... Yoga - I Chapter I The Jivatman in the Integral Yoga The Jivatman or Individual Self By Jivatma we mean the individual self. Essentially it is one self with all others, but in the multiplicity of the Divine it is the individual self, an individual centre of the universe—and it sees everything in itself or itself in everything or both together according... s but the vital and the mental too that are separated from the Truth by the Ignorance. The body is not the individual Self—it is the basis of the external personality or of the physical self, if you like so to express it; but that is not the individual Self. The individual Self is the central being (Jivatma) manifesting in the lower nature as the psychic being—it is directly a portion of the... es 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 the higher and subtler ranges of the consciousness it knows itself as that, but in the lower where the consciousness is ...
... Atma, the Universal Self, Sri Aurobindo speaks of the true individual self, the real "I," Jivatma, spoken of figuratively in the Gita as "an eternal portion of the Divine." He explains: By Jivatma we mean the individual self. Essentially it is one self with all others, but in the multiplicity of the Divine 7 it is the individual self, an individual centre of the universe—and it sees everything... individual. The "innermost I" that Eckhart speaks of is nor an individual self (Jivatma) but the one Universal Self (Atma). Therefore, someone familiar with the dominant Hindu thought, as found in the Gita, is apt to notice that Eckhart's teaching does not include one of the prominent Hindu themes, namely, the growth of the individual self, the Jivatma, from life to life until its liberation... (Non-Dualism or Monism) and Dvaita (Dualism), all of which are embraced by Sri Aurobindo's integral view. Qualified Monism recognizes the eventual unity of the infinite universal Self and the finite individual Self, but it holds that there is nevertheless a distinction between the two and a certain limitation of the Oneness, and that this limitation is not temporary but eternal, ...
... fulfil is himself; his knowledge of Nature, his knowledge of God are only helps towards self-knowledge, towards the perfection of his being, towards the attainment of the supreme object of his individual self-existence. Directed towards Nature and the cosmos, it may take upon itself the figure of self-knowledge, self-mastery, — in the mental and vital sense, — and mastery of the world in which we... individual salvation whether in heavens beyond or by a separate immergence in a supreme Self or a supreme Non-self, — beatitude or Nirvana. Throughout, however, it is the individual who is seeking individual self-knowledge and the aim of his separate existence, with all the rest, even altruism and the love and service of mankind, self-effacement or self-annihilation, thrown in, — with whatever subtle... with the One and the All by that delivering disappearance. The Life Divine, pp. 694-96 The first difficulty for the reason is that it has always been accustomed to identify the individual self with the ego and to think of it as existing only by the limitations and exclusions of the ego. If that were so, then by the transcendence of the ego the individual would abolish his own existence; ...
... the All-Negating Absolute that she saw the individual Self in her die, the cosmic disappear; she was not able to feel the presence of the transcendental Power. Sri Aurobindo described her state in the following words: The Holy Ghost without the Father and Son. 45 The Father is the transcendental Power, the Son is the individual Self, the Holy Ghost ... a substratum of what... meaning that is not necessarily Christian. It is man's soul that is nailed when the Son of God bears the Cross—because, as we shall see—according, to Sri Aurobindo the Son of God stands for the individual Self. 30 The words "It is finished" are very famous and are echoed and reechoed in Renaissance Literature, especially in the Latin version in 29 5f. John, xviii, 11. 30 Ibid... Psyche, bleeding with Fate's whips, bleeding on the Cross. As indicated already, and as we will see again, Sri Aurobindo considers the Christian concept of the Son of God as standing for the individual Self. The Primal descent of the Superconscient Divine into this world of Void, Nescience and Pain, mentioned already while discussing the vignette of Christ's crucifixion, is described in ...
... planes and through many poles of His being; to each mode its purpose, to each plane or pole its fulfilment both in the apex and the supreme scope of the eternal Unity. It is necessarily through the individual Self that we must arrive at the One, for that is the basis of all our experience. By Knowledge we arrive at identity with the One; for there is, in spite of the Dualist, an essential identity by which... height of love is the rapturous immersion of ourselves in unity Page 377 of ecstatic delight with the object of our love and adoration. But again for divine works in the world the individual Self converts itself into a centre of consciousness through which the divine Will, one with the divine Love and Light, pours itself out in the multiplicity of the universe. We arrive in the same way... for pure identity which cannot have to do with any play of difference, we shall embrace and reconcile the two poles of being where they meet in the infinity of the Highest. The Self, even the individual self, is different from our personality as it is different from our mental ego-sense. Our personality is never the same; it is a constant mutation and various combination. It is not a basic consciousness ...
... individual different from the eternal Self? No, the individual self is the eternal Brahman, for there is only one self and not many. But then the Jivatman also cannot be subject to Maya or escape from it. There is then nobody subject to it, nobody who escapes. And really that is so, says the illusionist, but what seems to us now to be the individual self, is a reflection of the eternal Self in the mind... Samadhi, and this is the [?prefatory] sign. Fix your mind upon that, look at things practically, and do not ask inconsistent questions, as to how there can be individual salvation when there is no individual self to be saved. These questions do not arise once the release is made, they arise in Maya which is a practical fact and can receive only a practical solution. Well that is a kind of answer. But ...
... be so arranged that Page 95 the hours of fresh study and labour which can be done by individual self learning are not affected in any way. (The major portion of the daily work should be available to the students for their individual self learning.) For purposes of the individual self learning, there will be, in a sense, no groupings since each individual will be free to choose his ...
... Being thus baffled in his efforts to square accounts between his own individual self-affirmation and the self-affirmation of the collective being, man has tried in desperation to cling to one of two extreme views. In one of these views, he has over-emphasised the so-called self-fulfilment of the individual. But if by individual self-fulfilment is meant the satisfaction of one's seperative ego, then... Sri Aurobindo: "The supramental being in his cosmic consciousness seeing and feeling all as himself would act in that sense; he would act in a universal awareness and a harmony of his individual self with the total self, of his individual will with the total will, of his individual action with the total action.... His cosmic individuality would know the cosmic forces and their movement and ...
... 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 to express his new consciousness, provided he feels the need Page 185 to express anything at all. The Vedic rishis, who have given us perhaps... But there are different kinds of heavens, just as there are different kinds of hells (each level of our being has its own "heaven" and "hell"). Generally, the religious man leaves behind the individual self, thereby leaving behind the subconscient. He merely has to pass through one gate, with "guardians" unpleasant enough to account for all the "nights" and "temptations" mentioned in the lives of ...
... with a difference, but the crowning perception of Monism becomes here possible. And when it is no longer only possible but grasped? Then the individual Self entering into full realisation, ceases in any Page 362 sense to be the individual Self, but merges into & becomes again the eternal and absolute Brahman, without parts, unbeginning, undecaying, unchanging. He has passed beyond causality... fact in 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;... therefore no mere delusion; it is a truth, but a phenomenal truth and not the ultimate reality of things. As it proceeds in the work of discovering and perfecting methods of knowledge, the individual self finds an entry into the universe of subtle phenomena. Here the difference that divides it from the Supreme Self is less acute; for the bonds of matter are lightened and the great agents of division ...
... One and the Many, all of which are equally logical and therefore equally valid to the reason, are the statements of the Upanishads and the Gita and the experiences of Yoga when the Jivatman or individual Self is in direct communion with the Paramatman or Supreme Universal Self and aware therefore of its real relations to Him. The supreme experience of Yoga is undoubtedly the state of complete identification... state in which the Jivatman is entirely aware only of itself and the Paramatman and lives in a state of exalted love and adoration of the Eternal Being; and without this state 3 To put the individual Self in intimate relation with the Eternal is the aim of Hindu life, its religion, its polity, its ethics. Morality is not for its own sake, nor for the pleasures of virtue, nor for any reward here... Page 403 are false aims and false sanctions. Its true aim is a preparation and purification of the soul to fit it for the presence of God. The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into the clear air of the spirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume ...
... itself as an independent personality, is a creation of the 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... state of consciousness, co-exists with a sense of unity: all others are perceived as "part of oneself" or "varied repetitions of oneself". In other words, the self is perceived as being both an individual self and a cosmic self. Page 372 Self, Ego and Individuality in Transcendent Consciousness A more radical disaffirmation of our ordinary perceptions of self, ego and individuality... 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 presides over individual birth and evolution, though the Jivatman itself is unborn, unevolving, above the manifestation. What comes down into the manifestation, descending ...
... and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an in separable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without... bridge that division up to the point at which separative Mind enters into Overmind and becomes a part of its action; it can unite individual mind with cosmic mind on its highest plane, equate individual self with cosmic self and give to the nature an action of universality; but it cannot lead Mind beyond itself, and in this world of original Inconscience it cannot dynamise the Transcendence: for it... for it grows and develops, and it is that which can effectuate a harmonious integration of the mental, vital and physical personality. The term 'central being' is also used for Jivatman, the individual Self which presides unseen above the evolution and of which the psychic being is the representative in the manifested nature. The Jivatman has been described by Sri Aurobindo as the 'multiple Divine ...
... it. परा मनीषा, आद्या मनीषा, दैवी मनीषा, any of these might do, if no single word can be found or invented. Overmind and Intuition Is Overmind to the Cosmic Spirit as Intuition is to the individual Self? The Cosmic Spirit uses all powers, but Overmind power is the highest it normally uses in the present scheme of things here. In that sense as intuition is normally the highest power used by... inner experience. The Jivatman or spirit, as it is usually called in English, is self-existent above the manifested or instrumental being—it is superior to birth and death, always the same, the individual Self or ātman . It is the eternal true being of the individual. The soul is a spark of the Divine which is not seated above the manifested being, but comes down into the manifestation to support ...
... in the infinite Spirit or Self of existence a Presence or a Being, a Consciousness that determines—that is what we speak of as the Divine,—not a separate Person, but the one Being of whom our individual self is a portion or a vessel. But it is not necessary for everybody to regard it in that way. Supposing it is the impersonal Self of all only, yet the Upanishad says of the Self and its realisation... Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage. Precise enough? By the Self, I suppose, you mean the individual Self! Good Lord, no. I mean the Self, sir, the Self, the Adwaita, Vedantic, Shankara self. Atman, Atman! A thing I knew nothing about, never bargained for, didn't understand either. 31 October ...
... as prayeror invocation. j ī va (Jiva): The Jivatman; the living being. jiva (Krishna's) (Jiva, Krishna's): A creature of Krishna, i.e.,God's creature. jīvtāman (Jivatman): The individual self. jyoti: Light; the principle of spiritual light in the higher ordivine Nature. karma: Action, work: the resultant force of action done inthe past, especially in past lives. ... from the sense ofpersonal being; release from cosmic existence. mūlādhāra: See cakra. nābhipadma: See cakra. nirvana (Nirvana): Spiritual extinction of the separate individual self. om: The primal sound representing the supreme spiritual reality. Parame ś vara (Parameshwara): The Supreme as Lord and Master of the universe. par ā prakrti: The higher ...
... the very stuff of his existence. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Jivatman in Other Indian Systems By Jivatma we mean the individual self. Essentially it is one self with all others, but in the multiplicity of the Divine it is the individual self, an individual centre of the universe—and it sees everything in itself or itself in everything or both together according to its state of ...
... of one's being not only for the sake of intellectual clarity but also for avoiding confusion in one's experience in sadhana. 8 Thus, for example, with regard to the distinction between the individual self (Jivatman)—which constitutes a single centre of the multiple Divine—and the all-embracing Divine itself, Sri Aurobindo remarks: "It is important to remember the distinction; for, otherwise, if... of one's being and of all its actions." 13 Traditionally, the term "yoga"—which literally means "union"—has been generally understood 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 ...
... exist—but of a mental compound or stream of associations or saṁskāras which we mistake for ourself. In illusionist Vedanta it means not a disintegration but a disappearance of a false and unreal individual self into the one real self or Brahman; it is the idea and experience of individuality that so disappears and ceases,—we may say a false light that is extinguished ( nirvāṇa ) in the true Light. In... ego, a device of Nature which holds Page 395 together her action in the mind and body. This ego has to be extinguished, otherwise there is no complete liberation possible; but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his ...
... farther—first to Overmind and then to Supermind. It [ the individual Self ] is not specially related [ to intuition ]—intuition is the highest power the embodied individual can reach without universalising itself; when it universalises itself it is then possible for it to come in contact with overmind. If by the individual Self is meant the Jivatman, it can be on any plane of consciousness. ...
... of the Brahman in illusory Maya. There is no Ishwara, Lord of the world, because there is no world—except in Maya; so too there is no Jivatman, only the Paramatman illusorily perceived as an individual self by the lower (illusory) consciousness in Maya. Those, on the other hand, who wish to unite with the Ishwara, regard or experience the Jiva either as a separate being dependent on the Ishwara or... is free, wide, silent, eternal, infinite. Obviously if it is a pure "I", of whatever nature, which gets the experience, it must be looked on by the consciousness that has the realisation as the individual self of the Being, Jivatman. (3) One can also have the experience of oneself as not the mind but the thinker, not the heart but the self or "I" which supports the feelings, not the life but that ...
... spiritual evolution already described. The basis of psychical as of spiritual existence is the pure Self called the Paramatman or Supreme Self when it manifests in the Cosmos and the Jivatman or individual Self when it manifests in man. The Self first manifests as Will or as the Rishis preferred to call it Ananda, Bliss, Delight. Ananda is the pure delight of existence and activity and may be identified... than thought. Swiftness implies motion; but the motion of Spirit in Cosmos is the illusory motion we see in the landscape as it whirls swiftly past the quiet watcher in the railway-carriage. The individual Self in Man is the watcher in the train, the train is Prakriti, the landscape the Universal Self in the Cosmos. The watcher is not moving, the landscape is not moving; it is the train which is moving ...
... and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Over mind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without ...
... becomes more often than not a subtle form of selfishness or turns into a larger affirmation of our ego; content with our pose of altruism, we do not see that it is a veil for the imposition of our individual self, our ideas, our mental and vital personality, our need of ego-enlargement Page 1065 upon the others whom we take up into our expanded orbit. So far as we really succeed in living for... Reality, a manifestation of the spirit of man, and there is a truth, a self, a power of the collective being. The individual is a formation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the individual, an individual self, soul or spirit that expresses itself through the individual mind, life and body and can express itself too Page 1085 in something that goes beyond mind, life and body, something even ...
... our supreme and integral self, our true individuality; it is our power of self-knowledge. By knowing the eternal unity of these three powers of the eternal manifestation, God, Nature and the individual self, and their intimate necessity to each other, we come to understand existence itself and all that in the appearances of the world now puzzles our ignorance. Our self-knowledge abolishes none of... determining delight of the Purusha, the relation which it wills to establish with its Prakriti, the experience at which it arrives as the result of the line it has followed in the development of its individual self-experience among all the various possibilities of its nature. Our intellectual justifications are only the account of that experience which we give to the reason and the devices by which we help ...
... and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without ...
... analogy with his own movements, inference. In yoga at a certain point this limitation breaks down, the consciousness enlarges itself, becomes directly aware of the Cosmic Self and knows the individual self to be one with it; of the Cosmic Energy and meets directly the action of the cosmic forces; of the cosmic mind, life, matter and feels first a contact of its individual mind, life, body with... a mental compound or stream of associations or sa ṁ sk ā ras which we mistake for ourself. In illusionist Vedanta it means, not a disintegration but a disappearance of a false and unreal individual self into the one real Self or Brahman; it is the idea and experience of individuality that so disappears and ceases, — we may say a false light that is extinguished ( nirvāṇa) in the true Light ...
... seeks to go beyond the present manifestation, these could very well be taken for granted and... the three highest, supermind and overmind might be called the three Supernals. (p. 250) Jivatma individual self, an individual centre of the universe, Atman individualised is Jivatman... psychic being a conscious form of the soul growing in the evolution. (p. 267) The eternal Divine is the Being; the... of the Brahman in illusory Maya. There is no Ishwara, Lord of the world, because there is no world—except in Maya; so too there is no Jivatman, only the Paramatman illusorily perceived as an individual self by the lower (illusory) consciousness in Maya. Those, on the other hand, who wish to unite with the Ishwara, regard or experience the Jiva either as a separate being dependent on Ishwara or as ...
... we do not first grow conscious of the supreme Truth of our being; for the direct touch of the Absolute alone can possibly help us arrive at our own absolute. But neither is our perfect individual self-expression feasible if we exclude the cosmic Reality. The individual will ever remain incomplete, bound within the confines of a separative ego-consciousness, if he does not open into universality... Every teacher has to realise that there is a soul or psychical entity in every individual behind his physical-vital-mental parts and this represents the fundamental truth of his existence, the individual self-manifesting divinity within him. He should know that the evocation of this psychical entity, the real man within, is the most rewarding object of education and indeed of all human life if it would ...
... Reality, a manifestation of the spirit of man, and there is a truth, a self, a power of the collective being. The individual is a formation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the individual, an individual self, soul or spirit that expresses itself through the individual mind, life and body and can express itself too in something that goes beyond mind, life and body, something even that goes beyond humanity... concluded his series of articles on Human Unity in the Arya, Rabindranath Tagore said in the course of his Hibbert Lectures: "On the surface of our being we have the ever-changing phases of the individual self, but in the depth there dwells the Eternal Spirit of human unity beyond our direct knowledge." 51 Still later, Arnold Toynbee ventured to see a "divine plan" behind the rise and fall of civilisation ...
... of education should be so arranged that the hours of fresh study and labour which can be done by individual self-learning are not affected in any way. (The major portion of the daily work should be available to the students for their individual self-learning.) For purposes of the individual self-learning, there will be, in a sense, no groupings since each individual will be free to choose his ...
... and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without... for it grows and develops, and it is that which can effectuate a harmonious integration of the mental, vital and physical personality. The term 'central being' is also used for Jivatman, the individual Self which presides unseen over the evolution and of which the psychic being is the representative in the manifested nature. The Jivatman Page 64 has been described by Sri Aurobindo ...
... of a mental compound or stream of associations or samskaras which we mistake for ourself. In illusionist Vedanta it means, not a disintegration but a disappearance of a false and unreal individual self into the one real Self or Brahman; it is the idea and experience of individuality that so disappears and ceases – we may say a false light that is extinguished (nirvana) in the true Light... name is a natural ego, a device of Nature which holds together her action in the mind and body. This ego has to be extinguished, otherwise there is no complete liberation possible; but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting ...
... is in us the meeting-place between the mind-consciousness and the life-consciousness, it is the. centre of our normal nature: whatever individual self or soul we may have is likely to be seated hereabouts. Intellectuals may enthrone the mind as the individual self; but we may cheekily ask an intellec-tual: "Who says the soul is the mind?" He will answer, "I say so", and, while answering, he will thump ...
... leads to 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 ...
... of the individual when he becomes one with all creatures and dwells in the oneness of the Eternal. The first difficulty for the reason is that it has always been accustomed to identify the individual self with the ego and to think of it as existing only by the limitations and exclusions of the ego. If that were so, then by the transcendence of the ego the individual would abolish his own existence;... vital, physical being separate from all other beings, incapable of unity with them by its very individuality. If we go beyond these three terms of mind, life and body, and speak of the soul or individual self, we still think of an individualised being separate from all others, incapable of unity and inclusive mutuality, capable at most of a spiritual contact and soul-sympathy. It is therefore necessary ...
... fulfil is himself; his knowledge of Nature, his knowledge of God are only helps towards self-knowledge, towards the perfection of his being, towards the attainment of the supreme object of his individual self-existence. Directed towards Nature and the cosmos, it may take upon itself the figure of self-knowledge, self-mastery—in the mental and vital sense—and mastery of the world in which we find ourselves:... individual salvation whether in heavens beyond or by a separate immergence in a supreme Self or a supreme Non-Self,—beatitude or Nirvana. Throughout, however, it is the individual who is seeking individual self-knowledge and the aim of his separate existence, with all the rest, even altruism and the love and service of mankind, self-effacement or self-annihilation, thrown in—with whatever subtle disguises—as ...
... beings is the same. Love, joy and happiness come from the psychic. The Self gives peace or a universal Ananda. The Atman, the Jivatman and the Psychic The Jiva is realised as the individual Self, Atman, the central being above the Nature, calm, untouched by the movements of Nature but supporting their evolution though not involved in it. Through this realisation silence, freedom, wideness... evolution which travels from life to life. The Jivatma and the soul are the same, but in two different statuses. The Jivatma is the Ansha of the Divine standing above the consciousness as the individual self and unchanged by the evolution—the soul is the same descended into the evolution and developing its consciousness from life to life until in the opening of knowledge the psychic being realises ...
... being of Brahman, absolute and supracosmic and eternal, the latter the reality of Brahman in Maya, cosmic, temporal and relative. Here we get a reality for ourselves and the universe: for the individual self is really Brahman; it is Brahman who within the field of Maya seems phenomenally to be subjected to her as the individual and in the end releases the relative and phenomenal individual into his... though he is undeluded by Maya and the creator of Maya, seems himself to be a phenomenon of Brahman and not the ultimate Reality, he is real only with regard to the Time-world he creates; the individual self has the same ambiguous character. If Maya were to cease altogether from its operations, Ishwara, the world and the individual would no longer be there; but Maya is eternal, Ishwara and the world ...
... supreme Self and Master of existence to do whatever is the will of his absolute wisdom and knowledge through our more and more perfected Nature. This is the sense of the self-surrender of the individual self to the Divine, ātma-samarpaṇa . It does not exclude a will for the delight of oneness, for participation in the divine consciousness, wisdom, knowledge, light, power, perfection, for the satisfaction... have before us and which can be wholly carried out when we become insistently aware of the highest spiritual presence and form of the divine Shakti. This surrender too of the whole action of the individual self to the Shakti is in fact a form of real self-surrender to the Divine. It has been seen that a most effective way of purification is for the mental Purusha to draw back, to stand as the passive ...
... 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 with our environment... becoming unreal the immanence becomes unreal and there is only the Self upon which our mind has falsely imposed the name and form of the universe. Thus are we justified in the withdrawal of the individual self into the Absolute. Still, the Self goes on with its imperishable aspect of immanence, its immutable aspect of divine envelopment, its endless trick of becoming each thing and all things; our ...
... its effort to reach Him. But the Upanishad is not concerned only with the ultimate reality of the Brahman to Himself, but also with His reality in His universe and His reality to the Jivatman or individual self. It is therefore sometimes Adwaitic, sometimes Dwaitic, sometimes Visishtadwaitic, and we should have the courage now to leave the paths which the mighty dead have trod out for us, discharge from... which are relative & partial; salokya or constant companionship with the Lord, sadrishya , or permanent resemblance to Him in one's nature & actions, and sayujya or constant union of the individual self with the Eternal. It is supposed by some schools that entire salvation consists in laya or absorption into the Eternal, in other words entire self-removal from phenomena and entrance into the ...
... concepts, analogy with his own movements, inference. In Yoga at a certain point this limitation breaks down, the consciousness enlarges itself, becomes directly aware of the Cosmic Self and knows the individual self to be one with it; of the Cosmic Energy and meets directly the action of the cosmic forces; of the cosmic mind, life, matter and feels first a contact of its individual mind, life, body with them... Divine is always One that is Many. The individual spirit is part of the "Many" side of the One, and the psychic being is what it puts forth to evolve here in the earth-nature. In liberation the individual self realises itself as the One (that is yet Many). It may plunge into the One and merge or hide itself in its bosom—that is the Laya of the Adwaita; it may feel its oneness and yet as part of the Many ...
... material improvement or social change. Only a deep and inner process of individual self-perfection can make for real progress and completely transform the present state of things, and change suffering and misery into a serene and lasting contentment. Consequently, the best example is one that shows the first stage of individual self-perfection which makes possible all the rest, the first victory to be ...
... Jivatmas really stand above the creation even though concerned in it; the natural existences, sarva-bhūtāni , are the creatures of Nature. Man, bird, beast, reptile are natural existences, but the individual Self in them is not even for a moment characteristically man, bird, beast or reptile; in its evolution it is the same through all these changes, a spiritual being that consents to the play of Nature... experience. The Jivatman or spirit, as it is usually called in English, is self-existent above the manifested or instrumental being —it is superior to birth and death, always the same, the individual Self or Atman. It is the eternal true being of the individual. The soul is a spark of the Divine which is not seated above the manifested being, but comes down into the manifestation to support its ...
... is in us the meeting-place between the mind-consciousness and the life-consciousness, it is the centre of our normal nature: whatever individual self or soul we may have is likely to be seated hereabouts. Intellectuals may enthrone the mind as the individual self; but we may cheekily ask an intellectual: "Who says the soul is the mind?" He will answer, "I say so", and, while answering, he will thump ...
... it gives us a new definition of shraddha, of faith. It is the very force of our true substance which inevitably manifests in our outer action, in our becoming. It says: "This Purusha, this individual self, is of the stuff of "Shraddha"; as is one's shraddha so verily he is." 1 "The lesson we learn from this profound statement is that the best way of keeping society progressive is to educate... knowledge, which manifests in our outer nature of mind, life and body, as their inner self. The Kathopanishad also calls it antaratman. This is antaratman because it represents our inmost individual self, jiva, and it is seated in the mystic seat of our heart. This inner soul, which can be called the psychic being, or chaitya purusha, grows Page 179 gradually in its domination over ...
... of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it Page 56 maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpretation and free ad full consciousness of each other: but in overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind s well aware of the essential Truth of the things; It embraces the totality; it uses the Individual self-determinations ...
... —and the working out by Nature is only the result of his Will; yet by virtue of his impersonality behind he is not bound by his works, kartāram akartāram . Page 230 But man as the individual self, owing to his ignorant self-identification with the work and the becoming, as if that were all his soul and not a power of his soul, a power proceeding from it, is bewildered by the ego-sense. ...
... help you. That obedience is the thing that is needful. 3) What do you mean by saying: "You have made me yourself"? The words seem to have no meaning. You cannot mean that you become the same individual self as I; there cannot be two Aurobindos; even if it were possible it would be absurd and useless. You cannot mean that you have become the Supreme Being, for you cannot be God or the Iswara. If it ...
... Reality, a manifestation of the spirit of man, and there is a truth, a self, a power of the collective being. The individual is a formation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the individual, an individual self, soul or spirit that expresses itself through the individual mind, life and body and can express itself too in something that goes beyond mind, life and body, something even that goes beyond humanity ...
... beautiful, the most perfect, the most disinterested, the most comprehensive, the best, before opening one's spiritual wings and looking at all that from above as something which still belongs to the individual self, in order to enter into true spirituality, that which has no limits, which lives in an integral way Infinity and Eternity. Source Freedom and Asceticism To be free from all attachment ...
... of a life according to Nature as the remedy for all our ills. An attempt to find such a rule in the essential nature of man has inspired many revolutionary conceptions of ethics and society and individual self-development down to the latest of the kind, the strangely inspired vitalistic philosophy of Nietzsche. The common defect of these conceptions is to miss the true character of man and the true law ...
... object in the movement, to the Knowledge as Brahman supporting individual consciousness and individual form, to the Ignorance as an individualised and limited being. He manifests as the Jivatman or individual self in the living creature. From the standpoint of our lower state in the kingdom of death and limitation Atman is Sachchidananda, supra-mental, Page 34 but reflected in the mind. If ...
... meant the loss of one's personal being or any idea of becoming the Divine, for that should be avoided. The ego has to be overcome, but the central personal being (which is not the ego but the individual self, soul, a portion of the Divine) has to remain a channel and instrument of the Divine Shakti. As for others, sadhaks etc. one can feel them in one's universalised consciousness, be aware of their ...
... therefore be the final aim of religion and ethics, otherwise religion and ethics will be out of harmony with the truth of things and therefore false or imperfect. Religion and ethics must train the individual self in a man to discover its universality, to see himself in all creatures and all creatures in himself, and the ideal or ethically perfect man is the one who has attained to this vision and observes ...
... Principles and not yet to the Supreme. "Not for the sake of the wife," says Yajnavalkya in the Upanishad, "but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear to us." This in the lower sense of the individual self is the hard fact behind the coloured and passionate professions of egoistic love; but in a higher sense it is the inner significance of that love too which is not egoistic but divine. All true ...
... which is not the mental ego, something that is one in essence with this greater reality: it is a pure reflection or portion of the one Purusha; it is the Soul Person or the embodied being, the individual self, Jivatman; it is the Self that seems to limit its power and knowledge so as to support an individual play of transcendent and universal Nature. In deepest reality the infinitely One is also infinitely ...
... is founded. By reason of this fundamental verity of the manifestation the Being presents itself to our cosmic experience in three poises,—the supracosmic Existence, the cosmic Spirit and the individual Self in the Many. But the multiplicity permits of a phenomenal division of consciousness, an effectual Ignorance in which the Many, the individuals, cease to become aware of the eternal self-existent ...
... activity and its experiences and, with regard to all the large rest of our becoming that is behind, it is an Ignorance. Secondly, it is a knowledge only of being and becoming as limited to the individual self and its experiences; all the rest of the world is to it not-self, something, that is to say, which it does not realise as part of its own being but as some outside existence presented to its separate ...
... individuality be complete. The supramental being in his cosmic consciousness seeing and feeling all as himself would act in that sense; he would act in a universal awareness and a harmony of his individual self with the total self, of his individual will with the total will, of his individual action with the total action. For what we most suffer from in our outer life and its reactions upon our inner ...
... he shall do this, in what particular way, can be decided by no general rule. It must develop or define itself from within; the decision lies between God and our self, the Supreme Self and the individual self that is the instrument of the work; even before liberation, it is from the inner self, as soon as we become conscious of it, that there rises the sanction, the spiritually determined choice. It ...
... consciousness of the universal Self. We may preserve a Page 411 yet greater distinctness between the two and enjoy the relations between them; we may remain, in a way, entirely the individual self while participating in the bliss and infinity of the universal Self. Or we may possess them both as a greater and lesser self, one we feel pouring itself out in the universal play of the divine ...
... 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 also ...
... has then as little value as the other, neither can be claimed as the truth. The consciousness by which we affirm the featureless sole Reality can be as fallacious as that by which we affirm our individual self and the universe. If consciousness is the self-awareness of the eternal Existence, it can only be this self-awareness seeing its own power and the works of its power as a real world. If con ...
... synthetical view of the principles and methods of the various lines of spiritual self-discipline and the way in which they can lead to an integral divine life in the human existence. But this is an individual self-development, and therefore it was necessary to show too how our ideal can work out in the social life of mankind. In the "Psychology of Social Development" we have indicated how these truths affect ...
... Individual in action, in manifestation. This is where the problem arises. Sri Aurobindo says it's permanent, while all the ancient traditions say it disappears with the body. A permanent individual self? Otherwise there could be no permanent material life—for this [individuality] is the very nature of materialization. Were it destined to disappear, then the phenomenon of physical dissolution ...
... that man "requires a new Selfhood continually". Blackstone 34 sees Blake's essential meaning and writes that he wanted us to have "consciousness of that larger Self which lies behind the fretful individual self, and in which all men share". As we have noted in our first chapter, Kathleen Raine 35 recognizes too in Blake's Divine Humanity "the Self of the Upanishads known to mystics both Platonic and ...
... detrimental to the free growth of other poetic personalities. The danger of imitating the stronger personality is very real. But Sri Aurobindo has always encouraged free flowering of each individual self. When Sethna wanted to compare his achievement with the achievements of other poet, Sri Aurobindo admonished him: "What have you to do with what others have achieved? If you write poetry ...
... junction of his eye-brows he said, "Whenever the mind ascends here, the embodied soul has a vision of the supreme Self and goes into Samadhi. Then there exists but a thin transparent veil between the individual Self and the Supreme. And there the soul experiences in this way —' Speaking so far, as soon as he started detailing the realisation of the Supreme, he went into the Samadhi state. After coming out ...
... not only to bring the various parts of our being - often in conflict with one another - into a general harmony. The process would also be to introduce into our being a principle wider than the individual self. Something of the universal, the cosmic, has to come into play, taking us out of our limited ego. In this way something more than a concord within us would be achieved. There would be a happy ...
... the heart-lotus. The Sahasradala has also a spiritual reality centred within it, the Atman or Supreme Self. More accurately, we may say that this Chakra is the seat of the Jivatman, the true individual Self which is not divided from the universal and infinite Atman - the free Jivatman, whose delegate in the evolution is .the psyche. The attention Sri Aurobindo paid to the Chakras in his writings ...
... may bring us near to the Light, but its limited clarity falls away from us when we enter into the luminous body of the divine Nature. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 660 ...man as the individual self, owing to his ignorant self-identification with the work and the becoming, as if that were all his soul and not a power of his soul, a power proceeding from it, is bewildered by the ego-sense ...
... in the universe. Whereas the Universal Self or Atman stands above the evolutionary process and is unaffected by it, the psyche is the element that develops in the evolution and grows into an individual self called the psychic being. It is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul (psychic being) and the pure Atman, self or spirit. The pure self is unborn ...
... years—talking of the Supermind's coming and prepared for it, as it were— yet they did not notice it when it came! The manifestation was a cosmic phenomenon and I took time to return to this individual self and it was difficult to speak the first word. In half an hour I formulated the whole experience and wrote it down. May 22,1956 THE MOTHER: Things are now all changed for me—radically ...
... feel in the infinite Spirit or Self-existence a Presence or a Being, a Consciousness that determines—that is what we speak of as the Divine—not a separate person, but the one Being of whom our individual self is a portion or a vessel. But it is not necessary for everybody to regard it in that way. Supposing it is the impersonal Self of all only, yet the Upanishad says of this Self and its realisation: ...
... the words turn back without attaining and mind also turns baffled: who knows the Bliss of the Eternal, he fears not for aught in this world or elsewhere.19 2. In the second process, the individual self, which always subsists behind our desire self or egoistic self asserts itself; it arrives at or takes advantage of that state of the mind where it can strive towards That; the mind attempts to ...
... and of all works as simply the Operation of universal Force of the prakriti. In the last step, the Supreme Self is to be seen as the governor of prakriti, both lower and higher, of whom the individual self is a partial manifestation, by whom all works are directed, in a perfect transcendence through Nature. Here whole being has to be surrendered to the Supreme and the whole consciousness raised up ...
... and karma, but by deriving deeper truths of that heritage and developing new knowledge and a new fund of wisdom. 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 ...
... the words turn back without attaining and mind also turns baffled: who knows the Bliss of the Eternal, he. fears not for aught in this world or elsewhere." 54 2. In the second process, the individual self behind our desire-self or egoistic self asserts itself; it arrives at or takes advantage of that state of the mind where it can attain to That; the mind attempts to lift to That, and although it ...
... profounder depths than the subliminal consciousness, are other than our body, life and mind, and it is they that support our individual life , mind and body. The psychic entity is the deputy of the individual self, jivatman, and it is a spark of the divine fire and divine love which are operations of the principle of Ananda, which is itself the union of Sat and Chit, the two other elements of Sachchidananda ...
... also speaks of a being who is no bigger than the thumb (soul or psychic being) and as Sri Aurobindo points out, that being (that is no bigger than the thumb) is a delegate of the Jiva or of the Individual Self. According to the Katha Upanishad, that, who is no bigger than the thumb, is also immortal, and it is the one who travels as an individual traveler, who enters into the human body at birth and ...
... always a mysterious word. Sri Aurobindo: Well, the determination of human life and events is a mysterious thing. Can't help that, you know. Fate is composed of many things - Cosmic Will + individual self-determination + play of forces -I- Karma -t-x + y + z-i-a + b + c ad infinitum. 38 NB: Some say that the Divine's Way would have been to try to turn the wife also this way or to help ...
... of its being and be the instrument of a Divine Manifestation and work here. I am told that the psychic even when it unites itself with the Mother keeps its separation. It is the individual self that merges entirely like a drop of water in the sea. If the psychic unites itself, it cannot be separated; separation is non-union. The psychic realisation is one of diversity in unity ...
... mind makes all the difference: it brings in the ignorance, selfishness, blind passion—a possession by the dark f9rces of atavism that makes the mischief. We ask for freedom, liberty of the individual, self-determination—well and good. But that does not mean the licence to do as one pleases, impelled by one's irrational idiosyncrasies. The individual must be truly individual, not a fractional being ...
... Now this flowering of the psychic personality is due to an especial Descent, the descent of a Person from another level of consciousness. That Person (or Superperson) is the j īvatman, the Individual Self, the central being of each individual formation. The Jivas are centres of multiplicity thrown up in the bosom of the infinite Consciousness: it is the supreme Consciousness eddying in unit formations ...
... opposition to others is the Maya of which the Vedanta speaks. It is real so long as it is taken to be real. But it possesses no inherent or absolute reality. A re-orientation or a remodelling of the individual self is the way towards reestablishing in the forefront, the background unity. Egoism, as it happens to be now, is the broken-up and scattered unity. Polarisation means precisely re-ordering and re ...
... a region where one meets one's soul. The individual seems always to precede the society. What begins in and with the individual is spread abroad and established in wide commonalty. But this individual self-concentration does not mean that one should withdraw from the world and its activities and sit and settle within oneself, apart and aloof. It does not mean while you are in prison, to accept i ...
... seeking an unhampered play and fulfilment in our life. It is the self-expressive élan of the fire and force of our being—the central will, one yet multiple, and attuned to, or more precisely, an individual self-formation of, the universal divine Will. To destroy the distortions and preserve the will, the real motive power of our swabhāva, and unite it with the self-revealing divine Will, is then the ...
... knowledge one understands the knowledge of the individual soul or self, ātmajñāna . "Know thyself" is considered the highest counsel of wisdom. In Sânkhya, knowledge of the purusa or the individual self is regarded as the ultimate knowledge. Jainism, taking the Sânkhya, standpoint, preaches as the highest knowledge kevlajñāna or knowledge of the naked soul, divested of all kârmic covering and ...
... of his nature widens out into a vast cosmocity of being and of nature. He can even rise to the supra-cosmic, the Transcendent and by an act of supreme surrender bring down into his apparently individual self, the Transcendent being and his Divine Power. This would be possible when his nature rejects the attraction of the lower life of darkness and ignorance, rejects the false puppet self,—the ego, ...
... wall that separates the psychic being from the outer nature, so also there is a wall above the head. You break the wall or, what is called the lid, and you feel yourself as the Infinite, and your individual self in the Infinite. That opening can be either vertical or horizontal. This realization makes dynamic liberation possible, – not merely a liberation of Laya. Disciple : Is it true that illness ...
... Infinite." If you take only the first manifestation of the Supreme, you get an imperfect idea of the Reality. You must take all the three poises together. Unless and until the One is known as the Individual Self of the One, the Cosmic Self of the All, and the Transcendent above with individual and the All you have not got the right perspective of the Truth-consciousness. Truth-consciousness is itself at ...
... Two-in-One: Pure Existence and Power of Consciousness, or 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 laws of nature which are the laws of God, and be broken to pieces. This then is our object and by what means do we seek it? We seek it by feeling our separateness and pushing forward our individual self-fulfilment by what we call Swadeshi—Swadeshi in commerce and manufacture, in politics, in education, in law and administration, in every branch of national activity. No doubt this means independence ...
... the conscious sacrifice of one's own individual desires. It is an inferior and semi-savage morality which gives up only to gain and makes selfishness the basis of ethics. To give up one's small individual self and find the larger self in others, in the nation, in humanity, in God, that is the law of Vedanta. That is India's message. Only she must not be content with sending it, she must rise up and live ...
... own Knowledge & all that is unknown to our Knowledge. What matters in the universe is the play of the All in Itself & its ultimate self-fulfilment in Knowledge, Bliss & Being. There is an individual self-fulfilment, a collective, a cosmic & an extra-cosmic. We may move towards any of these ultimate affirmations, but he who accepts them all & harmonises them, is the highest human expression of ...
... sense to the divine Sense, the life to the divine Life and by receptivity to constant touches and visitings of the highest be transfigured into a reflection of these transcendences; but also the individual self must through the mind's aspiration upwards, through upliftings of itself beyond, through constant memory of the supreme Reality in which during these divine moments it has lived, ascend finally ...
... Brahman. Cutting through all tremors & hesitations, scorning all doubt or reserve it announces with a hardy & daring incisiveness the complete identity of man & God. This is its gospel that the individual Self who seems so limited, thwarted, befouled, shamed & obscured with the bonds & shackles, the mud & stains of earthly life and the pure, perfect and illimitable Being who possesses & supports all ...
... mind, body & vital being, of which we are conscious now & here, or, on the contrary, stands back in the divine unity of Sacchidananda, it enjoys either of two states of conscious experience, the individual self-consciousness of the separate Jivatman or the universal divine consciousness of the Jivatman merged or dwelling in God. In the former & inferior self-poise, our status is that of a separate soul ...
... fixed by the wise in the Shastra is the right thing to observe, the true rule of action. First in the web of Dharma comes the social law; for man's life is only initially for his vital, personal, individual self, but much more imperatively for the community, though most imperatively of all for the greatest Self one in himself and in all beings, for God, for the Spirit. Therefore first the individual must ...
... must have its own awareness of its self-truth and its self-nature; or, if we prefer so to put it, the Being in that determination must be so self-aware. Spiritual individuality means that each individual self or spirit is a centre of self-vision and all-vision; the circumference—the boundless circumference, as we may say,—of this vision may be the same for all, but the centre may be different,—not located ...
... teaching, see Appendix II: The Three Instruments of the Teacher. × Soul, representative of the true individual Self; See pp. 78, 79. × Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 24, p. 1297. ...
... are not really bound. 160 The aim of this yoga is, first, to enter into the divine consciousness by merging into it the separative ego (incidentally, in doing so one finds one's true individual self which is not the limited, vain and selfish human ego but a portion of the Divine) and, secondly, to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth to transform mind, life and body. All else ...
... spiritual individual is one with the cosmic and transcendent Reality. Page 398 ...what do we mean by the individual? What we usually call by that name is a natural ego... but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting ...
... bridge that division up to the point at which separative Mind enters into Overmind and becomes a part of its action; it can unite individual mind with cosmic mind on its highest plane, equate individual self with cosmic self and give to the nature an action of universality; but it cannot lead Mind beyond itself, and in this world of original Inconscience it cannot dynamise the Transcendence: for ...
... experience. The Jivatman or spirit, as it is usually called in English, is self-existent above the manifested or instrumental being — it is superior to birth and death, always the same, the individual Self or Atman. It is the eternal true being of the individual. The soul is a spark of the Divine which is not seated above the manifested being, but comes down into the manifestation Page ...
... in fact, it is only the conscious continuity of the flux that creates a phenomenon of self and a phenomenon of personality. In the Adwaitic Mayavada there was the admission of a Jivatman, an individual self, and even of a real self of the individual; 3 but this concession to our normal language and ideas ends by being only apparent. For it turns out that there is no real and eternal individual ...
... Man. In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic and governing impulse. The characteristic energy of bodily Life is not so much in progress as in persistence, not so much in individual self-enlargement as in self-repetition. There is, indeed, in physical Nature a progression from type to type, from the vegetable to the animal, from the animal to man; for even in inanimate Matter Mind ...
... the Will which is above Nature, complete. Well, the determination of human life and events is a mysterious thing. Can't help that, you know. Fate is composed of many things—Cosmic Will + individual self-determination + play of forces + Karma + x + y + z + a + b + c ad infinitum. Predictions and Prophecy I am afraid I have no great confidence in Cheiro's ideas and prophecies—some prophecies ...
... bridge that division up to the point at which separative Mind enters into Overmind and becomes a part of its action; it can unite individual mind with cosmic mind on its highest plane, equate individual self with cosmic self and give to the nature an action of universality; but it cannot lead Mind beyond itself, and in this world of original Inconscience it cannot dynamise the Transcendence: for it ...
... mass mind. The thinker is the individual; it is he who calls out and throws into forms that which would otherwise remain subconscious in the amorphous human whole. The moral striver is also the individual; self-discipline, not under the yoke of an outer law, but in obedience to an internal light, is essentially an individual effort. But by positing his personal standard as the translation of an absolute ...
... 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 distinguished or separate, but in a certain ...
... Page 586 determinations of its being, it cannot either be ignorant of things, of their true nature, of their true action. But though we say that we are That, that the Jivatman or individual self is no other than the Paramatman, no other than the Absolute, yet we are certainly ignorant both of ourselves and things, from which this contradiction results that what must be in its very grain ...
... mind's limitations and from the mental instrumentation. The development of an other instrumentation has begun, but has yet to become total and effective; it has besides to cease to be a purely individual self-creation in an original Ignorance, something supernormal to Page 923 earth-life that must always be acquired as an individual achievement by a difficult endeavour. It must become the ...
... the Purusha, the complete domination of Prakriti and subjection of the soul to Nature. The soul does not know itself, it only knows, if anything, the workings of Prakriti. The emergence of the individual self-conscious soul in Man does not of itself abrogate these primary relations of ignorance and subjection. For this soul is living on a material plane of existence, a poise of Prakriti in which matter ...
... only be mental or material contact. From material contact nothing but animal feelings of passion & hatred can arise; from mental contact repulsion is as likely to arise as attraction. A separate individual Self will live its own life, pursue its own gratification or its own salvation; it can have no ground, no impulse to love another as itself, because it cannot feel that the other is itself. The Vedanta ...
... transcendent divine Becoming, that of the Ishwara, madbhāvaḥ . In this relation of the divine bhāva to the svabhāva and of the svabhāva to the superficial bhāvāḥ , of the divine Nature to the individual self-nature and of the self-nature in its pure and original quality to the phenomenal nature in all its mixed and confused play of qualities, we find the link between that supreme and this lower existence ...
... spirit in 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 ...
... of our self-determination with the common law of mutuality, where they begin to become one. It signifies in fact the discovery of an inner and larger self other than the mere ego, in which our individual self-fulfilment no longer separates us from others but at each step of our growth calls for an increasing unity. But it is from the self-determination of the free individual within the free collectivity ...
... principle can rightly stand in that way isolated and solely dominant in the complicated web of life and, if we so treat it, it gets falsified in its meaning and loses much of its virtue. Moreover, individual self-determination must harmonise with a common self-determination, freedom must move in the frame of unity or towards the realisation of a free unity. And it may readily be conceded to the opportunist ...
... to grief, spiritually and otherwise. The aim of this Yoga is, first, to enter into the divine consciousness by merging into it the separative ego (incidentally, in doing so one finds one's true individual self which is not the limited, vain and selfish human ego but a portion of the Divine) and, secondly, to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth to transform mind, life and body. All else ...
... in the infinite Spirit or Self of existence a Presence or a Being, a Consciousness that determines—that is what we speak of as the Divine,—not a separate Person, but the one Being of whom our individual self is a portion or a vessel. But it is not necessary for everybody to regard it in that way. Supposing it is the impersonal Self of all only, yet the Upanishad says of the Self and its realisation ...
... the feeling of the divine truth—then you cannot help feeling also that the whole world is ignorantly walking on its head with its feet in the air! You must learn to unite what you call your individual self with your true psychic individuality. Your present individuality is a very mixed thing, a series of changes which yet preserves a certain continuity, a certain sameness or identity of vibration ...
... limited personality and our obtuse egoism. We shall feel ourselves being swept along by this sublime current of true spirituality 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 ...
... Divine is always One that is Many. The individual spirit is part of the "Many" side of the One, and the psychic being is what it puts forth to evolve here in the earth-nature. In liberation the individual self realises itself as the One (that is yet Many). It may plunge into the One and merge or hide itself in its bosom - that is the laya of the Adwaita; it may feel its oneness and yet as part of the ...
... psychic being the separation that sharpens the duality is seen to be an illusion, an appearance and nothing more. 12 — The Mother * You must learn to unite what you call your individual self with your true psychic individuality. Your present individuality is a very mixed thing, a series of changes which yet preserves a certain continuity, a certain sameness or identity of Page ...
... Intuition —1) Insight without conscious reasoning. 2) Plane of consciousness between Illumined Mind and Overmind. See under gradations between mind and Supermind. Jivatman (Jiva) —the individual Self; the individualised self or spirit of the created being; the Spirit individualised and upholding the living being in its evolution from birth to birth. The full term is Jivatman—the Atman or eternal ...
... inner experience. The Jivatman or spirit, as it is usually called in English, is self-existent above the manifested or instrumental being—it is superior to birth and death, always the same, the individual Self or Atman. It is the eternal true being of the individual. The soul is a spark of the Divine which is not seated above the manifested being, but comes down into the manifestation to support its ...
... feeling of the divine truth— then you cannot help feeling also that the whole world is ignorantly walking on its head with its feet in the air! You must learn to unite what you call your individual self with your true psychic individuality. Your present individuality is a very mixed thing, a series of changes which yet preserves a certain continuity, a certain sameness or identity of vibration ...
... consciousness of 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 ...
... beautiful, the most perfect, the most disinterested, the most comprehensive, the best, before opening one's spiritual wings and looking at all that from above as something which still belongs to the individual self, in order to enter into true spirituality, that which has no limits, which lives in an integral way Infinity and Eternity. Page 409 ...
... cease from action. True, but action should not arise from personal desire, from private like or dislike, from any motive of the separate ego. There must be a vast equanimity and a surrender of the individual self to the Divine Presence, the Inner Lord, the Universal Oversoul. By a constant spiritual gesture of union (Yoga) with the dynamic Divinity (Ishwara) by the intelligent will (buddhi), the individual ...
... of attrition in the being, cannot but be disastrous for the prolonged maintenance of the embodied life. F. Sixth Factor: Imperfect Poise of Consciousness and Force The individual self or being is in essence one with the Divine and is secretly aware of its divine potentialities. In manifestation it assumes the aspect of Purusha or conscious being supporting the Prakriti or ...
... Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage. Precise enough? By the Self, I suppose, you mean the individual Self? Good Lord, no. I mean the Self, sir, the Self, the Adwaita, Vedantic, Shankara Self. Atman, Atman! A thing I knew nothing about, never bargained for, didn't understand, either. I had a ...
... about Fate which is always a mysterious word. Well, the determination of human life and events is a mysterious thing. Can't help that, you know Fate is composed of many things—Cosmic Will + individual self-determination + play of forces + Karma + x + y + z + a + b + c ad infinitum. Suicides and accidents are supposed to be due to hostile Forces. Not Forces hostile to our work, but hostile ...
... Just as there is a wall that separates the outer nature from the soul, the psychic being, so also there is a wall above the head. You break that wall or what is called the lid and you feel your individual self in the Infinite or you feel you are the Infinite. The opening can be vertical or horizontal—at various levels, the vital being, the heart, etc. CHAMPAKLAL: Is it true that illness comes from ...
... passage for reaching a state in which the true individuality can be attained. That individuality is vast, infinite, and can contain the whole world within itself. It is not the small narrow limited individual self in Nature. When you attain that true individuality you can remain in the world and yet be above it. You can act and still be not bound by your action. For getting rid of the separative personality ...
... of his eye-brows he said, 'Whenever the mind ascends here, the embodied soul has a vision of the supreme Self and goes into Samadhi. Then there exists but a thin transparent veil between the individual Self and the Supreme. And there the soul experiences in this way —'. Speaking so far, as soon as he started detailing the realisation of the Supreme, he went into the Samadhi state. After coming out ...
... that limitation; but even when it expands, it can never attain its ideal of universality. The ego does not correspond to what is experienced as the true eternal individual or individual soul or individual self. Pointing out that the true individual is nothing of the kind that obtains as individualized mental, vital, and physical being separate from all other beings and incapable of unity with them by ...
... principle and of all works as simply the operation of universal Force of the prakriti. In the last step, the Supreme Self is to be seen as the governor of prakriti, both lower and higher, of whom the individual self is a partial manifestation, by whom all works are directed, in a perfect transcendence through Nature. Here whole being has to be surrendered to the Supreme and the whole consciousness raised up ...
... The method is that of a synthesis of the development of faculties in their universality, symbolically described as the gods, and the discovery of the inner being, that which is deepest in the individual self. In this Upanishad also, the yoga-siddhi is described as follows: "The name of That is That Delight'; as that Delight one should follow after It. He who so knows That, towards him verily all ...
... worried about nothing else. A still higher attitude is a very simple one and may be very shortly expressed. The sadhak should not take any attack or difficulty as belonging to his individual self but consider it as moving in the general atmosphere. He should say to himself, "I am progressing as before, The Mother is carrying me on just as ever, whether I am aware or unaware of the fact ...
... opposition to others is the Maya of which the Vedanta speaks. It is real so long as it is taken to be real. But it possesses no inherent or absolute reality. A re-orientation or a remodelling of the individual self is the way towards reestabhshiag in the forefront, the background unity. Egoism, as it happens to be now, is the broken-up and scattered unity. Polarisation means precisely re-ordering and ...
... The true individual, the being who is capable of living and creating independently, is formed of a stuff that lies in these higher regions. It is only when one has found one's individual self seated in the Divine centre secret behind, organised around the centre all lesser movements, marshalled them according to an inner law, that one becomes master of one's environment and creative ...
... realities. The true individual, the being who is capable of living and creating independently, is formed of a stuff that lies in these higher regions. It is only when one has found one's individual self seated in the Divine centre secret behind, organised around the centre all lesser movements, marshalled them according to an inner law, that one becomes master of one's environment and creative ...
... The galloping deer now shows not his hooves. Bhushuk says: It is a thing that does not enter into the head of the deluded! NOTES 1. The deer is the individual self; his mate, the doe, is the secret deity, the conscious being in the heart, the immanent divine consciousness. 2. He gives up the joys of ordinary life. Page 259 ...
... Now this flowering of the psychic personality is due to an especial Descent, the descent of a Person from another level of consciousness. That Person (or Super- person) is the jivatman, the Individual Self, the central being of each individual formation. The Jivas are centres of multiplicity thrown up in the bosom of the infinite Consciousness: it is the supreme Consciousness eddying in unit formations ...
... where one meets one's soul. The individual seems always to precede the society. What begins in and with the individual is spread abroad and established in wide commonalty. But this individual self-concentration does not mean that one should withdraw from the world and its activities and sit and settle within oneself, apart and aloof. It does not mean while you are in prison, to accept i ...
... Now this flowering of the psychic personality is due to an especial Descent, the descent of a Person from another level of consciousness. That Person (or Super-person) is the Jivatman, the Individual Self, the central being of each individual formation. Page 52 The Jivas are centres of multiplicity thrown up in the bosom of the infinite Consciousness: it is the supreme Consciousness ...
... mind makes all the difference: it brings in the ignorance, selfishness, blind passion-a possession by the dark forces of atavism that makes the mischief. We ask for freedom, liberty of the individual, self-determination -well and good. But that does not mean the licence to do as one pleases, impelled by one's irrational idiosyncrasies. The individual must be truly individual, not a fractional being ...
... and otherwise. The aim of this yoga is, first, to enter into the divine consciousness by merging into it the separative ego (incidentaly, in doing so Page 80 one finds one's true individual self which is not the limited, vain and selfish human ego but a portion of the Divine) and, secondly, to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth to transform mind, life and body. All else ...
... The Supreme is at once the One and the Many; He is simultaneously immanent and transcendent; He is at once personal and impersonal; and yet He is beyond all the formulations. The Jivatma, the individual self, is a reality the same time distinct from, related to and one with the Supreme. Nothing exists but the Supreme. If He is all. He is all the contraries, all the opposites, even while He remains ...
... truth is not present. In the Supermind the essential truth is completely held, Truth of the total, that is to say, of the One and the Many, is held together in complete clarity. Here it uses the individual self-determination of all, self-determination—you have established a relation without being limited by any of the determinations; so a number of self-determinations are at work at the same time. In ...
... again he is able to identify himself with the content of consciousness of what, to him as an individual, are "others". He is able to know the content of consciousness which is not that of his individual self. That is one test. When we live in it, we live also in other minds, in other lives and we can produce effects on others and produce effect on the physical plane and mould events. One can take ...
... parts of the nature of man, released from the central control of the light of intuition and the coordinating force of the illumined intelligence, sought again, each in its distinctive way, its individual self-affirmation and self-satisfaction. Even when they turned towards spirituality, they pursued individual fulfilment, and cared little for a Page 31 total consummation. The Gitâ's ...
... 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. 40 The "personal effort" required is described more concretely and with much greater particularity in The Mother which Sri Aurobindo wrote almost immediately after going ...
... better! If we were all alike, it would be a frightful bore! That is not the point. What I felt in your place (apart from its qualities and beauty and all the external things) is probably an individual "self" a little stronger than the others, something that strongly delimits itself — and this too, is an indispensable quality, because what the Divine asks for is not wise and worshipping little sheep ...
... Power of ,Consciousness, Purusha and Prakriti, 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; but the more the Yogi becomes a power-house of the Supreme and a centre of the universal Existence, the more his ego will race towards Zero: When that has been ...
... The Light kept pouring for twenty minutes. Rather, I watched it for twenty minutes in meditation and then stopped the meditation.... I had to make a special effort to return into my external individual self and it was with great difficulty that I could utter a word. 11 Page 616 But the people at the Playground were as it were sleeping still on the lap of the inconscience, as though it ...
... consciousness and its values. Henceforth he seemed to breathe a superhuman air. Thereafter "The python coils of restricting Law Could not restrain the swift arisen God". His individual self became wide as the cosmos,—as the poet says "The soul and cosmos faced as equal powers." Henceforward the scope of his consciousness was widened without limits. Hereafter ...
... progressive evolution, an evolution which can lead man to his rightful happiness, does not lie in any external means, material improvement or social change. Only a deep and inner process of individual self-perfection can make for real progress and completely transform the present state of things, and change suffering and misery into a serene and lasting contentment.31 As Rainer Maria Rilke ...
... 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 self-projection or ...
... feeling of the divine truth — then you cannot help feeling also that the whole world is ignorantly walking on its head with its feet in the air! You must learn to unite what you call your individual self with your true psychic individuality. Your present individuality is a very mixed thing, a series of changes which yet preserves a certain continuity, a certain sameness or identity of vibration ...
... Advance no 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 ...
... worship and individual discipline & self-perfection, is and has always been the whole substance of the Hindu religion. Whatever we know of God, that we ought in every way to be and live, is almost the only common dogma of all Hindu sects and schools of every description. If then we know this of God and ourselves that we and He are one, So 'ham asmi, but divided by a movement of self-awareness which... becomes the supreme aim and meaning of every individual existence. Nothing connected only with the movement of division can be of any moment to us, neither our bodily life and health, nor our Page 421 family welfare, nor our communal wellbeing compared with this immense self-fulfilment; they can only be of importance as means or movements in the self-fulfilment. If, farther, we know that by... consummation, he being one life with that divine movement called humanity, it must also be part of his self-fulfilment to pour whatever fullness of being, knowledge, power or bliss he may attain, out on his fellow beings. It is his interest also, for humanity being one piece, it is difficult for the individual to attain fullness of life here when the race creates for him an atmosphere of darkness, unrest ...
... the viewpoint of yoga, Self and Existence are identical. In Sri Aurobindo's words: "Our supreme Self and the supreme Existence which has become the universe are one spirit, one self and one existence. The individual is in nature one expression of the universal Being, in spirit an emanation of the Transcendence. For if he finds his self, he finds too that his own true self is not this natural p... moment. Transactional Analysis seeks to impart such an insight through an analysis of an individual's "transactions" or social interactions. Thus the aim of Transactional Analysis is to bring about therapeutic or growth-inducing changes in the personality by promoting the individual's self-understanding and self-awareness pertaining to the psychological states of Child, Adult and Parent as they determine... another and in subordination to what is regarded as the core of the personality, namely, the Self. Though Psychosynthesis is Page 54 avowedly anti-analytical, its methods, like those of the analytical and non-analytical systems, lead to a greater awareness of aspects of personality of which an individual is largely unconscious. Thus by means of various techniques, such as visualisation, guided ...
... kingdom or reign of the individual's own self. In effect, the world-empire or the imperial reign of the Spirit has three gradations. At the outset each element, that is, each individual human being (we limit ourselves to the human collectivity at present) has to attain svarajya, self-rule, a perfectly homogeneous integral spiritual whole in himself: then all such individuals should achieve integrality... integration means all individuals have one mind, one vital being, even one physical consciousness, not of course one material body but still a feeling of the' kind. One mind or one vital or one physical consciousness does not mean everyone has the same identical formations and movements in these respective regions, but all possess substantially the same stuff belonging to a self-same unit. A comparison... integration in the Divine world-empire comes when not only individuals but groups and collectivities find and establish their own selves – each its svarajya, and all combined in a yet larger and greater organisation: combined and unified they act in a unified and homogeneous living as individuals do in the world aggregate. Although the individual is the basic reality, aggregations and collectivities also ...
... independence and sought and fought for this independence but that could only be at the cost of the Heart. The calvary of the Divine lay precisely here: it is due to this sense of separation, an individual exclusive self-existence prevailing in his children, issues of his own body. The ¹ Virgil: Aeneid, Book II, v. 126 FaciliS descensus Averni... Page 73 ... beginning, we may now say, long long ago, for it is now almost half a century ago, the Ashram from its very start and quite spontaneously and inevitably grew into a community life. That is to say, the individuals ceased to have any personal possessions. Whatever they had belonged not to themselves but to the group, rather to the Master of the group, the Guru, to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo . Whatever they... necessary and what was luxury . We had to be sincere. She was generosity itself. Page 70 The life of each one was directly linked with the Mother. The relation between individuals was founded on the relation each one had with the Mother. It did not depend on one's liking (or disliking), one's attraction (or repulsion): but it was as necessitated by the need of the common life ...
... sake, and therefore sin does not touch you. It is only because of selfishness that sin touches you. If you realise that Narayana is in all, it follows that you lose the smaller, the individual limited self. You look to wider things. You see yourself in the family, in the community, race, humanity, and all things in the world. You forget yourself altogether. You work for the race and others, for ...
... independence and sought and fought for this independence, but that could only be at the cost of the Heart. The calvary of the Divine lay precisely here: it is due to this sense of separation, an individual, exclusive self-existence prevailing in His children, issues of His own body. The units in the cosmic body of the Divine in the Ignorance are indeed ignorant, and the force that compels them to be together... which it has been always aspiring for, but has never attained till now in an appreciable degree. Today the possibility is an actuality before us. We have assembled here so that with each individual contributing his mite of sincerity and efficiency, a combined endeavour may create a wide and secure opening for the new Power and Presence to come into its own and possess a home in the material... beginning, we may now say long, long ago, for it is now almost half a century ago, the Ashram from its very start quite spontaneously and inevitably grew into a community life. In the first place, the individuals ceased to have any personal possessions. Whatever they had belonged not to themselves but to the group, or rather to the Master of the group, the Guru, to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Whatever they ...
... consciousness concentrating on a Beyond as by self-enlargement through the sex-embrace and self-prolongation into the Page 68 future through the offspring of the sex-act. What is needed is not the mere suppression or quiescence or else ejection of sexuality. The need is also for a radical change in the ideal of spirituality. If the individual is to get out of the sex-clutch laid by the... two ultimately irreconcilable. The question arises: Is it wisdom to make a trenchant division in Nature? Surely it is not undivine, much less devilish, of Nature to cry for the finite individual's bodily self-completion and his conquest of death. The cry is at bottom a hunger for materialisation of the plenitude and immortality of the Spirit. It is a cry that cannot be facilely set aside. Out of... narrow frenzy of the genitals. And yet we must admit there is something in sex that has a basis of incontrovertible necessity in Nature. Earth-life is haunted and obsessed by the fact of the individual's limitation and death. Sex is an effort by the elemental energy in us to abolish them, an effort that has no direct success, since what Page 65 it achieves are fits of feverish blinding ...
... 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;... 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... the omniscient divine Force. It is, really speaking, a direct action of the Divine in and through the instrumental being of the liberated, egoless individual. It is, if we can so put it, a service of the Divine by the Divine Himself with the individual serving only as a fire-point of concentration and diffusion. The Mother calls it service, because it is an unerring accomplishment of the work of the ...
... evolution. It is the individual heart that by sublimating its highest and purest emotions attains to the transcendent Bliss or the ineffable Nirvana, the individual mind that by converting its ordinary functionings into a knowledge beyond mentality knows its oneness with the Ineffable and merges its separate existence in that transcendent unity. And always it is the individual, the Self conditioned in its... , that attains to the Self unconditioned, free and transcendent. In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can be any possibility of Yoga; there must be, as it were, three consenting parties to the effort,—God, Nature and the human soul or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal Page 31 and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to... 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. It is this truth which makes necessary to every philosophy of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme Soul or supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true is the ...
... takes place; self-identification of the soul with the ego is the means by which she induces the soul to consent to this action and accept these habitual limiting conditions. While the identification lasts, there is a self-imprisonment in this habitual round and narrow action, and, until it is transcended, there can be no free use by the soul of its individual living, much less a real self-exceeding.... his highest self, the real man or highest Purusha in him, which is free and master in its own inalienable power. He must cease to be the mental, vital, physical ego; for that is always the creation, instrument and subject of mental, vital, physical Nature. This ego is not his real self, but an instrumentation of Nature by which it has developed a sense of limited and separate individual being in mind... personality,—personality is a composition of Nature,—but a mental Person, manomaya puruṣa . We become aware of a being within who takes his stand upon mind for self-knowledge and world-knowledge and thinks of himself as an individual for self-experience and world-experience, for an inward action and an outward-going action, but is yet different from mind, life and body. This sense of difference from ...
... of the self: the community was the body of the creator Brahma, the people was a life body of Brahman in the samaṣṭi , the collectivity, it was the collective Narayana, as the individual was Brahman in the vyaṣṭi , the separate Jiva, the individual Narayana; the king was the living representative of the Divine and the other orders of the community the natural powers of the collective self, prakṛtayaḥ... neither primarily by the needs, instincts, intuitions welling up out of the vital self, nor secondarily by the constructions of the reasoning mind, but first, foremost and always by the power of unity, sympathy, spontaneous liberty, supple and living order of his discovered greater self and spirit in which the individual and the communal existence have their law of freedom, perfection and oneness. That... condition of man, individual and collective,—a condition typified by the legendary Golden Age, Satya Yuga, Age of Truth,—there is no need of any political government or State or artificial construction of society, because all then live freely according to the truth of their enlightened self and God-inhabited being and therefore spontaneously according to the inner divine Dharma. The self-determining individual ...
... act as a strong lever of ascent. The individual consciousness, breaking out of the ego-bounds, will soar and expand till it realises the Atman, the individual-universal Self, or Vishwâtman, the Cosmic Self. This widening may be felt in the beginning by the ego as a mortal wrench, w a stunning and disintegrating shock. It is this shock, this dazed sense of self-loss that makes the ego associate Page... Divine to conscious, multiple self-reproduction; but it is only a deceptive semblance, and not a fact. The normal human consciousness is an ignorant consciousness, seeking but not possessing know- Page 129 ledge,—it is not a representative of the divine Consciousness. The human being, therefore, though a developed individual, is not the perfect, divine individual, which it is his destiny... of luminous self- awareness and self-expression. Even having become many, the Divine has not yet become divinely many, which was His primal Will. For that supreme consummation and the ultimate goal of terrestrial evolution, man has to get beyond the ego and widen into infinity. The ego's work of separative individualisation done, it has to fade away, giving place to the true individual, the soul of ...
... true self, and then finding out the nature and function of the true spirit or true self which man is; he finds that he is not confined to the individual formula of his being. You take this size of man that is a particle of the best representative of man. If he realizes his true self with this big mind of Nature inside, then he finds that this self is not only here in the individual, this self is also... first three books of Savitri, roughly. The first five cantos in the first book deal with Self-knowledge, knowledge of the self, independent of mind, life and body. First, a divine entity that is possible to realize by evoking faculties which are dormant in men now. Second, when the self is realized the self is found to be, not limited to the egoistic unit or egoistic constitution in which it happens... an expansion in consciousness, it can go on expanding until this self that is here is also all and is behind all. What he does is that he expands when he realizes his true self here, he feels that it is not confined to this body and mind and life here, but that it is capable of an expansion to other levels of consciousness, that the self is in the body but the body is only" a small pedestal over which ...
... in the very nature of one's own individual being, jiva; sahajam karma is the action that is born from the operations of the Para Prakriti appropriate to the individual's specific work that is determined by Para Prakriti on account of the individuals inner place in the harmony of the totality of the world; it is that action which can become an instrument of the self-finding of one's true place in the... becomes the Brahman "brahmabh ū y ā ya” . 158 But the Gita opens up further possibilities of self-realization and self-finding. The individual, since it is an eternal portion of Purushottama,159 and also a manifestation of the higher nature of the Purushottama, Para Prakriti; 160 the individual has the possibility of recovering his true status and nature in Para Prakriti and also in arriving... 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, 141 affirms that the individual soul has ...
... Vyasa in this great creative endeavour; in it he did business with men and gods. To uphold dharma and social order is a working translation of the Gita's conception of lokasamgraha for the individual developing self-consciousness in the dynamics of the day-to-day. Even though noble souls may suffer in the process, that itself, on participation in the endeavour, becomes their reward. The gods and the... is indeed considerably more difficult than to bathe the style in colour and grace and literary elegance, for it demands vigilant self-restraint, firm intellectual truthfulness and unsparing rejection, the three virtues most difficult to the gadding, inventive and self-indulgent spirit of man. The art of Vyasa is therefore a great, strenuous art; but it unfitted him, as a similar spirit unfitted... to abandon his body and others are universal agents in the deep and occult play. There are conflicting forces, and there is fate, and there is the circumstance in the working of Time; yet the individual's free-will is the primary factor in moulding and shaping his destiny. Of course, very characteristically, Vyasa does not speak of these metaphysical factors in his little narrative, but it is ...
... Vyasa in this great creative endeavour; in it he did business with men and gods. To uphold dharma and social order is a working translation of the Gita's conception of lokasamgraha for the individual developing self consciousness in the dynamics of the day-to-day. Even though noble souls may suffer in the process, that itself, on participation in the endeavour, becomes their reward. Page 126 ... it is indeed considerably more difficult than to bathe the style in colour and grace and literary elegance, for it demands vigilant self-restraint, firm intellectual truthfulness and unsparing rejection, the three virtues most difficult to the gadding, inventive and self indulgent spirit of man. The art of Vyasa is therefore a great, strenuous art; but it unfitted him, as a similar spirit unfitted the... going to abandon his body and others are universal agents in the deep and occult play. There are conflicting forces, and there is fate, and there is the circumstance in the working of Time; yet the individual's freewill is the primary factor in moulding and shaping his destiny. Of course, very characteristically, Vyasa does not speak of these metaphysical factors in his little narrative, but it is neither ...
... us at the outset of his or her individual life story is microscopic and one sole cell. By that cell's multiplication, and by its descendents' coherence, each of us attains his or her final form and size. Each at every stage of that astonishing 'becoming' is never any less than a self-centred individual.... The embryo, even when its cells are but two or three, is a self-centred co- operative society... matter what happens, there is or there is not in a radical sense "a whole presupposed by the parts". At every moment the embryo is, in Sherrington's phrase, "never any less than a self-centred individual... a self- centred co-operative society which is familial and a unity - an organization of family cells, with corporate individuality." This individuality may find itself limited by external ci... levels, life's self-involution in a mode apparently the very opposite of its own nature and serving as a starting- point for that nature's slow difficult evolution to the surface and graded developing disclosure of typical supra-material characteristics. Finally, if the organisms constructed by life are each a self-differentiated unity, an organic whole that is everywhere individual in different ...
... of my self from the mind. I can easily enough place myself as inactive spectator of the movements of the individual being. In these conditions I exist nevertheless as a mental being, endowed with the `I ' and centred in the brain. But behind this mental self I can discern another state, free from all relation with the manifested activity. There lies my true self which uses the mental self as a window... its activities, is this Manomaya Purusha ?* *The mental Purusha or mental self Yes. Is the consent of the Purusha individual, is it not the universal which determines it? There is the universal Purusha as there is the individual Purusha, and there is that which transcends them both. This individual Purusha is distinct, though not separate — he does not feel himself separate —... such cases are rare. Generally, these are tendencies or perhaps it is a faculty or some more or less important remembrance. This divine aspect is, in short, the individual Higher Self? You are speaking of the jiva, the individual element which persists and presides over the reincarnations ? It is more than that. These jivas, mostly, except for certain very rare cases, are like emanations of ...
... others Secularism Self-help Self-discipline Readiness to Respect for all Self-support Self-respect cooperate religions Obedience Awareness of Appreciation of Universal, self Duty and dignity of other's culture existent truth loyalty individual Compassion ... largely learned from various sources: culture, family, group membership, and life experiences. Self-concept or self-image: a person's perceptions/feelings about himself or herself, which includes self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worthlessness. It is a part of the sub-conscious mind of an individual, which continues to have a significant influence on human behaviour. 3.1. PERSONALITY STRUCTURE... the individualism invoked is nothing more than an egoistic self-assertion of an essentially alienated and insecure individual. The true individualism refers man to his creative freedom, to his capacity to ignore the forces of propaganda and conditioning. It is a safeguard for his humanity. The true individual has Page 376 self-knowledge and has located his existence in the unity of being ...
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