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... plane. It takes there in the figure of the story a double form of a personal and a political struggle, the personal a conflict between typical and representative personalities embodying the greater ethical ideals of the Indian Dharma and others who are embodiments of Asuric egoism and self-will and misuse of the Dharma, the political a battle in which the personal struggle culminates, an international clash... Upanishads and of the great philosophies are brought in continually and sometimes given new developments, as in the Gita; religious myth and tale and idea and teaching are made part of the tissue; the ethical ideals of the race are expressed or are transmuted into the shape of tale and episode as well as embodied in the figures of the story, Page 348 political and social ideals and institutions... like Rama and Sita, made so divinely and with such a revelation of reality as to become objects of enduring cult and worship, or like Hanuman, Lakshmana, Bharata the living human image of its ethical ideals; it has fashioned much of what is best and sweetest in the national character, and it has evoked and fixed in it those finer and exquisite yet firm soul tones and that more delicate humanity of ...

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... independence ushers in some new factors in international politics and contributes to the growth of collective life towards human unity. The Indian political movement has stressed the importance of ethical ideals; economical and political factors have been subordinated to them. It has put a new non-violent instrument in the hands of unarmed nations struggling to be free. Another fact worth noting is... in international life, quite disproportion- ate to her economic and military strength. It seems that the age of economic and military domination is passing from international life, and slowly, ethical ideals e. g. justice, equality, freedom, self-determination etc. are taking the place. Page 64 3. Up to the end of the 17th century nations defeated in War bad to face the ruin not only... England the movement of Vinoba should have found an echo under the leadership of intellectuals like Russel shows how the level of international life is rising from military and economic factors to ethical ideals. Values in international life are being transformed. The whole trend brings human unity nearer. THE POSSIBLE FORM OF UNITY OF MANKIND The question of the form that the unity ...

... swifter than thought, the Gods could not overtake It as It moved in front. While It standeth still, It outstrippeth others as they run. In It Matariswan ordereth the waters." I. The Root of Ethical Ideals Everything that has phenomenal existence, takes its stand on the Eternal and has reality only as a reflection in the pure mirror of His infinite existence. This is no less true of the affections... four the first two express in a few phrases the Vedantic philosophy of God and Cosmos as a necessary preliminary to the formation of a true and permanent ethical ideal. The close dependence of ethical ideals on the fundamental philosophy of the Eternal and Real to which they go back, is a law which the ancient Yogins had well understood. Therefore the Upanishad when it has to set forth an ethical rule ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad
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... images of a great culture." These epics give us the spiritual significance of individual and collective life from a strong and noble thought-power of a mind that has high social, political and ethical ideals Page 102 and is artistically delicate and refined. Savitri too offers a whole world of experience but it is altogether a new world in which the life of man, — in fact the ...

... activities of knowledge and reason and a wide intellectual curiosity, the activities of the cultivated aesthetic being, the activities of the enlightened will which make for character and high ethical ideals and a large human action, not to be governed by our lower or our average mentality but by truth and beauty and the self-ruling will is the ideal of a true culture and the beginning of an accomplished ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle
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... Arjuna's plea of sorrow, his plea of the recoil from slaughter, his plea of the sense of sin, his plea of the unhappy results of his action, are answered according to the highest knowledge and ethical ideals to which his race and age had attained. It is the creed of the Aryan fighter. "Know God," it says, "know thyself, help man; protect the Right, do without fear or weakness or faltering thy work ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
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... human nature were given a restricted field, confined in a sort of lists so as to do the minimum amount of harm to the general life of the race, while at the same time by being subjected to high ethical ideals and every possible rule of humanity and chivalry the function of war was obliged to help in ennobling and elevating instead of brutalising those who performed it. It must be remembered that it ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
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... Dharma A worse result was a certain fall from the high ideal of the Dharma. In the struggle of kingdom with kingdom for supremacy, a habit of Machiavellian statecraft replaced the nobler ethical ideals of the past; aggressive ambition was left without any sufficient spiritual or moral check and there was a coarsening of the national mind in the ethics of politics and government. The signs of ...

... ponder over these difficult problems, we are led to discover that the moral nature of the human being is not the last and the highest component. Neither religious doctrines nor formulations of ethical ideals correspond to the highest demands that human beings are capable of. There is, it will be found, a divine being in us that can be directly contacted by the pursuit of spirituality and by the methods ...

... disciplined force, strong helpfulness and chivalrous nobility for which the warrior's life pursued under the stress of a high ideal gives a field and opportunities.... Being subjected to high ethical ideals and brutalising those who per- formed it.... It is war of this kind and under these conditions that the Gita had in view, war considered as an inevitable part of human life, but so restricted ...

... images of a great culture". These epics give us the spiritual significance of individual and collective life from a strong and noble thought power of a mind that has high social, political and ethical ideals and is artistically delicate and refined. Sāvitrī too offers a whole world of experience but it is altogether a new world in which the life of man,— in fact the whole view of the cosmos,—undergoes ...

... the people. A worse result was a certain fall from the high ideal of the Dharma. In the struggle of kingdom with kingdom for supremacy a habit of Machiavellian statecraft replaced the nobler ethical ideals of the past, aggressive ambition was left without any sufficient spiritual or moral check and there was a coarsening of the national mind in the ethics of politics and government already evidenced ...

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... images of a great culture." These epics give us the spiritual significance of individual and collective life from a strong and noble thought-power of a mind that has high social, political and ethical ideals and is artistically delicate and refined. Savitri too offers us a whole world of experience, but it is altogether a Page 486 new world in which the life of man — in fact ...

... activities of knowledge and reason and a wide intellectual curiosity, the activities of the cultivated aesthetic being, the activities of the enlightened will which make for character and high ethical ideals and a large Page 282 human action, not to be governed by our lower or our average mentality but by truth and beauty and the self-ruling will is the ideal of a true culture and the ...

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... ponder over these difficult problems, we are led to discover that the moral nature of the human being is not the last and the highest component. Neither religious doctrines nor formulations of ethical ideals correspond to the highest demands that human beings are capable of. There is, it will be found, a divine being in us that can be directly contacted by the pursuit of spirituality and by the methods ...

... barbarism and Philistinism. It must develop activities of knowledge and reason and a wide intellectual curiosity, activities of enlightened will which make for Page 100 character and high ethical ideals and a large human action, governed by truth and beauty and self-ruling will. This is the ideal of -a true culture and the beginning of an accomplished humanity. This strategy by which this ...

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... While awaiting the day when that would be realized, ancient Indian civilization imposed conditions on the conduct of war so as to assure the minimum harm to the general life of the race. High ethical ideals and every possible rule of humanity and chivalry were exacted from the warrior. War of this kind and under these conditions is what the Gita envisaged. War is considered an inevitable part of ...

... figures like Rama and Sita, made so divinely and with such a revelation of reality as to become objects of enduring cult and worship, or like Hanuman, Lakshmana, Bharata the living human image of its ethical ideals; it has fashioned much of what is best and sweetest in the national character, and it has evoked and fixed in it those finer and exquisite yet firm soul-tones and that more delicate humanity of ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Rama
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... Aphorisms. Page 104 Decline and degradation. Yes. Given human nature and its tendency towards the downward pull, a fall from the high ideal of the Dharma was inevitable. The nobler ethical ideals gave way to a habit of Machiavellian statecraft, leading to a coarsening of the national mind in the ethics of politics. A total lack of political principle gave full force to the unbridled egoism ...

... this preparatory endeavour consists mainly in a spiritualising of the ethical supported by the psychical mind—or rather it brings in the spiritual power and purity to aid these in enforcing their absolute claim and to impart a greater authority than life allows to the ethical ideal of right and truth of conduct or the psychic ideal of love and sympathy and oneness. These things are helped to some highest... force of injustice conquers, the individual will still have preserved his virtue and vindicated by his example the highest ideal. On the other hand a more insistent extreme of the inner spiritual direction, passing beyond this struggle between social duty and an absolutist ethical ideal, is apt to take the ascetic turn and to point away from life and all its aims and standards of action towards another... place,—for it insists on the performance of the social duty, the following of the dharma for the man who has to take his share in the common action, accepts Ahinsa as part of the highest spiritual-ethical ideal and recognises the ascetic renunciation as a way of spiritual salvation. And yet it goes boldly beyond all these conflicting positions; greatly daring, it justifies all life to the spirit as a ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
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... would be that the individual will still have preserved his virtue and vindicated by his example the highest ideals. In a third possible answer, one may advocate a more insistent extreme of the inner spiritual direction, passing beyond this struggle between social duty and an absolutist ethical ideal; one would then favour the ascetic turn which points to get away from life and all its aims and standards... place; it insists on the performance of social duty, the following of the dharma for the man who has to take his share in the common action; it accepts ahimsa as a part of the highest spiritual-ethical ideal; it recognises also the ascetic renunciation as an effective way, if not as a solution of the problem, yet as a way of coming out of the problem. But the Gita goes boldly beyond these conflicting... raise some of the deepest questions that compel an answer at the deepest level. The answer that we find in the Bhagavadgita is, therefore, important not merely in the light of general philosophy or ethical doctrine, but it has also a bearing upon a practical crisis and the application of the highest knowledge to human life. The reason why the Bhagavadgita reads almost as fresh and still in its real ...

... would be that the individual will still have preserved his virtue and vindicated by his example the highest ideals. In a third possible answer, one may advocate a more insistent extreme of the inner Spiritual direction, passing beyond this struggle between social duty and an absolutist ethical ideal; one would then favour the ascetic turn which points to get away from life and all its aims and standards... place; it insists on the performance of social duty, the following of the dharma for the man who has to take his share in the common action; it accepts ahimsa as a part of the highest spiritual-ethical ideal; it ___________________________ ¹ Bhagavadgita, Chapter XVI.2 Page 160 recognises also the ascetic renunciation as an effective way, if not as a solution of the problem... raise some of the deepest questions that compel an answer at the deepest level. The answer that we find in the Bhagavadgita is, therefore, important not merely in the light of general philosophy or ethical doctrine, but it has also a bearing upon a practical crisis and the application of the highest knowledge to human life. The reason why the Bhagavadgita reads almost as fresh and still in its ...

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... earth is at best an ethical ideal of righteousness and Page 372 piety, carrying no implications of a collective ascent of mankind to a higher than the present mental level of consciousness and a corresponding descent of any higher Truth-Consciousness into humanity. The idea of Satya Yuga, as it prevails in India, is also a rather vague anticipation of a cyclic reign of Truth and Justice... significance.” That the ideal of such a Manifestation with its implicits of divine perfection and fulfilment in general humanity, as an inevitable evolutionary consummation, is a new one cannot be gainsaid. There is no evidence of its existence either in the traditions of Indian spirituality or in Western religious and philosophic literature. The Christian ideal of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth... Aurobindo's ideal of the divine Manifestation and the Divine Life on earth claims originality, in as much as it is "a thing to be achieved that has not yet been achieved, not yet clearly visualised, even though it is one natural but still secret outcome of all the past spiritual endeavour.” What Sri Aurobindo envisages as the aim of his Integral Yoga—for he holds up not only the sublime ideal, but gives ...

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... earth is at best an ethical ideal of righteousness and piety, carrying no implications of a collective ascent of mankind to a higher than the present mental level of consciousness and a corresponding descent of any higher Truth-Consciousness into humanity. The idea of Satyam Yuga, as it prevails in India, is also a rather vague anticipation of a cyclic reign of Truth and Justice ending the sway... significance." That the ideal of such a Manifestation with its implicits of divine perfection and fulfillment in general humanity, as an inevitable evolutionary consummation, is a new one cannot be gainsaid. There is no evidence of its existence either in the traditions of Indian spirituality or in Western religious and philosophic Idealism. The Christian ideal of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth... small section of humanity, has never been able to base itself on any definite truth of spiritual experience or any comprehensive vision of the purpose and possibilities of evolution. Sri Aurobindo's ideal of the divine Manifestation and the Divine Life on earth claims originality, in as much as it is "a thing to be achieved that has not yet been achieved, not yet clearly visualised, even though it ...

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... action brought face to face through that action in its highest and most violent crisis with the problem of human life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection. Arjuna is the fighter in the chariot with the divine Krishna as his charioteer. In the Veda also we have this image of the human soul and the divine riding in one chariot through... at least of the Puranas is plainly symbolic, full of figures and concrete representations of things that lie behind the veil, but the Gita is written in plain terms and professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual difficulties which the life of man raises, and it will not do to go behind this plain language and thought and wrest them to the service of our fancy. But there is this much of truth... morals and loss of the purity of race will be engendered, the eternal laws of the race and moral law of the family will be destroyed. Ruin of the race, the collapse of its high traditions, ethical degradation and hell for the authors of such a crime, these are the only practical results possible of this monstrous civil strife. "Therefore," cries Arjuna, casting down the divine bow and inexhaustible ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
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... idea, the ethical ideal, the greatness of ascetic self-mastery, and these too he makes a part of the beauty and interest of life and sees as admirable elements of its complete and splendid picture. All his work is of this tissue. His great literary epic, the "House of Raghu", treats the story of a line of ancient kings as representative of the highest religious and ethical culture and ideals of the race... narrative and drama and love poem. He has seen it all and filled his mind with it and never fails to bring it before us vivid with all the wealth of description of which he is capable. Her ethical and domestic ideals, the life of the ascetic in the forest or engaged in meditation and austerity upon the mountains and the life of the householder, her familiar customs Page 98 and social... p. x. 26.It may be of interest to mention here how eminent Rāmāyana scholars of foreign origin like Brockington of Edinburgh University have laid a special emphasis on the pre-eminently ethical aspect of Rāma's conduct. Cf. Prof. J.L. Brockington's The Relevance of the Ramayana, 3rd Surendra Lai Kundu-Sarojini Kundu Memorial lecture, delivered at Calcutta on 18th December 1993. "Rama's ...

... spiritual and religious idea. The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more... stage of human society is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal become more important than the ideal, the body or even the Page 11 clothes more important than the person. Thus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold order,—birth, economic function, religious ritual and sacrament, family custom,—each began to ... faithful to its own character. This rigidity once established, the maintenance of the ethical type passed from the first place to a secondary or even a quite tertiary importance. Once the very basis of the system, it came now to be a not indispensable crown or pendent tassel, insisted upon indeed by the thinker and the ideal code-maker but not by the actual rule of society or its practice. Once ceasing to ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle
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... thought of India conscious of this fourfold type of active human personality and nature built out of it the four types of the Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, each with its spiritual turn, ethical ideal, suitable upbringing, fixed function in society and place in the evolutionary scale of the spirit. As always tends to be the case when we too much externalise and mechanise the more subtle truths... a more and more mild, lofty, impersonalised and universalised personality. This is the ideal character and soul-power of the Brahmana, the priest of knowledge. If it is not there in all its sides, we have the imperfections or perversions of the type, a mere intellectuality or curiosity for ideas without ethical or other elevation, a narrow concentration on some kind of intellectual activity without... and use, bent upon efficient exploitation of the world or its surroundings, but well capable too of practical philanthropy, humanity, ordered benevolence, orderly and ethical by rule but without any high distinction of the finer ethical spirit, a mind of the middle levels, not straining towards the heights, not great to break and create noble moulds Page 745 of life, but marked by capacity ...

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... idea, the ethical ideal, the greatness of ascetic self-mastery, and these too he makes a part of the beauty and interest of life and sees as admirable elements of its complete and splendid picture. All his work is of this tissue. His great literary epic, the "House of Raghu", treats the story of a line of ancient kings as representative of the highest religious and ethical culture and ideals of the race... but not the deeper soul of these things so much as their outer character and body. There is much ethical and religious thought of a sufficiently high ideal kind, and it is quite sincere but only intellectually sincere, and therefore there is no impression of the deeper religious feeling or the living ethical power that we get in the Mahabharata and Ramayana and in most of the art and literature of India... narrative and drama and love poem. He has seen it all and filled his mind with it and never fails to bring it before us vivid with all the wealth of description of which he is capable. Her ethical and domestic ideals, the life of the ascetic in the forest or engaged in meditation and austerity upon the mountains and the life of the householder, her familiar customs and social standards and Page 360 ...

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... first and most pressingly the desires, interests, instincts of the vital being find themselves cast into a Page 402 sharp and very successful conflict with the ideal of Right and the demand of the higher law. Right ethical action comes therefore to seem to man at this stage the one thing binding upon him among the many standards raised by the mind, the moral claim the one categorical imperative... very doubtful moral value, gives to it an imperative sanction of right and slips into the crude mass or superimposes on it, but still as a part of one common and equal code, the true things of the ethical ideal. It appeals to the vital being, his desires, hopes and fears, incites man to virtue by the hope of rewards and the dread of punishment, imitating in this device the method of his crude and fumbling... of all energies and includes a conscience, a rectitude in all things, a right law of thought and knowledge, of aesthesis, of all other human activities and not only of our ethical action. But yet in the notion of Dharma the ethical element has tended always to predominate and even to monopolise the concept of Right which man creates,—because ethics is concerned with action of life and his dealing with ...

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... symbolic age that created it, the myth was humanised in the "typal" period of the Mahabharata. As retold by Vyasa, it became a force for the formation of character and the inculcation of a social and ethical ideal. Transmitted, next, to the conventional age of Indian society, it underwent a paradoxical conversion. Vyasa's Savitri, whose beauty and "flaming strength" (tejas) no prince dared to claim, who... mind. His passing comments in "Notes on the Mahabharata" are concerned with style rather than with substance. They only suggest that for him the essence of the story lay not in the intellectual and ethical content of Savitri's dialogue with Yama, but in "the power of a woman's silent love". This is the principal element in common between Vyasa's version and Sri Aurobindo's. The latter's originality lies... Vyasa's dialogue does Savitri openly defy the authority of Yama or challenge the established order of things. Her success in winning boons from the God of Death is a tribute to her qualities as an ideal Kshatriya woman. But her personal victory seems only an isolated exception to the universal law of life's subjection to the arbitrary intervention of death. It offers little hope that the law will be ...

... and ordering of the ethical nature of man. The ethical aspect of life, contrary to the amazingly ignorant observation of a certain type of critics, attracted a quite enormous amount of attention, occupied the greater part of Indian thought and writing not devoted to the things of pure knowledge and of the spirit and was so far pushed that there is no ethical formation or ideal which does not reach... reach in it its highest conception and a certain divine absolutism of ideal practice. Indian thought took for granted,—though there are some remarkable speculations to the contrary,—the ethical nature of man and the ethical law of the world. It considered that man was justified in satisfying his desires, since that is necessary for the satisfaction and expansion of life, but not in obeying the dictates... to the intellectual, ethical and religious development of the being. It is notable that the two vast Indian epics have been considered as much as Dharma shastras as great historico-mythic epic narratives, itihāsas . They are, that is to say, noble, vivid and puissant pictures of life, but they utter and breathe throughout their course the law and ideal of a great and high ethical and religious spirit ...

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... action brought face to face through that action in its highest and most violent crisis with the problem of human life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection.” 11 When putting the teachings of the Gita into practice, Sri Aurobindo himself was constantly guided by Sri Krishna whom afterwards he declared to have been the Master of his... of hatred towards the British colonial regime, Sri Aurobindo made his and the Mother’s standpoint clear: “I affirm again to you most strongly that this is the Mother’s war … It is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realize itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind ...

... following stages. “The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more... conventional stage of human society “is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal, become more important than the ideal, the body or even the clothes more important than the person. Thus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold order, – birth, economic function, religious ritual and sacrament, family custom, – each began to exaggerate... leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life. “This typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the human mind even when the stage itself is passed. The principal active contribution it leaves behind when it is dead is the idea of social honour” 47 – the honour ...

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... who discerneth, in whom all creatures have become Himself, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have sorrow in whose eyes all are one?" In these two stanzas the Upanishad formulates the ethical ideal of the Karmayogin. It has set forth as its interpretation of life the universality of the Brahman as the sole reality and true self of things; all things exist only in Him and He abides in all as... it their business and pleasure to do good to all creatures, not only all men, but all creatures,—the widest possible ideal of universal charity and beneficence. To do as one would be done by, to love your enemies and those who hate you, to return good for evil are the first ethical inferences from the Vedantic teaching; they were fully expressed in their highest and noblest form by Buddhism five hundred... validate its scheme of morals and an aim which will provide man the stimulus he needs, if he is to surmount his anti-ethical instincts and either subdue them or eradicate. Man is not a purely ethical being; he has immoral and nonmoral impulses which are primarily stronger than his ethical tendencies. To check the former, to liberate, strengthen and train the latter is the first object of all practical ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad
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... impose its own forms on the life of the body and the world outside; but this can be accepted only as a transitional stage and not as our soul's ideal or the ultimate goal of the passage. For the same reason the ethical solution is insufficient; for an ethical rule merely puts a bit in the mouth of the wild horses of Nature and exercises over them a difficult and partial control, but it has no power... to those around us. It is indeed by the religio-ethical sense that the law of universal goodwill or universal compassion or of love and service to the neighbour, the Vedantic, the Buddhistic, the Christian ideal, was created; only by a sort of secular refrigeration extinguishing the fervour of the religious element in it could the humanitarian ideal disengage itself and become the highest plane of... the universal and transcendent Eternal. Nor can the religio-ethical ideal be a sufficient guide,—for this is a compromise or compact of mutual concessions for mutual Page 152 support between a religious urge which seeks to get a closer hold on earth by taking into itself the higher turns of ordinary human nature and an ethical urge which hopes to elevate itself out of its own mental hardness ...

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... Ramayana are itihasa, that is to say, they are "an ancient historical or legendary tradition turned to creative use as a significant mythus or tale expressive of some spiritual or religious or ethical or ideal meaning and thus formative of the mind of the people." Valmiki and Vyasa indeed shaped the minds of the Indian people. They were architects and sculptors of life. Their epics contain a deep reflection... something remote from real life. On the contrary, this is a universal story containing some of the deepest truths about life. The story is about two human beings having immense qualities, placed in ideal circumstances: the king Nala and the princess Damayanti. It starts with a very pure love between them which is put to the test by the gods themselves, and then their marriage followed by a life of harmony... ignorance. For the central idea in the poem is that of the spirit of degeneracy, the genius of the iron age: Page 15 this evil being suddenly takes hold of a man who till that day had been an ideal of purity and loyalty, brings all kinds of calamities into his life, but eventually is over powered by a steadfast conjugal love. Nothing more tonic and refreshing for the soul than this tale of two ...

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... spiritual life, all it offered was basically a path founded on the philosophical concept of the brotherhood of mankind and the ethical ideal of service to humanity. There was a yearning in me, as yet unformulated, for something deeper than the philosophical light and the ethical path I had found in Theosophy. What my inner being seemed to be asking for was a spiritual path leading to self-discovery and... a little of the inner being escapes through these centres [of consciousness 3 ] into the outer life, but that little is the best part of ourselves and responsible for our art, poetry, philosophy, ideals, religious aspirations, efforts at knowledge and perfection. 4 I understood the significance of the period of agnosticism through which I passed: it served to disencumber me of certain beliefs ...

... us evil and so to re-form our being, to reconstitute and shape ourselves into the image of an ideal, is a more profound ethical motive, because it comes nearer to the true issue; it rests on the sound idea that our life is a becoming and that there is something which we have to become and be. But the ideals constructed by the human mind are selective and relative; to shape our nature rigidly according... method adopted by the mind of man through the ages has been always a principle of selection and rejection, and this has taken the forms of a religious sanction, a social or moral rule of life or an ethical ideal. But this is an empirical means which does not touch the root of the problem because it has no vision of the cause and origin of the malady it attempts to cure; it deals with the symptoms, but deals... or an ethical system founded on reason or on an aesthetic, emotional or hedonistic basis. Religion brings in her sanctions; there is a word or law of God that enjoins righteousness even though Nature permits or stimulates its opposite,—or perhaps Truth and Righteousness are themselves God and there is no other Divinity. But, behind all this practical or rational enforcement of the human ethical instinct ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... "What is the way?" "Three great ideals have come up in the forefront of humanity, and leaders of law must take full advantage of them and utilise them for creating the alchemy that humanity needs today Page 124 at this critical hour. These ideals are: the ideal of human unity, the ideal of harmony of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the ideal of self-determination. We do not have... religious custom, its law of honour, ethical role, suitable education and training, type of character, family ideal and discipline. It is true that the facts of life did not always correspond to the ideal but there was a constant and strenuous endeavour to keep up, as much as possible, a real correspondence. The importance of this attempt and of the cultural ideal and atmosphere it created in the training... example the highest ideal. 'The second possibility would be to advocate an extreme inner spiritual direction which would be apt to take the ascetic turn and to point away from the life and its aims and standards of action towards some celestial or supra-cosmic state. Under this possibility one would pass beyond the struggle between social duty and an absolutist ethical ideal or spiritualised ethics ...