... for the full knowledge and experience of each other and of that which they both are. So is it with the One and the Many, the finite and the infinite, the transcendent and the cosmic, the individual and the universal; each is the other as well as itself and neither can be entirely known without the other and without exceeding their appearance of contrary oppositions. We see then that there are three... power of transforming by self-knowledge the conditions of the play nearer and nearer to the truth of the divine Delight. In that power lies the justification of individual existence; the individual and the universal unfolding in themselves the divine light, power, joy of transcendent Sachchidananda always manifest above them, always secret behind their surface appearances, this is the hidden intention ...
... impenetrable forever." 42 In the supramental vision of the supreme reality, differentiations of names and forms, differentiations among individuals and differentiations between the individual and the universal and the transcendental do not contradict or abridge the overarching unity and the transcendental oneness. But it is true that there is, at a certain stage, in the functioning of the supramental... by self-knowledge the conditions of the play Page 58 nearer and nearer to the truth of the divine Delight. In that power lies the justification of individual existence; the individual and the universal unfolding in themselves the divine light, power, joy of transcendent Sachchidananda always manifest above them, always secret behind their surface appearances, this is the secret intention ...
... crude the notions attached to it, this idea of the necessity of sacrifice did express obscurely a first law of being. For it was founded on that secret of constant interchange between the individual and the universal powers of the cosmos which covertly supports all the process of life and develops the action of Nature. But even in its external or exoteric side the Vedic religion did not limit itself ...
... life and mind and spirit in the physical existence. That assumption of body we call birth, and in it only can take place here the development of self and the play of relations between the individual and the universal and all other individuals; in it only can there be the growth by a progressive development of our conscious being towards a supreme recovery of unity with God and with all in God: all the ...
... terms of its existence. There is indeed a truth behind the pragmatic impulse which an exclusive one-sided spirituality is apt to ignore or deny or belittle. It is this that since the individual and the universal are terms of that higher and vaster Being, their fulfilment must have some real place in the supreme Existence. There must be behind them some high purpose in the supreme Wisdom and Knowledge ...
... itself progressively from that character of Ignorance, of the oblivion of its essential Oneness, which gives it its name. Avidya fulfilled by turning more and more to Vidya enables the individual and the universal to become what the Lord is in Himself, conscious of His manifestation, conscious of His non-manifestation, free in birth, free in non-birth. Man represents the point at which the multiplicity ...
... for the exclusion of the something More that compels Art to change always in its constant seeking for more and more that must be expressed of the concealed or the revealed Divine, of the individual and the universal or the transcendent Spirit. If we take these three elements as making the whole of Art, perfection of expressive form, discovery of beauty, revelation of the soul and essence of things ...
... and your psychic being is a special aspect of the one Divine Consciousness that has taken shape in you. But in the psychic consciousness there is not that sense of division between the individual and the universal consciousness which affects the other parts of your nature. You are conscious there that your individuality is your own line of expression, but at the same time you know too that it is an ...
... on Yoga - III: The Psychic Being and Its Role in Sadhana It is certainly better if the psychic is conscious and active before there is the removing of the veil or screen between the individual and the universal consciousness which comes when the inner being is brought forward in all its wideness. For then there is much less danger of the difficulties of what I have called the Intermediate Zone ...
... Vishwamitra, Vamadeva and Bhardwaj, remain unfettered by dogma or any restraining force of limitation or obscurantism. They wanted perfect harmony between the human and the natural, between the individual and the universal, between the mundane and the supramundane. Their message was clear that the ancient Indian concept of education should not only be revisited by free India but should also be resurrected ...
... perception of the One and Divine infinitely everywhere, 'sarvam khalvidam brahma', verily, all this that is is the Brahman. And still there is a third and final step: to rise beyond the individual and the universal to the Transcendent through the Supramental consciousness and to bring down the powers of the Supramental into mind, life and body for a total and perfect transformation. We need not ...
... and determining truth of her existence and evolution in the material world: the developing ego acts as a veil between her and her Lord. In man the ego erects a thick wall between the individual and the universal, with the result that the ¹ Sri Aurobindo Page 10 individual is aware of himself as only a finite, mortal being engaged in an unequal struggle with the ...
... that it is a sort of notation or recording of the destiny of an individual, for, in the universal unity, everything is interrelated and, if you know how to read the relations between the individual and the universal, you may find in the universal positions of the stars a kind of diagram Page 284 representing symbolically the life of one individual or another. Experience proves that this ...
... outwardly professed something of the law. But they apply not only to the individual but to the nation. Here was the first error of the German subjectivism. Reasoning of the Absolute and the individual and the universal, it looked into itself and saw that in fact, as a matter of life, That seemed to express itself as the ego and, reasoning from the conclusions of modern Science, it saw the individual merely ...
... also be brought about by specific concentration and effort. It is certainly better if the psychic is conscious and active before there is the removing of the veil or screen between the individual and the universal consciousness which comes when the inner being is brought forward in all its wideness. For then there is much less danger of the difficulties of what I have called the intermediate zone ...
... physical nature, they resist by this kind of obstinate recurrence. One has to be very persistent in rejection to get rid of it. There are two aspects of physical Nature as of all Nature—the individual and the universal. All things come into one from the universal Nature—but the individual physical keeps some of them and rejects others, and to those it keeps it gives a personal form. So these things can ...
... view-point the true law of living must be whatever rule can help us soonest to get back to self-knowledge and lead by the most direct road to Nirvana; the true ideal must be an extinction of the individual and the universal, a self annulment in the Absolute. This ideal of self-extinction which is boldly and clearly proclaimed by the Buddhists, is in Vedantic thought a self-finding: but the self-finding of the ...
... they resist by this kind of obstinate recurrence. One has to be very persistent in rejection 3 to get rid of it. There are two aspects of physical Nature as of all Nature — the individual and the universal. All things come into one from the universal Nature — but the individual physical keeps some of them and rejects others, and to those it keeps it gives a personal form. So these things ...
... individual and universal which Sri Aurobindo applies to all parts of an individual's nature as in the following statements: "There are two aspects of physical Nature as of all Nature - the individual and the universal." 7 "The subconscient is universal as well as individual like all the other main parts of the Nature." 8 A further distinction, however, made by Sri Aurobindo is between what ...
... The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 847 Page 83 × The subliminal is thus the link between the individual and the universal (or the "transpersonal" as it would be called in the latest school of Western psychology). (Ed.) × ...
... something More that compels Art to change always in its constant seeking for more and more that must be expressed of the Page 329 concealed or the revealed Divine, of the individual and the universal or the transcendent Spirit. If we take these three elements as making the whole of Art, perfection of expressive form, discovery of beauty, revelation of the soul and essence of things ...
... Vamadeva and Bharadwaja, remain unfettered by dogma or any restraining force of limitation or obscurantism. They wanted perfect harmony between the human and the natural, between the individual and the universal, between the mundane and the supramundane. Their message was clear that the ancient Indian concept of education should not only be revisited by free India but should also be resurrected ...
... whose constituents will be spiritually perfect individuals. For, Sri Aurobindo tells us, the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single form and in the group-existence; the individual and the universal are equally important terms of the higher and vaster Being, and their total and complete fulfilment must have some real place in the supreme Existence. In Sri Aurobindo's own words, ".. ...
... they resist by this kind of obstinate recurrence. One has to be very persistent in rejection to get rid of it. "There are two aspects of physical Nature as of all Nature — the individual and the universal. All things come into one from the universal nature — but the individual physical keeps some of them and rejects others, and to those it keeps it gives a personal form. So these things can ...
... one's eternal self, and then its linking up (which is a matter of course) with the Divine everywhere: In the psychic consciousness there is not that sense of division between the individual and the universal consciousness which affects the other parts of your nature. You are conscious there that your individuality is your own line of expression, but at the same time you know too that it is ...
... the divine Self, it is called the Dawn. It opens the chance for further unfoldment of the human individual toward the fulfilment of That which has unrolled itself as the cosmos. The individual and the universal are terms of this Unknowable, this Unknowable which represents itself to man as Infinite, Satchidananda. Whatever the human consciousness may be seeking it is, in reality, seeking ...
... with Letters on the Mother The Universal Mother and the Individual Mother The universal and individual Mother are the same—these are two aspects of the Supreme Mother—but the differentiation is for the multiple action and play. So also one feels the self as one's own self in an individual way but also that there is the same self Page 50 individualised... 4 November 1934 What people mean by the formless svarūpa of the Mother,—they mean usually her universal aspect. It is when she is experienced as a universal Existence and Power spread through the universe in which and by which all live. When one feels that Presence one begins to feel a universal peace, light, power, bliss without limits—that is her svarūpa . One meets this more often by rising... peace. But it can be felt through the heart also—then the heart too feels itself wide as the world, pure and blissful, filled with the Mother's presence. There is also the Mother's personal and individual presence in the heart which brings immediately love and bhakti and the sense of a close intimacy and personal oneness. 9 June 1935 ...
... become mechanical like a marvellously articulated and animated toy moved by the consciousness from the height of its seat which though no longer individual is still universal, that is, which is not yet completely merged in Thy Oneness. All the laws of individual manifestation have become clear to me, but in so synthetical, so global, so simultaneous a way, that it is impossible to express this in our ordinary ...
... Preface Yoga is the methodized effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the cosmos. An important question regarding Integral Yoga is as to what are its specific methods that distinguish it from ...
... , the Universal Page 31 and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to exceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension... to the individual and sought after by him, so also the individual is necessary in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta. 1 There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties... human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic may be our intellectual conception ...
... comprehends and pervades; its action is in the universal and is in conscious communion with a transcendent source eternal and beyond the formations of the universe. Supermind regards the individual in the Page 45 universal and does not begin with him or make of him a separate being. It starts from the Transcendent and sees the universal and individual as they are in relation to it, as its terms... terms, as its formulas; it does not start from the individual and universal to arrive at the Transcendent. Mind acquires knowledge and mastery ; it reaches it by a constant mentalising and willing: Supermind possesses knowledge and mastery; possessing, it throws itself out freely in various willing and knowing. Mind gropes by divided sensation; it arrives at a sort of oneness through sympathy: Supermind... own being. Supermind fixes these points, sees how consciousness must act from them on other forms of itself and in obedience to the pressure of those other forms, once a particular rhythm or law of universal action is given; it governs the whole action of mentality according to what it thus fixes and sees. Even our ignorance is only the distorted action of a truth projected from the Supermind and could ...
... and comprising the utmost termini of things, symbols and signs. The soul within grasps the worlds without; the One apprehends and fuses with the Many. From the individual to the universal; from the universal to the transcendental. Such is the preordained pace of advance. Accordingly Aswapati dares beyond all beyonds, he plunges into the "nameless vast", and is: Caught by... Savitri. Aswapati is individual man, he is a king and therefore leader and representative of his race, and he is also the heart of humanity voicing forth its innermost aspiration. Thus his yoga too falls into three stages, and the first stage is the subject-matter of Book I, cantos 3,4 and 5. Page 71 As individual man, Aswapati's first dim spiritual awakening ...
... on of Conscious-Self following and supporting the individual play of movement and upholding its differentiation from other play of movement, — the same everywhere in soul-essence, but varying in soul-form. This Page vi concentration supporting the soul-form would be the individual Divine or Jivatman as distinguished from the universal Divine or one all-constituting self. There would be... and this phenomenon has to be understood and explained. Spiritual experiences can be sporadic, or they can be attained by pursuing a methodised effort leading to the union of the individual with the universal and the transcendental spiritual reality. When the experience is attained by methodised effort, it can be called yogic experience. When we study the records of the experiences of those... no essential difference, but only a practical differentiation for the play which would not abrogate the real unity. The universal Divine would know all soul-forms as itself and yet establish a different relation with each separately and in each with all the others. The individual Divine would envisage its existence as a soul-form and soul-movement of the One and, while by the comprehending action of ...
... SELF, INDIVIDUAL AND UNIVERSAL What is called one's self (not the soul or the psychic being) above the head? Is it individual or universal? I mean, is one's self the same as another's self or is there individuality in it as is in the soul of each person? The self is felt as either universal, one in all, or as uni-versalised individual the same in essence... is acting. Is not the self a portion of the Divine? It is the individual being that is a portion of the Divine. The universal self or Atman which is the same in all, is not a portion but an aspect of the Divine. Here what is exactly meant by the 'individual being' — is it the soul or the central being? The central being and the soul are... the Jivatman as a portion of the Divine. The self, Atman is in its nature either transcendent or universal (Paramatma, Atma); when it individualises and Page 267 becomes a central being, then it is the Jivatman. The Jivat-man feels his oneness with the universal but at the same time his central separateness as a portion of the Divine. " What acts on the ...
... turns towards That which is not manifested, to cry to it for a manifestation ever more complete and more perfect. All is, in one time, in a triple and clairvoyant total consciousness, the Individual, the Universal, the Infinite. ... infallibly and without care for the inevitable results, whatever be the apparent momentary consequences: they unite themselves with Thee, O Master eternal, they unite themselves with Thee, O Mother universal, and in this double identity with That which is beyond and That which is all the manifestation they taste the infinite joy of the perfect certitude. Peace, peace in all the world.... War is ...
... turns towards That which is not manifested to cry to it for a manifestation ever more complete and more perfect. All is , in one time, in a triple and clairvoyant total Consciousness, the Individual, the Universal, the Infinite. Page 237 ... infallibly and without care for the inevitable results, whatever be the apparent momentary consequences: they unite themselves with Thee, O Master eternal, they unite themselves with Thee, O Mother universal, and in this double identity with That which is beyond and That which is all the manifestation they taste the infinite joy of the perfect certitude. Peace, peace in all the world.... War is an ...
... term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and—highest condition of victory in that effort—a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious... ultimate object of his supreme endeavour or of his most powerful means of self-fulfilment. It can only be a temporary necessity under certain conditions or a specialised extreme effort imposed on the individual so as to prepare a greater general possibility for the race. The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga ...
... Natures that lack faith also lack endurance and courage. Sri Aurobindo tells us that for human beings the degree of success in physical life depends on the degree of harmony between the individual and universal physical Nature. Some people have a will which is spontaneously in tune with the will of Nature, and they succeed in everything they undertake; others, on the contrary, have a will which is... of cosmic Nature and they fail in everything they do or try to do. As for the question of what is necessary for progress, in an evolving world everything is necessarily a help to progress; but individual progress extends over a considerable number of lives and through innumerable experiences. It cannot be judged on the basis of a single life between birth and death. On the whole, it is certain that ...
... these methods of development can be epitomised in one sublime teaching, the very teaching Pythagoras gave to his disciples and which Mr. Han Byner has told us about. The Self of each individual and the great universal Self are one; we bear God within ourselves. 19 April 1912 Page 98 ... yesterday as the stepping-stone to tomorrow. Life is in perpetual movement, in perpetual transformation. However great or learned or wise one may be, he who does not follow the great current of universal life in an ever ascending march, inevitably moves towards downfall, towards the dissolution of his conscious being. This has been expressed very forcefully by Pythagoras, in the eloquent words ...
... power for things; it can pour downwards into the body, working, establishing its reign, extending into wideness from above, link the lowest in us with the highest above us, release the individual into a cosmic universality or into absoluteness and transcendence. 23 March 1933 Page 192 You often speak of the Mother's Force. What is it? It is the Divine Force which works to remove the... potent, extended and wide; it is there waiting for manifestation and to this Force we have to open ourselves—to the power of the Mother. In the mind it manifests itself as a divine mind-force or a universal mind-force and it can do everything that the personal mind cannot do; it is then the Yogic mindforce. When it manifests and works in the vital or physical in the same way, it is then apparent as a ...
... illumination, hours in which the union between the most divine Consciousness and the most material grew perfect, hours when the identification of the individual being with the universal Mother and of the universal Mother with Thee was so complete that the individual consciousness could perceive simultaneously its own existence, the life of the entire universe and Thy eternity beyond all change. Beatitude was ...
... to the Master barred. Thus he has left us a literature of immense value. The present volume is only a leaf out of that. Not that this literature is of a passing value. For it deals on individual fronts with universal problems and is therefore universally relevant to the seekers. The hints and guidance Sri Aurobindo has left are like lamp-posts in the expanding horizons of the unknown. Pilgrims to ...
... somebody. Only, if you turn to the Divine the friendship ceases in the old sense, but it taken up so that it does not become an obstacle to the progress of each other. There may be even individual love apart from universal love which one gets when one is conscious of the Divine. Page 232 ... oneself to love the other? Sri Aurobindo : If one has found the Divine in oneself then he adores Him and surrenders oneself to him. Such a man can love others – but that is a part of action of universal love. The spark in human love, even if it is degraded afterwards, tends to awaken the consciousness and evolve the being. Page 231 21st November, 1939 Disciple :... overclouded by the vital and the physical element. Of course, when it is merely physical then there is no adoration and love in it. Psychic relation is not generally found. Disciple : An individual who has not found his companion, and has hankering or need for one meets a woman whom he loves; now if he keeps his love free from physical and vital elements, i. e. keeps it pure and psychic – does ...
... , but on universal lines and in harmony with its universal law. But if that were all the truth, then there would be no real individual and no responsibility of any kind except the responsibility of universal Nature to carry out the idea or to execute the force put forth in the individual as in the universal by the All-Soul, the cosmic Spirit. But there is also this soul of the individual, and that... which this individual flame of the All-Soul lives. And it is apparent, if we consider, that the individual's energy of action is not something miraculously separate and independent, it is not a power born of itself, living in itself, acting in its separate and wholly self-formed puissance. On the contrary it is the universal that acts in the individual energy and acts, no doubt with an individual application... action of universal Nature is something quite different from the soul's action in character, in meaning, in the law of her being that constitutes it, if it is not itself the energy, the work of a Mind, a Soul, a Spirit. If the individual energy is that of a soul putting out action and receiving a return in kind, physical, mental, moral and spiritual from the universal energy, the universal energy too ...
... spiritual guidance. Yoga is, as stated by Sri Aurobindo, "a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos."5 Page 17 HOME ... climb thee like a ladder, O hundred powered. As one ascends from peak to peak, there is made clear the much that has still to be done. And yet in the ever-progressive movement, the individual seeker, the individual soul, discovers the stable source and foundation, the creative power of the world, and even while seated securely in that foundation, it sees luminously the progressive self-unfolding... faculties in search and realisation of psychic, spiritual and supramental reality or realities that lie beyond the body, life and mind, as also the consequences of that search and realisation for the individual and collective existence in the cosmos. Sri Aurobindo's book The Synthesis of Yoga is related to yogic experiences that can be attained by the application of yogic shastra, independent of any religion ...
... original nature or become distorted, coloured, transformed in the individual consciousness. But the idea goes far beyond the mind; the idea has an origin much higher than the mind. So, the functioning is the same from both the universal and the individual point of view; the individual movement is only representative of the universal one. The scale is different, but the phenomenon is the same. Of... they are universal principles—but it's the same thing—universal principles on which the universes are built. The universe, after all, is only one person, only one individuality in the midst of the eternal Creation. Each universe is a person who takes form, lives, dissolves, and another takes shape—it is the same thing. For us, the person is the human individual; and from the universal point of view... view the person is the universal individual; it is one universe in the midst of all the universes. Page 346 ...
... the Divine Presence is the only thing that matters. 2 June 1934 To want only what the Divine wants in us and for us, is the one important thing. 5 April 1935 The individual self and the universal self are one; in every world, in every being, in each thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man's mission is to manifest it. 30 October 1951 Page 3 We are... ordinary life is to carry out one's duty, the aim of spiritual life is to realise the Divine. In the world, as it is, the goal of life is not to secure personal happiness, but to awaken the individual progressively towards the truth-consciousness. It is not in order to be happy that we are upon earth, for in the present conditions of terrestrial life happiness is an impossibility. We are ...
... Gita too said, Raise thy self by thy own self. Yet here too, in the end, the individual did not stand, it rose but to get merged in the non-individual the universal, the Vast and the Infinite. The highest spiritual injunction is that God only existed and man has to annul his existence in Him. The great mantra of individual liberty, in the social and political domain, was given by Rousseau in that... establishment and maintenance of the individual's right. The Reformation characteristically sought to make room for individual judgement and free choice in a field where authority -the collective authority of the Church -was all in all and the individual was almost a nonentity. Page 273 In India the spiritual life, it is true, was more or less the individual's free venture to the unknown. The... Democracy is that of personal value, the sanctity of the individual. And its great failure is also exactly the failure to discover the true individual, the real person. The earlier stages of human society were chiefly concerned with the development of mankind in die mass. It is a collective growth, a general uplifting that is attempted: the individual has no special independent value of his own. The clan ...
... merely ignorant—a radical ill will. But it didn't have a human origin, did it? It wasn't from a human individual? No, it's not an individual: it's a universal way of being. It's always that way: things aren't positively impersonal, but they do not belong to one person; they are universal ways of being. I mean, there was no human instrument, was there? I wasn't conscious of an instrument... of being of beings: to certain tendencies, certain attitudes, certain reactions—it clings to all that. It's not at all "one" person or "one" will, that's not it, but it's a way of being. It's all universal ways of being that are destined to disappear from the field of activity and are being eliminated. But the reaction on the body was painful, as it was the first time. The first time (according... body: when the experience comes, it is quite widespread; I have an impression of many bloods, many cells, many nerves.... Which means that the CENTRAL consciousness isn't always aware of it, the individual isn't always aware of it (it has an extraordinary feeling, but it doesn't know what it is), while the cells are aware of it, but they cannot express it. I felt that several times: when the experience ...
... know that there are three principles: the transcendent, the universal and the individual or personal? No?—the Page 391 transcendent which is above creation, at the origin of creation; the universal which is the creation, and the individual which is self-explanatory. There is a transcendent Divine, a universal Divine and an individual Divine. That is, one may put oneself in contact with the... transcendent, constantly a universal, constantly an individual, and the transcendent, universal and individual are co-existent. That is, if you enter into a certain state of consciousness, you can at any moment be in contact with the transcendent Shakti, and you can also, with another movement, be in contact with the universal Shakti, and be in contact with the individual Shakti, and all this simul... the three aspects of the divine Mother: transcendent, universal and individual.... Do you know the flower I have called "Transformation"? 1 Yes. You know it has four petals. Well, these four petals are arranged like a cross: one at the top which represents the transcendent; two on each side, the universal; and one at the bottom, the individual. The petal at the top is divided into two. Exactly ...
... universal also individual realises itself for manifesting itself in its totality. That is why the individual universalises and the universal individualises and both have some kind of mutuality, which can be realised only when the limiting egoism is abolished. It is this large truth that is translated in the human endeavour to arrive at universal solidarity, which yet retains the individuality ... The individual and the universe have an intimate and mutual relationship, and this relationship is inalienable, even when the individual combats with the universe by building up the walls of division, of ego and of separateness. It is by means of the universe that the individual is impelled to realise himself. But this universalisation does not mean the annulment of the individual; for the,... Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays Towards Universal Fraternity If there is one central theme in human history, it is that of universal solidarity. None is alone in the world, except that psychologically one may feel lonely in the darkness of night, even when stars twinkle and invite for company. The whole world is our friend and our helper, only ...
... satisfaction of desire get gradually diminished. This is further aided by the knowledge that grows in the individual of the processes of energy, processes of action, and processes of relations between actions and results. The action, it is realized, proceeds from a vast universal engine, —from a universal dynamo of action, Prakriti. It is further realized that the idea that action proceeds from oneself does... its delight in states of supernal ecstasy. The methods of the yoga of Devotion, when followed with regularity and constancy, confirm the repeated experiences and realizations of the human individual with the universal consciousness and with the consciousness of the Lord of the universe. 33 Yoga of Knowledge The yoga of knowledge 34 has also its own specific methods where the powers... determiner of action is found to be an error, considering that even the ego is an instrument and a knot fashioned by the universal energy and therefore entirely derived from and dependent on the universal Prakriti. One also perceives that there is a rhythm in the working of the universal Prakriti and that there is a law of constant exchange of forces, and that this law is fulfilled when the forces of action ...
... of any individual soul from the universal Illusion. It is the individual soul itself which effects its supreme good by escaping from the sorrow and the division into the peace and the bliss. There would seem then to be some kind of reality of the individual soul as distinct from the world and from the Supreme even in the event of freedom and illumination. But for the Illusionist the individual soul is... the relation between three general forms of consciousness, the individual, the universal and the transcendent or supracosmic. In the ordinary distribution of life's activities the individual regards himself as a separate being included in the universe and both as dependent upon that which transcends alike the universe and the individual. It is to this Transcendence that we give currently the name of... n of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment to the transcendent and supracosmic. For the World-Transcendent embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not exclude him. The individual is a centre of the whole universal consciousness; ...
... and the delight of that play is entirely possessed by the Universal; but in the individual owing to the action of ignorance and division it is held back in the subliminal and the superconscient being; on our surface it lacks and has to be sought for, found and possessed by the development of the individual consciousness towards universality and transcendence. We may, therefore, if we will, pose... of seeing things from other centres or standpoints or even from the real Centre of all or in the vastness of a universal self-diffusion, still if he is not capable of fixing himself normally in his own firm standpoint for certain purposes of the divine activity, if there is only the universal self-diffusion or only infinite centres without some determining or freely limiting action for each, then there... thus omniscient and omnipotent, in entire luminous possession of itself, and such entire luminous possession being necessarily and in its very nature Bliss, for it cannot be anything else, a vast universal self-delight must be the cause, essence and object of cosmic existence. "If there were not" says the ancient seer "this all-encompassing ether of Delight of existence in which we dwell, if that delight ...
... we are centres of the multiplicity of the One; universal Mind, Life and Body are also forms of our self, because we are that One in our being. But the self is more than universal or individual mind, life and body and when we limit ourselves by identification with these things, we found our knowledge on a falsehood, we falsify our determining view and our practical experience not only of our self-being... of the soul to it in vision. But the universe is there as a truth in God even though the individual soul may have shut its eyes to it and the Self is there in the universe really and not falsely, supporting all that we have rejected, truly immanent in all things, really embracing the individual in the universal as well as embracing the universe in that which exceeds and transcends it. What shall we... material force and formation, but none the less or rather all the more for that reason a reality. Still, though the universe is a fact and not a fiction, a fact of the divine and universal and not a fiction of the individual self, our state of existence here is a state of ignorance, not the true truth of our being. We conceive of ourselves falsely, we see ourselves as we are not; we live in a false relation ...
... inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he... carried with it an immense advantage as well as great dangers. The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to discover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the sphere of religion, to the original truth which convention Page 27... goal of his individual and social destiny. In Europe and in modern times this has taken the form of a clear and potent physical Science: it has proceeded by the discovery of the laws of the physical universe and the economic and sociological conditions of human life as determined by the physical being of man, his environment, his evolutionary history, his physical and vital, his individual and collective ...
... of it. But in the first place this highest power of the individual consciousness cannot be peculiar to it, for it must be a power of the general and universal; the individual reflects the universal, for it is only the law of the universal that can be repeated with individual modifications in the law of the individual. Secondly, the universal soul is the same in all; for that is the experience of the... the changes of phenomena. As this self can draw back that which supports the individual into it, so it is and must be capable of drawing back that which supports the universal. In one case the stream of phenomena centred around its individual reflection ceases, in the other the stream of phenomena centred around its universal reflection. A theory only? But it is justified by reason acting on our total... in the substance of that self-consciousness into these images of form and force which make up the world. What we call world, is a harmony of things seen not by the individual mind or even by universal mind, but rather seen through universal mind, as through a reflecting medium, by the Eye of divine Being. The eye that sees is immaterial, the things seen are Page 199 immaterial; for matter ...
... psycho-spiritual inquiry makes us aware of two elements of our being, a soul and a Nature. Purusha or soul, individual or universal, is the observing and experiencing conscious existence seemingly inactive but in relation with its becoming, while Prakriti or Nature, again individual or universal, is the principle and the powers of the becoming, appearing as "an executive Force or an energy of Process... expressing the being, executing the will, satisfying the self-knowledge, ministering to the delight of being of the soul. There we have, founded on the very nature of being, the supreme and the universal relation of Prakriti with Purusha. The absolute joy of the soul in itself and, based upon that, the absolute joy of the soul in Nature are the divine fulfilment of the relation." 1 ... the infinite of the Self and it possesses the infinite of Nature .... The gnostic soul is the child, but the King-child; here is the royal and eternal childhood whose toys are the worlds and all universal Nature is the miraculous garden of the play that tires never.... This biune being of Purusha-Prakriti is as if a flaming Sun and body of divine Light self-carried in its orbit by its own inner ...
... great classical art and poetry is to bring out what is universal and subordinate individual expression to universal truth and beauty, just as the spirit of romantic art and poetry is to bring out what is striking and individual and this it often does so powerfully or with so vivid an emphasis as to throw into the background of its creation the universal, on which yet all true art romantic or classical builds... need or ought to be excluded,—provided we understand beauty both in its widest and its truest sense. A complete and universal appreciation of beauty and the making entirely beautiful our whole life and being must surely be a necessary character of the perfect individual and the perfect society. But in its origin this seeking for beauty is not rational; it springs from the roots of our life,... beauty which is hidden from the ordinary eye and the ordinary mind and revealed in its fullness only to the unsealed vision of the poet and artist in man who can seize the secret significances of the universal poet and artist, the divine creator who dwells as their soul and spirit in the forms he has created. The art-creation which lays a supreme stress on reason and taste and on perfection and purity ...
... To live and act no longer in human ignorance, but in divine Knowledge, conscient of individual nature and universal forces and responsive to a transcendent governance, this is Karmayoga. To live, be and act in a divine, illimitable and luminous universal consciousness open to that which is more than universal, no longer to grope and stumble in the old narrowness and darkness, this is Karmayoga... close union and deep communion with the Divine in us, the Universal around us and the Transcendent above us, not to be shut up any longer in the imprisoned and separative human mind, the slave of its ignorant dictates and narrow suggestions, this is Karmayoga. To work in obedience to a divine command, an eternal Will, a transcendent and universal impulsion, not to run under the whips of ego and need... united with mind and body and enjoying the bliss of difference. The ecstasy [of the] soul in the pure bliss of the Beatific. The ecstasy of the spirit united in consciousness and force with the Universal. The ecstasy of the pure being absolute and one with the Transcendent. Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Works 138 All spiritual paths lead to a higher consciousness and union with the Divine ...
... evolution of a new species on the earth. Three elements, a union with the supreme divine, unity Page 48 with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, — constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being. In the Integral... approach and cast itself into the eternal. It even goes farther and through its injunction to surrender totally to the Divine, it opens up the doors by which the spirit can take up the individual into the universal Power of higher Nature, parā Prakriti. In effect, this would be the method by which the concept of sdlokyamukti and sdyujyamukti is further extended into sādharmyamukti, the liberation... that the identification of Purusha with Prakriti constitutes the state of bondage; according to another system, the individual soul, which is called Jiva, when identified with the mind, is said to be in the state of bondage. According to a third system, the individual soul or jiva is nothing but a temporary conglomeration of perceptions and impressions, which by repetitive actions creates ...
... which aim at self-perfection, and (b) which are marked by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being, as also (c) which are claimed to lead to a union of the human individual with the universal and the transcendental Existence we see partially expressed .in man and in the universe. According to Yoga, spiritual experiences, even if they occur sporadically to some or many, are... or of mental or rational thought in the light of standards of conduct erected by moral or normative conscientiousness, — hedonistic, altruistic, or utilitarian or else in the light of standards of universal principles formulated under the light of the categorical imperative. But these standards of conduct are not found to be based on any claims of the certainty of knowledge. Moreover, these standards ...
... human species for the evolution of a new species on the earth. Three elements,- a union with the supreme divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life - action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, — constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being. In the ... and cast itself into the eternal. It even goes farther and through its injunction to surrender totally to the Divine, it opens up the door by which the spirit can take up the individual Page 295 into the universal Power of higher Nature, Para Prakriti. In effect, this would be the method by which the concept of salokyamukti and sayujyamukti is further extended into sadharmyamukti... confined to the individual, but would extend progressively to the collective divine life on the earth. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike of our individual and of our ...
... ignorant sense of one's being a separate individual. This self- insulation of the individual from the universal is the cause of all his besetting limitations—limitations of consciousness, knowledge and power. The ego, the circumscribing sense of I-ness and my-ness, mamatwa, must, therefore, completely disappear, if the individual has to recover his innate infinity and immortality;... through man. And in the last analysis, is not this the pivotal truth of all creation —the Divine is the sole Doer of all universal action, the Vishwakarma ? In no other way could this work of a manifold manifestation be accomplished. Describing the inner state of the individual from which this service proceeds, the Mother says, "Each activity in its own sphere accomplishing its special mission... and, last, dealing with and acting for individuals, but seeing, contacting and communing with the One everywhere, in all individuals and units. This last experience of service establishes its sovereignty in a life of spiritual perfection—it is the only means by which the Divine can be loved and adored and served, embraced and communed with in every individual and thing and circumstance at every step ...
... which knowledge, love and action, the threefold dharma of humanity, find their fulfilment and end. This is the ātman in the ānandakoṣa , and it is by communion and identity of this individual self with the universal self which is God that man will become entirely pure, entirely strong, entirely wise and entirely blissful, and the evolution will be fulfilled. The conquest of the body and the vital... formula abides the same. The theory is only acceptable if we recognise the truth of the conception formulated in the Vishnu Purana of the world as vijñāna-vijṛmbhitāni , developments of ideas in the Universal Intelligence which lies at the root of all material phenomena and by its indwelling force shapes the growth of the tree and the evolution of the clod as well as the development of living creatures... for our family, for our class, for our community, for our race and nation, for humanity. An ever-enlarging self takes the place of Page 20 the old narrow self which is confined to our individual mind and body, and it is this moral growth which society helps and organises. So far there is little essential difference between our own ideas of human progress and those of the West except in ...
... has emerged as an individual consciousness and is aware therefore only of a fragmentary movement of its own total activities. The whole crux and difficulty of human life lies here. Man is this mental being, this mental consciousness working as mental force, aware in a way of the universal force and life of which he is part but, because he has not knowledge of its universality or even of the totality... Conscious-Force from which this life took its rise. The potentiality thus contained in our human existence is Sachchidananda realising Himself in a certain harmony and unification of the individual life and the universal so that mankind shall express in a common consciousness, common movement of power, common delight the transcendent Something which has cast itself into this form of things. All life... sin and falsehood of our and others' minds, wills, emotions, life-energies,—only so can the life of man spiritually and practically become one with that of his fellow-beings and the individual recover his own universal self. The subconscient has this life of the All and the superconscient has it, but under conditions which necessitate our motion upwards. For not towards the Godhead concealed in the ...
... aim at self-perfection, and b) which are marked by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being, as also c) which are claimed to lead to a union of the human individual with the universal and the transcendental Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the universe. * * * According to Yoga, spiritual experiences, are in themselves not hazardous or... and the experiences to which these methods lead. Page 141 * * * Yoga insists in its methods on psychological refashioning of elements of consciousness in the individual, permitting each individual the freedom to develop on one's own line of growth appropriate to one's own psychological make-up, temperament and combination of cognitive, conative and affective elements as also... and Page 148 whole-heartedly, and this is the time when the individual has to exercise will for the needed efforts which can be successful only if that will is truly free, autonomous and self-conscious. * * * The implication is that the process of education must be so conducted that the individuals are constantly given opportunities to learn the experiences of freedom, and ...
... atmosphere, of the inner dimensions. Bhdva in Indian painting is the expression of the universal spiritual essence of the emotion modified by the essential soul-type that is presented in the image. Complexity of the dramatic insistence is avoided, and so much stress is only laid on character in the individual feeling as to give the variation without diminishing the unity of the fundamental emotion... vividly illustrated in the Indian painting. The deeper we travel in the heart and thought, in the soul and in the spirit, the deeper we travel from the form to the formless, and from the individual to the universal, the greater is the aesthetics, the greater is the charm, the greater is the harmony, the greater is the beauty and the underlying rasa of the experience of art. Sadrishya, Page 32... observation, experimentation and verification as also expansion by progressive inquiry. The essence of philosophical method is exploration of the realm of ideas, of eternity and infinity, of essence of universality and individuality, and a comprehensive approach to grasp the totality and reality not merely through speculation but particularly through investigation of the significance and meaning of the totality ...
... being and consciousness that are at the very basis, forming, as it were, the ground-plan of the integral reality. They are (i) the individual, (ii) the universal or cosmic and (iii) the transcendental. The first boon regards the individual, that is to say, the individual identity and integrity. It asks for the maintenance of that individuality so that it may be saved from the dissolution that Death... from life to life. The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature... known and experienced in two ways; for it has two fundamental aspects or modes of being. The Brahman is universal and it is transcendental. The Truth, satyam, the Upanishad says in its symbolic etymology, is 'This' (or, He) and 'That' (syat + tyat i.e. sat + tat). 'This' means the Universal Brahman: it is what is referred to when the Upanishad says: Iśāvāsyamidam sarvam : All this ...
... psychological individuality turned upon things held under the lens as an object of the intelligence; but now there are coming a universal subjectivity of the whole spirit, an attempt towards closeness and identity, a greater community of the individual with the universal soul and mind. The wider interest in Man has not lessened in breadth, but it is changing its character. More strenuous than before... suggested by Whitman, of the full power and meaning of the individual with the full power and meaning of the universal, eternal and infinite, but it is concentrated and brought to bear on a single feeling for its enlargement with a great power of intuitive and revealing suggestion. This enlarging of the particular to meet and become one with the universal and infinite—Tennyson's knowing of what God and man... deeper significance of his present, to his self-creation. The profounder ranges of his being are now sounded and there is an initial feeling and even some actual seeing of the greater individual and the communal or universal self of our kind. Nature is seen more in her hidden suggestions and soul meanings and in the finer impressions by which we enter into them and establish with her a spiritual relation ...
... point of view. The self, Atman, is in its nature either transcendent or universal (Paramatma, Atma); when it individualises and becomes a central being, it is then the Jivatman. The Jivatman feels his oneness with the universal but at the same time his central separateness as a portion of the Divine. The individual Self is usually described as a portion of the Transcendent and cosmic Self—in... instrument for psychic and spiritual self-expression, a divine manifestation in Nature. The bindu seen by you above may be a symbolic way of seeing the Jivatman, the individual self as a drop of the Sea, an individual portion of the universal Divine; the aspiration on that level would naturally be for the opening of the higher consciousness so that the being may dwell there and not in the ignorance. The... could have no knowledge of his individual Self or Spirit before he rose to the supramental plane; he could not have any experience of the Self, though he may have the sense of the dissolution of his ego in something Universal. But he can become aware of his unborn non-evolving Self, a centre of the Divine Consciousness, long before that; the Self cosmic or individual is experienced long before rising ...
... atmosphere, of the inner dimensions. Bhava in Indian painting is the expression of the universal spiritual essence of the emotion modified by the essential soul-type that is presented in the image. Complexity of the dramatic insistence is avoided, and so much stress is only laid on character in the individual feeling as to give the variation without diminishing the unity of the fundamental emotion... vividly illustrated in the Indian painting. The deeper we travel in the heart and thought, in the soul and in the spirit, the deeper we travel from the form to the formless, and from the individual to the universal, the greater is the aesthesis, the greater is the charm, the greater is the harmony, the greater is the beauty and the underlying rasa of the experience of art. Sadrishya, varnikabhanga... observation, experimentation and verification as also expansion by progressive inquiry. The essence of philosophical method is exploration of the realm of ideas, of eternity and infinity, of essence of universality and individuality, and a comprehensive approach to grasp the totality and reality not merely through speculation but particularly through investigation of the significance and meaning of the totality ...
... being and consciousness that are at the very basis, forming, as it were, the ground-plan of the integral reality. They are (i) the individual, (ii) the universal or cosmic and (iii) the transcendental. The first boon regards the individual, that is to say, the individual identity and integrity. It asks for the maintenance of that individuality so that it may be saved from the dissolution that Death... life to life. The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal ? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature... known and experienced in two ways; for it has two fundamental aspects or modes of being. The Brahman is universal and it is transcendental. The Truth, satyam, the Upanishad says in its symbolic etymology, is 'This' (or, He) and 'That' (syat + tyat i.e. sat + tat). 'This' means the Universal Brahman: it is what is referred to when the Upanishad says: Isavasyamidam sarvam: All this is ...
... and archetypes 50-51 and attitudes 117 and insight 61 motivating forces 7 Behaviourism 10-11, 14 and psychoanalysis 11-12 Being fullness of 62,63 individual and universal 60 inner 39,41,139 parts of 30,56 planes of 86 surface (outer) 17,41,138 Benson, Herbert 146 Bergson 6 Berne, Eric 52, 53 Breuer, Joseph 25 Buddha ...
... the realms of light of the Spirit. For the real governor can be only that light and knowledge, which is integral and which unites the individual with the universal without requiring the individual to be abolished and which shows both to the individual and to the universal that their source is in the same transcendental that is the foundation of oneness and unity of existence. The age of Reason, according... man found itself on the true communism of the equal godhead in the race; for the Spirit, the inmost Self, the universal Godhead in every being is that whose very nature of diverse oneness it is to realise the perfection of its individual life and nature in the existence of all, in the universal life and nature. 5 According to Sri Aurobindo, the present stage of human development can become... relation of individual with individual and society or of community with community. Hence, we find in history that sometimes an exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid on the individual, sometimes on the collectivity and society, sometimes on a right and balanced relations between the individual and the collective human whole. According to one ideal, freedom and growth of perfection of the individual is to ...
... Man, the individual, has to become and to live as a universal being; his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his... n and this perversion is the self-division of the being in his consciousness by measuring and limiting Maya and in consequence an egoistic and piecemeal instead of a universal reception of contacts by the individual. For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa , which means at once sap or essence... apply the universal truth; for this is the very domain of the nerves and the body, the centre and seat of that in us whose nature is to be dominated by external contact and external pressure. Even here, however, we have glimpses of the truth. We see it in the fact that according to the habit the same physical contact can be either pleasurable or painful, not only to different individuals, but to the ...
... Man, the individual, has to become and to live as a universal being; his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his... n and this perversion is the self-division of the being in his consciousness by measuring and limiting Maya and in consequence an egoistic and piecemeal instead of a universal reception of contacts by the individual. For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa, which means at once sap or essence... apply the universal truth; for this is the very domain of the nerves and the body, the centre and seat of that in us whose nature is to be dominated by external contact and external pressure. Even here, however, we have glimpses of the truth. We see it in the fact that according to the habit the same physical contact can be either pleasurable or painful, not only to different individuals, but to the ...
... Page 203 The-ideal of liberty is fundamentally the ideal of the individual self-determination and its message is consonant with the Indian idea to lift the individual from the bonds of mechanical necessities to the heights of spiritual freedom, individual integrality and individual fullness that can contain both the universal and transcendental reality. The ideal of equality is the idea of mutuality... created the framework of training each individual according to the predominant nature, swabhava, that the individual represented. But the deepest justification for this fourfold order was spiritual in character. The entire system emphasised that the intellectual, ethical and spiritual growth of the individual is the central need of the race, and that the individual and social life should be so organised... notices that casteism binds the individual to a small group, — both in regard to relationship and function, while individualism liberates the individual from narrow loyalties and fixed grooves of accident of birth into larger universe of free growth and participation in larger ends of the society and even humanity. It also notices that while casteism imprisons the individual in a network of hierarchy, inequity ...
... as a path which aims at achieving the union of the individual self with the Universal Self so as to lead to liberation from the ignorance and suffering of life on earth. In Sri Aurobindo's yoga, which aims at not only the liberation of the individual soul but also the transformation of earthly life, yoga implies not only union of the individual soul with the Divine but also the union of the outer... initial tasks of psycho-spiritual growth consist in: emerging progressively from the unconscious state in which one is more or less a fused part of the collective mass rather than an independent individual who is "a truly mental man who thinks for himself, is free from all outer influences, who has an individuality, who exists, has his reality" ( p. 104 ); developing an increasingly greater understanding... distinct character of the human being is that of a mental being, and it is but natural for one to start with a mental understanding and gradually develop a deeper understanding. It is only rare individuals who have a deep self-understanding so as to be able to distinguish the different inner movements of their many selves without having first learnt to label them mentally. As the Mother once said to ...
... new word arrives: "Here am I. " 30 The individual, the universal, the Transcendent - Mirra is now this, now that, and anon the other; these prayers and meditations too thus come to us, now from one plane, now from another; and, of course, even as Mirra is somehow triumphantly all three at the same time (the individual aspirant, the universal earth-mother, and also the Mother beyond all... in a truer sense it was but a new phase of their preordained spiritual odyssey on the earth. Sri Aurobindo had realised, as he told Dilip Kumar Roy in 1924, that the transformation of a single individual was not enough; humanity had to ripen too, and be ready for the desired radical change: "For the crux of the difficulty is that even when the Light is ready to descend it cannot come to stay until... egoism, scatter the obstacles of ignorance, shine resplendent as sovereign Master of the earth. 8 Later, in Pondicherry, Mirra meditates on the morning of 17 April on the meaning of the individual human personality, and the need to see it always in integral relation to the Divine. We may call this her own form of viśistādvaita, her qualified non-dualism! In a manifested universe, the ...
... the growth of the individual unit. The universal Will is stationed behind, controlling and co-ordinating the giant interaction of the multifarious hungers Page 226 and desires of the evolving units, but not obtruding on the surface. It acts through the unconscious drive or the subconscious urge or, as in man, through desire and a delusive free will, in each individual unit. Hunger or... ce behind the movements of individual and universal nature, but is only an overt incentive to action, a concomitant of ignorance, entailing conflict and struggle and suffering, which are inevitable, even necessary, in the egoistic phase of evolution. The real motive-force is the Will of the supreme Being, which emerges from behind the confusion and anarchy of individual desires and cravings, Page... widened, quickened and superbly accentuated in its manifold self-expression under the luminous direction of the omnipotent Will. The egoistic division having disappeared, the individual identifies himself with the Universal and the Transcendent and partakes of the life of all and embraces all in his unwalled consciousness. What will he now crave or covet ? What gain will elate and what loss depress ...
... is there not an individual evolution?... There is a universal evolution—Sri Aurobindo has shown this—but within this universal evolution, is there or is there not an individual evolution?... Now, he has given us one theory—which holds together perfectly, which is quite logical, you see—but in which it is not at all necessary to postulate an individual evolution. The whole universal plan is logical... possible to conceive of a progressive, evolving universe, in which the individual is not necessarily evolving individually... I must ask you questions to find out whether you understand first of all the difference between universal and individual evolution, and how both can proceed. How does Nature proceed in its universal evolution? I think, you have understood this, haven't you? One dies... and being reborn—that is the process of individual evolution, provided that something of the individual persists through life and death, for if he died entirely and disintegrated entirely, what could be reborn? Necessarily something must persist—persist through the rebirths—otherwise it is no longer the same person. If nothing persists, it is not the individual who progresses, it is Nature. Nature makes ...
... anyway). For some time, I was in a consciousness in which the separate individuality no longer existed, but the principle... (how should I Put it?) the particular principle of each individual persisted in the universal Consciousness. And then, mon petit, everything became so marvelous!... It lasted maybe for an hour, a little more or a little less, I don't know, but anyway long enough to... ( Mother... Mother smiles ), I mean, to lounge in it. There was no more, NO MORE separation, that had disappeared, but a certain... (how to explain?), almost like an outlook; each individual's outlook (not just the outlook, but at the same time the stand in action—"stand," that is, the part of the action initiated by that outlook), that persisted. It persisted in the One—no separation. And then, each thing has its ...
... of which we sometimes hear and speak but have not yet its inmost secret. For that is still retired in our depths and waits for our transcendence of the ego and the discovery of the true individual in whose universality we shall be united with all others. To transfer from the vital being, the instrumental reality in us, to the spirit, the central reality, to elevate to that height our will to be and our... be urged perhaps that after all individuals have succeeded in effecting some figure of transformation, have led entirely ethical or artistic or intellectual lives, even shaped their life by some ideal of the true, the good and the beautiful, and whatever the individual has done, the race too may and should eventually succeed in doing; for the exceptional individual is the future type, the forerunner... The Human Cycle The Human Cycle The Human Cycle Chapter XXII The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation Our normal conduct of life, whether the individual or the social, is actually governed by the balance between two complementary powers,—first, an implicit will central to the life and inherent in the main power of its action and, secondly, whatever ...
... beyond their individual formations find that they are only one centre of the sole Mind, Life, Form of things and therefore they find Brahman in that also and not only in an individual transcendence; they bring down the vision of the superconscient into that also and not only into their own individual workings. The mind of the individual escapes from its limits and becomes the one universal mind, his life... which exceeds the salvation of the individual soul, because the universal is more real than the individual, we who feel more and more, in the language of the Koran, that the Lord did not create heaven and earth in a jest, that Brahman did not begin dreaming this world-dream in a moment of aberration and delirium,—well may we ask whether this gospel of individual salvation is all the message even of... over-emphasis, on the salvation of the individual, on his rejection of the lower cosmic life. This note increases in them as they become later in date, it swells afterwards into the rejection of all cosmic life whatever and that becomes finally in later Hinduism almost the one dominant and all-challenging cry. It does not exist in the earlier Vedic revelation where individual salvation is regarded as a means ...
... which will deliver us from our narrow limits and bounds. The individual Self and the universal Self are one; in every world, in every being, in every thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man's mission is to manifest it. In order to do that, he must become conscious of this Divine Presence within him. Some individuals must undergo a real Page 41 apprenticeship in order... is our life and our light. This idea, expressed in sublime words, has been taught in various forms by all the great Instructors in all lands and all ages. The Self of each one and the great universal Self are one. Since all that is exists from all eternity in its essence and principle, why make a distinction between the being and its origin, between ourselves and what we place at the beginning... synthesis which can serve us as a protection against temptations from outside, as a landmark to prevent us from going astray, as a beacon to light our way across the moving ocean of life. Each individual should build up this mental synthesis according to his own tendencies and affinities and aspirations. But if we want it to be truly living and luminous, it must be centred on the idea that is the ...
... further, thoughts of hate!” *** He who walks in truth is not disturbed by any error, for he knows that error is the first effort of life towards the truth. *** The individual self and the universal self are one; in every world, in every being, in everything, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man’s mission is to manifest it. If we all brought here an ardent aspiration ...
... latent in the being and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. The commencement of yoga is characterized by the point of contact of the human individual consciousness with the higher and profounder states of consciousness that can ultimately lead to the universal and transcendent Existence. That contact normally... synthesis of yoga, the spirit in man is regarded not as solely an individual being traveling to a transcendent unity with the Divine, but a universal being capable of oneness with the divine in all souls and all-Nature with all its practical consequences. Page 6 As Sri Aurobindo points out: "The human soul's individual liberation and enjoyment of union with the Divine in spiritual being... the sixth element of perfection will consist of Gnostic evolution opening up into the divine principle of ananda, so that the perfected individual will experience "all the universe as the manifestation of the One, all quality and action as the play of his universal and infinite energy, all knowledge and conscious experience as the out flowing of that consciousness, and all in the terms of that one Ananda ...
... infinite strength & speed & motion. He bears all of them without respect of differences, samabhavena, with the divine impartiality and equality of soul—samam hi Brahma. To the type of each individual being this Universal Might adapts himself & seems to take upon himself their image. He is Haya to the Gods, Arvan to the Asura, Vajin to the Gandharvas, Aswa to men. Ye yatha mam prapadyante tans tathaiva ... visible sparks of the secret universal fire that is in him—guhahitam. But the real powers, the wonderful fundamental greatnesses of the Horse are, the Sage would have us remember, not the material. What are they then? The sunrise & sunset, day & night are their symbols, not the magnitudes of space, but the magnitudes of Time,—Time, that mysterious condition of universal mind which alone makes the... abruptness in an impetuous figure of the Horse of the Aswamedha. "OM" it begins "Dawn is the head of the horse sacrificial. The sun is his eye, his breath is the wind, his wide-open mouth is Fire, the universal energy; Time is the self of the horse sacrificial. Heaven is his back and the mid-region is his belly, earth is his footing,—the quarters are his flanks and their intermediate regions are his ribs; ...
... declares, "to bring out what is striking and individual, and this it often does so powerfully or with so vivid an emphasis as to throw into the background of its creation the universal, on which yet all true art romantic or classical builds and fills in its forms". Apropos of setting forth the universal or throwing into relief the striking and individual, Sri Aurobindo, 5 with his wonted integrality... attentive to the total effect. In turn of mind, it is systematic, lucid, beautifully general, broadly keen - its spirit is, as Sri Aurobindo 2 says, "to bring out what is universal and subordinate individual expression to universal truth and beauty". In range of vision, it is mostly restricted to the intellect's power of seeing and comprehend- ing: what is beyond the intellect it does not intimately... prevalent in Classical Antiquity. The free-dom of thought and feeling, the aesthetic response to the loveliness of the natural world and to the human body's vibrant vigour, the large interest in individual self-expression and in earthly concerns - it is these features of ancient Greek culture that proved potent to release the suppressed sensuous vitality of Europe. The mind of the time was stirred ...
... and the Page 330 universe begins to disappear and vanishes altogether. We realise the selfsame Pantheos in ourselves, in others and in all universal existence. But also by Yoga we become aware of something that is more than our individual being and more than the cosmic being, a transcendent Being or Existence which is not dependent on ours or the existence of the universe. Our existence... or a World Father or World Mother or an almighty Lord of all or a Divine Lover. We are in the presence of a Cosmic Spirit in whose universal consciousness we lose our separate ego or a Supracosmic Absolute in whom we lose altogether our cosmic as well as our individual existence. We find our own highest Self or the Self of all or we pass into a sublime Page 331 Mystery without relation... strong in spirit, the touch may indeed be rapid & summary & we may wake at once & stride Page 338 forward to the state of divine indwelling, soul of man in the soul of God, the individual in the universal; but the touch must be there. To enforce this preliminary step, to bring man into some kind of contact with God, is the common and sometimes the sole preoccupation of human religions. It ...
... truths of the individual and the collectivity coalesce; there, we discover that the individual and the collectivity are not what they appear to be in the lower or infra-rational parts of our being. Individual is not, it is discovered, fundamentally egoistic in nature; ego is only a temporary formation, but behind it there is the un-egoistic centre of universality, such that the individual finds its fullness... of yoga considers the individual soul and the universal principles of Matter, Life and Mind to be intertwined in an evolutionary process which has so far reached a critical stage where it is possible for the individual to develop knowledge and will that can be consciously applied for purposes of the evolution of supramental consciousness in matter by means of which the individual will be able to realize... fullness in universality and universality finds its concentrated centre in the unegoistic individual. page - 84 It is claimed that beyond ethics and religion is a realm of the Spirit, and even though religions and ethics may lead us to the borders of that realm, a secure possession of that realm can be attained when the methods and practices of yoga are undertaken. It may even be said that ...
... within in the peace and silence is the first necessity. I spoke of the wideness because in the wideness of silence and peace (which the Yogins recognise as the realisation of self at once individual and universal) is the basis for harmonising the inward and the outward. It will come. Peace is never easy to get in the life of the world and never constant, unless one lives deep within and bears ...
... of outward life or to sublimate the more inward but still untransformed and comparatively surface movements of human emotion and passion or to empower thought to perceive and utter certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life of Nature and man. But every power in the end finds itself drawn towards its... of the intellectual faculty striving at a high height of its own development to look beyond its own level directly into the unseen and the unknown and to unveil some ideal truth of its own highest universal conceptions hidden behind the veil of the ordinary mind and supporting them in their return to their eternal source. This high departure was not an inevitable outcome of the age that preceded Wordsworth ...
... inner vision, symbols which are as old as the Vedas. NIRODBARAN: The cross is a significant one. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, it is ancient and very well known. It marks the meeting-point of the Individual, the Universal and the Transcendent. These symbols are seen even when you don't know anything about them. There are some symbols which have not been fixed but which accompany the opening to the Brahman.... many languages perhaps? I don't understand what they mean by it. SATYENDRA: What is the significance of the Son, the Father and the Holy Ghost? SRI AUROBINDO: The Son, I suppose, could be the individual Divine, the Divine in man—they speak of the Christ in man; the Father is the personal Divine, the ruler of the world; and perhaps the Holy Ghost is the Impersonal. But I don't understand what... are two kinds of experiences: some people see visions with open eyes, others with closed eyes. Those who see with open eyes can easily mistake their visions for material forms and feel as if the individual seen was physically present. NIRODBARAN: But is materialisation possible? SRI AUROBINDO: There is a well-known case of such materialisation. It relates to the mother or the grandmother of the ...
... action and existence. There will be a luminous and enjoyed perfection of unity with all instead of a blind and suffered subjection of the individual to the universal, and at every moment the action of the universal in the individual and the individual in the universal will be enlightened and governed by the rule of the transcendent Supernature. But this highest condition is difficult and must evidently... the truth of Nature. This would be a real participation by the individual in the working of the universal Consciousness-Force; the individual Purusha would become the master of his own executive energy and at the same time a conscious partner, agent, instrument of the Cosmic Spirit in the working of the universal Energy: the universal Energy would work through him, but he also would work through her... is impossible. Moreover the individual must have sufficiently universalised himself, he must have recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a cosmic mentality, enlarged and vivified his individual life into the immediate sense and direct experience of the dynamic motion of the universal life, opened up the communications of his body with the forces of universal Nature, before he can be capable ...
... meaning of Yoga. By Yoga, says Sri Aurobindo, "We mean ... a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent existence we see partially expressed in man and in the cosmos." Page 349 In the right view of Yoga and of Education, we find, Education and Yoga are one and... and if it is lit and continues to burn, then, we are assured, we shall arrive. A thousand-rayed sun of solid mass of knowledge illuminating, by an incessant downpour of its sheer lustre, the universal skies and the hidden and distant secrets of Matter, a most potent drive of energy and action, and an irresistible bursting forth of love, joy and marvellous forms of beauty - these are the new ideals... body with the psychic centre and the body will learn to put forth at every minute the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action, to replace through contact with universal forces the energies it spends consciously and usefully. By this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, Page 366 reflecting the harmony of the regions which will ...
... being; it is Thy Will that directs, Thy Force that acts; and no longer on the limited field of a small individual consciousness, but on the universal field of a conscious- ness which, in each state of being, is united to all. And the being has at once the conscious perception of all the universal movements in their complexity, and even in their confusion, and the silent and perfect peace of Thy sovereign... being seems to be considered a summit attainment, even by most of the greatest of mystics. There may be, in this state, an intermittent or steady perception of a universal or transcendental Will behind the shifting waves of one's individual nature, but usually it is not accompanied by any clear knowledge of the why and the how of its working. A veil still remains, however thinned, between the shining... oneself, for the satisfaction of one's egoistic desires and for personal profit, hem in and heave the consciousness with their reactions and results, and emphasize the separateness of the individual from the universal. It is only when actions are stripped of desires and turned Godwards, that they become a powerful liberating force and a sure means of progressive self-transcendence. Each action, offered ...
... the highest, the spiritual principle, becomes expressed and dominant in her, takes up cosmic and individual existence on the lower planes into its truth and transforms all into a conscious manifestation of the Spirit. The true individual, the spiritual being, emerges, individual yet universal, universal yet self-transcendent: life no longer appears as a formation of things and an action of being created... true individuality by a limiting self-identification of it with this life, this mind, this body: it is a separation from other souls which shuts us up in our own individual experience and prevents us from living as the universal individual: it is a separation from God, our highest Self, who is the one Self in all existences and the divine Inhabitant within us. As our consciousness changes into the height... imprisonment in a separated individuality, becomes universal, assumes a cosmic consciousness in which it identifies itself with the self and spirit, the life, the mind, the body of all beings. Or it breaks out upward into a supreme Page 768 pinnacle and infinity and eternity of self-existence independent of its cosmic or its individual existence. The ego collapses, losing its wall of separation ...
... a concentration of Conscious-Self following and supporting the individual play of movement and upholding its differentiation from other play of movement,—the same everywhere in soul-essence, but varying in soul-form. This concentration supporting the soul-form would be the individual Divine or Jivatman as distinguished from the universal Divine or one all-constituting self. There would be no essential... essential difference, but only a practical differentiation for the play which would not abrogate the real unity. The universal Divine would know all soul-forms as itself and yet establish a different relation with each separately and in each with all the others. The individual Divine would envisage its existence as a soul-form and soul-movement of the One and, while by the comprehending action of consciousness... but were to project itself into the movement and to be in a way involved in it. Here, the character of the play would be altered, but only in so far as the individual Divine would so predominantly make the play of relations with the universal and with its other forms the practical field of its conscious experience that the realisation of utter unity with them would be only a supreme accompaniment ...
... ego-cadre, is an inherent aspect of the multi-moded Spirit and is not debarred from a genuine oneness with other individuals and with the universal consciousness. Beyond the universe it has its reality in the Transcendence whose complementary manifested formulations are the universe and the individual. In a general sense we may say that the original Consciousness is a unity-in-multiplicity and that for the... But we are afraid that he is thinking in terms of the Ahankar or ego. The ego is the separative individual, a formation of Nature whose very essence is its limitation, its exclusion of others. There cannot be the same ego in two beings, for that would be a self-contradiction. But the true individual, whose distorted figure in evolving Nature is the ego and which can be realised only by overpassing... m-dwelling Godhead. By the Supermind's integral realisation the mind, the life-force and even the body would become divinised, fulfilling Nature's evolutionary labour and establishing on earth a perfect individual and collective existence manifesting in Time ever-new riches of the inexhaustible Infinite. When Sri Aurobindo passed away, the Supermind was in process of being established in his body. This means ...
... the individual Divine and its universal source, with all the consequences that would accrue from the maintenance and operation of such a dualism." 10 The supermind is the consciousness and will of the Supreme; but there is no gulf between the Supreme and the Universal and the Individual; the supreme himself even while being transcendental and supracosmic is also cosmic; and the individual is the... the individual divine or Jivatman as distinguished from the universal Divine, since the individual is the transcendental itself realizing itself as a concentration of Conscious-Self following and supporting the individual play of movement and upholding its differentiation from other play of movement. The individual is the Supreme supporting the soul-form by means of concentration in the supermind in... its individual movement and its relations of a free difference in unity both with the One and with all its forms. By means of its projecting and confronting consciousness, which is proper to the third poise of the supermind, the individual Divine is able to alter its relations with the universal and with its other forms; in this altered state, the realization of utter unity with the universal and with ...
... indicate, is the way of the synthesis of Yoga, which aims at total freedom of each individual in his or her method of approach and which aims at integral development of personality and integral self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and the union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence which we see partially expressed in the human being... the One and known and worshipped Him in the glories of His light and purity and wisdom and power. 2 Ishopanishad describes the loftiest experiences of consciousness, where the individual, universal and the transcendental unite in the following verses: But he who sees everywhere the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self, shrinks not thereafter from aught. He... that cannot be doubted. There is, first, the experience of our individual entity as an observer who observes, experiences, acts and reacts. There is, second, a field of circumstances in which the individual finds in himself or herself and in which he or she works, learns and struggles to arrive at mastery. Arrival at this mastery, individual and collective, may be considered to be the realisation of human ...
... in the following words: Page 32 [Yoga is] a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. 11 According to Sri Aurobindo, what we need today is the practice of meticulous methods that can... Vaishnavism end in the release from life; here the object is the divine fulfilment of life. Page 22 Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing in of a... necessity of spiritual transformation. Sri Aurobindo points out that a change from the vital and mental to the spiritual order of life must necessarily be accomplished in the individual and in a greater number of individuals before it can come to have an effective hold upon community. What is necessary is that the common human mind begins to admit the ideas proper to the higher order that is in the ...
... intelligence. The Western mind lays an enormous stress upon force of personality, upon the individual will, upon the apparent man and the desires Page 144 and demands of his nature. But here is an opposing stress on a high growth towards impersonality, on the widening of the individual into the universal will, on an increasing or breaking beyond the apparent man and his limits. The flowering... there is any ethical strain in his character; it is because these vices do not come his way. His social system founded on the barbarous idea of the Dharma, of the divine and the human, the universal and the individual, the ethical and the social law, and supported on it at every point, has stupidly neglected to supply him with the opportunities of departing from it so liberally provided by Western ci... the Indian people have always gravitated towards the form rather than the substance and towards the letter rather than the spirit. One would have supposed that this kind of gravitation is a fairly universal feature of the human mind, not only in religion, but in society, politics, art, literature, even in science. In every conceivable human activity a cult of the form and forgetfulness of the spirit ...
... etc. that every human being possesses will be changed completely. A society free from all imperfection mental, vital and physical in which all human beings will embody the Truth of the One, individual and universal and transcendental. (4) Hostile Maya is difficult to surmount. Careful not to be dazzled by anything that imitates the Divine. Our surrender must be onepointed to the inner guide and the... own image. (3) A new society where every individual is given fullest freedom of action and expression is possible only when every unit of the society has transcended the present rules and ways and means of the society that have held together all the individuals. The laws of morality and compulsory rules will have no place in that society. The individual and collective life of that new society will... possess all these Gunas living together and each individuality is entitled to develop all these personalities together; for that there is ample opportunity. But in actuality these working Gunas in the individual create chaos and people do not find any inner contact in their external life and workings. The result is that they remain always externalised, having nothing to do with any inner consciousness. ...
... In Sri Aurobindo's yoga, the spirit in man is looked upon not merely as an individual being travelling to a transcendent unity with the Divine, but as a universal being capable of oneness with the Divine in all souls and all nature with all its practical consequences. As Sri Aurobindo explains: "The human soul's individual liberation and enjoyment of union with the Divine in spiritual being, con... so as to create a fundamental blissful dualism in unity between the individual Divine and its universal souls. These three statuses of the Supermind correspond, respectively, to unitary consciousness, qualified oneness and Page 64 blissful dualism. In the Supermind these three do not conflict with each other but express a total harmony. As Sri Aurobindo states: "We cannot stamp any of these... Nirvana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object; (2) the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement; and (3) a method has been preconized for achieving this ...
... ananda, in which they very obscurely and imperfectly, if at all consciously, partake. This tapas is the will of the transcendent spirit who creates the universal movement, of the universal spirit who supports and informs it, of the free individual spirit who is the soul centre of its multiplicities. It is one will, free in all these Page 675 at once, comprehensive, harmonious, unified;... oneself in the idea and realisation of the Divine, and this takes in certain forms of spiritual askesis the turn of a strain towards the abolition of all individual being and a casting away, in the trance of immersion, of all individual or universal relations with the Divine, in others it becomes an absorbed dwelling in him and not in this world or a continual absorbed or intent living in his presence... effortless and desireless, a spontaneous and illumined, a self-fulfilling and self-possessing, a satisfied and blissful will of the spiritual delight of being. But the moment the individual soul leans away from the universal and transcendent truth of its being, leans towards ego, tries to make this will a thing of its own, a separate personal energy, that will changes its character: it becomes an effort ...
... mechanical character of a marvelously articulated and animated toy moved from the height of its seat by my consciousness which is no longer individual but is still universal, and that means that it is not yet completely immersed in Thy Oneness. All the laws of the individual manifestation clearly appeared to me, but in a manner so synthetic, so global, so simultaneous, that it is impossible to express it... and Bliss to such an extent that he becomes at the moment of identification nothing but Power or Light or Bliss. Describing his identification with the plane of universal Power, he says, "I was so much identified with that (universal) Power that I felt I could tear the sun from its orbit and dash it to atoms." When he was identified with the plane of Light, he felt as if he was immersed in an ocean... parlance and spiritual philosophy knowledge does not mean mental knowledge. Mental knowledge is a knowledge of objects taken as separate integers or aspects, and not viewed as indivisible parts of a universal whole. Even when it arrives at a synthesis, it is an aggregate or a sum-total that it grasps, and never the essential unity of things. Besides, the mind can know only the surface of things, their ...
... middle term of its spiritual existence. Its self-realisation and divine realisation will be incomplete without its secure participation in the universality of Brahman, and it is this universality that justifies its continued co-operation, even after its individual liberation, in the upward labour of all beings towards the freedom and bliss of the Divine: sambhutyām- ṛtamaśnute, "by the Birth he enjoys... non-becoming".¹ Individual liberation is not the end. of man's life, his glory lies in striving through countless births, if need be, for the liberation of his fellow-mortals. who are equally his own self, and without whose liberation. his own personal freedom remains an imperfect attainment. And the object of liberation is not an ultimate retreat from all individual and universal play of God's delight... His universal immanence, not only in the abstractions of thought, but in the concreteness of feeling and sensation, will and action. That was why the experience of monism had to be enlarged and enriched by the experience of qualified monism, and even of dualism; and what seemed to be—and, in fact, was—a decline, was pregnant with great possibilities of expansion and enrichment for the individual parts ...
... discover and apply more and more refined means and instruments, not only to arrive at the union of the individual consciousness with the universal consciousness and transcendental consciousness, but also to manifest the consequences of this union for arriving at ever increasing perfection of the individual and collective life in the physical world and even to transform earthly life into what can be called... spiritual guidance. Yoga is, as stated by Sri Aurobindo, "a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos."³ Object and States of Yogic Knowledge Swami Vivekananda has stated: "Yoga is really one of... with religion, and yet the distinction is very vast. If Yoga is a quest, religion, too, is a quest; if yoga aims at the practice of a discipline which aims at uniting the individual and his faculties with the operation of the universal and transcendental consciousness and being, religion, too, has a similar discipline. Where then is the difference? The answer lies in the fact that although religion at ...
... Godhead, the universal Spirit, the transcendent Purushottama and, eventually, surrender the whole action into his hands, mayi sannyasya karmāṇi . Then as we get beyond the limitation of the three gunas, so also do we get beyond the division of the fourfold law and beyond the limitation of all distinctive Dharmas, sarvadharmān parityajya . The Spirit takes up the individual into the universal Swabhava... to put into regulated outward practice. And it is on the individual and spiritual value of this law and not on its communal and economic or other social and cultural importance that the eye of the thought is fixed in this passage. The Gita accepted the Vedic theory of sacrifice, but gave it a profound turn, an inner, subjective and universal meaning, a spiritual sense and direction which alters all... and universal Spirit. All is a veiled manifestation of the Godhead, Vasudeva, yataḥ pravṛttir bhūtānāṁ yena sarvam idaṁ tatam , and to unveil the Immortal within and in the world, to dwell in unity with the Soul of the universe, to rise in consciousness, knowledge, will, love, spiritual delight to oneness with the supreme Godhead, to live in the highest spiritual nature with the individual and natural ...
... recognition of an individual self as a part and parcel of the Universal Being. It also seems that Amal in his eloquent silence is indicating that the journey of life is for the understanding of this transcendental Reality and internalising it as realised experience through one's own inner calling and sadhana. This notion of oneness of an individual self with the Universal Being is not new.... seekers of Truth about the feasibility of it. It is indeed comforting to know the doability of life's mission when our individual undertaking is like J. R. R. Tolkien's the "Ring Bearer" but of individual destiny, which is how-ever inexplicably and integrally connected to the occultic universal scheme of things. Maybe, someday Amal Kiran would choose to share with us the glimpses of his twilight... inspired me and comforted me with recognition that my spiritual quest may be personal but that I am not alone in my endeavours. For instance, I find his following poems are representative of the universal nature of his poetry: 2. Ibid ., p. 9. 3. Ibid ., p. 325. Page 82 "Pilgrim of Truth" Each moment now is fraught with an immense Allure and impulse of ...
... to sin. It is to be rid of "I-ness" and "my-ness" so as to live in the one Self and act in the one Self; to reject the egoism of refusing to work through the individual centre of the universal Being as well as the egoism of serving the individual mind and life and body to the exclusion of others. To live in the Self is not to dwell for oneself alone in the Infinite immersed and oblivious of all things... is egoism in love and not love Page 329 itself, desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in things. A universal love we must have, calm and yet eternally intense beyond the brief vehemence of the most violent passion; a delight in things rooted in a delight in God that does not adhere to their forms but to... we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state so as to reach the utmost transcendence of the Divine and its utmost universality. Nor must we attach ourselves even Page 330 to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit himself to any form or ...
... noun would indicate a state of all-knowledge and not a being who knows all. The personal identity of the yogi is preserved in some supreme form in a realm where the basic Universal Page 138 wears numerous individual faces and the One Omniscient manifests in a multiplicity of Omniscients. There is also a sound-effect to be appreciated. The sh-sound in "hush" is caught up in "Omniscient"... 139 The absolute of this peace, the self-existent infinitude of it meets us in a life-changing passage when Aswapati's as-piring consciousness breaks beyond the barrier of both individual and universal existence: Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars The superconscient realms of motionless Peace Where judgment ceases... imagine the twofold birth of the Mantra: high above in an ether of Superconsciousness and deep within where the Rigvedic hrdaya samudra, the heart-ocean, the wondrous in-world into which opens the individual emotional-psychic experience, echoes and images the over-world. Then he should practise a dedicated silence in the mind in order to imitate something of the "hushed intense receptivity turned upwards" ...
... not only to the escape from life. The essential cause and condition of universal existence is the Lord, Ishwara or Purusha, manifesting and occupying individual and universal forms. The limited ego is only an intermediate phenomenon of consciousness necessary for a certain line of development. Following this line the individual can arrive at that which is beyond himself, that which he represents, and... human life if the terms of that life are necessarily bound to our present egoistic valuations. If life is in its nature individual phenomenon and not representation of a universal existence and the breathing of a mighty Life-Spirit, if the dualities which are the response of the individual to its contacts are not merely a response but the very essence and condition of all living, if limitation is the i... s 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 recovery of the universal in the individual and of the spiritual term in the physical consciousness. Then alone the soul in Nature can be allowed to partake of the fruit of the tree of life and be as the Divine and live for ever. For ...
... The habitual noun would indicate a state of all-knowledge and not a being who knows all. The personal identity of the yogi is preserved in some supreme form in a realm where the basic Universal wears numerous individual faces and the One Omniscient manifests in a multiplicity of Omniscients. There is also a sound-effect to be appreciated. The sh-sound in "hush" is caught up in "Omniscient" which is ... [p. 36] The absolute of this peace, the self-existent infinitude of it meets us in a life-changing passage when Aswapati's aspiring consciousness breaks beyond the barrier of both individual and universal existence: Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars The superconscient realms of motionless Peace Where judgment ceases... imagine the twofold birth of the Mantra: high above in an ether of Superconsciousness and deep within where the Rigvedic hrdaya samudra, the heart-ocean, the wondrous in-world into which opens the individual emotional-psychic experience, echoes and images the over-world. Then he should practise a dedicated silence in the mind in order to imitate something of the "hushed intense receptivity turned upwards" ...
... & ignores the rest; it is therefore a parent of much error. Mental tejas is impatient of the wideness of the mahat; it seeks to fasten on the alpam, the individual & possess it, & finds the process of possessing the individual through the universal too slow for its desire & too burdensome to its strength 27 June 1913 Yesterday, the trikaldrishti became more comprehensively effective & minutely... suspended progress for half the morning. This frequent return of duhkha & unease is imposed on the system from without, for purposes connected with the world, not with the individual. It belongs to the swabhava of things, not to the individual karma. It cannot immediately cease, assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet till it ceases there can be no perfected ananda— The finality of the first chatusthaya ...
... Then, instead of receiving the universal contact, one reduces oneself to a small being and reduces the universal to individual contact. The universal contact coming through the individual machinery of the small individual channel, completely changes its character from delight into pleasure, pain, and indifference. Instead of trying to contact, or having a universal reception to contacts of the world... world, one reacts from the point of division, and with an egoistic view,—piecemeal. With a universal reception to all contacts of the world there is attached the universal delight, the sap, as they call it, the "rasa", in Indian terminology. Through all universal movements the universal delight is flowing all the time. It is possible to taste the sap that all things have. The Upanishad says in one of... in this creature, man. Man has to become universal and the mental consciousness has to be transformed by man opening to the Supraconscient in whom unity is the law, and each embraces all. Then the narrowness is lost in the universal love, the vital restricted being returns equal shock to the whole universal contact, and then it becomes capable of universal delight. Even the physical being has to know ...
... meshes of ¹ The world of creative action. ² The worlds of enjoyment. Page 54 ignorance and recover its infinity and immortality. It is only here that the individual can regain his universality and transcendence and unite with the supreme Divine. It is only here, on this earth and nowhere else, that the highest Truth can be realised and expressed. It is said—and it is a fact—that... again in Thee; the Earth awaits Thy decree in a grandiose prostration. Listen, listen; its voice implores and supplicates Thee...What will be Thy decree, what is Thy sentence ?' O Lord of Truth, the individual world blesses Thy Truth which it knows not yet, but which it calls, and to which it adheres with all the joyful energy of its living forces. "Death has passed, vast and solemn, and all fell ...
... inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he... physical embodiments call constantly for growth and change …” “The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to discover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the sphere of religion, to the original truth which convention has overlaid... substituting “a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature” 2 : (“Nature” in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings is always a concrete Being, in fact an emanation or personality of the Universal Mother charged with the manifestation of the universe and everything in it.) The unity of the Truth that is All can to our mind only be represented as global. This too is a metaphor and a symbol, ...
... mental idea and mental or other action, he is inseparable from the universal being, his body from universal force and matter, his life from the universal life, his mind from universal mind, his soul and spirit from universal soul and spirit. 31 Thus each part of the individual being corresponds to a plane of the universal being. Ego and Individuality In our normal consciousness... may be realised in one or both of two aspects — the individual soul (psychic being) or the Universal Self (Atman). Page 347 Being — Individual and Universal When we think of the being, we normally think of the individual being, just as when we think of consciousness, we generally think of the consciousness of the individual. But Being or Consciousness — two aspects of the One... surrounding the body is that part of the individual being through which the individual is in inner contact with other beings and with universal forces. By environmental consciousness I mean something that each man carries around him, outside his body, even when he is not aware of it, — by which he is in touch with others and with the universal forces. It is through this that the thoughts ...
... personality on the basis that the Absolute was the only Reality and therefore her fulfilment lay in merging in the Absolute, or the negation of her individual living because of the Impersonal, for everything that the person has got is derived from the Universal. In either case. Death refuses to accept any truth in her personality, and tries to persuade her to reject it. Then a greater Voice spoke from... of Savitri, is triple: The Psychic, the Spiritual, the Supramental. Ashwapathy's yoga may be called the yoga of Ascent mainly, and that of the Vision of Reality in its triple States: the Individual, the Universal, the Transcendent. He ascends from the mind to planes above and reaches the Transcendent; whereas Savitri awakens the Soul in her and brings down the infinite power of the Divine Consciousness... throughout the position of the witness, Savitri carries out the Divine dynamis. Ahswapathy sees the Vision of the Supreme, Savitri brings down the Fire. Both pursue the yoga not for an individual but for a universal fulfilment. Both of them strive to change what seems to be the established law of the cosmos by bringing down a Higher Power than mind into the earth consciousness and earth nature. ...
... He feels all that as he now feels physical things and impacts. He finds it all to be one with his larger or universal self. There is the universal mental, the universal vital, the universal physical Nature and it is out of a selection of their forces and movements that the individual mind, vital and physical are made. The soul comes from beyond this nature of mind, life and body. It belongs to... union either transcendental (above the universe) or cosmic (universal) or individual or, as in our Yoga, all three together. Or it means getting into a consciousness in which one is no longer limited by the small ego, personal mind, personal Page 9 vital and body but is in union with the supreme Self or with the universal (cosmic) consciousness or with some deeper consciousness within... power for things; it can pour downwards into the body, working, establishing its reign, extending into wideness from above, link the lowest in us with the highest above us, release the individual into a cosmic universality or into absoluteness and transcendence. * Page 10 In the process of our Yoga the centres have each a fixed psychological use and general function which base all ...
... mind, confined life and dividing body. The Self in the lower hemisphere is shrouded in name and form; its consciousness is broken up by the division between the internal and external, the individual and universal; its vision and sense are turned outward; its force, limited by division of its consciousness, works in fetters; its knowledge, will, power, delight, divided by this division, limited by this... universe in the reign of a physical Nature. Spirit is then absorbed in its experience of Matter; it is dominated by the ignorance and inertia of the tamasic Power proper to physical existence. In the individual it becomes a materialised soul, annamaya puruṣa , whose life and mind have developed out of the ignorance and inertia of the material principle and are subject to their fundamental limitations.... dynamic Nature. Absorbed in the experiences of the power and play of a conscious Life, it is dominated by the desire, activity and passion of the rajasic principle proper to vital existence. In the individual this spirit becomes a vital soul, prāṇamaya puruṣa , in whose nature the life-energies tyrannise over the mental and physical principles. The physical element in a vital world readily shapes its ...
... its spiritual intensity can initiate posterity on ways that can promote both self-vision and world-vision. For ultimately it is an ideal and spiritual literature which expresses individual and universal truths, reveals the spirit in itself and in things around, and unveils ranges of existence beyond the physical that gives an adequate and satisfying account of the manifold creative ... literature blends a high intensity of rhythmic expression with an answering immensity of inner vision. The literature of the future must be expressive of the deepest soul of the individual as well as of the universal spirit in all things, and correspondingly evolve a language of its own, - a language that can aesthetically express both soul-experience and self-experience. It should be ... promise. Literature in reality is transfigured truth; it is the most beautiful and obedient servant of the infinitely creative goddess, Saraswati, as well as her radiant messenger. Its appeal is universal and for all time in the measure of its high aspiration and the radiance of its power and beauty of its expression. Literature can have a powerful appeal to our sensations as well as satisfy ...
... l transformation will knit in a stable and dynamic harmony the individual, the universal and the transcendent. The individual will find his complete- ness and harmonious fulfilment in his active unity with the universal and the transcendent. And this complete- ness will not be a completeness only in the consciousness of the individual, but it will also be a creative complete- ness in the will and force... force of his being; for, they too will be united with the Will and Force of the Supreme, which expresses itself in cosmic terms even while it transcends them.... "The complete individual is the cosmic individual, since only when we have taken the universe into ourselves—and transcended it—can our individuality be complete."¹ The supramental transformation will admit us into a participation in the... spiritual experience, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara and the Divine śakti, experience of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch with cosmic forces and with the occult movements of universal Nature, a psychic sympathy and unity and inner communication and interchanges of all kinds with other beings and with Nature, illuminations of the mind by knowledge, illuminations of the heart by ...
... monuments of the past. For this discovery by individual free-thought of universal laws of which the individual is almost a by-product and by which he must necessarily be governed, this attempt actually to govern the social life of humanity in conscious accordance with the mechanism of these laws seems to lead logically to the suppression of that very individual freedom which made the discovery and the... the free individual judgment, delivering it equally from alien compulsion and from erratic self-will. Here were laws and truths which justified and yet controlled the claims and desires of the individual human being; here a science which provided a standard, a norm of knowledge, a rational basis for life, a clear outline and sovereign means for the progress and perfection of the individual and the race... and law of his own being the individual seems to have discovered a truth and law which is not of his own individual being at all, but of the collectivity, the pack, the hive, the mass. The result to which this points and to which it still seems irresistibly to be driving us is a new ordering of society by a rigid economic or governmental Socialism in which the individual, deprived again of his freedom ...
... the Divine—a union either transcendental (above the universe) or cosmic (universal) or individual or, as in our Yoga, all three together. Or it means getting into a consciousness in which one is no longer limited by the small ego, personal mind, personal vital and body but is in union with the supreme Self or with the universal (cosmic) consciousness or with some deeper consciousness within in which... power for things; it can pour downwards into the body, working, establishing its reign, extending into wideness from above, link the lowest in us with the highest above us, release the individual into a cosmic universality or into absoluteness and transcendence. Ascent and Descent and Problems of the Lower Nature If one can remain always in the higher consciousness, so much Page 422 the... potent, extended and wide; it is there waiting for manifestation and to this Force we have to open ourselves—to the power of the Mother. In the mind it manifests itself as a divine mind-force or a universal mind-force and it can do everything that the personal mind cannot do; it is then the Yogic mind-force. When it manifests and works in the vital or physical in the same way, it is then apparent as ...
... death again and again as well as by transcending life repeatedly - on the other the secret spirit whose delegate is the soul and which never enters the birth-and-death process and is the individual focus of the universal Atman. You fail to realise the great thing that has happened to you because you have caught it by the negative end and missed the positive: namely, the zest of neither living nor dying... Yogi but also as the mighty poet of Savitri and, though his eyes had grown somewhat hazy in the physical sense, the subtle seeing behind them was supreme: one could well quote his own epic - A universal light was in his eyes - or His wide eyes bodied viewless entities - and assert that whatever he dictated to Nirodbaran had the vision and vibrancy of the Mantra: Words that can... ess, culminating in the discovery of the true soul that is a pure emanation of the Divine. Then, the opening out into the Cosmic Consciousness - the still Self of selves or the dynamic play of a universal Force. Next, the breaking through into the infinite luminosity above the mind. This is the state described in the following lines of Savitri: For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above. ...
... creative act of ordered imagination by a universal Being and he looked upon our imaginative experience as the universal Being's creative faculty actively at work in the individual, co-existent with the individual's conscious will. The two experiences he named the Primary Imagination and the Secondary Imagination. In both, the individual partakes of the universal, though in different ways, and both are... are founded in a basic oneness of the universal and the individual and, in both, it is the spirit that is subject in one aspect, object in another: "The Intelligence tends to objecti-vise itself and... to know itself in the object." But if the individual is really to enter into the universal, instead of functioning in some sort of separation and alienation as he ordinarily does, he must take his experience... degradation of the individual, but an apotheosis. The being of Keats too is not conceived as merged and lost in the Universal Spirit: The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." To be more precise and positive: the being of Keats is not only said by Shelley to suffer no self-loss in the Spirit that is Page 134 universal - it is also seen ...
... being in the individual corresponding to the universal principles of the One Being that is Bliss. The Upanishad defines the Brahman as the Truth, Knowledge, Infinity (satyam, jnanam, anantam), and it defines the result of the knowledge of the Brahman in the secrecy, in the cave of being, in the supreme ether as the enjoyment of all its highest aspirations by the soul of the individual in the attainment... Nevertheless, there is an emphasis in the Upanishads increasing steadily as time goes on into an overemphasis on the liberation of the individual, eclipsing the ideal of the attainment of collective harmony. As a result, there came about increasing overemphasis on the individual's rejection of the lower cosmic life. This note increases, and it swells in due course of time into the rejection of all cosmic life... identity, they confirmed the Vedic Page 19 methods of yoga and even developed them further so as to bring out the deeper subtleties of the knowledge of the world of the individual in the universe and the individual's fulfillment in the Transcendental Reality and Immortality. Page 20 ...
... Page 81 yet develops by the process of evolution an individuality of its own which becomes a particular radiating centre of the Divine Consciousness. It manifests an individual aspect of the universal and transcendent Divine. The object of its passing through births is not only awakening and liberation from the thraldom of Nature and recovery of its essential consciousness, but also... feel its own existence as separate from the universal existence. It lives in conscious unity with all. "You are conscious ¹ & ² Words of the Mother. Page 80 there (in the psychic being) that your individuality is your own line of expression, but at the same time you know too that it is an expression objectifying the one universal consciousness.”¹ It is only the ego in us... uses the psychic being as an immortal, living individual unrolling infinite variation on the bosom of a conscious unity. The psychic being is the living temple of the Divine on earth, and if we aspire to realise the Divine, it can be only through a realisation of the psychic in us. "Below the human level there is, ordinarily, hardly any individual formation—there is only this (psychic) presence ...
... formless & universal Krishna. Either the first was intensely sensed & the latter became merely Brahman or the latter was seen & the human form became a mask of Brahman + guna etc. This is now in type surmounted; but the Siddhi goes back to this stage firmly in order to bridge over the division by proceeding from the universal to the individual and no longer from the individual to the universal. In all... (without smarana). The perfect spontaneity of all the sharira Anandas must be assured before there can be fixed recurrence and continuity. The entire Krishnadarshana, individual in universal, universal in individual and both the same, is now accomplished. It has yet to be given such force & consistency as to eliminate all relapse and to be raised to higher intensities. Farther combination... in truth, but it has still its basis in the telepathy, and subject to the stress of error. 1 May 1915 The day is the close of one week of progress, steady and often rapid— Samata Universal samata has been finally confirmed and the reactions of asamata imposed from outside are now taken up by the Ananda. In the body there are still movements & reactions of discomfort & nirananda ...
... truths of the individual and the collectivity coalesce; there, we discover that the individual and the collectivity are not what they appear to be in the lower or infra-rational parts of our being. Individual is not, it is discovered, fundamentally egoistic in nature; ego is only at a temporary formation, but behind it there is the un-egoistic centre of universality, such that the individual finds its... of yoga considers the individual soul and the universal principles of Matter, Life and Mind to be intertwined in an evolutionary process which has so far reached a critical stage where it is possible for the individual to develop knowledge and will that can be consciously applied for purposes of the evolution of supramental consciousness in matter by means of which the individual will be able to realize... releases. According to one school or sect, the real self of man is indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme Spirit. According to another school or sect, the individual is one with the Divine in essence but different from him in Nature. According to a third school or sect. God, Nature, and the individual soul in man are three eternally different powers of being. The Advaitin, the Vishi ...
... contact with the immanent Divine, the Divine who is at the centre of each being and of whom the psychic being is the sheath and the expression. By the psychic change one passes from the individual Divine to the universal Divine and finally to the Transcendent. The spiritual change puts you directly in contact with the Supreme. 9 September 1959 Sweet Mother, How can one make one's psychic... exist! The soul is that which comes from the Divine without ever leaving Him, and returns to the Divine without ceasing to be manifest. The soul is the Divine made individual without ceasing to be divine. In the soul the individual and the Divine are eternally one; therefore, to find one's soul is to find God; to identify with one's soul is to unite with the Divine. Thus it may be said that... facilitates and improves respiration increases at the same time the absorption of physical energy. But there are many other kinds of energies, or rather many other forms of Energy, which is one and universal. And it is through the various yogic exercises of breathing, meditation, japa and concentration that one puts oneself in contact with these various forms of Energy. 10 September 1959 ...
... the universal precedes the individual, gives it its field, is that in which it exists cosmically even though its origin is in the Transcendence. The individual soul lives here by the All-Soul and depends upon it; the All-Soul very evidently does not exist by the individual or depend upon it: it is not a sum of individual beings, a pluralistic totality created by the conscious life of individuals; if... what acted was not desire in an individual or a universal Mind or Life, but a will in the Spirit,—a will of Being deploying something of itself or of its Consciousness, realising a creative idea or a self-knowledge or an urge of its self-active Force or a turn to a certain formulation of its delight of existence. But if the world has been created, not by the universal Delight of existence, but for the... premier importance of the universal and the dependence of the individual upon it, a theory of this kind becomes an impossibility to our intelligence. The world is too vast in its movement for such an account of its working to be credible; only a cosmic Power or a cosmic Being can be the creator and the upholder of the cosmos and it must have too a cosmic and not only an individual reality, significance ...
... unrelated to the universal being and its evolution. The evolutionary development has "a universal as well as an individual aspect: the Universal develops the grades of its being and the ordered variation of the universality of itself in the series of its evolved forms of being; the individual soul follows the line of this cosmic series and manifests what is prepared in the universality of the Spirit.... Mother, the parā prakṛti, who has become all these numberless Jivâtmâ, these multiple centres of the one transcendent and universal Consciousness— par ā prakṛtirjīvabh ū t ā . Each Jiva or Jivâtmâ is an individual Self in conscious union with the Transcendent and the Universal. It does not descend .into evolution, but presides from above over the evolution of the psychic entity, which is its sel... The universal Man, the cosmic Purusha in humanity, is developing in the human race the power that has grown into humanity from below it and shall yet grow to supermind Page 187 and spirit and become the Godhead in man who is aware of his true integral self and the divine universality of his nature. The individual must have followed this line of development; he must have presided over ...
... function proper to it and indispensable to the harmonious working of the organic whole. What is to be totally expunged is the ego, the separative ‛I-ness' and 'my-ness' which insulates the individual from the universal and condemns him to ignorance and incapacity. " O Lord, O almighty Master, sole Reality, grant that no error, no obscurity, no fatal ignorance may creep into my heart and my thought... wrong strategy to launch upon aggression before consolidating the defence. But when one realises one's true self, one finds it widening into infinity. It is realised not only as an individual entity, but also as universal and transcendent; and then nothing remains outside-all is seen and felt and tackled in oneself. It is only when we have this comprehensive realisation of ourself containing the whole... me and around me,—two things that are one, for I have now a constant and precise perception of the universal unity determining an absolute interdependence of all action.” 4 A comprehensive consciousness embraces all, feels itself in all, grapples with the forces and problems of life, individual and collective, ¹ Words of the Mother. ² Words of the Mother, Second Series ...
... character transcendental even when involved and identified with its universal and individual becomings, so the Purusha aspect is characteristically Page 362 universal-individual and intimately connected with Nature even when separated from her. For this conscious Spirit while retaining its impersonality and eternity, its universality, puts on at the same time a more personal aspect; 2 it is... differentiation,—as we see all human beings conscious in the one human way of the same cosmic things, yet always with an individual difference. This self-limitation would be, not fundamental, but an individual specialisation of a common universality or totality; the spiritual individual would act from his own centre of the one Truth and according to his self-nature, but on a common basis and not with any... bly adaptable. Maya is the supreme and universal consciousness and force of the Eternal and Infinite and, being by its very nature unbound and illimitable, it can put forth many states of consciousness at a time, many dispositions of its Force, without ceasing to be the same consciousness-force for ever. It is at once transcendental, universal and individual; it is the supreme supracosmic Being that ...
... more luminous force and a heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or to the inner but still surface movements of emotion and passion or the power of thought to perceive certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life of Nature and man. But every power in the end finds itself drawn towards its... sensation, passion, emotion. No transcendental view of things is involved, though a touch of the occult comes in the Macbeth-lines. Virgil's verse has also no such view, even if it does rise to a universal level out of a passage related to particular objects and incidents. The phrase of Leopardi, a wild indignant pessimism instead of the Virgilian majestic sadness, holds no recognisably spiritual notion... Because of the wish to; and if one has not the faintest wish? I believe, though it cannot be proved, that this mystic eagerness for unity is due ultimately to a loss of nerve. As man has grown more individual and intelligent, he has grown more divided and solitary. Men are not lemmings - Alone the sun rises, and alone Spring the great streams. Page 187 But at moments, realising ...
... corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine. Not the unborn Self or Atman, for the Self even in presiding over the existence of the individual is aware always of its universality and transcendence, it is yet its deputy in the forms of Nature, the individual soul, Page 238 caitya puruṣa , supporting mind, life and body, standing behind . the mental, the vital, the subtle-physical being... which is the foundation of the supramental existence. If we scrutinise these terms carefully we Page 231 shall see that they are shapes and stages of the soul's seeking for the individual and universal delight of things; the ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things from its dumb conception in Matter through vicissitudes and opposites to its luminous consummation... needed for the largest spiritual change. In the first place, since this is the individual soul in Nature, it can open to the hidden diviner ranges of our being and receive and reflect their light and power and experience, but another, a spiritual transformation from above is needed for us to possess our self in its universality and transcendence. By itself Page 240 the psychic being at a certain ...
... man found itself on the true communism of the equal godhead in the race; for the Spirit, the inmost self, the universal Godhead in every being is that whose very nature of diverse oneness it is to realise the perfection of its individual life and nature in the existence of all, in the universal life and nature. This is a solution to which it may be objected that it puts off the consummation of a better... it rationalises the individual by universal education of a highly developed kind, the more this suppression will be felt,—unless indeed all freedom of thought is negated and the minds of all are forced into a single standardised way of thinking. Man needs freedom of thought and life and action in order that he may grow, otherwise he will remain fixed where he was, a stunted and static being. If his... completeness the liberty of the individual will have to be destroyed or reduced to an almost vanishing quantity, it might be answered that the right of the individual to any kind of egoistic freedom as against the State which represents the mind, the will, the good and interest of the whole community, sarvaṁ brahma , is a dangerous fiction, a baneful myth. Individual liberty of life and action—even ...
... its own kind if the consciousness does not exceed the restricted play of an individual vitality and feel the universal life as its own and its oneness with all life. The mentality is not a full conscious existence or activity in its own kind if one does not exceed the individual mental limits and feel a oneness with universal Mind and with all minds and enjoy one's integrality of consciousness fulfilled... transcend not only the individual formula but the formula of the universe, for only so can either the individual or the universal existence find its own true being and a perfect harmonisation; both are in their outer formulation incomplete terms of the Transcendence, but they are that in their essence, and it is only by becoming conscious of that essence that Page 1062 individual consciousness or... the conscious mind in us has a limited individual action and the Inconscient is an immense action of a universal concealed Consciousness: the cosmic Force, masked as a material Energy, hides from our view by its insistent materiality of process the occult fact that the working of the Inconscient is really the expression of a vast universal Life, a veiled universal Mind, a hooded Gnosis, and without these ...
... great. But in his Hound of Heaven he has achieved the summit of poetic art and it sums up his whole life-experience. In that sense it is great. Sri Aurobindo : And it is not individual life but universal life – anybody who goes through spiritual life gets that experience. The idea of greatness of poetry is difficult to standardise. The French poet Villon, if you take his poems one... Disciple : I believe, formerly, Tagore had not got this idea of jana sādhārana – the common man. Sri Aurobindo : No. He had been always speaking of the viśwa mānava" – "the universal man". It is not the same as jana sādhārana. In the Vishwa Manava all the best people, as well as the lowest of humanity, are included. Perhaps in the jana sādhārana only the lowest remain... criterion? Disciple : Then how to judge? Sri Aurobindo : One feels these things. Disciple : But different people feel differently. Sri Aurobindo : So there cannot be a, universal standard. Each one goes by his feeling or opinion or liking. Disciple : Abercrombie tries to give a general criterion. Only one point I remember just now : he says that if the outlook ...
... further and arrives at an Asat, "a Void of everything that is here, a Void of unnameable peace and extinction of all, even of the Sat, even of that Existent which is the impersonal basis of individual or universal personality." 4 It is this Asat, arrived at by the absolute annulment of mind-existence and world-existence, that has been variously termed as Turiya or featureless and relationless Absolute... d mental plane, sees the reality of the spiritual; and then the will of the individual Purusha unifying itself with this poise of knowledge rejects the lower and draws back to the supreme plane, dwells there, loses mind and body, sheds life from it and merges itself in the supreme Purusha, is delivered from individual existence." 1 But a deeper and higher spiritual exploration reveals... 'passive Brahman', of the pure quiescent self-existence independent of all world-play, cannot be more than the necessary first basis. We cannot rest with an utter withdrawal in consciousness from the universal manifestation. We must instead return upon the world of action and creation and seek to repossess and remould our mind, life and body with the luminous dynamis of the 'active Brahman' and identify ...
... Love is seeking here in the darkness of the Ignorance and it is that which it finds when individual human love is changed into the love of the Immanent Divine incarnate in the material universe. As with individual, so with universal Love; all that widening of the self through sympathy, goodwill, universal benevolence and beneficence, love of mankind, love of creatures, the attraction of all the... transient movement men call love and becomes a pure and grand and deep uniting Ananda. Although it is a divine love for the supreme and universal Divine that must be the rule of our spiritual existence, this does not exclude altogether all forms of individual love or the ties that draw soul to soul in manifested existence. A psychic change is demanded, a divestiture of the masks of the Ignorance... broken; there we can feel at once—not merely infer from their results, but feel directly—the action of the secret world-forces, mind-forces, life-forces, subtle physical forces that constitute universal and individual existence; we shall even be able, if we will but train ourselves to it, to lay our hands on these world-forces that throw themselves on us or surround us and more and more to control or at ...
... intention behind the entire endeavour of yoga. Yoga is a methodized effort towards self-perfection, by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being, and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence that we see partially expressed in man and in the cosmos; it derives its significance from the fact that all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a... Ignorance to the Knowledge to throw off her mask and to reveal herself as the luminous Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and its universal Delight of being....What the evolutionary Power has done is to make a few individuals aware of their souls, conscious of their selves, aware of the eternal being that they are, to put them into communion with Page 29 the Divinity... the conclusion that the Rishis arranged the substance of their thoughts in a system of parallelism by which the same cosmic powers and beings were at once internal and external powers and beings of universal Nature, and that they managed their expressions through a system of double values by which the same language served for their systems of the practice of yoga in both aspects. According to this p ...
... You have to deal with world-forces because they make themselves felt, especially the hostile ones ; and so also you have to know the forces that make for help. Even when one is doing individual Sadhana, these universal forces make themselves felt. Of course, as you develop, their aspect changes completely. " The movement of these world-forces does not begin on the lower planes. It begins high above... open to the Infinite and Universal Power, to receive its intimations and to have experiences, to completely go beyond the ego, to realise the Universal Mind, Universal Soul, the Universal Spirit, that is only the first condition. We have to call down this greater Consciousness directly into the vital being and into the physical being, so that the supreme calm and universality will be there in all its... shown all the things by the Supreme. Only when the universal conditions are ready then all things are shown to him ; while one who is detached sees many things more. Also, the Supreme does not decide every detail before the universal conditions are ready when it comes down with an imperative .decision. In between, it is all a working of universal forces. For example, take the case of physical disease ...
... ascents, he reaches his goal at last, he becomes the perfected Aryan, the "Arhat", master of the three rungs of the ascending spiral of consciousness, Page 402 the individual, the cosmic-universal and the transcendent: The perfect Arhat is he who is able to live simultaneously in all these three apparent states of existence, elevate the lower into the higher, receive the... Krishna and Kali. The true Yogi turns himself into a pure engine of Power, to be used for His purposes by Krishna. What, then, happens to the individual self? In itself it is nothing; the more the Yogi becomes a power-house of the Supreme and a centre of the universal Existence, the more his ego dwindles into zero. But there are further horizons still: the power-house has to be charged with Divine Knowledge... were insuperable obstacles in the way to the realisation of the ideal of human brotherhood. Without freedom - freedom for individual man and also for each nationality - healthy self-expression would be impossible; but without order and unity - a sense of self-discipline in individual man and in the corporate life of the nation - harmony would again be impossible. Freedom and Unity were indeed the two ...
... unfold himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and the type of the individual's acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man. Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must necessarily express itself by... turning of the human soul from the egoistic state of consciousness absorbed in the outward appearances and attractions of things to a higher state in which the Transcendent and Universal can pour itself into the individual mould and transform it. The first determining element of the siddhi is, therefore, the intensity of the turning, the force which directs the soul inward. The power of aspiration... —that devours the ego and breaks up the limitations of its petty and narrow mould for the full and wide reception of that which it seeks, that which, being universal, exceeds and, being transcendent, surpasses even the largest and highest individual self and nature. But this is only one side of the force that works for perfection. The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply ...
... contact with the immanent Divine, the Divine who is at the centre of each being and of whom the psychic being is the vesture and the expression. By the psychic change one passes from the individual Divine to the universal Divine and finally to the Transcendent. The spiritual change puts you directly in contact with the Supreme. 8 September 1959 * * * Sweet Mother, How can one draw energy... exist! The soul is that which comes from the Divine without ever leaving Him, and returns to the Divine without ceasing to be manifest. The soul is the Divine made individual without ceasing to be divine. In the soul the individual and the Divine are eternally one; therefore, to find one’s soul is to find God; to identify with one’s soul is to unite with the Divine. Thus it may be said that... facilitates and improves respiration, increases at the same time the absorption of physical energy. But there are many other kinds of energies, or rather many other forms of Energy, which is one and universal. And it is through the various yogic exercises of breathing, meditation and concentration that one puts oneself in contact with these various forms of Energy. What are these other forms of ...
... 81, 100 meets Sri Aurobindo 86 'born into a new life' 88-9 learns Sanskrit and Bengali 91 Page 904 vision of the Himalayas 92 breakdown in health 95 renunciation 96 individual, universal, transcendental 99, 832 'work of creation' 100-6 mediatrix, collaboratrix, creatrix 100, 105, 117, 156 launching the Arya 101ff Kundalini experience 111 as 'the golden bridge'... the Divine 305, 308 getting out of the Karmic cycle 309 grappling with adverse forces 310ff, 557 place of adverse forces in the cosmic scheme 311, 526 vital beings, vampires 311-2 individual initiative and universal Will 314 psychological perfection 323 the five psychological perfections 612 total surrender 330, 526, 747 maladies of the vital 332 true resurrection 333 right attitude 335... classes 505ff range and soul-quality of her discourses 505ff, 518ff begins Wednesday classes 548-9 different ways of answering questions 607ff open air spiritual workshop 610 touch of universality in her answers 627-8 how to receive her teaching 628 understanding her words 636 (cf 372) her 'silences' 670-2 her words: carriers of potent occult forces 759 draws infinite energy ...
... wear out or fall away. But the prolongation of the difficulty and its acuteness come from the fact that there are Forces in Nature, not personal or individual but universal, which live upon these movements and through them have long controlled the individual nature. These do not want to lose their rule and so when these movements are thrown out, they throw them back on the sadhak in strong waves or with ...
... the true relationship between the individual consciousness, universal consciousness and transcendental consciousness. Great perils of occultism arise from great mixtures of knowledge and ignorance that are found in the domains in which occultism normally dwells. Occultism provides a very large field of self-knowledge and world-knowledge; it enables the individual to go behind his own surface consciousness... experiences of one universal God or one universal principle of Being or Non-Being. At one stage, tribal religions with tribal gods and goddesses fought among themselves; at another stage, regional or national religions flourished; it was only at advanced levels that there have grown up universal religions, and even there, there have been claims and counter-claims regarding their universality. This complex... thought suggestions, impulse Page 14 suggestions, will-suggestions, emotional and sensational suggestions, thought waves, life waves that come on us or into us from others or from the universal energy but act and produce their effects without our knowledge. Occultism is a systematized endeavor to know these movements and their laws and possibilities, to master and use the powers or Nat ...
... itself into innumerable forms which represent themselves as individual selves, yet all these are images of one great Cosmic Will to live, just as all material forms are merely images of one great undifferentiated Universality of Page 380 cosmic matter, causal ether, if we so choose to describe it. That Will is Purusha, that Universality is Prakriti; and both are but images of Parabrahman. ... the reality of things; difference is a fact in the appearance of things, the world of phenomena; for phenomena are in their essence nothing but seemings and the difference between the individual Self and the Universal Self is the fundamental seeming which makes all the rest possible. This difference grows as the manifestation of Brahman proceeds. In the world of gross matter, it is complete; the difference... [or] because, as Vedantism suggests, mankind has not risen as yet to that pitch of creative force. There is one class of phenomena however in which this defect of identity between individual Imagination and universal Avidya seems to be filled up. The mind can create under certain circumstances images surviving its own dissolution or departure, which do take some kind of form in gross matter or at ...
... being or self of the individual and as the Self of the cosmos. It has also an existence above the individual and transcending the cosmos in its aspect of Paramatma, the Supreme Being, the Divine. The individual, the cosmic and the transcendent are the three statuses of the Self. As the Self is at once one and many, the universal Self manifests also as the individual self, the Jivatman, which... cosmic illusion. Monism does admit of a Jivatman, an individual self, but the Jivatman is regarded as simply an appearance of the Brahman in illusory Maya. With the attainment of knowledge in the state of Moksha, the individual self is extinguished in the Reality. There is thus no real, eternal self of the individual, even no real eternal universal self, but only the One Self, the One Reality. Therefore... over individual birth and evolution, though the Jivatman itself is unborn, unevolving, above the manifestation. What comes down into the manifestation, descending into the individual being as the representative of the Jivatman, evolving from life to life is the Antaratman, the soul or psychic being. Page 379 Jivatman, the individual self, feels his oneness with the universal Atman ...
... comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowledge; the feelings, emotions, sensations are similarly felt as waves from the same cosmic immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross body and responded to in kind by the individual centre of the universality; for the body is only a small support or even less, a point of relation, for the action... and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many motions that were formerly egocentric may still continue, but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness. Thought, for the most part, no longer seems to originate individually in the body or the person but manifests from above or comes in upon the cosmic mind-waves: all inner individual sight or intelligence of things... of preparing the relationship between the individual soul and the Divine. In the end, prayer either ceases or remains only for the joy of the relationship. The relations which arise out of the attitude towards the divine are those of the divine Father and the Mother with the child and of the divine Friend; or else these relations mature into the individual as a pupil and the Divine as living Guide ...
... of Truth-Consciousness. And as a secondary operation, when it creates or turns further toward this creation, it adopts the constitution of mind. First, universal mind comes into being. It is not individual mind that comes into being first, Universality of mind comes into operation and then begins its principle of division. Then only, the creation of a limited individuality or separate ego becomes possible... true Page 217 that one comes to the possession of the true individual soul when one attains the psychic being. But another step of transformation from above is needed which can give man the possession of his self in its universality and transcendence. It is possible that the psychic being as the true individual, can choose to be static to the cosmic Self and return to the Silent Divine—and... the universal. Therefore, the psychic being automatically or easily expands into the universal consciousness and realizes oneness with all. And that oneness with all is so much more intense in its experience than sympathy and other things. It can't be put in the same category. Sympathy is a step, but identity is something else. And that unity brings about a vibration in life, in the individual and ...
... unfold himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and type of the individual's acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man. 17 The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, pp. 24-25. 18 Rig Veda: Mandala One, Sukta... the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there for man, he is there in the middle of his house,— he is as one universal in creatures; he is the Immortal, the perfect thinker. 18 Depending on the initial impetus to the Yoga, one may or may not begin with Bhakti. Yoga has multiple beginnings, indeed as many... seizes me, my captive grows: This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart-beats. For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! O lasso of my rapture's widening noose. Become my cord of universal love. The spirit ensnared by thee force to delight Of creation's oneness sweet and fathomless, Compelled to embrace my myriad unities And all my endless forms and divine souls. ...
... n ceases. Unable by the claim of the Infinite upon us to dwell for ever in the bonds of the finite or to find there satisfaction and largeness and peace, we have to break all the bonds of individual and universal Nature, destroy all values, symbols, images, self definitions, limitations of the illimitable and lose all littleness and division in the Self that is for ever satisfied with its own infinity... This initial incapacity could not be there if these objects were the Mind's own structures, creations of its self-Power. It may be that this is so because individual mind has only a frontal and derivative power and knowledge and there is a universal Mind that is whole, endowed with omniscience, capable of omnipotence. But the nature of Mind as we know it is an Ignorance seeking for knowledge; it is a... any rate verifiable by a common or universal experience in order to be valid. But obviously this is a false standard of reality and of knowledge, since this means the sovereignty of the normal or average mind and its limited capacity and experience, the exclusion of what is supernormal or beyond the average intelligence. In its extreme, this claim of the individual to be the judge of everything is an ...
... heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or to the inner but still surface movements of emotion and passion or the power of thought to perceive certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life of Nature and man". ... straightforward expres-sion of thought with a just, harmonious and lucid turn". 15 It "insists on the presentation of life, but for the purposes of thought; its eye is on the universal truths and realities of which it is the visible expression" . 16 On the side of form, as a result of the type of intellectual power at work, the particular... important still, Homer, unlike Chaucer, is no observer of external life "without any preoccupying idea, without any ulterior design, simply as it reflects itself in the individual mind and temperament of the poet": 28 he is moved to reveal and idealise and thus, in a broad sense, to interpret and not merely present. "When we read ...
... morning as the result of a dream. But, then, any facile generalisation about the interpretation of dreams would be out of place, for there can be no universal directory of dreams as a guide to human behaviour at all times and in all places. Each individual will have to formulate his own code on the basis of his careful objective study or recapitulation of his dream-life: The same discipline of... after she had heard of Sri Aurobindo, it seems to carry an echo of his spiritual vision. We have to begin with "a strong and pure mental synthesis" centred within the identity of the individual "I" with the universal "I", and the interpenetration of everything and every being with all things and all beings: When in each atom of Matter men shall recognise the indwelling thought of God, when in... 1910), as if wrung out of the depths at a time of acute personal suffering, or a period of crisis in her life. But she had only to seek deep within the "light, a living and conscious portion of a universal godhead", and there surely was the light that redeemed, the helper who was infallible. Shock is often a necessary element in our lives - shock that makes us suddenly sit up and open our eyes ...
... world-working, they belong to the universal will, they belong to the great purposes of the cosmos & not to any clamorous individual hunger. The second error of the human mind when it perceives itself to be the instrument only of a supreme universal Force or Will, its action to be only a whorl in the stream of universal energy and result to be a predestined event of universal Will partly executable by us... of divine or universal Will, it is the withdrawal from egoistic being & the perception of the individual as only a convenient term of the universal Ishwara, of the Jiva as only a form in consciousness of the Ishwara, it is the equal enjoyment of the fruits favourable or adverse not only of individual will, but of the universal will, not only our own joys, but the joys of all creatures, not only the... by universal nature, by pity, by vairagya, by fear of sin, and the fateful battle lose its fated nimitta. What is it that, not in free universal potentiality, but in the fixed fact must inevitably determine his return to his normal action? It is the executive Force of the universal Will which not only fixes personal nature, swabhava or swa-prakriti, but fixes too its working in each individual case ...
... answer to Aswapati's prayer. In the context of the creation's issue he carries with him the world's desire and invokes her to incarnate. For that he engages himself in the triple Yoga, the Individual, the Universal, and the Transcendental Yoga. This Yoga is done in earth-consciousness to prepare the needed base for her birth and action. Aswapati himself as the Supreme incarnate accepts the burden... looks for that which can bring about a universal change. He makes a total yogic surrender to the Reality which sustains the Earth, the Mid-region, and Heaven,—Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar. In that sacrifice he is newborn and even his body partakes in its joy. Yet this supernal birth is his alone and cannot be of great avail for the collective on the earth. The individual's supernal birth has to become a larger... of activity. She acquires the lore of the world, learns its many philosophies and sciences and arts and crafts. But by her native right she also sees something beyond them. She is aware of the universal Self and in her embrace stay all, that she might breathe living happiness into them. But scarcely is recognized her eminence Page – 62 by the world. Only a few get a distant glimpse ...
... source of the revelation Page 153 is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowledge; the feelings, emotions, sensations are similarly felt as waves from the same cosmic immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross body and responded to in kind by the individual centre of the universality; for the body is only a small support or even less, a point of relation, for the action... a free and pure essential self-consciousness or it is an identification with the All, — the extension or the identification constituting a cosmic being, a universal individual. In one state of the cosmic consciousness there is an individual included in the cosmos but identifying himself with all in it, with the things and beings, with the thought and sense, the joy and grief of others; in another... created overtopping and dominating the physical instrument, individual in fact of existence, but impersonal in feeling and recognised by a free cognition as something instrumental to the action of a Transcendent and Universal Being. In the transition towards the Supermind this centralising action tends towards the discovery of a true individual replacing the dead ego, a being who is in his essence ...
... in life. Savitri's mind had ceased to be an individual centre, it had become universal: "the great world's thoughts were part of her own thoughts". Thus, "the unseen grew visible and audible" to Savitri. She knew that "...man evolving to divinest heights "Colloques still with the animal and the Djinn." In the arrangement of universal Nature there are no abrupt breaks, but "the... into eternity" "She was all vastness and one measureless point". Her being one with the Universal did not prevent her from being an individual because even that individuality was a "measureless point". "All contraries were true in one huge spirit. "An individual, one with cosmic self In the heart of the Transcendent's miracle Her spirit saw the world as living... It was "The Spirit's conscious representative". "Comrade of the universe, the Transcendent's ray", It was the deepest truth of the individual, one with the universal Being and a projection of the Transcendent. Earth's bliss and grief this Being her soul—welcomed with a smile. This Being, "knows the toil of mind and life". It is this soul that "puts ...
... beyond individual mind, beyond even universal mind in the Ignorance; it carries in itself a first direct and masterful cognition of cosmic truth: here then we might hope to understand something of the original working of things, get some insight into the fundamental movements of cosmic Nature. One thing indeed becomes clear; Page 323 it is self-evident here that both the individual and the... is accepted and assimilated into the self-expression of the individual mental being, the personal Prakriti of the Purusha. But still, in view of these complexities, the question remains entire whether all this evolution and action is a phenomenal creation by some universal Energy presented to the mental being or an activity imposed by Mind-Energy on the Purusha's indeterminate, perhaps indeterminable... be little more than a formation of universal Mind, an engine for the reception, modification, propagation of cosmic thought-waves, idea-currents, will-suggestions, waves of feeling, sense-suggestions, form-suggestions. It has no doubt its own already realised expression, predispositions, propensities, personal temperament and nature; what comes from the universal can only find a place there if it is ...
... horses of the race. Sri Aurobindo has defined Yoga as "a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being, and a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence". In its far aims as also in its essential processes, education coalesces with Yoga, and it is thus no mystery at all that the Centre of Education is an inseparable... life of a Divine Society. A double attempt at self-perfection is thus called for: individual transformation and social transformation, or the perfection of the individual and the perfection of the race. Before the entire race can be perfected, we may have to start with experimental groups that strive in their individual and collective life towards perfection. The members of such a group will (i) strain... discovers, develops, builds into form in the individual man: it is through the progressive and formative individual that it offers the discovery and the chance of a new self-creation to the mind of the race. For the communal mind holds things subconsciently at first or, if consciously, then in a confused chaotic manner: it is only through the individual mind that the mass can arrive at a clear knowledge ...
... that divinity itself. Hers is the transcendental Yajna, ours the individual. In the flaming spirit of her Yajna are kindled all these thousand Yajnas of our souls. Such is the possibility that the Divine as Death has now opened out in this earthly existence. Such is the glory of Savitri's threefold Yajna: the Individual, the Universal, the Transcendental. This is the executive Truth we see in Savitri's... unseen, A voice of the eternal Ecstasy. 7 7 Ibid., pp. 612-13. Page 100 Savitri's love and joy, through an intensification in the soul of Satyavan, become wide and universal. There is as if a mission also that bids her to love. By its transforming alchemy it is to save the world from suffering,—and that appears to be its purpose. Not corporeality but a bright spiritual... the vast knowledge." 11 Or, on another occasion: "Placed in delight he flows to the pleasant Names in which he increases; vast and wise he ascends the chariot of the vast sun, the chariot of a universal movement." 12 In the lyrical sweetness of an enchantment Savitri herself tells Death: 11 The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 340. 12 Ibid., p. 540. Page 104 ...
... Purusha is only individual or universal or supreme is at first indistinct, but in one of the lofty experiences, one finds oneself as a vast and inalienable stillness, completely separate and independent of all the mental Ignorance, and therefore no longer compelled at all by the mental Ignorance. According to the Sankhya, the Purusha that is experienced in this way is the individual Purusha, although... mukti from desire and egoism to which inadequacies and conflicts are inextricably linked, but also s ā dharmya mukti, liberation in which the individual Page 116 instrument enjoys the freedom of the Divine's own transcendental and universal action and spontaneous harmony of the law of that action. It was in that state that Sri Krishna delivered to Arjuna the supreme secret of... works founded in a spiritual universality and perfect self-surrender is the key method of arriving at the complete spiritual liberation; that liberation unites s ā yujya mukti, s ā lokya mukti and s ā dharmya mukti. Page 123 4. Characteristics of the Trigun ā t ī ta In the first place, Sri Krishna, after describing how the individual soul is bound to the three gunas ...
... comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one’s separate self but in the universal knowledge; the feelings, emotions, sensations are similarly felt as waves from the same cosmic immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross body and responded to in kind by the individual centre of the universality; for the body is only a small support or even less, a point of relation, for the action... high and intense individual opening upwards is not sufficient, – to that vertical ascent towards summit Light there must be added a vast horizontal expansion of the consciousness into some totality of the Spirit. At the least, the inner being must already have replaced by its deeper and wider awareness the surface mind and its limited outlook and learned to live in a large universality; for otherwise... and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many motions that were formerly egocentric may still continue, but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness. Thought, for the most part, no longer seems to originate individually in the body or the person but manifests from above or comes in upon the cosmic mind-waves: all inner individual sight or intelligence of ...
... is its law of being, its dharma. This limitation of mind-consciousness by personality and of truth by mental temperament and preference must be the rule of our nature so long as the individual has not reached universality, is not yet preparing for mind-transcendence. But it is evident that this condition is inevitably a source of error and can at any moment be the cause of a falsification of knowledge... the light of self-knowledge. The third step is to know the Divine Being who is at once our supreme transcendent Self, the Cosmic Being, foundation of our universality, and the Divinity within of which our psychic being, the true evolving individual in our nature, is a portion, a spark, a flame growing into the eternal Fire from which it was lit and of which it is the witness ever living within us and... consciousness in these conditions is the growth of a self-affirming vital and physical individual, a construction of Nature of life and matter with a concealed psychic or spiritual true individual behind it for which Nature is creating this outward means of expression. As mentality increases, this vital and material individual takes the more developed form of a constantly self-affirming mental, vital and physical ...
... comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowledge; the feelings, emotions, sensations are similarly felt as waves from the same cosmic immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross body and responded to in kind by the individual centre of the universality; for the body is only a small support or even less, a point of relation, for the action... extension of a free and pure essential self-consciousness or it is an identification with the All,—the extension or the identification constituting a cosmic being, a universal individual. In one state of the cosmic consciousness there is an individual included in the cosmos but identifying himself with all in it, with the things and beings, with the thought and sense, the joy and grief of others; in another... created overtopping and dominating the physical instrument, individual in fact of existence, but impersonal in feeling and recognised by a free cognition as something instrumental to the action of a Transcendent and Universal Being. In the transition towards the Supermind this centralising action tends towards the discovery of a true individual replacing the dead ego, a being who is in his essence one ...
... has immensely enlarged the scope. The main story has not undergone much change. But within the ancient framework he has given form to a vast and eternal vision encompassing many planes of individual and universal life, physical, occult and spiritual. In the study of influence we could analyse how the original tale has grown, what the additions and modifications are. 74 Although it would be an ... aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or a deep abiding ecstacy... In the Overmind we have a first firm foundation of the experience of the universal beauty, a universal law, a universal delight." 142 If the poet can make this aesthesis his own, he "becomes a spokesman of the eternal spirit of beauty and delight and shares the highest creative and self-expressive... it will be an expression of the very self of man and the self of things and the self of Nature; it will be a creative and interpretative revelation of the infinite truth of existence and of the universal delight and beauty and of greater spiritualised vision and power of life." 38 To create the poetry of the future the expressions of the four powers have to be harmonised in a new expression ...
... ritam is communicating itself to the Tapas. The difficulty of the Tapas is to harmonise the universal, the central & the individual Will. The universal is realised in the present & past progression. The central having realised itself in the past & present determines & prepares the future. The individual submits to the central and accepts its part in the preparation & determination. Page 712 ... Ananda confirmed & universalised is the path to the conversion of Prana into the universal Chit-Tapas and that the path to the conversion of Body into Sat— It is this Chit Tapas which is the base of Aishwarya-IshitaVashita; so long as it is not entirely realised there can be only a partial efficacy of the individual Tapas. The way to it is self-association with all energies in the universe. The Dwayavins... real Self. This is now being corrected by the mind being seen Page 741 as an activity formulated & directed in himself by the universal Ishwara. To this is now being added the same relation of mind to the transcendent Ishwara in the individual. All that has now to be done is to confirm thoroughly the Krishnabhava & Ishwaradarshana against surprise & interruption, as is being ...
... control over the universal vital plane as to make it impossible for these Page 186 vital forces to represent themselves as the Truth or yourself and the Mother ? Sri Aorobindo : It is a question of consciousness and not of the physical plane where you can prevent somebody from doing something. Nothing is possible without the co-operation of the individual. The difficulty... prison. They suffer but suffering does not purify them ; on the contrary, it makes them worse. To my mind suffering is a sign of imperfection of nature. It is a stamp of imperfection on the individual and universal nature. You have to learn from suffering : firstly, why it is there, and, secondly, how to overcome it. But if you take delight in it and invite it like the Christian monks who used to... in Nature, as there is electricity, gas etc. Disciple : What is Nature ? Sri Aurobindo : The Universal Divine has projected the Universe and there is Universal Nature which affords all the material for us. Essentially, everything in Nature corresponds to something in the Universal Soul. For instance, the vital corresponds to the divine Tapas. The details about the law and the process ...
... real, to effect it in the physical, she spared no effort. In that effort in the Will of the Lord she brought the proclaimed future at our doorsteps. 3: After the siddhis of the Individual Yoga and the Universal Yoga Aswapati has to move forward. He has yet to discover the solution to the problem of imperfection of this suffering world. In the Transcendental Yoga of Aswapati a moment comes when... true,—because 45 Ibid., p. 429. hence onward in whatever form he might continue to exist at the bidding of Savitri, he is always going to be her instrument in universal affairs, in the universal commerce. What greater conquest or greater mastery over Death is then needed than making use of him for her own purposes in the scheme and details of the evolutionary process? The meaning... descent to bring about materially the transformation was there,—and that is what the significant legend of Savitri narrates,—the field, the necessary resplendent spiritual support, ādhār, for its universal action was not yet ready then. The eighteen-year arduous tapasya of Aswapati, that is to stay Sri Aurobindo, was exactly for preparing the ground for her transformative action. In that respect we ...
... principle beyond individual mind, beyond even universal mind in the Ignorance; it carries in itself a first direct and masterful cognition of cosmic truth: here then we might hope to understand something of the original working of things set some insight into the fundamental movements of cosmic Nature. One thing indeed becomes clear; it is self-evident here that both the individual and the cosmos come... s is manifested or built in us. That true centre is a luminous formulation of the one Consciousness and a pure channel and instrument of the one Existence. A support for the individual manifestation and action of the universal Force, it gradually reveals behind it the true Person in us, the central eternal being, an everlasting being of the Supreme, a power and portion of the transcendent Shakti.¹... it is accepted and assimilated into the self-expression of the individual mental being, the personal Prakriti of the Purusha. But still, in view of these complexities, the question remains entire whether all this evolution and action is a phenomenal creation by some universal Energy presented to the mental being or an activity imposed by Mind-Energy on the Purusha's indeterminate, perhaps indeterminable ...
... be found again. For there is also a Rhythm, which is not a fiction either, any more than that “fire” or “flowing” is. They are one and the same thing with a triple face, 55 in its individual and universal aspects, in its human condensation or interstellar space, in this rock or that bird. Each thing, each being has its rhythm, as well as each event and the return of the birds from the north... the world if it were confined to only a few individuals. Actually, from the very beginning, from the very first steps, the seeker has realized that this yoga of the superman was not an individual yoga, though the individual is the starting point and instrument of the work, but a collective yoga, a form of concentrated evolution in which the individual is but an outpost, the spreader of the possibility... poor whirling machine; deprived of its matter, our heaven is a pale nebula filled with the silent medusas of the disembodied spirit; deprived of the individual, our societies are dreadful anthills; and deprived even of his “sins,” the individual loses a focus of tension that helped him to grow. The fact is, no idea, however lofty it may seem, has the power to undo the Artifice – for the very good ...
... over Harm, we have omitted most of these "private" letters. All the same we have plucked a few lines from here and there, when the individual merged with the universal. After all, none of us are free from our dark side. For, are we not all buffeted by the play of universal forces, such as anger, pride, etc. ? Sri Aurobindo and Mother gave Harm a "long and full chance to develop his better side of... of a big universal working and it is impossible any longer to explain everything as the result of one's own sole and independent personality. Page 226 You yourself have at one time written that your crises of despair etc. came upon you as if thrown on you and worked themselves out without your being able to determine or put an end to them. That means an action of universal forces and... the sadhana. Even Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life; here the object is the fulfilment of life. 2. Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not a supra-cosmic achievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing in of a Power of ...
... he rarely attains universality through his own individual efforts, leaping instead beyond the individual without bothering to develop all the intermediate rungs of the personal consciousness, and when he reaches the "top" he no longer has a ladder to come down, or he does not want to come down, or there is no individual self left to express what he sees, or else his old individual self tries its best... Forces There is yet another difficulty. The vibrations coming from people or from the universal vital are not the only ones trying to disturb the seeker (actually, distinguishing between these two kinds is hardly possible since individuals are merely ground stations 65 for the universal vital or the universal mind, and vibrations weave endlessly from the one to the other). There is another type... toward the universal Mind, universal Vital, and universal Physical; the consciousness also seeks to go upward . This ascending urge may not even be the result of a conscious discipline; it may be a natural and spontaneous need (we should never forget that our efforts in this life are the continuation of many other efforts in many other lives, hence the unequal development of different individuals and the ...
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