... we proceed to this inquiry, it is as well to note that in the very opening of his second Brahmana, the Rishi passes on immediately from aswa the horse to Ashanaya mrityu, Hunger that is death and assigns this hunger that is death as the characteristic, indeed the very nature of the Force that has arranged and developed—evolved, as the moderns would say—the material worlds. "Dawn" says the Rishi ...
... आपोऽजायन्तार्चते वै मे कमभूदिति तदेवार्कस्यार्कत्वं कं ह वा अस्मै भवति य एवमेतदर्कस्यार्कत्वं वेद ।।१।। 1) Formerly there was nothing here; this was concealed by Death—by Hunger, for it is Hunger that is Death. That created Mind, & he said, Let me have substance. He moved about working & as he worked the waters were born & he said, Felicity was born to me as I worked. This verily is the activity in... यावान् संवत्सरस्तमेतावतः कालस्य परस्तादसृजत । तं जातमभिव्याददात् स भाणकरोत् सैव वागभवत् ।।४।। 4) He desired "Let a second self be born to me." He by mind had intercourse with speech, even Hunger that is Death; the seed that was of that union became Time. For before this Time was not (period of Time) but so long He had borne him in Himself. So long as is Time's period, after so long He gave it birth ...
... All with itself, the stillness eternally supporting the energy. That is the true existence, the Life from which our life proceeds; that is the immortality, while what we cling to as life is "hunger that is death". Therefore the object of the wise must be to pass in their illumined consciousness beyond the false and phenomenal terms of life and death to this immortality. Yet is this Life-force, however ...
... universe. The old Upanishads saw it very clearly and phrased it with an uncompromising thoroughness which will have nothing to do with any honeyed glosses or optimistic scuttlings of the truth. Hunger that is Death, they said, is the creator and master of this world, and they figured vital existence in the image of the Horse of the sacrifice. Matter they described by a name which means ordinarily food ...
... the Ancient of the worlds no less than the slow ages and Time's enormous sea and the days of this material Page 457 world where life, in the Upanishad's phrase, is one long hunger that is death. Maybe Mr. Ezekiel will brush all of Sri Aurobindo's sonnets away as bombastic mystagogism, but, if he does so, how shall we excuse him when it happens that he is himself a true poet by fits ...
... Whose secret will is a brightness in your pulse, You shall be free of the grave's gape in each kiss And of the future's fret in your small veins.... If all life's slaves to the hunger-that-is-death Found this enraptured endless liberty, The flesh, now strained to a breath beyond its own, Would draw from deeps where the Perfect lives all dreams A dense divinity no ...
... one it is the ego, man's self-centredness that limits, dilutes, and even perverts his happiness. In the other, it is precisely the egolessness that brings the pure felicity. For ego is hunger, hunger that is death, says the Upanishad. It is the ego, the personal shift that cuts the Infinite, obscures the consciousness which otherwise in its natural condition is always the supreme bliss and beatitude ...
... The Life Divine Chapter XX Death, Desire and Incapacity In the beginning all was covered by Hunger that is Death; that made for itself Mind so that it might attain to possession of self. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. (I. 2. 1.) This is the Power discovered by the mortal that has the multitude of its desires so that it may sustain all ...
... for the life outside, it is unable to protect itself and is devoured or is unable to renew itself and therefore wasted away and broken." 3 In order to obviate the necessity of this Hunger that is Death , a ś an ā y ā m ṛ tyu ḥ , the individual existence has to annul its ego-isolation and rediscover and re-live its secret unity with all. But uniformity or an amorphous oneness is not the ...
... (Rig Veda, V.7.6) O Thou in whom is the food, thou art that divine food, thou art the vast, the divine home. (Rig Veda, IX.83) In the beginning all was covered by Hunger that is Death. (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, I .2.1) All Matter...is food, and this is the formula of the material world that "the eater eating is himself eaten". (Sri Aurobindo, The ...
... violent, antisocial, chaotic forces, their names are cruelty, lust, hunger, blind selfishness. Nowhere else than in this domain can the great Upanishadic truth find its fullest application—Hunger that is Death. But this is the seamy side of Nature, there is also a sunny side. If there is a nadir, there must be a corresponding zenith. In the Vedic image, if man is born of the Dark Mother, he ...
... it is the ego, man's self-centredness that limits, dilutes, and even perverts his happiness. In the other, it is precisely the egolessness that brings the pure felicity. For ego is hunger, hunger that is death, says the Upa-nishad. It is the ego, the personal shift that cuts the Infinite, obscures the consciousness which otherwise in its natural condition is always the supreme bliss and beatitude ...
... violent, anti-social, chaotic forces, their names are cruelty, lust, hunger, blind selfishness. Nowhere else than in this domain can the great Upanishadic truth find its fullest application—Hunger that is Death. But this is the seamy side of Nature, there is also a sunny side. If there is a nadir, there must be a corresponding zenith. In the Vedic image, if man is born of the Dark Mother, he ...
... violent, anti-social, chaotic forces, their names are cruelty, lust, hunger, blind selfishness. Nowhere else than in this domain can the great Upanishadic truth find its fullest application – Hunger that is Death. But this is the seamy side of Nature, there is also a sunny side. If there is a nadir, there must be a corresponding zenith. In the Vedic image, if man is born of the Dark Mother, he is ...
... same place; its rotations carry it forward. The animal is distinguished from man by its enslavement to the body and the vital impulses. Aśanāyā mṛtyuḥ , Hunger who is Death, evolved the material world from of old, and it is the physical hunger and desire and the vital sensations and primary emotions connected with the prāṇa that seek to feed upon the world in the beast and in the savage man who ...
... perfection. It is a perfection in the realms of struggle and in the style of passing forms, a fulfilment in the kingdoms of Ashanaya Mrityu, Hunger who is death, Hunger that creates & feeds upon its creations; the upward movement is that which leads up through death to immortality & realises in this earth of the body the blissful and luminous kingdom of heaven; the downward lapse is destruction, Hell, ...
... multiplicity was termed by the Vedic Rishis as aciti and by the Upanishadic Rishis as avidyā. According to them, confinement to aciti or avidyā was the cause of desire or hunger, and they equated hunger with Death (aśanāyā mrtyuh). The individual, on account of limitation of his consciousness within the boundaries of his finitude or ignorance, does not know how to receive the infinitude... divisions and all exclusiveness, including the great division of life and death. The Mother discovered 'over-life', which is at once life and death or which is rather something that cannot be described either as life or as death, but some other third state in which the contradiction of life and death is overcome. The question of death had begun to receive the Mother's attention more and more pointedly during... necessity of the death of the body implies deficiency in the manifestation of the spirit in the body and that the full manifestation of spirit in the body would imply optimality of the Will of the spirit to continue in the same body or to leave the body, ichachā mrtyu. 50 In either case, the necessity of the death would have been overcome. Ultimate Reality and Phenomena of Death, Desire and ...
... citizens who for the sake of their town or their country confront the enemy and undergo hunger, thirst, wounds or death. So we have seen what is courage to help oneself and what is courage to help others. I shall tell you the story of Vibhishan the hero. He braved a danger that was greater than the danger of death: he braved the fury of a king and gave him the wise advice that others dared not voice... in her sleep. She is all alone with the priest and priestess, and the priest raises his knife just as Malati is thinking of Madhava whom she loves: O Madhava! Lord of my heart, Oh, may I after death live in thy memory. They do not die whom love embalms in long and fond remembrance. With a shout, brave Madhava leaps into the chamber of sacrifice and engages the priest in mortal combat. Malati... of the oppressed Jewish people. Such was the courage of Mohammed, the Prophet, who imparted his religious thought to the Arabs, and who refused to be silenced even though they threatened him with death. Such was the courage of Siddhartha, the Blessed One, who taught the people of India a new and noble path, and was not terrified by the evil spirits who assailed him under the Bo-tree. Such was ...
... individual life in death. The Upanishadic Rishi emphasised this point when he declared: "He who sees separation here proceeds from death to death." 3 The urge of all-consuming hunger that the individual in his egoistic self-limitation insatiably feels becomes in the sequel the harbinger of death. For in the cryptic utterances of the ancient Indian mystics: " Hunger is death ." 4 "Anna is... particular form in which manifests the blind drive of hunger felt by a separative ego. But a body given over to the functioning of sex cannot in the very nature of things escape the clutch of death. This was already hinted at in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh wherein it is shown that the indomitable hero Enkidu fell a sudden prey to death after he allowed himself to be seduced by a courtesan... the Integral Yoga would like to tackle the problem of Death . It is not out of any sense of ignorant attachment to terrestrial life nor because of any pusillanimity before the prospect of their bodies' death that they seek to abrogate the stringency of the Law of Death. In fact, the attitude they should bear vis-à-vis the phenomenon of death has been clearly delineated by the Mother in one of her ...
... himself with the ideas and images of the second chapter in the Brihad Aranyaka? Yet there are few profounder thoughts in philosophical literature than its great central idea of Ashanaya Mrityu, Hunger who is Death, as the builder of this material world. But who will be our guide in this forest? who can illuminate for us that which is dark in these Upanishads or, conquering the rapid and deafening surge... stood the test of thousands of years of practical experiment by men passionately in search not merely of speculative truth, but of actual, vital, verifiable experiences, to them of a more than life-and-death importance. Wherever it has been tested, this ancient system has always been justified by its results. In any field of scientific research such constant justification would be held conclusive of the ...
... sea of hunger and richly deserves the vivid Upanishadic epithet; "Life is hunger, which is death.” Individual life feeding on other lives in order to maintain and aggrandize itself, feeding and eventually being fed upon by the contending lives—this is the spectacle that presents itself to our view behind the apparent birth and death of living Matter. When Life evolves Mind, this hunger becomes... achieve this highest perfection on earth. We have seen that desire is an evolved, mentalised form of the hunger which characterises both organic and inorganic Matter, but we have not traced hunger to its ultimate source and watched its primal genesis. If we do that, we shall know what hunger or desire represents in the material world and what it is in its eternal essence. A clear perception of this... countless waves and ripples of the one infinite ocean of Power and Delight; and, breaking itself into splinters, emerges as the dark, blind hunger which we have envisaged as the motive-force behind every little movement of organic and inorganic Matter. This hunger is a fragmentary impulse of the one universal Will, but a fragment darkened and deformed in the conditions of the inconscience out of which ...
... and physical consciousness will be a source of puissant calm on which various other and supraphysical harmonies will be sounded. His body will not as before be a cause of fatigue, sleep, hunger, disease and death. At Page 58 every moment it will be felt releasing out of its calmness that is strength, a series of impulsions strong with light and capable of carrying out that towards which... a rhythm of faintly pulsating dim wakefulness. This sense again is but an involved 'sense-mind'. The struggle is the cause of the deaths that occur in the plant world — the fading of flowers, the withering leaves, and the blasting away of fields of corn; a general death reigns behind this life. The law of the God in His all-absorbing meditation is too powerful for the individual plant to persist in... perforce a little slackened. Yet the all-pervasive and Page 56 basic principle of ignorance pursues relentlessly the beings of the world of sense-mind and causes sleep, fatigue, disease and death. As in the plant, so in the animal world also, the individual animal dies, but the collective life-force, the total rhythm of the sense-mind continues. The plant world is more in consonance with the ...
... and physical consciousness will be a source of puissant calm on which various other and supraphysical harmonies will be sounded. His body will not as before be a cause of fatigue, sleep, hunger, disease and death. At Page 58 every moment it will be felt releasing out of its calmness that is strength, a series of impulsions strong with light and capable of carrying out that towards... a rhythm of faintly pulsating dim wakefulness. This sense again is but an involved 'sense-mind'. The struggle is the cause of the deaths that occur in the plant world — the fading of flowers, the withering leaves, and the blasting away of fields of corn; a general death reigns behind this life. The law of the God in His all-absorbing meditation is too powerful for the individual plant to persist in... little slackened. Yet the all-pervasive and Page 56 basic principle of ignorance pursues relentlessly the beings of the world of sense-mind and causes sleep, fatigue, disease and death. As in the plant, so in the animal world also, the individual animal dies, but the collective life-force, the total rhythm of the sense-mind continues. The plant world is more in consonance with the ...
... and physical consciousness will be a source of puissant calm on which various other and supraphysical harmonies will be sounded. His body will not as before be a cause of fatigue, sleep, hunger, disease and death. At Page 9 every moment it will be felt releasing out of its calmness that is strength, a series of impulsions strong with light and capable of carrying out that towards which... a rhythm of faintly pulsating dim wakefulness. This sense again is but an involved 'sense-mind'. The struggle is the cause of the deaths that occur in the plant world — the fading of flowers, the withering leaves, and the blasting away of fields of corn; a general death reigns behind this life. The law of the God in His all-absorbing meditation is too powerful for the individual plant to persist in... perforce a little slackened. Yet the all-pervasive and Page 7 basic principle of ignorance pursues relentlessly the beings of the world of sense-mind and causes sleep, fatigue, disease and death. As in the plant, so in the animal world also, the individual animal dies, but the collective life-force, the total rhythm of the sense-mind continues. The plant world is more in consonance with the ...
... great fundamental ignorance which creates Ahankara, the sense of your individual existence, the preoccupation with your own individual existence, which at once leads to Desire, to Hunger which is Death, death to yourself and death to others. The sense that this is I and that is you, and that I must take this or that, or else you will take it, that is the basis of all selfishness; the sense that this I must... another way and we get a new facet of the one truth. All hatred & repulsion arises from the one cause, Avidya, which begot Will, called Desire, which begot Ahankar, which begot desire called Hunger. From Desire-Hunger are born liking & dislike, liking for whatever satisfies or helps us to our desire, dislike for whatever obstructs or diminishes the satisfaction of desire. This liking in this way created... this is the law of death; death is a moment of great concentration when the departing spirit gathers up the impressions of its mortal life, as a host gathers provender for its journey, and whatever impressions are predominant at that moment, govern its condition afterwards. Hence the importance, even apart from Mukti, of living a clean and noble life and dying a calm & strong death. For if the ideas ...
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