... System of Vedic Psychology [A] Prefatory The successes of European science have cast the shadow of their authority & prestige over the speculations of European scholarship; for European thought is, in appearance, a serried army marching to world-conquest and we who undergo the yoke of its tyranny, we, who paralysed by that fascination and overborne by that domination, have almost lost... thinking for ourselves, receive without distinction all its camp followers or irregular volunteers as authorities to whom we must needs submit.We reflect in our secondhand opinions the weak parts of European thought equally with the strong; we do not distinguish between those of its ideas which eternal Truth has ratified and those which have merely by their ingenuity and probability captivated for a short... s of European Science (its discoveries, not its intellectual generalisations) belong to the first category; the greater part of the conclusions of European scholarship to the second. The best European thought has itself no illusions on this score. One of the greatest of European scholars & foremost of European thinkers, Ernest Renan, after commencing his researches in Comparative Philology with the ...
... these are outflowings from the same source. The materialistic view of the world is now rapidly collapsing and with it the materialistic statement of the evolution theory must disappear. Modern European thought progresses with a vertiginous rapidity. If it is Teutonic in its fidelity of observation and its tendency to laborious systematisation, it has also another side, Celtic-Hellenic, a side of suppleness... though by a higher revelatory Knowledge they may be foreseen. This element increases as we climb the ladder of existence; its scope is greater in Life than in Matter, freer in Mind than in Life. European thought already tends to posit behind all manifest activity an Unmanifest called according to intellectual predilection either the Inconscient or the Subconscient which contains more and in a way unseizable ...
... some of his ideas influenced such profound and fruitful thinkers as Plato, the Stoics, the Neo-platonists. But in his defect also he is a forerunner; it illustrates the great deficiency of later European thought, such of it at least as has not been profoundly influenced by Asiatic religions or Asiatic mysticism. I have tried to show how often his thought touches and is almost identical with the Vedic... Self and of Brahman; besides the universal consciousness active in divine knowledge, besides the universal force active in divine will, it saw the universal delight active in divine love and joy. European thought, following the line of Heraclitus' thinking, has fixed itself on reason and on force and made them the principles towards whose perfection our being has to aspire. Force is the first aspect of ...
... importance to Sri Aurobindo because this is where he learned French (English was his "mother tongue") and discovered a spontaneous affinity for France: There was an attachment to English and European thought and literature, but not to England as a country; I had no ties there.... If there was attachment to a European land as a second country, it was intellectually and emotionally to one not seen or... escape this voracious adolescent (except cricket, which held as little interest for him as Sunday school.) Shelley and "Prometheus Unbound," the French poets, Homer, Aristophanes, and soon all of European thought – for he quickly came to master enough German and Italian to read Dante and Goethe in the original – peopled a solitude of which he has said nothing. He never sought to form relationships, while ...
... reaction. The late Upadhyay was the type and champion of this feature of the national movement. He was never weary of harping on the necessity of stripping from ourselves every rag of borrowed European thought and habits and becoming intensely, uncompromisingly Indian. When we put aside all the mannerisms of that strong personality and seek its kernel, we find that this was his message and the meaning ...
... whole Continent. We shall therefore expect to find, as we do find, that Vedantic Evolution and Monism are very different things from Evolution and Monism as European Science understands them. European thought seizes on Evolution as manifested in the outward facts of our little earth and follows it into its details with marvellous minuteness, accuracy and care. The Vedanta slurs over this part of the ...
... herself in the new light she has been able to seize and admitting the truths of the spirit and the aim at a divine change in man and his life, we in India are to take up the cast-off clothes of European thought and life and to straggle along in the old rut of her wheels, always taking up today what she had cast off yesterday. We should not allow our cultural independence to be paralysed by the accident ...
... The meanings given below apply to the terms as used in this book. the Absolute — the supreme reality of that transcendent Being which we call God. Indian thought calls it Brahman, European thought the Absolute because it is a self-existent which is absolved of all bondage to relativities. Advaitin — a Vedantic Monist. Akshara — the Immobile, the Immutable. akṣitaṃ ...
... Brahman comes first to the conclusion that "Matter is Brahman" and only afterwards discovers Life that is Brahman, — so rising from the materialistic to the vitalistic theory of existence as European thought is now rising, — then Mind that is Brahman and then Knowledge that is Brahman, — so rising to the sensational and the idealistic realisations of the truth — and at last Bliss of Existence that ...
... thing itself, and trying to piece them together. Mind cannot arrive at Truth; it can only make some constructed figure that tries to represent it or a combination of figures. At the end of European thought, therefore, there must always be Agnosticism, declared or implicit. Intellect, if it goes sincerely to its own end, has to return and give this report: "I cannot know; there is, or at least ...
... Being which we call God, something without which all that we see or are conscious of as existing, could not have been, could not for a moment remain in existence. Indian thought calls it Brahman, European thought the Absolute be cause it is a self-existent which is absolved of all bondage to relativities. For all relatives can only exist by something which is the truth of them all and the source and continent ...
... the thing itself, and trying to piece them together. Mind cannot arrive at Truth; it can only make some constructed figure that tries to represent it or a combination of figures. At the end of European thought, therefore, there must always be Agnosticism, declared or implicit. Intellect, if it goes sincerely to its own end, has to return and give this report: "I cannot know; there is or at least it ...
... it is supporting itself, of whom it is a shadow; the shadow has to disappear and by its disappearance reveal the spirit's unclouded substance. That substance is the self of the man called in European thought the Monad, in Indian philosophy, Jiva or Jivatman, the living entity, the self of the living creature. This Jiva is not the Page 360 mental ego-sense constructed by the workings of ...
... the front of God; he had not the dharanam, the soul-power to support that tremendous vision. The story well illuminates the character of materialism generally and to its aggressive modern form, European thought & civilisation, it applies with a quite overwhelming appositeness. But it seems to me that the average Vedantist, too, has only seen, for his part, the crown of the Lord's head and the average ...
... the Brahman comes first to the conclusion that "Matter is Brahman" and only afterwards discovers Life that is Brahman,—so rising from the materialistic to the vitalistic theory of existence as European thought is now rising,—then Mind that is Brahman and then Knowledge that is Brahman,—so rising to the sensational and the idealistic realisations of the truth—and at last Bliss of Existence that is Brahman ...
... out the way. The English language and literature is practically the only window the Indian mind, with the narrow and meagre and yet burdensome education given to it, possesses into the world of European thought and culture; but at least as possessed at present, it is a painfully small and insufficient opening. English poetry for all but a few of us stops short with Tennyson and Browning, when it does ...
... he cast one last look at his all but adopted country and thus uttered his "Envoi". No, the statement was of a transition from one culture to another. There was an attachment to English and European thought and literature, but not to England as a country; he had no ties there and did not make England his adopted country, as Manmohan did for a time. If there was attachment to a European land as a ...
... the old moral ideas and habits and substituted for them a superficial respectability; intellectually, we prided ourselves on the tricking out of our minds in a few leavings, scraps and strays of European thought at the sacrifice of an immense and eternal heritage. Never was an education more remote from all that education truly denotes____ British rule, Britain's civilising mission in India has been ...
... influence. Some prominent national workers in India seem to me to be incarnations of some European force here. They may not be incarnations, but they may be strongly influenced by European thought. For instance, Gandhi is a European—truly, a Russian Christian in an Indian body. And there are some Indians in European bodies! Gandhi a European! Yes. When the Europeans say ...
... referring to his poem "Envoi", ² stated that it showed his attachment to England. Sri Aurobindo replied, writing of himself in the third person: "There was an attachment to English and European thought and literature, but not to England as a country; he had no ties there and did not make England his adopted country, as Manmohan did for a time." ³ Manmohan's letters breathe high patriotism ...
... the thing itself and trying to piece them together. Mind cannot arrive at Truth; it can only make some constructed figure that tries to represent it or a combination of figures. At the end of European thought, therefore, there must always be Agnosticism, declared or implicit. Intellect, if it goes sincerely to its own end, has to return and give this report: "I cannot know, there is, or at least it ...
... generated no new or living and evolving culture in the nations that spoke it; even so great a force as Christianity could not give it a new life. The times during which it was an instrument of European thought, were precisely those in which that thought was heaviest, most traditional and least fruitful. A rapid and vigorous new life only grew up when the languages which appeared out of the detritus ...
... humanism, poetic, artistic, many-sided, sounding by the poetic reason the ascertainable truth of God and man and Nature. That was Page 102 the line followed by the main stream of European thought and culture, and to that too English poetry had eventually to turn in the intellectual fullness of the nineteenth century. It was already the indistinct and half-conscious drift of the slow t ...
... fame for thinking, a great multitude of the most famous names in science, but no national scientific culture. Still in these fields there has been remarkable accomplishment and the influence on European thought has been frequently considerable and sometimes capital. But when finally we turn to the business of practical life, there is an unqualified preeminence: in mechanical science and invention, in ...
... heart also. At any rate the millennium of Tertullian is out of date. But still it is the Christian ideal, the Syrian interpretation of the truth and not the truth itself, which dominates the best European thought and the Christian ideal is the ideal of the united family . Page 141 THE STUDENT Surely it is a noble ideal. THE GURU Very noble and we have it among ourselves in a noble couplet ...
... right use of the divine law of our being. Connected with this triple mode of the Self is that distinction which Indian philosophy has drawn between the Qualitied and the Qualitiless Brahman and European thought has made between the Personal and the Impersonal God. The Upanishad indicates clearly enough the relative nature of this opposition, when it speaks of the Supreme as the "Qualitied who is without ...
... of Christianity". 36 We shall go to the heart of the matter if we glance at Teilhard's attitude to Spinoza, the arch-pantheist in Catholic eyes, the greatest religio-philosophical danger in European thought to Christianity. Wanting to avoid for the "consummated Christ" of the Pleroma at the world's end "what could be read into the language censored in some mystics (Eckhart, for example)", he 37 ...
... curious intellectual humanism, poetic, artistic, many-sided, sounding by the poetic reason the ascertainable truth of God and man and Nature. To that eventually, following the main stream of European thought and culture, English poetry turned for a time in the intellectual fullness of the nineteenth century; that too was more indistinctly the half-conscious drift of the slow transitional movement ...
... is discarded. This kind of national teaching is not provided in Government schools. In those schools the tender minds of our students are overburdened with the European way of thinking. But European thought and the European way of life are quite different from our thought and our way of life. It is true, of course, that when we speak of the development of our own country, we cannot ignore the progress ...
... the old moral ideas & habits and substituted for them a superficial respectability; intellectually, we prided ourselves [on] the tricking out of our minds in a few leavings, scraps and strays of European thought at the sacrifice of an immense and eternal heritage. Never was an education more remote from all that education truly denotes; instead of giving the keys to the vast mass of modern knowledge, ...
... much further than we are prepared to go and claims for Nationalism that it is the highest of all syntheses. This is a conclusion we are not prepared to accept; it is, we know, the highest which European thought has arrived at so far as that thought has expressed itself in the actual life and ideals of the average European. In Positivism Europe has attempted to arrive at a higher synthesis, the synthesis ...
... unending progress thus emerges as a consequence of reflection upon the principles of plenitude and continuity.” 18 This open-ended view, in academic literature seldom associated with former European thought, was worded by the philosopher Viscount Bolingbroke as follows: “Shall we not be persuaded rather that as there is a gradation of sense and intelligence here from animal beings imperceptible to ...
... marks of a German road that would eventually lead to Hitler. An anonymous publicist, called “the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine”, wrote the Book of a Hundred Chapters in 1510, at a time that European thought, stirred up by the revolution of the Renaissance, was in total turmoil. (Luther would pin his ninety-five theses on the door of a church at Wittenberg in 1517.) This elderly fanatic, writes Norman ...
... saints. Nor can the parapsychological discoveries of present-day science in its unorthodox activity be satisfactorily attuned to Whitehead's philosophy. There are other names in contemporary European thought that provide more direct approaches to what is here left too metaphysicised away or else inadequately metaphysicised. Bergson is perhaps the most notable: he has brought in his later works his ...
... better pay it, I paid.' Although Sri Aurobindo lived in England for fourteen years, he had no feelings of regret at leaving. To a disciple he once wrote: 'There was an attachment to English and European thought and literature, but not to England as a country.... If there was attachment to a European land as a second country, it was intellectually and emotionally to one not seen or lived in in this life ...
... far-away childhood scenes, but a clear picture as well... of the formative influence of those first incidents on the unattractive, hypersensitive small boy that he was, and through him on the European thought of two centuries. " 2 In the last years of Rousseau's life his bitterness diminished. At that time he mote his most beautiful book, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, harking back to the ...
... too can translate faithfully, present and embody the reality beyond somewhat as it acutally is, in its native rhythm and figure and not diffracted and diffused through a hazy atmosphere. European thought, European philosophy particularly, moves under the aegis of the Mind. It takes its stand within the Mind and from there tries to reach out to truths and realities; and therefore, however far it ...
... people, who are prominent national worker's in India, seem to me to be incarnations of some European force here. Sri Aurobindo : May not be incarnations, but may be strongly influenced by European thought. For instance Mahatma is a European, – truly, a Russian Christian in India, and there are some Indians in European bodies ! Disciple : Mahatma a European ! Sri Aurobindo : Yes ; ...
... too can translate faithfully, present and embody the reality beyond somewhat as it actually is, in its native rhythm and figure and not diffracted and diffused through a hazy atmosphere. European thought, European philosophy particularly, moves under the aegis of the Mind. It takes its stand within the Mind and from there tries to reach out to truths and realities; and therefore, however far it ...
... Fourth Gospel... 'ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make thee free' is one common aspect of their message... he has created a synthesis between her past spiritual achievement and modem European thought, so that the future spiritual destiny of India and the future destiny of Europe are inescapably the same destiny.... We are at the turning-point in the spiritual history of man.... Because ...
... England, especially at so impressionable a period of his life, should have completely de-nationalised Sri Aurobindo. This was not how things worked, however; he no doubt grew attached to English and European thought and literature, but not to England or the West; he had no personal ties there. 13 On the contrary, he was happy to be back in India. When he stepped on the soil of India, "a vast calm descended ...
... was asserting itself under the aegis of foreign rule? Had not the fools and the Philistines, whose name was Legion - the monstrous products of a soulless education nourished on the rind of European thought - already begun to laugh at their country's past? And dared to condemn the wisdom of their ancestors? Was India to deform herself from a temple of God into one vast inglorious suburb of English ...
... such regret in leaving England, no attachment to the past or misgivings for the future. Few friendships were made in England and none very intimate .... There was an attachment to English and European thought and literature, but not to England as a country." Ara had no ties there and did not make England his adopted country, as his poet-brother Mano did for a time. "If there was attachment to a European ...
... The Ishopanishad speaks of the Vedic gods Sun – Surya and Agni, but you can see that the significance there is symbolic. Veda, Upanishad, Gita all are equally great. Disciple : The Europeans thought that it was not possible to believe that the Vedic Rishis were so advanced – specially in those primitive times. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, they are so satisfied when they found the historical ...
... had, but I thought that it was due to his turning towards Knowledge. His attraction towards Buddhism is understandable, because to the European rational mind its rationalism has an appeal. It was first through Buddhism that Europe came to and began to know India. Blavatsky founded Theosophy on Buddhism. Next they understand Shanker in Europe and for many years the Europeans thought there was ...
... ns while I was coming here. The next issue of the Baroda paper will bring the tidings. SRI AUROBINDO: Tidings of the next issue? (Laughter) PURANI: When I read of the Gaekwar touring Europe, I thought: how could the Rani accompany him? DR. MANILAL: The Gaekwar does not take her with him. SRI AUROBINDO: Why? DR. MANILAL: Well, Sir, she comes in his way. Nirodbaran said that a Chinese ...
... Marcel's short treatise Positions et Approches Concrètes du Mystère Ontologique has been a luminously seminal document for European thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. In the second half the most significant event so far for Europe's thought has been the publication of Le Phenomène humain (The Phenomenon of Man) by the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin... possible into herself the best that France can show, the answer will be all the . more intimate and strong. And once there is the answer from France, all Europe will echo it in the course of time. For, France is still the vital core of European civilisation. Hence, both from the standpoint of helping out in the cause of the Divine some of our receded powers and from the standpoint of accomplishing... language itself has immense potentialities. No student of the world's literature will dispute that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may ...
... large inspiration and guidance. Outside India too it is universally acknowledged as one of the world's great scriptures, although in Europe its thought is better understood than its secret of spiritual practice. What is it then that gives this vitality to the thought and the truth of the Gita? The central interest of the Gita's philosophy and Yoga is its attempt, the idea with which it sets out... utility to the human mind of the present day after the long ages that have elapsed since it was written and the great subsequent transformations of thought and experience? The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly... an ancient doctrine consists in the extent to which it naturally lends itself to such a treatment; for that means that whatever may have been the limitations or the obsolescences of the form of its thought, the truth of substance, the truth of living vision and experience on which its system was built is still sound and retains a permanent validity and significance. The Gita is a book that has worn ...
... and medieval European medical thought. Though the "bile," "wind" and "phlegm" of the Europeans are apparently descendants of the ancient Indian concepts, they were (and are) too often corrupted by overly literal interpretation. Tridosha is essentially a system of conceptualizing mind, body and their interaction in dynamic terms that cut across the usual categories of Western thought. Tridosha... has continued to be practiced without interruption during this period of time, its present form having been shaped primarily by the writers Charaka, Shushruta and Vag Bhata prior to 500 B.C. It is thought that this codification rep resents a transfer of oral tradition into written, and it is considered likely by historians that the spoken tradition dates back much further. The form and organization... vast and comprehensive and is not separated from pharmacology. Since no distinction is admitted between foods and drugs, herbal and mineral substances that are used in the preparation of food are thought to be equally important medicinally as those that are given separately. Tridosha Those few people who are familiar with the name of Ayurveda know that it is often taken to be synonymous ...
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