... alone, neither Good nor Evil exists because, in Him, all is one. In other words, we must first attain to divine consciousness before going beyond Good and Evil which, paradoxically, is all that separates us from God. It is not by committing Good and Evil without knowing what they effectively are that we shall be able to go Page 36 beyond them, but rather by going beyond ourselves... all power of attraction, both positive and negative. Disparate voices will no longer be heard and we shall then be detached- Our vices and virtues will vanish. We shall live beyond what we call Good and Evil, not to commit with impunity what would today be viewed as culpable by our courts of law or supraterrestrial judges, but because, oriented towards other values, these things, whether good or bad... themselves, neither here nor beyond, but whose destiny is to submit themselves to, and become a conscious receptacle of, a Force which, not mental, transcends all duality—that of I and not-I, of Good and Evil, of Life and Death and, finally, of world and God. Thus, it is given to them alone to partially open the window of our vision onto the world and ourselves. Participating in the same being ...
... there is no real evil, no enemy or contradictions, only discordant rhythms. When we are in harmony with ourselves, everything is in harmony – but not Page 45 according to our ideas of good and evil, happy and unhappy, failure and success, but according to another order, which gradually turns out to be infallible and endowed with extended foresight – an order of truth. And each minute... little clan, draw a line here, a line there, boundary markers, and generally insure his precarious existence by encasing it in a shell of individual and collective self. It follows that there is good and evil, right and wrong, useful and harmful, dos and don'ts – we have slowly become entangled in a huge police network in which we scarcely have the spiritual freedom to breathe – and even that air... materialism, less impoverishing, and that matter is less stupid than is usually said. Our materialism is a relic of the age of religions, one could almost say its inevitable companion, like good and evil, black and white, and all the dualities stemming from a linear vision of the world which sees one tuft of grass after another, a bump after a hole, and sets the mountains against the plains, without ...
... primitive man felt from painful experiences of life. Then the growth of the sense of good and evil—- particularly the sense of evil—was connected with the mind of desire ; that is to say, good and evil has sensational value, what gave pleasure was good and what was painful was bad or evil. Then the sense of good and evil advanced from the field of individual experience to society and acquired a utilitarian... good ' and its opposite was 'bad '. _____________________ ¹ The Life Divine, P . 932 ² Ibid, P. 933 Page 21 Really speaking the sensational and utilitarian views of good and evil can hardly be called ' ethical'. When reason intervenes and tries to determine some principle or law of ethics, then the idealistic value of ethics comes into being. There is even a religious basis... form in thought and in action of life which becomes more or less an artificial construction, not a spontaneous expression. Still, with all its limitations, ethics, the sense of moral values of good and evil, is an indispensable stage in evolution. It arises from the perception of possibility of a higher idealistic—intellectual—harmony instead of the prevalence of a lower movement in man's nature—the ...
... supreme and universal Ananda. The soul's perception of good and evil may not coincide with the mind's artificial standards, but it has a deeper sense, a sure discrimination of what points to the higher Light and what points away from it. It is true that as the inferior light is below good and evil, so the superior spiritual light is beyond good and evil; but this is not in the sense of admitting all things... our depths where it has a native existence. Again, of good and evil it can be said that one exists by true consciousness, the other survives only by wrong consciousness: Page 621 if there is an unmixed true consciousness, good alone can exist; it is no longer mixed with evil or formed in its presence. Human values of good and evil, as of truth and error, are indeed uncertain and relative:... values of good and evil and the appreciation of their necessity and importance; this awakening, whatever may be the sanction or the validity of its particular judgments, is one of the indispensable steps in the process of evolutionary Nature. But from what then does this awakening proceed? what is it in the human being that originates and gives its power and place to the sense of good and evil? If we ...
... him to hear, see or feel the reality and distinguish between the wrong and the right. Islamic ethics can be defined as a science or moral philosophy that teaches how to distinguish between good and evil or how to deal with one another and what should one adopt or avoid in life. In simple words, the moral philosophy of Islam is a code of life, a set of codes and behaviours that regulate man's life... believes that it is ingrained in human nature to look at things from the perspective of their being good or bad. Man either likes or dislikes things that he comes across. Moreover, man's perception of good and evil is strikingly similar. It is a common day observation that human conscience usually condemns a few things as evil and appreciates others as good. There might be individual who think the vice versa... from the bad. This, then, also proves beyond doubt why some virtues, and also certain evils, are universally acknowledged realities, and hence easily recognizable. Here the question arises if good and evil are universally known and man has the innate capacity to distinguish between them why there exist differences among the moral philosophies of the world? The reason is that mankind has different ...
... Beyond Good and Evil God is beyond good and evil; man moving Godwards must become of one nature with him. He must transcend good and evil. God is beyond good and evil, not below them, not existing and limited by them, not even above them, but in a more absolute sense excedent and transcendent of the ideas of good and evil. He exceeds them in his universality;... mixture Page 148 of good and evil, whether a self-perplexed and struggling or a mysteriously ordered double principle, Ormuzd and Ahriman, or at least he cannot be limited by this duality, for there is much in the universe which is neither good nor evil. Perhaps the greatest part of the totality is either supramoral or inframoral or simply amoral. Good and evil come in with the development... universality; they exist in him, but the values of good and evil which we give to things is not their divine or universal value, they are only their practical value created by us in our psychological and dynamic dealings with life. God recognises them and seems to deal with us on the basis of this valuation of life, but only to such an extent as may serve his purpose in Nature. In his universal action he is ...
... The Taoist who J^Yes in the Impersonal Tao is more consistent and the Vedantin who believes that the Supreme is beyond good and evil but the Cosmic Force the Supreme has put out here Page 49 works through the dualities, therefore through both good and evil, joy and suffering, has a thesis which at least accounts for the double fact of the experience for the Supreme which is All... another for a mixture. I don't think any Vedantin (except perhaps some modernised ones) would maintain that all is good here—the orthodox Vedantic idea is all is here an inextricable mixture of good and evil, a play of the Ignorance and therefore a play of the dualities. The Christian missionaries, I suppose, hold that all that God does is morally good, so they are shocked by the Taoist priests aiding... some such experience which is at the base of Ramdas's statement about the kindness. As for the Divine Working, the experience of the Vedantic realisation is that behind the con- fused mixture of good and evil something is working that he realises as the Divine and in his own life he can look back and see that each step, happy or unhappy, [was?] meant for his progress and how it led towards the growth ...
... freer and more comprehensive ways of the cosmic Intelligence. In the action attributed to the law of Karma two values are selected out of the many created by Nature, moral good and evil, sin and virtue, and vital-physical good and evil, outward happiness and suffering, outward good fortune and ill-fortune, and it is supposed that there must be an equation between them, the Page 843 one must... and many-sided action of the spirit in life, and its variety cannot be set aside in favour of a single principle, neither can it be hammered into so many sections of the single duality of ethical good and evil; ethics, the maintenance of human standards of morality, cannot, therefore, be the sole preoccupation of the cosmic Law or the sole principle of determination of the working of Karma. Page 841... Nor can good fortune and evil fortune, pleasure and pain, happiness and misery and suffering be taken as if they existed merely as incentives and deterrents to the natural being in its choice of good and evil. It is for experience, for growth of the individual being that the soul enters into rebirth; joy and grief, pain and suffering, fortune and misfortune are parts of that experience, means of that ...
... conscious mind; an inconscient machinery could have no idea of good and evil, no moral intention or significance. An impersonal or omni-personal conscious Will or Spirit in the universe could well enact such a law and assure its execution, but must then be, although imposing on us good and evil and their results, itself beyond good and evil. And what is this but to say that the universal Being escapes... rule and rejoice to find that after all the universe does obey our human conceptions and therefore all is well. The mysterious conflict, the Manichean struggle, the inextricable tangle here of good and evil is not cured or accounted for, but we say that at least the good and the evil are justly dealt with according to their kind, this duly rewarded and that duly punished in other worlds or other births ...
... from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable... omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise... things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall ...
... ignorant censure of Vedanta as an immoral doctrine because it confuses the limits between good and evil or rejects the one necessary motive to action and virtue, proceeds from unwillingness or inability to understand the fine truth and harmony of its teachings. Vedanta does indeed teach that virtue and vice, good and evil are relative terms, things phenomenal and not real; it does ask the seeker to recognize... because he did not yet know good and evil. Innocence of this kind is possible only in the primitive state of man and the description of man as naked and unashamed shows that it is precisely the primitive state of society before arts and civilization were developed, to which the legend alludes. Man was then innocent, because being unable to distinguish between good and evil he could not choose evil of... Supreme Will in what is evil no less than in what is good; but it also shows how the progression of the soul rises out of the evil into the good and out of the good into that which is higher than good and evil. Vedanta does reject the lower self of desire as a motive to action and virtue, but it replaces it by the far more powerful stimulus of selflessness which is only the rising to our higher and truer ...
... respects each part of our nature while freeing it from its particular mixture; for in truth, there is no absolute evil anywhere – only mixtures. Furthermore, the seeker no longer thinks in terms of good and evil (assuming he still "thinks" at all), but in terms of exact and inexact. When a sailor needs to take his ship's bearing, he does not use his love of the sea to do so, but a sextant, and he makes... the seeker will not attempt to enter the muddle of the moral mind, or try the impossible task of sorting out good from evil in order to bring the psychic to light, for, actually, the purpose of good and evil is intimately linked to their mutual harmfulness. ( My lover took away my robe of sin and I let it Page 81 fall, rejoicing; then he plucked at my robe of virtue, but I was ashamed... the foundation of real spirituality and courage is its soul. 137 Then the wound is healed that seemed forever to divide the world between Satan and Heaven, as if there were nothing else but Good and Evil, with us in between like an infant coddled and whipped into virtuous ways. 138 All duality is a vision based on Ignorance. There is nothing but the innumerable One 139 everywhere, and ...
... Karma. In truth, the difficulty thus sharply presented arises only if Page 101 we assume the existence of an extra-cosmic personal God, not Himself the universe, one who has created good and evil, pain and suffering 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... effectively prevent him from arriving at real knowledge and complete sight. Material Nature is not ethical; the law which governs it is a co-ordination of fixed habits which take no cognisance of good and evil, but only of force that creates, force that arranges and preserves, force that disturbs and destroys impartially, non-ethically, according to the secret Will in it, according to the mute satisfaction... mentality it refines itself into repugnance, dislike, disapproval. Disapproval of that which threatens and hurts us, approval of that which flatters and satisfies refine into the conception of good and evil to oneself, to the community, to others than ourselves, to other communities than ours, and finally into the general approval of good, the general disapproval of evil. But, throughout, the fundamental ...
... the nature-bound soul realises this truth, it is delivered from the duality of good and evil. For good is all that helps the individual and the world towards their divine fullness, and evil is all that retards or breaks up that increasing perfection. But since the perfection is progressive, evolutive in Time, good and evil are also shifting quantities and change from time to time their meaning and value... arrangement an element in some future perfection. And on the spiritual level we transcend even this distinction; for we discover the purpose and divine utility of all these things that we call good and evil. Then have we to reject the falsehood in them and all that is distorted, ignorant and obscure in that which is called good no less than in that which is called evil. For we have then to accept only ...
... to be the law of a moral order. A third possible and less outwardly mechanical line of Karma is suggested by the dictum that like creates like and in accordance with that law good must create good and evil must create evil. In the terms of a moral return or rather repayment to moral energies this would mean that by putting forth love we get a return of love and by putting forth hatred a return of... mercy, beneficence, kindness are often enough rewarded by their opposites and ill will an answer to goodwill is a brutally common experience. If something in the world and in man returns good for good and evil for evil, it as often returns evil for good and, with or without a conscious moral intention, good for evil. And even an unegoistic virtue or a divine good and love entering the world awakens hostile... have to be taken into account in our view of the action of the world forces. But they are not and cannot be the whole law of Karma. And they cannot be that because they are transitional, because good and evil are moral and not vital values and have a clear right only to a moral and not a vital return, because reward and punishment put forward as the conditions of good doing and evil doing do not constitute ...
... that, it's from a higher mind, but it's mentalized, that is to say, accessible to thought), a clothing of the experience I had of the supramental Consciousness, in which the difference between good and evil and all that looked like childishness, and Sri Aurobindo expresses it in those Aphorisms in a manner accessible to intelligence. Only... those who understand don't understand right! Because they... Light .... Generally, it squirms and refuses! But... ( laughing ) it's the only way. That's why this Consciousness is so precious .... You understand, what caused the repression is the idea of good and evil—a sort of contempt or shame at what's regarded as evil—and so one goes like this ( gesture of repelling ), one doesn't want to see it, doesn't want to let it be. What's needed... The first thing—the... vibration are wholly different the minute they are joined. it's separation that makes them what they are. Separation must be done away with, and then their very nature changes: it's no longer 'good' and 'evil,' but something else, which is complete. It's complete." × A letter in which a disciple said ...
... individual is not responsible. The Cosmic is and contains both good and evil. Disciple : Then it is the Cosmic Spirit that is responsible for the evil. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, the Cosmic Spirit that is responsible for both – good and evil, you can't say it is responsible for one and not the other. Through both – good and evil – and their struggle between Light and Darkness, the Cosmic ...
... logical result of his primary philosophical concepts. Since all is one in its being and many in its becoming, it follows that everything must be one in its essence. Night and day, life and death, good and evil can only be different aspects of the same absolute reality. Life and death are in fact one, and we may say from different points of view that all death is only a process and change of life or that... vision and our standing-point on the earth and our relations of earth and sun that create the difference. What is day to us, is to others night. Because of this insistence on the relativity of good and evil, Page 241 Heraclitus is thought to have enunciated some kind of supermoralism; but it is well to see carefully to what this supermoralism of Heraclitus really amounts. Heraclitus does... any of these things, neti neti . As men approach him, so he accepts them. But the One to Heraclitus as to the Vedantin is absolute. This is quite clear from all his sayings; day and night, good and evil are one, because they are the One in their essence and in the One the distinctions we make between them disappear. There is a Word, a Reason in all things, a Logos, and that Reason is one; only ...
... children? The Taoist who believes only in the Impersonal Tao is more consistent and the Vedantin who believes that the Supreme is beyond good and evil, but that the Cosmic Force the Supreme has put out here works through the dualities, therefore through both good and evil, joy and suffering, has a thesis which at least accounts for the double fact of the experience of the Supreme which is All Light, All... another for a mixture. I don't think any Vedantin (except perhaps some modernised ones) would maintain that all is good here—the orthodox Vedantic idea is that all is here an inextricable mixture of good and evil, a play of the Ignorance and therefore a play of the dualities. The Christian missionaries, I suppose, hold that all that God does is morally good, so they are shocked by the Taoist priests aiding... some such experience which is at the base of Ramdas's statement about the kindness. As for the Divine working, the experience of the Vedantic realisation is that behind the confused mixture of good and evil something is working that he realises as the Divine and in his own life he can look back and see what each step, happy or unhappy, meant for his progress and how it led towards the growth of his ...
... progress of the soul towards a divine consciousness and divine existence. It is this feature of existence that we see figured in the tradition of the conflict between the Powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, cosmic Harmony and cosmic Anarchy, a tradition universal in ancient myth and in religion and common to all systems of occult knowledge. The theory of this traditional knowledge is perfectly... with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and the government of the life of man;—this was the significance of the contest between the Vedic Gods and their opponents, sons of Darkness and Division, figured... unreality we may attach to the traditional figures of past human belief or experience, they would then be representations of things that are true in principle. In that case the first source of good and evil would be not in terrestrial life or in the evolution from the Inconscience, but in Life itself, their source would be supraphysical and they would be reflected here from a larger supraphysical Nature ...
... any avenging justice and where could we find any deterrent sanction in Nature against evil? And this award is that of an exact judge, a precise administrator, a scrupulous merchant of good for good and evil for evil who has learned nothing and will never learn anything of the Christian or Buddhistic ideal rule, has no bowels of mercy or compassion, no forgiveness for sin, but holds austerely to an... Then there is the certainty that there must be a moral law of cause and consequence in the total web of her weaving and this we would perhaps currently put into the formula that good produces good and evil evil, which is a proposition of undoubted truth, though also we see in this complicated world that evil comes out of what we hold to be good, and again out of evil disengages itself something that... we may well see and believe that love does throw out widening ripples and helps to elevate the world while hatred has the opposite consequence. But what is the necessary connection between this good and evil on the one hand and on the other pleasure and pain? Must the ethical power always turn perfectly into some term of kindred hedonistic result? Not entirely; for love is a joy in itself, but also ...
... is to mis-see, misunderstand and probably to misuse them. It is a higher truth that the distinction of good and evil is indeed a practical fact and law valid for the egoistic human life which is the stage of transition from the animal to the divine, but on a higher plane we rise beyond good and evil, are above their duality even as the Godhead is above it. But the unripe mind, seizing on this truth without... without rising from the lower consciousness where it is not practically valid, will simply make it a convenient excuse for indulging its Asuric propensities, denying the distinction between good and evil altogether and falling by self-indulgence deeper into the morass of perdition, sarva-jñāna-vimūḍhān naṣṭān acetasaḥ . So too with this truth of the determinism of Nature; it will be mis-seen and ...
... his deviation from the full and pure acceptance of God and himself, or rather of God in himself, into a dividing consciousness which brings with it all the train of the dualities, life and death, good and evil, joy and pain, completeness and want, the fruit of a divided being. This is the fruit which Adam and Eve, Purusha and Prakriti, the soul tempted by Nature, have eaten. The redemption comes by the... partake of the fruit of the tree of life and be as the Divine and live for ever. For then only can the purpose of its descent into material consciousness be accomplished, when the knowledge of good and evil, joy and suffering, life and death has been accomplished through the recovery by the human soul of a higher knowledge which reconciles and identifies these opposites in the universal and transforms... formless which we call the subconscient,— hṛdya samudra , the ocean heart in things of the Rig Veda. We have the dualities of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil as the first formations of egoistic consciousness, the natural and inevitable outcome of its attempt to realise unity in an artificial construction of itself exclusive of the total truth, good, ...
... work is finished. But the Siddha of the integral perfection has to dwell in a larger plane of the Spirit's eternal purity beyond good and evil. By this phrase it is not meant, as the rash hastily concluding intellect would be prone to imagine, that he will do good and evil indifferently and declare that to the spirit there is no difference between them, which would be in the plane of individual action... action an obvious untruth and might serve to cover a reckless self-indulgence of the imperfect human nature. Neither is it meant that since good and evil are in this world inextricably entangled together, like pain and pleasure,—a proposition which, however true at the moment and plausible as a generalisation, need not be true of the human being's greater spiritual evolution,—the liberated man will live ...
... the unpleasant, the beautiful and the unbeautiful, truth and falsehood, fortune and misfortune, success and failure, good and evil, the inextricable double web of Nature. Attachment to its likings and repugnances Page 689 keeps the soul bound in this web of good and evil, joys and sorrows. The seeker of liberation gets rid of attachment, throws away from his soul the dualities, but as the... the dull aesthesis, the limited range of response, the insensibility to beauty, all that makes in man the coarse, heavy and vulgar spirit. Rajas contributes our normal active nature with all its good and evil; when unchastened by a sufficient element of sattwa, it turns to egoism, self-will and violence, the perverse, obstinate or exaggerating action of the reason, prejudice, attachment to opinion, clinging ...
... seem the worst as well as the best, just to... to obtain the necessary result. More and more it is so. All our notions of good and evil are.... We have to keep reacting to things, precisely the reactions based on "good" and "evil," the human conception of good and evil (it isn't exactly a human "conception," but an approximation of the Harmony).... ( Mother plunges in and comes back moving ...
... In truth, the difficulty thus sharply presented arises only if we Page 126 assume the existence of an extracosmic personal God, not Himself the universe, one who has created good and evil, pain and suffering 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... effectively prevent him from arriving at real knowledge and complete sight. Material Nature is not ethical; the law which governs it is a co-ordination of fixed habits which take no cognisance of good and evil, but only of force that creates, force that arranges and preserves, force that disturbs and destroys impartially, non-ethically, according to the secret Will in it, according to the mute satisfaction... mentality it refines itself into repugnance, dislike, disapproval. Disapproval of that which threatens and hurts us, approval of that which flatters and satisfies refine into the conception of good and evil to oneself, to the community, to others than ourselves, to other communities than ours, and finally into the general approval of good, the general disapproval of evil. But, throughout, the ...
... l. Disciple : Is there any such thing as the evil genius of a nation ? Sri Aurobindo : This idea is akin to the Christian conception of good and evil always counterbalancing each other and it corresponds to the old idea of good and evil Spirits. But there is no such rule that wherever there is a good Spirit there must be the evil Spirit. 28-6-1926 The subject was miracles or... ; for, though mental, they have correspondence on each plane of being, e.g. 2 corresponds to the ends of polarity – sex – male and female, positive and negative, attraction and repulsion, good and evil etc. 4 corresponds to will and creative action ; 7 is said to represent individual consciousness contacting the universe, unfolding its powers ; 8 is related to Karma ; 9 is related to life and ...
... Spirit is not in the evolution whereas the individual is. It contains in itself both good and evil. NIRODBARAN: Then it is responsible for evil. SRI AUROBINDO: First of all, it does not have a human standard of good and evil. You can't say that it is responsible for the one and not the other. Through good and evil, light and darkness, the Cosmic Spirit works out its purpose. NIRODBARAN: Why is ...
... ahead—right or left, above or below, by any means whatsoever, we keep progressing, whether we fall flat on our faces or soar into heaven. The descending road ascends perfectly. The mind is the maker of good and evil. Nature herself needs neither good nor evil; she needs to advance. Then why would Nature, who is so wise, have invented this instrument, the mind, if only to reject it? True, she has rejected many... cut off all alone in his skin. The mind is the great divider. Such is its evolutionary necessity and its mortal feature. It has divided everything, not a single thing escapes its fragmentation: good and evil, truth and falsehood, time and space, far and near, hell and salvation, spirit and matter, and you and me and millions of little selves at sidereal distances from one another—but who know themselves... know the need of each being and the good of each being and the truth of each being, within something that encompasses all, loves all, understands all—and which carries us beyond our own limits of good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, to the point where the fishbowl ceases to exist and where the thousand rays are ONE. Each evolutionary transition is not the destruction of an evil grown ...
... the Divine.... I don't think any Vedantin (except perhaps some modernised ones) would maintain that all is good here - the orthodox Vedantic idea is that all is here an inextricable mixture of good and evil, a play of the Ignorance and therefore a play of the dualities.... He [the Vedantin] says that the dualities come by a separative Ignorance and so long as you accept this separative Ignorance, you... be separated. But what explanation of the evil and misery can there be there? The Indian view is that the Divine is the inmost substance of the universe, but he is also outside it, transcendent; good and evil, happiness and misery are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and-a diminution of consciousness in the manifestation but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole- ...
... the nature of the evolution, the change we have to undergo in Nature; so it would appear perhaps to the impartial eye of a universal vision untroubled by our dualities of knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, happiness and suffering and participating in the untrammelled consciousness and delight of Sachchidananda. And yet, from the practical and relative point of view as distinguished from an essential... pressure of life and the difficulties of our conduct Page 404 amidst its immediate problems and perplexities; most of all we are thinking of the distinction we are obliged to make between good and evil or of that along with its kindred problem of the duality, the blend in us of happiness and suffering. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence in things, a divine origin of the world, a ...
... observance of vows is not enough to make him a Bhikkhu. But he who is above both good and evil, who leads a pure life, who walks with understanding in this world, he can be called a Bhikkhu. One who observes silence does not by that become a sage, if he is ignorant and foolish; but he who can weigh good and evil as in a balance and make his choice, him one can call a sage. He who by contemplation ...
... On Thoughts and Aphorisms Aphorism - 58 58—The animal, before he is corrupted, has not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the god has abandoned it for the tree of eternal life; man stands between the upper heaven and the lower nature. Is it true that there was an earthly paradise? Why was man driven out of it? 1 ... the same thing. It is the evolutionary power—the power of the mind—that led man towards knowledge, a separative knowledge. And it is a fact that man became conscious of himself with the sense of good and evil. But, of course, that spoiled everything and he could not stay there. He was driven out by his own consciousness. He could no longer stay there. But were they driven out by Jehovah or by their ...
... 1970 ( Mother listens to the English translation of the conversation of 13 December 1969 , in which she spoke of a cure "without repression": "What causes the repression is the idea of good and evil.... The infirmity of our consciousness is what creates this division." Mother added that one has to "learn to disappear." Satprem had proposed the publication of a few extracts in the "Notes on... their vibration are completely different the minute they unite. It's separation that made them what they are. Separation must be done away with, then their very nature changes: it's no longer "good" and "evil" but something else, which is complete. It's complete. ( silence ) It's on the borderline... all that is on the borderline.... When will THE Thing come?... I don't know. ...
... by Yoga." Three questions may arise at this stage: First : Is there not always some kind of distress in action, because while doing action there is always a choice between a relative good and evil, the fear of sin and the difficult endeavour towards virtue? Second: If action is entirely desireless, would it not be devoid of descisiveness, effectiveness and large or vigorous creative power... : The liberated who has united his reason and will with the Divine, casts away from him even here in this world of dualities both good doing and evil doing, for he rises to a higher law beyond good and evil, founded in the liberty of self-knowledge. Second : Action done in Yoga is not only the highest but the wisest, the most potent and efficient even for the affairs of the Page 308 ...
... saw with his Yogic vision God's purpose writ large upon the foaming waves of the national revolution, 14 and collaborated with it in its realisation. Unswayed by the ignorant human notions of good and evil, undismayed by the hurtling forces of destruction and confusion, undeterred by the misunderstandings of his colleagues and followers, firm in his steps and careless of fate and consequence, he... the world. But we submit to the illegitimate dominance of the body and give so much indulgence to our sense of the body being our soul that we become prisoners of the outer act and its apparent good and evil. The fruit of this ignorance is lifelong slavery.... The body is the prison.... "This captivity is the perpetual state of the human race. On the other hand, we see on every page of literature ...
... 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 harbours all possibilities—of good and evil—within him. The past lives in him and the future is preparing in the present. Mind of man goes on working and creating its own moulds but at last it is some other will—a divine power—that works... pangs of the earth and lull its heart to peace. I create ideals for man, I reveal God to man. "I am peace,...! am charity"'...'! am silence,...I am Knowledge". When man's mind is divided between good and evil "I am the Power that labours towards the best". All forms of the Good, the Right, of freedom, valour, sacrifices, martyrdom, of Truth and Beauty—all these I am. My work has not entirely succeeded ...
... reasoned high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate — Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argued then, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and apathy, and glory and shame: Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy! 1 And there is also... undestroyed and indestructible. Plant or animal life experiences the cycle of birth and growth and decay and death, but it is incapable of cerebration, and it indulges in no speculation about good and evil, pain and pleasure. It is man the mental being who has grown the faculty of interpreting phenomena in terms of the dualities. And yet human experience often jerks mental categories into hopeless ...
... He manifests. He does not reveal Himself, but is seen and felt by them as a vague and tremendous presence, the Yaksha, the Daemon, the Spirit, the unknown Power, the Terrible beyond good and evil for whom good and evil are instruments towards His final self-expression. Then there is alarm and confusion in the divine assembly; they feel a demand and a menace, on the side of the evil the possibility ...
... our works; for these are created by the inequalities of the ignorance. The equal Brahman is faultless, nirdoṣaṁ hi samaṁ brahma , beyond the confusion of good and evil, and living in the Brahman we Page 202 too rise beyond good and evil; we act in that purity, stainlessly, with an equal and single purpose of fulfilling the welfare of all existences, kṣīṇa-kalmaṣāḥ sarvabhūta-hite ratāḥ ...
... Yoga." Action is distressed by the choice between a relative good and evil, the fear of sin and the difficult endeavour towards virtue? But the liberated who has united his reason and will with the Divine, casts away from him even here in this world of dualities both good doing and evil doing; for he rises to a higher law beyond good and evil, founded in the liberty of self-knowledge. Such desireless ...
... Undoubtedly, the Gita does, like the Upanishads, teach the equality which rises above sin and virtue, beyond good and evil, but only as a part of the Brahmic consciousness and for the man who is on the path and advanced enough to fulfil the supreme rule. It does not preach indifference to good and evil for the ordinary life of man, where such a doctrine would have the most pernicious consequences. On the ...
... once again. And this is very simple, very simple. Suppose that there are in the universe two opposing and contradictory forces, as some religions have preached: there was good and evil, and there always will be good and evil, there will be a conflict, a battle, a struggle. The one that is stronger, whether it be the good or the evil, will win; if there is more of the good, the good will win and if ...
... Faery-land embodies Falsehood, the Roman Catholic Church and Mary Queen of Scots in an irritating and impossible jumble. The subject of a poem of this kind has to be the struggle of the powers of good and evil, but the human figures through whom it works out to its issues, cannot be merely the good or the evil, this or that virtue or vice; they should stand for them as their expressive opportunity of... and India which had an intention not altogether unsimilar, the Ramayana fusing something like a vast faery-tale with the story of an immense struggle between Page 85 world-powers of good and evil, the Odyssey with its magic of romance and its story of the assertion of right and of domestic and personal virtue against unbridled licence and wrong in an epic encounter between these opposite ...
... mentality as a web of opposites and contraries, not to say contradictions, and yet it is a question whether there can be in the universe any such thing as an entire opposite or a real contradiction. Good and evil seem to be as opposite powers as well can be and we are apt by the nature of our ethical mind to see the world, at any rate in its moral aspect, as a struggle and tug of war between these eternal... yet more radical instance of the eventual unreality of opposites. For the sages make too an opposition of the Knowledge and the Ignorance,— vidyā avidyā, citti acitti ,—on which this question of good and evil seems very intimately to hang. Evil runs behind an ignorant urge of the soul in nature, is itself an ignorant perversion of its will, and the partiality of good is equally an affliction of the Ignorance ...
... only a phenomenon of the surface. As long as we live in the ignorant seeming, we are the ego and are subject to the modes of Nature. Enslaved to appearances, bound to the dualities, tossed between good and evil, sin and virtue, grief and joy, pain and pleasure, good fortune and ill fortune, success and failure, we follow helplessly the iron or gilt and iron round of the wheel of Maya. At best we have only... and enjoyment, a struggle for the most part ineffective. The soul circles in an unending round of Nature's alluring and distressing opposites, success and failure, good fortune and ill fortune, good and evil, sin and virtue, joy and grief, pain and pleasure. It is only when, awaking from its immersion in Prakriti, it perceives its oneness with the One and its oneness with all existences that it can ...
... of the gnostic being would arise self-determined out of this nature of his gnostic individuality. There could be in it no separate problem of an ethical or any similar content, any conflict of good and evil. There could indeed be no problem at all, for problems are the creations of mental ignorance seeking for knowledge and they cannot exist in a consciousness in which knowledge arises self-born and... wrong dealing with one's own soul, mind, life or body or a wrong dealing with the soul, mind, life, body of others, which is the practical sense of all human evil. To rise beyond virtue and sin, good and evil is an essential part of the Vedantic idea of liberation, and there is in this correlation a self-evident Page 1032 sequence. For liberation signifies an emergence into the true spiritual ...
... thing that cannot be argued; it has to be seen. Paripaśyanti dhīrāḥ . And sight is only possible to the calm heart and the unperturbed understanding. The materialist is not wrong when he holds good and evil to be merely operations of Nature which she uses impartially and without making a distinction, and that the distinction is an evolution in the human mind. Evil is good disintegrating to prepare... grief by the coarseness of its composition, it rejected pain in the sense of not knowing it. The higher organisation of the future will not be below it, but rise above it. It was the knowledge of good and evil that brought grief and sin into the world; when that knowledge is surmounted, man will rise above grief and sin. Before he ate the forbidden fruit, he had the innocence of the animal; when he shall ...
... childhood I was already conscious of what Sri Aurobindo calls "living divinely," that is, outside the sense of Good and Evil. This was counterbalanced by a terrible censor which never left me. 11 It took Sri Aurobindo to clear it from my path. But I didn't have the sense of sin, of Good and Evil, sin and virtue—definitely not! My consciousness was centered around right action and wrong action 12 ...
... what you feel to be true? By LIVING it—there is no other way. Read me another aphorism. 58—The animal, before he is corrupted, has not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the god has abandoned it for the tree of eternal life; man stands between the upper heaven and the lower nature. Do you have a question? Was there actually an earthly paradise? Why was... he used to tell me the same thing: the evolutionary power—the mental evolutionary power—is what drove man to gain knowledge, a knowledge of division. And it's a fact that along with the sense of Good and Evil, man became conscious of himself. Naturally, this ruined everything and he couldn't stay: it was his own consciousness that drove him out of Paradise—he could no longer stay. Then was man banished ...
... because he did not yet know good and evil. Innocence of this kind is possible only in the primitive state of man and the description of man as naked and unashamed shows that it is precisely the primitive state of society before arts and civilisation were developed, to which the legend alludes, Man was then innocent, because being unable to distinguish between good and evil he could not choose evil of ...
... ""September 1893, Advaita Ashram, 1958 ' Almora, Vol. I. 43 Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, 1971, Pondicherry, Vol. 16, P. 394. 44 Vide., Rashdall, Hastings, Theory of Good and Evil, Oxford University Press, 1924, London, Vol. I-II; vide also, Joad, C.E.M., Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938, London; Berlin, I ., Four Essays on... from the point of view of the hedonist are on the whole Page 136 the same as those to be recommended by the sane moralist." P. 190). 46 Vide., Rashdall, Hastings, Theory of Good and Evil, Oxford University Press, 1969, London, Vol. I, Chs. VI-VII. 47 Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, SABCL, 1971, Pondicherry, Vol. 19, pp. 1046 65; vide also, ibid. Synthesis of Yoga, Vol ...
... into a means for the individual soul or the psychic entity to manifest more and more of its concealed consciousness.26 In this double process of evolution, a stage is reached where the sense of good and evil begin to arise and it is the evolutionary psychic entity or the psychic being, which insists on the distinction, though in a larger sense than the mere moral reference. The psychic being has a ... The limitation of its own consciousness and the mistaken view of itself as a fabricator instead of being only a small coordinator causes in the human consciousness the phenomena of dualities, — good and evil, joy and suffering, life and death.³¹ The task of conscious will and choice among alternative possibilities is its most important element; this task becomes increasingly difficult, since alternatives ...
... world, peruse every volume of its history; amid all these strange and cruel forms of worship, in this amazing variety of manners and customs, you will everywhere find the same [basic] ideas of good and evil.... There is, at the bottom of our hearts, an inborn principle of justice and virtue by which, despite our maxims, we judge our own actions, or those of others, to be good or evil; and it is this... echoed in Kant: Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide of a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free, infallible, judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In thee consists the excellence of man s nature and the morality of his actions; apart from. thee I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts — nothing but ...
... know the cause which it comes from, and I must get rid of it." That is quite different from taking pleasure in suffering as the Christians do. In the movement of the Infinite there are both good and evil, suffering and joy i.e. there are the higher and the lower movements and if you accept and invite the lower and take delight in it, well, you can have it ! If you want suffering, God will give you... error and evil or sin. Really speaking, it is the infinite Ananda which becomes perverted into suffering here in duality. But suffering does not enter into the infinite Ananda, as conceptions of good and evil do not enter into; the infinite power nor error into infinite knowledge. . Error is there and enters into me, because I am not able to enter into the knowledge that comes to me in that ...
... in the making, all sorrow a veiled delight. This the Saguna Brahman perceives and knows and as Vasudeva, or tranquil Personality, He utterly enjoys without any distinction of pleasure and grief, good and evil, the infinite play of the world within Himself. The Saguna is Sacchidananda envisaging cosmic activity. On the tranquillity [of] Vasudeva God by a new adhyaropa manifestsHimself to Himself as the ...
... consequences. The chapter has been called the Vibhuti-Yoga,—an indispensable yoga. For while we must identify ourselves impartially with the universal divine Becoming in all its extension, its good and evil, perfection and imperfection, light and darkness, we must at the same time realise that there is an ascending evolutionary power in it, an increasing intensity of its revelation in things, a hierarchic ...
... es of the flesh without the crude and the cramped which ordinarily go with flesh-impulses. This super-love is set in an atmosphere in contact with some Super-Nature: spirits and entities, both good and evil, pervade Sri Aurobindo's outer world, wearing shape and moulding movement. The outer world itself is seen as part of a gradation of planes that rise higher or sink lower than the material. The authentic ...
... consists of acts of causes and effects. They actualise the energy of the past and effect future. The present is very decisive in any act of karma. The right time is now, the present. Good produces good and evil its like, love begets more love and hate multiplies hate. Karma also establishes the law of freedom. The doctrine of predetermination is very prevalent in Indian tradition. However, if ...
... great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action; the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination ...
... a great poetic story of man or world or gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggles of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination ...
... be his handiwork. “The difficulty [ i.e. the problem of suffering and evil] arises only if we assume the existence of an extracosmic personal God, not Himself the universe, one who has created good and evil, pain and suffering 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 ...
... reconstruct the essence of human beings, unlock the key of human nature. … Such images fuel popular narratives of genetic essentialism – a picture of the gene as the essence of the person, the locus of good and evil, the key to ‘the secret of life’.” 70 But sometimes the muzzle comes off. “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will ...
... Great Mother created the gods. ‘But as the first four had come before them, at every step the gods ran into them, and so it was that the world changed into a battlefield’ between gods and demons, Good and Evil, as all the great traditions tell. Time and again the gods have to do battle with the first four Asuras and with their emanations – for the Asuras had the power to multiply into ‘cascades’ of ...
... religious studies" had inclined him towards "questions of metaphysics". He spent a great deal of his time over masters like Plato, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. He thought over profound issues like "good and evil, justice, charity and equanimity". While earlier he had "a reckless and wayward disposition", there was now a gentleness, which was the outcome of philosophical deveopments. The influence of a Jesuit ...
... and materialism, light and darkness, the Aryan and the Jewish side of the scale, were present in humanity since its beginning and therefore in every individual. In the eternal struggle between good and evil for dominion over the world the Germans constituted the vanguard. This battle must not only be fought in the open, between the opponents in society, but first of all in every individual, for only ...
... involutionary was a stair of the descent of the Page 812 Spirit. In the latter hypothesis the ascending gradation might have a double purpose. For it would contain pre-formations of the good and evil that must evolve in the earth as part of the struggle necessary for the evolutionary growth of the Soul in Nature; these would be formations existing for themselves, for their own independent s ...
... to this play of qualities which constitute our psychology and if from subjection to that play are born the struggle and discord in which we live, floundering eternally between the two poles of good and evil, virtue and sin, satisfaction and failure, joy and grief, pleasure and pain, then to get beyond the qualities and take our foundation in the settled peace of that which is always beyond them is ...
... reposing on a certain principle of divine justice, which he reads always according to his own ideas and character, as a sort of enlarged copy of his human justice; he conceives the idea of moral good and evil and looks upon suffering and calamity and all things unpleasant as a punishment for his sins and upon happiness and good fortune and all things pleasant as a reward of his virtue. God appears to ...
... ethical preoccupations of our forefathers. They represent the struggle between the powers of the higher Good and the lower desire, and this conception of the Rig Veda and the same opposition of good and evil otherwise expressed, with less psychological subtlety, with more ethical directness in the scriptures of the Zoroastrians, our ancient neighbours and kindred, proceeded probably from a common original ...
... sa, hunger and thirst; Shitoshna, heat and cold; pleasure and pain of the body. (b) Of the Chitta—Priyapriyabodha, the sense or feeling of love and hatred; Mangalamangalabodha, the sense of good and evil, good and bad fortune; Manapamanabodha, the sense of honour and obloquy. (c) Of the Mind (that is, Manas and Buddhi)—Satyasatya, the knowledge of truth and falsehood; Papapunya, the knowledge ...
... itself he enjoys immortality. By death is meant the state of mortality which is a subjection to the process of constant birth and dying as a limited ego bound to the dualities of joy and sorrow, good and evil, truth and error, love and hatred, pleasure and suffering. This state comes by limitation and self-division from the One who is all and in all and beyond all and by attachment of the idea of ...
... conquered and overcome. Look not at thy own pleasure and gain and profit, but above and around, above at the shining summits to which thou climbest, around at this world of battle and trial in which good and evil, progress and retrogression are locked in stern conflict. Men call to thee, their strong man, their Page 66 hero for help; help then, fight. Destroy when by destruction the world must ...
... individual Purusha, is attracted by her qualitative workings and this attraction of her qualities draws him constantly to births of all kinds in which he enjoys the variations and vicissitudes, the good and evil of birth in Nature. But this is only the outward experience of the soul mutable in conception by identification with mutable Nature. Seated in this body is her and our Divinity, the supreme Self ...
... Word, a One by which all things are unified, all laws and results perpetually determined, all measures unalterably maintained. Day and Night are one, Death and Life are one, Youth and Age are one, Good and Evil are one, because that is One and all these are only its various shapes and appearances. Heraclitus would not have accepted a purely psychological principle of Self as the origin of things, but ...
... with her furious blows the self in body, life & mind in order to liberate it as spirit eternal. 520) Our parents fell, in the deep Semitic apologue, because they tasted the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Had they taken at once of the tree of eternal life, they would have escaped the immediate consequence; but God's purpose in humanity would have been defeated. His wrath is our eternal advantage ...
... three parts of the booklet Thoughts and Glimpses (published in Essays in Philosophy and Yoga ). The Hour of God . Circa 1918. Beyond Good and Evil . Circa 1918. Editorial title. The Divine Superman . Circa 1918. Section Five (1927 and after) The second, third and ...
... improbable often happens, that facts mislead. He rises above reason to that direct and illuminated knowledge which we call vijñānam . The desire-driven mind is emmeshed in the intricate tangle of good and evil, of the pleasant and the unpleasant, of happiness and misfortune. It strives to have the good always, the pleasant always, the happiness always. It is elated by fortunate happenings, disturbed and ...
... doubtful whether the Vedic terms Aryan & unAryan at all refer to racial or cultural differences; they may have an entirely different and wholly religious & spiritual significance & refer to the good and evil powers & mortals influenced by them. If this prove to be the truth, and the close contiguity & probable historical connection between the Vedic Indians & the Zoroastrian Persians gives it a great ...
... eloquently of peace, of brotherhood, of freedom, of unity, which for the moment partly enlightened and kindled the soul of the race and gave its intellect a broader vista. Men spoke of the powers of good and evil separated on opposite sides and locked in a decisive conflict. These ideas were the exaggerations of sentiment and idealistic reason and in their excessive and blinding light many things took covert ...
... be separated. But what explanation of the evil and misery can there be there? The Indian view is that the Divine is the inmost substance of the Universe, but he is also outside it, transcendent; good and evil, happiness and misery are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and diminution Page 122 of consciousness in the manifestation, but are not part of the essence or of the ...
... es in which the side favoured by the Divine triumphed, because its leaders made themselves his instruments. I don't suppose he envisaged it as a battle between virtue and wickedness or between good and evil men or intended to equate the British with the Pandavas, nations with individuals or even individuals with individuals,—shall we say, Stafford Cripps with Yudhisthir, Churchill with Bhima and General ...
... education, it will try ever harder to extinguish within itself this little true thing, and sometimes it succeeds so well that it loses all contact with it, and also the power of distinguishing between good and evil. That is why I insist upon this, and I say that from their infancy children must be taught that there is an inner reality—within themselves, within the earth, within the universe—and that they, ...
... attained the perfection of knowledge, who has cast away all doubt and who has sounded the depths of immortality, him I consider to be a Brahmin. One who in this world has broken all ties (of good and evil) and who is delivered from grief, from taints and impurities, him I consider to be a Brahmin. One who, like the moon, is spotless, pure, clear, serene, from whom the thirst of earthly desires ...
... Children, do you find it sad that the demon of Kaveripakam was slain? And do you think it was a pity that the forty-nine bad poets of Madura fell into the water? In this world there are both good and evil things; and we should cherish and defend only the good, fight and undermine the evil. All wise men, like Tiruvalluvar the noble poet, know and are able to do this. And the wiser they are, the ...
... human pleasure delights you, you are not in the right state to know the Ananda. It may come to you and you will not even be aware of it. " A spiritual Truth and Right have convicted the good and evil of this world of imperfection or of falsehood and unveiled a supreme good.... But behind all these and in them he has felt a Divinity who is all these things, a Bringer of Light, a Guide and All-Knower ...
... decried by men, most despised by men, most condemned by human "wisdom", that one can see the divine light shining. They are not mere words, they are living experiences. All these ideas of good and evil, good and bad, higher, lower, all these notions belong to the ignorance of the human mind, and if one really wants to come into contact with the divine life, one must liberate oneself totally from ...
... mental, moral notions to the creation of the universe, you will never understand anything about it, never. Because from all sides and in all ways it goes beyond these conceptions—conceptions of good and evil, and these things. All the mental, moral conceptions we have cannot explain the universe. And for this part of ourselves which indeed lives in a total ignorance, all that can be said is: "Things ...
... them and not make a mistake. If your active thought comes in the way, it is finished, you cannot distinguish clearly any longer; you begin to question. And then you make use of your notions of good and evil to judge whether this comes from the Divine or doesn't come from the Divine. That's absurd. It is impossible. Even when one has had this double experience and can make the distinction, there ...
... at all natural—it seems almost supernatural! Man questions himself because the mental instrument is intended to see all possibilities. And the immediate consequence of this is the concept of good and evil, or of what is right and what is wrong, and all the miseries that follow from that. One cannot say that it is a bad thing; it is an intermediate—stage not a very pleasant one, but still… one which ...
... that the voice of the ordinary conscience is not the voice of the soul. What is it then? The voice of the ordinary conscience is an ethical voice, a moral voice which distinguishes between good and evil, encourages us to do good and forbids us to do evil. This voice is very useful in ordinary life, until one is able to become conscious of one's psychic being and allow oneself to be entirely guided ...
... Page 95 we fancy that we possess the supreme wisdom and the perfect justice that we are able to say with certainty, "This is good, this is bad"? Let us never forget that our notions of good and evil are wholly relative and so ignorant that, in what concerns others, we often find fault with an act which is the expression of a wisdom far greater than our own. True science does not judge; it ...
... the pure spiritual height where you have not to think whether the action is moral or not. People hastily conclude that when you ask them to rise above morality, you are asking them to sink below good and evil. That is not at all the case........By morality you become more human, but you do not go beyond humanity. Morality has done much good to man, maybe; it has also done much harm. (A disciple:) ...
... in the cells of the body, and then the attack dissolves. The other day, too, in your supramental experience, you said that moral values had lost all their meaning. But our conceptions of Good and Evil are so ridiculous! Our ideas of what is near to the Divine or far from the Divine are so absurd! The experience of the other day [ February 3 ] was quite a revelation to me, and I came out of it ...
... questions himself because the mental instrument is made for seeing all possibilities and because the human being feels he has freedom of choice... and the immediate consequences are the notions of good and evil, right and wrong, and all the ensuing miseries. This can't be called a bad thing: it's an intermediate stage—not a very pleasant stage, but nevertheless... it was certainly inevitable for a total ...
... , isn't he? So what becomes of one who has no conscience, who has lost it by having disregarded it too often? What is usually called "conscience" is a mental formation based on the idea of good and evil, a moral entity or rather an element of goodwill which tries to keep the individual on what is commonly known as the straight path. This element acts as a defence against the hostile forces which ...
... a "coldly scientific knowledge" because that introduces mental notions, but it was of such a wisdom!... A knowledge so wise, so calm, so imperturbably quiet, absolutely free from any notion of good and evil, of divine, of positive and negative, absolutely independent of all of that—purely material. And with an absolute power. Then in these same cells, which were fully conscious of this knowledge of ...
... surging up from the subconscient, and now even everything that was repressed.... It isn't something I "feel" or "experience," but it's a perception. The perception... yes, of how all our notions of good and evil, right and wrong are futile for the Divine vision, absolutely futile—unreal. All human notions are so narrow and limited, so partial and tinged with moral preferences. As if I were being shown ...
... part, every element making up the whole. So in order to give form to those elements, it all began with Separation, and it was Separation that gave birth to this division between what we call good and evil; but from the point of view of sensation—sensation in the most material part—we may say it's suffering and Ananda. And the movement is to put a stop to all separation and to realize the total c ...
... established experiences. So there, one is vulnerable. That's just what is being taught to the body: the inanity of this present way of seeing and understanding things based on the good and the bad, good and evil, the luminous and the dark... all those contradictions; and the whole judgment, the whole conception of life (material life) is based on that—it's to teach you the inanity of this base. I see that ...
... then in His own right time He will reveal His Presence." That's it! That's exactly it! Exactly. But the ones from "The Life Divine" are really interesting: "The tree of the knowledge of good and evil with its sweet and bitter fruits is secretly rooted in the very nature of the Inconscience from which our being has Page 282 emerged and on which it still stands as a nether soil and ...
... but Manichaeism." That is also why religions will never be able to unite humanity, because they have remained Manichaean in their principle, because they are founded on morality, on a sense of good and evil, necessarily varying from one country to the next. Religions will not reconcile men with one another any more than they have reconciled men with themselves, or reconciled their aspiration to "be" ...
... of Sri Aurobindo?... He tells us to lose all our moral sense! ( Satprem reads ) 520—Our parents fell, in the deep Semitic apologue, because they tasted the fruit of the tree of good and Page 202 evil. Had they taken at once of the tree of eternal life, they would have escaped the immediate consequence; but God's purpose in humanity would have been defeated. His wrath is our eternal ...
... throughout the poem do convince me. It all fits together. Yours is a scheme of advaita, mine dualistic, and finally the non-dual universe must be right and we know that for Blake heaven and hell, good and evil, the 'contraries', must be married in 'Jesus, the Imagination'. I find myself reflecting on the 'wrath-fires' of the Father, as the matrix of creation (Boehme) as surely depicted in the Milton ...
... appear in large numbers before our eyes (today) proving true, I foresee Page 212 (only) that which is unpropitious (to us). (17) (Propitious and unpropitious) time and place as well as (good and evil) omens, facial expressions, depression and liveliness, (the measure of) fatigue as also the strength and weakness of the warrior occupying the chariot must be ascertained (by a charioteer). (18) ...
... the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. Page 258 Good and Evil It is right in principle that those should be the best loved who have contributed most to the elevation of the human race and human life. But, if one goes on to ask who they are, one finds ...
... be no need for crucifixion, salvation or atonement to take place. In the Garden of Eden (Paradise), where the Creation took place, God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. In spite of God's commandment, they ate the fruit, thus becoming aware of good vs. evil. This disobedience of Adam and Eve against God's command is the Fall. According to Christianity, it was such ...
... way to answering the "why?". Or, perhaps, we cannot cross that barrier, and the mysterious will continue to remain the mysterious, and life with all its changes will still remain a bundle of good and evil, a succession of conflicts, a curious combination of incompatible and mutually hostile urges. Page 276 Or again, perhaps, the very progress of science, unconnected with and isolated ...
... conscious of what he was receiving from others, but he didn't care to think about what he was passing on to them! Even without meeting, there can be mutual effects. Even thought has power for good and evil. Bad thoughts may affect others. That's why Buddha used to emphasise right thinking. The need of company which people feel is really their need to interchange forces. What after all is the passion ...
... and many-sided action of the Spirit in life, and its variety cannot be set aside in favour of a single principle, neither can be hammered into so many sections of the single duality of ethical good and evil; ethics, the maintenance of human standards of morality, cannot, therefore, be the sole preoccupation of the cosmic Law or the sole principle of determination of the working of Karma." (The Life ...
... individual and the world towards their divine fullness, and evil is all that retards or breaks up that increasing perfection." But since this perfection is progressive and evolutive in time, good and evil change their meanings and values with the passage of time. Hence is the warning of Sri Aurobindo: 'To form higher and higher temporary standards as long as they are needed is to serve ...
... the programme. Page 31 A study of ethical thought as also religious and spiritual thought should also be a part of the programme of exploration. These will include the study of good and evil, comparative study of religions, and the psychology of yogic sciences. Since art is also a great gate to the perception and practice of the value of Beauty, this also should form a part of ...
... Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves — for Samadhi lies potential in us all — for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul."7 The Vedantists say that one may stumble into superconsciousness sporadically, without the previous discipline, but it is then impure ...
... in the midst of happiness, who is .free from attachment, fear and anger, such a one is called a sage of steady wisdom. He who is without attachment and who neither rejoices nor hates in whatever good and evil that may come upon him; his wisdom is firm. When one is able to withdraw his senses from the sense- objects as a tortoise withdraws its limbs from all sides, his wisdom is firm. When the embodied ...
... participating totally in the action and nature of the Purushottama and Para Prakriti. In the realization of that possibility, not only the limitations of laws of action (dharmas or standards of good and evil) which govern the operations of tamas, rajas, and sattwa, but also the limitations of the development of the swabhava and swadharma are also swept aside. In the rush of the flood of Para Prakriti ...
... egoistic initiative, and who is My devotee, - he is dear to Me. 12.16 He who does not get excited nor does he get depressed, he who envies none and desires nothing, who has given up all good and evil, and he who is full of devotion, he is dear to Me. 12.17 Page 315 He who is equal to the enemy and the friend and he who remains equal in honour and dishonour, in cold ...
... faltering thy work of battle in the world. Look not at thy own pleasure and gain and profit, but above and around, above at the shining summits and around on this world of battle and trial in which good and evil, progress and retrogression are locked in stern conflict. Destroy, when by destruction the world must advance but hate not which thou destroyest, neither grieve for those who perish. Know everywhere ...
... revelations, symbolized by Ila, inspiration or Saraswati, Page 58 intuition or Sarama, and discrimination between truth and falsehood, between knowledge and ignorance and between good and evil — the faculty symbolized by Dakshina. The Vedic yoga of knowledge is seen to be the process of sacrifice or cultivation or surrender of our cognitive activities by means of intensities of clarities ...
... Hesse often postulated the possibility of a spiritual kingdom towards which his heroes strive. In several essays he sought a new morality that would transcend the traditional dichotomy between good and evil and embrace all extremes of life in one unified vision. In Magister Ludi, the hero struggles to be true to his inner guide and is assisted by a teacher who is centred in his inner self. Both teacher ...
... actually a phrase of Tertullian vide his De Came Christi, V— though often ascribed to St. Augustine Page 155 The Indian spiritual consciousness considers the secular distinction of good and evil as otiose: both are maya, there must neither be attachment to the Good, nor repulsion from Evil, the two, dwandwas, belong to the same category of relativity, that is, unreality. Indian artists ...
... her there is only one absolute—the transcendent, the Supreme Divine himself—the Brahman, nothing else, netaram. The Indian spiritual consciousness considers the secular distinction of good and evil as otiose: both are maya, there must neither be attachment to the Good, nor repulsion from Evil, the two, dwandwas, belong to the same category of relativity, that is, unreality. Indian artists ...
... significant principle and mystery. Still it must be said that never in the annals of the physical world has this truth taken such momentous proportions as in the grim present. It is pregnant with all good and evil that may make or mar human destiny in the near future. Whether man will transcend his half-animal state and rise to the full height of his manhood, nay even to the godhead in him, or descend back ...
... separation in which Good is equated with not-evil and evil with not-good. This is the outlook of individualised consciousness. Next, as the consciousness grows and envelops the whole existence, good and evil are both embraced and are found to form a secret and magic harmony. That is the universal or cosmic consciousness. And Goethe's genius seems to be an outflowering of something of this status of ...
... And the leaves are the many desires that it carries. O, cut it down with the axe that is the Guru's word: Kanhu says, the tree must not grow again. Good and evil are the waters that nourish the tree; Directed by the Guru the wise one knows how to fell it. And he who knows not the trick Goes astray, the fool ...
... want of enmity. The truth is true not only in respect of two enemy forces of the same quality and on the same plane, but also with regard to the antagonism between higher and lower forces, between Good and Evil. Do we then propose taking it all lying down, it may be asked? Is martyrdom then our ideal? Not so, for we do not believe that evil forces can be appeased or conquered or transformed by yielding ...
... Law, whose clarity is overwhelmed can never have this wisdom perfected. [7] One whose thoughts are never dissipated, whose mind is never perplexed, who has gone beyond good and evil, one who is thus wakeful has nothing to fear. [8] Know this body to be a mere earthen pot. Establish this mind like a city. And with knowledge as your weapon fight with ...
... behind a thing, the perennial source of true delight. The poet or the seer creates something from the inspiration derived from the truth realised by him. Such an action is above the duality of good and evil, purity and impurity, good will and ill will. For an immature sadhaka, from the stand- Page 73 point of his sadhana, the absolute realisation of truth by the adept may not always ...
... we may only quote the last paragraph of that article: Page 197 Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish ...
... epic, a great poetic story of man or world or gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggles of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination ...
... shape." It is these beings who were seen by him to act upon the inner beings of man and to turn them round and round in the inescapable circle of ignorance. For "To sport with good and evil is their law; Luring to failure and meaningless success, All models they corrupt, all measures cheat, Make knowledge a poison, virtue a patten dull And lead the endless cycles ...
... After that he was driven by a divine breath into still higher regions of being ".. .past not-self and self and selflessness". In that region there is no duality of love and hate, good and evil, fate and chance and true and false. These things there "Find no access, no cause, no right to live." It being the realm of perfect harmony there could be no conflict between thought and thought ...
... nature and his whole life by his thought and action, and rise from the animal-human to the divine-human level of existence. The other worlds are the Bhogabhumi² where he can only enjoy the fruits, good and evil, of his actions. It is only here that the soul can liberate itself from the meshes of ¹ The world of creative action. ² The worlds of enjoyment. Page 54 ignorance ...
... of mystic experience of Christianity. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, X belonged to that group in England. But it created a lot of difficulty in his Sadhana because they posit two things in man, good and evil persons. The evil person has to rise up in order to be got rid of by the good. There are already sufficient evil things in the world without evoking the evil person. The Europeans have very imperfect ...
... story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure ...
... his nature. Sri Aurobindo : Why not? There can be anger, like Durvasa's or sex. You have not heard of the fall of Rishis through anger or through sex? The Yogis pass beyond the stage of good and evil. Ordinary questions of morality don't arise in them. They look upon outer nature as a child behaving according to its wants. I think X's fall came in that way. He had gone into the higher mind, ...
... Marshall Urban, "becomes a natural symbol for the creating and eliciting power. Moreover, the contrasts bound up with it, light and darkness, power and weakness, life and death, spirit and matter, good and evil, become a natural vehicle for the expression and embodiment of moral and other value contrasts as they develop in the life of man." 43 Energy, creativity, life, power, knowledge, enjoyment may ...
... powers and personalities, and once the issue is joined, they struggle to the bitter end. A battle, whether symbolic or real, whether fought with material or other weapons, between the forces of Good and Evil can be as exciting as, perhaps even more exciting than, a voyage, a quest, a climb, in search of the lost Grail or the veiled God. The traditional stories of Siddharta the Buddha mention a prolonged ...
... pure spiritual height where you have not to think whether the action is moral or not. These people hastily conclude that when you ask them to rise above morality, you are asking them to sink below good and evil. That is not at all the case. Disciple : They believe that a man can advance only by morality i.e. by remaining moral. Sri Aurobindo : Nobody denies that. By morality you become ...
... our new Means. An invasion of the divine Fire on the Earth, the hope of Prometheus unbound. The junction of heaven and earth through the walls of our grave. That Fire un-earths everything: good and evil, the beautiful and the hideous, truth and falsehood – life and death – as though each were merely the reverse of the other, or the same side of a Page 119 single Falsehood. And we are ...
... if one wished. She was there, so fragile, so vast and tranquil⎯without a shadow of a person in that small body: a formidable, quiet active witness who welcomed everything, looked at everything, good and evil, poison and nectar, who embraced all in her great, immobile white Fire, without any difference, without pluses and minuses. It was the world, her world. These were the data of the problem, and each ...
... 667 lower (human) and higher (spiritual) law 300, 331, 633-4 symbolic character of human body 302, 562, 653, 752 memories in deep consciousness 302-3, 523, 750 Art as Yoga 303-4 ideas of Good and Evil 303, 659 falsity of its dichotomy 711 sorting true from false impulses 641, 721, 727 motivation for doing Yoga 305, 309 psychic being, the divine spark 306-7, 513ff, 539, 784 (cf ...
... fully agreed with this. He used to tell me the same thing: that the mental evolutionary power is what led man to knowledge, a knowledge of division. Besides, it's a fact that with the sense of Good and Evil, man became conscious of himself. Naturally this spoiled everything and he couldn't stay; it was his own consciousness that exiled him from Paradise. He could no longer stay." Page 91 ...
... established experiences. So there, one is vulnerable. And that's just what is being taught to the body: the inanity of the present way of seeing and understanding things, based on right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark ... all those contradictions; the entire judgment, the entire conception of material life is based on that. Even the physical part which thought it knew how to live and knew what ...
... reproducing physiologically. So, she continued, in order to give form to those elements, it all began with Separation, and it was Separation that gave birth to this division between what we call "good" and "evil," black and white, night and day; but from the point of view of sensation—sensation in the most material part—we can say it's suffering and Ananda [beatitude].... It's the tendency to create two ...
... do not mean the direction of what is called conscience. Conscience, as it is understood, is a mental and moral construction, a central crystallisation of the more or less conventional ideas of good and evil in the human mind. It is invariably coloured by the preferences and prepossessions of the mind, and, even at its best, cannot but reflect the dominant tendency of the being, though that tendency ...
... the portals of death, we are born for ever, millions of times we are! O Tara, O Mother, it is Thou who doest, Thou who lovest, Thou who drivest, Thou who drawest us through day and night, through good and evil, through sorrow and joy, towards the Light which loves; O Tara, Tara, O Mother... I stood up, I walked towards the sea. It was like an immense turquoise at the foot of the dunes. I left my ...
... and suffering, the only suffering in fact, is to be unable to look in the right direction, because if we could, just one second, see what the world really is without all our false vision of good and evil or yes and no, we would be cured forever, and the world, without altering, even for one second, what it is at this cruel and dark minute, would be wholly different. It is a veil of Falsehood over ...
... captured, experienced, re-felt as if they were being produced in ourselves. 20 October 1959 The Mother playing the organ * * * Sweet Mother, How can one distinguish between good and evil in a dream? In principle, to judge the activities of sleep one needs the same capacity of discrimination as to judge the waking activities. But since we usually give the name “dream” to a ...
... powers native to his humanity. Another thing I would like to avoid is the assumption that there is somewhere and somehow an ideal morality, which draws an absolute and a sharp distinction between good and evil. Thus it is easy to say that chastity is good, licence is evil. But what if someone were to protest that this is a mistake, that chastity is bad, licence is good. How are you going to refute him ...
... might have found him on the other side. But because the heart and senses of Mirabeau were unsatisfied, the French Revolution triumphed. So it is that God prepares the man and the moment, using good and evil with a divine impartiality for His mighty ends. Without the man the moment is a lost opportunity; without the moment the man is a force inoperative. The meeting of the two changes the destinies ...
... From Him we come, to Him we go, desire Eternally, And so long as He wills, our separate birth Is and shall be. Shrink not from life, O Aryan, but with mirth And joy receive His good and evil, sin and virtue, till He bids thee leave. But while thou livest, perfectly fulfil Thy part, conceive Earth as thy stage, thyself the actor strong, The drama His. Work, but the ...
... Is from which by doubt we fell, Reaching only after Heaven And achieving only Hell. Page 539 Let the heart be king and master, Let the brain exult and toil; Disbelieve in good and evil, God with Nature reconcile. Therefore, O rebellious sweetness, Thou tookst arms for joy and love. There achieve them! Take possession Of our radiant seats above. ...
... man came into life with his present nature ready determined for him and irrevocable and had to act according to it, there would be no real responsibility; for he would do good according to the good and evil according to the evil in his nature, he would be imperfect according to its imperfection or perfect according to its perfection; and he might have to suffer the return of his good or evil, bear ...
... the last term of existence, we reach that in which ananda exists. What is that? It is not Turiya who is shivam, shantam, adwaitam, sacchidanandam, but that which is beyond shivam and ashivam, good and evil, shantam and kalilam, calm and chaos, dwaitam and adwaitam, duality and unity. Sat, Chit and Ananda are in this Highest, but He is neither Sat, Chit nor Ananda nor any combination of these. He is ...
... shrinking and gingerly theism afraid of the world's contradictions, but one which sees God as the omniscient and omnipotent, the sole original Being who manifests in himself all, whatever it may be, good and evil, pain and pleasure, light and darkness as stuff of his own existence and governs himself what in himself he has manifested. Unaffected by its oppositions, unbound by his creation, exceeding, yet ...
... doer of the work and the Divine Will behind as the master of universal Nature. Only so long as we have not this knowledge, are we bound by the character of the ego and its will as the doer and do good and evil and have the satisfaction of our tamasic, rajasic or sattwic nature. But once we live in this greater knowledge, the character and consequences of the work can make no difference to the freedom ...
... level, for that has been abandoned,—even the moral motive has been abandoned, since the liberated man has passed beyond the lower distinction of sin and virtue, lives in a glorified purity beyond good and evil. It cannot be the spiritual call to his perfect self-development by means of disinterested works, for the call has been answered, the development is perfect and fulfilled. His motive of action can ...
... back into the impersonal self the soul gets back into a greater self-knowledge and is liberated from the bondage of the works of Nature, untouched by her Gunas, free from her shows of good Page 231 and evil, suffering and happiness. The natural being, the mind, body, life, still remain, Nature still works; but the inner being does not identify himself with these, nor while the gunas play ...
... evil that has to be lived and does not cut at its roots. But the obvious right standpoint is to take life as it is and make the most of it, either practically for the best ordering of its mixed good and evil or ideally with some hope of a relative perfection. If spirituality is to have any meaning, it can only signify the aim or the high labour of a lofty intelligence, rational will, limited beauty ...
... equal value, all can be used, since by Her all is transformed, illumined, transfigured: all that becomes conscious of Her and gives itself to Her becomes Herself and thus escapes all notions of good and evil, which are purely external and human. One of these movements, one of these attitudes without the other is incomplete and one-sided. To consecrate our being in one block to the Supreme Essence ...
... superhuman motives and accept gladly whatever she does. At least that seems to be the logic of such a position. You base yourself evidently on the position that the Divine Consciousness is above good and evil. But that does not mean Page 362 that it does evil and good impartially. It can only mean that it acts from a light that is beyond that level of human consciousness which makes the human ...
... education, it will try ever harder to extinguish within itself this little true thing, and sometimes it succeeds so well that it loses all contact with it, and also the power of distinguishing between good and evil. That is why I insist upon this, and I say that from their infancy children must be taught that there is an inner reality - within themselves, within the earth, within the universe - and that they ...
... ignorant of the true Law, and whose faith is wavering will never be able to develop. If a man's thoughts are not agitated, if his mind is not troubled by desire, if he no longer cares for good and evil, this man, wide awake, knows nothing of fear. Observing that the body is as fragile as a jar, and fortifying the mind like a city at arms, one should attack Mara with the blade of intelligence ...
... supreme beings of the creation. This is not to encourage you to be asuric, you know, but it is like that—this will widen your minds a little and help you to free yourself from those ideas of opposing good and evil, for if you abide in that category, there is no hope. If the world was not essentially the opposite of what it has become, there would be no hope. For the hole is so black and so deep, and the ...
... a striving turmoil and an unhappy imbroglio. It is a soul of human or Titanic desire clinging to the garish colour, disordered poetry, violent tragedy or stirring melodrama of the mixed flux of good and evil, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, heady rapture and bitter torture. It loves these things and would have more and more of them or, even when it suffers and cries out against them, can accept ...
... conquer, keep your consciousness full of light, without the least tremor, without a word, without the slightest vibration in the cells of the body—and then the attack melts away. But our ideas of good and evil are so ridiculous! So ridiculous is our notion of what is close to the Divine or far from the Divine! The experience I had the other day, on the third of February, was for me revelatory, I came ...
... Sri Aurobindo writes: "As long as we live in the ignorant seeming, we are the ego and are subject to the modes of Nature. Enslaved to appearances, bound to the dualities, tossed between good and evil, sin and virtue, grief Page 56 and joy, pain and pleasure, good fortune and ill fortune, success and failure, we follow helplessly the iron round of the wheel of Maya." The Synthesis ...
... harder to extinguish Within itself this little Page-141 true thing, and sometimes it succeeds so well that it loses all contact with it, and also the power of distinguishing between good and evil. That is why I insist upon this, and I say that from their infancy children must be taught that there is an inner reality within themselves, within the earth, within the universe and that they, ...
... nation, his tyrant uncle Kansa, who shall say whether they did good or did evil? But this we can feel, that they acted divinely. This is a supremely elegant way of saying that all notions of good and evil are exclusively human and are worthless in the eyes of the Divine. 16 February 1970 Page 308 × King ...
... On Thoughts and Aphorisms Aphorism - 521 521—Our parents fell, in the deep Semitic apologue, because they tasted the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Had they taken at once of the tree of eternal life, they would have escaped the immediate consequence; but God's purpose in humanity would have been defeated. His wrath is our eternal advantage ...
... a great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination ...
... it is well that terrible examples of the utmost logic of these things should be prominently forced on the attention of mankind; for by showing the evil stripped of all veils the choice between good and evil instead of a halting between the two will be forced on the human conscience. Woe to the race if it blinds its conscience and buttresses up its animal egoism with the old justifications; for the ...
... monstrous commercialism. Nor is this due, as is so often asserted, to its divorce from religion or to any lack of idealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the powers of good and evil and provided an intellectual conviction both for reaction and for progress. Organised religion itself has often enough in the past hounded men to crime and massacre and justified obscurantism and ...
... and inspirations. That is what the ethical being labours towards and the higher ethical man increasingly attains to in his inner efforts. In fact ethics is not in its essence a calculation of good and evil in the action or a laboured effort to be blameless according to the standards of the world,—those are only crude appearances,—it is an attempt to grow into the divine nature. Its parts of purity ...
... Or, touch × The division, or the twofoldness of the nature divided between good and evil. × Or, the riches × ...
... be separated. But what explanation of the evil and misery can there be there? The Indian view is that the Divine is the inmost substance of the Universe, but he is also outside it, transcendent; good and evil, happiness and misery are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and diminution of consciousness in the manifestation, but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-c ...
... of ethical algebra, this system of moral accounts needs a different planet for its development; a qualified accountant has yet to be born on the human plane. You cannot assess pleasure & pain, good and evil in so many ounces & pounds; human feelings, abstract emotions are elusive and variable from moment to moment. Utilitarianism with all its appearance of extreme practicality and definiteness, is ...
... striving turmoil and an unhappy imbroglio. It is a soul of human or Titanic desire clinging to the garish colour, disordered poetry, violent tragedy or stirring melodrama of this mixed flux of good and evil, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, heady rapture and bitter torture. It loves these things and would have more and more of them or, even when it suffers and cries out against them, can accept ...
... sweetness and beauty and begun to impose its law of perfection and its ecstasy even amidst the disharmony of terrestrial life. A spiritual Page 128 Truth and Right have convicted the good and evil of this world of imperfection or of falsehood and unveiled a supreme good and its clue of subtle harmony and its sublimation of action and feeling and knowledge. But behind all these and in them ...
... play of fantasy, disharmony and disorder, supporting inexorably its extreme of falsehood, wrong and suffering, a Manichean double principle of conflicting and intermingling light and darkness, good and evil, stand at the root of cosmic existence. The idea of certain thinkers that there is an absolute good but also an absolute evil, both of them an approach to the Absolute, might assume consistence ...
... eternal wisdom and will. We shall realise the Divine, the eternal Self of all, first, as the source of all action and inaction, of all knowledge and ignorance, of all delight and suffering, of all good and evil, perfection and imperfection, of all force and form, of all the outgoing of Nature from the eternal divine Principle and of all the return of Nature towards the Divine. We shall realise it next ...
... human* but as you know I don't feel much enthusiasm for the idea of Utopia, under whatever form. I think I share Edwin Muir's liking for 'wheat and tares together sown' of this present world of Good and Evil. As to India, yes, India is a state of being, seen afar, and indeed it echoes in that 'mantra-vibrant light' which still persists in your ancient country, 1 was struck, hearing the Dagar Brothers ...
... many-sided harmony, towards an accord of the Here and the Beyond, is left uncompleted. At the same time he recognises that the means adopted so far for changing the earth from a mêlée of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, beauty and ugliness, Page 2 strength and weakness, into a mould for the Divine's manifestation have been inadequate. The Yoga of God's ...
... than of the larger creative power or narrative force" 3 and so his human figures through whom he works out his scheme of a romantico-ethical story stand as the "allegorical body" of the powers of Good and Evil rather than as these Powers' "expressive opportunity of life." 4 What made Shelley and Keats hold the promise of surpassing all English poets in the matter of expression is picked out by Sri ...
... Inconscient. According to this arrangement by Brahman there is a Page 97 constant and persistent and ubiquitous fight between the Divine and the undivine, between good and evil. Of course by "good" we must not mean always what puritanism or prudery or pacifism or any rigid rule or code sets up for our guidance: we must mean some profound urge towards surpassing our ...
... pantheism that has appeared in the poetic history of England. But we must not understand either his pantheism or Shelley's in a narrow sense which erases all distinctions between high and low, good and evil, right and wrong. If important distinctions had not been acknowledged in Reality's outer field, Shelley would never have had the ardour of the world-reformer or Wordsworth the zeal of the chara ...
... foreigners, but antipathy to the evils of foreign exploitation is the true root of boycott. If hatred is demoralising, it is also stimulating. The web of life has been made a mingled strain of good and evil and God works Page 1119 His ends through the evil as well as through the good. Let us discharge our minds of hate, but let us not deprecate a great and necessary movement because in ...
... therefore he is divine and there is no evil in him. If he questioned himself, then he would be a criminal. 59) The animal, before he is corrupted, has not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the god has abandoned it for the tree of eternal life; man stands between the upper heaven and the lower nature. Page 429 60) One of the greatest comforts of religion is that you can ...
... on. 545) The religionist speaks a truth, though too violently, when he tells us that even our greatest and purest virtue is as vileness before the divine nature of God. 546) To be beyond good and evil is not to act sin or virtue indifferently, but to arrive at a high and universal good. 547) That good is not our ethical virtue which is a relative and erring light in the world; it is supra-ethical ...
... different manifestations of three fundamental forces called the gunas or essential properties of Prakriti), and it is the attachment of the soul to the gunas that is the cause of births in bodies good and evil. The highest Purusha in this body is the one who watches, who sanctions, who enjoys, who upholds, who is the mighty Lord and the Supreme Soul." The personality of the Supreme Soul is universal ...
... of a vaster totality. I am insisting on this, because it eliminates all moral elements. It eliminates the derogatory notion of desire. The vision increasingly eliminates all those notions of good and evil, good and bad, inferior and superior, and so forth. There is only what I might almost call a difference of vibratory quality—"quality" still evokes the idea of superiority and inferiority, it isn't ...
... is His will, His action, His consciousness and so forth; at the same time, the perception of the world as it is ("as it is," anyway... as we feel it). And as there was no longer any notion of good and evil and all that, there was a sort of almost candid surprise, a very spontaneous surprise, not thought out, at reprobation, anger, disapproval, scorn for all the people who are called "bad," who do ...
... who made the Lamb make thee? Her comment is already known to us in gist. Let us now follow it in some detail. We may answer "Yes" if we think of the God of the Alchemist, who is beyond good and 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 ...
... “There can be no artificial escape from this problem [evil, suffering and death] which has always troubled humanity and from which it has found no satisfying issue. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil with its sweet and bitter fruits is secretly rooted in the very nature of the Inconscience from which our being has emerged and on which it still stands as a nether soil and basis of our physical ...
... in which the side favoured by the Divine triumphed, because its leaders made themselves his instruments. I don’t suppose he envisaged it as a battle between virtue and wickedness or between good and evil men or intended to equate the British with the Pandavas, nations with individuals or even individuals with individuals, or shall we say, Stafford Cripps with Yudhishtir, Churchill with Bhima ...
... vision of the apocalyptic conflict between the Aryans and the Jews”, which we have briefly examined when leafing through Mein Kampf. “It was his own Manichean version of the conflict between good and evil, between God and the Devil, Christ and the Antichrist.” If there is a solution of this mystery, it should be looked for in the occurrences at the time of Hitler’s “turnabout” when, in 1919, and ...
... thing towards which the earth is tending, something dead, cold and lifeless.” And: “Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.” 13 This macabre gospel of what might be called “black science” has found a fertile field in the contemporary crisis ...
... be a norm for the enormity of the negative forces – falsehood, ignorance, suffering and death – which Hitler was instrumental in unleashing. All ancient traditions tell us about the battle of good and evil which is the real key of the history of humanity. The evil is always very perceptible and easy to open oneself to; to adhere to the good requires discernment and effort, and humans soon become confused ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects Humanity - Peace And Harmony I had dealt with the workings of two contradictory forces, those of good and evil, light and darkness and Truth and Falsehood. These antagonists are striving to dominate our earth life ; they have ever done since the creation arrived at mental consciousness culminating in the creation ...
... Chawalla's Correspondence with The Mother 15 December 1966 In an experience I felt (or rather I was) an intense unformed aspiration — there moral good and evil and even spiritual values had no importance. I could have been a beast or a divine being — it would have changed nothing. Oh, to be that intensity always . . . This is truly very good. It ...
... feelings, all the movements of emotion can be captured, experienced, re-felt as if they were produced in ourselves. 20 October 1959 Sweet Mother, How can one distinguish between good and evil in a dream? In principle, to judge the activities of sleep one needs the same capacity of discrimination as to judge the waking activities. But since we usually give the name "dream" to a ...
... at all natural—it seems almost supernatural! Man questions himself because the mental instrument is intended to see all possibilities. And the immediate consequence of this is the concept of good and evil, or of what is right and what is wrong, and all the miseries that follow from that. One cannot say that it is a bad thing; it is an intermediate—stage not a very pleasant one, but still... one which ...
... opposites, that is to say, by separating them (it is that which has been seized Page 198 by someone who said that creation is separation): for example, night and day, black and white, good and evil, etc., etc.—all that, but it is our explanation. The whole of it, all together is a perfect unity, immutable and... indissoluble. Creation means separation of all that constitutes this unity—one ...
... al", but it is not that, it is a mentalised higher mind, that is to say, it is accessible to thought) of the experience of the supramental consciousness that I had, in which this difference of good and evil and all that, appears as childishness, and Sri Aurobindo expresses it in the aphorisms in a way accessible to the intellect. Only... those who understand do not understand well! because they understand ...
... climb much higher to find a higher Divine, since it is a conscious Divine, whereas the others are divine spontaneously and instinctively, without being conscious of it. All our moral notions of good and evil, all of that, are what we have thrown over the creation with our distorted and perverted consciousness. It is we who have invented it. Page 182 We are the distorting intermediary between ...
... gods and their enemies the demons, he says: "They represent the struggle between the powers of the higher Good and the lower desire, and this conception of the Rig-veda and the same opposition of good and evil otherwise expressed, with less psychological subtlety, with more ethical directness in the scriptures of the Zoroastrians, our ancient neighbours and kindred, proceeded probably from a common original ...
... the one and only deity, an aspect of whom may be considered "Endless Time", gave birth to the Good Spirit and the Bad Spirit. But such a view creates the problem of God being the cause of both Good and Evil, as appears also to have been Yahweh in the time of Isaiah. How and why the Bad Spirit, the Devil, was engendered has not been made clear. In the Christian world-view the being who is Satan was ...
... great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three words beyond us are as fit themes as primitive was and adventure for the imagination ...
... dull aesthesis, the limited range of response, the insensibility to beauty, all that makes in man the coarse, heavy and vulgar spirit. Rajas contributes our normal active nature with all its good and evil; when unchastened by a sufficient element of sattwa, it turns to egoism, self-will and violence, the perverse, obstinate or exaggerating action of the reason, prejudice, attachment to opinion ...
... technique and technology. Beginning with the discovery of gun powder and mariner's compass to the discoveries of electricity and telegraphy, and atomic power, we have a long story of mixed colours of good and evil, and we have today increasing number of sensitive and refined thinkers who have even come to equate science and technology with domination and violence. Some of them have fixed their attention on ...
... faltering thy work of battle in the world. Look not at thy own pleasure and gain and profit but above and around, " above at the shining summits and around on this world of battle and trial in which good and evil, progress and retrogression are locked in stern conflict. Destroy, when by destruction the world must advance but hate not which thou destroyest, neither grieve for those who perish. Know everywhere ...
... Dharmashāstra in India, where there has been strict insistence on adherence to social law and yet complex and flexible application of it, and even a supervening tendency to preach transcendence of all good and evil and all the binding chains of dharma. We come next to Nirukta. Nirukta is a kind of commentary on Nighantu which is a collection of difficult words of the Veda. Nighantu is supposed to have ...
... which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided... Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race is raised the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way... 1 Bertrand Russell represents the materialist or neutralist view of the law of struggle. But even the opposite ...
... consider experimental science alone. Armed with efficient technology it has registered phenomenal developments. But as you said the other day, the balance-sheet of scientific progress is a mixture of good and evil for humanity. For while new heights of excellence have been experienced by it, humanity has also got dwarfed as never before. A series of rivalries among nations dominated the scene. Two stupendous ...
... generally, and to plants, and to everything of which there is generation, and the proof will be easier. Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? I mean such things as good and evil, Page 104 just and unjust and there are innumerable other opposites which are generated out of opposites. And .1 want to show that in all opposites there is of necessity a similar ...
... have been based on some historical facts. The great episode, which has been depicted in the Gita has come to be viewed by some interpreters as a parable or as an allegory of an inner battle of good and evil that constantly takes place within the human personality. Despite all this, Sri Krishna has been experienced by a large number of mystics, saints, sages, poets and thousands of men and women ...
... its highest pinnacles and widest amplitudes. Rationalistic and experimental science, armed with efficient technology, registered phenomenal developments. The result was, however, a mixture of good and evil for humanity. While new heights of excellence were experienced by it, it also got dwarfed as never before. A series of rivalries among nations dominated the scene; two stupendous world devastating ...
... questioning why it is so. As I said, the only way to settle the world problem is to be conscious again, to recover the lost consciousness. Of course, if you say like some religions that good is good and evil evil and they will always remain so, then there is no longer any problem. An eternal struggle binds the two together and whichever wins for the moment will make the world a little better at ...
... final occupation. Nevertheless, there are ardours and hectic strivings that are Page 96 characteristic of this world. The hero is a recurrent emergent here. In him alas! good and evil intermingle, yet is he impressive in mould, whether his careerings end in defeat or success. King, Pope, Tyrant, all have their little hour of dominion, and then fade away. Power corrupts, absolute ...
... terrible Angel smites at every door: An awful laughter mocks at the world's pain And massacre and torture grin at Heaven:... 271 Man has propensities both towards good and evil; to give evil full and free play is to turn God's purposes upside down, for, It imitates the Godhead it denies, Puts on his figure and assumes his face. A Manichean ...
... as god himself. He defies reason, and is himself: Universal, he is all, - transcendent, none. To man's righteousness this is his cosmic crime, Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell Leaving the good to their fate in a wicked world And evil to reign in this enormous scene. 60 But the human drama is no tale told by an idiot, though such ...
... specific forms, figures, images, objects, etc...It was this image- making power of the human psyche which, for example, cast the archetype of the 'conflict between light and darkness, or good and evil' into the forms of the hero's fight with the dragon...or translated the 'idea of death and rebirth' into representable episodes in the life of a hero, or into the symbol of the labyrinth ...
... him, the Superman is man who has outgrown his Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions determined by Reason for a special purpose. The Superman is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "human, all too human"—who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom. This then is ...
... The principle is of wide applicability. It is not limited to intellectual or mental knowledge. It applies also, as we shall see, to ethical knowledge, the discrimination between good Page 49 and evil, and aesthetic knowledge, the feeling and understanding of beauty Sri Aurobindo says further: The second principle is that the mind has to be consulted in its own growth ...
... of anger as well as the sex impulse. Have you not heard of Durvasa's anger or the fall of the Rishis through sex? But all Yogis may not care about these defects. Yogis pass beyond the stage of good and evil: ordinary questions of morality don't arise then. So some of them may look upon the outer nature as a child behaving as it wants, and not bother to harmonise it with the inner being. There is also ...
... humanity that clouds the Divine and to reach the' Divine one must reject the human values, all the moralities, salva dharmān, seek only the Divine. The lesser way lies through the dualities, good and evil, the Great Way is beyond them and cannot be limited or measured by the relative standards. Especially in the modern age we see the decline and almost the disappearance of the Greater Light and instead ...
... a new world has to be recreated, a new humanity reshaped. The very stuff of human nature has to be changed, not only what is considered as bad in it but what is valued as good also. For beyond good and evil is Nature Divine. Man has to find out this divine nature and dissolve his human nature into that, remould it, reshape it in that pattern. So long as human consciousness remains too human, it will ...
... him, the Superman is man who has outgrown his Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions determined by Reason for a special purpose. The Superman is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "human, all too human" - who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom. This ...
... place in him! (Laughter) It was A who got hold of a politician here and made him what he is now. One thing he did, at any rate, was to make him get rid of all scruples about right and wrong, good and evil! This politician once said to Dr. LM, "It is impossible for me to fail. I am Sri Aurobindo's disciple." All say that he has power and that he is the one man who can do something if he wants to. ...
... Arjava (John Chadwick) belonged to one of their groups at Cambridge, and this created a lot of difficulty for him at the beginning of his sadhana here. The Rosicrucians posit two principles in man—good and evil personas. The evil person has to be raised up in order to be got rid of. There are already enough bad things in our nature to deal with without raising up other evil things. Europeans have no knowledge ...
... questioning why it is so. As I said, the only way to settle the world problem is to be conscious again, to recover the lost consciousness. Of course, if you say like some religions that good is good and evil is evil and they will always remain so, then there is no longer any problem. An eternal struggle binds the two together and whichever wins for the moment will make the world a little better at one ...
... phrase of Tertullian vide his De Carne Christi, V – though often ascribed to St. Augustine Page 290 The Indian spiritual consciousness considers the secular distinction of good and evil as otiose: both are maya, there must neither be attachment to the Good, nor repulsion from Evil, the two, dwandwas , belong to the same category of relativity, that is, unreality. Indian ...
... in a vacuum, a toy perfection; it couldn't last. Driven out of sheltered Eden, Adam and Eve commenced their chequered career, running uncertainly between the wicket-gates of truth and falsehood, good and evil, and joy and misery. They and their progeny for countless centuries have sought the lost key to the vacant Paradise - but all in vain. Redeemers have come and gone and not one "has availed to deliver"; ...
... 426; founding the Life Divine upon earth, 427; world-existence as Shiva's dance, 427; origin of ignorance, 428; lila, tapas, 429ff; Ignorance & Nescience, 430; origin and nature of error, 430; good and evil, 432; the turn towards Knowledge, 433; from Ignorance to Knowledge, 434; Karma and rebirth, 434; dynamics of spirituality, 434; ascent towards Supermind, 436ff; steps of ascent, 436ff; higher mind ...
... stain The living spirit.... To bring those heavens down upon the earth We all descend,... Shrink not from life, O Aryan, but with mirth And joy receive His good and evil, sin and virtue.... 37 Manu asks again where - whether in heaven or on the earth - he should seek God, and firm comes the Rishi's answer: Seek Him upon the earth.... Perfect thy ...
... assumptions, such facile presupposing, were little short of ridiculous, too readily taking the false for true and the true for false, and forging deceptive differentiations: But our ideas of good and evil are so ridiculous! So ridiculously is our notion of what is close to the Divine or far from the Divine! The experience I had... on the third of February, was for me revelatory, I came out of it ...
... the eternal play of oneness which keeps the universe fresh and beautiful. But still, mind constantly feels duality, a constant opposition between two mutually contradictory elements in life : good and evil, God and Satan, Light and Darkness, Matter and Spirit, conscient and inconscicnt, form and formless, infinite and finite, these appear to the mind to be fundamental and therefore eternal antinomies ...
... what avail our humanitarian strivings, our struggles to reform others, to help others, to enlighten others, so long as we are ourselves unregenerate, helplessly tossed between the dualities of good and evil, success and failure, gain and loss, honour and dishonour, and pain and pleasure; so long as we are floundering in ignorance and torn between the conflicting tendencies of our heterogeneous being ...
... cooking and another on how to clean latrines. Disciple : The last would be in the higher standards ! ( Laughter ) In his commentary on the Gita he tries to show that the war is between good and evil tendencies in man, – it is only a figure of speech, Sri Aurobindo : So, Sri Krishna says to Arjuna : "You may kill the bad passions or evil tendencies but do not be sorry ...
... 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 evil etc.,—gain first entry into human life? The animals though inferior to men have a frank simplicity and are not subject to this kind of suffering. But man has lost the instinct, has twisted his being ...
... a "coldly scientific knowledge" because that introduces mental notions, but it was of such a wisdom!... A knowledge so wise, so calm, so imperturbably quiet, absolutely free from any notion of good and evil, of divine, of positive and negative, absolutely independent of all of that—purely material... 14 And Mother added with such a charming smile: But it is so much more marvelous when one knows ...
... both change into a third state, which will be Life. This capacity for pain in our depths, which is the cry of our naked secret. The one thing we must face without masks, without tricks, without good and evil, without all the tawdry rags in which we try to clothe it so as to forget—in vain. We have something radical yet to find, and our very pain is the means. And at the turn of this century, after ...
... pure fire. And behold, that fire was like love. A pure love, for nothing, for everything, comme ҫa , simply because it burned. It burned all, devoured all: the past, the present, the future, good and evil, hopes and despair—it did not want anything, did not ask for anything except that one merge with it—annihilate oneself in it. It had no need of anything, but to burn, to keep on burning, to burn ...
... and Eliot, Heraclitus too had wrestled with seeming opposites only to forge a firm reconciliation at last. Commenting on the first of the above, Sri Aurobindo writes: ...day and night, good and evil are one, because they are the One in their essence and in the One the distinctions we make between them disappear. There is a Word, a Reason in all things, a Logos, and that Reason is one; only ...
... this life, which materialise in the next as good fortune or evil fortune. Again, it produces by its action for the good or ill of others a necessity of happiness or sorrow for ourselves in another birth. It produces, moreover, a tendency to persistence of that habit of thought or feeling in future lives, which involves the persistence of the good fortune or evil fortune, happiness or sorrow. Or, acting... acting on different lines, it produces a revolt or reaction and replacement by opposite habits which in their turn necessitate opposite results for good or evil. This is the chain of karma, the bondage of works, which is the Hindu Fate and from which the Hindus seek salvation. If, however, there is no escape from the Law, if Nature is supreme and inexorable, there can be no salvation; freedom becomes... lives. The spirit consents not that itself shall be bound, but that its enjoyment should be bound by time, space and causality and by the swabhava and the dharma. It consents to virtue or sin, good fortune or evil fortune, health or disease, joy or suffering, or it refuses them. What it is attached to, that Nature multiplies for it; what it is weary of, has vairāgya for, that Nature withdraws from it ...
... plastic to the stress of the higher Truth, so that the latter may find you full of the necessary formations to hold its creative light. The imagination is like a knife which may be used for good or evil purposes. If you always dwell in the idea and feeling that you are going to be transformed, then you will help the process of the Yoga. If, on the contrary, you give in to dejection and bewail that... instance, is all there on the mental plane existing independently of the physical. Each of us is a novelist to a certain extent and possess the capacity to make forms on that plane; and, in fact, a good deal of our life embodies the products of our imagination. Every time you indulge your imagination in an unhealthy way, giving a form to your fears and anticipating accidents and misfortunes, you are ...
... to the stress of the higher Truth, so that the latter may find you full of the necessary formations to hold its creative light. The imagination is like a knife which may be used for good Page 156 or evil purposes. If you always dwell in the idea and feeling that you are going to be transformed, then you will help the process of the Yoga. If, on the contrary, you give in to dejection and... instance, is all there on the mental plane existing independently of the physical. Each of us is a novelist to a certain extent and possesses the capacity to make forms on that plane; and, in fact, a good deal of our life embodies the products of our imagination. Every time you indulge your imagination in an unhealthy way, giving a form to your fears and anticipating accidents and misfortunes, you are ...
... nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres of philosophy and music is clearly predestined to lead in the turn to subjectivism and to produce a profound result for good or evil on the beginnings of the subjective age. “This was one side of the predestination of Germany; the other is to be found in her scholars, educationists, scientists, organizers. It was the industry ...
... flute. In vain you say the evil is man's creation; In vain you say cruelty is titan's fancy. This violent cruel play is His Whom you call the God of Kindness, the God of Love. Page 190 Why does he do so, why does he revel in this violent battle, ― Freedom from maya is the price you have to pay to know Keshava. When we see good in evil in the creation, In cruelty... in wild strife. This Buddhist cult was created in illusion and delusion Forbearance has made the spirit sluggish, compassion filled it with affliction — It has no ardent yearning for the good of the world, It wields no sword of knowledge to cut down ignorance, Its humbleness makes it void of energy and its laziness empty of substance, Proud of its shaven pate and an inflated belly ...
... one motherland may overcome the consciousness of religious differences. In all these contingencies there is a fusion, complete or partial; and the nation, though it may be profoundly affected for good or evil, need not be disorganized or lose the power of development. India under Mahomedan rule, though greatly disturbed and thrown into continual ferment and revolution, did not lose its power of organic ...
... class but of the majority of our educated people. We can understand the ruling class doing their very best to crush the movement out of self-interest. But it is none the less our duty to return good for evil and try our best to enlighten their intellectual haziness. It is from the want of a true perception of the nature of the movement that much of the misunderstanding and irritation has proceeded.... 557 ideas fit the crisis. They are seized on by virtue of an instinct of national self-preservation. The evil elements in them, if any, work themselves out in infinite mischief. The true elements in them save a country by firing men with social hope and patriotic faith, and the good done is well worth having even at the price of much harm and ruin. M. Taine gives the same explanation of the success ...
... planet tends towards weakness, an ascendant to strength, but it is better on the whole to have a planet just descendent than a planet only just ascendant. A good conjunction, helpful influence or favourable situation will go far to neutralise evil tendencies, and vice versa. When setting in the rays of the sun or in opposition to the Sun, a planet tends to weakness, but not to maleficence. When it... sources of strength. Forward motion brings the fortune, devious motion delays, backward motion brings opposite results. According as the motion is swift, slow or normal, will be the pace of the good or evil fortune. Beyond this the planets have certain mutual relations. A planet is in conjunction with another when in the same sign; in opposition when farthest away from it; in aspect when at a certain ...
... Sensuality and... Very intelligent indeed! Interesting. A strange man: he is amoral. That is to say, he may do extreme good or extreme evil just as easily. And a brilliant intelligence indeed. A politician of the first order.... You understand, he is good because that's good policy; but if the policy were to be bad, he would be bad. I wonder if they have many like that among the cardinals?.. ...
... and Mahomedans afterwards on the existence of great Mahomedan nations to which they feel themselves more akin, in spite of our common birth and blood, than to us. Hindus have no such resource. For good or evil, they are bound to the soil and to the soil alone. They cannot deny their Mother, neither can they mutilate her. Our ideal therefore is an Indian Nationalism, largely Hindu in its spirit and traditions... favour and the exclusion of Hindus from those blissful privileges figured largely in the speech of Sir Pratul Chandra Chatterji who was hailed as the natural leader of Punjab Hinduism. These are not good omens. It is not by rivalry for Anglo-Indian favour, it is not by quarrelling for the loaves and fishes of British administration that Hinduism can rise into a united and effective force. If the Hindu ...
... n of the good. [4] The evil-doer finds it all good, so long as the evil does not ripen. As soon as evil ripens than the evil-doer finds it all evil. [5] The goodly man finds it all evil, so long as the good does not ripen. When the good ripens then the goodly man finds it all good. [6] Think not lightly of Evil , saying... On Evil [1] Hasten towards the Good , turn the mind away from evil; if you do good in sloth, the mind will indulge in evil. [2] If a man does an evil thing, he must not repeat it, he must not indulge it. Painful is the accumulation of evil. [3] If a man does a good thing, let him repeat it... me". Water-drops falling constantly fill up the jar, even so the ignorant man gathers evil little by little and becomes full of it. [7] Think not lightly of the good, saying "it will not come to me". Water-drops falling constantly fill up the jar, even so the wise man gathers the good little by little and it is full of it. [8] A merchant who has ...
... methods had arrived. We recognize no political object of worship except the divinity in our motherland, no present object of political endeavour except liberty and no method or action as politically good or evil except as it truly helps or hinders our progress towards national emancipation. Page 297 ...
... to issue once for all a strong and dignified repudiation of the charge and then proceed calmly with the great work the Samaj has undertaken, serenely strong and unperturbed in good fortune or evil fortune, good report or evil report, confident in God's grace and the spiritual force communicated by the founder. This is the only course worthy of a manly community professing a robust and virile religion... the Englishman itself is an intolerably seditious rag,—for does it not try to bring Sir Edward Baker and the Government generally into contempt by intimating genially that they are liars, idiots and good-for-nothing Page 406 weaklings,—in connection with the Reforms and their unwillingness to put the whole population of India into prison? Would it not save trouble to prohibit speech or writing ...
... partially, grosso modo. The stone club in the hand of the palaeolithic man and the atom bomb in the hand of the modern are equally rough instruments, and the ends which they serve, whether for good or for evil, are also gross, neither far-visioned nor deep inspired, but superficial, strait and narrow, blindly immediate. In either case, however, the Divine remains unaffected, firmly seated behind and ...
... fingered his pockets again. Now, in the main-street of Time, I entered into that man; I entered into that role once more, forgetful of old gestures and of beings once loved, of ancient words of good or evil; only borne by that small, restless flame, perhaps always the same one, drawn by thousands of lost memories—thirsty, always thirsty; I am a thirst, it is all that remains in me, it is my memory ...
... grace and mercy" and similarly the final That all this good of evil shall produce is already there in Out of our evil seek to bring forth good. The sole new nuance in Book XII, which introduces the setting out of the fortunate character of the Fall with absolute explicitness, is the phrase: "And evil turn to good." Book II, in passing, carries on the thread of the theme... infinite, Goodness immense, That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good - more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Page 156 Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By me done and occasioned, or rejoice Much more that much more good thereof shall spring – To God more glory... if then his providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good... 10 And soon after these words on the beneficent office of Providence we have lines where Milton formulates God's ways with both Satan and Man apropos of Satan's being left at large, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought Evil to others, and enraged might see ...
... consciousness; man is an amalgam of both the good and the evil of the whole of terrestrial nature, a miniature world, a representation of the entire earth-consciousness in a concentrated form, on a mini-scale. The more the consciousness is developed, the more the individual being grows, and the more this parallelism becomes evident. All that is good in the world you have within you; all that is bad... consciousness from falsehood and ignorance, this will not do: we have to accept our burden; we must take part in the collective effort. If one of us makes a progress, he does it for the earth; if one bit of evil is annihilated in one individual consciousness, it produces a corresponding effect in the terrestrial consciousness; if one individual cures a single ill in his nature, the whole world gets the benefit ...
... put religiously, it means that God being Supreme Wisdom uses everything for His supreme purposes and out of evil cometh good. This is true of our private life as every man of spiritual insight can testify; he can name and estimate the particular good which has come out of every apparent evil in his life. The same truth applies to the life of the nation. God's Ways When it is said that God's ways... leader and guides it, that we belong to the world and the future and are not a spent and dying force. This faith we hold because we understand the processes by which He works and can therefore see good in evil, light in the darkness, a preparation for victory in defeat, a new life in the apparent process of disintegration. Mature Deliberation That the movement is from God has been apparent in its ...
... result is also entirely egoistic. It is as in that story by Sri Aurobindo 1 I read to you one Friday, the first story in which he explained Karma, saying that evil results in evil, and good results in good. Evil begets evil, and good begets good: that is Karma; it is not a punishment or a reward, it is something automatic. Well, if your sacrifice is egoistic and obscure, it will necessarily have an obscure... selfishly personal, something he desires and finds it hard to get; and so he snatches a chicken from his yard and goes and cuts its throat before the deity, with his prayer, perhaps for a good harvest or the good sale of his harvest, or for a child if he doesn't have one, or that his wife may be cured if she is ill—anything at all. And then imagine that this evolving psychic particle, already like ...
... has come to stay. Each and every individual is free, absolutely free and shall freely follow his own line of growth and development and fulfilment. No extraneous power shall choose and fix what is good or evil for him, nor coerce and exploit him for its own benefit. But that does not necessarily mean that collectivism has no truth in it; collectivism also, as much as individualism, has a lesson for us... individual soul finds and fulfils the divine law that by increasing itself it increases others and by increasing others it increases itself and thus by increasing one another they attain the supreme good. Unless man goes beyond himself and reaches this self, this godhead above, he will not find any real poise, will always swing between individualism and collectivism, he will remain always bound – bound ...
... limits of law and never, in their excitement, run into excesses but always to serve their motherland with unflinching devotion, through good report and evil ," and the old leader is right, because latest experience shows that Indian publicists and patriots have good reason to stand in fear of reports. The Indian Mirror is surprised that we are resting on our oars when the Congress-bark should... still understand that—"it is possible for a newspaper, as for an individual, to err at times and honestly to advocate views which may be mistaken." The Indian Mirror has, after all, found one good point in the armour of the "extremists", they will not stand any humbug, says our ancient contemporary; and no one will dare question the truth of his opinion, for he speaks clearly from personal experience ...
... though because it is too unbearable to see Job's suffering, asks her husband to curse God and die. The good 64 The Book of Job, XLII. 5, p. 500. Page 237 man asks her not to talk like a foolish woman. One must accept whatever God gives with an equal spirit, good or evil. The worst suffering does not change his Sattwic nature. Job moves away outside town, scrapes himself... It meets the sons of God with death and pain. A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene, Their sun-thoughts fading, darkened by ignorant minds, Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned, The cross their payment for the crown they gave. 25 The passage, like the whole section early in the epic, anticipates what we are to see in detail later. A whole book is yet... of diocese. We may take an example or two of both the words. Cathedral or chapel presented by Sri Aurobindo is not material building but a state of consciousness in which one turns to a power good or evil in a great limited way When, for example, Aswapati has acquired secret knowledge and cut off his moorings with material nature, he lives as a figure Pacing the vast cathedral of ...
... s opening out before us and a just view of the problem which the individual, the society, the race have to solve. Mankind has been drawn together by the developments of material science and for good or evil its external future is henceforth one; its different parts no longer develop separately and in independence of each other. There opens out at the same time the possibility that by the development ...
... I feel like a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in. I do not even know how to rule this people of which I am king. Therefore my desire is to have knowledge, so that I may know good from evil." And God replied: "Because you have not asked for long life or riches but have desired knowledge and a heart which can distinguish justice from injustice, I will give you this wise mind... were so plentiful that the brightness of the polished metal rivalled the light of day. Kai Kaus was filled with presumptuous pride; he thought that he was the greatest king on earth. Iblis, the evil spirit, observing the high opinion the king had of himself, resolved to trick him. He sent a demon disguised as a servant to the palace, with a bunch of flowers to present to the king. The servant... Abdul-Malik a good governor, Walid a powerful master, but I am young and handsome." The flowers in the vase are beautifully arranged and our eyes are delighted. But it is for us and not for the artist to praise them. Suleiman is handsome. It is true that there is no harm in his knowing it, but we laugh at his vanity when he gazes at himself in a mirror and tells himself that his good looks make ...
... in the ordinary consciousness and live wholly with that Page 98 consciousness, it is inevitable that, being in the midst of Nature's current, we should be buffeted along, the good and the evil, as we conceive them to be, befalling us indiscriminately. Or, again, if we happen to live in part or even mainly in an inner or higher consciousness, more or less in a mood of withdrawal from... s in the whole business? Some believers in God or in the Spirit admit that it is so. The world is the creation of another being, a not-God, a not-Spirit— whether Maya or Ahriman or the Great Evil. One has simply to forget the world, abandon earthly existence altogether as a nightmare. Peace, felicity one can possess and enjoy— but not here in this vale of tears, anityam asukham lokam imam,... larger part dwells in some higher status of Nature, even then we are not immune to the attacks that come from the inferior Nature. Those whom we usually call pious or virtuous or honest have still a good part of them imbedded in the Lower Nature, in various degrees they are yet its vassals; they owe allegiance to the three gunas, be it even to sattwa—sattwa is also a movement in Inferior Nature; they ...
... in normal life. If we are in the ordinary consciousness and live wholly with that consciousness, it is inevitable that, being in the midst of Nature's current, we should be buffeted along, the good and the evil, as we conceive them to be, befalling us indiscriminately. Or, again, if we happen to live in part or even mainly in an inner or higher consciousness, more or less in a mood of withdrawal from... consciousness in the whole business? Some believers in God or in the Spirit admit that it is so. The world is the creation of another being, a not-God, a not-Spirit –whether Maya or Ahriman or the Great Evil. One has simply to forget the world, abandon earthly existence altogether as a nightmare. Peace, felicity one can possess and enjoy-but not here in this vale of tears, anityam asukham lokam imam... larger part dwells in some higher status of Nature, even then we are not immune to the attacks that come from the inferior Nature. Those whom we usually call pious or virtuous or honest have still a good part of them imbedded in the Lower Nature, in various degrees they are yet its vassals; they owe allegiance to the three gunas, be it even to sattwa – sattwa is also a movement in Inferior Nature; ...
... suffering (to suffer with). SERENITY: Perfect knowledge of the state in which all suffering disappears (individual experience). LOVE: For the being in his entirety without distinction of good or evil, light or darkness. PITY: For all weakness and all bad will. SYMPATHY: Towards effort, encouragement, collaboration. SERENITY: Hope in the ending of suffering (knowing one's individual... it can be generalised and become the experience of all). LOVE: Without distinction of past, present or future. PITY: For the life of pain. SYMPATHY: Understanding of everything, even of evil. SERENITY: Certitude of the final victory. Page 30 Three active attitudes, one passive attitude; three external relationships with the all, one inner relationship. A state to be ... have this option on that subject rather than any other. The answer will almost invariably be the same, or nearly: Because it is the opinion prevalent in your environment, because it is considered good form to have it and therefore saves you from as many clashes, frictions, criticisms as possible. Or because this was the opinion of your father or mother, the opinion which moulded your childhood ...
... guidance or harm or misguidance from these beings; it is possible even to become subject to their influence, to be possessed by their invasion or domination, to be instrumentalised by them for their good or evil purpose. At times the progress of earthly life seems to be a vast field of battle between supraphysical Forces of either character, those that strive to uplift, encourage and illumine and those ...
... Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie; A beauty unreal graced a glamour face. Page 436 Nothing could be relied on to remain: Joy nurtured tears and good an evil proved, But never out of evil one plucked good: Love ended early in hate, delight killed with pain, Truth into falsity grew and death ruled life. A Power that laughed at the mischief of the world, An irony that joined... and that this will and action give Him a sardonic smile (I am commenting). A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none: There all could enter but none stay for long. It was a no man's land of evil air, A crowded neighbourhood without one home, A borderland between the world and hell. There unreality was Nature's Lord: It was a space where nothing could be true, For nothing was what it had... starts translating again! ( laughing ) So there's no work left for me! The conclusion is that when he has finished his book, I'll give you my manuscript to type. If my eyes were good, it would do, but they're no good, the poor things (I can't speak ill of them, they've served well, but anyway...). Or else, he [Satprem] would have to correct directly on my manuscript, but that he won't do. Ah ...
... and at the end of that opportunity the individual soul departs to a world of eternal bliss or to a world of eternal misery either according as the general or preponderant balance of his acts is good or evil or according as he accepts or rejects a particular creed, mode of worship, divine mediator or else according to the pre-destined judgment of his Creator. But there are many other views, — and there ...
... nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres of philosophy and music, is clearly predestined to lead in the turn to subjectivism and to produce a profound result for good or evil on the beginnings of a subjective age. This was one side of the predestination of Germany; the other is to be found in her scholars, educationists, scientists, organisers. It was the industry ...
... earth becomes less hard and resistant, and it begins receiving. Page 466 It's an approach which is not at all mental nor intellectual nor (God knows!) moral in the least—no notion of Good or Evil nor any of those things, absolutely none of that. There's a moment in life when you begin thinking a little and you see all this from an overall or universal point of view in which all moral notions... said was quite good and I encouraged him a great deal—some action on the right lines which will be quite useful, and then a book ... unfortunately mixed with an influence from that artificial world (but actually, even that can be used as a link to attract people). He must have spoken to you about this. He wants to write a kind of dialogue to introduce Sri Aurobindo's ideas—it's a good idea—like the ...
... back to the earth its own creative power, its “imagination of truth,” to wrest from Matter its own miracle. The miracle of Truth, for there is no other. And in everything, through everything⎯the good, the evil, the minuscule or the big thing, the white or blue or black sample, and all the samples of the world’s pain⎯to love forever. At least, we’ll have tried. The Old Way That is Dying And... and unite. And strangely, almost at the same time, there's torture and bliss—almost at the same time. There you are. 13 Of course, a new state which is neither bliss nor torture, neither good nor evil, neither life nor death … something else … that combines all that together and makes for a new substance, a new being, a new air. All our values of caterpillars⎯medical, spiritual, moral, legal... It’s ... stepping into Falsehood. Why? How? What?... And at the end of it all, Bliss. And then, pfft! it faded away, as if all this, which is so awful, did not exist. Something in the body that makes evil, death and destruction unreal. And all the methods—which we may call artificial, Nirvana included—all the methods to get out of it are worthless, Mother added. Beginning with the fool who kills himself ...
... Almighty Lord. He is free and unbound or binds himself only in play. He is inherently pure and he is not touched nor soiled by the impurities on which he feeds. He enjoys the play of good & evil and leads, raises or forces the evil towards goodness. He burns in order to purify. He destroys in order to save. When the body of the sadhak is burned up with the heat of the tapas, it is Agni that is roaring and ...
... work for change. Now all depends on what kind of leaven it is, what is the quality of the force that is called up, the nature of the ideal or idea that is invoked. For it can be either way, for good or for evil. There are elements that belong to the light, and there are elements that belong to darkness. There are mixtures in men no doubt, but on the whole there are these two types: one helps humanity's... to be inspired by that quality or mode of consciousness. A sound and healthy structure can be raised effectively upon that basis alone. The man in the mass, as I have said and as is well known, is a good-natured malleable material, but it is ignorant and inert: it can easily be worked upon by any kind of strong force, worked up to any kind of mischief. Shakespeare has made us very graphically familiar ...
... it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished or even false and evil. And so too we shall have the same equality of mind and soul towards all happenings, painful or pleasurable, defeat and success, honour and disgrace, good repute and ill-repute, good fortune and evil fortune. For in all happenings we shall see the will of the Master of all works and results and a... changed, not ugliness accepted but divine beauty, not imperfection taken as our resting-place but perfection striven after, the supreme good made the universal aim and not evil. But what we do has to be done with a spiritual understanding and knowledge, and it is a divine good, beauty, perfection, pleasure that has to be followed after, not the human standards of these things. If we have not equality, it... manifestation, we Page 223 shall have equality of soul towards the ugly and the beautiful, the maimed and the perfect, the noble and the vulgar, the pleasant and the unpleasant, the good and the evil. Here also there will be no hatred, scorn and repulsion, but instead the equal eye that sees all things in their real character and their appointed place. For we shall know that all things express ...
... only a subordinate and instrumental meaning. He does not ignore them, but he is above them. Good happening and evil happening, so all-important to the human soul subject to desire, are to the desireless divine soul equally welcome since by their mingled strand are worked out the developing forms of the eternal good. He cannot be defeated, since all for him is moving towards the divine victory in the ... has risen above these struggles and is seated firmly in the purity of the witnessing and enlightened soul. Sin has fallen away from him, and not a virtue acquired and increased by good action and impaired or lost by evil action, but the inalienable and unalterable purity of a divine and selfless nature is the peak to which he has climbed and the seat upon which he is founded. There the sense of sin... or before the eyes of the world. Or he might simply feel constrained by his heart and his honour to support his friends against his enemies, Page 182 the cause of the good and just against the cause of the evil and oppressive. The liberated soul looks beyond these conflicting standards; he sees simply what the supreme Self demands from him as needful for the maintenance or for the bringing ...
... manifestation.... 'And so too we shall have the same equality of mind and soul towards all happenings, painful or pleasurable, defeat and success, honour and disgrace, good repute and ill-repute, good fortune and evil fortune . For in all happenings we shall see the will of the Master of all works and results and a step in the evolving expression of the Divine... . 'Thus supremely balanced... changed, not ugliness accepted but divine beauty, not imperfection taken as our resting-place but perfection striven after, the supreme good made the universal aim and not evil. But what we do has to be done with a spiritual under-standing and knowledge, and it is a divine good, beauty, perfection, pleasure that has to be followed after, not the human standards of these things." (Ibid., p. 212) Here... on, we Page 247 shall have equality of soul towards the ugly and the beautiful, the maimed and the perfect, the noble and the vulgar, the pleasant and the unpleasant the good and the evil... . ' ... behind the variation we shall always see the Complete and the Immutable who dwells within it and we shall feel, know or at least, if it is hidden from us, trust in the wise ...
... balahinena labhyah² or The mystic forces are not only of immense potency but of a definite moral disposition and character, that is to say, they are of immense potency either for good or for evil. They are not mechanical and amoral forces like those that physical sciences deal with; they are forces of consciousness and they are conscious forces, they act with an aim and a purpose. The ...
... balahinena labhyah 2 The mystic forces are not only of immense potency but of a definite moral disposition and character, that is to say, they are of immense potency either for good or for evil. They are not mechanical and amoral forces like those that physical sciences deal with; they are forces of consciousness and they are conscious forces, they act with an aim and a purpose. The ...
... world-forces in which the side favoured by the Divine triumphed, because the leaders made themselves His instruments. 2 It is not to be envisaged as a battle between virtue and wickedness, the good and the evil men. After all, were even the Pandavas virtuous without defect, quite unselfish and without passions? ... Were not the Pandavas fighting to establish their own claims and interests—just and... . For us the question does not arise. We made it plain in a letter which has been made public that we did not consider the war as a fight between nations and governments (still less between good people and bad people) but between two forces, the Divine and the Asuric. What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once... democratic freedom, are new values, an evolutionary movement; this is a new Dharma which has only begun slowly and initially to influence practice,—an infant Dharma which would have been throttled for good if Hitler succeeded in his "Avataric" mission and established his new "religion" over all the earth. Subject nations naturally accept the new Dharma and severely criticise the old imperialisms; it is ...
... God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality, one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no difference between the Brahmin and the cow and Page 120 the elephant ...
... the transformation of man from the animal-state to that of the gods. But that was precisely what stirred the opposing Forces to action. They were to keep man distracted, lure him from the good path into evil ways, change him, not into a god but a demon, a titan, a ghoul. (Goethe once had presented this picture.) That is how man got his notion of the super-race, and the notion took concrete shape... of the ancient Shumbha and Nishumbha, Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu, Shishupala and Raktadanta, dual power of Evil defying the Divine Power. Something similar seemed to be happening again. Here was precisely what lay behind the origins of the second Great War: the descent of Evil incarnate to bar the descent of the Divine Power Page 73 ... this battle of the gods and the titans. Whenever there is a New Creation in the offing, and man is to be carried a step forward in his evolution, there comes up ranged against him the forces of Evil who do not want him to rise to a higher level of consciousness, towards the godhead. They want to hold man bound down in their grip. Such a moment of crisis came to man in the time of Sri Krishna ...
... feeling which followed on the Partition gave the required opportunity. Anger, vindictiveness and antipathy are not in themselves laudable feelings, but God uses them for His purposes and brings good out of evil. They drove listlessness and apathy away and replaced them by energy and a powerful emotion; and that energy and emotion were seized upon by the national self and turned to the uses of the future ...
... opposite of the power which Page 432 works for evil, because there is a retribution at work on the occult plane, be it vital or any other. You don't have powers working only for evil. Some work also for good and avenge evil doings. Just as they try to confuse the results of good deeds, so also they strike at excesses of evil-doing. Through the extreme action which Macbeth precipitated... something in them which is open to good influences, Macbeth much more than Lady Macbeth; that is why Lady Macbeth who goes to the limit of wickedness with hardly a care in the world is the greater sufferer because we must remember how the forces which are occult are also retributive forces; they can avenge an evil action which has been caused by an intervention of evil occult forces, and it is they who... for the human organism, can drive people crazy, how much more craziness can we not expect from sheerly occult forces? They don't care a fiddlestick whether a man goes mad or stays sane or does good or does evil; but a certain pitch of power from behind the scenes can steal away a man's wits or bring about calamities in his life and upset his life altogether if he oversteps purely human bounds. There ...
... Mohammedans afterwards on the existence of great Mohammedan nations to which they feel themselves more akin, in spite of our common birth and blood, than to us. Hindus have no such resource. For good or evil, they are bound to the soil and to the soil alone. They cannot deny their Mother nor can they mutilate her. Our ideal therefore is an Indian Nationalism, largely Hindu in its spirit and traditions... Page 34 the way of the possibilities of brotherhood and mutual understanding. Intellectual sympathy can only draw together; the sympathy of the heart can alone unite. But the one is a good preparation for the other".9 The Hindu Mahasabha The policy of support given by the British to the Muslims and their aggressiveness naturally invited a reaction from the Hindus ...
... the governing practical truth is the law of karma which drives the soul through the endless chain of birth & death & rebirth, whirling for ever betwixt heaven & earth & hell, tossed from good to evil & evil to good, pain to joy & joy to pain, like a tennis ball kept continually at play between two equally skilful players. But all action depends upon and is only rendered Page 497 possible... from action can a man escape from the grand Illusion of things; only by cessation in relationless knowledge & the eternal stillness of the actionless Brahman can there come the great release from good & evil, from joy & pain, from birth & death, from living & non-living. Verily do actions, cries the ancient Seer, accept thy full term of human life and endeavour; for action is not in itself a chain nor... It is as described in the Upanishad, shukram akáyam avranam asnáviram shuddham apápaviddham, luminous, bodiless, invulnerable, without sinews of force & action, pure, unpenetrated by evil,—whether evil of sin or evil of suffering. The soul in this state has for the world, at first & inalienably, either a peaceful or a joyous indifference,—not a repugnance, but an equal-souled acceptance or an equal-souled ...
... God's purpose in raising her up, even calamity, even evil, even error. He uses them for His purpose and out of evil bringeth good. We said "just now", because it is not true that God has always raised up India and always there has been an upward trend; sometimes He has cast her down, sometimes there has been a downward trend. Even that was for the good of India and the world as we shall take occasion to... limitation or the inconsistency? The limitation in the phrase "just now" applies to the upward trend, to the particular instance and not to the principle that out of evil cometh good, which is universal and absolute. Good out of Evil It is strange to find a philosopher like our contemporary parading in this twentieth century the ancient and hollow platitude that such a doctrine, however true,... these calamities were necessary for God's high purpose. The evil we spoke of was not moral evil, but misfortune and calamity. But we do not shrink from the doctrine that sin also is turned to His purposes and, so far as that goes, we do not see how such a doctrine abrogates morality. The wisdom and love of God in turning our evil into His good does not absolve us of our moral responsibility. Our contemporary ...
... we always tell people to be calm and detached and look upon these things not as their true selves but as an outer part that has to be worked upon quietly until it is what it should be. The Good and the Evil Persona Every man has a double nature except those who are born (not unborn) Asuras, Rakshasas or Pishachas and even they have a psychic being concealed somewhere by virtue of their latent... fellow or discover the central being in themselves, then a true harmonious whole can be created. There are always two sides to every human being. In Western occultism they call them the good and the evil Persona (personality). X has a strong personality and a formed, forceful and independent vital. It is a kind of character with great possibilities in it, but not liked by most people because... characters, if badly used by life, may develop great vital difficulties. Y and Z probably see only this side; the other side is too unusual for them to appreciate. What you say about the "Evil Persona" interests me greatly as it answers to my consistent experience that a person greatly endowed for the work has, always or almost always—perhaps one ought not to make a too rigid universal rule ...
... enough to give his representation a universal human touch, a comprehensive interpreting force in the domain of life's psychology, yet not any deliberate grasp on the occult and the ultra-human, the good or evil sources mightier than the subtle human background and governing the latter by their own interplay or their conflicting velleities towards the earth-scene. When his dramatic genius was at its intensest... epithet like "multitudinous" to "seas". Only a strikingly big word can prove competent to match that epithet as well as the ocean-idea, and "incarnadine" does this with unerring success. We feel that the evil with which the hand is stained is vast enough to pollute with its indelible heinousness the whole world of waters.... Nor have we appreciated Shakespeare's art enough if we have caught no other point... etching out all the more vividly the chief characters and events. But this is so on account of the surprising way his people become real to us on a life-breath of word-music. Webster is often almost as good in pure dramatic construction, but his poetry except in a small number of half-scenes and scattered sentences contains no masterful grace of rhythmic expression: he does not play upon his metrical base ...
... these things without a severe test and training it would be dangerous to themselves and others; this knowledge, these powers could be misused, misinterpreted, turned from truth to falsehood, from good to evil. A strict secrecy was therefore maintained, the knowledge handed down behind a veil from master to disciple. A veil of symbols was created behind which these mysteries could shelter, Page 55... an immortal Page 62 puissance of clear, discerning aspiration symbolised by Aryaman. The last condition is that of happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering. This condition is fulfilled by Bhaga. There are many other gods as Vayu, the master of life-energy, Brihaspati, the power of the soul; Ashwins, the... functions of the gods. This was based on the internal evidence of the Vedic Suktas themselves. The sense discovered for each of the fixed terms of the Vedas is a firm and not a fluctuating sense founded on good philological foundation __________________________________________ 5 Sri Aurobindo: The Secret of the Veda, Centenary Edition, p.44 Page 64 and fitting naturally into the context ...
... to wish to risk the adventure so long as there is another choice. War is physically an evil, a calamity; morally it has been like most human institutions a mixture, in most but not all cases a mixture of some good and much evil: but it is sometimes necessary to face it rather than invite or undergo a worse evil, a greater calamity. One can hold that, so long as life and mankind are what they are, there... preservation of her own chance of complete liberty and the preservation also of three continents or even of the whole earth from a heavy yoke of servitude. There remains the objection that all War is evil and no war can be supported; soul-force or some kind of spiritual or ethical force is the only force that should be used; the only resistance permissible is passive resistance, non-cooperation or Satyagraha... other Force is that of the evolutionary tendencies which have been directing the course of humanity for some time past and, till recently, seemed destined to shape its future. Its workings had their good and bad sides, but among the greater values it had developed stood the very things against which the new Force is most aggressive, the liberty of the individual, national liberty, freedom of thought ...
... Soul and Nature together mid streams and in cloudless spaces Naked and innocent? Someone offered a fruit of derision, Knowledge of good and of evil, cleaving in God a division. Though He who made all said, "It is good; I have fashioned perfection," "No, there is evil," someone whispered, "'tis screened from detection." Wisest he of the beasts of the field, one cunning and creeping; "See it," he... painfully flowered Into this giant phenomenon universe. Man who has towered Out of the plasm and struggled by thought to Divinity's level, Page 479 Man, this miniature second creator of good and of evil, He too was only a compost of Matter made living, organic, Forged as her thinking tool by an Energy blind and mechanic. Once by an accident queer but quite natural, provable, simple, Out of... ended, Page 484 After the sacrifice offered when the will and the strength are expended, Nothing is done but to have laid down one stone of a road without issue, Added our quota of evil and good to an ambiguous tissue. Destiny's lasso, its slip-knot tied by delight and repining, Draws us through tangles of failure and victory's inextricable twining. In the hard reckoning made by the ...
... the time of Buddha ], but with the path towards liberation found by Buddha. There are many paths and all need not be one and the same in their teaching. Destruction in itself is neither good nor evil. It is a fact of Nature, a necessity in the play of forces as things are in this world. The Light destroys the Darkness and the Powers of Darkness, and that is not a movement of Ignorance! It... judgment as to what will or will not help God's work? You seem to have very elementary Page 423 ideas in these matters. What is your idea of divinisation,—to be a virtuous man, a good husband, son, father, a good citizen etc.? In that case I myself am most undivine,—for I have never been these things. Men like X or Y would then be the great Transformed Divine Men. Many sinners are people... might be called the "human" point of view. Krishnaprem takes the standpoint that we must not only consider the temporary good to humanity, but certain inner laws. He thinks the harm, violence or cruelty to other beings is not compensated and can not be justified by some physical good to a section of humanity or even to humanity as a whole; such methods awake, in his opinion, a sort of Karmic reaction ...
... But it is not always the powers of Light and Heaven that they follow, but sometimes the powers of darkness and hell, for "Warriors of Good, they serve a shining cause, Or are Evil's soldiers in the pay of Sin." This is not a world of moral good only. It is a free world of the higher vital where knowledge is always relative and therefore carries with it ignorance as its counter part... dead and yet people were cherishing the putrid corpses of those dead truths. There were fear and lust everywhere and the spontaneous good of the soul was "Replaced by a manufactured virtue and vice" so that the evil that was present was only "a relief from spurious good". Thus, in this dark region "All glory of life dimmed tarnished into a doubt, All beauty ended in an aging face; All... It was a world of deception where nothing could be relied upon, for, there "Joy nurtured tears and good an evil proved, "Love ended early in hate, delight killed with pain, Truth into falsity grew and death ruled life." It all seemed to be the work of an evil power which was clothed in light and put on the appearance of a helping angel. "He deceived with wisdom ...
... Work Helpless acceptance [ of difficulties ] is no part of the Yoga of works—what is necessary is a calm equanimity in the face both of helpful and adverse, fortunate or unfortunate happenings, good or evil fortune, success or failure of effort. One must learn to bear without flinching and disturbance, without rajasic joy or grief, doing all that is necessary, but not dejected if difficulties or failure... grown by it in inward consciousness. On the other hand religious work can be merely external and vital in its nature or influence. I may say however that I do not regard business as something evil or tainted, any more than it was so regarded in ancient spiritual India. If I did, I would not be able to receive money Page 248 from X or from those of our disciples who in Bombay trade... the substance of the Gita's teaching. The cessation of desire of the fruit, of the attachment to the work itself, the growth of equality to all beings, to all happenings, to good repute or ill repute, praise or blame, to good fortune or ill fortune, the dropping of the ego which are necessary for the loss of all attachments can come completely only when all work becomes a spontaneous sacrifice to the ...
... became like counterfeit money at the service of teeming egoisms and pygmies of power; touch and delve ever deeper into its own misery along all the paths of faith or non-faith, yes or no, good or evil—and nothing was good or bad anymore—to end up in some dark hole where the only unmistakable reality was still the old death, with or without bombs, in the middle of a tragic and grotesque circus where man... pulverized darkening, which makes up the particular opaque Matter we tread upon. This is perhaps the desperate reason why all the sages and saints throughout the ages (but not all) tried to get out for good: there is nothing to be done here, it is hopeless, better purify yourself as much as possible and soar off into the great silence of snow, or to a lesser height, into some adjustable heaven proportionate... beliefs; and in the meantime, well, do your duty, be kind to your neighbors, cure the ill people if you can, and so it goes round and round, until everyone has had enough of it and is ready to get out for good. Very well. But after all, the baboon’s heaven is rather dubious—and are we so sure of our own? Is it not holding some other sinister trick in store for us, which would chain us to yet another wheel ...
... these things without a severe test and training it would be dangerous to themselves and others; this knowledge, these powers could be misused, misinterpreted, turned from truth to falsehood, from good to evil. A strict secrecy was therefore maintained, the knowledge handed down behind a veil from master to disciple. A veil of symbols was created behind which these mysteries could shelter, formulas of ...
... alive" 8 IV On 18 May 1966, 9 the Mother spoke about the use of drugs like LSD which resulted in people being "thrust without the least defence into the lowest vital"; whatever images - good or evil - that were earlier registered in the subconscious were objectified as a result of the drug-action. Nearly a year later, in April 1967, a disciple studying the subject was to prepare and submit... realisation in the mixed material world does not appear to the ignorant human sight as the triumph of good, what men call good and true." It is this wrong vision of things that gives "a deforming appearance to the divine Action". As to our ethical notions of good, ...no sage... has ever said: "Be good, and all will go well with you externally" - because it is a stupidity. In a world of disorder, in... whip" that set the body on the road back to aspiration, cure, ānanda. The aspiration evoked the response of Divine Love, the intervention of Grace, and the return of health and sweetness, for "an evil always carries its own remedy.... The three things - suffering as a means of progress, progress and the cure of suffering are coexistent, simultaneous." The Mother thought that a proper appreciation ...
... Consecrate your labour and leave its returns to the Spirit who manifests and fulfils himself in the universal movement. The outcome of your action is determined by his will alone and whatever it be, good or evil fortune, success or failure, it is turned by him to the accomplishment of his world purpose. An entirely desireless and disinterested working of the personal will and the whole instrumental nature... you from sin and evil and lift you far above human standards of virtue. For you will live and act in the absolute and spontaneous right and purity of the spiritual being and the immaculate force of the divine nature. The Divine and not you will enact his own will and works through you, not for your lower personal pleasure and desire, but for the world-purpose and for your divine good and the manifest... formal perfection, apposite to a religious turn or to an individual salvation, but rather all action of Page 575 human life taken up by the equal spirit and done for the sake of God and the good of all creatures. There will be needed an uplifting of the heart in a single aspiration to the Highest, a single love of the Divine Being, a single God-adoration. And there must be a widening too of ...
... an ego driven by the qualities of the lower Nature, subject to the balance of virtue and sin, joy and sorrow, preoccupied with the fruits and consequences of his works, success and defeat, good result and evil result, bound on the world machine, caught up in a great tangle of action and inaction and perverse action which perplex the heart and mind and soul of man with their changing and contrary masks... first practical facts of our present existence, its grief, its pain, evil, defect, undivine error and stumbling, aśubham , then there is no possibility of living out that greater knowledge. The soul that fails to get faith in the higher truth and law, must return into the path of ordinary mortal living subject to death and error and evil: it cannot grow into the Godhead which it denies. For this is a truth... truth of our spiritual existence. All the apparent truths one can oppose to it are appearances of the lower Nature. The release from the evil and the defect of the lower Nature, aśubham , can only come by accepting a higher knowledge in which all this apparent evil becomes convinced of ultimate unreality, is shown to be a creation of our darkness. But to grow thus into the freedom of the divine Nature ...
... men the transformation of man from the animal-state to that of the gods. But that was precisely what stirred the opposing Forces to action. They were to keep man distracted, lure him from the good path into evil ways, change him, not into a god but into a demon, a titan, a ghoul. (Goethe once had presented this picture.) That is how man got his notion of Page 487 the super-race, and... tell of the ancient Shumbha and Nishumbha, Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu, Shishupala and Raktadanta, dual power of Evil defying the Divine Power. Something similar seemed to be happening again. Here was precisely what lay behind the origins of the second Great War: the descent of Evil incarnate to bar the descent of the Divine Power. (2) The Second World War broke out in 1939. Sri Aurobirido... of man, this battle of the gods and titans. Whenever there is a New Creation in the offing, and man is to be carried a step forward in his evolution, there comes up ranged against him the forces of Evil who do not want him to rise to a higher level of consciousness, towards the godhead. They want to hold man bound down in their grip. Such a moment of crisis came to man in the time of Sri Krishna ...
... results which return again upon the life-world to modify it. From that the life-part of us, the desire-part is being always touched and influenced; there too are beneficent and malefic powers of good desire and evil desire which concern themselves with us even when we are ignorant of and unconcerned with them. Nor are these powers merely tendencies, inconscient forces, nor, except on the verges Page ...
... nature, without any participation of the beings drawn along this evolution. But man has now attained a position of full spiritual responsibility and is aware that he has the power to influence, for good or for evil, his own destiny. The next step should be conscious and deliberate. In this Sri Aurobindo sees an indication that the new being will be evolved in man, rather than out of man. A confirmation... all - what man calls his liberty and takes pride in. Ignorance and apparent liberty imply the possibility of self-deception, and consequently error, weakness, opposition, disharmony - in a word, evil. Evil is the price paid for apparent liberty. This illusion of separateness and liberty is, no doubt, necessary for a time; it marks a stage in the development of self-consciousness. By it, the, cosmic... ulterior end and cannot be made for ever an aim in themselves. Add a rich emotional life governed by a well-ordered ethical standard, and still there is the savour of something left out, some supreme good which these things mean, but do not in themselves arrive at, do not discover till they go beyond themselves. Add a religious system and a widespread spirit of belief and piety, and still you have not ...
... grows again, it grows again—each time it grows again. And then... it was there, in the depths of the night: a fiery orange heaven which changes everything. Evil had never been evil, it was the secret door of deliverance; good had never been good, it was the white prison of the blind—in that, they cease and are freed one from the other. Then I turned to the left, and I did not even know that I had... where is my suffering, my downfall? I have no more night, no more misery, I have that which burns, that is all; I have no more shame, I have no. more past, no more “yes”, no more “no”, no more good, no more evil, all is burned; I have lost everything, I have that which burns, for nothing, for everything, for whoever wishes. It burns, it is all I have: it is my hell, my heaven, my misery or my joy, I... done for you, your Guruji? What has he done to get out of this? Björn became pale. He sprang up, he took hold of his knife. —No, Björn, no... I wanted to check his arm, it was mad, absurd, an evil-spell, I wanted to take him in my arms, raise him up, press him to my heart, Björn! He freed himself with a blow of his fist, I saw a flash; the blade slashed my left hand and severed the top of my ...
... reincarnation supposed it to be a constant transmigration of the soul from animal to human, but also from human to animal bodies: the Indian idea added the explanation of Karma, of a return for good or evil done, of a result of past will and effort; but there was no suggestion of a progressive evolution from type to higher type, still less of birth into a kind of being that has never yet existed but ...
... thousands of beings I had been came to be unknotted here, to look with me, burn with me, love with me, to carry their offering of pain and hope, to open their hands in that forest and give back their good, their evil—give, give, there is nothing but giving at the end; to close one's eyes, to abandon oneself. Oh! I had never lived for anything else but that giving, that single moment when everything melts;... only a passing wave of “I”. And when everything relaxed, spread out, the Sannyasi stopped by the roadside as if by chance and drew out a handful of grains from his belt: —Here, little one, eat, it's good. And he looked at me with such tenderness that I felt like crying as well, and then I laughed, I caught hold of his staff: —Hey, sannyasi! let's be on our way, it's time! And we went along... kind of memory of all memories, a note of all notes, a something which had inhabited all the adventures, all the stories, vibrated identically in all the forms, all the faces, all the colours of the good, the bad—yes, like a similar music, my music, here and there, in a black skin or white, in lost times, in times retrieved; a same story of the story which created all stories, like the same blue in ...
... Mahabharata, the strife of the divine with the titanic forces in the life of the earth, but in more purely ideal forms, in frankly supernatural dimensions and an imaginative heightening of both the good and the evil in human Page 349 character. On one side is portrayed an ideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilization founded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation ...
... free from desire, from Page 195 whom liking and fear and wrath have passed away, is the sage of settled understanding. Who in all things is without affection though visited by this good or that evil and neither hates nor rejoices, his intelligence sits firmly founded in wisdom." If one abstains from food, it says, giving a physical example, the object of sense ceases to affect, but the affection... and power it cannot realise and hardly even conceives as real, while the joy of this lower turbid nature is to it the one thing familiar and palpable. Nor is this lower satisfaction in itself a thing evil and unprofitable; it is rather the condition for the upward evolution of our human nature out of the tamasic ignorance and inertia to which its material being is most subject; it is the rajasic stage... more than once repeats, is ever engaged with a large equality in doing good to all creatures and makes that his occupation and delight, sarvabhūtahite rataḥ . The perfect Yogin is no solitary musing on 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 ...
... carries in it, because it is that and not something fortuitous, not base less, illusory, a vain constructed figure. Even what deforms and disguises, as falsehood deforms and disguises truth, evil deforms and disguises good, has a temporal reality as true consequences of the Inconscience; but these contrary figures, though real in their own field, are not essential but only contributory to the manifestation... episode, this life is his one opportunity from which he departs to a world of eternal bliss or to a world of eternal misery either according as the general or preponderant balance of his acts is good or evil or according as he accepts or rejects, knows or ignores a particular creed, mode of worship, divine mediator, or else according to the arbitrary predestining caprice of his Creator. But that is... or utility, or whatever its suitability to individuals of a certain temperament or in a certain stage of spiritual evolution, unfit to be the general and complete rule of human living. Nature takes good care that the race shall not neglect these aims which are a necessary part of her evolution; for they fall within the method and stages of the divine plan in us, and a vigilance for her first steps ...
... the past, specifically in English literature, precious metals and stones have enjoyed a place of pride. The English poets may not have treated these metals and stones seriously as portents of good or evil. However, they did feel a sense of awe before these gems. 1 Questions and Answers , CWM, Vol. 6, p. 229. Shakespeare depicts Antony's immese love for Cleopatra through the... suspended as she makes herself a perfect instrument for God's work. Here "amethyst soul" signifies a soul that has all the necessary protection, because amethyst can shield the individual from all evil. Secondly, it can absorb all hostile attacks and maintain a steadfastness. 101 98 Questions and Answers , CWM, Vol. 5, p. 231. 99 Savitri , p. 264. '°°Ibid., p. 474. 101 R.Y... Although amethyst has not enjoyed the same prominence as diamond or even sapphire, yet it seems to have a powerful identity of its own. In Greek mythology an amethyst is said to absorb all the good forces vibrating in the atmosphere. Also it is said that wine drunk out of an amethyst cup never makes the person intoxicated. In Milton's Paradise Lost we see a related description: Tables ...
... and force of good and beauty and power—of mind-power and soul-power—and greatness and love and joy and knowledge. Mounting here the ethical mind no longer follows good for a reward now on earth or in another existence, but for the sake of good, and no longer shuns evil for fear of punishment on earth later on in this life or else in another life or in hell, but because to follow evil is a degradation... more tangible results to knowledge, to the right practical workings of the intelligence than it yields to moral right. In this material world it is at least doubtful how far moral good is repaid by vital good and moral evil punished by a recoil, but it is certain that we do pay very usually for our errors, for stupidity, for ignorance of the right way of action, for any ignoring or misapplication of... him, an upbuilding of his ethical being, a flowering of the soul of right, justice, love, compassion, purity, truth, strength, courage, self-giving that he seeks to be. The true return to the act of evil, to the ethically wrong output of energy—his punishment, if you will, and the sole penalty he has any need or right to fear,—is its return upon Page 418 him in a retardation of the growth ...
... delight in good and a delight in evil, a delight in truth and a delight in falsehood, a delight in life and an attraction to death, a delight in pleasure and a delight in pain, in one's own suffering and the suffering of others, but also in one's own joy and happiness and good and the joy and happiness and good of others. For the force of life-affirmation affirms alike the good and the evil:... it takes... is not the starving and the stunning of the vital into inaction but the constant turning of its dynamism towards the realisation of 'satyam, ś ivam, sundaram', of the True, the Good, the Beautiful. The vital is not evil in its very nature. What it always keeks is some sort of delight but normally it has no discriminating power as to wherein to find that delight.-And there lies the crux of the problem... tremely wicked, extremely cruel, extremely generous, extremely good and extremely heroic. It always goes to extremes and can be one side or the other, yes, as the current flows." (Ibid., p. 256) But the difficulty is that in its current unconverted disposition man's vital is often inclined to what is evil and false; it shrinks from light and is enamoured of darkness. And it is ...
... like a casket of gold For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.¹ But the more truly modern mind looks at the thing in a slightly different way. The good and the evil are not, to it, contrary to each other: one does not deny or negate the other. They are intermixed, fused in a mysterious identity. The best and the worst are but two conditions, two potentials... Baudelaire, who can be considered as the first of the real moderns in many ways, saw and experienced this intimate polarity or identity of opposites in human nature and consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One: ¹ W. B. Yeats: "The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart"-The Wind among the Reeds. Page 94 Une Idée, une Forme, Un Être Parti de l' azur et tombé ... intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versification – although here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry. Page 85 The three or four major orders I speak of in reference ...
... a question from the disciple, and the Mother's answer: Is it the material equivalent of a psychological experience one has in which the perception of the evil disappears completely in the perception of an absolute Good, even in the evil? Yes, that is it. One might say that instead of being just a mental conception, it is a concrete realisation of the fact. 19 Talking again on 28 August... ready for transformation". 18 Three days later the Mother had an experience in the morning pointing to a "creation of equilibrium" in which all the dualities of fair-foul, pleasant-unpleasant, good-evil, white-black, day-night, all "have to be together". There may have been a Separation out of a primordial Unity, "but as soon as you seek to return to the Origin, the two tend to fuse into each other";... cinemas, and life, people, things), memories of Page 767 this body, all the memories that might be called "anti-divine", in which the body had the sensation of something that was repulsive or evil, like negations of the divine Presence... so much so that the body almost sank into despair. Then, someone who had gone up to her that night spoke of the Divine as "something up there, so far away" ...
... increasing human unity or disrupting nations will depend the future of mankind. Q. These are all instruments that may be used either for good or for evil —I do not see how they— Page 21 A. I don't say they are being used for the good of the mankind. But I maintain that the awakened conscience of humanity—even if active in its leaders—can use these as unifying forces. ...
... lower nature in which the soul is involved and sees itself as a separate ego returning to the action of things upon it dual reactions of pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, right and wrong, good happening and evil fortune. These reactions create a tangled web of perplexity in which the soul is lost and bewildered by its own ignorance; it has to guide itself by partial and imperfect solutions that serve... and more largely seeing plane of vision and motive. Again, to abandon this particular action as evil would be another kind of solution, the ready resort of the shortsighted moralising mind, but to this evasion too the Teacher refuses his assent. Arjuna's abstention would work a much greater sin and evil: it would mean, if it had any effect at all, the triumph of wrong and injustice and the rejection... only a minor contribution ruled or overruled, so far as its motive is an egoistic claim, by this Self and Spirit in us who is the Self and Spirit 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 ...
... gold . For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart. 1 But the more truly modern mind looks at the thing in a slightly different way. The good and the evil are not, to it, contrary to each other: one does not deny or negate the other. They are intermixed, fused in a mysterious identity. The best and the worst are but two conditions, two potentials... Baudelaire, who can be considered as the first of the real moderns in many ways, saw and experienced this intimate polarity or identity of opposites in human nature and consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One: 1 W. B. Yeats: "The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart"— The Wind among the Reeds. Page 322 Une Idee, une Forme, Un Etre Parti de I'azur et tombe ... have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versification—although here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry. Page 313 The three or four major orders I speak of in reference ...
... ignorant minds suns-thought fading/ Their work hertrayed , their good to evil turned. evil good darkened The cross their payment for the crown they gave, cross ... hers. {T} Universal/ Mother Against the evil at life's affected roots, evil/life's. roots Her own calamity Its private sign, Of her pangs she made... marvellous birth bound 156 Only a little the god-light can stay:} {T} little god good-fight Imagery Diagram for the Sixth Thematic Unit This pattern continues into the next thematic unit [Only a little the God-light can stay] as the divine luster becomes submerged ...
... guidance or harm or misguidance from these brings; it is possible even to become subject to their influence, to be possessed by their invasion or domination, to be instrumentalised by them for their good or evil purpose. At times the progress of earthly life seems to be a vast field of battle between supraphysical Forces of either character, those that strive to uplift, encourage and illumine and those... from it, it took no part[:] It gave no heed to the paeans of victory, It was indifferent to its own defeats, It heard the cry of grief and made no sign, Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good, It saw destruction come and did not move. An equal Cause of things, a lonely Seer And Master of its multitude of forms, 64 Ibid, p. 279. 65 Ibid, Canto... and bliss free from ignorance, pain evil and death. This world merely transcended the inadequacies of the mortal world and declared them irrelevant but these inadequacies were not understood and explained here. Nor has this world any concern about carrying its truth and bliss to the lower worlds; it was totally indifferent to the lower worlds of death, evil, pain and suffering. This world did ...
... being and truth of nature; it is deeply conscious of truth and good and beauty because truth and good and beauty are akin to its own native character, forms of something that is inherent in its own substance. It is aware also of all that contradicts these things, of all that deviates from its own native character, of falsehood and evil and the ugly and the unseemly; but it does not become these things... an essential Existence, the formless Infinite and the nameless Absolute. This culmination can be arrived at more directly by tending immediately beyond all forms and figures, beyond all ideas of good or evil or true or false or beautiful or unbeautiful to That which exceeds all dualities, to the experience of a supreme oneness, infinity, eternity or other ineffable sublimation of the mind's ultimate... emotional suggestions into giving sanction to ignorance and error, to wrong thought and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil. Even when it is strong and clear and dominant, Mind, though it imposes a certain, a considerable mentalised harmony, cannot integrate the whole being and nature. These harmonisations by an inferior ...
... One who does good rejoices in the two worlds, in this world and in the other. He rejoices more and more as he recalls his good deeds. One who does evil suffers in the two worlds, in this world and in the other. "I have done wrong": this thought torments him. And his torments increase still more as he follows the way which leads to the infernal world. One who does good rejoices in the two... that pulls us down and leads us away from the spiritual reality. The Dhammapada does not take its stand so much on the moral point of view; it is not evil as men understand it with their blind justice and their arbitrary sense of good and bad. Evil, from the spiritual point of view, is truly that which leads us away from the goal, which sometimes even tears us away from Page 188 the deepest... one who does evil grieves. He laments and suffers as he recalls his evil deeds. Page 196 It is quite evident that when you act in an ugly and mean way, naturally you are unhappy; but to be unhappy because you are conscious of the ugliness of your actions seems to me to be already a very advanced stage, for one needs to be very conscious in order to be aware of the evil that one does, ...
... Man and woman together mid streams and in cloudless spaces, Naked and innocent? Someone offered a fruit of derision, Knowledge of good and of evil, cleaving in God a division, Though He who made all, said, "It is good; I have fashioned perfection." "Nay, there is evil," someone whispered, "'tis screened from detection." Wisest he of the beasts of the field, one cunning and creeping. "See it," he... you to heaven. Therefore you seize on me, vanquish and carry me swift to my falling. Fain would I linger, fain resist, to Infinity calling; But you possess all my limbs, you compel me, giants of evil. Am I then doomed to your darkness and violence, moonlight and revel? Hast thou no pity, O Earth, my soul from this death to deliver? Who are you, luminous movements? around me you glimmer and quiver... and her brood were created. Out to the desert He drove the rebellious. Flaming behind them Streamed out the sword of His wrath; it followed, eager to find them, Stabbing at random. The pure and the evil, the strong and the tempted, All are confounded in punishment. Justly is no one exempted. Virtuous? Yes, there are many; but who is there innocent? Toiling, Therefore, we seek, but find not that ...
... second; we see only a microscopic portion of the road, and anything that does not blossom exactly as we think it ought to in this absurd minute along the way is obviously evil and detestable. But our good is as absurd as our evil; we miss the point, we live in an idea of the universe but not in the reality of the universe! We live in the mind, which has divided up everything according to its habit... nothing to find, nothing to seek: the need was being, the emptiness was being, the suffocation was being—that which was seeking and seeking itself, filling itself with its own fire of being. Good was a fire, evil was a fire, the future and the past are a fire, and what do all those centuries matter! It burns: it is. That is all. Tomorrow and yesterday, summits and stupidities, here or there, it is all... close our eyes. Below, or outside, or within, the same old beast continues to walk, pant, hurt and grate, and Contradiction assails us on all sides—the great Contradiction everywhere, the yes-no, good-evil, true-false, life-death, there is no way out of it—of course, there is no way out! Where would we get out? There is nowhere to go I Go where? There is only THAT. 15 We cannot get out of the only ...
... world-forces in which the side favoured by the Divine triumphed, because the leaders made themselves His instruments. It is not to be envisaged as a battle between virtue and wickedness, the good and the evil men. After all, were even the Pandavas virtuous without defect, quite unselfish and without passions? . . . Were not the Pandavas fighting to establish their own claims and interests—just and... For us the question does not arise. We made it plain in a letter which has been made public that we did not consider the war as a fight between nations and governments (still less between good people and bad people) but between two forces, the Divine and the Asuric. What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once... democratic freedom, are new values, an evolutionary movement; this is a new Dharma which has only begun slowly and initially to influence practice,—an infant Dharma which would have been throttled for good if Hitler succeeded in his "Avataric" mission and established his new "religion" over all the earth. Subject nations naturally accept the new Dharma and severely criticise the old imperialisms; it is ...
... evolution. But man marks the passage from unconscious to conscious evolution. He has attained a position of full spiritual responsibility and is well aware that he has the power to influence, for good or for evil, his destiny, both individual and collective. The next step of evolution can only be conscious and deliberate. Page 172 In this Sri Aurobindo sees an indication that the new being... remedies that have been proposed are mere palliatives. They counter the effects and not the cause. If we want to find a genuine solution to the present difficulties, we have to discover the cause of the evil and for that to re-examine the whole foundation on which education rests. As early as 1910 when he was a political leader in Bengal, Sri Aurobindo propounded certain principles of education. At... sense that The Mother, speaking to teachers, has said: One must be a great Yogi to be a good teacher. One must have the perfect attitude to be able to exact from one's pupils a perfect attitude.8 And a little further: Those who are successful as teachers here... , i.e., who become truly good teachers, that would signify that they are capable of making an inner progress of imperso ...
... mission is but little. A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene, Their sun-thoughts fading, darkened by ignorant minds, Page 172 Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned, The cross their payment for the crown they gave, Only they leave behind a splendid Name. The earth-scene is traversed by a blaze of glory during the ministry of these... like a sun, bright, luminous; but these thoughts begin to fade, — because they are darkened by ignorant minds. All the great work that they have done is found to be betrayed. The good they have done is turned to evil by this ignorant humanity. The messengers bring the crown for man, but in return they are given the cross — an allusion to Christ, his crucifixion. Their great name is all that lasts... love is the all-embracing love of the universal Mother. Against the evil at life's afflicted roots, Her own calamity its private sign, Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword. She is not overcome by the evil that is staring at her in a personal way. She faces it as an individual sign of the Evil that has struck generally at the roots of life. With this awareness she converts ...
... great unsealing of the eyes to the Maya in which we existed and the discovery of some effective mantra, some strong spiritual impulse which should have the power to renovate us from within. For good or for evil the middle class now leads in India, and whatever saving impulse comes to the nation, must come from the middle class, whatever upward movement begins, it must initiate and lead. Page 1107... before and for the bourgeois there was no place vacant. (The men who figured in the revolutions in Bengal, the Deccan, the Punjab & the North were often, like their European allies & antagonists, men of evil character, self-seeking, unscrupulous & Machiavellian, but they were at least men.) It was not till mediaeval India breathed its last in the convulsions of 1857 that entirely new conditions reigned... vehement negation of the old. The old movement sought to make a wider circle of activity, freer living-room and a more comfortable and eminent position for the bourgeois, to prolong the unnatural & evil conditions of which the subject nations died under the civilizing rule of Rome and which British rule has recreated for India; the new seeks to replace the bourgeois by the Samurai Page 1105 ...
... world-philosophy - comes out as universally Christian in its dramatic part: Satan's opposition in Heaven, God's way with it, Man's original state and its loss, the role of Evil in world-history, God's providential bringing of Good out of Evil through Christ's intercession. And perhaps this part has mattered most to Christendom. But it should not induce us to agree with Rajan. For, we can show how Milton... enforcer of His own wish and the stern upholder Page 167 of the letter of the law, we feel - in connection with man's frailty - a fathomless heart mysteriously planning man's final good from the very beginning, a mighty mind of intrinsic grace subtly evoking on the highest level an urge towards the redemption of mortality. Nor must we forget that in this Book III, which first... how it is that he is able to eat of earthly food with creatures like Adam and Eve: O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom All things proceed, and up to him return, If not depraved from good, created all Such to perfection; one first matter all, Endued with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and, in things that live, of life; As nearer to him placed or nearer ...
... difficulties,—they cling in any case, even to the spirit, even to beauty, to good, or to evil, but it clings, that is the difficulty of the world, the only difficulty: it is the “I” which clings and everything becomes rotten. There is not a single good which is not rotted by that I—you let go of it and everything is good. And when one lets go of it, the gods are no longer the reverse of the devils... hill, leaped over the abysses, over lives, sown its white birds on the ineluctable summit, and we were walking through centuries, blind walkers in a little shadow, in an orange or blue bubble, in evil, in good, we were advancing across the great nameless canvas, forgetful of the great vision, the golden track, believing that our life stopped at the ford, knowing no longer that this purple shadow led to... misery, they build steel walls to protect themselves from their own immensity, they lay traps in order to retain one drop of their treasure. They are weak because they do not know, they are hard and evil because, they have forgotten; if they knew, they would open their doors wide and draw handfuls from the great treasure, they would drink their fill from the ocean of joy. One day, their walls will ...
... and at the end of that opportunity the individual soul departs to a world of eternal bliss or to a world of eternal misery either according as the general or preponderant balance of his acts is good or evil or according as he accepts or rejects a particular creed, mode of worship, divine mediator or else according to the pre-destined judgment of his Creator. But there are many other views, and there ...
... the mystery. Why shirk the responsibility now, because a surrealist poem has come out? You are responsible for it, I think. Excuse me, no. As the Gita says, the Lord takes not on himself the good or the evil deeds (or writings) of any. I may send a force of inspiration, but I am not responsible for the results. But did you seriously mean that I should send a "petition". Not very seriously... কর্ম্মসু কৌশলম্ । 87 It would certainly be unpoetic. What's your opinion about that bizarre poem—"Good" or "Grand"? what is the word? I can't flatter myself by taking it to be "grand", nor can my poetic being take it for "good" without pain. It was good. I forgot that you did not like "good" poetry, only "fine" and even "very fine". Let us then promote it to "fine", but stop short of "grand"... English style "grood" = "really good". I wrote a beautiful poem in the early morning, but I can't show it to you for it was done in sleep and I have lost it. Pity, isn't it? Great pity. January 20, 1937 How can one like "good"? To you good, fine, very fine, extremely fine, may be all equal! Of course, to the Divine, yes. Generally one likes good things and dislikes bad things ...
... the creation there is evil ? These two questions of pain and evil always come as difficult of explanation on the basis of an infinite bliss that is at work in infinite consciousness and existence. This pain is felt by the emotional and sensational consciousness of man and animals and beings, and the problem of evil is ethical, moral, it is concerned with right and wrong, good and bad, true and false... with the problem of explaining how this sole Infinite Existence-Consciousness-Bliss admitted into itself that which is pain, not bliss, not delight. Because all delight must be all good. How did evil come into that all good, how can it persist in life ? The second point, we have to make clear to our mind, is that the world we live in is not an ethical world, just as God is Page 96 ... . Most often this delight of existence is underlying, and men take it for granted never thinking that to exist is an act of Delight. When a man has good health he never feels "I am in good health." Only when he gets ill he feels that he is not in good health, he feels pain. The positive aspect is taken for granted. Man never thinks of his health as something positive. Pain is a negative element. Even ...
... propensities. 245) If you leave it to God to purify, He will exhaust the evil in you subjectively; but if you insist on guiding yourself, you will fall into much outward sin and suffering. 246) Call not everything evil which men call evil, but only that reject which God has rejected; call not everything good which men call good, but accept only what God has accepted. 247) Men in the world have two... sometimes a good training-ship; but it will never fly the flag of the admiral. 337) Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators. 338) Tangled is the way of works in the world. When Rama the Avatar murdered Vali or Krishna, who was God himself, Page 467 assassinated, to liberate his nation, his tyrant uncle Kansa, who shall say whether they did good or did evil? But... 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. 355) It is easy to distinguish the evil worked by sin & vice, but the trained eye sees also the evil done by self-righteous or self-regarding virtue. 356) The Brahmin first ruled by the book & the ritual, the Kshatriya next by the sword and the buckler; now the Vaishya ...
... assumed a form out of His own free will for the good of the world? 36. The one Spirit that pervades the souls of these Gopīs, their husbands and all other beings — that universal Witness has assumed the form of Śrī Krsna for the sake of sport. For the all-pervading Being, where is the distinction between oneself and another, and how can any good or evil therefore accrue to Him? 37. In order to shower... the inhabitants of Vraja are as good as dead. For they are like their Prāna to people; if they perish, the whole community perishes in the next generation. So if the Prāna of the community, their children, are killed, there is nothing to fear from them afterwards, as one need not concern oneself with a body whose Prāna has left it." 16. Having thus resolved, that evil-minded demon assumed the form of... there is no self-interest — there is nothing to gain by right actions, and nothing to suffer from by the contrary. 34. That being the case even with such exalted men, it is needless to say that no good or evil can bind that ego less one, the Supreme Being, who is the ruler of all Devās, men and brute creations. 35. By the service of His lotus feet, devotees are established in joy and in freedom from bondage ...
... which had never been explained before'. In biology, last of all, the action of radium on cancerous cells had proved efficacious. "Radium had enriched Knowledge and served the Good. But could it also serve the Evil? Page 52 One may also imagine (Pierre said in concluding) that in criminal hands radium might become very dangerous and here we may ask ourselves if humanity... admirable work. They are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of criminals who lead the peoples towards war. I am among those who think, with Nobel, that humanity will obtain more good than evil from the new discoveries." [... ] Radioactivity, generation of heat, production of helium gas and emanation, spontaneous self-destruction, how far we have traveled from the old theories... possible. Marya prepared for her departure: Paris was waiting, she was 24 years old. She said good-bye to her father on the platform of the railway station. Promising to return quickly to live with him again, she Page 28 boarded the train, almost ashamed of her good fortune. [...] In the night pierced with whistles and the clank of old iron the fourth-class carriage ...
... absolute good; for moral good exists as a counterpart and corrective to evil and has evil always for its shadow, complement, almost its reason for existence. But the spiritual consciousness belongs to a higher than the mental plane and there the dualities cease; for there falsehood confronted with the truth by which it profited through a usurping falsification of it and evil faced by the good of which... ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art... to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and jarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the universal Inconscience ...
... division of world-existence into the Good and the Evil. One should boldly identify oneself with even the anti-divine, and then make an offering with a view to transforming it altogether in the mould of the Divine. The operation is difficult and even dangerous, but it may not be shirked. And so the Mother concludes: Basically, this kind of will for purity, for good, in men - which expresses itself in... it not significant that it was during 1962 that Meditations on Savitri, comprising "The Symbol Dawn", had made its triumphant appearance? The universal Mother's love was hers. Against the evil at life's afflicted roots, ... Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword. A solitary mind, a world-wide heart, To the lone Immortal's unshared work she rose. 12 The fateful hour... divine Becoming. Likewise, when commenting on the next Aphorism - Examine thyself without pity, then thou wilt be more charitable and pitiful to others - the Mother said that this exhortation was good for everybody, especially those who thought highly of themselves; and she added disarmingly: ...this is an experience which I have been having for some time.... ...I have an increasingly concrete ...
... world-forces in which the side favoured by the Divine triumphed, because the leaders made themselves His instruments. It is not to be envisaged as a battle between virtue and wickedness, the good and the evil men, After all, were even the Pandavas virtuous without defect, quite unselfish and without passions? . . . Were not the Pandavas fighting to establish their own claims and interests... For us the question does not arise. We made it plain in a letter which has been made public that we did not consider the war as a fight between nations and governments (still less between good people and bad people) but between two forces, the Divine and the Asuric. What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once... democratic freedom, are new values, an evolutionary movement; this is a new Dharma which has only begun slowly and initially to influence practice,-an infant Dharma which would have been throttled for good if Hitler succeeded in his "Avataric" mission and established his new "religion" over all the earth. Subject nations naturally accept the new Dharma and severely criticise the old imperialisms; it is ...
... since through that experience the entire process of Karma yoga begins to be guided by direct intuition that distinguishes not only between Purusha and Prakriti but also distinguishes between the good and the evil, in the sense that it distinguishes between that which is determined by the engine of lower Prakriti and that which is demanded by the higher Prakriti or para prakritt and by the Purushottama... much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour. Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all things. ... When could it be evil when thou wert near? I had rather be poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there... hidden from us, trust in the wise purpose and divine necessity of the particular manifestation, whether it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished or even false and evil."10 Indeed, as one ascends in the path of sacrifice, one need more and more imperatively the knowledge of the will that issues from the Supreme. This enhances the pressure of karma yoga towards ...
... hostile forces and at the same time pass as yogis. Even, the Vedantic attitude is often made an excuse for yielding to the hostile forces. "All this is Maya, illusion, there is no virtue, no sin, no good, no evil," they say and give themselves up to lower vital forces. Disciple : But are the lower movements of nature themselves not hostile ? Sri Aurobindo : No, but they offer an opening to... you the yoga – then did he not give the Dattatraya yoga ? Sri Aurobindo : I did not begin with Lele. I first began on my own with prānāyma , drawing the breath into my head. This gave me good health, lightness and an increased power of thinking. Side by side certain experiences also came. But not many nor important ones. I began to see things in the subtle. Then I had to give it up when... and wished to take up Sri Aurobindo 's yoga. He was told that this was not his path.) Disciple : I told him to seek out his old Guru again and stick to him. But he likes an "educated" and a "good-looking" Guru ! ( Laughter ) Sri Aurobindo : He told me during our talk that he was "weak". So I told him he must become strong he is unwilling to sit down at; his task, that means; does not ...
... and Mahomedans afterwards on the existence of great Mahomedan nations to which they feel themselves more akin, in spite of our common birth and blood, than to us. Hindus have no such resource. For good or evil, they are bound to the soil and to the soil alone. They cannot deny their Mother, neither can they mutilate her. Our ideal therefore is an Indian Nationalism, largely Hindu in its spirit and traditions... Bengal are now well supplied with these essentials of Western civilisation ..........These conditions of the worst districts tend to become general and unless something is done to stem the tide of evil, it will sweep away the soul of India in its turbid current and leave only a shapeless monstrosity of all that is worst in human nature. * * * April 11, 1908 The Mother's feet... most delicately profound in life of all the peoples of the earth, is the task next in importance and urgency. . . . We must remember also why the degradation and denationalisation, "the mighty evil in our souls" of which the writer* complains, came into being. A painful but necessary work had to be done, and because the English nation were the fittest instrument for his purpose, God led them all ...
... since through that experience the entire process of Karma yoga begins to be guided by direct intuition that distinguishes not only between Purusha and Prakriti but also distinguishes between the good and the evil, in the sense that it distinguishes between that which is determined by the engine of lower Prakriti and that which is demanded by the higher Prakriti or Para Prakriti. With this guidance, the... much as thou wilt, when thou wilt. Do with me as thou knowest best, and as shall be most to thine honour. Place me where thou wilt, and freely work thy will with me in all things. ...When could it be evil when thou wert near? I had rather be poor for thy sake than rich without thee. I choose rather to be a pilgrim upon the earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is... or a long period of governance by a moral law but always as a provisional device. It always looks forward to a time when one can arrive at a higher plane of consciousness in which the Right and the Good can find spontaneous expression. To the yogic consciousness, moral virtue is valuable as an expression of certain qualities which are for the time being necessary and useful for a given individual in ...
... and fear as well for the earthly as the eternal destiny; and outright evil, given the uncountable instances of physical and moral cruelty in history and even today. “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” (Steven Weinberg 2 ) It is noteworthy... Zeus, whose mind embraces all things in its knowledge, and who guides all things and is king of all’.” (Werner Jaeger 7 ) And there was the Platonic Absolute, the God identified with the Idea of the Good as perfection or self-sufficiency. Moreover, one must be ignorant of Hinduism not to know about Brahman, the Absolute, of whom the gods and goddesses are the cosmic powers, and who is represented above... this praise of materialistic science is expressed again and again – till one reaches the pages on theodicy, where the horror of life and human existence are being discussed, and the incompetence of the Good God to change or put an end to them. Empiricism and Religion As we have seen, Dennett wants “to investigate religious phenomena scientifically” without knowing what they are. He praises “those ...
... known even to the righteous, 0 Rāma ! Beware lest the king should forsake that truth, angry as he is (with me) for your sake. (24) If you undertake to implement whatever the king says, whether it is good or evil (for you), in that case of course I shall repeat everything (to you). (25) If what has been resolved by the king is not disobeyed by you then I shall lay it all before you. In no case will he utter... pious lady (Kausalya) perceived with her penetrating mind that Śrī Rāma was resolved to take up his abode in the forest she spoke benedictory words to him and got inclined to perform rites of averting evil through recitation of sacred texts. (38) Canto XXVI Saluting Kausalya while about to set out for the forest, Śrī Rāma , on whom blessings had been invoked by his mother and who remains... source of suffering, (24) Therefore have done with the idea of proceeding to the forest. A forest is not secure for you. Bestowing my thought on the subject I perceive the forest as fraught with many evils as it were." (25) When the high souled Śrī Rāma did not agree to take Sītā to the forest, she did not readily accept his verdict. Sore afflicted, she then spoke as follows to the illustrious Rāma ...
... the truth to them is clearly enough no natural phenomenon. In the Brihadaranyaka, the most profound, subtle & mystical of human scriptures, the gods & Titans are the masters, respectively, of good and of evil. In the Upanishads generally the word devah is used as almost synonymous with the forces & functions of sense, mind & intellect. The element of symbolism is equally clear. To the terms of the... Indra by the Soma wine? Of the description of Soma as the amritam, the wine of immortality, & of its forces as the indavah or moon powers? Of the constant sense of the attacks delivered by the powers of evil on the sacrifice? Of the extraordinary powers already attributed to the mantra & the sacrifice? Have the neshtram potram, hotram of the Veda no symbolic significance? Is there no reason for the mul... with Vala, the grudging guardian of light, with the great obscuring dragon Vritra & his hosts, with the thieving Panis, with all the many forces that oppose man’s evolution & support limitation and evil. A great many of the words for sacrifice, mean also war Page 58 and battle, in Sanscrit or in its kindred tongues. Indra and Varuna are called to give victory, because both of them are ...
... ." 46 Valmiki makes the opposition of the good and the evil palpable and visible in powerful evocative passages. When Sita hears of Rama's banishment she says that she will go with him to the forests, and evokes a picture of the forest that is good and beautiful. Rama who wants to dissuade her paints a different picture which is evil and ugly. Both are true, both are expressions of the ...
... began to realise that what he perceived in the action of the universe was also there in some form within him and that in him also were elements that responded to invisible powers and forces for good or for evil; so would begin his religio-ethical formations and his possibilities of spiritual experience. An amalgam of primitive intuitions, occult ritual, religio-social ethics, mystical knowledge or e... mixtures, errors, concessions to the human mind and vital part which may often be of a very unspiritual character. Ignorant and injurious and even disastrous elements may creep in and lead to error and evil; the dogmatism of the human mind, its self-assertive narrowness, its Page 895 intolerant and challenging egoism, its attachment to its limited truths and still greater attachment to its... or a disguise or a corruption or malformation of a truth which is lost in the brutal radicality of the operation,—the truth is cut out along with the error. Nature herself very commonly permits the good corn and the tares and weeds to grow together for a long time, because Page 897 only so is her own growth, her free evolution possible. Evolutionary Nature in her first awakening of man ...
... Mahabharata, the strife of the divine with the titanic forces in the life of the earth, but in more purely ideal forms, in frankly supernatural dimensions and an imaginative heightening of both the good and the evil in human character. On one side is portrayed an ideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilization founded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation of the moral ideal... hold your dwelling with a woman's beauty? Workers of unrighteousness, who are ye, evil men, disgrace to the garb of the seer? I Viradha the Rakshasa range armed these tangled woods eating the flesh of the sages. This woman with the noble hips shall be my spouse, but as for you, I will drink in battle your sinful blood." Evil-souled Viradha speaking thus wicked words, Sita heard his haughty speech, alarmed... imperialism, unable to rise above the idea of power, accept the Jesuitic doctrine of any means to a good end, still less justify the goodness of the end by that profession of an utterly false disinterestedness which ends in the soothing belief that plunder, arson, outrage and massacre are committed for the good of the slaughtered nation. Vyasa's imperialism frankly accepts war and empire as the result of ...
... when I was only fourteen, it took firm root when I was eighteen. My aunt has made you believe that some bad man has led your good-natured husband astray; but, in fact, it is your good-natured husband who has led that man and hundreds of others to the path, be it good or evil, and will yet lead thousands of others too. I don't presume to assert that fulfilment will come during my life time, but come... than in virtue and other- where than in unrighteousness..." — Kathopanishad. "One whose intelligence has attained to unity, casts away from him even here in this world of dualities both good doing and evil doing..." — The Gita. "... He (the divine worker) has passed even beyond that distinction of sin and virtue which is so all-important to the human soul while it is struggling to minimise... happiness of large masses of men, they bear a charmed life. They may be hit, but cannot be hurt. They may be struck but are not stricken. Their towering optimism and the grace of God turn every evil into good, every opposition into help, every loss into gain. By the general verdict of his countrymen, Aravinda stands today among these favoured sons of God. 147 "...politics meant to him much ...
... without any infection by germs. N. was conscious of what he was receiving from others and did not care to think about what he was passing to them. Not only that, he even thought he had power for good or for evil. Bad thoughts may affect others. That is why Buddha used to emphasise right thought etc. You find some people cannot do without meeting others. What is after all the passion of man and woman for... necessary. (In the letter Jagatsingh wrote that the spiritual help was "undeserved.") Sri Aurobindo : It is never undeserved. It has come to him because he is a good adhar. His psychic being seems to be of an unusually good order, and his other parts of nature are also strong. (Jagatsingh had expressed a desire to see Sri Aurobindo either psychically or physically) Sri Aurobindo ... everybody has not got. 2. If the departed soul has got the will he can manifest himself. But if he is not willing, it is not good to pull him back to that relation, as it may retard his movement in the other planes where he may have to remain for his development. It is not good to tie him down to earthly attachment. Page 191 She writes about the Truth and its attainment. In case she ...
... I think. Excuse me, no. As the Gita says, the Lord takes not on himself the good or the evil deeds (or writings) of any. I may send a force of inspiration, but I am not responsible for the results. 19 January 1937 The Necessity and Nature of Inspiration I hope to be able to write not only good but very good and very fine poems as a part of Yoga. To write such poetry, one must first... put "very good" on a poem of Shailen's, it does not mean that it is on a par with Harin's or Arjava's or yours. It means that it is very good Shailen, but Page 620 not that it is very good Harin or very good Arjava. "If 'very good' was won by them all," you write! But, good heavens, you write that as if I were a master giving marks in a class. I may write "good" or "very good" on the... French prosody. Good verse is the first requisite and good rhythm. 10 July 1933 The point is that in French you must express yourself straightforwardly and clearly so that your meaning is at once apparent to the reader. Some Questions of Diction The diction of my poems is childish, too simple. Good poetry can be written in a very simple style. Yours are quite good for a beginner. ...
... up by a family which only wanted what was “good” for him — but a small good, religious, moral, medical or what not, which had nothing to do with him. François has been the victim of “good” more than of “evil,” and when he jumped from one extreme to the other — drugs, sexual excesses and what not — it was still an attempt to be delivered from a “Good” which stifled him. I know what it is: it took... not mean we must embrace cancer and death, it only means that we must find in cancer and death what can overcome and go beyond the Evil: to change it into a third thing which will no longer be either our false good and false remedies or this appearance of evil and its eternal domination. Undoubtedly, the S.A.S. did help the Aurovilians to find their true center, the necessity to find the true... 1974 (Message from Sujata) My beloved, my sweet one, Mother keeps us in her arms. We are together at the feet of Sri Aurobindo. Douce August 24, 1974 Something that is neither Good nor Evil — nor Light struggling against Darkness, nor Darkness claiming its right — an Ally apart from all that: the cellular mind? the body. September 4, 1974 (Note from Sujata) Page 103 ...
... October 1933 We quite approve of your resolution about propaganda, etc. But at any rate this has helped your sadhana which is an example of how the cosmic spirit sometimes, at least, extracts good out of evil. What you say about the ahamk ā r [ego-sense] of the instrument is true—it is one of the most sticky of the ego's self-deceptions and there are few who can detect it soon or get early... that's why I ask. There was no misdirection of your appeal to Krishna; if there was anybody responsible it was Anilkumar with his tabla. But there was nothing wrong and no "possession" in the evil sense of the word; nothing hostile. The beat-beat of the tabla more than anything else created a vibration which was caught hold of by some rhythmic material Energy and that in its turn caught hold... in winter, though not so cold. I suppose it is all right now. All seems to have come back to poise. As for Nalina's husband I dare say he is a good and righteous man, but I have noticed him as a signal example of how blind and ego-centred a good and righteous man can be. Of course I knew it before, but an example makes knowledge more living. However this is strictly between you and me. A ...
... defect of being; it is a failure of the creature to act in accordance with the will of the creator. This is the result of freewill in men and in angels. God permits the evil, but only that he may bring good out of the evil and eventually restore the whole creation to unity with himself. This is how I understand the process of creation. The world comes forth from God as a created manifestation of the... inequality makes no sense of an omniscient, omnipotent, all-good, all-loving God in connection with a world he has freely made and constantly oversees. To urge that all this evil, suffering and inequality is due to man's freewill and that it is rendered somewhat reasonable by saying that God permits it only in order to bring good out of it is merely covering up the problem and refusing to... it is good news that the Canon Law about the heretics has totally changed. On my part I am far from justifying whatever "blots" Hindu society has allowed to develop by what you call its "excessive tolerance", but the degradation of certain practices which began with creditable motives - e.g., functional divisions in society, dedication of "vestals" to houses of gods - are much lesser evils than ...
... You even threw mental realizations. You threw EVERY possible realization. You put everything into the fire. You put good, evil, sorrow, joy. All the "yeses" and "nos" of the world. You threw in everything: I don't want joy, I don't want sorrow, I don't want good, I don't want evil. I want the Thing that IS – that IS unchanging, always. THE Thing... that does not vary. (short silence) And when... apart. And they're breaking apart everywhere in the world. Not because evil is coming out, or because truth (as we conceive it) is coming out. But because there's truly a new air, a new oxygen, slipping in and UPSETTING everything – driving everything out of its false naturalness, out of its false good as well as its false evil. And absolutely everything is breaking down, you see! The truths as... own limits? They are being shattered everywhere, the limits. The limits of horror as well as the limits of good – all the limits are being broken to pieces, shattered. To an impartial observer this world appears to be completely mad. It appears mad in its good as much as in its evil. Clearly, something ELSE is trying to come into the picture. And that suffocation is palpable to all people a bit ...
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