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English [2521]
A Centenary Tribute [18]
A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo [2]
A Greater Psychology [11]
A National Agenda for Education [1]
A Philosophy of Evolution for the Contemporary Man [3]
A Pilgrims Quest for the Highest and the Best [7]
A Scheme for The Education of Bengal [3]
A Vision of United India [6]
Adventures in Criticism [5]
Alexander the great [2]
Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic [19]
Among the Not So Great [3]
Ancient India in a New Light [2]
Arguments for the Existence of God [6]
Arjuna's Argument At Kurukshetra And Sri Krishna's Answers [2]
Aspects of Sri Aurobindo [14]
Aspiring Swan [1]
At the feet of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo [1]
Auroville references in Mother's Agenda [2]
Autobiographical Notes [8]
Bande Mataram [20]
Beyond Man [25]
Bhagavadgita and Contemporary Crisis [3]
Blake's Tyger [4]
Blessings of the Grace [1]
By The Body Of The Earth or The Sannyasin [1]
By The Way - Part II [4]
By The Way - Part III [3]
Chaitanya and Mira [3]
Champaklal Speaks [5]
Champaklal's Treasures [4]
Champaklal's Treasures - Edition-II [7]
Child, Teacher and Teacher Education [4]
Children's University [1]
Classical and Romantic [10]
Collected Plays and Stories [10]
Collected Poems [31]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 [39]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2 [26]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3 [19]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4 [15]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 5 [9]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6 [8]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 [23]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8 [9]
Conversations with Sri Aurobindo [1]
Demeter and Persephone [2]
Down Memory Lane [1]
Early Cultural Writings [30]
Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo [5]
Education For Character Development [2]
Education and the Aim of human life [4]
Education at Crossroads [2]
Emergence of the Psychic [3]
Essays Divine and Human [35]
Essays in Philosophy and Yoga [45]
Essays on the Gita [42]
Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo [24]
Evolution II [1]
Evolution and the Earthly Destiny [24]
Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God [14]
Evolving India [3]
Finding the Psychic Being [1]
From Man Human to Man Divine [13]
Gods and the World [6]
Growing up with the Mother [3]
Guidance from Sri Aurobindo - Volume 1 [1]
Guidance from Sri Aurobindo - Volume 3 [2]
Guidance on Education [2]
Hitler and his God [41]
Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion [1]
How to Bring up a Child [2]
Hymns to the Mystic Fire [23]
I Remember [6]
Images Of The Future [2]
In the Mother's Light [30]
India's Rebirth [5]
Indian Identity and Cultural Continuity [2]
Indian Poets and English Poetry [6]
Inspiration and Effort [13]
Integral Yoga - Major Aims, Methods, Processes and Results [5]
Integral Yoga of Transformation [2]
Integral Yoga, Evolution and the Next Species [3]
Isha Upanishad [27]
Joan of Arc [1]
Karmayogin [16]
Kena and Other Upanishads [20]
Landmarks of Hinduism [12]
Learning with the Mother [1]
Lectures on Savitri [2]
Letters on Himself and the Ashram [21]
Letters on Poetry and Art [13]
Letters on Yoga - I [18]
Letters on Yoga - II [14]
Letters on Yoga - III [2]
Letters on Yoga - IV [6]
Life of Sri Aurobindo [9]
Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1) [23]
Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2) [17]
Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3) [18]
Light and Laughter [6]
Lights on Yoga [2]
Listen with your Heart - Welcome the Mother [3]
Man-handling of Savitri [7]
Marie Sklodowska Curie [2]
Memorable Contacts with The Mother [5]
Moments Eternal [8]
More Answers from the Mother [4]
Mother and Abhay [1]
Mother or The Divine Materialism - I [14]
Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III [4]
Mother or The New Species - II [9]
Mother steers Auroville [1]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Five [14]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Four [8]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Six [9]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Three [2]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Two [1]
Mother’s Agenda 1951-1960 [8]
Mother’s Agenda 1961 [13]
Mother’s Agenda 1962 [6]
Mother’s Agenda 1963 [10]
Mother’s Agenda 1964 [8]
Mother’s Agenda 1965 [1]
Mother’s Agenda 1966 [2]
Mother’s Agenda 1967 [4]
Mother’s Agenda 1968 [4]
Mother’s Agenda 1969 [3]
Mother’s Agenda 1970 [7]
Mother’s Agenda 1971 [1]
Mother’s Agenda 1972-1973 [1]
Mrinalini Devi [1]
My Burning Heart [1]
My Pilgrimage to the Spirit [5]
My Savitri work with the Mother [7]
Mysteries of Death, Fate, Karma and Rebirth [7]
Mystery and Excellence of the Human Body [11]
Nachiketas [4]
Nagin Bhai Tells Me [1]
Nala and Damayanti [2]
Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo [35]
Nishikanto - the Brahmaputra of inspiration [1]
Notebooks of an Apocalypse 1973-1978 [1]
Notebooks of an Apocalypse 1978-1982 [1]
Notes on the Way [2]
Old Long Since [2]
On Art - Addresses and Writings [5]
On Education [13]
On Savitri [4]
On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri [18]
On The Mother [52]
On Thoughts and Aphorisms [12]
On the Path [4]
On the Way to Supermanhood [1]
Our Light and Delight [9]
Our Many Selves [3]
Overhead Poetry [4]
Overman [5]
Parables from the Upanishads [2]
Parvati's Tapasya [2]
Passing Moments [2]
Patterns of the Present [7]
Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1 [23]
Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2 [25]
Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays [11]
Philosophy of Indian Art [1]
Philosophy of Value-Oriented Education [5]
Preparing for the Miraculous [10]
Principles and Goals of Integral Education [2]
Problems of Early Christianity [5]
Psychology, Mental Health and Yoga [2]
Questions and Answers (1929-1931) [5]
Questions and Answers (1950-1951) [7]
Questions and Answers (1953) [15]
Questions and Answers (1954) [11]
Questions and Answers (1955) [6]
Questions and Answers (1956) [5]
Questions and Answers (1957-1958) [8]
Record of Yoga [18]
Reminiscences [5]
Savitri [48]
Science, Materialism, Mysticism [7]
Seer Poets [6]
Selected Episodes From Raghuvamsam of Kalidasa [1]
Significance of Indian Yoga [4]
Six Talks [2]
Socrates [4]
Some Answers from the Mother [5]
Spiritual bouquets to a friend [3]
Sri Aurobindo - 'I am here, I am here!' [1]
Sri Aurobindo - A dream-dialogue with children [1]
Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique [4]
Sri Aurobindo - The Poet [19]
Sri Aurobindo - The Smiling Master [16]
Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history [28]
Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision [8]
Sri Aurobindo And The Mother [6]
Sri Aurobindo And The Mother - On India [5]
Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny [3]
Sri Aurobindo and Integral Yoga [4]
Sri Aurobindo and the Earth's Future [1]
Sri Aurobindo came to Me [15]
Sri Aurobindo for All Ages [10]
Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness [1]
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume I [4]
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume II [4]
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume III [4]
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume IV [7]
Sri Aurobindo's Humour [2]
Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine [13]
Sri Aurobindo's Message [6]
Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects [3]
Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study [18]
Sri Krishna In Brindavan [4]
Sri Rama [7]
Sudhir Kumar Sarkar: A Spirit Indomitable [7]
Sun Blossoms [1]
Supermind in Integral Yoga [4]
Synthesis of Yoga in the Upanishads [2]
Synthesis of Yoga in the Veda [3]
Taittiriya Upanishad [1]
Talks by Nirodbaran [16]
Talks on Poetry [24]
Talks with Sri Aurobindo [23]
Teilhard de Chardin and our Time [11]
The Adventure of the Apocalypse [1]
The Aim of Life [12]
The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri [4]
The Birth of Savitr [4]
The Crucifixion [5]
The Destiny of the Body [26]
The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and The Mother's Contribution to it [1]
The Divine Collaborators [6]
The Future Poetry [17]
The Genius Of India [1]
The Gita and its Synthesis of Yoga [4]
The Golden Path [3]
The Good Teacher and The Good Pupil [14]
The Hidden Forces of Life [6]
The Human Cycle [24]
The Indian Spirit and the World's Future [16]
The Inspiration of Paradise Lost [9]
The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo [22]
The Life Divine [37]
The Mind Of The Cells [1]
The Mother (biography) [16]
The Mother - Past-Present-Future [4]
The Mother Abides - Final Reflections [4]
The Mother on Auroville [3]
The Mother with Letters on the Mother [1]
The New Synthesis of Yoga [2]
The Philosophy of Love [1]
The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo [4]
The Practice of the Integral Yoga [15]
The Problem Of Aryan Origins [8]
The Psychic Being [4]
The Renaissance in India [15]
The Revolt Of The Earth [1]
The Role of South India in the Freedom Movement [1]
The Secret Splendour [8]
The Secret of the Veda [35]
The Siege of Troy [1]
The Signature Of Truth [1]
The Spirit of Auroville [2]
The Story of a Soul [4]
The Sun and The Rainbow [14]
The Sunlit Path [2]
The Supreme [1]
The Synthesis of Yoga [59]
The Thinking Corner [9]
The Veda and Human Destiny [1]
The Veda and Indian Culture [2]
The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo [20]
The Wonder that is K D Sethna alias Amal Kiran [1]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 1 [2]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 10 [4]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 11 [2]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 2 [2]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3 [5]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 4 [4]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 5 [3]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7 [3]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 8 [3]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 9 [1]
To the Heights [1]
Towards A New Social Order [3]
Towards A New Society [6]
Towards the Light [1]
Tribute to Amrita on his Birth Centenary [3]
Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo [11]
Uniting Men [1]
Varieties of Yogic Experience and Integral Realisation [3]
Vedic and Philological Studies [15]
Visions and Voices [1]
Visions of Champaklal [2]
Visions-Experiences-Interview [1]
Vyasa's Savitri [1]
Wager of Ambrosia [8]
What I Have Learnt From The Mother [2]
Words of Long Ago [6]
Words of the Mother - I [7]
Words of the Mother - II [5]
Words of the Mother - III [9]
Work - an offering [5]
Filtered by: Show All
English [2521]
A Centenary Tribute [18]
A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo [2]
A Greater Psychology [11]
A National Agenda for Education [1]
A Philosophy of Evolution for the Contemporary Man [3]
A Pilgrims Quest for the Highest and the Best [7]
A Scheme for The Education of Bengal [3]
A Vision of United India [6]
Adventures in Criticism [5]
Alexander the great [2]
Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic [19]
Among the Not So Great [3]
Ancient India in a New Light [2]
Arguments for the Existence of God [6]
Arjuna's Argument At Kurukshetra And Sri Krishna's Answers [2]
Aspects of Sri Aurobindo [14]
Aspiring Swan [1]
At the feet of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo [1]
Auroville references in Mother's Agenda [2]
Autobiographical Notes [8]
Bande Mataram [20]
Beyond Man [25]
Bhagavadgita and Contemporary Crisis [3]
Blake's Tyger [4]
Blessings of the Grace [1]
By The Body Of The Earth or The Sannyasin [1]
By The Way - Part II [4]
By The Way - Part III [3]
Chaitanya and Mira [3]
Champaklal Speaks [5]
Champaklal's Treasures [4]
Champaklal's Treasures - Edition-II [7]
Child, Teacher and Teacher Education [4]
Children's University [1]
Classical and Romantic [10]
Collected Plays and Stories [10]
Collected Poems [31]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 [39]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2 [26]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3 [19]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4 [15]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 5 [9]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6 [8]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 [23]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8 [9]
Conversations with Sri Aurobindo [1]
Demeter and Persephone [2]
Down Memory Lane [1]
Early Cultural Writings [30]
Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo [5]
Education For Character Development [2]
Education and the Aim of human life [4]
Education at Crossroads [2]
Emergence of the Psychic [3]
Essays Divine and Human [35]
Essays in Philosophy and Yoga [45]
Essays on the Gita [42]
Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo [24]
Evolution II [1]
Evolution and the Earthly Destiny [24]
Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God [14]
Evolving India [3]
Finding the Psychic Being [1]
From Man Human to Man Divine [13]
Gods and the World [6]
Growing up with the Mother [3]
Guidance from Sri Aurobindo - Volume 1 [1]
Guidance from Sri Aurobindo - Volume 3 [2]
Guidance on Education [2]
Hitler and his God [41]
Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion [1]
How to Bring up a Child [2]
Hymns to the Mystic Fire [23]
I Remember [6]
Images Of The Future [2]
In the Mother's Light [30]
India's Rebirth [5]
Indian Identity and Cultural Continuity [2]
Indian Poets and English Poetry [6]
Inspiration and Effort [13]
Integral Yoga - Major Aims, Methods, Processes and Results [5]
Integral Yoga of Transformation [2]
Integral Yoga, Evolution and the Next Species [3]
Isha Upanishad [27]
Joan of Arc [1]
Karmayogin [16]
Kena and Other Upanishads [20]
Landmarks of Hinduism [12]
Learning with the Mother [1]
Lectures on Savitri [2]
Letters on Himself and the Ashram [21]
Letters on Poetry and Art [13]
Letters on Yoga - I [18]
Letters on Yoga - II [14]
Letters on Yoga - III [2]
Letters on Yoga - IV [6]
Life of Sri Aurobindo [9]
Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1) [23]
Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2) [17]
Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3) [18]
Light and Laughter [6]
Lights on Yoga [2]
Listen with your Heart - Welcome the Mother [3]
Man-handling of Savitri [7]
Marie Sklodowska Curie [2]
Memorable Contacts with The Mother [5]
Moments Eternal [8]
More Answers from the Mother [4]
Mother and Abhay [1]
Mother or The Divine Materialism - I [14]
Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III [4]
Mother or The New Species - II [9]
Mother steers Auroville [1]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Five [14]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Four [8]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Six [9]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Three [2]
Mother's Chronicles - Book Two [1]
Mother’s Agenda 1951-1960 [8]
Mother’s Agenda 1961 [13]
Mother’s Agenda 1962 [6]
Mother’s Agenda 1963 [10]
Mother’s Agenda 1964 [8]
Mother’s Agenda 1965 [1]
Mother’s Agenda 1966 [2]
Mother’s Agenda 1967 [4]
Mother’s Agenda 1968 [4]
Mother’s Agenda 1969 [3]
Mother’s Agenda 1970 [7]
Mother’s Agenda 1971 [1]
Mother’s Agenda 1972-1973 [1]
Mrinalini Devi [1]
My Burning Heart [1]
My Pilgrimage to the Spirit [5]
My Savitri work with the Mother [7]
Mysteries of Death, Fate, Karma and Rebirth [7]
Mystery and Excellence of the Human Body [11]
Nachiketas [4]
Nagin Bhai Tells Me [1]
Nala and Damayanti [2]
Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo [35]
Nishikanto - the Brahmaputra of inspiration [1]
Notebooks of an Apocalypse 1973-1978 [1]
Notebooks of an Apocalypse 1978-1982 [1]
Notes on the Way [2]
Old Long Since [2]
On Art - Addresses and Writings [5]
On Education [13]
On Savitri [4]
On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri [18]
On The Mother [52]
On Thoughts and Aphorisms [12]
On the Path [4]
On the Way to Supermanhood [1]
Our Light and Delight [9]
Our Many Selves [3]
Overhead Poetry [4]
Overman [5]
Parables from the Upanishads [2]
Parvati's Tapasya [2]
Passing Moments [2]
Patterns of the Present [7]
Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1 [23]
Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2 [25]
Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays [11]
Philosophy of Indian Art [1]
Philosophy of Value-Oriented Education [5]
Preparing for the Miraculous [10]
Principles and Goals of Integral Education [2]
Problems of Early Christianity [5]
Psychology, Mental Health and Yoga [2]
Questions and Answers (1929-1931) [5]
Questions and Answers (1950-1951) [7]
Questions and Answers (1953) [15]
Questions and Answers (1954) [11]
Questions and Answers (1955) [6]
Questions and Answers (1956) [5]
Questions and Answers (1957-1958) [8]
Record of Yoga [18]
Reminiscences [5]
Savitri [48]
Science, Materialism, Mysticism [7]
Seer Poets [6]
Selected Episodes From Raghuvamsam of Kalidasa [1]
Significance of Indian Yoga [4]
Six Talks [2]
Socrates [4]
Some Answers from the Mother [5]
Spiritual bouquets to a friend [3]
Sri Aurobindo - 'I am here, I am here!' [1]
Sri Aurobindo - A dream-dialogue with children [1]
Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique [4]
Sri Aurobindo - The Poet [19]
Sri Aurobindo - The Smiling Master [16]
Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history [28]
Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision [8]
Sri Aurobindo And The Mother [6]
Sri Aurobindo And The Mother - On India [5]
Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny [3]
Sri Aurobindo and Integral Yoga [4]
Sri Aurobindo and the Earth's Future [1]
Sri Aurobindo came to Me [15]
Sri Aurobindo for All Ages [10]
Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness [1]
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume I [4]
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume II [4]
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume III [4]
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume IV [7]
Sri Aurobindo's Humour [2]
Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine [13]
Sri Aurobindo's Message [6]
Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects [3]
Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study [18]
Sri Krishna In Brindavan [4]
Sri Rama [7]
Sudhir Kumar Sarkar: A Spirit Indomitable [7]
Sun Blossoms [1]
Supermind in Integral Yoga [4]
Synthesis of Yoga in the Upanishads [2]
Synthesis of Yoga in the Veda [3]
Taittiriya Upanishad [1]
Talks by Nirodbaran [16]
Talks on Poetry [24]
Talks with Sri Aurobindo [23]
Teilhard de Chardin and our Time [11]
The Adventure of the Apocalypse [1]
The Aim of Life [12]
The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri [4]
The Birth of Savitr [4]
The Crucifixion [5]
The Destiny of the Body [26]
The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and The Mother's Contribution to it [1]
The Divine Collaborators [6]
The Future Poetry [17]
The Genius Of India [1]
The Gita and its Synthesis of Yoga [4]
The Golden Path [3]
The Good Teacher and The Good Pupil [14]
The Hidden Forces of Life [6]
The Human Cycle [24]
The Indian Spirit and the World's Future [16]
The Inspiration of Paradise Lost [9]
The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo [22]
The Life Divine [37]
The Mind Of The Cells [1]
The Mother (biography) [16]
The Mother - Past-Present-Future [4]
The Mother Abides - Final Reflections [4]
The Mother on Auroville [3]
The Mother with Letters on the Mother [1]
The New Synthesis of Yoga [2]
The Philosophy of Love [1]
The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo [4]
The Practice of the Integral Yoga [15]
The Problem Of Aryan Origins [8]
The Psychic Being [4]
The Renaissance in India [15]
The Revolt Of The Earth [1]
The Role of South India in the Freedom Movement [1]
The Secret Splendour [8]
The Secret of the Veda [35]
The Siege of Troy [1]
The Signature Of Truth [1]
The Spirit of Auroville [2]
The Story of a Soul [4]
The Sun and The Rainbow [14]
The Sunlit Path [2]
The Supreme [1]
The Synthesis of Yoga [59]
The Thinking Corner [9]
The Veda and Human Destiny [1]
The Veda and Indian Culture [2]
The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo [20]
The Wonder that is K D Sethna alias Amal Kiran [1]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 1 [2]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 10 [4]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 11 [2]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 2 [2]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3 [5]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 4 [4]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 5 [3]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7 [3]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 8 [3]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 9 [1]
To the Heights [1]
Towards A New Social Order [3]
Towards A New Society [6]
Towards the Light [1]
Tribute to Amrita on his Birth Centenary [3]
Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo [11]
Uniting Men [1]
Varieties of Yogic Experience and Integral Realisation [3]
Vedic and Philological Studies [15]
Visions and Voices [1]
Visions of Champaklal [2]
Visions-Experiences-Interview [1]
Vyasa's Savitri [1]
Wager of Ambrosia [8]
What I Have Learnt From The Mother [2]
Words of Long Ago [6]
Words of the Mother - I [7]
Words of the Mother - II [5]
Words of the Mother - III [9]
Work - an offering [5]
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Showing 600 of 2521 result/s found for God, Man and Nature

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Progress to Knowledge

... Argument Chapter XXXIII of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was extensively revised in 1939-40, becoming the present Book Two, Part II, Chapter XVII , "The Progress to Knowledge—God, Man and Nature". To rise out of the sevenfold Ignorance into the integral Knowledge is the progress of man's being; it is to grow in all his complex existence and consciousness into the full possession... all religions; for all seize on the Divine in many aspects and their variety is necessary in order that man should come to know God entirely.—When he arrives at the unity of his knowledge of God, man and Nature, he has the complete knowledge, the sense and goal of humanity's progress and labour and the sure foundation of all perfections and all harmonies. Page 500 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
[exact]

The Life Divine  >  The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature

... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XVII The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature Thou art That, O Swetaketu. Chhandogya Upanishad. (VI. 8. 7.) The living being is none else than the Brahman, the whole world is the Brahman. Vivekachudamani. (Verse 479.) My supreme Nature has become ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
[exact]

Bhagavadgita and Contemporary Crisis  >  What is Education

... language of the Bhagavadgita. So let me articulate what I have to say in a terminology appropriate to the Gita. "The aim of education should be to discover the Sun of Knowledge in which God, Man and Nature stand integrated in a blaze of light through which each individual would discover the Divine Will to manifest itself in physical life. To discover Purushottama, to discover His Will and to ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Bhagavadgita and Contemporary Crisis
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The Life Divine  >  Note on the Text

... The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence L XVII Revised form of a chapter originally published in the Arya . The Progress to Knowledge — God, Man and Nature XXXIII XVIII Revised form of a chapter originally published in the Arya . The Evolutionary Process — Ascent and Integration XXXVIII XIX Revised form of a chapter ...

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Words of the Mother - II  >  Gratitude

... Always joyfully accept what is given you by the Divine. A self-willed man cannot be grateful―because when he gets what he wants he gives all the credit for it to his own will, and when he gets what he does not want he resents it badly and throws all the blame on whomever he considers responsible, God, man or Nature. It is very difficult to keep up your gratitude; for a time it comes very ...

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The Spirit of Auroville  >  10 July 1978

... The Mother has said correctly in Vol. 14, p. 163: A self-willed man cannot be grateful—because when he gets what he wants he gives all the credit for it to his own will, and when he gets what he does not want he resents it badly and throws all the blame on whomever he considers responsible, God, man or Nature . The Mother, Words of the Mother - II: Gratitude ... remorselessly towards us for is not old-age and death approaching, and are not all barriers ineffective?’ Wide-awake now to the reality of life and death, King Pasenadi realised fully the fleeting nature of his existence and saw just how important it was that time should not be wasted in trivial pursuits.... posed with such a stark dilemma and seeing no possibility of escape, King Pasenadi dedicated ...

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Champaklal's Treasures  >  “The Wizard of Oz”

... Time will reveal how far earth has benefitted through it. A self-willed man can not be grateful, because when he gets what he wants he gives all the credit for it to his own will, and when he gets what he does not want he resents it badly and throws all the blame on whoever he considers responsible. God, man or nature. Compassion and gratitude are purely psychic virtues. They appear in the ... in the compassion or of inferiority in the gratitude. In the Bible, God calls Cain and asks him: 'What have you done with your brother?' Today I call man and ask him: “What have you done with the earth?” You have brought down upon earth Peace and Freedom. Now Freedom and Wisdom must manifest in the heart of every man. Have you never been mistaken in any of your decisions? Yes, you have... This body has neither the uncontested authority of a god nor the imperturbable calm of the sage. It is yet only an apprentice in supermanhood. On the choice of a motor-car: Do you want to go from one place to another without getting tired and without spending much time on the way, or do you want to be smart and look like an important man? And the body says to the Supreme Lord: “What You want ...

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Champaklal's Treasures - Edition-II  >  “The Wizard of OZ”

... Time will reveal how far earth has benefited through it. A self-willed man can not be grateful, because when he gets what he wants he gives all the credit for it to his own will, and when he gets what he does not want he resents it badly and throws all the blame on whomever he considers responsible, God, man or nature. Compassion and gratitude are purely psychic virtues. They appear in the... in the compassion or of inferiority in the gratitude. In the Bible, God calls Cain and asks him:. 'What have you done with your brother?' Today I call man and ask him: "What have you done with the earth?" You have brought down upon earth Peace and Freedom. Now Freedom and Wisdom must manifest in the heart of every man. Have you never been mistaken in any of your decisions? Yes, you have... This body has neither the uncontested authority of a god nor the imperturbable calm of the sage. It is yet only an apprentice in supermanhood. On the choice of a motor-car: Do you want to go from one place to another without getting tired and without spending much time on the way, or do you want to be smart and look like an important man? And the body says to the Supreme Lord: "What you want ...

Champaklal   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Champaklal's Treasures - Edition-II
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Essays Divine and Human  >  The Way of Yoga

... leaning down from God to Nature; they, therefore, even in losing themselves in Him yet keep themselves since in reaching God they do not depart from their centre but rather go towards it; arrived they are able to lean down again to humanity. Those who can thus emerge from this bath of God are the final helpers of humanity & are chosen by God & Nature to prepare the type of supernatural man to which our... existence, it seeks the supernatural. Every nature is a step towards some supernature, something natural to itself but supernatural to what is below it. Life is supernatural to Matter, Mind supernatural to Life, ideal being supernatural to mental being, infinite being supernatural to ideal being. So too man is supernatural to the animal, God is supernatural to man. Man too as soon as he has assured his natural... upon its upward-straining energies. The aim of rationalism & Science is to make man content with his humanity and contradict Nature, baffling her evolution; the aim of religion,—but not unhappily of the creeds & Churches—is to farther the great aim of Nature by pushing man towards his evolution. The attainment of God is the true object of all human effort for which all his other efforts political ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Aphorisms

... and enjoys man's blindness like the hands of a little child that grope after its mother. Page 202 God and Nature are like a boy and girl at play and in love. They hide and run from each other when glimpsed so that they may be sought after and chased and captured. Man is God hiding himself from Nature so that he may possess her by struggle, insistence, violence and surprise. God is universal... otherwise. Delight of being is not limited in Time; it is without end or beginning. God comes out from one form of things only to enter into another. What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden. Man, The Purusha God cannot cease from leaning down towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the... secret. God and Man, World and Beyond-world become one when they know each other. Their division is the cause of ignorance as ignorance is the cause of suffering. Man seeks at first blindly and does not even know that he is seeking his divine self; for he starts from the obscurity of material Nature and even when he begins to see, he is long blinded by the light that is increasing in him. God too answers ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  The Human Body

... it is thus that God clears the road, makes the path easy. On behalf of man God conquers Nature so that it may be easy for man to reconquer it. A question may be raised here: "the conquest of nature or the transformation of nature – cannot God effect it from His own Self or the World-Self? What necessity is there to accept a human form in order to do the work?" First of all, if God were to do everything... the wiseacre foolishly say, "God incurs cancer! What a helpless and poor God!"¹ But herein lies the real mystery. God has become man; that means he has assumed the human nature and has accepted the human weakness not only in word or allegorically but in fact, in actual practice. That is why we see this human weakness in Christ on the last day of his life when he asks God to remove the vessel of deadly... deadly poison from his lips, so that he may not have to drink of it any more. God having become a man shows by example how one can rise to a godly or divine nature from a human nature. God reveals this sadhana through his human life. Man knows himself as sinful, afflicted, weak and helpless. To him the spiritual realisation, the divine Life, the divine Consciousness may seem to be futile and hollow ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

Sri Aurobindo And The Mother - On India  >  Sri Aurobindo - The Hour of God

... possess the finite. It is to live in God and be one with him in his being. To become thyself is to be this and all that flows from it. .  .  .     . . . arise, transcend thyself, become thyself. Thou art man and the whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the... which God intends for us. But whatever our immediate success, our unvarying aim must be to perform the whole journey and not lie down content in any wayside stage or imperfect resting place. . . .     Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man; the mental being cannot by his own unaided force change himself into a supramental spirit. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone... whole apparent life is a becoming, but all becoming has for its goal and fulfilment being-and God is the only being; to become divine in the nature of the world, in the symbol of our humanity is our fulfilment. . . .     In order to exceed our Nature and become divine, we must first get God; for we are the lower imperfect term of our being, He its higher perfect term. The finite ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Sri Aurobindo And The Mother - On India

Essays on the Gita  >  The Theory of the Vibhuti

... secret significance. He is called to self-knowledge; he must see God as the Master of the universe and the origin of the world's creatures and happenings, all as the Godhead's self-expression in Nature, God in all, God in himself as man and as Vibhuti, God in the lownesses of being and on its heights, God on the topmost summits, man too upon heights as the Vibhuti and climbing to the last summits in... world see this struggling lower Nature alone. If we perceive only the apparent outward fact of our nature and others' nature, we are looking with the eye of the ignorance and cannot know God equally in all, in the sattwic, the rajasic, the tamasic creature, in God and Titan, in saint and sinner, in the wise man and the ignorant, in the great and in the little, in man, animal, plant and inanimate existence... human soul and to the inner human vision, is our liberation from limited ego and our elevation to the higher nature of a divine humanity. For dwelling in this greater spiritual nature and not in the mortal weft, the tangled complexity of the three gunas, man, one with God by knowledge, love and will and the giving up of his whole being into the Godhead, is able indeed to rise to the absolute Transcendence ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Isha Upanishad  >  Chapter I: God and Nature

... provided in Nature itself out of our bondage to Nature. Man must be able to find in Nature itself and in his humanity a way of escape into divinity & freedom from Nature, avidyayá mrityum tírtwá. This would not be possible if God and Nature, Brahman and the Universe, were two hostile & incompatible entities, the one real and the other false or non-existent. But Spirit and Universe, God and Nature are one... The unity of God governs His multiplicity; therefore the more general motion of Nature as representative of or nearest to that unity governs the multiple individual products of the movement. To each motion its law and to each inhabitant of that motion subjection to the law. Therefore Man, being human in Nature, is bound first by Nature, then by his humanity. But because God is also the transcendence... statement of the unity of God, and the multiplicity and mobility of Nature; for this relation in opposition is all that is immediately necessary to base the rule of divine living which it is his one object in the Upanishad to found upon a right knowledge of God & existence. The self then of every man, every animal and every object, whether animate or inanimate, is God; the soul in us, therefore ...

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Essays on the Gita  >  The Principle of Divine Works

... to the progress of man from the lower to the higher nature, from the apparent undivine to the conscious Divine. The whole range of human works must be that in which the God-knower shall move. All individual, all social action, all the works of the intellect, the heart and the body are still his, not any longer for his own separate sake, but for the sake of God in the world, of God in all beings and... itself the truth which lies behind the kinetic tendency,—the fulfilment of God in man and the presence of the Divine in all the action of the human race. God is there not only in the silence, but in the action; the quietism of the impassive soul unaffected by Nature and the kinetism of the soul giving itself to Nature so that the great world-sacrifice, the Purusha-Yajna, may be Page 143 effected... the lower nature to the Brahmic condition leads necessarily to inaction of the liberated man, his indifference to the works of the world; with it the same withdrawal becomes a step by which the works of the world are taken up in the spirit, with the nature and in the freedom of the Divine. See the silent Brahman as the goal and the world with all its activities has to be forsaken; see God, the Divine ...

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Essays on the Gita  >  The Message of the Gita

... in a single aspiration to the Highest, a single love of the Divine Being, a single God-adoration. And there must be a widening too of the calmed and enlightened heart to embrace God in all beings. There will be needed a change of the habitual and normal nature of man as he is now to a supreme and divine spiritual nature. There will be needed in a word a Yoga which shall be at once a Yoga of integral... great step, Page 580 but it is not the integral God-knowledge and self-knowledge. "A perfect perfection comes only by living in the supreme and the whole Divine. Then the soul of man is united with the Godhead of which it is a portion; then it is one with all beings in the self and spirit, one with them both in God and in Nature; then it is not only free but complete, plunged in the supreme... power and glory and ecstasy and sweetness of the manifestation of the Divine. This Nature in us is a Maya of the ego, a tangle of the dualities, a web of ignorance and the three gunas. And so long as the soul of man lives in the surface fact of mind and life and body and not in his self and spirit, he cannot see God and himself and the world as they really are, cannot overcome this Maya, but must do ...

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Essays Divine and Human  >  The Evolutionary Aim in Yoga

... apparent difference. The aim put before us in Yoga is God; the aim of Nature is to effect supernature; but these two aims are of one piece & intention. God & supernature are only one the real & the other the formal aspect of the one unattainable fulfilment towards which our human march is in its ascent directed. Yoga for man is the upward working of Nature liberated from slow evolution and long relapses... laboratory of Nature. We have to transcend Nature, to become super-Nature, but it follows from what I have said that it is by taking advantage of something still imprisoned in Nature itself, by following some line which Nature is trying to open to us that we ought to proceed. By yielding to our ordinary nature we fall away both from Nature itself and from God; by transcending Nature we at once satisfy... of bringing us back to Nature, takes us away from her entirely. He forgets or does not see that Nature is only phenomenally Nature, but in reality she is God. The divine element in her is that which she most purely & really is; the rest is only term and condition, process and stage in her whole progressively developed revelation of the secret divinity. He forgets too that Nature is evolving not evolved ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Karmayogin  >  Khulna Speech

... philosophy with the philosophy of Sankhya. Modern science denies that man has a soul. Science considers only the laws of nature. It regards nature as material, and man as merely a product of nature. It says man is a creation of natural forces. All his actions are results of fixed laws, and he has no freedom. According to the Sankhya, man has a soul and is essentially the Purusha Page 48 and... that the man who has knowledge has to do exactly what other men do. He has to live as a man in his family, race and nation. But there is a difference which is internal and not external. By the internal difference he acts in communion with God; others act in pursuance of their desires. He knows by experience how a man can act when he is free from desire. This force of action is the force of God Himself... and under her influence all actions take place. Prakriti acts. Man can only free himself by recognising that he is the Purusha. Srikrishna adopts this theory of Sankhya in the Gita, and he also adopts the philosophy of Vedanta. He says that man has an immortal soul, but there is also a universal soul. Man is merely part of God. He is merely a part of something that is eternal, infinite, omniscient ...

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Isha Upanishad  >  Ish and Jagat

... our existence, unqualified Spirit or God. By rising to the God within us, we become free, liberated from the bondage of the world and the snare of death. For God is freedom, God is immortality. Mrityum tírtwá amritam asnute. Crossing over death, we enjoy immortality. This relation of Nature & Spirit, World & God, on which the Seer fixes, Nature the mansion, God the occupant, is their practical, not... them and sets them in their right & eternal relation. Ishá vásyam idam sarvam yat kincha jagatyám jagat. Ish and Jagat, God and Nature, Spirit and World, are the two poles of being between which our consciousness revolves. This double or biune reality is existence, is life, is man. The Eternal seated sole in all His creations occupies the ever-shifting Universe and its innumerable whorls and knots of... is Brahman, single & indivisible; Spirit & Nature, World and God are one; anejad ekam manaso javíyas,—they are One unmoving swifter than mind. But for life, whether bound or free, and for the movement from bondage to freedom, this One must always be conceived as a double or biune term in which God is the reverse side of Nature, Nature the obverse side of God. The distinction has been made by Spirit itself ...

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Classical and Romantic  >  The natural and the supernatural in romanticism

... sovereignty" he spoke of did not cabin God within Nature: it merely refused to make Nature extra-neous to God. In the 1805 version he clearly combined, as C. Clarke has stressed, the singleness of God and Nature with God's transcendence by writing of ... Nature's self, which is the breath of God and repeating the metaphor from breathing in the lines: Great God! Who send'st thyself into... into this breathing world Page 122 Through Nature and through every kind of life And mak'st man what he is, Creature divine ... The early Wordsworth once actually went out of his way to repudiate vehemently the charge of identifying God with Nature. In a letter to Mrs. Catherine Clarkson in 1814 about the misinterpretation by her friend of the religious views expressed in ... Words-worth himself was accused of identifying God with Nature, and we may be deluded into agreeing with his accusers on the evidence of a line like ... God and Nature's single sovereignty, which occurs in the 1805 version of The Prelude and which he altered in the 1850 version to ... Presences of God's mysterious power Made manifest in Nature's sovereignty. E. H. de Selincourt holds ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Classical and Romantic

Essays Divine and Human  >  The Fullness of Yoga - In Condition

... spontaneously to a God-appointed path, from this broken & grief-besieged action to a joyous & free activity, from this confused strife of our members to a purified, unentangled and harmonious combination, from this materialised mentality to an idealised Page 120 & illuminated life, body & mind, from the symbol to reality, from man separated from God to man in God & God in man. In brief, as she... chemistry of Nature into the coming superior type? But the problem is not so simple, in reality. There are three errors hidden at the basis of this sceptical question. We mistake the nature of the operation to be effected, we mistake the nature of the power & process that works it out, we mistake the nature of the thing that uses the power & works out the process. Nature does not propose to man to work... the limits of its apparent nature. It is a particular becoming & is fixed in the nature of the symbol that it has become; only the touch of that which is all becomings and exceeds all becomings, can liberate it from the bondage to its own limited Nature. God is That which is the All and which exceeds the All. It is therefore only the knowledge, love and possession of God that can make us free. He who ...

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Hitler and his God  >  Man is a Transitional Being

... Hitler and His God Hitler and His God 14. Sri Aurobindo’s Vision Hitler and his God Man is a Transitional Being One of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms says: “Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.” 934 In other words, the... therefore, though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at the highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly... the human being is somewhere on the upward ladder, though not at the top. Man is not the king of creation but only its provisional leader, and the evolution ahead may be as long as was the past evolution, supposed it can be measured in time. “The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out Man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

Essays Divine and Human  >  Jnana

... Vedanta says rather, "Man, thou art of one nature & substance with God, one soul with thy fellow-men. Awake & progress then to thy utter divinity, live for God in thyself & in others." This gospel which was given only to the few, must now be offered to all mankind for its deliverance. 202) The human race always progresses most when most it asserts its importance to Nature, its freedom & its universality... acts according to his nature and knows not anything else, therefore he is divine and there is no evil in him. If he questioned himself, then he would be a criminal. 59) The animal, before he is corrupted, has not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the god has abandoned it for the tree of eternal life; man stands between the upper heaven and the lower nature. Page 429 ... action, creation and being. 161) Become & live the knowledge thou hast; then is thy knowledge the living God within thee. 162) Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges. 163) The power to observe law rigidly is the basis of freedom; therefore in most disciplines ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Essays on the Gita  >  Works, Devotion and Knowledge

... open themselves to the light and largeness of the diviner nature of which man is capable, are alone on the path narrow in the beginning, inexpressibly wide in the end that leads to liberation and perfection. The growth of the god in man is man's proper business; the steadfast turning of this lower Asuric and Rakshasic into the divine nature is the carefully hidden meaning of human life. As this growth... evil cannot bewilder the man who has surrendered himself to the Eternal. God to the soul that sees is the path and God is the goal of his journey, a path in which there is no self-losing and a goal to which his wisely guided steps are surely arriving at every moment. He knows the Godhead as the master of his and all being, the upholder of his nature, the husband of the nature-soul, its lover and cherisher... divine nature developed out of the imperfect physical human nature and through unity with God and man and universe the whole large truth of being discovered and lived and made visibly wonderful. That completes the long cycle of our becoming and admits us to a supreme result; that is the opportunity given to the soul by the human birth and, until that is accomplished, it cannot cease. The God-lover advances ...

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Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4  >  Notes on Freedom

... whereas in following God's Will you follow truly your own will, for in God you are one with God – His Will your will, your will His. Page 395 Man becomes the bodily creature when he cuts himself off from his spiritual nature which is his true nature. In isolating himself from the Master of nature, man becomes a slave of nature, this ignorant external nature. To attain freedom is... the Master of the causal ring. God alone is free. You are free only when you are united with God and your will merges in His Will and His Will manifests in yours. Freedom does not consist in doing as one likes but in doing what the Divine likes. In following your will you follow nature's will – nature's determinism; being part of nature in following nature's will you have an illusion that you... is to rise out of this lower status into the domain of the higher status which is man's own true nature, the Divine nature. The body can be remoulded and reconstituted by the soul and self; the inferior nature can be rebuilt into the mode' of the higher nature; when this is done there is the reign of Supreme Liberty. The body's domain then in its formation becomes a free expression of the soul, the ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-7 and 8

... movement of higher or lower Nature that is presented before it. Man has either to be "freed man—or God's slave". In truth "Our consciousness is- cosmic" and our "mind is only a means and body a tool." Man can be free and even rise above the cosmos and survey the world. Savitri attained this freedom, became silent and then she willed the whole world to be dedicated "to God's timeless calm". Her mind... movements of his nature: "Our tasks are given, we are but instruments". "Nothing is all our own that we create". The material for everything that man creates is furnished by Nature. "The Power that acts in us is not our force". Even the greatest man receives either the word, or form or charm, the glory and grace "from a stupendous Fire". It is, as it were, a "sample from the laboratory of God" is given... it and they can "break through the soul's stillness with a noise and cry". "Man's lower nature hides these awful guests." Page 311 Sometimes these lower forces break out into the open in the collective life of man. Then they let loose blood-lust and "the will to slay", "and fill with horror and carnage God's fair world". Pain, destruction, calamity are then abroad: "Creation rocks and ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Isha Upanishad  >  Chapter IV

... the soul, free & desireless, but not turning utterly away from her, is the true divine impulse of God in humanity. Life of Nature is intended to be to the soul of man as the Indian wife to her husband, not all in all, for it is to God that he should turn supremely & live in God perpetually, but yet always the half of himself through whose help alone as his sahadharmini, his comrade in works, he can... shama & tapas united in an action which is the fulfilment of a mighty Silence expressing itself in waves of power & bliss. That harmony & oneness of divine calm & divine work is man's ultimate experience & the true nature of God active in the world. This high teaching of the Seer, na karma lipyate nare, seems to contradict violently the great current doctrine of the bondage of Karma which Buddha found... claimed over us by our individual nature, when our hidden relation to her & God's open ultimate intention in us is the very opposite of such a submission to the brute & despotic control of Matter. The relation of the Page 504 Swarat to his being, of the Samrat to his environment is our secret & true relation. To conquer one's own nature & fulfil God in world-nature, standing back from her in the ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Essays on the Gita  >  The Vision of the World-Spirit - Time the Destroyer

... t Devil, Page 381 or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought... that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being and that so he has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful... highest spiritual secret of existence, that all is from God and all is the Divine and in all things God dwells and is concealed and can be revealed in every finite appearance. The illusion which so persistently holds man's sense and mind, the idea that things at all exist in themselves or for themselves apart from God or that anything subject to Nature can be self-moved and self-guided, has passed from ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  Spirituality in Art

... too have their special nature and the secret reason of their existence and I would comprehend them and manifest them before the world's eyes. I may Page 70 not like sin, but why should I remain blind to it? In actual life I may very well be a pious man, if it be the Will of God to establish virtue in the world through me, but in spite of being a virtuous man why should I refrain from... inferior to the delight of God. A sadhu may remain absorbed in tranquil pure bliss, but, if he fails to appreciate the ambrosial bliss which the artist finds in his artistic work in the midst of the surging current of earthly life, then has he not found God piecemeal? God dwells in the generosity, the nobility of man as well as in the regions beyond the senses. But the same God also dwells in the meanness... beauty and this itself is the image of God in it. The manifestation of this God is the aim of the artist. The ability of the artist that can awaken the spirit of an absolute renunciation is the same as that which can awaken the thirst for action in the man of action. The artist's prestige does not suffer even when he depicts the madness of lust in a lustful man. There is no conflict between art and ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

Kena and Other Upanishads  >  An Incomplete Work of Vedantic Exegesis

... where in all this is there any room for religion, for the spirit of man, for any idea of God? Who is the Lord, Isha, Maheshwar, Vishnu, Rudra, Indra, the Lord of the Illusion, the Ruler, the Mighty One of which all the Upanishads speak? Who is this triple Prajna-Hiranyagarbha-Virat? Who is this twofold Purusha-Prakriti, God & Nature, without which the existence of the phenomenal world and consciousness... realising oneself in Him by Love as God the Beloved, or by realising Him as the Lord of all in His universe and all its creatures by works. This realisation is the true crown of any ethical system. For whether we hold the aim of morality to be the placing of oneself in harmony with eternal laws, or the fulfilment of man's nature, or the natural evolution of man in the direction of his highest faculties... Book II: The Nature of God Chapter I The view of cosmic evolution which has been set forth in the first book of this exegesis, 1 may seem deficient to the ordinary religious consciousness which is limited & enslaved by its creeds and to which its particular way of worship is a master and not a servant, because it leaves no room for a "Personal" God. The idea of a Personal God is, however, ...

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Record of Yoga  >  Sapta Chatusthaya

... service of God, of man, of all beings. The principle of kamah or desire in him must change from Page 10 the seeking after physical well-being, and self-indulgence to the joy of God manifest in matter. The principle of prema must find itself and fulfil itself in dasyalipsa and atmasamarpana, in the surrender of himself to God and to God in man and the selfless service of God and of God in man... specially siddhis, because of their abnormal nature[,] rarity and difficulty; they are denied by the sceptic and discouraged by the saint. The sceptic disbelieves in them and holds them to be impostures, fables or hallucinations, as a clever animal might disbelieve in the reasoning powers of man. The saint discourages them because they seem to him to lead away from God; he shuns them just as he shuns the riches... Nevertheless these too we must take into our scope and give room to God's full joy in the world. The methods of the Yogin are also different for he tends more and more to the use of direct vision and the faculties of the vijnana and less and less to intellectual means. The ordinary man studies the object from outside and infers its inner nature from the results of his external study. The Yogin seeks to get ...

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A Philosophy of Evolution for the Contemporary Man  >  A Deeper Question

... ideal harmony, which is God.' God, according to Whitehead, is the home of the universals and the ideal harmony. 'Ingressive evolution' is a phrase that aptly describes Whitehead's theory. There is, according to Whitehead, a progressive ingression and incorporation into the cosmic series of the eternal order which God embraces in himself. The 'primordial' nature of God is the conceptual co... the whole being and nature, an integration, must be also part of the process, if the evolution is to be effective.' The end of the evolutionary process would be to manifest the supramental consciousness-force in material body. Man is a transitional being, and the spiritual man is the sign of the new evolution. The intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man is not merely to awaken... push or drag of the past, and that ultimate irreducibility which we may only call God. It is God who envisages the realm of possibilities and the world of settled fact so as to focus them on each occasion for the creation of something new. It is He who determines the ideal plans of events by the imposition of His nature. In the words of Whitehead, The universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Philosophy of Evolution for the Contemporary Man

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Higher and the Lower Knowledge

... whole means of the Yoga of works. Contemplation of God in Nature, contemplation and service of God in man and in the life of man and of the world in its past, present and future, are equally elements of which the Yoga of knowledge can make use to complete the realisation of God in all things. Only, all is directed to the one aim, directed towards God, filled with the idea of the divine, infinite, universal... ethics, psychology, the knowledge of man and his past, action itself are means by which we arrive at the knowledge of the workings of God through Nature and through life. At first it is the workings of life and forms of Nature which occupy us, but as we go deeper and deeper and get a completer view and experience, each of these lines brings us face to face with God. Science at its limits, even physical... investigate its nature, attributes and essential workings. So ethics must eventually perceive that the law of good which it seeks is the law of God Page 513 and depends on the being and nature of the Master of the law. Psychology leads from the study of mind and the soul in living beings to the perception of the one soul and one mind in all things and beings. The history and study of man like the ...

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Arjuna's Argument At Kurukshetra And Sri Krishna's Answers  >  Appendices

... all other standards of duty or conduct for a selfless performance of the divine will working through our nature; not social service, but the action of the Best, the God-possessed, the Master-men done impersonally for the sake of the world and as a sacrifice to Him who stands behind man and Nature. In other words, the Gita is not a book of practical ethics, but of the spiritual life. The modern... God-adoration. And there must be a widening too of the calmed and enlightened heart to embrace God in all beings. There will be needed a change of the habitual and normal nature of man as he is now to a supreme and divine spiritual nature. There will be needed in a word a Yoga which shall be at once a Yoga of integral knowledge, a Yoga of the integral will and its works, a Yoga of integral love, adoration and... it is a great step, but it is not the integral God-knowledge and self-knowledge. Page 84 "A perfect perfection comes only by living in the supreme and the whole Divine. Then the soul of man is united with the Godhead of which it is a portion; then it is one with all beings in the self and spirit, one with them both in God and in Nature; then it is not only free but complete, plunged ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Arjuna's Argument At Kurukshetra And Sri Krishna's Answers

Isha Upanishad  >  Chapter V: The Soul, Causality and Law of Nature.

... internal consciousness what he shall become. God in the world is not different in nature from God beyond the world but the same. Yad amutra tad eveha. God beyond is eternally free; God here is also eternally free. Spirit in all things & spirit in man are one spirit and not different entities or natures; therefore all spirit being eternally free, the soul of man also is eternally free. Mind in its multiple... maintained by the divine Powers consciously obedient to eternal Will & expressive of It through whom Ishwara has manifested Himself in material, moral and spiritual Nature. Law of Nature is in God's being what social Law is in man's action & experience, not indestructible essence of that being or indispensable condition of that action, but formed, evolved and willed condition of a regular, ordered... they are, the succession of these changes affected by action of man or action of Nature are not binding on Spirit, not an inexorable stream of cause & result which Spirit has passively & helplessly to endure, but a harmony or progressive rhythm of successive states which Spirit has freely arranged in itself. Na karma lipyate. God acts or rather produces action, produces, that is to say, process ...

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Essays on the Gita  >  The Divine Birth and Divine Works

... comes; for in all ways, varying with their nature, men are following the path set to them by the Divine which will in the end lead them to him and the aspect of him which suits their nature is that which they can best follow when he comes to lead them; in whatever way men accept, love and take joy in God, in that way God accepts, loves and takes joy in man. Ye yathā māṁ prapadyante tāṁs tathaiva ... results in the life of the race. Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the good, the right, morality and justice, ethics; it is the whole government of all the relations of man with other beings, with Nature, with God, considered from the point of view of a divine Page 171 principle working itself out in forms and laws of action, forms of the inner and the outer life, orderings of... community in which the God-seeker lives, it lifts it up by informing it with the Brahmic consciousness; the law it gives is the law of oneness, of equality, of liberated, desireless, God-governed action, of God-knowledge and self-knowledge enlightening and drawing to itself all the nature and all the action, drawing it towards divine being and divine consciousness, and of God-love as the supreme power ...

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Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-11 and 12

... union: "I know that I can lift man's soul to God." "I know that he can bring the Immortal down." Her mission is to raise man's soul to the divine and his power is to bring down the Immortal in life. There is a divine sanction to our works: "Our will labours permitted by thy will". The godhead replied: How would it be that earth-nature—human nature—would rise while the earth would unchanged... indissolubly linked to raise the world to God, to bring God down to the world,—to change earthly life to life divine. "I keep my will to save the world and man". "If thou and I are true, the world is true". "Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God". If man cannot outgrow his present limitation then a greater race than man must appear from man. The God answered: "thou art the force by which... known - "a playing ground and dwelling house of God" "who hides himself in bird and beast and man" "Sweetly to find himself again by love." Let us now go back because evening is coming : "Let us give joy to all, for joy is ours". Our spirits came not for ourselves alone, into life but "to lead man's soul towards Truth and God we are born." Then she closed her arms about him ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Godward Emotions

... worship, service and love of God, the Yoga admits, if not as its final accompaniments, yet as preparatory movements of the emotional nature. But there is one feeling with which the Yoga, at least as practised in India, has very little dealing. In certain religions, in most perhaps, the idea of the fear of God plays a very large part, sometimes the largest, and the God-fearing man is the typical worshipper... therefore the Hebraic righteousness of the God-fearing man, but the purity, love, beneficence, truth, fearlessness, harmlessness of the saint and the God-lover are the goal of the ethical growth according to this notion. And, speaking more largely, to grow into the divine nature is the consummation of the ethical being. This can be done best by realising God as the higher Self, the guiding and uplifting... of the primitive popular religions. It was the perception of powers in the world greater than man, obscure in their nature and workings, which seemed always ready to strike him down in his prosperity and to smite him for any actions which displeased them. Fear of the gods arose from man's ignorance of God and his ignorance of the laws that govern the world. It attributed to the higher powers caprice ...

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Early Cultural Writings  >  Hathayoga

... Sa and the Tat, God revealed and unrevealed, the Universal and Supreme Spirit who supports and contains the individual. To put it in language easier but more capable of misconception, the material man realises himself by identifying God with his own ego; the psychical man by identifying God with passionless, intelligent, blissful Will in himself; the spiritual man by identifying God with the All in... ultimate truth of things. The realisation of God in self with the eye on the body is the fulfilment of the tamasic or material man. The realisation of God in self with the eye on the antahkaran or heart and mind is the fulfilment of the rajasic or psychic man. The realisation of God in self with the eye on the spirit is the fulfilment of the sattwic or spiritual man. And each fulfils himself by rising beyond... he knows he has to transcend it. The ancient embraced it as a fulfilment; only he managed and directed it by the use of the psychical will-power which he identified with the Force of Nature and the supreme Will of God. Page 506 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

The Life Divine  >  The Human Aspiration

... its full organisation in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather... intention she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth. Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration... consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life Page 5 which ...

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Essays on the Gita  >  Deva and Asura

... have a dominant force of sattwic nature turned towards knowledge, self-control, beneficence, perfection and those who have a dominant force of rajasic nature turned towards egoistic greatness, satisfaction of desire, the indulgence of their own strong will and personality which they seek to impose on the Page 469 world, not for the service of man or God, but for their own pride, glory and... the law of desire is not the true rule of our nature; there is a higher and juster standard of its works. But where is it embodied or how is it to be found? In the first place, discovered is embodied in its Shastra, its rule of science and knowledge, rule of ethics, rule of religion, rule of best social living, rule of one's right relations with man and God the human race has always been seeking for this... enjoyment, not for God in themselves and God in man, they fall into the unclean hell of their own evil. They sacrifice and give, but from a self-regarding ostentation, from vanity and with a stiff and foolish pride. In the egoism of their strength and power, in the violence of their wrath and arrogance they hate, despise and belittle the God hidden in themselves and the God in man. And because they ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Isha Upanishad  >  Chapter II: The Golden Rule of Living - Enjoyment & Renunciation

... possessed through a man's senses so far as God in him accepts their action and in a man's soul by sympathy and identity with all beings & with universal Nature. Still, these things will always remain the instrument of enjoyment; the object of the enjoyment, the true object of all bhoga, for the liberated soul, is God,—not Nature, although God in Nature & through Nature. We shall enjoy God in & through His... sacrifice. The gods who are Powers of Nature, receiving our due sacrifice, give us the partial gains & enjoyments which come within their jurisdiction; God, receiving our due sacrifice, gives us Himself and in Himself everything that exists in Nature or beyond it. There is a common agreement in the different schools of Hinduism that to the man who has renounced, God gives Himself in return for his ... action,—variations produced by the differently distributed motion in us of Prakriti, of Jagati, of the process of our world-nature. According to our nature we seek God. It is always, in fact, by some principle in Avidya itself that we are moved to exceed Avidya. Even as a man approaches me, says the Gita, precisely in that spirit & in that way I accept and possess him. Ye yathá mám prapadyante táns ...

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Essays on the Gita  >  The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood

... supreme and divine utility. For there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhāvam āgataḥ ; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that... person, his role and his nature different and separate from man; the perfect cannot put on human imperfection; the unborn personal God cannot be born as a human personality; the Ruler of the worlds cannot be limited in a nature-bound human action and in a perishable human body. These objections, so formidable at first sight to the reason, seem to have been present to the mind of the Teacher in the Gita... the egoistic nature-consciousness through which he works, is God's universal method with creatures. Why then should we Page 153 suppose that in any form he comes forward into the frontal, the phenomenal consciousness for a more direct and consciously divine action? Obviously, if at all, then to break the veil between himself and humanity which man limited in his own nature could never lift ...

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My Pilgrimage to the Spirit  >  The Art of Living

... living is turned towards God-realization, when every individual would do the work assigned to him as a vehicle for God-realization. This practice of Karmayoga, i.e., doing one's duty as a means for attaining self-realization, may be employed to purify life and the way of doing one's duty and prepare all the three levels of nature—mental, vital and physical—for the attainment of God which is the object... to become a tool for his expression, an instrument for his creation is the sole purpose of life. Then we should allow the highest light to react on the threefold nature for its transformation into divine nature. Thus God and His nature embodied in human frame, will manifest in transparent shape to us and the world. This manifestation is a divine boon to humanity. The Mother says: Every individual... by the two world wars. Science ought to have induced man to enter into one's inner self, to acquire that inner power and to attain control over one's nature. But instead, science has urged man to conquer the moon. Thus he may some day acquire the empire of the planets but, in the process, has been reduced to the state of a slave of his own nature. The craze for pleasure, prodded by scientific inventions ...

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Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Principle of Evil

... Son of Man on the cross acquires a new significance and man himself becomes the Christ of the universe. Another question occurs. Is pain real or a shadow? The Vedantist believes that the soul is a part of God or one with God Himself, and cannot feel pain or grief, but only ānanda , bliss. The jīva or soul takes the rasa , the delight of the dualities, and it changes to bliss in his nature; but... brought grief and sin into the world; when that knowledge is surmounted, man will rise above grief and sin. Before he ate the forbidden fruit, he had the innocence of the animal; when he shall cease to eat it, he will have the innocence of the God. Is it not so that in nature pain is a possibility which has to be exhausted and man has been selected as the instrument to bring it into existence, in a limited... the devout soul to admit that evil can have its existence in God, has led to variations of the Manichean theory which sees a double control in the world, God as the Principle of good and Satan as the Principle of evil. Those who regard the belief in the existence of an intelligent evil power as superstition, find the origin of evil in man who abuses his freedom and by his revolt and self-will gives ...

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Savitri  >  'The Debate of Love and Death'

... held a sin:         A puritan God made pleasure a poisonous fruit,       Or red drug in the market-place of Death,       And sin the child of Nature's ecstasy. 43   Nevertheless it is folly to believe that, not Ananda or Bliss, but pain is at the root of things. World-Delight is the basically operative field of force in which we live. Nature talks the language of beauty and essays... figure of the coming superman, the demi-god. Page 214 Shall we blame man for nurturing these visions, visions that shall certainly prove true:         Motionless, voiceless in foreseeing depths,       He stands awake in Supernature's light       And sees a glory of arisen wings       And sees the vast descending might of God. 38   Death alas! is purblindly... purblindly looking on an "unfinished world" and condemning it entire and denying God. "How shall the child already be the man?" Death seems to ignore "the occult spiritual miracle":         Our imperfection towards perfection toils,       The body is the chrysalis of a soul:... 39   Proof of God's existence! There is glory in the glimmering moon, and glory in the purple sky; there is ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Isha Upanishad  >  Salvation through Works

... according to his nature and cannot help doing work; but he can choose to what he shall direct his works, whether to his lower self or his higher, whether to desire or to God. The man who leaves the world behind him and sits on a mountaintop or in an asram, has not therefore got rid of works. If nothing else he has to maintain his body, to eat, to walk, to move his limbs, to sit in asan and meditate; all... "For no man verily remaineth even for a moment without doing works, for all are helplessly made to do work by the moods to which Nature has given birth." And again सदृशं चेष्टते स्वस्याः प्रकृतेर्ज्ञानवानपि । "Even the Jnani moveth & doeth after the semblance of his own nature; for created things follow after their Page 205 nature and what can forcing it do?" A man works according... in the depths of their own being. True Sannyasins are the greatest of all workers, because they have the most unalloyed & inexhaustible strength and are the mightiest in God to do the works of God. Whatever be the precise nature of the vairagya or its immediate & exciting cause, if the thirst for the Eternal mingle in it, know that it is real vairagya and the necessary impulse towards your salvation ...

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Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-6

... Even when he perceives a law at work, it is to him a lifeless law—not a living heart. But the Self is there, behind the machine. If man could identify his nature with God's, if he could surrender to God their all can change here. Then can "the mind of man receive God's light" "It is decreed that Satyavan must die; The hour is fixed, chosen the fatal stroke." But "What else shall... enchanted eyes"? There are in Nature expanses, hills and woods where felicity reigns undisturbed. "There hast thou paused", "thou hast not drunk from an earthly cup" but hast wondered through "brighter countries than man's eyes can bear". Thou hast been in the Gandhamadan mountain sporting divinely, "and in god-haunts thy human footsteps strayed. Thy mortal bosom quivered with god-speech." And what kind of... towards God. They have their divine utility in the scheme of life. Man should patiently bear pain if it comes but he should not invite it. Also he should follow the way of ordinary Nature which takes him through joy and sorrow—and not follow the Titan's way which is dangerous. Rightly seen pain, joy and indifference are only garbs of universal Delight. As to the origin of pain: Man himself ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-3-Part-1

... of the riddle lies in the human being. Though man is a product of the higher consciousness descended on earth still he has not yet adequate power to change the whole cosmos and nature. Being subject to darkness, he is "A nomad of the far mysterious Life, In the wide ways a little spark of God." In his present state in the world man is subjected to darkness and opposed by hostile... perfection because of their inherent defects. And, yet, in man's imperfect state there is a godhead struggling. And the real leader of the course of human evolution is God himself behind the apparent veil of ignorance. Therefore, we need not despair of man. "His failure is not failure whom God leads; "And how shall the end be vain when God is guide?" In spite of the resistance of the... sign of the Supreme; Nature left nude and still uncovers God." This zero is not a void without content nor is the Nature an illusive manifestation without a mystery behind it. This silence of the Divine is not without power. For "in absolute silence sleeps an absolute Power." And, if that can be awakened, it can also awaken the human soul, "and in the ray reveal the parent sun." Even ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

The Inspiration of Paradise Lost  >  The Metaphysics of Paradise Lost

... nitarian dispute - whether Milton believes Christ to be co-essential with God or inferior to Him. We shall briefly busy ourselves, in the Miltonic context, with the fundamental nature of God, the relation of it to that of His Creation, the nature of man's spirit and body, man's future on earth and beyond. Milton's God has often been mocked: He has been dubbed a sophistical bore, a litigious... can be relaxed only if God's Son incarnates himself and by his self-sacrifice pays "death for death". But, as the result of Christ's redeeming "Man's mortal crime", what do we get in place of death? In other words - to quote the poem's opening again - how does one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat? 15 To understand the nature of man's punishment it is important... Just as the doctrine, in Paradise Lost, of God's literal and substantial omnipresence has broad affinities to the Vedantic multi-aspected pantheism, so also the doctrine of body turning all to spirit has a broad suggestion of the profoundest modern development from the Vedantic vision of man's triple-bodied existence. As to what would be the nature of the body turned all to Page 182 ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Inspiration of Paradise Lost

Education and the Aim of human life  >  The Drawing of the New Age

... which she has planted in certain forms Life.... The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be thinking and living laboratory in whom and with who conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?² For some time it was held that the evolution of living species proceeded by a... of man's soul as a thing entirely divine in its essence, we have to accept also the possibility of his whole being becoming divine, and this in spite of Nature's first patent contradictions of this possibility, her dark denials of this ultimate certitude, and even with these as the necessary earthly starting-point. The possible godhead of man because he is inwardly of one being with God will... according to their own nature and free leisure to grow inwardly, as well as a simply rich and beautiful life for all.12 In politics, our spiritualized society will not ... regard the nations within the scope of their own internal life as enormous State machines regulated and armoured with man living for the sake of the machine and worshipping it as his God and his larger self, content ...

Pavitra   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Education and the Aim of human life

Towards A New Social Order  >  Glimpses of the new social order

... measure - the joy of work according to their own nature and free leisure to grow inwardly, as well as a simply rich and beautiful life for all. In its politics it would not regard the nations within the scope of their own internal life as enormous State machines regulated and armoured with man living for the sake of the machine and worshipping it as his God and his larger self, Page 43 content... by the law of his own divine nature liberated from the ego." The individual will not live either for himself or for the state and society, but for God in himself and for the Divine in the universe "The spiritual life is the flower not of a featureless but a conscious and diversified oneness." "....he who sees God in all, will serve freely God in all with the service of... religious belief and form to universalise and impose itself is contrary to the variety of human nature and to at least one essential character of the Spirit. For the nature of the Spirit is a spacious inner freedom and a large unity into which each man must be allowed to grow according to his own nature. Again - and this is yet another source of inevitable failure - the usual tendency of these credal ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Towards A New Social Order

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  Goethe

... wonderful the glory of God manifest therein. But is it absolutely perfect? Is there nowhere any flaw in it? There is a doubting voice that enters a dissenting note. That is Satan, the Antagonist, the Evil One. Man is the weakest link in the chain of the apparently all-perfect harmony. And Satan boldly proposes to snap it if God only let him do so. He can prove to God that the true nature of his creation is... Satan and another, as a consequence, between Man and Satan. Satan is jealous of man who is God's favourite. He tells God that his partiality to man is misplaced. God has put into man a little of his light (reason and intelligence and something more perhaps), but to what purpose? Man tries to soar, he thinks he flies high and wide, but in fact he is and will be an insect that "lies always in the grass... eternal reality: it is anti-God, it seeks to oppose God, frustrate his work. It is the great tempter whose task it is to persuade, to inspire man to remain always an earthly creature and never turn to know or live in God. Now the crucial question that arises is, what is the necessity of this Antagonist in God's scheme of creation? What is the meaning of this struggle and battle? God could have created, if ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

The Human Cycle  >  Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age

... measure—the joy of work according to their own nature and free leisure to grow inwardly, as well as a simply rich and beautiful life for all. In its politics it would not regard the nations within the scope of their own internal life as enormous State machines regulated and armoured with man living for the sake of the machine and worshipping it as his God and his larger self, content at the first call... essential truths of existence which all Nature seems to be Page 254 an attempt to hide by their opposites and which therefore are as yet for the mass of mankind only words and dreams, God, freedom, unity. Three things which are one, for you cannot realise freedom and unity unless you realise God, you cannot possess freedom and unity unless you possess God, possess at once your highest Self and... division to get away from themselves by shutting their eyes while they turn somersaults around their own centre. When man is able to see God and to possess him, then he will know real freedom and arrive at real unity, never otherwise. And God is only waiting to be known, while man seeks for him everywhere and creates images of the Divine, but all the while truly finds, effectively erects and worships ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Savitri  >  The Basis of Savitri Sri Aurobindo's Yoga

... the distant skies:       In man's own heart He lies. 94   It is always a question of exceeding the limited human nature and growing into the Truth, the Right, the Vast. Man is at the meeting point of the physical and the metaphysical, and sums up in himself all physical nature and all the possibilities of angelic or divine nature. Page 322 The spiritual problem... in other words, but a quarter of man the Purusha is in the apparent world, the remaining three quarters subsist above as Immortality. This assurance, like "the lark's morning thrill of humanity" (in Brunnhofer's words), has been at the root of man's strivings to invade the invisible, to defy his mortality, and to see in himself, "the conscious vice-gerent of God or responsible cooperator with... denying the underlying unity; overmental activity can have multiple directions, but there will be no wasteful diffusion of effort, for the essential purpose, which is the divinisation of man and earth-nature, will not be ignored. Such was the power that Sri Aurobindo 'realised' through his yoga on 24 November 1926. Page 325 ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Yoga and Its Objects

... t—of man's present nature that it can be developed, and such a change is not possible except by yoga. The nature of man and of things is at present a discord, a harmony that has got out of tune. The whole heart and action and mind of man must be changed, but from within, not from without, not by political and social institutions, not even by creeds and philosophies, but by realisation of God in ourselves... responsibility yours; there is indeed no responsibility, no bondage of Karma, for God has no responsibility, but is in every way master and free. Our actions become not only like the Shastric man's svabhāvaniyata , regulated by nature and therefore dharma , but the svabhāva itself is controlled like a machine by God. It is not easy for us, full as we are of the Sanskaras of ignorance, to arrive at... Christ's gospel of the purity and perfection of mankind, Mahomed's gospel of perfect submission, self-surrender and servitude to God, Chaitanya's gospel of the perfect love and joy of God in man, Ramakrishna's gospel of the unity of all religions and the divinity of God in man, and, gathering all these streams into one mighty river, one purifying and redeeming Ganges, pour it over the death-in-life of ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-3-Part-2

... capacity of the earth and the aspiration of man, would they permit the transformation of man's Nature? Man is in love with his ignorance. She is even told that it might be better to leave the change to the slow evolutionary process. Why not merge into the Eternal? She resists the offer saying she and Satyavan are both pledged to raise the world to God, to bring God down to the world. Since it is the Divine... things are temporary, evanescent. Nature and her laws remain constant but man is only a transient being, a slave of, Nature. The world has remained the same through the ages. If there is Self one can only realise it by rejecting Nature. Savitri refuses to seek an individual escape and declares that the freedom she seeks is for all, that the world is not cut off from God, since it is He who supports... the hand of Nature sculpturing men to greatness",—from another point of view it is a perversion of the original Delight and a sign that "a secret God" is present in man's heart even though "denied by life". But at present pain is a stark necessity, so much so that even world-saviours and divine incarnations who come to help mankind have to accept it if they wish to change earth-nature. They don't ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Kena and Other Upanishads  >  Evolution in the Vedantic View

... in thinking man & living tree but in substances in which life & mind are inactive, this conceiving Spirit presides & determines its law & form. So 'rthān vyadadhach chhaswatibhyah samabhyah. We must not for a moment imagine that Brahman of the Upanishads is either an extracosmic God entering into a cosmos external to Him or that last refuge of the dualising intellect, an immanent God. When Brahman... not logically & on a principle of mutual exclusion, but harmoniously on a principle of mutual balancing & reconciliation. God's immanence & God's extramanence, God's identity with things & God's transcendence of things, God's personality & God's impersonality, God's mercy & God's cruelty & so on through all possible pairs of opposites, all possible multiplicity of aspects, are but the two sides of the... are but different views of the same scene & incompatible or inharmonious to our ideas only so long as we do not see the entire entity, whole vision. In Himself therefore God has arranged all objects according to their nature from years sempiternal. He has fixed from the Page 417 beginning the relations of his movements in matter, mind and life. The principle of diversity in unity governs ...

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Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-10

... Self can be attained. If there is a God he is indifferent to man's destiny. He does not require man's love. Do not dream of changing this world and its eternal law of ignorance and pain. If there is heaven where there is no grief you should seek joy there after leaving the earth. "If thou art Spirit and Nature is thy robe" then cast off thy garb, turn only to God,—"forgetting Love, forgetting Satyavan"... leaves, "and Thought seize the grey matter of the brain?" Why should not unknown powers emerge from Nature? "Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars arise" in the ignorant mind of man. If the door of the inner chamber of man "is even a little ajar" what can prevent "God from stealing in"? "Already God is near, the Truth is close". "I live in the glory of the Infinite...The Ineffable is now my household... and "poor petty life of animal Man"? "Renounce,... thy passionate nature in the bosom profound of... Nothingness" and be at rest. Forget all human aspirations and be calm. Savitri replied to the Dark Power: Your music is dangerous, your falsehood is mingled with sad strains of truth. But "my love is not a craving of the flesh"; "It came to me from God, to God returns." Even in the degraded ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Essays on the Gita  >  The Process of Avatarhood

... mystery of the divine Incarnation in man, the assumption by the Godhead of the human type and the human nature, is in the view of the Gita only the other side of the eternal mystery of human birth itself which is always in its essence, though not in its phenomenal appearance, even such a miraculous assumption. The eternal and universal self of every human being is God; even his personal self is a part... together in its great crises, to break the forces of the downward gravitation when they grow too insistent, to uphold or restore the great dharma of the Godward law in man's nature, to prepare even, however far off, the kingdom of God, the victory of the seekers of light and perfection, sādhūnām , and the overthrow of those Page 159 who fight for the continuance of the evil and the darkness... yuge yuge ? In some such spirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, first in animal forms, then in the animal man, then in the dwarf man-soul, Vamana, the violent Asuric man, Rama of the axe, the divinely-natured man, a greater Rama, the awakened spiritual man, Buddha, and, preceding him in time, but final in place, the complete divine manhood, Krishna,—for the last Avatar, Kalki, only ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Motives of Devotion

... that when we approach him by our human emotions, we receive a response in kind. This does not mean that the nature of the Divine is precisely the same as our human nature though upon a larger scale, or that it is that nature pure of certain perversions and God a magnified or else an ideal Man. God is not and cannot be an ego limited by his qualities as we are in our normal consciousness. But on the other... truth of the one existence in this sense that all in Nature is the Divine even though God be more than all in Nature, and love becomes then a movement by which the Divine in Nature and man takes possession of and enjoys the delight of the universal and the supreme Divine. In any case, love has necessarily a twofold fulfilment by its very nature, that by which the lover and the beloved enjoy their union... vast, powerful and incalculable beyond our nature by a certain inscrutability in the springs and extent of its action, Page 554 and of the veneration and adoration which one feels for that which is higher in its nature or its perfection than ourselves. For, even while preserving largely the idea of a God endowed with the qualities of human nature, there still grows up along with it, mixed ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Essays Divine and Human  >  The Divine Superman

... other than this, but wherefore shouldst thou enslave thyself to appearances? Rather arise, transcend thyself, become thyself. Thou art man and the whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the seeker after beauty. He shall be more than the thinker, he shall be the seer of knowledge; he shall... to it. It has been well said by one who saw but through a veil and mistook the veil for the face, that thy aim is to become thyself; and he said well again that the nature of man is to transcend himself. This is indeed his nature and that is indeed the divine aim of his self-transcending. What then is the self that thou hast to transcend and what is the self that thou hast to become? For it is... is to live the divine life, to be a god; for the gods are the powers of God. Be a power of God in humanity. To live in the divine Being and let the consciousness and bliss, the will and knowledge of the Spirit possess thee and play with thee and through thee, this is the meaning. This is the transfiguration of thyself on the mountain. It is to discover God in thyself and reveal him to thyself ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Arguments for the Existence of God  >  A Speculative Theory of Religion Its Data and Aim

... the God-idea, therefore, have a unity and a connexion through the active mind which reveals and expresses itself in them. It is not by accident that the spirit of man, reacting on stimuli from the environment, develops an idea of God corresponding to its own self-development. If it be true that man is 'incurably religious,' it is because there is something in him that makes him so. "Man's nature is... finally to decide its truth. A conception, changing yet enduring, like the conception of God, testifies to some large self-fulfilment which the human soul attains through it. A value which persists and maintains itself in the developing life of mankind, can only do so because it is in harmony with the nature of man and of the world in which his lot is cast. If we look then to the evolution of the religious... of an ethical and personal God. Is the nature of reality such that this conception of God can be justified? This is the great and enduring problem of a Philosophy of Religion. In proceeding to treat of this subject I shall begin by examining certain historic attempts which have been made to give rational proof of the existence of God. B. Proofs of the Existence of God The importance of ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Arguments for the Existence of God

Sri Aurobindo's Message  >  Destiny of Our Troubled Human Existence

... intelligence, will, character, genius, dynamic force, saintliness, love, purity or perfection. Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits, a greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature. ... Page 9 Man's greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of a living labour... the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature's process. The appearance of a human possibility in a material and animal world was the first glint of a coming divine Light, — the first far-off intimation of a godhead to be born out of Matter. The appearance of the superman in the human world will be the fulfilment of that distant shining promise. ... Man is a mind imprisoned, obscured and... instrument for the spirit's divine play and work in Matter. ... Supermind or gnosis is in its original nature at once and in the same movement an infinite wisdom and an infinite will. At its source it is the dynamic consciousness of the divine Knower and Creator. ... Superman is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Sri Aurobindo's Message

Essays on the Gita  >  The Core of the Gita's Meaning

... silence but in the world and its beings and in all self and in all Nature, it is by raising to an integral as well as to a highest union with him all the activities of the intelligence, the heart, the will, the life that man can solve at once his inner riddle of self and God and the outer problem of his active human existence. Made Godlike, God-becoming, he can enjoy the infinite breadth of a supreme spiritual... all not here in the life of the body or in the collective life of mortal man but in some immortal Beyond lies the heaven or the Nirvana where alone is to be found the true spiritual existence. It is here that the Gita intervenes with a restatement of the truth of the Spirit, of the Self, of God and of the world and Nature. It extends and remoulds the truth evolved by a later thought from the ancient... sincere and insistent will to live in the Divine, to be in self one with him and in Nature—where too we are an eternal portion of his being—one with his greater spiritual Nature, God-possessed in all our members and Godlike. The Gita in the development of its idea raises many issues, such as the determinism of Nature, the significance of the universal manifestation and the ultimate status of the liberated ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

The Renaissance in India  >  Indian Spirituality and Life - 3

... what it calls God, the Permanent, the Real, and it sees man as a soul and power of this being of God in Nature. The progressive growth of the finite consciousness of man towards this Self, towards God, towards the universal, the eternal, the infinite, in a word his growth into spiritual consciousness, by the development of his ordinary ignorant natural being into an illumined divine nature, this is for... the main gates of man's approach to the Spirit. The Vaishnava religion especially is a religion of love and beauty and of the satisfaction of the whole delight-soul of man in God and even the desires and images of the sensuous life were turned by its vision into figures of a divine soul-experience. Few religions have gone so far as this immense catholicity or carried the whole nature so high in its large... the fruits of his perfect spiritual evolution, an identity with the Self and Spirit, a dwelling in or with God, the divine law of his being, a spiritual universality, communion, transcendence. But distinctions are lines that can always be overpassed in the infinite complexity of man's nature and there was no sharp and unbridgeable division, only a gradation, since the actuality or potentiality of ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Renaissance in India

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Synthesis of the Systems

... that are are natural. All things are in Nature and all things are in God. But, for practical purposes, there is a real distinction. The lower Nature, that which we know and are and must remain so long as the faith in us is not changed, acts through limitation and division, is of the nature of Ignorance and culminates in the life of the ego; but the higher Nature, that to which we aspire, acts by unification... himself for the integral action of the lower Nature working in and by ego and division the integral action of the higher Nature working in and by God and unity. If indeed our aim be only an escape from the world to God, synthesis is unnecessary and a waste of time; for then our sole practical aim must be to find out one path out of the thousand that lead to God, one shortest possible of short cuts, and... ancient symbolic sense of the words Dakshina and Vama, it was the distinction between the way of Knowledge and the way of Ananda,—Nature in man liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities and Nature in man Page 42 liberating itself by joyous acceptance in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities ...

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Sri Aurobindo's Message  >  Arise, Transcend thyself, Become Thyself

... thyself; and he said well again that the nature of man is to transcend himself. This is indeed his nature and that is indeed the divine aim of his self-transcending. ... Rather arise, transcend thyself, become thyself. Thou art man and the whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the... live the divine life, to be a god; for the gods are the powers of God. Be a power of God in humanity. To live in the divine Being and let the consciousness and bliss, the will and knowledge of the Spirit possess thee and play with thee and through thee, this is the meaning. This is the transfiguration of thyself on the mountain. It is to discover God in thyself and reveal him to thyself ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Sri Aurobindo's Message

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Divine Work

... guided movement of Nature emerging in man towards God and that this is the work in which the Lord of the Gita declares that he is ever occupied although he himself has nothing ungained that he has yet to win, then a deep and true sense will appear for this great injunction. To participate in that divine work, to live for God in the world will be the rule of the Karmayogin; to live for God in the world and... personal choice or pleasure. Always he is moved to do whatever is in consonance with the Truth or whatever the Divine demands through his nature. A false conclusion is sometimes drawn from this that the spiritual man, accepting the position in which Fate or God or his past Karma has placed him, content to work in the field and cadre of the family, clan, caste, nation, occupation which are his by birth... reality, no man works, but Nature works through him for the self-expression of a Power within that proceeds from the Infinite. To know that and live in the presence and in the being of the Master of Nature, free from desire and the illusion of personal impulsion, is the one thing needful. That and not the bodily cessation of action is the true release; for the bondage of works at once ceases. A man might ...

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The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 5  >  VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

... believe in the divinity of man, the Chaldean line, the Semetic, for example. According to these, the Creator and the Created are separate in nature and being; to call anything created as God himself is blasphemy. The ancient Egyptian, the Hebrew or the Muslim place God high in Paradise, and, in their view, man can be only his servant or slave, his worker or warrior. Man is too small and too earthly... am born of God, and yet I am not 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... sort of connecting link between the two. Christ is not only the Son of God, he is also the God-Man—he declares very clearly and categorically that he and the Father in heaven are one and that everyone should be as perfect as God himself. Still a difference is maintained. First of all, with regard to the birth. The God-Man was not born in sin like ordinary mortals, an immaculate virgin gave him birth ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 5

Emergence of the Psychic  >  Appendix

... Out of the wood and stone of our nature's stuff A temple is shaped where the high gods could live. Even if the struggling world is left outside One man's perfection still can save the world. There is won a new proximity to the skies, A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven, A deep concordat between Truth and Life: A camp of God is pitched in human time. Book... to fulfil himself was God's desire. Book Three, Canto Two, pp. 310-12 * Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state. But for such vast spiritual change to be, Page 120 Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil And step into common nature's crowded rooms And... into eternity. An eye has opened upon timelessness, Infinity takes back the forms it gave, And through God's darkness or his naked light His million rays return into the Sun. There is a zero sign of the Supreme; Nature left nude and still uncovers God. But in her grandiose nothingness all is there: When her strong garbs are torn away from us, The soul's ...

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Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine  >  The Supermind as Creator

... this as God. The consciousness of God is Truth-Consciousness; it is not a mental consciousness. Agni is said to be Seer-will, the will that actuates itself in it. Light is one with the force of Will, Knowledge and Will go together; where the vibration of knowledge is one with rhythm of will and both become indistinguishable. There the divine nature is described as distinguished from human nature. When... the indication will not be clear. The two processes by which man begins to know the Divine Consciousness are inspiration and revelation, the two powers by which mind has known something of it. Hearing the vibration of Truth and seeing the vision of Truth—these two powers have brought man some inkling of the constitution of divine nature. It means there is a plane of consciousness where you can see... wrote about "Eternity in a grain of sand." Man has in him his natural instruments —mind, heart, vital being, nervous and physical being—and Page 152 the true Self, the Spark of the Divine. Man can awaken his true Self and identify it with the Eternal, and immortal. It is then possible for it to project its perfection into the instruments of nature and make them participate in the immortality ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

Essays on the Gita  >  God in Power of Becoming

... see God in the man of God, how shall we see him in those who oppose him and represent in act and nature all that we conceive of as undivine? If Narayana is without difficulty visible in the sage and the saint, how shall he be easily visible to us in the sinner, the criminal, the harlot and the outcaste? To all the differentiations of the world-existence the sage, looking everywhere for the supreme purity... mental associations to prevent us from admitting God in these high aspects. But the difficulty is to see him in the apparent truths of existence, to detect him in this fact of Nature and in these disguising phenomena of the world's becoming; for here all is opposed to the sublimity of this unifying conception. How can we consent to see the Divine as man and animal being and Page 358 inanimate... Vaishnavism and Shaktism in a greater intensity of vision, man's possible joy of the Divine in the world-existence, the universal Ananda, the play of the Mother, the sweetness and beauty of God's Lila. 2 The divine Teacher accedes to the request of the disciple, but with an initial reminder that a full reply is not possible. For God is infinite and his manifestation is infinite. The forms of ...

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The Life Divine  >  Man in the Universe

... in its nature a self-concealing; and in the descent there are successive levels, in the concealing successive veils. Necessarily, the revelation takes the form of an ascent; and necessarily also the ascent and the revelation are both progressive. For each successive level in the descent of the Divine is to man a stage in an ascension; each veil that hides the unknown God becomes for the God-lover and... on a false view of what the individual is in the universe and therefore a false attitude both towards God and Nature, towards self and environment. Because that which he has become is out of harmony both with what the world of his habitation is and what he himself should be and is to be, therefore man is subject to these contradictions of the secret Truth of things. In that case they are not the punishment... self-conscious concentration of the All through which it can aspire. In the conscious individual Prakriti turns back to perceive Purusha, World seeks after Self; God having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God. On the other hand it is by means of the universe that the Page 50 individual is impelled to realise himself. Not only is it his foundation, his means ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine

On Thoughts and Aphorisms  >  Aphorism - 201, 202

... 201—Mediaeval Christianity said to the race, "Man, thou art in thy earthly life an evil thing and a worm before God; renounce then egoism, live for a future state and submit thyself to God and His priest." The results were not over-good for humanity. Modern knowledge says to the race, "Man, thou art an ephemeral animal and no more to Nature than the ant and the earthworm, a transitory speck only... trained administrator and the scientific expert." Will this gospel succeed any better than the other? 202—Vedanta says rather, "Man, thou art of one nature and substance with God, one soul with thy fellow-men. Awake and progress then to thy utter divinity, live for God in thyself and in others." This gospel which was given only to the few, must now be offered to all mankind for its deliverance. ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Thoughts and Aphorisms

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 5  >  A Note on Supermind

... two hundred years, but actually we find man refuses to forget God. Churches and temples, com­munities and corporations have been cropping up always demanding that God is to be called God, He cannot be called by any other name. He is to be worshipped as God. No lesser gods but the Supreme God Himself. Does not the Bible say: "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God" ? ¹ A Godless morality or a Religion... lifeless, dry: it does not evoke enthusiasm, does not drive man spontaneously towards heigher hights and deeper depths. Man remains a groundling. God need not be there: but the feeling that is associated with God and the conception of God – which is usually called the religious feeling is a genuine human feeling and with the rejection of God, the feeling does not go, it persists. So a new religion is... added, the rest is Maya, illusion, unreal, false. They were terribly radical, iconoclasts. Cut away, they said, this world, this humanity, this nature. Go beyond into the transcendent. First enter and establish yourself there. That is the Supreme God, that is the own home of Truth. Cling to that unshakable status, thereafter only you can know of other things, then only you will know what to reject ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 5

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-1

... of imperfection so that ultimately man may rise to the divine nature. Transformation of nature becomes possible because of the presence of the Divine behind the human. As the Divine accepts man's nature with all its imperfections, so is it possible for man to put on the divine nature. In fact, that is the inevitable destiny intended of man. For we are children of God and must become like Him. The key... passed through a "Supernatural darkness",—which intervenes before man's soul draws nearer to God. "An hour comes when fail all Nature's means" and man's soul is thrown upon the help of God. Savitri was now passing through such an hour. She knew that only the power of the Spirit "can lift the yoke imposed by birth in time' and that her Nature's means comprising of the mind and the vital were impotent against... conceived by man; for, their purpose is to embody and be "Alive to the truth that dwells in God's extremes". In fact, the vision of an Immortal being is not the same as the vision of man, Page 159 for he sees things hidden from the mind of man. As he is in contact with the Eternal, and knows full well the trend of cosmic evolution in Time he waits for the Eternal's hour". Nature in the meantime ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Isha Upanishad  >  The Isha Upanishad

... waking self & the joy of God's divine being in & beyond the world, Amritam. The last is the goal proposed for man by the Isha Upanishad. The waking ego, identifying the Jiva with its bodily, vital & mental experiences which are part of the stream of Nature's movement & subject to Nature & the process of the movement, falsely believes the soul to be the subject of Nature & not its lord, anish and... in the body can arrive at the God-consciousness and at once transcend, contain and inform its universe. God-consciousness is not exclusive of world-consciousness; Nature is not an outcast from Spirit, but its Image, world is not a falsity contradicting Brahman, but the symbol of a divine Existence. God is the reverse side of Nature, Nature the obverse side of God. Since the soul in the body... ladder and the soul that has descended into Matter tends by its secret nature & inevitable self-impulsion to reemerge out of form towards the freedom of pure universal being. These are the two movements that govern world-existence, adhogati, the descent towards matter or mere form and urdhwagati, the ascent towards Spirit and God. Man is a mental being, manu or manomaya purusha, who has entered into ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  Varieties of Religious Experience

... believe in the divinity of man, the Chaldean line, the Semitic, for example. According to these, the Creator and the created are separate in nature and being; to call anything created as God himself is blasphemy. The ancient Egyptian, the Hebrew or the Muslim place God high in Paradise, and, in their view, man can be only his servant or slave, his worker or warrior. Man is too small and too earthly... identified with God: he can only be a worshipper. Man can love God, at the most, as his Beloved. But this devotion is for something afar, like the desire of the moth for the star. And to equate the two is to confuse realities. Man as worshipper and devotee can attain certain divine qualities, but limited and modified and always humanized to a large extent. And God can never become man. He sends down... the fusion is not absolute. Man is asked to be as pure and perfect as God, but only in kind and not in being and subs­tance. The purified and perfect souls sit by the side of God in heaven, they do not lose themselves in God. The Vaishnava conception in India was in the same line. The liberated soul, according to it, dwells with God in the same world, possesses God's qualities – the union is that ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

Essays on the Gita  >  The Vision of the World-Spirit - The Double Aspect

... sovereignly culminate, their marvellous and auspicious upshot. To this humanised embodied soul their end becomes here a union, a closeness, a constant companionship of man and God, man living in the world for God, God dwelling in man and turning to his own divine ends in him the enigmatic world-process. And beyond the end is a yet more wonderful oneness and inliving in the last transfigurations of the... lives in the sense of the fatherhood of God, the friendhood of God, the attracting love between the Divine Spirit and our human soul and nature. For the Divine inhabits the human soul and body; he draws around him and wears like a robe the human mind and figure. He assumes the human relations which the soul affects in the mortal body and they find in God their own fullest sense and greatest realisation... but to the normal man it is overwhelming, appalling, incommunicable. The truth that reassures, even when known, is grasped with difficulty behind the formidable and mighty aspect of all-destructive Time and an incalculable Will and a vast immeasurable inextricable working. But there is too the gracious mediating form of divine Narayana, the God who is so close to man and in man, the Charioteer of ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine  >  The Human Aspiration

... work out God or to manifest God". Man, and his reason or intelligence cannot order or beg Nature to stop at a certain stage. He cannot say to Nature : you cannot go beyond. At a given stage of evolution we cannot Page 6 condemn her as perverse, or call it a disease or a hallucination when we find that Nature through man is trying to give evidence of her intention to go beyond... immortality, God or Light, freedom. Now you can say, if you look at the process of growth that seems to have taken place, that man has evolved from the animal consciousness. In fact, he says in The Life Divine, that "animal is the laboratory in which Nature has worked out man. Then man himself can be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation, Nature wills to work... with the other and ignorant of the truth that God is immanent already in Nature, they put God and Nature in opposition to each other; God, Supremely Conscious Nature, absolutely inconscient. Now Sri Aurobindo says that if you accept this opposition of God versus Nature; then if you turn to God, you turn away from Nature. Accept Nature then you deny God. Thus you arrive at the exclusion so to say, not ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

The Human Cycle  >  The Ideal Law of Social Development

... once humanly and divinely—according to the law and nature of human existence, but of human existence fulfilled in God and fulfilling God in the world—both himself and the world is Page 64 the destiny of man and the object of his individual and social existence. 1 This is done primarily through the individual man; for this end man has become an individual soul, that the One may find... themselves, mankind, God and the world and when the idea of self-realisation for men and nations is coming consciously to the surface,—it is the natural work and should be the conscious hope of man in such an age to know himself truly, to find the ideal law of his being and his development and, if he cannot even then follow it ideally owing to the difficulties of his egoistic nature, still to hold it... association and union or by strife and opposition. Nor does he achieve his destiny as the individual Man for the sake of the individual soul alone,—a lonely salvation is not his complete ideal,—but for the world also or rather for God in the world, for God in all as well as above all and not for God solely and separately in one. And he achieves it by the stress, not really of his separate individual ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Essays on the Gita  >  The Supreme Word of the Gita

... ntal Godhead above us, the ever-present Master of all things here, God in man, God in Nature. It is at first a wisdom of the intelligence, the buddhi ; but that is accompanied by a moved spiritualised state of the affective nature, 6 bhāva . This change of the heart and mind is the beginning of a total change of all the nature. A new inner birth and becoming prepares us for oneness with the supreme... recognises the whole nature of the soul of man in the universe and validates by a large and wise unification its many-sided need of the supreme and infinite Truth, Power, Love, Being to which our humanity turns in its search for perfection and immortality and some highest joy and power and peace. There is a strong and wide endeavour towards a comprehensive spiritual view of God and man and universal existence... the world's nature, sarva-bhāvena , can that contact be made sensible and that union made real to our soul, heart, will, intelligence, spirit. Therefore is this other way natural and easy for man, sukham āptum . God does not make himself difficult of approach to us: only one thing is needed, one demand made on us, the single indomitable will to break through the veil of our ignorance and the whole ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Essays on the Gita  >  The Secret of Secrets

... between the self and Nature. While these two antinomies last, the Godhead in Nature and man remains obscure, irrational and unbelievable. Nature has been represented as the mechanical bondage of the gunas, the soul as the egoistic being subject to that bondage. But if that be all their truth, they are not and cannot be divine. Nature, ignorant and mechanical, cannot be a power of God; for divine Power... of the universe and the vision of God in the cosmos and to find out the door of escape from the Ignorance. For this knowledge, made effective for man by the offering up of his works and all his consciousness to the Godhead in all, enables him to return to his spiritual existence and through it to the supracosmic Reality eternal and luminous above this mutable Nature. This truth is the secret of being... but of Nature and his own personality, the secret at once of the individual and the universe. That was the Will universal in Nature, greater than the acts of Nature which proceed from him, to whom belong her actions and man's and the fruits of them. Therefore has he to do works as a sacrifice, because that is the truth of his works and of all works. Nature is the worker and not ego, but Nature is only ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

A Centenary Tribute  >  Sri Aurobindo's Vision-Kireet Joshi

... tested on the anvil of experimentation. "The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?" 2 Indeed, Sri Aurobindo made an experiment upon his entire integral being, using it... which is God." God, according to Whitehead, is the home of the universals and their ideal harmony.   Tngressive evolution' is a phrase that aptly describes Whitehead's theory. There is, according to Whitehead, a progressive ingression and incorporation into the cosmic series Page 279 of the eternal order which God embraces in himself. The 'primordial' nature of God is the ... evolution. The intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man is not merely to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself. There is a further intention - not only a revelation of the Spirit but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that nature. There is thus something ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Centenary Tribute

Hitler and his God  >  A New Man

... below humanity, the other will rise above the present humanity. I might call the former ‘god-man’ and the latter ‘mass animal’ … Yes, man is something that has to be overcome. Nietzsche knew already something about this in his own way … Man becomes God, this is what it all means in simple words. Man is the becoming God …” And it was here that he spoke the oft-quoted words: “He who understands National Socialism... the most severe tests. This is the stage of the heroic youth. From it will develop the stage of the free man, of the man who is the centre and norm of the world, of creative man, of the god-man. In my Ordensburgen there will be present the cultic example of the harmonious, self-mastering god-man, and he will prepare the youth for the next stage of virile maturity.” “But here Hitler cut himself short”... kind of amalgam of a super-poet and a Greek god. It is therefore no wonder that we find the expectation of “the new man” in the diary of young Goebbels. “ Heil and Sieg to the new man! … We must descend into the deepest depths if we want to create the new man … I am in search of the new Reich and the new man …” 809 Ernst Jünger too had perceived a new man, for in one of his books about the First ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  From Death to Deathlessness-Lucretius

... throbs, let thy heart beat in God: Thy nature shall be the engine of his works, Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word: Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death. 18 Man is not simply what he appears to be. All the world's possibilities in man are waiting as the tree waits in its seed. The unborn gods hide in his house of Life. Man is not a free being he imagines... living man from chemic plasm. But where is room for soul or place for God In the brute immensity of a machine? A transient Breath thou takest for thy soul, Bom from a gas, a plasm, a sperm, a gene, A magnified image of man's mind for God, A shadow of thyself thrown upon Space... Immortality thou claimest for thy spirit, But immortality for imperfect man, ... asleep in subconscient life and became active in conscious life. Man became a reasoning animal, measured the universe, opposed his fate, conqured the laws, became master of his environment and now hopes to become a demigod. Savitri tells the dire God: Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me, Since in humanity waits his hour the God, Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights, T ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  The Integral Surrender

... its terrestrial nature, with the Divine, and a resultant perfection and fulfilment of the whole being of man, neither mind, nor life, nor body is coerced or atrophied, or left out in the cold shade of a righteous neglect. Each part, each fibre of our complex nature has a divine origin, and a divine right to exist and grow, and an indispensable, legitimate use in the service of God in the world. The... intrepid adventurer; and it is also the enjoyer in man. It is made for possession and enjoyment. Its repression, mutilation or neglect—so common in ascetic spirituality —is a fatal folly, for it is nothing short of depriving God of the means of conquest and enjoyment in the material world. Purified of desire, the prāṇa becomes a potent ¹Nature's qualitative mode of enlightened poise and happiness... uncompromising and unreserved. "Rejection of the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large strong and consecrated vital being."¹ If this constant harasser of man's God-ward endeavour is once conquered and converted, life becomes ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Thoughts and Glimpses

... hate it for the ugliness of some of its faces, nor think that love only is God. All perfect perfection must have something in it of the stuff of the hero and even of the Titan. But the greatest force is born out of the greatest difficulty. All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature mental and vital and physical is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his... Thoughts and Glimpses Some think it presumption to believe in a special Providence or to look upon oneself as an instrument in the hands of God, but I find that every man has a special Providence and I see that God uses the mattock of the labourer and babbles in the mouth of a little child. Providence is not only that which saves me from the shipwreck in which everybody else... is sometimes less than the attraction of struggle and suffering; nevertheless the laurel and not the cross should be the aim of the conquering human soul. Souls that do not aspire are God's failures; but Nature is pleased and loves to multiply them because they assure her of stability and prolong her empire. Those who are poor, ignorant, ill-born or ill-bred are not the common herd; the common ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Superman

... subservience so that his own image may stand out stamped upon all things and dominating all his environment. In Nature, since it started from division and egoism, the Titan had to come first; he is here in us as the elder god, the first ruler of man's heaven and earth. Then arrives the God and delivers and harmonises. Thus the old legend tells us that the Deva and the Asura laboured together to churn... he now is out of flawed manhood into some higher symbol. For Man is Nature's great term of transition in which she grows conscious of her aim; in him she looks up from the animal with open eyes towards her divine ideal. But God is complex, not simple; and the temptation of the human intellect is to make a short cut to the divine nature by the exclusive worship of one of its principles. Knowledge... deceived by their stormy egoism. Therefore the award of Vishnu stands; to the God shall fall the crown and the immortality and not, unless he divinise himself, to the proud and strenuous Asura. Page 154 For what is supermanhood but a certain divine and harmonious absolute of all that is essential in man? He is made in God's image, but there is this difference between the divine Reality and its ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Mother’s Agenda 1972-1973  >  March 29, 1972

... shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought... that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being and that so he has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful... transform life, to reveal the Absolute hidden in it; it seeks to establish "the kingdom of God in man," as Sri Aurobindo wrote, "and not the kingdom of a Pope, clergy or sacerdotal class." If the modem world lives in conflict and anguish, if it is torn between "being" and "doing," it is because religion has driven away God from this world, severed him from his creation and flung him back to some distant heaven ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   Agenda   >   Mother’s Agenda 1972-1973

Integral Yoga, Evolution and the Next Species  >  Part Two

... harmony, which is God. God, according to Whitehead, is the home of the universals and the ideal harmony. Ingressive evolution' is a phrase that aptly describes Whitehead's theory; There is, according to Whitehead, a progressive ingression and incorporation into the cosmic series of the eternal order which God embraces in Himself. Page 13 The 'primordial' nature of God is capable of harmonious... push or drag of the past, and that ultimate irreducibility which we may call God. It is God who envisages a realm of possibilities and the word of actuality so as to focus the possibilities on each occasion for the creation of something new. It is He who determines the ideal plans of events by the imposition of His nature. The universe exhibits, according to Whitehead, a creativity with infinite freedom... realized in God. They are not imaginary and abstract. Some of them are apprehended as possibilities logically prior to their manifestation in actuality of existence and others as symbols of values that we pursue. The relation of form to the temporal world is that of potentialities to actualities. In the view of Whitehead, the temporary actualities realize the possibilities surveyed in God's nature. The order ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Integral Yoga, Evolution and the Next Species

Essays on the Gita  >  The Supreme Secret

... sattwic, rajasic, tamasic ego, the vital nature's fear of sin and its personal consequences, the heart's recoil from individual grief and suffering, the clouded reason's covering of egoistic impulses by self-deceptive specious pleas of right and virtue, our nature's ignorant shrinking from the ways of God Page 551 because they seem other than the ways of man and impose things terrible and unpleasant... way, that is the real deliverance." The Master of the worlds in the form of the divine Charioteer and Teacher of Kurukshetra has revealed to man the magnificent realities of God and Self and Spirit and the nature of the complex world and the relation of man's mind and life and heart and senses to the Spirit and the victorious means by which through his own spiritual self-discipline and effort he can... the law of its own nature, Swabhava, shapes man too and determines his action according to the general law of nature of his kind, the law of a mental being emmeshed and ignorant in the life and the body, shapes too each man and determines his individual action according to the law of his own distinct type and the variations of his own original swabhava. It is this universal Nature that forms and directs ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  22 DECEMBER 1938

... becomes easy. But even then, it is easy in the static aspect. When it comes to the dynamic expression it becomes difficult. Thus, when one finds a man behaving like a brute, it is very difficult to see God in him, unless one separates him from his outer nature and sees the Divine behind. One can also repeat the name of the Divine and come to a divine consciousness. NIRODBARAN: How does repeating... between modification of nature and transformation of it? SRI AUROBINDO: Transformation is the casting of the whole nature into the mould of your inner realisation. What you realise you project outwards into your nature. I speak of three transformations—the psychic, the spiritual and the supramental. Many have had the psychic: there were the Christian saints who spoke of God's presence in their hearts... or bad, if prompted by this voice, he replied that if it was from God he would follow it to any length. But, of course, merely unconventional conduct by a Yogi is not a fall. Once a disciple got shocked because he saw me eating meat. He complained to Ramana Maharshi. Maharshi replied that it is a question of habit and, when the man had departed, Maharshi said to his followers, "What an imbecile!" ...

Nirodbaran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks with Sri Aurobindo

The New Synthesis of Yoga  >  Part-1

... its full organisation in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say,... she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth."¹² In regard to the infirmities of the scientific theory of evolution, Sri Aurobindo points out that... constant creation of types is visible but that is no indubitable proof of evolution. In this light, man is a type among many types; he is one pattern among the multitude of patterns in the manifestation in Matter. To exceed himself, to create into a superman, to put on the Nature and capacities of God would be a contradiction of his self-law, impracticable and impossible. (e) If a supramental ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The New Synthesis of Yoga

Isha Upanishad  >  The Law of Renunciation

... the sheep had no more delight for him. So it is with man. Selflessness is his true nature, but the gratification of the body and the vital impulses has become his habit, his second or false nature, because he has been accustomed to identify his body & vital impulses with himself. He, a lion, has been brought up to think himself a sheep; he, a god, has been trained to be an animal. But let him once get... to man's nature, something against which the whole man is disposed to rebel. That is not the right way to look at it. Unselfishness is not something outside the nature, but in the nature, not negative but positive, not a self-mortification and abnegation but a self-enlargement and self-fulfilment; not a law of duty but a law of self-development, not painful, but pleasurable. It is in the nature, only... struggle but a glorious outpouring of the nature, a passionate delight. "It is only human nature," we say indulgently of any act of selfishness. But that is an error and thrice an error. It is not human nature, but animal nature; human nature is divine & selfless and the average selfish man is selfish not because of his humanity, but because his humanity is as yet undeveloped & imperfect. Christ, Buddha ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  The Hour of God

... it in the preceding chapters, envisages as its aim such an all-round divinely pragmatic consummation—an integral perfection and fulfilment of man in God, and an unflawed manifestation of God in man. It promises to fulfil all the deep-seated aspirations of man by developing all his powers and faculties, visible and invisible, and raising him beyond his mental consciousness to the Truth-Consciousness... pervading blight of winter. The hour of the defeat of man's ego is the hour of the Victory of God, for, the intense cry, the vibrant appeal that rises from the agony of a fall and an inner destitution cannot fail to bring down a deluge of God's all-achieving Grace. Let us listen to what Sri Aurobindo says on the Hour of God: THE HOUR OF GOD "There are moments when the Spirit moves... the soul of man to awake and assert its divinity and fulfil the purpose for which it has come down to earth—the manifestation of God in Matter. Its aim is the most comprehensive ever conceived by man, its appeal is at once intimate and universal, and its method—if method it can be called—an integral surrender to the Divine Shakti and Her Grace. It grips the thought, feeling and will of man and, forging ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Man and the Gods

... Such are the gods, such is their nature: The Spirit's free and absolute potencies Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God. ³ and Unmoved by cry of revolt and ignorant prayer They reckon not our virtue and our sin, They bend not to the voices that implore. 4 Human nature, human movement, is, however, different. Man, the terrestrial creature, has developed... 4 ibid Page 270 represent only one mode of consciousness, a fixed and definite type – a god is bound by his godhood; but man embodies all the modes of consciousness, he is an ever growing and changing type. Man is an epitome of creation, he is coterminous with Nature. If he is that within which is wholly divine – consciousness and bliss, truth and immortality – phenomenally he... the end, the purpose for which God created the world out of Himself. And as the earth epitomises the universe and becomes the instrument and channel of an evolutionary manifestation, even so man takes up within himself the earthly life and leads it to the high fulfilment intended for it. Earth is there as the home of man, as his mother and nurse; she has fashioned man out of her substratum and is seeking ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Essays Divine and Human  >  Karma

... Thoughts and Aphorisms Thoughts and Aphorisms Essays Divine and Human Karma 205) God leads man while man is misleading himself, the higher nature watches over the stumblings of his lower mortality; this is the tangle & contradiction out of which we have to escape into the [?self-unity] to which alone is possible a clear knowledge & a faultless action... about men of genius." And why not? For genius itself is an abnormal birth and out of man's ordinary centre. 214) Genius is Nature's first attempt to liberate the imprisoned god out of her human mould; the mould has to suffer in the process. It is astonishing that the cracks are so few and unimportant. 215) Nature sometimes gets into a fury with her own resistance, then she damages the brain in order... not purchased Page 457 by any man nor is Power bound over to her possessors. But defeat is not the end, it is only a gate or a beginning. 252) I have failed, thou sayest. Say rather that God is circling about towards His object. 253) Foiled by the world, thou turnest to seize upon God. If the world is stronger than thou, thinkest thou God is weaker? Turn to Him rather for His bidding ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1  >  The Yoga of Savitri The Finding of the Soul

... sprouting of the seeds of Life and the chaos of little sensiblities as well as the emergence of Mind were all seen as giant steps of the great energy of God on the road to Eternity. Human nature holds within itself both the forces of darkness and light. Man Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell. 9 He hisses but Savitri, undaunted, forces her way toward her soul. She first enters the... Out of the wood and stone of our nature's stuff A temple is shaped where the high gods could live. Even if the struggling world is left outside One man's perfection still can save the world. There is won a new proximity to the skies, A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven, A deep concordat between Truth and Life: A camp of God is pitched in human time. 62 ... towards my God, My God who never came to me till now; His voice I hear that ever says 'I come': I know that one day he shall come at last. 26 As she ceased to speak, picking up the refrain an angry voice spoke — the voice of a tortured Titan crouched within man's depths, of one who seemed to enjoy its suffering even as it complained against it. I am the Man of Sorrows ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8  >  Asceticism and Renunciation

... the work governed by one's own nature (swabhava); one's own na­ture evolves and develops in the course of time. In the process of Time man develops a general nature of his own; the works determined by this formulation of nature embody the law of that age. In the process of a nation's life-movement the nation's own nature is built up and the works determined by that nature are the nation's law of life... witness and enjoyer, Nature is the doer, the Divine is the giver of sanction. The being so illumined does not seek to help or hinder any work that the Divine Power under­takes. Submitted to the Shakti, the body and mind and intellect engage themselves in the work appointed by God. Even a terrible massacre like that of Kurukshetra cannot stain a soul with sin if it is sanctioned by God, if it occurs in... himself with obscurity. Many are the ways fixed by him which, if followed would take one out of the darkness, bring him into God's company. If anyone is not interested in the play and desires rest, God will fulfil his desire. But if one follows His way for His sake, then God chooses him, in this world or elsewhere as His fit playmate. Arjuna was Krishna's dearest comrade and playmate, therefore he ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8

From Man Human to Man Divine  >  Sri Aurobindo and the Crisis of Modern Man

... Dost thou see this pit in the earth? This is again God. Silence, this is God. Absence, this is God. God, it is the loneliness of men... If God exists, man is Nothing." In this mood of utter anguish, modern man is taught with insistence in terms of imposing polysyllables that religion is the result of the sense of guilt that arises from the Oedipus Complex and that various major religious... men. Modern man is verily in a state of utter alienation. The Crisis of the Alienated Man The man of our epoch has been described as an alienated man. As Frederick Copleston has aptly remarked, modern man is alienated from the Divine; he is alienated from the world around him; he is alienated from the society he lives in; he is alienated even from his own self. God, if He exists... modern man cries out with Goetz 1 : "I implored and begged for a gesture; I addressed my messages to Heaven: no response! Heaven does not know even my name. I used to ask myself all the time: what could I possibly be in the eyes of God? Now I know the answer: Nothing. God does not see me, God does not hear me, God does not know me. Dost thou see this void above our heads? This is God... Dost ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   From Man Human to Man Divine

Isha Upanishad  >  Chapter III: The Golden Rule of Life - Desire, Egoism and Possession

... leads us through our real nature as mental beings, takes account of our strength and teaches us to insist upon it and realise its perfection in God. Sannyasa is a rapid road of escape for our self-accepted weakness; tyaga is a path of fulfilment, the strait and narrow road, for our slowly-realised divine strength. By this road, supathá, Agni Vaisvanara, God's pure force in man, leads us to our felicity... this that man is universal being seeking an universal bliss and self-realisation and cannot repose permanently on the wayside, in hedged gardens, or in any imperfect prison whatsoever or bounded resting place. Universal Ananda & possession is our secret nature, to move towards it till it is reached, God's inexorable impulse in His creation. All solutions that deny or conflict with our nature, can only... the results of ego by affirming the ego or else deny or unduly limit God's purpose in the ego. "Accept your limitations, work and enjoy as perfectly as you may within boundaries," is the creed of a practical Paganism. For a century or two it may serve man's need indifferently, but he is infinite and universal and after a time Nature in him heaves restlessly and strains out towards its element. She accepted ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  All-Will and Free-Will

... antinomy would then be abrogated and not simply mitigated. My free-will would become God-will and Fate put off her mask. By consenting to be the mere slave of God and consciously but one instrument of That which is not bound by its instruments, I should know a freedom which sings on the harps of heaven, but which no speech of man can utter; I should be washed and rolled in the waves of pure puissance and pure... ulterior significance. Modern Science has brought in an equally formless and arbitrary predestination of Law of Nature and Heredity to contradict the idea of responsibility in a free, willing and acting soul. Where there is no soul, there can be no freedom. Nature works out her original law in man; our fathers and mothers with all that they carried in them are a second vital predestination and the dead... with the world. If Kismet is the will of God, yet is that will active in my present moment and not only in the hour of my birth or of the birth of the world. If my past actions determine my present, my immediate action also determines the moment that shall be and is not utterly put off by a tardy mechanism to belated effects in a far-off life. If Law of nature and heredity and environment are powerful ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Essays Divine and Human  >  Certitudes

... greater height. Sooner shall man arrive at the borders of infinity than at the fullness of his own being. For that being is infinity, is God— I aspire to infinite force, infinite knowledge, infinite bliss. Can I attain it? Yes, but the nature of infinity is that it has no end. Say not therefore that I attain it. I become it. Only so can man attain God by becoming God. But before attaining he can... develop. Those are the relations that are attained by the various practices we usually call Yoga. We may not know him as God, we may know him as Nature, our Higher Self, Infinity, some ineffable goal. It was so that Buddha approached Him; so approaches him the rigid Adwaitin. He is accessible even to the Atheist. To the materialist He disguises Himself in matter. For the Nihilist he waits ambushed... can enter into relations with him. To enter into relations with God is Yoga, the highest rapture & the noblest utility. There are relations within the compass of the humanity we have developed. These are called prayer, worship, adoration, sacrifice, thought, faith, science, philosophy. There are other relations beyond our developed capacity, but within the compass of the humanity we have yet to develop ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history  >  The Ten Limbs of The Yoga

... three rungs in the ladder of life - bodily life, mental life, divine life - which God and Nature have provided for man's ascent towards self-perfection culminating in a "trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight (Sachchidananda). To find this Transcendent, to link it with the life in Nature, and to possess the power freely to ascend or descend the great stair of existence... base are to come together. This man-changing, world-changing, Nature-changing Yoga aims thus at establishing nothing less than an Earthly Paradise, for not otherwise can the present crisis in evolution be decisively solved. And the Word is given, and Savitri and Satyavan are to be enabled to inaugurate the supramental age: The incarnate dual Power shall open God's door, Eternal supermind... of humanity". Yoga is quite simply the movement or effort towards self-perfection reuniting "God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life". There is of course the primordial process of natural evolution which is unconscious, slow and subject to uncertainties and serious set-backs, while it is man's prerogative to make the conscious and organised effort of Yoga forging "the harmony of our ...

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

The Destiny of the Body  >  Introduction

... consciousness that has been taking place in Nature. "If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim posible to man upon earth." 1 And Sri Aurobindo is emphatic on this point that even if man refuses his high spiritual fate, 'yet shall... And God needed no more the Inconscient's screen." 2 Now, what is the destiny of man as revealed by this supreme prophet of super-humaniy ? According to the vision of Sri Aurobindo, man's importance in the world is that he gives to it that development of consciousness in which its transfiguration by a perfect self-discovery becomes possible. The real sense of man's progress does... in him is a sure sign of Nature's will for a higher 1 Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 166. 2 Ibid., Book X, Canto IV, p. 664. way to fulfilment, the emergence of a greater status." 1 And what is then that greater status ? "The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Destiny of the Body

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Principle of the Integral Yoga

... Tantric discipline is in its nature a synthesis. It has seized on the large universal truth that there are two poles of being whose essential unity is the secret of existence, Brahman and Shakti, Spirit and Nature, and that Nature is power of the spirit or rather is spirit as power. To raise nature in man into manifest power of spirit is its method and it is the whole nature that it gathers up for the... of subjection to the divine Will a means for contact and increasing unity of the soul of man with the divine Master of the universe. Devotion selects the emotional and aesthetic powers of the soul and by turning them all God-ward in a perfect purity, intensity, infinite passion of seeking makes them a means of God-possession in one or many relations of unity with the Divine Being. All aim in their own... arrival, for all the hundred separate paths meet in the Eternal. But the gnostic being is a complete enjoyment and possession of the whole divine and spiritual nature; and it is a complete Page 614 lifting of the whole nature of man into its power of a divine and spiritual existence. Integrality becomes then an essential condition of this Yoga. At the same time we have seen that each of ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Savitri As poetic Expression

... says the same Upaniṣad, that man attains immortality. The pursuit of knowledge through various subjects by the mind can be converted into the pursuit of the Divine through them. When God is at last found in Nature, there will be then perhaps an end of the aspect of imperfection of Nature. She would cast herself into the image of the Divine. In this effort. Nature would find her fulfilment which... rhythmic word the God who is the Self of all things and beings, the Life of the Universe, the Divinity in man, and he will express all the emotion and delight of the endeavour of the human soul, to discover the touch and joy of that Divinity within him in whom he feels the mighty founts of his own being and life and effort and his fullness and unity with all cosmic experience and with Nature and with all... himself. He helped the toiling world by the stillness of his Spirit. Thus he was slowly chiselling the imperfect material of his Nature into the image of a Divine being. When Nature would be completely transformed then a new creation with "God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God" as its basic condition, would come into existence The line forms, seen in this way, the natural culmination Page 94 ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Essays on the Gita  >  The Fullness of Spiritual Action

... renunciation of desire is the better way; it has spoken of the action of the liberated man, muktasya karma . It has even insisted on doing all actions, sarvāṇi karmāṇi, kṛtsna-karma-kṛt ; it has said that in whatever way the perfected Yogin lives and acts, he lives and acts in God. This can only be, if the nature also in its dynamics and workings becomes divine, a power imperturbable, intangible,... Eternal in the world expressed through a sublimated force, a divine height of the personal nature uplifted, liberated, universalised, made one with God-nature,—this is the Gita's solution. Let us see what this comes to in the most plain and positive terms and from the standpoint of the problem which is at the root of Arjuna's difficulty and refusal. His duty as a human being and a social being is... the whole of this mutable Nature and in every part and result of her and in all her workings, and there too to make himself one with God, there too to live in him, to enter there too into the divine oneness. He unites in that integrality the divine calm and freedom of his deep essential existence with a supreme power of instrumental action in his divinised self of Nature. But how is this to be done ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

The Human Cycle  >  The Suprarational Good

... the ethical man is often called upon to reject and do battle with the social demand, to break, to move away from, to reverse the social standard. His relations with others and his relations with himself are both of them the occasions of his ethical growth; but that which determines his ethical being is his relations with God, the urge of the Divine upon him whether concealed in his nature or conscious... higher ethical man increasingly attains to in his inner efforts. In fact ethics is not in its essence a calculation of good and evil in the action or a laboured effort to be blameless according to the standards of the world,—those are only crude appearances,—it is an attempt to grow into the divine nature. Its parts of purity are an aspiration towards the inalienable purity of God's being; its parts... another, do not altogether restore. If man's conscience is a creation of his evolving nature, if his conceptions of ethical law are mutable and depend on his stage of evolution, yet at the root of them there is something constant in Page 151 all their mutations which lies at the very roots of his own nature and of world-nature. And if Nature in man and the world is in its beginnings inf ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

From Man Human to Man Divine  >  The Ever-Ascending March of Man

... being's kinship to infinity He has shut away from him into inmost self, Fenced off the greatnesses of hidden God. He is the crown of all that has been done: Thus is creations's labour justified; Page 245 This is the world's result, Nature's last poise! And if this were all and nothing more were meant, If what now seems were the whole of what must... love. But first the spirit's ascent we must achieve Out of the chasm from which our nature rose. The soul must soar sovereign above the form And climb to summits beyond mind's half-sleep; Our hearts we must inform with heavenly strength, Surprise the animal with the occult god. Then kindling the gold tongue of sacrifice, Calling the powers of a bright hemisphere... uplifted by an unknown Power, Man laboured on his little patch of earth For means to last, to enjoy, to suffer and die. A spirit that perished not with the body and breath Was there like a shadow of the Unmanifest And stood behind the little personal form But claimed not yet this earthly embodiment. Assenting to Nature's long slow-moving toil, Watching ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   From Man Human to Man Divine

Essays on the Gita  >  Equality and Knowledge

... everywhere, sarveṣu, sarvatra , and learn that it is in him they live, while this lower nature of division is only a prison-wall which they must break down or at best an infant-school which they must outgrow, so that they may become adult in nature and free in spirit. To be made one self with God above and God in man and God in the world is the sense of liberation and the secret of perfection. Page 211... right and has no longer to be maintained by effort, for it has become the very nature of the soul's being. The Gita accepts the endurance and fortitude of our struggle with the lower nature as a preliminary movement; but if a certain mastery comes by our individual strength, the freedom of mastery only comes by our union with God, by a merging or dwelling of the personality in the one divine Person and... of works. The peace of the Brahman in the liberated soul is the foundation; the large, free, equal, worldwide action of the Lord in the liberated nature radiates the power which proceeds from that peace; these two made one synthesise divine works and God-knowledge. We see at once what a profound extension we get here for the ideas which otherwise the Gita has in common with other systems of philosophic ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6  >  Gods and Men

... down into the material world. A great and glorious example of man becoming a god is that of Narada, therefore he is called Devarshi, that is to say, a rishi, a spiritually perfect man developing, that is, metamorphosing himself into a god coming down and inhabiting, possessing, becoming a human being. The function or role of a god-man or Devarshi like Narada has been described beautifully in Savitri... amplifying the present attain that nature. That nature itself, as I said, is to descend and enter into you and make you its own mode of existence. Now, this is a new fulfilment for the human being to attain to the status of a god, to evolve oneself, to attune oneself so as to call by this affinity a divine being, a god, and to become a Page 12 god. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the divine... divine life, the Life Divine, the life of a god, it means that you become a god, not only realise the utmost human perfection possible as man but surpass man's humanity and call in and embody divinity. You may remember Ramakrishna making a distinction between two kinds of perfect human beings – one he calls Jivakoti, that is to say, human creatures who have the capacity to attain the final liberation. Usually ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6

Mother or The Divine Materialism - I  >  10: The Need to Be

... order to remark that we are turning Nature into a new Demiurge. For no one has the right to be a demiurge, except man, of course. Oh well, let him be! Though for the moment, he cuts a different figure. Nature has no need to be a demiurge, nor God to be God!—each one needs to be what he is, not more, and when one is, there is only ONE thing, and it is all the same: God, demiurge, crocodile or ladybug.... is the imitator. It is even a perfect counterfeiter. A bird flies perfectly, for it is its nature to fly. Man walks, in theory, and he even pretends to know where he walks and where he is going, while Nature does not know. The mind is knowledge. And that is that! We just have to stop and contemplate: Nature has no knowledge—she is, so things are done naturally; they are known because they are done... it idolizes materialism or God, we are not sure it makes any difference. The mind is the maker of ideas. Nature needs no ideas; she simply does things. She even produces miracles that we find hard to imitate. Of course, she is not clever enough to invent theories; what concocts them is that mind of ours—only to unmake them immediately afterwards in an attempt to catch Nature at the next bend. But she ...

Satprem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

Questions and Answers (1957-1958)  >  9 January 1957

... that yet. What is it? It is about God and Nature. So? Why do God and Nature "run from each other when glimpsed"? 1 In order to play. He says so: "They are at play." It is in play. (A young disciple) Mother, does Nature know it is a game? God knows it is a game, but does Nature know it? I think Nature knows it too, it is only man who does not know! Page 9 (Another... 9 January 1957 " God cannot cease from leaning down towards Nature, nor man from aspiring-towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the infinite. When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting. " In man nature of the world becomes again self-conscious so that it may take the greater... Enjoyer whom unknowingly it possesses, whom life and sensation possessing deny and denying seek. Nature of the world knows not God, only because it knows not itself; when it knows itself, it shall know unalloyed delight of being. " Possession in oneness and not loss in oneness is the secret. God and Man, World and Beyond-world become one when they know each other. Their division is the cause of ignorance ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Questions and Answers (1957-1958)

Lectures on Savitri  >  Lecture II

... binds man to the Supreme for as He has cast Himself into the human mould, so the human has to rise into the divine mould. "His nature we must put on as He put ours." He has put on the human nature as we are to put on his divine nature. We are sons of God and must be even as he Page 54 His human portion, we must grow divine. Our life is a paradox with God for key... And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force; In Nature's instrument loiters secret God. The Immanent lives in man as in his house; He has made the universe his pastime's field, A vast gymnasium of his works of might. All-knowing he accepts our darkened state, Divine, wears shapes of animal or man; Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time, Immortal,... working. Now man is ego-bound and therefore feels: "I am only matter, I am only a handful of dust;" that is what man ordinarily feels and it may be justified, because that is the determinism of Nature. So long as you are within the determinism of Nature you always feel that man is the most insignificant thing going in the world; quite right, but that is as far as Nature is concerned; as soon ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Lectures on Savitri

Essays Divine and Human  >  Integral Yoga

... This change is a thing in Nature and not out of Nature; it is not only possible, but for the growing soul inevitable. It is the goal to which Nature in us walks through all this appearance of ignorance, error, suffering and weakness. 159 The supramental Yoga is at once an ascent of the soul towards God and a descent of the Godhead into the embodied nature. The ascent demands a one-centred... of an integral God realisation, an integral self-realisation, an integral fulfilment of the being, an integral transformation and perfection of the nature[.] 150 What is the integral Yoga? It is the way of a complete God-realisation, a complete Self-realisation, a complete fulfilment of our being and consciousness, a complete transformation of our nature—and this implies a complete... growth into some kind of superhumanity, but a change from the falsehood of our ignorant nature into the truth of God-nature. The mental or vital demigod, the Asura, Rakshasa and Pishacha,—Titan, vital giant and demon,—are superhuman in the pitch and force and movement and in the make of their characteristic nature, but these are not divine and those not supremely divine, for they live in a greater mind ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo  >  Freewill in Sri Aurobindo's Vision

... different order of being; others have said, "God cannot be a true creator if He cannot create creators." No proposition of this type is in itself satisfactory, though each may have a faint inkling of some truth which is ill- Page 91 caught and ill-expressed by it. To drive a wedge between God's knowledge in eternity and man's actions in time is to indulge in a quibble:... sine qua non to be recognised for making any freewill valid is: God who originates and decrees everything must somehow be not different from our own souls. Without identity with God no freewill anywhere can be. This identity would be the truth behind the epigram about creators: only, that epigram does not openly put man's soul on a par with the Divine, does not conceive it as an eternal aspect... own highest selves would be acting in an endless total Now and not merely from a deific past. The truth behind the idea that eternity and time are different orders and God's foreknowledge in the former need not clash with man's freewill in the latter seems to be just this that for an entire explanation of the real creative feeling which we have, however pin-pointed, eternity should carry time ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Kena and Other Upanishads  >  Svetasvatara Upanishad

... one lustre, even so this glorious & shining God, being One, entereth upon & ruleth nature that clingeth to the womb, to each womb its nature. Page 240 यच्च स्वभावं पचति विश्वयोनिः पाच्यांश्च सर्वान् परिणामयेद्यः । सर्वमेतद् विश्वमधितिष्ठत्येको गुणांश्च सर्वान् विनियोजयेद्यः ॥५॥ 5) For He who is the Womb of the World bringeth each nature to its perfection and He matureth all those that... of himself fashioneth his own web, so is God One & nought else existeth but by his own nature covereth Himself up in the threads He hath spun out of primal matter. May the One God ordain unto us departure into His Eternal. एको देवः सर्वभूतेषु गूढः सर्वव्यापी सर्वभूतान्तरात्मा । कर्माध्यक्षः सर्वभूताधिवासः साक्षी चेता केवलो निर्गुणश्च ॥११॥ 11) One God who alone is & He lurketh hidden in every... ॥१६॥ 16) He hath made all and knoweth all; for He is the womb out of which Self ariseth, & being possessed of the Nature Moods He becometh Time's Maker and discerneth all things. And Matter is subject to Him & the Spirit in Man that cogniseth His field of matter & the modes of Nature are His servants. He therefore is the cause of this coming into phenomena & of the release from phenomena—& because ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Kena and Other Upanishads

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Message of the Atomic Bomb

... machinery, this evolution of tools means man's increasing mastery over Nature, even though physical nature. The primitive Page 77 man like the animal is a slave, a puppet driven helplessly by Nature's forces. Both lead more or less a life of reflex action: there is here no free, original initiation of action or movement. The slow discovery of Nature's secrets, the gradual application and... 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 intelligence. Of course, man found at once that this in­creasing s... in many ways in the life of humanity. It opened a new direction of man's growth, opened and then closed also apparently. I am referring to the tragedy of the League of Nations. That was an attempt on the part of man (and Nature) to lift the inner life and consciousness to the level of the outer achievements. The attempt failed. Man could not rise to the height demanded of him. Now the second World ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Towards A New Society  >  The Message Of the Atomic Bomb

... march of machinery, this evolution of tools means man's increasing mastery over Nature, even though physical nature. The primitive man like the animal is a slave, a puppet driven helplessly by Nature's forces. Both lead more or less a life of reflex action: there is here no free, original initiation of action or movement. The slow discovery of Nature's secrets, the gradual application and utilisation... 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 and intelligence. Of course, man found at once that this increasing... in the life of humanity. It opened a new direction of man's growth, opened and then closed also apparently. I am referring to the tragedy of the League of Nations. That was an attempt Page 21 on the part of man (and Nature) to lift the inner life and consciousness to the level of the outer achievements. The attempt failed. Man could not rise to the height demanded of him. Now the second ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Towards A New Society

Essays on the Gita  >  The Creed of the Aryan Fighter

... and thinks like the Norwegian hero who thanked God because He had given him a hard heart? But the teaching of the Gita springs from an Indian creed and to the Indian mind compassion has always figured as one of the largest elements of the divine nature. The Teacher himself enumerating in a later chapter the qualities of the godlike nature in man places among them compassion to creatures, gentleness... absence of the thousands who must perish. All that is a weak falling from his higher nature. He has to see only the work that must be done, kartavyaṁ karma , to hear only the divine command breathed through his warrior nature, to feel only for the world and the destiny of mankind calling to him as its god-sent man to assist its march and clear its path of the dark armies that beset it. Arjuna in... for the man whose nature does not possess it, is not cast in its mould, to pretend to be the superior man, the master-man or the superman is a folly and an insolence, for he alone is the superman who most manifests the highest nature of the Godhead in humanity. This compassion observes with an eye of love and wisdom and calm strength the battle and the struggle, the strength and weakness of man, his virtues ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Savitri  >  Symbolism in Savitri

... the lower action of nature and from all repugnance to the cosmic action of the Divine. This liberation gets its completeness when the spiritual gnosis can act with a supramental knowledge and reception of the action of Nature and a supramental luminous will in initiation. The gnosis discovers the spiritual sense in Nature, God in things, the soul... instruments, mind, soul, emotions, works, could be god-inspired and god-directed, so could the body itself be. Mere asceticism is vain; inflicting on the body all sorts of punishment cannot lead to any easy escape. The body too is the house of the Spirit, and the body could be made to deserve that honour. An integral transformation of all the elements that make man is indeed the whole aim of the evolutionary... prudence can be a "deadly sin", says Abercrombie:         For this refuseth faith in the unknown powers       Within man's nature... Page 280       Narrows desire into the scope of thought.       But it is written in the heart of man,       Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire...       But send desire often forth to scan       The immense night ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Essays on the Gita  >  The Core of the Teaching

... all other standards of duty or conduct for a selfless performance of the divine will working through our nature; not social service, but the action of the Best, the God-possessed, the Master-men done impersonally for the sake of the world and as a sacrifice to Him who stands behind man and Nature. In other words, the Gita is not a book of practical ethics, but of the spiritual life. The modern mind... and for the man who is on the path and advanced enough to fulfil the supreme rule. It does not preach indifference to good and evil for the ordinary life of man, where such a doctrine would have the most pernicious consequences. On the contrary it affirms that the doers of evil shall not attain to God. Therefore if Arjuna simply seeks to fulfil in the best way the ordinary law of man's life, disinterested... rid of God or kept Him only for Sunday use and erected in His place man as its deity and society as its visible idol. At its best it is practical, ethical, social, pragmatic, altruistic, humanitarian. Now all these things are good, are especially needed at the present day, are part of the divine Will or they would not have become so dominant in humanity. Nor is there any reason why the divine man, the ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

From Man Human to Man Divine  >  Man: His Past Present and Future

... place in Nature. Page 24 Who can, in that case, bid her pause at a given stage? "If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth." 35 And Sri Aurobindo assures us that even if man refuses... him is a sure sign of Nature's will for a higher way to fulfilment, the emergence of a greater status." 32 And what is then that greater status? "The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say... From Man Human to Man Divine I MAN: HIS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE (An Essay on the Marvel that is Man) "It is the Son of Man who is supremely capable of incarnating God." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine.) In His Own Image Homo sapiens, "wise man": such is the term employed by the modern anthropologist to denote his own ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   From Man Human to Man Divine

Essays Divine and Human  >  Beyond Good and Evil

... Human Essays Divine and Human 1914-1919 Essays Divine and Human Beyond Good and Evil God is beyond good and evil; man moving Godwards must become of one nature with him. He must transcend good and evil. God is beyond good and evil, not below them, not existing and limited by them, not even above them, but in a more absolute sense excedent and... transformed, evil into good, good into pure and self-existent good, before they can be taken up into it. This explains the nature of the universe which would otherwise be inexplicable, inconsistent with the being of God, a forcefully inconscient and violently active enigma. God must be beyond limitation by our ideas of good, otherwise the universe such as it is could not exist whether as the partly... divine or universal value, they are only their practical value created by us in our psychological and dynamic dealings with life. God recognises them and seems to deal with us on the basis of this valuation of life, but only to such an extent as may serve his purpose in Nature. In his universal action he is not limited by them. But into his transcendent being of which his highest universal is the image ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

What I Have Learnt From The Mother  >  What is God and Why

... wishes. Through the evolutionary process, man has reached such a stage that he can be conscious of God within himself. That is why, in the Divine's play, he has a special role, a special responsibility. When everything else in the universe, including nature, moves unconsciously through this evolutionary process, man alone, if he so desires, can realise God within himself, make his will one with His... evolutionary process consciously, realise within himself God's truth, God's beauty and God's goodness, and establish them in the material world. Then, in the play of God, man's special role is - to realise God in himself, make his will one with the Divine's will, express Him through all his efforts and make his life and his surroundings God-pervaded. Page 10 ... 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, whatever is beautiful ...

Pranab Bhattacharya (Dada)   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   What I Have Learnt From The Mother

In the Mother's Light  >  The Goal of Human life

... effulgent world of infinite creativity he, the jivanmukta, will act and live : "Only to bring God's forces to waiting Nature, To help with wide-winged peace her tormented labour And heal with joy her ancient sorrow, Casting down light on the inconscient darkness”² ² Man has to combine in himself, because it is the Divine in him who combines in Himself, the transcendent... every victory.”¹ Will not man in his present predicament and perplexity hearken to the Mother's call of love and turn to the Divine to make Him the Pole-star and His Will the single pilot of his life ? Will he not awake to the reason of his earthly existence, to the glory of his mission here, and grow into "the great X, the quaternary link," joining God and Nature, Spirit and Matter, Light and... veiled from his mental consciousness, and take his effective seat in the intermediate world from where he can canalize and conduct the golden stream of God's descending Light for the illumination and transfiguration of the whole of his earthly nature. He is "the great X as the cross, the quaternary link". Body, life, the psychic being (soul), and the mind constitute his quaternity. The first two link ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Questions and Answers (1957-1958)  >  16 July 1958

... whether he knows it or not, always has a religion but the object of his religion is sometimes of a very inferior kind.... The god he worships may be the god of success or the god of money or the god of power, or simply a family god: the god of children, the god of the family, the god of the ancestors. There is always a religion. The quality of the religion is very different according to the individual,... meanwhile it has to take up as much of man's mentality, vitality, physicality as it can and give all his activities a turn towards the spiritual direction, the revelation of a spiritual meaning in them, the imprint of a spiritual refinement, the beginning of a spiritual character. It is in this attempt that the errors of religion come in, for they are caused by the very nature of the matter with which it is... truth is cut out along with the error. Nature herself very commonly permits the good corn and the tares and weeds to grow together for a long time, Page 353 because only so is her own growth, her free evolution possible." The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 864-65 Sweet Mother, is religion a necessity in the life of the ordinary man? In the life of societies it is a necessity ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Questions and Answers (1957-1958)

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-4

... transformed "The sunlight was a great god's golden smile. All Nature was at beauty's festival." Thus, when the earth was fall of yearning in spring an answer came to her from "a greatness from our other countries." Savitri was born, "A lamp was lit, a sacred image made." She was born as a "mediatrix" "bridging the gulf between man's mind and God's". She consciously descended into human... of God and man". "And beauty, grace and grandeur had their home" there. Subtle influences worked in that land. Savitri like a magnet attracted divine powers in that atmosphere. The knowledge of the thinker and the seer was there and "earth's brooding wisdom spoke" to Savitri's still breast. It led her from heights of thought "to dive into the cosmic vastnesses". The actions of mortal man were... lifted "the human word near to the god's". Crafts and sciences of reading the future also she knew. All attempts by man to make this earth "a stepping-stone to conquer heaven", to know the unknowable, were mastered by her. Savitri entered into human relationships with men around her, —though her circle was small, and selected. She was anxious to "make them one with God and world and her". But very few ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3  >  The Body Human

... personality", referred to in the parable of the Aitareya Upa-nishad,—that God has chosen the human form to inhabit. This is man's great privilege that, unlike the animal, he can surpass himself (the capacity, we may note, upon which the whole Nietzschean conception of humanity was based). Man is not bound to his human nature, to las anthropomorphism, he can rise above and beyond it, become what... Page 37 after the image of God and yet Lucifer had access into that tabernacle and all his host with him. This duality of the divine and the un-divine, the characteristic mark of human nature as it is, presents a field and a labour through which man's progress has to be worked out. The soul, the divine flame, has been placed in Ignorance, that is to say, what is apparent Ignorance, the... touch it, it is beyond the illusory consciousness. For they say Goloka stands above Brahmaloka. The Christian conception of God-man is also extremely beautiful and full of meaning. God became man: He sent down upon earth his own and only Son to live among men as man. This indeed is His supreme Grace, His illimitable love for mankind. It is thus, Page 40 in the words of the Offertory ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  The Body Human

... indeed in this mansion Page 80 of the Lord. Man was made after the image of God and yet Lucifer had access into that tabernacle and all his entire host with him. This duality of the divine and the undivine, the characteristic mark of human nature as it is, presents a field and a labour through which man's progress has to be worked out. The soul, the divine flame, has, been placed... personality", referred to in the parable of the Aitareya Upanishad,-that God has chosen the human form to inhabit. This is man's great privilege that, unlike the animal, he can surpass himself (the capacity, we may note, upon which the whole Nietzschean conception of humanity was based). Man is not bound to his human nature, to his anthropomorphism, he can rise above and beyond it, become what is... not touch it, it is beyond the illusory consciousness. For they say Goloka stands above Brahmaloka. The Christian conception of God-man is also extremely beautiful and full of meaning. God became man: He sent down upon earth his own and only Son to live among men as man. This indeed is His supreme Grace, His illimitable love for mankind. It is thus, in the words of the Offertory, that He miraculously ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Appendix I: The Human Aspiration

... or status of existence as final. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature. Shorter Synopsis of the Chapter Man's highest aspiration has been always a seeking for God, perfection, freedom, an absolute truth and bliss, immortality. A... in Brief A search for God, (for a spiritual or divine Reality within oneself and behind, above or within the phenomenon of existence,) for perfection, for freedom, for an absolute Truth and Bliss, for immortality has been the persistent preoccupation of the highest human thought since the earliest times. This preoccupation seems to be a perpetual element in man's nature; for it survives the longest... a divine being and a divine nature. As Nature has implanted the impulse to life in matter, to mind in life, so she has implanted in mind the impulse towards the evolution of what is beyond mind, spiritual, supramental. Each impulse justifies itself by the creation of the necessary organs and faculties. The animal is a laboratory in which she has worked out man; man may be a laboratory in which ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Isha Upanishad  >  Part II: The Field and Instruments of Vedanta

... much more helpful to mankind as a whole. God & the World is my subject,—not the incompatibility of God with the world He has created in Himself, but the fulfilment of Himself in it for which it was created—the conditions in which the kingdom of heaven on earth can be converted from a dream into a possibility,—by the willed evolution in man of his higher nature, by a steady self-purification and a development... Philosophy, but only from God's revelation. Nayam atma pravachanena labhyah. If Vedanta had not this high utility, if it only brought a philosophical satisfaction or were good for logical disputation, I should not think it worth while to write a word about it, much less to delve deep for its meaning. We wish to know, we enlightened moderns, what man is, what God, the nature & relation of matter, mind... development in the light of this divine knowledge towards the fulfilment of his own supra-material, supra-intellectual nature. For that purpose he must know God and not only the physical laws of Nature. He must know his soul and not only the open or secret machinery of his body. This knowledge he can only get from his own soul or from Vedanta explained to him by the Master, the one who knows, and awakening ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  Gods

... beginning of history Disciple : What is the difference between the personality of a God and that of a man ? Sri Aurobindo : The same as between your personality and that of a lizard.  : Disciple : Personality means being and nature. Sri Aurobindo : It means various beings and various natures. Different personalities may combine and form one personality. Disciple : Has... Some believe that the true self is the jiva and ii one is on that plane then he is helped by the Gods. Page 284 Disciple : Is the highest personal self of man a God ? Sri Aurobindo : Man is not a God. But he can attain to the plane of the Gods and there he has his divine self – the jiva – which is a portion of the divine. If you knock at their gates with desire, they show... right. But if the surface being is egoistic then there is a crash. The world of the Gods is above the psychic world. When one says an "Amsha" – portion – of the God manifests in a certain man, it is the man who develops into the God. The Gods do not evolve, they are principles or powers of the Divine. The Gods preside over the universe, they bring their qualities and powers to change the world. ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Work - an offering  >  Introduction

... this endeavour, there is the help from above, but there is also the need for man to strive to exceed himself.       "This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:         A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:         His nature we must put on as he put ours;         We are sons of God and must be even as he:         His human portion, we must grow divine... Work - an offering Introduction Nature has been at work for millions and millions of years, creating numberless forms, constantly trying out, constantly exceeding her previous results. In man she has created a being endowed with a conscious will and having within him the potentiality to leap forward to the next step in evolution. In the words of Sri ... Aurobindo: *  "... all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature attempting to realise her perfection in an ever - increasing expression of her potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises self-conscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Work - an offering

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  Varieties of Yoga

... start with the body and the life-energy, but with the mind of man. It does not dispense with Âsana and Prânâyâma, but, relegating them to a subsequent stage, gives the primary Page 21 importance to Yama and Niyama, which are mental disciplines calculated to conquer the desires and passions of the lower nature of man and, by an increase of moral purity and calm, help the concentration... For this is the action that comes by a conscious subjection and merging of the natural man into the divine Self and eternal Spirit; it is the Spirit that for ever transcends and guides this world-Nature."¹ Jnânayoga or the Yoga of Knowledge takes its stand upon the mind, or rather the intelligence of man, and, turning his thoughts towards the Divine, seeks to lift his consciousness to the ... pursuit or a hothouse growth, but a universal, national preoccupation. Mystics and saints have been born in all countries, but nowhere, as in India, has the ideal of the saint, the illumined God-drunk man, exerted such a permanent and powerful influence upon the generality of men. Nowhere has the call of the 'Infinite been responded to with such a resounding chorus of Page 17 ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Collected Poems  >  The Meditations of Mandavya

... tells us, "It is nought." And now we say we never can be free, For Nature binds us, for the fire must burn, The water drown and death must seize his prey And grief and torture do their will with us And sin be like a lion with the world, Because 'tis Nature. Man's not infinite, The proof is with us every day, they cry, And God Himself's a huge machine at last. Yet over us all the while Thought's... of thy hidden God. Let the whole world end now, since all for which It was created is fulfilled at last And I am swallowed up in Thee, O God. The Meditations of Mandavya - II Who made of Nature here a tyrant? Who Condemned us to be slaves? It was not God. Nay, we ourselves chose our own servitude And we ourselves have forged and heaped our chains On our own members. God only watched the... I know, O God, the day shall dawn at last When man shall rise from playing with the mud And taking in his hands the sun and stars Remould appearance, law and process old. Then, pain and discord vanished from the world, Shall the dead wilderness accept the rose And the hushed desert babble of its rills; Man once more seem the image true of God. 3 I will not faint, O God. There is this ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Isha Upanishad  >  Part II: The Field and Instruments of Vedanta

... correctly the Vedanta, we shall come to some knowledge of what God is, what man, of the nature and action of the great principles of our being, matter, life, mind, spirit and whatever else this wonderful world of ours may hold. In fact, this is my sole object in undertaking the explanation of the Upanishads. The essential relations of God & the world, so far as they affect our existence here, this is... editors Historically, then, we have our Hindu theory of the Vedanta. It is the systematised affirmation, the reaffirmation, perhaps, of that knowledge of God, man and the universe, the Veda or Brahmavidya, on which the last harmony of man's being with his surroundings was effected. What the Vedanta is, intrinsically, I have already hinted. It is the reaffirmation of Veda or Brahmavidya, not by ... and all Vedanta, within us is God & perfected humanity—two beatitudes that are the same and yet different. But to effect this great deliverance, to push aside the golden shield of our various thought from the face of Truth, to rescue the concealed Purusha, future Man, out of those waters in which he lies concealed and give him form by the intensity of our tapas, let no man think that it is a brief or ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Essays on the Gita  >  Nirvana and Works in the World

... soul-experience, is founded on the love of God and in that love there is no peril and no shortcoming. Fear and disgust of the world may often be necessary for the recoil from the lower nature, for it is really the fear and disgust of our own ego which reflects itself in the world. But to see God in the world is to fear nothing, it is to embrace all in the being of God; to see all as the Divine is to hate... look calmly on the lower nature and the works of the Maya of the three gunas and act in them and upon them without perturbation or fall or disturbance from the height and power Page 245 of the spiritual oneness, free in the largeness of the God-vision, sweet and great and luminous in the strength of the God-nature, may well be declared to be the supreme Yogin. He indeed has conquered the... hate and loathe nothing, but love God in the world and the world in God. But at least the things of the lower nature will be shunned and feared, the things which the Yogin has taken so much trouble to surmount? Not this either; all is embraced in the equality of the self-vision. "He, O Arjuna, who sees with equality everything in the image of the Self, whether it be grief or it be happiness, him I ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Integral Yoga - Major Aims, Methods, Processes and Results  >  PART FOUR

... organization in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose Page 68 conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we... a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond mind. There is, Sri Aurobindo affirms, the unconquerable impulse in man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality, and this impulse can be seen in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond mind. The impulse of life towards the mind bears a great analogical relationship with the impulse... human animal that we call Man more intimately, and when we discover the soul in man and the intentions of that soul as also the intention that seems to be operating of the supermind that is above and the supermind that is in the inconscience, we shall be led to the conclusion that man is a transitional being and that he is a living and thinking laboratory in whom the nature, with the collaboration of ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Integral Yoga - Major Aims, Methods, Processes and Results

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1  >  The Eternal Bridegroom

... this divine Inhabitant that has to be awakened; for, once he wakes up, no more can Death and Ignorance rule the world. Nature has still kept her charm and grace, but it is the mind of man that has come under the sway of the veil cast by Death. Savitri tells Death: Although God made the world for his delight, An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will And Death's deep falsity ... space. A lonely soul passions for the Alone, The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God. 19 The secret of man's transmutation lies in Love. The poet says here that he alone can respond to love of God who has loved man. He who has never known human love must remain a stranger to the love of God. Savitri says to Death: A Lover learning from his cloister's door ... ordained by the Divine and that she was not deviating in the least from the line indicated by God. She said that perhaps Death did not know that God created man not in order that he may be a mere puppet, a toy, in the hand of the Creator. He created man so that he may become a collaborator with God. But for this man has to be completely free. So long as he is not free, he will be afraid of Death and become ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Teilhard de Chardin and our Time  >  The Vedantic Vision, the Historical Christand soul-Evolution

... form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness...; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve. If there were not this rising of man into the Godhead to be helped by the descent of God into humanity... uniqueness, so dear to the Christian, of Christ's avatarhood would be set aside. Instead, we would have a divine phenomenon repeating itself at several stages of human history, a guiding companionship of God to man again and again.   "India," explains Sri Aurobindo, 1 "has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the reality of the Avatar, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead in... of Man and the Father above from whom he has descended are one, that Krishna in the human body... and the supreme Lord and Friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the same divine Purushottama, 6 revealed there in his own being, revealed here in the type of humanity."   We may throw a glance at what the Avatar Krishna reveals of his Godhead in the Gita. He is the Personal God par ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Lectures on Savitri  >  Lecture III

... addresses humanity rather than replying to her directly: Oh man, the events that meet thee in thy road, Though they smite thy body and soul with joy and grief. Are not thy fate; they touch thee awhile and pass; Page 74 "Thy Goal" is to reach "the indwelling God" O soul, intruder in Nature's ignorance, Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights... mankind; human nature as well as human consciousness is capable of liberation and perfection, and that perfection consists in a transformation of nature, not a rejection of nature but a transformation, not a control only, not a type of behaviour according to ethics and morality, but a free expression of the Divine in man with the divine nature. The Divine has the divine nature which man can also acquire... so he prays for it; the help is given to him in the form of a boon: that Savitri will be born to help man to solve the problem of ignorance and death. Then Savitri is born and seeing that the constitution of the universe is imperfect, she brings the perfect divine consciousness into the nature of man in order to realize immortality for him. Immortality is another word for divine consciousness. ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Lectures on Savitri

Savitri  >  'The Parable of the Search for the Soul'

... nether Hell as also .high Heaven. Mind has its handmaidens—fancy, imagination—and they annex vast territories of experience for man to lord over. In apprehension like a god, yet man can also solicit the dark and devalue himself:         Man's house of life holds not the gods alone:       There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,       Inhabitants of life's ominous... of consciousness, from inert matter to man and the future superman. It may be that man has his "prone obscure beginnings" in the jungle ape; but he has not ceased to grow, he has not ceased to hanker after good and beauty and God, and he has been moving "in a white lucent air of dreams". The setbacks have been many, the frustrations numberless, but pioneering man has moved breast-forward, flirted with... chances of the ignorant race of man responding to the "saviour Light" from above. "Is there a God whom any cry can move?" Isn't he careless of mankind, their dolour and their defeat?   What need have I, what need has Satyavan To avoid the black-meshed net, the dismal door, Or call a mightier Light into life's closed room, A greater Law into man's little world? 266   For ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Man to be Surpassed

... human nature has to be changed, not only what is considered as bad in it but what is valued as good also. For beyond good and evil is Nature Divine. Man has to find out this divine nature and dissolve his human nature into that, remould it, reshape it in that pattern. So long as human consciousness remains too human, it will be always branded with the bar sinister of all earthly things. Man has to... the other modern humanist Albert Schweitzer. Two types of humanism have been distinguished: man-centred humanism and God-centred humanism. Kahler's (and even Schweitzer's) humanism belongs, very much to the first category. He does Page 359 not seem to believe in any transcendent Spirit or God apart from the universal totality of existence, the unitary life of all, somewhat akin to the... individualistic either. Yes, man's true humanity, says Kahler, almost echoing Nietzcshe, consists precisely in his capacity to surpass himself. The animal is wholly engrossed in its natural nature and Page 358 activities; but man is capable of standing back, can separate from his biological self, observe, control and direct. For him "existence" truly means (as the Existentialist declares ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  God Made Human

... Nicholas Berdyaev : God Made Human NICHOLAS Berdyaev is an ardent worker, as a Russian is naturally expected to be, in the cause of the spiritual rehabilitation of mankind. He is a Christian, a neo-Christian: some of his conclusions are old-world truths and bear repetition and insistence; others are of a more limited, conditional and even doubtful nature. His conception of the value... 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 orthodox Christian faith: the Christ is inseparable from the Cross. So he says: "There is no such thing as personality if there is no capacity for suffering. Suffering is inherent in God too, if he is a personality... cannot but be weak. This very weakness, so human, is and must be specially characteristic of God also, if he is one with man and his lover and saviour. Eastern spirituality does not view sorrow and suffering – evil – as an integral part of the Divine Consciousness. It is born out of the Divine, no doubt, as nothing can be outside the Divine, but it is a local and temporal formation; it is a disposition ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

In the Mother's Light  >  Conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient

... culture which would combine the two in a clumsy practical compromise, such as is fondly advocated by the modern idealists. They met to help man live in God and God in man; to convert human life into a vehicle of the divine Light, and human nature into divine nature. They met to declare that Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, the One and the many are essentially one, and that their oneness can be dynamically... simultaneous conquest of the summits and the base has to be attempted, if the integral being of man has to have an integral divine fulfilment in life. This is the fundamental perception upon which the work of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo has been progressing, and its consummation will be the manifestation of God in life, the Life Divine. If we lose sight of this fundamental perception, we shall find ourselves... Mother and Sri Aurobindo. And yet it is the most momentous humanitarian work ever undertaken, for, without a complete transmutation of the basic stuff of human nature, it would be idle to dream of a happy and harmonious human life on earth. Man can be redeemed and released into his inherent divinity only by the double discovery we have spoken of above : the discovery of the golden summits of his being ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  Savitri and the Bible

... too unbearable to see Job's suffering, asks her husband to curse God and die. The good 64 The Book of Job, XLII. 5, p. 500. Page 237 man asks her not to talk like a foolish woman. One must accept whatever God gives with an equal spirit, good or evil. The worst suffering does not change his Sattwic nature. Job moves away outside town, scrapes himself with broken piece... is the Son of God bom as the Son of Man. We have referred already to the vision of the three-personed God of whom God the Son is the second person. We will have occasion to consider the idea of the three persons in some detail. In the present passage the first part ending with the words "God's martyred body" focuses on the "Son of God" who is not really different from God who is also called... evolution is possible. God asks the Satan to take away all Job has,— his property and even his ten children. The fellow does it readily, delighting as he does in others' suffering. But Job's Sattwic nature does not change. He tells himself that God gave and God has taken away all he had. He only blesses God, contrary to the Satan's prediction that he would curse him. God again points to the Satan ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 4  >  The Divine Man

... a future and man has hope. The world is not doomed nor man past cure; for it is not that the world has been merely created by God but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has veiled his... I The Divine Man The core of Sri Aurobindo's teaching, the central pivot on which his Yoga and his work rest is the mystery of the Divine Descent —Spirit descending into Matter and becoming Matter, God coming down upon earth and becoming human, and as a necessary and inevitable consequence, Matter rising and being transformed into Spirit and man becoming God and Godlike. This... creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in Page 2 another perspective, because Matter is essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy embedded or lying frozen in it ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 4

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  The Divine Man

... has a future and man has hope. The world is not doomed nor man past cure; for it is not that the world has been merely created by God but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has ... The Divine Man THE core of Sri Aurobindo's teaching, the central pivot on which his Yoga arid his work rest is the mystery of the Divine Descent—Spirit descending into Matter and becoming Matter, God coming down upon earth and becoming human, and as a necessary and inevitable consequence, Matter rising and being transformed into Spirit and man becoming God and Godlike. This... suffering, has become an earthly creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in another perspective because Matter is essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy imbedded or lying frozen in it ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  The Divine Man

... has a future and man has hope. The world is not doomed nor man past cure; for it is not that the world has been merely created by God but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme conscious­ness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has ¹ The... FOUR The Divine Man THE core of Sri Aurobindo's teaching, the central pivot on which his Yoga and his work rest is the mystery of the Divine Descent-Spirit descending into Matter and becoming Matter, God coming down upon earth and becoming human, and as a necessary and inevitable consequence, Matter rising and being transformed into Spirit and man becoming God and Godlike. This is a... suffering, has become an earthly creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in another perspective because Matter is essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy imbedded or lying frozen in it ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  Blaise Pascal

... something of the pure light and burned with a lurid glare. And the reason is his metaphysics. It is the Jansenist conception of God and human nature that inspired and coloured all his experience and consciousness. According to it, as according to the Calvinist conception, man is a corrupt being, corroded to the core, original sin has branded his very soul. Only Grace saves him and releases him. The order... If God exists, by accepting and reaching him what do we gain? All that man cares for – happiness, felicity. And what do we lose? We lose the world of misery. If, on the other 'hand, God does not exist, by believing him to exist, we lose nothing, we are not more miserable than what we are. If, however, God exists and we do not believe him, we gain this ¹ "Il faut savoir douter où il faut... are Pascal's own words on the subject: "The greatness of man is great in this that he knows he is miserable. A tree does not know that it is miserable. It is misery indeed to know oneself miserable. But one is great when one knows thus that he is miserable. Thought is man's greatness. Man is a mere reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed."¹ Pascal's faith had not the ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

The Crucifixion  >  Introduction -The Life of Jesus

... Jesus were those by which he acted as if he possessed the authority of God. That is to say, he virtually declared himself to be God. In the Gospels, Jesus forgives sins. How can a man forgive sin? Only God can forgive sins. There are several such incidents in the Gospels. When the Pharisees witnessed the curing of a paralyzed man after Jesus said to him "Your sins are forgiven." they angrily... break his fast. The answer of Jesus is famous: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by the Word of God." Then Satan carried Jesus to the top of the temple in Jerusalem and advised him to jump, reassuring Jesus that God would catch him and prevent him from being hurt. To which Jesus replied, "You shall not tempt your Lord, your God." Finally, Satan takes Jesus to a place where... That Jesus is God and died on the Cross to allow sinners to be saved is one of the most basic dogmas of the Christian religion. And thus Jesus becomes Jesus Christ. This is officially stated in the Nicene Creed, which is presented in this essay. By allowing Himself (God/Jesus) to be sacrificed on the Cross, He showed His love for humanity, because humans were doomed to sin by their nature and therefore ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Crucifixion

Hymns to the Mystic Fire  >  RV V.1

... calls up the godlike ideal activity in us which exceeds man's ordinary motions,—wakes it even before it actually occupies this mortal system, by its far-off touch and glimmer on the horizon; so too divine, inspired and faultless activity in us rises heavenward & calls down God's dawn on His creature. This great uprush of force is in its nature a great uprush of divine being; for force is nothing but... grappling with the contacts of the outer world. But when we rise from our mortal nature to the nature of godhead, devayantah, amritam sapantah, then the first change is the passage from mortal impurity to immortal purity, and the very nature of purity is a clear brightness and rightness, in which all our members work perfectly in God & the gods, each doing its own function & preserving its right relation with... comes with him to man, prátah, he stands up with the intellect and emotional temperament perfected & purified, sumanáh, for the great offering of man's whole internal & external life & activity to God in the gods, yajatháya deván, fulfilling the upward impulse, úrdhwa, which raises matter towards life, life towards mind, mind towards ideality & spirit, and thus consummating God's intention in the creature ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Hymns to the Mystic Fire

The Divine Collaborators  >  Conquest of The Subconscient And The Inconscient

... combine the two in a clumsy practical compromise, such as is fondly advocated by the modem idealists. They met to help man live in God and God in man; to convert human life into a vehicle of the divine Light, and human nature into divine nature. They met to declare that Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, the One and the many are essentially one, and that their oneness can be... simultaneous conquest of the summits and the base has to be attempted, if the integral being of man has to have an integral divine fulfillment in life. This is the fundamental perception upon which the work of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo has been progressing, and its consummation will be the manifestation of God in life, the Life Divine. If we lose sight of this fundamental perception, we shall find... without a complete transmutation of the 1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother 2 Ibid. Page 47 basic stuff of human nature, it would be idle to dream of a happy and harmonious human life on earth. Man can be redeemed and released into his inherent divinity only by the double discovery we have spoken of above: the discovery of the golden summits of his being ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Divine Collaborators

Early Cultural Writings  >  Dayananda: The Man and His Work

... inspiration to what thou shalt grow. Seeing, hew that out of thyself, hew that out of Life. Be a thinker, but be also a doer; be a soul, but be also a man; be a servant of God, but be also a master of Nature!" For this was what he himself was; a man with God in his soul, vision in his eyes and power in his hands to hew out of life an image according to his vision. Hew is the right word. Granite himself... self-definition. He was not only plastic to the great hand of Nature, but asserted his own right and power to use Life and Nature as Page 663 plastic material. We can imagine his soul crying still to us with our insufficient spring of manhood and action, "Be not content, O Indian, only to be infinitely and grow vaguely, but see what God intends thee to be, determine in the light of His inspiration... unspoilt stuff of Nature, fair and robust in body, instinct with a fresh and primal vigour, crude in the crude, but in a developed nature capable of becoming a great force of genial creation. When I seek to give an account to myself of my sentiment and put into precise form the impression I have received, I find myself starting from two great salient characteristics of this man's life and work which ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3  >  The Soul's Odyssey

... its best, it is then Nature herself that takes up the pen and writes for the poet. The deep spiritual truth we are referring to is the Odyssey of the human soul. And it is also an occult phenomenon happening in the world of the inner reality. The Soul's own home is in God, is God; for it is part and parcel of the divine consciousness, it is essentially one in being and nature with the supreme Reality... envelops and engulfs our normal life. And that is why at times—not unoften—there occurs a crack, a fissure in the crust of our earthly nature of ignorance and a tongue of flame leaps out—one or other perhaps of the seven sisters of which the Upanishad speaks. And then a mere man becomes a saint, a seer, a poet, a prophet, a hero. This is the flaming godhead whom we cherish within, Agni, the leader of our... mould one's consciousness Page 117 and being, one's substance and constitution, even the entire cellular organisation into the radiant truth is the goal of man's highest aspiration, the ultimate end of Nature's evolutionary urge and the cycle of rebirth. Page 118 Works' by the same Author The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo (in five parts) The Coming Race ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3

The Divine Collaborators  >  The Rainbow Bridge

... message is of the essential divinity of man and the inevitable fullness and perfection of its self-expression in life, on this earth and in the human body. He does not regard a union with God or Brahman only in the depths or on the heights of the being as a complete union. Man's birth-right, he affirms, is a constant, dynamic, integral union—a union in the nature as well as in the soul, in every little... consciousness of man from mind to Supermind, which is the Truth-consciousness, the Rita-chit of the Veda; (2) descent of the Supermind into Matter and the conversion and transformation of the integral nature of man—physical, vital and mental—by the Light-Force of the Supermind, and (3) the perfect manifestation of Sachchidananda on earth through the transformed and divinised human nature. Sri Aurobindo... ousness, where man can have a perfect union, both in silence and in action, and a simultaneous self-identification with the Transcendent and the Immanent. The general trend of mystical thought in the West, in spite of the towering achievements of Ruysbroeck and St. Teresa, inclines towards a denial of the possibility of a complete and constant union with God in human fife. "Man shall not see my ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Divine Collaborators

In the Mother's Light  >  The Rainbow Bridge

... message is of the essential divinity of man and the inevitable fullness and perfection of its self-expression in life, on this earth, and in the human body. He does not regard a union with God or Brahman only in the depths or on the heights of the being as a complete union. Man's birth-right, he affirms, is a constant, dynamic, integral union—a union in the nature as well as in the soul, in every little... consciousness of man from mind to Supermind, which is the Truth-consciousness, the Rita-chit, of the Veda, (2) descent of the Supermind into Matter and the conversion and transformation of the integral nature of man—physical, vital and mental,—by the Light- Force of the Supermind, and (3) the perfect manifestation of Sachchidananda on earth through the transformed and divinised human nature. Sri Aurobindo... consciousness, where man can have a perfect union, both in silence and in action, and a simultaneous self-identification with the Transcendent and the Immanent. The general trend of mystical thought in the West, in spite of the towering achievements of Ruysbroeck and St.Teresa, inclines towards a denial of the possibility of a complete and constant union with God in human life. "Man shall not see my ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality

... mould of working, guna, type of nature, yet puts its stamp of an initial transcendence, impersonality, pure fire of spirit, a something beyond the gunas of our normal nature. When the spirit in us is free, then what was behind this soul-force comes out in all its light, beauty and greatness, the Spirit, the Godhead who makes the nature and soul of man his foundation and living representative... Godhead, the spirit manifested in Nature appears in a sea of infinite quality, Ananta-guna. But the executive or mechanical Prakriti is of the threefold guna, sattwa, rajas, tamas, and the Ananta-guna, the spiritual play of infinite quality, modifies itself in this mechanical nature into the type of these three gunas. And in the soul-force in man this Godhead in Nature represents itself as a fourfold... violent rajasic man, Page 744 the grandiose egoist, the Titan, Asura, Rakshasa. But the soul-powers to which this type of nature opens on its higher grades are as necessary as those of the Brahmana to the perfection of our human nature. The high fearlessness which no danger or difficulty can daunt and which feels its power equal to meet and face and bear whatever assault of man or fortune or ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  Self-Consecration

... single task. Man in his effort at self-transcendence has usually to seize on some one spring or some powerful leverage in the complicated machine that his nature is; this spring or lever he touches in preference to others and uses it to set the machine in motion towards the end that he has in view. In his choice it is always Nature itself that should be his guide. But here it must be Nature at her highest... Master. This higher mentality and this deeper soul, the psychic element in man, are the two grappling hooks by which the Divine can lay hold upon his nature. The higher mind in man is something other, loftier, purer, vaster, more powerful than the reason or logical intelligence. The animal is a vital and sensational being; man, it is said, is distinguished from the animal by the possession of reason... this automatism of the vital nature. Man can bring an enlightened will, an enlightened thought and enlightened emotions to the difficult work of his self-development; he can more and more subject to these more conscious and reflecting guides the inferior function of desire. In proportion as he can thus master and enlighten his lower self, he is man and no longer an animal. When he can begin to replace ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  Walter Hilton

... story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of man-one level... possible for man, weak and bound as he is, to reject the thraldom of his flesh, he can never purify himself wholly by his own unaided strength. God in his infinite mercy sent his own son, an emanation created out of his substance – his embodied love – as a human being to suffer along with men and take upon himself the burden of their sins. God the Son lived upon earth as man and died as man. Sin therefore... the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and had betrayed, the Son of Man continued to love him. It was no make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said, the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is God's servant ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

Words of the Mother - III  >  The Supramental and the New Being

... blessings. 1 February 1963 Page 112 Somebody asked me,— "In the work of Transformation, who is the slowest to do his part, man or God?" I replied,— Man finds that God is too slow to answer his prayers. God finds that man is too slow to receive His influence. But for the Truth-Consciousness all is going on as it ought to go. Page 113 The Lord... transformation. And with a smile, Sri Aurobindo told you something like this: "Do you believe now?" It was as if he were evoking the three lines from Savitri : "God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep, For man shall not know the coming till its hour And belief shall be not till the work is done." I think that this is a sufficient explanation of the meditation you refer to... envisage beings whose control in the body may enable them to neutralize or absorb radioactivity or over-exposure to cosmic rays?" A learned man in the Ashram said that immunisation to radiation is "impossible" because physical matter is controlled by lower nature. I expect you to tell me that, for us, nothing is "impossible". Both statements are true. (1) So long as matter remains what it is, ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of the Mother - III

Essays Divine and Human  >  Man and Superman

... From Man to Superman: Notes and Fragments on Philosophy, Psychology and Yoga (1912-1947) From Man to Superman: Notes and Fragments on Philosophy, Psychology and Yoga (1912-1947) Philosophy: God, Nature and Man Essays Divine and Human Man and Superman Man and the Evolutionary Process 46 Man is a transitional being, he is not final. He is a... then we might believe that man was the last instrument by which Nature was passing from the terrestrial to the highest stage developing out of her initial inconscience a supreme conscient being. But man seems to be by his very mould of nature a being with an animal living out of which he grew and a mental boundary beyond which he cannot pass. For mind is the man, mind cramped into a body and... term in earth nature's climb from the electron and atom, gas and metal through the vegetable and animal and human formulas to the god and Titan and through the god to the Divine. It is not in the light of the realised alone that we should read the earth-riddle; it is in the light of the unrealised that we shall understand the realised and know why all was and to what all was moving in Nature. At present ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

The Renaissance in India  >  A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture - 5

... mind and will and an effort to be better than God or Nature made him. Far more ennobling, inspiring, filled with the motive-force of a great idea is the conception placed before us by Indian culture. Man in the Indian idea is a spirit veiled in the works of energy, moving to self-discovery, capable of Godhead. He is a soul that is growing through Nature to conscious self-hood; he is a divinity and an... prākṛto janaḥ , he can even become a free perfected semi-divine man, mukta, siddha . But he can do more; released into the cosmic consciousness, his spirit can become one with God, one self with the Spirit of the universe or rise into a Light and Vastness that transcends the universe; his nature can become one dynamic power with universal Nature or one Light with a transcendental Gnosis. To be shut up for... greater than the life it informs, of the final goal, of a high possible immortality, freedom, God-consciousness, divine Nature. Man was not allowed to forget that he had in him a Page 165 highest self beyond his little personal ego and that always he and all things live, move and have their being in God, in the Eternal, in the Spirit. There were ways and disciplines provided in number by which ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Renaissance in India

Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  12 NOVEMBER 1939

... sentence: Justice moved my Great Maker; God Eternal Wrought me: the Power, and the unsearchably High Wisdom, and the Primal Love Supernal. The attributes of the Trinity are mentioned here. Charles Williams in the Figure of Beatrice , comments thus: "If there is God, if there is free-will, then man is able to choose the opposite of God. Power, Wisdom, Love, gave man free-will: therefore Power, Wisdom... (rhythmic suggestion) is an important element of poetry but it is not everything. There must be something that appeals to the mind, man being mental. Poetry to be popular must be good poetry. 2 "Video meliora probocque, deteriora sequor." 3 "...the outer nature may become the field of an apparent incoherence although all within is luminous with the Self. Thus we become outwardly inert and inactive... refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha." 6 "Old man, old woman, the two together." 7 The following comments on Lajpat Rai are based on A. B. Purani's record of this talk. 8 World-repulsion arising from the Guna (quality) of Tamas (ignorance and inertia) in one's nature: the two other Gunas are Rajas (dynamism) and Sattwa (refinement and poise). 9 Sri ...

Nirodbaran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  The Soul's Odyssey

... its best, it is then Nature herself that takes up the pen and writes for the poet. The deep spiritual truth we are referring to is the Odyssey of the human soul. And it is also an occult phenomenon happening in the world of the inner reality. The Soul's own home is in God, is God; for it is part and parcel of the divine consciousness, it is essentially one in being and nature with the supreme Reality... and engulfs our normal life. And that is why at times – not unoften-there occurs a crack, a fissure in the crust of our earthly nature of ignorance and a tongue of flame leaps out – one or other perhaps of the seven sisters of which the Upanishad speaks. And then a mere man becomes a saint, a seer, a poet, a prophet, a hero. This is the flaming godhead whom we cherish within, Agni, the leader of our... legendary Salamander – to mould one's consciousness and being, one's substance and constitution, even the entire cellular organisation into the radiant truth is the goal of man's highest aspiration, the ultimate end of Nature's evolutionary urge and the cycle of rebirth. Page 121 ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history  >  The Supramental Manifesto

... after the phase of evolution in the Ignorance in transitional Man, now the stress naturally is on spiritual evolution, but in such a way that the triad matter-life-mind may also receive the transforming touch of the Spirit. In his arduous and anxious climb towards the heights, Man seeks support and light from both circumambient Nature and God the invisible Power, but he finds that the divers philosophies... warring religions only tend to confuse and distract him. Man perseveres nevertheless, and moves from higher to still higher peak, and arrives at more and more synoptic views of unity and harmony: The quest of man for God, which becomes in the end the most ardent and enthralling of all his quests, begins with his first vague questionings of Nature and a sense of something unseen both in himself and... Sciences meet together in a supreme Science. For that which all our mind-knowledge and sense-knowledge and suprasensuous vision is seeking, is found most integrally in the unity of God and man and Nature and all that is in Nature. 48 This faring forward, this labouring upward, this conquest of peak after peak of largeness, unity and harmony is the very pith of the Aurobindonian dialectic of ascent ...

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8  >  A Commentary on the First Six Suktas of Rigveda

... objects inherent in it. By self ­sacrifice one creates another form and gets in it one's larger self. The plant has evolved from Matter; the animal after the plant; man from the animal, and God wants now to manifest Himself through man by virtue of this process of self-sacrifice. Sacrificing itself, the cloud comes down as rain. Parents sacrifice flesh and blood to give birth to their offspring. All... Right, the Vast, the fourth world, is indeed svarloka, the own home (sva dama) of Agni and all the other gods. It is here that the gods reign supreme in their own real form, in their true nature. But, then, every god has his assigned field of activity here on earth through some suitable subtle ¹ Gita, III.11. Page 97 embodiment. The seat of Fire, his field of action, is the... (fruits or offspring), let this be your milker of desires.) It is the gods who are the primal powers holding and con­trolling this sacrifice and the cosmic creation. By his self offering man fulfils the nature of the gods. What is externally the sacrifice of physical elements ¹ Gita, III.15 ²Gita, II.10 Page 95 represents aYoga of union in the inner-consciousness ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Fate and Free-Will

... decided by the nature of the thing in which action takes place,— svabhāva-niyataṁ karma . Each separate existence, each individual has a swabhava or nature and acts according to it, each group, species or mass of individuals has a swabhava or nature and acts according to it, and the universe also has its swabhava or nature and acts according to it. Mankind is a group of individuals and every man acts according... inexorable Nature, or the necessity of our own previous development. The first is the answer of the devout and submissive mind in its dependence on God, but, unless we adopt a Calvinistic fatalism, the admission of the guiding and overriding will of God does not exclude the permission of freedom to the individual. The second is the answer of the scientist; Heredity determines our Nature, the laws... according to his human nature, that is his law of being as distinct from animals, trees or other groups of individuals. Each man has a distinct nature of his own and that is his law of being which ought to guide him as an individual. But beyond and above these minor laws is the great dharma of the universe which provides that certain previous karma or action must lead to certain new karma or results. ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Hymns to the Mystic Fire  >  RV V.10

... expressed in the heart or temperament, manma the mental realisation, vachas the expression of the god or his divine activities in the mortal nature, shansa the expression of the man's higher being which is brought about by the mantra, stoma the firm established condition of the manifest god in the man. Nor are these the only terms which are applied to the mantra in the Vedic s úktas. It is also called... the divine being or nature through the path of the Truth or Ritam manifested by the mantra; sáma when it brings about the harmony or equality of the different constituents of our nature, body, life-energy, mind, pure ideation in one divine ánandamaya consciousness. By the mantra the god, entering into the speech and the thought, the soul-state, takes possession of his seat in man & makes manifest there... becomes in its nature a self-luminous activity guiding itself whether consciously in our minds or super-consciously, guháhitam, to the divine goal. All Tapas is self-effective and God-effective. As Adhrigu, the divine Light in our embodied being, Agni is to bring to us an illumination of knowledge in our mentality which is ojistha, most full of ojas, superabundant in effective puissance. By God-directed ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Hymns to the Mystic Fire

Words of the Mother - II  >  The Ways of Working of the Lord

... Consciousness got angry over the defects of men, humanity would long since have ceased to be. 7 June 1972 Why was not man created good from the beginning? It is not God who made man wicked. It is man who makes himself wicked by separating himself from God. The Divine may very well lean down towards you, but to understand Him rightly you must come up to Him. To understand... right to change His mind. 1958 If we want to have conversations with God (of course within us), is it possible? If yes, on what condition? God does not indulge in conversation. Page 23 Does God ever become angry with us? If yes, when? When you believe He is angry. If we shed tears for God, does He ever shed a tear for us? Surely He has deep compassion for you, but... Man's Relationship with the Divine Man's Relationship with the Divine Words of the Mother - II The Ways of Working of the Lord The Divine's Grace is wonderful and almighty. And the ways of working of the Lord are full of a delightful sense of humour... Be always ready to receive the Divine, for He may visit you at any moment. And if sometimes ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of the Mother - II

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  Karmayoga and its Indispensability-1

... prakrti, the supreme Divine Nature, the Mother. The soul of man in its evolution inevitably passes through the lower Nature of the three guṇas, but when it is liberated, it does not shuffle off all Nature and retire into its immutable unembodied essence, but, seated securely in the higher, converts and perfects his lower Nature of mind, life and body, and, manifesting God's glory through this transformed... in the emergent light of spiritual knowledge. Not escape from Nature, but a sovereign possession and joyous utilisation and enjoyment of a divinised Nature, is the great objective of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo; and it is indispensable for man's perfection and fulfilment on earth through an integral ¹ sāyujya means liberation into an absorbed union with the Divine, sāmīpya into a... an active surrender of his whole being, to climb to the integral divinity of this double poise, and live in the world as a radiant channel of God's transforming Force. This all-embracing and all-exceeding truth of the omnipresent Reality and Life and Nature having been once accepted as the foundation of Karmayoga, a question naturally arises from the confused mass of spiritual traditions of the ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Hitler and his God  >  List and Lanz

... Germanic people’s leader, ‘the Strong One from Above’, would, according to List, rule as a god-man and be subject to no law. This heroic prince would be recognizable by the fact that he would be victorious in every battle. ‘The Strong One from Above’ would always be right. For List saw him attuned to the forces of Nature … He could make no mistakes. To him the ‘final victory’ was assured.” And Hamann reproduces... longed for by all, from the despairing crowd a simple man to save them. The people see this man, feel that he has come at the very last moment, recognize themselves in him and suddenly know what they want.” 394 “As early as 1891, List had discovered a verse of the Voluspa which invoked an awesome and benevolent messianic figure: A wealthy man joins the circle of counsellors, A Strong One from... People Hitler and his God List and Lanz We have met Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in the first chapters of our story. We recall that these Austrian mythic visionaries were widely read and exerted a direct influence on the Germanenorden, of which the Thule Society was a chapter. Both saw the Germanic race as a people of god-men who temporarily ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

Aspects of Sri Aurobindo  >  Sidelights on The Aurobindonian Truth

... the lines, overt or covert, of his own individual nature in this birth. At the same time, the spiritual light that he holds and that he imparts contains the source of all possible activities and he can make a man who has a musician in his nature create grand symphonies, a painter in his nature produce master-pieces of colour, a scientist in his nature become a Niels Bohr or a Jagadish Chandra Bose. He... He can give illuminating inspiration along any line of individual nature in his disciples, but he does not himself assume the functions of all individual natures. It is not necessary for his work: in fact, it is contrary to his mission, for then the God-realisations of other men who follow him would be superfluous and inutile so far as world-work is concerned. Even in poetry, literary criticism... wrote: "Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue." And another: "Neither God nor Heaven nor Hell nor the World can be otherwise honourable in you or by you except by their own existence and manifestation in you." All pretended knowledge of these things without this self-evident perception of their birth within you is only such knowledge as the blind man has of the light he has never ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

The Future Poetry  >  Recent English Poetry - IV

... universes? Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, At nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, O actual Me, And, lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of space,— and he foresees the coming of that kinship of God and man to conscious fruition in oneness, Greater... power of intuitive and revealing suggestion. This enlarging of the particular to meet and become one with the universal and infinite—Tennyson's knowing of what God and man is from a deep and intimate perception of all that is meant by Nature in a single little flower in the crannies—is a very characteristic and indicative feature of this new poetry. The same turn emerges in a more indirect and subtle... ourselves and all... O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? And with a singularly clear first seeing of the ideal goal and the ideal way of the conversion of the intellectual and vital into the spiritual self, he calls the spirit of man to the adventure. The circumnavigation of the world begin, Of man, the voyage of his mind's return, To reason's early paradise, Back, back ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry

In the Mother's Light  >  Grace

... untold it is possessed. Forsooth, it is not man's merit but God's gift..." Hilton, another mystic rings the same note : "...first He chooseth him, and that is when He draweth a man to Him by comfort of devotion..." In his "Scale Of Perfection", Hilton dwells again and again on the subject of Grace and waxes inspiringly eloquent over it. "The soul of a man, whilst it is not touched with special grace... of giving one's heart to God and striving for the divine likeness. In following that path man knows that his own powers are insufficient for attaining the end, and that the amount of grace bestowed upon him, being a free gift, depends upon God's will alone; it is inevitably a case of 'many being called, but few chosen'; there is however, no set limit either to man's spiritual energy, or to the... perfect' or, in other words, to become wholly like God. Christianity is the religion of grace and not of law. Man can and must by the moral effort of will and the spiritual intensity of prayer draw the gracious forces to himself, but it does not depend upon him in what measure they will flow to him, nor what their effect may be... .In revealing to man the ideal of absolute perfection for which he ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Karmayogin  >  Opinion and Comments

... humanity. A man must be strong and free in himself before he can live usefully for others, so must a nation. But that does not justify us in forgetting the ultimate aim of evolution. God in the nation becomes the realisation of the first moment to us because the nation is the chosen means or condition through which we rise to the higher synthesis, God in humanity, God in all creatures, God in Himself... Mitra is not denied by any man in his senses and was not denied but dwelt upon by the speaker at Jhalakati,—they are not necessary, in the sense that God does not depend upon them for the execution of His purposes. Our contemporary does not expressly deny God's existence or His omnipotence or His providence, and if he accepts them, he is debarred from insisting that God cannot save India without Sj... , it means that God being Supreme Wisdom uses everything for His supreme purposes and out of evil cometh good. This is true of our private life as every man of spiritual insight can testify; he can name and estimate the particular good which has come out of every apparent evil in his life. The same truth applies to the life of the nation. God's Ways When it is said that God's ways are inscrutable ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Karmayogin

On Thoughts and Aphorisms  >  Aphorism - 146, 147, 148, 149, 150

... inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula. 149—Where in material Nature wilt thou find Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows and hints of them she possesses, but they themselves tower over her. Page 249 150—There are two for whom there is hope, the man who has felt God's touch and been drawn to it and the sceptical seeker and self-convinced atheist; but for the formularists... character. That which Nature uses for concealing from us the Infinite, Shakespeare used for revealing the Ananta-guna in man to the eye of humanity. 148—Shakespeare, who invented the figure of holding up the mirror to Nature, was the one poet who never condescended to a copy, a photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner... religions and the parrots of free thought, they are dead souls who follow a death that they call living. Don't the "formularists" of the religions help the ordinary masses by giving them an image of God? Don't you think that religion helps ordinary people? Everything that happens, happens by the will of the Supreme Lord in order to lead the whole creation to the knowledge of the Supreme. But ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Thoughts and Aphorisms

Sri Aurobindo and the Earth's Future  >  Sri Aurobindo and the Earths Future

... the spearhead of evolution as man was once the spearhead of evolution among the great apes. "If", says Sri Aurobindo, "the animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man, man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god." 4 Sri Aurobindo has come to tell us... hearts. "It is a question," says Sri Aurobindo, "of creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution." 2 For, indeed, he says, "the imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit." 3 Beyond mental man, which is what we are, there opens the possibility of the emergence of another... "These laws of Nature," says Sri Aurobindo, "that you call absolute... merely mean an equilibrium established by Nature... it is merely a groove in which Nature is accustomed to work in order to produce certain results. But, if you change the consciousness, then the groove also is bound to change.' 9 This is the new adventure to which Sri Aurobindo calls us, an adventure into man's unknown. Whether ...

Satprem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo and the Earth's Future

The Renaissance in India  >  Indian Spirituality and Life - 1

... consider the real self of man to be indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with the Divine in essence but different from him in Nature. A third might hold God, Nature and the individual soul in man to be three eternally different powers of being. But for all the truth of Self held with equal force; for even to the Indian dualist God is the supreme self... self and reality in whom and by whom Nature and man live, move and have their being and, if you eliminate God from his view of things, Nature and man would lose for him all their meaning Page 183 and importance. The Spirit, universal Nature (whether called Maya, Prakriti or Shakti) and the soul in living beings, Jiva, are the three truths which are universally admitted by all the many religious... psychological planes of consciousness and experience and the truths of these supraphysical planes were no less real to it than the outward truths of the material universe. Man approaches God at first according to his psychological nature and his capacity for deeper experience, svabhāva, adhikāra . The level of Truth, the plane of consciousness he can reach is determined by his inner evolutionary stage ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Renaissance in India

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  Humanism and Humanism

... superior divine nature. He has conquered the evil of the lower nature, certainly; but also he has gone beyond the good of that nature. The liberated man is seated above the play of the three Gunas that constitute the apara prakrti. Human intelligence, human feeling, human sentiment, human motive do not move him. Humanism generally has no meaning for him. He is no longer human, but supra-human;... the forests of solitude. The religious or Christian humanism of the West is in its essential nature the pagan and profane humanism itself, at least an extension of the same. The sympathy that a St. Francis feels for his leprous brother is, after all, a human feeling, a feeling that man has for man; and even his love for the bird or an inanimate object is also a very human feeling, transferred... human feeling, but because there is a heightening and a transcendence in the consciousness and being. To man, to human valuation, the Boddhisattwa may appear to be greater than the Buddha; even so to the sick a physician or a nurse may seem to be a diviner angel than any saint or sage or perhaps God Himself – but that is an inferior viewpoint, that of particular or local interest. It is sometimes said ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

The Human Cycle  >  The Spiritual Aim and Life

... the conscious Infinite in man upon earth. The possible godhead of man because he is inwardly Page 227 of one being with God will be its one solitary creed and dogma. But it will not seek to enforce even this one uplifting dogma by any external compulsion upon the lower members of man's natural being; for that is nigraha , a repressive contraction of the nature which may lead to an apparent... accepting the truth of man's soul as a thing entirely divine in its essence, it will accept also the possibility of his whole being becoming divine in spite of Nature's first patent contradictions of this possibility, her darkened denials of this ultimate certitude, and even with these as a necessary earthly starting-point. And as it will regard man the individual, it will regard too man the collectivity... that it may come to do this greatest thing largely and sincerely, it must first endeavour to see and depict man and Nature and life for their own sake, in their own characteristic truth and beauty; for behind these first characters lies always the beauty of the Divine in life and man and Nature and it is through their just transformation that what was at first veiled by them has to be revealed. The dogma ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  Life and Yoga

... aim, reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consummation of both. For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher... transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth... in her less exalted but more general operations. Yogic methods have something of the same relation to the customary psychological workings of man as has the scientific handling of the force of electricity or of steam to their normal operations in Nature. And they, too, like the operations of Science, are formed upon a knowledge developed and confirmed by regular experiment, practical analysis and ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Essays on the Gita  >  The Lord of the Sacrifice

... many, beyond Nature though manifesting himself through Nature, beyond limitation by qualities though formulating the power of his being through infinite quality. This is the Purushottama to whom the sacrifice has to be offered, not for any transient personal fruit of works, but for the soul's possession of God and in order to live in harmony and union with the Divine. In other words, man's way to liberation... entire and synthetic relation of its world-knowledge with its God-knowledge and self-knowledge. The gospel of the Gita reposes upon this fundamental Vedantic truth that all being is the one Brahman and all existence the wheel of Brahman, a divine movement opening out from God and returning to God. All is the expressive activity of Nature and Nature a power of the Divine which works out the consciousness... to be at one with him, unify our consciousness with his, to make our fragmentary nature a reflection of his perfect nature, to be inspired in our thought and sense wholly by the divine knowledge, to be moved in will and action utterly and faultlessly by the divine will, to lose desire in his love and delight, is man's perfection; it is that which the Gita describes as Page 132 the highest ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Isha Upanishad  >  The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English

... that could be supplied by the editors 1. With God all this must be invested, even all that is world in this moving universe; abandon therefore desire and enjoy and covet no man's possession. THE GURU The Upanishad sets forth by pronouncing as the indispensable basis of its revelations the universal nature of God. This universal nature of Brahman the Eternal is the beginning and end of the... be helped, strengthened and maintained by the godlike nature of your works. This is what the Upanishad goes on to say Page 112 "Thus to you there is no other way than this, action clingeth not to a man." This means that desireless actions, actions performed after renunciation and devoted to God,—these & these only—do not cling to a man, do not bind him in their invisible chains but fall from... are all one God, & there is no other. This is He who has ordered from eternal years perfectly all things. याथातथ्यतः, each duly as it should be & must be because of its own nature, for the nature of a thing is its origin, its law, its destiny, its end; and harmony with its nature is its perfection. All this mighty universe where various things acting according to their various natures harmonise & melt ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

The Indian Spirit and the World's Future  >  Miracle

... the poet replied; "Oh no, I see an immeasurable company of the heavenly host crying, 'Holy, Holy, Holy' to the Lord God Almighty." Here there is no line between Nature and Super-nature. St. Francis, calling the sun his brother and the moon his sister and all things one family of God, catches a spark of the Gita's Vasudeva sarvam, "All is the Divine." Many sentences of the German mystic Eckhart and... what is most native to us - the sense of continuity between man and God, between the world and the All-Wonderful. This sense is born of India's intense pantheism. Not that India is pantheistic and nothing else. Indeed it is impossible to stop with the pantheistic vision. For, in that vision everything is equally the substance of God: all the distinctions we draw between true and false, high and... join in a quiet namaskar. In short, no miracle has occurred but just what one would expect since everything is Brahman. "That old man with a stick; that green bird hopping about - these too are Brahman," says the Upanishad. What is there to be surprised at if the old man suddenly threw away his stick and strode like a youngster or the green bird brought a message from Vishnu? The presence of ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Preparing for the Miraculous  >  4: What Arjuna saw: the Dark Side of the Force

... opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices. “We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in... has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment... y the race was not prepared and the poise of Nature in its evolution would not admit of its being immediately prepared for any such transcendence. … A day may come, must surely come, we will say, when humanity will be ready spiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace; meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and function of man as a fighter have to be accepted and accounted ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Preparing for the Miraculous

Integral Yoga of Transformation  >  Part Six

... methods of total transformation of human nature into divine nature. Organic Unity of the Integral Yoga The foundation of the integral yoga implies integrality of will, knowledge and love, which are the three divine powers in human nature and all these three powers which are at work in the life of man need to be integrated, and the union of man with the divine unites all these three divine... serve the higher and highest aims of the Yoga of Self-Perfection. The supramental perfection implies a complete enjoyment and possession of the whole divine and spiritual nature; and it is complete lifting of the whole nature of man into its power of a divine and spiritual existence. Integrality becomes, in this context, an essential condition of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental Yoga. ... reflect its thrust towards the yoga of self-perfection. In Sri Aurobindo's synthesis of yoga, the spirit in man is regarded not solely as an individual being traveling to a transcendent unity and the divine but universal being capable of oneness with the divine in all souls and in all-Nature with all its practical consequences. As Sri Aurobindo points out: "The human soul's individual liberation ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Integral Yoga of Transformation

A Greater Psychology  >  Introduction by Arabinda Basu

... postures, breath control, meditation, repeating a name of God or of a word or group of words, a mantra, etc. are understood as yoga. But these are particular disciplines and not the essence of yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, yoga has the same relation with the inner nature and being of man as the natural sciences have with the forces of external nature like, say, steam or electricity. Yoga studies by repeated... point of view of the world and man, which are respectively the venue and the medium of evolution of consciousness, the supermind is unfolding itself and its manifestation will bring about the emergence of a new race of beings here on this earth who will be equipped with true knowledge of the Reality and of the world and the will to effectuate the fulfilment of God here. Man is or can be a conscious and... 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 Reality and is called ...

Dr. A. S. Dalal   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Greater Psychology

Teilhard de Chardin and our Time  >  Christian pantheism ,Panpsychism,omega point,the cosmic christ

... Universe, p. 53. Page 41 identification, God becoming all things, but by the action - at once differentiating and unifying - of love, God being all in all, which latter concept is strictly in accord with Christian orthodoxy." 7   This footnote, whose text reappears almost verbatim in The Phenomenon of Man, 8 is vulnerable on more than one count. The mystical love-union... love is when the mind of man is ravished into the abyss of divine Light, so that the soul, having forgotten all outward things, is altogether unaware of itself, and passes out completely into its God." 9 Ruysbroeck reports: "We feel ourselves to be swallowed up in the fathomless abyss of our eternal blessedness, wherein we can never find any distinction between ourselves and God." 10 He has also written:... time, an organically cohesive and evolving whole which is most completely self-manifested in man and so is best to be understood in that context and perspective." Surely, such a whole, evolubonarily manifesting itself and fully disclosing its own significance in man, cannot but be, in its fundamental nature, a phenomenon of "one and the same consciousness" at work in differing intensities and on dissimilar ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Landmarks of Hinduism  >  Significant Features of Hinduism

... real self of man to be indivisible one with the universal Self or the Supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with divine in essence but different from him in Nature. The third might hold God, Nature and the individual Soul in man to be three eternally different powers of being. But for all of them the truth of Self is held with equal force; for even to the Indian dualists, God is the supreme... between these three. Universal also is the admission that the discovery of the inner spiritual self in man, the divine soul in him, and some kind of living and uniting contact or absolute unity of the soul in man with God or supreme Self or eternal Brahman is the condition of spiritual perfection. It is open to the adherents to conceive and have experiences of the divine as an impersonal Absolute and Infinite... supreme Self and Reality in whom and by whom nature and man live, move and have their being. The Spirit, universal Nature, (whether called Maya, Prakriti or Shakti) and the soul in living beings, Page 39 Jiva, are the three truths which are universally admitted by all the religious sects and conflicting religious philosophies of Hinduism; they differ only in respect of relations between ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Landmarks of Hinduism

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8  >  Hymns and Prayers

... and enslave other countries. Again, if you consider God as your self and love Him as your self, then too it would be the same thing. For love means supreme vision: if I am a yogi, full of love for the Divine, if I am a man of action acting desirelessly, then I shall be able to pos­sess a power, a knowledge or joy beyond the reach of the common man. And finally, if I consider the indefinable Su­preme... devotion; even 'then it is not the highest limb; for unqualified love is the highest perfection of devotion. That love can realise God's true self through hymns and prayers and then, transcending their necessity, merges itself in God's self-enjoyment. And yet there is hardly a man of devotion who can do without hymns and prayers. When there is no need of the process and practice (sadhana) even then the heart... all laws, remember me alone." All laws are harmonised in God. If you follow Him, He takes charge of you, makes you His instrument and works for the sovereign welfare and happiness of your family, your clan, your nation and the whole of humanity. Page 171 Even if the objective be the same, different seekers having different natures, the way also differs in each case. One important way for ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8

Bande Mataram  >  The Morality of Boycott

... of holy sweetness towards his assailant, but to expect so much from human nature is impracticable. Certain religions demand it, but they have never been practised to the letter by their followers. Hinduism recognizes human nature and makes no such impossible demand. It sets one ideal for the saint, another for the man of action, a third for the trader, a fourth for the serf. To prescribe the... also stimulating. The web of life has been made a mingled strain of good and evil and God works Page 1119 His ends through the evil as well as through the good. Let us discharge our minds of hate, but let us not deprecate a great and necessary movement because in the inevitable course of human nature, it has engendered feelings of hostility and hatred. If hatred came, it was necessary that... boycott is not an act of hate. It is an act of self-defence, of aggression for the sake of self-preservation. To call it an act of hate is to say that a man who is being slowly murdered, is not justified in striking out at his murderer. To tell that man that he must desist from using the first effective weapon that comes to his hand because the blow would be an act of hate, is precisely on a par with ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Bande Mataram

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  Love and the Triple Path

... divine powers in human nature and the life of man, and they point to the three paths by which the human soul rises to the divine. The integrality of them, the union of man with God in all the three, must therefore, as we have seen, be the foundation of an integral Yoga. Action is the first power of life. Nature begins with force and its works which, once conscious in man, become will and its ac... of his being." This is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from knowledge. Love is the crown of all being and its way of fulfilment, that by which it rises to all intensity and all fullness and the ecstasy of utter self-finding. For if the Being is in its very nature consciousness and by consciousness we become one with it, therefore by perfect... achievements; therefore it is that by turning his action God-wards the life of man best and most surely begins to become divine. It is the door of first access, the starting-point of the initiation. When the will in him is made one with the divine will and the whole action of the being proceeds from the Divine and is directed towards the Divine, the union in works is perfectly accomplished. But works ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Savitri  >  'The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain'

... grisly company of maladies Come, licensed lodgers, into man's bodily house, Purveyors of death and torturers of life. 230   And the result?         Life is a marvel missed, an art gone wry;.. . 231   God's gift of this bright and pleasant world to man is itself darkened by a shadow overhanging it. All Nature is ambivalent; there is a good, bright side, and withal, a... to its goal". Man's mental machine is limited in its scope, and cannot perceive the integral truth and the self that lurks behind the law of the universe. The limited vision of man sees only a lifeless law in the workings of the universe and thus misses the fact that the spirit of man works along with the wisdom and spirit of the Universe. For Savitri's future, the external spirit, God, has pronounced... rapine, ruin and massacre Are still the fierce pastimes of man's warring tribes; An idiot hour destroys what centuries made, His wanton rage or frenzied hate lays low Page 162 The beauty and greatness by his genius wrought And the mighty output of a nation's toil. 235   Thus man unmakes God's beautiful and kindly creation and "wallows in his self-made ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo  >  Misunderstanding of Mysticism

... and selfishness, the germ of man's failure to evolve the god that is involved in him. Here I may, in passing, draw attention to the truth that genuine world-work does not connote only social service and philanthropy. It includes inspired art, acute philosophy, constructive science, wise politics, fair industry. The swabhāva or innate nature of a man should determine his vocation;... blossom into a real God-lover, casting aside greed and lust and ambition as well as social attachments, facing the lure and the danger of the undiscovered Infinite, helping humanity not with an ego assuming altruistic colour but as a selfless medium of the Supreme Will that wants to evolve man into Superman. When he does blossom into a real God-lover, it is the sleeping God in himself that ... to a man who wants to do good to the world. If Prof. K were an atheist he might rank them above attempts at God-realisation, though of course he would be hard put to it to produce from atheism a satisfying ground or sanction for the moral passion as also for the aesthetic hunger and the intellect's cry for truth. Since he does believe in the Divine he must automatically imply that God being ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo - The Poet  >  Dionysian and Apollonian

... Worker and fighter and builder and thinker, light of the reason, Man shall leave all temples to crowd in thy courts, O Athene. Go then and do thy will, prepare man's tribes for their fullness." A little before this speech, Zeus addresses Apollo, and the Sun-god makes an outburst which etches most tellingly the true nature of the Apollonian. No doubt, it has certain lines of communication... of the crude stuff of our being which needs katharsis, purgation, and which on its own would blur our intellectual nature and prevent this nature's opening to the sun of truth-knowledge, the Apollonian 1 Ibid., p. 165. Page 326 lustre revealing the god-self in us that has to be known. Possibly the maxim of moderation taught in part that even the fiery inspiration... what you are—a man, and subject to the conditions and limitations of mortality." A less humbling interpretation might be: "analyse your nature by observation and introspection and ratiocination and realise your weaknesses on the one hand and your excellences on the other." The second half of this interpretation would join up with Pindar's "Become what you really are", Protagoras's "Man is the measure ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

The Sun and The Rainbow  >  Sex and Spirituality

... from its habitual mould and wholly re-orientated, it has not been put to any service of physical nature which might help out the secret behind sex. In consequence, the body has come to be regarded as baulked forever of a divine destiny. This implies that God cannot dwell in man from top to toe and that man must leave a part of himself as incapable of a supreme fulfilment. Pricked by a constant awareness... concrete love-union and creativity to counter the vacuous abstractness which the common man feels in the spiritual. Those emblems undermine his penchant to identify the mystical with the misty and prepare him to quest for God as the most positive, gripping and substantial of realities. The passionate force of our nature leaping towards an object of attraction is thus aided to divert itself from customary... attempts are made to render sex a legitimate part of the holy life, at least a harmless thing which scarcely hinders the soul's growth towards God. Originally these attempts were a reaction to the hypocrisy of the medieval monks. Seeing how contorted became human nature under a celibate regime, the Protestants deemed sex uncontrollable except by the few gifted geniuses of chastity. They made their peace with ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Sun and The Rainbow

Hymns to the Mystic Fire  >  RV I.1.1

... the divine with the undivine and the march of man to his goal, पुरएता, प्रणेता. The Seer-Will is the Ritwik, he sacrifices in the order, the right seasons, the right periods, the twelve months, the hundred years of the sacrificial session: he knows the time, place, order by which the Swadha, the self-arranging self-movement of the divine Nature in man that is developing itself, progresses till it turns... into the Swaha, the luminous self-force of the fulfilled divine Nature of the gods. This order of the sacrificial seasons is called ऋतु and represents the progressive movement of development of the hidden truth of things in man. The Seer-Will is also the Hota, the power that brings the divine powers into the physical consciousness of man by his flaming force in the revealedWord, manifests & forms them... Annotated Translations Mandala One Hymns to the Mystic Fire [10] RV I.1.1 1) I adore Agni the god, the Purohit of the sacrifice, the Ritwik, the Hota, most delight-placing. I seek with adoration the God-Will, divine priest of the sacrifice placed in front, sacrificer in the seasons, offerer of the oblation, who most ordains the ecstasy. Agni (अग् ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Hymns to the Mystic Fire

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Sanctity of the Individual

... Existentialists. The individual personality exists, they say, and its nature is freedom. In other words, it chooses, as it likes, its course of life, at every step, and Creates its destiny. This freedom, however, may. lead man and will inevitably lead him, according to one section of the group, to the perception and realisation of God, an infinite in which the individual finite lives and moves and has... so much in coming out as in going up and beyond. To be outside oneself is not always to transcend oneself: to be above oneself is the real transcendence. Man is a true and free person only when he is lord of Prakriti, dominating and commanding Nature, when he is identified with Ishwara, the supreme Person, the Master, and becomes an incarnate will and consciousness of His. The soul in ignorance and in... example, one Existentialist says: polarity being an essential truth of the reality, the law of day and night is an eternal and immutable law and therefore, God cannot subsist as pure love; there must be also anger in him. In fact, God too is a becoming God as the human being. The limitation of such a view, characteristically Germanic and intellectual, is evident. Page 350 ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  Renunciation

... are that very nature of the Divine which he would take upon himself as a robe of spiritual light and beauty. The revolvings of the great wheel bring to him no sense of terror or giddiness; he rises above it in his soul and knows from above their divine law and their divine purpose. The difficulty of harmonising the divine life with human living, of being in God and yet living in man is the very difficulty... of the world the object for which the world was created. We seek to realise our unity with God, but for us that realisation involves a complete and absolute recognition Page 328 of our unity with man and we cannot cut the two asunder. To use Christian language, the Son of God is also the Son of Man and both elements are necessary to the complete Christhood; or to use an Indian form of thought... well take delight in the game along with our divine Playmate. But, most of all, the view we have taken of the world forbids the renunciation of world-existence so long as we can be anything to God and man in their working-out of its purposes. We regard the world not as an invention of the devil or a self-delusion of the soul, but as a manifestation of the Divine, although as yet a partial because ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  Humanism and Humanism

... superior divine nature. He has conquered the evil of the lower nature, certainly; but also he has gone beyond the good of that nature. The liberated man is seated above the play of the three Gunas that constitute the apara prakrti. Human intelligence, human feeling, human sentiment, human motive do not move him. Humanism generally has no meaning for him. He is no longer human, but supra-human;... the forests of solitude. The religious or Christian humanism of the West is in its essential nature the pagan and profane humanism itself, at least an extension of the same. The sympathy that a St. Francis feels for his leprous brother is, after all, a human feeling, a feeling that man has for man; and even his love for the bird, or an inanimate object is also a very human feeling, transferred... human feeling, but because there is a heightening and a transcendence in the consciousness and being. To man, to human valuation, the Boddhisattwa may appear to be greater than the Buddha; even so to the sick a physician or a nurse may seem to be a diviner angel than any saint or sage or perhaps God Himself—but that is an inferior viewpoint, that of particular or local interest. It is sometimes said ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Divine Humanism

... the superior divine nature. He has conquered the evil of the lower nature, certainly; but also he has gone beyond the good of that nature. The liberated man is seated above the play of the three Gunas that constitute the inferior hemisphere of manifestation, apara Page 167 prakrti, Human intelligence, human feeling, human sentiment, human motive, even at their best and purest... forests of solitude. The religious or Christian humanism of the West is in its essential nature the pagan and profane humanism itself, at least an extension of the same. The sympathy that a St. Francis feels for his leprous brother is, after all, a human feeling, a feeling that man has for man; even his love for an animal or an inanimate object is also a very human feeling, transferred to another... Page 163 It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature, on one side, as it was positive and affirmative on the other. For its fundamental character – that which gave it its Very name – was a protest against a turning away from, whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1  >  The Message of Savitri

... can lift man's soul to God, I know that he can bring the Immortal down... . Give not to darkness and to death thy sun, Achieve thy wisdom's hidden firm decree And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love. 40 40 Ibid., p. 687. Page 136 His first answer comes almost as an admonition: How shall earth-nature and man's nature rise ... Truth supreme be given to men... . The superman shall wake in mortal man And manifest the hidden demigod Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force Revealing the secret deity in the cave.... Annulling the decree of death and pain, Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance.... Ruling earth-nature by Eternity's law... 74 When Life's tops shall flame with... the mantric words of the great Messiah of divine life, the mystic wins God not to rocket up to him leaving the earth to her fate, but to invoke His light here below for all. But this does not mean that the lure is an imaginary one: the lure of escapism. It would be idle to deny that, human nature being what it is, man generally prefers to travel light. Also, the knot of egoism is fastened ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Early Cultural Writings  >  Epistles from Abroad - II

... for Him; it was res judicata . It is wonderful how easily man tramples on one formula merely to bow reverently before another. Nature replaces God, Progress dethrones Immortality. Yet, in fact, these are merely different names for one thing in its varying aspects. Nature is God manifest in Matter; Progress is possible because the soul of man is immortal. This talk wearies you. You would prefer perhaps... of civilisation, and I am still the same dark-skinned barbarian you knew. Neither the complexion of my face nor the complexion of my thoughts has improved. I still believe in God and Vedanta, in India and impossibilities. Man is still to my eyes divine and not an animal. I believe in the soul and am afflicted with the imagination that it has a past and a future, that it neither came ready made into... considering the existence of God and immortality on the ground that the very motion would be retrograde. "It would be going back," he cried, "it would be going back. We have got rid of God; we have finished with the superstition of immortality. Will you deny the progress of enlightenment? My friend, let these ghosts rest in their shadows." And nothing would induce him to give God a chance. Darwin and Huxley ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Parting of the Ways

... that is now before Nature in her upward march of evolution. What is the exact significance of this choice?   To remain human means to continue the fundamental nature of man. In what consists the humanity of man? We can ascertain it by distinguishing what forms the animality of the animal, since that will give us the differentia that nature has evolved to raise man over the animal. The... finally man — these are the four great steps of Nature's evolutionary course.   The differentia, in each case, lies in the degree and nature of consciousness, since it is consciousness that forms the substance and determines the mode of being. Now, the inorganic is characterised by un-consciousness, the vegetable by sub-consciousness, the animal by consciousness and man by self... new species, as it were, fashioned in the nature of the gods. The vision of angels and Siddhas, which man is having ceaselessly since his birth, may be but a prophecy of the future actuality.   This then, it seems to us, is the immediate problem that Nature has set before herself. She is now at the parting of the ways. She has done with man as an essentially human being, she has brought ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)  >  chapter 012

... himself the whole human being and nature, represent all the sides and tendencies of evolving man, assume even the agnostic aspect of the modern mind and show ultimately how all Nature is to be taken into Super-nature and how by the latter's descent an integral transformation is to be accomplished in terms of the Truth-Consciousness. The final Avatar who would bring God to earth and establish Him here... on the matter. "Avatara" is the descent of God on earth in human form. The aspirant can only become first an aspirant, then a Siddha or Mukta or to use the language of Gita a Brahma Bhuta; and later on, can become merged in God, "enter Me". This is the basic idea of Aryan culture as developed in India. God descends on earth as a man and a man can merge himself into Him by complete surrender... matters of God-realisation as traditionally envisaged he had nothing more to achieve. I don't know where you have picked up the utterly apocryphal story that up to 1928 he was still making efforts at realising the Divine. What Sri Aurobindo has made tremendous efforts for was not God-realisation, We must not mix up God-realisation with the descent of the Supermind into the whole of embodied nature, down ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

Beyond Man  >  Chapter Eleven: All Life is Yoga

... not all the details, all the essence of the traditional yogas. ‘Will, knowledge and love are the three divine powers in human nature and the life of man, and they point to the three paths by which the human soul rises to the Divine. Their integrality, the union of man with God in all the three, must therefore … be the foundation of an integral Yoga.’ 14 ‘In this yoga all sides of the Truth are taken... individual and the race. The Shastra erects a collective and external standard; it ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable elements of a secret spiritual force within him. But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable.’ 26 ‘The decision lies between God and our self … It is altogether from within that must come the knowledge of the work that has to... formulation of our aim, “to become ourselves,” “to exceed ourselves,” implying, as it does, that man has not yet found his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully and spontaneously live, could not be bettered. But then the question of questions is there, what is our self, and what is our real nature? What is that which is growing in us, but into which we have not yet grown?’ 51 We are ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Beyond Man

Hitler and his God  >  Social Darwinism

... Social Darwinism the human being is no longer created directly by God: it did and does belong to the animal kingdom and is the result of a long evolution. The human being is a higher animal, but still an animal. Linnaeus had been the first, in 1751, to determine the three kingdoms of nature: mineral, vegetable and animal; he classified man in the animal kingdom, in the order of primates, together with... fourth kingdom reserved specifically for man. It was not Darwin but Lamarck who, in 1809, following the way shown by Linnaeus, made man descend from the ape. Darwin, shocked by the logical implications of his scheme of nature, did not write upon this subject in his Origin but waited till the publication of The Descent of Man, in 1871, when the animal origin of man had already been extrapolated from his... so the stronger group of individuals would and should conquer the weaker group. This “law of nature” was universally applicable; not to follow it, for instance by letting the weaker compassionately survive and even procreate, would mean tampering with the order of nature, whether or not created by a God. (Eugenics – and ultimately the eradication of a people that was supposed to be harmful, like the ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3  >  Sectarianism or Loyalty

... his Vibhutis, Ava-taras, his prophets and vicegerents have been of all sorts and kinds. Precisely because God is at once one and infinitely multiple and because human nature also is likewise, if one in essence, infinitely multiple in expression, each one, while seeing and finding the one God, seeks and finds him in and through a particular formulation. That is the original meaning, the genesis and... other words, one Page 79 has to be loyal and faithful to one's nature and being. That is why it is said: Better to perish while fulfilling one's own law of life than to flourish by fulfilling another's law. By being curious about another's Dharma—it is this kind of curiosity that led to the original fall of man, according to the Bible—that is to say, if one is vitally curious, allows onself... say that God is one and therefore wherever He is found and however He is found and whoever finds Him one must implicitly accept and obey and follow. God is one indeed: but it is equally true that he is multiple. God is not a point, but a limitless infinity, so that when one does reach Him one arrives at a particular spot, as it were, enters into only one of his many mansions. Likewise, God's manifestation ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  Sectarianism or Loyalty

... diverse, his Vibhutis, Avataras, his prophets and viceregents have been of all sorts and kinds. Precisely because God is at once one and infinitely multiple and because human nature also is likewise, if one in essence, infinitely multiple in expression, each one, while seeing and finding the one God, seeks and finds him in and through a particular formulation. That is the original meaning, the genesis and... direction of the Jiva. In other words, one has to be loyal and faithful to one's nature and being. That is why it is said: Better to perish while fulfilling one's own law of life than to flourish by fulfilling another's law. By being curious about another's Dharma – it is this kind of curiosity that led to the original fall of man, according to the Bible – that is to say, if one is vitally curious, allows... say that God is one and therefore wherever He is found and however He is found and whoever finds Him one must implicitly accept and obey and follow. God is one indeed: but it is equally true that he is multiple. God is not a point, but a limitless infinity, so that when one does reach Him one arrives at a particular spot, as it were, enters into only one of his many mansions. Likewise, God's manifestation ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

Bande Mataram  >  A Great Message

... means which man would never have dreamed of, by a chain of petty circumstances which seemed mere fortuity so that for six months his soul might be alone with itself and he might take stock of his personal strength and weakness and realize that his strength was not his own but God's, his eloquence was not his own but God's, his fruitful, strong and subtle brain was not his own but God's. When we heard... that the nation is alive. We have always believed that God is at work in the hearts of the people to effect His mighty purpose. When Sj. Bipin Chandra spoke at College Square in answer to the welcome he received from the people of Calcutta, the same deep conviction breathed from his lips and expressed itself in words of an inspired fervour. "The man is nothing, the personality is nought, and it is a vain... misleading the people and themselves being withdrawn from the field as unfit instruments. To them as to all this country it was a great and necessary message that the foremost man among us has delivered as the word that God spoke to him in the silence of his prison. Page 923 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Bande Mataram

Aspects of Sri Aurobindo  >  A Foreword to philosophy

... Spirit, when he sees God and delivers his outward nature into the hands of the divinity within, what is now impossible will be revealed as his one possibility and his eternal certainty; his obscure and Page 7 difficult journey will become a rapid and luminous ascension. Then will he climb to that fulfilment of the apparent and discovery and possession of the real Man which is the meaning... ultimate nature of the bedrock reality, take into account the two poles of evolutionary history — the material existence from which man is apparently sprung and his look upward from it towards spiritual truth. He is, somehow, always subject to the dual attraction of Matter and Spirit. Living and thinking in a physical body, he cannot neglect the demands and necessities of his material nature, its comfort... whole course of man's advance and destiny, seems to imply that there is such a comprehensive equation possible and that the very instinct of Nature is somehow to arrive at it. Hence we must take the human aspiration towards the immortal, the infinite, the divine as not just the fallen soul's home-sickness for a post-mortem paradise but rather as the evolutionary urge by which Nature is striving to ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-5

... observe and keep in her delightful memory the joys of Nature—the "sky and flower and hill and star" and phenomena of Nature. Savitri was absorbed in looking at the beauty of the colourful landscape, and even when she saw Satyavan she saw him like the other ordinary objects of Nature. She might have passed on in her chariot, but the God in her touched her conscious soul and then "her vision... trees stood there like thoughts from God". Butterflies, birds etc., made quite another impression than the ordinary creatures on my consciousness, "The peacock scattering on the breeze his moons," "Painted my memory like a frescoed wall." Thus, in all Nature "I felt a covert touch, I heard a call, But could not clasp the body of my God", "Or hold between my hands the... sign of "human and secret tread" she saw "a single path" shooting into the "bosom of vast life" of Nature. Following her gaze along the road she saw Satyavan against the "forest verge" "Inset twixt green relief and golden ray." He was standing "erect and lofty like a spear of God". With noble brow, "joy of life was on his open face", his "head touched with light", "his body was ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Karmayoga

... fullness. Yoga is communion with God for knowledge, for love or for work. The Yogin puts himself into direct relation with that which is omniscient and omnipotent within man and without him. He is in tune with the infinite, he becomes a channel for the strength of God to pour itself out upon the world whether through calm benevolence or active beneficence. When a man rises by putting from him the slough... there is no Page 11 man who has not strength or faith or love developed or latent in his nature, and any one of these is a sufficient staff for the Yogin. All cannot, indeed, reach in a single life the highest in this path, but all can go forward; and in proportion as a man advances he gets peace, strength and joy. And even a little of this dharma delivers man or nation out of great fear... anxiety for results and is neither eager for victory nor afraid of defeat;—when he devotes all his works to God and lays every thought, word and deed as an offering on the divine altar;—when he gets rid of fear and hatred, repulsion and disgust and attachment, and works like the forces of Nature, unhasting, unresting, inevitably, perfectly;—when he rises above the thought that he is the body or the heart ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Record of Yoga  >  Yogic Sadhan

... Creatures follow after nature; what is the use of coercion? That is to say, it has a temporary result and the coerced desires come back ravening and more furious than before. That was what Christ meant by the parable of the devil, the unclean spirit who is driven out of a man only to return with seven spirits worse than himself. For it is the nature of things, the unalterable nature of things, that unpurified... immortally blissful. It is in a word, not Harsha, not Sukha, but Ananda. It is Amrita, it is divinity and immortality, it is becoming of one nature with God. The soul has then no kama, but it has pure lipsa, an infinite readiness to take and enjoy whatever God gives it. Grief, pain, disgrace, everything that is to rajasic men a torture, changes then to bliss. Even if such a soul were to be cast into... meddle with the body until you have finished with the mind. Let nature do its work. Detach yourself as much as possible from the body, think of it as a mere case, leave it to the care of God and His Shakti. Many sadhaks are frightened by illness in the course of the Yoga. You need not be frightened, for you have put yourself in God's hands and He will see to it. It will come to you only as a part of ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Record of Yoga

Problems of Early Christianity  >  Raised From The Dead Section II

... his former self - goes to Sheol, the land of darkness and death. Consistent with this view of human nature, if man is to have a future life there must be a new miracle, a re-creation. God must raise up the body from death, reanimate it with his life-giving Spirit, and restore man to the God-relationship which is the source of his life." Page 259 We are expected to understand... 1:9+)."   The second definition keeps the term in line with the other two terms as what belongs by nature to man's being, though in that mode it does not exclude the action of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God and Christ, in this nature. The reference to Romans 1:9+ begins: "The God I worship spiritually.. ." 83 The Jerusalem Bible 84 appends the note: "Lit. 'Offer worship in my spirit'... News" he was mystically chosen to preach, telling how the man Jesus was revealed to be the Divine incarnate: "This news is about the Son of God who, according to the human nature he took, was a descendant of David: it is about Jesus Christ our Lord who, in the order of the spirit, the spirit of holiness that was in him, was proclaimed Son of God in all his power through his resurrection from the dead" ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Problems of Early Christianity

Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God  >  15: Intelligence that is Consciousness that is Being

... Hours of the Gods in our terrestrial manifestation.” (EPY 140) “The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god.” (LD 4) “The impersonal truth of things can be rendered into the abstract formulas of the pure reason, but... will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated. The plan, the peripeties, the denouement differ continually, yet are always governed by the conventions of an eternal Art. God, Man, Nature are the three perpetual symbols. (EDH 141) The gradations, planes or levels of being constitute the backbone of all schools of wisdom since ancient times. In the Hindu scriptures the worlds... different from it as the sunlight is from the ray of a distant star. It is what some scientists have intuited behind the complexities of nature, what is present in nature and supports it everywhere. It is the real “mind of God.” In fact, it is what is called ‘God’ in the purest sense. From the domains of the Supermind descend the worlds of the lower hemisphere, those with which we are more familiar: ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

The Human Cycle  >  The Unseen Power

... complete here or not filled in in their sense and action until humanity shall have fully evolved in its nature the potentialities of the mind and spirit. It works in man, but through his individual and corporate ego so long as he dwells within the knot of his present mentality. Only when his race knows God and lives in the Divine, will the ideal sense of his strivings begin to unfold itself and the kingdom... by putting God far above in distant heavens made man too much of a worm of the earth little and vile before his Creator and admitted only by a caprice of his favour to a doubtful salvation in superhuman worlds. Modern thought seeking to make a clear riddance of these past conceptions had to substitute something else in its place, and what it saw and put there was the material law of Nature and the biological... a God who is becoming or who has to be created by man; it is the Eternal of whom this infinite ideal is a mental reflection. It is beyond the form of the universe and these psychological realisations of the human being and yet it is here too in man and subsists surrounding him in all the powers of the world he lives in. It is both the Spirit who is in the universe and the invisible king in man who ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Vedic and Philological Studies  >  A Fragment

... to believe that God can reveal the Truth to man and reveal it in a word of Truth and not in a word that is half truth and half falsehood. The denial rests on the idea that though God exists, He does not interfere in the evolution but allows man to develop the knowledge of the truth for himself and that the word expressing it must, being human speech or writing, be in its very nature fallible. This denial... be anything else to a man of undoubted intellectual power. As if it were not precisely by challenging the received ideas of men, the ideas which are mechanically accepted because they are prevalent and have the stamp of a general currency that great and original minds open the door to new truths or restore truths that have been perverted or forgotten. And if the existence of God is once admitted, it... religious question and look only at the psychological fact.What after all do we mean by revelation? It seems to me that it can be nothing but this; there is to begin with an eternal Truth of things which man has to know and of which all particular truths are [ incomplete ] Page 196 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Vedic and Philological Studies

The Aim of Life  >  A Free Man's Worship

... of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been... was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula. " 'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play;... really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be. But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Aim of Life

Essays Divine and Human  >  The Evolution of Consciousness

... ; he would by perfecting himself consummate Nature. Evolution would end in a Man-God, crown of the earthly cycles. But Mind is not all; for beyond mind is a greater consciousness; there is a supermind and spirit. As Nature laboured in the animal, the vital being, till she could manifest out of him man, the Manu, the thinker, so she is labouring in man, the mental being till she can manifest out... a Spirit. In this evolution mental man is not the goal and end, the completing value, the highest last significance; he is too small and imperfect to be the crown of all this travail of Nature. Man is not final, but a middle term only, a transitional being, an instrumental intermediate creature. This character of evolution and this mediary position of man are not at first apparent; for to the... embodied Transcendental and Universal in the individual nature. From the clod and metal to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man, so much has she completed of her journey; a huge stretch or a stupendous leap still remains before her. As from matter to life, from life to mind, so now she must pass from mind to supermind, from man to superman; this is the gulf that she has to bridge ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

In the Mother's Light  >  The Mother's Work

... instincts. Undoubtedly, nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she endeavours to bring out a being who will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance. "Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional... ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, the last rung at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In that he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly... and find themselves one with all, in peace and harmony with all—in God. It is a place where they can serve humanity best by learning to serve the Divine in humanity. The Centre of Education is growing, slowly but steadily, in the silent way things grow and flower under the benignant eye of God, when the bustling mind of man, in its arrogant incompetence, ceases to interfere. The number of children ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

The Divine Collaborators  >  The Mother's Work

... Undoubtedly, nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she endeavours to bring out a being who will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance. "Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a tr... evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, Page 71 the last rung at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In that he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet... creed, and find themselves one with all, in peace and harmony with all—in God. It is a place where they can serve humanity best by learning to serve the Divine in humanity. The University is growing, slowly but steadily, in the silent way things grow and flower under the benignant eye of God, when the bustling mind of man, in its arrogant incompetence, ceases to interfere. The number of children ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Divine Collaborators

Sri Aurobindo's Message  >  How Society Should Regard the Individual

... accepting the truth of man's soul as a thing entirely divine in its essence, it will accept also the possibility of his whole being becoming divine in spite of Nature's first patent contradictions of this possibility, her darkened denials of this ultimate certitude, and even with these as a necessary earthly starting-point. And as it will regard man the individual, it will regard too man the collectivity... same standpoint, sub-souls, as it were, means of a complex manifestation and self-fulfilment of the Spirit, the divine Reality, the conscious Infinite in man upon earth. The possible godhead of man because he is inwardly of one being with God will be its one solitary creed and dogma. Sri Aurobindo Key to Human Unity Two great words of the divine Truth have forced... Individual The true and full spiritual aim in society will regard man not as a mind, a life and a body, but as a soul incarnated for a divine fulfilment upon earth, not only in heavens beyond, which after all it need not have left if it had no divine business here in the world of physical, vital and mental nature. It will therefore regard the life, mind and body neither as ends in themselves ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Sri Aurobindo's Message

Isha Upanishad  >  A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad

... then there is a greater agony. The intellectual man has the intellect God has given him to satisfy. The active man has the impulse to work, but at every step is faced with the difficulties of religion & ethics. He has to slay as a soldier, condemn as a judge, inflict pain, inflict anguish, choose between two courses which seem both to be evil in their nature or their results. Sin enters his heart, or there... 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 consciousness in man affirms the universal Brahman & teaches knowledge & self-surrender to Him as the inscrutable Self & the ever-present Master. Similarly, the Isha has for its subject the nature of human life... acting in these processes to the thought & senses, but whether their appearance is their reality, no man can say. The end of all Science is Agnosticism. The Rishi takes these two great terms, God, one, stable & eternal, the world shifting, multitudinous, transient. For this great flux of Nature, by which we mean a great cosmic motion & activity, shows us nowhere a centre of knowledge & intelligent ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  William Blake

... atomized society let us substitute an organic society, one in which every man will be free to do what he alone is qualified and able to do." So far so good. For it is not far enough. The being or becoming that is demanded in fulfilment of the divine advent in humanity must go to the very roots of life and nature, must seize God in his highest and sovereign status. No prejudice of the past, no notion... Lucifer, the one called Satan, was the real God, the so-called Messiah the fake one: the apparent Milton spoke in praise of God and in dispraise of Satan, but the real, the esoteric Milton glorified Satan, who is the true God and minimised or caricatured the counterfeit or shadow God. Here is Blakean Bible in a nutshell: But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be... and Matter that are to be uplifted and affianced to Heaven, but all that remains hidden within the bowels of the Earth, the subterranean regions of man's consciousness, the slimy viscous undergrowths, the darkest horrors and monstrosities that man and nature hide in their subconscient and inconscient dungeons of material existence, all these have to be laid bare to the solar gaze of Heaven, burnt or ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

The Birth of Savitr  >  Resume of Savitri

... she has no knowledge; but she has the certitude that an invisible magnet of love is drawing her to the destined place. It is in the Land of Tapasya that Man and Nature can awake to their eminent reality. Not the crowded cities of mind but god-listening silences of the woods can give to the spirit its wonder of deathlessness. Presently, Page – 63 when the sun is bright in the... new mind and body in the city of God. But he is tied to the fate of this creation and there cannot be rest for him until the dusk from man's soul is lifted. He must attend to it. I: 5 The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness Aswapati first has the knowledge about the possibilities waiting for the time-born man. He has read the secret Vedic text... free the self from the contingent Nature is a basic condition for any progress, there is also an obligation of fulfilling oneself here. Page – 60 Aswapati is alert to it and hence he must remove the veil of light. III: 2 The Adoration of the Divine Mother In that self-discovery Aswapati comes to know about God's desire that works here even in this ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Birth of Savitr

Isha Upanishad  >  Appendix

... Vishnu, Surya & Agni or as the Yaksha & the Pishacha; he may dwell here as the man or dwell here as the animal; he may shine out as the saint or lust in Himself as the criminal; but all these are He. APPENDIX [2] [ Written on a separate sheet of the manuscript. See the footnote on page 378 . ] The world & God. What is the world? It is jagati, says the Rishi, she who is constantly moving.... consequences arise which we have to accept if we wish to understand the teaching of the Upanishad. First, the Personality of God & His unity. Not only is the impersonal God one Brahman without a second, but the Personal God is one without a second. There is no other person besides God in the universe. Whatever different masks He may wear, from house to house of His habitation, it is always He. The disguises... ana or entire surrender to God, the uttamam rahasyam with which it culminates. We get the reason & spirit of the command to Arjuna from which all the moral teaching of the Gita starts & to which it returns, jitva shatrun bhunkshva rajyam samriddham, the command of activity, the command of enjoyment—but activity for God only, yajnartham, without ahankara, enjoyment in God only, mayi sannyasya, without ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

The Life Divine  >  The Ego and the Dualities

... 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 which has enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this evolution which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body,—the universal... fallen from the total and unifying knowledge of itself into some error of division and partial experience. This is the fall of man typified in the poetic parable of the Hebrew Genesis. That fall is his deviation from the full and pure acceptance of God and himself, or rather of God in himself, into a dividing consciousness which brings with it all the train of the dualities, life and death, good and evil... manipulate Nature's forces, sail the seas, ride the air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental and spiritual development. And if such a conception had been possible for the Ape-mind, it would still have been difficult for him to imagine that by any progress of Nature or long effort of Will and tendency he himself could Page 60 develop into that animal. Man, because ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Appendix - 3

... are being done by qualities of Nature on all sides yet the soul bewildered by ego believes "I am the doer". also:— "It is the self-nature that dominates". —Book VII, Canto 4. "God made experiments with animal shapes" —Book VII, Canto 4. Compare: A similar idea in the Upanishad. "Many are God's forms by which he grows in man"; Compare: Gita; "As... the warm precincts of the cheerful day Nor cast one .longing lingering look behind" —T. Grey. "Only if God assumes the human mind And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride, Can he help man to grow into the God". —Book VII, Canto 3. Compare: The Indian mythological story of Vaman—the Dwarf —the Incarnation ... rises from imaginative intellect. "He sang of the Truth that cries from Night's blind deeps," —Book VI, Canto I. Compare: "Arise from the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss" — Rose of God Page 385 "To light one step in front is all his hope" Compare: "One step enough for me"—Cardinal Newman "Our sympathies become our tortures" —Book ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Essays Divine and Human  >  Sat

... cries Tennyson addressing a pretty blossom in the wall in lines which make good thought, but execrable poetry, "if I could but know what you are, I should know what God and man is." Undoubtedly; the question is whether, without knowing God, we can really know the flower,—know it , and not merely its name and form or all the details of its name and form. Rupa we can know & analyse by the aid of science... error is natural and inevitable to the human consciousness. For the Angel in man is one who has descended out of light & bliss into the darkness, twilight and half light here, the darkness Page 78 of matter, the twilight of vital consciousness, the broken half lights of the mind, and the master impulse of his nature is to yearn passionately towards the light from which [he] has fallen. Unable... help man to his present attainable fullness; but by a sort of intellectual land hunger they are perpetual invaders of each other's dominion, deny each other's positions and therefore remain unprofitably at war through the human ages. Finally, all three after illegitimately occupying each other's fields insist on snatching at a knowledge of which they are all equally incapable—the essential nature of ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Savitri  >  Planes of Consiousness Stair of Worlds

... disappearance in the unmanifest utter calm of the Spirit thus preceded the experience of the manifest God. Then came the vision of the possibility of man becoming God, of Nature becoming supernature. Last came the realisation of the Overmind, the important first step to the supramentalisation of man and Nature. These experiences, although apparently unconnected, were actually interlinked. The 'earthly... great Ring of pure and endless light. 120         Eternity shut in a span!       Summer in winter! Day in night!       Heaven on earth! and God in man ! 121   Pico Delia Mirandola tells an interesting fable: God took man as a creature indeterminate though of infinite possibility and, locating him in the middle of the world, told him that he had his future largely in his own... to bring God to our midst: these are the mystic's, the yogin's, preoccupations. Some mystics are content with losing themselves in God; others, like Sri Aurobindo, go further—they would bring the heavens down, realise the "Kingdom of Heaven on earth— -'On Earth as it is in Heaven.'" 123     It is implied, of course, that always there is a meeting of God's response and man's striving ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Hymns to the Mystic Fire  >  RV I.1.1

... harp of God, they return always one cry, the cry of joyous battle, of war between Deva and Daitya, between mortality and immortality, between man's temporary imperfection and his eternal perfectibility. In this holy war the Gods are our chief helpers. There are seven planes of cosmic consciousness on which the soul of man Page 513 plays with the love and wisdom and power of God. When first... He as the Universal God pervades, governs, surpasses all. He is the master of the play,—यजति, He controls, rules and arranges it. This is Yajna. He again as the manifold individual God, ourselves, attaches Himself to every created thing (sarvabhuteshu) and limits not Himself but His manifestation in each adhara, arranging and perpetually developing in each a particular nature or law of life, a swabhava... sensational & vital consciousness. Then in man discriminative reason takes the lead, for discriminative reason is the shadow of the vijnanam, the link between the animal and the god and it is not till a fit body is formed for the works of reason that the spiritual evolution begins and the development of the higher states of consciousness is possible. Man is that fit body, sukritam eva, well indeed ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Hymns to the Mystic Fire

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita

... freedom possible to man,—a freedom which he cannot have unless he outgrows his mental separativeness and becomes the conscious soul in Nature. The only free will in the world is the one divine Will of which Nature is the executrix; for she is the master and creator of all other wills. Human free-will can be real in a sense, but, like all things that belong to the modes of Nature, it is only relatively... the whole meaning of our Yoga, an integral conversion to divinity not only of the soul but of all the parts of our nature. Our purpose in Yoga is to exile the limited outward-looking Page 90 ego and to enthrone God in its place as the ruling Inhabitant of the nature. And this means, first, to disinherit desire and no longer accept the enjoyment of desire as the ruling human motive... movement of Nature becomes to its experience a rising and falling of waves on the surface that make no difference to its own unfathomable peace, its wide delight, its vast universal equality or its boundless God-existence. 3 Page 100 These are the conditions of our effort and they point to an ideal which can be expressed in these or in equivalent formulae. To live in God and not ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  22nd December 1938

... try to see God in others, have a psychic good-will and in oneself reject all vital and mental impulses, and on that basis proceed towards the realization. The idea must pass into experience. Even then, it is easy in the static aspect, but when it comes to the dynamic experience it becomes difficult. For example, when one finds a man behaving like a brute it is very difficult to see God in him unless... then a man with inner realization, – I don't mean experience – won't have grave difficulties such as sex in his nature. Sri Aurobindo : Why not? There can be anger, like Durvasa's or sex. You have not heard of the fall of Rishis through anger or through sex? The Yogis pass beyond the stage of good and evil. Ordinary questions of morality don't arise in them. They look upon outer nature as a child... Disciple : What difference is there between modification of nature and its transformation? Sri Aurobindo : Transformation is the casting of the whole nature in the mould of realization. What you realize you project out in your nature. Christian Saints speak of the presence in the heart. That presence can change the nature. I speak of three transformations : 1) Psychic, 2) Spiritual ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Mother's Chronicles - Book Three  >  The Earthly Paradise

... harmony with the ascending march of Nature, without any perversion or deformation. That was the first stage of Mind's manifestation in material forms." She unlocked the doors of the Halls and began reading aloud from the inscriptions. "Because this much I know," Mother was now sure of her ground, "I know for having lived it, that when the passage from animal to man —a very obscure , passage, but... of sensation that one had sprouted from below. One had as though fallen there, simply, to amuse oneself." The faraway look in her eyes faded slowly. "It must have been before the first man produced by Nature. Not after. Before." Traditions say that the first human pair materialized through an occult process. "That is to say, beings belonging to higher worlds built or formed a body of physical... being, it was two who descended. Those beings lived an animal life in Nature, but with a mental consciousness, without, however, any disaccord with the general harmony. All the memories are perfectly clear about a spontaneous animal life, absolutely natural, lived in Nature. A marvellously beautiful Nature, strangely similar to the nature in Ceylon and in tropical countries —water, trees, fruits, flowers ...

Sujata Nahar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Mother's Chronicles - Book Three

Kena and Other Upanishads  >  The Spirit of Hinduism

... safely assert that so far man has not been able to understand Finality; he is constitutionally incapable of imagining a Final Cause which his reason when faithfully interrogated will not refuse to accept as Final, will not be forced by its own nature to subject to the query How & Why. There are only two ways of meeting the difficulty; one is to assert that the reason of man as at present constituted... conclusion. All that may exist beyond the bounds of Time, that too is OM . Man can conceive nothing that is neither in the past, present nor future, but if there be such inconceivable thing, it does not by becoming beyond Time place itself beyond OM. That too is OM. In a similar spirit another verse of the Upanishad declares of God "He moves & He moveth not, He is near & He is far, He is within the Universe... Universe is all that exists, all that Man can know or conceive & there can be nothing outside it because it has no limits; but if there does exist such inconceivable thing as is beyond illimitable Space it does not by becoming beyond Space, put itself beyond OM. He is within the Universe and He is outside the Universe . All Hindu Scripture is precise upon this point, our God is not a gigantic polypus, not ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Kena and Other Upanishads

The Human Cycle  >  Reason and Religion

... outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God and the finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, the Divine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being. Its work is a sincere living out of the true and intimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated... and service, a casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine and a descent of the Divine into man. All this has nothing to do with the realm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence: it... but did not provide all the conditions of our perfection. That was the idea of a spiritualised typal society. It proceeded upon the supposition that each man has his own peculiar nature which is born from and reflects one element of the divine nature. The character of each individual, his ethical type, his training, his social occupation, his spiritual possibility must be formed or developed within the ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1  >  Savitri — The Word of Sri Aurobindo

... anybody. If man finds no use for the gift she has brought down for him, naturally she will take it back and return it to Him to whom it belongs, for all things belong to the Supreme Lord, even She * CWM, Vol. 1, p. 372; SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 490: Since the man refused the meal I had prepared with so much love and care, I invoked the God to take it. My God, Thou hast accepted... power of the Mother that Slowly the Light grows greater in the East, Slowly the world progresses on God's road. His seal is on my task, it cannot fail; I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates When God comes out to meet the soul of the world. 26 But man in the strength of his ignorance and arrogance does not recognise this Goddess. Human power, we have said,... this is the Asura in man. Here is his philosophy of life: I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven. The last bom of the earth I stand the first... I am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me... No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve. 27 So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic hunger ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Overman  >  2: Four Pillars

... in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at his highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god, is something... then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the spirit manifesting in Nature. ” 52 “This is the meaning of our existence here, its futuristic value and inherent trend of power, to rise above ourselves, to grow into gods, to reveal God in a world of material forms... all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of its own worlds. This is the truth of that which we call God. Obviously this is not the too personal and limited Deity, the magnified and supernatural Man of the ordinary occidental conception; for that conception erects ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Overman

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 10  >  Savitri

... power of the Mother that "Slowly the Light grows greater in the East, Slowly the world progresses on God's road. His seal is on my task, it cannot fail; I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates When God comes out to meet the soul of the world." 2 But man in the strength of his ignorance and arrogance does not recognise this Goddess. Human power, we have said, is... this is the Asura in man. Here is his philosophy of life: "I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven. The last born of the earth, I stand the first... I am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me... No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve." 1 So this vital being in man in bis Rakshasic hunger... my fate will ever be the same, It is my Nature's work that cannot change.... I was made for evil, evil is my lot; Evil I must be and by evil live; Naught other can I do, but be myself; What Nature made, that I must remain." 1 The Divine glory manifests itself for a moment to the earthly consciousness but man refuses to be pulled out of its pig-sty. The Grace withdraws ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 10

On Savitri  >  Savitri

... Mother that Slowly the Light grows greater in the East, Slowly the world progresses on God's road. His seal is on my task, it cannot fail; I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates When God comes out to meet the soul of the world. 24 But man in the strength of his ignorance and arrogance does not recognise this Goddess. Human power, we have said... the Asura in man. Here is his philosophy of life: I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven. The last-born of the earth I stand the first... I am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me.... No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve. 25 So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic... is my Nature's work that cannot change... I was made for evil, evil is my lot; Evil I must be and by evil live; Nought other can I do but be myself; What Nature made, that I must remain. 22 22. Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 29. pp. 505-507. Page 13 The Divine glory manifests itself for a moment to the earthly consciousness but man refuses ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   On Savitri

Questions and Answers (1957-1958)  >  3 April 1957

... till then all interpretations of present happening and forecast of man's future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity. " Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 393-94 Mother, here Sri Aurobindo writes: "A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual... religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer; Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and... 1957 1957 April Questions and Answers (1957-1958) 3 April 1957 " All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, mental and vital and physical, is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfection. " The Spirit is the truth of our being; mind and life and body in their im ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Questions and Answers (1957-1958)

In the Mother's Light  >  The Conquest of Desire-Part-1

... of the wise, and the origin of obscuration and suffering. Therefore, slay desire, root it out of your nature once for all and desirelessly act in God and for God in the world. In the Upanishad, though the intellectual method of the Gita and the Buddhist scriptures had not yet so much developed,¹ the renunciation of desire is woven into the very grain of their teaching, as the following references amply... beings, himself in all beings, he "neither mourns nor desires", but works out God's Will in the world, poised in the absolute equality of his liberated soul and nature. It is evident from the foregoing consideration that desire is not the real and ultimate motive-force behind the movements of individual and universal nature, but is only an overt incentive to action, a concomitant of ignorance, entailing... and the conversion of their energies into the fire of the Will. An unreserved surrender makes for an unveiled action of the divine Omnipotence in man and lifts his life from the whirlpool of desires into the creative glory of a God-possessed and God-guided existence. Here, again, we must remember that surrender, like detachment and equality, should be dynamic and not only passive. If we want a ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Isha Upanishad  >  The Lord

... conception of a Personal God. Personality is generally conceived as identical with individuality and the vulgar idea of a Personal God is a magnified individual like man in His nature but yet different, greater, more vast and all-overpowering. Vedanta admits the human manifestation of Brahman in man and to man, but does not admit that this is the real nature of the Ishwara. God is Sachchidananda. He... proceeds to formulate the nature and manner, the general law of that becoming of God which we call the world. For on this conception depends the Vedic idea of the two poles of death and immortality, the reason for the existence of Avidya, the Ignorance, and the justification of works in the world. TRANSITIONAL THOUGHT THE DIVINE PERSONALITY The Vedantic idea of God, "He", Deva or Ishwara, must... without is the nature of Brahman as we see it manifested in the universe. There is therefore no farther objection to works. On Page 46 the contrary, works are justified by the participation or self-identification of the soul with the Lord in His double aspect of passivity and activity. Tranquillity for the Soul, activity for the energy, is the balance of the divine rhythm in man. THE LAW ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Soul and Its Liberation

... self-knowledge, but unifies and harmonises all things in God and in the divine nature. The intense religious ecstasy which knows only God and ourselves and shuts out all else, is only to it an intimate experience which prepares it for sharing in the embrace of the divine Love and Delight around all creatures. A heavenly bliss which unites God and ourselves and the blest, but enables us to look with... between self and others and the world to the exclusion of God and the Beyond is still more impossible, and therefore it cannot be limited by the earth or even by the highest and most altruistic relations of man with man. Its activity or its culmination is not to efface and utterly deny itself for the sake of others, but to fulfil itself in God-possession, freedom and divine bliss that in and by its ... aim becomes quite other; it is to live in the Divine, the Infinite, in God and not in any mere egoism and temporality, but at the same time not apart from Nature, from our fellow-beings, from earth and the mundane existence, any more than the Divine lives aloof from us and the world. He exists also in relation to the world and Nature and all these beings, but with an absolute and inalienable power, freedom ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

The Human Cycle  >  The Suprarational Ultimate of Life

... in force is God as Power taking possession, the absolute vital ideals must be of that nature. Nowhere are they wanting. If we take the domestic and social life of man, we find hints of them there in several forms; but we need only note, however imperfect and dim the present shapes, the strivings of love at its own self-finding, its reachings towards its absolute—the absolute love of man and woman, the... The Suprarational Ultimate of Life In all the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly enough, for God. To get at the Divine and Eternal in himself and the world and to harmonise them, to put his being and his life in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts of his nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest... preserved the heroic in man, they have created the kṣatriyās tyaktajīvitāḥ of the Sanskrit epic phrase, the men of power and courage who have abandoned their bodily life for a cause; for without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead; courage, energy and strength are among the very first principles of the divine nature in action. All this great vital, political, economic life of man with its two powers ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

In the Mother's Light  >  The Soul or the Psychic-1

... tic science lies in being scientific enough to recognise that besides the surface of man and things and Nature it has so successfully explored, there are far-flung uplands and hinterlands and netherlands which it has yet to explore; depths upon depths of human consciousness and nature, and even of material nature, beckon to its adventurous spirit. It must march forward to the Page 74 ... infinite force. It is at once an evidence and affirmation of the principle of infinity which man contains deep within him. But what is that in man which exhales this sense of infinity and immortality ? The materialist does not know it. Too exclusively preoccupied with the fugitive elements of his life and nature and the outer aspects and processes of things, he does not care to inquire if there is anything... by a direct flow of the Divine Force into us through a full-fledged psychic being. No moral precept, no emotional or humanitarian appeal, but the psychic alchemy alone can change the animal in man into a god. It is impossible to regard others as others after a perfect realisation of the psychic being—others become our own self. Conscious unity with all is of the very stuff of the psychic life. A dynamic ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Words of Long Ago  >  To the Women of Japan

... time. Now, as among all the animal forms there was one from which man was to come forth, so also, among the social and religious species, must one be born from which some day will come forth the superman. For it is this which Nature seeks in all her successive attempts, from the first germination of life until man, until the God who shall be born of him. In the multitude of men she seeks the possibility... implying, as it does, that man has not yet found all his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully and spontaneously live, could not be bettered; nevertheless, Nietzsche made the mistake we said we ought to avoid: his superman is but a man aggrandised, magnified, in whom Force has become super-dominant, crushing under its weight all the other attributes of man. Such cannot be our ideal... the primitive man? It is before him that will open the royal avenue leading to the palace of spirit. But how many races, how many generations will pass on the earth without discovering it, how many wrong paths will Nature follow in the footsteps of man. For, believing himself the masterpiece of the universe, he knows not that he has a further stage to pass through. Could the idea of man be conceived ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of Long Ago

Essays Divine and Human  >  Bhakti

... The Jew invented the God-fearing man; India the God-knower and God-lover. 415) The servant of God was born in Judaea, but he came to maturity among the Arabs. India's joy is in the servant-lover. 416) Perfect love casts out fear; but still keep thou some tender shadow and memory of the exile and it will make the perfection more perfect. 417) Thy soul has not tasted God's entire delight, if it... one living thing is the highest of all human virtues; but God practises neither. Is man therefore nobler and better than the All-loving? 530) Love and serve men, but beware lest thou desire their approbation. Obey rather God within thee. 531) Not to have heard the voice of God and His angels is the world's idea of sanity. 532) See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks. Believe that all... accepted God in thy spirit? 450) To love God, excluding the world, is to give Him an intense but imperfect adoration. 451) Is love only a daughter or handmaid of jealousy? If Krishna loves Chandrabali, why should I not love her also? 452) Because thou lovest God only, thou art apt to claim that He should love thee rather than others; but this is a false claim contrary to right & the nature of things ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine  >  The Sevenfold Chord of Being

... confirm man into life, if life were an illusion ? The position of God in Shankara's philosophy seems to be a weak point. Sri Aurobindo's outlook gives you the correct basis of God's place in the universe because God is not anything else but the organisation of that infinite Self-existence, Conscious-force and Delight taking up the role of the Creator or the Truth-Consciousness. That is God. ... world. The world that man lives in is an illusion, he says, and the purpose of its illusions is to make man rise to the Reality, that's all. The weak points in his thesis are two or three. One is he admitted God also as responsible for creation. Now the purpose of the human individual is to merge into the Absolute. There is a sort of a contradiction here, because if God is there in between, how... Intuitive Consciousness or the level of Intuition is not the same as the action of intuition in the man's nature. It is true, intuition works in the mind, it works in the vital being, it can work in the body. But that is not the Intuitive Consciousness. It is intuition coming down in the nature of man. In fact, many people come to know many things by intuition in ordinary life. They just simply have ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

Teilhard de Chardin and our Time  >  The Fundamentals of Teilhard's Faith The True Nature of his Christianity

... Christ" necessitating a radically novel envisagement of (1) God's creative act and His relationship with "participated being", (2) the nature of "original sin" in its bearing on man in particular as well as on the cosmos in general and (3) the right moment for Christ's "Parousia" or final advent to unify the Creation with himself and God - it is surprising how Rideau finds Teilhard still a true son... unorthodox.   In orthodox Christianity, sin occurs with the first Man, whether we take Adam in an individual or in a collective sense. As a result of Adam's violation of God's command, evil entered the world and ruined the paradisal state: all life, and not only humanity, underwent a catastrophe and man lost the intimacy with God he had been accorded by supernatural Grace. Adam's loss extends, because... human progression.)   ...we shall have to part with several notions long cherished by humanity. One of these is the pristine perfection of man and his degradation from his perfect state by falling into the domination of sin; God made man perfect but man by his own fault brought sin and death into the world. This Semitic tradition, passed from Judaism into Christianity and less prominently into ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Essays on the Gita  >  The Significance of Sacrifice

... the powers of the divine Soul in Nature and in the eternal interaction of these powers and the soul of man, mutually giving and receiving, mutually helping, increasing, raising each other's workings and satisfaction, a commerce in which man rises towards a growing fitness for the supreme good. He recognises that his life is a part of this divine action in Nature and not a thing separate and... Being who is the source of our existence and of whom all that is mutable or immutable is the manifestation. He is God, the Divine, the Purushottama. To Him we offer everything as a sacrifice; into His hands we give up our actions; in His existence we live and move; unified with Him in our nature and with all existence in Him, we become one soul and one power of being with Him and with all beings; with His... of the universal energy, Karma, in man and in all existences; from that work proceeds the principle of sacrifice. Even the material interchange between gods and men proceeds upon this principle, as typified in the dependence of rain and its product food on this working and on them the physical birth of creatures. For all the working of Prakriti is in its true nature a sacrifice, yajña , with the Divine ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  Karmayoga and its Indispensability-3

... no death, and no bondage to anything in the world. Deathless and free, he is a playmate of God in His universal līlā . Life after life, unwearied and unworn, he plays his part, not for any personal profit or for the realisation of any merely mental ideal, but only "to bring God's forces to waiting Nature", to help "her tormented labour" with his "wide-winged peace", and to "heal with joy her ancient... the infinitudes for ever. A Splendour is here, refused to the earthward sight, That floods some deep flame-covered all seeing eye; Revealed it wakens when God's stillness Heavens the ocean of move less Nature. A Power descends no Fate can perturb or vanquish, Calmer than mountains, wider than marching waters, A single might of luminous quiet Tirelessly bearing... here to a mortal body, He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not, For him the aeons are a playground, Life and its deeds are his splendid shadow. Only to bring God's forces to waiting Nature, To help with wide-winged Peace her tormented labour And heal with joy her ancient sorrow, Casting down light on the inconscient darkness, He acts and lives. Vain ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Heraclitus - VI

... itself in the large reason of things, it is from the absolute point of view good and just—to God, not to man. Does it follow that the relative view-point has no validity at all? Not for a moment. On the contrary, it must be the expression, proper to each mentality according to the necessity of its nature and standpoint, of the divine Law. Heraclitus says that plainly; "Fed are all human laws by one... that there is an absolute, a divine way of looking at things. "To God all things are good and just, but men hold some things to be good, others unjust." There is then an absolute good, an absolute beauty, an absolute justice of which all things are the relative expression. There is a divine order in the world; each thing fulfils its nature according to its place in the order and in its place and symmetry... example of "the sea, water purest and impurest", their fine element to the fish, abominable and undrinkable to man. And does not this apply to all things?—they are the same always in reality and assume their qualities and properties because of our standing-point in the universe of becoming, the nature of our seeing and the texture of our minds. All things circle back to the eternal unity and in their beginning ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Preparing for the Miraculous  >  11: The Kalki Avatar

... constitution of Christ, the God-Man. The standpoint, for instance, of the “heretic” sect of the Sabellians, was that Christ was fully and effectively God, also when in his human body, and that consequently, being God, he could not suffer. The same point was made in the 1930s to Sri Aurobindo, who had to state: “The Divine when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely... yuge yuge ? In some such spirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, first in animal forms, then in the animal man, then in the dwarf man-soul, Vamana, the violent Asuric man, Rama of the axe, the divinely-natured man, a greater Rama, the awakened spiritual man, Buddha, and, preceding him in time, but final in place, the complete divine manhood, Krishna, – for the last Avatar, Kalki,... 11: The Kalki Avatar God must be born on earth and be as man That man being human may grow even as God. Sri Aurobindo 1 According to the Hindu tradition, the evolution of life and consciousness on Earth has been supported by a succession of Avatars: the Fish, the Tortoise, the Boar, the Man-Lion, the Dwarf, Rama-with-the-Ax, Rama, Krishna, the Buddha ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Preparing for the Miraculous

Letters on Yoga - I  >  Social Duties and the Divine

... of all that is of the lower nature. Humanitarianism The idea of usefulness to humanity is the old confusion due Page 441 to secondhand ideas imported from the West. Obviously, to be "useful" to humanity there is no need of Yoga; everyone who leads the human life is useful to humanity in one way or another. Yoga is directed towards God, not towards man. If a divine supramental c... higher turn of our nature and which indicates the essential character of the action the liberated soul must pursue.... It is that which inspires a remarkable passage in a letter of Swami Vivekananda. 'I have lost all wish for my salvation,' wrote the great Vedantin, 'may I be born again and again and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in,... their life. It is only the very religious who try to make God the centre of their life—that too rather imperfectly, except for a few. None of these things are secure or certain, even the last being certain only if it is followed with an absoluteness which only a few are willing to give. The life of the Ignorance is a play of forces through which man seeks his way and all depends on his growth through experience ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - I

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Vengeance is Mine

... substitute of it. The true soul is .man's spiritual or divine being – the consciousness in which man is one in substance and nature with God. It is not a mere thought formation, a mental and moral ideal. The only force that can succeed against a lower or undivine force is God's own force – and the success can be complete and absolute by the calling in or intervention of God's force in its highest status.... that will be no more than a temporary lull or adjustment. The world is not changed in spite of many efforts, because man is always taking to human means, he is not allowing God to do God's work, but putting his own individual initiative in God's place, taking perhaps God's name on the lips with a secret, unconscious feeling that unless he himself does something nothing will be done – kart ā hamiti... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 Vengeance is Mine ONE who seeks to live in God's consciousness cannot take the law into his own hands; he must leave it all to God. When he takes up the self-appointed task of remedying the situation, "resisting evil" as Christ termed it, he invites resistance from the other side which takes up its own count ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

The Human Cycle  >  Religion as the Law of Life

... they are needed by man because the lower members have to be exalted and raised before they can be fully spiritualised, before they can directly feel the spirit and obey its law. An intellectual formula is often needed by the thinking and reasoning mind, a form or ceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other parts of the infrarational being, a set moral code by man's vital nature in their turn towards... rend her to pieces in order to get a free field for their legitimate development; and this because men in the passion and darkness of their vital nature had chosen to think that religion was bound up with certain fixed intellectual conceptions about God and the world which could not stand scrutiny, and therefore scrutiny had to be put down by fire and sword; scientific and philosophical truth had to... is due to a misunderstanding. It is true in a sense that religion should be the dominant thing in life, its light and law, but religion as it should be and is in its inner nature, its fundamental law of being, a seeking after God, the cult of spirituality, the opening of the deepest life of the soul to the indwelling Godhead, the eternal Omnipresence. On the other hand, it is true that religion when ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8  >  The Fifth Sukta

... to manifest in his being and nature this immensely diverse play. The manifoldness of Form is revealed consciously through the mind. When the true mental being awakes, all the formations lose their divided and mortal nature and appear as immortal, cadences and expressions of the Truth. That is why the mental Purusha or Indra is called Purutamam Purunam. No other god has so many diversified forms... outward nature. After his very birth Indra wants to be the eldest of all, i.e., as soon as the pure mental being awakes Page 107 in the aspirant, it becomes the master and guide of his sadhana and his new spiritual creation. For this reason Indra is called Isana (Lord) and Sukratu (the all-accomplishing Power of action). It is in him that all the masculine powers of God are... Bliss of Indra is founded on Truth. That is why this Bliss is pure and tranquil and yet dynamic. The joy of sensuous pleasure of an ordinary man is emotional and fleeting, Man cannot hold it and an aspirant cannot build anything on it. That joy flows out and man spills it away in trying to hold it. That is the reason why this joy of the senses has to be purified and made noble with the light of pure ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 8

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  Savitri

... thing could be refused by anybody. If man finds no use for the gift she has brought down for him, naturally she will take it back and return it to Him to whom it belongs, for all things belong to the Supreme Lord, 1 "Since the man refused the meal I had prepared with so much love and care, I invoked the God to take it. My God, Thou hast accepted my invitation, Thou hast... greater in the East, Slowly the world progresses on God's road. 1 Book VII: Canto 4: pp. 574-6. 2 Book VII: Canto 4: p. 576. Page 269 His seal is on my task, it cannot fail; I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates When God comes out to meet the soul of the world. 1 But man in the strength of his ignorance and arrogance does not... this is the Asura in man. Here is his philosophy of life: I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven. The last born of the earth, I stand the first.. I am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me. . No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve. 2 So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic hunger ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4  >  Savitri

... inconspicuous thing could be refused by anybody. If man finds no use for the gift she has brought down for him, naturally she will take it back and return it to Him to whom it belongs, for all things belong to the Supreme Lord, ¹ "Since the man refused the meal I had prepared with so much love and care, I invoked the God to take it. My God, Thou hast accepted my invitation, Thou hast come to... the Light grows greater in the East, Slowly the world progresses on God's road. ¹Book VII: Canto 4: pp. 574-6. ²Book VII: Canto 4: p. 576. Page 249 His seal is on my task, it cannot fail; I shall hear the silver swing of heaven's gates When God comes out to meet the soul of the world.¹ But man in the strength of his ignorance and arrogance does not recognise this... Rakshasa, this is the Asura in man. Here is his philosophy of life: I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven. The last born of the earth, I stand the first. . I am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me. . No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve. ² So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic hunger and ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

Letters on Yoga - II  >  Christianity and Theosophy

... bring that down in any fullness into earthly nature, which is the aim of transformation as we conceive it. VI. "For the Asiatic, the personality is the fall of man; for the Christian it is the very plan of God, the principle of union, the summit of the natural creation, and it calls wholly to the Grace." The personality of this single life in man is a formation in the Ignorance, therefore a... not gather from these extracts 1 the true nature of the transformation spoken of here. It seems to be something mental and moral with the love of God and a certain kind of union in separateness brought about by this divine love as the spiritualising element. Love of God and union in separateness through that love and a transformation of the nature by realising certain mental, ethical, emotional... sainthood" by the union of the soul with God "in an intellectual light full of love"—which is the most definite description of it in these extracts,—then it is not at all identical, but rather very far from what I mean by transformation. For the transformation I aim at is not from sin to sainthood but from the lower nature of the Ignorance to the Divine Nature of Light, Peace, Truth, Divine Power and ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - II

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  The Spiritual Genius of India

... steeped through and through in a religious atmosphere. The whole world, in fact, was more or less religious in the early stages of its evolution; for it is characteristic of the primitive nature of man to be god-fearing and addicted to religious rite and ceremony. And Europe too, when she entered on a new cycle of life and began to reconstruct herself after the ruin of the Graeco-Latin culture, started... moulded and guided the life and aspiration of the people; devotion to God and love of prayer and pilgrimage were as much in the nature of the average European of those times as they are in any Indian of today; every family considered it a duty and an honour to rear up one child at least to be consecrated to the service of God and the Church. The internal as well as the external life of the men of... none showed the full height to which she Could raise herself, none compassed the veritable amplitude of her innermost reality. It is when we come to the domain of the Spirit, of God-realisation that we find the real nature and stature and genius of the Indian people; it is here that India lives and moves as in her own home of Truth. The greatest and the most popular names in Indian history are not ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

Hitler and his God  >  Humanity is One

... worst catastrophes created by its own errors or by the violent turns of Nature and it must be so if there is any meaning in its existence, if its long history and continuous survival is not the accident of a fortuitously self-organizing Chance, which it must be in a purely materialistic view of the nature of the world. If man is intended to survive and carry forward the evolution of which he is at... Hitler and His God Hitler and His God 14. Sri Aurobindo’s Vision Hitler and his God Humanity is One A precondition for the superman to be embodied on this earth is the realization of the oneness of humanity, which does not mean its uniformization but a sharing of its highest values in a common experience, making the acquisition of a superior consciousness... consciousness possible. “All mankind is one in its nature, physical, vital, emotional, mental, and ever has been in spite of all differences of intellectual development … and the whole race has, as the human totality, one destiny which it seeks and increasingly approaches in the cycles of progression and retrogression it describes through the countless millenniums of its history.” 946 Seen in this light, the ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  To Be or Not To Be

... enemy is normal, is human. To preserve yourself, that is to say, your body, is the very first injunction of Nature. That is Nature's primary and funda­mental demand. And to preserve one's life one has to take others' life. That is also Nature. But then, it is said, man is meant to rise above Nature, live (even if it means to die) according to a higher law – not the biological law, the law of tooth and... in the Gita that God comes down upon earth, assuming a human body,¹to protect the good and slay the wicked,² slay not metaphori­cally but actually and materially, as he did on the field of the Kurus. It is a complex problem and the solution too is complex. The Gita – Hinduism generally – does not posit a univer­sal dharma, but a hierarchy of dharmas. Men have different natures; so their duties... another to your country, a third to yourself or to some ideal which you have set up. And naturally man feels confused in the midst of their conflicting claims and is at a loss to choose. Therefore, the Gita says, the highest law, the supreme code of conduct, is the Divine Will. And the only work and labour for man is to discover and identify oneself with this Divine Will. "Abandon all other standards of conduct ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 4  >  To Be or not to Be

... enemy is normal, is human. To preserve yourself, that is to say, your body, is the very first injunction of Nature. That is Nature's primary and fundamental demand. And to preserve one's life one has to take others' life. That is also Nature. But then, it is said, man is meant to rise above Nature, live (even if it means to die) according to a higher law—not the biological law, the law of tooth and claw... that God comes down upon earth, assuming a human body, to protect the good and slay the wicked, slay not metaphorically but actually and materially, as he did on the field of the Kurus. Page 67 It is a complex problem and the solution too is complex. The Gita—and Hinduism generally—does not posit a universal dharma, but a hierarchy of dharmas. Men have different natures; so their... another to your country, a third to yourself or to some ideal which you have set up. And naturally man feels confused in the midst of their conflicting claims and is at a loss to choose. Therefore, the Gita says, the highest law, the supreme code of conduct, is the Divine Will. And the only work and labour for man is to discover and identify oneself with this Divine Will. "Abandon all other standards of conduct ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 4

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  The Ego-The Desire-Soul

... ego-formation on the surface. The ego is a transitional Page 125 construction of Nature in her evolutionary self-unfolding, and represents, as best it can in the conditions of the Ignorance, the immortal soul of love and delight which is, in man, the spiritual centre and channel of God's manifestation in the world. THE GENESIS AND GROWTH OF THE EGO For tracing the birth of... end of the ego is the beginning of the manifest Divine in man. Page 135 THE EGO—THE DESIRE-SOUL PART II THE destiny of the individual, according to Sri Aurobindo, is to unite with God, who is his own supreme eternal Self, by the recovery of his universal and transcendent existence, and make his whole being and nature—his entire individuality—a manifesting centre and medium... with all existence, and fulfilling God's Will on earth through his transfigured individual nature. Realising God in himself and God in all and beyond all, himself in all and all in himself, sarv ā ni bh ū t ā ni ā tmani sarvabh ū tesu c ā tm ā nam— he lives and acts in the inalienable unity of existence, and expresses that blissful unity in terms of a harmonious God-revealing diversity. Page 154 ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Three Steps of Nature

... to the observant eye as a large conscious effort of Nature in man to effect a general level of intellectual equipment, capacity and farther possibility by universalising the opportunities which modern civilisation affords for the mental life. Even the preoccupation of the European intellect, the protagonist of this tendency, with material Nature and the externalities of existence is a necessary part... has found its base, what will be the nature of that farther possibility which the activities of the intellectual life must serve? If Mind is indeed Nature's highest term, then the entire development of the rational and imaginative intellect and the harmonious satisfaction of the emotions and sensibilities must be to themselves sufficient. But if, on the contrary, man is more than a reasoning and emotional... utilities upon which the method of each school of Yoga is founded. For the general principle we must interrogate the universal workings of Nature herself, recognising in her no merely specious and illusive activity of a distorting Maya, but the cosmic energy and working of God Himself in His universal being formulating and inspired by a vast, an infinite and yet a minutely selective Wisdom, prajñā prasṛtā ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Essays on the Gita  >  The Gunas, Mind and Works

... Tapas and at last a highest soul-force, the direct God-Power, the mighty and steadfast movement of a divine energy in the human instrument, the self-assured steps of the Seer-will, the gnostic intelligence and with it the wide delight of the free spirit in the works of the liberated nature. The reason armed with the intelligent will works in man in whatever manner or measure he may possess these... and oppression and injustice and move towards a kingdom of the Dharma. The liberated man does all his appointed work as the living instrument one in spirit with Page 498 the universal Spirit. And knowing that all this must be and looking beyond the outward appearance he acts not for self but for God and man and the human and cosmic order, 1 not in fact himself acting, but conscious of the... of the sattwic man and moves all the rest of the machine. An egoistic will of desire supported by the desire-soul is the dominant instrument of the rajasic worker. An Page 500 ignorant instinct or the unenlightened impulsion of the physical mind and the crude vital nature is the chief instrumental force of the tamasic doer of action. The instrument of the liberated man is a greater spiritual ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

A Centenary Tribute  >  Sri Aurobindo's Vision-Hemant Kapoor

... he is a god in the making. In each of these, plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is there containing and repressing himself as it were in order to make a certain statement of his being. Each is the whole Eternal concealed. Man himself, who takes up all that went before him and transmutes it into the term of manhood, is the individual human being and yet he is all mankind, the universal man acting in... be true at the same time and place & in the same circumstances. Now, Fact and Nature and God laugh aloud when they hear the logician state his fundamental conception. For the universe is based on the simultaneous existence of contradictions covering the same time, place and circumstances. The elementary conception that God is at once One and Many, Finite & Infinite, Formed and Formless and that each... the field for a new good or a more satisfying order. No man is simply good or simply bad; every man is a mixture of contraries: even we find these contraries often inextricably mixed up in a single feeling, a single action. All kinds of conflicting qualities, powers, values meet together and run into each other to make up our action, life, nature. We can only understand entirely if we get to some sense ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Centenary Tribute

Savitri  >  'Rose of God'

... was the red heart of the passion-flower,       Tie dream-white of the lotus in its pool....       She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,       She was the climbing of his soul to God. 314     Savitri is the link between man and God, time and Eternity, existence and Transcendence. Page 195 ... VII          'ROSE OF GOD' 310         Meantime Savitri lives her routine in the forest, gracious to all, striking them as being no different from what she has always been. She is "the same perfect Savitri", apt in speech and action, although inhabiting a total silence of mind. The power behind her life is "the miraculous Nihil... a cipher of God". It is a trance, a somnambulistic... s and form.       It was all Love and the one Beloved's arms,       It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind,       It was joy of Being on the peaks of God. 313   Savitri sees "the world as living God", and she is herself both a single being and all beings, "their bodies her many bodies kin to her":         Out of the infinitudes all came to her,       Into the ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Essays on the Gita  >  Man and the Battle of Life

... Gita accepts, the existence of God, that is to say of the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, yet always transcendent Being who manifests the world and Himself in the world, who is not the slave but the lord of His creative Consciousness, Nature or Force (Maya, Prakriti or Shakti), who is not baffled or thwarted in His world-conception or design by His creatures, man or devil, who does not need to... basis of harmony and transcendence. Page 52 Man meets the battle of life in the manner most consonant with the essential quality most dominant in his nature. There are, according to the Sankhya philosophy accepted in this respect by the Gita, three essential qualities or modes of the world-energy and therefore also of human nature, sattva , the mode of poise, knowledge and satisfaction... which his higher nature makes upon him, excused from accepting the necessity of farther struggle and the ideal of an increasing effort and mastery. Dominated by rajas , man flings himself into the battle and attempts to use the struggle of forces for his own egoistic benefit, to slay, conquer, dominate, enjoy; or, helped by a certain measure of the sattwic quality, the rajasic man makes the struggle ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Nachiketas  >  Introduction to Katha Upanishad

... when he has grasped Him as the 'Is', then the essential of God dawns upon a man. "When every desire that finds lodging in the heart of man, has been loosened from its moorings, then this mortal puts on immortality: even here he tastes God, in this human body. _________ 1. Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads, SABCL, Vol. 12, p. 263. Page 14 Yea, when all the strings of the heart are... who pervades all and alone has no sign nor feature. Mortal man knowing Him is released into immortality.' The last few verses give the secret of the Yoga by means of which one can arrive at the God-knowledge, soul-knowledge, and world-knowledge. These verses are so memorable that they can be quoted in full: One must apprehend God in the concept 'He Is' and also in His essential: but when... described poetically as 'no bigger than the thumb.' The second chapter of this cycle describes what happens to man after the death of his body, and explains the immortality of the soul, which has continuity of the past, present and the future. This chapter ends with the description of the nature of the Eternal and its surpassing luminosity. The last chapter describes the totality of Reality as an ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Nachiketas

Collected Poems  >  Index of First Lines

... shrine 608 In Bagdad by Euphrates, Asia's river 147 In gleam Konarak Konarak of the Gods 672 In god-years yet unmeasured by a man's thought . . . 632 In Manipur upon her orient hills 311 In occult depths grow Nature's roots unshown 598 In some faint dawn 650 In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest 201 ... hour, I will not dream 602 I am a single Self all Nature fills 619 I am filled with the crash of war . . . 679 I am greater than the greatness of the seas 626 I am held no more by life's alluring cry 606 I am swallowed in a foam-white sea of bliss 616 I am the bird of God in His blue 533 I cannot equal those most absolute... anguish of man . . . 663 Vast-winged the wind ran, violent . . . 651 Vision delightful alone on the hills . . . 477 Voice of the summits, leap from thy peaks . . . 681 What is this talk of slayer and of slain 182 What mighty and ineffable desire 275 What opposites are here! A trivial life 593 What points ascending Nature to her ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6  >  On the Brink

... to count much in the actual reckoning of things. Yes, the pity is that man does not know and yet so much, if not the whole thing, depends on him. For man as he is now is so far removed from godliness and so close to Asuras that the battle upon earth between Gods and Asuras seems to be an unequal game. Man by actual nature is asuric: it is through aspiration that he is trying to be godly but it seems... Conch: anityam asukham lokam imam prapya bhajasva mam. ...mamekam saranam vraja aham tva sarvapapebhyo moksayiviimi mil suca.¹ (2) A god is a single undivided being, even as an Asura is a single undivided being. But man is a divided dual being; on one side he is a soul, on the other he is predominantly a body complex. By his soul he is akin to the gods, by his external being... not efficient enough under the present circumstances. But man's destiny is not to be confined to this sphere of the triple world. He has a higher destiny transcending these lower worlds and that is being worked out elsewhere deep within him. He has a destiny which even the gods envy; for he has the Divine's own home in him. It is God himself who is implanted in him, in the cavern of his soul – ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6

The Secret of the Veda  >  Agni, the Divine Will-Force

... the Aryan who does the sacrifice. The Immortal conquers in the mortal and by his sacrifice. Man, the thinker, fighter, toiler, becomes a seer, self-ruler and king over Nature. The Veda speaks of this divine Flame in a series of splendid and opulent images. He is the rapturous priest of the sacrifice, the God-Will intoxicated with its own delight, the young sage, the sleepless envoy, the ever-wakeful... immortal worker in man. His mission is to purify all that he works upon and to raise up the soul struggling in Nature from obscurity to the light, from the strife and the suffering to love and joy, from the heat and the labour to the peace and the bliss. He is, then, the Will, the Knowledge-Force of the Deva; secret inhabitant of Matter and its forms, visible and beloved guest of man, it is he that guards... dwelling-place, the beloved guest, the lord in the creature, the seer of the flaming tresses, the divine child, the pure and virgin God, the invincible warrior, the leader on the path who marches in front of the human peoples, the immortal in mortals, the worker established in man by the gods, the unobstructed in knowledge, the infinite in being, the vast and flaming sun of the Truth, the sustainer of the ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Secret of the Veda

Sri Aurobindo came to Me  >  Bleeding Piece of Earth

... protested "against any attempt to make the human divine". And that is why this "bleeding piece of earth", human nature, has bled stanchlessly since the dawn of time and God on high has to wait on, in seeming helplessness till the blood shed may come to fertilise the life of the common man, because unless that happens, the flawless flowering cannot come about and the groping aspirant must remain what... motivated not by the spirit of God-allegiance, but by God-defiance — and therefore, Heavenward he clambers on a stair of storms .... He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force From life and Nature the immortals right, because having grown blind in his lust for quick results, He waits not for the outstretched hand of God To raise him out of his mortality... cover his naked ugliness. Years later, I read a citation from the great mystic William Law the purport of which is that none can turn towards God without turning his back upon his ego, because none can be fully alive to God till he completely dies to his lower nature. But I must pause here a little to stress an experience of mine which grew from day to day till I could not deny its vivid, concrete ...

Dilip Kumar Roy   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo came to Me

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1  >  The Symbol Dawn

... being followed by a noon like any other noon. Here Sri Aurobindo makes an observation: For Nature walks upon her mighty way Unheeding when she breaks a soul, a life; Page 175 Leaving her slain behind she travels on; Man only marks and God's all-seeing eyes. Nature has large mighty movements and when she unrolls herself, maybe one person is dead here, one life... elsewhere; but she does not pause to see what has happened; she goes on. There is a storm, there is an earthquake; countless creatures die. Nature goes on unconcernedly. Only man who is involved takes note. Also, it does not escape the all-seeing eyes of God. Even in this moment of her soul's despair, In its grim rendezvous with death and fear, No cry broke from her lips, no call... come down, but the earth-nature soils them with its mud. Its thorns of fallen nature are the defence It turns against the saviour hands of Grace; It meets the sons of God with death and pain. Against the hands of Grace that come to save, mortality turns its thorns of fallen nature in its own defence. This is how the messengers of Heaven, Sons of God, have been repelled with ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Collected Poems  >  The Rakshasas

... demon, man nor Titan's hand, Nor any lesser creature shall o'erthrow, But only God Himself compel my fall." And Kálí answered, smiling terribly, "It is decreed," and laughing loud she passed. Then Rávan from his sacrifice arose. Page 323 × The Ifrit, the Djinn, is the demoniac element in Nature. ... unregenerated Ego, the Asura. Each such type and level of consciousness sees the Divine in its own image and its level in Nature is sustained by a differing form of the World-Mother.) "Glory and greatness and the joy of life, Strength, pride, victorious force, whatever man Desires, whatever the wild beast enjoys, Bodies of women and the lives of men, I claim to be my kingdom. I have force My... Page 321 Rávan, the lord of all Thy Rákshasas, Give me Thy high command to smite Thy foes; But most I would afflict, chase and destroy Thy devotees who traduce Thee, making Thee A God of love, a God too sweet to rule. I have the knowledge; what Thou art, I know, And know myself, for Thou and I are one." So prayed the Lord of Lunca, and in Heaven Sri Krishna smiled, the Friend of all ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Karma and Freedom

... and determined in Nature, striving in his soul to bring out the spiritual light, mastery and freedom to work upon the obscurity and embarrassment of his first natural conditions and their narrow determinations, this would be the nature of man the mental being. On this basis it becomes possible to come at some clear and not wholly antinomous relation between man's necessity and man's freedom, between... abrogated by the pouring of its energies into the whirl of the universe. And one may say that man cannot enjoy the double freedom because as man he is an individual being and therefore a thing in Nature, subject to Ignorance, to Karma. To be free he must get away from individuality, nature and Karma, and then man no longer exists, there is only the unconditioned Infinite. But this is to assume that there... last resort by universal Nature who has shaped man and each man to what he is for her blind or her conscient uses? But we insist and say that we have a will which is aware of a however heavily burdened freedom and can shape to its own purpose and change by its effort environment and upbringing and the formations of heredity and even our apparently immutable common nature. But this will and its effort ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Immortal Person

... disintegrate into the world of mind. In fact, this is what happens to the human person after death or would happen normally. Thus man, the ordinary or "natural" man, has no person­ality, no real individuality. It is just like a wave-formation out of universal nature, moving in and being moved by the total swell and heave, being formed and being destroyed every moment – as the poet says: ... of the true light, the light of the Psychic consciousness is comparatively easy for a man. Mind is the first member of the lower sphere that is taken up and dealt with by the soul; for it is the highest and the most characteristic element in man and less dense and less subject to the darkness inherent in human nature. The mental indi­vidual persists the longest after the dissolution of the body, it survives... dissolve in you like the waves in the sea. And yet the building up of an abiding individual is the secret Page 295 urge of Nature's evolution: it is the hidden spring of human aspiration and the purpose of God's creation. Not mere disparate particles – of substance or energy or consciousness – breaking up constantly and scattering and finally dissolving into the void ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Greatness of the Individual

... helplessness of the mightiest and the sure fulfilment of God's decree. "Even without thee all they shall not be, the men of war who stand arrayed in the opposing squadrons." For these men are only alive in the body; in that which stands behind and fulfils itself they are dead men. Whom God protects who shall slay? Whom God has slain who shall protect? The man who slays is only the occasion, the instrument by... "The thought which thou thinkest and takest refuge in egoism saying 'I will not fight,' this thy resolve is a vain thing; Nature will yoke thee to thy work." When a man seems to have rejected his work, it merely means that his work is over and Kali leaves him for another. When a man who has carried out a great work is destroyed, it is for the egoism by which he has misused the force within that the force... the French Revolution, no man more. When he set himself against it and strove, becoming a prop of monarchy, to hold back the wheel, did the French Revolution stop for the backsliding of France's mightiest? Kali put her foot on Mirabeau and he disappeared; but the Revolution went on, for the Revolution was the manifestation of the Zeitgeist, the Revolution was the will of God. So it is always. The ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Essays Divine and Human  >  Nature: The World-Manifestation

... From Man to Superman: Notes and Fragments on Philosophy, Psychology and Yoga (1912-1947) From Man to Superman: Notes and Fragments on Philosophy, Psychology and Yoga (1912-1947) Philosophy: God, Nature and Man Essays Divine and Human Nature: The World-Manifestation The Divine and the Manifestation 22 All existence is Brahman, Atman & Iswara... call it or him God, Brahman, Purusha or by some other name is in its or his nature infinite existence aware of itself and its own eternal bliss of existence. Or speaking less in terms of division and analysis it is one existence, consciousness, bliss in an inalienable unity. Page 204 35 The object and condition of Life is Ananda; the means of Ananda is Tapas; the nature of Tapas is... evolutionary in its process. Page 218 The typal worlds do not change. In his own world a god is always a god, the Asura always an Asura, the demon always a demon. To change they must either migrate into an evolutionary body or else die entirely to themselves that they may be new born into other Nature. 45 All that is is the manifestation, even as all that is not is the self-reservation ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

The Future Poetry  >  The Ideal Spirit of Poetry

... poets meant by the Mantra was an inspired and revealed seeing and visioned thinking, attended by a realisation, to use the ponderous but necessary modern word, of some inmost truth of God and self and man and Nature and cosmos and life and thing and thought and experience and deed. It was a thinking that came on the wings of a great soul rhythm, chandas . For the seeing could not be separated from... beauty, but suns in the heavens of our highest mind and illuminative of our widest as well as our inmost life. It will be a poetry of a new largest vision of himself and Nature and God and all things which is offering itself to man and of its possible realisation in a nobler and more divine manhood; and it will not sing of them only with the power of the imaginative intelligence, the exalted and ecstatic... on a higher common level and may rise more often into a fuller intenser light and capture more constantly the greater tones of which this harp of God, to use the Upanishad's description of man's created being, is secretly capable. A greater era of man's living seems to be in promise, whatever nearer and earthier powers may be striving to lead him on a side path away to a less exalted ideal, and with ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry

Work - an offering  >  The Sublime Work

... To change the earthly life ...Savitri answered to the radiant God: "... the one task for which our lives were born, To raise the world to God in deathless Light, To bring God down to the world on earth we came, To change the earthly life to life divine. I keep my will to save the world and man; Even the charm of thy alluring voice, O blissful Godhead... thyself behind thy works, To be is not a senseless paradox; Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God; What hides within her breast she must reveal. I claim thee for the world that thou hast made. If man lives bound by his humanity, If he is tied for ever to his pain, Let a greater being then arise from man, The superhuman with the Eternal mate And the Immortal shine... perfection and order Mahasaraswati is the Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order. Sri Aurobindo God's final seal ...the perfecting of the body also should be the last triumph of the Spirit and to make the bodily life also divine must be God's final seal upon His work in the universe. Sri Aurobindo Faith in Sri Aurobindo Live rather in the constant hope and ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Work - an offering

Essays on the Gita  >  The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge

... any and every being. Man in Nature thinks that these manifestations in Nature are all the Divine, when they are only his works and his powers and his veils. He knows all past and all present and future existences, but him none yet knoweth. If then after thus bewildering them with his workings in Nature, he were not to meet them in these at all, there would be no divine hope for man or for any soul in... for their knowledge is reft away from them by Maya and they resort to the nature of being of the Asura." This bewilderment is a befooling of the soul in Nature by the deceptive ego. The evil-doer cannot attain to the Supreme because he is for ever trying to satisfy the idol ego on the lowest scale of human nature; his real God is this ego. His mind and will, hurried away in the activities of the Maya... his own need, temperament and nature, and he worships them to help or appease his natural longings. He constructs for the Godhead the name and form of Indra or Agni, of Vishnu or Shiva, of a divinised Christ or Buddha, or else some composite of natural qualities, an indulgent God of love and mercy, or a severe God of righteousness and justice, or an awe-inspiring God of wrath and terror and flaming ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Words of the Mother - II  >  "The Divine" and "Man"

... aspiration. What is God? God is the perfection that we must aspire to realise. 8 November 1969 The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. And if you like, I shall lead you to Him very willingly. Have confidence. 17 December 1969 Every being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant; and although no being in the whole universe is as weak as man, none is as divine... Man's Relationship with the Divine Man's Relationship with the Divine Words of the Mother - II "The Divine" and "Man" For those who are afraid of a word: This is what we mean by "Divine": all the knowledge we have to acquire, all the power we have to obtain, all the love we have to become, all the perfection we have to achieve, all the harmonious and... attain the Divine. Human mediocrity is intolerable. We aspire for a knowledge truly knowing, for a power truly powerful, for a love that truly loves. Suffocated by the shallowness of the human nature we aspire to the knowledge that truly knows, the power that truly can, the love that truly loves. 24 April 1964 Who am I? The Divine under many disguises. 1966 Page 18 ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of the Mother - II

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1  >  The Drama of Integral Self-Realisation

... all man's faltering searches, his limiting spiritual goals, and exaggerated and imperfect understanding of Truth to prove the futility of God's power; but Savitri, "delivered of all twilight thoughts," with a Heart of Truth answers his lures. Here Savitri chants lyrics of Nature's miracles, of the wonders of the Infinite and of the limitless powers of a soul integrally surrendered to God. ... Grace born in answer to Aswapati's longing for help in bringing some living form of God on earth to relieve it of its burden of inconscience. The marriage of Savitri and Satyavan is the divine linking of their lives for the raising of the world and Page 420 man to God and the bringing of God to earth to transform it into an abode of Divine Delight. Sri Aurobindo first... riddle of the world grew plain and "lost its catch obscure." In magnificent poetry we follow him as he rises, leaving earth-nature's summits below his feet. We are made to feel the ecstasy, might and sweetness of God's mystic power, as he is drawn from his loneliness into God's embrace. As he climbs, his sealless eye uncovers a series of graded kingdoms "twixt life's poles" through whose "organ ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine  >  Conscious Force

... because he has deliberately created the pot like that. That idea is wrong. To believe in a God who is extra-cosmic, away from the creation which He has brought into existence, would not lead one to a correct solution of this question. When one has pain one says, "God has made me suffer," is it not ? Or, "He has made man subject to pain." But when one knows that it is the Omnipresent Reality that is this... universe. We know that something in us is conscious when we sleep, when mind is not active. If the nature of that consciousness were only mental, we would retain our mental consciousness all through. But there are conditions in which the mind is in abeyance and still man is conscious. The nature of the consciousness Page 85 is not necessarily mental or intellectual. Our waking... is self-existent in its nature, not dependent on anything external like pleasure and pain. When man seeks happiness or pleasure he is really seeking Page 98 this all-pervading delight. The pleasure that objects give is temporary, whereas the delight is independent of objects and conditions. This seeking of true delight is covered in the ordinary man under the cover of impulses ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

From Man Human to Man Divine  >  Science and Spiritual Knowledge

... found most integrally in the unity of God and man and Nature and all that is in Nature.... A triune knowledge, the complete knowledge of God, the complete knowledge of himself, the complete knowledge of Nature, gives him [man] his high goal; it assigns a vast and full sense to the labour and effort of humanity. The conscious unity of the three, God, Soul and Nature, in his own consciousness is the sure... a means of God-realisation or of divine formation." 11 Even after his spiritual attainment, siddhi, a man of integral spirituality will continue to take interest in the knowledge of the world, in the "contemplation of God in Nature", and his "aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in man and creatures... involved in the argument between nature and man in which science plays only a part, so that the common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate and leads us into difficulties. Thus even in science the object of research is no longer nature itself, but man's investigation of nature. Here, again, man confronts himself alone." 33 ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   From Man Human to Man Divine

On Thoughts and Aphorisms  >  Aphorism - 214, 215

... about men of genius." And why not? For genius itself is an abnormal birth and out of man's ordinary centre. 215—Genius is Nature's first attempt to liberate the imprisoned god out of her human mould; the mould has to suffer in the process. It is astonishing that the cracks are so few and unimportant. Once a man becomes conscious of the Divine and unites with Him, he certainly becomes abnormal... abnormal to ordinary eyes, for he no longer has the weaknesses that make up ordinary human nature. But fortunately for him, by the very fact of his inner realisation, he loses man's habit of boasting and is thus able to avoid the ill will of others. 5 December 1969 ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Thoughts and Aphorisms

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  Gnosis and Ananda

... It possesses the infinite of the Self and it possesses the infinite of Nature. It does not so much lose as find its nature self in the self of the Infinite. On the other planes to which the mental being has easier access, man finds God in himself and himself in God; he becomes divine in essence rather than in person or nature. In the gnosis, even the mentalised gnosis, the Divine Eternal possesses... or supreme sublimation of nature. There is only a joyful static possession by the Self within us and an unregulated dynamic possession by the physical and the vital Nature without us. The mind soul and mind consciousness in man, manomaya puruṣa , can in the same direct way reflect and enter into Sachchidananda by a reflection of the Soul as it mirrors itself in the nature of pure universal mind luminous... power of its own bliss nature to the upward pull of the divine forces. The time for that marvellous hour of the evolving Time-Spirit is not yet come. Man, generally, cannot yet ascend to the bliss nature; he has first to secure himself on the higher mental altitudes, to ascend from them to the gnosis. Still less can he bring down all the Bliss-Power into this terrestrial Nature; he must first cease to ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Early Cultural Writings  >  Dayananda and the Veda

... , then there must inevitably be in the Veda a large part of psychology of the Divine Nature, psychology of the relations of man with God and a constant indication of the law governing man's Godward conduct. Dayananda asserts the presence of such an ethical element, he finds in the Veda the law of life given by God to the human being. And if the Vedic godheads express the powers of a supreme Deity who... flawlessly, he might well hold it for an infallible Scripture. The rest is a question of the method of revelation, of the divine dealings with our race, of man's psychology and possibilities. Modern thought, affirming Nature and Law but denying God, denied also the possibility of revelation; but so also has it denied many things which a more modern thought is very busy reaffirming. We cannot demand of... entities which we have to admit and whose relations we have to know if we would understand existence at all, God, Nature and the Soul. If, as Dayananda held on strong enough grounds, the Veda reveals to us God, reveals to us the law of Nature, reveals to us the relations of the Soul to God and Nature, what is it but a revelation of divine Truth? And if, as Dayananda held, it reveals them to us with a perfect ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

Record of Yoga  >  Miscellaneous Notes, c. 1914

... either from the heart or from the mind, while the actions of the animals proceed from the senses. We see the vast difference between an animal and a man. So if man transfers his centre of heart and mind, to that of a higher one, think how grand the God-man would be! That centre according to the psychology of the Hindus is Vijnana. This is just above Page 1465 the crown of [the] head. This... in the universe as the stable, by immutable Existence (Sat), is Purusha, God, Spirit; representing [itself] as the motional by its power of active Consciousness (Chit) [it] is Nature, Force or World-Principle (Prakriti, Shakti, Maya). The play of these two principles is the life of the universe. Prakriti [is] executive Nature as opposed to Purusha, which is the Soul governing, taking cognizance of... Therefore to become one with God, to be Divine and live a Divine Life is the first object of Yoga. The second is to know God in Himself and in ourselves and in everything. The third is to make ourselves one with the Divine Will and to do in our life a Divine Work by means of the Divine Power using us as an instrument. The fourth object is to enjoy God in all beings, in all things and in all that happens. ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Record of Yoga

Gods and the World  >  Introduction

... female-dominated or male-dominated), polytheism,5 nature worship, ancestor worship are found all over the world. A general tendency had long been to see the evolution of the religious Page 12 phenomena from "simple to complex” starting with the most elementary religious forms like totemism or fetishism, cults of nature and animism and evolving, as man and societies were becoming more civilized... when confronting the Trojan assembly, describes some of them beautifully: ... earth resists but my soul in me widens Helped by the toil behind and the age-long effort of Nature. Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet. Workings immortal obscurely struggling, hints of a godhead Labour to form in this clay a divinity. Hera widens, Pallas aspires... and enigmatical apophthegms*** on nature, which he deposited in the temple of Artemis. Heracleitus' philosophy is certainly one among the major products of the Greek mind. The first nucleus of his thought was the oneness of all that is, with fire at its core. All things are one, he said, and everything is a form of fire. (By identifying fire with soul and God, he used the term symbolically as ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Gods and the World

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  The Bride of Brahman

... and persuading the truant God. Sacrifice means – as I have told you just now – the ascension of the consciousness. When we rise up from the ordinary material level, when we have moved towards the higher Light from out of the obscurity of the senses, that is ascension, and that is called sacrifice: for you move up .by rejecting the lower strand, the lower levels of nature, and acquire the higher realities... her Lord. This is the story of the redemption of material nature and her gradual transmutation into the higher Nature, regaining her status by the side of her Lord. The process or the series of steps described by the Veda remains always the same, for human beings also for their liberation from inferior nature and regaining the spiritual nature. The Veda says the Gods came one by one and led the Shakti... in her earthly mother's home and returning to Kailash, to her heavenly Lord. There is also another, similar or parallel story in the Veda about the God Agni, about the disappearance of this very important God, Fire. He is, as you know, the God who presides over and even carries out the sacrifice, the Vedic ritual of yajña. Sacrifice cannot be done without fire, he is the Purohita, one installed ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Divine Intervention

... in nature, quality and extent in the lower order. Such miracles, interventions, providential happenings are not rare. They are always occurring, only they do not attract attention. For it is these phenomena that are the real causes of all progress – cosmic as well as individual. Evolution is based upon this truth of Nature. Man is not bound to the present pattern or complex of his nature and... something indelible and inviolable, immemorially the same which no man or god dare alter or disobey. Laplace, one of the pioneers of the scientific outlook, said, in fact, that he could very well imagine a mathematician recording and calculating all the forces that act and react in the world and from the present position of things foretell the time and place of each and every event in the cosmic field. The... Karma, or Kismet, is a parallel conception in the domain of human nature and character. The chain reaction of cause and effect" is rigorous and absolute, follows a single line of movement and possesses a rigidly predetermined disposition. The principle is equally applicable either to a phenomenon of the physical world or to that of man's inner consciousness. But we have arrived today at a stage ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Sri Aurobindo - The Poet  >  A Comment on Its Mysticism and Its Poetry

... have conquered Time's stroke of death. But man is not only thought, will, embodied vitality. He is also a soul which is his deepest self in the cosmos and which functions from far behind through his emotional heart which is the centre of his conscious organism. This soul is a spontaneous self-giver and God-worshipper and holds the ultimate yearning of Nature for the Divine Grace that has itself plunged... Nashe's line, never falls from the air. The nature of this Brightness can be gauged by a brief review of the figures under which the spiritual Reality is shown. The basic figure is, of course, that which gives the poem its title. The Rose is the symbol of Beauty and here we have the God-Rose—God as Beauty. But what shall we understand by the Beauty of God? Beauty is perfection of form. But there are... Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man. Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire, Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre! Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme; Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the Children of Time. Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face, Rose ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

On Education  >  The Human Mind (Sri Aurobindo)

... The basis of a man's nature is almost always, in addition to his soul's past, his heredity, his surroundings, his nationality, his country, the soil from which he draws sustenance, the air which he breathes, the sights, sounds, habits to which he is accustomed. They mould him not the less powerfully because insensibly, and from that then we must begin. We must not take up the nature by the roots from... soul and a wound to the nation, which loses the benefit of the best that a man could have given it and is forced to accept instead something imperfect and artificial, second-rate, perfunctory and common. Every one has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which God offers him to take or refuse. The task is to find it, develop it and use... minds and denies its application to the child, is a conservative and unintelligent doctrine. Child or man, boy or girl, there is only one sound principle of good teaching. Difference of age only serves to diminish or increase the amount of help and guidance necessary; it does not change its nature.     The second principle is that the mind has to be consulted in its own growth. The idea of hammering ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   On Education

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Status of Knowledge

... created by ourselves or Nature in its appeal to the aesthetic mind and the senses; thus the sense is satisfied of God. We can have even the vital, nervous experience and practically the physical sense of the Self in all life and formation and in all workings of powers, forces, energies that operate through us or others or in the world: thus the life and the body are satisfied of God. All this knowledge... understand how we can do more than conceive intellectually of the Self or of God; but it may borrow some shadow of this vision, experience and becoming from that inner awakening to Nature which a great English poet has made a reality to the European imagination. If we read the poems in which Wordsworth expressed his realisation of Nature, we may acquire some distant idea of what realisation is. For, first... beyond mind which is only occultly here, concealed at the basis of all existence. For it is that consciousness alone that truly knows and only by its possession can we possess God and rightly know the world and its real nature and secret forces. All this world visible or sensible to us and all too in it that is not visible is merely the phenomenal expression of something beyond the mind and the senses ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history  >  Man and Collective Man

... followed by Nature - religion, occultism, spiritual thought and spiritual experience and realisation - in her attempt to open up the inner being. 21 These are really interlinked lines and answer the needs of man's self-expansion and bring about his slow unfolding. Religion is quite simply "the search for God and the finding of God", and in this adventure reason is but a poor aid. Men with God-experience... feeling which will bring us intimately close to one another.... Every truly religious man whose nature is freed from dogmatic rigidity realises that all prayers flow into one Supreme." 53 It was Sri Aurobindo's view that to realise freedom and unity you have Page 486 first to realise and possess God "at once your highest self and the self of all creatures". 54 There is a superficial... ethical man and the aesthetic man - who flower in an age of culture - themselves need a sovereign third power to sustain and greaten them. This couldn't be Reason and the intelligent Will, although it has its importance; for Reason finds itself stopped by a stubborn barrier. Checkmated, Reason sees its occupation concluded and now tells unfinished Man: "There is a Soul, a Self, a God in the ...

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

Adventures in Criticism  >  The Poetic Experience

... of sincerity, truth, authenticity, value is, first and last, Inspiration — Inspiration working through any part of man's nature. The outward-going body-conscious Page 110 mind of Homer describes Apollo's descent from Olympus with an intense atmosphere of the god's subtle physicality of power. Shakespeare passes a sudden voice from spiritual heights through the life-force's peculiar... speak, of spiritual meaning as would an utterance by Sri Aurobindo couched in a similar style-key:   Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face, Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace! Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss: Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's kiss. 1   Nevertheless, who will... extraordinary imagination open to spheres of reality which transcend the reach not only of the average man but also the average poet of the first rank — say, Homer or Shakespeare. For, in poetry the main factor is imagination: we should never forget this central truth if we are to gauge rightly the nature of inspired utterance. Emotion makes poetry throb: it is the animating flame behind all idea and figure ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Adventures in Criticism

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  The Immortal Person

... disintegrate into the world of mind. In fact, this is what happens to the human person after death or would happen normally. Thus man, the ordinary or "natural" man, has no personality, no real individuality. It is just like a wave-formation out of universal nature, moving in and being moved by the total swell and heave, being formed and being destroyed every moment—as the poet says: They... of the true light, the light of the Psychic consciousness is comparatively easy for a man. Mind is the first member of the lower sphere that is taken up and dealt with by the soul; for it is the highest and the most characteristic element in man and less dense and less subject to the darkness inherent in human nature. The mental individual persists the longest after the dissolution of the body, it survives... and they dissolve in you like the waves in the sea. And yet the building up of an abiding individual is the secret Page 177 urge of Nature's evolution: it is the hidden spring of human aspiration and the purpose of God's creation. Not mere disparate particles—of substance or energy or consciousness—breaking up constantly and scattering and finally dissolving into the void (the ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

Essays on the Gita  >  The Way and the Bhakta

... Spirit and Nature and all creatures are the foundation offered for his activities to the liberated man. For from that foundation the soul in him can suffer the instrumental nature to act in safety; he is lifted above all cause of stumbling, delivered from egoism and its limitations, rescued from all fear of sin and evil and consequence, exalted out of that bondage to the outward nature Page 396... as good from the hands of his eternal Lover and Master. !12.18-19! The God-lover dear to God is a soul of wide equality, Page 404 equal to friend and enemy, equal to honour and insult, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, grief and happiness, heat and cold, to all that troubles with opposite affections the normal nature. He will have no attachment to person or thing, place or home; he will... the Purushottama will grow upon the natural man till he is filled with it and becomes a godhead and a spirit; all life will become a constant remembering of God Page 402 and perfection too will grow and the unity of the whole existence of the human soul with the supreme Existence. !12.11! But it may be that even this constant remembering of God and lifting up of our works to him is felt ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

The Destiny of the Body  >  Survival Beyond the Tomb

... Nachiketas says: "This doubt there is about a man who has passed: some say, ' He is'; some others, 'He is no more.' " (Katha Upanishad, 1. 1. 20) Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?... If a man die, shall he live again? (The Book of Job, 14.10,14) I shall live even when I am dead, just as the solar God Re lives for ever. (Egyptian Book of the... subconscious awareness of something really pertaining to truth, something of the nature of a prophetic indication of the future destiny of evolving man. For, as we shall presently see in the course of our study, death and dissolution do not necessarily inhere in living matter as such nor are they at all in the nature of a universal phenomenon in the realm of the living. We may remember in this connection... argument, which employs the concept of man's destiny and function, his disposition to free himself more and more from the conditions of time and space, and to develop completely his intellectual and moral potentialities, which development is impossible under the conditions of earthly life; (3)The theological argument: the wisdom and justice of God guarantee the self-realisation of personal ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Destiny of the Body

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  An Epochal Synthesis

... into the dark, subconscious regions of the being and a grappling with the most powerful forces of human nature, desire and lust and passion, in their own field; but it had to be undertaken, if the whole being and nature Page 36 of man were to be transmuted into the being and nature of the Divine to ensure the integrality and permanence of the dynamic divine union, which is the goal of... soul, but by the whole being—the soul and nature—of man. The mind, the life and even the body of man are to participate, as well as the soul, in the blissful experience of identity, union and communion with the Supreme Being. How can that be possible? How can the twilit mind, the restless, desire-driven life, and the dense, obtuse and inert body of man house the ineffable Presence, or even enter... One, but also as the many, as each being, each filing and each happening, and the liberated soul, liberated also in its nature, must rise into an identification, at once static and dynamic, with the cosmic Divine, and feel itself in all and all in itself. God in all and all in God, even while enjoying the indescribable bliss of the supracosmic union. And it is important to note that this universality ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo  >  Is Sri Aurobindo New

... "Physical death is no part of our programme"?¹ Where in any scripture is the assertion that the completely God-realised man has a body which is no longer subject to disease, decay and death and that this body need not be given up because of the operation of any so-called Nature's law or necessity? Great yogis are declared to leave the body and depart from life, at will; but this they do... world-play and taking part in it for a various expression of Himself by purifying and illuminating our mind and life-force and body. In Vaishnavism and Tantricism the ideal of God's self-expression in our nature was the most openly held. But everywhere a definite irreducible quantity was recognised in which no self-expression of the Divine could take place. And that is why, on the most external... innate idealist in man wanting the Absolute, the Flawless, the hundred per cent Divine, is to get rid of this illusion and pass into the formless and nameless samadhi, Nirvana, Nirguna Brahman. If we are told that something undivinisable is present in the world-elements, we may yet choose to work for the world and look upon the world as valuable because there are also so many God-expressive parts ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Significance of Indian Yoga  >  An Overview-6

... impel the yogin to draw away from the common existence and lose his hold upon it. If he gains God, he loses life, or if he turns his efforts outward to conquer life, he is in danger of losing God. Fortunately, there has been throughout the history of Indian Yoga a powerful tendency to reunite Spirit and Nature, God and Life. This is what we have seen in respect of the Veda, Upanishad, and the Gita. In Tantra... guidance in all the forces of nature for a divine living. Normally, liberation of the soul of man is considered to be purpose of all yogas. In Sri Aurobindo's yoga, the spirit in man is looked upon not merely as an individual being travelling to a transcendent unity with the Divine, but as a universal being capable of oneness with the Divine in all souls and all nature with all its practical consequences... According to Sri Aurobindo, man is that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower. He concludes that the true and full object and utility of yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Significance of Indian Yoga

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-9

... eternal Goddess? Nothing but the prolongation of this dream of existence. Man is "a fragile miracle of thinking clay" and "armed with illusions" he "walks, the child of Time". "God" "heavens" etc., are only his imaginations. It is the mind of man that creates all these unreal images, and "the incurable unrest" Page 337 Man is subject to Ignorance and yet he has die courage which is met by death... watched "life", the writhing serpent. Cycles of history had passed, stars had dissolved and this God of Death had looked on with "unchanging gaze." The two—woman and universal God—opposed each other. Then "a sad and formidable voice arose". "Unclasp...thy passionate influence and relax, 0 slave of Nature,...thy elemental grasp; weep and forget. Entomb thy passion in its living grave....Pass lonely back... the dreadful god of Death. She felt "as if her mind had died with Satyavan". She elapsed closely the lifeless form of Satyavan. Then suddenly a change came over her—as it happens sometimes to the human soul—the veil was torn and then "the thinker is no more, only the spirit sees" and "all is known". "Then a calm Power seated above our brows is seen". It is "immobile", "it moves Nature, looks on life" ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  Savitri- Assault of Ether and of Fire

... love is not a hunger of the heart, My love is not a craving of the flesh; It came to me from God, to God returns. Even in all that life and man have marred, A whisper of divinity still is heard, A breath is felt from the eternal spheres. Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man A sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love. There is a hope in its wild infinite cry; ... or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation. ... My soul and his indissolubly linked In the one task for which our lives were bom, To raise the world to God in deathless Light, To bring God down to the world on earth we came, To change the earthly life to life divine... Let a greater being then arise from man, The superhuman with the Eternal mate And the Immortal shine through earthly forms. 34 31 Ibid, ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history  >  Poet of Yoga

... of beauty, but suns in the heavens of our highest mind and illuminative of our widest as well our inmost life. It will be a poetry of a new largest vision of himself and Nature and God and all things which is offering itself to man... 17 Sri Aurobindo devotes the next few chapters to a more detailed consideration of the 'five powers' - Truth, Life, Beauty, Delight and the Spirit - that should... of outward actualities alone, but, more importantly, all - all the invisible worlds below and above - that may lie behind our apparent material life: What man sees and experiences of God and himself and his race and Nature and the spiritual, mental, psychic and material worlds in which he moves, his back look upon the past, his sweep of vision over the present, his eye of aspiration and... Although once begun in Eden, human life must now steer towards other horizons. Perhaps the Flute-Player of Brindavan gives us the clue to the secret; didn't the Divine and the devotees - God, man and all nature - achieve a perfect harmony, an absolute bliss? Earth-life met the Eternal "with close breast", and glory assumed a million faces in Brindavan's woodlands. There life acquired a "deeper power ...

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

Sri Aurobindo came to Me  >  Sri Aurobindo's Message

... A sudden bliss shall run through every limb And Nature with a mightier Presence fill. Thus shall the earth open to divinity And common natures feel the wide uplift, Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray And meet the Deity in common things. Nature shall live to manifest secret God, The Spirit shall take up the human play, This earthly... the doldrums. He wrote back: "As for your question whether Heaven wants Man, the answer is that if Heaven did not want him he would not want Heaven." (April, 1936) Years later, he improvised on this theme with the deeper suggestiveness of poetry (Savitri I. IV): "A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme: His nature we must put on as He put ours." which is the reason why (ibid... "The high gods look on man and watch and choose Today's impossibles for the future's base." And so, Sri Aurobindo, the born missionary of the spirit, with the light of morning in his eyes, teaches us every time through his life and words, his acts and withdrawals — aye, even through his gesture and long spells of silence — that when one is called by God one must leave aside all other ...

Dilip Kumar Roy   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo came to Me

Nachiketas  >  Story of Nachiketas

... He said: "When one realizes God through spiritual yoga, and when that Ancient of Days is realized as one who has entered deep into that which is hidden and is hard to see because he is established in our secret being and lodged in the deep heart of things, then the wise and steadfast man casts away from him all that man calls joy and sorrow. When a mortal man has heard, when he has grasped, when... describe how rare it is to find someone who is keen to hear of that Truth, that Reality, that Supreme God who is immortal. He said: "Not many find it easy to hear of Him; even among those who have heard of Him, there are not many who have come to know Him. The man who can speak of Him wisely or the man who is skillful to win Him is a miracle. But even if one such is found,i t will be a miracle to find... finds the God of our adoration, the Knower who is born from the Brahman, whom having beheld he attains to sur-passing peace." Yama had promised three boons. He had now fulfilled two boons. So he said: "A third boon choose, 0 Nachiketas." Now was the occasion for Nachiketas to ask a question which was perhaps most difficult. He said: "This debate that there is over the man who has passed ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Nachiketas

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Values Higher and Lower

... Reality, Spirit or God). Thus it has the true perception or vision of the forces that act in and upon the world and the powers that decide and is in union with them. The Yogic consciousness and power is also embodied in the Divine Incarnation – for he is Yogeshwara: and in India it is accepted as a commonplace that God descends in a human shape, whenever there is a great crisis and man needs salvaging... to it is not clear. Since Nietzsche spoke of the surpassing of man, many are taken up with the ideal, but the means to effect it remains yet to be discovered: it is still under discussion, at least. As a matter of fact, the goal itself is none too clear and definite: sometimes we think of a saintly transformation of human nature, sometimes the growing power of Intuition, very vaguely and variously... , it cannot be attained by 'mass action. Others declare that personal effort will not lead very far; if there is to be a great or fundamental change in human nature, it is the Divine Grace alone that can bring it about. The surpassing of man is a miracle and only the supreme magician as an Avatara can do it. Others, again, are not prone to believe in a physical Incarnation – somewhat difficult usually ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Spiritual Genius of India

... and through in a religious atmosphere. .   The whole world, in fact, was more or less religious in the early stages of its evolution; for it is characteristic of the primitive nature of man to be god-fearing and addicted to religious rite and ceremony. And Europe too, when she entered on a new cycle of life and began to reconstruct herself after the ruin of the Græco-Latin culture, started... moulded and guided the life and aspiration of the people; devotion to God and love of prayer and pilgrimage were as much in the nature of the average European of those times as they are in any Indian of today; every family con­sidered it a duty and an honour to rear up one child at least to be consecrated to the service of God and the Church. The internal as well as the external life of the men of... none showed the full height to which she could raise herself, none compassed the veritable amplitude of her innermost reality. It is when we come to the domain of the Spirit, of God-realisation that we find the real nature and stature and genius of the Indian people; it is here that India lives and moves as in her own home of Truth. The greatest and the most popular names in Indian history are not ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Early Cultural Writings  >  Rajayoga

... for he is the rajasic and psychical man, not the tamasic material. It is these that he has to conquer in order that he may realise God in his heart or in his buddhi or in both. God seen in the heart, that is the quest of the Rajayogin. He may recover the perception and enjoyment of the body afterwards, but it is only to help the enjoyment of God as Love and God as Knowledge. The processes of the... of the thoughts of men, of men in this world and spirits in the other, the vision of the past and the future, the knowledge of all that is in the present, the mastery of Nature, the siddhis of the Hathayogin, the realisation of God, all power, all bliss, all knowledge is in his grasp. As to what he shall do with the power, Patanjali leaves the choice to the successful Yogin. Page 511 ... Writings Rajayoga 19-December-1920 Man fulfilling himself in the body is given Hathayoga as his means. When he rises above the body, he abandons Hathayoga as a troublesome and inferior process and rises to the Rajayoga, the discipline peculiar to the aeon which man now evolves. The first condition of success in Rajayoga is to rise superior to the dehatmak ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

Collected Poems  >  In the Silence of the Midnight

... felt of God's vastness, fleeting touches of the Absolute Momentary and immeasurable smite the sense nature free from its limits,— A brief glimpse, a hint, it passes, but the soul grows deeper, wider: God has set his mark upon the creature. In the flash or flutter of flight of bird and insect, in the passion of wing and cry on treetops, In the golden feathers of the eagle, in the maned and tawny... tawny glory of the lion, In the voiceless hierophants of Nature with their hieratic script of colour, Orchid, tulip and narcissus, rose and nenuphar and lotus, Something of eternal beauty seizes on the soul and nerves and heartstrings. Page 679 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

On Thoughts and Aphorisms  >  Aphorism - 58

... 58—The animal, before he is corrupted, has not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the god has abandoned it for the tree of eternal life; man stands between the upper heaven and the lower nature. Is it true that there was an earthly paradise? Why was man driven out of it? 1 From the historical point of view—I am not speaking from the psychological but from the... egoistic god who wanted to Page 92 dominate everything and have everything under his control. And once he had taken the position of supreme lord in relation to earthly realisation, of course he was not pleased that man should make this mental progress, for it would bring him a knowledge that enabled him not to obey any longer! This made him furious! For it would enable man to become a god by... manifestation of the mind was in accord, was still in complete accord with the ascending march of Nature and totally harmonious, without perversion or distortion. This was the first stage of mind's manifestation in material forms. Page 88 How long did it last? It is difficult to say. But for man it was a life that was like a kind of outflowering of animal life. I have a memory of a life in ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Thoughts and Aphorisms

Savitri  >  'The Supreme Consummation'

... face". Nature too will be transfigured, "a divine force shall flow through tissue and cell" and every feeling will become a "celestial thrill":         Thus shall the earth open to divinity       And common natures feel the wide uplift,       Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray       And meet the deity in common things.       Nature shall live to manifest secret God, ... Savitri and Sayavan should be God's dual power—Savitri the force and Satyavan the soul—operating on earth to divinise it; between them they are to give the right turn to human life and point Page 232 to "the souls of men the routes to God". When favourable conditions have been created by the dual power,         The superman shall wake in mortal man       And manifest the... earth-soul to Light       And bring down God into the lives of men;... 87       Descend to life with him thy heart desires.       0 Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,       1 sent you forth of old beneath the stars,       A dual power of God in an ignorant world,       In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,       Bringing down God to the insentient globe,       Lifting ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-2-Part-3

... and it is "Its mights that bridge the gulf twixt man and God". It is the light of these planes that fights against Ignorance and Death. It is in this region that living gods dwell, each trying to build a world in his own right. There knowledge is certain, joy and powers spontaneous. Though these planes are of a different constitution from that of man Page 213 "But since our secret selves... body of God. It can afford the experience of deep peace but cannot embody the nameless Force, because "Our sweet and mighty Mother was not there Who gathers to her bosom her children's lives". Page 221 The rapture of the Infinite, the passion of god-ecstasy proceeding from the boundless heart of love was lacking. For a greater satisfaction of the spiritual hunger of man, a greater... captured truth and want to establish her worship and empire in the world. This Power of Truth, Parā śakti, that is above these higher planes of the mind can become the mental nature in man, serving him as his consort and companion. Man can have a relation of subjection and mastery with her and through all his dealings with her he can experience a throbbing delight. For, in effect, she is not what she seems ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Patterns of the Present  >  3: East and West

... only incarnation of God as man, of the Son of God who was also the Son of Man; the Christian institutions based on this faith were the only ones to possess the means of the salvation and the keys of heaven. Everything outside these institutions was condemned as primitivism and idolatry, as darkness peopled by demons. And when the Western faith became anaemic, when its image of God faded, science replaced... ism in the West. The soul is a part of the Divine – the Son of Man is also the Son of God. As each human being has a soul, Christ declared that he had come to show a new way to the whole of humanity, low as well as high. This doubly offended the Hebraic authorities; he was a blasphemer for asserting that he and all human beings had God within them and could communicate directly with Him, and he upset... world is Brahman, the world is God, the world is Satyam [Truth], the world is Ananda [Bliss]; it is our misreading of the world through mental egoism that is a falsehood and our wrong relation with God in the world that is misery. There is no other falsity and no other cause of sorrow.” 41 “We have then to return to the pursuit of an ancient secret which man, as a race, has seen only obscurely ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Patterns of the Present

Collected Poems  >  Ahana

... by Nature repeated, Careless of Time, with no fear of an end, with no need for endeavour Caught by his ecstasy dwell in a rapture enduring for ever. What was the garden he built when the stars were first set in their places, Soul and Nature together mid streams and in cloudless spaces Naked and innocent? Someone offered a fruit of derision, Knowledge of good and of evil, cleaving in God a division... Form of the formless All-Beautiful, lodestar of Nature's aspirance, Music of prelude giving a voice to the ineffable Silence, First white dawn of the God-Light cast on these creatures that perish, Word-key of a divine and eternal truth for mortals to cherish, Come! let thy sweetness and force be a breath in the breast of the future Making the god-ways alive, immortality's golden-red suture: Deep... ence, we with him climbing; Truth of man's thought with the truth of God's spirit faultlessly timing, That which was mortal shall enter immortality's golden precincts, Hushed breath of ecstasy, honey of lotus depths where the bee sinks, Timeless expanses too still for the voice of the hours to inveigle, Spaces of spirit too vast for the flight of the God-bearing eagle,— Enter the Splendour that ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Words of Long Ago  >  The Supreme Discovery

... in each living creature they shall perceive some hint of a gesture of God, when each man can see God in his brother, then dawn will break, dispelling the darkness, the falsehood, the ignorance, the error and suffering that weigh upon all Nature. For, "all Nature suffers and laments as she awaits the revelation of the Sons of God." This indeed is the central thought epitomising all others, the thought... said: "I would like each one of us to come to the point where he perceives the inner God who dwells even in the vilest of human beings; instead of condemning him we would say, 'Arise, O resplendent Being, thou who art ever pure, who knowest neither birth nor death; arise, Almighty One, and manifest thy nature.'" Let us live by this beautiful utterance and we shall see everything around us transformed... and what we place at the beginning? The ancient traditions rightly said: "Our origin and ourselves, our God and ourselves are one." And this oneness should not be understood merely as a more or less close and intimate relationship of union, but as a true identity. Thus, when a man who seeks the Divine attempts to re-ascend by degrees towards the inaccessible, he forgets that all his knowledge ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of Long Ago

Essays Divine and Human  >  Maya

... In the extreme forms of this view both nature & supernature, man & God are lies of consciousness, myths of a cosmic dream & not worth accepting. Amelioration is a chimera, divinity a lure and only absorption in a transmundane impersonal existence worth pursuing. The worshippers of God, the seekers after human perfection, those who would raise humanity from nature to supernature, find in their path two... two great stumbling blocks, on one side, the lower trend of Nature to persist in its past gains which represents itself in the besotted naturalism of the practical man & the worldling and on the other, this grand overshooting of the mark represented not only by the world-fleeing ascetic, who is after all, within his rights, but by the depressing pessimism of the ignorant who mean neither to flee the... renouncing the truth of Maya, perceives that it is only a partial explanation of existence. Mundane existence is not indispensable either to God's being or to God's bliss, but it is not therefore a vanity; nor is a liberated mundane existence—liberated in God—either a vain or a false existence. The ordinary doctrine of Maya is not a simple truth, but proceeds upon three distinct spiritual perceptions ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  A Global Humanity

... Viewed as a progressive growth of consciousness and transformation of nature, man's advance has been marked out in a few very definite stages. The first was the purely animal man – Pasu – when man lived merely as a physical being, concerned solely about his body. Then came the Pisacha, the man of vital urges in their crudest form, the man of ignorant passions and dark instincts who has been imaged in the... the supra-mental domains formed of the consciousness of the gods. Man, individually and collectively, has passed and is passing through these steps of evolution. The last one is his goal at the present stage. To be a saint, seer or sage is not enough for man. He must be a god. Indeed when he has succeeded to be a god then only would it be possible for him to become what a saint or a seer or... of the consciousness, when the larger vital impulses come into play man becomes the Rakshasa, the demon. Egoistic hunger for possession, enjoyment, enlarged and increased appetite are his characteristics. Next came the Asura, the Titan, the egoistic mental man in his earlier avatar seeking to emerge out of the purely vital nature. Ambition and pride are his guiding spirit. Prometheus is his prototype ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Sri Krishna In Brindavan  >  Sri Aurobindo on Integral Yoga of Divine Love

... for the temple of its self-manifestation. Ordinarily, man is limited in all these parts of his being and he can grasp at first only so much of the divine truth as has some large correspondence to his own nature and its past development and associations. Therefore God meets us first in different limited affirmations of his divine qualities and nature; he presents himself to the seeker as an absolute of... the name and form elected by our nature for its worship. In order that the human being may embrace this Godhead with every part of himself, it is represented with a form that answers to its aspects and qualities and which becomes the living body of God to the adorer. These are those forms of Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Kali, Durga, Christ, Buddha, which the mind of man seizes on for adoration. Even the... other relations, since he follows too knowledge and works and has need of the Divine as teacher, friend and master. The growing of the love of God must carry with it in him an expansion of the knowledge of God and of the action of the divine Will in his nature and living. The divine Lover reveals himself; he takes possession of the life. But still the essential relation will be that of love from which ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Krishna In Brindavan

Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine  >  The Divine Maya

... help the Soul, imprisoned in Nature and its works to free itself in knowledge and the Satchidananda is emerging out of the instruments it has created for its descent and ascent: in the descent mind is an instrument for creating multiple becomings, in the ascent it is a transitional stage. If the mind is not the creator of the world who is the creator ? And why should man accept the world-play ? In... generally protected. Periods of fatigue are probable in yoga because the changes required in nature are radical and time is required for assimilating the new experience and in adjusting the whole of one's nature to it. One has also to bear in mind that in this yoga which accepts life and nature, ignorance has to be eliminated. And that cannot be done completely by the effort and will of the... ordinarily man has many motives that satisfy him in life. A: Ordinary motives—like satisfaction of desires and impulses or higher motives like acquiring wealth or making a success, or ambition for fame or having a place in public life etc., etc.—do contribute to man's inner and outer progress. Only, that path is a very wasteful path. Besides, all these motives do not satisfy man when he succeeds ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Lone to the Lone

... angusthami ā tra purusah, - which is aloof and apart from his apparent and assumed personality and has no dealings with such personalities. God has no up ā dhi, phenomenal qualification, neither has the soul of man. Therefore in his spiritual aspiration, man has to divest himself of all the outer growths that cover and bury his soul: with the clear unmixed vision of his pure soul he has to look straight... characterises the singleness of the one in terms that make of it an essential whole, an integer. Man must isolate himself from his phenomenal being, certainly – as the neti neti formula enjoins – but also he must first find or become his real self, realise his true individuality before he can reach God, the Divine Self, identify himself with the Transcendent. It is only a freely and truly formed ... philosopher Plotinus, the flight of the lone to the lone. God is a solitary and the other solitary is the soul: so when one solitary mingles with the supreme solitary, the result is utter solitariness, which is spirituality at its apex, its highest height. The world, in this view, is an excrescence, an epiphenomenon – Illusion, Maya. God is the transcendent Reality, above and beyond all manifestation ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Talks on Poetry  >  The Heart and the Art of Poetry - Talk Twenty Seven

... philosophy than his. They did not begin with a sense of God as he had done: they began with the physical phenomena themselves. They found them acting with a vast regularity which they could predict by means of their mathematics. Matter was there in front of them — it was an imposing fact. And Matter had a certain nature, and this nature had a certain mode of operation. So far as the telescope gave... appeared to be Page 234 revealed by Newton. Pope summed up Newton's achievement: Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, "Let Newton be!" and there was light. In our own day a poet has added: But not for long. The Devil shouting, "Ho, Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo. Science in our day has become full of puzzling questions. Einstein's ... "Monsieur Laplace, where does God come in?" The reply rang out: "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." La place de Dieu, for Laplace, was nowhere! By Mallarme's time the atheism of such men had become established in the educated French mind. It seemed intellectually dishonest not to accept a Godless universe. What about man in this universe? The scientists saw that man was made up of the same sort ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks on Poetry

In the Mother's Light  >  Physical Transformation

... in its fullness; and that so to manifest is the sole reason of its being here. Sri Aurobindo wrote in one of his letters to Barindra, "What God wants from man is to manifest Him here, in the individual and the collectivity — to realise God in life. The ancient systems of Yoga failed to synthesise or mite spirituality and life; they have explained the world away as Maya (illusion) or a transient... dynamic union with the Divine in life, in every movement of life, in the whole being, in the entire nature and in all its thoughts and feelings and actions; and a persistence of the obscure habits of the physical nature and the subconscient scum is absolutely incompatible with it. So long as a man is on earth, the terrestrial life is his field of achievement, and all that he gains by personal effort... has been possible up to now to purify the mind and the heart to a certain extent and even to discipline and regulate (more by suppression or repression than otherwise) the life-parts of man, but the physical nature has been left almost unreclaimed. Its customary habits and tendencies, its crude appetites and impulses, its mechanical reactions and responses to outward impacts have always been the ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

The Divine Collaborators  >  Physical Transformation

... manifest in its fullness; and that so to manifest is the sole reason of its being here. Sri Aurobindo wrote in one of his letters to Barindra, "What God wants from man is to manifest Him here, in the individual and the collectivity—to realise God in life. The ancient systems of Yoga failed to synthesise or unite spirituality and life; they have explained the world away as Maya (illusion) or a... dynamic union with the Divine in life, in every movement of life, in the whole being, in the entire nature and in all its thoughts and feelings and actions; and a persistence of the obscure habits of the physical nature and the subconscient scum is absolutely incompatible with it. So long as a man is on earth, the terrestrial life is his field of achievement, and all that Page 24 ... collective. It has been possible to purify the mind and the heart to a certain extent and even to discipline and regulate (more by suppression or repression than otherwise) the life-parts of man, but the physical nature has been left almost unreclaimed. Its customary habits and tendencies, its crude appetites and impulses, its mechanical reactions and responses to outward impacts have always been the ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Divine Collaborators

Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  Sadhana

... You said yesterday that realisation of God is not sufficient to change human nature. Disciple : The question arose from a conversation which we had about the Christian mystics. They have an idea that once they realise the Divine Consciousness there is nothing else to be done. They also maintain that after that all the work a man does is., not his but God's, Page 130 Sri Aurobindo... attaining Perfection or God. Sri Aurobindo : I suppose surrender to a man means surrender to the Divine in him, and whether it would be sufficient or not depends upon the man to whom he surrenders, Disciple : Is it the same thing as surrendering to God ? Sri Aurobindo : I suppose when a man surrenders himself  to another man, he surrenders to the Truth in the man, in what other sense... certain forces of nature in their clutches. If you conquer the hostile beings these forces of nature are liberated and help in fulfilling the Lila of God. Thus anger is a; force, of; nature in the clutches of hostile powers. If it can be freed from their influence, it can be used for the divine purpose. Disciple : How can 'anger' act in the divine way ? Sri Aurobindo : God does not hesitate ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

The Life Divine  >  The Eternal and the Individual

... only am I in the world and the world in me, but God is in me and I am in God; by which yet it is not meant that God depends for His existence on man, but that He manifests Himself in that which He manifests within Himself; the individual exists in the Transcendent, but all the Transcendent is there concealed in the individual. Further I am one with God in my being and yet I can have relations with Him... —he is a god in the making. In each of these, plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is there containing and repressing himself as it were in order to make a certain statement of his being. Each is the whole Eternal concealed. Man himself, who takes up all that went before him and transmutes it into the term of manhood, is the individual human being and yet he is all mankind, the universal man acting in... the field for a new good or a more satisfying order. No man is simply good or simply bad; every man is a mixture of contraries: even we find these contraries often inextricably mixed up in a single feeling, a single action. All kinds of conflicting qualities, powers, values meet together and run into each other to make up our action, life, nature. We can only understand entirely if we get to some sense ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine

Education and the Aim of human life  >  Two Cardinal Points of Education

... dawning of a New Age, the beginning of a new life. And the faith of man's unlimited perfectibility, the fundamental optimism of man's heart and mind are completely justified. Biological evolution up to man has proceeded under the pressure of Nature, without the conscious participation of the creatures drawn along this evolution. But man marks the passage from unconscious to conscious evolution. He has... connection two points are of cardinal importance. The first springs from a true insight into human nature and constitution, and this will determine the attitude that the teacher should take towards the growing child. The second concerns the future of man, of man the individual and humanity the collective man. Modern education, on the whole, takes the child as an undeveloped body endowed with a young... evolution of man. He shows that the theory of evolution of which modern science is justly proud and which holds that life evolved out of matter and mind out of life, is susceptible of being extended one step further. May not mind be a veil of a still hidden higher power, which awaits the time of its emergence? The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself ...

Pavitra   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Education and the Aim of human life

Early Cultural Writings  >  The Harmony of Virtue

... preserve the boundaries prescribed by Nature. Each is a separate syllable in the grand poem of the universe: and it is all so inalterable because it is so perfect. Yes, Tennyson was right, tho' like most poets, he knew not what he said, when he wrote those lines on the flower in the crannies: if we know what the flower is, we know also what God is and what man. Wilson —I begin to catch a glimpse... in the tiger, has its seeds deep down in the nature Page 64 of man and if it is minimised in one generation will expand in another, nor is it possible for man to eradicate cruelty without pulling up in the same moment the bleeding roots of his own being. Yet the brute ferocity that in the tiger is graceful and just and artistic, is in the man savage and crude and inharmonious and must be... humanity is tending. Keshav —That is a very different question. Do you think that when a man's life is in harmony with his own creed, but not with yours, he is therefore not virtuous, or in your own phrase, deviates from his duty? Wilson —God forbid! Keshav —Then you really do believe that a man does his duty when he lives in harmony with the ethical scheme patronised by his own religion ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

Mother’s Agenda 1971  >  December 11, 1971

... spearhead of evolution among the great apes. "If," says Sri Aurobindo, "the animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man, man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god." 5 Sri Aurobindo has come to tell us how to create this other being, this supramental being, and not only... creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution." 3 For, in actuality, he says, "the imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit." 4 Beyond the mental man we are, there exists the possibility of another being who will be the spearhead of evolution as man was once the spearhead... [that is needed].... It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature." 2 For the problem is fundamental. It is not a question of bringing a new philosophy to the world or new ideas or illuminations, as they are called. The question is not of making the Prison of our lives more habitable, or of endowing man with ever more fantastic powers. Armed with his microscopes and telescopes ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   Agenda   >   Mother’s Agenda 1971

A Pilgrims Quest for the Highest and the Best  >  Spirituality and Yoga

... the spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seeking. The soldier of the spirit, the hero of God's battle and the gentle and puissant servant of God stand in the vital kinetic nature driven by a higher spiritual energy and turned by it towards an inspired action, a God-given work or mission, the service of some Divine power, idea or ideal. These higher degrees of spirituality... principles. Justice often demands what love abhors, and in fact man's absolute justice easily turns out to be in practice a sovereign injustice. Morality is thus riddled with a state of uncertainty and disequilibrium. Religion is an endeavor of man to turn away from the earth towards the Divine, even though it strives to relate man with God or gods or with the divine consciousness and to build bridges... ty, we find the emergence of the liberated man who has realized the Self and page - 34 Spirit within him. The liberated man enters into the cosmic consciousness and passes into union with the Eternal and, so far as he still accepts life and action, acts by the light and energy of the Power within him working through his human instruments of Nature. There are still higher stages of the spiritual ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Pilgrims Quest for the Highest and the Best

Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  Psychology

... "Soul" – it is the "true person" in man. It is the innermost being in the lower nature, it is the direct representative of the Divine in the lower nature. It is generally supposed to be behind the heart. It is behind the emotional activity which is its surface manifestation. Page 189 Ordinary emotional activity is not psychic in its nature. True psychic emotion is very deep, it... being in a man has : come to the front or when we say that it has become strong ? Sri Aurobindo : When we say that the psychic being has come to the surface we mean that it has begun to exert its influence on the other members of a man's nature-It becomes first an active influence and ultimately  is the influence in the being. And the result of influence is to turn the whole nature towards the... things which man delights in are not much different from those of the animals. We have inherited and brought into our human life much of the animal nature almost intact. All that you call "emotions" are, really speaking, vital in their origin ; and, as I have already told you, man has simply woven a web round them. Animals also have the same vital feelings, emotions and even thoughts. But in man they work ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

The Siege of Troy  >  Appendices

... the fury mounting inside me, down by force. Now, by god, I call a halt to my anger— It's wrong to keep on raging, heart inflamed forever. Quickly drive our long-haired Achaeans to battle now!" Page 67 This god-like man stands as an example to all Greeks —indeed to humanity — as one who subdues his lower nature and puts himself in the hands of the gods to work out a divine... In the experience of war a man is tested to see the strength of his courage and heroism. His nature is honed by gigantic forces (human and divine) that work to bring out noble human possibilities. The struggles between the Greeks and the Trojans, between Achilles and his king Agamemnon, revolve around issues of power and honor (two of the usual passions that dominate man's lower vital). From one point... agree to the destruction of Troy she will allow him to raze Mycenae, Argos, and Sparta to the ground. The war is renewed; many a man falls pierced by arrow, lance, or sword, and "darkness enfolds his eyes." (V) The gods join in the merry slicing game; Ares, the awful god of war, is hurt by Diomed's spear, "utters a cry as of nine thou-sand men" and runs off to complain to Zeus. (VI) In a pretty interlude ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Siege of Troy

Preparing for the Miraculous  >  6: Being Human and the Copernican Principle

... form by a Creator in his own image from the dust of the Earth. This is one of the numerous mythical stories about the origin of man. In this case the image after which he was made must have been that of an anthropomorphic God, in other words a God himself made in the image of man! Still there is a truth behind this myth. 29 When writing about the four varnas – brahmins , kshatriyas , vaishyas... November 2010: “Physics, the book states, can now explain where the universe came from and why the laws of nature are what they are. The universe arose ‘from nothing’ courtesy of the force of gravity, and the laws of nature are an accident of the particular slice of universe we happen to inhabit. ‘God may exist’, Hawking told Larry King, adding, ‘but science can explain the universe without the need for... evolution. In the popular mind man, as Darwin said, is still a descendant of the ape, but today paleoanthropology could neither tell you which ape nor when the event took place. Sri Aurobindo had already written in the Arya : “With regard to man especially there is still an enormous uncertainty as to how he, so like and yet so different from the other sons of Nature, came into existence.” 31 One ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Preparing for the Miraculous

Hitler and his God  >  Parallels and Contrasts

... the individual and would like to lose him in the mass or think of him chiefly as a cell, an atom, have got hold only of the obscurer side of the truth of Nature’s workings in humanity. It is because man is not like the material formations of Nature or like the animal, because she intends in him a more and more conscious evolution, that individuality is so much developed in him and so absolutely important... Hitler and His God Hitler and His God 14. Sri Aurobindo’s Vision Hitler and his God Parallels and Contrasts There are striking parallels between the conceptions of Adolf Hitler and the vision of Sri Aurobindo. After all, Hitler saw himself as the announcer and initiator of a new era in human history which was succeeding the millennium of the Christian... live for remains an enigma. Would racial pride, some resurrected folklore and a religion of the masses suffice? Could the life of a superior racial robot be satisfactory? And who would be their living god after Hitler had left the earthly stage? In contrast with this terrible prospect of a world ruled by racial robots, Sri Aurobindo stressed the crucial importance of the individual, always of a higher ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

Early Cultural Writings  >  "God, the Invisible King"

... ely in man and to man, and that man by Page 588 growth into self-knowledge and God-knowledge can grow into the whole truth of God and existence, which is one truth,—this seems still to be hidden from these wise men of the West. His partial unveiling in man seems to them a birth of the once non-existent Divine, a coming of God into the world, one knows not whence; and because man appears... indispensable; until the mass of mankind can awaken into it, the dream of a perfect society, an open brotherhood of God's rule, must end in failure and disappointment. The kingdom of God within is the sole possible foundation for the kingdom of God without; for it is the spirit by which man lives that conditions the outer forms of his life. Misled by this external view of things Mr. Wells, evidently... materiality mind and soul inexplicably evolve. God appears only in man and his aspiration, his longings for a higher order of things, for love, universal sympathy, immortality. This God and the mechanical inconscient Spirit of the world the Western mind finds it difficult—and no wonder—to bring under the same term. The simple harmonious truth that God is veiled in the material universe which is only ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4  >  The Story of Dr. Faustus Retold

... be a mere human being but an angel, indeed a god. And yet there is a still more mysterious mystery. Satan or his armies do not quite belong to the outside world apart from you, they are within you, at least their foothold is within you. In fact man is a twofold being, one half of him belongs to the Divine, the other half to the un-Divine. His nature is a twofold string, the two inextricably intertwined... you must have seen him on our school stage, was a very learned man. His ambition was to acquire all knowledge, knowledge of all subjects, of all arts and sciences. But he wanted not only to be a doctor of theories but of practice also, not only a learned man but a man of power in addition – not only to know but to control. Universal nature was his field and he sought not only to measure and survey the... between God and Satan. Satan said: "I am here to win away your children from you and make of them my slaves." God said: "My sons can never be your bond-slaves. You may test and try them, you may believe for a time you have won but your trials and ordeals only make them stronger in their inner being and they all come back to me." The soul is never lost, there is no eternal hell. But man, the ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

Teilhard de Chardin and our Time  >  Teilhardism and the Modern Religious Intuition

... "   De Lubac admits Teilhard's urge and need to arrive at an intellectual basis for the existence of Jesus as God-Man no less than for the existence of God as Person and for the value of the person-element in the world-plan. What de Lubac fails to bring forward is the nature of the intellectual basis. We have a clue to it in Teilhard's own expressions: "the whole effort of 'evolution'", "an... 243 O, be prepared, my soul! To read the inconceivable, to scan The million forms of God those stars unroll When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.   Our quotation from Teilhard is Meynellian through and through, though the "organic" and "physical" nature Teilhard's Evolutionism would discern in Christ's cosmicity was beyond the imaginative ken of the Victorian... their reference to the comment by Mooney, The passage is: "If things are to find their coherence in Christ, we must ultimately admit that there is in the nature of Christ, besides the specifically individual elements of Man - and in virtue of God's choice - some universal physical reality, a certain cosmic extension of his body and soul."   A little after the passage Teilhard 48 tells us: ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny  >  Some Danger Signals

... of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature." (The Life Divine, p. 847) Sri Aurobindo has referred to the same ominous possibility in his epic, Savitri: "Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God; What hides within her breast she must reveal. I claim thee for the world that thou hast made. If man lives bound by his humanity, If he is tied... preparedness or willingness of humanity. Thus we find in The Life Divine: "If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind Page 72 and supermanhood or at least... of that Work. If we Ashramites remain sincere in our effort and do not deviate from the Goal that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have set before us, there is no reason why our Ashram cannot realise its God-given destiny. But if we fail to fulfil the conditions for our spiritual awakening, we may be left behind and the Mother and Sri Aurobindo may initiate their work of integral transformation elsewhere ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

Hymns to the Mystic Fire  >  RV IV.7.1-3

... outwardly of physical, inwardly of psychical nature. Thus Agni outwardly is the physical principle of fire, but inwardly the god of the psychic godward flame, force, will, Tapas; Surya outwardly the solar light, inwardly the god of the illuminating revelatory knowledge; Soma outwardly the moon and the Soma-wine or nectarous moon plant, inwardly the god of the spiritual ecstasy, Ananda. The principal... take a larger view of the divine nature and functions of the god Agni. He is a god of the earth, a force of material being, अवमः; but he seems too [to] be a vital (Pranic) force of will in desire, devouring, burning through his own smoke; and again he is a mental power. Men see him द्यामिव स्तृभिः, heaven and the midworld and earth are his portion. But again he is a god Page 689 of Swar, one... power in man which awakes in the inner sacrifice. This Fire has built all the worlds; this creative Power, Agni Jatavedas, knows all the births, all that is in the worlds; he is the messenger who knows earth, knows how to ascend the difficult slope of heaven, आरोधनं दिवः, knows the way to the home of the Truth,—he mediates between God and man. These things apply only with difficulty to the god of physical ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Hymns to the Mystic Fire

Sri Aurobindo's Message  >  Key-word of the Yoga - Self-Surrender

... is at once an ascent of the soul towards God and a descent of the Godhead into the embodied nature. The ascent demands a one-centred all-gathering aspiration of soul and mind and life and body upward, the descent a call of the whole being towards the infinite and eternal Divine. ... There must be an opening and surrender of the whole nature to receive and enter into a greater divine... mind, life and body, any human psychological or physical process but only by the action of the supreme Shakti. ... Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man, but he can call down the divine Truth and its power to work in him. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptacle. Self-surrender to a supreme transmuting Power is the key-word of the Yoga. ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Sri Aurobindo's Message

Hitler and his God  >  “The Dwarf Napoleon”

... nothing less than the destiny of humanity: But if its tenebrous empire were allowed, Its mastery would prepare the dismal hour When the Inconscient shall regain its right, And man who emerged as Nature’s conscious power, Shall sink into the deep original night Sharing like all her forms that went before The doom of the mammoth and the dinosaur. Sri Aurobindo knew how the possession... Hitler and His God Hitler and His God 16. Two Poems Hitler and his God “The Dwarf Napoleon” Sri Aurobindo wrote two poems about Hitler and Nazism; both poems are reproduced in extenso below. The first, called “The Dwarf Napoleon – Hitler, October 1939”, is written in a polemical, scathing vein; it is an ad hominem attack on Adolf Hitler shortly after... set down as impossible in the chances of the future, and the urge in Nature always creates its own means.” 1035 Our universe is the work of Nature, and so is its evolution, “moving with difficulty upward from Matter to Spirit”. The primal condition, responsible for the fact that this is an evolutionary universe, is the work of Nature, for so is the manifestation of the great negative beings, called “asuras” ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

From Man Human to Man Divine  >  Sight More Sight

... The mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle, The body intuition's instrument, And life a channel for God's visible power. .... The spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes, The Spirit's force shall occupy Nature's force. .... The Spirit shall be the master of his world Lurking no more in form's obscurity And Nature shall reverse her action's rule, ... Veda, the self-revelatory knowledge of Surya, the Sun-God. "...The Sun-God represents the divine Illumination of the Kavi which exceeds mind and forms the pure self-luminous Truth of things.... His realm is described as the Truth, the Law, the Vast (satyam, ṛ tam, b ṛ hai). He is the Fosterer or Increaser ( pu ṣ an), for he enlarges and opens man's dark and limited being into a luminous and infinite... us think or feel; ... Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word-images which become the expressive body of the vision..." 98 Such being the case, the veritable ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   From Man Human to Man Divine

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Terrestrial Law

... the rock on which the ship drives do not ask whether the just man drowned in the waters deserved his fate. If there is a divine or a cosmic justice that works in these cruelties, if the lightning that strikes impartially tree or beast or man, is—but it would appear in the case of the man alone, for the rest is accident,—the sword of God or the instrument of Karma, if the destruction wrought by the... other law or justice. No law of Karma, the moral law included, could exist, if there were not to begin with this principle as the first foundation of order. What then is the relation of man to this physical Nature, man this soul intervening in and physically born of her in a body subjected to her law of action? what his function as something that is yet more than her, a life and a mind and a spirit?... virtues. Man as he dares the perils of physical nature, dares too the perils of the vital energy by transgressing her safe rules and limits which she imposes automatically on the animal. There are balances of her use of her energies, safe measures and restraints which make living as secure as it can be,—for all living is naturally a peril and an adventure, but a certain prudence in Nature minimises ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-2-Part-1

... thinking brain in addition to the apparatus of sensation and feeling. Through man Nature looked at herself and a feeling of wonder seized her in man. Even though man is "moulded a being out of a driven force", still. Nature is not satisfied in him. For "To be what she was not inflamed her hope". And, as a result, in man "An opening looked up to spheres above And coloured shadows limned... characteristic. He saw in it rather the mighty beginnings of "some tremendous dawn of God"— "The first writhings of cosmic serpent Force Uncoiled from the mystic ring of Matter's trance". The whole purpose of this movement seemed to him to be "To release the glory of God in Nature's mud" and behind all this lower play of life-force he felt a mystic Presence... Light, as the poet says, "but now, the Light supreme is far away" and generally "Our conscious life obeys the inconscience's law". This fate lasts so long as man's soul does not attain its freedom. When man awakes to his free Self, then, "Nature steps into the eternal Light", "Then only ends this dream of nether life". At the outset, he saw that in the Eternal consciousness there appeared something ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Vedic and Philological Studies  >  Ritam

... ratnam vasu, visvam tokam tmaná must describe either the nature of the ritam or the results of successful reaching & habitation in the ritam. Toka means son, says the ritualist. I fail to see how the birth of a son can be the supreme result of a man’s perfecting his nature & reaching the divine Truth; I fail to see also what is meant by a man marching unoverthrown beyond sin & falsehood towards pleasant... the higher & divine being so that human activities may be led up to the divine nature & be established in the divine consciousness, then there is either no meaning in human language or no sense or coherence in the Veda. The Vedic sacrificer is devayu,—devakámah,—one who desires the god or the godhead, the divine nature; or devayan, one who is in the process of divinising his human life & being; the... the truth, them, O Soma, head & navel, enjoy, thou, O Soma, know when they grow to thee in their being.” Soma is the lord of the immortalising nectar, he is the god of Ananda, the divine bliss which belongs to the Amrita or divine nature of Sacchidananda and is its foundation. The most high seat of the truth, Mahas, the pure ideal principle which links the kingdom of Immortality to our mortal worlds ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Vedic and Philological Studies

The Secret of the Veda  >  The Doctrine of the Mystics

... willing and longing bride; he shall become her seer and rule her as her King. By the hymn of prayer and God-attraction, by the hymn of praise and God-affirmation, by the hymn of God-attainment and self-expression man can house in himself the Gods, build in this gated house of his being the living image of their deity, grow into divine births, form within himself vast and luminous worlds for his soul... framed in the heart and mind of man and his life must be turned into a conscious and voluntary offering in which the soul is no longer the victim, but the master of the sacrifice. By right sacrifice and by the all-creative and all-expressive Word that shall arise out of his depths as a sublime hymn to the Gods man can achieve all things. He shall conquer his perfection; Nature shall come to him as a willing... of the Truth; the cosmic soul rising in attainment strives as the spiritual man for a higher peace, joy and harmony. These are the five Aryan types, each of them a great people occupying its own province or state of the total human nature. But there is also the absolute Aryan who would conquer and pass beyond these states to the transcendental harmony of them all. It is the supramental Truth that ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Secret of the Veda

Questions and Answers (1929-1931)  >  The Thousands

... if, for a single instant, he renders homage to a man who has mastered his nature, this brief homage has more value than all his long devotions. Page 226 Whatever the sacrifices and oblations a man in this world may offer throughout a whole year in order to acquire merit, that is not worth even a quarter of the homage offered to a just man. For one who is respectful to his elders, four... important than all external victories. Page 227 There is also an interesting reflection, that a victory over oneself is the only victory which is truly safe from the intervention of any god or power of Nature or any instrument of evil. If you have gained self-mastery on one point, that goes beyond the reach of any intervention even from the very highest powers, whether they are gods of the Overmind... all the peoples. No god, no Gandharva, 1 nor Mara nor Brahma 2 can change that victory to defeat. If, month after month, for a hundred years one offers sacrifices by the thousand, and if for a single instant one offers homage to a being full of wisdom, that single homage is worth more than all those countless sacrifices. If for a hundred years a man tends the flame on Agni's ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Questions and Answers (1929-1931)

Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God  >  6: The Chain of Being

... the universe as a Great Chain of Being.” Vast chain of being! which from God began, Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eyes can see, No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee, From thee to nothing … Thus wrote the popular poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in his Essay on Man . (The wonders revealed by the microscope – the “glass” – were thrilling the... work out the superman, the god. … The animal is man in the making; man himself is that animal and yet the something more of self-consciousness and dynamic power of consciousness that make him man; and yet again he is something more which is contained and repressed in his being as the potentiality of the divine: he is a god in the making. In each of these, plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is there ... riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within and above by the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness and eternal Wisdom confronting him as an inscrutable divine Maya.” 22 And he writes in The Life Divine : “The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

Blake's Tyger  >  The Poem in the General Context of Blake's Work

... gets assimilated into Christ. And elsewhere too, when Blake refers, without giving names, to Tharmas as the Strong Man, Luvah as the Beautiful Man and Urizen as the Ugly Man, he says: "They were originally one man, who was fourfold;... and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God." 254 The identification of Los with Christ is suggested in full when we hear of "the Poetic Genius, which is the... in the questions he asks soon after: "Is God a Spirit who must be worshipped in Spirit & Truth, & are not the Gifts of the Spirit Every-thing to Man? What is the Life of Man but Art & Science? is it Meat & Drink?" 45 Blake wishes to emphasize the intellect-part, the soul-side of our being, through which we can progress into the supreme Mind and Spirit of God, our true Self who is the 40. Ibid... its Miltonic character is beyond dispute. Let us listen to the news brought - about "Albion", "the Eternal Man" - by messengers to "those in Great Eternity" who are one in "Jesus the Christ". Before "the Council of God", met "as One Man" to receive them, they declare: "The Eternal Man wept in the holy tent: Our Brother in Eternity, "Even Albion whom thou lovest, wept in pain; his family ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Blake's Tyger

Early Cultural Writings  >  The National Value of Art

... the triple term in which ānanda may be stated is Joy, Love, Beauty. To see divine beauty in the whole world, man, life, nature, to love that which we have seen and to have pure unalloyed bliss in that love and that beauty is the appointed road by which mankind as a race must climb to God. That is the reaching to vidyā through avidyā , to the One Pure and Divine through the manifold manifestation... delight of emotions, the wonder, pathos, beauty, enjoyableness, lovableness, calm, serenity, clarity and also the grandeur, heroism, passion, fury, terror and horror of life, of man, of Nature, of the phenomenal manifestation of God. This is not the highest, but it is higher than the animal, vital and externally aesthetic developments. The large part it plays in life is obvious, but in life it is hampered... harmony of colours, can raise this apparently insignificant medium to suggest absolute and profound truths with a perfection which language labours with difficulty to reach. What Nature is, what God is, what man is can be triumphantly revealed in stone or on canvas. Behind a few figures, a few trees and rocks the supreme Intelligence, the supreme Imagination, the supreme Energy lurks, acts, feels, ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  The Mother in her Triple Poise

... steps of this radical transmutation. For, who else except the Divine Mother can effect tins change of the lower into the higher nature, bestowing upon man the double freedom of self-expression—the freedom of the soul and the freedom of the converted and divinised .nature? THE INDIVIDUAL POISE The most immediately effective and mysteriously transfiguring poise of the Mother is in... of the crowning expression of his God-drunk state and highest illumination, flashes a Page 86 mysterious hint, a bare but very significant suggestion, of a certain truth which will be apparent to us as we proceed in our consideration of the objectification and individualisation of the Mother's Presence for a radical transformation of our active nature. The Mother, whom Sri Râmakrishna... put out in front for the supramental creation and fulfilment in man- kind. The key to the highest spiritual achievement of the modem age is, therefore, in the hands of the Mother, and to be able to receive Her Grace is to qualify for a share in the glory of that consummation. This brings us to the question of the Avatarhood of God. Each epoch of a crucial turning in the life of humanity is graced ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  The New Humanity

... become his supreme Dharmashastra; for science seeks to teach us the moods of Nature and the methods of propitiating her. Our actual ideal of man is that of the cleverest slave. But the New Man will have found himself and by and according to his inner will, mould and create his world. He will not be in awe of Nature and in an attitude of perpetual apprehension and hesitation, but will ground himself on... varied experiences of his terrestrial life. The New Man will be Master—and not slave. He will be master, first, of himself and then of the world. Man as he actually is, is but a slave. He has no personal voice or choice; the determining soul, the Ishwara, in him is sleep-bound and hushed. He is a mere plaything in the hands of nature and circumstances. Therefore it is that Science has become... to live and so lives poorly and miserably. But the age is now upon us when the god-like soul anointed with its immortal royalties is ready to emerge and claim our salutation. The breath and the surge of the new creation cannot be mistaken. The question that confronts us today is no longer Whether the New Man, the Super-humanity, will come or if at all, when; but the question we have to ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

Savitri  >  Yoga

... intimate and living relation possible between God and man." 51 Rejection of all dharmas and total surrender to the Divine, such should be the decisive action. The rest would follow, for now the Divine would take up the responsibility. Krishna tells Arjuna in effect:   This then is the supreme movement, this complete surrender of your whole self and nature, this abandonment of all dharmas to ... leading to God or the Life Divine.         Aurobindo took these and other ideas from the older yogas and evolved a dynamic and truly multiform yoga of his own, which he called Integral or Purna Yoga. It was not necessary, he thought, to isolate this or that faculty or instrument; all could be simultaneously used to bring about the desired union with God or the desired transformation of man. He developed... spiritual power and being and divinise by it a liberated nature in the whole range of human living is our inspiring motive.   The principle in view is a self-surrender, a giving up of the human being into the being, consciousness, power, delight of the Divine, a union or communion at all the points of meeting in the soul of man, the mental being, by which the Divine himself.. ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Mystery and Excellence of the Human Body  >  Aikido

... followers to get closer to God: 1. Observe the true phenomena of nature and you will be thinking of the body (substance) of the only true God. 2. Observe the impeccable working of the universe and you will be thinking of the energy of the only true God. Page 667 3. Observe the mentality of living beings and you will understand the soul of the only true God. Reference to energy... weapons: the pure spirit of budo means accepting the spirit of the universe, spreading peace throughout the world, speaking correctly, protecting and honouring all nature's creatures. I understood that the purpose of budo is to accept the love of God in its true sense which protects and cultivates all living things and that it is advisable to use and assimilate it with our mind and body.' The master also... rediscover nature, cultivate the land and above all to strengthen his body, persuaded him to move to the north of Japan, to the island of Hokkaido. He was then 27. A year later, a meeting took place which was to alter the course of his life. The origin of aiki-do and the cost of learning This was a meeting with Master Sokaku from the Daito jujutsu ryu. Master Takeda was a man of small ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Mystery and Excellence of the Human Body

Words of the Mother - III  >  19 July 1958

... consciousness that has filled all Nature with the idea of sin and all the misery which it brings! Animals are not unhappy in the way we are, not at all, not at all, except, as Sri Aurobindo says, those that have been corrupted. The corrupted ones are those that live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt. It is because their whole aspiration is to become like man—man is god—and then, dissimulation,... own nature, its own truth, should spontaneously discover its own way of using things. When you live according to the truth of your being, you have no need to learn things, you do them spontaneously, according to the inner law. When you follow your nature spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine. As soon as you think, see yourself doing and begin to discuss, you are full of sin. It is man's mental... manifestation is divine without mixture, that is to say, spontaneously, by its very nature. It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally he is much more conscious! That is not to be disputed, it is well understood, because what we call consciousness (what "we" call, that is to say, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and mentalise things. It is not the ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of the Mother - III

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  An Aspect of Emergent Evolution

... Page 59 speaks of the Overmind and the Supermind, as farther steps of the evolutionary progress coming after Mind. He says that Mind closes the interior hemisphere of man's nature and consciousness; with Overmind man enters into the higher sphere of the Spirit. In this view, the religious feeling or perception or conduct would be but an intermediary stage between Mind and Overmind. They are... is, exists in God who is the all-continent. In fact, everything that is or was or shall be is in Him. And the evolutionary gradation expresses or puts in front, one by one, all the principles or types of existence that God holds in Himself. The explanation hardly explains. It simply posits the existence of Matter and Life and Mind and whatever is to come hereafter in the infinity of God, but the passage... Now after Mind there emerges another principle which has been termed Deity. By Deity the emergent evolutionists mean the embodiment of the religious feeling – piety, charity, worship, love of God or of God's creatures. Indeed, saints and prophets are visible deities, embodiments of the Deity in the making. These represent another element in the evolutionary process – a new evolute. Does this point ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 2  >  An Aspect of Emergent Evolution

... fact, Sri Aurobindo speaks of the Overmind and the Supermind, as farther steps of the evolutionary progress coming after Mind. He says that Mind closes the inferior hemisphere of man's nature and consciousness; with Overmind man enters into the higher sphere of the Spirit. In this view, the religious feeling or perception or conduct would be but an intermediary stage between Mind and Overmind. They are... is, exists in God who is the all-continent. In fact, everything that is or was or shall be is in Him. And the evolutionary gradation expresses or puts in front, one by one, all the principles or types of existence that God holds in Himself. The explanation hardly explains. It simply posits the existence of Matter and Life and Mind and whatever is to come hereafter in the infinity of God, but the passage... process. Now after Mind there emerges another principle which has been termed Deity. By Deity the emergent evolutionists mean the embodiment of the religious feeling—piety, charity, worship, love of God or of God's creatures. Indeed, saints and prophets are visible deities, embodiments of the Deity in the making. These represent another element in the evolutionary process— a new evolute. Does this ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 2

India's Rebirth  >  1910-1922: Essays, Letters and Articles

... opposition between world-nature Page 143 and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought of India has never taken refuge. We have to look courageously in... see that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being and that so he has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures.... No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace;... and the prophet has omitted from his teachings. There will always be more in God than the thought of man has ever conceived or the tongue of man has ever uttered. * The mediaeval ascetics hated women and thought they were created by God for the temptation of monks. One may be allowed to think more nobly both of God and of woman. Fight, while thy hands are free, with thy hands and thy voice ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   India's Rebirth

Hitler and his God  >  A Higher and a Lower Choice: What Went Wrong

... outbreak of the Second World War. For a time Germany was the only nation in which there was a longing and a possibility to go beyond man, as shown in the pages of our story about the projection of one kind of a superman or other, as well as in those about the knowledge that “God” was to be met in one’s own soul, and that this soul could communicate with the soul of the nation and the soul in all. What power... Hitler and His God Hitler and His God 14. Sri Aurobindo’s Vision Hitler and his God A Higher and a Lower Choice: What Went Wrong And yet, seldom has a non-German shown a greater appreciation for the qualities and possibilities in the German people than Sri Aurobindo. “Germany was for the time the most remarkable instance of a nation preparing for the ... my life, my mind, my temperament’, and became attached with a Titanic force to these; especially she had said, ‘I am my life and body’, and than that there can be no greater mistake for man or nation. The soul of man or nation is something more and diviner than that; it is greater than its instruments and cannot be shut up in a physical, a vital, a mental or a temperamental formula. So to confine it ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

From Man Human to Man Divine  >  Man, the Individual and Social Being

... of man. This subconscient is the field of all sorts of blind powerful impulses which surge up now and then to the surface and smash to pieces everything bright and golden erected there in the course of long labour and preparation. So long as this subconscient part of man's nature remains un-tackled and untransformed, the individual cannot be made perfect and remoulded 'in the image of God.' ... But since the evolution is progressive, the true person does not at once show himself in the outward nature of the individual. He is now, as it were, the constitutional monarch, and his false deputy, the ego, is governing the nature of man. But the first preoccupation of man should be to discover this secret person and dwell in his consciousness. But this is not enough. For, ... till this day, man's attempts at harmonisation have all miscarried and failed. He has tried his hand at a number of remedies, but the disease seems to have defied all palliatives up till now. In spite of his great and elaborate material civilisation man Page 219 has not travelled a whit towards true unity with his fellow-beings. Essentially in his nature he has remained ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   From Man Human to Man Divine

The Renaissance in India  >  Indian Spirituality and Life - 2

... s in the nature of man. A Truth, Right and Law sustains and governs all these levels of Nature; one in essence, it takes in them different but cognate forms. There is for instance the series of the outer physical light, another higher and inner light which is the vehicle of the mental, vital and psychic consciousness and a highest inmost light of spiritual illumination. Surya, the Sun-God, was the... physically-minded man made the development possible. But in its turn this raising of the basis of religion to the inner mind and life and psychic nature, this training and bringing out of the psychic man ought to make possible a still larger development and support a greater spiritual movement as the leading power of life. The first stage makes possible the preparation of the natural external man for spirituality;... Vedic seers saw as the aim of man and his life thousands of years ago and the Vedantic sages cast into the clear and immortal forms of their luminous revelation. Even the psychic-emotional part of man's nature is not the inmost door to religious feeling, nor is his inner mind the highest witness to spiritual experience. There is behind the first the inmost soul of man, in that deepest secret heart ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Renaissance in India

Isha Upanishad  >  Isha Upanishad

... of our nature should normally take us towards our fulfilment. Sin compels it instead to travel with stumblings amid uneven and limited tracts and along crooked windings ( duritāni, vṛjināni ). × The word vidhema is used of the ordering of the sacrifice, the disposal of the offerings to the God and, generally... the inner sense of the Veda Surya, the Sun-God, represents the divine Illumination of the Kavi which exceeds mind and forms the pure self-luminous Truth of things. His principal power is self-revelatory knowledge, termed in the Veda "Sight". His realm is described as the Truth, the Law, the Vast. He is the Fosterer or Increaser, for he enlarges and opens man's dark and limited being into a luminous and... sole Seer, Seer of Oneness and Knower of the Self, and leads him to the highest Sight. He is Yama, Controller or Ordainer, for he governs man's action and manifested being by the direct Law of the Truth, satyadharma , and therefore by the right principle of our nature, yāthātathyataḥ . A luminous power proceeding from the Father of all existence, he reveals in himself the divine Purusha of whom all beings ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

The Future Poetry  >  The Movement of Modern Literature - II

... is nearer, less grossly human, more supernatural to physical Nature; the symbols it is beginning to create and its reinterpretation of the old symbols are more adequate and more revealing; rid of the old insufficient forms and limiting creeds, it is admitting a near, direct and fearless seeing and experience of God in Nature, God in man, God in the universal and the eternal. From faith it has advanced... regretful scepticism, or a defiant atheism exulting in the revolt of the great denial, the hymn of the Void, an eternal Nihil which has taken the place of God, or else the large idea of Nature as a universal entity, the Mother of our being. To Science this Nature is only an inconscient Force; the poetic mind with its natural turn for finding a reality even behind what are to the intellect abstract conceptions... interests, so many-sided and universal, in man past and present after embracing all that attracts the observing eye in his life and history and apparent nature comes back to a profounder interest in the movements of his deeper self which reveals itself to an extended psychological experience and an intuitive sense. But an insistent interest in future man has been the most novel, the most fruitfully ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  Life and Time in Savitri

... distinguished in the nature of their manifestation. This may be illustrated with a story from the Bible. Jacob, who was named Israel by the angel of God and whose name today the Jewish State bears, had a wondrous mystical dream. 5 He saw a ladder that reached from Earth to Heaven, and he saw the angels of God ascending and descending from it. Yahweh, the Lord God, through this sign showed... to Immortality. 24 Thus the temporal life has significance only in its reference to the infinity for which man strives. For man time would lose meaning without infinity. The temporal life is meaningful only if one is able to enkindle the Life Divine, which is the true nature of the Self. 22 Savitri, p. 256. 23 Ibid., p. 336. 24 Ibid ., p. 339 Page 314 ... of soul called man Shall stand out on the background of long Time A glowing epitome of eternity, A little point reveal the infinitudes. 33 Although the above lines are spoken in the context of Aswapati, yet they bring out one of the recurring themes of all the teachings and writings of Sri Aurobindo. Man is a humble finite creature but stands out in Nature as the single ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

Mother’s Agenda 1951-1960  >  July 19, 1958

... is man's mental consciousness that has filled all Nature with Page 181 the idea of sin and all the misery it brings. Animals are not at all unhappy in the way we are. Not at all, not at all, except—as Sri Aurobindo says—those that are corrupted. Those that are corrupted are those that live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt, for their whole aspiration is to resemble man. Man... divine, without mixture; in other words, it exists spontaneously and in harmony with its nature. It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally, he is much more conscious! There's no question about it, it's a fact, although what we call consciousness (what 'we' call it, that is, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and mentalize things. It is not the true... should be eaten in its own way. The being who lives according to his own nature, his own truth, must spontaneously find the right way of using things. When you live according to the truth of your being, you don't need to learn things: you do them spontaneously, according to the inner law. When you sincerely follow your nature, spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine. As soon as you think or look ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   Agenda   >   Mother’s Agenda 1951-1960

Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine  >  Appendix

... He has made this tenement of flesh his own, His image in the human measure cast T hat to his divine measure we may rise;" "A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme; His nature we must put on as he put ours; We are sons of God and must be even as he: His human portion, we must grow divine." It is for working this great miracle that the Supreme has accepted Ignorance and... fulfilment of the limb intended by Nature or God. This solution based on monism has been accepted by a portion of humanity and is even followed by it. And it must be admitted that there is some truth in that outlook, however exaggerated. An infinite, omnipresent Reality is at the basis of this universe and in that Reality Ignorance does not find a place as it finds in man's consciousness : it does not exist... sense is outraged at the thought that a God all-merciful, all-knowing—if you call that Omnipresent Reality, God—has created a creature called man and inflicted Ignorance upon him; but that is not true. According to this view, God has managed to become ignorant: He has submitted Himself to a process which we know as Ignorance. And now the same Divinity—in man—feels a very galling sense of imperfection ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

Collected Poems  >  Rose of God

... flower, Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour. Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of might, Rose of Power with thy diamond halo piercing the night! Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of thy plan, Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man. Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire, Rose of Life, crowded with petals... like a sweet and magical rhyme; Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time. Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face, Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace! Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss: Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life Beatitude's kiss. Page 564 ... Collected Poems Rose of God Know more > Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven, Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven! Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame, Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name. Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being, Rose of Light ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  19th January 1939

... to it. Sri Aurobindo : D used to say to Dr. Le Mongnac, “It is impossible for me to fail because I am a God-man.” He said to many people here that he is not afraid because he is Sri Aurobindo’s disciple. He got the power from the Mother and all agree that he is the one man who can do something if he wanted to. Mrs. R used to write : “What has N come to – at Pondicherry? He is writing... pure Bhakta-nature. But all spiritual men are not saints, of course, both can go together, sometimes. Disciple : Is there a distinction between saints and spiritual persons? Sri Aurobindo : Of course, there is; saints are limited by their psychic nature, but spiritual men are not. The saint, generally, proceeds from and lives in the heart-centre. The spiritual man might live in... joint that all diseases are of the nature of inflammations. After he departed, Sri Aurobindo asked : "In what sense are all illnesses inflammations?  There could be any setisfactory explanation of it." The topic of Aldous Huxley's book "Ends & Means" was taken up by a disciple. Disciple : Huxley suggests two ways of solving the problems of man. One by changing the existing in ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  Savitri-The Devikavyam

... Soul and the Nature-Soul, Purusha and Prakriti: O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri, Isent you forth of old beneath the stars, A dual power of God in an ignorant world, In a hedged creation shut from limitless self, Bringing down God to the insentient globe, Lifting earth-beings to immortality... He is the soul of man climbing to God In Nature's surge out of ... Presence kneels in prayer. 36 For the moment we brush aside all the tomes of philosophical exegesis, the complications of metaphysical calculations and the whirring chaos of Nature's activities. The Nature-soul in man itself is now withdrawn into a single-pointed prayer from the depths of the heart. It is the anxious call of the lost child searching for its mother in a crowded bazaar, interiorised... Unknown is she, A power of silence in the depths of God; She is the Force, the inevitable Word, The magnet of our difficult ascent, The Sun from which we kindle all our suns, The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts, The joy that beckons from the impossible, The Might of all that never yet came down. All Nature dumbly calls to her alone To heal with her feet ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

The Human Cycle  >  Self-Determination

... property of the man over the woman, was once an axiom of social life and has only in recent times been effectively challenged. So strong was or had become the instinct of this domination in the male animal man, that even religion and philosophy have had to sanction it, very much in that formula in which Milton expresses the height of masculine egoism, "He for God only, she for God in him,"—if not actually... rather than God or the universal Life in place of God, stood as the author of the child's being; and the creator has every right over his creation, the producer over his manufacture. He had the right to make of him what he willed, and not what the being of the child really was within, to train and shape and cut him according to the parental ideas and not rear him according to his own nature's deepest needs... upon it in order to carry it out in newer and fuller ways for which a past humanity was not ready. The recognition and fulfilment of the divine being in oneself and in man, the kingdom of God within and in the race is the basis on which man must come in the end to the possession of himself as a free self-determining being and of mankind too in a mutually possessing self-expansion as a harmoniously sel ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Higher Lines of Karma

... which alone can make the law of our conduct a thing true and living,—an ethical being with an inalienably ethical nature. No rule imposed on him from outside, whether in the name of a supposed mechanical or impersonal law or of God or prophet, can be, as such, true or right or binding on man: it becomes that only when it answers to some demand or aids some evolution of his inner being. And when that inner... on each part of our self and nature and consciousness there can come a call and irresistible attraction of the Divine. Indeed, an uplift of all these, an imperative of the Divine upon all the ways of our being, is the impetus of self-enlargement to a complete, an integralising possession of God, freedom and immortality, and that therefore is the highest law of our nature. The fundamental movement... because to follow evil is a degradation and affliction of its being and a fall from its innate and imperative endeavour. This is to it a necessity of its moral nature, a truly categorical imperative, a call that in the total more complex nature of man may be dulled or suppressed or excluded by the claim of its other parts and their needs, but to the ethical mind is binding and absolute. The virtue that demands ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Karmayogin  >  Jhalakati Speech

... the movement will not cease. It will move forward irresistibly until God's will in it is fulfilled. He fulfils His purposes inevitably and this too He will fulfil. Those who are taken from us must after all some day pass away. We are strong in their strength. We have worked in their inspiration. But in the inevitable course of nature they will pass from us and there must be others who will take their... not perish as a nation, but live as a nation. Any authority that goes against this object will dash itself against the eternal throne of justice—it will dash itself against the laws of nature which are the laws of God, and be broken to pieces. This then is our object and by what means do we seek it? We seek it by feeling our separateness and pushing forward our individual self-fulfilment by what... physical force. We are a people in whom God has chosen to manifest Himself more than any other at many great moments of our history. It is because God has chosen to manifest Himself and has entered into the hearts of His people that we are rising again as a nation. Therefore it matters not even if those who are greatest and most loved are taken away. I trust in God's mercy and believe that they will soon ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Karmayogin

Sri Aurobindo for All Ages  >  XII: The Integral Yoga and the Ashram (1927-1938)

... its full organisation in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather... apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.' You can now see why renunciation of the world has no place in Sri Aurobindo's yoga. What must be renounced, rejected completely, is the hold of egoism and of the lower movements of nature in man — the instincts... the means, but the aim is always the union of the soul of man with the Divine, the Self, God, Brahman, or whatever name we give to that One Reality. It is possible for the soul of man to unite with the Divine because the soul — the psychic being, as Sri Aurobindo calls it — is a portion of the Divine and it is through this union that man can gain true Knowledge, 'knowledge by identity', in Sri ...

Nirodbaran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo for All Ages

Varieties of Yogic Experience and Integral Realisation  >  Appendix

... from the torture caused by the insects; for if he wished to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one another.² Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man is killed by murderers or strong beasts of prey it is soon over; but I lie dying here under the cruel insects, and yet cannot die. The nights in winter were never... was impure before God. I saw myself struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my name. [Here follows an account of his six months' hesitation to break away from the conditions of his life at Bagdad, at the end of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then, feeling my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will, I repaired to God like a man in distress who has... who reject and avoid the things perceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by narration and hearsay. Yet God has brought prophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal characters. This state is sleep. If you" were to tell a man who was himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are people ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Varieties of Yogic Experience and Integral Realisation

Talks on Poetry  >  The Heart and the Art of Poetry - Talk Thirty Nine

... only with any vocabulary and with any theme but also from any plane. According to Sri Aurobindo, man lives on several planes, and Existence is a manifold chord of powers, each power constituting a plane on which there is a universal play and within this universal Nature a large number of individual natures. People do not always realise that there are other worlds than the physical: they consider all... occurs from inside the levels and not from their surface. This specification takes us back to the phrase with which we commenced our lecture: inner nature. Poetry, like all art, like all worthwhile expression, comes from the inner nature of man. Speaking of planes, we should declare that the outer physical plane is never the source of poetry. To look at the world without any insight is not poetry:... intellectualism from the pupil was enough for the teacher who loved a soar, with all the being a lightness in the high heavens drenched with the luminous wine of the sun-god. The bottle sym- Page 356 bolises the holding, by man's mind, of the fire and ether of inspired supra-intellectual vision. We may say the bottle stands for individual expression and the wine in it for the stuff of poetry ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks on Poetry

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  Imagery and Structure in the First Canto of Savitri

... For Nature walks upon her mighty way Nature 265 Unheeding when she breaks a soul, a life; life soul Leaving her slain behind she travels on: Man only marks and God's nil-seeing eyes. man God's. eyes ... fallen nature are the defence fallen nature It turns against the saviour hands of Grace: saviour. grace It turns the sons of god with death and pain. sons of god ... [156] Only a little the God-light can stay: {T} VII. [156] Only a little the God-light can stay: The God-light withdraws and gives way to the common light of earthly day. {T} [185] Man lifted up the burden of his fate. {C} ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

In the Mother's Light  >  Yogic Action-1

... betrayal of God's intention in the world and a turning of one's back upon the highest perfection of one's terrestrial existence. 3) The third truth the Mother brings out in the Prayer is the dual nature of Yogic action—its nature as a means of purification and preparation for divine union, and as a means of manifestation of the divine splendours. When all the elements of one's nature have been... the will of God may make itself easily felt and powerfully and perfectly expressed in life. The Will of God, the direct, unimpeded, undiminished, undistorted will of God is the fount and fulcrum of all authentic Yogic action. It may reveal itself in various ways :— 1) as an intermittent drive strongly or faintly felt and Page 288 Working itself out in the nature of the Yogi... Eternal, is a step forward towards It and the unravelling of one of the million knots that attach man to ignorance and death. Rejection of action, therefore, is a willful postponement of the solution of the central problem of life, and cannot effect the release of the embodied being of man from Nature's yoke, however high his detached soul may soar in its unclamped freedom. That which binds must unbind ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The New Humanity

... ; for science seeks to teach us the moods of Nature and the methods of propitiating her. Our actual ideal of man is that of the cleverest slave. But the New Man will have found himself and by and according to his inner will, mould and create his world. He will not be in awe of Nature and in an attitude of perpetual apprehension. and... The New Man will be Master-and not slave. He will be master, first, of himself and then of the world. Man as he actually is, is but a slave. He has no personal voice or choice; the determining soul, the Ishwara, in him is sleep-bound and hushed. He is a mere plaything in the hands of nature and circumstances. Therefore... miserably. But the age is now upon us when the god-like soul anointed with its immortal royalties is ready to emerge and claim our salutation.   The breath and the surge of the new creation cannot be mistaken. The question that confronts us today is no longer whether the New Man, the Super-humanity, will come or ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Our Ideal

... how low a race can fall which in its eagerness to seek after God ignores His intention in humanity. Both the European and the Indian attempt were admirable, the Indian by its absolute spiritual sincerity, the European by its severe intellectual honesty and ardour for the truth; both have accomplished miracles; but in the end God and Nature have been too strong for the Titanism of the human spirit and... growth. It is an attempt to approximate man to the method of vegetable and animal existence. The earth is a world of Life and Matter, but man is not a vegetable nor an animal; he is a spiritual and a thinking being who is set here to shape and use the animal mould for higher purposes, by higher motives, with a more divine instrumentation. Therefore by his very nature he serves the working of a Thought... psychology,—religion as an emotional delusion, philosophy, the pure essence of the mind, as a barren thought-weaving,—and resolved to devote the whole intellectual faculty of man to a study of the laws of material Nature and of man's bodily, social, economic and political existence and to build thereon a superior civilisation. That stupendous effort is over; it has not yet frankly declared its bankruptcy ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Vedic and Philological Studies  >  The Hymns of Madhuchchhandas

... personifications of material realities? the idea of God behind phenomena? or even—for we know too little of the worlds, are still, as Newton was, children picking up pebbles on the shore of the infinite ocean of knowledge,—were there and are there—behind the names men give them—real personalities who stand in spirit behind the functions of man and of Nature, hidden masters, now unworshipped gods? If they... attributes, cannot be the personification of fire or the god of the material flame, but must be & is something greater. The Rishi of the Veda is raising his hymn to a mighty god, moral and intellectual, a god before whom sages can bow down, not to a savage & materialistic conception. He is not thinking of the burning fire, he is thinking of the helper of man who fortifies his character & purifies his intellect... of wisdom, truth, knowledge, fatherhood, moral force, spiritual helpfulness. How has this psychological miracle been effected? By the anthropomorphic tendency in man, say the Europeans,—Fire the god, given in imagination the shape of a man, he of the tongue of flame, came to be regarded as a personality independent of the fire—a personality first with the qualities of fire, speed, brightness, destr ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Vedic and Philological Studies

The Life Divine  >  The Two Negations: The Materialist Denial

... and possible only by an irrational mysticism. If we assert only pure Spirit and a mechanical unintelligent substance or energy, calling one God or Soul and the other Nature, the inevitable end will be that we shall either deny God or else turn from Nature. For both Thought and Life, a choice then becomes imperative. Thought comes to deny the one as an illusion of the imagination or the other as an... a superconscious Might that uses the individual as a centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, Page 17 the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Narayana, 6 the viśvamānava 7 as the mould... × A name of Vishnu, who, as the God in man, lives constantly associated in a dual unity with Nara, the human being. × The universal man. × ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine

On The Mother  >  Tea, Flowers and Flu

... Nishkama karma - desireless action - is therefore recommended. But' even that is too bloodless, too negative. Rather offer everything, not to the man, but to the God: not to the creature of ignorance and impermanence, but to the God within, the God omnipresent, the immutable Divine. Make an offering of all karma to the Divine! Offer it as a garland is offered, or as a burnt offering, or as one's... Aurobindo wrote: Nature is the worker and not ego, but Nature is only a power of the Being who is the sole master of all her works and energisms and of all the aeons of the cosmic sacrifice. Therefore, since his [man's] works are that Being's, he has to give up all his actions to. the Godhead in him and the world, by whom they are done in the divine mystery of Nature .... Thus only can we aspire... from Pondicherry - the Arya , and occasional letters too. Mirra knew well enough what she needs must do: offer everything ­ love, knowledge, works - not to the man but to the God! And the response was immediate: Page 197 My God, Thou hast accepted my invitation, Thou hast come to sit at my table, and in exchange for my poor and humble offering Thou hast granted to me the last liberation ...

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   On The Mother

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  God Protects

... also from the standpoint of a God-lover, the soul is immortal, as indeed the Gita says, and even if the body dies, the soul remains for ever, the body can be killed but not the soul – na hanyate hanyam ā ne Sarire. And as regards property, it is the ignorant who are attached to it; the man of God has no need of it, not only so, it is an obstacle in his way to meet God. Did not the Christ declare that... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 God Protects   THE protection that man naturally needs and asks for is that of life and property. It is, in the ordinary course of things, the duty of the State and society to give this protection. But sometimes the State or society is unable to do its duty as it should. 'In revolutionary epochs, when storm and... that a camel could pass through the eye of a needle, never a rich man enter the kingdom of Heaven. And Nachiketas too, a heroic boy that he was, flung back into the face of Yama himself all the riches offered to him by the Lord of Death. Have life and property then no value in the eye of God? To the divine consciousness are these things mere m ā y ā , transient objects of ignorance, ties that ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Early Cultural Writings  >  Epistles from Abroad - I

... are animals and God does not exist. For what we believe, that we become. The animal lives by a routine arranged for him by Nature; his life is devoted to the satisfaction of his instincts bodily, vital and emotional, and he satisfies himself mechanically by a regular response to the working of those instincts. Nature has regularised everything for him and provided the machinery. Man in Europe arranges... space in which to realise the dignity, beauty and repose of the god in man. The Anarchist sees in Government and Society the enemy of the race and gropes for the bomb and the revolver to recover individual liberty and destroy the tyranny of the majority. Both are guilty of the same fallacy, the mechanical fallacy. One hopes to liberate man by perfecting machinery, the other by destroying it. And yet... for a point-device and dapper civilisation which has lost sight of grandeur, beauty and nobility in life,—are we, I wonder, flitting visions of a nightmare that passes or real men and women made in God's image? Was life always so trivial, always so vulgar, always so loveless, pale and awkward as the Europeans have made it? This well-appointed comfort oppresses me; this perfection of machinery will not ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Caesar Versus the Divine

... "RENDER unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." We do not subscribe to the motto. We do not admit that the world and the spirit are irreconcilables and incommensurables. On the contrary we assert their essential unity and identity. The spiritual force is not and need not be impotent or out of place in Caesar's domain. Rather it is the spiritual man who alone can possess the secret of mastering... bound to be so ever and always. We must remember, if we admit the evolutionary character of Nature, of man and his growth and fulfilment, that spirituality in one of its forms at an early stage is and should be a movement of withdrawal, of diminishing dynamism in the sense of an "introversion". For when man still lives mostly in the vital domain and is full of the crude life urge, when the animal is... spiritual but rather mundane in their character and outlook? Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Chandragupta, Akbar, even Shivaji, were not spiritual personalities; their actions were of the world and of worldly nature. And the force they wielded cannot be described as spiritual, and yet how effective it was, what mighty changes it brought about in the affairs of men! And do we not actually see in the lives of saints ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Essays on the Gita  >  The Gunas, Faith and Works

... all things in Nature and varies according to the dominating quality of our nature. The faith of each man takes the shape, hue, quality given to it by his Page 481 stuff of being, his constituting temperament, his innate power of existence, sattvānurūpā sarvasya śraddhā . And then there comes a remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that this Purusha, this soul in man, is, as it were... to others and to the world and to God, ātma-dāna, ātma-samarpaṇa , which is the high consecration of the sacrifice of works enjoined by the Gita. And the transcendence in the divine nature will be a greatest completeness of self-offering founded on the largest meaning of existence. All this manifold universe comes into birth and is constantly maintained by God's giving of himself and his powers and... the perfected man who lives in the divine nature. For it is carried out as a fixed dharma, and it is offered as a sacrifice or service to the gods, to some partial power or aspect of the Divine manifested in ourselves or in the universe. Work done with a disinterested religious faith or selflessly for humanity or impersonally from devotion to the Right or the Truth is of this nature, and action of ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Savitri  >  Savitri Its Symbolic Action in a Cosmic Background

... And shall travail still Till man be the image of God... And this I believe is God's will. 129   Beast to man, man to God; or average ordinary man to the evolved spiritually awakened saint: how is this progression started, how achieved? "Spiritual evolution as distinct from revolution", says Hugh I' Anson Fausset, "consists of this gradual dying to the old life of the divided... Nihil, but an evolutionist who thought that man could evolve into God. He sought in this pluralistic temporal world itself the inspiration to build the Life Divine. A poem entitled The Human Power by Elder Olson expresses this idea very well:   Not in God's image was man First created, but in Likeness of a beast; Until that beast became man, All travailed in death and pain ... ancestors to accomplish.         It is, of course, understood that, whatever the materialists may say, the advance of the race is brought about as much by man's aspiration as by the answering response of God. John Elof Boodin says that, "God must be conceived as an energising spirit in the universe who furnishes the inspiration for creating an ideal realm of values—a kingdom of heaven—in a distressed ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Creative Soul

...   In one's own soul lies the very height and profundity of a god-head. Each soul by bringing out the note that is his, makes for the most wondrous symphony. Once a man knows what he is and holds fast to it, refusing to be drawn away by any necessity or temptation, he begins to uncover himself, to do what his inmost nature demands and takes joy in, that is to say, begins to create. Indeed there...   But this is not as it should be, nor is it the truth of the matter. Every individual soul, however placed it may be, is by nature creative; every individual being lives to discover and to create. Page 7 The inmost reality of man is not a passive receptacle, a mere responsive medium but it is a dynamo – a power-station generating and throwing out energy that produces... the Maelstrom and be what we are. We must shape things as we want and not allow things to shape us as they want.   Let each take cognisance of the godhead that is within him – for self is God – and in the strength of the soul-divinity create his universe. It does not matter what sort of universe he- creates, so long as he creates it. The world created by a Buddha is not the same as that created ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  The Creative Soul

... grief. In one's own soul lies the very height and profundity of a god-head. Each soul by bringing out the note that is his, makes for the most wondrous symphony. Once a man knows what he is . and holds fast to it, refusing to be drawn away by any necessity or temptation, he begins to uncover himself, to do what his inmost nature demands and takes joy in, that is to say, begins to create. Indeed there... and imitate. But this is not as it should be, nor is it the truth of the matter. Every individual soul, however placed it may be, is by nature creative; every individual being lives to discover and to create. Page 77 The inmost reality of man is not a passive receptacle, a mere responsive medium but it is a dynamo—a power-station generating and throwing out energy that produces and... ourselves out of the Maelstrom and be what we are. We must shape things as we want and not allow things to shape us as they want. Let each take cognisance of the godhead that is within him—for self is God—and in the strength of the soul-divinity create his universe. It does not matter what sort of universe he creates, so long as he creates it. The world created by a Buddha is not the same as that created ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

In the Mother's Light  >  The Life of Life

... existing elements, varying patterns, protean repetitions of the time-worn space-soiled principles and powers. It cannot transfigure or transform. It is only God and the Son of God, in whom lies the secret of the transfiguration of the son of man, it is only ii the Word that one has to seek the mystery of the transubstantiation of the flesh. Page 272 Faith, the Leader This tr... life has to be installed as the Guide of life, if man is to attain his highest Page 275 destiny. The glib prating of the rule of reason and free will cannot carry him anywhere, so long as the ego is the effective centre of his nature and desire the motive of his actions. Unless a higher light dawns and begins to lead his nature, his reason can never be perfectly rational, nor his... ”³ The unity and harmony of mankind is one of the goals modern man has been steadily pursuing in his conscious thought and subconscious aspiration. The disruptive differences and discords, the aggressive cupidity and power-lust, the savage self-seeking and brutal conflicts which disfigure the present dealings between man and man and between nation and nation, however hideous and inhuman they ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Karmayogin  >  The Doctrine of Sacrifice

... dignity, comfort. The family even so viewed becomes the basis of civilisation, because it makes social life possible. But the real development of the god in man does not begin until the family becomes so much dearer than the life of the body that a man is ready to sacrifice himself for it and give up his ease or even his life for its welfare or its protection. To give up one's ease for the family, that... act of a higher nature of which man is capable in individuals, in classes, but not in the mass. Beyond the family comes the community and the next step in the enlargement of the self is when the identification with the self in the body and the self in the family gives way to the identification with the self in the community. To recognise that the community has a larger claim on a man than his family... family selfishness, class selfishness having still deep roots in the past must learn to efface themselves in the larger national self in order that the God in humanity may grow. Therefore it is that Nationalism is the dharma of the age, and God reveals himself to us in our common Mother. The first attempts to form a nationality were the Greek city, the Semitic or Mongolian monarchy, the Celtic clan ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Karmayogin

Savitri  >  The Overhead Planes of Conciousness

... reign is by no means absolute. There are transparent patches through which light trickles in. Messiahs have been our beacon lights. The ideal of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man has been repeatedly placed before us. Many a man and woman has transcended in the past the limiting ego and claimed the larger freedom of a more universal consciousness. Page 293 But these... the 'lower' and the 'higher' knowledge, they are really but the reverse and the obverse of the same arc of integral knowledge:   All knowledge is ultimately the knowledge of God, through himself, through Nature, through her works. Mankind has first to seek this knowledge through the external life; for until its mentality is sufficiently developed, spiritual knowledge is not ...   At the present stage of the evolutionary advance, man has a body, certain vital instincts and passions, and a directing and controlling mind. Mental man is a great improvement on the mere animal, but he is also a prey to various dissatisfactions. What is the reason? Sri Aurobindo's diagnosis is pointed and clear: the mind of man, a helper in many ways, a gleaner of bits of truth and partial ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Arguments for the Existence of God  >  Appendix 3

... community, to others than ourselves, to other communities than ours, and finally into the general approval of good, the general disapproval of evil. But, throughout, the fundamental nature of the thing remains the same. Man desires self-expression, self-development, in other words, the progressing play in himself of the conscious-force of existence; that is his fundamental delight. Whatever hurts that... 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? If we say that pain is... is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moral problem, we arrive at an immoral or non-moral God, — an excellent world-mechanist perhaps, a cunning psychologist, but not a God of Good and of Love whom we can worship, only a God of Might to whose law we must submit or whose caprice we may hope to propitiate. For one who invents torture as a means of test or ordeal, stands convicted either of deliberate ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Arguments for the Existence of God

Essays on the Gita  >  Equality

... and pleasurable, the causes of the physical and mental affections of the nature, and breaks their effects to pieces; it is complete when the soul can bear all touches without being pained or attracted, excited or troubled. It seeks to make man the conqueror and king of his nature. The Gita, making its call on the warrior nature of Arjuna, starts with this heroic movement. It calls on him to turn on... reality he is not free from his lower nature, and it does actually assert itself in many ways and may at any moment take a violent revenge for its rejection and suppression. For, always, the play of the lower nature is a triple play, and the rajasic and tamasic qualities are ever lying in wait for the sattwic man. "Even the mind of the Page 198 wise man who labours for perfection is carried... while the joy of this lower turbid nature is to it the one thing familiar and palpable. Nor is this lower satisfaction in itself a thing evil and unprofitable; it is rather the condition for the upward evolution of our human nature out of the tamasic ignorance and inertia to which its material being is most subject; it is the rajasic stage of the graded ascent of man towards the supreme self-knowledge ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3  >  Mater Dolorosa

... arrangement, to say the least, if there is a wise and just and benevolent God! Yes, how many honest people, people who strive to live piously, honestly and honourably, according to the law of righteousness, fail to escape! All equally undergo the same heavy punishment. Is it not then nearer the truth to say that a most mechanical Nature, a mere gamble of chance, Page 97 a statistical equation... and playthings of Nature and we must not wonder if, externally, suffering becomes the badge of our tribe. And yet the solution need not be a total rejection and transcendence of Nature. For what is ignored in this view is Nature's dual reality. In one form, the inferior (apara), The whole question then is this—now far Page 99 has this Higher Nature been a reality with... If, on the contrary, any part of us belongs to the Inferior Nature, even if the larger part dwells in some higher status of Nature, even then we are not immune to the attacks that come from the inferior Nature. Those whom we usually call pious or virtuous or honest have still a good part of them imbedded in the Lower Nature, in various degrees they are yet its vassals; they owe allegiance to ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3

Essays Divine and Human  >  Social Reform

... religion by religion, civilisation by civilisation God is perpetually leading Page 54 man onwards to loftier & more embracing manifestations of our human perfectibility. When in His cosmic circling movement He establishes some stable worldwide harmony, that is man's Satya Yuga. When harmony falters, is maintained with difficulty, not in the nature of men, but by an accepted force or political... of the divine nature; we must act in the reflection of God's Love, Strength & Wisdom. We are Hindus seeking to re-Hinduise society, not to Europeanise it. But what is Hinduism? Or what is its social principle? Page 57 One thing at least is certain about Hinduism religious or social, that its whole outlook is Godward, its whole search and business is the discovery of God and our fulfilment... but we are rather eager to act violently in the light of any dim ray of knowledge that may surprise our unreflecting intellects, and although God often uses our haste for great and beneficial purposes, yet that way of doing things is not the best either for a man or a nation. One thing seems to me clear that the future will deny that principle of individual selfishness and collective self-interest on ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Savitri  >  'The Birth and Childhood of the Flame'

... world of Nature and man, she is also not of it, she is ruled by an occult godhead, and it is as though,         Invisibly protected from our sense       The Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray       And feels another air of storms and calms       And quivers inwardly with mystic rain. 161   The traditional stories of "Krishna Lila" reveal the boy who was also God, the innocence...       As from the soil sprang glory of branch and flower,       As from the animal's life rose thinking man,       A new epiphany appeared in her.       A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,       A body instinct with hidden divinity       Prepared an image of the coming god;... 162   As the years add to her strength of limb and grace of form, as the movements of her heart... Wordsworth writes:         Three years she grew in sun and shower,       Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flower       On earth was never sown;       This Child I to myself will take....'    The occult powers behind the phenomena of Nature lend Savitri their graces and their strengths, as Nature moulds Lucy; but Savitri draws to herself other powers too, from the home and base of ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  Some Reflections on Savitri

... the man who is united with the One know the "plan"? The Mother: To the extent it is necessary for the execution, yes, and to the extent of the need, but not in its integrality all at once. In the context of happening on the first of January 15 the following lines of Savitri become more significant: The superman shall wake in mortal man And manifest the hidden demi-god ... Eyes in which Nature's blind ecstatic life Sprang from some spirit's passionate content, Missioned her to the whirling dance of earth. 26 3:Fate in Savitri In the opening canto of Savitri, speaking of the earth and man, Sri Aurobindo says: And, leader here with his uncertain mind, Alone who stares at the future's covered face, Man lifted up the burden... And what is free-will, if "man lives like some secret player's mask?" 57 He knows not even what his lips shall speak. For a mysterious Power compels his steps And life is stronger than his trembling soul. None can refuse what the stark Force demands. 58 and, Nature and Fate compel his free-will's choice. 59 Yet we are told, Man can accept his fate, he can ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo  >  The Aim of Spiritual Practice

... with God, but for us that realisation involves a complete and absolute recognition of our unity with man and we cannot cut the two asunder. To use Christian language, the Son of God is also the Son of Man and both elements are necessary to the complete Christhood; or to use an Indian form of thought, the divine Narayana 162 of whom the universe is only one ray is revealed and fulfilled in man; the... for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; its aim is to work out the will of the Divine in the world, to effect a spiritual transformation and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. Its object is not personal Mukti, although Mukti is a necessary condition of the yoga, but the liberation and transformation of the human being.... static Divine Consciousness by rising above the consciousness of mind, life, and body. This can be achieved by a certain degree of change of the ordinary consciousness without altering its fundamental nature. Transformation is the dynamic process of bringing down the Divine Consciousness into all parts of the being from top to bottom in order to effect a radical change of consciousness from its present ...

Dr. A. S. Dalal   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo

Child, Teacher and Teacher Education  >  Philosophy of Spiritual Education 2

... sect. God, Nature, and the individual soul in man are three eternally different powers of being. The Advaitin, the Vishishta-advaitin and the Dualist, however they may differ from each other, they all agree in underlining the importance of the discovery of the inner spirit or self in man, the divine soul in him, and some kind of living and uniting contact or absolute unity of the soul in man with... Some religions hold belief in God, some do not share their belief in God; even those who believe in God have different and conflicting views of the nature of God: some hold dualistic belief, others atheistic belief, and still others pantheistic beliefs; some believe in the existence of only one God, some believe in the existence of only one Absolute; some believe in one God but with inherent trinity... union with God, — that is the common idea and aim of religion, that is the sense of spiritual salvation, that is the living Truth that fulfills and releases. According to one school or sect, the real self of man is indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme Spirit. According to another school or sect, the individual is one with the Divine in essence but different from him in Nature. According ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Child, Teacher and Teacher Education

The Life Divine  >  Delight of Existence: The Problem

... community, to others than ourselves, to other communities than ours, and finally into the general approval of good, the general disapproval of evil. But, throughout, the fundamental nature of the thing remains the same. Man desires self-expression, self-development, in other words, the progressing play in himself of the conscious-force of existence; that is his fundamental delight. Whatever hurts that... 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? If we say that pain is... is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moral problem, we arrive at an immoral or non-moral God,—an excellent world-mechanist perhaps, a cunning psychologist, but not a God of Good and of Love whom we can worship, only a God of Might to whose law we must submit or whose caprice we may hope to propitiate. For one who invents torture as a means of test or ordeal, stands convicted either of deliberate ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine

Savitri  >  'The Vision and the Boon'

... apparently doomed to follow the circuit of folly and failure? How long this compromise between the beast and God? As the beast has been exceeded by man, shall not man in turn be superseded by a greater than man, the Superman?         This high divine successor surely shall come       Behind man's inefficient mortal pace,       Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears:...       Inheritor... hostile Time; Man is too weak to bear the Infinite's weight. 150   Death must be unconquered still on earth, and the dramas played in the theatre of Time must still diet on suffering and pain. It is man's merit that he is awake, that he has memory and desire, that he cannot help aspiring "to change the cosmic dream". But the law of Chance and Death cannot be altered; man is condemned yet... grind also with a complete inevitability, and man is the base on which the citadels of the seeming impossible are to be reared in the future. Aswapati is to hope and persevere, not force the pace:   Traveller upon the bare eternal heights, Tread still the difficult and dateless path Joining the cycles with its austere curve Measured for man by the initiate Gods... Ask not the ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  The Psychic-The Delight-Soul

... step into eternity. An eye has opened upon timelessness, Infinity takes back the forms it gave, And through God's darkness or his naked light His million rays return into the Sun. There is a zero sign of the Supreme; Nature left nude and still uncovers God. But in her grandiose nothingness all is there: When her strong garbs are torn away from us, The soul's... point in man that proclaims the advent of the Eternal Sun. "The aspiration of the psychic being is for the opening of the whole lower nature, mind, vital, body to the Divine, for the love and union with the Divine, for Its presence and power within the heart, for the transformation of the mind, life and body by the descent of the higher consciousness into this instrumental being and nature."¹ It... prepared in the universality of the Spirit. The universal Man, the cosmic Purusha in humanity, is developing in the human race the power that has grown into humanity from below it and shall yet grow to supermind Page 187 and spirit and become the Godhead in man who is aware of his true integral self and the divine universality of his nature. The individual must have followed this line of d ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

The Hidden Forces of Life  >  Human Will, Nature-Force and Divine Will

... its Karma and it says “I did” and “I will” and “I suffer”, but if it looks at itself and sees how it was made, it is obliged to say of man as of the animal, “Nature did this in me, Nature wills in me”, and if it qualifies by saying “my Nature”, that only means “Nature as self-determined in this individual creature”. It was the strong perception of this aspect of existence which compelled the Buddhists... things that obey a rigid law. The plasticity increases with the growth of Mind so that man can have at least a sense of free will, of a choice of his action, of a self-movement which at least helps to determine circumstances. But this freedom is dubious because it can be declared to be an illusion, a device of Nature, part of its machinery of determination, only a seeming freedom or at most a restricted... desires. For you can wholly respond to it only when you are impersonalised by knowledge and widened to see all things in the self and in God and the self and God in all things. All becomes here by the power of the Spirit; all do their works by the immanence of God in things and his presence in the heart of every creature. Sri Aurobindo Essays on the Gita: The Message of the Gita … what is ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   The Hidden Forces of Life

Images Of The Future  >  Images of the future

... the cradle. No god-man has seen the light of day knowing himself to be God. All were first men like us. Human consciousness could dominate them for a very long time, and it is clear that they retained something of that consciousness until the end, even after divine consciousness had descended in them. That which is to take place, on the other hand, is of an entirely different nature, as enlightenment... the avatar, the God-man, takes upon himself the obscurity in which we live. He shares entirely the conditions of our existence—beginning with the unconscious in which we are the ultimate reality of the world and of ourselves. His life would be nothing other than a conjuring trick in which, while feigning to resemble us, he would follow laws which, different from those of our nature, would exempt him... the world. But the birth towards which we work is not, as formerly, that of a son of God, of an avatar, a messiah. It is the advent of a new species, of a divine race heralded by the messiahs. It is not the appearance of man as god or of god as man which we must expect, but the manifestation of humanity as god. For that is what we bear in ourselves and its embryo has been growing over the centuries ...

Archaka   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Images Of The Future

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  Mater Dolorosa

... arrangement, to say the least, if there is a wise and just and benevolent God! Yes, how many honest people, people who strive to live piously, honestly and honourably, according to the law of righteousness, fail to escape! All equally undergo the same heavy punishment. Is it not then nearer the truth to say that a most mechanical Nature, a mere gamble of chance, a statistical equation, as mathematicians... playthings of Nature and we must not wonder if, externally, suffering becomes the badge of our tribe. And yet the solution need not be a total rejection and transcendence of Nature. For what is ignored in this view is Nature's dual reality. In one form, the inferior ( apara ), Nature means the Law of Ignorance – of pain and misery and death; but in another form, the superior ( para ), Nature's is the Law... perfection. If, on the contrary, any part of us belongs to the Inferior Nature, even if the larger part dwells in some higher status of Nature, even then we are not immune to the attacks that come from the inferior Nature. Those whom we usually call pious or virtuous or honest have still a good part of them imbedded in the Lower Nature, in various degrees they are yet its vassals; they owe allegiance to ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

Beyond Man  >  Chapter Seven: Sri Aurobindo’s Vision

... Kingdom of God on earth. ‘Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal so out of man the superman emerges,’ 10 reads one of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms. And in the first pages of The Life Divine he writes: ‘The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself... Mother in her youth. ‘Up to my twenty-fifth year, or thereabouts, I knew only the God of the religions, the God as men have made him, and I did not want anything of it, nothing at all!’ (Then, as we know, she discovered the Revue cosmique with its teaching of the immanent God, the Presence in the heart of man.) A God who has placed the ignorant, helpless human being in a world like the present one... separation which the ancient Indian writings call ‘a golden lid’; it is this separation which is the rationale behind the supposed ‘gap’ between God and his creation as taught by the religions of the Chaldean family. This golden lid is a gate, as it were, which man in his present state is not allowed to pass, for the Vedas say that he who goes through ‘the gate of the Sun’ cannot come back. Sri Aurobindo ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Beyond Man

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Some Thoughts on the unthinkable

... increasing light, Page 171 the darkness, the ignorance that form one part of the dual Nature.   The actual manifestation, the world as it stands, is in the hands of the Undivine. The Divine has to establish his reign through a working out of struggling and combating forces. The evil that man does or suffers from comes from his slavery to the Undivine: likewise the good that he is capable... Some Thoughts on the unthinkable   GOD is not an autocrat – a despot like the Czar or the Shahan Shah, pedestalled high above and ruling over his subject-slaves according to his fancy and caprice, issuing ukases and firmans which suffer no delay or hindrance in their execution. God is, if he is at all to be compared to a king, more like a constitutional sovereign... and move as it chooses. And although the Divine Will in the cosmos acts as a continuous pressure in the form of the evolutionary urge pushing inferior Nature gradually towards an unfolding of the Divine's own Consciousness and Nature, inherent in it and overarching it, yet it is a force that lies in the background and its fulfilment is only eventual. There is a long interim period of a full ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  Savitri- Its Inner Significance

... greater light come down upon the earth Delivering her from her unconsciousness, Man's spirit from unalterable fate? 14 And Savitri, awakened to her inner mission, asks the Divine Mother to give a command. She is told: Conquer thy heart's throbs, let thy heart beat in God: Thy nature shall be the engine of his works, Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:... To raise the world to God in deathless Light, To bring God down to the world on earth we came, To change the earthly life to life divine. 30 Aswapati and Savitri are the Divine Delegates—the former ascends into the Supreme Consciousness and makes the descent of Savitri a possibility; the latter descends into the Inconscient and makes the ascent of Man into the Superman an assured... other animals and the whole dynamic kingdom of nature. So, this is how the divine consciousness, in Matter called Satyavan, brought forth Life from Matter. And when Life element in Nature was mature—it may take billions of years and it has taken truly a long long time—it is only then that he brought forth the element of Mind and that Mind is Man. We also know from Sri Aurobindo's philosophy ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

Essays Divine and Human  >  The Path

... above to work in the nature. This is only possible if there is on our part a progressive surrender of the being into the hands Page 169 of the Divine; there must be a complete and never failing assent, a courageous willingness to let the Divine Power do with us whatever is needed for the work that has to be done. Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man; the mental being... Essays Divine and Human 1927 and after Essays Divine and Human The Path The supramental Yoga is at once an ascent towards God and a descent of Godhead into the embodied nature. The ascent can only be achieved by a one-centred all-gathering upward aspiration of the soul and mind and life and body; the descent can only come by a call of the whole... himself into a supramental spirit. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptacle. For the powers of our mind, life and body are bound to their own limitations and, however high they may rise or however widely expand, they cannot rise above their natural ultimate limits or expand beyond them. But, still, mental man can open to what is beyond him and call down a supramental ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision  >  Sri Aurobindo and Indian Cultural Renaissance

... had more than faith and had realised God.... He was a man without intellectual training... such a man as the English- educated Indian would ordinarily talk of as one useless to society. He will say, " This man is ignorant, what does he know? What can he teach me who have received from the West all that it can teach ? " But God knew what he was doing. He sent that man to Bengal and set him in the temple... fruitless gyre, The new-born ages perish like the old. 14 As to man : " Nothing has he learnt from Time and its history;"15 " A growing register of calamities Is the past's account, the future's book of Fate The centuries pile man's follies and man's crimes Upon the countless crowd of Nature's ills;"16 Holding that all human cultures are imperfect, why, it may be asked... recognised if that belief, if that God within them, had not been there to open their eyes, men whose lives were very different from what our education, our Western education, taught us to admire. One of them, the man who had the greatest influence and has done the Page 37 most to regenerate Bengal, could not read and write a single word. He was a man who had been what they call absolutely ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Four Aids

... our higher Self from the lower through which he is preparing his self-revelation. As in the world, so in ourselves, we cannot see God because of his workings and, especially, because he works in us through our nature and not by a succession of arbitrary miracles. Man demands miracles that he may have faith; he wishes to be dazzled in order that he may see. And this impatience, this ignorance may turn... Divine. Its necessity for the human soul is evident. God is the All and more than the All. But that which is more than the All, how shall man conceive? And even the All is at first too hard for him; for he himself in his active consciousness is a limited and selective formation and can open himself only to that which is in harmony with his limited nature. There are things in the All which are too hard for... for the full spiritual life in man. Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must necessarily express itself by an increasing richness of variety in its forms, said once that the perfect state of that essential unity would come when each man had his own religion, when not bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Essays Divine and Human  >  The Beginning and the End

... will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated. The plan, the peripeties, the denouement differ continually, yet are always governed by the conventions of an eternal Art. God, Man, Nature are the three perpetual symbols. The idea of eternal recurrence affects with a shudder of alarm the mind entrenched in the minute, the hour, the years, the centuries, all the finite's unreal... inexhaustible ocean of its ever-flowing energies is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the thought the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite. God, Man, Nature, what are these three? Whence flow their divergences? To what ineffable union advances the ever-increasing sum of their contacts? Let us look beyond the hours Page 141 and moments;... for ever or does it dwell in the eternal harmony? When a soul goes back to God is it blotted out from existence or does it know and enjoy that into which it enters? Does universe ever end? Does it not exist eternally in God's total idea of His own being? Unless the Eternal is tired out by Time as by a load, unless God suffers loss of memory, how can universe cease from being? Neither for soul ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Strength of Stillness

... leads to good; for God is all and God is sarvamaṅgalam . He knows that the apparent evil is often the shortest way to the good, the unpleasant indispensable to prepare the pleasant, misfortune the condition of obtaining a more perfect happiness. His intellect is delivered from enslavement to the dualities. Therefore the action of the Yogin will not be as the action of the ordinary man. He will often... of the tamasic man is a stumbling-block to the energies around him, the inaction of the Yogin creates, preserves and destroys; his action is dynamic with the direct, stupendous driving-power of great natural forces. It is a stillness within often covered by a ripple of talk and activity without,—the ocean with its lively surface of waves. But even as men do not see the reality of God's workings from... again, the breath resumes its activity. But when the thought flows without the resumption of the inbreathing and outbreathing, then the Prana is truly conquered. This is a law of Nature. When we strive to act, the forces of Nature do their will with us; when we grow still, we become their master. But there are two kinds of stillness—the helpless stillness of Page 57 inertia, which heralds d ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Collected Poems  >  In the Moonlight

... our toils deserved. O this new god who has replaced the old!     He dies today, he dies tomorrow, dies     At last for ever, and the last sunrise Shall have forgotten him extinct and cold. But virtue to itself is joy enough?     Yet if to us sin taste diviner? why     Should we not herd in Epicurus' sty Whom Nature made not of a Stoic stuff? For Nature being all, desire must reign.     It...     Man and restrain from his tempestuous Uprising that immortal spirit strong. He rises now; for God has taken birth.     The revolutions that pervade the world     Are faint beginnings and the discus hurled Of Vishnu speeds down to enring the earth. The old shall perish; it shall pass away,     Expunged, annihilated, blotted out;     And all the iron bands that ring about Man's wide... their divergence wakes. The source that none have traced, since none can know     Whether from Heaven the eternal waters well     Through Nature's matted locks, as Ganges fell, Or from some dismal nether darkness flow. Two genii in the dubious heart of man,     Two great unhappy foes together bound     Wrestle and strive to win unhampered ground; They strive for ever since the race began. ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Savitri  >  Savitri and the 'Sonnets'

... Earth was a cradle for the arriving God And man but a half-dark half-luminous sign Of the transition of the veiled Divine From Matter's sleep and the tormented load Of ignorant life and death to the Spirit's light. 148   The ascending Force is not unlike Kazantzakis Combatant, but it is also the veiled Divine, the beckoner of the arriving God. The entire Aurobindonian dialectic... immortal eyes:         I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self       And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are.       I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,       I am the wind's speed and the blazing star.       All Nature is the nursling of my care,       I am its struggle and the eternal rest;       The world's joy thrilling runs through me, I bear      ... darkness was the Omnipotent's abode,       Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God... 151       As with the figures of a symbol dance       The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance. 152   What's the point of it all, it may be asked. We have to fall back on the explanation that all is God's play, the lila of the Supreme:         One who has made in sport the suns and ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Savitri  >  'The Paradise of the Life-gods'

...       IX   'The Paradise of the Life-gods'         Like a man returned to life, Aswapati luxuriates in the "great felicitous Day" that now warms him up and intoxicates him with the "wine of God". Here life is in league with light and love; it beats "a jewel-rhythm of the laughter of God" and lies "on the breast of love". 93 Aswapati can now move with light dancing steps... Pleasure and Dream play their truly appropriate roles. All here is under God's sway; pain changes to joy, the commonplace to the miraculous. Such is this "Paradise of perfect heart and sense".         Aswapati too feels profoundly affected by the blissful climate of the place. His body acquires a new glow; earth-nature changes; he becomes a comrade of Heaven. A bliss overwhelms him, a fiery ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic  >  Poet and Pioneer in Consciousness Literature

... experience of the intuitive mind. It is in need of the experience of the harmonious integration of man's nature and being. It is imperceptibly closing upon a new birth of humanity, - the birth of a new light and truth upon the earth. It is in search of the inmost truth of man and Nature and God; it seems to be already well set to climb up greater ranges of consciousness and to fathom the depths... the puissance of your light, The blinding lustre of a measureless sun! Page 253 To dissolve the barriers between God and men, to bring God into life and to unveil the divine godhead, and to reflect man's intimacy with the immanent Infinite is the true purpose of all great literature. Amal Kiran in our own times is one of those divinely animated... and infinite freedom, of unrestrained adventure and trust to see It, to experience It and to manifest It through creative expression. For the divinely inspired creative artist Nature wears a transparent robe and God reveals himself in many ways, as in Amal's Prelude: O Fire divine, make this great marvel pass, That some pure image of your shadowless will May float within ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

The Secret of the Veda  >  Surya Savitri, Creator and Increaser

... the sacrificial energies." Man thus arrives at a vast and all-embracing affirmation in himself of this divine Creator. It is implied in this passage and indicated more clearly in the next verse that the result is a right and happy creation—for all our existence is a constant creation—of the universe of man's whole being. "Vast is the comprehensive affirmation of the god Savitri." Surya is the seer... affirming Savitri in his own being as the illuminative Truth, the creative, the progressive, the increaser of man—he who brings him out of egoistic limitation into universality, out of the finite into the infinite. "And thou hast power alone for creation; and thou becomest the Increaser, O God, by the goings; and thou illuminest entirely all this world (literally, becoming). Shyavashwa has attained to... the Night upon either side; and thou becomest by the law of thy actions the lord of Love, O God. उतेशिषं प्रसवस्य त्वमेक इदुत पूषा भवसि देव यामभिः । उतेदं विश्वं भुवनं वि राजसि श्यावाश्वस्ते सवितः स्तोममानशे ॥५॥ 5) And thou art powerful for every creation; and thou becomest the Increaser, O God, by thy movings; and thou illuminest utterly all this world of becomings. Shyavashwa has attained ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Secret of the Veda

The Future Poetry  >  The Breath of Greater Life

... more and more towards the very self of the self of things, the very spirit of which the soul of man is a living power and to a vision of unity and totality which is bound to take note of all that lies behind our apparent material life. What man sees and experiences of God and himself and his race and Nature Page 249 and the spiritual, mental, psychic and material worlds in which he moves... sometimes of God, but not often with a living experience, oftener in the set forms taught by religions and churches and without true beauty and knowledge. But now the mind of man is opening more largely to the deepest truth of the Divine, the Self, the Spirit, the eternal Presence not separate and distant, but near us, around us and in us, the Spirit in the world, the greater Self in man and his kind... sense-experience. But still all life is one and a new human mind moves towards the realisation of its totality and oneness. The poetry which voices the oneness and totality of our being and Nature and the worlds and God, will not make the actuality of our earthly life less but more real and rich and full and wide and living to men. To know other countries is not to belittle but enlarge our own country and ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry

Essays Divine and Human  >  God: The One Reality

... From Man to Superman: Notes and Fragments on Philosophy, Psychology and Yoga (1912-1947) From Man to Superman: Notes and Fragments on Philosophy, Psychology and Yoga (1912-1947) Philosophy: God, Nature and Man Essays Divine and Human God: The One Reality The Divine Eternal and Infinite 1 There are three Powers with whom we have to reckon, three... boundless finite. Man claiming to be a divine soul and an all-discovering intellect is brought up short by Nature's rude proof of his ignorance and incompetence and exhibits constantly in his thoughts the proneness to self-confident error and in his feelings and acts the petty faultiness, meanness, and darkness or suddenly the abysses of falsehood or foulness or cruelty of his nature. In the management... three and no others; for no others are in the universe or out of the universe: God, the Soul and Nature. And these three are, as it were, different fronts of One Being. 2 All existence, whatever its appearance or its process of being, is and draws its substance, origin, energy, truth from a Spirit which is the beginning, middle and end of all—itself being eternal, infinite, self-existent ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Mystery of Love

... temple of its self-manifestation. Ordinarily, man is limited in all these parts of his being and he can grasp at first only so much of the divine truth as has some large correspondence to his own nature and its past development and associations. Therefore God meets us Page 600 first in different limited affirmations of his divine qualities and nature; he presents himself to the seeker as an... the name and form elected by our nature for its worship. In order that the human being may embrace this Godhead with every part of himself, it is represented with a form that answers to its aspects and qualities and which becomes the living body of God to the adorer. These are those forms of Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Kali, Durga, Christ, Buddha, which the mind of man seizes on for adoration. Even the... other relations, since he follows too knowledge and works and has need of the Divine as teacher, friend and master. The growing of the love of God must carry with it in him an expansion of the knowledge of God and of the action of the divine Will in his nature and living. The divine Lover reveals himself; he takes possession of the life. But still the essential relation will be that of love from which ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Essays Divine and Human  >  Parabrahman, Mukti & Human Thought-Systems

... universe cease to operate. It only means that God throws back out of the ocean of manifest consciousness one stream or movement of Himself into that from which all consciousness proceeded. All who go out of universe-consciousness, do not necessarily go into Parabrahman. Some go into undifferentiated Nature (Avyakrita Prakriti), some lose themselves in God, some pass into a dark state of non-recognition... primary symbols; not Atman or unAtman or Maya; not Personality or Impersonality; not Quality or Non-Quality; not Consciousness or NonConsciousness; not Bliss or Non-Bliss; not Purusha or Prakriti; not god nor man nor animal; not release nor bondage; but something of which all these are primary or derivative, general or particular symbols. Still, when we say Parabrahman is not this or that, we mean that It... be freed and all is only God's Lila, Parabrahman's play of manifestation. God uses this sattwic Maya in certain egos in order to draw them upwards in the line of His special purpose & for these egos it is the only right and possible path. But the aim of our Yoga is Jivanmukti in the universe; not because we need to be freed or for any other reason, but because that is God's will in us, we have to ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

The Future Poetry  >  The Power of the Spirit

... rhythmic word the God who is the Self of all things and beings, the Life of the universe, the Divinity in man, and he will express all the emotion and delight of the endeavour of the human soul to discover the touch and joy of that Divinity within him in whom he feels the mighty founts of his own being and life and effort and his fullness and unity with all cosmic experience and with Nature and with all... and creative interpretation of the world and nature and all that man is and does and thinks and dreams, but when the spirit turns to its own large intuitive will and vision, then it is yet profounder things to which the great poet must give utterance, the inmost sense of things, the inmost consciousness of Nature, the movement of the deepest soul of man, the truth that reveals the meaning of existence... the calm and delight of the spirit. And this poetry must bring with it too a new depth of the intimacies of the soul with Nature. The early poetry of Nature gave us merely the delight of the forms of objects and the beauty of the setting of the natural world around man's life, but not any inner communion between him and the universal Mother. A later tone brought in more of the subtleties of the ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry

Questions and Answers (1957-1958)  >  27 March 1957

... have been asked, and my reply is that of Sri Aurobindo: If man could once consent to be spiritualised.... And I add: Time presses... from the human point of view. Page 75 × "All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, mental and vital and physical, is rebellious to the higher... " Wherever thou seest a great end, be sure of a great beginning. Where a monstrous and painful destruction appals thy mind, console it with the certainty of a large and great creation. God is there not only in the still small voice, but in the fire and in the whirlwind. " The greater the destruction, the freer the chances of creation; but the destruction is often long, slow and oppressive... and again and the day lingers or seems even to have been a false dawning. Despair not therefore but watch and work. Those who hope violently, despair swiftly: neither hope nor fear, but be sure of God's purpose and thy will to accomplish. " The hand of the divine Artist works often as if it were unsure of its genius and its material. It seems to touch test and leave, to pick up and throw away and ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Questions and Answers (1957-1958)

Sri Aurobindo and Integral Yoga  >  Integral Yoga

... of Sri Aurobindo's affirmation that 'spiritual liberation' or mukti is not the highest aim for Man on the earth, and that there is a farther aim imperatively demanded by the concealed intention of 'evolutionary' Nature. Not merely liberation of the Spirit from Nature, but also liberation of Nature itself from its limitations by a radical transformation; not merely an escape into the acosmic static... can study Nature consciously and apply scientifically the inner workings of Nature to our own evolution, and we can consciously make all life a conscious Yoga. As Sri Aurobindo puts it: 'The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly coterminus with life itself and we can once more looking... recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in Nature, in the other it becomes swift and self-conscious ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo and Integral Yoga

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  Sri Ramakrishna

... real truth, the quintessence of spirituality, which means also the supreme felicity. The fundamental nature of the spiritual perfection of Sri Ramakrishna consists in the realisation of God in his Absoluteness. He exemplified, philosophically speaking, the unity and synthesis of the Self and Nature, existence and power, the immutable and its dynamis. He used to say that the Eternal and its manifestation... conduct reflects his inner becoming. In the words of Sri Ramakrishna, a man breathes out what he eats. Perhaps we have a mission in the world, but before that we have to realise God. He alone has the right to act, and his deeds alone achieve fulfilment, who has been chosen and authorised by God. The spiritual practice of Sri Ramakrishna laid great stress on Yogic trance. It signifies that the outer... attainment of that only Goal. To know the Truth, the Self or God, one has first to realise them, one has to merge in them, one has to become these – as the Upanishad says, "Verily the knower of the Brahman becomes the Brahman Itself." The essential truth of spirituality consists not even in "doing" something but in this 'becoming'. Man manifests his inner soul through his actions. His external conduct ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Yoga and Skill in Works

... works to which the undivinised will of man, even when it is most vehement and powerful or Olympian and victorious, must eternally be subject. It is the utility of Yoga that it opens to us a gate of escape out of the vicious circle of our ordinary human existence. The idea of works, in the thought of the Gita, is the widest possible. All action of Nature in man is included, whether it be internal or... that any kind of skill in works was Yoga, but by Yoga it signified a spiritual condition of universal equality and God-union and by the skill of the Yogic worker it intended a perfect adaptation of the soul and its instruments to the rhythm of the divine and universal Spirit in a nature liberated from the shackles of egoism and the limitations of the sense-mind. Essentially, Yoga is a generic name... consciousness which is not that of the ordinary animal and intellectual man. Yoga is the exchange of an egoistic for a universal or cosmic consciousness lifted towards or informed by the supra-cosmic, transcendent Unnameable who is the source and support of all things. Yoga is the passage of the human thinking animal towards the God-consciousness from which he has descended. In that ascent we find many ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Delight of the Divine

... 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 oneness with God in man and God in the universe not less complete than any transcendent union. But still this is not quite imperative. For we may plead that there is a higher and a lower knowledge, a higher self-awareness and... the will alone, nor with the heart alone, but with all these equally and also with the whole mental and vital being in him he aspires to the Godhead and labours to convert their nature into its divine equivalents. And since God meets us in many ways of his being and in all tempts us to him even while he seems to elude us,—and to see divine possibility and overcome its play of obstacles constitutes the... adores; Page 590 he feels the rapture of the will which he obeys and with which all the force of his being is blissfully identified. So too, again, this God-lover will seek after perfection, because perfection is the nature of the Divine and the more he grows into perfection, the more he feels the Beloved manifest in his natural being. Or he will simply grow in perfection like the blossoming ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

The Destiny of the Body  >  The Inwardization and the Ascension

... vast for the experience of man's soul: All here gathers beneath one golden sky: The Powers that build the cosmos station take 1 The Life Divine, p. 949. 2 Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 660. 3 4 Ibid., p. 660. Page 132 In its house of infinite possibility; Each god from there builds his own nature's world; Ideas are phalanxed... the nameless light not leap on men, And unknown powers emerge from Nature's sleep? Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance; Even now the deathless Lover's touch we feel: If the chamber's door is even a little ajar, What then can hinder God from stealing in Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul ?" 2... make of Matter's world the home of God. 3 In that case, we shall have no other choice than to take a superconscient leap from the station of Mind into the Unknowable beyond and to agree willy-nilly to the following trenchant conclusion of the incredulous Darkness persuading Savitri to abandon her task of world-transformation: He who would turn to God must leave the world; He who ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Destiny of the Body

On Thoughts and Aphorisms  >  Aphorism - 485, 486, 487, 488, 489

... 488, 489 485—Love of God, charity towards men is the first step towards perfect wisdom. 486—He who condemns failure and imperfection, is condemning God; he limits his own soul and cheats his own vision. Condemn not, but observe Nature, help and heal thy brothers and strengthen by sympathy their capacities and their courage. 487—Love of man, love of woman, love of things, love... humanity are all the love of God reflected in these living Page 346 images. So love and grow mighty to enjoy all, to help all and to love for ever. 488—If there are things that absolutely refuse to be transformed or remedied into God's more perfect image, they may be destroyed with tenderness in the heart, but ruthlessness in the smiting. But make sure first that God has given thee thy sword... distance affect the body, the heart goes beyond them. Brotherhood is of blood or country or religion or humanity, but when self-interest clamours what becomes of this brotherhood? It is only by living in God and turning mind and heart and body into the image of his universal unity that that deep, disinterested and unassailable love becomes possible. All the human reasons that are given for solidarity ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Thoughts and Aphorisms

Aspects of Sri Aurobindo  >  Our Destiny Human And Divine

... are natures that have a true bent for it, just as there are natures with a true penchant for art or science or philosophy, industry or business or even warfare. Then philanthropy becomes a worthy occupation — a mode of fulfilling one's destiny. However, there is a human Page 189 destiny and there is a divine destiny. The former proves one a dedicated brother or sister of God's children... The ringing slogans of high ethics — "Love thy neighbour as thyself", "To love man is to love God" — can deafen us to the still small voice from the inmost silence and the call of Krishna's flute from dream-distances. Yes, such is the allure of the altruistic mission that we are tempted to consider ourselves as obeying God's dictate to the full. Actually, the altruist is doing no more than serving, however... children. The latter shows one to be a consecrated child of God. This is certainly the essential, the fundamental destiny of each one. Along with it, one has to pursue the right line — or lines — of one's nature, whether philanthropy or any of the others I have listed. There is no compulsion to give oneself exclusively to philanthropic activity. We can't wish a Shakespeare to stop writing plays or ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

The Thinking Corner  >  Sri Aurobindo's 72nd Birthday

... again in order finally to escape beyond for good does not justify the Soul's incarnating travail. And our terrestrial nature can have no divine rationale unless it be capable of being completely divinised. Have not our mind, our vital force and our physical form derived from God's self and substance? Surely then they are here for a Godlike existence and not simply to be used awhile and thrown aside:... aspiration for God goes from strength to strength. It is God and not the ego who, in answer to the aspiration, flowers in the mind, the elan vital and the body. No attachment to things gross is at the back of the body's change: the thirst for divine integrality alone is the alchemist. The body's change is insisted on as a grand finale because Sri Aurobindo deems it a slur on God's creative vision... universe's fulfilment. In some hidden Consciousness must be waiting the archetype, the perfect ideality of our whole embodied nature. He calls Page 24 that Consciousness Supermind or Gnosis. The gnostic plane has created the evolutionary process. Our evolving nature is upheld by a truth of its terms, a truth of its varied individuality in the gnostic plane and it has been created for ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Thinking Corner

Talks on Poetry  >  Stray Talks - Poets, Poems, Poetry - 1

... there is an incompatibility between words and nature's beauty — though, if we said "nature's beauty", it would bring in the suggestion of the natural. You might protest that, just like words which are the natural means used by human beings, a lake and snow are things which are equally natural because they belong to the same vast domain of nature to which man himself belongs, But this is a little queerness... what was never meant to be done: ...I think God never made a single flowering tree For poets' babblings — but for ecstasy! This reminds me of the end of a poem by another poet, a young man who died in the First World War: Joyce Kilmer. He has a whole poem on a tree. It concludes: Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. The same idea as Kobrin's is... are mostly the themes of lyric poetry. And she says that when she has stood upon a hill like God she has seen things which are inexpressible in language. Her central contention is: language cannot cope with exalted inner experience. The implication of "exalted" is important, she says she has stood like God; that conveys the intensity and the immensity of the experience of which she is speaking. It ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks on Poetry

Old Long Since  >  Visions and Voices

... Sun of Truth, the demands of the lower nature will be transmuted into self-impelled movements of delight, and the lower nature itself will be transformed into that of which it is a mutilated and incomplete reflection. WORK, FAITH, AND KNOWLEDGE Work, faith and knowledge are interdependent principles of life. Work is the hammering that makes man, if not now, at least after a time, se... Sun-Lord through the firmaments — every new ascent into a new firmament, a new birth and enrichment of the wide and opulent ranges of his being. THE GREAT TITAN God is substance-delight whose nature is consciousness that is force. The innateness of force is vibration. That is its inherent character in activity, vibration of consciousness, vibration of delight, vibration of substance... harmonious and above-man; and the joy of self-sacrifice is troubled, uneven and is of the man. Duty is the finely knotted and knuckled walking-staff of man groping and stumbling in the dimly lit vast forests of forces whose movements perpetually collide, clash, appear, disappear, rise. fall, and whose destiny and end are still unintelligible to hunch-backed, groping and ancient Man. THE DEMANDS ...

Amrita   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Old Long Since

Tribute to Amrita on his Birth Centenary  >  Visions and Voices

... Sun of Truth, the demands of the lower nature will be transmuted into self-impelled movements of delight, and the lower nature itself will be transformed into that of which it is a mutilated and incomplete reflection. WORK, FAITH, AND KNOWLEDGE Work, faith and knowledge are interdependent principles of life. Work is the hammering that makes man, if not now, at least after a time, sel... Sun-Lord through the firmaments — every new ascent into a new firmament, a new birth and enrichment of the wide and opulent ranges of his being. THE GREAT TITAN God is substance-delight whose nature is consciousness that is force. The innateness of force is vibration. That is its inherent character in activity, vibration of consciousness, vibration of delight, vibration of substance... and above-man; and the joy of self-sacrifice is troubled, uneven and is of the man. Duty is the finely knotted and knuckled walking-staff of man groping and stumbling in the dimly lit vast forests of forces whose movements perpetually collide, clash, appear, disappear, rise. fall, and whose destiny and end are still unintelligible to hunch-backed, groping and ancient Man. ...

Amrita   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Tribute to Amrita on his Birth Centenary

Visions and Voices  >  Visions and Voices

... the Sun of Truth, the demands of the lower nature will be transmuted into self-impelled movements of delight, and the lower nature itself will be transformed into that of which it is a mutilated and incomplete reflection. WORK, FAITH, AND KNOWLEDGE Work, faith and knowledge are interdependent principles of life. Work is the hammering that makes man, if not now, at least after a time, self-luminous... ascends the Sun-Lord through the firmaments — every new ascent into a new firmament, a new birth and enrichment of the wide and opulent ranges of his being. THE GREAT TITAN God is substance-delight whose nature is consciousness that is force. The innateness of force is vibration. That is its inherent character in activity, vibration of consciousness, vibration of delight, vibration of substance... harmonious and above-man; and the joy of self-sacrifice is troubled, uneven and is of the man. Duty is the finely knotted and knuckled walking-staff of man groping and stumbling in the dimly lit vast forests of forces whose movements perpetually collide, clash, appear, disappear, rise. fall, and whose destiny and end are still unintelligible to hunch-backed, groping and ancient Man. THE DEMANDS ...

Amrita   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Visions and Voices

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Basis of Social Reconstruction

... reformation of human nature. Otherwise any amount of casting and recasting the mere machineries would not bring about any appreciable result, but leave the thing as it is. Change the laws as much as you like, but if you do not change the nature of man, the world will not change. For it is man that makes laws and not laws that make man. Laws express at best the demand which man feels within himself...   The Divine Nature only can permanently reform the vital nature that is ours. Neither laws and institutions, which are the results of that vital nature, nor ideas and ideals which are often a mere revolt from and more often an auxiliary to it, can command the power to regenerate society. If it is thought improbable for any group of men to attain to that God Nature, then there is hardly any... himself. A truth must realise itself in human nature before it can be codified. You may certainly legalise an ideal, but that does not necessarily mean realising it. The realisation must come first in nature and character, then it is naturally translated into laws and institutions. A man lives the laws of his soul and being and not the law given him by the shastras. He violates the shastras, modifies them ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  The Basis of Social Reconstruction

... reformation of human nature. Otherwise any amount of casting and recasting the mere machineries would not bring about any appreciable result, but leave the thing as it is-. Change the laws as much as you like, but if you do not change the nature of man, the world will not change. For it is man that makes laws and not laws that make man. Laws express at best the demand which man feels within himself... Divine. The Divine Nature only can permanently reform the vital nature that is ours. Neither laws and institutions, which are the results of that vital nature, nor ideas and ideals which are often a mere revolt from and more often an auxiliary to it, can command the power to regenerate society. If it is thought improbable for any group of men to attain to that God Nature, then there is hardly any... himself. A truth must realise itself in human nature before it can be codified. You may certainly legalise an ideal, but that does not necessarily mean realising it. The realisation must come first in nature and character, then it is naturally translated into laws and institutions. A man lives the laws of his soul and being and not the law given him by the shastras. He violates the shastras, modifies ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

The Renaissance in India  >  A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture - 4

... And this is not as a thing to speculate about, but as a real presence and a constant Power which demands the soul of man and calls it. Here is a mentality which sees the Divine in Nature and man and animal and inanimate thing, God at the beginning, God in the middle, God at the end, God everywhere. And all this is not a permissible poetical play of the imagination that need not be taken too seriously... head of things, casts its shadow on the vital instincts and calls man to exceed the life of the body and even the life of the mental will and intelligence. The Western mind lays an enormous stress upon force of personality, upon the individual will, upon the apparent man and the desires Page 144 and demands of his nature. But here is an opposing stress on a high growth towards impersonality... instincts of the half subconscient parts must be taken into the influence. Religion must lead man towards the suprarational, the spiritual truth and it must take the aid of the illumined reason on the way, but it cannot afford to neglect to call Godwards the rest of our complex nature. And it must take too each man where he stands and spiritualise him through what he can feel and not at once force Page ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Renaissance in India

Arguments for the Existence of God  >  Is the Ontological Argument for the existence of God Successful

... world. But there seems to be little doubt that the quest of man for God is a perennial quest, and even in periods of scepticism, people have been obliged to be preoccupied with the examination of the notion of God and with the affirmation or denial of the existence of God. Religions have been largely formulated around some conception of 'God', although it is true that religions like Buddhism and Jainism... concludes that though all existential propositions must be synthetic, however, a statement such as 'God exists' can never be of that nature since existence can never be a predicate. Finally, he concludes that the people who have argued for the existence of God regard existence as a predicate of God and therefore at the very root of their attempt to argue there is a fallacy. But the question... propositions must be synthetic, however, a statement such as 'God exists' can never be of that nature since existence can never be a predicate." (Quotation from my paper on the Ontological Argument for the existence of God) Tutor (1): I think there is a misunderstanding here. Kant certainly maintained that the proposition 'God exists' is synthetic. What it asserts is that there is ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Arguments for the Existence of God

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  In This Crisis

... difficult it is to fathom the depth of deformation and depravity in which human nature and human society have sunk. The scriptures speak of the darkest days of Kali when even the last traces of religion would be wiped out; man would become irreligious to the last degree; even in his stature he would shrink to a pigmy. Today's man seems certainly to have diminished to such an extent; his life and consciousness... passed away the sense of restraint, politeness of heart, gracefulness. It is not that want has impoverished human nature to such a miserable extent. Even where there is no want we find the same play of desire and impulse. It seems that some black force from somewhere has possessed man, which tempts him into mean ways and mean things, which has given his outlook a downward turn, towards whatever makes... things and accepted as the human way, as human temperament and human nature. If anyhow there occurs an exception anywhere to the general rule, it gives rise to surprise and suspicion. Leave aside worldly men. And look at the youth on whom the burden of the world has not yet fallen and who speak of visions and ideals. What is their nature today? Their liberty means licence, absolutism; any sort of obedience ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

Essays on the Gita  >  Kurukshetra

... wicked will or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God. As if man had created the law of death and devouring in the animal world or that tremendous process by which Nature creates indeed and preserves but in the same step and by the same inextricable action slays and destroys. It is... us from the flabbiness and relaxation encouraged by a too mellifluous philosophic, religious or ethical sentimentalism, that which loves to look upon Nature as love and life and beauty and good, but turns away from her grim mask of death, adoring God as Shiva but refusing to adore him as Rudra; secondly, because unless we have the honesty and courage to look existence straight in the face, we shall... solution may be. And to look existence in the face is to look God in the face; for the two cannot be separated, nor the responsibility for the laws of world-existence be shifted away from Him who created them or from That which constituted it. Yet here too we love to palliate and equivocate. We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a God of good, a God just, righteous and virtuous according to our own moral c ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Mother’s Agenda 1962  >  July 21, 1962

... hammered and tempered iron." No one is a God but in each man there is a God and to make Him manifest is the aim of divine life. That we can all do. I recognize that there are great and small adharas [vessels]. I do not accept, however, your description of yourself as accurate. Still whatever the nature of the vessel, once the touch of God is upon it, once the spirit is awake, great and small and all that... Sannyasa [Renunciation], Moksha [Liberation] and Nirvana, and it has no others. One man or another may indeed attain this featureless Moksha, but what is the gain? The Brahman, the Self, God are ever present. What God wants in man is to embody Himself here in the individual and in the community, to realize God in life. The old way of yoga failed to bring about the harmony or unity of Spirit and... call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes possible to fully know and fully realize God—to do what is said in the Gita, "To know Me integrally." The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda—these are the spirit's five levels. The higher man rises on this ascent the nearer he comes to the state ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   Agenda   >   Mother’s Agenda 1962

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Three Purushas

... the Europeans call Nature. The kṣara puruṣa is the soul in Nature and enjoying Nature, the akṣara puruṣa is the soul above Nature and watching her. But there is One who is not seated on the tree but occupies and possesses it, who is not only lord of Himself, but lord of all that is: He is higher than the kṣara , higher than the akṣara , He is Purushottama, the Soul one with God, with the All. ... the higher, Sri Krishna defines more minutely the relations of God and the individual soul to Nature. "Prakriti is the basic source of cause, effect and agency; the Purusha, of the sense of enjoyment of happiness and grief; for it is the soul in Nature (Purusha in Prakriti) that enjoys the threefold workings of things caused by Nature, (the play of conservation, creation and destruction; reception... Prakriti or Nature; only by his attachment to Prakriti he forgets himself and identifies himself with her so as to have the illusion of agency and, by thus forgetting himself, ceases to be lord of himself, becomes subject to Causality, imprisoned in Time and Space, bound by the work which he sanctions. He himself, being a part of God, is made in His image, of one nature with Him. Therefore what God is, he ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  Upanishadic Symbolism

... bring down something of the substance and nature of the Solar reality into the lower world, enlighten and elevate the lower, as far as it is allowed, into the higher. IV. THE TRIPLE AGNI Agni is the divine spark in man, the flaming consciousness in the mortal which purifies and uplifts (pāvaka) mortality into immortality. It is the god "seated in the secret heart, who is the ... the mind the directing knowledge. This triune world forms the humanity of man. But there is another aspect hidden behind this apparent nature, there is another world where man dwells in his submerged, larger and higher consciousness. To that his soul – the Purusha in his heart only has access. It is the world where man's nature is transmuted into another triune reality – Sat, Chit and Ananda. ... field – is the society to which one belongs, the particular group of humanity in which he functions as a limb. The service to society or good citizenship entails the worship of humanity, of Man as a god. Lastly, man belongs to the family, which is the unit of society; and the backbone of the family is the continuous line of ancestors, who are its presiding deity and represent the norm of a living dharma ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

The Mother Abides - Final Reflections  >  On the Brink

... much in the actual reckoning of things. Yes, the pity is that man does not know and yet so much, if not the whole thing, depends on him. For man as he is now is so far removed from godliness and so close to the Asuras that the battle upon earth between the Gods and the Asuras seems to be an unequal game. Man by actual nature is asuric: it is Page 51 through aspiration that he... mi m ā ś ucah. Gita 9.33; 18.66 2 A god is a single undivided being, even as an Asura is a single undivided being. But man is a divided dual being; on one side he is a soul, on the other he is predominantly a body complex. By his soul he is akin to the Gods, by his external being he is neighbour to the Asuras. Man is thus the link between Heaven and Earth. He is the twice-born... efficient enough under the present circumstances. But man's destiny is not to be confined to this sphere of the triple world. He has a higher destiny transcending these lower worlds and that is being worked out elsewhere deep within him. He has a destiny which even the Gods envy; for he has the Divine's own home in him. It is God himself who is implanted in him, in the cavern of his heart—it ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Mother Abides - Final Reflections

India's Rebirth  >  1929-1938: Letters

... of Sri Aurobindo's letters.) Undated Man is a transitional being; he is not final____ The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth's evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature's process____ Superman hood is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree... to read an economic cause, conscious or unconscious, into all phenomena of man's history is part of the Bolshevik gospel born of the fallacy of Karl Marx. Man's nature is not so simple and one-chorded as all that—it has many lines and each line produces a need of his life. The spiritual or mystic line is one of them and man tries to satisfy it in various ways, by superstitions of all kinds, by ignorant... knowledge, power, intelligence, will, character, genius, dynamic force, saintliness, love, purity or perfection. Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits; it is a greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature. Man in himself is little more than an ambitious nothing. He is a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are beyond him, a dwarf enamoured ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   India's Rebirth

The Human Cycle  >  The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation

... but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at his highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god, is something so much greater than what he is that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to the animal. This... over external Nature will appear only as a rough hint and a poor beginning. What precisely is the defect from which all his imperfection springs? We have already indicated it,—that has indeed been the general aim of the preceding chapters,—but it is necessary to state it now more succinctly and precisely. We see that at first sight man seems to be a double nature, an animal nature of the vital and... and nature,—that hidden self which we are not yet, but have to become and which is not the strong and enlightened vital Will hymned by Nietzsche, but a spiritual self and spiritual nature that will use the mental being which we already are, but the mental being spiritualised, and transform by a spiritual ideality the aim and action of our vital and physical nature. For this is the formula of man in ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  Rabindranath the Artist

... just want to study Rabindranath the man and not the poet Rabindranath. The poet may raise a slight objection – he may say that if we want truly to evaluate him we must consider him as a poet. What he has done or not done as a man is insignificant; he has stored up in his poetry whatever eternal and everlasting was there in him, in his true being and real nature. The rest is of no real significance... silence. On one side, his vital being, athirst for delight, is overwhelmed with the mass of Nature's wealth, luxuriant in colours and smells, in peals of laughter and rhythms of dance; his senses enamoured of beauty are eagerly prone to hug the richness of external things; he wants to seize upon the Self, God, through the embrace of the senses and the fivefold life-force. Still, there is the other side... d with ecstasy In the core of Man's being: Blood runs riot in his veins. Suddenly your girdles give way On the horizon, O naked beauty! What a visionary world of matchless and unique beauty is unveiled before the mind's eye! That is the true Rabindranath, the creator of such magic wonders. Perfect 'perfection of beauty is inherent in the nature of his inner being. The advance he ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

Collected Poems  >  The Death of a God - II

... is free from fire and stress, left to the joy of her smallness, rid of his mighty spirit at last. All that is false and wry and little are freed to follow their nature once more.         Close time's brilliant pages! Give back to man's life the old tables, its dull ease, its bowed greyness restore. ... 1927-1947) Pondicherry (Circa 1927-1947) Incomplete Poems from Manuscripts (Circa 1927-1947) Collected Poems The Death of a God - II         Arise, tread out the fire,     Scatter the ashes of a god through the stars!         Forget to hope and aspire. He is dead and his greatness that cumbered the world has vanished like a golden shadow from the ages ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  1 FEBRUARY 1940

... speak of the gods as well as of principles. If I speak of Agni as Tapas1 it is as a psychological principle. It doesn't mean that by being a god of Tapas he is no more a god of the fire of sacrifice. Agni is taken as a psychological principle as well as a god. (After a while) And he can also quote the Chandi where it says the goddess inhabits all creatures in the form of benevolence. It doesn't... NIRODBARAN: This man's prophesy about the new race isn't correct, as anything can be made out of anything, and you said that by his reading the supermind is far off. That is what I am driving at. (Sri Aurobindo was laughing all the time) SATYENDRA: It may be possible for one man but not for the race. SRI AUROBINDO: For the race he says millennium. SATYENDRA: But according to this man our continent... Vedas but rather his predominantly ritualistic interpretation. And he can point out that Sri Aurobindo has no Western stamp in his interpretation. At the same time Sri Aurobindo speaks of one Supreme God from whom all other gods have emanated. PURANI (after a long break in the talk) : In Gurukul they have an exercise or drill of laughter. When students are asked to laugh, they have to laugh. SRI ...

Nirodbaran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Savitri  >  'The Triple Soul- Forces'

... I rend man's narrow and successful life And force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sun That he may die to earth and live in his soul. 287   While Durga-Lakshmi claims that she alone is Savitri's secret soul, there comes a "warped echo" from below, from "the dwarf Titan, the deformed chained god"that is man the master of knowledge and power, the asuric man; he is the man that has... has mastered Nature and would one day supersede God; he would smash the atom, canalise cosmic energy, "expunge a nation or abolish a race". Savitri, having heard them both, admits that while knowledge and power are necessary, without wisdom they cannot achieve much. Savitri promises to return to the Madonna of might with an accession of light that will enable them together to abolish fear and weakness... deliverance. When she concludes her speech, however, there explodes a cry from below, the voice of the Man of Sorrows, breathing exasperation and despair, a job in his burning passion of defeat:         I am he       Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;       To enjoy my agony God built the earth,       My passion he has made his drama's theme.       He has sent me naked ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  God's Labour

... He can, on the contrary, become truly the ordinary man and labour as all others, yet maintaining his divinity and being conscious of it. After all, is not man, every human being, built in the same pattern, a composite of the earthly human element supported and infused by a secret divine element? However, God, the individual Divine, does become man, one of them and one with them. Only, his labour thereby... absolute, that it is divine intervention alone, and in the most physical sense, which can save him. God takes upon himself man's load and relieves him of it: thus freed he can soar up easily and join the company of the Happy in heaven alongside God. This is the ransom paid by God to His Enemy, the vicarious atonement suffered by the Divine, the cross he has to bear when he comes   Page 282 ... a heavenly or divinised earth. God made man, the spirit become flesh: this is Grace, the benediction of the Holy One upon the sinful earth. The working of Grace in one of its characteristic movements has been beautifully envisaged in esoteric Christianity. The burden of sin-that is to say, of weakness, impurity and ignorance – lies so heavy upon man, the force of gravitation is so absolute ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision  >  The Life Divine : Some Aspects

... that is involved in the Inconscient. " The animal is the living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the super- man, the God. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?"17 THE PHYSICAL BODY IN THE SCHEME OF SUPRAMENTAL PERFECTION... subconscient and the lower vital nature. Secondly, practice of ethics or morality tends to purify the ordinary nature and may serve as the beginning of dissolution of the ego which is a great obstacle in man's inner progress towards Truth. Ethics establishes active impersonal values in man's nature which require the subjugation of his ego. In the process of man's evolution out of Ignorance ethics... scientific advance to collective life has put into man's hand such a tremendous reservoir of material power that without a corresponding inner transformation of his nature man would not be able to make a real advance in his culture. It means the material advance by itself would not solve man's problems though the possibility of its misuse has instilled fear in his mind and the fear makes him halt ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision

A Vision of United India  >  The advent of the Muslims

... of consciousness and experience and the truths of these supraphysical planes were no less real to it than the outward truths of the material universe. It believed that man approaches God at first according to his psychological nature and his capacity for deeper experience. Thence comes the variety of religious cults, but these are not imaginary structures, inventions of priests or poets; they are i... hand. Every Islamic State inevitably became a theocracy. As already seen, the tenets of Islam are: the unity of God, the abomination of idolatry, and the duty laid upon man of submission to the will of his Creator. The unity of God was expressed in this phrase: "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah". The abomination of idolatry meant that they broke and destroyed all... universal mind. Therefore the ancient Rishis were able to see what now we are beginning again to glimpse dimly that not only is Nature herself an infinite teleological and discriminative impersonal Force of Intelligence or Consciousness, but that God dwells within and over Nature as infinite universal Personality, universal in the universe, individualised as well as universal in the particular form, or ...

Prof. Kittu Reddy   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Vision of United India

Emergence of the Psychic  >  Emergence of the Psychic Being

... You do not mistake them for the soul. Secondly, when awakened, the psychic being gives true bhakti for God or for the Guru. That bhakti is quite different from mental or vital bhakti. In the mind one may have admiration or appreciation for the intellectual greatness of the man — or Guru, but it is merely mental; it does not carry the matter very far. Of course there is no harm in having... impose itself through it, then the soul can come forward and control the nature. It is by the coming forward of this true monarch and his taking up of the reins of government that there can take place a real harmonisation of our being and our life. 85 — Sri Aurobindo * It is true again that it is difficult for man's mind to distinguish entirely the soul or self or any spiritual element... it is obliged to look on while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil. Even when it is strong and clear and dominant, Mind, though it imposes a certain, a considerable mentalised harmony, cannot integrate the whole being and nature. These harmonisations by an inferior control are, besides, inconclusive, because it is one part of the nature which dominates and fulfils itself ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Emergence of the Psychic

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  On Ideals

... soul-interchange. But these great personalities do not contain in themselves the combination which humanity most needs; not the man of action driven by ideas, the pragmatist stirred by a half-conscious exaltation from the idealistic, almost the mystic side of his nature, but the seer who is able to execute his vision is the higher term Page 116 of human power and knowledge. The one takes... created; but this order of our sense-enslaved consciousness is not the real order of the universe. God pre-exists before the world can come Page 111 into being, but to our experience in which the senses act first and only then the finer workings of consciousness, the world seems to come first and God to emerge out of it, so much so that it costs us an effort to rise out of the mechanical, pluralistic... l limitations and the mutual misunderstandings by which the arrogance of our imperfect temperament and mentality shuts itself out from perfection It is as if we were to think that God the Seer and Knower must despise God the Master of works and energies or the Lord of action and sacrifice ignore the divine Witness and Originator. But these two are one and the division in us a limitation that mankind ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Words of Long Ago  >  Modesty

... ti was struck by the noble modesty of the scholar and exclaimed, "You are not a man, Vidyasagar, but a god in human form!" Now here is the story of a conceited glow-worm. A man looked up at the glorious sun and exclaimed: "How bright!" "Like all the rest of us shining ones," answered a voice. The man looked all around him and saw a glow-worm in the shade of a bush. "Was it you... a splendid temple in honour of the God of his fathers and his nation. But before the temple was built, while the timber for it was still growing in the form of cedar-trees on the mountains, Solomon had a dream in which his God appeared to him and said: "Ask of me what you wish me to give you." Solomon answered: "My father David was a just and truthful man and now I have succeeded to his throne... marvelled at the wisdom of this man who was so skilled in reading the works and wonders of Nature. One day a lady spoke to Newton of his learning and knowledge and he replied: Page 259 "Alas! I am only like a little child picking up pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth." You will understand that the ocean of truth means the laws of Nature which even the most learned men hardly ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of Long Ago

A Centenary Tribute  >  Amal Kiran-Reminiscences-Alok Pandey

... the light of faith is our future. For as is a man's faith, that in the end he becomes. Faith is the cry of the unborn child in him. It is this that we must look for and be inspired by in turning towards those who walk ahead, their backs turned against the trail of the shadow left behind, their face turned towards the blazing lights of God ahead. For God moves always forward in a perpetual and endless... failures of yesteryears but the victory of tomorrow. For a man is not his failings, Page 54 just as he is not his success, not his personal deficiencies, just as he is not the capacity of a more or less developed nature. These are only pale hints and weak reflections, distortions of a truth by the mirror of his outer nature which is not yet polished and pure. There are some who can... of the Divine half-revealed, half-masked in man is the story of faith, aspiration, courage, perseverance, sincerity, devotion and surrender. Both are a necessary complement to each other; both inspire us, one from above, the other from below and within. If the Divine Master opens the path and shows us the way and carries us in His arms, the devotee of God shows us how to walk on the path thus opened ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Centenary Tribute

Vedic and Philological Studies  >  The Gods of the Veda

... towards truth, trees grow according to their seed, animals act according to their species & nature, & man walk in the paths which God has prescribed for him. It is that in the Akasha—the Akasha where Varuna is lord—which develops arrangement & order, it is the element of law in Nature. But not only in material Nature, not only in Page 54 the moral akasha even,the akasha of the heart of which... fiery elements in Nature & in man, but is also the vehicle of pure tapas, tu, tuvis or divine force. They are therefore mankind’s greatest helpers. (9) But in order that they may help, it is necessary to reinforce them in these lower worlds, which are not their own, by self-surrender, by sacrifice, by a share in all man’s action, strength, being & bliss, and by this mutual help man’s being physical... dhishnya, combined with the word girah. And we know that the gods in the Veda are called girvanah, those who delight in the mantra; Indra, the god of mental force, is girvahas, he who supports or bears the mantra. Why should Nature gods delight in speech or the god of thunder & rain be the supporter or bearer of any kind of speech? The hymns? But what is meant by bearing the hymns? We have to give unnatural ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Vedic and Philological Studies

Socrates  >  Appendix - 4

... The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him. Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. I must first know myself, as the Delphic inscription says; to be curious about things not my concern while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be absurd. Virtue is knowledge, and the man who knows the right will act rightly... for doing good. He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy. Page 154 If thou continuest to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men. Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us. ... rightly. He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature. An honest man is always a child. Be as you wish to seem. The greatest way to live with honour in this world is to be what we pretend to be. Page 151 Top: The Acropolis at Athens. Every city had an acropolis, or citadel. Destroyed by the Persians, the Athenian ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Socrates

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  In Quest of Reality

... say here that there are two realms in which man lives, but they are incommensurables: Page 300 the truths and categories of one cannot be judged and tested by those of the other. Each is sui generis, each is valid in its own right, in its own dominion. God, Soul, Immortality these are realities belonging to one section of our nature, seizable by a faculty other than the Pure Reason... but dynamic powers that almost negate or flout the usual laws of science have been demonstrated to exist and can be and are used by man. The Indian yogic discipline speaks of the eight siddhis, super-natural powers attained by the Yogi when he learns to control nature by the force of his consciousness. Once upon a time these facts were challenged as facts in the scientific world, but it is too late... indisputable examples of a purposiveness, a forward reference in the scheme of Nature. In the domain of life-play teleology is a fact which only the grossest brand of obfuscation can deny. And teleology means – does it not ?-the stress of an idea, the pattern of a consciousness. Consciousness or thought in man, we know, is linked with the brain: and sentience which is the first step towards ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

The Indian Spirit and the World's Future  >  A Defence of Hinduism

... for manifestation the secrets of the one Lord and Master of all existence - this is Hinduism. And it is also Hinduism that man can experience and realise the Divine, become unified with the Infinite, act as a channel of the Eternal, for man is in essence the Supreme and man's nature can be through Yoga a form of the Supreme's dynamic. Hinduism recognises three Yogas to suit the three types of men - the... nourishes has become decadent in many respects and is resistant in many ways to the influence of spirituality - to value more the abolition of untouchability than the existence of the God-knowers and God-lovers who open up for man the possibilities of a further evolution: this is a capital mistake, a loss of right proportion, a blurring of correct perspective, a depreciation of the force that alone can in... except in words, from that of a British lord to a navvy, or a Park Avenue banker to an East Side huckster, or a white man to a negro, or a European to an Asiatic?" What is clear from Durant's question is Page 77 that there is a deplorable tendency in human nature towards unjust discrimination. And a social structure with Buddhism as the religious ingredient of it is as likely as ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

From Man Human to Man Divine  >  Introduction

... worth is the individual man in this immense cosmic drama? Does his existence bear any relevance here? Is there any sense and purpose behind the march of humanity, and if so, what is it? What should be the goal of man the individual and of the human race? Is there any truth in the notion of human free-will, or is man a mere creature of circumstances? What is meant after all by God or the Absolute? Does... aspiration, the urge, the persistent endeavour in him is a sure sign of Nature's will for a higher way to fulfilment, the emergence of a greater status." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 843) And what is then that greater status? "The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose... whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is." (Sri Aurobindo, op. cit., pp. 3-4) Elsewhere, in his book The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   From Man Human to Man Divine

Beyond Man  >  Chapter Nine: From Man to Superman

... precarious, that is measured out to us. Is a human being really so intelligent and of a stature so high as to commit sins against God — supposing that one could sin against God — sins of such a nature that his soul would have to burn eternally in hell? What understanding has man of God, sin, hell and eternity? Are his psychological and physiological shortcomings not too much of a disadvantage in his struggle... Part One: Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfassa Beyond Man Chapter Nine: From Man to Superman [Present] man is but the shadow of Man; Man is but the shadow of God. 1 Inscription deciphered on a bas-relief in a Babylonian temple. To most of us, anything related to the spirit seems airy, insubstantial, unreal and on the whole fictitious. We... and was born a man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? 42 — Jalal ud-Din ar-Rumi Our true self is in the manifestation of our growing soul. Whatever we do can only increase the growth of our self and the human being can only become itself by surpassing itself. This means that it is not man who becomes the superman; he is the link between the animal and the god, the laboratory ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Beyond Man

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  The Age of Sri Aurobindo

... the very highest which God and Nature and Man have in view, is not and cannot be kept in cold storage: it is being worked out even here and now, and it has to be worked out here and now. The ideal of the Life Divine embodies a central truth of existence, and however difficult or chimerical it may appear to be to the normal mind, it is the preoccupation of the inner being of man – all other ways or attempts... opportunity to pursue a spiritual idea. On the contrary, spiritual leaders have thought and experienced otherwise. Apart from the well-recognised fact that only in distress does the normal man think of God and non-worldly things, the real matter, however, is that the inner life is a thing apart and follows its own line of movement, does not depend upon, is not subservient to, the kind of outer life... spiritual attempt or minimised its importance. To say that because an ideal is apparently too high or too great for the present age, it must be kept in cold storage is to set a premium on the present nature of humanity arid eternise it: that would bind the world to its old moorings and never give it the opportunity to be free and go out into the high seas of larger and greater realisations. The ideal ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  Upanishadic Symbolism

... bring down something of the substance and nature of the Solar reality into the lower world, enlighten and elevate the lower, as far as it is allowed, into the higher. IV. THE TRIPLE AGNI Agni is the divine spark in man, the naming consciousness in the mortal which purifies and uplifts (pavaka) mortality into immortality. It is the god "seated in the secret heart, who is the ... the mind the directing knowledge. This triune world forms the humanity of man. But there is another aspect hidden behind this apparent nature, there is another world where man dwells in his submerged, larger and higher consciousness. To that his soul—the Purusha in his heart only has access. It is the world where man's nature is transmuted into another triune reality—Sat, Chit and Ananda. The one... field—is the society to which one belongs, the particular group of humanity in which he functions as a limb. The service to society or good citizenship entails the worship of humanity, of Man as a god. Lastly, man belongs to the family, which is the unit of society; and the backbone of the family is the continuous line of ancestors, who are its presiding deity and represent the norm of a living dharma ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Ascent of the Sacrifice - I

... m and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism... sensational hungering vital creates in man a false soul of desire; it is this that is the crude and dangerous element which the reason rightly distrusts and feels a need to control, even though the actual control or rather coercion it succeeds in establishing over our raw and insistent vital nature remains always very uncertain and deceptive. But the true soul of man is not there; it is in the true invisible... luminous cave of the nature: there under some infiltration of the divine Light is our soul, a silent inmost being of which few are even aware; for if all have a soul, few are conscious of their true soul or feel its direct impulse. There dwells the little spark of the Divine which supports the obscure mass of our nature and around it grows the psychic being, the formed soul or the real Man within us. It is ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Letters on Himself and the Ashram  >  Remarks on Spiritual Figures in India

... one very strong strain in human nature it could be accepted. But mark that it is in human physical consciousness only. The human vital tends rather to reject a happiness untainted by sorrow and to find it a monotonous, boring condition. Even if it accepts it, after a time it kicks over the traces and goes to some new painful or risky adventure. "Man's real nature is happiness. Happiness is inborn... psychic being and the nature of the psychic being is that of the divine light, harmony, love, but it is covered by the mental and separative vital ego from which strife, hate, cruelty naturally come. It is therefore natural to feel in the kindness the touch of the Divine, while the cruelty is felt as a disguise or perversion in Nature, although that would not prevent the man who has the realisation... it was made? Where on earth is this extraordinary file? How could Vivekananda know anything about me? Trikaldrishti? 5 July 1937 God knows where that extraordinary file of Vivekananda's letters is. I got news of it from X who heard about it from a man of the Ramakrishna Mission who came here. What I want to know is when did Vivekananda write that or what led him to take notice of me. ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Himself and the Ashram

Savitri  >  'The Kingdoms of the Little Life'

... primitive man; creatures of Nature red in tooth and claw, they have been content to work for the body's wants,—"content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act", no more. Selfhood and Breed (in the elemental sense in which Robert Bridges uses the terms in his poem, Toe Testament of Beauty) spin the animal plot, and primitive man is engaged in grovelling in the "grooves of animal desire". Even when man leaves... and uncertainly at first, but presently with more concerted and ambitious aim. Mind-crowned man has made his appearance on earth , and he is rich in endowments and his life is full of possibilities.         He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;       In his fragile tenement he grows Nature's lord. 54   From matter to life, from life to mind, and from mind to-he doesn't... grey unease". Yet Aswapati finds a meaning even in these obscure beginnings of life. Even here the world is somehow charged with the beauty of God. The slime and the mire somehow yield a wondrous progeny.   The world's senseless beauty mirrors God's delight. That rapture's smile is secret everywhere; It flows in the wind's breath, in the tree's sap, Its hued magnificence blooms ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4  >  The Mounting Fire

... , sentiments, passions, desires, etc.: the nervous knots there are the controlling agent of these lower functions of the mind; that is the control room, as it were, for all dynamism, for man's character and nature. And the part hidden or imbedded below houses the infra-impulses: the demands and needs that are Page 324 inherent mostly in the bodily functions, all the movements that... indeed it is ready and available only at the call of the fire below. Agni is therefore named 'hota,' one who calls the Divine down here below. It is the God here below that can call down the God above. Page 326 But how to awaken this God buried in matter, how is one to kindle this fire that apparently lies extinguished, the Vedic Rishis have a whole ritual of the process. They speak, first... (2) the hub behind and (3) further down, a hidden part – they are as we know, the cerebrum, the cerebellum and the Bridge and the Medulla. Such is man's head, the cranium, the lodgings where human mind dwells and from where it moves and controls all man's dynamic behaviour. The frontal lobe is the seat of intellect and intelligence: the topmost portion, the crown of the head is usually associated ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Appendix - 1 and 2

... countries than man's eyes can bear. Assailed by trooping voices of delight And seized mid a sunlit glamour of the boughs In faery woods, led down the gleaming slopes Of Gandhamadan where the Apsaras roam, Thy limbs have shared the sports which none has seen, And in god-haunts thy human footsteps strayed, Page 376 Thy mortal bosom quivered with god-speech And... the honeycombs of God, Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy, Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise. She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom, Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze. A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour, A branch of heaven transplant to human soil; Nature shall over leap her... of the World-Soul Moving in harmony with the cosmic Thought. As glides God's sun into the mystic cave Where hides his light from the pursuing gods, It glided into the lotus of her heart And woke in it the Force that alters Fate. It poured into a navel's lotus depth, Lodged in the little life-nature's narrow home, On the body's longings grew heaven-rapture's flower Page ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Perfection of Equality

... killing of the emotional nature but a transformation. All that presents itself here in our outward nature in perverse or imperfect forms has a significance and utility which come out when we get back to the greater truth of divine being. Love will be not destroyed, but perfected, enlarged to its widest capacity, deepened to its spiritual rapture, the love of God, the love of man, the love of all things... our ignorance so often a cruel confusion and distraction—from these depths and is not troubled by the clamour of the surface. The divine nature does not share in our gropings and our passions; when we speak of the divine wrath or favour or of God suffering in man, we are using a human language which mistranslates the inner significance of the movement we characterise. We see something of the real truth... must seek for them in the greatest degree of these powers which is at all attainable by our human nature. Man's urge of self-perfection is to be, in the ancient language, svarāṭ and samrāṭ , self-ruler and king. But to be self-ruler is not possible for him if he is subject to the attack of the lower nature, to the turbulence of grief and joy, to the violent touches of pleasure and pain, to the tumult ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

In the Mother's Light  >  Manifestation

... significance and a final consummation to all the diverse strivings of man. Without this ideal and underlying evolutionary impulsion, life would be a futile buffet against the tide of Time and the blockade of material circumstances. A hedonistic life, made up of desires and sensations, may satisfy the animal in man, but not the God who longs to recover and reveal His radiant infinity and immortality... is the history of the progressive purification and preparation of Page 132 this nature from its centre to its dense peripheries. But though much has been achieved, an immense more has still to be achieved. The ideal of the Yogi being, in his outer nature, like an inert stone or a mad man or a demon or a child, is an out- worn creed reflecting the failure of the Spirit to conquer and... then, no hope for man ? Will the hell-fire consume his whole being till it is reduced to ashes ? The Mother holds Page 133 out high hopes of his regeneration and eventual divinisation. She takes her stand upon the assurance of the Divine : "Of that ,O Lord, Thou hast given us assurance, an assurance which has been accompanied by the most powerful promise which Nature, the universal ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

The Crucifixion  >  Introduction -Jesus and the Theme of Love

... Christian theology, Jesus is the Son of God and is also God. So the sacrifice on the cross is that of God himself. That is, God incarnated Himself as Jesus. This was made necessary because of the sinful nature of man, which made it impossible for man to obey the Law of Moses as he should. Since we fail to keep the Law perfectly, we fall under its curse. Jesus (God) redeemed us from the curse of the Law... blocked out the love God asks us all to have for each other. The Pharisee was so busy congratulating himself for not being like other men, it never occurred to him that he was not much like God either. In contrast, the kneeling tax collector recognized the vast gulf between God and himself and, consequently, "went down to his house justified." Because of prideful ego in human nature, __________ ... Nelson). The basic reason accepted by the Early Christians for the crucifixion was that God loved man so much, that he sent his only son, Jesus, as a sacrifice that would atone* for the sins committed by mankind. Thus, the one idea central to Jesus' __________ * atone: the reunion of man and God by the life, and the sacrificial crucifixion of Jesus. Page 25 mission is love. This ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Crucifixion

Teilhard de Chardin and our Time  >  Towards a Vendantic Christianty the Individual, the Universal, the Transcendental

... l reality, with the universe a phantasmal appearance; (2) the universe, as a system of the One and the Many, is the sole reality, in which case God is nothing except Nature and hence, despite appearance, everything of Nature is equally divine. Nature, as we know it, is, for the ancient Vedanta, merely the outer manifestation and if we ignore what is behind this manifestation "we shall fall into... beginning. Therefore it creates in itself a self-conscious concentration of the All through which it can aspire. In the conscious individual...,World seeks after Self; God having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God.   "On the other hand it is by means of the universe that the individual is impelled to realise himself. Not only is it his foundation, his means, his field... 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 and identified with its universal and individual becomings, so the Purusha aspect is characteristically universal-individual and intimately connected with Nature even ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  Boris Pasternak

... though not voluntary but imposed. In winter all nature puts on an austere form. Perhaps, it is for this reason that winter is so dear to Pasternak. Of course, the Russian winter is well-known for its special features, and its scenic effects have passed into' the stuff of the Russian consciousness. As is the wintry external nature, so is the life of man; from the standpoint of esoteric truth, the world... a cruel irony? No, it is not so. "When our calamities reach their climax, He rushes upon us and covers us up." Therefore it is said that God appears before us not in the broad daylight but at the dead of night like a thief on tiptoe. The virtue of a spiritual man lies in his capacity to see weal in woe. Ordinarily sorrow is taken as an unmixed evil. But in the vision of the poet there are veins of... in all climes and times. The same vibration of life, the same rhythmic movement is at play in the universe. Man, animal and plant – in all there is only one golden thread that runs through. They are moved by the same tune, the same rhythm and the same life-energy. They have a common nature, a common virtue, a common movement and a common goal. The experience of this union is perhaps the fount of an ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

The Indian Spirit and the World's Future  >  The Spiritual Life and World-Renunciation: A Letter to One Attracted by the Cloister

... not been made the soul's luminously built abode. The earth too is God's own creation and all the power and diversity, colour and complexity that are Nature are secretly God's and are in existence not in order to be hated and dreaded and shunned and escaped from but in order to be converted into channels and instruments and moulds of God. As the Upanishad puts it: "The Eternal is before us and the Eternal... spiritual growth. The error of many a religion is to make too much of austerity and sorrow. This casts a shadow upon the forces of nature in oneself and makes one miss the goal of God in the world. God does not come on the cheap: that is true, and yet it is also true that God is infinite bliss and endless creativity and life abounding. The goal of evolution is not the martyr's crown of thorns but the wreath... seek to serve God. If you give a dying man some water and save his life, you do a fine thing, but it is not in itself a spiritual act unless you remember intensely that Page 144 you are offering the saving cup to the Divine within the man. A conscious self-consecration, a conscious self-offering are requisite, for then alone all activity becomes a means of uniting with God, participating ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays  >  Yoga, Consciousness and Human Fulfilment

... to the higher Nature. It is this, rather, that must be the aim of an integral Yoga. Page 278 ... The whole life is the Yoga of Nature. The Yoga that we seek must also be an integral action of Nature, and the whole difference between the Yogin and the natural man will be this, that the Yogin seeks to substitute in himself for the integral action of the lower Nature working in and... and by ego and division the integral action of the higher Nature working in and by God and unity. If indeed our aim be only an escape from the world to God, synthesis is unnecessary and a waste of time; for then our sole practical aim must be to find out one path out of the thousand that lead to God, one shortest possible of short cuts, and not to linger exploring different paths that end in the same... the change of consciousness, to be indispensable in the further progression of Man? Man and his crisis, man and his limitations, man and his death, man and his evolutionary future, man as a species preparing a new species - all these seem to be related to each other, and they all seem to point to the mystery of man's consciousness. Yoga as a science of Consciousness promises to hold the key to ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays

The Practice of the Integral Yoga  >  On Human Relationships in Sadhana

... someone simply because that someone happens to be a man or a woman. (v)Relationship between a man and a woman should be as between two human beings and not as between a man and a woman. (vi)One should not seek to establish relationships in order tot satisfy the sentimental, sensational and physical wants of the lower vital nature. (vii)A relationship should not be formed with a... (M C W, Vol. 12, pp. 68-69) "Love Him alone?" — What a disconcerting demand is this if How disturbing for the ego-bound attached heart of man! The sadhaka may at this point raise some questions of perplexity as j regards the real nature and goal of the Integral Yoga. He may ask: "Have I to renounce all other loves, all without exception, far I the sake of the love for the Divine... orientation it is asserted that a sadhakas love for the Divine should be exclusive; that is to say, it should admit of no sharing with others . Do we not read in the Bible? - "1the Lord thy God am a jealous God." The Mother also has said: 'To love truly the Divine we must rise above all attachments. To become conscious of the Divine Love, all other love must be abandoned." But , we wonder ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Practice of the Integral Yoga

Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history  >  Musa Spiritus

... the Gita had swum into his ken and stimulated in him a spirit of restless philosophical inquiry into the "first and last things" and the realm of "ends and means". Religion, humanism, science: God, man, Nature: Providence, foreknowledge and fate: rebirth, evolution and progress - what did they mean? He would not take things simply on trust. He must think things out for himself, he must come to grips... will one day be surpassed by another, by greater Man who will see God in himself and not himself in God, and who will see in existence more than life and body - who will see in it the dimensions of mind and Spirit as well. The Rakshasa, the Asura, and the mental man - these would be the necessary steps on the steep ascent to the summit of the future Man Divine. Kama is an interesting variation... the earth - he should seek God, and firm comes the Rishi's answer: Seek Him upon the earth.... Perfect thy human might. Perfect the race. For thou art He, O King. Only the night Is on thy soul By thy own will. Remove it and recover The serene whole Page 168 Thou art indeed, then raise up man the lover To God the goal. 38 If is ...

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo  >  Is Philanthropy Enough

... practising "artificiality"? You have expressed your doubt whether they live as God meant human beings to live, you think they are tending to be unnatural. But what is "natural" and what is God's ordinance for us? If the Creator whom you imagine to be arranging out things with finality put a man in a filthy slum, is that man not to try his best to get into a less hoggish way of existence? Would you... of the has-been: it is an outgrowing of old habits, a changing of Nature. New organs are developed, new faculties are formed by a refusal to accept the status reached and to acquiesce in what has seemed "natural". Truly speaking, the most unnatural thing is to remain what we are instead of falling into line with Nature's universal movement of changing from a lower level to a higher, giving... real light, radiating an influence around you which is filled with the divine initiative, the truth-conscious impulsion. Then your actions are bent automatically towards the certain good which God alone can know: whether the results of your actions be beneficial in any conventional sense or not, you have the firm assurance that in being a pure instrument of the super-human knowledge you ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Yoga - I  >  Morality and Yoga

... that a man is superior to others because he is born a Brahmin is not rational or justifiable. A spiritual or cultured man of Pariah birth is superior in the divine values to an unspiritual and worldly-minded or a crude and uncultured Brahmin. Birth counts, but the basic value is in the man himself, the soul behind, Page 430 and the degree to which it manifests itself in his nature. ... to be outgrown before there can be a true utilisation of the resources of Nature. Natural Calamities Why should earthquakes occur by some wrong movement of man? When man was not there, did not earthquakes occur? If he were blotted out by poison gas or otherwise, would they cease? Earthquakes are a perturbation in Nature due to some pressure of forces; frequency of earthquakes may coincide with... letter are the hard assertions of a mental belief leading to a great vehement assertion of one's creed and god because they are one's own and must therefore be greater than those of others—an attitude which is universal in human nature. Even the atheist is not tolerant, but declares his credo of Nature and Matter as the only truth and on all who disbelieve it or believe in other things he pours scorn as ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - I

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  In Quest of Reality

... We say here that there are two realms in which man lives, but they are incommensurables: Page 207 the truths and categories of one cannot be judged and tested by those of the other. Each is sui generis, each is valid in its own right, in its own dominion. God, Soul, Immortality— these are realities belonging to one section of our nature, seizable by a faculty other than the Pure Reason... but dynamic powers that almost negate or flout the usual laws of science have been demonstrated to exist and can be and are used by man. The Indian yogic discipline speaks of the eight siddhis, super-natural power? attained by the Yogi when he learns to control nature by the force of his consciousness. Once upon a time these facts were challenged as facts in the scientific world, but it is too late... are indisputable examples of a purposiveness, a forward reference in the scheme of Nature. In the domain of life-play teleology is a fact which only the grossest brand of obfuscation can deny. And teleology means— does it not?—the stress of an idea, the pattern of a consciousness. Consciousness or thought in man, we know, is linked with the brain: and sentience which is the first step towards ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

A Centenary Tribute  >  Amal Kiran-Reminiscences-Arun Vaidya

... p. 131. Page 90 Can I attain it? Yes, but the nature of infinity is that it has no end. Say not therefore that I attain it. I become it. Only so can man attain God by becoming God." 16 Sri Aurobindo has presented to us the golden key of heavenly existence here on earth as, to find God, one has to become God. The New Year Message of 2000 in the Mother's words was: "O divine... thought; He is the many who was the silent One... . 13 The Voice replied: "Remember why thou cam'st: Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self, In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths, Then mortal nature change to the divine. 14   Sri Aurobindo has helped us with the framework of the blue-print of life's evolutionary mission but it is our choice to follow it. The choice... and it is a unified seamless whole with infinite perspectives inherently impregnated with the trinity of Truth, Bliss and Beauty (Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram). This transformational relationship of man and God is depicted in the two-bird metaphor in Mundaka Upanishad, which derives its origin from the two-bird parable in Rig Veda. In case of Amal, an inevitable mile-stone in his pursuit of the Integral ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Centenary Tribute

The Story of a Soul  >  26 October 1955

... heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time. Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face, Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire passion of Grace! Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss: Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's kiss. Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Rose of God And on October 31, Lakshmi Puja day, she came... flower, Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour. Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of might, Rose of Power with thy diamond halo piercing the night! Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of thy plan, Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man. Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire, Rose of Life, crowded with petals... Meditation Hall and distributed to everyone Sri Aurobindo's poem "Rose of God": Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven, Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven! Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame, Passion flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name. Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being, Rose of Light, immaculate ...

Huta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Story of a Soul

Early Cultural Writings  >  Historical Impressions: Napoleon

... perceived by his panegyrists and critics that Bonaparte was not a man at all, he was a force. Only the nature of the force has to be considered. There are some men who are self-evidently superhuman, great spirits who are only using the human body. Europe calls them supermen, we call them vibhutis . They are manifestations of Nature, of divine power presided over by a spirit commissioned for the purpose... he is the second power of God, wrath, strength, grandeur, rushing impetuosity, overbearing courage, the avalanche, the thunderbolt; he is Balaram, he is Jehovah, he is Rudra. As such we may admire and study him. But the vibhuti, though he takes self-gratification and enjoyment on his way, never comes for self-gratification and enjoyment. He comes for work, to help man on his way, the world in... trample on others to satisfy himself, he does so without compunction. Is he not the strong man, the efficient ruler, the mighty one? The Rakshasa has kama, he has no prema. Napoleon knew not what love was; he had only the kindliness that goes with possession. He loved Josephine because she satisfied his nature, France because he possessed her, his mother because she was his and congenial, his soldiers ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

The Human Cycle  >  The Infrarational Age of the Cycle

... and at once entirely satisfying change and magical transformation. The advance, however it comes about, will be indeed of the nature of a miracle, as are all such profound changes and immense developments; for they have the appearance of a kind of realised impossibility. But God works all his miracles by an evolution of secret possibilities which have been long prepared, at least in their elements, and... vital urgings that he cannot exclude, visits or touches of a light from above that are not less suprarational because he does not recognise their source. No god, but at his highest a human being touched with a ray of the divine influence, man's very spirituality, however dominant, must have, while he is still this imperfectly evolved human, its rational and infrarational tendencies and elements. And... unrefined reason and unenlightened spirit in him cannot work for their own ends; they are bond-slaves of his infrarational nature. At a higher stage of development or of a return towards a fuller evolution,—for the actual savage in humanity is perhaps not the original primitive man, but a relapse and reversion towards primitiveness,—the infrarational stage of society may arrive at a very lofty order ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Integral Yoga, Evolution and the Next Species  >  Part Four

... full organization in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. .. .If it be true that... that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth."19 Sri Aurobindo points out that although Spirit and Matter appear to be entirely opposed to each other, and although this direct contradiction between the two could... when we come to Man, we find that the energizing consciousness appears as Mind more clearly aware of itself and things. This is still a partial and limited, not an integral power of itself; but a first conceptive potentiality and promise of integral emergence is visible. That integral emergence is the goal of evolving Nature. Man and Evolutionary Process The appearance of Man in the evolutionary ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Integral Yoga, Evolution and the Next Species

Savitri  >  'The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real'

... renders only "gold coin with bright alloy"; not God, but the empty name of God, is hers; and if God there be, somewhere or other, he is indifferent to, "the animals agony and the fate of man". If Savitri desires to reach the God she believes in, she must first die to herself, and make of Death "the gate of immortality".         Death the "sophist God" is himself the great perverter, making the less... an exposition—a Gita, shall we say—of God's secret purposes. Death is a god too, a power of no mean significance, but still no more than a shadow of the Real. A collapse of mere logic should precede our attempts to apprehend Truth as god himself. He defies reason, and is himself:         Universal, he is all, - transcendent, none.       To man's righteousness this is his cosmic crime,... ready:         Easy the heavens were to build for God.       Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory.. . 58   Between the static perfection of heaven and its gods and the dynamic evolving destiny of earth and its inhabitants, there is a vast difference; and it is earth and man that really engage the creative soul of God and offer a fruitful field for his lila or ecstatic ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Sri Aurobindo - The Smiling Master  >  The Smiling Master

... with sparkling humour. Here is it: Anatole's boutade and God's rejoinder! "Dilip, "Anatole France is always amusing whether he is ironising about God and Christianity or about that rational animal man or Humanity (with a big H) and the follies of his reason and his conduct. "But I presume you never heard of God's explanation of his non-interference to Anatole France when they... discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The discords of the worlds are God's discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and thrilled vastnesses of his transcendent... will be right upon earth, tip-top, A-l: my daughter Science and I have arranged that between us. Man will raise his noble brow, the head of creation, dignified, free, equal, fraternal, democratic, depending upon nothing but himself, with nothing greater than himself anywhere in existence. There will be no God, no gods, no churches, no priestcraft, no religion, no kings, no oppression, no poverty, no war ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - The Smiling Master

Kena and Other Upanishads  >  A Last Word

... goal. And this would seem to imply a rejection of the life of the cosmos. Well then may we ask, we the modem humanity more and more conscious of the inner warning of that which created us, be it Nature or God, that there is a work for the race, a divine purpose in its creation which exceeds the salvation of the individual soul, because the universal is more real than the individual, we who feel more... emphasis of the later teachings upon divine love and the high emphasis of the Veda upon divine works. The Vedic gospel of a supreme victory in heaven and on earth for the divine in man, the Christian gospel of a kingdom of God and divine city upon earth, the Puranic idea of progressing Avataras ending in the kingdom of the perfect and the restoration of the Golden Age, not only contain behind their forms... mental being who dwells in the world subjected helplessly to this law of death and birth or seems at least by his ignorance to be subjected to this and to other laws of the lower Nature. To know and possess its true nature, free, absolute, master of itself and its embodiments is the soul's means of transcendence, and to know and possess this is to know and possess the Brahman. It is also to rise out ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Kena and Other Upanishads

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4  >  The Sorrows of God

... of nature: one who has identified himself with Nature, ignorant nature, of which the ignorant and suffering humanity is part and parcel, one whose body and soul are in unison and union with the body and soul of all beings and creatures, made of the same stuff and substance cannot – and wants not to escape the general fate whatever it is. If misery be the badge of the human tribe, the Divine Man, the... Sorrows of God THE Son of Man – the Avatar – suffers with and suffers for the suffering humanity. The Christ with his cross, Ramakrishna with his cancer, Socrates with the hemlock creeping up and benumbing his limbs and Mohammed being hunted from place to place are familiar and poignant pictures. "Verily, verily, the foxes have their holes, the birds their nests, but the son of man hath nowhere... of the Divine Man it is a willing acceptance not an imposition or blind sub mission. Indeed, it is this difference that makes the unity of creation a progressive unity, instead of a static unity, a never-ending repetition, an eternal recurrence. There is a consciousness above and a consciousness below: a consciousness above the ignorant nature and a consciousness within that nature. They are not ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

Letters on Poetry and Art  >  Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

... perfect prose has been written by any man. In some of his books his prose carries in it the qualities of poetry and his thought has poetic vision. That is what I meant when I said it was poetry. 3 January 1937 How do you find Plato's ideas about philosophy, about Nature, existence of the soul, etc.? I don't know what are his ideas about philosophy or Nature. He believes in the soul and immortality... misses when he sweeps idealism out of the field. Man's utopias may be the projection of his hopes and desires, but he has to go on building them on pain of death, decline or collapse. As for the gospel of pleasure, it has been tried before and always failed—Life and Nature after a time weary of it and reject it, as if after a surfeit of cheap sweets. Man has to rush from his pursuit of pleasure, with... June 1932 As far as the photograph of which you speak can be taken as showing the man—it is that of a nature of which the chief character is intensity, but in a very narrow range. There is here no wide range of ideas or feelings; a few ruling ideas, a few persistent and keenly acute feelings. The face of a man whose vital is also intense, but without strength and therefore over sensitive. There ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Poetry and Art

The Psychic Being  >  The Psychic Being is the human portion of the Divine

... 1. Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being The Psychic Being The Psychic Being is the human portion of the Divine This bodily appearance is not all; The form deceives, the person is a mask; Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell. || 5.14 || His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years An incognito of the Imperishable. || 5.15 || A spirit... spirit that is a flame of God abides, A fiery portion of the Wonderful, Artist of his own beauty and delight, Immortal in our mortal poverty. || 5.16 || This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite, This screened unrecognised Inhabitant, Initiate of his own veiled mysteries, Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought. || 5.17 || In the mute strength of the occult Idea Determining predestined... predestined shape and act, Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale, Changing his imaged self from form to form, He regards the icon growing by his gaze And in the worm foresees the coming god. || 5.18 || ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   The Psychic Being

Collected Poems  >  The World Game

... Lyrical Poems from Manuscripts (Circa 1934-1947) Collected Poems The World Game Know more > ( The Ishwara to the Ishwari ) In god-years yet unmeasured by a man's thought or by the earth's dance or the moon's spin     I have guarded the law of the Invisible for the sake of thy smile, O sweet; While lives followed innumerable winged lives, as... is mine and the immense scope of the slow aeons my heart's way;     For I follow a secret and sublime Will and the steps of thy Mother-might. In the dim brute and the peering of man's brain and the calm sight in a god's eyes     It is I questing in Life's broken ways for thy laughter and love and light. When Time moved not nor yet Space was unrolled wide, for thy game of the worlds I gave     Myself... close, to the heart heart and to self self,     As a sea with a sea joins or limbs with limbs, and as waking's delight with sleep's. When mind pinnacled is lost in thy Light-Vasts and the man drowns in the wide god,     Thy Truth shall ungirdle its golden flames and thy diamond whiteness blaze; My souls lumined shall discover their joy-self, they shall clasp all in the near One,     And the sorrow ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1  >  Savitri — the Epic of the Spirit

... An animal with some instincts of a god, His life a story too common to be told, His deeds a number summing up to nought... His hope a star above a cradle and a grave. 15 The tragedy of human life subject to ignorance is intensely brought home to us. And yet there is much more than that in these lines. And about the nature of man's enjoyments, he says: Here even the... concerned it is free from such possible ambiguity. In the Mahabharata man suffers, struggles, tries to win, sometimes succeeds or fails, fate intervenes in human life, and the relation between man and God is in a very great degree indirect. In Savitri man, even as a struggling and a suffering being, is raised to a higher status because man knows himself to be an episode between the Inconscient and the... first time has brought out clearly the necessity of complete identification by the Avatar in his nature-part with the nature of man in order to save humanity. This identification, be it noted, is not an ignorant subjection on his part to Nature or even an outcome of sympathy as ordinarily understood by man. It proceeds on the basis of knowledge, — it is an act of divine compassion, an act of grace ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Savitri, An Epic

... instincts of a god, Page 47 His life a story too common to be told, His deeds a number summing up to nought,... His hope a star above a cradle and a grave." Sāvitrī Book I, Canto 5. The tragedy of human life subject to ignorance is intensely brought home to us. And yet there is much more than that in these lines. And about the nature of man's enjoyments, he says:... from such possible ambiguity. In the Mahābhārata man suffers, struggles, tries to win, sometimes succeeds or fails, fate intervenes in human life, and the relation between man and God is in a very great degree indirect. Page 40 In Sāvitrī, even as a struggling and a suffering being, man is raised to a higher status because man knows himself to be an episode between the Inconscient... the first time has brought out clearly the necessity of complete identification in his nature part by the Avatār with the nature of man in order to save humanity. This identification, be it noted, is not an ignorant subjection on his part to Nature or even an outcome of sympathy as ordinarily understood by man. It proceeds on the basis of knowledge,—it is an act of divine compassion, an act of grace ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Isha Upanishad  >  The Eternal in His Universe

... who is at the same time the particular present Self in each. They reached His singleness aloof from phenomena, they saw Him in every one of His million manifestations in phenomena. God in Himself, God in man, God in Nature were the "ideas" which their life expressed. Their civilisation was therefore more manysided and complete and their ethical and intellectual ideals more perfect and permanent than... others hold it to be the fulfilment under self-rule and guidance of man's nature, others a natural evolution of man in the direction of his highest faculties. The Hindus perceived that it was all these at once but they discovered that the law with which the soul must put itself in relation was the law of the Eternal Self, that man's nature must seek its fulfilment in that which is permanent & eternal in... very nature of limitation a swabhav , an ownbeing or as it is called in English a nature, which differentiates it from others of its kind, develops under the law of its nature; that is its swadharma , its own law & religion of being, and every separate & particular existence, whether inanimate thing or animal or man or community or nation must follow & develop itself under the law of its nature and ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study  >  Summary of Book-2-Part-2

... conceit". It was to "marry with a sky of calm a sea of bliss". But this vision of Nature seems to go be- yond the reach of her actions. For instance, she sees the possibilities of the life of gods in her vision but in actuality she succeeds in creating "A demi-god emerging from an ape". The secret energies of Nature act in such a way in this ignorant world that by their own action, sometimes by their... led to perdition by the heavenward path. A lavish sense he gave of power and joy." It was such a deceptive power that it used logic to convince man's mind and made the false seem true. Very often, this being spoke in the name of God himself. But all who lived in this atmosphere "lived for themselves alone". Under the garb of outer friendship and good-will, there lay treachery and hate... s of dark ideas which were responsible for the creation of man's hell. This hell was "...the gate of a false Infinite, An eternity of disastrous absolutes". It denied all true things because it was the power of the Inconscience. Thought became an instrument of perversity and even Good "...a faithless gardener of God, Watered with virtue the world's upas-tree". He saw ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)  >  chapter 013

...   All Yoga is a transaction between God in quest of man and man in search of God or, if you like a somewhat paradoxical turn, God from beyond man pulling him and God from behind and within man pushing him. Perhaps the most Chestertonian way of putting the matter would be: the archetypal Man who is God is at hide-and-seek with the evolving God who is Man. The long and short of the Yogic situation... connection with a visiting aspirant who was an extreme and chronic mastur-bator. He was a good man but with a terrible twist in his vital   1. Life-Literature-Yoga; Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo. Revised and Enlarged Edition (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1967), pp. 27-28. Page 151 nature. A number of times he had come to my room for a chat and each time I had got a severe... Agni, the Fire-god, in his role of all-refiner as a splendour in front of me, I thrust my dross out of my body and feel liberated from it. As a Parsi, dubbed "fire-worshipper" in religious classification, I had been accustomed to face in temple or at home the urn bearing the golden bouquet of flames flying up, sustained by logs of fragrant sandalwood. This fire, addressed as "Son of God" in the Avesta ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3)

Letters on Himself and the Ashram  >  Sadhana in the Ashram

... possible, but if it resists, then there is in the nature of things difficulty and struggle and the Asuric forces have their chance. 25 December 1933 It may be that a God-man was created first. But by "interference" he degenerated into the present man in his surface mental and vital consciousness. And this same spirit of a self-contradictory hostile nature created in his surface consciousness the exclusive... explained in terms of the psychic being and its relation to the instrumental (nature) being? It is certainly the psychic being turning the nature definitively Godwards, but the transformation has still to be worked out in the nature. Or can it be said that whoever has some aspiration for the Light or Truth or God vaguely, has some sort of conversion of consciousness, for the reason that he... consciousness of a self-contradictory nature. I have no inner knowledge to that effect—that it was intended to be worked out by these three forces alone. The whole thing looks like an intended perfect manifestation perverted in its surface mental and vital consciousness by the power of a self-contradictory hostile nature that was a possibility of God's being. If it started from the Inconscience ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Himself and the Ashram

Champaklal's Treasures - Edition-II  >  An Interview with Velji

... not then he ceases to have any meaning for man. But how is his Ādhāra prepared? It is a certain movement which takes place in his nature leaving his soul free, unaffected. If he were to use his freedom he would grow twenty arms and ten eyes. But he does not do so. Krishna says he has been taking birth always since the beginning. It is not that God is above somewhere else and has to come down... the ordinary man are formed as a result of his past Karma. The Avatar having no such past how are his mind, life and body formed? The Avatar gets it as other men do. What has that to do with his being an Avatar? All that is only a certain movement in nature in his lower Prakriti. If your idea is that Avatar is something miraculous and that he is not subject to the laws of Nature, then you have... thing from above then there is no such thing, one is not affected by birth and death. Then Buddha did not achieve perfection of his nature? He may have entered the higher ignorance. You see there are infinite movements of the higher consciousness in Nature. Human mind can occupy itself with certain mental absolutes, not all. It can confine itself to the absolute of the silent Brahman or the ...

Champaklal   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Champaklal's Treasures - Edition-II

Savitri  >  'The Secret Knowledge'

... "in Nature's instrument loiters secret God". Coercing his divinity, God is labouring here in our midst. 20 We are driven to action, shaped, changed and chastened by the Power—the Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone—"who is in us as our secret self". He will recast us into his own mould and raise us to Infinity.         Yet, for the time being, the Dusk is more real than the Dawn. God is veiled... to come. In Alexander Pope's words, man finds himself at the fluid junction between two continents:         Plac'd on this Isthmus of a middle state,       A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:       With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,       With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride...       In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;       In doubt his... possess high-souled man. He should leave the familiar coastal regions and venture forth to reach "the islands of the Blest". Beyond the seeming termini of this world must the traveller—the veiled Purusha; the insatiable mariner; the indefatigable Odysseus of the occult seas— dare to catch the vision of the blessed Isles, to discover "a new mind and body in the city of God". 21 No sleep, no ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Hymns to the Mystic Fire  >  The Doctrine of the Mystics

... recognise in the soul of man their brother and ally and desire to help and increase him by themselves increasing in him so as to possess his world with their light, strength and beauty. The Gods call man to a divine companionship and alliance; they attract and uplift him to their luminous fraternity, invite his aid and offer theirs against the Sons of Darkness and Division. Man in return calls the Gods... and his strengths, his clarities and his sweetnesses,—milk and butter of the shining Cow, distilled juices of the Plant of Joy, the Horse of the Sacrifice, the cake and the wine, the grain for the God-Mind's radiant coursers. He receives them into his being and their gifts into his life, increases them by the hymns and the wine and forms perfectly—as a smith forges iron, says the Veda—their great... human being this increasing godhead? Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Hymns to the Mystic Fire

The Birth of Savitr  >  The Birth of Savitr

... the whims in nature's play. Passive has become the thinker, listless the thought, And the Vedantist himself an illusion, Gods, creatures, imperious death but shadows. The will to be disappeared in that calm And remained the mute alone and self-absorbed. 10 May 2002 Page 20 Canto Nineteen Shadows of night turned into splendours of god And a delicate... emotional-intellectual being presiding over the actions of the three nature-powers: compassionate toiler and warrior on the battlefield and luminous in wisdom, full of Karuna, Jnana-Prem-Ananda, Prakash-Harsha-Shanti. Page 39 Canto Thirty-Eight Now the way must cut through brahmāndhāra And Savitri meet god in a godless form. By whatever it may be known or perceived That... is a dream Paradisal and Savitri is naïve That nature and spirit would consort here, As if the truth-gods harboured an illusion That the great sun would burn in body's house. Adamant the dreadful will of darkness stood, Dismissing hope of the mortal's return to life. But the flaming woman on battleground Took charge of god's work and fled the denial. 4 June 2002 ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Birth of Savitr

Gods and the World  >  The Colloquy of Indra and Agastya

... in his nature although elder in being. He should by their means effect the perfection towards which Agastya is striving and not turn enemy nor slay his friend in this terrible struggle towards the goal. Indra replies that Agastya is his friend and brother, brother in the soul as children of one Supreme Being, friend as comrades in a common effort and One in the divine love that unites God and man... goal. Agastya accepts the will of the God and submits. He agrees to perceive and fulfil the Supreme in the activities of Indra. From his own realm Indra is supreme lord over the substances of being as manifested through the triple world of mind, life and body and has therefore power to dispose of its formations towards the fulfilment, in the movement of Nature, of the divine Truth that expresses itself... friendship and alliance has attained to the present stage in his progressive perfection; but now he treats Indra as an inferior Power and wishes to go beyond without fulfilling himself in the domain of the God. Page 27 He seeks to divert his increased thought-powers towards his own object instead of delivering them up to the universal Intelligence so that it may enrich its realisations in humanity ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Gods and the World

Nachiketas  >  A Synoptic Essay on Immortality

... dies?' 'Does man die?' 'Does the body die?' 'If the body dies, what happens to man?' 'Is there rebirth of man?' 'What happens to man between death and rebirth?' 'Why should man die?' 'Why should man be born?' 'What is man?' According to some, behind and above the Universe, behind and above man, there is a Supreme Reality. What is the nature of that Reality? ... as asks a question as to whether 'man is' or' man is not' after death, the answer lies in the fact that the soul which is the master of the chariot remains, even when the body or the chariot is dissolved. In other words, Nachiket as is ultimately told by Yama that what remains after the man is dead is his soul, because the soul is immortal. But what is the nature of the soul? What is its location... to start with, we may like to have brief answers that we can gain from them in terms of the conclusions that they have arrived at on the important questions of birth and death, of God and Soul, of God and Matter, of Man and the Universe, on why we are on the earth, why we are born, why we die, what happens to us after death, whether we can be reborn and why we should be reborn, what, in fact, is the ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Nachiketas

The Psychic Being  >  What is Meant by the Psychic Being

... an evolutionary creature like man; it may mean the spark of the Divine which has been put into Matter by the descent of the Divine into the material world and which upholds all evolving formations here. There is and can be no psychic being in a non-evolutionary creature like the Asura; there can be none in a god who does not need one for his existence. But what the god has is a Purusha and a Prakriti... and beautiful, finally becomes ready and strong enough to turn the nature towards the Divine. It can then come entirely forward, breaking through the mental, vital and physical screen, govern the instincts and transform the nature. Nature no longer imposes itself on the soul, but the soul, the Purusha, imposes its dictates on the nature. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - III: The Psychic Being and... 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, but exteriorised in the ignorance of Nature it is the individual apparent being imperfect with her imperfection. Thus the soul ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   The Psychic Being

Sri Aurobindo - The Poet  >  The Longest Sentence in English Poetry

... Him as the hidden Master of all works, bow down before the one God or the manifold Deity, the one divine Man or the one Divine in all men or, more largely, discover the One whose presence enables us to become unified in consciousness or in works or in life with all beings, unified with all things in Time and Space, unified with Nature and her influences and even her inanimate forces,—the truth behind... Immutable, reject Him in Nature and Cosmos,—whether they adore Him in various strange or beautiful or magnified forms of the human ego or for His perfect possession of the qualities to which man aspires, His Divinity revealed to them as a supreme Power, Love, Beauty, Truth, Righteousness, Wisdom,—whether they perceive Him as the Lord of Nature, Father and Creator, or as Nature herself and the universal... change; He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power, All knowledge rushes on him like a sea: Transmuted by the white spiritual ray He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm, Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech: An equal greatness in her life was sown. Perhaps the next longest sentence—141 words and, if the three compounds count each for 2, 144 as in Sri Aurobindo's ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

On Thoughts and Aphorisms  >  Aphorism - 206

... spiritual aspiration enable one to master one’s karma. To learn is good. To become is better. The Mother Aphorism - 206 206—God leads man while man is misleading himself; the higher nature watches over the stumblings of his lower mortality; this is the tangle and contradiction out of which we have to escape into the self-unity to which alone is possible a ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Thoughts and Aphorisms

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Intuition of the Age

... life as a whole, seize man and the world in an integral realisation. The greater part of the vast mystery of existence escapes its envergure. Reason is that faculty which is for analysing, defining, classifying and fixing things. It is a power that has grown in man in order that he may best manipulate the things of the world. It is utilitarian, practical in its nature and outlook. And as practical... batter things into a shape in order to create. He creates means, he manifests. He wills and he achieves -"God said 'let there be light' and there was light."   As a matter of fact, the superman is not, as Nietzsche thinks him to be, the highest embodiment of the biological force of Nature, not even as modified and refined by the aesthetic and aristocratic virtues of which the higher reaches... not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 11  >  The Mounting Fire

... desires, Page 26 etc. : the nervous knots there are the controlling agent of these lower functions of the mind; that is the control room, as it were, for all dynamism, for man's character and nature. And the part hidden or embedded below houses the infra-impulses: the demands and needs that are inherent mostly in the bodily functions, all the movements that are called forth in the wake... it is ready and available only at the call of the fire below. Agni is therefore named 'hota', one who calls the Divine down here below. It is the God here below that can call down the God above. Page 29       But how to awaken this God buried in matter, how is one to kindle this fire that apparently lies extinguished, the Vedic Rishis have a whole ritual of the process. They speak... lobe, (2) the hub behind and (3) further down, a hidden part—they are as we know, the cerebrum, the cerebellum and the Bridge and the Medula. Such is man's head, the cranium, the lodgings where human mind dwells and from where it moves and controls all man's dynamic behaviour.         The frontal lobe is the seat of intellect and intelligence: the topmost portion, the crown of the head is usually ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 11

Notes on the Way  >  18 May 1966

... was necessary for man to forget his omnipotence, because it had simply puffed him up with pride and vanity, and so had become completely distorted; and he had to be made to feel that many things were stronger and more powerful than he. But essentially this is not true. It is a necessity of the curve of progress, that's all. Man is potentially a god. He believed himself an actual god. He needed to learn... but if men accept to be cattle. There is in the essence of human nature a sovereignty over all things which is spontaneous Page 37 and natural, when it is not falsified by a certain number of ideas and so-called knowledge. One could say that man is the all-powerful master of all the states of being of his nature, but that he has forgotten to be this. His natural state is to be... he had... not understood, but at least felt a bit. But as soon as he takes the right stand, he knows that he is potentially a god. Only, he must become this, that is, overcome all that is not this. This relationship with the gods is extremely interesting.... As long as man stands dazzled, lost in admiration of the power, beauty, accomplishments of these divine beings, he is their slave. But when ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Notes on the Way

Preparing for the Miraculous  >  1: Adam Kadmon and the Evolution

... Their core is that “the essence of Man is the God within,” and that the goal of the initiate is “an actual assumption of the attributes of God, in short: divinization.” The way of Hermes is the way of immortality, and the goal is reached when the purified soul has realized God, “so that the reborn man, although still a composite of body and soul, can be fairly called a god.” (Fowden) Such realizations are... “pre-existent man” was none other than the archetypal man perceived by the Mother, or the cosmic Purusha mentioned by Sri Aurobindo. As the light not darkened by matter but at its origin, he is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind or archetypal Superman. Kabbalah One of the biblical expressions that have entered into the common language is that “man is created in the image of God.” The in... understood. For the biblical book of Genesis tells of two ways in which Adam was created. In the one he was at first alone, and God gave him a mate to lighten his solitude; in the other God created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. The latter version would mean that Adam was man-woman, potentially androgynous, and that the separation of the sexes resulted from an operation upon Adam’s bisexual body. This ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Preparing for the Miraculous

The Spirit of Auroville  >  02 September 1966

... Savitri flashed into my mind: This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven: A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme: His nature we must put on as he put ours; We are sons of God and must be even as he: His human portion, we must grow divine. || 15.10 || Our life is a paradox with God for key. || 15.11 || ...

Huta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Spirit of Auroville

Collected Poems  >  The Hidden Plan

... The Hidden Plan Know more > However long Night's hour, I will not dream     That the small ego and the person's mask Are all that God reveals in our life-scheme,     The last result of Nature's cosmic task. A greater Presence in her bosom works;     Long it prepares its far epiphany: Even in the stone and beast the godhead lurks,     A bright Persona of... burst out from the limit traced by Mind     And make a witness of the prescient heart; It shall reveal even in this inert blind     Nature, long veiled in each inconscient part, Fulfilling the occult magnificent plan, The world-wide and immortal spirit in man. Page 602 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  Love-Its Place and Power-1

... other relations, since he follows too knowledge and works and has need of the Divine as teacher, friend and master. The growing of the love of God must carry with it in him an expansion of the knowledge of God and of the action of the divine Will in his nature and being."¹ All these and other complex needs of the sâdhaka of the Integral Yoga are fully met by the Divine Mother. In Her we embrace our eternal... the Divine. "To make the mind one with the divine consciousness, to make the whole of our emotional nature one love of God everywhere, to make all our works one sacrifice to the Lord of the worlds and all our worship and aspiration one adoration of Him and self-surrender, to direct the whole self God wards in an entire union is the way to rise out of Page 339 a mundane into a divine... its realisation and fulfilment. Sri Ramakrishna brings out the essential truth of bhakti when he says in his inimitable, homely imagery, "Knowledge is like a man and bhakti like a woman. Knowledge has entry only up to the drawing room of God, but love can enter His inner apartments." Sri Krishna winds up his luminous gospel with the supreme word, paramam vacah , which he calls the most secret truth ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo's Message  >  Sri Aurobindo on Religion

... they are needed by man because the lower members have to be exalted and raised before they can be fully spiritualised, before they can directly feel the spirit and obey its law. An intellectual formula is often needed by the thinking and reasoning mind, a form or ceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other parts of the infrarational being, a set moral code by man's vital nature in their turn towards... without any issue. The spiritual life, on the contrary, proceeds directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a greater consciousness in which one finds one's true being and comes first into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine. For the spiritual seeker this change of consciousness... the mind; it enters into the deeper consciousness of the Spirit and acts out of the truth of the Spirit. As for the question about the ethical life Page 18 and the need to realise God, it depends on what is meant by fulfilment of the objects of life. If an entry into the spiritual consciousness is part of it, then mere morality will not give it to you. * There are ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Sri Aurobindo's Message

Aspects of Sri Aurobindo  >  The true Teilhard and the Essential Sri Aurobindo

... planetary scale. What we may call in Indian nomenclature the Vishwa Manava, the World-Man, in complete unitary and multiple thought-expression, is evolved. To dub this earthly "totalization" of Mental Mankind the cosmic consciousness, the Page 37 realization of the All, the God Ahead joining with the God Above — as Teilhard does — would be an exaggeration. No supreme divine reality is... then it is evident that it is the progressive experience of that soul in Nature which takes the form of this evolution of consciousness: rebirth is self-evidently a necessary part, the sole possible machinery of such an evolution." Thirdly, we may probe the content of Omega Point. Teilhard has written, as we have seen, of "God, the eternal being-in-itself,...everywhere in process of formation for... individual "soul" but he has no answer to the question: how has the soul-individuality come up? He does not subscribe to the orthodox theory that each soul is newly created by God at the birth of a body. He 29 says of the man deeply convinced of the evolutionary viewpoint: "Body and soul, he is the product of a huge creative work with which the totality of Page 36 things has collaborated ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

The Secret of the Veda  >  The Sons of Darkness

... will be enough to translate without comment Page 230 the hymn in which this phrase occurs so as to show finally the nature of this symbolism. "Of this divine and rapturous seer (Soma), bearer of the sacrifice, this honeyed speaker with the illumined thought, O god, join to us, to the speaker of the word the impulsions that are led by the cows of light ( iṣo goagrāḥ ). He it was who desired... growing in knowledge makes a third his helper and rushing impetuously looses upward the multitude of the cows ( gavyam ) by the help of his fighters." And the last Rik of the Sukta speaks of the Aryan (god or man) arriving at the highest knowledge-vision ( upamāṁ ketum aryaḥ ), the waters in their meeting nourishing him and his housing a strong and brilliant force of battle, kṣatram amavat tveṣam . From... produced through Indra's conquest of Swar for man following as we know upon his destruction of the Pani armies with the help of the Angirases and the ascent of the Sun and the shining Cows. It is for man and as powers of man that all this is done by the gods, not on their own account since they possess already;—for him that as the Nṛ , the divine Man or Purusha, Indra holds many strengths of that ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Secret of the Veda

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Man - Slave or Free?

... , grouping together and manipulating the recorded experiences from outside objects. The very nature of mind is, according to them, a creation of past material experience transmitted by heredity with such persistence that we have grown steadily from the savage with his rudimentary mind to the civilised man of the twentieth century. As a natural result of these materialistic theories, science has found... the moral future of mankind. First, man is a creation and slave of matter. He can only master matter by obeying it Secondly, the mind itself is a form of gross matter and not independent of and master of the senses. Thirdly, there is no real free will, because all our action is determined by two great forces, heredity and environment. We are the slaves of our nature, and where we seem to be free from... reject and control external stimuli, but can defy such apparently universal material laws as that of gravitation and ignore, put aside and make nought of what are called laws of nature and are really only the laws of material nature, inferior and subject to the psychical laws because matter is a product of mind and not mind a product of matter. This is the decisive discovery of Yoga, its final contradiction ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  The Novel Alchemy

... on the first day. The Rishis of the Upanishads give us a slightly different version. God was not at all pleased with the first sketch and with the forms of animalkind created. He tried a second time, and again it failed to please. After several essays of this nature, He was at last pleased with His work when man came into being. Now it was truly well done, sukrtam etat. In fact, Creation is a... Agni has an assistant and counterpart in Parjanya, the Rain-God. The work of this godhead is to help in the descent, the bringing down of the waters of heaven, as in a downpour of rain. To establish here on this earth what has risen to the heights and exists there, is the supreme and integral achievement. The spiritualised body of man will not be simply a spiritual consciousness. It will be all... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 The Novel Alchemy ACCORDING to the Bible, God said, "Let there be Creation", and the Creation came. God was pleased, not only because the Creation came but also because the Creation was all-perfect, with nothing to change: it was like an edifice firm and solid and flawless, it would endure eternally firm and ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Yoga and Human Evolution

... emotions are stilled and by the perfect awakening of the intuitive reason which places mind in communion with spirit the whole man is ultimately placed at the service of the Infinite. All false self merges into the true Self. Man acquires likeness, union or identification with God. This is mukti , the state in which humanity thoroughly realises the freedom and immortality which are its eternal goal. ... bondage to the body and the vital impulses. According to the scientific theory, the human being began as the animal, developed through the savage and consummated in the modern civilised man. The Indian theory is different. God created the world by developing the many out of the One and the material out of the spiritual. From the beginning, the objects which compose the physical world were arranged by Him... once more by the body and to put itself at its service and the lordship of the body over the whole man becomes more dangerous than in the natural state because the innocence of the natural state is lost. The power of knowledge is placed at the disposal of the senses, sattva serves tamas , the god in us becomes the slave of the brute. The disservice which scientific Materialism is unintentionally ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Aspects of Sri Aurobindo  >  A Gross Misunderstanding of Sri Aurobindo

... is Sri Aurobindo who affirms that "anyone who wants to change earth-nature must first accept it in order to change it" 1 — Sri Aurobindo of those lines of his "A God's Labour", which he himself quotes in this context: He who would bring the heavens here, Must descend himself into clay And the burden of earthly nature bear And tread the dolorous way. I should like to know if... history." 8 Then comes Nair's confession of faith and sight of Pisgah: "The last verse of the Gita affirms that this can be achieved only by a conjoint action by man and deity which means that man can and should attain similitude (sadharmya) to God, accepting deity who incessantly works for the world as his own soteriological model and working in the same manner. This I would regard as the highest perception... puts it with reminiscence of Virgil's "Sunt lacrimae rerum" ("Tears in the nature of things") and Wilfred Owen's "heartbreak at the heart of things", than he who talked of having undergone more difficulties than any spiritual seeker before him because he wanted to face in full all the grievous lack and sorrowful strain which man in his imperfection suffers and to assure him of the possibility of overcoming ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)  >  chapter 011

... Technically, their number is said to be in the neighbourhood of 10 20 . Science does not envisage a divinisation of man but it looks forward to immense technological development which could make man the scientist independent of the earth in the remote future. So the future Aurobindonian man, whom we may designate the divinised scientist, need have no worry even on purely scientific grounds. They will permit... art That", God as the human soul's own essence and ultimate self. But these formulas which frightened the orthodox church and laid their maker open to the charge of heresy are not the whole of Eckhart. They express the Eckhart who wrote in German. The Eckhart who wrote in Latin manifests another shade of spiritual vision, the more typically Christian sense of the soul as distinct from God even when... s Dei" - "the intellectual love of God" - the mind's ardent seizure of the underlying unifying Reality by a direct intuition which is at bottom the One knowing the One or, in Plotinus's phraseology, "the return of the Alone to the Alone". But the Schoolman frowned on Spinoza's pantheism and refrained from extending the function of the "intellectus" to seeing God as the highest Universal, the supreme ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  Greek Drama

... are replete with instances of this type of mentality. But it has been characterised there as being typical not of man, but of the titan, the demon and the ogre, it is not truly human. The names given to these types indicate their nature. These belong to the undivine nature, whereas man belongs to the divine. The struggle between the divine and the undivine, the gods and the titans, and the final victory... authority, it is a man-made law, temporary and temporal, depending on circumstances. There is another kind of law, an unwritten code derived from God and that cannot be transgressed: "Yes, for these laws were not ordained of Zeus, And she who sits enthroned with Gods below, Page 61 Justice enacted not these human laws. Nor did deem that thou, a mortal man, Couldst by... satisfaction and fulfilment of her own life, the hidden secret of her love. We have seen a king renounce his throne for the sake of his personal love. We are also familiar with the spectacle of a man, or god-man, sacrificing personal love for the good of the state. Antigone too walks on these paths. She has not demanded the satisfaction of her personal, too intimately personal needs. In her urge to carry ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

The Human Cycle  >  Foreword to the First Edition

... devices of our reason, the truths or fictions of our intelligence, but much rather according to the truth of what man is and the real soul and meaning of what he does. God is not to be deceived, says the Scripture. The modern mind does not believe in God, but it believes in Nature: but Nature too is not to be deceived; she enforces her law, she works out always her results from the thing that really is... Hell that is paved with these excellent professions and passable intentions, and the cause is that while the better reason and will of man may be one hopeful factor in Nature, they are not the whole of nature and existence and not by any means the whole of our human nature. There are other and very formidable things in us and in the world and if we juggle with them or put on them, in order to get them... stand and they represent the greater aims Page 604 of the spirit in man which through all the denials, obstacles and imperfections of his present incomplete nature knows always the perfection towards which it moves and the greatness of which it is capable. Circumstance and force and external necessity and past nature may still be too strong for us, the Rudra powers still govern our destinies ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The March of Civilisation

... terrible – has been well recognised and experienced in the great French Revolution. A violence came out from somewhere and seized man and society: man was thrown out of his gear, society broken to pieces. There came a change in the very character and even nature of man: and society had to be built upon other foundations. The past was gone. Divasa gatah Something very similar has happened again more... itself, man's very nature and sought to know it from within and shape it consciously. In Europe where the frontal consciousness is more stressed and valued, the more charac­teristic feature of its history is the unfoldment and meta­morphosis of the forms and expressions, the residuary powers, as it -were, of man's evolving personality, individual and social.         To sum up then. Man progresses... was taken up into the travailing crucible of consciousness. We may name it also as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached its climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God denoted that the lower ranges of the vital being (its physical foundations) were now stirred in man to awake and to receive the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most material to be worked upon and made ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  The March of Civilisation

... and terrible—has been well recognised and experienced in the great French Revolution. A violence came out from somewhere and seized man and society: man was thrown out of his gear, society broken to pieces. There came a change in the very character and even nature of man: and society had to be built upon other foundations. The past was gone. Divasa gatah. Something very similar has happened again more... substance itself, man's very nature and sought to know it from within and shape it consciously. In Europe where the frontal consciousness is more stressed and valued, the more characteristic feature of its history is the unfoldment and metamorphosis of the forms and expressions, the residuary powers, as it were, of man's evolving personality, individual and social. To sum up then. Man progresses through... was taken up into the travailing crucible of consciousness. We may name it also as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached its climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God denoted that the lower ranges of the vital being (its physical foundations) were now stirred in man to awake and to receive the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most material to be worked upon and made ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

Words of the Mother - II  >  Love for the Divine

... one; but in the manifestation, it is coloured and differentiated by each individual nature. If you are impure and egoistic, love in you will become impure and egoistic, narrow, sectarian, limited, ambitious and possessive, violent, jealous, vulgar, brutal and cruel. Is this the kind of love that can be offered to God? If you want your love to be worthy of the one you love, if you want to enjoy love... November 1952 It is said that one grows into the likeness of what one loves; but with regard to God it is also true that one can remain always with Him only when one grows into His likeness. It is not through human love that one can learn to love the Divine, for the love is of quite a different nature. First learn to give yourself sincerely to the Divine and then the joy of love will come afterwards... what he asks. Whereas the Divine does for each one what is best for him from all points of view. But man, in his ignorance and blindness, revolts against the Divine when his desire is not satisfied, and says to Him, "You do not love me." 28 May 1946 Page 129 You say of your God: "I have loved Him so much and yet He did not remain with me!" But what kind of love have you given Him ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of the Mother - II

The Sun and The Rainbow  >  Money and the Spiritual Aspirant

... as that the God-lover and God-follower invariably gets impoverished in worldly things. But, of course, the mere fact of one's being a God-lover and God-follower does not automatically safeguard one against financial difficulties and mishaps. Foolishness and incompetence in financial matters may accompany the Godward turn, and ordinary nature brings a toll for them: to turn towards God does not ... ordinary man — especially when one is the practitioner of a Yoga which accepts the world and seeks to divinise life's activities instead of renouncing them and abandoning Sometimes, however, financial difficulties come as a test and in order to increase one's spiritual intensity; they are not really punishments by Asuric forces but part of the working out of a Yogic development in one. God's workings... one's actions themselves and feel oneself Page 46 to be merely watching what goes on by force of Prakriti or Nature. This deepens into one's becoming the witness Purusha, the individual Being who initiates nothing and only gives or withholds sanction to Nature's doings — and ultimately one realises the infinite impersonal Atman, the one World-Self standing aloof in divine tranquillity ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Sun and The Rainbow

Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique  >  Sri Aurobindo in Baroda

... marrow of my bones. It is to accomplish this mission that God has sent me to the earth. 42 The seed began to sprout when I was only fourteen, it took firm root when I was eighteen. My aunt has made you believe that some bad man has led your good-natured husband astray; but, in fact, it is your good-natured husband who has led that man and hundreds of others to the path, be it good or evil, and... of present nature that it can be developed, and such a change is not possible except by Yoga. The nature of man and of things is at present a discord, a harmony that has got out of tune. The whole heart and action and mind of man must be changed but from within and not from without, not by political and social institutions, not even by creeds and philosophies, but by realisation of God in ourselves... three manias, which were the dynamic forces moulding his life and nature. The first, the will to consecrate all he was and all he had to God: "I firmly believe that the qualities, talent, higher education and learning, and money God has given me, all belong to Him." The second, a consuming passion for realising God: "I must see God face to face." The third, his resolve to raise India to her full ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique

Education and the Aim of human life  >  Sri Aurobindo's Integral Education

... endeavour is "to see and depict man and Nature and life for their own sake, in their own characteristic truth and beauty; for behind these first characters lies always the beauty of the Divine in life and man and Nature and it is through their just transformation that what was at first veiled by them has to be revealed."29 In this way the aesthetic being of man will rise towards its diviner p... the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reaction of the desire-soul in man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of the nature. 16 The vital is a vast kingdom full of forces acting and reacting upon one another, the very nexus of man's life an the... appeared in the whole and has manifested a nature of its own and a law of that nature, a Swabhāva and Swadhārma, and embodied it in its intellectual, aesthetic, Page 47 ethical, dynamic, social and political forms and culture. And equally then our cultural conception of humanity must be in accordance with her ancient vision of the universal man testing in the human race, evolving ...

Pavitra   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Education and the Aim of human life

Champaklal's Treasures - Edition-II  >  Letters to Barindra Kumar Ghose

... the indivisible. In order to reach it, sannyāsa, moksa, nirvāna are the mind's means. One man or another can get this featureless Moksha, but what is the gain? The Brahman, the Self, God, are always there. What God wants in man is to embody Himself here in the individual and the community, to realize God in life. The old way of Yoga would not make the harmony or union of the Spirit and life. It dismissed... a spiritual community. This is my present idea. As yet it has not been fully developed. All is in God's hands, whatever He makes us do that we shall do. You write about the deva sangha: "I am not a God, I am only some much hammered and refined iron". No one is a God but in each man there is a God and to make Him manifest is the aim of divine life. That we can all do. I recognise that there are... accurate your description of yourself. Still whatever the nature of a vessel be, once the touch of God is put upon it, once the spirit is awake, great and small, all that does not make much difference. There may be more difficulties, more time may be taken, there may be difference in the manifestation, but even about that there is no certainty. The God within keeps no account of all these hindrances and ...

Champaklal   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Champaklal's Treasures - Edition-II

The Secret of the Veda  >  The Colloquy of Indra and Agastya

... in his nature although elder in being. He should by their means effect the perfection towards which Agastya is striving and not turn enemy nor slay his friend in this terrible struggle towards the goal. Indra replies that Agastya is his friend and brother,—brother in the soul as children of one Supreme Being, friend as comrades in a common effort and one in the divine love that unites God and man... Agastya accepts the will of the God and submits. He agrees to perceive and fulfil the Supreme in the activities of Indra. From his own realm Indra is supreme lord over the substances of being as manifested through the triple world of mind, life and body and has therefore power to dispose of its formations towards the fulfilment, in the movement of Nature, of the divine Truth that expresses itself... friendship and alliance has attained to the present stage in his progressive perfection; but now he treats Indra as an inferior Power and wishes to go beyond without fulfilling himself in the domain of the God. He seeks to divert his increased thought-powers towards his own object instead of delivering them up to the universal Intelligence so that it may enrich its realisations in humanity through Agastya ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Secret of the Veda

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Liberation of the Spirit

... gunas of Nature; for to be desireless, ego-less, equal of mind and soul and spirit and nistraiguṇya , is in the idea of the Gita to be free, mukta . We may accept this description; for everything essential is covered by its amplitude. On the other hand, the positive sense of freedom is to be universal in soul, transcendently one in spirit with God, possessed of the highest divine nature,—as we may... Page 679 true highest being. All this means that it is not at one with God; for to be at one with God is to be at one with oneself, at one with the universe and at one with all beings. This oneness is the secret of a right and a divine existence. But the ego cannot have it, because it is in its very nature separative and because even with regard to ourselves, to our own psychological existence... may say, like to God, or one with him in the law of our being. This is the whole and full sense of liberation and this is the integral freedom of the spirit. We have already had to speak of purification from the psychic desire of which the craving of the prana is the evolutionary or, as we may put it, the practical basis. But this is in the mental and psychic nature; spiritual desirelessness has ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  The Triple Aim

... whole nature in all its parts. But it is only a partial and preliminary work of liberation and transformation that can be done by this initial ascent. The final ascent implies an irrevocable transformation, integration and sublimation of the whole being of man consequent upon a series of initial ascents and descents. It consummates the establishment of the entire conscious- ness of man upon... consciousness into the divine consciousness of the Supermind, and bring the Light and Force of the latter for the transformation and divinisation of the whole nature of man, including even his surface Page 66 physical nature and its movements. I shall consider the conditions of this ascent and its implications and results when I come to dwell upon the details of the Integral Yoga... and culminating in the perfect Epiphany in man is the ultimate sense and significance o terrestrial existence. The soul's wandering from birth to" birth and assumption of form after form is a long and complex preparation of its instrumental nature for the perfect manifestation of the Divine. Creation can have no other purpose, the aeonic travail of Nature can have no other goal. Delight? But it must ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God  >  2: The Making of a Theory

... miracles, hell, and the suffering in nature ordained by a good God. The death of his favourite daughter, Anne, at the age of nine, delivered the final blow to his formerly cherished religious convictions. The more he thought, the more bewildered he became. Later in life he will describe himself as an “agnostic,” somebody who does neither accept nor deny the existence of God, and who acquiesces in his ignorance... whose book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691) states in a nutshell what natural theology was about. Ray was the first to use the metaphor of the watch: if you happened to find in nature something made like a watch, you could not but deduce that it must be made by an intelligent being, a watchmaker. Therefore, seeing how marvellously everything in nature and the universe had been... , one could not but deduce that there was a supreme Intelligent Being who had made it all. You had to conclude that God existed. At Cambridge William Paley’s book: Natural Theology – or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1803) had been mandatory reading. Darwin had been fascinated by this and other works of Paley, one of the last writers ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  What is Yoga

... Yoga of Nature for the unveiled manifestation of the One whom she holds secret in herself, and a conscious, constant, and dynamic union with Him in her terrestrial play. Nature Page 9 is not inconscient and blind, nor her universal strivings a senseless gamble of caprice and chance, and a purposeless expenditure of force—she is big with God. "But what Nature aims at... In his evolution man has arrived at a stage when his nature must either consent to be converted into the Supernature or go slithering down into perdition. If we look with a searching and dispassionate eye into the heart of Nature's universal working in the material world, we perceive that all life is Yoga—a slowly, spirally, precariously evolving stupendous Yoga of Nature aiming at a progressive... divine conversion and transfiguration of the whole being of man by the power of the Divine is the only means. A desperate and pervasive degeneracy calls for a radical and revolutionary redemption—and that can only be Yoga. "All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Soul and Nature

... spirituality at the absolute of the soul is our possibility on one side of our dual existence; to enjoy the absolute of Nature and of everything in Nature is our possibility on the other side of this eternal duality. To unify these highest aspirations in a divine possession of God and ourselves and the world, should be our happy completeness. In the lower poise this is not possible because the soul... separate absolute of the soul, even if they reject the many rapturous infinities of the Absolute which the true possession of Nature by the soul in its divine existence offers to the eternal seeker in man. Uplifted into the Spirit the soul is no longer subject to Nature; it is above this mental activity. It may be above it in detachment and aloofness, udāsīna , seated above and indifferent, or... absolute of unattachment and freedom from affection by the phenomena of the cosmic existence. As the pure Witness, the soul refuses the function of upholder or sustainer of Nature. The upholder, bhartā , is another, God or Force or Maya, but not the soul, which only admits the reflection of the natural action upon its watching consciousness, but not any responsibility for maintaining or continuing ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga

Sri Aurobindo - The Poet  >  Sonnets, Lyrics, Compositions in New Metres

... Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions, Blaze in my spirit. Slow the heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's; Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway Words that live not save upon Nature's summits, Ecstasy's chariots. These eight lines make a most magnificent composite picture, Vedic and Upanishadic in its symbols, and the sound-strokes of the words... concealed in the upper fire", he calls on it to leap into "the gulfs of our nature": In the uncertain glow of human mind, Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts, Carve thy epic mountain-lined Crowded with deep prophetic grots. Page 139 And in his most incantatory poem, Rose of God, an experiment in pure stress metre, where a symbol famous in mystical verse... sound of the overhead and even the mantric, every stanza connects by a half esoteric half intimate imagery Supernature's heights and Nature's depths. Lines 5-8 may serve as an illustration, playing a variation on the theme of our excerpt from Musa Spiritus: Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being, Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing! Live in the mind of ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

Sri Aurobindo And The Mother - On India  >  Sri Aurobindo - On India

... humanity in God, of God in humanity, the ancient ideal of the Sanatana dharma but applied, as it has never been applied before, Page 9 to the problem of politics and the work of national revival. To realise that ideal, to impart it to the world is the mission of India. She has evolved a religion which embraces all that the heart, the brain, the practical faculty of man can desire... miserable inutility of all God's mighty creation. Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit. It is to accept the world as an effort of manifestation of the Divine, but also to transform humanity by a greater effort of manifestation than has yet been accomplished, one in which the veil between man and God shall be removed, the divine... superhuman will, only the vehemence of an effort which transcends all that man has done and approaches divinity. Where will she find that strength, that force, that vehemence? In herself... India has in herself a faith of superhuman virtue to accomplish miracles, to deliver herself out of irrefragable bondage, to bring God down upon earth. She has a secret of will-power which no other nation possesses ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Sri Aurobindo And The Mother - On India

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4  >  This Great Earth, Our Mother

... and the integrality of its supreme divine fulfilment. Egoism, the fount and origin of sin, is the mask, the camouflage over the visage of God, the Individual. (4) I have spoken of the sprouting virtue in the earth-element; the same has developed in man, the earth's child, to unforeseen dimensions. Earth's upward drive towards a greater harmony is in reality the working of the Godhead "Agni"... with the growth of consciousness and will and individuality in man, developed into the psychic being which moves on towards the Divine impersonation on the earth. This is Earth's divine fulfilment in and through her earthly son, man. She clothes Page 372 herself more and more with the developing psychic consciousness of man meeting the Divine Consciousness – finally incorporating in... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4 PART TWELVE This Great Earth, Our Mother MAN'S soul is man's inalienable possession. And also it is his exclusive possession. He is the only created being that has a soul. It is, strange to say, an earthly gift and belongs to no other creature either in this world or other worlds and levels ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4

Mother’s Agenda 1966  >  May 18, 1966

... scriptures say, "Man is cattle for the gods"—but that's if man ACCEPTS the role of cattle. There is in the essence of human nature a sovereignty over all those things which is spontaneous and natural, when it's not warped by a certain number of ideas and a certain amount of so-called knowledge. We could say that man is the all-powerful master of all the states of being of his nature, but that he has... necessary for man to forget his all-powerfulness, because it had quite simply puffed him up with conceit and vanity, and so it was completely distorted and he had to be given the sense that lots of things were stronger and more powerful than he. But essentially, it's not true. It's a necessity in the curve of progress, that's all. Man is a potential god. He thought he was a realized god. He needed... "understood" isn't the word, but anyway, felt to some extent. But as soon as he assumes the true position, he knows he is a potential god. Only, he must become it, that is, he must overcome all that isn't it. This relationship with the gods is extremely interesting. As long as man is dazzled, in admiration before the power, beauty, realizations of those divine beings, he is their slave. But when they are ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   Agenda   >   Mother’s Agenda 1966

Synthesis of Yoga in the Upanishads  >  Part Two

... fellow." "Man is the bird that dwelleth on one common tree with God, but he is lost in its sweetness and the slave of its sweetness and looseth hold of God; therefore he hath grief, therefore he is bewildered. But when he seeeth that other bird who is God, then he knoweth that nothing is but God's greatness, and his grief passeth away from him."60 Page 68 "Know Nature (Prakrti) ... Then man becomes very vigilant, for yoga is the birth of things and their ending. Not with the mind has. man the power to get God, no, nor through speech, nor by the eye. Unless one says "He is", how can one become sensible of Him? One must apprehend God in the concept Page 34 "He is" and also in His essential: But when he has grasped him as the "Is", then the essential of God dawns... dawns upon a man. When every desire that finds lodging in the heart of man, has been loosened from its moorings, then this mortal puts on immortality; even here he tastes God, in this human body. Yea, when all the strings of the heart are rent asunder, even here, in this human birth, then the mortal becomes immortal. This is the whole teaching of the Veda and the Upanishad. A hundred and one are the nerves ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Synthesis of Yoga in the Upanishads

Essays on the Gita  >  The Yoga of the Intelligent Will

... But it is not with this deep and moving word of God to man, but rather with the first necessary rays of light on the path, directed not like that to the soul, but to the intellect, that the exposition begins. Not the Friend and Lover of man speaks first, but the guide and teacher who has to remove from him his ignorance of his true self and of the nature of the world and of the springs of his own action... hell and punishment, afraid of God, afraid of this world, afraid of the hereafter, afraid of yourself. What is it that you are not afraid of at this moment, you the Aryan fighter, the world's chief hero? But this is the great fear which besieges humanity, its fear of sin and suffering now and hereafter, its fear in a world of whose true nature it is ignorant, of a God whose true being also it has not... our subjectivity in the evolving consciousness of animal and man, we shall see that the Sankhya system squares well enough with all that modern enquiry has elicited by its observation of material Nature. In the evolution of the soul back from Prakriti towards Purusha, the reverse order has to be taken to the original Nature-evolution, and that is how the Upanishads and the Gita following and almost ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Essays Divine and Human  >  Parabrahman and Parapurusha

... non-Becoming (Sambhuti, Asambhuti); neither Quality nor non-Quality (Saguna, Nirguna); neither Consciousness nor non-consciousness, (Chaitanya, Jada); neither Soul nor Nature (Purusha, Prakriti); neither Bliss nor non-Bliss; neither man nor god nor animal; He is beyond all these things, He maintains & contains all these things; in Himself as world He is & becomes all these things. The only difference... Parabrahman and Parapurusha God or Para Purusha is Parabrahman unmanifest & inexpressible turned towards a certain kind of manifestation or expression, of which the two eternal terms are Atman and Jagati, Self and Universe. Atman becomes in self-symbol all existences in the universe; so too, the universe when known, resolves all its symbols into Atman. God being Parabrahman is Himself Absolute ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision  >  Appendix (Why The Way is Hidden)

... regarded as the second step in nature's ascent to freedom and perfection. In the Vibhuti nature rises to far greater heights' than even the highest attainment reached by man. For example, the non-violence practised by Mahatma Gandhi far surpasses the ordinary practice of it by man. In that sense he can be called the Vibhuti of Ahimsa. In the Avatar, the incarnation, nature attains its highest Page... Saint, the Mahatma, the great Soul, or the Sreshta and the ordinary man is due to what they express in their Nature, in their Prakriti. That may be regarded as the first step of the movement of Prakriti towards freedom and perfection. Next, the Gita speaks of the Vibhuti special becoming. The Vibhuti embodies not merely the nature of a Sadhu, not merely heightened human perfection but some quality... phenomenon of Avatarhood. The Divine is not some absentee land-lord away from life, it can take up human nature and a human form. Some religions, like Christianity, accept one and only one incarnation of the Divine. They practically limit the Omnipotence to one single act-but to the Hindu view Omnipotence of God cannot be limited to one incarnation and therefore the Hindu admits many in- carnations including ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision

A Centenary Tribute  >  Essays on Amal Kiran-Rita Nath Keshari

... example:   God is intense  With bliss undying that would gladly die  If one time-creature's gold might never grey. ("The Great Face", p. 286)   The quibbling on dying focuses sharply on God's immortality and the essential finite nature of man. Since these two irreconcilable points cannot meet therefore God need not meet with human fate. At the same time man does not wish to alter... In another poem "Equality" (p. 388), the poet addresses God as the great Jeweller who transforms the crude metal of the human soul into a perfect ornament. The poet admits the frailty of human nature and its reluctance to reflect a multi-faceted sparkle. God alone can create the necessary conditions for inner perfection since human nature has the tendency to slacken its pace of progress:.   ... white' is a colour traditionally associated with ascetic spirituality. Page 261 'Griefless carmine' conjures up before the mind's eye a life enriching correspondence with the Rose of God, though its exact connotations remain elusive. The limitless expansion of the sky is restricted in the single epithet' ample' implying that the liberated soul can ignore all restraints of time and space ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Centenary Tribute

Collected Poems  >  A God's Labour

... Night     For our petty flickering fires. How shall it brook the sacred Light     Or suffer a god's desires? "Come, let us slay him and end his course!     Then shall our hearts have release From the burden and call of his glory and force     And the curb of his wide white peace." But the god is there in my mortal breast     Who wrestles with error and fate And tramples a road through... bed for the golden river's song,     A home for the deathless fire. I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night     To bring the fire to man; But the hate of hell and human spite     Are my meed since the world began. Page 534 For man's mind is the dupe of his animal self;     Hoping its lusts to win, He harbours within him a grisly Elf     Enamoured of sorrow and sin. The... Baroda and Pondicherry (Circa 1902-1936) Baroda and Pondicherry (Circa 1902-1936) Poems Past and Present Collected Poems A God's Labour Know more > I have gathered my dreams in a silver air     Between the gold and the blue And wrapped them softly and left them there,     My jewelled dreams of you. I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Teilhard de Chardin and our Time  >  What is Basic Teilhardism What Place has his Christianity in it

... can lead the unbeliever to the recognition of God and of Christianity. Both on the objective and the personal level, the order of nature and that of the supernatural are connected by a dialectic of analogy and discontinuity. The passage from one order to the other is achieved by a gratuitous initiative on the part of God, which resumes and transcends nature, and subjectively by an act of   11... evolution and calling for total adherence: that is the prime spiritual necessity. The Christian religion is only the next desideratum. And it is wanted because it supplies a God-Man. Not this religion especially but any that provides a God-Man will serve. A Christ of one kind or another is indispensable - not necessarily the Christ we know of as Jesus of Nazareth. Such, logically, is the sense of the adjective...   Rideau" tells us that "in his sense of nature and of man, Teilhard follows in the steps of Saint Thomas who also based his thought on the analogy of being, on the correspondence between the 'orders' and on nature's pre-adaptation to the supernatural". But Rideau 8 himself admits a little later: "[Teilhard] did not, of course, deny man's supernatural end, but by making religion a function ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  Sri Aurobindo's Gita

... the modernist conception of a dynamic spirituality. Fundamentally the dynamism is made to reside in the élan of the ethical man, – the spiritual element, as a consciousness of Page 21 supreme unity in the Absolute (Brahman) or of love and delight in God, serving only as an atmosphere for the mortal activity. Sri Aurobindo has raised action completely out of the mental and moral... somewhat into the background and present a diminished stature and value. The centre of gravity has shifted to the conception of the Divine Nature, to the Lord's own status, to the consciousness above the three Gunas, to absolute con­secration of each limb of man's humanity to the Supreme Purusha for his descent and incarnation and play in and upon this human world. The higher secret of the Gita lies... moral plane and has given it an absolute spiritual life. Action has been spiritualised by being carried back to its very source and origin, for it is the expression in life of God's own Consciousness-Energy (Chit-Shakti). The Supreme Spirit, Purushottama, who holds in himself the dual reality of Brahman and the world, is the master of action who acts but in actionlessness, the Lord in whom and through ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

The Crucifixion  >  The Crucifixion

... life, the human will sin according to the demands of human nature. Therefore, God sacrificed Himself in the person of Jesus on the Cross to redeem" the sins pf the human, and most importantly God/Jesus redeemed the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. Thus, we humans can all see the great love God has for His creation through this miracle of God coming to humanity as His Own Son, Jesus and allowing Himself... up, and the condemned man was left hanging to die in the hot sun. That is, the excruciating torture before dying was the Roman's real instrument of punishment. It is this cross - the cross of the crucifixion that has become the symbol of Christianity. It symbolizes reconciliation with God through faith in Christ whose life, death, and Resurrection are proof of God's forgiveness of human... suffering. Heaven or Hell is determined according to the judgement of God about the life of a human. Page 69 To go to heaven means a life of no sin. Obviously, evil acts such as murder, lying, stealing, etc. are sinful acts. Sinful acts are to be avoided. But considering human nature, can a human being live a truly sinless life? According to Christianity, the human cannot. Throughout life ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Crucifixion

Collected Poems  >  Man the Mediator

... came all     The self-same Power that shines on high unwon: Our Night shall be a sky purpureal,     Our torch transmute to a vast godhead's sun. Rooted in mire heavenward man's nature grows,— His soul the dim bud of God's flaming rose. ... Pondicherry (Circa 1927-1947) Pondicherry (Circa 1927-1947) Sonnets from Manuscripts (Circa 1934-1947) Collected Poems Man the Mediator Know more > A dumb Inconscient drew life's stumbling maze,     A night of all things, packed and infinite: It made our consciousness a torch that plays     Between the Abyss and a supernal Light. Our ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

On Thoughts and Aphorisms  >  Aphorism - 308, 309, 310

... fail, it is because the wisdom and force of Nature overbear their intellectual cleverness. God alone knows when and how to blunder wisely and fail effectively. Page 300 309—Distrust the man who has never failed and suffered; follow not his fortunes, fight not under his banner. 310—There are two who are unfit for greatness and freedom, the man who has never been a slave to another and the ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Thoughts and Aphorisms

The Aim of Life  >  Life's Phiosophy

... remembering that nothing that can happen is likely to overcome the spirit of man which has survived so many perils; remembering also that life, for all its ills, has joy and beauty, and that we can always wander, if we know how to, in the enchanted woods of nature. What else is wisdom? What of man's endeavour Or God's high grace, so lovely and so great? To stand from fear set free, to breathe... More recent researches into the nature of matter, the structure of the atom, the transmutation of the elements, and the transformation of electricity and light, either Page 275 into the other, have carried human knowledge much further. Man no longer sees nature as something apart and distinct from himself. Human destiny appears to become a part of nature's rhythmic energy. All this upheaval... approaches, rather frighten me with their vague, formless incursions into infinity. The diversity and fullness of nature stir me and produce a harmony of the spirit, and I can imagine myself feeling at home in the old Indian or Greek pagan and pantheistic atmosphere, but minus the conception of God or Gods that was attached to it. Some kind of ethical approach to life has a strong appeal for me, though ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Aim of Life

Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays  >  Yoga, Religion and Morality

... so rigidly framed that they Page 230 prove unworkable and are, therefore, rejected by Nature. Or, sometimes, they are turned into a system of compromises and become obsolete in the march of Time. The truth is that neither morality nor religion represents the highest status of man's consciousness. They may prepare, but they are only stations on an evolutionary journey. Both of them... replaces the moral law by a progressive law of self-perfection spontaneously expressing itself through the individual nature. No more in this operation is the imposition of a rule or an imperative on the individual nature; the spiritual law that Yoga presents respects the individual nature, modifies it and perfects it, and in this sense it is unique for each individual and can be known and made operative... and imperfect humanity come easily to be conflicting principles. Justice often demands what love abhors, and in fact man's absolute justice easily turns out to be in practice a sovereign injustice. Morality is always in a state of disequilibrium. Religion is an endeavour of man to turn away from the earth towards the Divine; but this seeking is still of the mind or of the lower ignorant consciousness ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays

The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo  >  Waste in Nature

... The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo Waste in Nature A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PROBLEM One of the most burning issues in the controversies about God is Waste in Nature. Philosophies that do not admit a Divine Being as the source and support and goal of the world, or only admit a rudimentary consciousness fundamental to Matter and attaining higher... erring and false and feeble in our nature into the Divine. In this vision waste, featuring as a reality to be confronted, is not seen to be there because we are short-sighted: a ground for it has to be discovered in the cosmic scheme just as much as for suffering and falsehood, a formula that would make it possible in God's universe without impugning God's supreme Intelligence. The required... should be done and wrong-doing." The waste in our human activity is but an example of all waste in Nature: it is due to insufficient knowledge and insufficient power. When conscious man is liable to such a lot of error and incapacity, what should we not expect of phenomena in which Nature has no surface consciousness at all or at best a very restricted one? On looking at "evil" as a ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  The Triple Foundation

... of the whole nature of man, it needs an untrembling foundation of a positive and permanent calm. A negative calm may Page 76 well serve as a vaulting board for a leap into the Self or Spirit, but fails as a platform or pedestal for a radical conversion and a new-modelling of nature. Therefore, the initial movement of quiet detachment from the turmoil of nature has to be supplemented... being, its unceasing and unflagging invocation to the Supreme to descend into us and manifest His supernal- splendour in our life and nature. It is a call for the closest and completest union, but a constantly creative and revelatory union, in our waking state—God's unimpeded self-expression and the perfect fulfilment of His Will in- and through our transformed consciousness and being». steeped in... knowledge, as born of the ignorance or illusion of nature. The impartial indifference remains equal and impervious to all the shocks and surprises of life—a calm witness, silent and impassive, and unassailable in its impassiveness. The third way is that of the Christian or Vaishnavic submission, namas .or nati, a devoted resignation to the will of God, and a quiet acceptance of all that comes,—happiness ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri  >   Sight- Its Future Apotheosis

... (14)"Yet shall they look up as to peaks of God" (704) (15)"His regard crossing infinity's mystic waves" (706) (16)"The Spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes" (707) (17)"The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze" (709) (18)"Time's sunflowers gaze at gold Eternity" (279) (19)"And all earth look into the eyes of God" (450) So the journey ends. And we... and Other Writings, 1989, p. 40) Of course, it is the consciousness within which has first to change; for, our means and ways of knowledge and action must necessarily be according to the nature of our consciousness and "it is the consciousness that must radically change if we are to command and not only be occasionally visited by that higher power of knowledge." (The Synthesis of Yoga, ... mind to the supermind and the consequent transformation of the being from the state of the mental to that of the supramental Purusha must bring with it... a transformation of all the parts of the nature and all its activities." There will be according- Page 89 ly a profound transformation in the physical senses, "a supramentalising of the physical sight, hearing, touch, etc." that ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Hitler and his God  >  Back to Nature

... Nazism The Roots of Nazism 9. The Völkisch Movement Hitler and his God Back to Nature Nature was the temple of God where, in ever varying beauty, harmony and grandeur, one could communicate with Him and contact one’s inmost soul. Nature was timeless and allowed one to transcend time. In nature everything was the visible expression of the life-forces; there... oppressive human conglomerates which were the modern towns and cities. Romanticism had been one big hymn to nature, conciliating man with suffering and death, and it was to nature that “the new romanticism”, refusing to yield to modern life, turned back. “Many of our generation sought such contact with nature”, wrote Albert Speer, the son of a stiffly conventional upper middle-class family. “This was not merely... day after unforgiving day from early morning till late at night. If the country was good, the city was bad; a harvest was nature’s gift from the land, a city was man’s product from the mind; “culture” was related to the land and healthy, “civilization” was an artefact of man’s brain, rootless, and symptomatic of decline. This dualism is again abundantly expounded by Spengler in his utterly negative ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

The Human Cycle  >  The Suprarational Beauty

... and truth of reason, a critical rather than a true creative aim. Their leading object has been an intellectual criticism of life and nature elevated by a consummate poetical rhythm and diction rather than a revelation of God and man and life and Page 138 nature in inspired forms of artistic beauty. But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of things, which is... the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and Page 144 forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty... side of it, the aesthetic and the ethical being, the search for Beauty and the search for Good. Man's seeking after beauty reaches its most intense and satisfying expression in the great creative arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, but in its full extension there is no activity of his nature or his life from which it Page 136 need or ought to be excluded,—provided we understand ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle

Mother’s Agenda 1951-1960  >  July 6, 1958

... a part of Nature, but as Sri Aurobindo has explained, from the moment mind expressed itself in man, it put him into a relationship with Nature very different from the relationship all the lower species have with her. All the lower species right up to man are completely under the rule of Nature; she makes them do whatever she wants, and they can do nothing without her consent. Whereas man begins to... being the case ... This is what terrestrial Nature told me: 'It is beyond my control.' So considering all that, Sri Aurobindo came to the conclusion that only the supramental power ... ( Mother brings down her hands ) as he said, will be able to rule over everything. And when that happens, it will be all over—including Nature. For a long time, Nature rebelled (I have written about it often). She... with the different flowers I had put there. And one day when the subject of prosperity or wealth came up, I thought (they always say that Ganesh is the god of money, of fortune, of the world's wealth), I thought, 'Isn't this whole story of the god with an elephant trunk merely a lot of human imagination?' Thereupon, we meditated. And who should I see walk in and park himself in front of me but a living ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   Agenda   >   Mother’s Agenda 1951-1960

Essays Divine and Human  >  Note on the Texts

... sections. The editors have represented his sign uniformly by a single asterisk. Notes on Individual Pieces in Part Two 1. Circa 1927. Heading: "God, Nature and Man" (used as the subtitle of this section; cf. the heading of piece 14). The text of the piece is cancelled in the manuscript. 2. Circa 1936. 3. Late 1920s... edition of The Hour of God , along with Thoughts and Aphorisms and other material, were brought out as The Hour of God and Other Writings , volume 17 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. In 1994 those parts of The Hour of God and Other Writings that had not been published during Sri Aurobindo's lifetime, along with other material of the same nature that had not yet been... 12. Circa 1942. The phrase "Ekam evadvitiyam" was written at the end of the first paragraph, then cancelled. 13. 1930s. 14. Circa 1945. Heading: "God, Nature and Soul. / God / I" (cf. the subtitle of this section).  Page 509 15. 1930s. 16. Circa 1927. 17. Circa 1927. This piece ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Bande Mataram  >  Sacrifice and Redemption

... prophets and preachers were not ready to go through the sacrifices that the nature of the hostile circumstances demanded, exile, durance or death. Not mere conviction, but courage of conviction that dares to stare death in the face has been the secret of those passions and emotions that are immortally human. Love of man or love of God, love of knowledge or love of the Motherland, each and every one has had... human nature to death, because it brings the human mind face to face with its immortal spirit that transcends more the agonies of the mortal flesh. The sight of the man who makes light of sufferings, even of death, for the sake of an idea or a faith, turns the thoughts of his fellowmen to that for which he thus suffers. Surely there is something in Page 676 the ideal for which a man can readily... Sacrifice and Redemption 14-September-1907 The abiding attributes of humanity, those that have endured through time's changes and have redeemed man's nature from the mortality of the flesh, have behind them a tradition of sacrifice. There is not a single ideal in the world that has been able to secure permanence in human thought without striking root ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Bande Mataram

Talks on Poetry  >  The Heart and the Art of Poetry - Talk Eighteen and Nineteen

... Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man. Page 145 Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire, Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre! Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme; Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time. Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's... existence. The abysmal heart must be some power of feeling that is not confined to man but resides as an upward-yearning ache in the very depths of Matter from which all living things have evolved — a power of feeling which is Nature's counterpart of Supernature's "ruby depth of all being" and which must be there in man's own depths and of which his heart of humanhood must be the frontal expression. The... our chest. He calls it the psyche or psychic being which is in its essence a spark of the Divine. This spark came originally from the highest world into the night of material Nature and from that abyss kept yearning towards God and rose through various organisations of matter to its present level where it has developed a human in-strument: it had during its lesser development in the past a sub-human ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks on Poetry

The Destiny of the Body  >  The Seeking and the Escapist Urge

... seek mukti and mok ṣ a in some supreme Absolute. The spiritual history of man abounds in views, expressed in different terms, epitomizing this conception of metaphysical dualism that puts into sharpest antithesis the soul and the body, God and the world, the spiritual and the material parts of man. Examples are legion testifying to this widely prevalent attitude of denial and disparagement... discontent' has seized man who occupies such 'a strange position in the great realm of being'. 4 Eternal is his seeking for the meaning of existence, the meaning of life and the meaning of death, the meaning of himself and that of the universe. He wonders what he is: "An outcast of the universal order? an outlaw, a freak of nature ? a shred of yam dropped from nature's loom, which has since been... the dualism of the Neo-Pythagoreans on both metaphysical and ethical principles. But through a curious turn of logic he too was led to declare that the 'supersensual' part of man, which was pre-existent and in union with God, has suffered disaster from having entered the body. From the union of soul and body springs all the irrationality 1 W. Capelle, op. cit. 2 "To consider ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Destiny of the Body

A Philosophy of Evolution for the Contemporary Man  >  An Experiment in Evolution

... of Evolution for the Contemporary Man An Experiment in Evolution A distinctive feature of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of evolution is that it is not speculative; its premises and conclusions are tested on the anvil of experimentation. 'The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and... and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?' Indeed, Sri Aurobindo made an experiment upon his entire integral being, using it as an evolutionary laboratory, so as to evolve and manifest higher and higher grades of consciousness reaching up to the supermind and to supramentalize the human... centre and spiritual centre called the thousand-petalled lotus where ascending Nature, the Serpent Power of the Tantrics, meets the Brahman and is liberated into the Divine Being. These centres are closed or half closed within us and have to be opened before their full potentiality can be manifested in our physical nature: but once they are opened and completely active, no limit can easily be set to ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Philosophy of Evolution for the Contemporary Man

The Life Divine  >  The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence

... life in the material universe. God, if God exists, is an eternal Becoming; or if God does not exist, then Nature,—whatever view we may take of Nature, whether we regard it as a play of Force with Matter or a great cosmic Life or even admit a universal impersonal Mind in Life and Matter,—is a perennial becoming. Earth is the field or it is one of the temporary fields, man is the highest possible form... accepted four legitimate motives of human living,—man's vital interests and needs, his desires, his ethical and religious aspiration, his ultimate spiritual aim and destiny,—in other words, the claims of his vital, physical and emotional being, the claims of his ethical and religious being governed by a knowledge of the law of God and Nature and man, and the claims of his spiritual longing for the Beyond... reconciliation of these parts of our nature. A spiritual evolution, an unfolding here of the Being within from birth to birth, of which man becomes the central instrument and human life at its highest offers the critical turning-point, is the link needed for the reconciliation of life and spirit; for it allows us to take into account the total nature of man and to recognise the legitimate place ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine

Bande Mataram  >  Bhawani Mandir

... ingrained in the Indian nature, but in the absence of Shakti we cannot concentrate, we cannot direct, we cannot even preserve it. Bhakti is the leaping flame, Shakti is the fuel. If the fuel is scanty how long can the fire endure? When the strong nature, enlightened by knowledge, disciplined and given a giant's strength by Karma, lifts itself up in love and adoration to God, that is the Bhakti which... three hundred millions of men from the Raja on his throne to the coolie at his labour, from the Brahmin absorbed in his sandhya to the Pariah walking shunned of men, GOD LIVETH. We are all gods and creators, because the energy of God is within us and all life is creation; not only the making of new forms is creation, but preservation is creation, destruction itself is creation. It rests with us what... now-a-days that it is impossible; that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction. WHAT IS A NATION? THE SHAKTI OF ITS MILLIONS. For what is a nation? What is our mother-country? It ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Bande Mataram

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1  >  An Approach to Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

... Spirit's Force and can fashion in the clay (in Matter) God's perfect Shape. When the Traveller was thus standing on Being's naked edge and all the passion and seeking of his soul faced their extinction in the featureless Vast, the Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close. The Being of Wisdom, Power and Delight took to her breast Nature and world and soul, as a mother draws her child into... leaves And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp... The life of the enchanted globe became A storm of sweetness and of light and song... The sunlight was a great god's golden smile. All Nature was at beauty's festival. In this high signal moment of the gods Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss A greatness from our other countries came... A spirit... looked down from ecstasy's skies on worlds of deathless Bliss. Magical unfoldings of the Eternal's smile captured Satyavan's secret heartbeats of delight. God's everlasting day surrounded Savitri. Domains of sempiternal light invaded all Nature with the Absolute's Joy. Transfigured was the formidable shape of the Lord of Death. His darkness and his sad destroying might Abolishing for ever ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 1

Kena and Other Upanishads  >  The Parable of the Gods

... mighty development of themselves, a splendid efflorescence of their greatness in man, their joy, their light, their glory, their power and pleasure. But their vision is as yet sealed to their own deeper truth; they know of themselves, Page 79 they know not the Eternal; they know the godheads, they do not know God. Therefore they see the victory as their own, the greatness as their own. This... discover its nature, limits, identity. The gods of the Upanishad differ in one all-important respect from the gods of the Rig-veda; for the latter are not only powers of the One, but conscious of their source and true identity; they know the Brahman, they dwell in the supreme Godhead, their origin, home and proper plane is the superconscient Truth. It is true they manifest themselves in man in the form... gods of mind and life and body conquer and affirm themselves, and in whom alone they are great. Uma is the supreme Nature from whom the whole cosmic action takes its birth; she is the pure summit and highest power of the One who here shines out in many forms. From this supreme Nature which is also the supreme Consciousness the gods must learn their own truth; they must proceed by reflecting it in ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Kena and Other Upanishads

Words of the Mother - II  >  Relationship with the Divine

... possess His nature is difficult. As we progress and purify ourselves of our egoism, our friendship with the Divine becomes more and more clear and conscious. Friendship with the Divine: delicate, attentive and faithful, ever ready to respond to the smallest appeal. Closeness to the Divine will always grow with the growth of consciousness, equanimity and love. God cannot be taken... Man's Relationship with the Divine Man's Relationship with the Divine Words of the Mother - II Relationship with the Divine All is relative except the Supreme. The Supreme alone is absolute; but as the Supreme is at the centre of each being, each being carries in himself his absolute. After all, it is very simple, we have only to become what we are... taken by violence. It is only through love and harmony that you can reach God. Be in peace―my blessings are with you. 13 July 1966 Page 20 Attachment for the Divine wraps itself around the Divine and finds all its support in Him so as to be sure never to leave Him. Affection for the Divine: a sweet and confident tenderness that gives itself unfailingly to the Divine. ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of the Mother - II

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  Here or Otherwhere

... sacrifice, as an offering to the supreme Master of works. The question naturally turns upon the nature and the kind of work –whether there is a choice and selection in it. Gita speaks indeed of all works, krtsna-karmakrt , but does that really mean any and every work that an ignorant man, an ordinary man steeped in the three Gunas does or can do? It cannot be so. For, although all activity, all energy... duty to the country, to humanity and, finally, duty to God (which last belongs properly to the life in Yoga). Now, can all these duties dwell and flourish together? The Christ is categorical on the point. He says, in effect: Leave aside all else and follow Me and look not back. Christ's God seems to be a jealous God who does not tolerate any other god to share in his sovereign exclusiveness. You have to... lose it. But is not The Gita's solution somewhat different? Sri Krishna urges Arjuna to be in the very thick of a deadly fight, not a theoretical or abstract combat, but take a hand in the direst man-slaughter, to "do the deed" (even like Macbeth) but yogically. Yes, The Gita's position seems to be that – to accept all life integrally, to undertake all necessary work ( kartavyam karma ) and turn ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

In the Mother's Light  >  The Divune Manifestation and the Divine Life

... transcendent Supermind or Vijnana, in which man will live, even as the Divine lives, in the unfading glory of infinite knowledge and power and creative delight of an immortal existence. The ascent to the Supermind will be followed by a descent of the supramental Consciousness-Force into the nature of man and the latter's transformation into the divine nature or Page 370 Para Prakriti... collective aspect of the message of Manifestation foreshadows the splendour of a more or less universal perfection in humanity. This Manifestation of Spirit in Matter, of God in man, will be an unhampered expression of man's integral living in the Divine. His body, life, soul and mind, in possession of the Divine and possessed by Him, will reveal nothing but Him in Page 371 thought... under the conditions of mental ignorance and material limitations, as we have today in the mental man, but a perfect self-expression of the Divine Sachchidananda in the triple term of mind, life and body, as the crown of Nature's evolutionary endeavour. He says that emerging from inconscience, the soul of man is mounting, through whatever stumbles and zigzags, towards its own infinite consciousness and ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Gods and the World  >  The Book of the Gods

... they mixed with our nations. Then the long youth of the world had not faded still out of our natures, Flowers and the sunlight were felt and the earth was glad like a mother. Then for a human delight they were masked in this denser vesture Earth desires for her bliss, thin veils, for the god through them glimmered. Quick were men's days with the throng of the brilliant presences... Saturnian kingdoms. Equals were heaven and earth, twin gods on the lap of Dione. Now shall my waning greatness perish and pass out of Nature. For though the Romans, my children, shall grasp at the strength of their mother, They shall not hold the god, but lose in unsatisfied orgies Yet what the earth has kept of my j'oy, my glory, my puissance, Who shall but drink for a troubled... dreams shall enthrone thee for ever, Building thee temples in Paphos and Eryx and island Cythera, Building the fane more enduring and bright of thy golden ideal. Even if natures of men could renounce thee and God do without thee, Rose of love and sea of delight, O my child Aphrodite, Still wouldst thou live in the worship they gave thee protected from fading, Splendidly statued ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Gods and the World

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Ascending Unity

... how these four victorious words seem to settle the whole business of God and man and world and life at once and for ever in their uncompromising antithesis of affirmation and negation. But after all perhaps when we come to think more at large about the matter, we may find that Nature and Existence are not of the same mind as man in this respect, that there is here a great complexity which we must follow... once unique in each, common in our collectivities and one in all beings. God moves in many ways at once in his own indivisible unity. Page 309 The conception of man as a separate and quite peculiar being in the universe has been rudely shaken down by a patient and disinterested examination of the process of nature. He is without equal or peer and occupies a privileged position on earth... greater power of manhood; our inner history as indicated by our present nature, which is the animal plus something that exceeds it, must have been a simultaneous and companion growing on the same curve into the soul of humanity. The ancient Indian idea which refused to separate nature of man from the universal Nature or self of man from the one common self, accepted this consequence of its seeing. Thus ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  Heraclitus - VII

... all other truths. But what is their practical effect on human life and aspiration? For that is in the end the real value of philosophy for man, to give him light on the nature of his being, the principles of his psychology, his relations with the world and with God, the fixed lines or the great possibilities of his destiny. It is the weakness of most European philosophy—not the ancient—that it lives... lift this mortal to the nature of immortality? Against his melancholy image of human transiency we have that remarkable and cryptic sentence, "the gods are mortals, men immortals", which, taken literally, might mean that the gods are powers that perish and Page 251 replace each other and the soul of man alone is immortal, but must at least mean that there is in man behind his outward transiency... and the self-revelation of God"? Heraclitus might not so have phrased it, might not have seen all that his thought contained, but it does contain this sense when his different sayings are fathomed and put together in their consequences. We get very near the Indian conception of Brahman, the cause, origin and substance of all things, an absolute Existence whose nature is consciousness (Chit) manifesting ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Savitri  >  Philosophy

... social development. Man's primary urge should be to open to the higher light of the overhead planes of consciousness: to turn to the Divine, to achieve a progressive divinisation of his nature. As he once wrote to his brother Barin: "No one is God but in each man there is a God and to make him manifest is the aim of divine life. That we can all do." 81         When man so manifests the divine... primary spiritual intuition which is only afterwards elaborated by the reasoning mind." 66 As for Berdyaev, his postulation of Nature's 'transfiguration' is rather suggestive in the context of the Aurobindonian postulation of a supramental transformation of man and Nature. Dorothy M. Richardson the novelist once wrote after reading about Sri Aurobindo's life and thought:   Has there ever existed... a fact!" 68         Again, the recently (and posthumously) published book, The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin provokes comparison with The Life Divine at many points. Father de Chardin, a Jesuit was also a hard-headed biologist and palaeontologist, and he saw in man the spearhead of the evolutionary adventure. But his thesis, although sought to be scientifically sustained ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 1  >  Sri Aurobindo's Gita

... apparent enough in the modernist conception of a dynamic spirituality. Fundamentally the dynamism is made to reside in the elan of the ethical man,—the spiritual element, as a consciousness of supreme unity in the Absolute (Brahman) or of love and delight in God, serving Page 36 only as an atmosphere for the mortal activity. Sri Aurobindo has raised action completely out of the... somewhat into the background and present a diminished stature and value. The centre of gravity has shifted to the conception of the Divine Nature, to the Lord's own status, to the consciousness above the three Gunas, to absolute consecration of each limb of man's humanity to the Supreme Purusha for his descent and incarnation and play in and upon this human world. The higher secret of the Gita... the mental and moral plane and has given it an absolute spiritual life. Action has been spiritualised by being carried back to its very source and origin, for it is the expression in life of God's own Consciousness-Energy (Chit-shakti). The Supreme Spirit, Purushottama, who holds in himself the dual reality of Brahman and the world, is the master of action, who acts but in actionlessness, the ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 1

In the Mother's Light  >  Asceticism

... Light Asceticism IN its simple and moderate form, asceticism is a self- imposed mortification or privation for the discipline and control of the lower nature. When the animal in man refuses to be tamed or quieted, but opposes his inner quest and living by an obstinate insistence on the satisfaction of its base appetites, a curb or brake is put upon it by his will.... desired freedom. A totally different vista opens before our eyes as we look at the problem from this new angle of vision. Man is essentially a consciousness, a certain individual formation of consciousness with major and minor vibrations in it, and his complex nature is only an instrumental mechanism, a realising and revealing medium, of that consciousness. The greater the limpidity and lightness... 'I want nothing’ and the attitude of the man of the world who says, 'I want this thing’ , are the same. The one may be as much attached to his renunciation as the other to his possession” The solution of the problem with which the ascetic vainly struggles, is an ascent of consciousness by aspiration, rejection, and surrender. If the impurities of your nature seem to be obstinate, detach yourself from ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Isha Upanishad  >  Book III

... s, a godlike courage. For when a man sees God in all things and himself in all beings, it is impossible for him to fear. What is it that can cause him terror? Not danger or defeat, not death or torture, not hatred or ingratitude, not the worse death of humiliation and the fiercer torture of shame and disgrace. Not the apparent wrath of God Himself; for what is God but his own self in the Cosmos? There... last two chapters is correct, we shall have to part with several notions long cherished by humanity. One of these is the pristine perfection of man and his degradation from his perfect state by falling into the domination of sin; God made man perfect but man by his own fault brought sin and death into the world. This Semitic tradition passed from Judaism into Christianity and less Page 299 ... and the good of others shall be worked out not only by his victories and joys, but by his defeats and sufferings. He will not be terrified by the menace of misfortune or the blows dealt him by man or nature, nor even by his own sins and failures, but walk straight forward in the implicit faith that the Supreme Will is guiding his steps aright and that even his stumblings are necessary in order to reach ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Essays Divine and Human  >  Partial Systems of Yoga

... From Man to Superman: Notes and Fragments on Philosophy, Psychology and Yoga (1912-1947) From Man to Superman: Notes and Fragments on Philosophy, Psychology and Yoga (1912-1947) Yoga: Change of Consciousness and Transformation of Nature Essays Divine and Human Partial Systems of Yoga Jnana Yoga: The Yoga of Knowledge 128 All existence is the... and passion and desire, and not to be goaded by the pricks of mental and vital and physical preference, but to be moved by God only, by the highest Truth only, this is Karmayoga. To live and act no longer in human ignorance, but in divine Knowledge, conscient of individual nature and universal forces and responsive to a transcendent governance, this is Karmayoga. To live, be and act in a divine... darkened mind and life, ignorant, suffering, spinning like a top whipped by Nature always in the same obscure and miserable rounds, on the other a soul touched by a ray from the hidden Truth, illumined, conscious, concentrated in a single unceasing effort towards its own and the world's Highest,—this is the difference between man's ordinary life and the way of the divine Yoga[.] Page 349 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Significance of Indian Yoga  >  Appendix

... universal divinity; each god is all the other gods. This complex aspect of the Vedic teaching and worship has been given by the European scholar the title of henotheism. Beyond, there is, according to the Vedas, triple Infinite, and in this Infinite, the godheads put on their highest nature and are Names of the one nameless Ineffable. This teaching was applied to the inner life of man, and this application... power. Power of the godheads can be built, according to the Vedic teaching, within man, and affirmation of these powers leads to the conversion of human nature into universality of divine nature. The gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the Infinite Mother, Aditi. Man arrives at immortality by calling of the gods into himself by means of a connecting... the collective life cannot be achieved if only the physical mind of man is trained or even if a greater effort is made to train the psychic- emotional part of man's nature. What is needed is to turn the entirety of mental, psychical and physical living of the individual and the collectivity to divinise the whole of human life and nature. It is significant, therefore, that there arose from the middle of ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Significance of Indian Yoga

Memorable Contacts with The Mother  >  XIX: OUR DEBT AND HOMAGE

... Presence into our physical being and allowing her to do the work she has undertaken to do." "A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme: His nature we must put on as he put ours; We are sons of God and must be even as he: His human portion, we must grow divine. Our life is a paradox with God for key." Page 168 What is this work mentioned above? Work for humanity? Or any other high... we do not suffer from indigence in her absence. Our material prosperity has not been affected by her physical withdrawal. God has fully paid his debt to man. Her bounty is flowing abundantly. "Affiliated to cosmic Space and Time And paying here God’s debt to earth and man A greater sonship was his divine right." It is now our part of the bargain that we have to fulfil. We can "requite ...

Nirodbaran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Memorable Contacts with The Mother

Words of Long Ago  >  Sympathy

... and left him to die. You will have noticed that when sorrow is felt, it is soon felt by the heart of someone near. When Duryodhana fell, at once Nature grieved. When danger threatened his parents, Nandiya went out to protect them. When the man of Namir looked on in his thirst, the noble Arab chief immediately offered him his water. Sorrow quickly follows sorrow and joy goes with joy. When... this, Kab-ibn-Mamah was about to take the cup when he saw a man of the Namir tribe looking at him longingly. Kab said to the man who was giving out the water, "Give my share to this brother," and pointed to the man of Namir. The man drank eagerly. Kab had no water. The next day, the time came again to share the water. Once more the man of Namir looked on with longing. Once more Kab gave the cup... Dismount from them when they are tired. Give them to drink when they are thirsty." In the records of Islam it is said that one day the angels of heaven said to God: "O God, is there anything in the world stronger than rock?" "Yes," God replied, "iron is stronger, for it breaks rock." "Is there anything stronger than iron?" "Yes, fire, for it melts iron." "And is there anything stronger ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of Long Ago

Questions and Answers (1957-1958)  >  20 March 1957

... sometimes less than the attraction of struggle and suffering; nevertheless the laurel and not the cross should be the aim of the conquering human soul. " Souls that do not aspire are God's failures; but Nature is pleased and loves to multiply them because they assure her of stability and prolong her empire. " Those who are poor, ignorant, ill-born or ill-bred are not the common herd; the common... their energy; lead and instruct men, but see that their initiative and originally remain intact; take others into thyself, but give them in return the full godhead of their nature. He who can do this is the leader and the guru. " God has made the world a field of battle and filled it with the trampling of combatants and the cries of a great wrestle and struggle. Would you filch His peace without paying... mistake a stage for the goal or to linger too long in a resting place. " Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 391-92 All that Sri Aurobindo says here is aimed at fighting against human nature with its inertia, its heaviness, laziness, easy satisfactions, hostility to all effort. How many times in life does one meet people who become pacifists because they are afraid Page 65 ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Questions and Answers (1957-1958)

Collected Poems  >  Soul's Scene

... mood of a Soul lonely in Nature On earth's face puts a mask pregnantly carved, cut to misfeature,     And man's heart and his stilled mind react hushed in a spiritual passion         Imitating the contours of her desolate waiting. Impassible she waits long for the sun's gold and the azure, The sea's song with its slow happy refrain's plashes of pleasure,—     As man's soul in its depths waits... waits the outbreaking of the light and the godhead         And the bliss that God felt when he created his image. Page 580 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Wager of Ambrosia  >  The Theory of the Tripleusha

... an opposite nature and is free from all evil. The statements ‘That art thou’ and ‘This Atman is Brahman’ attempt to show that the two, Brahman and Atman, God and man, are in reality one. If Brahman be the cause of everything, it must be the cause of the individual soul as well. The absolute divine essence is present in all its manifestations. Every individual shares in the spirit of God. It is not clear... on, and as the manifestation is real, eternal and not an illusion, it cannot be called unreal. The dualistic schools affirm the Jiva as an independent category or stand on the triplicity of God, soul and Nature. ( Letters on Yoga , SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 266) In another letter he writes: Purusha in Prakriti is the Kshara Purusha—standing back from it is the Akshara Purusha.  The psychic... metaphor of the Soul and the Oversoul connecting in an organic way the individual and the cosmic in their works here. In the process, he also dismisses the Puranic experience of Nara and Narayana, of Man and God. No doubt the world is full of falsehood, but is certainly not false and there is a chance for it,—because the amsa , the Immortal in the Mortal of the Veda, is present here. Jnaneshwar had ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Wager of Ambrosia

Early Cultural Writings  >  The Real Difficulty

... sight and sees what God wills, and it knows that what is God's will, must happen. Sraddha, not blind but using sight spiritual, can become omniscient. Will is also omnipresent. It can throw itself into all in whom it comes into contact and give them temporarily or permanently a portion of its power, its thought, its enthusiasms. The thought Page 536 of a solitary man can become, by exercise... of such magnitude, to have resort to a higher Power than that of mind and body in order to overcome unprecedented obstacles. This is the need of sadhana. God is within us, an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient Power; we & He are of one nature and, if we get into touch with Him and put ourselves in His hands, He will pour into us His own force and we shall our portion of omnipotence, omnipresence... disinterestedness. Yet the task we have before us is not less difficult than to move a mountain. The force that can do it, exists. But it is hidden in a secret chamber within us and of that chamber God holds the key. Let us find Him and claim it. Page 537 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Early Cultural Writings

Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  23rd January 1939

... in the nature of the individual. It is these personalities in nature that are bound. Disciple : It is said that psychic being is a spark of the Divine. Sri Aurobindo : Yes. Disciple : Then it seems that the function of the psychic being is the same as that of Vedic Agni who is the God of Fire, who is the leader of the journey. Sri Aurobindo : Yes. Agni is the God of the... to put you a question; but he is puzzled by what he thinks as the contradiction in what you said yesterday about Gunas. Disciple : You said that a man like Hitler does what he does because of the action of the Gunas, the modes of nature. In other-words he does what the Cosmic Spirit makes him do and yet he is individually responsible for his actions. It seems contradictory. Sri Aurobindo... yogis when they go beyond into the Spirit or the Cosmic consciousness, allow Cosmic nature to act through them without any sense of individual responsibility. They remain concentrated in, or identified with the Page 175 Higher Consciousness uncontrolled And you find as X found that the spiritual man uses foul language :  of course, the yogi or the spirit in him is not bound by the ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Essays on the Gita  >  Above the Gunas

... qualitative modes of Nature. The Gita applies this generalised analysis of the universal Energy to the psychological nature of man in relation to his bondage to Prakriti and the realisation of spiritual freedom. Sattwa, it tells us, is by the purity of its quality a cause of light and illumination and by virtue of that purity it produces no disease or morbidity or suffering in the nature. When into all... soul with Nature, to know God and ourselves and the world with a spiritual and no longer with a physical or externalised experience, through the deepest truth of the inner soul-consciousness and not through the misleading phenomenal significances of the sense-mind and the outward understanding, is an indispensable means of this perfection. Perfection cannot come without self-knowledge and God-knowledge... attachment to the work itself, either for its own sake, the essential rajasic bond, or owing to a lax subjection to the drive of Nature, the tamasic, or for the sake of the attracting rightness of the thing done, which is the sattwic attaching cause powerful on the virtuous man or the man of knowledge. And here evidently the resource is in that other injunction of the Gita, to give up the action itself to the ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Mother's Chronicles - Book Five  >  The Man and the Moment

... Mother's Chronicles - Book Five 40 The Man and the Moment "God prepares the man and the moment," wrote Sri Aurobindo in Historical Impressions. "Without the man the moment is a lost opportunity; without the moment the man is a force inoperative. The meeting of the two changes the destinies of nations and the poise of the world is altered... deepest insight into the Man of the Moment. Page 380 "O Friend, O my country's friend, you are the voice incarnate of India's soul!... Unobstacled, you are awake for the fullness of perfection God's greatest gift, our birthright, You have asked for the country In flaming words of noble truth, in boundless faith. Has God today heard your prayer... him in the supreme self-consciousness he possessed of his God-ordained mission of which he was to be the chosen instrument some day to work out this Divine will ....... as a spark of fire to burn up all that was base and false in the national life of the country and turn it into true gold.........Everybody felt in his heart of hearts that the man for Bengal who had been long overdue ... had at last come ...

Sujata Nahar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

Collected Poems  >  The Dwarf Napoleon

... hold, It cries its demon slogans to the crowd. But if its tenebrous empire were allowed, That mastery would prepare the dismal hour When the Inconscient shall regain its right, And man who emerged as Nature's conscious power, Shall sink into the deep original night Sharing like all her forms that went before The doom of the mammoth and the dinosaur. It is the shadow of the Titan's robe ... waits upon that foaming lip. A Titan Power upholds this pigmy man, The crude dwarf instrument of a mighty Force. Hater of the free spirit's joy and light, Made only of strength and skill and giant might, A Will to trample humanity into clay And unify earth beneath one iron sway, Insists upon its fierce enormous plan. Trampling man's mind and will into one mould Docile and facile in a dreadful... act and cry and wrestle. Thus driven he must stride on conquering all, Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible, Until he meets upon his storm-swept road A greater devil—or thunderstroke of God. ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

The Secret of the Veda  >  Agni and the Truth

... sense of the Veda the Gods are universal powers of physical Nature personified; in any inner sense they must be universal powers of Nature in her subjective activities, Will, Mind, etc. But in the Veda there is always a distinction between the ordinary human or mental action of these puissances, manuṣvat , and the divine. It is supposed that man by the right use of their mental action in the inner sacrifice... sacrifices to Agni, and thus the good of the sacrificer becomes the good of the god. Here again it would be better to render, "The good that thou wilt do for the giver, that is that truth of thee, O Angiras," for we thus get at once a simpler sense and construction and an explanation of the epithet, satya , true, as applied to the god of the sacrificial fire. This is the truth of Agni that to the giver of... communication and interchange. We see, then, in what capacity Agni is called to the sacrifice. "Let him come, a god with the gods." The emphasis given to the idea of divinity by this repetition, devo devebhir , becomes intelligible when we recall the standing description of Agni as the god in human beings, the immortal in mortals, the divine guest. We may give the full psychological sense by translating ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Secret of the Veda

Essays Divine and Human  >  Nature

... existence. Let us not say that the prodigality of Nature, her squandering of materials, her frequent failure, her apparent freaks and gambollings are signs of purposelessness and absence of intelligence. Man with his reason is guilty of the same laches and wanderings. But neither Man nor Nature is therefore purposeless or unintelligent. It is Nature who compels Man himself to be other than too strenuously ... delight in the work, she takes delight, too, beyond the work. But in all this we anticipate, we speak as if Nature were self-conscious; what we have arrived at is that Nature is teleological, more widely than man, more perfectly than man, & man himself is only teleological because of that in Nature & by the same elementary means & processes as the animal & the plant, though with additions of fresh means... Therefore were the ancient Rishis able to see what now we are beginning again to glimpse dimly that not only is Nature herself an infinite teleological and discriminative impersonal Force of Intelligence or Consciousness, prajna prasrita purani, 2 but that God dwells within & over Nature as infinite universal Personality, universal in the universe, individualised as well as universal in the particular ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  Of Some Supreme Mysteries

... Divinity which has precipitated and taken this material form, the Aspiration is to regain God-head even in this form of matter, to sublimate itself into that Divinity here and now. . The secret urge of Evolution lies there in the compelling stress of that consciousness and that Aspiration. In so far as man embodies in himself and gives expression in his terrestrial life to this consciousness... The godhead above, Page 363 descending, has become the godhead here below ascending to meet again and recover its original nature not there, but here. Creation is the interaction of these two elemental Powers expressing themselves as Nature-Nature, an Involution and Evolution of the double Divinity. Progress is the march of the godhead below towards a triumphant self-revelation;... act for, and act with, and act as, the gods. *** To be conscious means to become aware of the truth of one's nature and to live with the light and the force of that truth. To be unconscious means to be ignorant of the realities that make one's true nature, to be a mere tool driven and utilised by the forces of Untruth. *** To be free and independent does not ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

The Life Divine  >  The Divine and the Undivine

... to defect as the immediate will of God, a present law of imperfection laid on our members, but on condition that we recognise it also as the will of God in us to transcend evil and suffering, to transform imperfection into perfection, to rise into a higher law of Divine Nature. In our human consciousness there is the image of an ideal truth of being, a divine nature, an incipient godhead: in relation... riddle. But if, accepting this side of Nature, we say that all things are fixed in their statutory and stationary law of being, and man too must be fixed in his imperfections, his ignorance and sin and weakness and vileness and suffering, our life loses its true significance. Man's perpetual attempt to arise out of the darkness and insufficiency of his nature can then have no issue in the world itself... to an ignorant or inconscient Nature, to the action of the human mind and will, even to a conscious Power or Forces of darkness and evil that take their stand upon the reign of a basic Inconscience. But none of these things are independent of Its own existence, nature and consciousness and none of them can act except in Its presence and by Its sanction or allowance. Man's freedom is relative and he cannot ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine

The Divine Collaborators  >  The Divine Manifestation And Divine Life

... transcendent Supermind or Vijnana, in which man will live, even as the Divine lives, in the unfading glory of infinite knowledge and power and creative delight of an immortal existence. The ascent to the Supermind will be followed by a descent of the supramental Consciousness-Force into the nature of man and the latter's transformation into the divine nature or Para Prakriti. When the transformation... collective aspect of the message of Manifestation foreshadows the splendour of a more or less universal perfection in humanity. This Manifestation of Spirit in Matter, of God in man, will be an unhampered expression of man's integral living in the Divine. His body, life, soul and mind, in possession of the Divine and possessed by Him, will reveal nothing but Him in thought and feeling and action... conditions of mental ignorance and material limitations, as we have today in the mental man, but a perfect self-expression of the Divine Sachchidananda in the triple term of mind, life and body, as the crown of Nature's evolutionary endeavour. He says that emerging from inconscience, the soul of man is mounting, through whatever stumbles and zigzags, towards its own infinite consciousness ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Divine Collaborators

Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God  >  13: Science and Religion

... s brought many views of God to bear, but when it came to find God in nature, there were two primary options: a process God or a traditional omniscient monarch: a God who grew up with the universe or a king who imposed his will on nature. A third kind of deity, which was more Platonic, was a borderline case, but was generally viewed as transcendent, as far outside of nature, whether as an idea, mathematical... all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of the worlds. This is the truth of that which we call God. Obviously, this is not the too personal and limited Deity, the magnified and supernatural Man of the ordinary occidental conception, for that conception erects a... disprove the existence of God (in God – The Failed Hypothesis ), he should at least have read something or other about the difference between subjective and objective reality. “Subjective reality cannot be referred to the evidence of the external senses; it has its own standards of seeing and its inner method of verification: so also supraphysical realities by their very nature cannot be referred to ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

Landmarks of Hinduism  >  Landmarks of Hinduism

... universal divinity, each god is all the other gods. This complex aspect of the Vedic teaching and worship has been given by European scholars the title 'henotheism'. Beyond, there is, according to the Vedas, triple Infinite, and in this Infinite, the godheads put on their highest nature and are Names of the one nameless Ineffable. This teaching was applied to the inner life of man, and the application... Consciousness of the godheads can be built, according to the Vedic teaching, within man, and affirmation of these powers leads to the conversion of human nature into universality of divine nature. Gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the Infinite Mother, Aditi. Man arrives at immortality by calling the gods into himself by means of a connecting... mind of the common man is trained as in the Vedic Age or even if a greater effort is made to train the psychic-emotional part of common man's nature, as was attempted in the Purano-Tantric Age. What is needed is to turn to spiritual reality the entirety of mental, psychical and physical living of the individual and the collectivity so as to divinise the entire human life and nature. It is significant ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Landmarks of Hinduism

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2  >  The Mission of Buddhism

... omissions: it turned man's mind to two new directions. In our eagerness to reach the spiritual and the supra-sensual, we gave scant recognition to the mental and the rational; and yet mind and reason should Page 280 be the very basis of the life spiritual. And in the pursuit of God and the gods and the things divine, we became blind to human problems, things concerning man in the human way... know of death ?¹ Yes, it was the age, almost a golden age, when man lived with his sense married to the Dawn, spontaneous in his reflexes, prime-sautier, intuitive and imaginative, full of a natural, unspoilt, unsophisticated happiness and hopefulness. But the Age of Reason had to come, and man's maturer nature, perhaps some "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought". Such an age of... are the two primary truths - arya sarya-which Buddha's illumination meant and for which he has become one of the great divine leaders of humanity. First, he has discovered man's rationality, and second, he has discovered man's humanity. Since his advent two thousand and five hundred years ago till the present day, in this what may pertinently be called the Buddhist age of humanity, the entire growth ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

Essays Divine and Human  >  The Hour of God

... rain of God's bounty. Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction. In the hour of God cleanse... Essays Divine and Human Essays Divine and Human 1914-1919 Essays Divine and Human The Hour of God There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being; there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weakness of their own egoism. The first are periods... and cast thee down in the midst of thy triumph. But being pure cast aside all fear; for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest, a treading of the winepress of the wrath of God; but he who can stand up in it on the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand; even though he fall, he shall rise again, even though he seem to pass on the wings of the wind, he shall return. Nor ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays Divine and Human

India's Rebirth  >  1893-1910: Revolutionary Writings

... will of God, against a decree written from of old, and are already defeated and slain in the karanajagat, the world of types and causes where Nature fixes everything before she works it out in the visible world. * *  * November 27, 1909 , A purely scientific education tends to make thought keen and clear-sighted within certain limits, but narrow, hard and cold.... Man intellectually... soon find how terrible is the grasp of God and how insignificant the human reason before the whirlwind of __________ * A mantra capable of bringing a dead man back to life. Page 37 His breath. That man only is likely to dominate the chances of a Revolution, who makes no plans but preserves his heart pure for the will of God to declare itself. The great rule of life... believe that they are animals and God does not exist. For what we believe, that Page 78 we become. The animal lives by a routine arranged for him by Nature; his life is devoted to the satisfaction of his instincts bodily, vital and emotional, and he satisfies himself mechanically, by a regular response to the working of those instincts. Nature has regularised everything for him ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   India's Rebirth

Inspiration and Effort  >  Poetic Values and Powers (A Letter)

... Silent — these are some of the contraries in which God has been conceived and realised — and the tendency is to regard the second term of each pair as the more truly Godlike, as having more of the essence of the Ultimate. The cause of this tendency lies in the lagging of our Nature-parts behind our pure self. The self soars up to the Eternal, but our nature of mind, life and matter remains untransformed... the medium. Mystical ideas pour down from above into many people, but all don't write a Rose of God, that poem of Sri Aurobindo's which both of us regard as a ne plus ultra of spiritual incantation. I don't aver that a man who has so far given no sign of being a poet will not blossom into one under the impact of a down-pouring mystical idea: some inmates of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram have become poets... plane. In brief, God cannot be truly spoken except by God Himself! To fasten on God an incapacity to utter Himself would be to cast a slur on His Godhead. It is speech taking shape on the level of the human consciousness or even on any-level below the highest divine, that to a more or less extent may be said to "come a cropper". On the highest divine level an everlasting Song that is God goes on simultaneous ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Inspiration and Effort

Hymns to the Mystic Fire  >  Translations of the First Hymn of the Rig Veda

... is he that moveth in the Gods. Agni, the warrior whose strength is wisdom, he of the Truth who has the knowledge rich, cometh, a God attended by the Gods. O beloved, O Agni, that thou desirest to do good to him who seeks to hurt thee, this is utterly thy nature, O Lord of Love. To thee, O Agni who protectest us in darkness day by day, if with hearts full of self-surrender we come, then thou... every side, that verily moveth in the gods. Agni, the offering priest whose might is knowledge, the true, the exceeding rich in inspiration, cometh a god with the gods. That thou, O friend, O Agni, wilt surely effect the weal of the giver, that is the nature & truth of thee, O lord of love. To thee, O Agni, day by day, O dweller in the twilight, we with the discerning mind bring our submission when thy... [8] I.1 1) The God-will I seek with adoration, divine priest of the sacrifice who is set in front and sacrifices in the seasons of the Law, giver of oblation who most ordains the ecstasy. 2) The Flame adored by the ancient finders of knowledge must be sought also by the new, for it is he that shall bring hither the godheads. 3) By the flame of the Will man enjoys a treasure of felicity ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Hymns to the Mystic Fire

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 5  >  The Return

... alone with man in his canoe on the ocean immensity; alone, and two, and all; emerged out of the song of separation and of inconscience;   Man and Nature, Man and Man, God and God for the first time, from the inmost depth of an embodied gaze contemplate each other.   From man to man, ... sing in your flowing hair.   HE                                They dance in the hollow of your shoulders; and all the multitude of creatures and the glorified man.   SHE                              O the one all, the one Self peopled with my first and eternal wholeness, as with undying stars,     . I am mirrored everywhere ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 5

A Pilgrims Quest for the Highest and the Best  >  Another Line of Inquiry

... Some religions hold belief in God, some do not share their belief in God; even those who believe in God have different and conflicting views of the nature of God: some hold dualistic belief, others atheistic belief, and still others pantheistic beliefs; some believe in the existence of only one God, some believe in the existence of only one Absolute; some believe in one God but with inherent trinity and... and some believe in one God but also in many gods, too. And if we examine the beliefs of various cults and sects, we shall find hundreds of variations and subtle page - 71 differences which seem too difficult to be reconciled with each other. There are also varieties of beliefs and doctrines pertaining to the nature of the soul, the nature of the soul's life on the earth and the destiny of... following: "Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Pilgrims Quest for the Highest and the Best

In the Mother's Light  >  The Mother

... Page 10 been in constant possession and enjoyment of it as her birthright; but what she has steadfastly yearned for and willed is the manifestation of God in Matter through the liberated and transformed nature of man. It was the reconciliation of Spirit and Matter, the long-dreamed-of marriage of Earth and Heaven that was the problem the Mother set before herself early in life, and... who willest in them and that Thou canst will in such a way that all their being may be illumined....”² But the mind of man is beset by doubts which impede the working of the divine Will. Man judges by his very limited and often misleading experiences of life and Nature and by the puny standards he has erected in his half-lit mind. By a fraction of the past and the present which is all that... for the Divine and rendered a radiant scene of His rapturous self-manifestation. The Manifestation of God in Matter We have seen what the constant seeking of the Mother's soul is and the means of its fulfilment in the material world. Let us now try to understand the nature and significance of her work upon earth. If we take a synoptic view of all her experiences and teachings, we cannot ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  Rationalism

... demands a categorical imperative, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason cannot do that, it must be regarded as inefficient. It is poor consolation to man that Reason is gradually finding out the truth or that it is trying to grapple with the problems of God, Soul and Immortality and will one day pronounce its verdict. Whether we have or have not any other instrument of knowledge is a different question... WHAT is Reason, the faculty that is said to be the proud privilege of man, the sovereign instrument he alone possesses for the purpose of knowing? What is the value of knowledge that Reason gives? For it is the manner of knowing, the particular faculty or instrument by which we know, that determines the nature and content of knowledge. Reason is the collecting of available sense-perceptions... Reason is proof of its being a reliable and perfect instrument for the knowledge of Truth and Reality. It is beside the mark to prove otherwise, simply by analysing the nature of Reason and showing the fundamental deficiencies of that nature. It is rather to the credit of Reason that being as it is, it is none the less a successful and trustworthy agent.   Now the question is, does Reason never ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

On Art - Addresses and Writings  >  On Art and Beauty : The Ladder of Aesthetic Experience

... the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty... world of immortality. His experience of beauty is largely in the field of Nature; to him Nature is living; outside Nature—particularly in human life—he was very much disappointed. He did not feel beauty in life, in action or character as he felt in Nature. He wished man to identify himself with the presence that pervades Nature. He describes his experience in one poem thus— "These beauteous forms... life; today man wants to make science and industry a part of life. There is nothing wrong in it, so long as it is only one part and not the all-absorbing and dominating part. The capacity to utilise the resources of Nature should not promote in man the merely utilitarian view of life. To see this world as Nature's inexhaustible treasure house and to feel that the highest business of man is to rob as ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   On Art - Addresses and Writings

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Foundation

... self-being, and each individual too a nature of his own, an individual way of his self-being within that of the species. The law of the action is determined generally by this swabhava of the species and individually by the swabhava of the individual but within that larger circle. Man is at once himself, in a certain way peculiar and unique, and a depressed portion of God and a natural portion of mankind... things, the will of the soul in Nature and the action of Nature in and on the soul and through it and back to it, the effect of the intercrossing between the action of Page 384 the soul on others and the return to it of the force of its action complicated by theirs, and the meaning of the soul's action in relation to its own highest Self and the All-Self, to God, make up between them all the... within it of the individual swadharma. But again, if that were all, if each man came into life with his present nature ready determined for him and irrevocable and had to act according to it, there would be no real responsibility; for he would do good according to the good and evil according to the evil in his nature, he would be imperfect according to its imperfection or perfect according to its ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history  >  Lights on Scripture

... the Divine heights: ...there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhāvam āgataha; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that... Upanishad too ends with an invocation to the Mystic Fire: "O god Agni, knowing all things that are manifested, lead us by the good path to the felicity." Sri Aurobindo sees the central idea of the Upanishad as "a reconciliation and harmony of fundamental opposites"; the conscious Lord and phenomenal Nature, renunciation and enjoyment, action in nature and the soul's freedom, the one stable Brahman and the... intended to serve. 52 The aim of Krishna the Avatar is to raise the man Arjuna to the level of a 'superman' deploying a divine consciousness and a divine energy and drive - not a Nietzschean, Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian 'superman', but a man "whose whole personality has been offered up into the being, nature and consciousness of the one transcendent and universal Divinity and by loss ...

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic  >  The Mind and Spirit of Our Age

... love and beauty; he introduces a very human element by remembering his own early shy encounters with romance and by discussing love and beauty in the life of man and woman. He points out the difference between the needs in man's nature and those in woman's. He is not anti-feminist, wanting woman to remain shackled and inferior nor is he in favour of old cramping customs; Russell has a good... the outward differentiations, since the fundamental human nature is the same and escapes the sex-limits and holds every sort of potentiality and commands the power of a varied function. In essence this pressure is a highly evolutionary factor. We tend overmuch to see man and woman in relation to each other and in the way their natures manifest commonly on the mental, vital, physical levels... liberation from earth and from embodiment together with transformation and fulfilment of both, mukti in the impersonal Infinite together with ascension to the personal God and incarnation of His powers and purposes in our total nature. That would imply a consummating of all that is truly valuable and creative in Rolland, Gandhi, Tagore and also Page 107 Russell where ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

The Indian Spirit and the World's Future  >  The Mind and Spirit of Our Age: Dilip Kumar Roy's Interviews with Five World-Figures

... through love and beauty; he introduces a very human element by remembering his own early shy encounters with romance and by discussing love and beauty in the life of man and woman. He points out the difference between the needs in man's nature and those in woman's. He is not anti-feminist, wanting woman to remain shackled and inferior nor is he in favour of old cramping customs; Russell has a good word... beyond the outward differentiations, since the fundamental human nature is the same and escape the sex limits and holds every sort of potentiality and commands the power of a varied function. In essence this pressure is a highly evolutionary factor. We tend overmuch to see man and woman in relation to each other and in the way their natures manifest commonly on the mental, vital, physical levels. What... liberation from earth and from embodiment together with transformation and fulfilment of both, mukti in the impersonal Infinite together with ascension to the personal God and incarnation of His powers and purposes in our total nature. That would imply a consummating of all that is truly valuable and creative in Rolland, Gandhi, Tagore and also Russell where his attack on mystical isolation and oth ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2  >  Savitri, the Mother

... mind, Page 94 She was thought and the passion of the world's heart, She was the godhead hid in the heart of man, She was the climbing of his soul to God. The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed. She was Time and the dreams of God in Time; She was Space and the wideness of his days. A deep concentration seized on me, and I perceived that I was identifying... unfelt energy kept the body intact or it was impelled by the momentum gathered in the past, by Nature. Perhaps she bore made conscious in her breast The miraculous Nihil, origin of our souls And source and sum of the vast world's events, The womb and grave of thought, a cipher of God, A zero circle of being's totality. It used her speech and acted in her acts, It... finitising movement of the instrumental members of the personality. She has "annulled herself so that God might be. So her divine emptiness has become now an instrument of the dual power at being's occult poles"—the supreme Superconscient above and the nethermost Inconscient below. Inconscient Nature dealt with the world it had made, And using still the body's instruments Slipped through ...

R. Y. Deshpande   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Perspectives of Savitri - Part 2

Hitler and his God  >  A New Human Being

... Nietzsche, symbolizing the philosophical tradition of Nazism. Nietzsche’s superman was not the only new human being expected by Germans. There was also, for instance, the “Ario-Germanic god-man” of Guido von List. This god-man was supposed to be the present-day successor of a long line of “heirs of the sun-king” going back all the way to Atlantis: the Armanen. The Atlantidians were supposed to have been... nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness: he must come one day. ” 695 What kind of being would Nietzsche’s superman be? Stern has composed an outline of his character from Also sprach Zarathustra... powers had never been interrupted and was surfacing again today. They would be instrumental in creating the future, for List “saw as the culminating point of the universal development the Ario-Germanic god-man”. 697 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes: “The myth of an occult elite is not new in European ideology. It has been a perennial theme of post-Enlightenment occultism, which attempts to restore the ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri  >  Index of lines in Savitri

... wider than the universe101 I am, I love, I see, I act, I will66 I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream70,295 Idea rotated symphonies of sight129 Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes123 In her unlit temple of eternity253, 288 In him that high transition laid its base308,312 In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives285 Page 371 In moments when the... 246,291,330 It wrote the lines of a significant myth 248 Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference 113 Lifting the human word nearer to the god's 181 Love must not cease to live upon the earth 75 Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked 203 My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer 69 Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven 24,322 Neighbouring... quiet eve 66 Page 372 The conscious Force that acts in Nature's breast284 The conscious Force that acts in Nature's breast284 The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak47 The dubious godhead with his torch of pain 108,187, 241 The Gods above and Nature sole below245 The great are strongest when they stand alone266 ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision  >  The Problem of Collective Life

... external, touching only the economic life of man. I am afraid he oversimplifies the problem. Tracing man's evolution up to now he puts it in three heads: ( 1 )Man Vs. Nature, ( 2 ) Man Vs. Man, ( 3 ) Man divided in his own self, a state of a psychological dichotomy. The first of these, Man Vs. Nature, is only a half truth. Nature is not always antagonistic to man. Tagore is more correct when he says... says that the effort to divide man and Nature- is artificial like that of dividing the plant from the flower, and is therefore wrong. It is Nature that supports man giving him food, water and air, and even when she seems to oppose man it is to bring out the potential powers of man which might lead him to conquer her. There are, besides,. many problems over and above economics and politics. Russel's... Cycle and The ideal of Human Unity will appeal more easily to European minds. Sri Aurobindo tackles the problem of man's destiny on earth and the nature of perfection man can attain. He finds that all the problems, difficulties, imperfections in man's life arise out of man's ignorance. The word " Ignorance " is to be understood in the sense given to it in Indian culture. Our ancient culture recognises ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision

Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God  >  4: Lamarck: The First Evolutionary Theorist

... this day. God or Nature The existence of God, from unquestioned, became ever more problematic and was already denied by many atheists. In his writings Lamarck still professed to be a deist – “a vague deist” – in the way Voltaire had been: recognizing the existence of God as creator, but removing him outside the works of his creation. God was “the Supreme Being” who had created nature with its laws... having been created by the Supreme Being, became a kind of substitute of God, possessing the powers to modify and develop. “I hope to prove that nature possesses the necessary means and the faculties to produce herself what we are admiring in her,” he wrote. 9 Nonetheless, materialists like Lamarck posited that nature and everything in it was material and nothing else. Lamarck is often erroneously... Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God 4: Lamarck: The First Evolutionary Theorist Who would dare to put boundaries to the human intelligence, and to assure that there is a knowledge man will never acquire or a secret he will never penetrate? Jean-Baptiste Lamarck The Natural Sciences Members of the French nobility had names as long ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

Hymns to the Mystic Fire  >  RV III.1.1-12

... To heaven and earth in man, manushye, mind & matter manifesting in this mortal world & in human nature, Agni stands in two relations. Divine force in us is purity & to the soul that is pure both mental & physical nature become harmonious, amical, like two friends and helpful playfellows. Divine force in us is also mastery & enjoyment; to the strong soul mental & physical nature become like wives submitted... his mastery, common friends to his purity. Them in man do thou protect. The garbha, that which was contained in the secret hold of the father & which now comes forth as the child of Purusha & Prakriti, Agni bears & brings to man, all this higher fruit of their union upon the levels of purified mind. Agni, alone possessing the whole of our nature as Force divine manifested in many forms, drinks the... higher knowledge, a fit vessel for the divine Ananda which is to be offered up in Yogic action & enjoyment to the gods. He calls upon the god to sustain his lower parts and maintain him in full strength for that divine burden. Then, sustained by Agni, his whole nature flames up in divine force from its natural mortality towards the divinity of the gods and he attains that pure stillness of the mind & ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Hymns to the Mystic Fire

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1  >  The Eternal East and West

... the Spirit either – but this does not mean that the Spirit cannot have its own expression and movement. God too likewise is not a mere supracosmic being – a somewhat aggrandised human being – treating and dominating man and the world as something foreign and essentially antagonistic to his nature. God himself has made himself all creatures and all worlds. He is That and He is This fundamentally and integrally... his entire existence. Man has always aspired, in the midst of the transience and imperfection that the world is, for something stable and perfect, in the heart of disharmony for some core of perfect harmony. He termed it God, Atman, Summum Bonum and he sought it sometimes, as he thought necessary, even at the cost of the world and the life, if it is to be found elsewhere. Man aspired also always to... if on the other hand, the world and its life are given only their face value emptying them of their deeper and transcendent contents – in the manner of the great Laplace who could find no place for God in his map of the world which seemed to be quite complete in itself, if this trenchant division is made in the very definition of the terms, in our primary axioms and postulates, then, of course, we ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Collected Poems  >  The Children of Wotan

... has the edge of the thunderbolt, our acts the claws of the lion. We rejoice in the pain we create as a man in the kiss of a woman." Page 641 "Have you seen your fate in the scales of God, O children of Wotan, And the tail of the Dragon lashing the foam in far-off seas?" "We mock at God, we have silenced the mutter of priests at his altar. Our leader is master of Fate, medium of her mysteries... seed of blood on the soil, a flower of blood in the skies. We march to make of earth a hell and call it heaven. The heart of mankind we have smitten with the whip of the sorrows seven; The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold sunrise." "I hear the cry of a broken world, O children of Wotan." "Question the volcano when it burns, chide the fire and bitumen! Suffering is the food of our... mysteries. We have made the mind a cypher, we have strangled Thought with a cord; Dead now are pity and honour, strength only is Nature's lord. We build a new world-order; our bombs shout Wotan's peace. "We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan, We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage. A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will, ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  On Books

... fit for it. You can now see your lower nature; especially the vital play Page 126 of Kama (lust) and Krodha (anger) etc – is essentially the Dharma – the functioning – of the animal man. You have to rise into the Divine Nature by rejecting the lower nature. How can you get the Divine Nature unless you conquer the nature of the animal-man in you ? The first step has been given... impulse. But if a man goes and butts against the gods then he knocks his head. But no god harms intentionally. It is you who go to get your head broken. It is your folly and stupidity which is responsible for the knocks. . Disciple : The gods do not care whether man is killed or not. Sri Aurobindo : Not in the human, sentimental way. They go on doing their work and if man becomes happy... between man and woman in this yoga ?" Sri Aurobindo replied : "This is not a yoga of renunciation in the sense that one has not to reject life or the world externally. But that does not mean that one has to give room to lower forces and allow them full play in their lower forms. "This is a yoga of rising into the Divine Nature from the lower nature. What that higher Nature is you ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Aspects of Sri Aurobindo  >  The Search For Soma

... immortal state. It is his own true seat, ittha padam asya, that the God concealed in man conquers ascending out of the darkness and the twilight through the glories of the Dawn into the solar plenitudes." Having made out the case that the Rigveda is not merely religious ritualism directed at deified nature-forces but a spiritual cult aiming at the human soul's realisation of the Supreme Being... worshipped a plant called soma (Avestan haoma) which was at the same time a god." There is also the information to be derived from the reviewer that even in later times Soma was more than a mere plant: it was "firmly identified with the moon". A sense of the deific, the numinous, in the "high-lights", so to speak, of Nature is evident here, taking us beyond a mere earth-plant and indicating much more... natural to an age of spiritual symbolism. The Sun and the Moon are obvious symbols of Divine Knowledge and Divine Delight. Identification of the God Soma with the moon argues for more than a plant's colour and shape — more even than for the urge of Nature-worship. It harks back to the psychology of the cult of "Mysteries" — the ancient mind's resort to a set of symbols which, to the adept, signified ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo  >  Love-Its Place and Power-2

... of the Divine here, on earth, and in the human body. It yearns to serve God by fulfilling His Will here.¹ The tendency in the individual towards the ¹ Cf. The Western mystic Ruysbroeck: "Tranquillity according to His essence, activity according to His Nature: absolute repose, absolute fecundity...for this dignity has man been made." Page 345 peace and passivity of Nirvana,... business is to rum our entire being God wards by saturating it with its own love and devotion, and prepare it for the work of divine manifestation. The psychic love is a white flame which is inextinguishable, and it mounts straight towards the Divine. A total and constant self-giving, a self-consecration through service, a progressive surrender of the whole nature, an instinctive recoil from all that... become a single flame of love rising towards the Divine. What Sri Aurobindo calls the sun-lit path is the path of the psychic leading the human being to God. It is a Page 344 path of unflagging aspiration and spontaneous devotion, god a cheerful trust and confidence in the Divine. There is no room in it for any morbid self-pity or the excessive rigours of austerity; none at all for di ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram  >  The Present Situation

... the man who had the greatest influence and has done the most to regenerate Bengal, could not read and write a single word. He was a man who had been what they call absolutely useless to the world. But he had this one divine faculty in him, that he had more than faith and had realised God. He was a man who lived what many would call the life of a madman, a man without intellectual training, a man without... day about national education, and I spoke of a man who had given his life to that work, the man who really organised the National College in Calcutta, and that man also is a disciple of a sannyasin, that man also though he lives in the world lives like a sannyasin, and if you take the young workers in Bengal, men that have come forward to do the work of God, what will you find? What is their strength... belief through the longing to live for their countrymen, to suffer for their countrymen, because God is not only here in me, He is within all of you; it is God whom I love, it is God for whom I wish to suffer. ( Applause ) In that way many have come to do what God bade them do and He knows which way to lead a man. When it is His will, He will lead him aright. Another thing, which is only another name ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Bande Mataram

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Stress of the Hidden Spirit

... because that is its nature. But why is that its nature? Why should it not be its nature to produce some other form of existence, or some other kind of tree? That is the law, is the answer. But why is it the law? The only answer is that it is so because it is so; that it happens, why no man can say. In reality when we speak of Law, we speak of an idea; when we speak of the nature of a thing, we speak... Intelligence, conscious in things unconscious, active in things inert. Page 65 The energy of Prajna is what the Europeans call Nature. The tree does not and cannot shape itself, the stress of the hidden Intelligence shapes it. He is in the seed of man and in that little particle of matter carries habit, character, types of emotion into the unborn child. Therefore heredity is true; but if... heart, body of man. Because the hidden spirit urges himself on the body, stamps himself on it, expresses himself in it, the body expresses the individuality of the man, the developing and conscious idea or varying type which is myself; therefore no two faces, no two expressions, no two thumb impressions even are entirely alike; every part of the body in some way or other expresses the man. The stress ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

The Future Poetry  >  The Lost Boat

... forlorn ocean. Is it Chance smites? is it Fate's irony? dead workings or blind purpose of brute Nature? Or man's own deeds that return back on his doomed head with a stark justice, a fixed vengeance? Or a dread Will from behind Life that regards pain and salutes death with a hard laughter? Is it God's might or a Force rules in this dense jungle of events, deeds and our thought's strivings? Yet... new azure, Amid bright splendour of beast glories and birds' music and deep hues, an enriched Nature And a new life that could draw near to divine meanings and touched close the concealed purpose. Page 379 In a chance happening, fate's whims and the blind workings or dead drive of a brute Nature, In her dire Titan caprice, strength that to death drifts and to doom, hidden a Will labours ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry

Savitri  >  'The Soul's Choice'

... liberties of heaven. 78   She cannot solace herself in heaven when earth is full of suffering men. With Satyavan by her side, she will be able to give battle to the world's woe, lift man's soul to God, and bring immortality to the earth.         A fresh doubt is posed before Savitri. Is it ever possible that the basic distinction between earth and heaven can be annulled? With average... She says simply:         To bring God down to the world on earth we came,       To change the earthly life to life divine. 81   She will not sacrifice earth to "happier worlds". Wasn't it God Page 229 who made the earth and planted in it the seed for perfection? God has made earth, and earth must bring down her God. Savitri has actually "felt a secret spirit... spirit stir in things/Carrying the body of the growing God", and hence earth's climb to its own eternity is certain.         Realising at last that Savitri's purpose holds despite the doubts posed and the difficulties prophesied, the god tells her that while he appreciates the strength of her vision and will and voice—because these have had their origin in him—he must warn her about "the tardy ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  >  The Delight of Works

... settled by the intention and working of Nature and the more the conscious instrument learns to feel and obey the pure and essential law of its nature, the sooner shall the work turned out become perfect and flawless. Self-choice by the nervous motive-power, revolt of the physical and mental tool can only mar the working. Let thyself drive in the breath of God and be as a leaf in the tempest; put thyself... proper nature and an individual energy. Follow that like a widening river till it leads thee to its infinite source and origin. Know therefore thy body to be a knot in Matter and thy mind to be a whirl in universal Mind and thy life to be an eddy of Life that is for ever. Know thy force to be every other being's force and thy knowledge to be a glimmer from the light that belongs to no man and thy... 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 has made the sun and the systems ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

Talks on Poetry  >  The Heart and the Art of Poetry - Talk Forty

... comes not because the simile-leg is shorter but because it is longer. To take the most ordinary instance: "This man is like a lion." Do we extend and enrich the man or do we cramp and impoverish him? And do we not hint at something in which man-nature and lion-nature fuse in a kind of world-nature common or basic to both? The second interpretation is: a simile fastens on a few important features of... and not only representative. Sri Aurobindo writes: "Homer gives us the life of man always at a high intensity of impulse and action and without subjecting it to any other change he casts it in lines of beauty and in divine proportions; he deals with it as Phidias dealt with the human form when he wished to create a god in marble. When we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are not really upon this... rise also to the occasion of our present theme: the planes of poetry. I shall begin at the beginning, the foot of the "World-stair": the subtle physical plane. Here it is the outer activities of man and Nature that pass through the poetic imagination and acquire an inwardness which reveals the psychological or even superhuman powers at work in the world. The poet's preoccupation, however, is now not ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks on Poetry

Essays on the Gita  >  The Divine Teacher

... expresses the relation of God in man to man in God by the double figure of Nara-Narayana, associated historically with the origin of a religious school very similar in its doctrines to the teaching of the Gita. Nara is the human soul which, eternal companion of the Divine, finds itself only when it awakens to that companionship and begins, as the Gita would say, to live in God. Narayana is the divine... we can know by spiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted in the light of his teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural Law by that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is the symbol? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of Mary physically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So too the Krishna... all and on the Godhead secret in man. It is this internal divinity who is meant when the Gita speaks of the doer of violent Asuric austerities troubling the God within or of the sin of those who despise the Divine lodged in the human body or of the same Godhead destroying our ignorance by the blazing lamp of knowledge. It is then the eternal Avatar, this God in man, the divine Consciousness always ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita

Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision  >  On Art and Beauty

... the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty... world of immortality. His experience of beauty is largely in the field of Nature; to him Nature is living. Outside Nature- particularly in human life-he was very much disappointed. He did not feel beauty in life, in action or character as he felt in Nature. He wished man to identify himself with the presence that pervades Nature. He describes his experience in one poem thus: " These beauteous forms... life; today man wants to make science and industry a part of life. There is nothing wrong in it so long as it is only one part and not the all-absorb- ing and dominating part. The capacity to utilise the resources of Nature should not promote in man the merely utilitarian view of life. To see this world as Nature's inexhaustible treasure house and to feel that the highest business of man is to rob ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo - some aspects of His Vision

In the Mother's Light  >  Yogic Action-2

... only the conscious parts of the nature, but also the subconscient and the inconscient can be thoroughly cleansed of even the last, lingering vestiges of the ego and transferred to the sole charge of the Divine ? Can the lower human nature of the three shackling qualitative modes, guṇas, be raised and converted into the divine Nature, parā prakṛti ? Can man become wholly divine, not only... frontal part of the nature and its contribution or non-contribution to the Yogic action. In other words, does the ego completely fade out of the individual nature, or does it persist even when the soul is in command ? With the blunt, disarming candour, characteristic of him, Sri Ramakrishna says, "If the obstinate ego would not go, well, let it then remain as a servant of God." The implication is... disappear out of the nature of the liberated individual, but persists, subdued and surrendered, it may be, enlightened and widened in consciousness, but essentially separative and self-assertive, This view lends colour to the wide-spread belief that so long as the body is there, some kind of "I" ness or the ego is bound to persist in the nature parts of even a liberated man. The physical knot of ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

The Secret Splendour  >  Epilogue-The Overhead planes - Sri Aurobindo

... veil from God and life. Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse, The cosmic empire of the Overmind, Time's buffer state bordering Eternity, Too vast for the experience of man's soul: All here gathers beneath one golden sky: The Powers that build the cosmos station take In its house of infinite possibility; Each god from there builds his own nature's world; ... comes the glory sometimes seen on earth, The visits of Godhead to the human soul, The Beauty and the dream on Nature's face. There the perfection born from Eternity Calls to it the perfection born in Time, The truth of God surprising human life, The image of God overtaking finite shapes. There is a world of everlasting Light, In the realms of the immortal Supermind ... Truth who hides here her head in mystery, Her riddle deemed by reason impossible In the stark structure of material form, Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there Is Nature and the common law of things. There in a body made of spirit stuff, The hearth-stone of the everlasting Fire, Action translates the movements of the soul, Thought steps infallible find absolute ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Secret Splendour

Overhead Poetry  >  Epilogue The Overhead Planes

... glory sometimes seen on earth, The visits of Godhead to the human soul, The Beauty and the dream on Nature's face. There the perfection born from Eternity Calls to it the perfection born in Time, The truth of God surprising human life, The image of God overtaking finite shapes. There is a world of everlasting Light, In the realms of the immortal Superrnind... away the veil from God and life. Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse, The cosmic empire of the Overmind, Time's buffer state bordering Eternity, Too vast for the experience of man's soul: All here gathers beneath one golden sky: The Powers that build the cosmos station take In its house of infinite possibility; Each god from there builds... builds his own nature's world; Ideas are phalanxed like a group of sums; Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard; All Time is one body, Space a single book: There is the Godhead's universal gaze And there the boundaries of immortal Mind: The line that parts and joins the hemispheres Closes in on the labour of the Gods Fencing eternity from the toil of ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Overhead Poetry

Aspiring Swan  >  Champaklal-One of the Hundred

... path of faith. Never forget even for a moment the path shown to you by Arvindbabuji. You will never find a God so long as you do not have a keen desire to find Him. But, when will I find God? 0 God! Show mercy on me! Give me Thy refuge! Give me pure knowledge,, devotion and love." Each man who enters the realms of yogic experience is free to follow his own way, but guidance from a guru is indispensable... pure and true feelings of a devoted heart and a fragrance of Sat-Chit- Ananda. Champaklal has seen many visions.² These visions are "like a glorious song of cosmic forces at work both in man and nature." About his 'Golden Vision' an enlightened devotee Amal Kiran has written, "It reveals the Mother in her full reality - not only the Universal Form of her but also the individual being.... What... 'ONE 0F THE HUNDRED' To be free from ego and become an instrument of God is indispensable for sadhana, Sri Aurobindo conveyed this in the following words, "I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if 1 can get a hundred complete men, purified of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God." On 2nd February 1972, the Mother wrote on Champaklal's birthday card, ...

Prof. Roshan Dumasia   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Aspiring Swan

Isha Upanishad  >  The Inhabiting Godhead: Life and Action

... enjoy; lust not after any man's possession. 2) Doing verily works in this world one should wish to live a hundred years. Thus it is in thee and not otherwise than this; action cleaves not to a man. 3) Sunless are those worlds and enveloped in blind gloom whereto all they in their passing hence resort who are slayers of their souls. THE BASIS OF COSMIC EXISTENCE God and the world, Spirit and... all others, free, eternal, immutable, lord of Nature. TRANSITIONAL THOUGHT Avidya The object of habitation is enjoyment and possession; the object of the Spirit in Cosmos is, therefore, the possession and enjoyment of the universe. Yet, being thus in his essence one, divine and free, man seems to be limited, divided from others, subject to Nature and even its creation and sport, enslaved to... Lord, who expresses Himself in it with perfect freedom. By getting behind Nature to the Lord of Nature, merging the individual in the Cosmic Will, one can act with the divine freedom. Our actions are given up to the Lord and our personal responsibility ceases in His liberty. The chain of Karma only binds the movement of Nature and not the soul which, by knowing itself, ceases even to appear to be bound ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7  >  My Professors

... workmanship of the artist. However a man's true quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even. Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and... us far away on some unknown wings? Tranquillity and a pleasant sweetness are then the first doors of entry. Through the second doors we come to a wide intimacy, an all-pervading unity, where man and nature have fused into one. This unity and universality breathe through and inspire such simple yet startling words: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, ... God-Realisation". I do not now remember which of the two I supported, Self or God! Perhaps I said that Self-Realisation really meant God-Realisation, for the Self was nothing but an illusi'on. Or did I say that to realise God was nothing but Self-Realisation, for God was nothing, Self alone was the reality? I must have introduced a lot of such metaphysical stuff. This brought the following comment from the ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

The Destiny of the Body  >  The Physical Conquest of Death

... all earth look into the eyes of God .... He must pass to the other shore of falsehood's sea, He must enter the world's dark to bring there light. The heart of evil must be bared to his eyes, He must learn its cosmic dark Necessity, Its right and its dire roots in Nature's soil.... He must enter the eternity of Night And know God's darkness as he knows his Sun... Superman, the divine Child, is growing up on earth, and will surely annihilate in the Hour of God the twin demons of Ignorance and Death. For, "...in the march of all-fulfilling Time The hour must come of the Transcendent's will... All turns and winds towards his predestined ends In Nature's fixed inevitable course, Decreed since the beginning of the worlds In the deep... perilous bridge in Time And reach an apex of world-destiny Where all is won or all is lost for man. In that tremendous silence lone and lost Of a deciding hour in the world's fate, In her soul's climbing beyond mortal time When she stands sole with Death or sole with God Apart upon a silent desperate brink Alone with her self and death and destiny As on ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Destiny of the Body

Karmayogin  >  Facts and Opinions

... it exceeds experience because experience often gives the balance of its support to one conclusion where faith using intuition inclines to the opposite conclusion. God and Man Our contemporary does not understand why we wrote of God and the universal force or why we insisted on the special manifestation of the Divine Force as opposed to its veiled workings through human egoism. We did so because... but God, but for the purposes of life we have to recognise that there is a dualism in the underlying unity. It profits nothing to say, for instance, "The Divine Force wrote two columns of Facts and Comments the other day in the Bengalee ." God reveals Himself not only in the individual where He is veiled by ignorance and egoism, but in Himself. When the Bengalee sees no alternative to man's sel... in an unconscious inanimate Nature. The Divine Force is not unconscious but conscious and intelligent and to see Him as a conscious power only in men is to deny Him altogether. When again our contemporary uses a misapplication of the truth of Adwaita to justify the deifying of his own reason, he is encouraging practical atheism while taking the divine name in vain. God manifests Himself in everything ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Karmayogin

Sri Aurobindo's Message  >  Key-word of the Earth's Riddle

... driven force of insensible Nature. Earth-life is one self-chosen habitation of a great Divinity and his aeonic will is to change it from a blind prison into his splendid mansion and high heaven-reaching temple. * Evolution is nothing but the progressive unfolding of Spirit out of the density of material consciousness and the gradual self-revelation of God out of this apparent animal... Soul secret in Form and Force, the slow becoming of a Godhead, the growth of a Spirit. In this evolution mental man is not the goal and end, the completing value, the highest last significance; he is too small and imperfect to be the crown of all this travail of Nature. Sri Aurobindo Page 7 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   Sri Aurobindo's Message

Spiritual bouquets to a friend  >  Letter from Rishabhchand to Rutledge Tompkins

... physical and seeks to express itself in the outer nature of the mind, life & body of man. It is not the nature of the ego. Arjun was not aware of his essential nature, he was being led by his sattwic rajasic nature the norms of which he knew as his dharma. This Dharma is the ethical dharma, an ensemble of ethical principles and rules by which a sattwic man seeks to regulate his life. When this ethical... not needed then, but without which modern man cannot fully satisfy his soul. Evolution is a progression in which to repeat the past is to stop dead on the way, or even to fall back to a lower level. 17.02.65 * * * In your last letter you have referred to the "essential nature" of man. This essential nature or Svabhava is the nature of the psychic being which evolves by means... the serpent in man that have broken loose and are running amuck. No humanity is left in man. And yet, we know, he has to become Divine. He has to become a vehicle of God's Love and Light, Peace and Harmony on earth. May the dark night pass and the promised Dawn break at last! May the Mother's Grace shower upon Her stricken children! 7.06.68 * * * It is the hour of God. The world is in ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Spiritual bouquets to a friend

On The Mother  >  Childhood and Girlhood

... expresses itself in a Nature ridden with calamities and catastrophes and in a disharmonious humanity. The two things are not cause and effect, but stand on the same level. Above them there is a consciousness which is seeking for manifestation and embodiment upon earth, and in its descent towards matter it meets everywhere the same resistance, in man and in physical Nature. 30 Page 13 ... the gods Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss A greatness from our other countries came .... A mediating ray has touched the earth Bridging the gulf between man's mind and God's; ... A spirit of its celestial source aware Descended into earth's imperfect mould And wept not fallen to mortality, But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.² ... after. As she recalled these experiences decades later in 1920: Page 9 Between 11 and 13 a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man's possibility of uniting with Him, of realising Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon earth in a life divine. This, along with a practical discipline for its fulfilment ...

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   On The Mother

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny  >  The Eternal East and West

... the Spirit either—but this does not mean that the Spirit cannot have its own expression and movement. God too likewise is not a mere supracosmic being—a somewhat aggrandised human being— treating and dominating man and the world as something foreign and essentially antagonistic to his nature. God himself has made himself all creatures and all worlds. He is That and He is This fundamentally and integrally... his entire existence. Man has always aspired, in the midst of the transience and imperfection that the world is, for something stable and perfect, in the heart of disharmony for some core of perfect harmony. He termed it God, Atman, Summum Bonum and he sought it sometimes, as he thought necessary, even at the cost of the world and the life, if it is to be found elsewhere. Man aspired also always to... earth, if on the other hand, the world and its life are given only their face value emptying them of their deeper and transcendent contents—in the manner of the great Laplace who could find no place for God in his map of the world which seemed to be quite complete in itself, if this trenchant division is made in the very definition of the terms, in our primary axioms and postulates, then, of course, we ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

Isha Upanishad  >  The Isha Upanishad

... workings both Nature and man have assisted. Animism is the obscure memory of an ancient discipline which put us into spiritual communion with intelligent beings and forces living behind the veil of gross matter sensible to our limited material organs. Nature-worship is another side of the same ancient truth. Fetishism remembers barbarously the great Vedic dogma that God is everywhere and God is all and... cannibal are merely the human beast, man hurled down from his ascent and returning from the sattwic or intelligent state into the tamasic, crumbling into the animal and almost into the clod by that disintegration through inertia which to the Hindu idea is the ordinary road to disappearance into the vague & rough material of Nature out of which we were made. The ascent of man, according to this theory, is... have left behind the last Satya period, the age of harmony, and to be now in a period of enormous breakdown, disintegration and increasing confusion in which man is labouring forward towards a new harmony which will appear when the spirit of God descends again upon mankind in the form of the Avatara called Kalki, destroys all that is lawless, dark and confused and establishes the reign of the saints ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad

Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine  >  The Triple Status of Supermind

... of God in the field of external nature has not yet been achieved. Victory of the Divine Truth, victory over ignorance is possible. Then not only the manifestation of the Divine consciousness in the world would be possible, but also His power could remould man's life and body until the image of the Satcid-ananda is projected in life. And the victory in the outer nature may be the victory of God in humanity... a tendency, a tension at work in the mental consciousness always to go beyond the difficulties of a divided being that is man. For man to refuse the ascent to the higher plane would be to limit the force of evolution. Sri Aurobindo wants man to justify the upward trend of Nature by making a conscious movement to go beyond the mental consciousness. Page 173 Now the question is : Is Supermind... First God, is illimitable bliss of existence-consciousness and He is our highest Self. That is the conception of God at which we have arrived. And when concentrated within Himself, He is Bliss. When He is active He becomes the delight of the play of Bliss. It becomes for us the universe. Divine consciousness possesses that delight eternally. For that, the problem does not exist. But if man is to attain ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

Questions and Answers (1929-1931)  >  14 April 1929

... what you desire? Certainly. There was a young man who wanted to do Yoga. But he had a mean and cruel father who troubled him very much and tried to prevent him from doing it. He wished ardently to be free from the father's interference. Soon the father fell ill and very seriously; he was about to die. Whereupon the other side of the boy's nature rose up and he loudly bewailed the misfortune and... seized by beings or entities of a certain type, you become blind instruments in their hands and are devoured by them in the end. Wherever there is pretence, there is danger; you cannot deceive God. Do you come to God saying, "I want union with you" and in your heart meaning "I want powers and enjoyments"? Beware! You are heading straight towards the brink of the precipice. And yet it is so easy to avoid... scream or dance about is always a proof of weakness, either of the vital or the mental or the physical nature; for on all these levels the activity is for self-satisfaction. One who dances and jumps and screams has the feeling that he is somehow very unusual in his excitement; and his vital nature takes great pleasure in that. If you have to bear the pressure of the Divine Descent, you must be very ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Questions and Answers (1929-1931)

In the Mother's Light  >  The Service of the Divine

... a supreme triumph of the Divine in man. The former is an ascent of man's love for the Divine, the latter is a descent of the Divine's Love for all creatures. The first is a God-ward service, the second is a God-possessed earthward service. The ideal of true service is the only ideal that can regenerate earthly life, redeem humanity and make it a vehicle of God-manifestation. True service is at... awake, at last, to the futility of of its peregrinations and beat a glorified retreat from this terrestrial existence, but to prepare its triple nature of mind, life, and body till it is fit to fulfil its mission: the manifestation of the Spirit in Matter. Man is not, therefore, a biological creature of a passing moment, but an immortal spark-soul, clad in mind, life, and body and charged with the... existence. It is service alone that can turn the whole field of human existence in the material world—a field so much spurned and condemned by short-sighted religions—into a heaven of constant and active God-union. In a Prayer of flaming aspiration and melting sweetness, the Mother prays to the Divine to let her only be His servant and nothing else. She puts service above everything else, above every ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

The Secret of the Veda  >  Indra and the Thought-Forces

... that they share with the god of Force, Agni. Although Indra is described sometimes as the eldest of the Maruts,— indrajyeṣṭho Page 268 marudgaṇaḥ,—yet they would seem at first to belong rather to the domain of Vayu, the Wind-God, who in the Vedic system is the Master of Life, inspirer of that Breath or dynamic energy, called the Prana, which is represented in man by the vital and nervous... originally active, swift or strong. We have nṛmṇa , strength, and nṛtama nṛṇām , most puissant of the Powers. It came afterwards to mean male or man and in the Veda is oftenest applied to the gods as the male powers or Purushas presiding over the energies of Nature as opposed to the female powers, who are called gnā . × ... Indra speaks more than once of the Maruts. They are Indra's brothers, and therefore the god should not strike at Agastya in his struggle towards perfection. They are his instruments for that perfection, and as such Indra should use them. And in the closing formula of submission and reconciliation, he prays to the god to parley again with the Maruts and to agree with them so that the sacrifice may proceed ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Secret of the Veda

Sudhir Kumar Sarkar: A Spirit Indomitable  >  The Awakening of India

... troubled mankind can only be solved by conquering the kingdom within, not by harnessing the forces of Nature to the service of comfort and luxury, but by mastering the forces of the intellect and the spirit, by vindicating the freedom of man within as well as without and by conquering from within external Nature. For that work the resurgence of Asia is necessary, therefore Asia rises. For that work the freedom... establish her claim.” * God is doing everything. We are not doing anything. When he bids us suffer, we suffer because the suffering is necessary to give others strength… this is a work God has asked us to do,… He himself is behind us, He himself is the worker and the work. * We say to the individual and especially to the young who are now arising to do India’s work, God’s work: “You cannot cherish... destiny would rise and fill all India with its light and overflow India and overflow Asia and overflow the world. Every hour, every moment could only bring them nearer to the brightness of the day that God had decreed. * What is our mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units ...

Sudhir Kumar Sarkar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sudhir Kumar Sarkar: A Spirit Indomitable

The Sun and The Rainbow  >  Spiritual India and Sri Aurobindo

... less real than the universe to which we are accustomed. To rest content with faith in God and in the Hereafter is far from enough from the Indian standpoint; it is equally insufficient to chop logic about the Absolute and the soul's immortality. The Gospel of Mark has the famous query: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" The Indian mystic, from the... philosophical speculation does he grow aware of his true soul and become a mystic. SEEING GOD     When the young Narendra, who later made a name on three continents as Swami Vivekananda, met the God-intoxicated Ramakrishna, the first question he shot at him was: "Sir, have you seen God?" A crude question for the awed religionist and a naive one for the abstract thinker, but typically... typically Indian in its approach to the Unknown. And typically Indian was the answer it evoked: "I see God more concretely than I see you." Indian mysticism begins to be understood as we start grasping its concreteness.   When the sacred books of this land spoke, for instance, of God's light, they did not use a poetic figure. They meant light just as concretely as Raman meant it when he won ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Sun and The Rainbow

Collected Poems  >  The Lost Boat

... forlorn ocean. Is it Chance smites? is it Fate's irony? dead workings or blind purpose of brute Nature? Or man's own deeds that return back on his doomed head with a stark justice, a fixed vengeance? Or a dread Will from behind Life that regards pain and salutes death with a hard laughter? Is it God's might or a Force rules in this dense jungle of events, deeds and our thought's strivings? Yet... and a new azure, Amid bright splendour of beast glories and birds' music and deep hues, an enriched Nature And a new life that could draw near to divine meanings and touched close the concealed purpose. In a chance happening, fate's whims and the blind workings or dead drive of a brute Nature, In her dire Titan caprice, strength that to death drifts and to doom, hidden a Will labours. Not with ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Collected Poems

The Future Poetry  >  Soul's Scene

... mood of a Soul lonely in Nature On earth's face puts a mask pregnantly carved, cut to misfeature,     And man's heart and his stilled mind react hushed in a spiritual passion         Imitating the contours of her desolate waiting. Impassible she waits long for the sun's gold and the azure, The sea's song with its slow happy refrain's plashes of pleasure,—     As man's soul in its depths waits... waits the outbreaking of the light and the godhead         And the bliss that God felt when he created his image. Page 382 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3  >  Man and Superman

... irrevocable feature of human organisation. They can be remedied to a large extent, and society made more decent to live in, even though it may not be transfigured into the City of God. Man, without foregoing his present human nature, can yet be a more humane and humanistic creature, that is to say, more truly human and less animal and de­moniac that he is trying to be. To this end the advent and the presence... We do not say that the superman will deal with man in the same way (although something of the kind may be found in the Nietzschean ideology). For man was a creature of Ignorance, and his behaviour and influence were naturally of the ignorant kind. The superman, however, being delivered of ignorance and living in perfect knowledge, has a different nature and outlook. He is one with the universe, with... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3 Man and Superman WHEN we speak of the superman we refer to a new race­ – almost a new species – that will appear on earth as the in­evitable result of Nature's evolution. The new race will be developed out of the present humanity, there seems to be no doubt about that; it does not mean however ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

On Education  >  Psychic Education and Spiritual Education

... curing the universe by abolishing it, but a transformation, a total transfiguration of matter brought about by the logical continuation of Nature's ascending march in her progress towards perfection, by the creation of a new species that will be to man what man is to the animal and that will manifest upon earth a new force, a new consciousness and a new power. And so will begin a new education which... one can say that the supramental education will result no longer in a progressive formation of human nature and an increasing development of its latent faculties, but in a transformation of the nature itself, a transfiguration of the being in its entirety, a new ascent of the species above and beyond man towards superman, leading in the end to the appearance of a divine race upon earth. Bulletin,... been brought up, the path you have followed and the affinities of your temperament. Those who have a religious tendency will call it God and their spiritual effort will be towards identification with the transcendent God beyond all forms, as opposed to the immanent God dwelling in each form. Others will call it the Absolute, the Supreme Origin, others Nirvana; yet others, who view the world as an unreal ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Education

Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume IV  >  Correspondence 1946

... to start creating it must receive an initiating “inspiration “, a transmission or a suggestion from the cosmic consciousness and with that it does what it can. God is, but man’s conceptions of God are reflections in his own mentality, sometimes of the Divine, sometimes of other Beings and Powers and they are what his mentality can make of the suggestions that come to him, generally very partial... exist, they are not created by man, even though he does seem to conceive them in his own image; fundamentally, he formulates as best he can what truth about them he receives from the cosmic Reality. An artist or a bhakta may have a vision of the God and it may get stabilised and generalised in the consciousness of the race and in that sense it may be true that man gives their forms to the Gods;... that is to say, to the data of other planes of consciousness than the physical, as also on the nature of the relations between the cosmic consciousness and the individual and collective consciousness of man. From the point of view of spiritual and occult Truth, what takes shape in the consciousness of man is a reflection and particular kind of formation, in a difficult medium, of things much greater ...

Dilip Kumar Roy   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume IV

The Crucifixion  >  Notes

... referring to what are today called Jews. — Holy Spirit In Christianity, the Holy Spirit is God. The Christians believe in a mystery called the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit. There are three persons in one God. Humans cannot understand this nature of God, but must simply accept it on faith. It is the Holy Spirit that conceived Jesus in the womb of Mary... Kingdom of God and deceiver of humans, leading those weak in faith to a sinful life. The result is the soul of a sinner having to spend all of eternity in Hell, a place of great suffering. This conflict between God and Satan to capture the souls of humans is a strong Christian belief. Satan is presented as an angel that disobeyed God, was cast out, and chose to be the enemy of God and man. In the New... 'the son of man' which is not a supernatural figure such as a messiah. Yet, Christianity claims _______________ * anoint: to apply oil to as a sign of holiness in a sacred rite (ceremony). Page 120 that through the miraculous deeds and teachings of his public ministry, he demonstrated the power of God to change life through himself. The basic Christian dogma that God manifested ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Crucifixion

Savitri  >  Song of Myself and Savitri

...       Sir Aurobindo refers to Whitman as, "this giant of poetic thought with his energy of diction, this spiritual crowned athlete and vital prophet of democracy, liberty and the soul of man and Nature and all humanity." 27 In an audacious phrase, Sri Aurobindo calls Whitman "the most Homeric voice since Homer", because "he has the nearness to something elemental" and he has, "the elemental... his ambience, he declares:         I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and       each moment then,       In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own       face in the glass, Page 384 I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that ... world is there, and in the knowing, to know itself as there; in effect, through such a transaction to create itself and the possibility for readers to create themselves." 31 The chronic malady that man suffers from is the malady of isolation, of feeling completely estranged from his environment, from the universe. To be in the universe yet feel no sense of belonging to it is a misery, or at least ...

Dr. Prema Nandakumar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Savitri

Kena and Other Upanishads  >  A Commentary on the Kena Upanishad

... clashing with the forces of material Nature, clashing too with Page 311 forces of immaterial Nature of which we are aware not with the physical senses but with the mind. We must become this multitudinous world, become it in our souls, obviously, not in our body & senses. The body & senses are intended to keep the multitudinousness,—they are there to prevent God's worldwide time-filling play from... Isha Upanishad, for example, is occupied with the problem of spirituality and life, God and the world; its motive is the harmonising of these apparent opposites and the setting forth of their perfect relations in the light of Vedantic knowledge. The Kena is similarly occupied with the problem of the relations between God and the soul and its motive is to harmonise our personal activities of mental energy... its instruments; it thinks they alone exist or is absorbed in their action with which it tends to identify itself preponderatingly or wholly;—it forgets itself in its activities. To recall the soul in man to self-knowledge, to lift it above the life of the senses [........] always refer its activities to that highest Self and Deity which [we] ultimately are, so that we may be free and great, may be pure ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Kena and Other Upanishads

The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo  >  Sri Aurobindo from A to Z

... Brahman and the universe."¹³ The other instance effects an entertaining anagram on the nature of dead matter by giving us "cold" for "clod" in a phrase on the surrender, in "Adhyātma Yoga", to the transcendent, infinite and universal Personality who "informs with his being not only the Gods above, but man and the worm and the cold below." 14 Such diminutive misprints are passing occurrences... by giving you in a few flashes what I feel and see from several sides. What is the spiritual life? Every moment a remembrance of God, every moment an offering to God, and no prayer for any gift from God save God's own self! And what is God! An infinite stillness behind all motion, an infinite motion without losing that stillness. A pure radiance within, an immense grace above... shed but we are placed in it for realising God in physical terms and as part of the body's daily experience. Men ask for strange signs from Eternity - I for nothing except daydawn and nightfall. The golden sun within the immeasurable blue and the silver stars against a black infinity are revelations enough for me of God magnificent and God mysterious. Not that my aspiration should stop ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

In the Mother's Light  >  Peace

... modern world from ruin and bring about the cherished millennium are either ignorant of human nature, or infatuated with an impossible Utopian dream. Violence will continue to disturb or disrupt human society and shatter the naive hopes of the pacifists so long as any of the lower lusts of man sways his nature. If it is repressed on the physical level it will migrate to the vital and chafe and seethe... growing discontent and disquiet. How will peace emerge out of this heaving chaos ? And unless peace comes, how will this chaos dissolve ? In this dilemma, the soul of man, unknown to his outer consciousness, appeals to God, its sole refuge. It is this appeal that rings in many of the Mother's "Prayers and Meditations" with the haunting pathos of psychic sadness. Her Prayer of the 29th Nov. 1913... only an ideal never yet perfectly realised by man. It includes a complete elimination of all rajasic restlessness from the very cells of the body and a saturation of the entire being with the serenity of an imperturbable calm. There have been many Yogis who lived in an absolute peace in the depths of their being, but the outer partsof their nature were still subject to the onslaughts of the lower ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Towards A New Society  >  The World War

... More in man which always inspires and enables him to break away from the Asuric nature. Moreover, though there may be an outer resemblance between the Asuric qualities of man and the Asuric qualities of the Asura, there is an intrinsic difference, a difference in tone and temper, in rhythm and vibration, proceeding as they do from different sources. However cruel, hard, selfish, egocentric man may be... to be banished for ever; they are to be regarded as things of luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and Page 8 armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency... work out a growth or transformation of nature. Their consciousness is an immutable entity. The Asuras do not mend, they can only end. Man can certainly acquire or imbibe Asuric force or Asura-like qualities and impulsions; externally he can often act very much like the Asura; and yet there is a difference. Along with the dross that soils and obscures human nature, there is something more, a clarity that ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Towards A New Society

Preparing for the Miraculous  >  10: Theodicy: “Nature does not Make Mistakes”

... ethical world. … Material nature is not ethical … Animal or vital Nature is also non-ethical, although as it progresses it manifests the crude material out of which the highest animal evolves the ethical impulse.” (Evolutionary psychology will agree with this.) Ethics is a matter of the mind and therefore a stage in evolution. It is “man the mental being” who evaluates God as obligatorily “good” – an... 10: Theodicy: “Nature does not Make Mistakes” The term “theodicy” comes from the Greek “theos,” which means god, and “dikè,” which means justice. “Theodicy” could therefore be defined as “the justification of divine providence in view of the existence of evil and suffering in the world.” According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary the meaning is “defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence... that there is in the world; when you consider the stupidity of a good number of people; when you consider the cataclysms of nature; when you consider that all of human life is only a transitory phase of the universe, I think it is difficult to suppose that [the] omnipotence [of God] could not possibly have done better.” (Bertrand Russell) “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Preparing for the Miraculous

Parvati's Tapasya  >  Introduction

... Shiva from his trance, all the beauty of this world, the need and aspiration of this earth took the form of a woman. Parvati is Nature, Prakriti, and from her union with the Eternal Purusha, a being will be born who will defeat evil. She is the soul of us all searching for God. She is destined to meet Him and unite with Him. Yet, for attaining Him, whom Kama's weapon could not touch, in a fierce effort... level) is an image of man's condition in the world. Striving to realise our own perfection, we have no other choice than to move, to act — and tapasya, giving Page 13 and sacrifice, are the means of our action. Parvati's tapasya and its achievement are described by Kalidasa in the fifth canto of his great epic poem Kumarasambhava , the Birth of the War God, which many critics... entering their minds; but when Kama had been ready to shoot his arrow of mango-buds at Shiva's heart, a blazing fire had flown out of the third eye of the great God, angry to be disturbed in his meditation. Only ashes were left where the god of Desire had stood. Not by desire indeed was Shiva's love to be won. Then Parvati understood that she had to go beyond beauty, beyond desire, beyond love ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Parvati's Tapasya

Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine  >  Man in the Universe

... did it happen—this division ? It is caused by the separation of man's consciousness from its origin, the Divine. It is this that the Bible speaks of as the "fall of man". The temptation of Adam by Eve is the temptation of the Soul —the Purusha—by the potentialities of Nature : the Soul Page 43 was attracted by Nature. The question arises why did the Absolute abandon its status and... hard to convince the ordinary mind, though it is not impossible to give a rationale of it because man is a mental being. Sri Aurobindo says : if you tell an ape and try to convince him that a being called man is possible,—man who would have the power of reasoning and judgment, of control over nature,—the ape would not believe it. And if you further try to tell him that not only such a being can... Divine Omnipotence. Sri Aurobindo lays down that if the self-aware individual admits the possibility of awakening to a condition better than his present egoistic nature, then life divine can start. That, in fact, has been man's constant effort throughout the ages. There is the problem of ego and dualities. An infinite being, consciousness, delight—Satchidananda—is the cause of and material ...

A. B. Purani   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine

Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6  >  Notes on Savitri

... sky: The Powers that build the cosmos station take In its house of infinite possibility; Each god from there builds his own nature's world; Ideas are phalanxed like a group of sums; Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard; All Time is one body, Space a single book: There is the Godhead's universal gaze And there the boundaries of immortal Mind: The line that parts... world (Night and Day) - Griffin is the guardian God of this passage - Dvarapalaka. ' 1 Savitri (Cent. Ed., Vol. 28), Bk.I, C.3, p. 25. Page 45 II Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse, The cosmic empire of the Overmind, Time's buffer state bordering Eternity, Too vast for the experience of man's soul: All here gathers beneath one golden sky:... measured and definite and pre­cise – e.g., in the case of an army – company, brigade, battalion, army – an ascending scale, the whole also form­ing one big unit, taken in at a glance – that is the nature of overmind vision. Note, a unit is a summation or-sub-units – even the ulti­mate units are composites (masses, in case of bigger units)­ – e.g., molecule, atom, particle (nucleon), point. ...

Nolini Kanta Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 6

Teilhard de Chardin and our Time  >  Pantheistic Christianity and Panentheism

... always the concrete, historical God-Man of whom he is thinking, never the Word independent of his humanity. How this is to be explained theologically is a question for which there is as yet no satisfactory answer."   Thus the proper Teilhardian vision would be: the Cosmic Christ who precedes and exceeds the historic human Jesus is still a human Christ, a God-Man, a theandric Being, though above... Christ invests himself organically with the very majesty of his creation. And it is in no way metaphorical to say that man finds himself capable of experiencing and discovering his God in the whole length, breadth and depth of the world in movement. To be able to say literally to God that one loves him, not only with all one's body, all one's heart and all one's soul but with every fibre of the unifying... "Though frightened for a moment by evolution, the Christian now perceives that what it offers him is nothing but a magnificent means of feeling more at one with God and of giving himself more to him. In a pluralistic and static Nature, the universal domination of Christ could, strictly speaking, still be regarded as an extrinsic and super-imposed power. In a spiritually converging world this 'Christie' ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

On Education  >  Psychic And Spiritual Education (The Mother)

... curing the universe by abolishing it, but a transformation, a total transfiguration of matter brought about by the logical continuation of Nature's ascending march in her progress towards perfection, by the creation of a new species that will be in relation to man what man is in relation to the animal and that will manifest upon earth a new force, a new consciousness and a nevI power. Then will begin also... that the supramental education will result not merely in a progressively developing formation of the human nature, an increasing growth of its latent faculties, but a transformation of the nature itself, a transfiguration of the being in its entirety, a new ascent of the species above and beyond man towards superman, leading in the end to the appearance of a divine race upon earth. Page 131 ... you have grown, the path you have followed and the affinities of your temperament. If you have a religious tendency you will call it God and your spiritual efiort will be towards identification with the transcendent God beyond all forms, in opposition to the Immanent God dwelling in each form. Others will call it the Absolute, the Supreme Origin, others again, Nirvana; yet others who view the world as ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   On Education

The Life Divine  >  The Destiny of the Individual

... represent Itself in the values of Life. Life exists in Brahman in order to discover Brahman in itself. Therefore man's importance in the world is that he gives to it that development of consciousness in which its transfiguration by a perfect self-discovery becomes possible. To fulfil God in life is man's manhood. He starts from the animal vitality and its activities, but a divine existence is his objective... pursued by exclusion of the thing exceeded leads along the path of negation to the refusal of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by absorption in the act and the energy leads to an inferior affirmation and the denial of the Highest. But what God combines and synthetises, wherefore should man insist on divorcing? To be perfect as He is perfect is the condition of His integral attainment. Through... forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many states of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integral and all-embracing. Besides the recoil from the physical life, there is another exaggeration of the ascetic ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine

A Greater Psychology  >  Self, Ego and Individuality

... reality of freedom and mastery, man must find out his highest self, the real man or highest Purusha in him, which is free and master in its own inalienable power. He must cease to be the mental, vital, physical ego; for that is always the creation, instrument and subject of mental, vital, physical Nature. This ego is not his real self, but an instrumentation of Nature by which it has developed a sense... this stage still insistently seeking to discover, to know, to fulfil is himself; his knowledge of Nature, his knowledge of God are only helps towards self-knowledge, towards the perfection of his being, towards the attainment of the supreme object of his individual self-existence. Directed towards Nature and the cosmos, it may take upon itself the figure of self-knowledge, self-mastery, — in the mental... of power, of egoistic self-effectuation and only secondarily of knowledge. Therefore a time must come when man has to look below the obscure surface of his egoistic being and attempt to know himself; he must set out to find the real man: without that he would be stopping short at Nature's primary education and never go on to her deeper and larger teachings; however great his practical knowledge ...

Dr. A. S. Dalal   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   A Greater Psychology

In the Mother's Light  >  Love

... such a fundamental, darkening sway over them. It is only a completely psychicised human nature upon which divine Love can take its stand and base its operations in the material world. Human Love A derivative of divine Love, human love is dwarfed and distorted in the ignorance of man's nature. It is infected with desire, clouded by mental ideas, and darkened and weighed down by the... form can ever fulfil. It is only the Infinite that can fulfil it, and it is the Infinite, the infinite Being or Purusha, whom love has been seeking in the ignorance of the terrestrial nature. The awakening of man's consciousness to this truth of love is the end of the night of his ignorant quest and the dawn of a new life of growing light, happiness and harmony. Love the Victor ... if psychic love has cleared the whole consciousness and nature of all selfish distortions and the individual has opened wide—receptively wide—to its mighty influx. Often it is seen partially and temporarily occupying the being of an individual and working through it; it retires as soon as egoism or the unredeemed obscurities of the nature re-assert themselves. Except in a few extremely rare cases ...

Rishabhchand   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   In the Mother's Light

Talks with Sri Aurobindo  >  23 AUGUST 1940

... glory of God. Today's news announced Trotsky's death at an assassin's hand. Somebody said, "Stalin's last enemy is gone!" He was in dread of Trotsky, it seems. NIRODBARAN: But how is it Trotsky was thrown out by Stalin? SRI AUROBINDO: He was a good organiser, but not a man to lead a revolution. He did not have sufficient vital force to support his action. That doesn't mean he was not a man of action... the vital force. Stalin has more vital force. He has no intellect, but has a clever and cunning brain. Lenin combined both intellect and vital force. Trotsky's actions were more of an intellectual nature. His very cut of face shows that he is more of an intellectual type. Such people work better under a leader, not by themselves. Like Subhas Bose, for instance. He did very good work under Das. Here... 23 AUGUST 1940 EVENING SRI AUROBINDO: The Viceroy, it seems, has wired to Bonvain that the Governor of Bengal wants Baron back in Pondicherry. He won't accept the man who is to replace him. When Schomberg was told this news, he broke down. It came out that Schomberg was a staunch Catholic and had taken Holy Orders and so was as good as a priest. He was therefore ...

Nirodbaran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks with Sri Aurobindo

The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo  >  Sri Aurobindo and Human Evolution

... be drawn away into an illimitable peace, or that here is a mysterious play of God with the soul around a theme of love's hide and seek, or else that a creative divine Force is sweeping the soul upward through various phases of effective self-expression to an ultimate identity with the Supreme Spirit above Nature. Ascetic quietism, ecstatic devotionalism, enlightened dynamism have been the... external nature."² Although originally applied to a particular crisis in a disciple's career, the surmounting of the habitual outer personality with its petty and egoistic ways of thought, feeling, character and action, they can be taken in general to suggest Sri Aurobindo's keen sense of the need for a new principle and power of spiritual life to solve the many- sided problem of man's imperfect... politics, is never indifferent to the crises brought about in any part of the world by tyrannies that seek to arrest into a single-typed thought-fettered uniformity the many-sided evolutionary nature of man which can be fulfilled only by a diversity in unity, a freedom within co-operation. But Sri Aurobindo has always reminded the world that its dreams of liberty and democracy and international ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Hitler and his God  >  Convergences (continued)

... odd syllogism: “The soul is by nature Christian”; only the German people have a soul; therefore to be German and to be Christian is one and the same. And from this follows: “God-like – Christian – German” is the antithesis of “devilish – Jewish – anti-German”. 1003 Fundamentally, Eckart saw himself as the champion of a new spirituality which would lead to a new man and a new world, as opposed to... Hitler and His God Hitler and His God 15. “The Lord of the Nations” Hitler and his God Convergences (continued) During the Red revolution in Bavaria, the legal social-democratic Hoffmann government sought refuge in the town of Bamberg and remained there for some time even after Munich had been liberated in May 1919. This meant that the real authority in... answer: ‘Through his absolute identification with God’. At another point Hitler highlighted a brief but revealing paragraph: ‘God and I are One. Expressed simply in two identical sentences – His life is mine; my life is his. My work is his work, and his work is my work’.” This reminds Ryback of a saying of Hitler’s in December 1941: “If there is a God, then he gives us not only life but also consciousness ...

Georges van Vrekhem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Hitler and his God

Mother's Chronicles - Book Six  >  God's Cracker

... scientists puzzle out Nature's secrets. There are other means of knowing. The memories of the dawn of humans remain embedded in Earth's memory. Some people have access to the storehouse. Mother has already taken us with her on a voyage of her memories of an earthly paradise, 1 when man lived in harmony with Nature. Sri Aurobindo, in his turn, describes vividly that Nature. "Visions of waters... 12 God's Cracker Aeons passed. Aeons had passed before. But when aeons were not? When "Time moved not yet nor Space was unrolled wide?" 1 Whamm! Cra-a-a-ck! Boom-booom-boo-ooom! What was that whiz-bang? A cracker bursting? My friends, had we been there to hear that ear-splitting noise, we would have had no ears left to hear anything. It was God setting off his... is then aimless? Or does she have an aim and a purpose? If we look carefully, we discover that Earth-nature has followed an amazing plan. Probe deep, and we find that Earth's aim was—is—to develop consciousness. Now, my friends, does it seem logical or reasonable to you to suppose that Earth-nature's billions of years' meticulous work is destined to be destroyed in a jiffy by the degraded bipeds, Homo ...

Sujata Nahar   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

Classical and Romantic  >  Romantic Panthesim and its philosophy

... conflict with essential Christianity where also God is spoken of as He "in whom we live and move and have our being". When Shelley sings of the young Keats,"Adonais", becoming by his death a portion of universal Loveliness, he does not mean a dissolution into material Nature as Thompson supposes: he means, says Noyes, an entry into a divine Spirit within Nature and to be part of it is not to be individually... all things in God. This actively imaginative sensing of what the active imagination of God has created is the source, whether recognised or not, of the highest poetry. In the highest poetry, according to Coleridge, the barrier between mind and matter, subject and object, seems miraculously broken down. He writes: "To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and... modes of being", the occult presences, and the transcendent glories of "God who is our home" and from whom the soul comes into terrestrial birth with what Plato calls "reminiscence". The actively imaginative sensing, however, is not confined to the mystical apprehension or to the poetic vision. In fact it occurs every time Nature is enjoyed as beautiful or sublime, for, according to Coleridge, beauty ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Classical and Romantic

The Future Poetry  >  Poetic Vision and the Mantra

... ethical preacher. It is necessary therefore to say that when I claim for the poet the role of a seer of Truth and find the source of great poetry in a great and revealing vision of life or God or the gods or man or Nature, I do not mean that it is necessary for him to have an intellectual philosophy of life or a message for humanity, which he chooses to express in verse because he has the metrical gift... sovereign dramatic poet. Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word-images which become the expressive body of the vision. The great poets are those who repeat in some measure... seizing by the inner sense. The Mantra too is not in its substance or its form a poetic enunciation of philosophic verities, but a rhythmic revelation or intuition arising out of the soul's sight of God and Nature and itself and of the world and of the inner truth—occult to the outward eye—of all that peoples it, the secrets of their life and being. In the attempt to fix the view of life which Art must ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry

Synthesis of Yoga in the Veda  >  Vedic System of Cosmic Knowledge

... feelings of enmity again. 8. O Indivisible God, O Settler of all, grant us for our felicity, the Immemorial All-pervading Gladdening nature. O Mighty Lord, the accomplishment of an action is alone praise-worthy. Omnipresent Lord, Thou rulest over all. I adore Thee worthy of adoration! 9. O All-powerful, Vice-Destroying God, we sing Thy praise in man's pilgrimages for progress. Thou art Wise,... thy glory, O Deva, the gods attain to right vision, and holding in themselves all the multiplicity of the vast manifestations taste Immortality. Man set Agni in them as the priest of the sacrifice when desiring the immortality, they distribute to the god the self-expression of the being...". The being is one, according to the Veda, but its self- expressions are many and varied. That reality is... ceases to have in the outer act a mere imitation of the Divine, and one begins to grow into the likeness of the Divine in our nature. Bhakti yoga culminates in a sort of liberation by likeness to the Divine, liberation from our lower nature and a change into the divine nature. It is in the context of this profundity of Bhakti yoga that the place and significance of prayer needs to be underlined ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Synthesis of Yoga in the Veda

Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects  >  This Commercial Civilisation Must Go

... and impulsions of our vital nature. There is no compunction of conscience in economic and political relations. Lust for power and greed for gain have become the sole criterion of individual Page 47 and international relations. The exceptions are few and rare. To add to all these vicious trends, unabashed worship is offered to Mammon and Power-god everywhere in this iron age.... of humanity at large ,? Lust, anger and greed like other evils such as jealousy, ill-will, fear and hatred etc. are inherent in human nature. Education and mental enlightenment have not been able to eliminate these ingrained evils of vital and physical nature. On the other hand, the more clever and intelligent one is, the less scrupulous he becomes in his dealings with his fellowmen. Whatever might... No regard is paid to the man of virtue or the pious man ; he is laughed at as an imbecile unfit to live in this world of thriving wickedness and sin. The honest politician has no place in the politics of his country or the world. He must be corrupt and unscrupulous to gain the plaudits of the multitude. The good discriminating few have no place in this degenerate world where false standards and values ...

Jibendra Kumar Gupta   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects

Guidance from Sri Aurobindo - Volume 1  >  Human Greatness

... what will or will not help God's work? You seem to have very elementary ideas in these matters. What is your idea of divinisation, — to be a virtuous man, a good husband, son, father, a good citizen etc.? In that case, I myself must be undivine, — for I have never been these things. Men like N or W would then be the great Transformed Divine Men.         If God is indifferent to both vices... Divine (he and two others like him); for he is a man without a single vice, all virtues from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe. He is the type of the truly great man as you conceive him. But do you really believe that men like Napoleon, Caesar, Shakespeare were not great men and did nothing for the world or for the cosmic purpose? that God was deterred from using them for his purpose because... they use it in virtues or in vices?       Why should he care? Is he a policeman? So long as one is in the ordinary nature, one has qualities and defects, virtues and vices. When one goes beyond there are no virtues and vices; — for these things do not belong to the Divine Nature.         If an overflow of energy in great men is merely of the mental, vital or physical kind what is new in ...

Nagin Doshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Guidance from Sri Aurobindo - Volume 1

Visions of Champaklal  >  The Faith and the Downward Pull

... water all around—difficult to say whether it was a river or a lake or a sea. I saw a man fallen in a place where it was hot possible to swim. That man was not in a position to come out. I had to follow the same route. On seeing the plight of this man, I was not sure as to how I could go. I managed to pull that man out and thought I had saved a life. I asked him, “why did you not call for any help?... Would you not have been drowned if I had not pulled you out?” He replied, “I have full faith in God—if He wants to save me, He would surely help.” He said it with such an ardent faith that even an atheist would have had to believe it. I, then, found a new route. I went along this route. I had to climb a mountain. I do not know what happened to the people who were with me. I kept climbing up the... mental -vital plane and indicates the saving power of an absolute faith. The other shows the ascent to the highest levels of the earth-consciousness, but there is still something of the old self and nature clinging and trying to pull downwards; it refuses to let go, but finally it has to fall off and the being can ascend without downward pull or fear of fall into the skies of the higher consciousness ...

Champaklal   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Visions of Champaklal

Principles and Goals of Integral Education  >  Sri Aurobindo's Seven Principles of Education

... purpose of man's existence upon earth, his role as a biological species, and the all-important programme that Nature and the Divine have set before him. A simultaneous awareness of man's actuality and his great potentiality makes it clear to us that a proper educational system has to be developed which, when rightly conceived and clairvoyantly put into practice, will help man the individual and man the ... upon is that man is not just a living body somehow developed by physical nature which has evolved in him certain vital propensities, an ego, a mind and a reason. Man is not pre-eminently just a reasoning animal of the genus homo, nothing more than a thinking, feeling and willing natural existence, a mere mental product of inconscient physical Nature. For if such is the view we take of man — and this... (Ibid., p. 1060) Is it too much to expect in this Hour of God that some of us who are actively involved in the task of finding the right kind of education for the children of the future, admit the new truth revealed by the Master-Yogi, turn our minds to this "new knowledge of oneness, and world and God and soul and Nature, a knowledge of oneness, a knowledge of universal Divinity" (SABCL ...

Jugal Kishore Mukherjee   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Principles and Goals of Integral Education

Mother’s Agenda 1968  >  January 12, 1968

... reproduction has been the key to the proliferation of species so as to reach the form most fit for the manifestation of consciousness. Since the appearance of man two or three million years ago, Nature hasn't produced new species, as if she had found in man the fittest mode of expression. But evolution cannot remain stagnant, or else it no longer is evolution. So it means that the key of evolution no longer... of species by means Page 29 of sexual reproduction, but directly in the very power of consciousness. Before man, consciousness was still too buried in its material support; with man, it has disengaged itself sufficiently to assume its true mastery over material Nature and work out its own mutations by itself. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, this is the end of sexuality. We... sinister farce invented by goodness knows what divine masochist. If God exists, he must be a little less foolish than that, and we are entitled to think that this material evolution has a divine sense and that it is the field of a divine manifestation in Matter. Our spiritual discipline must therefore aim at gaining this divine man or perhaps that other, still unknown being who will emerge from us just ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   Agenda   >   Mother’s Agenda 1968

The Synthesis of Yoga  >  The Divine Personality

... 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 there are other things in the divine nature which we have put outside the form of personality in which we are thus worshipping him. The courage of an unflinching spiritual vision and experience... or else, when we perceive that this will not quite do, by erecting a power which we call Nature and attributing to that all the lower quality and mass of action for which we do not wish to make the Divine responsible. At a higher pitch the attribution of mind and character to God becomes less anthropomorphic and we regard him as an infinite Spirit, but still a separate person, a spirit with certain... sides. We may think, feel and say that God is Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Power, Love, Delight, Beauty; we may see him as a universal force or as a universal consciousness. But this is only the 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 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Synthesis of Yoga