... (L'ame du monde, 1918, in Ecrits, p. 227). 22 22. Ibid., p. 319. Page 192 We also read: "Some reasonable reconciliation must be made, I am sure, between God and the world, between the detaching mysticism of Christianity and the ineradicable passion that makes our whole being vibrate when we experience something of the soul of the mighty whole of which we are undeniably... especially in the last ten years, I have always offered myself to Our Lord as a sort of testing-ground, where, on a small scale. He might bring about the fusion between the two great loves, of God and the World - for without that fusion I am convinced no Kingdom of God is possible. - Is it perhaps for this that He makes me share so intensely the spirit of those whom we call free-thinkers, heretics and ...
... . In this we find that Teilhard has already arrived at his fundamental idea that being is defined by union, whether active or received, and is trying to envisage an interconnexion between God and the world that goes beyond the notion of efficient causality. He imagines 'a primitive substratum of spirit' which he sees as an 'extremely attenuated and reduced substance', and even as 'a sort of positive... writes: "What we find at the heart of the teaching and [of] those outbursts is none other than the affirmation and the experience of a strictly bilateral and complementary relationship between God and the world.... We should read St. John again, and St. Paul. They accept the existence of the world (in too summary a fashion, maybe, for our taste) as an initial datum. But, on the other hand, what a feeling ...
... is not non-material but hyper-material - keeping in sight all these shades of the Cosmic Christ we must pierce to the true intent of expressions where Teilhard seems to drive a wedge between God and the world, Christ and the cosmos, even while holding them tightly together. 14.Christianity and Evolution, p. 180, 15,Science and Christ, p. 57. Page 59 Thus he... Body and simultaneously it exceeds in favour of Christian transcendentalism as well as personalism the traditional Pantheos." But obviously the primary crucial step is the consubstantiality of God and the world, Christ and the cosmos: that is, in the pantheist direction. And, although this direction does not quite bear us to the philosophy usually passing under the designation "pantheism", several ...
... resulting aspect of the known; to each there belongs a particular motive and a distinguishing ground-idea. The 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 ...
... only, to achieve expansion, greatness, power and prosperity,—though these too she must not neglect,—and certainly not like others to acquire domination of other peoples, but to live also for God and the world as a helper and leader of the whole human race. Those aims and ideals were in their natural order these: a revolution which would achieve India's freedom and her unity; the resurgence and liberation ...
... 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 be denied in order that religious error might survive. We ...
... known and enjoyed by the soul thus liberated and perfected. For it possesses the eternal Reality of which they are the appearances. Thus it is possible, by the realisation of the unity of God and the world ( īś and jagatī ) in the complete knowledge of the Brahman, to renounce desire and illusion through the ascent to the pure Self and the Non-Becoming and yet to enjoy by means of all things in ...
... and to affirm the Absolute to the exclusion of these two others leaves man unsatisfied and cosmos unexplained.—In affirming himself man has first to put himself in front and act and feel as if God and the world existed for him and were less important to him than himself; this is his egoistic phase necessary to disengage his individuality out of Nature and as if against her and to bring it out into force ...
... habitation by the Lord is all this, everything whatsoever that is moving thing in her that moves. This relation of divine Inhabitant and objective dwelling-place is the fundamental truth of God and the World for life. It is not indeed the whole truth; nor is it their original relation in the terms of being; it is rather relation in action than in being, for purpose of existence than in nature of existence ...
... notions of another order than the modern, but quite as firm and clear—a religion which knew its own ideas and its own psychology. If we can find out what precisely are these ideas, what notions of God and the world are covered by these images of Indra, Agni, Vayu, the Aswins, Varuna, we may find out the real secret which the lapse of ages keeps concealed from us in the hymns. We may even find that our opening ...
... besides that even at the best an intense figure of sainthood clamped in rigid hieratic lines is quite other than the wide ideal of an integral Yoga. A larger psychic and emotional relation with God and the world, more deep and plastic in its essence, more wide and embracing in its movements, more capable of taking up in its sweep the whole of life, is imperative. A wider formula has been provided by ...
... recognition, first, of an essential dualism and, then, of an irreconcilable opposition between the dual principles, between the Conscient and the Inconscient, between Heaven and Earth, between God and the World, between the limitless One and the limited Many, between the Knowledge and the Ignorance. We have arrived by the train of our reasoning at the conclusion that this need be no more than an error ...
... may have given to the world in relation to God, the eyes of both were ultimately fixed on the Beyond: "the paradigm of holiness...was the world-renouncing monk." Aware of the conflict between God and the world in their respective religious backgrounds, Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard set about resolving the conflict by "extending to the world the value traditionally accorded to God" — while never permitting ...
... that, instead of a machine without a maker, there is really only an existence and no machine. The Hindus have many images by which they seek to convey their knowledge of the relation between God and the world, but the idea of the machine does not figure largely among them. It is a spider and his web, a fire with many sparks, a pool of salt water in which every particle is penetrated by the salt. The ...
... If Law of nature and heredity and environment are powerful, yet do they depend on the individual for the use to which they shall be turned. The fruit of my actions belongs not to me, but to God and the world; my action belongs to God and myself. There I have a right. Or rather it belongs to God in myself; the right is His, but I enjoy it. The Will that works in me is the indivisible All which only ...
... perception intimate to this basic original perception and inseparable from it is a synthetic view in which things that are usually supposed to be contraries find their harmony and union, viz; God and the World, Permanence and Flux, Unity and Multiplicity, the Universal and the Individual. The equal reality of the two poles of an integral truth is characteristic of many of the modern philosophical systems ...
... perception intimate to this basic -original perception and inseparable from it is a synthetic view in which things that are usually supposed to be contraries find their harmony and union, viz., God and the World, Permanence and Flux, Unity and Multiplicity, the Universal and the Individual. The equal reality of the two poles of an integral truth is characteristic of many of the modern philosophical systems ...
... end of the Age of the Mysteries and the advent of the great religions, both in the West and in the East, a chasm appeared, a Knowledge that did not make such a formidable distinction between God and the world was obscured; all the traditions, all the legends testify to this. The conflict between Matter and Spirit is a modern creation; the so-called materialists are really the offspring, legitimate ...
... They cannot be entirely validated unless we know the real cause of ignorance, imperfection and suffering and their place in the cosmic purpose or cosmic order. There are three propositions about God and the world,—if we admit the Divine Existence,—to which the general reason and consciousness of mankind bear witness; but, one of the three,—which is yet necessitated by the character of the world we live ...
... partially united though in an inextricable, confused entanglement of chaotic unity, when they are being compelled to know each other and impelled to know more profoundly 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 ...
... becomes a mere drive of force across the field of life, a storm that passes and devastates more than it constructs,—must be capable too of obedience and make the use of his strength a service to God and the world, otherwise he becomes a selfish dominator, tyrant, brutal compeller of men's souls and bodies. The man of productive mind and work must have an open inquiring mind and ideas and knowledge, otherwise ...
... Analysis Isha Upanishad II Second Movement [1] Brahman: Oneness of God and the World Verses 4-5 4) One unmoving that is swifter than Mind; That the Gods reach not, for It progresses ever in front. That, standing, passes beyond others as they run. In That the Master of Life establishes the Waters. 5) That moves and That moves not; That is far and ...
... 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 formative Nature are confronted and their relations fixed. COSMOS All world is a movement of the Spirit in Itself and is mutable and transient in all its formations and appearances; ...
... further, to gather up all that has been said in its main principles. The whole of the Gita's gospel of works rests upon its idea of sacrifice and contains in fact the eternal connecting truth of God and the world and works. The human mind seizes ordinarily only fragmentary notions and standpoints of a manysided eternal truth of existence and builds upon them its various theories of life and ethics and ...
... the first line becomes a contradiction of the whole thought of the Upanishad which teaches the reconciliation, by the perception of essential Unity, of the apparently incompatible opposites, God and the World, Renunciation and Enjoyment, Action and internal Freedom, the One and the Many, Being and its Becomings, the passive divine Impersonality and the active divine Personality, the Knowledge and the ...
... shows and forms of our life has returned to it and become its normal consciousness: all doubt and perplexity gone, it can turn to the execution of the command and do faithfully whatever work for God and the world may be appointed and apportioned to it by the Master of our being, the Spirit and Godhead self-fulfilled in Time and universe. Page 561 ...
... in all and governs things for the universal end and good and not for the sake of our ego. To work impersonally, desirelessly and without attachment to the fruits of our work, for the sake of God and the world and the greater Self and the fulfilment of the universal will,—this is the first step towards liberation and perfection. But beyond this step there lies that other greater motion, the inner ...
... only, to achieve expansion, greatness, power and prosperity,-though these too she must not neglect,-and certainly not like others to acquire domination of other peoples, but to live also for God and the world as a helper and leader of the whole human race. Those aims and ideals were in their natural order these: a revolution which would achieve India's freedom and her unity; the resurgence and liberation ...
... old, unfitted for the new age and will not endure—for such excitement has no capacity to last. But the merit of the Vaishnava Bhava [emotional enthusiasm] is that it keeps a connexion between God and the world and gives a meaning to life; but since it is a partial bhava the whole connexion, the full meaning is not there. The tendency to create sects which you have noticed was inevitable. The nature ...
... to achieve expansion, greatness, power, and prosperity—though these too she must not neglect,—and certainly not like others to acquire domination of other peoples, but to live also for God and the world as a helper and leader of the whole human race." And the Prime Minister further says, "This, I believe, is the quintessence of India's work, now and in the future." I must say that I felt ...
... Inconscience. In the older disciplines the central or key truth, the heart of reality where the higher and the lower – Brahman and Maya, the Absolute and the Contingency, the One and the Many, God and the World – met and united in harmony was bypassed: one shot from below right into the supreme Absolute; the matrix of truth-creation was ignored. Even so, at the other end, the reality of brute matter ...
... 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 of body and bodily existence. To cite en passant ...
... ignorance. And all this simply 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 philosophic truth had to be denied in order that religious error might survive". 5 ...
... only, to achieve expansion, greatness, power and prosperity,— though these too she must not neglect, —and certainly not like others to acquire domination of other peoples, but to live also for God and the world as a helper and leader of the whole human race. Those aims and ideals were in their natural order these: a revolution which would achieve India's freedom and her unity; the resurgence and liberation ...
... because men in the passion Page 179 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 be denied in order that religious error might survive. ...
... experience. All this is very old, unfitted for the new age and will not endure – for such excitement has no capacity to last. But the merit of the Vaishnava Bhava is that it keeps a connexion between God and the world and gives a meaning Page 171 to life; but since it is a partial Bhava the whole connexion, the full meaning is not there. The tendency to create sects which you have noticed ...
... to turn action into sacrifice or yajña, "The whole of the Gita's gospel of works", says Sri Aurobindo, "rests upon its idea of sacrifice and contains in fact the eternal connecting truth of God and the world and works." 50 The first six Books of the Gita, forming as they do "a sort of preliminary block of the teaching", describe this phenomenon of sacrifice in relation, not only to Karma, but also ...
... we lose God in Existence, the second is attained when we fulfil existence in God. Let ours be the path of perfection, not of abandonment; let our aim be victory in the battle, not the escape from all conflict. Buddha and Shankara supposed the world to be radically false and miserable; therefore escape from the world was to them the only wisdom. But this world is Brahman, the world is God, the world... world is Satyam, the world is Ananda; 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 a misery. There is no other falsity and no other cause of sorrow. God created the world in Himself through Maya; but the Vedic meaning of Maya is not illusion, it is wisdom, knowledge, capacity, wide extension in consciousness. Prajna... irrevocably bound to misery, a means of escape from this bondage would be the sole secret worth discovering. But perfect truth in world-existence is possible, for God here sees all things with the eye of truth; and perfect bliss in the world is possible, for God enjoys all things with the sense of unalloyed freedom. We also can enjoy this Page 96 truth and bliss, called by the Veda amritam, ...
... On Thoughts and Aphorisms Aphorism - 179 179—Live for God in thy neighbour, God in thyself, God in thy country and the country of thy foeman, God in humanity, God in tree and stone and animal, God in the world and outside the world, then art thou on the straight path to liberation. There is nothing to add. It is true—every obviously true—and ...
... suffering and purification. Page 258 169—Christ came into the world to purify, not to fulfil. He himself foreknew the failure of his mission and the necessity of his return with the sword of God into a world that had rejected him. In this Aphorism what does "the sword of God" represent? The sword of God is the power that nothing can resist. 7 October 1969 ...
... outward's spell.... Nor must the string be loosened to fall asleep After one ravishing note uttering all heaven: The rapturous rest was made to be pulled forth, Since not else God can grow world-harmony. A traffic to and fro 'twixt heaven and earth And not earth-tension or heaven-calm is the goal. Music for ever, music above all, Music to marry the two extremes of Self ...
... outward's spell . . . Nor must the string be loosened to fall asleep After one ravishing note uttering all heaven: The rapturous rest was made to be pulled forth, Since not else God can grow world-harmony. A traffic to and fro 'twixt heaven and earth And not earth-tension or heaven-calm is the goal. Music for ever, music above all, Music to marry the two extremes of Self ...
... joy 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. All Yoga which takes you entirely away from the world, is a high but narrow specialisation of divine tapasya. God in His perfection embraces everything; you also must become all-embracing. God in His ultimate... the priority of different aspects of God & different Yogins, Rishis & Saints have preferred this or that philosophy or religion. Our business is not to dispute about any of them, but to realise & become all of them, not to follow after any aspect to the exclusion of the rest, but to embrace God in all His aspects and beyond aspect. God descending into world in various forms has consummated on this... multiplicity & when it recovers its unity, finds it difficult, owing to the nature of mind, to preserve its play of multiplicity. Therefore when we are absorbed in world, we miss God in Himself; when we seek God, we miss Him in the world. Our business is to break down & dissolve the mental ego & get back to our divine unity without losing our power of individual & multiple existence in the universe ...
... indulging in his perdition thy brother. 355—Self-denial is a mighty instrument for purification; it is not an end in itself nor a final law of living. Not to mortify thyself but to satisfy God in the world must be thy object. 356—It is easy to distinguish the evil worked by sin and vice, but the trained eye sees also the evil done by self-righteous or self-regarding virtue. Step by step ...
... foulest of criminals, how canst thou believe that thou hast accepted God in thy spirit? 451—To love God, excluding the world, is to give Him an intense but imperfect adoration. 452—Is love only a daughter or handmaid of jealousy? If Krishna loves Chandrabali, 1 why should I not love her also? 453—Because thou lovest God only, thou art apt to claim that He should love thee rather than... but thou art of the many. Rather become one in heart and soul with all beings, then there will be none in the world but thou alone for Him to love. 454—My quarrel is with those who are foolish enough not to love my Lover, not with those who share His love with me. 455—In those whom God loves, have delight; on those whom He pretends not to love, take pity. This is the most charming criticism ...
... अनवद्या पतिजुष्टेव नारी ॥३ devo na yaḥ pṛthivīṁ viśvadhāyā upakṣeti hitamitro na rājā, puraḥsadaḥ śarmasado na vīrā anavadyā patijuṣṭeva nārī. 3 Rig Veda 1.73.3 He is like a God upholding the world and he inhabits earth like a good and friendly king: he is like a company of heroes sitting in our front, dwelling in our house; he is as if a blameless wife beloved of her lord. (Translation ...
... create this world of misery, suffering and poverty? Is there any use praying to God? Are not prayers only for consoling ourselves? And do I not act because I can't remain without doing something and because mere enjoyments don't give me peace? I feel for my countrymen and I work for them—but don't I work more for myself than for them?" SRI AUROBINDO: I see. So if God were omnipotent and all merciful... action, God, etc. He has lost his old standard of values of life and action and finds himself an advocate of the theory of illusionism against which he, a prominent leader of the Arya Samaj and a monotheist, had preached all his life. His relatives and friends have all become unreal, impermanent, and he asks in "What are these worldly relations based on? How can an all powerful and all-merciful God create... merciful, he would not create this world! But I wonder why people in India at the end of their lives come to the same conclusion as Lajpat Rai. Almost all come to regard life and the world as an illusion. Is it the ancestral Indian blood or is it the atmosphere of the place or something personal, a psychological change? I suppose there may be a strain running in the blood. But the Christians also have ...
... or a beginning. 253—I have failed, thou sayest. Say rather that God is circling about towards His object. Page 286 254—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 and for strength to fulfil it. Why does God need to "circle about towards His object"? He can easily reach it... it immediately if He wants to, and make everybody's work easier and more effective. Surely Sri Aurobindo did not say that "God" needs to circle about, because he is all-powerful; but his power is not an arbitrary one as men understand it. To begin to understand anything about this, one must know and feel that in the whole universe there is nothing which is not an expression of his omnipotent... even with the widest intelligence, man can only grasp an infinitesimal part of creation and so he cannot understand it and still less judge it. And if we want to hasten the transformation of the world, the best we can do is to give ourselves without reserve or calculation to That which knows. 28 December 1969 ...
... forced marches of the great dumb stars, A darkness occupied the fields of God, ( Mother repeats ) A darkness occupied the fields of God, And Matter's world was governed by thy shape. The shape of Death. Thy mask has covered the Eternal's face, It's marvelous! The Bliss that made the world has fallen asleep. Abandoned in the Vast she slumbered on: An evil transmutation... arose when Life entered Matter. ( Mother leafs through her thick translation notebook 1 ) Page 326 Although God made the world for his delight, An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will In other words, that Power assumed the appearance of God's Will. And Death's deep falsity has mastered Life. All grew a play of Chance simulating Fate. ( X.III.629 ) And ...
... Resurrection of Jesus' crucified body. This doctrine is meant to convey the sense of an unparalleled intervention by God in our world's affairs, converting an absolute-seeming defeat - Jesus' death on the cross - into a mighty triumph over mortality, a triumph which declared him God's elect and the supreme hope for mankind's salvation. Such being the claim, one need hardly wonder at the spate ...
... practical hints about Yoga. All religion is a flower of which Yoga is the root; all philosophy, poetry & the works of genius use it, consciously or unconsciously, as an instrument. We believe that God created the world by Yoga and by Yoga He will draw it into Himself again. Yogah prabhavapyayau, Yoga is the birth and passing away of things. When Srikrishna reveals to Arjuna the greatness of His creation and... general process for specific and definite ends. Yoga stands essentially on the fact that in this world we are everywhere one, yet divided; one yet divided in our being, one with yet divided from our fellow creatures of all kinds, one with Page 18 yet divided from the infinite existence which we call God, Nature or Brahman. Yoga, generally, is the power which the soul in one body has of entering... relation with other souls, with parts of itself which are behind the waking consciousness, with forces of Nature and objects in Nature, with the Supreme Intelligence, Power & Bliss which governs the world either for the sake of that union in itself or for the purpose of increasing or modifying our manifest being, knowledge, faculty, force or delight. Any system which organises our inner being & our outer ...
... SATYENDRA: He is also the God of destruction. DR. MANILAL: Yes, and he runs away from the destruction! SRI AUROBINDO: He doesn't care for destruction any more than for running away. DR. MANILAL: Why did God create this world? Was he very unhappy? NIRODBARAN: Do you create out of unhappiness? SRI AUROBINDO: Why unhappy? He may have created the world for fun. "Let me create Manilal... many meanings. Maybe Krishna's compassion. DR. MANILAL: Patience till eternity? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, you must think as if all eternity were before you. SATYENDRA: Krishna is a very difficult God. Shiva would have been easy to satisfy. PURANI: Yes, he doesn't care for consequences. Krishna has to come afterwards to save the situation. DR. MANILAL: Shiva seems to give boons to the Asuras ...
... desirelessly & happily, as eternal inhabitant & possessor, God in the world, it asks us to live in God's peace while embracing God's action. Kurvanneveha karmáni; thou shalt verily do actions in the world and not abstain from them; thou shalt not renounce thy human activity among these many kinds of races of thy fellow beings, for God's will in thee is towards action, kurvanneva, not inaction. Evam... divergence in the fundamental conception of God in the world. To the Mayavadin, Ishwara, God in relation to the world, is a supreme term of Maya and therefore like all things in Maya existent yet not existent; to the Seer God is an eternal reality standing behind Chit-Shakti in its works, embracing it, possessing it, fulfilling Himself in it through the world rhythm. Action to the Mayavadin can only be... religion as the indispensable first condition of escape from Karma; in Mayavada we get back to the affirmation of God, but an ill-balanced affirmation ending for the purposes of life in a practical negation, since God in the world is presented to us as a dream of Maya and God aloof from the world as the only real reality. To get back to the full affirmation we have to return to the ancient Veda. There, we ...
... 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 low... 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... The Indian Spirit and the World's Future Miracle THE Indian mind and the European have many points in common, but there is also a marked difference. The difference can perhaps be best brought to light by referring to the word "miracle". The non-Indian world is always prone to be startled by supernatural events: the mouth gapes, the eyes bulge out and the ...
... with their God, who moreover is Unthinkable and must not be named... but who, seen from the standpoint of a vaster truth, seems (I am not sure), seems to be an Asura. Because it's an almighty and UNIQUE God, foreign to the world—the world (as far as I know) and he are two completely different things. It's the same with Catholicism. Yet, if I remember correctly, their God created the world with a part... No, no, he "created" the world. Out of nothingness he made the world? That's right. Then it's the same problem, the same difficulty. It's quite simply an incomprehension. And in fact he sent his son to "save the world." Then his son doesn't belong to the creation? He is the son of God—not so the others. He is the ONLY son of God? Yes, of course! They've... But Adam belonged to the creation, didn't he? Yes, while Christ isn't human, he is the son. But he took on a human body. Yes, but he's the son of God. He isn't a human being become divine, he is a divine being—"the son of God"—who took on a human body. But that's understood! All Avatars are like that. Yes, but he's the only one. It's all twisted. But the Virgin, in that ...
... trail of the Ideas that made the world, And, sown in the black earth of Nature's trance, The seed of the Spirit's blind and huge desire From which the tree of cosmos was conceived And spread its magic arms through a dream of space. || 8.19 || Immense realities took on a shape: There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born And tries to gain from the... the Void Peered out; he saw the hope that never sleeps, The feet that run behind a fleeting fate, The ineffable meaning of the endless dream. || 8.22 || As if a torch held by a power of God, The radiant world of the everlasting Truth Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge. || 8.23 || Even were caught as through a cunning veil The smile of... completely with this magnificent World of Golden Light. I was reluctant to come back to the dark world of falsehood. But alas, the next morning I saw myself lying in my bed. I felt extremely sorry and lost, and shed a few silent tears. Also my memory flew back to one of the Mother's letters of the preceding year, when I had expressed to her my wish to go back to my own world of Beauty and Peace. She ...
... rather the view that the world is a divinely 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 therefore so to act that the Divine may more and more manifest himself and the world go forward by whatever way of its obscure pilgrimage and move nearer to the divine ideal. How he shall do this, in what particular way, can be decided by no general rule. It must develop or define itself from within; the decision lies between God and our self, the Supreme... towards the fulfilment of God in the world, an expression of the Eternal in Time. A divine action arising spontaneously, freely, infallibly from the light and force of our spiritual self in union with the Divine is the last state of this integral Yoga of Works. The truest reason why we must seek liberation is not to be delivered, individually, from the sorrow of the world, though that deliverance ...
... Nature are God's becomings, sarvabhutani. Although there are to world-experience multitudinous souls (Purushas) in the universe, all these are only one Purusha masked in many forms of His consciousness. Each soul in itself is God entirely, every group of souls is collectively God; the modalities of Nature's movement create their separation and outward differences. God transcends world and is not... 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... laws, laws do not use Him. God transcends world and is not bound to any particular state of consciousness in the world. He is not unity-consciousness nor multiple consciousness, not Personality nor Impersonality, not stillness, nor motion, but simultaneously includes all these self-expressions of His absolute being. Page 353 God simultaneously transcends world, contains it and informs it; ...
... because the man finds interest in it. Disciple : Another man may find that effort difficult. Sri Aurobindo : It is said in the Upanishads that God created the world by Tapas. It was not that he found it difficult to create the world, but he had to make the effort. Disciple : There is an instance given of concentration as when a lady goes about doing all sorts of works with a pitcher ...
... moulding of our life and being in the type of the true relations between God and the soul can become possible. Therefore every Upanishad has in it an element of Yoga as well as an element of Sankhya, the scientific psychology on which Yoga is founded. Vedanta, the perception of the relations between God in Himself and God in the world, Sankhya, the scientific, philosophical and psychological analysis of... compared with this immense self-fulfilment; they can only be of importance as means or movements in the self-fulfilment. If, farther, we know that by recovering our secret oneness with God we shall also be at one with the world and that hatred, grief, fear, limitation, sickness, mortality, the creations of the divided movement, will no longer be able to exercise their yoke upon us, then the abandonment of... Page 422 realising his oneness with God to the plural asman when he turns to pray for the equal purification and felicity of his fellows. Our ideal, therefore, is fixed,—to become one with God and lead individually the divine life, but also to help others to the divine realisation and prepare, by any means, humanity for the kingdom of God on earth,—satyadharma, satyayuga. Our means is ...
... we must turn from the world to the Master of the world; in ordinary religious parlance, we must renounce the world in order to find and possess God. So also the Gita, after describing our condition, arrived in this transient and troubled world, anityam asukham imam lokam prápya, immediately points out the remedy, bhajaswa Mám. Turn & cleave rather to me, the Lord. But the world was made by its Lord... universal manifestation, but always God and never the universe falsely experienced as a thing existent & enjoyable for its own sake, apart from God and different from Him. The possession of God in the world-transcending height of His being does not exclude possession of God in His world-containing wideness. To the liberated soul there is no high and base, but only one equal divine bliss and perfection... Lord, is an all-embracing universality and the way he chooses for us is to embrace the all-blissful One in the world and in transcendence of the world, as the unity and as the multiplicity, through Vidya & through Avidya, in the Spirit and in the world, by God above Nature and by Nature in God. Ishwara, Brahman, the Life-principle Matariswan, the Bright and Pure Stillness, the supreme & absolute Personality ...
... this saying from the Book of Wisdom: "We fight to win sublime Wisdom; therefore men call us warriors". Page 131 Huxley gives only one quotation from Sri Aurobindo under the heading "God in the World". Here it is: "The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really... even the most distant acquaintance with the heights and the fullness, it is possible to understand what its author means. To discover the Kingdom of God exclusively within oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there, but also in the outer worlds of minds and things and living creatures. It is easier because the heights within reveal themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview... there is exclusive concentration on the heights within, temptations and distractions are avoided and there is a general denial and suppression. But when the hope is to know God inclusively – to realise the divine Ground in the world as well as in the soul, temptations and distractions must not be avoided, but submitted to and used as opportunities for advance; there must be no suppression of outward-turning ...
... and Aphorisms Aphorism - 466, 467, 468 466—God, the world Guru, is wiser than thy mind; trust Him and not that eternal self-seeker and arrogant sceptic. 467—The sceptic mind doubts always because it cannot understand, but the faith of the God-lover persists in knowing although it cannot understand. Both are necessary to our darkness, but there... I shall some day master, but if I lose faith and love, I fall utterly from the goal which God has set before me. 468—I may question God, my guide and teacher, and ask Him, "Am I right or hast Thou in thy love and wisdom suffered my mind to deceive me?" Doubt thy mind, if thou wilt, but doubt not that God leads thee. Life is given to us to find the Divine and unite with Him. The mind tries ...
... a furious clasp of enmity. 511—The greatest of joys is to be, like Narada, the slave of God; the worst of Hells being abandoned of God, to be the world's master. That which seems nearest to the ignorant conception of God, is the farthest from him. 512—God's servant is something; God's slave is greater. Sri Aurobindo gives us the true way to understand the Scriptures, which thus become universal... and the world's master? But that which thy soul was really hunting after, has escaped from thee. 510—Ravana's mind thought it was hungering after universal sovereignty and victory over Rama; but the aim his soul kept its vision fixed upon all the time was to get back to its heaven as soon as possible and be again God's menial. Therefore, as the shortest way, it hurled itself against God in a ...
... stick? SRI AUROBINDO: That is all fantasy SATYENDRA: But do not fantasies become truths? It is in that way that God creates the world probably. Looking at hippopotamuses, zebras and all queer animals, I have to come to that view. DR. MANILAL: Why should God have created the world? Was He unhappy? SRI AUROBINDO: Does one create when one is unhappy? Or do you think like that because Nirodbaran... tennis ball! (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: And self-existent with Eliot and his hippopotamus existing from eternity? (Laughter) SATYENDRA (to Dr. Manilal) : If you don't believe God has created this world then God can't help you to get liberation. You have to rely absolutely on your Purushartha (self-effort). SRI AUROBINDO: Quite so. SATYENDRA (seeing Dr. Manilal sprinkling on his body the... the link one has established with the occult worlds. These worlds have their own laws. There are good and bad vital worlds and the results will depend on the connection one has made. NIRODBARAN: All these powers come from the vital worlds? SRI AUROBINDO: Of course. NIRODBARAN: It would be good then if one establish connection with good vital worlds and cure cases. SRI AUROBINDO: Why, one ...
... She remarked: "Ati, an extraordinary idea!" Christmas reminds me of a talk by the Mother on Christ: Christ came into the world to purify, not to fulfil. He himself foreknew the failure of his mission and the necessity of his return with the sword of God into a world that had rejected him. Are not Sri Aurobindo's verses in Savitri Book One, Canto 1, telling us of Earth's antipathetic response... Inflicting on the heights the abysm's law, It sullies with its mire heaven's messengers: 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. || 2.12 || Days passed rapidly. It was the last day of the year 1959. I stood near my window in a melancholy mood watching the vast vista of the snow. My heart was filled... lovely pink rose painted on cloth on the left side and on the right she had written: "Love." The message of the Victory Day was: How can the immortal Gods and Nature change? All changes in a world that is the same As man from childhood grows, yet is the same. Man most must change who is a soul of Time And the gods alter too who rule his mind. Out of their Chthonian darkness they arise And ...
... trail of the Ideas that made the world, And, sown in the black earth of Nature’s trance, The seed of the Spirit’s blind and huge desire From which the tree of cosmos was conceived And spread its magic arms through a dream of space. || 8.19 || Immense realities took on a shape: There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born And tries to gain from the... the Void Peered out; he saw the hope that never sleeps, The feet that run behind a fleeting fate, The ineffable meaning of the endless dream. || 8.22 || As if a torch held by a power of God, The radiant world of the everlasting Truth Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night Above the golden Overmind’s shimmering ridge. || 8.23 || Even were caught as through a cunning veil The smile of... happiness. I roamed here and there freely, and silently communicated with the beings. Nothing was new to me because I identified myself completely with this magnificent World of the Golden Light. I was reluctant to come back to the dark world of falsehood. But alas, the next morning I saw myself lying in my bed. I felt extremely sorry and lost, and shed a few silent tears. At once I remembered the whole ...
... based on one thing, an entity you call God, and a world you call his creation, which, to your mind, are two different things—one having made the other, the latter being subjected to the former and the expression of what the former made. Well, that's the initial error. But if you could feel deep down that there is no division between that something you call God and that something you call the creation;... creation; if you thought, 'It's exactly the same thing,' if you could FEEL that what you call God (which is perhaps a mere word), what you call God suffers when you suffer, is ignorant when you are ignorant, and it is through this whole creation that he finds himself again little by little, step by step, unites with himself, realizes himself, expresses himself, and it's not at all Page 254 something... little, if for some reason you have been put in presence of a lot of misery in the world, if you have unhappy friends or suffering parents or difficulties—anything—then you ask that the entire consciousness may rise TOGETHER towards that perfection which must manifest, that all this ignorance which has made the world so unhappy may be changed into enlightened knowledge, that all that bad will may be ...
... fulfilled; and still, the sacrifice of works continues; the path becomes the triune way of knowledge, works and devotion. The bhakta who is loved most is the bhakta who has true self-knowledge, God-knowledge and world-knowledge and who is engaged in works as an offering to the Master of self-energising and all-giving sacrifice. That is the path that leads to the state of immortality, the state of union with... tenser and completer self-surrender. In the next six chapters there is insistence on knowledge, and the states and contents of self-realization, and knowledge of the true nature of the self and the world are described, not only in terms of essence but also in terms of fullness of essential details (Jñānam and vijñānam). 4 But the sacrifice of the works continues and the path of Works becomes one ...
... Ascent ============= God has made the world a field of battle and filled it with the trampling of combatants and cries of the great wrestle and struggle. Would you filch His peace without paying the price He has fixed for it? Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: Thoughts and Glimpses All things considered, looking at the world as it is and as it seems it must be... be irremediably, the human intellect decreed that this world must have been a mistake on the part of God and the manifestation or creation can be only the result of desire, desire for self-knowledge, desire for self-manifestation, desire for self-enjoyment and the only thing to be done is to put an end to this mistake as soon as possible by refusing consent to desire and its evil consequences. But ...
... secret motion & purpose to our gaze. Against this sublime Trinity of the Vedanta, this penetrating analysis of the reality of things, this discovery of the real existence of God in the world, the appearances of that world seem to protest and militate. That which strikes us most saliently & leaps on us fiercely at every turn, is grief & pain, not delight; that Page 85 which besieges our... was in abeyance only in the overpowered & cessant parts of the same material waking mind and behind it was a most exalted & perfect state of awareness which stands near the threshold of the House of God in which we really dwell; for here we are only labourers or overseers in His outer farms. It is admitted that when we are in sound sleep we dream; we are conscious, when we are swooned or stunned only... or circumstance; in all these motions it is seeking to recover itself as infinite Delight. In this way the final perceptions of Vedanta explain the whole process & labour of consciousness in the world. These three, Sat, Chit and Ananda are one Trinity, Sachchidananda. They are not three different factors making a single sum, neither are any two of them merely attributes, even inseparable & invariable ...
... g wall of white Outrunning the extremes of human gaze, Vanishing to the right, fading to the left And lifting a universe of dreaming ice, A vast virginity with no gaa in God To let the world's familiar face yearn through— All life plucked from its level loiterings To one dense danger of divinity, A sheer leap everywhere of soul made rock Of rapture unperturbable ...
... wall of white Outrunning the extremes of human gaze, Vanishing to the right, fading to the left And lifting a universe of dreaming ice, A vast virginity with no gap in God To let the world's familiar face yearn through— All life plucked from its level loiterings To one dense danger of divinity, A sheer leap everywhere of soul made rock Of rapture unperturbable ...
... fulfil than thy waking force and intellect. But the spirit is stronger than both together; from fear and hope take refuge in the grandiose calm and careless mastery of the spirit. 378—God made the infinite world by Self-knowledge which in its works is Will-Force self-fulfilling. He used ignorance to limit His infinity; but fear, weariness, depression, self-distrust and assent to weakness are the ...
... 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 in their causes, developed under the law of their being in the subtle or psychical world and then manifested in the gross or material world. From kāraṇa to sūkṣma , from sūkṣma... progress of mankind. Whichever theory we take, the laws of the material world are not affected. From aeon to aeon, from kalpa to kalpa Narayan manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a Page 18 series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self-realisation in God. That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of yugas . Each age in... 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 doing the world is to encourage a return to this condition; the suddenly awakened masses of men, unaccustomed to deal intellectually with ideas, able to grasp ...
... matter. It sees, feels, thinks, senses the Divine. For to the spiritual consciousness all manifest existence appears as a world of spirit and not a world of matter, not a world of life, not a world even of mind; these other things are to its view only God-thought, God-force, God-form. That is what the Gita means by living and acting in Vasudeva, mayi vartate . The spiritual consciousness is aware of... light and power of 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... conscious of God absolute, God as self, God as spirit, soul and nature. Even this external Nature it knows by identity and self-experience, but an identity freely admitting variation, admitting relations, admitting greater and lesser degrees of the action of the one power of existence. For Nature is God's power of various self-becoming, ātma-vibhūti . But this spiritual consciousness of world-existence ...
... 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 to be finite, God whom they conceive of as the sum of... to make plain the way to the world theocracy. Its rule of life is the discovery and service of the will of God which dwells in the hearts of men and the performance of that will" in the life of the believer, the individual, and of the nation of which he is a part. "I give myself to God not only because I am so and so, but because I am mankind.... I become a knight in God's service.... I become a responsible... alone is the true God. He is a personal and intimate God. He is finite. He is a spirit, a single spirit and a single person. He has come, we know not whence, into the conflict of life. He has begun and will never end. And yet he is the immortal part and leader of mankind, our friend and brother and light of the world. And from these first principles is drawn a description of God as certain qualities ...
... 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. The essence of the world is not Space nor Time nor Circumstance which we call Causality—its essence is motion. Not only so, but every single force & object in it is of... the word Ish has been selected as the fundamental relation of God to ourselves & the world—the master of all our existence to whom we renounce, the Lord who for his purposes has made & governs the world—for in this relation of "Lord" he is inseparable from His movement. It is a relation that depends on the existence & play of the world of which He is the ruler & master. Envisaging the ruler, we envisage... ian fixes his concentration of Will in Knowledge only on the Impersonal & pursuing it through the world & beyond, he affirms the Impersonal God but tends to deny the Personal. The devotee, fixing his concentration on the Personal & pursuing it through the world & beyond, affirms the Personal God but tends to deny or ignore the Impersonal. Both affirmations are true, both denials are false. Neither ...
... The complete Yoga will be one which accepts God in the world and oneness with all beings and solidarity with the human kind, fills life and existence with the God-consciousness and not only raises man the individual but leads man the race towards a total perfection. 127 The aim put before itself by Yoga is God; its method is tapasya. God is the All and that which exceeds & transcends... closeness to the Divine, whatever the Divine may be. We see the Divine as a personal Godhead or as an impersonal Existence. A God of Love or compassion attracts us or a God of might and power. It is a divine Friend who meets us or a Divine Master or a World Father or World Mother or an almighty Lord of all or a Divine Lover. We are in the presence of a Cosmic Spirit in whose universal consciousness... and at play with him in thy nature, and because this world is a scene in his being in which he is thy secret Master and lover and friend and the lord and sustainer and aim of all thou art, therefore is oneness with him the perfect way of thy being[.] Page 333 124 The human being on earth is God playing at humanity in a world of matter under the conditions of a hampered density ...
... contrary, it affords him an occasion for adventure, for staking his all for God's victory in the world of division and darkness. He is born as God's warrior to fight God's battle and establish God's opulent kingdom here,¹ and not to fly away from the grim realities of life and its complex and baffling problems. Envisaging God as the doer of all works as well as the eternal non-doer, he aspires, by an... this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees Him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome... e Page 292 life discredited and discouraged, and the world spume a nightmare, the soul would be left with the single alternative of a precipitate retreat, if it were awakened enough to find itself choking in the darkness of its material tenement. That cannot evidently be the intention of god in the world and the denouement of the soul's long and difficult evolution in it. The ...
... The love of the world spiritualised, changed from a sense-experience to a 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... nothing, it is to embrace all in the being of God; to see all as the Divine is to 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 all, God in all and, not disturbed or bewildered by the appearances of these things, moved only by them to help and heal, to occupy himself with the good of all beings, to lead men to the spiritual bliss, to work for the progress of the world Godwards, he shall live the divine life, so long as days upon earth are his portion. The God-lover who can do this, can thus embrace all things in God, can look ...
... supreme victory and that what he calls the supramental world will be brought down on earth and realised by us here and now? The Mother 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... Not vain their meeting, nor heaven's touch a snare. If thou and I are true, the world is true; Although thou hide 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... descent of the supramental world. For that descent will be the successful con- summation of our work, a descent of which the full glory has not yet been or else the whole face of life would have been different. The Mother Spirit of 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 ...
... 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 the price He has fixed for it? "... victory 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;... repose of complete trust in the divine Grace, of the absence of desires, of victory over egoism. True repose comes from the widening, the universalisation of the consciousness. Become as vast as the world and you will always be at rest. In the thick of action, in the very midst of the battle, the effort, you will know the repose of infinity and eternity. Page 66 ...
... are only a part, a side of Vedantic truth. There are other sides, in a way even greater and more blissful, and at any rate 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... But the Vedanta is not useful only for the denial of life; it is even more useful for the affirmation of life. If it affirms the evil of bondage to the idea of this world, it also affirms the bliss of harmony between the world & God. Neither Shankara nor Schopenhauer have for us the entirety of its knowledge. It is this supreme utility of Vedanta for life, for man's individual and racial evolution... past and its future. Mayavada commits this error when not content with trampling the tyranny of cosmic Illusion underfoot, it seeks to deny and destroy the world in order to attain That which has chosen to express itself through the world. For God has expressed us in many principles & not one. He has ranged them one over the other & commanded us not to destroy one in order to satisfy another, not to ...
... breath A mighty supernature waits on Time. The world is other than we now think and see, Page 247 Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed; Our minds are starters in the race to God, Our souls deputed selves of the Supreme. In this investiture of fleshly life A soul that is a spark of God survives And sometimes it breaks through the sordid... His 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... wideness of the Spirit's gaze. At last there wakes in us a witness Soul That looks at truths unseen and scans the Unknown; Then all assumes a new and marvellous face. The world quivers with a God-light at its core, In Time's deep heart high purposes move and live, Life's borders crumble and join infinity. Our seekings are short-lived experiments Made by a wordless ...
... to do? To struggle with God in others & God in the world or live only for God in others & not at all for God in ourselves? In his second line the Rishi utters his golden rule of life which supplies us with the only practical solution of the difficulty. To enjoy as we enjoy now is to lift to our lips a cup of mixed honey & poison; to abandon the world is to contradict God's purpose by avoiding the... exposition. God & the World,—these are the two terms of all our knowledge. From their relation we start, to their relation in union or withdrawal from union all our life & activity return. When we have known what the world is, when we have exhausted Science & sounded all the fathomless void, we have still to know what God is, & unless we know what God is, we know nothing fundamental about the world. Tasmin... saved. The worship of a Personal God different from ourselves & Page 399 the world brings with it a better chance of joyful activity in the world. "God's will, be it joy or sorrow; God's will, be it the triumph of good or the siege of the evil." This is a great mantra & has mighty effects. But it does not by itself give a secure abiding place. God's will may bring doubt & then there is ...
... the actual illness. There was only a strange sacrifice. And if Sri Aurobindo the indomitable made the sacrifice, it must be one that was a sudden terrible short-cut to some secret victory for God in the world at the cost of a personal consummation. We may remember the opening of his sonnet entitled "In the Battle": Page 78 Often in the slow ages' long retreat On Life's thin ridge... his plan to fight from two bases, remains on earth to foster the golden future, that he could draw back from the visible scene as if to pull inward the taut string of the spiritual bow and make the God-tipped arrow fly swifter and farther. She who has been one with him in the Supramental attainment, one in vast vision and integral work, joint-parent of the new age in which the outer physical as well... fourfold aspiration, Sri Aurobindo was throwing away the earnest of the final and supreme triumph, a physical being in which the very cells were beginning to flower into a divine substance such as the world had scarcely dreamt of in even its most apocalyptic hours. The doctors who were his attendants knew their patient to be no mere mortal: they treated his body for what they recognised it to be, a ...
... 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... unaffected by them, watching, ruling, doing His will with a suffering and struggling world or, if not doing His will, if allowing the world to be driven by an inexorable law, unhelped by Him or inefficiently helped, then not God, not omnipotent, not all-good and all-loving. On no theory of an extracosmic moral God, can evil and suffering be explained,— the creation of evil and suffering, — except by ...
... 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... unaffected by them, watching, ruling, doing His will with a suffering and struggling world or, if not doing His will, if allowing the world to be driven by an inexorable law, unhelped by Him or inefficiently helped, then not God, not omnipotent, not all-good and all-loving. On no theory of an extra-cosmic moral God, can evil and suffering be explained,—the creation of evil and suffering,—except by an ...
... 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 my subject... sense, and that could be supplied by the 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... into that karanasamudra or causal ocean from which our beings emerge and bringing out from thence the lost Veda and the already existing future. Within us is all Veda 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 ...
... point here is that the modern mind has exiled from its practical motive-power the two essential things, God or the Eternal and spirituality or the God-state, which are the master conceptions of the Gita. It lives in humanity only, and the Gita would have us live in God, though for the world in God; in its life, heart and intellect only, and the Gita would have us live in the spirit; in the mutable Being... of the Divine as Lord and Purusha and its doctrine of the Purushottama, the Supreme Being who is superior both to the mutable Being and to the Immutable and who is what in His relation to the world we know as God, are the most striking and among the most vital elements of the Gita. Still, this Lord is the Self in whom all knowledge culminates and the Master of sacrifice to whom all works lead as well... 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 ...
... unless they are filled with the breath of God's delight. These things are images, but all is an image. Abstractions give us the pure conception of God's truths; images give us their living reality. If Idea embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight of Being begot the Idea. Because the Infinite conceived an innumerable delight in itself, therefore worlds and universes came into existence. Page... 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... 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 great leap towards its Enjoyer. This is the 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 the world will be devoted to the same pursuit of life. Thus mankind will be linked together with divine ties, and wake up into a millennium of peace and happiness in the quest of which man has been engaged in an eternal odyssey. "All men are brothers" will not then be a mere pedantic quotation but a fact of life. The Ishopanishad says: "All that lives is full of God." In this world He has set... He has created the world for His own expression, and so He alone should be the object of all living beings. The further you go from this object, the wider becomes the chasm between you and the rest of the creation. The more we ignore this the more we give rise to discord and widen the cleavage between our life and God. The modern attempt to instal ego on the pedestal of God has enslaved man to... embodied in the Incarnate Lord in human frame. This God wills to express Himself in human form with all His powers and glory. As a result of opposition to and revolt against His appearance or expression in human frame today's life has become individualistic, egoistic, discordant and bleak, whose Satanic gloom is smothering the whole world. The whole world, both the Orient and the Occident, is trying to ...
... ecclesiastical ordinance. That narrow absurdity prances about as the true religion which all must accept on peril of persecution by men here and spiritual rejection or fierce eternal punishment by God in other worlds. This grotesque creation of human unreason, the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty, obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the free and supple mind... "civilization" seems to be in its last throes. But in the fifteenth century the western world was just coming into its own. And it had a role to play in the world. The new-found zeal of the Europeans for exploration and discovery, pushed along by strides made by technology, sped them to colonize the world. The Cape of Good Hope was rounded in 1488, the West Indies were "discovered" in 1492... west of the new continent—which confirmed the newness of these lands. The Europeans named the New World: America. 1 To be ' Derived from the name of the Italian merchant, Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the north coast of South America in 1499. Page 128 precise, the 'New World' was a 'discovery' only for the Europeans, because the lands were already inhabited, and many regions ...
... significance here of all works and living and sacrifice and the world's endeavour. This highest message is first for those who have the strength to follow after it, the master men, the great spirits, the God knowers, Page 570 God-doers, God-lovers who can live in God and for God and do their work joyfully for him in the world, a divine work uplifted above the restless darkness of the human... in some immutable 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... be imperative or the mental would be clear to its own pure and unobstructed principle or the spiritual self-existent and self-sufficient to spirit. The animals are aware of no problems; a mental god in a world of pure mentality would admit none or would solve them all by the purity of a mental rule or the satisfaction of a rational harmony; a pure spirit would be above them and self-content in the infinite ...
... in the world as a means of preparation and self-mastery is admitted, yet a final passing away into the infinite heavenly world or status of the Brahman-consciousness is held out as the 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... makes that its foundation or ignore it in practice while professing it in precept or else must sink under the weight of its own impotence and the sense of the illusion of life or of the curse of God upon the world as mediaeval Christendom sank into ignorance and obscurantism or later India into stagnant torpor and the pettiness of a life of aimless egoism. The promise for the individual is well, but the... from egoism, the union with the Divine, the realisation of our universality as well as our transcendence, and no salvation should be valued which takes us away from the love of God in humanity and the help we can give to the world. If need be, it must be taught, "Better this hell with the rest of our suffering brothers than a solitary salvation." Fortunately, there is no need to go to such lengths and ...
... 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... Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force Revealing the secret deity in the cave. 89 All shall then change, a magic order will displace the "mechanic universe", and "the superman shall reign as king of life/Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven." 90 As a "high crown of all", there will result "the end of Death, the death of Ignorance". Matter's world will itself be transformed... And meet the deity in common things. Nature shall live to manifest secret God, The Spirit shall take up the human play, This earthly life become the life divine. 91 The subtle music ceases at the conclusion of the great ambrosial revelation, and presently, "through unseen worlds and bottomless spaces forced", Savitri's soul sinks down to the earth, drawing with ...
... Disciple : The world is Swayambhu – self-existent – according to Jainism. God can't have created world because he lacks motive. Sri Aurobindo : Do you create because you are unhappy? Nirod writes poetry because he is miserable? Disciple : No, to get more joy. Sri Aurobindo : He is then full of joy and wants more. Disciple : If God has not created the world, you can't get... law of Karma. If Karma brings its own reward inevitably then help of God is unnecessary. If God helps and intervenes effectively and changes the result of action, then the law of Karma is not true. Disciple : Jainism believes in Purushartha. Sri Aurobindo : If you believe in Purushartha you can't expect Grace of God. How can you pray to help you? Disciple : I believe in Grace... think of God, since the greater number of spiritual people have been those who have renounced everything and lived on very little. As soon as people have money they forget those who have no money. Disciple : His idea was that people cannot believe that God is all-merciful, kind and loving, unless at least their physical needs are satisfied. Sri Aurobindo : If the idea is that God is all ...
... longing and success and failure, its oscillations of joy and grief, its duality of virtue and sin? God may be in the world, but he is not of the world; he is a God of renunciation and not the Master or cause of our works; the master of our works is desire and the cause of works is ignorance. If the world, the Kshara is in a sense a manifestation or a līlā of the Divine, it is an imperfect play with... 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, the Purushottama as the goal, superior to action yet its... 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 that all those beings may move forward, as he has moved, by the path of works ...
... then there arises the difficulty caused to our darkened minds by the false conception that God & world, God & the human soul are different entities. From this division of the indivisible there arises the notion, the fatal noumenal error, the illogical logic, that God beyond the world is free but God in the world is bound, bound to action, bound to sorrow, bound to death and birth,—the great fundamental... determining now by his play in works as he has previously determined by his play in 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... universal all-inhabiting Ishwara—if indeed the real goal be not some transcendental Impersonality in which man & world & God are all & for ever extinguished. We might accept this conclusion but for the distinct injunction of the Seer, bhunjítháh, thou shouldst enjoy. Divine Ananda in God at play & God at rest, not loss of interest and a quietistic indifference is the human fulfilment contemplated by the ...
... 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 as ignorance... 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 leap... And in fact, as long as one has not consciously passed beyond, there is a whole world of things one cannot understand. So I would like us now to open the way and pass beyond, all together, a little. There we are. Page 14 × "God and Nature are like a boy and a girl at play and in love. They hide and run from ...
... a general symbol which tries to translate the untranslatable existence, God, into the terms of world-consciousness. It is intended to try, it is not intended to succeed; for the moment it succeeds, it ceases to be itself and becomes that untranslatable something from which it started, God. No symbol is intended to express God perfectly, not even the highest; but it is the privilege of the highest symbols... Upanishad there occurs one of those powerful and pregnant phrases, containing a world of meaning in a point of verbal space, with which the Upanishads are thickly sown. Yogo hi prabhavapyayau. For Yoga is the beginning & ending of things. In the Puranas the meaning of the phrase is underlined & developed. By Yoga God made the world, by Yoga He will draw it into Himself in the end. But not only the original... expression of God, reaches out to and seeks to become its own entire reality; it aspires to become its real self by transcending its apparent self. Thing that is made, is attracted towards thing that is, becoming towards being, the natural towards the supernatural, symbol towards thing-in-itself, Nature towards God. The upward movement is, then, the means towards self-fulfilment in this world; but it ...
... Presence, moving freely in the courts of God, admitted hourly to His presence and growing always liker & liker in his spiritual image to the purity, majesty, might and beauty of the Lord. To love God in His world Page 216 and approach God in himself is the discipline of the Karmayogin; to embrace all created things in his heart and divinely become God in his spirit, is his goal and ideal.... has said, who remain in the world, can be above the world and live in communion with the Eternal; but few also who flee to the mountains, really attain Him, and few of those who spend their days in crying Lord, Lord, are accepted by Him to whom they cry. It is always the many who are called, the few who are chosen. And if Janak could remain in the world and be ever with God in the full luxury, power... of action and give up work in the world; he is not called upon to abandon the objects of enjoyment, but to possess them with a heart purified of longing and passion. In this spirit he must do his work in this world and not flee from the struggle. Neither must he shrink from life as a bondage. He must realise that there is no bondage to him who is full of God, for God is free and not bound. He must therefore ...
... The Destiny of the Body Chapter XIII Metaphysical Factors of Death Although God made the world for his delight, An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will And Death's deep falsity has mastered Life. (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto III, p. 629) Death is the constant denial by the All of the ego's false ... Christ, p. 186) A. First Factor: The Part against the Whole The individual life, emerging as a finite and ephemeral wave in the bosom of the 'All-Force' that is governing the world, has constantly to bear the disrupting impact of the latter. In order to secure permanence for itself, it has perforce to contend with this All-Force and establish its harmony with it. But although ...
... errors, O Lord! Thy falsehoods save Truth alive; by Thy stumblings the world is perfected. 447) Life, Life, Life, I hear the passions cry; God, God, God, is the soul's answer. Unless thou seest and lovest Life as God only, then is Life itself a sealed joy to thee. 448) "He loves her", the senses say; but the soul says "God God God". That is the all-embracing formula of existence. 449) If thou canst... possible & be again God's menial. Therefore, as the shortest way, it hurled itself against God in a furious clasp of enmity. 510) The greatest of joys is to be, like Naraka, the slave of God; the worst of Hells, being abandoned of God, to be the world's master. That which seems nearest to the ignorant conception of God, is the farthest from him. 511) God's servant is something; God's slave is greater... 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 ...
... of the reins in the clamorous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle. The Teacher of the Gita is therefore not only the God in man who unveils himself in the word of knowledge, but the God in man who moves our whole world of action, by and for whom all our humanity exists and struggles and labours, towards whom all human life travels and progresses. He is the secret Master... difficulty and blind violence of its apparent movements forces itself with the shock of a visible revelation on the mind of its representative man and raises the whole question of the meaning of God in the world and the goal and drift and sense of human life and conduct. India has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the reality of the Avatara, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead... things, uttamaṁ rahasyam . When Page 14 this eternal divine Consciousness always present in every human being, this God in man, takes possession partly 4 or wholly of the human consciousness and becomes in visible human shape the guide, teacher, leader of the world, not as those who living in their humanity yet feel something of the power or light or love of the divine Gnosis informing and ...
... principle; but he who has passed over to God, has done with both and replaced them by God's will. If men abuse thee for this, care not, O divine instrument, but go on thy way like the wind or the sun fostering and destroying. 248) Not to cull the praises of men has God made thee His own, but to do fearlessly His bidding. 249) Accept the world as God's theatre; be thou the mask of the Actor and... 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 and for strength to fulfil it. 254) So long as a cause has on its side one... therefore God sent thee into this human body. 370) What is the use of only being? I say to thee, Become, for therefore wast thou established as a man in this world of matter. 371) The path of works is in a way the most difficult side of God's triune causeway; yet is it not also, in this material world at least, the easiest, widest & most delightful? For at every moment we clash against God the worker ...
... 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. The knowledge... 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 and experience are primary means of arriving... secondly we have no natural previous experience of that in them which is other than their physical substance. A purified or tranquillised mind may reflect or a powerful concentration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult. 2 And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the Page 303 process of the ...
... and he said he would come back, but this time, holding the sword of God... Page 371 169—Christ came into the world to purify, not to fulfill. He himself foreknew the failure of his mission, and the necessity of his return with the sword of God into a world that had rejected him. I was asked what's "the sword of God" (!) I said it was the irresistible Power. ( silence ) Oh, a... conscious in them is like that, cherished). It's the ignominy of humans.... They must become conscious of their ignominy... They find it quite natural. This world is revolting from one end to the other. There's nothing—I would keep nothing of this world, nothing. ( Mother laughs ) No, this isn't revolting ( Mother lays her hand on a bouquet of roses near her ). This is... a really and truly beautiful... (he went there for something else), and he came upon that. He was so horrified, you know, so disgusted that he resolved to make it stop. And for maybe two years, he has been campaigning all over the world—through television and all sorts of means—for people to intervene. There was a strong pressure on the prime minister (it's in northern Canada and northern Norway, I think, on perpetually frozen islands) ...
... see that their initiative and originality 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 the price He has fixed for it? Page... or the weakling; a patience full of a calm and gathering strength which watches and prepares itself for the hour of swift great strokes, few but enough to change destiny. Wherefore God hammers so fiercely at his world, tramples and kneads it like dough, casts it so often into the blood-bath and the red hell-heat of the furnace? Because humanity in the mass is still a hard, crude and vile ore which... 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 ...
... 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. 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 of Salokya and Sadharmya—but... plural, referring to the deities or occult powers, the official version translates it as God, to give the necessary theistic value and atmosphere. But if occultism is to be feared because of its wrong use and potential danger, spirituality too should then be placed on the same footing. All good things in the world have their deformation and danger, but that is no reason why one should avoid them ...
... 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 are That, or again, that which is in me and the conscious being which is there in the Sun are one and the same thing. God has created man and the world, He is in man and in the world, He has become and is man and the world. Not... 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 of Salokya and Sadharmaya... plural, referring to the deities or occult powers, the official version translates it as God, to give the necessary theistic value and atmosphere. But if occultism is to be feared because of its wrong use and potential danger, spirituality too should then be placed on the same footing. All good things in the world have their deformation and danger, but that is no reason why one should avoid them altogether ...
... of action, emotion, sense, sensation, to enjoy too by their means objects, persons, life, the world, is the activity for which this prana gives us a psycho-physical basis. A really perfect enjoyment of existence can only come when what we enjoy is not the world in itself or for itself, but God in the world, when it is not things, but the Ananda of the spirit in things that forms the real, essential... s of anger, fear, hatred, repulsion and could not embrace the world with an impartial love and joy. But the purified heart is rid of anger, rid of fear, rid of hatred, rid of every shrinking and repulsion: it has a universal love, it can receive with an untroubled sweetness and clarity the various delight which God gives it in the world. But it is not the lax slave of love and delight; it does not... the mind into an obedient instrument. We may call these greater things, too, by the name of desire, if we choose, but then we must suppose that there is a divine desire other than the vital craving, a God-desire of which this other and lower phenomenon is an obscure shadow and into which it has to be transfigured. It is better to keep distinct names for things which are entirely different in their character ...
... illuminated fulfils the harmony which is the goal of the divine movement. But the power of this lord of Will and Light is also needed. Force and Love united and both illumined by Knowledge fulfil God in the world. Will is the first necessity, the chief actualising force. When therefore the race of mortals turn consciously towards the great aim and, offering their enriched capacities to the Sons of... affirmed in this world of an inferior Ray,— gotamebhir ṛtāvā . And it is upon those whose minds are pure, clear and open, vipra , that there can dawn the right knowledge of the great Births which are behind the physical world and from which it derives and supports its energies,— viprebhir jātavedāḥ . Agni is Jatavedas, knower of the births, the worlds. He knows entirely the five worlds 8 and is not... of the worlds by clarified minds. He shall foster in them the force of illumination, he too the plenty; he shall attain to increase and to harmony by his perceptions. Commentary Gotama Rahugana is the seer of this Hymn, which is a stoma in praise of Agni, the divine Will at work in the universe. Agni is the most important, the most universal of the Vedic gods. In the physical world he is ...
... 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 the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being... 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 or... reigns supreme in a world where "all is vanity." I would like to quote here a passage from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita which throws a clear light on the problem: "To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the 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 ...
... for ever and unchangeably divine - God is in all and all are in God. He adds to it another vision and experience - God not only in all but coming out in all, all not only in God but bringing out God. This simultaneously implies for him an unflinching realism and world-labour on the one hand and on the other an unqualified radiance and world-fulfilment. And an Aurobindonian's reply... even to the Gita's doctrine that though action in the world is never to be disdained as a revolving in a field of Māyā our true and final abode is in some supra-cosmic status after death has brought the God-realised soul its liberation from bodily existence. Sri Aurobindo is not content with substituting Līlā, or God's play in the world, for Māyā or the universal illusion of activity... I do not maintain my "peace of mind" by a reply like the one you construct for me: "Oh, this is quite simple and clear; this is due to that and that is the result of this; God is in all and all are in God; the world is the manifestation of the One in its process of becoming the Many; there is in fact no sorrow, grief, suffering, and evil but all is an appearance and the Inner Being is i ...
... NIRODBARAN: A sportsman can shift his interest without much difficulty. SRI AUROBINDO: It is said in the Upanishad that God created the world by Tapas. I believe he didn't find it difficult, though he had to make an effort. (Laughter) NIRODBARAN: If you bring in God, we mortals have no chance. PURANI: That is only an illustration. SRI AUROBINDO: I myself have to make an effort to read... SRI AUROBINDO: No, they will have a mystic evolution. This man brings out a book of prophecy every year and sends me a copy every time. He is a friend of Maurice Magre. He says that in this dark world I am the only one who can be called a real man. (Sri Aurobindo said this laughing.) SATYENDRA: The Life Divine has come out at the right time then. NIRODBARAN: Your books have a good sale ...
... boundlessness, and ignore the world and its intolerable budget of woes. But Savitri refuses to be tempted with the promise of solitary bliss for herself and Satyavan. 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 ... uttered the sanction of the Voice supreme. Arise upon a ladder of greater worlds To the infinity where no world can be. 82 But the double-faced god, one side dark and the other bright, who is the master of the magic that makes the worlds, is himself no more than a mediate power, and his worlds of night, twilight and day too are only mediating links between the Spirit above... destiny's curve and stamp thy will on Time". With these valedictory words, the god withdraws, and with him the "heaven-worlds" too vanish in "spiritual light". And Savitri lives fulfilled in "an ineffable world", experiencing a rapture, a virgin unity, Housing a multitudinous embrace To marry all in God's immense delight, Page 230 Bearing the eternity ...
... trampling to pieces all that it no longer needs. Those who fight against her fight against the will of God, against a decree written from of old, and are already defeated and slain in the kāraṇa jagat , the world of types and causes where Nature fixes everything before she works it out in the visible world. Nihatāḥ pūrvameva . The mass of humanity has not risen beyond the bodily needs, the vital desires... our own philosophy the whole world came out of ānanda and returns into ānanda , and 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 ... the final self-revelation of which is the goal of humanity. Man becomes God, and all human activity reaches its highest and noblest when it succeeds in bringing body, heart and mind into touch with spirit. Art can express eternal truth, it is not limited to the expression of form and appearance. So wonderfully has God made the world that a man using a simple combination of lines, an unpretentious harmony ...
... 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 of the conqueror.... we have of the flesh, the recoil we have from the world. To the soul the earth is not a devil's trap. No doubt, a lot of ugliness is about us, but that is because the earth has 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... being and God's own will. There are those superb words of Allah in the Koran: "Dost thou think I have made this whole world in a jest?" Surely the long march of time has some aim and if the soul has come into the world and passes from birth to birth, it is not for kicking off everything and leaving unfulfilled the poor dust out of which we are made. An utter inner detachment from all objects ...
... The Roots of Nazism The Roots of Nazism 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God World Conspiration One of the prevalent accusations against “international Jewry” was that the Jews were plotting a conspiracy to dominate and exploit the world, and that they were using the liberal and capitalist rightist movements as well as the socialist and communist... movements to achieve their aim as “the Chosen People” to whom their God had promised the world. It may be noted that the Jews were not the only ones saddled with this design, and that the arguments against the others were much better founded in reality. Bolshevism, for one, openly proclaimed its intention to promote the proletarian world revolution; the grasp for global power by the former USSR was to... aspirations of the Jews, propagated by malicious pamphlets like The Protocols of the Wise Man of Zion but never substantiated. “The thesis of a Jewish world conspiration, of a centrally directed, racially determined and systematically executed world conquest [by the Jews] is so absurd that only a narrowed, diseased mind and a consequently calcified psyche could perceive such obvious fabrication of ...
... 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 not to linger exploring different paths that end in... integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the... realisation and possession of God by the power of love, by the extension of inborn spirituality into various experience and by the spontaneous play of an intuitive knowledge. Such an example cannot be generalised. Its object also was special and temporal, to exemplify in the great and decisive experience of a master-soul the truth, now most necessary to humanity, towards which a world long divided into jarring ...
... superhuman wisdom of God. Has not H. G. Wells, an idealist of our own day, uttered the crashing blasphemy that he would spit in the face of a God who did not utilise His almightiness to lend a fiat to "the Open Conspiracy" by which a "Capitalist-ridden" world is to be saved? The same humanitarian conscience anxious to spare an almighty Maker the responsibility of an imperfect world has compelled Bernard... see that Vivekananda's philosophy, though a golden torch of truth when compared to the conjectural ingenuities of metaphysicians who are not Yogis, falls short of what we may term the integral God-view and world-view. No more inspiring mouth-piece can be found for a particular type of spiritual realisation; but this realisation, necessary and grand as it is, could be overstressed, and Vivekananda did... of beauty. God is the most lovely of all objects because His is the superhuman power of an unimaginable love and benevolence. All quibbles about His perfection are vain for the born devotee because they amount to measuring with little wit the supreme wisdom. But, according to Vivekananda, when his intellect put the personal God on the horns of a dilemma, the horns were fatal to such a God's existence: ...
... Here to fulfil Himself was God's desire.”¹ The goal towards which the Mother would have us advance is just this fulfilling of God in the world. So, when she speaks of the integral union with the Divine, she means a union out of which will pour, as from an inexhaustible fountain. His Love and Light and blissful Force upon this obscure material world. "O divine Mother, Thy march... 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 him to the manifested world and make him its representative... commonplace of spiritual philosophy that God is the ultimate goal of life, and it has also been an experience of countless men, purchased at the cost of many a cruel pang and bitter remorse and cheerless roving in the wilderness of the world. Even the politicians of today, who have perforce to ply a trade in blustering falsehood and burnished hypocrisy, take the name of God and implore His protection at the ...
... hidden from it, a power of passive, yet sympathetic reflection of the Light that surpasses it. Its limit is reached, its function is finished when it can say to man, "There is a Soul, a Self, a God in the world and in man who works concealed and all is his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His minister I have been, slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until... them, for the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and pessimism, for activism and quietism. It can justify the most mystic religionism and the most positive atheism, get rid of God or see nothing else. In aesthetics it supplies the basis equally for classicism and romanticism, for an idealistic, religious or mystic theory of art or for the most earthy realism. It can with equal... synthesis and into the effort of our life which advances by a sort of experimental and empirical seeking, these powers become disparate and conflicting ideals which we have all the difficulty in the world to bring into any kind of satisfactory harmony. Such are the primary principles of liberty and order, good, beauty and truth, the ideal of power and the ideal of love, individualism and collectivism ...
... Our 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... the relations 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... it is our power of self-knowledge. By knowing the eternal unity of these three powers of the eternal manifestation, God, Nature and the individual self, and their intimate necessity to each other, we come to understand existence itself and all that in the appearances of the world now puzzles our ignorance. Our self-knowledge abolishes none of these things, it abolishes only our ignorance and those ...
... knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. But this union reveals God not only in his powers of consciousness and powers of delight but also in his powers of will; and the God-lover who loves God in every way of his being, sarvabhāvena, is automatically thrown into the channels of God's will and God's work for the world. Once again, one arrives at the trinity of our powers, the union of knowledge... of all being and its way of fulfillment, as also where knowledge will perfect love and love will perfect knowledge and they will both lend their powers for perfection and accomplishment of God's works in the world. 61 The Page 71 essential and the inalienable relationship between knowledge, will and delight will also determine the principle of the synthesis of yoga, which in Sri Aurobindo's... points out, the ārta, arthi, and jijnāsu (the one who suffers from pain, one who is in need of material help, and one who wants to know) may and do approach God. 59 As the Gita further points out, all these three motives which turn God ward are legitimate ( udārah ) ,60 and all these approaches can develop into approaches of love. Love is indeed the crown of Karma yoga and Jnana yoga, but love ...
... of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7 The Problem of Evil God has created the world, the material world as it is? Yes and No, more "No" than "Yes". For he has not created it directly. There have been many creators, rather formateurs, form-rqakers, in between the world and God, who joined in the work of creation. Who are they? They have been given various names. Creation... current, more or less permanently accepted by human thought during ages; they are of an astounding simplicity. There is a world here, it is said, and up there somewhere there is a being called God. This person one day thought of creating some kind of thing, a visible form. The world was the result. Evidently we see a lot of mistakes in his work. We conclude the creator perhaps is a well-meaning benevolent... are one and identical in their origin. The universe is God himself projected into Space (and Time). So the universe is the Divine in one aspect or another. You cannot divide the two, making one the creator and the other his work, the watchmaker and his watch. You put your idea of the Divine upon him and ask, why he has created such a nasty world. If the Divine were to answer, "It is not I, it is yourself ...
... GOD has created the world, the material world as it is? Yes and No, more "No" than "Yes". For he has not created it directly. There have been many creators, rather formateurs, form-makers, in between the world and God, who joined in the work of creation. Who are they? They have been given various names. Creation generally follows a principle of gradation. It is done step by step, world rising... current, more or less permanently accepted by human thought during ages; they are of an astounding simplicity. There is a world here, it is said, and up there somewhere there is a being called God; This person one day thought of creating some kind of thing, a visible form. The world was the result. Evidently we see a lot of mistakes in his work. We conclude the creator perhaps is a well-meaning benevolent... are one and identical in their origin. The universe is God himself projected into Space (and Time). So the universe is the Divine in one aspect or another. You cannot divide the two, making one the creator and the other, his work, the watch-maker and his watch. You put your idea of the Divine upon him and ask, why he has created such a nasty world. If the Divine were to answer, "It is not I, it is yourself ...
... 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 I made the worlds. But... ladder to greater worlds where no world can be. The summit of Mind, greater Life-plane, or subtle Matter are only mediating links—they are not originating planes. If you want to deliver man and earth then, on the spiritual height, "discover the truth of God and man and world", "ascend...into thy timeless self". "Choose destiny's curve and stamp thy will on Time." Then the heaven-worlds disappeared in... "heaven's touch fulfils but cancels not our earth". I am the same Savitri, "the sovereign and the slave of thy desire" "thou art my world" - and "the god I adore". Now the world is given back to us and it is now 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 ...
... Yajna, the Master of the Universe, is the universal living Intelligence who possesses and controls His world; Yajna is God. Agni also is a living intelligence that has gone forth, is srishta , from that Personality to do His work and represent His power; Agni is a god. The material sense sees neither God nor gods, neither Yajna nor Agni; it sees only the elements and the formations of the elements, material... Yet the man exists in the body and thought exists in the look or the gesture. So too Agni exists in the fire and God exists in the world. They also live outside of as well as in the fire and outside of as well as in the world. How do they live in the fire or in the world? As the man lives in his body and as thought lives in the look or the gesture. The body is not the man in himself and the gesture... and the world is not God in Himself but God in manifestation. The man is not manifested only by his body, but also and much more perfectly by his work and Page 522 action, thought is not manifested only by look and gesture, but also and much more perfectly by action and speech. So too, Agni is not manifested only by fire, but also and much more perfectly by all workings in the world,—subtle ...
... the world!" but they really mean "For myself seen in my country!" "For myself seen in humanity!" "For myself imaged to my fancy as the world!" That may be an enlargement, but it is not liberation. To be at large & to be in a large prison are not one condition of freedom. 179) Live for God in thy neighbour, God in thyself, God in thy country & the country of thy foeman, God in humanity, God in tree... performed them. 87) Open thy eyes and see what the world really is and what God; have done with vain and pleasant imaginations. Page 432 88) This world was built by Death that he might live. Wilt thou abolish death? Then life too will perish. Thou canst not abolish death, but thou mayst transform it into a greater living. 89) This world was built by Cruelty that she might love. Wilt thou... tree & stone & animal, God in the world & outside the world, then art thou on the straight path to liberation. 180) There are lesser & larger eternities, for eternity is a term of the soul & can exist in Time as well as exceeding it. When the Scriptures say "śaśwatih samah", they mean for a long space & permanence of time or a hardly measurable aeon; only God Absolute has the absolute eternity. Yet ...
... vigilant action. And the cure is brought about by the Grace. God created this world of ignorance for His joy. Why then disturb Him by the Yoga? You make of this God a personage, quite personal and arbitrary.. . such is not the Truth. But to continue in the same spirit, one can say more truly that God created the world for the individuals to return consciously towards Him. And then... In the context of what happened on the first of January the following lines of "Savitri" become significant: "The superman shall wake in mortal man And manifest in hidden demi-god Or grow into the God-light and God-force Revealing the secret deity in the cave." 1 Yes, undoubtedly this is what is going to happen. 18.4.1969 Isn't disinterested self-giving basically a movement... certainly a greater harmony will be manifested in the material world, in the same way as the terrestrial appearance has changed much with the advent of the human species. 4.1.1969 In other words, Mother, it can be said that the transformation of the human body, the microcosm, will serve the transformation of the material world, the macrocosm. Yes, it is an intellectual way of transcribing ...
... already described,—for that was only a first Yoga of knowledge. There is also a Yoga of action in the illumination of God-experience; works can be made one spirit with knowledge. For works done in a total self-vision and God-vision, a vision of God in the world and of the world in God are themselves a movement of knowledge, a movement of light, an indispensable means and an intimate part of spiritual... knowledge to this one lonely aspect, the renunciation of life and action is your only resource. But God in the world and you in the world are realities; the world and you are true and actual powers and manifestations of the Supreme. Therefore accept life and action and do not reject them. One with God in your impersonal self and essence, an eternal portion of the Godhead turned to him by the love and... then your self; know your true self to be God and one with the self of all others; know your soul to be a portion of God. Live in what you know; live in the self, live in your supreme spiritual nature, be united with God and Godlike. Offer, first, all your actions as a sacrifice to the Highest and the One in you and to the Highest and the One in the world; deliver last all you are and do into his hands ...
... hopes to become a demi god. He now "sees the vast descending might of God." "0 Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world", it is not sure of its road and therefore thou "sayest God is not and all is vain". But man is an infant today, shall he never grow? "In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks". So, in man's imperfect state the Divine is hidden. "In God concealed the world began to be, ... craving of the flesh"; "It came to me from God, to God returns." Even in the degraded forms of love, generally found in life, one finds "a whisper of divinity". One day I shall behold my great sweet world. "Put off the dire disguises of the gods, Unveil from terror and disrobe from sin." We have met and known each other since the world began. Savitri then commanded Death "Advance... humanity is a mask of God". Death cried out: You are living in imagination; how can you force two eternal enemies to join? For example: "Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream" "If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie, "The Real with the unreal cannot mate. He who would turn to God must leave the world; and even "Sages exploring the world-ocean's vasts, Have ...
... The task of the world-redeemer is hard because "the world itself becomes his adversary." "His enemies are beings he came to save." why is this so? Because "This world is in love with its own ignorance," "It gives the cross in payment for the crown". There is an easier and a sun-lit path to God. But few can tread that path. Even if a few souls can escape from ignorance the world cannot be saved... spoke. She brought in her utterance the full burden of suffering that is in the world's dumb heart: "By what pitiless adverse Necessity", "by what random accident or governed Chance", came "the dire mystery of grief and pain?" Is God who created the world, cruel? or is there some antidivine power that thwarts the work of God? How did this duality, these pairs of opposites,—pleasure and pain.; good and... human mind and therefore, ignorantly: Page 299 for Thought is "a light of Ignorance". You can see the world but cannot know the meaning of God in the world. ' "Thy mind's light hides from thee the eternal's thought" "Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God's face." As to suffering—"Where ignorance is, there suffering too must come." "Thy grief is a cry of darkness ...
... becoming & the Will of God in the world. Page 132 × The following sentence was written at the beginning of this essay during revision. It was not worked into the text, and so is given here as a footnote : Nature is Force of Consciousness in infinite Being. The opinion that sees a mechanical world in which consciousness... 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 form, or self-consciousness who perceives, enjoys & conducts... the universal as well as to the particular effect; she has to work out each detail with her eye on the group and not only on the group but the whole kind & not only on the whole kind but the whole world of species. Man, a particular intelligence limited by his reason, is incapable of this largeness; he puts his particular ends in the forefront and neither sees where absorption in them hurts his general ...
... incarnation of the Divine may take place. The Earth has come out of the universe, has evolved out of it as a distinct entity, carrying and developing within it 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... each with his own truth and norm and dominion, ¹ Our dark destinies move under vast laws that nothing diverts, nothing softens. Thou canst not have sudden clemencies that disturb the world, 0 God, Spirit tranquil!-Victor Hugo, A Villequier. Page 275 although, in the higher status, all work together and harmoniously. Even then they do not possess a soul, a psychic... even as a human being is recognisable Page 273 by his body. In spite of variability the form retains its identity. The form changes, for a god has the capacity to act in different contexts at the same time; within his own universe a god is multi-dimensional. The Indian seer and artist often seeks to convey this character of the immortals by giving them a plurality of arms and heads. In ...
... LETTERS TO FLORENCE RUSSELL You are right in seeing a clear sign of the luminously unexpected - that is, of the "Hour of God" - in certain world-events where parties that had looked absolutely irreconcilable have come together to create a new harmony. But much in the world still remains untouched by the breath of the Spirit blowing from - to quote a Wordsworthian expression - An ampler ether... which betokens the subtle presence of Sri Aurobindo within our gross-physical space. The Hour of God has indeed struck - in fact it struck quite a time ago - but the ears of most men are closed. The only thing that somehow has sounded on their dull tympanums is that there should be no third world-war. But it needed the terrific blasts of the Atom Bomb to get this message in. I suppose the Divine... ple beginning the Renaissance, and the Fall of Paris commencing the horror of the Hitlerite Festung Europa. But nothing has moved me so much as the Fall of Florence a few weeks before, initiating God-knows-what new era of inner history and soul-development. It needs a never-forgetting Florentine like Dante to plumb with the triple rhymes of his Divina Commedia the profound cadence of this unexpected ...
... of God and universe is a still more limited view,—he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it; but he is other also than this self or extended infinity of spiritual being which contains and exceeds the universe. All exists here in his world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a self-conception by the supracosmic reality of the Godhead which exceeds all our terms of world and... power and light of the one Godhead. For that seeing too is essential to the God-knowledge; on it is founded the integral turn of the whole being and the whole nature Godwards, the acceptance by man of the works of the divine Power in the world and the possibility of remoulding his mentality and will into the type of the God-action, transcendent in initiation, cosmic in motive, transmitted through the... one Divine, all is Vasudeva, and they worship him not only as the supreme Godhead beyond, but here in the world, in his oneness and in every separate being. They see this truth and in this truth they live and act; him they adore, live, serve both as the Transcendent of things and as God in the world and as the Godhead in all that is, serve him with works of sacrifice, seek him out by knowledge, see nothing ...
... 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 × The Rigveda so speaks... labhate jñānam . "The ignorant who has not faith, the soul of doubt goeth to perdition; neither this world, nor the supreme world, nor any happiness is for the soul full of doubts." In fact, it is true that without faith nothing decisive can be achieved either in this world or for possession of the world above, and that it is only by laying hold of some sure basis and positive support that man can attain... mastery only comes by our union with God, by a merging or dwelling of the personality in the one divine Person and the loss of the personal will in the divine Will. There is a divine Master of Nature and her works, above her though inhabiting her, who is our highest being and our universal self; to be one with him is to make ourselves divine. By union with God we enter into a supreme freedom and a ...
... all works of goodwill that men understand. But if they are told that we want to change the human consciousness, we want to create a new world, oh! the first thing they say is: "Pardon me! Do not speak of God, for if it is God who is doing the work, well, it is God who will give you the means for it and you have no need of our help." I have heard people saying: "If you represent the Divine upon earth... say: "Ah! it is very good", as it is narrated in some religious books, that after having made the world such as it is, the seventh day he looked at it and was extremely satisfied with his work and he rested.... Well, that never! I do not call that God. Or otherwise, follow Anatole France and say that God is a demiurge and the most frightful of all beings. But there is a way out of the difficulty.... thing, an entity that you call God and a world that you call his creation, and you believe these are two different things, one having made the other and the other being under the first, being the expression of what the first has made. Well, that is the initial Page 161 error. If you could feel deeply that there is no division between that something you call God and this something you call ...
... living finite symbols, the Divine through his powers. Or the God- heads are to be revealed, luminously interpreted or in some way suggested to the soul's understanding or to its devotion or at the very least to a spiritually or religiously aesthetic emotion. When this hieratic art comes down from these altitudes to the intermediate worlds Page 477 behind ours, to the lesser godheads or genii... secrets of inner nature which the instrument of science cannot measure. Above all, art takes us beyond reaches of thought and morality and takes us deeper into spiritual truths and into the joy and God in the world as also the beauty and desirableness of the manifestation of divine force and energy in phenomenal creation. Indian art, particularly, provides a ready means through which body, heart and mind... genii, it still caries into them some power or some hint from above. And when it comes quite down to the material world and the life of man and the things of external Nature, it does not altogether get rid of the greater vision, the hieratic stamp, the spiritual seeing, and in most good work - except in moments of relaxation and a humorous or vivid play with the obvious - there is always something ...
... 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... refute the conjecture of the sophist Power of doubt and denial: How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind And bliss can never invade the mortal's heart Or God descend into the world he made ? If in the meaningless Void the creation rose, If from a bodiless Force Matter was born, If Life could climb in the unconscious tree, If green delight break... 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 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 ...
... already described, — for that was only a first Yoga of knowledge. There is also a Yoga of action in the illumination of God-experience; works can be made one spirit with knowledge. For works done in a total self-vision and God-vision, a vision of God in the world and of the world in God are themselves a movement of knowledge, a movement of light, an indispensable means and an intimate part of spiritual... point here is that the modern mind has exiled from its practical motive-power the two essential things, God or the Eternal and spirituality or the God-state, which are the master conceptions of the Gita. It lives in humanity only, and the Gita would have us live in God, though for the world in God; in its life, heart and intellect only, and the Gita would have us live in the spirit; in the mutable Being... knowledge to this one lonely aspect, the renunciation of life and action is your only resource. But God in the world and you in the world are realities; the world and you are true and actual powers and manifestations of the Supreme. Therefore accept life and action and do not reject them. One with God in your impersonal self and essence, an eternal portion of the Godhead turned to him by the love and ...
... secrets of inner nature which the instrument of science cannot measure. Above all, art takes us beyond reaches of thought and morality and takes us deeper into spiritual truths and into the joy and God in the world as also the beauty and desirableness of the manifestation of divine force and energy in phenomenal creation. Indian art, particularly, provides a Page 36 ready means through which... Kalidasa •The Siege of Troy •Homer and the Iliad-Sri Aurobindo and Ilion •Gods and the World •Socrates •Crucifixion •Alexander the Great m •Joan of Arc •Catherine the Great •Uniting Men-Jean Monnet •Arguments for the Existence of God •Marie Sklodowska Curie Page 39 ... spiritually or religiously aesthetic emotion. When this hieratic art comes down from these altitudes to the intermediate worlds behind ours, to the lesser godheads or genii, it still caries into them some power or some hint from above. And when it comes quite down to the material world and the life of man and the things of external Nature, it does not altogether get rid of the greater vision, the hieratic ...
... of god-devoted showering auspiciousness visit uninterruptedly the creatures in the world. The righteous men who are a moving garden of wish-fulfilling trees, are mines of live wish-fulfilling gems, are talking oceans of nectar, The moons sans spots, the suns sans heat,— such righteous men be always kinsmen of all. What more, everyone be perfectly happy in three worlds and... and intimacy. May those who are unethical and sinful be free of that darkness; may the world behold the sun of one’s own righteous conduct; may each and every living creature, each one, whatever he desires or wishes to have be happy in its gainful accomplishment. Let the assembly of those who are God-founded, steady and firm in their beliefs, shower all over and always every kind of benignity;... . May the darkness of evil dissolve, likewise May the sun of right life greet our eyes And whatever every being should prize Shall attain it. May the host of God-loyal saints who shower Eternal goodness on the world dower Everyone always with the righteous power Of their presence. A mobile orchard of wish-granting trees are they, A colony of live, wish-fulfilling diamonds are ...
... × The forests or delightful growths of earth ( vana means also pleasure) are the basis of the mid-world, the vital world in us which is the realm of Vayu, the Life-God. That is the world of the satisfaction of desires. This also is spread out in its full wideness, free from limitation, to receive the Ananda or divine delight by means of the... lord and creator, the Godhead in his creative wisdom and might forming the world and maintaining the law of things in the earth and mid-air and heavens. In the esoteric, in which the physical phenomena of the exoteric become symbols, the infinite Godhead is hymned in his all-pervading wisdom and purity opening the three worlds of our being to the Sun of knowledge, pouring down the streams of the Truth... वरुण प्रियासः ॥८॥ 8) The sin we have done like cunning gamesters who break the law of the play, or have done against the truth or what we have sinned in ignorance, all these cleave far from us, O god, like loose hanging fruits: then shall we be beloved of thee, O Varuna. The Mighty Master of Infinite Wisdom [The Rishi hymns Varuna as the Lord of infinite purity and wisdom who opens our earthly ...
... be the creature born into the world,—these things are impossible even to his absolute omnipotence. To these objections the thoroughgoing dualist would add that God is in his 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... figure for some high manifestation of human power, character, genius, great work done for the world or in the world, and at the worst to regard it as a superstition,—to the heathen a foolishness and to the Greeks a stumbling-block. The materialist, necessarily, cannot even look at it, since he does not believe in God; to the rationalist or the Deist it is a folly and a thing of derision; to the thoroughgoing... of vision. Nor does God rule the world from some remote heaven, but by his intimate omnipresence; each finite working of force is an act of infinite Force and not of a limited separate self-existent energy labouring in its own underived strength; in every finite working of will and knowledge we can discover, supporting it, an act of the infinite all-will and all-knowledge. God's rule is not an absentee ...
... earlier draft) : of the saviours of the world. The earlier draft closes with the following additional paragraph : For, in truth, saviours they will be, as each being of this new type will not live either for himself or for State or society, for the individual ego or the collective ego, but for something much greater, for God in himself and for God in the world. ... a Thought of God, new for us, descending into this world and taking a new form here. And here we come back to our starting point, to our duty of true maternity. For this form meant to manifest the spiritual force capable of transforming the earth's present conditions, this new form, who is to construct it if not the women? Thus we see that at this critical period of the world's life it is no... feels in himself other worlds, other faculties, other planes of consciousness beyond his mental life, they are only as promises for the future, in the same way as the mental possibilities are latent in the monkey. It is true that some men, very few, have lived in that world beyond, which we may call the spiritual; some have been, indeed, the living incarnations of that world on earth, but they are ...
... the Self in his ivory tower of spiritual isolation, but yuktaḥ kṛtsna-karma-kṛt , a many-sided universal worker for the good of the world, for God in the world. For he is a bhakta , a lover and devotee of the Divine, as well as a sage and a Yogin, a lover who loves God wherever he finds Him and who finds Him everywhere; and what he loves, he does not disdain to serve, nor does action carry him away... to all he is equal in spirit; yet is the God-lover the special receiver of his grace, because the relation he has created is different and the one impartial Lord of all yet meets each soul according to its way of approach to him. Desirelessness is the illimitable Spirit's superiority to the limiting attraction of the separate objects of desire in the world; when it has to enter into relations with... in the greatest similarities of the world we find difference of inequality and difference of unlikeness and the adjusted balancings of the world can only come about by a poising of combined unequal weights. Hence the immense importance attached by the Gita in its elements of Karmayoga to equality; it is the nodus of the free spirit's free relations with the world. Self-knowledge, desirelessness, ...
... n.” 388 “Fichte and other Romantics radicalized the Christian apocalyptic”, writes Michael Ley, “the salvation of humanity is no longer the task of God but of Man, in whom God incarnates himself. The new bringers of salvation and redeemers of the world are the Germans … The Germans will build a worldwide empire of the spirit … The Jews incorporate the Antichrist, who must be subjugated … To protect... “do not count any longer in world history”. To the Germans fell the mission once entrusted by God to the Jews. On the shoulders of the Germans rested therefore the salvation of the world. And (once again) the freedom of the individual lay in the voluntary submission to the State, which was to be revered as something divine in an earthly form. Such a kind of thinking, comments Ley, “means factually the... individualization – and if the individual genius was so highly considered by the Romantics, it was because he or she was the channel through which the soul of the Volk could communicate with God, or with the World Soul, or with the universal Spirit. The greatest genius was to be the Leader of the Volk, the Great One sent to do great deeds. Such were some of the themes which later also dominated the mind ...
... before Christianity, there was Hinduism, which accepted that everything, including destruction, suffering, death and all calamities, are part of the one Divine, the one God (it's the image of the Gita, the God who "swallows" the world and its creatures). There is that, here in India. There was the Buddha, who on the other hand, was horrified by suffering in all its forms, decay in all its forms, and... is that the son (to use their language), the "son of God" came to give his message (a message of love, unity, fraternity and charity) to the earth; and the earth, that is, those who govern, who weren't ready, sacrificed him, and his "Father," the supreme Lord, let him be sacrificed in order that his sacrifice would have the power to save the world. That is how they see Christianity, in it's most co... there is only one policy worth following, that of Sri Aurobindo. And he wants a message from me. Here it is: "O India, land of Light and spiritual knowledge, wake up to your true mission in the world. Show the way to union and harmony." I deliberately didn't use the word peace ; I said harmony . I don't want to say peace , because for them, peace means to utter platitudes to other nations ...
... is the arch-enemy of man, the eternal foe 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... immortality, seek not for permanence in the things of this world that pass and are not.” In the words of Christ, "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on” , there is an implicit denunciation of desire and an ardent advocacy of a complete dependence on God. We find, therefore, that, whatever its spell on deluded... he now crave or covet ? What gain will elate and what loss depress him ? Perceiving the underlying unity of all 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 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... exceed all bounds, To feel the world a toy between our hands! Yet now enough that I have seized one current Of the tremendous Force that moves the world. 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... They call a world, this thing that turns and turns And shrieks and bleeds and cannot stop, this victim Broken and living yet on its own wheel, And if a Will created this, what name Shall best blaspheme against that tyrant God? Let all men seek it out and hurl it up Against Him with one cry, if yet perchance Complete denial may destroy His life With happy end to His unhappy world. For where ...
... manuscript, shows the structure of this proposed work: Part I The Upanishad Part II The First Movement—God, Life & Nature Part III The Second Movement—Brahman Self Blissful and All-Blissful Part [IV] The Third Movement—God in World—Vidya & Avidya Part [V] The Fourth Movement—Surya & Agni Part [VI] The Divine Life Of these six... or revised for publication. All were discovered among his manuscripts after his passing and subsequently transcribed and published in various journals and books. Isha Upanishad : All that is world in the Universe . Circa 1902. Sri Aurobindo abandoned this work after a few pages. There is no full stop after the last word written. The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English. Circa ...
... Moreover, my packages were heavy. They were heavy and they so saddled my arms that I was unable to hold onto anything and had constantly to do a balancing act. Then I began thinking, 'My God, how complicated this world is!' And just at that moment, I saw a young person coming along, like a young girl dressed in European clothes, with a hat on her head ... all black! This young person had white skin, but... dreadful confusion. But from next week people will start leaving. The crowning day will be January 6, which is Epiphany (but we have made it into a day for the offering of the material world to the Divine: the material world giving itself to the Divine)—it will be the climax , 2 and I shall then see you on the 7th. After that, we'll work hard! But until then, no work—my head's in a kind of soup ...... all in black. Like complete unconsciousness. She also came carrying packages (many more than me), and she came hopping along the whole length of the scaffolding, putting her feet just anywhere! 'My God,' I said to myself, 'she's going to break her neck!'—But not at all! She was totally unconscious; she wasn't even aware that it was dangerous or complicated—a total unconsciousness. But her unconsciousness ...
... be light and peace in all the worlds. 44 Savitri moved still onwards and entered the "night of God," a region beyond knowledge and wisdom, outside the pale of any human light and love. Here, she realised that, Her self was nothing, God alone was all, Yet God she knew not but only knew he was. A sacred darkness brooded now within, The world was a deep darkness great and... eventual fulfilment of her mission even When God comes out to meet the soul of the world. 32 As she finished, there came a voice — the Asuric antithesis growing ego-like in the mind of the human person that claimed allegiance both of earth and the wide heavens. It was the voice of the dwarf Titan, the cry of The Ego of this great world of desire. 33 It represents that part... baulked in this splendid effort to help himself and humanity. An immeasurable pathos was reflected in his voice: I am the mind of God's great ignorant world Ascending to knowledge by the steps he made; I am the all-discovering Thought of man. I am a god fettered by Matter and sense... A smith tied to his anvil and his forge. 41 Man has succeeded in mapping the heavens ...
... It is a force of Conscious Being manifesting itself in forms and movements and working out exactly as it is guided, from stage to stage, the predetermined progress of our becoming & the Will of God in the world. The essential tenets of Hinduism What are the essential tenets of Hinduism? Hinduism is founded upon three basic ideas or rather three fundamentals of the highest and widest... 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 intermediate truths of a supraphysical existence between the consciousness of the physical world and the ineffable superconscience of the Absolute... 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 ...
... expressed, he is like a blissful self and our support. 28 देवो न यः पृथिवीं विश्वधाया उपक्षेति हितमित्रो न राजा । पुरःसदः शर्मसदो न वीरा अनवद्या पतिजुष्टेव नारी ॥३॥ 3) He is like a God upholding the world and he inhabits earth like a good and friendly king: he is like a company of heroes sitting in our front, dwelling in our house; he is as if a blameless wife beloved of her lord. तं... He unravels the nights and uncovers the stable and the moving; for this is the one God who envelops with himself the grandeurs of all the Gods. आदित् ते विश्वे कतुं जुषन्त शुष्काद् येद् देव जीवो अनिष्ठाः । भजन्त विश्वे देवत्वं नाम ऋतं सपन्तो अमृतमेवैः ॥२॥ 2) All cleave to 9 thy will of works when, O God, thou art born a living being from dry matter. All enjoy the Name, the Godhead; by... knower, these worlds, and the birth of the Gods, and mortal men. वर्धान्यं पूर्वीः क्षपो विरुपाः स्थातुश्चरथमृतप्रवीतम् । अराधि होता स्वर्निषत्तः कृण्वन् विश्वान्यपांसि सत्या ॥४॥ 4) Many nights of different forms have increased him, the Fire who came forth from the Truth, who is the stable and the moving: the Priest of the call, he is achieved for us, seated in the sun-world, 18 making ...
... , he immediately explained, in his Wherefore of the Worlds , that the world is the fruit of Desire—God's desire. Yet Sri Aurobindo says (in simple terms), 'God created the world for the Joy of the creation,' or rather, 'He brought forth the world from Himself for the Joy of living an objective life.' This was Theon's thesis too, that the world is the Divine in an objective form, but for him the origin... out that in one case the world is reprehensible and in the other it is adorable! And that makes all the difference. To the whole European mind, the whole Christian spirit, the world is reprehensible. And when THAT is pointed out to them, they can't stand it. So the very normal, natural reaction against this attitude is to negate the spiritual life: let's take the world as it is, brutally, materially... wasn't interested. I was interested in the result, in the inner change: how my attitude towards the world changed, my position relative to the creation—that interested me from my infancy; how what seemed to be quite ordinary incidents could so completely change my relationship with that whole little world of children. And it was always the same thing: instead of feeling burdened, with a weight on your ...
... – “Buddha and Shankara supposed the world to be radically false and miserable; therefore escape from the world was to them the only wisdom. But this 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... has to turn the eye of a resolute inquisition; when he is told that this is the sacred truth of things or the command of God or the immemorial order of human life, he has to reply: ‘But is it really so? … And of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts of the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of truth, with my experiences of reality?’ And if it does not the revolting ... part of himself he belongs to the nation, by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity. And even there is a part of him, the greatest, which is not limited by humanity; he belongs by it to God and to the world of all beings and to the godheads of the future.” 32 “But in addition there is this deeper truth which individualism has discovered, that the individual is not merely a social unit; ...
... different and potent, not to say miraculous, values. “Saviours appeared everywhere”, remembers Sebastian Haffner, “people with long hair and hair shirts, declaring that they had been sent by God to save the world. The most successful in Berlin was a certain [Louis] Häusser, who used posters and mass meetings and had many followers. His Munich counterpart, according to the press, was a certain Hitler... The Roots of Nazism The Roots of Nazism 11. The German Aspiration Hitler and his God Things Visible and Invisible It is a symptom of the confusion in the Western “consensus mentality”, supposedly materialistic and scientific, that occultism remains a subject of suspicion while millions accept the occult ceremonies of their Churches without questioning... writes Detlev Rose. “The liberal-enlightened idea of human thought and action solely guided by the intellect is nothing more than wishful thinking. Who does not want to accept that thought conceptions, world views and impulses to act are also determined by irrational forces, fails to recognise an elementary part of the realities of life.” 652 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in his unanimously appreciated The ...
... the Upanishads use among other images this very symbol of the Fire? "As one Fire has entered into the world and taken shapes according to the various forms in the world," so the one Being has become all these names and forms and yet remains the One. Heraclitus tells us precisely the same thing; God is all contraries, "He takes various shapes just as fire, when Page 228 it is mingled with... microcosm of the same motion and instability Existences are "all becomings"; the Self-existent Atman, Swayambhu, has become all becomings, ātmā eva abhūt sarvāṇi bhūtāni . The relation between God and World is summed up in the phrase, "It is He that has moved out everywhere, sa paryagāt "; He is the Lord, the Seer and Thinker, who becoming everywhere—Heraclitus' Logos, his Zeus, his One out of which... immortal Fire. Something that is eternal, that is itself eternity, something that is for ever one,—for the cosmos is eternally one and many and does not by becoming cease to be one,—something that is God (Zeus), something that can be imaged as Fire which, if an ever-active force, is yet a substance or at least a substantial force and not merely an abstract Will-to-become,—something out of which Page ...
... How canst thou force to wed two eternal foes ? How shall thy will make one the true and the false?... The Real with the unreal cannot mate. He who would turn to God, must leave the world; He who would live in the Spirit must give up life... (Savitri, Book X, Canto III, p. 635) The denial of the exclusive spiritual seeker has been equally categorical... claim — that this manifested world is fundamentally and unchangeably a world of Ignorance, ajñānāt-maka visva, transient and full of suffering, anityam asukha ṁ lokam, devoid of any essential reality, saṁsārameva niḥsāram, the only sensible and legitimate task before man is to find out some way of escape from the discordant falsehood of this manifested world, saṁsāra, into the eternal... The Destiny of the Body Chapter V The Double Denial 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. (Savitri, Book I, Canto IV, p. 55) (A) The Materialist Negation Matter on the firm earth sits strong ...
... 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 surrender of the mind, therefore, means, in the Integral Yoga, a surrender of all its faculties. and functions into the hands of the divine Mother, so that She may, in Her inscrutable but... 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 Page 112 instrument in the hands... undetected self (ego) even in what is deemed as selfless,—it must be definitely and authentically God- willed and God-directed. The soul of man belongs neither to any society, nor to any nation, nor to any country, nor even to humanity,—it belongs solely and eternally to God; and to be dynamically united with God in life and be to Him "what his own hand is to man", is the purpose of its descent into mortal ...
... source and goal of their power and endeavour. All our objective workings move out towards him in the world and make him their object, initiate a service of God in the world of which the controlling power is the Divinity within us in whom we are one self with the universe and its creatures. For both world and self, Nature and the soul in her are enlightened by the consciousness of the One, are inner and... To the soul that thus knows, adores, offers up all its workings in a great self-surrender of its being to the Eternal, God is all and all is the Godhead. It knows God as the Father of this world who nourishes and cherishes and watches over his children. It knows God as the divine Mother who holds us in her bosom, lavishes upon us the sweetness of her love and fills the universe with her forms... still less can it see him in the objective world on which it looks out from its prison of separative ego through the barred windows of the finite mind. It does not see God in the universe; it knows nothing of the supreme Divinity who is master of these planes full of various existences and dwells within them; it is blind to the vision by which all in the world grows divine and the soul itself awakens ...
... Delight of Existence. If with life death were also an illusion then both get dissolved in that Nothing, making room for God’s immortality in God’s way. That was the culmination of Savitri’s Yoga, in Sri Aurobindo's epic, in the conquest of God who had become Death in the twilight world of this enormous Void of Consciousness. Page 66 ... away God from this world. He saw everything in the scriptures only from this point of view and interpreted these accordingly. The haunting problem of the ultimate reality, “of the unreal there is no being and of the real there is no non-being” (The Gita: 2.16) he chose to tackle in his own way. Finally he arrived at the unreality of this changing world in contrast... 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 grown in this milieu of Brahminical Adwaitism and generally accepted its formulations. Indeed, he is interpreting the Gita in the Shankarite way in which there is no place for a personal God, in which ...
... idea of God made me furious." Hearing Mirra, God in his heaven must have laughed in his beard. He had other ideas about this young lady who said, "I believed in nothing but what I could touch and see." Mirra's hands were now to touch immaterial things, and the eyes she had so meticulously trained were now to become doors through which world after world would come bursting into sight. God was... otherwise — I was already past twenty —I said, 'Oh, really? Is that so?'" Mother laughed. "And then when he told me all about Théon's teachings and the 'Cosmic Life' and about the inner God and a new world that would be a world of beauty and, at least, of peace and light . . . well, I rushed into it headlong." After a moment she went on, "But even at the time I was told: 'It depends upon YOU alone, not... have said, 'God? What's this foolishness! He does not exist.' Mentally, an absolute refusal to believe in a 'God'." This refusal stemmed from a sort of misunderstanding. "Up to the age of twenty-five or so, I knew of no other God than the God of religions, the God as men have made him, and I would not have him at any price. I denied his existence, but with the certainty that if such a God did exist ...
... on an unfinished world Assailed by thee and of its road unsure, Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives, And sayest God is not and all is vain. How shall the child already be the man? 3 Savitri says that Death is looking at the unfinished world. Here Sri Aurobindo has indicated the dynamic concept of Godhead. God did not create a finished world and is now resting... that the world by itself makes no meaning; for, it can never speak the language of the Spirit. We may describe the world as a symbol of the Real, but the Real can never be put in a symbol. But even though the world mispronounces and misspels the language of the Spirit, there are hidden in it the intimations of the true and the real. She says that "the world is not cut off from Truth and God." 42 ... mortal's heart Or God descend into the world he made?... I have discovered that the world was He; I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self, But I have loved too the body of my God. I have pursued him in his earthly form. A lonely freedom cannot satisfy A heart that has grown one with every heart: I am a deputy of the aspiring world, My spirit's liberty ...
... to it no other salvation. But Nature is the will of the all-Wise God and she is not working out a reduction of the world to absurdity. She knows her goal, she knows that man as he is at present is only a transitional type; and so far as she can consistently with the survival of the type, she presses forward to what she has seen in God's eternal knowledge as standing beyond. From this ego, she moves towards... and possessing Page 115 human nature. The prophets have spoken & the Avatars have descended always for the one purpose, to call us to God, to inspire us to this great call on our upward straining energies or else to prepare something in the world which will help to bring humanity nearer to the goal of its difficult ascending journey. It may seem at first sight that there is no need for... labour of evolving at least a part of humanity temperamentally equal to the effort and intellectually, morally & physically prepared for success. Nature moves toward supernature, Yoga moves towards God; the world-impulse & the human aspiration are one movement and the same journey. Page 121 ...
... otherwise (I was already past twenty), I said, "Oh, really? Is that so?" ( Mother laughs ) And then when he told me all about Théon's teachings and The Cosmic Life and about the inner God and a new world that would be a world of beauty and (at least) of peace and light... well, I rushed into it headlong. But even then I was told: "It depends on YOU alone, not on circumstances—above all, don't blame ... and almost be a pastime—just imagine yourself talking to children and telling them the most beautiful story in the world. And it's true! It is the most beautiful fairy tale in the world. There's none more beautiful. I am going to tell you the most beautiful story in the world.... I'll do my best. I'll try. ( Mother then asks Satprem various questions about his japa, and, after a... to will, but it has nothing to do with thought, it's a feeling: I wanted to take you into the experience. And it was shown to me—literally shown—that your whole relationship with the inner and outer worlds is situated here ( gesture above the head ); that's why it is so well expressed through intellectual activity. But here ( gesture to the solar plexus ) there's not much. And I was seeing this, you ...
... justify the actions of its God, whoever he is supposed to be. Sri Aurobindo considered the problem as follows in The Life Divine : “God being All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we say that pain 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 Love whom we... 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 in view of the existence of evil.” The definition... for His creatures, but Himself stands above and unaffected by them, watching, ruling, doing His will with a suffering and struggling world or, if not doing His will, if allowing the world to be driven by an inexorable law … then not God, not omnipotent, not all-good and all-loving.” The Vedanta , on the contrary, establishes that “all that is, is He. If then evil and suffering exist, it is He that bears ...
... cosmic deal-ings of the Spirits of Destruction and Ignorance: the sharpness, the assiduous cunning, the greedy competition with God's work in the world, the alert exploitation of man's folly and frailty. The term "frailty" recalls to me lines of another poet, indicative of God's work through the cosmic process: There is no haste in heaven, no frailty mars The very quiet business of the stars.... dwells near the dark end of things, or The One by whom all live, who lives by none, or that tremendous statement of Savitri's whole dynamic being against the argued sophistries of Yama, the God of Death, that passionate refusal to be overwhelmed by the mere Reason which can destroy but cannot build: I am, I love, I see, I act, I will. Effects like these are as good as impossible in... word is three syllables. The same can hardly be said of an English word. There are thousands of lines in English which are most effectively monosyllabic. There is Shakespeare's: And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain — in Hamlet's last words to Horatio, a line which is one of the glories Page 56 of poetic expression, summing up a universal experience in the simplest words ...
... -120?) in De For-tuna Romanorum 8 there is inscriptional evidence going back to the time of Augustus for the use of euangelion in connection with the imperial cult: 'The birthday of the god was for the world the beginning of tidings of joy [euangelion] on his account.'* Gerhard Friedrich has summarized what the term implied when associated with the saving power and person of the emperor: ... Age. What is most striking as between the two illustrious contemporaries is that just as Jesus came to be called the Son of God, worshipped as divine and considered mankind's Saviour as well as the inaugurator of a new era moving towards the Kingdom of God, Augustus was heralded by poets like Virgil as the creator of a Golden Age of peace and prosperity and accepted worship from the East... with "all the world" according to "a decree from Caesar Augustus", which was passed "when Cyrenius was governor of Syria". By our present computation of the Christian era both these statements are inaccurate - except for the broad contemporaneity of Jesus and Augustus and for the fact that Jesus' birthplace Bethlehem fell within the empire - termed at that time "all the world" - of the latter ...
... Mind is not the power that could create the world. It is sometimes said : Infinite Mind —meaning God's mind—created the world. But then infinite mind is not mind at all. An infinite human mind would only create infinite chaos. An infinite, Omnipotent mind would not be mind. What seems to be at work in the universe is Something more than mind and life. "The world expresses a foreseen Truth, obeys a pre... law ? In that case we could have a world of chance, of chaos, a world in which things are in a mess. Instead, we find a world which, in spite of all the elements of disharmony, conflict, pain and evil, is a world in which working of a law is discoverable by our mind. The 'law' that the mind perceives may not be the law accepted by the Infinite in creating the world. What do we mean by a 'law'... 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 Sri Aurobindo's vision the world is self-determination of the Supreme Knowledge, power and wisdom in the higher Nature. This world is not a creation of the lower m ā y ā working in the opposition to the Higher. Creation is not ...
... continues to know and see God in the finite Page 517 and be a channel of God-consciousness and God-action in the world; therefore the knowledge of the world and the enlarging and uplifting of all that appertains to life comes within his scope. Only, in all he sees God, sees the supreme reality, and his motive of work is to help mankind towards the knowledge of God and the possession of the... the supreme reality. He sees God through the data of science, God through the conclusions of philosophy, God through the forms of Beauty and the forms of Good, God in all the activities of life, God in the past of the world and its effects, in the present and its tendencies, in the future and its great progression. Into any or all of these he can bring his illumined vision and his liberated power of... 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 ...
... the life and the emotion and which has had its bounds broken and its narrownesses condemned by the free light of intellectual thought: this will be rather an illumined self-knowledge and God-knowledge and a world-knowledge too which transmuted in that greater light will spiritualise the whole view and motive of our existence. That is the one development to which an accomplished intellectualism can... a vision of inmost things and therefore a changed vision of the world and life and the untold potentialities of the soul's experience. It will restore to us the sense of the Eternal, the presence of the Divine which has been taken from us for a time by an intellect too narrowly and curiously fixed on the external and physical world, but it will not speak of these things in the feeble and conventional... 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 vital soul of the natural world and a response of the moved sensation and emotion of the life-spirit in us and out of this arose an intellectual ...
... from the world and from life in all its aspects is. “Buddha and Shankara supposed the world to be radically false and miserable; therefore escape from the world was to them the only wisdom. But this world is Brahman, the world is God, the world is Satyam, the world is Ananda; 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... holds the world in the hollow of his hand. And meanwhile the fierce forward labour of mankind tormented and oppressed by the Powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle and the word of its prophet.” 48 – “Every time a god has taken a body, it has always been with the intention of transforming the earth and creating a new world. But till... mincing his words: “The world abounds with Scriptures sacred and profane, with revelations and half-revelations, with religions and philosophies, sects and schools and systems. To these the many minds of a half-ripe knowledge or no knowledge at all attach themselves with exclusiveness and passion and will have it that this or the other book is alone the eternal Word of God and all others are either ...
... of the traditional proofs of the existence of God has greatly diminished in modern times. No one, remarks the late Prof. Pfleiderer, now holds it possible to prove the divine existence from an abstract conception of God, or, from an abstract conception of the world, to reach by inference a God who is separate from the world. 3 Nor can it be said that these proofs have ever played a part in producing... reflexion to the idea of God, we have to reverse the order in which we have taken the proofs. The evidences of design, which he seemed to find in the world around him, led man in the first instance to think of a designer, and this designer he identified with God. Further reflexion served to show that the argument must be extended to embrace the world as a whole, and the world, it was inferred, must have... desire satisfied. Now, for Kant, virtue and happiness belong to two different worlds, the former to the intelligible and the latter to the phenomenal world. How can the union of these diverse elements demanded by the Supreme Good be assured? Kant replies by the postulate of God as the teleological ground of both worlds: God then guarantees the union of virtue and happiness, and therefore the realisation ...
... whatever world-action without any fall from his oneness with the divine Self, without any loss of his constant communion with the Master of existence. 5 This knowledge translated into the affective, emotional, temperamental plane becomes a calm love and intense adoration of the original and transcendental Godhead above us, the ever-present Master of all things here, God in man, God in Nature... religion. Even illusionist Mayavada with its ultralogical intolerance of action and the creations of mentality had to allow a provisional and practical reality to man and the universe and to God in the world in order to have a first foothold and a feasible starting-point; it had to affirm what it denied in order to give some reality to man's bondage and to his effort for liberation. But the weakness... contact and union with our human existence and by all essential ways of our nature and of 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 ...
... 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 his being... omnipotent and omniscient God in view of the existence of evil and suffering. 14 In The Life Divine he formulates the problem as follows: “God being All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we say that pain 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 Love whom... to say without any reserve, like the Indian, that this enigmatic World-Power is one Deity, one Trinity, to lift up the image of the Force that acts in the world in the figure not only of the beneficent Durga, but of the terrible Kali in her blood-stained dance of destruction and to say, ‘This too is the Mother; this also know to be God; this too, if thou hast the strength, adore.’” 6 Therefore: ...
... counter-balance and dominate in our hearts the glory of the world that is coming into view. And so that we should triumph over the world with You, come to us clothed in the glory of the world." The cosmic has burst upon the Teilhardian vision, particularly the infinite multitudinous unity which is the evolving cosmos of modern science. And the God whom he invokes for adoration is the Cosmic Christ, who;... that immensity itself the glorious manifestation of his own universality. We are called beyond the God-Man to a God-World. An enormously enlarged Christianity is offered to us. And Teilhard's summing up 9 runs: "The great mystery of Christianity is not exactly the appearance, but the transparence of God in the universe. Yes, Lord, not only the ray that strikes the surface, but the ray that penetrates... universal Presence which goes beyond the traditional omnipresent God of Christianity and, if there is, whether it has to be named "Christ" and nothing else. The very first sentence provides the answer, and the answer contradicts the assertion of the last three. Teilhard has actually stated that Blessed Angela's exclamation, "The world is full of God", could arise because not only the Redeemer, but also the ...
... infinitesimal and the immense: energy—that floating, universal entity from which all emerges and into which all falls back as into an ocean; energy, the new spirit; the new god. So, as the world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal. 75 There is also in de Chardin's thought the same apparent ignoration of the problem of pain and evil that we find in Sri Aurobindo's... 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, then his philosophy, art, science, ethics, social existence... (active, passive, neutralising) are in perfect harmony; but down the scale of creation (or 'involution', as Sri Aurobindo would prefer to call it), the forces separate, mingle, clash, and the divers worlds—the suns, the planets, etc.—come into being. But even as evolution is possible and is actually proceeding, it is also possible to go up the Ray of Creation and reach the highest state ...
... upholding and protection is or else formulates itself as the Mother of the worlds, Luxmi or Durga. Or beneficent even in the mask of destruction, it is Chandi or it is Kali, the dark Mother. The One Godhead manifests himself in the form of his qualities in various names and godheads. The God of divine love of the Vaishnava, the God of divine power of the Shakta appear as two different godheads; but in... cal ordinance. That narrow absurdity prances about as the one true religion which all must accept on peril of persecution by men here and spiritual rejection or fierce eternal punishment by God in other worlds. This grotesque creation of human unreason, the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty, obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the free and supple mind... approach to the Eternal and Infinite. The Infinite is full of many infinities and each of these infinities is itself the very Eternal. And here in the limitations of the cosmos God manifests himself and fulfils himself in the world in many ways, but each is the way of the Eternal. For in each finite we can discover and through all things as his forms and symbols we can approach the Infinite; all cosmic ...
... easy and trenchant solutions; it has generated and fixed deeply the tendency of religions and of schools of Yoga to separate the life of the world from the inner life. The powers of this world and their actual activities, it is felt, either do not belong to God at all or are for some obscure and puzzling cause, Maya or another, a dark contradiction of the divine Truth. And on their own opposite side... fortune. The endless difficulties that arise from the environing world are dismissed by erecting firmly against them a defence of outer physical and inner spiritual solitude; safe behind a wall of inner silence, he remains impassive and untouched by the world and by others. To be alone with oneself or alone with the Divine, to walk apart with God and his devotees, to entrench oneself in the single self-ward... desire, not for its own separate sake, but for God in the world and for the Divine in ourselves; it has to fix itself upon no personal spiritual gain, though of all possible spiritual gains we are sure, but on the great work to be done in us and others, on the high coming manifestation which is to be the glorious fulfilment of the Divine in the world, on the Truth that has to be sought and lived and ...
... of Truth And Mind can never see the soul of God." 53 Because "On the ocean surface of vast Consciousness Small thoughts in shoals are fished up into a net But the great truths escape her narrow cast." 54 But "Mind is not all his tireless climb can reach, There is a fire on the apex of the worlds, There is a house of the Eternal's Light."... sincere seeker should not falter at the last step. He should clearly see that "Its [reason's] limit is reached, its function is finished when it can say to man, 'There is a Soul, a Self, a God in the world and in man who works concealed and all is his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His minister I have been, slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until... now-famous statement of Leopold Kronecker made at a meeting in Berlin in 1886: "Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles undere ist Menschenwerk." ("The integer numbers have been made by God, everything else is the work of man.") Consider next the case of fluxions and infinitesimals introduced by Newton and Leibnitz in the building up of the Differential and the Integral Calculus ...
... evolution. Every experience and outer Page 27 contact with our world-environment, however, trifling or disastrous, is used as an occasion and opportunity for the yogic work, and every inner experience becomes a step on the path to perfection. 'And we 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,... Transformation for humanity. It is in this context that Sri Aurobindo has previsaged the coming of world unity and of the spiritual age for mankind. The advent of the supramental at the present critical hour is for Sri Aurobindo the key to the gates of the New Future. And the present hour is for him the Hour of God, the hour of decisive change, advent and manifestation. Indeed, it has been affirmed that the... subject to the world-self, a mirror of the universal existence, consciousness, power, delight, but not their full participant or possessor. . . .'12 While the psychic is the inmost and deepest being in us, the spiritual is the higher and transcendental. While the psychic life is the life immortal, endless time, limitless space, ever progressive change, unbroken continuity in the world of forms ...
... consider the success sufficiently tempting for him to ignore the next life and risk whatever might be the consequences after his own death, whatever the punishment meted out by God in the Page 285 other world. The passage is very effective in expression and is regarded as high poetry by the critics. But, as they have noted, it has a sibilant hissing quality rather than the quality of... and half her side — A thing to dream of, not to tell. This is pretty abstract as far as details go, but the removal of the state of Lady Geraldine's body from any this-world possibility to the possibilities of a world of nightmare confers extra effectiveness. When Shelley read the passage he fainted! This incident is one of the two on record in which lines of poetry produced a bodily effect... was an Arab chief, a Sheikh of the desert, who had joined hands with T.E. Lawrence when this Arabianised English-man rallied the Bedouins against the Germans and their allies the Turks in the First World War. That Arab chief was so angry with the Germans that, when he remembered that the false teeth which he had been wearing for years had come from a dental firm in Berlin, he pulled them out and, with ...
... Arjuna is called, explains Sri Aurobindo, …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 lowness of being and on its heights, God on the topmost summits, man too upon heights as the Vibhuti and climbing to the last... n must be seen by him as the figure of the Godhead in its steps,—steps that accomplish the cycles of the cosmos on whose spires of movement the divine spirit in the human body rises doing God’s work in the worlds as his Vibhuti to the supreme transcndences. This knowledge has been given; the Time-figure of the Godhead is now to be revealed and from the million mouths of that figure will issue the command... perhaps serves no purpose to know if there is anterior or posterior, that God has front or rear, and therefore, O Master, my obeisances to you that you are at my back. It may so happen that you would be on my backside and hence I would speak of it that way; but it cannot be really said that there is a front or rear for you in the world. It is impossible indeed to enumerate your several limbs and parts and ...
... vision of the Will of God in the material world and a new perspective to the goal of human existence. Union with the Divine, she holds, is the first objective in spiritual life, but the ultimate aim and the glorious consummation of human existence, the very meaning and purpose of human birth, is the manifestation of the Divine in man and the fulfilment of His Will in the world. The legendary... its unthinkable eternity, consented to bear the cross of human life and labour in the darkness of the material world, so that even here, on these very shores, in the very midst of the darkness, the divine Light may be lit and shine undimmed, and a divine humanity manifest the glory of God. It is the Grace that has invaded Gethsemane, so that Gethsemane itself may be transformed into Heaven. It is... the two, the unspeakable embrace of God and man in a single being, will elude us. The constant aspiration of the Mother's early life was to be transformed into divine Love. This aspiration finds a vibrant expression in the Prayer of the 27th August, 1914: "To be the divine love, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being—it is for this I cry to Thee ...
... has done up to now, an increasing renunciation of life in the world and culminating in the final disappearance of the soul in the immobile Infinite. That is an eventuality which the Mother does not envisage in her teachings, for it arbitrarily cuts up the unity of existence into two. Light and Life, and ignoring God's purpose in the world, lures the soul away from the field of its divine perfection... knowledge for hastening the earthly transfiguration, for accomplishing Thy sublime work.”¹ If we take a flight to the Infinite, it is not to merge in but to be united with It, and to return to the world with Its force and benediction in order to conquer and transform our material life for Its self- revelation. We cannot, therefore, afford to coerce the mind into a complete inaction and impose upon... ¹ The Science of Living by the Mother, Page 201 the Mother in which the Mother points out some of the normal defects and limitations of the human mind. "The whole mental world in which you live is limited, even though you may not know or feel its limitations, and something must come and break down this building in which your mind has shut itself and liberate it. For instance ...
... " The problem is not why God is subjecting us to pain, but why does an Infinite Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, which is the world Becoming, inflict upon Himself, what we as human beings feel as pain and suffering ? That is the correct way of putting the question. Then, he says, there is some answer possible. Therefore the God of this world is not a moral God, He is superior to moral considerations... is that the world we live in is not an ethical world, just as God is Page 96 not an extra-cosmic person who is away from the cosmos. Look back on the cosmos and you will see that there is no ethics below the human range. Even in the human range ethics is relative. Ethics for the human being is only a temporary stage to be passed through, but ethics is not the aim. A world of force,... 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 world, one says "How is it that He has inflicted ...
... "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you". And sundry poets have affirmed: Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God... 9 The world is charged with the grandeur of God... 10 ...see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour... 11... Early in the first volume, there is a significant affirmation about the mystic relationship between Pure Existence (Being) and World-existence (Becoming): World-existence is the ecstatic-dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of Page 427 the God numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole absolute... spirit; the new god. So, at the world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal. 83 There is also, in Teilhard's treatment of the problem of pain and individual human suffering, the same assumption as in Sri Aurobindo that the incidence of such evil is inseparable from the evolutionary process. Again, both Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin took the material world as seriously ...
... English derivation from the latin is via the adjective ancillaris. That is, we have "ancillary" meaning "subservient", but I can easily imagine an English poet writing: Anciilar to God's will is the world's work. Very interesting indeed is what you say about Dante's verbal innovation. I wonder whether in an English rendering we can incorporate a suggestion of his feat. Laurence Binyon... is experienced directly as a one-pointed love for a Supreme Master or Mother of the world who is stationed at once on some secret altitude and in some arcane profundity. I am reminded of that invocation put by Sri Aurobindo into the. mouth of his Aswapati: 0 radiant fountain of the world's delight, World-free and unattainable above, O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within While... transitive verb - a poetic licence - to render vivid and forceful the transfiguration envisaged of the state, as of a desert, which is behind every human heart's longing in a world of mutabili "this transient and unhappy world", as Sri Krishna puts it in the Gita. The memory of her appearance on that balcony is unfading - an "amaranth" I may call it, a particularly impressive one because those ...
... Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however, trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in... complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, universal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe. {Synthesis of Yoga, Vol. 20, pp. 41-43.) * * * There have been other syntheses in the long history of Indian thought. We start... new forms suitable to the new ages. The creation has descended all the degrees of being from the Supermind to Matter and in each degree it has created a world, reign, plane or order proper to that degree. In the creating of the material world there was a plunge of this descending Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience and an emergence of it out of that Inconscience, degree by degree, until ...
... at least in the form in which it is usually advanced to attract unripe minds. This is the ethical argument by which it is sought to justify God's ways with the world or the world's ways with itself. There must, it is thought, be a moral governance for the world; or at least some sanction of reward in the cosmos for virtue, some sanction of punishment for sin. But upon our perplexed and chaotic earth... stripped of all concealment and cry at him, "O thou wicked one! for if thou wert not evil, wouldst thou in a world governed by God or at least by good, be thus ragged, hungry, unfortunate, pursued by griefs, void of honour among men? Yes, thou art proved wicked, because thou art ragged. God's justice is established." The Supreme Intelligence being fortunately wiser and nobler than man's childishness... terror. Better a strong sinner than a selfish virtuous coward Page 266 or a petty hucksterer with God; there is more divinity in him, more capacity of elevation. Truly the Gita has said well, kṛpaṇāḥ phalahetavaḥ . And it is inconceivable that the system of this vast and majestic world should have been founded on these petty and paltry motives. There is reason in these theories? then reason ...
... instance in that old renowned sentence, brahma satyaṁ jagan mithyā , the Eternal alone is true, the universe is a lie, and 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... infinitely variable Spirit in things carries over all of himself into each form of his omnipresence; the self, the Being is at 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... or the riches of our father Ether. Man began this familiar process of simple cuttings by emphasising his sense of himself as man; he made of himself a being separate, unique and peculiar in this world, for whom or round whom everything else was supposed to be created,—and all the rest, the subhuman existence, animal, plant, inanimate object, everything to the original atom seemed to him a creation ...
... 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... 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. For... the pure consciousness of Purusha these degrees and powers of Nature-force become the material of our impure subjectivity, impure because its action is dependent on the perceptions of the objective world and on their subjective reactions. Buddhi, which is simply the determinative power that determines all inertly out of indeterminate inconscient Force, takes for us the form of intelligence and will ...
... the great Christian theme of "Felix Culpa" - "the Happy Blunder", "the Fortunate Fall" of Adam without which there would have been no need for a Saviour to come on earth, for the "Son of God" to visit man's world in order to atone for the "Original Sin". I recall too a poem of Longfellow's which begins - Page 215 Saint Augustine! well hast thou said That of our vices we can frame... New Year. Our old year climaxed with several falls of abundant snow and the mountains around here still keep their wonderful pure whiteness, which is all so calm and helps the inner calm too. With God's help and protection always things move along well and hopefully for us all to the vistaed future for which we long and pray always." (April 1989) Your wise as well as witty remarks about "t... to its momentous opening part in relation to me - a colossal though tiny-seeming act of grace - may be quoted in extenso tor its remarks on a very promising young Englishman (soon to get killed in World War II) whose letter and picture had been sent from Cambridge by my younger brother, as well as for its sidelight on the Ashram at the rime and the slowly developing Savitri, instalments of which ...
... "celestial yearnings", and song absorbed the heart "linking the human with the Cosmic cry". She mastered "the world-interpreting movements of the dance" which mould "idea and mood to a rhythmic sway and posture." "Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds" 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 step... 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 men responded to her call. Among those who could respond there were very few who felt the divinity that was in her. There were some who felt that she had some hidden splendour... 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 ...
... to it. We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce... material existence and reject it either wholly and physically or in the spirit. It sees this world as the kingdom of evil or of ignorance and the eternal and divine either in a far-off heaven or beyond where there is no world and no life. It separates itself inwardly, if not also physically, from the world's impurities; it asserts the spiritual reality in a spotless isolation. This withdrawal renders... may pour itself out on the world in good deeds, in service, in compassion, the inner Truth in the giving of knowledge, without therefore attempting the transformation of a world which must by its inalienable nature remain a battlefield of the dualities, of sin and virtue, of truth and error, of joy and suffering. But if Progress also is one of the chief terms of world-existence and a progressive ...
... Existence not conscious of itself, but a supreme & self-aware One who exists—absolutely in Himself, infinitely in the world & with an appearance of the finite in His various manifestations in the world. God in Himself apart from all world manifestation or realisable relation to world manifestation is called the Paratpara Brahman, & is not knowable either to the knowledge that analyses or the knowledge... enduring types; partly it moves through a long unrolling series of vicissitudes of change and new formation and 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... 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, three names for one unnameable reality which alone exists. We shall give to this sole real existence the general name of God, because we find it ultimately ...
... and normally lacking any conscious connection with those higher worlds, we feel there is a gap between the two realms, between the higher and lower hemispheres of global existence. The very concrete experience of this gap is at the basis of spiritual paths like Buddhism and Advaita, as it is the cause of the Western view which puts God, the angels and the saints in heaven, and suffering humanity on... attributes of Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This radical reversal by Sri Aurobindo and Mirra of the essential values, declaring the world “worthy” 31 , was based on a spiritual discovery whose time seemed to have come: Supermind, the link between God in his heaven and the human being on his planet. Mirra as well as Sri Aurobindo had come into contact with “an intermediate link between... 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 a too human eidolon ...
... even its very existence, from God" (pp. 25-26). This must imply that God is the sole existence. If so, the world can be nothing except his existence willed and moulded by him to be this or that. You also write: "Every created thing existing in time and space has its 'idea', which exists eternally in the mind of God" and you add that "when the world is created, then God causes these ideas, which exist... dogma of a soul forever different from God and having an existence given to it by God and with no intrinsic existence of its own, with no "ground" of identity with God? There is a summing-up sentence of yours: "The Christian doctrine of creation, as we have seen, maintains that the world does not add anything to the being of God or take anything away. God alone is being, and nothing else 'exists'... its stark form which bars transcendence. I fail to see how genuine panentheism, "all-in-God", can exclude the weltstoff from being in some way one aspect of God's substance. To avoid pantheism's restriction of God to the world-stuff as well as to avoid transcendentalism's division of the world-stuff from God, this all-inclusive philosophy was born. I have always understood it as its originator ...
... you, taken from God's beautiful world!" Chanced! There is no such thing in this creation as chance, thought Sturge. But who then had given him that mystic warning? Who had put the revolver in his hand? or sent him on a mission of slaughter? Who had made Imogen rise just in time? Who had fired that shot in the drawing-room? The God within? The God without? The Easterns spoke of God in a man. This... walk away very quietly. No one will see, no one will hear. God with his fog has blinded and deafened the world. You see it's He or it would not have been so perfectly arranged for me." Very grimly Sturge Maynard smiled. Men who hated each other might, it seemed, have very similar minds. Perhaps that was why they clashed. Well, if it was God, He was a tragic artist too and knew the poetical effectiveness... that had lived, was dead and could not return to life again. He remembered, too, the command in Renée 's eyes. God in a man?—was God in a man a murderer then? In him? and in her? "It is to enquire too curiously to think so," he concluded, "but very strangely indeed has He made His world." Then he told her about the German mystic and the chime of the phantom hour that had brought him to her in ...
... latter with many sadhaks here but I think the sadhana is better without it. Anyhow chaos means an anarchy of disordered forces and the old theory was that out of such a chaos God created a world by imposing order and harmony on the forces. Page 243 THE ASHRAM SADHAKS People believe that drawing down of the higher things is not a desirable... Some parts of my being feel this world as a strange place for them. They think they belong to the higher worlds which have nothing much to do with this earth. So whenever anything of the world pulls them down they do not feel at ease. That would be all right for some other Yoga - this one has as its aim a change of nature in this world. What is meant by this full... There are two different things, (1) The liberated soul. (2) The sadhak who has surrendered his actions to God. The liberated soul is necessarily above shastra. But the sadhak of liberation need not be unless he has surrendered his actions to God. Quite so! To live in the mind and vital and try to reach the Divine through them is religion at the most, it is ...
... the soul may live in oneness with the Divine in a state of knowledge and bliss. In many of the traditional paths of yoga, it is considered necessary to renounce the world, to become a sannyasi, in order to find God because the world is looked upon as unreal, an illusion or Maya, and the aim is to realise the pure Spirit which is the sole Reality. In Sri Aurobindo's view, this ascetic renunciation... 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.' 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... grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep On the Dragon's outspread wings. ... I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart And heard her black mass' bell. I have seen the source whence her agonies part And the inner reason of hell. ... A little more and the new life's doors Shall be carved in silver light With its aureate roof and mosaic floors In a great world bare and bright. ...
... Truth is not in them, nor clean doing, nor faithful observance. They see naturally in the world nothing but a huge play of the satisfaction of self; theirs is a world with Desire for its cause and seed and governing force and law, a world of Chance, a world devoid of just relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true, not founded in Truth. Whatever better intellectual or higher religious dogma... strong, happy, fortunate, a privileged enjoyer of the world; I am wealthy, I am of high birth; who is there like unto me? I will sacrifice, I will give, I will enjoy." Thus occupied by many egoistic ideas, deluded, doing works, but doing them wrongly, acting mightily, but for themselves, for desire, for enjoyment, not for God in themselves and God in man, they fall into the unclean hell of their own... knowledge, a transcendent power, an unfathomable repose. But still there remains the question of the transition; for there must be a transition, a proceeding by steps, since nothing in God's workings in this world is done by an abrupt action without procedure or basis. We have the thing we seek in us, but we have in practice to evolve it out of the inferior forms of our nature. 3 Therefore in the ...
... Page 416 But Savitri replied to the radiant God: In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss Two spirits saved out of a suffering world; My soul and his indissoiubly 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... make this world a vessel of 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... eyes of Death, And Darkness saw God's living Reality. 17 Then a voice was heard from the throat of Savitri, addressed to Death: I hail thee almighty and victorious Death, Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite... Thou art my shadow and my instrument... But now, O timeless Mightiness, stand aside... Release the soul of the world called Satyavan... That he may ...
... the aim of the yoga were to be only an escape from the world to God or to the inactive Brahman or world-negating Nirvana or Nihil, synthesis is unnecessary and a waste of time. But, as Sri Aurobindo points out, if our aim is to attain a complete and harmonious integration and also the transformation of our integral being into the terms of God- Existence, then the synthesis of yoga becomes indispensable... crown of all endeavour of knowledge and works and where knowledge will perfect love and love will perfect knowledge, and they will both lend their powers for perfection and accomplishment of God's work in the world. The essential and the inalienable relationship between knowledge, will and delight will also determine the principle of the synthesis of yoga. It is that synthesis which, in Sri Aurobindo's... he seized upon one yogic method after another and extracted the substance out of it with an incredible rapidity, always to return to the heart of the whole matter, the realisation and possession of God by the power of love, by the extension of inborn spirituality into various experiences and by the spontaneous play of an individual intuitive knowledge. But it is obvious that the process of successive ...
... grammar or sense, and that could be supplied by the editors Foreword As the Isha Upanishad is concerned with the problem of God & the world and consequently with the harmonising of spirituality & ordinary human action, so the Kena is occupied with the problem of God & the Soul and the harmonising of our personal activity with the movement of infinite energy & the supremacy of the universal Will... vital forces? By whom controlled is this word that men speak, and what god set ear & eye to their workings? That which is hearing within hearing, mind of the mind, speech behind the word, he too is the life of vitality & the sight within vision; the calm of soul are liberated from these instruments and passing beyond this world become Immortals... There the eye goes not & speech cannot follow nor the... is in relation with the outside world through the senses, through the vitality, through mind. It is entangled in the mesh of its instruments, thinks they alone exist or is absorbed in their action with which it identifies itself—it forgets itself in its activities. To recall it to itself, to lift it above this life of the senses, so that even while living in this world, it shall always refer itself & ...
... on no more than the fulfilment of that Page 23 Will whatever it may be: psychicisation, spiritualisation or supramentalisation. It should be regarded as the fulfilment of God's working in the world, not as a personal chance or achievement." The letter contains a potent threefold hint of Sri Aurobindo's Avatar-status - the awareness of a pre-existent conscious plenitude as if... the physical stage - we cannot look forward to it in our present lives, but all the marvels on the way to it are within our grasp in the measure of our devotion to the ideal and in accordance with God's vision for our work. From what you write I think you are doing well enough what lies in your power, and that smile of Sri Aurobindo's suggests that he is pleased with you. The detail you mention that ...
... Death: Release the soul of the world called Satyavan... 166 Savitri and Satyavan are Shakti and Shiva, they are Power and Truth; the victory certain, now they will realise its fruits on earth: I know that I can lift man's soul to God, I know that he can bring the Immortal down.... To bring God down to the world on earth we came, To change the earthly... earthly life to life divine... I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds. 167 Urban says truly that the religion of the mystics is, "that the love of man for God is also a love for all humanity...our human love, both for God and man, is also a witness of the love of God for us. In this love divine, all loves excelling, we know the oneness of the Good and of Being which our human reason, while... Savitri. "The great human appeal of idealism", writes Boodin, "has been a call to recreate the world into a better world, with the assurance that a power, greater than ourselves, is on the side of the creators. This call to creativeness involves the challenge that all is not well with the world—that the world needs to be made over." 161 Savitri is both a human power (which is the appearance) and the ...
... to make this weft" (I.164.5). The gods are thus not merely outer, objective powers, but also inner powers, for every time we are "born" to another world, it means, first of all, that we have given birth in us to the god corresponding to that world, or, as we would now say, that we have risen in our consciousness, otherwise there would be no meeting point. And so we give birth to greater and greater... us a path to the Great Heaven, they discovered the Day and the sun-world and the intuitive ray and the shining herds" (I.71.2). "They found the treasure of heaven hidden in the secret cavern like the young of the Bird, within the infinite rock" (I.130.3), "the contents of the pregnant hill came forth for the supreme birth ... a god opened the human doors" (V.45). In the very depths of Matter, that... earth for heaven? But beyond the lower triple world, the Rishis discovered "a certain fourth" turiyam svid , they found the "vast dwelling place." the "sun-world," Swar : "I have arisen from earth to the mid-world [life], I have arisen from the mid-worid to heaven [mind], from the level of the firmament of heaven I have gone to the Sun-world, the Light" (Yajur Veda. 17.67). And it is said, "Mortals ...
... and time, where they are allowed to exist. I do not give any assent to the gloomy doctrine which preaches a world of sorrow and inaction and withdrawal from it as the sole condition of bliss and freedom, which thinks, contrary to all reason and knowledge, that God in himself is blessed, but God in manifestation accursed. I will not admit that the Brahman is a fool or a drunkard dreaming bad dreams, ... choose, you can be shuddha, siddha and everything else, or, if you choose, you can be just the opposite. The first necessity is to believe in yourself, the second in God and the third to believe in Kali; for these things make up the world. Educate the Will first, through the Will educate the Jnanam, through the Jnanam purify the Chitta, control the Prana and calm the Manas. Through all these instruments... But if you can only exercise knowledge when you are in Samadhi, then you will have to become an ascetic or recluse, a man who gives up life or thought. That is a necessity which cuts the unity of God's world into two and makes an unnatural division in what should be indivisible. The Tantric knows that this is not necessary, that Samadhi is a great instrument, but not the only instrument. He so arranges ...
... Canto of the first Book: As if a torch held by a power of God, The radiant world of the everlasting Truth Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge. There is a night between the Overmind and the Supramental Truth-world, and so vast, so deep is it that the Supermind appears above the Overmind... successful future means the supramental change of the world, when the Divine will stand manifest — unveiled in its total perfection. Then she told us: "I do not mean to say that the whole world will at once feel its presence or be transformed; but I do mean that a part of humanity will know and participate in its descent — say, this little world of ours here. From there the transfiguring grace will... think here is a continuation of the highest "radiant world". But when Sri Aurobindo came down to the vital plane and still more when he descended to the physical consciousness for the Page 78 transformative sadhana there, then it became sharply evident that the Overmind was not merely a sub-Supermind. Standing in the world of marked division, the plane where the One is broken ...
... Light of the Spirit, and India's ideal man, the Rishi, is one who has found the supraintellectual and supramental spiritual truth. Such a man can "guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it". 23 This is not very different from the Platonic view, expressed in the Republic, that "until philosophers are kings... and political... a piece of work is a 'man', exclaims Hamlet; "How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" Deep within him, there is a fount of Truth that asks to be tapped, and unless this is done, man will be condemned to go round and round the prickly pear of his... 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 world and in man who works concealed and all is his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His minister I have been, slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until ...
... One. The One God, eko devah, as hiranya-garbha, becomes the All. Some say that this All is not marvels at all, it is nothing but illusion, maya. But for Sethna, disciple of Sri Aurobindo, Behind the false glow dreams the epiphany. (Maya) The vast world of God is not unsubstantial, unreal. He writes, Vain is the immensity of the one God If all that... is but intolerance Of time and life and earth's long cry for love! (Eternity) The All, the world is not an illusion; for there is Page 373 The golden smile of the one Self everywhere! (The Sannyasi) God, as World-Soul, I have told above, has divided himself into the heaven and the earth, and into all dualities, - Beneath... (Turn Your Back) In the Vedic tradition as developed by the Upanishads we find that Brahman that is unknowable becomes isvara, the personal God, the divine Beloved- The next manifestation is hiranya-garbha, the Golden Seed, the World-Soul that becomes, by dividing itself into two halves, the heaven and the earth, the eternal parents of all creatures. And finally It becomes virat ...
... the other, those in which God sends Christ on the world-creative mission - "...my Word, begotten Son, by thee This I perform; speak thou, and be it done! My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee I send along" the world-creative mission which is performed when on the wat'ry calm His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, 129.Bk. III... in Milton about God a little above the lines beginning "Begotten Son, Divine Similitude" and becomes transferable to God's likeness: Immutable, immortal, infinite... 98 And the association, in Blake's poetic consciousness, of what is eternal with eyes that are immortal, is shown in his famous declaration of his "great task": To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal... remembering that in Paradise Lost God as Christ the Son is the Creator: 41 Christ's seeing and work and approval are collocated just as in our reading of The Tyger. Blake's presentation of the idea of approval by means of the act of smiling has also an anticipation in Milton. The anticipation is not in the account either of the battle in Heaven or of world-creation. But still it has to do with ...
... by all. 29 Savitri then returns to earth with Satyavan; she returns to earth bringing with her a new world and thus fulfils her mission: 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. 30 Aswapati and Savitri are the Divine... this baby in Savitri's arms, or Satyavan, is the New World that she is bringing down. So the symbolism is that Savitri is bom as the wife of Satyavan and this union of Spirit and Matter is necessary for the New Creation. Savitri is the daughter of the supreme God; she is the Divine Word, meaning the Creative Power. And, specifically here in Savitri, she is the Word of the Supramental Co... bringer of strength... Misery shall pass abolished from the earth; The world shall be freed from the anger of the Beast, From the cruelty of the Titan and his pain. There shall be peace and joy for ever more. 23 The Asuric and Rakshasic vital forces of man do not recognise the Mother of Might: God imperfect left, I will complete, Out of a tangled mind and half-made ...
... glories of the newly created stellar universe, the Sun full-blazing at noon-day. Here they are: O thou that, with surpassing glory crowned, Look'st from thy sole dominion like the god Of this new World - at whose sight all the stars Hide their diminished heads - to thee I call, OSun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, That bring to my remembrance from what state Ifell, how... Obtruded on us thus? who, if we knew What we receive, would either not accept Life offered, or soon beg to lay it down, Glad to be so dismissed in peace. Can thus The image of God in Man, created once So goodly and erect, though faulty since, To such unsightly sufferings be debased Under inhuman pains? 9 Now, keeping both the passages in mind, with the turns... listen to the lines on old age in Love and Death: Not as a tedious evil nor to be Lightly rejected gave the gods old age, But tranquil, but august, but making easy The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time Still batter down the glory and form of youth And animal magnificent strong ease, To warn the earthward man that he is spirit Dallying with transience, nor by death ...
... abandonment of the world and departure into some reality of supracosmic existence or some form of limited perfection, knowledge, bliss or mastery in the world. But there is a third objective of Yoga in which there is a harmony between world existence & supracosmic freedom. God is possessed; the world is not renounced or rather renounced as an aim in itself, but possessed as the play of God. A selfless and... which enables us to fulfil entirely God's purpose in us in this universe. All Yoga which takes the soul entirely out of world-existence, is a high but narrow specialisation of divine tapasya. Page 359 God's purpose in us is that we should fulfil His divine being in world-consciousness under the conditions of the Lila. With regard to the universe God manifests Himself triply, in the ... a harmony at once single and entire. It is the method Page 357 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 ...
... one God, who transcends the world, and that the aim of life is to commit oneself to Him and to submit to His will. The oneness and transcendence of God is stated again and again throughout the Koran. He is God; there is no god but He. He is the knower of the Unseen and the Visible; He is the All-merciful, the All-compassionate. He is God; there is no god but... remains to this day a virile force through half the world. Is there in Muhammad's message something that can be considered as central? What comes across most powerfully is a deep sense of the one God, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent and correspondingly, the call for surrender to the divine will. The quality of faith, of surrender to the will of God, represents an eternal value in the history of... material that came to hand. An authorised version was finally established some twenty years after the Prophet's death. To this day, that version remains as the authoritative word of God for all the Muslims of the world. Who was this man of such rare destiny? From an historical point of view, little is known about the youth of the Prophet, although many legends exist about it. In one of these ...
... y. The Church sought to build up society on that basis, attempting a fusion of the spiritual and the temporal power, so that instead of a profane secular world, a mundane or worldly world, there maybe established God's own world, the City of God. The drive towards the building of Heaven upon earth and with earth, the materialisation of the Spirit on a cosmic scale, the remodelling of... in life-force what the Rabi of Bethlehem saw and felt in the inner heart--one was a lover, the other a servant warrior of God. Turning to India we find a fuller and completer – if not a global-picture of the whole movement. India, we may say, is the spiritual world itself: and she epitomised the curve of human progress in a clearer and more significant manner. Indian history, not its political... stage of the movement. The whole emotional being 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 ...
... y. The Church sought to build up society on that basis, attempting a fusion of the spiritual and the temporal power, so that instead of a profane secular world, a mundane or worldly world, there may be established God's own world, the City of God. The drive towards the building of Heaven upon earth and with earth, the materialisation of the Spirit on a cosmic scale, the remodelling of the whole... express in life-force what the Rabi of Bethlehem saw and felt in the inner heart—one was a lover, the other a servant warrior of God. Turning to India we find a fuller and completer—if not a global—picture of the whole movement. India, we may say, is the spiritual world itself: and she epitomised the curve of human progress in a clearer and more significant manner. ^ Indian history, not its political... stage of the movement. The whole emotional being 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 ...
... of the Ideas that made the world, And, sown in the black earth of Nature's trance, The seed of the Spirit's blind and huge desire From which the tree of cosmos was conceived And spread its magic arms through a dream of space. Immense realities took on a shape: There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown The bodiless Namelessness that saw God bom And tries to gain... Void Peered out; he saw the hope that never sleeps, The feet that run behind a fleeting fate, The ineffable meaning of the endless dream. As if a torch held by a power of God, The radiant world of the everlasting Truth Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge. Even were caught as through a cunning veil The smile... have seen the beauties and wonders of the higher worlds. Now I think of expressing them in painting by various colours—blues, golds, pinks and whites—with certain vibrations of Light—all in harmony forming the New World. I wish to bring down upon earth this New World. Since I have no time physically, I will paint through you. The world of Supreme Beauty exists. I shall take you there ...
... It is the critical and affirmative intelligence that is most active and not the vision seeing and interpretative. The epic greatness of the soul that sees and chants the self-vision and God-vision and supreme world-vision, the blaze of light that makes the power of the Upanishads, is absent, and absent too the direct thought springing straight from the soul's life and experience, the perfect, strong... farther outward, were taken and transmuted into a psychical form and, so changed, they became the elements of a mystic capture of the Divine through the heart and the senses and a religion of the joy of God's love, delight and beauty. In the Tantra the new elements are taken up and assigned their place in a complete psycho-spiritual and psycho-physical science of Yoga. Its popular form in the Vaishnava religion... psychical symbol created Page 378 by the Puranas, and this assumes its most complete and artistic shape in Bengal and becomes there a long continued tradition. The desire of the soul for God is there thrown into symbolic figure in the lyrical love cycle of Radha and Krishna, the Nature soul in man seeking for the Divine Soul through love, seized and mastered by his beauty, attracted by his ...
... as the world goes on, as a vehicle of divine revelation and a means of awakening other human beings to the great "dual work of the forge and the illumination.” The liberated soul in a liberated, luminous nature—this is exactly what Sri Aurobindo means by the term "Jivanmukta"—works on in the world in an immortalized divine body or in several divine bodies in succession, if that be God's Will, securely... n, discounts, in effect, the Will of God in creation and is doomed to wither out of existence. It may have its fulfilment in some timeless Otherwhere, but none here, in the eternal march of Time. The great gift of the West to the culture of modern humanity is the insistent sense of the significance of Life and its irresistible purpose in the material world. But this purpose cannot be read on the... weak and obscure life of homo sapiens change into an epiphany of Light and Force, once the possibility of such a radical change is admitted ? Renunciation of work spells a 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 ...
... impresses on mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass all the possible means by which man can approach God. It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth which all religions acknowledge that He is in all men and all things and that in Him we move and have our being. ...It is the one religion which shows the world what the world is, that it is the Lila of Vasudeva... with or self-surrender to that within us which rules the world.... This force and energy can be directed to any purpose God desires for us; it is sufficient to knowledge, love or service; it is good for the liberation of an individual soul, the building of a nation or the turning of a tool. It works from within, it works in the power of God, it works with superhuman energy. The reawakening of that... Purusha the Universal Person, on that day the Chariot of Jagannath will come out of the avenues of the world, radiating its light in all directions. Satya Yuga the Age of Truth will descend upon earth; the world of mortal man will become the field for the play of the Divine, the temple-city of God, the metropolis of Ananda. 28 V Sri Aurobindo came out of prison on 6 May 1909 and launched ...
... desire and self-will and doomed to self-torture and error, Came she to birth then with God for her enemy? Were we created He unwilling or sleeping? did someone transgress the fated Limits he set, outwitting God? In the too hasty vision Marred of some demiurge filmed there the blur of a fatal misprision, Making a world that revolves on itself in a circuit of failure, Aeons of striving, death for a ... 1910-1920) Pondicherry (Circa 1910-1920) Two Poems in Quantitative Hexameters Collected Poems Ahana Know more > (Ahana, the Dawn of God, descends on the world where amid the strife and trouble of mortality the Hunters of Joy, the Seekers after Knowledge, the Climbers in the quest of Power are toiling up the slopes or waiting in the valleys. As... one with world-being, Outbursts of vision opening doors to a limitless seeing, Gases and glands and the genes and the nerves and the brain-cells have done it, Brooded out drama and epic, structured the climb of the sonnet, Studied the stars and discovered the brain and the laws of its thinking, Sculptured the cave-temple, reared the cathedral, infinity drinking Wrought manufacturing God and the ...
... prison, So shall you prosper or die as you use or misuse and deceive me. Vast, I descend from God. O world and its masters, receive me! Page 503 The Descent of Ahana - II AHANA Lo, on the hills I have paused, on the peaks of the world I have halted Here in the middle realms of Varuna the world-wide-exalted. Gods, who have drawn me down to the labour and sobs of creation, First I would... rapture, spirits of sweetness and playtime, Thrilled with my honey of night and drunk with my wine of the daytime, If there were strengths that could seize on the world for their passion and rapture, If there were souls that could hunt after God as a prey for their capture, Such might aspire to possess me. I am Ahana the mighty, I am Ashtaroth, I am the goddess, divine Aphrodite. You have a thirst full... kisses; Strength from thy breasts drawing force of the Titans shall unrelaxing Stride through the worlds at his work. One shall drive him ruthlessly taxing Page 502 Sinew and nerve, though our slave, yet seized, driven, helpless to tire, Borne by unstumbling speed to the goal of a God's desire. What shall thy roof be, crown of thy building? Knowledge, sublimely, High on her vaulted ...
... divine Will in one and insists on no more than the fulfilment of that Will whatever it may be, psychisation, spiritualisation or supramentalisation. It should be regarded as the fulfilment of God's working in the world, not as a personal chance or achievement. 20 April 1935 I have been pondering over your letter [pp. 346-47]. I trust I have grown wiser, not less so as a result of the irony in your... done without it—but the transformation is also possible. 26 January 1935 I am disgusted with the world and would have preferred to go away from it to some subtler existence had it not been for your programme of changing the world and bringing some better things into it. But does the world want to change and buy your wares at the heavy cost of giving up all it is and has and does? It wants... wants and it does not want something that it has not got. All that the supramental could give, the inner mind of the world would like to have, but its outer mind, its vital and physical do not like to pay the price. But after all I am not trying to change the world all at once but only to bring down centrally something into it it has not yet, a new consciousness and power. 31 July 1935 It seems ...
... And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love. 33 Her second divinely inspired response: In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss Two spirits saved out of a suffering world; 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... single will opposed the cosmic rule. To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.... This truth broke in in a triumph of fire; A victory was won for God in man, The deity revealed its hidden face. The great World-Mother now in her arose... A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks Empowered to force the door denied and closed Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute... never be erased, It is written in the record book of God... My heart has sealed its troth to Satyavan: Its signature adverse Fate cannot efface, Its seal not Fate nor Death nor Time dissolve... Let Fate do with me what she will or can; I am stronger than death and greater than my fate; My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me Helpless against my immortality ...
... man. The saint discourages them because they seem to him to lead away from God; he shuns them just as he shuns the riches, power & attainments of this world, and for the same reason. We need not shun them and cannot shun them, because God is sought by us in His world-fulfilment as well as apart from the world and in the world these are the riches of His power and knowledge which we cannot avoid, once... knowledge of the world; but the Yogin, reversing the order of the worldly mind, seeks to know Brahman first and through Brahman the world. Scientific knowledge, worldly information & instruction are to him secondary objects, not as it is with the ordinary scholar & scientist, his primary aim. Nevertheless these too we must take into our scope and give room to God's full joy in the world. The methods of... the most of the world. He is the Vishnushakti, as the Brahmana is the Shivashakti & the Kshatriya the Rudrashakti. Shudrashakti कामः प्रेमः दास्यलिप्सात्मसमर्पणमिति शुद्रशाक्तिः । Kamah, premah, dasyalipsa atmasamarpanam iti Shudrashaktih. The Shudra is God descending entirely into the lower world and its nature, giving himself up entirely for the working out of God's lila in Matter & ...
... merit of these views, it is true that Western culture is permeated by the Love Jesus preached and taught as the key to God's Kingdom. The whole world has not been made Christian as Jesus commanded of his disciples, but certainly his Love has played an enormous role in shaping the world as we know it today. Western law to the extent that it is tempered with mercy and seeks social justice reflects... Other Instructions In 6:19-7, Jesus provides further instructions on behaviour for the Kingdom. These touch on total dedication to God, as opposed to worrying about things of this world. Examining oneself carefully rather than examining others is urged; God's generosity in answering prayers is assured; and the Golden Rule (7:12) is given: "Do to others what yon would have them do to you." ... receive life. Jesus (God) loved us so much that He willingly died in utter shame and pain for our sins. On the cross, he bore all the world's sin because of His Love. The cross was the focus of Jesus' mission as a human. His job was not done until he was crucified. The only way to complete His story of love is to love Him in return. Our love for Him is to be shown by Faith in God's (Jesus) sacrifice ...
... the branch of philosophy that deals with first principles esp. of being and knowing. 2. the philosophical study of the nature of reality, concerned with such questions as the existence of God, the external world, etc. 2 The Iliad is an epic poem on the Trojan War traditionally attributed the ancient Greek poet Homer. 3 To annotate: to supply (a written work, such as an ancient text) with... the whole inhabited world for the Macedonians, he found himself deserted and left only with his friends and those who were willing to continue the expedition. These are almost the exact words which he used in his letter to Antipater, and he says that after he had spoken in this way, the whole of his audience shouted aloud and begged him to lead them to whatever part of the world he chose. Once he had... Macedonians to sleep, but himself spent the night in front of his tent in the company of his diviner Aristender, with whom he performed certain mysterious and sacred ceremonies and offered sacrifice to the god Fear. Meanwhile some of the older of his companions and Parmenio in particular looked out over the plain between the river Niphates and the Gordyaean Mountains and saw the entire plain agleam1 with the ...
... eagle peaks! Now this soft valley blooms; Page 641 The cuckoo cries from branches of delight, The bee sails murmuring its low-winged desires. VASUNTHA It was to amuse himself God made the world. For He was dull alone! Therefore all things Vary to keep the secret witness pleased. How Nature knows and does her office well. What poignant oppositions she combines! Death fosters life... certainties are snares, her dreams prevail. What little seeds she grows into huge fates, Proves with a smile her great things to be small! All things here secretly are right; all's wrong In God's appearances. World, thou art wisely led In a divine confusion. ALURCA The Minister Watches this man so closely, he must think There is some dangerous purpose in his mind. VASUNTHA He is the... ? VUTHSA Then rejoice with me That I have found my brother. Joy in my joy, Love with my love, think with my thoughts; the rest Leave to much older wiser men whose schemings Have made God's world an office and a mart. We who are young, let us indulge our hearts. ALURCA Thou tak'st all hearts and givest thine to none, Udaian. Yet is this prince Gopalaca, This breed from Titans and ...
... fulfilled; and still, the sacrifice of works continues; the path becomes the triune way of knowledge, works and devotion. The bhakta who is loved most is the bhakta who has true self-knowledge, God-knowledge and world-knowledge and who is engaged in works as an offering to the Master of self-energising and all-giving sacrifice. That is the path that leads to the state of immortality, the state of union with... bondage in future embodiments." 27 The ritualistic teaching of the Vedavada did not represent the deeper and yogic view of progression towards the highest possible realization of the God-knowledge, world-knowledge and soul-knowledge; the esoteric method of the yoga of the Veda as also of the Upanishad was that of progressive sacrifice of desire leading up to complete elimination of desire so... Yoga and Jnana Yoga, it is necessary to rise above the dualities and become impersonal, equal, one with the Immutable — one with all-existence. As this process develops, self-knowledge, world-knowledge and God-knowledge are enlarged. And with this enlargement, a new element grows more spontaneously and begins to occupy a central position. This new element is the increase in devotion, Bhakti ...
... supposition able either to take the world as practically real and think and act in it or to reject it as an unreality and cease to think and act; I am not compelled to reconcile contradictions, not called on to be conscious of and conscious in something beyond myself and world and yet deal from that basis, as God does, with a world of contradictions. The attempt to be as God while I am still an individual... attributes, which is exactly what the Upanishad says about God who is nirguno guni , with and without attributes, is not admitted by this logic. If formlessness, oneness, infinity of the Brahman are true, then attributes, forms, multiplicity and finiteness of Brahman are false; brahma satyam jaganmithya , 'the Brahman is the sole reality, the world is an illusion' - such a totally ruinous deduction is... power of consciousness that make him man; and yet again he is the 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 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 ...
... Both the verses speak of ultimate rest being found only in God: Dante refers to God in action, Sri Aurobindo to God in pure existence, but, as the next line makes it clear, this God-existence is in connection with a Page 257 life ending not in a cessation of action but in a supreme living, a divine activity in the world as well as beyond. The repose is a consummation, not a quiescence... Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride, Linger not long with thy transmuting hand Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time, As if Time dare not open its heart to God. O radiant fountain of the world's delight World-free and unattainable above, O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within While men seek thee outside and never find, Mystery and Muse of hieratic tongue, ... Then there is that other cry in which a whole world of aching human experience obtains its repose in a resignation one with heroic hope: O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem. Sri Aurobindo has essentially caught its charmed anguish and wisdom in his English version: Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will give ending. Dante also is no mean master ...
... the jeers & reprobation of the world for His sake. Thus by a singular paradox, one of those beautiful oxymorons of which the Hindu temperament is full, we reach God through the senses, just as our ancestors did through the intellect and through the emotions; for in the Hindu mind all roads lead eventually to the Rome of its longing, the dwelling of the Most High God. One can see how powerfully Kalidasa's... as within the wide compass of his greatest. Shakespeare lavishes life upon his minor characters, but in Shakespeare it is the result of an abounding creative energy; he makes living men, as God made the world, because he could not help it, because it was in his nature and must out. But Kalidasa's dramatic gift, always suave and keen, had not this godlike abundance; it is therefore well to note the... with a more beautiful world than our own. These creatures of fancy hardly seem to be an imaginary race but rather ourselves removed from the sordidness & the coarse pains of our world into a more gracious existence. This, I think, is the essential attraction which makes his countrymen to this day feel such a passionate delight in Kalidasa; after reading a poem of his the world and life and Page ...
... intermediate world, link between the divine & human hemispheres, and corresponds to the subjective region of Vijnana, so Jana, Tapas & Satya are the divine half of existence, & answer to the Ananda with its two companion principles Sat andChit, the three constituting the Trinity of those psychological states which are, to & in our consciousness, Sacchidananda,God sustaining from above His worlds. But why... his characteristic, his law of being, the stamp that God has put upon him. But even for the manishi ideal Truth has its bounties. For from thence come the intuitions of the poet, the thinker, the artist, scientist, man of action, merchant, craftsman, labourer each in his sphere, the seed of the great thoughts, discoveries, faiths that help the world and save our human works & destinies from decay & ... spiritual Freedom. One is Samrat when one is master of the laws of being, ritam, rituh, vratani, and can therefore control all forces & creatures. Samrajya is divine Rule resembling the power of God over his world. Varuna especially is Samrat, master of the Law which he follows, governor of the heavens & all they contain, Raja Varuna, Varuna the King as he is often styled by Sunahshepa and other Rishis ...
... able to recognise what he taught." An achalāyatan. 1 As for Christ, Sri Aurobindo said clearly: "Christ came into the world to purify, not to fulfil. He himself foreknew the failure of his mission and the necessity of his return with the sword of God into a world that had rejected him." 1. Achalāyatan, a play by Tagore. Its theme is the return of the Guru to his old haunts only... Light . . . A brain by a disordered stomach driven Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell . . . Thus wagged on the surreal world, until A scientist played with atoms and blew out The universe before God had time to shout. 2 1. A Vision of Science. 2. A Dream of Surreal Science. Page 18 For the meantime Great Britain's... true religion," wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Foundations of Indian Culture, "which all must accept on peril of persecution by men here and spiritual rejection or fierce eternal punishment by God in other worlds. . . . This grotesque creation of human unreason is the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty, obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism." Mother was against religions as humans practise them ...
... 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 the ego we have to go back to the beginning of creation itself. It is said in the Upanishads that the Absolute,... 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... religious principles. When the humanitarian says that he is ready to lay down even his life for the welfare of mankind or the vindication of his lofty principles, or, when the spiritual seeker seeks God not for God's own sake, but for the achievement of some spiritual end, unless it is their own soul speaking or seeking in them, it is unmistakably their glorified ego. In many self-justifying religious or spiritual ...
... the unrolling of a willed and mighty Enigma. What we see in and around us is a play of God, a "Lila". It is a scene arranged, a drama played by the One Person with his own multitudinous personalities in his own impersonal existence,—a game, a plan worked out in the vast and plastic substance of his own world-being. He plays with the powers and forces of his Nature a game of emergence from the inconscient... the superman. Page 260 77 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 and forces. Earth and conscious life upon earth are not a freak of cosmic Chance, a meaningless accident in the vacant history of nebula and electron and gas and plasm; they... the body of God, O God lover, but keep it for thy joy; for His body too is delightful even as His spirit. Perishable and transitory delight is always the symbol of the eternal Ananda, revealed and rapidly concealed, which seeks by increasing recurrence to attach itself to some typal form of experience in material consciousness. When the particular form has been perfected to express God in the type ...
... sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the Sadhaka of the Sadhana¹ as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection....² In the integral yoga, the Divine Power in us uses all life as the means of our upward evolution. Every experience and outer or inner contact with our world-environment... disastrous, is used as an occasion and opportunity for the yogic work, and every experience becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we 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;... Agenda, Vol. 2, pp. 373-4. Page 92 seems possible in the present perturbed world... all this was necessary because certain possibilities had to emerge and be got rid f if a new and better world was at all to come into being; it would not have done to postpone them for a later time... the new world whose coming we envisage is not to be made of the same texture as the old and different ...
... instrument of manifestation and not an obstacle, would be necessary to preserve the continuity, the evolutionary total; it would be needed as the living vehicle, vāhana , of the emergent god in the material world where he would have to act and achieve the works and wonders of the new life. It is certain that a form of body making this connection and a bodily action containing the earth-dynamism and... In the first place, it is in one of its aspects a cosmic and even a divine principle: it takes the spiritual form of the Ishwara and the Shakti and without it there could be no world-creation or manifestation of the world-principle of Purusha and Prakriti which are both necessary for the creation, necessary too in their association and interchange for the play of its psychological working and in their... and the outside world where they could then become effective directly, communicating themselves without physical means from mind to mind, producing with a similar directness effects on the thoughts, actions and lives of others or even upon material things. The heart would equally be a direct communicant and medium of interchange for the feelings and emotions thrown outward upon the world by the forces ...
... Sita or Radha, she could not be said to have made an unambiguous Avataric appearance in history. Far more doubtful would be such an appearance in any other woman prominently connected with God's work in the world. The Mother is supposed to have been Mirabai as well as Joan of Arc, but neither of these, for all their wonderful achievements, can count as Avatars. Much less, though still glorious, the... and possessed him on rare occasions. Christ said 'I and my father are one', but yet he always spoke and behaved as if there were a difference. Ramakrishna's earlier period was that of one seeking God, not aware from the first of his ¹ Ibid., p. 412. ² Ibid. ³ Ibid. Page 61 indentity... And supposing the full and permanent consciousness, why should the ... in Savitri where Sri Aurobindo describes the end of the symbolic night preceding the symbol dawn: The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak From the reclining body of a god.4 In elaborating upon her vision she mentions in her talk of May 28, 1958 "a very old tradition", more ancient than ¹ Ibid. , pp. 284-285. ² On Yoga II, Tome One, pp ...
... starting point of the Vedic knowledge of reality, of God. And there are so many other verses to which I do not make reference here for the sake of brevity. Then comes the world-knowledge. What is the world- knowledge of the Veda? They say that the physical world that we can see is only the outer fringe of the whole world. But even this world consists of three earths, not only one earth. Even the... make is that this Veda contains a very deep knowledge of reality, of the world, and of the self. A triple knowledge: god-knowledge, world-knowledge, and soul-knowledge (self-knowledge). Now, what is that knowledge, what is the content of that knowledge? What is God? What is the ultimate reality? It is not the kind of god sitting in the seventh heaven with a long beard. In one of the first statements... — the names, the meaning, the secret of each God — the function of each God. It is as if you are going to a Ministry, and you find out who is the minister and who is the secretary and who is the clerk and who is the cashier, what is the function of each one. Unless you know this, you can never succeed in a Ministry. Similarly, in the Ministry of the world, you cannot succeed unless you know who are ...
... futility and impossibility of all ideals given to man by the gods. It even argues that the only God is the one who devours life,— the God of punishment and destruction. Savitri affirms her inherent right to immortality and Love and her knowledge of God as Will and Love. It is her God who can remake the world of Death. In fact Death admits it has no existence—if it had it would not be Death—apart from... 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 who has made the earth, earth must make in her God. She was asked to rise to her Tuneless Self, then only could she know the Divine Plan. Then once more a choice was given to Savitri,—to choose... power. She discovered that there was nothing real there. There was negation all round,—from the negation of being to that of all ideals, negation of God, except the God of destruction, or an aloof and indifferent God who leaves the management of the world to Death. For a time, Savitri was lost in it "like a golden lamp in darkness." She went through the immense self-torture of dissolution but ultimately ...
... discover A new mind and body in the city of God And enshrine the Immortal in his glory's house And make the finite one with Infinity. 43 What adventure can be more daring, more perilous and yet more satisfying and joyous than the his symbolic quest into the unknown for a new mind and body in the city of God? Symbol of the World-Stair: The spiritual evolution and transformation... A well, a tunnel of the depths of God. It plunged as if a mystic groove of hope Through many layers of formless voiceless self 56 Ibid, pp. 217-18. 57 Ibid., p. 218. 58 Ibid. , p. 286. Page 437 To reach the last profound of the world's heart. 59 It would be very interesting to compare this image of the World-Soul with the image of the black pit... fields of God. This, once the Light is accepted by Nature, leads to the magical gate and to the "lucent comer"; see the magnificent image as under Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge 32 Ibid., p. 3. 33 Ibid,p.2. 34 Ibid, p. 3. Page 430 A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge One lucent comer windowing hidden things Forced the world's blind ...
... highest light in her and so answers the "radiant God", a sunbeam answering the Sun: In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss Two spirits saved out of a suffering world; 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... reason dictated not by her brain but her heart: If thou and I are true, the world is true; Although thou hide 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. 55 To which the propitiated Godhead answers, beginning... Some rapture of the bliss that made the world, Some rush of the force of God's omnipotence, 69 Ibid., p. 698. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 699. 72 Ibid., p. 701. Page 143 Some beam of the omniscient Mystery. 73 And at that fateful hour The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time And God be bom into the human clay In forms made ...
... belief concerning the conception of man, of the world, and of God. This system, the world view of Catholic Christianity in Western Europe, had elementary limitations and flaws which one day would have to be brought to the surface if homo europaeus was to fulfil his destiny, his part in the evolution of humankind. The criticism of the medieval world view started with the reactivation of the rational... most famous scientists are when they write about “the mind of God”. They always seem to think that God’s mind is something like their own human mind, although perhaps a little more powerful. If science takes years of intensive training and is not accessible to everybody then it is reasonable to suppose that knowledge of “the mind of God” may demand some training too. ... namely, the thought that we no longer live in the ‘modern’ world. The ‘modern’ world is now a thing of the past. Our own natural science today is no longer ‘modern’ science. Instead … it is rapidly engaged in becoming ‘postmodern’ science: the science to the ‘postmodern’ world, of ‘postnationalist’ politics and ‘postindustrial’ society – the world that has not yet discovered how to define itself in terms ...
... this that not 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... supposition able either to take the world as practically real and think and act in it or to reject it as an unreality and cease to think and act; I am not compelled to reconcile contradictions, not called on to be conscious of and conscious in something beyond myself and world and yet deal from that basis, as God does, with a world of contradictions. The attempt to be as God while I am still an individual... dialectics does help to accomplish and its part in the preparation of knowledge is therefore very Page 381 great. But by itself it cannot arrive either at the knowledge of the world or the knowledge of God, much less reconcile the lower and the higher realisation. It is much more efficiently a guardian against error than a discoverer of truth,—although by deduction from knowledge already acquired ...
... instrument of manifestation and not an obstacle, would be necessary to preserve the continuity, the evolutionary total; it would be needed as the living vehicle, vahana, of the emergent god in the material world where he would have to act and achieve the works and wonders of the new life. It is certain that a form of body making this connection and a bodily action containing the earth dynamism and... In the first place, it is in one of its aspects a cosmic and even a divine principle: it takes the spiritual form of the Ishwara and the Shakti and without it there could be no world-creation or manifestation of the world principle of Purusha and Prakrit! which are both necessary for the creation, necessary too in their association and interchange for the play of its psychological working and in their... and the outside world where they could then become effective directly, communicating themselves without physical means from mind to mind producing with a similar directness effects on the thoughts, actions and lives of others or even upon material things. The heart would equally be a direct communicant and medium of interchange for the feelings and emotions thrown outward upon the world by the forces ...
... have been a faithful subject of my emperor. I had to go away. 18 There is the classic compromise that one should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. But the spiritual world admits of no such compromises! Page 160 VII For several months after her arrival in Japan, Mirra was absorbing new impressions, sifting the permanent... Japan. And I had seen these landscapes without human beings, nothing but the landscape, quite pure, like that, and it had seemed to me they were visions of a world other than the physical; they seemed to me too beautiful for the physical world, too perfectly beautiful. Particularly I used to see very often those stairs rising straight up into the sky; in my vision there was the impression of climbing... to found securely the play in us of his divine Knowledge governing the action of his divine Power. The rest is the full opening up of the different planes of his world-play and the subjection of Matter and the body and the material world to the law of the higher heavens of the Truth: 6 The main object of the Power which moves him, of course, is to "possess securely the Light and the Force ...
... “Chapters for a Work on the Isha Upanishad” on pages 311 to 349 of Isha Upanishad , volume 17 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO. No work with the title mentioned in the last paragraph, “God & the World”, is known to have survived. In the third paragraph Sri Aurobindo writes that he intends to examine “the eleven hymns of Madhuchchhanda Vaiswamitra & his son Jeta with which the Rigveda opens” ...
... Incarnate into the worlds of Night is a wonderful thing that can happen to her and in it is her opportunity to change. II: 8 The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness God created Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice, but this love has to first conquer the appalling Inane. The existential problem is the denial to all that is God's. Here are titans... of suffering and divine grief, Karunamayi Mata, nursing the little spirit of man. Her task is to change this world of pain by patient work. Challenging her there stands the small life-force with its sorrow. But because of this God's labourer there is hope. The next in the inner world of Mind is the triumvirate of wisdom-love-bliss, Jnana-Prem-Anandamayi Mata. Page – 67 She... therefore engaged in the Yoga of Knowledge of the Time-Born Man. He now gets a new vision of himself and of the world. He may not be yet aware of the goal fixed for him, not know whether he is going to reach just the featureless unseen or discover a 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 ...
... the view of such a being, "the world's destruction" would be a "small transient storm" "in the calm infinity it has become." As to the solution of the question, how did the bondage come to the Transcendent the answer is you will know it when you withdraw your being from the world: "be God's void" then you will be "one with God's bare reality," "and the miraculous world he has become." You will also... 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 tremble top and base". All over the world there is "a momentary Evil's almightiness". But that does not mean that the world is delivered over to them. "There is a guardian power, there are Hands that save" humanity. Man... 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 and life became quiet. Even in the ...
... evil and unites contraries. As Boehme lays down: "the God of the holy World and the God of the dark World are not two Gods; there is but one only God." This God is the "Father" of Boehme with His creative "wrath-fires" without whose energy there cannot be 124. Paradise Lost. Bk. VI, 11.850-852. Page 175 any life and to which the "Proverbs of Hell" in Blake's Marriage - that eminently... inside outwards to break its present limits. He writes: I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity For ever expanding in the Bosom of God... 29 God "exists in us and we in him": 30 Supernature is, in the deepest connotation of the word, Human, it is the Divine Humanity... there is no other God than that God who is the Intellectual fountain of Humanity. 39 They try to make out that Blake merely apotheosized human virtue and the higher intellectual and visionary mind of man as he is, rather than that he asserted a condition transcending our life-experience. But these interpreters might remember that Imagination is put over against the World of Mortality and ...
... the first verse of the same part of the Upanishad :— "There are two that drink deep of the truth of works well done- in the world: they are lodged in the heart of the creatures and in the highest half of the most high is their dwelling.” "As of light and shade God-knowers speak of them...” An ascent of the integrated consciousness of the individual to the supreme Truth-Consciousness, ṛta-cit... and the nature and purpose of its work, and a conscious and constant cooperation in that work with an unwavering faith in its final accomplishment—the full and perfect manifestation of God in the material world. The only objective we have to set before ourselves, in this age at least, is the Victory of the Divine over the forces of darkness —over Ignorance, Falsehood and Death. This is the... period of human evolution at least, as we learn from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo a Will to Victory over the forces of darkness and death, and a manifestation of God's supramental sovereignty and splendour in the material world. Those who have felt or perceived the transcendental great- ness of this work of the establishment of the supramental life or the Life Divine upon earth, and ...
... breach began: A breach—the spirit intervenes in the world; the beginning of thought, sense, memory. {I} [78] All can be done if the God-touch is there. {T} IV. [78] All can be done if the God-touch is there. God's touch transfigure's the world; the outpouring of the revelation and the flame... save the world—as well as her sacrifice—the Divine imprisoned in a human form, confronting death and human fate. Accordingly, when we examine the imagery diagram for these units, we see almost a merging of imagery as images of World and Nature alternate with those of Spirit and God, while images of Darkness and Sleep alternate with those of Light and Awakening. Time Timeless world spirit darkness... sense of a reluctant world resisting the Divine Grace, while the Divine eternally attempts to awaken the earth to its own greater reality. [78-101] All can be done if the God-touch is there. {T} This transitional line introduces the idea of the transfiguring touch of God, and the thematic unit it initiates describes the radiant light as it breaks through the world's reluctant darkness ...
... lustre of the divine Immortal. But then he reappears as the Tempter of the Worlds and offers easy boons to Savitri. She at once sees the trap and does not fall into it, to live with Satyavan in the heavens of the deathless gods. Her concern is for the soul of man, Satyavan's soul to do God's work in the world of the mortals. Earth is the chosen place and it is this earth which in the splendour... sages and learned ascetics engaged in holy spiritual practices, one prominent and well-respected among them being the sage Gautama. Yama or the God of Death is at once frightful-dark and kind-gracious in the benignity of the Upholder of the Order of the Worlds. Princess Savitri's own birth was in response to Aswapati's prayer to the goddess Savitri who incarnated herself as his daughter in fulfilment... esoteric. The Savitri-tale is not a mere pious holy tale meant for the God-fearing and the credulous, for small minds, for young simple housewives; but it is actually a strong effective symbol charged with the high potency of the supernatural, even that of the transcendental which is pressing forth to establish itself in this world of suffering and grief and death. Savitri herself was a highly proficient ...
... understand the principle of this world and not chase the will-o'-the-wisp. She must lend herself to see and recognise the laws of nature operating here, respect them in the tight earthly framework of things. There is actually no room for God in this brute immensity. It is by the process of Death's Sankhya that the inconscient world arose and it is in that sense that the world is fulfilling itself. That is... to multiply it immeasurably is a supreme act and only some confident supreme omnipotence can conceive of it and dare to do it. God's plunge in the Night was with the unfailing intent of lifting up every bit breathing of him to the gracious worlds of dazzling happiness, worlds over which shines the Sun of Truth. He had the glory of Being; he shall have the glory of adventurous Becoming. Indeed, because... A hidden Bliss is at the root of things. A mute Delight regards Time's countless works: To house God's joy in things Space gave wide room, To house God's joy in self our souls were bom. This universe an old enchantment guards; Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight Whose charmed wine is some deep soul's rapture-drink: The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with ...
... put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable 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... that it will be used, for the world does not mend itself quickly, and therefore it will have violently to be mended____ Men cry out dismally and lament that all is perishing. But if they trust in God's Love and Wisdom, not preferring to it their conservative and narrow notions, they would rather insist that all is being reborn. So much depends on Time and God's immediate purpose that it is... silent all-besieging soul and thy wide-ranging will-power and when thou art dead, fight still with the world-encompassing force that went out from God within thee. Thou thinkest the ascetic in his cave or on his mountain-top a stone and a do-nothing. What dost thou know ? He may be filling the world with the mighty currents of his will and changing it by the pressure of his soul-state. The existence ...
... life as a divine mystery, breathed by God into the world or introduced, as if it were a sort of psychical meteoric dust, from some other planet. Upanishadic philosophy accounts for the appearance of Life in a more calm and rational manner. Life, it would say, is in a sense a divine mystery but no more and no less so than the existence of inanimate matter. God did not breathe it from outside into an... things 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... not God. Good is a mask and evil is a mask; both are eidola, valid for the purposes of life in phenomena, but when we seek that which is beyond phenomena, we must resolutely remove the mask and see only the face of God behind it. To the Karmayogin there should be nothing common or unclean. There is nothing from which he has the right to shrink; there is none whom he can dare to loathe. For God is within ...
... sparrow' and is part of a profounder world-consciousness. And where in Tagore can you find the ornithological vision that the Yogi's eye raises before us? All things hang here between God's yes and no... The white head and black tail of the mystic drake, The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken Sustaining the body of the uncertain world, A great surreal dragon in... the God of Death, and snatch his soul back to earth. She is not content that she should join him in some other world and be free of the toil, the trouble, the tangle, which the Divine has imposed on terrestrial existence: Freedom is this with ever seated soul, Large in Life's limits, strong in Matter's knots, Page 66 Building great stuff of action from the worlds ... lost but upon God alone, as well as Sidney's Leave me, O love, that readiest but to dust, and Auden's less sublime yet still quietly piercing We must love one another or we die. We may well come to almost a climax with Shakespeare's masterstroke of metre responding to the meaning - Page 35 Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath ...
... 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 Sri Aurobindo's grip. The elite of humanity are turning to Him, knowingly or u... men to understand, because it speaks of the Brahman being the sole Reality and in the same breath speaks of Maya as the Page 59 eternal creatrix of the phenomenal world. It speaks of God as a lower formulation of the Brahman which is yoked to Maya. The Advaita of the Upanishads is simple enough, but the Advaita of Sankar, which Vivekananada accepted, is full of confusing c... many things more. When a Vedantin (Shankar's Advaita Vedantin) says that God is both the efficeient and the material cause of the Universe, the Creator and the created, he doesn't mean that it is the Brahman who is that. His "God" is an inferior aspect and status of the Brahman, yoked to Maya. The Vedantin aspires to go beyond God and realise the Brahman. I won't go into these philosophical subtleties ...
... 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 earth's ignorance. O Savitri, thou art my spirit's Power, ... Ananda, another part of him remains conscious of the world below. Even as he bears witness to the splendours above, his soul articulates the earth's prayer set as a poetic image of incalculable charm by Sri Aurobindo: In the centre of his vast and fateful trance Half-way between his free and fallen selves, Interceding twixt God's day and the mortal's night, Accepting worship as... the Penultimate Centre) 7.The Sun of Supramental Substance-Energy (Descent into the Muladhara) 38 One is naturally reminded of the opening stanza of the mantric 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 ...
... not 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 Page 103 individual. Further I am one with God in my being and yet... supposition able either to take the world as practically real and think and act in it or to reject it as an unreality and cease to think and act; I am not compelled to reconcile contradictions, not called on to be conscious of and conscious in something beyond myself and world and yet deal from that basis, as God does, with a world of contradictions. The attempt to be as God while I am still an individual... three modes of Prakriti omnipresent in the created world; nor is it qualified Monism although it places in the One his eternal supreme Prakriti manifested in the form of the Jiva and lays most stress on dwelling in God rather than dissolution as the supreme state of spiritual consciousness; nor is it Sankhya although it explains the created world by the double principle Page 93 of Purusha ...
... which, because of the Overmind's dazzling splendours, could not look beyond it - the critical newness is hit off very strikingly in the verses: As if a torch held by a power of God, The radiant world of the everlasting Truth Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge. ² These lines are unique in Sri Aurobindo's writings... The constituents no less than the cells have potential divinity. Don't you remember the octave of that sonnet of Sri Aurobindo's? - The electron on which forms and worlds are built, Leaped into being, a particle of God. A spark from the eternal energy spilt, It is the Infinite's blind minute abode. In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. The One devised innumerably... three worlds. In the world of Sat, the beings are not separately individualised but have a divine universality. There Consciousness-force and Ananda are held back and subordinated in the manifestation. In the world of Chit, Consciousness-force becomes prominent and determines everything. In the world of Ananda, Bliss is the determinant. Then there is the Supramental world, with the ...
... to know that last secret of the world. The problem of the world does not get solved. There, the ignorance of duality between spirit and matter, the spiritual truths and life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Lila of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. There it becomes possible to fully know and fully possess God — as it is said in the Gita, "To... 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 the world as Maya or a transient Lila. The result has been the loss of the power of life and... Shankara's Myasa etc. What is now taking place is the turn of the Vaishnava Dharma — the Lila, love, intoxication of the emotional delights. The merit of Vaishnava is that it keeps a connection between God and world and gives a meaning to life. The tendency to create sects which you have noticed was inevitable. It is the nature of the mind to take the part and call it the whole and to exclude all the other ...
... tempest with solitary bliss Two spirits saved out of a suffering world; My soul and his indissolubly linked In the one task for which our lives were bom, To raise the world of God in deathless Light, To bring God down to the world on earth we came, To change the earthly life to life divine. 51 The God has no option but to submit to Savitri's adamantine resolution: ... again, there is reference both of the awesome phenomenon of Death and the answer provided by the Son of Man who is also the Son of God: Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, heavenly Muse... Eternity. 27 And when he returns to the outer consciousness after this baptism in the waters of transcendence, he has won "his soul's release from Ignorance": A wide God-knowledge poured down from above, A new world-knowledge broadened from within... A genius heightened in his body's cells That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works. 28 His body's cells have themselves ...
... of calm, The massive barrier-breakers of the world And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will, The labourers in the quarries of the gods, The messengers of the Incommunicable, The architects of immortality. 50 The Four Aids of the Overman “Imagine not the way is easy …” The reader may remember Sri Aurobindo’s poem A God’s Labour , in which he writes about his avataric... This truly is a new world … “But there is one essential condition: the reign of the ego must have come to an end. The ego is now the obstacle. The ego must be replaced by the divine Consciousness. Sri Aurobindo called it ‘Supermind’. We too can call it ‘Supermind’ so that there is no misunderstanding. Because when one speaks of ‘the Divine’, people immediately think of a ‘God’, and that spoils ... part of himself he belongs to the nation, by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity. And even there is a part in him the greatest, which is not limited by humanity; he belongs by it to God and to the world of all beings and to the godheads of the future.” 70 “The perfect society will be that which most entirely favours the perfection of the individual; the perfection of the individual ...
... but a dynamic power which helped the toiling world by its silent working. He saw from the height of his spiritual consciousness a new self-creation "A transfiguration in the mystic depths, A happier cosmic working could begin Page 154 And fashion the world-shape in him anew, God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God." The light of this higher consciousness... constant inflow of Light from above and the inner urge from below that ultimately "Forced the worlds' blind immensity to sight". It is then that the darkness like a robe slipped from the body of this unknown entity and revealed "the reclining body of a God". Behind the mask of the Nescience the body of a God is revealed. To an objection that the description was not applicable to the physical phenomenon... material world man seems to be only a pawn in Nature's game, the cosmos appears like a vast prison wherein Ignorance rules with the karmic laws and pain and joy seem to be the inevitable results of its working. Death seems an inevitability and life seems to be under its sway. Thus we see in the world the working of an iron law. This law equally restrains "the Titan in us and the God". Savitri ...
... recovered if he pursues to its end his initial faith in the world, and that this very faith leads him to the position in which the need of a direct revelation of the Christian vision is logically compassed; for, if a Personal God issues from the dialectic of faith in the world, not only the strong possibility but also the extreme probability of such a God directly communicating Himself to man and even incarnating... raison d'etre for him. So it is this scientific truth which, ultimately, is all in all. It needs to be enriched by a faith in the God-Man of Nazareth - it needs him if it is to become a total grip on our hearts and minds - yet it is the World that is the primary Value. If World-value were not there, nothing would be of any consequence: Christ would stand merely as the Centre of a religion which would be... such confidence in an inwardly propelled world-development, we may justifiably argue that, apart from his desire for a "face" borrowed from a human-divine historical figure, there is no vacuum left to be filled by Christianity in the science-inspired philosophical religion of faith in the world, which is the basic religion of Teilhard. The desire for a God-Man's face is a legitimate one; but it never ...
... bliss Two spirits saved out of a suffering world; My soul and his indissolubly linked In 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. 59 The God has no option but to submit to Savitri's adamantine... traverse the three worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven before he can find an answer to this fear and this terror - he finds the answer in Beatrice and Love, "the love that moves the Sun and the other stars". In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, again, there is reference both to the awesome phenomenon of Death and the answer provided by the Son of Man who is also the Son of God: Of man's... Eternity. 35 And when he returns to the outer consciousness after this baptism in the waters of transcendence, he has won "his soul's release from Ignorance"; A wide God-knowledge poured down from above, A new world-knowledge broadened from within:... A genius heightened in his body's cells That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works... 36 His body's cells have themselves ...
... evolution; and the many worlds are also One World, even in the deepest mire the Divine is veiled or coiled, and even the giddiest Everests of the Spirit are susceptible to the obscure pulls towards the stark densities of Matter. If in 'Though the Paraclete' there is graphed the ascent to the "vasts of God", in sonnets like 'The Pilgrim of the Night' there is described - as in 'A God's Labour' - a determined... not the complex 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... was planted deep At the very root of things Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep On the Dragon's outspread wings. 64 The poet of Yoga describes things vivid to him, ever present or significant to him, and these might comprise happenings in our world or in the occult worlds above and below, insights and inscapes and intensities undreamt of by the average human ...
... to know the last secret of the world. The problem of the world does not get solved. There, the ignorance of duality between spirit and matter, the spiritual truths and life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Lila of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. There it becomes possible to fully know and fully possess God—as it is said in the Gita, “To... 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 realise God in life. The old way of Yoga would not make the harmony or union of the Spirit and life. It dismissed the world as Maya or a transient Lila. The result has been the loss of the power of life and... Shankara's Maya etc. What is now taking place is the turn of the Vaishnava Dharma—the Lila, love, intoxication of the emotional delights. The merit of Vaishnava is that it keeps a connection between God and world and gives a meaning to life. The tendency to create sects which you have noticed was inevitable. It is the nature of the mind to take the part and call it the whole and to exclude all the other ...
... it is a living thing. It is the Mother in whom you move and have your being. Realise God in the nation, realise God in your brother, realise God in a wide human association.' This is the ideal by which humanity is moved all over the world, the ideal which is the dharma of the Kali Yuga.... For the fiat of God has gone out to the Indian nation, 'Unite, be free, be one, be great'." We make... that the Divine directed him to other spheres of work and experience, it was not for him to say No. God's will comes first to a man of God, and family, country, even humanity come after. The soul of man comes from God to do His Will in the world, and once that Will is known, nothing in the world can prevent it from fulfilling it. In the first issue of the Dharma, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the... been realising the infinite goodness of the All-Good God in all my observation of the happenings of the world. Nothing hap- pens - whether it is something momentous or the most insignificant - but contributes to some good. Often He serves several purposes through a single act. Many a time we see the play of a blind force in the world and, denying God's omniscience, find fault with His divine Intelligence ...
... I have nothing left In all the world but her and these few pieces. HAROUN She pleases me. ANICE O wretch! NUREDDENE Another time I would have slain thee. But now I feel 'tis God Has snared my feet with dire calamities, And have no courage. HAROUN Dost thou give her to me? NUREDDENE Take her, if Heaven will let thee. Angel of God, Avenging angel, wert thou lying... Conspiring murder. They have killed The son of Almuene. Good Ibn Sawy, God's kind to thee who has relieved thy age Of human burdens. Thus He turns thy thought To His ineffable and simple peace. Page 174 IBN SAWY God, Thou art mighty and Thy will is just. King Mohamad Alzayni, I have come To a changed world in which I am not needed. I bid farewell. ALZAYNI Nay, Vizier, clasp... Nureddene alone. NUREDDENE We sin our pleasant sins and then refrain And think that God's deceived. He waits His time And when we walk the clean and polished road He trips us with the mire our shoes yet keep, The pleasant mud we walked before. All ills I will bear patiently. Oh, better here Than in that world! Who comes? Khatoon, my aunt! Enter Khatoon and a Slave. KHATOON My Nureddene ...
... brought out here from the letter : 1. The question : why act ? – What is the meaning of action ? 2. How can a perfect all-merciful, all-powerful God create such a world full of misery, suffering, poverty? 3. There is no use praying to God because prayers are only for consoling ourselves. 4. I act simply because I can't help doing actions. Lajpat Rai now seems to accept the "illusion"... Disciple : Lajpat Rai, who has been known as an Arya Samajist and therefore a theist, seems to doubt even the existence of God in this letter. Sri Aurobindo : That does not matter. It only means he wants to understand the way of God's working, the nature of this world etc. 27–2–1939 Disciple : Promode Sen in his biography mentions that you knew Hebrew. There are other points... after human happiness there would be so much misery left in the world ? The gods are merciful because the Divine is merciful. Disciple : It seems that the Devil is powerful in life. Sri Aurobindo : You think the gods are weaker than the devils and they can't destroy the devils? They are merciful and good because God is merciful and good but it does not mean they have no power. They ...
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