... not assist me in the least—and it does not support your thesis either. Ramprasad is not speaking of an embodied, but of a bodiless and invisible Divine—or visible only in a subtle form to the inner experience. When he speaks of maintaining his claim or case against the Mother until she lifts him into her lap, he is not speaking of any outer vital or physical contact, but of an inner psychic experience;... love by turning human love towards the Divine. It made a strong and intense effort and had many rich and beautiful experiences; but its weakness was just there, that it remained valid only as an inner experience turned towards the inner Divine, but it stopped at that point. Chaitanya's prema was nothing but a psychic divine love with a strong sublimated vital manifestation. But the moment Vaishnavism... fixed faith in is the guidance of the Divine, his will to manifest to you or your capacity to receive him. It is this that the adverse attacks which began when you were on the threshold of the inner experience— as so often happens in the Yoga,—try constantly to fix in your brain. They want to have a fixed mental formation there, so that whenever you make the attempt there will be in the physical mind ...
... the intimations of supraphysical world realities which we receive in our inner experience and compare with it the account of such intimations that has continued to come down to us from the beginnings of human knowledge, and if we attempt an interpretation and a summarised order, we shall find that what this inner experience most intimately conveys to us is the existence and action upon us of larger... all those psychic phenomena which seem to be seen and heard by the outer senses and are not sensed inwardly through representative or interpretative or symbolic images which bear the stamp of an inner experience or have an evident character of formations in a subtle substance. There can, then, be various kinds of evidence of the existence of other planes of being and communication with them; objectivisation... that as it grows, man's mind enters into relation with new ranges of being and consciousness not at all created by him, new to him, already pre-existent in the All-Existence. In his increasing inner experience he opens up new planes of being in himself; as the secret centres of his consciousness dissolve their knots, he becomes able through them to conceive of those larger realms, to receive direct ...
... idea of what the inner experience was. That is why perhaps I have these difficulties. But perhaps this too was useful after all? Yes, as a preparation of the instrument. But what we are doing here is so different from what people are in the habit of thinking, even here in India, and so much more in Europe or in ... …October 1926 Mother : ... in the inner experience. That I... important. The receptivity is good. As soon as you are seated, the force descends and you receive it. What is missing is something in the consciousness. You do not get sufficiently absorbed in the inner experience. If that were so you would return with the full knowledge of what happened. Between your head and chest a line of light is set up, a column, but not round, a square column so to say, of gleaming... my consciousness often follows in its train. I go to and fro so to say between the inner and outer movements. I cannot remain for long united with the inner movement. But I hope that when this inner experience becomes more enduring, I shall become more easily absorbed in it. At present I have often the feeling of transparency. My mind becomes transparent and thoughts are like little centres of ...
... The Nature and Value of Experiences Letters on Yoga - III Chapter III Inner Experience and Outer Life Subjective Experience and the Objective Existence Experiences on the mental and vital and subtle physical planes or thought formations and vital formations are often represented as if they were concrete external happenings; true experiences are in... knowledge. Subjective does not mean false. It only means that the Truth is experienced within but it has not yet taken hold of the dynamic relations with the outside existence. It is an inner experience of the cosmic consciousness and the overmind knowledge that you have. The cosmic consciousness, the overmind knowledge and experience is an inner knowledge—but its effect is subjective... nature or the appearance of unyogicness does not necessarily mean that a person can do or is doing no sadhana. To change the nature is not easy and always takes time, but if there is no inner experience, no gradual emergence of the other purer consciousness that is concealed by all these things you now see, it would be almost impossible even for the strongest will. You say that first you must ...
... stages came to be called Hinduism, lies in the fact that it came to develop itself into a congregation of religions providing, at the same time, to each human being with his or her own method of inner experience. It began with the Vedas and developed various facets of spiritual experience, philosophical thought and systems responding to emotional and vital needs as also demands of the physical nature... The Hindu religious thinker has succeeded in spreading widely the idea that all the highest eternal verities are truths of the spirit, and that the supreme truths are fruits of the soul's inner experience rather than of logical reasoning or affirmations of credal statements. A permanent flow of thought in India has constantly given a message that there are no true and false religions, but... If we study the history of Hinduism, it will become clear that what has been emphasised most is the pursuit of the One eternal under whatever conception or whatever form, to attain to it by inner experience, to live in it in consciousness. One school or sect might consider the real self of man to be indivisible one with the universal Self or the Supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with ...
... highest eternal verities are truths of the spirit. The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul's inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple. And since intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature many-sided and not narrowly... intellectual or theological conceptions about the supreme Truth to be the one thing of central importance. To pursue that Truth under whatever conception or whatever form, to attain to it by inner experience, to live in it in consciousness, this it held to be the sole thing needful. One school or sect might consider the real self of man to be indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme... misunderstanding, denunciation and supercilious condemnation come at once to his rescue. The Indian mind on the contrary is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for a great force of intuition and inner experience had given it from the beginning that towards which the mind of the West is only now reaching with much fumbling and difficulty,—the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic vision. Even when it sees the ...
... often occurs, they are formations only, of a wrong or misleading or adverse kind, they have still their power as formations and must be understood before they can be rejected and abolished. Each inner experience is perfectly real in its own way, although the values of different experiences differ greatly, but it is real with the reality of the inner self and the inner planes. It is a mistake to think... rejected. Live in the inner consciousness which can remain in its own calm and light whatever happens outside. To remain within, above and untouched, full of the inner consciousness and the inner experience,—listening, when need be, Page 226 to X or another with the surface consciousness, but with even that undisturbed, not either pulled outwards or invaded, that is the perfect condition... the shantimaya Shiva. It was this that touched you (descending through the head) in this experience. For the rest it is a resumption of the piercing of the veil, the beginning of the power of inner experience as opposed to the lesser experiences of the surface, the opening of the inner being, which is necessary for bringing the Yogic consciousness. A certain amount of vital purification has taken place ...
... principle. But, for the full and perfect fulfilment of the evolutionary urge, this illumination and change must take up and re-create the whole being, mind, life and body: it must be not only an inner experience of the Divinity, but a remoulding of both the inner and outer existence by its power; it must take form not only in the life of the individual but as a collective life of gnostic beings established... of interests, is a partial and insecure superstructure. The spiritual consciousness, the spiritual life reverses this principle of building; it bases its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being, an inner sense and reality of oneness. The spiritual individual acts out of that sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the... ethical standards and a conformity to institution, ceremony and ritual. Religion so conceived can give a religio-ethical colour or surface tinge,—sometimes, if it maintains a strong kernel of inner experience, it can generalise to some extent an incomplete spiritual tendency; but it does not transform the race, it cannot Page 1095 create a new principle of the human existence. A total spiritual ...
... eternal verities are truths of the spirit and that the supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statements, but fruits of the soul's inner experience. They acknowledge that intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer aspects of the religion. They also came to recognize that since intellectual truth turned towards the infinite... conceptions to be the one thing of central importance. It allowed the development of varieties of conceptions and varieties of forms and emphasized the attainment of spiritual consciousnesses by inner experience. As a result, we find in the Indian religion, varieties of schools or sects developing and living side by side under a general consensus that spiritual realizations and spiritual praxis is the... change and divine integration. Thirdly, every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the yogic development, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. It is recognized that all life is a yoga of Nature and that yoga marks the stage ...
... to that may be limited in result to the inner experience without any transformation of the outer being." I do not understand. It is rather surprising that you should be unable to understand such a simple and familiar statement; for that has been always the whole reason of this Yoga that to follow after the Impersonal only brings inner experience or at the most mukti - without the action... 1should aspire to the Mother to know about her Force and how and where its workings are in me? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes - not to know with the mind only, but to feel them and see them with inner experience. Page 267 Finally I may quote a most enlightening answer to a question by me: MYSELF: When a sadhak does his work with the right attitude and calls ...
... visit after eighteen years. This was followed by about six more years of less intensive practice. These twelve years were the most difficult, yet at the same time the most fruitful in terms of inner experience. Tantra is basically a fusion of the three aspects of Joy (ananda or love). Knowledge and Power, i.e. the power and joy of effectuating knowledge in the creation, which is the Divine Mother... Tantra, instructed in Sufism, and guided through all these experiences by the Supreme Shakti we call the Mother. What I have learned from all these paths is that each approach leads to a particular inner experience, and that each experience contributes to a more total, complex and rich spiritual realization which can be a more solid basis for Sri Aurobindo’s yoga of transformation. In short, all these spiritual ...
... those psychic phenomena which seem to be seen and heard by the outer senses and are not sensed inwardly through representative or interpretative or symbolic images which bear the stamp of an inner experience or have an evident character of formations in a subtle substance. There can, then, be various kinds of evidence of the existence of other planes of being and communication with them; objectivisation... the reason and its logic or its judgment cannot give you the realisation of spiritual truths but can only assist in an intellectual presentation of ideas; realisation comes by intuition and inner experience. Reason and intellectuality cannot make you see the Divine, it is the soul that sees. Mind and the other instruments can only share in the vision when it is imparted to them by the soul and ...
... shall be for some time longer withdrawn in the practice of Yoga destined to be a basis not withdrawal from life, but for the transformation of human life. It is a "Yoga" in which large tracts of inner experience and new paths of Sadhana had to be opened up and which therefore needed retirement and long time for its completion. But the time is approaching though it has not yet come, when I shall have to... thought a physical something in him Waiting for and on the verge of spiritual awakening. I understand that he is waiting for intellectual conviction and to bring it some kind of assurance from the inner experience. To that also there is nothing to say. But the question is, and it seems to me the one question in his case, whether he will be ready to bring to the yoga the firm entire and absolute will and ...
... despondency trying to come up again and have its spell or its gloomy innings—that is why it is trying to persuade you that truth is on its side, that you have never had the least shadow of any inner experience and especially that Yoga must be a grim affair in which there is no place for music or literature. The first thing to do is not to open the door to these old visitors. It is better often to... half sleep or quarter sleep or even sixteenth sleep that you had; it was the going inside of the consciousness, which in that state remains conscious but shut to outer things and open only to inner experience. You must distinguish clearly between these two quite different states, one is nidr ā [sleep], the other the beginning at least of sam ā dhi (not nirvikalpa, of course). This drawing ...
... intellectual statements of truth. That is not truth to us which is merely well & justly thought out & can be justified by ratiocinative argument; only that is truth which has been lived & seen in the inner experience. We meditate not to get ideas, but in order to experience, to realise. When we speak of the Jnani, the knower, we do not mean a competent and logical thinker full of wise or of brilliant ideas... founders of great religious sects, immense moral & spiritual forces;—inevitably because Europe has made thought its highest & noblest aim, while India seeks not after thought but soul-vision and inner experience and even in the realm of ideas believes that they can & ought to be seen & lived inwardly rather than merely thought and allowed indirectly to influence outward action. This has been the mentality ...
... surrender to that may be limited in result to the inner experience without any transformation of the outer being." 1 I do not understand. It is rather surprising that you should be unable to understand such a simple and familiar statement; for that has been always the whole reason of this Yoga that to follow after the Impersonal only brings inner experience or at the most mukti. Without the action of ...
... the vital, for by doing that the emergence of the true consciousness becomes possible. But rejection alone cannot succeed; it is by rejection and by inner experience and growth that it is done. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - III: Inner Experience and Outer Life You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience. ...
... instance, that when necessary, the body will suddenly sit up straight—it comes spontaneously. As he said, the important thing is not the external frame but the inner experience, and if there is a physical necessity and your inner experience is entirely sincere, that physical necessity will come ALL BY ITSELF. 2 This is something I am absolutely sure Page 133 of. And he gave me his own ...
... Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. He 1 has emphatically declared it as something "simple and familiar" that the entire reason of his Yoga has always been "that to follow after the Impersonal only brings inner experience, or at the most mukti [=liberation]. Without the action of the integral Divine there is no change of the whole nature. If it were not so, the Mother would not be here and I would not be here... full-length biography and interpretation of Ramalingam by G. Vanmikanathan, 3 who argues that the Saint's celebration of a "golden body", won by him and enjoying deathless life or immortality, is an inner experience consequent on the soul's union with the Supreme and its liberation thereby from our doomed physical existence. Griffiths demurs to such a gloss which harks back simply to the famous Upanishadic ...
... eternal verities are truths of the spirit and that the supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statements, but fruits of the soul's inner experience. They acknowledge that intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer aspects of the religion. They also came to recognize that since intellectual truth turned towards the infinite... conceptions to be the one thing of central importance. It allowed the development of varieties of conceptions and varieties of forms and emphasized the attainment of spiritual consciousnesses by inner experience. As a result, we find in the Indian religion, varieties of schools or sects developing and living side by side under a general consensus that spiritual realizations and spiritual praxis is the ...
... some time longer withdrawn in the practice of a yoga destined to be a basis not for withdrawal from life, but for the transformation of human life. It is a yoga in which vast untried tracts of inner experience and new paths of sadhana had to be opened up and which therefore needed retirement and long time for its completion. But the time is approaching, though it has not yet come, when I shall have... thought, a psychic something in him waiting for and on the verge of spiritual awakening. I understand that he is waiting for intellectual conviction and, to bring it, some kind of assurance from an inner experience. To that also there is nothing to say. But the question is, and it seems to me the one question in his case, whether he will be ready to bring to the Yoga the firm, entire and absolute will and ...
... Supermind (except in some kind of trance or Samadhi) unless one has first objectivised the overmind Truth in life, speech, action, external knowledge and not only experienced it in meditation and inner experience. 25 February 1934 I sent up an article on your Yoga some time ago. You returned it without comment. I do not know whether you have gone through it and approve of its publication or not... Spark-Soul and Psychic Being The Jivatman, spark-soul and psychic being are three different forms of the same reality and they must not be mixed up together as that confuses the clearness of the 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 ...
... the intimations of supraphysical world realities which we receive in our inner experience and compare with it the account of such intimations that has continued to come down to us from the beginnings of human knowledge, and if we attempt an interpretation and a summarised order, we shall find that what this inner experience most intimately conveys to us is the existence and action upon us of larger ...
... not assist me in the least—and it does not support your thesis either. Ramprasad is not speaking of an embodied, but of a bodiless and invisible Divine—or visible only in a subtle form to the inner experience. When he speaks of maintaining his claim or case against the Mother until she lifts him into her lap, he is not speaking of any outer vital or physical contact, but of an inner psychic experience;... love by turning human love towards the Divine. It made a strong and intense effort and had many rich and beautiful experiences; but its weakness was just there, that it remained valid only as an inner experience turned towards the inner Divine, but it stopped at that point. Chaitanya's prema was nothing but a psychic divine love with a strong sublimated vital manifestation. But the moment Vaishnavism ...
... flowers means always the falling of the light of spirituality on the consciousness (the moon) and the descent of a psychic influence (flowers). These things are symbols to the mind, but in the inner experience they have a reality and can produce a tangible effect. Page 138 Some Symbolic Visions and Dreams Interpreted The depth of the sleep in your experience was intended to make you go... her presence and help which will draw you up and lead you to the top of the ladder. The separate images [ in a mystic poem submitted by the correspondent ] are very usual symbols of the inner experience, but they have been combined together here in a rather difficult way. The fire of course is the psychic fire which wells up from the veiled psychic source. The bird is the soul and the flower ...
... cessation of thoughts and other movements, was the coming of the state called "samadhi" in which the consciousness goes inside in a deep stillness and silence. This condition is favourable to inner experience, realisation, the vision of the unseen truth of things, though one can get these in the waking condition also. It is not sleep but the state in which one feels conscious within, no longer outside... half sleep or quarter sleep or even one-sixteenth sleep that you had; it was a going inside of the consciousness, which in that state remains conscious but shut to outer things and open only to inner experience. You must distinguish clearly between Page 254 these two quite different conditions, one is nidrā , the other the beginning at least of samādhi (not nirvikalpa of course!). This ...
... between your inner experience and a concrete realization in the world.' This is the number one argument of the hostile forces. I know it well—for millions of years I have been hearing them say the same thing over and over again, and each time I unmask them. It is a lie, it is THE Lie. All that seeks to establish a divorce between the Earth and the Spirit, all that separates the inner experience from ...
... This smile you will discover wherever Indians live in tune with their own historic genius — wherever the national consciousness is at its truest. True India is the life of subtle vision and inner experience to which the Divine is a concrete reality — a reality not only beyond the cosmos but also within it, permeating all things and beings and manifesting itself in a thousand different yet harmonious... reawakened national soul as a face and front of some universal Goddess-Power making for a many-hued profound national vitality as well as for a grand symphonic world-unity on a basis of actual inner experience of the one Self of selves. All those who intellectually and emotionally respond to this Presence in some mode or other and serve it through art, literature, philosophy, politics, social life or ...
... they say, "the most beautiful experiences possible within the four walls of the Ashram, but on the outer plane your life is spoiled, wasted. There is an abyss that you will never fill between the inner experience and the concrete realisation in the world." This is the number one argument of the adverse forces. I know it. For millions of years I have heard the same thing repeated and each time I have... have unmasked it. It is a falsehood—it is the falsehood. Everything that tends to establish a divorce between earth and the Spirit, is good for them, everything that separates the inner experience from the divine realisation in the world. But it is the contrary that is true: it is the inner realisation that is the key to the outer realisation. How can you expect to know the true thing which you have ...
... most extraordinary being who had assumed a woman's form in terrestrial history. The distinguishing feature was also the powerful sense of that form still permeating the atmosphere and the rare inner experience that overwhelmed those who were attuned to this perception. The Divine Light which the Mother had manifested during her life-time persisted even after she had her body. Under its guidance... Consciousness and Light directly into its cells. The next occasion on which we hear of something less than certainty is, paradoxically, in the very talk of 24 March 1972 telling us her inner experience of "a body altogether new", a subtle perfection of shape — "sexless ... very white... very slim... pretty... truly a harmonious form".¹ She exclaims: "If that were to materialise..." Apparently ...
... shall be for some time longer withdrawn in the practice of Yoga destined to be a basis not withdrawal from life, but for the transformation of human life. It is a “Yoga” in which large tracts of inner experience and new paths of Sadhana had to be opened up and which therefore needed retirement and long time for its completion. But the time is approaching though it has not yet come, when I shall have to... thought a physical something in him waiting for and on the verge of spiritual awakening. I understand that he is waiting for intellectual conviction and to bring it some kind of assurance from the inner experience. To that also there is nothing to say. But the question is, and it seems to me the one question in his case, whether he will be ready to bring to the yoga the firm entire and absolute will and ...
... subjective delusions without any truth or value. I suppose all spiritual or inner experiences can be denounced as merely subjective and delusive. But to the spiritual seeker even the smallest inner experience is a thing of value. I stand for the Truth I hold in me and I would still stand for it even if it had no chance whatever of outward fulfilment in this life. I should go on with it even if all... Certainly, I prefer that sadhaks should be reasonably considerate towards each other, but that is for the sake of collective life and harmony, not as a siddhi of the Yoga or an indispensable sign of inner experience. 143 [As for the other matter how can the écarts of the sadhaks here, none of whom have reached perfection or anywhere near it, be a proof that spiritual experience is null or worthless ...
... spirit to believe that the Supreme Being, who is the Supreme Value, is only a fiction of the mind. 8 The refusal to entertain the thought is not due to convincing argument, but to the demands of inner experience. The Ontological Proof, in its traditional form, represents an artificial way in which men sought to justify to themselves a faith, of the truth of which they felt sure on other grounds. ... experience which are manifested collectively in history, and also are revealed in personal lives. The one argument is mainly concerned with what is commonly termed outer experience, the other with inner experience: in the first case we have more to do with facts, in the second with values. But the one argument cannot be ultimately separated from the other; indeed the only hopeful method is to make them ...
... way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me... and I saw in his eyes that it was He. The two things clicked (gesture of instantaneous shock), the inner experience immediately became one with the outer experience and there was a fusion—the decisive shock. But this was merely the beginning of my vision. Only after a series of experiences—a ten months'... how for so long it could have been otherwise. Sakyamuni.¹ The earth was in pain, being shattered by the war. And to turn to the earth was to turn to the war. Recounting years later the inner experience of that war, Mother said: I remember quite well that when the war—the first war—broke out, each part of my body, one after the other (and Mother touched her legs, arms, chest), or sometimes ...
... fashion cool-grey clouds within my body, And weave your rain into a diamond mesh. The Universal Beauty dances, dances A glimmering peacock in my flowering flesh! Spring lives as a symbol of inner experience, universal spring,— The Spring-hues deepen into human Bliss! The heart of God and man in scent are blended... The sky meets earth and heaven in one transparent kiss. Simple, moving ...
... Even if, as is quite probable, we cannot in one birth attain to the fullness of this grand result yet it is clear that even a little progress towards it must mean an immense change in our life & inner experience and be well worth the sacrifice and the labour. As the Gita says with force, "A little of this rule of life saves man out of his great fear." If farther a man knows that all mankind is intended ...
... means of escape Page 498 by an ultimate act of knowledge, substituted knowledge of real self for Buddha's knowledge of non-self as the essence of that act & the true culmination of inner experience & meditative reason. Shankara like Buddha refuses to explain or discuss how active consciousness came at all to exist on the surface of a sole Self-existence which is in its very being shanta ...
... age of the Upanishads. The Vedantic seers renewed the Vedic truth by extricating it from its cryptic symbols and casting it into a highest and most direct and powerful language of intuition and inner experience. It was not the language of the intellect, but still it wore a form which the intellect could take hold of, translate into its own more abstract terms and convert into a starting-point for an ...
... those who came after them the Veda was a book of knowledge, and even of the supreme knowledge, a revelation, a great utterance of eternal and impersonal truth as it had been seen and heard in the inner experience of inspired and semi-divine thinkers. The smallest circumstances of the sacrifice around which the hymns were written were intended to carry a symbolic and psychological power of significance ...
... recurrent; it is the support of all the rest. The first age of India's greatness was a spiritual age when she sought passionately for the truth of existence through the intuitive mind and through an inner experience and interpretation both of the psychic and the physical existence. The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost, but rather always enriched it with fresh spiritual experience and ...
... disposal or by a careful dialectical scrutiny of the concepts of the reason or a mixture of the two methods. But from the spiritual view-point truth of existence is to be found by intuition and inner experience and not only by the reason and by scientific observation; the work of philosophy is to arrange the data given by the various means of knowledge, excluding none, and put them into their synthetic ...
... understand and deal with the suprarational; the suprarational is the realm of the spirit, and in the largeness, subtlety, profundity, complexity of its movement the reason is lost; here intuition and inner experience alone are the guide, or, if there is any other, it is that of which intuition is only a sharp edge, an intense projected ray,—the final enlightenment must come from the suprarational Truth-co ...
... profounder and infinitely more powerful. I have tried to take my music from Her. My music is my labour and my aspiration for the Divine and what I try to convey through it are the voices of my inner experience. My grateful thoughts are with Her who has been my Guide, Guru, Mentor and Mother. One day it was Her Light that sparked my heart, it is Her Light that has sustained its glow, it is Her Light ...
... of the traditional Indian paths of knowledge, such as Advaita and Sankhya, is not an abstract cosmological and metaphysical system but consists of psychological truths that appeal more to one's inner experience and intuition rather than to the speculative intellect. In Eckhart's teaching, to be present implies more than just becoming the observing witness. Presence, says Eckhart, is a state when ...
... that I should aspire to the Mother to know about her Force and how and where its workings are in me? Sri Aurobindo: Yes—not to know with the mind only, but to feel them and see them with inner experience. Finally I may quote a most enlightening answer to a question by me. Myself: When a sadhak does his work with the right attitude and calls down the Mother's Force into him freely ...
... Sri Aurobindo's yoga. Though Eckhart's teachings do not deal with philosophical questions posed by the intellect, they contain a wealth of psychological insights that resonate with one's inner experience and intuition. It is in fact the thoroughly psychological, experiential, nonmetaphysical, and dogma-free nature of his teachings that makes them most appealing. Page 7 The Egoic ...
... experience it is highly important to distinguish among different aspects of the Self, otherwise the nature of the Self is blurred and a confusion arises both in intellectual understanding and inner experience. The word 'Atman' like 'spirit' in English is popularly used in all kinds of senses, but both for spiritual and philosophical knowledge it is necessary to be clear and precise in one's ...
... Yoga, pp. 438-39 The Jivatman, spark-soul and psychic being are three different forms of the same reality and they must not be mixed up together, as that confuses the clearness of the 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 ...
... in which an individual transcends the limitations of identifying exclusively with the ego or personality. Transpersonal content also includes the mythical, archetypal, and symbolic realms of inner experience that can come into awareness through imagery and dreams." 40 According to Sri Aurobindo, in order to know what lies outside mental awareness and be able to distinguish among the subconscient ...
... Krishnaprem’s, and I understand he is now under the protection of Raman Maharshi. We can very well leave him there. Page 167 Your dream was certainly not moonshine: it was an inner experience and can be given its full value. As for the other questions, they are full of complications and I do not feel armed to cut the Gordian knot with a sentence. Certainly, you are right to follow ...
... the very moment you get inside yourself even as the outer man is very much the other way round — modernised, externalised, vigorously outward vital and knowing nothing of Yoga or the world of inner experience. I could see at once when I saw you that there was this inner Yogi and your former experiences here were quite convincing to anyone who knows anything at all about these things. When there is ...
... to mentality and exists, acts and proceeds in the fundamental truth and unity of things and not like the mind in their appearances and phenomenal divisions.” 32 It was this discovery, this inner experience and knowledge, that Mirra brought with her when she met Sri Aurobindo and discovered that he had the same realisation. In the West as well as in the East, at the same time, a new light had begun ...
... abruptly turned towards Nolini, who with some other adults also attended the classes: ‘Nolini, you will have to explain this … I don’t understand a thing of it. It does not correspond with an inner experience as far as I am concerned. I have never had this kind of experience, therefore I cannot talk about it … To make a division like that and to name the one, Purusha, masculine, and the other, Prakriti ...
... happen?” She replied: “Do you remember I promised in 1938 to inform you? I came now to fulfill my promise.”’ 45 Eighteen years later. The Mother has often emphasized that one should allow an inner experience to work itself out as quietly and undisturbed as possible, without wanting to intervene, to understand or to interpret it mentally. An immediate mental interpretation can but deform the experience ...
... H. B. of L., Max Théon had been ‘the group’s chief instructor of practical occultism … The H. B. of L. was an “order of practical occultism.” Its use of mystical techniques to open the way to inner experience was something of a novelty at the time. Most esoteric groups, including the Theosophical Society, were content to disseminate secret doctrines … The popularity of the practical approach of the ...
... ignorance of the spiritual realm and its phenomena and only show the incapacity of the outer intellectual reason to play the role you want it to play, that of a supreme judge of spiritual truth and inner experience—a quite natural incapacity because it does not know even the A.B.C. of these things and it passes my comprehension how one can be a judge about a thing of which one knows nothing. I know that ...
... I prefer that sadhakas should be reasonably considerate towards each other, but that is for the rule of collective life and harmony, not as a siddhi of the Yoga or an indispensable sign of inner experience. "And then how can the écarts of the sadhakas here, none of whom has reached perfection or is anywhere near it, be a proof that spiritual experience is null? You write as if the moment ...
... the reason and its logic or its judgment cannot give you the realisation of spiritual truths but can only assist in an intellectual presentation of ideas; realisation comes by intuition and inner experience. Page 206 Reason and intellectuality cannot make you see the Divine, it is the soul that sees. Mind and the other instruments can only share in the vision when it is imparted ...
... banquet.” Now he makes himself bold and asks him to show him his universal Form. No doubt he is present in essentiality and in every detail in this creation and there is nought but he,—as the inner experience recognises it to be so. But at this crucial stage for Arjuna that experience does not seem to be sufficient; it ought to become perceptible and concrete as a working proposition; it is necessary ...
... have the passing of the seen through the touched into the tasted. And to get this combination needs not only a fusion of the senses but also their turning subtle to concretise the realities of inner experience. On the non-mystical level, that experience may be romantic fervour or idealistic enthu-siasm. Or it may be creative art-frenzy: have we not Hopkins writing of "Sweet fire, the sire of Muse.. ...
... latter too are beautifully or powerfully vivid. Rather a vividness most revolutionary is at work in the Aurobindonian sensitivity - simile, metaphor, vision, intuition, all are of an unusual inner experience mostly beyond the classics. Sri Aurobindo's sensitivity is based on the classics in only one respect: it is neither morbid nor injudicious and has a certain poise and control even in the midst ...
... dynamically the Divine Truth in our day-to-day dealing with the physical world? This Truth has to become a normal active part of our bodily awareness instead of remaining a static supernormal fact of inner experience. A smiling equality of attitude as the wide background of the constant act of remembering and offering - such is the state in which we are expected to be on the way to our goal, the state best ...
... places at the same time; it is a substance that concretely expresses the divine attributes. The Mother did not live in a world like ours anymore since Tlemcen, there were no boundaries to her inner experience. But she now found that supramental substance in her body, which had become the body of the Earth; she saw that marvellous substance illuminating her body, sparkling like gold and diamonds. Million ...
... the chain of strict causality—as are also the results of the free will. (3) What is important is not the actual freedom of the will, but the man's consciousness of freedom. This creates an inner experience of conscious motive which again creates fresh motives and so on indefinitely. For this reason it is impossible for a man to predict his future action—for at any moment a fresh motive may arise ...
... frame, an architecture. The object here is not to amuse or entertain but the self-expression of an inner truth, a seeing of things and ideas not familiar to the common mind, a bringing out of inner experience. It is the true more than the new that the poet is after. He uses āvṛtti , repetition, as one of the most powerful means of carrying home what has been thought or seen and fixing it in the mind ...
... It is simply a question of "spiritual tactics" not a hard and fast rule for all in all states and stages. Why did Sahana find it necessary to stop? Because she was losing hold of her inner experience and thinking only of her novel. When I was writing that novel or even while busy with poems, I had often a curious experience. I used to feel an inclination to read a passage from Sri Aurobindo's ...
... surrender, there can be no transformation of the whole being. A surrender by any means is good, but obviously the impersonal is not enough—for surrender to that may be limited in result to the inner experience without any transformation of the outer nature. Passive or Tamasic Surrender Active surrender is when you associate your will with the Divine Will, reject what is not the Divine, assent ...
... fixed faith in is the guidance of the Divine, his will to manifest to you or your capacity to receive him. It is this that the adverse attacks which began when you were on the threshold of the inner experience—as so often happens in the Yoga—try constantly to fix in your brain. They want to have a fixed mental formation there, so that whenever you make the attempt there will be in the physical mind ...
... surface subconscious is only a transcriber. It is for this reason that the Upanishad describes the subliminal being as the Dream Self because it is normally in dreams, visions, absorbed states of inner experience that we enter into and are part of its experiences,—just as it describes the superconscient as the Sleep Self because normally all mental or sensory experiences cease when we enter this super ...
... and moral being in us is a greater divine being that is spiritual and supramental; for it is only through a large spiritual plane where the mind's formulas dissolve in a white flame of direct inner experience that we can reach beyond mind and pass from its constructions to the vastness and freedom of the supramental realities. There alone can we touch the harmony of the divine powers that are poorly ...
... creation of the ancient Indian thinkers and its truth is not at once obvious, because it was the result of long psychological experiment and profound internal experience. Therefore without a long inner experience, without intimate self-observation and intuitive perception of the Nature-forces it is difficult to grasp accurately or firmly utilise. Still certain broad indications may help the seeker on the ...
... Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His ...
... depends on the devotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity. This inner vision is one form of psychological experience; but the inner experience is not confined to that seeing; vision only opens, it does not embrace. Just as the eye, though it is alone adequate to bring the first sense of realisation, has to call in the aid of experience ...
... vital parts by purity, God-ecstasy, the love of God and men and all creatures into a thing of spiritual beauty, full of divine light and good, he develops into the saint and reaches the highest inner experience and most considerable change of nature proper to this way of approach to the Divine Being. But for the purpose of an integral transformation this too is not enough; there must be a transmutation ...
... epoch thought proceeded by other methods than those of our logical reasoning and speech accepted modes of expression which in our modern habits would be inadmissible. The wisest then depended on inner experience and the suggestions of the intuitive mind for all knowledge that ranged beyond mankind's ordinary perceptions and daily activities. Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal ...
... animal existence. All this infinite becoming is a birth of the Spirit into form. This is the truth, obscure at first or vague to the intelligence, but very Page 314 luminous to an inner experience, on which the ancient Indian idea of rebirth took its station. But the repeated birth of the same individual does not at first sight seem to be indispensable in this overpowering universal ...
... better—for it is very silly. As for shyness etc., it should be got rid of, but do not replace it by familiarity or overintimacy. Loneliness The inner loneliness can only be cured by the inner experience of union with the Divine; no human association can fill the void. In the same way, for the spiritual life the harmony with others Page 310 must be founded not on mental and vital ...
... of the nature. The other motive for anubhava is of a more general applicability; for in order to reject anything from the being one has first to become conscious of it, to have the clear inner experience of its action and to discover its actual place in the workings of the nature. One can then work upon it to eliminate it, if it is an entirely wrong movement, or to transform it if it is only the ...
... Certainly, I prefer that sadhaks should be reasonably considerate towards each other, but that is for the sake of collective life and harmony, not as a siddhi of the Yoga or an indispensable sign of inner experience. As for the other matter how can the écarts of the sadhaks here, none of whom have reached perfection or anywhere near it, be a proof that spiritual experience is null or worthless? You write ...
... that the reason and its logic or its judgment cannot give you the realisation of spiritual truths but can only assist in an intellectual presentation of ideas; realisation comes by intuition and inner experience. Reason and intellectuality cannot make you see the Divine, it is the soul that sees. Mind and the other instruments can only share in the vision when it is imparted to them by the soul and welcome ...
... cannot progress fully without it. In this Yoga some kind of action is necessary for all—though it need not take the form of some set labour. But for the moment progress through concentration and inner experience is the first necessity for you. This [ stream of thoughts ] is what we call the activity of the mind, which always comes in the way of the concentration and tries to create doubt and dispersion ...
... makes itself an instrument of the pleasure taken in this barren and harmful pursuit of the vital. Control of the speech, refusal of this disease and the itch of the vital is very necessary if inner experience has to have any true effect of transformation in the outer life. It is also better to be more strict about not talking of others and criticising them with the ordinary mind—not only in ...
... obstruct the sadhana. The mind must give up its insistence on its own ideas and the vital the insistence on satisfying its desires for the full quietude to come and for the permanent opening of the inner experience to realise itself. We shall put our Page 37 Force persistently for the removal of these two difficulties till it is done. No, there is a limit to the resistance [ of the physical ...
... Yoga is integral; so also to throw oneself outward and live in the external being alone is to be unbalanced, one-sided in the sadhana. One must have the same Page 246 consciousness in inner experience and outward action and make both full of the Mother. There should be not only a general attitude, but each work should be offered to the Mother so as to keep the attitude a living one all ...
... calling our help. At that rate hardly anybody could call for help. Almost everybody in the Asram except a few have this difficulty of the external consciousness denying or standing in the way of the inner experience and trying to cling to its old ways, ideas, habits and desires. This division in human nature is a universal fact and one should not make too much of it. Once the Peace Page 123 and ...
... of the inexplicable. It is only if you approach the Supreme through his double aspect of Sat and Chit-Shakti, double but inseparable, that the total truth of things can become manifest to the inner experience. The other side was developed by the Shakta Tantrics. The two together, the Vedantic and the Tantric truth unified, can arrive at the integral knowledge. But philosophically this is what your ...
... sadhak has to be very careful, for he may easily mistake the guiding of his own mind, ego or vital or the guiding of some inferior Power that flatters his ego for the Divine guidance. It is by the inner experience and consciousness that one knows a spiritual result—one feels and sees it happening. There are two kinds of knowledge—mental knowledge such as you describe here which is usually necessary as ...
... the recipient consciousness that varies Page 101 —in one the waking consciousness shares in the vision, in the other it is excluded for the sake of greater facility and range in the inner experience. But in both it is the inner vision that sees. The physical things 1 are simply an occasion or starting-point for the inner vision to work through the open eyes and bring in the significant ...
... otherwise, you must control it. Any separation made by it between the Mother and myself (like substituting my name for hers) must be discouraged—because when that happens, errors may creep into the inner experience. When I aspire to feel Mother with me and call "Mother, Mother", something in me calls "Lord, Lord" and I feel him near me! What is this you are doing, Lord? Probably I come to work ...
... "Ask for the consciousness of her force." Does it mean that I should aspire to know her consciousness and her force? Yes—not know with the mind only, but to feel them and see them with the inner experience. 18 June 1933 Page 230 My mind fails to make out the present state of the being. It does not understand what the Mother's Force is doing. Plenty of people progress rapidly ...
... and Difficulties Undeterred by Difficulty I suppose all spiritual or inner experiences can be denounced as merely subjective and delusive. But to the spiritual seeker even the smallest inner experience is a thing of value. I stand for the Truth I hold in me and I would still stand for it even if it had no chance whatever of outward fulfilment in this life. I should go on with it even if all ...
... conscious transformation, who are aware of the eternal and infinite life within themselves, in the depths of their being, must, in order to preserve this consciousness, constantly refer back to their inner experience, return to their inner contemplation, live in a sort of more or less constant meditation. And when they come out of meditation, their outer nature is pretty much what it was before, and their ...
... 31 August 1955 Mother reads from Lights on Yoga , "Work". Sweet Mother, here I did not understand "One must have the same consciousness in inner experience and outward action and make both full of the Mother." I haven't understood either. 1 Isn't there a clause of the sentence missing? I too haven't understood the structure of this sentence ...
... Soul and Psychic Being The Jivatman, spark-soul and psychic being are three different forms of the same reality and they must not be mixed up together as that confuses the clearness of the 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 ...
... in the Integral Yoga The Jivatman, spark-soul and psychic being are three different forms of the same reality and they must not be mixed up together, as that confuses the clearness of the 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 ...
... the door to the other approach. In this respect it is fatal. From my own experience, though, I could say to all those who believe EXCLUSIVELY in the spiritual approach, the approach through inner experience, that this—at least if it's exclusive—is equally fatal. For it reveals to them ONE aspect, ONE truth of the Whole—but not THE Whole. The other side seems just as indispensable to me, for when ...
... way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me... and I saw in his eyes that it was He. The two things clicked ( gesture of instantaneous shock ), the inner experience immediately became one with the outer experience and there was a fusion—the decisive shock. But this was merely the beginning of my vision. Only after a series of experiences—a ten months' ...
... and down—there was no end to it, and it was becoming more and more compressing. 1 It went down and down ... And so, physically, the body followed. My body has been taught to express the inner experience to a certain extent. In the body there is the body-force or the body-form or the body-spirit (according to the different schools, it bears a different name), and this is what leaves the body last ...
... sound-spaces with their vibration. Again, if he had written 'Quivering no longer with the cry of clay', it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image—not so to the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right ...
... mind has lost its limits and that it functions in a powerful immensity fraught with unfathomable suggestions. The rhythm fills out the meaning to a tense mystery breaking into a largeness of inner experience which is distinct both from the Classically Sublime and the Romantically Stupendous known to poetry so far. We have a grandeur of sense and sound sui generis. Take the line : Calm faces ...
... full-length biography and interpretation of Ramalingam by G. Vanmikanathan, 3 who argues that the Saint's celebration of a "golden body", won by him and enjoying deathless life or immortality, is an inner experience consequent on the soul's union with the Supreme and its liberation thereby from our doomed physical existence. Griffiths demurs to such a gloss which harks back simply to the famous Upanishadic ...
... some time longer withdrawn in the practice of a Yoga destined to be a basis not for withdrawal from life, but for the transformation of human life. It is a Yoga in which vast untried tracts of inner experience and new paths of Sadhana had to be opened up and which, therefore, needed retirement and long time for its completion. But the time is approaching, though it has not yet come, when I shall have ...
... the eternal Loveliness, the perfect Presence that glimmers out to us from beyond the all-too-human and to strive to catch a sense of it from the strangely glinting transiences in both outer and inner experience: this seems to me the life of the true poet. And here is at the same time joy and sorrow. The vision of Eden, however distant, and the discovery of its wandering reflections, its passing echoes ...
... glory immutable. Yet I am afraid you will see nothing save "abstractions" in a comparable snatch from Savitri which in fact is more shot with sight while treating a similar theme of inner experience beyond the common human range : In moments when the inner lamps are lit And the life's cherished guests are left outside Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs. ...
... have the passing of the seen through the touched into the tasted. And to get this combination needs not only a fusion of the senses but also their turning subtle to concretise the realities of inner experience. On the non-mystical level, that experience may be romantic fervour or idealistic enthusiasm. Or it may be creative art-frenzy: have we not Hopkins writing of "Sweet fire, the sire of Muse..." ...
... of lyric poetry. And she says that when she has stood upon a hill like God she has seen things which are inexpressible in language. Her central contention is: language cannot cope with exalted inner experience. The implication of "exalted" is important, she says she has stood like God; that conveys the intensity and the immensity of the experience of which she is speaking. It is as if she saw, for the ...
... or powerfully vivid. Page 57 Rather a vividness most revolutionary is at work in the Aurobindonian sensitivity - simile, metaphor, vision, intuition, all are of an unusual inner experience mostly beyond the classics. Sri Aurobmdo's sensitivity is based on the classics in only one respect: it is neither morbid nor injudicious and has a certain poise and control even in the midst ...
... interacting and counteracting mobility and stability is also hinted at. We are given simultaneously a satisfying sight and a felicitous insight. This is the function of all inspired poetry. We get an inner experience through an outer stimulus: our perceptions get subtilised. Without even a directly spiritual communication attempted we undergo an exquisite refinement which can prepare us for it. As a critic ...
... literary creed of a Zola with its insistence on crude raw life but the utilitarian habit of mipd of a Bentham. "Romanticism," he writes, "is withdrawal from outer experience to concentrate on inner experience", as in Blake or Shelley or "Cubist painting". But Lucas points out how it was Classicism which raised a clamour against outer experience if it happened to be of a Page 1 familiar ...
... from that time on he had the ability to anticipate an enemy's thought and actions. This sixth sense which only a few great masters actually manage to acquire, almost always goes with a deep inner experience which is difficult to describe. It seems that for a time, maybe a fraction of a second, the veil which divides the world of normal perception from that of profound reality suddenly ceases to exist ...
... sensible enough to see that that wasn't what she came here for. She didn't want to question everything and be satisfied in her limited intellect before she took the way of spiritual self-giving and inner experience. How did this 'fundamental calm" get established in her? It came of itself through the sincerity of her will to open and to live for the Divine—there was insincerity and ego on the surface ...
... critics give meanings to his poems which he never intended. He tells them, "They are simply poems. Why don't you take them like that?" SRI AUROBINDO: What I have described is a condition of inner experience. NIRODBARAN: Yes, but the symbols do stand for something, SRI AUROBINDO: I can't remember the poem, so I can't say anything. NIRODBARAN: You speak of a single-pointed star. SRI AUROBINDO: ...
... and reject the desires and wrong movements of the vital, for by doing that the emergence of the true consciousness becomes possible. But rejection alone cannot succeed: it is by rejection and by inner experience and growth that it is done. Compassion and gratitude are essentially psychic virtues. They appear in the consciousness only when the psychic being takes part in active life. ...
... feeling of bhakti, love comes. Page 5 A surrender by any means is good, but obviously the impersonal is not enough - for surrender to that may be limited in result to the inner experience without any transformation of the outer nature. Could you kindly inform me when you find my surrender is on the decrease? It is not a question of decrease, but of necessary ...
... community of spiritual seekers, as our Page 26 Ashram yearns to grow into, must reverse the ordinary principle of group-building and base its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being. An inner sense of oneness should be the binding element in the group-existence. To quote Sri Aurobindo again: "The spiritual individual acts out ...
... I took off, and obviously there would be no opportunity to sleep before I landed. My lack of sleep turned out to be the most-difficult and dangerous factor of the flight, but it resulted in an inner experience that seemed to penetrate beyond mortality. "There comes a point when the body's demand for sleep is harder to endure than any other pain I have encountered, when it results in a state of ...
... of the Vedic seers. It can be seen that the post-Vedic and later spirituality of Indian people was contained in the Veda in seed or in the first expression. The great force of intuition and inner experience, so evident in the Veda and the Upanishad, gave to the Indian mind the sense and reality of cosmic consciousness and cosmic vision. Perception of the One underlying reality, recognition of the ...
... certain occult phenomena, we seem to see and hear by the outer senses but which are not sensed inwardly through representation or interpretation of symbolical images which bear the stamp of an inner experience or an evident character of formations in a subtle substance. In the field of yoga and in the field of occultism, there are various kinds of evidences of the existence of other planes of being ...
... between the individual soul in its egoistic eagerness and the universal Powers which seek to fulfil the divine purpose of the Cosmos. The seer Agastya, at such a moment, confronts in his inner experience Indra, Lord of Swar, the realm of pure intelligence, through which the ascending soul passes into the divine Truth. Indra speaks first of that unknowable Source of things towards which Agastya ...
... door to the other approach. In this respect it is fatal. From my own experience, though, I could say to all those who believe EXCLUSIVELY in the spiritual approach, the approach through inner experience, that this —at least if it's Page 128 exclusive — is equally fatal. For it reveals to them ONE aspect, ONE truth of the Whole — but not THE Whole. The other side seems just as in ...
... At that time the vital demand was kept in abeyance at the pranam and the other part of the vital which wanted the inner contact and not anything else was able to act and open the being to the inner experience. When the physical inertia came and suspended the higher experience, the vital demand awoke, demand for the physical love and its satisfaction so the awakened inner part of the ...
... That state pulls me inward, plunging me deep into the peace and silence. It is all right. It is the fire of aspiration and purification with the beginning of the true inner experience which, if it continues, creates the Yogic consciousness and in the end replaces by it the ordinary outer consciousness. The central fire is in the psychic being, but it can be lit in ...
... mean that I should aspire to the Mother to know about Her force and how and where are its workings in me? Yes — not know with the mind only, but to feel them and see them with the inner experience. Page 169 The year 1934 I do not attempt anything and yet wrong suggest tions, ideas, etc., are failing away. Even my receptivity seems to be on the increase ...
... things, in their essential spiritual reality, under the figure or mode of beauty. Keats indeed spoke of truth being beauty and beauty truth. But there is a great difference in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty, unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein ...
... change and divine integration. Thirdly, every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the yogic development, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. It is recognized that all life is a yoga of Nature and that yoga marks the stage at ...
... seers. It can be seen that the post-Vedic and later spirituality of Indian people was contained in the Page 101 Veda in seed or in first expression. A great force of intuition and inner experience, so evident in the Veda and the Upanishad, gave to the Indian mind the sense and reality of cosmic consciousness and cosmic vision. Perception of the One underlying reality, recognition of the ...
... us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however, trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His ...
... evolution. Every experience and outer Page 27 contact with our world-environment, however, trifling or disastrous, is used as an occasion and opportunity for the yogic work, and every inner experience becomes a step on the path to perfection. 'And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, ...
... The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 6 EVER GREEN! When you have an inner experience, there is a natural tendency in you to have it again, to repeat it, and to repeat it, you go by the same way and in the same manner. When you sit in meditation, for example, you withdraw yourself from outward contacts and enter into a condition with which you have become ...
... Ananda plane; saccidananda has been their limit. But these Siddhacharyas of the esoteric cult have passed beyond the realm of Delight to that of Divine Love; this Love too has changed from an inner experience to a divine Passion and Joy in the physical body. In other words, they have arrived at the experience of bodily delight with the full consciousness of the heights, effected a unique marriage ...
... he and Upen who gave a characteristic stamp to Yugantar by their writings. His was the mind of a meditative thinker. His thought was wide in its range, rich in knowledge, he had insight and inner experience. And all this he could combine with a fine sense of humour which did not, however, as in the case of others always explode in laughter. Nor did his appearance belie his mental stature; he was ...
... of the inner situation: As soon as you are seated, the force descends and you receive it. What is missing is something in the consciousness. You do not get sufficiently absorbed in the inner experience. If that were so you would return with the full knowledge of what happened. Between your head and chest a line of light is set up .... ... this white light comes from Maheshwari, it ...
... closing the door to the other approach. In this respect it is fatal. From my own experience, though, I could say to all those who believe exclusively in the spiritual approach, the approach through inner experience, that this—at least if it's exclusive—is equally fatal. For it reveals to them ONE aspect, ONE truth of the Whole—but not THE Whole. The other side seems just as indispensable to me, for when ...
... her pithy utterances. "The Lord as electrical vibrations!" Our laughter swelled the sound of her musical laugh. It was during one of those 'reposes' that a young man was upset by an inner experience. To be upset always indicates a weakness in some part of the being. "I knew a boy in France who was a fine musician," said Mother. "He played the violin admirably. But he didn't have a very ...
... Dressed the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me, and I saw in his eyes that it was He. The two things clicked (Mother gestured), the inner experience immediately combined with the outer experience and there was a fusion: the decisive shock." Page 19 They talked that day a little. Mirra told Sri Aurobindo in a few words some ...
... is only slowly recovering the power to see through its folds; but they are for all that always valid and can be experienced today by any one of us who chooses to turn to the deepest way of the inner experience. Modern thought and science, if we look at the new knowledge given us in its whole, do not contradict them, but only trace for us the outward effect and workings of these realities; for always ...
... have followed—mystical perhaps but not necessarily more unsound than the insistence & equally personal standards of the logician & the scholar. And Page 274 for the rest, where no inner experience of truth sheds light on the text, to abide faithfully by the wording of the Upanishad and trust my intuitions. For I hold it right to follow the intuitions especially in interpreting this Upanishad ...
... Infinite. A belief in one Divine Being superior to cosmos who is all cosmos and who lives in many forms of godhead, is a hotch-potch, mush, confusion of ideas; for synthesis, intuitive vision, inner experience are not the forte of this strongly external, analytic and logical mind. The image to the Hindu is a physical symbol and support of the supraphysical; it is a basis for the meeting between the ...
... art and which I ought not to expect from its characteristic creation. And if I had steeped myself in this Renascence mind as in the original Hellenic spirit, I could have added something to my inner experience and acquired a more catholic and universal aesthesis. I lay stress on this psychological misunderstanding or want of understanding, because it explains the attitude of the natural European ...
... civilisation, because the difference between its standpoint and that of European modernism is deeper, its spirit unique and the rich mass and diversity of its thousand Page 73 lines of inner experience a heritage that still India alone can preserve in its intricate truth and dynamic order. The tendency of the normal Western mind is to live from below upward and from out inward. A strong ...
... calling our help. At that rate hardly anybody could call for help. Almost everybody in the Asram except a few have this difficulty of the external consciousness denying or standing in the way of the inner experience and trying to cling to its old ways, ideas, habits and desires. This division in human nature is a universal fact and one should not make too much of it. Once the Peace and Power are there, it ...
... true consciousness, be in contact with the Divine and let Him govern your action; and then you can act upon outer circumstances, even actions, and overcome outer difficulties. You must have the inner experience first before hoping to be able to [...] 1 something external. In fact everything is founded upon an awareness of the divine Consciousness, and unless this is done all the rest is uncertain ...
... again I have to give the impression that I don't know. ( Mother turns to Nolini. ) Nolini, explain this. ( Laughter ) As for me, I understand nothing at all of this, it does not correspond to any inner experience for me, I have never had this experience; consequently, I cannot speak about it. If Mother says that Mother does not know, then I must say I am ignorant! (Laughter) The Indian concept ...
... e your experience; immediately your old mind has come between the truth and you and the thought and expression are wrong and confused and quite full of errors. It is better to wait, to gather inner experience, to allow the sense of the truth to grow in you—in that way, the time will sooner come when a true supramental revelation (and not the mental attempt at the thing) can find its exact thought and ...
... doubt or attraction to the old life—family, friends etc. The only one of these things that can act in your case is this doubt of your own capacity. As I have told you, the capacity for having inner experience—and that is the one thing all sadhaks must have or develop—this you have, for it showed itself clearly. The rest does not depend on personal capacity, but on reliance and opening to the Mother's ...
... education and wrote rather clumsy French, who had not developed her imagination and had absolutely no literary sense: that seemed to be among the possibilities she did not have. Well, when she had the inner experience of contact with her psychic being, and as long as the contact was living and very present, she wrote admirable things. When she fell back from that state into an ordinary one, she could not even ...
... growing spiritually in devotion, obedience, self-offering to the Mother, not insisting on himself, his ideas, his feelings and preferences. To be able to do that makes the consciousness ready for inner experience and progress in sadhana. I have tried to explain what the Mother wants and why she wants it. She wants you to do her work quietly, taking all inconveniences, defects or difficulties quietly ...
... Sadhana - for our Yoga is integral; so also to throw oneself outward and live in the external being alone is to be unbalanced, one-sided in the Sadhana. One must have the same consciousness in inner experience and outward action and make both full of the Mother. * To keep up work helps to keep up the balance between the internal experience and the external development; otherwise one-sidedness ...
... against the divine. The Mother Questions and Answers (1929 - 1931): 7 April 1929 … in order to reject anything from the being one has first to become conscious of it, to have the clear inner experience of its action and to discover its actual place in the workings of the nature. One can then work upon it to eliminate it, if it is an entirely wrong movement, or to transform it if it is only the ...
... ethical standards and a conformity to institution, ceremony and ritual. Religion so conceived can give a religio ethical colour or surface tinge,-sometimes, if it maintains a strong kernel of inner experience, it can generalize to some extent an incomplete spiritual tendency; but it does not transform the race, it cannot create a new principle of the human existence. A total spiritual direction given ...
... Anarchy, a tradition universal in ancient myth and in religion and common to all systems of occult knowledge. The theory of this traditional knowledge is perfectly rational and verifiable by inner experience, and it imposes itself if we admit the supraphysical and do not cabin ourselves in the acceptation of material being as the only reality. As there is a cosmic Self and Spirit pervading and upholding ...
... the rest. The Page 41 first age of India's greatness was a spiritual age when she sought passionately for the truth of existence through the intuitive mind and through an inner experience and interpretation both of the psychic and the physical existence. The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost, but rather always enriched it with fresh spiritual experience and ...
... follow the path of the intellect may have a very high and true conception; they may have all the information about the true life, the life One with Thee, but they do not know it; they have no inner experience of that life and are ignorant of all contact with Thee. These men whose knowledge is intellectual and whose action is confined to a construction which they believe to be the best, are the most ...
... great intensity, one is able to remain immobile and receive what one can without being knocked over. But there is not one being in a million who can do it. Only those who have had a foretaste of inner experience can know what this means. But even if you enter consciously into the psychic, it is dazzling; and it is within your reach because it is your own psychic being, and yet it is so different from ...
... cause of all suffering. Ever since division began and creation lost its direct contact with the Creator, ignorance has reigned, and all suffering is its result. All those who have had the inner experience have had this experience, that the moment one re-establishes the union with the divine source, all suffering disappears. But there has been a very persistent movement, about which I spoke to you ...
... realisation; they are not satisfied with going away into the clouds or into worlds where forms no longer exist. They must have their physical consciousness and even their body participate in their inner experience. Now, it may be said that the need to adopt or follow or participate in a religion as it is found all ready-made, arises rather from the "herd instinct" in human beings. The true thing would ...
... the other approach. In that way it is fatal. But according to my personal experience, I could say that for all those who believe in the exclusive spiritual approach, the approach through inner experience, at least if it is exclusive, is also fatal—because it shows them one aspect, one truth of the Whole, not the Whole. The other aspect seems equally indispensable to me, in the sense that while ...
... even as the outer man is very much the other way round, modernised, externalised, vigorously outward-vital (for the Yogi is inward-vital and psychic) and knowing nothing of Yoga or the world of inner experience. I could see at once when I saw you that there was this inner Yogin and your former experiences here were quite convincing to anyone who knows anything at all about these things. When there is ...
... important thing and more essential and effective than capacities. Also to get the consciousness to turn inwards, not remain outward-going is of great importance—to arrive at the inner call, the inner experience, the inner Presence. The help you ask will be with you. Let the aspiration grow and open the inner consciousness altogether. One has only to aspire sincerely and keep oneself as open ...
... given whether directly or in symbol or in poetic image is not the formal steps of the Sadhana, but Page 236 the strongly felt movement and the living outcome, the vision and life and inner experience, the spirit and power and body of sweetness and beauty and delight. The tracing of close and too meticulous bounds round the steps of poetic truth or turning of its wide continental spheres into ...
... but not of the greatest truths of the spirit. And this supernature remains in them a thing seen indeed and objectively real, but abnormal; but it is only when supernature becomes normal to the inner experience that it can be turned into material of the very greatest poetry. Coleridge more than any of his great contemporaries missed his poetic crown; he has only found and left to us three or four ...
... birth this time. According to the Puranic stories there must have been many Rishis who were far from being jitendriya, jitakrodha . But also there are many Yogis who are satisfied with having the inner experience of the Self but allow movements of a rajasic or tamasic nature on the surface, holding that these will fall off with the body. The Vedic Rishis were mystics of the ancient type who everywhere ...
... and without any possibility of fall or failure. It is also true that with many purification is the first need,—certain things have to be got out of the way before one can begin any consecutive inner experience. But the main need is a certain preparation of the consciousness so that it may be able to respond more and more freely to the higher Force. In this preparation many things are useful—the poetry ...
... emptiness with nothing in it, nothing in it either Page 75 good or bad, happy or unhappy, no impulse or movement. This neutral state is often or even usually followed by the opening to inner experience. There is also an emptiness made of peace and silence, when the peace and silence come out from the psychic within or descend from the higher consciousness above. This is not neutral, for in it ...
... own being. That was the knowledge which the ancients sought to express through religious and social symbolism, and subjectivism is a road of return to the lost knowledge. First deepening man's inner experience, restoring perhaps on an unprecedented scale insight and self-knowledge to the race, it must end by revolutionising his social and collective self-expression. Meanwhile, the nascent subjectivism ...
... more leisurely glance at your selections [ from A. E.'s poetry ], if you can spare them for some time. 6 February 1932 Nishikanta The separate images are very usual symbols of the inner experience, but they have been combined together here in a rather difficult way. The fire of course is the psychic fire which wells up from the veiled psychic source. The bird is the soul and the flower ...
... Radhakrishnan reason, but take refuge in intuition because their reasoning fails. Can the issue be settled in so easy and trenchant a way? The fact is that the mystic stands on an inner knowledge, an inner experience—but if he philosophises, he must try to explain to the reason, though not necessarily always by the abstract reason alone, what he has seen to be the Truth. He cannot but say, "I am explaining ...
... mind and vital proper can be, but because they find it difficult to change their habitual movements. It is this now that you feel and that makes you think you have a poor responsiveness to the inner experience. But that is not a fact; in your mind and in a great part of your vital there is a considerable capacity of response. As for the physical its difficulty is universal in everybody and not peculiar ...
... Supermind (except in some kind of trance or Samadhi) unless one has first objectivised the overmind Truth in life, speech, action, external knowledge and not only experienced it in meditation and inner experience. The Overmind, the Intuition and Below The Overmind receives the Divine Truth and disperses it in various formations and diverse play of forces, building thus different worlds out of this ...
... experience as the final stage, even to take it for the overmind, supermind, full siddhi. The supermind or the overmind either is not so easy to reach as that, even on the side of Knowledge or inner experience only. What you are experiencing belongs to the spiritualised and liberated mind. At this stage there may be intimations from the higher mind levels, but these intimations are merely isolated ...
... sound-spaces with their vibrations. Again if he had written "Quivering no longer with the touch on clay", it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image—not so to the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right word ...
... Spark-Soul and Psychic Being The Jivatman, spark-soul and psychic being are three different forms of the same reality and they must not be mixed up together, as that confuses the clearness of the inner experience. The Jivatman or spirit is self-existent above the manifested or instrumental being—it is superior to birth and death, always the same; it is the individual self or Atman, the eternal true ...
... which has been brought up in the Ignorance and is full of defects, imperfections and impurities. It is for this reason that in sadhana things cannot be changed in a Page 89 moment. The inner experience grows and extends and fills more and more of the nature, but till all is filled, the imperfections remain somewhere. It is a usual experience—to live within in one consciousness while the ...
... with the ground upon which the reasoning dances. Logic after all is only a measured dance of the mind, nothing else. Page 348 Your dream was certainly not moonshine; it was an inner experience and can be given its full value. As for the other questions, they are full of complications and I do not feel armed to cut the Gordian knot with a sentence. Certainly, you are right to follow ...
... yet attained a quiet indifference towards them. It is necessary to replace this condition by the true quietude which will allow the psychic being to become again active and reopen the doors of inner experience, and we shall try to get this done. I do not know that sadness has the power to cure [ dryness in the vital ]. I have myself followed the Gita's path of equanimity—but for some the psychic ...
... subjective delusions without any truth or value. I suppose all spiritual or inner experiences can be denounced as merely subjective and delusive. But to the spiritual seeker even the smallest inner experience is a thing of value. I stand for the Truth I hold in me and I would still stand for it even if it had no chance whatever of outward fulfilment in this life. I should go on with it even if all ...
... is not founded on any mental opinion or preconceived moral idea, but on probative facts and on observation and experience. I do not deny that so long as one allows a sort of separation between inner experience and outer consciousness, the latter being left as an inferior activity controlled but not transformed, it is quite possible to have spiritual experiences and make progress without any entire cessation ...
... that Page 406 something has come up, some part or layer of the physical, which needs to be worked on and, when that has been done,—it may take longer or shorter,—the conscious active inner experience recommences. The muteness in the mind is not a bad thing in itself, it is a favourable condition for the working. Also what you describe as taking place in the head, must be the working of the ...
... ess between the individual soul in its egoistic eagerness and the universal Powers which seek to fulfil the divine purpose of the Cosmos. The seer Agastya at such a moment confronts in his inner experience Indra, Lord of Swar, the realm of pure intelligence, through which the ascending soul passes into the divine Truth. Indra speaks first of that unknowable Source of things towards which Agastya ...
... might precede or accompany an experience and put it in a concrete form, might predict or give an occult body to it: so it would Page 14 be quite possible for him to see at once the inner experience and in image its symbolic happening, the flow of clarifying light and the priest god pouring the clarified butter on the inner self-offering which brought the experience. This might seem strange ...
... standardised and definitive, others more plastic, various and many-sided. A religion which is itself a congeries of religions and which at the same time provides each man with his own turn of inner experience, would be the most in consonance with this purpose of Nature: it would be a rich nursery of spiritual growth and flowering, a vast multiform school of the soul's discipline, endeavour, self-r ...
... made no mention of this division in subsequent chapters. Elsewhere he acknowledged his indebtedness to the Vedantic tradition while at the same time affirming that his philosophy owed more to inner experience than to the reading of texts: My philosophy was formed first by study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise ...
... through the full realisation of the subliminal inner being's natural connection with other planes of being; a knowledge of their powers and influences will have become a normal element of the inner experience, and the happenings of this world will be seen not solely in their external aspect but also in the light of all that is secret behind the physical and terrestrial creation and movement. A gnostic ...
... pure ideative mind which lives disinterestedly in truth of the idea apart from any necessary dependence on its value for action and experience. It views the data of the senses and the superficial inner experience, but only to find the idea, the truth to which they bear witness and to reduce them into terms of knowledge. It observes the creative action of mind in life in the same way and for the same purpose ...
... process all around you: "However, you say Sri Aurobindo believed in a progression, not a regression, and one can but hope he was right. Meanwhile we all do our best." Sri Aurobindo, speaking from inner experience as well as from insight into the world-movement across the ages, declares that the Supermind is a thing decreed for the earth and that its advent in the course of evolutionary history is inevitable ...
... books, but they had not the experience of Aurobindo and the Mother". Evidently you perceive and grant that both these Gurus go by their Yogic perspicacity, their special insights born of direct inner experience and sadhana. They don't go by reading books and mere external knowledge or information. If you are aware of this how can you write: "I am not surprised that Sri Aurobindo could find no support ...
... the whole." 14 . "It is only if you approach the Supreme through his double aspect of Sat and Chit-Shakti, double but inseparable, that the total truth of things can become manifest to the inner experience. This other side was developed by the Shakta Tantriks. The two together, the Vedantic and the Tantric truth unified, can arrive at the integral knowledge.... It is already indicated in the ...
... that it has been decided, and that it is not to be told to the body. It accepts, it is not impatient, it accepts, it says, 'It is all right, it is as Thou wilt'..." Not much later she had the inner experience of the new body that was ready to be manifested. Recounting it in the Bulletin of August 1972, p. 75, she said: "I was like that, I had become like that." And shortly afterwards, in the Bulletin ...
... of her schooling, endurance first, next equality of soul, last ecstasy. ... I am still in a period of conflict. There are all the time periods of conflict between outside ideas and the inner experience. Page 144 The problem is this: you can take the attitude of endurance and endure everything, to the point where you are able to turn pain into ecstasy, as he says—it's an experiment ...
... me ("on me," well, it isn't on me), on this body, which is obliged to answer questions, obliged to read letters, obliged to see people... whereas it has so much more fun when it can enjoy the inner experience and have this new vision of things—because all that is very material, it's not going out of Matter to see the world in another way (that has been done for a long time, of course, it's nothing ...
... the latter too are beautifully or powerfully vivid. Rather a vividness most revolutionary is at work in the Aurobindonian sensitivity—simile, metaphor, vision, intuition, all are of an unusual inner experience mostly beyond the classics. Sri Aurobindo's sensitivity is based on the classics in only one respect: it is neither morbid nor injudicious and has a certain poise and control even in the midst ...
... different effects in different emotional situations: pain tells severely on the victim while happiness is virtually felt after it is past. These experiences would go a long way in evidence of the inner experience of time, which Page 335 is no constant. The outer conventional time is supposed to be maintained at a normally universally accepted regularity. Although there are stretchings ...
... "imitation higher experiences", "false inspirations" and "false voices" which come from this realm "into which hundreds of yogins enter and some never get out of it". 19 To a disciple who reported an inner experience, Sri Aurobindo wrote: You are taking the first steps towards the cosmic consciousness in which there are all things good and bad, true and false, the cosmic Truth and the cosmic Ignorance ...
... depends on the devotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity. This inner vision is one form of psychological experience; but the inner experience is not confined to that seeing; vision only opens, it does not embrace. Our whole being ought to demand God and not only our illumined eye of knowledge. For since each principle in us is only ...
... clarifications. “The Jivatma, spark-soul [Antaratma] and psychic being are three different forms of the same reality and they must not be mixed together, as that confuses the clearness of the inner experience.” Secondly: “The soul is a spark of the Divine in the heart of the living creatures of Nature … This spark of Divinity is there in all terrestrial living beings from the earth’s highest to its ...
... things of themselves would in time bring about the necessary growth of the inner consciousness behind the surface which makes for successful concentration and meditation and renders all kinds of inner experience possible. Before coming to the main point I may as well clear out one matter not unconnected with it, my articles or messages, as they have been called, in the Bulletin; for their ...
... April 4, 1955 ( Letter to Mother from Satprem ) Pondicherry, April 4, 1955 Mother, for more than a year now I have been near you and nothing, no really significant inner experience, no sign has come that allows me to feel I have progressed or merely to show me that I am on the right path. I cannot even say I am happy. I am not so absurdly pretentious as to blame the divine ...
... so that nothing happens to it. As soon as it has an experience, as it did the other day, 4 it's quite shaken. We know nothing, we know nothing, nothing. All the rules... Naturally, the inner experience and the inside are very fine, there's no question. But that sort of tension every minute in your every movement... You know, to do EXACTLY what should be done, to say exactly what should be said—the ...
... doing that, because my nights are very interesting! I have had... some rather strange things have been happening. I don't know whether you understand the difference between the memory of an inner experience (from the subtle physical, the subconscient, all the inner regions) and the memory of a physical fact. There is a very great difference in quality, the same difference that exists between inner ...
... than one Page 140 individual and most eminently when more than five hundred individuals could see the risen Jesus "at the same time", there could not be a purely subjective inner experience, however true in its own field. We have before us a phenomenon "out there" of a supernatural order but projected into our space-time world on a few special occasions. Yes, were we able ...
... wrote for the three-months' collection of the poems when, on Sri Aurobindo's recommendation, they were brought out as a book in 1949. Undoubtedly the heart-trouble seemed worthwhile having for the inner experience of the Mother's help and the outer expression in those eighty-nine poems. Page 89 May I continue to speak for a little while more? I'll turn to another aspect of ...
... could be, coming at so late an hour all alone, and sitting with shut eyes. I was a little frightened, but I kept my courage up and went on visiting the pier. Nothing very much happened by way of inner experience. Only once I felt as if the waves of the sea were washing into me and washing through me and out of me: I suppose it was some opening to the cosmic forces — though a poor and small opening — a ...
... - essentially just like the Harappans! However, all discrepancies and historical vagaries would be avoided if the pur were no actual city like Mohenjo-daro or Harappa but a symbolic picture of inner experience - a stronghold of the soul in which spiritual light was defended or a stronghold of demon-forces of the in-world in which preternatural darkness was established. The basic trouble with ...
... surface subconscious is only a transcriber. It is for this reason that the Upanishad describes the subliminal being as the Dream Self because it is normally in dreams, visions, absorbed states of inner experience that we enter into and are part of its experiences,— just as it describes the superconscient as the Sleep Self because normally all mental or sensory experiences cease when we enter this s ...
... creation of the ancient Indian thinkers and its truth is not at once obvious, because it was the result of long psychological experiment and profound internal experience. Therefore without a long inner experience, without intimate self-observation and intuitive perception of the Nature-forces it is difficult to grasp accurately or firmly utilise.... These modes are termed in the Indian books qualities ...
... a constant preoccupation with the outward idea, the organisation, the form,... The Indian mind, on the contrary, is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for. a great force of intuition and inner experience has given it from the beginning that towards which the mind of the West is only now reaching with much 6. The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 151-54. Page 73 ...
... sound-spaces with their vibration. Again, if he had written 'Quivering no longer with the cry of clay', it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image—not so to the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right word ...
... and without any possibility of fall or failure. It is also true that with many purification is the first need—certain things have to be got out of the way before one can begin any consecutive inner experience. But the main thing is a certain preparation of the consciousness so that it may be able to respond more and more freely to the higher Force. In this preparation many things are useful—the poetry ...
... not willing or ready to see anything else, you will see a human being only—if you look for the Divine, you will find the Divine. That has been always your difficulty—but it can only be solved by inner experience which will open the external eye also. You were actually heading that way before this crisis disturbed you. But it is really an unnecessary crisis that you have created by indulging this ...
... continuity and change. The Vedantic seers renewed the Vedic truth by extricating it from its cryptic symbols and casting it into a higher and most direct and powerful language of inner intuition and inner experience. It is true that the language of the Upanishads was not the language of the intellect, but still it wore a form which the intellect could take hold of, translate into its own more and abstract ...
... preparing food seems far divorced from Western laboratory research on nutrition. By contrast, the Oriental science of nutrition is organized around and based on personal experience. It is through the inner experience of taste and one's reaction to the food that he formulates its properties. It is one's individuality and experience of himself that allows a conceptualization of how his system is functioning ...
... . And so, physically, the body followed. My body has been _____________________________ ¹Later Mother added, 'Stifling, suffocating'. Page 127 taught to express the inner experience to a certain extent. In the body there is the body-force or the body-form or the body-spirit (according to the different schools, it bears a different name), and this is what leaves the body last ...
... as will be evident to the perceptive reader, the book is not a product of armchair study, but an outcome of what has been assiduously shaped on the anvil of long practice, deep reflection and inner experience. The author has remarked in the prefatory note about his role as merely that of a weaver of the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But in writing this book lugal Kishore Mukherjee ...
... only the condition of the recipient consciousness that varies -in one the waking consciousness shares in the vision, in the other it is excluded for the sake of greater facility and range in the inner experience. But in both it is the inner vision that sees. Page 197 HIGHER KNOWLEDGE AND MENTAL KNOWLEDGE How is it that at times I feel myself in the ...
... sound-spaces with their vibrations. Again if he had written "Quivering no longer with the touch on clay" it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image—not so to the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right word ...
... expression of the child, so serenely happy in the possession of that worthless scrap of coloured paper, observing it with the full absorption of its little soul, provoked Maria a profound inner experience. "I cannot explain it, " she was to say in later years. "It just happened like that. You will probably think it a very silly story; and if you told it to others they would probably just laugh ...
... and put them into writing. According to the Indian tradition, the Veda is the creation of an age anterior to our intellectual philosophies. In that age, the wisest-the Rishi-depended on inner experience and suggestions of the intuitive mind for all knowledge that ranged beyond mankind's ordinary perceptions and daily activities. Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal ...
... like a burning fire within me; it pulls me more and more inward till I get plunged into peace and silence. It is the fire of aspiration and purification with the beginning of the true inner experience which, if it continues, creates the Yogic consciousnesss and in the Page 114 end replaces by it the outer ordinary consciousness. Is this fire the aspiration ...
... physical to purity and light. All that may be very well in theory, but practically it is found that the physical impurity is strong enough to bar the inner progress and limit rigidly the inner experience to some passive peace. I have often seen that when the inner being or the mind feels love, happiness, joy, etc., the other parts of my being also feel a tendency towards them. ...
... have that quality, it is merely a lesson – a rhetorical lesson, at best – in poetics. A poet – a true poet – does not compose to exemplify a theory; he creates out of the fullness of an inner experience. It may be very true that the modern poetic spirit is seeking a new path, a new organisation, a "new order", as it were, in the poetic realm: the past forms and formulae do not encompass or satisfy ...
... images I have used are, of course, not of a mental nature. What has been seen or realised is yogic through experience or vision, I have tried to express inner symbols. All the images are symbols of inner experience. And in these poems I always use yogic symbols. These experiences and visions have a form; the images have been used to give as correct a description of these forms as possible so that they may ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3 Ever Green! WHEN you have an inner experience, there is a natural tendency in you to have it again, to repeat it, and to repeat it, you go by the same way and in the same manner. When you sit in meditation, for example, you withdraw yourself from outward contacts and enter into a condition with which you ...
... leave the religious focused on the other world for the spiritual focused on the Totality. Then nothing is excluded, everything widens. The integral seeker must therefore be on his guard, for any inner experience touching our being's intimate substance always feels irrefutable and final when it occurs; it is dazzling at any level – we may recall Vivekananda speaking of Nirvana: "An ocean of infinite peace ...
... attributed any success that he may have had to the abundant flow of her Grace: My music is my labour and aspiration for the Divine and what I try to convey through it are the voices of my inner experience. My grateful thoughts are with her, who has been my Guide, Guru Mentor and Mother. One day it was her Light that sparked my heart, it is her Light that has sustained its glow, it is her Light ...
... In Sri Aurobindo's words: "The first age of India's greatness was a spiritual age when she sought passionately for the truth of existence through the intuitive mind and through an inner experience and interpretation both of the psychic and the physical existence." The age of the Rishis. "The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost, but rather always enriched it with fresh ...
... evening's reading. Like the one on the relevance of the New Year message, for example. And sometimes, after speaking, the Mother would invite questions. When the Mother spoke of some segment of her inner experience or of some contradictions of human behaviour, the children would feel overawed, or feel filled with a sudden light, or become overwhelmed - and they could ask no questions. Such silences often ...
... separate from others. The ego, in its self- enlargement, may come to perceive its unity with others, but, even at its best, this perception can be either a mental idea or a sentiment, not a fact of inner experience, not a dynamic stuff of consciousness. Even if it lives and acts only for others, it so lives and acts according to its own ideas, its personal principles and ethical rules, which are in- variably ...
... invokes the star to supply "the missing arc",—the crying need—of the circle in the form of some bright vision of the future. The last stanza embodies the most subjective turn and happily makes the inner experience potently objective:— "O star of mind's dark inwardness, Prolong the struggle with your force! By your not being dare to be More than the eye. can see, A silence audible ...
... ancients also represented life and the modernists try to dismiss their work as unreal simply because the life represented by them is not familiar to them. If the ancients expressed in their art an inner experience of an aspect of the cosmic Reality the modernists think it unreal —at any rate, less real than representation of physical nature or an action in life, or of nature remoulded according to the idea ...
... silence. He saw the resistance of the inconscient Nature and the alternate movement of ascent and descent. The resistance was due to Nature not being ready for a radical change. He knew by an inner experience that the Self is something greater than the instruments of nature—mind, life and body, that the Self is Eternal and Infinite. Even Nature has many powers hidden behind her outer appearance which ...
... EXACTLY my vision! Dressed the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me ... and I saw in his eyes that it was He. The two things clicked, the inner experience immediately became one with the outer experience and there was a fusion—the decisive shock. 6 And nothing happens in the cosmic play But at its time and in its foreseen place. 7 ...
... d expression, like someone faced with an incomprehensible problem. Some rather strange things have been happening. I don't know whether you understand the difference between the memory of an inner experience (from the subtle physical, the Subconscient, all the inner regions) and the memory of a physical fact? There is a very great difference in quality, the same difference that exists between inner ...
... consciousness." Page 156 Informed Mother of the proposed arrival of Diane Hassinger and Lunaura. * * * 6.4.72 In response to Michel Klostermnn's letter about his inner experience Mother gave her photo. She did not give appointment to see Malik and Auroarindam. She gave a blessings packet for the journey of R. S. Gupta to Bombay for the Handmade Paper Factory's ...
... The Mother and Sri Aurobindo 08 December 1931 This is the true reply. To remain within, above, and untouched, full of inner consciousness and the inner experience, — listening, when need be, to X or another with the surface consciousness, but with even that undisturbed, not either pulled outwards or invaded, that is the perfect condition for the sadhana ...
... mantra, I had put in it the power to make it effective. Now that you stated what is the word of this mantra, I am confirming the power into it. It can be useful for a time to have certain inner experiences, but this attitude is not to be kept permanently as it is only a partial truth and far from the whole truth of the integral yoga. The Mother ...
... Is welcomed everywhere, This welcome is for You, for You only, For You alone, The whole being blooms fully due to this And becomes blessed, blessed, blessed. When the inner experiences Will come to the forefront, (2) This only You know; (2) They will come only by Your Grace, They will come solely by Your Grace, Surely, They will come by Your Grace alone ...
... What’s the Use of just Regretting? What's the use of just regretting... (3) If life's path is not changed ...(3) What's the use of just regretting... (2) If inner experiences don't come to the forefront ... (3) Don't come to the forefront If in life the Supreme Mother and Lord do not manifest... (3) This life is like death... (3) O Ma... O Supreme Mother ...
... shrine in Chandod on the banks of the Narmada, the vision of the Godhead surging up from within when in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay etc. But these were inner experiences coming of themselves and with a sudden unexpectedness, not part of a sadhana. He started Yoga by himself without a Guru, getting the rule from a friend, a disciple of Brahmananda of [Ganganath]... also advised Sri Aurobindo, in the final resort, to trust only to his own inner spiritual inclinations. [ Last phrase altered to: ] to trust only to the guidance of the Divine within him if once he could become aware of that guidance. What Lele asked him was whether he could surrender himself entirely to the Inner Guide within him and move as it moved him; Page 109 if so he needed... needed no instructions from Lele or anybody else. This Sri Aurobindo accepted and made that his rule of sadhana and of life. Before he met Lele, Sri Aurobindo had some spiritual experiences, but that [was] before he knew anything about Yoga or even what Yoga was,—e.g. a vast calm which descended upon him at the moment when he stepped first on Indian soil after his long absence, in fact with his first ...
... emphasis on consciousness, then on the vital and aesthetics, then on the mind... and culminating here, in 1920, with action. From 1911 or '12, up to 1914, there was the whole series of inner experiences, psychic experiences, preparing me to meet Sri Aurobindo (so this ran parallel to my mental development). In practice, these periods overlap, but approximately every twelve years a particular type of... That was clearly from 1920 on; I had met Sri Aurobindo earlier, but it really began in 1920. 2 And the realization of the inner Divine? The dates... I am no good at dates! And I don't have any papers left to give me precise details. But the realization of the inner Divine must have been in 1911, because that's when I started writing my Meditations . 3 But since my earliest childhood, you ...
... you trying to show that the sannyasin's path isn't the true path, or how it leads to the true path? Page 160 Yes, I want to show it's part of the path, that the whole inner field, the field of inner experiences, all that opening of consciousness up above, is after all only a starting point. That's right. And that, afterwards, one is led to seek something else, which has a reality ...
... soul. The experience is proved by this convincing spell thrown on us. We must not ask if an emotion or an object poetised is part of common life; we must only inquire whether it lives in its own way with a convincing beauty and appears real, even though its reality be remote from our ordinary perspectives. Nor is it necessary for a poet to pass completely through the inner experiences recorded... rule, does is to take suggestive hints given by actual experience, outer or inner, and then transform them into a power of measured beauty by reflecting or transmitting the response from some centre of consciousness beyond the normal human nature: that is to say, the imagination is a medium. Some poets are close to their own experience-stuff; still, they too reshape it in order to embody as... If a mystic poet, for instance, were to claim that his work invariably mirrored his inner experiences, he would be an insincere fraud. But his poems themselves are neither insincere nor fraudulent: if they are inspired, the "I" of each poem is not the human ego but some entity which has an experience on a superhuman plane and sends down its self-expression through a human medium, coloured in ...
... wish for integral consecration will not do; there must be the push for a radical and total change. It is not by taking a mere mental attitude that this can be done or even by any number of inner experiences which leave the outer man as he was. It is this outer man who has to open, to surrender and to change. His every least movement, habit, action has to be surrendered, seen, held up and exposed ...
... Aurobindo, Collected Poems: The Life Heavens ============= "This Jivanmukta is not merely a poem, but a transcript of a spiritual condition, one of the highest in the inner Overmind experience. To express it at all is not easy ...." Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art: On Bengali Translations of Shiva and Jivanmukta The subject is the Vedantic idea of the living ...
... more than that? I see no reason therefore why you should care so much if anybody is not behaving well with you. I have told you already that people in the Asram—it is true even of those who have inner experiences and some opening—are not yet free in their outer selves from ego and wrong ideas and wrong movements. It is no use getting distressed or depressed by that. What you must do is to be turned only ...
... Mother (Mirra Alfassa) was born in Paris on the 21st February, 1878. Her mother was Egyptian and her father was Turkish - both of them were perfect materialists. As a result, although she had inner experiences, including that of the divine presence, right from her childhood, she was in her external life an atheist until she entered into adulthood. In her early years, she had a good grounding in music... occultist, having incredible faculties. She could leave one body and enter the consciousness of the next plane, fully experiencing the surroundings and all that was there, describe it... twelve times. The Mother learned to do the same thing and, with great dexterity. In one of her experiences, while entering into the last stage before the Formless, she experienced total Unity. And she found herself in the ...
... and spiritual training of the neophyte and his physical and moral fitness for the Yogic practices. It became therefore an established rule for the learner to observe strict reserve as to the inner experiences of Yoga and for the developed Yogin as far as possible to conceal himself. This has not prevented treatises and manuals from being published dealing with the physical or with the moral and in... asserting that freedom. The first great fundamental discovery of the Yogins was a means of analysing the experiences of the mind and the heart. By Yoga one can isolate mind, watch its workings as under a microscope, separate every minute function of the various parts of the antaḥkaraṇa , the inner organ, every mental and moral faculty, test its isolated workings as well as its relations to other functions... that even when the mind seems to act of itself and on its own material it is only associating, grouping together and manipulating the recorded experiences from outside objects. The very nature of mind is, according to them, a creation of past material experience transmitted by heredity with such persistence that we have grown steadily from the savage with his rudimentary mind to the civilised man of the ...
... Page 54 It can be useful for a time to have certain inner experiences, but this attitude is not to be kept permanently as it is only a partial truth and far from the whole truth of the integral yoga. The true revelation is the revelation of the Divine. The descent of calm and light which you experience is a sign that the sadhana has actually begun in you; it shows that you... further down until it touches all the centres and is experienced in the whole body. At first it comes only for a moment or two; afterwards it lasts for longer periods. The other experiences show that the faculty of inner vision is opening; this is also a part of the yoga. The fire seen by you must have been the fire of aspiration lit in the vital being. The other things you saw are not definite enough... should keep up my practice of getting out of the body. It is extremely fascinating, but is it a necessary part of Yogic development for keeping the consciousness open to inner spiritual things? It is much better to stop the experiences altogether. They seem to take you into levels which are undesirable and most unsafe; they are not at all necessary for any opening in the yoga. 28 March 1944 ...
... philosophy at all at that time; he was interested in the sayings and life of Ramakrishna and the utterances and writings of Vivekananda, but that was almost all with regard to spiritual life; he had inner experiences, from the time he stepped on to the shores of India, but did not associate them at that time with Yoga about which he knew nothing. Afterwards when he learned or heard something about it from ...
... absolutely necessary to catch hold of everything, all inner experiences, and to begin to formulate them. If, in addition, they have a power of expression, they try to formulate them in words and sentences; and when one has lived these experiences and becomes aware of the descending curve, one sees at each stage the deep reality of the experience withdrawing, fading into the background, instead of being... realisation and experience, an intuitive and direct knowledge, a growth of inner consciousness, a growth of the soul and of an intimate soul-perception, soul- vision and a soul-sense, are indeed the proper means of this evolution: but the support of the reflective and critical reason is also of great importance; if many can dispense with it, because they have a vivid and direct contact with inner realities... enthusiastic words, but in comparison with what the thing itself was, in itself, in its deep truth, it is so shrivelled up, diminished.... All the true joy, the true beauty, the inner enthusiasm, that wonderful warmth of the experience—all this retreats far behind. You try to keep a hold on it, but it eludes you. And you pay dearly for this power of formulation. Mother, in our life here, what do we mean ...
... age-old wisdom of India and its sanatana dharma , ‘the eternal religion’. Up until then Aurobindo had been an indifferent agnostic, and he had not followed up on the few rationally inexplicable inner experiences he had known. Sanskrit literature, however, opened up unexpected vistas for him — and did the yogis not claim they possessed extraordinary powers? If the wise were indeed wise, would it not be... became his guidance and source of inspiration. Who could have imagined that this radical politician, considered a very dangerous man and involved in that busy life of his, was continuously absorbed in inner concentration? Sri Aurobindo at Alipore Jail, Calcutta, after his arrest in May 1908 in the Alipore Bomb Case (photograph from police records) In Alipore jail he had his second important... easy reading matter. The Record of Yoga, as these writings have been named, ‘provides a first-hand account of the day-to-day growth of the spiritual faculties of an advanced yogi.’ 8 These experiences would lead him to his great spiritual discoveries, which afterwards he found confirmed in the Vedas and the Upanishads , and which would change the destiny of the world. What had started as a ...
... ' in the illnesses; all that, it is as if the experiences multiply to show that... for us to learn that it is simply a question of attitude—of attitude—to transcend... to transcend this mental prison in which humanity locks itself up and to... breathe up there. And this is the experience of THE BODY. Previously, those who had inner experiences used to say: 'Yes, up there it is like that, but... structure of the physical. All the experiences that others had had, those of entering into contact with superior worlds, they left the physical here as it is. Page 193 (How to say?...) From the beginning of existence until Sri Aurobindo's departure, I was in the consciousness that one can climb up, one can know, one can have all the experiences (in fact, one had them), but when one... appears to us) without mercy (Mother hangs her fist on matter), in order that we learn the lesson. (long silence) I remembered the time when Sri Aurobindo was here.... Indeed, the inner part of the being entered into a consciousness which felt, saw things according to the superior consciousness: totally different; and then, exactly when Sri Aurobindo had fallen sick, and when there ...
... although she had inner experiences, including that of the divine Presence, right from her childhood, she was in her external life an atheist until she entered into adulthood. In her early years, she had a good grounding in music (piano), painting and higher mathematics. At the same time, she used to have spontaneous experiences including those of coming out of her body to discover inner realities without... artists' horizon to be limited. She discovered that even the best among them were unable or unwilling to expand their horizons. At the same time, her inner experiences had continued unabated; but she was in need of explanations of these experiences in the light of intellectual or wider knowledge. This was the second domain towards which she turned. At this stage, a young man, Themanlys, who was... like in my early years, the presence of a kind of inner Guide; and all centred on studies: the study of sensations, observations, the study of technique, comparative studies, even a whole spectrum of observations dealing with taste, smell and hearing—a kind of classification of experiences. And this extended to all facets of life, all the experiences life can bring, all of them—miseries, joys, difficulties ...
... her parents. She accepted only what she could touch and see, and she never sought for explanations elsewhere than on a material basis. This did not prevent the inner experiences from happening, nor did it inhibit her from feeling that inner ‘Presence’ for which she had no name and about which she could talk to nobody. She most certainly would not have called it God. ‘The feeling I have had all my life... it was one of the reasons why she had chosen those very parents. Taking into account her numerous inner experiences, her hereditary constitution was the best possible base for her not getting trapped in mental or other aberrations and to prevent her from drifting. Thus she was assured that her experiences were no mystical reveries, for she said that her body, her constitutional make-up, had nothing mystical... She was evidently on the lookout for any meaningful help she could get in her quest. The inner experiences continued to come frequently, and so did the memories of past lives, as they had done even long before she had the slightest idea of reincarnation. Eager for knowledge and understanding of her experiences, she read everything she could find about spirituality, including the Dhammapada and other ...
... take everything with an inner detachment and equanimity was the constant call — and every minute was meant to be a gesture of remembering the Divine and offering oneself to Him. A subtle discipline in the midst of a wide freedom lay at the basis of this "Integral Yoga". Yes, it was not a smooth canter all the way. But the returns were great. There were intense inner experiences. The discovery of an inmost ...
... discovering a host of other things. She was already proving in practice what Sri Aurobindo was to write later. "The theory of traditional knowledge is perfectly rational and verifiable by inner experiences, and it imposes itself if we admit the supraphysical and do not cabin ourselves in the acceptation of material being as the only reality." Under the able tutorship of Max Théon, Mirra the... sit in a chair, at a table?" "I don't know," came the glum reply. "Why not?" Then dwelling on this point for some time she concluded, "What's required is to have the inner attitude." "Exactly," he said, "the inner attitude. I feel this new work as an empty and mechanical thing." "Don't you feel each word as you write it?" Page 147 Mother raised her eyebrows in surprise... owing to "this central Presence." Colours. Lights. All possible subjects were included in Mirra's study. "All lights," wrote Sri Aurobindo, "are indications of a Force or Power." Mirra, whose inner vision was as vivid as her actual sight, could now determine the plane from which a particular light emanated, as well as its action, by the light's colour. Later, Mother and Sri Aurobindo made a detailed ...
... the settled experience of the Divine Power taking up one's work and doing it, one acts according to one's nature; afterwards it is that Power which determines what is to be done or not done. The overcoming of all attachments must necessarily be difficult and cannot come except as the fruit of a long sadhana , unless there is a rapid general growth in the inner spiritual experience which is the... come completely only when Page 446 all work becomes a spontaneous sacrifice to the Divine, the heart is offered up to Him and one has the settled experience of the Divine in all things and all beings. This consciousness or experience must come in all parts and movements of the being ( sarvabhavena ), not only in the mind and idea; then the falling away of all attachments becomes easy. I speak... contained in your letter. There is no need for you to change the line of life and work you have chosen so long as you feel that to be the way of your nature ( svabhava ) or dictated to you by your inner being, or, for some reason, it is seen to be your proper dharma . These are the three tests and apart from that I do not think there is any fixed line of conduct or way of work or life that can be ...
... what would be natural to a new dimension of spiritual realisation in the body. Towards that dimension the whole effort of the Ashram established by Sri Aurobindo tends, with a host of wonderful inner experiences on the way and with the helping presence of the Master subtly behind his Ashram always. Certainly, it is the height of gratuitous impudence for Rajneesh to proclaim: "The work at Pondi- ... insight into spirituality, can pen such a criticism. Rajneesh seems to have dipped into Sri Aurobindo's "logical" and "philosophical" books but missed completely the great sweep of the spiritual experience that is behind the grand progression of his argument. The direct vision and the concrete realisation that have used a master-intellect to build the thought-system have not been felt at all. One who... greatest system-maker before Sri Aurobindo, was subject to the same 'greatest limitation' as Sri Aurobindo and cannot have gone even a little beyond reason. In other words, Shankara had no spiritual experience at all of the suprarational." Will any Indian agree to this conclusion? Does even Rajneesh suggest Page 206 it? Not at all. He has no censure to pass on Shankara the outstanding ...
... it is Page 227 as though experiences were multiplied in order to show... in order that one might learn that it is simply a question of attitude, yes, attitude, of going beyond, going beyond this mental prison in which humanity has shut itself and of... breathing up above. And it is the experience of the body. Before, those who had inner experiences used to say, "Yes, up there it is so... to change the physical structure. All the experiences that others have had, which were in order to come in contact with the higher worlds, left here below the physical as it is.... How to say it? From the beginning of my life till Sri Aurobindo's departure, I was in the consciousness that one can go up, one can know, one can have all the experiences (indeed, one did have them), but when one came... extraordinary force and that seems (seems to us) pitiless ( Mother strikes her fist into Matter ), so that the lesson might be learnt. I remembered the time when Sri Aurobindo was there.... Well, the inner part of the being was in a consciousness that felt, that saw things according to the higher consciousness: altogether different; and then, just when Sri Aurobindo fell ill and when there were all those ...
... " and "irrevocable" in diseases. With all that, experiences seem to multiply in order to show... in order for one to learn that it's simply a question of attitude—the attitude of going beyond... beyond this mental prison humanity has locked itself in, and of... breathing up above. It's the BODY'S experience. Before, those who had inner experiences would say, "Yes, up above, that's the way it is... things, change the structure of the physical. All the experiences others had had of making contact with the higher worlds, used to leave the physical here as it is. (How should I put it?...) From the very beginning of existence up to Sri Aurobindo's departure, I lived in the awareness that one may rise, one may know, one may have all experiences (and one did have them), but when one came back into this... that appears (appears to us) pitiless ( Mother strikes her fist into Matter ), so we may learn our lesson. ( long silence ) I remembered the time when Sri Aurobindo was here.... You see, the inner part of the being used to enter into a consciousness that felt and saw things according to the higher consciousness—they were quite different; then, when Sri Aurobindo fell ill, in fact, when there ...
... explanations I asked were always down-to-earth, and it seemed obvious to me that there's no need of any mystery, nothing of the sort — you explain things materially." Indeed, if you want inner experiences without becoming unbalanced, you need to stand on a solid base. Mirra was well equipped. "I had the most solid base —no imaginings, no mystical atavism : my mother was very much an unbeliever... it was late 1903 or even in the course of 1904. She did say once that her first contact with the inner Divine —through Théon's teaching—was established when she was around twenty-five. That is the only given pointer we have. Which again would indicate 1903 as the year when Mirra first heard about the inner Divine. And "I rushed headlong like a . . . like a cyclone." Mother was telling Satprem one... told me it could be otherwise — I was already past twenty —I said, 'Oh, really? Is that so?'" Mother laughed. "And then when he told me all about Théon's teachings and the 'Cosmic Life' and about the inner God and a new world that would be a world of beauty and, at least, of peace and light . . . well, I rushed into it headlong." After a moment she went on, "But even at the time I was told: 'It depends ...
... the reasons behind this almost universal sense of disparagement for the body, we must note that in the Sadhanas followed so far, it is the subjective realisation of the Purusha part and the inner experiences of the Self and the Supreme, as distinct from the spiritual transformation of the Prakriti part, of the instrumental Nature; that have been generally sought after. The Self separates from the... pertinent grounds for the disparagement and denigration of the physical body. In ancient Greece and Rome, in the Dionysian cult and in the Neo-Platonic philosophy of Plotinus, such mystical-psychical experiences as men obtained in rare moments of exaltation described as ekstasis led to the conviction that it is the body alone that is the villain of the piece obstructing and fettering the soul in its... in a physical body and since this is a temporary and short-lived deficiency, it may not be very much grudged. After all, so it is averred, one may withdraw into the state of Samadhi in order to experience the highest realisation even while still in the body. But the trouble is, one cannot continually remain in Samadhi, 1 Swami Nikhilananda (Tr.), The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna ...
... disadvantage of the one who does not know mentally is that he gets the experience without understanding it and this may be a hindrance or at least retardarory to development while he would not get so easily out of a mistake as one more mentally enlighrened. 33 A mistake often made by spiritual seekers pertains to inner experiences. Sri Aurobindo regards the mind as a useful instrument in ... life. This is probably because Eckhart had a transformative experience Page 87 without any prior acquisition of mental knowledge about spiritual life. The mental understanding of his experience, as he says, came to him considerably later when he read spiritual books and visited teachers. It was only after his experience that he came to understand ir in terms of such concepts as... all this? Then here one is on the right side. One knows that it is not an imagined experience, that it is a sincere, spontaneous one, and this always has a power of transformation much greater than the experience that was brought about by a mental knowledge. 32 But there is also a disadvantage in experiencing something without previous mental understanding of it. As Sri Aurobindo writes: ...
... have the Yogic attitude in all things, they have been contented with the common ideas, common view of things, common motives of life, only varied by inner experiences and transferred to the framework of the Asram instead of that of the world outside. It is not enough and there is great need that this should change." 9 Sri Aurobindo 9 September 1936 Page 258 ... a change of nature. The pressure is becoming greater now for this change of character even more than for decisive Yoga experience—for if the experience comes, it fails to be decisive because of the want of the requisite change of nature. The mind, for instance, gets the experience of the One in all, but the vital cannot follow, because it is dominated by ego-reaction and ego-motive or the habits of... of the outer nature keep up a way of thinking, feeling, acting, living which is quite out of harmony with the experience. Or the psychic and part of the mind and emotional being feel frequently the closeness of the Mother, but the rest of the nature is unoffered and goes its own way prolonging the division from her nearness, creating distance. It is because the Sadhaks have never even tried to have ...
... people speak of Samadhi, I tell them, " Well, try to develop your inner individuality and you can enter into these very regions in full consciousness, with the delight of communion with the highest regions without losing consciousness for that and returning with a zero instead of an experience." (The Mother, Bulletin, Vol. XIV, No. 3, pp. 43-45) ... Page 72 It is because of its inward plunge bringing in its train a wealth of inner experiences, dreams and visions, that the self in this status has been termed the 'dream-self that is wise of the inward' (svapnasthāno'ntaḥprajña ḥ ). 1 The Sleep-State : This corresponds to a still higher super-conscient status, a state of pure consciousness (prajñānaghana) 2 ,... front: Our inner Mind dwells in a larger light, Its brightness looks at us through hidden doors; A mighty life-self with its inner powers Supports the dwarfish modicum we call life; Our body's subtle self is throned within In its viewless palace of veridical dreams. 3 Thus, the subliminal reach of our being comprises our inner existence, that is ...
... deeper silence will spontaneously open me to the understanding of the inner experiences and the higher devel- Page 286 opments by the light of the Knowledge from above. Then there will be no need to write to you so much about my sadhana as now . Yes, for the most part. But when the experience is of importance for the progress it can be written. ... positive side, I do not like to look much at the negative or write on the happenings there, provided you agree to it. Yes, certainly — that is the best. The inner and spiritual experiences, realisations etc. come truly from the Mother. But that truth we accept only on faith, as their source is not detectable by us in the beginning. But now I can clearly see and feel them... progress in the sadhana will not be affected. Often a sadhak feels that the experiences have stopped; this is because what he has already received is being consolidated in him. But even then, if he is sufficiently conscious and watchful, he will find that it is only from the surface consciousness that they are withdrawn. The inner Page 292 being still has them in the deeper regions ...
... first, of the constant activity of the psychic and secondly of the conversion of the physical and its openness to inner supraphysical experience. Apart from the vital and its disturbances the physical is the chief difficulty in establishing a continuity of Yogic consciousness and experience. If the physical is thoroughly transformed—opened and conscious—then stability and continuity become easy. 16... makes the constant Presence at last possible. The feeling comes from the psychic and is true of the inner being—its not being yet fulfilled in the whole does not make it an imagination; on the contrary, the more it grows the more is the likelihood of the whole being fulfilling this truth; the inner bhāva takes more and more possession of the outer consciousness and remoulds it so as to make it a... of the mind and heart and will and through them prevails over the ignorance of the outer members and brings the inner truth out there also. 16 September 1936 What stands in the way is the recurring circle of the old mixture. To break out of that is very necessary to arrive at an inner Yogic calm and peace not disturbed by these things. If that is established, it will be possible to feel in it the ...
... test after test and accumulated experience upon experience. He frankly told his intellectual disciples that testing Yogic experiences by the ordinary reason won't do. "For I am unable to see by what valid tests you propose to make the ordinary reason the judge of what is beyond it." Because, he explained in his precise way, "the experiences of Yoga belong to an inner domain and go according to a ... method and I have found it absolutely incapable and inapplicable." The conscientious Scientist concluded with a counter question. "Finally, how without inner knowledge or experience can you or anyone else test the inner knowledge and experience of others?" Page 194 ... drowning Nirod with a torrent of similar experiences Sri Aurobindo told him, "Kindly reflect a little and don't talk facile nonsense." Sri Aurobindo was rather disdainful of intellectuals. With reason of course. "These intellectuals, when they talk of something beyond their scope, make fools of themselves," he observed. When his disciples had inner experiences, Sri Aurobindo told them not to bother ...
... education’ for someone who had come to do a great and difficult work. All her inner experiences had occurred totally unexpectedly, which according to the Mother is the necessary condition for them so as not to be falsified. Expectation limits the experience and distorts it. Often expectation even creates the experience which then adapts itself to the artificial, imaginary world of the subject which... which no longer has any relation with reality. Little then remains of the experience except illusion. From her early years Mirra was aware of something she could neither name nor describe. ‘There was a kind of inner light, a Presence. I was born with that.’ She went and sat in a little chair, especially made for her, to feel that Presence, which probably exerted a light, rather pleasant pressure on... method of spiritual realization. She always took up every task with a total dedication — which she did this time too. Her inner growth progressed from one realization to the next. But who was she actually? Who was this young Parisian woman who had such extraordinary experiences, who was probably the greatest occultist of her time without anybody knowing, and who by the Presence in her heart had been ...
... displeased with you for shunning these delights. Page 211 Some, of course, might ask why any sports at all in an Ashram which ought to be concerned only with meditation and inner experiences and the escape from life into the Brahman; but that applies only to the ordinary kind of Ashram to which we have got accustomed and this is not that orthodox kind of Ashram. It includes life... 15, 1948 I don’t know whether I can throw any positive light on Miss Chadwick’s mystic experiences. The description, at any rate the latter part, is not very easy to follow as it is very allusive in its expressions and not always precise enough to be clear. The first part of the experience indicates a native power of healing of whose action she herself does not know the process. It seems... her mind for some time past and it was an increasing kindness that was her feeling and intention. The only change she could expect from you was to grow in your psychic and spiritual endeavour and inner progress and in this you have not failed, quite the contrary. Apart from that, the notion that she could be displeased because you did not change according to this or that pattern and that we could ...
... intimacy with the occult increased day by day; and there were the experiences of the Mother too. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri has doubtless the bone-structure of the tale in the Mahabharata, but the tissues and the cells, the blood-streams and the pulse-beats, all derive from the Mother's and the Master's inner experiences and yogic realisations. In the Mother's prayer of 24 November 1931... and, in those high ranges of experience, what happened to her, what happened to him, had accordingly the same contours, the same colours, the same force of impulsion. Savitri thus became essentially the inner life-history of both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. As the Mother has succinctly put it, Savitri is: 1) The daily record of the spiritual experiences of the individual who has written... perhaps some cosmic beauty will emerge!" 19 It is mainly this long Book that is packed with the experiences of the occult World Stair: the worlds of Light above, the worlds of Darkness below, the worlds of subtle Matter, the Life-Force and the Mind in between, these together comprising the whole inner structure of the cosmos. In fact, all the three Books of Part I were retouched as often as the ...
... ous experiences. In this process of inward withdrawal or upward ascension, the consciousness first enters the 'dream-state' and then proceeds to the 'sleep-state'. While in the dream-state, the outer mind of the Sadhaka becomes quiescent and his inner mind, separated from the outer and no longer covered up by it, ranges through a wonderful world of rich and variegated inner experiences. ... he be aroused.' " 2 The Trance-Experience of Sri Ramakrishna : Now we come to the very authentic historical case of the Sage of Dakshinesvara whose trance-experiences as depicted in his authoritative biography published by the Ramakrishna Order itself we reproduce below: "Sri Ramakrishna's Samadhi covered a wide range of experiences from his perception of various visions to... felt eager for the enjoyment of the inner Sattwic bliss; but this was indeed an intermittent mood, for most often the mind would rush towards outward objects again, as if it was stung by a 1 The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 500. 2 Vide Yoga-Vasishtha (Upashama Prakarana), Sargas 51-54. Page 81 venomous snake. At times, his inner state was being cleared of the obscurity ...
... Mother I see no reason therefore why you should care so much if anybody is not behaving well with you. I have told you already that people in the Ashram - it is true even of those who have inner experiences and some opening - are not yet free in their outer selves from ego and wrong ideas and wrong movements. It is no use getting distressed or depressed by that. What you must do is to be turned only... well and sleep peacefully, and you would have no time to wonder whether you are in a good or a bad mood. The Mother Freedom and the inner liberty Freedom is far from meaning disorder and confusion. Page 17 It is the inner liberty that one must have, and if you have it nobody can take it away from you. The Mother An austere truth The freedom of which... than with criticising those of others, the work would go more quickly. The Mother The inner contact Now that you are here, the only thing to do is to forget the past and to concentrate on your work here. It is true that for the moment I cannot see you regularly, but you must learn to get the inner contact (it is one of the chief reasons of my retirement) and then you will know that I am ...
... was acquainted with Mirra’s brother Mattéo. This is how Mirra came to know about the Groupe cosmique , the group inspired by Théon and Alma. At last she found an explanation for the numerous inner experiences she had had without expecting or knowing anything, and about which she had never been able to talk in Mathilde’s harshly positivistic household. She had tried once, years ago, and Mathilde had... to live in the outskirts of Tlemcen, an Algerian town at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. Théon was a multifaceted personality. He spoke several languages, was well read, could draw from a rich experience, had an artistic sense, and knew how to use his hands. He usually wore a kind of white or brown robe, tightened around his middle with a red cord. He was a smooth talker and rolled, with nimble fingers... trance, but she had trained her body in such a way that, even while in trance, it allowed her to go about her normal daily occupations. For hours on end she scribbled down her inexhaustible occult experiences and has left over twelve thousand pages. ‘Madame Théon was an extraordinary occultist. She possessed exceptional abilities, that woman, exceptional!’ 6 said the Mother, who was not lacking in ...
... of others, not even that of his daughter. (She may not have tried to confide in him very often.) And to her positivist mother all unusual inner experiences were ‘brain disorders,’ to be treated without further ado by the family physician. Her conscious inner life began when she was five years old. ‘I started at the age of five … I was five or six years old; at the age of seven it became very serious... importance of the choice will become clearer as our story unfolds. Young Mirra had many strange experiences and sometimes went into trance in the middle of a sentence or a gesture. She was supposed to have fallen asleep. At the time she herself had no explanation for this kind of occult experience, ‘but the faculties were already present.’ Thus it happened, during a ceremonious family luncheon at... material universe … Rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the machinery of an evolutionary process.’ 12 (Sri Aurobindo) When the soul has gone through all the necessary experiences in a given life, it withdraws by a process we call death and goes to rest in a world where it assimilates the essence of the life just ended. When in the course of their evolution certain souls have ...
... part in sports, and who didn't; it was entirely their own lookout. As for the question "Why any sports at all in the Ashram?" Sri Aurobindo said that "to be concerned only with meditation and inner experiences and the escape from life into Brahman... applies only to the ordinary kind of Ashram... this is not that orthodox kind of Ashram. It includes life in Yoga". And hence anything that was useful... 1948: Do not judge on appearances and do not listen to what people say, because these two things are misleading.... ...There is in the Ashram no exterior discipline and no visible test. But the inner test is severe and constant.... 6 But censorious people, driven by the demon of doubt and suspicion, could still continue to make unwarranted accusations. Page 459 But Sri Aurobindo... , and the rest. Above all, she had her own occult way of taking decisions and implementing them, and it was futile to weigh them in the sheerly mental balance of propriety and utility. Hers was an inner vision, and an integral consciousness. This the sadhaks - not all of them - would understand. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in the course of a subsequent letter: Page 460 If she is busy with ...
... course, "the greatest inner discoveries, the experience of self-being, the cosmic consciousness, 25. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 190. Page 71 the inner calm of the liberated spirit, the direct effect of mind upon mind, the knowledge of things by consciousness in direct contact with other consciousness or with its objects, most spiritual experiences of any value, cannot... ways of approach; but yet the broad lines are the same everywhere and the intuitions, experiences, phenomena are the same in all ages and countries far apart from each other and in systems practised quite independently from each other." 25 The substance of spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, is identical everywhere; only when it gets translated into the external... those of the physical sciences, since it seeks to identify our inner being with the Reality behind the appearances and see from there the workings of Nature, while Science endeavours to make us aware of the detailed workings and through them get some indirect glimpse of the Reality. Thus the experiences of Yoga belong to an inner domain, go according to a law of their own and have their own standards ...
... and the plane of Divine Reality ranks among the first words of the inner wisdom. The turn given to it in these pages is not merely an ingenious explanation; it expresses very soundly one of the clear certainties you meet when you step across the border and look at the outer world from the standing-ground of the inner spiritual experience. The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes... towards the realisation of the Divine. A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience; yet sometimes the divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks dowu, something is seen, a profound change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge... describe one level of the Vak-Shakti, the seeing Word; here is pasyanti buddhi, a seeing intelligence. It might be because the seer Within has passed beyond thought into experience, but there are many who have a considerable wealth of experience without its clarifying their eye of thought to this extent; the soul feels, but the mind goes on with mixed and imperfect transcriptions, blurs and confusions in the ...
... movement; it is the decisive ordeal of this Yoga. For the physical consciousness and the material life cannot change if this does not change. Nothing that may have been done before, no inner illumination, experience, power or Ananda, is of any eventual value if this is not done. If the little external personality is to persist in retaining its obscure and limited, its petty and ignoble, its selfish... physical consciousness and live for the sadhana and the Divine only. You must give up positively the bad habits that still persist and never resume those that have ceased or been interrupted. Inner experiences are helpful to the mind and higher vital for change, but for the lower vital and the outer being a sadhana of self-discipline is indispensable. The external actions and the spirit in them must... at the root of most of the vital revolts that have spoiled many an individual sadhana here and disturbed the progress of the general inner work and the spiritual atmosphere. The supramental creation, since it is to be a creation upon earth, must be not only an inner change but a physical and external manifestation also. And it is precisely for this part of the work, the most difficult of all, that ...
... conclusion was that the Master was jealous of the disciple because the latter was receiving direct messages from his Master and out of jealousy Sri Aurobindo was forbidding him to have extraordinary inner experiences of Sri Aurobindo! Apart from such aberrancies, it is not always easy to decide whether to depend or not on one's messages, leave aside other people's messages. But with a bit of sincerity... intelligent will makes a dispassionate inquiry before taking whatever step may be required. Sri Aurobindo puts a stress on this part of our psychology when he wants us to practise "equality" and avoid the inner disturbance that stems from "desire". He says that people think we shall be inert if desire is lacking. This, to him, is a mistake; for desire is not the sole source of dynamism: man is a mental being... In the life here one rarely has the sense of wasting one's time. Even if one does practically nothing, there is the feeling that something momentous is happening. For there is no end to the inner work which goes on - the Mother's refining, deepening and widening of one's consciousness. In a transfigured version I can repeat Mark Twain's famous joke: "O I love work, I can sit for hours watching ...
... profounder and infinitely more powerful. I have tried to take my music from her. My music is my labor and my aspiration for the Divine and what I try to convey through it are the voices of my inner experiences. “My grateful thoughts are with her who has been my Guide, Guru, Mentor and Mother. One day it was her Light that sparked my heart, it is her Light that has sustained its glow, it is her Light... whereas in past years they stayed on and became Ashramites. But mentally they are clearer. They know exactly what they want. Mostly they are taken up with external things. The inner life has to be encouraged. They feel shy about inner things. They are so much more mental and of course technology has produced this. They all want to go out of the Ashram and obtain MBAs, go into business, computers, mass ... “Art House”, their large French-style colonial residence on Jawaharlal Nehru Street in Pondicherry. Jhumur graciously welcomed me into her home on each day of the interviews and her regal bearing and inner and outer beauty are indications of a life lived in pursuit of higher values and spiritual goals. Her purity of purpose became more and more evident to me as the interviews proceeded. She was born in ...
... back) mainly to prepare the action in the heart. When the centres begin to open, inner experiences such as the seeing of light or images through the subtle vision in the forehead centre or psychic experiences Page 238 and perceptions in the heart, become frequent—gradually one becomes aware of one's inner being as separate from the outer and what can be called a Yogic consciousness with... that of inner (occult) thought, will and vision. This inner or occult vision is called by ordinary people psychic vision. It [ the centre between the eyebrows ] is the centre of the inner mind—therefore also of the inner mental will and inner mental vision. Page 237 The centre of vision is between the eyebrows in the centre of the forehead. When it opens one gets the inner vision... Ajnachakra, the centre of the inner will, also of the inner vision, the dynamic mind etc. (This is not the ordinary outer mental will and sight, but something more powerful, belonging to the inner being.) When this centre opens and the Force there is active, then there is the opening of a greater will, power of decision, formation, effectiveness beyond what the ordinary mind can achieve. The centre ...
... Upanishad, Darshana, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner spiritual experiences that we shall find the proof and source of the world's Scriptures, the law of knowledge, love and conduct, the basis and inspiration of Karmayoga. Our aim will therefore be to help in... most, the most believing because it has the deepest experience and the most varied and positive spiritual knowledge,—that wider Hinduism which is not a dogma or combination of dogmas but a law of life, which is not a social framework but the spirit of a past and future social evolution, which rejects nothing but insists on testing and experiencing everything and when tested and experienced turning it... will have any terrors for you. Difficulty and impossibility will vanish from your vocabularies. For it is in the spirit that strength is eternal and you must win back the kingdom of yourselves, the inner Swaraj, before you can win back your outer empire. There the Mother dwells and She waits for worship that She may give strength. Believe in Her, serve Her, lose your wills in Hers, your egoism in the ...
... enlarged her" that is the transfiguring touch: the rest is good but gets its meaning and depth of emotion from this hint at the same time of the outer physical phenomenon of pregnancy and the inner psychological experience of mystical wideness - a hint which also renders apt the accumulation of so many syllables in each line. In all the three instances I have cited, the thought plunges below the surface or... thy tortured bosom And kiss thy sweet wrung lips and hush thy cries. Love shall draw half thy pain into my limbs; Then we shall triumph glad of agony. From the point of view of the inner music - that is, the thrill of the inspired consciousness - creating the outer music that embodies it, the lines are some of the most perfect in literature, with a sustained exquisiteness of the mot ...
... life is not something lived on romantic heights with no reference to earth and its movements. The Yogic or spiritual attitude has to be applied to the small outward details of life as well as to inner experiences or high ideals on a large scale. You ought to know by this time that the Mother attaches a great importance to the true spirit in the organisation of the material life. It is more often in relation... these petty things that the genuineness of one's spiritual change is tested—so there is little point in talking of petty things or material or outward things as if they were not worth notice and no inner change with regard to them needed. There is no objection to the tiffin carrier being washed by a servant. The objection was to the servants being tipped by sadhaks so that they neglect or do not... have a rather poisonous bite. 27 January 1934 These bites are like that. I have often had them—they last sometimes for eight days. 30 January 1934 If you cannot get rid of the sciatica by inner means, the medical remedy (not for curing it, but for keeping free as long as possible) is not to fatigue yourself. It comes for periods which may last 8 weeks, then suddenly goes. If you remain quiet ...
... wish for integral consecration will not do; there must be the push for a radical and total change. It is not by taking a mere mental attitude that this can be done or even by any number of inner experiences which leave the outer man as he was. It is this outer man who has to open, to surrender and to change. His every least movement, habit, action has to be surrendered, seen, held up and exposed... true knowledge. But if the intellect is surrendered, open, quiet, receptive, there is no reason why it should not be a means of reception of the Light or an aid to the experience of spiritual states and to the fullness of an inner change. * The turmoil of mental (intellectual) activity has also to be silenced like the vital activity of desire in order that the calm and peace may be complete... with it to these greater things - or else to extinction of itself, Nirvana. The real Self is not anywhere on the surface but deep within and above. Within is the soul supporting an inner mind, inner vital, inner physical in which there is a capacity for universal wideness and with it for the things now asked for - direct contact with the truth of self and things, taste of a universal bliss, liberation ...
... Sri Aurobindo for the first time in 1914, two years later, and I had already worked out the complete programme,’ 3 a programme that was the outcome of an inner realization. ‘And I have arrived here in that state, with a world of experiences and already the conscious union with the Divine above and within — everything consciously realized, noted down, and so on — when I came to Sri Aurobindo.’ 4... Without knowledge and the unification with God, all else is nothing but ‘vanity of vanities’ while mankind keeps plodding around in its mental circles. ‘Yoga is not a thing of ideas but of inner spiritual experience. Merely to be attracted to any set of religious or spiritual ideas does not bring with it any realization. Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change... book which gives an undistorted outline of Sri Aurobindo’s ideas, and he is often represented as an epigone of Friedrich Nietzsche. At the time he gave in the Arya a philosophical shape to his inner experiences and coined the terminology for them, he was of course aware of the possible association with Nietzsche, if only because of the word ‘superman’ and its connotations. This is why in one of the first ...
... shining seed, a packed pulsation, an intuitive thrill, without yet any clear knowledge of what had been intuited. As soon I had this experience I was sure that a poem was on the way. But what would emerge first was the climax of the thing that was piercing through the inner into the outer. The culminating revelation would crystallise and the job then would be to trace the process leading to the crystallisation... significance of the inversion in the first stanza." There are several points here to be marked. The inversion makes for suspense and a final focus on "Some vow profound" which in the inner imaginative experience serves to balance the speaking of the words and to explain why this speaking should be such as it is pictured in the poem. The inversion also induces a feel of the breaking that is mentioned:... be done about it. Praise or blame seems irrelevant. At times even publication appears to be pointless. All that the poem, if it is really good, requires or demands after it has been offered at the inner altar is — another poem 1 My dream is spoken As if by sound Were tremulously broken some vow profound. A timeless hush Draws ever back The winging music-rush ...
... the other answering to impressions inherited from an antiquity which by its far-awayness has grown one with the projections of a mythic imagination and with the mysterious splendours of inner spiritual experience. What Sri Aurobindo has called "memories of the Arctic home" belong to the second shade crossed here and there by superimposed tinges from the first, as when the Vedic Dawn with its backdrop... a new understanding. "Why suppose a symbol where there is only an image? Why invite the difficulty of a double figure in which 'cow' means light of dawn and light of dawn is the symbol of an inner illumination? Why not take it that the Rishis were praying not for spiritual illumination, but for daylight? "The objections are manifold and some of them overwhelming. If we assume that the Vedic... the Angirasas become at all intelligible. But though it is extremely probable that the memories of the Arctic home enter into the external sense of the Veda, the Arctic theory does not exclude an inner sense behind the ancient images drawn from Nature nor does it dispense with the necessity for a more coherent and straightforward explanation of the hymns to the Dawn." 4 The Arctic allusion ...
... The Mother (Mirra Alfassa) was bom in Paris on the 21st February, 1878. Her mother was Egyptian and her father was Turkish-both of them were perfect materialists. As a result, although she had inner experiences, including that of the divine presence, right from her childhood, she was in her external life an atheist until she entered into adulthood. In her early years, she had a good grounding in music... occultist, having incredible faculties. She could leave one body and enter the consciousness of the next plane, fully experiencing the surroundings and all that was there, describe it... twelve times. The Mother learned to do the same thing and, with great dexterity. In one of her experiences, while entering into the last stage before the Formless, she experienced total Unity. And she found herself in the... University Press, 2000; Galloway, George, CharlesScribner's Sons, New York, 1920, Chs. 2-5; Cottingham, John, The Spiritual Dimension, Cambridge University press, 2005; Bagger, Mathew C., Religious Experience: Justification and History, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999. Vide., Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, SABCL, 1971, Pondicherry, Vol. 19, pp.874 7. Vide., Woodworm ...
... have begun. My inner absorption is deepened to such an extent that it has become difficult to come out to the mind, even for reporting to you my inner experiences. Yet to write is necessary. Page 215 THE INTELLECT AND ITS TRAINING What is the place of intellect with regard to the inner being and the outer being? ... are the fruition of spiritual experience and a yogic practice is necessary for their attainment. Worldly quietude or peace is very fragile, momentary, variable. Solid, lasting, self-existent, firm are the attributes of a higher peace. One who has that peace can stand against any turbulence or disturbance, shock or attack from the world, and yet hold his inner peace unmoved. ... perception and experience. I have heard that X has studied philosophy widely and is himself the author of a number of books. All that has nothing to do with ordinary philosophy. Philosophy knows nothing about peace and silence or the inner and outer vital. These things are discovered only by Yoga. I suppose they have such notions because they are given too ...
... what you describe it may be an inner being's experience and not psychic. Even then, no doubt that your face is beaming with Ananda, seeing which I thought you went within. Disciple : Can one get the diagnosis of diseases in such states? Sri Aurobindo : Oh yes. Many people are said to have their problems solved in this way. I remember a peculiar experience of mine. As I was meditating... (shyly), "I fell into deep sleep I think, but I had some visions also which seem to be quite distinctly outside. Sri Aurobindo : Then why do you call it sleep? It may be the psychic being, or the inner being watching what is happening. Sometimes one goes into deeper state and remembers nothing in his outer consciousness, though many things may be going on within. What is called dreamless sleep is ...
... vision of the Godhead surging up from within when in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay. But these were inner experiences coming of themselves and with a sudden unexpectedness, not part of a sadhana." The first great experience that was part of a sadhana was the one of Nirvana I have already spoken of. About this the booklet says: "Meditating only for three days... various forms that idea and hope, - and our aim has been to search for the spiritual, religious and other truths which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour. The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based were already present to us, otherwise we should have had no right to make this endeavour at all; but the complete intellectual statement... major spiritual realisations and the special supramental realisation he was not acting the speculative philosopher; he was only putting into philosophical terms the body of a direct and concrete experience that was his already in 1914 when the Arya began publication. This point being disposed of, the other point of yours -namely, that "as regards individual evolution, Sri Aurobindo's ...
... analytical and he subordinated his imagination to the demands of reason. Although his visits to Sri Ramakrishna were marked by overwhelming inner experiences, his great respect for Western material science and its processes made him want to test each of these experiences, and he would accept only those that he felt stood the test. He yearned for Truth, but would not believe anything merely through blind... are you doing to me? I have my parents, brothers, and sisters at home. " Then Sri Ramakrishna laughed and stroked the young man' s chest, and the experience vanished as quickly as it had come. Narendra was tremendously puzzled by these experiences and was angry with himself for having succumbed to the influence of a "madman". But what the sceptic in him refused proved irresistibly fascinating... wrote during this time. "It is as if I were to blaze forth. There are so many powers in me! It seems to me as if I could revolutionize the world... " In California, 1900 After a fierce inner struggle to integrate his intellect, his fiery spirit and his inherent spirituality, the two-fold mission of this man of destiny — namely, the quest for God and service to mankind — was to crystalize ...
... Consciousness we must see that the poet in us speaks out of the man who has realised the presence of the Supreme and is not merely an outer person who wants to put to the uses of art the inner person's experience. In Sri Aurobindo the great words occur organically, as a living self-expression charged with truth. But we, who are not Sri Aurobindo nor sufficiently Aurobindonians even, have to be on guard ...
... transformation of our nature in all its details, mere sedentary meditation or an outpouring of ecstatic devotion will not help us in the fulfilment of our goal. In that way we may gather some inner experiences but our outer nature will mostly remain untransformed as before. For the entire transformation we have to achieve dynamic union with the Divine. And this can be effected only through our self-offering... moments of critical decision, the sadhaka of the Integral Path will discover that his-psychological field is turning into the jostling ground for many different forces and influences past or present, inner or outer, one's own or imported from others. They create by their combined operation a psychological resultant which forcefully pushes the sadhaka to a particular course of action or reaction. The sadhaka... moment's impulse is seeking from the sadhaka for its expression, has to be blocked altogether: one need not for the time being waste one's energy or Page 24 effort in tackling its inner turmoil in the sadhaka' s consciousness. Of course, the urge, the desire, the passion will still be there in the sadhaka' s heart producing churnings and whirls there, but outside one does resist ...
... open the centre there, liberate the inner mind and vision and the inner or Yogic consciousness and its experiences and powers. From here also one can open upwards and act also in the lower centres; but the danger of this process is that one may get shut up in one's mental spiritual formations and not come out of them into the free and integral spiritual experience and knowledge and integral change of... which one is conscious of inner experiences that are not dreams (i.e. the waking consciousness is lost for the time, but it is replaced not by sleep but by an inward conscious state in which one moves in the supraphysical of the mental or vital being). The Yogic sleep is good only when it is Yogic enough to contain something, to be an inner consciousness or an experience of other planes. The jāgarti... have at will an inner quietude or silence. It should be noted that the result of the Yogic processes is not, except in rare cases, immediate and one must apply them with patience till they give a result which is sometimes long in coming if there is much resistance in the outer nature. How can you fix the mind on the higher Self so long as you have no consciousness or experience of it? You can ...
... may be an inner-being experience and not a psychic one. Even then, there is no doubt that your face is beaming with Ananda. It is on seeing it like this that I thought you had gone within. NIRODBARAN: Can one get diagnoses of diseases in such a state? SRI AUROBINDO: Oh yes. Many people are said to have had their problems solved when they had gone within. I remember a peculiar experience of mine... NIRODBARAN: I fell into deep sleep, I think. But I had also some visions which seemed to be quite distinctly outside me. SRI AUROBINDO: Then why do you call it sleep? It may be the psychic being or the inner being watching what was happening. Sometimes one goes into a deep state and remembers nothing of the outer consciousness though many things may be occurring on the surface. What is called dreamless ...
... mechanical Nature to the exclusion of our personality, but at the inner subjective experience of man the mental being, our nature takes to us a quite different appearance. We may believe intellectually in a purely mechanical view even of our subjective existence, but we cannot act upon it or make it quite real to our self-experience. For we are conscious of an I which does not seem identical with our... by the ego-sense, lives in a partial and separate experience of her workings, uses only a modicum and a fixed action of her energy for its self-expression. It seems rather to be mastered and used by this energy than to use it, because it identifies itself with the ego-sense which is part of the natural instrumentation and lives in the ego experience. The ego is in fact driven by the mechanism of Nature... action of the divine Shakti. To open ourselves to the universal energy is always possible to us, because that is all around us and always flowing into us, it is that which supports and supplies all our inner and outer action and in fact we have no power of our own in any separately individual sense, but only a personal formulation of the one Shakti. And on the other hand this universal Shakti is within ...
... physical world. It is, however, argued that the supra-physical experience is essentially subjective, 23 and that subjective experiences or subtle-sense images can easily be deceptive, since we have no recognized method or standard of verification. But the counter-argument is that error is not the prerogative of the inner subjective experience alone; it is also a part of the knowledge that can be gained... or science, which consists of the systematic body of the knowledge of the truths, principles, powers and processes that govern the spiritual experiences and spiritual realizations. This shastra has been built upon the perception and experience that our inner elements, functions, forces can be separated or resolved or they can be new-combined and set to novel and formerly impossible workings or can... spiritual experiences were a matter of sporadic occurrence or of a sudden momentary flash, — then, considering the variety of spiritual experiences and considering the page - 39 conflicts in regard to the truth-claims of various spiritual experiences, one would have hesitated to assign much value to the realm of spiritual experiences. But the dismissal of the claims of spiritual experiences on the ...
... greatest inner discoveries, the experience of self-being, the cosmic consciousness, the inner calm of the liberated spirit, the direct effect of mind upon mind, the knowledge of things by consciousness in direct contact with other consciousness or with its objects, most spiritual experiences of any value, cannot be brought before the tribunal of the common mentality which has no experience of these... their result or their process. All reality, all experience must indeed, to be held as true, be capable of verification by a same or similar experience; so, in fact, all men can have a spiritual experience and can follow it out and verify it in themselves, but only when they have acquired the capacity or can follow the inner methods by which that experience and verification are made possible. It is necessary... fragmentary signs and data and inferences which are at every step liable to error. Our subjective movements and inner experiences are a domain of happenings as real as any outward physical happenings; but if the individual mind can know something of its own phenomena by direct experience, it is ignorant of what happens in the consciousness of others except by analogy with its own or such signs, data ...
... of verification by experience. Yoga is science, par excellence (statements from Swami Vivekananda on this subject). Materialism, science and yoga. Need for the synthesis of science and spirituality. Science and the discovery of the fourth dimension. Discovery of the manifold dimensions of human personality. Central Experiences of Inner Consciousness Experience of true individuality:... Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Tantra, Integral Yoga. Aids for the Development of the Yogic Consciousness and Experience Need for the systematic knowledge of the principles and methods of yoga. Need for the Teacher: the real inner Teacher. Need for inner aspiration in the student. The right attitude towards time: to do everything as quickly and as perfectly as possible... cause of the uneasiness, so that it can be removed by inner or other methods. It should be emphasized that if one has a sincere and steady aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet in one way or another, externally by study and instruction, internally by concentration, revelation or experience, the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable, the ...
... mechanical Nature to the exclusion of our personality, but at the inner subjective experience of man the mental being, our nature takes to us a quite different appearance. We may believe intellectually in a purely mechanical view even of our subjective existence, but we cannot act upon it or make it quite real to our self-experience. For we are conscious of an I which does not seem identical with... Purushas — has to be grasped and accepted before the experiences of the yoga can be fully understood. Letters on Yoga, pp. 284-85 In a certain sense the various Purushas or beings in us, psychic, mental, vital, physical are projections of the Atman, but that gets its full truth only when we get into our inner being and know the inner truth of ourselves. On the surface, in the Ignorance... however, something in man's consciousness which does not fall in with the rigidity of this formula; he has a faith, which grows greater as his soul develops, in another and an inner reality of existence. In this inner reality the truth of existence is no longer Nature but Soul and Spirit, Purusha rather than Prakriti. Nature herself is only a power of Spirit, Prakriti the force of the Purusha ...
... of the eternal and the infinite, but live in its power and universalise, spiritualise and divinise himself by self-knowledge? What greater aim can be for the life of man than to grow by an inner and outer experience till he can live in God, realise his spirit, become divine in knowledge, in will and in the joy of his highest existence? And that is the whole sense of the striving of Indian culture. ... things which are most native to its ideal, its temperament, its way of looking at the world. To deny the truth or the value of spirituality, of the sense of the eternal and infinite, the inner spiritual experience, the philosophic mind and spirit, the religious aim and feeling, the intuitive reason, the idea of universality and spiritual unity is one resource, and this is the real attitude of our critic... aggressive ugliness of modern European life, its paucity of philosophic reason and aesthetic beauty and religious aspiration, its constant unrest, its harsh and oppressive mechanical burden, its lack of inner freedom, its recent huge catastrophe, the fierce struggle of classes are things of which we have a right to take note. To harp in the style of the Archerian lyre on these aspects alone and to ignore ...
... familiar to the external consciousness, through which the inner experiences have to express themselves, if they are to be expressed at all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly speaking, however, symbols are not chosen in a subtle or spiritual experience, that is to say, they are not arbitrarily selected and... beyond sorrow and grief. It is the hearth secreted in the inner heart where burns the Divine Fire, the God of Life Everlasting. And this is the nodus that binds together the threefold status of the manifested existence, the body, the life and the mind. This. triplicity is the structure of name and form built out of the bricks of experience, the kiln, as it were, within which burns the Divine Agni,... transcendent reality that the immanent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Master— sarvabhutantaratma, antaryami— is called brahmajam, born of the Brahman. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and experience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brahman, there is a definite line along which the human consciousness ...
... familiar to the external consciousness, through which the inner experiences have to express themselves, if they are to be expressed at all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly speaking, however, symbols are not chosen in a subtle or spiritual experience, that is to say, they are not arbitrarily selected and ... and beyond sorrow and grief. It is the hearth secreted in the inner heart where burns the Divine Fire, the God of Life Everlasting. And this is the nodus that binds together the threefold status of the manifested existence, the body, the life and the mind. This triplicity is the structure of name and form built out of the bricks of experience, the kiln, as it were, within which burns the Divine Agni,... transcendent reality that the immanent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Master – sarvabhūltāntarātmā, antaryāmī – is called brahmajam, born of the Brahman. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and experience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brahman, there is a definite line along which the human consciousness ...
... constant experiences which it is able to put in the right place. But some get absorbed in inner experiences which they get lost in and get passionately attached to and this inner life becomes for them the sole reality without the outer to poise it and keep it under check and test—there lies a danger. Again if one remains isolated without the support of a settled inner poise and constant experience over... grip of the vital on the person or a grip of the person on one's vital etc. Helping Others To concentrate most on one's own spiritual growth and experience is the first necessity of the sadhak—to be too eager to help others draws away from the inner work. There is also likely to be an overzeal and haste which clouds the discrimination and makes what help is given less effective than it should be... you maintain the inner peace and a simple quietude turned towards the Mother. We have no objection to your doing this [ withdrawing from social contacts ] for a week, as you propose; I understand that it is not a retirement, but a cessation of social visits. My objection to retirement is that so many have "gone morbid" by it or gone astray into zones of false vital experiences; secondly, that ...
... of the heart. The inner urge was kept intact in the language of the ancients. The language Page 86 and their direct perception were not intercepted by the syllogistic reasoning. So the subtle experiences when expressed in language used to entail the corresponding gross perceptions as well. The ceremonials and the sacrifices are but symbols of inner experiences. According to the... the Vedas. It is the Upanishads that can claim to be the first exposition of and commentary on the living ideas of the Vedas. The Upanishad is spiritual realisation, supraphysical experience, mystic perception and inner vision. The Katha Upanishad has clearly indicated: sarve veda yatpadamamananti...¹ ("The seat or goal that all the Vedas glorify and which austerities declare, for the desire of which... ayamakasastavanesontarhrdaya akash ... (The sky that we see in the outer space is also in our inner heart. Both the Heaven and the earth, Agni as well as Vayu — all are concentrated in our inner heart). In the Katha Upanishad too we come across the same utterance: yadeveha tadamutra¹ (Whatever is there in the inner world is to be found here as well). In ancient times, not only in India, but in all countries ...
... In the vast circle of its sovereignty.... The moment passed and all was as before; Only that deathless memory I bore. 17 But these, and others like these, were inner experiences coming of themselves, with a sudden unexpectedness, and were not the clear results of any Yogic sadhana. When presently he started practising pranayama, he did so by himself, without a ... thought or idea. I have told you before that after the Nirvana experience I had no 'thoughts' of my own. Thoughts used to come from above. From the beginning I didn't feel Nirvana to be the highest spiritual achievement. Page 388 Something in me always wanted to go on further. But even then I didn't ask for this new experience. In fact, in Nirvana, with that peace, one does not ask for... affected the calm assurance and constancy of the ocean's depths. In his merely outward life, Sri Aurobindo was more or less like many others: yet how little this reflected the imponderables of the inner man, the granite strength of the Himalayas of his mind, the sheer infinitudes of his spirit? Born in Calcutta thirty-seven years earlier, his Odyssey ad covered many places, many climes: ...
... she could not think of being displeased with you for shunning these delights. Some, of course, might ask why any sports at all in an Ashram which ought to be concerned only with meditation and inner experiences and the escape from life into the Brahman; but that applies only to the ordinary kind of Ashram to which we have got accustomed and this is not that orthodox kind of Ashram. It includes life in... with what one is given. Sannyasa is not enforced, but the inner tyāga of non-desire, non-demand, non-attachment is indispensable. A thing like this, an inconvenience that is not remedied when one asks, should be welcomed as a test for this inner tyāga ; all things of the kind should be welcome as such opportunities to the seeker after the inner perfection. I don't know that wearing the Sannyasi dress... told me the last time, what shall I do to fulfil the capacity? It is something in the inner being that has the power of which the Mother spoke, not the external human part. I think you are seeking the power in the external being, but that can only raise up difficulties. Awaken the psychic in you, let the inner being come out and replace the ego, then the latent power also will become effective. You ...
... subjective and the supraphysical that mind has no means of knowledge except from fragmentary signs and data and inferences which are at every step liable to error. Our subjective movements and inner experiences are a domain of happenings as real as any outward physical happenings …” (Sri Aurobindo 47 ) “Scientists studying mysticism are still in the fact-accumulation stage, and may always be,” is... Rhine Valley or the Zen masters. “All spiritual disciplines, in the East and in the West, have a common core of experience,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, 46 who had read the literature of both hemispheres, and who had had such experiences himself. “If a person undergoes a religious experience that truly places her in communication with some reality from beyond the material world,” continues Stenger, “then... of the individual inner exploration are not welcome in the body of the established religious communities, ruled by dogma and authority. In the West, where they are called ‘mystics’, hardly a single one has escaped persecution by the Church, and many have paid with their life for the truthful confession of their spiritual attainments. For scientific materialism there is no inner reality, and consequently ...
... find fault, but because it points to a difficulty which seems to me insuperable. This Jivanmukta is not merely a poem, but a transcript of a spiritual condition, one of the highest in the inner Overmind experience. To express it at all is not easy. If one writes only ideas about what it is or should be, there is failure. There must be something concrete, the form, the essential spiritual emotion of... meant. The lines: Revealed it wakens when God's stillness Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature express an exact spiritual experience with a visible symbol which is not a mere ornamental metaphor but corresponds to exact and concrete spiritual experience, an immense oceanic expanse of Nature-consciousness (not the world) in oneself covered with the heavens of the Divine Stillness and itself... definable? What is prominent in No. 3 is a certain calm, deep and intense spiritual emotion taken up by the spiritual vision that sees exactly the state or experience and gives it its exact revelatory words. It is an overmind vision and experience and condition that is given a full power of expression by the word and the rhythm—there is a success in "embodying" them or at least the sight and emotion ...
... not get the settled experience of the Divine Power taking up one's works and doing Page 236 them; afterwards it is the Power which determines what is to be done or not done. The overcoming of all attachments must necessarily be difficult and cannot come except as the fruit of a long sādhanā —unless there is a rapid general growth in the inner spiritual experience which is the substance... of Work To keep up work helps to keep up the balance between the internal experience and the external development; otherwise one-sidedness and want of measure and balance may develop. Moreover, it is necessary to keep the sadhana of work for the Divine, because in the end that enables the sadhak to bring out the inner progress into the external nature and life and helps the integrality of the sadhana... receive and transmit Page 241 a greater and greater correct vision and inner Force that has to be developed and this must be done quite coolly and patiently without being elated or disturbed by immediate victory or failure. Right Attitude in Work The spiritual effectivity of work of course depends on the inner attitude. What is important is the spirit of offering put into the work. If one ...
... must needs seize everything, all inner experiences, and begin to formulate them. If, besides, they have a power of expression, they try to arrange them in words and phrases. But when you have lived these experiences and when you have perceived this fall, this descending line between experience and expression, you see at each step the profound reality of the experience receding, fading away into the ... above our mental comprehension." 103 The most perfect speech so far evolved by man to embody his mystic experiences - the language of the Veda - is one such, for it is " ś ruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal knowledge. The words themselves... What Sri Aurobindo calls 'taking mental possession of the experience'... is done, so to say, almost automatically; unfortunately, the best part of the experience escapes always. To keep it intact, one must remain in the state where the experience is not mentalised... But if you want to transform life, if you want the spiritual experience to have an effect on the mind and the vital and the body, upon ...
... perfect not only by the secret spirit within it but in its manifest and most outward form of existence. But these conclusions are only first reasonings or primary intuitions founded on our inner self-experience and the apparent facts of universal existence. They cannot be entirely validated unless we know the real cause of ignorance, imperfection and suffering and their place in the cosmic purpose... seem to be a real limitation of consciousness: there is an ignorance of self, a veiling of the inner Divinity, and all imperfection is its consequence. For we identify ourselves mentally, vitally, physically with this superficial ego-consciousness which Page 417 is our first insistent self-experience; this does impose on us, not a fundamentally real, but a practical division with all the untoward... ) Know That for the Brahman and not this which men cherish here. Kena Upanishad. (I. 4.) One controlling inner Self of all beings.... As the Sun, the eye of the world, is not touched by the external faults of vision, so this inner Self in beings is not touched by the sorrow of the world. Katha Upanishad. (II. 2. 12, 11.) The Lord abides in the heart ...
... acting massively in the subtle body. When the Force and Peace descend into my body, I experience the power, swiftness and palpability as of a waterfall. Could such concrete sensations be a mere record of the experiences of the inner physical? Why "mere" record? If you think the experiences in the subtle body are feeble vague things, you are mistaken - they can be quite as intense, swift... the body. How to distinguish a mere reflection of a subtle physical experience from a pure and direct experience of the outer body? You cannot distinguish except either by intuition or by experience and established direct knowledge of the different sheaths. Is the whole of the inner being made up of sheaths only? Yes. Sheaths is simply a term for bodies, because... Page 112 EXPERIENCES IN THE SUBTLE AND GROSS PHYSICAL When H wrote in his poem that he felt peace in his body, some people commented that it was impossible to experience peace or anything spiritual in the body itself at such an early stage of the sadhana. According to them, a strong peace descending into the inner or subtle physical gives only an illusion ...
... growth. In such a system, it is not merely the 'subjects' of study that should count. A much greater importance will have to be assigned to the inner aspiration, experience of freedom, possibility of educating oneself, self experimentation, discovery of the inner needs and their relation with the _______________________ 1. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Vol.20 (Centenary Edition), p.55. ... how to look 'steadily and whole'. This situation is due to the fact that we have lost the real art of learning; for the secret of learning is, as was known to the ancient seers, the experience which comes by an inner and sincere practice. To know what is the Truth, one must practise the Truth in words, thoughts and actions. To be able to possess the Truth, one must practise day and night self... attitude towards life situations and derive from them the educational experience proper to the need of our growth. We are here on the earth not merely to be deep and wide' in our consciousness, but also to deal with outer situations, to control and master them, and also to create situations appropriate to the needs of our inner growth and our internal and external perfection. A good teacher will ...
... growth. In such a system, it is not merely the 'subjects' of study that should count. A much greater importance will have to be assigned to the inner aspiration, experience of freedom, possibility of educating oneself, self-experimentation, discovery of the inner needs and their relation with the programmes of studies, and the discovery of the aim of life and the art of life. A great stress will... 'steadily and whole'. This situation is due to the fact that we have lost the real art of learning; for the secret of learning is, as was known to the ancient seers, the experience which comes by an inner and sincere practice. To know what is the Truth, one must practise the Truth in words, thoughts and actions. To be able to possess the Truth, one must practise day and night... right attitude towards life situations and derive form the educational experience proper to the need of our growth. We are here on the earth not merely to be deep and wide in our consciousness, but also to deal with outer situations, to control and master them, and also to create situations appropriate to the needs of our inner growth and our . internal and external perfection. A good teacher ...
... one in that experience. Thus to the soul perfected in this knowledge everything that is, seems or is experienced, thinker & thought, action, doer, sufferer, object, field, result, becomes only one reality, Brahman, Self, God and all this variety is only play, only movement of conscious-self in conscious-self. That moves, God has His lila, the Self rejoices in its own inner experiences of itself seen... patience, a great passivity, waiting for experience, waiting for light & then waiting for still more light. Insufficient data, haste of conclusions, wilful ramming of one's own favourite opinions into the text, wilful grasping at an imperfect or unfinished experience, wilful reading of a single narrow truth as the sole meaning of this complex harmony of thought, experience & knowledge which we call the Veda... upon him any ideas of my own to govern & override his apparent meaning—all that I am allowed to do, is to explain his evident textual meaning in the light of my inward spiritual experience but I must not use that experience which may be imperfect to contradict the text. Shankara has permitted himself all these departures from the attitude of subjection to the text. He has dealt with the Upanishad ...
... in Pondicherry early in 1927, a few months after Sri Aurobindo had retired. [1] 3 August 1926. Written in reply to a letter from Sloane dated 5 June 1926, in which she enumerated certain inner experiences, which she called "initiations". [2 - 4] August - September 1927. Undated drafts, written in reply to a letter from Sloane in which she asked Sri Aurobindo if he was "the Krishna, the Supreme... ly Reddy wrote asking Sri Aurobindo for a message to be read out at the award ceremony. Sri Aurobindo replied by telegram that while he "usually does not give any message unless it comes by some inner inspiration", he felt sure "in this case inspiration and message will not fail to come". The message — which dealt at some length with the question of linguistic provinces, then a charged political... tried to set up; see "Note on a Forged Document" above. [2] August 1912 or after. (In April 1914, Sri Aurobindo wrote of "the Page 577 Parabrahma darshana", apparently the experience mentioned in this letter, as happening "two years ago"; see Record of Yoga , volume 10 of T HE C OMPLETE W ORKS OF S RI A UROBINDO , p. 447.) [3] Circa January 1913. According to Arun Chandra ...
... Upanishad, Darshan, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner spiritual experiences that we shall find the proof and source of the world's Scriptures, the law of knowledge, love and conduce the basis and inspiration of Karmayoga. 40 Let the Hindu, let the Indian... puzzle the ordinary man. A wise passivity today, fire and brimstone tomorrow; in either case, he would but be following the inner Light of which others might be totally unaware. There is, of course, very real danger in all and sundry talking about their intuitions and inner voices and proclaiming themselves to be agents of the Divine. Sri Aurobindo was therefore careful to add that, not everybody... May 1909, there was much common ground - but there was some significant difference in stress as well. Sri Aurobindo had spoken at Bombay after his Baroda nirvanic experience, while at Uttarpara he spoke after the Alipur experience of Narayana darsan. Yet it was the same man, dedicated to the service of the Mother, the man self-poised and self-giving and exuding iron resolve and tremendous purpose ...
... rhythm would not at all move or impress you in the same way. This something else is an inner content or suggestion, a soul-feeling or soul-experience, a vital feeling or life-experience, a mental emotion, vision, or experience (not merely an idea), and it is only if you can catch this and reproduce the experience in yourself, that you have got what the poem can give you, not otherwise. “The real... tasted a joy which was divine! When I had arrived at the Ashram I had seen the Mother giving the New-Year blessings at midnight. It was a unique experience to go and see her during that hour. The quiet, still and meditative night created the same inner mood in us and our little human form would get merged in the limitless expanse of the living darkness. The Infinite, the Eternal would become a more... she gave carried with it an inner means for going forward, and a touch that broke the spell of ignorance. Her look, her smile, her touch — everything brought to us our souls’ nourishment. For three years we were blest with this New-Year gift. Then in 1931 she fell ill, after which she started giving the New-Year blessing in another way. That was also a unique experience and it evokes a thrill in our ...
... accomplishes two difficult tasks: it creates a personality, Savitri, a human-divine character and, secondly, it succeeds in making all the inner spiritual experiences of man real, concrete and direct. It is well known that the highest spiritual experiences defy expression in language. But Savitri for the first time succeeds in such a thorough objectification of them in terms of images and symbols... a realm of experience that is not known to the common man and it is therefore likely that it may not meet with general appreciation or understanding at first. The creator of Savitri knew this very well and so he wrote: "Savitri is a record of a seeing, of an experience, which is not of the common kind, and it is often very far from what the general human mind sees or experiences." But even... therefore, the whole Nature seems to be bathed in an ether of Delight. This experience seems so far from the ordinary experience of man that one would have thought that its expression in poetry would lack the sense of a convincing Reality. But the most miraculous power of the Goddess of Poetry is that the expression of this experience by the ancient sages carried with it a very intense sense of concreteness ...
... Sāvitrī accomplishes two difficult tasks; it creates a personality, Savitri, a human-divine character and secondly it succeeds in making all the inner spiritual experiences of man real, concrete and direct. It is well known that the highest spiritual experiences defy expression in language. But Sāvitrī for the first time succeeds in such a thorough objectification of them in terms of images and symbols... with a realm of experience that is not known to the common man and it is therefore likely that it may not meet with general appreciation or understanding at first. The creator of Sāvitrī knew this very well and so he wrote: "Sāvitrī is a record of a seeing, of an experience, which is not of the common kind, and it is often very far from what the general human mind sees or experiences". But even the... therefore, the whole Nature seems to be bathed in an ether of Delight. This experience seems so far from the ordinary experience of man that one would have thought that its expression in poetry would lack the sense of a convincing Reality. But the most miraculous power of the Goddess of poetry is that the expression of this experience by the ancient sages carries with it a very intense sense of concreteness ...
... into many divergent strains and finally tended to narrow down to one predominant strain of other-worldly renunciation. The fourfold scheme of experience found in the Mandukya Upanishad is here: Virāt, the gross outer, called Waking—Hiranyagarbha, the subtle inner, called Dream— Prajnā, the causal inmost, called Sleep—the sheer absolute Self, simply called Turiya or Fourth. We must remember that in the... fault, but because it points to a difficulty which seems to me insuperable. This Jivanmukta is not merely a poem, but a transcript of a spiritual condition, one of the highest in the inner Overmind experience. To express it at all is not easy. If one writes only ideas about what it is or should be, there is failure. There must be something concrete, the form, the essential spiritual emotion of... sense of unreality disappeared and there was a return to participation in the world-consciousness, the inner peace and freedom which resulted from this realisation remained permanently behind all surface movements and the essence of the realisation itself was not lost. At the same time an experience intervened: something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but ...
... Pondicherry that has sprung up around him is a scene of multifarious activity, a field for a hundred talents and aptitudes - men of diverse types developing by a series of inner Yogic experiences and the expression of those experiences in outer life. The Ashram is a glowing focus of India's innate spirituality, fraught with immense possibilities of irradiating the entire life of the nation. ... his (or her) own personality, carried his own inner climate of the soul; and the figure of the Purusha lying in the ananta-śayanam posture affected each a little differently perhaps, yet it was also on the whole a cleansing, cathartic and chastening experience for most. One of the inmates, Dara (Aga Syed Ibrahim), had a singular experience that morning when he walked past Sri Aurobindo's... spiritual help and a saving Light. ... we must not disguise from ourselves the fact that after these long years of subjection and its cramping and impairing effects a great inner as well as outer liberation and change, a vast inner and outer progress is needed if we are to fulfil India's true destiny. The twenty-three years since this was said have justified the fears expressed above but ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.