subconscient. The higher, the self-luminous descends... sacred and enlightening Word, holding them firmly in the thought, became illuminated in mind, open to the full inflow of the superconscient. They were thus able to bring into the front of the conscious being that activity of the soul-thoughts which works usually in the background, veiled, and to make it the leading activity of their nature. As a result Brihaspati in them became able to taste for them... vastness of that Light of the Truth-consciousness, in that highest heavenly space of the supreme superconscient, maho jyotiṣaḥ parame vyoman , presents himself in the full sevenfold aspect of our conscious being, multiply born in all the forms of the interplay of its seven principles ranging from the material to the purest spiritual, luminous with their sevenfold ray which lights all our surfaces and all ...
... you go on, for that will help to make the action of the Force more precise. These thoughts that attack in sleep or in the state between sleep and waking do not belong to any part of your conscious being, but come either from the subconscient or from the surrounding Page 605 atmosphere through the subconscient. If they are thoughts you had in the past and have thrown out from you, then... in life leaves an impression, a sort of essential memory of itself in the subconscient and this can come up in dreams even long after those feelings, movements or experiences have ceased in the conscious being,—still more when they have been recent and are only now or lately thrown away from the mind or vital. Thus long after one has ceased to think of old acquaintances or relatives dreams about them... Always therefore one should begin by a positive, not a negative experience, by bringing down something of the divine nature, calm, light, equanimity, purity, divine strength into the parts of the conscious being that have to be changed; only when that has been sufficiently done and there is a firm positive basis, is it safe to raise up the concealed subconscious adverse elements in order to destroy and ...
... The Life Divine, p. 251. 3 Ibid., p. 254. Page 310 forms of its own being. Since Force is only the action of one sole-existing Conscious-Being, its results can be nothing else but forms of that Conscious-Being; Substance or Matter, then, is only a form of Spirit." 1 "Energy seems to create substance, but, in reality, as existence is inherent in Consciousness-Force... has hold of a universal and fundamental truth; and when philosophy discovers that matter only exists as substantial appearance to the consciousness and that the one reality is Spirit or pure conscious Being, it has hold of a greater and completer, a still more fundamental truth.... "We shall understand better if we go back...to the original principle of things. Existence is in its activity ...
... faculties are combined, developed and purified, and there is a progressive integral concentration upon the object of integral perfection. The first stage in the Integral Yoga is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with all that we consider to be true, good and beautiful, all that we consider to be perfect and divine. In the second stage, three is a wide, full and therefore laborious... or into sleep or a dull trance or a comatose torpor. Our first concern must be with all that we are conscious of, and it is only when there has been already a good deal of harmonisation of our conscious being and an ascent to high levels of consciousness that it becomes easier and safer to deal with the subconscient. The higher we rise the greater the capacity we achieve to deal with the lower. The... in essence a heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being so that it may be raised in to the greater intensity of what is still unmanifest. In this evolutionary process, our conscious being stands as a middle term, which is neither unconscious nor superconscious. Our consciousness is normally unaware of all that is subconscious and unconscious of all that is superconscious. It is ...
... obscure, opposed to the divine realization is rejected. The result of this movement is that the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for the psychic and spiritual experience of every kind, and the whole conscious being is delivered from the hold of tamas, rajas and satwa; the whole conscious being becomes tuned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, and action. The second result is ...
... The exercise of conscious directive will, supported and illumined by a self-consciousness, that occurs with the advent of the Mind is a function of the Purusha, the self-conscious being, in the Mind; but this self-conscious being has been able to come up, manifest itself and be active, because of pressure of the underlying psychic personality that has formed here. Thus we have three characteristics... considered as a mere force, movement or quality. There is another aspect, however, in which the descent is of a particular and personal character and consciousness is not force or status only but conscious being or Person. The various movements or forces of consciousness that play in the various fields or levels of creation are not merely states or degrees and magnitudes, currents and streams of ...
... biological units, and of course, very overtly and patently in the human mental consciousness. There seems to be an entity lying at the other end away from Matter, it is the Spirit, the individual Conscious Being. If Matter is Bondage, Law, Determinism, Spirit is Freedom, Liberty, Self-choice. That is the well-known duality – Purusha and Prakriti, that divide existence between themselves. Purusha is the... goal of the Divine Lila is the liberation of Nature, Prakriti. Prakriti is born in Bondage as inconscient Energy. Prakriti itself is a prison-house made of, wholly made of unconsciousness. The conscious Being is there involved, imprisoned and suffers and is miserable. For the gloom of unconsciousness covers it and almost swallows it up. That is the immanent Godhead in creation and is in man his soul... the inner stem of a blade of grass out of its covering, for that which is Pure, Stainless is not here but out there. But we have set before us a different process. The immanent Godhead, the Conscious Being imbedded, apparently lost in matter need not withdraw or depart elsewhere to be free and to be itself. We have already said the force of its consciousness has or can have a different function and ...
... ess is self-existent, eternal in itself. One can go one step farther. The Conscious Energy is seen to be one with the Being that creates the universe, but at the same time it is seen that the conscious Being which is the truth of the infinite supermind, is more than the universe and lives independently in Its own inexpressible infinity as well as in the cosmic harmonies. It is found that the world... even of impersonal Self and to justify a spiritualised atheism or agnosticism; he Page 55 becomes to the mind of man an indefinable, anirdesyam. But out of this unknowable the conscious Being, the divine Person, who has manifested himself here, still speaks, "This too is I; even here beyond the view of mind, I am He, the Purushottama." 46 The path of the Divine Love leads the... overmind descent would not be able to transform wholly the Inconscience. It is true that the descent of the overmental consciousness would be able to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious being, the inner and outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff and impose That upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and knowledge. But this transformation would not ...
... faculties are combined, developed and purified, and there is a progressive integral concentration upon the object of integral perfection. The first stage in the Integral Yoga is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with all that we consider to be true, good and beautiful, all that we consider to be perfect and divine. In the second stage, there is a wide, full and therefore laborious... incoherence, sleep or dull trance or comatose torpor. Our first concern must be with all that we are conscious of, and it is only when there has been already a good deal of harmonisation of our conscious being and an ascent to high levels of consciousness that it becomes easier and safer to deal with the subconscient. The higher we rise the greater the capacity we acquire to deal with the lower. The... evolution is in essence a heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being so that is may be raised into greater intensity of what is still unmanifest. In this evolutionary process, our conscious being stands as a middle term, which is neither unconscious nor superconscious. Our consciousness is normally unaware of all that is subconscious and unconscious of all that is superconscious. It is ...
... The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 6 THE CONSCIOUS BEING The conscious being in us is truly the psychic being. But it is behind at present and out of the picture. What is normally conscious then is the mind, a part of it which has got the light is illumined. We are conscious through this portion, and even we identify ourselves with it, know and feel it as... harmonised or bound together as a team for serving a common purpose, a single aim. That union and harmonisation can be done only through the supreme Purusha, the Divine Witness who is the true conscious Being, the one Purusha behind or above all the others, whose light first of all centralises in the psychic being and then through it is canalised into its delegates or emanations on the lower levels ...
... Conscious Energy, one with Being that creates the world. It is the Sat and the Chit aspect of the Supreme that is responsible for the world creation. Therefore Conscious-Being that one speaks of, thus, is more than the universe. Conscious Being—not cosmic being—is more than the Cosmos; it lives also within, inside the working of cosmic harmonies. The world that we know lives by That which is beyond... from 'Being' —, freedom from all the terms of existence,— not the denial of all reality of existence but the denial of all the limitation of its expression. Thus, simultaneous awareness of a conscious being, a Self as a Reality and an Unknowable beyond as the same Reality becomes realisable to the awakened human soul. Man then realises that the Reality is not limited to its expression. That is ...
... according to the metaphysician, have only a conceptual and not a real existence; but since all things and not these only are forms assumed by Conscious-Being in its own consciousness, the distinction is of no great importance. Time and Space are that one Conscious-Being viewing itself in extension, subjectively as Time, objectively as Space. Our mental view of these two categories is determined by the idea... ego. We must not indeed exclude the personal aspect of the Deity, for the impersonal is only one face of existence; the Divine is All-existence, but it is also the one Existent,—it is the sole Conscious-Being, but still a Being. Nevertheless, with this aspect we are not concerned at present; it is the impersonal psychological truth of the divine Consciousness that we are seeking to fathom: it is this ...
... conscient is what we call God; and He must obviously be omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. Omnipresent, for all forms are forms of His conscious being created by its force of movement in its own extension as Space and Time; omniscient, for all things exist in His conscious-being, are formed by it and possessed by it; omnipotent, for this all-possessing consciousness is also an all-possessing Force and al... primary Supermind. It is the pure divine ideation and formation in the Infinite,—only an ideation and formation that is organised not as an unreal play of mental thought, but as a real play of conscious being. The divine soul in this poise would make no difference between Conscious-Soul and Force-Soul, for all force would be action of consciousness, nor between Page 156 Matter and Spirit ...
... consciousness is to us a superconscience, a state which is beyond us and in which our mind, if suddenly transferred to it, could not at first function; but it is towards that superconscience that our conscious being must be evolving. But this evolution of our consciousness to a superconscience or supreme of itself is possible only if the Inconscience which is our basis here is really itself an involved Su... perfection, the perfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth, by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and... surpass the known action of material Energy which is now ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things and the sole instrumentation of the World-Force. A human working of marvels, by the conscious being discovering and developing an instrumentation of material forces overpassing anything that Nature has herself organised, is accepted as a natural fact and an almost unlimited prospect of our existence; ...
... to the total sense consciousness within and behind the vision a revelation of the soul of the thing seen and of the universal spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its own conscious being. Page 868 There is at the same time a subtle change which makes the sight see in a sort of fourth dimension, the character of which is a certain internality, the seeing not only of... the inner and the outer planes, this world and others, partly by an awareness, which may be very constant, vast and vivid, of their impacts, suggestions, communications to our inner thought and conscious being and a capacity of reaction upon them there, partly also through many kinds of symbolic, transcriptive or representative images presented to the different psychical senses. But also there is the... complete transformation comes on us by a certain change, not merely of the poise or level of our regarding conscious self or even of its law and character, but also of the whole substance of our conscious being. Till that is done, the supramental consciousness manifests above the mental and psychical atmosphere of being—in which the physical has already become a subordinate and to a large extent a dependent ...
... these barriers of material & dimension. What is true [of] matter is not true of Spirit, nor do the standards of form become facts applied to the formless. For matter is conscious being confined in form, the spirit is conscious being using form but unconfined in it; & it is the privilege of Spirit that though Page 342 indivisible in its pure being, it is freely self-divisible in its conscious... within the range of the word Yoga. Yoga takes us from the surface into the depths of our consciousness or it admits us into its very centre; it takes us up to the hidden topmost heights of our conscious being. It shows to us the secrets of the Self and the secret of the Divine. It gives us the knowledge, the vision, the presence of the Immanent and the Cosmic and the Transcendent Reality; that is its ...
... consciousness, guṇa , the result of quality of being perceived by sense-knowledge. Solidity itself is only a combination of the guṇas, saṁhati and dhṛti , cohesion and permanence, a state of conscious being, nothing else. Matter, life, mind and what is beyond mind, it is all Sri Krishna the Ananta-guna Brahman playing in the world as the Sachchidananda. When we have this realisation, when we dwell... but God's; you yourself will be only a centre of being, knowledge and bliss through which God works in that Adhar. This is the condition in which one is utterly taccittaḥ , given up in all his conscious being to God, in which there is utter fulfilment of the description, यस्य नाहंकृतो भावो बुद्धिर्यस्य न लिप्यते । "One whose state of being is free from egoism and whose understanding receives... which Sri Krishna gives so much importance. मयि सर्वाणि कर्माणि संन्यस्याध्यात्मचेतसा । निराशीर्निर्ममो भूत्वा युध्यस्य विगतज्वरः ।। "Laying down all actions upon Me, with thy whole conscious being in adhyātmayoga , become free from desire and the sense of belongings; fight, let the fever of thy soul pass from thee." For this great and complete liberation it is necessary that you should ...
... 15 It is only after the Purusha has emerged as both a Witness and a Sanctioner that the Soul, the Conscious Being, can progressively become the Master. Sri Aurobindo speaks of these three stages in the liberation of the Purusha from the Prakriti thus: ... the Conscious Being standing back detached from all the movements of Nature and observing them as witness and knower and finally... called Darshanas—Darshan means "seeing"—because they are not producers of the intellect but of spiritual realizarions. Sankhya views Existence as made up of two principles— Purusha (Soul or Conscious Being) and Prakriti (Nature). Explaining these two principles of existence in terms of yogic experience, Sri Aurobindo states: When we come to look in at our selves instead of out at the world ...
... Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that conscious force, terms of that delight of... often farther confused by a false issue starting from the idea of a personal extracosmic God and a partial issue, the ethical difficulty. Sachchidananda, it may be reasoned, is God, is a conscious Being who is the author of existence; how then can God have created a world in which He inflicts suffering on His creatures, sanctions pain, permits evil? God being All-Good, who created pain and evil... be brought back in a modified form; All-Delight being necessarily all-good and all-love, how can evil and suffering exist in Sachchidananda, since he is not mechanical existence, but free and conscious being, free to condemn and reject evil and suffering? We have to recognise that the issue so stated is also a false issue because it applies the terms of a partial statement as if they were applicable ...
... eternally true. ⁂ At its origin, the psychic begins by a kind of a divine spark within oneself, a spark of the divine consciousness. Out of this spark will slowly emerge an independent conscious being which will have its own action and its own will. The progress of the psychic consists in its formation, building and organisation. It grows into a conscious individuality through successive... like the progress of a child that grows. It is a continuous growing. For a long time, in most human beings the psychic is a continuously growing entity. It is not a fully individualised, fully conscious being and master of itself. It needs to be born in many lives one after another so that it may build itself and become fully conscious. Page 18 But that has an end. There comes a... necessary for him to be reborn in a body. Till then reincarnation was obligatory. For it is in the physical life and in the physical body that he grows little by little until he becomes a wholly conscious being. But once he is completely formed, he is free, in the sense that he can, at will, take a body or not take. When a psychic being incarnates, it throws itself down into inconscience, because ...
... exercise of conscious directive will, supported and illumined by a self-consciousness, I that occurs with the advent of the Mind is a function of the I Purusha, the self-conscious being, in the Mind; but this self-conscious being has been able to come up, manifest itself and be active, because of pressure of the underlying psychic personality that has formed here. Thus we have three characteristics... considered as a mere force, movement or quality. There is another aspect, however, in which the descent is of a particular and personal character and consciousness is not force or status only but conscious being or Person. The various movements or forces of consciousness that play in the various fields or levels of creation are not merely states or degrees and magnitudes, currents and streams of co ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3 The Conscious Being THE conscious being in us is truly the psychic being. But it is at present behind and out of the picture. What is normally conscious then is the mind, a part of it which has got the light is illumined. Weare conscious through this portion, and even we identify ourselves with it, know... harmonised or bound together as a team for serving a common purpose, a single aim. That union and harmonisation can be done only through the supreme Purusha, the Divine Witness who is the true conscious Being, the one Purusha behind or above all the others, whose light first of all centralises in the psychic being and then through it is canalised into its delegates or emanations on the lower levels ...
... is eternally true. At its origin, the psychic begins by a kind of a divine spark within oneself, a spark of the divine consciousness. Out of this spark will slowly emerge an independent conscious being which will have its own action and its own will The progress of the psychic consists in its formation, building and organisation. It grows into a conscious individuality through successive lives;... like the progress of a child that grows. It is a continuous growth. For a long time, in most human beings the psychic is a continuously growing entity. It is not a fully individualised, fully conscious being and master of itself. It needs to be born in many lives one after another so that it may build itself and become fully conscious. But that has an end. There comes a moment when the being is... necessary for him to be reborn in a body. Till then reincarnation was obligatory. For it is in the physical life and in the physical body that he grows little by little until he becomes a wholly conscious being. But once he is completely formed, he is free, in the sense that he can, at will, take a body or not take it. When a psychic being incarnates, it precipitates itself down into the inconscience ...
... continually concerned in its daily movements. Brahmanaspati is the creator by the Word; he calls light and visible cosmos out of the darkness of the inconscient ocean and speeds the formations of conscious being upward to their supreme goal. It is from this creative aspect of Brahmanaspati Page 345 that the later conception of Brahma the Creator arose. For the upward movement of Brahmanaspati's... the Mighty One of Heaven, but he begins his work upon the earth and gives effect to the sacrifice on the five planes of our ascent. He is the Violent One who leads the upward evolution of the conscious being; his force battles against all evil, smites the sinner and the enemy; intolerant of defect and stumbling he is the most terrible of the gods, the one of whom alone the Vedic Rishis have any real ...
... conscient, yet inactive entity. The other supposes the conscious soul, the Purusha, to be the material as well as the cause of the universe and Prakriti to be only its Shakti or the Force of its conscious being which operates upon itself as the material of forms. 1 The latter is the view of the Upanishads. Certainly, if we study the material world only, excluding all evidence of other planes as a dream... of things. But this is the natural conclusion—even apart from spiritual experience—from the nature of the supramental principle. For it is at its highest an eternal knowledge, will, bliss and conscious being and it is more reasonable to conclude that it is eternally conscious, though we are not conscious of it, and the source of the universe, than that it is eternally inconscient and only becomes conscient ...
... particle of the universe and active in every stirring and current of the constant flux and interchange which constitutes the world. But just as mind is only an inferior movement of the supreme Conscious-Being and above mind there is a divine and infinite principle of consciousness, will and knowledge which controls the ignorant action of mind, and it is by this superior principle and not by mind that... by this Life-force and its dual terms of birth and death. What then is this Life of our life? It is the supreme Energy 3 which is nothing but the infinite force in action of the supreme conscious Being in His own illumined self. The Self-existent is luminously aware of Himself and full of His own delight; and that self-awareness is a timeless self-possession which in action reveals itself as ...
... god's experience while Abercrombie's weather-blinded trances are only a felicitous thought-reflection of the godlike. It is the rhythm that most decisively distinguishes one plane of conscious being from another. For, rhythm is not just a play of ordered sound; it is the thrill of the consciousness translating itself into sound-vibration. That thrill gives us more than the mood: it gives too... grounded in species, species grounded in genera. A wide variation playing upon a persistent pattern is her creative mode everywhere. The overhead planes hold that basic oneness most intensely. Conscious being there does not forget as in our lower hemisphere the universal Self: every movement is fraught with awareness of the Infinite. The principle of metre translates most strikingly into speech Nature's ...
... the properties of form, the most obvious such as colour, light, etc., merely operations of Force, but form itself is only an operation of Force. This Force again proves to be self-power of conscious-being in a state of energy and activity. Practically, therefore, all form is only an operation of consciousness impressing itself with presentation of its own workings." 114 Thus the form... this vision of the supramental eye there will always be the revelation of "the soul of the thing seen and of the universal Spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its own conscious being." There will be at the same time a subtle change which will make the sight see in a sort of fourth dimension. The material object will become to this sight something different from what ...
... struggle at the first defeat. As long as they can, they seek to retain possession and even when they are cast out they will, as long as there is any chance of response in the conscious or the sub-conscious being, try to recur and regain their hold. It is no use being discouraged by these attacks. What has to be done is to see that they are made more and more external, all assent refused until they weaken... a belief in and a surrender to the Supreme Presence and force above the mind, an aspiration in the heart and a will in the higher mind to the Supreme Truth and the transformation of the whole conscious being by its descent and power. He must, in his meditation open himself silently to it and call down first a deeper calm and silence, next the strength from the above working in the whole system and ...
... consciousness of the subliminal or inner being. Psychic being —the divine portion in the individual which evolves from life to life, growing, by its experiences until it becomes a fully conscious being. The term "soul" is often used as a synonym for "psychic being", but strictly speaking, the soul is the undifferentiated psychic essence, whereas the psychic being is the individualised sou... the psychic being. Psychicisation — the psychic change in which the psychic being comes forward to dominate the mind, vital and physical and change the lower nature. Purusha — Conscious Being; Conscious-Soul; essential being supporting the play of Prakriti (Nature); a Consciousness behind that is the lord, witness, enjoyer, upholder and source of sanction for Nature's works; the Purusha ...
... least an urge of inherent necessity producing the evolution of forms and in the forms a developing Consciousness, and it may well be held that this urge is the evolutionary will of a secret Conscious-Being and its push of progressive manifestation the evidence of an innate intention in the evolution...; the teleology, the element of purpose in the nisus is the translation of self-operative Truth... into the outer instrumentation or raise ourselves to dwell on higher and wider levels and bring their powers to bear on physical existence... there could begin a heightening of our force of conscious being so as to create a new principle of consciousness.... 16 Page 397 Ego and Human Development All transpersonal views of human growth regard ego development as a necessary ...
... being, another which is that of plant-life, and another which is that of the lower animal creation around us. All these are so much dominated and conditioned by the thinking and reasoning conscious-being in us that we have no real awareness of these lower planes; we are unable to perceive in their own terms what these parts of us are doing, and receive it very imperfectly in the terms and values... only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind Page 331 which is the greater ...
... of the race. All existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is a gradation between the supreme being of the Divine... and be ready for salvation. Here, again, there is implied the conception of vegetable and animal life-forms as the lower steps of a ladder, humanity as the last or culminating development of the conscious being, the form which the soul has to inhabit in order to be capable of the spiritual motive and a spiritual issue out of mentality, life and physicality." A soul-evolution and a qualitative ...
... Consciousness that must become the being … Therefore all the consciousness that is in the cells must become grouped, organized, and form an independent conscious being. The consciousness that is in the cells must be gathered and organized, and form a conscious being that can be conscious of Matter and at the same time of the Supermind. This is what it is about. This is what is happening.’ 27 These words ...
... universal Intelligence which in its conscious being, as on a canvas, has planned and executed the world. Sweet Mother, what does "artist" represent here? Sri Aurobindo here compares the work of the Supreme Lord, creator of the universe, to the work of an artist who would paint, with great strokes of brush, the picture of the world in his conscious being as on a canvas. And when by the fact ...
... or shall not accept—the conscious being has begun to impose itself on the forces that act on it. This mastery has become Page 513 so complete that he can largely determine his own actions and can even within certain limits not only forecast but fix the results—so that what he wants shall happen sooner or later. As for the Superman, that is the conscious being whose emancipation is complete ...
... The Cosmos: Terms from Indian Systems Letters on Yoga - I Chapter II The Sankhya-Yoga System Purusha Purusha is the conscious Being who supports all the action of Nature. There is no fixed place, but as the central being he usually stands above the adhar—he becomes also the mental, vital, physical, psychic being. The word being is used with... and can also control the movements of Prakriti. It is Prakriti (Nature) that sends these impulses [ to act ]—Nature sends all kinds of forces and experiences to each. It is for you as a conscious being (Purusha) to choose whether you shall do or not do—you should reject what you see to be wrong, accept only what is true and right. In Nature there is the higher and the lower, the true and the ...
... enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine; next, the reception of that which transcends, that with which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of our whole conscious being; last, the utilisation of our transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world. So long as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree established, so long as there is not... miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryāmin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently ...
... out of an infinitesimal substance of being impalpable to the senses but revealed to them at a certain stage of the action of Energy as Matter, would be real, as also the individual emerging as a conscious being of the original Existence in a world of Matter. This original Reality might be a cosmic spiritual Existence, a Pantheos, or it might have some other status; but in any case there would be, not... self's experience of the Self, something of the Self enters into it, is affected by its happenings because it accepts them, believes in them, they are to it real experiences, creations out of its conscious being; but it is unreal because it is a sleep state, a dream state, an eventually transient waking state, not the true status of the superconscient Reality. Here there is no actual dichotomy of being ...
... That which is unseen, indefinable, self-evident in its one selfhood, is the fourth part: this is the Self, this is that which has to be known. Mandukya Upanishad. (Verses 2-7.) A conscious being, no larger than a man's thumb, stands in the centre of our self; he is master of the past and the present;... he is today and he is tomorrow. Katha Upanishad. (II. 1. 12, 13.) It... d for relation to his being, gathered into consistency around an ego-sense which formulates the habit of response of self-experience to the contacts of Nature in a persistent limited field of conscious being. It is this ego-sense that gives a first basis of coherence to what otherwise might be a string or mass of floating impressions: all that is so sensed is referred to a corresponding artificial ...
... Therefore every seed of things implies in itself all the infinity of various possibilities, but is kept to one law of process and result by the Will, that is to say, by the Knowledge-Force of the Conscious-Being who is manifesting himself and who, sure of the Idea in himself, predetermines by it his own forms and movements. The seed is the Truth of its own being which this Self-Existence sees in itself... which follows inevitably upon the self-vision and keeps to the processes Page 137 involved in the original Truth. All Nature is simply, then, the Seer-Will, the Knowledge-Force of the Conscious-Being at work to evolve in force and form all the inevitable truth of the Idea into which it has originally thrown itself. This conception of the Idea points us to the essential contrast between our ...
... casting of oneself into the universal; from that universality one can aspire more easily to the Transcendent. There is a pushing back and rending or a rushing down of the walls that imprisoned our conscious being; there is a loss of all sense of individuality and personality, of all placement in Space or Time or action and law of Nature; there is no longer an ego, a person definite and definable, but only... trance or in waking, in passive reflection or energy of action be able to remain in the constant Samadhi of the firmly founded Brahmic consciousness. 1 But if Page 364 or when our conscious being has become sufficiently pure and clear, then there is a firm station in the higher consciousness. The impersonalised Jiva, one with the universal or possessed by the Transcendent, lives high-seated ...
... the Idea the mental existence which at present we are breaks open the barrier of our mentality and arrives at the state of consciousness, the state of being, the state of power of conscious-being and bliss of conscious-being to which the Idea corresponds and of which it is the symbol, movement and rhythm. Concentration by the Idea is, then, only a means, a key to open to us the superconscient planes ...
... the One upward and running into the twenties. In Vedic thought the basis chosen was the number of the psychological principles, because all existence was conceived by the Rishis as a movement of conscious being. However merely curious or barren these speculations and classifications may seem to the modern mind, they were no mere dry metaphysical distinctions, but closely connected with a living psychological... of the later idea of Prakriti or Shakti,—the Purusha is in this early pastoral imagery the Bull, Vrishabha,—the Mother of things taking form on the seven planes of her world-action as energy of conscious being. So also, the seven rivers are conscious currents corresponding to Page 98 the sevenfold substance of the ocean of being which appears to us formulated in the seven worlds enumerated ...
... an unexpressed desire of the delight of existence and this desire is the first seed of what afterwards appears as the sense-mind. The gods thus find out a means of building up the existent, the conscious being, out of the subconscient darkness; they find it in the heart and bring it out by the growth of thought and purposeful impulsion, pratīṣyā , by which is meant mental desire as distinguished from... Purana use the same symbolic images; the ocean is for them the image of infinite and eternal existence. We find also that the image of the river or flowing current is used to symbolise a stream of conscious being. We find that Saraswati, one of the seven rivers, is the river of inspiration flowing from the Truth-Consciousness. We have the right then to suppose that the other six rivers are also psychological ...
... in the terms of conscious Being. It is a formula symbolically expressive of the Unknowable,—so arranged that every level of consciousness really represents something beyond itself, depth of depth, continent of continent. It is a play 3 of the divine Consciousness existing for its own satisfaction and adding nothing to That, which is already complete. It is a fact of conscious being, justified by its ...
... the Idea the mental existence which at present we are breaks open the barrier of our mentality and arrives at the state of consciousness, the state of being, the state of power of conscious-being and bliss of conscious-being to which the Idea corresponds and of which it is the symbol, movement and rhythm." THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO, vol. 23, p. 321 . ...
... the Idea the mental existence which at present we are breaks open the barrier of our mentality and arrives at the state of consciousness, the state of being, the state of power of conscious-being and bliss of conscious-being to which the Idea corresponds and of which it is the symbol, movement and rhythm" [ p. 321 ]. I have not the original chapter before me just now; but from the sentences quoted ...
... of yourself, conscious in all details, but you must organise what you call "yourself" around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being, so that it would make a single, coherent, fully conscious being. And as this divine centre is itself already consecrated ( Mother makes a gesture of offering ) entirely to the Divine, if everything is organised harmoniously around it, everything is consecrated... Divine gives you permission to let your ego merge in Him, to live henceforward only for the Divine. But it is the Divine who takes this decision. You must first have done all this work, become a conscious being, solely and exclusively centred around the Divine and governed by Him. And after all that, there is still an ego; because it is Page 260 the ego which serves to make you an individual ...
... to that of a growing child. It is a thing in the making. For a long time, in most human beings the psychic is a being in the making. It is not a fully individualised, fully conscious being and master of itself and it needs all its rebirths, one after another, in order to build itself and become fully conscious." (p. 63) The term "soul" as used in this book generally... advanced stage of its growth the psychic has the power to influence even the formation of the body in the new life. "When it has become an almost completely formed and already very conscious being, it presides over the forma- tion of the new body, and usually through an inner influence it chooses the elements and the substance which will form its body in such a way that the ...
... becomes a fully conscious being. The term "soul" is often used as a synonym for "psychic being", but strictly speaking, the soul is the undifferentiated psychic essence, whereas the psychic being is the individualised soul-personality developed by the psychic essence in the course of evolution. See also the psychic, soul , and soul-personality . Purusha —Conscious Being; Conscious-Soul; ...
... of yourself, conscious in all details, but you must organise what you call “yourself” around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being, so that it would make a single, coherent, fully conscious being. And as this divine centre is itself already consecrated ( Mother makes a gesture of offering ) entirely to the Divine, if everything is organised harmoniously around it, everything is consecrated... Divine gives you permission to let your ego merge in Him, to live henceforward only for the Divine. But it is the Divine who takes this decision. You must first have done all this work, become a conscious being, solely and exclusively centred around the Divine and governed by Him. And after all that, there is still an ego; because it is the ego which serves to make you an individual. But once this work ...
... artist in the work of that supreme and universal Intelligence which in its conscious being, as on a canvas, has planned and executed the world. What does the "artist" represent here? Here Sri Aurobindo compares the work of the Supreme Lord, creator of the universe, to the work of an artist painting in his conscious being, with sweeping brush-strokes, as on a canvas, the picture of the world ...
... movements of the being around the psychic centre—that has made of itself a single being, solely turned to the Divine; then, if the body falls off, that remains. It is only a completely formed conscious being that can remember exactly in another life all that has happened before. It can even pass consciously from one life to another without losing anything of its consciousness. How many people upon... lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the outer life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one's divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives. The Mother Words of the Mother - III: 1958 (1) There ...
... so weak that he is influenced even by the wind that blows about him, by a book he reads or a picture he sees. He is most vulnerable. That happens when he has not taken care to organise his conscious being around the psychic centre, which is the Truth of his being. 28 June 1963 Sweet Mother, Most people here quote the Mother to suit their own convenience. Before criticising others... Truth-Consciousness, must one always remain silent, even though as an individual one is obliged to make decisions and give opinions? What constitutes an individuality? An individuality is a conscious being organised around a divine centre. All the divine centres are essentially One in their origin, but they act as separate beings in the manifestation. The individual must make decisions in order ...
... Pavitra opened his eyes and looked at him... So I told him, "I don't know, but with a yogic knowledge of the process, quite an extraordinary knowledge" (he had never boasted of having it), "his conscious being melted last night and entered my body, this body..." 2 I told him, "We'll see." But half an hour later, they told me that just as I was talking with A., the doctor declared he had left. ... like a shadow, you understand, which is wholly in my atmosphere. And he has stayed there—he stays there, rests there. But in Pavitra's case, it was something else altogether: it's the entire conscious being which gave up... (how can I put it?) its limits, the personal limit and form, so as to identify totally—he entered like that, like a stream of consciousness and force, but very material, very material: ...
... the gradual application and utilisation of these secrets in actual life meant, first, a liberation of man's conscious being originally imbedded in Nature's inertial movements, and then, a growing power to react upon Nature and mould and change it according to the will of the conscious being. The result at the outset was a release and organisation on the mental level, in the domain of reason and in ...
... reasoning and dividing consciousness, creates in the course of its development. For the world is not an illusion and a meaningless unreality but evolving manifestation of the self-existent and conscious being through the comprehensive determining supramental consciousness. This is the argument which Sri Aurobindo presents in the very first chapter of The Life Divine. Let us refer to this argument... different utilities. That one common principle and force is the principle and force of concentration, and Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga is based upon integral concentration of our entire conscious being on concentrated relation and contact with the Divine so that the Divine may transform our entire being into His. In psychological terms, this method translates itself into the progressive surrender ...
... including those of prānāyāma, this Kundalini can be awakened. It then uncoils itself and begins to rise upwards like a fiery serpent breaking up each lotus as it ascends until the shakti meets the Conscious Being (Purusha) in the brahmarandhra in a deep trance or Samadhi of union. Tantra also has discovered the power of the mantra, sacred syllable, name or mystic- formula, and with the aid of mantra,... operations of analysis, synthesis and discrimination, but even the ego- sense are all products of the engine of Prakriti. Page 101 The second experience is that of the presence of a conscious being, which is in Indian philosophy called Purusha, is at the root of the propulsion of Prakriti. Even this yogic experience has several stages of development. In the first place, Purusha is seer as ...
... Pr ā n ā y ā ma, this Kundalini can be awakened. It then uncoils "self and begins to rise upwards like a fiery serpent breaking up each lotus as it ascends until the shakti meets the Conscious Being (Purusha) in the brahmarandhra in a deep trance or Sam ā dhi of union. Tantra has also discovered the Page 23 power of the mantra, sacred syllable, name or mystic- formula... intellectual operations of analysis, synthesis and discrimination, but even the ego-sense are all products of the universal engine of Prakriti. The second experience is that of the presence of a conscious being, which is in Indian philosophy called Purusha, who is other than Prakriti, but who by his cast of glance causes the propulsion of Prakriti. Even this yogic experience has several stages of ...
... conscious of yourself, conscious in every detail. You must organise what you call yourself around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being so that you can possess a single, cohesive, fully conscious being: as this centre is wholly consecrated to the Divine, if all the elements are organised harmoniously around it, they too get consecrated to the Divine. Thus, when the Divine wills it, when the time... permits you to let your ego melt in Him, so that you may exist for the Divine alone. But it is the Divine that takes the decision. You should have done the whole preliminary work first, become a conscious being, solely and exclusively centred around the Divine and governed by Him. When your ego has served its purpose in forming a complete individual out of you, when that work is perfectly, fully achieved ...
... Life in and Through Death THE soul carries the body even like a corpse, says a scripture. It is a dead inert mass of inconscience weighing upon the conscious being that is behind. Such is the burden of life that the soul bears through its earthly existence. The image is beautifully delineated in the Indian legend of Shiva and Sati. Sati is dead, the bereaved... ends, one pure, the other impure. The ancients thought that the whole creation is impure; the only pure substance is the Divine. The Sankhya posited clearly the demarcation between Purusha, the Conscious Being secreted above and behind and the entire Prakriti which is absolute unconsciousness. But as we have said, a new revelation has been slowly coming up which speaks of a different conclusion 'and ...
... considered as a mere force, movement or quality. There is another aspect, however, in which the descent is of a particular and personal character and consciousness is not force or status only but conscious being or Person. The various movements or forces of consciousness that play in the various fields or levels of creation are not merely states or degrees and magnitudes, currents and streams of... body and life and mind. The exercise of conscious directive will, supported and illumined by a self-consciousness, that occurs with the advent of the Mind is a function of the Purusha, the self-conscious being, in the Mind; but this selfconscious being has been able to come up, manifest itself and be active, because of pressure of the underlying psychic personality that has formed here. Thus we ...
... is a global or collective consciousness. There is also a consciousness of the species. Each species has its consciousness which is called sometimes the spirit of the species, that is to say, a conscious being presiding over a particular species. Nature is conscious in the sense that she knows what she wants, she knows her whither and her how, her end and the way to go towards it. To man much of Nature... has not an overall vision. When you look at the small details, the little fragments, you do not understand; you do not find any link, sequence, sense. But Nature has a conscious will, she is a conscious being. Perhaps the word "being" is too human. When we speak of Nature's being, we naturally think of the human being, only a little bigger, or perhaps much bigger but working more or less in the same ...
... reincarnation i.e. by taking up a new body that he progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being. But once it is fully formed, Page 398 it is free either to take birth or not to do so at will. There then one kind of progress comes to an end. But if the fully formed being... that is not expected to go Page 401 beyond a year. The second factor that somewhat modifies or qualifies his choice comes from the nature of the birth itself. The soul, the conscious being, precipitates into the inconscience, for the physical world, even human consciousness, at its very best, is an inconscient thing when compared to the psychic consciousness. It is as though the ...
... of yoga, one can begin with any one of these processes, but in the course of the development, it can be seen that in the integral view of things all these processes tend to unify and the total conscious being comes to be concentrated on the integral object of synthesis. This method of all-receiving concentration consists of a natural organization of the highest processes and movements of which the nature... clarity of their original intention. In the synthesis of the Vedanta and Tantra, both Purusha and Prakriti are admitted. As a result, the integrating method that is developed is to put our whole conscious being (soul and Prakriti) into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His, so that in a sense, God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the Yogin ...
... transformation. According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, our first concern must be with all that we are conscious of, and it is only when there has been a good deal of harmonization of our conscious being by the power of our psychic consciousness and an ascent to high levels of consciousness in the superconscient that it becomes easier and safer to deal with the subconscient. The higher we rise... Evolution is in essence a heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being so that it may be raised into greater intensity of what is still unmanifest. In this evolutionary process, our conscious being stands as middle term. As noted earlier, our consciousness is normally unaware of all that is subconscient and unconscious of all that is superconscient. It is conscious only of certain operations ...
... with and the manifestation of the Divine — this would be the natural formula of the Integral Yoga. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: 'The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the Sadhaka of the Sadhana6 as... 'In the terrestrial evolution itself the overmind descent would not be able to transform wholly the Inconscience; all that it could do would be to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious being, inner and outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff and impose that upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and knowledge. But a basis of Nescience would remain; ...
... application and utilisation of these secrets in actual life meant, first, a liberation of man's conscious being originally imbedded in Nature's inertial movements, and then, a growing power to react upon Nature and mould and change it according to the will Page 20 of the conscious being. The result at the outset was a release and organisation on the mental level, in the domain of reason ...
... s : that of the Spirit involved in Matter and of Matter involved in the Spirit. Every seed implies all infinity—all infinity of possibility. Nature really is seer-will, knowledge-force of the Conscious-being at work. In the mind thought seems separate from existence, in the mind abstract thought and Reality are distinct from each other, so also are will and idea. In the Supermind all being is consciousness... postponed because of the rain. In certain diseases the doctors and even others assert that it is incurable, and yet there are cases in which one finds that it is cured. Time and Space are the Conscious-Being viewing itself in extension subjectively as Time, objectively as Space. Space is, thus, the self-extension of the Infinite—the Brahman. Space is not empty, it is filled with the silence of the ...
... Matter ? No. It is the Universal Mind that is the creator of Matter. " Matter is substance of one conscious-being phenomenally divided within itself by the Page 16 action of a universal Mind. "¹ " Material substance is the form in which Mind acting through sense contacts the conscious Being of which it is itself a movement of knowledge."² Are not, then, inconscience, inertia, division ...
... or nothing, or at least nothing which has anything to do with man and the world or with which, therefore, man or the world has anything to do. Matter, body is only a massed motion of force of conscious being employed as a starting-point for the variable relations of consciousness working through its power of sense; nor is Matter anywhere really void of consciousness, for even in the atom, the cell... which ordinarily it possesses only from behind the veil as the Ishwara while the outward consciousness in front of the veil is rather possessed than in possession because there it is a partially conscious being, the Jiva lost to self-knowledge and bound in its works through a phenomenal subjection to Nature. The Avatar 2 therefore is a direct manifestation in humanity by Krishna the divine Soul of ...
... object of the soul's consciousness. In it all the soul is the enjoying and observing Deity in Nature; the divine powers of Page 293 mind and will and sense, all the powers of its conscious being by which it reflects this working of Prakriti are its godheads, adhidaiva . This soul in Nature is therefore the kṣara puruṣa , it is the mutable soul, the eternal activity of the Godhead: the... Creator and Ruler of the worlds, kavim anuśāsitāram, dhātāram , and it is by knowing and by loving Him as the One and the All, vāsudevaḥ sarvam iti , that we ought by a union with him of our whole conscious being in all things, all energies, all actions to seek the supreme consummation, the perfect perfection, the absolute release. Then there comes a more curious thought which the Gita has adopted from ...
... and lights up to our vision that self-being supreme beyond the dualities of this lower existence, ādityavat prakāśayati tat param . By a long whole-hearted endeavour, by directing our whole conscious being to that, by making that our whole aim, by turning it into the whole object of our discerning mind and so seeing it not only in ourselves but everywhere, we become one thought and self with that... conquered and controlled our mind and senses, saṁyatendriyaḥ , so that we are no longer subject to their delusions, but rather the mind and senses become its pure mirror; we must have fixed our whole conscious being on the truth of that supreme reality in which all exists, tat-paraḥ , so that it may display in us its luminous self-existence. Finally, we must have a faith which no intellectual doubt can ...
... not, illusion or not, this idea of our will, of our action is not a thing of no consequence, of no utility; everything in Nature has a consequence and a utility. It is rather that process of our conscious being by which Nature in us becomes more and more aware of and responsive to the presence of the secret Purusha within her and opens by that increase of knowledge to a greater possibility of action;... to what we are, we act, and by our action we develop, we work out what we are. Nature is the action, the mutation, the becoming, and it is the Power that executes all these; but the Soul is the conscious Being from which that Power proceeds, from whose luminous stuff of consciousness she has drawn the variable will that changes and expresses its changes in her actions. And this Soul is One and Many; ...
... original principles whose inter-relation is the cause of the universe,—Purusha, the inactive, Prakriti, the active. Purusha is the Soul, not in the ordinary or popular sense of the word, but of pure conscious Being immobile, immutable and self-luminous. Prakriti is Energy and its process. Purusha does nothing, but it reflects the action of Energy and its processes; Prakriti is mechanical, but by being reflected... extended, but is aloof from it; the other is the Purusha involved in Prakriti. The first verse indicates that the two are the same, represent different states, bound and liberated, of the same conscious being,—for the second Unborn has descended into the enjoyment of Nature and withdrawn from her; the other verse brings out what we would Page 78 not gather from the former, that in its higher ...
... of the race. All existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of Page 13 name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is a gradation between the supreme... is withdrawn and man speaks face to face with God, hears the divine voice, receives the divine light, acts in the divine power, then becomes possible the supreme uplifting of the embodied human conscious-being into the unborn and eternal. He becomes capable of that dwelling in God and giving up of his whole consciousness into the Divine which the Gita upholds as the best or highest secret of things, ...
... prakrti (Prakriti): Nature, the active and executive Energy, as distinguished from the witnessing and sustaining soul or conscious being. pralaya: The dissolution of the cosmos; any dissolution of the created things. purusa (Purusha): The soul or conscious being supporting the action of Nature. Page 60 rajas: One of the three gunas, fundamental qualities or modes ...
... soul. See also psyche and psychic being. psychic being — the divine portion in the individual which evolves from life to life, growing, by its experiences until it becomes a fully conscious being. The term "soul" is often used as a synonym for "psychic being", but strictly speaking, the soul is the undifferentiated psychic essence, whereas the psychic being is the individualised soul-p... psychic essence. psychicisation — the psychic change in which the psychic being comes forward to dominate the mind, vital and physical so as to change the lower nature. Purusha — Conscious Being; Conscious-Soul; essential being supporting the play of Prakriti; the Purusha represents the true being on whatever plane it manifests — physical, vital, mental, psychic. Page 125 ...
... timeless eternity of conscious being, any real eternal Self. Therefore the nature of our Mind is an Ignorance seizing at knowledge by successive action in the moments of Time.—If mind is all, then we must remain for ever in this Ignorance which is not absolute nescience, but an ineffectual and fragmentary seizing at knowledge. But there are really two powers of our conscious being, Ignorance of the mind ...
... must also be present in all atomic aggregates because they are present in the Force which constitutes the atom. That force is Chit-shakti, force of conscious being, variously represented in various forms of life.—Life is an energising of conscious being in substance of Matter, which on one side is constantly supplying the material of physical formation and on the other labouring to release mind and ...
... of poetry and art; it extends to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think Page 40 or in any way experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious being. Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things also. It is the universal Ananda that... operation of genius has at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or touch or influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use. But this power has two ways of acting: in one it touches the ordinary modes of mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines their ...
... be so important. It will mean that the sex has sunk down from the conscious mind, vital, physical being into the subconscious; from there it comes up in sleep. But if it has no support from the conscious being, it may be active for a time but its activity will afterwards diminish, become more and more rare till it is eliminated. This may take time, shorter or longer, but in the end the elimination is... Force on the physical subconscient is to be put. The subconscient may be often obstinate in its continual persistence, but it can and does accommodate itself quickly or slowly to the will of the conscious being. The pressure from the kidneys or the intestines causing dream of sex-tendency or imagination is the last and most physical form—it often remains when the others have gone. The body dull ...
... truth-knowledge. Our imperfect mental intelligence is a necessary stage of transition before this higher transformation can be made possible. There are, in practical fact, two poles of the conscious being between which the evolutionary process works, one a surface nescience which has to change gradually into knowledge, the other a secret Consciousness-Force in which all power of knowledge is and... we have seen, a machinery of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience; the principle of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence. The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a translation of the ...
... all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are Page 127 the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their source. A ...
... ego. The sum of movement of these activities eventuates in an internal growth which is partly visible and operative in this life, partly a seed of progress in lives hereafter. This growth of the conscious being, an expansion, an increasing self-expression, a more and more harmonised development of his constituent members is the whole meaning and all the pith of human existence. It is for this meaningful... highest truth either Page 98 of Purusha or of Prakriti, still it is a valid and indispensable practical knowledge in the lower hemisphere of existence. The individual soul or the conscious being in a form may identify itself with this experiencing Purusha or with this active Prakriti. If it identifies itself with Prakriti, it is not master, enjoyer and knower, but reflects the modes and ...
... by a golden lid; that remove, O Fostering Sun, for the Law of the Truth, for sight. O Sun, O sole Seer, marshal thy rays, gather them together,—let me see of thee thy happiest form of all; that Conscious Being everywhere, He am I. Isha Upanishad. (Verses 15, 16.) The Truth, the Right, the Vast. Atharva Veda. (XII. 1. 1.) It became both truth and falsehood. It became... Truth and the night of the material Inconscience. All that is necessary to note at present is that it must be in its essential character an exclusive concentration on one movement and status of Conscious Being, which puts all the rest of consciousness and being behind and veils it from that one movement's now partial knowledge. Still there is one aspect of this problem which must be immediately c ...
... consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject. In the self-experience of the self-observing inner being, the object is always some state or movement or wave of the conscious being, anger, grief or other emotion, hunger or other vital craving, impulse or inner life reaction or some form of sensation, perception or thought activity. The act is some kind of mental observation... conscious force. He is thus the Self that is immutably and at the same time the Self that becomes eternally in the succession of Time. It is evident that there are not really two selves, but one conscious being which throws itself up in the waves of conscious force so as to experience itself in a succession of changing movements of itself, by which it is not really changed, increased or diminished,—any ...
... Supermind, so Life is only a final operation of the Consciousness-Force of which Real-Idea is the determinative form and creative agent. Consciousness that is Force is the nature of Being and this conscious Being manifested as a creative Knowledge-Will is the Real-Idea or Supermind. The supramental Knowledge-Will is Consciousness-Force rendered operative for the creation of forms of united being in an ordered... consciousness works individualised in each form from the standpoint proper to it and with the cosmic relations which proceed from that standpoint, so Life is the final operation by which the Force of Conscious-Being acting through the all-possessing and all-creative Will of the universal Supermind maintains and energises, constitutes and reconstitutes individual forms and acts in them as the basis of all the ...
... transforming into harmony with the Divine all individual determinations. We have then the manifestation of the divine Conscious Being in the totality of physical Nature as the foundation of human existence in the material universe. We have the emergence of that Conscious Being in an involved and inevitably evolving Life, Mind and Supermind as the condition of our activities; for it is this evolution ...
... to act according to the claim of temporary accident and phenomenon. The truth of all things is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting inconstant wave form on the surface. The supreme conscious Being in his divine knowledge and will and love governs their evolution—to our ignorance so often a cruel confusion and distraction—from these depths and is not troubled by the clamour of the surface... we perceive that whether in the silence of self or in its action in the cosmos, the Divine is always Sachchidananda, an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness and self-founded power of conscious being, an infinite bliss in all his existence. We ourselves begin to dwell in an equal light, strength, joy—the psychological rendering of the divine knowledge, will and delight in self and things which ...
... with her in her universal action, but to realise and possess the fullness of this Shakti in our individual being and nature. For the supreme Spirit is one as Purusha or as Prakriti, conscious being or power of conscious being, and as the Jiva in essence of self and spirit is one with the supreme Purusha, so on the side of Nature, in power of self and spirit it is one with Shakti, parā prakṛtir jīvabhūtā ...
... predilections by the Self the Immutable and by Maya Page 427 the power the Self has of imposing on itself the cosmic illusion, or by the Self the Divine Being and by Maya the nature of conscious-being and the conscious-force by which the Divine embodies himself in soul-forms and forms of things. Others spoke of Ishwara and Shakti, the Lord and His force, His cosmic power. The analytic philosophy... the works of its consciousness and force, its knowledge and its will, Chit and Tapas, Chit and its Shakti,—that is Prakriti. Delight of being, Ananda, is the eternal truth of the union of this conscious being and its conscious force whether absorbed in itself or else deployed in the inseparable duality of its two aspects. It unrolls the worlds as Prakriti and views them as Purusha; acts in them and ...
... although these too are to it movement and form of the reality and not, as they are to a certain action of the spiritualised mind, an illusion. The idea too is to it real-idea, stuff of the reality of conscious being, full of power for the substantial rendering of the truth and therefore for creation. And again, while the pure ideative mind tends to build up arbitrary systems which are mental and partial... y imperative power of the spirit's knowledge by identity, turning the light of the infinite consciousness freely and illimitably into substance and form of real-idea, creating out of power of conscious being and power of real-idea, stabilising a movement which obeys its own law but is still a supple and plastic movement of the infinite, uses its thought and knowledge and a will identical in substance ...
... to identify the Supreme Reality with what Shankara describes as "Self" or "Atman". For, he says: "This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature, - Self, Conscious Being or Spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory, - Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara." He also writes: "As there are three fundamental aspects... self-force of that consciousness conceptively creative of all things, Maya; it is Prakriti, Nature or Force made dynamically executive, working out all things under the witnessing eye of the Conscious Being, the Self or Spirit; it is the conscious Power of the Divine Being, Shakti, which is both conceptively creative and dynamically executive of all the divine workings. These three aspects and ...
... Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that conscious force, terms of that delight... mentality struggling towards knowledge but itself, in what seems to be its fundamental nature, an Ignorance. Thus hampered and burdened, mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood or a spiritual and supramental supermanhood which shall be the next product of the evolution. That transition will mark the passage from the evolution in the Ignorance to a ...
... their lives and which, at such moments, touched Matter concretely. And all that is gathered, collected together little by little, gradually, until it produces a conscious being. Now, this ( Mother's being ) is a rather special conscious being.... The psychic of this life ( laughing ) was rather collective! Memories of Catherine the Great, memories of Elizabeth, memories of two lives at the same time ...
... confined to a reception of poetry and art; it extends to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think or in any way experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious being. Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things also. It is the universal Ananda that... Every operation of genius has at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use. But this power has two ways of acting: in one it touches the ordinary modes of mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines ...
... written "from those rarer levels whose voices have occasionally joined the utterance from the usual sources to make the profoundest moments of past poetry". The source is "an infinitude of conscious being above our brain-damped mentality". 1 The result is the sustained perfection of substance and style exemplified in his This Errant Life: This errant life is dear although it ... the pyramid is able to be seen as the triangle-yantra in which the serpent power of evolution is pent up, reminding us that Rudra/Shiva is the one who leads the upward evolution of the conscious being. Shiva in his "measureless trance of truth" has his counterpart below in one who is locked in "the body's swoon of rock", whence the flames of his aspiration soar upwards like winged ...
... 3 is... a machinery of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience; the principle of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence. The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a translation of... also in an infinite experience, from many standpoints, on many planes, through many conscious powers or selves of itself, individualities — in our limited intellectual language — of the one conscious being. Each one of us is one of these individualities. To stand away from God in limited ego, limited mind is to stand away from ourselves, to be unpossessed of our true individuality, to be the apparent ...
... Civilisation, and barbarism distinguished, 274-75 defined, 274-75 cf. Culture Clairvoyance, 79, 82, 244, 248 cf. Psychical phenomena Conscience, 89, 91 Conscious Being, 105, 345-46 See also Purusha Consciousness, 3-11, 162-65, 180 and brain, 3, 332-33, 334 cosmic, see Cosmic consciousness a creative energy, 8 environmental, see Environmental... (Western), 23, 288-96 passim, 298, 317 transpersonal, definitions of, 390-91 yoga, nature and methods of, 303-13 Purusha, 4, 15, 131, 133, 134, 384 See also Conscious being; Purusha and Prakriti Purusha and Prakriti, 96-107, 345- 47; see also Purusha; Prakriti Rajas, 108, 110-15 passim changed into tapas, 118 Ramakrishna, 229 ...
... primary Supermind. It is the pure divine ideation and formation in the Infinite, — only an ideation and formation that is organised not as an unreal play of mental thought, but as a real play of conscious being. The divine soul in this poise would make no difference between Conscious-Soul and Force-Soul, for all force would be action of consciousness, nor between Matter and Spirit since all mould would... universal Mind, but a conscious birth of that which is beyond Mind into forms of itself." 12 The forms and expressions that are being manifested in the world are supported by a Truth of conscious being; that Truth expresses itself in them, and the knowledge corresponding to the truth thus expressed reigns as a supramental Truth-Consciousness or Real-Idea organizing real ideas in a perfect harmony ...
... a union with and manifestation of the Divine—this would be the natural formula of the Integral Yoga. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the Sadhaka of the Sadhana¹ ... In the terrestrial evolution itself the overmind descent would not be able to transform wholly the Inconscience; all that it could do would be to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious being, inner and outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff and impose that upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and knowledge. But a basis of Nescience would remain; ...
... Maria Montessori dedicated her life to bringing forth the "hidden treasure" that exists in every child. She understood that a child is not a blank slate but a conscious being, and that the role of education is to help this conscious being to grow and develop. All other methods of education have taken the work of certain adults as their points of departure and have sought to educate or teach ...
... III Life in and through Death The soul carries the body even like a corpse, says a scripture. It is a dead inert mass of inconscience weighing upon the conscious being that is behind. Such is the burden of life that the soul bears through its earthly existence. The image is beautifully delineated in the Indian legend of Shiva and Sati. Sati is dead, the bereaved... one pure, the other impure. The ancients thought that the whole creation is impure; the only pure substance is the Divine. The Sankhya posited clearly the demarcation between Purusha, the Conscious Being secreted above and behind and the entire Prakriti which is absolute unconsciousness. But as we have said, a new revelation has been slowly coming up which speaks of a different conclusion and ...
... For, till now Mind has been the last, term of the evolutionary consciousness—Mind as developed in man is the highest instrument built up and organised by Nature through which the self-conscious being can express itself. That is why the Buddha said: Mind Page 11 is first of all principles, Mind is the highest of all principles: indeed Mind is the constituent of all principles—... Overmind this turns out a thing of blind conflict and battle and, as it would appear, of chance survival. Creation or manifestation originally means the concretisation or devolution of the powers of Conscious Being into a play of united diversity; but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Page ...
... through reincarnation—taking up a new body that he progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being. But once it is fully formed, it is free either to take birth or not to at will. There then one kind of progress stops. But if the fully formed being now wishes to become an instrument for the... period of uncertainty, but that is not expected to go beyond a year. The second factor that somewhat modifies or qualifies his choice comes from the nature of the birth itself. The soul, the conscious being, precipitates into the inconscience, for the physical world, even human consciousness, at its very best, is an inconscient thing when compared to the psychic consciousness. It is as though the ...
... Mind has been the last term of the evolutionary Page 16 consciousness—Mind as developed in man is the highest instrument built up and organised by Nature through which the self-conscious being can express itself. That is why the Buddha said: Mind is the first of all principles, Mind is the highest of all principles: indeed Mind is the constituent of all principles— mano puvvangama dhamma... Overmind this turns out a thing of blind conflict and battle and, as it would appear, of chance survival. Creation or manifestation originally means the concretisation or devolution of the powers of Conscious Being into a play of united diversity; but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Divine C ...
... is a global or collective consciousness. There is also a consciousness of the species. Each species has its consciousness which is called sometimes the spirit of the species, that is to say, a conscious being presiding over a particular species. Nature is conscious in the sense that she knows what she wants, she knows her whither and her how, her end and the way to go towards it. To man much of Nature... has not an over-all vision. When you look at the small details, the little fragments, you do not understand; you do not find any link, sequence, sense. But Nature has a conscious will, she is a conscious being. Perhaps the word "being" is too human. When we speak of Nature's being, we naturally think of the human being, only a little bigger, or perhaps much bigger but working more or less in the same ...
... the subtle. Sri Aurobindo : That is something quite different from earth-memory. Disciple : There is a being or a Spirit behind every place, I believe ; for instance, is there no conscious being behind Pondicherry ? Sri Aurobindo : Do you mean nagar devat ā , the presiding deity of the town ? Disciple : Something like that. Sri Aurobindo : It is true that there... n. Many people get that sort of intimation. You can always get it provided you are open to it in the subconscious Page 168 and you allow it to come up to the surface in the conscious being. Disciple : Do you mean that there are forces that intimate these occurrences ? Sri Aurobindo : Yes. Man is surrounded by these small physico-vital beings and some of them take ...
... Mind has been the last term of the evolutionary Page-8 consciousness – Mind as developed in man is the highest instrument built up and organised by Nature through which the self-conscious being can express itself. That is why the Buddha said: Mind is the first of all principles, Mind is the hi hest of all principles: indeed Mind is the constituent of all principles-mana puvvangama ... Overmind this turns out a thing of blind conflict and battle and, as it would appear, of chance survival. Creation or manifestation originally means the concretisation or devolution of the powers of Conscious Being into a play of united diversity; but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Divine C ...
... conscious of yourself, conscious in every detail. You must organise what you call yourself around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being so that you can possess a single, cohesive, fully conscious being: as this centre is wholly consecrated to the Divine, if all the elements are organised harmoniously around it, they too get consecrated to the Divine. Thus, when the Divine wills it, when the time... permits you to let your ego melt in Him, so that you may exist for the Divine alone. But it is the Divine that takes the decision. You should have done the whole preliminary work first, become a conscious being, solely and exclusively centred around the Divine and governed by Him. When your ego has served its purpose in forming a complete individual out of you, when that work has been perfectly, fully ...
... Matter the Spirit is involved, at the other end in Spirit, Matter is involved. All creation is nothing but self-manifestation: Existence acts and creates by its power of pure delight of conscious being. Satchidananda is the cause and object or goal of all becoming all creation. Knowledge in the Infinite means Self-vision and Law there expresses innate knowledge. When a poet creates, it is himself... expression. But apart from man, how does the Satchidananda realise the world-play ? As already suggested, it is done by a triple movement: First of involution,—that is a self-absorption of the conscious being into the density and infinite diversity of the substance; otherwise no finite variation is possible. Second, of Emergence rather than Evolution of the self-imprisoned force into formal beings, ...
... self. It is therefore real because the self is real. The form and the world, therefore, are eternal complements of this process of self-unrollment of an original Reality. It is a creation of Self-conscious Being out of Its own eternal Truth. The substance of the world, therefore, is real existence. Our mind, when it looks at this creation, can feel that though it can grant an infinite being and consciousness... Delight of the infinite being flows into, activates itself into, a delight of Becoming, which is our perception of the world. That is the root of creation. So there is one indivisible conscious Being behind all experiences, supporting them by its inalienable Delight. This support of the Being full of Delight—behind this variable inexhaustible play of multiple variant rhythm of its own Self ...
... also limited and inconclusive and, being aware of and impelled by the infinite within and around him, he cannot escape the necessity of seeking to know and possess it. This progression of the conscious being out of the Inconscient to the infinite Consciousness might be a happy outflowering but for the principle of rigid division and imprisonment of each divided being in his own ego which imposes the ...
... consciousness. As Mind is only a final dividing action of Supermind and Life of Conscious-Force working in the conditions of the Ignorance, so Matter as we know it is only the final form taken by conscious-being as the result of that same working. Mind precipitating itself into Life to create form gives to the universal principle of Being the appearance of material substance instead of pure substance, ...
... . That replaces mentality by luminous vision and the eye of the gods, mortal life by breath and force of the infinite existence, obscure and death-possessed substance by the free and immortal conscious-being. The progress of man must be therefore, first, his self-expanding into a puissant vitality capable of sustaining all vibrations of action and experience and a clear mental and psychical purity; ...
... system of the man who drinks this strong wine of Ananda must by suffering and conquering all the torturing heats of life have been prepared for the secret and fiery heats of the Soma; otherwise his conscious being will not be able to hold it; it will spill and lose it as soon as or even before it is tasted or it will break down mentally and physically under the touch. This strong and fiery wine has to ...
... cow herself is she of the universal forms and universal impetus of movement, viśvajuvaṁ viśvarūpām , in other words she is the first Radiance, Aditi, the infinite Consciousness of the infinite conscious Being which is the mother of the worlds. That consciousness is brought out by the Ribhus from the veiling movement of Nature and a figure of her is fashioned here in us by them. She is, by the action ...
... apart from the world and its reality in the world or can see the Universe at will in itself or outside itself possessing and enjoying it as an omniscient, omnipotent, all-seeing, all-hearing, all-conscious Being; Visishtadwaita therefore is also true. Finally, there is the state in which the Jivatman is entirely aware only of itself and the Paramatman and lives in a state of exalted love and adoration ...
... disturbance in Prakriti, cosmic ripple in Nature. The Vedanta continually speaks of the world as a movement. The Isha speaks of things as jagatyam jagat, particular movement in the general movement of conscious Being steadily viewed by that Being in His own self-knowledge, atmani atmanam atmana, self by self in self. This is the motion & nature of the Universe. This then is Matter, a particular movement ...
... phenomenal existence is determined by the working of Shakti or Prakriti, Force of Nature, under the will & choice of Soul, Self or Spirit. This Soul or Spirit, variously termed Deva, self-luminous conscious Being behind the Force of Nature, or Purusha, informing Male inhabitant and possessor of this female executive Energy, or Ishwara, omnipresent Lord of this Will Power, this Shakti formulated in Force ...
... be to turn away utterly from the world after abandoning it in itself & in the lower consciousness, but to conquer and repossess it through the divine Krishna and in the supreme & all-blissful conscious being of the Lord. Nivasishyasi mayyeva. Thou shalt dwell in Me utterly, in My illimitable being & not in a limited & mortal experience of the world. To form the basis of the rule of life which the Seer ...
... Manifested. And is not this after all the truth that pursues us wherever we cast our eyes, unless seeing we choose not to see? Is not this after all the perfectly natural and simple mystery of Conscious Being that It is bound neither by Its unity nor by Its multiplicity? It is "absolute" in the sense of being entirely free to include and arrange in Its own way all possible terms of Its self-expression ...
... own right apart from the self-illumined energy which assumes the form, that would be a contradiction of the truth of things, a phantasmagoria, a nightmare, an impossible falsehood. But this conscious Being which is the truth of the infinite Page 25 supermind, is more than the universe and lives independently in Its own inexpressible infinity as well as in the cosmic harmonies. World lives ...
... Death, not simply to the physiological phenomenon of dying, but to the being, to the cosmic power which Death is, and in which some traditions see one of the great powers of Darkness, a formidably conscious Being whose function would appear to be to negate the divine state, the immortality of pure Being, and to prevent us from ever attaining to it. Nevertheless, as everything is the Eternal and Infinite ...
... the profoundest moments of past poetry. The rarest of those levels give birth to overhead poetry: they are "planes" whose afflatus comes as if from an Page 59 infinitude of conscious being above our brain-clamped mentality. Sri Aurobindo labels them Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Above even Over-mind is the sovereign divine dynamism which he names Supermind ...
... the eternal, from the finite to the everlasting: We move by the rapid impulse of a will That scorns the tardy trudge of mortal Time. 36 However tardy may be the progress a conscious being strives, yet one cannot deny the desire in man to yearn for the eternal. In Savitri the striving of Aswapati is the journey of such a soul who with all the difficulties and shortcomings of ...
... (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969). 7. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, SABCL Vol. 22, p. 315. 8. Ibid., p. 316. 9. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, SABCL Vol. 18, p. 17. 10. Conscious Being. 11. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL Vol. 20, p. 278. 12. Sri Aurobindo speaks of various levels of Mind above the ordinary Page 387 mind. The Overmind ...
... Upanishad says farther, "He being born distinguished only the working of the material elements, for what else was there of which he should discuss and conclude?" Yet in the end "he beheld this conscious being which is Brahman utterly extended and he said to himself, Now have I really seen." So too in the Taittiriya Upanishad Bhrigu Varuni meditating on the Brahman comes first to the conclusion that ...
... inner and the outer planes, this world and others, partly by an awareness, which may be very constant, vast and vivid, of their impacts, suggestions, communications to our inner thought and conscious being and a capacity of reaction upon them there, partly also through many kinds of symbolic, transcriptive or representative images presented to the different psychical senses. But also there is ...
... mentality struggling towards knowledge but itself, in what seems to be its fundamental nature, an Ignorance. Thus hampered and burdened, mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood or a spiritual and supramental supermanhood which shall be the next product of the evolution. That transition will mark the passage from the evolution in the Ignorance to a ...
... against that." 8 One recommendation for the discovery of the true being and its liberation from the surface nature is "the practice of the separation of the Prakriti and the Purusha, the conscious Being standing back detached from all the movements of Nature and observing them as witness and knower and finally as the giver (or refuser) of the sanction Page 134 and at the highest ...
... in Mind, it shall ascend Page 7 into yet superior forms beyond Mind. For the Force that builds the worlds is a conscious Force, the Existence which manifests itself in them is conscious Being and a perfect emergence of its potentialities in form is the sole object which we can rationally conceive for its manifestation of this world of forms. The Life Divine, pp. 85-90 ...
... terms of the desire of the ego that is discouraged—their only value is their value in the manifestation of the Divine. Who desires external things for their own sake and not for some value to the conscious being? Even Cheloo, the day-labourer, is not Page 51 interested in a two-anna piece for its own sake, but for some vital satisfaction it can bring him; even with the hoarding miser it ...
... the desires of the ego that is discouraged — their only value is their value in the manifestation of the Divine. Who desires external things 'for their own sakes' and not for some value to the conscious being? Even Cheloo, the day-labourer, is not interested in a four-anna piece for its own sake, but for some vital satisfaction it can bring him; even with the hoarding miser it is the same — it is his ...
... necessarily also the ascent and the revelation are both progressive” – which summarises the process of involution and evolution. “We have to conceive first of an involution and a self-absorption of conscious being into the density and infinite divisibility of substance, for otherwise there can be no finite variation. Next, an emergence of the self-imprisoned force into formal [material] being, living being ...
... principle: “The universe, and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends, must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage.” 5 The observer is a living, conscious being. According to the weak principle this being may passively state the fact that the universe has created the (very improbable) circumstances of his being there; the strong principle asserts that ...
... were causes partly general in the shape of a resistance to a great descending force which was not personal to you at all, and, so far as there was a response to it in you, it was not from your conscious being, otherwise you would not have had it in this way, but from the part in us which keeps things for a long time that have been suppressed or rejected by the conscious will. It is the conscious will ...
... Mental, and above – all that was gone, and this poor body was left to itself! And then, naturally, little by little, all that was being rebuilt [in the body itself], rebuilt in a conscious, purely conscious being.’ 31 The Mother could function again. We will sketch briefly some of the happenings which demanded her attention. In October 1962 the Chinese crossed in many places their disputed border ...
... species, species grounded in genera. A wide variation playing upon a persistent pattern is her creative mode everywhere. The overhead planes hold that basic oneness most intensely. Conscious being there does not forget as in our lower hemisphere the universal Self: every movement is fraught with awareness of the Infinite. The principle of metre translates most strikingly into speech Nature's ...
... happened to drift away from the Ashram after a number of years. I was confused —until the Mother explained that the subconscient could hold the very opposite of the qualities present in the conscious being and this opposite might erupt at any moment under the pressure of circumstances. If one was not sufficiently on guard, the upsurge could bring about a "fall". According to the Mother, the mistake ...
... has not appeared to the birds"- and it seems to mean that all creatures except man have a sort of fullness and finality and contentment because they are fixed types, as it were, in their outer conscious being and do not have man's restless aspiration, an aspiration rendered unbearable to himself no less than disturbing to the world in general by his inkling of the Divine Presence that turns all natural ...
... height of consciousness and give all his Page 5 thought, emotion, sense-experience the value and figure and vibrancy that come from that selected centre behind the commonly conscious being, whence flows what he deems his most spiritual expression. So, guided by his pointing instinct, helped by his discriminating intelligence, carried by his exploring intuition, he dedicates himself ...
... operation of genius has at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or touch or influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use. But this power has two ways of acting: in one it touches the ordinary modes of the mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines ...
... characterised as follows, The Aurobindonian poet recognises within himself the Lord of the Flame into whose creative beatitude he incessantly steeps his imagination by surrendering his conscious being to the spontaneities of mystical love and by contacting through the intuition of the aesthetic unity of the world a common spiritual foundation, to himself 4. Sethna, K.D., The Secret ...
... nature and can suppose some kindred movement of being in the beginning as its cosmic origin. On the contrary, a play of self-concealing and self-finding is one of the most strenuous joys that conscious being can give to itself, a play of extreme attractiveness. There is no greater pleasure for man himself than a victory which is in its very principle a conquest over difficulties, a victory in knowledge ...
... into a language of pure symbols and mystic values of speech,—but, what is worse, we are, in the attempt to get away from the idea of the ego, using a too abstract language. Let us say, then, a conscious being who is for our valuations of existence a being of the Eternal in his power of individualising self-experience; for it must be a concrete being—and not an abstract power—who enjoys immortality. ...
... Purusha Prakriti is the Kshara Purusha—standing back from it is the Akshara Purusha. Ego-sense and Purusha are two quite different things—ego-sense is a mechanism of Prakriti, Purusha is the conscious being. The psychic being evolves, so it is not the immutable. The psychic being is especially the soul of the individual evolving in the manifestation the individual Prakriti and taking part in ...
... being is in essence one with the Divine or at the least it is a portion of the Divine and has all the divine potentialities. But in manifestation it takes two aspects, the Purusha and Prakriti, conscious being and Nature. In Nature here the Divine is veiled, and the individual being is subjected to Nature which acts here as the lower Prakriti, a force of Ignorance, Avidya. The Purusha in itself is divine ...
... Ferdinand and Miranda ... Prospero reminded them of what he had said before—namely, that "these our actors ... were all spirits". They melt into thin air but do not disappear from existence, from conscious being of some character however unearthly: they just become invisible and what disappears is the visible pageant produced by them, a seemingly material construction which yet was a mere phantom. From ...
... not and cannot be in the will of the self-knowing spirit any contradiction, division or difference between its will and its knowledge. The spiritual will is the Tapas or enlightened force of the conscious being of the spirit effecting infallibly what is there within it, and it is this infallible operation of things acting according to their own nature, of energy producing result and event according to ...
... themselves sufficient without the companion activities. The revelation may indeed present the reality, the identities of the thing in itself and add something of great power to the experience of the conscious being, but it may lack the embodying word, the out-bringing idea, the connected pursuit of its relations and consequences and may remain a possession in the self but not a thing communicated to and through ...
... if our aim be a transformation of our integral being into the terms of God-existence, it is then that a synthesis becomes necessary. The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His. Thus in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sadhaka of the sadhana 1 ...
... call for our immediate purpose soul-force; and it is always this soul-force which supports all the workings of the powers of the reason, the mind, life and body and determines the cast of our conscious being and the type of our nature. The normal ordinarily developed man possesses it in a subdued, a modified, a mechanised, submerged Page 740 form as temperament and character; but that is ...
... reverse movement of elimination of the ego is indispensable. To see our actions as not our own but those of the divine Shakti working in the form of the lower Prakriti on the inferior levels of the conscious being, helps powerfully towards this change. And if we can do this, then the separation of our mental, vital and physical consciousness from that of other beings thins and lessens; the limitations of ...
... repetition of experience and is in its nature precarious and transient. All this means that the natural relations of Purusha to Prakriti in the material universe are the complete absorption of conscious being in the force of its workings, therefore the complete self-oblivion and self-ignorance of the Purusha, the complete domination of Prakriti and subjection of the soul to Nature. The soul does not ...
... itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance. Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations. For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength and endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and effective ...
... universal Powers, ceases to be a mechanical, involuntary or imperfect offering; the thinking and observing mind participates and becomes the instrument of the sacrificial will. Agni is the power of conscious Being, called by us will, effective behind the workings of mind and body. Agni is the strong God within ( maryaḥ , the strong, the masculine) who puts out his strength against all assailing powers, who ...
... formative of the Earth. For in the idea of the Rishis a world is primarily a formation of consciousness and only secondarily a physical formation of things. A world is a loka , a way in which conscious being images itself. And it is the causal Truth, represented in the person of Surya Savitri, that is the creator of all its forms. For it is the causal Idea in the infinite being,—the idea, not abstract ...
... conceived in the terms of the truth and let all that belongs to the falsehood, to the evil dream created by the ignorance of the divine Truth, duḥṣvapnyam , be dismissed, dispelled away from our conscious being. In the next verse he makes clearer the sense of duḥṣvapnyam . What he desires to be dispelled is all evil, viśvāni duritāni . Suvitam and duritam in the Veda mean literally right going ...
... Night and Day, symbols of the alternation of the divine and human consciousness in us. The Night of our ordinary consciousness holds and prepares all that the Dawn brings out into conscious being. × Ila, Saraswati, Mahi; their names are translated in order to give the idea of their functions ...
... Sense-Pleasure borne up together by the Ananda are to be full of the sense-delight & so carried & wedded to the Inspired Thought in the Vijnana, ie known & taken cognizance of by it. In the streams of conscious being they are to form in an universal fashion the planes of activity of the siddhi & to remove from the "heart" of the vijnanamaya being the obscurations that still remain. Script. The lines of ...
... in Vidya. By immortality is meant the consciousness which is beyond birth and death, beyond the chain of cause and effect, beyond all bondage and limitation, free, blissful, self-existent in conscious-being, the consciousness of the Lord, of the supreme Purusha, of Sachchidananda. Immortality and Birth On this realisation man can base his free activity in the universe. But having so ...
... development that occupies all the rest of the book. "Hear," he says, "how by practising Yoga with a mind attached to me and with me as āśraya (the whole basis, lodgment, point of resort of the conscious being and action) thou shalt know Me without any remainder of doubt, integrally, samagraṁ mām . I will speak to thee without omission or remainder, aśeṣataḥ ," (for otherwise a ground of doubt may ...
... the final experience is that of a unity of all beings which is not merely a community of experience, a common subjection to one force of Nature, but a oneness in the spirit, a vast identity of conscious being beyond all this endless variety of determination, behind all this apparent separativism of relative existence. The Gita takes its stand in that highest spiritual experience. It appears indeed to ...
... may lie before the soul which has now reached and is lifted to a perfecting of the high scale of humanity. It may even be that this ascending rebirth is not the long upward rocket shooting of a conscious being out of matter or its whirling motion in mind destined to break up and dissolve in some high air of calm nothingness or of silent timeless infinity, but a progress to some great act and high display ...
... trance of consciousness forgetting itself in its own symbol or form. Consciousness in this its outer shell has become to the appearance something else which seems not to have any resemblance to conscious being, as gas becoming water is to appearance something else which has no remotest gaseous semblance. The truth sits veiled behind the appearance, self-absorbed; there is in all things, without exception ...
... universe. Be not deceived by Ignorance, be not deceived by knowledge; there is none bound & none free & none seeking freedom but only God playing at these things in the extended might of His self-conscious being, para maya, mahimanam asya, which we call the universe. Page 95 ...
... Upanishad says farther, "He being born distinguished only the working of the material elements, for what else was there of which he should discuss and conclude?" Yet in the end "he beheld this conscious being which is Brahman utterly extended and he said to himself, Now have I really seen" So too in the Taittiriya Upanishad Bhrigu Varuni meditating on the Brahman comes first to the conclusion that "Matter ...
... even if stated in different terms, because they are the subjects of a common experience. Now the facts discovered by the Indian method, the duality of Purusha and Prakriti, the triple states of conscious being, the relation between the macrocosm & the microcosm, Page 184 the fivefold and sevenfold principles of consciousness, the existence of more than one bodily case in which, simultaneously ...
... power or conscious delight and beauty. A more deeply seeing and intimate poetry will take up these things into a yet greater Nature sense and vision and make us aware of the very self and soul and conscious being of Nature, her profoundest psychic suggestion and significance, the spirit in her and the intuition of all that she keeps hidden in her forms and veils and reveals more and more to the soul that ...
... them to invade one. If one faces a difficulty in the right spirit and overcomes it, naturally one progresses, but that is a different thing from letting alien forces or influences enter into the conscious being. No one need invite that,—they are only too ready to do it without being invited. One can look at and become conscious of all forces, even the worst, darkest and most hostile, provided one remains ...
... or being is in essence one with the Divine or at least it is a portion of the Divine and has all the divine potentialities. But in manifestation it takes two aspects, the Purusha and Prakriti, conscious being and Nature. In Nature here the Divine is veiled, and the individual being is subjected to Nature which acts here as the lower Prakriti, a force of Ignorance, Avidya. The Purusha in itself is divine ...
... you had begun, the things you did not feel, did not understand, have become clear. If you are resolved, you are sure to succeed. This is the first step towards unifying yourself, becoming a conscious being who has a central will and acts only according to this will, which will be a constant expression of the divine Will. It is worth trying. And I may tell you from my personal experience that there ...
... if truly you take this attitude of confidence, there is no difficulty that you will not be able to conquer. Anxiety makes the difficulty greater. Evidently there is one difficulty: in your conscious being something does not want the difficulty, wishes sincerely to overcome it, but there are numberless movements in other parts of your consciousness of which you are not conscious. You say, "I want ...
... of things that encompass us and act upon what we improperly call "ourselves", whether through the intermediary of our senses or directly on the mind by suggestion. The only way to become a conscious being, to be oneself, is to unite with the divine Self that is in all. For that, we must, by the aid of concentration, isolate ourselves from external influences. When you are one with the Divinity ...
... Words of Long Ago The Supreme Discovery If we want to progress integrally, we must build within our conscious being a strong and pure mental synthesis which can serve us as a protection against temptations from outside, as a landmark to prevent us from going astray, as a beacon to light our way across the moving ocean of life. Each individual should ...
... is aware of one's own soul, one's own inner being and of the real truth of existence. In the Yogic consciousness one is not only aware of things, but of forces, not only of forces, but of the conscious being behind the forces. One is aware of all this not only in oneself but in the universe. There is a force which accompanies the growth of the new consciousness and at once grows with it and helps ...
... have its own individuality and does it also reincarnate after death? This may happen, but it is accidental. There are trees—trees especially—which have lived long and can be the home of a conscious being, a vital being. Generally it is vital entities which take shelter in trees, or else certain beings of the vital plane which live in forests—as certain beings of the vital live in water. There were ...
... from it. And to free yourself from it, you must first of all become aware of it; and the first step is the most difficult, for this formation was so subtle, it was made when you were not yet a conscious being, when you had just fallen altogether dazed from another world into this one ( laughing ) and it all happened without your participating in the least in it. Therefore, it does not even occur to ...
... this state of reason, of effort, desire, individualisation and solid physical balance in accordance with the ordinary mode of living is indispensable to begin with, until the time one becomes a conscious being, when one must give up all these things in order to become a spiritual being. Now, has anybody a question to ask on the subject? Sweet Mother, when can one say that one is conscious? ...
... When one sleeps, how can one distinguish the nature of the visions? They do not leave the same impression at all. In order to know things well, one must educate oneself, develop the conscious being. But there are all kinds of different things, there are mental and vital projections exactly as in the cinema; then there are visions you may have if you are exteriorised in the mental and vital ...
... another. Individuality is a conquest. And, as Sri Aurobindo says here, this first conquest is only a first stage, and once you have realised within you something like a personal independent and conscious being, then what you have to do is to break the form and go farther. For example, if you want to progress mentally, you must break all your mental forms, all your mental constructions to be able to make ...
... "Only in the quiet mind and being can the supramental Truth build its true creation." Sweet Mother, what is the Sat-Purusha? The Purusha? What is it in the being? Knowledge. The conscious being. What is this true supramental creation? True creation means the new supramental creation, the one we want to realise here. When we speak of a new transformed world, it is the supramental ...
... being and to the extent it is perfectly unified with the psychic. Otherwise all this mixture is dissolved and the psychic being alone remain, at times just as a flame, at times as a completely conscious being. This of course is the general law. Now there are bridges, as it were, "protected passages" which have been built in the vital world in order to cross over all these dangers. There are atmospheres ...
... philosophies and Scriptures, but there its sense has been the growth of the soul through developing or successive forms and many lives of the individual to its own highest reality. For if there is a conscious being in the form, that being can hardly be a temporary phenomenon of consciousness; it must be a soul fulfilling itself and this fulfilment can only take place if there is a return of the soul to earth ...
... The psychic or psychic being is the evolving soul of the individual, the divine portion in him which evolves from life to life, growing by its experiences until it becomes a fully self-conscious being. From its place behind the heart centre, the psychic supports the mind, life and body and, as it develops, increasingly aids their evolution and growth. The word psychic, from the Greek psyche ...
... from it. And to free yourself from it, you must first of all become aware of it; and the first step is the most difficult, for this formation was so subtle, it was made when you were not yet a conscious being, when you had just fallen altogether dazed from another world into this one (laughing) and it all happened without your participating in the least in it. Therefore, it does not even occur to you ...
... philosophies and Scriptures, but there its sense has been the growth of the soul through developing or successive forms and many lives of the individual to its own highest reality. For if there is a conscious being in the form, that being can hardly be a temporary phenomenon of consciousness; it must Page 552 be a soul fulfilling itself and this fulfilment can only take place if there is a return ...
... very advanced cases the psychic can, before leaving the body, decide what kind of life it will have in its next incarnation. When it has become an almost completely formed and already very conscious being, it presides over the formation of the new body, and usually through an inner influence it chooses the elements and the substance which will form its body in such a way that the body is adapted ...
... and there are all the stages of formation from the spark which becomes a little light to the fully formed being, and this extends over thousands of years. This ascent of the soul to become a conscious being having its own will, capable of determining the choice of its own life, takes thousands of years. So, you are thinking of a soul which would say, "No, I refuse this body, I am going to look ...
... at least an urge of inherent necessity producing the evolution of forms and in the forms a developing Consciousness, and it may well be held that this urge is the evolutionary will of a secret Conscious-Being and its push of progressive manifestation the evidence of an innate intention in the evolution.... Truth of Being inevitably fulfilling itself would be the fundamental fact of the evolution, but ...
... of conception that are the first ground for man the thinker, so man the mental being is sublimated by the endeavour of the evolutionary Energy to develop out of him the spiritual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his true self and highest nature. " But if this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put themselves ...
... the states of being, the vital, the mental and above, all that gone! and this poor body left to itself. And then naturally, little by little, all that was rebuilt, rebuilt, a conscious, purely conscious being. Yes, I understand, I understand. But truly it was cut off, that I have known—I have seen—cut off, the states of being sent away: "Go away, you are no longer wanted." And then a new life needed ...
... lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the outer life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one's divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives. Page 343 ...
... Always therefore one should begin by a positive, not a negative experience, by bringing down something of the divine nature, calm, light, equanimity, purity, divine strength into the parts of the conscious being that have to be changed; only when that has been sufficiently done and there is a firm positive basis, is it safe to raise up the concealed subconscious adverse elements in order to destroy and ...
... the highest fantasies; in animals, the divine spark is too deeply buried to come to the surface consciously and be associated with the Page 122 outer life. One must become a totally conscious being, in all the parts of the being, and be totally united with one's divine origin before one can truly say that one recalls his past lives. ...
... consisted of a sort of conscious concentration on one person or another, one thing or another, to obtain the desired result. For years on end, the Will and Force acted from above, and the outer conscious being [of Mother] wasn't concerned with anything further, knowing that it would only make things more complicated instead of helping them, and that the Force left to itself, directly under the supreme ...
... system of the man who drinks this strong wine of Ananda must by suffering and conquering all the torturing heats of life have been prepared for the secret and fiery heats of the Soma; otherwise his conscious being will not be able to hold it; it will spill and lose it as soon as or even before it is tasted or it will break down mentally and physically under the touch." Sri Aurobindo 11 also elucidates ...
... Auroville, and I see... I see surprising things. With some (not many, one or two), it's like a very small animal, it's nothing—it's very sweet: a very small animal. But with almost all of them, it's a conscious being. And the parents are absolutely stupid in their behavior with them, because they don't know, they don't understand. I saw one today again ( tiny gesture ): he is three or four days old, five ...
... creative possibilities lets loose the interrelated scheme of significant forms we call the universe: the universe is God's līlā, God's play, an expression of the Ananda which He takes of His Conscious Being. That Ananda constituting the God-Rose is vivified for us by Sri Aurobindo against a background which he terms c«the sapphires of heaven". Try to visualise an illimitable stretch of unbroken ...
... Synthesis of Yoga, p. 114. Page 146 will, Chit and Tapas, Chit and its Shakti, — that is Prakriti. Delight of being, Ananda, is the eternal truth of the union of this conscious being and its conscious force whether absorbed in itself or else deployed in the inseparable duality of its two aspects, unrolling the worlds and viewing them, acting in them and upholding the action ...
... is all so overwhelming that I hardly believe that it is. I remember how often I was reading and repeating to myself in Poland, "In order to stand aside, you must know yourself as the Purusha (conscious being; essential being supporting the play of Prakrit (Nature or cosmic energy)) who merely watches, consents to God's work, upholds the Adhar and enjoys the fruits that God gives." But at that time ...
... immortality. "By immortality is meant the consciousness which is beyond birth and death, beyond the chain of cause and effect, beyond all bondage and limitation, free, blissful, self-existent in conscious-being, the consciousness of the Lord, of the supreme Purusha, of Sachchidananda." 3 But as a corollary to this true immortality—our spirit's time-lessness, there exists as a natural consequence ...
... and intermediary, is the supremely conscious universal Energy of existence, the Tapas or Chit-Shakti of the Divine Sachchidananda. It is "nothing but infinite force in action of the supreme conscious Being in His own illumined self. The self-existent is luminously aware of Himself and full of His own delight; and that self-awareness is a timeless self-possession which in action reveals itself ...
... lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the outer life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one's divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives. In rebirth it is not the external being, that which is ...
... out of it one never knows what happened.' He looked at me, he saw what I meant and told me, 'It is unconsciousness.....Yes, one enters into what is called Samadhi, when one comes out of one's conscious being and enters into a part of one's being which is completely 1 The Synthesis of Yoga p. 453. (Italics ours) 2 Vide Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education ...
... l; but this relation was concealed by the first abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external Inconscience outweighing and obscuring in importance the spiritual element, the conscious being. But once the balance has been righted, it is no longer the change of body that must precede the change of consciousness; the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate ...
... 'spiritual existence' even beyond the grave. Hence man has sought to adduce some additional arguments to establish the fact that the physical death does not denote the total annulment of all conscious being. Leaving aside the elaboration of the intricate maze of reasoning adopted by philosophers and logicians, we may content ourselves with the bare statement, in the words of Professor Hammond, of ...
... these forces and he determines by his mental idea and resolve what he shall or shall not do.... the Purusha has begun to emancipate itself and decide what it shall accept or shall not accept — the conscious being has begun to impose itself on the forces that act on it." (Letters on Yoga, pp. 473-74) (vii) A hierarchy of values has to be established in the consciousness of the sadhaka. A clear ...
... In this vision of the supramental eye there will always be the "revelation of the soul of the thing seen and of the universal Spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its own conscious being." There will be at the same time a subtle change which will make the sight see in a sort of fourth dimension. The material object will become "to this sight something different from what ...
... "individual" is either unnecessary or else illusory, for none of these theories assume any ultimate purpose of fulfilment here upon earth. Therefore, a single birth is all that can be asked for by a "conscious being" who is fortuitiously engendered as part of a purposeless creation. Take the analogy of a wave which rises on the surface of the sea, remains in existence for half a minute or so, and then vanishes ...
... regard the fundamental spiritual determinates of the absolute Existence; they are its triune powers, necessary first postulates for all its self-creation or manifestation, — Self, the Divine, the Conscious Being; Atman, Ishwara, Purusha.¹ __________________________________________ ¹ (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, vol. 18, Centenary edition, Pondicherry, 1972, pp. 308-315 Page 191 ...
... intellectual exposition of the Sankhya begins with the statement of two ultimate principles of existence, — Purusha, the inactive being, and Prakriti, the active force of action. Purusha is a pure conscious Being, immobile, immutable and self-luminous. Prakriti is Energy and its process. Purusha does nothing, but it reflects the action of Energy and its processes; Prakriti is mechanical, but by being reflected ...
... primary Supermind. It is the pure divine ideation and formation in the Infinite, — only an ideation and formation that is organised not as an unreal play of mental thought, but as a real play of conscious being. The divine soul in this poise would make no difference between Conscious-Soul and Force-Soul, for all force would be action of consciousness, nor between Matter and Spirit since all mould would ...
... instrumental. This relation was concealed by the first abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external inconscience outweighing and obscuring in importance the spiritual element, the conscious being. But once the balance has been righted, it is no longer the change of body that must precede the change of consciousness; the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate whatever ...
... of her amazing persistence and perpetual force of survival and revival". 2 "A Nation is a living personality; it has a soul, even like the human individual. The soul of a nation is a conscious being, a formation out of the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it. It is not merely the sum total of its individuals that compose it, but a collective personality of which the individuals ...
... concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between man and the world: man is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; man is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, man is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he is rather the possessor of a consciousness; an empty "mind" passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books ...
... by the other attempt from below going upward and from outside going inward. That is the way of science, of the pragmatic man. The one we may say somewhat philosophically, is the Purusha, the conscious being corning down; the other, Prakriti, pushing up, Nature driving upward or inward. It is true the process of acclimatisation that Nature follows is a slow one and gradual though somewhat ...
... duty) to bring us back to him: after a process of self-separation a process of self-integration. Man, so long as he is a separate consciousness has to dedicate, lift up and unify this separative conscious being to the whole being and consciousness. This is how he discharges his debt to the Divine, and the answering grace of the Divine is the clearing of the debt which He owes to His creatures. ...
... by the other attempt from below going upward and from outside going inward. That is the way of science, of the pragmatic man. The one we may say somewhat philosophically, is the Purusha, the conscious being coming down; the other, Prakriti, pushing up,Nature driving upward or inward. It is true the process of acclimatisation that Nature follows is a slow one and gradual though somewhat crude ...
... and ignorance, is relegated to a status of relative reality. Prakriti is considered as maya, the illusory consciousness, the ignorance. Page 181 Purusha is the Brahman, the Conscious Being, the One Absolute Pure Reality. The Tantra comes next in the scale. Tantra does not consider Prakriti as absolutely separate from Purusha and opposite in character. Prakriti is not unconsciousness ...
... Bhushuk says: It is a thing that does not enter into the head of the deluded! NOTES 1. The deer is the individual self; his mate, the doe, is the secret deity, the conscious being in the heart, the immanent divine consciousness. 2. He gives up the joys of ordinary life. Page 259 VII Illusion and ...
... flame, that feed and increase that flame. Life after life you have to gather these experiences that fortify and greaten the contents of your being and then there comes a time when this flame, this conscious being is so developed, so mature, so well-formed, that you begin to think of the life spiritual. When one is not content, not wholly content with ordinary life, yearns after something else, something ...
... with unconsciousness and ignorance, is relegated to a status of relative reality. Prakriti is considered as m ā y ā , the illusory con-sciousness, the ignorance. Purusha is the Brahman, the Conscious Being, the One Absolute Pure Reality. The Tantra comes next in the scale. Tantra does not consider Prakriti as absolutely separate from Purusha and opposite in character. Prakriti is not unc ...
... Yogi, for in his consciousness the higher, deeper, subtler or other modes of experiences pass through and are recorded with the minimum aberration or diffraction. But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible ...
... closed, shut up, hermetically scaled. One should then return within away from them, if one is to come into contact with the true consciousness, the true reality. Even the Gita says, the conscious being is seated in tranquillity within, closing all the nine gates of the city, himself doing nothing nor causing anything to be done. Well, that is one way of procedure in dealing with the ...
... by the other attempt from below going upward and from outside going inward. That is the way of science, of the pragmatic man. The one we may say somewhat philosophically, is the Purusha, the conscious being coming down; the other, Prakriti, pushing up, Nature driving upward or inward. It is true the process of acclimatisation that Nature follows is a slow one and gradual though somewhat crude, ...
... K: When the sun has set, when the moon has set, when the fire has gone out, what then is man's light? Y: The self is his light. K: And what is this self ? Y: The self is the conscious Being, master of life-energies, dwelling within the heart. Yajnavalkya's answer has been put succinctly and most beautifully in another Upanishad, the most beautiful verse in the whole Upanishadic ...
... all the stages of growth, from the tiniest spark that is becoming a little flame of light up to the fully conscious and fully formed being. This ascent of the soul in order to become a mature conscious being, having its own will and deciding its own destiny, takes thousands of years. When, however, it is a free and conscious soul that seeks to take a body again upon earth, it begins to work upon ...
... and contact with the Divine; in next stage, the seeker receives light, power, communion and help that comes to him from above; what is received is utilized for the transformation of the whole conscious being. In the third stage the transformed seeker is to be utilized as a divine centre in the world. Each of the three stages has, in this yoga, its necessity and utility and must be given its time ...
... subjection to their delusions. In the process, the mind and senses become pure reflecting vehicles. In the final analysis, education becomes a process of yoga when we are enabled to fix our inner conscious being on the truth of that supreme reality in which all exists, so that it may display in us its luminous self-existence or that which transcends the limitations of description in terms of existence ...
... synthetic or exclusive, had one common principle, which can be discerned in every system; that common principle is the principle of concentration. In the new synthesis, the method is to put our whole conscious being, all the instruments of our consciousness, in all-inclusive concentration, on the Divine and to call Him to transform our entire being into His; in effect, the pressure of the concentration, the ...
... yoga is that of concentration; in the new synthesis, that common principle and force of concentration is sought to be developed integrally, as a result of which the method is to put our whole conscious being into relation, concentration and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being. As a result of this integral concentration, the present lower personality of the seeker ...
... Ananda by which is expelled the darkness of ignorance. The aspirant gets strength to fight against the attraction of the unregenerated nature and to climb up and move in the higher regions. His conscious being gets intoxicated with the nectar of delight, armoured with a hundred powers. He surmounts all the obstacles of the spiritual adventure and makes the aspirant firmly established in all the acco ...
... disappeared from the sight. And that living matter With no hope in it, is bound in its own mood as always. But my mind freed out of the matter's touch, I recognised the intent of the veiled conscious Being, I captured in my spirit Nature's hidden desire. My eyes capturing the whole landscape, consoled I returned To earthly sphere. Page 182 ...
... serviceable and necessary to the principle of mind and the life of a mental being, so too a body must be developed with new powers, activities or degrees of a divine action expressive of a truth-conscious being and proper to a supramental consciousness and manifesting a conscious spirit. While the capacity for taking up and sublimating all the activities of the earth-life capable of being spiritualised ...
... and sleeping, suffering and fatigue, etc. But even in metals the same tendencies have been located by science, as fatigue, resistance, etc. It is a universal energy manifesting itself as life, Conscious-Being projecting itself or flowing out into life-movement in which the transition from the inconscient to the conscient is effected. So life is a mid-term between the inconscient and the conscient. Life ...
... What I Have Learnt From The Mother What is God and Why ? God is a conscious Being, who is present everywhere, who is all-powerful, who is all-knowledge and who is all-perfect. He cannot be recognised by the mind, understood by the intellect, known by the reason; He has to be felt in the heart. God expresses Himself through whatever is true, ...
... that is present in the subconscious part of the medium; the spirit that communicates knows it and gives it out; or if someone present at the planchette has some thought in his subconscious or conscious being the spirit gives it out. Of course, spirits can act on their own through mediums, or those who have passed away or those who are living can communicate through them. But in that case the medium ...
... Page 430 of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience.... The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction... it is separated by ignorance from other-self and from the inner Divinity, but it is still ...
... the lower Nature working in and by ego and division the integral action of the higher Nature working in and by God and unity.... The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the Sadhaka of the Sadhana as ...
... of the being around the psychic centre - that has made of itself a single being, solely turned towards the Divine; then, if the body falls off, that remains. It is only a completely formed conscious being that can remember exactly in another life all that has happened before. It can pass consciously from one life to another without losing anything of its consciousness. 16 Psychic memory ...
... Nation' given at about the same time: A nation is a living personality; it has a soul, even like a human individual. The soul of a nation is also a. psychic being, that is to say, a conscious being, a formation out of the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it, a power and aspect of Mahashakti. A nation is not merely the sum total of the individuals that compose it, but a ...
... to the total sense consciousness within and behind the vision a revelation of the soul of the thing seen and of the universal spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its conscious being."¹ It is, in short, an infusion of the supramental sense, the ¹ The Synthesis of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo. Page 456 sanjñāna , into the physical sense, resulting in the ...
... vital forces which are behind and of which the physical circumstances are mere instruments." Nowadays even a layman will understand Sri Aurobindo's remark: "Nature is not so mechanical, she is a conscious being. If you try to circumvent her in one way she circumvents you in another." Let the medical science but come up with a new drug to combat a disease, Nature confounds it by confronting it with a more ...
... of beings was a logical necessity of the Vedic conception of existence. Existence being a life, a soul expressing itself in forms, every distinct order of consciousness, every stratum or sea of conscious-being (samudra, sindhu, apah as the Vedic thinkers preferred to call them) demanded its own order of objective experiences (lokas, worlds), tended inevitably to throw itself into forms of individualised ...
... are the seven rivers poured down the hill by Indra after slaying Vritra, the rivers or streams of the Truth, ṛtasya dhārāḥ ; and they represent, according to our theory, the seven principles of conscious being in their divine fulfilment in the Truth and Page 178 Bliss. This is why the seven-headed thought,—that is to say, the knowledge of the divine existence with its seven heads or powers ...
... and with this self-wrapped ego-bounded knot of action of the mind, life and body. To rise above the modes of Nature, to be traiguṇyātīta , is indispensable, if we are to get back into our fully conscious being away from the obsessing power of the lower action and to put on the free nature of the spirit and its eternal immortality. That condition of the sādharmya is what the Gita next proceeds to develop ...
... Master-Consciousness, however high and great a thing it may be, has a relation to the universe and the cosmic movement; it cannot be the utter Absolute, Brahman superior to all relativities. This Conscious-Being who originates, supports and governs our mind, life, senses is the Lord; but where there is no universe of relativities, there can be no Lord, for there is no movement to transcend and govern. ...
... mind can only envisage what is limited by Time and Space and this Brahman is that which, as the Rig-veda has said, is neither today nor tomorrow and though it moves and can be approached in the conscious being of all conscious existences, yet when the mind tries to approach it and study it in itself, it vanishes from the view of the mind. The Omnipresent cannot be seized by the senses, the Omniscient ...
... Upanishads Truth, Knowledge, Infinity Truth, Knowledge, Infinity, not as three separate things, but in their inseparable unity, are the supernal conscious being of the Eternal. It is an infinite being, an infinite truth of being, an infinite self-knowledge of self-being. Take one of these away and the idea of the Eternal fails us; we land ourselves in ...
... standards of action have led to a result which destroys the practical aims of action. But the whole upshot is that all-embracing inner bankruptcy which Arjuna expresses when he says that his whole conscious being, not the thought alone but heart and vital desires and all, are utterly bewildered and can find nowhere the dharma , nowhere any valid law of action. For this alone he takes refuge as a disciple ...
... However great or learned or wise one may be, he who does not follow the great current of universal life in an ever ascending march, inevitably moves towards downfall, towards the dissolution of his conscious being. This has been expressed very forcefully by Pythagoras, in the eloquent words recently pronounced here by Mr. Han Byner. And these words led me to decide against summarising in this last ...
... there are spirits of fire. One day, I was in my bed. I was concentrating, looking at people. Suddenly I saw something like a cloud of flames drawing close to the house. I looked and I saw it was a conscious being. —Eh! what are you here for? —I have the right to burn the house, start a fire. Page 136 —That's possible, I told it, but not here. And it could not resist. It is a question ...
... movements of the being around the psychic centre—that has made of itself a single being, solely turned to the Divine; then, if the body falls off, that remains. It is only a completely formed conscious being that can remember exactly in another life all that has happened before. It can even pass consciously from one life to another without losing anything of its consciousness. How many people upon ...
... There are Asuras and Asuras... that is to say... no, the Asuras are Asuras, but there are all those who have come out of them, and who are beings of an inferior kind. An Asura is generally a conscious being and he knows he has an end. He knows that the attitude he has taken up in the universe is bound to destroy him after a certain time. Naturally, the time of an Asura is extremely long if we compare ...
... a belief in and a surrender to the Supreme Presence and Force above the mind, an aspiration in the heart and a will in the higher mind to the supreme truth and the transformation of the whole conscious being by its descent and power. He must, in his meditation, open himself silently to it and call down first a deeper calm and silence, next the strength from [ ] 9 above Page 366 working ...
... the Yoga shakti? What is Yogic mind-force, Yogic life-force and Yogic body-force? In the Yogic consciousness one is not only aware of things, but of forces, not only of forces, but of the conscious being behind the forces. One is aware of all this not only in oneself but in the universe. There is a force which accompanies the growth of this new consciousness and at once grows with it and helps ...
... instrumental; but this relation was concealed by the first abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external Inconscience outweighing and obscuring in importance the spiritual element, the conscious being. But once the balance has been righted, it is no longer the change of body that must precede the change of consciousness; the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate whatever ...
... into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection. But while the former steps in evolution were taken by Nature ...
... process may be rapid or tardy according to the amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and s ...
... power of transference are of immense importance. On the one side they immediately justify, at any rate as an actual possibility, the ancient tradition of at least a temporary sojourn of the human conscious being in other worlds than the physical after the dissolution of the physical body. On the other side they open to us the possibility of an action of the higher planes on the material existence which ...
... into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection. Sri Aurobindo Page 8 ...
... The Signature Of Truth SUPERMIND AND OVERMIND Sri Aurobindo's work is a unique earth-transformation. Above the mind there are several levels of conscious being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world of the Truth. Rut in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic ...
... and Answers (1929-1931) Supermind and Overmind Sri Aurobindo's work is a unique earth-transformation. Above the mind there are several levels of conscious being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world of the Truth. But in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic ...
... looked at me, saw what I meant and told me, "It is unconsciousness." I asked him for an explanation, I said, "What?" He told me, "Yes, you enter into what is called samadhi when you go out of your conscious being and enter a part of your being which is completely unconscious, or rather a domain where you have no corresponding consciousness—you go beyond the field of your consciousness and enter a region ...
... which passes from one form to another and, with each new form, makes a new progress and becomes capable of entering into a higher form, more and more, until this "something" becomes a perfectly conscious being at the end of the evolution. Then this being would have a personal evolution which would duplicate—it won't be independent but simultaneous—and complement the evolution of Nature or rather make ...
... slightest sing breeze. " Nature as Prakriti is an inertly active Force,—for she works out a movement imposed upon her; but within her is One that knows.... "The individual soul or the conscious being in a form may identify itself with this experiencing Purusha or with this active Prakriti. If it identifies itself with Prakriti, it is not master, enjoyer and knower...." The Synthesis of ...
... and spoiled by the mixture of these forces of the Ignorance. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Higher Planes of Mind * Overmind Above the mind there are several levels of conscious being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world of the Truth. But in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic ...
... this was possible, because it had happened to her! But when I am in my own state—I cannot even say that, it is not "personal", it is a way of being—when one is in the true state, when one is a conscious being and has the true way of being, this cannot touch one. It is like the experience of meeting an enemy and wanting to strike him, and then the blows do not go home and all that you do has no ...
... vision and joy and the height and clarity of its purpose it became creative of the life of the people. Ananda, the joy of the spirit in itself carrying in it a revelation of the powers of its conscious being, was to the ancient Indian idea the creative principle, and ancient poetry did thus creatively reveal to the people its soul and its possibilities by forms of beauty and suggestions of power in ...
... the self's sake and so with other objects of interest or desire—whether the self be the inner self or the ego. 3 Who desires external things for their own sake and not for some value to the conscious being? Even Cheloo is not interested in a two anna piece for its own sake, but for some vital satisfaction it can bring him; even with the hoarding miser it is the same. It is his vital being's passion ...
... movements at a time instead of working only upon details—although that working is always necessary. I may cite as an example the practice of the separation of the Prakriti and the Purusha, the conscious being standing back detached Page 235 from all the movements of Nature and observing them as witness and knower and finally as the giver (or refuser) of the sanction and at the highest stage ...
... Vedanta, man has five koshas or sheaths of existence, the material (Annamaya), vital (Pranamaya), mental (Manomaya) which together make up the aparardha or Page 33 lower half of our conscious-being; the ideal (vijnanamaya) which links the lower to the parardha or higher half; the divine or Anandamaya in which the divine existence (Amrita) is concentrated for communion with our lower human ...
... its nature in action is Tapas or the concentration of consciousness on action & its object or its results. Now the nature of Agni, kratu or active power is precisely this Tapas or Chit-shakti, Conscious Being in concentration of action. It is then by Tapas or Will that Agni creates in us Knowledge. But how can Action be said to transform itself into Knowledge, kriyáshakti into jnánashakti?We can see ...
... perfected and happy mentality, pure in perception, light and calm in the emotional parts,—the bhandishthasya sumatim of the tenth rik,—which the divine force dwelling in us abidingly assures to our conscious being. The Page 702 image of the physical morning sacrifice is maintained throughout the first two riks, but from its closing phrase, mahán devas tamaso niramochi, the Rishi departs from ...
... Inhabitant of all forms: and, as we shall find, identical with the universal Purusha of the 16th verse,—"The Purusha there and there, He am I." It is He who has become all things and beings,—a conscious Being, the sole Existent and Self-existent, who is Master and Enjoyer of all He becomes. And the Upanishad proceeds to formulate the nature and manner, the general law of that becoming of God which we ...
... the seeker of the Truth in its second verse. Works are the essence of Life. Life is a manifestation of the Brahman; in Brahman the Life Principle arranges a harmony of the seven principles of conscious being by which that manifestation works out its involution and evolution. In Brahman Matarishwan disposes the waters, the sevenfold movement of the divine Existence. That divine Existence is the Lord ...
... the Force to the Consciousness which drives it. Accordingly we have, besides the Infinite Existence, first the life of material Nature ruled by the infallible Inconscient; secondly the life of conscious being in material Nature emerging out of the Inconscient, fallible, bewildered, only half-potent, which is our own; and thirdly the life of the real Man to which we are moving where Consciousness and ...
... Akasha, & wideness is constantly associated with him in the Veda,—leads us to surmise that he may also be the master in the ideal faculty, ritam brihat, where he dwells, urukshaya, of pure infinite conscious-being out of which knowledge manifests & with which it is, ultimately, one entity The hymns of Kanwa follow the hymns of Sunahshepa and Hiranyastupa in the order of the first Mandala. In the hymns ...
... simply all animals. × आचक्रे. The obverse expression of आभू—junction of two personalities in conscious being and bringing into junction. × Or for fulfilment. अभिष्टये. D. [Romesh Chunder Dutt] अभिमतसिद्धि ...
... he knows that the whole world is but a divine play of the eternal Child-God Srikrishna with Himself in the playground of His self-existence. All this he cannot have unless in the roots of his conscious being he feels not concealed or subliminal, but manifest & always present to him, the Bright, Calm, Unconcerned, Unbound, Unrelated Divine Existence. This Pure Existence is not only an impersonal ...
... not even noticeable, I believe. All the same, current speech, if your favourite Chambers's Dictionary as well as my dear Oxford Concise is to be believed, insists on "evening", "precious" and "conscious" being dissyllabic and "realm" monosyllabic. I am mentioning this disparity between poetic and current usages not because I wish "meditation" to be robbed of its full length or "vision" to lose half ...
... reasoning on the analogy of our own very cabined and limited sense-consciousness and its rather clumsy relations with the happenings in material space. What is space after all but an extension of conscious being in which Consciousness-Force builds its own surroundings? In the subtle physical plane there Page 401 are not one, but many layers of consciousness and each moves in its own being, ...
... one is aware of one's own soul, one's own inner being and of the real truth of existence. In the Yogic consciousness one is not only aware of things, but of forces, not only of forces but of the conscious being behind the forces. One is aware of all this not only in oneself but in the universe. There is a force which accompanies the growth of the new consciousness and at once grows with it and helps ...
... of that kind to have any such result, only the violent breaking of a trance might have a bad result though it would not necessarily produce a disaster. But there is the possibility that if the conscious being goes out of the body in an absolutely complete trance, the thread which connects it with the body might be broken or else cut by some adverse force and it would not be able to return into the physical ...
... consciousness or a plane. Sea or Ocean The sea with the sun over it is a plane of consciousness lit by the Truth. To enter into the rays is to be no longer merely lit by it, but in one's own conscious being to begin to become part of the Truth. A sea in tumult usually indicates a vital upheaval or a period of strain and stress and struggle. The blue ocean is often a symbol of the spiritual ...
... were causes, partly general in the shape of a resistance to a great descending force which was not personal to you at all, and, so far as there was a response to it in you, it was not from your conscious being, otherwise you would not have had it in this way, but from the part in us which keeps things for a long time that have been suppressed or rejected by the conscious will. It is the conscious will ...
... consciousness, this Will is not individual. It is the will of the Purusha who is in all things and transcends them. It is the will of the Lord. Knowledge of the Lord as the One in the fully self-conscious being, submission to the Lord as the universal and transcendent in the fully self-conscious action, are the two keys of the divine gates, the gates of Immortality. And the nature of the two united ...
... how is this done? Existence in its activity is a Consciousness-Force which presents the workings of its Force to its consciousness as forms of being. The Force of Existence of the one sole conscious being can by its workings produce no results that are not forms of that Being. Matter as substance of forms must then be itself a form or substance of spirit; it can be nothing else. The appearances ...
... as gāvaḥ , the luminous cows, are the rays of its light. × The Bull is the Purusha, soul or conscious being; the Cow is the Prakriti, the power of consciousness. The creation of the godhead, the Son, comes by the fertilising of the triple luminous consciousness by the triple luminous soul of the Truth-being ...
... extension of the One. Between these two unknown infinities, infinite potential zero and infinite plenary x , they saw around them, before their eyes, below, above, a third sea of ever-developing conscious being, a sort of boundless wave, which they spoke of by a hardy metaphor as climbing up or flowing up beyond heaven to the supreme seas. It is this perilous ocean which we have to navigate. There Bhujyu ...
... of the Supreme Good [The Divine Will-Force is that of which all the other godheads are forms and he manifests all these powers of supreme Truth as he grows in us. Thus the supreme state of conscious being is attained and by that our complex and manifold existence is maintained in the Light and the Joy. The Rishi prays that the evil may not be allowed to express itself again in him, that the secret ...
... The gods. Swar is the "own house" of the Gods. × The divine force of the Truth-conscious being, called in the next verse "the force of the gods"; the Vast, bṛhat , is the constant description of that plane or "wide world",—the Truth, the Right, the Vast. ...
... the first ground for man the thinker, so Page 883 man the mental being is sublimated by the endeavour of the evolutionary Energy to develop out of him the spiritual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his true self and highest nature. But if this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put themselves ...
... Divine Being, Sachchidananda, is at once impersonal and personal: it is an Existence and the origin and foundation of all truths, forces, powers, existences, but it is also the one transcendent Conscious Being and the All-Person of whom all conscious beings are the selves and personalities; for He is their highest Self and the universal indwelling Presence. It is a necessity for the soul in the universe—and ...
... inconscience developing in life into a limited and divided self-consciousness, an original inert subjection to the drive of a blind self-existent Force developing in life into a struggle of the self-conscious being to possess himself and all things and Page 501 to establish in the kingdom of this unseeing mechanic Force the reign of an enlightened Will and Knowledge. And because the blind mechanic ...
... all-being into phenomenal forms of itself. The dissolution of the aggregate into an infinite nothingness at which Mind seems to arrive, is to the Supermind only the return of the self-concentrating conscious-being out of its phenomenon into its infinite existence. Whichever way its consciousness proceeds, by the way of infinite division or by the way of infinite enlargement, it arrives only at itself, at ...
... material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit ...
... the essence of Matter. Both admit and confess each other as divine, real and essentially one. Mind and Life are disclosed in that illumination as at once figures and instruments of the supreme Conscious Being by which It extends and houses Itself in material form and in that form unveils Itself to Its multiple centres of consciousness. Mind attains its self-fulfilment when it becomes a pure mirror of ...
... and response, though much of the actual operation belongs to an inner Buddhi. Mind physical, mind supraphysical,—we have and can use this double sense mentality. Buddhi is a construction of conscious being which quite exceeds its beginnings in the basic chitta; it is the intelligence with its power of knowledge and will. Buddhi takes up and deals with all the rest of the action of the mind and life ...
... Yoga Chapter XXII Vijnana or Gnosis In our perfect self-transcendence we pass out and up from the ignorance or half-enlightenment of our mental conscious-being into a greater wisdom-self and truth-power above it, there to dwell in the unwalled light of a divine knowledge. The mental man that we are is changed into the gnostic soul, the truth-conscious ...
... as the expression and shaping out in various ways of the numberless and infinite qualities of the Brahman. His being assumes by conscious Will all kinds of properties, shapings of the stuff of conscious being, habits as it were of cosmic character and power of dynamic self-consciousness, guṇas , into which all the Page 379 cosmic action can be resolved. But by none of these nor by all of ...
... practicality and artistry, scientific analysis and religious fervour. Rare as such a combination may be, it is not the full and whole man. Human fullness and wholeness come when the entire range of conscious being possible to the human creature is compassed. Behind our common experience are occult regions of abnormal gleams and shadows which Western psychologists vaguely call the "subliminal". Beyond ...
... from the usual sources to make the profoundest moments of past poetry. The rarest of those levels give birth to overhead poetry: they are "planes" whose afflatus comes as if from an infinitude of conscious being above our brain-clamped mentality. Sri Aurobindo labels them Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Above even Overmind is the sovereign divine dynamism which he names Supermind ...
... ence. It is also a harmony between Nature's scenes and man's moods, as if the objective and the subjective were two sides of the same ex-perience and all Nature were a condition of the poet's conscious being. Nature may thus be entered by a sort of empathy, in-feeling, and its shapes and hues read by an answering mood. Or else a mood may seize upon Nature's shapes and hues and turn them to a personal ...
... matter-stuff, this true psyche here below makes a projection of itself into them, a projection which gets steeped in their tones. Now, all existence has a biune reality - Purusha and Prakriti, conscious being and Nature. Wherever consciousness plays, this biune reality is present in one form or another, openly concordant or apparently divided. We have thus in the realm of evolutionary existence ...
... goes on to sum up: "The Real is behind all that exists; it expresses itself intermediately in an Ideal which is a harmonised truth of itself; the Ideal throws out a phenomenal reality of variable conscious-being which, inevitably drawn towards its own essential Reality, tries at last to recover it entirely whether by a violent leap or normally through the Ideal which put it forth. It is this that explains ...
... of as Chit (Jnanashakti) it fulfils infallibly as Tapas (Kriyashakti); for Jnanashakti is only the stable & comprehensive, Kriyashakti only the motional and intensive form of one self-luminous Conscious Being. They are one power of conscious force of God (Chit-Shakti of Sat-Purusha). But in the lower hemisphere, under the conditions of mind, life & body, the luminousness becomes divided & broken up ...
... also Purusha. So far, then, we succeed in forming some idea of the great force which is to work out our emergence from our nature to our Page 131 supernature. It is a force of Conscious Being manifesting itself in forms & movements & working out exactly as it is guided, from stage to stage, the predetermined progress of our becoming & the Will of God in the world. Page 132 ...
... millions of devices, but without any intelligence. So it seems, but so it cannot be; there is something hidden from us which we have to discover. It is the consciousness behind the Energy, the conscious Being behind the action that we have to discover. Consciousness, being, force, energy (shakti), these are the three first terms of the fundamental truth of existence. What we have to know is how they ...
... made before on a lower scale and were often taken for the full and final siddhi: but this is of a greater, fuller, final kind in the real ideality standing on an idealised substance of the whole conscious being. Subsequently the inspired thought began to take the place of the intuitional gnosis and take up into it the T². Much more might have been done on the intuitional basis, but this would have ...
... other members. Vyapti is still chiefly of the mental kind The interpretative revelatory since last night is being fixed in the system—the essentiality of it, its status in the tissue of the conscious being. But there is already the urge to the revelatory in its own highest kind. The lipi which has been ideal of all kinds is now shedding the intuitive vijnana and keeping only the revelatory and ...
... and its revelations are on that level pursued by the uncertainties of the intellect, by its tapas or ineffectual straining after certainty and effectivity, by its smallness of periphery in the conscious being and scope of knowledge and power. The object seems to be to meet these difficulties in their own field and even there to establish the fullness of revelatory light and substance and the free c ...
... finally complete. Momentary touches of asamata in asiddhi alone remain, but are being rapidly replaced by ananda, which is now not only the passive, but the active Brahmabhava occupying the whole conscious being. (2) Second chatusthaya finally completed though still not quite perfect in devibhava (aishwaryabodha, attahasya). Dasya absolute except for some remnant of the habit of responsible effort in ...
... truths shut out from us by our preoccupation with matter; coincidence for the curious touches of Page 424 artistry in the work of that supreme & universal Intelligence which in its conscious being as on a canvas has planned & executed the world. 16) That which men term a hallucination is the reflection in the mind & senses of that which is beyond our ordinary mental & sensory perceptions ...
... And all these things are because they are in thy unfinished nature. For Nature is the worker and what is it that she works at? She shapes out of her crude mind and life and matter a fully conscious being Know thyself next as the Worker. Understand thy nature to be the worker and thy own nature and All-Nature to be thyself. This nature-self is not proper to thee nor limited. Thy nature ...
... those eternal seats of joy... What is memorable here is the communication of the magical livingness of paradisal scenery through words like "trembling", "pulse", "quivering", as if some vast conscious being were grown wood and sky and mountain and as if its eternal bliss were all the time astir in them. But in Urvasie Sri Aurobindo is not merely suggestive of the supra-terrestrial through ...
... Therefore every seed of things implies in itself all the infinity of various possibilities, but is kept to one law of process and result by the Will, that is to say, by the Knowledge-Force of the Conscious-Being who is manifesting himself...." 2 Fourthly, one Real-Idea does not clash with other Real-Ideas, for there is a single vast Consciousness which contains and relates all Real-Ideas in itself ...
... In Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's terminology, 'psychic' or 'psychic being' means the soul or the portion of the Supreme in man which evolves from life to life until it becomes a fully self-conscious being. The soul is a special capacity or grace of human beings on earth. × The film on August 5. ...
... personalization, otherwise that 2 could not exist. But each individual has a different personality. Yes... perhaps not in the present state of disorder! But in principle. Every conscious being? Yes, in principle—each TRUE soul. True, meaning formed? Yes, 'formed' if you consider it from below. But if you consider it from above... ( Mother laughs ). Each individual represents ...
... In Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's terminology, 'psychic' or 'psychic being' means the soul or the portion of the Supreme in man which evolves from life to life until it becomes a fully self-conscious being. The soul is a capacity or grace particular to human beings on earth. × Experience of July 24 ...
... be apt. After referring to the three oceans envisaged by the Rigvedic seers - the upper one of a remote radiance, a lower one of deep darkness and, between them, "a third sea of ever-developing conscious being", 484 our present existence - Sri Aurobindo 485 writes, marshalling several Rigvedic images: From this idea of the oceans arose naturally the psycholo- 484. Ibid., p. 449. 485 ...
... to the total sense consciousness within and behind the vision a revelation of the soul of the thing seen and of the universal Spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its own conscious being. This realisation consists of three successive movements, internal vision, complete internal experience and identity. After that revelation whatever fadings of the light, whatever periods ...
... end.” 22 Which means that we do not have “any surety that there ever was or ever will be a period in time when no form of universe, no play of being is represented to itself in the eternal Conscious-Being.” 23 “[The ancient Hindu] believes that Nature has repeated itself over and over again, as indeed it is probable she has done, resuming briefly and in sum at each start what she had previously ...
... the being. This is what is important, and the rest remains to be seen … To this end, all the [supramental] consciousness which is in these cells has to assemble, to organize itself and to form a conscious being which is able to be conscious of Matter and at the same time of the Supramental. This is what is being done. How far will we be able to go? I don’t know. I do not say that this body will be able ...
... serviceable and necessary to the principle of mind and the life of a mental being, so too a body must be developed with new powers, activities or degrees of a divine action expressive of a truth-conscious being and proper to a supramental consciousness and manifesting a conscious spirit”, writes Sri Aurobindo. And he goes on: “While the capacity for taking up and sublimating all the activities of the ...
... movements at a time instead of working only upon details – although that working is always necessary. I may cite as an example the practice of the separation of the Prakriti and the Purusha, the conscious Being standing back detached from all the movements of Nature and observing them as witness and knower and finally as the giver (or refuser) of the sanction and at the highest stage of the development ...
... hemisphere would become manifested 93 upon Earth. Therefore, the manifestation of the Supramental on 29 February 1956 meant, among other things, that the future embodiment of the supramentally conscious being beyond Man, of the divine Superman, was now assured, as it was assured that the human aspiration throughout countless millenniums was being fulfilled: the world would not always be a place of ...
... with man in his potentiality, with man as he is bound to evolve into. For, it is sure that, although at present hampered and burdened, mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood or rather a spiritual-supramental manhood which shall be the next product of earthly evolution. Sri Aurobindo's message represents a forward-looking philosophy that wants ...
... and functioning which follows inevitably upon the self-vision and keeps to the processes involved in the original Truth. All Nature is simply, then, the Seer-Will, the Knowledge-Force of the Conscious-Being..." 54 Thus, "the world expresses a foreseen truth, obeys a predetermining Will, realises an original formative self-vision, — it is the growing image of a divine creation." 55 (Italics ...
... Knowledge one with self-existence and self-awareness and a substantial Will which is in perfect unison with that knowledge." 2 Thus, "Consciousness that is Force is the nature of Being and this Conscious-Being manifested as a creative Knowledge-Will is the Real-Idea or Supermind." 3 This Supermind that is the divine Gnosis has created and arranged the cosmic order, but arranged it indirectly through ...
... that kind to have any such result, only the violent breaking of a trance might have a bad result, though it would not necessarily produce a disaster. But there is the possibility that if the conscious being goes out of the body in an absolutely complete trance, the thread which connects it with the body might be broken or else cut by some adverse force and it would not be able to return into the ...
... comes out of it, one has no idea of what has happened.” He looked at me, saw what I meant and told me: “It is unconsciousness … You enter into what is called ‘samadhi’ when you go out of your conscious being and enter into a part of your being which is completely unconscious, or rather into a domain where you have no corresponding consciousness: you go beyond the field of your consciousness and enter ...
... × The soul or portion of the Supreme in man which evolves from life to life until it becomes a fully conscious being. × Sri Aurobindo on Himself. ...
... something was rebuilt. For a long time I remained unable ... unable to do hardly anything (a little bit, but hardly anything), but gradually it was all rebuilt, rebuilt, rebuilt: a conscious, purely conscious being—which is now chattering away! (It was unable to express itself.) Yes, I understand. I understand. Well, perhaps that is what Sri Aurobindo meant when he said to me, "Your body is at present ...
... to learn to meditate. To focus their consciousness where thinking or feeling takes place serves to activate the meditative state. Meditation in the Yogic sense seems to me to be a flow of one's conscious being towards the Divine. My natural tendency at the beginning of my Yogic life was to turn mentally towards Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but the real urge within me was to open my emotional self to ...
... completely created by it in response Page 107 to that hidden reality. That reality and this manifestation have both of them the look of a physical counterpart or expression of a Conscious Being at work; so the granting of an "objective" status to the world of matter and of relative space and time does not diminish the primacy of Consciousness and what the human mind does in its perceptual ...
... a belief in and a surrender to the Supreme Presence and force above the mind, an aspiration in the heart and a will in the higher mind to the Supreme. Truth and the transformation of the whole conscious being by its descent and power. He must, in his meditation open himself silently to it and call down first a deeper calm and silence, next the strength from the above working in the whole system and ...
... energy-substance. The body's functionings are a necessary machinery or instrumentation for the movements of this mental Inhabitant; it is only by setting the corporeal instrument in motion that the Conscious Being emerging, evolving in it can transmit its mind formations, will formations and turn them into a physical manifestation of itself in Matter. The capacity, the processes of the instrument must ...
... 122, 123 Prières et Meditations (the Mother), 2, 5 psychic being, 3 psycho-analysis, 132, 133 purification methods, 120, 121 need for, 28, 29 Purusha (Soul or Conscious Being), 68-76, 114, 128 Purushottama, of the Gita, 78, 110 Q quiet state, defined, 24 R the Reality, 77, 78 rebirth, 5 rejection, 107, 125, 153, 154 ...
... consciousness Page 157 which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection. But while the former steps in evolution were taken by ...
... type. All the colour and variety of life is made of the intricate pattern of the weaving of the gunas. The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 656-60 Page 112 The individual soul or the conscious being in a form may identify itself with this experiencing Purusha or with this active Prakriti. If it identifies itself with Prakriti, it is not master, enjoyer, and knower, but reflects the modes ...
... Existent-Conscious, Reality has three self-determined aspects: Self, Soul and God the Lord. As Self it remains in the background of the process of self-manifestation of the Reality; as Soul it is the Conscious Being who sanctions the creative adventure of the Consciousness-Force, and as the Lord it controls the process of the self-manifestation of the Reality. The true being in man is a portion of the supreme ...
... 22 Purusha and Prakriti Developing the concepts of the Sankhya philosophy, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes between the soul or spirit side of the Being called Purusha (Person or Conscious Being), which is the essential or true being, and the Nature side of Being called Prakriti (Nature), which is the phenomenal or instrumental being. Both the outer being and the inner being described ...
... true that they also count as sentient entities ? Entirely true as far as the Earth is concerned and true not so much for the cloud as for the Cloud-Power or Cloud- Spirit. The Earth is a conscious being and the globe is the form in which it manifests—behind the Cloud or Fire etc. there are Fire and Cloud Spirits of which the action of cloud or fire is a manifestation. This is an ancient knowledge ...
... Our Evolutionary Task In the light of the foregoing, man can be conceived as a laboratory of evolution in which Nature is experimenting to bring about his mutation. But man is a conscious being with a conscious will and instrumentation of deliberate action. The evolutionary force of Nature and man's will can therefore act and react upon each other, and the entire human drama can be seen ...
... But if we were more deliberate, we might have probably concluded that man, the mental being, is sublimated by the endeavour of the Energy to evolve out of him as the spiritual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his true self and highest nature. Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 ...
... Kings ( Rajanah ) They are also considered to be the guardians of the light of the Sun, 19 who presides over the realm of the supermind, the world beyond which is a triple world of the Supreme Conscious Being who is All-Delight ( Madhu ) The realm of the supermind is the realm of plenary light in which is the power of all-comprehending truth- consciousness (r ita chit ) It is at the gates of the realm ...
... Ribhus again fashion the cow that gives sweet milk; this is a symbolic expression of the manifestation of the universal forms the light of Aditi, the Cow, the infinite Consciousness of the infinite conscious Being which is the Mother of the worlds. It is by the intervention of Aditi that the inferior nature of the man, which is mortal, is transformed into the higher nature of unity and infinity, which is ...
... yoga is that of concentration; in the new synthesis, that common principle and force of concentration is sought to be developed integrally, as a result of which the method is to put our whole conscious being into relation, concentration and Page 121 contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being. As a result of this integral concentration, the present lower ...
... heaven, but he begins his work upon the earth and gives effect to the sacrifice on the Page 96 five planes of our ascent. He is the Violent One who leads the upward evolution of the conscious being, his force battles against evils, smites the sinner and the enemy. Agni, Kumara, prototype of the Puranic Skanda, is on earth the child of this force of Rudra. In these and many other aspects ...
... Brahmanaspati needs a special uplifting force, and Rudra supplies this force. Rudra is named in the Veda the Mighty One of heaven. He is described as the One who leads the upward evolution of the Conscious being; his force battles against all evil, smites the sinner and the enemy; intolerant of defect and Stumbling, he is the most fierce among the gods. Agni is On the earth the child of this force of ...
... Knowledge 47 We who are subject to this sevenfold ignorance are, in reality, true individuals. The true individual is, according to Sri Aurobindo, the eternal portion of the Supreme Reality, a conscious being who is for our valuation of existence a being of the Eternal in its power of individualizing self-experience; it is a concrete being who, on arriving at the liberation, enjoys immortality. In the ...
... Timeless Reality is also all this Universe, sarvam khalu idam brahma. Brahman is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his consciousness — Force put out in self-manifestation; he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the Omniscient and Omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti ...
... instrumental. This relation was concealed by the first abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external inconscience outweighing and obscuring in importance the spiritual element, the conscious being. But once the balance has been righted, it is no longer the change of body that must precede the change of consciousness; the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate ...
... although that relationship was concealed by the first abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external Inconscience outweighing and obscuring in importance the spiritual element, the conscious being. "But once the balance has been righted," Sri Aurobindo states, "it is no longer the change of body that must precede the change of consciousness; the consciousness itself by its mutation will ...
... foundation of all living and being, and knowledge is the action of the consciousness, the light by which it knows itself and its realities. It is by the powers of pursuit of knowledge that our conscious being grows until it accomplishes itself, by union in the infinity of the divine being. In the pursuit of knowledge, one meets the Divine in many aspects, and it is by knowledge that one can enter into ...
... When a conflict began ... a thousand appalling meteors fell; clouds and darkness prevailed. Even this earth, with the oceans and mountains it contains though it is unconscious, quaked like a conscious being — like a fond bride when forcibly torn from her bridegroom — like the festoons of a vine shaking under the blasts of a whirlwind. The ocean rose under the vibration of this earthquake; rivers flowed ...
... standards of action have led to a result which destroys the practical aims of action. But the whole upshot is that all-embracing inner bankruptcy which Arjuna expresses when he says that his whole conscious being, not the thought alone but heart and vital desires and all, are utterly bewildered and can find nowhere the dharma, nowhere any valid law of action. For this alone he takes refuge as a disciple ...
... the properties of form, even the most obvious such as colour, light, etc. merely operations of Force, but form itself is only an operation of Force. This Force again proves to be self-power of conscious-being in a state of energy and activity. Practically, therefore, all form is only an operation of consciousness impressing itself with presentations of its own workings." (SABCL, Vol. 12, p. 195) ...
... Nature. What we are envisaging is the control and conquest of the prevailing determinism of our bodily system by the reverse higher determinism of the supernal grades and powers of our conscious being. And there is nothing "miraculous" or "irrational" here. Indeed, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out: "What seems to us supernatural is in fact either a spontaneous irruption of the phenomena ...
... "realm" as a dissyllable... All the same, current speech, if your favourite Chambers' Dictionary and as well as my dear Oxford Concise is to be believed, insists on "evening", "precious" and "conscious" being dissyllabic and "realm" monosyllabic... ... the Concise Oxford Dictionary is specially stated to be in Page 192 its very title as "of Current English"; is all its claim to ...
... lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the outer life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one's divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives." (Ibid., p. 364) Page 168 Nature of psychic ...
... a reasoning mental being. But even in his highest elevation man is still weighed down by a heavy stamp of original animality. Therefore mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood which shall be the next product of evolution. A great responsibility lies with man; for with his advent upon the earth-scene, the evolutionary movement has entered a new ...
... Centre. Mother ______________________________ ¹ Sadhana: spiritual discipline. ²The soul or portion of the Supreme in man which evolves from life to life until 't becomes a fully conscious being. ³ Ibid., pp. 26-7. Page 110 gave a good deal of her time to the children of this Centre,, and day after day, she attempted to prepare them for the adventure of consciousness ...
... something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. "The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection. ... "A conversion has to be made, a turning of the co ...
... the universe, individualised as well as universal in the particular form, or self-consciousness who perceives, enjoys and conducts to their end its vast and complex workings. It is a force of Conscious Being manifesting itself in forms and movements and working out exactly as it is guided, from stage to stage, the predetermined progress of our becoming & the Will of God in the world. The ...
... should be closed, shut up, hermetically sealed. One should then return within away from them, if one is to come into contact with the true consciousness, the true reality. Even the Gita says, the conscious being is seated in tranquillity within, closing all the nine gates of the city, himself doing nothing nor causing anything to be done. Well, that is one way of procedure in dealing with the senses ...
... light. K: When the sun has set, when the moon has set, when the fire has gone out, what then is man's light? Y: The self is his light. K: And what is this self? Y: The self is the conscious Being, master of life-energies, dwelling within the heart. Yajnavalkya's answer has been put succinctly and most beautifully in another Upanishad, the most beautiful verse in the whole Upanishadic ...
... the gods of the age have gathered and are preparing themselves to take the field in. the new creation: the gods that men have to become and embody in their life, and thus manifest a new type of conscious being and activity. The gods are approaching to change humanity but perhaps humanity also will bring about a new change in the status of the gods themselves. They may lose something of their typal ...
... there are all the stages of growth, from the tiniest spark that is becoming a little light up to the fully conscious and fully formed being. This ascent of the soul in order to become a mature conscious being, having its own will and deciding its own destiny, takes thousands of years. When, however, it is a free and conscious soul that seeks to take a body again upon earth, it begins to work ...
... indeed, the essential part. Today a new consciousness is abroad. The earth-atmosphere is filled with a new spirit. And here the Mother has left with us not merely her consciousness but a conscious being, a part of her living personality in us; that is the divine legacy we enjoy. We must not simply be proud of it but try to prove ourselves worthy of it. The Divine Personality will grow everywhere ...
... God'? So the Indian boldly declares, all this is the supreme Divine, there is nothing else than the Divine— sarvam khalvidam brahma —I am He, Thou art That, or again, that which is in me and the conscious being which is there in the Sun are one and the same thing. God has created man and the world, He is in man and in the world, He has become and is man and the world. Not only so. Not only does God become ...
... XI THE SOUL OF A NATION A nation is a living personality; it has a soul, even like a human individual. The soul of a nation is also a psychic being, that is to say, a conscious being, a formation out of the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it, a power and aspect of Mahashakti. A nation is not merely the sum total of the individuals that compose it, but a collective ...
... should be closed, shut up, hermetically sealed. One should then return within away from them, if one is to come into contact with the true consciousness, the true reality. Even the Gita says, the conscious being is seated in tranquility within, closing all the nine gates of the city, himself doing nothing nor causing anything to be done. Well, that is one way of procedure in dealing with the senses ...
... you triumph. We shall see if you can bear the blow" To the Asuras too the Divine gives what they ask for. Generally it is in that way that their end comes all the sooner. An Asura is a conscious being. He knows that he has an end. He knows that the attitude he has taken in this universe will necessarily destroy him after a time. Of course the Asura's time is much longer than human time. Even ...
... understood and enjoyed my answer. Here is that answer for the readers and I hope they too will enjoy reading it: What is God and Why? (As learnt from Mother) God is a conscious Being, who is present everywhere, who is all-powerful, who is all-knowledge and who is all-perfect. He cannot be recognised by the mind, understood by the intellect, known by the reason; He has ...
... has led me by the hand. So many misfortunes came my way, misfortunes that should have completely wiped me out, but I just sailed over them. This would certainly not have been possible if a conscious Being, a guiding Power had not led me. I feel very strongly that a great pilot is guiding me on. Page 345 I gained the knowledge of this mystery of life after many, many years of closeness ...
... Disciple : Cannot death be conquered by them? Sri Aurobindo : Oh, no; death is far too ingenious for that. That is never the way to conquer death. Nature is not so mechanical, she is a conscious being. If you try to circumvent her in one way she circumvents you in another. All this sanitation and hygiene etc. of yours can deal with is the physical circumstances of health. But they cannot ...
... they are together and grow together; but in actuality one aspect is more in front than the other. The masculine aspect is often termed as the right hand and the feminine as the left hand of the conscious being. And in a general way man represents the knowledge aspect – the conceptual dynamism – and woman represents the executive dynamism. This definition however should not be taken absolutely or rigidly ...
... aspect of creativity or activism. An Eastern sage, a Vedantin, would look for the true spiritual reality behind the flux of forces: Prakriti or Energy is only the executive will of the Purusha, the Conscious .Being. The personality in Nature is a formulation and emanation of the transcendent impersonality. There is another aspect of personality as viewed by Berdyaev which involves a bias of the more ...
... So the Indian boldly declares, all this is the supreme Divine, there is nothing else than the Divine – sarvam khalvidam brahma – I am He, Thou are That, or again, that which is in me and the conscious being which is there in the Sun are one and the same thing. God has created man and the world, He is in man and in the world, He has become and is man and the world. Not only so. Not only does God become ...
... The Soul of a Nation A NATION is a living personality; it has a soul, even like a human individual. The soul of a nation is also a psychic being, that is to say, a conscious being, a formation out of the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it, a power and aspect of Mahashakti. A nation is not merely the sum total of the individuals that compose it, but a collective ...
... inspires and supports his whole life-and all his other lives too-although till now from behind the veil. That is what we call the Divine in the individual, the Inner Controller, antary ā min, the conscious being ever seated within the heart, purusa sad ā h ŗ di sannivista. Once this centre has been aspected – in whatever manner, to whatever degree, even faintly and feebly-one has always to come ...
... not even for it the ineluctable destiny. For like the individual, the group too has that in it or the possibility of that in it which is akin, to – an isotope of – the soul or self, the immortal conscious being. Page 246 ...
... anything else. You can't make the machine move like a train. It has its own characteristics according to which it will work. If such be the case with a machine, how much more so with man who is conscious being? It makes it all the more complicated. And even if an individual is a perfect automaton, a passive instrument of the Divine Will, here too he has to act only according to that Will. He has to reject ...
... make you triumph. We shall see if you can bear the blow!" To the Asuras too the Divine gives what they ask for. Generally it is in that way that their end comes all the sooner. An Asura is a conscious being. He knows that he has an end. He knows that the attitude he has taken in this universe will necessarily destroy him after a time. Of course the Asura's time is much longer than human time. Even ...
... duty) to bring us back to him: after a process of self-separation a process of self-integration. Man, so long as he is a separate consciousness has to dedicate, lift up and unify this separative conscious being to the whole being and consciousness. This is how he discharges his debt to the Divine, and the answering grace of the Divine is the clearing of the debt which He owes to His creatures. What ...
... indeed, the essential part. Today a new consciousness is abroad. The earth-atmosphere is filled with the new spirit. But here the Mother has left with us not merely her consciousness but a conscious being – a part of her living personality in us, that is the divine legacy we enjoy. We must not simply be proud of it but try to prove ourselves worthy of it. The Divine Personality will grow everywhere ...
... to be sure), one can have a contact with a stone (sometimes more easily than with a human being): amethyst does not respond the same way as granite, and a piece of granite that has lived near a conscious being retains the imprint of the contact; the walls of Thebes have such an imprint. Even our houses sometimes have sad imprints. We could not make contact if there were no consciousness; an "unconscious" ...
... Then he looked at me, saw what I meant and told me, "It is unconsciousness." I asked him for an explanation .... He told me, "Yes, you enter into what is called samadhi when you go out of your conscious being and enter a part of your being which is completely unconscious, or rather a domain where you have no corresponding consciousness... a region where you are no longer conscious ... that is why ...
... August, based on one of the talks by the Mother: A nation is a living personality; it has a soul, even like a human individual. The soul of a nation is also a psychic being, that is to say, a conscious being, a formation out of the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it, a power and aspect of Mahashakti. A nation is not merely the sum total of the individuals that compose it, but a collective ...
... It compels obedience to itself in the individual. One is not subjected to existence mechanically, one can participate in the process of the Eternal at work. That is the utility of creating a conscious being. In a sense, what one calls Eternal is in time a progressive movement of consciousness. If one lives in that one can be fulfilled every moment. Until that is realised and man lives in an indivisible ...
... fruition. The supramental Light-Force can alone handle each element of human nature with a masterful finality. The utmost that the spiritual trans- formation can do is the universalisation of the conscious being of man, but it cannot transform the Inconscience, which still remains as the base of his existence. It can vouchsafe frequent glimpses of the Transcendent, or even contact and communion with It ...
... inextricable skein of desires and demands, hopes and disappointments, struggles and successes and failures, unsteady 'pleasures and pains, all marked by a dull or raging fever in their active, conscious being, will find it extremely difficult to believe that there can be a state of untroubled peace and un- ebbing delight securely maintained in the midst of life's distracting maelstrom, just as those ...
... entire nature and initiates a wealth of uplifting spiritual experiences which flood the being with light and bliss and raise its consciousness above mortality. "As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, turned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and ...
... uninfluenced by vital desires and attachments. BUDDHI OR THE INTELLIGENCE Describing the buddhi, Sri Aurobindo says in The Synthesis of Yoga, "Buddhi is a construction of conscious. being which quite exceeds its beginnings in the basic citta; it is the intelligence with its power of knowledge and will.... It is in its nature thought-power and will- power of the Spirit turned ...
... taking up a new body...that he (the psychic being) progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being.”¹ ¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII by Nolini Kanta Gupta. Page 94 After-death Journey and the Process of Rebirth As I have already said, the Mother does ...
... the One upwards and running into twenties. In Vedic thought the basis chosen was the number of the psychological principles, because all existence was conceived by the Rishis as a movement of conscious being. However merely curious or barren these specula- tions and classifications may seem to the modern mind, they were no mere dry metaphysical distinctions, but closely ____________________ ...
... faculty. This form of substance—which we called Matter—which the mind senses is nothing else than the original divine principle of Infinite Being—Satchidananda. Matter is a form of force, force of Conscious-being. The Consciousness there is concealed. Even the delight of being is there concealed; it offers itself to the consciousness concealed in it as an object of sensation. This delight of being offers ...
... a submental organisation,—the nervous system in the plants is not mental. Mind can continue when Life is suspended. Attraction and repulsion of elements is a sign of some movement which to the conscious being would become "like and dislike." Positive and negative in the material world become in the world Page 175 of Life, attraction and repulsion. In hibernation life is suspended and ...
... gives us - the picture of many finite beings and a world-order. Then we shall have an outer world other than each consciousness and in that -world other conscious beings and a Sudden reality to be perceived as material. At the same time we shall have an explanation of why the hidden reality monies in an essentially common form to the various conscious beings: it comes so because, on the one hand,... one'61701^ consciousness; (2) pluralism of consciousness, the belief the existence of many conscious beings who carry their own contents of consciousness and who interact among them - selves; (3) objectivism, the belief in an outer world other than one's own consciousness and composed of other conscious n beings and of an unknown reality whose impact makes the perception-contents of each consciousness... and given-ness noticeable in perception to due to reception's coming to the "I" from some wider range of one's own being, some range normally hidden. We nave actual awareness of memories, desires, thoughts, visualisations getting into focus out of concealed regions of our own being. Those regions could very well be the cause and creator of our perception. And when we weigh the sense of vastness in ...
... forgotten it, and it was as if one of those beings came to bring the memory back, with at the same time, "And what if there were another one?" "Oh," I said, "what nonsense!" Just the evening before. Then I wondered, "What? Are these earthquakes organised by beings of this sort? ..." I don't understand ... With rain, I know: there are conscious beings, quite small, that is, limited to a single ...
... abstractions, lifeless ideas, forms without a soul. In reality, however, all movements in man, all forces in nature are more than mere movements and forces, they are personalities, embodiments of conscious beings. Indeed the Puranic tradition has elaborated this conception almost to its extreme limit. Those people crowded the world with an infinite number of Gods and Goddesses. They speak of 33 crores ...
... The vast majority of human beings have a collective destiny. For them, the question does not arise. One who has an individualized psychic being can survive even in the midst of collective catastrophes, if such is the choice of his soul. How is the soul conscious of being and existing after death, once it is separated from its physical, vital and mental beings? The soul is a spark of... to explain. I've had the example (not an example: it was lived with the full perception) of a being who lived with me for years, who remained in perfectly conscious contact after he had left his body (and left it quite materially), and who didn't merge, but closely associated himself with another living being and in this association went on living the life of his OWN CONSCIOUSNESS. I can give neither... of the Supreme Divine, I do not see how the Lord needs a body in order to be conscious of being. Page 71 It's nothing very new, but it's a broadening of the consciousness. And all these questions have in fact been coming into the atmosphere lately, giving at first the impression that man knows nothing about death—he doesn't know what it is, doesn't know what happens, he has built all kinds ...
... if Mind and Life, impersonal forces, form conscious beings or use persons to embody them in physical forms and in a physical world and can act upon Matter and through Matter, it is not impossible that on their own planes they should form conscious beings whose subtler substance is invisible to us or that they should be able to act from those planes on beings in physical Nature. Whatever reality or mythical... are conscious. There are besides individualised beings who represent the forces or use them. The wall between consciousness and force, impersonality and personality becomes much thinner when one goes behind the veil of matter. If one looks at a working from the side of impersonal force one sees a force or energy at work acting for a purpose or with a result, if one looks from the side of being one... one sees a being possessing, guiding and using or else representative of and used by a conscious force as its instrument of specialised action and expression. You speak of the wave, but in modern science it has been found that if you look at the movement of energy, it appears on one side to be a wave and act as a wave, on the other as a mass of particles and to act as a mass of particles each acting in ...
... there is one Spirit within all creatures, but the sorrow of this world soils it not: for it is beyond grief and danger. The One Eternal in the transient, the One consciousness in many conscious beings, who being One orders the desires of many: the calm and strong who behold Him in their self as in a mirror, theirs is eternal peace and 'tis not for others. Katha Upanishad 2.2.11 , 2.2.13 ...
... May 3, 1914 O Divine Love, supreme Knowledge, perfect Oneness, at every moment of the day I call to Thee so as to be nothing but Thou alone! May this instrument serve Thee, conscious of being an instrument, and may all my consciousness, merged in Thine, contemplate all things with Thy divine vision. O Lord, Lord, grant that Thy sovereign Power may manifest; grant that Thy work ...
... and the conscious beings proper to it enables the rise to a greater consciousness beyond and the greater order of beings up to the ultimate godheads of which Nature is striving and is destined to show herself capable. Matter developed its organised forms until it became capable of embodying living Page 586 organisms; then life rose from the subconscience of the plant into conscious animal... mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution... appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and delivered out of the Ignorance. Instead, it ...
... action. There must be conscious beings powerful enough to convince Nature that there are other methods than hers.... This looks like madness, but all new things have always seemed like madness before they became realities. The hour has come for this madness to be realised. And since we are all here for reasons that are perhaps unknown to most of you, but are still very conscious reasons, we may set... strong feel despair and always this question arises: "If there is a conscious Will behind all that, this Will seems to be monstrous." But here Sri Aurobindo tells us that this was an indispensable means of awakening in the consciousness of matter the need for perfection, the necessity of progress, that without this catastrophe, all beings would have been satisfied with the condition they were in—perhaps... awakened a little has asked himself at least once in his life. There is in the depths of the being such a need to perpetuate, to prolong, to develop life, that the moment one has a first contact with death, which, although it may be quite an accidental contact, is yet inevitable, there is a sort of recoil in the being. In persons who are sensitive, it produces horror; in others, indignation. There is ...
... consciousness and the conscious beings proper to it enables the rise to a greater consciousness beyond and the greater order of beings up to the ultimate godheads of which Nature is striving and is destined to show herself capable. Matter developed its organised forms until it became capable of embodying living organisms; then life rose from the subconscience of the plant into conscious animal, formations... capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind .and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution... , the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and . delivered out of the Ignorance. Instead, ...
... consciousness. The ego is what makes one conscious of being separate from others. If there were no ego, you would not perceive that you are a person separate from others. You would have the impression that you are a small part of a whole, a very small part of a very great whole. On the other hand, every one of you is most certainly quite conscious of being a separate person. Well, it is the ego that... would be no individual, and with the ego the world cannot become divine. It would be logical to conclude, "Well, let us first of all become conscious individuals and then we shall send away the ego and become divine." Only, when we have become conscious individuals, we have grown so accustomed to living with our ego that we are no longer able to discern it and much labour is needed to become aware... that gives you this impression. As long as you are conscious in this way, it means that you have an ego. When you begin to be aware that everything is yourself, and that this is only a very small point in the midst of thousands and thousands of other points of the same person that you are everywhere, when you feel that you are yourself in everything and that there is no separation, then you know that ...
... yourself superior to others and I shall tell you why; you must know that in a being, human or other, it is Page 57 the consciousness that matters and you are either conscious or unconscious : you can consider yourself superior only when you are unconscious; the very moment you are conscious, truly conscious, you lose the sense of superiority or inferiority. In either case you must... personal relation with the little conscious beings that are behind wind and storm and rain, behind thunder and lightning and the so-called forces of Nature, which are, however, personal forces; then through the relation you establish a kind of friendship with them. And instead of looking at them as enemies and mechanical inexorables that you have simply to bear without being able to do anything, you arrive... Thus there was a little discussion and the little beings went away with the permission to snow. The mountain was covered Page 54 with snow. And it was quite near the Sahara. You come down a few miles and you reach the Sahara. Someone took the fancy of covering the hills with fir and fir is a tree of cold countries. The beings were called in and there they came. All that is ...
... not consider yourself superior to others and I shall tell you why; you must know that in a being, human or other, it is the consciousness that matters and you are either conscious or unconscious: you can consider yourself superior only when you are unconscious; the very moment you are conscious, truly conscious, you lose the sense of superiority or inferiority. In either case you must not feel superior... with the little conscious beings that are behind wind and storm and rain, behind thunder and lightning and the so-called forces of Nature, which are, however) personal forces; Page 140 then through the relation you establish a kind of friendship with them. And instead of looking at them as enemies and mechanical inexorables that you have simply to bear without being able to do anything... and so we come." Thus there was a little argument and the little beings went away with the permission to snow. The mountain was covered with snow. And it was quite near the Sahara. You come down a few miles and you reach the Sahara. Someone took the fancy of covering the hills with fir and fir is a tree of cold countries. The beings were called in and there they came. All that is true fact, it is ...
... indeed are those who are conscious of the Lord. And it is this unconsciousness of the creation which constitutes its Falsehood. All at once it was so obvious: "There it is! There it is!" How did Falsehood come? But that's it, it is the unconsciousness of the creation that constitutes the Falsehood of the creation. And as soon as the creation once more becomes conscious of being the Lord, Falsehood... do we call Falsehood? Why is the creation false?" It is not an illusion in the sense of not existing: it really exists, but... it is not conscious of what it is! Not only unconscious of its origin, but unconscious of its essence, of its truth—it is not conscious of its truth. And that is why it lives in Falsehood. Page 204 This Aphorism is magnificent. There is nothing to say, it says ...
... Page 165 The ego becomes more and more conscious and resistant as the being develops. Very primitive, very simple beings, little children will respond first, because they don't have an organized ego. But these big people! People who have worked on themselves, who have mastered themselves, who are organized, who have an ego made of steel, it will be difficult for them. Unless they go... will be. It is truly a state of absolute omniscience and omnipotence in the body which changes all the vibrations around it. It is likely that the greatest resistance will be in the most conscious beings due to a lack of mental receptivity, due to the mind itself which wants things to continue (as Sri Aurobindo has written) according to its own mode of ignorance. So-called inert matter is much... mind; beings who live in an entirely crystallized, organized mental consciousness are as hard as stone! It resists. According to my experience, what is unconscious will certainly follow more easily. It was a delight to see the water from the tap, the mouthwash in the bottle, the glass, the sponge—it all had such an air of joy and consent! There is much less ego, you see, it is not a conscious ego. ...
... or else Destiny (either their character or Fate, Destiny). They were all like puppets on strings. Now, they are conscious beings—they're BEGINNING, they're beginning to be conscious. The proportion has changed. And I was able to show them precisely the proportion between the conscious, willed movement, which can be observed, and that sort of almost unconscious instinct which obeys a COMPELLING... ordinary life, they don't take any notice), there's a whole field of things that are absolutely... not quite unconscious, but certainly not conscious; they are reflexes—reflexes, reactions to stimuli, and so on—and also the response (a semiconscious, barely conscious response) to the pressure exerted from above by the Force, which people are totally unconscious of. It is the study of this question which... organized in the Subconscient—it's beginning to get organized—in the subconscient of individuals as well as in the general Subconscient. It's less unconscious (!) It's a bit more... yes, a bit more conscious, reflective and organized—a very faint beginning of organization, very little, but a growth in consciousness; it isn't quite so unconscious any more. It's always the last part of the night that ...
... further experience. We are not automata but conscious beings and our mentality, our will and its decisions, our attitude to life and demand on it, our motives and movements help to determine our course: they may lead to much suffering and evil, but through it all, the guidance makes use of them for our growth in experience and consequently the development of our being and consciousness." (Letters on Yoga... has affirmed in his Epic poem, Savitri: "In its unshaken grasp it keeps for us safe The one inevitable supreme result No will can take away and no doom change, The crown of conscious Immortality... After we have served this great divided world God's bliss and oneness are our inborn right." Book One Canto IV) Now comes the fourth proposition which deals... Guidance. We least concerned with the fulfilment of the interests of the ego or with the satisfaction of the desires of the physical-vital-mental self of man. "Its main concern is with the growth of our being and consciousness, the growth towards a higher self, towards the Divine,... the rest is secondary, sometimes a means, sometimes a result, not a primary purpose." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, Part ...
... every object, in every movement, in every vibration, in all the things around—not only people and conscious beings, but things, objects; not only trees and plants and living things, but simply any object one uses, the things around one—this delight, this delight of being, of being just as one is, simply being. And one sees that all this vibrates like that. One touches a thing and feels this delight. But... is the herald of Delight. After this, the path is easy. Sweet Mother, what is the true Delight of being? That very one of which I am speaking! Then, Sweet Mother, here when Sri Aurobindo speaks of Page 21 an existence "that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being", what is this delight? The delight of existing. There comes a time when one begins to be almost ready... ending. " Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God. " What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably. " And what is the middle? Division that strives towards a multiple unity, ignorance that labours towards ...
... There was no more personality, no more individuality: there was only a column of Light descending right into the very cells of the body—and that's all. Then it gradually became conscious of itself, conscious of BEING this column of Light. And then the ordinary consciousness slowly returned. ( silence ) It's interesting for me to come here soon after the meditation, for it's as if I were o... of smiling and serene peace that I live in entering into the body. The cells are still not always conscious of it (sometimes they feel a sort of... tension of life—I don't know what to call it). They're conscious of their existence and of what it means and of the Energy that is acting (yes, conscious of the Action and the Energy that acts), but during the meditation THAT descended and there was an ...
... long as you believe in personal effort, you must make a personal effort. There is one part of the being which is not at all conscious of being a part of the Divine. The whole of the outer being is convinced that it is something separate, independent and related only to itself. This part of the being must necessarily make a personal effort. It can't be told, "The Divine does the sadhana for you", for... be played; that the Divine hides himself behind material Nature to compel all conscious beings to find Him. That is an opinion... people say many things. One of the great difficulties for most philosophies is that they have never recognised or studied the different planes of existence, the different regions of the being. They have the Supreme and then the Creation and then that's all, nothing between... it imposes its will, and the poor body has but to obey, while the Divine just shows the light, gives the consciousness, and so one must obey consciously and willingly—it is a question of collaboration, it is no longer a question of coercion. The physical being and physical consciousness must be very plastic to be able to lend themselves to all the necessary changes, so as to be of one kind one day and ...
... false earth⎯and the two worlds remain as if superimposed, without communication. This is how things already are. It is the dwelling of Sri Aurobindo, and of many conscious beings. But this does not seem to be the evolutionary solution. If we have been shaped in Matter, it means that this Matter holds its own plenitude and its own accomplishment⎯where is the seed that ends in a non-tree? Thus this seed... it is Matter of the cage and one goes on to be a butterfly in an elsewhere that is here. And there remains a corpse, doesn’t here? It is the symbol of death. And how could a fully conscious, fully truthful being end up as a corpse, even if it is a false corpse and he is frolicking about in another body? Truth cannot end up as Falsehood. Death must be the final key: the corpse. It is there ... others at the end of the growth cycle, when the true body, the body of consciousness is fully shaped, developed, conscious and loving?… Does one drop the animal rag and disappear, disencumbered, into the true earth?⎯like “ghosts” in reverse. We could easily imagine a world where all conscious bodies joyfully frolic … on earth , the true earth, while the “real” ghosts are in the foreground, the false ...
... is only secondarily and derivatively self-conscious. The development of human society has been no exception to the rule; for man, though in the essence of his nature a mental being, has practically started with a largely mechanical mentality as the conscious living being, Nature's human animal, and only afterwards can he be the self-conscious living being, the self-perfecting Manu. That is the course... man. His law is the mānava-dharmaśāstra , the science of the law of conduct of the mental or human being and in this sense we may think of the law of any human society as being the conscious evolution of the type and lines which its Manu has fixed for it. If there comes an embodied Manu, a living Moses or Mahomed, he is only the prophet or spokesman of the Divinity who is veiled in the fire and the... the mental being. He is the divine legislator, the mental demi-god in humanity who fixes the lines upon which the race or people has to govern its evolution. In the Purana he or his sons are said to reign in subtle earths or worlds or, as we may say, they reign in the larger mentality which to us is subconscient and from there have power to determine the lines of development of the conscious life of man ...
... past. But what is surprising is that in a flash, no one was there any longer. No one, you understand—I was gone. Perhaps I was everywhere (but in fact I am always everywhere, I am always conscious of being everywhere at the same time), though normally there is the sense of the body, a physical center, but that evening there was no more center! Nothing, no one, not even the sense that there was ...
... light—the supramental light, for example—that would have the power to individualise the inconscient. But, through a conscious, individualised being, this light can be brought down into the inconscient and gradually make it conscious. First of all, it is the subconscient that has to become conscious, and indeed the main difficulty of the integral transformation is that things are constantly rising up from... all that is divine is there involved and pressing to evolve, Light, Consciousness, Power, Perfection, Beauty, Love. For in the Inconscient itself and behind the perversions of the Ignorance Divine Conscious ness lies concealed and works and must more and more appear, throwing off in the end its disguises. That is why it is said that the world is called to express the Divine. Sri Aurobindo Letters... Supramental If one of you (I have my doubts, but still) went down into the Inconscient, what is called the pure Inconscient, you would realise what it is. A stone will seem to you a marvellously conscious object in comparison. You speak disdainfully of a stone because you have just a wee bit more consciousness than it has, but the difference between the consciousness of the stone and the total Inconscient ...
... individualised psychic being can survive even in the midst of collective catastrophes, if that is his soul's choice. After death, once separated from his physical being, from his vital and mental beings, how is the soul conscious of being, of existing? The soul is a spark of the Supreme Divine; I do not see how the Lord has need of a body in order to be conscious of his being. ... example, but something lived, the full perception—of a person who lived for years with me, who has remained in wholly conscious contact after going out of the body (but going out of the body very materially), and who is not dissolved but is closely associated with another living being, and has continued the life of his own consciousness in this association. And all that—I cannot give the names or the... new consciousness, just this morning. Extraordinarily concrete in its effects: changing the capacities and movements of the consciousness of the other, and consciously—an absolutely conscious life. And it is the same consciousness that was conscious during the period when there was nobody at all and the presence was visible only in the vision at night. There are others. That one is very near and ...
... descent and identification of beings, of conscious beings, individualities, in the forms produced by the evolution—and so there is a union which takes place between beings of higher regions and the forms evolved by this divine Presence. And the identification takes place between this immanent godhead and this being which comes down. You see, it is when the psychic being, for instance, identifies itself... were they special manifestations? What do you mean? Whether they were evolutionary beings or involutionary beings? They were probably... no... they were surely involutionary beings. But the body was the result of evolution. But it is absolutely certain that they were involutionary beings, that is, beings who had come down from higher regions and used these bodies, who had identified themselves... very different words, of the New Earth or the Divine World or a New Creation, etc. And I think it was perhaps at the beginning... not exactly the beginning of humanity but the beginning of the conscious evolution of humanity towards a realisation. We said last time that for a very long time humanity was very static and as though undergoing a preparation so slow, so invisible that it has taken perhaps ...
... the cell says, "But I am immortal!" Only it must become conscious. But this takes place almost automatically: the brain cells are very conscious; the cells of the hands and arms of musicians are very conscious; with athletes and gymnasts, the cells of the entire body are wonderfully conscious. So, being conscious, those cells become conscious of their principle of immortality and say, "Why would I... must be a grace associated with that state, and probably people see ONLY what they are able to see without being upset. I know this because when the body became like that—it was more than three-quarters dead 1 —and people were taking care of me, doing everything for me, I was fully conscious, FULLY, but I couldn't.... I was like a dead person. And it wasn't that I couldn't move, but I couldn't manifest... ordinary physical consciousness, and unite with the great universal Force, or the divine Presence, then all these little things.... It's not that you're not conscious of them—you are very conscious: conscious of what others are doing, conscious of everything, but... it's not important. But for those who are attached to people and things when they die, it must be a hellish torment. Hellish. ...
... subject is in a sense part of it, immanent in it—it embraces the subject in its comprehending consciousness and posits it as part of itself or a function of its apprehension. The many Purushas (conscious beings or subjects) are imbedded in the universal Nature, say the Sankhyas. Kali, Divine Nature, is the manifest omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent reality holding within her the transcendent divine... entered into the presentation of facts and the whole mass passed as truth, the process often being given the high-sounding name of Intuition, Vision or Revelation but whose real name is fancy. And if there happened to be truth of fact somewhere, it was almost by chance; Once we thought of the eclipse being due to the greed of a demon, and pestilence due to the evil eye of a wicked goddess. The universe... and (4) objective subjective. The first two are extreme positions, one holding the subject as the sole or absolute reality, the object being a pure fabrication of its will and idea, an illusion, and the other considering the object as the true reality, the subject being an outcome, an epiphenomenon of the object itself, an illusion after all. The first leads to radical or as it is called monistic ...
... all this is only concentrated energy, and of course it is a conscious force which has produced all this. But apparently, when we see a rock, we don't think it is conscious, it does not give the impression of being conscious, it seems to be altogether unconscious. It is the appearance that is inconscient. It becomes more and more conscious. Even in the mineral kingdom there are phenomena which reveal... inconscience to be done consciously, willingly, and therefore much more rapidly and in the joy of realisation. In man one can already see that the spiritual reality is being developed and that it is going to express itself totally and freely. Formerly, in the animal and the plant, it was... it was necessary to be very clear-sighted to see it, but man is himself conscious of this spiritual reality... what the Supreme Origin wants of him and is collaborating in carrying it out. Nature wants the creation to become conscious of being the Creator himself in an objectivisation, that is to say, there is no difference between the Creator and the Creation, and the goal is a conscious and realised union. That is the secret of Nature. Mother, here Sri Aurobindo writes: "the dumb secrecy of her in ...
... ess of suffering (the most acute disorder) and of Harmony (the most perfect Ananda)—both together, perceived together. Naturally that changes the nature of suffering. But all that is very conscious of being some kind of chatter. It's not the translation of what is. There is also the perception that little by little, following all these experiences, every aggregate (what, for us, is a body) is... body conscious not only of the forces they receive, the forces going through the body, but of the action of its inner working. That's growing increasingly precise. It's mostly this: for the body, everything is a phenomenon of Page 329 consciousness, and when it wants to do something, it almost no longer understands the meaning of "knowing how to do it"; it must be CONSCIOUS of the... it occurs and what it must be leading to: how an apparent disorder can lead to a greater perfection. That's it. It's a tiny little beginning. But it has begun. The body is beginning to be a little conscious. And not only for itself alone, but for all others too, it has begun: seeing, perceiving how the Consciousness (with a Page 330 capital C) acts in others. And in fact, at times (words ...
... subject is in a sense part of it, immanent in it – it embraces the subject in its comprehending consciousness and posits it as part of itself or a function of its apprehension. The many Purushas (conscious beings or subjects) are imbedded in the universal Nature, say the Sankhyas. Kali, Divine Nature, is the manifest Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent reality holding within her the transcendent divine... entered into the presentation of facts and the whole mass passed as truth, the process often being given the high-sounding name of Intuition, Vision or Revelation but whose real name is fancy. And if there happened to be truth off act somewhere, it was almost by chance. Once we thought of the eclipse being due to the greed of a demon, and pestilence due to the evil eye of a wicked goddess. The universe... (4) objective subjective. The first two are extreme positions, one holding the subject as the sole or absolute reality, the object being a pure fabrication of its will and idea, an illusion, and the other considering the object as the true reality, the subject being an outcome, an epiphenomenon of the object itself, an illusion after all. The first leads to radical or as it is called monistic spirituality ...
... long—it is always the same work. This is why life upon earth for a psychic being is the opportunity to progress. The duration of earthly life is the time of progress. Outside earthly life there is, so to say, no progress. It is in earthly life that there is the possibility and the means of progress. But for all conscious beings it is the same thing, not only for those you call incarnated. It is for... incarnated being has a very weak physical body; in this case isn't his body an obstacle to his work upon earth? An incarnated being? Whom do you call an incarnated being? For example, Ramakrishna or some others... Page 75 Oh! Oh, oh, but I don't understand your question very well. The present being, whatever it may be, and whoever may be within it, always has a psychic being. You see... see, usually it depends on the degree of evolution of the psychic being but still every psychic being which is in a body has states of being formed in the present formation. Its work is always to transform these; it is as though this were the part of the universe given to him for his work of transformation. And even if he has a vaster mission than that of his own person, unless he does this work in ...
... things at night in your sleep. You forget most of them. If however you recall them, become Page 30 conscious of them, you can begin controlling them. Before being conscious, without being conscious of a thing, you cannot have control over it. It is by being conscious that you get the power for control. If you can control your activities in sleep, you can have a restful sleep. Sometimes... Sometimes you get into bad quarters, dark and ugly regions and you struggle there, fight there, receive blows, give blows and you are prostrate in the end. All that you can avoid, when you become conscious and gain control. * * When one sees oneself dead or dying, it may mean several things. It may mean a spiritual death or a vital death or the death of some part in you that is to go;... body. When the body suffers, when you have high fever, for example, when you are sick, sick to the last degree, the only thing to do then is to come out of the body, come out with your vital being. If you are a yogi and have the knowledge, you remain outside the body but just above it so that you are able to look at it. You can see your own body if the vital form in which you go out is sufficiently ...
... totally indifferent to all things in the world, that you must have only one thought, to prepare yourself to receive the divine Grace, instead of that you are told, "No, try to become developed and conscious beings who know things and have healthy, strong, agile bodies capable of doing exceptional things, an adequate will and a rich, supple, agile mind; these will be useful for the future realisation." ... Five paragraphs dealing with five modes of being or five states of being, and the same thing recurs in all the different domains: " When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have Knowledge. Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar. " Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 377 This is about the mental being in man, that is, his mental activities; and Sri... having identified ourselves with the supreme Reality, want to make It descend into life and transform the world, if we offer to this Reality instruments which are refined, rich, developed, fully conscious, the work of transformation will be more effective. And that is why instead of telling you when you are a little mite, to do ( laughing ) what those little children are asked to do, to sit still ...
... the night. You do many things at night in your sleep. You forget most of them. If however you recall them, become conscious of them, you can begin controlling them. Before being conscious, without being conscious of a thing, you cannot have control over it. It is by being conscious that you get the power for control. If you can control your activities in sleep, you can have a restful sleep. Sometimes... bad quarters, dark and ugly regions and you struggle there, fight there, receive blows, give Page 23 blows and you are prostrate in the end. All that you can avoid, when you become conscious and gain control. When one sees oneself dead or dying, it may mean several things. It may mean a spiritual death or a vital death or the death of some part in you that is to go; in the last... the body. When the body suffers, when you have high fever, for example, when you are sick, sick to the last degree, the only thing to do then is to come out of the body, come out with your vital being. If you are a yogi and have the knowledge, you remain outside the body but just above it so that you are able to look at it. You can see your own body if the vital form in which you go out is sufficiently ...
... him, he will remain where he is. And instead of being a conscious element in the world, he will be a cork upon the waters, tossed by circumstances. And with anything that happens, he will be carried away without having the least control over what is happening. Because the first thing necessary to have a control over events is to be absolutely conscious and master of oneself; and I think you are pretty... can... they hope, for thousands of years, you see. And it is this conflict which has come to its crisis. It is their last chance; and as those who are behind their external action are altogether conscious beings, they know very well that it is their last chance, and they will put all they can into it, and what they can is much. These are not ordinary little human consciousnesses. They are not human c... contact with it, but live integrally this Will, that is, be unified in all one's being: not have a single bit which goes on this side and another bit which goes on that. You must be entirely in one single will. Sweet Mother, when we are faced with a difficulty, does this mean that the Divine is trying to make us conscious of the defects of our nature? If you face it, yes. That is, as soon as you ...
... that extent as here. The urge, the movement that finds expression here is not concerned merely with the aspiration of human beings or individuals; here is expressed in a profound, grandiose voice the aspiration of the inert soil and the mute earth; not merely in conscious beings but also in the subconscient world there vibrates an intense, passionate, vast, upward longing. A sleepless march proceeds... Upanishads. In many cases we see that as the Vedanta is in his inner Being, in the marrow of his bones, so there is Europe in his poetic consciousness, in flesh and blood. Rabindranath is a unique blending of these two. However, due to the unique quality of the aspiration, curiosity and seeking which we have mentioned as being in his heart, two qualities are perceptible in his poetical style. First... beyond sound, touch, form and change' of the Upanishad. His aspiration is for another realisation of the Upanishad: "One who has taken this form, that form and all the forms." Or "He being bodiless dwells in the forms and non-forms as well." Page 179 That supreme truth cannot be called formless simply because it has no special form. He is formless since His form has ...
... as a seed Logos, spermatikos , reproduced in conscious beings as a number of seed Logoi; and this at once reminds us of the Vedantic prājña puruṣa , the supreme Intelligence who is the Lord and dwells in the sleep-state holding all things in a seed of dense consciousness which works out through the perceptions of the subtle Purusha, the mental Being. Vijnana is indeed a consciousness which sees things... law of their existence, their primal and total truth; therefore it is the seed Logos, the originative and determinant conscious force working as supreme Intelligence and Will. The Vedic seers called it the Truth-consciousness and believed that men also could become truth-conscious, enter into the divine Reason and Will and by the Truth become immortals, anthrōpoi athanatoi . Does the thought of... in things, then there must be some power behind the conflict which determines them, fixes their measures. What is that power? Heraclitus tells us; all indeed comes into being according to strife, but also all things come into being according to Reason, kat' erin but also kata ton logon . What is this Logos? It is not an inconscient reason in things, for his Fire is not merely an inconscient force ...
... individual mastery of the new creation. These beings in corresponding worlds (like the gods of the overmind, 4 or the beings of higher regions) came upon earth as soon as the corresponding element began to evolve out of its involution. This accelerates the action, first of all, but also makes it more perfect—more perfect, more powerful, more conscious. It gives a sort of sanction to the realization... emanations (Theon narrated it in such a way that someone not a philosopher, someone with a childlike mind, could understand), these emanations, conscious of their own power, separated themselves from their Origin; that is, instead of Page 279 being entirely surrendered to the supreme Will and expressing only.... Ah, the fourth emanation is Truth! Instead of carrying out only the supreme Will... hesitant and complicated. Thus these forms inevitably had an aspiration towards a sort of perfection and a truly perfect mental state, and this aspiration brought the descent of already fully conscious beings from the mental world who united with terrestrial forms—this is a very, very concrete experience. What emerges from the Inconscient in this way is an almost impersonal possibility (yes, an impersonal ...
... farther experience. We are not automata but conscious beings and our mentality, our will and its decisions, our attitude to life and demand on it, our motives and movements help to determine our course; they may lead to much suffering and evil, but through it all, the guidance makes use of them for our growth in experience and consequently the development of our being and consciousness. All advance by however... express depreciation of mental constructions and vital formations—because they are the defence works mind and vital throw up against their capture by the Divine. However the first thing is to become conscious of all that as you have now become,—the next thing is to be firm in knocking it all down and making a tabula rasa , a foundation of calm, peace, happy openness for the true building. No Insistence... therefore why X 's realisation of his being should not come in its own way by growth from within, not by the Divine Grace if his mind objects to that description, but let us say by the spontaneous movement of the Self within him. For, as to this "Grace", we describe it in that way because we feel in the infinite Spirit or Self of existence a Presence or a Being, a Consciousness that determines—that ...
... not—even if it doesn't know it—gravitates towards the Divine. But consciousness must already be there in order to be able to affirm this. And even among men, who at the moment are the most conscious beings on earth, there is an immense majority who are potentially drawn towards the Divine, but who know nothing about it; and there are even some who deliberately refuse this attraction. Perhaps, in... Not quite. An integral yoga is one which comprises all the parts of the being and all the activities of the being. But the activities of one being are not as powerful as the activities of another; and the integrality of one being is not as total as the integrality of another. You don't understand? If all your being, as it is, participates in the yoga, it becomes for you an integral yoga. But... say. It is quite natural, but with another naturalness than that of ordinary physical Nature. Indeed, it is quite logical to say that one must be conscious of the Spirit to be able to perceive the work of the Spirit. If you are not conscious of the Spirit, how will you be able to see it at work? Because the result of what the Spirit does is necessarily material in the material world; and as it ...
... is very young and as I say "well-born", that is, born with a conscious psychic being within, there is always, in the dreams of the child, a kind of aspiration, which for its child's consciousness is a sort of ambition, for something which would be beauty without ugliness, justice without injustice, goodness without limits, and a conscious, constant success, a perpetual miracle. One dreams of miracles... miseries, its limitations, one must establish this dream in it—of a strength which would have no limit, a beauty which would have no ugliness, and of marvellous capacities: one dreams of being able to rise into the air, of being wherever it is necessary to be, of setting things right when they go wrong, of healing the sick; indeed, one has all sorts of dreams when one is very young.... Usually parents or teachers... inveterate habit and, when something is going well, immediately brings up in the being the idea: "Oh, that won't last!", when somebody is kind, the impression, "Oh, he will change!", when one is capable of doing something, "Oh, tomorrow I won't be able to do it so well." This is like an acid, a destructive acid in the being, which takes away hope, certitude, confidence in future possibilities. When ...
... with her new country, and its people, she identified fully with it, revoking her austere Lutheran faith and whole-heartedly Page 11 embracing the orthodox religion. For years, conscious of being no ordinary woman, she had nursed, deep within, the ambition to be great and do great things. Russia became her opportunity. At the age of 33, she came to the throne and reigned 34... fervour that compel admiration: ten, twelve, fourteen hours of work a day: meetings of the Senate, councils of ministers, personally controlling all the machinery of government. Catherine insisted on being her own minister of finance, of war, of home and foreign affairs. Her ministers were to carry out her orders and were only occasionally called upon to advise her. She would read each paper submitted ...
... finding answers in a super-library, but catching hold of something up above—and you have all the answers. But that's more difficult, isn't it? Maybe not.... When I was a kid, I was quite conscious of being able to PULL something down from above, and that the answer was there, above. Children just don't know, in fact. If they were told, if they were shown and made to understand that the knowledge... of view, naturally, the CONDITIONS OF LIFE in Auroville were not arbitrarily fixed in advance. This is what I wrote: "From the psychological point of view, the essential conditions are: "1) Being convinced of the essential human unity and having the will to collaborate in the advent of this unity. "2) The will to collaborate in all that furthers future realizations." That's all, it's... from the material point of view: "The material conditions will be worked out as the realization progresses." It's not too complicated. Of course, we'll add a note to say that for the time being, after they have read the brochures on "Why Auroville?" and have adhered to that, people will have to send their photograph along with their request, and I am the one who will accept them or not. As ...
... and Bliss which is conscious and self-existent. It also describes the different states of being in the individual corresponding to the universal principles of the One Being that is Bliss. The Upanishad defines the Brahman as the Truth, Knowledge, Infinity (satyam, jnanam, anantam), and it defines the result of the knowledge of the Brahman in the secrecy, in the cave of being, in the supreme ether... who is the eater of sweetness, and it is also the self within our being that is lord of what was and what shall be. That immortal, the supreme Self is also Aditi,7 is the imperishable mother of the gods. Finally, that supreme self is the One Eternal and the transient, the Page 9 One consciousness in many conscious beings, and the seeker who is calm and strong beholds Him in his self as... the superconscient Truth and Bliss, and when we study the accounts of the victories such as those of Angirasa Rishis and Ribhus, we find that those who had achieved the victory in the past are the conscious helpers of their yet battling posterity. The Upanishads have provided to humanity with great clarity, plenitude and noble catholicity the integral vision of the Brahman, and therefore, we find in ...
... the action of the divine forces. That is why disaster was very close although no human government consciously wanted it.” 977 In one of the Mother’s recorded talks to the children of the Ashram school, she said in 1951: “Hitler communicated with a being which he considered to be the Supreme. This being came and gave him advice, it told him everything he had to do. Hitler used to retire into solitude... through he has been guided by inspiration and he has gone ahead depending on luck … He has a most original mind because it is not his own mind.” 976 Hitler was, according to the Mother, “very conscious of being the instrument” of the asura. We read in a letter to her son André written in October 1938, after the fate of Czechoslovakia was sealed at Munich: “Speaking of recent events, you ask me whether... to the truth. Hitler was certainly bluffing … Tactics and diplomacy were used, but on the other hand, behind every human will there are forces in action whose origin is not human and which move consciously towards certain goals. The play of these forces is very complex and generally eludes the human consciousness. But for the sake of explanation and easy understanding, they can be divided into two ...
... every case?" He said, "Always." Only, one isn't conscious, human beings aren't conscious, but that's how it is. But now I am beginning to understand! Some experiences, some examples are given in the details of the body's inner vibrations, and I see that there is a choice, a choice generally unconscious, but which, in some individuals, can be conscious. I am not talking about sentimental cases, I am... endurance: that disappears, it becomes a glory. Then... That's what is being learned. ( silence ) But to be able to observe (this is something being worked out on a parallel line), to observe exactly what goes on in this cellular Page 168 realm, one must be perfectly free from and independent of other human beings' influence. And this is extremely difficult because of that habit of... is active, when you have dedicated your life and are fully convinced that it's your only raison d'être, you tend to imagine that if you work for the Divine, the whole being participates, and if you aspire to progress, the whole being participates. You are satisfied once all contradiction has disappeared either in the vital or in the mind, and once everything is in agreement and harmonious. You think ...
... a jest. 1 To know that and possess it, to find and fulfil consciously the universal being's hidden significances is the task given to the human spirit. There are other statements or colourings of the idea of rebirth which admit a more positive sense for existence and nourish a robuster confidence in the power and delight of being which are its secret fountains; but they all stumble in the end... not carry us much farther than the simple material reality of this single life in the body, that first fact of our conscious sensation and memory which is the occasion of all our speculations. Behind our present starting-point and preceding this one lappet of our race in the fields of being rebirth reminds us indeed of a past, of pregnant anterior courses, a soul-existence in many previous bodies which... perhaps during its uncertain longer time to the species. The world grows to us a field of soul-experience, a system of soul-recurrences, a means of self-effectuation, perhaps a crystallising of the conscious being's effective self-reflections. But to what end if our recurrence is only a repetition or a hesitating fluctuation within a few set types with a very limited, always uncompleted circle of accomplishment ...
... Action belongs to the physical part of us, it is the physical outcome of our being; but behind our surface is a freer life power, a freer mind power which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate. Karma... that of the energy which returns as effect, that this is the universal law and nothing in the world can, being of and in our world, escape from its governing incidence. Sri Aurobindo Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: Karma … if Karma be a universal truth or the universal truth of being, it must be equally true of the inly-born mental and moral worlds of our action as in our outward relations... provision made for the energy and force of the being which can change or cancel part or much of what is so written or even all but the most imperative and powerful bindings of Karma. This is a reasonable account of the balance: but there is also to be added to the computation the fact that destiny is not simple but complex; the destiny which binds our physical being, binds it so long or in so far as a greater ...
... only an instrument. I mean he isn't an Asuric incarnation. But a strong will. He isn't a being who acts consciously for the Adversary: he thinks he is doing the right thing. He's a "theoretician." Yes. Oh, he may have violent passions and reactions, and ambitions too, but he isn't one of those beings who know they are instruments of the great Asura—he's not that. He is less dangerous than... than that. Not like Hitler—who knew, of course. Hitler asserted that Falsehood should govern the world and that it was governing it. And he was very conscious of being the instrument Page 280 of the Asura who had himself called "the Lord of Nations," who is precisely the present, current representation of the Asura of Falsehood (the one who was born "the Lord of Truth"—a lovely story..... It was like that to an extremely sharp degree: for instance, if I was moved from one place to another, I could be suddenly cured of an illness from the change of air. When I met Théon, it became conscious, an object of study, and... it still goes on. Perhaps a few days ago (I can't say, time has no meaning), but not very long ago, I said, "There's something new in the air." And something very unpleasant ...
... There are two siddhis of knowledge, three of power and three of being. All siddhis exist already in Nature. They exist in you. Only owing to habitual limitations you make a use of them which is mechanical and limited. By breaking these limitations, one is able to get the conscious and voluntary use of them. The three siddhis of being are siddhis of the Sat or pure substance. In matter, Sat uses these... speech. Consciousness in itself is free to communicate between one mind and another without physical means consciously and voluntarily. The two siddhis by which this is done are called Vyapti and Prakamya. In the same way there is a power in the consciousness of acting upon other conscious beings or even upon things without physical means or persuasion or compulsion. Great men are said to make others... that is to say there is a force in their words, in their action, or even in their silent will or mere presence which influences and compels others. To have these siddhis of power is to have the conscious and voluntary use of this force of Chit. The three powers are Aishwarya, Ishita, Vashita. These powers can only be entirely acquired or safely used when we have got rid of Egoism and identified ourselves ...
... see Him in their self as in a mirror, theirs is eternal felicity and 'tis not for others. Page 64 13. "The One Eternal in the transient, the One consciousness in many conscious beings, who being One orders the desires of many: the calm and strong who behold Him in their self as in a mirror, theirs is eternal peace and 'tis not for others. 14. " 'This is He' is all they... triple being of man. 6. Possibly, the three Purushas, soulstites or Personalities of the divine Being, indicated by the three letters AUM. The highest Brahman is beyond the three letters of the mystic syllable. 7. The sacrifice of the lower existence to the divine, consummated on the three planes of man's physical, vital and mental consciousness. 8. The Purusha or Divine Being, Knower... is hidden and is hard to see, for he is established in our secret being and lodged in the cavern heart of things, the wise and steadfast man casts away from him joy and sorrow. 13. "When a mortal man has heard, when he has grasped, when he has forcefully separated the Righteous One from his body and won that subtle Being, then he has delight, for he has got that which one can indeed delight ...
... plan, it has a conscious will, it is altogether a conscious entity—it can't be called a being, for it is not in the Page 150 same proportion. When we speak of a being with our human consciousness, we immediately imagine a human being, perhaps a little larger or much larger, but still functioning always in the same way. That is why I don't call it a being, but it is a conscious entity, a conscious... are moved by the spirit of the species which in itself is conscious and has a conscious will, we can then say that all these imaginations (I give you this one instance, but there are any number of them as terrible, as monstrous for our human consciousness), all these beings, fashioners, who have created these insects must be frightful beings (don't you think so?) and have a perverse and diabolical ... exactly is instinct? It is the consciousness of Nature. Nature is conscious of its action, but this is not an individual consciousness. There is an instinct of the species. Some have said that there were even "spirits of the species", conscious beings for each species. Instinct depends on the way Nature works, and Nature is a conscious force which knows what it wants, does it in its own way, knowing ...
... Material and Spiritual Evolution It may seem amazing how near E.F. Schumacher brings the higher animal to the human being. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother go still further in this. ‘Man and the animal are both mentally conscious beings …’ 19 In the animal the human intellect is being prepared, ‘for the animal too thinks.’ 20 (Sri Aurobindo) Studying their line of thinking one concludes that the... grows conscious of her aim; in him she looks up from the animal with open eyes towards the divine ideal. 1 — Sri Aurobindo ‘a story has neither a beginning nor an end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’ These are the opening words of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair. The story of the human being has neither... intermediary beings have been found and classified by paleontologists. The Mother confirms the teachings of the ancient traditions and also what is stated in the Bible: that beings from a higher world first came on the Earth in their pure form, but that later on they united with the higher animals, which resulted in a long transition of probably very bizarre corporeal forms, of which the human being finally ...
... is the first paradox of the theory and its justification must be crushing and conclusive if it is to be finally accepted by the human mind. Again, Force in indeterminate Matter without any Conscious-Soul being all the beginning and all the material of things, Mind, Life and Consciousness can only be developments out of Matter and even only operations of Matter. They cannot be at Page 171 ... heredity appears. Thus the whole view of Evolution begins to change. Instead of a mechanical, gradual, rigid evolution out of indeterminate Matter by Nature-Force we move towards the perception of a conscious, supple, flexible, intensely surprising and constantly dramatic evolution by a superconscient Knowledge which reveals things in Matter, Life and Mind out of the unfathomable Inconscient from which... and mechanical aspect; its source and the seat of its motive power are shifted to that which is least material, most psychical in Matter. Finally, the first idea of a slow and gradual evolution is being challenged by a new theory of evolution through sudden and rapid outbursts; and again we pass from the sense of an obvious superficial machinery and all-sufficient material necessity to profundities ...
... work, or else a psychic being in its last incarnation wanting to complete its development and realize itself. This is what aspires, this is what has the contact. So, when you're told "become conscious of your psychic being," it's for the being formed by external Nature to contact the divine Presence through the psychic being. Then the psychic takes charge of the whole being; in fact, it is the inner... becomes more and more conscious as well as more and more organized. Ultimately it becomes a completely conscious individual being, master of itself and moved exclusively by the divine Will. That is to say, an individual expression of the Supreme. This is what we call the "psychic being." Generally speaking, those who practice yoga have either a fully developed, independent psychic being which has taken... rather special case. And what happened to me happens to everyone whose psychic being has deliberately incarnated: the psychic being guides your life, and if you let it act freely, it arranges ALL circumstances—it's truly wonderful!... I have seen—not only for myself but for so many people who also had conscious psychic beings—that everything is arranged with a view to... not at all your personal egoistic ...
... care, and... I don't know, I can't explain, but certain things have to remain as they are and there should be nothing to disturb those people—but the body is quite unconcerned about that. The conscious, active being is turned only to the supreme Consciousness and exclusively concerned with doing what this Consciousness wants it to do, and so there are, as it were, people (or someone) whose responsibility... they are there. But the others would need to have a lot of patience!... ( silence ) What do you have to ask, or to say?... There is no need to "ask"—tell me something. How can one make conscious contact with this subtle physical? That, mon petit, I have no idea, because I never did it deliberately! ( Mother laughs ) It came on its own. Now, very strangely, there are times when both... something like a perception, an impression of an AWESOME Power! The Power that would seem capable of bringing a dead man back to life, you know. An awesome Power that uses this [the body] without conscious identification, but quite, quite naturally, without... as if there were no resistance. It's a natural state, and it's neither this nor that nor that, it's... it's EVERYTHING ( gesture showing an immense ...
... देवमादेवं जनत प्रचेतसं विश्वमादेवं जनत प्रचेतसं, "They gave being in mortals to the god as the reflected divinity who has the prajnana , the universal reflected divinity conscious in knowledge." This is the sense of आ in आ कृ & आ भू as applied to the gods who are formed or become in mortals; that is to say, they throw there their reflected image or being which is shaped in himself by man. Sayana. I call... Truth have established him in his right place in the sacrifice in such a way that he pervades the upper ocean, to the superconscient existence, and occupies two places in man, his conscious mortal being and his secret divine being. In the mortal man he drives the rapid swiftnesses of the vital strength upwards to the ocean of the superconscient, for he is the aspiring toiler set here to that end by the... and is as that of one's own being and he has the vision of one hastening (on his path) and seeking to discern; when he darts to & fro his tongue upon the growths of earth (lit. heat-holders) he is as the galloping chariot-horse and is running towards the supreme boons." The sense is that the growth of the Force is a delight & is as if the growth of one's own being; his light, his vision is that ...
... experience. We are not automata but conscious beings and our mentality, our will and its decisions, our attitude to life and demand on it, our motives and movements help to determine our course; they may lead to much suffering and evil, but through it all, the guidance makes use of them for our growth in experience and consequently the development of our being and consciousness. All advance, by... all; these things have nothing to do with surrender. Also, complete and total surrender is not so easy as some seem to imagine. There are always many and large reservations; even if one is not conscious of them, they are there. Complete surrender can best come by a complete love and bhakti. Bhakti, on the other hand, can begin without surrender, but it naturally leads, as it forms itself, to surrender... an) and Nirvana is one of them, but by no means the only one. You may remember Ramakrishna’s saying that the Jivakoti [a human being who, once immersed in God cannot return] can ascend the stairs, but not return, while the Ishwarakoti [a divine human being] can ascend and descend at will. If that is so the Jivakoti might be those who describe only the curve from Matter through Mind ...
... For this transformation to succeed, all human beings—even all living beings as well as their material environment—must be transformed. Otherwise things will remain as they are: an individual experience cannot change terrestrial life. This is the essential difference between the old idea of transformation—that is, the becoming conscious with the psychic being and the inner life—and transformation as we... light—the supramental light, for example—that would have the power to individualise the inconscient. But, through a conscious, individualised being, this light can be brought down into the inconscient and gradually make it conscious. First of all, it is the subconscient that has to become conscious, and indeed the main difficulty of the integral transformation is that things are constantly rising up from... overcome before the cells can be spontaneously aware of the Truth, of the Eternity of matter. Of course, until now, those who have achieved this conscious transformation, who are aware of the eternal and infinite life within themselves, in the depths of their being, must, in order to preserve this consciousness, constantly refer back to their inner experience, return to their inner contemplation, live in ...
... from the unity conscious of its unity, in order to arrive at the unity conscious of its multiplicity in the unity . And then it is this path which, because of its fragments, is translated for us by space and time. For us, such as we are, it is possible for each point of this consciousness to be conscious of itself and conscious of the original Unity. And that is the work which is being done; that is... its unity—yes, that is the Inconscient. And this Inconscient becomes more and more conscious in beings who are conscious of their infinitesimal existence and at the same time , through what we call progress or evolution or transformation, become conscious of the original Unity. And that, as it was seen, explains everything. Words are nothing. Everything, everything from the most material to the... Consciousness conscious of its unity and conscious of the whole play, conscious of the innumerable elements of this Unity. This for us is translated into the sense of time: moving from the Inconscient up to this state of Consciousness. And the Inconscient is the projection of the first Unity (if one can say it; all these words are altogether senseless), of the essential unity which is only conscious of its ...
... subhuman, if it existed in the typal world, would also be changed and become supramental. But, earth being an evolutionary world, the supramental descent is not likely to have such a devastating completeness. It would be only the establishment of a new principle of consciousness and a new order of conscious beings and this new principle would evolve its own forms and powers in the terrestrial order. Even the... workings of Mind and a mentalised race of beings here. The supermind is a different order of consciousness far removed from the mental—there are in fact several grades of higher consciousness between the human mind and the supramental. If the earth were not evolutionary but a typal world, then indeed one could predict that the descent of a higher type of conscious ness would swallow up or abolish the existing... of higher beings as you suggest may be envisaged as a part of the process of the change. But the main part of the change will be the appearance of the supramental being and the organisation of a supramental nature here, as a mental being has appeared and a mental nature organised itself during the last stage of the evolution. I prefer nowadays not to speak of the descent of the higher beings because ...
... us down in an absolute sense. Of course, our power of re-creating ourselves in our lives is limited. But self-conscious beings, beings who can stand back and watch their own nature, inner and outer, with however small a detachment, beings who not only know but know that they know — such beings have at least a speck of true freedom, and from that speck they can alter their lives at any instant. This certainty... psychic consciousness where we are one with the Divine and eternally free from the reactions of Karma. Without becoming aware of the psychic, it is not possible to do so; but once we are securely conscious of the true soul in us all bondage ceases. Then incessantly life begins afresh, then the past no longer cleaves to us." After this, the Mother went on to an astounding pronouncement based on a realisation... divine being. All objects were as if individualised forms of divinity. The chairs and tables of my room appeared to be gods and goddesses. I felt like getting up and kneeling at their feet. The doctor had forbidden me to get up or even to lift my head from the pillow. The heart must have complete rest. I did keep to my bed, with the various booklets, in which Savitri was then being issued ...
... ss, which starts from unity conscious of its unity to arrive at unity conscious of its multiplicity IN UNITY. So then, this route is what, for us—for the fragments—is expressed as space and time. And for us as we are, each point of this Consciousness has the possibility of being conscious of itself AND conscious of the original Unity And that's the work now being accomplished, that is to say... essential unity unconscious of its own Unity—that's the Inconscient. And this Inconscient is growing increasingly conscious in beings who are conscious of their infinitesimal existence and AT THE SAME TIME—through what we call progress or evolution or transformation—who manage to be conscious of the original Unity. And that, as it was seen, explained everything. Words are nothing. Everything,... mal element of this Consciousness, while retaining this state of consciousness, is now recapturing the total original state of consciousness—the result is the original Consciousness conscious of its Unity AND conscious of the whole play: all the Page 434 innumerable elements of this Unity So for us, it gets expressed as the sense of time: going from the Inconscient to this state of con ...
... you have to say? I have a feeling that I am less conscious than in the past—in my sleep, for instance. Earlier, you always used to tell me that you were unconscious! In the first years, I was more conscious. Ah? For instance, during my sleep, I would often wake up in the middle of a meditation, or else I was conscious of being seized by a force and moving on elsewhere, things like... the vital are gone, so there was a need to replace the mind in the functioning, and this physical mind has developed in quite an extraordinary way. It has become... (what should I say?) far more conscious, first of all, far more organized and methodical in its work. So if it's your physical mind, something can be done—I'll try. I can try to do something at night. The mind, I can't do anything about... fun! ( silence ) I remember having seen you not very long ago (I'll have to see Page 240 that), and it must have been in the subtle physical. So if that's where you want to become conscious, it's easier for me. It's very interesting, you know! Very interesting... Life stripped of its false appearance! There are still forms, but not at all the same thing. You know, people are so ...
... नित्योऽनित्यानां चेतनश्चेतनानामेको बहूनां यो विदधाति कामान् । तमात्मस्थं येऽनुपश्यन्ति धीरास्तेषां शान्तिः शाश्वती नेतरेषाम् ॥१३॥ 13) The One Eternal in many transient, the One Conscious in many conscious beings, who being One ordereth the desires of many; the calm and strong who behold Him in the self as in a mirror, theirs is eternal peace and 'tis not for others. Page 122 तदेतदिति ... teaching, nor by brain power, nor by much learning: but only he whom this Being chooses can win Him; for to him this Self bares His body. नाविरतो दुश्चरितान्नाशान्तो नासमाहितः । नाशान्तमानसो वापि प्रज्ञानेनैनमाप्नुयात् ॥२४॥ 24) None who has not ceased from doing evil, or who is not calm, or not concentrated in his being, or whose mind has not been tranquillised, can by wisdom attain to Him. ... Probably, the divine force utilised to raise to divinity the triple being of man. × Possibly, the three Purushas, soul-states or Personalities of the divine Being, indicated by the three letters A U M. The highest Brahman is beyond the three letters of the mystic syllable ...
... the inner, vital being [ Mother touches the heart center ] that's conscious of oneness, that is, conscious of being a being), that this aggregate of cells is now an aggregate OF ITS OWN WILL, with an organized consciousness which is a sort of collective gathering of that cellular consciousness; well... Obviously this is an exceptional condition, but even in the past, in those beings who were very developed... developed outwardly, there was a beginning of willed, conscious cellular gathering, and that's certainly why in ancient Egypt, where occultism was very developed. exceptional beings such as the pharaohs, the high priests, etc., were mummified, so as to preserve the form as long as possible. Even here in India, generally they were petrified (in the Himalayas there were petrifactive springs). There was... contradict it: I cannot doubt that the consciousness is increasing more and more—the consciousness in the body. It is growing more and more precise, luminous, exact—QUIET—very peaceful. Yet very conscious of a TREMENDOUS battle against millennial habits. Do you follow? When it was over, I saw that even physically, bodily, there is a strength: the result is an increased strength. A very clearly increased ...
... a simple fact of psychology which is relevant to your context. What is the basic psychological difference between the mentality of animals and ours? Surely, animals are conscious but they are not conscious of being conscious. We humans have a self-observing poise. Something in us stands a little apart from the diverse processes going on in our physical-vital-mental system. It knows that it can watch... an inch's distance the never-ceasing stream of thoughts, feelings, proclivities and sensations is evidence of a degree of Page 248 freedom in us - a degree of being uncaught by that stream and a degree of being the acceptor or rejecter of it. Such freedom as an inherent part of our make-up and of our existence should convince us that no astrological chart can completely rule our life... 1 know from having sat at times in the meditation hall on the ground-floor of the Ashram's main" building and heard him moving on the floor above in the corridor next to his room. Surely, his eyes being generally open during meditation to and fro was not due only to the spiritual movement going on in the soul-profundities, the inmost heart, rather than through the mental consciousness playing about ...
... what he was? Stalin? I am not quite sure that he was a human being... in the sense that I don't think he had a psychic being. Or perhaps he did have one—in all matter, in every atom there is a divine centre—but I mean a conscious psychic being, formed, individualised. I don't think so. I believe it was a direct incarnation of a being of the vital world. And that was the great difference between him... consciousness, love and Ananda, life and truth—truth, that's the exact word. And naturally, they were supremely powerful beings, you understand. They were what are called in that tradition the first emanations, that is, the first formations. And each one became very conscious of its qualities, its power, its capacities, its possibilities, and, suddenly forgot each in its own way that it was only an emanation... by ordering this consciousness to realise a universe. This consciousness began by emanating four beings, four individualities which were indeed altogether very high beings, of the highest Reality. They were the being of consciousness, the being of love (of Ananda rather), the being of life and the being of light and knowledge—but consciousness and light are the same thing. There we are then: consciousness ...
... have an experience of this kind. I don't know. I saw the photograph... there didn't seem to be much of a psychic being there! ( Laughter ) It was rather a rudimentary something, a possibility which will be realised after centuries and centuries. Still, even if it was a conscious psychic being which wanted an experience, perhaps it wanted this one, perhaps it asked itself: "What kind of sensations does... of education; that is, one must work for it. For example, there is a considerable difference between the vision of ordinary people and that of artists. Their way of seeing things is much more conscious and complete than that of ordinary people. When one has not trained one's vision, one sees vaguely, imprecisely, and has impressions rather than an exact vision. An artist, when he sees something... that" and all this kind of foolishness), you know the quality of things, their use and their interrelations through this study of the senses. This puts you in contact with the world in a completely conscious way. For everything, the least detail... For example, you are obliged to cook and want to prepare a good dish. Well, if you have not trained your senses you will have to try out a little of this ...
... Then that suppleness.... It means a capacity for decrystallizing oneself; the whole span of life given over to self-individualization is a period of conscious, willed crystallization, which then has to be undone. To become a conscious, individualized being there has to be a constant, constant, willed crystallization, in everything; and afterwards, again constantly, the opposite movement has to be made—with... "materialize" something, to work occultly—to create a new body by occult means.... That was the idea: for a few beings to first attain, here in this physical world, a level of realization giving them the power to materialize a supramental being. I once told you I put a body on a vital being 7 —but I couldn't have made that body material; it would have been impossible: something is lacking. Something... motion. Generally, when we do something, we can perceive in ourselves a will to do it; when you watch yourself, you see this: there is always (it can happen in a flash) the will to do. When you are conscious and watch yourself doing something, you see in yourself the will to do it—this is where the mind intervenes, its normal intervention, the established order in which things happen. But the supramental ...
... another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate." 199 The so-called finality of fate is thus not quite so final, after all. Fixed fate doesn't rule out free will. The perversity of the outer ego is not the source of this will; on the other... behind it all, which is the Process as well as the Power that regulates it. "The destiny which binds our physical being", writes Sri Aurobindo, "binds it so long or in so far as a greater law does not intervene. Action belongs to the physical part of us, it is the physical outcome of our being; but behind our surface is a freer life power, a freer mind power which has another energy and can create another... hardly love and beauty can live safe, Thyself a being dangerously great,... As high, as happy might thy waking be! If for all time doom could be left to sleep! 207 The dreaming—and the waking; and the shadow of doom in between, this is what Narad sees, and the word is almost spoken. The dream is vivid, being decked in golden hues. Savitri has been to an enchanted ...
... I had appealed to the Mother never to let go her hold on me, no matter how much I might appear to deviate from the path, there was no question of her not being with me, but the possibility existed of my not being fully with her in my conscious parts. Here lies the relevance of the second meaning of "basic". And it is pinpointed in an exchange of letters between us some thirty-six years ago in... your enterprise — I do not — just because I find it silly. So, do not be misled if I end by love and blessings. These words are for your soul of which you are not just now very conscious, and not for your exterior being." (18-6-1942) A similar note is struck in another statement of the Mother's: "Understand that blessings are for the best spiritual result, not necessarily according to human... at his Samadhi I have not been aware so much of him in my heart as of myself within him. I told the Mother of this peculiar sense. "Sri Aurobindo is too big for my heart to hold him. I am conscious of being included in his great form. I nestle in his heart, a small creature enveloped by his huge divinely throbbing love. Always he carries me. I live in him rather than he in me." The Mother commented: ...
... nirmamo bhūtvā . Page 215 This view of our being starts from the Sankhya analysis of the dual principle in our nature, Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is inactive, akartā ; Prakriti is active, kartrī : Purusha is the being full of the light of consciousness; Prakriti is the Nature, mechanical, reflecting all her works in the conscious witness, the Purusha. Prakriti works by the inequality... enemy." When one has conquered one's self and attained to the calm of a perfect self-mastery and self-possession, then is the supreme self in a man founded and poised even in his outwardly conscious human being, samāhita . In other words, to master the lower self by the higher, the natural self by the spiritual is the way of man's perfection and liberation. Here then is a very great qualification... nature and not, therefore, the law of action, svadharma , of the tiger, storm or fire. He has a conscious intelligent will, Page 220 a buddhi , and to that he must refer his actions. If he does not do so, if he acts blindly according to his impulses and passions, then the law of his being is not rightly worked out, svadharmaḥ su-anuṣṭhitaḥ , he has not acted according to the full measure ...
... from unity conscious of unity to unity conscious of its multiplicity in the unity, in the background of space and time. The problem, as the Mother saw it, was at each infinitesimal point of consciousness to be both conscious of itself and conscious of the original Unity. The Inconscient was the projection (or inversion) of the original Unity, and it became increasingly conscious in beings in their... become total when the cells become conscious of the Divine in them and when they open themselves voluntarily to His influence." Then, referring to her own recent experiences, she added, This is what the consciousness that descended on the earth last year [1 January 1969] is working for. Little by little the subconscient automatism of the body is being replaced by the consciousness of the... divinity who comes to help.... Material, external, concrete, "it did not pass through an inner being, through the psychic being, it came directly upon the body"! On 8 January she said that it was the descent of the superman consciousness, the intermediary between man and the supramental being. On the 18th, she described it as "a mighty power"; and in those touched by it there would enter "a ...
... and it's over. Immediately. And the change comes automatically, mon petit, without the slightest effort. Simply... simply be sincere, in other words, TRULY want the right thing. One is quite conscious of being powerless, utterly incompetent: more and more, I feel that this amalgam of matter, of cells and all the rest, is just pitiful! Pitiful. I don't know, under certain conditions people may feel... a box without air and light—while FULLY CONSCIOUS. And just because they can no longer express themselves, people say they are "dead." They don't waste any time declaring them dead! But they are conscious. They are conscious. Imagine someone who can no longer speak or move—according to human laws, he is "dead." He is dead but he is conscious. He is conscious, so he sees the people around him: some... they are beings in transition between animal and man.) And naturally the first things they pick up from man are his defects—that's always what's easiest to pick up! And then they make themselves unhappy... for nothing. So many things, so many things.... Human beings have made an appalling tragedy out of death. And I saw, with all these recent experiences, I saw how many, many poor human beings have ...
... object, in every movement, in every vibration, in all the things around—not only people and conscious beings, but things, objects; not only trees and plants and living things, but simply any object one uses, the things around one—this delight, this delight of being, of being just as one is, simply being. And one sees that all this vibrates like that. One touches a thing and feels this delight. ... operating in the universe. Very few human beings are conscious of the fact that, in our normal or egoic consciousness, we are constantly at war with reality. Thus, for instance, very few people realize that, even complaining against bad weather, which is so common with most human beings, implies a resistance to what is. Eckhart's teaching helps one become more conscious of the fact that, complaining, which... "The Impersonal is Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, not a Person, hut a state. The Person is the Existent, the Conscious, the Blissful; consciousness, existence, bliss taken as separate things are only states of his being. But in fact the two (personal being and eternal state) are inseparable and are one reality." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, SABCL ., Vol. 22, p. 259.) ...
... The hostile forces are, as we know, real and conscious beings. They exist in a double hierarchy. There is, on the one hand, the hierarchy descending from the Asuras (mental and higher vital) downwards via the Rakshasas (lower vital) to the Pishachas (lowest vital); there are, on the other hand, the hierarchies descending in uncountable strata of beings cascading, as it were, from the main forces in... they know that these things delay and hinder the action of the divine forces. That is why disaster was very close although no human government consciously wanted it. But there was to be no war at any cost and that is why war has been avoided – for the time being.’ 21 It is no exaggeration to say that the Second World War has still not been understood, in spite of the thousands of volumes dedicated... and which move consciously towards certain goals. The play of those forces is very complex and generally eludes the human consciousness. But for the sake of explanation and understanding, they can be divided into two main opposing tendencies: those which work for the fulfilment of the Divine Work upon Earth and those which are opposed to this fulfilment. The former have few conscious instruments at ...
... coming forth from the hand of the Creatrix, at each moment in time, before time, after time. Together with the seeing attention, the gift of wonder is the indispensable quality of the actually conscious human being, the one Rimbaud had in mind when he wrote: II faut être absolument moderne (one must be absolutely modern) — modern not by way of fashion but as an instrument of experience and knowledge... She did not find it necessary to go into all details. ‘But I must say that I was fully conscious, aware of everything, knowing that an Asuric force was there — but not rejecting it because of the infinity of Sri Aurobindo. I knew that everything is part of him and I do not want to reject anything. I met this being last night three times.’ She remembered everything with perfect accuracy, even the time... he sat near me.’ It must have been at that time, or shortly afterwards, that she unlocked the door of her psychic being, ‘very cautiously,’ for Sri Aurobindo was now corporeally present again, not completely there and not all the time, it is true, but enough to prevent her psychic being from rushing away to be reunited with its complement. From then onwards the Mother mentions both worlds time and ...
... freer Life-power, a freer Mind-power which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate. 62 If Spirit is liberty, fate cannot be inflexible for those great souls who have completed the transition... mind that wants one thing and does not want another. In the divine plan each thing has its place and importance. So it is not success that matters. What matters is to be a docile and if possible a conscious instrument of the Divine Will. To be and to do what the Divine wants, this is the truly important thing. All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour. 13 Can man delay or hasten... final sentence, Fate's law may change, but not my spirit's will. 43 Here is a first challenge to the inexorability, the inflexibility, the unchangeability of Fate. In Savitri the conscious Will has taken human shape and she has come to earth for a certain purpose. She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time And reach an apex of world-destiny Where all is won or all ...
... fundamental capacity of the cells though not in their surface consciousness, otherwise all of us would be conscious cosmic beings, which we are not. (Consisting of cells, elementary particles, a subliminal mind and vital, and a soul, we are indeed cosmic beings unconsciously, and even more than cosmic beings.) To put it graphically, we could say that the cell shows the respective gradations of the evolution... into the terrestrial consciousness … ‘And what is strange (I was conscious, fully conscious; the “Witness”-consciousness is never annulled, but it is not disturbing): I knew, I saw (although my eyes were closed, I was lying on my bed), I saw my body move … Every gesture, every finger, every attitude was something that was being realized … ‘I have the impression that Action is not at all limited... were able to receive it. And I came to know that it was the consciousness of the overman, which means the intermediary between the human and the supramental being.’ 18 January 1969. ‘That [consciousness of the overman] is very consciously active. It is like a projection of power and it has now become habitual. ‘It contains a consciousness — something very precious — that teaches lessons to ...
... further experience. We are not automata but conscious beings and our mentality, our will and its decisions, our attitude to life and demand on it, our motives and movements help to determine our course; they may lead to much suffering and evil, but through it all the guidance makes use of them for our growth in experience and consequently the development of our being and consciousness. All advance by however... lead another and yet keep faith with his conscience? And lastly — to cap my discomfiture, as it were — Indira testified again and again that she had received my help, even though I was not conscious of having given any! Duly I wrote to him about it all soliciting his explanation and opinion. And he replied at once and categorically. ________________ * Perfection of the Body, an article... for the future's base. A new faith burgeoned deep down in my core and a new vista opened when I beheld, for the last time, his statuesque face of bliss lying in regal repose of Yoganidra conscious sleep ________________________ *Quoted from a poem of his published posthumously in LAST POEMS: / have sailed the golden ocean And crossed the silver bar; I have reached ...
... merged in the Mother, and his vital being remained behind to help his near and dear ones whom he had left at death. (8)'I' was a very advanced sadhaka. His being was completely integrated: all the parts of his nature were consciously centred around his psychic being. When he breathed his last because of an Page 44 attack of coronary thrombosis, his soul was not held back in its... subjectively and objectively; subjectively, as the planes of consciousness of an individual being, and objectively as independently existing worlds of manifestation. There is one other essential point we have to note in this connection: these supraphysical worlds are not contentless voids; they have conscious beings of their own, habitually dwelling and functioning there. Just as these worlds are made... way, a "medium" is supposed to be an extraordinarily gifted human being who possesses the powers of clairaudience and clairvoyance and has acquired the surprising capacity of establishing a direct and conscious contact with disembodied souls, while plunged in a state of trance. It is claimed that once-living but now-dead departed beings can use these mediums as vehicles of transmission, give information ...
... Eternal and Infinite. Yet these things too which it restricts unduly, the potent will, the strong yearning of love, the positive light and all-embracing intuition Page 339 of the conscious mental being are from the Divine, represent essential powers of him and must have some justification in their Source and some dynamic way of self-fulfilment in him. No God-knowledge can be integral, perfect... great undying Powers and immortal Personalities who consciously inform, constitute, preside over the subjective and objective forces of the cosmos. The gods are spiritual forms of the eternal and original Deity who descend from him into the many processes of the world. Multitudinous, universal, the gods weave out of the primary principles of being and its thousand complexities the whole web Page... that divine Wisdom which has evolved all things out of its own self-conscious infinitude, prajñā purāṇī ,—developed them down the range of the seven principles of its own essence. These Rishis embody the all-upholding, all-illumining, all-manifesting seven Thoughts of the Veda, sapta dhiyaḥ ,—the Upanishad speaks of all things as being arranged in septettes, sapta sapta . Along with these are coupled ...
... was the method of self-development, where one evolves oneself from plane to plane of one's own being and embraces on each successively one's own oneness with the world and arrives at ananda or bliss which is at once self-existent and conscious, and one takes into oneself the action of the lower grades of being as one ascends. One may thus work out a comprehensive process of self-development by a sort... only the calm and strong see Him in their self as in a mirror; theirs is eternal felicity, but it is not for others. He is the one eternal in the transient, the One consciousness in many conscious beings, who being one orders the desires of many: He that Nachiketas was keen to Page 37 know, is the Bright One and Brahman, and Immortality, and he is eternal Ashwattha-Tree that manifests from... life and mind. This dwelling of the mind in this truth is nidīdhyāsana, which leads to the realization, sāksātkāra, of the ultimate reality, of the subtle Being, of the delight or rather of Sachchidananda, — the Existent who is Conscious and who is Bliss. In an earlier statement,28 Yama had spoken of the preparation Nachiketas had made for entering into the path of yoga by casting away wisely ...
... psychological law that whatever is suppressed in the conscious mind remains in the subconscient being and recurs either in the waking state when the control is removed or else in sleep. Mental control by itself cannot eradicate anything entirely out of the being. ... In order to make a true and complete change, one has to make all these conscious, to see clearly what is still there and to reject them... in various nervous forms or other disorders of the mind or vital or body without it being evident what is their real cause. This has been recently discovered by European psychologists and much emphasized, even exaggerated in a new science called psycho-analysis. Here again, in sadhana one has to become conscious of these Page 132 suppressed impulses and eliminate them—this may be... enemy." When one has conquered one's self and attained to the calm of a perfect self-mastery and self-possession, then is the supreme self in a man founded and poised even in his outwardly conscious human being, Page 134 samāhita. In other words, to master the lower self by the higher, the natural self by the spiritual is the way of man's perfection and liberation. 132 ...
... all his life in the service of Sri Aurobindo, to surrender himself. He organised every part of his being around his psychic being. He was an extremely conscious human being. I saw him rise straight upward, gathering every part of his being, straight to that plane where Sri Aurobindo is at work. That’s where he has gone.” The Mother told Satprem many things about death. While talking about this, She... description below. If man lives his life consciously then his soul progresses. Father’s life is proof of that. The Mother observed: “Take N.D. for example, a man who lived his whole life with the idea of serving Sri Aurobindo; he died clasping my photo to his breast. This was a consecrated man, very conscious, with an unfailing dedication, and all the parts of his being well organised around the psychic... Aurobindo’s protection. At first the being is overwhelmed with ordinary despair. Then slowly all kinds of bad suggestions start invading the sadhak’s mind. You have to be very careful. Let me tell you of an experience of mine. I was once meditating. I felt a little uneasy, as if from somewhere an asuric force was trying to swallow me up. I began meditating more consciously. I noticed a black, ugly shape ...
... according to the place we must occupy. Sweet Mother, I would like to add: the more we are in contact with our inner being, the more exact are the means given us. Oh, that's good! (Mother writes:) The more we are CONSCIOUSLY in contact with our inner being, the more are the exact means given to us. It's getting interesting! That gives them a basis. Oh, but we... I'm seeing... I'm seeing some astonishing things. There are some (not many, one or two) who are like little animals, nothing - very nice, a very little animal. But almost all of them are conscious beings. And the parents are absolutely stupid in their manner of behaving with them, because they don't know, they don't understand. I saw one again today (tiny gesture): he is 3, 4, 5 days old... and I saw her psychic being rising above her this much (about 20 cm), bigger. That's the first time. Her physical being was small, and the psychic being was big like that. And it was a sexless being: neither man nor woman. So I thought (it's possible that it's always like that, I don't know, but in this case I noticed it very clearly), I thought, "But it is the psychic being which will materialize ...
... only awake Agni from time to time, by repeated pressure, but have and hold continuously the inner flame of will and knowledge, a present godhead, the one whom we then see and adore in all conscious thinking beings. Or we may take the last two padas in the sense "now indeed they seize" etc and we will have to take it in the opposite sense, ie, that for the present men do not have this continuous flame... Flame among men. For the spirit is there concealed in man, guhâ hita as it is said in Veda and Upanishad, in the inner cave of our being; and his will is a spiritual will, hidden there in the spirit, present indeed in all our outward [being] and action,—for all being and action are of the spirit, but still its real nature, its native action is concealed, altered, not manifest in the material life... "Does this mean the constant burning of the physical fire on the altar and the ordered sequence of the physical sacrifice, or does it mean the awakening to constant developing knowledge or ordered conscious action of knowledge of the divine Flame in man?" I note that in the next rik (3) Agni is described as the possessor of truth (or of sacrifice?), the entirely wise, ऋतावानं विचेतसं, in 4 as the vision ...
... can clearly identify as "vital" or "mental" or "spiritual", yet something so non-material, non-physical and still substantial as to look like the most natural emanation, as it were, of a conscious omnipresent Being in terms of a stretching out of itself for the holding together of objects that are physical and material. So much for Einstein's space. What about his time? If ultimately time and space... as an emptiness either. No empty space, no empty time. A time-ether, non-physical, non-material and still substantial, has to be conceived - the most natural emanation, as it were, of a conscious omnipresent Being in terms of a stretching out of itself for the deployment of a movement carrying physical and material objects. When we take the space-ether and the time-ether in fusion, we have as... contact both with experience and whatever inherent forms of thought there may be in the mind, but they are still free and found by a creative activity of the mathematical conscious- ness, akin to the activity of the artist. Being artistic in quality they are reached by a sort of inner vision, a sort of intuition. They are divined. In Einstein's view, the mathematician's mind has a capacity of sheer ...
... contactual means of a conscious knowledge. This further development begins with overtly conscious life; what we see in it is the imprisoned consciousness struggling out to the surface: it is under the compulsion of this struggle that the separated living being strives, however blindly at first and within narrow limits, to enter into conscious relations with the rest of the world-being outside it. It is... its self, so it is intrinsically aware of all that is in its being: this is not by an act of knowledge formulated in a self-regard, a self-observation, but by the same inherent awareness; it is intrinsically all-conscious of all that is by the very fact that all is itself. Thus conscious of its timeless self-existence, the Spirit, the Being is aware in the same way—intrinsically, absolutely, totally... as there is no faculty or means of communication, it is only by being brought into contact with person or object or by a conscious utilisation by living beings that their influences can become active,—such a utilisation is the practical side of more than one human science. But still these powers and influences are attributes of Being, not of mere indeterminate substance, they are forces of the Spirit ...
... complete and is taking the madhura into itself. The bhava is firmly founded on jnana & state of being & the Ishwara is being felt in all thought, feeling & action. The distinction between Ishwara and Prakriti is not yet merged in the unity + difference, but the Prakriti is subordinate & more conscious of being a form of the Ishwara. Mahalaxmi brings with her bhakti & prema, the stable permanence of... itself a more entire, ready & solid participation in the siddhi by the whole conscious existence. The subconscious is being rapidly trained by the force of its obstructed aspiration towards the light. Page 788 The response to the Asiddhi proceeds from the subconscious; as the source of these responses, it is being purified from them and fortified for the response to the Siddhi— In the... The obstruction now offered is to the conscious use of the Affirmations. They are all present in act, but the physical consciousness is prevented from enjoying their light. This obstruction serves eventually the end of a more entire & solid participation in the siddhi by the whole conscious existence; for the subconscious is being trained through the aspiration towards the light. It ...
... Trikaldrishti is now being developed on the principle of affirmation, ie everything is accepted as a fact, only the precise incidence & value of the fact has to be disengaged from the rude & inaccurate impression on the sensational mind. The importance of the unfulfilled tendency, intention or impulse physical, vital, mental or supramental, conscious, subconscious or super-conscious, is being emphasised its... dissatisfaction still assail the Adhara even though Paramatman has been realised, owing to the Brahman being identified with the ego-world in the environmental intellect. This is due to the persistence of Avidya, there, that is of the sense life & the imperfect activity of the Vijnana.. Conscious[ness] reflected in the sense life is subject to ignorance & unrest which may become grief. This sortilege... Ananda. But the personal Anandamaya Purusha is only occasionally manifest. 7 April 1914 The Anandamaya Saguna becomes more & more immanent in all objects, & what is more difficult in all beings, to the conscious vision. The vision of all movements of sensation as forms & vikaras of Ananda-Chit-Sat is now fixed, as also the comprehensive Ananda-Akasha in which all things move, & of actions as vikaras ...
... . a something: a way of being. 67.211 Now that the cells are becoming conscious, they very much wonder what's the use of all this? “How should things truly be? What's our function, our utility, our basis? What's the divine way of being? What will be the difference?...” And a very subtle perception of a way of being that could be luminous, harmonious. That way of being is still quite indefinable;... was horrifying. And not because I was being buried alive: it was because my body was conscious. It was considered “dead” by everybody since the heart had stopped beating — yet it was conscious. It was a horrifying experience.... I showed all the signs of death, that is, the heart wasn't working anymore, nothing was working — and I was conscious. It was conscious. We must... we must warn them not to... be of great interest to the physicists. ... All possible colours are combined without being mixed together, and combined in luminous dots. Everything is as though made up of this. And it seems to be the true mode of being — I am not yet completely sure, but at any rate it's a far more conscious mode of being. I see it all the time: with eyes open, or eyes closed, all the time. It gives a strange ...
... the following by way of reply : "Firstly, when the psychic awakens you grow conscious of your own soul, you know your true being. You no longer commit the mistake of identifying yourself with the mental or the vital being, you do not mistake them for the soul. Secondly, when it is awakened, the psychic being gives the Sadhaka the true Bhakti, devotion, for God or for the Guru. That devotion... sense-perception. All the senses are everywhere. The ancients knew this truth. One can see from everywhere in the body. In the normal human being the different senses become organised : for example, the eye or seeing. But all cells are capable of being conscious. Page 61 Disciple : But to what is due the phenomenon demonstrated by Dr. Joules Romain ? Sri Aurobindo : ... everything in it, but when it can't bring it forward it is called weak. Disciple : Is the psychic being the same as what is called Atman – the Self? Sri Aurobindo : The Atman generallymeans what you apply in English by the word "Spirit". It is self-existent, conscious, theānandamaya Being, the Purusha. The Atman is the same in all; it is that which is behind all the manifestation of Nature ...
... with human beings and says: "If we wish to discern the phenomenon of spirit in its entirety, we must educate our eyes to perceiving collective realities.... Like drops of water scattered in the sand and subjected to the same pressure, that of the layer to which they belong; like electrical charges distributed along a single conductor and subjected to the same potential; so conscious beings are in truth... Omega Point pulling towards a future in which a super-organic super-conscious unification will take place on earth of a mankind converging upon a "Soul of the world" 45 that is both a Divine Centre and a Divine Milieu, a God who is, as Rideau 46 tells us in a phrase from Teilhard, "complete in himself while for us he is continually being born" or, as Rideau 47 puts it in his own words, a God whose "eternity... disappear; the road becomes level, and movement becomes possible between the two poles of the universe, the conscious and the unconscious. If the cosmos were basically material, it would be physically incapable of containing man. Therefore, we may conclude... that it is in its inner being made of spiritual stuff." 22 Here we may remark that Teilhard goes beyond what Wildiers, in his Foreword ...
... 22 December 1914 Intensity of the Krishnadarshana in all beings, (Krishna & Kali, not yet KrishnaKali in human beings). Krishnakali-darshana intensity begins in things & animals. It has begun also in human beings. Also pervading the extension of the Brahman in Akasha, Vayu etc— It is the full joy & plenitude of the conscious existence illuminating also the inert & the void. The... it necessary to recuperate itself from the strain which the pranic parts of the body feel less & less but the physical still consciously or subconsciously undergoes. The Nine Affirmations have now again to be considered It is evident that IV-VII are being completed first. The tertiary dasya is perfect in the body and perfecting in the mind & prana and there is a firm though not always... Anandamaya Lilamaya Krishna in the Brahmadrishti as the continent, cause, lord & Purusha of all the conscious activity— That is to say, the relation now established personally has to be seen as the Truth in all others & in the universe in general. The eighth & ninth affirmations are still being prepared for their effectivity, but are not yet fully realised in consciousness or Page 702 ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.